What's on Your Mind: Andrew Callaghan's Gonzo Tour of the American Edge

The episode opens on the second night of the 2020 Minneapolis unrest. A college classmate, Lacey, picks Andrew Callaghan up from the airport with two friends in ski masks and drives toward Lake Street. Kmart is burning. Target is burning. She hands him a Sony and a microphone, points at a man still holding a Molotov cocktail, and tells him to go talk. Callaghan asks what he should even say. She answers with three words: "What's on your mind?"

He had not planned to be there. When George Floyd was killed he was at a Juggalo-adjacent fetish mansion in central Florida nicknamed the Sausage Castle, watching the Third Precinct burn on his phone. Friends told him to go; he thought of himself as a comedy reporter and feared it would end the brand. Doing Things Media CEO Reid warned him that if he turned a party show into a social-justice show, they would get a different host. Callaghan booked the flight on his own card anyway.

The man with the Molotov said everything happening was supposed to happen. Was it right? No. Would it help the community? No. "This is how we feel." Callaghan tells Lex Fridman that line became the undertone of almost everything he has filmed since. Aside from the outlet Unicorn Riot, he says, almost nobody else was actually interviewing the people in the street. Local news sat several blocks back and shot the fire.

Off camera he watched an anarchist wind up to torch a White Castle until a Black neighbor grabbed his arm and said they fuck with White Castle — the chain still stands on a street of burned storefronts. He watched friends sledgehammer an ATM, then fight each other when the cash sprayed out. National Guard rubber bullets caught him in the backside. The video landed, and the ambush-comedy persona started to look like something else: a reporter who would walk up to the edge and ask what it felt like from inside.

To understand why a microphone in front of a burning Kmart felt calmer than staying home, Callaghan goes back to eighth grade. At a friend named Toby's house he took an eighth of Psilocybe cyanescens — a normal adult dose, he says, except he was 13 or 14. He woke up inside visual snow, morphing edges, walls that seemed to breathe. He thought it would fade. It did not. The diagnosis is HPPD, hallucinogen-persisting perception disorder, and he says there is no cure. The snow is in the room as he talks. It is on Fridman. It is lifelong.

The only treatments he has heard a researcher treat as real are alcohol and benzodiazepines. That is how a 40-ounce of Mickey's — green bottle, hornet on the label — became a daily ritual after school at 14 and 15. Alcohol dimmed the static. HPPD also dragged depersonalization and derealization with it: the sense that you are not real, or that the world is a projection and you are the only living person. He describes a soul trapped behind the eyes, puppeteering a flesh suit that does not feel like a body.

Ninth grade handed him both the condition and Calvin Shaw's journalism class at an alternative high school in Seattle. Shaw let him leave campus all day if he came back with a story. Putting himself on the front line of intense scenes, and then watching the MP4, became proof that he was still on Earth. The first piece he published under his own name was "Inside the Deep Web: A Conversation with a Hitman," written after he found a hire-a-hitman listing on the Hidden Wiki and messaged it as a ninth grader. He was on Tor, so he felt anonymous; he still signed the article.

He is tired of the Wikipedia line that he hated every class except journalism. Astronomy's Tim, sixth-grade creative writing, a New Orleans mythology course with Charles Cannon — those teachers wrote in after that page went up. What he hated was being forced through the same Han Dynasty unit three times at three schools. Journalism hooked him for a simpler reason: everybody wants coverage, which means a reporter gets a ticket to the front row of other people's realities and then gets to go home.

After freshman year at Loyola University in New Orleans, Callaghan left his belongings in the dorm, took the streetcar to Greyhound, and bought a one-way ticket to Baton Rouge. The plan was to hitchhike home to Seattle with no money. He had spent a year on the campus paper, The Maroon, without the right to pick his own stories: the Pope visiting town, glass recycling in the French Quarter, hoverboards banned on campus. He wanted gonzo. The traditional newsroom ladder did not look like a path there. An old hobo manual, Ed Buryn's Vagabonding in America, was outdated on fence-post soup codes but still right about which railroad towns treated drifters kindly.

