Andrew Callaghan Harassment, Drug Legalization, & Creating Documentaries (w/ Alex Novell)

Psymposia interviews YouTube documentarian @Alex-Novell about his experience with Andrew Callaghan and Channel 5, drug legalization, and creating documentary films.

Thumbnail terminator image provided by Alex Novell.

Footnotes:

The Twisted Tale of Mr. Based and WorlfOfTShirts (Alex Novell): https://youtu.be/CUlMBuqgATc?si=V_ppsIDkjSpB_fhD

The Willy Wonka of Rolling Papers (Alex Novell): https://youtu.be/m9KmUlnStQY?si=ndtvX5WG0kQP_awp

Channel 5 isn't Telling You the Full Story... (Himpleton): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPc3XyjOETc

Did Channel 5 THREATEN This Small Youtuber? (Himpleton): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF76qNEYhdA

Hamilton's Pharma Cope (Psymposia): https://www.psymposia.com/hamiltons-pharma-cope/

Andrew Callaghan Isn't Devastated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBAOLS4-hr4

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.

[00:00] I've tried to in my work partner with researchers and journalists because I do a fair bit of journalism, but not every video is going to be a huge scoop. And I think it's the responsibility of creators to try to partner with researchers and journalists and smart people to make sure that the stories that they're telling are, you know, doing something good for society, but also like contributing to the growth of the ecosystem that we're all on online. And that's just not happening right now. Instead, when you make, say this video becomes really popular for some reason, what would happen is not that this video would start getting a million views.

[00:51] It's that Moist Critical would make a video saying, "You guys, this situation with the Psymposia podcast is actually freaking crazy, dude." That was good. then 24 million people watch that video and maybe 10,000 people will come over and watch the full podcast episode. But people aren't relying on the primary source or even the secondary source to relay information to them anymore. They're relying on aggregators to deliver that stuff to them on a golden platter. And those aggregators aren't necessarily taking the best care when it comes to telling these stories that they're hearing.

[01:36] Hey there, this is Russell with the Psymposia podcast here with Normie and James before our interview with filmmaker Alex. The interview with Alex gets pretty deep into the harassment of our team as well as Alex by Andrew Callahan in Channel 5. And they've recently run into some hot water that's got them back kind of in the headlines for passing on their audience's information to Hunter Biden to promote his memecoin. We wanted to talk a little bit about that news before we start up the interview. Just so you have context on that. This all kind of started on September 7th when Channel 5 posted this statement on Twitter.

[02:24] So, this is Channel 5's Twitter and they put out this statement in an image that says, "Channel 5 and I, meaning Andrew, have nothing to do with Hunter Biden's cryptocoin. We have not and do not and never will advertise crypto. Hunter asked if he could use our mailing list whenever he launched a new product. We provided him a simple CSV sheet from our email list to help him expand his audience. As we have told our followers numerous times, we do not believe crypto is a legitimate investment. We wish Hunter the best. Shout out to the homie. So, simultaneously, we have nothing to do with this. And we did give him our whole email list to promote. Yeah. So basically people who signed up to channel 5 email list got an email from Hunter Biden launching his memecoin which is called laptop and everyone was like what the [expletive] is why am I getting a Hunter Biden email and you want to just go through the comments?

[03:22] So they put out kind of a clarification. Also emails from Hunter's team have not gone out to any of our public subscribers. We were able to get all info completely removed from the list before blast went out. all info except for their emails apparently, right? Like yeah, I guess all info except for the info that they did give. And it's hard to believe that they even put out a statement on this because it likely violates especially like European what is it the G whatever. Oh yeah. No, 100%. Yeah. I actually used to work at an email marketing company as a salesperson and I was working there when the want to say like GDPR Yeah, the GDPR. That's what I was getting at. I was there when that went into effect and we had to tell a lot of our people like you're going to have to scrub your lists and this is 100% not an acceptable practice.

[04:13] And these are pretty representative of most of the responses to this. Like you gave Hunter Biden all your fans emails because he asked. Might as well just admit you're selling your mailing list because the alternative that you're just handing it out is even worse. [laughter] I thought this one here was pretty good. legal exposure over 9,000. And it's a screenshot of Channel 5's privacy policy, which has highlighted, we do not disclose your information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes. Completely unsurprising. Oh, of course. He's Andrew is just such a complete [expletive] ass, as you'll see more in this episode. This guy just doesn't respect his people, his audience whatsoever. Just handing a guest his email list to then just promote a memecoin. The person who said that it's much more embarrassing to give it out for free than to sell it is like nail on the head.

[05:04] Like it feels like bootlickery. Just like crazy behavior to give Hunter Biden your email list just because like and you know he's like a divisive political figure that obviously 100% of your audience doesn't agree with. I think another question Yeah. And is you know has he done this to other guests on his show or you know Yeah. or what else? What else is he doing with audience data or anything like that? I think it's valid. And with that recent news in mind, enjoy this interview with filmmaker Alex Novel. Welcome to the Psymposia podcast. I am Russell with Psymposia here with my colleagues Nishay and Normmy today and a special guest Alex novel who's a documentarian, awesome YouTuber. We kind of came across his stuff a lot earlier. and Shay had actually pretty extensively cited some of Alex's video essays in one of their pieces on Substack.

[05:55] U but more recently a YouTuber named Himleton put out kind of this long form breakdown of the Andrew Callahan being sued case and in addition to that put out an interview with Alex on his experience with Andrew Callahan and Al Andrew Callahan's team. Alex, thanks a lot for being here today. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. So, this interview is going to be mostly about standard poodles, I assume. Is that correct? Yeah, she [laughter] she's asleep right now. That's a shame. Alex has a great standard poodle that features in some of his documentaries as well. Just wanted to toss that out there. But yeah, thanks a lot for being here. We really like your work. I was texting the chat the other day. I think I love stumbling upon kind of a YouTuber I'm less familiar with and just getting to dig into the back catalog.

[06:42] And I've been really really enjoying falling down the rabbit hole of some of your documentaries. I kind of started with some of the shorter ones because just for time and then I recently fell into the Mr. Beas documentary and watched that whole thing and oh holy crap you do a lot of work on the back end kind of following your sources and spending a lot of time embedded with people and it's really cool to see if the content is a little bit disturbing to watch. Yeah, thanks. I'm in the since the new year hit, I've been trying to move away from stuff that's so disturbing because it definitely weighs on you after a while from of doing it. For sure. But I guess if there was a place to start that kind of is a crossover between our work and your work was, like I said, the interview you did about your experience with Andrew Callahan and his team.

[07:32] We kind of saw that and we're like, "Wait, we This is someone we were actually familiar with prior to this, but wow, they have their own experience with Andrew and his team." We have kind of an extensively documented history with Andrew and Channel 5 where he hosted Hamilton Morris to spew a whole bunch of lies about our team, our finances, and generally spew a bunch of ad hominemom [expletive] about [laughter] us to an audience of a couple million. Fun stuff. But what was your experience like with Andrew and his team? This was during a documentary I believe you were filming and Andrew kind of came in as a side character interviewing the subject that you were following around. Is that correct? Exactly. Yeah. So it was I think it was 2022. I was working on a documentary about the H3H3 podcast guest Jimmy Lee the Jersey Outlaw.

[08:25] And Jimmy's whole thing is that he's a dentist who wants to be a famous comedian and he goes around and harasses people on the street basically to try to become a famous comedian. And this was before all of the Ethan Klein stuff really transpired before you know before the crash out. Before the [laughter] crash out. Exactly. But what the important thing is is that when I started working on that doc, I was following around this guy who basically had like no connections. No, the only connection he had was like someone at Newsmax who wanted to, you know, make stuff on him. And all of a sudden, Jimmy Lee calls me one day and says, "Do you know who Andrew Callahan is?"

[09:13] And I was like, "Yeah, of course." But Andrew was at the time, you know, off the radar because of his cancellation for the sexual assault allegations. And so Jimmy was asking me like whether or not it would be a good idea to collab with Andrew. And you know, I didn't fully believe him that that was even going to happen because I was like, why in Andrew's time off would he want to collab with Jimmy Lee of all people? like he it just didn't really like the math didn't add up for me. But nonetheless, I got a camera crew together and I met Jimmy Lee at a diner in New Jersey and some random girl shows up and says, "Oh, you know, Andrew is going to be here in a minute.

[10:03] Don't tell him that I'm here or that I set this up, but you know, he's going to come here and interview you, Jimmy." And Andrew shows up, they shoot some content together or whatever. And the whole time, you know, they were very kind of worried that Jimmy was going to like post something on social media or something like that, you know, outing Andrew for being, you know, in public during his cancellation or whatever. And they never said anything to me. They were just they just kept treating me like I was Jimmy's camera guy. Even though I told them over and over again, I was like, "I'm not Jimmy's camera guy. I'm a filmmaker out here making my own thing on Jimmy. [laughter] It's gonna be here's my link to my YouTube channel. Here's who I am. Like I'm gonna be doing this thing.

