Andrew Callaghan
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Unfortunately, it was kind of the meditative path or, you know, the Eastern path that I took and kind of fused that with psychedelic culture in Seattle that took me down the psychedelic use rabbit hole in the first place. So like, I'd say it all started with Siddhartha.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
King Von was Lil Durk's artist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
king von's now dead so there's a definitely a concern that some of the fed charges will fall on dirt not sure if that's true but it's rumors in the hip-hop community so o block right now and when i film the video it's trying to go through a major image rehab if you go on any instagram of anyone in o block they've all converted to islam and so they post pictures of themselves praying in the morning and have captions like put the guns down
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Let's pray. So I think when I went there, they saw it as a good opportunity to do a positive rebrand. And so I interviewed a rapper named Boss Top, who was there all the way back in 2011 when Chief Keef was coming up. And so he basically ensured my safe protection. But he didn't even need to. They're all very friendly. And they know exactly what's up with YouTube stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I appreciate it. Well, hell yeah, man. I mean, rappers... In their own way. Since I touched a microphone, rappers have gravitated toward me. I think there's something happening. You're a rapper whisperer? I think there's something happening on a deeper cosmic spiritual level that lets the mind of rappers know that they have a safe place in front of our camera crew.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, Krip Mac's the safest guy in the world. He's a sweetheart? Oh, definitely, dude. Yeah, that's fun. I feel more safer on Krip Mac than I do on any given pedestrian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
What's his story? Well, his name's Trevor. He grew up in Ontario, California in the Inland Empire, moved to Texas with his mom after his dad left. His mom started dating a cop from Houston named Mr. Gary. His mom found Mr. Gary getting...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
you know anally penetrated by a co-worker and so uh she booked crit mac a one-way greyhound ticket to la where he joined the crips that's a good story you know it's true oh you jumped right to mr gary yeah yeah of course yeah
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No, I don't really do psychedelic drugs. But like a lot of people think that I'm against them, which I'm not. It just doesn't work for me. If it works for you, I'm sure that can be really fun. Especially, I know there's lots of like therapeutic uses for acid and ketamine and psilocybin. But I personally abstain from those kind of anything psychotropic I try to stay away from. Drinking a bit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I'm just saying that, you know, he's a classic case of somebody without a father figure who found camaraderie and, you know, sense of belonging and purpose in a street gang, which in LA is like a rule of law in most of the city.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, I think so. He gets into a lot of fights in jail, though, and from what I've heard, he wins about half of them. What did he go to jail for now? Firearm possession. It was a probation violation. Oh. It's too bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That was horrible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. Well, you know, I didn't know that I couldn't hop my own border as an American. I'm thinking this is my country. I can get in any way that I want. Wrong. You can only enter the U.S. through an official port of entry, which I learned the hard way because I got arrested by Border Patrol and held as a detainee at a migrant center for a few days. What was that like? Horrible. Which aspect?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, well, for one, like, I don't know. It was just to be in a place like that. And I probably sound like such a wimp right now because I know someone's watching this who's done some hard time. But we thought we were going to do At least six months in jail because the guards freaked us out and were like, you're being charged with a federal crime. You know what you boys did is serious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
We're waiting on word from San Antonio about whether or not we're going to extradite you. So we're just sitting in these cells alone most of the time in solitary with no pillows. No pillows. No pillows, no mat, nothing. Just a space blanket and I was sleeping on my shoes, stinking up the place. It was no good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I really want to know what you think about that. That's the one question that I want to reverse on you. Because you've talked to so many people. Do you think that aliens have actually visited Earth? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So you think that they have knowledge of it? Yeah. Yeah. One thing I think about with aliens is scale. So we have this idea that an alien would be a gray alien or almost humanoid lookalike that would visit us in human form, arms, legs, head. But who's to say that they're not able to shrink down to microscopic size with the same neural capacity?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, yeah. I mean, I didn't drink at all before I had the HPPD stuff. And I would have drank later in life, but definitely like 14, 15. Every day after school, I'd drink a 40 ounce of Mickey's. It's like a, it kind of looks like old English, but the bottle's green and it has a hornet on the side of it. Just kind of became a ritual just to deal with the anxiety of that situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Language is really interesting too. I have this series that I'm going to announce for the first time on here, but I'm really interested in endangered languages in the US. There's like 150 languages in the US with less than a thousand speakers. Wow. And I want to like help spearhead efforts to preserve some of these. Like for example, Hawaiian sign language, 15 of those people left. Holy shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Because when Hawaii got annexed, the ASL community tried to make it so the deaf native Hawaiians wouldn't be able to speak their native sign language. And so they would do it under the desks at like schools for the deaf and blind. And they would get like their mouth washed out with soap and stuff if they so much as did the Hawaiian hand signs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Also, the Gullah Geechee language in the South Carolina Sea Islands, Hilton Head Island and stuff, that's almost a Creole language that's been in the U.S. for hundreds of years existing in isolation. That's being threatened by golf course developments. I don't know how into language you are, but I've been getting super nerded out about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I've been trying to learn Navajo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That was good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, my God. You have a Spanish robot assigned to you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You're not a freedman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So the ones that do all the extreme shit. Okay, I'll put it like this. Most people think they're doing the best thing for the world. I don't think anyone except for maybe a small fraction of sociopaths wakes up every day and says, I'm going to fuck somebody's life up today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think the far majority of people are fighting for what they think is right and do want to see America succeed and want us to be in a happy place where no one is subjugated. I just think people have drastically different ideas of what means will get us there. And unfortunately, that's leading to a lot of misunderstandings between cultures. And yeah, I think that most people are good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. Alcohol really works to suppress HPPD symptoms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I've been through some things that leads me to believe that a lot of people, though, are primarily motivated by self-interest and that in a fight or flight situation, most people will choose flight. So I don't know if people are courageous as a whole, but I think generally good. But the energy to stand up for what's right, not sure about that. They have the capacity though to do good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think human beings are inherently selfish as well. But I don't think that selfish is inherently bad. I think humans are primarily motivated by self-interest. but generally have positive intentions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Okay, we need to clear this up because on my Wikipedia page, for some reason, for Andrew Callahan early life, it says, Andrew hated every single class except for one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Listening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
the only option we have no forced education no like forced meetings or mediations between political opponents just listen to more people and really listen try to get rid of whatever preconceived notions you might have about how you should feel about someone you are supposed to disagree with and just keep your ears and your heart open to people that you don't know and your life will change keep your heart open a lot of people are scared to listen
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So I've had a bunch of teachers who are super cool, like this guy, Tim, my astronomy professor in ninth grade, Mrs. Zanetti, my creative writing teacher in sixth grade, and this really cool dude at my college in New Orleans named Charles Cannon, who taught me a class called New Orleans Mythology. My three favorite classes besides my journalism classes. And they all hit me up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And they're like, hey, man, saw you said you hated every class. Sorry I couldn't be everything that you wanted me to be. And so I just want to say shout out to all those teachers. I didn't hate every class. The point that I was making is that being forced into the institution of school so young and having to take common core classes like biology, dissecting frogs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
history of the Han dynasty, stuff like that, that I didn't want to learn, but I had to learn multiple times. I mean, I learned about the dynastic cycle in ancient China, three separate times at three different schools. And I was like, who is writing this curriculum? And why is it so important that I understand this process? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
The part that makes school difficult, especially in college, is that you have people just going to school just to get the degree who don't really know exactly what they're interested in. And they don't even have time to figure that out because they're in a business program or a communications program with no specific interest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And it is somewhat interesting, the Silk Road and the Great Wall and Terracotta, the soldiers and stuff. But I'm just saying, when I got to college, I signed up for journalism school, right? And I didn't get to take a media class until the second semester. And I had to take everything prior to that. And I'd already spent so much time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I just think the excruciating boredom of schooling left a bad taste in my mouth. But there was individual classes that I liked a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And you're also saying so Wikipedia is not always perfectly right. No, but it's just interesting because like I've said so much in podcasts, but that's what they isolated. And I've gotten that question before, which I understand it's the first thing on my Wikipedia page, but it makes me sound like a super hater. Have you ever seen this Instagram page called Depths of Wikipedia? Oh, it's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, it's so good, dude.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
On a basic level, everybody wants media coverage, right? Everyone likes to be on camera and get exposure for whatever they're doing. And so being a journalist and being almost like a portal for exposure for people allows you to be on the front row of everything that you want to be a part of. You get to be in the front row for history as it's unfolding because everyone wants to be covered.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So being a journalist gives you a ticket to everywhere that you want to go in life. And so it allows you to step into different realities almost and then go back to yours. And it just keeps life interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Who are your influences? I think the early Daily Show was so good. Sacha Baron Cohen, huge influence. I mean, that was like, the Ali G show especially. I think Louis Theroux's broadcasts on BBC were great. I was really into Hunter S. Thompson too, but not really until college.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You know, I really like a particular Hunter S. Thompson book called The Great Shark Hunt, where he covers the Reuben Salazar murder by LAPD or LA Sheriff's Department in Boyle Heights in the 70s. And his relationship with his lawyer, Oscar Acosta, and that whole saga is great. Fear and loathing, I like, but not as much as his straightforward reporting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Because there's the Gonzo side of Hunter, where he's like saying he's taking drugs and seeing shit. And there's the other side of him, which is like an actual reporter interested in telling a story that has news value. So it's two different lanes for him. There is something about you...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, well, that's a very kind comparison. I'll get there one day, maybe. I just went to Aspen on a little Hunter S. Thompson recon trip to go check out the Woody Creek Tavern, which is the spot that he, it was like his bar near his cabin. And it was pretty cool to see. Unfortunately, it's kind of turned into not a dive bar now, but it's a sit-down sort of country restaurant. But it was cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But I expected to see a bunch of gnarly Hunter S. Thompson types. Doing speeds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But I will say though, as someone now who doesn't party like I did when I was younger, it's not as important as I thought it was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, I'm actually a fan of alcohol, moderate drinking. But I'm saying my life before, I would say 2019, 2018 especially, there was the chaos on camera, but then there was my private life, which was like chaotic partying all the time. Oh, I see. And I convinced myself, much like Hunter did, that that was the secret sauce in my spiritual core that gave me the creativity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But then I cut out a lot of that stuff, and I'm just as creative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And it's interesting that a lot of, I think one of the hardest parts about addiction is that if you're a functioning, highly creative addict of any kind, your brain and the addictive part of your brain convinces yourself that it's all part of the cross purpose and that it has this like symbiotic, you know, inspirational thing going on. But it's not true. It can be, but it's typically not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Have you read Hunter's daily routine in the year up to his death? It was like 15 grapefruits and eight ball of Coke and just a certain amount of shotgun shells for him to fire into the sky every morning. There's no way, and he didn't do anything creative in those final years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I was like, I believed you for a second. I'm like, did Einstein have blow? I don't think he did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, was Albert Einstein attractive as a teenager? Not teenager. Was he attractive as a young man? Sexually attractive? I don't, I mean, you know. I'm turned on by Einstein at all ages. I don't discriminate. But are you more turned on by the work that he did or his physical being?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Was there people saying he was crazy when he was around? Or was he universally recognized as like an OG of this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So back now, where does a black hole go after something gets sucked into it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I hope we get to the bottom of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, yeah, for sure. Astronomy can be terrifying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I want to do a research paper or like a report about space madness. You know, it's supposed to be this like torturous feeling that you get when you look away from Earth and into the abyss after you've exited Earth's orbit or whatever. Because there's one specific psychiatrist who knows how to deal with space madness. And I want to figure out how and interview people with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Like is there a Wikipedia article on it? Yes, look up space madness treatment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, I think it's just a feeling of extreme insignificance that you might get sometimes when you look at the night sky, but it's that times a thousand. It's like an existential void that's created after looking into the abyss and then realizing how small earth is in the grand scheme. You just start to really have a strange new perception about the pointlessness of existence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, only a handful of people have been to space, but I'm sure they're all pretty well off. So this psychiatrist has to be like in the multi-millions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, probably so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But not everyone believes that as you've seen from my work probably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, this sort of connects to what I was talking about with the boredom of school and these common core classes. So after my first year of school, where I lived in the dorms, like an old school dormitory building at a school in New Orleans called Loyola University, I wanted to just do something. I felt so bored. I was working for the school newspaper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
for that whole first year, it was called the Maroon. And I didn't have the ability to write my own stories. Like I had to defer to an older editor and they would give me stories to write about. And they were all about like on-campus happenings, like the Pope visits New Orleans or glass recycling to be restored in the French Quarter or hoverboards banned on campus due to safety concerns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And it just kind of felt like, all right, I kind of wanted to be a gonzo reporter. I'm not sure if working my way up through the traditional newsroom hierarchy is going to get me to that point. So I started reading a bunch of old hobo literature, you know, like post-World War II vagabonding stuff. And there was this book called Vagabonding in America by an old hobo named Ed Byrne.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And I read this and it just basically, obviously some of it was outdated. They had stuff in there like the hobo code, like, oh, this moniker on the side of a fence means this person has free soup or something like that. They didn't have stuff like that. But what it did tell me- That's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It told me about train stop towns like Dunsmuir and places in Montana where there was a friendly attitude toward drifters and that still persists from the 60s and 70s to this day, even though in my opinion- Movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre have ruined hitchhiking culture in America because now everyone thinks you're going to decapitate them if they pick you up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So after my final day of courses at Loyola, I literally left all of my belongings inside my dorm and took the streetcar to the Greyhound station, got a one-way ticket to Baton Rouge, and I was like, I'm going to hitchhike across the whole country back to Seattle. with no money and that was the plan and it worked out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That's a step above hitchhiking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Hitchhiking, Greyhound, Amtrak, airline.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
What's in between Greyhound and Amtrak? A car. That's what it is. Yeah, it's a car. A car. A shitty car. Okay, cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You lived in a car?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Solo? Solo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I love cold soup. What I like is the cold chickpeas in a can. You get the water out and just dump them in your mouth. Yeah. Those are good. Beef jerky, kind bars. Kind bars are really good for the road.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So what was the route you took? Was it Chicago across or was it Philadelphia across?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
To LA or where?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So you went Philly through Appalachia up to the Midwest. Did you cut over through the Southwest down to San Diego?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I went straight down to Texas all the way down to the Midwest. So like... But did you cut from Texas west through New Mexico and Arizona to get to San Diego?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That is the best road trip place. Interstate 40, like Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Vegas, Kingman, the Mojave Desert, Yuma, doesn't get better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It gives me some sanity, like whenever I'm feeling kind of out of control or, you know, like bummed out, I just remember that the road is still out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
The open road never goes anywhere, and it's kind of like a, I see like an invisible door in the corner of the room all the time that makes me more comfortable, because I'm like, hey, at the end of the day, if I'm bummed out, I can go hit the road, and I'm sure there's going to be a fun time ahead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I would say silver dog, half, because sometimes I got to ride the dog when no one will pick me up. There's some places in the country where no one's going to pick you up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Kansas, Missouri, they're not going to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I was 19, fresh, clean shaven. Yeah. I was pretty charming, I'd say. But the older you get, the harder it is to hitchhike because they think you're like an escaped convict or some type of like psycho wanderer. And some of these people are like what we call punishers. It's people who never stop talking. And so they see someone hitchhiking and they're like, yes, I'm going to talk at this person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And you can tell their eyes are wide. They're like, what's up? And you're like, oh, shit. So it's six hours of just like, oh, cool. Nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. But then that also raises the question, are they about to kill me? You know what I mean? I think that's a you problem, not a... You know what's funny is almost everybody who picked me up when I was hitchhiking was like a day laborer. It was almost all Mexican day laborers who picked me up. Oh, interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Because I think that in some places down there, that's a typical thing to do, hitchhike to work. A lot of people don't have cars, but they still have to get to their jobs. So a lot of people ask me, hey, where should I drop you off? Where's your job at? And I'm like, my job is to explore. And they were down with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So you know what I'm talking about. Yeah. It can anchor you a bit, just to remind you that every pattern that I've fallen into is voluntary, and it's for my own stability and mental health.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Let's go. What's the hardest item you've had to part with in this experience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So you'd give that watch to somebody if it meant anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Not really. I mean, there was a hard drive that I lost that had all of my, like, childhood pictures on it and stuff like that that I think about all the time. Cause I left it on a train and like the certain memories you think about it, you just get pissed off. I just think to myself, someone has that somewhere. I have dreams about reuniting with the hard drive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I don't think he wants to reunite with that one. Okay. It's crazy. Like, you know, All he did was smoke crack, right? Or was there more stuff going on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
The B generation? I didn't know who it was. And then after I did the... Ultimately, I wrote a book about my hitchhiking experience years later. And everyone was like... heavy read on the road. And then on the road, I probably heard the title of that book every day, at least 10 times for two years. And I'm sure Kerouac is a great guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, I just don't, I'm not too familiar with the beat generation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I refuse to read it. People even have gifted it to me and been like, hey, man, you're going to love this one. And I'm like, is that on the road? Honestly, people have given me a book with wrapping paper on it, and they're like, this is right at Pirelli. I was like, that's fucking on the road, isn't it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, no, I'm like, anything but that. But I'm sure it's a great book. It's just the comparison thing drives me crazy. But respect. Big respect to Kerouac. Would never speak down on anyone in the Beat Generation. What are some interesting moments you remember from those 70 days? Man, there was so much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, getting mistaken for a gay prostitute on my first hitchhiking ride in Louisiana was pretty funny. Where did you come from and where did you go? Well, I mean, the journey began in Baton Rouge. And the first destination was Houston, which is about four and a half hours west on Interstate 10. So I'm in Crowley, Louisiana. I'm on the side of the road. And I guess...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
This was a cruising truck stop. It was known for being a place where male lot lizards would go to procure clients. And I was there. Lot lizards are... It's a derogatory term in trucker culture for a prostitute who hangs out at the Loves or Pilot Flying J. Large interstate truck stops.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Now trucker culture as it once was is pretty much finished because of the live stream cameras they have inside of the trucks now. So you can't snort Sudafed or pick up anybody. You can't even pick up a hitchhiker or you get fired.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, definitely. The old school outlaw trucker lifestyle, unless you're an owner operator who's not even in a union, which is like a real cowboy way to haul loads, you can't do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Mistaken for a lot lizard by a small man from Honduras with a spiky leather jacket covered in studs. Nice. Didn't speak any English, but you know, I thought he was just, you know, a nice guy. And then he pulled over at a, There's private theaters in the South where they have confessional booths set up, and they have three channels, and people go in there and, you know... It's boring? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
