1156: Andrew Callaghan | Documenting America's Shadow Self

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This episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show has some explicit language, so if you're offended by that, well, skip to the next one.

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I'm Jordan Harbinger.

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Today on the show, Andrew Callahan of All Gas No Breaks, aka Channel 5, one of the most iconic personal brands on the internet today.

We dive into a lot on this one, why Why people radicalize and attach themselves to extreme political ideologies, gonzo journalism in the age of the internet, psychedelic use and drug abuse, cancel culture, and a whole lot more.

We get into some real-ish on this episode.

In fact, he even says as much towards the end there.

I know you'll dig the conversation whether you're already a fan of Andrew's work or not.

Now, here we go with Andrew Callahan.

The thing is, a lot of the people you interview, I think, would just urinate in their pants.

Yeah, that's for sure.

At the moment.

Myself included.

I've been known to leak a little bit.

That tan suit, you would not be able to hide.

How would you, by the way, describe what you do?

Because I had some trouble with that when I was prepping the show.

I was like, gonzo journalism?

That sounds pretty accurate.

Yeah.

Well, gonzo journalism, if you look at the official definition, was pioneered by Hunter S.

Thompson, and it included elements of reality and fiction.

And it was always retrospective fiction.

So fear and loathing in Las Vegas is supposed to be half true and half featuring fictional elements.

The word gonzo gets used to refer to like in the field reporting because that's also something something that Hunter S.

Thompson did.

So I just kind of roll with it.

But technically, gonzo has to be written and it has to be semi-fictitious or fantasy-like.

It sounds cool.

The word gonzo.

So I just kind of roll with it every time it's mentioned.

Yeah, I'm with it.

I shouldn't admit this.

It's usually like a category of porn.

I didn't know it was a real category of journalism.

There's gonzo pornography category.

Yeah.

In the field setups turning into like sexual activity.

I think now it's like most porn is that.

I don't know because I wrote the stuff off a while ago for like mental health reasons and physical health reasons actually.

But I think now it's like what most of the videos are.

I think back in my college days and like the early aughts, it was like, yeah, it's not like in a studio.

It's like a guy's a camera in a bed.

Oh, like fake taxi or like fake POV.

Yeah, stuff like that nonsense.

Yeah, because the Pizzaman setup got kind of played out.

And a lot of people became delivery guys and realized we're not getting laid.

Yeah, man.

I've been delivering sandwiches for like six months and I've gotten laid zero times.

Depends where you work.

I think if you work for Erewhon and deliver like really healthy sandwiches, you could have a chance at like meeting someone nice.

But Jimmy John's.

Jimmy John's.

It's exactly

in-cell profession.

No offense to people who work for Jimmy Johns.

I just mean being a delivery driver may not be fruitful in the romantic department.

That's true.

It does depend.

You're right.

Erewhon, definitely highest chances of getting a piece.

Totally.

So you actually used to live in a van.

Is that correct?

An RV.

So van life is its own thing.

Van life is pretty sick.

You can customize them to do a lot.

RVs are spacious.

So I felt like I was living in a house on wheels.

Okay, so you started the all-gas no brakes, which by the way, I love that, but then it blew up so fast.

I can only imagine that you were not also expecting that to happen.

Definitely not.

And so, yeah, the all-gas no brakes RV was a 26-foot Class C Catalina Coachman sport motorhome that was acquired for $21,000.

I was getting $45K a year.

And then like, that was a sick salary coming out of college.

Yeah.

The show exploded to a degree that created some tension with me and the production company.

But before you proceed, I just reacquired All Gas No Breaks three days ago.

You did?

Wow.

Congratulations.

I own the IP catalog, brand rights, and all that stuff.

So the beef is squashed.

The beef is squashed.

Wow.

That's pretty awesome.

I also lost an old business in a way where it was like, hey, guys, I want to leave.

And they were like, cool.

We'll just do this amicably.

And then they were like, wait, what if we screw you out of everything?

And then you just have to sue us.

And as an attorney, I was like, not only am I going to do that, but I also know that this is going to take forever.

So I'm just going to start over.

And there's so many layers to how crappy that all is.

Like, it's, can I do this again?

Was that lightning in the bottle that I can't do anymore?

Why did these people do this thing when they could have done it a million different ways?

And then it's also my identity was the all-gas, no breaks guy.

So who am I now?

And can I redo that?

Or is it, am I still that person?

I assume you went through a lot of that.

Yeah, I've gone through a couple different business fallouts.

One of them in particular, the two people in it quit while simultaneously both owning a significant share.

But there was a loophole in the contract where they could quit and resign from their duties while retaining economic interest in the company.

So I had to complete their resignation by accepting a buyout offer for their share.

So it's like stuff like that that made me very wary.

Now moving forward, I have a lawyer draft like a perfect agreement for everything, whether it's a work for hire editor or a camera person.

I just make sure that there's no room for error.

Yeah, that's smart.

Even, and I don't mean to scare you, people always, they would go, oh man, that happened to you as a lawyer.

Dude, you got to get these certain kinds of agreements.

And what people who aren't lawyers don't realize is you can have the best lawyer in the world draft something.

And if I go, yeah, well, I'm not going to follow that.

You then have to sue me and hire an attorney to do it.

And it's going to cost you $50,000 or $100,000 when all is said and done.

And then the judge is going to take three years to go through this whole thing.

Like I had a judge tell me, this business only makes a few million dollars a year.

I just asked, where were you even in front of me?

And are you kidding?

If I have a sandwich shop that makes $200,000 a year, I can't go to court.

This is 10 times that size.

And the judge is like, why are you in front of me?

And yeah, we're not Deutsche Bank, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem for the company.

What the hell is wrong with you?

Yeah.

You get up in close to some objectively crazy people.

I don't know if that's a fair assessment, but.

It depends, but definitely sometimes.

Yeah.

The subject of the new documentary, this guy Kelly, it's, I'd rather die than wear a mask.

People are selling baby parts at Planned Parenthood.

That's another thing this guy Kelly believes.

What part of this is brainwashing and what part of this is mental illness?

And where does the Venn diagram overlap, you think?

I think that for one, people who gravitate toward conspiracy theories, even if they masquerade as being very angry, it's actually collective self-soothing because they could appear angry, but they're very united in their belief in the perseverance of the human spirit, specifically the human ability to keep secrets.

Right?

In a world full of random variables where every single day loose-lipped clout chasers and people who are just like leaking stuff on signal are throwing totally straightforward operations off track in a catastrophic way.

The conspiracy mindframe tells people there's someone with a plan.

And the conspiracy way of thinking doesn't make you do the intellectual legwork of actually identifying who these people are.

So you say, all right, there's someone that's a demonic force, but the point is someone's got a plan.

And so I think that a lot of people who gravitate toward conspiracy movements, their life has fallen apart.

And so they can hold on to certain nuggets of truth and draw a correlation where it doesn't exist to prove some kind of order.

Because poverty and decay comes with an existential crisis and conspiracy theories offer a band-aid for that.

So it's, there's so much chaos in my world.

Lost my family, lost my house, lost my car.

Kids won't talk to me.

Career falls apart.

It's part of an evil plan.

It's not the result of all these terrible decisions that I've made over the last 20 years or 10 years.

It's part of a plan.

And also just even collectively as a country, like everybody I know is worse off economically now.

There's all these things going on.

Surely someone is pulling these strings.

It's not just a series of bad decisions.

by the leaders that we have voted in collectively.

Except the random, chaotic, and horrific nature of humankind that nobody knows what's going on.

Yes.

And the idea that there is a shadowy cabal of unknown figures that are making very deliberate, coordinated plans every day is comforting to some people.

And for the Planned Parenthood stuff, there's some truth to what's being said.

Let's keep it real.

Planned Parenthood does, in fact, have some system set up where they donate some of the embryos and the fetuses that are aborted to science for research purposes.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

They do that at the morgue, too.

Yeah.

There's organ donors.

There's plenty of situations like that.

But they're not selling the baby's parts.

You can look at it how you want, but they're definitely not selling them to a cabal of satanic Epstein Island residents who are then using them for ritual purposes.

So it's when you draw certain correlations, there could be an argument to say, I don't think any people who have passed away, whether it's a fetus or a living human old person, you could argue that their bodies shouldn't be given to anybody for research purposes.

If that's your stance, you say, once people rest in peace, I don't want cremation, let them decompose safely in a casket.

That's a normal position to have if that's how you feel.

But the conspiratorial way of thinking is, no, this is actually just the tip of of the iceberg to a far darker situation.

Yeah, that's so interesting.

I wonder, aside from politics, you mentioned the person's life is falling apart.

What does that look like?

What factors make people so susceptible to being brainwashed, persuaded by QAnon-esque ideology, other kooky ideologies?

Every catastrophic generational event is a big conspiracy-pilling moment for the masses.

For us, it was probably 9-11, the Iraq war.

These are all situations that create despair, whether it be people dying overseas, COVID, obviously, massive economic recession, social isolation, all of these things, the LA fires.

There's plenty of collectively traumatic events that cause people to ask questions because they're upset.

That's a perfect time for someone to be fed disinformation.

Yeah, that's true.

That's a good point.

It's really obvious when you list the events because those are the things with the most conspiracies around it.

When things go bad, people look for answers, and then there's lots of theories that are floating around because people are desperate to find answers.

And like I I said, the conspiracy route gives people an easy answer to complicated questions.

That is insightful, right?

It's the easy answer to complicated questions.

Yeah, like I said, you don't have to do the intellectual legwork of identifying exactly whose plan it was, but it was somebody's plan, the evil nebulous force that is trying to take everything from the hardworking American patriot.

For Kelly, the 2008 recession and the economic fallout after that was probably his catalyst.

Yeah, we'll get more into this dude, Kelly, because he's what a find, right?

When you come across a guy like this, you've got to go, wow, this is great.

But also I feel bad for this guy.

But holy crap, I'm so glad I met this guy because you ran into this guy like in the street.

I ran into him at a White Lives Matter rally in 2021 in Huntington Beach, California.

But to clarify, he wasn't a part of the white supremacist group that was planning to show up.

So what happened?

It was like the boomerang effect, right?

Where Antifa and Black Lives Matter showed up to counter-protest the Klansmen.

I see.

He's like on the third string MAGA group chat being like, Antifa is at the pier.

So he's showing up to confront Antifa thinking it's an Antifa rally, but they're there to confront the Klansmen who never showed up.

I think the FBI calls it a honeypot.

Yeah, that's so funny.

So they probably were like, hey, dude, we're just trying to catch some Antifa violent guys or whatever.

You don't need to be here with your triple flag thing.

The Fourbanger.

The Four Banger.

So there's

the Fourbanger is Kelly's battle staff.

It's a Sherwin-Williams extendable flagpole.

It has four flags on it.

There's the All Lives Matter aborted baby flag.

I think there's Blue Line, Gadsden, Don't Tread on Me flag, and of course the American flag.

Yeah, the top.

That's funny.

So you get into conversations with a lot of these people.

I mean, I talked to some of these people casually, not on the show, but you talk to these people professionally.

And one common thread is that a lot of them have a deep personal tragedy.

So it's not just, oh man, 9-11 was really bad, traumatized all of us.

They had something severe happen to them, or usually more than one thing happened to them.

In the case of Kelly, it's like he lost his home, but it was like, eh, that's not the beginning of the story for this guy.

They connect that to this wider spiritual war.

Like it somehow becomes God, Jesus, versus the Democrats.

And it's like, dude, you had your home foreclosed.

How does that happen?

So that leap is what I'm interested in.

But also, I feel like that's the common thread is that these people have a personal tragedy.

And then it's like, instead of dealing with that, they do like a sidestep and they go, now I'm a spiritual warrior.

Well, it makes it so they don't have to complete the grief process.

And they can be stuck in between.

Between denial and anger is pretty much where that radicalization happens.

So I theorize in the movie that there are three core needs, security, significance, and connection.

Yes.

Security is like a home, an actual like roof over your head, a bed to sleep on.

Significance is like your place in society.

It's typically in line with employment or creative contribution.

Like for me, I find significance in doing journalism.

Like even right now, you're interviewing me on a podcast.

Like your show is part of your significance.

Your security is where you lay your head at night.

Connection is the third most important need.

And that is something that's not related to security or significance.

And that's like human connection, being loved by another person, your partner, your children, your grandparents.

And connection is the most important one.

And it can't be fulfilled by the first two.

