Andrew Callaghan_ Channel 5_ Gonzo_ QAnon_ O-Block_ Politics _ Alex Jones _ Lex Fridman Podcast _425(M4A_128K)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There's two people in the back two of her home
worlds wearing like shisty 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 A seven.
She gives me a microphone and she's like, go talk

(00:21):
to that guy. 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?

Speaker 2 (00:36):
The following is a conversation with Andrew Callighan hosts the
Channel five on YouTube, where he does Gozo style interviews
with fascinating humans at the edges of society. The soul
called vagrants, vagabonds, runaways, outlaws, from queuing on adherents to
fish heads, to old block residents, and much more. He

(00:57):
created the documentary that I highly recommen and called This
Place Rules on the undercurrents that led to the January
sixth Capital riots. This is the lextream podcast. To support it,
please check out our sponsors in the description and now,
dear friends, here's Andrew Kalgan.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
I tried to color match you, though, got the black
and white guing. I went to Walmart before this and
got the Wrangler shirt with the Texas longhorns tea.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Is that where you shot Walmart?

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Generally?

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, I'm a Target man myself.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
There's no way you get those suits from Target.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
So you're saying it's it's a nice way to compliment
a suit.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
I think you go Men's Warehouse. If not further, I
think you would be wrong. You go further.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
No, the other direction. You got that from Target, not Target.
I was joking about Target. I like Walmart, butter. It
just felt like a funny thing to say. The most
expensive thing I own is this watch and it was
given to music gift.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah. When I was on tour, I had these twenty
seven hundred dollars Cardier glasses that I got for a
lot of money. Twenty seven hundred dollars like some glasses, yeah,
but are really embarrassing. But I was on tour, so
I just felt like I could do anything as far
as fashion choices. But look looking back at pictures for
myself in that era, I'm my god.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
So that was the symbol of the fame got to
your head, I think so.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yeah, I think sam getting to your head. If you
spend more than a hundred bucks on sunglasses, you've officially
gone off with you.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
You've crossed a lot, and that's where you go back
to Walmart to humble yourself. I really love Walmart. In fact,
I moved to Austin because I was a Walmart and
a lady said that I look handsome in a suit,
and I was like, that's it. I love this place.
She just said it. For no reason whatsoever. This older
lady just kind of looked at me and with this
like genuine sweetness just said, oh, you look handsome.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
She's She's not wrong, man, thank you. That's part of
your whole swag though.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Yeah, the suit thing.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
Anyway, what was the first if you remember, first recorded interview?

Speaker 1 (02:52):
You did well, like my first grade teacher, missus Claudia.
This is back in the day, Like I was telling you,
we just 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 then. I wanted to be a rapper.
It's all about hip hop and meditation and picking psilocybin

(03:13):
mushrooms and public parks and stuff like that. That's what
I was into.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
That's a lot psilocybin meditation, rap, public parks.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah, I was making like conscious rap music. I was
to the point where I had like four dream catchers
hanging above my bed, Alex Gray painting on the wall,
tapestry on the ceiling, just scribbling rhymes down all the time.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
So you said somewhere these sucked at school.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
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 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, like skin, 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

(03:58):
I could come back by the end of the day
and write a story for his class, and he'd mark
me as present. 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

(04:18):
in the world. And so, if you remember, they had
that hidden Wiki link that was like hire a hitman,
you know, and so I 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 it 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.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
That's nice. Yeah, I mean you're fearless even then.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
I mean I was hiding behind a tour browser, so
there's not much fear to be having anymous. It was anonymous,
but I did publish it under my name, so you're right,
I could have been could have been in danger.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
I also saw that he said he took too many
shrooms when you were young, and that led you to
have hallucin gin persisting perception disorder HPPD. Can you explain
what this is?

Speaker 1 (05:05):
Well, that condition is classified by persistent visual snow, floaters,
morphing objects like I see them right now. I see
them all the time.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
The snow is in the room.

Speaker 1 (05:15):
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. I took about
an eighth of sinis and mushrooms, which are the ones
that come from the earth instead of cowshit, and I
took an eighth of those at my friend Toby's house,
and which is a normal amount. But I was in

(05:37):
eighth grade. 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 was. 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? I say, remember that every other sense

(05:58):
that you have. What you can he hear, what you
can taste, you know your feet on the ground, you're
still on earth, You're still here.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
Well, he said, it's only visual. And yes, gratitude for
being alive at all.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
It's great.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
But you said that this led you into some dark
psychological places like depersonalization disorder.

Speaker 1 (06:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
Both are pretty intense.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
HPPD creates both of those things, and so when I've
talked to people who have the condition, it's really either or,
but more than seventy percent of people with HPPD fall
into either category. They're both coping mechanisms for the I
don't know what really happens. I talked to a researcher
once named doctor Abraham. He lives in upstate New York.
He's the leading scientist when it comes to HPPD research.

(07:02):
He's the only one who actually seems to care about
finding a cure. And the only known treatment right now
is alcohol and benzo diaphines. 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.
Never tried benzos though.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
So can you explain to me more in that spectrum
you are? So do you sometimes have a sense that
you're not real? Sometimes something else is not real, like
the reality is not real?

Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah? I experienced it all the time, you know, But
like I said, my job helps with that because I
get to feel like, you know, 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 fringed subcultures, you
get this feeling that you're real, And being filmed is
also confirmation if you can look at the MP four

(07:57):
file that you're in fact living here on.

Speaker 2 (07:59):
Earth, confirming that you were in it with the reality
by watching yourself on video exactly. So is that basically
the engine behind all the extreme interviews you've done.

Speaker 1 (08:11):
Well. I got HPPD around the same time that I
began this journalism course in ninth grade, so I sort
of always use 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, or that you're just
this like nebulous soul that's trapped in a flesh suit

(08:32):
that you're not really a part of your sort of
puppeteering a flesh and bone skin suit.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Trapped, or just the ability to step outside of yourself.

Speaker 1 (08:42):
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?

Speaker 2 (08:54):
Like dark stuff like that. Oh, so you're trapped. I mean,
there's a higher state of being that you can kind
of step outside of yourself, but this is not that.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
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 Siddartha.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
Siddartha, that's a good book. Have you done for him
since then?

Speaker 1 (09:22):
No, I don't really do psychedelic drugs, but like a
lot of people think that I'm against them, which I'm not.
Just doesn't work for me. If it works for you,
I'm sure they 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.

Speaker 2 (09:41):
I try to stay away from drinking a bit.

Speaker 1 (09:44):
Well, yeah, I mean I didn't drink it all before
I had the HPPD stuff, and I would have drank
later in life, but definitely, like fourteen fifteen, every day
after school, i'd drink a forty ounce of Mickey's. It's
like a kind of looks like old English but the
bottles green and it has a hornet on the side
of it just kind of be him a ritual just
to deal with the anxiety of that situation.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
And it made the snow go away.

Speaker 1 (10:05):
Yeah, alcohol really works to suppress HPPD symptoms.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
So you said you hated classes in school except that
journalism class.

Speaker 1 (10:12):
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.
So I've had a bunch of teachers who are super cool,
like this guy Tim, my astronomy professor at ninth grade,
Missus Zanetti, my creative writing teacher in sixth grade, and
this really cool dude at my college in New Orleans
name Charles Cannon, who taught me a class called New

(10:34):
Orleans Mythology, my three favorite classes besides my journalism class.
And they they all hit me up and they're like, hey, man,
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

(10:54):
so young and having to take common core classes like biology,
dissecting for all 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
dynastics cycle and the 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

(11:16):
understand this process. Yeah, 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.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
Well, I think if you want to do school right,
take on every single subject that you're forced into. It's
like the David Foster Wallace, just be unborable by it.
Just really go in as if ancient Chinese dynasties are
is the most interesting thing you could possibly learn.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
And it is somewhat interesting, the Silk Road in the
Great Wall and terra Cotta, the soldiers and stuff. But
I'm just saying, like, 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
you know, I had to take everything prior to that,
and I'd already spent so much time. I just think
the excruciating boredom of schooling left a bad taste in

(12:10):
my mouth. But there was individual classes that I liked
a lot.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yeah, there should be some choice or maybe a lot
of choice, even at the level of high school for
what kind of classes you pursue.

Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
And you're also saying, so Wikipedia is not always perfectly right.

Speaker 1 (12:25):
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 depth of Wikipedia that that's so good? Dude?

Speaker 2 (12:42):
You said you love journalism? What did you love about journalism?

Speaker 1 (12:45):
I mean, what hooked you 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. So

(13:07):
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 go back
to yours, and it just keeps life interesting by.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
The ticke to take the ride.

Speaker 1 (13:19):
Hunter s.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
Thompson, is he up there in the as one of
the influences. Who are your influences?

Speaker 1 (13:23):
I think the early Daily Show was so good. Sasha
Baron Cohen a huge influence. I mean that was like
the Alig Show especially. I think Louis Therow's broadcast on
BBC were great. I was really into Hunter s. Thompson too,
but not really until college, you know. I really like
a particular Hunter s. Thompson book called The Great Shark Hunt,

(13:44):
where he covers the Reubens salas Ar murder by lapd
or L a sheriff's department in Boyle Heights in the seventies,
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 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,

(14:06):
which is like an actual reporter interested in telling a
story that has news value. So it's two different lanes
for him.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
There is something about you that makes people want to
say you're the Hunter s Thompson of this generation. And
I don't think they mean the drugs. I think they
mean some kind of nonstandard willingness to explore the extremes
of humanity and like almost a celebration of the extremes

(14:36):
of humanity.

Speaker 1 (14:37):
Yeah. Well, it's a very kind to 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 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. But

(14:58):
I expected to see a bunch of gnarley Hunter s
Thompson types.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
Oh, wood speeds doing drugs. I mean drugs and alcohol
is all part of it somehow. Yeah, so it opens
a gateway to a deeper understanding of humanity.

Speaker 1 (15:13):
But I will say, though, like as someone now who
doesn't party like I did when I was younger, it's
not as important as I thought it was, you know.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah, I'm conflicted on this. I'm good friends with a
lot of people that say alcohol is really bad for you,
and I believe that too, But there's something that I'm
just as an introvert as a person who has a
lot of anxiety. For me, alcohol has opened doors of
like just opening myself up to the world more.

Speaker 1 (15:42):
Oh, I'm actually a fan of alcohol moderate drinking. But
I'm saying, like my life before I would say twenty nineteen,
twenty eighteen, especially, there was the chaos on camera, but
then there was my private life, which was like chaotic
partying all the time. And I convinced myself, much like
Hunter did, that that was the secret sauce that in
the core, the spiritual in my spiritual core, that gave

(16:03):
me the creativity. But then I cut out a lot
of that stuff, and I'm just as creative. 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 your brain and
you're a de 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,

(16:26):
but it's not it's not true. It can be, but
it's typically not.

Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yeah, it's not. It's not a requirement.

Speaker 1 (16:32):
Right.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
You can sometimes channel, you can sometimes leverage all those
things for your creativity, but the creative engine lives.

Speaker 1 (16:39):
Outside of that. Like have you read the Hunter's daily
routine in a year up to his death, It was
like fifteen grapefruits and eight ball of coke and like
just like a certain amount of shotgun shells for him
to fire into the sky every morning. Yeah, there's no way.
And he didn't do anything creative in those in those
final years. Yeah, But so the creativity goes away and
gradually just come like a party animal like Andy.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
Dick, a caricature of yourself.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
I mean that's why life is interesting. You make all
kinds of choices, and sometimes you can have create works
of genius in a short amount of time based on
drugs and no drugs. Einstein had that miracle year where
he published several incredible papers in one year nineteen o five?

Speaker 1 (17:21):
Did he do it?

Speaker 2 (17:21):
Drugs before that? Lots of coke?

Speaker 1 (17:23):
And I was like, I believe you for a se
like Einstein have blow I don't think he did.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
I do you think he gets that hair?

Speaker 1 (17:30):
Come on, it's true.

Speaker 2 (17:32):
I'm just asking questions.

Speaker 1 (17:33):
High confidence hair, look into it, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (17:37):
Yeah, Well, no, he's a well put together, sexy young man.
The hair came later.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
Yeah. Was Albert Einstein attractive as a teenager? That's not a teenager?
Was he attractive as a young man sexually? Attractively? I don't.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
I mean, I'm turned on by Einstein at all ages.
I don't screamin it.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
But are you more turned on by the work that
he did or his physical being? No?

Speaker 2 (17:56):
Sometimes I fantasize what would be like to be though
in the arms of Binstein. I could even get that
out in terms of Einstein.

Speaker 1 (18:03):
Yeah, just just I want to feel safe. It's a
good idea for a rom com to be.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
A little more serious. Like general relativity, that space time
can be unified and curved by gravity is an incredibly
wild and difficult idea to come up with. Like, it's
a really, really difficult thing to imagine, given how well
Newtonian classical mechanics physics works for predicting how stuff happens

(18:31):
on Earth. To think like like like the that gravity
can get more space time, both space and time, and
it permeates the entire universe. It's a field. It's a
really wild idea to come up as one human on

(18:51):
Earth to intuit that is really, really, really difficult, and
it's really sad to me that he didn't get an
about price for that.

Speaker 1 (18:58):
Was there people saying he was crazy when he was
around or was he universally recognized It's like an ogus.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
No. I think once the papers came out he was
widely recognized as a true genius, but before that he
wasn't recognized. He had a really difficult So.

Speaker 1 (19:14):
Back, now, where does a black hole go, like after
something gets sucked into it?

Speaker 2 (19:18):
You mean, is it a portal to another place? That
kind of thing. Yeah, no, Well, we don't know.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
It could be.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
It could be that the universe is kind of like
Swiss cheese full of black holes. There's something called Hawking
radiation where the because of quantum mechanics, the information leaks
out of a black hole, so it is possible to
escape a black hole. There's a lot of interesting questions there.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
I hope we get to the bottom of that.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
And there's a super massive black hole at the center
of our galaxy, which doesn't seem to scare physicis, but
it terrifies me.

Speaker 1 (19:45):
Oh yeah, for sure, astronomy can be terrifying.

Speaker 2 (19:48):
Yeah, we're all like orbiting. I mean we're not just
orbiting the song, but the song is part of the
Solar System, is part of the galaxy, and it's all
orbiting a gigantic black hole.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
Have you ever spoke to someone who's been in outer space?

Speaker 2 (20:00):
Jeff Bezels, He flew his own rocket. Wow, it's quite
cool astronaut that's been to deep space. Though, well, maybe
I've spoken to an alien that just hasn't admitted it.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
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 interview people with it.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
Is this a real thing? Like? Is there a Wikipedia
article on it?

Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yes, look up space madness treatment.

Speaker 2 (20:37):
Well, now I don't trust Wikipedia after what you.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
Told me so, and now they think I hate classes.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
I thought you meant more about the fact that you're
isolated out in the space, that we need social connection
and it's difficult.

Speaker 1 (20:47):
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 and the the
Grand Scheme, you just start to really have a strange
new perception about the pointlessness of existence.

