Wildest stories from Bourbon Street | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

you worked as a doorman on the uh I could say legendary Bourbon Street in New Orleans uh where you saw what you described as this might be another Wikipedia quote by the way this is where I do my research wiip does it say hellish scenes hellish scenes and quotes Wikipedia is damn right about that all right thank you that's a win that's one in the win column uh so yeah tell the story of that what's it like to work on Bur what kind of stuff did you see I mean I was a host at a at a fine dining restaurant that on the corner of bourbon and Iberville so that's the first street if you go from Canal Street onto the quarter so this is like across from like a Dairy Spot it's the the middle of the tourist Corridor of New Orleans and the spot was kind of like an kind of a tourist trap it was called Bourbon House the food was good Chef Eric I don't want you to see this and think you don't make good and dewy sausages but it was overpriced and so I had to we had to maintain this like fine dining facade on a street where almost everyone is like throwing up fighting or is half naked so there was this policy we had these giant glass windows next to the the the tables so if you're eating at at Bourbon House you can look out onto Bourbon Street and you can see as you're dining a full panoramic view of all these parters throwing beads boobs all that y we had this policy where if we're serving someone we can't look onto Bourbon Street if something crazy is happening so there's a fight or something like that we can't look right so there is a dude I remember I'm [ __ ] serving a table there's a dude in a Batman mask butt naked with 12 pairs of beads just jerking it yeah back to jerking it he's jerking it right and every every single person at the restaurant's looking out there like look they're taking pictures and the manager step looks at me he's like keep your [ __ ] eyes on the table so I'm serving these people you know I'm like you want what you like red beans and rice or would you like some cre [ __ ] and uh there's just this dude and you know ultimately the manager went out and you know escorted him further down Bourbon Street but you know I would get off work at around midnight every night and that was when Bourbon Street is at its most chaotic and so I lived in the French Quarter as well so I lived I lived about 12 blocks down bourbon on at a in a small Creole Cottage in a cute little like orange Old School New Orleans one-story spot I lived in the Attic above these uh these gay meth dealers named Frankie and Johnny oh wow and so I would get off work and I would basically have to walk through like this battlefield I mean it was a battlefield getting home was out of like the Warriors movie it was of Humanity on display yeah it was like Kensington Philadelphia but just alcohol you know what I mean oh it's all alcohol but it's a lot of with a lot of visitors right from outside almost all visitors yeah and that that kind of would set the flow for the weekend for example if the Raiders were playing the Saints Raider Nation and they do not play around if it's the Patriots that's a whole different crowd they think they're better than everybody else yeah well they technically are better than everybody else but yeah but people from Massachusetts aren't like the cream of the crop in terms of like American superiority strong words yeah no no offense but I mean no I that's I'm sure they won't take that as they are good at fighting though I'll tell you that all right great New England has hands compared to some places which places are those Colorado Colorado has no hands yeah the West Coast not too much hand that's why you feel safe talking [ __ ] about Colorado but if you get to the cornfed parts of East Colorado I mean these guys got hands bigger than my head they'll be the [ __ ] out of me but anyways I'd walk back to uh to my house on bbon street and I would be sifting through this battlefield and I had a friend at the time who was like yo we should do a a taxi cab confessions type spin-off where we ask people to confess a deep dark secret and we post it the next day and so we we tried that and it went viral on Instagram instantly it was mostly incest stories you know people admitting to incest I know it's a common Southern stereotype but there's some truth to it uh there was some murder confessions that was pretty crazy uh we never really posted any of those but how did you get people to confess it's pretty easy and New Orleans has a homicide solve rate of like 22% so I mean most of the time they'll they'll just tell you I remember I was I was walking down Bourbon and I asked this kid I was like what's your deepest darkest secret and he told me he's like I just smoked a dude in the Magnolia it's a project hous in the third W project development and they said I just smoked a dude in the Magnolia playground for touching my sister molesting his sister and I was like what and he was like yeah look it up and I was like all right hold on and it it was like man found dead in Central City playground like appeared to be homeless shot execution style so I told the kid I was like why'd you