The first ride nearly ended the experiment. Outside Crowley, Louisiana, at a truck stop known for male sex work, a small man from Honduras in a studded leather jacket picked him up, spoke no English, and pulled into a southern porn theater with private booths. He bought two, sat down beside Callaghan, and started masturbating, offering money. Callaghan said he was just a hitchhiker. The man laughed, apologized, and drove him the rest of the way to Houston. They talked about everything except that. Callaghan had a knife and a size advantage. He did not want to use either, "especially not at a place like that."

Couchsurfing filled the nights: Catholic hosts treating it as charity, accidental nudist houses whose profiles said "clothing optional" in small type, a Santa Fe firefighter with 15 people crashed in the living room. The exhausting part was not danger. It was eight thank-yous a day, living on a frequency of shallow gratitude. Later he wanted an RV partly to stop performing thanks. Jack Kerouac was not the prompt. After he published a hitchhiking diary, strangers gifted him On the Road so often that he now refuses to open it on principle.

The lesson that stuck was about charity. Minivans with the Jesus fish and the stick-figure family never stopped. Whole families flipped him off, threw full cans of Dr Pepper, and yelled at him to go to hell, hippie. The people who extended a hand were seasonal-visa workers, drivers with less than a quarter tank, people in addiction who assumed he was hitchhiking because he had no car and would burn a day to put him exactly where he needed to go. Fridman offers a theory Callaghan says he had not framed that way: some religious communities build a value system that proves they are better than others, and the system trains them to be cruel. Callaghan says that is true.

Back in New Orleans he hosted at Bourbon House, a fine-dining room on Bourbon and Iberville that had to keep its facade while the street outside vomited, fought, and stripped. Policy: while you are serving, do not look out the panoramic windows. He remembers describing red beans and rice while a naked man in a Batman mask and twelve strings of beads masturbated on the sidewalk and the whole dining room rushed to take pictures. Manager Steven told him to keep his eyes on the table. After midnight he walked twelve blocks home through what he calls a Warriors-movie battlefield, upstairs from a gay couple who sold meth, Frankie and Johnny.

A friend suggested a taxi-confessions spinoff: ask drunk people their deepest, darkest secret and post it the next day. Quarter Confessions went viral on Instagram at once, mostly incest stories, plus a few murder confessions they did not run. New Orleans, he notes, had a homicide clearance rate around 22 percent, which is another way of saying people will tell you. A boy who looked about 15 said he had just "smoked a dude" at Magnolia playground for molesting his sister and asked Callaghan to post it and tag him. Callaghan looked it up: a homeless man, shot execution-style in a Central City playground. He deleted the clip in front of the kid and told him never to say it again. Juvenile life in Louisiana is real even when you think you are justified.

The gray suit came from Goodwill, twelve to twenty-five dollars, oversized on purpose, Ron Burgundy by way of Eric Andre. The magnetism for freestyle rap started there too. He cannot explain why rappers find him; he rapped in middle school, and Fridman thinks he simply builds a space where performance feels safe. What soured the series was regret. Almost everyone featured came to wish they had not been. Bourbon Street is an anything-goes atmosphere. Online, five years later, that same person has a family, and a child can find grandpa talking about eating ass. He realized he was doing ambush interviews while presenting as agreeable. Ali G and Borat do that for comedy, and he does not call it illegal. He just did not want to keep doing it.

Asked whom he approaches now, Callaghan says they do not extract answers. They look for open body language, people who already seem ready, including people with pain in their eyes. A recent Channel 5 film followed residents of the Las Vegas flood tunnels. The practical bottleneck they named was identification: without an ID you cannot check into a shelter, do day labor, or qualify for housing. So the crew actually took people to the DMV. Then nothing much changed.

A recovery specialist who had spent ten years doing in slow motion what they had tried in a week told him the underlying trauma has to be faced before someone can step into housed life. Breaking the shame cycle comes first. Callaghan's own generation, he says, romanticizes vagrancy when it is branded van life or Willie Nelson on the highway. People over 50 in the same spiral often feel like failures, especially if they were not there for their kids. That is not pain a tiny home dissolves. If someone does not want to change, paternalism and shame send them back to the start.

