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

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

In this episode, Louis speaks with gonzo journalist and fellow gangly documentarian Andrew Callaghan. The pair discuss Andrew’s life after cancellation, whether lizard people run the world, and his legal issues with Melania Trump.     Warnings: Strong language and adult themes.     Links/Attachments:    Film: This Place Rules (2022) - HBO  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23950956/    Video: Flat Earth Conference (2020) - YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H110vCGvTmM     Video: Minneapolis Protest (2021) - YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZPeD2miyF8     Film: Dear Kelly (2025)  https://www.dearkellyfilm.com/     Video: Hunter Biden Returns (2025) - YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4WCtYDtgbM     Song: Because I Got High, Afroman (2000)  https://open.spotify.com/track/0rRboI6IRuGx56Dq3UdYY4     Article: A Full Guide the sexual misconduct allegations against YouTuber Andrew Callaghan (2022) - NPR  https://www.npr.org/2023/01/20/1149748975/a-full-guide-to-the-sexual-misconduct-allegations-against-youtuber-andrew-callag     Video: In Response (2022) - YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQt3TgIo5e8     Video: Clavicular Interview (2026) - YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_6mni6k0Zw     Video: Nick Shirley Interview (2026) - YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IrMqA3fVO0     TV Show: Da Ali G Show - Ali G Interviews Donald Trump (2003) - HBO  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lau6sqyRku0     Film: The Settlers (2023) - BBC  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002bm1y     Article: Trolls for Trump (2016) - The New Yorker  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/trolls-for-trump     If you've been affected by the topics discussed in this episode, visit spotify.com/resources.    Credits:  Producer: Millie Chu   Assistant Producer: Maisie Williams  Production Manager: Francesca Bassett   Music: Miguel D’Oliveira   Audio Mixer: Tom Guest  Video Mixer: Scott Edwards  Executive Producer: Arron Fellows       A Mindhouse Studios Production for Spotify   www.mindhouse.co.uk   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Louis Theroux podcast. In this episode, I'm joined by American Gonzo journalist and YouTube sensation, Andrew Callaghan. For those of you who aren't familiar with Andrew's work, he is the creator and host of independent journalism platform Channel 5, which boasts 3.5 million followers on YouTube, not to be confused with the UK's Channel 5. side high-profile interviews with Hunter Biden, clavicular and Shia Leberf, Andrew presents episodes roaming around the streets of America, attending NRA conferences and joining spring breakers on Miami Beach. And many other things.

You may even have seen him without realizing it. He used to wear a comedy big suit with a flappy tie with Channel 5 on it, and the hair was sometimes wild and unruly, often holding a tiny little microphone in the style of certain YouTube documentary makers. And at the beginning, a bit like my good self, it was a little more Mickey-taking, satirical, enjoying the comedy of people with strange beliefs. And then he matured and specifically there was a pivot point where he was covering the George Floyd uprising or riots, whatever you want to call them in 2020.

and we talk about how he got more serious and the journey that he's been on. He went on to direct This Place Rules for HBO, a documentary about the January 6th Capitol Riot, and more recently, Dear Kelly, a film that investigates the life of a conspiracy theorist and traces his background and beliefs. It's a conscious attempt to not just hang out with and enjoy the weirdness of a guy who's gone down the conspiracy rabbit hole,

but also engage with it emotionally, understand what's motivating him and others to find meaning in conspiratorial content. In 2023, two women came forward with allegations against Andrew of sexual misconduct, leading to him taking time away from his work. After a nine-month hiatus, Andrew returned to filmmaking in late 2023. We discussed this in the chat. We discuss Info Wars, the far-right news outlet and conspiracy propaganda, platform created by Alex Jones. Not the UK's one show Alex Jones, but the one in America

talks like this, kind of. Not really. My interest in sitting down with Andrew was, well, it goes back a couple of years at least, and has to do with the overlap in the kinds of stories we cover. And Andrew's obviously a creature of a different generation of documentary makers and content creators, different platforms, YouTube, whereas I was a beast. BBC and Network TV in America creation. But we are interested in similar sorts of things. We recorded this conversation in May at Spotify HQ. Andrew had just flown in and lost his luggage.

So he had to pop down to TK Max on route to the studio, hence the high-vis look for people watching on Spotify. A quick warning, this conversation contained some strong language and adult themes. All that as well as much else besides coming up. This 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 Jim Shark continue to trust Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash louis. That's Shopify.com slash louis. Here we are in the flesh. I know. Thanks so much for having me.

I would say you're a big inspiration. Thank you. And it hasn't escaped my attention that in a couple, at least a couple of interviews that I've seen that you gave, you've shouted me out, you've given me props. Yeah, it's a specific listening style where you're just giving people enough to keep going. And it's not so much like you're being over-affirmational

because that freaks people out too. Like, you're like, yeah, hell yeah. But you're not making them feel dumb, so you're giving them the patience and the space to keep going. That's something I learned from you. I call it the toddler nod. You go like this. It's the most slight head movement that you do

that just keeps people talking to where you think they're done and then they just keep going and they give you the best sound bite after a couple different nod sessions. You're making it sound so technical and I don't even... This is going to get like shop talk, but that's fine. Like I do have a couple of things that I impart.