So some of the people with the most security and significance, i.e., some of the richest people, are the most alienated.

Whereas there are people with very little significance or security who have a lot of connection to others.

Community exists, in my opinion, more on a working class level than it does at the very top.

That makes sense.

I think that part of the reason Kelly had such a fallout is because in this country in particular, everything is connected.

There was a 1950s Levittown Leave It to Beaver era thing that said, strong fences make strong neighbors.

That's a distinctly American dream post-war thing where your status is inextricably connected to your own privacy and the walls that you build in between the people around you.

When I lived in Phoenix, Arizona, I lived in a nice neighborhood, like maybe 6K a month.

My neighbors, I never saw them one time.

They would call the landlords for noise complaints, never talk to me.

I was totally isolated from them.

That's weird, hey?

Yeah.

And when I was younger and I was paying like 500 bucks a month living in the French quarter on Bourbon Street in an attic the size of a baseball dugout, my next door neighbors, Frankie and Johnny, these gay dudes who sold meth, were like my best friends.

And if I needed their help, I would call them.

So the more money that I've made in my life, the less close I felt to my neighbors and community.

So I think a snake that eats itself.

I think a lot of people have that experience.

Not the gay meth dealing neighbors, but the community issue.

Reminds me of that movie Office Space, which I'm sure you've seen where he's like talking on the phone.

He's like, hey, man, you want to come over?

And the guy already heard everything.

No, man, I don't want you fucking my love up too, man.

Oh, yeah, he's already heard the whole thing because he's right there.

Those two gay Beth dealing dudes are like, guys, I need your help.

And they're like, yeah, we heard the whole thing.

We're on it, man.

We're on it.

We know.

Yeah.

That's a perfect reference.

I forgot about that scene.

Yeah.

But yeah, that guy's neighbor literally is like exactly what I'm talking about.

Yeah.

And they're both like down and out.

Like one dude's like a construction guy.

The other guy works in that crappy office.

They look forward to hanging out.

They can count on each other for stuff.

They can lean on each other.

They have pretty much nothing in common.

Yeah.

And the reason that's so significant is because when Kelly lost his home, his neighbors were like, can't help you.

Good luck.

Like in an ideal world, if you have a strong community, you can get your house foreclosed and people will help you.

You can stay on your friends' couches, like assuming you're a well-standing community member.

You can recover from that.

But the way it was in his world, where everyone had built up their own empires, even if they were next door and they wouldn't share, it was like, oh, you lost your house.

Sorry, bro.

You got to go with the poor.

Yeah.

And you almost get the sense that in a community like that, there's gleeful gossip going on.

Oh, did you know that he lost his home?

The family had to move out.

Oh, I thought he was was a lawyer.

Yeah, well, not anymore.

You got disbarred.

And it's like, I see a little bit of that in the online space.

There's a lot of people who really, we should all be like helping each other out and cheering for each other.

And I mean, you saw this when you got accused of stuff, which we can talk about a little bit later.

There was a lot of people that were like, dang, I can't really believe that.

And I was like, okay, I want to hear the detail.

I always is, especially as a lawyer.

I'm like, I want to see the details and the receipts.

But a lot of people were like, I knew that guy sucked.

And I'm like, no, you didn't.

You know nothing.

You still know nothing.

What are are you talking about?

Online hatred and the accumulation of wealth are all rooted in existential dread.

The desire for power, whether it be wealth or followers, is rooted in the existential fear that nothing matters and that your entire life you're just working toward achieving something intangible that will disappear the moment you pass away.

The reason people want to hoard wealth is because being rich is the closest thing you have to immortality.

And being famous might even be a more immortal sense than that because you go around and you see outlines of the Beatles on stained glass windows at the Hard Rock Cafe, murals of Kurt Cobain on Melrose in places he's never been before.

So fame and money are the two things that can help us deal with this shared dread that we have because everybody's going to die.

A friend of mine, Neil Strauss, wrote a bunch of cool books.

He was like, what would you do if you had six months to live?

And I was like, oh, I record so many cool podcast interviews.

And he's like, why?

No one's going to remember you in 100 years.

And I enjoy doing it.

And I think, oh, it's going to be a great legacy.

But he's not wrong.

It's also like, you should just really only spend that time with your kids and your family because none of the rest of it matters at all.

That's something hard to grasp.

I'm sure you're a workhorse like me.

I see you do a bunch of episodes.

Yeah.

The satisfaction and dopamine rush of like doing numbers on a podcast is transitory compared to the fulfillment you get from really connecting with somebody.

It is.

It's very hard for guys like us.

You don't have kids now, do you?

No, I want to, though.

Yeah.

Once you have kids, this was before I had kids.

So I was like, no way, man.

You know, do the podcast.

And then once I had kids, I was like,

love y'all listeners.

This is great.

We're going to be in reruns because i have terminal cancer or something like that this is not true not true not true folks but if that were the case and i'd be like i'm just gonna go to greece with my kids i'm going to china i'm literally not going to answer any more email if you want to write me my wife will check it probably after i'm dead the end this makes me think man my mom invited me on a birthday trip this weekend I told her I couldn't go because I had to record a broadcast, but maybe I should just postpone that and go with her.

Yeah.

Make those memories.

Right.

It's her birthday or your birthday?

It's mine, but we haven't got to spend time together.

Um, just us in a while.

But Dan, the way you said that i'm the one who brought this whole train of thought up but you kind of drove it to the station maybe i should just say fuck the broadcast this weekend and go to san diego how important is the broadcast can it be moved it can be moved yeah just move it dude yeah whenever i miss important stuff i regret it a hundred percent of the time yeah and like i missed halloween with my kids this year because i was in another country And I was like, oh, it's early Halloween.

My dad's taken the kids.

My wife's taking the kids.

And I was like, how was it?

She's like, oh, they had a good time.

And then she goes, okay, if I'm 100% honest, all week they said, Why is dad missing Halloween?

Why is dad missing Halloween?

And then the day of, they were all really bummed that you weren't there.

And then the whole time, they were like, You think dad will meet us later?

And she's like, I'm not telling you this to make you feel bad.

I'm just telling you.

And I'm like, I am never going to miss Halloween again.

Because for me, I'm like, Halloween, it's like 90 minutes max before they get bored and tired.

Who cares?

They're not going to miss me.

My whole family's there.

They only wanted me to be there.

And I was like, on a plane.

Damn.

So this year, you're going to be extra.

Hell or high water.

I'm waking up with my costume.

Thousand dollar makeup.

That's right.

Yeah, I'm calling somebody from Marvel Studios to come do my Halloween.

I'm going to scare people in my neighborhood.

My own kids are going to be scared.

That's right.

Shitless.

That's right.

It's going to be Voltron with my daughter on my right arm and my son on my left arm.

You guys live here in California?

We live up in San Jose.

Yeah.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

How do you feel about staying in California?

I like it because my wife's family is there.

My parents are there.

I moved them in from Michigan.

And I like my neighbors.

Speaking of community, it's actually really cool.

We have neighborhood watch because somebody tried to break into my house a couple months ago and freaked everyone out.

We were home.

So I scared them off.

Holy shit, that's terrifying.

It's really scary.

Luckily, the cops were like, look, this is a break-in crew.

This is not a like, come and kill everyone in your house crew.

And you could tell because on the cameras, they kick my window in after looking in our windows and not seeing anyone because we were in bed like eight because I got little kids.

And I was in my bedroom.

They kick the window in and you hear like, get the f out of here from you.

Yeah.

And then they would stand up like, oh crap, there's someone home.

And they just took off.

So it's not like I'm some hard ass.

I actually didn't see them.

I would have bought a MAGA hat for the day after that.

I was like, this fucking bullshit.

Comifornia.

Those communists tried to come in here and convert my children to MS-13.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So look, at the end of the day, I like California because I love the weather and I go outside like every day.

I'm always outside doing stuff.

I grew up in Michigan where.

literally half the year I'm depressed AF because apparently seasonal affective disorder is a thing.

And I didn't know that growing up.

I just thought, wow, really hate life for six to eight months.

This is normal.

And then when I went to LA for a temporary period when I lived here, I was like, wait, you can just skip winter?

You can just opt out?

This is awesome.

Yeah.

You can also opt out of winter in Arizona.

Yeah.

So like if you

brave like the worst summer imaginable, because I'm from Seattle.

I had a similar like seasonal effective thing.

I moved to New Orleans for college and it just swaps.

Everybody's depressed in the summertime.

Same with South Florida.

And I was like, oh my God, this is really the spot.

But I asked you that because so many different podcasters, entertainers, and just business people have left California.

It's true.

I think they lost $4 trillion in wealth in the past year.

And I just got my IRS statement.

They're going to take 45% of my income this year.

Don't you have an accountant that's like, Andrew makes $60,000 and everything else goes through the business.

Yeah, but still, this is like federal plus state.

And now I'm thinking, like, dude, I love it here so much, but is this worth it?

Because I can hire more people and pay less for rent money in a different state.

I know.

That's true.

You can spend a lot of time in California and live and have your business in another state.

It's just, do you want to spend every other week in California and then your business is in Nevada?

That's a pain in the butt.

Once you have kids, you can't really do that.

Yeah.

I wouldn't mind the taxation if we were living in a utopia.

Like they actually took care of people, created tunnels under the freeways that alleviated traffic.

And you just saw like lots of people coming here for business.

But in turn, it feels like they're, I don't know if they're embezzling it or just giving it to nonprofits who are doing nothing with it.

But it's crazy because it's like you look at other states that have reinvested their money properly and it looks great.

Like even if you go to Vegas right now, you're like, damn, this place is booming.

It's cool to be around somewhere where there's like young hustlers and people getting to it as opposed to here.

Like I have an office in Universal City and like my janitor was like mopping the floor and like pointing to empty offices and being like, Michael Jackson once recorded beat it right there in 1995.

It feels like I'm in Detroit after GM shots.

Yeah, that's depressing.

When I was in New York and doing the finance hustle thing back in the early aughts as a lawyer, that place was electric energy and it was awesome.

I would live in New York again.

Even in winter in New York is dope because it's just so much going on and you're inside and stuff.

It's like whatever.

You can wear nice winter clothes.

You feel stylish, whatever.

But winter in Michigan is just...

So I have to get in my car right now for 20 minutes.

I got to warm up my car for 40 minutes to take that ride.

No, this is terrible.

So if my family didn't live in California, I don't think I would live here.

It's tough.

But also, all my friends who moved to Austin are like, same problems, different weather.

I also, this is a controversial take, but I believe Texas is for Texans.

And I say this as a guy who loves Texas and respects the culture there.

They have a different way of life.

I just don't think that California bag chasing mentality works too good out there.

I can definitely see that being an issue.

For them.

Yeah.

Florida, I feel like it's for everybody.

It's like a mutual American place where you can just go to start a second chapter.

Texas people belong there.

You can feel it in the way they talk, the way they dance, the way they just think about things.

Like the pace is meant for them.

It's not meant for LA comedians looking to turn over anyway.

That's a really good point.

There's a lot of people who moved to Austin, for example, from California, and they brought a lot of their same mindset that didn't work in California down to Austin.

And it's funny because the people in Texas are like, God, get out of here.

But they're also still annoyed with how Austin has turned up.

And I'm like, you guys are doing that to yourselves.

But I also have a lot of friends who move to Austin that love it, but they don't live necessarily in the city.

My friend Ryan Holliday lives in Bastrip, Texas.

Just out there.

Just like out in the middle of nowhere, runs a bookstore.

And this is for me.

So look, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I agree with you a lot.

I think there's a lot to think about.

Move before you have kids.

It's so much harder to move after you have kids.

It's nearly impossible.

You mentioned those three core needs, security, significance, connections.

When this happens to teenagers, you mentioned in the documentary, they go into dangerous attention-seeking behavior.

So when someone's assaulted or has issues at home, they start getting into trouble.

And that's why we look at the homes of teenagers when they go off the rails.

But what about adults?

What do we see with adults?

Because not everybody who goes through a personal trauma ends up being a QAnon forebanger.

Obviously, your underlying opinions, if you were already kind of like a staunch Reagan-style conservative, you'd be more likely to gravitate toward MAGA conservatism.

Of course, some people have less media literacy than others, and that has to do with intelligence and not so much with their upbringing.

Yeah, you're right.

There's plenty of people who get their homes foreclosed and don't go like straight to the Capitol on January 6th.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and there's also plenty of kids who grow up in broken homes and don't join gangs.

