This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #469 with Oliver Anthony.
The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in
the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors.
Here are some useful links:
- Go back to this episode’s main page
- Watch the full YouTube version of the podcast
Table of Contents
Here are the loose “chapters” in the conversation.
Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript:
- 0:00 – Introduction
- 1:14 – Open mics
- 5:17 – Mainstream country music
- 14:24 – Fame
- 20:20 – Music vs politics
- 29:10 – Rich Men North of Richmond
- 39:20 – Popularity, money, and integrity
- 54:08 – Blue-collar people
- 1:06:11 – Depression
- 1:31:04 – Nature
- 1:53:40 – Three-legged cat
- 2:02:11 – I Want to Go Home (live performance)
- 2:05:50 – Guitar backstory
- 2:10:12 – Playing live this year
Introduction
Lex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Oliver Anthony, a singer-songwriter from Virginia who first gained worldwide fame with his viral hit Rich Men North of Richmond. He became a voice for many who are voiceless with his songs speaking to the struggle of the working class in modern American life.
His legal name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford. Oliver Anthony was his grandfather’s name. And so, Chris used this name as a dedication to his grandfather, and to 1930s Appalachia where his grandfather was born and raised.
“Dirt floors, seven kids, hard times,” as Chris says. He’s happy to be called either one, by the way. I’ve gotten to know Chris more since the recording of this conversation. He truly is as he appears online, and in his songs, down to Earth, humble, and a good man who deeply feels the pain of the downtrodden.
This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here’s Christopher Lunsford, or as many of you know him as, Oliver Anthony.
Open mics
So, I was texting you last night sitting at an open mic listening to a guy perform Great Balls of Fire. Like I told you, he was giving everything he got for, like, five people in the audience plus me.
Oliver Anthony
Well, you were there. I’d have been doing it too, if you were out there. Like, “Oh, that’s Lex Fridman.”
Lex Fridman
No, man. He was this big dude on a keyboard, just everything, sweaty, long hair, you could tell he was there in his own little world. I love the courage of that, of just giving it everything. I don’t think he wants to be famous, I don’t think he wants anything in life except to be there, and to play his heart out. That’s why I love open mics.
Like, some people still aspire to be famous when they play open mics, but some people, maybe they’ve given up, or maybe they never wanted to be famous, they’re just there for the pure artistry of it.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
And you said you started out playing open mics at shitty bars. What was that like?
Oliver Anthony
Well, yeah. Real quick before I forget to, a great example of a guy who had that same mindset and was able to maintain it really well was this mandolin player named Johnny Staats in West Virginia.
To me, he’s one of the best, and he’s won all these awards, and stuff, and he still works for UPS full-time. And he could go out and tour, play mandolin for anybody he wanted to, but, man, when you meet Johnny, you can tell he’s just got this joy in him that I don’t think he would have if he …
But as far as me with the open mics, yeah, it was just … A lot of them were embarrassing. There was a couple … I remember there was times where I’d go up and try to do … I’d do one song, I’d get halfway through the next song, and I’d be so nervous by that point, I couldn’t remember any of the words, and there’s a couple times I …
I remember there was one time in particular that I just walked off halfway through the song, and put my guitar in the case, and just left. I couldn’t even stay in there, just total freakout.
Lex Fridman
Just embarrassment?
Oliver Anthony
And I never drank in bars either. Like, I wasn’t really a social drinker. So, I was just there to try to do the mic. So, I was a little out of place anyway. I feel out of place in a bar to start with.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. This is back when you could smoke in bars. There’s a whole vibe to it-
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
… people smoking and drinking. And, yeah. Definitely bombing in a place like that when the audience is … There’s, like, five people, and they’re bored.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. There was one like that. It was in Matoaka. It wasn’t that far from where I lived. The place is gone now, but it was about as big as the room we’re in here, if that. Like, the ceiling tiles were yellow from where everybody had smoked in it since the beginning of time. But, yeah. That was my little spot, those little type of spots.
Lex Fridman
You did covers. What’d you play? What was your go-to?
Oliver Anthony
Back then it was, like, I don’t know, Fishing in the Dark, Nitty- Gritty Band, or any of those old Hank Jr. Songs, any of those bar type of … Like, David Allan Coe, You Never Call Me By My Name, any of that kind of stuff.
And I haven’t even played any of those in forever now, but that was … Any of those ones where you get people singing along, and stuff, that’s what I’d always try to do.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. That song you performed Take Me Home Country Roads, how does that go? “West Virginia”-
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
That’s a good song.
Oliver Anthony
John Denver was just one of those guys that who knows where he would have went, long-term, if he wouldn’t have passed, but-
Lex Fridman
You know what’s a fun song that I love, I shouldn’t, but I love is … What is it? Thank God I’m A Country Boy.
Oliver Anthony
I think that’s what I liked about John Denver was he was a little bit … He let himself be a little bit corny in the spirit of having fun with it. Like, a great example, there’s this older guy that not a lot of people have heard of him named Roy Clark, but my farm’s a mile down the road from Roy Clark’s old farm, but he used to be on Hee Haw. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that old show from the ’60s, or whatever, but a crazy dude. He could pick any instrument up. Like, there’s videos on YouTube of him, but he would just sit there and just pick anything up, and just rip it to death.
But he would always just be real silly about it. He never took himself too seriously.
Mainstream country music
Lex Fridman
Some people go to the fun place, some people go to the dark place.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Country can do both. You more often go to the dark place to-
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
To the pain.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. Well, especially, some of the new songs that are coming out. They’ll be probably not … I don’t know what they’ll be. I don’t know. What is country anymore anyway?
I don’t know that many people who listen to the type of music that I grew up listening to ain’t probably listening to country radio anymore anyway. Like, I think there’s quite a lot of people who have disowned that space.
In commercialized country, you only really get what sells, and a lot of what sells isn’t necessarily what matters.
Lex Fridman
Well, you had that whole experience where the take where you record it and “polish it”, try to make it perfect, and in so doing, destroy the soul of the thing. And so, probably that happens with these big artists. They’re so famous. It’s, like, a machine and so-
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
… what the machine does is it over-polishes things. And so, the raw power of the person, the uniqueness of the person, the soul of the person is gone, if you do that.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. Well, I think professionalism in general … Like, applying the tactics of corporate America to anything that is-
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Oliver Anthony
… baseline artistic is not going to end well.
Lex Fridman
They’re all individually brilliant, but together, this corporate speak comes out.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Just the soul of the people, it dissipates. It disappears. Why are you all pretending that life is not terrible and beautiful and you’re both scared shitless and excited and this guy’s going through a divorce, this person just fell in love. Like, you’re-
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
… forgetting the intensity of life with this corporate nine to five, “Hi, John. It’s great to see you today.” “Oh, you too. You as well.”
