Lex Fridman PodcastAndrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones | Lex Fridman Podcast #425
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,034 words- 0:00 – 1:18
Introduction
- ACAndrew Callaghan
There's two people in the back, two of her homegirls wearing, like, sheisty masks. I'm like, "What are we doing? What, where are we going?"
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- ACAndrew Callaghan
And she goes, "We're gonna go film the riot. We're going to Lake Street." And so, uh, we drive down there. Kmart is burning. Target is burning. Everything is on fire. She has the Sony A7. She gives me a microphone and she's like, "Go talk to that guy." And there 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?" She goes, "What's on your mind?" So I walk up to him and I'm like, "What's on your mind?"
- LFLex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Andrew Callaghan, host of Channel 5 on YouTube, where he does Gonzo-style interviews with fascinating humans at the edges of society, the so-called vagrants, vagabonds, runaways, outlaws, from QAnon adherence 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. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Andrew Callaghan.
- 1:18 – 2:48
Walmart
- ACAndrew Callaghan
I tried to color match you, though. Got the black and white going. It's when, I went to Walmart before this and got the Wrangler shirt with the, uh, Texas Longhorns tee under it.
- LFLex Fridman
Is that where you shop, Walmart?
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Generally, yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
I'm a Target man myself.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
There's no way you get those suits from Target.
- LFLex Fridman
So you're saying it's a ni- it's a nice way to compliment a suit.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
I think you go Men's Warehouse, if not further.
- LFLex Fridman
I think you would be wrong.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
You go further?
- LFLex Fridman
No, the other direction.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
You got that from Target?
- LFLex Fridman
Not Target. I was joking about Target. I like Walmart better. It just felt like a funny thing to say.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
(laughs) No, it was funny.
- LFLex Fridman
The most expensive thing I own is this watch, and it was given- given to me as a gift.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Yeah. When I was on tour, I had these $2,700 Cartier glasses that I got for a lot of money, $2,700.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, like sunglasses?
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Yeah, but they're really embarrassing.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
But I was on tour, so I just felt like I could do anything as far as fashion choices, but looking-
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, yeah.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
... looking back at pictures from myself in that era, I'm like, "God, what was I-"
- LFLex Fridman
So that was the symbol of, of the fame got to your head, and you just- (laughs)
- ACAndrew Callaghan
I think so, yeah. I think fame getting to your head, if you s- spend more than a hundred bucks on sunglasses, you've officially gone off the deep end.
- LFLex Fridman
You've crossed the line.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Totally.
- LFLex Fridman
And that's where you, uh, 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.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
And I was like, "That's it. I love this place." She just said it for no reason whatsoever. This older lady just kinda looked at me and with this, like, genuine sweetness, just said, "Oh, you look handsome."
- ACAndrew Callaghan
She's, she's not wrong, man.
- LFLex Fridman
Thank you.
- 2:48 – 21:38
Early life
- LFLex Fridman
what was the first, if you remember, first recorded interview you did?
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Mm. Well, like, my first grade teacher, Mrs. Claudia, we, uh... This is back in the day, like I was telling you. We just asked her about her life in Colombia and stuff like that. But I didn't really get into actual journalism until my ninth grade year. I had no idea I had an interest in it. Before then, I wanted to be a rapper. Was all about hip hop and meditation and, uh, picking psilocybin mushrooms in public parks and stuff like that. That's what I was into.
- LFLex Fridman
That's a lot. Psilocybin meditation, rap, public parks.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Yeah, I was making, like, conscious rap music. Like, I was to the point where I had like four dream catchers hanging above my bed.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Alex Gray painting on the wall.
- LFLex Fridman
Nice.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Tapestry on the ceiling. Just scribbling rhymes down all the time.
- LFLex Fridman
So you said somewhere that you sucked at school.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Okay. Well, let me... Let- let's step back a little bit. So I had this amazing journalism course in ninth grade.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
I went to an alternative high school, and the teacher was named Calvin Shaw. And he was just like... He... I ended up taking his class all four years, and he used to let me actually leave school, like ski- ... 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, the Silk Road and the deep web. (laughs) 'Cause, you know?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. Nice.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
As a ninth grader, when I discovered the Hidden Wiki, I thought that I was, like, really tapping into, like, the, 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."
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
You know? And so I, I messaged them and I was like, "All right, you know, I wanna get someone killed at my school. Like, how much is it gonna cost me?"
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
And I published my interview with the Hidden Wiki hitman, who was probably a fed or something, but who knows?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
And that, my first article was called, like, "Inside the Deep Web: A Conversation With a Hitman."
- LFLex Fridman
That's nice.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Yeah. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, you're fearless, even then.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
I mean, I was hiding behind a, a Tor browser, so there's not much fear to be had.
