Andrew Callaghan Interviews the Most Controversial People in America on 'All Gas No Brakes'
Neo Nazi's, Furries, Flat Earthers, UFO Hunters, for Andrew Callaghan they all got something to say
Update 4/15/2021: After announcing in March that they had parted ways with former backers Doing Things Media — over contract disputes and disagreements about the political nature of their content — the All Gas No Brakes crew have returned as Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan.
Having lost access to their old content and revenue streams, the team are hoping to rebuild, and have just dropped their first video on the new channel, delving into this year's spring break chaos in Miami Beach, Florida.
Miami Beach Spring Breakwww.youtube.com
Andrew Callaghan has always been drawn to the absurd.
Born and raised in Seattle, the budding Internet star and host of the web series All Gas No Brakes described himself as a mischievous teenager. A "fourteen-year-old stoner" who divided his time between "anarchists and hip-hop kids," he regularly found himself surrounded by unsavory characters.
During his freshman year of high school, Callaghan enrolled in a journalism class, and his teacher actively encouraged him to write on the seedy lifestyle he experienced.
"I was already getting myself into weird, sketchy shit for my own enjoyment," Callaghan told me. "So being able to have a platform to share those experiences was like the ultimate gratification."
Callaghan wrote investigative op-eds on how to access the Deep Web and described how to buy drugs off the now-defunct Silk Road. He talked first-hand about life inside Seattle's tent city during the Occupy movement and about his experiences hanging out with Juggalos in Seattle's sleazy Westlake Center. His classmates and his teacher were fascinated.
Callaghan, who travels around the country in a beat-up RV and interviews people, has somehow made a career out of meeting America's strangest characters. Trump supporters, Flat Earthers, Furries, UFO Hunters ––he's even met Diplo.
While Callaghan regularly hears and sees abhorrent things on the road, he has an uncanny ability to remain completely unfazed. He often lulls his subjects into a false sense of security.
"I call it hyper-agreement," he said. "Just don't be a dick, and validate your interviewee with aggressive head nods and inquisitive facial expressions." It's a similar tactic to what you might see on "The Daily Show" with their 'man on the street' segments.
During the tense Anti-Antifa rally in Portland, Oregon, last summer, Callaghan became partially embroiled in an absolutely ludicrous standoff between a white supremacist and an Antifa supporter. "[Antifa] needs to go the hell away," said Callaghan's interviewee. "We need to go the hell away from our city?" called out a bystander on his bicycle, "F*ck you." As the two squared off, Callaghan documented it all, his microphone seen in the corner of the screen.
Even when things go off the rails, Callaghan somehow remains fearless. "You just can't convince certain people of certain things, especially when they believe that public information is controlled by nefarious puppet masters," he said. "Things often go wrong afterward. I've gotten a handful of lawsuit threats...frat bros try to fight me."
In fact, it's in the quieter moments that Callaghan struggles to keep his composure. At the 2019 Flat Earth Conference in Dallas, Texas, three separate Flat Earthers justified their beliefs by quoting Protocols of the Elders of Zion a propaganda book used by Hitler in the 1930s to sway public opinion against the Jewish people.
"I had a hard time holding my tongue," he admits.
While All Gas No Brakes is still in its early stages (he recently asked his fans for donations so he could start to put together a production team), Callaghan has amassed years of experience interviewing off-putting characters. At nineteen, Callaghan hitchhiked across the country for 70 days completely alone.
"After I took my last final, I basically sprinted out of campus," he told Office Magazine. "I left everything in my dorm, all of my stuff...I just didn't even think about it."
When his adventure ended, he composed an online zine, fittingly titled All Gas No Brakes, where he wrote on a few of his most noteworthy encounters.
From there, he wound up working as a doorman on New Orleans' infamous Bourbon Street. "I always thought of Bourbon Street as the last frontier of anarchy in the western world," he told Office. "It's this backward city of corrupt institutions. People come here from all across the world and they get possessed by this spirit...you're truly able to see what humans are like in their raw form."
One day, he abruptly quit his job and decided to document what he was seeing in a "smart and funny way." He became the anchor of "Quarter Confessions," a relatively popular Instagram and YouTube channel that documents drunk people on Bourbon Street. "Sometimes I miss the consistent, chaotic simplicity of Bourbon Street," Callaghan told me. "But [the yelling] got old."
As All Gas No Brakes has gained traction. The show has garnered the attention of a few notable celebrities, such as millionaire playboy Dan Bilzerian. "He's a fan and a mega-tool," Callaghan said of the infamous poker player.
The two were scheduled to meet up while Callaghan was filming in Las Vegas. Bilzerian thought it'd be fun to crash a party together. "[He] flaked at the eleventh hour with a text that read, 'sorry bro, I think I'm gonna smoke and bang these girls,'" Callaghan said.
"I could roast him further, but that's enough said. Dude's corny, take my word for it."
As the show has grown, Callaghan has somehow managed to turn a handful of his subjects into reoccurring characters, almost like it's a sitcom. On his most recent trip to Las Vegas, he hit the strip with Mr. Daddy and Luchi, two strange men he had met on two separate occasions a few months prior.
"I like the idea of recurring characters," he said. "Plus [they] embody two staunchly different but equally essential Vegas character types–the unstoppable coke dive and the aspiring promoter who whispers sweet dreams of exotic cars, Versace robes and 7 to 1 gender ratios [at parties.]"