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
“You as well.” But when I look at it, I’m like, “Why am I whining?” I feel like a Bukowski type character, because they’re all really nice. They’re all good people. But something is gone when you have this corporate machine.
Oliver Anthony
Well, they’re there to fill a role, contractually, and I think if they bring too many of their human elements into that, then they jeopardize losing their sense of security. It’s all just out of fear. It’s out of fear of losing your job.
It’s the reason why all of the songs say Oliver Anthony and not Christopher Lunsford on them. Like, it’s fear of … It’s so difficult to, especially now, it seems … Who knows? I was never around in the ’40s or ’50s to work a job. I’m sure they were probably pretty miserable back then, but they talk about now how difficult it is, like, the impossibility of having a single family household, or anything else, but when you find a decent-paying job that you can do without it just torturing you every day, that’s a pretty important thing now.
And so, it’s pretty easy to turn yourself into a robot for eight, or 10 hours a day out of fear of … It’s, like, you don’t want to be yourself too much, because maybe part of yourself isn’t something that’s accepted in this dystopian nightmare that you go to work at every day. And so, you’ve just got to do your best to just not step on any toes, or do anything that makes you stand out too much.
And now when you scroll through some of these videos of people … Even when I was still working my lame job, it was, like, there was this whole big thing of people talking about quiet quitting, or something like that where they were just going to go to work, but not really do anything, but-
Lex Fridman
That hurts me so much. That hurts me when you just stop, when you’re there, but you’re not really there. That makes me so sad.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. So, then these companies just slowly fall apart, and disintegrate, because they’re so worried about structure and …
Like, God, man, even in America today, our culture has become … Because so many big corporations own and manage everything that we live under, like, food, agriculture, healthcare, social media, it’s all in corporate structures, that it’s almost, like, a lot of the problems we find ourselves in now with society, I think are like … It’s almost, like, corporate HR has been implemented into our whole thought process of everything.
I think that’s what you’re touching on, though. It’s hard to be a human, and be a good little corporate employee at the same time. And as our whole society moves more into becoming, basically, one big corporation, it’s, like, you don’t want to piss the HR lady off. So, it’s a lot easier for me to just beep boop. We’re all turning into robots.
Lex Fridman
I’ve talked to great engineers about this, Jim Keller is a legendary engineer, Elon, Elon Musk is another example, that you need that … I don’t know what’s the nice term for it, but you need the asshole, because you want to get to the ground truth of things, to the first principle of things. Like, how do we simplify? How do we make it more efficient? How do we move faster? How do we get shit done? And that has no place for this polite speak.
And then other great team members swoop in, and repair the damage that the tornado has done.
Oliver Anthony
Do you think that’s … Because I’m not super well-versed about all this. So, I’m probably dumb to even mention it, but this guy who’s been helping me with doing a documentary, he’s been following me around since the very first show, August of ’23.
His background was doing promotional videos for Boeing. Like, for on their new spacecraft to pitch it to whoever. And so, we touched base a little bit on Boeing, and, of course, they’re having a lot of problems now it sounds like.
And he was comparing that with SpaceX, or with … I think it’s that, exactly what we touched on with that thought process of that dehumanization within companies.
I think that’s what, ultimately, causes maybe … I don’t know if there’s a connection there, or not, but it seems like Boeing would be more of that … They don’t have that tornado. They’re very … He was telling me even just with his protocols, and some of the people he worked with, like, everything’s just very, “Lightly touch everything. Don’t touch anything too hard.”
Lex Fridman
So, it’s not just HR. It’s just this managerial class where it’s, like, Bob from this department has to schedule a meeting with John from this department and Debbie … Like, they have to have a meeting two and a half weeks from now, and then there’s paperwork, and then that bureaucracy that’s created in the managerial class just slows everything down.
And one of the things that slowing everything down does is it really demotivates the people that are actually doing the shit. Like, the people on the ground, the engineers that are building stuff, it’s, again, soul-drenching to be excited, show up, and now you hit this wall of paperwork. Like, you have to wait for John and Debbie and I forgot the third guy’s name that I imagined in my head to have a meeting. And then you slow down, and you disappear in terms of that fire, that passion that’s required to create big things.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, because they don’t believe there’s a lack of leadership, and if they don’t believe in that leadership, then why the hell would they be motivated? I remember a while back watching Jocko Willink talk about that when he was in leadership when he was leading his guys. I think he mentions it in his book is probably where I remember seeing it, one of his books.
And he talks about how important it was for the people under him in rank to believe in the actions he was giving them, even if he necessarily didn’t agree with them himself, it was, like, it’s really hard to take orders, and to have human spirit, especially, in something that’s innovative, and not … If you’re working for a company where you just think everybody’s dumb …
I can, certainly, relate with that. God, at my old job, that’s all we did is we spent half our day just talking about how dumb we thought everybody was that was above us. It’s easy to fall into that in a corporate world.
And so, yeah. The morale gets terrible, and everyone suffers as a result of it. Like, the people at the top who were implementing all that dysfunction suffer, and the people at the bottom. It’s not good for anybody.
I had thought now that I’m doing this that I could escape away from that, but that exact same mentality, and that dysfunction, and that inefficiency, I still battle it every day.
Lex Fridman
That’s why it takes unique characters to lead the way. Such unique characters are very much needed in the music industry to revolutionize everything, cut through the bureaucracy, the bullshit that, ultimately, is just the machine that steals money, and doesn’t get anything done really.
Fame
We’ll talk about it. By the way, all the love in the world to Jocko. He’s great. I’ve been going through lots of ups and downs in life, lots of low points for myself over the past, shit, three years really, but recently, especially, and he always texts in his very high testosterone way of like, “You good, bro? Just checking in.” He’s a good man. He’s a good man. He’s, obviously, an inspiration to millions of people, but also just he’s a good human being himself.
Oliver Anthony
Maybe one thing that we felt similarly, I would imagine, you way more than me is just feeling like, “Wow. I have the ability to influence, or the ability to either bring truth, or to improve people’s lives, or …” Every word that you say sometimes matters so much, and you’re just like, “Man, I’m an idiot.”
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Oliver Anthony
Like, I don’t know … Like, I would have never guessed. We were talking about that before about we would have never guessed that this would have turned into all this, but it is a weight that you bear, whether you really even acknowledge it, or not.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. I think the songs you’ve created, they speak to the human condition, to the struggle of everyday working people in a society that has the elites, that try to take advantage of those working people. And you’re just speaking through your music those truths of how life is.
And that has a huge impact on a lot of people. That’s really positive. But then you also get attacked, and misrepresented and lied about from different angles.
