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Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo Journalism, Controversy, and Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #425
2 hours 51 minutes 59 seconds
🇬🇧 English
Speaker 1
00:00
There's 2 people in the back, 2 of her homegirls wearing like, shiesty masks. And I'm like, what are we doing? Where are we going? And she goes, we're gonna go film the riot.
Speaker 1
00:07
We're going to Lake Street. And so we drive down there. Kmart is burning. Target is burning.
Speaker 1
00:14
Everything is on fire. She has the Sony a7, she gives me a microphone and she's like, go talk to that guy. And that was a guy with a Molotov cocktail in his hand who had just burned Kmart down. And so I go, what should I ask him?
Speaker 1
00:29
She goes, what's on your mind? So I walk up to him and I'm like, what's on your mind?
Speaker 2
00:36
The following is a conversation with Andrew Callaghan, host of Channel 5 on YouTube, where he does Gazelle style interviews with fascinating humans at the edges of society. The so-called vagrants, vagabonds, runaways, outlaws, from QAnon adherents to fish heads to O-block residents and much more. He created the documentary that I highly recommend called This Place Rules on the undercurrents that led to the January 6th Capitol riots.
Speaker 2
01:08
This is the Last Streaming Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, Here's Andrew Kalgan.
Speaker 1
01:18
I tried to color match you though. Got the black and white going. I went to Walmart before this and got the Wrangler shirt with the Texas Longhorns tee.
Speaker 2
01:25
Is that where you shop, Walmart? Generally, yeah. I'm a Target man myself.
Speaker 1
01:29
There's no way you get those suits from Target.
Speaker 2
01:30
So you're saying it's a nice way to compliment a suit.
Speaker 1
01:33
I think you go men's warehouse if not further.
Speaker 2
01:35
I think you would be wrong. You go further. No, the other direction.
Speaker 1
01:39
You got that from Target? Not Target.
Speaker 2
01:41
I was joking about Target. I like Walmart better. It just felt like a funny thing to say.
Speaker 1
01:45
No, it was funny.
Speaker 2
01:46
The most expensive thing I own is this watch and it was given to me as a gift.
Speaker 1
01:49
Yeah, when I was on tour, I had these $2,700 Cartier glasses that I got for a lot of money, $2,700. Like sunglasses? Yeah, but they were really embarrassing.
Speaker 1
02:01
But I was on tour, so I just felt like I could do anything as far as fashion choices. But looking back at pictures from myself in that era, I'm
Speaker 2
02:07
like, God. So that was the symbol of the fame got
Speaker 1
02:11
to your head. I think so, yeah. I think fame getting to your head.
Speaker 1
02:13
If you spend more than 100 bucks on sunglasses, you've officially gone off the
Speaker 2
02:17
deep end. You've crossed the line. Totally.
Speaker 2
02:18
And that's where you go back to Walmart to humble yourself. I really love Walmart. In fact, I moved to Austin because I was at Walmart and a lady said that I look handsome in a suit. And I was like, that's it, I love this place.
Speaker 2
02:32
She just said it for no reason whatsoever. This older lady just kind of looked at me and with this like genuine sweetness, just said, oh, you look handsome.
Speaker 1
02:40
She's not wrong, man. Thank you. That's part of your whole swag though.
Speaker 2
02:44
Yeah, the suit thing. Yep. Anyway, what was the first, if you remember, first recorded interview you did?
Speaker 1
02:54
Well, like my first grade teacher, Mrs. Claudia, this is back in the day, like I was telling you, we just asked her about her life in Columbia and stuff like that. But I didn't really get into actual journalism until my ninth grade year.
Speaker 1
03:06
I had no idea I had an interest in it. Before then I wanted to be a rapper. It's all about hip hop and meditation and picking psilocybin mushrooms in public parks and stuff like that. That's what I was into.
Speaker 2
03:16
That's a lot, so side bend meditation, rap, public parks.
Speaker 1
03:20
Yeah, I was making like conscious rap music. I was to the point where I had like 4 dream catchers hanging above my bed, Alex Gray painting on the wall, tapestry on the ceiling, just scribbling rhymes down all the time.
Speaker 2
03:33
So you said somewhere that you sucked at school.
Speaker 1
03:36
Okay, well let's step back a little bit. So I had this amazing journalism course in ninth grade. I went to an alternative high school, and the teacher was named Calvin Shaw, And he was just like, I ended up taking his class all 4 years and he used to let me actually leave school.
Speaker 1
03:52
I didn't like going to school. So he'd let me basically go around Seattle and do different interviews with people as long as I could come back by the end of the day and write a story for his class. And he'd mark me as present. So the first article that I wrote was about the Silk Road and the deep web.
Speaker 1
04:08
Because as a ninth grader, when I discovered the hidden wiki, I thought that I was really tapping into the most secret society elite level black market in the world. And so if you remember, they had that hidden wiki link that was like hire a hitman. And so I messaged them and I was like, all right, I wanna get someone killed at my school, how much is it gonna cost me? And I published my interview with the Hidden Wiki hitman, who was probably a fed or something, but who knows.
Speaker 1
04:34
And my first article was called, like, Inside the Deep Web, a Conversation with a Hitman.
Speaker 2
04:38
That's nice. Yeah. I mean, you were fearless even then.
Speaker 1
04:42
I mean, I was hiding behind a Tor browser, so there's not much fear to be had.
Speaker 2
04:46
Oh, so it was anonymous.
Speaker 1
04:47
It was anonymous, but I did publish it under my name, so you're right, I could have been in danger.
Speaker 2
04:53
I also saw that you said you took too many shrooms when you were young, and that led you to have hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder, HPPD.
Speaker 1
05:03
Can you explain what this is? Well, that condition is classified by persistent visual snow, floaters, morphing objects. Like, I see them right now.
Speaker 1
05:13
I see them all the time.
Speaker 2
05:14
The snow's in the room.
Speaker 1
05:15
The snow's definitely in the room. It's all over you. And basically, it wasn't that I took too many shrooms.
Speaker 1
05:23
I think that it was, I took about an eighth of senna essence mushrooms, which are the ones that come from the earth instead of cow shit. And I took an eighth of those at my friend Toby's house, and which is a normal amount, but I was in eighth grade. So I woke up the next morning with these extreme, you know, visual distortions. And I thought that it would go away.
Speaker 1
05:44
I tried to make it go away, but there's really no cure for HPPD. It's a lifelong condition, so it's just a matter of dealing with it and realizing that it is only visual. So when people ask me, hey, I have HPPD, how do I cope with it? I say, remember that every other sense that you have, what you can hear, what you can taste, you know, your feet on the ground, you're still on earth, you're still here.
Speaker 2
06:04
Well, you said it's only visual, and yes, gratitude for being alive at all, it's great. But you said that this led you into some dark psychological places like depersonalization disorder.
Speaker 1
06:16
Yeah, depersonalization is the feeling that you are not real, but that reality still exists. Derealization is the idea that reality itself is an illusion created by your mind and that you're the only person alive and that everything that your brain is projecting to your visual cortex is a lie and that you're the only living human being.
Speaker 2
06:37
Both are pretty intense.
Speaker 1
06:39
HPPD creates both of those things. And so when I've talked to people who have the condition, it's really either or. But more than 70% of people with HPPD fall into either category.
Speaker 1
06:50
They're both coping mechanisms for the, I don't know what really happens. I talked to a researcher once named Dr. Abraham. He lives in upstate New York.
Speaker 1
06:58
He's the leading scientist when it comes to HPPD research. He's the only 1 who actually seems to care about finding a cure. And the only known treatment right now is alcohol and benzodiaphines.
Speaker 2
07:09
That's not good.
Speaker 1
07:10
Right, so alcoholism, something that came into my life pretty early. Alcohol abuse as a result of that experience because that helps with the visual symptoms, makes some of the static go away. Never tried benzos though.
Speaker 1
07:24
So can you
Speaker 2
07:24
explain to me what in that spectrum you are? So do you sometimes have a sense that you're not real? And something else is not real?
Speaker 2
07:33
Like the reality's not real?