Fox 5 Las Vegas had the film taken down. It ran an hour and 45 minutes and used ten seconds of a publicly broadcast news clip. Callaghan cites the Copyright Act of 1976 on transformative use. Gray Media, which he says controls stations in almost every small town, had lawyers hit YouTube; YouTube complied. He estimates he put about $70,000 into the video, including $20,000 for human voiceovers in five languages. He is taking them to court not only for himself — he has audience, money, a partner-program relationship — but to set a precedent for smaller documentary makers who cannot mobilize either. Even if the file comes back, he says, the steam is already off its trajectory.

A week after he graduated in May 2019, Doing Things Media called. They would buy an RV, pay $45,000 a year, cover gas, food, and two hotel nights a week, and stay in the background. All Gas No Brakes took its name from his self-published hitchhiking diary. The new question was not your darkest secret but your craziest psychedelic trip. A test interview in Boulder produced ancestral aliens at a peyote retreat. Then they drove to Burning Man, a gift-economy festival that hates cameras and, in his telling, is full of well-paid Silicon Valley people who come to become their burner persona: ketamine, kaleidoscope glasses, steampunk hats, MDMA in the dust.

Street-corner extraction did not work on bottled-up burners, so Callaghan and a friend, CL, went on Burning Man Radio as "psychedelic journalists," announced a 1998 Catalina Coachmen at 10 and I, and invited trip reports. Two hours later ten people were in line. Razma said she was known in Berkeley circles for being multi-orgasmic by squinting. A man whose burner name was Kimbo Slice described watching his childhood and past lives in the toilet after a quarter of mushrooms. It was still comedy. Then they filmed DJ Soft Baby in a gold leotard, smearing clam chowder on his face and yelling that he wanted to be covered in it. The next morning every Doing Things Instagram page was down. Reid said the dancer was "at the top of MIT" — or Harvard; Callaghan is not sure — and had called enough people in big tech to hold the whole network hostage until they agreed never to post the clip again. First brush with powerful people on drugs, he says. Probably the last.

The fun, for him, started when they left elite drug parties for Alabama, Florida, Talladega, a Donald Trump Jr. book signing, the Sausage Castle. Then COVID shut the country. He was on Sixth Street in Austin the night a doorman swore the Dirty Sixth never closes; the next day it was plywood. Four depressed months in the RV in Seattle followed, until politics swallowed social life. In Sacramento, about two months into lockdown, he filmed a "freedom rally" that became his biggest video yet. Immunocompromised people told him they would rather be free and dead than alive in fear. Two groups, he says, both thought they were saving something. Mutual understanding at that point is impossible.

Callaghan goes out of his way to say Reid was a businessman protecting a festival-and-merch brand, not a villain. A different Hollywood-connected partner, unnamed, is who he blames for the collapse. As the country reopened, Eric Wareheim of Tim & Eric DMed him at a UFO mega-conference in Laughlin: let's make a show. Three days later Jonah Hill wanted in. Networks still passed, because Callaghan had signed, at 21, what rap contracts call a 360 deal: Doing Things took 100 percent of any outside income, even a $500 week at Sbarro. He had not read the fine print. A24 then offered a movie and permission to keep the digital brand. Asked what the film should be, he predicted 2020 out loud: if Trump won, major cities would burn; if Trump lost, militias would try a coup in Washington. He would follow the lead-up and the aftermath. A24 said okay.

The unnamed partner still demanded All Gas No Brakes videos on top of the movie. Callaghan said there were only so many hours, and that if they wanted double work he wanted a 50 percent profit split. They fired him and the two childhood friends he had hired. The verbatim line he remembers: "I have tons of connections in the comedy world. We can replace Andrew overnight." He calls it sidekick syndrome: people on the periphery start to believe the front man is interchangeable, forgetting that the audience came from Quarter Confessions and the hitchhiking book. The three of them got the notices in an RV Tim & Eric's company had bought, parked at a South Philly Walmart, propane just out, 15 degrees, the trailer going cold. Jonah Hill's lawyers, given to him for free, eventually pulled him out of the contract.