Speaker 2 (21:07):
I don't need to go to space for that.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
Well, technically we're all in space because Earth is in space.
But so I wonder if you have to go to
space to talk to the psychiatrist. Yeah, probably so, Well,
technically we're all in space, so you can't. That's a
boundary he can't have.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
But not everyone believes that, as you've seen from my work.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
Probably you're right, and those are important people that are
asking important questions. Yeah, you hitchhiked across us for seventy
days when you were nineteen, tell the story of that.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
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 I wanted to just do something I felt. So
I was working for the school newspaper for that whole
first year, was called The Maroon, and I didn't have

(22:06):
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 band on campus due to safety concerns, and
it just kind of felt like, all right, I kind
of wanted to be a gonzo reporter. I'm not sure

(22:29):
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 two vagabonding stuff, And there was
this book called Vagabonding in America by an old hobo,
Ed Burne, 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

(22:51):
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 does great. It told me about train
stop towns like Dun's here and you know, places in
Montana where there was a friendly attitude toward drifters, and
that still persists from the sixties and seventies to this day,
even though in my opinion, movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre

(23:13):
have ruined hitchhiking culture in America because now everyone thinks
we're going to, you know, decapitate them if they pick
you up. So after my final day of courses at Loyola,
I literally left all of my belongings inside my dorm
and took the street car 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 that was the

(23:36):
plan and it worked out.

Speaker 2 (23:37):
I love it. I traveled across the United States before
in similar kind of plan because you were you.

Speaker 1 (23:43):
On the Silver Dog. So it's the very greyhound bus.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
Greyhound is pretty nice.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
That's a step above hitchhiking. That's way better than Hitchhikingking Greyhound, Amtrak, Amtrak, No,
that's the latest. What's in between Greyhound and Amtrak? A car,
that's what it is.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah, it's a car. Yeah, car, A shitty car. Okay, cool,
I lived in a shitty car.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
You lived in a car. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
When I was driving across from the United States with
a friends, some some solo and I would uh have
I would eat cold soup.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
I love cold soup. What I like is the cold
chickpeas and I can 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.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
Yeah, I mean all of that is great, but too
much of it is not great. Like too much cold
soup not great, too much beef jerky.

Speaker 1 (24:40):
So what was the route you took? Was it Chicago
across or was it Philadelphia across Philadelphia across to La uh?

Speaker 2 (24:48):
San Diego's will wind up. But it was a zig
zagging went up to Chicago and then all the way
down to Texas.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
So you went Philly through through Appalachia up to the Midwest.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:57):
Did you cut over like through the southwest down to
San Diego?

Speaker 2 (25:00):
No, no, no, I went straight down to Texas all the
way down, okay west, so like.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
But did you cut from Texas west through New Mexico
and Arizona to get to this same Yeah, that is
the best road trip place Interstate forty like Albuquerque, flag Staff, Vegas, Kingmen,
the Mojave Desert, Yuma. Doesn't get better.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yeah, I mean, and your kids, so you don't care
and you're throwing caution to the wind. And I met
some crazy, crazy people.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
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.
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, I bum bummed out, I can go hit
the road and I'm sure there's gonna be a fun
time ahead.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
Yeah, get that Greyhound ticket and go.

Speaker 1 (25:46):
I would say silver Dog half because sometimes I gotta
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. Yeah, Kansas, Missouri, they're not going
to do it.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
Maybe you're not charming enough thought about that.

Speaker 1 (26:00):
I was nineteen, fresh, clean shaven. I was pretty charming,
I'd say it. 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 with what we call punishers,
people who never stopped talking, and so they see someone
hitchhiking and they're like, yes, I'm gonna talk at this person. Yeah,

(26:20):
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, Yeah that's rough.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
Yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right. I like people that
are comfortable in silence.

Speaker 1 (26:33):
Yeah, And then that also raises the question are they
about to kill me? You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (26:37):
I think that's a you problem.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Not. You know what's funny is almost everybody who picked
me up when I was hitchhiking, it was like a
like a day labor Like it was almost all Mexican
day laborers. You picked me up. Oh interesting, because I
think that, like 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 floor and they

(27:00):
were down with it.

Speaker 2 (27:01):
See Like for me, it was really easy because you
just say, like, I'm traveling across the United States, and
I think people love that idea and they want to help.
They were romantic because they also have that invisible door.
Everybody has that invisible door.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
I just want to go, so you know what I'm
talking about. Yeah, Mann, 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.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
Well that's why I'm like renting everything and I'm making
sure that tomorrow could just go. I gave away everything
I owned twice in my life, just very like, I'm
ready to go tonight, let's go.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
What's the hardest item you've had to part with in
this experience? There's nothing You've never had a material object
that was really hard to let go of. So you
give that watch to somebody if it meant this is
You're right, You're right. That's probably the only I've never
had to let go of that though. That's the only
thing I own. This means a lot to me, but
everything else. But then again, listen, because okay, this watch

(28:00):
is giving me to me by Rogan has become a
close friend. But like, whenever I romanticized the notion that
this watch means a lot to me, he's like, oh
my god, I'll just give you the same one again. Yeah,
I was like, I God, damn it. It's a pretty
so sick ass gift. Though, yeah, it's pretty pretty sick.
I'm not usually a gift guy.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
But you know, when when somebody you look up to
kind of gives you a thing, it's a nice little
symbol of U. Yeah, of that relationship, so it's nice.
But other than that, no, but even this, like whatever,
the relationship is what matters. The human is what matters,
not the agree you had something like this, Not really.

Speaker 1 (28:36):
I mean there was a hard drive that I lost
that had all of my childhood pictures on it and
stuff like that that I think about all the time
because I left it on a train, and like certain memories,
you think about it and you just get pissed off.
I just think to myself, someone has that somewhere. I
have dreams about reuniting with the hard drive.

Speaker 2 (28:53):
You and Hunter Biden have the similar I.

Speaker 1 (28:57):
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?

Speaker 2 (29:06):
And I think there's processes involved. Oh okay, whatever, I
think you got to look into it.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
I think I have to look into it.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
Was Jack Carrock and somebody that wasn'tn inspiration at all
in this road trip. Did you even know who that is?
The beat generation all know.

Speaker 1 (29:24):
Who it was. And then after I did the ultimately
I wrote a book about my headchecking 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 ten times for two years,
and I'm sure.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Kerouac is a great guy.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
I mean, I just don't I'm not too familiar with
the Beat generation. It's a great book.

Speaker 2 (29:46):
It's uh, you've read it or no.

Speaker 1 (29:48):
I refuse to read it. People even have gifted it
to me and been like, hey, man, you're gonna love
this one. And I'm like, is that on the road?
If I honestly, people have given me a book with
wrapping paper on it and they're like, this is read
at the rally, was like, that's fucking on the road.
Isn't it.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
Different cover?

Speaker 1 (30:03):
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 carre Act. I
would never speak down on the whole anyone in the
Beat generation.

Speaker 2 (30:15):
What are some interesting moments you remember from that those
seventy days?

Speaker 1 (30:19):
Man, there was so much. I mean, getting a mistaken
for a gay prostitute on my first hitchhiking ride and
Louisiana was pretty funny.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
Where did you come from and where did you go?

Speaker 1 (30:28):
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 ten. So I mean Crowley, Louisiana.
I'm on the side of the road, and I guess
this was a cruising truck stop. It was known for
being a place where male lot lizards would go to

(30:48):
procure clients, and I was there. Lot lizards are It's
a derogatory term, and trucker culture for a prostitute who
hangs out at the loves or pilot flying Jay large
interstate truck stop. 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,

(31:08):
suit a fed or pick up anybody. Can't even pick
up a hitchhiker, or you.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
Get fired, killed all the romance.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
Yeah, definitely the truck that 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 waded haul loads, you
can't do that. You are mistaken for a lot Mistaken
for a lot lizard by a small man from Honduras
with a spiky leather jacket covered in studs. I didn't
speak any English, but you know. I thought he was just,

(31:36):
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 born. Yeah,
people going there and you know, please Yeah. So he
thought he was taking me to one of one of those.

(31:58):
I was like, all right, cool man, yeah, like, you know,
this guy wants to go jerk off. I'm just gonna
wait in the car. It's all good. I don't discriminate.
But then I'm I was like, he buys a booth
for me, and I'm like, okay, you know, it's 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,

(32:20):
can you stop. He stopped 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.
What's And I was like, oh no, I'm just a
regular guy. He was super cool about it. He started laughing.
He's 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

(32:40):
anything except that for the rest of the car ride.
That's great.

Speaker 2 (32:43):
There's just rolled with it. Oh sor about that.

Speaker 1 (32:46):
It could have mean I had about a foot in guy.
I wasn't too scared. I also had like a knife
in my pocket, but I didn't want to stab him,
especially not at a place like that.

Speaker 2 (32:55):
And you were still that that didn't like leave a
bad taste in your mouth.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
I mean, who.

Speaker 2 (33:09):
Among us have not been mistaken for a lot lizard?

Speaker 1 (33:12):
It's a fact you heard here first. What else?

Speaker 2 (33:15):
What there's some interesting, beautiful people that you've met A well.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
I used to have a CouchSurfing to find places to
stay in college surf. Now you can only submit like
five CouchSurfing requests today unless you're a premium member, which
means you also host people. CouchSurfing is still wrong, yeah, yeah, totally,
but it's evolved obviously into a different thing.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
Airbnb is a kind of competitor to that, right.

Speaker 1 (33:36):
CouchSurfing is free though, right, So CouchSurfing they call it
like the CS community. So basically there'd be these like
CouchSurfing superhosts in different cities, Like there was one in
Santa Fe, this firefighter dude who had like fifteen other couchsurfers.
They're chilling nice, So I would do it everywhere. A
lot of them were Catholics, you know, so it is
their way of giving back. A lot of them were nudists,

(34:00):
and so I didn't realize that there's a small little
section at the bottom of someone's CouchSurfing profile that says
clothing optional yes, 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

(34:23):
great CouchSurfing hosts were amazing. Yeah, that was just great.
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.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
Yeah. I love CouchSurfing. Like again, for me being an introvert,
just crashing on a person's couch being essentially forced into
a great conversation is great.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
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 let me sleep on your couch, thanks for the food.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
I think the shallowness of that interaction is exhausting, not
just the not the thanks.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
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 know, you get eight
rides a day, You're like thanking eight people a day
like they're you know, the Second Coming of Jesus, you
start to feel a little bit debased.

Speaker 2 (35:23):
What'd you learn about people from that? From that journey
that's your first time really kind of going into it.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
That 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 US who
drive in minivans and have that 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 actually stick figure. Those people never picked

(35:54):
me up and would flip me off with their whole family.
Sometimes they would throw full doctor peppers at me as
a family while I stood on the side of the road.
They yelled shit like go to hell, hippie when I
was on the side of the road. And so it's
weird that the most charitable Christian American family values people

(36:14):
never gave me any charity or even conversation. They were
antagonizing me and saw me as like a hippie left
over from the sixties who needed to go to work,
go to Vietnam. I don't get it. But the people
who really extended a hand to me is people on
the margins, people working on seasonal visas, people whose cars

(36:35):
have you know, 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.

Speaker 2 (36:52):
That's beautiful, man, I've had similar kind of experience that
people were struggling the most of the ones who are
willing to help you when you're struggling. Yeah, there's people,
like in religious contexts and other kind of communities that
just judge others because they've kind of constructed a value
system where they're better than others because of that value system,

(37:12):
and that that actually has a cascade that forces you
to actually be kind of a dick.

Speaker 1 (37:19):
Yeah, that way, that's so true. Do you think about
like morality and religion a lot.

Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, I've been to certain parts of the
world where religion is really a big part of life.
I'm just always skeptical about tribes of people that believe
a thing and believe there are better than others because
they believe that thing that could be nations, that could
be religions. Yeah, I mean in Ukraine and Russia, I've

(37:47):
seen a lot of hate towards the other. Yeah, and
that that hate I'm always very skeptical of because it
could be used by powerful people to direct that hate
just so the powerful people can maintain power and get money.
This kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (38:04):
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 where 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.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Now. Are there some places in America that are better
than others? Can you can you speak negatively of like
aforementioned Joe Rogan talks shit about Connecticut and that'll stop.
Is there an Can you pick a region in the
United States you can talk shit about, talk shit about?

Speaker 1 (38:37):
Oh for sure, I mean or from that experience that
is just narrowed down too that oh Colorado. Oh Jesus, really.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
I know so many people that love Colorado.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
It's just like, stop. You don't like circles.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
I like grids, man, Oh you're a good guy, Manhattan, Orleans,
San Francisco.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
What is it about grids that bring out the worst
in people? Circles is wherever we just there's it, everyone's
just vibing out. But the grid gets people locked in
and hateful. I don't know, man, but I've never heard
anyone talk shit about Colorado. I have to say it's
kind of refreshing.

Speaker 1 (39:17):
Yea.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
It provides a necessary balance for the Colorado Wikipedia page.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
Yeah Oregon too, I got problems with Oregon.

Speaker 2 (39:23):
Oregon.

Speaker 1 (39:24):
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 but 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 in the blamita, What.

Speaker 2 (39:43):
Do you have against anarchism?

Speaker 1 (39:45):
Have nothing. I used to be an anarchist when I
was an eighth grade at his 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 John Williams, who is a Native
American wood carver in downtown Seattle. He got killed by
a Seattle police officer named Ian Burke. John Williams was

(40:09):
carving a pipe or from a woodblock 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 shoot some six seconds later. So that police involved
shooting is what instantly turned me into like a very
critical of law enforcement kind of person when I was
super young, and so as someone who used to see

(40:31):
this guy who got murdered, who was a fifty five
year old man, I used to see him around Pip
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. You can look up
the video. It's horrific, you know, and it didn't get reported.
The officer. I'm pretty sure he's still active duty. And

(40:53):
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 exists in a small little chamber,
you know. You can't apply that to the industrial heartland

(41:15):
of the country.

Speaker 2 (41:15):
And I think also anarchism. I've gotten to know Michael
Malice who's written quite a bit about anarchism, and it
also exists as a body of literature about different philosophical
notions that kind of resist the state, the ever expanding state,
in different kinds of ways. And it's always nice to
have extreme thought experiments to understand what kind of society

(41:38):
we want to build, but implementing it may not necessarily
be a good idea.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
I mean, Emma Goldman, I'm a huge fan of her writing.
Also the prison abolitionists that are associated with the anarchist movement,
Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson, Gilmore, all that stuff influential. I
still adhere to a lot of those principles when talking
about stuff like radical prison reform and stuff like that.
But just I drifted more toward having a more open

(42:04):
mind as I got older.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
Extremism implemented in almost all of its forms is probably
going to cause a lot of suffering. Yeah, you worked
as a doorman on the h I could say, legendary
Bourbon Street in New Orleans where you saw what you
described as This might be another Wikipedia quote, by the way,
but this is where I do my research, say hellish scenes,

(42:28):
hellish scenes and quotes.

Speaker 1 (42:29):
Wikipedia is damn right about that.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
All right, thank you. That's a wind that's one in
the wind column. Uh So, yeah, tell the story of that.
Was like to work on Bourbon Street? What kind of
stuff do you see?

