Lex Fridman Podcast
#425 – Andrew Callaghan: Channel 5, Gonzo, QAnon, O-Block, Politics & Alex Jones
Sat, 13 Apr 2024
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
The following is a conversation with Andrew Calligan, host of Channel 5 on YouTube, where he does Gonzo-style interviews with fascinating humans at the edges of society. The so-called vagrants, vagabonds, runaways, outlaws, from QAnon adherents to fish heads to O'Block residents and much more.
He created the documentary that I highly recommend called This Place Rules on the undercurrents that led to the January 6th Capitol riots. 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.
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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. 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. 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.
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I'm a big fan of conversation, obviously, for exploring the human mind, exploring the dark and the light that lurks in the shadows and in the corners of the human psyche. And in conversation, rigorous conversation, deliberate conversation, Careful conversation.
Empathic conversation is a really good way to shine a light on the darkness and discover the darkness behind the light, if that's fair to say. I had a great conversation yesterday with... Ben, favorite barbecue buddy of mine. He runs JNL Barbecue that I highly recommend you guys should check out. We talked about life, freedom, country. We 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 the artistry, if I can use that word. Kind of like what Jiro dreams of sushi, what Ben dreams of barbecue. Anyway, he is not a licensed therapist. He's not even a licensed barbecue creator because you don't get a license for that kind of thing.
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, you know, expertise and professionalism and discreteness, then you should try BetterHelp.
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For me, if I 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 it'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 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.
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 gonna 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. 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 on 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, five hours.
Darren Aronofsky that I got to meet recently. Boy, what a beautiful mind. 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.
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when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Freeman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Andrew Kalgan.
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. Is that where you shop, Walmart? Generally, yeah. I'm a Target man myself. There's no way you get those suits from Target. So you're saying it's a nice way to compliment a suit. I think you go men's warehouse, if not further.
I think you would be wrong. You go further. No, the other direction. You got that from Target. Not Target. I was joking about Target. I like Walmart better. It just felt like a funny thing to say.
No, it was funny.
The most expensive thing I own is this watch, and it was given to me as a gift.
$2,700.
Like sunglasses? 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. So that was the symbol of... of the fame got to your head. I think so, yeah.
I think fame getting to your head, if you spend more than a hundred bucks on sunglasses, you've officially gone off the deep end.
You've crossed the line. Totally. 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.
She's not wrong, man. Thank you. That's part of your whole swag, though.
Yeah, the suit thing. Yep. Anyway, what was the first, if you remember, first recorded interview you did?
Well, like my first grade teacher, Mrs. Claudia, this is back in the day, like I was telling you, we just asked her about her life in Columbia and stuff like that. But I didn't really get into actual journalism until my ninth grade year. I had no idea I had an interest in it. Before that, 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.
That's a lot. Psilocybin, meditation, rap, public parks.
Yeah. I was making conscious rap music. I was to the point where I had four dream catchers hanging above my bed, Alex Gray painting on the wall, tapestry on the ceiling. Just scribbling rhymes down all the time. So you said somewhere that you sucked at school. Okay. Well, let's step back a little bit. So I had this amazing journalism course in ninth grade. I went to an alternative high school.
And the teacher was named Calvin Shaw. And he was just like... I ended up taking his class all four years. And he used to let me actually leave school. I didn't like going to school. So he'd let me basically go around Seattle and do different interviews with people as long as I could come back by the end of the day and write a story for his class. And he'd mark me as present.
So the first article that I wrote was about the Silk Road and the deep web. 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 world. And so if you remember, they had that hidden Wiki link that was like hire a hit man, 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 hit man who 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 hit man. That's nice.
Yeah.
I mean, you're fearless even then. Yeah. I mean, I was hiding behind a Tor browser, so there's not much fear to be had. Oh, so it was anonymous. It was anonymous, but I did publish it under my name, so you're right. I could have been in danger.
I also saw that you said you took too many shrooms when you were young, and that led you to have hallucinogen-persisting perception disorder, HPPD. Can you explain what this is?
Well, that condition is classified by persistent visual snow, floaters, morphing objects. Like, I see them right now. I see them all the time.
The snow is in the room.
The snow is definitely in the room. It's all over you. And basically... It wasn't that I took too many shrooms. I think that it was, I took about an eighth of senna essence mushrooms, which are the ones that come from the earth instead of cow shit. And I took an eighth of those at my friend Toby's house, which is a normal amount, but I was in eighth grade.