So there's a bunch of factors.

Some are cultural, but some do have to do with media literacy and intelligence.

That is a good point.

A few decades ago, ago, maybe I'm delusional.

Maybe you've got some info on this.

A few decades ago, I feel like Americans could disagree with each other without hating each other.

And politicians from opposite parties, they played softball together or whatever.

But also, there was just this totally different level of respect, I feel like, in the 90s.

And if somebody was a Republican and you were a Democrat, you didn't shame them or call them names or anything.

You were just like, oh.

I voted because I care about education.

And they're like, taxes are too high.

And that was kind of it.

It wasn't like Uncle Frank's spit takes, takes, spitting his food.

Also, dude, like politics were boring back then.

There wasn't this like WWE showmanship.

There couldn't be like a Romney adjacent Proud Boys.

You know, and there couldn't be like Antifa during Bill Clinton.

When I see British politicians, like the maybe 10 years ago, 20 years ago, when I was in college, I was like, these people are ridiculous.

So they're like, ah, hurrump, hurrump, hurrum.

And they're like yelling at each other.

And you see these other, I don't know, like Lebanon's parliament or whatever.

They're all freaking out and yelling and screaming.

Serbia, they're launching tear gas.

I just remember thinking, gosh, look at our Congress.

Like we have our shit together.

Now it's, nope, we're the same slash worse than all these other sort of, like you said, WWE showdown in government.

And it's like, what are you talking about?

Marjorie Taylor Greene's talking about Jewish space lasers.

And it's, how did this happen?

And also the politicians are on the same damn phones as we are.

So now we're in an era back in the day, it was like politicians were the ones who traveled.

They were more engaged with the public.

They're also on Twitter being hypnotized by the same social media platforms that the average person is.

And that goes for like left and right.

So that's why there's such little conversation.

I actually think that the generation after Gen Alpha, so when the current 12, 13 year olds who were in elementary school during COVID, once they are at the age where they can have kids, their kids are going to be anti-technology because their parents are going to be so hypnotized by like watching live streamers and just being engaged with this AI-generated brain rot content.

So I think all kids born in 2040 are going to look at people with phones as like, you guys are dumb.

Don't you know those things destroy your mind?

Yeah, that's a really interesting point.

It'll be like cigarettes.

Yeah, they're like, dude, put that damn phone away.

Kids are going to want to kick the can around.

Like I grew up throwing sticks around, chasing squirrels.

You did too.

Yeah, climbing up trees and stuff.

Now,

if you have your kid climb a tree now, other mothers will call the police on you sometimes.

My buddy has this kid who's eight climbing trees and he climbs quite high.

He'll climb up.

And other mothers are like, that's dangerous.

And he's not really.

He's going to fall on the grass.

It's not going to be a big deal.

And also, he's not going to fall.

And then they called the police.

And the police came and they were like, yeah, that's pretty high.

What's the problem?

And the guy's like, women are harassing me about how high my kid's climbing in a tree.

And he's like, the cop was like, you called the police for this?

Also, they did respond to the call.

They weren't like, click, what are you talking about?

They showed up for that.

That's insane to me also.

And you're right.

I think that next generation is going to be like, yeah, my dad's always on the virtual thing.

And I'm going to be sitting there like, no, this is cool.

The movie looks 3D.

And it's going to be like, dad, touch grass man totally because i think that already now they did a survey i think it was like related to the new madden games where people actually preferred to play madden 2007 to 25 because it turns out that people we're at this point now where people prefer nostalgic video game graphics to hyper realistic graphics because it makes them feel like a loser they're like here i am controlling this man who looks real and stronger than me and playing a fake game back in the day like now there is actually more of a demand for a regression to back when things were more fun and arcade-like And we're going to see that more and more.

There's an anti-tech movement that is brewing, and it just hasn't hatched yet because Gen Alpha doesn't have any kids.

That is quite fascinating.

I'm actually looking forward to that.

I do need my son, who's five right now, to slap the iPad out of my hand.

Like I want to slap it out of his hand.

What's funny about this is my kids, they love iPad.

They love watching stuff and they learn a bunch of stuff.

They always want to play with actual toys.

If they have a choice between iPad and Legos every time, if they have a choice between iPad, phone, and running running outside run outside every time bubbles flying planes whatever so your kids might be that anti-tech generation that's awesome they're three and five and they'll love the ipad if they're eating when they're done eating they don't want that thing at all and sometimes my son will be like ipad please and we're like now we're going to talk and he's okay yeah and i'm like wait that doesn't work on anyone over the age of 10.

yeah what's going on here and look sample size up too because i have two kids but it's pretty incredible to see yeah and all you hear is that kids are addicted to devices.

Sorry, mom.

Sorry, dad.

My parents are addicted to the devices.

Dude, honestly, in the same way that a lot of parents don't let their kids have social media until they're 13 or 14, we should do a similar thing with people after they turn like 80.

Yes.

Or maybe even like 75, like where they have to be supervised on Facebook.

Because I've seen some old people fall for some real like...

terrible computer art that anyone can tell is fake like hillary clinton eating a baby and it's just so obviously like a dead baby photoshopped as like on Microsoft paint over like an AI Hillary Clinton with like giant jaws and they're like, look at this picture.

Yeah.

This is a photograph.

Shit, you sound like a kid.

Yeah.

This is a like a kid who's intellectually disabled and doesn't understand that it's a cartoon.

That's crazy to me.

Do you subscribe to the idea that any of the, speaking of conspiracies, is any of this culture war stuff a manufactured distraction or is it just the result of bad incentives?

I think that most of the things they talk about are true, but it's just a matter of scale.

For example, the trans sports stuff that's happening.

That's probably affecting a couple different sports throughout the country, but the magnitude of the broadcast and the way it's recommended on Twitter makes that 40 times more important than student debt or income inequality.

And you're like, what the hell's going on?

No one can afford medicine.

In 1990, it was so crazy.

The average cost of a four-year university for a bachelor's degree was $9,000.

And people were leaving with no student debt and an 85% chance of getting a good job in the white-collar sector.

Now, the average cost is between $45,000 and $68,000.

And the average debt that people have is almost twice that.

And they're three times less likely to get a job.

That's a big problem.

Let's figure that out.

So when I go on TV and people say, I don't know if you saw, but there's a transition trying to play in women's sports.

I'm like, sounds like something for the school to handle.

What the hell am I hearing about this for?

But I'm careful to like cast everything.

It's like just culture war bullshit because it makes it sound like the thing itself doesn't matter.

For example, police brutality was a real thing.

It dominating the conversation in a way that it did for that long on a corporate level made no sense.

I suppose that's true.

I don't know the stats or anything around that stuff.

Yeah, I'm just saying, like, even if you look at trans rights, trans people by state, and a lot of states don't have access to the health care that they need, period.

Women's rights, that stuff's real too.

That is real.

The ability to have an abortion is important, especially if you're young or you didn't want the baby.

It's a real thing.

I'm not going to to say, yo, the news is talking about that.

They're just trying to hop us up on some culture war bullshit while they're silencing the truth because that stuff does matter.

Like I said, it's just a matter of scale.

Scale.

Yeah.

That's an interesting way to look at it.

You're right.

I do feel like certain things are nonsense distractions, especially the trans hysteria.

And during the election, it was crazy to me when you looked at what they were talking about, the politicians.

You would think that was the biggest problem or issue in the entire country was whether trans women could play soccer or something like that.

It was just like unbelievable.

And meanwhile, I was thinking, don't we have massive debt and like trade issues and education issues and stuff?

And it was just like, can you believe they're going to let them use the bathrooms?

And it's, okay, I thought we moved on three years ago.

This is still the number one thing.

It's absolutely insane to me.

That part, I think, is distraction by design because it's real easy to just harp on that instead of being like, we have a complicated question.

We got to figure out about our education system or like healthcare.

It makes for more potent reactionary content and headlines that capture the average person.

Like I said, the showmanship, the WWE wrestling style nature of political discourse today makes it so the real boring shit just isn't talked about.

Yeah, no, that's a good point because it doesn't get enough clicks.

It's boring.

I don't know if I want to hear about tariffs.

No, you're right.

I look at these things and I go, I'll read a book about it later because I can't control it now.

That's partially an excuse.

The other part is it's not interesting enough compared to the other things that I'm looking at.

Now, look, I'd like to think the things I'm looking at are objectively interesting.

I'm profiling people like you or whatever that's more interesting than learning more and more about what somebody did yesterday that's no longer the case especially because trump changes his mind so often that it's like i don't need to learn the whole plan the plan's going to change on monday yeah like we were going to go to harvard university this weekend to cover the dei student walkout another thing came out yesterday i don't know what the hell happened but it's not happening anymore So when you chase the reactionary fault lines of different Trump-related issues, you're always chasing yesterday's papers.

Yeah, what you need to do is buy refundable flight tickets.

Otherwise, you're just wasting your money today.

That's a good piece of advice.

Yeah.

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All right.

Back to Andrew Callahan.

I'm curious why you make some of the choices you do when you produce and edit documentaries.

For example, I think it was Kelly talking about, he's describing his villain origin story, and you're like, let's set him up in the bathroom.

And I'm like, okay, that's a deliberate choice.

He's talking about how he loses his house to fraud, according to him.

He's either you were on the toilet or he was on the toilet, and someone else is like on a little stool.

And I'm thinking, you could have set this up anywhere, but you set him up in the bathroom.

Yeah, I feel bad about that because the reason that happened is we hate shooting interviews in hotel rooms.

We travel so much for work, and we typically get these identical $125 Super 8 holiday in express rooms and around the country.

And it always looks the same: two tiny queen beds, maybe twin beds with this weird TV and the coffee machine and the mini bar, and then one really bad piece of stock image art.

And so we have this thing where like we can't shoot any more interviews in these hotel rooms because it makes us look amateur.

And so we just sort of panicked and we're like, let's just do the bathroom.

That's going to make people think.

And now I feel bad about it because like it was an important interview.

But thankfully, the Z90 shot, which is the Zoom cam, was tight.

So we try to avoid the bathroom shot, but I am, in fact, on the toilet.

Okay.

Yeah.

I just, I wondered if that was, oh, look at the juxtaposition between us being in here and like him telling him this to this.

Okay, so even this question shows that it was a good choice to do it in the bathroom.

Because like, what is he trying to say?

A deep hidden message.

Yeah.

Hidden messages, we're sick of it.

We're flushing down the problem.

We're just like, this is really silly.

And we're not taking it that serious, even though he's taking it that serious.

But that's kind of a mean way to look at it.

Cause you actually did treat him with a tremendous amount of respect.

So this guy, Kelly, once again, lost his home.

He lost his business.

He was disbarred.

And he lost his family.

His version is what?

I lost my home because of Bill Joyner.

But then it was more like, actually, you got out of your skis financially.

Then when you got disbarred for literal tons of misconduct, which maybe was related to a mental illness, because that's a lot of misconduct, dude.

Then he loses his home because he lost his business.

And then it's like his family's like, yo, we can't take any more of your shenanigans.

So they go their separate ways.

Yeah.

And he just blames it all on this one event, which is the foreclosure.

He's a semi-sympathetic character when you get to know the story.

And I think part of the reason that he was pushing his family away, because think about it, the foreclosure was like, I think 2017, 2018, he continuously pushed his family away for four years because he couldn't accept what had happened and completed the grief process to where he was like, you know what?

I took an L.

I'm going to step back and I'm going to figure out what to do next and live life in a way that where I can avoid this kind of catastrophe, which is hard to do because you have to swallow your pride.

You have to forget about what was lost.

You have to forgive enemies of the past and move forward.

And nobody likes to be around a resentful, spiteful person, even if they were done super wrong.

It's just exhausting.

Everybody's got their own problems and their own conflicts in life.

They don't want to be around some person spinning out about, oh, fuck Bill Droiner.

He's a piece of shit.

So I think just that energy and that frantic negativity is part of what made them feel like, I don't want to be around my dad.

Yeah, it's sad.

You start to feel sympathy for him, but then you also go, I wouldn't end up in this situation because I would make different choices all the way.

By the way, the misconduct thing, did you ever get further insight on that?

Because getting disbarred is actually hard to do.

I just knew it was for a variety of infractions that occurred over a five to six year period of time, just not paying clients back, overcharging hours, just different stuff.

I went on his, I don't know if it's like Google reviews or whatever, but his former clients had left some feedback.

