#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones

Andrew Callaghan is the host of Channel 5 on YouTube, where he does street interviews with fascinating humans at the edges of society, the so-called vagrants, vagabonds, runaways, outlaws, from QAnon adherents to Phish heads to O Block residents and much more. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – ShipStation: https://shipstation.com/lex and use code LEX to get 60-day free trial – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off – LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free sample pack – MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lexpod to get 15% off – AG1: https://drinkag1.com/lex to get 1 month supply of fish oil Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/andrew-callaghan-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan: https://www.youtube.com/channel5YouTube Andrew’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/andreww.me Andrew’s Website: https://andrew-callaghan.com/ Andrew’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/channel5 This Place Rules: https://www.hbo.com/movies/this-place-rules Books Mentioned: On the Road: https://amzn.to/4aLPLHi Siddhartha: https://amzn.to/49rthKz PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (08:53) – Walmart (10:24) – Early life (29:14) – Hitchhiking (40:49) – Couch surfing (49:50) – Quarter Confessions (1:07:33) – Burning Man (1:22:44) – Protests (1:28:17) – Jon Stewart (1:31:13) – Fame (1:44:31) – Jan 6 (1:48:15) – QAnon (1:54:00) – Alex Jones (2:10:52) – Politics (2:20:29) – Response to allegations (2:37:28) – Channel 5 (2:43:04) – Rap (2:44:51) – O Block (2:48:47) – Crip Mac (2:51:59) – Aliens

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Andrew Callaghan, host of Channel 5 on YouTube, where he does Gosse-style interviews with fascinating humans at the edges of society. The so-called vagrants, vagabonds, runaways, outlaws, from QAnon adherents to fishheads 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.

• 0:32Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got ShipStation for businesses who want to ship stuff, BetterHelp for humans who want to figure out what's going on in their mind, Element for hydration, MasterClass for learning, and AG1 for delicious, delicious health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.

• 1:16Lex Fridman?

  This episode is brought to you by ShipStation, a new sponsor. It's a shipping software designed for businesses that want to save time and money on shipping, whatever e-commerce thing going on, to do the fulfillment for that. So if you're a business owner and you need to ship some stuff, check out ShipStation. There's an incredible commercial. I think it's probably fake from a long time ago. It's either for Walmart or Kmart. I don't remember. And we talk about Walmart in this episode, which kind of warms my heart, if I'm being honest. Actually, I do think it's Kmart. And the commercial is, well, they talk about, "I just shipped my pants."

• 1:58Lex Fridman?

  At the risk of explaining humor, the commercial involves the full on absurdity of various kinds of people talking about shipping their pants and shipping the bed, all that kind of stuff. Anyway, it's hilarious and I wish people would do edgy or stuff like that more often, where the commercial itself is a little piece of artistic absurdity. Anyway, go to shipstation.com/lex and use code LEX to sign up for your free 60 day trial at shipstation.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.

• 2:40Lex Fridman?

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• 3:24Lex Fridman?

  He runs J N L barbecue that I highly recommend. You guys should check out. We talked about life, freedom, country, talked about a lot of things, about love, about love for humans, about love for the art of what you do. The man loves barbecue. He truly loves cooking and their artistry, if I can use that word, kind of like what Jiro dreams of sushi, or Ben dreams of barbecue. Anyway, he is not a licensed therapist.

• 3:56Lex Fridman?

  He's not even a licensed barbecue creator because you don't get a license for that kind of thing. His, uh, his father, grandfather, he's just been in the family. He's been a Texan for like, I don't know how many centuries, but you know, Texan through and through barbecue guy through and through. But if you want that kind of depth of conversation, but with a little bit more rigor and some, uh, you know, expertise and professionalism and, uh, discreetness, then you should try BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element. It's a, an electrolyte drink, delicious. It helps you get your sodium, potassium, magnesium in the right kinds of proportions. For me, if I

• 4:41Lex Fridman?

  had to get rid of everything I consume, the last things that would remain that would make me still feel good, like say if I'm fasting for many days, which is the thing I kind of want to do, like fast for like seven days or more. I think that's a beautiful experience, but if you do that, you still need water and electrolytes because if you have those, then you can be happy. Your body can be happy. You can still feel good. And, um, it's just also a fun way to consume water for me. And it's just a fun, delicious way to consume water for me. I'm traveling to the Amazon jungle in Maine, so I get to think about all the things I'll consume there. And I'll definitely miss Element.

• 5:24Lex Fridman?

  The things you miss, but also the things that empowers you when you travel to those kinds of places is the little habits, the little comforts of home. And Element is that for me. And I'm looking forward to a long run today. I don't know how many miles I'll do, maybe 10, 12, maybe 15. And I'm going to drink Element before and I'm going to drink Element after before. So I feel good on the run after. So I recover well from the run. It's a big part of feeling good for me, given all the diet, given all the craziness that I do. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com/lex.

• 6:02Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by MasterClass, where you can watch over 180 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Phil Ivey on poker. Aaron Franklin on barbecue and brisket. Carl Santana on guitar. Tom Morello on guitar. Terrence Tao, mathematical thinking. Martin Scorsese on filmmaking. Boy, would I love to talk to Martin Scorsese. Just from his MasterClass, you could understand the depth of genius there. There's some directors that I would just love to talk to for two, three, four, or five hours. Darren Aronofsky that I got to meet recently. God, boy, what a beautiful mind.

• 6:43Lex Fridman?

  I love great filmmaking and I love artists that enable that, whether that's cinematography, directors, actors, all of that. Writers, the paintbrushes and the colors behind the art. I love it all. And so MasterClass is a good place. It gives the early inklings of what it takes to create that genius from the very people that created it. Get unlimited access to every MasterClass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com/lexpod. That's masterclass.com/lexpod. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.

• 7:27Lex Fridman?

  I just drank it and that's the reason I feel good. I'm going to do a long run later today and I'm going to drink shortly after that, mostly because it makes me super happy. I'm going to make an AG1 in the container that comes with it when they ship it. I'm gonna put cold water in there, mix it all up, and put it in the freezer for about like 30 minutes. It gets a little slushy. It gets that like some texture to it after a long run in the Texas heat. It's just so refreshing to get that AG1. And I think about life and I'm listening to some intense audiobook and it's just a zen place where I get to reflect on the battles that I fought inside my mind on that long run.

• 8:11Lex Fridman?

  And AG1 is just the delicious orchestra that plays while I reflect on the battle fought. Friends, they will give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex.

• 8:28Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Andrew Calligan.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  I tried to color match you, though. Got the black and white going. I went to Walmart before this and got the Wrangler shirt with the Texas Longhorns tee.

• 9:01Lex Fridman?

  Is that where you shop, Walmart?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Generally, yeah.

• 9:03Lex Fridman?

  I'm a Target man myself.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  There's no way you get those suits from Target.

• 9:06Lex Fridman?

  So you're saying it's a nice way to compliment a suit?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  I think you go Men's Warehouse, if not further.

• 9:11Lex Fridman?

  I think you would be wrong.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  You go further.

• 9:14Lex Fridman?

  No, the other direction.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  You got that from Target?

• 9:16Lex Fridman?

  Not Target. I was joking about Target. I like Walmart better. It just felt like a funny thing to say.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  It was funny.

• 9:22Lex Fridman?

  The most expensive thing I own is this watch, and it was given to me as a gift.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. When I was on tour, I had these $2,700 Cartier glasses that I got for a lot of money. $2,700.

• 9:34Lex Fridman?

  Like sunglasses?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they're really embarrassing. But I was on tour, so I just felt like I could do anything as far as fashion choices. But looking back at pictures from myself in that era, I'm like, God.

• 9:44Lex Fridman?

  So that was the symbol of the fame got to your head?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah. I think fame getting to your head. If you spend more than 100 bucks on sunglasses, you've officially gone off a deep

• 9:53Lex Fridman?

  You've crossed the line.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 9:54Lex Fridman?

  And that's where you go back to Walmart to humble yourself. I really love Walmart. In fact, I moved to Austin because I was at Walmart and a lady said that I look handsome in a suit. And I was like, that's it. I love this place. She just said it for no reason whatsoever. This older lady just kind of looked at me and with this like genuine sweetness just said, oh, you look handsome.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  She's not wrong, man.

• 10:18Lex Fridman?

  Thank you.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  That's part of your whole swag, though.

• 10:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the suit thing. Yep. Anyway, what was the first, if you remember, first recorded interview you did?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Well, like, my first grade teacher, Mrs. Claudia, we, 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. It's all about hip hop and meditation and picking psilocybin mushrooms in public parks and stuff like that. That's what I was into.

• 10:52Lex Fridman?

  That's a lot. Psilocybin, meditation, rap, public parks.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was making like conscious rap music. I was to the point where I had like four dream catchers hanging above my bed, Alex Gray painting on the wall, tapestry on the ceiling, just scribbling rhymes down all the time.

• 11:09Lex Fridman?

  So you said somewhere that you sucked at school.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Okay, well, let me, let's step back a little bit. So I had this amazing journalism course in ninth grade. I went to an alternative high school and the teacher was named Calvin Shaw. And he was just like, I ended up taking his class all four years and he used to let me actually leave school. Like, I didn't like going to school. So he let me basically go around Seattle and do different interviews with people as long as I could come back by the end of the day and write a story for his class. And he'd mark me as present. So the first article that I wrote was about the Silk Road and the deep web. Because, you know, as a ninth grader, when I discovered the hidden wiki, I thought that I was like really tapping into like the most secret society, elite level black market in the

• 11:54Speaker 01

  world. And so if you remember, they had that hidden wiki link that was like hire a hitman, you know? And so I messaged them and I was like, all right, you know, I want to get someone killed at my school. Like, how much is it going to cost me? And I published my interview with the hidden wiki hitman. It was probably a fed or something, but who knows? And that, my first article was called like Inside the Deep Web: A Conversation with a Hitman.

• 12:14Lex Fridman?

  That's nice.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:16Lex Fridman?

  I mean, you were fearless even then.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  I mean, I was hiding behind a Tor browser. So there's not much fear to be had.

• 12:22Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so it was anonymous?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  It was anonymous, but I did publish it under my name. So you're right, I could have been, could have been in danger.

• 12:29Lex Fridman?

  I also saw that he said he took too many shrooms when you were young and that led you to have hallucinogen persisting perception disorder, HPPD. Can you explain what this is?

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Well, that condition is classified by persistent visual snow, floaters, morphing objects. Like, I see them right now. I see them all the time.

• 12:50Lex Fridman?

  The snow is in the room?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  The snow is definitely in the room. It's all over you. And basically,

• 12:57Speaker 01

  It wasn't that I took too many shrooms. I think that it was, I took, I took about an eighth of seni essence mushrooms, which are the ones that come from the earth instead of cow shit. And I took an eighth of those at my friend Toby's house and, which is a normal amount, but I was in eighth grade. So I woke up the next morning with these extreme, you know, visual distortions. And I thought that it would go away. I tried to make it go away, but there was, there's really no cure for HPPD. It's a lifelong condition. So it's just a matter of dealing with it and realizing that it is only visual. So when people ask me, hey, I have HPPD, how do I cope with it? I say, remember that every other sense that you have, what you can hear, what you can taste, you know, you're feet on the ground, you're still on earth, you're still here.

• 13:40Lex Fridman?

  Well, you said it's only visual and yes, gratitude for being alive at all. It's great. But you said that this led you into some dark psychological places like depersonalization disorder.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Depersonalization is the feeling that you are not real, but that reality still exists. De-realization is the idea that reality itself is an illusion created by your mind and that you're the only person alive and that everything that your brain is projecting to your visual cortex is a lie and that you're the only living human being.

• 14:13Lex Fridman?

  Both are pretty intense.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  HPPD creates both of those things. And so when I've talked to people who have the condition, it's really either or, but more than 70% of people with HPPD fall into either category. They're both coping mechanisms for the, I don't know what really happens. I talked to a researcher once named Dr. Abraham. He lives in upstate New York. He's the leading scientist when it comes to HPPD research. He's the only one who actually seems to care about finding a cure. And the only known treatment right now is alcohol and benzodiazepines.

• 14:45Lex Fridman?

  That's not good.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Right. So alcoholism, something that came into my life pretty early, alcohol abuse as a result of that experience, because that helps with the visual symptoms, makes some of the stative go away. Never tried benzos though.

• 14:59Lex Fridman?

  So what, so can you explain to me where in that spectrum you are?

• 15:04Lex Fridman?

  So do you sometimes have a sense that you're not real?

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Sometimes.

• 15:08Lex Fridman?

  And something else is not real, like the reality is not real?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I experience it all the time, you know. But like I said, my job helps with that because I get to feel like, um, you know, when you seek out extremes to a certain extent and you put yourself on the front lines of intense events, whether it be politically or socially, or just dive into deep fringe subcultures, you get this feeling that you're real. And being filmed is also confirmation, if you can look at the MP4 file, that you're in fact, living here on earth.

• 15:36Lex Fridman?

  Confirming

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:37Lex Fridman?

  that you were in it with the reality by watching yourself on video.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 15:42Lex Fridman?

  So there is that basically the engine behind all the extreme interviews you've done?

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Well, I got HPPD around the same time that I began this journalism course in ninth grade. So I sort of always use journalism as a therapeutic mechanism to deal with some of these symptoms, especially depersonalization. There's some pretty good illustrations of what it feels like. Kind of feels like you're trapped behind your eyes or that you're just this like nebulous soul that's trapped in a flesh suit that you're not really a part of. You're sort of puppeteering a flesh and bone skin suit.

• 16:13Lex Fridman?

  Trapped or just the ability to step outside of yourself?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  You feel like your soul is not something that is connected to your body. It's something living in your head. It's really hard to explain to people who haven't gone through de-realization or depersonalization. But if you go on support groups, they always say like, how do I break free from behind my eyes? Like dark stuff like that.

• 16:32Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so you're trapped. I mean, there's a higher state of being through meditation that you can kind of step outside of yourself. But this is not that.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, it was kind of the meditative path or, you know, the eastern path that I took and kind of fused that with psychedelic culture in Seattle that took me down the psychedelic use rabbit hole in the first place. So like, I'd say it all started with Siddhartha.

• 16:55Lex Fridman?

  Siddhartha, that's a good book. Have you done shroom since then?

• 16:58Speaker 01

  No, I don't really do psychedelic drugs, but like, a lot of people think that I'm against them, which I'm not, just doesn't work for me. If it works for you, I'm sure that can be really fun, especially, I know there's lots of like, uh, therapeutic uses for acid and ketamine and psilocybin, but I personally abstain from those kind of. Anything psychotropic, I try to stay away from.

• 17:18Lex Fridman?

  Drinking a bit?

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, I didn't drink at all before I had the HPPD stuff. And I would have drank later in life, but definitely like 14, 15. Every day after school, I'd drink a 40 ounce of Mickey's. It's like a, it kind of looks like Old English, but the bottle's green and it has a hornet on the side of it. Just kind of became a ritual just to deal with the anxiety of, of that situation.

• 17:39Lex Fridman?

  And it made the, the snow go away?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, alcohol really works to suppress HPPD symptoms.

• 17:44Lex Fridman?

  So you said you hated classes in school, except that journalism class.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Okay, we need to clear this up because on my Wikipedia page, for some reason, for Andrew Callaghan early life, it says Andrew hated every single class except for one. So I've had a bunch of teachers who are super cool, like this guy, Tim, my astronomy professor in ninth grade. Mrs. Zanetti, my creative writing teacher in sixth grade. And this really cool dude at my college in New Orleans named Charles Cannon, who taught me a class called New Orleans Mythology. My three favorite classes besides my journalism class. And they all hit, they all hit me up and they're like, hey, man, saw you said you hated every class. Sorry, I couldn't be everything that you wanted me to be. And so I just want to say shout out to all those teachers. I didn't hate every class. The point that I was making is that being forced into the institution of school so young

• 18:31Speaker 01

  and having to take common core classes like biology, dissecting frogs, history of the Han Dynasty, stuff like that, that I didn't want to learn, but I had to learn multiple times. I mean, I learned about the dynastic cycle in ancient China. Three separate times at three different schools. And I was like, who is writing this curriculum? And why is it so important that I understand this process?

• 18:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  The part that makes school difficult, especially in college, is that you have people just go into school just to get the degree, who don't really know exactly what they're interested in. And they don't even have time to figure that out because they're in a business program or a communications program with no specific interest.

• 19:09Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think if you want to do school right, take on every single subject that you're forced into. It's like the David Foster Wallace, he'd be unborable by it. Just really go in as if ancient Chinese dynasties are as the most interesting thing you could possibly learn.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  And it is somewhat interesting, the Silk Road and the Great Wall and terracotta, the soldiers and stuff. But I'm just saying, like, when I got to college, I signed up for journalism school, right? And I didn't get to take a media class until the second semester. And, you know, I had to take everything prior to that. And I'd already spent so much time. I just think the excruciating boredom of schooling left a bad taste in my mouth. But there was individual classes that I liked a lot.

• 19:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there should be some choice, or maybe a lot of choice, even at the level of high school, for what kind of classes you pursue.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 19:57Lex Fridman?

  And you're also saying so Wikipedia is not always perfectly right.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  No, but it's just interesting because, like, I've said so much in podcasts, but that's what they isolated. And I've gotten that question before, which I understand, it's the first thing on my Wikipedia page, but it makes me sound like a super hater. Have you ever seen this Instagram page called Depths of Wikipedia?

• 20:15Lex Fridman?

  Oh, it's great.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Oh, it's so good, dude.

• 20:17Lex Fridman?

  You said you love journalism. What did you love about journalism?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  I mean-

• 20:21Lex Fridman?

  What hooked you?

• 20:22Speaker 01

  On a basic level, everybody wants media coverage, right? Everyone likes to be on camera and get exposure for whatever they're doing. And so being a journalist and being a, almost like a portal for exposure for people, allows you to be on the front row of everything that you want to be a part of. You get to be in the front row for history as it's unfolding, because everyone wants to be covered. So being a journalist gives you a ticket to everywhere that you want to go in life. And so it allows you to step into different realities almost, and then go back to yours. And it just keeps life interesting.

• 20:53Lex Fridman?

  Buy the ticket, take the ride. Hunter S. Thompson, is he up there in the, as one of the influences? Who are your influences?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  I think the early Daily Show was so good. Sacha Baron Cohen, huge influence. I mean, that was like, the Ali G Show especially. I think Louis Theroux's broadcasts on BBC were great. I was really into Hunter S. Thompson too, but not really until college. You know, I really like a particular Hunter S. Thompson book called The Great Shark Hunt, where he covers the Ruben Salazar murder by LAPD or LA Sheriff's Department in Boyle Heights in the 70s. And his relationship with his lawyer, Oscar Acosta, and that whole- Saga is great. Fear and Loathing, I like, but not as much as his straightforward reporting. Cause there's the gonzo side of Hunter, where he's like saying he's taking drugs and seeing shit. And there's the other side of him, which is like an actual reporter

• 21:44Speaker 01

  interested in telling a story that's has news value. So it's two different lanes for him.

• 21:50Lex Fridman?

  There is something about you that makes people want to say you're the Hunter S. Thompson of this generation. And I don't think they mean the drugs. I think they mean some kind of non-standard willingness to explore the extremes of humanity. And like almost a celebration of the extremes of humanity.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's a very kind comparison. I'll get there one day, maybe. I just went to Aspen on a little Hunter S. Thompson recon trip to go check out the Woody Creek Tavern, which is the spot that he, it was like his bar near his cabin. And it was pretty cool to see. Unfortunately, it's kind of turned into not a dive bar now, but it's a sit-down sort of country restaurant. But it was cool. But I expected to see a bunch of gnarly Hunter S. Thompson types.

• 22:36Lex Fridman?

  Uh, what?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Doing speeds.

• 22:39Lex Fridman?

  Doing drugs. I mean, drugs and alcohol is all part of it somehow.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:45Lex Fridman?

  And so it opens a gateway to a deeper understanding of humanity.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  But I will say though, like as someone now who doesn't party like I did when I was younger, it's not as important as I thought it was. You know?

• 22:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'm conflicted on this. I'm good friends with a lot of people that say alcohol is really bad for you. And I believe that too. But there's something that I'm just, as an introvert, as a person who has a lot of anxiety, for me, alcohol has opened doors of like, just opening myself up to the world more.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm actually a fan of alcohol, moderate drinking. But I'm saying like my life before. I would say 2019, 2018 especially. There was the chaos on camera, but then there was my private life, which was like chaotic partying all the time.

• 23:31Lex Fridman?

  Oh, I see.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  And I convinced myself, much like Hunter did, that that was the secret sauce that in the core, the spiritual, in my spiritual core, that gave me the creativity. But then I cut out a lot of that stuff and I'm just as creative. And it's interesting that a lot of, I think, one of the hardest parts about addiction is that if you're a functioning, highly creative addict of any kind, your brain and the addictive part of your brain convinces yourself that it's all part of the cross purpose and that it has this symbiotic inspirational thing going on, but it's not, it's not true. It can be, but it's typically not.