tell me that he's like man put that [ __ ] out there like I'm trying to go viral like tag me too oh wow I don't think you understand that even if you're a juvenile he was probably 15 you can go you can get juvenile life in Louisiana for a homicide even if it's you know Justified so uh I just deleted the footage in front of him I was like I'm going to delete this footage see that trash button I'm hitting it right now don't tell anyone that again and he was like all right I appreciate it and he walked off but it's the little little moments like that what I always anything for the grham I guess yeah after a while though it became sort of a repetitive you know because there's only so many things that people can confess to that are that go viral you know and just oh so you were trying to see like what well I mean there's the incest one some people just say like I eat ass that was like every everyone said that like I cheated on someone or I've seen a surprising number of people on your channel say mention eating ass yeah the way how seriously you said that will live in my head for the rest of my life that's good I want you I want to live in your head saying that a lot of people mention eating ass yeah a lot of people do mention that yeah also that's kind of where I developed this magnetism for freestyle style rapping you know everywhere I go people rap not sure why I mean as a former rapper myself and middle school and for the first year of high school I think that maybe like it takes one to no one but everywhere I go people start rapping if you and me went outside of this podcast studio and walked around for five minutes I could find somebody it's rapping I can tell who raps or who can rap who has eight bars in their head they're ready to go I think also there's something about you that gives them creates the safe space yeah yeah to uh perform their artart yeah that was the quarter confession series was the first time you saw the suit that's when the suit came out yeah it was kind of like a Ron Burgundy Eric Andre inspired type where' you get that suit Goodwill Goodwill yeah always wow I was playing checkers you're playing chess good job I mean Goodwill has a surprising amount of identical gray suits for sale yeah I've actually gotten suits at uh at TH stores before they're great yeah a lot of people donate suits and I was going for oversized suits which are the cheapest ones there so yeah it was like 12 bucks 12 to $25 every time for the outfit if I wanted to look super sophisticated like like I'm from another era MH that I would go to Thrift Store yeah cuz there usually like this there's like a like the patterns they have it's just like a more sophisticated suit which is what you kind of picked out it made you look ridiculous but in the best kind of way the tough part about quarter confessions for me is that everybody that was featured for the most part would more or less regret being a part of the show yeah and that over time just gave me a bad feeling where I was like you know what I kind of feel like I'm doing an ambush interview especially because I'm presenting as so agreeable yet the intention is to make something funny yeah and I get that that's what people do in the satire sphere I'm sure Al and Bruno and Borat did the same thing and I don't think it's unethical because that's all for the purposes of Comedy it is what it is but for me I wanted to do something different yeah because there's an intimacy to confessing a thing right and then you just don't really realize what the implications of that and the atmosphere of Bourbon Street is like anything goes like it's a free-spirited place but if you transport that energy digitally to a different place like Colorado yeah they might look at it and be like different place in time like 5 years later right that same person has a family and stuff like this and all of a sudden they're talking about eating ass right exactly kids have to think about that or you know imagine if there's a video of your grandma or Grandpa out there when he was a kid talking about eating ass that's a horrible experience to to discover that about your you know respected Elder later in life it's tough I don't even know where to go with that but uh is is the literally the opening question was tell me your deepest darkest secret uh yeah you just come up to somebody like that yeah how often do you get like a no how often what's the yes to no ratio well the weird thing is like we don't really um extract answers from people like what makes a good interview is when they're ready to talk the more you have to talk and try to get an answer out of them it it's just not a good vibe like so we kind of look for people who appear to be already ready to talk open body language like they seem confident in verbose and we approach them first there's a look we wouldn't approach a shy person and be like come on tell me no what about a person with pain in their eyes oh yeah we're interviewing them yeah so they're ready to talk they're just not like yeah there's different ways to be ready right I see homeless people a lot and they always look fascinating and the ones I've talked to are always fascinating yeah we just did a video at the Vegas in