And it was all like, man, this guy sucks.

But some people said he was a great lawyer.

I don't think he was particularly like evil.

I just think he cut corners and he got caught.

I wonder, do you think it's chicken egg, right?

Was it like mental illness?

Then he starts doing the misconduct stuff because he's not all there.

That results in him also overspending and then losing his house because he didn't lose his house to a bank.

He took something that might be a loan with aggressive terms because banks wouldn't deal with him, most likely.

Totally.

So chicken egg, right?

Was he mentally not all there?

I just think he had bad spending habits.

I think he didn't grow up with a lot of money.

A lot of it has to do with how you raise.

Think about rappers or athletes when they get a $38 million check.

Somehow it goes away in two years because they didn't grow up with people who were spending wisely.

I think he grew up in a trailer park in Iowa or somewhere in the Midwest.

So like he got all this money.

He succeeded.

He's like, I'm balling.

I want to prove to myself and to my wife and kids and community and family family that I am the shit.

So I need this big ass house.

If he didn't move into a giant house and get 47 animals, he'd probably be in a position where he's a nice apartment.

Here's how we're living.

He could have even gotten disbarred and used his legal expertise to do a different job.

That's true.

That's a really good point.

Yeah.

When you see this guy, so he has 47 animals, which is wild.

And it's like a stingray.

It's not just like a bunch of cats.

It's like a stingray.

There's a bunch of the aquarium is probably like 25 girls.

Pygmy goat.

Like animals you never even heard of.

He's got a little pig.

Miss Piggy, yeah.

Rest in peace.

It's just, oh no.

The video was filmed 25 years ago, so I'm assuming Miss Piggy's passed away.

I'm not sure what the pig lifespan is.

Yeah, that's a good point.

You know, this super interesting fact, you talked about the January 6th rioters.

60% of January 6th capital rioters had recently filed for bankruptcy.

20% had recently lost their home, and 50% were in severe debt.

That was like a real wake-up call, I guess you would say for me, because I was like, who are these people?

Is it just a random cross-section?

No, it's the same people who have this deep personal tragedy.

Bankruptcy is serious because it's not just that you're out of money.

You usually lose your assets, which is like your home and your business as a result, which can have profound personal consequences.

So those are the people, by and large, that ended up breaking into the Capitol building.

Yeah, because they channeled their personal grievances into a larger, grand spiritual battle.

And thinking the way the politicians talk, like there is a conspiracy to take things from me and from you guys.

If you're doing well and financially stable, that rhetoric's not going to land so well.

You're going to be like, I'm doing pretty good.

What the hell is this guy talking about?

America's in decline.

We're under attack by the communists.

What do you mean?

Illegals are taking jobs.

What jobs?

I have a job.

Most people can't see beyond their situation.

If you're somebody who just got screwed over by a landlord or an authoritative figure in your life who didn't give you the benefit of the doubt and cast you to the side, here comes a politician who's like, this is happening to you and me and everybody who's good.

And it works perfectly.

In a way, you feel bad for some of those people.

Actually, I felt bad for most of them because the way that they end up there, these are not universally losers, right?

Some of them were like the guy with the Auschwitz t-shirt.

Like this is a guy who clearly like never a productive member of society.

But when you look at a guy like Kelly from your documentary, yeah, he's a lawyer.

He had a great business.

He had a couple of kids.

He had a nice home in Laguna Hills.

He lost all of that stuff.

And it doesn't really even matter whose fault it was.

The fact is that he lost it.

And so it's sad to see that downfall from somebody.

And it can result in those sort of mental health consequences that result in radicalization.

I'm not trying to get too in the weeds on this particular guy, but I do think it illustrates the complexity of factors behind the breakdowns that these people have in their lives that lead to extreme belief systems.

And on the other end, I think that there is extreme leftists as well.

Yeah, when you hear about it.

It's typically and not always caused by an over-fulfillment of core needs.

Yeah.

So in a way that radical conservatism is about a mythologized past that needs to be revived.

Oftentimes radical leftism or liberalism, I'll say, is about a mythologized utopian future.

And a lot of people that you see are the most active in the protest movement are those who actually grew up quite wealthy, had their core needs fulfilled, have two loving parents, then go to college, hear something, and for whatever reason, shave their head or dye their hair and get a spider web tattooed on their head.

And now they're going to jail for Palestine.

What's the spider web thing?

I don't even know.

It's just hipster style.

I grew up in Seattle, so I grew up with anarchists.

And I know that like most of the hardcore, like throw a Molotov cocktail with the cop type of people have loving parents.

That is quite fascinating because for me, I would think, wow, this guy got into skateboarding and the rest is history.

No, but the people feel like I grew up with a lot and I'm learning as I'm getting older because obviously microtraumatic media is like pictures of sad people who are oppressed.

They deploy on the liberal side.

They're thinking, I feel so bad about what I have that I need to go above and beyond to fight for those who don't, which is well-intentioned, but it often leads to a lot of like appropriating of other people's causes, a lot of paternalistic attitudes about minorities who they perceive as being disempowered, a lot of weird ways that you see white people talk about black people, stuff like that.

We're like, this is fucking weird.

Have you met a black person before that's not like a part of your social group at school?

Have you ever gone to a black neighborhood and made friends?

It's pretty easy to do.

You should try it.

Go do that for a little bit and then go to the protest after and be like, huh, these black people leading this protest don't exactly think the same things as all of my friends who are black, who are their own people and have a diversity of opinion.

That's quite fascinating.

So political fanaticism, you said something along the lines of it's built on top of unprocessed trauma.

You think that's both for the right and the left?

I think it's possible for the the left.

Definitely those who grew up very poor can become extreme progressives.

Yeah, for sure.

And I'm pretty far progressive.

But I mean, like, those who are the most vocal and doing extra-out shit, like shining laser pointers in the eyes of police officers and carrying around squeaky pig toys and terrorizing the police like they do in Portland and Seattle, most of those kids don't have to work.

Yeah.

I don't want to make it seem like every conservative is a blue-collar man who's fallen from grace because that's not true.

But like I know a lot of hardcore conservatives and they work real jobs, like farming in the actual working-class sector.

That's why it's hilarious when so much progressive leftist logic is about the working class versus the ruling class when the far majority of the agriculture and manufacturing sector is conservative because these people want to get taxed less and they don't want to see free stuff being given to the homeless and poor.

Yeah, it's really hilarious.

Of course, you have trade unions, you know, like the Starbucks Union and Workers United and stuff.

Those are, they're doing great work.

I'm not going to discount unions or something.

I'm not an asshole.

But it's just funny growing up in Seattle, then moving to the South and going back and seeing like the most rich kids from my high school are now like dedicating their life to social justice causes.

And I'm like, that's crazy.

You used to say the N-word at house parties.

Yeah.

Not with the hard R, but like singing along to YG.

Oh, that's

okay.

But dude, I would never do that.

You wouldn't even the just.

No, dude, I grew up in the inner city.

Like, that's just weird.

Like, I'm not wired that way.

What is that movie I just saw where the guy does it in private and there's a camera on him?

What movie was this?

I think it was actually like a Bill Burr movie called like Bad Dads or something like that.

And they show the guy doing it in the privacy of his own home and he's all sing along there, but then he's not comfortable doing it.

I mean, hey, if I'm singing along to a song, shit, you never know.

But the point I'm making is that like, I feel like when you're in the belly of the beast, you can see things progress.

Like, I definitely have more understanding of progressive radicalization or whatever than conservative.

That's why I made a whole movie about Kelly because I'm trying to figure it out.

Yeah, yeah.

No, that makes sense.

This guy, man, he's obsessed with these causes and he's basically dead to his kids.

And that's a little bit unfair, but he's estranged completely.

Yeah.

And you can't help but feel bad for people like this.

But then when they make their problems everyone else's problem, that's where it gets bad.

Not just annoying.

It's more than that.

I don't exactly know.

Everybody will have situations in their life where everything they care about falls apart.

It's a matter of rebounding from that in a healthy way.

And that's a thing that some people can't do.

A lot of people live in perpetual victim mindset about certain things.

And I think that he was like that to an extent too.

As much as the Trump conservative crowd wants to be like, we're not victims, we're not going to say that we were ever disadvantaged in any capacity, a lot of them are stuck in anger about an enemy of the past who's no longer even thinking about them.

Jeez, you've been to some of the most charged, chaotic, bizarre events in America.

What's something that shocked you, something that you didn't expect going in?

I didn't know furries would be that cool.

Really?

Yeah, furries are chill.

They're not even weird.

Tell us what that is again, because I think so.

Furries are people who dress in anthropomorphic fursuits that cost like a lot.

Like Chuck E.

Cheese.

Chuck E.

Cheese, but it's connected to like an anime adjacent fandom of non-verbal animal interaction.

Oh, it's non-verbal.

Okay.

It's verbal, but you don't use your real voice when you're in the fursuit.

Oh, so you talk like, oh, hey, everyone.

Yeah.

Hello, I'm Andrew.

Oh, really?

Yeah, sometimes.

So that's strange.

What's going on there?

I don't know.

But a lot of them have, a lot of them are on the spectrum and they're just chill.

Okay.

I thought they were going to be all like zoophiles.

The sort of rumor about it is it's all a bunch of weird sex stuff.

They do some sex stuff, but it's mostly just like playing around.

That almost seems, I hate to say this.

I kind of want to see that.

You should get a fursuit.

It's going to run you like four grand then.

Do I have to get one?

And you can't just be like, yo, I'm here to cover this as a journalist.

Well, I feel like

you kind of have to be given a fursona.

You have to develop it.

They can tell if you're a poser, like if you go to a country music concert, you know, and you have your cowboy hat.

Right.

Like one time I wore a cowboy hat to an event in Virginia City, Nevada that was camel racing.

I didn't know I had a women's cowboy hat on with a bedazzled cross on the front.

Like, they were not fucking with me.

So, with the fur suit, you'd have to really grow into it and develop your voice.

So, like, for me, I'm a scaly.

I'm not a furry.

So, you're a reptile.

Yeah.

Because I was close with a reptile back in the day who passed away during the American Idol finale in 2006.

That was when Bobice lost, who was my favorite.

So, Bobice loses.

I go into my room.

Snakey, the gecko, was dead.

It was the worst night of my life.

So, I felt like when I was becoming a scaly at the Midwest Fur Fest, I was channeling the spirit of my lost brother.

I kind of feel like I'm you in one of your videos right now, interviewing somebody.

Yeah, you're just telling me that.

Why do you think I'm so good at it?

That's really funny.

Guaranteed, somebody who listens to this show, many people are furries.

I would love for them to email me and tell me, you said given a fursona, right?

So, do other furries tell you what they perceive of you?

Kind of, but you might come up with a couple names yourself.

But if you have a real certified furry homie and you bounce it off them, they'll be like, nah, that's not you.

At first, I was Franklin the Fantastical Falcon.

And they were like, nah, you're not a falcon.

Because everyone's got a spirit animal, and I'm not a falcon.

Man, I am dying to know how I come across to that community.

Yeah, they're cool.

And no judgment, I'm just genuinely interested.

I feel like I've asked this question before, and I got a couple emails about it, but I replied and I didn't get answers.

I think I don't want anybody to think I'm making fun of them.

I'm actually just genuinely.

No, no, you're coming off with respect.

It's obvious.

Yeah, good, good.

Is there any specific interview or rally moment that's haunted you aside from when you went to TJ Maxx and bought a bedazzled cowboy hat by accident?

No, I have pretty bad memory.

Conversationally, I can remember a lot of stuff, but I've just experienced so much.

I don't really remember anything unless someone's talking about an event and I have a thousand stories.

But if you were to ask me straight up, what's a crazy ass interview you've done?

I would say, like, I don't know.

Yeah, what's your favorite interview?

And I'm like, gosh, I can't even remember the ones I did this week.

I literally don't know.

If you were to say, like, what's your favorite interview you've ever done in Tulsa, Oklahoma or Las Vegas at night?

I believe that.

Or like with a cop.

I could maybe come up with a couple.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, something like that.

I know you did, I saw this, something about psychedelics and you have visuals and you can't drive.

Is that true?

I can drive, but my night vision is kind of bad.

It's called hallucinogen persisting perception disorder.

Researchers are not that sure about what causes it.

If you want to get ocular real quick, it's caused from psychedelics like LSD, MDMA, peyote, all that.