You know, it's not rocket science, but one of them is just... And I don't know if you do this is just that people perform themselves when you're interviewing them and that's fine. Like you kind of want their performed self, whoever it may be. But what you also notice is you want to sort of get outside of that a bit.

And if you say to someone, okay, we're going to get a few wide shots and the mood changes. And the person you're interviewing, they kind of relax. And they sort of think they're off. They know they're being videoed. They know they're on mic. But the vibe changes. And you might even say like, was that okay? Or they might say that. Or you go like, how do you feel? And you get a very different energy. So even if they know they're wearing a loud microphone and they can see a boom, if the camera in retreats gets a wide shot. Some part of them thinks the interview is over. In the traditional sense. In the traditional sense. It's not like they think they're off mic. It's just that they think the formal part of the interview is done and now they can maybe be a bit more themselves.

Yeah. So it's not a hot mic moment, but it's like sometimes the decompression ritual causes them to say like how they really feel. And it kind of allows you to commentate on the interview or revisit whatever the thing that you perhaps feel was the most interesting part you go like that thing you said about um you know you did once meet the lizard people did you really mean that and you could you could you know you like you can dip your voice down of it yeah and it can be more did you really mean that yeah and they go like yeah yeah and it was he was nine feet tall and it was completely green you know what I mean that's a pretty good America yeah um anyway Listen, we're going to talk about what you do.

We're going to geek out on journalism. We're also going to talk a little bit about some allegations that were made against you. I hope you're okay with that. We can talk about, for those who don't know your work, how do you describe what you do? I would say it's just gonzo journalism. Maybe not in the literary Hunter-R-Thompson sense, but it's independent journalism, interview-based content creation.

the New York Times and the Atlantic and stuff, they won't use the word journalist to describe me. So they would say RV YouTuber. Really? I like that one, because even though I'm not that, it sounds great, like, you know, checking out new RV parks and amenities and libraries and dumping wasted spots.

You used to travel around in an army. Yeah. But journalists would be the word that I would use. So the New York Times, do you think that's a style, they literally, it would be part of their style manual like we can't actually call them a journalist? I think that the American press establishment

is very hostile. toward those who didn't come up inside of it. It's unfortunate because we actually have no problem with them. I went to school for journalism. I graduated in 2019. I planned to work at like a traditional newsroom because I love like the grind. I love waking up and picking up the phone

and getting out there and following the beat. But the industry was in free fall and collapse. I think even between 2015 when I started college in 2019, I think of the newspaper industry had gone from like $82 billion a year to like 12. Like frozen yogurt makes more money than press did at that time. And so naturally, we have the option of either working at like a mainstream press outlet if we're lucky for 45K a year. Or we can just move into RVs, travel around the country, work freelance, start creating content and do things a different way.

So like there's no beef. It's frustrating that even sometimes I feel like some of the fans, like I'll make a dope video and they'll be like, mainstream media can never. Even on a Hunter Biden interview, the top comments like, CNN's going to shit their pants when they see this. I'm just like, there's no problems. The door was just closed by the time we wanted it to open. Well, you did say CNN is out to get me. When did I say that?

I don't know. I don't think I would have said that so directly. Maybe that was just like a thumbnail. That's definitely a thumbnail. We did a Don Lemon thing? Oh, that was a crazy experience, yeah. I mean, that was probably my most negative experience I've ever had with the media outlet before. That was during the HBO film promotion.

It was weird because they had booked me this. press tour. Because we should say at a certain point you got this movie deal you worked with Tim Heidecker and Jonah Hill?

Yeah, yeah, a bunch of people. Were they very involved? No. I mean, with rounds of notes. They were involved in getting it sold. Especially as soon as Jonah Hill came on, 824 bought it immediately. But yeah, like, I had been given

this weird media training by some people at HBO. Like, I had to sign an NDA, but I'm just going to break it. And they were just telling me how to respond, if they asked me about Trump or if they asked me about

the upcoming revolution or misinformation. They're like teaching me how to pivot. All this weird stuff that like I thought didn't actually happen. It was like a media black box of like 30 suits on Zoom where they were telling me how to respond to questions. So I go on CNN and they tell me like, hey, Don Lemon's going to ask you about your life, the movie, all that stuff. So I get on there, Don Lemon like, this is live.

Immediately goes like, what can you tell us about Enrique Tario's mental state leading up to January 6? And I was like, for one... Enrique Tario, the leader of the proud boys, right? who I still had an active relationship with the proud boys because I was still covering the proud boys, not to mention they were involved in ongoing criminal litigation. So he's basically asking me to snitch on someone

that I'm actively working with at the time. So I just responded, I was like, it's not so much about individual people involved in men's groups. It's about the mainstream media system, the 24-hour news cycle, the divisive nature of the media and how it divides people into perfect consumer groups to make sure no change happens.

And I mentioned CNN's also complicit in that. I don't know, I was just like upset because I, you know, looking back, maybe I shouldn't have called out CNN on CNN, but it was just in the moment. I was like so burnt out from touring. And then pretty much as soon as that wrapped up, my handler, the HBO had assigned me, was like panicking. She's like checking her phone, whatever.

