Andrew Callaghan Isn't Devastated
Psymposia discusses flaws in Andrew Callaghan's journalism, his response to sexual abuse allegations, and how it relates to our experience as the subjects of targeted reporting from Channel 5.
Timestamps:
00:24 Channel 5 Coverage of Psymposia
02:20 Andrew Callaghan's Interview With Nick Shirley
04:00 Coordinated Campaign Against Psychedelic Industry Whistleblowers
05:36 Andrew Callaghan and Hamilton Morris — Parasocial Perception vs. Reality
11:20 Andrew Callaghan Sexual Abuse Allegations and Response
19:30 Psymposia's Coverage of MAPS/Lykos' MDMA Clinical Trials
22:30 Leftist Terrorism Tropes + What Leftists Miss About The Psychedelic Industry
31:58 Information Literacy and Journalistic Corrections (or Lack thereof)
38:10 Andrew Callaghan Incites His Audience to Target and "Destroy" Psymposia
Footnotes:
1) Two Women Accuse Documentary Filmmaker Andrew Callaghan of R***, [SA] (The Stranger): https://www.thestranger.com/news/2023/02/28/78881322/two-women-accuse-documentary-filmmaker-andrew-callaghan-of-rape-sexual-assault
2) More Women Accuse YouTuber Andrew Callaghan of Sexual Misconduct and Assault (The Stranger): https://www.thestranger.com/news/2023/01/13/78812714/more-women-accuse-youtuber-andrew-callaghan-of-sexual-misconduct-and-assault
3) How Elon Musk’s billionaire Doge lieutenant took over the US’s biggest MDMA company (The Guardian): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/aug/28/elon-musk-antonio-gracias-mdma-psychedelics-company
4) The Psychedelic Syndicate (Psymposia): https://www.psymposia.com/psychedelic-syndicate-executive-summary-silicon-valley-maps-lykos-mdma-fda-billionaires/
5) The Psychedelic Alt-Right Pipeline, Part 1: Lessons for the psychedelic left from Hasan Piker's "Collargate" (Chemical Poetics): https://chemicalpoetics.substack.com/p/the-psychedelic-alt-right-pipeline
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] It was crazy. After the controversy, they were like, "All right, we're gonna make a statement on your behalf, man. Seriously going to turn the tides on this whole scandal." And this friend, it said, "Andrew Callahan is devastated." [laughter] I was like, "What the [expletive] is wrong with you guys?" There was like one group that was particularly active in anti-csychedelic reporting. this group called Psymposia. They've actually advised people to start engaging in terrorist tactics. It just kept getting worse and worse. The problem was that these people were uncontrollable. They were seriously insane. One of the people is pretending to be indigenous and was outed for lying to the FDA and beating her boyfriend with a broom.
[00:50] The other one distributed underage revenge pornography and stalked a ex-girlfriend. The other is living with his wife who is a coworker, which I think is ethically questionable. And the other dedicated her life to trying to destroy an indigenous man who she had consensual sex with, but could only get New York magazine to publish it because every other magazine wanted to speak with the person who's being accused. New York Magazine was only a publication that lacks enough standards to allow this to be published. And one of them, I don't know, he's probably just going to be like a freelance psycho harassing people on Twitter. And those are the core Psymposia members. Yeah. Those are the people that stopped MDMA from being legal for use for PTSD therapy.
[01:39] It's almost inspiring if it weren't so horrible. Yeah. Hi. We're symposium. We were the villains of that story, which was entirely false. That was us being discussed on Andrew Callahan's five cast with Hamilton Morris last year. Pretty inflammatory interview that's been seen by over half a million people. We thought this might be a good time to discuss Andrew as he's kind of come back into the discourse online after he did a recent interview with right-wing influencer Nick Shirley, who was played a big part in instigating a lot of hate and misinformation around Minneapolis prior to ICE kind of invading there.