Channel 5 launched in March 2021 after they wrapped the HBO project. During All Gas days, when a drunk tried to hijack the camera, they would say they were Channel 5 — every city has one — and the person would leave so grandma would not see it. Channel5.com and channel5.news were unclaimed. The film, This Place Rules, had been America Shits Itself. It opens on two Miami men, Joker Gang and Gum Gang, talking trash and then fighting, a cartoon of left and right extremes; Joker Gang, whom Callaghan had followed for toilet Percocet freestyles as "Joker 305, rawest Chico alive," becomes the voice of wisdom at the end. Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, later looking at 23 years, told Callaghan two weeks after January 6 that he was glad he had not been there and did not even think the election was stolen. "Why'd you get everyone so hyped up?" Callaghan still wonders.

The Spencer family, nonpolitical until Stop the Steal in September 2020, had their whole life inside Q's mythology within four months. He has never seen a psyop devour people that fast. The child in the film walks the whole road — Hillary as lizard, the darkest versions — then wakes up, not angry at politics so much as at the letdown: they let my dad down, they let our family down. January 6 was supposed to be the Storm. The military would arrest the deep state. Trump would take a helicopter and reclaim the country. Nothing happened. The next day Trump was almost denouncing it. Trump rapper Forgiato Blow told Callaghan a lot of people's pride got hurt. Callaghan's own guess about the mechanism: get people close to class consciousness, then divert them into lizards on the moon so they never notice a conservative deep state or Trump's corporate apparatus, only a Democratic one.

The film's most radioactive guest is Alex Jones. Off camera, Callaghan says, he is the same as on camera. The studio looks MSNBC-grade. Jones told him real Americans die before 58, then warned him that putting Jones in the movie would bring serious backlash. Callaghan had to campaign to keep the scene, because 2018-era deplatforming logic said even a platform was collaboration. HBO's media trainers drilled him on "sunlight is the best disinfectant." He used none of the pointers. He does not like being media-trained. He still thinks Jones eggs people on — the January 5 speech about millions of patriotic Americans taking the country back — and then steps away when it gets hot. He also thinks Jones is right about big-tech companies colluding to deplatform, and that a lot of the rest is Infowars doing the character the audience pays for.

The promotional disaster began at 7 a.m. on Don Lemon's CNN show, the morning after a Times Square gig, Callaghan still groggy. Lemon's first question was about Enrique Tarrio's mental state before the Capitol riot. Callaghan said the film was not about Tarrio. It was about how Fox, MSNBC, and CNN use a 24-hour cycle to enrage people, sell ads, and pit Americans against each other. Lemon said nothing about CNN was fake. Callaghan said he had not called them liars; he had said they stir up half the country because a dying platform needs the money. His mother texted: what are you doing. The A24 handler had already heard from Time Warner C-suite. CNN and HBO, he then learned, share an owner. The rest of the late-night press tour vanished.

The last date was an NPR premiere in Boston, supposed to be a friendly Q&A after a screening. Backstage a reporter in two N95s would not shake his hand: he had been around people whose germs she did not want. In front of the live audience her first question was how Sandy Hook families would feel about him platforming Jones. He answered that Mark Bankston, the lawyer who represented those families in Connecticut, had told him Leonard Pozner — father of Noah Pozner — was a huge fan of the film. That closed that lane. The rest of the night was exploitation, mentally ill people, misinformation reporter. NPR never posted it. The only recording is vertical phone video from a fan named Rob. Fridman is blunt: the movie criticizes Jones in the artful way, by showing the grift and the indifference to consequences, without the two-mask finger-wag. Callaghan sometimes wonders what the film would have been without Jones. He still thinks the scene was worth it.

On his own politics Callaghan will not pick a jersey. Socially left, he says: people should dress and live how they want. He does not love city-level left economics as practiced in California. He is not very PC, believes in a free internet, and thinks empathy sits more on the left while that free-internet instinct now sits more with conservatives. Every community, he adds, has terms of exile — Black Rifle Coffee and Kyle Rittenhouse, Bud Light — so the idea that only one side eats its own is incomplete. One QAnon "pedophile hunter" in the film, he notes, is himself a convicted child molester. Every accusation is a confession, to a point, and some lives after a crime become a performance of being the good guy.