People go in there and, you know, please themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I thought he was taking me to one of those, and I was like, all right, cool, man. Yeah, like, you know, if this guy wants to go jerk off, I'm just going to wait in the car. It's all good. I don't discriminate. But then... I was like, he buys a booth for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And I'm like, okay, you know, I'm not really in the mood to watch porn with this random guy. So he gets in the same booth as me and he starts jerking off right next to me. And I'm like, oh man, like, I don't think this is chill. I'm like, dude, can you stop? Can you stop jacking off? And he's like, what do you mean? Like, I thought this is what you want to do. Like, I have money for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Like, what's up? And I was like, oh no, I'm just a regular guy. He was super cool about it. He started laughing. He was like, oh, my bad, man. I thought you were, you know, selling something. I said, no. And he said, oh, it's all good. And he gave me a ride all the way to Houston. That's great. Yeah. We talked about anything except that for the rest of the car ride.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I had about a foot and a half on this guy, so I wasn't too scared. I also had a knife in my pocket, but I didn't want to stab him, especially not at a place like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, I figured that can't happen again. It can't keep happening. So I was like, all right, if I got this out of the way the first ride, the following rides are going to be spectacular. Yeah, I mean...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, I used the app Couchsurfing to find places to stay. I remember Couchsurfing. Now you can only submit like five Couchsurfing requests a day unless you're a premium member, which means you also host people. Wait, Couchsurfing's still around? Yeah, yeah, totally. Oh, nice. But it's evolved, obviously, into a different thing. Airbnb is a kind of competitor to that, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Couchsurfing is free, though. Right. So couch surfing, they call it like the CS community. So basically there'd be these like couch surfing super hosts in different cities. Like there was one in Santa Fe, this firefighter dude who had like 15 other couch surfers there chilling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So I would do it everywhere. A lot of them were Catholics, you know, so it was their way of giving back. A lot of them were nudists. And so I didn't realize that there's a small little section at the bottom of someone's couch surfing profile that says clothing optional.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And that means if you go there, I thought it meant like it's cool if you walk to the bathroom in your underwear. No, if you go there, everyone's going to be butt naked. So I made that mistake a few times. Not that I'm anti-nudist, but I didn't want to, you know, I wasn't ready to take that leap of faith. And yeah, it was just great. Couch surfing hosts were amazing. That was just great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It was this constant thing where I felt like, wow, people are so welcoming. I'm not having to pay them a dollar for this experience. Yeah, I love couch surfing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. The one thing that gets exhausting about hitchhiking is constantly thanking people. You know, being in like sort of constant superficial gratitude everywhere all the time. Like, oh, thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. Thanks for the food. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Part of the reason I wanted to live in an RV later in life is to avoid having to constantly live in this like, thanks so much type of frequency. Because it's exhausting to constantly, hey man, thanks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, it was a true favor. Of course, I love giving people gratitude for that. But just this thing where everyone who picks you up, you get eight rides a day. You're thanking eight people a day like they're the second coming of Jesus. You start to feel a little bit debased.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
The American public is just so kind overall. I mean, they're so like embracing depending on who you are. And specifically though, the Christian family people of the U.S. who drive in minivans and have that fish sticker on the back where it's like Jesus fish and then they have the family sticker, you know, where each member of the family is a stick figure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Those people never picked me up and would flip me off with their whole family. Sometimes they would throw full Dr. Peppers at me as a family while I stood on the side of the road. As a family, together. They would yell shit like, go to hell, hippie, when I was on the side of the road. And so it's weird that the most...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Charitable Christian American family values people never gave me any charity or even conversation. They were antagonizing me and saw me as like a hippie leftover from the 60s who needed to go to work, go to Vietnam. I don't get it. Yeah. But the people who really extended a hand to me is people on the margins.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
People working on seasonal visas, people whose cars have less than a quarter tank left, people struggling with addiction who saw me struggling, or at least they thought that I was because they assumed I was hitchhiking, not out of adventure, but because I had no car and were willing to sacrifice their day almost sometimes to take me exactly where I needed to go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, I never thought about it that way. It's so true. Do you think about like morality and religion a lot?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's a scary thing to see how easy it is for high up political people to mobilize the hate of just the average working person and can almost convince them to sabotage their own countrymen who they share more in common with than the politician they look up to just to advance the agenda of one party. That's what we're seeing now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Really? Yes. I know so many people that love Colorado. Dude, Dallas, Denver. I used to think Phoenix sucks, but I love Phoenix now. The way they build these cities to just be so circular and massive, it's just like, stop it. You don't like circles? I like grids, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Manhattan, New Orleans, San Francisco.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. Oh, Oregon too. I got problems with Oregon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. Well, here's the issue. You have, and I don't like just calling people racist because it's kind of like a two-dimensional insult, but you have the most racist state with the most psychotic anarchist city in the middle of it. What is going on up there? How did this happen? The yin and the yang is so extreme that there must be something in the Willamette. What do you have against anarchism?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I used to be an anarchist. When I was in eighth grade, I had this friend named Mads who was part of a group called Seattle Solidarity, which is like an Antifa precursor. So I grew up like going to black block protests. And I mean, there was a particular shooting, the murder of John Williams, who was a Native American woodcarver in downtown Seattle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
He got killed by a Seattle police officer named Ian Burke. John Williams was carving a pipe from a wood block with a pocket knife. He's deaf in one ear. officer pulls a gun on him and says, put it down. He doesn't hear him, he shoots him six seconds later. So that police involved shooting is what instantly turned me into like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
a very critical of law enforcement kind of person when I was super young. And so as someone who used to see this guy who got murdered, he was a 55-year-old man. I used to see him around Pike Place where my mom lived. It's a public market in downtown. That to me put me into the anarchist political sphere, just channeling the anger of that experience. And the officer got no charges, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You can look up the video. It's horrific. And it didn't get reported. The officer, I'm pretty sure, is still active duty. And so it's like situations like that, early in life channeled me toward political extremism, but I grew up to realize how incompatible that anarchistic worldview is with reality and with American society. It can only exist in a small little chamber.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You can't apply that to the industrial heartland of the country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
extreme thought experiments to understand what kind of society we want to build but implementing it may not necessarily be a good idea yeah i mean emma goldman i'm a huge fan of her writing um also the prison abolitionists that are associated with the anarchist movement angela davis ruth wilson gilmore all that stuff influential.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I still adhere to a lot of those principles when talking about stuff like radical prison reform and stuff like that. But just, uh, I drifted more toward having a more open mind as I got older.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
This is where I do my research. Does it say hellish scenes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Wikipedia is damn right about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, I was a host at a fine dining restaurant on the corner of Bourbon and Iberville. So that's the first street if you go from Canal Street onto the quarter. So this is like across from like a daiquiri spot. It's the middle of the tourist corridor of New Orleans. And the spot was kind of like... kind of a tourist trap. It was called Bourbon House. The food was good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Chef Eric, I don't want you to see this and think you don't make good and dewy sausages, but it was overpriced. And so I had to, we had to maintain this like fine dining facade on a street where almost everyone is like throwing up, fighting, or is half naked. So there was this policy. We had these giant glass windows next to the tables.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So if you're eating at a bourbon house, you can look out onto Bourbon Street and you can see as you're dining a full panoramic view of all these partiers throwing beads, boobs, all that. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
we had this policy where if we're serving someone we can't look onto bourbon street if something crazy is happening so there's a fight or something that we can't look right so there is a dude i remember i'm fucking serving a table there's a dude in a batman mask butt naked with 12 pairs of beads just jerking it yeah back to jerking it he's jerking it right and every every single person at the restaurant's looking out there like look they're taking pictures and the manager steven looks at me he's like keep your
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
fucking eyes on the table. So I'm serving these people, you know, and I'm like, you like red beans and rice or would you like some Creole? And there's just this dude and, you know, ultimately the manager went out and, you know, escorted him further down Bourbon Street. But, you know, I would get off work at around midnight every night and that was when Bourbon Street At its most chaotic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And so I lived in the French Quarter as well. So I lived about 12 blocks down Bourbon in a small Creole cottage, a cute little like orange, old school New Orleans, one story spot. I lived in the attic above these gay meth dealers named Frankie and Johnny. Oh, wow. And so I would get off work and I would basically have to walk through like this battlefield. I mean, it was a battlefield.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Getting home was out of like the Warriors movie. It was almost impossible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. It was like Kensington, Philadelphia, but just alcohol. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But it's a lot of visitors, right? From outside. Almost all visitors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And that kind of would set the flow for the weekend. For example, if the Raiders were playing the Saints, Raider Nation, and they do not play around. If it's the Patriots, that's a whole different crowd. They think they're better than everybody else. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But people from Massachusetts aren't like the cream of the crop in terms of like American superiority. Strong words, yeah. No offense, but I mean- No, I'm sure they won't take that as- They are good at fighting though, I'll tell you that. All right, great. New England has hands compared to some places.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Colorado has no hands. Yeah. The West Coast, not too much hands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But if you get to the corn-fed parts of East Colorado, these guys got hands bigger than my head. They'll beat the shit out of me. But anyways, I'd walk back to my house on Bourbon Street, and I would be sifting through this battlefield. And I had a friend at the time who was like, yeah, we should do a taxicab confessions type spinoff where we ask people to confess a deep, dark secret.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And we posted the next day. And so we tried that and it went viral on Instagram instantly. It was mostly incest stories, you know, people admitting to incest. I know it's a common Southern stereotype, but there's some truth to it. There was some murder confessions. That was pretty crazy. We never really posted any of those. How did you get people to confess? Pretty easy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And New Orleans has a homicide solve rate of like 22%. So, I mean, most of the time, they'll just tell you. I remember I was walking down Bourbon, and I asked this kid, I was like... What's your deep historical secret? And he told me, he's like, I just smoked a dude in the Magnolia, it's a project housed in the third ward, project development.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And they said, I just smoked a dude in the Magnolia playground for touching my sister, molesting his sister. And I was like, what? And he's like, yeah, look it up. And I was like, all right, hold on. And it was like, man found dead in Central City playground, like appeared to be homeless, shot execution style. So I told the kid, I was like, why'd you tell me that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
He's like, man, put that shit out there. Like, I'm trying to go viral. Like, tag me too. Oh, wow. I was like, dude, I don't think you understand that even if you're a juvenile, he was probably 15, you can get juvenile life in Louisiana for a homicide, even if it's, you know, justified. So I just deleted the footage in front of him. I was like, I'm going to delete this footage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
See that trash button? I'm hitting it right now. Don't tell anyone that again. And he was like, all right, I appreciate it. And he walked off, but... It's the little moments like that that I always remember.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. After a while, though, it became sort of repetitive, you know, because there's only so many things that people can confess to that go viral, you know, and just... Oh, so you were trying to see, like, what... Well, I mean, there's the incest one. Some people just say, like, I eat ass. That was, like, everyone said that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, a lot of people do mention that. Also, that's kind of where I developed this magnetism for freestyle rapping. You know, everywhere I go, people rap. Not sure why. I mean, as a former rapper myself in middle school and for the first year of high school, I think that maybe like it takes one to know one, but everywhere I go, people start rapping.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
If you and me went outside of this podcast studio and walked around for five minutes, I can find somebody. It's rapping. I can tell who raps or who can rap, who has eight bars in their head that they're ready to go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. The Quarter Confessions series was the first time you saw the suit. That's when the suit came out. Yeah. It was kind of like a Ron Burgundy, Eric Andre inspired type of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Goodwill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, always.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Good job. I mean, Goodwill has a surprising amount of identical gray suits for sale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, a lot of people donate suits. And I was going for oversized suits, which are the cheapest ones there. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
The tough part about quarter confessions for me is that Everybody that was featured, for the most part, would more or less regret being a part of the show. Yeah. And that, over time, just gave me a bad feeling where I was like, you know what? I kind of feel like I am doing an ambush interview, especially because I'm presenting as so agreeable, yet the intention is to make something funny. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And I get that that's what people do in the satire sphere. I'm sure Ali G and Bruno and Borat did the same thing. And I don't think it's unethical because that's all for the purposes of comedy. It is what it is. But for me, I wanted to do something different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And the atmosphere of Bourbon Street is like anything goes. It's a free-spirited place. But if you transport that energy digitally to a different place like Colorado, they might look at it and be like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Right, exactly. Kids have to think about that. Or imagine if there's a video of your grandma or grandpa out there when he was a kid talking about eating ass. That's a horrible experience. To discover that about your respected elder later in life, it's tough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, the weird thing is we don't really extract answers from people. What makes a good interview is when they're ready to talk. The more you have to talk and try to get an answer out of them... It's just not a good vibe. So we kind of look for people who appear to be already ready to talk. Open body language, like they seem confident and verbose, and we approach them first. There's a look.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
We wouldn't approach a shy person and be like, come on, tell me. No. What about a person with pain in their eyes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. We just did a video in the Vegas tunnels. Obviously, it got taken down by Fox, but whatever. I was going to make a joke that I didn't see it. We tried to help a lot of them by getting them IDs. And when I made the documentary, I had this idea that it's a big roadblock for them is getting identification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Without IDs, you can't check into a homeless shelter, you can't do day labor, you can't qualify for housing, nothing. So when we interviewed them, they'd basically tell us, if I had my ID, I wouldn't be here. And so we said, okay, we're going to really help this time. We're not just going to talk to them about their struggles. We're going to actively go out and get them IDs at the DMV.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So we did that and nothing really changed in their life. And we sat down with a recovery specialist who works directly with them day in and day out. And he explained to me that he's been trying to do the same thing I tried to do in a one week period for the past 10 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And that they have deeper underlying traumas and pain that need to be dealt with far before they even take the steps to enter society as a housed person. That's a heavy truth right there. Breaking that shame cycle has to come first because you got to think, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Like I'm from a generation that romanticizes vagrancy and homelessness to a certain extent, if it's called van life or if it is done in a way that's sort of like Rolling Stone, Willie Nelson hit the road. People who are above 50, they feel really embarrassed to be in the spiral of homelessness. They feel like failures. A lot of them have kids who they weren't there for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That's not the kind of pain that can be dealt with by giving someone a tiny home. It's a good step forward, but for someone to really make a change, they have to want to change. And so it's how do you help someone and guide themselves in the right direction? And if you're too paternalistic and you use shame as a method to get them to clean up, they're gonna end up right where they started.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That's a tough truth to accept because a lot of people want a quick fix to things. And I don't blame people who go out and give bologna sandwiches out to the homeless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Each person is so complex. Now imagine drug abuse, what that does to the brain. Yeah. Trauma, childhood trauma. There's so much to unpack. And then just the belief that they're the undesirables, that they don't deserve to be a part of society because they failed a fundamental obligation like taking care of their kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, it was illegal. Fox 5, I guess. So the documentary was an hour and 45 minutes. We used 10 seconds of a news clip that was publicly broadcast by Fox 5 Vegas. And according to the Copyright Act of 1976, you're allowed to use any publicly broadcast news clip in a transformative capacity in any documentary film or research paper or broadcast or anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
They, specifically this corporation called Gray Media that controls the TV stations in almost every small town, They had lawyers hit up YouTube and YouTube complied with an illegal copyright strike to get our video immediately removed. And I'm a YouTube partner. I'm in the YouTube partner program.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So to think that I wasn't forewarned is... It's a bit strange, but it also smells like corruption to me to a certain extent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, but I'm taking them to court because... I have the means to be able to do so. I'm a larger creator. I have an audience. I have the financial backing to do it. I can't imagine how many people out there are smaller creators with not as much consumer of a fan base they can mobilize against someone like Fox 5 or the money to go to court.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So I want to take them all the way there to set precedent for future cases so that these giant mainstream media conglomerates can't copyright strike documentary filmmakers at will. It doesn't make sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, I talked to my YouTube partner today and he said that the Fox 5 lawyers have two weeks to comply with my counter appeal. But, you know, I spent 20 grand on human voiceovers in five different languages. So I invested probably in total like 70K into this video. So even if it gets reinstated, the steam's kind of been taken out of its trajectory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, like why the hell would Fox 5 have a vested interest in having the video taken down? I just hate it when people do that to videos or to creators that are doing good in the world. Yeah, it's not an expose on the mayor of Las Vegas. It's an attempt to show the civilian public how to get involved in a local nonprofit and potentially intervene in the lives of the tunnel people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No. It was all real life reality TV documentary. But it caught the attention of a larger company called Doing Things Media. Yes. And they contacted me pretty much like a week after I graduated from college in the May of 2019. And they said, hey, like, how would you like to produce a show? I was like, what do you mean? They were like, we'll get you an RV. We'll pay you 45K a year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You get to pay for gas, for food, for two hotels a week. Go out there, make content, and we'll be in the background just powering it all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yes. I mean, All Gas, No Brakes was named after a book that I wrote called All Gas, No Brakes, A Hitchhiker's Diary, which chronicled the 70-day journey that we were just talking about. It's a tough book to find, by the way. Oh, yeah. There's only a few copies left. I'm thinking about doing a reprint at some point down the line, but I sold off the last 100 copies like a month and a half ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. Until then, you guys should go read On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You should read it. I don't know if you've read it before. If you can't get my book, get On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It's great. It's the best. When's your birthday, Allison? April 23rd. Okay. I'm a Taurus. Coming soon. Typical Taurus, yeah. Yeah. I'm a typical Taurus man. I'm a Scorpio moon. Just write that down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Typical. This guy knew it. That's the real science. Yeah. Anyways, so the idea of All Gas No Brakes as a show was to combine the... I guess, road dog ethos of the All Gas No Brakes book with the presentation and editing style of Quarter Confessions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So it was to take Quarter Confessions on the road that was pretty much like a simulated hitchhiking experience, but with the editing and like punchy effects of Quarter Confessions, which is like, I wear a suit, we do the fast zoom-ins, little effects, stuff like that. It was a, man, those were the best years ever. It was just so fun. I mean, imagine you're fresh out of college.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You were just a doorman interviewing people about like, you know, making out with their cousin and stuff. And then boom, this company that you've never even heard of is willing to buy you an RV and give you 45K a year, which to me at the time was more money than I could possibly imagine. So I called my dad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I was like, dad, I need you to find me an RV because he's the only guy I know who knows about cars. And even he doesn't know much about cars. So he's like, all right, I'm on it. So the RV was 20,000. And the first event that we were called to cover was the Burning Man Festival. And that was tough because Burning Man is not too keen on filming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's supposed to be a non-commercialized escape from reality. They have a gift economy set up. It's based upon mutual participation and non-exploitation. And so the idea of making a Burning Man video was tough at first because – Burners, oftentimes, and this is not all of them, but are pretty well off in general. A lot of them have tech jobs, are pretty high up in Silicon Valley.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And Burning Man is where they go to take off, you know, to take the edge off and basically become their burner persona. On the playa, they become reborn. And they take ketamine and they wear kaleidoscope glasses and steampunk hats and they, you know, snort MDMA and they run around the sand. Listen to tech. Do you snort MDMA?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yes, you can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I didn't know. It's better to take it in a pill or water, but you can snort MDMA.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, don't snort it because it'll only last you like 90 minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So anyways, we didn't know what to do because we tried to film. Don't snort. The initial idea for All Gas No Brakes was to, instead of asking people, what's your deepest, darkest secret? It was, what's the craziest trip you've been on? So the idea was to not satirize drunk people, but satirize people who are fried on acid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And so we went to Boulder real quick, did a test interview with some lady who talked about seeing ancestral aliens during a peyote retreat. And so it's pretty easy to extract trip reports from hippies and, you know, gutter punks and stuff like that, or oogles. So... We go to Burning Man. We start asking people, like, you know, what's your craziest trip story?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And they didn't have the same type of free-flowing storytelling style that, like, an on-the-street cross-punk in New Orleans might have, where they're like, I don't give a fuck, I'll tell you whatever. These people were very bottled up about... they were willing to disclose. So we went on Burning Man Radio and we did a broadcast and we said, hey, we're doing, we're psychedelic journalists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It was me and my friend CL at the time. I said, we're psychedelic journalists. We're parked on Tan and I, which is a cross street in Black Rock City. And we said, we have a 1998 Catalina Coachman Sport. It's an RV. We've set up a podcast studio. We're doing a show about psychedelic voyages. Yeah. So lo and behold, two hours later, we had 10 people lined up at the RV. Willing to talk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So that vetted people in advance for us. And so we did a couple interviews and that was that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