[02:24] The discourse has sort of centered around whether Andrew is kind of like a good representation of left-wing ideals and journalism and a reliable source. And people sort of making a lot of apologies for him and saying he's a productive source of information for he's an important voice, you know. Yeah. An important voice on of new journalism on the left. And this is sort of an issue we're familiar with covering psychedelics, which is that the left doesn't seem to understand psychedelics and the reactionary forces at play within it. In psychedelia, there's all these Silicon Valley billionaires and right-wing advocacy groups that are getting involved and people still see it as sort of this left-wing space without realizing what's really going on.
[03:12] And we don't really think that the left understands the issues around Andrew's reporting either, just based on the online discourse and the people that we see citing him as a reliable source and whatnot. As an organization, like you saw in that preview clip, we were recently the subject of kind of targeted reporting by him, which we never were reached out to or contacted for or anything like that. So, as he's back in the news discourse, we thought our experience provides a kind of a clear picture into what's wrong with Andrew's reporting. And it's important to understand that that narrative that was previewed in the video clip that we just showed is an extension of a coordinated campaign against our team that has been funded and pushed by the pharmaceutical industry.
[04:02] You can find a lot more details and documentation of this campaign in our psychedelic syndicate reporting. You can also find it in a an abbreviated video here with some documentation and audio. This campaign culminated in a number of attacks against us from different organizations including the veterans group Heroic Hearts, politicians like Dan Krenshaw up to the New York Times which published a piece by Rachel Newer and Andrew Jacobs basically describing us as a leftist group who torpedoed this application. In response to that, we also released a pretty comprehensive rebuttal on our website after New York Times made it clear that corrections were not going to be made. We also released the interview that the reporters conducted with Nache in order to show people that we provided a lot more background and information than was included in the piece.
[04:56] You can find that on our YouTube channel. Part of the reason that we wanted to come and share our side of the story here is because every time people on the left cosign Andrew's legitimacy and his the importance of his platform, they are legitimizing his video that is false and directing hate and harassment our way. And so we wanted to make sure that leftists who do care about the you know abuses of power and themes like that are equipped with the information to make decisions that are in line with their values around this. Yeah. So we thought it might be a good idea to sort of play an example of how Andrew is discussed by people who kind of hold him up as this bastion of good journalism.
[05:44] So this is a quick clip of him just sort of taking a glazing from Neil Brennan on his podcast. I would argue you are one of the number one sources for unbiased journalism on earth. Thank you, man. Yeah, I mean the Exactly. You know, I really appreciate that. I'm sure he does. You know, as Russell was mentioning, you know, we were never reached out to in their coverage of our organization, but beyond that, they did not Andrew Andrew and his team did not respond at all when we had sent them Yeah, we sent them We sent him an email. No response whatsoever. Yeah.
[06:29] Requesting corrections, you know. Wait. Well, and not just requesting corrections, but offering to explain our side of the story, which was not represented at all in that video. Yeah, we reached out to Andrew and his team on September 29th of 2025 after the video was released. We wrote, "Andrew and Channel 5 team, we're writing because your channel published an interview with Hamilton Morris making several alarming false claims about Psymposia and its members. These claims are all easily disproven, but we never received a chance to comment on any of them. Following the publication of your interview, which frames us as terrorists, we have received numerous threats, including a communication calling us cancers, which need to be eradicated, and threatening to dox our addresses, social security numbers, family, and friends, phone numbers, and financial information.
[07:19] This threat said it would make everyone's life hell and make sure you live in a cardboard box in a year. I promise. This email came about a day after the interview was published. We continued, "At the very least, we would like the opportunity to disprove all the false claims made on your channel about us. We would prefer that the interview on your YouTube and other social media channels were removed until given this opportunity." Psymposia. We reached out a second time in October prior to the publication of our psychedelic syndicate series. Neither email has received any kind of response. And it's interesting because even in the clip that we showed the preview of the full length video, which is the full length is quite long, but in that clip they talked about or Hamilton mentioned the fact that, you know, New York Magazine didn't reach out to someone who was accused for their side of the story.
