TCB Infomercial: Andrew Callaghan

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This episode is sponsored in part by Liquid IV. How do you show yourself some love? What is that guilty pleasure you have? Mine is running and meditating.
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And be sure to have a wild, wild weekend wherever you are. On this episode of the Commercial Break.
Podcasting has definitely softened the barrier between consumer and creator in a way that's never been done before, which in a lot of ways is cool. Like, for me, it's been great.
I'm not even a podcaster, but social media has allowed me to be closer to my fan base and have, like, you know, a more organic feedback loop to where, like, when I ask people, yo, what should I cover? Next thing you know, I got 500 suggestions. That was impossible even 15 years ago.
Yeah. So I'm not going to doggone it too much, but I do think that, like, Trump being on these podcasts of communicating like, yo, Trump is your friend.
This could be you here with us. The next episode of The Commercial Break starts now.
Oh yeah, cats and kittens, welcome back to another episode of The Commercial Break. I'm Brian Green, this is my dear friend and the co-host of the show, Chris and Joy Hoadley.
Best to you, Chris. Best to you, Brian.
Best to you out there in the podcast universe. I'll start it off saying it right now, ahead of time, as all the kids like to say, trigger warning on this episode.
TCB Infomercial with Andrew Callahan from Channel 5 News. All gas, no breaks.
Quarter confessions. He is a journalist of our time.
He is a new media journalist doing a blog and YouTube, doing it really well. I think he's one of the, I'll say this, I think he's one of the more important documentarians of our time because he kind of, he just gets into the heart of it.
He has a good way of summing things up. if you haven't seen channel five or all gas no breaks i highly recommend that you go check out the channel um this will be a show where we definitely talk about politics because andrew's new movie dear kelly is out right now he had a previously a movie with hbo films called this place rules about the lead up to the januaryth thing that happened.
I don't know. Some people call it a riot.
Some people call it a tour. But anyway, he had an excellent HBO documentary and now he has self-produced, self-directed, or Channel 5 has directed a movie called Dear Kelly where he takes it even a step further trying to get into the head of people who have kind of become extreme, who have become super tribalist.
And that is not uncommon in our culture today. And I watched Dear Kelly.
I got a screener of it. He was nice enough to send it to me.
It's out available now. Go to the Channel 5 YouTube page.
You can just go to... I'll put a link in the show notes so you can see it.
But Dear Kelly is an excellent movie. It follows around a guy named Kelly, who Andrew met chasing kind of Trump and the MAGA crowd around for eight years now.
And he met this guy, and he really wanted to understand why Kelly had gotten so radicalized so quickly. A seemingly normal guy.
And he really gets to the bottom the bottom of it he gets to the heart of it and then he takes it even a step further by trying to help kelly piece his life back together kelly has lost his family he has lost his friends he has lost his house his job and um i think and i'd like to talk to andrew about this and get his thoughts i have that kind of this unscientific theory that the tribalism that we're experiencing today on both sides has a lot to do with a pandemic that is happening called loneliness, desperation, and the need to feel like we're a part of something. Yeah, we belong somewhere.
and i think kelly kind of is this in action this my theory in action um because that's

where kelly finds himself he loses his house and he finds himself in a really bad way. And he kind of buries himself into a lot of theories and political talk and political action that he feels there's a bad guy and he can help take that bad guy down.
But that bad guy is very nebulous. It's just a thing, right? And so, you know, while we tend not to talk about politics on the commercial break, we've loosened those rules up a little bit.
And there's some of you that don't like that. And I get that.
So I'm letting you know right now, this is not the episode for you. We're not talking about ice penises.
Yeah, we're not talking about ice penises today. No ice penis today.
We're going straight for it. But I really feel like Andrew is an important journalist.
I think the Dear Kelly is an important movie. And when given the opportunity, I, of course, wanted to invite him onto the show just to talk to him.
So this will be a more serious episode of the commercial break. This will be the one, the one episode.
Okay. I promise we'll get back to ice penises tomorrow.
So, Dear Kelly, Channel 5, All Gas No Breaks, Quarter Confessionals, all of that stuff. Andrew has been a journalist since he was a wee bitty little kid in high school.
Full ride to Loyola University, a media scholarship, a journalism scholarship. And he has done something very interesting.
He is one of these people who is out there. You know, we talk a lot about new media and the fact that there's going to be possibly Joe Rogan sitting at the White House press briefings and how this was the podcast election and all of this.
Andrew is very much, I think, a part of this and maybe one of the first to do it, I think, pretty impartially and really, really well to get in there and to document our culture as it's happening without a lot of judgment and put his finger on what's going on. So, love him or hate him, Andrew Callahan, and I like him.
Andrew Callahan is coming up from Channel 5. It's a new movie, Dear Kelly.
We're going to talk all about it. Why don't we do this? Let's take a break.
Chrissy. Okay.
And through the magic. Of telepodcasting.
Whabam! Whabam! Whabam! You just turned off the show. Whabam! Whabam! I just heard half our audience leave.
We'll get through it together. I promise.
This is worth the why. This is worth the listen.
I promise. We'll take a break.
We'll be back with Andrew. Did you know that we have a phone number? Well, we do.
And you should call us. Nobody's going to answer, but you can leave a voicemail for us that we may or may not play on the show.
And if that's not the vibe, then just send us a text, okay? Our number is 212-433-3TCB. So get texting and give us something to talk about,