Speaker 1 (42:41):
I mean, I was a host at at a fine
dining restaurant that 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 dackery spot. It's the middle of the tourist
corridor of New Orleans, and the spot was kind of
like an kind of a tourist trap. It was called
Bourbon house. The food was good, Chef Eric, I don't

(43:02):
want you to see this and think you don't make
good end Dewey 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, so if you're eating at a Bourbon House,
you can look out onto Bourbon Street and you can

(43:24):
see as you're dining, a full panoramic view of all
these partiers throwing beads, boobs all that. 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

(43:47):
twelve pairs of beads, just jerking it. Yeah, back to
jerking it. He's jerking it right, And every single person
at the restaurant's look it out there, like look, they're
taking pictures. And the manager, Stephen looks at me, He's like,
keep your fucking eyes on the table, sobserving these people.
You know, I'm like, you want like red beans and
rice or would you like some of creole? And uh,

(44:07):
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 is
at its most chaotic. And so I lived in the
French Quarter as well. So I lived. I lived about
twelve blocks down Bourbon at a in a small creole
cottage and a cute little like orange old school in

(44:29):
New Orleans, one story spot. I lived in the attic
above these these gay meth dealers named Frankie and Johnny.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
Oh wow.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
And so I would get off work and I would
basically have to walk through like this battlefield. I mean
it was a battlefield. Getting home was out of like
the Warriors movie.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
It was almost in the humanity on display.

Speaker 1 (44:50):
Yeah, it was like Kensington, Philadelphia, but just alcohol, you
know what I mean. Oh, it's all alcohol, but it's
a lot of a lot of visitors right from outside,
almost all visitors. Yeah, 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.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
Yeah, well they technically are better than everybody else.

Speaker 1 (45:13):
But yeah, people from Massachusetts aren't like the cream of
the crop in terms of like American superiors.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
Strong words.

Speaker 1 (45:19):
Yeah, no, no offense, but I mean.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
No, that's I'm sure they won't take that.

Speaker 1 (45:24):
They are good at fighting. They I'll tell you that,
all right, Great New England has hands compared to some places.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
Which places of those? Colorado?

Speaker 1 (45:31):
Colorado has no hands. Yeah, the west coast not too
much hands.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
That's why you feel safe talking about Colorado.

Speaker 1 (45:39):
But if you get to the corn fed parts of
East Colorado, these guys got hands bigger than my head.
Don't leave the shadowy. 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's like, yo, we should do a taxi cab
confessions type spin off where we ask people to confess
a deep, dark secret. And we posted the next day

(46:00):
and so we tried that and it went viral on
Instagram instantly. It was mostly incest stories, you know, people
admitting the 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, But.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
How did you get people to confess?

Speaker 1 (46:20):
Pretty easy? And New Orleans has a homicide solve rate
of like twenty two percent, so I mean, most of
the time they'll just tell you. I remember I was
I was walking down Bourbon asked this kid. I was like,
what's your deepest wor like a secret, and he told me.
He's like, I just smoked a dude in the Magnolia
it's a project housing the Third World project development. And
they said, I just smoked a dude in the Magnolia

(46:41):
playground for touching my sister. I'm 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 he
was like man found dead in Central City playground, like
appeared to be a homeless shot execution style. So I
told the kid, I was like, why'd you tell me that?
He's like, man put that shit out there like I'm
trying to go viral, like tag me too. Oh, I
don't think you understand that even if you're a juvenile

(47:02):
He was probably fifteen. Yeah, you can go. 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 gonna delete
this footage. 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 little moments like that.

Speaker 2 (47:21):
I always anything for the GRAM, I guess.

Speaker 1 (47:24):
Yeah. After a while, though, it became sort of a repetitive,
you know, because there's only so many things that people
can confess to that are they go viral, you know, and.

Speaker 2 (47:32):
Just oh, so you were trying to see like what well.

Speaker 1 (47:35):
I mean, there's an incest one some people just say
like I eat ass. That was like every everyone said that,
or like I cheated on someone, or.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
I've seen a surprising number of people on your channel
say mention eating ass.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
Yeah the way, how seriously you said that? We'll live
in my head for the rest of my life.

Speaker 2 (47:56):
That's good.

Speaker 1 (47:57):
Yeah, I want you.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
I want to live in your head saying that. A
lot of people mentioned eating ass.

Speaker 1 (48:04):
Yeah, a lot of people do mention that.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:06):
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 no one,
but everywhere I go people start rapping. If you and
me went outside of this podcast studio and walked around

(48:28):
for five minutes, I can find somebody. It's I can
tell who raps, who can rap, who has eight bars
in their head that they're ready to go.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
I think you're also there's something about you that gives
them creates the safe space yah to perform their art.

Speaker 1 (48:42):
Yeah, that was the quarter Confession series. Was the first
time you saw the suit.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
That's when the suit came out.

Speaker 1 (48:48):
Yeah, it was kind of like a Ron Burgundy eric
Andre and inspired. Where'd you get that suit? Goodwill?

Speaker 2 (48:54):
Goodwill? Yeah always wow, I was playing checkers, you're playing chess.

Speaker 1 (48:59):
I mean, Goodwill has a surprising amount of identical gray
suits for sale. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:04):
I actually gotten suits at a three stores before the Great.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
A lot of people donate suits, and I was going
for oversized suits, which are the cheapest ones there. So yeah,
it was like twelve bucks twelve to twenty five dollars
every time for the outfit.

Speaker 2 (49:16):
If I wanted to look super sophisticated, like I'm from another.

Speaker 1 (49:20):
Era, I would go to thrist store, Yeah, because they're
usually like this.

Speaker 2 (49:25):
There's like a like the patterns they have. It's just
like a more sophisticated suit, which is what you kind
of picked out. It made you look ridiculous, but in
the best kind of way.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
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

(49:55):
make something funny. Yeah, and I get that that's what
people do in the satire. I'm sure lig 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.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
Yeah, because there's an intimacy to confessing a thing, right,
and then you just don't really realize the implications of that.

Speaker 1 (50:19):
And the atmosphere of Bourbon Street is like anything goes
like 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.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
Like, different place in time, like five years later, right,
that same person as the family and stuff like this,
and all of a sudden they're talking about eating ass.

Speaker 1 (50:39):
Right exactly, And you know, the kids have to think
about that or you know, 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 you know, respected elder later
in life. It's tough.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
I don't even know where to go with that. But literally,
the opening question was tell me your deepest, darkest secret. Yeah,
we just come up to somebody like that. Yeah, how
often do you get like a no often? What's the
yes to no? Ratio.

Speaker 1 (51:06):
Well, the weird thing is like we don't really extract
answers from people, Like 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. Like, 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. We wouldn't

(51:28):
approach a shy person and be like, come on, tell me, now.

Speaker 2 (51:31):
What about a person with pain in their eyes?

Speaker 1 (51:33):
Oh yeah, we're interviewing them.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Yeah, so they're ready to talk, they're just not like, yeah,
there's different ways to be ready, right. I see homeless
people a lot, and they always look fascinating, and the
ones I've talked to are always fascinating.

Speaker 1 (51:47):
Yeah. We just did a video at the Vegas in
the Vegas Tunnels, like trying. Obviously it got taken down
by Fox, but whatever, We was.

Speaker 2 (51:54):
Going to make a joke that I didn't see it.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
We try to help a lot of them by getting
them IDs. And when I made the documentary, I had
this idea that if it's a big roadblock for them
is getting identification. Without ideas, 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.

(52:17):
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 id's at the DMV. So we did that,
and you know, nothing really changed in their life. And
we sat down with a recovery specialist who works directly
with them day in and day out. He explained to
me that he's been trying to do the same thing

(52:38):
I tried to do in a one week period for
the past ten years, 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.

Speaker 2 (52:54):
That's a heavy truth right there.

Speaker 1 (52:56):
Breaking that shame cycle has to come first, because I
think like I'm from a generation that romanticizes a 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 fifty, they feel really embarrassed to be

(53:17):
in the spiral of homelessness. They feel like failures. A
lot of them have kids who they weren't there for.
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.

(53:39):
And if you're too paternalistic and you use shame as
a method to get them to clean up, they're going
to end up right where they started. That's a tough
truth to accept because a lot of people want to
quick fix to things. And I don't blame people who
go out and give baloney sandwiches out to the homeless.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
And each case is probably its own little puzzle.

Speaker 1 (53:57):
Each person is so complex. Now imagine drug abuse 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.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
If we could take a small tangent to you mentioned
this Vegas video which just fascinating. It was taken down
recently by YouTube or YouTube took it down based on Yeah,
it was illegal.

Speaker 1 (54:29):
Fox five, I guess. So the documentary was an hour
and forty five minutes. We used ten seconds of a
news clip that was publicly broadcast by Fox five Vegas.
And according to the Copyright Act of nineteen seventy six,
you're allowed to use any publicly broadcast news clip in
a transformative capacity in any documentary, film, or research paper

(54:49):
or broadcast or anything. They specifically at this corporation called
Gray Media that controls the TV stations in almost every
small town, they had lawyers hit up YouTube and YouTube
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. So to think that I wasn't

(55:10):
forewarned is it's a bit strange. But it also smells
like corruption to me to a certain extent.

Speaker 2 (55:16):
Yeah, you shouldn't have that amount of power. At the
very least they should have the power to just like
silence that five second clip.

Speaker 1 (55:24):
Maybe 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 like not as
much consumer of a you know, a fan base, they
can mobilize against someone like Fox five or the money
to go to court. So I want to take them

(55:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:57):
Oh thank you for doing that. That's really really really
important and that's really powerful, and it might hopefully empower
YouTube to also put pressure on people to not YouTube
is in a difficult position because there's so much content
out there, there's so many claims, it's hard to investigate.
But YouTube should be in a place where they push
back against this kind of stuff as a first line

(56:20):
of defense, especially to protect small creators. So what you're
doing is really really important.

Speaker 1 (56:24):
Appreciate it, man, And.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
It sucks that it was taken down. I do you
have any hope.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
Well, I talked to my YouTube partner today and he
said that the Fox five lawyers have two weeks to
comply with my counter appeal. But you know, I spent
twenty grand on human voiceovers in five different languages, so
I invested probably in total, like seventy k into this video.
So even if it gets reinstated, this steam has kind
of been taken out of its trajectory.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
But also it's just like a really important video is good.

Speaker 1 (56:50):
For the world. Yeah, like, why the hell would Fox
five have an invested interest in having the video taken down.

Speaker 2 (56:57):
I just hate it when people do that to videos
or to creators. They're doing good in the world.

Speaker 1 (57:01):
Yeah, it's not an expos 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 intervened in
the lives of the tunnel people.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
Well fuck Fox five the other Channel five, as you said, Yeah,
well thank you for pushing back man highlighting it. Hopefully
it gets brought back off. But yeah, defending other creators, Yeah,
so that other creators can take risks and don't get
taken down for stupid reasons. Yeah. So Quarter Confessions was written.

Speaker 1 (57:30):
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 twenty nineteen, and they said, hey, like, how would
you like to produce a show? I was like, what

(57:50):
do you mean. They were like, we'll get you an RV.
We'll pay you forty five K year, you get to
pay for gas for food for two hotels week. Go
out there, make content and we'll be in the background,
just powering it all.

Speaker 2 (58:06):
And that was the birth of All Gas No Breaks.

Speaker 1 (58:09):
Yes, I mean All Gas No Breaks was named after
a book that I wrote called All Gas No Breaks
The Hitchhiker's Diary, which chronicled the seventy day journey that
we're just talking about.

Speaker 2 (58:19):
It's a tough book to find, by the way.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
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 one hundred copies like
a month and a half ago.

Speaker 2 (58:28):
Yeah. Until then, you guys should go read on the
Road by Jack Carroll. Should read I don't know if
you read it.

Speaker 1 (58:33):
If you can't get my book Get on the Road
by Jack Carrow. It's great. It's the best.

Speaker 2 (58:37):
Once your birth hous April twenty third.

Speaker 1 (58:39):
Okay, I'm a taurust coming through typical tourists. Yeah, yeah,
I'm a typical tourist. Man, I'm a scorpio moon. Just
write that down.

Speaker 2 (58:47):
What's the time when you were born?

Speaker 1 (58:48):
Eleven thirty?

Speaker 2 (58:49):
Eleven thirty at night?

Speaker 1 (58:50):
Or of course, yeah, typical. This guy knew it. That's
the real science.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:57):
Anyways, So the idea of All Gas No as a
show was to combine the I guess road dog ethos
of the All Gas No Breaks book with the presentation
and editing style of Quarter Confessions. So it is to
take Quarter Confessions on the road. That was pretty much
like a simulated hitchhiking experience, but with the editing and

(59:17):
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. It was just so fun. I mean,
imagine you're fresh out of college, 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

(59:39):
never even heard of is willing to buy you an
RV and give you forty five K year, which to
me at the time was more money than I could
possibly imagine. So I called my dad. I was like, Dad,
I need you to find me in 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 twenty thousand,
and the first event that we were called to cover

(01:00:00):
was the burning Man Festival, and that that was tough
because burning Man is not too keen on filming, supposed
to be a non commercialized, you know, escape from the
from reality. I mean, they have a gift economy set up.
It's based upon like mutual participation and non exploitation, and
so the idea of making a burning Man video was

(01:00:21):
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, 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 ply,
they become reborn and they take ketamine and they wear

(01:00:43):
kaleidoscope glasses and steampunk hats and they you know, snort
m d M A and they run around the sand listen.

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
To that's what I need. I thought, it's a pill.

Speaker 1 (01:00:53):
It's better to take it in a pill or water,
but you can snort md M A.

Speaker 2 (01:00:58):
I definitely need to take MDMA. I'm already for love,
but like that, I'd probably go on another level.

Speaker 1 (01:01:02):
Yeah, don't snort it because it only lasts like ninety minutes.

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
Let me write that down.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
Yeah. So, anyways, we didn't know what to do because
we didn't try to film. The initial idea for All
Gas No Breaks 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 were fried on acid.
And so we went to Boulder real quick, did a

(01:01:28):
test interview with some lady who talked about seeing ancestral
aliens during a payote retreat, and so it's pretty easy
to extract trip reports from hippies and you know, gutter
punks and stuff like that our oogles. So we go
to Bernie Man. We start asking people like, you know,
what's your craziest trip story? And they didn't have the
same type of free flowing storytelling style that like on

(01:01:51):
the street crosspunk 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 what 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. It was me and my friend cl
At the time I said we're psychedelic journalists. Were parked
on ten and I, which is a cross street in

(01:02:12):
Black Rock City, and we said, we have a nineteen
ninety eight 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 ten
people lined up at the RV nice willing to talk.
So that vetted people in advance for us, and so

(01:02:34):
we did a couple of interviews, and that was that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:37):
Well, what were some of the stories from the CHIRP reports.

Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
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,

(01:03:00):
went crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:03:01):
I feel like I talked to several people like that
at Berkeley.

Speaker 1 (01:03:04):
Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
And not that Well, Yeah, that lady, I think she
manifests herself in many forms.