the Vegas tunnels like trying to obviously it got taken down by Fox but whatever we uh I was going to make a joke that I didn't see it we tried to help a lot of them by getting them IDs and when I made the documentary I had this idea that if I it's a big roadblock for them is getting identification without IDs you can't check into a homeless shelter you can't do day labor you can't qualify for housing nothing so when when we interviewed them they'd basically tell us if I had my ID I wouldn't be here and so we said okay we're going to really help this time we're not just going to talk to them about their struggles we're going to actively go out and get them IDs at the DMV so we did that and you know nothing you really changed in their life and we sat down with a recovery specialist who works directly with them day in and day out and he explained to me that he's been trying to do the same thing I tried to do in a onewe period for the past 10 years and that they have deeper underlying traumas and pain that need to be dealt with far before they even take the steps to enter society as a housed person that's a heavy truth right there breaking that shame cycle has to come first because you you got to think right like I'm from a generation that romanticizes vagrancy and homelessness to a certain extent if it's called van life or if it is done in a way that's sort of like Rolling Stone Willie Nelson hit the road people who are above 50 they feel really embarrassed to be in in the spiral of homelessness they feel like failures a lot of them have kids who they weren't there for that's not the kind of pain that can be dealt with by giving someone a tiny home yeah it's a good step forward but to to for someone to really make a change they have to want to change and so it's how do you help someone and guide themselves in the right direction and if you're paternalistic and you use shame as a as a method to get them to clean up they're going to end up right where they started yeah that's a tough truth to accept cuz a lot of people want a quick fix to things and I don't blame people who go out and give baloney sandwiches out to the homeless and each case is probably its own little puzzle each person is so complex now imagine drug abuse what that does for the brain yeah trauma childhood trauma there's so much to unpack and then just the uh the belief that they're the undesirables that they're they they don't deserve to be a part of society because they failed a fundamental obligation like taking care of their kids if we could take a small tangent to you mentioned this Vegas video which is fascinating um it was taken down recently by YouTube or YouTube took it down based on yeah it was illegal uh Fox 5 I guess so the documentary was an hour and 45 minutes we used 10 seconds of a news clip that was publicly broadcast by Fox 5 Vegas and according to the Copyright Act of 1976 you're allowed to use any publicly Broadcast News clip in a transformative capacity in any documentary film or research paper or broadcast or anything um they specifically this Corporation Called gray media that controls the TV stations in almost every small town they had lawyers hit up YouTube and YouTube YouTube complied with an illegal copyright strike to get our video immediately removed and I'm a YouTube Partner I'm in the YouTube Partner program so to think that I wasn't forewarned is it's a bit strange but it also smells like corruption to me to a certain extent yeah you shouldn't have that amount of power at the very least they should have the power to just like silence that 5-second clip maybe yeah but I'm taking them to court because I I have the means to be able to do so I'm a larger Creator I have an audience I have the financial backing to do it I can't imagine how many people out there are smaller creators with like not as much consumer of a you you know a fan base they can mobilize against someone like Fox 5 or the money to go to court so I want to take them all the way there to set precedent for future cases so that these giant main mainstream media conglomerates can't uh copyright strike documentary filmmakers at at will it doesn't make sense oh thank you for doing that that's really really really important and that's really powerful and it might hopefully Empower YouTube to also put pressure on people to not and YouTube is in a difficult position because there's so much content out there there's so many claims it's hard to investigate but YouTube should be in a place where they push back against this kind of stuff as a first line of defense especially to protect smaller creators so what you're doing is really really important appreciate it man and it's sucks that it was taken down are you do you have any hope well I talked to my YouTube Partner today and he said that the Fox Five lawyers have two weeks to comply with my counter appeal but you know I spent 20 grand on uh human voiceovers to in five different languages so I invested probably in total like 70k into this video so even if the it gets reinstated the steam's kind of been taken out of its trajectory but also it's just like a really important video is good for the world yeah why the hell would Fox 5 have an a vested