I'm like, what's going on? She's like, Time Warner C-suite is furious. I'm like, what's Time Warner C-suite? And she was like, oh, well, the same people who own HBO on CNN. And like, they're just mad as fuck. Like, you're going against protocol. You weren't supposed to do that. And so they didn't book me any more press appearances after that.

For real. Yeah. So I'm not saying CNN's out to get me. I'm not like a red-pilled, like, anti-mainstream media. Escape the Matrix guy. The UK audience may not know Don Lemon was at that time a CNN anchor, right? What was he trying to get from you? I don't know.

I think that liberal mainstream media has this weird thing where they want to make me seem conservative. It's very strange. Like I went on, this also was never aired, but I went on NPR. And it was, again, supposed to be a premiere for my movie in Boston on January 5th, 2023. And she asked me, she said, It's the interview that it went semi-viral, right? Was this the one where-

It went semi-viral because a fan filmed it. Right. They refused to air it. Really? Yeah, and she asked me, how do you think the Sandy Hook families would feel about you platforming one of the most despicable people in history?

Not knowing that the Sandy Hook lawyer, the one who represents the families, Mark Bankston, was like a huge fan of the film. The families loved that scene. Yeah, this was the segment that you'd done with Alex Jones, right? Yeah, where we're like working out, like, with our shirts off. Like, it was... I was going to talk to you about that one, because it is an amazing segment.

And you see Alex Jones in all his modes. Like, he comes on, let's get this right. He comes on and he says, I did the Sandy Hook killing. I normally can do him better than that. Yeah. I created cancer, hair loss, gingeritis, and acne. Yeah. So he's kind of leaning in to the media caricature of him. I created cancer, which would be one thing, but he just keeps going and going.

Yeah. which leaves you in a weird position. But then he backs down and goes like, of course I didn't create cancer. But he's kind of making a point. Yeah, make me a bogeyman. I don't care. Yeah.

But then I think the bit when you're interviewed by NPR, she brings up the fact that there's a scene where you're working out with him. Yeah. And what is he drinking? Jameson. A half gallon of Jameson, which is a popular American whiskey.

Or it might be Irish. Oh my God. I think it is Irish. Okay, people in the UK know what Jameson is. He was drinking. He was drinking whiskey. And the point was to highlight the absurdity of Info Wars. And even though these people were instrumental

in ramping people up for January 6th, behind the scenes, this is how they're living. They're in the sort of like goofy, sort of semi-alcoholic prankster state. And it was very deliberate and it was on purpose. And at that time... And I could see, like, it was funny, it was surreal. I could see why some people might have an issue with it.

The problem was, at that point, and I'm sure now they don't feel this way, liberal mainstream media, and I mean anti-leftist, you know, liberal establishment media, they thought that by limiting problematic viewpoints from being platformed that would somehow

subvert the rise of fascism and far-right ideology in the U.S. They thought that if you could censor people and send them on different platforms

like Rumble and Gap or if you could stop people like Alex Jones from having a platform in these major studio films and documentaries that somehow their power would go away

and evidently that didn't work it actually made people might have been a smaller focus group but they became twice as militant on smaller platforms and now they are back Elon Musk bought X

and now they're back to their previous level of influence, if not more. So I think at the time, they thought that I was part of the problem for giving a platform to people. But at the same time, those same people thought that I was like a liberal agitator who was sent there to make them look bad. So I was put between a rock and a hard place where conservative outlets and pundits thought that I was like a liberal tool of the establishment.

And then liberals thought that I was like a sort of cozying up to the right. Even now when Variety wrote about Dear Kelly, which is about a man broken down by economic factors who found the far right as a comforting place, they wrote like, Andrew's piece of maga apologia seeks to humanize those who want the destruction of our democracy. Yeah, so I don't know why they keep doing

it. I'm not going to say the outlet, but they were again asking me if I hang out with Enrique Tario, they're still on this beat of like, you say that you're a progressive, but I saw you hanging out with Forgiato Blow in Miami, which is a mega rapper, and I'm like, yeah, man, I'm a journalist, I hang out with people to get them comfortable enough to interview them sometimes.

Or just to meet them. You know, not that I'm like just hanging out with them for that purpose. But, you know, you know how it is. In the field sometimes you get lunch or coffee with someone who you fundamentally disagree with. And it's part of the, I guess, discovery process. And that's my legal term to describe it. Yeah. I think that regarding the NPR interview, it felt a little bit odd.

And I could see you were offended. It was clear you were offended, right? Well, you know that it was supposed to be a premiere. No, I didn't know that. It was a premiere. And she wouldn't shake my hand backstage because she was like, I don't know whose hand. you've shaken. Before?

Yeah. So it was really just like, what is happening? And especially that coming after the CNN interview, I was like, okay, these people don't have my back anymore. You have, I've got five key episodes of All Gas No Breaks. This was before Channel 5, right? Yes. All Gas No Breaks is back. We bought it back.

There was a corporate fallout. You lost the label. Yes. Lost the label. And then you got it back. Yep. Jan 2020, pre-COVID. The Flat Earth Conference.

Yes. Seven million views. Really? It's a lot. It's very short. It's like, what, eight, nine minutes? That's one of my favorite videos. It's a classic.

It's a great place to start. Yeah. How would you describe it? Yeah, it's a flat earth conference. It's people who believe the earth is flat. How did you find out about it? I was at the rate of Area 51, which was 90% content creators and 10% lost souls. One of the lost souls was like a divorced dad who was like, I'm going in there, man.