Speaker 1 (01:03:11):
Yeah right, but still it was on the cruider end.
There was one guy named Kimbo Slice was his burner name.
He talked about taking a shit after taking like a
quarter of mushrooms and how he was like seeing his
childhood and visualizing his past life, you know, as the
turds were flowing into the toilet, and just talks about
the psychedelic union between poohing and taking shrimps.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
So he was very visual with his words.

Speaker 1 (01:03:36):
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 nineteen seventy one, 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, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
Was there a narrative that tied it together. It's like,
really just a trip comedic almost with.

Speaker 1 (01:04:03):
The interview and then I go burning man, and then
it's on to the next one. So I guess that
could give a loose structure, but it's just like a
punchy and slapstick thing. Everything was going good until we
interviewed this guy named DJ soft Baby. But he was
wearing a golden leotard with once again kaleidoscope glasses shirt, shirtless,

(01:04:24):
dancing like you know, dancing, and he was eating chowder
out of a plastic bowl, and he was like, this
chowder is so fucking good. He's like, this is the
best shot 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.

(01:04:45):
He does a dance we posted on Instagram. The next
morning doing things. Media CEO calls me read 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 is at the top of MIT.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
I don't understand he is my brother is a rocket sign.
He's like head of NASA or whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:05:09):
Well, I mean, the guy knows people in Boston, you know,
not in the whitey Bulger sense, but in the reverse sense.

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
I have trouble believing the DJ soft Baby.

Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
Oh DJ soft Baby was major. It could have been Harvard,
it could have been, but it wasn't It wasn't you Mass.

Speaker 2 (01:05:25):
I don't think there's anybody that's quote at the head
of MIT who's putting what was it all over his face?

Speaker 1 (01:05:32):
Chowder chowder. Well, then you haven't been to burning Man yet.

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
Okay, So I don't have to consult my colleagues at
T if they know DJ soft Baby. So whoever he
probably was Harvard, let's put it on them the top
of Harvard.

Speaker 1 (01:05:48):
So he made some calls, you know, to the 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,
and so that was a he made us agreed to

(01:06:09):
never post that video again, and then somehow got all
of our pages reinstated. So that was my first brush
with like, uh, you know, powerful people on drugs, and
that was probably my last brush with people on drugs.

Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
So what what what did you transition into from there?

Speaker 1 (01:06:23):
I think after Burning Man, we went to the South,
went to Talladega Race weekend, went to a Donald Trump
junior book signing, went to a Juggalo adjacent fetish mansion
in Central Florida called the Sausage Castle.

Speaker 2 (01:06:36):
Juggalo adjacent, Uh, sausage Okay, can you can you run
that by me again?

Speaker 1 (01:06:42):
Juggalo adjacent fetish mansion in Central Florida.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
Fetish mansion in Central Florida. Juggalo adjacent. I mean every
single one of those words, I feel like needs a
book or something.

Speaker 1 (01:06:54):
So juggle By the way, who are the Jugglos is this?
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.

Speaker 2 (01:07:05):
Oh okay, Juggler friendly.

Speaker 1 (01:07:07):
Yeah, because they get made fun of in a lot
of places.

Speaker 2 (01:07:09):
Oh so it's not okay, I got it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:11):
And Juggalos say outrageous shit, you know, and they embarrass
themselves and they fight a lot. So they're they're on
the FBI's gang list, which if you ask me.

Speaker 2 (01:07:18):
And ICP or the the Jugglers, the Juggalos, if it
was the head of the Juggalos, it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:24):
Would be violent Jay and Shaggy too dope. But there's
associated acts like Twizz did, and there's a whole rabbit hole. Honestly,
Tech nine is sort of.

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
A part of that. Tech nine I don't know who
that is. Should I know?

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
He's a He's actually one of the top selling touring
rappers despite having sort of not that many streams. Tech
nine is like it's got a huge cult following in Missouri.
This is like the Juggalos started in uh Warren, Michigan.

Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
We should also say ICP in Sant clumb Posse. So
this is the thing. This is a movement.

Speaker 1 (01:07:51):
Oh, Yeah, if you if you went to Seattle right
now and punched the cop and they booked you in
county jail, you may end up running with the Juggalos.

Speaker 2 (01:08:01):
Running with the Juggalos.

Speaker 1 (01:08:02):
They're a presence in Pacific Northwest prison system. From what
I've heard.

Speaker 2 (01:08:06):
Can you tell a Juggalo from like a distance?

Speaker 1 (01:08:09):
Well, they say so. If you see a Juggalo they'll
say that also, like.

Speaker 2 (01:08:13):
I'll try to.

Speaker 1 (01:08:15):
They're kind of it's called the dark carnivals. The mythology
they abide by.

Speaker 2 (01:08:21):
What do they define themselves? What's the ideology?

Speaker 1 (01:08:23):
Family? Family?

Speaker 2 (01:08:24):
No, I understand, but what's the ideology? What's the philosophical
foundation of that?

Speaker 1 (01:08:28):
They're anti racist? They like to drink fago and also
just like cheap liquor and stuff like that. They're 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 a Juggalo
party and someone's smoking twizz or something, it's relatively accepted.

(01:08:50):
What's the twizz myth myth? Right? Right? Lots of tattoos, Yeah,
the hatchet man is the most common one, so it's
a a Psychopathic Records logo. It's a car tune of
a clown wheeling a hatchet. It's actually a pretty sick logo.

Speaker 2 (01:09:03):
I vaguely remember enjoying some of the ICP music. It's good,
it's pretty good, it's funny, it's edgy.

Speaker 1 (01:09:11):
Well, they get satirized a lot, but I got love
for the clowns. And also so when all gat snow
breaks 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.

Speaker 2 (01:09:27):
Why what is it about it?

Speaker 1 (01:09:29):
People are just so friendly down there, and it's warm
year round, and people are non judgmental. It's just great.
The South gets hated on a lot, especially in the
coastal states Mississippi and Alabama, a kind of like the
butts of a lot of jokes and stuff. But those
are great states.

Speaker 2 (01:09:44):
No, I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:44):
New Mexico, Albuquerque, all those Oh yeah, abq's it's great Albuquerque.
That's what Jesse Pinkman called it as the ABQ.

Speaker 2 (01:09:53):
Oh shit. The depth of references you bring to the
table is intense.

Speaker 1 (01:09:57):
It's okay.

Speaker 2 (01:09:58):
I met a lady in Albuquerque when I was traveling
across the United States and she said, take me with
you said, I'm sorry, man, I can't. Yeah, but I
think about that, lady.

Speaker 1 (01:10:07):
I think you made the right call.

Speaker 2 (01:10:09):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:10:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:10:11):
On the Road Yeah, by Jack Carrouak, best book I've
ever read in my life. There's a there's a moment
when he meets a nice girl on a bus and
they have a love affair.

Speaker 1 (01:10:23):
It's good on the bus.

Speaker 2 (01:10:25):
No, No, they went to California. Well, yeah, and there
was a love affair on the bus. But it wasn't sexual.
It was just romantic.

Speaker 1 (01:10:31):
It was it was in the air.

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):
It was an air, which there is something in the
air on the bush, like a Greyhound, megabus, that type
of situation.

Speaker 1 (01:10:40):
There's certainly something in the air because a romance.

Speaker 2 (01:10:43):
There is man when you travel across because it's like
strangers getting together and you're like feeling each other out,
but you're in it like you each have a story.
Because you wouldn't be taking a bus unless you had
a story. So you're especially if you're traveling across country,
there's something.

Speaker 1 (01:10:57):
You ever taken the dollar bus from Philly to New
York to China. Tell me, yeah, I have, that's a
great buss. The people on that it's not a fucking
dollar though, it was. There's some that are five bucks. No, no, no,
if you book a way ahead of time, which it's
like twenty dollars, I was like, this is a fucking
line calling it one dollar.

Speaker 2 (01:11:15):
I don't know why I'm swearing. The anger came out.

Speaker 1 (01:11:17):
Was squaring's okay. Sometimes when I got out last time
I was on the China Town bus, there was like
a rooster walking down the aisle. Actually, yeah, was chilling.
It was awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:11:25):
Well, there's a nice part of your film with the rooster.

Speaker 1 (01:11:27):
I forgot about that. Yeah, that felt almost fake. Yeah,
did you plant the rooster? No, the rooster. There's a
place in Ebor City in Tampa where roosters walk around
all the time, and we had a rooster park there
right by the main drag for what did I say
we had a rooster parked. We had the RV park
to Eboar City for a long time and the rooster

(01:11:48):
laid eggs and the undercarriage nice back to the Augasto
breaks thing though, Yeah, yeah, so it was lots. It
was really fun making it, and then we started all
gasnow breaks in September of twenty nineteen. 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 Sixth Street. I remember the uh. I
don't just hang out on Sixth Street all the time,

(01:12:09):
but I.

Speaker 2 (01:12:10):
Was just here.

Speaker 1 (01:12:12):
Yeah, I do like Sixth Street. Yeah, I like East
Austin better, but I like six Street too. So anyways,
the NBA shuts down, everything's shutting down. And so I
went down to the Dirty Six and I asked this
door man. 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. And then I

(01:12:34):
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 on the RV and I just
spent four months just depressed, living in the RV, trying
to figure out what would happen.

Speaker 2 (01:12:51):
But all gas, no breaks went on.

Speaker 1 (01:12:54):
Still, well, yeah, This was the crazy thing about that
period of time is that when when COVID hit, I'm
sure you remember, everything turned political. Yeah, overnight in Seattle,
if you went to a house party, you can get canceled,
you know, because people were like, oh, you're a super spreader.
So if you wanted to socialize, even with the group

(01:13:15):
of four or more, you had to do so with
your phone damn near turned off. 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 five hundred deep with no mask to
make a statement against the establishment. So you had this

(01:13:37):
polarization that led to more division. And that's when the
anti vax protest started and I went to Sacramento and
the passion was unreal. This is about it. 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 They called it the
Freedom Rally, but that's typically like anti vax stuff, and

(01:14:00):
it was real intensity, and that video was my most
successful to date at that time, and so I was like, okay,
am I a political reporter? Now? Am I covering politics? Like?
What's going on?

Speaker 2 (01:14:15):
What were the interviews that made up that video? What
kind of what style of questions were you asking? What?

Speaker 1 (01:14:21):
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 ninety five percent fatality rate. But guess what,

(01:14:41):
I'd rather be free and dead than alive living in fear.
And I was like, wow, so it's just stuff along
those lines. You had some San Diego surfers there complaining
about the beaches being shut down when such awesome waves
were going.

Speaker 2 (01:14:54):
Yeah, it's interesting how that really brought out the worst
in people. Oh yeah, and so why that is fear?
Maybe paranoia, I don't know. It really divided people, like
along the lies as you mentioned, like Triple Mask yourself

(01:15:15):
or fight for your country.

Speaker 1 (01:15:17):
Yeah right, exactly why are those the two options? That
is literally what it was, yeah, 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.

(01:15:38):
And so after three months of almost every 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

(01:16:01):
I'm somebody, like I said, you know, 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. 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

(01:16:22):
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
gasno breaks into a news source. So I called Reid,
who is the CEO of the company company that owned
all gasno Breaks, 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

(01:16:43):
he said, the Sausage Castle.

Speaker 2 (01:16:46):
Yeah, the Jugglo. All right, it's called the Sausage Castle.

Speaker 1 (01:16:49):
So I'm watching Minneapolis unfold on Lake Street where it
was burning. And I got to the Orlando airport and
I booked a flight without can 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

(01:17:12):
a different host this. If you mess this up and
you turn our show away from a party show about
drinking and drugs and all that stuff and you make
this a social justice show, that 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,

(01:17:34):
and when I got to the airport, there was National
guardsman in the airport and there was a it was
like a call of duty mission, and the one in
the airport, 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

(01:17:55):
out where you're going. You are not permitted to go
outside tonight. And so Lacey picks me.

Speaker 2 (01:18:00):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:18:01):
There's two people in the back two of her Home
worlds wearing like shisty masks. I'm like, what are we doing?
Where are we going? And she goes, we're gonna 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 A seven.
She gives me a microphone and she's like, go talk

(01:18:22):
to that guy. 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

(01:18:45):
how we feel.

Speaker 2 (01:18:45):
This is how we feel. That's pretty powerful. Yeah, through
a lot of the the documenting that you do. This
is how we feel is like, yeah, screaming through that.

Speaker 1 (01:18:57):
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 fifteen not fifteen
but five blocks away, you know, filming just the scene itself,
just at the fire. But I saw some crazy things
off camera too. I saw so there was kind of
tube groups there. There was like the anarchists, more mobilized protesters,

(01:19:21):
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 he's about to throw it at
White Castle, and this black dude ran up to him

(01:19:42):
and grabbed his arm and he's like, nah, we fucked
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. And I also saw these
dudes rip this ATM out of a bank and hit
it with sledgehammers. They were a group of friends hitting
it with sledgehamer right hingo, sledgehamers, boom. All of a sudden,

(01:20:03):
money starts spraying out of the atm, like I've never
seen some shit like this, like pouring out of it.
And then these group of friends who were just united
and getting it open start fighting each other for the
money as it's flying out of it. And so there
was just it was like a 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

(01:20:25):
what Rubbert bullet. Yeah, yeah, not feel like honestly, it hurt.

Speaker 2 (01:20:32):
I'm not sure what I was expecting because an answer
to that question, yeah, but I liked it. It was good.

Speaker 1 (01:20:36):
Yeah. And then after that I posted the video and
it was very well received, and that was the pivotal
point where I realized that everything was gonna change.

Speaker 2 (01:20:45):
I mean, there was a still kind of a comedic
element to the way you do conversations, to the way
you edit. So did you see yourself as a potentially
like a Jon Stewart type of.

Speaker 1 (01:20:56):
Character at first, but you know, I just think human
beings are just fun in general. Yeah, the absurdity of it.
Cool thing about John Stewart is like I generally like
to say that anybody who works for corporate media, whether
it be Comedy Central or anything known by Time, Warner, Fox, MSNBC,
they can't say what they want because in order to
climb up in those organizations, you have to appease the

(01:21:18):
narrative of the company that you're working for to rise
in the ranks. John Stewart, I feel like, has so
much clout in the media world that I'm pretty sure
he can say whatever he wants. Like, I actually don't
think that John Stewart is controlled by anybody. I really don't.
I think that he can go on the show and
talk about whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:21:36):
I do think that certain people have broken the brains
of the COVID broke the brains of a lot of
really great people I admire. Trump broke the brains of
a lot of people I admire. Like to where Trump
drangement syndrome became a thing, like you can't see the
world quite as clearly because of it, And I think

(01:21:57):
John Stewart is quite a genius at like stepping away
even though the world needed him in that time, stepping
away during that moment of Trump and coming back now
sort of being able to reflect being those sort of
the other statesman.

Speaker 1 (01:22:13):
My favorite John Stuart 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 league theory.
He was just goofing around. He was like, it's called
the coronavirus lab and they had it before, and now

(01:22:34):
what do we have? 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. Yeah, And that made me realize, like, oh,
everything that John Stuart did, especially for the nine to
eleven first responders, He's a true American, and not in
the sense of like the different political parties want you

(01:22:57):
to believe as an American, not a dude your part
in 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.