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, so it was anonymous.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
It was anonymous, but I did publish it under my name. So you're right, I could have been, could have been in danger.
- LFLex Fridman
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.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Can you explain what this is?
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Well, that condition is classified by persistent visual snow, floaters, morphing objects. Like, I see them right now. I see them all the time.
- 21:38 – 33:14
Hitchhiking
- LFLex Fridman
you hitchhiked across US for 70 days when you were 19.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
Tell the story of that.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
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 a, like a old school dormitory building at a school in New Orleans called Loyola University, I wanted to, I wanted to just do something. I felt so bored. I was working for the school newspaper for the, 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 hover boards banned on campus due to safety concerns. And it just-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- ACAndrew Callaghan
... kind of felt like, all right, well, I kind of wanted to be a, a gonzo reporter. I'm not sure if working my way up through the traditional newsroom hierarchy is gonna get me to that point. So I started reading a bunch of old hobo literature, you know, like post-World War II vagabonding stuff and there was this-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
... book called Vagabonding in America by an old hobo-
- LFLex Fridman
Name.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
... Ed Burn. 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.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) .
- ACAndrew Callaghan
But what it did tell me-
- LFLex Fridman
That's great. (laughs)
- ACAndrew Callaghan
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 you're gonna, you know, 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 street car 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, that was, that was the plan and it worked out.
- LFLex Fridman
I love it.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
I traveled across the United States, uh, before in similar kind of plan 'cause you want the-
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Oh. Were you on, were you on the Silver Dog?
- LFLex Fridman
Sil... (laughs) . Greyhound.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
It's the Grey- Greyhound bus.
- LFLex Fridman
Greyhound is pretty nice.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
That's a step above hitchhiking.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, that's way better than hitchhiking. So I don't wanna-
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Hitchhiking, Greyhound, Amtrak, airline.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, Amtrak, no. That's elitist. Uh-
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Uh, what's in between Greyhound and Amtrak?
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- ACAndrew Callaghan
A car. That's what it is.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, it's a car. Yeah.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
It's a car then.
- 33:14 – 42:14
Couch surfing
- ACAndrew Callaghan
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) What else? What e- what are some interesting beautiful people that you've met ac- along the way?
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Well, I used the app, uh, CouchSurfing to find places to stay.
- LFLex Fridman
Nice. Yeah, I remember CouchSurfing.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Now, you can only submit to like five CouchSurfing requests a day unless you're a premium member, which means you also host people.
- LFLex Fridman
Wait. CouchSurfing's still around?
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Yeah, yeah, totally.
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, nice.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
But it's evolved, obviously, into a different thing.
- LFLex Fridman
Airbnb is a kinda competitor to that, right?
- ACAndrew Callaghan
CouchSurfing is free though.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
So, CouchSurfing, uh, they call it like the CS community, so basically there'd be these like CouchSurfing super hosts in different cities. Like, there was one in Santa Fe, this firefighter dude who had like 15 other couch surfers there chilling.
- LFLex Fridman
Nice.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Um, so I would do it everywhere. A lot of them were, um, Catholics.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
You 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 CouchSurfing profile that says, "Clothing optional."
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
So, I ha- I made that mistake a few times. Not that I'm anti-nudist, but I didn't wanna... you know, I wasn't ready to take that leap of faith. And, uh, yeah, it was just great. CouchSurfing hosts were amazing.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Th- that was just great. 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."
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, I love couch surfing.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
For like, again, for me being an introvert, just crashing on a person's couch, being essentially forced into a great conversation is great.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Yeah. The one 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 your couch. Thanks for the food."
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
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, 'cause it's exhausting the constantly, "Hey man, thanks."
- LFLex Fridman
I think the shallowness of that interaction-
- 42:14 – 59:58
Quarter Confessions
- LFLex Fridman
doorman on the, uh, I could say legendary Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
That's right.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, (laughs) where you saw what you described as... This might be another Wikipedia quote, by the way.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
But this-
- LFLex Fridman
This is where I do my research, is Wikipedia.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Does it say, does it say hellish scenes?
- LFLex Fridman
Hellish scenes, in quotes.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Wikipedia is damn right about that one.
- LFLex Fridman
All right, thank you.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) That's a win. That's one in the win column.... uh, so yeah. Tell the story of that. What's it like to work on Bourbon Street? What kind of stuff did you see?
- ACAndrew Callaghan
I mean, I was a host at a, 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. 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. So there was this policy, we had these giant glass windows next to the- the tables. So if you're eating at a- at 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
... boobs, all that.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
We had this policy where if we're serving someone, we can't look onto Bourbon Street if something crazy's happening. So if there's a fight or something like that, we can't look, right? 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Back to jerking it.