There was this lady named Rosma who said that she was known in several circles in Berkeley for being multi-orgasmic and could create multiple repeated climaxes using only her mind by like squinting her eyes and squeezing her eyes together so much that like the pleasure spiral just, you know, went crazy. I feel like I talked to several people like that at Berkeley.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Right, but still, it was on the cruder end. There was one guy named Kimbo Slice was his burner name. He talked about taking a shit after taking a quarter of mushrooms and how he was seeing his childhood and visualizing his past life as the turds were flowing into the toilet and just talks about the psychedelic union between pooing and taking, taking shrimps. So he was very visual with his words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. So there was stuff like that. I interviewed Alex Gray, which was super cool about his first trip in San Francisco when he was in 1971, shortly after the summer of love. I got to do some pretty cool interviews, but still it was a semi ambush style. I wouldn't say that we were doing journalism yet. It was still comedic video work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And then I go burning man. And then it's onto the next one. So I guess that could give a loose structure, but it's just like a punchy and slapstick thing. Um, Everything was going good until we interviewed this guy named DJ Soft Baby. He was wearing a golden leotard with, once again, kaleidoscope glasses, shirtless, dancing, like, you know, dancing. And he was eating chowder out of a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
a plastic bowl. And he was like, this chowder's so fucking good. He's like, this is the best chowder I've ever had in my life. And he starts putting the chowder on his face. And he's like, I want the chowder all over me. Yeah. And so we just go, hey man, can you just do a dance for us real quick, just for some B-roll? He does a dance. We post it on Instagram the next morning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Doing Things Media CEO calls me, Reed, he says, all of our pages are down. And he's like, that guy you filmed dancing last night on drugs, putting chowder on his face, that guy's at the top of MIT.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
top of mit i don't understand what he went to that's like saying you know my brother's a rocket scientist he's like head of nasa or whatever well i mean the guy knows people in boston okay you know not in the whitey bulger sense but in the reverse sense i have trouble believing that dj soft baby oh dj soft baby was major it could have been harvard it could have been but it wasn't it wasn't umass it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Chowder. Chowder. Well, then you haven't been to Burning Man yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I've not been to Burning Man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Okay. The top of Harvard. So he made some calls, you know. to the tops, to the heads of big tech, got all the doing things media pages taken down. At the time that was like a vast network of pages. And we ended up having to take the, obviously the video came down and he held the entire network of Instagram pages hostage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And so that was, he made us agree to never post that video again, and then somehow got all of our pages reinstated. So that was my first brush with like, you know, powerful people on drugs. And that was probably my last brush with powerful people on drugs. So what did you transition into from there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think after Burning Man, we went to the South, went to Talladega Race Weekend, went to a Donald Trump Jr. book signing, went to a Juggalo adjacent fetish mansion in Central Florida called the Sausage Castle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Just ICP fans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But I say adjacent because it's not a juggalo mansion, but there's a lot of juggalos who kick it at the mansion and it's juggalo friendly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Juggalo friendly. Yeah, because they get made fun of in a lot of places.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And juggalos say outrageous shit, you know, and they embarrass themselves and they fight a lot. So they're on the FBI's gang list, which if you ask me... ICP or the... The juggalos. The juggalos. Who's the head of the juggalos? It would be Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. But there's associated acts like Twizz did and there's a whole rabbit hole. Honestly, Tech N9ne is sort of a part of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
He's actually one of the top-selling touring rappers, despite having sort of not that many streams. Tech N9ne has got a huge cult following in Missouri. The Juggalos started in Warren, Michigan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, yeah. If you went to Seattle right now, and punched a cop, and they booked you in county jail, you may end up running with the juggalos. Running with the juggalos. They're a presence in Pacific Northwest prison system from what I've heard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, they say, whoop, whoop. So if you see a Juggalo, they'll say that. Also like... I'll try to look after that. They're kind of... It's called the Dark Carnivals, the mythology they abide by. What do they define themselves?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
A family, a family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
They like to drink Faygo and also just like cheap liquor and stuff like that. They're into drugs. Yeah. A lot of circles, if you pull out a crack pipe, people will be like, I don't want to drink with you anymore. If you're at a juggalo party and someone's smoking Twiz or something, it's relatively accepted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. The hatchet man is the most common one. So it's a psychopathic records logo. It's a cartoon of a clown wielding a hatchet. It's actually a pretty sick logo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, they get satirized a lot, but I got love for the clowns. And also, so when All Gas No Brakes transitioned away from, you know, rich elite drug parties and into like the South, that's when the fun really started to happen. Living in your RV in Alabama and Florida and stuff is the best. Why? What is it about Alabama?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
People are just so friendly down there and it's warm year round and people are nonjudgmental. It's just great. The South gets hated on a lot, especially in the coastal states. Mississippi and Alabama are kind of like the butts of a lot of jokes and stuff, but... Those are great states.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, yeah. The ABQs. It's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Albuquerque. It's what Jesse Pinkman called it, is the ABQ.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
On the bus?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
There's something. You ever taken the dollar bus from Philly to New York, the Chinatown bus?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That's a great bus. The people on that. It's not a fucking dollar though. There's some that are five bucks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I apologize. Swearing's okay sometimes. Last time I was on the Chinatown bus, there was like a rooster walking down the aisle. Actual rooster?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I forgot about that. Yeah. That felt almost fake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No, the rooster. There's a place in Ybor City in Tampa where roosters walk around all the time. And we had a rooster parked there right by the main drag for, what did I say? We had a rooster parked? We had the RV parked in Ybor City for a long time and the rooster laid eggs in the undercarriage. Nice. Back to the all gas, no brakes thing though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So it was lots, it was really fun making it. And then we started all gas, no brakes in September of 2019. Six months later, the country shuts down and everything just hits the fan. I was actually here in Austin when it shut down. I was on 6th Street. I remember the, I don't just hang out on 6th Street all the time, but I was just here. Yeah, you do. Come on. Let's just be honest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I do like 6th Street. Yeah. I like East Austin better, but I like 6th Street too. So anyways, the NBA shuts down. Everything's shutting down. So I went down to the Dirty Six and I asked this doorman. I was like, are you guys ever going to shut down? He was like, fuck no, bro. The Dirty Six never closes. And I was like, all right, we'll see about that. Next day, plywood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And then I was like, all right, I thought my career was over when COVID hit. I was like, what are we going to do? Nothing's happening anymore. There's no more parties or Talladega races or Burning Man's to go to. So I went back to Seattle in the RV and I just spent four months just depressed, living in the RV, trying to figure out what would happen. But all gas, no brakes went on still.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, this was the craziest thing about that period of time is that when COVID hit, I'm sure you remember, everything turned political overnight. In Seattle, if you went to a house party- you can get canceled because people were like, oh, you're a super spreader. So if you wanted to socialize, even with a group of four or more, you had to do so with your phones damn near turned off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And a lot of people were doing hyper social policing at that time. Beyond that, in the South and in more conservative places, they were doing the opposite. They were trying to prove that they could hang out 500 deep with no mask to make a statement against the establishment. So you had this polarization that led to more division. And that's when the anti-vax protests started.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And I went to Sacramento and the passion was unreal. This is about two months after... the COVID lockdowns began. And that was my first political video, was at the Sacramento, the California State Capitol in Sacramento, documenting the, they called it the Freedom Rally, but that's typically like anti-vax stuff. And it was real intensity. And that video was my most successful to date at that time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And so I was like, okay, am I a political reporter now? Am I covering politics?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I don't know if you remember, but I was actually scared when the pandemic started. I thought that this is something that might kill us all based upon what I was consuming. And so I'd ask people, what do you think about this lockdown? And I've had people say, you know, I'm immune compromised. If I get exposed to COVID, I have a 95% fatality rate. But guess what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I'd rather be free and dead than alive living in fear. And I was like, wow. So it was just stuff along those lines. You had some San Diego surfers there complaining about the beaches being shut down when such awesome waves were coming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, right. Exactly. Why are those the two options? That is literally what it was. Yeah, it's wild. And both groups think they're fighting for the survival of something. And so that's where you really run into problems when you have two polarized groups who both think that their cause is for the common good. Mutual understanding is impossible at that juncture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And so after three months of almost everybody being locked down, George Floyd happens. And I remember I saw the third precinct burning on my phone in Minneapolis. And everyone says, Andrew, you have to go cover this. And I'm somebody, like I said, police violence has been close to my heart since I was a kid. And my first thought is, I can't do that. I'm a comedic reporter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I can't go to Minneapolis and cover this. It'll be the end of my career. And I had a friend named Lacey who I went to college with. And she told me, she was like, bro, this is your chance for you to do something serious. You can actually create a meaningful piece of reporting like you always wanted to before quarter confessions. And you can turn all gas stone breaks into a news source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So I called Reed, who is the CEO of the company that owned All Gas No Brakes. And I was like, look, man, I want to go to Minneapolis. I was in Orlando at the time. I was actually at the Sausage Castle. And he said- Sorry, the Sausage Castle? Yeah, the Juggalo Mansion. Oh, right. That's called the Sausage Castle. So I'm watching Minneapolis unfold on Lake Street where it was burning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And I got to the Orlando airport and I booked a flight without, I booked it on my own card. I didn't consult my boss or anything. And I was sitting in my seat on the flight and he straight up told me, he's like, if you fuck this up and this destroys the brand, we're getting a different host. This, if you mess this up and you turn our company
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
our show away from a party show about drinking and drugs and all that stuff, and you make this a social justice show, you're done." But I was like, I just turned my phone off. I got to the Minneapolis airport on the second night of the riots. And when I got to the airport, there was National Guardsmen in the airport. And it was like a call of duty mission, the one in the airport.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And on the speaker, they say, if you're arriving here right now, you are not permitted to go anywhere outside of the airport. National Guardsmen will escort you to your Uber or to your car. They're going to take a picture of your ID. They're going to figure out where you're going. You are not permitted to go outside tonight. And so Lacey picks me up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
There's two people in the back, two of her home girls wearing like shysty masks. I'm like, what are we doing? Where are we going? And she goes, we're going to go film the riot. We're going to Lake Street. And so we drive down there. Kmart is burning. Target is burning. Everything is on fire. She has the Sony A7. She gives me a microphone and she's like, go talk to that guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And that was a guy with a Molotov cocktail in his hand who had just burned Kmart down. And so I go, what should I ask him? She goes, what's on your mind? So I walk up to him and I'm like, what's on your mind? He said something like, everything that was happening here was supposed to happen. This is how we feel. Is it right? No. Is this going to benefit the community? No. But this is how we feel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. And I noticed that aside from a group called Unicorn Riot, there was no one else actually interviewing the protesters. The local news was on the bridge 15, not 15, but five blocks away. you know, filming just the scene itself, just the fire. But I saw some crazy things off camera too. I saw... So there was kind of two groups there. There was like the anarchists, more mobilized protesters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And then there was just mostly... African-American community members who were just pissed, who had nothing to do with the organized resistance. And they were all kind of joining forces to riot. And there was this anarchist kid who ran up to White Castle with like a Molotov cocktail. And he was about to throw it at White Castle. And this black dude ran up to him and grabbed his arm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And he's like, no. We fuck with White Castle. And I was like, what? And so you see, if you go on Lake Street, every business is burned. White Castle remains. I also saw all these dudes rip this ATM out of a bank and hit it with sledgehammers. They were a group of friends hitting it with sledgehammers, right? They're hitting it with sledgehammers. Boom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
All of a sudden, money starts spraying out of the ATM. Like I've never seen some shit like this, like pouring out of it. And then this group of friends who were just united in getting it open start fighting each other for the money as it's flying out of it. And so it was like Joker from the Batman's Army type vibes. But I got shot in the ass by the National Guard. It was no good. Like a what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
A rubber bullet? Yeah. Not shot in the butt. Honestly, it hurt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
At first, but I just think human beings are just funny in general. Yeah, the absurdity of it. Cool thing about Jon Stewart is like... I generally like to say that anybody who works for corporate media, whether it be Comedy Central or anything owned by Time Warner, Fox, MSNBC, they can't say what they want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Because in order to climb up in those organizations, you have to appease the narrative of the company that you're working for to rise in the ranks. Jon Stewart, I feel like... has so much clout in the media world that I'm pretty sure he can say whatever he wants. I actually don't think that Jon Stewart is controlled by anybody. I really don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I tried to color match you, though. Got the black and white going. I went to Walmart before this and got the Wrangler shirt with the Texas Longhorns tee. Is that where you shop, Walmart? Generally, yeah. I'm a Target man myself. There's no way you get those suits from Target. So you're saying it's a nice way to compliment a suit. I think you go men's warehouse, if not further.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think that he can go on the show and talk about whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
My favorite Jon Stewart moment that illustrates that perfectly is whenever he went on the Colbert show. And he was just joking around with Stephen Colbert, who I think is a full-blown propagandist, about the Wuhan lab leak theory. He was just goofing around. He was like, It's called the coronavirus lab and they had it before. And now what do we have?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And it was like, you could see in Stephen Colbert that he was like gun to his head type shit where he's like, John, John, stop joking about that. And that made me realize like, oh, everything that John Stewart did, especially for the 9-11 first responders, he's a true American. And not in the sense of like the different political parties want you to believe as an American,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Not a do your part and social distance American. Not a, you know, wave your Trump flag in the back of your pickup truck American. Just a guy who genuinely stands up for what's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think he's done the best job, though. If someone in that obviously Democrat-connected corporate media economy, he seems to be the freest talker.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So this is when you first became famous, right? I'm not even sure what fame means. I mean, I just see myself as me. When did you get the shades? Oh, that was on tour. That was... That's a whole... The shades... That's a dark time. But this... I didn't make... This is a meme, really. I don't even know if that's a symbol of fame or whatever. I didn't make journalism to become famous. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I made it to give people a platform to share their stories. It just so happens that people liked it enough to where I became sort of famous, but... You know, if I could go back and not be the on-camera guy and just platform the stories, I would. But the reality is people need a face to attach to stuff they like. And so that's just how it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But yeah, I would say right around Minneapolis protest, Portland protest, Proud Boys rally time when I was really in there is when I started to be acclaimed as more than just like a ambush meme lord. Did that have effect on you, the fame? Not at that point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, the country was basically closed. Yeah. So it wasn't like there was a street to walk down where people were like, there's that guy. So getting famous during COVID made it so when the country reopened, it was as if like my life really changed because I was like, oh, all these fans I made during COVID are like seeing me out at the bar. This is cool. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
At first, fame is the best thing ever because you can go anywhere in the country and these spaces that you normally feel a bit insecure in, like a local dive bar, a cool restaurant, a coffee shop, where you just be another guy, all of a sudden they're like, oh my God, I'm a big fan. They give you like free stuff. You get this sense of acceptance that you never would have gotten before. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But there's also the dark side. Well, it's all love, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I'm sure you know what it's like. Yeah, it's beautiful. The only downside of fame, really, is that you can't really be anonymous again. And you have to seek out more strange environments to be anonymous in. Like right now, I live in the desert, basically. And I want to live in the middle of nowhere in the Mojave Desert.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Not because I'm scared of people, but because I just want to be like curious me again. People don't know and I can ask questions to people that I'm interested in without them going, I remember, I see you here or I see you there. That's the main thing. That's what I loved about hitchhiking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No, it was funny.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, it's the best. But both are great. Complaining about fame is just the lamest shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I love furries. I should do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think you might like it more than you think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, your fursona, the true legs will come out when you're in a $3,600 lizard suit. Everything is possible. Lizard? Is that what they go with? Well, scalies... are the lizard furries. Yeah. And there's a big division in the community where they think scalies are kind of douchebag, you know, because the scaly suits are more expensive. They're about seven grand, whereas a fur suit is 3,600.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So, and they're also taller.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So when the scalies pull up to the fur fest, it's like, ah, fuck the reptiles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, I mean, I want to clear up a few things. Reid, the CEO of Doing Things, I actually think he's a good guy. I think that he was just trying to run a business. He saw what was working for his brand, which is very college centric, very festival centric. And he was right to think that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Journalism and especially coverage of sensitive topics like COVID or police brutality would definitely not work on merch. You're not going to sell a picture of me interviewing someone at a riot like you would me interviewing a furry or a drunk dude in Alabama. It doesn't work the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So it was a lot harder to monetize, not just because of YouTube censorship, but also just because of the sensitive nature of the content. So Reid was looking out for himself as a businessman. There was a different partner, I'm not going to say his name, that was more connected in Hollywood. I think he's responsible for the collapse of the show. What was the collapse like? What happened?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Like sunglasses? Yeah, but they're really embarrassing. But I was on tour, so I just felt like I could do anything as far as fashion choices. But looking back at pictures from myself in that era, I'm like, God. So that was the symbol of... of the fame got to your head. I think so, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So right as the country's reopening, I get a DM from Eric Wareheim of Tim and Eric. And I'm covering something called the UFO Mega Conference in Laughlin, Nevada, which is a beautiful river town. And, um, you know, he, he DMs me, he says, let's make a show. And I'm like, oh shit, is this real? You know, I grew up such a big fan of, uh, Nathan for you and the Eric Andre show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And those are produced by their company. Absolutely. So I was like, hell yeah, let's do it. Um, And three days later, I get a call that says Jonah Hill wants to hop on board. And I can't believe this. I'm still in the RV and I'm in Laughlin, Nevada. So I'm like, Jonah Hill, super bad. Are you shitting me right now? So I was excited. And Moneyball, Jonah Hill's a great actor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So basically, just within a week, I assembled this super team of Tim and Eric.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, pretty much. Of Tim and Eric. Sorry, I'm so sorry. No, that was good. And Jonah Hill. And yeah, we just pitched it around. Every single TV network rejected it. I don't know why. And they mainly did that because I was in this weird situation where I had signed a contract with Doing Things Media that I didn't realize was called a 360 deal. That's what they use in like the rap world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Basically means that I can't do anything outside of them without them getting 100% of the money. So if I was to go work at Sbarro or Quiznos while I was working for all gas, no brakes, they would get my 500 bucks a week from the sandwich spot. I was unable to earn any outside income. I didn't read the fine print because I was 21. And like I told you, 45K a year RV sounds sick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And basically, the TV networks were like, why would we buy a show if the digital brand is going to be running at the same time? Because they didn't want to stop doing All Gas No Brakes to make a TV show. They wanted All Gas No Brakes to continue as a web show while All Gas No Brakes as a future TV show at Showtime or Hulu or somewhere like that was also concurrently running.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
which is impossible for one man to do. And so every TV network said, okay, we're not doing that. We want an exclusive rights contract with this guy. Next, oh yeah, this is crazy to think about because it all happened so fast. So Jonah Hill says A24 Films wants to do a movie instead of a show and they're going to let you keep the digital brand running.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think fame getting to your head, if you spend more than a hundred bucks on sunglasses, you've officially gone off the deep end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So this meant that I could keep doing my Instagram stuff with doing things media slash all gas, no brakes while making an A24 movie with Jonah Hill and Tim and Eric. So it was just like, I was excited. It sounded perfect. So they said, okay, what do you want to make a movie about? And I told them, okay, here's what's going to happen in 2020.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