please. We need it.
While you're doing that, you can also follow us on Instagram

at The Commercial Break and on TikTok at TCB Podcast. And as always, check out our website,

tcbpodcast.com for all of our audio and video content. Speaking of video, we are also posting

full video episodes at youtube.com slash the commercial break. So go watch them, please.
Anyway, now let's hear from our sponsors and get back to the good stuff. This episode is sponsored in part by Chime Checking.
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Hey, all you cats and kittens out there in the podcast universe, I want to tell you about Rule Breakers with Soraya. It's a new podcast from our partners at Odyssey that celebrates the rebels, the risk takers, and the ones who make their own way.
It's these people who often change the lives of the people around them and the world at large. And while in the moment it may be hard to see the forest through the trees, those Rule Breakers often define what it means to be a success.
Each week, former wrestling superstar Surya sits down with the boldest voices in sports, entertainment, and beyond to talk about breaking barriers, defying expectations, and rewriting the rules. They're talking about it all, the fights, the failures, and the moments that changed everything.
You can follow and listen to Rule Breakers with Soraya on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And hear, hear to the Rule Breakers for keeping life interesting.
This episode is sponsored by one of our favorites, Squarespace. I was having a conversation with my brother Patrick the other day about all of the challenges and hurdles that come with being an entrepreneur.
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And we thank Squarespace for being a sponsor of the Commercial Break. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today.
We're really grateful for your time. Hey, it's a pleasure to be on the Commercial Break podcast.
Thanks for having me. Great time over there in Atlanta.
It's a great city. It is a great city you were just doing a um were you talking about at the underground screamo scene here uh at one point an interview with a 15 year old youtuber named jinterviews and like i i get a lot of press requests but that just like jumped out because he was like 15 year old Atlanta independent journalist i was like let's go he facetimes me he's like wearing braces and he's telling me he's like bro you got to come to the underground screamo rave scene here in atlanta he's like we have 50 person screamo concerts in the underground society beneath the state capital and i was like oh shit yeah like at underground atlanta huh did he did you go did you actually go or just do the facetime with him it was only 48 hours ago that i learned about this so i haven't yet, but I'm sure that I'll make a mess up sometime soon.
All right, you come here and I'll take you to the best burger place in the world. Let's go.
Okay, Andrew, quarter confessions, all gas, no brakes, now Channel 5. You, of course, did the incredible documentary with HBO.
It was really good. I thought it did a better job of any of the there were so there was so much press and there was so much material and so much documenting of what led up to uh the January 6th event whatever you know if you're on one side it's a tour if you're on the other side it's a riot whatever you think about that it certainly was a moment in history that you probably will never forget where you were when you're watching those images go down.
And you did such an incredible job of documenting that in a way that even though I know that you, and I want to talk about this too, even though in a way you had to spin it a little bit, it really was, you did a great job of catching the mood of the moment, documenting the culture and the attitudes that were going on right in the emotion and the heat of it without getting caught up in it. Is that a difficult thing to do? Yeah, I mean, it generally is, but it's sort of like the 10,000 hours thing when it comes to those kinds of events, sort of practice makes perfect.
Probably it was hard to keep my composure when I started my career, around 2018. But after you go to 50 right-wing conspiracy rallies in a row yeah you might as well just be going to like IHOP or something yeah I mean you just like everything's normalized but yeah I mean to be fair I am proud of the HBO project like I didn't want people to come away from Dear Kelly thinking oh my god this guy hated his directorial debut yeah I didn't I didn't come away from that with a feeling I came away from it with a feeling that, and when Dear Kelly is his brand new documentary that has been self produced and self directed which is so fantastic but at the beginning you kind of preface it by saying, hey listen HBO made me do some outtakes, some spin outtakes that were on there.
But I didn't come away with a feeling that you weren't proud of it. I came away with the feeling that you wanted to come clean a little bit.
Yeah, and to clarify, those orders weren't coming from HBO. They were coming from Absolutely, which was Tim and Eric's production company.
HBO, we didn't even really come into contact with them until three months before the movie was going to be released. They were just like, this is great.
HBO was great to work with the entire the entire time they still are you know what i mean yeah but it was more of the studios that funded the film were very concerned about being um seen as being on the wrong side of history okay ironically if you were to look back at you know this place rules even if you were to look back at it without the editorial notes you would say this is a strongly uh anti january 6th movie. A hundred percent.
A hundred percent.

At the time, there was so much, like you said, so much press around it.