[08:07] And yet that's exactly what they both did during that video. Yeah. When we offered to explain a lot of the thing, I mean, in that first video, you saw him call us terrorists essentially. Say make claims about like the sexual relationships of some of our members. Someone distributing pornography who wasn't even part of our group at any point in time. And those would have been very easy things to disprove and explain to Andrew had he ever contacted us. I just want to point out that Hamilton Morris has not reached out to us a single time either and he is just spewing complete lies as the truth. he's wrong on so many of these issues that are if had he reached out if he was trying to do an honest job or actually report on facts
[09:09] He could have easily corrected anything by a simple message to us and he's shown zero interest in doing that whatsoever and part of the issue here is that both Andrew and Hamilton have very large parasocial followings of people who trust them and especially with Hamilton I He was well known for Hamilton's Pharmacopia, a series on Vice and a lot of people who have an interest academically or otherwise in drugs and substances have, you know, were kind of grew up watching his content and really looking up to and respecting him. So when he's spreading this information about us, there's a lot of people who are just, you know, lapping it up and taking his word for it. And since they watch and since a lot of those people kind of grew up with Hamilton, they sort of assume that he's sort of like this progressive kind of maybe not left, but he's sort of this progressive libertarian guy.
[10:06] So if he go he's since he's a trusted voice covering psychedelic science or issues on drug prohibition, a lot of figures on the left, they just default to, oh, if Hamilton Morris says it, this must be true. And even though his positions are like they're like in the Candace Owens version of conspiracy world, you had been providing them with money and intel to destroy Compass. No, they're that unhinged and untethered from reality. So a lot of people who are just listening to Hamilton, they just accept it at face even though it's this deranged conspiracy world that he descended into increasingly over the last, it's about a year, two years at this point.
[11:02] We should circle back and we need to talk a little bit about Callahan as a journalist in that, you know, he's somebody who is out there visible. He has name recognition. A lot of that name recognition came from All Gas and No Brakes. Yeah. So, he sort of gained this large audience from his platform, All Gas No Brakes, which full disclosure, I was a huge fan of for a long time. I thought it was very funny, interesting kind of man on the street content where he was going to MAGA rallies and doing these things and kind of letting MAGA people show their ass on video. And it was interesting and he gained this big following. And he had a dispute with the funders of All Gas No Breaks, dropped that brand, rebranded as Channel 5, and started producing this HBO documentary, This Place Rules.
[11:53] And around that time, a lot of sexual abuse allegations started coming out about him online and being published in The Stranger, believe out of Seattle. And around that time he produced kind of a wishy-washy apology video and kind of went a little bit underground for a while and apparently went to rehab or something like that. And a lot of people see him as kind of reformed based on these apologies he made. Which denied some of the central claims. He said he always respected consent and he never, you know, pushed past to know. All of those are really core to the allegations against him. So, you know, sorry, not sorry. And part of how this all fits into our story is that he after lying low for a little while has been making a really big pit push to scale and grow his platform.
[12:49] So, right now, I'm trying to get into the Mexican media market. Imagine Channel 5 is like some kind of virus spreading across the country. Mhm. I want the outbreak of the contagion to be the United States and we sort of spread in both directions across the world cuz we say channel 5 worldwide. So it has to be a fluid thing. One day we'll have a news station in every city and country and I think that we'll overtake the global media market. And in our case he targeted a group of people who are supporting individuals who have been abused, sexually abused in the context of a clinical trial. And I don't think that that's coincidental that there are these parallels. Yeah. Even in the interview he did with Hamilton, he they kind of discussed like cancel culture [expletive] and stuff like that.