Covering the border got him hate from conservatives for letting migrants talk. What he learned was desperation, and a mismatch. People who speak no English say they are here for a better life; asked where they will go, they say they have no idea. He wishes them success and still thinks the American-dream pitch catfished them. It made him feel sheltered. West Baltimore and the Ninth Ward, the poverty he grew up treating as the bottom, are not the bottom compared with much of the world. Homelessness in Seattle and San Francisco is, in his view, a housing crisis and gentrification story. Conservative media packaging it as "Biden's America," as if the president manufactured unhoused people, is the same move he hates everywhere: a real wound used as a partisan club.

Will January 6 happen again? No. Not because institutions got wiser. Because Americans like going to Sonic for milkshakes, to AMC, ice skating, mini golf, the bar after work. Even the most divided do not want 7-Eleven to disappear. The Arab Spring talked like January 6ers and actually took governments. Occupying the Capitol, he says, is occupying a building. Real rupture would need economic desperation, starvation, or a basic resource like water going away. He may not even vote in 2024. "That's really our guys?" He would rather decide a bike lane, a playground, or an ampm in a 500-person pocket of Henderson, Nevada, where you can actually persuade a hundred neighbors. Fridman notes that the presidency still sets the national tone. Callaghan's reply is shorter than the objection.

Fridman asks about a woman who said Callaghan had been pushy: consent, she agreed, but pressure. He had not told this story publicly, he says, because it was hard and he wanted the reporting to come first. The HBO film was set for December 30, 2022, a date he learned only in early November. He counted down like a child toward Christmas, then hid in a Mojave hotel with the anxiety. Release was 8:00 p.m. Pacific. At 7:52 a text arrived from someone he had not spoken to in years and thought he was on good terms with. It asked for a portion of his "fat HBO check" toward years of therapy bills, because she felt he had pressured her into consent. He did not reply. Seven days later came TikToks, friends, an online campaign, then the press.

He is not against restitution when real abuse takes someone out of work. What he later learned, he says, is that she already had legal counsel, and the text was an attempt to extract a confession for a civil suit in the millions. They had met when he was 22, living in the RV, treating Instagram like a dating app: new city, post the location, surf DMs, find fans to party with, often women. They did not have sex. There was a consensual encounter. Two weeks later she wrote that she did not want him to take it the wrong way, did not think it was his fault, but looking back she had felt more pressure than she realized in the moment, that he had come on strong, and that she had given in because she did not want to let him down. That language, he says, made him feel horrible. If she had said no, he would not have wanted to hook up. She had also disclosed childhood trauma and PTSD treatment. He apologized and offered the phone.

About six months later, at Sturgis, a friend texted that he was being canceled. An Instagram story used an ugly photo and called the All Gas host a piece of shit who had knowingly abused the poster's friend. The poster, a stranger to him, emailed every production company he worked with and DMed hundreds of people. He frantically messaged everyone he had been intimate with that year, found the original woman, and apologized again. She said apology accepted: her friend had asked to speak, she had been in a bad place, his fame was rising, she had said yes. They made amends in private. That was two years before the premiere-night text. He wanted to speak; a PR firm told him they had it, and ran a TMZ item that Andrew Callaghan was "devastated," with a picture of him on NBC. He still does not understand how that was supposed to help.

He will not rest the whole thing on a setup, because other people posted similar videos. That, to him, means a pattern. The question he wants is not who the enemy is. It is: what was my role, and how do I never make someone feel that way again? As men, he says, they are trained to be the initiating party, to read resistance as hard-to-get. If you initiate and the other person has a trauma history, they may agree because they are scared, and you will not see it, because you do not experience yourself as someone who crosses lines. Anyone with a platform inherits a power dynamic they may not feel. He tells young men to have the unsexy, trauma-informed conversation first. If that conversation kills the vibe, you probably should not be in the room.

After the posts he went into recovery, first AA, then a more specialized program. The lowest point, he says, was logically concluding that the people who loved him would be better off if he were gone: a cancelled son, a disgrace, a burden. He read parents who had lost children to suicide and noticed how much anger they reported, then tried to choose a method that would produce the least of it. Hanging meant someone finds a body. He figured drinking himself to death would be quieter. He could not do it. He remembers hating the people who loved him because their future grief was the thing stopping him, and he was ready to go. If you had passed him on the sidewalk, he says, he would have looked like anyone else. That is why he now assumes you have no idea what a stranger is carrying.