[10:50] And then like I think it was like a week after we shot that I was like I'm putting an edit together. I'm like gonna, you know, my goal was to like kind of [expletive] with Andrew's like comeback or whatever because they kept talking about how this was going to be for his comeback and it needed to be like so secretive and stuff. And I was like, I'm gonna I don't want to ruin this guy's comeback. I want to like step in his pudding a little bit. And so I like put up my own video that had him in the thumbnail and was like ba basically you know I had two camera guys there and they had two camera guys there and I had them I had my own microphones on Jimmy. So I was able to without any of their footage build a whole episode of an Andrew Callahan interview without Andrew's team.

[11:37] And I thought that was pretty funny. and I put it on my YouTube channel and I start getting like all these calls from a random number I don't recognize and Jimmy starts texting me like, "Pick up your phone. Andrew's team is calling you." And I was like, "Andrew's team? That can't be good." And I got on the phone and it was this woman named Jade who was at the shoot as well. And Jade was kind was very upset and Andrew was in the background kind of telling her what to say, but wouldn't like talk to me directly. [laughter] he had to like speak through Jade and they basically just begged me to take down the video because it was ruining his comeback. And when I said no, then they kind of threatened me a little bit and were really pushing me to take down the video.

[12:24] But once the video's up and like people post about it on Reddit, the damage is is done, which I explained to them. And that's about it. If I could ask Yeah. Quick question about that because you I think you mentioned in we saw the Hamilton video you did the interview and I think you mentioned there that like part of the threats were at least implied that there could be future legal repercussions from like lost wages or whatever it was. Is that the case that there was some kind of like implied legal threat if not overt? Yeah. I mean, basically what they were saying to me on the phone was that I was ruining his return and that I could be liable for the cost of, you know, the shoots that they've been doing because I, you know, they've invested this specific money into it and I verbally agreed not to put which I didn't verbally agree.

[13:18] They just, they are saying Jimmy's a proxy for me, which he wasn't. And it was just very it was all so like laughable at the time that I just was very rude to them cuz like for one I didn't like at the time Andrew super hated and I was just like why would I do this guy any favors? He was super mean to me in person for one like he treated me like a schmuck. Why am I gonna why am I going to do anything to help him out at this point? They were trying to negotiate a certain point being like, "Well, could you just take him out of your thumbnail?" And I'm like, "What [laughter] purpose does that do? What does that do at this point? PE, everyone's already seen the video. It stopped getting views. [laughter] It It got 14,000 views.

[14:03] Did that really ruin your comeback or are you just kind of, you know, calling me on the phone and crying multiple times?" And then for like weeks after that, every time I posted on Instagram stories, Jade was like within five minutes watching my Instagram story. She was like always the first viewer of my Instagram story. And I'm like, I don't have any more like I don't make the same video twice. I don't like do a bunch of stuff about the same thing. So, I wasn't going to continue talking about him. But then he started like doing all this stuff, collabing with Nick Fuentes and [expletive] like that. And I started tweeting about it and people were like I tweeted something like off the cuff about how he threatened to sue me one time and how like you know it's rich that he's asking people for money and everyone was like the hell are you talking about?

[14:56] And I think it's because like on the internet people are so used to like if there's like a drama or a or something that happens between two creators that it immediately gets talked about and spread all over the place. But like it just didn't feel like newsworthy to me at the time. I guess I was just kind of like these people are really weird and nobody likes them already. This weird toxic behavior from weird toxic people. Why did they think that what you were doing was going to ruin his, you know, comeback? Like what did they give you any like reasoning for that? Was it or was it more of just a sense of that like they weren't able to control the narrative there and you were kind of disrupting that? I think it was that I think it was also it was a couple of things.

[15:44] I gave him a lower third title that said popular YouTuber/ sexest. I did like a couple of things and like the I had like a one-on-one short conversation with him after he did his thing with Jimmy and he said all this weird centrist like you know it just sounded like they're trying to cancel comedy type rhetoric and I was like that's weird and I cut all that together and put it at the end. You think that young people do want to see that kind of edgy stuff because your stuff is also kind of Well, the way you got to operate nowadays is no one can tell you what there's space for and isn't space for. No one can tell you, hey, there's no space for this in the discussion unless they want to weaponize like a nebulous mob of haters against you. You could say, "Hey, you don't deserve a platform for what you're saying."

[16:31] But in reality, people can make the choice whether to support it or not. You know, that's for sure. And you know what I meant by that? So like I think it's that stuff that like they can't control that narrative and normally they would maybe cut that stuff out, but I think it's also that they had invested so much time and money into having this orchestrated comeback that was supposed to paint Andrew not as the guy who interviews people like Jimmy Lee, but as the guy who is doing like much bigger things. And as we can see now, he's worked really hard to kind of maintain this image of guy who is adjacent to in my mind James O'Keeffe.

[17:21] Yeah. I mean, and the people he like goes on interviews with like jerk him off about it too of like you're like the new face of left journalism and you're like the new face of like he's Tyler Olivera with extra steps. Yeah. [laughter] What do you think of his team using the phrase comeback? I thought that was like really interesting in this story of like that they had a planned comeback that they were like his story arc is sex pest to face of new media or something. Originally he was explaining to us that his comeback was going to be him going around all 50 states and interviewing different it was something like that. Like he was going to do 48 tours. lower 48. That's what it was. That was what it was.

[18:06] And it was like he was going to talk to someone about the Jersey Devil and all this stuff. And he had to The weirdest part about meeting him in person is that like so the way it went down was like our camera crew was inside this diner. The girl who didn't want to be associated with Andrew or him to know that she was there shows up, comes into the diner, says Andrew's coming. Then she leaves, like drives away, and then Andrew shows up, and his team comes into the diner. Jade and Susan start filming Jimmy in the diner. Andrew's still nowhere to be found. Then they tell Jimmy, "Okay, we're gonna go outside and film with Andrew."

[18:53] Andrew is still not out there. They text him. He comes out of his out of the car, which was just sitting in the parking lot. It's not like he was just like sitting in the parking lot waiting for his call time when it's his production. You're supposed to go there and like meet the subject in person and be like, "Hi, nice to meet you." But he didn't interact with Jimmy off camera at all. The second camera cut, Andrew went straight back in the car like he was like some sort of like ventriloquist dummy or something, [laughter] you know? He just like you do your act and then you go get put away back in the box. And I thought I just thought the whole thing was so weird. Like he was bit trying to big time everybody. Yeah. It reminds me I was on an episode of the Dr. Phil show and the way like Dr.

[19:38] Phil was described that way where it's like oh like you don't talk to him. he is the like the one in charge. And I appreciated what you said about the way that he it's so contradictory to Andrew's image as this like kind of man of the people gonzoesque journalist that's like embedded and yet he has this like very elitist way of interacting with people. And I did think it was funny how that elitist attitude kind of like created the problem in the first place because he just grouped you in with like the plebs of, you know, the staff essentially. And I had a nicer camera than them, too. [laughter] The weirdest part, like we had like nice cinema cameras and they had like little camcorders and I was like being really nice.

[20:24] I was like, "Hey, I'll send you my footage." Like I don't like when I meet someone who's truly not a good person, I try to face that with a certain level of kindness at first. The other day I was having a drink with my friend in Williamsburg, like a beer hall in Williamsburg, and I was sitting with my dog outside, and who do I see? Pam Bondi. What? And I went up to her and she pet my dog and was very, very nice to me. And I thought to myself, I'm probably the only person who like was nice to her in Brooklyn today. And then she walked into the bar and got chased out of there. But I just think like there that like there's a certain duty to face people who aren't good or who have preconceived notions about like the plebes as it were. to face them with kindness even if you don't necessarily

[21:26] Agree with them until of course they threaten to sue you. Then you can yell at them on the phone. And that that is so interesting to me too. And it seems very hypocritical to me that he would have had that approach considering how much he complains when other people do that or use, you know, any kind of legal pretense from the outside as like evidence of the badness of his opponents. Like, and yet he's doing the same he's doing the same thing. And even worse, I get a sense that he's like, you know, he became very popular in his 20s. He has all these allegations that are made. I don't think he knows how to handle it. He's in the spotlight. He's trying to become famous. Yeah. I've been like trying to figure it out.

[22:12] Like what? And then this right-wing pivot that he's doing and then it's like before we even get into any of that. Russ, do you want to like do any rundown on the Hamilton to kind of provide some context on the baby? Just throw that in there. Yeah, definitely. big time Nepo baby. For those who don't know, his dad, not to explain it to you guys, I'm sure you know, but to any listeners, Hamilton's dad is one of the most famous documentary filmmakers of all time. [laughter] Like the Orson Wells of documentary film making. One of the interesting things, if you've seen the Theronos documentary, there's all this like really fascinating footage with Elizabeth Holmes in it. and it's the footage the way that that shot is very different than the rest of the documentary.

[23:03] But it wasn't until I watched the what was the Hulu fictionalized version of the whole Theronos thing and at one point I forget the actress's name that plays what was it? Amanda Cipherid. Oh yeah. And at one episode starts out with I think someone saying like Errol Errol. And it wasn't until then that I realized all of the Elizabeth Holmes footage was actually shot by Errol Morris who was working for The commercials. Yeah. Yeah. And then Gibney doing that documentary. I forget the whole thing, but he acquired that footage which made the documentary like extra fascinating because that I forget what Errol Morris calls that shot.