Wait, MDMA is a ecstasy.

That can cause that?

Yeah.

That's alarming.

The dose must have to be massive to cause it.

No, it's very specific.

It happens between 4 to 4.5% of psychedelic users, so something like one in 30.

That is a lot.

Check this out.

If you have HPPD at home and you have visual snow, palaenopsia, and all the things that we have, it's not an eye problem.

It's a brain problem.

It has to do with the visual processing system.

So it's a little bit of ocular science here.

There's 130 milliseconds between your eyes seeing something and sending that information to your frontal lobe to be processed.

Before it goes there, it goes through four steps.

So it goes into the eye through some sort of stem to the back of the brain, so the occidental lobe, and then from there to the front where it's registered in the mind.

So there's like, we're actually living in the past in a very micro way at all times.

So they think that HPPD is something similar to epilepsy, where, you know, when epileptics, when they see strobe lights, they can have a seizure.

I remember the Nintendo issue.

So this is something like that, where they don't know quite yet because nobody wants to put up the money to help people with this condition.

But it's something about the occidental lobe in the visual processing center being basically disinhibited by psychedelics.

So do you see snow or whatever right now?

Yeah, and actually, so according to HPPD science, the brain has a self-correcting mechanism that clears it up before exporting the final high-res.

So I'm seeing white noise based on things my eyes are seeing and my brain's like, we ignore that because it's everywhere.

Yeah, it's not necessary.

It's not real.

And so I see that and I see extreme eye floaters.

Like I probably see a hundred black squigglies right now.

Wow.

And I'm surprised that your brain can't then be retrained to forget to see those things or to not.

tell you that those things are being seen.

What I've done is I've trained myself to prioritize other senses.

So I'll try to live a lot through hearing and sensation.

Like when you're doing their HPPD therapy, they say be grounded, feel the earth through your toes.

Just don't look at eyesight as the main way to perceive the world.

It's generally the most important sense.

But if you start to prioritize others, that's the conscious way to retrain.

I apologize for eating all that garlic last night since you're relying on your other senses.

No, I can't eat that.

This Jordan guy freaking

fucking reeks, man.

He's a genius, but he smells like shit.

That's right.

Garlic shit, actually.

What is depersonalization?

You mentioned this in another interview, and I remember it was terrifying because this, what is it called?

HPPD.

HPPD.

Something that can get rid of the symptoms is what?

Benzodiazepines, which you should never take, and alcohol, which, you know, can go wrong.

Yeah.

So the first person to research HPPD was Dr.

Henry Abraham, who's from the American Psychiatric Association.

He lives in Massachusetts.

He theorized in the 80s and 90s that it was benzodiafines, particularly diazepam and xanax, that could help you not think about HPPD.

It doesn't take it away, but it stops the anxiety mechanisms.

And alcohol works as a suppressant, but the problem with alcohol is it makes you forget you have HPPD, but it makes the symptoms worse over time.

And alcoholism is generally bad.

There are scientists now who are pointing to a couple different treatment options.

One of them is over-the-counter magnesium every night, which apparently has worked for some.

And the other is an epileptic medication called lamotragine.

Have you tried these?

I have, and I have to go to a doctor to get it, but it's shown some promising results, especially for kids, because there's a lot of kids who are prescribed Ritalin who develop HPPD.

Oh, no way.

Wow.

So, this is something you can get from a lot of different pharmaceuticals.

Yeah, it seems to be totally random.

A lot of people say, man, you must have done a lot of mushrooms.

I'm like, I did mushrooms three times.

Oh, I just assumed that you were like, hey, it's college.

I'm going to do this seven.

No, kidding.

So it must just have to do with developing brains and like you have a pathway that wires or unwires that shouldn't be unwired or wired.

And that's the end of that.

And there's got to be a way to fix it.

But the problem is you've got two lobbies.

You got people trying to make drugs look as beneficial as possible, you know, doing clinical trials to to use MDMA to treat PTSD and anxiety.

Then you have the other crowd who are just not trying to help drug users with anything.

We're like, why would we help these brain-fried people?

Here's the solution.

Don't do drugs.

How about abstinence?

Those are the same people that are like, oh yeah, a lot of unwanted kids.

How about just find Jesus and don't have sex before you get married?

Exactly.

That's not working.

And I look at HPPD much like that.

It's a harm reduction conversation because right now psychedelics are decriminalized in nine different states.

And in Colorado and Oregon, a psychiatrist can give you them for supervised use.

So obviously, if it follows the same same trajectory as marijuana legalization, in 40 years, there's going to be mass legalization of psilocybin mushrooms.

So I think it's important for people to know about HPPD so we can figure out how to cure it and how to prevent it.

Once all that stuff gets legalized and 200,000 people get HPPD the following year, then they're going to work on it.

It's got to be a simple mechanism if in fact it disinhibits the processing center and the occidental load.

This is maybe a reach, but whatever.

Do you think that interviewing other people in the very authentic way that you do and then being able to watch yourself on video maybe proves to you in some way that you are actually real.

Oh, yeah,

that's the best question I've ever been asked in history.

Really?

Yeah, because you asked me about no one's ever figured that out.

I don't know how you did that.

Just because of, I don't know, I watched a lot of your stuff.

I've never said it.

You thought of that.

Yeah, I wrote it down.

So basically, depersonalization is the main symptom that accompanies HPPD symptoms.

Because of the unreality created by your visual symptoms, oftentimes you become depersonalized.

And depersonalization is similar to the second symptom, which is derealization.

So the difference is that when you're depersonalized, you get the sensation that I am not real.

I have no connection to my body.

I am a nebulous soul being held prisoner in a skin suit, and particularly trapped in an escape room behind my eyes and trying to figure out how to escape the hell of self.

That's super terrifying.

Once you come to terms with the fact that you are stuck in the skin suit, derealization comes, which is: okay, I am real, but the rest of the world is not.

Everything that I'm seeing is a non-sensory object, and everything in my visual field and in the world is a hallucination or a figment of my condition.

And I'm the only conscious being on the planet.

That's like the loneliest thing I've ever.

I wouldn't wish the feeling on my worst enemy.

I hate my enemies.

Yeah.

Wow.

So, do you feel that way now, or do you know that's not the case?

After filming content for years, the derealization just left me.

So it goes HPPD in my experience.

It's first HPPD, then depersonalization, then derealization.

And in the fourth stage, you can just break it and accept your broken eyes.

I've never heard of derealization.

Like you're saying, being on camera and filming stuff in the field is proof to me that I'm living in a shared reality and on the same 3D plane as the other people.

So it helps with derealization, not HPPD, not depersonalization.

But that third symptom, I was able to treat by filming people in the streets.

I think one of the reasons that this came about was because I can't even put my own finger at it, but these conversations that I have with people like you on the show, it gets you so far outside your personal opinion, so far outside your belief system, so far outside your personal experiences, so far outside like your own upbringing, whatever it is, that it also, I suppose, makes me realize that other things are actually real.

It's not the same though, as yours is like way more acute.

I don't think I've ever thought I'm the only thing real in this universe.

That's too heavy.

And it's making my heart race thinking about it.

What sucks about it, too, is like when you try to talk to people about it, oftentimes it gets mistaken for an existential crisis or like a philosophical musing like what if i'm the only person no it is a sensation i am the only person your brain is telling you that and so when people try to talk you out of it they're typically not doing it well they're like what do you mean we're here together and i'm like you're the hallucination yeah you're a hallucination it's just like when you dream something that's not real but it's got to be hard to talk about because other people might also think oh look at this narcissistic piece of crap you're the only person in the universe that's real i don't even think about that sorry there's something else to worry about he's the fucking center of the universe.

Yes, literally.

Oh, yeah.

We all exist in your head, bro.

We don't have feelings or wants or lives or anything.

Yeah, it sounds like I'm justifying sociopathic behavior.

No, we're all just a hallucination for you to enjoy.

But I remember I would look at cars driving by the window of my mom's apartment and I would just try to imagine myself being the driver of that car and being like, they're here too.

You know what I mean?

Like it's not just me.

And I would convince myself and I'd be like, no, it is just me.

And I would stare at my own eyes in the mirror and being like, who is that fucking guy?

And I'd go, oh, that's me.

Wait, if that's me, though, then there's no one else.

But it leaves hard work and consistently working towards something tangible on a shared planet with others.

When I walk in the street and people say, I love your video, that's them saying your derealization symptoms are an illusion.

Derealization, is that also a result of psychedelic use?

No, no, no, no.

Psychedelic use causes the HPPD, which sort of starts the chain reaction that leads to that.

I see.

Remember that if you're derealized, that's the final boss.

You're not going to be depersonalized again.

So it can feel like the scariest part, but it's like the final boss in a video game because once you defeat that shit, you're good.

Not everybody can become a creator that gets spotted on the street.

So what did we recommend for those people?

Just find something that gives you value in your community.

Volunteer at the food bank in a small town.

Move to Aberdeen, Washington, and give out moon pies to homeless people.

And then you come back a week later and they're going to go, yo, thanks for the sandwich, bro.

I love moon pies.

Maybe that's an extreme example.

You could do something.

It doesn't have to be homeless people.

You could become a street magician in Venice Beach.

I don't know.

There's so many ways.

We're going to be walking down Venice Beach and someone's going to to go, hey man, I came up with this idea based on your podcast.

And it's going to be like, what?

Making sandcastles?

Yeah, man.

The only thing that makes me feel real.

And I guess we'll have to pound it out.

Yeah, I can see that happening in the future, especially if this episode pops off.

Who are some of your influences?

Because to me, it seems like a mix of certain people.

Look, of course, yourself, but I don't know, Louis Theroux.

You know Louis Theroux, right?

Yeah, yeah.

He liked Adir Kelly.

That was the person that I was most stoked about is he texted me.

He got my number.

It was a plus four, four British number.

And he was like, it's louis fantastic film i was on the edge of my seat really amazing cool compliment i was like yes that was the sickest compliment louis thoreau big inspiration i was inspired by a lot of other shit that's not journalism like chief keith music he's a rapper from chicago fallout new vegas the video game on xbox little b random stuff has nothing to do with journalism was an inspirational what about the alley g show sasha baron cohen honestly probably that stuff there's also a lesser known interview show called brushstrokes with norman Venami.

Oh, I've totally heard of it.

So random.

It's done by a graffiti writer named J.A.

Is this on YouTube?

It's on YouTube.

It aired 16 years ago.

He has two characters.

One's called Shams the Baron, which is like Allie G.

One of them is Norman Venemi, who's supposed to be an asshole like Paris art gallery collector.

And so he would go to different art galleries and just troll people.

That was a big influence.

Early Daily Show was super good.

Oh, yeah.

When it was Wyatt Senak and John Oliver and that shit.

What do you think about when it comes to substance abuse and creativity?

Because I know you did the psychedelic thing a lot of people like the hunter s thompson like oh i've got to be like super drunk all the time to write it's bullshit i used to think that my magic was like doing finette shots every night and partying and that i had to be in an rv getting drunk but actually when i stopped doing that i got 10 times more creative Addiction has a weird way of embedding itself in your creative purpose.

I'm telling you, I'm doing something good for you.

Yeah, in your creative pursuits.

Like, you need me.

It's almost like a bad friend who's like, you need me to succeed.

Once I cut out alcohol, I was able to start this five cast.

I'm putting out three episodes a week.

We've expanded the newscast to Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, England, Lebanon, and Canada.

And I'm not even stressed out.

I just have all this free time that I was spending on my second job, which was

going out, getting the homies.

Yeah, getting over hangovers and stuff like that.

All that stuff.

That's a good message.

Look, I've done a lot of drinking way too much.

I've also done other things.

One of my big realizations also was you don't need that stuff to be creative.

But like you said, your addiction brain tells you you're more creative when you're abusing substances.

It's like a rationalization.

And look at the end of Hunter's life.

Yeah.

A lot of these guys, right?

I mean, a lot of these greats who rationalized, and I'm not saying that Hunter wasn't doing anything at the end of his life.

Hunter S.

Thompson's widow, Anita, she told me that his biographer was jealous of him.

And he hijacked Hunter S.

Thompson's story.

And he said, oh, he was unable to write because at the end of his life, he was just doing all this cocaine.

And so they published this schedule that was like Hunter S.

Thompson's daily routine was like grapefruits in the morning, go shoot shotgun shells in the backyard, do a bunch of whippets and cocaine all day, coffee, write a little bit.