So I woke up the next morning with these extreme visual distortions. And I thought that it would go away. I tried to make it go away, but There's really no cure for HPPD. It's a lifelong condition. So it's just a matter of dealing with it and realizing that it is only visual. So when people ask me, hey, I have HPPD, how do I cope with it?
I say, remember that every other sense that you have, what you can hear, what you can taste, you know, your feet on the ground, you're still on earth, you're still here.
Well, you said it's only visual. And yes, gratitude for being alive at all. It's great. Yeah. But you said that this led you into some dark psychological places like depersonalization disorder.
Yeah. Depersonalization is the feeling that you are not real, but that reality still exists. Derealization is the idea that reality itself is an illusion created by your mind and that you're the only person alive and that everything that your brain is projecting to your visual cortex is a lie and that you're the only living human being. Both are pretty intense. 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 condition. 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 benzodiaphines. That's not good. Right. So alcoholism, something that came into my life pretty early. Alcohol abuse as a result of that experience because that helps with the visual symptoms, makes some of the static go away. Man. Never tried benzos though.
So can you explain to me where in that spectrum you are? So do you sometimes have a sense that you're not real? Sometimes. And something else is not real?
Like the reality is not real? Yeah, I experience it all the time. But like I said, my job helps with that because I get to feel like when you seek out extremes to a certain extent and you put yourself on the front lines of intense events, whether it be politically or socially, or just dive into deep fringe subcultures, you get this feeling that you're real.
And being filmed is also a confirmation, if you can look at the MP4 file, that you're in fact living here on earth.
Confirming that you were in it with reality by watching yourself on video. Exactly. So is that basically the engine behind all the extreme interviews you've done?
Well, I got HPPD around the same time that I began this journalism course in ninth grade. So I sort of always used journalism as a therapeutic mechanism to deal with some of these symptoms, especially depersonalization. There's some pretty good illustrations of what it feels like. 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.
Trapped or just the ability to step outside of yourself.
You feel like your soul is not something that is connected to your body. It's something living in your head. It's really hard to explain to people who haven't gone through derealization or depersonalization. But if you go on support groups, they always say like, how do I break free from behind my eyes? Like dark stuff like that.
Also, 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.
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.
Siddhartha, that's a good book. Have you done shroom since then?
No, I don't really do psychedelic drugs. But like a lot of people think that I'm against them, which I'm not. It just doesn't work for me. If it works for you, I'm sure that can be really fun. Especially, I know there's lots of like therapeutic uses for acid and ketamine and psilocybin. But I personally abstain from those kind of anything psychotropic I try to stay away from. Drinking a bit?
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 that situation.
And it made the snow go away?
Yeah. Alcohol really works to suppress HPPD symptoms.
So you said you hated classes in school, except that journalism class.
Okay, we need to clear this up because on my Wikipedia page, for some reason, for Andrew Callahan early life, it says, Andrew hated every single class except for 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 classes. And they all hit me up.
And they're like, hey, man, saw you said you hated every class. Sorry I couldn't be everything that you wanted me to be. And so I just want to say shout out to all those teachers. I didn't hate every class. The point that I was making is that being forced into the institution of school so young and having to take common core classes like biology, dissecting frogs.
history of the Han dynasty, stuff like that, that I didn't want to learn, but I had to learn multiple times. I mean, I learned about the dynastic cycle in ancient China, 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? Yeah.
The part that makes school difficult, especially in college, is that you have people just going to school just to get the degree who don't really know exactly what they're interested in. And they don't even have time to figure that out because they're in a business program or a communications program with no specific interest.
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, just be unboreable by it. Just really go in as if ancient Chinese dynasties are the most interesting thing you could possibly learn.
And it is somewhat interesting, the Silk Road and the Great Wall and Terracotta, the soldiers and stuff. But I'm just saying, 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 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.
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. Yeah, for sure.
And you're also saying so Wikipedia is not always perfectly right. 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? Oh, it's great.
Oh, it's so good, dude.
You said you love journalism. What did you love about journalism? What hooked you?
On a basic level, everybody wants media coverage, right? Everyone likes to be on camera and get exposure for whatever they're doing. And so being a journalist and being almost like a portal for exposure for people allows you to be on the front row of everything that you want to be a part of. 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.