Speaker 1
07:35
Yeah, I experience it all the time. But like I said, my job helps with that because I get to feel like when you seek out extremes to a certain extent and you put yourself on the front lines of intense events, whether it be politically or socially, or just dive into deep fringe subcultures, you get this feeling that you're real. And being filmed is also confirmation, if you can look at the MP4 file, that you're in fact living here on Earth.
Speaker 2
08:00
Confirming that you were in it with reality by watching yourself on video. So is that basically the engine behind all the extreme interviews you've done?
Speaker 1
08:11
Well, I got HPPD around the same time that I began this journalism course in ninth grade. So I sort of always used journalism as a therapeutic mechanism to deal with some of these symptoms, especially depersonalization. There's some pretty good illustrations of what it feels like.
Speaker 1
08:26
Kind of feels like you're trapped behind your eyes or that you're just this nebulous soul that's trapped in a flesh suit that you're not really a part of. You're sort of puppeteering a flesh and bone skin suit.
Speaker 2
08:38
Trapped or just the ability to step outside of yourself?
Speaker 1
08:41
You feel like your soul is not something that is connected to your body. It's something living in your head. It's really hard to explain to people who haven't gone through derealization or depersonalization, but if you go on support groups, they always say, how do I break free from behind my eyes?
Speaker 1
08:54
Like, just dark stuff like that.
Speaker 2
08:56
Also, you're trapped. I mean, there's a higher state of being through meditation that you can kinda step outside of yourself,
Speaker 1
09:02
but this is not that. Unfortunately, it was kind of the meditative path or the Eastern path that I took and kind of fused that with psychedelic culture in Seattle that took me down the psychedelic use rabbit hole in the first place. So like, I'd say it all started with Siddhartha.
Speaker 2
09:19
Siddhartha, that's a good book. Have you done shrooms since then?
Speaker 1
09:22
No, I don't really do psychedelic drugs, but like a lot of people think that I'm against them, which I'm not, it just doesn't work for me. If it works for you, I'm sure that can be really fun, especially, I know there's lots of like therapeutic uses for acid and ketamine and psilocybin, but I personally abstain from those kind of anything psychotropic I try to stay away from.
Speaker 2
09:42
Drinking
Speaker 1
09:43
a bit? Well, yeah, I mean, I didn't drink at all before I had the HPPD stuff. And I would've drank later in life, but definitely like 14, 15, everyday after school, I'd drink a 40 ounce of Mickey's.
Speaker 1
09:54
It's like a, it kinda looks like Old English, but the bottle's green and it has a hornet on the side of it. Just kinda became a ritual just to deal with the anxiety of that situation.
Speaker 2
10:03
And it made the snow go away?
Speaker 1
10:05
Yeah, alcohol really works to suppress HPPD symptoms.
Speaker 2
10:09
So you said you hated classes in school, except that journalism class.
Speaker 1
10:12
Okay, we need to clear this up, because on my Wikipedia page, for some reason, for Andrew Callahan, early life, it says, Andrew hated every single class except for 1. So I've had a bunch of teachers who are super cool, like this guy Tim, my astronomy professor at ninth grade, Mrs. Zanetti, my creative writing teacher in sixth grade, and this really cool dude at my college in New Orleans named Charles Cannon who taught me a class called New Orleans Mythology.
Speaker 1
10:35
My 3 favorite classes besides my journalism class. And they all hit me up and they're like, hey man, saw you said you hated every class. Sorry I couldn't be everything that you wanted me to be. And so, I just want to say, shout out to all those teachers, I didn't hate every class.
Speaker 1
10:50
The point that I was making is that being forced into the institution of school so young and having to take common core classes like biology, dissecting frogs, history of the Han Dynasty, stuff like that that I didn't want to learn but I had to learn multiple times. I mean, I learned about the dynastic cycle in ancient China 3 separate times at 3 different schools and I was like who is writing this curriculum and why is it so important that I understand this process? The part that makes school difficult, especially in college, is that you have people just going to school just to get the degree who don't really know exactly what they're interested in and they don't even have time to figure that out because they're in a business program or a communications program with no specific interest.
Speaker 2
11:33
Well, I think if you wanna do school right, take on every single subject that you're forced into, it's like the David Foster Wallace, just be unboreable by it. Just really go in as if ancient Chinese dynasties are the most interesting thing you could possibly learn.
Speaker 1
11:49
And it is somewhat interesting, the Silk Road and the Great Wall and terracotta soldiers and stuff. But I'm just saying, like when I got to college, I signed up for journalism school, right? And I didn't get to take a media class until the second semester.
Speaker 1
12:01
And I had to take everything prior to that, and I'd already spent so much time, I just think the excruciating boredom of schooling left a bad taste in my mouth. But there was individual classes that I liked a lot.
Speaker 2
12:12
Yeah, there should be some choice, or maybe a lot of choice, even at the level of high school, for what kind of classes you pursue.
Speaker 1
12:20
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2
12:21
And you're also saying so Wikipedia is not always perfectly right.
Speaker 1
12:25
No, but it's just interesting because like, I've said so much in podcasts, but that's what they isolated. And I've gotten that question before, which I understand, it's the first thing on my Wikipedia page, but it makes me sound like a super hater. Have you ever seen this Instagram page called Depths of Wikipedia?
Speaker 1
12:39
Oh,
Speaker 2
12:39
it's great.
Speaker 1
12:40
Oh, it's so good, dude.
Speaker 2
12:42
You said you love journalism. What did you love about journalism? I mean.
Speaker 2
12:45
What hooked you?
Speaker 1
12:46
On a basic level, everybody wants media coverage, right? Everyone likes to be on camera and get exposure for whatever they're doing. And so being a journalist and being almost like a portal for exposure for people allows you to be on the front row of everything that you want to be a part of.
Speaker 1
13:02
You get to be in the front row for history as it's unfolding because everyone wants to be covered. So being a journalist gives you a ticket to everywhere that you wanna go in life. And so it allows you to step into different realities almost and then go back to yours. And it just keeps life interesting.
Speaker 2
13:18
Buy the ticket, take the ride. Hunter S. Thompson, is he up there as 1 of the influences?
Speaker 2
13:22
Who are your influences?
Speaker 1
13:23
I think the early Daily Show was so good. Sacha Baron Cohen, huge influence. I mean, that was like, the Ali G Show especially.
Speaker 1
13:31
I think Louis Theroux's broadcasts on BBC were great. I was really into Hunter S. Thompson too, but not really until college. You know, I really like a particular Hunter S.
Speaker 1
13:41
Thompson book called The Great Shark Hunt, where he covers the Ruben Salazar murder by LAPD or LA Sheriff's Department in Boyle Heights in the 70s. And his relationship with his lawyer, Oscar Acosta, and that whole saga is great. Fear and loathing, I like, but not as much as his straightforward reporting. Because there's the Gonzo side of Hunter, where he's like saying he's taking drugs and seeing shit.
Speaker 1
14:05
And there's the other side of him, which is like an actual reporter interested in telling a story that has news value. So it's 2 different lanes for him.
Speaker 2
14:14
There is something about you that makes people wanna say you're the Hunter S. Thompson of this generation. And I don't think they mean the drugs.
Speaker 2
14:25
I think they mean some kind of non-standard willingness to explore the extremes of humanity and like almost a celebration of the extremes of humanity.
Speaker 1
14:37
Yeah, well that's a very kind comparison. I'll get there 1 day maybe. I just went to Aspen on a little Hunter S.
Speaker 1
14:43
Thompson recon trip to go check out the Woody Creek Tavern, which is the spot that he, it was like his bar near his cabin. And it was pretty cool to see. Unfortunately, it's kind of turned into, not a dive bar now, but it's a sit down sort of country restaurant. But it was cool.
Speaker 1
14:57
But I expected to see a bunch of gnarly Hunter S. Thompson types. Doing speed and stuff.
Speaker 2
15:05
Just doing drugs. I mean, drugs and alcohol is all part of it somehow. So it opens a gateway to a deeper understanding of humanity.
Speaker 1
15:12
But I will say though, as someone now who doesn't party like I did when I was younger, it's not as important as I thought it was.
Speaker 2
15:20
Yeah, I'm conflicted on this. I'm good friends with a lot of people that say alcohol is really bad for you. And I believe that too.
Speaker 2
15:28
But there's something that, I just, as an introvert, as a person who has a lot of anxiety, for me alcohol has opened doors of just opening myself up to the world more.
