#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones

0:00:00 The following is a conversation with Andrew Kalligan, host of Channel 5 on YouTube, where
0:00:05 he does gospel style interviews with fascinating humans at the edges of society.
0:00:10 The so-called vagrants, vagabonds, runaways, outlaws, from QAnon adherents to fishheads,
0:00:17 to obloc residents, and much more.
0:00:20 He created the documentary that I highly recommend called This Place Rules on the undercurrents
0:00:27 that led to the January 6th Capital Riots.
0:00:32 And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
0:00:35 Check them out in the description, it’s the best way to support this podcast.
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0:00:44 want to figure out what’s going on in their mind, Element for hydration, Masterclass for
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0:01:36 There’s an incredible commercial.
0:01:38 I think it’s probably fake from a long time ago.
0:01:42 It’s either for Walmart or Kmart, I don’t remember.
0:01:45 And we talk about Walmart in this episode, which kind of warms my heart if I’m being
0:01:50 honest.
0:01:51 Actually, I do think it’s Kmart and the commercial is, well, they talk about, “I just shipped
0:01:57 my pants at the risk of explaining humor.”
0:02:01 The commercial involves the full on absurdity of various kinds of people talking about shipping
0:02:08 their pants and shipping the bed, all that kind of stuff.
0:02:13 Anyway, it’s hilarious and I wish people would do edgier stuff like that more often, where
0:02:17 the commercial itself is a little piece of artistic absurdity.
0:02:21 Anyway, go to ShipStation.com/Lex and use code “Lex” to sign up for your free 60-day
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0:02:31 This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P. Help.
0:02:35 They figure out what you need to match it with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
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0:02:46 on taking your mental health seriously.
0:02:49 I’m a big fan of conversation, obviously, for exploring the human mind, exploring the
0:02:53 dark and the light that looks in the shadows and in the corners of the human psyche, getting
0:03:00 conversation, rigorous conversation, deliberate conversation, careful conversation, empathic
0:03:07 conversation is a really good way to shine the light on the darkness and discover the
0:03:15 darkness behind the light, if that’s fair to say.
0:03:17 I had a great conversation yesterday with Ben, a favorite barbecue buddy of mine.
0:03:24 He runs J-N-L barbecue that I highly recommend, you guys should check out.
0:03:29 We talked about life, freedom, country, talked about a lot of things, about love, about love
0:03:36 for humans, about love for the art of what you do, and man loves barbecue.
0:03:41 He truly loves cooking and the artistry, if I can use that word, kind of like what Giro
0:03:48 dreams of sushi will ban dreams of barbecue.
0:03:51 Anyway, he is not a licensed therapist, he’s not even a licensed barbecue creator because
0:03:58 you don’t get a license to that kind of thing.
0:04:01 His father, grandfather, he’s just been in the family, he’s been a Texan for I don’t
0:04:05 know how many centuries, but Texan through and through, barbecue guy through and through,
0:04:11 but if you want that kind of depth of conversation, but with a little bit more rigor and some
0:04:16 expertise and professionalism and discreteness, then you should try BetterHelp.
0:04:23 Check them out at betterhelp.com/legs and save in your first month at betterhelp.com/legs.
0:04:29 This episode is also brought to you by Element.
0:04:32 It’s an electrolyte drink, delicious, it helps you get your sodium, potassium and magnesium
0:04:38 in the right kinds of proportions.
0:04:40 For me, if I had to get rid of everything I consume, the last things that would remain
0:04:46 that would make me still feel good, like say if I’m fasting for many days, which is the
0:04:51 thing I kind of want to do like fast for like seven days or more.
0:04:56 I think it’s a beautiful experience, but if you do that, you still need water and electrolytes
0:05:02 because if you have those, then you can be happy, your body can be happy, you can still
0:05:06 feel good, and it’s just also a fun way to consume water for me, and it’s just a fun,
0:05:15 delicious way to consume water for me.
0:05:17 I’m traveling to the Amazon jungle in Maine, so I get to think about all the things I’ll
0:05:21 consume there, and I’ll definitely miss Element.
0:05:25 The things you miss, but also the thing that empowers you when you travel to those kinds
0:05:30 of places, is the little habits, the little comforts of home, and Element is that for
0:05:36 me.
0:05:37 I’m looking forward to a long run today.
0:05:40 I don’t know how many miles I’ll do, maybe 10, 12, maybe 15.
0:05:45 Going to drink Element before, and I’m going to drink Element after, before so I feel good
0:05:49 on the run, after so I recover well from the run.
0:05:52 It’s a big part of feeling good for me, given all the diet, given all the craziness that
0:05:56 I do.
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0:06:02 This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 180 classes from
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0:06:12 Phil Ivey, I’m poker, Aaron Franklin, I’m barbecue and brisket, Carl Santana on guitar,
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0:06:22 boy, would I love to talk to Martin Scorsese.
0:06:25 Just from his Masterclass, you could understand the depth of genius there.
0:06:30 There’s some directors that I would just love to talk to for two, three, four, five hours.
0:06:37 Darren Aronofsky, then I got to meet recently, boy, what a beautiful mind.
0:06:43 I love great filmmaking, and I love artists that enable that, whether that’s cinematography,
0:06:49 directors, actors, all of that, writers, the paint brushes and the colors behind the art.
0:06:56 I love it all, and so Masterclass is a good place to give the early inklings of what it
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0:07:19 This episode is also brought to you by AG1, and all in one daily drink to support better
0:07:25 health and peak performance, I just drink it, and that’s the reason I feel good.
0:07:29 I’m going to do a long run later today, and I’m going to drink shortly after that, mostly
0:07:35 because it makes me super happy.
0:07:37 I’m going to make an AG1 in the container that comes with it when they ship it.
0:07:42 I’m going to put cold water in there, mix it all up, and put it in the freezer for about
0:07:48 like 30 minutes.
0:07:49 It gets a little slushy, it gets some texture to it after a long run in the Texas heat.
0:07:56 It’s just so refreshing to get that AG1, and I think about life, and I’m listening to some
0:08:01 intense audiobook, and it’s just the zen place where I get to reflect on the battles
0:08:07 that I fought inside my mind on that long run.
0:08:11 AG1 is just the delicious orchestra that plays while I reflect on the battle fought.
0:08:19 Friends, they will give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex.
0:08:28 This is the Lex Freeman Podcast to support it.
0:08:31 Please check out our sponsors in the description, and now dear friends, here’s Andrew Kaligan.
0:08:37 I tried to color match you though, got the black and white going.
0:08:57 I went to Walmart before this and got the Wrangler shirt with the Texas Longhorns tee.
0:09:01 Is that where you shop, Walmart?
0:09:02 Generally, yeah.
0:09:03 I’m a target man myself.
0:09:05 There’s no way you get those suits from Target.
0:09:06 You see, you’re saying it’s a nice way to compliment a suit.
0:09:08 I think you go men’s warehouse, if not further.
0:09:11 I think you would be wrong.
0:09:13 You go further.
0:09:14 No, the other direction.
0:09:15 You got that from Target?
0:09:16 Not Target.
0:09:17 I was joking about Target.
0:09:18 I like Walmart better.
0:09:19 It just felt like a funny thing to say.
0:09:20 No, it was funny.
0:09:21 The most expensive thing I own is this watch, and it was given to me as a gift.
0:09:25 Yeah.
0:09:26 When I was on tour, I had these $2,700 Cartier glasses that I got for a lot of money, $2,700.
0:09:34 Like sunglasses?
0:09:35 Yeah.
0:09:36 But they’re really embarrassing.
0:09:37 But I was on tour, so I just felt like I could do anything as far as fashion choices.
0:09:41 But looking back at pictures from myself in that era, I’m like, “God.”
0:09:44 So that was the symbol of the fame got to your head.
0:09:47 I think so, yeah.
0:09:48 I think fame getting to your head.
0:09:49 If you spend more than a hundred bucks on sunglasses, you’ve officially gone off the
0:09:53 deep end.
0:09:54 You’ve crossed the line.
0:09:55 Totally.
0:09:56 And that’s where you go back to Walmart to humble yourself.
0:09:57 I really love Walmart.
0:09:58 In fact, I moved to Austin because I was a Walmart and a lady said that I look handsome
0:10:04 in a suit.
0:10:06 And I was like, “That’s it.
0:10:07 I love this place.”
0:10:08 She just said it for no reason whatsoever.
0:10:09 This older lady just looked at me and with this genuine sweetness just said, “Oh, you
0:10:15 look handsome.”
0:10:16 She’s not wrong, man.
0:10:18 Thank you.
0:10:19 That’s part of your whole swag, though.
0:10:20 Yeah.
0:10:21 The suit thing.
0:10:22 Yeah.
0:10:23 Anyway, what was the first, if you remember, first recorded interview you did?
0:10:29 Well, like my first grade teacher, Mrs. Claudia, yeah.
0:10:33 This is back in the day, like I was telling you we just asked her about her life in Columbia
0:10:37 and stuff like that, but I didn’t really get into actual journalism until my ninth grade
0:10:42 year.
0:10:43 I had no idea I hadn’t interested in it.
0:10:44 Before then, I wanted to be a rapper.
0:10:45 It’s all about hip hop and meditation and picking psilocybin mushrooms and public parks and
0:10:51 stuff like that.
0:10:52 That’s what I was into.
0:10:53 That’s a lot.
0:10:54 Psilocybin, meditation, rap, public parks.
0:10:56 Yeah.
0:10:57 I was making conscious rap music.
0:10:58 I was to the point where I had four dream catchers hanging above my bed, Alex Gray painting
0:11:03 on the wall, tapestry on the ceiling, just scribbling rhymes down all the time.
0:11:09 So you said somewhere that you sucked at school.
0:11:12 Okay.
0:11:13 Well, let me, let’s step back a little bit.
0:11:14 So I had this amazing journalism course in ninth grade.
0:11:17 I went to an alternative high school and the teacher was named Calvin Shaw and he was
0:11:21 just like, I ended up taking his class all four years and he used to let me actually
0:11:25 leave school like, I didn’t like going to school, so he’d let me basically go around
0:11:31 Seattle and do different interviews with people as long as I could come back by the end of
0:11:35 the day and write a story for his class and he’d mark me as present.
0:11:39 So the first article that I wrote was about the silk road and the deep web because, you
0:11:45 know, as a ninth grader, when I discovered the hidden wiki, I thought that I was like
0:11:50 really tapping into like the most secret society elite level black market in the world.
0:11:55 And so if you remember, they had that hidden wiki link that was like hire a hit man, you
0:11:58 know.
0:11:59 And so I messaged them and I was like, all right, you know, I want to get someone killed
0:12:02 at my school.
0:12:03 Like how much is it going to cost me?
0:12:05 And I published my interview with the hidden wiki hit man.
0:12:07 It was probably a fed or something, but who knows.
0:12:10 And that my first article was called like inside the deep web, a conversation with a hit man.
0:12:15 That’s nice.
0:12:16 Yeah.
0:12:17 I mean, you’re fearless even then.
0:12:18 I mean, I was hiding behind a tour browser.
0:12:21 So there’s not much fear to be had.
0:12:22 Oh, so it was anonymous.
0:12:23 It was anonymous, but I did publish it under my name.
0:12:26 So you’re right.
0:12:27 It could have been in danger.
0:12:29 I also saw that you said you took too many shrooms when you were young and that led you
0:12:33 to have hallucinogen persisting perception disorder HPPD.
0:12:38 Can you explain what this is?
0:12:41 Well, that condition is classified by persistent visual snow, floaters, morphing objects.
0:12:48 Like I see them right now.
0:12:49 I see them all the time.
0:12:50 The snow is in the room.
0:12:51 The snow is definitely in the room.
0:12:53 It’s all over you.
0:12:54 And basically, it wasn’t that I took too many shrooms.
0:12:58 I think that it was, I took about an eighth of senescence mushrooms, which are the ones
0:13:05 that come from the earth instead of cow shit.
0:13:07 And I took an eighth of those at my friend Toby’s house, which is a normal amount, but
0:13:12 I was in eighth grade.
0:13:13 So I woke up the next morning with these extreme visual distortions and I thought that it would
0:13:19 go away.
0:13:20 I tried to make it go away, but there was really no cure for HPPD.
0:13:24 It’s a lifelong condition.
0:13:25 So it’s just a matter of dealing with it and realizing that it is only visual.
0:13:29 So when people ask me, “Hey, I have HPPD.
0:13:31 How do I cope with it?”
0:13:32 I say, “Remember that every other sense that you have, what you can hear, what you can
0:13:36 taste, your feet on the ground, you’re still on earth.
0:13:39 You’re still here.”
0:13:40 Well, you said it’s only visual and yes, gratitude for being alive at all.
0:13:45 It’s great.
0:13:46 But you said that this led you into some dark psychological places like depersonalization
0:13:51 disorder.
0:13:52 Yeah.
0:13:53 So depersonalization is the feeling that you are not real, but that reality still exists.
0:14:00 Derealization is the idea that reality itself is an illusion created by your mind and that
0:14:05 you’re the only person alive and that everything that your brain is projecting to your visual
0:14:09 cortex is a lie and that you’re the only living human being.
0:14:13 Both are pretty intense.
0:14:15 HPPD creates both of those things.
0:14:17 And so when I’ve talked to people who have the condition, it’s really either or, but
0:14:22 more than 70% of people with HPPD fall into either category.
0:14:26 They’re both coping mechanisms for the, I don’t know what really happens.
0:14:30 I talked to a researcher once named Dr. Abraham.
0:14:33 He lives in upstate New York.
0:14:35 He’s the leading scientist when it comes to HPPD research.
0:14:38 He’s the only one who actually seems to care about finding a cure.
0:14:41 And the only known treatment right now is alcohol and benzodiazepines.
0:14:46 That’s not good.
0:14:47 Right.
0:14:48 Alcoholism, something that came into my life pretty early.
0:14:51 Alcohol abuse as a result of that experience, because that helps with the visual symptoms,
0:14:55 makes some of the static go away.
0:14:58 Never tried benzos though.
0:15:00 So can you explain to me where in that spectrum you are?
0:15:04 So do you sometimes have a sense that you’re not real and something else is not real?
0:15:09 Like the reality is not real?
0:15:11 Yeah, I experience it all the time, but like I said, my job helps with that because I get
0:15:16 to feel like when you seek out extremes to a certain extent and you put yourself on the
0:15:21 front lines of intense events, whether it be politically or socially, or just dive into
0:15:26 deep fringe subcultures, you get this feeling that you’re real.
0:15:30 And being filmed is also a confirmation if you can look at the MP4 file that you’re in
0:15:34 fact living here on earth.
0:15:36 Confirming that you were in it with reality by watching yourself on video.
0:15:42 So is that basically the engine behind all the extreme interviews you’ve done?
0:15:47 Well, I got HPPD around the same time that I began this journalism course in ninth grade.
0:15:52 So I sort of always use journalism as a therapeutic mechanism to deal with some of these symptoms,
0:15:57 especially depersonalization.
0:15:58 There’s some pretty good illustrations of what it feels like, kind of feels like you’re
0:16:03 trapped behind your eyes, or that you’re just this like nebulous soul that’s trapped in
0:16:07 a flesh suit that you’re not really a part of, you’re sort of puppeteering a flesh and
0:16:12 bone skin suit.
0:16:14 Trapped or just the ability to step outside of yourself?
0:16:17 You feel like your soul is not something that is connected to your body, it’s something
0:16:21 living in your head.
0:16:22 It’s really hard to explain to people who haven’t gone through de-realization or depersonalization,
0:16:27 but if you go on support groups, they always say like, “How do I break free from behind
0:16:30 my eyes?”
0:16:31 Like dark stuff like that.
0:16:32 Also you’re trapped.
0:16:33 I mean, there’s a higher state of being through meditation that you can kind of step outside
0:16:37 of yourself, but this is not that.
0:16:39 Unfortunately, it was kind of the meditative path or the Eastern path that I took and kind
0:16:46 of fused that with psychedelic culture in Seattle that took me down the psychedelic
0:16:50 use rabbit hole in the first place.
0:16:52 So I’d say it all started with Siddhartha.
0:16:54 Siddhartha, that’s a good book.
0:16:57 Have you done it since then?
0:16:58 No, I don’t really do psychedelic drugs, but a lot of people think that I’m against them,
0:17:03 which I’m not.
0:17:04 It just doesn’t work for me.
0:17:05 For you, I’m sure that can be really fun, especially, I know there’s lots of like therapeutic
0:17:09 uses for acid and ketamine and psilocybin, but I personally abstain from those kind of
0:17:16 anything psychotropic I try to stay away from.
0:17:18 Drinking a bit?
0:17:19 Well, yeah.
0:17:20 I mean, I didn’t drink at all before I had the HPPD stuff and I would have drank later
0:17:24 in life, but definitely like 14, 15 every day after school, I’d drink a 40 ounce of Mickey’s.
0:17:30 It’s like a kind of looks like old English, but the bottle’s green and it has a hornet
0:17:34 on the side of it.
0:17:35 Just kind of became a ritual just to deal with the anxiety of that situation.
0:17:39 And it made the snow go away?
0:17:41 Yeah.
0:17:42 Alcohol really works to suppress HPPD symptoms.
0:17:45 So you said you hated classes in school, except that journalism class.
0:17:48 Okay.
0:17:49 We need to clear this up because on my Wikipedia page, for some reason for Andrew Callahan
0:17:53 early life, it says Andrew hated every single class except for one.
0:17:57 So I’ve had a bunch of teachers who are super cool like this guy, Tim, my astronomy professor
0:18:01 at ninth grade, Mrs. Zanetti, my creative writing teacher in sixth grade, and this really cool
0:18:06 dude at my college in New Orleans named Charles Cannon, who taught me a class called New Orleans
0:18:10 Mythology.
0:18:11 My three favorite classes besides my journalism class, and they all hit me up and they’re
0:18:16 like, “Hey man, Saul, you said you hated every class.
0:18:19 Sorry, I couldn’t be everything that you wanted me to be.”
0:18:22 And so I just want to say, shout out to all those teachers.
0:18:24 I didn’t hate every class.
0:18:26 The point that I was making is that being forced into the institution of school so young
0:18:31 and having to take common core classes like biology, dissecting frogs, history of the Han
0:18:37 dynasty, stuff like that that I didn’t want to learn, but I had to learn multiple times.
0:18:42 I mean, I learned about the dynastic cycle in ancient China three separate times at three
0:18:47 different schools.
0:18:48 And I was like, “Who is writing this curriculum and why is it so important that I understand
0:18:53 this process?”
0:18:54 Yeah.
0:18:55 What makes school difficult, especially in college, is that you have people just going
0:18:58 to school just to get the degree who don’t really know exactly what they’re interested
0:19:02 in and they don’t even have time to figure that out because they’re in a business program
0:19:05 or a communications program with no specific interest.
0:19:08 Well, I think if you want to do school right, take on every single subject that you’re forced
0:19:13 into.
0:19:14 It’s like the David Foster Wallace, just be unboreable by it.
0:19:19 Just really go in as if ancient Chinese dynasties are the most interesting thing you could possibly
0:19:24 learn.
0:19:25 And it is somewhat interesting.
0:19:26 The Silk Road and the Great Wall and terracotta soldiers and stuff.
0:19:30 But I’m just saying, when I got to college, I signed up for journalism school, right?
0:19:35 And I didn’t get to take a media class until the second semester and I had to take everything
0:19:39 prior to that.
0:19:40 And I’d already spent so much time, I just think the excruciating boredom of schooling
0:19:45 left a bad taste in my mouth, but there was individual classes that I liked a lot.
0:19:48 Yeah.
0:19:49 There should be some choice or maybe a lot of choice even at the level of high school
0:19:53 for what kind of classes you pursue.
0:19:56 Yeah, for sure.
0:19:57 And you’re also saying so Wikipedia is not always perfectly right.
0:20:01 No.
0:20:02 But it’s just interesting because I’ve said so much in podcasts, but that’s what they
0:20:05 isolated.
0:20:07 And I’ve gotten that question before, which I understand it’s the first thing on my
0:20:10 Wikipedia page, but it makes me sound like a super hater.
0:20:13 Have you ever seen this Instagram page called Depths of Wikipedia?
0:20:15 No, that’s great.
0:20:16 Oh, it’s so good, dude.
0:20:18 You said you love journalism.
0:20:19 What did you love about journalism?
0:20:21 What hooked you?
0:20:22 On a basic level, everybody wants media coverage, right?
0:20:26 Everyone likes to be on camera and get exposure for whatever they’re doing.
0:20:29 And so being a journalist and being almost like a portal for exposure for people allows
0:20:33 you to be on the front row of everything that you want to be a part of.
0:20:38 You get to be in the front row for history as it’s unfolding because everyone wants to
0:20:42 be covered.
0:20:43 So being a journalist gives you a ticket to everywhere that you want to go in life.
0:20:48 And so it allows you to step into different realities almost and then go back to yours.
0:20:52 And it just keeps life interesting.
0:20:54 Buy the ticket.
0:20:55 Take the ride.
0:20:56 Hunter S. Thompson.
0:20:57 Is Zee up there as one of the influences?
0:20:58 Who are your influences?
0:20:59 I think the early Daily Show was so good.
0:21:03 Sasha Baron Cohen, huge influence.
0:21:05 I mean, that was like the Alley G Show especially.
0:21:07 I think Louis Thoreau’s broadcasts on BBC were great.
0:21:11 I was really into Hunter S. Thompson too, but not really until college.
0:21:15 I really like a particular Hunter S. Thompson book called The Great Shark Hunt, where he
0:21:20 covers the Ruben Salazar murder by LAPD or LA Sheriff’s Department in Boyle Heights
0:21:25 in the ’70s and his relationship with his lawyer, Oscar Acosta, and that whole saga
0:21:31 is great.
0:21:32 Fear and Loathing, I like, but not as much as his straightforward reporting.
0:21:36 Because there’s the Gonzo side of Hunter, where he’s like saying he’s taking drugs and
0:21:40 seeing shit.
0:21:41 And there’s the other side of him, which is like an actual reporter interested in telling
0:21:45 a story that has news value.
0:21:47 So it’s two different lanes for him.
0:21:50 There is something about you that makes people want to say you’re the Hunter S. Thompson
0:21:56 of this generation.
0:21:57 And I don’t think they mean the drugs.
0:22:01 I think they mean some kind of non-standard willingness to explore the extremes of humanity.
0:22:10 And like almost a celebration of the extremes of humanity.
0:22:13 Yeah.
0:22:14 Well, it’s a very kind comparison.
0:22:15 I’ll get there one day maybe.
0:22:17 I just went to Aspen on a little Hunter S. Thompson recon trip to go check out the Woody
0:22:22 Creek Tavern, which is the spot that he was like his bar near his cabin, and it was pretty
0:22:26 cool to see.
0:22:27 Unfortunately, it’s kind of turned into, not a dive bar now, but it’s a sit-down sort
0:22:31 of country restaurant.
0:22:33 But it was cool.
0:22:34 But I expected to see a bunch of gnarly Hunter S. Thompson types doing speed.
0:22:39 Just doing drugs.
0:22:41 I mean, drugs and alcohol is all part of it somehow.
0:22:44 Yeah.
0:22:45 So it opens a gateway to a deeper understanding of humanity.
0:22:48 But I will say though, like as someone now who doesn’t party like I did when I was younger,
0:22:53 it’s not as important as I thought it was.
0:22:56 You know.
0:22:57 Yeah.
0:22:58 I’m conflicted on this.
0:22:59 I’m good friends with a lot of people that say alcohol is really bad for you, and I believe
0:23:03 that too.
0:23:04 But there’s something that I’m just as an introvert, as a person who has a lot of anxiety.
0:23:12 For me, alcohol has opened doors of just opening myself up to the world more.
0:23:18 Oh, I’m actually a fan of alcohol, moderate drinking.
0:23:21 But I’m saying like my life before, I would say 2019, 2018 especially, there was the chaos
0:23:27 on camera, but then there was my private life, which was like chaotic partying all the time.
0:23:32 And I convinced myself, much like Hunter did, that that was the secret sauce that in my
0:23:38 spiritual core that gave me the creativity.
0:23:41 But then I cut out a lot of that stuff, and I’m just as creative.
0:23:44 And it’s interesting that a lot of, I think one of the hardest parts about addiction is
0:23:49 that if you’re functioning, highly creative, addict of any kind, your brain and the addictive
0:23:55 part of your brain convinces yourself that it’s all part of the cross-purpose, and that
0:23:58 it has this like symbiotic, you know, inspirational thing going on, but it’s not, it’s not true.
0:24:03 It can be, but it’s typically not.
0:24:06 Yeah.
0:24:07 It’s not a, it’s not a requirement.
0:24:09 You can sometimes channel, you can sometimes leverage all those things for your creativity.
0:24:14 But the creative engine, it lives outside of that.
0:24:16 Like have you read Hunter’s daily routine in the year up to his death?
