AllGasNoBreaks (AGNB) first emerged from the internet wastelands to crash Burning Man. Tech executives cosplaying as hippies danced and babbled into the microphone as host Andrew Callaghan nodded along. For the next year and some, AGNB took us to flat earth conventions, Proud Boys rallies, NASCAR races, bigfoot hunts, and furry conferences. Andrew plunged us right into bowels of American freak power—the strange and deranged world of misfits, lunatics and Floridians that gather like hordes on the badlands of the American id. Among the tweets, the TikTok teens, and Trump spam of 2020, AGNB sparkled, but all that glitters must eventually be seized by an LLC. Andrew has split with his financial backer, Doing Things Media, which has generously kept all the intellectual property. AllGasNoBreaks is dead. This is my eulogy.
AGNB was built on two pillars: the first was Andrew’s take on interviewing and the second was the series’ meme-style editing. As an interviewer, Callaghan played a naive local news reporter, throwing out softball questions and letting the microphone do most of the work. People responded by going off about their conspiracy theories, oversharing their dating history, or throwing down some homebrew raps. Meanwhile the series’ visual language was straight off the memepages: episodes moved quick and lent themselves to being clipped and reposted. AGNB understood that losing resolution on a deep zoom is fine if it meant getting a laugh.
The show draws its aesthetics from American journalistic tradition. You might draw a line to it from the world of New Journalism and call it Youtube Gonzo. You could file it in the library of American road stories going back to Mark Twain’s letters from the Comstock Lode; you could call it a parody of local broadcast news in the vein of the Daily Show, or you could call it Gen-Z digital natives going nomad. It’s all true; as Americans we respond with Pavlovian fidelity to the whistle of the wind over tarmac, and we admire the big-dreaming rambler, whether with pen or camera. AGNB’s connection to our literary past, while it remains rooted in its own digital age, highlights the series’ importance as a piece of American media.
Historical connections aside, AGNB still has real potential to influence journalism. The show was a clarion call to the memelands, to those people who want to carry their native language to journalism, but who could never get it past an editor. AGNB embraced the culture of the internet because it came from the internet; it feels authentic thanks to its production choices, and it offers an entirely fresh approach to understand this great ugly country of ours. But most of all, Callaghan proved that there’s an appetite for this sort of content, that the people want to know, “what the fur is going on?”
AllGasNoBreaks was outsider journalism: Callaghan convinced Doing Things to buy him an RV in exchange for posting Youtube videos, and then he set out for his great American road trip. A year later, he was in a Minneapolis Target, running interviews while the store burned and looters pushed out shopping carts of merchandise. Was it journalism? Was the K.A.R.E news crew posted on a bridge 200 yards away doing a better job of covering the story? As for his understanding of online and street culture, Andrew is all insider. He especially understood the importance of comedy. AGNB seeks out the funky corners of American life without resorting to slumming or milking people’s sob stories. If you remember the Instagram page “Humans of New York”, you know what I’m talking about. Humans of New York had two basic templates: “I have a disease, seven kids, and I just got laid off” and “that time I watched the sunset with grandma the night she drowned”. I understand that blood and misery turn the wheels of narrative, but I appreciate AGNB’s choice to focus on the long stretches of life between disaster. When it comes to online content, not everything has to be so serious and dramatic: just yesterday I liked and commented on a picture of my friend eating fried chicken. The only difference between that and AGNB’s is that where my friends use their free time and money on movies and food, other people choose to blow it all on a full-body fursuit and a ticket to Las Vegas. So if I’ll like and comment on a fried chicken post, I’ll watch furries be weird for twenty minutes. Definitely.
Andrew is not the first guy to get awkward interviews out of people on the fringe, he’s not even the first guy to post it all on the internet, but he set himself apart by owning his connection to the dirty reality of his subjects and his audience. Where journalists like Louis Theroux play the role of curious Etonian mixing it up with the natives, Andrew comes off as a local kid doing his high school project on the village imbecile. This authenticity, this connection between audience, narrator, and subject can not be overvalued. It is core not only to the success of AGNB, but also to the failures of American mainstream media to connect and build credibility with audiences.
AllGasNoBreaks authenticity also comes from its production and online presence. AGNB’s production value is good, but not mind-blowing. There’s no fancy intro, no drone shots, no slick animations, and definitely no interviews with expensive experts. It’s a lot closer to your high school newspaper’s Youtube channel than it is to Vox. Bypassing the frills is part of the authenticity. Maybe it’s because high production value means big budgets, which means financing, which means corporate strings and risk-averse editorial oversight, which means hiring established writers, people with degrees and blue ribbons, people steeped in the conceit that journalism is a grand and very serious public service. AGNB just gets on the ground, sticks a microphone in somebody’s face, and starts nodding.
I also appreciate that AllGasNoBreaks isn’t trying to teach me the neuroscience of oddness, it’s not trying to get me to hack my inner weirdo and maximize the activity of my brain’s creative circuits. It doesn’t whine about how weirdness was patterned out of us when we were kids. It doesn’t sell weirdness as an antidote to trauma. It doesn’t contextualize weirdness in the bigger story of America’s failures in mental health or the collapse of community because of the overreliance on cars. AllGasNoBreaks just watches the freaky flower blowing in the breeze, and once in a while it checks that you, too, are seeing this.
At its heart, AllGasNoBreaks was a reminder that the world can still be a strange place; there’s still adventure to be had, and not every crumb of fun has been banned or turned into a competition. The freaks live. AGNB was an epileptic tribute to them, a reminder that weirdness and excitement are still out there, ready to seize.