FIELD NOTES #15 - SHOUT OUT TO THE HOMIE (PART ONE)
It’s a strange feeling to be duped by someone you believed in. A guy you could not imagine would be so short-sighted as to launch a memecoin on the precipice of becoming a near-universally beloved figure. What could have been an anomalous comeback for Hunter Biden after four years spent in shame and silence was broken with a single misstep. I mean, he must have known that there was no way dabbling in the crypto-sphere would go well.
The nightmare began around a week ago, I was in Paris visiting my grandmother. Actually, I was in a strange small town on the western outskirts of Paris called Saint-Cloud. We sat and sipped espresso outside an art deco themed cafe. I filled her in on my recent adventures in Germany. I had just shot a dual set of documentaries that couldn’t have been more different – one about the rising far-right AfD party in Saxony-Anhalt, and the other about Berlin’s mephedrone-fueled and occasionally urine-soaked club scene.
“So are people just allowed to be naked in this place…Berghain?” Grandma asked.
“Well, there’s no phones allowed, so...”
As I tip-toed uncomfortably close to the kind of conversation no one wants to have with their grandmother, I felt a little relief as my dopamine box began to buzz in my jort pocket. I looked to see an incoming Signal call from Hunter Biden.
“One sec, grams. Gotta take a call!”
She gave me a look twinged with dismay, which quickly turned into delight once I flashed her the caller ID.
I stood up from my chair and held the phone to my ear as I wandered down the rue. Hunter sounded cheerful, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. Neither was getting a call from him.
Back in journalism school, they taught us to never befriend ‘subjects’ and to always maintain the cold distance of a staff reporter on-deadline. They teach you the same thing about hiring and working with friends. Basically, the classic don’t mix business with pleasure sentiment.
At this point in my life, that would be an impossible rule to follow. Not only do I employ all of my friends, but I have no real life outside my job. Nor do I want one. I love what I do. I travel constantly, and get meet fascinating individuals along the way. Yet the consuming quality of my work makes it so I don’t possess a single strong friendship outside the ever-reaching tentacles of Channel 5. If I were to follow the ‘golden rule,’ I’d be the loneliest man on earth, which brings us to the curious case of my friendship with Hunter.
After he trusted us to do his comeback interview in July of 2025, it felt natural to embrace him as more than than an interviewee.
For a refresh, our three-hour sit down with Hunter went about as viral as an interview could go. We scored millions of views in a single day, feeding material to every dark corner of the internet. The chaos that followed brought us closer.
That August, Melania Trump threatened to sue us for a BILLION dollars if we didn’t remove our interview and publicly redact certain damning statements Hunter had made about her connection to Jeffrey Epstein. Hunter doubled down returning to Channel 5 to say “fuck that, it’s not gonna happen”. He dared Melania to sue in the hopes that she and President Trump would eventually have to sit for deposition if they went through with it.
It was after this second interview, perhaps out of camaraderie in the face of a billion-dollar presidential lawsuit, that Hunter and I started hanging out a bit off-camera. We communicated casually. Mostly, it was him seeking counsel on whether or not he should go on a certain podcast. I don’t think he heeded any of my advice though, as it seemed like he went on every single one of them. Hunter seemed hell-bent on speedrunning twenty-eight podcast appearances in a four month span. In each one, he donned the same denim on denim outfit from our first sit-down. Often repeating exact viral quotes verbatim in the hopes of inciting a reaction from the host.
I started to get this creeping feeling. I resented that the frequent and brutal “once a crackhead always a crackhead” type comments that flood any Hunter related content on my platforms may have some merit..
But to be frank, Hunter’s media blitz felt addict-like, as if he was desperately trying to recreate the dopamine rush associated with our audience’s initial feedback to his off-the-cuff remarks, and quippy one-liners, such as “fuck George Clooney,” “I’m a crackhead,” and other self deprecating tirades about his life with hookers at the Super 8. These confessions gradually morphed into inspiring speeches about recovery.
As someone who has grown up with painkiller addiction in my family and also spent a lot of time around clout-chasers in Los Angeles, I can tell you that online attention is a more powerful drug than anything you can score from a drug dealer. In retrospect, Hunter’s relentless podcast tour was a clear attempt to chase a high that he’d never be able to recreate. Much like I’ve heard is the case with heroin, it’s just never as good as the first time.
I was worried about him. Still, I hoped Hunter would have some time to reflect once he sobered up from his clout bender. Perhaps, the initial thrill of likes, comments, and views flooding in would no longer intoxicate him. I hoped he’d get dulled out like the rest of us.
We kept in touch for all of 2025 and into 2026. I invited him to moderate a couple of our live shows on the C5 Carnival tour. Each time he walked on stage there was uproarious applause, fans cheered him on like he was the second coming of Chief Keef. It felt like the Channel 5 fan base had mobilized into a private army of Hunter diehards.