Speaker 2 (01:23:09):
There's a degree to which you can be in those
positions easily captured by group think, though, even when you're
not controlled by bosses and money and all that kind
of stuff. And I think John Stewart is but mostly resistant,
but it's it's hard. His position is difficult.

Speaker 1 (01:23:25):
I think he's done the best job, though. If someone
is obviously democrat connected corporate media economy, he seems to
be the freest talker.

Speaker 2 (01:23:34):
Yeah, so this is when you first became famous.

Speaker 1 (01:23:38):
I'm not even sure what fame means. I mean, I
just see myself as me.

Speaker 2 (01:23:42):
Why did you get the shades?

Speaker 1 (01:23:43):
Oh that was on tour? That was that's a whole
the shades. That's a dark time. But I didn't make
like a meme.

Speaker 2 (01:23:53):
Really, I don't even know.

Speaker 1 (01:23:54):
I didn't make journalism to like become famous. 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

(01:24:16):
they like and so that's just how it is. But yeah,
I would say right around Minneapolis protest, Portland protest, Proud
Boy's rally, time when I was really in there is
when I started to be acclaimed. It's more than just
like a ambush meme.

Speaker 2 (01:24:28):
Lord, did that have effect on you, the fame not
at that point. Not at that point, so like you
were still able to have a lightness to you.

Speaker 1 (01:24:36):
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 famous during
COVID made it so when the country reopened, it was
as if like I my life really changed because I
was like, oh, all these fans I made during COVID
are like seeing me out of the bar is this cool? Yeah?

(01:24:58):
First famous 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. So, but there's also the dark side.

Speaker 2 (01:25:18):
Well, it's all love, man, I love. I mean, I
just to speak to the first part you're saying. It's
just so much love that people have and it's amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:25:26):
I'm sure you know what it's like. That'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, not
because I'm scared of people, but because I just want
to be like curious me again who people don't know,

(01:25:47):
and I can ask questions to people that I'm interested
in without them going I remember I see I seen
you here or I seen you there. That's that's the
main thing. That's what I loved about hitchhiking.

Speaker 2 (01:25:55):
Yeah, just to have anonymity.

Speaker 1 (01:25:57):
Yeah, it's best, But both are great. Complaining about fame
is just the lamest ship.

Speaker 2 (01:26:01):
Yeah. We should go to furry conventions that you covered.
We were an outfit.

Speaker 1 (01:26:06):
I love furries. I should do that.

Speaker 2 (01:26:08):
Yeah, we should.

Speaker 1 (01:26:08):
We should go together.

Speaker 2 (01:26:09):
I go all the time we should go together. What's
your favorite? No, I have not.

Speaker 1 (01:26:14):
I think you might like it more than you think.

Speaker 2 (01:26:16):
I listen. Maybe I'm just afraid to face squam really am.

Speaker 1 (01:26:23):
Yeah, your first one of the true legs will come
out when you're Yeah, in a thirty six everything is lizard?

Speaker 2 (01:26:30):
Is that what they go with?

Speaker 1 (01:26:31):
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, the scaley suits are more expensive.
They're about seven grand, whereas a first suit is thirty
six hundred. So, and they're also taller. Yeah, so when
the scalies pull up to the FurFest, it's like, ah,
fuck the reptiles.

Speaker 2 (01:26:49):
Fuck the reptiles. I can get behind that. I like,
like more like a Teddy bear type of guy. Yeah,
I think bears.

Speaker 1 (01:26:55):
What's that?

Speaker 2 (01:26:56):
Maybe squirrels.

Speaker 1 (01:26:57):
I don't know. Oh, squirrels are so cool day squirrels.
I want to put a GoPro on one and just
see what the hell they do.

Speaker 2 (01:27:04):
You were talking about that conversation with the guy at
the head of doing things media. How did that end up?

Speaker 1 (01:27:12):
Well, I mean I want to clear up a few
things read 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 journalism, and especially
coverage of sensitive topics like COVID or you know, police

(01:27:32):
brutality would definitely not work on merch. You know, you're
not going to sell a picture of me interviewing someone
at a riot like you would be interviewing a ferry
or a drunk dude in Alabama. Doesn't work the same.
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

(01:27:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:28:03):
What was the collapse?

Speaker 1 (01:28:04):
Like?

Speaker 2 (01:28:04):
What was so.

Speaker 1 (01:28:07):
Right? Is the country's reopening? I get a d M
from Eric Wareheim of Tim and Eric, and I'm covering
something called the UFO Mega Conference and Laughland, Nevada, which
is a beautiful Rivertown and you know, he deended 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 Nathan for You and The Eric Andre Show,

(01:28:28):
and those are produced by their company absolutely, so I
was like, hell, yeah, let's do it. Three days later,
I get a call that says Jonah Hill wants to
hop on board. And I can't believe this. You know,
I'm still in the RV and I'm in Laughland, Nevada.
So I'm like, Jonah Hill, super bad? Are you shitting
me right now? So I was excited and uh oh
and moneyball. Jonah Hill is a great actor and all around. Yeah,

(01:28:52):
and the credit he deserves well, I mean he's got
the credit by now, but it still deserves more. So basically,
just within a week, I assembled this super team of
Tim and Eric supera yeah, pretty much of Tim Andary
I'm sorry, good in JOEA 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

(01:29:15):
was in this weird situation where I had signed a
contract with doing things media that I didn't realize was
called a three sixty deal. That's what they use in
like the rap world. Basically means that I can't do
anything outside of them without them getting one hundred percent
of the money. So if I was to go work
at Samorrow or Quizno's while I was working for All

(01:29:36):
Gas No Breaks, they would get my five hundred 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 twenty one and like I told you,
forty five k year RV sounds sick. And basically the
TV networks were like, why would we buy a show

(01:29:57):
if the digital brand's going to be running at the
same time, Because they didn't want to stop doing All
Gas No Breaks to make a TV show. They wanted
All Gas No Breaks to continue as a web show
while All Gas No Breaks as a future TV show
at Showtime or Hulu or somewhere like that was also
concurrently running, which is impossible for one man to do.
And so every TV network said, Okay, we're not doing that,
we want exclusive rights contract with this guy next. Oh yeah,

(01:30:23):
this is crazy to think about because it all happened
so fast. So Jonah Hill says A twenty four Films
wants to do a movie instead of a show, and
they're going to let you keep the digital brand running.
So this meant that I could keep doing my Instagram
stuff with doing things media Slash, all Gas, no Breaks
while making an A twenty four movie with Jonah Hill
and Tim and Eric. So it was just like I

(01:30:45):
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 twenty twenty.
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

(01:31:08):
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, 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.

(01:31:30):
This meant that I couldn't film anything for all gas
no breaks the digital show because I had to dedicate
one hundred percent of my time to making this perfect movie. Yes,
still one of the partners at doing things. Media was
demanding that I not only produced 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 going
to be impossible. And I said, if you want it

(01:31:53):
to be possible, I can make it work. But I
want to have half of the monetization from the show
fifty percent profit split, which I thought is fair 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.
We're all out of a job. As we were filming

(01:32:15):
for the now HBO project, we got our fire notices,
the guts.

Speaker 2 (01:32:21):
On those on that person to because you should be
owning probably close to one hundred percent of it.

Speaker 1 (01:32:28):
I think so too, but they didn't see it that
way because they figured we made the initial investment. We
discovered him as how they looked at it, so it
wasn't read. But it was the other partner who wasn't
Reid 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

(01:32:49):
made that miscalculation. I wish you would have thought about
it twice. I wish you didn't have to end like that,
but it did. Why do people do that?

Speaker 2 (01:32:57):
Like, what's the benefit of acting like that? I think
you can part amicably without the drama.

Speaker 1 (01:33:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:33:23):
Oh I see, Well that's a stupid way to think.

Speaker 1 (01:33:27):
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 frontman doesn't matter or something,
and that the brains of the operation are actually the
people on the periphery, and so they start to believe
that they can just shift things around and the audience

(01:33:48):
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 Breaks, watched Quarter Confessions and read the book
and so you know, well.

Speaker 2 (01:34:05):
This happens also, not just financially, but just with people
that sort of part of a team, but they don't
really contribute creatively to the team, and they force their
opinion or pressure. I mean, whether it's comes from like
from editors or all that kind of stuff, or from sponsors,

(01:34:25):
or there's pressure they create when they when the creator
alone should be celebrated and have all the power because
they're the ones that are creating the thing.

Speaker 1 (01:34:33):
In a way, I have sympathy because I can't relate
to that because I've always been the front man of
my own projects by design. So I'm not sure what
it's like to be like someone's owner from a content perspective,
I don't understand the challenges they face. Maybe there was
something that I didn't understand. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:34:51):
True, Well, oftentimes if you own a thing like this,
like this company, you do think about brand, right and
then maybe have a big picture idea what brand means
and that that can be at tension with the creative project,
right yeah, Like, but ultimately freedom for the creators is

(01:35:15):
the best kind of brand. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:35:16):
I remember all three of us who worked on all
gas snow breaks got fired at the same time. And
we were in that We were in the RV that
Tim and Eric's company bought for us, which was a
bigger RV in the parking lot, parking lot of a
Walmart in South Philly, and the propane had just ran
out and it was fifteen degrees outside, so like the
RV was getting really cold, really fast, and I just

(01:35:37):
looked at my phone and it was like, you're fired.
And I was just like, God help me. I've had
a couple moments like that and God does help me.

Speaker 2 (01:35:46):
And they were always in the parking lot of Walmart.

Speaker 1 (01:35:48):
Right. Well, yeah, although I know that Walmart, by the way,
the one in South Philly is great. Yeah, that's great,
But technically now you can't park an RV there.

Speaker 2 (01:35:57):
Well you're not, you're not a man fallows the rules.

Speaker 1 (01:36:00):
Well, you know, the thing is goes Walmart, cracker barrel
and big five are supposed to technically all let rb
campus 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.
Any city with like significant homelessness and like petty property crime,

(01:36:20):
the walmart's are at no go fascinating.

Speaker 2 (01:36:23):
So that was a low point. Yeah, but from there,
from the ashes, the phoenix.

Speaker 1 (01:36:31):
Rose over time. Yeah, Channel five was born. Channel five
was born in the March of twenty twenty one, after
a we finished filming for the HBO project.

Speaker 2 (01:36:42):
Oh really, so you went all in on the HBO project.

Speaker 1 (01:36:44):
Yeah, I mean we filmed the HBO project from November
twenty twenty up until April twenty twenty one. Damn near.
We were just like you know, picking up the pieces,
going back for individual interviews, stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (01:36:55):
So let's go to that project. It turned out to
be a movie called This Place.

Speaker 1 (01:36:59):
Rule was supposed to be called America Shits Itself.

Speaker 2 (01:37:02):
Yeah, maybe you can tell the story of the film.
You have what's his name? I wrote this down Joker
Gang and Gum Gang, Is that correct? The opening scene,
the opening scene of two characters just talking shit and
then getting into a fight, and that I think it
was really brilliant how you presented that as almost like
a microcosm of like the division between the extremes of

(01:37:26):
the left and the extremes of the right.

Speaker 1 (01:37:27):
That's exactly what it was. I'm glad you picked up
on it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:37:30):
And then what I really liked is that the joke
again Joker Gang was kind of a little bit of
a spoiler alert, I apologize, but at the end of
the film, as a kind of a voice of wisdom. Yeah,
he seems the most sane.

Speaker 1 (01:37:47):
He was the voice of wisdom. He like cut through it. Yeah.
I also just realized that a lot of people are
going to stream the movie after watching this podcast, which
is cool.

Speaker 2 (01:37:55):
Yeah, where did they stream it on?

Speaker 1 (01:37:59):
I never got a chance to.

Speaker 2 (01:38:00):
It's such a pain in the ass, man. I wish
we could all just pay out it on YouTube or something. Yeah,
and HBO gets the profits or whatever, but like it's
such as a subscribe for every single thing. But yes,
if you want to watch it, it's really I recommend,
extremely highly sign up to HBO.

Speaker 1 (01:38:15):
Whatever the hell On the positive note, HBO is great
to work with like that they're the most professional, like
respectful company I've ever worked with pretty much.

Speaker 2 (01:38:24):
Yeah, HBO is great as some of the greatest like TV.

Speaker 1 (01:38:27):
But even in the background, like they get shipped done,
there's there's no there's no way 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 had a little bit man, but you know, it's
a it's.

Speaker 2 (01:38:43):
A truly original like documentary like meaning like I just
haven't seen anything like it. It's even like it's so
like there's a humor and enlighteness at the right kinds
of moments, like like I said, there's like a rooster
in your that's like okay, that's like a non sec
what are like thing as part of a storytelling, it
kind of intensifies and reveals the absurdity of the division

(01:39:07):
and how once like January sixth happens, like everybody that
goes on to the next thing. Yeah, it's like what
happened to us is it was almost like a delirium
that everybody was participating in some weird just like well
like people say mind virus, like all of a sudden,
we just got captured. Yeah, and people just like yelling
at each other doing the most ridiculous shit. And I mean, really,

(01:39:28):
January sixth, the way you present it especially, just reveals
the circus of it all.

Speaker 1 (01:39:34):
I mean, it really broke the fourth wall, how I
would describe it, because if you were at January sixth
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 that you
haven't seen anything like it since it was supposed to
be a second one on January twentieth. It was the
actual inauguration that never happened. It was a crazy time

(01:39:56):
to be alive and around, and especially the relationship. But
I develo with Enrique Tarrio, who's the former chairman of
the Proud Boys. He's now facing, you know, twenty three
years in prison. It's like a trip because I went
to his house in Miami maybe two weeks after January sixth,
and talking to him, it seemed like he didn't think
anything was gonna happen. He was just like, yeah, man,

(01:40:16):
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 mind fuck.
It's like, why'd you get everyone so hyped up? It's
just weird to think about how so many people's lives
were drastically altered forever because of that just bizarre moment
in time that will always live on.

Speaker 2 (01:40:38):
Yeah, what did you QAnon? As part of that story,
what'd you learn? I bought qand from that.

Speaker 1 (01:40:45):
Just an all encompassing worldview. That family that I talked to,
I called them a QAnon family, but it's called the
Spencer family. You know, they were non political up until
the Stop the Steel movement began in September of twenty twenty,
and within four months their entire life revolved around the
mythology and lore of q And I've never seen in

(01:41:05):
my life a psyop just devour people's minds in such
an intense way and such a rapid period of time.

Speaker 2 (01:41:12):
And I love how the kids in the movie are
also the voices of wisdom and the Spenser family, it's
the kid who like goes to the full journey. Yeah,
of like believing that whatever, Hillary Clinton is a lizard
or and just believing all the worst versions of the
conspiracy theories and then kind of waking up was like,
what was the point?

Speaker 1 (01:41:33):
Yeah, it was heartbreaking to see his disappointment and his
dad for even you know, following QAnon so militantly, because
he was like, I felt like they let my dad down.
I feel like they let our family down, you know,
because January sixth 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

(01:41:54):
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. In fact, the next day he
was like almost denouncing it. Now he doesn't, but then
he did, and it was really I think it hurt
people's pride a lot. My friend for Giatto Blow, he's

(01:42:14):
a Trump rapper. He describes it that way. He says
a lot of people's pride got hurt by January sixth.