Buy the ticket, take the ride. Hunter S. Thompson, is he up there as one of the influences?
Who are your influences? 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 Reuben Salazar murder by LAPD or LA Sheriff's Department in Boyle Heights in the 70s. And his relationship with his lawyer, Oscar Acosta, and that whole saga is great. Fear and loathing, I like, but not as much as his straightforward reporting.
Because there's the Gonzo side of Hunter, where he's like saying he's taking drugs and seeing shit. And there's the other side of him, which is like an actual reporter interested in telling a story that has news value. So it's two different lanes for him. 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.
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. Doing speeds.
Doing drugs. I mean, drugs and alcohol is all part of it somehow. Yeah. So it opens a gateway to a deeper understanding of humanity.
But I will say though, as someone now who doesn't party like I did when I was younger, it's not as important as I thought it was.
You know? 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 just, as an introvert, as a person who has a lot of anxiety, for me, alcohol has opened doors of just opening myself up to the world more.
Oh, I'm actually a fan of alcohol, moderate drinking. But I'm saying my life before, I would say 2019, 2018 especially, there was the chaos on camera, but then there was my private life, which was like chaotic partying all the time. Oh, I see. And I convinced myself, much like Hunter did, that that was the secret sauce 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 like symbiotic, you know, inspirational thing going on. But it's not true. It can be, but it's typically not.
Yeah, it's not a requirement. You can sometimes channel, you can sometimes leverage all those things for your creativity, but the creative engine, it lives outside of that.
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 just a certain amount of shotgun shells for him to fire into the sky every morning. There's no way, and he didn't do anything creative in those final years.
yeah but so the creativity goes away and gradually you just become like a party animal like andy dick a caricature of yourself yeah i mean that's why life is interesting you make all kinds of choices and sometimes you can have uh create works of genius in a short amount of time based on drugs and no drugs einstein had that miracle year where he published several incredible papers in one year 1905 did he do drugs before that
Lots of coke.
I was like, I believed you for a second. I'm like, did Einstein have blow? I don't think he did.
How do you think he gets that hair? Come on. It's true. I'm just asking questions. High confidence hair. Look into it. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, no, he's a well put together, sexy young man. The hair came later.
Yeah, was Albert Einstein attractive as a teenager? Not teenager. Was he attractive as a young man? Sexually attractive? I don't, I mean, you know. I'm turned on by Einstein at all ages. I don't discriminate. But are you more turned on by the work that he did or his physical being?
No, sometimes I fantasize what it would be like to be in the arms of Einstein. I couldn't even get that out. In the arms of Einstein. Yeah, just I want to feel safe. It's a good idea for a rom-com. 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.
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 that gravity can morph space-time, both space and time, And it permeates the entire universe. It's a field. It's a really wild idea to come up as 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.
Was there people saying he was crazy when he was around? Or was he universally recognized as like an OG of this?
No, I think once the papers came out, he was widely recognized as a true genius. But before that, he wasn't recognized. He had a really difficult life.
So back now, where does a black hole go after something gets sucked into it?
You mean is it a portal to another place, that kind of thing?
Yeah.
No. Well, we don't know. It could be. It could be that the universe is kind of like Swiss cheese full of black holes. There's something called Hawking radiation where because of quantum mechanics, the information leaks out of a black hole. So it is possible to escape a black hole. There's a lot of interesting questions there.
I hope we get to the bottom of that.
And there's a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. which doesn't seem to scare physicists, but it terrifies me.
Oh, yeah, for sure. Astronomy can be terrifying.
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. Have you ever spoke to someone who's been to outer space? Jeff Bezos. He flew his own rocket. Wow. That's pretty cool. Astronaut that's been to deep space, no.
Well, maybe I've spoken to an alien that just hasn't admitted it.
I want to do a research paper or like a report about space madness. You know, it's supposed to be this like torturous feeling that you get when you look away from Earth and into the abyss after you've exited Earth's orbit or whatever. Because there's one specific psychiatrist who knows how to deal with space madness. And I want to figure out how and interview people with it.
Is this a real thing?
Like is there a Wikipedia article on it? Yes, look up space madness treatment.
Now I don't trust Wikipedia after what you told me, so.
I know, they think I hate classes.