And there was a lot of posturing as to who was going to make the most elite hit piece about that event. Right.
I didn't see that. Yeah, a hundred percent.
Tim and Eric, like, is that Heidecker? Yeah. Okay.
And so they just felt strongly that they wanted to make it clear that this was not uh in favor of the january 6th events well politically we're a bit different like they're more liberals and i'm more of like a leftist if that makes sense yes you know i don't i don't believe that you need to necessarily editorialize or like punch down on a lot of conservative people who have been kind of caught up in the political propaganda of the day i felt felt like they, and they were okay to work with, but it was more like they felt like we had to draw an extreme line in the sand, like denounce Alex Jones before showing him on camera. I'm like, I think it's enough to, you know, drink Jameson shirtless and have him say a bunch of crazy stuff.
I don't think you need to add in this like mean spirited jab, but that's just, it generational gap, too. Sure.
Because there was this idea, I think around 2016, that if you censor people online and if you limit the spread of their voice, their ideas will go away. And you saw that a lot of early censorship on Facebook and Twitter when it was a Jack Dorsey company.
It was like, all right, a lot of these flat earthers, these QAnon people, the Trump crowd, we're going to push them gradually off these platforms in the hopes that their movement will become smaller. But what it actually did is it moved them into more concentrated, tight echo chambers only amongst each other.
And, you know, that created, we're kind of paying for those mistakes now. I totally agree with you.
So you do a great, incredible job of documenting what leads up to these events and dear kelly is part two but it's almost i don't know it's almost like a pre-log you are getting you answer the question what happened now you want to answer the question how did we get here and in dear kelly i think you do i think this is really an important piece um of of film if i'm being real honest i don't want to be hyperbolic about it but it's important because i think you do the best job yet that i have seen of understanding why this tribalism and extremism is happening i have had this unscientific theory for a long time that loneliness desperation desperation, and a feeling of wanting to belong to something has been causing this. And Kelly, is this in action? It's this in real life.
And you really get to the bottom of it. What drove you to follow Kelly? Well, it kind of actually all started back at the Flat Earth Conference in 2019 that I covered in Dallas for All Gas, No Breaks.
So I post a video of people at the rally talking about various Flat Earth concepts. And most of the comments on Instagram would be making fun of them, being like, I can't believe they think this.
But then at the end of every comment section on every single post, there'd be a comment or two that would say, like, this is my brother. I haven't seen him in five years.
He hasn't been the same since that workplace accident. Wow.
He lost his pension or got taken off a workman's comp and fell off the deep end. Or, man, this is my best friend.
You know, he's been an alcoholic or a divorce or, you know, it's very common with older dudes too. Yeah.
And so I had it in my head for a long time that a lot of the people that you'd see who are the most angry at these kinds of, you know, fringe events had some deep personal tragedy in their life prior to even getting politicized at all. I just never had enough time to actually spend with someone to show that theory in action.
And This Place Rules was filmed over the course of two and a half months where I was popping from political flashpoint to political flashpoint, capturing the raw group energy of the crowds at that time. But with Kelly, I had four years to film this documentary.
Wow. And so I really got to get into the nitty gritty of what that process looked like.
Not with an emphasis on what particular media he consumed, because that's a lot of times people fall into that trap. Oh, he got radicalized by this particular platform, like Infowars or something.
But way before that, what conditions primed him to be a candidate for radicalization? And he loses his family and he loses his home and he's, you know, falls victim to unscrupulous lenders. And I also have this unscientific theory, and I think this would hold true for a lot of people our age, right? Which is when you get older, you become a little bit more isolated.
You don't go to as many social events. Life, it gets harder to make friends.
And so, if you are in a position where you lose things and you lose people and you lose friends and you lose material things, loneliness is a pandemic. It's a pandemic that I think affects.
But this is also true for young men too, I think especially men, is that when you're lonely and you don't have anyone to reach out to, and then someone reaches out or you find something that you connect with, there is a real sense of belonging. And now you have something to fight against.
You're fighting the good fight. And I wonder how you feel, Andrew, you know, you do such a great job of kind of humanizing Kelly.
And I think that's we need more of that, because these are our friends and our neighbors. These aren't strangers.
Our friends are neighbors and our family members. I wonder how you feel.
I feel that at some point, people are going to come home. You know what I'm saying? People are going to come down off the ledge, and we are going to have to deprogram i don't know um deprogram a little bit we're gonna have to welcome them and i fear that all the judgment on both sides is making that really hard to do what do you how do you feel about that i think 2028 is kind of the goalpost year because trump's in office now so a lot of these people like in on the ke side of things, they don't have that underdog complex that put the battery in their back for so many years.
Yes. If he does good things for the country, if the bottom line is improved for the working people of America, we're going to report that too.
I hope that happens. I'm not the kind of person who's just so anti-Trump that I won't give him credit for positive change in the country.
I hope that happens. I agree with you.
That does happen. A thousand percent.
These people will calm down. They'll have access to mental health services.
On the other hand, if that doesn't happen, it's also a positive because they're like, oh, we put all this energy into getting this guy in office and nothing good happened. So, 2028 is the year, not only that these people will either realize that they were doing the right thing or got lied to, but we'll also have fresh primaries for the left and right.
So we'll have new personalities, just a total clean slate. Obviously, the Democratic Party is basically irrelevant now.
I'm not even sure they'll have a ticket in the next election. So I think it'll be like conservatives versus independents versus leftists.
It'll be great. You feel that strongly that the Democratic Party will fall apart over the next couple of years.
I think it already has. I think it's kind of their last

win. I mean, they're so tapped out from the

youth and the things that

regular young Americans want, which is

like being able to afford a house.

Not everybody's so pent up about

what Trump is saying. Most people aren't even

politically involved. They like sports

and not having to pay a bunch of money for stuff.