Speaker 1
15:42
Oh, I'm actually a fan of alcohol, moderate drinking. But I'm saying my life before, I would say 2019, 2018 especially, there was the chaos on camera, but then there was my private life, which was like chaotic partying all the time.
Speaker 2
15:55
Oh, I see.
Speaker 1
15:56
And I convinced myself, much like Hunter did, that that was the secret sauce in the core, the spiritual, in my spiritual core, that gave me the creativity. But then I cut out a lot of that stuff and I'm just as creative. And it's interesting that a lot of, I think 1 of the hardest parts about addiction is that if you're a functioning, highly creative addict of any kind, your brain and the addictive part of your brain convinces yourself that it's all part of the cross purpose and that it has this symbiotic, inspirational thing going on, but it's not true.
Speaker 1
16:27
It can be, but it's typically not.
Speaker 2
16:30
Yeah, it's not a requirement. You can sometimes channel, you can sometimes leverage all those things for your creativity, but the creative engine, it lives outside of that.
Speaker 1
16:40
Like have you read Hunter's daily routine in the year up to his death? It was like 15 grapefruits and 8 ball of Coke and just a certain amount of shotgun shells for him to fire into the sky every morning. There's no way, and he didn't do anything creative in those final years.
Speaker 1
16:57
But so the creativity goes away and gradually you just become a party animal, like Andy Dick.
Speaker 2
17:02
A caricature of yourself. Yeah. I mean, that's why life is interesting.
Speaker 2
17:05
You make all kinds of choices, and sometimes you can have, create works of genius in a short amount of time based on drugs and no drugs. Einstein had that miracle year where he published several incredible papers in 1 year, 1905.
Speaker 1
17:21
Did he do drugs before that?
Speaker 2
17:22
Lots of coke and...
Speaker 1
17:25
I was like, I believed you for
Speaker 2
17:26
a second.
Speaker 1
17:27
I'm like, did Einstein have blow? I don't think he did. How do you
Speaker 2
17:29
think he gets that hair?
Speaker 1
17:31
Come on,
Speaker 2
17:31
it's true. I'm just asking questions.
Speaker 1
17:33
High confidence hair. Look into it, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2
17:36
Yeah, well, no, he's a well put together, sexy young man, the hair came later.
Speaker 1
17:42
Yeah, was Albert Einstein attractive as a teenager? No, not teenager, Was he attractive as a young man?
Speaker 2
17:47
Sexually attractive? I
Speaker 1
17:48
don't, I mean,
Speaker 2
17:48
you know. I'm turned on by Einstein at all ages, I don't discriminate.
Speaker 1
17:51
But are you more turned on by the work that he did or his physical being?
Speaker 2
17:56
No, sometimes I fantasize what it would be like to be in the arms of Einstein, I could even get that out.
Speaker 1
18:01
Yeah, in the arms of Einstein.
Speaker 2
18:03
Yeah, just I want to feel safe. It's a good
Speaker 1
18:06
idea for a rom-com.
Speaker 2
18:08
To be a little more serious, like general relativity, that space-time can be unified and curved by gravity is an incredibly wild and difficult idea to come up with. Like it's a really, really difficult thing to imagine, given how well Newtonian classical mechanics physics works for predicting how stuff happens on Earth, to think like, like that gravity can morph space-time, both space and time, and it permeates the entire universe, it's a field. It's a really wild idea to come up as 1 human on Earth to intuit that is really, really, really difficult.
Speaker 2
18:54
And it's really sad to me that he didn't get a Nobel Prize for that.
Speaker 1
18:58
Was there people saying he was crazy when he was around? Or was he universally recognized as like an OG of this?
Speaker 2
19:05
No, I think once the papers came out, he was widely recognized as a true genius. But before that, he wasn't recognized. He had a really difficult life.
Speaker 1
19:14
So back Now, where does a black hole go? Like after something gets sucked into it?
Speaker 2
19:18
You mean, is it a portal to another place? That kind of thing? Yeah.
Speaker 2
19:21
No. Well, we don't know. It could be. It could be that the universe is kind of like Swiss cheese full of black holes.
Speaker 2
19:27
There's something called Hawking radiation where because of quantum mechanics, the information leaks out of a black hole. So it is possible to escape a black hole. There's a lot of interesting questions there.
Speaker 1
19:37
I hope we get to the bottom of that.
Speaker 2
19:39
And there's a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, which doesn't seem to scare physicists, but it terrifies me. Oh yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1
19:46
Astronomy can be terrifying.
Speaker 2
19:48
Yeah, we're all like orbiting. I mean, we're not just orbiting the sun, but the sun is part of the solar system, is part of the galaxy, and it's all orbiting a gigantic black hole.
Speaker 1
19:57
Have you ever spoke to someone who's been to outer space? Jeff Bezos. He flew his own rocket.
Speaker 1
20:03
Wow. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2
20:05
Astronaut that's been to deep space, no. Well, maybe I've spoken to an alien that just hasn't admitted it.
Speaker 1
20:11
I wanna do a research paper, or like a report about space madness. You know, it's supposed to be this like torturous feeling that you get when you look away from Earth and into the abyss after you've exited Earth's orbit or whatever, because there's 1 specific psychiatrist who knows how to deal with space madness, and I wanna figure out how, interview people with it. Is this a real thing?
Speaker 2
20:34
Like is there a Wikipedia article on it?
Speaker 1
20:35
Yes, look up space madness treatment.
Speaker 2
20:37
Now I don't trust Wikipedia after what you told me, so.
Speaker 1
20:39
I know, they think I hate classes.
Speaker 2
20:41
I thought you meant more about the fact that you're isolated out in space, that we need social connection and it's difficult.
Speaker 1
20:47
Yeah, I think it's just a feeling of extreme and insignificance that you might get sometimes when you look at the night sky, but it's that times a thousand. It's like an existential void that's created after looking into the abyss and then realizing how small Earth is in the grand scheme. You just start to really have a strange new perception about the pointlessness of existence.
Speaker 2
21:07
I don't need to go to space for that.
Speaker 1
21:08
I mean, only a handful of people have been to space, but I'm sure they're all pretty well off, so this psychiatrist has to be in the multi-millions.
Speaker 2
21:15
Well, technically we're all in space because Earth is in space, but so, I wonder if you have to go to space to talk to the psychiatrist.
Speaker 1
21:22
Yeah, probably so.
Speaker 2
21:24
Well, technically we're all in space, so he can't, that's a boundary he can't have.
Speaker 1
21:29
But Not everyone believes that, as you've seen from my work, probably.
Speaker 2
21:33
You're right, and those are important people that are asking important questions. You hitchhiked across the US for 70 days when you were 19. Tell the story of that.
Speaker 1
21:44
Well, this sort of connects to what I was talking about with the boredom of school and these common core classes. So, after my first year of school where I lived in the dorms, like an old school dormitory building at a school in New Orleans called Loyola University, I wanted to just do something. I felt so bored.
Speaker 1
22:00
I was working for the school newspaper for that whole first year, it was called The Maroon and I didn't have the ability to write my own stories. Like I had to defer to an older editor and they would give me stories to write about and they were all about like on-campus happenings, like the Pope visits New Orleans, or glass recycling to be restored in the French Quarter, or hoverboards banned on campus due to safety concerns. And it just kind of felt like, all right, I kind of wanted to be a gonzo reporter. I'm not sure if working my way up to the traditional newsroom hierarchy is gonna get me to that point.
Speaker 1
22:33
So I started reading a bunch of old hobo literature, you know, like post-World War II vagabonding stuff. And there was this book called Vagabonding in America by an old hobo named Ed Byrne. And I read this and it just basically, obviously some of it was outdated, they had stuff in there like the hobo code, like oh this moniker on the side of a fence means this person has free soup or something like that. They didn't have stuff like that.
Speaker 1
22:56
But what it did tell
Speaker 2
22:56
me- That's great.
