Andrew Callaghan on the ‘cancelverse’, lizard people, and whether he’s being sued by Melania Trump

[Music] Hello and welcome to the Louis Theroux podcast. [Music] In this episode I'm joined by American Gonzo Journalist and YouTube sensation Andrew Callahan. For those of you who aren't familiar with Andrew's work, he is the creator and host of independent journalism platform Channel 5, which boasts 3.5 million followers on YouTube, not to be confused with the UK's Channel 5. Alongside high profile interviews with Hunter Biden, Clavicular and Shia LaBurfe, Andrew presents episodes roaming around the streets of America, attending NRA conferences and joining spring breakers on Miami Beach. And many other things. You may even have seen him without realizing it. He used to wear a comedy big suit with a flappy tie with Channel 5 on it. And the hair was sometimes wild and unruly, often holding a tiny little microphone in the style of certain YouTube documentary makers. And at the beginning, a bit like my good self, it was a little more mickey taking, satirical, enjoying the comedy of people with strange beliefs. And then he matured, and specifically, there was a pivot point where he was covering the George Floyd uprising or riots. What have you want to call them in 2020? And we talk about how he got more serious and the journey that he's been on. He went on to direct this place rules for HBO, a documentary about the January 6th Capitol riot. And more recently, Dear Kelly, a film that investigates the life of a conspiracy theorist and traces his background and beliefs. It's a conscious attempt to not just hang out with and enjoy the weirdness of a guy who's gone down the conspiracy rabbit hole, but also engage with it emotionally, understand what's motivating him and others to find meaning in conspiratorial content. In 2023, two women came forward with allegations against Andrew of sexual misconduct, leading to him taking time away from his work. After a nine month hiatus, Andrew returned to filmmaking in late 2023. We discuss this in the chat. We discuss info wars, the far right news outlet and conspiracy propaganda platform created by Alex Jones, not the UK's one show Alex Jones, but the one in America talks like this kind of. Not really. My interest in sitting down with Andrew was what goes back a couple of years at least and has to do with the overlap in the kinds of stories we cover. And Andrew's obviously a creature of a different generation of documentary makers and content creators, different platforms, YouTube, whereas I was a BBC and network TV in America creation. But we are interested in the similar in similar sorts of things. We recorded this conversation in May at Spotify HQ. Andrew had just flown in and lost his luggage, so he had to pop down to TK Max on route to the studio hence the high-vis look for people watching on Spotify. A quick warning, this conversation contains some strong language and adult themes all that as well as much else besides coming up. Here we are in the flesh. I know, thanks so much for having me. I would say you're a big inspiration. Thank you. And it hasn't escaped my attention that in a couple, at least a couple of interviews that I've seen that you gave, you've shouted me out, you've given me props. Yeah, it's a specific listening style where you're just giving people enough to keep going. And it's not so much like you're being overaffirmational because that freaks people out too. Like if you're like, "Yeah, hell yeah." But you're not making them feel dumb. So you're giving them the patience and the space to keep going. That's something I learned from you that call it the toddler nod. You go like this. It's the most slight head movement that you do that just keeps people talking. So where you think they're done and then they just keep going and they give you the best sound bite after a couple different nod sessions. You're making it sound so technical. And I don't even, this is going to get like shop talk, but that's fine. Like I do have a couple of things that I impart. You know, it's not rocket science, but one of them is just, and I don't know if you do this, is just that people perform themselves when you're interviewing them. And that's fine. Like you kind of want their performed self, whoever it may be. But what you also notice is you want to sort of get outside of that a bit. And if you say to someone, okay, we're going to get a few wide shots. And the mood changes and the person you're interviewing, they relax. And they sort of think they're off. They know they're being videoed. They know they're on mic, but the vibe changes. And you might even say like, was that okay? Or they might say that or you go like, how do you feel? And you get a very different energy. So even if they know they're wearing a lab microphone and they can see a boom. If the camera and retreats gets a wide shot. Yeah, some part of them thinks the interview is over in the traditional sense. In the traditional sense. It's not like they think they're off mic. It's just that they think the formal part of the interview is done. And now they can maybe be a bit more themselves. Yeah, so it's not a heart mic moment, but it's like, sometimes the decompression ritual causes them to say like how they really feel. And it kind of allows you to commentate on the interview. Or revisit whatever the thing that you perhaps feel was the most interesting part. You go like that thing you said about, you know, you did once meet the lizard people. Did you really mean that? And you could you could you know, you can dip your voice down a bit. Yeah, and it can be more. Yeah. And they go like, yeah, yeah. And it was it was nine feet tall and it was completely green. And you know what I mean? That's a pretty good American. Yeah. Anyway, listen, we're going to talk about what you do. Yeah. We're going to geek out on journalism. We're also going to talk a little bit about some allegations that were made against you. I hope you're okay with that. We can talk about. Let's talk about, but those who don't know your work. How do you describe what you do? I would say it's just gone so journalism, you know, maybe down in the literary, Hunter S. Thompson sense, but it's independent journalism, interview based content creation, the New York Times and the Atlantic and stuff. They won't use the word journalists to describe me. So they would say RV YouTuber. Really? I like that one because even though I'm not that, it sounds great. Like, you know, checking out new RV parks and amenities and libraries and dumping waste. You used to travel around in an army. Yeah. But journalists would be the word that I would use. So the New York Times, you think it's a style that literally is part of their style manuals like we can't actually go on a major. I think that the American press establishment is very hostile toward those who didn't come up inside of it. It's unfortunate because we actually have no problem with them. You know, I went to school for journalism. Like I graduated in 2019. I plan to work at like a traditional newsroom because I love like the grind. I love waking up and picking up the phone and getting out there and following the beat. But the industry was in free fall and collapse. I think even between 2015 when I started college in 2019, I think the newspaper industry had gone from like $82 billion a year to like 12. Like frozen yogurt makes more money than pressed into that time. And so naturally we have the option of either working at like a mainstream press outlet if we're lucky for 45 K a year or we can just move into our v's travel around the country, work freelance, start creating content, do things a different way. So like there's no beef. It's frustrating that even sometimes I feel like some of the fans like I'll make a dope video and they'll be like mainstream media could never like even on a hundred Biden interview. The top comments like CNN's going to shit their pants when they see this. I'm just like there's no problems. The door was just closed by the time we wanted it to open. Well you did say CNN is out to get me. When did I say that? I don't know. I don't think I would have said that so directly. Maybe that was just like a thumbnail. That's definitely a thumbnail. Was it a Donald Leman thing? Oh, that was a crazy experience. Yeah. I mean that was probably my most negative experience I've ever had with the media outlet before. That was during the HBO film promotion. It was weird because they had booked me this press tour because we should say like at a certain point you got this movie deal. You worked with Tim Pideca and Jonah Hill. Yeah, a bunch of pieces. Were they very involved or just? No. I mean with rounds of notes. They were involved in getting it sold especially as soon as Jonah Hill came on a 24 bought it immediately. But yeah, like I had been given this weird media training by some people at HBO. Like I had to sign an and a but I'm just going to break it and they were just telling me like how to respond if they asked me about Trump or if they asked me about the upcoming revolution or misinformation. They're like teaching me how to pivot all this weird stuff that like I thought didn't actually happen. It was like a media black box of like 30 suits on zoom were telling me how to respond to questions. So I go on CNN and they tell me like, Hey, Donald Leman's going to ask you about your life, the movie, all that stuff. So I get on there. Donald Leman like it's this is life immediately goes like what can you tell us about Enrique Torio's mental state leading up to January 6th. And I was like for one, the leader of the proud boys who I was still had an active relationship with the proud boys because I was still covering the proud boys. not to mention, they're involved in ongoing criminal litigation. So like, he's basically asking me to like, snitch on someone that I'm actively working with at the time. So I just responded. I was like, it's not so much about, you know, individual people involved in men's groups. It's about the mainstream media system, the 24 hour news cycle, the divisive nature of the media, and how it divides people into like, perfect consumer groups to make sure no change happens. And I mentioned like CNN's also complicit in that. I don't know, I was just like upset because I, you know, looking back, maybe I shouldn't have called out CNN on CNN, but I was just in the moment. I was like, so burnt out from touring. And then pretty much as soon as that wrapped up, that my handler, that HBO had assigned me, was like panicking. She's like checking her phone, whatever. I'm like, what's going on? She's like, time-worn or C-suite is furious. I'm like, what's time-worn or C-suite? And she was like, oh, well, the same people who own HBO on CNN. And like, they're just mad as fuck. Like, you're going against protocol. You weren't supposed to do that. And so they didn't book me anymore press appearances after that. For real? Yeah. So I'm not saying CNN's out to get me. I'm not like a red-pilled anti-mainstream media, escape the Matrix guy. UK audience may not know Don Lemon was at that time at CNN anchor, right? What was he trying to get from you? I don't know. I think that liberal mainstream media has this