It’s not every day that Vermin Supreme slides into your DMs. If you’re even a casual political observer, you might be familiar with Supreme’s unusual fashion sense and the atypical presidential campaigns he’s been running since 1992. So when the perennial presidential candidate, famous for his boot-headed antics, asked if I was interested in an interview, I had to respond.

“I've always maintained that if I didn't have the boot and was talking serious things on the street corner, it would be very easy to ignore me,” Supreme tells me in an interview, a few months after we connected via Twitter. “When I was younger, it was very easy to ignore me because I was like some crazy hippie kid. But as I've gotten older, and I'm more gray and more lines on my face, it has given me a lot more gravitas. And now I'm like the elder statesman of wingnuts.”

“My right hand is making a circle, and that's the Vermin Supreme's imaginary world of make-believe campaign and stuff,” Supreme says. “The other hand is making another circle; that's reality. And they generally don't overlap too hard.”

I got Supreme on the phone just after the new year, and we had a broad conversation about politics, when Supreme told me the thing I least expected to hear from him: His 2020 campaign is for real.

That’s right: Vermin Supreme — the man who made his name on a platform of free ponies, mandatory toothbrushing, and bringing actual kangaroos into courts; the man who calls himself a “friendly fascist” and “tyrant you can trust” — says he’s actually taking his 2020 campaign seriously.

“This election year is ultimately my first real campaign,” Supreme tells me. “I have a solid staff of about a dozen people around the country with the various state coordinators, and it's a very interesting thing. I've never really done it, and there's a lot more strategic concerns and things that never would have mattered when it was an imaginary campaign.”

How in the name of free ponies did this happen? Well, it’s kind of a funny story. Supreme explains that a group of Libertarians reached out to him about seeking their party’s 2020 nomination, and he agreed. He’s even, for the first time in his career, hired a campaign staff to see if he can do what has henceforth been unthinkable for a Libertarian Party candidate: earn 5% of the presidential general election vote by building a coalition of young people and nerds.

To understand how Supreme has made this pivot toward pseudo-seriousness, you have to know where he comes from. According to what his mother and childhood friends said in the documentary Who Is Vermin Supreme?, the Massachusetts-born Supreme first got involved in politics in high school because he was outraged that the police kept busting his fellow students for smoking pot. After high school, Supreme moved to Baltimore for college, where he ended up living on the edges of the local art scene.

“In 1986, I started operating as a Vermin Supreme,” he tells me. “All booking agents, club owners were Vermin, and I was going to be the Supreme of those.” (Supreme says that his name has been legally changed, something he says was necessary to be named accurately on ballots and in lawsuits he’s filed against various police departments.) Not long after he started operating as Vermin, he ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Baltimore in 1987, before, he says, he became burned out on the city.

From there, it was the 1986 Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament that captured his interest. Supreme says that, before long, he was involved in an anarchist collective, and met his wife, Becky Supreme, on one of those peace marches.