If Trump wins, there's going to be riots across the country. The major cities are going to burn down. If Trump loses, the militias and his loyal supporters are going to try to have a coup in DC. That's what I said. And I said, so I'm going to follow the lead up to whoever wins the election, and I'm going to document what happens after. So they said, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And so I was to begin filming in late October, you know, during the campaign trail, maybe mid-October, up until November, and then in the following months to see what would happen. This meant that I couldn't film anything for All Gas, No Brakes, the digital show, because I had to dedicate 100% of my time to making this perfect movie. Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Still, one of the partners at Doing Things Media was demanding that I not only produce the movie, but also more content for the show. And I told them, there's only so many hours in a day, man, that's gonna be impossible. And I said, if you want it to be possible, I can make it work, but I wanna have half of the monetization from the show, 50% profit split, which I thought is fair.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
If you want me to do double work when I was getting almost nothing before, split me in on the profits. They fired us immediately. Me and my two childhood friends who I hired to work on the show with me were all out of a job. As we were filming for the now HBO project, we got our fire notices.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think so too, but they didn't see it that way because they figured we made the initial investment. We discovered him is how they looked at it. So it wasn't Reed, but it was the other partner who wasn't Reed who said, we have tons of verbatim. He said this, we have, I have tons of connections in the comedy world. We can replace Andrew overnight. I'm not sure why he made that miscalculation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I wish he would have thought about it twice. I wish it didn't have to end like that, but it did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think... Because you can part amicably without the drama. I think all betrayal and anything like that is motivated by self-interest, whether that be economic success, social stability, whatever it is. They figured that because I was being such a burden and asking for the profit, that they could just release me and find someone equally talented and not split them in so they can make more money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, I see. Well, that's a stupid way to think. People think like that, man. People who are... The word I use is like sidekick syndrome. Like when people are kind of a part of the production, but they're not integral, they start thinking that the front man doesn't matter or something. And that the brains of the operation are actually the people on the periphery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And so they start to believe that they can just shift things around and the audience won't care. Not realizing that I was actually the one who created the show. and that the lore of the show is connected to my rise outside of their jurisdiction, if that makes sense. Like the people who watch All Gas, No Brakes watched Quarter Confessions and read the book. And so, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
She's not wrong, man. Thank you. That's part of your whole swag, though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, I remember all three of us who worked on All Gas No Brakes got fired at the same time. And we were in the RV that Tim and Eric's company bought for us. which was a bigger RV in the parking lot of a Walmart in South Philly. And the propane had just ran out and it was 15 degrees outside. So like the RV was getting really cold, really fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And I just looked at my phone and it was like, you're fired. And I was just like, God help me. But I've had a couple moments like that and God does help me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, yeah. Although...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
The one in South Philly is great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But technically now you can't park an RV there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, the thing is those Walmart, Cracker Barrel, and Big Five are supposed to technically all let RV campers park overnight. But if there's like a crime problem in the city where they're at, they can lobby. Individual Walmarts can lobby with the corporate to take that away. So like all the Portland Walmarts, you can't sleep there anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Any city with like significant homelessness and like petty property crime, the Walmarts are a no-go. Fascinating. So that was a low point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Channel 5 was born. Channel 5 was born in the March of 2021. After we finished filming for the HBO project. Oh, really? So you went all in on the HBO project? Yeah. I mean, we filmed the HBO project from November 2020 up until April 2021. Damn near. We were just like, you know, picking up the pieces, going back for individual interviews, stuff like that. So let's go to that project.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It turned out to be a movie called This Place Rules. It was supposed to be called America Shits Itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, like my first grade teacher, Mrs. Claudia, this is back in the day, like I was telling you, we just asked her about her life in Columbia and stuff like that. But I didn't really get into actual journalism until my ninth grade year. I had no idea I had an interest in it. Before that, I wanted to be a rapper.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I also just realized that a lot of people are going to stream the movie after watching this podcast, which is cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, HBO Max. I never got a chance to promote them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
On a positive note, HBO is great to work with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
like that they're the most professional like respectful company i've ever worked with pretty much like yeah hbo has created some of the greatest like tv but even in the background like they get shit done there's there's no there's no wait time they have some of the best heavy hitters on their team for trailers for posters all the promotional apparatus they have is like super solid did you get like good notes from people there like how to a little bit man but you know
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, it really broke the fourth wall. That's how I would describe it. Because if you were at January 6th and the lead up, it felt like it was the beginning to a series of similar riots. But it just popped off so much that that was it. You haven't seen anything like it since. There was supposed to be a second one on January 20th. It was the actual inauguration. That never happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It was a crazy time to be alive and around. And especially the relationship that I developed with Enrique Tarrio, who's the former chairman of the Proud Boys. He's now facing, you know, 23 years in prison. It's like a trip because I went to his house in Miami, maybe two weeks after January 6th. talking to him, it seemed like he didn't think anything was going to happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's all about hip hop and meditation and picking psilocybin mushrooms in public parks and stuff like that. That's what I was into.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
He was just like, yeah, man, that was crazy. I'm glad I wasn't there. Like, they're dumb for doing that. He even told me he doesn't think the election was stolen, which is just a mindfuck. It's like, why'd you get everyone so hyped up? It's just weird to think about how so many people's lives are drastically altered forever because of that just bizarre moment in time that we'll always live on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Just an all-encompassing worldview. That family that I talked to, I call them the QAnon family, but it's called the Spencer family. You know, they were non-political up until the Stop the Steal movement began in September of 2020. And within four months, their entire life revolved around the mythology and lore of Q. And I've never seen in my life
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, it was heartbreaking to see his disappointment in his dad for even, you know, following QAnon so militantly because he was like, I feel like they let my dad down. I feel like they let our family down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. I was making conscious rap music. I was to the point where I had four dream catchers hanging above my bed, Alex Gray painting on the wall, tapestry on the ceiling. Just scribbling rhymes down all the time. So you said somewhere that you sucked at school. Okay. Well, let's step back a little bit. So I had this amazing journalism course in ninth grade. I went to an alternative high school.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You know, because January 6th was supposed to be the day, according to QAnon, that the storm happens and that the military is supposed to mobilize and arrest the members of the deep state, Clinton, Soros, all that. Trump was supposed to go into a helicopter, you know what I mean? And take control of the country back from, you know, the swamp. And it didn't happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
In fact, the next day he was like almost denouncing it. Now he doesn't, but then he did. And it was a really, I think it hurt people's pride a lot. My friend 4G Auto Blow, he's a Trump rapper. He describes it that way. He says a lot of people's pride got hurt by January 6th. Trump rapper. Oh, yeah, dude. Honestly, there's some pretty dope Trump rap out there. I'm serious. MAGA rap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, like you would think like, oh, yeah, MAGA, there's no rappers there. But there's rappers, and they do a pretty good job. They're good? At delivering the messaging they want to deliver, yeah. I mean, they think of stuff, and I'm like, that's clever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You know, I don't want this to sound rude or anything. I just don't care about QAnon. You know what I mean? I've put so much thought into it, and I just can't seem to care about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I guess that's why. It just seems like it's gone. And the ideas of QAnon have just bled into mainstream standard conservative thinking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Exactly. What I'm saying is I don't want QAnon adherents to see this and think I don't care about them. Yeah. But as far as who is behind it, the damage is done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Have you kind of thought about that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's possible, you know, that QAnon is a psyop to distract people away from actually uncovering what the deep state is and who is truly running things behind the scenes because the deep state is just the 1%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's that you take, you get people so close to any type of class consciousness and then you totally divert everything into like lizard humans who live on the moon and that Hillary Clinton is eating babies on camera and QAnon did just that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
They want to convince you that, one, there's no conservative deep state, which is even more hilarious, that Trump isn't connected to a huge, rich corporate apparatus of propagandists, and two, that the Democratic establishment is the only deep state, and that some middle-of-the-road conservatives, that there's no grifters or manipulators outside of that group. Three-headed snake, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And the teacher was named Calvin Shaw. And he was just like... I ended up taking his class all four years. And he used to let me actually leave school. I didn't like going to school. So he'd let me basically go around Seattle and do different interviews with people as long as I could come back by the end of the day and write a story for his class. And he'd mark me as present.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
There's grifters everywhere. Everywhere. Everyone wants to make money, dude. This is the world that we're in. It's in collapse. Everybody wants to make money and engagement is the rule of law. So anything, that's why these news organizations follow retention incentives. They want to make money by selling ads. So they try to create fear and constant division to enrich corporate media establishment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And you have people who are almost realizing, hey, it seems like Fox and CNN might be owned by the same people and are tactically using these machines to keep us divided perfectly 50-50 to ensure that the power structure never gets disrupted. And then you get these people, you know who's going to save us? Donald Trump. That's the guy? How is that the guy? It's not the guy. I don't have TDS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I'm not an orange man basher who thinks about the guy all the time, but I don't think he's the guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
For one, is that he's the exact same off camera as he is on camera. Yeah. It's not an act. He told me that all real Americans die before 58. He mentioned Sean Connery and a few others. How old is he? Getting up there. Yeah. I think early 50s. Yeah. I just found it fascinating. I mean, how nice his studio is. I mean, the guy's got like an MSNBC level setup. I actually had a great time with him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, it's bizarre because having him in that movie, created so many problems for me. And when I interviewed him, you know, I didn't necessarily portray him in the best light. You know, we joked around a bit, but it wasn't an Alex Jones hit piece necessarily.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But I like to think that I was a bit critical of him in the film, especially the ways that he antagonized his supporters to storm the Capitol or to follow that trajectory. He told me when I met with him, he was like, I know you think that having me in this movie is a good idea, but you're going to have some serious backlash because of that. At the time, I was like, man, it's fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You know, it's all good. We're just hanging out, drinking whiskey, doing bench presses, drinking Jameson. It's all good. It was, first of all, I had to campaign to get him in the film because the studios were like, we don't, there was a bizarre time around like, I think it was 2018, where deplatforming was the big thing that people were encouraging.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It said, giving a platform to problematic ideologies will in turn expand their reach. And so even extending your platform to someone who's problematic is helping them. AKA destroying humanity, whatever it was. So that was the whole thing. And when I did this media training that was mandated by HBO, it was all training and how to defend from that exact question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
They said, when we put you on NPR and we put you on CNN, They're gonna ask you about platforming problematic ideologies. And you're gonna have to say stuff like, sunlight is the best disinfectant. I believe that extremism only goes away when you shine a light on it because leaving it in the dark will only allow it to grow. They gave me like 15 pointers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So the first article that I wrote was about the Silk Road and the deep web. Because, you know, as a ninth grader, when I discovered the hidden wiki, I thought that I was like... really tapping into like the most secret society elite level black market in the world. And so if you remember, they had that hidden Wiki link that was like hire a hit man, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I didn't use any of those pointers because I'm not the kind of person who wants to be media trained. I like to speak freely. But in the promotional run for the film, when I went on CNN, this was a crazy experience. So I went on CNN and thankfully my friend was with me. And so I'm on CNN and- By the way, your friend is chilling in sunglasses laying in the couch right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No, but I mean, I'm sure it describes Larry Seuss.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. So HBO had a press tour set up for me. And the main ones were CNN and NPR. And so they said, you're going to go on CNN on the Don Lemon morning show. And he's going to ask you about your life, what led up to the movie, what we can expect. So I get in the studio. It's about 7 o'clock in the morning in New York at a show the night before at Times Square. So I'm like groggy-eyed, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
They put the lav on me. Boom, I'm live on CNN Sunday morning. And he goes, how would you describe Enrique Tarrio's mental state in the lead up to the Capitol insurrection? And I'm looking around, I'm like, is this guy serious? Like, am I sandwiched in the January 6th hit piece right now? I thought it was about me. And so I told him, it's not about Enrique Tarrio.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's about how companies like Fox, MSNBC, and even your station, CNN, use the 24-hour news cycle to enrage people to generate ad revenue and pit Americans against each other during times like that. And he said, there's nothing fake about CNN. And I said, I didn't say you were fake news.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I'm not saying you're lying, but you're directly antagonizing and stirring people up against half the country because you need money during, to support a dying platform.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Pretty much. Nice. And, you know, I was so, my mom was watching it. She was texting me. She's like, what are you doing? And I was like, I don't know. And so he goes, why'd you extend the platform to Alex Jones? And I go, I don't know. I just wanted to drink some Jameson and lift some weights with him. You know, I'm just, at this point, I don't support that kind of media. I don't support CNN.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So, you know, I just, I didn't give them much information about Alex, but it was very awkward. They never posted the segment online. When I got off of that interview, I had a handler that A24 assigned to me. So I had someone with me and she, you could tell she was flustered. Like she was furious about what I just did. And so she goes, I just got an email from Time Warner C-Suite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And I go, what's Time Warner C-Suite? She says, I don't know if you know this, but the same people who own CNN own HBO. And it's Time Warner. And so they canceled my press tour. So my press tour was finished. All the late night shows that I was supposed to go on, I was supposed to go on like the late night shows.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And that was off the table because they were worried that I was like a loose cannon, I think. And then the only remaining appearance I had left was NPR in Boston. And that was supposed to be a premiere. So it wasn't supposed to be an interrogation. It wasn't supposed to be anything like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And so I messaged them and I was like, all right, you know, I want to get someone killed at my school. Like how much is it going to cost me? And I published my interview with the hidden Wiki hit man who was probably a fed or something, but who knows? And that my first article was called like inside the deep web, a conversation with a hit man. That's nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's supposed to be a premiere in front of a live audience where they watch the film and I show up after for a Q&A. So I'm like, all right, whatever. It's kind of weird. They only have this one press opportunity left. I kind of felt bad that I ruined the entire press tour by confronting Don Lemon. But at this point, I wanted to just do this final one, especially because it was a viewing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And I was like, cool. I sat in the audience. I watched people laugh to the film. It was awesome. So I go backstage and there's an NPR journalist waiting for me. And nothing against people who wear masks, but she had two N95s on. And I'm not... Two N95s is... It's a lot. It's over the line. So I go, hey, great to meet you. She doesn't shake my hand. And I go, why not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And she goes, you've been around some people who I don't want their germs. Yeah. And I'm like, okay, okay. This is weird. I thought this is a sort of like fun premiere for my movie. We sit down. The first thing she asks me is, how do you think the Sandy Hook families would feel about you platforming one of the most despicable Americans in history, Alex Jones? In front of a live audience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
NPR never published this. The only recordings of it are by a fan named Rob in Boston who put it on YouTube, vertical phone footage. And I literally am like, well, the Sandy Hook family's lawyer, Mark Bankston, who represented them in court in Connecticut, told me specifically that Leonard Posner, the father of Noah Posner, who died at Sandy Hook, was a huge fan of the film.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And so I said that to her and that kind of just like silenced that conversation. But the rest of the whole conversation was just about exploitation and why are you platforming mentally ill people and giving a platform to conspiracies like QAnon? Don't you feel like you're a part of their spread? Some would call you a misinformation reporter. All this crazy stuff. And yeah, next day hit the fan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Fuck all those people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, you're fearless even then. Yeah. I mean, I was hiding behind a Tor browser, so there's not much fear to be had. Oh, so it was anonymous. It was anonymous, but I did publish it under my name, so you're right. I could have been in danger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. And it was just, when all that was happening, when I was under fire from the mainstream press for platforming Alex Jones, I thought back to what he said to me. And it doesn't mean I agree with everything he says, but he told me, you're gonna be in trouble with these people if you put me in your video. And it wasn't too bad a trouble, but definitely I do think sometimes
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
what the film would have been like without him. And I think that it was worth it because his scene is so funny to me and it brings me back to a different time in my life and I'm happy that that scene's out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So he eggs people on, and then when it gets hot, he steps away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
They've always been gay. Saying frogs are straight is even crazier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
How much of it is real? He's right about big tech censorship. I think if he's right about anything, it would probably be the heads of big tech colluding together across company lines to deplatform certain people. He's right about that. I think most of the things that he says...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
follow the question everything narrative, and then everything is kind of like a conspiracy or like a plot or a false flag. I think that he's built up a following for so long that... wants him to do that, you know, so I think he'll question things that he probably thinks are relatively straightforward because that's the shtick of the show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, the info war is fighting misinformation and people want to see him be that guy. To a certain extent, if you're a creator who supports your family, you do follow economic incentives and people want you to be the character and so you're going to naturally gravitate toward being it. Do you feel that pressure yourself? I did. Years ago, not anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I feel like now I can speak freely and really say what I want to say in my new life. But when I was younger, yeah, I feel like I had to be this sort of awkward, sort of amicable, aloof guy who just didn't think anything about anything and just was here to listen. But now I feel more confident adding some narrative and voiceover and things like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, I mean, for sure, because I definitely feel that sometimes. I know what works for me, but I like to think that my audience appreciates when I try new things. So I'm not totally enslaved to it. Yeah, I try not to pay attention to views or any of that. Well, you get some high views, so I'll report that for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, that condition is classified by persistent visual snow, floaters, morphing objects. Like, I see them right now. I see them all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, honestly, I do actually feel that way sometimes. Like I'll put out something that I care about a lot, but if it doesn't get as many views, I'm like, all right, it must've not been as good as my high review videos or whatever. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. I think it's easier to do when you're really successful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Really?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
and that's why he'll have like ridiculous guests and just yeah and just like just he enjoys doing yeah it's pretty cool maybe i'll one day try to do that for now i'm too attached to like the gratification of getting a million views in a day and stuff like that i'm not gonna lie to you and say that i've beat that or something like well it's a worthy enemy to be fighting because it's a drug and it's one that should be
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
The snow is definitely in the room. It's all over you. And basically... It wasn't that I took too many shrooms. I think that it was, I took about an eighth of senna essence mushrooms, which are the ones that come from the earth instead of cow shit. And I took an eighth of those at my friend Toby's house, which is a normal amount, but I was in eighth grade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oh yeah, for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
A lot of people are controlled by their audience. They don't have to have a puppet master on a corporate level. Audience incentive is a different type of, I don't want to say slavery, but.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That's pretty cool. Yeah, it was a great experience, man. I mean, it was awesome working with Tim and Eric, awesome working with Jonah Hill. I feel the same about HBO and A24. Everybody that I worked on the film with, I have a lot of love for, and I appreciate the experience. It's my first movie. It's a big deal. It was a good one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
In my head, it's like I finally got to make the transition from YouTuber to filmmaker, and that was always this psychic barrier that I felt like I had to jump over, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Whose idea was that? It was actually Tim and Eric's idea. There was a really great editor named Clay who works for Absolutely, and they did all the editing pretty much in the office. And so it was Clay's idea to add a retrospective director's chair narrative arc to the whole film.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
think that jonah hill has a good eye for like what's cool amongst the younger folks like he's into skateboarding stuff that's why he did that film mid 90s and i think he probably saw a similar thing in what was going on with all gas no brakes and was like this could be this could be big and so not only did he actually fund the film he also gave me his agent and i forgot to mention that it was jonah hill's lawyers that he gave me for free that got me out of my contract eventually with doing things media or
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
freed me up to speak about what happened. So he was also a part of you kind of gaining your freedom. Yeah, in a weird way. Like even though him and I don't talk that much just because he's doing his own thing, Jonah Hill is like a huge factor in my current success and just like everything that I've been able to accomplish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I'm not really sure sometimes. I like to think that I am socially left. I think people should be able to dress and act however they want. I don't believe in restricting people's social freedoms. Economics-wise, it doesn't seem... Like leftist economic policy works very well on a city funding level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Like if you see what's going on in California, it seems like the city leadership is mishandling the funds in California too. So I don't know about that, but I don't know. I don't really see myself as left or right. I just never have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I tend to lean toward like the empathetic perspective, which I do think is more on the left than the right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