He's like, I don't go to fuck what they do to me. What year was that? 2019. Did anyone actually cross the... This fucking guy. This guy that I met the divorced dad, he was like drinking these alien-themed bud lights in his RV. And he's like, I'm a deadbeat man.

He's like, I'm worthless. If I'm going to go down for something, it's going to be getting the truth about the aliens. Yeah. So he gave me the info about the flight of earth conference. But how far into Area 51 did he get? When you get close to the perimeter fence, they have a weapon that makes your body tingle.

Stop it. Yeah, that's what he told me. It's not out of the question, is it? That could exist. He said that his body started tingling like he was like getting a fever and a flu at the same time. And the cutouts of army men were like coming out of the sand. Like, you know, imagine a toy soldier but real life. And they had fake gun sounds.

So that he was being shot at. And he's getting closer to the fence. Well, he has a flat earther. But the flat earth conference was recommended. Do you think there are UFOs at Area 51? No. No. So carry on.

So I get there. And the first question they asked me when I get into the courtyard is, are you guys globe tards? you know, which is a person who believes in a spherical earth. I said, no, man, I can't stand those guys. Did you? Why did you say that? Because I had to get a press pass. Right, but if you said, I'm not sure.

Oh, I would have never been allowed in. Really? They really hate the conventional scientific. Yeah, because they think those are people who fall for NASA propaganda. And as flat earthers say, you can't spell Satan without NASA, which is phonetically true. so go on so everyone that I met there was a lost soul of some form

looking back now at the flight earth conference I realized that it was kind of like it sort of foreshadowed the kind of lost souls that would be dragged together during COVID with isolation and like the amount of misinformation

that was distributed online but everybody there had essentially lost their livelihood in some way there was one canceled tattooer there named Watson Atkinson who had been like canceled for being hansy with a client in Brooklyn or something

and you know he was living in his RV and he was a newly converted flat earther one of the guys wearing a truth shirt or just the word truth on it. This car had truth on the side of it. He was disinvited from his family Thanksgiving because of his belief in different Anunnaki style theories. There was

comedian Owen Benjamin was headlining and he had just been fired from Hollywood and kicked off of SNL, I believe it was, for anti-Semitic tweets. That rings a bell. But everybody at the Flat Earth Conference was sort of dejected. Been through a personal crisis. A bit like June 6? Exactly like January 6. They were people who had been dejected in some way.

And for whatever reason, they felt like the world was a battle between good and evil. And they were on the good side of spiritual warfare. There's no accountability to be taken. They're just like, I got fucked over because I'm the good guy and the world's ran by bad guys. And we're going to figure out who these bad guys are together. And they were looking for community because they had lost theirs. And community that validates their version of events. A lot of them rapped to quite a high standard.

Everybody wraps. What was that all up? I mean, even though it's like a nice. minute segment, it's almost like a rap musical. Yeah, yeah, there was... There's two or three raps in it. Yeah. Do you remember any of the rap?

Of course. Go on. Earth is flat jack, flatter than a flapjack. We about to black flag. Globers get your backpack. Asmusa, exfuscant flap upon my snapback. Some shit like that. You used to rap?

I still do. Do you? Yeah. I rap in Spanish. My Spanish name is Andres. I just recorded my first song recently. So I'm going to start my Spanish rap career as soon as I get back from. Why not English?

Well, because there's enough English rap. And I wrapped on English in high school But you know To me It sounds crazy But you would spit some of your old bars I don't have any bars to spit Oh you must remember some from back in the day

Yeah Go on Okay okay okay okay I'll do this because we're on Louis Thro podcast Well I shall I share the lyrics That got me kicked out of high school Yeah Okay

Backdoor in these hose on my white goon shit With a bagged up zip In my North Face vest That's it I've got I've got more I've got more. I've got more.

Let me think of a couple. Living lavish, I'm a savage, but I tend to hide it. When you're a Seattle-wide client, you've got to keep it solid. I keep a goddess off the Mali while I'm driving. Bascalis, Anaconda, Hermione. It's very good. It's nice, but you're just saying them. You're not performing them.

I've lost it. But I'll get it back. I'll get it back. Do you know what I mean? I didn't feel like you were owning the lyrics. Well, I don't have the same vibe anymore as I did when I was a high school graffiti writer. Right. rapper. But the rapping

was journalism, believe it or not. I was rapping about the shit that I was doing, exploring the city, sneaking out at nighttime, talking to bums all night, drinking twisted teas, catching tags, climbing on bridges and stuff. It's good stuff. That was a flat earth conference. It's crazy.

So strange. It was a great time. Does it get... Do you think it would be an obstacle to a like... For a while you're getting good content. You're like, this is great. Yeah. And let's get another one. And this is going to be amazing and then you would be talking to them and thinking actually i don't think i could be friends with you because this would get in the way i'm down to be friends with everybody and i don't think that it

would get in the way but they would reach a point where i would have to establish my opinion you know like if i was with a flat earther and the cameras are off we're getting a beer or something kicking it within 20 minutes it'd be irresponsible for me to not be like hey dude i don't believe in the flat earth i believe in a spherical did you not level with them while you were filming I would relate to questioning authority and questioning narratives, but I wouldn't be like, I'm a flat earther, man, let's do an interview, because that would just be too duplicitous for me. Especially nowadays with streaming culture, everything's live.