[13:37] And I think like every community has some version of this group. Like comedy had that guy Seth Simons. You know what I'm talking about? He was like the person who got Shane Gillis. Shane Gillis canceled. So he's the one who went and found that Asian quote from back in the day. Made it a whole thing. Destroyed the guy's career for a couple years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [expletive] that guy. Yeah. Yeah. [expletive] that guy. Yes. Weird hustle. I do have two clips that we could watch if we wanted to. One is sort of the beginning of the apology video he issued when the allegations were coming out. And then the second is an interview from last year that he did with Neil Brennan where he's sort of discussing the allegations now. I think it's sort of insightful to see how he was apologizing at the time and how he discusses it now if we want to check those out.
[14:28] So this is sort of how he framed his apology video. It's like 40 seconds here. I never thought I'd make a video like this, but I think there's an important conversation to be had and I just want to be fully accountable, honest, and transparent with all of you guys. So, I'd like to start by thanking every single person who's came out in the past week to speak about different ways in which my behavior has made them feel uncomfortable or pressured during a sexual situation and to people who said that I've made unwanted advances and had a hard time with rejection. I'm sure this was not easy to do. It's never easy to speak out and it was hard for me to hear as well because to be honest with you, up until this point, I didn't even really realize that I had this pattern.
[15:14] And so that's sort of the video that most people have seen and left off on with their analysis around his response to these sexual assault allegations. And most people sort of give him credit for being reformed and handling that really well. But I think it's interesting and telling the way he discusses the allegations which included up to rape by a woman. How he discusses them in an interview from last year which I'll play here. Tell us about that. Tell us about the worst controversy. Yeah. It was just a bad situation, you know, after the HBO film. Lot of So, you make an HBO film called This Place Rules, right? Which they aired a little. They aired it. It's still there. Okay. They just halted promotion for it.
[16:00] Got it. Okay. And why did they halt promotion? Just a whole bunch of cancel [expletive] It was girl I remember it was girls and Twitter or girls and DMs. Sounds about right. That wasn't on some like super weird [expletive] It was just like let's meet up. No, dude. It was I'll get into it more at some point in a more distinguished manner. I got you. But yeah, I was No offense taken. It still destroyed my life at the time. Yeah. And the publicist at HBO assigned me. Boy, were they bad. Great. [expletive] [laughter] Yeah. Crisis PR. Oh my god. Yeah, dude. I can't wait to write this goddamn book, man. Yeah, cuz you're, by the way, you could go direct to consumer with that. I'm sure you won't cuz you'll get the advance and do all that.
[16:45] But like, it was crazy. After the controversy, they were like, "All right, we're going to make a statement on your behalf, man. Seriously going to turn the tides on this whole scandal." And this said, "Andrew Callahan is devastated." [laughter] I was like, "What the [expletive] is wrong with you guys?" Did you read it before they released it? No. I mean, I was like, "What?" And they were like, they did release that, right? So, I remember reading it and being like, sent it to like NBC and they were like, you've expressed remorse that I'm [laughter] like I know. I pictured you with like a dog cone on your head. Like, yeah, you're devastated. Like, Andrew, what did you do? Yeah. It's Man, there's just so much I want to say cuz Oh, man. I can't wait to be The problem is so many people have gotten cancelled for sexual stuff that and they all say there's so much I want to say.
[17:38] I can't yet, but I know why you're not. But like I'm going to It's just a matter of when. Yeah, exactly. I mean, they all So, I want to just point out that the Stranger is called Two Women Accuse Documentary Filmmaker Andrew Callahan of rape, sexual assault by Chase Hutcherson. Do go and take a look at that. Reading and ask yourself if this person seems remorseful or like they had any kind of personal work done. A whole bunch of cancel [expletive] This article has pretty much a very very high standard of journalism on these topics. You have you know interviews from people at the time supporting documentation and read the Hudson piece in the stranger please.
[18:28] So, the clip that we just saw that came after the first apology video, apology, non-apology video. The apology video I want to say was like early 2020s and then the one that we just watched was from 2025. Yeah, it was around when the video about us came out. And that's actually why I saw it because I was really disturbed that, you know, someone who Andrew Callahan being someone who was looked up to by a lot of people on the left putting out this very demonizing false narrative that was designed rhetorically designed to like a stocastic terrorism campaign to encourage people implicitly to and explicitly as we'll say later to target us. It was very disturbing especially considering the fact that our work as I mentioned earlier we were in touch with people we are friends with people who have been sexually assaulted in a clinical trial context.
