S8 EP3: Andrew Callaghan on the ‘cancelverse’, lizard people, and whether he’s being sued by Melania Trump

25:55There's a kind of poetry in it. What do you think everything is inevitable means? That the boiling point would have been reached regardless. and the George Floyd incident being captured on video the way it was was just an inevitable point of what was happening already in some of these communities, whether it was on camera or off camera. They just needed a jump-off point to point to something so direct and horrific like that, to be like, this is why we're upset. We're hitting the streets. And so how did that change things for you? Those words were like the beginning of my new career. It just enabled me to be taken more seriously in the field gave me interview access to different people.

26:34It just changed how people thought of All Gas No Breaks. And it also soured the relationship with the parent company, doing things media. They wanted me to mostly film party content and capture coverage of people yelling slogans like, show me your butthole, so they could put it on merchandise and sell it on their platforms. So it kind of just changed things for the better and the worse, depending on how you look at it. And were you on a salary at that time? Yeah, 45K a year. Just to be that guy for a second, A lot of the conservative or right-wing commentators were like, hey, how come the mainstream media was sort of sympathetic to protests and violence in the case of the George Floyd riots?

27:13But then they had a big problem with Jan 6. Well, for one, they actually weren't sympathetic to the George Floyd riots. Biden and Harris were like condemning violence the whole time. That's a false narrative. Additionally, a lot of people were charged and convicted of crimes related to the George Floyd riots. It's like my friend Dylan from Minneapolis who was just in the third precinct when it was burning down. He had to spend three and a half years in prison in Leavenworth. So like people did get convicted. There's still people in jail from the riots. I mean there was probably more immunity than I guess would have been afforded in like 92 with the LA riots.

27:47I don't know. I can't think of a comparative tool. No, well, if you compared it with Jan 6, you'd be – Enrique Tarrio got like 30 years. I think, I mean, first of all, I want to say the January 6th convictions were ridiculous. The fact that you're giving people that amount of time when they were encouraged to do what they did by the most powerful political party in the country who essentially controls their loyal media outlets like Fox. And no one's being charged except for the individual soldiers on the front line. Not all the people who made millions of dollars, you know, harvesting their anger, turning it into clicks for money.

28:23You know, it was unfair. I mean, Trump should have been charged for it. All those people. Sidney Powell should have been charged for it. General Flynn should have been charged. Not Dave from Nebraska, who just has no friends and has been smoking 40 % weed and listening to these fringe podcasts every day for six months straight. And his community's in collapse. All small businesses in his town have closed. He has no friends anymore. He can't go out and drink with his buddies. All third spaces that were already dwindling have gone away. And now he's like, what's my purpose in life? to defeat the forces of evil that are causing all these unrelated problems.

28:57They were treated horribly, man. And it's only made them double down. Right. A lot of them have been since pardoned. Yeah. And I think they're looking for compensation now. Yeah. I mean, the prison system is horrible in the United States. It's awful. I mean, regardless of if you're a QAnon January 6th or a wrongfully convicted person in Louisiana, it's not rehabilitative. The recidivism rate is ridiculous. The conditions are horrific. I mean, you've seen so much of this. Sure. Yeah. But I also want to ask you about, because we were going to do this last week, and then it was like, oh, I can't leave now because I've got a lawsuit and I have to raise a million dollars.

29:31Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty much like the higher I've grown in profile, the more I've become a target for financial exploitation, and especially because we're totally independent. We don't have like a major newspaper, despite maybe a lack of success or funding. We'll have lawyers on retainer to defend their journalists. But if we make a documentary about a powerful person, then they can just jam us up in civil court. we have to file the anti-slap motion. We have to do all these free speech protection things, but they're very costly because you don't get a public defender in civil court like you do if you're charged with a crime in the US.

30:01So we got sued for wiretapping last week, which is a violation of the Federal Wiretap Act. Never happened, but we platformed a guy who has a vendetta against a private lender named Bill Joyner. Bill Joyner is the guy who sued us. Kelly J. Patriot. Okay, this was part of your 2025 film, Dear Kelly. Yeah. In which you had a Jan 6, is he QAnon? I would say QAnon adjacent. I mean, I don't like to put people in that bucket because the people who espouse some of these beliefs don't even necessarily follow Q or follow Q drops. But they believe all the QAnon tenets. So I would just say that Q was allegedly like a high up civil servant, some big wig inside the deep state who was on side with Trump and the idea of some massive disclosure project.

30:49It was supposed to be a military whistleblower within the deep state who was exposing the truth about the elite cabal of satanic pedophiles at the top who are secretly running things. But Trump's one of the good guys. Trafficking infants. Yeah, but in this world, Trump is one of the good guys. He's supposed to purge the swamp of the deep state, drain the swamp of the deep state, basically. So Q was leaking stuff on QAnon.pub, which is like a random open source website about the upcoming storm. And the storm was supposed to be that Trump would essentially put all the evil deep state people in jail, like Hillary Clinton.

31:20He'd go into Air Force One in the sky. And while he's up there making the plays from the ether, the world would be purified of satanic spirits. So January 6th was supposed to be the storm. So everyone who stormed the Capitol was expecting that to be the one-two play. Really? Yeah, so they were very confused when they got arrested. And it took years for that confusion to wear off. Some of them are still like, all right, when's the storm coming? just for the general they were doing so called Q drops basically they were uploading to 8chan right these kind of cryptic messages purporting to be from Q saying things it was very sort of being there sort of Peter Sellers thing where it's like the garden shall be weeded but the water will be truth and people were like oh that and then something would happen that's what they were talking about I think that it was better if I had a real example I think I mean that's pretty accurate but sometimes it would just be like a um aerosmith instrumental with like an american flag gif and it would be like tomorrow and then some random shit would happen tomorrow and they'd be like that's what q was talking about it was one of those stories that comes along it feels like this is very symptomatic of the times we live in the first thing to reflect on is that trump came to the presidency as a kind of conspiracy president right he rode conspiracy narratives into the white house right the way back from like the birther gate stuff.

32:42He was talking about Obama actually was African and didn't have a birth certificate and shouldn't be president. And that was way before 2016, wasn't it? And then subsequently felt like he was a beneficiary of various conspiracy narratives, as sort of seen as disruptor in chief, right? And it was amazing how he kind of rode both sort of establishment horse and then also almost like quasi-New Age UFO-believing horse, right? Yeah, I mean, he was able to unite every kind of skeptical person. Why do you think those kind of crystal UFO, turbo New Age David Ickish people were susceptible to the Trump phenomenon?

