Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's Friday crazy night. Let's go. Friday crazy night. Gonna dance, dance, dance all night. Yeah, one more time. Friday crazy night. Gonna dance, dance, dance all night. Hey, be sure to have a wild, wild weekend wherever you are.
On this episode of The Commercial Break...
podcasting has definitely softened the barrier between consumer and creator in a way that's never been done before, which in a lot of ways is cool. Like for me, it's been great. I'm not even a podcaster, but social media has allowed me to be closer to my fan base and have like, you know, a more organic feedback loop to where like when I ask people, yo, what should I cover?
Next thing you know, I got 500 suggestions. That was impossible even 15 years ago. Yeah. So I'm not going to dog on it too much, but I do think that like Trump being on these podcasts was a way of communicating like, yo, Trump is your friend. Like this could be you here with us.
The next episode of The Commercial Break starts now.
Oh yeah, cats and kittens, welcome back to another episode of The Commercial Break. I'm Brian Green, this is my dear friend and the co-host of the show, Kristen Joy Hoadley. Best to you, Kristen. Best to you, Brian. Best to you out there in the podcast universe. I'll start it off saying it right now, ahead of time, as all the kids like to say, trigger warning.
On this episode, TCB Infomercial with Andrew Callahan from Channel 5 News. All gas, no brakes. Quarter confessions. He is a journalist of our time. He is a new media journalist doing a blog.
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Chapter 2: What makes Andrew Callaghan a unique journalist?
YouTube. YouTube. Doing it really well. I think he's one of the... I'll say this. I think he's one of the more important documentarians of our time because he kind of he just gets into the heart of it. He has a good way of summing things up. And if you haven't seen Channel 5 or All Gas, No Brakes, I highly recommend that you go check out the channel. This will be a show.
where we definitely talk about politics because Andrew's new movie, Dear Kelly, is out right now. He had previously a movie with HBO Films called This Place Rules about the lead-up to the January 6th thing that happened. I don't know. Some people call it a riot. Some people call it a tour.
Ha!
but anyway he had an excellent HBO documentary and now he has self-produced self-directed or Channel 5 has directed a movie called Dear Kelly where he takes it even a step further trying to get into the head of of people who have kind of become extreme, who have become super tribalist. And that is not uncommon in our culture today. And I watched Dear Kelly. I got a screener of it.
He was nice enough to send it to me. It's out available now. Go to the Channel 5 YouTube page. You can just go to... I'll put a link in the show notes so you can you can see it. But Dear Kelly is an excellent movie. It follows around a guy named Kelly who Andrew met chasing kind of Trump and the MAGA crowd around for eight years now.
And he met this guy and he really wanted to understand why Kelly had gotten so radicalized so quickly. Seemingly normal guy. And he really gets to the bottom of it. He gets to the heart of it. And then he takes it even a step further. by trying to help Kelly piece his life back together. Kelly has lost his family. He has lost his friends. He has lost his house, his job.
And I think, and I'd like to talk to Andrew about this and get his thoughts. I have that kind of this unscientific theory that the tribalism that we're experiencing today on both sides has a lot to do with a pandemic that is happening called loneliness, desperation, and the need to feel like we're a part of something.
Yeah, we belong somewhere.
And I think Kelly kind of is this in action. My theory in action. Because that's where Kelly finds himself. He loses his house and he finds himself in a really bad way. And he kind of buries himself into a lot of theories and political talk and political action that he feels there's a bad guy and he can help take that bad guy down. But that bad guy is very nebulous. It's just a thing, right?
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Chapter 3: How did Andrew Callaghan's film 'Dear Kelly' come about?
I was like, let's go. Sure. He FaceTimes me. He's like wearing braces and he's telling me, he's like, bro, you got to come to the underground screamo rave scene here in Atlanta. He's like, we have 50 person screamo concerts in the underground society beneath the state Capitol. And I was like, oh shit.
Yeah. Like at underground Atlanta, huh?