Moments like this are everything to Callaghan. "Every day is a new adventure and because of the show, I have friends everywhere." While his passion project is only just starting to take off, Callaghan already has enough stories to fill a memoir. He's seen Juggalos pee on each other's heads at Mike Busey's Sausage Castle in Orlando, Florida.
He interviewed Kimberly Guilfoyle at Donald Trump Jr's book signing, as well as a woman who referred to the LGBTQ community as "witches" and proudly believed that people should only date within their race.
"Just today I crashed the press conference at the AVN awards, where I asked [adult film star] Alexis Texas if she's ever worried she won't get gifts at Christmas if her family sees she's been naughty."
He hopes to one day see All Gas No Brakes become its own "gonzo" journalism show, but for now, he's just focused on interviewing a man named Daryll. "[He] believes he's an alien named Bashar."
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Stephen King's Tweets: Why We Need Fewer White Men Voting for the Oscars
The king of horror doesn't understand his own implicit biases.
Stephen King 'Good Morning America' TV show, NYC
Today, Stephen King—one of the most beloved and prolific authors of all time—joined the ranks of celebrities who have made an ass of themselves on Twitter.
King is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the body of people who vote to determine the outcome of the Oscars. Apparently, adding his two cents to the conversation surrounding the very white 2020 Oscar nominations, King began tweeting:
And then, more than two hours later, King added a seemingly contradictory sentiment:
Many people on Twitter took issue with King's tweets, responding with accusations of white privilege, among other things.
King is a historically progressive voice on the Internet, often tweeting critiques of Trump and other conservative leaders; he is also a noted philanthropist and activist for a variety of progressive causes. But, given the nature of racism in America, Twitter users who critiqued his tweets are right in their perception that he was being ignorant, and it shouldn't come as a surprise.
First, to say that the issue of diversity "did not come up" in his voting process is essential to claim color blindness, something that has been proven over and over again to be a way to allow subconscious bias to continue to exist unchecked. As The Atlantic puts it, "They [sociologists] argue that as the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality have become more covert and obscure than they were during the era of open, legal segregation, the language of explicit racism has given way to a discourse of colorblindness. But they fear that the refusal to take public note of race actually allows people to ignore manifestations of persistent discrimination." Essentially, just because King did not openly discriminate against films made by and starring people of color, that does not mean that his choices were unaffected by racial biases.
He then goes on to say, "I would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong." While this is a common argument against practices like affirmative action, it is also deeply flawed. This kind of egalitarianism would be admirable in a world in which art made by POC and white people existed on an equal playing field, but thanks to centuries of systemic racism and oppression, it does not. We are culturally programmed to see white art as the only legitimate kind of art, particularly in the case of films, because, until relatively recently, filmmaking was a particularly inaccessible medium for POC.
Of course, King ultimately backpedaled (or clarified his point, depending on your perspective), stating, "The most important thing we can do as artists and creative people is to make sure everyone has the same fair shot, regardless of sex, color, or orientation. Right now such people are badly under-represented, and not only in the arts." This tweet suggests that what King was trying to say was that as long as POC and other marginalized groups have the opportunity to make art and therefore be in the running for awards, then they should be judged by the same criteria applied to white art. Unfortunately, this is still an optimistic and privileged point of view. The fact of the matter is, while explicit racism is becoming less and less acceptable in modern America, "aversive racism" still affects as many as two-thirds to three-quarters of white Americans. John Dovidio, a professor of psychology at Yale, explains "aversive racism" as: "Instead of feelings of hatred, it's more like feelings of avoidance and discomfort. That's where the name aversive racism comes from."
Considering the fact that as recently as 2012, Oscar voters were 94% Caucasian and 77% male, it's safe to say that there is a lot of aversive racism and sexism at play in Oscar voting. The Academy has supposedly attempted to diversify since then, and they now have 7,902 voting members, a group that is supposedly made up of more women and POC than in previous years. But still, the Academy remains predominantly white and male; and as long as that remains true, it's unlikely we'll see much of an uptick in the diversity of Oscar nominees. Essentially, acknowledging your implicit bias as a white person is very important, but there is only so much you can do to overcome it because most of the time, you're certain you're being completely fair.
While this kind of bias confrontation is important work, as Dovidio puts it, aversive racism "...usually happens when you can justify a response on the basis of some factor other than race. So, there may be like two people that you are interviewing – one white and one black – and you shift your criteria for the job in a way that actually favors the white person without actually directly discriminating against it. So the problem is every time we look at our behavior and monitor our behavior, we behave in an egalitarian way. And it's only when we're not paying attention that we discriminate."
All of this being said, one has to ask: Should King have voted for films made by POC just for the sake of diversity, even if he didn't think those films deserved his vote? Not necessarily. But what he should have done, and what all white people should do on a daily basis when put in the position to judge and critique art made by and for POC, is interrogate our opinions and our biases.
Here are a few of the questions we need to ask ourselves in those kinds of situations:
So maybe King should have voted for POC movies for the sake of diversity. Maybe he should have acknowledged that, as a white man, he was inevitably going to gravitate towards movies made for and about white men and reacted by casting his votes for films he knew were important to and celebrated by POC. Does this seem like a completely fair way to determine the recipient of an award? No, but neither is being a POC in America.
At the end of the day, the only way to actually address the inequality in Hollywood is to make room for POC to take up space. In this case, that looks like diversifying the Academy until it truly represents the reality of our diverse, multicultural country. And that starts when white men (and white women) admit their implicit biases, confront them, and ultimately move out of the way to give POC and women a chance to make their opinions heard.