0:24:21 It was like 15 grapefruits and eight ball of coke and like just like a certain amount
0:24:25 of shotgun shells for him to fire into the sky every morning.
0:24:29 There’s no way, and he didn’t do anything creative in those, in those final years.
0:24:33 But so the creativity goes away and gradually you just become like a party animal, like
0:24:37 Andy Dick.
0:24:38 A caricature of yourself.
0:24:39 Yeah.
0:24:40 I mean, that’s why life is interesting.
0:24:41 You make all kinds of choices, and sometimes you can have, create works of genius in a
0:24:47 short amount of time based on drugs and no drugs.
0:24:50 Einstein had that miracle year where he published several incredible papers in one year in 1905.
0:24:57 Did he do drugs before that?
0:24:59 Lots of coke.
0:25:00 I was like, I believed you for a sec, but I’m like, did Einstein have blow?
0:25:04 I don’t think he did.
0:25:05 How do you think he gets that hair?
0:25:06 Come on.
0:25:07 It’s true.
0:25:08 I’m just asking questions.
0:25:09 High confidence hair.
0:25:10 Look into it.
0:25:11 Yeah.
0:25:12 You know what I mean?
0:25:13 Yeah.
0:25:14 Well, he’s a well put together sexy young man.
0:25:17 The hair came later.
0:25:18 Yeah.
0:25:19 Was Albert Einstein attractive as a teenager?
0:25:20 No, that’s not a teenager.
0:25:21 Was he attractive as a young man?
0:25:23 Sexually attractive.
0:25:24 I don’t, I mean, I’m turned on by Einstein at all ages.
0:25:26 I don’t discriminate.
0:25:27 What are you more turned on by the work that he did or his physical being?
0:25:31 No, sometimes I fantasize what it would be like to be in the arms of Einstein.
0:25:36 I could even get that out.
0:25:37 Yeah.
0:25:38 In the arms of Einstein.
0:25:39 Yeah.
0:25:40 Just, just I want to feel safe.
0:25:41 It’s a good idea for a romcom to be a little more serious like general relativity that space
0:25:48 time can be unified and curved by gravity is an incredibly wild and difficult idea to
0:25:57 come up with.
0:25:58 Like it’s a really, really difficult thing to imagine, given how well Newtonian classical
0:26:04 mechanics, physics works for predicting how stuff happens on earth to think like, like
0:26:11 the, that gravity can get more space time, both space and time is, and it permeates the
0:26:23 entire universe.
0:26:24 It’s a field.
0:26:25 It’s a really wild idea to come up with one human on earth to intuit that it’s really,
0:26:29 really, really difficult.
0:26:30 And it’s really sad to me that he didn’t get a Nobel Prize for that.
0:26:34 Was there people saying he was crazy when he was around?
0:26:38 Or was he universally recognized as like an OG of this?
0:26:41 No, I think once the papers came out, he was widely recognized as a true genius, but before
0:26:47 that he wasn’t recognized.
0:26:48 He had a really difficult.
0:26:50 So back now, where does a black hole go?
0:26:52 Like after something gets sucked into it?
0:26:54 You mean is it a portal to another place?
0:26:56 That kind of thing?
0:26:57 Yeah.
0:26:58 No.
0:26:59 Well, we don’t, we don’t know.
0:27:00 It could be, like it could be that the universe is kind of like Swiss cheese full of black
0:27:02 holes.
0:27:03 There’s something called Hawking radiation where the, because of quantum mechanics, the
0:27:08 information leaks out of a black hole.
0:27:10 So it is possible to escape a black hole.
0:27:12 There’s a lot of interesting questions there.
0:27:13 I hope we get to the bottom of that.
0:27:15 And there’s a super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy, which doesn’t seem
0:27:19 to scare physicists, but it terrifies me.
0:27:21 Oh yeah, for sure.
0:27:23 Astronomy can be terrifying.
0:27:24 Yeah.
0:27:25 We’re all like orbiting.
0:27:26 I mean, we’re not just orbiting the Sun, but the Sun as part of the solar system is part
0:27:30 of the galaxy.
0:27:31 And it’s all orbiting a gigantic black hole.
0:27:33 Have you ever spoke to someone who’s been to outer space?
0:27:36 Jeff Azos.
0:27:37 He flew his own rocket.
0:27:39 Wow.
0:27:40 It’s pretty cool.
0:27:41 Astronaut that’s been to deep space now.
0:27:43 Well, maybe I’ve spoken to an alien that just hasn’t admitted it.
0:27:47 I want to do a research paper or like a report about space madness.
0:27:51 You know, it’s supposed to be this like torturous feeling that you get when you look away from
0:27:55 Earth and into the abyss after you’ve exited Earth’s orbit or whatever.
0:28:01 Because there’s one specific psychiatrist who knows how to deal with space madness.
0:28:05 And I want to figure out how to interview people with it.
0:28:09 Is this a real thing?
0:28:10 Like is there a Wikipedia article on it?
0:28:11 Yes.
0:28:12 Look up space madness treatment.
0:28:13 Now I don’t trust Wikipedia after what you told me, so.
0:28:15 I know.
0:28:16 They think I hate classes.
0:28:17 I thought you meant more about the fact that you’re isolated out in space, that we need
0:28:21 social connection.
0:28:22 And it’s difficult.
0:28:23 Yeah.
0:28:24 I think it’s just a feeling of extreme insignificance that you might get sometimes when you look
0:28:27 at the night sky.
0:28:28 But it’s that times a thousand.
0:28:30 It’s like an existential void that’s created after looking into the abyss and then realizing
0:28:34 how small Earth is in the grand scheme.
0:28:36 You just start to really have a strange new perception about the pointlessness of existence.
0:28:43 I don’t need to go to space for that.
0:28:44 I mean, only a handful of people have been to space, but I’m sure they’re all pretty
0:28:47 well off.
0:28:48 So this psychiatrist has to be like in the multi millions.
0:28:50 Well, technically we’re all in space because Earth is in space, but so I wonder if you
0:28:56 have to go to space to talk to the psychiatrist.
0:28:58 Yeah.
0:28:59 Probably so.
0:29:00 Well, technically we’re all in space, so he can’t, that’s a boundary he can’t have.
0:29:05 But not everyone believes that, as you’ve seen from my work probably.
0:29:09 You’re right.
0:29:10 And those are important people that are asking important questions.
0:29:14 You hitchhiked across US for 70 days when you were 19.
0:29:18 Right.
0:29:19 Tell the story of that.
0:29:20 So I have connections to what I was talking about with the boredom of school and these
0:29:23 common core classes.
0:29:24 So after my first year of school where I lived in the dorms, like a old school dormitory
0:29:29 building at a school in New Orleans called Loyola University, I wanted to just do something.
0:29:35 I felt so bored.
0:29:36 I was working for the school newspaper for that whole first year.
0:29:40 It was called the maroon.
0:29:42 And I didn’t have the ability to write my own stories.
0:29:44 Like I had to defer to an older editor and they would give me stories to write about.
0:29:49 And they were all about like on-campus happenings.
0:29:52 Like the Pope visits New Orleans or glass recycling to be restored in the French Quarter
0:29:56 or hoverboards banned on campus due to safety concerns.
0:30:00 And it just kind of felt like, all right, I kind of wanted to be a Gonzo reporter.
0:30:04 I’m not sure if working my way up through the traditional newsroom hierarchy is going
0:30:08 to get me to that point.
0:30:09 So I started reading a bunch of old hobo literature, you know, like post-World War II vagabonding
0:30:15 stuff and there was this book called “Vagabonding in America” by an old hobo Ed Byrne.
0:30:20 And I read this and it just basically, obviously some of it was outdated.
0:30:23 They had stuff in there like the hobo code, like, oh, this moniker on the side of a fence
0:30:27 means this person has free soup or something like that.
0:30:30 They didn’t have stuff like that.
0:30:32 But what a detail.
0:30:33 That’s great.
0:30:34 It told me about train stop towns like Dunn’s Mere and, you know, places in Montana where
0:30:38 there was a friendly attitude toward drifters and that still persists from the 60s and 70s
0:30:44 to this day.
0:30:45 Even though, in my opinion, movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre have ruined hitchhiking
0:30:50 culture in America because now everyone thinks you’re going to, you know, decapitate them
0:30:53 if they pick you up.
0:30:54 So after my final day of courses at Loyola, I literally left all of my belongings inside
0:31:00 my dorm and took the streetcar to the Greyhound station, got a one-way ticket to Baton Rouge,
0:31:06 and I was like, I’m going to hitchhike across the whole country back to Seattle with no
0:31:10 money.
0:31:11 And that was the plan and it worked out.
0:31:13 I love it.
0:31:14 I traveled across the United States before in a similar kind of plan because you weren’t
0:31:19 where you’re on the Silver Dog.
0:31:21 It’s the Greyhound bus.
0:31:23 Greyhound is pretty nice.
0:31:25 That’s a step above hitchhiking.
0:31:26 Yeah, that’s way better than hitchhiking.
0:31:27 So I don’t want to.
0:31:28 Hitchhiking Greyhound Amtrak.
0:31:29 Yeah, Amtrak, no.
0:31:30 That’s the leadest.
0:31:31 What’s in between Greyhound and Amtrak?
0:31:33 A car.
0:31:34 That’s what it is.
0:31:35 Yeah, it’s a car.
0:31:36 It’s a carbon.
0:31:37 A shitty car.
0:31:38 Okay, cool.
0:31:39 Yeah, I lived in a shitty car.
0:31:41 You lived in a car?
0:31:42 Yeah, when I was driving across the United States.
0:31:46 Solo?
0:31:47 With a friend, some solo, and I would eat cold soup.
0:31:55 I love cold soup.
0:31:56 What I like is the cold chickpeas, and I can get the water out and just dump them in your
0:32:02 mouth.
0:32:03 Yeah.
0:32:04 Those are good.
0:32:05 Beef jerky, kind bars.
0:32:06 Kind bars are really good for the road.
0:32:07 Yeah.
0:32:08 I mean, all of that is great, but too much of it is not great.
0:32:11 Too much cold soup, not great.
0:32:14 Too much beef jerky.
0:32:16 So what was the route you took?
0:32:17 Was it Chicago across, or was it Philadelphia across?
0:32:20 Philadelphia across.
0:32:21 To LA, or where?
0:32:24 San Diego’s will end up, but it was a zigzag and went up to Chicago and then all the way
0:32:28 down to Texas.
0:32:29 So you went through Appalachia up to the Midwest, did you cut over through the Southwest down
0:32:35 to San Diego?
0:32:36 No, no, no.
0:32:37 I went straight down to Texas, all the way down to Midwest.
0:32:39 Okay.
0:32:40 But did you cut from Texas West through New Mexico and Arizona to get to San Diego?
0:32:44 That is the best road trip place.
0:32:47 Interstate 40, like Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Vegas, Kingman, the Mojave Desert, Yuma doesn’t
0:32:53 get better.
0:32:54 Yeah.
0:32:55 I mean, you’re kids, so you don’t care, and you were throwing caution to the wind, and
0:32:58 you met some crazy, crazy people.
0:33:01 It gives me some sanity, like whenever I’m feeling kind of out of control or, you know,
0:33:05 like bummed out.
0:33:06 I just remembered that the road is still out there.
0:33:08 The open road never goes anywhere, and it’s kind of like a, I see like an invisible door
0:33:12 in the corner of the room all the time that makes me more comfortable because I’m like,
0:33:15 hey, at the end of the day, bummed out, I can go hit the road, and I’m sure there’s
0:33:18 going to be a fun time ahead.
0:33:20 Yeah, get that Greyhound ticket and go.
0:33:22 I would say Silver Dog, half, because sometimes I got to ride the dog when no one will pick
0:33:28 me up.
0:33:29 There’s some places in the country where no one’s going to pick you up.
0:33:32 Yeah.
0:33:33 Kansas, Missouri, they’re not going to do it.
0:33:34 Maybe you’re not charming enough.
0:33:35 You thought about that?
0:33:36 I was 19, fresh, clean-shaven.
0:33:39 I was pretty charming, I’d say.
0:33:41 But the older you get, the harder it is to hitchhike because they think you’re like
0:33:45 an escaped convict or some type of like psycho wanderer.
0:33:48 And some of these people are like what we call punishers, people who never stop talking.
0:33:52 And so they see someone hitchhiking, and they’re like, yes, I’m going to talk at this person.
0:33:56 Yeah.
0:33:57 And you can tell their eyes are wide.
0:33:58 They’re like, what’s up?
0:33:59 And you’re like, oh, shit.
0:34:00 So it’s six hours.
0:34:01 I’m just like, oh, cool.
0:34:02 Nice.
0:34:03 That’s rough.
0:34:04 Yeah, yeah.
0:34:05 You’re right.
0:34:06 And they’re comfortable in silence.
0:34:08 Yeah.
0:34:09 But then that also raises the question, are they about to kill me?
0:34:12 You know what I mean?
0:34:13 I think that’s a you problem, not a–
0:34:15 You know what’s funny is almost everybody who picked me up when I was hitchhiking was
0:34:18 like a day laborer.
0:34:21 It was almost all Mexican day laborers who picked me up.
0:34:23 Oh, interesting.
0:34:24 Because I think that in some places down there, that’s a typical thing to do, hitchhike to
0:34:28 work.
0:34:29 A lot of people don’t have cars, but they still have to get to their jobs.
0:34:31 So a lot of people ask me, hey, where should I drop you off?
0:34:33 Where’s your job at?
0:34:34 And I’m like, my job is to explore, and they were down with it.
0:34:37 See, for me, it was really easy because you just say I’m traveling across the United States.
0:34:43 And I think people love that idea, and they want to help.
0:34:47 They were romantic, because they also have that invisible door.
0:34:50 Everybody has that invisible door.
0:34:51 I just want to go.
0:34:52 So you know what I’m talking about?
0:34:53 Yeah.
0:34:54 I mean, I don’t think–
0:34:55 It can anchor you a bit, just to remind you that every pattern that I’ve fallen into is
0:34:58 voluntary, and it’s for my own stability and mental health.
0:35:01 Well, that’s why I’m renting everything, and I’m making sure tomorrow I can just go.
0:35:05 I gave away everything I own twice in my life, just very like, I’m ready to go tonight.
0:35:12 Let’s go.
0:35:13 What’s the hardest item you’ve had to part with in this experience?
0:35:16 There’s nothing.
0:35:17 You’ve never had a material object that was really hard to let go of?
0:35:20 No.
0:35:21 So you’d give that watch to somebody if it meant a change?
0:35:23 No, that’s you’re right.
0:35:24 You’re right.
0:35:25 That’s probably the only– I’ve never had to let go of that, though.
0:35:28 Yeah.
0:35:29 The only thing I own, this means a lot to me, but everything else.
0:35:33 But then again, because this watch is giving me– to me by Rogan has become a close friend.
0:35:40 But whenever I romanticize the notion that this watch means a lot to me, it’s like, don’t
0:35:43 worry about it.
0:35:44 I’ll just get you the same one again.
0:35:45 Yeah.
0:35:46 I was like, goddammit.
0:35:47 It’s a pretty sick-ass gift, though.
0:35:50 Yeah.
0:35:51 It’s pretty sick.
0:35:52 I’m not usually a gift guy, but when somebody you look up to gives you a thing, it’s a nice
0:35:59 little symbol of that relationship, so it’s nice.
0:36:03 But other than that, no.
0:36:04 But even this, whatever, the relationship is what matters.
0:36:07 The human is what matters, not the–
0:36:09 I agree 100%.
0:36:10 You had something like this?
0:36:12 Not really.
0:36:13 I mean, there was a hard drive that I lost that had all of my childhood pictures on it
0:36:17 and stuff like that that I think about all the time because I left it on a train.
0:36:21 And certain memories, you think about it and you just get pissed off and just think to myself,
0:36:25 someone has that somewhere.
0:36:26 Like, I have dreams about reuniting with the hard drive.
0:36:29 You and Hunter Biden have a similar kind of trip.
0:36:32 I don’t think he wants to reunite with that one.
0:36:34 Okay.
0:36:35 Dude, it’s crazy.
0:36:38 All he did was smoke crack, right?
0:36:40 Or was there more stuff going on?
0:36:42 I think there’s prostitutes involved.
0:36:43 Oh, okay.
0:36:44 Whatever.
0:36:45 I think you got to look into it.
0:36:46 I think I have to look into it, too.
0:36:49 I don’t know.
0:36:52 There was Kerouac, Jack Kerouac, somebody that was an inspiration at all in this road
0:36:57 trip.
0:36:58 Did you even know who that is?
0:36:59 The beat generation?
0:37:00 I didn’t know who it was.
0:37:01 And then after I did the– ultimately, I wrote a book about my hitchhiking experience
0:37:04 years later.
0:37:05 And everyone was like, “Have you read On The Road?”
0:37:08 And then On The Road, I probably heard the title of that book every day at least 10 times
0:37:13 for two years.
0:37:14 And I’m sure Kerouac is a great guy.
0:37:17 I mean, I just don’t– I’m not too familiar with the beat generation.
0:37:21 It’s a great book.
0:37:23 You read it or no?
0:37:24 I refuse to read it.
0:37:25 People even have gifted it to me and been like, “Hey, man, you’re going to love this
0:37:28 one.”
0:37:29 And I’m like, “Is that On The Road?”
0:37:30 If I– honestly, people have given me a book with wrapping paper on it, and they’re like,
0:37:34 “This is right at your alley.”
0:37:35 I was like, “That’s fucking On The Road, isn’t it?”
0:37:37 Give you a different cover.
0:37:39 Yeah, no, I’m like, “Anything but that.”
0:37:40 But I’m sure it’s a great book.
0:37:41 It’s just– the comparison thing drives me crazy, but respect– big respect to Kerouac
0:37:48 would never speak down on the whole– anyone in the beat generation.
0:37:51 What are some interesting moments you remember from those 70 days?
0:37:54 Man, there was so much– I mean, getting mistaken for a gay prostitute on my first hitchhiking
0:37:59 ride in Louisiana was pretty funny.
0:38:02 Where did you come from and where did you go?
0:38:04 Well, I mean, the journey began in Baton Rouge, and the first destination was Houston, which
0:38:08 is about four and a half hours west on Interstate 10.
0:38:13 So I’m in Crowley, Louisiana, on the side of the road, and I guess this was a cruising
0:38:18 truck stop.
0:38:19 It was known for being a place where male lot lizards would go to procure clients.
0:38:25 And I was there.
0:38:26 Lot lizards are–
0:38:27 It’s a derogatory term in trucker culture for a prostitute who hangs out at the loves
0:38:31 or pilot flying, Jay.
0:38:34 Large Interstate truck stops.
0:38:36 Now trucker culture, as it once was, is pretty much finished because of the live stream cameras
0:38:41 they have inside of the trucks now.
0:38:43 So you can’t snort suit of fit or pick up anybody.
0:38:46 You can’t even pick up a hitchhiker or you get fired.
0:38:48 Killed all the romance.
0:38:49 Yeah.
0:38:50 Definitely.
0:38:51 The old school outlaw trucker lifestyle, unless you’re an owner operator who’s not
0:38:55 even in a union, which is like a real cowboy way to haul loads, you can’t do that.
0:39:00 You were mistaken for a lot lizard.
0:39:01 Mistaken for a lot lizard by a small man from Honduras with a spiky leather jacket covered
0:39:08 in studs.
0:39:09 Nice.
0:39:10 Didn’t speak any English, but I thought he was just a nice guy.
0:39:14 And then he pulled over at a, there’s private theaters in the South where they have confessional
0:39:20 booths set up and they have three channels and people go in there and you know.
0:39:26 Is it boring?
0:39:27 Yeah.
0:39:28 People go in there and you know, please themselves.
0:39:30 That’s right.
0:39:31 Yeah.
0:39:32 So he thought he was taking me to one of those and I was like, all right, cool, man.
0:39:35 Yeah.
0:39:36 Like, you know, this guy wants to go jerk off.
0:39:37 I’m just going to wait in the car.
0:39:38 It’s all good.
0:39:39 I don’t discriminate.
0:39:40 But then I was like, he buys a booth for me and I’m like, okay, you know, I’m not
0:39:44 really in the mood to watch porn with this random guy.
0:39:47 So he gets in the same booth as me and he starts jerking off right next to me.
0:39:51 And I’m like, oh man, like, I don’t think this is chill.
0:39:55 I’m like, dude, can you stop?
0:39:57 He stopped jacking off and he’s like, what do you mean?
0:39:59 Like, I thought this is what you want to do.
0:40:01 Like, I have money for you.
0:40:02 What’s up?
0:40:03 And I was like, oh no, I’m just a regular guy.
0:40:06 He was super cool about it.
0:40:07 He started laughing.
0:40:08 He was like, oh, my bad man.
0:40:09 I thought you were, you know, selling something.
0:40:11 I said, no.
0:40:12 And he said, oh, it’s all good.
0:40:13 And he gave me a ride all the way to Houston.
0:40:15 That’s great.
0:40:16 Yeah.
0:40:17 We talked about anything except that for the rest of the car ride.
0:40:19 It’s great.
0:40:20 It was just rolled with it.
0:40:21 Oh, sorry about that.
0:40:22 It could.
0:40:23 I mean, I had about a foot and a half on this guy, so I wasn’t too scared.
0:40:26 I also had like a knife in my pocket, but I didn’t want to stab him, especially not
0:40:29 at a place like that.
0:40:30 And you were still, that that didn’t like leave a bad taste in your mouth.
0:40:34 Well, I figured that can’t happen again.
0:40:36 It can’t keep happening.
0:40:37 So I was like, all right, if I got this out of the way the first ride, the following
0:40:41 rides are going to be spectacular.
0:40:42 Yeah.
0:40:43 I mean, who among us have not been mistaken for a lot lizard?
0:40:47 It’s a fact.
0:40:48 You heard here first.
0:40:50 What else?
0:40:51 What are some interesting, beautiful people that you’ve met along the way?
0:40:55 Well, I used the app Couch Surfing to find places to stay.
0:40:59 Now you can only submit like five couch surfing requests a day unless you’re a premium member,
0:41:04 which means you also host people.
0:41:06 Couch surfing still around?
0:41:07 Yeah.
0:41:08 Yeah.
0:41:09 Totally.
0:41:10 But it’s evolved obviously into a different thing.
0:41:11 It’s a kind of competitor to that, right?
0:41:12 Couch surfing is free though.
0:41:14 Right.
0:41:15 So couch surfing, they call it like the CS community.
0:41:17 So basically there’d be these like couch surfing super hosts in different cities.
0:41:20 Like there was one in Santa Fe, this firefighter dude who had like 15 other couch surfers there,
0:41:25 chilling.
0:41:26 Nice.
0:41:27 So I would do it everywhere.
0:41:28 A lot of them were Catholics, you know, so it was their way of giving back.
0:41:33 A lot of them were nudists.
0:41:36 And so I didn’t realize that there’s a small little section at the bottom of someone’s
0:41:40 couch surfing profile that says clothing optional.
0:41:42 Yes.
0:41:43 And that means if you go there, I thought it meant like it’s cool if you walk to the
0:41:46 bathroom in your underwear.
0:41:47 No, if you go there, everyone’s going to be butt naked.
0:41:50 So I made that mistake a few times.
0:41:52 Not that I’m anti-nudist, but I didn’t want to, you know, I wasn’t ready to take that
0:41:56 leap of faith.
0:41:58 And yeah, it was just great.
0:41:59 Couch surfing hosts were amazing.
0:42:00 Yeah.
0:42:01 That was just great.
0:42:02 It was this constant thing where I felt like, wow, people are so welcoming.
0:42:05 I’m not having to pay them a dollar for this experience.
0:42:07 Yeah.
0:42:08 I love couch surfing.
0:42:09 Yeah.
0:42:10 For me, being an introvert, just crashing on a person’s couch, being essentially forced
0:42:16 into a great conversation is great.
0:42:19 Yeah.
0:42:20 The one thing that gets exhausting about hitchhiking is constantly thanking people, you know, being
0:42:24 in like sort of constant superficial gratitude everywhere all the time, like, “Oh, thanks
0:42:29 for letting me sleep on your couch.
0:42:30 Thanks for the food.”
0:42:31 Yeah.
0:42:32 Part of the reason I wanted to live in an RV later in life is to avoid having to constantly
0:42:35 live in this like, “Thanks so much” type of frequency because it’s exhausting to constantly
0:42:40 be, “Hey man, thanks.”
0:42:41 I think the shallowness of that interaction is exhausting, not just the, not the thanks.
0:42:46 Yeah.
0:42:47 It was a true favor.
0:42:48 Of course, I love giving people gratitude for that, but just this thing where everyone
0:42:51 who picks you up is, you know, you get eight rides a day.
0:42:54 You’re like thanking eight people a day like they’re, you know, the second coming of Jesus.
0:42:58 You start to feel a little bit debased.
0:42:59 What did you learn about people from that, from that journey?
0:43:02 That’s your first time really kind of going into it.