33:25Well, I mean, I think it's good to have a healthy amount of skepticism as to the elite crest of society who's running the world. They bought the anti-elite narrative. Well, I mean, it's good to have an anti-elite narrative. And I personally believe that QAnon was like a psyop to distract people from the reality of some of the new Epstein disclosure stuff that we're seeing. They know who Q is. There's a few theories. Some people think it's Ron or Jeremy Watkins. That's what I'm talking about. It's a father and son team. But I think that retrospectively, QAnon analysis now has to be looked at with the Epstein file releases at the same time.

34:00Because that ended up being true. And that was one of the core tenets of QAnon. So it wasn't complete bullshit, but it was 80 % bullshit, which makes you wonder, why is that 20 % truth being lumped in with flat earth and lizards and chemtrails and 5G towers controlling your mind and making you a communist? If it was a psyop, who would be doing it? People associated with Epstein intelligence, trying to move the target and basically drown the entire thing in just unbelievable bullshit so that you associate the word, you associate Epstein with Flat Earth. It works pretty well. Do you believe that?

34:33Yeah, 100%. Really? Well, I mean, I'm very normie. The file releases... I genuinely think, I'm going to get cancelled probably for this. That's so overused. I'm going to get cancelled. Shut up, Louis. But I might surprise people by saying, I think Epstein probably did kill himself. That's how normie I am. Come on, man. I'm serious. Because of the shame of the whole situation? He was at the end of the road. He doesn't want to be in prison for 20 years. Yeah, I mean, there is a possibility. It's not that weird. Like, well, that's an unbelievable scenario. Or that if he was killed, which, again, I don't tend to believe, but that he was killed by some rando, not on the orders of the deep state.

35:11Like you think some, like, pedo smasher in jail was like, this guy's got dirty. Yeah, but MDC, where he was locked up, is pretty extreme as far as the surveillance goes. Like, you think some, like, Peckerwood or Mexican mafia member could have got to him, like Miami megajail stuff. You get a lot of points. You know this. You get a lot of points in jail for killing a pedo. I have seen a couple of pedo podcasters on YouTube. That's an explosive genre right now too. Pedo catchers. Yes. Yes, not pedo podcasters. Is that what I said? Yeah. No, pedo podcasters are not doing well. That would be very niche.

35:40Yeah, that's very niche. But pedo catchers. I'll leave that to you. Okay.

35:46Pedo podcasters. They're booming right now. So you think, I'm not trying to pin you down. You can. If there was a psyop, it would be associates of Epstein. Are you going to give names? like do you have people in mind um yeah trump you think trump bannon i mean everybody that was named in the files pretty much like all the tech oligarchs right now that are buying up mainstream press outlets ellison andreessen bezos musk that's why when i talk about q anon like we can talk about like the sensational elements which were obviously the majority of it but now you look at it a bit differently with the full epstein file release even even in its redacted form and you're like okay there actually was some nuggets of truth in there so why was the misinformation promoted so hard.

36:26It's almost impossible to look at outside that prism now, comparatively to right after January 6th. I'm going to gently push back, and you might be deeper in it than I am. My take on it is that Epstein is a crystallization of a form of abuse that, if not routine, is not that, except in scale, right? Of course, scale, but not that uncommon at elite levels of power. And across the board, you have VIP people in different fields, business, otherwise, you know, whether it's Jimmy Savile, or Mohammed Al-Fayed, or Harvey Weinstein, or most recently Cesar Chavez, the civil rights leader. They've all used their positions of power and privilege to satiate their like, kind of deviant sexual interests.

37:13So rather than seeing it as a conspiracy i would see it as just the way in which people get corrupted especially men not exclusively but overwhelmingly and prey upon the women that they get access to and the girls well i think both things can be true right if you have an elite crest of people with unchecked power who are using that to take advantage of people because they know that they have the infrastructure to do so with impunity maybe those people would have some kind of organization so that they could protect each other but i'm open to it not being a conspiracy i think that would be great if there wasn't an elite pedophile blackmail network.

37:47But I said there's too many unanswered questions now. But like I said, with a full disclosure, I think it should be pretty easy to figure out. But I know that a lot of times with conspiratorial thinking, you kind of want the truth to be as extreme as possible to justify the amount of research you're putting in. So I'm not like a full-time Epstein researcher. It would be kind of awesome if they were lizards. If you remove the moral dimension, it would be obviously horrific. But what would be more amazing? holy shit Alex Jones and David Icke were right they actually are shape-shifting reptoids I did not see that coming that'd be a pretty good like that'd be one of the best moments in history handycam footage of lizards in a room yeah are you being sued by Melania?

38:29no she threatened to sue well actually fill the listeners in and the viewers on what that was all about so I interviewed Hunter Biden you know that was a pretty prolific interview thank you and he was like for about six hours yeah it was quite an interview It was very long. And then he basically insinuated in the podcast that Epstein introduced Melania to Trump through some modeling contract. And that was a claim that was made by biographer Michael Wolff, who knew Epstein quite well. If you believe him, I'm not quite sure. He's being sued as well. He's taken some of the statements back as a result of legal pressure.

39:00Michael Wolff has? Yeah, because, I mean, they threatened to sue. So backing up. So I published this claim that Hunter Biden made. And we should say for legal reasons at this point that Melania Trump denies that she was introduced to Trump. I don't know if true or not. I just talk to people. I let people mostly say what they want unless it's too extreme or I don't have the amount of information to push back. But I let them say it. And there is a picture of them together, right? Yes. There's a photo of Donald, Melania, and Epstein, I think. Yeah. Yeah, so she sends him a legal demand letter saying, if you don't get Andrew Callahan to remove your interview from YouTube, I'm going to sue you for$1 billion and name Andrew Callahan as a plaintiff for whatever the word is.

39:41What did that feel like when you got that letter? Awesome. I bet. It was epic. I'm like, oh, my God. The first lady wants to kind of sue me, in a sense, for$1 billion. You know, I was just living in an RV four years prior outside of Flagstaff in Indiana. It felt like you'd made it. Yeah, dude, it's awesome. You know, there's little moments like that, like this moment, You're like, damn, I'm not even 30 yet. I'm getting to do some pretty cool stuff. I'm thinking of suing is a classic kind of completely meaningless statement. I'm thinking of suing, you know, like. But it was a cease and desist. It was, okay.