Speaker 1
22:57
It told me about train stop towns like Dunsmuir and you know, places in Montana where there was a friendly attitude toward drifters and that still persists from the 60s and 70s to this day, even though, in my opinion, movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre have ruined hitchhiking culture in America because now everyone thinks we're gonna decapitate them if they pick you up. So after my final day of courses at Loyola, I literally left all of my belongings inside my dorm and took the streetcar to the Greyhound station, got a one-way ticket to Baton Rouge, And I was like, I'm gonna hitchhike across the whole country back to Seattle with no money. And that was the plan and it worked out.
Speaker 2
23:37
I love it. I traveled across the United States before in similar kind of plan. Cause you
Speaker 1
23:43
were on the silver dog. Greyhound bus.
Speaker 2
23:47
Greyhound is pretty nice.
Speaker 1
23:49
That's a step above hitchhiking.
Speaker 2
23:50
That's way better than hitchhiking.
Speaker 1
23:51
Hitchhiking, Greyhound, Amtrak, airline.
Speaker 2
23:54
Amtrak, no, that's the leadest.
Speaker 1
23:55
What's in between Greyhound and Amtrak? A car, that's what it is.
Speaker 2
24:00
Yeah, it's a car, yeah. It's a car, man. A shitty car.
Speaker 1
24:02
Okay, cool.
Speaker 2
24:03
Yeah, I lived in a shitty car.
Speaker 1
24:05
You lived in a car?
Speaker 2
24:06
Yeah, when I was driving across the United States. Solo? With a friend, some solo.
Speaker 1
24:14
And I would have, I would eat cold soup. I love cold soup. What I like is the cold chickpeas in a can.
Speaker 1
24:24
Get the water out and just dump them in your mouth. Those are good. Beef jerky, kind bars. Kind bars are really good for the road.
Speaker 2
24:31
Yeah, I mean, all of that is great, but too much of it is not great. Like, too much cold soup, not great. Too much beef jerky.
Speaker 1
24:40
So what was the route you took? Was it Chicago across, or was it Philadelphia across?
Speaker 2
24:44
Philadelphia across.
Speaker 1
24:45
To LA, or where?
Speaker 2
24:47
San Diego's where we ended up, but it was a zigzagging, went up to Chicago and then all the way down to Texas.
Speaker 1
24:53
So you went Philly through Appalachia up to the Midwest. Yep. Did you cut over through the Southwest down to San Diego?
Speaker 1
25:00
No, no,
Speaker 2
25:00
no, I went straight down to Texas, all the way down to the Midwest.
Speaker 1
25:04
But did you cut from Texas west through New Mexico and Arizona to get to the
Speaker 2
25:08
San Diego?
Speaker 1
25:08
That is the best road trip place. Interstate 40, Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Vegas, Kingman, the Mojave Desert, Yuma, doesn't get better.
Speaker 2
25:19
Yeah, I mean, and you're a kid, so you don't care, and you're throwing caution to the wind, and you met some crazy, crazy people.
Speaker 1
25:25
It gives me some sanity, like whenever I'm feeling kind of out of control or, you know, like bummed out, I just remember that the road is still out there. The open road never goes anywhere and it's kind of like a, I see like an invisible door in the corner of the room all the time that makes me more comfortable because I'm like, hey, at the end of the day, if I'm bummed out, I can go hit the road and I'm sure there's gonna be a fun time ahead.
Speaker 2
25:44
Yeah, get that Greyhound ticket and go.
Speaker 1
25:46
I would say silver dog, half, because sometimes I gotta ride the dog when no 1 will pick me up. There's some places in the country where no one's gonna pick you up. Kansas, Missouri, they're not gonna do it.
Speaker 2
25:58
Maybe you're not charming enough. You thought about that?
Speaker 1
26:00
I was 19, fresh, clean shaven. I was pretty charming, I'd say. But the older you get, the harder it is to hitchhike because they think you're like an escaped convict or some type of like psycho wanderer.
Speaker 1
26:12
And some of these people are like what we call punishers, people who never stop talking. And so they see someone hitchhiking and they're like, yes, I'm gonna talk at this person. And you can tell their eyes are wide, they're like, what's up? And you're like, oh shit.
Speaker 1
26:23
So it's 6 hours of just like, oh cool, nice.
Speaker 2
26:26
That's rough. Yeah, yeah. You're right, you're right.
Speaker 2
26:30
I like people that are comfortable in silence.
Speaker 1
26:33
Yeah, but then that also raises the question, are they about to kill me? You know what I mean?
Speaker 2
26:37
I think that's a you problem, not a...
Speaker 1
26:39
You know what's funny is almost everybody who picked me up when I was hitchhiking was like a day laborer. It was almost all Mexican day laborers who picked me up. Oh, interesting.
Speaker 1
26:48
Because I think that in some places down there, that's a typical thing to do, hitchhike to work. A lot of people don't have cars, but they still have to get to their jobs. So a lot of people ask me, hey, where should I drop you off? Where's your job at?
Speaker 1
26:58
And I'm like, my job is to explore. And they were down with it.
Speaker 2
27:01
See, like for me, it was really easy because you just say like, I'm traveling across the United States and I think people love that idea and they wanna help. They romanticize it because they also have that invisible door. Everybody has that invisible door and I just wanna go.
Speaker 1
27:16
So you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, I
Speaker 2
27:17
mean, I don't think.
Speaker 1
27:18
It can anchor you a bit, just to remind you that every pattern that I've fallen into is voluntary and it's for my own stability and mental health.
Speaker 2
27:25
Well, that's why I'm like renting everything and I'm making sure like tomorrow I could just go. I gave away everything I own twice in my life. Just very like, I'm ready
Speaker 1
27:34
to go tonight. Let's go. What's the hardest item you've had to part with in this experience?
Speaker 2
27:40
There's nothing.
Speaker 1
27:41
You've never had a material object that was really hard to let go of? No. So you'd give that watch to somebody if it meant anything.
Speaker 1
27:47
No,
Speaker 2
27:47
this, you're right. You're right, that's probably the only, I've never had to let go of that though. That's the only thing I own.
Speaker 2
27:54
This means a lot to me, but everything else. But then again, listen, because, okay, This watch is given to me by Rogan, who's become a close friend. But whenever I romanticize the notion that this watch means a lot to me, he's like, don't worry about it, I'll just get you the same 1 again.
Speaker 1
28:09
Yeah. So I was like, God
Speaker 2
28:11
damn it.
Speaker 1
28:12
It's a pretty sick-ass gift though.
Speaker 2
28:14
Yeah, it's pretty sick. I'm not usually a gift guy, but you know, when somebody you look up to kind of gives you a thing, it's a nice little symbol of that relationship. So it's nice.
Speaker 2
28:27
But other than that, no. But even this, like, whatever. The relationship is what matters. The human is what matters, not the.
Speaker 1
28:33
I agree 100%.
Speaker 2
28:34
You had something like this?
Speaker 1
28:36
Not really, I mean, there was a hard drive that I lost that had all of my childhood pictures on it and stuff like that, that I think about all the time because I left it on a train. And certain memories, you think about it, you just get pissed off. I just think to myself, someone has that somewhere.
Speaker 2
28:51
I
Speaker 1
28:51
have dreams about reuniting with the hard drive.
Speaker 2
28:53
You and Hunter Biden have a similar kind of dream.
Speaker 1
28:56
I don't think he wants to reunite with that 1.
Speaker 2
28:58
Okay.
Speaker 1
28:59
Dude, it's crazy. All he did was smoke crack, right? Or was there more stuff going on?
Speaker 2
29:06
And I think there's prostitutes involved.
Speaker 1
29:08
Oh, okay, whatever.
Speaker 2
29:09
I think you gotta look into it.
Speaker 1
29:10
I think I have to look into it too. I don't know.
Speaker 2
29:15
Was Kerouac, Jack Kerouac, somebody that was an inspiration at all in this road trip? Did you even know who that is, the Beat Generation? I didn't
Speaker 1
29:24
know who it was and then after I did the, ultimately I wrote a book about my hitchhiking experience years later and everyone was like, have you read On the Road? And then On the Road, I probably heard the title of that book every day at least 10 times for 2 years. And I'm sure Kerouac is a great guy.
Speaker 1
29:41
I mean, I just don't, I'm not too familiar with the Beat Generation.
Speaker 2
29:45
It's a great book. It's a, You read it or no?
