Episode #690: Andrew Callaghan is a true gonzo journalist. Putting himself in the middle of the stories he covers, Andrew has become a leading independent documentarian in the age of "emerging media". With a sly sense of humor and self awareness Channel 5 news (The Youtube Channel he created) is shining a light on the hidden corners of American culture. Bryan & Krissy talk to Andrew about his self funded, directed and produced film "Dear Kelly". Follow Andrew Callaghan on Instagram Watch Channel 5 News on YouTube Support Andrew's Work On Patreon "Dear Kelly" Premiere Tickets Watch episode #690 on Youtube Text us or leave us a voicemail: +1 (212) 433-3TCB FOLLOW US: Instagram: @thecommercialbreak Youtube: youtube.com/thecommercialbreak TikTok: @tcbpodcast Website: www.tcbpodcast.com CREDITS: Hosts: Bryan Green & Krissy Hoadley Executive Producer: Bryan Green Producer: Astrid B. Green Voice Over: Rachel McGrath To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
On this episode of the Commercial Break.
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
The next episode of The Commercial Break starts now.
Oh yeah, Captain Kittens, welcome back to another episode of The Commercial Break. I'm Brian Green, this is my dear friend and the co-host of the show, Kristen Joy Hoadley. Best to you, Kristen. Best to you, Brian. Best to you out there in the podcast universe. I'll start it off saying it right now, ahead of time, as all the kids like to say, trigger warning. on this episode.
Chapter 2: Who is Andrew Callaghan and what is his impact on journalism?
TCB Infomercial with Andrew Callahan from Channel 5 News. All gas, no brakes. Quarter confessions. He is a journalist of our time. He is a new media journalist doing a blog and YouTube. Doing it really well. I think he's one of the I'll say this. I think he's one of the more important documentarians of our time because he kind of, he just gets into the heart of it.
He has a good way of summing things up. And if you haven't seen Channel 5 or All Gas, No Brakes, I highly recommend that you go check out the channel. This will be a show. where we definitely talk about politics because Andrew's new movie, Dear Kelly, is out right now. He had previously a movie with HBO Films called This Place Rules about the lead-up to the January 6th thing that happened.
Ha!
But anyway, he had an excellent HBO documentary, and now he has self-produced, self-directed, or Channel 5 has directed a movie called Dear Kelly, where he takes it even a step further, trying to get into the head. of people who have kind of become extreme, who have become super tribalist. And that is not uncommon in our culture today. And I watched Dear Kelly. I got a screener of it.
He was nice enough to send it to me. It's out available now. Go to the Channel 5 YouTube page. You can just go to... I'll put a link in the show notes so you can see it. But Dear Kelly is an excellent movie. It follows around a guy named Kelly who Andrew met chasing kind of Trump and the MAGA crowd around for eight years now.
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Chapter 3: What is 'Dear Kelly' about and why is it important?
And he met this guy and he really wanted to understand why Kelly had gotten so radicalized so quickly. Seemingly normal guy. And he really gets to the bottom of it. He gets to the heart of it. And then he takes it even a step further. by trying to help Kelly piece his life back together. Kelly has lost his family. He has lost his friends. He has lost his house, his job.
And I think, and I'd like to talk to Andrew about this and get his thoughts. I have that kind of this unscientific theory that the tribalism that we're experiencing today on both sides has a lot to do with a pandemic that is happening called loneliness, desperation, and the need to feel like we're a part of something. Part of something, yeah.
We belong somewhere.
And I think Kelly kind of is this in action, my theory in action, because that's where Kelly finds himself. He loses his house and he finds himself in a really bad way. And he kind of buries himself into a lot of theories and political talk and political action that he feels there's a bad guy and he can help take that bad guy down. But that bad guy is very nebulous. It's just a thing, right?
And so... You know, while we tend not to talk about politics on the commercial break, we've loosened those rules up a little bit. And there's some of you that don't like that. And I get that. So I'm letting you know right now, this is not the episode for you.
We're not talking about ice penises.
Yeah, we're not talking about ice penises today. No ice penis today. We're going straight for it. But I really feel like Andrew is an important journalist. I think Dear Kelly is an important movie. And when given the opportunity, I, of course, wanted to invite him onto the show just to talk to him. So this will be a more serious episode of the commercial break. This will be the one.
The one episode. Okay? I promise we'll get back to ice penises tomorrow. So, Dear Kelly, Channel 5, all gas, no brakes, quarter confessionals, all of that stuff. Andrew has been a journalist since he was a wee bitty little kid in high school, full ride to Loyola University, a media scholarship, a journalism scholarship. And he has done something very interesting.
He is one of these people who is out there. You know, we talk a lot about new media and the fact that there's going to be possibly Joe Rogan sitting at the White House press briefings and how this was the podcast election and all of this.
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Chapter 4: How does tribalism influence American culture?
going to talk all about it why don't we do this let's take a break chrissy okay and through the magic of telepodcasting you just turned off the show i just heard half our audience leave we'll get through it together i promise this is worth the why this is worth the listen i promise we'll take a break we'll be back with andrew
Did you know that we have a phone number? Well, we do. And you should call us. Nobody's going to answer, but you can leave a voicemail for us that we may or may not play on the show. And if that's not the vibe, then just send us a text, okay? Our number is 212-433-3TCB. So get texting and give us something to talk about. Please. We need it.
While you're doing that, you can also follow us on Instagram at The Commercial Break and on TikTok at TCB Podcast. And as always, check out our website, tcbpodcast.com for all of our audio and video content. Speaking of video, we are also posting full video episodes at youtube.com slash The Commercial Break. So go watch them, please.
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Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today. We're really grateful for your time.
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Chapter 5: How can loneliness contribute to political radicalization?
Yeah, it is a great city. You were just doing a... Were you talking about the underground Screamo scene here at one point?
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.
He's like, we have 50 person screamo concerts in the underground society beneath the state Capitol. And I was like, oh shit.
Yeah. Like at underground Atlanta, huh?
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.
All right, you come here, and I'll take you to the best burger place in the world. Let's go. Okay, Andrew, quarter confessions, all gas, no brakes, now Channel 5. You, of course, did the incredible documentary with HBO. It was really good. I thought it did a better job of any of the...
There was so much press and there was so much material and so much documenting of what led up to the January 6th event, whatever, you know, if you're on one side, it's a tour. If you're on the other side, it's a riot. Whatever you think about that, it certainly was a moment in history that you probably will never forget where you were when you're watching those images go down.
And you did such an incredible job of documenting that in a way that even though I know that you, and I want to talk about this too, even though in a way you had to spin it a little bit, it really was, You did a great job of catching the mood of the moment, documenting the culture and the attitudes that were going on right in the emotion and the heat of it without getting caught up in it.
Is that a difficult thing to do?
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of podcasting on political discourse?
Yes, it does.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you do a great, incredible job of documenting what leads up to these events. And Dear Kelly is part two, but it's almost... I don't know. It's almost like a pre-log. You are getting... You answer the question, what happened? Now you want to answer the question, how did we get here? And in Dear Kelly, I think you do... I think this is really an important piece of...
of film, if I'm being real honest. I don't want to be hyperbolic about it, but it's important because I think you do the best job yet that I have seen of understanding why this tribalism and extremism is happening. I have had this unscientific theory for a long time that loneliness, desperation, and a feeling of wanting to belong to something has been causing this. And Kelly, is this in action?
It's this in real life. And you really get to the bottom of it.
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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Chapter 7: How did new media influence the recent election?
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.
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.
That does happen. A thousand percent. Yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fair enough. In the run up to the election, did you get the sense that Trump was taking this away?
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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