0:43:05 The American public is just so kind overall.
0:43:08 I mean, they’re so like embracing, depending on who you are.
0:43:13 And specifically though, the Christian family people of the US who drive in minivans and
0:43:17 have that, that fish sticker on the back where it’s like Jesus fish and then they have the
0:43:22 family sticker, you know, where each member of the family is a stick figure.
0:43:27 Those people never picked me up and would flip me off with their whole family.
0:43:33 Sometimes they would throw full doctor peppers at me as a family while I stood on the side
0:43:37 of the road.
0:43:38 As a family together.
0:43:39 They would yell shit like, go to hell hippie when I was on the side of the road.
0:43:43 And so it’s weird that the most charitable Christian American family values people never
0:43:51 gave me any charity or even conversation.
0:43:54 They were antagonizing me and saw me as like a hippie left over from the sixties who needed
0:43:58 to go to work, go to Vietnam.
0:44:00 I don’t get it.
0:44:01 Yeah.
0:44:02 The people who really extended a hand to me is people on the margins.
0:44:07 People working on seasonal visas.
0:44:10 People whose cars have, you know, less than a quarter of a tank left.
0:44:14 People struggling with addiction who saw me struggling, or at least they thought that
0:44:17 I was because they assumed I was hitchhiking, not out of adventure, but because I had no
0:44:20 car and were willing to sacrifice their day almost sometimes to take me exactly where
0:44:27 I needed to go.
0:44:28 That’s beautiful, man.
0:44:29 Yeah.
0:44:30 I’ve had similar kind of experience that people who are struggling the most are the
0:44:32 ones who are willing to help you when you’re struggling.
0:44:35 Yeah.
0:44:36 There’s people like in religious context and other kind of communities that just judge
0:44:40 others because they’ve kind of constructed a value system where they’re better than others
0:44:46 because of that value system.
0:44:48 And that actually has a cascade that forces you to actually be kind of a dick.
0:44:54 Yeah.
0:44:55 I never thought about it that way.
0:44:56 It’s so true.
0:44:57 I never thought about morality and religion a lot.
0:45:00 Yeah.
0:45:01 Yeah.
0:45:02 Yeah.
0:45:03 I’ve been to certain parts of the world where religion is really a big part of life.
0:45:07 I’m just always skeptical about tribes of people that believe a thing and they believe
0:45:15 they’re better than others because they believe that thing.
0:45:18 That could be nations.
0:45:19 That could be religions.
0:45:20 Yeah.
0:45:21 I mean, in Ukraine and in Russia, I’ve seen a lot of hate towards the other.
0:45:26 Yeah.
0:45:27 Yeah.
0:45:28 That hate I’m always very skeptical of because it could be used by powerful people to direct
0:45:33 that hate just so the powerful people can maintain power and get money, this kind of
0:45:39 stuff.
0:45:40 It’s a scary thing to see how easy it is for high-up political people to mobilize the
0:45:44 hate of just the average working person and can almost convince them to sabotage their
0:45:50 own countrymen who they share more in common with than the politician they look up to just
0:45:54 to advance the agenda of one party.
0:45:57 That’s what we’re seeing now.
0:45:58 Are there some places in America that are better than others?
0:46:01 Can you speak negatively of like aforementioned Joe Rogan, talk shit about Connecticut and
0:46:09 I’ll stop.
0:46:10 Can you pick a region in the United States you can talk shit about?
0:46:13 To talk shit about?
0:46:14 Oh, for sure.
0:46:15 I mean, or from that experience, let’s just narrow it down to that.
0:46:19 Oh, Colorado.
0:46:20 Oh, jeez.
0:46:21 Really?
0:46:22 Yes.
0:46:23 I know so many people that love Colorado.
0:46:24 Dude.
0:46:25 Dallas, Denver.
0:46:26 I think Phoenix sucks, but I love Phoenix now.
0:46:27 The way they build these cities to just be so circular and massive, it’s just like stopping.
0:46:31 You don’t like circles?
0:46:32 I like grids, man.
0:46:33 Oh, you’re a grid guy.
0:46:35 Manhattan, New Orleans, San Francisco.
0:46:38 What is it about grids that bring out the worst in people?
0:46:42 Circles is wherever we just, there’s a, everyone’s just vibing out the goosey, but the grid
0:46:45 gets people locked in and hateful.
0:46:48 I don’t know, man, but I’ve never heard anyone talk shit about Colorado, I have to say.
0:46:52 It’s kind of refreshing.
0:46:53 It provides a necessary balance for the Colorado Wikipedia page.
0:46:57 Yeah.
0:46:58 Oh, Oregon too.
0:46:59 I got problems with Oregon.
0:47:00 Oregon.
0:47:01 Yeah.
0:47:02 Well, here’s the issue.
0:47:03 You have, and I don’t like just calling people racist because it’s kind of like a two dimensional
0:47:05 insult, but you have the most racist state, but the most psychotic anarchist city in the
0:47:11 middle of it.
0:47:12 What is going on up there?
0:47:13 How did this happen?
0:47:14 The yin and the yang is so extreme that there must be something in the, in the Willamette.
0:47:19 What do you have against anarchism?
0:47:20 I have nothing.
0:47:21 I used to be an anarchist.
0:47:22 I was an eighth grade.
0:47:23 I had this friend named Mads who was part of a group called Seattle Solidarity, which
0:47:26 is like an Antifa precursor.
0:47:28 So I grew up like going to black block protests and I mean, there was a particular shooting.
0:47:35 The murder of John Williams, who was a Native American woodcarver in downtown Seattle.
0:47:39 He got killed by a Seattle police officer named Ian Burke.
0:47:43 He, John Williams was carving a pipe or from a wood block with a pocket knife.
0:47:48 He’s deaf in one ear.
0:47:51 The officer pulls a gun on him and says, put it down.
0:47:53 He doesn’t hear him.
0:47:54 He shoots him six seconds later.
0:47:55 So that police involved shooting is what instantly turned me into like a very critical
0:48:02 of law enforcement kind of person when I was super young.
0:48:04 And so as someone who used to see this guy who got murdered was a 55 year old man.
0:48:09 I used to see him around Pike Place where my mom lives.
0:48:11 It’s a public market in downtown.
0:48:13 That to me put me into the anarchist political sphere, because just, just channeling the
0:48:18 anger of that experience and the officer got no charges by the way.
0:48:23 You can look up the video.
0:48:24 It’s horrific, you know, and it didn’t get reported.
0:48:26 The officer I’m pretty sure is still active duty.
0:48:29 And so it’s like situations like that early in life channeled me toward political extremism.
0:48:36 But I grew up to realize how incompatible that anarchistic worldview is with reality
0:48:43 and with the, with American society can only exist in a small little chamber.
0:48:48 You know, you can’t apply that to the industrial heartland of the country.
0:48:51 And I think also anarchism, so I’ve gotten to know Michael Malice who’s written quite
0:48:56 a bit about anarchism, and it’s also exists as a body of literature about different philosophical
0:49:01 notions that kind of resist the state, the ever expanding state in different kinds of
0:49:06 ways.
0:49:07 And it’s always nice to have extreme thought experiments to understand what kind of society
0:49:13 you want to build, but implementing it may not necessarily be a good idea.
0:49:18 Yeah.
0:49:19 I mean, Emma Goldman, I’m a huge fan of her writing.
0:49:22 Also the prison abolitionists that are associated with the anarchist movement, Angela Davis,
0:49:27 Ruth Wilson-Gilmore, all that stuff influential, I still adhere to a lot of those principles
0:49:31 when talking about stuff like radical prison reform and stuff like that.
0:49:36 But just I drifted more toward having a more open mind as I got older.
0:49:42 Artism implemented in almost all of its forms is probably going to cause a lot of suffering.
0:49:49 You worked as a doorman on the, I could say legendary Bourbon Street in New Orleans, where
0:49:56 you saw what you described as, this might be another Wikipedia quote, by the way.
0:50:00 This is where I do my research.
0:50:01 Does this say hellish scenes?
0:50:04 Hellish scenes and quotes.
0:50:05 Wikipedia is damn right about that.
0:50:06 All right, thank you.
0:50:09 That’s a win.
0:50:10 That’s one in the win column.
0:50:13 So yeah, tell the story of that.
0:50:15 What’s it like to work on Bourbon Street?
0:50:16 What kind of stuff did you see?
0:50:17 I mean, I was a host at a fine dining restaurant on the corner of Bourbon in Iberville.
0:50:22 So that’s the first street if you go from Canal Street onto the quarter.
0:50:25 So this is like across from like a daiquiri spot.
0:50:29 It’s the middle of the tourist corridor of New Orleans.
0:50:32 And the spot was kind of like, and kind of a tourist trap, it was called Bourbon House.
0:50:36 The food was good.
0:50:37 Chef Eric, I don’t want you to see this and think you don’t make good and dewy sausages,
0:50:41 but it was overpriced.
0:50:44 And so I had to, we had to maintain this like fine dining facade on a street where almost
0:50:49 everyone is like throwing up, fighting or is half naked.
0:50:51 So there was this policy.
0:50:52 We had these giant glass windows next to the tables.
0:50:56 So if you’re eating at a Bourbon house, you can look out onto Bourbon Street and you can
0:50:59 see as you’re dining a full panoramic view of all these partiers, throwing beads, boobs,
0:51:05 all that.
0:51:06 We had this policy where if we’re serving someone, we can’t look onto Bourbon Street
0:51:12 if something crazy is happening.
0:51:13 So there’s a fight or something like that.
0:51:15 We can’t look, right?
0:51:16 So there is a dude.
0:51:17 I remember I’m fucking serving a table.
0:51:19 There’s a dude in a Batman mask, butt naked with 12 pairs of beads, just jerking it.
0:51:25 Yeah.
0:51:26 Back to jerking it.
0:51:27 He’s jerking it, right?
0:51:28 And every single person at the restaurants looking out there like, look, they’re taking
0:51:32 pictures and the manager, Steven, looks at me like, keep your fucking eyes on the table.
0:51:36 So I’m serving these people and I’m like, you want red beans and rice or would you like
0:51:40 some Creole fucking…
0:51:42 And there’s just this dude and ultimately the manager went out and escorted him further
0:51:48 down Bourbon Street.
0:51:49 But I would get off working around midnight every night.
0:51:51 And that was when Bourbon Street is at its most chaotic.
0:51:55 And so I lived in the French Quarter as well.
0:51:57 So I lived about 12 blocks down Bourbon in a small Creole cottage, a cute little like
0:52:04 orange old school New Orleans one story spot.
0:52:07 I lived in the attic above these gay meth dealers named Frankie and Johnny.
0:52:13 And so I would get off work and I would basically have to walk through like this battlefield.
0:52:19 I mean, it was a battlefield.
0:52:21 Getting home was out of like the Warriors movie.
0:52:24 It was almost impossible.
0:52:25 The best of humanity on display.
0:52:26 Yeah.
0:52:27 In Kensington, Philadelphia, but just alcohol.
0:52:29 You know what I mean?
0:52:30 Oh, it’s all alcohol.
0:52:31 But it’s a lot of, well, a lot of visitors, right?
0:52:33 From outside.
0:52:34 Almost all visitors.
0:52:35 Yeah.
0:52:36 And that kind of would set the flow for the weekend.
0:52:38 For example, if the Raiders were playing the Saints, Raider Nation, and they do not
0:52:42 play around.
0:52:43 If it’s the Patriots, that’s a whole different crowd.
0:52:45 They think they’re better than everybody else.
0:52:47 Yeah.
0:52:48 Well, they technically are better than everybody else.
0:52:49 But yeah.
0:52:50 But people from Massachusetts aren’t like the cream of the crop in terms of like American
0:52:54 superiority.
0:52:55 Strong words.
0:52:56 Yeah.
0:52:57 What do you mean?
0:52:58 No, that’s, I’m sure they won’t take that as the best.
0:53:00 They are good at fighting, though.
0:53:01 I’ll tell you that.
0:53:02 All right.
0:53:03 Great.
0:53:04 New England has hands compared to some places.
0:53:05 Which places are those?
0:53:06 Colorado?
0:53:07 Colorado has no hands.
0:53:09 Yeah.
0:53:10 The West Coast, not too much hands.
0:53:12 That’s why you feel safe talking shit about Colorado.
0:53:15 But if you get to the corn fed parts of East Colorado, I mean, these guys, you got hands
0:53:19 bigger than my head.
0:53:20 They’ll beat the shit out of me.
0:53:21 But anyways, I’d walk back to my house on Bourbon Street and I would be sifting through
0:53:25 this battlefield.
0:53:26 And I had a friend at the time who was like, you know, we should do a taxi cab confessions
0:53:30 type spin off where we ask people to confess a deep dark secret and we posted the next
0:53:35 day.
0:53:36 And so we tried that and it went viral on Instagram instantly.
0:53:41 It was mostly incest stories, you know, people admitting to incest.
0:53:44 I know it’s a common Southern stereotype, but there’s some truth to it.
0:53:49 There was some murder confessions.
0:53:50 That was pretty crazy.
0:53:52 We never really posted any of those.
0:53:54 But how did you get people to confess?
0:53:56 Pretty easy.
0:53:57 And New Orleans has a homicide solve rate of like 22%.
0:54:00 So I mean, most of the time, they’ll just tell you.
0:54:04 I remember I was walking down Bourbon and I asked this kid, I was like, what’s your
0:54:07 deepest dark secret?
0:54:08 And he told me he’s like, I just smoked a dude in the Magnolia to project housing the
0:54:12 third world project development.
0:54:14 And they said, I just smoked a dude in the Magnolia playground for touching my sister
0:54:18 and lusting his sister.
0:54:19 And I was like, what?
0:54:20 And he was like, yeah, look it up.
0:54:21 And I was like, all right, hold on.
0:54:23 And it was like, man found dead in central city playground.
0:54:26 Like I appeared to be homeless, shot execution style.
0:54:29 So I told the kid, I was like, why’d you tell me that?
0:54:31 He’s like, man, put that shit out there.
0:54:33 Like I’m trying to go viral.
0:54:34 Like tag me too.
0:54:35 Oh, I don’t think you understand that even if you’re a juvenile, he was probably 15.
0:54:39 You can get juvenile life in Louisiana for a homicide, even if it’s justified.
0:54:44 So I just deleted the footage in front of him.
0:54:47 I was like, I’m going to delete this footage.
0:54:49 See that trash button?
0:54:50 I’m hitting it right now.
0:54:51 I don’t tell anyone that again.
0:54:53 And he was like, all right, I appreciate it.
0:54:54 And he walked off.
0:54:55 But it’s the little moments like that.
0:54:58 Anything for the gram, I guess.
0:54:59 Yeah.
0:55:00 After a while though, it became sort of a repetitive, you know, because there’s only
0:55:04 so many things that people can confess to that are, that go viral, you know, and just.
0:55:08 Oh, so you were trying to see like what?
0:55:10 Well, I mean, there’s the incest one.
0:55:13 Some people just say like, I eat ass.
0:55:15 That was like every, everyone said that or like I cheated on someone or I’ve seen a surprising
0:55:20 number of people on your channel say, mentioned eating ass.
0:55:24 Yeah.
0:55:25 The way how seriously you said that will live in my head for the rest of my life.
0:55:32 That’s good.
0:55:33 Yeah.
0:55:34 I want you, I want to live in your head saying that a lot of people mentioned eating ass.
0:55:39 Yeah.
0:55:40 A lot of people do mention that.
0:55:42 Yeah.
0:55:43 Also, that’s kind of where I developed this magnetism for freestyle rapping.
0:55:47 You know, everywhere I go, people rap.
0:55:50 I’m not sure why.
0:55:51 I mean, as a former rapper myself in middle school and for the first year of high school,
0:55:56 I think that maybe like it takes one to know one, but everywhere I go, people start rapping.
0:56:01 If you and me went outside of this podcast studio and walked around for five minutes,
0:56:04 I can find somebody.
0:56:05 It’s rapping.
0:56:06 I can tell who raps or who can rap, who has eight bars in their head that they’re ready
0:56:10 to go.
0:56:11 I think you’re also, there’s something about you that gives them, creates the safe space
0:56:15 to perform their art.
0:56:18 Yeah.
0:56:19 I mean, the quarter confession series was the first time you saw the suit.
0:56:23 That’s when the suit came out.
0:56:24 Yeah.
0:56:25 It was kind of like a Ron Burgundy, Eric Andre inspired type of thing.
0:56:27 Where’d you get that suit?
0:56:29 Goodwill.
0:56:30 Goodwill.
0:56:31 Yeah.
0:56:32 Always.
0:56:33 Wow.
0:56:34 I was playing checkers here playing chess.
0:56:35 Good job.
0:56:36 I mean, Goodwill has a surprising amount of identical gray suits for sale.
0:56:39 Yeah.
0:56:40 I’ve actually gotten suits that are three stores before.
0:56:42 They’re great.
0:56:43 Yeah.
0:56:44 A lot of people donate suits and I was going for oversized suits, which are the cheapest
0:56:46 ones there.
0:56:47 Yeah.
0:56:48 12 bucks, 12 to $25 every time for the outfit.
0:56:52 If I wanted to look super sophisticated, like I’m from another era, I would go to the thrift
0:56:58 store.
0:56:59 Yeah.
0:57:00 Because they’re usually like this.
0:57:01 There’s like the patterns they have.
0:57:03 It’s just like a more sophisticated suit, which is what you kind of picked out.
0:57:07 It made you look ridiculous, but in the best kind of way.
0:57:10 The tough part about quarter confessions for me is that everybody that was featured, for
0:57:15 the most part, would more or less regret being a part of the show.
0:57:18 Yeah.
0:57:19 And that over time just gave me a bad feeling where I was like, “You know what?
0:57:24 I kind of feel like I am doing an ambush interview, especially because I’m presenting
0:57:28 a so agreeable, yet the intention is to make something funny.”
0:57:32 Yeah.
0:57:33 And I get that that’s what people do in the satire sphere.
0:57:36 I’m sure LEG and Bruno and Borat did the same thing.
0:57:40 And I don’t think it’s unethical because that’s all for the purposes of comedy.
0:57:43 It is what it is.
0:57:44 But for me, I wanted to do something different.
0:57:47 Yeah.
0:57:49 Because there’s an intimacy to confessing a thing.
0:57:51 Right.
0:57:52 And then you just don’t really realize the implications of that.
0:57:55 And the atmosphere of Bourbon Street is like, “Anything goes, it’s a free spirited place.”
0:57:59 But if you transport that energy digitally to a different place like Colorado, they might
0:58:05 look at it and be like, “Oh, man.”
0:58:08 Different place in time, like five years later, that same person has a family and stuff
0:58:12 like this and all of a sudden they’re talking about eating ass.
0:58:15 Right.
0:58:16 Exactly.
0:58:17 Kids have to think about that.
0:58:18 Or imagine if there’s a video of your grandma or grandpa out there when he was a kid talking
0:58:21 about eating ass.
0:58:22 That’s a horrible experience.
0:58:24 To discover that about your respected elder later in life, it’s tough.
0:58:28 I don’t even know where to go with that.
0:58:30 But is literally the opening question was, “Tell me your deepest, darkest secret?”
0:58:34 Yeah.
0:58:35 You just come up to somebody like that?
0:58:37 Yeah.
0:58:38 How often do you get like a no?
0:58:41 What’s the yes to no ratio?
0:58:42 Well, the weird thing is we don’t really extract answers from people.
0:58:46 What makes a good interview is when they’re ready to talk.
0:58:49 The more you have to talk and try to get an answer out of them, it’s just not a good
0:58:53 vibe.
0:58:54 We kind of look for people who appear to be already ready to talk, open body language.
0:59:00 They seem confident and verbose and we approach them first.
0:59:03 There’s a look.
0:59:04 We wouldn’t approach a shy person and be like, “Come on, tell me.”
0:59:06 No.
0:59:07 What about a person with pain in their eyes?
0:59:09 Oh, yeah.
0:59:10 We’re interviewing them.
0:59:11 Yeah.
0:59:12 So they’re ready to talk.
0:59:13 They’re just not…
0:59:14 Yeah.
0:59:15 There’s different ways to be ready.
0:59:16 Right.
0:59:17 I see homeless people a lot and they always look fascinating.
0:59:21 And the ones I’ve talked to are always fascinating.
0:59:23 Yeah.
0:59:24 We just did a video at the Vegas, in the Vegas tunnels, just like trying to, obviously
0:59:27 it got taken down by Fox, but whatever.
0:59:29 I was going to make a joke that I didn’t see it.
0:59:33 We tried to help a lot of them by getting them IDs.
0:59:37 When I made the documentary, I had this idea that if I…
0:59:39 The big roadblock for them is getting identification.
0:59:42 Without IDs, you can’t check into a homeless shelter, you can’t do day labor, you can’t
0:59:46 qualify for housing, nothing.
0:59:48 So when we interviewed them, they’d basically tell us, “If I had my ID, I wouldn’t be here.”
0:59:53 And so we said, “Okay, we’re going to really help this time.
0:59:56 We’re not just going to talk to them about their struggles.
0:59:58 We’re going to actively go out and get them IDs at the DMV.”
1:00:02 So we did that and nothing really changed in their life.
1:00:08 And we sat down with a recovery specialist who works directly with them day in and day
1:00:11 out.
1:00:12 He explained to me that he’s been trying to do the same thing I tried to do in a one-week
1:00:16 period for the past 10 years.
1:00:19 And that they have deeper underlying traumas and pain that need to be dealt with far before
1:00:25 they even take the steps to enter society as a housed person.
1:00:29 That’s a heavy truth right there.
1:00:32 Breaking that shame cycle has to come first because you got to think, right, like I’m
1:00:36 from a generation that romanticizes vagrancy and homelessness to a certain extent if it’s
1:00:41 called van life or if it is done in a way that’s sort of like Rolling Stone, Willie Nelson,
1:00:47 hit the road.
1:00:49 People who are above 50, they feel really embarrassed to be in the spiral of homelessness.
1:00:55 They feel like failures.
1:00:56 A lot of them have kids who they weren’t there for.
1:00:58 That’s not the kind of pain that can be dealt with by giving someone a tiny home.
1:01:02 It’s a good step forward, but for someone to really make a change, they have to want
1:01:08 to change.
1:01:09 And so it’s how do you help someone and guide themselves in the right direction?
1:01:15 And if you’re too paternalistic and you use shame as a method to get them to clean up,
1:01:19 they’re going to end up right where they started.
1:01:21 That’s a tough truth to accept because a lot of people want a quick fix to things.
1:01:25 And I don’t blame people who go out and give baloney sandwiches out to the homeless.
1:01:29 In each case, it’s probably its own little puzzle.
1:01:33 Each person is so complex.
1:01:34 Now imagine drug abuse, what that does to the brain, childhood trauma, there’s so much
1:01:39 to unpack.
1:01:40 And then just the belief that they’re the undesirables, that they don’t deserve to be
1:01:46 a part of society because they failed a fundamental obligation like taking care of their kids.
1:01:51 If you could take a small tangent to, you mentioned this Vegas video, which is fascinating.
1:01:58 It was taken down recently by YouTube, or YouTube took it down based on Fox 5, I guess.
1:02:07 So the documentary was an hour and 45 minutes.
1:02:09 We used 10 seconds of a news clip that was publicly broadcast by Fox 5 Vegas.
1:02:15 And according to the Copyright Act of 1976, you’re allowed to use any publicly broadcast
1:02:20 news clip in a transformative capacity in any documentary film or research paper or
1:02:25 broadcast or anything.
1:02:28 They specifically, this corporation called Gray Media that controls the TV stations in
1:02:33 almost every small town.
1:02:34 They had lawyers hit up YouTube, and YouTube complied with an illegal copyright strike
1:02:40 to get our video immediately removed.
1:02:42 And I’m a YouTube partner, I’m in the YouTube Partner Program.
1:02:45 So to think that I wasn’t forewarned is, it’s a bit strange, but it also smells like corruption
1:02:50 to me to a certain extent.
1:02:52 Yeah.
1:02:53 You shouldn’t have that amount of power.
1:02:54 At least they should have the power to just silence that five-second clip, maybe.
1:03:00 Yeah.
1:03:01 But I’m taking them to court because I have the means to be able to do so.
1:03:05 I’m a larger creator.
1:03:06 I have an audience.
1:03:07 I have the financial backing to do it.
1:03:09 I can’t imagine how many people out there are smaller creators with not as much consumer
1:03:14 of a fan base they can mobilize against someone like Fox 5, or the money to go to court.
1:03:20 So I want to take them all the way there to set precedent for future cases so that these
1:03:25 giant mainstream media conglomerates can’t copyright strike documentary filmmakers at
1:03:32 will.
1:03:33 It doesn’t make sense.
1:03:34 Oh, thank you for doing that.
1:03:35 That’s really, really, really important.
1:03:36 And that’s really powerful.
1:03:37 And it might hopefully empower YouTube to also put pressure on people to not.