interest in having the video taken down I I just hate it when people do that to videos or to creators that are doing good in the world yeah it's not an expose on the mayor of Las Vegas it's an attempt to show the civilian public how to get involved in a local nonprofit and potentially intervene in lives of the tunnel people well [ __ ] Fox 5 the other channel 5 as you said yeah well thank you for pushing back hey man and highlighting it hopefully it gets brought back up but yeah defending other creators yeah so that other creators can take risks and and don't get taken down for stupid reasons yeah so uh Court of confessions was written no it was all real life reality TV documentary but it caught the attention of a a larger company called doing things media yes and they contacted me pretty much like a week after I graduated from college in the May of 2019 and they said hey like how would you like to produce a a show I was like what do you mean they were like we'll get you an RV we'll pay you 45k year you get to we pay for gas for food for two hotels a week go out there make content and we'll be in the background just powering it all and that was the birth of all gas no breaks yes I mean all gas no breaks was named after a book that I wrote called all gas no breaks a hitchhiker di which chronicled the 70-day journey that we were just talking about it's a tough book to find by the way oh yeah there's only a few copies left I'm thinking about doing a reprint at some point down the line but I sold off the last 100 copies like a month and a half ago M yeah until then you guys should go read on the Rob by Jack yeah you should read it I don't know if you read it you can't get my book get on the road by Jack carow it's great it's the best when's your birthday I'll send you April okay I'm a Taurus coming soon sh typical Taurus yeah yeah I'm a typical Taurus man I'm a Scorpio Moon just write that down what's the time when you were born 11:30 11:30 at night or oh of course yeah typical this guy knew it that's the real science yeah anyways so the name the idea of all gas no breaks as a show was to combine the the I guess Road dog ethos of the all gas no breaks book with the presentation and editing style of quarter confession so was to take quarter confessions on the road that was pretty much like a simulated hitchhiking experience but with the editing and like Punchy effects of quarter confessions which is like I wear a suit we do the fast Zoomin little effects stuff like that it was a man those were the the best years it was just so it was just so fun I mean imagine you're fresh out of college you were just a door man interviewing people about like you know making out with their cousin and stuff and then boom this that you've never even heard of is willing to buy you an RV and give you 45k a year which to me at the time was more money than I could possibly imagine so I called my dad I was like Dad I need you to find me an RV because he's the only guy I know who knows about cars and even he doesn't know much about cars so he's like all right I'm on it so the RV was 20,000 mhm and the first event that we were called to cover was the The Burning Man festival and that was tough because burning man is not too keen on filming supposed to be a non-commercialized you know escape from the from reality I mean they have a gift economy set up it's based upon like Mutual participation and uh non- exploitation and so the idea of making a burning man video was tough at first because burn burners oftentimes and this is not all of them but are pretty well off in general a lot of them have tech jobs are pretty high up in Silicon Valley and burning man is where they go to take off you know to take the edge off and basically become their burner persona on the pla they become reborn and they take ketamine and they wear Kaleidoscope glasses and steampunk hats and they you know snort MDMA and they run around the sand listen to do you snort MDMA that's one I need to go MDMA I thought it's a pill I didn't know it's better to take it in a pill or water but you can snort MDMA I definitely need to take MDMA I'm already full of love but like that I probably go on another level yeah don't snort it cuz it'll only last you like 90 minutes let me write that down yeah so anyways we didn't know what to do because we try to film don't snort the initial idea for all gas no breaks was to instead of asking people what's her deepest AR secret it was what's the craziest trip you've been on so the idea was to not saiz drunk people but saiz people who are fried on acid oh and so we went to Boulder real quick did a test interview with some lady who talked about seeing ancestral aliens during a Peyote Retreat and so it's pretty easy to extract trip reports from hippies and you know gutter punks and stuff like that or oogles so we go to Burning Man uh we start asking people like you know what's your craziest trip story and they didn't have the same type of free flowing storytelling style that like a on the street crust punk in New Orleans might have where they're like I don't give a [ __ ] I'll tell you whatever these people were very bottled up about what they were willing to disclose so we went on Burning