• 24:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's not a, it's not a requirement. You can sometimes channel, you can sometimes leverage all those things for your creativity, but the creative engine, it lives outside of that.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Like, have you read Hunter's daily routine in the year up to his death? It was like 15 grapefruits and eight ball of coke and like, just like a certain amount of shotgun shells for him to fire into the sky every morning.

• 24:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  There's no way, and he didn't do anything creative in those, in those final years.

• 24:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  But, so the creativity goes away and gradually you just become like a party animal, like Andy Dick.

• 24:38Lex Fridman?

  A caricature of yourself.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:40Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's why life is interesting. You make all kinds of choices and sometimes you can have, create works of genius in a short amount of time, based on drugs or no drugs. Einstein had that miracle year where he published several incredible papers in one year, 1905.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Did he do drugs before that?

• 24:58Lex Fridman?

  Lots of coke and.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  I was like, I believed you for a second. I'm like, did Einstein have blow? I don't think he did.

• 25:05Lex Fridman?

  How do you think he gets that hair?

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Come on, it's true.

• 25:08Lex Fridman?

  I'm just asking questions.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  High confidence hair.

• 25:10Lex Fridman?

  Look into it.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 25:12Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yeah, well, no, he's a well put together, sexy young man. The hair came later.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, was Albert Einstein attractive as a teenager? Not teenager, was he attractive as a young man?

• 25:22Lex Fridman?

  Sexually attractive.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  I don't, I mean.

• 25:24Lex Fridman?

  I'm turned on by Einstein at all ages. I don't discriminate.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  But are you more turned on by the work that he did or his physical being?

• 25:31Lex Fridman?

  Uh, no, sometimes I fantasize what it would be like to be in the, in the arms of Einstein. I could even get that out.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. In the arms of Einstein.

• 25:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, just, just I want to feel safe.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  It's a good idea for a rom com.

• 25:44Lex Fridman?

  To be a little more serious, like general relativity, that space, time can be unified and curved by gravity is an incredibly wild and difficult idea to come up with. Like, it's a really, really difficult thing to imagine, given how well Newtonian classical mechanics physics works for predicting how stuff happens on Earth. To think like, like, like the, that gravity can, can morph space, time, both space and time is, and it permeates the entire universe. It's a field.

• 26:25Lex Fridman?

  It's a really wild idea to come up as one human on Earth to intuit that is really, really, really difficult. And it's really sad to me that he didn't get a Nobel Prize for that.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Was it, was there people saying he was crazy when he was around? Or was it all, was he universally recognized as like an OG of this?

• 26:40Lex Fridman?

  No, I think once the papers came out, he was widely recognized as a, as a, as a true genius. But before that, he wasn't recognized. He had a really difficult.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  So back now, where does a black hole go? Like after something gets sucked into it?

• 26:54Lex Fridman?

  You mean, is it a portal to another place, that kind of thing?

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:57Lex Fridman?

  No, I, well, we don't, we don't know. It could be, like, it could be, uh, that the universe is kind of like Swiss cheese full of black holes. There's something called Hawking radiation where the, because of quantum mechanics, the information leaks out of a black hole. So it is possible to escape a black hole. There's a lot of interesting questions there.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  I hope we get to the bottom of that.

• 27:15Lex Fridman?

  And there's a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, which doesn't seem to scare physicists, but it terrifies me.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, for sure. Astronomy can be terrifying.

• 27:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, we're all like orbiting. I mean, we're not just orbiting the sun, but the sun is part of the solar system, is part of the galaxy, and it's all orbiting a gigantic black hole.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Have you ever spoke to someone who's been to outer space?

• 27:36Lex Fridman?

  Jeff Bezos, he flew his own rocket.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Wow. That's pretty cool.

• 27:41Lex Fridman?

  Astronaut that's been to deep space, no. Well, maybe I've spoken to an alien that just hasn't admitted it.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  I want to do a research paper, like a report about space madness. You know, it's supposed to be this like torturous feeling that you get when you look away from Earth and into the abyss after you've exited Earth's orbit or whatever. Because there's one specific psychiatrist who knows how to deal with space madness, and I want to figure out how, interview people with it.

• 28:09Lex Fridman?

  Is this a real thing? Like, is there a Wikipedia article on it?

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yes, look up space madness treatment.

• 28:13Lex Fridman?

  Now I don't trust Wikipedia after what you told me, so.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  I know, they think I hate classes.

• 28:17Lex Fridman?

  I thought you meant more about the fact that you're isolated out in space, that we need social connection and it's difficult.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's just a feeling of extreme insignificance that you might get sometimes when you look at the night sky, but it's that times a thousand. It's like an existential void that's created after looking into the abyss and then realizing how small Earth is in the grand scheme. You just start to really have a strange new perception about the pointlessness of existence.

• 28:43Lex Fridman?

  I don't need to go to space for that.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  I mean, only a handful of people have been to space, but I'm sure they're all pretty well off, so this psychiatrist has to be like in the multimillions.

• 28:50Lex Fridman?

  Well, technically, we're all in space because Earth is in space, but so I wonder if you have to go to space to talk to the psychiatrist.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Probably so.

• 29:00Lex Fridman?

  Well, technically, we're all in space, so you can't, that's a boundary he can't have.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  But not everyone believes that, as you've seen from my, my work, probably.

• 29:09Lex Fridman?

  You're right, and that's, those are important people that are asking important questions.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:14Lex Fridman?

  You hitchhiked across US for 70 days when you were 19.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:19Lex Fridman?

  Tell the story of that.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  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 an 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 hoverboards banned on campus due to safety concerns. And it just kind of felt like, alright, well, I kind of wanted to be a gonzo reporter.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  I'm not sure if working my way up through the traditional newsroom hierarchy is going to 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 book called Vagabonding in America by an old hobo named Ed Byrne. And I read this and it just basically, obviously some of it was outdated. They had stuff in there like the hobo code, like, oh, this moniker on the side of a fence means this person has free soup or something like that. They didn't have stuff like that. But what it did tell me-

• 30:32Lex Fridman?

  That's great.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  It told me about train stop towns like Dunsmere 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 going to, 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 streetcar to the Greyhound station, got a one-way ticket to Baton Rouge. And I was like, I'm going to hitchhike across the whole country back to Seattle with no money. And that was, that was the plan and it worked out.

• 31:13Lex Fridman?

  I love it. I traveled across the United States before in similar kind of plan.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Were you on the Silver Dog? It's the Greyhound bus.

• 31:23Lex Fridman?

  Greyhound is pretty nice.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  That's a step above hitchhiking.

• 31:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's way better than hitchhiking.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Hitchhiking, Greyhound, Amtrak airline.

• 31:29Lex Fridman?

  Amtrak, no, that's elitist.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  What's in between Greyhound and Amtrak? A car, that's what it is.

• 31:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's a car, yeah. A shitty car.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Okay, cool.

• 31:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I lived in a shitty car.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  You lived in a car?

• 31:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, when I was driving across the United States.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Solo?

• 31:47Lex Fridman?

  Uh, with a friend, some solo. And I would have, I would eat cold soup.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  I love cold soup. What I like is the cold chickpeas in a can. Get the water out and just dump them in your mouth.

• 32:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Those are good. Beef jerky, kind bars. Kind bars are really good for the road.

• 32:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, all of that is great, but too much of it is not great. Like, too much cold soup?

• 32:14Lex Fridman?

  Not great. Too much beef jerky.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  So what was the route you took? Was it Chicago across or was it Philadelphia across?

• 32:20Lex Fridman?

  Philadelphia across.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  To LA or where?

• 32:22Lex Fridman?

  Uh, San Diego is where I ended up, but it was a zigzag and went up to Chicago and then all the way down to Texas.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  So you went Philly through Appalachia up to the Midwest?

• 32:32Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Did you cut over like through the Southwest down to San Diego?

• 32:36Lex Fridman?

  No, no, no. Went straight down to Texas, all the way down to the Midwest. So like.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  But did you cut from Texas West through New Mexico and Arizona to get to San Diego? That is the best road trip place. Interstate 40, like Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Vegas, Kingman, the Mojave Desert, Yuma, doesn't get better.

• 32:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, and your kids, so you don't care and you throw them caution to the wind. You met some crazy, crazy people.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  It gives me some sanity, like whenever I'm feeling kind of out of control or, you know, like bummed out, I just remember that the road is still out there. The open road never goes anywhere and it's kind of like a, I see like an invisible door in the corner of the room all the time that makes me more comfortable. Cause I'm like, hey, at the end of the day, if I'm bummed out, I can go hit the road and I'm sure there's going to be a fun time ahead.

• 33:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Get that Greyhound ticket and go.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  I would say Silver Dog half because sometimes I gotta ride the dog when I'm, when no one will pick me up. There's some places in the country where no one's going to pick you up.

• 33:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Kansas, Missouri, they're not going to do it.

• 33:34Lex Fridman?

  Maybe you're not charming enough. You thought about that?

• 33:36Speaker 01

  I was 19, fresh, clean shaven. I was pretty charming, I'd say. But the older you get, the harder it is to hitchhike because they think you're like an escaped convict or some type of like psycho wanderer. And some of these people are like what we call punishers, people who never stop talking. And so they see someone hitchhiking and they're like, yes, I'm going to talk at this person.

• 33:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  And you can tell their eyes are wide. They're like, what's up? And you're like, oh shit. So it's six hours of just like, oh, cool. Nice.

• 34:02Lex Fridman?

  That's rough.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:03Lex Fridman?

  You're right. You're right. I like people that are comfortable in silence.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then that also raises the question, are they about to kill me? You know what I mean?

• 34:13Lex Fridman?

  I think that's a you problem, not a.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  You know what's funny is almost everybody who picked me up when I was hitchhiking was like a, like a day laborer. Like it was almost all Mexican day laborers who picked me up.

• 34:23Lex Fridman?

  Oh, interesting.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Cause I think that like in some places down there, that's a typical thing to do hitchhike to work. A lot of people don't have cars, but they still have to get to their jobs. So a lot of people ask me, hey, where should I drop you off? Where's your job at? And I'm like, my job is to explore. And they were, they were down with it.

• 34:37Lex Fridman?

  See, like for me, it was really easy because he'd just say like, I'm traveling across the United States. And I think people love that idea and they want to help. They, they romanticize it because they also have that invisible door. Everybody has that invisible door and I just want to go.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  So you know what I'm talking about?

• 34:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  It can anchor, it can anchor you a bit, just to remind you that every pattern that I've fallen into is voluntary. And it's for my own stability and mental health.

• 35:01Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's why I'm like renting everything and I'm making sure like tomorrow I could just go. I gave away everything I own twice in my life, just very like, I'm ready to go tonight. Let's go.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  What's the hardest item you've had to part with in this experience?

• 35:16Lex Fridman?

  There's nothing.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  You've never had a material object that was really hard to let go of?

• 35:21Speaker 01

  So you'd give that watch to somebody if it meant.

• 35:22Lex Fridman?

  No, this, you're right. You're right. That's probably the only, I've never had to let go of that though. But that's the only thing I own. This means a lot to me, but everything else. But then again, listen, cause okay, this watch is given to me by Rogan. This become a close friend. But like whenever I romanticize the notion that this watch means a lot to me, he's like, don't worry about it. I'll just get you the same one again.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:47Lex Fridman?

  It's like, God damn it.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  It's a pretty sick, sick ass gift though.

• 35:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's pretty, pretty sick. I'm not usually a gift guy, but you know, when, when somebody you, you look up to kind of gives you a thing. It's a nice little symbol of a.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:01Lex Fridman?

  Of that relationship. So it's nice. But other than that, no, but even this, like whatever. The relationship is what matters. The human is what matters, not the.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  I agree a hundred percent.

• 36:10Lex Fridman?

  You had something like this?

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Not really. I mean, there was a hard drive that I lost that had all of my like childhood pictures on it and stuff like that, that I think about all the time. Cause I left it on a train and like the certain memories, you think about it and you just get pissed off and just think to myself, someone has that somewhere. I have dreams about reuniting with the hard drive.

• 36:29Lex Fridman?

  You and Hunter Biden have a similar.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  I don't think he wants to reunite with that one.

• 36:34Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Dude, it's crazy. Like, you know.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  All he did was smoke crack, right? Or was there more stuff going on?

• 36:42Lex Fridman?

  I think there's prostitutes involved.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, whatever.

• 36:45Lex Fridman?

  I think you gotta look into it.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  I think I have to look into it, too. I don't know.

• 36:51Lex Fridman?

  Was Kerouac, Jack Kerouac, somebody that was an inspiration at all in this road trip? Did you even know who that is? The Beat Generation?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  I didn't know who it was. And then after I did the, ultimately, I wrote a book about my hitchhiking experience years later. And everyone was like, have you read On the Road? And then On the Road, I probably heard the title of that book every day at least 10 times for two years. And I'm sure Kerouac is a great guy. I mean, I just don't, I'm not too familiar with the Beat Generation.

• 37:21Lex Fridman?

  It's a great book. It's a, you read it or no?

• 37:24Speaker 01

  I refuse to read it. People even have gifted it to me, been like, hey, man, you're gonna love this one. And I'm like, is that On the Road? If I, honestly, people have given me a book with wrapping paper on it. And they're like, this is Red Hot Rally. I was like, that's fucking On the Road, isn't it?

• 37:38Lex Fridman?

  Give you a different cover.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I'm like, anything but that. But I'm sure it's a great book. It's just the comparison thing drives me crazy.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  But respect, big respect to Kerouac.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Would never speak down on the whole, anyone in the Beat Generation.

• 37:50Lex Fridman?

  What are some interesting moments you remember from that, those 70 days?

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Man, there was so much. I mean, getting mistaken for a gay prostitute on my first hitchhiking ride in Louisiana was pretty funny.

• 38:02Lex Fridman?

  Where did you come from and where did you go?

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the journey began in Baton Rouge. And the first destination was Houston, which is about four and a half hours west on Interstate 10. So I'm in Crowley, Louisiana, I'm on the side of the road. And I guess this was a cruising truck stop. It was known for being a place where male lot lizards would go to procure clients. And I was there.

• 38:26Lex Fridman?

  Lot lizards are?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  It's a derogatory term in trucker culture for a prostitute who hangs out at the Loves or Pilot Flying J. Large interstate truck stops. Now, trucker culture as it once was is pretty much finished because of the live stream cameras they have inside of the trucks now. So you can't snort Sudafed or pick up anybody. You can't even pick up a hitchhiker or you get fired.

• 38:48Lex Fridman?

  Killed all the romance.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. The old school outlaw trucker lifestyle, unless you're an owner operator, who's not even in a union, which is like a real cowboy way to haul loads, you can't do that.

• 38:59Lex Fridman?

  You were mistaken for a lot lizard.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Mistaken for a lot lizard by a small man from Honduras with a spiky leather jacket covered in studs. Didn't speak any English, but you know, I thought he was just, you know, a nice guy. And then he pulled over at a, there's private theaters in the South where they have confessional booths set up and they have three channels and people go in there and, you know.

• 39:26Lex Fridman?

  Porn?

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. People go in there and, you know, please themselves. Yeah. So I thought he was taking me to one of those. And I was like, all right, cool, man. Yeah. Like, you know, if this guy wants to go jerk off, I'm just gonna wait in the car. It's all good. I don't discriminate. But then I was like, he buys a booth for me. And I'm like, okay, you know, not really in the mood to watch porn with this random guy. So he gets in the same booth as me. And he starts jerking off right next to me. And I'm like, oh, man, like, I don't think this is chill. I'm like, dude, can you stop? Can you stop jacking off? And he's like, what do you mean? Like, I thought this is what you want to do. Like, I have money for you. What's up? And I was like, oh, no, I'm just a regular guy. And he was super cool about it. He started laughing. He was like, oh, my bad, man. I thought you were, you know, selling something.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  I said, no. And he said, oh, it's all good. And he gave me a ride all the way to Houston.

• 40:15Lex Fridman?

  That's great.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, we talked about anything except that for the rest of the car ride.

• 40:19Lex Fridman?

  It's great. He just rolled with it. Oh, sorry about that.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  It could have been, I had about a foot and a half on this guy, so I wasn't too scared. I also had like a knife in my pocket, but I didn't want to stab him, especially not at a place like that.

• 40:30Lex Fridman?

  And you were still, that didn't like leave a bad taste in your mouth.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Well, I figured that can't happen again. It can't keep happening. So I was like, all right, if I got this out of the way the first ride, the following rides are gonna be spectacular.

• 40:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean. Who among us have not been mistaken for a lot lizard?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  It's a fact. You heard it here first.

• 40:50Lex Fridman?

  What else? What? Some interesting, beautiful people that you've met.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Well, I use the app Couchsurfing to find places to stay. Now you can only submit like five Couchsurfing requests a day unless you're a premium member, which means you also host people.

• 41:05Lex Fridman?

  Couchsurfing is still around?

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, totally. But it's evolved, obviously, into a different thing.

• 41:10Lex Fridman?

  Airbnb is a kind of competitor to that, right?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Couchsurfing is free, though.

• 41:14Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  So Couchsurfing, 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 Couchsurfers there chilling.

• 41:25Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  So I would do it everywhere. A lot of them were Catholics. 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.

• 41:42Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  And that means if you go there, I thought it meant like it's cool if you walk to the bathroom in your underwear. No, if you go there, everyone's gonna be butt naked. So I made that mistake a few times. Not that I'm anti-nudist, but I didn't want to, you know, I wasn't ready to take that leap of faith. And yeah, it was just great. Couchsurfing hosts were amazing.

• 42:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I love Couchsurfing. For like, again, for me, being an introvert, just crashing on a person's couch, being essentially forced into a great conversation is great.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  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. Part of the reason I wanted to live in an RV later in life is to avoid having to constantly live in this like. Thanks so much type of frequency because it's exhausting that constantly, hey, man, thanks.

• 42:41Lex Fridman?

  I think the shallowness of that interaction is exhausting, not just the, not the thanks.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a true favor. Of course, I love giving people gratitude for that, but just this thing where everyone who picks you up is, you know, you get eight rides a day. You're like thanking eight people a day like they're, you know, the second coming of Jesus. You start to feel a little bit debased.

• 42:59Lex Fridman?

  What'd you learn about people from that, from that journey? That's your first time really kind of going into it.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  That the American public is just so kind overall. I mean, they're so like embracing, depending on who you are. And specifically though, the Christian family people of the US who drive in minivans and have that, that fish sticker on the back where it's like Jesus fish. And then they have the family sticker, you know, where each member of the family is a stick figure. Those people never picked me up and would flip me off with their whole family. Sometimes they would throw full Dr. Peppers at me as a family while I stood on the side of the road.

• 43:38Lex Fridman?

  As a family together.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  They'd yell shit like, go to hell hippie when I was on the side of the road. And so it's weird that the most charitable Christian, American family values people never gave me any charity or even conversation. They were antagonizing me and saw me as like a hippie leftover from the sixties who needed to go to work, go to Vietnam. I don't get it.

• 44:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  But the people who really extended a hand to me is people on the margins.

• 44:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  People working on seasonal visas, people whose cars have, you know, less than a quarter tank left, people struggling with addiction who saw me struggling, or at least they thought that I was because they assumed I was hitchhiking, not out of adventure, but because I had no car and were willing to sacrifice their day almost sometimes to take me exactly where I needed to go.

• 44:28Lex Fridman?

  That's beautiful, man. I've had similar kind of experience that people who are struggling the most are the ones who are willing to help you when you're struggling.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:36Lex Fridman?

  There's, there's people like in religious contexts and other kind of communities that just judge others because they've kind of constructed a value system where they're better than others because of that value system. And that, that actually has a. Cascade that forces you to actually be kind of a dick.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I never thought about it that way. It's so true. Do you think about like morality and religion a lot?

• 45:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been to certain parts of the world where religion is really a big part of life.

• 45:07Lex Fridman?

  I'm just uh always skeptical about tribes of people that believe a thing and they believe they're better than others because they believe that thing. That could be nations, that could be religions.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:21Lex Fridman?

  And I mean, in Ukraine and Russia, I've seen a lot of hate towards the other.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:27Lex Fridman?

  And that that hate I'm always very skeptical of because it could be used by powerful people to direct that hate.

• 45:35Lex Fridman?

  Just so the powerful people can maintain power and get money, this kind of stuff.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  It's a scary thing to see how easy it is for high up political people to mobilize the hate of just the average working person. And can almost convince them to sabotage their own countrymen who they share more in common with than the politician they look up to. Just to advance the agenda of one party. That's what we're seeing now.

• 45:58Lex Fridman?

  Are there some places in America that are better than others? Can you can you speak negatively of like aforementioned Joe Rogan talks shit about Connecticut nonstop? Is there can you pick a region in the United States you can talk shit about?

• 46:12Speaker 01

  To talk shit about? Oh, for sure. I mean.

• 46:15Lex Fridman?

  From that experience, let's just narrow it down to that.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Oh, Colorado. Oh, jeez.

• 46:21Lex Fridman?

  Really?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:21Lex Fridman?