1:03:44 YouTube is in a difficult position because there’s so much content out there, there’s
1:03:48 so many claims.
1:03:49 It’s hard to investigate, but YouTube should be in a place where they push back against
1:03:53 this kind of stuff as a first line of defense, especially to protect small creators.
1:03:58 So what you’re doing is really, really important.
1:04:00 Appreciate it, man.
1:04:01 It sucks that it was taken down.
1:04:03 Do you have any hope?
1:04:05 Well, I talked to my YouTube partner today, and he said that the Fox 5 lawyers have two
1:04:08 weeks to comply with my counter-appeal.
1:04:11 But I spent 20 grand on human voiceovers in five different languages.
1:04:16 I invested probably in total like 70k into this video.
1:04:20 So even if it gets reinstated, the steam’s kind of been taken out of its trajectory.
1:04:24 But also it’s just like a really important video is good for the world.
1:04:27 Yeah.
1:04:28 Why the hell would Fox 5 have an vested interest in having the video taken down?
1:04:33 I just hate it when people do that to videos or to creators that are doing good in the
1:04:37 world.
1:04:38 Yeah.
1:04:39 It’s not an expose on the mayor of Las Vegas.
1:04:40 It’s an attempt to show the civilian public how to get involved in a local nonprofit and
1:04:44 potentially intervene in the lives of the tunnel people.
1:04:46 Well, Fox 5, the other Channel 5, as you said.
1:04:49 Yeah.
1:04:50 Well, thank you for pushing back and highlighting it.
1:04:53 Hopefully it gets brought back up.
1:04:55 But yeah, defending other creators so that other creators can take risks and don’t get
1:05:00 taken down for stupid reasons.
1:05:03 So Quarter Confessions was written?
1:05:06 No.
1:05:07 It was all real-life reality TV documentary.
1:05:10 And it caught the attention of a larger company called Doing Things Media.
1:05:16 And they contacted me pretty much like a week after I graduated from college in the May
1:05:20 of 2019.
1:05:21 And they said, “Hey, how would you like to produce a show?”
1:05:25 I was like, “What do you mean?”
1:05:27 They were like, “We’ll get you an RV, we’ll pay you $45K a year, we’ll pay for gas for
1:05:34 food for two hotels a week, go out there, make content, and we’ll be in the background
1:05:40 just powering it all.”
1:05:42 And that was the birth of All Gas No Breaks?
1:05:45 Yes.
1:05:46 I mean, All Gas No Breaks was named after a book that I wrote called All Gas No Breaks,
1:05:50 A Hitchhiker’s Diary, which chronicled the 70-day journey that we’re just talking about.
1:05:54 It’s a tough book to find, by the way.
1:05:56 Oh yeah, there’s only a few copies left.
1:05:58 I’m thinking about doing a reprint at some point down the line, but I sold off the last
1:06:01 100 copies like a month and a half ago.
1:06:03 Yeah.
1:06:04 Until then, you guys should go read On The Robot jet camera.
1:06:07 Yeah.
1:06:08 You should read it.
1:06:09 I don’t know if you read it before.
1:06:10 Look, Get On The Road by Jack Kerouac.
1:06:11 It’s great.
1:06:12 It’s the best.
1:06:13 What’s your birth date Allison?
1:06:14 April 23rd.
1:06:15 Okay.
1:06:16 I’m a tourist.
1:06:17 Coming soon.
1:06:18 Shhh, typical tourist.
1:06:19 Yeah.
1:06:20 I’m a typical tourist man.
1:06:21 I’m a Scorpio Moon.
1:06:22 Should write that down.
1:06:23 What’s the time when you were born?
1:06:25 1130.
1:06:26 1130 at night?
1:06:27 Of course.
1:06:28 Yeah.
1:06:29 Typical.
1:06:30 This guy knew it.
1:06:31 That’s the real science.
1:06:32 Yeah.
1:06:33 Anyways, so the idea of All Gas No Breaks as a show was to combine the, I guess, road
1:06:39 dog ethos of the All Gas No Breaks book with the presentation and editing style of quarter
1:06:44 confessions.
1:06:45 So it was to take quarter confessions on the road that was pretty much like a simulated
1:06:50 hitchhiking experience, but with the editing and like punchy effects of quarter confessions,
1:06:56 which is like, I wear a suit, we do the fast zoom ins, little effects, stuff like that.
1:07:01 It was a, man, those were the best years.
1:07:04 It was just so, it was just so fun.
1:07:05 I mean, imagine you’re fresh out of college.
1:07:07 You were just a doorman interviewing people about like, you know, making out with their
1:07:12 cousin and stuff, and then boom, this company that you’ve never even heard of is willing
1:07:17 to buy you an RV and give you 45K a year, which to me at the time was more money than
1:07:22 I could possibly imagine.
1:07:23 So I called my dad, I was like, dad, I need you to find me an RV because he’s the only
1:07:27 guy I know who knows about cars and even he doesn’t know much about cars.
1:07:30 So he’s like, all right, I’m on it.
1:07:31 So the RV was 20,000 and the first event that we were called to cover was the Burning Man
1:07:37 Festival.
1:07:38 And that was tough because Burning Man is not too keen on filming.
1:07:43 Supposed to be a non-commercialized, you know, escape from the, from reality.
1:07:48 I mean, they have a gift economy set up.
1:07:49 It’s based upon like mutual participation and non-exploitation.
1:07:54 And so the idea of making a Burning Man video was tough at first because burners, oftentimes,
1:08:00 and this is not all of them, but are pretty well off in general, a lot of them have tech
1:08:06 jobs are pretty high up in Silicon Valley.
1:08:08 And Burning Man is where they go to take off, you know, to take the edge off and basically
1:08:13 become their burner persona.
1:08:15 On the playa, they become reborn and they take ketamine and they wear kaleidoscope glasses
1:08:19 and steampunk hats and they, you know, snort MDMA and they run around the sand.
1:08:24 Listen to that.
1:08:25 Do you snort MDMA?
1:08:26 That’s what I need to do.
1:08:27 Yes, you can.
1:08:28 I thought it’s a pill.
1:08:29 I didn’t know.
1:08:30 It’s better to take it in a pill or water, but you can snort MDMA.
1:08:33 I definitely need to take MDMA.
1:08:35 I’m already full of love, but like that, I’d probably go on another level.
1:08:38 Yeah, don’t snort it because it’ll only last like 90 minutes.
1:08:40 Let me write that down.
1:08:43 So anyways, we didn’t know what to do because we tried to film.
1:08:45 Don’t snort.
1:08:46 The initial idea for All Gas No Breaks was to, instead of asking people what’s your deepest
1:08:51 darkest secret, it was what’s the craziest trip you’ve been on?
1:08:56 So the idea was to not satirize drunk people, but satirize people who are fried on acid.
1:09:02 So we went to Boulder real quick, did a test interview with some lady who talked about seeing
1:09:06 ancestral aliens during a peyote retreat.
1:09:10 And so it’s pretty easy to extract trip reports from hippies and gutter punks and stuff like
1:09:15 that or Oogles.
1:09:17 So we go to Burning Man.
1:09:20 We start asking people what’s your craziest trip story.
1:09:22 And they didn’t have the same type of free-flowing storytelling style that like on the street
1:09:27 Crust Punk in New Orleans might have where they’re like, “I don’t give a fuck.
1:09:31 I’ll tell you whatever.”
1:09:32 These people were very bottled up about what they were willing to disclose.
1:09:36 So we went on Burning Man Radio and we did a broadcast and we said, “Hey, we’re psychedelic
1:09:41 journalists.”
1:09:42 It was me and my friend Ciel at the time.
1:09:43 I said, “We’re psychedelic journalists.
1:09:46 We’re parked on Tan and I,” which is across street in Black Rock City.
1:09:49 And we said, “We have a 1998 Catalina Coachman Sport.
1:09:53 It’s an RV.
1:09:54 We’ve set up a podcast studio.
1:09:56 We’re doing a show about psychedelic voyages.”
1:09:59 Yeah.
1:10:00 And so, lo and behold, two hours later, we had 10 people lined up at the RV, willing
1:10:06 to talk.
1:10:07 So that vetted people in advance for us.
1:10:10 And so we did a couple interviews and that was that.
1:10:13 What were some of the stories from the Chirp Reports?
1:10:16 There was this lady named Razma who said that she was known in several circles in Berkeley
1:10:21 for being multi-orgasmic and could create multiple repeated climaxes using only her
1:10:29 mind by like squinting her eyes and squeezing her eyes together so much that the pleasure
1:10:34 spiral just went crazy.
1:10:37 I feel like I talked to several people like that at Berkeley.
1:10:40 Yeah.
1:10:41 You know what I’m talking about?
1:10:42 Not that.
1:10:43 Well, yeah, that lady.
1:10:44 I think she manifests herself in many forms.
1:10:47 Yeah.
1:10:48 Right.
1:10:49 But still, it was on the cruder end.
1:10:50 There was one guy named Kimbo Slyce was his burner name.
1:10:53 He talked about taking a shit after taking like a quarter of mushrooms and how he was
1:10:58 like seeing his childhood and visualizing his past life as the turds were flowing into
1:11:03 the toilet and just talks about the psychedelic union between pooing and taking shrimps.
1:11:10 So he was very visual with his words.
1:11:12 Yeah.
1:11:13 So there was stuff like that.
1:11:14 I interviewed Alex Gray, which was super cool about his first trip in San Francisco
1:11:17 when he was in 1971, shortly after the summer of love.
1:11:22 I got to do some pretty cool interviews, but still it was a semi-ambush style.
1:11:27 I wouldn’t say that we were doing journalism yet.
1:11:30 It was still comedic video work, you know?
1:11:34 Was there a narrative that tied it together?
1:11:36 It’s like really just a trip comedic almost with the interview and then I go burning man
1:11:41 and then it’s on to the next one.
1:11:43 So I guess that could give a loose structure, but it’s just like a punchy and slapstick
1:11:46 thing.
1:11:49 Everything was going good until we interviewed this guy named DJ soft baby, but he was wearing
1:11:54 a golden leotard with once again kaleidoscope glasses, shirtless dancing and he was eating
1:12:03 chowder out of a plastic bowl.
1:12:07 And he was like, “This chowder is so fucking good.
1:12:08 He’s like, “This is the best chowder I’ve ever had in my life.”
1:12:11 And he starts putting the chowder on his face and he’s like, “I want the chowder all over
1:12:14 me.”
1:12:15 Yeah.
1:12:16 And so we just go, “Hey man, can you just do a dance for us real quick just for some
1:12:19 b-roll?”
1:12:20 He does a dance.
1:12:21 He posted on Instagram the next morning doing things media CEO calls me, read, he says,
1:12:26 “All of our pages are down.”
1:12:29 And he’s like, “That guy you filmed dancing last night on drugs, putting chowder on his
1:12:32 face?”
1:12:33 That guy is at the top of MIT.
1:12:35 Top of MIT.
1:12:36 I don’t understand what that means.
1:12:38 That’s like saying, you know, my brother’s a rocket science, and he’s like head of NASA
1:12:43 or whatever.
1:12:44 Well, I mean, the guy knows people in Boston.
1:12:48 Okay.
1:12:49 He’s not in the Whitey Bolger sense, but in the Reverse sense.
1:12:52 I’ve trouble believing the DJ Soft Baby.
1:12:55 Oh, DJ Soft Baby was major.
1:12:56 It could have been Harvard.
1:12:57 It could have been.
1:12:59 But it wasn’t UMass.
1:13:01 I don’t think there’s anybody that’s at the head of MIT who’s putting, what was it all
1:13:06 over his face?
1:13:08 Chowder.
1:13:09 Chowder.
1:13:10 Well, then you haven’t been the Burning Man yet.
1:13:11 Okay.
1:13:12 I’m not the Burning Man.
1:13:13 But I would have to consult my colleagues at MIT if they know DJ Soft Baby.
1:13:19 So whoever he– Probably was Harvard, let’s put it on them.
1:13:22 Okay.
1:13:23 The top of Harvard.
1:13:24 So he made some calls, you know, to the tops, to the heads of big tech, and got all the
1:13:30 Doing Things Media pages taken down.
1:13:32 At the time, that was like a vast network of pages.
1:13:35 And we ended up having to take, obviously the video came down, and he held the entire
1:13:40 network of Instagram pages hostage.
1:13:43 And so that was a, he made us agree to never post that video again, and then somehow got
1:13:47 all of our pages reinstated.
1:13:49 So that was my first brush, was like, you know, powerful people on drugs.
1:13:54 And that was probably my last brush with powerful people on drugs.
1:13:56 So what did you transition into from there?
1:13:59 I think after Burning Man, we went to the south, went to Talladega Race Weekend, went
1:14:04 to a Donald Trump Jr. book signing, went to a Juggalo adjacent fetish mansion in central
1:14:10 Florida called the Sausage Castle.
1:14:13 Juggalo adjacent Sausage, okay, can you, can you run that by me again?
1:14:18 Juggalo adjacent fetish mansion in central Florida.
1:14:22 Fetish mansion in central Florida.
1:14:24 Juggalo adjacent, I mean, every single one of those words that you like, needs a book
1:14:28 or something.
1:14:29 Right.
1:14:30 So, by the way, who are the Juggalos?
1:14:33 Is this ICP?
1:14:34 Just ICP fans.
1:14:35 ICP fans, okay.
1:14:36 But I say adjacent because it’s not a Juggalo mansion, but there’s a lot of Juggalos who
1:14:39 kick it at the mansion.
1:14:40 It’s Juggalo friendly.
1:14:41 Oh, okay.
1:14:42 Juggalo friendly.
1:14:43 Yeah.
1:14:44 Because they get made fun of in a lot of places.
1:14:45 Oh, so it’s not, okay, got it.
1:14:47 And Juggalos say outrageous shit, you know, and they embarrass themselves and they fight
1:14:50 a lot.
1:14:51 So they’re kind of, they’re on the FBI’s gang list, which if you ask me, ICP or the, the
1:14:55 Juggalos.
1:14:56 The Juggalos.
1:14:57 If it was the, the head of the Juggalos, it would be Violent J and Shaggy Too Dope.
1:15:02 But there’s associated acts like Twisted and there’s a whole rabbit hole.
1:15:05 Honestly, Tech Nine is sort of a part of that.
1:15:07 Tech Nine.
1:15:08 I don’t know who that is.
1:15:09 Should I know who that is?
1:15:10 I’m not selling touring rappers, despite having sort of not that many streams.
1:15:14 Tech Nine is like, it’s got a huge cult following in Missouri.
1:15:18 This is like, the Juggalos started in Warren, Michigan.
1:15:23 We should also say ACP in St. Claude Posse.
1:15:25 So this is a thing.
1:15:26 This is a movement.
1:15:27 Oh yeah.
1:15:28 If you, if you went to Seattle right now and punched a cop and they booked you in county
1:15:33 jail, you may end up running with the Juggalos.
1:15:37 Running with the Juggalos.
1:15:38 They’re of presence in Pacific Northwest prison system from what I’ve heard.
1:15:42 Can you tell a Juggalo from like a distance?
1:15:45 Will they say whoop whoop?
1:15:46 So if you see a Juggalo, they’ll say that.
1:15:49 Also like, I’ll try to, I’ll try to look after that.
1:15:52 They’re kind of, it’s called the dark carnivals, the mythology they abide by.
1:15:57 What do they define themselves with?
1:15:58 What’s the ideology?
1:15:59 A family.
1:16:00 A family.
1:16:01 No, I understand.
1:16:02 But what’s the ideology?
1:16:03 What’s the philosophical foundation of the?
1:16:04 They’re anti-racist.
1:16:05 They like to drink Fago and also just like cheap liquor and stuff like that.
1:16:12 They’re, they’re into drugs.
1:16:14 Yeah.
1:16:15 A lot of circles, if you pull out a crack pipe, people will be like, I don’t want to
1:16:18 drink with you anymore.
1:16:19 If you’re at a Juggalo party and someone’s smoking Twiz or something, it’s relatively
1:16:23 accepted.
1:16:26 What’s Twiz?
1:16:27 Meth.
1:16:28 Meth.
1:16:29 Right.
1:16:30 Right.
1:16:31 Lots of tattoos.
1:16:32 Yeah.
1:16:33 The Hatchet Man is the most common one.
1:16:34 So it’s a, it’s a psychopathic records logo.
1:16:35 It’s a cartoon of a clown wheeling a hatchet.
1:16:37 It’s actually a pretty sick logo.
1:16:39 I vaguely remember enjoying some of the ICP music.
1:16:43 It’s good.
1:16:44 Yeah.
1:16:45 It’s pretty good.
1:16:46 It’s funny.
1:16:47 It’s edgy.
1:16:48 Well, they get satirized a lot, but I got love for the clowns.
1:16:50 And also, so when all gas no breaks transitioned away from, you know, rich elite drug parties
1:16:56 and into like the South, that’s when the fun really started to happen.
1:17:00 Living in your RV in Alabama and Florida and stuff is the best.
1:17:03 Why?
1:17:04 Why is it about it?
1:17:05 People are just so friendly down there and it’s warm year round and people are non-judgmental.
1:17:10 It’s just great.
1:17:11 The South gets hated on a lot, especially in the coastal, coastal states.
1:17:15 Mississippi and Alabama are kind of like the butts of a lot of jokes and stuff, but those
1:17:19 are great states.
1:17:20 I love it.
1:17:21 New Mexico.
1:17:22 Albuquerque.
1:17:23 All those.
1:17:24 Oh yeah.
1:17:25 The ABQs.
1:17:26 It’s great.
1:17:27 ABQ, what’s that?
1:17:28 Albuquerque.
1:17:29 It’s what Jesse Pinkman called it as the ABQ.
1:17:30 Oh shit.
1:17:31 I mean, the difference that you bring to the table is intense.
1:17:33 It’s okay.
1:17:34 I met a lady in Albuquerque when I was traveling across the United States and she said take
1:17:38 me with you.
1:17:39 Said I’m sorry man, I can’t.
1:17:41 Yeah.
1:17:42 But I didn’t think about that lady.
1:17:43 I think you made the right call.
1:17:45 I don’t know.
1:17:46 Yeah.
1:17:47 On the road.
1:17:48 Yeah.
1:17:49 By Jack Kerrwack.
1:17:50 Best book I’ve ever read in my life.
1:17:53 There’s a moment when he meets a nice girl on a bus and they have a love affair.
1:17:59 It was good.
1:18:00 Yeah.
1:18:01 On the bus?
1:18:02 No.
1:18:03 No.
1:18:04 They went to California.
1:18:05 Well, yeah.
1:18:06 And there was a love affair on the bus, but it wasn’t sexual.
1:18:07 It was just romantic.
1:18:08 It was.
1:18:09 It was in the air.
1:18:10 It was in the air.
1:18:11 Which there is something in the air on the bus, like a Greyhound mega bus, that type of
1:18:15 situation.
1:18:16 There’s certainly something in the air.
1:18:17 It was a romance.
1:18:19 There is man.
1:18:20 Yeah.
1:18:21 When you travel.
1:18:22 Because it’s like strangers getting together and you’re like feeling each other out, but
1:18:25 you’re in it.
1:18:26 Like you each have a story because you wouldn’t be taking a bus unless you had a story.
1:18:30 So you’re, especially if you’re traveling across country.
1:18:32 There’s something.
1:18:33 Have you ever taken the dollar bus from Philly to New York, the Chinatown bus?
1:18:36 Yeah.
1:18:37 I have.
1:18:38 That’s a great bus.
1:18:39 The people on that.
1:18:40 It’s not a fucking dollar though.
1:18:41 It was.
1:18:42 There’s some that are five bucks.
1:18:43 No.
1:18:44 No.
1:18:45 No.
1:18:46 No.
1:18:47 No.
1:18:48 No.
1:18:49 No.
1:18:50 No.
1:18:51 No.
1:18:52 No.
1:18:53 No.
1:18:54 No.
1:18:55 No.
1:18:56 If you book it way ahead of time, which it’s like $20.
1:18:56 I was like, this is a fucking lie calling a $1.
1:18:57 I got on the train.
1:18:58 I don’t know why I’m swearing.
1:18:59 The Rooster.
1:19:00 Yeah.
1:19:01 Well, it was chilling.
1:19:02 It was awesome.
1:19:03 Well, there’s a nice part of your film of the Rooster.
1:19:04 I forgot about that.
1:19:05 Yeah.
1:19:06 That felt almost fake.
1:19:07 Yeah.
1:19:08 Did you plant the Rooster?
1:19:09 No.
1:19:10 The Rooster.
1:19:11 There’s a place in Ebor City in Tampa where roosters walk around all the time.
1:19:15 And we had a rooster park there right by the main drag for, what did I say, we had
1:19:19 a rooster park?
1:19:21 We had the RV park, just Ebor City for a long time and the rooster laid eggs in the
1:19:25 undercarriage.
1:19:26 Nice.
1:19:27 It was the All Gastronome Breaks thing though.
1:19:28 Yeah.
1:19:29 Yeah.
1:19:30 So it was lots, it was really fun making it.
1:19:31 And then we started All Gastronome Breaks in September of 2019.
1:19:35 Six months later, the country shuts down and everything just hits the fan.
1:19:38 I was actually here in Austin when it shut down.
1:19:41 I was on Sixth Street.
1:19:42 I remember the, I don’t just hang out on Sixth Street all the time, but I was just here.
1:19:46 Yeah, you do.
1:19:47 Come on.
1:19:48 Just be honest.
1:19:49 I do like Sixth Street.
1:19:50 Yeah.
1:19:51 I like East Austin better, but I like Sixth Street too.
1:19:52 So anyways, the NBA shuts down.
1:19:54 Everything’s shutting down.
1:19:55 So I went down to the Dirty Six and I asked this doorman, I was like, are you guys ever
1:19:59 going to shut down?
1:20:00 He was like, fuck no, bro.
1:20:01 The Dirty Six never closes.
1:20:04 And I was like, all right, we’ll see about that next day, plywood.
1:20:09 And then I was like, all right, I thought my career was over when COVID hit.
1:20:12 I was like, what are we going to do?
1:20:15 Nothing’s happening anymore.
1:20:16 There’s no more parties or Talladega races or Burning Man’s to go to.
1:20:20 So I went back to Seattle on the RV and I just spent four months just depressed, living
1:20:25 in the RV trying to figure out what would happen.
1:20:28 But all gas note breaks went on still.
1:20:32 This was the craziest thing about that period of time is that when COVID hit, I’m sure
1:20:36 you remember everything turned political overnight in Seattle.
1:20:42 If you went to a house party, you can get canceled because people were like, oh, you’re
1:20:47 a super spreader.
1:20:48 So if you wanted to socialize, even with a group of four or more, you had to do so with
1:20:53 your phone stamina turned off.
1:20:55 And a lot of people were doing hyper social policing at that time.
1:20:59 Beyond that, in the South and in more conservative places, they were doing the opposite.
1:21:04 They were trying to prove that they could hang out 500 deep with no mask to make a statement
1:21:11 against the establishment.
1:21:12 So you had this polarization that led to more division.
1:21:16 And that’s when the anti-vax protests started.
1:21:19 And I went to Sacramento and the passion was unreal.
1:21:22 This is about two months after the COVID lockdowns began.
1:21:26 And that was my first political video, was at the Sacramento, the California State Capitol
1:21:30 in Sacramento, documenting the, they called it the freedom rally, but that’s typically
1:21:34 like anti-vax stuff.
1:21:36 And it was real intensity.
1:21:39 And that video was my most successful to date at that time.
1:21:44 And so I was like, okay, am I a political reporter now?
1:21:48 Am I covering politics?
1:21:49 Like, what’s going on?
1:21:51 What were the interviews they made up that video?
1:21:54 What kind of, what style of questions were you asking what?
1:21:57 I don’t know if you remember, but I was actually scared when the pandemic started.
1:22:01 I thought that this is something that might kill us all based upon what I was consuming.
1:22:06 And so I’d ask people, what do you think about this lockdown?
1:22:10 And I’ve had people say, you know, I’m immune compromised.
1:22:13 If I get exposed to COVID, I have a 95% fatality rate.
1:22:16 But guess what?
1:22:17 I’d rather be free and dead than a lie, living in fear.
1:22:21 And I was like, wow.
1:22:23 So it was just stuff along those lines.
1:22:24 You had some San Diego surfers there complaining about the beaches being shut down with such
1:22:29 awesome waves were coming.
1:22:30 Yeah.
1:22:31 It’s interesting how that really brought out the worst in people.
1:22:37 Oh yeah.
1:22:38 I’m not sure why, why that is fear, maybe paranoia.
1:22:44 I don’t know.
1:22:45 It really divided people.
1:22:46 It was along the lines, as you mentioned, like triple mask yourself or fight for your
1:22:52 country.
1:22:53 Yeah.
1:22:54 Right.
1:22:55 Exactly.
1:22:56 Like, why is it two options?
1:22:57 That is literally what it was.
1:22:59 Yeah.
1:23:00 It’s wild.