Backstage at the San Diego show his wife, Melissa, struck up a friendship with my Mom. The two of them started hanging out, and it almost felt like our worlds were starting to merge…especially after the Nick Fuentes interview in Philadelphia. It had gone so well, we planned to do another one. We planned to use it as the pilot episode for a joint podcast. Via text, we’d brainstorm cheeky titles like, ‘Motel Talk’ or ‘Take A Crack At It’. When I took his call that day in Saint-Cloud, that’s what I initially thought he was hollering about.
“Hey man, who do you want to interview next?” I asked him. “Maybe Bam Margera?”
“Nah, nah, buddy,” he said in typical Biden cadence, “I’ve got a better idea, hear me out.”
He went on to explain that he’d recently raised an extremely large sum of money for charity purposes through his position on the board of an organization called BASTA in Los Angeles, a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for tenants rights, preventing homelessness, and eliminating substandard housing. He also casually mentioned that he’d just been awarded $1.7 million dollars in punitive damages after a judge found Overstock CEO Patrick Bryne liable for defamation.
“The point is, buddy, I’m working with a lot of capital right now and I really love the community you’ve built through Channel 5,” Hunter explained. “And I want to give back to them in some way. When I think of my community, I think of Channel 5. I really love you, and love them. So I want to offer something in return.”
In the moment, this explanation seemed perfectly reasonable. He was a fan favorite amongst the community and it was no secret that he had plenty of access to money – his dad was just the president, after all.
“Ok, that seems like an awesome idea," I replied, “but what do you mean by give back?”
Hunter explained that if I provided him with a curated list of fan emails, he’d provide them a link to a free giveaway that would then allow them to make zero-cost payments on rent, groceries or gas. In hindsight, I’m aware of how preposterous the whole ‘free money’ proposal sounds. There really is no such thing. But in that moment, it seemed far more ridiculous that Hunter would permanently jeopardize our friendship and his reputation to launch a meme-coin than to give out free cash-or-credit to a specific group of Channel 5 fans. Not to mention, he’d aggressively lambasted Don Jr. and Eric Trump in his many podcast appearances for their involvement in the $TRUMP coin, so the idea that he'd publicly replicate their behavior was baffling.
I wish I’d asked more questions. I wish I understood that my ‘friend’ was potentially taking advantage of me in an attempt to scam the support base that I work tirelessly to inform and entertain in exchange for their monthly support. Yet I didn’t. He seemed genuine. I had no reason to think he wasn’t. He’d always done right by me.
I also had no reason to think that there was anything wrong with handing over a limited email list to a known ‘friend of the show’, so long as the email they planned to blast out wasn’t explicitly marketing a product and had my personal stamp of approval, which Hunter’s pitch did.
“Alright, sounds good Hunter,” I told him, “I got my grandma waiting on me. I gotta go.”
“Sounds good, buddy, just send me the list when you can.”
I hung up and called our producer Juan, who manages Channel 5’s task delegation.
“Yo, do we have any kind of email list?” I asked Juan.
“Yeah, I think so. Let me ask Sydney.”
Sydney generally manages our eCommerce and runs point for our merch website, which is managed by a dude named AJ from San Diego.
Juan called back shortly after and relayed what AJ explained to Sydney, which is that within our merch website, there is a box you can click during checkout which says ‘email me with news and offers,’ which then spits back a csv sheet of all users who checked the box.
Surprisingly, an overwhelming majority of merch customers left the box unselected. I would too. Of the 40,000 merch orders processed since launching C5 in 2021, only 4,700 users opted-in.
Well, I thought to myself, that select few is sure gonna be happy they signed up for spam emails when Hunter sends the free rewards.
I then sent Sydney a text, instructing her to shoot the csv sheet over to Hunter’s email. I now see that my decision was incredibly shortsighted. They never got an email anyway, but users who checked the box weren’t signing up to hear from Hunter, they wanted to hear direct updates from C5. Yet, it felt like he was becoming a part of the Channel 5 family, so I saw no problem with it..
I thought of the applause he was met with by fans during our final tour stop in Albuquerque, and all of their beaming faces. I assumed they’d be just as pleased when his email popped up. I mean, who doesn’t like free money? It sounds ridiculous now, to think that the son of a career politician would be forking over cash to 4,700 anonymous users with no strings attached. But what can I say? I trusted the guy. To make matters even worse, my grandma was looking neglected outside the Parisian cafe. I’d been on the phone for over twenty minutes working all of this out, and I owed it to her to be present.