  I know so many people that love Colorado.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Dude, Dallas, Denver. I used to think Phoenix sucks, but I love Phoenix now. The way they build these cities to just be so circular and massive is just like stopping.

• 46:31Lex Fridman?

  You don't like circles?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  I like grids, man.

• 46:34Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you're a grid guy?

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Manhattan, New Orleans, San Francisco.

• 46:37Lex Fridman?

  What is it about grids that bring out the worst in people? Circles is where everyone just, there's a-

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Everyone's just vibing out the goosey goosey, but the grid gets people locked in and hateful. I don't know, man, but-

• 46:49Lex Fridman?

  I've never heard anyone talk shit about Colorado, I have to say. It's kind of refreshing.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:53Lex Fridman?

  It provides a necessary balance for the Colorado Wikipedia page.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, Oregon too. I got problems with Oregon.

• 46:59Lex Fridman?

  Oregon?

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, here's the issue. You have, and I don't like just calling people racist because it's kind of like a two dimensional insult, but you have the most racist state with the most psychotic anarchist city in the middle of it. What is going on up there? How did this happen? The yin and the yang is so extreme that there must be something in the, in the balama.

• 47:18Lex Fridman?

  What do you have against anarchism?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  I have nothing. I used to be an anarchist. When I was in eighth grade, I had this friend named Mads, who was part of a group called Seattle Solidarity, which is like an Antifa precursor. So I grew up like going to black block protests and, I mean, there was a particular shooting, the murder of John Williams, who was a Native American woodcarver in downtown Seattle. He got killed by a Seattle police officer named Ian Burke. He, John Williams was carving a pipe or from a wood block with a pocket knife. He's deaf in one ear. Officer pulls a gun on him and says, put it down. He doesn't hear him. He shoots him six seconds later. So that police involved shooting is what instantly turned me into like, a very critical of law enforcement kind of person when I was super young.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  And so as someone who used to see this guy who got murdered, who was a 55 year old man, I used to see him around Pike Place where my mom lived. It's a public market in downtown. That to me, put me into the anarchist political sphere, just, just channeling the anger of that experience. And the officer got no charges, by the way. You can look up the video. It's horrific. You know, and it didn't get reported. The officer, I'm pretty sure is still active duty. And so it's like, situations like that, early in life, channeled me toward political extremism. But I grew up to realize how incompatible that-

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Anarchistic worldview is with reality and with the with American society can only exist in a small little chamber. You know, you can't apply that to the industrial heartland of the country.

• 48:51Lex Fridman?

  And I think also anarchism, so I've gotten to know Michael Malice, who's written quite a bit about anarchism. And it's also exists as a body of literature about different philosophical notions that kind of resist the state, the ever-expanding state in different kinds of ways. And it's always nice to have extreme thought experiments to understand what kind of society you want to build. But implementing it may not necessarily be a good idea.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Emma Goldman, I'm a huge fan of her writing. Also, the prison abolitionists that are associated with the anarchist movement, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, all that stuff, influential. I still adhere to a lot of those principles when talking about stuff like radical prison reform and stuff like that. But just I drifted more toward having a more open mind as I got older.

• 49:41Lex Fridman?

  Extremism implemented in almost all of its forms is probably going to cause a lot of suffering.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:49Lex Fridman?

  You worked as a doorman on the, I could say legendary Bourbon Street in New Orleans.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 49:56Lex Fridman?

  Where you saw what you described as, this might be another Wikipedia quote, by the way.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  But this is where I do my research. Does it say hellish scenes?

• 50:03Lex Fridman?

  Hellish scenes in quotes.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Wikipedia is damn right about that.

• 50:06Lex Fridman?

  All right. Thank you. That's a win. That's one in the win column. So yeah, tell the story of that. What's it like to work on Bourbon Street? What kind of stuff do you see?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  I mean, I was a host at a, at a fine dining restaurant that on the corner of Bourbon and Iverville. 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, 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 tables. So if you're eating at a Bourbon house, you can look out onto Bourbon Street and you can see as you're dining, a full panoramic view

• 51:02Speaker 01

  of all these partiers throwing beads, boobs, all that.

• 51:05Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  We had this policy where if we're serving someone, we can't look onto Bourbon Street if something crazy is happening. So if there's a fight or something like that, we can't look, right? 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.

• 51:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Back to jerking it.

• 51:26Lex Fridman?

  Full on.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  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. So I'm serving these people, you know, and I'm like, you want, you like red beans and rice? Or would you like some Creole? Fucking da, da, da. And 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, 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 meth dealers named Frankie and Johnny.

• 52:12Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  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 impossible.

• 52:25Lex Fridman?

  The best of humanity on display.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was like Kensington, Philadelphia, but just alcohol. You know what I mean?

• 52:30Lex Fridman?

  Oh, it's all alcohol. But it's a lot of, well, a lot of visitors, right, from outside?

• 52:34Speaker 01

  Almost all visitors.

• 52:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  And that, that kind of would set the flow 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.

• 52:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Well, they technically are better than everybody else, but yeah.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  But people from Massachusetts aren't like the cream of the crop in terms of like, American superiority.

• 52:54Lex Fridman?

  Strong words, yep.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  No, no offense, but I mean.

• 52:57Lex Fridman?

  No, that's, I'm sure they won't take that as.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  They are good at fighting, though, I'll tell you that.

• 53:01Lex Fridman?

  All right, great.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  New England has hands, compared to some places.

• 53:05Lex Fridman?

  Which places are those? Colorado?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Colorado has no hands.

• 53:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  The west coast, not too much hand.

• 53:12Lex Fridman?

  That's why you feel safe talking shit about Colorado.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  But if you get to the corn fed parts of east Colorado, these guys got hands bigger than my head. They'll beat the shit out of me. But anyways, I'd walk back to my house on Bourbon Street. And I would be sifting through this battlefield. And I had a friend at the time who was like, yeah, we should do a taxi cab confessions type spinoff. Where we ask people to confess a deep dark secret. And we posted the next day. And so we tried that and it went viral on Instagram instantly. It was mostly incest stories, you know, people admitting to incest. I know it's a common southern stereotype, but there's some truth to it. There was some murder confessions. That was pretty crazy. We never really posted any of those, but.

• 53:54Lex Fridman?

  How did you get people to confess?

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Pretty easy. And New Orleans has a homicide solve rate of like 22%. So, I mean, most of the time, they'll, they'll just tell you. I remember I was, I was walking down Bourbon and I asked this kid, I was like, what's your deepest darkest secret? And he told me, he's like, I just smoked a dude in the Magnolia. It's a project housing, the third ward, project development. And they said, I just smoked a dude in the Magnolia playground for touching my sister, molesting his sister. And I was like, what? And he was like, yeah, look it up. And I was like, all right, hold on. And it was like, man found dead in Central City playground, like appeared to be homeless, shot execution style. So I told the kid, I was like, why'd you tell me that? He's like, man, put that shit out there. Like, I'm trying to go viral. Like, tag me too.

• 54:35Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  I don't think you understand that even if you're a juvenile, he was probably 15. You can go, you can get juvenile life in Louisiana for a homicide, even if it's, you know, justified. So I just deleted the footage in front of him. I was like, I'm gonna delete this footage. See that trash button? I'm hitting it right now. Don't tell anyone that again. And he was like, all right, I appreciate it. And he walked off. But it's the little, little moments like that that I always remember.

• 54:58Lex Fridman?

  Anything for the gram, I guess.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, after a while though, it became sort of repetitive. You know, because there's only so many things that people can confess to that are, that go viral, you know, and just.

• 55:08Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so you were trying to see like what?

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, there's the incest one. Some people just say like, I eat ass. That was like every, everyone said that. Or like, I cheated on someone or.

• 55:19Lex Fridman?

  I've seen a surprising number of people on your channel say, mention eating ass.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  The way, how, how seriously you said that will, will live in my head for the rest of my life.

• 55:32Lex Fridman?

  That's good.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:33Lex Fridman?

  I want you, I want to live in your head saying that a lot of people mention eating ass.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of people do mention that.

• 55:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Also, that's kind of where I developed this magnetism for freestyle rapping. You know, everywhere I go, people rap. Not sure why. I mean, as a former rapper myself in middle school and for the first year of high school, I think that maybe like it takes one to know one. But everywhere I go, people start rapping. If you and me went outside of this podcast studio and walked around for five minutes, I could find somebody.

• 56:05Lex Fridman?

  It's rapping.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  I can tell who raps or who can rap, who has eight bars in their head that they're ready to go.

• 56:10Lex Fridman?

  I think you're also, there's something about you that gives them, creates the safe space.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:16Lex Fridman?

  To perform their art.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. That was, I mean, the quarter confession series was the first time you saw the suit.

• 56:23Lex Fridman?

  That's when the suit came out.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was kind of like a Ron Burgundy, Eric Andre inspired type.

• 56:27Lex Fridman?

  Where'd you get that suit?

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Goodwill.

• 56:29Lex Fridman?

  Goodwill?

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, always.

• 56:32Lex Fridman?

  Wow, I was playing checkers, you were playing chess.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Good job. I mean, Goodwill has a surprising amount of identical gray suits for sale.

• 56:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I've actually gotten suits at, at thrift stores before.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of people donate suits and I was going for oversized suits, which are the cheapest ones there, so.

• 56:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  It was like 12 bucks, 12 to 25 dollars every time for the outfit.

• 56:52Lex Fridman?

  If I wanted to look super sophisticated, like, like I'm from another era, I would go to thrift store.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:59Lex Fridman?

  Cause they're usually like this, there's like a, like the patterns they have, it's just like a more sophisticated suit, which is what you kind of picked out. It made you look ridiculous, but in the best kind of way.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  The tough part about quarter confessions for me is that everybody that was featured, for the most part, would more or less regret being a part of the show.

• 57:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  And that, over time, just gave me a bad feeling where I was like, you know what? I kind of feel like I am doing an ambush interview, especially because I'm presenting as so agreeable, yet the intention is to make something funny.

• 57:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  And I get that that's what people do in the satire sphere. I'm sure Ali G and Bruno and Borat did the same thing. And I don't think it's unethical because that's all for the purposes of comedy, it is what it is. But for me, I wanted to do something different.

• 57:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, because there's an intimacy to confessing a thing.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:52Lex Fridman?

  And then you just don't really realize the implications of that.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  And the atmosphere at Bourbon Street is like, anything goes, like, it's a free spirited place. But if you transport that energy digitally to a different place like Colorado, they might look at it and be like.

• 58:07Lex Fridman?

  Different place in time, like five years later.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:10Lex Fridman?

  That same person has a family and stuff like this, and all of a sudden they're talking about eating ass.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. Kids have to think about that. Or, you know, imagine if there's a video of your grandma or grandpa out there when he was a kid talking about eating ass. That's a horrible experience to discover that about your, you know, respected elder later in life. It's tough.

• 58:28Lex Fridman?

  I don't even know where to go with that, but is the, literally the opening question was, tell me your deepest darkest secret?

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah.

• 58:35Lex Fridman?

  You just come up to somebody like that?

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:37Lex Fridman?

  How often do you get like a no? How often, what's the yes to no ratio?

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Well, the weird thing is like, we don't really extract answers from people. Like, what makes a good interview is when they're ready to talk. The more you have to talk and try to get an answer out of them, it's just not a good vibe. Like, so we kind of look for people who appear to be already ready to talk. Open body language, like, they seem confident and verbose, and we approach them first.

• 59:02Lex Fridman?

  There's a look.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  We wouldn't approach a shy person and be like, come on, tell me. No.

• 59:07Lex Fridman?

  What about a person with pain in their eyes?

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, we're interviewing them.

• 59:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so they're ready to talk, they're just not like.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:14Lex Fridman?

  There's different ways to be ready.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:18Lex Fridman?

  I see homeless people a lot, and they always look fascinating, and the ones I've talked to are always fascinating.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, we just did a video at the Vegas, in the Vegas tunnels, like, trying, obviously it got taken down by Fox, but whatever. We.

• 59:30Lex Fridman?

  I was gonna make a joke that I didn't see it.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  We tried to help a lot of them by getting them IDs. And when I made the documentary, I had this idea that if I, it's a big roadblock for them is getting identification. Without IDs, you can't check into a homeless shelter, you can't do day labor, you can't qualify for housing, nothing. So when we interviewed them, they'd basically tell us, if I had my ID, I wouldn't be here. And so we said, okay, we're gonna really help this time. We're not just gonna talk to them about their struggles, we're gonna actively go out and get them IDs at the DMV. So we did that and you know, nothing really changed in their life. And we sat down with a recovery specialist who works directly with them day in and day out. And he explained to me that he's been trying to do the same thing I tried to do in a one

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  week period for the past 10 years. And that they have deeper underlying traumas and pain that need to be dealt with far before they even take the steps to enter society as a housed person.

• 1:00:30Lex Fridman?

  That's a heavy truth right there.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Breaking that shame cycle has to come first because you gotta think, right? Like, I'm from a generation that romanticizes vagrancy and homelessness to a certain extent, if it's called van life, or if it is done in a way that's sort of like Rolling Stone, Willie Nelson hit the road. People who are above 50, they feel really embarrassed to be in the spiral of homelessness. They feel like failures. A lot of them have kids who they weren't there for. That's not the kind of pain that can be dealt with by giving someone a tiny home. It's a good step forward, but to, for someone to really make a change, they have to want to change. And so it's how do you help someone and guide themselves in the right direction?

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  And if you're too paternalistic and you use shame as a, as a method to get them to clean up, they're going to end up right where they started.

• 1:01:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  That's a tough truth to accept because a lot of people want a quick fix to things. And I don't blame people who go out and give bologna sandwiches out to the homeless.

• 1:01:29Lex Fridman?

  And each case is probably its own little puzzle.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Each person is so complex. Now imagine drug abuse, what that does to the brain.

• 1:01:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Trauma, childhood trauma, there's so much to unpack. And then just the, the belief that they're, the undesirables, that they're, that they don't deserve to be a part of society because they failed a fundamental obligation, like taking care of their kids.

• 1:01:51Lex Fridman?

  If we could take a small tangent to, you mentioned this Vegas video, which is fascinating. It was taken down recently by YouTube or YouTube took it down based on.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was illegal.

• 1:02:05Lex Fridman?

  Fox five, I guess.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  So the documentary was an hour and 45 minutes. We used 10 seconds of a news clip that was publicly broadcast by Fox five Vegas. And according to the copyright act of 1976, you're allowed to use any publicly broadcast news clip in a transformative capacity in any documentary film or research paper or broadcast or anything.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  They specifically this corporation called Gray Media that controls the TV stations in almost every small town. They had lawyers hit up YouTube and YouTube, YouTube complied with an illegal copyright strike to get our video immediately removed. And I'm a YouTube partner. I'm in the YouTube partner program. So to think that I wasn't forewarned is it's a bit strange, but it also smells like corruption to me to a certain extent.

• 1:02:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you shouldn't have that amount of power. At the very least, they should have the power to just like silence that five second clip, maybe.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I'm taking them to court because I have the means to be able to do so. I'm a larger creator. I have an audience. I have the financial backing to do it. I can't imagine how many people out there are smaller creators with like not as much consumer of a, you know, a fan base they can mobilize against someone like Fox five or the money to go to court. So I want to take them all the way there to set precedent for future cases. So that these giant mainstream media conglomerates can't copyright strike documentary filmmakers at will. It doesn't make sense.

• 1:03:33Lex Fridman?

  Well, thank you for doing that. That's really, really, really important and that's really powerful. And it might hopefully empower YouTube to also put pressure on people to not. YouTube is in a difficult position because there's so much content out there. There's so many claims. It's hard to investigate, but YouTube should be in a place where they push back against this kind of stuff. Yeah. For as a first line of defense, especially to protect small creators. So what you're doing is really, really important.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Appreciate it, man.

• 1:04:00Lex Fridman?

  And it sucks that it was taken down. Are you, do you have any hope?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Well, I talked to my YouTube partner today and he said that the Fox five lawyers have two weeks to comply with my counter appeal. But, you know, I spent 20 grand on human voiceovers in five different languages. So I invested probably in total like 70K into this video. So even if it gets reinstated, the steam's kind of been taken out of its trajectory.

• 1:04:24Lex Fridman?

  But also it's just like a really important video is good for the world.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, like why, why the hell would Fox five have a vested interest in having the video taken down?

• 1:04:33Lex Fridman?

  I, I just hate it when people do that to videos or to creators that are doing good in the world.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not an expose on the mayor of Las Vegas. It's an attempt to show the civilian public how to get involved in a local nonprofit and potentially intervene in the lives of the tunnel people.

• 1:04:46Lex Fridman?

  Well, fuck Fox five, the other channel five, as you said.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:50Lex Fridman?

  Well, thank you for pushing back.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Hey, man.

• 1:04:52Lex Fridman?

  And highlighting it. Hopefully it gets brought back up, but yeah, defending other creators.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:57Lex Fridman?

  So that other creators can take risks and, and don't get taken down for stupid reasons.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03Lex Fridman?

  So, uh, Quarter Confessions was written?

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  No, it was all real life, reality TV documentary. But it caught the attention of a, a, a larger company called Doing Things Media.

• 1:05:15Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  And they contacted me pretty much like a week after I graduated from college in the May of 2019. And they said, hey, like, how would you like to produce a, a show? I was like, what do you mean? They were like, we'll get you an RV, we'll pay you 45K a year. You get to, we'll pay for gas, for food, for two hotels a week. Go out there, make content and we'll be in the background just powering it all.

• 1:05:42Lex Fridman?

  And that was the birth of All Gas No Brakes.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, All Gas No Brakes was named after a book that I wrote called All Gas No Brakes, A Hitchhiker's Diary, which chronicled the 70 day journey that we were just talking about.

• 1:05:55Lex Fridman?

  It's a tough book to find, by the way.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, there's only a few copies left. I'm thinking about doing a reprint at some point down the line, but I sold off the last 100 copies like a month and a half ago. Yeah.

• 1:06:04Lex Fridman?

  Until then, you guys should go read On The Road by Jack Kerouac.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Lex Fridman?

  You should read it. I don't know if you read it.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  If you can't get my book, get On The Road by Jack Kerouac.

• 1:06:11Lex Fridman?

  It's great.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  It's the best.

• 1:06:13Lex Fridman?

  When's your birthday? I'll send you.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  April 23rd.

• 1:06:15Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  I'm a Taurus. Coming soon.

• 1:06:17Lex Fridman?

  Typical Taurus, yeah.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm a typical Taurus man. I'm a Scorpio moon. Should write that down.

• 1:06:23Lex Fridman?

  What's the time when you were born?

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  Eleven thirty.

• 1:06:25Lex Fridman?

  Eleven thirty at night? Or, of course.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, typical. This guy knew it. That's the real science.

• 1:06:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Anyways, so the idea of All Gas No Breaks as a show was to combine the, I guess, road dog ethos of the All Gas No Breaks book with the presentation and editing style of Quarter Confessions. So it was to take Quarter Confessions on the road that was pretty much like a simulated hitchhiking experience, but with the editing and like punchy effects of Quarter Confessions, which is like, I wear a suit, we do the fast zoom ins, little effects, stuff like that. It was, man, those were the best years. It was just, it was just so fun. I mean, imagine you're fresh out of college, you were just a doorman interviewing people about like, you know, making out with their cousin and stuff, and then boom, this company that you've never even

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  heard of is willing to buy you an RV and give you 45K a year, which to me at the time was more money than I could possibly imagine. So I called my dad, I was like, Dad, I need you to find me an RV, because he's the only guy I know who knows about cars, and even he doesn't know much about cars. So he's like, alright, I'm on it. So the RV was 20,000, and the first event that we were called to cover was the Burning Man Festival. And that was tough, because Burning Man is not too keen on filming. It's supposed to be a non-commercialized, you know, escape from, from reality. I mean, they have a gift economy set up, it's based upon like mutual participation and non-exploitation. And so the idea of making a Burning Man video

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  was tough at first, because 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 kaleidoscope glasses and steampunk hats, and they, you know, snort MDMA, and they run around the sand, listen to techno.

• 1:08:25Lex Fridman?

  Do you snort MDMA? That's what I need to do.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  Yes, you can.

• 1:08:28Lex Fridman?

  I thought it's a pill. I didn't know.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  It's better to take it in a pill or water, but you can snort MDMA.

• 1:08:33Lex Fridman?

  I definitely need to take MDMA. I'm already full of love, but like that, I'd probably go on another level.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't snort it because it'll only last for you like 90 minutes.

• 1:08:41Lex Fridman?

  Let me write that down.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  So anyways, we didn't know what to do because we tried to film.

• 1:08:45Lex Fridman?

  Don't snort.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  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? So the idea was to not satirize drunk people, but satirize people who are fried on acid. 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 crosspunk in New Orleans might have where they're like, I don't give a fuck.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  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, we're doing, we're psychedelic journalists. It was me and my friend CL at the time. I said, we're psychedelic journalists. We're parked on Tan and I, which is a cross street in Black Rock City. And we said, we have a 1998 Catalina Coachman Sport. It's an RV. We've set up a podcast studio. We're doing a show about psychedelic voyages.