1:23:01 And both groups think they’re fighting for this revival of something.
1:23:04 And so that’s where you really run into problems when you have two polarized groups who both
1:23:08 think that their cause is for the common good.
1:23:11 Mutual understanding is impossible at that juncture.
1:23:14 And so after three months of almost everybody being locked down, George Floyd happens.
1:23:24 And I remember I saw the third precinct burning on my phone in Minneapolis.
1:23:31 And everyone says, Andrew, you have to go cover this.
1:23:37 And I’m somebody, like I said, you know, police violence has been close to my heart
1:23:41 since I was a kid.
1:23:43 And my first thought is I can’t do that.
1:23:46 I’m a comedic reporter.
1:23:47 I can’t go to Minneapolis and cover this.
1:23:50 It’ll be the end of my career.
1:23:52 And I had a friend named Lacey who I went to college with.
1:23:56 And she told me, she was like, bro, this is your chance for you to do something serious.
1:24:00 You can actually create a meaningful piece of reporting like you always wanted to before
1:24:03 quarter confessions and you can turn all gas note breaks into a new source.
1:24:07 So I called Reid, who is the CEO of the company that owned all gas note breaks.
1:24:13 And I was like, look, man, I want to go to Minneapolis.
1:24:15 I was in Orlando at the time.
1:24:16 I was actually at the sausage castle.
1:24:18 And he said–
1:24:19 Sorry, the sausage castle?
1:24:21 Yeah.
1:24:22 The Juggalo mansion.
1:24:23 Oh, right.
1:24:24 Let’s call the sausage castle.
1:24:25 So I’m watching Minneapolis unfold on Lake Street where it was burning.
1:24:31 And I got to the Orlando airport and I booked a flight without– I booked it on my own card.
1:24:37 I didn’t consult my boss or anything.
1:24:39 And I was sitting in my seat on the flight and he straight up told me.
1:24:43 He’s like, if you fuck this up and this destroys the brand, we’re getting a different host.
1:24:50 If you mess this up and you turn our show away from a party show about drinking and
1:24:57 drugs and all that stuff and you make this a social justice show, you’re done.
1:25:04 But I was like, I just turned my phone off.
1:25:06 I got to the Minneapolis airport on the second night of the riots.
1:25:10 And when I got to the airport, there was National Guardsmen in the airport.
1:25:14 And it was like a call of duty mission, the one in the airport.
1:25:18 And on the speaker, they say, if you’re arriving here right now, you are not permitted to go
1:25:23 anywhere outside of the airport.
1:25:25 National Guardsmen will escort you to your Uber or to your car.
1:25:29 They’re going to take a picture of your ID.
1:25:30 They’re going to figure out where you’re going.
1:25:32 You are not permitted to go outside tonight.
1:25:35 And so Lacey picks me up, there’s two people in the back, two of her homegirls wearing
1:25:39 like shiesty masks.
1:25:40 I’m like, what are we doing?
1:25:42 Where are we going?
1:25:43 And she goes, we’re going to go film the riot.
1:25:44 We’re going to Lake Street.
1:25:46 And so we drive down there.
1:25:48 Kmart is burning.
1:25:49 Target is burning.
1:25:51 Everything is on fire.
1:25:54 She has the Sony A7.
1:25:56 She gives me a microphone and she’s like, go talk to that guy.
1:25:59 And that was a guy with a Molotov cocktail on his hand who had just burned Kmart down.
1:26:05 And so I go, what should I ask him?
1:26:06 She goes, what’s on your mind?
1:26:09 So I walk up to him and I’m like, what’s on your mind?
1:26:11 He said something like everything that was happening here was supposed to happen.
1:26:15 This is how we feel.
1:26:17 Is it right?
1:26:18 No.
1:26:19 Is this going to benefit the community?
1:26:20 No.
1:26:21 But this is how we feel.
1:26:22 This is how we feel.
1:26:23 That’s pretty powerful.
1:26:24 Yeah.
1:26:25 But through a lot of the documenting that you do, this is how we feel is like screaming
1:26:32 through that.
1:26:33 Yeah.
1:26:34 And I noticed that aside from a group called Unicorn Riot, there was no one else actually
1:26:37 interviewing the protesters.
1:26:39 The local news was on the bridge 15, not 15, but five blocks away, filming just the scene
1:26:46 itself, just the fire.
1:26:48 But I saw some crazy things off camera too.
1:26:51 I saw.
1:26:52 So there was kind of two groups there.
1:26:54 There was like the anarchists, more mobilized protesters.
1:26:57 And then there was just mostly African American community members who were just pissed who
1:27:03 had nothing to do with the organized resistance.
1:27:04 And they were all kind of joining forces to riot.
1:27:07 And there was this anarchist kid who ran up to White Castle with like a Molotov cocktail.
1:27:14 And he was about to throw it at White Castle and this Black D ran up to him and grabbed
1:27:18 his arm and he’s like, “We fuck with White Castle.”
1:27:21 And I was like, “What?”
1:27:22 And so you see, if you go on Lake Street, every business is burned, White Castle remains.
1:27:27 I also saw these dudes rip this ATM out of a bank and hit it with sledgehammers.
1:27:34 They were a group of friends hitting it with sledgehammers, right?
1:27:36 They’re hitting it with sledgehammers.
1:27:37 Boom.
1:27:38 All of a sudden, money starts spraying out of the ATM.
1:27:42 Like I’ve never seen some shit like this, like pouring out of it.
1:27:44 And then these group of friends who were just united and getting it open, start fighting
1:27:49 each other for the money as it’s flying out of it.
1:27:51 And so it was like a joker from the Batman’s army type vibes, but I got shot in the ass
1:27:58 by the National Guard.
1:27:59 It was no good.
1:28:00 Like a what?
1:28:01 A rubber bullet?
1:28:02 Yeah.
1:28:03 Yeah.
1:28:04 Not shot.
1:28:05 I feel like.
1:28:06 Honestly, it hurt.
1:28:07 Yeah.
1:28:08 It hurt.
1:28:09 I’m not sure what I was expecting as an answer to that question.
1:28:10 Yeah.
1:28:11 I liked it.
1:28:12 It was good.
1:28:13 At that point, I posted the video and it was very well received and that was the pivotal
1:28:18 point where I realized that everything was going to change.
1:28:20 I mean, there was a, still kind of a comedic element to the way you do conversations or
1:28:26 the way you edit.
1:28:28 So did you see yourself as a potentially like a John Stuart type of character at first?
1:28:33 But you know, I just think human beings are just funny in general.
1:28:36 Yeah.
1:28:37 The absurdity of it.
1:28:38 Cool thing about John Stuart is like, I generally like to say that anybody who works for corporate
1:28:43 media, whether it be Comedy Central or anything owned by Time Warner, Fox, MSNBC, they can’t
1:28:49 say what they want because in order to climb up in those organizations, you have to appease
1:28:53 the narrative of the company that you’re working for to rise in the ranks.
1:28:57 John Stuart, I feel like has so much clout in the media world that I’m pretty sure he
1:29:03 can say whatever he wants.
1:29:04 Like, I actually don’t think that John Stuart is controlled by anybody.
1:29:07 I really don’t.
1:29:08 I think that he can go on the show and talk about whatever.
1:29:12 I do think that certain people have broken the brains of, COVID broke the brains of
1:29:17 a lot of really great people I admire.
1:29:20 Trump broke the brains of a lot of people I admire, like to where Trump derangement
1:29:25 syndrome became a thing.
1:29:27 You can’t see the world quite as clearly because of it.
1:29:30 And I think John Stuart is quite a genius at like stepping away, even though the world
1:29:38 needed him in that time, stepping away during that moment of Trump and coming back now,
1:29:46 sort of being able to reflect being sort of that other statesman.
1:29:49 My favorite John Stuart moment that illustrates that perfectly is whenever he went on the
1:29:54 Colbert show and he was just joking around with Stephen Colbert, who I think is a full
1:29:59 blown propagandist, about the Wuhan lab leak theory.
1:30:04 He was just goofing around.
1:30:05 He was like, “It’s called the Coronavirus Lab and they had it before.
1:30:09 And now what do we have?”
1:30:11 And it was like, you could see in Stephen Colbert that he was like, gun to his head
1:30:16 type shit where he’s like, “John, John, stop joking about that.”
1:30:20 And that made me realize like, “Oh, everything that John Stuart did, especially for the 9/11
1:30:25 first responders, he’s a true American and not in the sense of like the different political
1:30:31 parties want you to believe as an American.
1:30:35 Not a do your part in social distance, American.
1:30:38 Not a wave your Trump flag in the back of your pickup truck, American.
1:30:42 Just a guy who genuinely stands up for what’s right.”
1:30:45 There’s a degree to which you can be in those positions easily captured by group think,
1:30:51 though, even when you’re not controlled by bosses and money and all that kind of stuff.
1:30:56 I think John Stuart was mostly resistant, but it’s hard.
1:31:00 His position is difficult.
1:31:01 I think he’s done the best job though.
1:31:02 If someone in that obviously Democrat connected corporate media economy, he seems to be the
1:31:08 freest talker.
1:31:10 Yeah.
1:31:11 So this is when you first became famous.
1:31:14 I’m not even sure what fame means.
1:31:16 I mean, I just see myself as me.
1:31:17 When did you get the shades?
1:31:19 Oh, that was on tour.
1:31:20 That was, that’s a whole, the shades, that’s a dark time.
1:31:24 But this, I didn’t make like-
1:31:28 This is a meme really.
1:31:29 I don’t even know if that’s a simple thing.
1:31:30 I didn’t make journalism to like become famous.
1:31:34 I made it to give people a platform to share their stories.
1:31:37 It just so happens that people liked it enough to where I became sort of famous.
1:31:41 But if I could go back and not be the on-camera guy and just platform the stories, I would.
1:31:49 But the reality is people need a face to attach to stuff they like.
1:31:52 And so that’s just how it is.
1:31:53 But yeah, I would say right around Minneapolis protest, Portland’s protest, Proud Boys Rally
1:31:58 Time, when I was really in there is when I started to be acclaimed as more than just
1:32:01 like an ambush meme Lord.
1:32:04 Did that have effect on you, the fame?
1:32:07 Not at that point.
1:32:08 Not at that point.
1:32:09 So like you were still able to have a lightness to you.
1:32:12 Well, the country was basically closed.
1:32:15 So it wasn’t like there was a street to walk down where people were like, there’s that
1:32:19 guy.
1:32:20 So getting famous, famous during COVID made it so when the country reopened, it was as
1:32:25 if like my life really changed because I was like, oh, all these fans I made during COVID
1:32:30 are like seeing me out of the bar.
1:32:31 This is cool.
1:32:32 Yeah.
1:32:33 If first fame is the best thing ever because you can go anywhere in the country and these
1:32:38 spaces that you normally feel a bit insecure in like a local dive bar, a cool restaurant,
1:32:42 a coffee shop where you just be another guy.
1:32:44 All of a sudden they’re like, oh my God, I’m a big fan.
1:32:46 They give you like free stuff.
1:32:48 You get this sense of acceptance that you never would have got before.
1:32:52 But there’s also the dark side.
1:32:55 It’s all love man.
1:32:56 I mean, just to speak to the first part you’re saying is there’s so much love that people
1:33:01 have in this show.
1:33:02 It’s amazing.
1:33:03 I’m sure you know what it’s like.
1:33:04 That’s beautiful.
1:33:05 The only downside of fame really is that you can’t really be anonymous again and you have
1:33:09 to seek out more strange environments to be anonymous in.
1:33:12 Like right now I live in the desert basically and I want to live in the middle of nowhere
1:33:16 in the Mojave desert.
1:33:18 Not because I’m scared of people, but because I just want to be like curious me again so
1:33:22 people don’t know and I can ask questions to people that I’m interested in without them
1:33:25 going.
1:33:26 I remember, I see you here or I see you there.
1:33:29 That’s the main thing.
1:33:30 That’s what I loved about hitchhiking.
1:33:31 Yeah, just to have an anonymity for sure.
1:33:33 Yeah, it’s the best.
1:33:34 But both are great.
1:33:35 Complaining about fame is just the lamest shit.
1:33:37 Yeah.
1:33:38 We should go to furry conventions that you covered.
1:33:40 We’re an outfit.
1:33:42 I love furries.
1:33:43 I should do that.
1:33:44 Yeah, we should go together.
1:33:45 I go all the time.
1:33:46 We should go together.
1:33:47 We should go together right off.
1:33:48 No, I have not.
1:33:50 I think you might like it more than you think.
1:33:53 I, listen, maybe I’m just afraid to face why I really am.
1:33:58 Yeah, your first owner of the true Lex will come out when you’re in a $3600 lizard suit.
1:34:04 Everything is possible.
1:34:05 Lizard?
1:34:06 Is that what they go with?
1:34:07 Well, Scales are the lizard furries.
1:34:10 And there’s a big division in the community where they think Scales are kind of douchebagged.
1:34:15 The Scales suits are more expensive.
1:34:16 They’re about $7,000, whereas the first suit is $3600 and they’re also taller.
1:34:21 So when the Scales pull up to the fur fest, it’s like, ah, fuck the reptiles.
1:34:25 Fuck the reptiles.
1:34:26 I can get behind that.
1:34:27 I like more like a teddy bear type of guy.
1:34:30 Yeah.
1:34:31 I think bears…
1:34:32 What’s that?
1:34:33 Maybe squirrels?
1:34:34 I don’t know.
1:34:35 Oh, squirrels are so cool.
1:34:36 Giant squirrels, yeah.
1:34:37 I want to put a GoPro on one and just see what the hell they do.
1:34:40 We were talking about that conversation with the guy at the head of doing things media.
1:34:46 How did that end up?
1:34:47 Well, I mean, I want to clear up a few things.
1:34:50 Read the CEO of doing things.
1:34:52 I actually think he’s a good guy.
1:34:53 I think that he was just trying to run a business.
1:34:56 He saw what was working for his brand, which is very college-centric, very festival-centric.
1:35:01 And he was right to think that journalism and especially coverage of sensitive topics
1:35:05 like COVID or police brutality would definitely not work on merch.
1:35:11 You’re not going to sell a picture of me interviewing someone at a riot like you would
1:35:15 me interviewing a furry or a drunk dude in Alabama.
1:35:17 It doesn’t work the same.
1:35:19 So it was a lot harder to monetize, not just because of YouTube censorship, but also just
1:35:24 because of the sensitive nature of the content.
1:35:27 So Read was looking out for himself as a businessman.
1:35:31 There was a different partner, I’m not going to say his name.
1:35:34 He was more connected in Hollywood.
1:35:35 I think he’s responsible for the collapse of the show.
1:35:39 What was the collapse like?
1:35:40 What happened?
1:35:41 So, right as the country’s reopening, I get a DM from Eric Werheim of Tim and Eric.
1:35:48 And I’m covering something called the UFO Megaconference in Laughlin, Nevada, which is a beautiful
1:35:54 river town.
1:35:55 And he DMs me, he says, “Let’s make a show.”
1:35:59 And I’m like, “Oh, shit.
1:36:00 Is this real?”
1:36:01 He’s a big fan of Nathan For You and the Eric Andre show.
1:36:04 And those are produced by their company, absolutely.
1:36:06 So I was like, “Hell yeah, let’s do it.”
1:36:10 Three days later, I get a call that says, “Jonah Hill wants to hop on board.”
1:36:14 And I can’t believe this.
1:36:15 I’m still on the RV and I’m in Laughlin, Nevada.
1:36:18 So I’m like, “Jonah Hill, super bad.
1:36:20 Are you shitting me right now?”
1:36:21 So I was excited.
1:36:22 And Moneyball, Jonah Hill’s a great actor.
1:36:25 Oh, he’s great.
1:36:26 He’s great all around.
1:36:27 Yeah.
1:36:28 Doesn’t get the credit he deserves.
1:36:29 He’s got the credit by now, but still deserves more.
1:36:32 So basically, just within a week, I assembled this super team of Tim and Eric.
1:36:37 Super bad team?
1:36:38 Yeah, pretty much.
1:36:39 Of Tim and Eric.
1:36:40 Sorry, I’m so sorry.
1:36:41 No, that was good.
1:36:42 And Jonah Hill.
1:36:43 And yeah, we just pitched it around.
1:36:44 Every single TV network rejected it.
1:36:47 I don’t know why.
1:36:48 And they mainly did that because I was in this weird situation where I had signed a contract
1:36:54 with Doing Things Media that I didn’t realize was called a 360 deal.
1:36:58 That’s what they use in the rap world.
1:37:01 Basically means that I can’t do anything outside of them without them getting 100% of
1:37:06 the money.
1:37:07 So if I was to go work at Sabarro or Quiznos while I was working for All Gas No Breaks,
1:37:13 they would get my 500 bucks a week from the sandwich spot.
1:37:16 I was unable to earn any outside income.
1:37:21 I didn’t read the fine print because I was 21 and, like I told you, 45K a year RV.
1:37:27 I’m sick.
1:37:28 And basically the TV networks were like, why would we buy a show if the digital brand
1:37:34 is going to be running at the same time?
1:37:36 Because they didn’t want to stop doing All Gas No Breaks to make a TV show.
1:37:39 They wanted All Gas No Breaks to continue as a web show while All Gas No Breaks as a
1:37:43 future TV show at Showtime or Hulu or somewhere like that was also concurrently running, which
1:37:49 is impossible for one man to do.
1:37:51 And so every TV network said, okay, we’re not doing that.
1:37:53 We want an exclusive rights contract for this guy.
1:37:58 Next, oh yeah, this is crazy to think about, is it all happened so fast?
1:38:02 So Jonah Hill says A24 Films wants to do a movie instead of a show, and they’re going
1:38:08 to let you keep the digital brand running.
1:38:10 So this meant that I could keep doing my Instagram stuff with doing things media/All
1:38:14 Gas No Breaks while making an A24 movie with Jonah Hill and Tim and Eric.
1:38:19 So it was just like, I was excited.
1:38:21 It sounded perfect.
1:38:23 So they said, okay, what do you want to make a movie about?
1:38:26 And I told them, okay, here’s what’s going to happen in 2020.
1:38:31 If Trump wins, there’s going to be riots across the country.
1:38:35 The major cities are going to burn down.
1:38:38 If Trump loses, the militias and his loyal supporters are going to try to have a coup
1:38:44 in DC.
1:38:45 That’s what I said.
1:38:47 And I said, so I’m going to follow the lead up to whoever wins the election, and I’m going
1:38:51 to document what happens after.
1:38:54 So they said, okay.
1:38:55 And so I was to begin filming in late October during the campaign trail, maybe mid October,
1:39:00 up until November, and then in the following months to see what would happen.
1:39:06 This meant that I couldn’t film anything for All Gas No Breaks, the digital show, because
1:39:11 I had to dedicate 100% of my time to making this perfect movie.
1:39:16 Still, one of the partners at Doing Things Media was demanding that I not only produce
1:39:21 the movie, but also more content for the show.
1:39:23 And I told them, there’s only so many hours in a day, man, that’s going to be impossible.
1:39:28 And I said, if you want it to be possible, I can make it work, but I want to have half
1:39:33 of the monetization from the show, 50% profit split.
1:39:37 Which I thought is fair.
1:39:38 If you want me to do double work when I was getting almost nothing before, split me in
1:39:42 on the profits.
1:39:44 They fired us immediately.
1:39:46 Me and my two childhood friends who I hired to work on the show with me were all out of
1:39:49 a job.
1:39:50 As we were filming for the now HBO project, we got our fire notices.
1:39:56 The guts on that person, because you should be owning probably close to 100% of it.
1:40:04 I think so too.
1:40:05 But they didn’t see it that way because they figured we made the initial investment.
1:40:08 We discovered him is how they looked at it.
1:40:11 So it wasn’t Reed, but it was the other partner who wasn’t Reed, who said, “We have tons
1:40:17 of verbatim,” he said this, “I have tons of connections in the comedy world.
1:40:22 We can replace Andrew overnight.”
1:40:24 I’m not sure why he made that miscalculation.
1:40:27 I wish he would have thought about it twice.
1:40:28 I wish he didn’t have to end like that.
1:40:31 But it did.
1:40:32 Why don’t people do that?
1:40:33 Like, what’s the benefit of acting like that?
1:40:35 Because you can part amicably without the drama.
1:40:39 I think all betrayal and anything like that is motivated by self-interest, whether that
1:40:44 be economic success, social stability, whatever it is.
1:40:48 They figured that because I was being such a burden and asking for the profit that they
1:40:53 could just release me and find someone equally talented and not split them in so they can
1:40:57 make more money.
1:40:58 Oh, I see.
1:40:59 Well, that’s a stupid way to think.
1:41:03 People think like that, man.
1:41:05 People who are … The word I use is like sidekick syndrome.
1:41:09 When people are kind of a part of the production, but they’re not integral, they start thinking
1:41:13 that the front man doesn’t matter or something and that the brains of the operation are actually
1:41:18 the people on the periphery.
1:41:20 They start to believe that they can just shift things around and the audience won’t care.
1:41:25 Not realizing that I was actually the one who created the show and that the lore of the
1:41:29 show is connected to my rise outside of their jurisdiction, if that makes sense.
1:41:34 The people who watch All Gas No Bricks watched quarter confessions and read the book.
1:41:41 This happens also not just financially, but just with people that are part of a team and
1:41:48 they don’t really contribute creatively to the team and they force their opinion or pressure.
1:41:54 Whether it comes from editors or all that kind of stuff or from sponsors, there’s pressure
1:42:02 they create when the creator alone should be celebrated and have all the power because
1:42:07 they’re the ones that are creating the thing.
1:42:09 In a way, I have sympathy because I can’t relate to that because I’ve always been the
1:42:14 front man of my own projects by design.
1:42:17 I’m not sure what it’s like to be someone’s owner from a content perspective.
1:42:23 I don’t understand the challenges they face.
1:42:25 Maybe there was something that I didn’t understand.
1:42:27 I don’t know.
1:42:28 Oftentimes, if you own a thing like this company, you do think about brand.
1:42:35 Then maybe you have a big picture idea of what brand means and that can be at tension
1:42:41 with the creative project, but ultimately freedom for the creators is the best kind
1:42:51 of brand.
1:42:52 I remember all three of us who worked on All Gas No Bricks got fired at the same time and
1:42:57 we were in the RV that Tim and Eric’s company bought for us, which was a bigger RV in the
1:43:03 parking lot of a Walmart in South Philly.
1:43:06 The propane had just ran out and it was 15 degrees outside, so the RV was getting really
1:43:11 cold really fast.
1:43:13 I just looked at my phone and it was like, “You’re fired.”
1:43:15 I was just like, “God help me.”
1:43:18 I’ve had a couple moments like that and God does help me.
1:43:21 They were always in the parking lot of Walmart, right?
1:43:24 Well, yeah, although … I know that Walmart, by the way.
1:43:28 The one in South Philly is great.
1:43:29 Yeah, that’s great.
1:43:30 But technically, now you can’t park an RV there.
1:43:33 Well, you’re not a man who follows the rules.
1:43:35 The thing is, though, is Walmart, Cracker Barrel, and Big Five are supposed to technically
1:43:40 all let RV campers park overnight.
1:43:43 But if there’s a crime problem in the city where they’re at, individual Walmarts can
1:43:47 lobby with the corporate to take that away.
1:43:50 All the Portland Walmarts, you can’t sleep there anymore.
1:43:53 Any city with significant homelessness and petty property crime, the Walmarts are at
1:43:58 no go.
1:43:59 Fascinating.
1:44:00 So that was a low point.
1:44:02 Yeah.
1:44:03 But from there, from the ashes, the Phoenix rose.
1:44:08 Over time, yeah.
1:44:09 Channel 5 was born.
1:44:11 Channel 5 was born in the March of 2021 after we finished filming for the HBO project.
1:44:17 Oh, really?
1:44:18 So you went all in on the HBO project at the time?
1:44:20 Yeah.
1:44:21 The HBO project from November 2020 up until April 2021.
1:44:25 Damn near.
1:44:26 We were just picking up the pieces, going back for individual interviews, stuff like
1:44:30 that.
1:44:31 So let’s go to that project.
1:44:33 It turned out to be a movie called This Place Rules.
1:44:36 It was supposed to be called America Shits Itself.
1:44:38 Yeah.
1:44:39 Maybe you can tell the story of the film.
1:44:40 You have, what’s his name?
1:44:42 I don’t know if this is down, Joker Gang and Gum Gang.
1:44:44 Is that correct?
1:44:45 Yeah.
1:44:46 The opening scene.
1:44:47 The opening scene of two characters.
1:44:49 It’s talking shit and then getting into a fight.
1:44:51 And that, I think, was really brilliant how you presented that as almost like a microcosm
1:44:57 of like the division between the extremes of the left and the extremes of the right.
1:45:03 That’s exactly what it was.
1:45:04 I’m glad you picked up on it.
1:45:05 Yeah.
1:45:06 And then what I really liked is that the Joker Gang was kind of a little bit of a spoiler
1:45:14 alert.