And just the turmoil, the intense chaos of that, it disorients, it disorients me to be attacked by a very large number of people, to be lied about, to be … Because I love people, I have a general optimism about humanity, it just disorients me. It gives me this feeling like … I generally, just like you said, think of myself as an idiot, not really knowing what I’m doing, and when a lot of people tell you that, “You’re correct. You don’t know what you’re doing,” you start to want to hide. You want to hide from the world, hide from yourself, and then there’s also just the chemistry of the brain. You shake up the brain a little bit. It starts getting weird.
And then on many fronts, it can get real lonely, when you’re getting attacked, when you’re fucking things up in many ways, it can get lonely. Yeah. And so, you get a text from Jocko like, “You good?” “Yeah. Yeah.”
And I have good friends. Andrew Huberman’s been great, Rogan’s been great.
Oliver Anthony
Well, you know, Lex, however many years ago was in a different place in society than Lex is now. And so, it’s, like, every conversation you have, or every relationship you have is inherently different, even if you aren’t any different.
Friends that you had from before maybe, or even just new people you meet, your interactions with them are going to be a lot different than if this wasn’t a thing.
And so, it’s, like, that can be tricky too. When you’ve spent your whole life from the time you’re three years old and you’re starting to play with other kids, and developmentally learning how to share and how to interact, and you’re playing in the playground with kids and learning how to set rules and boundaries, and how to, basically, fit into society.
And so, you have this whole learning pattern up until whatever point in time when “success” happens. And then it’s, like, all that shifts pretty dramatically in a relatively short period of time.
So, how do you think managing your previous friendships, or your … Has that been tricky for you? Or-
Lex Fridman
Yeah. It’s been tough. I value deep, close, long-term friendships. And, yeah. I have amazing friends, but they, certainly, do treat me a little different. They bust my balls noticeably less.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. And you need that sometimes.
Lex Fridman
I need … Not sometimes. All the time. First of all, it’s how dudes show love is making fun of each other, at least, my friends.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Man, I’m going to get in trouble, but when you watch women interact, they’re often really positive towards each other. Like, “Oh, you look great,” dah, dah, dah. Yeah.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
When you watch dudes interact, like, close friends, they’re just busting each other’s balls, nonstop making fun of each other. And so, yes. That has been a little bit harder.
I try to break those walls, but that’s why with the famous friends it’s a little bit easier, because they can still … Like, Rogan roasts me nonstop. And it just feels good. I just sit there and get made fun of, and it’s great.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
It’s great.
Oliver Anthony
And I still do it all the time. It’s just a different experience now, but I’m, like, a Goodwill junkie. Like, most of even my clothes were from Goodwill, but I have this addiction with buying paintings from Goodwill.
Lex Fridman
Nice.
Oliver Anthony
Like, the $8 paintings where it looks like someone was following along with a Bob Ross-
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Yeah.
Oliver Anthony
… video, and it didn’t work out quite right. Like, I buy every one of those.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Oliver Anthony
I’ll go in there, and buy, like, 10. So, just even any time you go out into public now, you know it’s going to be a little different than it was. I don’t know if that makes sense, or not, but-
Music vs politics
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I’m trying to deal with it, but although, when you talk to world leaders, when you stop into politics a little bit, and you apparently stepped into politics, even though, you never meant to, you’re not a political person, that world is like, “What the fuck?” It’s very intense. Especially, at an intense moment in history in an extremely divided country.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. Like, saying that I’m not in politics, people are like, “Well, of course, you’re in politics,” and I don’t know whether I am, or not, but I do think a lot of people in politics … Like, as far as the people who sit on the internet all day, and argue about stuff on X, or on whatever, Facebook, and all, I do think their heart is in it for the right reasons. They observe that there’s a lot of things wrong in the world that they’d like to see different.
It’s just how do you get those people out of this four by four square and really … They’re entrapped in a same kind of box that the people at Boeing might be with that …
It’s the tornado metaphor, but it applies in politics too. Like, there needs to just be a tornado through politics, and we need to just lay all this other stuff aside, and just figure out what’s really pissing everybody off, what’s really affecting our quality of life.
A lot of times we’re arguing over the symptoms of problems instead of identifying the problems, if that makes any sense. If Jordan Peterson were here, he would tell us about fire and how-
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Oliver Anthony
… important that is, and burning … But it’s all the same-
Lex Fridman
Water and fire and ice, it’s a metaphor, and there would definitely be a connection to the Bible-
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
… and then you will receive a three hour lecture-
Oliver Anthony
But it’s all true.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. It’s all true.
Oliver Anthony
It’s all 100% accurate. Yeah. That’s the crazy thing, but it all ties into that same thing. Like, yeah. In politics now, it’s almost like there’s a rule book that you have to follow, and if, “You can’t agree with this unless you also agree with that,” it’s like …
And maybe it’s, like, the way that we receive information about what’s going on in the political landscape is always so biased, and it’s like the … Well, it’s contingent upon this algorithm, this algorithmic system that we live under where we’re fed … It’s, like, we’re almost fed certain sub …
And it’s easy to fall into that, because you don’t like hearing things you disagree with. And so, it’s a lot easier to just turn the TV on, or go on Facebook and look at whatever page posts things that you know you’re going to consistently agree with every day, and it’s not going to challenge the way you think in any little way, or expand your thinking at all.
It’s easy to just … It’s a cult-like type of thing. It’s like, “This is what we all agree with, and if you don’t, then go on git.” But we’re far too complicated for it to really work that way.
Lex Fridman
Well, this actually relates to one of my favorite things in your conversation with Jordan where you’re just shooting the shit about playing live music, and he goes to Kierkegaard.
Oliver Anthony
Yes.
Lex Fridman
Just, like, Søren Kierkegaard, the philosopher.
Oliver Anthony
Yes.
Lex Fridman
I love Jordan so much.
Oliver Anthony
I do too.
Lex Fridman
He just goes to Carl Jung and Nietzsche. And there, this idea from Kierkegaard that the crowd is un-truth. There’s elements to the crowd that loses the humanity, and the honesty of an individual that makes up the crowd, because the default incentive of the crowd is to conform to some kind of narrative. It’s, like, a distributed system that arrives at a narrative, and the narrative holds control over that crowd as opposed to the individual humans who are thinking for themselves, and being honest with their own thoughts, and realities, and so on.
So, he was saying that as a reason from a communication perspective to speak to individuals in the crowd, not to the crowd. So, from the performer perspective, the moment you speak to the crowd, you’re speaking to the lie that is the crowd according to Søren Kierkegaard.
It’s pretty hardcore. Kierkegaard is pretty hardcore. Jordan’s pretty hardcore.
Oliver Anthony
But that is true. But, specifically, in my case, really, it applies more than it probably does in a lot of cases with crowds, and music.
Talking about Richmond, I wasn’t necessarily even excited that Richmond did as well as it did. It was, like, in a way, it was almost alarming that it did so well. And so, those crowds that show up, maybe they do like my music, but I also think they’re there for something … There is something bigger about it. I wish I would have done a better job of having people there at shows to capture some of those crowds I had in ’24, man.