weird thing where they want to make me seem conservative. It's very strange. Like, I went on this, this also was never aired, but I went on NPR. And it was, again, supposed to be a premiere for my movie in Boston on January 5, 2023. And she asked me, she said, how do you-- It's the interview that's-- It went semi-viral, right? Was this the one where-- It went semi-viral because a fan filmed it. They refused to air it. Really? Yeah, and she asked me, how do you think the Sandy Hook families would feel about you platforming one of the most despicable people in history, not knowing that the Sandy Hook lawyer, the one who represents the families, Mark Bankson, was like a huge fan of the film. The families love that scene. Yeah, this was the segment that you'd done with Alex Jones, right? Yeah, where we're working out with our shirts off. Like, I was going to talk to you about that one, because it is an amazing segment. And you see Alex Jones in all his modes. Like, he comes on, let's get this right. He comes on and he says, I did the Sandy Hook killing. I normally can do it better than that. Yeah. I created cancer, hair loss, gingivitis, and acne. Yeah. So he's kind of leaning in to the media caricature of him. I created cancer, which would be one thing, but he just keeps going and going, which leaves you in a weird position. But then he backs down, he goes, like, I, of course, I didn't create cancer, but he's kind of making a point. Yeah, make me a bogie man. I don't care. Yeah. But then I think the bit when you're interviewed by NPR, she brings up the fact that there's a scene where you're working out with him. Yeah. And he's, what is he drinking? Jamison. James Galen of Jamison, which is a popular American whiskey. Or maybe Irish, oh my god. I think it is Irish. Okay, people in the UK know what Jamison is. He was drinking. He was drinking whiskey. And the point was to highlight the absurdity of info wars. And even though these people were instrumental in ramping people up for January 6th, behind the scenes, this is how they're living. They're in the sort of like goofy, sort of semi-alcoholic prankster state. And it was very deliberate and it was on purpose. And at that time-- And I could see, like, it was funny. It was surreal. I could see why some people might have an issue with it. The problem was, at that point-- And I'm sure now they don't feel this way-- Liberal mainstream media. And I mean, anti-leftist, you know, liberal establishment media-- they thought that by limiting problematic viewpoints from being platformed, that would somehow subvert the rise of fascism and far-right ideology in the US. They thought that if you could censor people and send them into different-- on different platforms, like Rumble and Gap, or if you could stop people like Alex Jones from having a platform in these major studio films and documentaries, that somehow their power would go away. And evidently, that didn't work. It actually made people-- might have been a smaller focus group, but they became twice as militant on smaller platforms. And now they are back-- Elon Musk bought X and now they're back to their previous level of influence, if not more. So I think at the time, they thought that I was part of the problem for giving a platform to people. But at the same time, those same people thought that I was like a liberal agitator who was sent there to make them look bad. So I was put between a rock and a hard place where conservative outlets and pundits thought that I was like a liberal tool of the establishment. And then liberal thought that I was like a sort of co-seeing up to the right. Even now, when Variety wrote about Dear Kelly, which is about a man broken down by economic factors who found the far right as a comforting place, they wrote like Andrews piece of mega-apologia seeks to humanize those who want the destruction of our democracy. Yeah, so I don't know why they keep doing it. At the interview recently, I'm not going to say the outlet, but they were again asking me if I hang out with Enrique Tariot. They're still on this beat of like-- You say that you're progressive, but I saw you hanging out with 4G out of Blow in Miami, which is a mega-rapper. And I'm like, yeah, man, I'm a journalist. I hang out with people to get them comfortable enough to interview them sometimes, or just to meet them. Not that I'm just hanging out with them for that purpose, but you know how it is. In the field, sometimes you get lunch or coffee with someone who you fundamentally disagree with. And it's part of the, I guess, discovery process. And that's my legal term to describe it. Yeah. I think that regarding the NPR interview, it felt a little bit odd. And I could see you were offended. It was clear you were offended, right? Well, you know that it was supposed to be a premiere. It wasn't. I didn't know that. It was a premiere. And she wouldn't shake my hand backstage, because she was like, I don't know whose hand you've shaken. So it was just-- Before? So it was really just like, what is happening? And especially that coming after the CNN interview, I was like, OK, these people don't have my back anymore. You have-- OK, I've got five key episodes of All Gas No Brakes. This was before Channel 5, right? Yes. Well, All Gas No Brakes is back. We bought it back. There was a corporate fallout. You lost the label. Yes. Lost the label. And then you got it back. Yep. Jan 2020 pre-COVID. The Flat Earth Conference. Yes. Seven million views. Really? It's a lot. It's very short. It's like, well, eight, nine minutes. That's one of my favorite videos of all. It's a classic. It's a great place to start. Yeah. How would you describe it? Yeah, it's a flat Earth conference. It's people who believe the Earth is flat. They did-- How did you find out about it? I was at the rate of Area 51, which was 90% content creators and 10% lost souls. One of the lost souls was like a divorced dad who was like, I'm going in there, man. He's like, I don't give a fuck what they do. What year was that? 2019. Did anyone actually cross the-- This fucking guy. Sorry, really? This guy that I met the divorced dad, he was drinking these alien theme bud-lighted his RV. And he's like, I'm a deadbeat man. And he's like, I'm worthless. If I'm going to go down for some, it's going to be getting the truth about the aliens. Yeah. So he gave me the info about the Flat Earth Conference. Well, how far into Area 51 did he get? When you get close to the perimeter fence, they have a weapon that makes your body tingle. Stop it. Yeah, that's what he told me. He said that-- It's not out of the question, is it? That couldn't exist, couldn't it? He said that his body started tingling like he was getting a fever and a flu at the same time. And that cutouts of army men were coming out of the sand. Like, imagine a toy soldier but real life. And they had fake gun sounds. So that was being shot at. And it's getting closer to the fence. Are you believing? Well, he is a Flat Earther. But the Flat Earth Conference was-- Do you recommend Area UFOs at Area 51? No. No. So carry on. So I get there. And the first question they asked me when I get into the courtyard is, are you guys globetards? You know, which is a person who believes in a spherical Earth? I said, no, man. I can't stand those guys. Did you? Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Why did you say that? Because I had to get a press pass. Right. But if you'd said, I'm not sure-- Oh, I would have never been a alien. Really? They really hate the conventional scientific-- Yeah. Because they think those are people who fall for NASA propaganda. And as Flat Earther say, you can't spell "sane" without NASA, which is phonetically true. So go on. So everyone that I met there was a lost soul of some form. Looking back now at the Flat Earth Conference, I realized that it was kind of like a-- it's sort of foreshadowed the kind of lost souls that would be dragged together during COVID with isolation and like the amount of misinformation that was distributed online. But everybody there had essentially lost their livelihood in some way. There was one canceled tattooer there named Watson who had been like canceled for being handsy with a client in Brooklyn or something. And he was living in his RV and he was a newly converted Flat Earther. One of the guys wearing a truth shirt or just the word truth on it. His car had truth on the side of it. He was disinvited from his family Thanksgiving because of his belief in different, you know, ununachys-style theories. There was comedian Owen Benjamin was headlining and he had just been fired from Hollywood and kicked off of SNL, I believe it was, for antisemitic tweets. So-- It rings a bell. But everybody at the Flat Earth Conference was sort of dejected-- - Been through a crisis. - Been through a personal crisis. - A bit like Chan Six. - Exactly like Janari Six. They were people who had been dejected in some way. And for whatever reason, they felt like the world was a battle between good and evil and that they were on the good side of spiritual warfare. There's no accountability to be taken. They're just like, I got fucked over 'cause I'm the good guy and the world's ran by bad guys. And we're gonna figure out these bad guys are together. And they were looking for community 'cause they had lost theirs and community that validates their version of events. A lot of them wrapped to quite a high standard. Everybody wraps. - What was that all about? I mean, even though it's like a nine minute segment, it's almost like a wrap musical. - Yeah, yeah, there was-- - It's two or three wraps in it. - Yeah. - Do you remember any of the wraps? - Of course. - Of course. - Earth is flat jack, flat of inner flap jack. We bet to black flag, Globus gets you backpack. Aspen lose the extra distance, flap upon my snapback, some shit like that. - You used to wrap. - Still do. - Do you? - I'm in Spanish. My Spanish name is Andres. I just recorded my first song recently. So I'm gonna start my Spanish wrap career as soon as I get back from it. - Why not English? - Well, because there's enough English wrappers. And I wrapped an English in high school. But, you know, to me, it sounds crazy, but it was-- - It would spit some of your old bars. (laughing) - I don't have any marks, it's been a long time. - Oh, you must remember some from back in the day. - Yeah. - Go on. Okay, okay, okay, I'll do this 'cause we're on a Louis throw podcast. Well, I should share the lyrics of "I'm You Kick That Up High School." Yeah. Okay. Backdoor in these hose on my white goonshit with a bagged up zip in my North Face vest. That's it. I've got more. (laughing) I've got more, I've got more. Let me think of a couple. "Living lavish, I'm a savage, but I tend to hide it. "When you're a Seattle-wide client, you gotta keep it solid. "I keep agatus off the Molly while I'm driving. "Baskaless, Anaconda, Hermione." It's very good, it's nice, but you're just saying them. You're not performing them. I've lost it, but I'll get it back. I'll get it back. You know what I mean? I didn't feel like you were owning the lyrics. Well, I don't have the same vibe anymore as I did when I was a high school graffiti writer and rapper. But the rapping was journalism, believe it