40:16Which to me is like one. You familiar? Not really. A cease and desist is basically a lawsuit threat. And it says if you don't cease distributing the problematic clip, we will sue you. So it's pretty much like giving you a chance to pull things down before you file a litigation. I'm understanding. Kind of, yeah, but it's typically like a doom and gloom letter from a bully lawyer. I never fold to any cease and desist letters, typically, because I do the Afro-Man thing, where I weaponize the Streisand effect. Because when people sue you... You do the Afro-Man thing. The Afro-Man whose big hit was because I got high, which was a banger.

40:48Thank you. I don't know why I said thank you. As an American, thank you for appreciating our culture. People say we have no culture, look at Afro-Man. Exactly. So the Streisand effect, you know, when you're getting sued by someone or they want to bully you with paperwork, you just publicize it on your own platforms. We're blessed to have that opportunity and that ability. So that's what you did with the Melania letter. That's what I do with every legal threat now. So what happens next with Melania? Nothing. She just, I mean, she issued like an unprovoked public statement in the White House recently that was like, by the way, Epstein did not introduce me to my husband.

41:20Yeah. I met him on Grindr. That was kind of perfect too, in a way. Yeah. It was so random. Wait, wait, everyone's saying this thing, and it's not true. Like, oh, wait, wait, what are they saying? Yeah. That was a Streisand effect big time. Oh, the Streisand effect. I've been misusing that term. Okay. That's why I was confused, maybe. Oh, sorry. I've just heard people say the Streisand effect. The Streisand effect is when Barbara Streisand tried to remove, Google Maps had pictures of her house, and she said, I want you to remove them. She kicked up a fuss, and as a result, everyone looked at the pictures of her house.

41:53it's when you try and suppress something and draw attention to it instead so it would be like if i went online and was like anyone saying i'm gay yeah please stop saying i'm a pedophile who's saying that wait you're what okay i guess i'm not that's my point the way that i was using it is whenever somebody tries to bully you into silence you basically publicize the fact that they are bullying you into silence we'll come up with a new term for it that's the i think that might be judo the judo effect i think so that's where you use someone's strength as their weakness they come at you and then you sidestep and yeah throw them so their strength becomes a disadvantage and it works for us because half of like the legal bullies like don't know the media game and like the way content creation works now so in their head they're like this guy's gonna get a letter and it's gonna scare the fuck out of them they don't know that you will publicize it and then that will it's in a sense lead them to back off because they don't want the bad pr because nobody wants bad PR.

42:47Actually, that's maybe not true. That's not true at all. Maybe the streamers clavicular wants bad PR. That is such a normie. That's a very 2010 take. That was my time. When did that change? I think that the rise of the attention economy, doom-scrolling content, the collapse of attention span, and just now that everybody wants to be a content creator and there's no jobs, people look at it like, even if people are hating on me or saying bad things about me, at least they're talking about me. It boosts my SEO. I can turn this into an opportunity to make money and get exposure. Exactly. Rage baiting, trigger coating.

43:23Even like Nick Fuentes, who sort of used a lot of those techniques. Because I was going to say, well, you might still not want to play with the idea that you're actually an abuser or a pedophile. But Nick Fuentes has actually started selling, I think, and certainly wearing Jeffrey Epstein branded shirts. Yeah. He's also said before that Epstein was epic and wasn't a pedophile. I mean I think the thing about rage baiting is whenever you rage bait even if people are mad they're talking about you which gives you room for like a redemption arc or like some sort of other thing that you can do there's a Mike Cernovich I'm sure he didn't come up with it but he was sort of Manosphere before Manosphere was a thing in the sort of 2015-16 era I think and his thing was like conflict creates attention attention creates I don't know you can monetize it I guess but you've got to start with the conflict provoke outrage.

44:14I think that's especially true if you don't have a marketable skill or like a talent to present to the world. For us, like, I think people appreciate the documentaries. So I don't think we need to create some kind of beef. We don't have to call people out or, you know, I don't have to squirt lime juice into my eyes and run naked through shopping malls. We hope, but we'll do that if we absolutely have to. So I think we came up doing stuff like that, maybe. Yeah, I mean, we're... You know what I mean? Like, I think I wouldn't strip off for a documentary now. it would feel a bit like I was trying too hard.

44:43Well, I mean, back in the day, I did do that. I think your earliest work had like a sprinkle of more satire in it than it does now. And my early work had more like, I don't want to say like more of a pompous attitude, but I would definitely like look into the camera like Jim from The Office, and I would definitely apply crash zooms to people. And it felt like the people were sometimes the butt of the joke, and that's changed.

45:18This episode is brought to you by Shopify. When you're starting a new venture, support is everything, which is why you should lean on Shopify. With tools to design an eye-catching website that reaches customers, Shopify is the ultimate business partner with a built-in support system. and you don't have to be a design pro to make an awesome online store that matches your brand there's hundreds of templates for you to use shopify even has commerce experts to help you out so you can stress less and start growing see why businesses like gymshark continue to trust That's Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash Louis.

46:04L-O-U-I-S. That's shopify.com slash Louis.

46:21Let's talk about what happened. Okay. You ready? Yeah, dude, I'm down to talk about anything. Okay. So, right, 2022, your movie comes out on HBO. This place rules. It's excellent. It kind of turbocharged what you'd been doing, knitted it into a narrative. It felt more prestige, but every bit as crazy. Like, you did a great job with it. and then not long a few weeks later on tiktok i think a woman makes a serious allegation of feeling um that her i guess her safety was violated that she felt violated the quote was i told him no i told him i wasn't interested he did eventually get consent because he wore me down it's not true and another woman said that uh he attempted to put his hands down in my pants and I was fighting him during this.

47:10And then there were a few others and then there was a more serious one later where two women said that they actually felt their consent had been violated. You did a statement. You said, you acknowledged that they might have felt pressure. Was that the phrase? I mean, it's hard to even look back at that public statement because, I mean, to be in that moment, you know, within, I think, a four-day period, you lose all of your support. You know, you get dropped from your agency, lose every sponsor, your best friends evaporate. Your DMs on Instagram have like tens of thousands of messages and half of them say, you know, kill yourself.