Lex Fridman
You mean the size? The intensity?
Oliver Anthony
The intensity. Like, it was revolutionary almost.
Lex Fridman
A song of revolution. Yeah. I think of Redemption Song from Bob Marley. Like, that song, it just connected with people. There’s something there.
Oliver Anthony
Well, and so many people identified different … Like I said, it goes back to when we were talking when we first got here, but it was crazy how it was almost like at the beginning, along with the scrutiny, and some of the other things, it was a lot of different people almost fighting over me, or fighting over it, because it resonated with people who voted differently than each other, which is probably a pretty terrifying thing, if you’re in the business of keeping people divided and angry at each other.
So, it was one of the only times that I can think where there was that much of a sense of unity among people who otherwise wouldn’t … I think about 9/11 when I was a kid. I was in fourth grade, but, God, man, people just put everything aside there for a little while. And it was, like, there’s bigger problems that just aren’t in our face, and if they’re in your face just for a second, or two, you realize it’s hard in your mind to create a graph that’s got all these …
But we argue about a lot of these problems, but if you were to really look at them … If you really just stand back and look at all the problems we spend time focusing about on the internet versus all of the things that are affecting us, that really, and probably even at our core piss us off, it’s got to be very disproportionate.
And the reason it got the reaction it did was because we all … Like, no matter what it is that we’re upset about, or what we think needs to be different in the world, or our opinions of things, or how we’re raised, or what our parents taught us, it’s, like, I think we all feel a little bit out of control in this new society. We all feel like we’re probably …
We probably all feel like we’re falling into this kind of corporate power structure where we all are just robots, we’re not allowed to be ourselves and be human almost.
Lex Fridman
And there’s enough people feeling that. People on the left feeling like the people in power are fucking over the working class, people on the right feeling the exact same with different words assigned to it, the deep state fucking over middle America-
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
… whatever the narratives are, and they’re just … When enough of that is happening, again, with the corporate polite speak, there’s something about politeness that’s really dangerous.
I feel like there was a lot of politeness in the Soviet Union.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. Prime example. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Underneath that, it’s, like, Chernobyl, which is this nuclear power plant that melted down. I feel like the bureaucracy needs politeness and civility, and paperwork to function, and then atrocities can happen underneath that.
So, everybody, people in power, with a smile on their face can just do horrific things, and then give propaganda that, “Look, it’s rainbows and sunshine, and unicorns.”
Yeah. So, people that are rude, and I’m starting to awaken to this a little bit, like, you need a little … Like, Tom Waits says, “I like my town with a little drop of poison.” You need some poison, some swearing, some meanness, some bullshit, some intensity to shake up a system, because when it converges towards this polite bureaucracy, the atrocities can happen and hidden away.
Oliver Anthony
And what’s probably the most terrifying to me is that that politeness is just theatrical whereas it emulates the respect that we would normally give each other in society if we were healthy and functional.
Rich Men North of Richmond
Lex Fridman
What was the process of writing that song? It really spoke to the pain and the anger of millions of people. There was magic there. How many edits? How many lines did you write? Were there any lines that you were tormented by? Haunted by? Come back, “Should I do it this way or this way? Or that?”
Oliver Anthony
Do you have a … I don’t know. Can you pull a TikTok up on this? If you go to my page, so, if you go to-
Lex Fridman
Chickens-
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. Go down, pre-Richmond, you can see the original version of Richmond where I put it up.
Lex Fridman
This is so cool to see the evolution.
Oliver Anthony
There it is. Okay. If you play that, that’s-
Lex Fridman
I have too many unfinished songs?
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. Play that. Click that and play it.
MUSIC
I would sell my soul-
Oliver Anthony
724.
Lex Fridman
Oh, wow.
MUSIC
… for bullshit pay.
Lex Fridman
Wow.
MUSIC
So, I can sit out here, waste my life away, drive back home to drink my troubles away.
Oliver Anthony
And if you read through this, it’s so funny. Everybody’s like, “You’re about to blow up.”
MUSIC
What the world’s gotten to for people like me-
Oliver Anthony
That’s all I had.
MUSIC
… for people like you.
Oliver Anthony
So, I had just that.
Lex Fridman
“You should probably finish this one. Might be real popular.” That’s a post from a few days later.
Oliver Anthony
That was in July.
Lex Fridman
Oh, fuck. That’s so inspiring, man.
Oliver Anthony
So, that’s what I had.
Lex Fridman
That’s so inspiring. That’s what? A couple weeks before you posted the final-
Oliver Anthony
Well, that’s all I had. Yeah. That’s all I had written at that point. In my mind, that’s the inspiration for the song was that little bit, and I wrote that just because I was on job sites all day, and going into all these just terrible places to work, dealing with different contractors and stuff.
You were talking about wanting to go and talk to blue collar people, and that’s what I did for work, basically, for eight years was build long-term relationships with people in blue collar. I was in the industrial space. So, sometimes I’d talk to 20 different people a day.
When you sit in a job site trailer, and talk to a group of dudes and you’re not there with some news camera, you’re just there as a random dude, you hear so much about what really goes on behind the scenes of the structure, of what builds this country, and keeps it going, and I think that’s probably what it was. It was how I felt, but also how I guess a lot of other …
I don’t know. It just seemed like the truth.
Lex Fridman
And so, you jotted down even to the details, in a notebook? Like, those words.
Oliver Anthony
No. It’s always just on my phone. I would just keep recording. I would just keep …
So, if you were to go back to TikTok and look at any of those original videos … So, like, the songs that ended up charting, let’s say, like, the ones that were on there that charted with Richmond, like this, I’ve Got To Get Sober. So, literally-
Lex Fridman
That’s a good song. Yeah.
Oliver Anthony
So, literally, what I did was this video I took at my property. This is my carport where my camper was. And I took this video, I went to some sketchy virus-ridden MP3 to WAV file … Or MP4 to WAV file transfer thing. I would rip the audio off of this video, put this on TikTok, and then put that on [inaudible 00:32:33]. And that was the song.
But, basically, like, this would have been the first time I played I’ve Got To Get Sober all the way through. Like, I would just keep writing it, and working on it, and writing it, and recording myself. And maybe I would record myself 30 times over the period of two months. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman
Oh, but when you say writing, you mean in your head? Not actually typed out, or written-
Oliver Anthony
Right. It was just video.
Lex Fridman
… in a way.
Oliver Anthony
It was mostly just video.
Lex Fridman
Over and over it was just videos.
Oliver Anthony
I was just trying to figure out how to make it … Yeah. But that’s what all these … Like, the audio file from all these videos is what ended up on Spotify and all that. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman
It’s cool to see these videos before you blew up. So, this is a good song. You’re playing … What is this?