Man radio and we did a broadcast and we said hey we're we're doing we're psychedelic journalists it was me and my friend C at the time I said we're psychedelic journalists we're parked on tan and I which is across street in Black Rock City and we said we have a 1998 Catalina Coachman sport it's an RV we've set up a podcast Studio we're doing a show about psychedelic voyages yeah so lo and behold two hours later we had 10 people lined up at the RV nice willing to talk so that vetted people in advance for us and so we did a couple interviews uh and that was that well what were some of the stories from the trip reports uh there was this lady named rosma who said that she was known in several circles in Berkeley for being multi-orgasmic and could create multiple repeated climaxes using only Her Mind by like squinting her eyes and squeezing her eyes together so much that like the pleasure spiral just you know went crazy I feel like I talked to several people like that at Berkeley yeah you know what I'm talking about not that well yeah that lady I think she manifests herself in many forms yeah right so but still it was on the cruder end there was one guy Nam uh Kimbo Slice was his burner name he talked about taking a [ __ ] after taking like a a quarter of mushrooms and how he was like seeing his childhood and visualizing his past life you know as the the turds were flowing into the toilet and just talks about the Psychedelic Union between pooing and taking taking shrooms so he was very visual with his words yeah so there was stuff like that I interviewed Alex Gray which was super cool about his first trip in San Francisco when he was in 1971 shortly after the summer of love I got to do some pretty cool interviews but still it was a semi Ambush style I I I wouldn't say that we were doing journalism yet it was still comedic video work you know was there a narrative that tied it together it's like really just a trip comedic almost with the interview and then I go Burning Man and then it's on to the next one so I guess that could give a loose structure but it's just like a punch and slapstick thing um everything was going good until we interviewed this guy named DJ soft baby but he was uh wearing a golden leotard uh with once again Kaleidoscope glasses short shortless dancing like you know dancing and uh he was eating chowder out of a a plastic bowl and he was like this chowder is so [ __ ] good he's like this is the best chatter I've ever had in my life and he starts putting the chatter on his face and he's like I want the Chow all over me yeah and so we we just go hey man can you just do a dance for us real quick just for some b-roll he does a dance we posted on Instagram the next morning doing things media CEO calls me read he says all of our pages are down and he's like that guy you filmed dancing last night on drugs putting Chowder on his face that guy's at the top of MIT top of MIT I don't understand what that means went to that's like saying yo my brother's a rocket science he's like head of NASA or whatever well I mean the guy knows people in Boston okay you know not in the Whitey Bulger sense but in the reverse sense I I have trouble believing the DJ soft baby oh DJ soft baby was Major it could have been Harvard it could have been but it wasn't it wasn't UMass I don't think there's anybody that's at quote at the head of MIT who's putting um what was it all over his face uh chowder chowder well then you haven't been to Burning Man yet okay I not been burning man so to consult the my colleagues at MIT if they know DJ soft baby so who probably was Harvard if let's put it on them okay the top of Harvard so he made some calls you know to the to the tops to the heads of big Tech and got all the doing things media Pages taken down at the time that was like a vast network of pages and we ended up having to take the V obviously the video came down and he held the entire network of Instagram Pages hostage and so that was uh he he made us agree to never post that video again and then somehow got all of our Pages reinstated so that was my first brush with like uh you know powerful people on drugs and that was probably my last brush with powerful people on drugs so what what did you transition into from there uh I think after burning man we um went to the South went to Talladega race weekend went to a Donald Trump Jr book signing went to a uh Jugo adjacent fetish mansion in Central Florida called the sausage Castle uh Jugo adjacent uh sa can can you can can you run that by me again the jugal adjacent fetish mansion in Central Florida okay fetish mansion in Central Florida Jugo adjacent I mean every single one of those words I feel like needs a book or something um so uh jug by the way who are The Jug is this ICP fans ICP fans okay but I say adjacent because it's not a jug Mansion but there's a lot of jug who kick it at the Mansion it's jug friendly oh okay jug friendly yeah cuz they get made fun of in a lot of places oh so it's not okay got it and jugal say outrageous [ __ ] you know and they embarrass themselves and they fight a lot so they're kind they're on the FBI's gang list which if you ask MEP or the the The Jug The Jug if who's the the head of the