i also i'm not into like super like pc stuff you know i don't believe in limiting free speech either i don't believe that i believe in a free internet which i think is more embraced now by conservatives but it does seem that maybe you can correct me but i get the sense sometimes that the left attack their own very intensely It does happen. But every community has terms of exile.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So I woke up the next morning with these extreme visual distortions. And I thought that it would go away. I tried to make it go away, but There's really no cure for HPPD. It's a lifelong condition. So it's just a matter of dealing with it and realizing that it is only visual. So when people ask me, hey, I have HPPD, how do I cope with it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, look, imagine, think about what happens in the conservative realm. You know, like when Black Rifle Coffee Company, like, denounced Kyle Rittenhouse. They lost a lot of money, too. Like, it's not, the right attacks its own, too. I mean, think about Bud Light and stuff. Like, they, I mean, you know, like, every community has terms of exile. You just got to know who you're
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
engaging with and you gotta make that decision carefully.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
If you're a conservative and you have a t-shirt with like a demon on it, like say goodbye. You know what I mean? You know, there's certain stuff that they freak the hell out about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. I mean, I don't like pedophiles either, but I don't think about it all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, he calls himself a pedophile hunter and makes videos exposing democratic elite pedophile cabals and is himself a convicted child molester. There's an old thing that people say that every confession, every accusation is a confession to a certain extent. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
so like it's it's bizarre that some people's whole life after a big mistake will revolve around trying to seem like the good guy instead of taking accountability for themselves yeah it's a common thing you see all the time like neighborhood watch people You know what I mean? Like, what made you that? You know, like, what did you do, bro?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You feel like you have to get karmic retribution by doing the reverse. I don't get it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No, but, I mean, with the migrant situation, I don't know. What was that covering that like? I just got a lot of hate from conservatives for, like, letting the migrants tell their stories about their journey and stuff. Well, what did you learn from just going to the border? I mean, just the sheer desperation that the citizens of the world are in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, there's people who truly believe that America is the only hope for their success and to feed their family. And I think a lot of them are kind of getting catfished. Meaning America has its problems too? It has severe problems. There's extreme poverty here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
for a person to succeed, to rise is higher. I wish success on everybody who comes here. But my thing is the expectation that they have and the sort of American dream propaganda they've been installed with isn't necessarily a reflection of contemporary American reality. So I'm talking to people who speak no English and say, I'm here for a better life. I go, where are you going to go?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
They say, I have no idea. And I'm like, man, that's tough. And you almost think how bad are things elsewhere? for someone to abandon their family, make this journey across multiple continents and end up here with no plan. And it just made me realize how sheltered I am to a certain extent as an American. And walking back what I said a little bit, because I was just trying to make a point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I say, remember that every other sense that you have, what you can hear, what you can taste, you know, your feet on the ground, you're still on earth, you're still here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But what I think of as bad poverty, like let's say West Baltimore or Ninth Ward, New Orleans, is nothing compared to what's going on in almost half of the world, if not more. And so it just made me zoom out a little bit. Sometimes you forget about third world poverty when you live here for so long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And you get programmed to believe the worst things that are out there is like Kensington, Philadelphia, or Tenderloin, San Francisco. But those are just microcosms of more or less functioning cities. Despite what they might lead you to believe, Philadelphia is a great place. So is San Francisco. But there's places where everywhere is really run down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I mean, homelessness in Seattle and San Francisco is for sure a result of the housing crisis, especially post-COVID and all the gentrification that preceded it, you know. And it's unfortunate now to... that the conservative media is saying like, look at Biden's America as if Biden created homeless people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And it's just disappointing because once again, you're seeing the media use real issues that should concern every US citizen and causing people to point fingers at a different political party as responsible for the suffering of others. Do you think January 6th can happen again?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I think that Americans overall are very comfortable with our standard of living. I think people like going to Sonic and waiting in their car and getting milkshakes, and people like going to the AMC theaters, and they like going ice skating and mini golfing and going to the bar after work. I don't think that anyone wants a collapse of the basic structure of the country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Even the most politically divided don't want to see 7-11 go away. We are so comfortable. If you look at other countries, even Europe, look at how they protest. And look at the Arab Spring. Those guys were talking like January Sixers, and they actually took control of the government. And so think about even if the MAGA crowd took over the Capitol building, it's just a building. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I just think that Americans, when they talk about Civil War stuff, we're so far from that. Even if the rhetoric is as divided as it was in 2020, it won't happen again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
There has to be a level of economic desperation that's causing people to starve or some basic resource going away. Water, something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, we don't have the guns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah. Depersonalization is the feeling that you are not real, but that reality still exists. Derealization is the idea that reality itself is an illusion created by your mind and that you're the only person alive and that everything that your brain is projecting to your visual cortex is a lie and that you're the only living human being. Both are pretty intense. HPPD creates both of those things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I don't even know if I'm going to vote. It's weird that this is our choice. I know. I wish people were more focused on, like, city politics. Like, I'd rather vote, like, yes or no for a bike lane in my neighborhood than I would for the president. So local politics to you is where it is. And you feel it, yeah. Oh, I mean, your vote actually matters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Let's say you have a community of 500 people and you live in Henderson, Nevada. You can influence whether or not there's a bike lane or if this is going to be a playground or, you know, an AMPM. You get to choose. And you can influence 100 people to choose and boom. This is your community. You can't influence the result of an election.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I just can't believe those are our guys. Yeah. I mean, that's really our guys. Like, that's where we're at. All these smart people we have in this country, they have a great history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well. Is he a legit juggalo or is he just. No, no, no, no. Joker gang is like a Miami Cuban guy. Oh. Is Joker 305 Rawest Chico alive? So me and, I had been following him for a long time on Instagram because he used to like post videos of himself like popping Percocets and smoking blunts on the toilet freestyling. And so I had followed him for a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And then I finally got this platform and I said, oh my God, I bet you now that we have a million followers, Joker gang will sit down with us. And lo and behold, the clout did its thing. And there I was face to face with the man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, I mean, I've yet to speak on this for a lot of reasons, mostly because it was a hard time and it's a sensitive subject. And I've wanted to prioritize the reporting, but I think that now I'm ready and able to do so. Everything sort of started on December 30th, 2022. And that was the release date of the HBO project. Like I told you, we didn't know when the movie was going to come out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
We weren't told that it was going to come out on that date until early November. And so it was like, oh my God, here we go. We got a movie coming out. HBO had, I didn't even know it was going to be them. So... every day for those 50 days to where I received word and to the movie announcement or to the movie release was like, I was like a kid waiting for Christmas morning. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It was like every day. I just, I saw the movie release date as the first day of like the rest of my life. And so I remember the week of the movie release, it was like every day I was like, Oh my God, six days, five days, four days. And I,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
When it became two days, like I was so excited and so like honestly anxiety riddled because it was such a massive platform that I went out to the desert by myself out in the Mojave, got a hotel and just kind of sat there and then Movie release day comes. It was supposed to come out at 8 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I remember it was like 12 hours left, 10 hours left, and then eight minutes before the movie at 7.52, or I guess it was sent at 10.52 East Coast time, I got a text message requesting a portion of my fat HBO check to contribute toward Apparently years of therapy bills that this person had accrued after she says that she felt that I pressured her into giving consent years prior.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And I was confused, not only because of the timing, but because this is someone that I hadn't seen in years or spoken to in years. And I presume that I was on good terms with. So I didn't respond to the text message.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And then when I didn't respond, about seven days later, this person made some TikTok videos and with the help of some friends launched an online campaign that got picked up by the press pretty quickly. So what did you feel like when you got that text? Well... It's tough because on one hand, I'm not opposed to restitution being part of a private accountability process for real abuse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And so when I've talked to people who have the condition, it's really either or. But more than 70% of people with HPPD fall into either category. They're both coping mechanisms for the condition. I don't know what really happens. I talked to a researcher once named Dr. Abraham. He lives in upstate New York. He's the leading scientist when it comes to HPPD research.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
If you've hurt someone to an extent that it took them out of work or something, I think they're entitled to some money. But unfortunately, as I later learned, this person had legal counsel and this was an attempt to basically create evidence by extracting a confession from me to use as precedent for a civil lawsuit to the tune of a couple million dollars. It's dark. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
How did you meet this person? Well, I met them when I was 22. And like I told you, I was living in an RV making this show called All Gas, No Brakes. And I would travel between cities like every other day. And so I would basically pick a new city. And I got in this like pretty bad habit of what I would say is essentially treating Instagram like a dating app. You know, I would go to a new place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I'd post my location. I'd surf the DMs and I would look for like fans to meet up with. It wasn't always girls. It was just people to party with because I was also partying every night. But a lot of times ended up being girls and stuff. And so that's kind of how this situation was. I didn't have sex with this person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Had a consensual encounter that they reached out to me about two weeks after saying, hey, I don't want you to take this the wrong way. But looking back, I felt a lot more pressure to agree than I realized in the moment. I don't think this is any fault of yours. I just think that you came on a bit too strong and I didn't want to let you down. I gave in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And it was that language made me feel horrible, mainly because if this person had told me, hey, I don't want to hook up, I would have said, yeah, of course not. I don't want to hook up with someone who doesn't want to hook up with me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And I think that as fame increased during that time, I think I was just kind of oblivious to how people were seeing me, especially those who had a digital relationship with me prior to me knowing them. And I don't think that I handled that the right way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, I was the initiatory party in an interaction with a fan who felt it. she had to say yes because of, I'm not sure why, I don't know why, but like I said, this person also disclosed to me they had a history of childhood trauma and were actively being treated for PTSD and that they felt things moved too fast for them given their situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And so I told her, I said, hey, if you wanna reach out, if you wanna talk on the phone, I'm always here for you. I'm sorry to hear that. Let me know if we can talk further. About six months after that, Um, I was at Sturgis bike week and, uh, I remember this day, this was the hardest day. I was just chilling and I got a text from my friend and said, Hey man, you're getting canceled right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And I was like, what do you mean? Like, did someone find an old tweet or something? What are you talking about? And I opened my phone and it was this Instagram story of me. It was like the ugliest picture of me you can find. It was like my face open. That was like screenshotted. Um, And it said, I remember this specifically because I just couldn't believe it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It said, the ugly loser who hosts all gas, no brakes is a piece of shit. He knowingly abused my friend and got away with it. If you follow him, I'm going to message you and ask you why. So this person who I don't know, I didn't even know where who that accusation was coming from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
He's the only one who actually seems to care about finding a cure. And the only known treatment right now is alcohol and benzodiaphines. That's not good. Right. So alcoholism, something that came into my life pretty early. Alcohol abuse as a result of that experience because that helps with the visual symptoms, makes some of the static go away. Man. Never tried benzos though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
They text, they emailed every production company that I was working with, DM hundreds, if not thousands of people like just saying that like I was this piece of shit and I didn't even know who this person was. So I was frantically calling and texting like every person that I'd seen intimately for the past year and be like, Hey, are we on good terms? Is everything okay? And then I figured out that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
person was coming from florida and i knew who it was and so thankfully i reached out to the original um person who i had the communication with and um i said hey like i think this might have been you this might have been your friend who posted this are we good like i'm sorry i i apologized again i was like listen i feel bad that you feel this way i want to do anything that i can
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
to help you again. I apologize. And she said, apology accepted. I'm sorry. My friend asked if she could post on my behalf. And I'm sorry, I was going through a lot mentally and I saw your fame increasing. And so I agreed to let her speak on my behalf. And we made amends in private. I said, okay, I'm here for you, let me know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And she said, apologies enough, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. And that was two years prior to this text message being sent to my phone eight minutes before the movie. So naturally, I wanted to go on my platforms and talk about what was happening. But I also didn't want to mess up the rollout of the movie, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And so the PR firm was like, we got this, we'll handle this for you. And that was, I guess, by way of a TMZ thing that said, Andrew Callahan is devastated. I'm not sure why they thought that that was going to make people...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
be in my favor but yeah it was just a picture of me on NBC that said Andrew Callahan devastated by allegations that that was their plan I guess to show that I was remorseful or something you know how much of this do you think lawyers kind of pushing this when money and fame are involved well I wish I could say the lawyer but I just can't um that was involved in this
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But I will tell you that I try to lean away from resentment and toward accountability completely. What was my role in the situation? How can I never make someone feel like that again? What can I do? What changes can I make to make sure that one, I never treat someone this way, and two, to never be in that position again? Well, again, thank you for taking accountability.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And the main reason I talk about that is because it wasn't just that person. There was multiple people who made videos reporting similar behavior. And so it's obvious that that was a pattern of behavior of mine. And so I made the apology video to announce that I was taking some time away because I just needed time away. I mean, my entire support system collapsed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
My friends at the time disappeared. I was getting like obituaries texted to my phone that were like, Hey, it's been nice knowing you. It was great to see you grow. Good luck. You know, like I was dead. And yeah, it got dropped from my agency. No one gave me tough love. No one called me to ask me if I was all right. It was just only everyone disappeared in a week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, and it was hard to separate the initial situation that I knew was... more or less the setup and the possibly genuine other accounts. And so it was like, all right, you know what? At this point in my life, I want to be on the right side of history. I don't want to be the anti cancel culture mouthpiece.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I don't have the mental strength to fight this, especially because I was envisioning the HBO drop to be this like the world opens up to me moment. And it was just the reverse. But it wasn't so much the media reporting on it that hurt me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It was just little stuff like a childhood friend that you love seeing they unfollowed you on Instagram or just like seeing someone on the street that you grew up with and like waving at them and they don't do anything back. And you're just like, oh, my God, man, like this is my new life. But what are you supposed to do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Thankfully, like somehow two weeks after, I met an amazing partner who I'm still with to this day. And I was able to conquer my two biggest fears, which is monogamy and dogs. I was terrified of dogs and terrified of having a girlfriend. Now I have a girlfriend who I love and two dogs. So... What was the lowest point? Well... Right after this happened, I entered like recovery programs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Like the reality is not real? Yeah, I experience it all the time. But like I said, my job helps with that because I get to feel like when you seek out extremes to a certain extent and you put yourself on the front lines of intense events, whether it be politically or socially, or just dive into deep fringe subcultures, you get this feeling that you're real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Started with AA, but then I found a more specialized program that dealt with the issues that I was dealing with. Say the hardest point was logically deducing that the lives of my loved ones would be better off if I was gone. You know what I mean? And thinking that my mom and my friends, that their life would be better if I took myself out of the picture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And for one, I just figured, you know, their friend's canceled. You know, her son is a disgrace. My family's going to think they raised me wrong. And my friends, I'm a social pariah now. I'm a burden. I'm better off dead. And the hard part was, you know, I would read stories in books written by parents who lost their kids to suicide. And they reported feeling a lot of anger after the suicide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So I tried to think of what's the way I can do it to get the least amount of anger on behalf of the people who would grieve. Because hanging someone will discover you. So I figured drinking myself to death would be the way to do it. And I wasn't able to. Yeah, that was just a dark place. I remember hating the people who loved me because I knew they would grieve and that made me mad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
That makes sense. Like I was ready to go. I had no will to live. But their grief was like, I didn't want to cause that. I didn't want to hurt them. So I was like, I hated the people who loved me because they were stopping me from taking my own life. You know, and it's weird to think that like when I was going through that, if you walk by me in the street, I look like a normal guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And so now when I walk around and I see people, I think to myself, you have no idea what that person is going through. It's crazy that so many people are suffering in complete silence and they don't wear it on them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I also thought, if I could write down what I just told you on a piece of paper, and I was to do it, and then they found the note, they would take it more seriously. because they would know that I wasn't lying. Yeah. But then, you know, if you do it, it reduces the lifespan of your parents by 15 years. So I looked at it like I was taking time away from them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
If you have any kind of platform, you know, whether it doesn't have to be famous on Instagram, it could be like if you're a pillar of your community in the culinary world or whatever it is. Just be hyper aware of that and remember that you are inheriting a power dynamic that can create situations where there might be some pressure that you don't even realize is there, but it's definitely there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And you just have to be aware of that. And two, when meeting new partners, having hookups and stuff like that, just try to have a trauma-informed conversation about their past. Really know the experiences and the backstory of what a new partner has gone through in that world of intimacy, whatever they're comfortable to share, obviously. But I would advise against one night stands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And being filmed is also a confirmation, if you can look at the MP4 file, that you're in fact living here on earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I would advise against hooking up with someone that you're meeting for the first time. Have those conversations prior because even though it might sound like a vibe killer, it's not. And if you think that that conversation is a vibe killer, you probably shouldn't be in that situation in the first place. Especially now, how hyper-sexualized things are and how common that type of violence is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You need to be able to have those conversations and stop and say, hey, tell me a little bit about your past. Is there any triggers that make you uncomfortable? Let me know how I can be the best partner to you. And I'm sure that college-age people are not having those conversations, but I'm sure that it would go a long way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yeah, and also as men, we're trained to believe that it's our duty to be the initiatory party in any type of sexual encounter. like oh like man chases woman you know what i mean like you know you have to be the one to make the move and or like she's playing hard to get if you know she's resistant to your first like compliment or something i think that That's not always how it has to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And that extra caution needs to be placed if you're taking the initiatory role in an interaction, especially if someone has a traumatic background. They might agree to do something with you because they're scared and you might not realize that's what's going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But because you don't see yourself as a predatory person, you don't see yourself as someone who would ever consciously make someone uncomfortable or cross a boundary, but people have histories that you might not understand. And for me, as someone who...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
doesn't have much, honestly, like childhood trauma or anything like that, it's been an interesting year for me working in therapy and elsewhere, understanding how that affects the mind. And also I understand that hurt people hurt people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And that someone with a traumatic background isn't going to have sympathy for applying that traumatic pain to someone else, even if that person isn't the cause of what put them in that spot. If we can go back to Channel 5, can you tell the origin story of that? Yeah, I mean, Channel 5...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