Speaker 1
29:48
I refuse to read it. People even have gifted it to me, been like, hey man, you're gonna love this 1. And I'm like, is that on the road?
Speaker 1
29:54
Honestly, people have given me a book with wrapping paper on it and they're like, this is Reddit Pirali. I was like, That's fucking on the road, isn't it?
Speaker 2
30:02
Give you a different cover.
Speaker 1
30:03
Yeah, no, I'm like, anything but that. But I'm sure it's a great book, it's just the comparison thing drives me crazy. But respect, big respect to Kerouac.
Speaker 1
30:12
Would never speak down on that whole, anyone in the Beat Generation.
Speaker 2
30:15
What are some interesting moments you remember from that, those 70 days?
Speaker 1
30:19
Man, there was so much. I mean, getting mistaken for a gay prostitute on my first hitchhiking ride in Louisiana was pretty funny.
Speaker 2
30:26
Where did you come from and where did you go?
Speaker 1
30:27
Well, I mean, the journey began in Baton Rouge And the first destination was Houston, which is about 4 and a half hours west on Interstate 10. So I'm in Crowley, Louisiana, I'm on the side of the road, and I guess this was a cruising truck stop that was known for being a place where male lot lizards would go to procure clients. And I was there.
Speaker 1
30:50
Lot lizards are- It's a derogatory term in trucker culture for a prostitute who hangs out at the Love's or Pilot Flying J. Large interstate truck stops. Now, trucker culture as it once was is pretty much finished because of the live stream cameras they have inside of the trucks now. So you can't snort Sudafed or pick up anybody.
Speaker 1
31:10
Can't even pick up a hitchhiker or you get fired. Killed all the romance. Yeah, definitely. The old school outlaw trucker lifestyle, unless you're an owner operator who's not even in a union, which is like a real cowboy way to haul loads, you can't do that.
Speaker 2
31:23
You were mistaken for a lot lizard.
Speaker 1
31:25
Mistaken for a lot lizard by a small man from Honduras with a spiky leather jacket covered in studs. Nice. Didn't speak any English, but you know, I thought he was just, you know, a nice guy.
Speaker 1
31:38
And then he pulled over at a... There's private theaters in the South where they have confessional booths set up and they have 3 channels and people go in there and you know... Porn? Yeah.
Speaker 1
31:52
People go in there and you know, please themselves.
Speaker 2
31:54
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1
31:55
So, I thought he was taking me to 1 of those and I was like, all right, cool man, yeah, like you know, if this guy wants to go jerk off, I'm just gonna wait in the car, it's all good, I don't discriminate. But then I was like, he buys a booth for me, and I'm like, okay, you know, not really in the mood to watch porn with this random guy. So he gets in the same booth as me, and he starts jerking off right next to me.
Speaker 1
32:15
And I'm like, oh man, I don't think this is chill. I'm like, dude, can you stop? He stopped jacking off and he's like, what do you mean? Like, I thought this is what you wanna do.
Speaker 1
32:25
Like, I have money for you. Like, what's up? And I was like, oh no, I'm just a regular guy. He was super cool about it.
Speaker 1
32:31
He started laughing, he was like, oh, my bad, man, I thought you were, you know, selling something. I said, no, and he said, oh, it's all good. And he gave me a ride all the way to Houston.
Speaker 2
32:39
That's great.
Speaker 1
32:39
Yeah, we talked about anything except that for the rest of the car ride.
Speaker 2
32:43
That's great, he just rolled with it. Oh, Sorry
Speaker 1
32:45
about that. It could have been, I had about a foot and a
Speaker 2
32:48
half on this
Speaker 1
32:48
guy, so I wasn't too scared. I also had like a knife in my pocket, but I didn't want to stab him, especially not at a place like that.
Speaker 2
32:54
And you were still, that didn't like, leave a bad taste in your mouth?
Speaker 1
32:58
Well, I figured that can't happen again. It can't keep happening. So I was like, all right, if I got this out of the way the first ride, the following rides are gonna be spectacular.
Speaker 2
33:06
Yeah, I mean, who among us have not been mistaken for a lot lizard?
Speaker 1
33:12
It's a fact, you heard it here first.
Speaker 2
33:14
What else? What, there's some interesting, beautiful people that you've met along the way? Well, I
Speaker 1
33:19
used the app Couchsurfing to find places to stay.
Speaker 2
33:22
Nice, I remember Couchsurfing.
Speaker 1
33:23
Now you can only submit like 5 couchsurfing requests a day, unless you're a premium member, which means you also host people.
Speaker 2
33:29
Wait, Couchsurfing's still around?
Speaker 1
33:31
Yeah, yeah, totally. Oh, nice. But it's evolved, obviously, into a different thing.
Speaker 1
33:34
Airbnb is a kind of competitor to that, right? Couchsurfing is free, though. Right. So couchsurfing, they call it the CS community, so basically there'd be these couchsurfing super hosts in different cities.
Speaker 1
33:45
Like there was 1 in Santa Fe, this firefighter dude who had like 15 other couch surfers there chilling. Nice. So I would do it everywhere. A lot of them were Catholics.
Speaker 2
33:54
You
Speaker 1
33:54
know, so it was their way of giving back. A lot of them were nudists. And so I didn't realize that there's a small little section at the bottom of someone's couch surfing profile that says clothing optional.
Speaker 2
34:06
Yes.
Speaker 1
34:07
And that means if you go there, I thought it meant like it's cool if you walk to the bathroom in your underwear. No, if you go there, everyone's gonna be butt naked. So I made that mistake a few times.
Speaker 1
34:16
Not that I'm anti-nudist, but I didn't want to, I wasn't ready to take that leap of faith. And yeah, it was just great. Couchsurfing hosts were amazing. That was just great.
Speaker 1
34:26
It was this constant thing where I felt like, wow, people are so welcoming. I'm not having to pay them a dollar for this experience.
Speaker 2
34:31
Yeah, I love couch surfing. For like, again, for me being an introvert, just crashing on a person's couch, being essentially forced into a great conversation is great.
Speaker 1
34:43
Yeah, the 1 thing that gets exhausting about hitchhiking is constantly thanking people. You know, being in like sort of constant, superficial gratitude everywhere all the time. Like, oh, thanks for letting me sleep on
Speaker 2
34:54
your couch. Thanks for the food.
Speaker 1
34:55
And part of the reason I wanted to live in an RV later in life is to avoid having to constantly live in this like, thanks so much type of frequency, because it's exhausting to constantly, hey man, thanks.
Speaker 2
35:05
I think the shallowness of that interaction is exhausting, not just the thanks. Yeah,
Speaker 1
35:10
it was a true favor. Of course, I love giving people gratitude for that, but just this thing where everyone who picks you up, you know, you get 8 rides a day, you're like thanking 8 people a day like they're, you know, the second coming of Jesus, you start to feel a little bit debased. What'd you learn about people from that journey?
Speaker 1
35:26
That's your first time really kind of going into it. The American public is just so kind overall. I mean, they're so like embracing, depending on who you are. And specifically though, the Christian family people of the US who drive in minivans and have that fish sticker on the back where it's like Jesus fish and then they have the family sticker, you know, where each member of the family is a stick figure.
Speaker 1
35:51
Those people never picked me up and would flip me off with their whole family. Sometimes they would throw full Dr. Peppers at me as a family while I stood on the side of the road.
Speaker 2
36:02
As a family, together.
Speaker 1
36:03
They would yell shit like, go to hell, hippie, when I was on the side of the road. And so it's weird that the most charitable, Christian, American family values people never gave me any charity or even conversation. They were antagonizing me and saw me as like a hippie leftover from the 60s who needed to go to work, go to Vietnam.
Speaker 1
36:24
I don't get it. Yeah. But the people who really extended a hand to me is people on the margins. Yeah.
Speaker 1
36:31
People working on seasonal visas, people whose cars have less than a quarter tank left, people struggling with addiction, who saw me struggling, or at least they thought that I was, because they assumed I was hitchhiking, not out of adventure, but because I had no car, and were willing to sacrifice their day almost sometimes to take me exactly where I needed to go.
Speaker 2
36:52
That's beautiful, man. I've had similar kind of experience that people were struggling the most are the ones who are willing to help you when you're struggling. Yeah.