or not. You know, I was rapping about the shit that I was doing, exploring the city, sneaking out at nighttime, talking to bombs all night, drinking twisted teas, kitchen tags, climbing on bridges and stuff. It's good stuff. That was a flat earth conference. It's crazy. So strange. It was a great time. You think it would be an obstacle to it? Like, for a while, you're getting good content. You're like, this is great. Yeah. And let's get another one. And this is gonna be amazing. And then you would be talking to them and thinking, I don't think I could be friends with you because this would get in the way. I'm down to be friends with everybody. And I don't think that it would get in the way, but there would reach a point where I would have to establish my opinion. If I was with a flat earther and the cameras were off, we're getting a beer or something, kicking it. Within 20 minutes, it'd be irresponsible for me to not be like, hey dude, I don't believe in the flat earth. I believe in the spirit. So did you not level with them while you were filming? I would relate to questioning, authority, and questioning narratives, but I wouldn't be like, I'm a flat earther man, let's do an interview because that would just be too duplicitous for me. Especially nowadays with streaming culture, everything's live, you can't really do what you used to do. There's one of the guys who's wearing a hat and you're going flat gang. Flat gang, yeah. Flat gang. That's a chief key reference because even if I'm familiar with the Chicago Drow Artists, Chief Key started in 2013 or 2011 actually, he would take these exosy pills called flats. Exosy is very popular in Oblock and in South Chicago. People don't know that, but those guys take exosy all day. I think you could have to do a PTSD, but it's also a good for staying alert and being up. And it's not like cocaine where you have to use it every 30 minutes. You can take a flat, a pressed exosy pill, like a blue dolphin and be up for like eight hours, having a great time. Never taken one, but that's just my observation. So chief key would say flat gang. And he would say, I don't pop ex, I pop flats. So flat gang is a chief key reference, but I used it and I added this thing to level with the flyer. - It was funny. - Thank you. - That's seven million views. Minneapolis protest. - Yeah. That was a big moment. - That was the moment. - How was that the moment? - It changed my entire brand from a comedy platform and a satirical interview show to a serious, journalistic outlet. 'Cause I was providing a service that mainstream outlets weren't allowed to. - Why couldn't the mainstream journalists? - Well, there was two things. One, it was still COVID. And they had protocols where they couldn't talk to people. They had to keep a large physical distance. Like they had all this weird, like testing protocols and stuff. And in the moment, it was happening then and now. Like KMR is on fire. You know, we don't have time to get a COVID test and get insurance approval to take our gear out there. And I just think that they didn't-- - We should make click 'cause it could be ambiguous. June 2020 was at the height of the George Floyd uprising. - Yeah, I was in Minneapolis. In South Minneapolis during the riots. Three days after George Floyd was murdered. And yeah, I also just think that they didn't want to, they didn't want the perspective of the protesters. You know, there was the perspective that was critical of the protesters. And then there was centrist coverage that just like acknowledged the fact that there was shit on fire. But nobody was asking people at the riots in Minnesota, why are you doing this? What experiences have you had in your life that makes you feel like it's worth a to burn down lake street where you presumably live? And so that was an interesting time. And I felt like what I was doing wasn't particularly special. I was just with my friends who happened to be from Minnesota. Do the interviews, film for like a half an hour, went home, edited it. I never saw a reaction like that before. I mean, people were like, oh my God, I was so nervous when I saw you covering this because I was like, is he gonna make fun of the protesters like he did at the Flat Earth conference or at Taladega and people were stoked on it. 'Cause the protesters were presenting cogent narratives for what had brought them to the thing. Yeah. And that opening line is like always gonna be in my head. I said, what are you doing out here? He pointed at the fire and he goes, everybody feel like that. Everybody feel like that. Is this the right thing to do? No, but this is how people are actually feeling and everything is inevitable. And that was just crazy. This is a guy with like can of gasoline in his hand who just burned down came art or auto zone or something. And I just felt like wow, like even though it wasn't like the most complex set of words, it perfectly summed up. There's a kind of poetry in it. What do you think everything is inevitable means that the boiling point would have been reached regardless. And the George Floyd incident being captured on video the way it was was just an inevitable point of what was happening already in some of these communities, whether it was on camera or off camera, they just needed a jump off point to point to something so direct and horrific like that, to be like, this is why we're upset. We're here in the streets. And so how did that change things for you? Those words like the beginning of my new career, it just enabled me to be taken more seriously in the field, gave me interview access to different people and it just changed how people thought of all gas and outbreaks. And it also soured the relationship with the parent company doing things media. They wanted me to mostly film party content and capture coverage of people yelling slogans like show me your butthole so they could put it on merchandise and sell it on their platforms. So it kind of just changed things for the better and the worse depending on how you look at it. - And you would be, were you on a salary at that time? - Yeah, 45K a year. Just to be that guy for a second. A lot of the conservative or right-wing commentators were like, hey, how come the mainstream media was sort of sympathetic to protest and violence in the case of the George Floyd riots? But then they did had a big problem with Jan 6th. - Well, for one, they actually weren't sympathetic to the George Floyd riots. Biden and Harris were condemning violence the whole time. That's a false narrative. Additionally, a lot of people were charged and convicted of crimes related to the George Floyd riots. Like my friend Dylan from Minneapolis who was just in the third precinct when it was burning down. He had to spend three and a half years in prison in Levinworth. You know, so like people did get convicted. There's still people in jail from the riots. I mean, there was probably more immunity than I guess would have been afforded in like 92 with the LA riots. I don't know. I can't think of a comparative tool. But. - No, well, if you compare it with Jan 6th, you'd be, I mean, Enrique Tario got like 30 years. - I think, I mean, first of all, I should have said. - I know what you mean, Paul. - The January 6th convictions were ridiculous. The fact that you're giving people that amount of time when they were encouraged to do what they did by the most powerful political party in the country who essentially controls their loyal media outlets like Fox. And no one's being charged except for the individual soldiers on the front line, not all the people who made millions of dollars, harvesting their anger, turning it into clicks for money. You know, it was unfair. I mean, Trump should have been charged for it. All those people, all Sidney Palis should have been charged for it. General Flynn should have been charged. You know, Dave from Nebraska, who just like has no friends and has been like smoking like 40% weed and listening to these fringe podcasts every day for six months straight. And his communities and collapse. All small businesses in his town have closed. He has no friends anymore. He can't go out, drink with his buddies. All third spaces that were already dwindling have gone away. And now he's like, what's my purpose in life? It's a defeat, the forces of evil that are causing all these unrelated problems. They were treated horribly, man. And it's only made them double down. Right. A lot of them have been since pardoned. And I think they're looking for compensation now. Yeah. I mean, the prison system is horrible in the United States. It's awful. I mean, regardless of if you're a Q&A in January of '06 or a wrongfully convicted person in Louisiana, it's not rehabilitative. The recidivism rate is ridiculous. The conditions are horrific. You've seen so much of this. Sure. Yeah. But I also want to ask you about, because we were going to do this last week. And then it was like, oh, I can't leave now because I've got a lawsuit. I don't have to raise a million dollars. Yeah. I'm pretty much like the higher I've grown and profiled and more I've become a target for financial exploitation. And especially because we're totally independent. We don't have a major newspaper, despite maybe a lack of success or funding. We'll have lawyers on retainer to defend their journalists. But if we make a documentary about a powerful person, then they can just jam us up in civil court. We have to file the anti-slap motion. We have to do all these free speech protection things. But they're very costly, because you don't get a public defender in civil court. Like you do if you're charged with a crime in the US. So we got sued for wiretapping last week, which is violation of the Federal Wire Tab Act. Never happened. But we platformed a guy who has a vendetta against a private lender named Bill Dwayner. Bill Dwayner is the guy who sued us. Kelly J. Patriot. OK, this is part of your 2025 film, dear Kelly. Yeah. In which you had a gen 6-- Is he QAnon on? I would say QAnon adjacent. I mean, I don't like to put people in that bucket, because the people who espouse some of these beliefs don't even necessarily follow Q or follow Q drops. But they believe all of the QAnon tenants. So I would just say that yeah, that Q was allegedly like a high up civil servants. I'm bigwig inside the deep state who was on side with Trump and the idea of some massive disclosure project. It was supposed to be a military whistleblower within the deep state who who is exposing the truth about the elite cabal of satanic pedophiles at the top, who are secretly running things, but Trump's one of the good guys. - A terrific convince. - Yeah, but in this world, Trump is one of the good guys, and he's supposed to purge the swamp of the deep state, drain the swamp of the deep state, basically. So, Q was leaking stuff on QAnon.pub, which is like a random open source website about the upcoming storm, and the storm was supposed to be that like, Trump would essentially put all the evil deep state people in jail, like Hillary Clinton. He'd go into Air Force One in the sky, and while he's up there making the plays from the ether, the world would be purified of satanic spirits. So January of six was supposed to be the storm. So everyone