• 1:09:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  So low and behold, two hours later, we had 10 people lined up at the RV.

• 1:10:05Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  Willing to talk. So that vetted people in advance for us. And so we did a couple of interviews, uh, and that was that.

• 1:10:12Lex Fridman?

  Well, what were some of the stories from the trip reports?

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Uh, there was this lady named Rosma 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.

• 1:10:37Lex Fridman?

  I feel like I talked to several people like that at Berkeley.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

• 1:10:42Lex Fridman?

  Not that, well, yeah, that lady, I think she did, she manifested herself in many forms, yeah.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  Right, so, but still, it was on the cruder end. There was one guy named Kimbo Slice was his burner name. He talked about taking a shit after taking like a quarter of mushrooms and how he was like seeing his childhood and visualizing his past life. You know, as the turds were flowing into the toilet and just talks about the psychedelic union between pooing and taking, taking shrooms.

• 1:11:10Lex Fridman?

  So he is very visual with his words.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there was stuff like that. I interviewed Alex Gray, which was super cool, about his first trip in San Francisco when he was in 1971. Shortly after the summer of love. I got to do some pretty cool interviews, but still it was a semi ambush style. I, I, I wouldn't say that we were doing journalism yet. It was still comedic video work, you know?

• 1:11:33Lex Fridman?

  Was there a narrative?

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:11:35Lex Fridman?

  That tied it together? It's like really just a trip comedic almost with the?

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  Interview and then I go, Burning Man, and then it's on to the next one. So I guess that could give a loose structure, but it's just like a punchy and slapstick thing.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Everything was going good until we interviewed this guy named DJ Soft Baby. He was wearing a golden leotard with, once again, kaleidoscope glasses, shirtless, dancing like, you know, dancing and he was eating chowder. Out of a, a plastic bowl and he was like, this chowder is so fucking good. He's like, this is the best chowder I've ever had in my life. And he starts putting the chowder on his face and he's like, I want the chowder all over me. Yeah. And so we, we just go, hey, man, can you just do a dance for us real quick? Just for some B-roll? He does a dance. We posted on Instagram the next morning, doing things, media CEO calls me, Reid, he says, all of our pages are down.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  And he's like, that guy you filmed dancing last night on drugs, putting chowder on his face? That guy's at the top of MIT.

• 1:12:36Lex Fridman?

  Top of MIT. I don't understand what that means.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  He went to MIT.

• 1:12:39Lex Fridman?

  That's like saying, you know, my brother's a rocket scientist. He's like head of NASA or whatever.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the guy knows people in Boston.

• 1:12:48Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  You know, not in the Whitey Bulger sense, but in the reverse sense.

• 1:12:52Lex Fridman?

  I have trouble believing that DJ Soft Baby.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  Oh, DJ Soft Baby was major. It could have been Harvard. It could have been, but it wasn't, it wasn't UMass.

• 1:13:01Lex Fridman?

  I don't think there's anybody that's quote at the head of MIT who's putting, um, what was it all over his face?

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Uh, chowder.

• 1:13:08Lex Fridman?

  Chowder.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  Well, then you haven't been to Burning Man yet.

• 1:13:11Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:13:14Lex Fridman?

  But I'm gonna have to consult the, uh, my colleagues at MIT if they know DJ Soft Baby.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  So whoever he.

• 1:13:19Lex Fridman?

  It probably was Harvard. Let's put it on them.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Okay. The top of Harvard. So he made some calls, you know, to the, to the tops, to the heads of big tech.

• 1:13:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Got all the Doing Things Media pages taken down. At the time, that was like a vast network of pages. And we ended up having to take the, obviously the video came down and he held the entire network of Instagram pages hostage. And so that was a, he, he made us agree to never post that video again, and then somehow got all of our pages reinstated. So that was my first brush with like, uh, you know, powerful people on drugs. And that was probably my last brush with powerful people on drugs.

• 1:13:56Lex Fridman?

  So what, what did you transition into from there?

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Uh, I think after Burning Man, we, um, went to the South, went to Talladega Race Weekend, went to a Donald Trump Jr. book signing, went to a, uh, Juggalo adjacent fetish mansion in central Florida called the Sausage Castle.

• 1:14:12Lex Fridman?

  Uh, Juggalo adjacent, uh, sausage. Okay. Can you, can you run that by me again?

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  A Juggalo adjacent fetish mansion in central Florida.

• 1:14:22Lex Fridman?

  Fetish mansion in central Florida, Juggalo adjacent. I mean, every single one of those words, I feel like, needs a book or something.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:30Lex Fridman?

  So, uh, Jugg- by the way, who are the Juggalos? Is this ICP?

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  ICP fans.

• 1:14:34Lex Fridman?

  ICP fans, okay, okay.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  But I say adjacent because it's not a Juggalo mansion, but there's a lot of Juggalos who kick it at the mansion. It's Juggalo friendly.

• 1:14:41Lex Fridman?

  Okay, Juggalo friendly.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz they get made fun of in a lot of places.

• 1:14:45Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so it's not, okay, got it.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  And Juggalos say outrageous shit, you know, and they embarrass themselves and they fight a lot. So they're ki- they're on the FBI's gang list, which, if you ask me.

• 1:14:54Lex Fridman?

  ICP or the, the?

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  The Juggalos.

• 1:14:56Lex Fridman?

  The Juggalos.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  If, if.

• 1:14:57Lex Fridman?

  Who is the, the head of the Ju- the Juggalos?

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  It would be Violent J and Shaggy Too Dope. But there's associated acts like Twizzed and there's a whole rabbit hole. Honestly, Tech 9 is sort of a part of that.

• 1:15:07Lex Fridman?

  Tech 9, I don't know who that is. Should I know?

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  He's a, uh, he's actually one of the top selling touring rappers despite having sort of not that many streams. Tech 9 is like, he's got a huge cult following in Missouri. This is like, the Juggalos started in, uh, Warren, Michigan.

• 1:15:23Lex Fridman?

  We should also say ICP and St. Clown Posse. So this is a thing, this is a movement.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, if you, if you went to Seattle right now and punched a cop and they booked you in county jail.

• 1:15:34Lex Fridman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  You may end up running with the Juggalos.

• 1:15:36Lex Fridman?

  Running with the Juggalos?

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  They're a presence in Pacific Northwest prison system from what I've heard.

• 1:15:42Lex Fridman?

  Can you tell a Juggalo from like a distance?

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  Well, they say whoop, whoop. So if you see a Juggalo, they'll say that. Also, like.

• 1:15:49Lex Fridman?

  I'll try to.

• 1:15:51Lex Fridman?

  I'll try to look up that.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  They're kinda, it's called the Dark Carnival is the mythology they abide by.

• 1:15:57Lex Fridman?

  What do they define themselves? What's the ideology?

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  A family, a family.

• 1:16:00Lex Fridman?

  No, I understand, but what's the ideology? What's the philosophical foundation of the?

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  Uh, they're anti-racist. Uh, they like to drink Faygo and also just like cheap liquor and stuff like that. They're, they, they're into drugs.

• 1:16:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of circles, if you pull out a crack pipe, people will be like, I don't wanna drink with you anymore. If you're at a Juggalo party and someone's smoking Twizz or something, it's relatively. Accepted.

• 1:16:25Lex Fridman?

  What's twiz?

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Meth.

• 1:16:27Lex Fridman?

  Meth, right, right. Lots of tattoos?

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. The Hatchet Man is the most common one, so it's a psychopathic records logo. It's a cartoon of a clown wheeling a hatchet. It's actually a pretty sick logo.

• 1:16:39Lex Fridman?

  I vaguely remember enjoying some of the ICP music.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  It's good.

• 1:16:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's pretty good. It's funny. It's edgy.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  Well, they get satirized a lot, but I got love for the clowns. And also, so when All Gas No Brakes transitioned away from, you know, rich, elite drug parties and into like the South, that's when the fun really started to happen. Living in your RV in Alabama and Florida and stuff is the best.

• 1:17:03Lex Fridman?

  Why? Why? What is it about?

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  People are just so friendly down there and it's warm year round and people are nonjudgmental. It's just great. The South gets hated on a lot, especially in the coastal coastal states. Mississippi and Alabama are kind of like the butts of a lot of jokes and stuff, but those are great states.

• 1:17:20Lex Fridman?

  No, I love it. New Mexico, Albuquerque, all those.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. The ABQs is great.

• 1:17:24Lex Fridman?

  ABQ, what's that?

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  Albuquerque. It's what Jesse Pinkman called it, is the ABQ.

• 1:17:29Lex Fridman?

  Oh, shit. The depth of references you bring to the table is intense.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  It's okay.

• 1:17:34Lex Fridman?

  I met a lady in Albuquerque when I was traveling across the United States and she said, take me with you. I said, I'm sorry, ma'am, I can't.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Lex Fridman?

  But I think about that lady.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Think you made the right call.

• 1:17:45Lex Fridman?

  I don't know. Yeah, On the Road.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Lex Fridman?

  By Jack Kerouac.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  Best book I've ever read in my life.

• 1:17:52Lex Fridman?

  There's a, there's a moment when he meets a nice girl on a bus and they have a love affair. It was good.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  On the bus or they?

• 1:18:01Lex Fridman?

  No, no, they went to California. Well, yeah, and there was a love affair on the bus, but it wasn't sexual. It was just romantic. It was.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  It was in the air.

• 1:18:09Lex Fridman?

  It was in the air, which there is something in the air on the bus. Like a Greyhound, Megabus, that type of situation. There's some.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Certainly something in the air.

• 1:18:18Lex Fridman?

  It was a romance. There is, man. We travel across, because it's like strangers getting together and you're like feeling each other out and but you're in it. Like you each have a story because you wouldn't be taking a bus unless you had a story. So you're, especially if you're traveling across country, there's something.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  You ever taken the dollar bus from Philly to New York, the Chinatown bus?

• 1:18:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I have.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  That's a great bus. The people on that.

• 1:18:38Lex Fridman?

  It's not a fucking dollar, though.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  It was, there's some that are five bucks.

• 1:18:42Lex Fridman?

  No, no, no, no, no. If you book it way ahead of time, which.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  It's like twenty dollars. I was like, this is a fucking lie calling it one dollar. I got on the. I don't know why I'm swearing. The anger came out. I apologize. Swearing is okay sometimes. When I got up, last time I was on the Chinatown bus, there was like a rooster walking down the aisle. Actual rooster? Yeah, well, chilling. It was awesome. Well, there's a nice part of your film with the rooster. Hmm, I forgot about that. Yeah, that felt almost fake. Yeah. Did you plant the rooster? No, the rooster. There's a place in Ebor City in Tampa where roosters walk around all the time, and we had a rooster park there right by the main drag for, what did I say? We had a rooster parked? We had the RV parked in Ebor City for a long time, and the rooster laid eggs in the the undercarriage. Nice. Back to the all gas, no brakes thing, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  So it was lots. It was really fun making it. And then we started all gas, no brakes in September of twenty nineteen. Six months later, the country shuts down and everything just hits the fan. I was actually here in Austin when it shut down. I was on Sixth Street. I remember the, I don't just hang out on Sixth Street all the time, but I was just here. Come on. Let's be honest. I do like Sixth Street. Yeah. I like East Austin better, but I like Sixth Street, too. So anyways, the NBA shuts down, everything's shutting down. And so I went down to the Dirty Six and I asked this doorman, I was like, are you guys ever gonna shut down? He was like, fuck no, bro. The Dirty Six never closes. And I was like, all right, we'll see about that. Next day, plywood.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  And then I was like, all right, I thought my career was over when COVID hit. I was like, what are we gonna do? Nothing's happening anymore. There's no more parties or Talladega races or Burning Mans to go to. So I went back to Seattle in the RV and I just spent four months just depressed, living in the RV, trying to figure out what would happen. But all gas, no brakes went on still. Well, this was the craziest thing about that period of time is that when when COVID hit, I'm sure you remember, everything turned political. Yeah. Overnight. In Seattle, if you went to a house party, you can get canceled. You know, because people were like, oh, you're a super spreader. So if you wanted to socialize, even with a group of four or more, you had to do so with your phones damn near turned off.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  And a lot of people were doing hyper social policing at that time. Beyond that, in the South and in more conservative places, they were doing the opposite. They were trying to prove that they could hang out five hundred deep with no mask to make a statement against the establishment. So you had this polarization that led to more division. And that's when the anti-vax protests started. And I went to Sacramento and the passion was unreal. This is about, this is about two months after the COVID lockdowns began. And that was my first political video. It was at the Sacramento, the California State Capitol in Sacramento documenting the, they called it the Freedom Rally, but that's typically like anti-vax stuff. And it was real intensity.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  And that video was my most successful to date at that time. And so I was like, okay, am I a political reporter now? Am I covering politics? Like, what's going on?

• 1:21:51Lex Fridman?

  What were the interviews that made up that video? What kind of, what style of questions were you asking? What?

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  I don't know if you remember, but I was actually scared when the pandemic started. I thought that this is something that might kill us all, based upon what I was consuming. And so I'd ask people, what do you think about this lockdown? And I've had people say, you know, I'm immune compromised. If I get exposed to COVID, I have a 95% fatality rate. But guess what? I'd rather be free and dead than alive, living in fear. And I was like, wow. So it was just stuff along those lines. You had some San Diego surfers there complaining about the beaches being shut down and such awesome waves were coming.

• 1:22:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's interesting how that really brought out the worst in people.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:38Lex Fridman?

  I'm not sure why, why that is. Fear, maybe paranoia? I don't know. It really divided people, like along the lines, as you mentioned, like triple mask yourself or fight for your country.

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Exactly. Why are those the two options? That is literally what it was.

• 1:22:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's wild.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  And both groups think they're fighting for the survival of something. And so that's where you really run into problems, when you have two polarized groups who both think that their cause is for the common good. Mutual understanding is impossible at that juncture. And so after three months of almost every, everybody being locked down, George Floyd happens.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  And I remember I saw the third precinct burning on my phone in Minneapolis. And everyone says, Andrew, you have to go cover this. And I'm somebody, like I said, you know, police violence has been close to my heart since I was a kid. And my first thought is, I can't do that. I'm a comedic reporter. I can't go to Minneapolis and cover this. It'll be the end of my career. And I had a friend named Lacey, who I went to college with. And she told me, she was like, bro, this is your chance for you to do something serious. You can actually create a meaningful piece of reporting like you always wanted to before quarter confessions. And you can turn all Gaston breaks into a news source.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  So I called Reed, who is the CEO of the company that owned all Gaston breaks. And I was like, look, man, I want to go to Minneapolis. I was in Orlando at the time. I was actually at the Sausage Castle. And he said, he said- Sorry, the Sausage Castle? Yeah, the Juggalo mansion. Oh, right. It's called the Sausage Castle. So I'm watching Minneapolis unfold on Lake Street where it was burning. And I got to the Orlando airport. And I booked a flight without, I booked it on my own card. I didn't consult my boss or anything. And I was sitting in my seat on the flight. And he, he straight up told me, he's like, if you fuck this up and this destroys the brand, we're getting a different host.

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  This, if you mess this up and you turn our, our, our show away from a party show about drinking and drugs and all that stuff, and you make this a social justice show,

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  you're done. But I was like, I just turned my phone off. I got to the Minneapolis airport on the second night of the riots. And when I got to the airport, there was National Guardsmen in the airport. And there was a, it was like a call of duty mission, the one in the airport. And on the speaker, they say, if you're arriving here right now, you are not permitted to go anywhere outside of the airport. National Guardsmen will escort you to your Uber or to your car. They're going to take a picture of your ID. They're going to figure out where you're going. You are not permitted to go outside tonight. And so Lacey picks me up. There's two people in the back, two of her homegirls, wearing like shysty masks. I'm like, what are we doing? Where are we going? And she goes, we're going to go film the riot. We're going to Lake Street.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  And so we drive down there, Kmart is burning, Target is burning, everything is on fire.

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  She has the Sony A7, she gives me a microphone and she's like, go talk to that guy. And that was a guy with a Molotov cocktail in his hand who had just burned Kmart down. And so I go, what should I ask him? She goes, what's on your mind? So I walk up to him and I'm like, what's on your mind? He said something like, everything that was happening here was supposed to happen. This is how we feel. Is it right? No. Is this going to benefit the community? No, but this is how we feel.

• 1:26:21Lex Fridman?

  This is how we feel. That's pretty powerful.

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:24Lex Fridman?

  That's through a lot of the documenting that you do, this is how we feel is like

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:31Lex Fridman?

  screaming through that.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I noticed that aside from a group called Unicorn Riot, there was no one else actually interviewing the protesters. The local news was on the bridge, 15, not 15, but five blocks away. You know, filming just the scene itself, just the fire. But I saw some crazy things off camera too. I saw, so there was kind of two groups there. There was like the anarchists, more mobilized protesters. And then there was just mostly African American community members who were just pissed, who had nothing to do with the organized resistance. And they were all kind of joining forces to riot. And there was this anarchist kid who ran up to White Castle with like a Molotov cocktail.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  And he was about, he was about to throw it at White Castle and this black dude ran up to him and grabbed his arm and he's like, nah, we fuck with White Castle. And I was like, what? And so you see, if you go on Lake Street, every business is burned.

• 1:27:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  White Castle remains.

• 1:27:27Lex Fridman?

  Damn.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  I also saw these dudes rip this ATM out of a bank and hit it with sledgehammers. They were a group of friends hitting it with sledgehammers, right? They're hitting it with sledgehammers, boom. All of a sudden, money starts spraying out of the ATM. Like, I've never seen some shit like this, like pouring out of it. And then this group of friends who were just united and getting it open, start fighting each other for the money as it's flying out of it. And so there was just, it was like a Like Joker from the Batman's army type vibes. But I got shot in the ass by the National Guard. It was no good.

• 1:28:00Lex Fridman?

  Like a what, a rubber bullet?

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, not, not shot.

• 1:28:03Lex Fridman?

  How did that feel like?

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  Honestly, it hurt.

• 1:28:08Lex Fridman?

  I'm not sure what I was expecting as an answer to that question.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Lex Fridman?

  I liked it. It was good.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then after that, I posted the video and it was very well received. And that was the pivotal point where I realized that everything was gonna change.

• 1:28:21Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there was a, still kind of a comedic element to the way you do conversations, to the way you edit. So, did you see yourself as a potential, like a Jon Stewart type of character?

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  Uh, at first, but you know, I just think human beings are just funny in general.

• 1:28:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the absurdity of it.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  Cool thing about Jon Stewart is like, I generally like to say that anybody who works for corporate media, whether it be Comedy Central or anything owned by Time Warner, Fox, MSNBC, they can't say what they want. Because in order to climb up in those organizations, you have to appease the narrative of the company that you're working for to rise in the ranks. Jon Stewart, I feel like, has so much clout in the media world that I'm pretty sure he can say whatever he wants. Like, I actually don't think that Jon Stewart is controlled by anybody. I really don't. I think that he can go on the show and talk about whatever.

• 1:29:12Lex Fridman?

  I do think that certain people have broken the brains of, COVID broke the brains of a lot of really great people I admire. Trump broke the brains of a lot of people I admire. Like to where Trump, Trump derangement syndrome become, became a thing. Like, you can't see the world quite as clearly because of it. And I think, uh, Jon Stewart is quite a genius at like stepping away, even though the world needed him in that time, stepping away during that moment of Trump and coming back now.

• 1:29:46Lex Fridman?

  Sort of being able to reflect being the sort of the elder statesman.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  My favorite Jon Stewart moment that illustrates that perfectly is whenever he went on the Colbert Show and he was just joking around with Stephen Colbert, who I think is a full-blown propagandist, about the Wuhan lab leak theory. He was just goofing around. He was like, "It's called the coronavirus lab and they had it before and now what do we have?" And it was like, you could see in Stephen Colbert that he was like gun to his head type shit where he's like, "John, John, stop joking about that."

• 1:30:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  And that made me realize like, oh, everything that Jon Stewart did, especially for the 9/11 first responders, he's a true American and not in the sense of like the different political parties want you to believe is an American, not a do your part and social distance American, not a, you know, wave your Trump flag in the back of your pickup truck American, just a guy who genuinely stands up for what's right.

• 1:30:45Lex Fridman?

  There is a degree to which you can be in those positions easily captured by group think though, even when you're not controlled by bosses and money and all that kind of stuff. And I think Jon Stewart is mostly resistant, but it's hard. His position is difficult.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  I think he's done the best job though. If someone in that obviously Democrat-connected

• 1:31:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  corporate media economy, he seems to be the freest talker.

• 1:31:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So this is when you first became famous?

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  I'm not even sure what fame means. I mean, I just see myself as me.

• 1:31:17Lex Fridman?

  When did you get the shades?

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  Oh, that was on tour. That was, that's a whole, the shades, that's dark time. But

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  I didn't make like-

• 1:31:28Lex Fridman?