—
The Channel 5 infrastructure is now composed of twenty two human beings, a long shot from our humble three-man origins. There are six editors, three social media managers, three full-time producers, five shooters, two co-hosts, two lawyers, one talent rep named Ben from WME and one genius gay publicist named Mitchell who I’d never cross in a million years. There are also three offices — the main office in L.A, a satellite news-desk in Texas and additional editing suite in Berlin, Germany that just opened.
Amongst this vast apparatus, there are people who never even communicate with each other. For example, my WME agent Ben has never met our lead L.A. editor, Wiggy. Nor have my lawyers met Sidam (thankfully). But, from top-to-bottom, there is one rule that is widely understood: don’t call Andrew on desert time unless it’s an absolute emergency.
‘Desert time’ refers to the five days out of each month that I spend in my Mojave Desert trailer on the Salton Sea, somewhere near Slab City. I usually spend these days riding my minibike shirtless through the martian landscape, ripping the bong like I’m back in tenth grade, listening to nostalgic music from Odd Future era, re-watching movies like The Dark Knight and Burn After Reading, eating sugary cereal, recording rap songs on GarageBand, shooting the shit with local bar flies at the only watering hole in town, sleeping in past noon, and most importantly NOT giving orders to C5 employees or discussing documentary matters with anyone whatsoever. Resisting this is a lot harder than it seems.
I think I’ve developed a certain strain of workaholism since 2023, likely shaped by a series of professional betrayals and public controversies that forced me to work twice as hard to ‘prove people wrong,’ which requires me to force myself to stop working in order to prevent total physical collapse. I’m not being hyperbolic here for the sake of sympathy. You can ask anyone at the L.A. office — I sometimes will research, shoot, edit and publish videos for weeks straight with little-to-no sleep until eventually passing out on the office floor, just to wake up and restart the process after a few hours of biologically required hibernation.
I’ve been aware of the workaholic issue for quite some time, which is why I chose to carve out some desert time as a monthly requirement. It’s also somewhat of a digital detox. I still check my phone when I’m out there, but it stays in a dresser drawer on do-not-disturb, creating a sonic firewall that only a few contacts have the ability to burst through. Four contacts, actually — my lawyer, publicist, agent and mom, all of whom knew I was in recharge mode. So it rarely rings.
But my phone sure was ringing on the morning of September 9. Not once, but twice. Then four times. Then six. I could hear its muffled vibrations through the hollow wood paneling of my dresser drawer, growing increasingly concerned with each ring. My mind immediately went to the worst case scenario, which is that either a close family member had passed away in a tragic accident or that my name was being smeared in the tabloids for some reason. I stared at the drawer’s cobweb covered golden handle, paused for a moment and gave it a rip, flinging the sucker open to see who was calling. It was my publicist, Mitchell.
“Mitch, what’s up?”
“What the fuck is laptop coin?”
I chuckled, completely oblivious to what he was talking about.
“What do you mean?”
“Dude. Did you see the Wall Street Journal article?”
“No.”
“Well it says you and Hunter are launching a meme-coin.”
I hardly had the energy to take any of this seriously, convinced that it must have been some kind of misunderstanding or possibly, just blatantly false reporting.
“Um, alright.. well can you tell them I’m not?”
“Sure, but I’ll have to go out to the others as well.”
Others? Mitchell explained that sixteen other mainstream outlets had already reported the same, alternative facts… which is that Hunter and I were launching a meme-coin called $LAPTOP and that I had personally volunteered the email addresses of every Channel 5 subscriber so that Hunter could solicit them to pre-order his meme-coin ahead of ‘drop day.’ It was so absurd that I may have mistaken it some kind of a practical joke, if not for the grave tone of my publicist.
“Andrew,” he said. “This is not good.”
I stepped out of my trailer into the desert air and gazed into the chemical stillness of the Salton Sea. I took a deep breath and called my friend, who is an attorney, for legal advice. His tone was similar to Mitchell’s, yet with more concern as to the legal implications of this impending disaster.
“So according to my research, I'm not certain if Hunter’s pardon covers this kind of thing, especially if people stand to lose money when the token’s value plummets.”
Days before his father left office, Hunter was issued a full, presidential pardon after being convicted of unregistered firearm possession and felony tax evasion in California. Much like Crip Mac’s probation, Hunter’s pardon came with strict terms that increased the penalties for crimes like.. fraudulent commercial activity.
“So if he does a pump and dump scheme,” he explained, "it could open the floodgates to a whole litany of lawsuits and criminal charges that would absolutely be weaponized by the Trump administration to discredit the Democratic establishment.”
“Ok. But I’m obviously not involved,” I replied. “And how do we know if he’s gonna do a pump and dump?”
“Well, we don’t yet.. and I know you’re not involved. But as of right now, according to the Wall Street Journal, you are feeding him your entire fan base to launch this thing, which could make you an accomplice to fraud if he does a rug pull.”