[23:50] It's a type of shot that's like really tight on the subject's face. But yeah, and the other thing on the Nepo baby of Russ, isn't he in like Apple commercials and he's done like [laughter] Yeah, Hamilton's been in a bunch of his dad's like commercial work from the time he was like it looks like a 12-year-old in that Apple commercial, but he still has that deep baritone. I love my iPod. 100 CDs and something that's, you know, that big. So much music. It makes me feel powerful. Well, just in actuality though, be beyond that, the reason why he was even able to do what he did on television was like, no, nobody's co-signing that, unless you're the child of a very famous documentary filmmaker.

[24:39] Like that was the pitch to investors in that project is Errol Morris's crazy son is going to go make a documentary about psychedelic drugs and he's going to do drugs on camera and nobody had ever heard of anything like that before because Vice used to be good basically and we've kind of like covered bits and pieces of his like leadup to being in journalism in the past and he has like no formal journalism degree. He like goes on stage talking about how like he's trained himself in journalistic ethics or whatever which like whatever but like and how he's got like a science degree that's stitched together between three universities because he didn't really know what he wanted to do and so he basically like went to three different spots and ended up being allowed to like stitch his credit hours together into like one big degree.

[25:27] But just a little bit of background on our history with like Hamilton in the leadup to the Andrew stuff in case you're not so as familiar is we've kind of beenounded by Hamilton Morris for years kind of starting it's more than it's an obsession like he set out on this like to say rentree living rent free I think is even like an understatement like well I mean it's been similar to and this is why I was writing about Alex, Alex's piece originally has been similar to the dynamic with Destiny and Hassan like that kind of vicious fixation. Yeah. But ju just like the like cliffnotes version of our history in like 2021 what Hamilton made this big shift, right?

[26:14] So he was a documentary filmmaker for Vice and then he kind of dropped that and we were some of the first people to kind of report on the fact that he dropped journalism to go work for Compass Pathways which was like the first for-profit pharmaceutical company in the psychedelic space and they were like very much under scrutiny in controversy for like filing some of the first patents on psychedelic drugs which everyone thought were like oh there's already prior art on all this stuff. there's already like how can they do this and they kind of started as like a nonprofit organization recuperated a bunch of information from like researchers scientists in the space and then took their company for profit patented the stuff then Hamilton goes to work for them and so by Peter they were backed by Peter Teal that was like backed by Peter Teal he goes to work for them and it's like if you have any sense of journalistic ethics you don't just like go from the field you cover to working for the most controversial for-profit pharma company in the space that you cover.

[27:14] So, we write about that. He's not happy about it. Then there's this I was 2022 Wonderland Miami. The this like pharmaceutical corporate pharmaceutical conference happens in Miami, Florida. And I wouldn't even call it a corporate. This is like sort of this like VCbacked fund that does this conference to host like their portfolio companies and then like almost immediately pivots to longevity and it's slopfest. Yeah. [laughter] So, so we find out like not even because we're going to this conference, but because some anonymous account tweets something that they see like behind the security desk, which is all of our faces printed on a sheet that says banned from all events at this conference.

[28:05] [laughter] And we're like, what the [expletive] Like, none of us are even going to this conference or had any idea this was going on before it was like tweeted about. And so that becomes a thing. And then Hamilton's talk at this conference we're banned from gets out there on the internet where he spends like half of the entire entirety of his talk like shit-talking our work. the fact that we're critical of like the corporate elements of the space that Nishay and our colleague Brian Pace had written a paper called right-wing psychedelia which was addressing like all of the cases of like historic right-wing use of psychedelics in the face of all of this research that was coming out that was like psychedelics will combat authoritarianism, psychedelics are going to make you more environmentalist, blah blah blah. So we were kind of like addressing that.

[28:52] He spends a big chunk of his time being like, "Oh my god, right-wing people do psychedelics." And like kind of [expletive] all over this paper. Then of course the everpresent threat of right-wing people using psychedelics. Uhoh. [laughter] What are we going to do? Right-wing people use the same drugs as leftwing people. I had no idea. So we did a big live stream about that when it came out. So we have this history going back to like 2021 with Hamilton. And then he goes, well, before that though, like I would like, you know, the field was very small when I first got involved, 2010. I met Hamilton that year. I've like been to his house. We did events together. Like it, you know, there this crash out phase has happened since that time, but I've known him for a long time.

[29:41] We did an event, our first literally our first thing we ever did was with Hamilton was one of the guest speakers. We worked again with him in 2016 with Duncan Trussell in New York City. That was when he was in his phase of like he would he was in this like really weird phase where he would only wear white. He like every appearance he did was just all white. Yeah, it was really weird and it lasted for I don't know a scientist. Yeah, it was like this very culty sort of like persona that he was like developing for himself and he was just always this super [expletive] weird dude that was like I don't know it was bizarre. Yeah. But so then lead up to the 2024 and what ended up being a rejection of MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD. was a company that for a long time we had reported on issues with their clinical trials, issues with like whistleblowers and stuff coming to us with problems about the culture within their

[30:42] Organization, the treatment of their clinical trial participants, abuse that occurred during the clinical trials. And we participated in like the FDA's open public comment period to discuss our reporting on this that we'd been doing for the last half decade or whatever. And then postrejection, this kind of big media apparatus goes into effect blaming us for the rejection of MDMA, saying we like tainted the process or whatever. We intentionally, not just tainted, but intentionally sabotaged the process, committing federal crimes by telling lies to a federal, you know, agency. And it that was completely not true. Like all of our and my testimony was completely factually based. I even had my research challenged at one of you know a top bioeththics journal and the journal sided with me after reviewing the evidence.

[31:34] So it that that's another reason why we I wrote this essay kind of interfacing with your work because it was such a you know shock dog kind of a moment where it was like distorted and then intentionally weaponized to try to take us down. Yeah. And the Hamilton the final bit of this story is the Hamilton Andrew interview which up until that point people had been distorting things that actually kind of did happen like right like we did participate in the advisory committee meeting. We did like report on abuse in these clinical trials and people in their own way were distorting whether what we reported was true or not and whatever which it was but at least pointing to something real.

[32:20] Hamilton goes on Andrew's podcast, the whatever his like sort of informal interview segment is podcast, the five cast, and escalates these claims from they participated in the advisory committee and tainted their like opinions about this or whatever to Hamilton's like call I think I have like five or six citations from that interview of Hamilton calling us terrorists saying that we're funded by a pharmaceutical company called Eona. I've never received a scent from like and like while they're talking about this they're saying like Eona funded a terrorist organization and Fivecast throws up on screen the Wikipedia article of Israel funds Hamas like to like illustrate like the idea of like how funding terrorist organizations doesn't always go your way and making all these like insane claims about us.

[33:12] So at the juncture we're at right now is that you have this pharmaceutical company encouraging terroristic action, paying activists to terrorize their competitors, terrorizing terrorist action, start terrorizing, engaging in terrorist tactics. They were seriously insane. Dangerously insane. This is why funding terrorist organizations to do your bidding is usually a bad idea. Historically, every time we do it, it always backfires. It hasn't ended well. And then the interview ends with Andrew being like, "How can the Fivecast viewers like get behind you, Hamilton? How can they destroy these bastards?" All right, so what are we going to do about these people? What's the plan? How are we going to take them down? What can the people of the world do, the five cast viewers, to destroy these bastards?

[33:59] Yeah, destroy [laughter] these bastards. And that that was the thing that I was like I could not believe when I heard that. It's like why is this tool like inciting his [laughter] his audience against us in retaliation for our sharing our research about clinical trial participants who had been sexually abused like it like hello like from a sex past as well. So that was just very surreal. It was also surreal for us as people who had, you know, watched some of Andrew Callahan's content back in the day is like, why are you now in this like weird like sketchy timeline? And the like kind of final point I wanted to make, and you as a documentarian might have some thoughts on this, but like we had also just wrapped up like a year of writing what ended up being like a 200 and some odd page like expose on some of the major funders in the psychedelic space.

[34:52] And for that we like collaborated with a legal team who like vetted all of our requests for comment and like we every person we made a claim about and any major point of like contention that might come upon publication we like put to the people in the story like we reached out to them and like gave them a chance to at least comment on it or like contest it if they so felt they needed to. And in the leadup to this interview where we're deemed terrorists funded by some pharmaceutical company, these claims that like could easily be contested, we were never contacted by Andrew's team. We reached out to Andrew's team twice to say, "Yo, there's like some egregious misinformation in this reporting that you guys put out and it's like affecting us. Like we're receiving like threats in our emails and stuff since this interview was published."