During the all gas, no brakes days, we used to tell people that we were called Channel 5 if we wanted them to stop antagonizing us while we were filming. Because every town has a Channel 5. So when people were like, what's this for? If they were being super rude and like trying to get in the camera and be hella obnoxious, we would just say, oh, we're Channel 5.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Well, I got HPPD around the same time that I began this journalism course in ninth grade. So I sort of always used journalism as a therapeutic mechanism to deal with some of these symptoms, especially depersonalization. There's some pretty good illustrations of what it feels like. Kind of feels like you're trapped behind your eyes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And they would be like, oh, my grandma's going to see that. And they would leave us alone. So Channel 5 was a diversion tactic during all gas, no brakes days. And it just so happened that we were in Miami Beach one time and this kid came up like drinking liquor, like, you know, trying to yell about like whatever they yell about in Miami Beach, like titties or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And we're like, bro, this is Channel 5. Be careful what you say. And he was like, for real? And he just walked off. And I said to my friend at the time, I was like, that sounded pretty good, right? Channel 5. And he goes, that does sound pretty good. He's like, that's got to be trademarked though. No. No. It's not trademarked. It's crazy, right? There's a Channel 5 in every city.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Channel 5 KTLA, Channel 5 Seattle, Como News. Dude, Channel 5 itself, we own it. Because no one's thought of something that simple. Because you'd think you'd have to specify. We own channel5.com, channel5.news. Dude, we own it. It's awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I believe that was. There's only about five places in the U.S. where people yell about eating ass all the time. Mm-hmm. Bourbon Street, South Beach, Miami, 6th Street in Austin, Broadway in Nashville. And I'm just going to go ahead and say Times Square. You might not think it, but... Times Square, really? Yeah, they yell about ass there. Times Square.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I would say Beale Street in Memphis, but it's not good. Oh, yeah. I mean, Beale Street is like... The median age is too high on Beale Street for anyone to yell about ass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I guess before, especially it used to be like deadpan. Now I would describe it as more directed, but still relatively affable, agreeable, deadpan interview style.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And that's intentional.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
I used to look at the camera like Jim from The Office back in the day. Yeah. I don't do that anymore. What about the editing? How do you think about the editing? I still do most of it, but Susan helps a lot too. It's my associate. Yeah, the editing style. Like I said, we pioneered this editing style that honestly was inspired a bit by like Vic Berger, but we took it to real life. Crash zooms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
kind of chopping up vocals a bit to add comedic timing where it didn't necessarily exist like you might add two seconds of awkward silence that are built with room tone or you might make everything really fast by cutting silence and switching frames i mean switching camera angles but now we try to be pretty straightforward because we want to be taken more seriously you know
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Or that you're just this like nebulous soul that's trapped in a flesh suit that you're not really a part of. You're sort of puppeteering a flesh and bone skin suit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
A crash zoom is when it's artificial zoom that you might add in Adobe Premiere where the camera zooms in on someone's face. Where the resolution is not there. The resolution is not there. Unless you have a Blackmagic cinema camera. Which you don't. We don't use those.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And you also do voiceover storytelling. I think the first time I really did that was in the San Francisco Streets video. Because there's so much content about San Francisco, homelessness, tenderloin shoplifting. But there's not that much...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
context in those videos about the history of san francisco the housing crisis nimbyism random zoning stuff that sounds boring but has a major role in the current situation on the streets there as to why the tenderloin is neglected by police and by the city council and the other neighborhoods like knob hill and north beach are so nice so i added that purposely to the san francisco video and then also to the philadelphia streets video to accentuate the reporting and add some historical analysis
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Number one is always humanization. That's the primary goal is to take people in circumstances where they're often news items and remind the public that these are people with lives and concerns and dreams just like you. But secondly, we also want to start introducing more solution-oriented journalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
So not just, oh my God, I'm becoming aware of how horrible this is, but what can you actually do to help? And as you can see with the Vegas Tunnels video, people are responding pretty positively to it. Like here's how you can maybe help a homeless neighbor, help get them an ID, help them qualify for housing or get a job at the scrapyard. There's always ways to help.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
You feel like your soul is not something that is connected to your body. It's something living in your head. It's really hard to explain to people who haven't gone through derealization or depersonalization. But if you go on support groups, they always say like, how do I break free from behind my eyes? Like dark stuff like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
But so much of the YouTube world is oversaturated by just like endless videos of people suffering. And the comments are always like, wow, so horrible. But what does that really do for somebody?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
There's a lot to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's an evolving situation. Drill began in 2010. Some people say it was Chief Keef in Chicago. I think it was King Louie in Chicago. But I think all of it was very influenced by Waka Flocka Flame, who dropped an album called Flocka Valley in 2010 that was like hyper-violent, adrenaline-boosting,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
rap music made by people who were actually in the streets so in the 90s you had like if you had 50 cent you had rappers rapping about like whatever gangster shit selling crack and beating people up but they weren't actually doing it drill has a true crime component to where drill fans want to know that the person rapping about catching bodies does in fact kill people so drill is uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's pretty horrifying. It sounds great, but it started in Chicago, then it spread to England, and now it's bounced back to New York, the Bronx and Brooklyn specifically, and spread from New York to the rest of the country. So now there's probably a drill wrapper every 10 square miles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Yes. And the fans are typically not in the communities that are affected by poverty. So they're kind of like superheroes to white kids. It's dark. And not just white kids, but just anyone who's not in the hood. It's not necessarily a race thing. There's white drill rappers too. Slim Jesus was a big one. He's out of the picture now, but there's white drill rappers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Oblock is a housing project in South Chicago, in the Englewood area, where Michelle Obama grew up. It's also where Chief Keef was born and raised. I don't know if he was born there, but he was raised there. And he is the forefather of modern drill music as we know it. So these are the projects where drill began.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
It's also the first place where you have that intersection of drill music and true crime because Oblock has a lot of rappers and then nearby is an area called St. Lawrence, aka Tukaville, which has a lot of rappers as well. And so these two rival drill gangs basically have a lot of history and it connects to music at large. So you've interviewed people there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
No, I mean, I think that Oblock has calmed down a lot. For one, it has security, so you can't even really get in and out. But two, I think that Oblock's trying to rebrand itself a lot. Because it could be because Lil Durk's avoiding a Rico charge. Could be for a variety of reasons. I know you don't know exactly what that means, but... Lil Durk? Rapper Lil Durk is... from affiliated with Oblock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
And a lot of people have been murdered in retribution for killings that Lil Durk may or may not have influenced the ordering of. But anyways. And Lil Durk documented the killings via rap music probably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Okay, I know you don't know about Drill, but Lil Durk was associated with a rapper named King Von, and King Von perhaps paid for the assassination of a rapper named FBG Duck who got killed in Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood. It's possible. The Oblock Six are Drill-associated, not rappers, but just shooters, and they perhaps operated on King Von's behalf when he killed FBG Duck.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, it's crazy, man. Especially like I grew up in Capitol Hill.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And I like to say that I grew up like after grunge and before tech. Yeah. So it's like that weird window where Seattle, in my opinion, had its like had its moment. It was sick when I was growing up on the hill. And then Amazon moved their corporate campus to a neighborhood called South Lake Union in like 2013 when I was a sophomore in high school. And they tore down that whole neighborhood.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
But it was like industrial before that. So we're like, all right, you know what?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
It's like, go ahead and build your corporate campus there. It's totally fine. But then the problem was they were importing all of these like like random remote workers and shit into Seattle. Yeah. So I think you had like a thousand Amazon employees move from somewhere else to Seattle every single week for like five years. That's crazy.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Oh, that scene. Yeah, what the fuck, dude? You're just up in a guy's office. Yeah, you know what's a trip to is I'm being sued by Bill Joyner. What's the most painful piece of truth that's hurt you?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And the average residency of an Amazon employee in Seattle was, I think, between 14 to 16 months. Because they would get promoted and go somewhere else like Austin, Portland, wherever they're going. And so it got to the point where all the Amazon employees had to have a place to live. So they all moved to Capitol Hill. So developers sold the city out, literally bulldozed the entire neighborhood.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Every dope coffee shop like Bauhaus, so many institutions just got bulldozed because the city wanted to give tax breaks to Bezos, which is 0% taxes, and stimulate the economy. So the Capitol Hill neighborhood, the Central District, all that shit is totally gone. And then COVID happens. All the workers start working remotely.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And they realize, dude, I can make my Amazon paycheck and move to Idaho and have some land full of chill-ass people where no one's going to make fun of me for being a tech bro. And they're like, if they leave, I would too. So now Seattle's a ghost town full of empty skyscrapers, and the landlords won't lower the rents. So we have this homelessness happening, and half the city is vacant apartments.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, and then you have fucking Republican pundits come in and be like, look at these liberals and their dumbass bullshit.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Of course it was their biggest cash cow. And what they did is like, they systematically fell in line with the DNC and disenfranchised Bernie Sanders in 2016 and,
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
But it's especially prominent now.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah. So he sued us like way before it came out. And it basically said there's like eight different counts. We're going to slam you for intentional infliction of emotional distress, defamation, civil stalking, a violation of the federal wiretap act, like a insane litany of false. You never got him on the phone. Never, but he's claiming that actually tapped his phone lines.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, just imagine you walk through the jungle. You leave Venezuela into Colombia on foot. You walk through the Darien Gap. There's like crocodiles trying to eat you and shit. People are dropping around you like flies, like it's Phoenix in the summertime. There's dropping. Sorry, dead weight. We got to keep moving.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
You take buses through Mexico for like two months. Cartel fools are extorting you, taking advantage of migrants, holding the rich ones ransom. Mexican police also are systematically extorting you at every single border checkpoint for your watch, your shoes. You finally get to the U.S. border. For some reason, it's open. Let's keep it real. Because Joseph R. Biden and Kamala Harris.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
There's all of a sudden some Texas ranger pulls up and he's like, get in, Venezuelans, we're going to Colorado to the sanctuary cities. You get there, you get to a shitty apartment. There's a couple kids at the apartment. One of them's named Cookie. He robs an old lady.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Then fucking next thing you know, there's a hundred and fifty youtubers live streamers Yeah dudes with maggot t-shirts and baseball helmets and ski goggles with gimbals on their back live streaming being like what's the craziest thing? You've seen over here. You have Sean handy doing a walkthrough my ass pulls up out of nowhere I'm all fucking like hey, I'm trying to tell the truth. Yeah
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
People were just like, dude, what the fuck is going on?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
They're automatically just like, oh, thank God. They're excited.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
You know, cause Spanish is also just like a beautiful language. So when you speak it to them, it just, it's, it's nicer. Like even if they spoke English, they'd prefer to be spoken to in Spanish.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
which you didn't like the wire yeah no i didn't do but so check out a wire up we got a wire up on so this is going to blow your mind so you know that scene in the film where i visit his office and i talked to like a bunch of random corporate white collar guys yeah well you're outside everyone's stoked for free lunch on a thursday yes who doesn't love a free lunch right so in the lawsuit it says that i interviewed one of his employees in the film so one of those dudes on free lunch thursday was actually a bill joiner cadet was the guy that played in the major league related to joiner
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
basically like a propaganda farm i mean honestly just a pr for pr for i don't even think they see themselves as political it's almost like a lawyer it's just like a necessary service you know i mean you can pay the the union between lawyers pr firms and real estate agents is like something that's been ruining the country for like 200 years yeah you know because it's like and they're just like fuck you know why we don't know where to put our retired hots
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
They put them in like Scottsdale or like Scottsdale, clear water, just like places to die.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
It really is like- That's like how Aberdeen, Washington, and Eureka, California are. Yeah. It's like the specific breed of tweakers who are perpetually in recovery. Yeah.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I know, dude. Like, Pill made a new song because he was like, yo, Dear Kelly's doing numbers, blood. I'm about to come up with a new song. Right? His new song is just like, basically like him, like the lyrics are just him being like, Pill can't say the N word. Fuck you, bitch. And the whole song, the whole song is just like, Pill, my name is like, I'm just like, bro, this is not the marketing.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And it's literally like you can look at it like an earthquake spreading from San Francisco. All the Frisco natives live in Oakland, and all the Oakland fools are in Sac and Stockton.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Dude, that's the thing is like, it's almost like they use certain buzzwords to program and get people upset. Like, you know, Colorado is a place where everyone thinks it's just a bunch of white people. So you say, like, the average person thinks, like, oh, Colorado. It is white.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
There's a lot of white people there, but they say the same thing about Seattle, Washington. Sure. So it's like, you know, obviously they think, like, migrant gangs taking over. Colorado hits a lot harder than, like, a migrant gang taking over a small Nevada town. Everyone's like, ah, we'll let them do whatever the fuck they want to do. Yeah. So I think that worked pretty well.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
But, like, you know that, like, Colfax has always been, like—
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Always been that way. We have something like Colfax in Seattle called Aurora. And it's like everybody from Seattle is like, yeah, watch yourself on Aurora. And so if you were a migrant, you live somewhere that's cheap as fuck where they're not going to check for your papers. And every single bad neighborhood in America has gangs.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I don't think so. I think Joyner's like a pretty common last name. Because I know that because I tried to find Bill Joyner for like two years.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, shout out to Aurora. I love it down there. Great people, strong people. Yeah, just like regular people. Doing their thing. Yeah. Being regular.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Dude, exactly. And they almost create these correlations in their mind. It's a sequence of events that might not even be true to reality. First, this happens with my house in Kelly's case. And then this happens with the election. It's all theft. Honestly, it is all theft. I mean, the world is based upon the exploitation of the poor.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And speaking of gangs, we also started those. Gangs began here. Even the gangs that people see as being these Central American threats, like MS-13 and 18th Street, those started in L.A. And they also started and grew in American prisons. And then Reagan deported those people to El Salvador. These poor El Salvadorian people get basically taken over by American trained gangs.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And then they come back with their tattoos that are like an American tagger style on their whole chest.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
didn't even know that i didn't know that it goes back to reagan sending them to el salvador ms-13 started in koreatown in los angeles because the salvadorians were getting bullied by the mexicans who were living there so ms-13 the reason they go like this is because it started off as like a black metal like hangout club so these salvadorian kids who would like do this they'd listen to like black sabbath and talk about how they're tired of getting pushed around by mexicans and then so like they just started getting more and more savage just mexican
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, and so they took it to the next level, you know Then they started going to jail and they were like, oh shit full sink We're actually satanic because in Mexico, they're pretty scared of like we're very it's a Catholic country. Yeah, it's a very Catholic country So they're thinking like how do we scare all these Mexicans? Let's act like we're demons
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
and so it worked and uh 18th street formed as a rival salvadorian gang because now these new salvadorians came and they're like we want to hang out with you guys ms was like fuck you for we're the guys yeah and it's still going i mean it's still a big presence in you know california that's the thing about this idea about gangs most people especially like news consumers don't even know how close they actually are to gangs there's gangs everywhere you might just not see them
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
You got people who are like, I live in an upscale part of San Diego and I'm sick of these gangs coming across the border. It's like, well, dude, if you actually knew what was going on in your city, you might realize there's some gangs. There's also crazy rich kid high school gangs.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
You know, also too, like with the rappers like Lil Wayne becoming famous, especially you saw it in the South, people just would listen to Lil Wayne and be like, I'm a blood.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
you know what i mean like it really happened like i i knew some bloods in new orleans and i was like how'd you guys become bloods they were like back in the day like 2009 like my big bro was just connecting hella with that carter three album you know what i mean he slaps and he's like i got my fucking that's so funny and then it's like at that point it's like that's your big homie yeah i'm kind of scared of him and he fucks with little wayne so i guess we're bloods now so we're bloods only wear red go buy bulls jerseys
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, and, like, gangs are pretty accepting if you're, like, from somewhere else. So they probably go to L.A. like, what's up? I'm a blood from New Orleans. No one's going to be like, is it because of Lil Wayne?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And those gangs were also started, you know, low-key by the FBI, too.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Specifically to dismantle the Black Panthers.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, they actually protected Oakland and Compton.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Oh yeah, that's our shit.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah. Dude, they were pretty nuts back in the day.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Former MLB baseball player.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
So if you were on like 24th and international in the sixties, you're saying that was a white neighborhood. I'm pretty sure that it was like white working class, young parents. Yeah. Cause I read a hell's angels by Hunter S Thompson. And just like ethnographically, I was like, wait, what? there's these like tough white fools from Oakland that like act white as fuck.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I feel like Cocoa County kind of absorbed like the last remnants of whatever that was.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah. And a lot of it has to do with like self mythology. I think that can be one of the most damaging things to people's life and recovery. is a lot of people think of themselves in a certain way that's not necessarily how they are, but the character of how they want to be perceived. Kelly has this idea of like, I never complain. I never ask for help.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I am like an alpha buff businessman who gets it done and takes care of his family. And so that kind of conflicted with the reality of like, I lost my house and I can't provide for them. How do I maintain this bravado while simultaneously accepting my sort of downtrodden situation? And he wasn't able to do that. So he was able to channel that alpha mentality into the political shit.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I mean, I just think they're I wouldn't say so much like accountability, but the Reagan era toxic positivity of like, I'm doing great. Everything's totally fine. I don't know if it's like a response to like their their parents being like, I went to World War Two. What the fuck do you have to complain about?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, I think part of it has to do with that of like any complaint they leverage is like, well, your grandpa was at Omaha. So I don't know what you're complaining about.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
So you think Bill Joyner is a big guy physically, but then I realized that wasn't his brother.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
But I think part of the reason that the 60s became such like this fucking crazy moment is because World War II, we were like the good guys. So you got home from World War II, and everyone was like, thank you, man. You defeated the Nazis. I think that from what my grandpa told me, he was in the Air Force.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
He told me he was wearing his uniform on the subway in Philadelphia, and there was these hippies cursing at him, trying to spit on him. And I think he still looks at that as one of his worst memories. Because, you know.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah. And he was 19. He comes home and these kids are, you know. Baby killer. They're looking at him like he is the manifestation of, like, imperialism.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Unnecessary wars against communism. But the reality is, like, we've came a long way since then. I don't think that you still see protesters spiting service members. Sure. When you're against the Iraq war, you don't see a soldier in uniform and think, like, Fuck you. You say, fuck George Bush. Yeah. You go like, fuck the old guy that sent you to do that.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
So I think that also like that really drove a generational wedge that made way for like that Reagan era.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Well, in Kelly's mind, Bill Joyner is like this tiny demonic guy, like some four foot 11, like sniveling, who hides behind his lawyers and all this shit. But I've been able to confirm through third parties that Bill Joyner is around like five foot nine. So he's not like insanely small. He's like Joe Rogan's height.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
In terms of the VA benefits?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, I mean, I will say there is like certain small town environments that I've been in. Freeport, Pennsylvania, Algona, Iowa. Some outskirts of Duluth, Minnesota.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Where these are towns with like a thousand people or less.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
You got veterans wearing their, you know, full fatigues or whatever they wear in Iraq. And they walk around town and they are the shit. Good. They walk into Waffle House or a diner and everyone stands up. They clap. They salute. They give a salute. They give them a... free food. They go out to the bars at nighttime. The chicks are all over them. Their life is awesome.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I think that sort of like coming home from war dream does exist in small town America.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
But I think in the major cities, there's just not that much understanding of the sacrifice that they made. And that's something that a lot of people don't know about me is that like, I have a lot of military family background, not my dad, but the generation before that, almost everybody was involved in the army or air force in some way. So I have a lot of respect for service members.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And when I hear people talk shit about them, it pisses me off, especially some of these rich-ass pampered college kids. I don't know why it pissed me off so much, but during the Free Palestine protests, that was one of the most classic examples of the psychology of this new generation. The Columbia protests. Yeah, yeah. Columbia is $75,000 a year.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
So you have people at those protests who are saying like, this school is a demonic, hellish organization. They give money to an apartheid ethnic state. And the first thing that comes to mind is, oh, why don't you drop out then? Why don't you stop literally paying your money to this evil cabal? But that's off limits. And no one even questions that. Because my dad won't let me.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I want to have a career. And those are the kind of people, logically, who see a service member and are like, dude, what nice would you do? Kill a kid out there?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, no. A kid tried to fucking kill me. But I think that's what.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah. It's weird because I'm in the reverse of that right now. I just moved into a really nice neighborhood for the first time in California. I only got a six-month lease. I'm not going to say the neighborhood because it's going to make people hate me, but it's a fucking nice place. I'm paying a six-month because I was like, I want to know what it's like to live like a rich person.