And they use that when explaining why he ended up taking his own life, saying, look at this poor man at the end of his life.

He wasn't able to muster up any creative energy because he was incapacitated by addiction.

Hunter S.

Thompson's wife, Anita, she told me, no, that was bullshit.

At the end of Hunter's life, All he wanted to do was be a sports reporter.

He hated the character that he had built with fear and Loathing.

He hated that he had built himself into this gonzo hero of doing drugs and traveling and he had built up this character because that character made it so that he couldn't get jobs from ESPN and other trade publications like Rolling Stone.

Surprised by that.

He was writing more in his final years about baseball statistics and sports information than any other time in his life.

And they wouldn't buy his columns or pay him a fair price per word because they said, you're the drugs guy.

We don't want you in our newspaper.

And he'd say, I'm not the drugs guy anymore.

And then the people who used to buy his columns, like fear and loathing, the drug stuff were like, hey, can you go back to the Kentucky Derby again and do some ether and do a bunch of ketamine and talk to some horse jockeys?

And he was like, dude, I have a wife and kid now.

I don't want to do that.

And so I think that part of the reason he was so depressed and took his own life is because he felt that he had to live up to this character that he no longer identified with.

Yeah.

I think a lot of us can relate to that, I suppose.

You hitchhiked for a long time, eh?

Yeah, for sure.

Tell me about that.

I would love to do that, but I'm also scared because I grew up in the 80s and the 90s where it's like, they're going to get hatchet murdered if you hitchhike.

Yeah.

I said this incorrectly in a news broadcast because I mixed up different information, which happens when you're speaking off the cuff.

But there was an FBI counterintelligence program that had something to do with incentivizing car ownership where they were trying to stigmatize hitchhiking.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory.

It's real.

It was like part of, I think it was J.

Edgar Hoover, or it was someone.

He's the one who did all the bad stuff.

It was this whole idea of the danger on the side of the road.

If you look at some of the films that were made during that time, i.e.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1972, kind of seems like there was a concentrated effort to take hitchhiking culture away and incentivize car ownership.

If you look at L.A., they destroyed public transit.

Detroit did that too.

Yeah.

They had streetcars going up and down Woodward, which is like the main street all the way from downtown all the way up towards Woodward.

And I want to say Ford bought it and was like, Let's rip these out so people have to buy cars, which is a damn shame.

Yeah, exactly.

And now look at these cities.

There's such low social cohesion.

But yeah, hitchhikers are like the enemy of the state back in the day.

I don't know if they're still that.

Now they're just like escaped convicts.

Yeah, that's true.

You have to drive on the highway and it's like, prison area, do not pick up hitchhikers.

Yeah, from up Nevada, it's every fucking mile.

Yeah.

And you're like, shouldn't they be in the prison though?

It's like, why did you guys let them get out?

Yeah, but I used to hitchhike every summer.

When I went to college in New Orleans, I would just hitchhike back to Seattle after every semester.

Other countries have pretty robust hitchhiking culture.

Like Israel, you can hitchhike.

And if you're a soldier, you're expected to hitchhike.

Sounds annoying as shit.

It is.

But I remember going to Israel in college and we were on a bus tour or something and we picked up a soldier because you always pick up soldiers.

They're going home or whatever.

And they're carrying like an automatic rifle.

And I remember being like, yeah, whatever.

And I remember this girl next to me and the guy next to him were like, I don't think my parents would be too happy if they knew we picked up an armed man.

And I was like, when you put it that way, it is kind of sketchy.

Like one o'clock in the morning, we're driving and we picked up two armed dudes who are like carrying an automatic weapon with ammunition i mean there's still places in the u.s that you can hitchhike if you're in the um colorado mountains west of denver during ski season the pacific coast trail the east coast is just a no-go obviously can you imagine trying to hitchhike from philly to new york gee sounds like you know we're

yeah no one's picking your ass up i was in ukraine 20 plus years ago and single girls would hitchhike.

Yeah.

And it was the craziest thing.

I remember hanging out with my host sister.

So these girls that were like, I don't know, 19, 19, 20 years old.

And they would just wave a car down, dude, and on roll the window.

And they would lean in like you see prostitutes doing in the United States.

And they'd lean in and go, hey, we want to go downtown.

And the guy would be like, all right, 10 bucks.

And they'd be like, how about five for each of us?

And then my friend's free.

And they're like, the guy's like, all right, fine.

Yeah, I just want some chicks in the car.

Yeah.

He's like, oh, it just kind of smells better when you guys are in the car.

And then you get in the car and you go downtown.

And the guy says, whatever, man.

And that was really common.

I remember saying, like, aren't you guys scared?

And they're like no we've been doing this since we were 14 nothing has ever happened my friends all do this none of us have ever had anything other than a guy might be like hey uh you don't have to pay me if you like sit in my lap and you're like no thanks next it seems crazy to us growing up in this day and age but it's really common in other countries to hit i mean i have a lot of female friends who are hitchhikers It's weird.

The gender stuff is so intense nowadays.

When I tell people I hitchhike, I remember one time I had a live show.

I think it was Richmond, Virginia, and I told this this story about hitchhiking, and this lady raised her hand in the audience, and she was like, don't you feel like it's kind of a male privileged thing for you to be able to hitchhike?

And I was like, first of all, most dudes don't have the nuts to hitchhike.

Secondly, yes.

However, that doesn't disqualify my story from being interesting.

Yeah, that's a weird gripe.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a male privilege thing.

Lots of things are.

Does anybody else have a real question about this?

Also, female privilege, you got to pay five bucks.

I had to pay $100.

All right.

Now, I don't get sued nearly as much as Andrew Callahan, but I've still got bills to pay.

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Now for the rest of my conversation with Andrew Callahan.

you got mistaken for a gay prostitute.

Tell me how that happened.

Well, I just was the youngest person on the road in a place called Crowley, Louisiana, and a gay Honduran man thought that I was a gay prostitute, took me to a little place where you have sex with gay prostitutes, and then I told him I wasn't.

He was hella chill.

Oh, he wasn't like, oh, dang.

He couldn't believe it because apparently the place that I was at was a cruising truck stop where a lot lizards of the male variety would procure clients.

But he was chill.

I think he just wanted like a hand job.

I take it you didn't provide the

hand job, but I was like, good luck.

And he was like, it's all good.

I'll find one by the end of the day.

Let he who hasn't been confused for a gay prostitute cast the first stone.

Yeah, respect.

I was one of the first 500 members of Couchsurfing, and I heard you're really named.

Oh, shit.

Okay, dope.

Yeah.

It was a great community.

It was so awesome.

I remember emailing the guy who started it.

It was like a month after he started it.

And name was Corey.

And I was like, hey, this is the greatest idea.

Let me know if you need help.

And he's like, I might need some website help.

And I remember like using Dreamweaver to try to make like a template or something for him.

And the stories I have from couch surfing have changed my life.

There were times where I had 13 random people who would otherwise be homeless, basically in LA in my crib, like German girls, Brazilian dudes, Colombian girls, like guys and girls from all over the world, Lithuanians.

And I'd be like, it's going to be hard to sleep in here because the floor is taken, the couch is taken, the chairs are taken.

There's girls like snuggling in my bed and I'm on an airbed on the floor next to them.

We should go to a bar and we would just invade a bar.

And I remember sounds so fun.

It was so fun.

Cause imagine you show up and the bartender's like, how do you know all these people?

And I'm like, I don't.

I met them all yesterday, today, and the day before.

And they're all from all over the world.

And we're all just hanging out like we've known each other for a year.

Dude, I'm so happy you brought that up because when I was hitchhiking, I would use couch surfing almost every night to find a place to stay.

It was easier back then because you could just bomb applications.

I could hit like 100 people up in one night.

Now I think it's 10 per day.

Oh, it didn't hurt you?

Yeah, that makes sense.

Otherwise, you get mad spam.

Yeah, I mean, I only had one bad experience on couch surfing.

What happened?

I didn't read in the description that this place I was going to in Dallas was clothing optional.

For me, that just meant like you can walk to the bathroom naked.

Like, I'm not going to be pissed if I see you walking around naked.

But I didn't realize that was like obvious code for a nudist colony.

Oh, okay.

And so I got there.

So it's not really optional.

I just didn't want to be naked.

Like, I wasn't weirded out by it, but I was just like, I didn't want to do it.

And like, they were just really mad at me.

So I ended up leaving.

I was like, I don't want to be naked.

They're like, okay, we understand.

Some people people aren't as evolved as us.

Some people have a very limited consciousness and they don't understand.

I'm like, dude, I don't care if you guys are naked.

I was also the youngest person and shit.

I was like, this is wow.

It's a little predatory to like enforce that on you if it's optional.

I just think being a nudist is kind of like being an atheist.

There's this inherent edgelord thing to it.

What's like, you grew up thinking you had to wear clothes.

Guess what, asshole?

I'm butt naked.

It's kind of like people who are like, I'm an atheist.

I don't know.

There's no way that we go to heaven.

It's like, how do you know?

Why don't you just be non-religious?

Yeah.

Or just don't force it on other people.

I think it would be a little strange if everybody I was in a couch surfing house with for a night was naked, but it's way more weird if they're like, hey, man, you're supposed to be naked too.

And it's like, came here to sleep, maybe watch a couple episodes of the office.

I'm not here to like compare dong sizes or like, because you're going to look at everybody's dick.

Obviously.

There's no way around it.

I'm doing that even with my clothes on.

So I don't want other people to look at mine.

No matter how evolved you are, like, I'm going to look at everyone's dick, whether or not i like it because it's just there's a dick and you have to see what's up with it exactly because maybe if there's something wrong with it you could say hey man one of your nuts is huge you have to go to the hospital do something about that yeah yeah there's nothing weirder than the male genitalia dude i was at a nude beach one time in florida called hollover beach i saw a guy with the biggest dick ever it must have been a two-foot-long dick i'll never fucking forget this he was like a short cuban looking dude in miami with a two-foot dick nobody was with me so i tell this story and I'm like, are people going to think that I'm like lying?

Got to take a photo.

The only thing is, why would I be lying about some guy's dick if I don't even know?

Yeah, you shouldn't be lying about.

That's hilarious.

But if you're out there and get in touch with me, we have a documentary crew ready to find you.

The man with the two-foot-long dick.

Yeah, that's one of those where you're like, oh man, props.

Oh, wait.

Actually, everything for you probably really sucks.

There's no woman that can like handle.

And you can't even use the urinal because your dick probably falls.

Oh, gosh.

You got to carry sanitizer wipes because it's always dangling in things it's not supposed to be.

Jeez, I almost feel bad for that guy.

Me too.

Almost.

By the way, Insane Clown Posse is from my hometown in Michigan.

Royal?

Yeah.

Cool.

The Juggalos, you know, of this community.

Oh, my God.

Have you covered them?

I didn't catch anything.

I haven't covered them because they were just so overcovered.

Do you know what I mean?

Weiss did such a good job, and so many journalists have done such a great job covering the Juggalos that I almost feel like, what could I possibly have to add to the current discourse?

But my neighbor right now in LA does all their merchandising.

So I have the end for college.

So for people who don't know, Insane Clown Posse is a rap group that's clown themed, for lack of a better word.

And their juggalos are ICP Insane Clown Posse fans, super fans, and they have goth clown theme makeup.

Yeah, they dress like clowns.

They have the dark carnival mythology, which has its own like lore and history.

Yeah.

This is probably mean, but whatever.

It's like white trashy kind of stuff.

So there's a lot of getting super drunk and like wrestling.

No, they own that.

They own that.

They have something called Lake Hepatitis at the gathering, or they used to, where everyone takes their car batteries and throws them into a mud pit and fills the mud pit up with fago and beer and swims in it.

Oh, that's really gross.

Or I was told that by Mike Busey.

It could be an exaggeration.

That's super gross, but also kind of on brand.

And building up natural immunity to other chemicals.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

Really gross.

What's this about getting shot in the ass by the National Guard?

Oh, I got shot in the ass by the National Guard.

Okay.

Is there more to the story?

I was in Minneapolis on Lake Street right after the George Floyd murder, and i was doing an interview and i got shot with a rubber bullet in the ass by national guard this is a dumb question many of my questions are but that hurt really bad right it was such an intense day yeah i was watching someone rip an atm out of a wells fargo and take sledgehammers to it did that work i don't know i i left because i my friend lacey started filming and they were like bitch turn the fucking camera off so i was like all right i'm out

sorry you're gonna die and i'm gonna live yeah man shot in the ass i've seen people get shot actually my friend got shot in the nuts with a rubber bullet and he's suing LAPD for that.