Speaker 2 (01:42:20):
Trump rapper.

Speaker 1 (01:42:21):
Oh yeah, dude. Honestly, there's some pretty dope Trump rap
out there. I'm serious. They 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.

Speaker 2 (01:42:40):
Oh, They're like they have some political depth. Dom Yeah, Well,
I mean, is there something more you could say about
like how c and now works, Like who's behind it? Well,
it's your sense of who's behind the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (01:42:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:43:12):
We said, like almost a disappointment, because like the to me,
it was like a thing that just captured a very
large number of people's minds and then it just kind
of faded.

Speaker 1 (01:43:22):
I guess that's why it just seems like it's gone
and the ideas of q and on have just bled
into mainstream standard conservative thinking.

Speaker 2 (01:43:31):
But there has to be a kind of retrospective. That's
the problem I have with COVID. You know, a lot
of stuff happened, everybody freaked out. There's a lot of
big drama around it, and now everyone was like okay,
forgot Yeah, just like move that way. What are the
lessons learned? Has anyone learned any lessons? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:43:47):
Like what exactly? And what I'm saying is I don't
want qan on adherence to see this and thing I
don't care about them. Yeah, but like as far as
who was behind it, the damage is done.

Speaker 2 (01:43:57):
Yeah, but what are the mechanisms that made it work?

Speaker 1 (01:43:59):
I mean, what have you kind of like thought about that.

Speaker 2 (01:44:02):
I kind of think that these viral ideas can be
driven by and your film kind of shows this by
just a handful of people and they're not malevolent. They
just want to clout. Yeah, and there's something sexy. There's
something really sticky about conspiracy theories, like especially extreme ones.
It's just kind of like some of them can have

(01:44:24):
this momentum. They capture the minds of a lot of
people and you just go with it. And like, when
I hear some conspiracy theories, like there's something like a
small part of me that kind of.

Speaker 1 (01:44:34):
Like, yeah, it's beside it, it's possible. You know that
QAnon is a syop 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 one percent. It's that you take. You get
people so close to any type of class consciousness, and

(01:44:56):
then you totally divert everything into like lizard humans who
live on the moon, and that Hillary Clinton is eating
babies on camera and humanon did just that that they
want you to 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

(01:45:20):
only deep state, and that some middle of the road conservatives,
that there's no grifters or manipulators outside of that three
headed snake. You know, there's grifters there who are 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

(01:45:42):
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, and
you have people who are almost realizing, hey, it seems
like Fox and CNN it might be owned by the
same people, and are tactically using these machines to keep

(01:46:02):
us divided perfectly fifty to fifty, to ensure that the
power structure never gets disrupted. And then you guess, and
then you get these people. You know who's gonna save us?
Donald Trump? That's the guy? How is that the guy?
It's not the guy. And I don't have TDS. I
don't I'm not an orange man basher who thinks about
the guy at the time, but I don't think he's
the guy. Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:46:24):
You were shirtless lifting weights while whiskey or some alcohols
poured into your mouth by Alex Jones in this movie,
and then you did the same to him.

Speaker 1 (01:46:36):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (01:46:38):
It seems like an interrogation. Uh so Alex was a
was a part of this film. He was like throughout
throughout the narrative, and yet you had a great interview
with him. What did you learn about interacting with Alex
Jones from making this film?

Speaker 1 (01:46:54):
For one, is that he's the exact same off cameras
he is on camera. Yeah, it's not an act. He
told me that all real Americans die before fifty eight.
He mentioned Sean Connery and a few others. And how
old is he getting up there? Yeah, I think early fifties.
I just found it fascinating. I mean, how nice his

(01:47:16):
studio is. I mean, the guy's got like an MSNBC
level setup. I actually had a great time with him,
you know. 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 betray him
in the best light. You know, we joked around a bit,

(01:47:36):
but it wasn't Alex Jones hit piece necessarily. 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 gonna have some serious

(01:47:56):
backlash because of that. At the time, I was like, man,
it's fine, you know, it's all good. We're just hanging
out drinking whiskey, doing bench presses, drinking Jamison it's all good.
It was a 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 twenty eighteen where deplatforming was the big

(01:48:18):
thing that people were encouraging. 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

(01:48:38):
training that was you know, mandated by HBO, it was
all training and how to defend from that exact question.
They said, when we put you on NPR and we
put you on CNN, they're going to ask you about
platforming problematic ideologies, and you're going to have to say
stuff like sunlight is the best disinfectant. I believe that

(01:49:00):
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 fifteen pointers. 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.
You know, when I went on CNN, this was a
crazy experience. So I went on CNN and thankfully my

(01:49:24):
friend was with me. And so I'm on CNN and.

Speaker 2 (01:49:27):
By the way, your friend is chilling in sunglasses laying
in the cogeay. That like it's a mix of like
the dude from Big Lebowski and the Brad Pitt role
in uh True Romance. Yeah you know that reference.

Speaker 1 (01:49:45):
No, but I mean I'm sure it describes Larry's sound
like it kind of looks like Brad Jack Carwak. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:49:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:49:51):
So HBO had a press tour set up for me,
and the main ones were CNN and NPR, And so
they said, we're gonna You're gonna 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 seven o'clock in the morning in New York
at his show the night before at Times Square. So
I'm like groggy eyed whatever. They put the lab on

(01:50:11):
me boom, I'm live on CNN Sunday morning, and he goes,
how would you describe in Enrique Tario's mental state in
the lead up to the Capital insurrection, and I'm looking around,
I'm like, is this guy serious? Like am I sandwiched
in the January sixth hit piece right now?

Speaker 2 (01:50:28):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:50:28):
I thought it was about me. Yeah, And so I
told him, it's not about Enrique Tario. It's about how
companies like Fox, MSNBC and even your station, CNN use
the twenty four hour news cycle to enrage people, to
generate ad revenue and pitt Americans against each other during
times like that. And he said, there's nothing fake about CNN.
I said, I didn't say you were fake news. I'm

(01:50:49):
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. You said that pretty much,
and great, 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 a platform to Alex Jones?

(01:51:11):
And I go, I don't know. I just wanted to
drink some Jamison 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, so you know, I
just I didn't give them much information about Alex, but
it was very awkward. They never posted this segment online.
When I got off of that interview, I had a
handler that A twenty four assigned to me, so I

(01:51:32):
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 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 the same people who
own CNN own HBO, and it's Time Warner. And so

(01:51:53):
they canceled my press store. So my press stour was finished.
You know, all the late night shows that I was
supposed to go on. I was supposed to go on
like the late night shows, 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

(01:52:15):
supposed to be a premiere, so it wasn't supposed to
be an interrogation. It wasn't supposed to be anything like that,
supposed to be a premier in front of a live
audience where they watched the film. And I show up
after it for a Q and 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 and I

(01:52:38):
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 N ninety fives on and I'm not two N
ninety five's is It's over the line. So I go, hey,
great to meet you. She doesn't shake my hand and

(01:52:58):
I go why not? And she goes, you've 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

(01:53:20):
of the most despicable Americans in history, Alex Jones in
front of a live audience. 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 famili's lawyer,

(01:53:40):
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, 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

(01:54:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:54:13):
Fuck all those people that film, just in case you
don't get a chance to see it, and you should.
You're critical of Alex Jones in the most artful way,
like it was the correct way to be critical. It
showed him to be more interested in the grift of it.

Speaker 1 (01:54:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:54:35):
Yeah, and you didn't do it in a like a
pointing fingers and like saying in the kind of NPR
way that you just mentioned. It's more like a human way,
like this is tragedies happen all over the world, and
there's grifters that roll in and then take advantage of
it interesting ways, and then human beings get swept up
on either side of it, and it's revealing the humor,

(01:54:56):
the absurdity of it all. And it was done masterfully.
It was done Like for people who criticized you for
platforming Alex Jones or whatever. The film from a political
perspective is probably leans very much left, like heavily left,
but does it without that exhausting energy of like judging right,

(01:55:18):
just this kind of you know, yeah, two masks kind
of judging.

Speaker 1 (01:55:24):
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 doesn't mean I agree with everything he says,
but he told me you're going to be in trouble
with these people if you put me in your video
and you know, it wasn't too bad of trouble. But

(01:55:45):
definitely I do think sometimes 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.

Speaker 2 (01:55:57):
I think it was really well done. It shocks men
the layering of it, all the entertainment plus sort of
not considering from his perspective, the consequences of like rolling
people up in this way that it's not just I mean,
you really highlight this in the interview, Like he keeps
saying it's info wars, but then there's always kind of
a sense that info wars can turn to actual like

(01:56:19):
civil war, and yeah, but maybe not. Maybe it's all
just a circus, like we play for each other.

Speaker 1 (01:56:25):
If you look at the speech he did on January fifth,
it was said he said, tomorrow, you know, millions of
patriotic Americans will take our country back.

Speaker 2 (01:56:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:56:34):
So he eggs people on and then when it gets
hot he steps away.

Speaker 2 (01:56:39):
Yeah. But like you said, the thing he told you,
he turned out to be right. Oh yeah, and the
frogs are becoming gay.

Speaker 1 (01:56:46):
They've always been gay. Well, saying the frogs are straight
even crazier.

Speaker 2 (01:56:52):
I've read stories where you kiss one and becomes a prince,
and yeah, it's true, one hundred percent. You think Alex
believes what he says in terms of the everything he
says on Any four wars, like how much of it
is real?

Speaker 1 (01:57:05):
He's right about like 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 follow the question everything narrative
and everything is kind of like a conspiracy or like
a plot or a false flag. I think that he's

(01:57:27):
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 stick of the show. I mean, the Info War
is fighting misinformation, and people want to see him be
that guy. So to a certain extent, if you're a
creator who supports your family, you do follow economic incentives,

(01:57:49):
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.
I feel like now I can freely and really say
what I want to say in my new life. But
when I was younger, yeah, I like I had to
be this sort of awkward, sort of amicable aloof guy

(01:58:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:58:18):
So for some people, especially who publish on YouTube, the
YouTube algorithm, they can become a slave to the YouTube algorithm.

Speaker 1 (01:58:25):
Yeah, I mean for sure, because and I definitely feel
that sometimes I know what works for me, but I
like to think that my audience appreciates when I tried
new things, so I'm not totally enslaved to it.

Speaker 2 (01:58:36):
I mean, yeah, I try not to pay attention to
views or any of that.

Speaker 1 (01:58:40):
Well, you get some high views, so I'll report that
for you.

Speaker 2 (01:58:45):
So I wrote a chrome extension that hides all the
views on anything great, So you.

Speaker 1 (01:58:49):
Took it to that level.

Speaker 2 (01:58:50):
Yeah, just because it's a drug man, And I'm also
a number guy, meaning like you give me like if
I do thirty push ups today. Tomorrow I'm gonna try
to do thirty five, just like caning number go up?
Like That's why I like video games like RPGs, like
where you're like improving you're skill tree, you're like getting
an extra point. And there's some aspect of YouTube and

(01:59:11):
other platforms anything and any other platform you're like, ooh,
I got more today than yesterday. That's really really dangerous
to me because it can influence how much I enjoy
a thing. Mhm, Like if nobody gives a shit about
it based on the numbers, you're like, oh, maybe that
wasn't such a great experience. I thought it was a

(01:59:31):
great experience, but maybe it wasn't.

Speaker 1 (01:59:33):
Yeah, honestly I do. Actually I feel that way sometimes,
Like I'll put out something that I care about a lot,
but if if it doesn't get as many views, I'm like,
all right, it must've not been as good as my
higher review videos or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:59:46):
Yeah, that's that's just like not true though. Yeah, and
it might mean like on YouTube that your thumbnail socks
or something like this or whatever whatever. However the algorithm works.
But I mean that's the thing I'm battling against to
make sure I ignore all of that. It's actually something
Joe Rogan has been extremely good at it.

Speaker 1 (02:00:08):
He gives your shits, and I think it's easier to
do when you're really successful.

Speaker 2 (02:00:12):
Well, he was doing that when he wasn't successful really
about anything. He just follows like the stuff he enjoys
doing and legitimately enjoys it. He happens to be really
good at it, but he gets good because he's doing
the things he really enjoys and like full on passionate about.
And that's why he'll have like ridiculous guests and just
just like just shit he enjoys doing.

Speaker 1 (02:00:33):
Yeah, that'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.

Speaker 2 (02:00:43):
Well, it's a worthy enemy to be fighting because it's
a drug, and it's one that should be resistant for
a creator because I feel like it can do negative
stuff to your mind as a creator.

Speaker 1 (02:00:55):
Oh yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (02:00:56):
Anybody that controls you is not good.

Speaker 1 (02:01:00):
A lot of people were 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 yeah it is.

Speaker 2 (02:01:12):
And that's why variety is good. And you're doing that, yeah,
always expanding. Well, let me just zoom out on this.
You made a film. Yeah, that's pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (02:01:23):
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 A
twenty four. Everybody that I worked on the film with
I have a lot of love for and I appreciate
the experience. My first movie, it's a big deal. Like
it was a good one in my head. It's like
that I finally got to make the transition from YouTuber
to a filmmaker, and that was always this psychic barrier

(02:01:44):
that I felt like I had to jump over.

Speaker 2 (02:01:46):
You know, there's a I mean just the way shot,
the humor that goes throughout it, just the narration that
you're doing in like a shitty director's chair. As really
walked up whose idea was that it.

Speaker 1 (02:02:01):
Was actually a 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.

Speaker 2 (02:02:13):
Yeah, it's just like starting with the absurd fight and
then going like, oh that that's a good way to
start the movie, which is really really well done.

Speaker 1 (02:02:20):
Thanks man.

Speaker 2 (02:02:22):
Well what about Jonah Hill?

Speaker 1 (02:02:24):
Great guy?

Speaker 2 (02:02:25):
He believed in this he did so was that what's that?

Speaker 1 (02:02:30):
Like?

Speaker 2 (02:02:30):
What do you think is behind him believing in such
a wild project.

Speaker 1 (02:02:33):
I think that Jonah Hill has a good eye for
like what's cool amongst the younger folks, Like he's in
the skateboarding stuff. That's why he did that film mid nineties,
and I think he probably saw a similar thing in
what was going on with all gas no breaks and
was like, shit, 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

(02:02:54):
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 freed me up to
speak about what happened.

Speaker 2 (02:03:02):
So he was also part of you kind of gaining
your freedom.

Speaker 1 (02:03:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:03:17):
Just on your own politics, is it fair to say
that your politics lean's left.

Speaker 1 (02:03:23):
I'm not really sure. Sometimes, you know, I like to
think that I am socially left, Like I think people
should be able to dress and act like however they want.
I don't believe in restricting people's social freedoms. Economics wise,
doesn't seem like leftist economic policy works very well on
a city funding level, Like if you see what's going

(02:03:46):
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 Well,
if he's just.

Speaker 2 (02:03:59):
Like objective, zoom out and don't have an insane standard
of the extremes, it feels like a lot of your
work leans left.