You can't really do what she used to do. There's one of the guys who's wearing a hat and you're going, flat gang. Flat gang, yeah. Flat gang. That's a Chief Keefe reference because even familiar with the Chicago drill artist, Chief Keefe started in 2013 or 2011, actually. He would take these ecstasy pills called flats. ecstasy is very popular in Oblock and in South Chicago.

People don't know that, but those guys take ecstasy all day. I think it could have to do with PTSD, but it's also good for staying alert and being up. It's not like cocaine where you have to use it every 30 minutes. You can take a flat, pressed ecstasy pill like a blue dolphin and be up for like eight hours, having a great time. Never taken one, but that's just my observation. So Chief Keefe would say, Flat Gang, and he would say, I don't pop X, I pop flats. So Flat Gang is a Chief Keefe reference. But I used it, and I added this thing to level with the flyerthers.

It was funny. Thank you. That's seven million views. Minneapolis protest. Yeah. That was a big moment. That was the moment. How was that the moment?

It changed my entire brand from a comedy platform and a satirical interview show to a serious journalistic outlet. Because I was providing a service that mainstream outlets weren't allowed to. Why couldn't the mainstream journalists do? Well, there was two things. One, it was still COVID. And they had protocols where they couldn't talk to people. They had to keep a large physical distance. They had all this weird, like, testing protocols and stuff.

And in the moment, it was happening then and now. Like, Kmart is on fire. You know, we don't have time to get a COVID test and get insurance approval to take our gear out there. And I just think that they didn't. We should make clear because it could be ambiguous. This was June 2020, it was at the height of the George Floyd uprising. I was in Minneapolis, in South Minneapolis during the riots, three days after George Floyd was murdered.

And yeah, I also just think that they didn't want to, they didn't want the perspective of the protesters. You know, there was the perspective that was critical of the protesters. And then there was centrist coverage that just acknowledged the fact that there was shit on fire. But nobody was asking people at the riots in Minnesota, why are you doing this? What experiences have you had in your life that makes you feel like it's worth it to burn down Lake Street where you presumably live?

And so that was an interesting time. And I felt like what I was doing wasn't particularly special. I was just with my friends who happened to be from, Minnesota, do the interviews, film for like a half an hour, went home, edited it. I never saw a reaction like that before. I mean, people were like, oh my God, I was so nervous when I saw you covering this because I was like, is he going to make fun of the protesters like he did at the Flat Earth Conference or at Talladega? And people were stoked on it. Because the protesters were presenting cogent narratives for what had brought them to the thing. Yeah. To the thing.

Yeah. And that opening line is like always going to be in my head. I said, what are you doing out here. He pointed at the fire and he goes, everybody feel like that. Everybody feel like that. Is this the right thing to do? No. But this is how people are actually feeling. And everything is inevitable. And that was just crazy. This is a guy with like

a can of gasoline in his hand who just burned down Kmart or AutoZone or something. And I just felt like, wow, like even though it wasn't like the most complex set of words, it perfectly summed up. There'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 the George

Floyd incident being captured on video the way it was was just an inevitable point of how 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 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 like the beginning of my my new career It just enabled me to be taken more seriously in the field, gave me interview access to different people. And it just changed how people thought of all gas, no brakes.

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 worst, depending on how you look at it. And you'd been, 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 protest and violence in the case of the George Floyd riots? But 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. 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 L.A. riots. I don't know. I can't think of a comparative tool. But, no, well, if you compared it with Jan 6, I'd be, I mean, Enrique Tario 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 harvesting their anger, turning it in the clicks for money. It was unfair. I mean, Trump should have been charged for it.

all those people all Sydney Powell should have been charged for it general Flynn should have been charged not you know Dave from Nebraska who just like has no friends and has been like smoking like 40% weed listen into these fringe podcasts every day for six months straight and his communities and collapse all small businesses in his town have closed he has no friends anymore he can't go out 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. They were treated horribly, man, and it's only made them double down. Right. A lot of them have been since pardoned. 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, you know, Q&N on January 6 or a, you know, wrongfully convicted person in Louisiana, it's not rehabilitative. The recidivism rate is ridiculous. The conditions are horrific. 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. Yeah, 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, you know, 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 like 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 U.S. So we got sued for wiretapping last week, which is violation of the federal wiretap act.

Never happened, but we platformed a guy who has like 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 6th. Is he Q&N on? I would say Q&ONA adjacent.

I mean, I don't like to put people in that bucket. Because the people who espoused some of these beliefs don't even necessarily follow Q or follow Q drops, but they believe all of the Q and non-tenants. So I would just say that, yeah, 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. It 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.

A trafficking infants. Yeah, but in this world, Trump is one of the good guys, and 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 Q&on.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. He'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 6 was supposed to be the storm. So everyone who stormed the capital was like expecting that to be like the one-two play.

Yeah, so they were very confused when they got arrested. And like, it took like years for that confusion to wear off. Some of them are still like, all right, when's the storm coming? Just for the general language, they were doing so-called cue drops. Basically they were uploading to 8chan, right? Yeah. These kind of cryptic messages purporting to be from Q-Droping. you saying things.