jug the Jugos it would be violent Jay and Shaggy to dope but there's Associated acts like twisted and there's a whole Rabbit Hole honestly Tech 9 is sort of a part of that Tech 9 I don't know who that is should I know he's a he's actually one of the top selling touring rappers despite having sort of not that many streams Tech is like it's got a huge cult following in Missouri this is like the Jugo started in uh waren Michigan we should also say ICP and St clown posy so this is a thing this is a movement oh yeah if you if you went to Seattle right now and punched a cop and they booked you in County Jail you may end up running with the Jugos running with the Jugos they're a presence in Pacific Northwest prison system from what I've heard can you tell a Jugo from a a distance well they say whoop whoop so if you see a Jung they'll say that also like I'll try to I'll try to look they're kind of it's called the dark carnival is the mythology they abide by what do they Define themselves what's the ideology family a family no I understand but what's the ideology what's the the philosophical foundation of the uh they're anti-racist uh they like to drink fago and also just like cheap liquor and stuff like that they're they they're into drugs yeah a lot of circles if you pull out a crack pipe people will be like I don't want to drink with you anymore if you're at a Jugo party and someone's smoking twiz or something it's relatively accepted what's twiz meth meth right right lots of tattoos yeah the hatchet man is the most common one so it's a it's a Psychopathic Records logo it's a cartoon of a clown Wheeling a hatchet it's actually a pretty sick logo I vaguely remember enjoying some of the uh ICP Music it's good yeah it's pretty good it's funny it's edgy well they get sazed a lot but I got love for the clowns and also so when all gasn breaks transitioned away from you know Rich Elite drug parties and into like the south is that's when the fun really started to happen living in your RV in Alabama and Florida and stuff is the best why why what what is it about people are just so friendly down there and it's it's warm year round and people are non-judgmental it's just great the South gets hated on a lot especially in the coastal C Coastal States Mississippi and Alabama are kind of like the butts of a lot of jokes and stuff but those are great States no I love it New Mexico Albuquerque all those oh yeah the ABQ is is great ABQ what's that Albuquerque it's what Jesse Pinkman called it is the ABQ oh [ __ ] the the depth of references you bring to the table is intense it's okay I met a lady in Albuquerque when I was traveling across the United States and she said take me with you said I'm sorry ma'am I can't yeah but I think about that lady think you made the right call I don't know yeah on the road yeah by Jack carak best book I've ever read in my life there's a there's a moment when he meets uh a nice girl on a bus and they have a love affair was good on the bus or they no no he they went to C California well yeah and there was a love affair on the bus but it wasn't sexual it was just romantic it was it was in the air it was in the air which there is something in the air on the bus uh like a greyhound Mega Bus that type of situation there's something certainly something in the air but a romance there is man when you travel AC cuz it's like strangers getting together and you're like feeling each other out and but you're in it like you each have a story CU you wouldn't be taking a bus unless you had a story so you're especially if you're traveling cross country there something you ever taken the dollar bus from Philly to New York the Chinatown Bus yeah I have yeah that's a great bus the people on that it's not a [ __ ] dollar though it it was a there's some that are five bucks no no no no no no if you book it way ahead of time which it's like $20 I was like this is a [ __ ] lie calling it $1 I I don't know why I'm swearing the anger came out I apologize swearing is okay sometimes when I got last time I was on the Chinatown Bus there was like a rooster walking down the the aisle actual rooster yeah watch chilling it was awesome well there's a nice part of your film with a rooster I forgot about that yeah that felt almost fake yeah did you plant the rooster no the rooster there's a place in ebore city in Tampa where roosters walk around all the time and we had a rooster park there right by the main drag for what did I say we had a rooster parked we had the RV parked eore City for a long time and the rooster laid eggs in the the undercarriage

Channel: Lex Clips

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Keywords: ai, ai clips, ai podcast, ai podcast clips, andrew callaghan, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, computer science, consciousness, deep learning, einstein, elon musk, engineering, friedman, joe rogan, lex ai, lex clips, lex fridman, lex fridman podcast, lex friedman, lex mit, lex podcast, machine learning, math, math podcast, mathematics, mit ai, philosophy, physics, physics podcast, science, tech, tech podcast, technology, turing

Id: xnOJ9f2XpwI

Length: 30min 0sec (1800 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2024