  This is a meme, really? I don't even know if that's a symbol of fame or whatever.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Journalism to like become famous?

• 1:31:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  I made it to give people a platform to share their stories. It just so happens that people liked it enough to where I became sort of famous. But, you know, if I could go back and not be the on-camera guy and just platform the stories, I would. But the reality is people need a face to attach to stuff they like. And so that's just how it is. But yeah, I would say right around Minneapolis protest, Portland protest, Proud Boys rally time, when I was really in there, is when I started to be acclaimed as more than just like a ambush meme lord.

• 1:32:04Lex Fridman?

  Did that have an effect on you, the fame?

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Not at that point.

• 1:32:08Lex Fridman?

  Not at that point. So like you were still able to have a lightness to you.

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  Well, the country was basically closed.

• 1:32:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  So it wasn't like there was a street to walk down where people were like, there's that guy. So getting famous, famous during COVID made it so when the country reopened, it was as if like, I, my life really changed because I was like, oh, all these fans I made during COVID are like seeing me out at the bar. This is cool.

• 1:32:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  At, at first fame is the best thing ever because you can go anywhere in the country. And these spaces that you normally feel a bit insecure in, like a local dive bar, a cool restaurant, a coffee shop, where you just be another guy. All of a sudden they're like, oh my God, I'm a big fan. They give you like free stuff. You get this sense of acceptance that you never would have got before. So, but there's also.

• 1:32:53Lex Fridman?

  The dark side.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:32:55Lex Fridman?

  It's all love, man. I, I, I, I mean, I, uh, just to speak to the first part you're saying is there's so much love that people have and they share.

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  Amazing. I'm sure you know what it's like.

• 1:33:03Lex Fridman?

  That's beautiful.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  The only downside of fame really is that you can't really be anonymous again. And you have to seek out more strange environments to be anonymous in. Like right now I live in the desert, basically. And I want to live in the middle of nowhere in the Mojave desert. Not because I'm scared of people, but because I just want to be like curious me again. So people don't know, and I can ask questions to people that I'm interested in without them going. I remember I see, I seen you here or I seen you there. That's, that's the main thing. That's what I loved about hitchhiking.

• 1:33:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Just to have anonymity.

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's the best, but both are great. Complaining about fame is just the lamest shit.

• 1:33:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. We should go to furry conventions that you covered. Wear, wear, wear an outfit.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  I love furries. I should do that.

• 1:33:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, we should, we should go together. I go all the time. We should go together. What's your favorite outfit? No, I have not.

• 1:33:50Speaker 01

  I think you might like it more than you think.

• 1:33:52Lex Fridman?

  I've, listen. Maybe I'm just afraid to face who I really am.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Your first owner, the true Lex will come out when you're.

• 1:34:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  In a $3,600.

• 1:34:04Lex Fridman?

  Everything is possible. Lizard? Is that what they go with?

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  Well, scaly's. Are the lizard furries.

• 1:34:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  And there's a big division in the community where they think scaly's are kind of douchebag. You know, the scaly suits are more expensive. They're about seven grand, whereas a first suit is thirty six hundred. So, and they're also taller.

• 1:34:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  So when the scaly's pull up to the fur fest, it's like, ah, fuck the reptiles.

• 1:34:25Lex Fridman?

  Fuck the reptiles. I can get behind that. I like, like more, I'm more like a teddy bear type of guy.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Lex Fridman?

  I think bears, I, what's, that may be squirrels. I don't know.

• 1:34:34Speaker 01

  Oh, squirrels are so cool.

• 1:34:35Lex Fridman?

  Giant squirrels, yeah.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  I want to put a GoPro on one and just see what the hell they do.

• 1:34:40Lex Fridman?

  You were, you were talking about that conversation with the guy, the head of doing things media. How did that end up?

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I want to clear up a few things. Reed, the CEO of doing things, I actually think he's a good guy. I think that he was just trying to run a business. He saw what was working for his brand, which is very college centric, very festival centric. And he was right to think that journalism and especially coverage of sensitive topics like COVID or, you know, police brutality would definitely not work on merch. You know, you're not going to sell a picture of me interviewing someone at a riot like you would me interviewing a furry or a drunk dude in Alabama. It doesn't work the same. So the, it was a lot, a lot harder to monetize, not just because of YouTube censorship, but also just because of the sensitive, sensitive nature of the content. So Reed was looking out for himself as a businessman.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  There was a different partner, who I'm not going to say his name, that was more connected in Hollywood. I think he's responsible for the, the collapse of the show.

• 1:35:39Lex Fridman?

  What was the collapse like? What was?

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  So, right as the country's reopening, I get a DM from Eric Werheim of Tim and Eric. And I'm, I'm covering something called the UFO mega conference in Laughlin, Nevada, which is a beautiful river town. And, um, you know, he, he DM'd me, he says, let's make a show. And I'm like, oh shit, is this real? You know, I grew up such a big fan of Nathan For You and the Eric Andre Show, and those are produced by their company, absolutely. So I was like, hell yeah, let's do it.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  Three days later, I get a call that says Jonah Hill wants to hop on board. And I can't believe this, you know, I'm still in the RV and I'm in Laughlin, Nevada. So I'm like, Jonah Hill, Superbad, are you shitting me right now? So I was excited. And, uh, oh, and Moneyball, Jonah Hill's a great actor.

• 1:36:25Lex Fridman?

  Oh, he's great. He's great all around.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:28Lex Fridman?

  Doesn't get the credit he deserves. Well, I mean, he's got the credit by now, but still deserves more.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  So basically, just within a week, I assembled this super team of Tim and Eric.

• 1:36:36Lex Fridman?

  Superbad team?

• 1:36:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much of Tim and Eric.

• 1:36:39Lex Fridman?

  Sorry, I'm so sorry.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  And Jonah Hill. And yeah, we just pitched it around. Every single TV network rejected it. I don't know why. And they mainly did that because I was in this weird situation where I had signed a contract with Doing Things Media that I didn't realize was called a 360 deal. That's what they use in like the rap world. Basically means that I can't do anything outside of them without them getting a hundred percent of the money. So if I was to go work at Sabaro or Quiznos while I was working for All Gas No Breaks, they would get my 500 bucks a week from the sandwich spot. I was unable to earn any outside income.

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  I didn't read the fine print because I was 21 and like I told you, 45K a year, RV, sounds sick. And, uh, basically the TV networks were like, why would we buy a show? If the digital brand's going to be running at the same time? Because they didn't want to stop doing All Gas No Breaks to make a TV show. They wanted All Gas No Breaks to continue as a web show while All Gas No Breaks as a future TV show at Showtime or Hulu or somewhere like that was also concurrently running, which is impossible for one man to do. And so every TV network said, okay, we're not doing that. We want an exclusive rights contract with this guy.

• 1:37:57Speaker 01

  Next, oh yeah, this is crazy to think about because it all happened so fast. So Jonah Hill says 824 Films wants to do a movie instead of a show. And they're gonna let you keep the digital brand running. So this meant that I could keep doing my Instagram stuff with doing things media slash all gas no breaks. While making an 824 movie with Jonah Hill and Tim and Eric. So it was just like, I was excited. It sounded perfect. So they said, okay, what do you want to make a movie about? And I told them, okay, here's what's gonna happen in 2020, in 2020. If Trump wins, there's gonna be riots across the country. The major cities are gonna burn down.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  If Trump loses, the militias and his loyal supporters are going to try to have a coup in DC. That's what I said. And I said, so I'm gonna follow the lead up to whoever wins the election. And I'm gonna document what happens after. So they said, okay. And so I was to begin filming in late October, you know, during the campaign trail, maybe mid October. Up until November and then in the following months to see what would happen. Um, this meant that I couldn't film anything for all gas no breaks. The digital show, because I had to dedicate a hundred percent of my time to making this perfect movie.

• 1:39:15Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  Still, one of the partners at doing things media was demanding that I not only produce the movie, but also more content for the show. And I told them, there's only so many hours in a day, man, that's gonna be impossible. And I said, if you want it to be possible, I can make it work. But I want to have half of the monetization from the show. 50% profit split, which I thought is fair. If you want me to do double work when I was getting almost nothing before, split me in on the profits. They fired us immediately. Me and my two childhood friends who I hired to work on the show with me were all out of a job. As we were filming for the now HBO project, we got our fire notices.

• 1:39:56Lex Fridman?

  The guts on those, on that, on that person to, because you should be owning probably close to a hundred percent of it.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  I think so too, but they didn't see it that way because they figured we made the initial investment. We discovered him is how they, they looked at it. So it wasn't Reed, but it was the other partner who wasn't Reed, who said, We have tons of verbatim, he said this, we have, I have tons of connections in the comedy world. We can replace Andrew overnight. I'm not sure why he made that miscalculation. I wish he would have thought about it twice. I wish it didn't have to end like that, but it did.

• 1:40:32Lex Fridman?

  Why do people do that? Like, what's the benefit of acting like that?

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  I think.

• 1:40:35Lex Fridman?

  You can part amicably without the drama.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  I think all betrayal in anything like that is motivated by self-interest. Whether that be economic success, social stability, whatever it is. They figured that because I was being such a burden in asking for the profit, that they could just release me and find someone equally talented and not split them in so they can make more money.

• 1:40:59Lex Fridman?

  Oh, I see. Well, that's a stupid way to think.

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  People think like that, man. People who are, the word I use is like sidekick syndrome. Like when people are kind of a part of the production, but they're not integral. They start thinking that the front man doesn't matter or something. And that the brains of the operation are actually the people on the periphery. And so they start to believe that they can just shift things around and the audience won't care. Not realizing that I was actually the one who created the show. And that the lore of the show is connected to my rise outside of their jurisdiction. If that makes sense, like the people who watch All Gas No Brakes, watched Quarter Confessions and read the book. And so, you know.

• 1:41:41Lex Fridman?

  Well, this happens also not just financially, but just with people that are sort of part of a team, but they don't really contribute creatively to the team. And they, they force their opinion or pressure.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Lex Fridman?

  I mean, whether it's comes from, like from editors or all that kind of stuff, or from sponsors, or there's, there's pressure they create when they, when the, the creator alone should be celebrated and have all the power. Cause they're the ones that are creating the thing.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  In a way I have sympathy because I, I can't relate to that. Cause I've always been the front man of my own projects by design. So I'm not sure what it's like to be a, like someone's owner from a content perspective. I don't understand the challenges they face. Maybe there was something that I didn't understand. I don't know.

• 1:42:27Lex Fridman?

  True. Well, oftentimes if you own a thing like this, like this company, you do think about brand.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:35Lex Fridman?

  And then maybe you have a big picture idea what brand means and that, that. Be at tension with the creative project, right?

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:45Lex Fridman?

  Like, but ultimately, freedom for the creator is the best kind of brand.

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember all three of us who worked on All Gas No Brakes got fired at the same time. And we were in that, we were in the RV that Tim and Eric's company bought for us, which was a bigger RV in the parking lot, parking lot of a Walmart in South Philly. And the propane had just ran out and it was 15 degrees outside. So like, the RV was getting really cold, really fast. And I just looked at my phone and it was like, you're fired. And I was just like, God, help me. But I've had a couple of moments like that and God does help me.

• 1:43:21Lex Fridman?

  And they were always in the parking lot of Walmart, right?

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, although.

• 1:43:27Lex Fridman?

  I know that Walmart, by the way.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  The one in South Philly is great.

• 1:43:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  But technically now you can't park an RV there.

• 1:43:33Lex Fridman?

  Well, you're not, you're not a man who follows the rules.

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  Well, the thing is though, Walmart, Cracker Barrel and Big Five are supposed to technically all let RV campers park overnight. But if there's like a crime problem in the city where they're at, they can lobby, individual Walmarts can lobby with the corporate to take that away. So like all the Portland Walmarts, you can't sleep there anymore. Any city with like significant homelessness and like petty property crime, the Walmarts are a no go.

• 1:43:58Lex Fridman?

  Fascinating. So that was a low point.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:03Lex Fridman?

  And, but from there, from the ashes, the phoenix rose.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  Over time, yeah.

• 1:44:09Lex Fridman?

  Channel five was born.

• 1:44:10Speaker 01

  Channel five was born in the March of 2021. After we finished filming for the HBO project.

• 1:44:18Lex Fridman?

  Oh, really? So you went all in on the HBO project.

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we filmed the HBO project from November 2020 up until April 2021, damn near. We were just like, you know, picking up the pieces, going back for individual interviews, stuff like that.

• 1:44:31Lex Fridman?

  So let's go to that project. It turned out to be a movie called This Place Rules.

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  It's supposed to be called America Shits Itself.

• 1:44:38Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah. Maybe you can tell the story of the film. You have, what's his name? I wrote this down, Joker Gang and Gum Gang. Is that correct?

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, the opening scene.

• 1:44:46Lex Fridman?

  The opening scene of two characters. Just talking shit and then getting into a fight. And that, I think it was really brilliant how you presented that as a, almost like a microcosm of like the division between the.

• 1:45:01Lex Fridman?

  The extremes of the left and the extremes of the right.

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  That's exactly what it was. I'm glad you picked up on it.

• 1:45:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And then what I really liked is that the joke again, Joker gang was kind of a little bit of a spoiler alert. I apologize, but at the end of the film is a kind of a voice of wisdom.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:20Lex Fridman?

  He seems the most, he seems the most sane.

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  He was the voice of wisdom. He like cut through it.

• 1:45:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  I also just realized that a lot of people are going to stream the movie after watching this podcast, which is cool.

• 1:45:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Where do they stream it? On HBO Max?

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, HBO Max. I never got a chance to promote them.

• 1:45:36Lex Fridman?

  It's such a pain in the ass, man. I wish we could all just pay on it on YouTube or something.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:40Lex Fridman?

  And HBO gets the profits or whatever, but like it's such a, I had to subscribe for every single thing. But yes, if you want to watch it, it's really, I recommend extremely highly. Sign up to HBO, whatever the hell.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  On the positive note, HBO is great to work with. Like they're the most professional, like respectful company I've ever worked with, pretty much.

• 1:46:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. HBO has created some of the greatest like TV.

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  But even in the background, like they get shit done. There's, there's no, there's no wait time. They have some of the best heavy hitters on their team for trailers, for posters, all the promotional apparatus they have is like super solid.

• 1:46:14Lex Fridman?

  Did you get like good notes from people there? Like how to?

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  A little bit, man, but you know.

• 1:46:18Lex Fridman?

  It's a, it's a truly original like documentary, like I, meaning like, I just haven't seen anything like it. It's even like, it's, so like there's a humor and a lightness at the right kinds of moments.

• 1:46:31Lex Fridman?

  Like, like I said, there's like a rooster in your, that's like, okay, that's like a non sequitur like thing as part of a storytelling. It kind of intensifies and reveals the absurdity of the division. And how one, once like January 6th happens, like everybody like goes on to the next thing.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:48Lex Fridman?

  It's like, what happened to us? It was almost like a delirium that everybody was participating in some weird, just like, well, like people say mind virus. Like all of a sudden we just got captured.

• 1:46:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:58Lex Fridman?

  And people just like yelling at each other, doing the most ridiculous shit. And I mean. Really, January 6th, the way you presented especially, just reveals the circus of it all.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  I mean, it really broke the the fourth wall, or that's how I would describe it because if you were at January 6th and the lead up, it felt like it was the beginning to a series of similar riots, but it just popped off so much that that was it. You haven't seen anything like it since. It was supposed to be a second one on January 20th. It was the actual inauguration. It never happened. It was a crazy time to be alive and around. And especially the relationship that I developed with Enrique Tarrio, who's the former chairman of the Proud Boys. He's now facing, you know, 23 years in prison. It's like a trip because I went to his house in Miami, maybe two weeks after January 6th and talking to him, it seemed like he didn't think anything was going to happen. He was just like, yeah, man, that was crazy. I'm glad I wasn't there.

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  Like, they're dumb for doing that. He even told me he doesn't think the election was stolen. Which is just a mindfuck. It's like, why'd you get everyone so hyped up? It's just weird to think about how so many people's lives are drastically altered forever because of that just bizarre moment in time that will always live on.

• 1:48:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, what did you QAnon as part of that story? What'd you learn about QAnon from that?

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  Um, just an all encompassing worldview. That family that I talked to, I call them the QAnon family, but it's called the Spencer family. You know, they were non-political up until the Stop the Steal movement began in September of 2020. And within four months, their entire life revolved around the mythology and lore of Q. And I've never seen in my life a psyop just devour people's minds in such an intense way in such a rapid period of time.

• 1:48:48Lex Fridman?

  And I love how the kids in the movie are also the voices of wisdom. It's in the Spencer family, it's the kid who like goes through the full journey of like believing that whatever Hillary Clinton is a lizard or and just believing all the the worst versions of the conspiracy theories and then kind of waking up was like, what was the point?

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was heartbreaking to see his disappointment in his dad. For even, you know, following QAnon so militantly. Cause he was like, I felt like they let my dad down. I feel like they let our family down. You know, because January 6th was supposed to be the day, according to QAnon, that the storm happens and that the military is supposed to mobilize and arrest the members of the deep state, Clinton, Soros, all that. Trump was supposed to go into a helicopter. You know what I mean? And take control of the country back from, you know, the swamp. And it didn't happen. In fact, the next day, he was like almost denouncing it. Now he doesn't, but then he did. And it was a really, I think it hurt people's pride a lot. My, my friend, 4G Auto Blow, he's a Trump rapper. He, he describes it that way.

• 1:49:53Speaker 01

  He says, a lot of people's pride got hurt by January 6th.

• 1:49:56Lex Fridman?

  Trump rapper?

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, dude. Honestly, there's some pretty dope Trump rap out there. I'm serious. They.

• 1:50:03Lex Fridman?

  MAGA rap.

• 1:50:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, like you would think like, oh yeah, MAGA, there's no rappers there, but there's rappers and they do a pretty good job.

• 1:50:10Lex Fridman?

  They're good?

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  At delivering the messaging they want to deliver. Yeah. I mean, they think of stuff and I'm like, that's clever.

• 1:50:16Lex Fridman?

  Oh, they're like, they have some political depth to them.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:19Lex Fridman?

  Wow. I mean, is there something more you could say about like how QAnon works? Like who's behind it? What's your sense of who's behind the whole thing?

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  You know? I don't want this to sound rude or anything. I just don't care about QAnon. You know what I mean? I've, I've put so much thought into it and I just can't seem to care about it.

• 1:50:48Lex Fridman?

  Was it like almost a disappointment? Cause like the, to me, it was like a thing that just captured a very large number of people's minds and then it just kind of faded.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  I guess that's why. It just seems like, uh, it's gone. And the ideas of QAnon have just bled into mainstream, standard conservative thinking.

• 1:51:07Lex Fridman?

  But there, there has to be a kind of retrospective, like, that's, that's the problem I have with COVID. You know, a lot of stuff happened. Everybody freaked out. There's a lot of big drama around it. And now everyone was like, okay, forgot.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:18Lex Fridman?

  Just like moved up. Wait, what are the lessons learned? Has anyone learned any lessons?

• 1:51:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:23Lex Fridman?

  Like, what?

• 1:51:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. And what I'm saying is, I don't want QAnon adherents to see this and think I don't care about them.

• 1:51:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  But like, as far as who is behind it, the damage is done.

• 1:51:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but what are the mechanisms that made it work?

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  I mean, that's a really. Have you kind of like thought about that?

• 1:51:38Lex Fridman?

  I, I kind of think that these viral ideas can be driven by, and your film kind of shows this, by just a handful of people. And they're not malevolent. They just want to clout.

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:50Lex Fridman?

  And there's something sexy. There's something really sticky about conspiracy theories, like especially extreme ones. You just kind of like, it, some of them can have this momentum. They capture the minds of a lot of people and you just go with it.

• 1:52:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:04Lex Fridman?

  And it like, when I hear some conspiracy theories, like, there's something, like a small part of me that kind of like, yeah.

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  It's possible, it's possible, you know, that QAnon is a psyop to distract people away from actually uncovering.

• 1:52:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:19Speaker 01

  What the deep state is and who is truly running things behind the scenes because the deep state is just the 1%. It's that you take, you get people so close to any type of class consciousness. And then you totally divert everything into like lizard humans who live on the moon and that Hillary Clinton is eating babies on camera. And QAnon did just that. That they want you to, they want to convince you that one, there's no conservative deep state, which is even more hilarious. That Trump isn't connected to a huge, rich corporate apparatus of propagandists. And two, that the democratic establishment is the only deep state. And that some middle, middle of the road conservatives, that there's no grifters or manipulators outside of, of that.

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  Three-headed snake, you know?

• 1:53:07Lex Fridman?

  There's grifters everywhere.

• 1:53:09Speaker 01

  Everywhere. Everyone wants to make money, dude. This is the world that we're in. It's in collapse. Everybody wants to make money and engagement is the rule of law. So anything, that's why these news organizations follow retention incentives. They want to make money by selling ads. So they try to create fear and constant division to enrich corporate media establishment. And you have people who are almost realizing, hey, it seems like Fox and CNN might be owned by the same people and are tactically using these machines to keep us divided perfectly 50/50 to ensure that the power structure never gets disrupted. And then you get, then you get these people, you know, who's gonna save us? Donald Trump. That's the guy? How is that the guy? It's not the guy. I don't have TDS.