I thought you meant more about the fact that you're isolated out in the space that we need social connection and it's difficult.
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.
I don't need to go to space for that.
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 multi-millions.
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.
Yeah, probably so.
Well, technically we're all in space. So he can't, that's a boundary he can't have.
But not everyone believes that as you've seen from my work probably.
You're right. And that's, those are important people that are asking important questions. Yeah. You hitchhiked across US for 70 days when you were 19. Right. Tell the story of that.
Well, this sort of connects to what I was talking about with the boredom of school and these common core classes. So after my first year of school, where I lived in the dorms, like an old school dormitory building at a school in New Orleans called Loyola University, I wanted to just do something. I felt so bored. I was working for the school newspaper.
for that whole first year, it was called the Maroon. And I didn't have the ability to write my own stories. Like I had to defer to an older editor and they would give me stories to write about. And they were all about like on-campus happenings, like the Pope visits New Orleans or glass recycling to be restored in the French Quarter or hoverboards banned on campus due to safety concerns.
And it just kind of felt like, all right, I kind of wanted to be a gonzo reporter. I'm not sure if working my way up 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- That's great.
It told me about train stop towns like Dunsmuir and 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 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 the plan and it worked out.
I love it. I traveled across the United States before in similar kind of plan. Were you on the Silver Dog? It's the Greyhound bus. Greyhound is pretty nice.
That's a step above hitchhiking.
That's way better than hitchhiking.
Hitchhiking, Greyhound, Amtrak, airline.
Amtrak, no, that's elitist.
What's in between Greyhound and Amtrak? A car. That's what it is. Yeah, it's a car. A car. A shitty car. Okay, cool.
I lived in a shitty car.
You lived in a car?
Yeah, when I was driving across the United States.
Solo? Solo.
With a friend, some solo, and I would eat cold soup.
I love cold soup. What I like is the cold chickpeas in a can. You get the water out and just dump them in your mouth. Yeah. Those are good. Beef jerky, kind bars. Kind bars are really good for the road.
Yeah. I mean, all of that is great, but too much of it is not great. Like too much cold soup, not great. Too much beef jerky, not great.
So what was the route you took? Was it Chicago across or was it Philadelphia across?
Philadelphia across.
To LA or where?
San Diego is where we ended up. But it was a zigzag and went up to Chicago and then all the way down to Texas.
So you went Philly through Appalachia up to the Midwest. Did you cut over through the Southwest down to San Diego?
No, no, no.
I went straight down to Texas all the way down to the Midwest. So like... But did you cut from Texas west through New Mexico and Arizona to get to San Diego?
Yeah.
That is the best road trip place. Interstate 40, like Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Vegas, Kingman, the Mojave Desert, Yuma, doesn't get better.
Yeah, I mean, and you're a kid, so you don't care, and you were throwing caution to the wind, and you met some crazy, crazy people.
It gives me some sanity, like whenever I'm feeling kind of out of control or, you know, like bummed out, I just remember that the road is still out there.
The open road never goes anywhere, and it's kind of like a, I see like an invisible door in the corner of the room all the time that makes me more comfortable, because I'm like, hey, at the end of the day, if I'm bummed out, I can go hit the road, and I'm sure there's going to be a fun time ahead.
Yeah, get that Greyhound ticket and go.
I would say silver dog, half, because sometimes I got to ride the dog when no one will pick me up. There's some places in the country where no one's going to pick you up.
Yeah.
Kansas, Missouri, they're not going to do it.
Maybe you're not charming enough. You thought about that?
I was 19, fresh, clean shaven. Yeah. 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. It's people who never stop talking. And so they see someone hitchhiking and they're like, yes, I'm going to talk at this person.
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.
That's rough. Yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right. I like people that are comfortable in silence.
Yeah. But then that also raises the question, are they about to kill me? You know what I mean? I think that's a you problem, not a... You know what's funny is almost everybody who picked me up when I was hitchhiking was like a day laborer. It was almost all Mexican day laborers who picked me up. Oh, interesting.
Because I think that in some places down there, that's a typical thing to do, hitchhike to work. A lot of people don't have cars, but they still have to get to their jobs. So a lot of people ask me, hey, where should I drop you off? Where's your job at? And I'm like, my job is to explore. And they were down with it.