who stormed the Capitol was like, expecting that to be like the one to play. - Really? - Yeah, so they were very confused when they got arrested, and like, it took like years for that confusion to wear off. Some of them are still like, all right, when's the storm coming? - Just for the general, as you just say, they were doing cute, so-called "cute" drops. Basically, they were uploading to 8chan, right? These kind of cryptic messages, purporting to be from Q saying things. It was very sort of being this, what Peter Sellers think was like, "The garden shall be weeded, but the water will be truth." And people were like, "Oh, that, and then something would happen." - Yeah. - That's what they were talking about. - I think that it was just- - It would be better if I had a real exon. - I think, I mean, that's pretty accurate. But sometimes it would just be like a, "Aro-Smith Instrumental" with like an American flag gift, and it would be like tomorrow. And then some random show would happen tomorrow, and they'd be like, "That's what Q was talking about." - It was one of those stories that comes along, it feels like this is very symptomatic of the times we live in. The first thing to reflect on is that Trump came to the presidency as the kind of conspiracy president, right? He rode conspiracy narratives into the White House, right the way back to from like the birth of Gates stuff, what he was talking about, Obama actually was African and didn't have a birth certificate and shouldn't be president. And that was way before 2016, wasn't it? And then subsequently felt like he was a beneficiary of various conspiracy narratives as sort of seen as disruptor and chief, right? And it was amazing how he kind of rode both a sort of establishment horse, and then also almost like quasi-new age UFO believing horse, right? - Yeah, I mean, he was able to unite every kind of skeptical person. - Why do you think those kind of crystal UFO, turbo-new age David Ikeish people were susceptible to the Trump phenomenon? - Well, I mean, I think it's good to have a healthy amount of skepticism as to like the elite, crest of society who's running the world. - They bought the anti-allete narrative. - Well, I mean, it's good to have an anti-allete narrative. And I personally believe that QAnon was like a siop to distract people from like the reality of some of like the new Epstein disclosure stuff that we're seeing. - They know who Q is. - There's a few, there's a few theories. Some people think it's Ron or Jeremy Watkins. - That's what I'm talking about. - There's a father and son team. - But I think that retrospectively like QAnon analysis now has to be like looked at with the Epstein file releases at the same time, because that ended up being true. And that was one of the core tenets of QAnon. So it wasn't complete bullshit, but it was 80% bullshit, which makes you wonder why is that 20% truth being lumped in with like flat earth and lizards and chemtrails and 5G towers controlling your mind and making you a communist. - If it was a siop, who would be doing it? - People associated with Epstein intelligence, trying to move the target and basically drown the entire thing and just unbelievable bullshit so that you associate the word, you associate Epstein with flat earth. It works pretty well. - Do you believe that? - Yeah, 100%. - Really? - Well, I mean, I'm very normal. The file releases. - I genuinely think I'm gonna get canceled properly for this. That's so overused. I'm gonna get canceled. Shut up, Louis. But I might surprise people by saying, I think Epstein probably did kill himself. That's how normal I am. - Come on, man. - I'm serious. Because of the shame of the whole situation. - He was at the end of the road. He doesn't want to be in prison for 20 years. - Yeah, I mean, there is a possibility. - It's not that weird. Well, that's an unbelievable scenario. Or that if he was killed, which again, I don't tend to believe, but that it was killed by some rando, not on the orders of the Deep Street. - You think some like, Pettos, Smasher, and Jail was like, - It's got dirty, yeah, but MDC, where he was locked up is pretty extreme as far as the surveillance goes. You think some like, Peckerwood or Mexican mafia member could have got to him, like Miami, Megadale, so a lot of, you know that you get a lot of points in Jail for killing a Peto. I have seen a couple of Peto podcasters on YouTube. That's an explosive genre right now too. - A Peto catchers. - Yes. - Yes, not Peto podcasters. (laughing) - Is that what I said? - No, Peto podcasters would be-- - There's been a lot going on. - Doing well. - Doing well. - Very niche. - Yeah, that's very niche. - I'll leave that to you. - Okay. - Okay. - Uh, Peto podcasters. They're booming right now. - So you think, I'm not trying to pin you down. - Again. - If there was a siop, it would be, associates of Epstein, are you gonna give names? Like, do you have people in mind? - Yeah, Trump. - You think Trump. - Bannon, I mean, everybody that was named in the files, pretty much like all the tech oligarchs right now that are buying up mainstream press outlets, Ellison, and Dreson, Bezos, Musk. That's why when I talk about QAnon, like we can talk about the sensation elements, which were obviously the majority of it. But now, you look at it a bit differently with the full Epstein file release, even in its redacted form, and you're like, "Okay, there actually was some nuggets of truth in there, so why was the misinformation promoted so hard? It's almost impossible to look at outside that prison now." Comparatively, it's a right after January 6th. - I'm gonna gently push back, and you might be deeper than I am. My take on it is that Epstein is a crystallization of a form of abuse that, if not routine, is not that. Acceptance scale, right? Of course scale, but not that uncommon at elite levels of power. And that across the board, you have VIP, people in different fields, business, otherwise, whether it's Jimmy Savile or Muhammad Al-Fayed or Harvey Weinstein almost recently says, "A chave is the civil rights leader." They've all used their positions of power and privilege to satiate their kind of deviant sexual interests. So rather than seeing it as a conspiracy, I would see it as just the way in which people get corrupted, especially men, not exclusively, but overwhelmingly, and prey upon the women that they get access to and the girls. - Well, I think both things can be true, right? If you have an elite crest of people with unchecked power, who are using that to take advantage of people, 'cause they know that they have the infrastructure to do so with impunity, maybe those people would have some kind of organization so that they could protect each other. But I'm open to it not being a conspiracy. I think that would be great if there wasn't an elite, pedophile blackmail network, but I said, there's too many unanswered questions now. But like I said, with a full disclosure, I think it should be pretty easy to figure out. But I know that a lot of times with conspiratorial thinking, you kind of want the truth to be as extreme as possible to justify the amount of research you're putting in. So I'm not like a full-time Epstein researcher. - It would be kind of awesome if they were lizards. Like just if you remove the moral dimension, it would be obviously horrific. But can you, what would be more amazing? Holy shit, Alex Chowde and David Eight were right. They actually are shapeshifting reptoids. I did not see that coming. - That'd be a pretty good, like, that'd be one of the best moments in history. Handycam footage of lizards of the world. - Yeah. Are you being sued by Melania? - No. - That she threatened to sue. - Well, actually, - No one list does in and the view is on what that was all about. - So I interviewed Hunter Biden. You know, that was a pretty prolific interview. - Thank you. - And he was like-- - For about six hours. - Yeah, it was quite an interview. It was very long. And then he basically insinuated in the podcast that Epstein introduced Melania to Trump through some model and contract. And that was a claim that was made by Bagram from Michael Wolfe. Who knew Epstein quite well? If you believe him, I'm not quite sure. He's being sued as well. He's taken some of the statements back as a result of legal pressure. - Michael Wolfe has? - Yeah, because I mean, they're threatened to sue. So backing up. So I published this claim that Hunter Biden made. And we should say for legal reasons at this point that Melania Trump denies that she was introduced to Trump. - I don't know if she or not, I just talked to people. I let people mostly say what they want unless too extreme. Or I don't have the amount of information to push back. But let them say it. - And there is a picture of them together, right? - Yes. - There's a photo of Donald, Melania, and Epstein, I think. - Yeah. - Yeah, so she says-- - Oh, that's him. - Anything other than they were in a room together. - So she sends him a legal demand letter saying, "If you don't get Andrew Callahan "to remove your interview from YouTube, "I'm gonna sue you for $1 billion, "and name Andrew Callahan as a plaintiff "for whatever the word is." - What did that feel like when you got that letter? - Awesome, I bet. It was epic. I'm like, oh my God, the first lady wants to kind of sue me in a sense for a billion dollars. You know, I was just living in an RV four years prior. Outside of Flagstaff, India. - I don't like you'd made it. - Yeah, dude, it's awesome. You know, there's little moments like that, like this moment where you're like, damn. I'm not even 30 yet, getting to do some pretty cool stuff. I'm thinking of suing is a classic kind of completely meaningless statement. I'm thinking of suing, you know, like, but it was a cease and desist. - It was okay. - Which to me is like the mean. - Is that one, you familiar? - Not really. - A cease and desist is basically a lawsuit threat. And it says, if you don't cease distributing the problematic clip, we will sue you. So it's pretty much like giving you a chance to pull things down before you file a cease and desist. - It's kind of, yeah, but it's typically like a doom and gloom letter like from a bully lawyer. I never fold tannies season to cease letters typically. 