[35:40] Yeah. Threats. Never contacted us. Threats against our families and like Yeah. our safety. We, you know, several of us filed police reports because of it. Like, it was like really like disturbing. And this was also, you know, well into Hamilton's own campaign. So, we had been receiving a lot of threats ahead of time. Do you find that when you're publishing reporting on sensitive topics such as psychedelics or you know abuse going on during clinical trials that specifically because it's about something that like cuz I see this like for example on Reddit when people are discussing marijuana legalization that even people who are passionate about it like that there's so much splitting going on in that community that they're not just it's not just like a straight like we should see the government legalize this but that all these arguments and stuff break out and that when it comes to

[36:41] Something like psychedelics, marijuana is kind of a psychedelic, not necessarily a neutropic, whatever. When it comes to reporting on stuff like that, the audience for that content is primed to debate you in a way and say, "Well, what do you know? I know better than you do because Johnny down the street told me this big time." [laughter] Yeah. And how do you combat that when the whole, you know, social history of psychedelics stems from like clandestine chemists and this like community sharing type of thing that doesn't necessarily smile in the face of science?

[37:29] Yeah. I have some thoughts. Yeah. It's definitely it's a great question. Big challenge. I think part of the issue as well is that people, you know, psychedelics produce powerfully persuasive experiences. And so people assume that the kind of experience that they have had or that their friends have had is the psychedelic experience and assume that this is like they have a lens to understand the entire topic. And a lot of our work has been drilling down into the fact that there's lots of different ways that psychedelics are experienced and interpreted. And for like for example fascists taking psychedelics often just become more committed fascists. It doesn't Elon Musk. Yeah. Exactly. So we are just at trying to add nuanced to [laughter] that conversation.

[38:19] But it is a big barrier that people feel emotionally like they already know what's going on. U makes it very hard to talk about. I will say though, we saw we had to put out a recent series on psychedelic conversion therapy, a trilogy, and we Russ and I were commenting on our chat last night because we saw there were some posts on Reddit about it, and we were very surprised how receptive people were to our perspective. So, I kind of feel like that's starting to change, you know, in part because of some of the work that we've been doing to add that like multiple things can be true at the same time. little Timmy down the street might have had a great experience and the way that we're doing things is allowing people to get abused in a way that they don't need to be.

[39:05] So, I do think that is shifting, but there's a lot of big feelings around it for sure. Yeah. Yeah. In a lot of ways, psychedelics produce evangelists. And so, people are very much like primed to think they're part of something bigger. And in the responses that we've often got to like the criticism we've reported on or like the criticism we've reported on the industry and way things are happening is often we just need to get psychedelics over the finish line regardless. And if that means some casualties get swept under the rug, it's worth it in the end because in order to something world peace, something net zero trauma, we need to get this fully legalized so that it can be in anyone's hands.

[39:53] And our perspective has always been like, well, the way that it's going to get rolled out is not how you think it's going to get rolled out. Like we were some of the first people to report that it's going to be bifurcated, right? like your recreational use is still going to be criminalized and it's just going to be in the hands of like a clinic at the point that it's going to get legalized or it being legalized under the Trump administration and championed by people like Rick Perry and like Christian nationalists is going to shape how psychedelics are rolled out to the mainstream. And that's those people are taking 25 eye. They're not taking they're all doing I gain right now. [laughter] That's they're doing like weird RC's. I don't know. there along those lines of like by any means possible that kind of attitude of like we just need to mainstream this there's there there have even on that thread that was overall more more nuance that I was talking about there was this like super unhinged comment about psychedelic conversion therapy which as we explained in our series super abusive

[40:53] [expletive] up practice but someone said in a never interrupt your enemy while they're making a mistake sense if this is the avenue to legal psychedelic access we might have to let them continue while denouncing conversion therapy. It's not even conversion therapy though. You're you are quite literally putting someone on a psychedelic and then abusing them. That's not a therapy. You're like psychologically that's how we made the uniomber basically, right? Yes. But that that perspective, however unhinged, is unfortunately very widespread that people have that kind of just blinders on and like hyperfixated on the goal.

[41:39] It reminds me of like I heard of alligators or something during mating season. They'll like climb over houses and like the line of like shortest distance to get to where they're going. That it's just like that. It's like [laughter] a robotic impulse. Should my thought as someone who loves marijuana, I love smoking marijuana. It's one of my favorite things to do because I sit around editing 24/7 and it's a lovely way to pass the time. Should it be legal? I've seen what legal marijuana looks like in New York and I don't think it's that great. I prefer to buy it illegally via a website that sells THCA through the loophole in the farm bill. So, I can buy weight that way and it's good quality and it's what all the small stores around here that that aren't like dispensaries are selling anyways.

[42:33] I think that that there has to be a level of harm reduction, but I don't necessarily think that flat out nec I don't think that flat out we should be making everything legal as much as we should be decriminalizing it so that people who use those substances don't get, you know, wrongfully arrested for essentially doing nothing. Yeah. One of the biggest I one of the biggest problems to me with the whole medicalization movement which is 95% of psychedelic activists if you want to call them that I don't think you're a psychedelic activist if you're not like advocating for the abolition of the control substances act right but like so much of the it's really taken the wind out of the sails of any sort of actual like structural effort medicalization right like very there there are like grassroots groups who have done great

[43:35] Work throughout the country mostly on the local level which is sort of problematic. It's a hard thing to argue though you know like the medicalization is so easy to argue and it's so accessible to white folks. You can have a you know rich conservative white mom of six go and get ketamine therapy or go for a weekend mushroom retreat and that's looked at in their like you know hidy toy communities as a sign of you know luxury or something now. Yeah. This is this was something we put out in 2020 the kind of as we've been documenting this sort of mindset for a while. This was one of the first psychedelic for-profit companies alongside Compass, MindMed.

[44:24] And why does it look like it's got GPT logo? [laughter] Yeah, it's the MindMed logo. But now, what are they called now? Defininium or something. So, but he was publicly saying like, I want nothing to do with these psychedelic DRC people. And meanwhile, he's the CEO of a psychedelic company with and but he had to like promise to not get involved with like drim efforts because Kevin Olirri from Shark Tank like invested in his company and like made him like shake his hand and say, "Well, you'll never get involved with anything recreational, right?" Like I guess my position Yeah. My position on it is like DRIM needs to be first and foremost. The abolition of the control substances act needs to be first and foremost and then there's some kind of legalization around there, right? Like I should have the ability to get mushrooms off of a local person who has protection under the law or if I want to go if I want like absolute certainty to go into a store that is subject to some kind of regulations or something like that.

[45:24] I totally agree. The then you open a whole other can of worms which is the commercialization and the corporatization and the [expletive] mess of that we're in with marijuana across the country right now. It's a mess. It's just a mess. But the third gross bud and it's just a mess. The third path here is the medicalization which you need to be like is so if MDMA or psilocybin is going to pass FDA you have to have a diagnosis of PTSD or depression of some sort and then you obviously can't walk into a store into a pharmacy and get the drug. You then need to go to a certain a certified therapist who's going to give you the drug at the same time. That was one of the biggest controversies with MDMA is because the FDA their job as a regulatory agency is to approve a drug, not approve a therapy.

[46:20] And so when MAPS came at them, they were doing a drug therapy combo. No one could understand what the [expletive] therapy is. No one understands what Nishay always picks apart my point here. And I completely agree with them. The therapy is sort of this amalgam of new age modalities. However, within that amalgam of new age modalities is a very specific protocol that maps pushes that's roots are in this guy Stan Grath and these weird like take new age stuff, put it underground, incubate it for several decades and like express that through the lens of like the Bay Area weird like California vibes and you get what maps tried to push through to the FDA.

[47:07] So, and masquerade it as like try to masquerade it as close to like e, you know, like western medicine as possible. Yeah. Yeah. They like completely euphemized what they were actually doing and all of their descriptions to the FDA. Yeah. So, but like when we had come out with a with Russ came out with this story, I don't know, five, six years ago at this point, I think we were the first people to say like, "Hey guys, even I we understand you're putting all of your emotional weight in MDMA behind MDMA legalization." But what that looks like is that that the FDA and the DEA would bifurcate scheduling. Meaning that if passed MAP's specific brand of MDMA would be legal and prescribable.

[47:56] Your MDMA that you get on the street, you'll have no legal protections whatsoever. It's not legal for you. It's legal for them and it's legal for the people who would be prescribed this. So which makes access it's a controlled access kind of like what you have with ketamine Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ketamine is like a good base understanding of what's going to get rolled out. It's like something that I feel like I've said this in a few interviews recently. But strip mall psychedelia like you see ketamine clinics in your strip malls. You go and like see billboards. Even beyond that. Do you guys remember when there were all these companies advertising that they could get you aderall prescriptions on Tik Tok? Yeah, there were all these companies popping up saying, "Sign up for our thing." And it was kind of like advertising it like him, this stuff for hair growth, but it's like, "Do you have trouble focusing?

[48:46] You might have ADHD. Fill out this thing and we can get you the pills." Most of the time, it wasn't actually getting people the pills. It was getting them to sign up for a service that, you know, might connect them with a doctor. But that's what you're going to see with this push for medicalization is, you know, capitalist enterprises popping up to be like, here's an app to get your psychedelics. And really, those type of organizations aren't focused on harm prevention or anything like that. So, you're gonna see you're going to see a lot of bad stuff happen to people who aren't educated about psychedelics and who see an ad on TikTok and are like, "Hey, I might want to do this."