Did you actually go or just do the FaceTime with him? It was only 48 hours ago that I learned about this, so I haven't gone yet, but I'm sure that I'll pick him up sometime soon.
All right, you come here, and I'll take you to the best burger place in the world. Let's go. Okay, Andrew, quarter confessions, all gas, no brakes, now Channel 5. You, of course, did the incredible documentary with HBO. It was really good. I thought it did a better job of any of the...
There was so much press and there was so much material and so much documenting of what led up to the January 6th event, whatever, you know, if you're on one side, it's a tour. If you're on the other side, it's a riot. Whatever you think about that, it certainly was a moment in history that you probably will never forget where you were when you're watching those images go down.
And you did such an incredible job of documenting that in a way that even though I know that you, and I want to talk about this too, even though in a way you had to spin it a You did a great job of catching the mood of the moment, documenting the culture and the attitudes that were going on right in the emotion and the heat of it without getting caught up in it. Is that a difficult thing to do?
Yeah, I mean, it generally is, but it's sort of like the 10,000 hours thing when it comes to those kinds of events, sort of practice makes perfect. Probably it was hard to keep my composure when I started my career around 2018. But after you go to 50 right-wing conspiracy rallies in a row, you might as well just be going to IHOP or something. You know what I mean? Fair enough.
Everything's normalized. But yeah, I mean, to be fair, I am proud of the HBO project. I didn't want people to come away from Dear Kelly thinking, oh my God, this guy hated his directorial debut.
Yeah, I didn't come away from that with a feeling. I came away from it with a feeling that... Dear Kelly is his...
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Chapter 4: What themes are explored in 'Dear Kelly'?
There was so much, like you said, so much press around it. And there was a lot of posturing as to who was going to make the most elite hit piece about that.
Right.
Yeah. A hundred percent. Did Tim and Eric, like, is that Heidecker? Yeah. Okay. And so they just felt strongly that they wanted to make it clear that this was not in favor of the January 6th events.
Well, politically we're a bit different. Like they're more liberals and I'm more of like a leftist, if that makes sense. Yes, it does. I don't, I don't believe that you need to necessarily editorialize or like it's punch down on a lot of conservative people who have been kind of caught up in the political propaganda of the day.
I felt like they, and they were okay to work with, but it was more like they felt like we had to draw an extreme line in the sand, like denounce Alex Jones before showing him on camera. I'm like, I think it's enough to, you know, drink Jameson shirtless and have him say a bunch of crazy stuff.
I don't think you need to add in this like mean spirited jab, but that's just, it's also a generational gap too, you know, because there was this idea of, I think around 2016, that if you censor people online and if you limit the spread of their voice, their ideas will go away. And you saw that a lot of early censorship on Facebook and Twitter when it was a Jack Dorsey company.
It was like, all right, a lot of these flat earthers, these QAnon people, the Trump crowd, we're going to push them gradually off these platforms in the hopes that their movement will become smaller. But what it actually did is it moved them into more concentrated, tight echo chambers only amongst each other. And that created, we're kind of paying for those mistakes now. I totally agree with you.
So you do a great, incredible job of documenting what leads up to these events. And Dear Kelly is part two, but it's almost, I don't know, it's almost like a pre-log. You answer the question, what happened? Now you want to answer the question, how did we get here? And in Dear Kelly, I think this is really an important piece of... of film, if I'm being real honest.
I don't want to be hyperbolic about it, but it's important because I think you do the best job yet that I have seen of understanding why this tribalism and extremism is happening. I have had this unscientific theory for a long time that loneliness, desperation, and a feeling of wanting to belong to something has been causing this. And Kelly, is this in action? It's this in real life.
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Chapter 5: How does loneliness contribute to radicalization?
I just never had enough time to actually spend with someone to show that theory in action. And This Place Rules was filmed over the course of two and a half months where I was popping from political flashpoint to political flashpoint. capturing like the raw group energy of the crowds at that time. But with Kelly, I had four years to film this documentary. Wow.