'Cause I do the afferment thing, or I weaponize the strison effect. Because when people sue you, - You do the afferment thing. - The afferment who's big hit was because I got high, which was a bang, huh? - Thank you. - I don't know why I said thank you. I'm not the. I just. American. Thank you for appreciating our culture. People say we have no culture. Look at that from it. Exactly. So this dry sand effect, you know, it's when you're, when you're getting sued by someone, they want to bully you with paperwork, you just publicize it on your own platforms. We're blessed to have that opportunity and that, you know, ability. So that's what you did with the Melania lesson? That's what I do with every legal threat now. So what happens next with Melania? Nothing. She just, I mean, she issued like a unprovoked public statement in the White House recently that was like, by the way, Epstein did not do this thing in my husband. Yeah. I mean, I know. That was kind of perfect tune away. Yeah. It was so, I mean, everyone's saying this thing and it's not true. Like, wait, wait, what are they saying? Yeah. That was a strizoned effect. Big time. Oh, the strizoned effect. I've been misusing that term. Okay. That's what's why I was confused. I'm sorry. I don't, I've just heard people say the strizoned effect. The strizoned effect is when Barbara strizoned tried to remove Google maps had pictures of her house and she said, I want you to remove them. She kicked up a fuss and as a result, everyone looked at the pictures of her house. Okay. When you try and suppress something and draw attention to it instead. So it would be like, if I went online and was like, anyone saying I'm gay, yeah, I'm going to stop saying I'm a paid-of-file. It was like, who's saying that? Wait, you're what? Okay. I guess I'm not. So that's my point. The way that I was using it is whenever somebody tries to bully you into silence, you basically publicize the fact that they are bullying you into silence. We'll come up with a new term for it. I think that might be judo. The judo effect. I think so. That's where you use someone's strength as their weakness. They come at you and then you sidesteep and throw them. So their strength becomes a disadvantage. And it works for us because half of the legal bullies don't know the media game and the way content creation works now. So in their head, they're like, this guy's going to get a letter and it's going to scare the fuck out of them. They don't know that you will publicize it and then that will, in a sense, lead them to back off because they don't want the bad PR because nobody wants bad PR. Actually, that's not true at all. Maybe the streamers, that's the issue. That's not true at all. The streamers, the particular one's bad PR. It's such a normy. That's a very 2010 take. That was my time. When did that change? I think that the rise of like the just attention economy, doom scrolling content, the collapse of attention span and just now that everybody wants to be a content creator and there's no jobs. People look at it like even if people are hating on me or saying bad things about me, at least they're talking about me. It boosts my SEO. I can turn this into an opportunity to make money and get exposure. Exactly. Rage baiting, trigger coating. Even like Nick Fuentes, who sort of used a lot of those techniques, because I was going to say, well, you might still not want to play with the idea that you're actually an abuser or a pitiful, but Nick Fuentes has actually started selling, I think, and suddenly wearing Jeffrey Epstein branded shirts. He's also said before that like Epstein was epic and wasn't a pedophile. I mean, I think the thing about rage baiting is whenever you rage bait, even if people are mad, they're talking about you, which gives you room for like a redemption arc or like some sort of other thing that you can do. There's a Mike Surnovitch, I'm sure he didn't come up with it, but he was sort of manned as fear before manned as fear was a thing. In the sort of 2015, 2016 era, I think. His thing was like conflict creates attention, attention creates. I don't know how you can monetize it, I guess. But you've got to stop with conflict, provoke, outrage. I think that's especially true if you don't have a marketable skill or like a talent to present to the world. For us, I think people appreciate the documentaries, so I don't think we need to create some kind of beef. We don't have to call people out or, you know, I don't have to squirt land use into my eyes and run naked through shopping malls. We hope, but we'll do that if we absolutely have to. So I think we came up doing stuff like that maybe. Yeah, I mean, we're, you know what I mean? I think I wouldn't strip off for a documentary now. It would feel a bit like I was trying too hard. Well, I mean, if I can the day I did do that. I think your earliest work had like a sprinkle of more satire than it does now. In my early work had more like, I don't want to say like more of a pompous attitude, I would definitely like look into the camera like Jim from the office. I would definitely apply crash zooms to people and that felt like the people were sometimes the butt of the joke and that's changed. Let's talk about what happened. Okay. You ready? Yeah, I'm down to talk about anything. Okay. So right, 2022, your movie comes out on HBO. Yeah, yeah. This place rules. It's excellent. It kind of turbocharged what you'd been doing. Knitted it into a narrative. It felt more prestige, but every bit is crazy. Like you did a great job with it. And then not long or a few weeks later on TikTok, I think a woman makes a serious allegation of feeling that her, I guess her safety was violated, that she felt violated. The quote was, I told him no, I told him I wasn't interested. He did eventually get consent because he wore me down. That's not true. And another woman said that he attempted to put his hands down my pants and I was fighting him during this. And then there were a few others and then there was a more serious one later with two women said that they actually felt their consent had been violated. You did a statement. You said you acknowledged that they might have felt pressure without the front phrase. I mean, it's hard to even look back at that public statement because I mean, to be in that moment, you know, within I think a four day period, you lose all of your support. You know, you'd get dropped from your agency, lose every sponsor, your best friends evaporate, your DMs on Instagram have like tens of thousands of messages. And half of them say, you know, kill yourself, you're a piece of shit. And the other half just say, take accountability. And so I didn't feel that what was going on made any sense. Certainly didn't match up with my lived experience of what they were talking about. But I wanted to do the right thing. You don't ever want to be someone who's hurt somebody. And you just want to try to move forward and analyze the situation. After the fact, figure out how to avoid ever making someone feel that way again. So I recorded that statement because I felt like it was the right thing to do. Now it's hard to say because it gets like brought up all the time and people say, oh, you admitted to it. But I just tried to do what I could to do the right thing and took some time off. There are like, it kind of, there's a certain template. And I'm not comparing in terms of how serious it was. Truthfully, I don't know. But it felt like it didn't meet, evidently, either didn't meet or didn't reach the criminal standard, right? So it was in this area of some women are saying they felt violated. And a guy saying that it wasn't like that. What did I guess the question would be if you're in the middle of that, because it's not clear to me what accountability necessarily looks like. If the statement you gave felt to me, I'm obviously a man. I bring a certain lens to it. Felt to me like the beginning of accountability. I mean, I definitely spent the next six months in recovery in different kinds of situations, making amends with people that I feel like needed to be made amends with privately. Because accountability looks like making amends with an individual, not necessarily advocating for yourself to a bunch of supporters who have never met you in real life. I mean, they probably want a level of it. But I mean, what happened behind the scenes leading up to the first allegations is something that I've been trying to figure out where and how to talk about the initial accuser sent me a message eight minutes before the film came out asking for a portion of my fat HBO chick to assist with therapy and from what I know now, what I've learned since then, that was trying to get me on the hook for more. So it's hard to want to take accountability when you know that that happened and there's not much clarification on it, you know, but I would like to know more, you know, but I'm not sure how to reopen that without bringing back all those feelings. Is there a takeaway for you like, you know, many? I think the biggest mistake that I made was engaging romantically and sexually with fans. I was 22 years old living on the road and what I would do when I got to a new town. And I had just gotten famous online and I would go to a new town. I'd post my location. You were literally living it in all the way at this time. And so what I would do out of loneliness or desire for companionship and, you know, experience, I'm going to a new town, post my location like who wants to hang out. Sometimes I'd post a bar location and 250 fans would show up and it was like my birthday every night for years. But I think that the power dynamic at play was something I didn't realize was happening. I never have seen myself as like a famous person. I still really don't. But I was engaging with like, I was hooking up with fans all the time for years. Really? And I think that, like, there's situations that I felt like we're all good where, you know, someone may have looked back and feel like they wouldn't have done that if I wasn't who I was or they, you know, looked up to me in some way and they felt like they didn't want to let me down. And I probably should have been more considerate of that. I think so. Date more intentionally, not rush to hook up on the first date and just don't hook up with fans if you're a 22 year old internet celebrity. What do you call that time? Like, would you call it being cancelled or. I don't know, man. It's hard to say because my audience is bigger now than it was then. What happened with your movie? It's still online. Where is it? I couldn't find it. On HBO, but not in the UK. They halted distribution for international. For that reason, you were considered a tarnished brand. Yeah, it was radioactive. Did you get messages from. your collaborators? - No, nothing. You know, when I got the financial request, you know, from the person, I told the collaborators, and they said, "We got your back. I showed them all the text messages, including one from right after where she said she had a good time. This is four years before the text was sent to me asking for money." And I showed that to them, and they were like, "We got your back. We've seen the texts. It's gonna be totally fine. We'll handle this." My agent said the same thing. But when she hit the fan, and when the press picked it up, yeah, they all disappeared overnight. There was no parting words, no tough love, just a total evaporation of everyone that I worked with. - How did you feel about that? - Terrible. - What would you have done in that position? - I can't speak for anybody else, but I probably would have maybe called me and expressed how they felt, or maybe asked some clarifying questions, because I had the information that they were probably looking for. They just didn't want to hear it from me. And because of the scale of it, I can't blame people for protecting their reputations over wanting to reach out to me. But I don't know. I do know that the collaborators knew about all that stuff beforehand. It's hard for me to feel sympathy for someone who was acting blindsided when they're addressing the public, when that's not the truth of what was happening behind the scenes. I don't know. I try