Speaker 2
37:00
There's people like in religious context and other kind of communities that just judge others because they've kind of constructed a value system where they're better than others because of that value system. And that actually has a cascade that forces you to actually be kind of a dick. Yeah, I never thought about it that
Speaker 1
37:20
way, it's so true. Do you think about morality and religion a lot?
Speaker 2
37:24
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been to certain parts of the world where religion is really a big part of life. I'm just always skeptical about tribes of people that believe a thing and they believe they're better than others because they believe that thing. That could be nations, that could be religions.
Speaker 2
37:44
Yeah. I mean, in Ukraine and in Russia, I've seen a lot of hate towards the other. Yeah. And that hate, I'm always very skeptical of,
Speaker 1
37:54
because it could be used by powerful people to direct that hate,
Speaker 2
38:00
just so the powerful people can maintain power and get money, this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1
38:04
It's a scary thing to see how easy it is for high up political people to mobilize the hate of just the average working person and can almost convince them to sabotage their own countrymen who they share more in common with than the politician they look up to, just to advance the agenda of 1 party. That's what we're seeing now.
Speaker 2
38:22
Are there some places in America that are better than others? Can you speak negatively of like aforementioned Joe Rogan talk shit about Connecticut and I'll stop is there nothing can you pick a region in the United States you can talk shit about
Speaker 1
38:37
talk shit about oh for sure I mean well
Speaker 2
38:40
from that experience let's just narrow it down to that
Speaker 1
38:42
Oh Colorado oh she's really yeah
Speaker 2
38:45
I know so many people that love Colorado.
Speaker 1
38:47
Dude, Dallas, Denver. I used to think Phoenix sucks, but I love Phoenix now. The way they build these cities to just be so circular and massive, it's just like, stop it.
Speaker 2
38:55
You don't like circles?
Speaker 1
38:56
I like grids, man.
Speaker 2
38:57
Oh, you're a grid guy.
Speaker 1
38:59
Manhattan, New Orleans, San Francisco.
Speaker 2
39:01
What is it about grids that bring out the worst in people?
Speaker 1
39:05
Circles is where everyone just, there's a. Everyone's just vibing out, loosey goosey, but the grid gets people locked in and hateful. I don't know, man, but.
Speaker 2
39:13
I've never heard anyone talk shit about Colorado, I have to say. It's kind of refreshing. Yeah.
Speaker 2
39:17
It provides a necessary balance for the Colorado Wikipedia page.
Speaker 1
39:21
Yeah, oh, Oregon too, I got problems with Oregon. Oregon? Yeah, well here's the issue.
Speaker 1
39:25
You have, and I don't like just calling people racist because it's kind of like a two-dimensional insult, but you have the most racist state with the most psychotic anarchist city in the middle of it. What is going on up there? How did this happen? The yin and the yang is so extreme that there must be something in the Willamette.
Speaker 2
39:43
What do you have against anarchism? I have
Speaker 1
39:45
nothing, I used to be an anarchist. When I was in eighth grade, I had this friend named Mads who was part of a group called Seattle Solidarity, which is like an Antifa precursor. So I grew up going to Black Block protests.
Speaker 1
39:56
And I mean, there was a particular shooting, the murder of John Williams, who was a Native American woodcarver in downtown Seattle. He got killed by a Seattle police officer named Ian Burke. John Williams was carving a pipe from a wood block with a pocket knife, he's deaf in 1 ear. Officer pulls a gun on him and says, put it down.
Speaker 1
40:17
He doesn't hear him, he shoots him 6 seconds later. So that police involved shooting is what instantly turned me into like a very critical of law enforcement kind of person when I was super young. And so as someone who used to see this guy who got murdered, who was a 55 year old man, I used to see him around Pike Place where my mom lives, it's a public market in downtown. That to me, put me into the anarchist political sphere, just channeling the anger of that experience.
Speaker 1
40:44
And the officer got no charges by the way, You can look up the video, it's horrific. You know, and it didn't get reported. The officer, I'm pretty sure, is still active duty. And so it's like, situations like that, early in life, channeled me toward political extremism.
Speaker 1
41:00
But I grew up to realize how incompatible that anarchistic worldview is with reality and with American society. It can only exist in a small little chamber. You know, you can't apply that to the industrial heartland of the country.
Speaker 2
41:15
And I think also anarchism, so I've gotten to know Michael Malice who's written quite a bit about anarchism. And it also exists as a body of literature about different philosophical notions that kinda resist the state, the ever-expanding state in different kinds of ways. And it's always nice to have extreme thought experiments to understand what kind of society we want to build, but implementing it may not necessarily be a good idea.
Speaker 1
41:42
Yeah, I mean, Emma Goldman, I'm a huge fan of her writing. Also the prison abolitionists that are associated with the anarchist movement, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, all that stuff, influential. I still adhere to a lot of those principles when talking about stuff like radical prison reform and stuff like that.
Speaker 1
41:59
But just, I drifted more toward having a more open mind as I got older.
Speaker 2
42:05
Extremism implemented in almost all of its forms is probably going to cause a lot of suffering.
Speaker 1
42:12
Yeah.
Speaker 2
42:13
You worked as a doorman on the, I could say legendary Bourbon Street in New Orleans. That's right. Where you saw what you described as, this might be another Wikipedia quote by the way.
Speaker 1
42:24
But this
Speaker 2
42:24
is where I do my research.
Speaker 1
42:26
Does it say hellish scenes? Hellish scenes and quotes. Wikipedia is damn right about that.
Speaker 2
42:30
All right, thank you. That's a win. That's 1 in the win column.
Speaker 2
42:37
So yeah, tell the story of that. What's it like to work
Speaker 1
42:39
on Bourbon Street? What kind
Speaker 2
42:40
of stuff did you see?
Speaker 1
42:41
I mean, I was a host at a fine dining restaurant that on the corner of Bourbon and Iberville. So, that's the first street if you go from Canal Street onto the quarter. So, this is like across from like a daiquiri spot, it's the middle of the tourist corridor of New Orleans.
Speaker 1
42:55
And the spot was kind of like and kind of a tourist trap, it was called Bourbon House. The food was good. Chef Eric, I don't want you to see this and think you don't make good andouille sausages, but it was overpriced. And so I had to, we had to maintain this like fine dining facade on a street where almost everyone is like throwing up, fighting, or is half naked.
Speaker 1
43:15
So there was this policy, we had these giant glass windows next to the tables. So if you're eating at a bourbon house, you can look out onto Bourbon Street and you can see as you're dining, a full panoramic view of all these partiers throwing beads, boobs, all that. We had this policy where if we're serving someone, we can't look onto Bourbon Street if something crazy is happening. So if there's a fight or something like that, we can't look, right?
Speaker 1
43:40
So there is a dude, I remember I'm fucking serving a table. There's a dude in a Batman mask, butt naked, with 12 pairs of beads, just jerking it.
Speaker 2
43:49
Yeah.
Speaker 1
43:49
Back to jerking it. Full on. He's jerking it, right?
Speaker 1
43:53
And every single person at the restaurant's looking out there like, look, they're taking pictures. And the manager, Steven, looks at me, he's like, keep your fucking eyes on the table. So I'm serving these people, you know, and I'm like, you want to eat, you like red beans and rice or would you like some Creole? And there's just this dude and, you know, ultimately the manager went out and, you know, escorted him further down Bourbon Street.
Speaker 1
44:13
But, you know, I would get off work at around midnight every night and that was when Bourbon Street is at its most chaotic. And so I lived in the French Quarter as well. So I lived about 12 blocks down Bourbon in a small Creole cottage, a cute little like orange, old school New Orleans one-story spot. I lived in the attic above these gay meth dealers named Frankie and Johnny.
Speaker 2
44:36
Oh, wow.
Speaker 1
44:37
And so I would get off work and I would basically have to walk through like this battlefield. I mean, it was a battlefield. Getting home was out of like the Warriors movie.
Speaker 1
44:48
It was almost impossible.
Speaker 2
44:48
The best of humanity on display.
Speaker 1
44:50
Yeah, it was like Kensington, Philadelphia, but just alcohol, you know what I mean? Oh,
Speaker 2
44:54
it's all alcohol. But it's a lot of, well, a lot of visitors, right? From outside.