1:45:15 I apologize, but at the end of the film, it was a kind of voice of wisdom.
1:45:20 Yeah.
1:45:21 I just realized.
1:45:22 He seems the most sane.
1:45:23 He was the voice of wisdom.
1:45:25 He cut through it.
1:45:26 Yeah.
1:45:27 I also just realized a lot of people are going to stream the movie after watching this podcast,
1:45:30 which is cool.
1:45:31 Yeah.
1:45:32 Where do they stream it?
1:45:33 On HBO Max?
1:45:34 Yeah, HBO Max.
1:45:35 I never got a chance to promote the movie.
1:45:36 It’s such a pain in the ass, man.
1:45:37 I wish we could all just pay on it on YouTube or something.
1:45:40 Yeah.
1:45:41 And HBO gets the profits or whatever.
1:45:42 I had to subscribe for every single thing, but yes, if you want to watch it, I recommend
1:45:48 extremely highly sign up to HBO or whatever the hell.
1:45:52 On the positive note, HBO is great to work with.
1:45:55 They’re the most professional, respectful company I’ve ever worked with pretty much.
1:45:59 Yeah.
1:46:00 HBO is great as some of the greatest TV ever.
1:46:03 But even in the background, they get shit done.
1:46:05 There’s no wait time.
1:46:07 They have some of the best heavy hitters on their team for trailers, for posters.
1:46:11 All the promotional apparatus they have is super solid.
1:46:14 Did you get good notes from people there?
1:46:17 A little bit, man, but you know.
1:46:18 It’s a truly original documentary, meaning I just haven’t seen anything like it.
1:46:25 It’s even like, there’s a humor and a lightness at the right kinds of moments.
1:46:31 Like I said, there’s a rooster in here.
1:46:34 That’s like, okay, that’s like a non sequitur thing as part of a storytelling.
1:46:38 It kind of intensifies and reveals the absurdity of the division and how once like January
1:46:45 6th happens, like everybody that goes on to the next thing, it’s like, what happened to
1:46:49 us?
1:46:50 It was almost like a delirium that everybody was participating in.
1:46:52 Some weird, just like, well, like people say, mind virus, like all of a sudden we just
1:46:57 got captured and people just like yelling at each other, doing the most ridiculous shit.
1:47:02 And I mean, really January 6th, the way you presented, especially, just reveals the circus
1:47:09 of it all.
1:47:10 I mean, it really broke the fourth wall, that’s how I would describe it.
1:47:14 Because if you were at January 6th and the lead up, it felt like it was the beginning
1:47:18 to a series of similar riots, but it just popped off so much that that was it.
1:47:24 You haven’t seen anything like it since.
1:47:26 It was supposed to be a second one on January 20th.
1:47:28 It was the actual inauguration.
1:47:30 That never happened.
1:47:31 It was a crazy time to be alive and around.
1:47:34 And especially the relationship that I developed with Enrique Tario, who’s the former chairman
1:47:38 of the Proud Boys, he’s now facing 23 years in prison.
1:47:42 It’s like a trip because I went to his house in Miami maybe two weeks after January 6th
1:47:47 and talking to him, it seemed like he didn’t think anything was going to happen.
1:47:51 He was just like, yeah man, that was crazy.
1:47:53 I’m glad I wasn’t there.
1:47:55 They’re dumb for doing that.
1:47:56 He even told me he doesn’t think the election was stolen.
1:48:00 Which is just a mindfuck.
1:48:01 It’s like, why’d you get everyone so hyped up?
1:48:05 It’s just weird to think about how so many people’s lives are drastically altered forever
1:48:09 because of that just bizarre moment in time that we’ll always live on.
1:48:14 Yeah, what did you cue and on as part of that story?
1:48:17 What did you learn about cue and on from that?
1:48:21 Just an all-encompassing worldview.
1:48:23 That family that I talked to, I call them the cue and on family, but it’s called the
1:48:26 Spencer family.
1:48:28 They were non-political up until the stop, the steel movement began in September of 2020
1:48:35 and within four months their entire life revolved around the mythology and lore of cue and I’ve
1:48:40 never seen in my life a PSYOP just devour people’s minds in such an intense way in such a rapid
1:48:46 period of time.
1:48:47 I love how the kids in the movie are also the voices of wisdom.
1:48:52 In the Spencer family, it’s the kid who goes through the full journey of believing that
1:48:59 whatever Hilary Clinton is a lizard and just believing all the worst versions of the conspiracy
1:49:05 theories and then kind of waking up was like, what was the point?
1:49:09 Yeah, it was heartbreaking to see his disappointment and his dad for even following cue and on
1:49:15 so militantly because he was like, I felt like they let my dad down.
1:49:19 I felt like they let our family down because January 6 was supposed to be the day according
1:49:25 to cue and on that the storm happens and that the military is supposed to mobilize and arrest
1:49:30 the members of the deep state, Clinton, Soros, all that.
1:49:33 Trump was supposed to go into a helicopter and take control of the country back from
1:49:38 the swamp and it didn’t happen.
1:49:39 In fact, the next day he was almost denouncing it.
1:49:43 Now he doesn’t, but then he did and it was really, I think it hurt people’s pride a lot.
1:49:49 My friend, Forgiato Blow, he’s a Trump rapper.
1:49:52 He describes it that way.
1:49:53 He says a lot of people’s pride got hurt by January 6.
1:49:56 Trump rapper.
1:49:57 Oh yeah, dude.
1:49:58 Honestly, there’s some pretty dope Trump rap out there.
1:50:02 I’m serious.
1:50:03 Maga rap.
1:50:04 Yeah, you would think like, oh yeah, Maga, there’s no rappers there, but there’s rappers
1:50:09 and they do a pretty good job.
1:50:10 They’re good.
1:50:11 Delivering the messaging they want to deliver.
1:50:13 Yeah.
1:50:14 I mean, they think of stuff and I’m like, that’s clever.
1:50:15 Oh, they have some political depth zone.
1:50:19 Yeah.
1:50:20 Wow.
1:50:21 I mean, is there something more you could say about like how QAnon works, like who’s
1:50:24 behind it.
1:50:25 Man.
1:50:26 What’s your sense of who’s behind the whole thing?
1:50:27 You know, I don’t want this to sound rude or anything.
1:50:36 I just don’t care about QAnon.
1:50:39 You know what I mean?
1:50:40 I’ve put so much thought into it and I just can’t seem to care about it.
1:50:48 Was it like almost a disappointment because like the, to me, it was like a thing that
1:50:54 just captured a very large number of people’s minds and then it just kind of faded.
1:50:58 I guess that’s why.
1:50:59 It just seems like it’s gone and the ideas of QAnon have just bled into mainstream standard
1:51:06 conservative thinking.
1:51:07 But there has to be a kind of retrospective like, that’s the problem I have with COVID.
1:51:12 You know, a lot of stuff happened.
1:51:14 Everybody freaked out.
1:51:15 There’s a lot of big drama around it and now everyone was like, okay, forgot.
1:51:18 Yeah.
1:51:19 Just like, wait, what are the lessons learned?
1:51:21 Has anyone learned any lessons?
1:51:22 Yeah.
1:51:23 Like what?
1:51:24 Exactly.
1:51:25 What I’m saying is I don’t want QAnon adherents to see this and think I don’t care about them.
1:51:29 But like, as far as who is behind it, the damage is done.
1:51:33 Yeah.
1:51:34 But what are the mechanisms that made it work?
1:51:35 I mean, that’s really.
1:51:36 You kind of like thought about that.
1:51:38 I kind of think that these viral ideas can be driven by, and your film kind of shows
1:51:44 this by just a handful of people and they’re not malevolent.
1:51:47 They just want to clout.
1:51:49 Yeah.
1:51:50 And there’s something sexy.
1:51:51 There’s something really sticky about conspiracy theories, like especially extreme ones.
1:51:57 You just kind of like, some of them can have this momentum.
1:52:01 They capture the minds of a lot of people and you just go with it.
1:52:04 Yeah.
1:52:05 And here’s some conspiracy theories, like there’s something like a small part of me
1:52:09 that kind of like, yeah, excited.
1:52:13 It’s possible that QAnon is a PSYOP to distract people away from actually uncovering what
1:52:19 the deep state is and who is truly running things behind the scenes because the deep
1:52:24 state is just the 1%.
1:52:29 You get people so close to any type of class consciousness and then you totally divert
1:52:33 everything into like lizard humans who live on the moon and that Hillary Clinton is eating
1:52:40 babies on camera and QAnon did just that.
1:52:44 They want to convince you that one, there’s no conservative deep state, which is even
1:52:48 more hilarious, that Trump isn’t connected to a huge, rich corporate apparatus of propagandists.
1:52:53 And two, that the democratic establishment is the only deep state and that some middle
1:52:59 of the road conservatives that there’s no grifters or manipulators outside of that three-headed
1:53:06 snake.
1:53:07 You know, there’s grifters everywhere, everywhere.
1:53:10 Everyone wants to make money, dude.
1:53:11 This is the world that we’re in.
1:53:12 It’s in collapse.
1:53:13 Everybody wants to make money and engagement is the rule of law.
1:53:16 So anything, that’s why these news organizations follow retention incentives.
1:53:21 They want to make money by selling ads, so they try to create fear and constant division
1:53:27 to enrich corporate media establishment.
1:53:30 And you have people who are almost realizing, “Hey, it seems like Fox and CNN might be
1:53:34 owned by the same people and are tactically using these machines to keep us divided perfectly
1:53:39 50/50 to ensure that the power structure never gets disrupted.”
1:53:43 And then you get these people, “You know who’s going to save us?
1:53:46 Donald Trump.
1:53:48 That’s the guy.
1:53:49 How is that the guy?
1:53:51 It’s not the guy.
1:53:52 I don’t have TDS.
1:53:54 I’m not an orange man bachelors who thinks about the guy all the time, but I don’t think
1:53:57 he’s the guy.”
1:54:00 You were shirtless, lifting weights while whiskey or some alcohol was poured into your
1:54:08 mouth by Alex Jones in this movie, and then you did the same to him.
1:54:12 That’s true.
1:54:13 It feels like an interrogation.
1:54:16 So Alex was a part of this film.
1:54:19 He was like throughout the narrative, and yet he had a great interview with him.
1:54:24 What did you learn about interacting with Alex Jones for making this film?
1:54:30 For one, he’s the exact same off-camera as he is on camera.
1:54:34 It’s not an act.
1:54:36 He told me that all real Americans die before 58.
1:54:39 He mentioned Sean Connery and a few others.
1:54:42 How old is he?
1:54:45 Getting up there.
1:54:46 I think early 50s.
1:54:49 I just found it fascinating how nice his studio is.
1:54:53 And the guys got an MSNBC level set up.
1:54:55 I actually had a great time with him.
1:55:01 It’s bizarre because having him in that movie created so many problems for me, and when
1:55:07 I interviewed him, I didn’t necessarily portray him in the best light.
1:55:11 We joked around a bit, but it wasn’t Alex Jones’ hit piece necessarily.
1:55:14 But I like to think that I was a bit critical of him in the film, especially the ways that
1:55:18 he antagonized his supporters to storm the Capitol, or to follow that trajectory.
1:55:25 He told me when I met with him, he was like, “I know you think that having me in this movie
1:55:29 is a good idea, but you’re going to have some serious backlash because of that.”
1:55:34 At the time, I was like, “Man, it’s fine.
1:55:36 It’s all good.
1:55:37 We’re just hanging out drinking whiskey, doing bench presses, drinking Jameson.
1:55:39 It’s all good.”
1:55:40 First of all, I had to campaign to get him in the film because the studios were like,
1:55:47 there was a bizarre time around like, I think it was 2018 where de-platforming was the big
1:55:53 thing that people were encouraging.
1:55:55 It said giving a platform to problematic ideologies will in turn expand their reach, and so even
1:56:01 extending your platform to someone who’s problematic is helping them, a.k.a. destroying
1:56:08 humanity, whatever it was.
1:56:10 That was the whole thing.
1:56:13 When I did this media training that was mandated by HBO, it was all training and how to defend
1:56:20 from that exact question.
1:56:22 They said, “When we put you on NPR, we put you on CNN, they’re going to ask you about
1:56:28 platforming problematic ideologies, and you’re going to have to say stuff like, “Sunlight
1:56:33 is the best disinfectant.
1:56:34 I believe that extremism only goes away when you shine a light on it because leaving it
1:56:39 in the dark will only allow it to grow.”
1:56:41 They gave me like 15 pointers.
1:56:45 I didn’t use any of those pointers because I’m not the kind of person who wants to be
1:56:49 media trained.
1:56:50 I like to speak freely, but in the promotional run for the film, when I went on CNN, this
1:56:55 was a crazy experience.
1:56:58 I went on CNN, and thankfully my friend was with me.
1:57:02 I’m on CNN.
1:57:03 By the way, your friend is chilling in sunglasses, laying in the couch right now.
1:57:10 It’s a mix of the dude from Big Lebowski and the Brad Pitt role in True Romance.
1:57:20 You know that reference?
1:57:21 No, but I mean, I’m sure it describes Larry.
1:57:22 He kind of looks like Brad Jackerwack.
1:57:27 HBO had a press tour set up for me, and the main ones were CNN and NPR.
1:57:31 They said, “You’re going to go on CNN on the Don Lemon morning show.”
1:57:36 He’s going to ask you about your life, what led up to the movie, what we can expect.
1:57:41 I get in the studio, it’s about seven o’clock in the morning in New York.
1:57:43 I just show the night before at Times Square, so I’m like groggy-eyed, whatever.
1:57:46 They put the lab on me, boom, I’m live on CNN Sunday morning.
1:57:52 He goes, “How would you describe Enrique Tarrio’s mental state in the lead-up to the
1:57:56 Capitol insurrection?”
1:57:59 I’m looking around.
1:58:00 I’m like, “Is this guy serious?
1:58:02 Am I sandwiched in the January 6th hit piece right now?
1:58:04 I thought it was about me.”
1:58:06 I told him, “It’s not about Enrique Tarrio.
1:58:08 It’s about how companies like Fox, MSNBC, and even your station, CNN, use the 24-hour
1:58:14 news cycle to enrage people to generate ad revenue and pit Americans against each other
1:58:19 during times like that.”
1:58:20 He said, “There’s nothing fake about CNN.”
1:58:22 I said, “I didn’t say you were fake news.
1:58:25 I’m not saying you’re lying, but you’re directly antagonizing and stirring people up against
1:58:29 half the country because you need money to support a dying platform.”
1:58:34 You said that.
1:58:35 Pretty much.
1:58:36 Nice.
1:58:37 Great.
1:58:38 You know, I was so, my mom was watching it, she was texting me, she was like, “What are
1:58:42 you doing?”
1:58:43 I was like, “I don’t know.”
1:58:44 He goes, “Why’d you extend the platform to Alex Jones?”
1:58:46 I go, “I don’t know.
1:58:48 I just wanted to drink some Jameson and lift some weights with him.
1:58:51 At this point, I don’t support that kind of media, I don’t support CNN.”
1:58:57 You know, I didn’t give them much information about Alex, but it was very awkward.
1:59:00 They never posted this segment online.
1:59:03 When I got off of that interview, I had a handler that A24 assigned to me, so I had someone
1:59:09 with me, and you could tell she was flustered, like she was furious about what I just did.
1:59:14 She goes, “I just got an email from Time Warner C-suite,” and I go, “What’s Time Warner C-suite?”
1:59:19 She says, “I don’t know if you know this, but the same people who own CNN own HBO.”
1:59:26 It’s Time Warner, and so they canceled my press tour.
1:59:31 My press tour was finished.
1:59:36 All the late night shows that I was supposed to go on, I was supposed to go on the late
1:59:40 night shows, and that was off the table because they were worried that I was a loose cannon,
1:59:44 I think.
1:59:46 The only remaining appearance I had left was NPR in Boston, and that was supposed to
1:59:52 be a premiere.
1:59:53 It wasn’t supposed to be an interrogation, it wasn’t supposed to be anything like that.
1:59:57 It was supposed to be a premiere in front of a live audience where they watched a film
2:00:00 and I show up after for a Q&A.
2:00:02 I’m like, “All right, whatever.
2:00:03 It’s kind of weird.
2:00:04 They only have this one press opportunity left.”
2:00:05 I kind of felt bad that I ruined the entire press tour by confronting Don Lemon, but
2:00:09 at this point, I wanted to just do this final one, especially because it was a viewing,
2:00:14 and I was like, “Cool.
2:00:15 I sat in the audience, I watched people laugh to the film, it was awesome.”
2:00:19 So I go backstage and there’s an NPR journalist waiting for me, and nothing against people
2:00:23 who wear masks, but she had two N95s on, and two N95s is over the line.
2:00:30 So I go, “Hey, great to meet you.”
2:00:32 She doesn’t shake my hand, and I go, “Why not?”
2:00:34 And she goes, “You’ve been around some people who I don’t want their germs.”
2:00:40 And I’m like, “Okay.
2:00:41 Okay.
2:00:42 This is weird.
2:00:43 I thought this is a fun premiere for my movie.”
2:00:46 We sit down.
2:00:48 The first thing she asks me is, “How do you think the Sandy Hook Families would feel about
2:00:54 you platforming one of the most despicable Americans in history, Alex Jones?”
2:01:01 In front of a live audience, NPR never published this.
2:01:05 The only recordings of it are by a fan named Rob in Boston who put it on YouTube, vertical
2:01:11 phone footage.
2:01:12 And I literally am like, “Well, the Sandy Hook Families lawyer, Mark Bankston, who represented
2:01:17 them in court in Connecticut, told me specifically that Leonard Posner, the father of Noah Posner,
2:01:23 who died at Sandy Hook, was a huge fan of the film.”
2:01:26 And so I said that to her, and that kind of just silenced that conversation.
2:01:30 But the rest of the whole conversation was just about exploitation and why are you platforming
2:01:35 mentally ill people and giving a platform to conspiracies like QAnon?
2:01:39 Don’t you feel like you’re a part of their spread?
2:01:42 I would call you a misinformation reporter, all this crazy stuff, and yeah, next day hit
2:01:49 the fan.
2:01:50 Fuck all those people.
2:01:51 That film, just in case you don’t get a chance to see it and you should, you’re critical
2:01:56 of Alex Jones in the most artful way.
2:02:01 It was the correct way to be critical.
2:02:03 It showed him to be more interested in the grift of it.
2:02:11 And you didn’t do it in a pointing fingers and saying in the kind of NPR way that you
2:02:17 just mentioned, but more like a human way.
2:02:21 This is tragedies happen all over the world, and there’s grifters that roll in and then
2:02:25 take advantage of it in interesting ways, and then human beings get swept up on either
2:02:30 side of it.
2:02:31 And it’s revealing the human, the absurdity of it all, and it was done masterfully.
2:02:35 It was done for people who criticize you for platforming Alex Jones or whatever.
2:02:40 The film from a political perspective has probably leans very much left, heavily left, but does
2:02:48 it without that exhausting energy of like judging, just this kind of, yeah, two masks
2:02:59 kind of judging.
2:03:01 It was just, when all that was happening, when I was under fire from the mainstream press
2:03:07 for platforming Alex Jones, I thought back to what he said to me.
2:03:11 And doesn’t mean I agree with everything he says, but he told me, you’re going to be
2:03:14 in trouble with these people if you put me in your video.
2:03:18 And it wasn’t too bad of trouble, but definitely I do think sometimes what the film would have
2:03:25 been like without him, and I think that it was worth it because his scene is so funny
2:03:28 to me, and it brings me back to a different time in my life, and I’m happy that that scene’s
2:03:32 out there.
2:03:33 I think it was really well done.
2:03:34 Thanks, man.
2:03:35 Thanks for the layering of it all, the entertainment, plus sort of not considering from his perspective
2:03:41 the consequences of like rallying people up in this way, that it’s not just, I mean you
2:03:46 really highlight this in the interview, like he keeps saying it’s info wars, but then there’s
2:03:52 always kind of a sense that info wars can turn to actual like civil war.
2:03:57 But maybe not, maybe it’s all just a circus, like we play for each other.
2:04:01 If you look at the speech he did on January 5th, he said tomorrow, you know, millions
2:04:07 of patriotic Americans will take our country back.
2:04:09 So he eggs people on, and then when it gets hot, he steps away.
2:04:14 Yeah, but like he said, the thing he told you, he turned out to be right.
2:04:20 And the frogs aren’t becoming gay.
2:04:22 They’ve always been gay.
2:04:24 Well, saying frogs are straight is even crazier.
2:04:27 I’ve read stories where you kiss one and it becomes a prince and…
2:04:31 Yeah, that’s true.
2:04:32 100%.
2:04:33 You think Alex believes what he says in terms of the, everything he says on info wars?
2:04:39 Like how much of it is real?
2:04:41 He’s right about like big tech censorship.
2:04:44 I mean, I think if he’s right about anything, it would probably be the heads of big tech
2:04:48 colluding together across company lines to de-platform certain people.
2:04:51 He’s right about that.
2:04:53 I think most of the things that he says follow the question, everything narrative and everything
2:04:58 is kind of like a conspiracy or like a plot or a false flag.
2:05:02 I think that he’s built up a following for so long that wants him to do that, you know?
2:05:08 So I think he’ll question things that he probably thinks are relatively straightforward
2:05:12 because that’s the shtick of the show.
2:05:14 I mean, the info war is fighting misinformation and people want to see him be that guy.
2:05:19 To a certain extent, if you’re a creator who supports your family, you do follow economic
2:05:24 incentives and people want you to be the character and so you’re going to naturally
2:05:28 gravitate toward being it.
2:05:30 Do you feel that pressure yourself?
2:05:32 I did years ago, not anymore.
2:05:34 I feel like now I can speak freely and really say what I want to say in my new life.
2:05:39 But when I was younger, yeah, I feel like I had to be this sort of awkward sort of amicable
2:05:45 aloof guy who just didn’t think anything about anything and just was here to listen.
2:05:50 But now I feel more confident adding some narrative and voiceover and things like that.
2:05:54 So for some people, especially who publish on YouTube, the YouTube algorithm, they can
2:05:59 become a slave to the YouTube algorithm.
2:06:00 Yeah.
2:06:01 I mean, for sure.
2:06:02 Because I definitely feel that sometimes.
2:06:05 I know what works for me, but I like to think that my audience appreciates when I try new
2:06:09 things.
2:06:10 So I’m not totally enslaved to it.
2:06:12 Yeah.
2:06:13 I try not to pay attention to views or any of that.
2:06:15 Well, you get some high views, so I’ll report that for you.
2:06:19 So I wrote a Chrome extension that hides all the views on anything I create.
2:06:24 So you took it to that level.
2:06:25 Yeah.
2:06:26 Just because it’s a drug, man.
2:06:28 And I’m also a number guy, meaning you give me, if I do 30 pushups today, tomorrow I’m
2:06:34 going to try to do 35.
2:06:35 Just enjoying number go up.
2:06:38 That’s why video games, RPGs, where you’re improving your skill tree, you’re getting
2:06:43 an extra point.
2:06:45 There’s some aspect of YouTube and other platforms, anything, any other platform.
2:06:50 You’re like, “Ooh, I got more today than I yesterday.”
2:06:53 That’s really, really dangerous to me because it can influence how much I enjoy a thing.
2:07:00 If nobody gives a shit about it based on the numbers, you’re like, “Oh, maybe that wasn’t
2:07:05 such a great experience.”
2:07:06 I thought it was a great experience, but maybe it wasn’t.
2:07:09 Yeah.
2:07:10 Honestly, I do actually feel that way sometimes.
2:07:13 I’ll put out something that I care about a lot, but if it doesn’t get as many views,
2:07:17 I’m like, “All right, it must have not been as good as my high-review videos or whatever.”
2:07:21 Yeah.
2:07:22 That’s just not true, though.
2:07:25 Yeah.
2:07:26 And it might mean on YouTube that you’re thumbnail sucks or something like this or whatever.
2:07:32 However the algorithm works, but I mean, that’s the thing I’m battling against to make sure
2:07:38 I ignore all of that.
2:07:40 It’s actually something Joe Rogan has been extremely good at.
2:07:43 He gives zero shits.
2:07:45 Yeah.
2:07:46 I think it’s easier to do when you’re really successful.
2:07:48 He was doing that when he wasn’t successful.
2:07:50 Really?
2:07:51 But anything, he just follows the stuff he enjoys doing and legitimately enjoys it.
2:07:55 He happens to be really good at it, but he gets good because he’s doing the things he
2:07:58 really enjoys and full-on passionate about.
2:08:03 That’s why he’ll have ridiculous guests and just shit he enjoys doing.
2:08:09 Yeah.
2:08:10 That’s pretty cool.
2:08:11 Maybe I’ll one day try to do that.
2:08:12 For now, I’m too attached to the gratification of getting a million views in a day and stuff
2:08:16 like that.
2:08:17 I’m not going to lie to you and say that I’ve beat that or something.