not to be salty about it, because at the end of the day, it was blowing up on a massive scale, specifically by the press. So, that was like my first moment ever being covered. That was like the first time my name was ever said, and most of these outlets, NBC, Rolling Stone, Reuters, Chinese outlets. Across the country, I've seen people talk about it in Singapore on the news, newscasters. People who didn't even know I existed. So, that was the film rollout. I think a lot of people felt like their friendship with me wasn't worth, you know, what it would mean to have to publicly defend me in a moment like this. Most of the people, since then, except for one, have reached out to me, post, come back, and been like, I'm sorry, I panicked, I choked. -Really? -Yeah, almost all of them. Yeah. But that's now in retrospect where it's not dangerous to be my friend. Apparently, Info Wars reached out. (laughs) Yeah. Info Wars are for me a job a week later. That's what people don't understand about cancellation and cancel culture. Yeah. It's not the end of your career. It's the beginning of a new one. If you double down and make yourself into a free speech warrior that was silenced by the machine and kind of enter that sphere, you can make double the money. You can just keep killing it. It's not the end. That's what the cancellation machine, which is like the press apparatus gets wrong. Look at Russell Brand. I mean, now it's a little harder. But there's so many instances of people who. Go on. Dave Chappelle, I mean, there's like so many people who, especially now, where people are like a little different than they used to be in regards to like controversy. We jokingly call it the cancel verse that you pass through the, you know, whatever that barrier is. Yeah. And you emerge on the other side and there's Russell and I don't mean to trivialize it. No, no. But and you go to Mar-a-Lago and you can chill with Eric Trump. Right? Yeah. And I'm really happy that I didn't take that route because I think the Info Wars thing is a good example of how possible it would have been. You know, because they look at people who are going through that experience. And they're like, "I know that you've lost your friends. You're in a fight or flight state. Come, you know, into the arms of the right. And they'll take care of you and they'll make you feel. You make you feel seen again. And half the time when people are in that spot, they just want to be made to feel like they matter." You did have a little chemistry with Alex Jones. Thank you, man. Didn't you, though? Yeah, he's pretty easy to get along with. Unless you're like. You would have loved to have you in his table. Absolutely. It would have been perfect because I would have been like the. The kid who like came up through liberal media and got spit out because the left eats their own and now look at him. Now he's a real truth secret, but he had to go through that to see things clearly. Now he knows who the good guys are and he's on our team. That would have been the red pill. You could have taken it. Did you see things any differently off towards? Yeah, absolutely. In what way. I mean, I just don't like to be around people as much as I used to. I'm very careful about who I spend time with. I definitely don't want to work with any studios. That's for sure. I don't know because it just makes you for one, a target for financial exploitation. And two, it makes it so there's people around you who can control your success and your trajectory in life. If I produce Dear Kelly, and I release Dear Kelly, and someone's upset about it, and they figure out a way to put pressure on me, I'm not going to take it down. I'm not going to denounce myself. But if you work with others, that opens up the ability for people to fold on you. Being a journalist, you piss people off. And when you made Dear Kelly, how did you make that one then? I just edited it myself out of an office in Las Vegas, my first office off the old Fremont strip, put it out on, you know, DearKellyFilm.com. And yeah, like it was one of the highest grossing independent self-distributed films of documentaries ever. How did you distribute it? Just on the website. Really? Paywall, yeah. And it did more in revenue and numbers than this place rules. Should we talk numbers? Yeah, sure. It got 75,000 rentals in the first two months. What is that? In money terms? That times $55,000 plus a $1.52 processing fee. So they could end up with merchandise and lifetime purchases around a million dollars. Wow. So cool. But I don't have any salt toward anyone who jumped off and left me hanging because what do you expect people to do? But yeah, I see the world very differently. I mean, I wish I could explain more about what I know is going on behind the scenes because it's like just very dark. But I just don't want to open that wound, you know? Really? Yeah. So then you come back. And in fact, as you said, like you've been doing some great work, like documentaries and interviews. You scored like Hunter Biden. Got him. And then recently, Clavicular, you interviewed. Yeah, yeah. And he seemed to get annoyed with you. I just don't like the guy. He was a fucking asshole, man. Like straight up. He was so just like negative. And I was trying to give him the time and data. Like I wasn't setting him up for any kind of, uh, gotcha moment. It didn't feel that you were. It felt like he got annoyed. And then you got annoyed that he was annoyed. Well, just at the end, he's like, this is a shitty interview. So this is shitty interview. You haven't asked me any questions about looks, Maxing. And in fact, you had asked him quite a bit. What he was trying to do. It felt like you weren't annoyed till the end. You didn't start it annoyed. Did you? No, I started it like, I mean, I was weird out because he wouldn't look at anybody in the eye. I think he's on the spectrum. Yeah, yeah. And it was weird because, you know, he realized that he was kind of losing control of the interview. So he first went for like to add hominem attack being like, you're a shitty interviewer. And then at the end, he asked me like, are you secure with everything about yourself? His goal was to get me to profess some kind of personal insecurity so he could gain control of the narrative in the interview and give me. Which is, so he's a looks, Max. Does everyone know who he is? Do you think the norm is? No, a clavicular AKA Braden Peters is a 22 year old New Jersey man who is one of the most popular streamers on a platform called Kick and he promotes looks maxing which involves peptide injections, both are going to do a different mode. Well, I'm just trying to explain to people. He believes in non FDA non CDC approved methods of improving your physique to be more attractive to women, not necessarily to have sex with them, but to raise your value. And you're sure you're a worldwide. That was his brand, but he was a streamer and then he went viral with his streaming content. Yeah. So he sort of took over that whatever the place in the culture that whether it was Sneakow or Andrew Tate, in the matter of months, he just blew up. And it's important to note that clavicular discovered looks maxing on in cell forms during COVID. That's basically the most important thing of it. It was in lockdown during puberty, during which in a moment of isolation, confusion and hormonal rage found on in cell forms, PSL forms, pick up artist hate, slut hate, it looks maxing, which is the three tiers of the in cell community. And so he found about looks maxing because he was insecure about his acne and his face and his, I guess, bone structure and muscle mass. Also he DMed me to collaborate. Just put it. I didn't mention that in the interview because I just wanted to maintain amicable dynamics, but like it was him who hit me up to do the interview. He DM me out of nowhere. I was like, "Yo, what up?" And like ask for a number. So he knew who I was. Like, even though he pretended he's like, "You're from Channel 5, right? Channel 5 Fort Lauderdale. You guys are part of the mainstream media and I explain like, "No, it's a joke. We're not Channel 5. We're all gas and breaks, reframe Channel 5." And he was like, "Holy semantics man, it's the same shit to me." So he was just playing dumb. I'm sure there's some pickup artist style like code word for what he was doing similar to nagging. Some kind of nagging thing. Pretending you don't know who someone is. I'm sure there's a term for it. They've got a term for every type of manipulation technique. How did it end off? I just left. More recently, Nick Shirley, who is the director. He told the people who Nick Shirley is. Nick Shirley is a content creator who used to be a Mormon missionary in Chile. So he went to go convert people in the slums of Santiago to join the Lauderdale Saints for a small sign-up fee. And then he came back immediately and began making some prank content. And then after Elon Musk bought Twitter and you could make content that was political in nature and you wouldn't be algorithmically suppressed for producing politically divisive content. He began shooting content along the border, essentially trying to monetize domestic divisions and profit content-wise from eroding the social cohesion of the US by producing fear-mongering content about every oppressed demographic you can possibly think of. Whether it be immigrants, liberals, gay people, whoever it is. And he was recently really salibusted shortly after the first Epstein file drop when he was I guess disqualified. patched after getting tipped off by a congressman, a conservative congressman or senator in Minnesota, and he was accusing and allegedly exposing the Somali community and Minneapolis for perpetrating daycare fraud. A couple days after his video went viral, after being signal boosted and shared by Elon Musk and JD Vance, the feds moved in. Ice began operation, metro surge in Minneapolis, shortly after his peace kind of had turned the country against the city as a whole, and that's kind of the purpose of a lot of his reporting. He was just in Cuba asking people about the horrors of communism, and where Shirley goes, sweeps follow. So I expect them to be in the-- Regretation sweeps really everywhere. It seemed a legit story in the sense that, well, the New York Times did a follow-up coverage with like, actually there was systematic abuse of the system in Minneapolis. You know, I'm just saying, of course there probably was a problem with a small community in Minnesota taking money from the federal government and not using it how they were supposed to, but why is this report being boosted? You know, you have to ask those questions, and you have to look at things sequentially when you're looking at any and surely piece because he's wrapped up in tight end with the GOP. So it's interesting because I think you make a good point, which is that a lot of times-- I mean, sometimes it's an outright lie, like the idea that in Springfield, the immigrants were eating pets. I mean, that's a lie. But sometimes it's just something that's, as you say, been amplified, and strategically deployed, weaponized as a pretext for driving policy. Yeah, there's seasoned anecdotal story and just absolutely coverage blasted from Nick's really