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. These were all-
Lex Fridman
“Don’t sell your soul, brother. This is the best music I’ve heard in a long time.” That’s a comment before you blew up.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. Yeah. I think I had about 10,000 followers, or something.
MUSIC
… on just getting by.
Lex Fridman
What a fucking song. That’s a good on.
Oliver Anthony
And you’ve got to think, like, this was … Like, that was when I quit drinking. You know what I mean?
MUSIC
But the troubles and the sin of the world that we’re in knock me back off of my feet.
Lex Fridman
So, that’s coming right from your heart right there. I just imagine the thousands of people you helped with that.
MUSIC
I don’t know how it’s going to go-
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
MUSIC
… but it ain’t going to happen tonight. So, pour mine strong until I drown.
And if I wake up tomorrow, and that sun comes back around, I’ll be wishing I was sober.
Oliver Anthony
It’s so crazy how those cicadas and stuff come in. I just felt like it was a God-
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Oliver Anthony
… I don’t know how to-
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Oliver Anthony
Like, that’s just off my phone. All that stuff is just there. You know?
MUSIC
They’ve been saving my soul from the pain that the world’s put on me.
And Lord, I know that upstairs there’s an old man who cares and one day he’ll-
MUSIC
… man who cares and one day he’ll set me free.
I’ll go on a whim, start writing the hymn.
Lex Fridman
That’s a genius of song. That’s genius, brother. It’s genius.
Oliver Anthony
It’s just crazy to think about …
Lex Fridman
And what’s this one right before? What is this?
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, so that’s private …
Lex Fridman
And this is a nice recording. Got it.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, so this video got uploaded and then Draven from Radio WV would’ve gotten a hold of me in between this and that. He watched this and was like, “Dude,” he said, we got to record that one.” And so I didn’t have it all … I just had whatever was in that video is all I had written. I think it was just the chorus in the first verse. Draven saw that video …
Lex Fridman
And said, “We got to do this one.”
Oliver Anthony
Reach out to me to record. And he’s like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “No, we got to do that one.” And I was like, ” Dude, that’s all I got.”
Lex Fridman
Tell me about that guy. Draven.
Oliver Anthony
He’s probably my best friend now. We hit it off with this, and we’re like brothers now, I guess, but-
Lex Fridman
Can you talk about what he’s doing for music in general, for country music, for discovering talent for … He clearly sees something in people.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, he’s a little bit younger than I am, and he wrote music and played, and he’s got some of his … If you look up Draven Riffe, he’s going to kill me for even saying this, but he’s got some pretty … Dude, if he was like a pop singer, he would be … He can write the most catchy stuff ever. Let’s go. Yeah, so click on, I don’t know.
Lex Fridman
Bye-Bye.
Oliver Anthony
There you go. All right.
Lex Fridman
That’s him?
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Where’s this from? Five years ago.
MUSIC
I was feeling on the way. I was 10 years old, walking underneath the blanket of West Virginia snow.
Then walked right by no trespass sign.
And the grass look greener across the property line.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.
Lex Fridman
He could probably do, if he does … He could probably be real famous. He’s got a certain look.
Oliver Anthony
That dude will sit there and and he’ll just … We’ll just be sitting there at 2:00 in the morning, and he’ll just all of a sudden do this little thing and he’s got the most amazing first part of this song. We just started to co-write together in the last few months. So I’m really excited for that. But if you go to his … This is really funny too. I’m sorry Draven … I love you, man. So go to videos and go to oldest first. This is what’s so awesome about Draven.
He was originally working for this lady who was trying to develop different types of hair care products, but he thought the market was too saturated. So he was going to get into beard oil. So he created Radio WV as like a fake plug page for his Burley Boy beard brand he was working with. So if you look at, yeah that very first video.
Lex Fridman
Yeah.
Oliver Anthony
It’s got all his beard products and if you look, there’s multiple ones like that. So he started it just to do this beard thing with, and then … I don’t know, he just kind of felt called to keep going with it and it just naturally progressed from that.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that too is inspiring. You start out one way and then you discover something real special. I mean, he’s got an eye for how to bring out … I don’t know what it is, both the audio side and the video side, how to bring out the best in a person.
Oliver Anthony
He says he just wants it to sound like the way he likes hearing it, which makes sense. It’s in the same way talking about when we were talking about setting the cameras up, and a professional would tell you you needed three lights and you’re like, “Well, I think it would work with …” He’s just like, “Well, it’ll just work like this.”
Lex Fridman
And do it in a way where he likes it. Yeah, just do it for yourself.
Oliver Anthony
He does it because he loves it, and it shows.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, you can see it in there, and there’s some good talent. You were showing me this new lady, Gabrielle.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, she’s got it. But not a lot of people would record her doing that song, but he’s like, “I don’t know, it just was different. I just thought people ought to hear it.” But man, it was a blessing that he came along when he did. It really changed both of our lives.
Popularity, money, and integrity
Lex Fridman
We got to talk about that. So you posted the song Rich Men North of Richmond on August 8, 2023.
Oliver Anthony
I remember I was at work that day when it went up. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
So it blew the fuck up, straight to number one on the charts. Tens of millions of views and listens. And a few days later on August 17th, you made a post that I thought was pretty gangster. It was beautiful and gangster. So one of the things you said is, “It’s been difficult as I through the 50,000-plus messages and emails I’ve received in the last week. The stories that have been shared paint a brutally honest picture. Suicide, addiction, unemployment, anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and the list goes on.”
And then you went on to write “People in the music industry give me blank stares when I brush off $8 million offers. I don’t want six tour buses, 15 tractor trailers and a jet. I don’t want to play stadium shows. I don’t want to be in the spotlight. I wrote the music I wrote because I was suffering with mental health and depression. These songs have connected with millions of people on such a deep level because they’ve been sung by someone feeling the words in the very moment they were being sung. No editing, no agent, no bullshit. Just somebody and his guitar. The style of music that we should have never gotten away from in the first place.”
So huge props for that, for walking away from lucrative multi-million dollar record deals, and I’m sure the money that was just coming your way. Huge props. Moments happen where the world tests you, and integrity is what you do in those moments. So huge props for that. What was your philosophy? What was your thinking behind that?
Oliver Anthony
It was all those messages I got. I mean, you can see it in the comment sections of a lot of the videos after everything happened. But people just felt this spark like, “Wow, maybe we actually have a chance to …” Maybe we actually do have some kind of power. Those people put that song there, nobody else, and gave me the opportunity to make, even without signing anything, I was still able to make millions of dollars and have financial freedom and … I felt like if I was going to do anything like that, that I’d be betraying … I would be taking those people and almost betraying them somehow. I hate the big machine just like everybody else, and the last thing I’d want to do is ever support it or be a part of it. I want to watch it crash and burn.