Fair enough. In the run up to the election, did you get the sense that trump was taking this away honestly i'm not gonna lie to you i want to sound like i'm smart and be like yeah i knew it i thought kamala harris was gonna win well i mean i think that was just the general mood in the room right i think even trump thought kamala harris was going to win yeah but little did we know there was this kind of undertow that was going on with, I think, people that did not squarely fall in the Democrat Big D camp, that they were swinging a different way because they felt like they were left out of the conversation.
And I also believe that Trump showing up in new media, new media, whatever that means, podcast exactly it's a podcast presidency right that that had a big sway on what happened at the voting booth that people young people who listen to podcasts decided that if my favorite podcaster is on board with trump i am also on board with trump give it a try right it's something it's? Be a voter. Did you get that same sense? Yeah, I think the podcast thing was definitely like a campaign psyop to make people think like, oh, this guy's my friend, because podcasts are already the home of all parasocial relationships as it is.
It's just a true thing, because podcasts are so organic and long form. You know, it kind of is a little bit depressing sometimes when you're like in the car with someone that you're friends with and they play a podcast and they're kind of laughing along like that's their actual friends yeah it's kind of a sweet thing but you just think to yourself like man these guys don't even know you exist yeah i just feel like man that's kind of depressing that's how i feel about comedic and like more more bro-y podcasts like what's up homies we're in this bitch and i'm like yo this is so crazy because like i don't know it just podcasting has definitely uh softened the barrier between consumer and and creator in a way that's never been done before which in a lot of ways is cool like for me it's been great i'm not even a podcaster but social media has allowed me to be closer to my fan base and have like you know a more organic feedback loop to where like when i ask people yo what should i cover next thing you know i got 500 suggestions was impossible even 15 years ago.
So I'm not going to doggle on it too much. But I do think that like Trump being on these podcasts was a way of communicating like, yo, Trump is your friend.
Like this could be you here with us. Yes, 100%.
I think you nailed this. You know, podcasting in general is a lonely venture, because there's no one responding to you.
I mean, you can get certainly good phone calls and all the other stuff. but you're talking into a microphone and you make an interesting point what's happening on the other end of that microphone i have no fucking clue do people think i'm their friend are they taking me seriously i don't know and i think um i think you're right about this is that this long form kind of freewheeling pseudoscience pseudo-spiritual bro-osphere that's going on certainly helped push Trump over the edge.
How do you feel about Trump giving the new media podcasters a seat at the table when it comes to the White House press briefing room? I mean, I think it's great given the fact that the mainstream press has given him such an unfair shot. I mean, however you feel about trump the way they've treated him has been unbelievable if you look at the way they treat the biden and in harris campaigns versus trump it's like they give him nothing but fluff questions on the on the on the liberal side the moment trump's in there they're just dogging on him all the time at least this press briefing room will now have an opportunity for there to be more organic conversations i mean i hope it's not just packed to the brim with manosphere influencers but if he does open it up to like a wide spectrum of independent media like myself and others that would be sick that would be fantastic would you take a seat at that at that conversation i think you would be so good at that how did you get so fucking smart dude i'm being i'm asking like a serious question what uh what was your childhood like growing up um so i grew up in philadelphia till i was like 11 i grew up in um in like center city around north philly in fairmount and then i moved to seattle when i was 11 and then uh yeah i mean i've always been like my mom always um took me to libraries and was encouraged me to be curious and talk to new people but really i had this high school teacher named calvin shaw who was my journalism professor and he really like taught me that it was cool to be like smart and actually be curious about things because before then i was only into like skateboarding mr shaw yeah mr shaw before then i was only into like skateboarding rapping writing graffiti just like fucking around trying to steal beer things like that you know like regular regular kids freshman year shit Like, you know, how do we steal as many beer kegs at the same time as we can? And then he taught me like, yo, you can live just as crazy of a lifestyle without the risk and without the consequences.
And you can, you know, be a journalist and go wherever you want and go to the craziest places in the world and get rewarded for it, you know? And I was like, damn, for real? And he would let me leave school for hours at a time as long as I could report back by the final bell at 3.30 and show him substantial progress on a feature article. Nice.
He was sick. And then he left the same year that I left in 2015.
Well, I graduated. I didn't drop out.
But yeah, I don't know where he's at now. I think he's in Hawaii.
I haven't even talked to him since. When somebody helps you so much in life, you almost don't even want to tell them how much they help you sometimes.
Yeah. There's an old saying that I like that is, don't meet your heroes.
Don't remember your heroes. Don't meet your heroes.
But Mr. Shaw, if you're out there, I mean, he let you go out of school as long as you were back by the 330 bell.
What a fucking rock star. That must have had a huge impression on you as a young man like hey i can he's let he he sees something in me he's giving me the faith he's giving me the trust to go out there my teachers wouldn't even let me out of the front row i mean honestly they wouldn't let me out of the front he was also like a he was like a young teacher like he was like 37 you know what i mean which for like a school that's pretty young you know yeah I connected with you so like he he would you know it wasn't like I it was some like 65 year old professor you know like you know this guy was cool as hell and I remember he saw me because I was drawing these stickers on on pieces you know like graffiti stickers on uh shipping labels on the back of class yeah he like he came up he's like Andrew I know what you're doing he's like you might think this is cool now this is gonna be some loser shit when you're 20 years old and he's like i had so many friends take this route get out of here go to the occupy tent city the occupy seattle tent city and come back with a story and i was like well holy shit he was like spider-man's editor-in-chief but not mean yeah wow that is fucking incredible that is amazing teachers can do that teachers can do that and we need more of the teachers like Mr.
Shaw and less of the teachers like I had, which are basically nuns that would whack you across the knuckles if you looked in the wrong direction. I mean, I went to Catholic school growing up, and it was a totally different experience.
Yeah, you had a bad experience. Yeah, I had a bad experience.
Well, I know the Catholics haven't had a great run with children. You know what I'm saying? I'm just throwing that out there you did is mr shaw then tell me about you so you went to loyal university down in uh new orleans and then you started is that when you started in earnest kind of getting out there yeah my my first day of freshman year at loyola like i always knew i wanted to be a journalist so i signed up for this student newspaper called the maroon and um it was actually like not the most gratifying experience because i wanted to be a gonzo journalist like through and through from from mr shaw's class on and uh also vice was in their heyday back then and they were making journalism cool again for the first time in decades so they were already laying the foundation and so like probably if you would have asked me when i was 18 what do you want to do i'd be like i want to vice reporter.
Yes. They would end up kind of selling out by the time I graduated.
But digressing, first day I start working for the Maroon and I'm telling my editor-in-chief about all these stories I want to do. Like, I want to do something about, you know, voodoo practitioners in New Orleans or the post-Katrina gentrification or, you know, all this shit, the history of the streetcar.
And he's like, I just remember he sent me an email in all caps and he said, not relevant.