47:50You're a piece of shit. And the other half just say, take accountability. And so I didn't feel that what was going on made any sense. Certainly didn't match up with my lived experience of what they were talking about, but I wanted to do the right thing. You don't ever want to be someone who's hurt somebody and you just want to try to move forward and analyze the situation after the fact, figure out how to avoid ever making someone feel that way again. So I recorded that statement because I felt like it was the right thing to do. Now it's hard to say because it gets brought up all the time and people say, oh, you admitted to it.

48:20But I just tried to do what I could to do the right thing and took some time off.

48:26There's a certain template. And I'm not comparing it in terms of how serious it was. Truthfully, I don't know. But it felt like it didn't meet, well, evidently either didn't meet or didn't reach the criminal standard, right? So it was in this area of some women are saying they felt violated and a guy saying that it wasn't like that. I guess the question would be, if you're in the middle of that, because it's not clear to me what accountability necessarily looks like. If the statement you gave felt to me, I'm obviously a man, I bring a certain lens to it, felt to me like the beginning of accountability.

49:04I mean, I definitely spent the next six months in recovery in different kinds of situations, making amends with people that I feel like needed to be made amends with privately. Because accountability looks like making amends with an individual, not necessarily advocating for yourself to a bunch of supporters who've never met you in real life. I mean, they probably want a level of it, but I mean, what happened behind the scenes leading up to the first allegations is something that I've been trying to figure out where and how to talk about. The initial accuser sent me a message eight minutes before the film came out asking for a portion of my fat HBO check to assist with therapy.

49:45And from what I know now, what I've learned since then, that was trying to get me on the hook for more. So it's hard to want to take accountability when you know that that happened and there's not much clarification on it. but I would like to know more but I'm not sure how to reopen that without bringing back all those feelings Is there a takeaway for you? I think the biggest mistake that I made was engaging romantically and sexually with fans I was 22 years old living on the road and what I would do when I got to a new town I had just gotten famous online and I would go to a new town, I'd post my location You were literally living in an RV at this time And so what I would do out of loneliness or desire for companionship and experience, I'd go to a new town, post my location, like who wants to hang out.

50:35Sometimes I'd post a bar location and 250 fans would show up. And it was like my birthday every night for years. But I think that the power dynamic at play was something I didn't realize was happening. I never have seen myself as like a famous person. I still really don't. But I was engaging with like, I was hooking up with fans all the time for years. Really? And I think that there's situations that I felt like were all good, where someone may have looked back and feel like they wouldn't have done that if I wasn't who I was, or they looked up to me in some way and they felt like they didn't want to let me down, and I probably should have been more considerate of that.

51:07I think so. Date more intentionally, not rush to hook up on the first date, and just don't hook up with fans if you're a 22-year-old internet celebrity. What do you call that time? Would you call it being cancelled? I don't know, man. It's hard to say because my audience is bigger now than it was then. What happened with your movie? It's still online. Where is it? I couldn't find it. On HBO, but not in the UK. They halted distribution for international. For that reason? You were considered a tarnished brand? Yeah, it was radioactive. Did you get messages from your collaborators? No. Nothing. When I got the financial request from the person, I told the collaborators.

51:54And they said, we got your back. I showed them all the text messages, including one from right after where she said she had a good time. This is four years before the text was sent to me asking for money. And I showed that to them. And they were like, we got your back. We've seen the texts. It's going to be totally fine. We'll handle this. My agent said the same thing. But when shit hit the fan and when the press picked it up, yeah, they all disappeared overnight. There was no parting words, no tough love, just a total evaporation of everyone that I worked with. How did you feel about that? Terrible.

52:22What would you have done in their position? I can't speak for anybody else, but I probably would have maybe called me and expressed how they felt or maybe asked some clarifying questions because I had the information that they were probably looking for. They just didn't want to hear it from me. And because of the scale of it, I can't blame people for protecting their reputations over wanting to reach out to me. But I don't know. I do know that the collaborators knew about all that stuff beforehand. It's hard for me to feel sympathy for someone who's acting blindsided when they're addressing the public when that's not the truth of what was happening behind the scenes.

52:57I don't know. I try not to be salty about it because at the end of the day, I was blown up on a massive scale, specifically by the press. So that was my first moment ever being covered. That was the first time my name was ever said in most of these outlets, It's NBC, Rolling Stone, Reuters, Chinese outlets. Across the country, I've seen people talk about it. In Singapore, on the news, newscasters. People who didn't even know I existed. So that was the film rollout. I think a lot of people felt like their friendship with me wasn't worth what it would mean to have to publicly defend me in a moment like this.

53:31Most of the people since then, except for one, have reached out to me post-comeback and been like, I'm sorry. I panicked. I choked. Really? Yeah. Almost all of them. Yeah. But that's now in retrospect, where it's not dangerous to be my friend. Apparently InfoWars reached out. Yeah. InfoWars offered me a job a week later. That's what people don't understand about cancellation and cancel culture. Yeah. It's not the end of your career. It's the beginning of a new one. If you double down and make yourself into a free speech warrior that was silenced by the machine and kind of enter that sphere, you can make double the money.

54:10you can just keep killing it it's not the end that's what the cancellation machine which is like the press apparatus gets wrong look at russell brand i mean now it's a little harder but there's so there's so many instances of people who go on dave chappelle i mean there's like so many people who especially now where people are like a little different than they used to be in regards to like controversy we jokingly call it the cancel verse that you pass through the you you know, whatever that barrier is. Yeah. And you emerge on the other side and there's Russell and I don't mean to trivialize it.

54:45No, no. And you go to Mar-a-Lago and you can chill with Eric Trump, right? Yeah. And I'm really happy that I didn't take that route because I think the Infowars thing is a good example of how possible it would have been. You know, because they look at people who are going through that experience and they're like, I know that you've lost your friends. You're in a fight or flight state. come into the arms of the right, and they'll take care of you, and they'll make you feel seen again. And half the time when people are in that spot, they just want to be made to feel like they matter. You did have a little chemistry with Alex Jones.