Lex Fridman
See, this is the really important thing is whether it’s betrayal or not, we’ll never know. But you felt that it was and to have the integrity to walk away from the bag of money when you felt that way. That’s fucking epic.
Oliver Anthony
It was also, you got to think a couple months before this, of course I had a wife and kids that I loved, and I had a lot of really important things to live for, but I didn’t have a whole lot to lose. None of this was even really real. I didn’t care about that. I didn’t care to lose this just as quick as I got it. This didn’t mean anything to me. It just meant something to me that I could do something for. It’s like even if I’m not smart enough to figure out how to fix some of my own problems in my life, the fact that I felt like I could help fix somebody else’s, that meant hell of a lot more to me than any … That’s what I didn’t want to lose. I didn’t want to lose those people’s trust or feel … You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oliver Anthony
And so I’ve just tried to make every decision around as best as I can, what I think the right thing is to do and who knows what the hell the right thing is to do, but I just try to follow … We all have that little voice in us like that. We all have some, and I think sometimes we mask. It’s hard for us to listen to that little voice, whether it’s our gluttony or our lust or we numb ourselves with medications or with alcohol, or we scroll on YouTube for four hours a night and instead of … because we don’t want to listen to our conscience. But there is this very intelligent discerning thing inside of us that’s able to tell us what’s right and wrong, and it’s a spiritual thing I guess, and I just try to listen to that when I can. I don’t know. I just still feel like I haven’t done enough.
Lex Fridman
I think you did a lot. I think you did a lot. I think you’re an inspiration. You have helped a huge number of people and you’re also an inspiration to the other side of it, which is the artists and just to humans to have integrity. I don’t think people realize how much of a test of integrity fame, money, power also is. Rogan and I talk about this quite a bit. We get to see, I mean Joe especially, but I’ve had a bit of the same, you get to see people become famous, and you get to see how they deal with that, and it’s not easy. A lot of people will sell themselves a bit, sell the soul a bit, give away a bit of their integrity of the spirit that made them who they are. You get caught up in the wave of it and so to keep holding onto that, that’s a powerful thing. That’s a really powerful thing.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, that’s all I got though. When you lose that, what the hell are you? And you see it. You see these celebrity people that just fall off the … They go off the deep end. You have to have something in your life to keep you centered and to keep you your whole perception of reality. And your just existence and reality as all contention upon this center that you exist in and you have to … if you don’t have that, then you’re just flying through … I mean, we’re all just riding on this rock that’s going who knows how fast.
Lex Fridman
You said something I think to Jaco that I really liked. “Everything that has purpose behind it comes with risk.” So in that moment, I mean you’re taking a hell of a risk.
Oliver Anthony
I was terrified. I talked about this a little bit with him too, but I was terrified to even put the song out. I knew I was going to be the subject of scrutiny and judgment, and I knew people were going to … I knew all that was going to happen. I was going back to that talking about crowds, to stand in front of thousands of people and everybody be in some sense of unity. A lot of times when I end the shows, I’ll always end with this statement that just says, “No matter what, no matter how you feel when you go online, everyone feels so small and insignificant and powerless.” But I just say, “No matter how they make you feel online or when you turn on the TV or when you look at polling numbers or whatever, when you just look at all this trash that we digest every day, there will always be more of us than them.” And all that.
But just to see the light in people’s eyes when you say that, but the truth is, and it’s like who is us and who is them? And it’s us just represents humanity and all the things we talked about so far. Just the fire and the chaos, but also the love and just life. Life is just such a crazy complicated, beautiful, disastrous thing. And then them is like it is. It’s the power structure. It’s that same terrible side of us that created things like the Soviet Union and is ultimately what’s created this monster that we all live under today, which now doesn’t just exist within the confines of the Soviet Union, but seems to almost be a global epidemic.
Lex Fridman
And then that song became the rebel call against that, against the power structures that creates that.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. It’s like how much fire am I willing to play with? Because I know at some point I am going to get burned from it. I just pray a lot that God … I don’t have a lot of self-worth in myself anyway, so I don’t really care what they say or do to me or I don’t care. I don’t even care if I die, whatever. Just protect the people I love is all. That’s all I ask of God.
I have this dream of just creating this parallel system that sits beside all these stupid systems that we live under that are all engulfed in this thing that we talked about at the beginning. This type of structure. We’re all just robots. And it’s like if we hate the way music is, and all these artists are complaining about the way the venues are monopolized and the ticket sales monopolize, then let’s just go find other places to play music, because so many people hungry for music in places that don’t ever get it.
And if you look at it, there’s so many passionate people that are fighting all these different causes. Just in food. It’s the word they use for more or less starvation. It’s a more polite, it’s called food insecurity. But if you look up just in Virginia, just where I live in Virginia in the rural areas, how much food insecurity there is and how many empty vacant farms there are. It’s like this is an obvious problem that we should be on Twitter talking about non-stop. Everyone has to eat. It don’t matter what you vote for or what you look like or any of that crap.
Why are we living in a country where where half of us are obese and eating shit food and don’t know any better, and then the other half of us don’t have … It’s lack of leadership that’s caused dysfunction. And so if we’re tired of that, then let’s just fix it. We don’t need anybody’s permission. That’s the whole beauty of what America is. We don’t need some greasy-haired corporate schmuck to give us permission to go fix all these things that are wrong. Let’s just go do it. And if they don’t like it, fuck them.
Lex Fridman
In all domains of life from food to the music industry, honestly to education, also to government itself, all of it. Your music is also just the soundtrack to that spirit that makes America great, of just constantly trying to revitalize itself. When the bullshit piles up a little too high, there’s that revolutionary spirit that says we need to fix this shit.
Oliver Anthony
And that inspiration that created this country was from years of people living under tyranny. We forget the story of the people who really created this country. It’s funny. One of the statements I made at the very beginning that got taken way out of context, but I wasn’t in a position to even begin to have a conversation about it, is I made this comment early on at one of the shows about how our diversity is a strength, but that term has been hijacked now to mean something a lot different than what it really means.