2:08:20 It’s a worthy enemy to be fighting because it’s a drug and it’s one that should be resisted
2:08:27 for a creator.
2:08:28 I feel like it can do negative stuff to your mind as a creator.
2:08:31 Oh yeah, for sure.
2:08:33 Anybody that controls you is not good.
2:08:36 A lot of people are controlled by their audience.
2:08:38 They don’t have to have a puppet master on a corporate level.
2:08:41 Audience incentive is a different type of, I don’t want to say slavery, but yeah, it
2:08:47 is.
2:08:48 That’s why variety is good and you’re doing that.
2:08:51 Yeah.
2:08:52 Always expanding.
2:08:53 Well, let me just zoom out on this.
2:08:55 You made a film.
2:08:56 Yeah.
2:08:57 Yeah.
2:08:58 That’s pretty cool.
2:08:59 Yeah.
2:09:00 It was a great experience, man.
2:09:01 I mean, it was awesome working with Tim and Eric, awesome working with Jonah Hill.
2:09:04 I feel the same about HBO and A24.
2:09:06 Everybody that I worked on the film with, I have a lot of love for and I appreciate the
2:09:10 experience.
2:09:11 It’s my first movie.
2:09:12 It’s a big deal.
2:09:13 It was a good one.
2:09:14 In my head, I finally got to make the transition from YouTuber to filmmaker and that was always
2:09:18 this psychic barrier that I felt like I had to jump over.
2:09:23 This is just the way it’s shot, the humor that goes throughout it, just the narration
2:09:29 that you’re doing in a shitty director’s chair.
2:09:35 That was really well done.
2:09:36 Whose idea was that?
2:09:37 It was actually Tim and Eric’s idea.
2:09:38 There was a really great editor named Clay who works for Absolutely and they did all
2:09:41 the editing pretty much in the office and so it was Clay’s idea to add a retrospective
2:09:47 director’s chair narrative arc to the whole film.
2:09:49 Yeah, just starting with the absurd fight and then going, “Oh, that’s a good way to
2:09:54 start a movie.”
2:09:55 It’s just really, really well done.
2:09:57 Thanks.
2:09:58 What about Jonah Hill?
2:10:00 Great guy.
2:10:01 He believed in this.
2:10:02 He did.
2:10:04 So what’s that like?
2:10:06 What do you think is behind him believing in such a wild project?
2:10:09 I think that Jonah Hill has a good eye for what’s cool amongst the younger folks.
2:10:13 He’s in the skateboarding stuff.
2:10:15 That’s why he did that film Bid90s and I think he probably saw a similar thing in what was
2:10:19 going on with All Gas No Breaks and was like, “Shit, this could be big.”
2:10:25 Not only did he actually fund the film, he also gave me his agent and I forgot to mention
2:10:30 that it was Jonah Hill’s lawyers that he gave me for free that got me out of my contract
2:10:34 eventually with doing things media or freed me up to speak about what happened.
2:10:38 So he was also a part of you gaining your freedom?
2:10:41 Yeah, in a weird way.
2:10:43 Even though him and I don’t talk that much just because he’s doing his own thing, Jonah
2:10:46 Hill is like a huge factor in my current success and just everything that I’ve been
2:10:51 able to accomplish.
2:10:53 Just on your own politics, is it fair to say that your politics leans left?
2:10:59 I’m not really sure sometimes.
2:11:02 I like to think that I am socially left.
2:11:05 I think people should be able to dress and act like however they want.
2:11:08 I don’t believe in restricting people’s social freedoms.
2:11:13 Economics-wise, it doesn’t seem like leftist economic policy works very well on a city
2:11:20 funding level.
2:11:21 If you see what’s going on in California, it seems like the city leadership is mishandling
2:11:26 the funds in California too.
2:11:28 So I don’t know about that, but I don’t really see myself as left or right.
2:11:33 I just never have…
2:11:34 Well, if you just objectively zoom out and don’t have an insane standard of the extremes,
2:11:41 it feels like a lot of your work leans left.
2:11:44 I tend to lean toward an empathetic perspective, which I do think is more on the left and the
2:11:53 right.
2:11:54 But I’m not into super PC stuff.
2:11:59 I don’t believe in limiting free speech either.
2:12:01 I don’t believe that…
2:12:02 I believe in a free internet, which I think is more embraced now by conservatives.
2:12:09 But it does seem that maybe you can correct me, but I get the sense sometimes that the
2:12:13 left attacked their own very intensely.
2:12:18 It does happen, but every community has terms of exile.
2:12:21 I mean, look, imagine thinking about what happens in the conservative realm, like when
2:12:24 Black Rifle Coffee Company denounced Kyle Rittenhouse.
2:12:28 They lost a lot of money too.
2:12:30 It’s not the right attacks its own too.
2:12:32 I mean, think about Bud Light and stuff.
2:12:34 Date.
2:12:35 Terms of exile.
2:12:36 I mean, every community has terms of exile.
2:12:40 You just got to know who you’re engaging with, and you got to make that decision carefully.
2:12:45 It’d be nice if there’s an actual write-up of the things you’re not about to say for
2:12:49 each thing.
2:12:50 I wonder whose list would be longer.
2:12:52 It just does feel like the left’s list is a little longer.
2:12:55 If you’re a conservative and you have a t-shirt with a demon on it, say goodbye.
2:12:59 You know, there’s certain stuff that they freaked the hell out about.
2:13:07 Conservatives are really concerned about pedophiles.
2:13:11 Yeah.
2:13:12 I mean, I don’t like pedophiles either, but I don’t think about it all the time.
2:13:14 It’s one of the things you do in the film is confront one of the QAnon folks where his
2:13:20 concern is that everybody’s a pedophile, and you show it to him.
2:13:24 He’ll cause himself a pedophile hunter, and it makes videos exposing democratic elite
2:13:28 pedophile cabals, and it is himself a convicted child molester.
2:13:32 There’s an old thing that people say that every confession, every accusation is a confession
2:13:37 to a certain extent.
2:13:39 It’s bizarre that some people’s whole life after a big mistake will revolve around trying
2:13:45 to seem like the good guy instead of taking accountability for themselves.
2:13:49 It’s a common thing you see all the time.
2:13:51 You could watch people.
2:13:52 You know what I mean?
2:13:54 What made you that?
2:13:55 What did you do, bro?
2:13:57 You feel like you have to get karmic retribution by doing the reverse.
2:14:00 I don’t get it.
2:14:01 Do you think to the degree you have bias that affects your journalism?
2:14:05 No, but with the migrant situation, I don’t know.
2:14:11 What was that covering that like?
2:14:13 I just got a lot of hate from conservatives for letting the migrants tell their stories
2:14:17 about their journey and stuff.
2:14:20 What did you learn from just going to the border?
2:14:23 Just the sheer desperation that the citizens of the world are in.
2:14:27 There’s people who truly believe that America is the only hope for their success and to
2:14:33 feed their family, and I think a lot of them are getting catfished.
2:14:37 Meaning America has its problems too?
2:14:39 It has severe problems.
2:14:41 There’s extreme poverty here.
2:14:43 But in America, if you just compare all the nations, the level of corruption is much lower
2:14:47 to where the opportunity for a person to succeed to rise is higher.
2:14:54 I wish success on everybody who comes here.
2:14:56 But my thing is the expectation that they have and the sort of American dream propaganda
2:15:00 they’ve been installed with isn’t necessarily a reflection of contemporary American reality.
2:15:06 So I’m talking to people who speak no English and say, “I’m here for a better life.”
2:15:09 I go, “Where are you going to go?”
2:15:10 They say, “I have no idea.”
2:15:13 And I’m like, “Man, that’s tough.”
2:15:15 And you almost think, “How bad are things elsewhere for someone to abandon their family,
2:15:21 make this journey across multiple continents and end up here with no plan?”
2:15:26 And it just made me realize how sheltered I am to a certain extent as an American.
2:15:32 Walking back what I said a little bit, because I was just trying to make a point, but what
2:15:36 I think of as bad poverty, like let’s say West Baltimore or ninth Ward, New Orleans,
2:15:40 is nothing compared to what’s going on in almost half of the world, if not more.
2:15:45 And so it just made me zoom out a little bit.
2:15:47 Sometimes you forget about third-world poverty when you live here for so long, and you get
2:15:51 programmed to believe the worst things that are out there is like Kensington, Philadelphia,
2:15:56 or Tenderloin, San Francisco.
2:15:58 But those are just microcosms of more or less functioning cities.
2:16:02 Despite what they might lead you to believe, Philadelphia is a great place.
2:16:06 It’s always San Francisco, but there’s places where everywhere is really rundown.
2:16:12 Yeah, like people focus on in major cities in the United States, homelessness somehow
2:16:19 that’s a sign of a fallen empire, but that’s a problem, it reveals some mismanagement of
2:16:29 cities and government.
2:16:30 I mean, homelessness in Seattle and San Francisco is for sure a result of the housing crisis,
2:16:35 especially post-COVID and all the gentrification that preceded it.
2:16:39 And it’s unfortunate now that the conservative media is saying like look at Biden’s America
2:16:46 as if Biden created a homeless people.
2:16:49 And it’s just disappointing because once again, you’re seeing the media use real issues that
2:16:56 should concern every US citizen and causing people to point fingers at a different political
2:17:02 party as responsible for the suffering of others.
2:17:06 Do you think January 6th can happen again?
2:17:09 No.
2:17:10 I don’t think so.
2:17:11 So all the lessons were learned?
2:17:13 Yeah, for sure.
2:17:14 I mean, people got really screwed over.
2:17:17 I mean.
2:17:18 Don’t you have a sense that there’s a greater and greater growing questioning of the electoral
2:17:24 process and all this kind of stuff?
2:17:25 I think that Americans overall are very comfortable with our standard of living.
2:17:29 I think people like going to Sonic and waiting in their car and getting milkshakes and people
2:17:34 like going to the AMC theaters and they like going ice skating and mini golfing and going
2:17:38 to the bar after work.
2:17:39 I don’t think that anyone wants a collapse of the basic structure of the country, even
2:17:44 the most politically divided don’t want to see 7-Eleven go away.
2:17:48 We are so comfortable.
2:17:50 If you look at other countries, even Europe, look at how they protest.
2:17:53 And look at the Arab Spring.
2:17:55 Those guys were talking like January 6th and they actually took control of the government.
2:17:59 You know, and so think about even if the MAGA crowd took over the Capitol building, it’s
2:18:05 just a building.
2:18:06 I don’t know.
2:18:07 I just think that Americans, when they talk about Civil War stuff, it’s just so, we’re
2:18:13 so far from that, even if the rhetoric is as divided as it was in 2020.
2:18:18 It won’t happen again.
2:18:21 For it to really happen, there has to be a level of desperation.
2:18:25 There has to be a level of economic desperation that’s causing people to starve or some basic
2:18:29 resource going away, water, something like that.
2:18:33 Who do you think wins, Trump or Biden?
2:18:37 In the Civil War?
2:18:38 No, in the Game of Mario Kart.
2:18:43 In the election 2024.
2:18:45 Oh man, I have no idea man.
2:18:47 I don’t even know if I’m going to vote.
2:18:49 It’s weird that this is our choice.
2:18:51 I know.
2:18:52 I wish people were more focused on city politics.
2:18:55 I’d rather vote yes or no for a bike lane in my neighborhood than I would for the president.
2:18:59 It’s a local politics to use where it is.
2:19:01 I think the future, oh, I mean, your vote actually matters.
2:19:05 Let’s say you have a community of 500 people and you live in Henderson, Nevada.
2:19:09 You can influence whether or not there’s a bike lane or if this is going to be a playground
2:19:13 or an AMPM.
2:19:15 You get to choose and you can influence 100 people to choose and boom, this is your community.
2:19:20 You can’t influence the result of an election.
2:19:23 I feel that those at the presidential level, it sets the tone of the country and so Trump
2:19:30 running again and Biden running again, it just feels like there’s going to be a lot
2:19:35 of questioning of election results.
2:19:38 I just can’t believe those are our guys.
2:19:40 Yeah.
2:19:41 I mean, that’s really our guys.
2:19:44 That’s where we’re at.
2:19:45 All these smart people we have in this country, the great history.
2:19:49 We got Joker Gang versus Goom Gang.
2:19:52 Mm-hmm.
2:19:53 Where’d you find Joker Gang?
2:19:56 Well, is he a legit juggler or is he just-
2:19:58 No, no, no, no.
2:19:59 Joker Gang is like a Miami Cuban guy.
2:20:01 Oh.
2:20:02 He’s Joker 305, Rawis Chico alive.
2:20:05 So me and I had been following him for a long time on Instagram because he used to post
2:20:12 videos of himself like pop and percassettes and smoking blunts on the toilet freestyling.
2:20:15 And so I had followed him for a while and then I finally got this platform and I said,
2:20:20 “Oh my God, I bet you now that we have a million followers, Joker Gang will sit down
2:20:23 with us.”
2:20:24 And lo and behold, the clout did its thing and there it was, face-to-face with the man.
2:20:28 There was a controversy a year ago where a woman came forward and said that you were
2:20:34 pushing with her.
2:20:36 You respected and know you got the consent but you were pushing about it.
2:20:40 Looking back, can you tell the story of that?
2:20:42 What are the lessons you learned from it?
2:20:44 Yeah.
2:20:45 I mean, I’ve yet to speak on this for a lot of reasons, mostly because it was a hard time
2:20:49 and it’s a sensitive subject and I’ve wanted to prioritize the reporting but I think that
2:20:54 now I’m ready and able to do so.
2:20:58 Everything started on December 30th, 2022 and that was the release date of the HBO project.
2:21:05 Like I told you, we didn’t know when the movie was going to come out.
2:21:08 We weren’t told that it was going to come out on that date until early November and
2:21:12 so I was like, “Oh my God, here we go.
2:21:14 We had a movie coming out.
2:21:15 HBO, I didn’t even know it was going to be them.”
2:21:18 So every day for those 50 days to where I received word and to the movie announcement
2:21:25 or to the movie release was like, I was like a kid waiting for Christmas morning.
2:21:29 You know what I mean?
2:21:30 It was like every day, I just, I saw the movie release date as the first day of like the
2:21:36 rest of my life and so I remember the week of the movie release, it was like every day.
2:21:42 I was like, “Oh my God, six days, five days, four days,” and when it became two days, like
2:21:47 I was so excited and so like, honestly, anxiety riddled because it was such a massive platform
2:21:53 that I went out to the desert by myself out in the Mojave, got a hotel and just kind of
2:21:57 sat there and then movie release day comes, it was supposed to come out at 8 p.m. Pacific
2:22:05 Standard Time.
2:22:06 I remember it was like 12 hours left, 10 hours left and then eight minutes before the movie
2:22:11 at 7.52 or I guess it was sent at 10.52 East Coast time, I got a text message requesting
2:22:19 a portion of my fat HBO check to contribute toward apparently years of therapy bills that
2:22:26 this person had accrued after she says that she felt that I pressured her into giving consent
2:22:32 years prior and I was confused not only because of the timing but because this is someone
2:22:36 that I hadn’t seen in years or spoken to in years and I presume that I was on good terms
2:22:41 with so I didn’t respond to the text message and then when I didn’t respond about seven
2:22:48 days later, this person made some TikTok videos and with the help of some friends, launched
2:22:54 an online campaign that got picked up by the press pretty quickly.
2:22:57 So what did you feel like when you got that text?
2:23:00 Well, it’s tough because on one hand, I’m not opposed to restitution being part of
2:23:06 a private accountability process for real abuse.
2:23:11 If you’ve hurt someone to an extent that it took them out of work or something, I think
2:23:14 they’re entitled to some money.
2:23:17 But unfortunately, as I later learned, this person had legal counsel and this was an attempt
2:23:23 to basically create evidence by extracting a confession from me to use as precedent for
2:23:28 a civil lawsuit to the tune of a couple million dollars.
2:23:32 It’s dark.
2:23:33 Yeah.
2:23:34 How did you meet this person?
2:23:37 Well, I met them when I was 22 and I told you I was living in an RV making this show
2:23:42 called All Gas Snow Breaks and I would travel between cities like every other day and so
2:23:47 I would basically pick a new city and I got in this pretty bad habit of what I would say
2:23:53 is essentially treating Instagram like a dating app.
2:23:57 I would go to a new place, I’d post my location, I’d surf the DMs and I would look for fans
2:24:02 to meet up with.
2:24:03 Not always girls, it was just people to party with because I was also partying every night
2:24:07 but a lot of times ended up being girls and stuff.
2:24:11 And so that’s kind of how this situation was.
2:24:14 I didn’t have sex with this person, had a consensual encounter that they reached out
2:24:19 to me about two weeks after saying, “Hey, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way.”
2:24:23 But looking back, I felt a lot more pressure to agree than I realized in the moment.
2:24:28 I don’t think this is any fault of yours.
2:24:30 I just think that you came on a bit too strong and I didn’t want to let you down so I gave
2:24:36 in.
2:24:37 And it was that language made me feel horrible mainly because if this person had told me,
2:24:43 “Hey, I don’t want to hook up,” I would have said, “Yeah, of course not.
2:24:46 I don’t want to hook up with someone who doesn’t want to hook up with me.”
2:24:50 And I think that as fame increased during that time, I think I was just kind of oblivious
2:24:55 to how people were seeing me, especially those who had a digital relationship with me prior
2:25:01 to me knowing them and I don’t think that I handled that the right way.
2:25:04 Well, thank you for taking accountability.
2:25:08 But just to clarify, you got consent.
2:25:11 Yeah.
2:25:12 I was the initiatory party in an interaction with a fan who felt that she had to say yes
2:25:21 because of, I’m not sure why, I don’t know why, but like I said, this person also disclosed
2:25:27 to me they had a history of childhood trauma and were actively being treated for PTSD and
2:25:32 that they felt things moved too fast for them given their situation.
2:25:35 And so I told her, I said, “Hey, if you want to reach out, if you want to talk on the phone,
2:25:39 I’m always here for you.
2:25:40 I’m sorry to hear that.
2:25:41 Let me know if we can talk further.”
2:25:43 About six months after that, I was at Sturgis Bike Week and I remember this day, this was
2:25:49 the hardest day.
2:25:50 I was just chilling and I got a text from my friend and I said, “Hey man, you’re getting
2:25:54 canceled right now.”
2:25:55 And I was like, “What do you mean?
2:25:56 Did someone find an old tweet or something?
2:25:57 What are you talking about?”
2:25:58 And I opened my phone and it was this Instagram story of me.
2:26:02 It was like the ugliest picture of me you can find.
2:26:04 It was like my face open, it was like screen-shotted and it said, I remember this specifically
2:26:10 because I just couldn’t believe it, it said, “The ugly loser who hosts all-gas-no-breaks
2:26:15 is a piece of shit.
2:26:16 He knowingly abused my friend and got away with it.
2:26:19 If you follow him, I’m going to message you and ask you why.”
2:26:22 So this person who I don’t know, I didn’t even know who the accusation was coming from.
2:26:29 They text, they emailed every production company that I was working with, DMed hundreds if
2:26:33 not thousands of people just saying that I was this piece of shit.
2:26:39 And I didn’t even know who this person was.
2:26:42 So I was frantically calling and texting every person that I’d seen intimately for the past
2:26:46 year and being like, “Hey, are we on good terms?
2:26:48 Is everything okay?”
2:26:50 And then I figured out that the person was coming from Florida and I knew who it was.
2:26:55 And so thankfully, I reached out to the original person who I had the communication with and
2:27:01 I said, “Hey, I think this might have been you.
2:27:03 This might have been your friend who posted this.
2:27:05 Are we good?”
2:27:06 Like I’m sorry, I apologized again.
2:27:08 I was like, “Listen, I feel bad that you feel this way.
2:27:10 I want to do anything that I can to help you again.”
2:27:14 I apologized and she said, “Apology accepted.
2:27:18 I’m sorry.”
2:27:19 My friend asked if she could post on my behalf and I’m sorry, I was going through a lot mentally
2:27:24 and I saw your fame increasing and so I agreed to let her speak on my behalf and we made
2:27:31 amends in private.
2:27:32 I said, “Okay.
2:27:33 I’m here for you.
2:27:34 Let me know.”
2:27:35 And she said, “Apologies enough.
2:27:36 Thank you for taking the time to speak with me.”
2:27:38 And that was two years prior to this text message being sent to my phone eight minutes
2:27:42 before the movie.
2:27:43 So naturally, I wanted to go on my platforms and talk about what was happening but I also
2:27:51 didn’t want to mess up the rollout of the movie and so the PR firm was like, “We got
2:27:58 this.
2:27:59 We’ll handle this for you.”
2:28:00 And that was, I guess, by way of a TMZ thing that said Andrew Callahan is devastated.
2:28:05 I’m not sure why they thought that was going to make people be in my favor but it was just
2:28:11 a picture of me on NBC that said Andrew Callahan devastated by allegations that that was their
2:28:17 plan, I guess, to show that I was remorseful or something.
2:28:21 How much of this do you think lawyers kind of pushing this when money and fame are involved?
2:28:29 Well, I wish I could say the lawyer but I just can’t that was involved in this.
2:28:34 But I will tell you that I try to lean away from resentment and toward accountability completely.
2:28:42 What was my role in the situation?
2:28:44 How can I never make someone feel like that again?
2:28:46 What can I do?
2:28:47 What changes can I make to make sure that, one, I never treat someone this way and two,
2:28:52 to never be in that position again?
2:28:54 Well, again, thank you for taking accountability.
2:28:57 And the main reason I talk about that is because it wasn’t just that person.
2:29:00 There was multiple people who made videos reporting similar behavior.
2:29:05 And so it’s obvious that that was a pattern of behavior of mine.
2:29:08 And so I made the apology video to announce that I was taking some time away because I
2:29:14 just needed time away.
2:29:15 I mean, my entire support system collapsed.
2:29:18 My friends at the time disappeared.
2:29:21 I was getting like obituaries texted to my phone that were like, “Hey, it’s been nice
2:29:25 knowing you. It was great to see you grow. Good luck.” Like I was dead.
2:29:31 And yeah, it just got dropped from my agency.
2:29:34 No one gave me tough love.
2:29:35 No one called me to ask me if I was all right.
2:29:38 It was just only, everyone disappeared in a week.
2:29:42 Again, thank you for taking accountability.
2:29:45 But I just hate how many collars there are out there.
2:29:48 Like when people hit low points is when you should help, when you should stand with them
2:29:58 if you know their character.
2:30:00 Yeah.
2:30:01 And it was just, it was hard to separate like the initial situation that I knew was more
2:30:08 or less a setup and the possibly genuine other accounts.
2:30:14 And so it was like, all right, you know what? At this point in my life, I want to be on
2:30:19 the right side of history.
2:30:20 I don’t want to be the anti-cancel culture mouthpiece.
2:30:23 I don’t have the mental strength to fight this, especially because I was envisioning
2:30:29 the HBO drop to be this like the world opens up to me moment and it was just the reverse.
2:30:35 But it wasn’t so much the media reporting on it that hurt me.
2:30:39 It was just a little stuff like a childhood friend that you love seeing they unfollowed
2:30:45 you on Instagram or just like seeing someone on the street that you grew up with and like
2:30:50 waving at them and they don’t do anything back.
2:30:54 And you’re just like, oh my God, man, like this is my new life, but what are you supposed
2:30:59 to do?
2:31:00 Thankfully, I like somehow two weeks after I met an amazing partner who I’m still with
2:31:06 to this day. And I was able to conquer my two biggest fears, which is monogamy and dogs.
2:31:13 I was terrified of dogs and terrified of having a girlfriend. Now I have a girlfriend who
2:31:16 I love and two dogs.
2:31:19 What was the lowest point?
2:31:24 Well, right after this happened, I entered like a recovery programs started with AA,
2:31:31 but then I found a more specialized program that dealt with the issues that I was dealing
2:31:35 with.
2:31:36 Say, the hardest point was logically deducing that the lives of my loved ones would be better
2:31:47 off if I was gone, you know what I mean?
2:31:50 And thinking that my mom and my friends did their life would be better if I took myself
2:31:56 out of the picture.
2:31:58 And for one, I just figured, you know, their friends canceled. You know, her son is a disgrace
2:32:04 and my family is going to think they raised me wrong. My friends, I’m a social pariah now.
2:32:09 I’m a burden. I’m better off dead.
2:32:12 And the hard part was, you know, I would read stories and books written by parents who lost
2:32:18 their kids to suicide and they reported feeling a lot of anger after the suicide.
2:32:25 So I tried to think of what’s the way I can do it to get the least amount of anger on
2:32:31 behalf of the people who would grieve because hanging someone will discover you.
2:32:36 So I figured drinking myself to death would be the way to do it. And I wasn’t able to.
2:32:43 Yeah, that was just a dark place. You know, I remember hating the people who loved me
2:32:46 because I knew they would grieve and that made me mad. That makes sense. Like, I was
2:32:53 ready to go. I had no will to live, but their grief was like, I didn’t want to cause that.