55:17Thank you, man. Didn't you, though? Yeah, he's pretty easy to get along with. He would have loved to have you in his stable. Absolutely. It would have been perfect because I would have been like the kid who came up through liberal media and got spit out because the left eats their own, and now look at him. Now he's a real truth seeker. but he had to go through that to see things clearly. Now he knows who the good guys are, and he's on our team. That would have been the red pill. Could have taken it. Did you see things any differently afterwards? Yeah, absolutely. In what way? I mean, I just don't like to be around people as much as I used to.

55:51I'm very careful about who I spend time with. I definitely don't want to work with any studios, that's for sure. Why not? Because it just makes you, for one, a target for financial exploitation, and two, it makes it so there's people around you who can control your success and your trajectory in life. Like if I produce Dear Kelly, and I release Dear Kelly, and someone's upset about it, and they figure out a way to put pressure on me, I'm not going to take it down, I'm not going to denounce myself. But if you work with others, that opens up the ability for people to fold on you. And being a journalist, you piss people off.

56:25So when you made Dear Kelly, how did you make that one then? I just edited it myself out of an office in Las Vegas, my first office off the old Fremont strip. Put it out on, you know, dearkellyfilm.com. And yeah, like it was one of the highest grossing independent self-distributed films of documentaries ever. How did you distribute it? Just on the website. Really? Paywall, yeah. And it did more in revenue and numbers than this place rules. Should we talk numbers? Yeah, sure. It got 75 ,000 rentals in the first two months. What is that in money terms? That times$5.55 plus$1.52 processing fee. So I think it ended up with merchandise and lifetime purchases around$1 million.

57:08Wow. So it was cool. But I don't have any salt toward anyone who jumped off and left me hanging because what do you expect people to do? But yeah, I see the world very differently. I mean, I wish I could explain more about what I know is going on behind the scenes because it's like just very dark. But I just don't want to open that wound, you know? Really? Yeah. So then you come back. And in fact, as you said, like you've been doing some great work, like documentaries and interviews. You scored like Hunter Biden. Got him. And then recently, Clavicula, you interviewed. Yeah, yeah. And he seemed to get annoyed with you.

57:47I just don't like the guy. He was a fucking asshole, man. Like straight up. He was so just like negative. And I was trying to give him the time of day to like, I wasn't setting him up for any kind of gotcha moment. It didn't feel that you were. it felt like he got annoyed and then you got annoyed that he was annoyed well just at the end he's like this is a shitty interview you said this is a shitty interview you haven't asked me any questions about looks maxing and in fact you had asked him quite a bit what he was trying like you weren't annoyed till the end you didn't start it annoyed did you no i started it like i mean i was weirded out because he wouldn't look at anybody in the eye i think he's maybe on the spectrum yeah and uh yeah it was weird because you know he realized that he was kind of losing control of the interview so he first went for like an ad hominem attack being like you're a shitty interviewer and then at the end he asked me like are you are you secure with everything about yourself his goal was to get me to profess some kind of personal insecurity so he could gain control of the narrative in the interview and give me say he's a looks max does everyone know who he is do you think the normies no uh clavicular aka braden peters is a 22 year old new jersey man who is one of the most popular streamers on a platform called kick and he promotes looks maxing which involves peptide injections botox you've gone into a different mode well i'm just trying to explain to people.

58:58He believes in non-FDA, non-CDC approved methods of improving your physique to be more attractive to women, not necessarily to have sex with them, but to raise your value and your ROI on life. That was his brand, but he was a streamer and then he went viral with his streaming content. So he sort of took over that whatever the place in the culture that whether it was Sneeko or Andrew Tate, in a matter of months he just blew up. And it's important to note that Clavicular discovered looks maxing on incel forums during COVID. That's basically the most important thing of it. It was in lockdown during puberty, during which, in a moment of isolation, confusion, and hormonal rage, found on incel forums, PSL forums, found out about this look, pick up artist hate, slut hate, and looks maxing, which is the three tiers of the incel community.

59:50And so he found about looks maxing because he was insecure about his acne and his face and his, I guess, bone structure and muscle mass. Also, he DM'd me to collaborate. I didn't mention that in the interview because I just wanted to maintain amicable dynamics. But it was him who hit me up to do the interview. He DM'd me out of nowhere. I was like, yo, what up? And asked for my number. So he knew who I was. I'm sure. Even though he pretended, he's like, you're from Channel 5, right? Channel 5, Fort Lauderdale? You guys are part of the mainstream media. And I explained, no, it's a joke. We're not Channel 5.

1:00:20We're all gas, no brakes, reframed as Channel 5. And he was like, holy semantics, man. it's the same shit to me so yeah he was just playing dumb it's i'm sure there's some pickup artist style like code word for what he was doing similar to nagging some kind of nagging pretending you don't know who someone is i'm sure there's a term for it they've got a term for every type of uh manipulation technique how did it end afterwards i just left more recently you you did nick shirley who was tell the people who nick shirley is nick shirley is a content creator who used to be a Mormon missionary in Chile.

1:00:55So he went to go convert people in the slums of Santiago to join the Latter-day Saints for a small sign-up fee. And then he came back immediately and began making some prank content. And then after Elon Musk bought Twitter, and you could make content that was political in nature, and you wouldn't be algorithmically suppressed for producing politically divisive content, he began shooting content along the border, essentially trying to monetize domestic divisions and profit content-wise from eroding the social cohesion of the US by producing fear-mongering content about every oppressed demographic you can possibly think of, whether it be immigrants, liberals, gay people, whoever it is.

1:01:37And he was recently really Salem-boosted shortly after the first Epstein file drop when he was, I guess, dispatched after getting tipped off by a congressman, a conservative congressman or senator in Minnesota, and he was accusing and allegedly exposing the Somali community in Minneapolis for perpetrating daycare fraud. A couple days after his video went viral, after being signal boosted and shared by Elon Musk and J.D. Vance, the feds move in. ICE began Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis shortly after his piece kind of had turned the country against the city as a whole. And that's kind of the purpose of a lot of his reporting.

1:02:14Like he was just in Cuba asking people about the horrors of communism. And, you know, where Shirley goes, sweeps follow. So I expect them to get... Immigration sweeps really. Everywhere. It seemed a legit story in the sense that, well, the New York Times did a follow-up coverage where actually there was systematic abuse of the system in Minneapolis. You know, I'm just saying like it's, of course, there probably was a problem with, you know, a small community in Minnesota taking money from the federal government and not using it how they were supposed to, but why is this report being boosted? You know, you have to ask those questions and you have to look at things sequentially when you're looking at any Nick Shirley piece because he's wrapped up and tied in with the GOP.