But it’s like think about how many different people came together just at the founding of this country. People who spoke different languages, different cultures, religions, ways of thinking. So many different people came together to even create this place now, and we’ve just forgotten about all that. They didn’t all come here because they wanted to ride on some miserable boat ride and risk their whole lives to live in some crazy jungle essentially that had no structure, no infrastructure, no medicine. They didn’t come here for some glorified camping trip. It’s because they were tired of generations of being persecuted and living under tyranny and not being allowed to practice their …
It’s not like they wanted freedom of religion and they didn’t want separation of church and state because they were a bunch of goody two-shoes and they love going to church every Sunday. It’s because they weren’t allowed to believe in what they believed in because some asshole king or some hierarchy told them they couldn’t, and they were just tired of it. That’s what we’re losing now, is we’ve forgotten that we’re those people. The same structures that have plagued this country are … they’re multinational corporations and it’s just the ideology behind them, and their structure is what the problem is.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I mean it’s multinational corporations. It’s nation states that are deeply corrupt and are authoritarian and ultimately abuse power and yes, create elements of tyranny. And from that, the human spirit rises. Like I said, with songs like the ones you Write or at the founding in this country, that’s why all this diverse outcasts come together and write something as crazy as all men are created equal. What a gangster line. I guess not an easy thing. We take a lot of that stuff for granted now, but that’s not an easy thing to come up with. That’s a really gutsy thing, to see the value in all people equally. And of course they also were suffering from delusion. They didn’t see Black people as equal. They didn’t see women as equal. But even that first leap of all men are created equal, that’s a gigantic fuck you to the past.
Oliver Anthony
Taking that leap forward really took a lot in an age and a time when it probably sounded … and it’s not like they just made a statement and put it on Twitter. Think about how much … just think about the insanity. I can’t even conceptualize the insanity of what took place from the time that … even from the Revolutionary War until now to try to preserve that idea. So much has happened and so much sacrifice has been made in just so many hours of labor and thought and intensity.
Blue-collar people
Lex Fridman
Even the 20th century’s got two world wars, and especially in the Second World War, the United States played a very crucial role. And there was a lot of ideological battle of ideas going on at that time, of the role of war and peace, of the role of the United States as the center place for the ideal of human freedom and human rights. We continue to innovate. I’d love to get back to talking to blue collar people you mentioned. Those are some of my favorite people. So it was actually really cool to find out that for many years of your life, basically the way you made a living is talking to blue collar people and getting their story. So I’m traveling across the world for a bit, but of course the world I love the most and I’m most curious about is the different subcultures and towns of the United States.
So I took a road trip across the U.S. in my early 20s for several months, and that was a transformative experience for me. And that’s something, one of the luxuries I have is to have the freedom to do whatever the hell I want now. And so I want to take a road trip across the United States for several months. And one of the things I wanted to do is just to talk to people in small towns in middle America. I don’t know what words to put on it, but to talk to the very people that you talked about. Construction workers, plumbers, waitresses, oil rig workers, just people that do something real, people that are real, that don’t make much money, that struggle but have as you talked about, have a richness to them. That’s not often revealed. That’s not often talked about. So maybe can you speak to that, to your time with blue collar folk?
Oliver Anthony
When I got all those messages, we were talking about earlier on, earlier in this, so many of them, and even now, even since … even in the last couple of days, I’ve gotten some where they start with, “Hey, I’m a nobody.” But that’s how a lot of those start. The nobodies of the world if you want to call them. It’s frustrating that the people who literally have built and preserve and maintain the structure of society that we all comfortably live in, those people have the least amount of representation. They’re ignored just because of the way the social hierarchy exists. But some of the most dimwitted, irrelevant, terrible people are put here and are idolized and spotlighted, and they’re all over television, and they’re all over the internet and we act like they’re kings and queens and that they’re royalty. And then all these people who do jobs that most of us will be too … either wouldn’t have even the ability to do, we’d be like … How many people are going to go underwater and weld?
But if we didn’t have underwater welders … One of my best friends whose name is also Jaco, funny enough, the dude works 70, 80 hours every week. He’s on the Chesapeake Bay tunnel job now. But the dude’s gotten up on heights that I couldn’t get on. He’s went underground places I wouldn’t go. And nobody even knows those people’s stories or what they went through or the kind of lives they lived in. And they’re the people who create the fabric of society, and even the waitresses and the waiters and all these factory jobs that I worked in, all those people. Talk about the craziest place I ever worked and the craziest people I ever met was this little place called Perfect Air in Marion, North Carolina, and it was this commercial air conditioning factory, which is I think closed now. But they didn’t pay very well. And so everyone they hired was either people that had criminal backgrounds who couldn’t get jobs elsewhere or idiots who dropped out of high school and couldn’t work elsewhere, like me.
And so I was 18 years old working in this place with people who were mostly in their 50s and 60s. But you want to talk about being exposed to just a whole nother world of people and just the stories and just … Those people are far more interesting than many of the people that we consider to be celebrities. Most people who are celebrities are just pretty boring and airheaded don’t really even know what real life is about. They’re pretty unrelatable to the rest of the world. And so it would be really cool. I mean that’s the whole reason that I want to go out and do these shows in places that haven’t had music in them in 10 years because those people, that is America to me.
How many people in Pittsburgh have been an hour outside of Pittsburgh? And even in Virginia. If you lived in northern Virginia and you drive two and a half hours Southwest, you’re in a whole nother planet. The people, the accents, the culture. And so I feel driven in the same way. I would love to find a way to try to bridge that cultural gap to make those people relevant because they are some of the most … And it’s funny because we emulate a lot of those people. Modern country music is a bunch of people emulating those people.
Lex Fridman
And there’s also, I love people that have a skill and become masters of that skill also. So that element is also there, even if it’s insanely difficult work like being a miner. There’s skill to that. There’s stories there. There’s what it takes to do that. I mean, some of my favorite humans are engineers, and all they do is solve really hard problems and they develop. I mean, it’s a pain in the ass, the job. Anything in the factory is extremely difficult, but that you learn so much about what it takes to solve intricate nuanced problems in the physical world. Coal mining, oil rigs, like you mentioned, welding, that’s a fascinating line of work.
Oliver Anthony
And those are trades that are in many cases dying because they aren’t popular in culture anymore. Everything from agricultural to plumbing and electrical, it’s like those are all areas that I think if you were to go out and talk to some of those people and shed light on it, you could change the entire landscape in America of how it’s perceived and make it cool.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, so thank you, what you’re doing on that front. I want to say, I wrote it down. Please, if you know people that will be willing to talk out to me. A good way to do that is lexfridman.com/contact.