And so I really got to get into the nitty gritty of what that process looked like. Not with an emphasis on what particular media he consumed, because that's a lot of times people fall into that trap. Oh, he got radicalized by this particular platform, like InfoWars or something. But way before that, what conditions primed him to be a candidate for radicalization?
And he loses his family and he loses his home and he falls victim to unscrupulous lenders. And I also have this unscientific theory, and I think this would hold true for a lot of people our age, right? Which is when you get older, you become a little bit more isolated. You don't go to as many social events. Life gets harder to make friends.
And so if you are in a position where you lose things and you lose people and you lose friends and you lose material things, loneliness is a pandemic. It's a pandemic that I think affects. But this is also true for young people.
men too, I think, especially men is that, you know, when you're lonely and you don't have anyone to reach out to, and then you, someone reaches out or you find something that you connect with, there is a real sense of belonging. And now you have something to fight against. You're fighting the good fight. And, um, I wonder how you feel, Andrew.
You do such a great job of kind of humanizing Kelly, and I think we need more of that because these are our friends and our neighbors. These aren't strangers. Our friends are neighbors and our family members. I wonder how you feel. I feel that at some point people are going to come home. You know what I'm saying? People are going to come down off the ledge, and we are going to have to –
kind of like, I don't know, deprogram a little bit. We're going to have to welcome them. And I fear that all the judgment on both sides is making that really hard to do. What do you, how do you feel about that?
I think 2028 is kind of the goalpost year because Trump's in office now. So a lot of these people like on the Kelly side of things, they don't have that underdog complex that put the battery in their back for so many years. Yes. If he does good things for the country, if the bottom line is improved for the working people of America, we're going to report that too. I hope that happens.
I'm not the kind of person who's just so anti-Trump that I won't give him credit for positive change in the country. I hope that happens. I agree with you. It does happen. A thousand percent. Yeah. These people will calm down. They'll have access to mental health services.
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Chapter 6: What impact does social media have on journalism today?
I grew up in, like, Center City, around North Philly, in Fairmount. And then I moved to Seattle when I was 11. And then, yeah, I mean, I've always been, like, my mom always took me to libraries and encouraged me to be curious and talk to new people. But really, I had this high school teacher named Calvin Shaw, who was my journalism professor.
And he really, like, taught me that it was cool to be, like, smart and actually be curious about things. Because before then, I was only into, like, skateboarding. Fuck yeah, Mr. Shaw. Fuck yeah, Mr. Shaw.
Teachers are great.
Before then, I was only into skateboarding, rapping, writing graffiti, just fucking around, trying to steal beer, things like that. Regular kid stuff. Freshman year shit. How do we steal as many beer kegs at the same time as we can?
And then he taught me, yo, you can live just as crazy of a lifestyle without the risk and without the consequences, and you can be a journalist and go wherever you want and go to the craziest places in the world and get rewarded for it. And I was like, damn, for real? Yeah.
And he would let me leave school for hours at a time as long as I could report back by the final bell at 3.30 and show him substantial progress on a feature article. Nice. He was sick. And then he left the same year that I left in 2015. Well, I graduated. I didn't drop out. But yeah, I don't know where he's at now. I think he's in Hawaii. I haven't even talked to him since.
When somebody helps you so much in life, you almost don't even want to tell them how much they help you sometimes.
Yeah, there's an old saying that I like that is don't meet your heroes. Don't remember your heroes. Don't meet your heroes. But Mr. Shaw, if you're out there, I mean, he lets you go out of school as long as you were back by the 330 bell. What a fucking rock star. That must have had a huge impression on you as a young man. Like, hey, he sees something in me. He's giving me the faith.
He's giving me the trust to go out there. My teachers... wouldn't even let me out of the front row. I mean, honestly, they wouldn't let me out of the front row.