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  I don't, I'm not an orange man basher who thinks about the guy all the time, but I don't think he's the guy.

• 1:54:00Lex Fridman?

  You were shirtless lifting weights while whiskey or some alcohol was poured into your mouth by Alex Jones in this movie. And then you did the same to him.

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:54:13Lex Fridman?

  This feels like an interrogation. So Alex was a, was a part of this film. He was like throughout, throughout the narrative and yet he had a great interview with him.

• 1:54:26Lex Fridman?

  What did you learn about interacting with Alex Jones from making this film?

• 1:54:30Speaker 01

  For one, is that he's the exact same off-camera as he is on-camera.

• 1:54:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  It's not an act. He told me that all real Americans die before 58. He mentioned Sean Connery and a few others. And uh.

• 1:54:44Lex Fridman?

  How old is he?

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  Getting up there.

• 1:54:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:46Speaker 01

  I think early 50s. Um, I just found it fascinating. I mean, how, how nice his studio is. I mean, the guy's got like an MSNBC level setup. I actually had a great time with him, you know? I mean, it's bizarre because having him in that movie created so many problems for me. And when I interviewed him, you know, I didn't necessarily portray him in the best light. You know, we joked around a bit, but it wasn't an Alex Jones hit piece necessarily. But I like to think that I was a bit critical of him in the film, especially the ways that he antagonized his supporters to storm the Capitol or to follow that trajectory.

• 1:55:25Speaker 01

  He told me when I met with him, he was like, I know you think that having me in this movie is a good idea, but you're gonna have some serious backlash because of that. At the time, I was like, man, it's fine, you know? It's all good. We're just hanging out, drinking whiskey, doing bench presses, drinking Jameson. It's all good. It was a, first of all, I had to campaign to get him in the film because the studios were like, we don't, there was a bizarre time around like, I think it was 2018, where deplatforming was the big thing that people were encouraging. It said, giving a platform to problematic ideologies will in turn expand their reach. And so even extending your platform to someone who's problematic is helping them,

• 1:56:07Speaker 01

  AKA destroying humanity, whatever it was. So that was the whole thing. And when I did this media training that was, you know, mandated by HBO, it was all training and how to defend from that exact question. They said, when we put you on NPR, we put you on CNN, they're gonna ask you about platforming problematic ideologies. And you're gonna have to say stuff like sunlight is the best disinfectant. I believe that extremism only goes away when you shine a light on it because leaving it in the dark will only allow it to grow. They gave me like 15 pointers.

• 1:56:45Speaker 01

  I didn't use any of those pointers because I'm not the kind of person who wants to be media trained. I like, I like to speak freely. But in the promotional run for the film, you know, when I went on CNN, this was a crazy experience. So I went on CNN and thankfully, my friend was with me. And so I'm on CNN and

• 1:57:03Lex Fridman?

  By the way, your friend is chilling in sunglasses, laying in the couch right now.

• 1:57:07Speaker 01

  That's Larry Sutts.

• 1:57:09Lex Fridman?

  It's a mix of like, the dude from Big Lebowski and the Brad Pitt role in True Romance.

• 1:57:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20Lex Fridman?

  You know that reference?

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  No, but I mean, I'm sure it describes Larry Sutts.

• 1:57:22Lex Fridman?

  Kind of like

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  He kind of looks like Brad Pitt.

• 1:57:24Lex Fridman?

  Jack Kerouac.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So HBO had a press tour set up for me and the main ones were CNN and NPR. And so they said, we're gonna, you're gonna go on CNN on the Don Lemon Morning Show. And he's gonna ask you about your life, what led up to the movie, what we can expect. So I get in the studio, it's about seven o'clock in the morning in New York at his show the night before at Times Square. So I'm like groggy eyed, whatever. They put the lav on me. Boom, I'm live on CNN, Sunday morning. And he goes, how would you describe Enrique Tarrio's mental state in the lead up to the Capitol insurrection?

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  And I'm, I'm looking around, I'm like, is this guy serious? Like, am I, am I sandwiched in the January 6th hit piece right now? I thought it was about me. And so I told him, it's not about Enrique Tarrio. It's about how companies like Fox, MSNBC, and even your station, CNN, use the 24 hour news cycle to enrage people, to generate ad revenue and pit Americans against each other during times like that. And he said, there's nothing fake about CNN. And I said, I didn't say you were fake news. I'm not saying you're lying, but you're directly antagonizing and stirring people up against half the country because you need money during, to support a dying platform.

• 1:58:34Lex Fridman?

  You said that.

• 1:58:35Speaker 01

  Pretty much.

• 1:58:35Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 1:58:36Speaker 01

  And

• 1:58:37Lex Fridman?

  Great.

• 1:58:38Speaker 01

  You know, I was so, my mom was watching and she was texting me, she was like, what are you doing? And I was like, I don't know. And so he goes, why'd you extend the platform to Alex Jones? And I go, I don't know, I just wanted to drink some Jameson and lift some weights with him. You know, I'm just, at this point, I don't support that kind of media, I don't support CNN. So, you know, I just, I didn't give them much information about Alex. But it was very awkward, they'd never posted the segment online. When I got off of that interview. I had a handler that A24 assigned to me. So I had someone with me and she, you could tell she was flustered. Like she was furious about what I just did. And so she goes, I just got an email from Time Warner C suite. And I go, what's Time Warner C suite?

• 1:59:18Speaker 01

  She says, I don't know if you know this, but the same people who own, the same people who own CNN own HBO. And it's Time Warner. And so they canceled my press tour. So my press tour was finished. You know? Uh, all the late night shows that I was supposed to go on, I was supposed to go on like the late night shows. And that was off the table because they were worried that I was like a loose cannon, I think. And then the only remaining appearance I had left was NPR in Boston. And that was supposed to be a premiere. So it wasn't supposed to be an interrogation. It wasn't supposed to be anything like that. It's supposed to be a premiere in front of a live audience where they watched a film and I show up after for a Q and A. So I'm like, all right, whatever. It's kind of weird.

• 2:00:03Speaker 01

  They only have this one press opportunity left. I kind of felt bad that I ruined the entire press tour by confronting Don Lemon. But at this point, I wanted to just do this final one, especially because it was a viewing. And I was like, cool. I want to, I sat in the audience. I watched people laugh to the film. It was awesome. So I go backstage and there's an NPR journalist waiting for me. And nothing against people who wear masks, but she had two N95s on. And I'm not, two N95s is, it's, it's over the line. So I go, hey, great to meet you. She doesn't shake my hand. And I go, why not? And she goes, you've been around some people who I don't want their germs.

• 2:00:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  Oh, and I'm like, okay, okay. This is weird. I thought this is a sort of like fun premiere for my movie. We sit down. The first thing she asks me is, how do you think the Sandy Hook families would feel about you platforming one of the most despicable Americans in history, Alex Jones?

• 2:01:00Speaker 01

  In front of a live audience, NPR never published this. The only recordings of it are by a fan named Rob in Boston, who put it on YouTube, vertical phone footage. And I literally, I'm like, well, the Sandy Hook family's lawyer, Mark Bankston, who represented them in court in Connecticut, told me specifically that Leonard Posner, the father of Noah Posner, who died at Sandy Hook, was a huge fan of the film. And so I said that to her, and that kind of just silenced that conversation. But the rest of the whole conversation was just about exploitation and why are you platforming mentally ill people and giving a platform to conspiracies like QAnon? Don't you feel like you're a part of their spread? Some would call you a misinformation reporter.

• 2:01:45Speaker 01

  All this crazy stuff. And yeah, next day hit the fan.

• 2:01:49Lex Fridman?

  Fuck all those people. That film, just in case you don't get a chance to see it, and you should, you're critical of Alex Jones in the most artful way. Like, it was the correct way to be critical. It showed him to be more interested in the grift of it.

• 2:02:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:11Lex Fridman?

  And you didn't do it in a, like, a pointing fingers and like saying, in the kind of NPR way that you just mentioned. It's more like a human way. Like, this is tragedies happen all over the world, and there's grifters that roll in and then take advantage of it in interesting ways. And then human beings get swept up on either side of it. And it's revealing the humor, the absurdity of it all. And it was done masterfully. It was done, like, for people who criticize it for platforming Alex Jones or whatever.

• 2:02:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:40Lex Fridman?

  The film, from a political perspective, is probably leans very much left.

• 2:02:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:46Lex Fridman?

  Like, heavily left, but does it without that exhausting energy of, like, judging.

• 2:02:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:02:54Lex Fridman?

  Just this kind of, you know, yeah, two masks kind of judging.

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it was just, when all that was happening, when I was under fire from the mainstream press for platforming Alex Jones, I thought back to what he said to me. And doesn't mean I agree with everything he says, but he told me, you're gonna be in trouble with these people if you put me in your video. And, you know, it wasn't too bad a trouble, but definitely, I do think sometimes... What the film would have been like without him. And I think that it was worth it because his scene is so funny to me. And it brings me back to a different time in my life. And I'm happy that that scene's out there.

• 2:03:33Lex Fridman?

  I think it was really well done.

• 2:03:34Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 2:03:35Lex Fridman?

  The layering of it all, the entertainment, plus sort of not considering from his perspective, the consequences of like rallying people up in this way, that it's not just. I mean, you really highlight this in the interview, like it's, he keeps saying it's info wars. But then there's always kind of a sense that info wars can turn to actual like civil war.

• 2:03:56Speaker 01

  And yeah.

• 2:03:57Lex Fridman?

  But maybe not, maybe it's all just a circus, like we play for each other.

• 2:04:01Speaker 01

  If you look at the speech he did on January 5th, it was said, he said tomorrow, you know, millions of patriotic Americans will take our country back.

• 2:04:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  So he eggs people on, and then when it gets hot, he steps away.

• 2:04:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But like you said, the thing he told you, he turned out to be right.

• 2:04:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:04:19Lex Fridman?

  And the frogs are becoming gay.

• 2:04:22Speaker 01

  They've always been gay.

• 2:04:25Lex Fridman?

  Well.

• 2:04:25Speaker 01

  Saying frogs are straight is even crazier.

• 2:04:28Lex Fridman?

  I've read stories where you kiss one and it becomes a prince.

• 2:04:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that shit's true.

• 2:04:32Lex Fridman?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:04:35Lex Fridman?

  You think Alex believes what he says in terms of the, everything he says on Infowars? Like, how much of it is real?

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  He's right about like big tech censorship. I mean, I think if he's right about anything, it'd probably be the heads of big tech colluding together across company lines to deplatform certain people. He's right about that. Uh, I think most of the things that he says follow the question everything narrative. And then everything is kind of like a conspiracy or like a plot or a false flag. I think that he's built up a following for so long that wants him to do that, you know? So I think he'll question things that he probably thinks are relatively straightforward because that's the shtick of the show. I mean, the info war is fighting misinformation and people want to see him be that guy. To so, to a certain extent, if you're a creator who supports your family, you do follow

• 2:05:24Speaker 01

  economic incentives and people want you to be the character. And so you're going to naturally gravitate toward being it.

• 2:05:30Lex Fridman?

  Do you feel that pressure yourself?

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  I did. Years ago, not anymore. I feel like now I can speak freely and really say what I want to say in my new life. But when I was younger, yeah, I felt like I had to be this sort of awkward, sort of amicable, aloof guy who just didn't think anything about anything and just was here to listen. But now I feel more confident adding some narrative and voiceover and things like that.

• 2:05:54Lex Fridman?

  So for some people, especially who publish on YouTube, the YouTube algorithm, they can become a slave to the YouTube algorithm.

• 2:06:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, for sure, because I definitely feel that sometimes. I know what works for me, but I like to think that my audience appreciates when I try new things. So I'm not totally enslaved to it. I mean.

• 2:06:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I try not to pay attention to views or any of that.

• 2:06:16Speaker 01

  Well, you get some high views, so I'll report that for you.

• 2:06:20Lex Fridman?

  So I wrote a Chrome extension that hides all the views on anything I create.

• 2:06:24Speaker 01

  So you took it to that level?

• 2:06:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, just because it's a drug, man. And I'm also a number guy, meaning like you give me like, if I do 30 pushups today, tomorrow I'm gonna try to do 35, just like enjoying number go up. Like, that's why I like video games, like RPGs, like where you're like improving your skill tree, you're like getting an extra point. And there's some aspect of YouTube and other platforms, anything, any other platform, you're like, ooh, I got more today than I yesterday. That's really, really dangerous to me because it can influence how much I enjoy a thing. Like, if nobody gives a shit about it based on the numbers, you're like, oh, maybe that wasn't such a great experience. I thought it was a great experience, but maybe it wasn't.

• 2:07:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, honestly, I do actually feel that way sometimes. Like, I'll put out something that I care about a lot, but if it doesn't get as many views, I'm like, alright, it must have not been as good as my higher review videos or whatever.

• 2:07:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's, that's just like not true, though.

• 2:07:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:25Lex Fridman?

  And it might mean like on YouTube that your thumbnail sucks or something like this, or whatever, whatever, however the algorithm works. But, I mean, that's the thing I'm battling against to make sure I ignore all of that.

• 2:07:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:07:40Lex Fridman?

  It's actually something Joe Rogan has been extremely good at. He gives zero shits.

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And. I think it's easier to do when you're really successful.

• 2:07:48Lex Fridman?

  Well, he was doing that when he wasn't successful.

• 2:07:50Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:07:50Lex Fridman?

  But anything, he just follows like the stuff he enjoys doing and legitimately enjoys it. He happens to be really good at it, but he gets good because he's doing the things he really enjoys and like full on.

• 2:08:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:01Lex Fridman?

  Passionate about. And that's why he'll have like ridiculous guests and just.

• 2:08:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and just like.

• 2:08:07Lex Fridman?

  Just shit he enjoys doing.

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty cool. Maybe I'll one day try to do that. For now, I'm too attached to like the gratification of getting a million views in a day and stuff like that. I'm not gonna lie to you and say that I've beat that or something like.

• 2:08:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's a worthy enemy to be fighting. Cause it's a drug and it's one that should be resisted for a creator. Cause I feel like it can do negative stuff to your mind as a creator.

• 2:08:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 2:08:32Lex Fridman?

  Anybody that controls you is not good.

• 2:08:35Speaker 01

  A lot of people are controlled by their audience. They don't have to have a puppet master on a corporate level. Audience incentive is a different type of, I don't wanna say slavery, but.

• 2:08:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it is. And that's why variety is good. And you're doing that.

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:51Lex Fridman?

  Always expanding. Well, let me just zoom out on this. You made a film.

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:57Lex Fridman?

  That's pretty cool.

• 2:08:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a great experience, man. I mean, it was awesome working with Tim and Eric, awesome working with Jonah Hill. I feel the same about HBO and 824. Everybody that I worked on the film with, I have a lot of love for and I appreciate the experience. It's my first movie. It's a big deal, like.

• 2:09:12Lex Fridman?

  It's a good one.

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  In my head, it's like I finally got to make the transition from YouTuber to filmmaker. And that was always this psychic barrier that I felt like I had to jump over, you know?

• 2:09:23Lex Fridman?

  There's a, I mean, just the way it shot, the humor that goes throughout it. Just the narration that you're doing in like a shitty director's chair.

• 2:09:34Lex Fridman?

  That's really well done. Whose idea was that?

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  It was actually Tim and Eric's idea. There was a really great editor named Clay who works for Absolutely and they did all the editing pretty much in the office. And so it was Clay's idea to add a retrospective director's chair narrative arc to the whole film.

• 2:09:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, just like starting with the absurd fight and then going like, oh, that's a good way to start a movie. Just really, really well done.

• 2:09:56Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 2:09:58Lex Fridman?

  Uh, what about Jonah Hill?

• 2:10:00Speaker 01

  Great guy.

• 2:10:01Lex Fridman?

  He believed in this.

• 2:10:02Speaker 01

  He did.

• 2:10:04Lex Fridman?

  So was that, what's that like? What do you think is behind him believing in such a wild project?

• 2:10:09Speaker 01

  I think that Jonah Hill has a good eye for like, what's cool amongst the younger folks. Like, he's into skateboarding stuff. That's why he did that film mid 90s. And I think he probably saw a similar thing in what was going on with All Gas No Brakes. And was like, shit, this could be, this could be big. And so, not only did he actually fund the film, he also gave me his agent. And I forgot to mention that it was Jonah Hill's lawyers that he gave me for free. That got me out of my contract eventually with doing Things Media. Or freed me up to speak about what happened.

• 2:10:38Lex Fridman?

  So he was also a part of you kinda gaining your freedom?

• 2:10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, in a weird way. Like, even though him and I don't talk that much, just because he's doing his own thing. Jonah Hill is like a huge factor in my current success and just like, everything that I've been able to accomplish.

• 2:10:53Lex Fridman?

  Just on your own politics, is it fair to say that your, uh, politics leans left?

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  I'm not really sure sometimes. You know, I like to think that I am socially left. Like, I think people should be able to dress and act like however they want. I don't believe in restricting people's social freedoms. Economics wise, it doesn't seem like leftist economic policy works very well. On a city, city funding level. Like, if you see what's going on in California, it seems like the, uh, the city leadership is mishandling the funds. In California too. So I don't know about that, but, I don't know, I don't really see myself as left or right. I just never have.

• 2:11:34Lex Fridman?

  Well, if you just like objectively zoom out and don't have an insane standard of the extremes. It feels like a lot of your work leans left.

• 2:11:44Speaker 01

  I tend to lead toward, lean toward like the empathetic perspective. Which I do think is more on the left than the right.

• 2:11:54Speaker 01

  But also, I'm not into like, super like, PC stuff. You know, I don't believe in limiting free speech either. I don't believe that, I believe in a free internet, which I think is more embraced now by conservatives.

• 2:12:08Lex Fridman?

  But it does seem that, maybe you can correct me, but I get the sense sometimes that the left attacked their own very intensely.

• 2:12:17Speaker 01

  It does happen, but every community has terms of exile. I mean, look, imagine, think about what happens in the conservative realm, you know, like when Black Rifle Coffee Company like denounced Kyle Rittenhouse, they lost a lot of money too. Like, it's not, the right attacks its own too. I mean, think about Bud Light and stuff, like they.

• 2:12:35Lex Fridman?

  Terms of exile.

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, like every community has terms of exile. You just gotta know who you're engaging with and you gotta make that decision carefully.

• 2:12:45Lex Fridman?

  It'd be nice if there's an actual write-up of the things you're not allowed to say for each thing.

• 2:12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:50Lex Fridman?

  I wonder whose list would be longer. It just does feel like the left's list is a little longer.

• 2:12:54Speaker 01

  If you're a conservative and you have a t-shirt with like a demon on it, like, say goodbye. You know what I mean? There, you know, there's certain stuff that they freak the hell out about.

• 2:13:06Lex Fridman?

  And conservatives are really concerned about pedophiles.

• 2:13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I don't like pedophiles either, but I don't think about it all the time.

• 2:13:14Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's one of the things you do in the film is kind of confront one of the QAnon folks where his concern is that everybody's a pedophile and you showed to him.

• 2:13:24Speaker 01

  Well, calls himself a pedophile hunter and makes videos exposing Democratic elite pedophile cabals and is himself a convicted child molester. There's an old thing that people say that every confession, every accusation is a confession to a certain extent. So like, it's bizarre that some people's whole life after a big mistake will revolve around trying to seem like the good guy instead of taking accountability for themselves.

• 2:13:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:49Speaker 01

  It's a common thing you see all the time, like neighborhood watch people. You know what I mean? Like, what made you that? You know, like, what did you do, bro? That you feel like you have to get karmic retribution by doing the reverse? I don't get it.

• 2:14:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Do you think to the degree you have bias that affects your journalism?

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  No, but, I mean, with the migrant situation, I don't know.

• 2:14:11Lex Fridman?

  What was that covering that, like?

• 2:14:13Speaker 01

  I just got a lot of hate from conservatives for like letting the migrants tell their stories about their journey and stuff.

• 2:14:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, what did you learn from just going to the border?

• 2:14:22Speaker 01

  I mean, just the sheer desperation that the citizens of the world are in. I mean, there's people who truly believe that America is the only hope for their success and to feed their family, and I think a lot of them are kind of getting catfished.

• 2:14:37Lex Fridman?

  Meaning, America has its problems, too?

• 2:14:39Speaker 01

  It has severe problems. There's extreme poverty here.

• 2:14:43Lex Fridman?

  But in America, like if you just compare it to other nations, the level of corruption is much lower to where the opportunity for a person to succeed, to rise, is higher.