to Fox News to everybody else. Like, do I think Nick's really is inherently a bad, hateful person? No. I don't think so. He's a 20-1 or 22-year-old kid who I met when he was filming his first YouTube video at the Turning Point USA conference in 2023, groomed and put into a world that he's not even aware of why it was created, if that makes sense. Really? Yeah, these sort of algorithmic, like, worlds and the world of reactionary, right-wing street content. I was there for the genesis of it, which really was like the anti-lockdown era. That's when you saw the first non-GOP street political influencers on the conservative side of things, when MAGA formed as a market group. Dreamers or YouTubers? Back then, this is before streaming really took over like it has now. I think it was YouTubers, Instagram content creators, but even smaller stuff like on kick and gab and rumble and parlor and truth social. That was the first era where you saw, I guess, trumpers and stuff like going into Portland to interview Antifa with their master up undercover. That's when you saw videos about the collapse of San Francisco or the fall of England really start to be produced by the top dogs, like the Tommy Robbins, Sims of the world, and then also people under that who are seeing that it's an effective way to make money. All this is connected to the housing and affordability crisis in the US. Why there's so many content creators following the lead of the influential ones is because there's no opportunities. You're looking at people have three or four roommates. They're living in these post-gentrified AI robot neighborhoods. People are miserable. Community collapse has gotten to a point now where only 19% of people are a part of an in-person community. People have no friends. They're lonely and they have no way to make money. You see these content creators making the living for themselves following the lead of cats in Springfield, Haitians eating cats, not the cats themselves. Gangs taking over Aurora Colorado or Afrod in Minnesota, which it was more true than the others. Or, you know, Portlanders on Mayday wearing blackblock, throwing water balloons full of pacet cups, all these things. Going back to your point about divisive content and being controlled by deliberately enticing, misleading or overemphasized stories. It was pre-2016. It was Facebook originally, wasn't it? And that term "fake news" originally was talking about they find a photo of people putting pieces of paper in a dumpster and they say, "I found evidence of massive cover-up and troll farms in Eastern Europe, I think. We're putting up fake content." And then it was Trump then adopted the term "fake news" and sort of judoed it back on the guys who'd come up with it. judo effect. judo effect. Big time. Trump, have you tried? I would, but I don't think he would do it. What about ban and. Yeah, I would interview almost anybody. But if it's someone that I knows up to no good, that would change the level of research required. You know, I want to make sure that I came in swinging and didn't give him a softball. Not swinging, but swinging in the Louis throw sense. Thank you. Well, they don't even. My sense is taking your clothes off and saying, "You want a party?" Yeah. But you can swing it and that, you know, I've obviously learned from you a lot, like, without them knowing it. Which is crucial. Thank you. You're sort of the opposite of Pierce Morgan. What would you ask Trump? That's a really good question, man. So many things, but I don't know. That's so good in interviews. It's very rare that someone gets the better of him. Yeah, famously, Sasha Barron Cohen interviewed him as Ali G and Trump kind of rumbled him as the ice cream love segment. Yeah, you remember that? I was. people say that's the only person that he could control. Yeah. I'm sure there's been a lot of things. He says, like, I've got a business idea for you. What does everyone love? What's the most popular thing in the whole world? What does Trump say? Music. Music. It's a good answer. So good. I still think about that one. I'm like, God damn. And then. He goes, no, it's ice cream. And I've invented an ice cream that doesn't melt. And then Trump's like, "Okay, I gotta be. " You know, a little busy. I can need to go and do something. Yeah. I think that if I were to document Trump, I'd want like a day at my. Tomorrow logo. You know, like the lifestyle, the country club lifestyle, and just the surreal nature of being in Palm Beach and like, you know, setting up like a little. I ran War Workstation in the basement and just having your buddies who are like the FBI and National Security Director is like pulling up and you're like, "Coming off the golf course with the iced tea or a diet Pepsi." And you're like, "All right, fellow, what are we getting into today?" I think less so than what he would actually say to me, the atmosphere of that situation and scene or what I would find most interesting to capture. My thing used to be that he's like one of those people who. He's so self-contained, almost like a black hole that you sort of need to see the distorting effect, like a. Astronomer, you sort of need to observe the distorting effect it has on the bodies around it in order to chart its power and its gravity. And so I would interview Melania, maybe with Trump there, and I'd just ask her questions and then sort of kind of see what was happening between them. Yeah. Baron could be pretty good too. Baron would be kind of. You could follow Baron around NYU, kind of like you did the Fred Phillips daughter. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be like, you need a ladder. He's like seven feet tall. Yeah. So where we are now, there's been this strange fragmentation of the mega movement, right? It feels like, from my perspective, having unleashed divisive content, whether through the algorithms, you know, call it free speech, call it amplification of division, then this final boss taboo of anti-semitism, suddenly it was. Maga was like, "Oh, well, that one's not okay." Like, we're okay with demonizing immigrants and we're okay with misogyny and homophobia, but suddenly there's a split and some people want to keep going and embrace full anti-semitism. And I looked at this in my manuscript, Doc. And then others are like, "No, no, no, this is where we stop. We're holding this line." Yeah. It feels like it's probably the end of the Trump movement, maybe the Trump era, because of that, at least partly because of that. Yeah, I think that Trump has lost the Gen Z and younger right. You know, they're totally anti-seinist, borderline, anti-semitic in every way, because they can't see nuance in anything. And yeah, so. Definitely anti-semitic. Certainly. And that's a big problem too. But I think that the only real Trump supporters would be young as ionist, the dwindling Ben Shapiro audience, probably, and then just boomers who just are kind of stuck in their ways. Yeah, it's been interesting. I read a thing about how Ben Shapiro's ratings have really created. Yeah, because of Israel. I mean. Because of his unstinting support for Israel and that now these young right-wing Republicans who were rooting for Trump, and now they like Fuentes, a lot of them like Fuentes. And they're very skeptical of the support for Israel. Well, I mean, yeah, but it's. I try not to be cynical here, but so many of those people just don't care about Palestine. They just recognize that the tides were shifting against Israel. They don't care about Palestine at all. So they're just like, "All right, cool. Let me take this moment to sort of seem righteous." You know, and be like, "Oh, look at these babies in Gaza." By the way, Jews suck ass. And you can tell this verb doing a hookline and sinker type of deal where they don't care. They just know that getting people in with the empathy card is going to allow them to spread that stuff. And it's very disappointing. Do you think you have anyone specific? All those guys you just mentioned. Right. Well, I only mentioned Fuentes, I think. Anybody in that sphere? You think Tucker Carlson? Yeah. Oh my God. He's just laid to the party. Tucker Carlson is the ultimate propaganda scripter. You know, he is the face of Fox News' disinformation campaign for seven, eight years straight. And even before that, he is like the final boss of reactionary politics. And him becoming like a main based podcaster just shows that the independent establishment is the new corporate establishment because his news network, TCN, you know what, there is slogan is, "Corpere media is dead." If you ever hear that, you know what? here Tucker Carlson saying that best believe it's not. And so he just, I think, realized at some point, well, you know what, like if I, if I turn on Israel, I'm probably gonna lose most of my support base. And so she's realized like, I gotta start being like, let's ask questions. They're attacking Christians in Jerusalem, which makes me think as an American. I don't wanna support these people. (barking) You know? - 'Cause you're trying to say one step ahead of the right-wing herd by finding a new demon. It's like, it's getting old. It's a bit like having a new hit. We need a new tune. So it's getting old just bashing on immigrants or the elites in the US. So now we have to turn it up a notch and explicitly call out Israel and it's gonna new frontier of divisiveness. - I mean, I think that for one, Fountaise was hammering him. - Right. - 'Cause after October 7th, Tucker was spent maybe a year in, you know, 10 days or something being like, you know, Hamas is no different than Al-Kaeda. They must be eliminated for the progress of the West, they're holding society back. You wanna be gay there? - Good luck. You know, and so I think that now, public tide has shifted so much and that he has to take that stance. I think like I said, he'll be, he'll love Vance when Vance runs. - But he hates, he won't hate Vance when Vance makes small-- - Or the friends, the friends. - I mean, I just think it's popular to hate Trump right now, but like I said, these people's perspectives change all the time. I can't tell you how many right-wing commentators are like, I'm turning on Trump. You're going too far, dude. You're Epstein's friend. You suck, and then a couple weeks later, you know, he does some type of thing like an ice raid or something and they're just like, yeah, deport them all, clean the city up. We got too many, too many illegal aliens that poisoned in the well, great replacement. They read the comment sections, they sort of gauge public opinion and they follow public opinion. - How's your, I feel like we covered a lot, too much of it, too much of it. - I have unlimited time. - Jesus, fucking hell, got me. - You gave up the RV lifestyle? - Yeah, why? - Was it just two-eye tinder-in? - Well, I had to move to LA to sign the deal for the HBO film and they didn't have an editing staff. Tim and Eric didn't. They had a couple people, but I had to really be there in Burbank all the time to edit. And then I don't know, it was just two transitory and then obviously getting in trouble later in time, cancellation-wise made me feel like, I don't want to be back out there engaging with random people all the time. You don't know what