Speaker 1
44:58
Almost all visitors. Yeah. And that kind of would set the flow for the weekend.
Speaker 1
45:02
For example, if the Raiders were playing the Saints, Raider Nation, and they do not play around. If it's the Patriots, that's a whole different crowd. They think they're better than everybody else.
Speaker 2
45:11
Yeah, well, they technically are better than everybody else, but yeah.
Speaker 1
45:14
But people from Massachusetts aren't like the cream of the crop in terms of like American superiority.
Speaker 2
45:19
Strong words.
Speaker 1
45:19
Yeah, no offense But I mean,
Speaker 2
45:21
no, I that's I'm sure they won't take that as a they
Speaker 1
45:24
are good at fighting though I'll tell you that. All right, great. New England has hands compared to some places.
Speaker 2
45:29
Which places are those Colorado?
Speaker 1
45:31
Colorado has no hands. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1
45:34
The West Coast, not too much hands. That's why you feel
Speaker 2
45:37
safe talking shit about Colorado.
Speaker 1
45:39
But if you get to the corn fed parts of East Colorado, I mean, these guys got hands bigger than my head. They'll beat the shit out of me. But anyways, I'd walk back to my house on Bourbon Street, and I would be sifting through this battlefield.
Speaker 1
45:50
And I had a friend at the time who was like, yo, we should do a taxicab confessions type spinoff where we ask people to confess a deep, dark secret, and we post it the next day. And so we tried that, and it went viral on Instagram instantly. It was mostly incest stories, you know, people admitting to incest. I know it's a common Southern stereotype, but there's some truth to it.
Speaker 1
46:12
There was some murder confessions. That was pretty crazy. We never really posted any
Speaker 2
46:17
of those, but... How did you get people to confess?
Speaker 1
46:20
Pretty easy. And New Orleans has a homicide solve rate of like 22%. So, I mean, most of the time, they'll just tell you.
Speaker 1
46:28
I remember I was walking down Bourbon, And I asked this kid, I was like, what's your deepest darkest secret? And he told me, he's like, I just smoked a dude in the Magnolia, it's a project housed in the Third Ward, project development. And they said, I just smoked a dude in the Magnolia playground for touching my sister, molesting his sister. And I was like, what?
Speaker 1
46:44
And he's like, yeah, look it up. And I was like, all right, hold on. And it was like, man found dead in Central City playground, like appeared to be homeless, shot execution style. So I told the kid, I was like, why'd you tell me that?
Speaker 1
46:55
He's like, man, put that shit out there. Like, I'm trying to go viral, like tag me too. Oh, wow. I don't think you understand that even if you're a juvenile, he was probably 15, you can get juvenile life in Louisiana for a homicide, even if it's justified.
Speaker 1
47:08
So I just deleted the footage in front of him. I was like, I'm gonna delete this footage. See that trash button? I'm hitting it right now.
Speaker 1
47:15
Don't tell anyone that again. And he was like, all right, I appreciate it. And he walked off, but it's the little moments like that.
Speaker 2
47:22
Anything for the gram, I guess.
Speaker 1
47:24
Yeah, after a while, though, it became sort of repetitive. Because there's only so many things that people can confess to that go viral.
Speaker 2
47:32
Oh, so you were trying to see like what?
Speaker 1
47:34
Well, I mean, there's the incest 1. Some people just say like, I eat ass. That was like everyone said that.
Speaker 1
47:41
Or like, I cheated on someone or.
Speaker 2
47:43
I've seen a surprising number of people on your channel say, mention eating ass.
Speaker 1
47:48
Yeah. The way, how seriously you said that will live in my head for the rest of my life. That's good. Yeah, I have been around.
Speaker 2
47:58
I want to live in your head saying that a lot of people mentioned eating ass.
Speaker 1
48:03
Yeah, a lot of people do mention that. Also, that's kind of where I developed this magnetism for freestyle rapping. You know, everywhere I go, people rap.
Speaker 1
48:14
Not sure why. I mean, as a former rapper myself in middle school and for the first year of high school, I think that maybe it takes 1 to know 1, but everywhere I go, people start rapping. If you and me went outside of this podcast studio and walked around for 5 minutes, I could find somebody.
Speaker 2
48:29
It's rapping. I
Speaker 1
48:30
can tell who raps, or who can rap, who has 8 bars in their head. They're ready to go I think you're also there's something about you that gives them Creates the safe space. Yeah to perform their art Yeah, that was the quarter confession series was the first time you saw the suit.
Speaker 1
48:46
That's when the suit came out. Yeah, it was kind of like a Ron Burgundy, Eric Andre inspired type of thing.
Speaker 2
48:51
Where'd you get that suit? Goodwill. Goodwill?
Speaker 1
48:54
Yeah, always.
Speaker 2
48:56
Wow, I was playing checkers, you were playing chess. Good job.
Speaker 1
48:59
I mean, Goodwill has a surprising amount of identical gray suits for sale.
Speaker 2
49:03
Yeah, I've actually gotten suits at thrift stores before. They're great. Yeah, a
Speaker 1
49:06
lot of people donate suits. I was going for oversized suits, which are the cheapest ones there.
Speaker 2
49:11
Yeah. It was
Speaker 1
49:12
like 12 bucks, 12 to $25 every time for the outfit.
Speaker 2
49:16
If I wanted to look super sophisticated, like I'm from another era, I would go to thrift store.
Speaker 1
49:22
Yeah.
Speaker 2
49:23
Because they're usually like this, there's like the patterns they have, it's just like a more sophisticated suit, which is what you kind of picked out. It made you look ridiculous, but in the best kind of way.
Speaker 1
49:34
The tough part about Quarter Confessions for me is that everybody that was featured, for the most part, would more or less regret being a part of the show. Yeah. And that, over time, just gave me a bad feeling where I was like, you know what, I kind of feel like I am doing an ambush interview, especially because I'm presenting as so agreeable, yet the intention is to make something funny.
Speaker 1
49:57
And I get that that's what people do in the satire sphere. I'm sure LEG and Bruno and Borat did the same thing. And I don't think it's unethical, because that's all for the purposes of comedy, it is what it is. But for me, I wanted to do something different.
Speaker 2
50:12
Yeah, because there's an intimacy to confessing a thing. Right. And then you just don't really realize the implications of that.
Speaker 1
50:19
And the atmosphere of Bourbon Street is like, anything goes, it's a free-spirited place, but if you transport that energy digitally to a different place like Colorado, they might look at it and be like, oh man.
Speaker 2
50:31
Different place and time, like 5 years later, that same person has a family and stuff like this, and all of a sudden they're talking about eating ass. Right, exactly.
Speaker 1
50:40
Kids have to think about that. Or imagine if there's a video of your grandma or grandpa out there when he was a kid talking about eating ass. That's a horrible experience.
Speaker 1
50:48
To discover that about your respected elder later in life, it's tough.
Speaker 2
50:52
I don't even know where to go with that. But literally the opening question was, tell me your deepest, darkest secret? Yeah.
Speaker 2
51:00
You just come up to somebody like that? Yeah. How often do you get like a no? How often, what's the yes to no ratio?
Speaker 1
51:06
Well, the weird thing is like, we don't really extract answers from people. Like what makes a good interview is when they're ready to talk. The more you have to talk and try to get an answer out of them, It's just not a good vibe.
Speaker 1
51:18
So we kind of look for people who appear to be already ready to talk, open body language, like they seem confident and verbose and we approach them first.
Speaker 2
51:26
There's a look.
Speaker 1
51:27
We wouldn't approach a shy person and be like, come on, tell me. What about a person with pain in their eyes? Oh yeah, we're interviewing them.
Speaker 2
51:34
Yeah, so they're ready to talk, they're just not like, there's different ways to be ready. Right. I see homeless people a lot and they always look fascinating.
Speaker 2
51:45
And the ones I've talked to are always fascinating.
Speaker 1
51:47
Yeah, we just did a video in the Vegas tunnels, like trying to, obviously it got taken down by Fox, but whatever.
Speaker 2
51:53
I was gonna make a joke that I didn't see it.