• 2:14:54Speaker 01

  I wish success on everybody who comes here. But my thing is, the expectation that they have and the sort of American dream propaganda they've been installed with isn't necessarily a reflection of contemporary American reality. So I'm talking to people who speak no English and say, I'm here for a better life. I go, where are you gonna go? They say, I have no idea. And I'm like, man, that's tough. And you almost think, how bad are things elsewhere? For someone to abandon their family, make this journey across multiple continents and end up here with no plan. And it just made me realize how sheltered I am, to a certain extent, as an American. And going, walking back what I said a little bit, because I was just trying to make a point. But what I think of as bad poverty, like, let's say, West Baltimore or Ninth Ward

• 2:15:39Speaker 01

  New Orleans, is nothing compared to what's going on in almost half of the world, if not more. And so it just made me zoom out a little bit. Sometimes you forget about Third World poverty when you live here for so long. And you get programmed to believe the worst things that are out there is like Kensington, Philadelphia, or Tenderloin, San Francisco. But those are just microcosms of more or less functioning cities. Despite what they might lead you to believe, Philadelphia is a great place. So is San Francisco. But there's places where everywhere is really rundown.

• 2:16:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, like people focus on in major cities in the United States like homelessness somehow that's a sign of a fallen empire.

• 2:16:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:16:23Lex Fridman?

  But you know, that that's a problem. There's definitely it reveals some mismanagement of cities and government.

• 2:16:30Speaker 01

  I mean homelessness in Seattle and San Francisco is for sure a result of the housing crisis, especially post COVID and all the gentrification that preceded it, you know, and it's unfortunate now to that the conservative media is saying like, look at Biden's America as if Biden created homeless people. And it's just disappointing because, once again, you're seeing the media use real issues that should concern every US citizen and causing people to point fingers at a different political party as responsible for the suffering of others.

• 2:17:06Lex Fridman?

  Do you think January 6th can happen again?

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  No. I don't think so.

• 2:17:11Lex Fridman?

  So all the lessons were learned?

• 2:17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, people got really screwed over. I mean.

• 2:17:18Lex Fridman?

  Don't you have a sense that there's a greater and greater growing questioning of the electoral process and all this kind of stuff?

• 2:17:25Speaker 01

  I think that Americans overall are very comfortable with our standard of living. I think people like going to Sonic and waiting in their car and getting milkshakes and people like going to the AMC theaters and they like going ice skating and mini golfing and going to the bar after work. I don't think that anyone wants a collapse of the basic structure of the country. Even the most politically divided don't want to see 7-Eleven go away. We are so comfortable. If you look at other countries, even Europe, look at how they protest. And look at the Arab Spring. Those guys were talking like January Sixers and they actually took control of the government.

• 2:17:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:59Speaker 01

  You know, and so think about even if the MAGA crowd took over the Capitol building, it's just a building. I don't know. I just think that Americans, when they talk about civil war stuff, it's just so, we're so far from that. Even if the rhetoric is as divided as it was in 2020, it won't happen again.

• 2:18:20Lex Fridman?

  For it to really happen, it has to be, there has to be a level of desperation.

• 2:18:25Speaker 01

  There has to be a level of economic desperation that's causing people to starve or some basic resource going away. Water, something like that.

• 2:18:34Lex Fridman?

  Who do you think wins, Trump or Biden?

• 2:18:37Speaker 01

  In the civil war? Well, we don't have the guns.

• 2:18:40Lex Fridman?

  In a game of Mario Kart, no, in the election 2024.

• 2:18:46Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I have no idea, man. I don't even know if I'm gonna vote.

• 2:18:49Lex Fridman?

  It's weird that this is our choice.

• 2:18:51Speaker 01

  I know. I wish people were more focused on like city politics. Like, I'd rather vote like yes or no for a bike lane in my neighborhood than I would for the president.

• 2:19:00Lex Fridman?

  It's a local politics to you is where it is.

• 2:19:01Speaker 01

  I think the future.

• 2:19:02Lex Fridman?

  You feel it, yeah.

• 2:19:02Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, you can, your vote actually matters. Let's say you have a community of 500 people and you live in Henderson, Nevada. You can influence whether or not there's a bike lane or if this is gonna be a playground or, you know, an AMPM. You get to choose and you can influence 100 people to choose and boom, this is your community. You can't influence the result of an election.

• 2:19:23Lex Fridman?

  Still, that those at the presidential level, it sets the tone of the country. And so Trump running again and Biden running again, it just feels like there's going to be a lot of questioning of election results.

• 2:19:38Speaker 01

  I just can't believe those are our guys.

• 2:19:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:41Speaker 01

  I mean, what is, that's really our guys. Like, that's where we're at. All these smart people we have in this country, they have great history.

• 2:19:49Lex Fridman?

  We got Joker Gang versus Gum Gang. Where'd you find Joker Gang?

• 2:19:55Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:19:56Lex Fridman?

  Is he a legit juggalo or is he just?

• 2:19:58Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. Joker Gang is like a Miami Cuban guy.

• 2:20:01Lex Fridman?

  Oh.

• 2:20:02Speaker 01

  Is Joker 305 Ross Chico alive? So me and, I have been following him for a long time on Instagram because he used to like, uh, post videos of himself like popping Percocets and smoking blunts on the toilet freestyling. And so I had followed him for a while and then I finally got this platform and I said, oh my God, I bet you now that we have a million followers, Joker Gang will sit down with us. And lo and behold, the clout did its thing and there I was, face to face with the man.

• 2:20:29Lex Fridman?

  There was a controversy a year ago where a woman came forward and said that you were pushy with her. You respected and know you got the consent, but you were pushy about it. Looking back, can you tell the story of that? What are the lessons you learned from it?

• 2:20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I've yet to speak on this for a lot of reasons, mostly because it's just it was a hard time and it's a sensitive subject. And I've wanted to prioritize the reporting, but I think that now I'm ready and able to do so. Everything sort of started on December 30th, 2022, and that was the release date of the HBO project. Like I told you, we didn't know when the movie was going to come out. We weren't told that it was going to come out on that date until early November. And so I was like, oh, my God, here we go. We had a movie coming out. HBO had, I didn't even know it was going to be them. So every day for those 50 days to where I received word and to the movie announcement or to the movie release was like, I was like a kid waiting for Christmas morning. You

• 2:21:29Speaker 01

  know what I mean? It was like, every day I just, I saw the movie release date as the first day of like the rest of my life. And so I remember the week of the movie release, it was like every day. I was like, oh, my God, six days, five days, four days. And when it became two days, like, I was so excited and so like, honestly, anxiety riddled because it was such a massive platform that I went out to the desert by myself out in the Mojave, got a hotel and just kind of sat there. And then movie release day comes, it was supposed to come out at 8:00 PM Pacific Standard Time. I remember it was like 12 hours left, 10 hours left, and then eight minutes before the movie at 7:52, or I guess it was sent

• 2:22:14Speaker 01

  at 10:52 East Coast time, I got a text message requesting a portion of my fat HBO check to contribute toward apparently years of therapy bills that this person had accrued after she says that she felt that I pressured her into giving consent years prior. And I was confused, not only because of the timing, but because this is someone that I hadn't seen in years or spoken to in years, and I presumed that I was on good terms with. So I didn't respond to the text message. And then, when I didn't respond, about seven days later, this person made some TikTok videos and with the help of some friends, launched an online campaign that got picked up by the press pretty quickly.

• 2:22:57Speaker 01

  So what did you feel like when you got that text? Well, it's tough because on one hand, I'm not opposed to restitution being part of a private accountability process for real abuse. You know, like if you've hurt someone to an extent that it took them out of work or something like, I think they're entitled to some money. But unfortunately, as I later learned, this person had legal counsel and this was an attempt to basically create evidence by extracting a confession from me to use as precedent for a civil lawsuit to the tune of a couple million dollars. It's dark. Yeah. How did you meet this person? Well, I met them when I was 22 and like I told you,

• 2:23:40Speaker 01

  I was living in an RV, making this show called All Gas No Brakes. And I would travel between cities like every other day. And so I would basically pick a new city. And I got in this like pretty bad habit of what I would say is essentially treating Instagram like a, like a dating app, you know? I would go to a new place, I'd post my location, I'd surf the DMs and I would look for like fans to meet up with. It wasn't always girls, it was just people to party with because I was also partying every night, but a lot of times ended up being girls and stuff. And so that's kind of how this situation was. I didn't have sex with this person. Had a consensual encounter that they reached out to me about two weeks after saying, hey, I don't want you to take this the wrong way.

• 2:24:23Speaker 01

  But looking back, I felt a lot more pressure to agree than I realized in the moment. I don't think this is any fault of yours. I just think that you came on a bit too strong and I didn't want to let you down. So I gave in and it was, that language made me feel horrible. Mainly because if this person had told me, hey, I don't want to hook up, I would have said, yeah, of course not. Well, I don't want to hook up with someone who doesn't want to hook up with me. And I think that as fame increased during that time, I think I was just kind of oblivious to. How people were seeing me, especially those who had a digital relationship with me prior to me knowing them, and I don't think that I handled that the right way.

• 2:25:05Lex Fridman?

  Well, thank you for taking accountability, but just to clarify, you got consent?

• 2:25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was the initiatory party in an interaction with a fan who felt that she had to say yes because of, I'm not sure why, I don't know why, but like I said, this person also disclosed to me they had a history of childhood trauma and were actively being treated for PTSD and that they felt things moved too fast for them, given their situation. And so I told her, I said, hey, if you want to reach out, if you want to talk on the phone, I'm always here for you. I'm sorry to hear that. Let me know if we can talk further. About six months after that, I was at Sturgis Bike Week and I remember this day, this was the hardest day. I was just chilling and I got a text from my friend and it said, hey, man, you're getting canceled right now. And I was like, what do you mean? Like, did someone

• 2:25:56Speaker 01

  find an old tweet or something? What are you talking about? And I opened my phone and there was this Instagram story of me. It was like the ugliest picture of me you can find. It was like my face open. It was like screenshotted. And it said, I remember this specifically because I just couldn't believe it. It said, "The ugly loser who hosts All Gas No Breaks is a piece of shit. He knowingly abused my friend and got away with it. If you follow him, I'm going to message you and ask you why." So this person who I don't know, I didn't even know where, who that accusation was coming from. They text, they emailed every production company that I was working with, DM'd hundreds, if not thousands of people, like just saying that like I was this piece of shit. And I didn't even know who this

• 2:26:41Speaker 01

  person was. So I was frantically calling and texting like every person that I'd seen intimately for the past year and being like, hey, are we on good terms? Is everything okay? And then I figured out that the person was coming from Florida and I knew who it was. And so thankfully, I reached out to the original person who I had the communication with. And I said, hey, like, I think this might have been you. This might have been your friend who posted this. Are we good? Like, I'm sorry. I apologized again. I was like, listen, I feel bad that you feel this way. I want to do anything that I can to help you. Again, I apologize. And she said, apology accepted. I'm sorry, my friend asked if I could, if she could post on my behalf. And I'm sorry, I was going through a lot mentally and I saw your fame increasing.

• 2:27:26Speaker 01

  And so I agreed to let her speak on my behalf. And we let, we made amends in private. You know, I said, okay, I'm here for you. Let me know. And she said, apologies enough. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. And that was two years prior to this text message being sent to my phone eight minutes before the movie. So naturally, I wanted to go on my platforms and talk about what was happening. But I also didn't want to mess up the rollout of the movie, you know? And so the PR firm was like, we got this. We'll handle this for you. And that was, I guess, by way of a TMZ thing that said Andrew Callaghan is devastated. I'm not sure why they thought that that was going to make people be in my favor.

• 2:28:10Speaker 01

  But it was just a picture of me on NBC that said Andrew Callaghan devastated by allegations. That that was their plan, I guess, to show that I was remorseful or something, you know?

• 2:28:21Lex Fridman?

  How much of this do you think lawyers kind of pushing this when money and fame are involved?

• 2:28:29Speaker 01

  Well, I wish I could say the lawyer, but I just can't that was involved in this. But I will tell you that I try to lean away from resentment and toward accountability completely. What was my role in the situation? How can I never make someone feel like that again? What can I do? What changes can I make to make sure that, one, I never treat someone this way? And two, to never be in that position again?

• 2:28:54Lex Fridman?

  Well, again, thank you for taking accountability.

• 2:28:57Speaker 01

  And the main reason I talk about that is because it wasn't just that person. There was multiple people who made videos reporting similar behavior. And so it's obvious that that was a pattern of behavior of mine. And so I made the apology video to announce that I was taking some time away. Because I just needed time away. I mean, my entire support system collapsed. My friends at the time disappeared. I was getting like obituaries texted to my phone. They were like, hey, it's been nice knowing you. It was great to see you grow. Good luck, you know, like I was dead. And yeah, I got dropped from my agency. No one gave me tough love. No one called me to ask me if I was all right. It was just only, everyone disappeared in a week.

• 2:29:42Lex Fridman?

  Again, thank you for taking accountability. But I just hate how many cowards there are out there. Like when people hit low points is when, when you should help. We should stand with them if you know their character.

• 2:30:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it was just, it was hard to separate like the initial situation that I knew was more or less a setup and the possibly genuine other accounts. And so it was like, all right, you know what? At this point in my life, I want to be on the right side of history. I don't want to be the anti-cancel culture mouthpiece. I don't have the, the mental strength to fight this, especially because I was envisioning the HBO drop to be this like, the world opens up to me moment. And it was just the reverse. But the, it wasn't so much the, the media reporting on it that hurt me. It was just little stuff, like a, a childhood friend that you love, seeing they unfollowed

• 2:30:45Speaker 01

  you on Instagram. Or just like seeing someone on the street that you grew up with and like waving at them and they don't, they don't do anything back. And, and you're just like, oh my God, man, like this is my new life. But what are you supposed to do? Thankfully, I like somehow two weeks after I met an amazing partner who I'm still with to this day. And I was able to conquer my two biggest fears, which is monogamy and dogs. I was terrified of dogs and terrified of having a girlfriend. Now I have a girlfriend who I love and two dogs.

• 2:31:20Speaker 01

  So. What were the, what was the lowest point? Well, right after this happened, I entered like a recovery programs. Started with AA, but then I found a more specialized program that dealt with the issues that I was dealing with. Say the hardest point was um.

• 2:31:42Speaker 01

  Logically deducing that the lives of my loved ones would be better off if I was gone, you know what I mean? And thinking that my mom and my friends, that their life would be better if I took myself out of the picture.

• 2:31:58Speaker 01

  And for one, I just figured, you know, their friends canceled. You know, her son is a disgrace. My family is gonna think they raised me wrong and my friends. I'm a social pariah now. I'm a burden. I'm better off dead. And the hard part was, you know, I would read um. Stories and books written by parents who lost their kids to suicide. And they reported feeling a lot of anger after the suicide. So I tried to think of what's the way I can do it to get the least amount of anger? On behalf of the people who would grieve. Cause hanging, someone will discover you. So I figured that drinking myself to death would be the way to do it. And I wasn't able to.

• 2:32:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was just a dark place. You know, I remember hating the people who loved me because.

• 2:32:50Speaker 01

  I knew they would grieve and that made me mad. That makes sense. Like I was ready to go. I had no will to live. But their grief was like, I didn't want to cause that. I didn't want to hurt them. So I was like, I hated the people who loved me because they were stopping me from taking my own life.

• 2:33:10Speaker 01

  You know, and it's weird to think that like when I was going through that. If you walk by me in the street, I'll look like a normal guy. And so now, when I walk around and I see people, I think to myself, you have no idea what that person is going through, you know? Like, it's crazy that so many people are suffering in like, complete silence and you can't, they don't wear it on them. You know?

• 2:33:38Lex Fridman?

  Many of the people you talk to are probably that.

• 2:33:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:42Lex Fridman?

  Many people you've interviewed before all this and after are probably going through some shit.

• 2:33:47Speaker 01

  And I also thought, if I could write down what I just told you on a piece of paper, and I was to do it, and then they found the note, they would take it more seriously. Because they would know that I wasn't lying.

• 2:33:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:01Speaker 01

  But then, you know, if you do it, it reduces the lifespan of your parents by 15 years. So I looked at it like I was taking time away from them.

• 2:34:13Lex Fridman?

  Well, thank you for the most part leaning towards accountability. It's the right path to take. Uh, what advice would you give to young men

• 2:34:24Lex Fridman?

  uh, that look up to you on how they can be good men? Especially in regard to women?

• 2:34:29Speaker 01

  If you have any kind of platform, you know, whether it doesn't have to be famous on Instagram, it could be like if you're a pillar of your community in the culinary world or whatever it is. Um, just be hyper aware of that and remember that you are inheriting a power dynamic that can create situations where there might be some pressure that you you don't even realize is there, but it's definitely there. And you just have to be aware of that. And two,

• 2:34:56Speaker 01

  um, when, when meeting new partners, having hookups and stuff like that, just try to have a trauma-informed conversation about their past. Really know.

• 2:35:07Speaker 01

  The experiences and the backstory of what a new partner has gone through in that world of intimacy, whatever they're comfortable to share, obviously. But I would advise against one night stands. I would advise against hooking up with someone that you're meeting for the first time. Have those conversations prior because even though it might sound like a vibe killer, it's not. And if you think that that conversation is a vibe killer, you probably shouldn't be in that situation in the first place, especially now how hypersexualized things are and how common that type of violence is. You need to be able to have those conversations and stop and say, hey, tell me a little bit about your past. Is there any triggers to make you uncomfortable? Let me know how I can be the best partner to you.

• 2:35:50Speaker 01

  And I'm sure that college age people are not having those conversations, but I'm sure that it would go a long way.

• 2:35:57Lex Fridman?

  So especially when you're young, college aged, you don't have enough experience to be able to read a person without having that conversation. Because a lot of times you can see the trauma without explicitly talking about it. But that takes experience and knowledge and seeing the world. When you're young, you don't know, you really don't know shit. Making things a bit more explicit is probably better.

• 2:36:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also, like, as men, we're trained to believe that it's our duty to be the initiatory party in any type of sexual encounter. Like, oh, like, man chases woman. You know what I mean? Like, you have to be the one to make the move. And or like, she's playing hard to get if, you know, she's resistant to your first compliment or something. I think that that's not always how it has to be and that extra caution needs to be placed if you're taking the initiatory role in an interaction, especially if someone has a traumatic background. They might agree to do something with you because they're scared and you might not realize that's what's going on. But because you don't, you don't see yourself as a predatory person. You don't see yourself as someone who would ever consciously make someone uncomfortable or cross a boundary. But people have histories that you might not understand.

• 2:37:02Speaker 01

  And for me, as someone who doesn't have much, honestly, childhood trauma or anything like that, it's been an interesting year for me, working in therapy and elsewhere, understanding. How that affects the mind. And also, I understand hurt people hurt people. And that someone with a traumatic background isn't going to have sympathy for applying that traumatic pain to someone else, even if that person isn't the cause of what put them in that spot.

• 2:37:29Lex Fridman?

  If we can go back to Channel 5, can you tell the origin story of that?

• 2:37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Channel 5, we, during the all gas, no breaks days, we used to tell people that we were called Channel 5 if we wanted them to stop antagonizing us while we were filming. Cause every town has a Channel 5. So when people were like, what's this for? If they were being super rude and like trying to get in the camera and be hella obnoxious, we would just say, oh, we're Channel 5. And they would be like, oh, my grandma's gonna see that. And they would leave us alone. So Channel 5 was a diversion tactic during all gas, no breaks. And it just so happened that we were in Miami Beach one time and this kid came up like drinking liquor, like, you know, trying to yell about like whatever they, whatever they yell about in Miami Beach, like titties or whatever. And we're like, bro, this is Channel 5. Be careful what you say. And he was like, for real? And he just walked off. And I said to my friend at the time, I was like,

• 2:38:17Speaker 01

  that sounded pretty good, right? Channel 5. And he goes, it does sound pretty good. He's like, that's gotta be trademarked, though. No. It's not trademarked.

• 2:38:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:26Speaker 01

  It's crazy, right? There's a Channel 5 in every city, Channel 5 KTLA, Channel 5 Seattle, Como News. Dude, Channel 5 itself, we own it.

• 2:38:38Speaker 01

  Cause no one's thought of something that simple. Cause you'd think you'd have to specify. We own channel5.com, channel5news. Dude, we own it. It's awesome.

• 2:38:47Lex Fridman?

  So it was the same kind of spirit as, as the previous thing.

• 2:38:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:38:53Lex Fridman?

  What was the first one you did under the Channel 5 flag?

• 2:38:56Speaker 01

  Miami Beach Spring Break.

• 2:38:58Lex Fridman?

  I think I've seen that. And it's gonna be a callback. I think, I think the, I think somebody mentioning eating ass there too.

• 2:39:07Speaker 01

  That would be the place.

• 2:39:08Lex Fridman?

  I believe that.

• 2:39:09Speaker 01

  There's only about five places in the US where people yell about eating ass all the time. Bourbon Street, South Beach Miami, Sixth Street in Austin, Broadway in Nashville. And I'm just gonna go ahead and say Times Square. You might not think it, but.

• 2:39:22Lex Fridman?

  Times Square, really?

• 2:39:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, they yell about ass there.

• 2:39:25Lex Fridman?

  Times Square.