2:33:00 I didn’t want to hurt them. So I was like, I hated the people who loved me because they
2:33:06 were stopping me from taking my own life. You know, and it’s weird to think that like
2:33:13 when I was going through that, if you walk by me in the street, I look like a normal guy.
2:33:19 And so now when I walk around and I see people, I think to myself, you have no idea what that
2:33:25 person is going through. You know, like, it’s crazy that so many people are suffering in
2:33:32 like complete silence and you can’t, they don’t wear it on them. You know,
2:33:39 Many of the people you talk to are probably that many people you’ve interviewed before
2:33:43 all this and after are probably going through some shit.
2:33:47 And I also thought if I could write down what I just told you on a piece of paper and I
2:33:52 was to do it, and then they found the note, they would take it more seriously because
2:33:58 they would know that I wasn’t lying. Yeah.
2:34:01 But then you know, if you do it, it reduces the lifespan of your parents by 15 years.
2:34:09 So I looked at it like I was taking time away from them.
2:34:13 Well, thank you for the most part, leaning towards accountability. It’s the right path
2:34:19 to take. What advice would you give to young men that look up to you on how they can be
2:34:26 good men, especially in regard to women?
2:34:29 If you have any kind of platform, you know, whether it doesn’t have to be famous on Instagram,
2:34:34 it could be like if you’re a pillar of your community in the culinary world or whatever
2:34:37 it is. Just be hyper aware of that and remember that you are inheriting a power dynamic that
2:34:44 can create situations where there might be some pressure that you don’t even realize
2:34:50 is there, but it’s definitely there. And you just have to be aware of that.
2:34:55 And two, when meeting new partners, having hookups and stuff like that, just try to have
2:35:01 a trauma-informed conversation about their past. Really know the experiences and the
2:35:08 back story of what a new partner has gone through in that world of intimacy, whatever
2:35:15 they’re comfortable to share, obviously. But I would advise against one-night stands.
2:35:20 I would advise against hooking up with someone that you’re meeting for the first time. Have
2:35:26 those conversations prior because even though it might sound like a vibe killer, it’s not.
2:35:31 And if you think that that conversation is a vibe killer, you probably shouldn’t be in
2:35:34 that situation in the first place. Especially now, how hypersexualized things are and how
2:35:39 common that type of violence is, you need to be able to have those conversations and
2:35:43 stop and say, “Hey, tell me a little bit about your past. Is there any triggers to make you
2:35:47 uncomfortable? Let me know how it can be the best partner to you.” And I’m sure that college-age
2:35:51 people are not having those conversations, but I’m sure that it would go a long way.
2:35:57 So especially when you’re young, college-aged, you don’t have enough experience to be able
2:36:02 to read a person without having that conversation. Because a lot of times you can see the trauma
2:36:06 without explicitly talking about it, but that takes experience and knowledge and seeing
2:36:10 the world. When you’re young and you really don’t know shit, making things a little bit
2:36:15 more explicit is probably better.
2:36:17 Yeah. And also, as men, we’re trained to believe that it’s our duty to be the initiatory party
2:36:23 in any type of sexual encounter. Like, “Oh, man chases woman.” You have to be the one
2:36:29 to make the move or she’s playing hard to get if she’s resistant to your first compliment
2:36:35 or something. I think that that’s not always how it has to be, and that extra caution needs
2:36:41 to be placed if you’re taking the initiatory role in an interaction, especially if someone
2:36:45 has a traumatic background. They might agree to do something with you because they’re scared
2:36:50 and you might not realize that’s what’s going on, but because you don’t see yourself as
2:36:53 a predatory person. You don’t see yourself as someone who would ever consciously make
2:36:57 someone uncomfortable or cross a boundary, but people have histories that you might not
2:37:02 understand. And for me, as someone who doesn’t have much, honestly, childhood trauma or anything
2:37:07 like that, it’s been an interesting year for me working in therapy and elsewhere, understanding
2:37:13 how that affects the mind. And also, I understand hurt people hurt people, and that someone
2:37:18 with a traumatic background isn’t going to have sympathy for applying that traumatic pain
2:37:24 to someone else, even if that person isn’t the cause of what put them in that spot.
2:37:29 If we can go back to channel five, can you tell the origin story of that?
2:37:32 Yeah. I mean, channel five, we, during the Augusta No Brakes days, we used to tell people
2:37:37 that we were called channel five if we wanted them to stop antagonizing us while we were
2:37:42 filming, because every town has a channel five. So when people were like, what’s this
2:37:46 for if they’re being super rude and like trying to get in the camera and be hella obnoxious,
2:37:49 we would just say, oh, we’re channel five. And they would be like, oh, my grandma’s going
2:37:52 to see that. And they would leave us alone. So channel five was a diversion tactic during
2:37:56 Augusta No Brakes. And it just so happened that we were in Miami Beach one time. And
2:38:01 this kid came up like drinking liquor, like, you know, trying to yell about like whatever
2:38:05 they, whatever they yell about in Miami Beach, like titties or whatever. And we’re like,
2:38:09 bro, this is channel five. Be careful what you say. And he was like, for real? And he
2:38:13 just walked off. And I said to my friend at the time, I was like, that’s not a pretty
2:38:17 good, right? The channel five. And he goes, it’s some pretty good. He’s like, that’s got
2:38:21 to be trademark though. No, it’s not trademark. Yeah, it’s crazy, right? There’s a channel
2:38:28 five in every city, channel five, KTLA, channel five, Seattle, Como News, dude, channel five
2:38:33 itself, we own it. Because no one’s thought of something that simple, because he’d think
2:38:41 you’d have to specify, we own channel five.com channel five. New dude, we own it. It’s awesome.
2:38:47 So it was the same kind of spirit as the previous thing. What was the first one you did under
2:38:55 the channel five flag? Miami Beach spring break. I think I’ve seen that. And it’s going
2:39:00 to be a callback. I think somebody mentioning eating ass there too. That would be the place.
2:39:08 I believe that was. There’s only about five places in the US where people yell about eating
2:39:12 ass all the time. Urban street, South Beach, Miami, six street in Austin, Broadway in Nashville.
2:39:19 And I’m just going to go ahead and say time square. You might not think it, but. Time
2:39:22 square, really? Yeah, yell about ass there. Time square. I would say Beale Street in Memphis,
2:39:28 but it’s not, it’s not good. Oh, yeah. I mean, Beale Street is like the median age is too
2:39:35 high on Beale Street for anyone to yell about ass. This is a fascinating portrait of America
2:39:41 through that specific lens. So Miami Beach. And then how would you describe your style
2:39:49 of interviewing? Just now that you’ve collected so many. If you had a style, how would you
2:39:55 describe your style? I guess before, especially it used to be like deadpan. Now I would describe
2:40:00 it as more directed, but still relatively affable, agreeable, deadpan interview style.
2:40:07 Yeah, there’s a, like in the face of absurdity. Yeah. You’re just like there with a microphone.
2:40:14 There’s a comic aspect to it. And that’s intentional. Yeah. I used to look at the camera like Jim
2:40:20 from the office back in the day. I don’t do that anymore. What about the editing? Like
2:40:26 how do you think about the editing? I still do most of it, but Susan helps a lot too.
2:40:31 It’s my associate. Yeah, the editing style, like I said, we pioneered this editing style
2:40:36 that honestly was inspired a bit by like Vic Berger, but we took it to real life. Crash
2:40:41 zooms kind of chopping up vocals a bit to add comedic timing where it didn’t necessarily
2:40:47 exist. Like you might add two seconds of awkward silence that are built with room tone or you
2:40:52 might make everything really fast by cutting silence and switching frames. I mean, switching
2:40:56 camera angles. But now we try to be pretty straightforward because we want to be taken
2:41:01 more seriously. Yeah. Sure. What’s crash zoom, by the way?
2:41:07 A crash zoom is when the, like it’s artificial zoom that you might add in Adobe Premiere
2:41:12 where the camera zooms in on someone’s face. Where the resolution is not there. The resolution
2:41:17 is not there unless you have a little like a black magic cinema camera, which you don’t.
2:41:22 We don’t use those. The file size is too big. That’s stolen constraint. Yeah. And you also
2:41:28 do voiceover storytelling. I think the first time I really did that was in the San Francisco
2:41:33 streets video because there’s so much content about San Francisco homelessness, Tenderloin
2:41:38 shoplifting, but there’s not that much context in those videos about the history of San Francisco,
2:41:43 the housing crisis, nimbyism, random zoning stuff that sounds boring, but has a major
2:41:49 role in the current situation on the streets there as to why the Tenderloin is neglected
2:41:53 by police and by the city council and the other neighborhoods like Nob Hill and North
2:41:58 Beach are so nice. So I added that purposely to the San Francisco video and then also to
2:42:02 the Philadelphia streets video to accentuate the reporting and add some historical analysis.
2:42:09 What’s your goal with some of these videos like the Philadelphia streets one? Is it to
2:42:12 reveal the full spectrum of humanity? Or is it also to tell a story that’s almost political
2:42:17 about the state? Number one is always humanization. That’s
2:42:21 the primary goal is to take people in circumstances where they’re often news items and remind
2:42:25 the public that these are people with lives and concerns and dreams just like you. But
2:42:30 secondly, we also want to start introducing more solution oriented journalism. So not
2:42:36 just oh my God, I’m becoming aware of how horrible this is, but what can you actually
2:42:40 do to help? And as you can see with the Vegas tunnels video, people are responding pretty
2:42:44 positively to it. Like here’s how you can maybe help a homeless neighbor, help get them
2:42:49 an ID, help them qualify for housing or get a job at the scrap yard. There’s always ways
2:42:52 to help. But so much of the YouTube world is oversaturated by just like endless videos
2:42:58 of people suffering. And the comments are always like, wow, so horrible, but what does
2:43:02 that really do for somebody? You’ve interviewed many rappers.
2:43:08 Yes.
2:43:09 Educate me.
2:43:10 There’s a lot to it.
2:43:11 Yeah. Can you explain this drill rap situation? What is drill rap?
2:43:16 Solving situation. Drill began in 2010. Some people say it was Chief Keefe in Chicago.
2:43:22 I think it was King Louis in Chicago. But I think all of it was very influenced by Waka
2:43:26 Flocka Flame, who dropped an album called Flocka Valley in 2010. It was like hyper violent,
2:43:31 adrenaline boosting rap music made by people who were actually in the streets. So in the
2:43:38 90s, you had like, if you had 50 cent, you had rappers rapping about like whatever gangster
2:43:43 shit selling crack and beating people up, but they weren’t actually doing it. Drill has
2:43:49 a true crime component to where drill fans want to know that the person rapping about
2:43:53 catching bodies does in fact kill people. So drill is a, it’s pretty horrifying. It sounds
2:44:01 great, but it started in Chicago, then it’s spread to England. And now it’s bounced back
2:44:06 to New York, just like the Bronx and Brooklyn specifically and spread from New York to the
2:44:12 rest of the country. So now there’s probably a drill rapper every 10 square miles.
2:44:17 So these are, as opposed to pretending to be a gangster and killing people, you get
2:44:24 some credibility by actually doing it. Yes. And the fans are typically not in the communities
2:44:31 that are affected by poverty. So they’re kind of like superheroes to white kids. It’s dark
2:44:37 and not just white kids, but just anyone who’s not in the hood. It’s not necessarily a race
2:44:41 thing. There’s white drill rappers too. Slim Jesus was a big one. He’s out of the picture
2:44:47 now, but there’s white drill rappers. Slim Jesus. You made a video on O-Block. What is
2:44:55 O-Block? The place, the culture, the people. O-Block is a housing project in South Chicago
2:45:01 in the Englewood area where Michelle Obama grew up. It’s also where Chief Keefe was born
2:45:06 and raised. I don’t know if he was born there, but he was raised there. And he is the forefather
2:45:11 of modern drill music as we know it. So these are the projects where drill began. It’s also
2:45:17 the first place where you had that intersection of drill music and true crime because O-Block
2:45:22 has a lot of rappers and then nearby is an area called St. Lawrence, AKA Tukaville, which
2:45:28 has a lot of rappers as well. And so these two rival drill gangs basically have a lot
2:45:37 of history and it connects to music at large. So you’ve interviewed people there. Was there
2:45:44 any concern for your safety? No. I mean, I think that O-Block has calmed down a lot for
2:45:51 one, it has security so you can’t even really get in and out. But two, I think that O-Block’s
2:45:56 trying to rebrand itself a lot because it could be because Lil Durk’s avoiding a re-coach
2:46:01 charge. It could be for a variety of reasons. I know you don’t know exactly what that means,
2:46:04 but… Lil Durk? Rapper Lil Durk is from, affiliated with O-Block and a lot of people
2:46:13 have been murdered and retribution for killings that Lil Durk may or may not have influenced
2:46:19 the ordering of. But anyways. And Lil Durk documented the killings in the V.R. Rapp
2:46:26 music probably. Okay, I know you don’t know about Drill, but Lil Durk was associated with
2:46:31 a rapper named King Von and King Von perhaps paid for the assassination of a rapper named
2:46:37 F.B.G. Duck who got killed in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood. It’s possible. The O-Block
2:46:41 6 or Drill associated, not rappers, but just shooters and they perhaps operating on King
2:46:48 Von’s behalf, went and killed F.B.G. Duck. King Von was Lil Durk’s artist. King Von’s
2:46:54 now dead. So there’s definitely a concern that some of the fed charges will fall on
2:46:59 dirt. Not sure if that’s true, but it’s rumors in the hip hop community. So O-Block right
2:47:03 now, and when I film the video, it’s trying to go through a major image rehab. If you go
2:47:08 on any Instagram of anyone in O-Block, they’ve all converted to Islam. And so they post pictures
2:47:13 of themselves praying in the morning and have captions like put the guns down. Let’s pray.
2:47:20 So I think when I went there, they saw it as a good opportunity to do a positive rebrand.
2:47:25 And so I interviewed a rapper named Boss Top, who was there all the way back in 2011 when
2:47:29 Chief Keef was coming up. And so he basically ensured my safe protection. But he didn’t
2:47:34 even need to. They’re all very friendly and they know exactly what’s up with YouTube stuff.
2:47:38 I like how 2011 is the old days, like the ancient, the founding fathers. I was in eighth
2:47:45 grade. Oh man, time flies when you’re having fun. It sure does. Lil’ Dirk. Where’s Lil’
2:47:56 Dirk now? Atlanta. So you left Chicago, not safe. Yeah. I mean, every rapper has to leave
2:48:02 their hometown. That’s what I did. It’s a journey. Seattle would have taken me out,
2:48:10 bro. I mean, you do interview a lot of people. I mean, that’s like a top comment, but it
2:48:14 speaks to the reality of the fact that you always find somebody rapping or you create
2:48:20 the space for people to rap. What’s that about? I don’t know, man. They’re usually really
2:48:25 good. You think so? I appreciate it. Well, hell yeah, man. I mean, rappers… In their
2:48:30 own way. Since I touched a microphone, rappers have gravitated toward me. I think there’s
2:48:36 something happening. You’re a rapper whisperer. I think there’s something happening on a deeper
2:48:39 cosmic spiritual level that lets the mind of rappers know that they have a safe place
2:48:44 in front of our camera crew. You have an interview with Krip Mack. I do. Free Krip Mack. He’s
2:48:51 a feeler right now. Oh, he is. Is that a hashtag? Yeah, for sure. That’s an intense interview.
2:48:59 People should go watch all your interviews, but that one is pretty intense. Thanks. I
2:49:05 was a little afraid for your life. Oh, Krip Mack’s the safest guy in the world. He’s
2:49:10 a sweetheart. Oh, definitely, dude. Yeah, both fun. I feel like more safe around Krip Mack
2:49:14 than I do in any given pedestrian. Yeah, he was loud and flavorful. Yeah, I should say.
2:49:20 So who’s he? What’s his story? Well, his name’s Trevor. He grew up in Ontario, California,
2:49:27 in the Inland Empire, moved to Texas with his mom after his dad left. His mom started
2:49:32 dating a cop from Houston named Mr. Gary. His mom found Mr. Gary getting anally penetrated
2:49:39 by a coworker, and so she booked Krip Mack a one-way Greyhound ticket to LA where he
2:49:46 joined the Crips. That’s a good story. You know, it’s true. Yeah, yeah, of course. I’m
2:50:01 just saying that, you know, he’s a classic case of somebody without a father figure who
2:50:05 found camaraderie and, you know, sense of belonging and purpose in a street gang, which
2:50:10 in LA is like a rule of law in most of the city. I forget what context earlier, talking
2:50:16 about martial arts and fighting and he’s got to work on his punching form. Yeah, I think
2:50:21 so. He gets into a lot of fights in jail, though, and from what I’ve heard, he wins
2:50:24 like about half of them. What’d he go to jail for now? Firearm possession. It was a probation
2:50:30 violation. Oh. It’s too bad. All right. What’s, so Philly, you went to the border. Occupy
2:50:41 Seattle protests. You went to Ukraine. Yeah. What are some interesting things that stand
2:50:48 out to you from memory, just as I asked the question? Some interesting… I mean, I was
2:50:53 in jail at the border for a while. That was horrible. What was that like? Was that your
2:50:58 first time? Yeah. Well, you know, I didn’t know that I couldn’t hop my own border as
2:51:01 an American. I’m thinking this is my country. I can get in any way that I want. Wrong. You
2:51:08 can only enter the U.S. through an official border of entry, which I learned the hard
2:51:11 way because I got arrested by border patrol and held as a detainee at a migrant center
2:51:16 for a few days. What was that like? Horrible. Which aspect? I mean, well, for one, like,
2:51:24 I don’t know. It was just to be in a place like that. And I probably sound like such
2:51:28 a wimp right now because I know someone’s watching this who’s done some hard time. But
2:51:33 we thought we were going to do at least six months in jail because the guards freaked
2:51:37 us out and we’re like, you’re being charged with a federal crime. You know what you boys
2:51:41 did is serious. We’re waiting on word from San Antonio about whether or not we’re going
2:51:44 to extradite you. So we’re just sitting in these cells alone, most of the time in solitary
2:51:50 with no pillows. No pillows, no mat, nothing, just a space blanket. And I was sleeping on
2:51:56 my shoes stinking up the place. It was no good. You mentioned the UFO convention. Yeah.
2:52:05 What have you learned from those guys? The ufologists? I really want to know what you
2:52:09 think about that. That’s the one question that I want to reverse on you because you’ve
2:52:12 talked to so many people. Do you think that aliens have actually visited Earth? Yeah.
2:52:18 When? When? Exact dates. I do. I think there’s alien civilizations everywhere. I talked to
2:52:28 a lot of people that have doubts about it. I just think I even suspect there’s a intelligent
2:52:34 alien civilization in our galaxy. And I just can’t imagine them not having visited us.
2:52:41 So I lean on that. What that actually looks like, I don’t know. The stuff we’re seeing
2:52:47 in terms of UFO sightings, I think that’s much more likely to the degree it’s real,
2:52:54 it’s much more likely government projects, so military Lockheed Martin, this kind of
2:52:59 stuff. So you think that they have knowledge of it? Yeah. Yeah. One thing I think about
2:53:05 with aliens is scale. So we have this idea that an alien would be a gray alien or almost
2:53:11 humanoid lookalike that would visit us in human form, arms, legs, head, but who’s to
2:53:16 say they’re not able to shrink down to microscopic size with the same neural capacity? Yeah. Or
2:53:21 just have a very difficult to perceive form. But I mean, they would go small, not big.
2:53:27 No, I think they would take a humanoid like form just to be able to communicate with humans.
2:53:31 I think the big challenge with aliens is to be able to find a common language. So if
2:53:36 you come to another planet and you suspect that there’s some kind of complexity going
2:53:40 on, but it looks nothing like humans, you have to find a common language. And I think
2:53:46 aliens would try to take physical form that’s similar that us dumb humans would understand.
2:53:52 Language is really interesting too. I have this series that I’m going to announce for
2:53:55 the first time on here, but I’m really interested in endangered languages in the US. There’s
2:54:00 like 150 languages in the US with less than 1000 speakers. And I want to like help spearhead
2:54:05 efforts to preserve some of these. Like for example, Hawaiian sign language, 15 of those
2:54:10 people left. Holy shit. Because when Hawaii got annexed, the ASL community tried to make
2:54:16 it so the deaf native Hawaiians wouldn’t be able to speak their native sign language.
2:54:21 And so they would do it under the desks at like schools for the deaf and blind, and they
2:54:25 would get like their mouth, watch that, watch that with soap and stuff if they so much as
2:54:29 did the Hawaiian hand signs. Also, the Gullah Geeti language and the South Carolina Sea
2:54:34 Islands, Hilton Head Island and stuff. That’s like a, it’s almost a Creole language that’s
2:54:38 been in the US for hundreds of years, existing in isolation. That’s being threatened by golf
2:54:43 course developments. I don’t know how into language you are, but I’ve been getting super
2:54:48 nerded out about it.
2:54:49 Actually, I’m interviewing somebody tomorrow who’s an expert in human language. He’s from
2:54:53 MIT studying the syntax of a lot of languages, including in the Amazon jungle, the, the,
2:55:03 the peoples that live in the Amazon jungle region. Yeah, it’s fascinating. Human language
2:55:07 is fascinating. And also the barriers that creates and also how the games are played
2:55:11 to what you’re speaking by governments. This is part of the story of Russia and Ukraine
2:55:17 is this as a battle over language. The Ukrainian language is a symbol of independence, which
2:55:26 is why they made, they were trying to make it the primary language of the nation. And
2:55:31 so sometimes the language represents the culture and the peoples. It’s like intricately
2:55:38 tied to the culture of the people.
2:55:40 I’ve been trying to learn Navo, which, which languages do you know, Spanish and English,
2:55:47 Spanish. Well, see, I don’t know Spanish that well. So that passes me. Yeah, you’re fluent.
2:55:54 Oh, it doesn’t. Hola. That was good. That was real Cancun spring break. Well, I actually
2:56:02 speak fluent Spanish according to Spotify because there’s a, uh, uh, every episode translated
2:56:06 overdub by AI in, in Spanish. Yeah, there’s a very Spanish robot assigned to you Spanish
2:56:13 robots. Really. I sound like incredibly intelligent and intellectual in Spanish.
2:56:18 They make it free, man. Exactly. Uh, from everything you’ve done, all the people you’ve
2:56:26 seen, do you think most people are good underneath it all? Yeah. So the ones that do all the
2:56:35 extreme shit. Okay, I’ll put it like this. Most people think they’re doing the best thing
2:56:40 for the world. I don’t think anyone except for maybe a small fraction of sociopaths wakes
2:56:46 up every day and says, I’m going to fuck somebody’s life up today. I think the far majority of
2:56:50 people are fighting for what they think is right and do want to see America succeed and
2:56:55 want us to be in a happy place where no one is subjugated. I just think people have drastically
2:56:59 different ideas of what means will get us there. And unfortunately that’s leading to
2:57:04 a lot of misunderstandings between cultures. And yeah, I think that, uh, most people are
2:57:10 good. I’ve been through some things that leads me to believe that a lot of people though are
2:57:14 primarily motivated by self-interest and that in a fight or flight situation, most people
2:57:20 will choose flight. So I don’t know if people are courageous as a whole, but I think generally
2:57:26 good, but the energy to stand up for what’s right. Not sure about that. There’s the capacity
2:57:31 though to do good. I think human beings are inherently selfish as well, but I don’t think
2:57:37 that you selfish is inherently bad. I think humans are primarily motivated by self-interest
2:57:43 but generally have positive intentions. I do hope more humans rise to the occasion
2:57:52 and have courage, courage of their convictions, courage to have integrity. But yeah, I think
2:57:59 that most people are good and they want to do good and they have the capacity to do a
2:58:03 lot of good. That’s why I have hope for this whole thing we got going on. How do you heal
2:58:10 the misunderstandings between people you think? Listening. It’s the only option we have. No
2:58:16 forced education, no like forced meetings or mediations between political opponents.
2:58:22 Just listen to more people and really listen. Try to get rid of whatever preconceived notions
2:58:27 you might have about how you should feel about someone you are supposed to disagree with
2:58:30 and just keep your ears and your heart open to people that you don’t know and your life
2:58:34 will change. Keep your heart open. A lot of people are scared to listen. Andrew, I’m
2:58:42 a big fan and thank you for being one of the best listeners in the world and showing the
2:58:48 full spectrum of humanity to us so we can listen as well and learn. Just thank you for
2:58:55 doing everything you’re doing. Hey man, thanks so much for having me on. You’re a great man.
2:58:59 Thank you, brother. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew
2:59:03 Cowellkin. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
2:59:08 And now let me leave you with some words from Hunter S. Thompson. The edge. There is no
2:59:14 honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the
2:59:19 ones who have gone over. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
2:59:27 [Music]
2:59:34 [Music]
2:59:38 (gentle music)
2:59:40 you