I would, too.

Obviously, I believe lost that one.

No way.

Yeah.

No, not the lawsuit.

Sorry, the nut.

He lost that nut.

That's my figure.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

The nut's gone.

And he used to be one of Nelson Mandela's security guys.

So this is not like some kid.

Are people still trying to kill Mandela?

Yeah.

Not anymore.

For Connor's tracking him down.

Not anymore.

Yeah.

Back in the day, he foiled an assassination plot against Nelson Mandela.

He was on the show.

But yeah, he protested against LAPD, and they shot him in the balls.

And yeah, now he lives in South Africa.

That's where he's from originally.

But yeah, once like the kind of bruise sets in, it hurts to sit down, but the immediate sting's not too bad.

Oh, not really?

Not too bad, huh?

Yeah, kind of.

That's crazy.

Jeez.

I heard people lost their shit when you had Alex Jones in the documentary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Why, though?

I mean, it's clear that you're not like, this guy's amazing.

On a corporate level, oh my God, dude.

I wish I could take you into some of those 16-person Hollywood Zoom calls with people I've never met.

But there is a school of thought that happened around 2016 in Hollywood that

deplatforming people and refusing to speak about people who are problematic in some capacity will reduce their power.

I see.

Which it does reduce their reach, but the people who stick with them are as powerful as 10 people because they've been emboldened.

The natural human response to being deplatformed is, I'm telling the truth, so they're silencing me.

Especially when that axe is dropped by a faceless corporate entity like Facebook moderators.

So Alex Jones is enemy number one of Hollywood.

And me putting him in the film, even though it was in a satirical light, was not enough for certain people who I'm not going to name.

It's really interesting to see that or hear that because when you watch this, you're lifting weights with Alex Jones.

Alex Jones is a conspiracy theorist.

He said Sandy Hook was a hoax.

He's, in my opinion, a terrible guy for doing that.

He dragged those families through hell.

But you're weightlifting with him and he's like pouring whiskey down your throat.

I mean, it's objectively ridiculous.

And it doesn't portray this guy.

Oh, this is a credible source of news I should listen to.

It's, oh, this this is a ridiculous person.

I will say about Sandy Hook, though, obviously what he said was horrible.

Yeah.

But they've dragged it out in the news media on purpose to make sure through SEO that you will always think of him as the Sandy Hook guy, if that makes sense.

His whole thing back in the day was I am going to question and offer a false flag conspiracy on every single event that happens ever.

He still does it.

That's what his audience wants.

A lot of his fans are the ones who engaged in the relentless harassment of the Sandy Hook families.

And so I think it was very much like a creator responsibility thing.

He hasn't fully apologized for it because it's also like if he did apologize for it, he would lose some of those fans.

So it's a delicate balance.

And I do think that, of course, that was horrible, but I will just add that in there real quick, that that was the perfect moment for the media to use against him every time he says anything ever.

So they look for disqualifying things.

And that's one of them.

I just feel bad about somebody who lost their kids and then is being threatened to be murdered because it's just quote unquote fake or a false flag when they lost their kids and now they have to move.

They got to change jobs.

I mean, it's just like, I agree 100%.

I'm just throwing that in there just to explain that, like,

the agenda against Alex Jones is for both horrible things that he's done and also to make sure that other things that he's saying don't get out there, too.

I see.

The soundbite he's most well-known for is that they're turning the freaking frogs gay.

Yeah.

Which is funny because that's kind of true.

This weird stuff.

The frogs aren't turning gay.

They're just reproducing what asexually or something.

And it has to do with the chemicals and the water.

So it's like the most ridiculous thing that he said is true.

yeah anyway you shot yourself in the foot with this media tour that you were doing for was it the last thing

it was for the uh the hbo thing the hbo press tour of 2022 tell me about this because i laughed when i heard the story originally which i know is bad because it was not good for you but it's funny what 2020 hindsight yeah basically

hbo who was great to work with set up a press tour and they gave me media training and they said here's how you're going to have to answer certain things And I didn't understand why they were being so deliberate about it.

But they told me, they were like, I don't know why I did this, but I decided to do everything the opposite of what they told me.

I wanted to see what's going to happen if I don't do that.

So they were like, when you go on CNN, be very complimentary.

They're going to ask you about your life.

They're going to ask you about the film.

What inspired you?

All of that stuff.

So I'm assuming the CNN interview was the first interview of the press tour.

I go on there and I'm assuming they're going to ask me about all that stuff.

Immediately, I'm sandwiched into an expose about the Proud Boys, who I was still actively covering.

So it's a conflict of interest as well.

And Don Lemon goes, what can you tell us about the mental state of Enrique Atario leading up to the January 6th riots?

And I'm like, holy shit.

I'm with this handler that the 824 films had sent to accompany me.

And I'm looking at her.

She's wearing like an N95.

And I'm like, hey, what's up?

And she's not even looking at me.

People say they see red.

I didn't see red, but I was like, you know what?

The mainstream media is complicit in the division cycle that even created the climate for something like January 6th to happen, much like they were in the riots of the summertime.

So I was like, it's not about that.

It's about you guys and Fox and this constant 24-hour news cycle that you're doing and these gymnastics and WWE political climate you're creating that's making people lose their minds and get fried in a time where we should be coming together to get over this pandemic and revamp the economy.

And they were not having it.

So that CNN interview was over.

And then I got word where someone told me that Time Warner C-suite was furious.

And I didn't know what that was.

I was like, what's Time Warner C-suite?

And they told me that the same people who own CNN own HBO and that my press tour, aside from that day, was being discontinued.

Sorry, it sucks.

But you know what?

It also illustrates one of the exact points that you're making, which is like, these are all in cahoots and the messaging is essentially curated in some weird way that maybe shouldn't happen.

I I wouldn't take back what I did that day for a billion dollars.

Really?

Yeah.

I don't blame you.

The reason I thought it was funny was because you innocently proved your point in a way that embarrassed a lot of people in a kind of a funny way.

But yeah, you're right.

A news channel didn't get the answer they want.

So HBO, where the documentary was like, ah, we're not going to platform this guy.

Well, they got the pressure from the corporate partners.

And that's the thing about economic interests is that it allows for leveraging and that kind of stuff.

Like HBO HBO is the homie.

It's people above them who are like, hey, you have to act this way or you're going to lose your funding.

They say follow the money.

Money, if you follow it to the top, you just get to a bunch of corporations who are interested in having a profit yield.

And if they're co-signing someone who is causing their ratings to go down or challenging them, that's seen as a threat to capital.

That's right.

No, that totally makes sense.

Do you think January 6th could happen again?

That kind of thing?

No, because, okay, I tell people this all the time.

During 2020, the groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who are the ones who led 2020, they thought that they were on the side of law enforcement.

They actually thought they were a wing of law enforcement.

A lot of that has to do with some of the political theater that was unfolding in Portland in particular when you had brawls between Antifa and the Proud Boys.

Because of the 2020 defund the police, let's call it what is the fuck the police movement that happened in 2020, the groups that were defending the police were very chummy with the police because they were also against Antifa.

So I would go to parks where they had Proud Boy rallies in 2020 and I would see cops yucking it up with Proud Boys.

They were like chummy.

They were in group chats together.

They were operating as a unified front and a force, the men's groups and the Trump-adjacent militia groups and the cops.

That made them think that they could storm the Capitol.

Nobody who stormed the Capitol thought that they would get in any trouble.

They were storming the Capitol with blue line flags while fighting Capitol police officers.

They had no clue they would get in trouble.

So it couldn't happen again because they were not ready for the consequences.

A lot of people went down.

Of course, they're out of jail now, but a lot of them spent four years in terrible conditions in prison.

And it wouldn't happen again because, for one, Trump can't run again to get them out of jail.

But two, they realized, holy shit, we can go to jail for 25 years for doing something like that.

They didn't think there'd be any consequences.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Yeah, they got pardoned, but hopefully some of those examples were set.

I guess we'll see.

Consequences are what create recidivism for violent action.

Consequences create the likelihood for a recurrence.

So if, for example, 2020 summer could happen again, because aside from a select few like my friend Dylan Robinson, who did three and a half years in federal prison for burning down the precinct in Minneapolis, that's a guy.

People always say, oh, Antifa had no consequences.

A lot of them did, but the vast majority of people did not go to prison for anything.

So the riots could happen again.

January 6th couldn't happen again because of the consequences.

Law and order is real.

It does make a difference.

You're very attuned to other people's trauma, I noticed.

Do you personally relate to that on some level?

You're really empathetic with them in a way that I don't think most people would be.

I think most of the time you see an interview with these people, it's kind of like, oh, look at this guy.

You're not really doing that.

Well, I firmly believe that most people are good, and I definitely believe that almost everyone thinks they're doing the right thing.

I don't think anyone wakes up aside from a select few sociopaths and says, you know what, I'm going to do something bad today that I think will hurt people.

There is Ted Bundy's out there.

Yeah, sure.

But so I just naturally felt like most conservatives and people that I disagreed with had coming from a genuine, non-hateful place for some people.

Now I'm just as empathetic, but I don't think that people are as good as I used to think.

What sort of eroded some of that?

Just finding money and success, man.

You see a dark side of people when you succeed.

Interesting.

Yeah, I think you're right.

Most people are good, but you're right.

It's kind of like the people who are up at these other echelons.

They're less wholesome.

Whenever, I put it like this, whenever you're like a regular person who hasn't achieved some level of like clout or money that people want, there's some people that like you and there's some people that don't like you, but no one feels particularly strongly about you.

You got your friends in high school.

You don't have any extreme enemies.

When you become famous and successful in any capacity, bro, it could be at a company.

It doesn't have to be on TV.

The margin goes like this.

And people either love the fuck out of you or they hate you and they want to see you go down.

They're either your best friend because they see you online every day or they hate you because of the same reason because they see you on the media and they don't like what you say.

Even if the people you grew up with, I can't tell you how many times I hear, yo, bro, I just met your homie.

He said he went to high school with you.

He said you guys were best friends.

What's his name?

Josh Danielson.

I'm like, I have never heard that name in my fucking life.

Or reversed, yeah, bro, my homie went to high school with you.

And he said you were like a total piece of shit.

Yeah.

And I'm like, what's his name?

Mark Fairhaven.

And I'm like, I don't know who that is either.

So all of a sudden, everyone's your homie or your enemy.

And it's just, there's no one normal in my life anymore.

That's kind of depressing.

Does that cause you any sort of struggle personally?

Yeah, it's fucking annoying.

I can't find any real friends.

Really?

It's hard.

all my friends either work for me or are working against me most of my friends work at channel five and I love them and I have nothing against them I love them I love my family too but every friendship I have seems poisoned by some ulterior motive whether it's oh yeah like it's just this augmented enthusiasm it doesn't make any sense like all of a sudden i make a friend and they're a fan and i'm like can we be friends if you're a fan are you perceiving me as a regular person if i let you down in some way are you gonna come for me i just try to stay away from people That's why I want to move back into RV in the middle of the Mojave Desert and just stay the fuck away from people.

Geez, that does not sound super healthy.

I'm sorry to hear that.

I hate to pile on with this, but I want to address these sexual misconduct or whatever allegations.

What happened there?

I've heard your version of events before, but I think it's important to get it out there because if I don't address it, people are going to be like, oh, avoided it because you guys want to be buddies.

And so you're not going to hold them to account.

I mean, I understand that you have to ask about it if you're doing a podcast.

So what happened?

Sexual misconduct, shit like that.

Yeah.

When I heard it originally, it sounded horrific.

And then when I researched it, it was possibly a misunderstanding.

Yeah, it was.

So, can you tell me a little bit about that?

I don't want to speak too much about it because I've talked about it before, but pretty much I was on really good terms with somebody who a long time ago I had hooked up with.

And at one point, it felt like they said I had a good time.

I enjoyed the experience.

But looking back, I have these texts.

I just didn't put them out because I don't want to release texts without people's permission.

That's fair.

And she was was like, yeah, looking back, I felt more pressure to agree than I realized at the time.

I still want to be friends.

I have no ill will towards you.

I don't feel like anything happened.

And then we made amends at that point.

And then two and a half years later, eight minutes before the release of the film on HBO, she asked if I could give her a portion of my HBO paycheck to pay for therapy.