“Fuck.”
I looked over at my fire-red, Coleman minibike in dismay, knowing the thing wouldn’t be fired up for at least another month. Desert time was undoubtedly over. My much-anticipated peace was broken, all because of this thing that I barely understood. Despite my extensive sit-down with alleged fraudster Hailey “Hawk Tuah” Welch and seven years in the social media space, I’ve failed to really understand what the hell a meme-coin even is and how they could possibly turn a profit for those involved. The same goes for NFT’s a few years back, which seemed to only be promoted by the most nauseatingly uncreative people I’ve ever had the misfortune of encountering in the wild.
Mitchell called back. Apparently, the WSJ was refusing to correct the record unless I issued my own personal statement. This notion infuriated me.
“What, so they don’t fucking believe that you are my publicist?” I barked at Mitchell in desperation. “What could make those dipshit fucking reporters possibly not take your word for it?”
“No, they know we officially rep you. They just think you hired a PR team for damage control and to work things out on the backend to stay under the radar and avoid pissing off your fans.”
“Well do the fans know about this already? Are they pissed?”
Mitchell took a deep breath and paused for a few seconds before replying. Another bad sign.
“Just don’t check twitter today.”
Fucking hell. I checked Twitter immediately. Sheer bloodshed and mayhem.
I thought he was the last real journalist in America, turns out he’s a DNC shill who sold our private data to the Biden family, one wrote.
I’ve supported Andrew from the All Gas No Brakes days until now, but this is the last straw, another said. Cancelling my Patreon subscription.
There were hundreds, if not thousands of more, and even harsher, similar tweets. Even the benevolent Mormon missionary Nick Shirley was chiming in. I flipped open my laptop and checked our Patreon stats. Three hundred had withdrawn their support. My phone buzzed again. It was Ben, my agent from WME. He was considerably more level headed than my lawyer or agent, but nonetheless called to deliver some bad news —
“[REDACTED] has cancelled your annual ad contract.”
That meant $50,000 down the drain and all of the money we’d budgeted for our upcoming journalistic voyages to Cuba, Lebanon, Albania and Ukraine. I could only get a few words out.
“Damn, that sucks bro.”
“It definitely does. Have you talked to Hunter yet?”
It occurred to me that I had not, in fact, called the alleged friend of mine who roped me into this mess. I opened the Signal app and gave him a buzz. The call was brief, and full of excuses that morphed into compliments before I could even respond.
“Ah, um.. jeez pal.. y’know this is all one big, massive misunderstanding and I think my team messed up big time,” Hunter said. “I’m gonna make this right, but boy, my god, I gotta tell ya.. um.. and I tell everyone I meet this.. you’re the smartest guy I know, I mean seriously. What you’ve built is just remarkable and the last thing I’d want to do is jeopardize our relationship.”
“OK. Well I had no idea you would be launching and selling any kind of coin. Those things literally never go well. I don’t want a single email going out to anyone who was on that list we sent.”
“Sure, no problem buddy.”
I hung up the phone. That was that, I figured. No emails would go out. No harm, no foul..
If Hunter is so naive to think that he will be the prodigal son of the crypto space and the first public figure to ever launch an ethical meme-coin, that’s a battle he can fight on his own. All I had to do was make a public statement, clarifying that I had absolutely no involvement in the coin.. From there, there was a small possibility that I’d be able to return to desert time as planned.
I walked back into my trailer, laid on my boxspring mattress, opened the notes app and begin writing a few concise few words, intended to relieve my supporters of their fraud suspicions and give the WSJ what they needed to correct the record.
“Channel 5 and I have nothing to do with Hunter Biden’s crypto coin. We have not, do not, and never will advertise crypto,” I wrote, adding a few more words about how we’d sent over a list of our supporters’ emails without realizing that he intended to market some kind of coin.
I wasn’t sure how to end the statement. I thought of all the nice things Hunter had said to me over the phone, how kind he was to my mom backstage at our San Diego show. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings with the statement or speak in a way that would unleash a torrent of online hate. It could make him relapse, and I didn’t have absolute certainty that he was running a scam. At that point, $LAPTOP hadn’t launched yet. Maybe he’d pull it off in a way where no one lost money. Maybe he’d bring some goodwill to the space, and knew something I didn’t about how to navigate the space ethically. Either way, it felt like I’d be going nuclear on him without bowtie’ing the statement with a basic courtesy.
I wrote the first thing what came to mind—
“We wish Hunter the best, shout out to the homie.”
Looked alright to me.
I took a screenshot, published it to Instagram, set my phone to airplane mode, then closed the blinds and settled back down a mid-morning Salton snooze.
AC