Whoa.

And I was like, what do you mean?

And he told me, he's like, this newsroom has a hierarchy.

You're a freshman at this.

This is your first week writing for the school newspaper.

If you want enough clout in the newsroom to pitch your own stories, you have to just do

these bulletins for like a year straight.

So I had to write about stuff like English department tries to seek new writers.

The Pope visits campus. Hoverboards banned due to safety concerns.
School safety officers voiced their concerns about vaping in classrooms, like straight up boring shit. It wasn't until, you know, sophomore, I think actually at the end of that freshman year, I quit the newspaper and I hitchhiked alone around the whole country by myself all summer.
Just out of frustration with the newsroom. I was like, you know what? Fuck this.
I'm going to create my own gonzo path by any means. And then I realized at the end of that 90-day hitchhiking voyage, like, you know what? The job at the school newspaper isn't half bad.
I'm just going to try to put my foot down and really write what I want about. Sure.
Write what I, yeah. So then I got back the next year, my sophomore year, for the school newspaper and I started popping off my own stories.
And then, you know, I continued to write for the school newspaper for the rest of college. You are like Hunter S.
Thompson, but much more clear-headed. You hitchhiked across the country.
Yeah. So you must have some story.
Tell us about that. Yeah.
You must have some story. I mean, Chrissy and I, we know a lot of hippies, right? And so, we've seen our fair share of hitchhikers, and every hitchhiker has a great story.
What is the shadiest situation you got yourself in? I mean, definitely the scariest situations. I mean, being mistaken for a prostitute at certain trucks.
Oh, yeah. Those situations are kind of scary, but most people, when they realize you're not a gay prostitute, they get so embarrassed and ashamed that they pretend like they're just joking and they drop you off.
It goes pretty well. Definitely the scariest one, just the most viscerally scary one, is when a guy picked me up in Tifton, Georgia, which, as you know, is a rural.
Tifton, yeah. Yes, Tifton's a truck stop.
That's what it is. is and just doesn't say a word the whole drive no and that was the weirdest one he was like he had these wraparound kind of like redneck shades giant red beard and was just chewing dip and not saying a word oh wow i mean he was like where are you going and i told him where i was going i think it was like macon and he's like all right and didn't say anything and that just scared me because most of the time people are so curious like oh my god you're hitchhiking what's yeah what are you doing absorb some of your information and figure out what's up with you he just had no curiosities and i thought i was gonna die the whole time but then he just he was like right here's good i was like yep let me out i don't know why that kicked me out so bad he was trying to decide the whole time whether or not he was gonna hit on you he's's like is he or is he not are you gay because if you are we can stop pull over and have sex and if you're not i'm just joking i'm just dropping the funniest prank in georgia yeah i'll drop you off right here son yeah tifton georgia uh that is a truck stop no was it mostly, mostly truckers have picked you up.
So ironically enough, people think that truckers are like the number one hitchhiker picker uppers. But the unions have modernized the trucking equipment a lot.
So now the insurance companies have basically made it so they can't pick up any hitchhikers. They have 24-7 live feeds connected to their dash cams.
I do notice. They're not always being if you, let's say you're in the Teamsters Union or you work for a major trucking company, they can use satellites to see your feed at any given time.
And if they catch you with a lot lizard or a passenger or snorting Sudafed or drinking a beer or even driving more than nine hours at a time or something like that, they will instantly fire you. And so the only truckers that can pick you up are owner operators, meaning like you somehow have created your own lane like I have to where you own the loads you're hauling, which is super rare, but you can spot them because they always have insane trucks.
Like they have trucks, they're painted in colors that no company would approve. Right.
You can write about this like lightning bolts across the side. Flames and half-naked girls and no company name.
You're like, all right, this guy will pick me up. Yes, those like multi, you know, like they cost a million dollars.
Those huge trucks that have apartments in the back, those aren't owned usually by the companies. My brother's a teamster.
He works in the movie business and he drives trucks. That's what he is.
He's a fueler, right? He goes and he refuels everybody around the the movie scene and um he tells me that the teamsters they have you know chips or whatever they have at any given moment they know where he is and what he's doing and that's just part of the gig um so yeah i can understand that so i i think it takes real balls to hitchhike actually i've done it once and it was the scariest and there was two of us and it was the scariest experience i had ever had and i had had some really fucking scary experiences uh and i just got i was like yeah i don't think i'm i don't think i'm in for this i don't think i'm down for just writing for it no i wasn't cut out for it but it didn't it didn't help that the guy was a total the driver that picked us up was a total maniac with a lot of road rage um i'm just curious what state were you in when you had experience? We were in Colorado when we had that experience. Were you guys in the mountains or in the plains? We were driving from Denver North.
Oh, so you guys weren't in the mountains. No, we were not in the mountains.
Ironically, whenever you cross to a certain elevation or whether it be the mountains or the West Coast, the culture of hitchhiking changes. if you were to take the 101 from seattle down the pacific coast to santa barbara you're gonna have the best time it's super safe because hitchhiking is a culture there sure it's also a culture in the mountains between like aspen and vale and towns like that and basalt but dude as soon as you hit flat land the hitchhiking culture becomes pretty sketchy like arkansas the people who pick you up in arkansas like it's just it's either people who's like who think you're addicted to drugs and and they have like a like a son or a niece or nephew who's also strung out they want to help you just like you you want me to take you to the church like stuff like that yeah save your complex pick you up yeah yeah someone with savior complex or wants to preach about god for you for 35 minutes or have sex Yeah, or have sex with you.
Or all those things at the same time. Yeah, true.
I'd be lucky. At that age, I would have been lucky if anybody wanted to have sex with me.
Tell me about, so you go from, you do these like quarter confessions, right? Which is you down in New Orleans and you're kind of cutting your teeth and getting this very unique style of interviewing people, which I would say you're kind of a non-obstructionist. You ask a question, you let someone hang themselves with their own words, so to speak.
I don't want to say hang themselves always. It doesn't always happen.
At that time, that was accurate. Yeah.
Yeah. And so now, yeah, now you're, now you, now you're a noted journalist, right? So I think now you know how to operate very well with the microphone and around whoever it is you're interviewing to get what you want out of them or to get them to give you whatever's going on in their head right what happened with no gas with all gas no brakes which was just i think probably what a lot of people would have started knowing you from i mean you know all gas no breaks was like the peak fame for the the covet era you know suit man personality that i developed so whenever i first started working for all gas no breaks it was my idea my concept but the the company that funded it they provided the funding was a parent company called doing things media it's actually based in atlanta and they run a network of.
Like, I think someone called them the meme Illuminati. So, they are able to create viral sensations out of, you know, different pictures they source online.
It's pretty fascinating. Like, it's almost like a startup for the meme sphere.
Very interesting. Okay.
So, they worked out of a WeWork in Buckhead. So, I went down and met them.
I know that one well. Yeah.
Yeah. So, they pretty much, you know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, we do. So they agreed to pay me $45,000 a year and buy me a $20,000 RV and hire my friends.
So it was a really good deal to start off with. The fact that I had minimal, a small following from quarter confessions that I was able to transfer to All Gas.
But generally, it was still like amazing. You know, I thought it was very gracious.