The support system disappeared in a week. Friends vanished. People sent obituary-flavored texts: nice knowing you, great to watch you grow, good luck. The agency dropped him. Nobody called to ask if he was all right. A childhood friend unfollowed him. Someone he grew up with did not wave back. Fridman does not soften it: low points are when you stand with someone if you know their character, and cowards do the opposite. Two weeks later Callaghan met the partner he is still with. He jokes that he conquered his two biggest fears, monogamy and dogs, and now has a girlfriend he loves and two dogs.

Channel 5's method, now that the brand exists, is what he calls directed but still affable, agreeable, deadpan. He used to look at the camera like Jim from The Office; he does not anymore. The edit, partly his, partly associate Susan's, borrowed Vic Berger tricks and put them on documentary footage: crash zooms, chopped vocals for comic timing, two seconds of room-tone awkwardness, jump cuts that make speech faster. They are trying to be more straightforward because they want to be taken seriously. Voiceover arrived in a San Francisco street film, because the internet is full of Tenderloin shock and short on NIMBYism, zoning, and why Nob Hill looks like a different city. Goal one is always humanization: people who are usually news items have lives, worries, dreams. Goal two is solution-oriented reporting — not only how horrible this is, but what a viewer might actually do.

Drill rap, he explains for Fridman, starts in Chicago around 2010 — King Louie more than Chief Keef, in his view, all of it downstream of Waka Flocka Flame's Flockaveli. Nineties gangster rap talked about selling crack; the speakers were not necessarily doing it. Drill has a true-crime demand: fans want to know the person rapping about catching bodies has actually killed people. It sounds great and is, he says, pretty horrifying. It jumped to England, then to the Bronx and Brooklyn, and now there is a drill rapper every ten square miles. The fans are typically not in the neighborhoods paying the cost, which is how the rappers become superheroes to kids outside the hood.

O-Block is a South Side Englewood project, Michelle Obama's old neighborhood, where Chief Keef was raised and modern drill took its true-crime turn. Nearby St. Lawrence, or Tookaville, is the long rival. Callaghan was not afraid. The complex has security, and when he filmed it was in image rehab: Instagram grids full of morning prayer, captions about putting the guns down, a possible shadow of Lil Durk and RICO talk. King Von, a Durk artist, is rumored in hip-hop circles to have paid for the killing of FBG Duck in Gold Coast; the O-Block 6, he says, are shooters, not rappers. A veteran named Boss Top walked with him. He did not need to. People were friendly and fluent in YouTube. Crip Mac, born Trevor, is the cleaner parable: father left, mother in Texas, a Houston cop, a one-way Greyhound to Los Angeles, the Crips as brotherhood and law. Callaghan feels safer with him than with a random pedestrian. He was in jail on a gun-related probation violation when they taped.

A border-patrol arrest still sits in his body. He thought an American could enter the country anywhere, hopped the line, and spent a few days in a migrant center: solitary, no pillow, no mat, a space blanket, sleeping on his shoes, guards talking federal charges and six months while they waited on San Antonio. He knows he sounds like a wimp to anyone who has done real time. On a lighter beat he announces, for the first time on the show, a project on endangered languages in the United States: about 150 with fewer than a thousand speakers. Hawaiian Sign Language has fifteen users left, suppressed after annexation until deaf Native students signed under desks and got soap in the mouth. Gullah Geechee on the South Carolina sea islands, a Creole that survived centuries of isolation, is now crowded by golf courses. He is trying to learn Navajo. He has Spanish and English.

After all of those rooms, are people good? Yes, with a clause. Most people, he says, think they are doing the best thing for the world. Almost nobody except a sliver of sociopaths wakes up intending to ruin a life. They want America to work and no one subjugated; they disagree violently about the means. He has also been through enough to believe people are primarily self-interested, and that in fight or flight most choose flight, so he is less sure about courage as a group trait. Selfish, in his mouth, is not the same as bad. How do you heal the misunderstandings? Listening. Not forced education, not staged sit-downs between enemies. Listen to more people, drop the script for how you are supposed to feel about someone you disagree with, keep your ears and your heart open. Fridman says a lot of people are scared to do that, then closes with Hunter S. Thompson: the only people who really know where the edge is are the ones who have gone over.