- LFLex Fridman
Full-on.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
He's jerking it, right? And every, 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." (laughs) So I'm serving these people, you know, and I'm like, "You want... You like red beans and rice or what you like some Creole?" Fucking da-da-da. And, uh, there's just this dude and, you know, ultimately the manager went out and, you know, escorted him further down Bourbon Street. 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, wow.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
... I lived about 12 blocks down Bourbon on, at a- in a small Creole cottage, in a cute little like orange old school New Orleans one-story spot. I lived in the attic above these, uh, these gay, uh, meth dealers named Frankie and Johnny.
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, wow.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
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. It was almost-
- LFLex Fridman
The best of humanity on display.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
... impossible. Yeah. It was like Kensington, Philadelphia, but just alcohol. You know what I mean?
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, it's all alcohol. But it's a lot of... Wait, a lot of visitors, right, from outside?
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Almost all visitors.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
And that- that kind of would set the floor for the weekend. 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.
- 59:58 – 1:15:08
Burning Man
- LFLex Fridman
- ACAndrew Callaghan
And the first event that we were called to cover was the, the Burning Man Festival. And that, that was tough because Burning Man is not too keen on filming. It's supposed to be a non-commercialized, you know, escape from the, from reality. They have a gift economy set up, it's based upon like mutual participation and, uh, non-exploitation. And so the idea of making a Burning Man video was tough at first because Burning, Burners oftentimes, and this is not all of them, but are pretty well off in general. A lot of them have tech jobs, are pretty high up in Silicon Valley, and Burning Man is where they go to take off, you know, to take the edge off and basically become their Burner persona. On the playa, they become reborn and they take ketamine and they wear c- kaleidoscope glasses and steampunk hats-
- LFLex Fridman
Yep.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
... and they, you know, snort MDMA and they run around the sand, listen to techno.
- LFLex Fridman
Do you snort MDMA? That's what ... I need to do MDMA.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Yes, you can.... yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
I thought it was a pill. I didn't know.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
It's better to take it in a pill or water, but you can snort MDMA.
- LFLex Fridman
I definitely need to take MDMA. I'm already full in love, but, like, that I'd probably go on another level.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Yeah. Don't snort it 'cause it'll only last for, like, 90 minutes.
- LFLex Fridman
Hmm. Let me write that down.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Yeah. So anyways, we didn't know what to do because we tried to film, like-
- LFLex Fridman
Don't snort.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
... the initial idea for All Gas, No Brakes was to instead of asking people, "What's your deepest darkest secret?" It was, "What's the craziest trip you've been on?"
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
So the idea was to not satirize drunk people, but satirize people who were fried on acid.
- LFLex Fridman
Oh.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
And so we went to Boulder real quick, did a test interview with some lady who talked about seeing ancestral aliens during a peyote retreat. And so it's pretty easy to extract trip reports from hippies and, you know, gutter punks and stuff like that, or oogles. So, we go to Burning Man. Uh, we start asking people, like, you know, "What's your craziest trip story?" And they didn't have the same type of free-flowing storytelling style that, like, a on-the-street crust punk in New Orleans might have where they're like, "I don't give a fuck. I'll tell you whatever." These people were very bottled up about what they were willing to disclose. So, we went on Burning Man Radio, and we did a broadcast. And we said, "Hey, we're- we're doing... We're psychedelic journalists." It was me and my friend Ciel at the time. I said, "We're psychedelic journalists. We're parked on 10 and I," which is a cross street in Black Rock City, and we said, "We have a 1998 Catalina Coachmen Sport. It's an RV. We've set up a podcast studio. We're doing a show about psychedelic voyages."
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
So lo and behold, two hours later, we had 10 people lined up at the RV.
- LFLex Fridman
Nice.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Willing to talk.
- LFLex Fridman
Nice.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
So I vetted people in advance for us. And so we did a couple interviews, uh, and that was that.
- LFLex Fridman
What, what, what were some of the stories from the trip reports?
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Uh, there was this lady named Rasna who said that she was known in several circles in Berkeley for being multi-orgasmic and could create multiple repeated climaxes using only her mind by, like, squinting her eyes and squeezing her eyes together so much that, like, the pleasure spiral just, you know, went crazy.
- LFLex Fridman
I feel like I s- talked to several people like that at Berkeley.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Yeah. You know what I'm talking about?
- LFLex Fridman
Not that... Well, yeah, that lady. I think she did a- she manifests herself in many forms, yeah.
- ACAndrew Callaghan
Right. So but still, it was on the cruder end. There was one guy named, uh... Kimbo Slice was his burner name. He talked about taking a shit after taking, like, uh, a quarter of mushrooms and how he was like seeing his childhood and visualizing his past life, you know, as the, the turds were flowing into the toilet and just talks about the psychedelic union between pooing and taking, taking shrooms.
Episode duration: 2:51:59
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