See, for me, it was really easy because you just say, I'm traveling across the United States, and I think people love that idea, and they want to help. They're romantic, because they also have that invisible door. Everybody has that invisible door, and I just want to go.
So you know what I'm talking about. Yeah. 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.
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. What's the hardest item you've had to part with in this experience?
There's nothing.
No.
So you'd give that watch to somebody if it meant anything.
No, this, you're right. You're right. That's probably the only, I've never had to let go of that though. That's the only thing I own. This means a lot to me, but everything else. But then again, listen, because, okay, this watch is given to me by Rogan, who's become a close friend. But 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.
Yeah. I was like, God damn it. It's a pretty sick ass gift though.
Yeah, it's pretty sick. I'm not usually a gift guy, but, you know, when somebody you look up to kind of gives you a thing, it's a nice little symbol of that relationship. So it's nice. But other than that, no. But even this, like, whatever. The relationship is what matters. The human is what matters, not the... I agree 100%. You had something like this?
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, you just get pissed off. I just think to myself, someone has that somewhere. I have dreams about reuniting with the hard drive.
You and Hunter Biden have the similar.
I don't think he wants to reunite with that one. Okay. It's crazy. Like, you know, All he did was smoke crack, right? Or was there more stuff going on?
I think there's prostitutes involved. Oh, okay. Whatever. I think you got to look into it. I think I have to look into it too. I don't know. Was Kerouac, Jack Kerouac, somebody that wasn't an inspiration at all in this road trip? Did you even know who that is?
The B generation? 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... heavy 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.
It's a great book. You read it or no?
I refuse to read it. People even have gifted it to me and been like, hey, man, you're going to love this one. And I'm like, is that on the road? Honestly, people have given me a book with wrapping paper on it, and they're like, this is right at Pirelli. I was like, that's fucking on the road, isn't it?
Give you a different cover.
Yeah, no, I'm like, anything but that. But I'm sure it's a great book. It's just the comparison thing drives me crazy. But respect. Big respect to Kerouac. Would never speak down on anyone in the Beat Generation. What are some interesting moments you remember from those 70 days? Man, there was so much.
I mean, getting mistaken for a gay prostitute on my first hitchhiking ride in Louisiana was pretty funny. Where did you come from and where did you go? 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. Lot lizards are... 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.
Killed all the romance.
Yeah, definitely. The old school outlaw trucker lifestyle, unless you're an owner operator who's not even in a union, which is like a real cowboy way to haul loads, you can't do that.
You were mistaken for a lot lizard.
Mistaken for a lot lizard by a small man from Honduras with a spiky leather jacket covered in studs. Nice. Didn't speak any English, but you know, I thought he was just, you know, a nice guy. 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... It's boring? Yeah.
People go in there and, you know, please themselves. Yeah, yeah, 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 going to 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, I'm 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.
Like, what's up? And I was like, oh no, I'm just a regular guy. He was super cool about it. He started laughing. He was like, oh, my bad, man. I thought you were, you know, selling something. I said, no. And he said, oh, it's all good. And he gave me a ride all the way to Houston. That's great. Yeah. We talked about anything except that for the rest of the car ride.
That's great. I was just rolled with it. Oh, sorry about that.
I had about a foot and a half on this guy, so I wasn't too scared. I also had a knife in my pocket, but I didn't want to stab him, especially not at a place like that.
And you were still... That didn't leave a bad taste in your mouth?
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 going to be spectacular. Yeah, I mean...
Who among us have not been mistaken for a lot lizard? It's a fact. You heard it here first. What else? Some interesting, beautiful people that you've met along the way.
Well, I used the app Couchsurfing to find places to stay. I remember Couchsurfing. Now you can only submit like five Couchsurfing requests a day unless you're a premium member, which means you also host people. Wait, Couchsurfing's still around? Yeah, yeah, totally. Oh, nice. But it's evolved, obviously, into a different thing. Airbnb is a kind of competitor to that, right?
Couchsurfing is free, though. Right. So couch surfing, they call it like the CS community. So basically there'd be these like couch surfing super hosts in different cities. Like there was one in Santa Fe, this firefighter dude who had like 15 other couch surfers there chilling.
Nice.
So I would do it everywhere. A lot of them were Catholics, 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 couch surfing profile that says clothing optional.
Yes.
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 going to 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. Couch surfing hosts were amazing. 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. Yeah, I love couch surfing.