[49:33] And then that's going to drive things back so much further in the wrong direction. Yeah, totally. Yeah, during CO the big thing was tellahalth ketamine like you just get the k from mind bloom when they even like had you know when I heard that they were going to start doing tellaalth sending to your home unsupervised injectable ketabine that was very very concerning to hear for the reasons that you mentioned especially and just real quick when you were asking Alex about the de versus legalization I was going to say that you know from my mind and I my broader academic IC work is connected to harm reduction in general. And I think that we just the state of education around drugs in this country especially is is so poor that it's hard to do any kind of like overt legalization.

[50:21] While the combination of the capitalistic commercialized impulses with people that are just like have no idea what they're doing, have so many strong assumptions as we were saying about what the drugs do and how they work and don't have any kind of like nuanced critical thinking around it. It is totally a recipe for disaster. The craziest part is like I would call the current psychedelic movement, it's right-wing adjacent at this point. The left has no understanding. They're not taking psychedelics in general. I would say that's probably the case. They have no understanding about like the field though. Like it is the so basically you had MAPS you have different factions you have different companies you have different backers right MAPS there was this group one of the main guys that this guy Graham Boyd he was one of the main lawyers behind

[51:23] A lot of the state marijuana initiatives across the country he then pivoted to psychedelics he created this group called sea psychedelic science funders collaborative he joined up with David Bronner from Dr. for Bronner Soaps and he joined up with this guy Joe Green who was one of Zuckerberg's roommate frat boys at Harvard. Joe Green went on to work at like an NGO that Zuckerberg backed in DC. They all linked up I don't know 2017 2018 and that started acting as like this siphon for Silicon Valley money into maps into pushing MDMA. They created a pack. called New Approach Pack and the people within PFC FC then like sort of merged with maps and so now you had overlapping circles of people their board members they like share PSFC eventually sort of becomes MAPS

[52:24] Becomes their offshoot pharmaceutical company and they have this new approach pack that is the group that is pushed they've pumped all the money into the failed mass Massachusetts ballot initiatives into Oregon into Colorado. They worked with Scott Weiner in California and in a and they work and the new owner of MAPS now after they failed the FDA trials, the new owner is Antonio Gracias, who's Musk's one of his like primary henchmen. He was the guy that was on stage with Musk in Wisconsin when Musk was wearing the cheese thing pushing a xenophobic social security [expletive] on stage when he pumped all the money in to get the Supreme Court justices in Wisconsin. That's Antonio Gracias. He was a Doge guy.

[53:09] And the other big guy that's behind it is Steve Jervson. He's SpaceX SpaceX Tesla guy. And these are the guys that are like most to gain from medicalization. These are the guys who, you know, most people who are interested in psychedelics don't care about the legality status unless they're, you know, unless they get popped. Well, well, I was going to say unless they're like you guys where you know you're researchers and you're like thought leaders in this space. So, but the majority of people who are interested in learning about that stuff are coming at it from the angle that billionaires are coming at it from, which I think is kind of why there's a lot of animosity towards your reporting because it's speaking truth to that type of power.

[54:11] And it's weird because you wouldn't think that those to bring it back to Andrew Callahan, you wouldn't think that people who are interested in Andrew's work, if you were to just look at his work and not know anything about him, you wouldn't think that those people are the same people who are like, "We don't believe women and that type of stuff." In the same way that with the psychedelic community, you wouldn't expect that the people who are, you know, at the forefront of the industry as it were are tied to, you know, the upper echelons of government, right? Right. Yeah. Well, we went from like, you know, think for yourself, question authority to like just bootlicking for these billionaires.

[54:57] The people who have the most money. It's not about It's about like, you know, when I was young, and I think I said this on Himleton, too. When I was young, the reason why I wanted to do YouTube was was not to make money or to get attention. It was for one so that I could unlock custom thumbnails and stuff like that, but two to like contribute to this like merit-based economy of creating art on the internet. And in that, like my theory is that if you work hard enough at something and you continue to get better at it, that eventually people will take notice of that and that the cream rises to the top.

[55:43] But that's not actually the case in that the way things work nowadays is that people who are willing to step on others and like you know hack their way to the top are much more you know regarded as interesting characters you know what I mean like they're like people like Hamilton or people like Andrew are respected by their audiences and their audiences have these parasocial relationships with them are willing to go to war for them when they don't know them. Versus it used to be that there was a lot more respect for the people who were the little guy, the people who were on the ground doing this reporting but not necessarily getting the most views or the most attention from it.

[56:28] Now people are like, "Haha, you should just quit. You should just quit and let Andrew do. Andrew is better than you and you're jealous of him." And it's that's couldn't be further from the truth. But I think so many people online put value on who has the most money in the conversation. Yeah. And if you have less money than the big money guy, then you might just be jelly. You're maybe we can invalidate all of your wellthoughtout talking points by just saying, "Well, you're jelly because he's richer." Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that that dynamic is you part of how this right-wing pipeline has been built out in the psychedelic ecosystem like with other places.

[57:13] So, in my piece on that in my Substack where I cited your Destiny video, I included this quote that you had in that video where you said, "Building your online community up by going to war with other creators and their communities is something that's incredibly common place these days. there's a whole news politics and entertainment system in place ready to be misused and exploited by guys like Destiny to stop progressive ideas from actually breaking through. And I thought that line was so important because it's like it's not an accident that this is happening this way. It's like with so much inequality in society right now and there's so much interest behind dehumanizing leftist perspectives so that they can't take they can't be taken seriously. I mean, and that's why people that's why I felt it was really important to draw the connections between us and Hassan because essentially it's the same dynamics that are playing out in different lanes and topics, you know, like with Palestine where there was like this inconvenient truth that inconvenient for

[58:15] The powerful interests. That's like what happened with us where we were raising these inconvenient truths about psychedelic medicalization and the clinical trials and people like Hamilton were the boots on the ground to ensure that we were misrepresented in a way that people who would otherwise be receptive to hearing us out were kind of assuming that they knew we were just bad actors and not even paying attention and so just getting like funneled into that right-wing orientation and beyond credibility. I think clout matters so much more on the internet. And you guys can have all the credibility and all of the fact in the world, but when you're going up against someone who everybody saw on TV as the vice expert for psychedelics, you can't beat that.

[59:07] No matter what facts you have, you are up against an unstoppable force, which is the thing that's kept television going for years and years is that's the value. But, you know, people always say like TV and movies don't actually make money for the investors. Why do they keep investing in it? It's because of stuff like that. It's because of the power that is achieved by being the like go-to source on something or being the expert. It's not, you know, experts used to be more so confined to courtrooms and to like, you know, to research papers, but now because of the internet and because of podcasts and all of that, it's a way for people to actually get this information out there in a way that's more digestible to these audiences, but those same audiences don't want to hear it because it's not coming from their favorite creator.

[1:00:05] And I've tried to in my work partner with researchers and journalists because I do a fair bit of journalism, but not every video is going to be a huge scoop. And I think it's the responsibility of creators to try to partner with researchers and journalists and smart people to make sure that the stories that they're telling are, you know, doing something good for society, but also like contributing to the growth of the ecosystem that we're all on online. And that's just not happening right now. Instead, when you make, say this video becomes really popular for some reason, what would happen is not that this video would start getting a million views.

[1:00:56] It's that Moist Critical would make a video saying, "You guys, this situation with the Psymposia podcast is actually freaking crazy, dude." [laughter] That was good. then 24 million people watch that video and maybe 10,000 people will come over and watch the full podcast episode. But people aren't relying on the primary source or even the secondary source to relay information to them anymore. They're relying on aggregators to deliver that stuff to them on a golden platter. And those aggregators aren't necessarily taking the best care when it comes to telling these stories that they're hearing. Yeah. They don't. In the case of Andrew Callahan, he doesn't give a [expletive] Like there was zero factchecking.

[1:01:47] The entire interview was was fake. It was just made up [expletive] that he had. And what's crazy is that like if you watch the Himleton video, what she did an amazing breakdown of the Joiner lawsuit against Andrew Callahan and it's like you listen to what Callahan says and then you know you listen to the what's actually in the lawsuit and what how Joiner is describing everything that happened to like kind of check our experience with Callahan against that. It was it's exactly the same. He doesn't care. And I was wonder I it's like is I'm just curious your thoughts on Callahan here. So he gets all the accusations. He gets slammed online.

[1:02:34] I'm just Is it just a move a strategic move to him? He's like I'm out on the left. I need new audience here. Am I just going in this direction? I like the right-wing audience is just there for the taking for me. Is is that what it is? He's taken a lot of the leftwing audience though, too. I know a lot of people who still watch him. I think what he's really done so well is since his cancellation is be a radical centrist. Big libertarian vibes. That's always kind of been his vibe. But since the cancellation, I think it's amped up to a point that like one day he'll be making a whole documentary in Palestine in Gaza and one day he's sitting down with Nick Fuentes.