Hadn't heard anything about this before?

I don't know if it was coming from a genuine place.

I'm not opposed to the idea if you've harmed someone of helping them out if they need help, but just because of our interaction before, it wouldn't make any sense I would come at that time, especially no communication, no defined amount of money.

I learned a little bit later that she was connected with a lawyer here in the LA area who was trying to basically get a confession of guilt from me.

So they hit me in court for money.

Yeah, after that came out, some more stuff piled on, most of which is not true.

Do you worry about

meeting a girl when you're out having fun?

And this scares a lot of people.

I mean, look, I feel bad for her too.

She's been traumatized.

And that's why, like, I haven't gone like super hard on clearing it up because obviously this person went through some trauma.

They disclosed to me that they had PTSD from a childhood incident, and for whatever reason, attached onto me as like the cause of that.

It probably has something to do with the fact that I was on the media all the time.

And I don't know.

It's hard to get in people's minds.

But yeah, as far as like people being scared, I don't like when people say like you can avoid allegations by this.

If I was treating people perfectly and being really cautious and not rushing things and not hanging out with fans, that wouldn't have happened to me.

So I just look at it as what did I do to put myself in that situation?

Because what else am I going to do?

No one wants to see some successful guy, especially after a rebound, talk about how like you got to be careful around these women because I don't think it's like a women thing.

I think you would have to be careful hanging out with dudes who you don't know who are fans who are possibly compromised in some capacity.

I don't think that the person is lying because you have your own experiences if that's how you experience something.

I do know that them asking me for money is inconsistent with our correspondence up to that point.

Yeah, that's interesting.

When you're young, you're like, oh, I'm going to hook up with girls.

I'm going to drink and party.

And now it's, I'm married now, but let's say I was single, I would probably not be having one-night stands and random encounters with people I met.

Yeah, I would say avoid that altogether, especially if you think that you're going to find success at some point in life.

But just in general, avoid hookup culture.

I think it's bad.

Maybe have fun, I guess, when you're younger, but it's a spiritually dark, negative experience.

for everybody involved.

You end up regretting it.

I had a lot of fun being young partying, but the pain that that situation caused is much greater than the excitement of hooking up with someone new.

So I just look at dad and I think seeing your mom cry reading the newspaper with your name in it is not worth the best hookup in the world.

Yeah, geez.

Did people stick by you or did you get dropped by Hollywood?

Instantaneously.

Didn't have anybody there for me except for a couple.

But you got to think when I first got the request,

me and my friends are like, you know, what the fuck?

This is crazy.

You work something for years and someone just sees you on TV and thinks I'm going to ask them for money at this strange juncture.

My friends were like, Oh, well, we can't tell if it's genuine.

The people in Hollywood are like, Just pay it.

Get the paperwork signed.

Just get pay it, sign a whatever, not NDA, but like a

NDA.

I said, No, I'm not going to be in this NDA sphere that you guys are in.

Once someone's got that on me, they could probably use it to control me at some point down the line and limit the messaging.

So, I mean, it was a pretty compromising position.

Yeah.

I will say that, like, there was journalists who were writing shit.

It was like total and utter bullshit after

that initial thing.

But also that initial allegation is what broke the headlines immediately.

So that kind of freaked me out.

That kind of weirded me out too.

Why is that being covered by NBC, Fox?

They never covered me before.

Yeah.

No, that's a good point.

That's strange.

Yeah.

The hardest thing was like people making it seem like I had this like long-standing pattern.

I'm just randomly assaulting people or something.

When I was actually in really good standing in every community that I've been a part of.

And anyone saying otherwise is lying.

Because at first, I was like, oh, I don't know.

This guy's allegations against him.

And I was like, well, I'm going to look into it.

And then I was like, what am I missing?

And the answer was, I wasn't missing anything.

It just got completely destroyed, blown out of proportion by the news media.

Fair to say, because there's two things happening.

Like a lot of people always comment, do you think that you got set up after CNN or whatever, NPR?

No, I think that there was something that was posted that wasn't architected by the deep state.

But I do think that the news machine latched onto it as the perfect chance to try to get me out the way.

You said something, or at least I gleaned this from something you said.

TV news has basically replaced reality TV for nonsense clickbait attention-grabbing headlines.

Totally.

And that's a fascinating take because I hadn't heard it phrased that way, but you're not wrong.

When you create, you're coming at this from a very different approach than legacy media.

I'm curious why you think mainstream media has lost the public trust, not just because of blown-up, stupid headlines that are clickbaity-y, but there's more to the story.

Well, I just think that the casual nature of podcasts is what people connect with.

I think that mainstream media is so fixated on crossfire and arguing between people.

There was actually a show called Crossfire

Day.

I think Jon Stewart broke it down perfectly.

It was a Tucker Carlson show on CNN back in the day where he would just get two people of opposing viewpoints and get them to yell at each other because he knew people would watch that because it triggers a cortisol.

Most news media today is based upon the deployment of micro-traumatic digital media, which you might not be traumatized by it, but it is pulling on something through messaging, through words and images that triggers a fight-or-flight response and makes you want to engage with it.

I have that with certain things online.

I definitely have that.

They know what they're doing.

They know what words and phrases can be used to cause someone to have an association.

And so, if you watched Fox Drink 2020, it was all cops.

putting old ladies in headlocks for not wearing their mask at the grocery store.

And on CNN, it was all cops brutalizing black and brown people.

And so you're collectively traumatizing the public.

And the George Floyd video was extremely traumatic for a good reason.

Yeah.

But that is a microcosm of what the media has been doing for a very long time.

And podcasters don't do that.

However, I do think that alternative media is following the exact same incentive structure as the MSM, if not worse.

Most of these people were like, we're not the mainstream, but we're going to give you an alternative perspective when it's just the mainstream.

It's like, we're not mainstream, but do you know that Democrats drink adrenochrome from babies?

And it's, it's, well, okay, you're not the mainstream in that you have no accountability, but this is the same dumb crap rebranded.

Absolutely.

And also, corporate media is figuring out how to own alternative channels through sponsorships and investment and stuff like that.

Do you think mainstream outlets can earn that trust back or is it too late?

That's too late.

Yeah, I think it's too late, too.

I agree with you.

This is random.

I noticed that the editing style of your videos has changed over the years.

Just like a slightly different style, but you got rid of.

What do you call it?

Like the office where it's like looked straight at the camera.

Yeah.

And that's gone.

And a lot of the slapstick stuff, the what are they called?

Like those crash zoom?

Yeah, the crash zoom is like the reason the crash zoom and the slapstick stuff is gone is because of what I call the borad effect.

I'd wear the tan suit and I would do essentially what were ambush interviews.

And the borad effect was when Sasha Barron Cohen couldn't go film borat skits anymore because everybody would either know that he was borat and they would overact or they would see that he was borat and avoid the cameras because they didn't want to be embarrassed.

It got to the point where I would be going into the field and half the people would be running up to me yelling viral catchphrases from the show.

Or they would see me and say, don't talk to that guy.

He's going to make you look stupid.

So undoing those editing choices was a way of me earning back public trust to be able to do my job in the field.

I see.

It seems like it worked.

It totally worked.

I just had to pivot.

Yeah.

Good for you.

What do you make of the projection from some of the folks in your videos?

Like the QAnon type stuff.

I'll give you an example.

There's a man who's like, Hillary, Biden, Oprah, they're all pedophiles.

And then you were like, here's your criminal record where you were convicted of raping an eight-year-old boy.

You know what I'm talking about, right?

Yeah, of course.

And it's like, what do you think is going on here?

Yes, projection, obviously, but what function is that serving in this guy's life?

I think it's just deep guilt.

It's a way of putting a band-aid over it.

When you know you are something, you can posture yourself as like a Superman against that thing so that nobody suspects you.

It's like really basic two-dimensional shit.

Yeah.

Because it becomes really obvious.

But you always see like the Mormon, anti-gay people in Utah are like caught with a gay prostitute getting a blowjob in the bathroom of the Senate.

It's literally repeats itself every single time.

You you know what i mean every accusation is sometimes a confession but it's particularly just like those who are fighting for the kids oftentimes are pedos but not always i mean the boys and girls club those people are chill i don't think they have any it's not like the catholic church

with everything you've seen from q anon rallies to protests to political conventions do you have a take on how we can begin to heal as a country get off the damn phone

that's the first thing but no things are going to have to get worse before they get better there's just so much collective hypnosis and polarization that I can't even perceive what that would look like.

What are you working on right now?

Yeah, I'm actually pitching two things on like a studio level because the studios have accepted me again, which is great.

And one is a Native American-directed TV show that's like a breaking bad, but on an Indian reservation in Arizona.

It's a narco-drama.

So I'm pretty stoked about it.

That's totally different than what you...

So this is a completely new TV show.

Yeah, I'm the executive producer of it.

It's like a sick-ass thing.

I'm playing like an alcoholic journalist who's like on the trail trail of a corrupt tribal official in Arizona.

It's like the first time I've acted.

That's been really fun.

I bet.

I'm pitching a separate documentary about a man who lost his parrot and his search for the lost bird.

It's a true story, I assume.

Yeah.

Can I ask you about your tats?

Yeah, sure.

What are those all about?

Okay, this is the space needle.

Yeah, because I'm from Seattle, but I didn't want it to take up the whole arm.

I got this because we used to joke back in middle school that like all the kids from the suburbs would get space needle tattoos because they felt like they weren't from the city and they wanted to live up to it.

And so I said, you know what, I'm going to take that back and get the needle blasted myself.

Shout out to Thomas from Liberty for doing this.

This is a Mount Rushmore tattoo, which might go against what I just said about directing and helping Native Americans break Hollywood.

Sure.

But when I was younger and I was drinking a lot, I got arrested in Sturgis, South Dakota for vandalism.

I was really drunk.

Vice was following me around, making a documentary about me.

Okay.

And Vice said that it was their protocol at the time that they had to wear N95 masks because they would get fired if they were like in a red state at that time without a mask.

And if you know that during that time, wearing a mask in a red state was like wearing a MAGA hat in Portland, Oregon.

So they were following me around with these masks on and it was making people in the Sturgis Spike Week environment think that I was a liberal that was there to shame them for not being masked while they were outside.

So one night I figured, okay, I'm going to get Vice to leave town by spray painting Vice News was here all over this historic town so that they kind of hit the streets in the morning and get chased off by bands of vigilantes from this town.

I grew up writing graffiti, so it was kind of an impulse.

And that's why I'm happy I'm so sober.

So I write Vice News on a historic building.

Vice was here.

Fuck the police.

Then I go over and I do a tag.

I think I wrote Crazy Horse over a mural of Mount Rushmore with black spray paint because I was like, I was so drunk that I was like, fuck Rushmore.

Like, I'm not even particularly well-versed in the history of the Black Hills, but I was like, all right, yeah.

And so I get arrested by the police chief on scene.

I spray painted the side of a Domino's pizza as well.

So I had to read an apology letter to Domino's corporate.

Oh, gosh.

So the chief of police arrests me.

He takes me to jail.

I'm thinking because I'm from Seattle that I'm not going to get in that much trouble.

I go to my court date and they say you might have up to like a year in the state jail.

So they gave me a court date for defacing the Mount Rushmore mural.

They had put me in the newspaper as like Seattle anarchist activist target.

King the Sturgis, whatever.

You're a few years too late for the anarchist activist thing.

And so during my court date, I say to the judge, I got my tattoo before my court date.

I say, how could I have spray-painted a Mount Rushmore mural if I have Mount Rushmore tatted on my arm?

I have respect for it.

Look, I even put it on my battle.

I took it from one year in jail to five days.

Five days.

So I served five days in the slammer.

So that tattoo saved you 360 days in jail.

That's a good investment.

And then I have a tattoo right here for my boy, Mr.

Daddy, who passed away.

He died recently.

He's my buddy from Vegas.

He passed away.

He was on ketamine.

He went in the lake.

And if you're at home watching this and you're a ketamine user, this is how Matthew Perry passed away too.

Don't submerge yourself in cold or hot water because it causes a mechanism where something happens where you go into shock and you have no control of your motor function.

So you can drown in a pool or a lake or ocean.

Oh my gosh.

Did not know that.

Jeez, that's a PSA and a half right there.

Man, thank you for coming on the show, dude.

I really appreciate it, bro.

It was a lot of fun.

Yeah.

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