For me, being an introvert, just crashing on a person's couch, being essentially forced into a great conversation is great.
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. Yeah.
Part of the reason I wanted to live in an RV later in life is to avoid having to constantly live in this like, thanks so much type of frequency. Because it's exhausting to constantly, hey man, thanks.
I think the shallowness of that interaction is exhausting. Not just the, not the thanks.
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, you get eight rides a day. You're thanking eight people a day like they're the second coming of Jesus. You start to feel a little bit debased.
What'd you learn about people from that journey? That's your first time really kind of going into it.
The American public is just so kind overall. I mean, they're so like embracing depending on who you are. And specifically though, the Christian family people of the U.S. who drive in minivans and have that fish sticker on the back where it's like Jesus fish and then they have the family sticker, you know, where each member of the family is a stick figure.
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. As a family, together. They would yell shit like, go to hell, hippie, when I was on the side of the road. And so it's weird that the most...
Charitable Christian American family values people never gave me any charity or even conversation. They were antagonizing me and saw me as like a hippie leftover from the 60s who needed to go to work, go to Vietnam. I don't get it. Yeah. But the people who really extended a hand to me is people on the margins.
People working on seasonal visas, people whose cars have less than a quarter tank left, people struggling with addiction who saw me struggling, or at least they thought that I was because they assumed I was hitchhiking, not out of adventure, but because I had no car and were willing to sacrifice their day almost sometimes to take me exactly where I needed to go.
That's beautiful, man. I've had similar kind of experience that people were struggling the most are the ones who are willing to help you when you're struggling. Yeah. There's people like in religious context and other kind of communities that just judge others because they've kind of constructed a value system where they're better than others because of that value system.
And that actually has a cascade that forces you to actually be kind of a dick.
Yeah, I never thought about it that way. It's so true. Do you think about like morality and religion a lot?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been to certain parts of the world where religion is really a big part of life. I'm just always skeptical about tribes of people that believe a thing and they believe they're better than others because they believe that thing. That could be nations, that could be religions.
Yeah.
I mean, in Ukraine and in Russia, I've seen a lot of hate towards the other. Yeah. And that hate I'm always very skeptical of because it could be used by powerful people to direct that hate just so the powerful people can maintain power and get money, this kind of stuff.
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.
Are there some places in America that are better than others? Can you speak negatively of like aforementioned Joe Rogan talk shit about Connecticut nonstop? Can you pick a region in the United States you can talk shit about? To talk shit about? Oh, for sure. I mean, from that experience, let's just narrow it down to that. Oh, Colorado. Oh, Jesus.
Really? Yes. I know so many people that love Colorado. Dude, Dallas, Denver. I used to think Phoenix sucks, but I love Phoenix now. The way they build these cities to just be so circular and massive, it's just like, stop it. You don't like circles? I like grids, man.
Oh, you're a grid guy.
Manhattan, New Orleans, San Francisco.
What is it about grids that bring out the worst in people? Circles is where everyone's just vibing out, but the grid gets people locked in and hateful. I don't know, man. I've never heard anyone talk shit about Colorado, I have to say. It's kind of refreshing. It provides a necessary balance for the Colorado Wikipedia page.
Yeah. Oh, Oregon too. I got problems with Oregon.
Oregon.
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 Willamette. What do you have against anarchism?
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. John Williams was carving a pipe 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. And so as someone who used to see this guy who got murdered, he 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 channeling the anger of that experience. And the officer got no charges, by the way.
You can look up the video. It's horrific. 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 anarchistic worldview is with reality and with American society. It can only exist in a small little chamber.
You can't apply that to the industrial heartland of the country.
And I think also anarchism, so I've gotten to know Michael Malice, who's written quite a bit about anarchism. And it also exists as a body of literature about different philosophical notions that 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 we want to build but implementing it may not necessarily be a good idea yeah i mean emma goldman i'm a huge fan of her writing um 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, uh, I drifted more toward having a more open mind as I got older.
Extremism implemented in almost all of its forms is probably going to cause a lot of suffering.
Yeah.
You worked as a doorman on the, uh, I could say legendary Bourbon Street in New Orleans. That's right. Where you saw what you described as, this might be another Wikipedia quote, by the way.
This is where I do my research. Does it say hellish scenes?
Hellish scenes, in quotes.