Soder
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And on the reverse end, when it's too nice, people hate you no matter what if you're below 50 years old. So my neighbors, like a lot of them are nice, but some of them, like I'll leave the lights on at nighttime and they'll call the police. You know what I mean? Like I will, they'll email the, we're also the only renters like in the area for like two miles.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And so I'm about to move back into the RV. I'm saying it right now. I'm about to move back into the RV. Like I feel like I'm losing my touch with, with reality. Because you're just surrounded by nice stuff. Yeah, dude. Like the more money you have, the less community there is. Everyone wants your money. Yeah. And also there's this like fear of the outside and fear of the pores.
Soder
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It's like kind of ruptures the brainwaves of a lot of the rich. We're like, all right, I got my shit now. I don't want anybody without shit to be near me.
Soder
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Yeah, definitely. And also just the way that like being social media famous or whatever the fuck influences, like personal interactions made me want to live in the Hills away from everybody.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Because I'm like, dude, this augmented reality is really fucking with my perception of self. I need to be more grounded. But now that I look at the differences, I'm like, all right, live in an RV and get recognized 10 times a day versus live around a bunch of rich people. I'll take the RV.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
It's also too, I have like employees for the first time. I have like six people working for me. So I'm like, dude, I got to be in the office to teach him how to edit. I'm training editors so I can work less behind a computer. So I'm getting there soon. I just bought this new ambulance. It's like a European ambulance. So I painted it white.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I might paint it all kinds of crazy colors, but I'm going to hollow out the back of it and build an editing studio with Starlink internet and shit where I can sleep and there's a backdrop so I can do a mobile podcast. That's fucking sick. And I'm just trying to get back out there, bro, because like...
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I mean, that by far is the most controversial part of the documentary is, you know, spoiler alert. He goes to rehab after the intervention and he's diagnosed by this rehab facility as a cannabis addict, which, which, I mean, I'm not going to say that.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
No, bro. Oh, God, I missed the road. Fuck. I wish I was at a gas station in Indiana right now. You know what I mean? No, I'm happy to be on this podcast.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I'd be buying smokes. Imagine people we could talk to.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And we could find snacks and merchandise you can't find in other places.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Oh, even better. Real Alabama. Not that Birmingham's not real, but, like, up north, it's a little different.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
You should go to Gadsden. Have you been there? No. Oh, bro, that's where Yellow Wolf's from.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Damn. It's low-key the Aurora, Colorado of Alabama. You know? Dudes in sideways DC hats, vaping.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Everybody's like Yellow Wolf's second cousin out there.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Americana and like American culture is the best. The people in like the fucking mosaic of personalities and communities we have is the best. However, we're one of the worst global presences and we have some of the most obnoxious, manipulative, rich elites of anywhere else. And they use the news machine as their like propaganda apparatus. They just pump money into it and hypnotize the public.
Soder
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But what's worse now is they're figuring out how to do it with independent media and podcasting.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And you're seeing a lot of these podcasters. I'm sure you've seen this leaning into the mainstream media. And I knew that was suspicious when I saw it. It's fucking crazy. I was like, wait a second. If you're saying like, I don't want to shit on any podcast. Sure. But it's like, I'm fine with it. You're saying, you're saying, oh, fuck it.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
fuck fox news yet you give joe rogan theo vaughn and jake paul a front row at the fucking inauguration yeah and the milk boys i think were there too but they got snubbed but the point is i'm saying it's like that is they used trump and those people used the podcast sphere to manipulate their way into the white house by like assuming this like oh i'm just your friend it's me trump your buddy you know and what's funny is people get like so mad i don't like any politicians
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
greedy rich motherfuckers would let if if we would have just finished bernie's second term yeah we would be in a much better we'd be doing fantastic and also like back to the podcaster thing i don't want to shit on them but what i'm saying is i understand the appeal of the trump's fear and like the post cancel comedy world sure because like it obviously like the language policing and just like the hyper liberalization of like comedy that you're talking about in 2016 wild made shit not funny
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, and guess who doesn't care about language? Trump. So it's like, for example, I went to Austin. I went on Shane and Matt's podcast.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, shout out to the homies. Dude, the comedians there are hilarious. I was even just seeing, I know people have their own, I know stand-up's got its own drama and class.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
yeah that's what i was seeing i was seeing live stand-up and i was like wow i haven't seen funny stand-up in person in a long time yeah this is actually funny not because they're doing like offensive shit just for the sake of shock like they're not scared to make funny jokes this is tight i don't see this too much in los angeles no you know what i mean i was like it really is and like well i would say something i give credit to new york for new york new york
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I think it's sort of like hijacked his dopamine reward systems.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
You know what I mean? To where he's like, he's having a good day or bad day. It's not determined on like how his day's actually going, but if he's high or not.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And didn't lean into it. I was going to tell you that is by far my favorite thing about Shane and kind of why I look up to him in certain ways.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
It's because a lot of people, they go through a public controversy or a scandal and then they make their whole life this like vendetta about like, I am the underdog, the righteous one who got done wrong. I'm a free speech lion and a guardian of people being able to say retarded.
Soder
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And then you have people who are like, oh, that sucked. I'm just going to keep pushing forward and just keep doing their shit.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And then you take like the, the, obviously we know that people who have, obviously we know that people who are prone to schizophrenia, sometimes they smoke some of this new high grade shit, like doing dabs and all this crazy, you know, science experiments. And they go a little bit off the rails. Cause that shit is like dabs to me is drugs.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And there's a new pipeline now that I'm not sure was as prevalent then. But if you go through a public scandal of any kind...
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
people the mainstream media tells you your career is over but it actually means that you get to have a second career with like the worst people ever so as soon as i remember for me like dude i was getting i can't even tell you the job offers the kid like i don't even want to say it but like okay i'm just gonna say i had info wars hit me up and be like dude you want a paid position and i was like what the fuck is going on i want to sell your frog brain fucking pills it was like a one-to-one ratio people being like you're a piece of shit and people being like bro fuck liberals come work with me and i was like
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Absolutely. But a lot of those like free speech movements, they do harvest anger. when you're in a traumatic state. It's actually pretty similar to the whole Kelly situation.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
is like for sure it's very big and i think that was why the the weed segment was particularly controversial yeah because when he went to rehab that phone call that we had the first week where he was like dude i'm realizing i had these unprocessed consecutive traumatic events that i haven't dealt with i have to apologize to bill joiner i have to get right with my family and get right with god and all this good yeah by the third week of the of the treatment he was just like dude i've realized i'm an addict
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I have addiction. It wasn't me. It was the fact that I was just smoking so much. So once I find God or my higher power, as they say in this world, and I push that evil addiction to the side, I'm gonna be fine. So they externalize all accountability for their own role and shit.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And the next thing you know, they're replacing their conquest, not conquest, like their, whatever you wanna call it, their holy mission is just back, but they're just sober. And so I don't know how much of that was the facility itself. Sure. Incentivizing him to be like, you're an addict, you're broken, repent, find the higher power, you're going to be fine. Which is very AA.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And also the recovery and rehab industry is predatory.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And psychologically, you teach someone that they're inherently broken to have super negative self-talk about their old self and create this old self thing. Like you go to a meeting and someone's like, I was such a piece of shit. It's like, well, no, you're still a piece of shit. You're the same guy.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Dude, straight up. And back to the AA thing. Dude, when I went to AA, which was like for a month and a half, every day made me want to go on like a crazy bender. Because all these people were telling these sick ass stories.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
They're like, yeah, dude, I was down bad. It was like, I remember one time I spent, I won a hundred grand at black.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Jack had like a threesome with like these two Brazilians and I'm driving back in a Corvette and I stop and get another beer and I crashed my car wake up in jail end up being friends with the jail guy he lets me out early we go back to the strip club anyways dude I'm so happy to be here with you guys and I'm like fuck I gotta get out of here because there I am Willie Nelson's telling me to put it put it down and I said Willie you pussy we got yeah dude that's so funny and they're just talking about alcohol so much I don't think about beer this much
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I stopped going to AA and I've never drank less.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
But I want to say though, shout out to AA.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah. And with the Kelly shit, when he was at rehab, so what I was saying is I'm not sure if they made him think he was an addict to weed, of weed, or if he realized he could kind of get out of the hard part. Because he kind of picked up on the vibe of the service provider and was like, maybe if I just tell her that I don't spend 15 hours a day on QAnon.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
and like I just like smoke too much she'll be like alright just stop smoking yeah and so obviously it was a bit disappointing after spoiler alert after he gets out of rehab he's kind of doing the same shit yeah well you see him that's actually the ending is cause I mean I'm gonna tell you there's I was moved with how much you cared about Kelly Me?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, and part of the, one of the main people who was spreading the gang misinformation was a city council member herself named Danielle Jurinsky, who's like trying to get reelected. And the crazy shit is that city council, the Aurora City Council member, Danielle Jurinsky. Well, let me back up a little bit.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
So the property owner, Zev Baumgartner, hired the PR firm called Red Banyan Crisis Communications out of, I think it was Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to run the story about the gangs. Sure. They had her distribute the press release. So it was like landlord, PR firm, crisis communications person giving information to the council member. So it comes out officially. You know what I mean?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And then the family, the Romeros, who like, let's keep it real. Why were they getting robbed? Why are they the only people in the entire apartment building who all these kids are mad at? Do you think maybe they could be involved business-wise with the gang members? Who the fuck? Can you imagine? You know what I mean?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
when they come in with an ar-15 i mean they were fucking strapped they had a reason and there's there's people in the hallway living in almost every other unit no one else's door is getting banged on except this one family that won't show their face you know what i mean they're like just look into this shit yeah i i really think that like but it is true that those gang members did beat up zev the proper sure and they did and they were there like a prison prison gangs were there yeah but
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah. There's also a pretty big connection between like, uh, obviously poorly maintained apartment buildings and gangs.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Pretty sure like project buildings. That's where gangs start. Yeah. Dude, go by Queensborough. Yeah. The Queensborough projects. Dude, I flew over that shit. And I was like, that is like a massive complex.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
What's it like in Queens?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Does it look like North Jersey?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Does it look like Fishtown, Philadelphia?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I'm scared in tall buildings. I know we're in one right now.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
So as a viewer, going back to the weed thing, how much do you think weed actually played into what happened with Kelly?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
It's like the worst, the most negative vibe. But you know what I mean? I didn't put this in the film. But the actual media source that Kelly consumes 10 hours a day is called Scott McCabe's Patriot Street Fighter. It's a serious XM radio show out of Missouri where it's just like a dude like, have you guys ever seen the movie Hotel Rwanda? Yeah. Don Cheadle?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
You know the guy who runs Hutu Power Radio? Yeah. It's like, time to kill the cockroaches. Yeah, yeah. Scott McCabe's Patriot Street Fighter was like, good morning, pussies. You want to kick some Antifa ass?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And he goes, I hope you fucking die, homie. Straight up. Straight up. Straight up was crazy. I was like, he practiced that in the mirror all morning.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah. It's a trip. Cause like, I'm sure that when Bill Gates thought of the internet, he's like, dude, people are going to be so smart. They're going to share info.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Now it's like made people like infinitely more retarded. A thousand percent.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, dude. What I do is I try to go for more of a CBD ratio. I probably smoke maybe once a week. I was just in Jamaica. I was smoking, no exaggeration, five splits a day. That's sick, though. I wasn't getting that high. Because I was hanging out with these Rastafarian dudes who actually grew the weed on their property.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Dude, it was chill. No paranoid thoughts. I wasn't going back into my past lives. That's sick. You were just hanging with Rastas. No paranoia. No paranoia. Not at all. They also created a very chill environment. It's not a stereotype. These dudes are cooking ital, which is vegan Jamaican food. They're frying up plantains, making curried beans and lentils.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
smoking weed on the beach you know what i mean i was like wow i love weed i come home i meet up with my homie elliot i hit his like dispensary weed one time immediately day ruined spiral yeah spiraled gotta go lay down put a blanket over you makes me think it can't just be that they're like the weed here is stronger i think that it's being like fucking manipulated fucked with Augmented.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah. I'm stoked to talk about that.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
That's sick that you have a journalism degree, though.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And then they wonder why like YouTube and digital media is doing bigger numbers. It's like, it's because we don't have to have this corporate oversight because you're trying to make it like advertiser safe and But real advertisers will take risks for enjoyable, controversial content. So it's like, who is the advertiser you're talking about? Is it Pepsi? Is it Dasani?
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
So for those who don't know, it was supposed to be called America Shits Itself. Which is great.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Everybody on the team was like, let's do this. Even Jonah Hill was going to bat. He was telling HBO, he was like, we're calling it this. I'm fucking drawing a line in the sand. And they were just like, you got to change it or it can't go out.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
They were like, you know, the S word's going to ruffle some feathers. I was like, come on. Dude, it's everywhere now. Shit is everywhere.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
You kind of like let them follow their own path, especially like somebody who goes through the process of going to Office Depot or Staples, getting markers, getting a cardboard sign, going home, writing shit on it that sounds funny, physically going to a location, holding it up and screaming. Yeah. That's insane. It's insane. No matter what you think.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
So when I talk to somebody at a protest, they're ready. They're just waiting for the right person to ask them, hey, what's on your mind? And as soon as you ask them that, boom, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. In terms of content. Not saying that I want to shoot them.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah, I cut a part of that interview out where I was talking to the guy because he was saying like, we need to abolish public schools. And I'm like, dude, what kind of school did you go to? He's like, a public school. Yeah.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
and i'm like did you like any of your teachers he's like no they fucking suck yeah and i was like which teacher in particular was the worst and he's like my fucking wrestling coach he would like never let me get on varsity and like made me show up early to practice and now i'm showing him that i'm tough and strong yeah but no i'm saying that is similar to the kelly equation which is like you take a tragic personal situation some political movement comes around that like has this really binary view of the world like good versus bad angels versus demons hard-working red-blooded american patriots being robbed blind by this like nebulous dark force yeah and you're
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
It's just dearkellyfilm.com.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Elon's not doing nothing shady. And you're like, that's wild. Dude, it's crazy. I really think the best example of actual solidarity that threatened the government itself was the Occupy movement. Yeah. Because that wasn't even necessarily left versus right. It was like the collective people, working class people versus the richest in the country.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
I think the last Occupy-style point of solidarity was like the mid-1960s, civil rights movement, that time period where it was like, you know what, we're done with this shit. You had almost every single movement that we see today, social movement, formed in the 60s. Animal rights, Chicano rights, black, even white working class union shit really started back then.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And if you look at it, the FBI strategically deployed like programs to take the leaders out, to disrupt the solidarity between a lot of these communities and kind of turn them against each other. And it actually worked. And by the 80s, you had Reagan come in and be like, anyone complaining is a fucking pussy. Pick yourself up. Are you an American? Go to work and you're going to become me one day.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Yeah. And then now you're kind of seeing, I look at the period between 2012 Occupy Movement and 2016 as our FBI infiltration moment. Because all of a sudden 2016 comes around and you've got these smart dudes who happen to be white. And someone's like, can you please hold space for the people who are marginalized? And they're like, what? I have a great idea.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And someone's like, I know you have a great idea, but your heteronormative positioning is making you unable to actually have a good idea. Yeah. I think that a lot of that is, like, you're taking people when they're 18, 19, and they're kind of awkward. They're trying to figure out who they are in the world, you know, whether they're black, white, man, woman, or whatever.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And you tell someone you can have an automatic leg up socially on, like, all these fucking white dudes if you just posture yourself as, like, a super hardcore, like, it's my moment type of person.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
an american thing a very american thing is to go like break a treaty go profit absolutely and if you look at the actual ownership structures they're not changing no like if you look at you know all these colleges that are pushing this like hardcore like rich leftist gentrifier agenda like liberal agenda which is like you know what i mean put up a black lives matter yard sign give your cash app go move to bushwick and push people out of their area
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And that is like, if not the most, that is like the most pressing social class issue in the US right now.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
And like, but it's the one thing they're not like canceling each other for it
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
Dude, I'm from Seattle, it's the exact same thing.