[19:26] We discovered that there was a flaw in the way that the therapy was being run that was leading to these incidents of abuse. And we tried to call attention to this with genuine concern about the potential for this harm to scale, for this abuse to scale to other vulnerable people who were looking for healing for PTSD. So to me that's a really important thing to understand about where we were coming from and his attitude towards us as individuals as a group and a lot of the things that we have been talking about for years that that were deep problems with the MAPS licos MDMMA clinical trials that was all then validated when the FDA released something called the complete response letter which was their reasoning for rejecting the clinical trials.
[20:17] We were not surprised when we read what was in there because it was stuff that had been told to us from a variety of sources both within and outside of the company over the years that we've talked to who were fully aware of the issues that were going on within the company. Yeah. And had Andrew ever reached out to us in advance of this interview that he did with Hamilton, basically accusing us of tanking the application and such. We could have explained this stuff to him and he could have actually put out a more comprehensive piece of journalism. Yeah, I mean, I would say that that wasn't ever really the goal. I mean as we were talking about sort of the parasocial relationships and people growing up watching Hamilton and his pharmacopia that's something that that describes Andrew Andrew himself and his conversation with Hamilton says how much he wanted to be him and
[21:19] Yeah I wanted to be you when I was younger. What Andrew Callahan is doing is very much it would be like if he was slamming the whistleblowers of the opioid crisis versus the pharmaceutical companies who like actually caused it. And it's a much sexier narrative to have a small leftist group like us tanking some application and being terrorists in Hamilton's words or whatever. As opposed to a more comprehensive narrative around the failures of these trials. And I think that's one of the core issues with Andrew being seen as sort of a unbiased like reliable source of journalism is that in most of what he produces, while some of it aligns with like leftist takes, not most of it.
[22:12] It's more whatever narrative is the most interesting for him to explore and whatever sources will give him the most time and energy. Yeah. Well, just on this terroristic point, this is something I have been thinking a lot about recently as context about why Andrew's video about us was so dangerous. It was released into what was the week after the Charlie Kirk murder occurred in the context where the government had officially labeled leftist terrorist groups as worthy of retaliation by the state. They put out this narrative about leftist a kind of a leftist terrorist group undermining this pharmaceutical initiative. that that moment was they were the administration was describing nonprofit you know progressive and media outlets as a target and painting them as
[23:15] Terrorists at the moment that this two-hour long like string of falsehoods was painting us in exactly that light which we now know through Ken Clippenstein's reporting it's the NS SPM7. This is the climate that Andrew Andrew threw this out into. The irresponsible nature and danger of what Andrew was doing in releasing this completely unverified, unvetted interview into this climate just post Charlie Kirk killing should have been obvious considering especially Andrew's actions directly after the shooting. On September 30th, just three days after releasing the interview, he wrote to his Patreon followers cancelling an upcoming tour date, writing, "I regret to inform you guys that I'll be postponing my upcoming tour to the winter spring of 2026.
[24:06] To keep it real, the escalating political rhetoric in the US along with the general low security nature of Channel 5 events has made me feel uneasy about visiting 28 cities in the immediate future, especially given the recent coverage. So, just getting back to something that Russ said earlier about the fact that the left generally isn't aware of what's going on in the psychedelic industry. We are effectively an island of like the lone leftist analysis in of the psychedelic space. There's not a lot of other leftists who are aware of what's going on in the industry and aware of some of the concerns of the way that this is being rolled out as a new normalized medicine for society. It's worth noting that some of the same oligarchs and other aspects of the tech kind of development are also invested in psychedelics.