[1:03:27] Mhm. So, you know, I don't quite understand what kind of net he's casting in terms of audience, but I do think that the way that he's going about doing his work has become a lot more focused on clout chasing versus I think it used to be like my favorite thing Andrew ever did was a piece he did with Brace Belden where he went to Key West for Ernest Hemingway lookalike competition. It was very interesting. It was very slice of life and human interest story and that's where he thrived. But he's tried so hard to become more of a independent political journalist so that he can win back those people who disliked him for the cancellation.

[1:04:22] But he won't go far-left enough to actually make a statement. He will just kind of continue to flip-flop between making far-left content and making far-right content because in actuality, it's the smartest business move to do. people on the internet are very extreme and if you're making stuff that's targeted towards the middle, it's not actually going to appeal to a lot of people. Versus if you're making something that is so aggressive and targeted towards a specific audience, even if you feel like the video is far right, you're still going to watch it and say, it's like the Jubilee effect, you know, where you're like, damn it, Jubilee.

[1:05:07] Jubilee put out another rage bait. Gotta watch it. Exactly. Yeah. No, it that Yeah. All All that's makes a lot of sense to me and really tracks I think with his content. And I was just thinking about, you know, his app his ongoing appeal to the left after that video about us came out, you know, has had over 600,000 views or something like that currently. And it has Yeah. I mean, just it's it was so wrong factually and caused such like was was so unacceptably harmful, I think, to do. So for a long time I was just trying to connect with the left about this because I it was very disorienting for me personally to see people like Emma Vigland like you know casually shouting out his work you know from the majority report and just like because I feel like the left should care about the fact that we were targeted for drawing attention to abuse documented abuse

[1:06:08] Lawyer checked abuse in psychedelic therapy and there's just been no you know there had didn't like no one really paying attention to it. And I think that connects back to what you were saying where the nuances of the situation are so outside the Overton window of expectation for the left's view of psychedelics that it just wasn't registering what was going on here. But I remember before we were able to connect with Lance from the Surfs and I went on their channel to talk about it, I tried posting to Hassan's subreddit to just try to, you know, as like a mutual aid sort of like thing of like, you know, we're dealing with this situation. I feel like this should matter to people. And it was really surreal how knee-jerk misogynistic and like rape culture appalloia like so many of the responses were even on Hassan's subreddit and I was interacting with the mods around it because it was like so disturbing like [laughter] disturbing some of the responses to me

[1:07:10] Just saying like you know I was personally assaulted in the psychedelic context and that's why I do the work that I do and you know I'm supporting other people who have been assaulted. And people were just like, "Oh, you're just trying to get clicks. You're just trying to, you know, you're just That's just Reddit, though. That's really just totally I think there probably is something to be said about like the actual left just really doesn't use psychedelics and they sort of like their thoughts, their opinions, their views on it are sort of just they're just out there. So if like psychedelic legalization comes along, they just like default. Most of them don't even smoke pot. Yeah. Yeah. and you know this dynamic existed back in the 60s too. There was a big divide between the hippies and like the new left as well.

[1:07:56] So like that wouldn't surprise me. And like has talked about psychedelics in the past like there are people who like know about this topic and have the skill set to be able to like have some literacy around it. But yeah, it just is hard for people I think to even register. I mean, like some of the worst takes on all of this have been from Ryan Grim. Like his horrible takes. He was Maps Maps and Dublin had this guy following him around for 10 years for filming a documentary on him. And the big end was supposed to be after this decade, the big end that that this director had in mind, which his project is actually backed by Darren Areronowski. The big ending was supposed to be MDMA passes the FDA and like you know at the last minute the FDA comes in and just rejects it.

[1:08:49] And so that's I mean that's just not going to happen for like at le Well, they're resubmitting. This is a whole new we can talk about this in one second. But so so this guy puts out this totally propaganda piece like little film thing. He like strategically edited it and he put that out. This was during this. So the FDA the advisory committee voted it down in what June and then they had there was two months in between before like FDA thumbs up or thumbs down. And so this guy puts out this total propaganda video about us and like Ryan Grim is like posting that.

[1:09:38] It's getting tons of attention on Grim's like account. The guy has no idea what he's talking about. He doesn't even he doesn't know that he's like putting out talking points for like the SpaceX board who's like at the other end of the pipeline, you know, and then even in the congressional stuff, you have some you have AOC who signed that. She doesn't know anything about like the industry. She it's sort of this just this outsourced, oh, psychedelics, that's kind of a left-wing thing and that's it. That's like the end all be all to it without any understanding of what the what that means. Nobody I don't want to say nobody. Very few people have actually taken the time and even asked the question of like what is psychedelic therapy? They don't know.

[1:10:23] They just it's like the analysis ends at the word psychedelic. They don't understand what the therapeutic part of it is. And then there's like no interest in being critical about like an actual pharmaceutical trial and was it corrupt? Was what did the data actually say? It's just this emotional we want this past. That's it. Yeah. Well, it reminded me as I wrote in my was it my piece or we talked about it? But either way, Taylor Loren, you know, trying to talk about the what was it? like the digital ID and stuff where it's like or like you know protecting kids with mass surveillance. It's a similar sort of blind spot I think where it's like people like progressive people you know hear oh protecting kids on the internet that's great and then they move on and they don't realize how sinister this broader surveillance apparatus like actually is and it's kind of Trojan horse for that same thing with psychedelics or progressive people here like oh you know this is challenge to

[1:11:23] The war on drugs this seems like a fine thing and then they keep moving they don't realize that there's also a tro Trojan horse going on in this context and this is what happens when this space had outsourced like actual activism to a pharmaceutical company. Like if there was actually a like also all these crypto sorry all these crypto billionaires who are now at the forefront of the industry like do you guys remember how people were buying psychedelics for a long time? They were using crypto. That's pretty much the first function of crypto was to buy drugs on the internet. Yeah. So the first use was Bitcoin on on Silk Road. And now all those guys are the same ones who made millions off of crypto and are now trying to push for medicalization because that's their new business.

[1:12:21] Yeah. they've already made their money off of crypto and now they're taking things to the next level. I mean, that's what it from my, you know, small perspective on the situation is like we it's like us versus them. Yeah, absolutely. And most people don't see it that way, especially if they're engaging negatively with your guys' work. The us versus them is specifically like they don't like that argument. Especially the real psychedelic evangelical people, they hate that argument because that's like that's seen as too heavy. It's seen as maybe you can give me an assist here like nay the I don't [laughter] know what you're trying to say. The other what I'm trying to say the like the other they don't specifically like the othering because Oh yeah, they're like why can't we all just get along?

[1:13:11] Aren't we all crypto people at heart or something? Well, you need to embrace their you need to embrace their shadow because you have a shadow as well, right? And if you're judging them, Peter Pan, I don't have a shadow. Yeah, definitely that. I just want to acknowledge real quick, we're at an hour and 15. Alex, are you still good on time? I just wanted to kind of talk I've got about half an hour before I have to get running. And I just I thought, you know, I'm not sure if you've seen the series, but I thought it might be interesting to talk about this just because the story behind the psychedelic industry is so bananas and I feel like eventually it's going to make for like really interesting storytelling once the story is told. But one of the like crazy subplots of everything that we've been dealing with is that like our former lawyer is now the like drugsar of the Trump administration and he's the one who wrote the, you know, the draft of the Trump executive order and stuff like that.

[1:14:11] And when I was listening to you talk about legal stuff with the with Hamilton, you were a few things stood out. One of them is I was very interested by your like, oh, you could you don't need a lawyer. You can just self-defense. You don't need a lawyer. Lawyers are the dumbest people. I stand by this. Lawyers are actually the dumbest [expletive] people who have ever existed. And they've tricked the world into thinking that you need them. It's like the biggest prank they've pulled on society is making you think that if you're in a bind that you need an attorney's help when attorneys don't give a [expletive] about you. attorneys, video editors give more of a [expletive] about you because at least they're going to actually look through the transcript and like try to understand the story here.

[1:14:58] Lawyers, lawyers take the easy way out constantly. They love AI now and they don't actually do anything. And you with the help of Google, not AI, can do everything that a lawyer does and more because you know more about your case than any lawyer ever will. It never ever unless you are guilty of a crime, you should not have a lawyer. [laughter] I don't know. As someone who has been charged by the state, that's different. That's a different thing. I'm talking about civil litigation. I think it depends on the I think it depends on the nature of what you're doing. I've had really bad experience with a lawyer like a media lawyer before on a project that I was working at with a couple friends on a film project and basically did nothing.

[1:15:51] It's just like marked 15 minutes didn't give us an answer which we could have found out like very easily online which we did. But yeah, criminal char I would disagree on No, if it's criminal charges, you need that's a completely [laughter] I'm talking I'm more so talking about like if you're a journalist and you publish a piece of reporting and Ethan Klein sues you for defamation, you don't need to do a GoFundMe. Or when I got attacked on the streets of New York by Mr. Based who admitted on the phone to murdering a girl in 2010 to me. Tell the truth. [expletive] up. Call the cops. Get off. Call the cops. Call the cops. He's attacking me. Call the cops. [screaming and groaning] Dog.