They took a big risk.

The show grew at an unprecedented rate.

It was amazing to watch that thing explode.

I remember that.

It took six months, man.

It went from like, you know, we're talking 10,000 viewers to like 10 million viewers in a very short period of time.

And obviously we were doing merch drops.

So we dropped, you know, t-shirts and hoodies and stuff. And we'd be making like multi-million dollars off these merch drops.
Jesus Christ, really? And so all of a sudden, you know, what I was being offered by them to start off with seemed relatively unfair. Of course.
Especially given the fact that they weren't helping to produce the show at all. I was doing the planning, the travel, the accommodations, the editing, the deliverables.
All they were doing is using their pages to kind of market the show and also providing the base level funding for the RV stuff. So I basically asked for 20% equity and they approved.
They were like, you know what, we'll give you 20%. And so I was happy with that for a very long time.
Now, we signed a movie deal with A24 and Tim and Eric's company to make this. Yes.
And they wanted us to have a four-month period that we blocked off just to make This Place Rules. So they said, okay, we want during the 2020 election, this is what A24 said.
They said, we want you to only make content for the This Place Rules, for the film. You can't make any digital content for All Gas No Breaks.
Fair enough. Yeah.
Yeah. Doing Things doing things media said yo actually andrew's in a 360 full management contract so you can't tell him to not make digital content for us so it became these sort of two corporate entities battling over who i was going to make shit for right and so doing things media told me you're going to lose your job if you don't simultaneously produce digital content for us during the shoot schedule for the film.
Whoa.