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Chapter 7: How did Andrew transition from 'All Gas, No Brakes' to Channel 5?
And he's like, I just remember he sent me an email in all caps and he said, not relevant. Whoa. And I was like, what do you mean? And he told me, he's like, this newsroom has a hierarchy. You're a freshman at this. This is your first week writing for the school newspaper.
If you want enough clout in the newsroom to pitch your own stories, you have to just do these bulletins for like a year straight. So I had to write about stuff like English department tries to seek new writers. Yeah. The Pope visits campus. Hoverboards ban due to safety concerns. School safety officers voice their concerns about vaping in classrooms, like straight up boring shit.
It wasn't until sophomore. I think actually at the end of that freshman year, I quit the newspaper and I hitchhiked alone around the whole country by myself all summer just out of frustration with the newsroom. I was like, you know what? Fuck this. I'm going to create my own gonzo path by any means. And then I realized at the end of that 90-day hitchhiking voyage, like, you know what?
The job at the school newspaper isn't half bad. I'm just going to try to put my foot down and really write what I want about. Sure. Yeah. So then I got back the next year, my sophomore year, for the school newspaper, and I started popping off my own stories. And then, you know, I continued to write for the school newspaper for the rest of college.
You are like Hunter S. Thompson, but much more clear-headed. You hitchhiked across the country. Yeah. Yeah. So you must have some story. You must have some story. We I mean, Chrissy and I, we we know a lot of hippies. And so we've seen our fair share of hitchhikers and every hitchhiker has a great story. What is the shadiest situation you got yourself in?
I mean, definitely the scariest situations. I mean, being mistaken for a prostitute at certain trucks. Oh, yeah. Those situations are kind of scary. But most people, when they realize you're not a gay prostitute, they get so embarrassed and ashamed that they pretend like they're just joking and they drop you off. Yeah. It goes pretty well.
Definitely the scariest one, just the most viscerally scary one, is when a guy picked me up in Tifton, Georgia, which, as you know, is rural. Tifton, yeah. Yes, Tifton's a truck stop. That's what it is. And he picks me up and just doesn't say a word the whole drive. No way. And that was the weirdest one.
He was like, he had these wraparound kind of like redneck shades, giant red beard, and was just chewing dip and not saying a word. Wow. You know what I mean? He was like, where are you going? And I told him where I was going. I think it was like Macon. And he was like, all right. And didn't say anything. And that just scared me.
because most of the time people are so curious like oh my god you're hitchhiking what's yeah what are you doing yeah absorb some of your information and figure out what's up with you he just had no curiosities and i thought i was gonna die the whole time but then he just he was like right here's good i was like let me out i don't know why that kicked me out so bad he was trying to decide the whole time whether or not he was gonna hit on you he's like
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Chapter 8: What challenges did Andrew face in the entertainment industry?
Uh, and I just got, I was like, yeah, I don't think I'm, I don't think I'm in for this. I don't think I'm down for just writing it. No, I wasn't cut out for it, but it didn't help that the guy was a total... The driver that picked us up was a total maniac with a lot of road rage.
I'm just curious, what state were you in when you had that experience?
We were in Colorado when we had that experience.
Were you guys in the mountains or in the plains?
We were driving from Denver north.
Oh, so you guys weren't in the mountains.
No, we were not in the mountains.
Yeah, ironically, whenever you cross to a certain elevation or like, you know, whether it be the mountains or the West Coast, the culture of hitchhiking changes. Oh, yeah. Because if you were to take the 101 from Seattle down the Pacific Coast to Santa Barbara, you're going to have the best time. It's super safe because hitchhiking is a culture there.
It's also a culture in the mountains between like Aspen and Vail and towns like that and Basalt. But, dude, as soon as you hit flat land, the hitchhiking culture becomes pretty sketchy. It's a little bit different. The people who pick you up in Arkansas, it's either people who think you're addicted to drugs and they have a son or a niece or nephew who's also strung out. They want to help you.
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