[24:56] So people like Peter Teal across surveillance and AI and psychedelics, they're all connected. And the left has not been aware of how dangerous this fascist interest in psychedelic medicine actually is. And so I've been hoping to kind of connect with more people on the left to un to explain and talk through what's been going on. And ideally seeing some of these leftist terrorist tropes cited as justification to target us. It would be helpful if you know some people on the left could kind of see that and say like hey what's going on here? Usually when these narratives are being promoted it's not because this is actually what's going on. there's something else there and that the people who are being targeted with that rhetoric are tending to be doing things that are against the interests of the oligarchs in some important way.
[25:43] And yet because I think people see the drug issue as a progressive issue of kind of undermining the war on drugs and getting into a new era of you know progressivism around these drug topics. People are not understanding why this is so dangerous. Taylor Loren has been doing similar kind of analysis around the ID verification on as it relates to the tech industry. So there's been a lot of like push to get people to have to give their age verification and their personal, you know, have their ID associated with their digital profile in the internet. and she has been kind of shaking the branches and saying like I'm really encouraging the left to understand that this is being rolled out with rhetoric about child safety but it's actually for surveillance and control and the left needs to be paying more attention.
[26:30] That's where we are coming from around the psychedelic industry. There is a very real risk of using psychedelics as a tool of mass persuasion in the ways that it's being rolled out to society right now and mass influence and control. And so we are urging the left to take a look at Andrew's narrative and kind of like think deeper about what might be actually going on in the situation. And it's also a bunch of [expletive] So, we'd like to say that I mean the entire thing is, is just a garbage narrative to see Andrew Callahan, you know, platforming Nick Shirley as Minnesota and in particular Minneapolis is engulfed in, you know, ICE Gestapo agents going through and terrorizing entire communities and, you know, having a nice fireside chat with one of the guys stoking up fraudulent claim. claims about you know Somali daycarees, none of which have ever been proven to have any weight
[27:34] To them whatsoever. It actually tracks quite well with the sort of attentionseeking you know how can I build my platform where are the eyeballs kind of way that that Callahan's operating and that is fundamentally a different game than what like quality journalism looks like. Fun watching the reaction from both sides. Appreciate you coming out. Wish you the best in all you do, bro. To which I've replied kindly. But then the Clippers started doing the thing that they do contrabind it, finding the most outrageous or dumb sound bite in the entire piece and naming it into oblivion while missing the entire point of the dialogue, which is to try to find common ground on issues like affordability and the collapse of the mainstream media.
[28:19] I mean, I fundamentally hope that everything you're saying is true, just so you know. Yeah, I hope so, too. Yeah. Like it's like I mean like I hope we all have the best interest in society and for our people because the affordability is insane and people can't buy houses and if we're talking about creating change we need to let innovation prosper inside the United States and you're not seeing it we're not seeing innovation. In fact we're seeing fraudsters take our money. Nick suggests that I cherrypicked his worst moments which is concerning because we consciously did the opposite. I wanted to just point out that it's not the lack of understanding about the psychedelic field, psychedelic science being funded by essentially the men at SpaceX.
[29:06] So much of it revolves around them. It the public doesn't have an understanding of that and even left more leftleaning journalists don't have an understanding of that. For instance, Ryan Grim, who's someone I respect, I think who does excellent work. He was even and he probably didn't look into any of it, but he was just mindlessly reposting industry propaganda that was funded by these people and not just funded by, but they're actually targeting us as well. Psymposia who represents pretty radical anti- capitalist oftentimes anti-military ideologies has been able to infiltrate and manipulate a lot of people in the media and organizations like IER and it seems like the adcom process during the public commentary the panelists heard from a small group of radical activists called Psymposia they have referred to veterans as imperialists right so he was co-signing that well and I reached out to Ryan
[30:08] Grim and you know sent him the psychedelic syndicate in which we do quite a bit of exogesis on these topics. I guess the idea though is that mirrors kind of why we're here and what we're talking about in the first place is that these are topics that connect to much broader things that are happening in the econ in the political economy things that people should pay attention to. they link up and dovetail with the issues that people care about, things that are happening and unfolding right now. The technofudalism that that's happening right now, these guys that that Norman was just referring to, you know, we've written extensively about them because we have a lens that comes from you know, like left analysis and it works when you look at the psychedelic industry.