• 2:39:27Speaker 01

  I would say Beale Street in Memphis, but it's not, it's not good.

• 2:39:30Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:39:32Speaker 01

  I mean, Beale Street is like, the median age is too high on Beale Street for anyone to yell about ass.

• 2:39:39Lex Fridman?

  Oh, this is a fascinating portrait of America through that specific lens. So Miami Beach and then, uh, how would you describe your style of interviewing? Just now that you've collected so many. If you, if you had a style, how would you describe yourself?

• 2:39:56Speaker 01

  I guess before, especially it used to be like deadpan. Now I would describe it as more directed, but still relatively affable, agreeable, deadpan interview style.

• 2:40:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a, like in the face of absurdity. Yeah, it was just like there with a microphone. There, there's a, there's a comic aspect to it. And that's intentional.

• 2:40:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I used to look at the camera like Jim from The Office back in the day.

• 2:40:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:22Speaker 01

  I don't do that anymore.

• 2:40:24Lex Fridman?

  What about the editing? Like, how do you think about the editing?

• 2:40:27Speaker 01

  I still do most of it, but Susan helps a lot too. It's my associate. Uh, yeah, the editing style, like I said, we pioneered this editing style that honestly was inspired a bit by like Vic Berger, but we took it to real life. Crash zooms, kind of chopping up vocals a bit to add comedic timing where it didn't necessarily exist. Like you might add two seconds of awkward silence that are built with room tone, or you might make everything really fast by cutting silence and switching frames. I mean, switching camera angles. But now we try to be pretty straightforward because we want to be taken more seriously. You know?

• 2:41:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, sure. What's Crash Zoom, by the way?

• 2:41:07Speaker 01

  A Crash Zoom is when the, like, it's artificial zoom that you might add in Adobe Premiere, where the camera zooms in on someone's face.

• 2:41:15Lex Fridman?

  Where the resolution is not there?

• 2:41:17Speaker 01

  The resolution is not there unless you have a, like a Blackmagic Cinema Camera.

• 2:41:21Lex Fridman?

  Which you don't.

• 2:41:21Speaker 01

  We don't, we don't use those. The file size is too big.

• 2:41:24Lex Fridman?

  The file, that's the only constraint?

• 2:41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:26Lex Fridman?

  All right. And you also do, uh, voiceover storytelling?

• 2:41:30Speaker 01

  I think the first time I really did that was in the San Francisco Streets video, because there's so much content about San Francisco homelessness, Tenderloin shoplifting. But there's not that much context in those videos about the history of San Francisco, the housing crisis, NIMBYism, random zoning stuff that sounds boring.

• 2:41:48Speaker 01

  But has a major role in the current situation on the streets there. As to why the Tenderloin is neglected by police and by the city council and the other neighborhoods like Nob Hill and North Beach are so nice. So I added that purposely to the San Francisco video and then also to the Philadelphia streets video to accentuate the reporting and add some historical analysis.

• 2:42:08Lex Fridman?

  What's your goal with some of these videos like the Philadelphia streets one? Is it to reveal the full spectrum of humanity or is it also to tell a story that's almost political?

• 2:42:17Speaker 01

  Well, number one is always humanization. That's the primary goal. It's to take people in circumstances where they're often news items and remind the public that these are people with lives and concerns and dreams just like you. But secondly, we also want to start introducing more solution oriented journalism. So not just, oh, my God, I'm becoming aware of how horrible this is, but what can you actually do to help? And as you could see with the Vegas tunnels video, people are responding pretty positively to it. Like, here's how you can maybe help a homeless neighbor. Help get them an ID, help them qualify for housing or get a job at the scrapyard. There's always ways to help, but so much of the YouTube world is oversaturated by just like endless videos of people suffering.

• 2:43:00Speaker 01

  And the comments are always like, wow, so horrible. But what does that really do for somebody?

• 2:43:05Lex Fridman?

  You've interviewed many rappers.

• 2:43:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:43:09Lex Fridman?

  As you keep me.

• 2:43:10Speaker 01

  There's a lot to it.

• 2:43:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Can you explain this drill rap situation? What is drill?

• 2:43:16Speaker 01

  It's an evolving situation. Drill began in 2010. Some people say it was Chief Keef in Chicago. I think it was King Louie in Chicago. But I think all of it was very influenced by Waka Flocka Flame, who dropped an album called Flocka Valley in 2010. It was like hyper violent, adrenaline boosting rap music made by people who are actually in the streets. So in the 90s, you had like, if you had 50 Cent, you had rappers rapping about like whatever gangster shit, selling crack and beating people up. But they weren't actually doing it. Drill has a true crime component to where drill fans want to know that the person rapping about catching bodies does in fact kill people. So Drill is a

• 2:44:00Speaker 01

  it's pretty horrifying. It sounds great, but it started in Chicago, then it spread to England and now it's bounced back to New York. It's just like the Bronx and Brooklyn specifically and spread from New York to the rest of the country. So now there's probably a drill rapper every 10 square miles.

• 2:44:17Lex Fridman?

  So these are, as opposed to pretending to be a gangster and killing people, you, you get some credibility by actually doing it.

• 2:44:27Speaker 01

  Yes, and the fans are typically not in the communities that are affected by poverty. So they're kind of like superheroes to white kids.

• 2:44:37Lex Fridman?

  It's dark.

• 2:44:37Speaker 01

  And not just white kids, but just anyone who's not in the hood. It's not necessarily a race thing. There's white drill rappers too. Slim Jesus was, was a big one. He's out of the picture now, but there's, there's white drill rappers.

• 2:44:50Lex Fridman?

  Slim Jesus. You made a video on O Block.

• 2:44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:54Lex Fridman?

  What is, what is O Block? The place, the culture, the people?

• 2:44:57Speaker 01

  O Block is a housing project in South Chicago, in the Englewood area, where Michelle Obama grew up. It's also where Chief Keef was born and raised. I don't know if he was born there, but he was raised there. And he is the, the forefather of modern drill music as we know it. So these are the projects where drill began. It's also the first place where you have that intersection of drill music and true crime. Because O Block has a lot of rappers. And then nearby is an area called St. Lawrence, AKA Tuukaville, which has a lot of rappers as well. And so these two rival drill gangs, basically, have, you know, a lot of history and it connects to music at large.

• 2:45:39Lex Fridman?

  So you've interviewed people there. Was there any concern for your safety?

• 2:45:46Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I think that, um, O Block is, has calmed down a lot. For one, it has security, so you can't even really get in and out. But two, I think that O Block's trying to rebrand itself a lot. Because it could be because Lil Durk's avoiding a Rico charge. Could be for a variety of reasons. I know you don't know exactly what that means, but.

• 2:46:07Lex Fridman?

  Lil Durk?

• 2:46:08Speaker 01

  Rapper Lil Durk is. From affiliated with O Block.

• 2:46:12Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 2:46:12Speaker 01

  And a lot of people have been murdered in retribution for killings that Lil Dirk may or may not have influenced the ordering of. But anyways.

• 2:46:21Lex Fridman?

  And Lil Dirk documented the killings in via rap music, probably.

• 2:46:27Speaker 01

  Okay, I know you don't know about Drill and but Lil Dirk was associated with a rapper named King Von and King Von perhaps paid for the assassination of a rapper named FBG Duck who got killed in Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood. It's possible. The O Block Six are Drill-associated, not rappers, but just shooters. And they, perhaps operating on King Von's behalf, went and killed FBG Duck. King Von was Lil Dirk's artist. King Von's now dead. So there's a definitely a concern that some of the fed charges will fall on Dirk. Not sure if that's true, but it's rumors in the hip hop community. So O Block right now, and when I filmed the video, is trying to go through a major image rehab. If you go on any Instagram of anyone in O Block, they've all converted to Islam.

• 2:47:12Speaker 01

  And so they post pictures of themselves praying in the morning and have captions like, "Put the guns down, let's pray." So I think when I went there, they saw it as a good opportunity to do a positive rebrand. And so I interviewed a rapper named Boss Top, who was there all the way back in 2011 when Chief Keef was coming up. And so he basically ensured my safe protection. But he didn't even need to. They're all very friendly and they know exactly what's up with YouTube stuff.

• 2:47:39Lex Fridman?

  I like how 2011 is the old days, like the ancient.

• 2:47:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:47:43Lex Fridman?

  The founding fathers.

• 2:47:45Speaker 01

  I was in eighth grade.

• 2:47:50Lex Fridman?

  Oh, man. Time flies when you're having fun.

• 2:47:53Speaker 01

  It sure does.

• 2:47:54Lex Fridman?

  Lil Dirk. Where's Lil Dirk now?

• 2:47:57Speaker 01

  Atlanta.

• 2:47:59Lex Fridman?

  So you left Chicago, not safe.

• 2:48:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, every rapper has to leave their hometown. That's what I did.

• 2:48:04Lex Fridman?

  It's a journey.

• 2:48:08Speaker 01

  Seattle would have taken me out, bro.

• 2:48:10Lex Fridman?

  How's your, I mean, you do interview a lot of people. I mean, that's like a top comment, but it speaks to the reality of the fact that you always find somebody rapping. Or you, uh, yeah, you create the space for people to rap. What's that about?

• 2:48:23Speaker 01

  I don't know, man.

• 2:48:24Lex Fridman?

  But they're usually really good.

• 2:48:25Speaker 01

  You think so?

• 2:48:27Lex Fridman?

  I appreciate it.

• 2:48:28Speaker 01

  Well, hell, yeah, man. I mean, rappers.

• 2:48:30Lex Fridman?

  In their own way.

• 2:48:31Speaker 01

  Since I touched a microphone, rappers have gravitated toward me. I think there's something happening.

• 2:48:36Lex Fridman?

  You're a rapper whisperer?

• 2:48:38Speaker 01

  I think there's something happening on a deeper cosmic spiritual level.

• 2:48:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:41Speaker 01

  That lets the mind of rappers know that like, they have a safe place in front of our camera crew.

• 2:48:47Lex Fridman?

  You have an interview with Crip Mac?

• 2:48:49Speaker 01

  I do. Free Crip Mac. He's in jail right now.

• 2:48:52Lex Fridman?

  Oh, he is?

• 2:48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48:53Lex Fridman?

  Is that a hashtag?

• 2:48:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:48:56Lex Fridman?

  What, uh, that's an intense interview. People should go watch it. People should go watch your, uh, all your interviews, but that one is pretty intense.

• 2:49:03Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 2:49:05Lex Fridman?

  I was a little afraid for your life.

• 2:49:07Speaker 01

  Oh, Crip Mac's the safest guy in the world.

• 2:49:09Lex Fridman?

  He's a sweetheart.

• 2:49:10Speaker 01

  Oh, definitely, dude.

• 2:49:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:11Speaker 01

  That's fun. I feel like more safer on Crip Mac than I do on any given pedestrian.

• 2:49:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, he was loud and flavorful.

• 2:49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:19Lex Fridman?

  I should say. So, uh, who's he? What's his story?

• 2:49:23Speaker 01

  Well, his name's Trevor. He grew up, uh, in Ontario, California, in the Inland Empire. Moved to Texas with his mom after his dad left. His mom, um, started, started dating a cop from Houston named Mr. Gary. His mom found Mr. Gary getting, you know, anally penetrated by a coworker. And so, uh, she booked Crip Mac a one-way Greyhound ticket to LA where he joined the Crips.

• 2:49:49Lex Fridman?

  That's a good story.

• 2:49:55Lex Fridman?

  You know?

• 2:49:56Speaker 01

  It's true. Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. I'm just saying that, uh, you know, he's a classic case of somebody without a father figure who found camaraderie and, you know, sense of belonging and purpose in a, a street gang, which in LA is like a rule of law in most of the city.

• 2:50:13Lex Fridman?

  Uh, we were, I forget in what context earlier, talking about martial arts and fighting and he's got to work on his punching form.

• 2:50:20Speaker 01

  I, yeah, I think so. He, he gets into a lot of fights in jail though, and from what I've heard, he wins like.

• 2:50:25Lex Fridman?

  He does.

• 2:50:25Speaker 01

  About half of them, so it's.

• 2:50:27Lex Fridman?

  All right. What did he go to jail for now?

• 2:50:28Speaker 01

  Firearms possession. It was a probation violation.

• 2:50:31Lex Fridman?

  Oh.

• 2:50:32Speaker 01

  It's too bad.

• 2:50:34Lex Fridman?

  All right. Uh, what's the Philly? You went to the border.

• 2:50:39Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:50:40Lex Fridman?

  Occupy Seattle protests. You went to Ukraine?

• 2:50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50:46Lex Fridman?

  Uh, what are some interesting things that stand out to you from memory? Just as I ask the question, some interesting.

• 2:50:52Speaker 01

  I mean, I was in jail at the border for a while. That was horrible.

• 2:50:56Lex Fridman?

  What was that like? Was that your first time?

• 2:50:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, I didn't know that I couldn't hop my own border as an American. I'm thinking this is my country. I can get in any way that I want. Wrong. You can only enter the US through an official port of entry, which I learned the hard way because I got arrested by Border Patrol and held as a detainee at a migrant center for a few days.

• 2:51:18Lex Fridman?

  What was the, that like?

• 2:51:20Speaker 01

  Horrible.

• 2:51:21Lex Fridman?

  Which aspect?

• 2:51:22Speaker 01

  I mean, well, for what, like, I don't know. It was just to be in a place like that. And I probably sound like such a wimp right now because I know someone's watching this who's done some hard time. But we thought we were gonna do at least six months in jail because the, the guards freaked us out and we're like, you're being charged with a federal crime. You know what you boys did is serious. We're waiting on word from San Antonio about whether or not we're gonna extradite you. So we're just sitting in these cells alone, most of the time in solitary with no pillows, just a.

• 2:51:51Lex Fridman?

  No pillows.

• 2:51:52Speaker 01

  No pillows, no mat, nothing, just a space blanket and I was sleeping on my shoes, stinking up the place. It was no good.

• 2:51:59Lex Fridman?

  Uh, you mentioned the UFO convention.

• 2:52:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:03Lex Fridman?

  Uh, what have you learned from those guys, the ufologists?

• 2:52:08Speaker 01

  I really want to know what you think about that. That's the one question that I want to reverse on you because you've talked to so many people. Do you think that aliens have actually visited Earth?

• 2:52:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:18Speaker 01

  When?

• 2:52:19Lex Fridman?

  When? Uh, exact dates? I do. I think there's alien civilizations everywhere. I talked to a lot of people that have doubts about it. I just think, I even suspect there's an intelligent alien civilization in our galaxy. And I just can't imagine them not having visited us. So I lean on that. What that actually looks like, I don't know.

• 2:52:46Lex Fridman?

  The stuff we're seeing in terms of UFO sightings, I think that's much more likely, to the degree it's real, it's much more likely government projects, so military Lockheed Martin, this kind of stuff.

• 2:53:00Speaker 01

  So you think that they have knowledge of it?

• 2:53:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:04Speaker 01

  One thing I think about with aliens is scale. So we have this idea that an alien would be a gray alien or almost humanoid look-alike that would visit us in human form, arms, legs, head. Who's to say that they're not able to shrink down to microscopic size with the same neural capacity?

• 2:53:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, or just have a very difficult to perceive form.

• 2:53:24Speaker 01

  But I mean, that, they would go small, not big.

• 2:53:27Lex Fridman?

  No, I think that would take a humanoid-like form just to be able to communicate with humans. I think the, the, the big challenge with aliens is to be able to find a common language. So if you come to another planet and you suspect that there's some kind of complexity going on, but it looks nothing like humans, you have to find a common language. And I think aliens would try to take physical form that's similar that us dumb humans don't understand.

• 2:53:51Speaker 01

  Language is really interesting, too. I have this series that I'm gonna announce for the first time on here, but I'm really interested in endangered languages in the US. There's like 150 languages in the US with less than 1,000 speakers.

• 2:54:03Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 2:54:04Speaker 01

  And I wanna like help spearhead efforts to preserve some of these. Like, for example, Hawaiian sign language, 15 of those people left.

• 2:54:11Lex Fridman?

  Holy shit.

• 2:54:12Speaker 01

  Because when Hawaii got annexed, the ASL community tried to make it so the deaf native Hawaiians wouldn't be able to speak their native sign language. And so they would do it under the desks at like schools for the deaf and blind, and they would get like their mouth washed out, washed out with soap and stuff if they, so much as did the Hawaiian hand signs. Also, the Gullah Geechee language in the South Carolina Sea Islands, Hilton Head Island and stuff, that's like a, it's almost a Creole language that's been in the US for hundreds of years, existing in isolation, that's being threatened by golf course developments. I don't know how, how into language you are, but I've been getting super nerded out about it.

• 2:54:50Lex Fridman?

  Actually, I'm interviewing somebody tomorrow who's an expert in human language. He's from MIT, studying the syntax of a lot of languages, including in the Amazon jungle that the... The peoples that live in the Amazon jungle region. Yeah, it's fascinating. Human language is fascinating and also the barriers that creates. And also how the games are played to what you're speaking by governments. This is part of the story of Russia and Ukraine is this is a battle over language.

• 2:55:22Lex Fridman?

  The Ukrainian language is a symbol of independence, which is why they may they were trying to make it the primary language of the nation. So sometimes the language represents the culture and the peoples.

• 2:55:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:55:36Lex Fridman?

  It's intricately tied to the culture of the people.

• 2:55:40Speaker 01

  I've been trying to learn Navo.

• 2:55:42Lex Fridman?

  Which which languages do you know?

• 2:55:44Speaker 01

  Spanish and English.

• 2:55:47Lex Fridman?

  Spanish well?

• 2:55:48Speaker 01

  See.

• 2:55:50Lex Fridman?

  I don't know Spanish that well, so that passes me. You're fluent, basically. Oh, it doesn't.

• 2:55:57Lex Fridman?

  Hola.

• 2:55:58Speaker 01

  That that was good.

• 2:55:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:59Speaker 01

  That was real Cancun spring break.

• 2:56:01Lex Fridman?

  Well, I actually speak fluent Spanish according to Spotify because there's a every episode is translated overdubbed by AI in in Spanish. Yeah, there's a very.

• 2:56:11Speaker 01

  Spanish robot assigned you?

• 2:56:12Lex Fridman?

  Spanish robots, really, it's I sound like incredibly intelligent and intellectual in Spanish.

• 2:56:18Speaker 01

  Say go to Friedman.

• 2:56:20Lex Fridman?

  Exactly.

• 2:56:24Lex Fridman?

  From everything you've done, all the people you've seen, do you think most people are good?

• 2:56:30Lex Fridman?

  Underneath it all?

• 2:56:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56:34Lex Fridman?

  So the ones that do all the extreme shit.

• 2:56:36Speaker 01

  OK, I'll put it like this. Most people think they're doing the best thing for the world. I don't think anyone, except for maybe a small fraction of sociopaths, wakes up every day and says, I'm gonna fuck somebody's life up today. I think the far majority of people are fighting for what they think is right and do want to see America succeed and want us to be in a happy place where no one is subjugated. I just think people have drastically different ideas of what means will get us there. And unfortunately, that's leading to a lot of misunderstandings between cultures. And yeah, I think that most people are good. I've been through some things that leads me to believe that a lot of people, though, are primarily motivated by self-interest. And that in a fight or flight situation, most people will choose flight.

• 2:57:22Speaker 01

  So I don't know if people are courageous as a whole, but I think generally good. But the energy to stand up for what's right, not sure about that.

• 2:57:30Lex Fridman?

  They have the capacity, though, to do good.

• 2:57:33Speaker 01

  I think human beings are inherently selfish as well. But I don't think that selfish is inherently bad. I think humans are primarily motivated by self-interest, but generally have positive intentions.

• 2:57:48Lex Fridman?

  I do hope more humans rise to the occasion and have courage. Courage of their convictions, courage to have integrity. But yeah, I think that most people are good and they want to do good. And they have the capacity to do a lot of good. That's why I have hope for this whole thing we've got going on. How do you heal the misunderstandings between people, you think?

• 2:58:12Speaker 01

  Listening. It's the only option we have. No forced education, no like forced meetings or mediations between political opponents. Just listen to more people and really listen. Try to get rid of whatever preconceived notions you might have about how you should feel about someone you are supposed to disagree with. And just keep your ears and your heart open to people that you don't know. And your life will change.

• 2:58:36Lex Fridman?

  Keep your heart open.

• 2:58:37Speaker 01

  A lot of people are scared to listen.

• 2:58:40Lex Fridman?

  Well, Andrew, I'm a big fan and thank you for being one of the best listeners in the world.

• 2:58:46Speaker 01

  Hey, man.

• 2:58:46Lex Fridman?

  And showing the full spectrum of humanity to us so we can listen as well and learn. And just thank you for doing everything you're doing.

• 2:58:56Speaker 01

  Hey, man, thanks so much for having me on. You're a great man.

• 2:58:59Lex Fridman?

  Thank you, brother.

• 2:58:59Speaker 01

  I appreciate it.

• 2:59:01Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Calhoun. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Hunter S. Thompson. The edge, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.