Speaker 1 (02:04:08):
I tend to lean toward, lean toward like the empathetic perspective,
which I do think is more on the left and
the right. But 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.

Speaker 2 (02:04:33):
But it does seem that maybe you can correct me,
but I get the sense sometimes that the left attack
their own very intensely.

Speaker 1 (02:04:42):
It does happen, but every community has terms of exile.
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 it's own too. I mean,
think about bud Light and stuff like they in terms
of exile. I mean, you know, like every community has

(02:05:04):
terms of exile. You just got to know who you're
engaging with, and you got to make that decision carefully.

Speaker 2 (02:05:10):
It'd be nice if there's an actual writeup of the
things you're not about to say for each thing, and
then yeah, I wonder whose list would be longer. It
just does feel like the last list is a little longer.

Speaker 1 (02:05:19):
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, and conservatives are really
concerned about pedophiles. Yeah. I mean I don't like pedophiles either,
but I don't think about it all the time.

Speaker 2 (02:05:39):
It's one of the things you do in the film
is kind of confront one of the QAnon folks where
his concern is that everybody's a pedophile, and you showed.

Speaker 1 (02:05:48):
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
accusation is a confession to a certain extent, 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

(02:06:09):
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
that you feel like you have to get karmic retribution
by doing the reverse. I don't get it.

Speaker 2 (02:06:25):
Yeah, do you think to the degree of bias it
affects your journalism?

Speaker 1 (02:06:30):
No, But I mean with the migrant situation, I don't.

Speaker 2 (02:06:34):
Know what was that covering that?

Speaker 1 (02:06:37):
Like, I just got a lot of hate from conservatives
for like letting the migrants tell their stories about their
journey and stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:06:43):
What did you learn from just going to the border?

Speaker 1 (02:06:46):
I mean just the sheer desperation that the citizens of
the world are in. 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.

Speaker 2 (02:07:01):
Meaning America has its problems too.

Speaker 1 (02:07:03):
It has severe problems. There's extreme poverty here.

Speaker 2 (02:07:07):
But they're in America. Like if you just compared to
other nations, the level of corruption is much lower to
where the opportunity for a person to succeed to rise
is higher.

Speaker 1 (02:07:18):
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?
They say, I have no idea, and I'm like, man,
that's tough, and you almost think how bad are things

(02:07:42):
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 going walking
back what I said a little bit, because I was
just trying to make a point. But what I think
of as bad poverty, like let's say West Baltimore or

(02:08:03):
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 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

(02:08:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:08:38):
Yeah, Like people focus on in major cities in the
United States, like homelessness somehow that's a sign of a
fallen empire, right, But you know that's a problem. There's
definitely it reveals some mismanagement of cities.

Speaker 1 (02:08:54):
And 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 that the conservative media is saying, like,
look at Biden's America as if Biden created homeless people.
And it's just disappointing because once again you're seeing the

(02:09:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:09:30):
Do you think January sixth can happen again? No? Think
so all the lessons were learned.

Speaker 1 (02:09:37):
Yeah for sure. I mean people got really screwed over.

Speaker 2 (02:09:41):
I mean, don't you have a sense that there's a
greater and greater growing questioning of the electoral process and
all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:09:50):
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 to collapse
of the basic structure of the country. Even the most
politically divided don't want to see seven to eleven go away.

(02:10:12):
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 six
ers and they actually took control of the government. Yeah,
you know, And so think about even if the MAGA
crowd took over the Capitol building, it's just a building.

(02:10:32):
I don't know. I just think that Americans when they
talk about civil war stuff, it's just so we're so
far from that. Even if the rhetoric is as divided
as it was in twenty twenty, it won't happen again.

Speaker 2 (02:10:45):
For it to really happen, it has to be there
has to be a level of desperation.

Speaker 1 (02:10:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:10:59):
Who do you think wins Trump or Biden in the
Civil War? Well, no, the guns in a game of
Mario Kart in the election twenty twenty four.

Speaker 1 (02:11:10):
Oh, man, I have no idea. Man, I don't even
know if I'm going to vote.

Speaker 2 (02:11:13):
It's weird that this is our choice.

Speaker 1 (02:11:15):
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 that I would
for the president.

Speaker 2 (02:11:24):
So local politics, to you is where it is.

Speaker 1 (02:11:27):
Oh, I mean, you can your vote actually matter. Let's
say you have a community of five hundred people when
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 a MPM.
You get to choose, and you can influence one hundred
people to choose and boom, this is your community. You
can't influence the result of an election.

Speaker 2 (02:11:47):
Still, that to those at the presidential level, it sets
the tone of the country. And so Trump running again
and Biden running again, it just feels like there's going
to be a lot of questioning of election results.

Speaker 1 (02:12:03):
I just can't believe those are our guys. Yeah, I mean,
what is that's really our guys? Like, that's where we're at,
all these smart people we have in this country, the
great history.

Speaker 2 (02:12:13):
We got Joker Gang versus gom Gang. Where'd you find
Joker Gang?

Speaker 1 (02:12:20):
Well? Is he illegit juggler or is he just no no, no no.
Joker Gang is like a Miami Cuban guy. Oh is
Joker three h five raws Chico alive. So me and
I have 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,

(02:12:40):
and so I didn't follow him for a while, 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 cloud did its thing, and there
I was face to face with the man.

Speaker 2 (02:12:53):
There was a controversy a year ago where a woman
came forward and said that he will pushing with her.
You were expected to know you got the consent, but
you were pushy about it. Looking back, Can you tell
the story of that, What are the lessons you learned
from it?

Speaker 1 (02:13:08):
Yeah? I mean I've yet to speak on this for
a lot of reasons, mostly because it's just a 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 thirty, twenty twenty two, and that
was the release date of the HBO project. Like I

(02:13:29):
told you, we didn't know when the movie was going
to come out. We weren't told that it was going
to come out on that date until early November, and
so I was like, oh my god, here we go.
We had a movie coming out HBO had I didn't
even know it was going to be them. So every
day for those fifty days to where I received word
and to the movie announcement or to the movie release

(02:13:51):
was like I was like a kid waiting for Christmas morning,
you know what I mean. 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 when it became
two days, like, I was so excited and so like

(02:14:14):
honestly anxiety riddled because it was such a massive platform
that I went out to the desert by myself, out
in the Mohave, got a hotel and just kind of
sat there. And then movie release day comes. I was
supposed to come out at eight pm Pacific Standard time.
I remember it was like twelve hours left, ten hours left,
and then eight minutes before the movie at seven fifty

(02:14:36):
two or I guess it was sent at ten to
fifty two 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. And I was confused,

(02:14:58):
not only because of the time, 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.
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

(02:15:20):
up by the press pretty quickly.

Speaker 2 (02:15:21):
So what did you feel like when you got that text?

Speaker 1 (02:15:24):
Well, it's tough because, on one hand, I'm not opposed
to restitution being part of a private accountability process for
real abuse, you know, like if you've hurt someone to
an extent that it took them out of work or
something like, I think they're entitled to some money. But unfortunately,
as I later learned, this person had legal counsel, and

(02:15:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:15:58):
Yeah, how did you meet this person? Well?

Speaker 1 (02:16:01):
I met them when I was twenty two, and like
I told you, I was living in an RV making
this show called All Gas Snow Breaks, and I would
travel between cities like every other day, and so I
would basically pick a new city, and I got in
this 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, I'd post my location,

(02:16:24):
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,
had a consensual encounter that they reached out to me

(02:16:44):
about two weeks after saying hey, I don't want you
to take this 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, so I
gave in. And it was that language made me feel horrible,

(02:17:05):
mainly because if this person had told me, hey, I
don't want to hook up, I would have said, yeah,
of course not. Well, I don't want to hook up
with someone who doesn't want to hook up with me.
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

(02:17:26):
don't think that I handled that the right way.

Speaker 2 (02:17:29):
Well, thank you for taking accountability. But just to clarify,
you got consent.

Speaker 1 (02:17:36):
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 move

(02:17:57):
too fast for them given their situation. So I told her,
I said, hey, if you want to reach out, if
you want to 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,
I was at Sturgis Bike Week and 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,

(02:18:18):
you're getting canceled right now. 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
and it said I remember this specifically because I just
couldn't believe it. It said, the ugly loser who hosts All
Gas No Breaks is a piece of shit. He knowingly

(02:18:41):
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. They text,
They emailed every production company that I was working with,
DMed hundreds, if not thousands of people just saying that,

(02:19:01):
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 had seen
intimately for the past year and being like, hey, are
we on good terms? Is everything okay? And then I
figured out that the person was coming from Florida and
I knew who it was, and so thankfully I reached

(02:19:21):
out to the original person who I had the communication
with and 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 apologized again.
I was like, listen, I feel bad that you feel
this way. I want to do anything that I can
to help you again. I apologize and she said, apology accepted.

(02:19:42):
I'm sorry. My friend asked if I could, 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, you know. I said, okay,
I'm here for you. Let me know and she said,
apologies enough, thank you for taking the time to speak
with me. And that was two years prior to this

(02:20:03):
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, and so the PR firm was like, we
got this, we'll handle this for you. And that was,

(02:20:25):
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 be in my favor,
but yeah, it was just a picture of me on
NBC that said Andrew Callahan devastated by allegations. That was
their plan. I guess to show that I was remorseful
or something.

Speaker 2 (02:20:44):
You know, how much of this do you think lawyers
kind of pushing this when money and fame are involved.

Speaker 1 (02:20:54):
Well, I wish I could say the lawyer, but I
just can't that was involved in this. 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

(02:21:15):
and two to never be in that position again?

Speaker 2 (02:21:18):
Well? Again, thank you forward taking accountability.

Speaker 1 (02:21:21):
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. My friends at

(02:21:43):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:22:06):
Again, thank you for taking accountability. But I just hate
how many callers there are out there, Like people hit
low points. Is when when you should help, When you
should stand with them if you know their character.

Speaker 1 (02:22:25):
Yeah, And it was just it was hard to separate,
like 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

(02:22:45):
the anti cancel culture mouthpiece. I don't have the mental
strength to fight this, especially because I was envisioning the
HBO dropped to be this like the world opens up
to me moment, and it was just the reverse. But
the it wasn't so much the media reporting on it
that hurt me. It was just little stuff like a

(02:23:05):
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? Thankfully, I like somehow two weeks after, I

(02:23:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:23:45):
So what were the what was the lowest point?

Speaker 1 (02:23:48):
Well, right after this happened, I entered like recovery programs,
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

(02:24:10):
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. And for one
I just figured, you know, their friends canceled. You know,
her son is a disgrace. My family's gonna think they
raised me wrong. My friends, I'm a social paria. Now

(02:24:33):
I'm a burden. I'm better off dead. And the hard
part was, you know, I would read stories and books
written by parents who lost their kids to suicide, and
they reported feeling a lot of anger after the suicide.
So I tried to think of, what's the way I
can do it to get the least amount of anger

(02:24:55):
on behalf of the people who would grieve because the 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,
you know. I remember hating the people who loved me
because I knew they would grieve and that made me mad.

(02:25:16):
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 because I don'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

(02:25:37):
think that, Like when I was going through that, if
you walk by me in the street, I'll look like
a normal guy. 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, you know,
like It's crazy that so many people are suffering in
like complete silence and you can't they don't wear it

(02:26:00):
on them.

Speaker 2 (02:26:02):
You know, many of the people you talk to are
probably that many people you've interviewed before all this and
after are probably going through some shit.

Speaker 1 (02:26:11):
And I also thought, I 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 life span of
your parents by fifteen years. So I looked at it

(02:26:34):
like I was taking time away from them.

Speaker 2 (02:26:38):
Well, thank you for the most part. Leaning towards accountability,
it's the right path to take. What advice would you
give to young men that look up to you on
how they can be good men, especially in regard to women.

Speaker 1 (02:26:53):
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

(02:27:15):
it's definitely there, 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 in
the backstory of what a new partner has gone through

(02:27:36):
in that world of intimacy. Whatever they're comfortable you know
to share obviously, but you know, I would advise against
one night stands. 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

(02:27:56):
conversation is a vibe killer, you probably shouldn't be in
that situation in the especially now how hyper sexualized things
are and how common that type of violence is. 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 to make you uncomfortable, Let me
know how it can be the best partner to you.
And I'm sure that college age people are not having

(02:28:16):
those conversations, but I'm sure that it would go a
long way.

Speaker 2 (02:28:21):
So, especially when you're young, college aged, you don't have
enough experience to be able to read a person without
having that conversation, because a lot of times you can
see the trauma without explicitly talking about it. Yeah, that
takes experience and knowledge and seeing in the world when
you're young and you don't know, you really don't know shit.
Making things a bit more explicit is probably better.

Speaker 1 (02:28:41):
Yeah. And also, like as men were trained to believe
that it's our duty to be the initiatory party in
any type of like 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,
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,

(02:29:04):
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. 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 across a boundary.
But people have histories that you might not understand. And

(02:29:27):
for me, as someone who 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 hurt people
hurt people, and that someone with a traumatic background isn't
going to have sympathy for applying that traumatic pain to

(02:29:49):
someone else, even if that person isn't the cause of
of what put them in that spot.

Speaker 2 (02:29:53):
If you can go back to Channel five, can you
tell the origin story.

Speaker 1 (02:29:56):
That, Yeah, I mean Channel five. We during the gas
snow breaks days, we used to tell people that we
were called Channel five if we wanted them to stop
antagonizing us while we were filming, because every town has
a Channel five. 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 hell obnoxious, we would
just say, oh, we're Channel five, and they would be like, oh,

(02:30:16):
my grandma's going to see that, and they would leave
us alone. So Channel five was a diversion tactic during
all gas snow breaks. 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 whatever they yell about in Miami Beach,
like titties or whatever. And we're like, bro, this is
Channel five. Be careful what you say. And he was

(02:30:36):
like for real, and he just walked off. And I
said to my friend at the time, I was like,
that's not a pretty good right, Channel five, And he goes,
that does sound pretty good. He's like, that's got to
be trademark. Though, no, it's not trademark. It's crazy, right,
there's a Channel five in every city Channel five KTLA,
Channel five Seattle como news dude, Channel five itself. We

(02:30:59):
own it because because no one's thought of something that simple,
because you'd think you'd have to specify, We own Channel
five dot Com Channel five dude. It's awesome.

Speaker 2 (02:31:12):
So it was the same kind of spirit as u
as the previous thing. Yeah, what was the first one
you did under the Channel.

Speaker 1 (02:31:19):
Five flag Miami Beach spring break?

Speaker 2 (02:31:22):
I think I've seen that and it's gonna be a callback.
I think I think there. I think somebody mentioning eating
as there too.

Speaker 1 (02:31:31):
That would be the place. I believe that there's only
about five places in the US where people yell about
eating ass all the time. Bourbon Street, South Beach, Miami,
Sixth Street in Austin, Broadway in Nashville. And I'm just
gonna go ahead and say Times Square. You might not
think it, but Square really, Yeah, they yell about ass.

Speaker 2 (02:31:48):
There Times Square.

Speaker 1 (02:31:51):
I would say Bill Street in Memphis, but it's not
it's not good.