Well, And so Doing Things Media told me, you're going to lose your job if you don't simultaneously produce digital content for us during the shoot schedule for the film. Whoa.
Whoa. And I was like, fuck.
Yeah. What do you do? Yeah.
You know what? Okay. I will do that if you bump my profit share from 20% up to 50%.
So that's 50% profit share for this duration of time, plus the salary. And they immediately fired me.
No shit. They immediately fired you.
Okay. Pretty much.
So you're getting like, we have experienced this in our own podcast universe. The many machinations of working in the quote unquote entertainment industry, right? Is that everybody wants a piece of you.
Everyone wants you to work for a little bit less. Everyone wants to take a little bit more.
That is a really tough position to put you in, especially since all gas, no brakes is probably the best thing that this company has going besides their meme pages. And to fire you because you just needed four months off really takes some fucking balls, actually.
Yeah. And a lot of it had to do with the fact that um so the ceo of doing things media his name's reed he's actually a cool guy he was the one who took the chance i really don't think that i'm actually on good terms with him now i think that looking back he would have granted me that 50 share and uh he but he was partnered up at the time with a guy named max who we called him hollywood max you'm actually in the building right now where i first met oh my god full circle and so i remember he and i remember we were when i first met him we were on the highway passing like the hollywood hills and he he points to the hills and he goes you see that little dot on the mountain he goes that's justin bieber's house and he goes how's that's gonna be in 10 years andrew fucking so i was like curious so you couldn't write this guy character and so i think from what i have heard from leaked messages and stuff he communicated to reed the ceo of doing things who owned all gas he said i have so many connections in the comedy world andrew is a glorified mic stand he's replaceable we don't need him at all and i I think Reed is like, all right, well, you know, this guy's asking for a lot.
You know, he's going on to do Hollywood shit anyway. Let's get somebody else.
When did you do the Flat Earth thing for? That was, I think, in the November of 2019. Probably six to, no, almost a year before the all gas breakup, a year and a half.
So here is the, and that's like right at the, that's like coming into the heyday of all gas, no breaks, right? Okay. So when I first saw Andrew on, on one of his videos, he was doing the flat earth, which then led me down a rabbit hole, which then led to the second episode of the commercial break.
There's like a strange thing there you it was you weren't an empty suit you weren't an empty microphone you were what was making it interesting you were at that time that was you were so non-obstructionist and letting people hang themselves with their own words that the comedy and the clarity came through and the way that the show was edited was so brilliantly done that it was like these you really are gonzo journalists but you're getting a point across somehow way shape or form through all this chaos and that's what i really appreciate thank you i also did the editing too so that was particularly puzzling no way really when you yeah but when you have like people who don't create art and content managing people who do they just they don they don't understand that the streamlined creative process, they don't know how that works. They think that they can sort of just like replace one crucial part of the operation with someone else they know and things will still flow.
But the thing is people aren't mathematical like that. No.
And you know, they, they attempted to find new hosts for all gas still breaks. But by the time they were going down that road, I had already leaked the information to the New York Times about what had happened.
And, you know, that got reported on. So I didn't even really need to, like, wait a beat until I launched Channel 5.
I launched Channel 5 two months after All Gas No Breaks ended. And did you find that most of those people jumped right over to Channel 5? Every single person.
you know what I mean? And like I said, I've had great conversations with Reed since then and I think we both made some mistakes there. Obviously, I felt like their mistake was a bit more significant, but my I guess, ultimatum style marketing, not marketing, the ultimatum that I presented.
The negotiating. Yeah, the negotiation.
My negotiation style was a little bit abrasive and I was 21.

Yeah.

So probably if I was an adult now,

I would have softened it a little bit,

but I was like,

you know,

I was like,

I deserve 50%.

You guys don't do anything.

Like,

I think I didn't need to slip in

any of those like personal attacks.

Yeah,

but you know,

you're 21.

We all,

if I could go back to 21

and do business all over again, I'd probably still have four of the jobs that I lost over the period of time. Because that's...
You learn from it. Yeah, you learn from it.
And that's what, you know, as we grow, that's what we learn. We go through these iterations and we decide, oh, remember that conversation I had last time with Reed? Maybe I shouldn't make that same mistake again with HBO somewhere down the line.
So tell me about Dear Kelly. What is the plan for dear kelly how can we help you i mean yeah so dear kelly is just my first self-funded independently distributed film streaming at www.dearkellyfilm.com links in the show notes i think it's been up for like 10 days we got or almost two weeks now we got 35 000 rentals which is sick as Holy shit, nice work.
We're breaking straight to consumer records. The dream is to eventually shop into a streaming service after we've recouped the initial budget.
Are there any interested? You don't have to tell me all the details. I know that's highly classified.
Do you have any nipples? It's not classified. It's only classified if you work for them.
Yeah, that's right. I haven't even had any of these conversations yet because like I told you, a lot of these content people who work in the business side of things, they don't even care if it's good or bad.
They just want to see numbers. Numbers.
Yeah, that's it. So if you say, hey guys, 100,000 people rented this, I'm probably going to wait until we hit 100,000 rentals and then I'll be like, yo, Netflix, 100,000 people signed up just to see this movie.
Imagine how many would sign up for your whole service. Yes.
If it's hosted in the movie. You are smart.
He has learned. He has learned, Chrissy.
And now we need a new manager. We're going to hire Andrew to manage our next contract negotiation.
Andrew, you have done something quite amazing, my friend. We are big fans of Channel 5.
I am a big

fan of the movie Dear Kelly. I do believe this is an important piece of film that people should

watch. We all need to understand each other a little bit.
There are some true bad guys on both

sides of the aisle. True bad guys that have no one's best interest at heart.
This is not Kelly,

and it's not most of the people, I don't think. Do you agree with that? I definitely agree.
And, you know, growing up in Seattle, kind of in a progressive bubble, I didn't really understand the mentality of a lot of conservative people until I went to school in the South. And I kind of felt like I was doing this to teach the progressive crowd a little bit of something as well, which is if you have this utopian vision of a new America where everyone has access to equal have has access to you know equal services and everything's great you have to also consider what to do with the tens and tens of millions of people in kelly's position yes who don't want the future that you want and have valid grievances especially when it comes to economic uh you know stuff that need to be addressed and also have crippling mental health conditions, pretty much.