[1:16:38] Heing attacked me. Am I still bleeding? Is it still going? Oh, yeah. You have a big scar right over there. And then I came with a police report from 2010 to read it to him and ask him, you know, for comment. And he attacked me and I sued him in civil court. Went up against his attorney. He had the same attorney that Art Garfuncle had. And I outnegotiated the guy and won. It's not hard to do if it's a civil case because civil law is this elusive thing that like no attorneys anywhere technically really understand. It more so is about understanding this like interpersonal conflict or whatever and then understanding how that conflict then corresponds to whatever damages you feel like you're owed.

[1:17:28] But that's, you know what I mean? Like that that is a conversation for you to have with whatever you know your team or affected party is. And to bring an attorney into that might just dilute your winnings or your earnings or you know, it's going to dilute that. And it's also going to create a much longer span of time that the whole thing's going to run for because attorneys have multiple clients. And you'll be your best, you know, if you're your own attorney, you're going to be a great attorney for yourself. Some people competent people. There's a lot of there's a lot of people who represent themselves who don't know what they're doing. Yeah. A lot of that is with the asterisk of like you know if you are a filmmaker or a documentarian or a journalist which implies a certain level of competency because you know I have friends who have been sued and they spent a lot of money

[1:18:29] On especially you know people in the whole you know Ethan Klein situation who have spent lots of money defending themselves retaining counsel when what they really should have been doing is running up Ethan's legal bills as much as possible by doing filings and filings for discovery and flooding his attorney's office with tons of paperwork. And also, you know, when I did my lawsuit, I filed it in person so that you couldn't do any digital filings online. So, basically that attorney's office anytime they needed to file paperwork had to fly there. They Well, it wasn't that they had to fly there because this was in New York. They had to go I filed a case out of Brooklyn.

[1:19:17] Their office was in Manhattan. They had to come and take three transfers on the train just to get to the courthouse. And so it was like they were constantly begging me to let it be an efiled matter. And I was like, "No, I'm not doing that." And I think like that's really fun if you're passionate about the thing that you're fighting for and if you're educated and willing to like if your job as a researcher, guess what? You are perfectly primed already to represent yourself because you have your brain is wired a specific way that you don't just say, "Okay, this is what I'm going to do." you say let's unpack this and find out the best way to move forward.

[1:20:04] Yeah. Nay, you've often said that in like another life had you not gone into academia, lawyer would be a great profession [laughter] of all the research you can do. Just speaking of like legal stuff because we did even in Hamilton's farm code, we had like systematically debunked the claims in Andrea's video. So, it's like we've already assembled all the facts there [laughter] behind his incitement. But I did, you know, because we were dealing with so much like, you know, death threats and stuff for a while, I did have a call with Bill Joiner's lawyers, like I heard about that lawsuit before the latest wave. This was back in like November of last year. I spoke to them and they were looking at, you know, the overt incitement of the audience and all of these like provably false claims, the fact that he didn't reach out and they were like, "Yeah, we really think you have a case."

[1:20:52] And it's so similar to the dynamics in the Bill Bill Joiner situation were just like complete contempt for the people involved in the like such reckless antagonistic reporting. But they said it would cost six figures and we don't [laughter] have that kind of money. So I that's why we just you know put our research to the series that we put together with all the factors. The other problem with defamation in general is it lawyers are generally not going to accept a case on conting on contingency. Yeah. Unless you're very close friends with a lawyer. Like you're not going to get the case on contingency. And the only people who are able to challenge that are people who already have deep pockets like the rest of the [expletive] criminal justice system.

[1:21:38] Now, I wouldn't recommend pursuing defamation cases. I would recommend defaming people because defaming people is the new like meta. That's just what people are doing now. And people will sue each other for defamation, but that literally never sticks. I've seen like maybe one case where it's stuck. It's incredibly difficult for it to stick. I do think that I do think in the Callahan Joiner case, Callahan's going to lose this. He's e he's either going to they're either going to settle or they're going to make a point and they're going to go through a jury trial or I'm not sure if it's a I'm guessing it's a jury and not like a directed a judgment. I do think he will lose that.

[1:22:25] He's going to settle. They always settle. 90% of cases, civil cases settle. I agree. I agree. It's I think it's an issue of do they want to be [expletive] with it and make a point that they want. I don't know. But he's not he is not going to come out victorious and especially since his anti-slap was tossed in our case and we were sued by a wackadoodle church in this connects to the clip. Yeah. In Texas I Yeah. So this church sued a bunch of people. Totally frivolous lawsuit. It was in Texas and they were we countered with an anti-slap. The judge tossed the case and ruled in all the defendants favor and they're on the hook for quite a lot of money at this point for paying legal fees.

[1:23:13] That's the what I've been told by anti-sl. Yeah. That what I've been told by lawyers is it's like stay on the defensive. It's like you got to eat [expletive] on like if someone's defaming you now unless you have deep pockets, you basically have to eat [expletive] and defend yourself through the internet. But if you are sued like you do have and you know it that it's a [expletive] lawsuit, you can hit him back at least in state courts with anti-slap. The reason why I won my case was cuz I wrote a beautiful anti-slap cuz I had sued him and then he sued me with a counter suit, which was a huge mistake because I hadn't done anything and he had alleged I had done all these things in his suit and then the New York Post picked it up and it like completely spiraled out of control for him and he was like, I just want it to go away and I got a case settled.

[1:24:06] But that that's really the way things happen for Andrew. It doesn't even really matter because he can lose this lawsuit. He can settle. Anything can happen. He's still going to have tons of people who are just going to blindly take his side on. He's built up post cancellation built up such a dedicated group of fans who are so passionate about the political perspective that he has which is crazy because in my perspective it's like void of perspective. There's no actual like vision or perspective in his work. It's very like devoid of soul in that way. But there's lots of people out there who don't want to be challenged in the content that they watch and they don't want their ideas challen.

[1:24:58] That's what we've been kind of talking about all day with this is that people don't like it when their ideas are challenged. They don't like it when their notions about something are flipped on their heads and they rely on people like Andrew to continue to deliver them that same per perfectly packaged channel 5 slop, you know, regardless of whether or not it's actually got a moral or a vision in the end like his work did at the beginning. even like the talade, you know, people drinking from a shoe. He kind of tried to wrap things up in a way that made sense and explained why he was doing it versus now the reason why he's doing it is because you're watching it and get more money from you watching it.

[1:25:48] Yeah. I think it's, you know, the importance of to say the Joiner case is is at least, you know, if it's settled or if he's found to have defamed him, at least it's on the record and at least like, you know, people who do want to know the truth, it is it will be out there. And the other thing with like Andrew is probably also gonna go the way of Vice where it's like cool for the you know what 18 to 25 year olds, but as soon as you like kind of get out of that demographic, I think it starts to loosen its grip on people when they realize he's just like some [expletive] you know? I don't know. At least that's my hopeful view of it. What do you think it would take for him to actually kind of get like detractors, you know, like h how could his audience start to realize that he's full of it?

[1:26:41] I mean, he has detractors, but I think that on the internet, when you rise to a level of an Andrew Tate or a Nick Fuentes, which is what Andrew Callahan's really risen to the level of, it's not it's no longer the level of a creator, but it's more the level of like one of these personalities. Let's Candace. Yeah, Candace. Exactly. And that's what he wants to elevate himself to. So like you're you become cancellable when you do that and in fact the cancellation actually reinforces Yeah. Exactly. It becomes a benefit at that point. It become it becomes you know a way to branch out and get new viewers because people are still going to be talking.

[1:27:30] I mean, even the mistake that anyone can make in criticizing Andrew is that it feeds into the conversation about this person. And the best thing that you can do with someone like him is just completely like turn off the TV, you know, click on a different video. But I mean, I've done that since I had my runin with him. But that hasn't stopped his videos from showing up on my homepage on YouTube sometimes and me being like, "Wow, 8 million views, 8 million people watching that. That's crazy." So, will will there be a future where that viewership dies off? Perhaps. But he already lost because he every filmmaker's dream is to make YouTube videos that get a good enough audience and good enough cult wants to take a chance on you.

[1:28:31] And he had all that happen and then had it taken away from him. So all he's left with now is the rehashing of the old thing that he did and trying to perhaps make new documentaries. I mean, he's been promoting Dear Kelly. I think I've made three or four featurelength documentaries in the time that he's been promoting Dear Kelly, right? So, like, you know, despite the bad stuff that he's done, he'll still be out there making stuff, but I don't think that he's ever going to make featurelength docs in that way again. I don't I think if we do see featurelength films from him, it's going to be in the format that's more like his videos and less like Dear Kelly was because he proved himself there that that's not profitable for him and he only really follows what content is profitable.

[1:29:27] Yeah. And do we still have time to get because is the cut off at two? Yeah. Yeah. Let's watch the clip. Okay. Well, just to lead into it, I wanted to mention that part of the reason I thought it might be fun to look at this with you is that you mentioned in your discussion of the legal stuff in the Hamilton video that lawyers that are like incompetent like aren't viewed well by judges and I think this example [laughter] was a case where that did not happen. So again, do you have it queued up already? Yeah, I've got it here. Yeah, I guess in our case, we were lucky enough to have someone that was fairly familiar with the scene and what was going on, which was that this church was basically selling what amounted to just mushrooms as a whole other substance and kind of anyone that reported on this study that proved that they tried to sue for like half a million dollars or something.