their agenda is. So it was a mix of a few things. I still take little road trips, but I'm very, like, deliberate now. I've heard you say though that you missed the road trip days, like the fully kind of-- - Yeah, I do, I missed my life days. - I missed being young and not so cynical about people and full of adventure and not having gone through various experiences that have affected my outlook for the worse. I missed being naive and not being so successful. I missed not being recognized everywhere. I have some anger toward my younger self for trying so hard to succeed at a young age. I don't understand why I was so hell-bent since a 1920 year old's succeeded in doing everything and work every day and go everywhere. I mean, everyone. I wish I would have committed to a more slow growth. - Right. - Oh yeah. - Were you very driven? - Extremely, and I still am. But I'm like, why did I want this so much? - What was behind that? - I have no idea. - What did your parents do? - When you were growing up? - Well, they divorced when I was 12. And my dad, before then, I think he was a salesman. And then after that, he refused to work for anybody. So he was just flipping MacBooks on Craigslist, doing some landscaping work for people. - In Seattle? - Yep, going home? - She was a hotel concierge. - Were you financially secure? - No, but I mean, I wasn't poor, but we would have to switch apartments every time the lease was up. So I lived in like maybe 20 houses throughout my life before turning 18. And then once Amazon moved their corporate headquarters to Seattle when I was a sophomore in high school, they basically bulldozed the city to build like cheaply constructed apartments for their workers. And after that, the rent doubled if not tripled. So my dad had to move to like a trailer park in the Booneys. My mom had a downsize to a studio apartment. And so there's definitely a financial motive, you know, where I'm like, I got a succeed to put on for them. Like I bought my mom a house or not bought, but I'm renting her really nice place in Santa Monica on the beach. And then I bought a dive bar for my dad to run in Seattle. - Were you a good student? - No. I knew what I wanted to do. I always wanted to be a journalist. And I always wanted to be outside where things were happening. I wanted to be on the front lines of news events. And journalism as Hunter S. Thompson said, it was just a ticket to ride. You know, it was just a way of getting everywhere I wanted to be. 'Cause it's, you know, it's what the job entails. You get to meet all kinds of people. So I just wanted to pull up, be active, be outside. And anything that was inside being made to do math homework as like a 16 year old who just wants to like be kicking it downtown, having new conversations every day. Wasn't something I really cared for. You talked about having a medical condition, yes. - Sort of. - What's it called? - HPPD, hallucinogen, persisting perception disorder. So that just came from frying my brain on shrooms when I was like 14, you know. - You must have had a lot of shrooms. - No, it actually, you know, that's a common response. It wasn't the dosage. It was how young I was. I've probably had a half and eighth of shrooms of Liberty Caps, which is a regular amount of shrooms to take. But you're not supposed to take psychedelics until your brain has developed. - And describe what happened. So right now, if I'm looking around at you, I see visual snow everywhere right now. And my entire visual feels still like a TV screen with steady. - Really? - Yeah. - Is it a problem? - No, 'cause I've had it for longer than I've not had it now. Actually, I'm 29 now, so I got it when I was 14. - It's not diminishing. - No, but you forget about it because it's just been so much time. So I don't even, I don't really think about it anymore. But at the time, certainly for the five, six year period after it was like, every day was like a nightmare. 'Cause I'm like, when is it gonna go away? Trying everything I could to make it go away. All these experimental tools and different medicines online. They said worked. I would have been susceptible to any kind of new age medical misinfo at that time. But thankfully, they hadn't fully formed like it had today. That industry, information economy. But yeah, definitely alcohol. So I started drinking so much as a young person. 'Cause that was what helped the most. - Okay. - Around 15, just, you know, stops smoking weed and just would drink after school. - Do you still drink? - Yeah. You know, we were talking a lot about the streaming culture and this sort of new media landscape we inhabit, right? And I made a documentary about the manosphere, so I've observed it at ground level. But what I haven't really observed is how it works in the offices of the corporate tech barons and the decision makers who actually tweaked the algorithms, right? And I'm just wondering whether, because it's not visual, right? And it's a hard story to tell. It's a kind of story about sterile offices and plausible seeming business people, right? But I guess my question would be, how do you hold those people to account? And how can we, and I suppose further to that, do you have a sense of how we create a space or a culture in which free speech is allowed, but division isn't amplified and whether that's even meaningful. 'Cause there's sort of two ways of looking at it, or more than two. And it's hard to figure out a way through, especially because any attempt to suppress information, or censor information allows that person to take on a sort of David and Goliath attitude, which judo effect makes their information spread twice as far. I tend to think that we're doomed in the short term and that future generations will have to learn from the mistakes of the previous ones, but we, and me specifically, are also the first generation to grow up, totally inundated by digital media. We are the alpha generation, the test generation, for what it's like to have someone spend their whole life with digital devices, phones, computers, et cetera. So I think that if you consider that every generation for the next 500 or 5,000 will also have access to the same tools, the mistakes that we've made as a generation, Gen Z, and I mean, everything that comes after it, Gen Alpha, is probably gonna be even worse, will inform the way future generations interact with technology. The thing is our neurosurkitry doesn't change. Like we have this evolutionary endowment that's adapted to the conditions in millennia ago. Same reason we eat too much fat and sugars like, we talk like plenty of that, 'cause you won't get it again, thinking that we're just hunting caribou out on the savannah. Do you know what I mean? - I didn't know that, but it makes sense. - Yeah, so I don't think you can hunt caribou on the savannah, I think caribou are reigned here and they live in Northern Canada. I think the metaphor is effective for girl with some species. - Okay, thank you. And so information wise, we're easily distractable, so it will have to be proactive. We'll literally have to, we'll make it illegal to have phones. Will they have government guys going into, I need to see your algorithms, or because we've had reports that they're, oh, you know what I mean? - Maybe it'll be something like Ciesta and Spain, where it's not enforced necessarily by the boot of the authority figure, but it's like, it's just a social thing, like, okay, it's after 5 p.m. - Oh, so this is family over there. They have phones off to four o'clock. - Like they're weird. - Do you know what I mean? - Totally. - Social type of enforcement. - Well, but also, you know, I have a theory that when, so Jan Alpha, which is the current 15 year olds, 16 year olds, supposedly have like the lowest literacy rate, they're not even doing homework 'cause of chat GPT, they don't read, they are essentially slaves to the tablets and the phones. iPad kids are now reaching voting age. I think that in a similar way, where Gen X hates cable TV, because their baby boomer parents are essentially overdosing on NCIS reruns all the time, I think Gen Alpha's kids will see the digital device as something that took their parents away from them, and something that disabled their maternal and paternal figures from being present in their lives. And I think the anti-tech generation be those raised by parents who are too young. just reacted by it to care about them. So I would just imagine 2050, maybe, love hope. But it would be insane for me to be optimistic in this short term. I mean, it's fun as an exercise. And I always, I fall into it sometimes. Like, this is, you know, we're gonna have a watershed moment. Oh my God, we have the songbird of a generation here. It's gonna shepherd us into a new era, but we don't have a figure like that. We're done for now, but humanity isn't done. We just need to be more careful in the future. Do we think how we interact with each other, especially online? Dude, I feel like we could, um, we could go for another two hours, but that's not the format. But thank you for coming by. Yeah, man. What's going on today? Tonight, I'm gonna screening of my documentary, The Settle Is At The Frontline Club. You're welcome to come along if you're around. I would love to. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) And we're back. Thank you for watching or listening, wherever you get your podcasts. Some housekeeping. The quote I attributed to Mike Surnovich, the manosphere influence. I got it slightly wrong. It was conflict his attention. Attention is influence. It's a kind of rubric for hacking the internet. Get the conflict, then you get the attention, then you get the influence. He's profiled in a great New Yorker piece in 2016 by Andrew Moranse. So check that out. Maybe we'll link to it. Some legal notes, okay. Are you ready? Donald Trump denied responsibility for his supporters storming of the US Capitol and said his remarks before the siege were quote, "totally appropriate." He was acquitted of an impeachment charge that he incited a mob to storm the Capitol in 2021. Okay, Donald, if you're listening, you never know, it's not impossible. It's unlikely. Baron would be more likely. Even that seems quite unlikely. Regarding the first welcome to the chat, Baron. Hi, Baron, come on the part. Regarding the first allegation made against Andrew in 2023, the alleged victim sent Andrew a message offering him an opportunity to quote, contribute to the massive amounts of therapy bills I have accrued due to the night you coerced me, end quote. She stated that this is the only time she brought up the idea of him reimbursing her in their conversations together. The alleged victim maintains that Andrew knew how she felt about the incident months before she posted it on TikTok. If you've been affected by the topics discussed in this episode, Spotify do have a website for information and resources. Visit Spotify.com/resources. Okay, that's it for this week, apart from the credits. The producer was Millie Choo. The assistant producer was Maisie Williams. The production manager was Francesca Bassett. The music in this series was by Miguel de Oliveira. The executive producer was Aaron Fellows. This is a Mind House Studios production for Spotify. [BLANK_AUDIO]