Speaker 2 (02:31:55):
Oh yeah, I.

Speaker 1 (02:31:56):
Mean Bill Street is like that at the median age
is too high on Bill's read for anyone to yell
about ass.

Speaker 2 (02:32:03):
Oh, this is a fascinating portrait of America through that
specific lens.

Speaker 1 (02:32:07):
So Miami Beach.

Speaker 2 (02:32:09):
And then how would you describe your style of interviewing,
just now that you've collected so many if you if
you had a style, how would you describe it?

Speaker 1 (02:32:20):
I guess before especially it used to be like deadpan.
Now I would describe it it's more directed but still
relatively affable, agreeable dead pan interview style.

Speaker 2 (02:32:31):
Yeah, there's a like in the face of absurdity, You're
just like there with a microphone. There's a there's a
comic aspect to it, and that's intentional.

Speaker 1 (02:32:42):
Yeah. I used to look at the camera like Jim
from the office back in the day. I don't do
that anymore.

Speaker 2 (02:32:48):
What about the editing, Like, how do you think about
the editing?

Speaker 1 (02:32:52):
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 Vick Berger, but we took
it to real life crash zooms 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

(02:33:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:33:27):
Know, Yeah, sure, what's the crash zoom?

Speaker 1 (02:33:31):
By the way, a crash zoom is when the like
it's artificial zoom that you might add in an Adobe
premiere where the camera zooms in on someone's.

Speaker 2 (02:33:38):
Face where the resolution is not there.

Speaker 1 (02:33:41):
The resolution is not there unless you have a like
a black magic cinema camera, which you don't.

Speaker 2 (02:33:45):
Don't.

Speaker 1 (02:33:46):
We don't use those.

Speaker 2 (02:33:46):
The file size to file that's still the constraint. Yeah, yeah,
And you also do a voiceover storytelling.

Speaker 1 (02:33:54):
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 context in those videos about the history of
San Francisco, the housing crisis, nimbiism, random zoning, stuff that
sounds boring but has a major role in the current
situation on the streets there as to why the tenderloin

(02:34:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:34:33):
What's your goal with some of these videos, like the
Philadelphia Streets Is it to reveal the full spectrum of humanity?
Or is it also to tell a story that's almost political?

Speaker 1 (02:34:42):
Enough? States 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,
so not just oh my god, I'm becoming aware of

(02:35:02):
how horrible this is, but what can you actually do
to help? And as you could 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.
But so much of the YouTube world is oversaturated by
just like endless videos of people suffering, and the comments

(02:35:24):
are always like, wow, so horrible, But what does that
really do for somebody? You know?

Speaker 2 (02:35:29):
Uh, you've interviewed many rappers, Yes, edu keep me, there's
a lot to it. Yeah, can you explain this drill
rap situation?

Speaker 1 (02:35:39):
What is drill evolving situation? Drill began in twenty ten.
Some people say it was Chief Keef in Chicago. I
think it was King Louis in Chicago. But I think
all of it was very influenced by Walk a Flock
of Flame, who dropped an album called Flock of Velly
in twenty ten that was like hyper violent, adrenaline boosting
rap music may by people who are actually in the streets.

(02:36:02):
So in the nineties you had, like if you had
fifty 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

(02:36:23):
a it's pretty horrifying, it sounds great, But it started
in Chicago, then it's 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 rapper every ten square miles.

Speaker 2 (02:36:41):
So these are as opposed to pretending to be a
gangster and killing people. You get some credibility by actually
doing it.

Speaker 1 (02:36:51):
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 can 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,

(02:37:11):
but there's there's white drill rappers.

Speaker 2 (02:37:14):
Slim Jesus. You made a video on O Block? Yeah,
what is Old Block? The place the culture of the
people you.

Speaker 1 (02:37:22):
O Block is a housing project in South Chicago in
the Englewood area where Michelle Obama grew up. It's also
where Chief Keith 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.
It's also the first place where you had that intersection

(02:37:43):
of drill music and true crime because Oblock has a
lot of rappers, and then nearby is an area called
Saint Lawrence Akay Tucaville, which has a lot of rappers
as well, and so these two rival drill gangs basically
have you know, a lot of history, and it connects
to music at large.

Speaker 2 (02:38:04):
So you've interviewed people, there was there any concern for
your safety?

Speaker 1 (02:38:10):
No, I mean I think that O Block has calmed
down a lot for want of as 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 because Little Dirk's avoiding a reco charge could
be for a variety of reasons. I know you don't
know exactly what that means, but Little Dirk is from

(02:38:35):
affiliated with Oblock, and a lot of people have been
murdered in retribution for killings that Little Dirk may or
may not have influenced the ordering of.

Speaker 2 (02:38:45):
But anyways, and Little Dirk documented the killings in the
now via rap music.

Speaker 1 (02:38:50):
Probably Okay, I know you don't know about Drill, and
but Little Dirk was associated with a rapper him King Von,
and King Von perhaps paid for the assassin of a
rapper named FBG Duck who got killed in Chicago's Gold
Coast neighborhood. It's possible the old Block six or Drill
associated not rappers but just shooters, and they, perhaps operating

(02:39:12):
on King Von's behalf, went and killed FBG Duck. King
Von was Little Dirk's artists. King Vaughn'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 Oblock
right now, and when I filmed the video is trying
to go through a major image rehab. If you go

(02:39:32):
on any Instagram of anyone in Oblock, 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,
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 twenty eleven when

(02:39:54):
Chief Keith was coming up, and so he basically ensured
my safe protection. But he didn't even need to. Very friendly,
and they know exactly what's up with YouTube stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:40:03):
I like, how twenty eleven is the old days, like
the ancient Oh yeah, the found the Founding Fathers.

Speaker 1 (02:40:09):
I was in eighth grade.

Speaker 2 (02:40:14):
Oh man, time flies when you're having fun.

Speaker 1 (02:40:18):
It sure does.

Speaker 2 (02:40:18):
A little Dirk, where's a little Dirk now? Atlanta so
you left Chicago not safe?

Speaker 1 (02:40:25):
Yeah, I mean every rapper has to leave their hometown.
That's what I did.

Speaker 2 (02:40:28):
It's a journey, Seattle.

Speaker 1 (02:40:32):
What have taken me out? Bro?

Speaker 2 (02:40:34):
How's your I mean you do interview a lot of people.
I mean that's like a top comment, but it speaks
to the reality of the fact that you always find
somebody rapping or you. Uh. Yeah, you create the space
for people to wrap. What's that about.

Speaker 1 (02:40:47):
I don't know, but they're usually really good, you think
so I appreciate it. Well the 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.

Speaker 2 (02:41:00):
Happened to a rapper whisper.

Speaker 1 (02:41:02):
I think there's something happening on a deeper, cosmic, spiritual
level that lets the mind of rappers know that, like
they have a safe place in front of our camera crew.

Speaker 2 (02:41:11):
You have an interview with Krip Mack.

Speaker 1 (02:41:13):
I do he's a jial right now?

Speaker 2 (02:41:16):
Oh? He is?

Speaker 1 (02:41:17):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:41:17):
Is that a hashtag? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (02:41:19):
For sure? What?

Speaker 2 (02:41:21):
Uh that's an intense interview. People should go watch it.
People should go watch your all your interviews, but that
one is pretty intense.

Speaker 1 (02:41:27):
Thanks.

Speaker 2 (02:41:29):
I was a little afraid for your life. Oh.

Speaker 1 (02:41:31):
Krit Mak is the safest guy in the world. Is
a sweetheart? Oh definitely, dude. Yeah, I feel like more
safe around krit Mak than I'm doing with any given pedestrian.

Speaker 2 (02:41:40):
Yeah. He was loud and flavorful. Yeah, I should say so.
Who see what's his story?

Speaker 1 (02:41:47):
Well, his name's Trevor. He grew up in Ontario, California
and the Inland Empire. Moved to Texas with his mom
after his dad left. His mom started started dating a
cop from Houston named mister Gary. His mom found mister
Gary getting you know, anally penetrated by a coworker, and
so she booked krit Maka one way Greyhound ticket to

(02:42:10):
LA where he joined the crips.

Speaker 2 (02:42:13):
That's a good story, you know.

Speaker 1 (02:42:20):
It's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 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 in
purpose in a street gang, which in La is like
a rule of law in most of the city.

Speaker 2 (02:42:38):
We were I forget what contexts earlier talking about martial
arts and fighting, and he's got to work on his
punching for him.

Speaker 1 (02:42:44):
Yeah, I think so. He gets into a lot of
fights in jail, thoughing from what I've heard, he wins
like he does about half of them. All right, what
do you go to jail for now? Firearm possession was
a probation violation. Oh it's too bad.

Speaker 2 (02:42:58):
All right? What so, Philly, you went to the border
occupy Seattle protests? You went to Ukraine? Yeah? What are
some interesting things that stand out to you form memory?
Just as I asked the question, some interesting?

Speaker 1 (02:43:17):
I mean I was in jail at the border for
a while. That was horrible.

Speaker 2 (02:43:20):
What was that like? Was that your first time?

Speaker 1 (02:43:22):
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 US through
an official bordermentary, which I learned the hard way because
I got arrested by a border patrol and held as
a detainee at a migrant center for a few days.

Speaker 2 (02:43:42):
What was the that like?

Speaker 1 (02:43:44):
Horrible? Which aspect? I mean, well, for what?

Speaker 2 (02:43:48):
Like?

Speaker 1 (02:43:48):
I don't know. It was just to be in a
place like that. And I probably sound like such a
whimp right now because I know someone's watching this who's
done some hard time. But we thought we were gonna
do at least six months in jail because the guards
freaked us out and we're like, you're being charge of
a federal crime. You know what you boys did is serious.
We're waiting on word from San Antonio about whether or
not we're going to extradite you. So we're just sitting

(02:44:11):
in these cells alone, most of the time, in solitary
with no pillows, just to smoke pillows, no pillows, no
matt and that then just a space blanket, and I
was sleeping on my shoes, stinking up the place. It
was no good. Uh.

Speaker 2 (02:44:24):
You mentioned the UFO convention. Yeah, what have you learned
from those guys?

Speaker 1 (02:44:30):
The youupologists? 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?

Speaker 2 (02:44:42):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (02:44:43):
When so?

Speaker 2 (02:44:44):
When exact dates?

Speaker 1 (02:44:46):
I do.

Speaker 2 (02:44:48):
I think there's alien civilizations everywhere. I talked to a
lot of people that have doubts about it. I just
think I even suspect there's an intelligent alien civilization in
our galaxy, and I just can't imagine them not having
visited us. So I lean on that what that actually
looks like, I don't know the stuff we're seeing in

(02:45:12):
terms of UFO sightings. I think that's much more likely,
to the degree it's real, it's much more likely government projects,
so military, Lockheed Martin this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:45:24):
So you think that they have knowledge of it.

Speaker 2 (02:45:27):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:45:28):
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. Who's to say that
they're not able to shrink down to microscopic size but
the same neural capacity.

Speaker 2 (02:45:45):
Yeah, or just have a very difficult to perceive form.

Speaker 1 (02:45:49):
But I mean that they would go small, not big.

Speaker 2 (02:45:51):
No, I think that would take a humanoid like form.
Just to be able to communicate with humans. I think
the big challenge with aliens is to be able to
find a common language. So if you come to another
planet and you suspect that there's some kind of complexity
going on, but it looks nothing like humans, you have
to find a common language, and I think aliens would
try to take physical form that's similar dumb humans would

(02:46:15):
understand language.

Speaker 1 (02:46:16):
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 one hundred and fifty languages in the US with
less than a thousand speakers, and I want to like
help spearhead efforts to preserve some of these, Like, for example,
Hawaiian Sign Language, fifteen of US people left, holy shit,
because when Hawaii got annexed, the ASL community tried to

(02:46:40):
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, washed out with soap and stuff if they
so much as did the Hawaiian hand signs. Also the
Gulla Geechee language and the South Carolina Sea Islands, Hilton
Head Islands and stuff that's like it's almost a creole

(02:47:02):
language that's been in the US 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.

Speaker 2 (02:47:14):
Actually, I'm interviewing somebody tomorrow who is an expert in
human language. He's from MIT, studying the syntax of a
lot of languages, including in the Amazon Jungle, the peoples
that live in the Amazon Jungle region. Yeah, it's fascinating.
Human language is fascinating, and also the barriers that creates,
and also how the games are played to what you're

(02:47:36):
speaking by governments. This is part of the story of
Russia and Ukraine is a battle over language. The Ukrainian
language is a symbol of independence, which is why they
they are trying to make it the primary language of
the nation. And so sometimes the language represents the culture

(02:47:59):
and the people. It's intricately tied to the culture of
the people.

Speaker 1 (02:48:04):
I've been trying to learn Navo, which which language is
seen now Spanish and English. Spanish.

Speaker 2 (02:48:11):
Well, see I don't know Spanish that well, so that
passes me. Yeah, you're fluent basically, Oh it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (02:48:21):
Oh lah, that was good. That was real cancuon spring Break.

Speaker 2 (02:48:25):
Well, I actually speak fluent Spanish. Accorin to Spotify because
there's every episode is translated over dubbed by AI in Spanish.

Speaker 1 (02:48:34):
Yeah, there's a very Spanish robot.

Speaker 2 (02:48:37):
Spanish robot. It's really it's I sound like incredibly intelligent
and intellectual and Spanish exactly.

Speaker 1 (02:48:45):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (02:48:48):
From everything you've done, all the people you've seen, do
you think most people are good underneath it all?

Speaker 1 (02:48:56):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:48:59):
So the ones that do all the extreme shit.

Speaker 1 (02:49:00):
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. 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

(02:49:22):
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. 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

(02:49:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:49:54):
They have the capacity, though, to do good.

Speaker 1 (02:49:57):
I think human beings are inherently selfish as well, but
I don't think that you selfish is inherently bad. I
think humans are primarily motivated by self interest, but generally
have positive intentions.

Speaker 2 (02:50:12):
I do hope more humans rise to the occasion and
have courage, courage of their convictions, courage to have integrity.
But yeah, I think that most people are good and
they want to do good, and they have the capacity
to do a lot of good. That's why I have
hope for this whole thing we got going on. How

(02:50:34):
do you heal the misunderstandings between people? You think listening
it's the only option. We have no forced education, no
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

(02:50:55):
just keep your ears and your heart open to people
that you don't know, and your life will change. Keep
your heart open.

Speaker 1 (02:51:01):
A lot of people are scared to listen.

Speaker 2 (02:51:04):
Well, Andrew, I'm a big fan, and thank you for
being one of the best listeners in the world hey man,
and showing the full spectrum of humanity to us so
we can listen as well and learn and just thank
you for doing everything you're doing.

Speaker 1 (02:51:20):
Keep me man, Thanks so much for having me on.
You're a great man.

Speaker 2 (02:51:23):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:51:23):
I appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (02:51:25):
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Calcan. To
support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you some words from Hunter S.
Thompson The Edge. There is no honest way to explain
it because the only people who really know where it
is are the ones who have gone over. Thank you

(02:51:47):
for listening and hope to see you next time.