Soder
71: America Shits Itself with Andrew Callaghan | Soder Podcast | EP 69
What do you think's the main situation in the film that would cause you to puss out?
The Commercial Break
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I think 2028 is kind of the goalpost year because Trump's in office now. So a lot of these people like on the Kelly side of things, they don't have that underdog complex that put the battery in their back for so many years. Yes. If he does good things for the country, if the bottom line is improved for the working people of America, we're going to report that too. I hope that happens.
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I'm not the kind of person who's just so anti-Trump that I won't give him credit for positive change in the country. I hope that happens. I agree with you.
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These people will calm down. They'll have access to mental health services. On the other hand, if that doesn't happen, it's also a positive because they're like, oh, we put all this energy into getting this guy in office and nothing good happened.
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So 2028 is a year, not only that these people will either realize that they were doing the right thing or got lied to, but we'll also have fresh primaries for the left and right. So we'll have new personalities, just a total clean slate. Obviously, the Democratic Party is basically irrelevant now. I'm not even sure they'll have a ticket in the next election.
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So I think it'll be like conservatives versus independents versus leftists. It'll be great. You feel that strongly that the Democratic Party will fall apart over the next couple of years? I think it already has. I think it's kind of their last win. I mean, they're so tapped out from the youth and the things that regular young Americans want, which is like being able to afford a house.
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Not everybody's so pent up about what Trump is saying. Most people aren't even politically involved. They like sports and not having to pay a bunch of money for stuff.
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Honestly, I'm not going to lie to you. I want to sound like I'm smart and be like, yeah, I knew it. I thought Kamala Harris was going to win.
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Yeah, I think the podcast thing was definitely like a campaign psyop to make people think like, oh, this guy's my friend. Because podcasts are already the home of all parasocial relationships as it is. It's just a true thing. Because podcasts are so organic and long form.
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You know, it kind of is a little bit depressing sometimes when you're like in the car with someone that you're friends with and they play a podcast and they're kind of laughing along like that's their actual friends. It's kind of a sweet thing, but you just think to yourself like,
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man these guys don't even know you exist yeah i always just feel like man that's kind of depressing that's how i feel about comedic and like more more bro-y podcasts like what's up homies we're in this bitch and i'm like yo this is so crazy because like i don't know it just podcasting has definitely uh softened the barrier between consumer and and creator in a way that's never been done before which in a lot of ways is cool like for me it's been great i'm not even a podcaster but
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But social media has allowed me to be closer to my fan base and have like, you know, a more organic feedback loop to where like when I ask people, yo, what should I cover? Next thing you know, I got 500 suggestions. That was impossible even 15 years ago. So I'm not going to dog on it too much.
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But I do think that like Trump being on these podcasts was a way of communicating like, yo, Trump is your friend. Like this could be you here with us.
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I mean, I think it's great given the fact that, you know, the mainstream press has given him such an unfair shot. I mean, however you feel about Trump, the way they've treated him has been unbelievable. If you look at the way they treat the Biden and Harris campaigns versus Trump, it's like they give him nothing but fluff questions on the liberal side.
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And the moment Trump's in there, they're just dogging on him all the time. At least this press briefing room will now have an opportunity for there to be more organic conversations. I I mean, I hope it's not just packed to the brim with manosphere influencers. But if he does open it up to like a wide spectrum of independent media like myself and others, that would be sick. That would be fantastic.
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What was your childhood like growing up? So I grew up in Philadelphia until I was, like, 11. I grew up in, like, Center City, around North Philly, in Fairmount. And then I moved to Seattle when I was 11. And then, yeah, I mean, I've always been, like, my mom always took me to libraries and encouraged me to be curious and talk to new people.
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But really, I had this high school teacher named Calvin Shaw, who was my journalism professor. And he really, like, taught me that it was cool to be, like, smart and actually be curious about things. Because before then, I was only into, like, skateboarding. Fuck yeah, Mr. Shaw. Yeah, teachers. Fuck yeah, Mr. Shaw.
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Before then, I was only into skateboarding, rapping, writing graffiti, just fucking around, trying to steal beer, things like that. Regular kid stuff. Freshman year shit. How do we steal as many beer kegs at the same time as we can?
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And then he taught me, yo, you can live just as crazy of a lifestyle without the risk and without the consequences, and you can be a journalist and go wherever you want and go to the craziest places in the world and get rewarded for it. And I was like, damn, for real? Yeah.
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And he would let me leave school for hours at a time as long as I could report back by the final bell at 3.30 and show him substantial progress on a feature article. Nice. He was sick. And then he left the same year that I left in 2015. Well, I graduated. I didn't drop out. But yeah, I don't know where he's at now. I think he's in Hawaii. I haven't even talked to him since.
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When somebody helps you so much in life, you almost don't even want to tell them how much they help you sometimes.
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And he was also like a, he was like a young teacher. Like he was like 37. You know what I mean? Which for like the school, that's pretty young. Yeah.
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So like he, he would, you know, it wasn't like I had, it was some like 65 year old professor, you know, like, you know, this guy was cool as hell. And I remember he saw me cause I was drawing these stickers on, on pieces, you know, like graffiti stickers on a shipping carton. labels on the back of class. He came up, he's like, Andrew, I know what you're doing.
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He's like, you might think this is cool now, but this is going to be some loser shit when you're 20 years old. And he's like, I had so many friends take this route, get out of here, go to the Occupy tent city, the Occupy Seattle tent city and come back with a story. And I was like, well, holy shit. He was like Spider-Man's editor in chief, but not mean.
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Yeah, my first day of freshman year at Loyola, like I always knew I wanted to be a journalist. So I signed up for this student newspaper called The Maroon. And it was actually, like, not the most gratifying experience because I wanted to be a gonzo journalist, like, through and through from Mr. Shaw's class on. And also, Vice was in their heyday back then.
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And they were making journalism cool again for the first time in decades. So, they were already laying the foundation. And so, like, probably if you would have asked me when I was 18, what do you want to do? I'd be like, I want to be a Vice reporter. Yeah. They would end up kind of selling out by the time I graduated.
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But digressing, first day I start working for the Maroon and I'm telling my editor-in-chief about all these stories I want to do. Like I want to do something about voodoo practitioners in New Orleans or the post-Katrina gentrification or all this shit, the history of the streetcar. And he's like, I just remember he sent me an email in all caps and he said, not relevant. Whoa.
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And I was like, what do you mean? And he told me, he's like, this newsroom has a hierarchy. You're a freshman at this. This is your first week writing for the school newspaper. If you want enough clout in the newsroom to pitch your own stories, you have to just do these bulletins for like a year straight. So I had to write about stuff like English department tries to seek new writers. Yeah.
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The Pope visits campus. Hoverboards ban due to safety concerns. School safety officers voice their concerns about vaping in classrooms, like straight up boring shit. It wasn't until, you know, sophomore. I think actually at the end of that freshman year, I quit the newspaper and I hitchhiked.
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alone around the whole country by myself all summer just out of frustration with the newsroom I was like you know what fuck this I'm gonna create my own gonzo path by any means and then I realized at the end of that 90 day hitchhiking voyage like you know what the job at the school newspaper isn't half bad I'm just gonna try to put my foot down and really write what I want about sure
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So then I got back the next year, my sophomore year, for the school newspaper, and I started popping off my own stories. And then I continued to write for the school newspaper for the rest of college.
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I mean, definitely the scariest situations, I mean, being mistaken for a prostitute at certain trucks. Those situations are kind of scary, but most people, when they realize you're not a gay prostitute, they get so embarrassed and ashamed that they pretend like they're just joking and they drop you off. Yeah. It goes pretty well.
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Definitely the scariest one, just the most viscerally scary one, is when a guy picked me up in Tifton, Georgia, which, as you know, is a rural.
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And he picks me up and just doesn't say a word the whole drive. No. And that was the weirdest one. He was like, he had these wraparound kind of like redneck shades, giant red beard, and was just chewing dip and not saying a word. Oh, wow. You know what I mean? He was like, where are you going? And I told him where I was going. I think it was like Macon. And he was like, All right.
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And didn't say anything. And that just scared me. Because most of the time people are so curious, like, oh, my God, you're hitchhiking.
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I want to absorb some of your information and figure out what's up with you. He just had no curiosities. And I thought I was going to die the whole time. But then he was like, right here is good. I was like, let me out. I don't know why that kicked me out so bad.
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Yeah, mostly truckers that picked you up. So ironically enough, people think that truckers are like the number one hitchhiker picker-uppers. But the unions have modernized the trucking equipment a lot. So now the insurance companies have basically made it so they can't pick up any hitchhikers. They have 24-7 live feeds connected to their dash cams. I do know this, yeah.
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They're not always being watched, but if you, let's say you're in the Teamsters Union or you work for a major trucking company, they can use satellites to see your feet at any given time. And if they catch you with a lot lizard or a passenger or doing snorting Sudafed or drinking a beer or even driving more than nine hours at a time or something like that, they will instantly fire you.
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And so the only truckers that can pick you up are owner operators, meaning like you somehow have,
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created your own lane like i have to where you own the loads you're hauling which is super rare but you can spot them because they always have insane trucks yeah like they have trucks they're painted in colors that no company would approve right about this like yeah lightning bolts across the side yeah flames and half-naked girls and no company name you're like all right this guy will pick me up
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I'm just curious, what state were you in when you had that experience?
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Were you guys in the mountains or in the plains?
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Yeah, ironically, whenever you cross to a certain elevation or like, you know, whether it be the mountains or the West Coast, the culture of hitchhiking changes. Oh, yeah. Because if you were to take the 101 from Seattle down the Pacific Coast to Santa Barbara, you're going to have the best time. It's super safe because hitchhiking is a culture there.
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It's also a culture in the mountains between like Aspen and Vail and towns like that and Basalt. But, dude, as soon as you hit flat land, the hitchhiking culture becomes pretty sketchy. It's a little bit different. The people who pick you up in Arkansas, it's either people who think you're addicted to drugs, and they have a son or a niece or nephew who's also strung out. They want to help you.
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Oh, my niece is just like you. You want me to take you to the church? Stuff like that.
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I mean, you know, All Gas No Brakes was like the peak fame for the COVID era, you know, suit man personality that I developed. So, whenever I first started working for All Gas No Brakes, it was my idea, my concept. But the company that funded it, that provided the funding was a parent company called Doing Things Media. It's actually based in Atlanta. And they run a network of meme pages.
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Like, I think someone called them the Meme Illuminati. Yeah. So, they are able to create viral sensations out of different pictures they source online. It's pretty fascinating. It's almost like a startup for the meme sphere. Very interesting. Okay. So, they worked out of a WeWork in Buckhead. So, I went down and met them.
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Yeah. So, they pretty much, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, we do. So, they agreed to pay me $45,000 a year and buy me a $20,000 RV and hire my friends. So, it was a really good deal to start off with. Considering the fact that I had a small following from Quarter Confessions that I was able to transfer to All Gas. But generally, it was still amazing. I thought it was very gracious.
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They took a big risk. The show grew at an unprecedented rate. It was amazing to watch that thing explode. I remember that. It took six months, man. It went from like, you know, we're talking 10,000 viewers to like 10 million viewers in a very short period of time. And obviously we were doing merch drops. So we dropped, you know, t-shirts and hoodies and stuff.
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And we'd be making like multi-million dollars off these merch drops.
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Exactly. So all of a sudden, you know, what I was being offered by them to start off with seemed relatively unfair. Of course. Especially given the fact that they weren't helping to produce the show at all. I was doing the planning, the travel, the accommodations, the editing, the deliverables.
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All they were doing is using their pages to kind of market the show and also providing the base level funding for the RV stuff. So I basically asked for 20%. Equity. And they approved. They were like, you know what, we'll give you 20%. And so I was happy with that for a very long time. Now, we signed a movie deal with A24 and Tim and Eric's company to make This Place Rules. Yes.
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And they wanted us to have a four-month period that we blocked off just to make This Place Rules. So they said, okay, we want, during the 2020 election, this is what A24 said, they said, we want you to only make content for the This Place Rules, for the film. You can't make any digital content for all gas, no brakes. Fair enough.
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Doing Things Media said, yo, actually, Andrew's in a 360 full management contract. So you can't tell him to not make digital content for us. So it became these sort of two corporate entities battling over who I was going to make shit for.
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And so Doing Things Media told me, you're going to lose your job if you don't simultaneously produce digital content for us during the shoot schedule for the film. Whoa. Whoa. And I was like, fuck. Yeah. What do you do? Yeah. You know what? Okay. I will do that if you bump my profit share from 20% up to 50%. So that's 50% profit share for this duration of time plus the salary.
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podcasting has definitely uh softened the barrier between consumer and and creator in a way that's never been done before which in a lot of ways is cool like for me it's been great i'm not even a podcaster but social media has allowed me to be closer to my fan base and have like you know a more organic feedback loop to where like when i ask people yo what should i cover next thing you know i got 500 suggestions that was impossible even 15 years ago yeah so i'm not gonna dog on it too much but i do think that like trump being on these podcasts was a way of communicating like yo trump is your friend like this could be you here with us
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Hey, it's a pleasure to be on the Commercial Break podcast. Thanks for having me. Great time over there in Atlanta. It's a great city.
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I did an interview with a 15-year-old YouTuber named Ginterviews. I get a lot of press requests, but that just jumped out because he was like, 15-year-old Atlanta independent journalist. I was like, let's go. He FaceTimes me. He's like wearing braces and he's telling me, he's like, bro, you got to come to the underground screamo rave scene here in Atlanta.
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He's like, we have 50 person screamo concerts in the underground society beneath the state Capitol. And I was like, oh shit.
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Did you actually go or just do the FaceTime with him? It was only 48 hours ago that I learned about this, so I haven't gone yet, but I'm sure that I'll make a FaceTime sometime soon.
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Yeah, I mean, it generally is, but it's sort of like the 10,000 hours thing when it comes to those kinds of events, sort of practice makes perfect. Probably it was hard to keep my composure when I started my career, like around 2018. But after you go to, you know, 50 right-wing conspiracy rallies in a row, you might as well just be going to like IHOP or something. Yeah.
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I mean, you just like, everything's normalized, but yeah, I mean, to be fair, I am proud of the HBO project. Like I didn't want people to come away from dear Kelly thinking, Oh my God, this guy hated his directorial debut.
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Yeah. And to clarify that, that those orders weren't coming from HBO. They were coming from absolutely, which was Tim and Eric's production company. It wasn't HBO. We didn't even really come into contact with them until three months before the movie was like, you know, going to be released. They were just like, this is great. HBO was great to work with the entire time. They still are.
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You know what I mean? But it was more of the studios that funded the film were very concerned about being seen as being on the wrong side of history. Ironically, if you were to look back at This Place Rules, even if you were to look back at it without the editorial notes, you would say this is a strongly anti-January 6th movie.
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There was so much, like you said, so much press around it. And there was a lot of posturing as to who was going to make the most elite hit piece about that.
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Well, politically we're a bit different. Like they're more liberals and I'm more of like a leftist, if that makes sense.
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I don't, I don't believe that you need to necessarily editorialize or like it's punch down on a lot of conservative people who have been kind of caught up in the political propaganda of the day. I felt like they, and they were okay to work with, but it was more like they felt like we had to draw an extreme line in the sand, like denounce Alex Jones before showing him on camera.
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I'm like, I think it's enough to, you know, drink Jameson shirtless and have him say a bunch of crazy stuff. I don't think you need to add in this like mean spirited jab, but that's just, it's also a generational gap too. Sure. You know, because there was this idea of, I think around 2016, that if you censor people online and if you limit the spread of their voice, their ideas will go away.
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And you saw that a lot of early censorship on Facebook and Twitter when it was a Jack Dorsey company. It was like, all right, a lot of these flat earthers, these QAnon people, the Trump crowd, we're going to push them gradually off these platforms in the hopes that their movement will become smaller.
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But what it actually did is it moved them into more concentrated, tight echo chambers only amongst each other. And that created, we're kind of paying for those mistakes now. I totally agree with you.
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is what drove you to follow Kelly? Well, it kind of actually all started back at the Flat Earth Conference in 2019 that I covered in Dallas for All Gas, No Brakes. So I post a video of people at the rally talking about various Flat Earth concepts. And most of the comments on Instagram would be making fun of them, being like, I can't believe they think this.
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But then at the end of every comment section on every single post, there'd be a comment or two that would say like, this is my brother. I haven't seen him in five years. He hasn't been the same since that workplace accident.
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He lost his pension or got taken off a workman's comp and fell off the deep end. Or, man, this is my best friend. He's been an alcoholic or a divorce. It's very common with older dudes, too.
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So I had it in my head for a long time that a lot of the people that you'd see who are the most angry at these kinds of fringe events had some deep personal tragedy in their life prior to even getting politicized at all. I just never had enough time to actually spend with someone to show that theory in action.
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And this place rules was filmed over the course of two and a half months where I was popping from political flashpoint to political flashpoint, capturing like the raw group energy of the crowds at that time. But with Kelly, I had four years to film this documentary. Wow. So you really got to get into the nitty gritty of what that process looked like.
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Not with an emphasis on what particular media he consumed, because that's a lot of times people fall into that trap. Oh, he got radicalized by this particular platform, like InfoWars or something. But way before that, what conditions primed him to be a candidate for radicalization?