[1:30:15] So, half a billion. They claimed half a billion dollars. So, I've got it queued up here. That's why I mentioned Matt Zoran who's the current psychedelics are the Trump administration. Yeah. Not at the time when he was representing us. More concerning in an effect it is as part of what appears to be a fact gathering operation to complete service. Plaintiff's council impersonated a fake individual and contacted the Eona one of the Eona defendants Eona. And this is beyond dispute, your honor, because there's a recorded voicemail of plaintiff's council purporting to be a person named G. But this was one day after plaintiffs sent a demand letter to Eona. Plaintiff's council calls impersonating an individual named G and then also sends a written communication where plaintiff's council purports to be a Roger Growing.

[1:31:08] And then when we confronted Plaintiff's Council with frankly these unimpeachable facts, plaintiffs council floated conspiracy theories like his phone number, phone being hacked, and then simply stating he never misidentified himself. Unfortunately, this has caused me a lot of stress, my normal work, plus taking on this litigation. And I had a couple seizures over the course of about 3 weeks. And I honestly do not remember placing these two phone calls to Eona. My wife tells me that I did did make the one with and identified myself as G. You know why I did that where I was mentally when I did that.

[1:31:55] I do not know. In case that wasn't clear, that was Greg Lake, one of the founders of the Church of Silthoxin, who was representing the church in court, saying that he impersonated people while attempting to contact Eona, but doesn't remember it. So, you get the gist there. So, yeah. I mean, he's a really bad attorney. That was Greg representing himself and he was the attorney for the church. That's really brutal, you know? That's what I mean, though. I mean, that's beyond like That that's like a skit. That's like a comedy skit level. [laughter] Like the complaining to the judge about having a seizure. The judge how that ended that that like session ended. The judge was like, "Now, Mr. Lake, I just encourage you before you get on the next time, if you could just review the rules of this courtroom, I think that would go a long way."

[1:32:46] [laughter] Yeah. And actually in that hearing, our side had the basically the ability to just hold him in contempt in court. Yeah. But the way that type of stuff works as always is if someone perjures themsself or they hold themselves in contempt, the state usually doesn't pursue charges against that for some reason. I mean, it's a huge problem, especially when it comes to perjury, is that like people will lie on the stand all the time. Cops do it, you know, lawyers do it. It's a very very common thing to lie in the courtroom. Yeah. It's just like the amount of lies and defamation that occurs daily on the internet at this point. It just seems like it is it's breaking any institution of, you know, defamation that would enforce defamation at this point.

[1:33:41] It's like you really can only go ahead with it if you have tremendous financial backing. I also think beyond, you know, I think what you guys do is so special because you're reporting on something versus a lot of people on the internet who have criticisms or, you know, conversations about even say Andrew Callahan, they're not coming at it from the same perspective because they're there there's people who make stuff and there's people who watch stuff and People who watch stuff don't like it when you mess with the stuff they watch. And I've learned that the hard way for sure is that like any person I've covered or work that I've done have when I've done stuff that a lot of my work shows the negative side of something or shows a deeper view on a person who you know I made a documentary film on Johnny Somali.

[1:34:41] I went to Korea and spent time with him there. He's a person who is a despicable person that everybody dislikes, but I tried to understand why he's like that. Instead of just making a film being like, "This guy sucks, doesn't he?" I was like, "Why does he suck? Why is he doing this to himself?" People don't like that. People don't like that at all. They don't want that level of introspection on the internet because they're going onto the internet to turn away from those things. In the same way that that people who are arguing with your reporting don't actually want to engage with it or have a meaningful conversation about what you're publishing. They want to express their frustrations towards you for in their mind stepping back the progress that they see happening.

[1:35:36] Yeah. most common that this backwards view of what progress is and blaming others for walking back progress while you yourself are actually like being fascist is is the through line that we can draw from Andrew Callahan directly to like Andrew Callahan and his fans directly to like what you guys have been through with Hamilton and with Andrew is that failure to engage with the actual ual, you know, the burying of the lead and focusing on on something that has nothing to do with the actual facts. Yeah, [laughter] 100%. Absolutely. And as we kind of I know we're kind of wrapping up on our time with you here.

[1:36:22] I just wanted to kind of give you a chance here towards the end. I wanted to call first call out, you mentioned a lot of your work kind of deals with the shittier side of humanity at times. And I know on the beginning of the call or before we started recording, you mentioned you're kind of trying to move away from that a little as the toll can be pretty heavy mentally. I know we have experienced that on our end as well. I wanted to call out one of your documentaries though that I think is on the lighter side and that I think our audience would really enjoy and as someone who has become quite jaded on like Hamilton Morris's documentaries was kind of fun to watch which was your profile on the guy who founded Raw Kessleman. I thought that was a really fun documentary to watch. And if you want to speak at all to how that documentary came about and where your work's headed in the future, anything that you want people to be looking out for, any anything that you want to say about your own work moving forward, I would love to hear it.

[1:37:18] Sure. Yeah, I love raw papers. I have a [expletive] ton of raw stuff. And I was I like one day found out that he was the guy behind Juicy Jay's and Elements. I had no idea about that until and I was like oh [expletive] like all of my favorite papers are this guy and I was like he's like the Willy Wonka of papers and he had this video on his channel of him just standing on a like white wall. or it wasn't it was like in a in like a smoke shop front in like the RAW headquarters talking about the story of RAW and I like could see it all in my head but I they didn't have like the visuals to go along with it. So I like rotoscoped him out and then I like put him in all the scenes that he was talking about and that's where I like came up with the whole editing style that I use in my videos now where I like kind of sandwich myself in between stuff.

[1:38:16] You had to buy it directly from the producer. I did comes in and I immediately sell I open up thinking it's going to be this beautiful natural thing and it was just a regular white looking cigarette and I'm looking right at them as they're smoking and it's this white cigarette. Now you're talking to a dude who knows paper. He loves paper and I'm looking at this like dude that's not natural. So yeah. No, it was a hu that was like a really formative video for me. I also had like maybe a hundred subs when I made that and that video got me like monetized on YouTube and got me like that that was the one that really got me started. So yeah, I love that one. And you know, I made this vid the last big video I made was on a big expose on Ethan Klein. I talked to some people who were harassed by him and, you know, I did a deep dive into his content and who he is.

[1:39:07] And I think I've hit the peak of making those type of videos talking about the misgivings of other creators. And besides the fact that it's a level of negativity that I was engaging in cuz I'm okay with getting in the [expletive] a little bit. I just I want to make something where the subject is not a guy who's weird. I want to be the guy who's weird. I want to start making my work be about dealing with my weird issues instead of about because that's what it always was about for me. like I want to make something on Johnny Somali because I like see something in him that I see in myself and I want to understand that.

[1:39:56] And I think that like it can be hard on your mental health, especially when you're comparing yourself to those terrible people and trying to find parts of yourself that resonate with and instead I'm trying to deal with something that's more important to me, which is like I have these issues with like being not as good as I want to be at what I do. I wish I was. Part of it's money. Part of it's that like movies are expensive to make and I do this with my friends and stuff. Part of it's that like, you know, I'm just not as good at this as I want to be. And that's something like that's like a huge insecurity of mine that I'm really trying to hash out in the new film that I'm making. And yeah, I think that like the work that I've got planned beyond the I'm making a film about Michael Jackson impersonators where I am going to become a Michael Jackson impersonator.

[1:40:52] The beyond that I want to make stuff about people who are on the internet, people who are interesting and have a story that hasn't been told. So I was in touch with the guy who played the melodica in the band Axes of Awesome. He wrote the four chord song and the other two bandmates stole the song out from under him basically. He is like a music teacher now and they're both still kind of famous and I had a really interesting interview with him and hopefully I'll turn that into something. But I think like my goal has shifted from okay, who's next to okay, like what about like myself do I not like that I can like tackle and change through making these films.

[1:41:47] And it's not necessarily going to be super good for my YouTube channel because I've lost like 400 subs already just in taking the time to start doing this kind of stuff. But I think that it's worth the investment long term to just not be looking for who's the most controversial or who's got the worst possible take and instead focusing on people who are like, you know, uplifting each other in some type of way. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. And thanks for sharing. I mean, in a way, it's a very psychedelic art form type of project where it's like, you know, you're cultivating yourself through the vehicle, the medium of the film project. So, we're super down with that.

[1:42:34] We will definitely watch it when it comes out. And I've told people I've told the team before you came on and had this opportunity just watching your stuff for my previous essay, you're one of my favorite like video essayist content creators on on YouTube. So, I appreciate we really appreciate what you do and the blend of humor and the editing and stuff. So, even with your kind of current journey, I wanted to just say that and say thank you so much for as well coming on and joining us. Yeah, thank you guys so much. It's been a pleasure.