It was very sort of being there, sort of Peter Sellers thing where it was like, the garden shall be weeded, but the water will be truth. And people are like, oh, that,

and then something would happen. Yeah. That's what they were talking about. Yeah, I think that it was to say. It would have been better if I had a real example. I think, I mean, that's pretty accurate.

But sometimes it would just be like an 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. Yeah.

It was one of those stories it 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 the kind of conspiracy president, right? He rode conspiracy narratives into the White House right the way back from like the Bertha Gate stuff. Yeah. He was talking about Obama actually was African and didn't have a birth certificate and shouldn't be president. And that was like, 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?

Yeah. 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 Ikeesh, people were susceptible to the Trump phenomenon. Well, I mean, I think it's good to have a healthy amount of skepticism as to like 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 sciop to distract people from like the reality of some of like 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.

His father and son team. But I think that retrospectively, like, Q&R analysis now has to be, like, looked at with the Epstein file releases at the same time. Because 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, like, flat earth and lizards and chemtrails and 5G towers controlling your mind and making you a communist? If it was a sci-op, who would be doing it? people associated with Epstein, intelligence, trying to move the target and basically drown the entire thing and just unbelievable bullshit so that you associate the word, you associate Epstein with flat earth. It works pretty well.

Do you believe that? Yeah, 100%. Really? Well, I mean, I'm very normy. 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 normally 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.

Well, that's an unbelievable scenario. Or that if he was killed, which, again, I don't tend to believe, but that it was killed by some rando not on the orders of the deep state. Like, 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 Megadale stuff? You know this. You get a lot of points in jail for killing a pito.

I have seen a couple peto podcasters on YouTube. That's an explosive genre right now too. Petro catchers. Yes. Yes. Not petto podcasters. Is that what I said? Yeah.

No, peto podcasters are not doing well. It would be very niche. Yeah, that's very niche. I'll leave that to you. Okay. Petro catchers. They're booming right now. So you think.

I'm not trying to pin you down. You can't. If there was a PSYOP, it would be associates of Epstein. Are you going to give names? Do you have people in mind? Yeah, Trump. You think Trump. Bannon?

I mean, everybody that was named in the files, pretty much like all of the tech oligarchs right now that are buying up mainstream press outlets, Ellison, Andreessen, Bezos, Musk. That's why when I talk about QAnon, like, we can talk about the sensational elements, which are obviously the majority of it. But now you look at it a bit differently with the full Epstein file release, 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? It's almost impossible to look at outside that prison 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, you know, whether it's Jimmy Saville or Muhammad Al-Fayette 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. So 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, you know, an elite, you know, pedophile blackmail

network. But I said, like, there's too many unanswered questions now. Yeah. You know, 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, like, 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, it would be kind of awesome if they were lizards. Like, just, if you remove the moral dimension, it would be, you know, obviously horrific. But can you, what would be more amazing that? Holy shit, Alex Jones and David Ike were right. They actually. They actually. 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. Handy cam footage of lizards in the room. Are you being sued by Melania? No, that 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 Wolf 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. Michael Wolf has? Yeah, because I mean they're 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 too extreme, or I don't have the amount of information to push back. But I let him 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 says anything other than they were in a room together. 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.

What did that feel like when you got that? Blesser. Awesome. I bet. It was epic. I'm like, oh my God. The first lady wants to kind of sue me in a sense, in a sense for a billion dollars. You know, I was just living in an RV four years prior outside of Flagstaff in India. You felt like you'd made it. Yeah, dude, it's awesome. You know, there's little moments like that, like this moment where 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. Which 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 decision. So it has some standing. Kind of, yeah. But it's typically like a doom and gloom letter like from a bully lawyer. I never fold to any cease and desist letters typically.

Because I'm, because I do the aforeman thing or I weaponize the stricand effect. Because when people sue you... Afro-man thing. Afro-man whose big hit was because I got high, which was a banger. Thank 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-ma. Exactly. So the stricand 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.

Yeah. I met him on nowhere. That was kind of perfect too in a way. Yeah. It was so random. By the way, everyone's saying this thing and it's not true. Like, oh, 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 was why I was confused maybe. Oh, sorry. I don't, I've just heard people say the stric sand 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. It'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, I'm gonna fucking sue you. Please stop saying I'm a paedophile. Who was saying that? You're what? No, 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 the new term for it. 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

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 going to get a letter and it's going to scare the fuck out of them. They don't know that you. you will publicize it and then that will, in a sense, lead them to back off because they don't want the bad PR, because nobody wants bad PR. Actually, that's maybe 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 like the just 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. Even 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 paedophile, but Nick Fuentes has actually started selling, I think, and certainly wearing Jeffrey Epstein-branded shirts.

Yeah. He's also said before that, like, Epstein was epic and wasn't a pedophile. Yeah. 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 Sernovich, I'm sure he didn't come up with it, but he was sort of Manosphere before Manusphere 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 stop with the conflict. Provoke outrage. I 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.

But 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. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. When you're starting a new venture, support is everything,

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash louis. That's Shopify.com slash Louis. Let's talk about what happened. Okay. Are you ready? Yeah, I'm down to talk about anything. Okay. So right, 2022, your movie comes out on HBO.