Speaker 1
51:56
We tried to help a lot of them by getting them IDs. And
Speaker 2
52:01
when I
Speaker 1
52:01
made the documentary, I had this idea that if I, it's a big roadblock for them is getting identification. Without IDs, you can't check into a homeless shelter, you can't do day labor, you can't qualify for housing, nothing. So when we interviewed them, they'd basically tell us, if I had my ID, I wouldn't be here.
Speaker 1
52:17
And so we said, okay, we're gonna really help this time. We're not just gonna talk to them about their struggles, we're gonna actively go out and get them IDs at the DMV. So we did that and you know, nothing really changed in their life. And we sat down with a recovery specialist who works directly with them day in and day out.
Speaker 1
52:35
He explained to me that he's been trying to do the same thing I tried to do in a 1 week period for the past 10 years. And that they have deeper underlying traumas and pain that need to be dealt with far before they even take the steps to enter society as a housed person.
Speaker 2
52:54
That's a heavy truth right there.
Speaker 1
52:56
Breaking that shame cycle has to come first because you gotta think, right? Like I'm from a generation that romanticizes vagrancy and homelessness to a certain extent, if it's called van life or if it is done in a way that's sort of like Rolling Stone, Willie Nelson hit the road. People who are above 50, they feel really embarrassed to be in the spiral of homelessness.
Speaker 1
53:18
They feel like failures. A lot of them have kids who they weren't there for. That's not the kind of pain that can be dealt with by giving someone a tiny home. It's a good step forward, but For someone to really make a change, they have to want to change.
Speaker 1
53:33
And so it's how do you help someone and guide themselves in the right direction? And if you're too paternalistic and you use shame as a method to get them to clean up, they're gonna end up right where they started. Yeah. That's a tough truth to accept because a lot of people want a quick fix to things.
Speaker 1
53:49
And I don't blame people who go out and give bologna sandwiches out to the homeless.
Speaker 2
53:53
And each case is probably its own little puzzle.
Speaker 1
53:56
Each person is so complex. Now imagine drug abuse, what that does to the brain. Trauma, childhood trauma, There's so much to unpack.
Speaker 1
54:04
And then just the belief that they're the undesirables, that they don't deserve to be a part of society because they failed a fundamental obligation like taking care of their kids.
Speaker 2
54:15
If we could take a small tangent to, you mentioned this Vegas video which is fascinating. It was taken down recently by YouTube or YouTube took it down based on…
Speaker 1
54:27
Yeah, it was illegal.
Speaker 2
54:29
Fox 5, I guess?
Speaker 1
54:31
So the documentary was an hour and 45 minutes We used 10 seconds of a news clip that was publicly broadcast by Fox 5 Vegas and according to the Copyright Act of 1976 you're allowed to use any Publicly broadcast news clip in a transformative capacity in any documentary film or research paper or broadcast or anything. They specifically, this corporation called Gray Media that controls the TV stations in almost every small town, they had lawyers hit up YouTube and YouTube complied with an illegal copyright strike to get our video immediately removed. And I'm a YouTube partner, I'm in the YouTube partner program.
Speaker 1
55:09
So to think that I wasn't forewarned is, it's a bit strange, but it also smells like corruption to me to a certain extent.
Speaker 2
55:16
Yeah, you shouldn't have that amount of power. At the very least, they should have the power to just like silence that 5 second clip maybe.
Speaker 1
55:24
Yeah, but I'm taking them to court because I have the means to be able to do so. I'm a larger creator. I have an audience.
Speaker 1
55:31
I have the financial backing to do it. I can't imagine how many people out there are smaller creators with like, not as much consumer of a fan base they can mobilize against someone like Fox 5 or the money to go to court. So I want to take them all the way there to set precedent for future cases so that these giant mainstream media conglomerates can't copyright strike documentary filmmakers at will. It doesn't make sense.
Speaker 2
55:57
Oh, thank you for doing that. That's really, really, really important and that's really powerful. And it might hopefully empower YouTube to also put pressure on people to not, and YouTube is in a difficult position because there's so much content out there, there's so many claims, it's hard to investigate, but YouTube should be in a place where they push back against this kind of stuff as a first line of defense, especially to protect small creators.
Speaker 1
56:22
So what you're doing is really, really important. Appreciate it, man.
Speaker 2
56:24
And it sucks that it was taken down. Do you have any hope?
Speaker 1
56:28
Well, I talked to my YouTube partner today and he said that the Fox 5 lawyers have 2 weeks to comply with my counter appeal. But you know, I spent 20 grand on human voiceovers in 5 different languages. So I invested probably in total like 70K into this video.
Speaker 1
56:44
So even if it gets reinstated, the steam's kind of been taken out of its trajectory. But
Speaker 2
56:48
also it's just like a really important video is good for the world.
Speaker 1
56:51
Yeah, like why the hell would Fox 5 have a vested interest in having the video taken down?
Speaker 2
56:57
I just hate it when people do that to videos or to creators that are doing good in the world.
Speaker 1
57:01
Yeah, it's not an expose on the mayor of Las Vegas. It's an attempt to show the civilian public how to get involved in a local nonprofit and potentially intervene in the lives of the tunnel people.
Speaker 2
57:10
Well, fuck Fox 5, the other Channel 5, as you said. Yeah. Well, thank you for pushing back.
Speaker 2
57:16
Amen. And highlighting it. Hopefully it gets brought back up. But yeah, defending other creators so that other creators can take risks and don't get taken down for stupid reasons.
Speaker 2
57:27
So Court of Confessions was written?
Speaker 1
57:30
No, it was all real life, reality TV documentary. But it caught the attention of a larger company called Doing Things Media. And they contacted me pretty much like a week after I graduated from college in the May of 2019.
Speaker 1
57:45
And they said, hey, like, how would you like to produce a show? I was like, what do you mean? They were like, we'll get you an RV, we'll pay you 45K a year, you get to, we'll pay for gas, for food, for 2 hotels a week, go out there, make content, and we'll be in the background just powering it all.
Speaker 2
58:06
And that was the birth of All Gas No Brakes.
Speaker 1
58:09
Yes, I mean, All Gas No Brakes was named after a book that I wrote called All Gas No Brakes, A Hitchhiker's Diary, which chronicled the 70 day journey that we were just talking about.
Speaker 2
58:18
It's a tough book to find, by the way.
Speaker 1
58:20
Oh yeah, there's only a few copies left. I'm thinking about doing a reprint at some point down the line, but I sold off the last 100 copies like a month and a half ago. Yeah.
Speaker 2
58:28
Until then, you guys should go read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Yeah, read On the Road. You should read it.
Speaker 2
58:32
I don't know
Speaker 1
58:32
if you've read it before. If you can't get my book, get On the Road by Jack Kerouac. You should read it.
Speaker 1
58:33
I don't know if you read it before. If you can't get my book, Get On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It's great. It's the best.
Speaker 1
58:36
When's your birthday, I'll send you. April 23rd. Okay. I'm a Taurus.
Speaker 1
58:40
Coming soon.
Speaker 2
58:41
I'm a typical Taurus, yeah.
Speaker 1
58:42
Yeah, I'm a typical Taurus man. I'm a Scorpio moon, just write that down.
Speaker 2
58:47
What's the time when you were born? 1130. 1130 at night?
Speaker 2
58:51
Or, of course.
Speaker 1
58:53
Yeah, typical, this guy knew it. That's the real science. Yeah.
Speaker 1
58:58
Anyways, so the idea of All Gas No Brakes as a show was to combine the, I guess, road dog ethos of the All Gas No Brakes book with the presentation and editing style of Quarter Confessions. So it was to take Quarter Confessions on the road that was pretty much like a simulated hitchhiking experience, but with the editing and like punchy effects of Quarter Confessions, which is like, I wear a suit, we do the fast zoom-ins, little effects, stuff like that. It was a man, those were the best years. It was just so fun.
Speaker 1
59:29
I mean, imagine you're fresh out of college, you were just a doorman interviewing people about like, you know, making out with their cousin and stuff. And then boom, this company that you've never even heard of is willing to buy you an RV and give you 45k a year, which to me at the time was more money than I could possibly imagine. So I called my dad I was like dad I need you to find me an RV because he's the only guy I know who knows about cars even he doesn't know much about cars so he's like all right I'm on it. So the RV was $20,000 and the first event that we were called to was a car show.
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