[31:01] So we think people should pay attention to these things. The company that we've been researching and whistleblowing and working to uncover over the last couple years is very much related to current events. The owner is Antonio Gracias who is Doge member and has been very he's Elon Musk's lieutenant and he is very much involved in spewing social security administration [expletive] anti-migrant [expletive] out there. This is the company who is trying to be the savior of mental health. That's the reality. And meanwhile, people like Ryan Grim are mindlessly reposting [expletive] that he doesn't know what he's talking about. Well, I think some of this relates to a topic that Andrew discusses in another Neil Brennan clip that I have.
[31:53] That's sort of ironic in that it's discussing informationational literacy, which is sort of what we're saying a lot of people on the left don't seem to have around psychedelics right now. I'll just play this clip real quick and we can discuss. If somebody's just you just there's disagreeing and there's also like this person's dead wrong. Yeah. Do you try to have equal time within packages? Well, it just depends because like let's say I'm talking to a conspiracy theorist, right? Someone like a flatearther or someone who's like really out there. I know that there's a thread of truth that pushed them off the edge. Now, so I don't know that their soul is like rotten or if they're like malicious.
[32:39] I think so. That's why I'm not I'm withholding judgment of them as a person. However, I'm definitely judging theirformational like literacy skills. I'm definitely thinking you don't understand how to differentiate between real information and post made on Facebook by I don't know why I cut off there, but he says crazy person. But I just think it's sort of ironic to hear him speaking with such authority on information literacy when he's falling into essentially the same pit we're talking about as all of these other people sharing propaganda online when he has Hamilton Morris on for a two-hour interview to basically take the person on Facebook's conversation onto his massive platform and spew conspiracy theories.
[33:24] Of course, anyone can get things wrong, even if they're trying to, you know, really pay attention to the details, but when it when you do get things wrong and you're ending up co-signing a campaign that is targeting people that are speaking up against abuse, it's important to correct the record and to get that information right. And Andrew Callahan is someone who has said that correcting the record in that way is important to him. And yet, that didn't occur in our case. Yeah. Yeah, and I've got a clip that kind of directly relates to that from his interview with Hamilton where they're sort of patting themselves on the back for their ability to correct the record and admit their mistakes. So, I'll play that really quick. Like in the third season of my show, I did an episode, the mistakes episode that was entirely dedicated to mistakes I'd made at my own reporting.
[34:11] Yeah. Radical transparency. Yeah. And it was good. No one used it against me. They appreciated that I was transparent about any problems with my previous reporting. And I think that's a good thing to show how these things happen. It's good for other journalists. It's good for the public. If the idea is that just everything that comes out, we're going to pretend that it's true. Even though everyone knows that journalists make mistakes and no one ever issues retractions or corrections of any kind, unless it's like the New York Times and you get like a little tiny thing at the bottom, but for the most part, we just pretend that everything that comes out is true. And if there's something wrong with it, people just hope nobody notices. That's a bad way to do things. Super bad. Yeah. We we've been doing the same thing. Like we had this documentary about greyhound racing in West Virginia and we spent so much time with this Greyhound racing advocate and kennel owner named Steve Sus from Brockton Massachusetts that we sort of got scoped by his propaganda and we ended up putting out like a pretty much a Greyhound racing sort of pro greyhound racing piece and then we learned after that he was kind of full of [expletive] and so we issued a whole follow-up statement.
[35:11] That's yeah this kind of thing can happen. You spend a lot of time with someone they make a good argument and it kind of makes sense. I mean, that's the case for a lot of It's almost like they are preempt. It's almost like they know they're talking [expletive] in this about us and they're preempting it in a way to down the road to have some sort of plausible deniability. We're going to get into some super spicy potentially lawsuit inducing conversation pretty soon. Yeah. It also sounds like sort of what in the sort of intelligence world is called the limited hangout. You admit to some small failings to take away, you know, attention from much larger and extensive wrongdoing.