Yeah, yeah. 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 is crazy. 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 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. It's not true. And another woman said that he attempted to put his hands down my pants and I was fighting him during this. And 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, you'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 but I just tried to do what I could to do the right thing and took some time off there'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'll bring a certain lens to it. It felt to me like the beginning of accountability. I mean, I definitely spent the next six months, like, in recovery,

in different kinds of situations, making amends with people that I feel like needed to be made amends with, you know, privately. Because accountability looks like making amends with an individual, not necessarily advocating for yourself to a bunch of supporters who have 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,

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. And 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, you know, 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 So many 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

And 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 companion and, you know, experience, I'd go to a new town, post my location, like, who wants to hang out? Sometimes 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, like, there's situations that I felt like were all good, where, you know, someone may have looked back and feel like, 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 don't want to let me down. And I probably should have been more considerative of that. I 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 canceled or... 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. You know, when I got the financial request, you know, from the person, I told the collaborators.

And they said, we got your back. I showed them all the text messages, including one from right after where she's. 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. What 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. I don't know. Like, I try not to be salty about it because at the end of the day, it was blown up on a massive scale, specifically by the press. So, you know, that was like my first moment ever being covered. That was like the first time my name was ever said in most of these outlets,

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 you know, what it would mean to have to publicly defend me in a moment like this. Most 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, Info Wars reached out. Yeah. Info Wars 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. You 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 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 me in regards to like controversy. We jokingly call it the cancel verse that you pass through the, 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. No, no.

But, 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 Info Wars. 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 fighter flight state.

Come, you know, 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. Thank you, man. Didn't you, though? Yeah, he's pretty easy to get along with. Unless you're like...

You would have love to have you in his stable. Absolutely. It would have been perfect because I would have been like the kid who like 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 secret. 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. I'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, you know, 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, like, 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, you know, the ability for people to fold on you. you know and being a journalist you piss people off so 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 dear kellyfilm.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 paywall yeah and it did more in revenue in 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 55 plus $1.52 processing fee. So I think it ended up with merchandise and lifetime purchases around a million dollars. Wow. 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 what I was 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, clavicular, you interviewed. And he seemed to get annoyed with you. I 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. It felt 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. Right, I think he's on the same.

spectrum. Yeah, yeah. And 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. We should say he's a looks, Mac. Does everyone know who he is? Do you think the normies? No. Clivicular, 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 got into a different mode. Well, I'm just trying to explain to people. He believes in non-FDA, non-CD-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. Yeah. So he sort of took over that, whatever the place in the culture that, whether it was Sneako or Andrew Tate, in the matter of months, he just blew up. And it's important to note that clavicular discovered looks maxing on in-cell 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 out on in-cell forums, PSL forums. I found out about this look

Pick up artist hate slut hate and looks maxing which is the three tiers of the in-cell community and 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 just put in that I didn't mention that in the interview

because I just wanted to maintain amicable dynamics but like it was him who hit me up to do the interview he DM me out of nowhere I was like yeah what up

and asked for a number so he knew who I was like 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, like, no, it's a joke.

We're not Channel 5. We're all gas, no brakes, reframed as Channel 5. And he was like, holy semantics, man. It's the same shit to me. So he was just playing dumb. I'm sure there's some pickup artist style, like, code word for what he was doing, similar to nagging. Some kind of nagging thing. 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 manipulation technique. How did it end afterwards? I just left. More recently, you did Nick Shirley. Tell the people who Nick Shirley is. Nick Shirley is a content creator who used to be a Mormon missionary in Chile. So 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 U.S. by producing fear-mongering content about every oppressed demographic you can possibly think of, whether it be immigrants, liberals, gay people, whoever it is. And he was recently really signal-boasted 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 peace 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 like 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 in the world it seemed a legit story in the sense that

well the New York Times did a follow-up coverage with like actually there was systematic abuse of the 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. So it's interesting because it, 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 who are eating pets. I mean, that's a lie. But sometimes it's just something that's, as you say, been amplified. Yeah. 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. Really? Yeah, these sort of algorithmic, like, worlds and the world of reactionary right-wing street content, like 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,

like, 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 Parlor and Truth Social. That was the first era where you saw like, I guess, Trumpers and stuff,

like going into Portland to like interview Antifa where they're masked up, undercover. That's when you saw like videos about like the collapse of San Francisco or the fall of England really start to be produced by the top dogs, like the Tommy Robinson's 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 kind 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. It's people are miserable. Community 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, Haitians eating cats, not the cats themselves,

migrant gangs taking over Aurora, Colorado, or a fraud in Minnesota, which it was more true than the others. Or, you know, Portlanders, you know, on Mayday, wearing black block, throwing, you know, water balloons full of piss at cops, all these things. Going back to your point about divisive content and being controlled by deliberately enticing, misleading or over-emphasized stories, it was pre-2016. It was Facebook originally, wasn't it? And that term fake news originally was talking about they'd find a photo of people putting pieces of paper in a dumpster and they'd 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? Have 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's up to no good, that would change a 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-thro sense. Thank you. You know what I mean? Like, where they don't even- My sense is taking your clothes off

and saying, you want to party. Yeah, but you can swing and, you know, I've obviously learned from you a lot, like, without them knowing it, which is crucial. Thank you. You just sort of the opposite of Pierce, Morgan. What would you ask Trump? That's a really good question, man. So many things. But I don't know That's so good in interviews It's very rare that someone Gets the better of him Yeah

Famously Sasha Baron Cohen interviewed him as Ali G And Trump kind of rumbled him Yeah 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 like I've got a business idea for you What's the 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.