1:02:54So it's interesting because I think you make a good point, which is that a lot of times, I mean, sometimes it's an outright lie, like the idea that in Springfield, the immigrants were eating pets. I mean, that's a lie, but sometimes it's just something that's, as you say, been amplified and strategically deployed weaponized as a pretext for driving policy. Yeah, they'll seize an anecdotal story and just absolutely coverage blast it from Nick Shirley to Fox News to everybody else. Like, do I think Nick Shirley is inherently a bad, hateful person? No, I don't think so. He's a 21 or 22-year-old kid who I met when he was filming his first YouTube video at the Turning Point USA conference in 2023, groomed and put into a world that he's not even aware of why it was created, if that makes sense.

1:03:42Yeah, these sort of algorithmic worlds and the world of reactionary right-wing street content, I was there for the genesis of it, which really was like the anti-lockdown era. That's when you saw the first non-GOP street political influencers on the conservative side of things, when MAGA formed as a market group. Streamers or YouTubers? I mean, back then, this is before streaming really took over like it has now. I think it was YouTubers, Instagram content creators, but even smaller stuff like On Kick and Gab and Rumble and Parler and Truth Social. That was the first era where you saw, I guess, Trumpers and stuff going into Portland to interview Antifa with their masked up undercover.

1:04:28That's when you saw videos about the collapse of San Francisco or the fall of England really start to be produced by the top dogs, like the Tommy Robinsons of the world, and then also people under that who are seeing that it's an effective way to make money. All this is connected to the housing and affordability crisis in the U.S. Why there's so many content creators following the lead of the influential ones is because there's no opportunities. You know, you're looking at people have three or four roommates. They're living in these like post-gentrified AI robot neighborhoods. People are miserable.

1:05:04Community collapse has gotten to a point now where only 19 % of people are a part of an in-person community. People have no friends. They're lonely, and they have no way to make money. So you see these content creators making a living for themselves, following the lead of cats in Springfield. You know, Haitians eating cats, not the cats themselves. migrant gangs taking over Aurora, Colorado, or fraud in Minnesota, which it was more true than the others, or, you know, Portlanders, you know, on May Day, wearing black block, throwing, you know, water balloons full of piss at cops, all these things.

1:05:39Going back to your point about divisive content and being controlled by deliberately enticing misleading or overemphasized stories. It was pre-2016. It was Facebook originally, wasn't it? And that term fake news originally was talking about they find a photo of people putting pieces of paper in a dumpster and they say, I found evidence of a massive cover-up and troll farms in Eastern Europe, I think, were putting up fake content. And then it was Trump then adopted the term fake news and sort of judoed it back on the guys who'd come up with it. Judo effect. Judo effect, big time. Would you interview Trump?

1:06:19Have you tried? I would, but I don't think he would do it. What about Bannon? Yeah, I'd interview almost anybody. But if it's someone that I know is up to no good, that would change the level of research required. I'd want to make sure that I came in swinging and didn't give him a softball. Not swinging, but swinging in the Louis Thoreau sense. Thank you. You know what I mean? My sense is taking your clothes off and saying you want to party. Yeah, but you can swing. and that you know i've obviously learned from you a lot like without them knowing it which is crucial um thank you you're sort of the opposite of piers morgan what would you ask trump that's a really good question man so many things but i i don't know that's so good in interviews it's very rare that someone gets the better of him uh yeah famously uh sasha baron cohen interviewed him as Ali G and Trump kind of rumbled him.

1:07:13Yeah, the ice cream glove segment. Yeah. You remember that? People say that's the only person that he could control. Yeah. I'm sure there's been others. He says, I've got a business idea for you. What does everyone love? What's the most popular thing in the whole world? What does Trump say? Music. Music. It's a good answer. So good. I still think about that one. I'm like, God damn. He was nice with that one. He goes, no, it's ice cream. And I've invented an ice cream that doesn't melt. and then Trump's like, okay, I got to be a little busy. I need to go and do something. Yeah. I think that if I were to document Trump, I'd want like a day at Mar-a-Lago.

1:07:47You know, like the lifestyle, the country club lifestyle and just the surreal nature of being in Palm Beach and like, you know, setting up like a little Iran war workstation in the basement and just having your buddies who are like the FBI and national security directors like pulling up and you're like coming off the golf course with an iced tea or a Diet Pepsi and you're like, all right, fellas, what are we getting into today? I think less so than what he would actually say to me, the atmosphere of that situation and scene are what I would find most interesting to capture. My thing used to be that he's like one of those people who, he's so self-contained, almost like a black hole, that you sort of need to see the distorting effect.

1:08:23Like an astronomer, you sort of need to observe the distorting effect it has on the bodies around it in order to chart its power and its gravity. and so I would interview Melania, maybe with Trump there, and I'd just ask her questions and then sort of kind of see what was happening between them. Yeah, Barron could be pretty good too. Barron would be better. You could follow Barron around NYU kind of like you did Fred Phelps' daughter. Yeah. You'd be like, you'd need a ladder. He's like seven feet tall. Yeah. So where we are now, there's been this strange fragmentation of the MAGA movement, right?

1:09:01Yeah. It feels like, from my perspective, having unleashed divisive content, whether through the algorithms, you know, call it free speech, call it amplification of division. Yeah. Then this final boss taboo of anti-Semitism, suddenly MAGA was like, oh, well, that one's not okay. Like, we're okay with demonizing immigrants, and we're okay with misogyny and homophobia, but suddenly there's a split and some people want to keep going and they embrace full anti-Semitism. And I looked at this in my Manosphere doc. And then others are like, no, no, no, this is where we stop. We're holding this line.

1:09:41It feels like it's probably the end of the Trump movement, maybe the Trump era because of that, at least partly because of that. Yeah, I think that Trump has lost the Gen Z and younger, right? you know they're totally anti-zionist borderline anti-semitic in every way because they can't see nuance in anything and uh yeah so definitely anti-semitic certainly and that's a big problem too but uh they i think that the the only real trump supporters would be young zionist the dwindling ben shapiro audience probably and then just boomers who just are kind of stuck in their ways yeah it's been interesting it's been interesting i read a thing about how ben And Shapiro's ratings have really cratered.