Which is a big problem.

Yeah.

Whether or not they're born with them genetically or it comes as a result of stress imposed

by life, there needs to be a clear plan in place to provide mental health services to

these people.

Yeah.

You know, there's an interesting experiment that was done a long time ago, and I think

it's been repeated many times.

They give a rat cocaine.

They put cocaine and food in a bottle and they say, and they give them unlimited unlimited access to it and the rat continues to go back to the cocaine until it dies then they put a couple of rats a family of rats and they give cocaine and food in a bottle and very rarely do any of the rats go to the cocaine and the reason concluded would be community uh people around them other other rats around them they have some sourceace. They're not lonely.
They don't find themselves in a position to get that kind of high because they get it from interaction. And so, I think what I take part of what I take away from Dear Kelly is that there are a lot of people out there who are feeling lonely and they're getting some of that interaction and some of that love from the podcast, from the tribalism, from the extremism on both sides and that we all probably should you know put down a fucking instagram and give our friends a call and say hello yeah definitely i think that's that's another great thing too if you have a family member or friend that's in kelly's position definitely don't ostracize them or make them feel even worse than they already do about humanity.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, there's so many, there's this big drive to exile and alienate people in that,

you know, in the rabbit hole.

And like, you're crazy, man.

You're a piece of shit.

You voted for a fascist.

I don't even want to talk to you.

Yeah.

Evidently, that's made things worse.

So this is a call for understanding and conversation.

I love it.

I love your positive spin on this.

Andrew, we, you're welcome back here. Thank you so much.
Any and every time that you have something new coming out, or we'll just check in with you in a little while. I wish you the best of luck with dear Kelly.
Come to Atlanta. Come to Atlanta.
Come in. I got you an email.
I'll hit you up. Yeah, email me, and I promise you I'll take you for the best burger in the country.
All right. Appreciate you guys.
Andrew, bye. Thank you so much.
Hell yeah. Have you got a hankering down deep in your soul to tell us what's up? Well, I am encouraging you to do just that.
Text us at 212-433-3TCB and tell us what's going on. Give us the haves.
Tell us the dirty secrets of your life. That's all we've ever wanted to hear.
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Love you. Bye.
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Andrew Callahan, Channel 5 News.

Wow.

I so enjoy my conversation with him.

What a fresh perspective and very interesting person to talk to.

I don't care who you voted for. I think that we can all agree he's making some incredibly intelligent and prescient points.
And the movie is really good. Dear Kelly.
And if you haven't watched This Place Rules, watch that. Subscribe to Channel 5.
Do all of that stuff. Listen, Andrew is a super nice guy.
He's very young. He has got an incredible career ahead of him.
I think we just talked to a future media heavyweight for sure. If he's not already, so many people are into his work.
I know. I love him forging his own path, too.
Yeah, I think that's the best thing about Andrew is that he's forging his own path. He's learning his own lessons.
He's doing his own thing. And he's at 28 years old.
I think, I think he was born in 97. What is that? One plus four, carry the three.
I don't know. He's, he's very young.
Okay. He's a very young guy.
Oh, he's like 20. Yeah.
He's 20 something. Anyway, the kid is young and well, the guy is young and he is doing great work.
So, but he's still been doing it for so long. He has.
Well, Mr. Shaw was letting him do it at 13 years old or whatever.
We didn't even get into this, whatever, Sika Seiblin-induced blah, blah, blah. Yes.
Yeah, we'll have to ask him that the next time he comes. Anyway, you must go watch Dear Kelly.
You must. Link's in the show notes.
See, that wasn't that bad, it we didn't bash on trump we didn't bash on anybody brought up some interesting points too even about the mainstream media the way that they've treated each side yes and i agree with him wholeheartedly not sure i i'm 100 on board with podcasters in the front row of the point house Press I still think it's great, too. I've said it since the beginning, but it does depend on who it is.
Yes, 100%. And Andrew said as much.
And so I can agree with that. I can agree with that.
It's the new media. If it's Andrew, I'm all about it.
Please. If it's Alex Jones, probably not going to be so excited about it.
Anyway, TCBpodcast.com. That's where you go for more information about the show, all the show notes, all the links to all of our guests' information, all of their to-dos, all of their events, all of their tickets, Andrew's movie.
It's all there. Just check out the show notes on each particular page.

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These don't have them, but man, I go through more socks. Really? I do.
I'm a heel walker. I'm a heel walker.
So yeah, I can't keep a pair of socks more than two weeks. We have to buy socks.
But like Amazon is on subscription. I just keep getting socks.
And I go through them. I throw away more socks and I know what to do with.
Anyway, tcbpodcast.com.

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Well, best of luck to Andrew on his movie. Chrissy, that's all I can do for now.
I think so. I love you.
I love you. Best to you.
And best to you out there in the podcast

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Until next time, we do say, we must say, we will say goodbye. I have it.
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