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. You 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 butt. who are the FBI and National Security Director is like pulling up and you're like coming off the golf course with an iced tea or 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 or 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. Like 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 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?

Yeah. 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, you know, 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 Manusphere doc. And then others are like, no, no, no, this is where we stop.

We're holding this line. Yeah. It 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 Young. younger, right? You know, they're totally anti-Zionists, borderline, anti-Semitic in every way, because they can't see nuance in anything. And yeah, so I... Definitely anti-Semitic. Certainly. And that's a big problem, too. But I think that 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. I read a thing about how Ben Shapiro's ratings have really created... Yeah, because of Israel. I mean... 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 McFentez. And they're very skeptical of the support for Israel. Well, I mean, yeah, but it's, 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 babies in Gaza. By the way, Jews suck ass. And you can tell us for 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 of 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 laid to the party. Tucker Carlson is the ultimate propaganda scripter. You know, he is the face of Fox News' disinformation campaign for seven, eight years straight. And even before then, 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? But if I don't turn on Israel, I'm probably going to lose most of my support base. And so you just realized, I've 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. You know? Is you trying to stay one step ahead of the right wing herd by finding a new demon? It's like, it's getting old.

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 U.S. So now we have to turn it up a notch and explicitly call it. fallout 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 in, you know, 10 days or something being like, you know, 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. You know, and so I think that now public tide has shifted so much and that he has to take that stance. I think, like I said, he'll love Vance when Vance runs. But he hates Vance. He won't hate Vance when Vance makes small. Or like friends, I can't remember.

They'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 a ice raid or something. And they're just like, yeah, deport them all. Clean the city up. We 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.

How is your... I feel like we covered a lot. I have unlimited time. Jesus. Fucking all. Got me. You gave up the RV lifestyle. Yeah.

Why? Was it just too it 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. So it was a mix of a few things. I still take a little road trips, but I'm very, like, you know, deliberate now. I've heard you say, though, that you miss the road trip days, like the fully kind of fan life days. I miss being young and not so cynical about people and fully. adventure and you know just not not having gone through various experiences that have affected my outlook

for the worst 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 hell-bent as a 1920 year old to like succeed and like do everything and work every day and go everywhere and meet everyone i wish i would have committed to a more slow growth you know oh yeah 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? Um, when you were growing up? Well, they divorced when I was 12 and my dad, like, before then I think he was a salesman. And then after that, he like 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, uh, yeah. Were you financially secure? No. But I mean, I wasn't poor, but we would have to switch apartments every, every time the lease was up. So 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 like a trailer park in the boonies. My mom had a downsize to a studio apartment.

And so there's definitely a financial motive, you know, where I'm like, I got to succeed to put on for them. Like I bought my mom a house or not bought, but I'm renting her a really nice place in Santa Monica. on the beach, and 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, it was just a ticket to ride. It was just a way of getting everywhere I wanted to be, because it's, you know, 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 home. work as like a 16-year-old who just wants to like be kicking it downtown having new conversations

every day wasn't something i really cared for you've talked about having a medical condition yes sort of what's it called uh 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 and eighth of shrooms Liberty caps, which is a regular amount of shrimps 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 at my entire visual field. Still? Like a TV screen with static. 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. Now, but you forget about it because it's just been so much time. I don't even really think about it anymore. But at the time, certainly for the five, six-year period after, 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. But 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, stop smoking weed and just would drink after school. Do you still drink?

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 tweet the algorithms, right? And 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 create a space or a culture in which, you know, free speech is allowed, but division isn't amplified and, you know, 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 sensor information allows that person to take on a sort of David and Goliath attitude, which judo effect makes their influence.

information spread twice as far. I tend to think that we're doomed in the short term and that 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 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 neurocircuitry doesn't change. You know, we have this evolutionary endowment that's adapted to, you know, the conditions of millennia ago. You know, same reason we eat too much fat and sugar is like, we talk about 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, 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 guides going into, I need to see your algorithm. them, 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 Jan Alpha, which is the current 15 year old, 16-year-olds, supposedly have the lowest literacy rate.

They'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 were too distracted by it to care about them. So 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 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. 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. But 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. And we're back. Thank you for watching. or listening wherever you get your podcasts.

Some housekeeping. The quote I attributed to Mike Sernovich, 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. He's profiled in a great New Yorker piece. in 2016 by Andrew Morantz. 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 US Capitol and said his remarks before the siege were, quote, totally appropriate. He 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 baron would be more likely even that seems quite unlikely

regarding the first welcome to the chat baron hi baron come on the pod regarding the first allegation made against andrew in twenty twenty three 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. The 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 is Millie Chu. assistant producer was Maisie Williams. The production manager was Francesca Bassett. The music in this series was by Miguel Di Olivera. The executive producer was Aaron Fellows. This is a Mindhouse Studios production for Spotify. This 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

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