1:10:21Yeah, because of Israel. Because of his unstinting support for Israel. And that now these young right-wing Republicans who were rooting for Trump, and now they like Fuentes. A lot of them like Nick Fuentes. And they're very skeptical of the support for Israel. Well, I mean, yeah. But I try not to be cynical here, but so many of those people just don't care about Palestine. They just recognize that the tides were shifting against Israel. They don't care about Palestine at all. So they're just like, all right, cool. Let me take this moment to sort of seem righteous, you know, and be like, oh, look at these, you know, babies in Gaza.

1:10:54By the way, Jews suck ass. And you can tell they're sort of doing a hook, line, and sinker type of deal where they don't care. They just know that getting people in with the empathy card is going to allow them to spread that stuff. And it's very disappointing. Are you thinking of anyone specific? All those guys you just mentioned. Right. Well, I only mentioned Fuentes, I think. Anybody in that sphere. You think Tucker Carlson? Yeah. Oh, my God. he's just late to the party. Tucker Carlson is the ultimate propaganda scripter. He is the face of Fox News' disinformation campaign for seven, eight years straight.

1:11:26And even before that, he is like the final boss of reactionary politics. And him becoming like a main-based podcaster just shows that the independent establishment is the new corporate establishment. Because his news network, TCN, you know what their slogan is? Corporate media is dead. if you ever hear Tucker Carlson saying that best believe it's not you know what I mean and so he just I think realized at some point oh you know what like if I don't turn on Israel I'm probably going to lose most of my support base and so he just realized I got to start being like let's ask questions they're attacking Christians in Jerusalem which makes me think as an American I don't want to support these people is he trying to stay one step ahead of the right wing herd by finding a new demon it's a bit like having a new hit we need a new tune So it's getting old just bashing on immigrants or the elites in the US.

1:12:16So now we have to turn it up a notch and explicitly call out Israel. And it's a new frontier of divisiveness. I mean, I think that for one, Fuentes was hammering him. Because after October 7th, Tucker spent maybe a year and 10 days or something being like, Hamas is no different than Al-Qaeda. They must be eliminated for the progress of the West. They're holding society back. You want to be gay there? Good luck. And so I think that now public tide has shifted so much that he has to take that stance. I think, like I said, he'll love Vance when Vance runs. But he hates Vance, doesn't he? He won't hate Vance when Vance makes small— Or like friends, I can't remember.

1:12:57They're friends. I mean, I just think it's popular to hate Trump right now, but like I said, these people's perspectives change all the time. I can't tell you how many right-wing commentators are like, I'm turning on Trump. You're going too far, dude. You're Epstein's friend. You suck. and then a couple weeks later, you know, he does some type of thing, like an ice raid or something, and they're just like, yeah, deport them all, clean the city up. We've got too many illegal aliens. They're poisoned in the well. Great replacement. They read the comment sections. They sort of gauge public opinion, and they follow public opinion.

1:13:26How's your... I feel like we covered a lot. I have unlimited time. Jesus. Fucking hell. Got me. You gave up the RV lifestyle. Yeah. Why? Was it just too itinerant? Well, I had to move to L.A. to sign the deal for the HBO film, and they didn't have an editing staff. Tim and Eric didn't. They had a couple people, but I had to really be there in Burbank all the time to edit. And then, I don't know, it was just too transitory. And then obviously getting in trouble later in time, cancellation-wise, made me feel like I don't want to be back out there engaging with random people all the time. You don't know what their agenda is.

1:14:02So it was a mix of a few things. I still take little road trips, but I'm very deliberate now. I've heard you say though that you miss the road trip days like the fully kind of Yeah, I do. I miss being young and not so cynical about people and full of adventure and you know just not having gone through various experiences that have affected my outlook for the worse. I miss being naive and not being so successful. I miss not being recognized everywhere. I have some anger toward my younger self for trying so hard to succeed at a young age. I don't understand why I was so hellbent as a 19, 20-year-old to succeed and do everything and work every day and go everywhere and meet everyone.

1:14:40I wish I would have committed to a more slow growth. Really? Were you very driven? Extremely, and I still am. But I'm like, why did I want this so bad? What was behind that? I have no idea. What did your parents do when you were growing up? Well, they divorced when I was 12. And my dad, before then, I think he was a salesman. And then after that, he refused to work for anybody. So he was just flipping MacBooks on Craigslist, doing some landscaping work for people. Yep. And your mom? She was a hotel concierge. Right. So, yeah. Were you financially secure? No. But I mean, I wasn't poor, but we would have to switch apartments every time the lease was up.

1:15:18So I lived in like maybe 20 houses throughout my life before turning 18. And then once Amazon moved their corporate headquarters to Seattle when I was a sophomore in high school, They basically bulldozed the city to build cheaply constructed apartments for their workers. And after that, the rent doubled, if not tripled. So my dad had to move to a trailer park in the boonies. My mom had to downsize to a studio apartment. And so there's definitely a financial motive where I'm like, I got to succeed to put on for them. I bought my mom a house, or not bought, but I'm renting her a really nice place in Santa Monica on the beach.

1:15:49And then I bought a dive bar for my dad to run in Seattle. Were you a good student? No. I knew what I wanted to do. I always wanted to be a journalist. I always wanted to be outside where things were happening. I wanted to be on the front lines of news events. And journalism, as Hunter S. Thompson said, was just a ticket to ride. It was just a way of getting everywhere I wanted to be because that's what the job entails. You get to meet all kinds of people. So I just wanted to pull up, be active, be outside. And anything that was inside, being made to do math homework as a 16-year-old who just wants to be kicking it downtown, having new conversations every day, wasn't something I really cared for.

1:16:26You've talked about having a medical condition. Yes, sort of. What's it called? HPPD, hallucinogen persisting perception disorder. So that just came from frying my brain on shrooms when I was like 14, you know. You must have had a lot of shrooms. No, it actually, you know, that's a common response. It wasn't the dosage. It was how young I was. I probably ate a half an eighth of shrooms, Liberty Caps, which is a regular amount of shrooms to take. But you're not supposed to take psychedelics until your brain has developed. And describe what happened. So right now, if I'm looking around at you, I see visual snow everywhere right now in my entire visual field.