[35:59] That's what's going on. A lot of issues where people don't Yeah. Most people probably don't have a strong opinion about Greyhound Racing. And so if someone's like, "No, it's actually really really good." I could see myself being like, "All right, fair enough." Yeah. I just noticed that I tend to have a little bit of bias favored toward the person that I spent the most time with when I'm covering a story. The person who gave me the most access and showed me the most like kindness and gave me the most cumulative like hours of their time, I end up just feeling like more camaraderie with unless I unless I'm totally convinced that they're a piece of [expletive] Like if I'm, you know, at like a QAnon rally, it's not like I'm going to be one over because I spent eight hours with someone as opposed to the opposition for 30 minutes. But with the Greyhound racing topic, like I just happened to go to this guy's kennel and it was really well put together and he like showed us a great time. His opposition only had like an hour with him and they were kind of cold but still they were kind of in the right and this is not critical thinking.
[36:49] It's just not No. And it was a whole mind [expletive] watching the video of him discussing this with Hamilton as I'm watching it having spent no time with Andrew to make any kind of clarifications or comment on the things he's broadcasting to his audience. And they're like in the meta basically discussing exactly what they've done with this interview. Like you said earlier in this interview, Andrew tells Hamilton like, "Dude, I wanted to be you growing up. like I'm like you're such an inspiration to me and like you can clearly tell he has this deference to Hamilton who he's like baffled he's like getting the time from and then we've given him every opportunity to correct the record and it's hero for doing there and they haven't done it.
[37:40] But yeah, it's challenging because it comes across like they're being very credible and like, you know, honest and open. Like people hearing that are like, "Oh, wow. These are people who really care about the facts." And so for people like us that are in this conversation being smeared and demonized, it is difficult to kind of like get our perspective across because people are like, "Oh, they're not the type of people that would do that. They're the type of people that care about the details and care about checking facts and getting things right." And instead of having that orientation you know Andrew very much co-signed this false narrative from Hamilton Morris to the extent of calling for like inciting actively and explicitly inciting his audience against us in the at the end of his conversation.
[38:31] 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. And we did receive threats as a result of this encouragement and incitement of the audience. And in the comments of the video, there are a lot of people calling for our deaths, calling for us to be doxed, calling for terrible things to happen to us. And this video remains up. And so I would just like to kind of like end my thoughts here at the end of this conversation. Well, first to say that we're going to be putting out a longer video conversation fully debunking the claims in that video in case anyone has any kind of ongoing questions about any of those.
[39:18] But I'd also like to put a kind of mutual aid request out there to the left to identify that we have been under attack and isolated as far as the left is concerned. And I do think more people on the left understood what was going on, they would understand that this is a serious situation and want to get involved. So if that is someone if you are someone who might be interested in kind of learning more about our story and connecting it to broader themes and of problems that are going on in the world today, please be in touch with us. When I said we were the villains of this story, not joking. they this is a smear job, a demonization, a villainization across multiple platforms. But it's in incredibly irresponsible.
[40:08] One of the ways to really get a good sense of what we've been going through and working on is to go check out the psychedelic syndicate on Psymposia.com. That's Psymposia with a silent p. And another reading that I can point folks to is I have a Substack called Chemical Poetics and I have a recent piece there about the psychedelic alt-right pipeline that analyzes some of the ways that leftist voices are suppressed on in the psychedelic space if you're interested in that. And I'll also just add at the end that I am someone who was personally assaulted in the ways that I have analyzed and have kind of stepped forward to express concern about scaling to the world as a medicine.
[40:56] And that is like a big motivation for me to have done the work that I did that he is smearing in this video. And that's part of why I do see it as connected to his minimization of his own allegations of abuse and why the left should be concerned about these patterns.