1:17:02Still? Like a TV screen with static. Really? Yeah. Is it a problem? No, because I've had it for longer than I've not had it now. Actually, I'm 29 now, so I got it when I was 14. It's not diminishing? No. But you forget about it because it's just been so much time. So I don't even really think about it anymore. But at the time, certainly for the five, six-year period after, it was like every day was like a nightmare because I'm like, when is it going to go away? Trying everything I could to make it go away, all these experimental tools and different medicines online they said worked. I would have been susceptible to, like, any kind of new age medical misinformation at that time.

1:17:34But thankfully, that hadn't fully formed like it had today, that industry information economy. But yeah, definitely alcohol. That's why I started drinking so much as a young person, because that was what helped the most. Okay. Around 15, just, you know, stopped smoking weed and just would drink after school. Do you still drink? Yeah. Yeah. You know, we were talking a lot about the streaming culture and this sort of new media landscape we inhabit, right? And, you know, I made a documentary about the manosphere. So I've observed it, you know, at ground level. But what I haven't really observed is how it works, you know, in the offices of the corporate tech barons and, you know, the decision makers who actually tweak the algorithms, right?

1:18:17and I'm just wondering whether because it's not visual right and it's a hard story to tell it's a kind of story about sterile offices and plausible seeming business people right but I guess my question would be how do you hold those people to account and how can we and I suppose further to that do you have a sense of how we curate a space or a culture in which free speech is allowed, but division isn't amplified, and whether that's even meaningful. Because there's sort of two ways of looking at it, or more than two, and it's hard to figure out a way through. Especially because any attempt to suppress information or censor information allows that person to take on a sort of David and Goliath attitude, which judo effect makes their information spread twice as far.

1:19:14I tend to think that we're doomed in the short term and that our future generations will have to learn from the mistakes of the previous ones. But we, and me specifically, are also the first generation to grow up totally inundated by digital media. We are the alpha generation, the test generation for what it's like to have someone spend their whole life with digital devices, phones, computers, etc. So I think that if you consider that every generation for the next 500 or 5 ,000 will also have access to the same tools, the mistakes that we've made as a generation gen z and i mean everything that comes after it gen alpha is probably going to be even worse will inform the way future generations interact with technology the thing is our neuro circuitry doesn't change really like we are we have this evolutionary endowment that's adapted to uh you know the conditions of millennia ago you know same reason we eat too much fat and sugar is like our we talk i'll get plenty of that because you won't get it again thinking that we're just hunting caribou out on the savannah do you know what i mean i didn't know that but it makes sense yeah so um i don't think you can hunt caribou on the savannah i think caribou are reindeer and they live in northern canada i think the metaphor is effective regardless of species okay thank you and so information wise you know we're easily distractible so it will be we'll have to be proactive like we'll literally have to will we make it illegal to have phones will they have government guys going into i need to see your algorithms sir because we've had reports that they're oh you know what i mean maybe it'll be something like siesta in spain where it's not enforced necessarily by like the boot of the authority figure but it's like it's just a social thing like okay it's it's after 5 p.m it's like there's a family over there and they they have phones off to four o 'clock like they're weird do you know what i mean like totally social type of enforcement well but also you know i have a theory that when so gen alpha which is the current 15 year old 16 year olds supposedly have like the lowest literacy rate.

1:21:10They're not even doing homework because of chat GPT. They don't read. They are essentially slaves to the tablets and the phones. iPad kids are now reaching voting age. I think that in a similar way where Gen X hates cable TV because their baby boomer parents are essentially overdosing on NCIS reruns all the time, I think Gen Alpha's kids will see the digital device as something that took their parents away from them and something that disabled their maternal and paternal figures from being present in their lives. And I think the anti-tech generation will be those raised by parents who are too distracted by it to care about them.

1:21:45So I would just imagine 2050, maybe we'll have hope. But it would be insane for me to be optimistic in the short term. I mean, it's fun as an exercise. And I always, I fall into it sometimes. Like this is, you know, we're going to have a watershed moment. Oh my God, we have the songbird of a generation here. It's going to shepherd us into a new era. But we don't have a figure like that. We're done for now. But humanity isn't done. We just need to be more careful in the future and to rethink how we interact with each other, especially online. Dude, I feel like we could go for another two hours, but that's not the format.

1:22:20But thank you for coming by. Yeah, man. What's going on tonight? Tonight I've got a screening of my documentary, The Settlers at the Frontline Club. You're welcome to come along if you're around. I would love to.

1:22:44and we're back thank you for watching or listening wherever you get your podcasts uh some housekeeping the quote i attributed to mike cernovich the manosphere influencer i got it slightly wrong it was conflict is attention attention is influence it's a kind of rubric for hacking the internet get the conflict then you get the attention then you get the influence um he's profiled in the new in a great new yorker piece in 2016 by andrew morance so check that out maybe we'll link to it some legal notes okay are you ready donald trump denied responsibility for his supporters storming of the u.s capital and said his remarks before the siege were, quote, totally appropriate.

1:23:37He was acquitted of an impeachment charge that he incited a mob to storm the Capitol in 2021. Okay, Donald, if you're listening, you never know. It's not impossible. It's unlikely. Barron would be more likely. Even that seems quite unlikely. Regarding the first... Welcome to the chat, Barron. Hi, Barron. Come on the pod. regarding the first allegation made against Andrew in 2023. The alleged victim sent Andrew a message offering him an opportunity to, quote, contribute to the massive amounts of therapy bills I have accrued due to the night you coerced me, end quote. She stated that this is the only time she brought up the idea of him reimbursing her in their conversations together.

1:24:21The alleged victim maintains that Andrew knew how she felt about the incident months before she posted it on TikTok. If you've been affected by the topics discussed in this episode, Spotify do have a website for information and resources. Visit spotify.com slash resources. Okay, that's it for this week, apart from the credits. The producer was Millie Chu. The assistant producer was Maisie Williams. The production manager was Francesca Bassett. The music in this series was by Miguel de Oliveira. The executive producer was Aaron Fellows. This is a Mindhouse Studios production for Spotify.

1:25:25have to be a design pro to make an awesome online store that matches your brand. There's hundreds of templates for you to use. Shopify even has commerce experts to help you out so you can stress less and start growing. See why businesses like Gymshark continue to trust Shopify. Sign up for your one per month trial today at shopify.com slash louis l-o-u-i-s that's shopify.com slash louis