Oliver Anthony
This was another one of the things early on that I had an idea about and I thought was getting done, and it wasn’t, that I’ve got to go back and try to figure out, is doing prison shows and doing rehab shows and all that. But I am really intrigued with going into those places and trying to immerse myself in just the mental state that those people are in. And it’s not talked about a whole lot, but …
Lex Fridman
Also people who get out. Ex-convicts. I mean, that’s a hard life. That’s just a hard life, to try to reintegrate back into society.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. And a lot of those people at Perfect Air that I worked with, they almost all were in some form of legal trouble. There was a lady that worked on the assembly line beside me named Denise, and her and her husband had been manufacturing methamphetamine. And he took the fall for most of it. She only had to go on probation. He was still in prison. But man, Denise was a very sweet lady and aside from the meth manufacturing, she was like, great. And just such a character in such a good way. And so it’s like, yeah, just …
Lex Fridman
Denise, LexFriman.com/contact, let’s talk. I mean, yeah, both the plumbers and the coal miners and Denise with the old meth habits. I mean, they’re walking, the line of … Surviving is hard. So you have to do a real hard job, and then you also have to live life, which is in general hard. Divorce, kids, people die, you lose, medical issues, and that can destroy you completely. All of a sudden something happens, you can’t afford it. Then the insurance system destroys people, all of that. So you have to somehow navigate life while working your ass off in a real hard job. And those people, they have stories that’s a real pain, and from that pain, from that anger, that’s where Rich Men North of Richmond, that you could just feel their pain come through with that song and with your other work. So there is a landscape of suffering.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. It doesn’t have to be that. We don’t all have to be that decentralized either. If there is that much commonality among people, which I do believe there is, just innately in suffering. Yeah, there’s a guy in West Virginia that I talked to that he’s got a piece of property beside of mine that he was interested in selling, but the reason he’s got this dream of opening … putting some cabins there and renting them out for people to come, Airbnb. He works at Lowe’s full-time, but his son’s got this, his son’s 19, and he has got this heart surgery he’s got to have, and so he’s trying to sell the place for that. And just that guy and all you’d ever see him as is the guy that works at Lowe’s pulling lumber or whatever. But he’s got this very Insanely complex life he’s trying to manage. He doesn’t want to lose his son. He’s just going to sell everything.
And at one point in time, maybe the church served that role of when people really fell off track and they didn’t have a support system and they were on this tiny bow out in the ocean. They figured out some kind of way to rally. In my mind, that’s the dream of all this. If I die and there’s any legacy left or anything done, it’s finding a way to take all the people that fill that role and organizing them and empowering them and protecting them. It’s rebuilding the community, but in a real way, not in this fairy tale bullshit, everybody’s going to love each other, and we’re all just going to be one big happy family. Everybody’s still going to get mad and hate each other in certain ways, and that’s good. We need those tornadoes, like you said. We need people pissed off and angry, and we need people to feel like they can be angry and open about things that are wrong.
People should be able to speak their mind, and we shouldn’t all just kiss each other’s ass, and we shouldn’t all just pretend to be overly polite and say, “Hey, Debbie, you have a good weekend?” Like you said, we need all this controversy and this turmoil. And we need the hell of that side that the internet brings out in people, but it just needs to be in real life, and it needs to be in a way where we all are at least chasing the same common goal, which is probably that we don’t want to starve, and we want to have decent health, and we want to be able to provide a decent life for our kids, or at least we just want to live a decent life.
I think somehow that fixes what you describe, the people who fall in despair and are isolated. It’s a terrifying world to live in. It’s that principle. Again, I need a phone a friend thing where we can just keep calling Jordan for all these things. But he explains, there’s this principle in the Bible about the more you have, the more you’ll receive and the less you’ll receive kind of a thing. And it’s just a universal law in society where it seems like the lower you get to the bottom, it’s almost like the less resources you have available and the less friends you have, and it’s like you, the further you go, it snowballs into where it’s like people just hit rock bottom, and then what? It’s like when you get out of prison, what are you supposed to do? Or when you’re a veteran with mental health, what are you supposed to do? In my mind, that’s what the church is supposed to be there for is … but obviously it doesn’t fill that role anymore.
Lex Fridman
To some people, at least religion does a little bit. It’s at least a foundation of community, a foundation of hope for people when they’re really struggling.
Depression
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
You got thousands of messages, like you talked about from people. You’ve gotten to talk to thousands of people about their pain. Through your work, through your music, you’ve been an inspiration to those people to find a way out of the pain. Can you tell the full story of your own lowest point. Before all of this, before the music, before you blew up, can you take me through the story of the depression, the drinking, and just the roughest times in your life?
Oliver Anthony
Sometimes it’s not even … It’s funny, but it’s almost not even where you’re at in life. It’s where you perceive yourself at in life and what your goals are moving forward. I dropped out of high school at 17, basically ran away from home. I have always had this authority problem, and so I just didn’t want to listen to my parents. I didn’t want to go to college. I just wanted to go move into the mountains. I was running away from responsibility, I guess is what I was doing. And so got this girl pregnant, had my first kid when I was 18 or just about to turn 19. And like I said, I’m working in the air conditioning factory with a bunch of convicted felons. And so from there, everything was just reactionary. I never really had a plan. I would jump from job to job just like most everybody else.
I don’t know. I just got to a point where I guess I just quit believing in myself and I knew that I wasn’t doing … I wasn’t feeling my purpose, and I wasn’t being the best version of myself I could be. And so the alternative to facing yourself in the mirror and accepting that I’m not a shitty person, I’ve just let myself fall. It’s so hard to accept when you’ve had that fall, that it’s just easier just to get drunk and just do the bare minimum you can to keep everything sort of moving along, but you don’t really care if you live or die. You don’t really care about much anything. I don’t know. Life is just so beautiful when you’re a child. You’re so imaginative and exploratory, and you’re learning all these things, and you just can’t wait to be an adult because you’re just going to go out and do all these incredible … and then …
Lex Fridman
You face the reality of it.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. And the pressure and the fear of failure. I think maybe even my own fear of failure is what drove me into … But yeah, and you think negatively about yourself for so many days and weeks and months, and you don’t even have a real self-awareness of what you’re doing or how destructive you’ve become. But you always have that discernment in you, that conscious, that little voice and your spirit that is letting you know you’re messing up. I was almost like I was wrestling with myself. And so I don’t know. I just got to a point where it was just a very overwhelming sense of numbness. Nothing that mattered before really matters anymore.
I guess that’s probably, to me, the definition of depression, is when all the things you love and care about are just meaningless, and you can’t really can’t find meaning or purpose or excitement in anything. I think especially with men that commit suicide, it’s a prolonged period of that. It’s not like they just wake up one day and they have a bad day, and they kill themselves. It’s like you self-reflect negatively about yourself and your life, and you don’t do the things that you’re supposed to do every day for a long enough period of time, and it’s … pretty soon you’ve built this whole mountain of-
Oliver Anthony
It’s like, pretty soon you’ve built this whole mountain of mismanaged, neglected stuff, for lack of a better word, this mountain that you have to climb back up in order to fix all these things that you should have been doing all along. And then, on the other side of it it’s like, well, I could just die, that seems like… It’s almost like, I think from a man’s perspective, maybe, the friends that I’ve had that I’ve lost, it seems like, a lot of times you think you’d never see it coming. I don’t know, maybe that’s a general thing with… It seems like a lot of times men mask that better, and you don’t pick up on it as much. But I think it’s like you just dig yourself into a point to where it’s like you have a mountain of responsibility in front of you that you haven’t faced, that you don’t know how to face, and you haven’t been able to do so for a long time, but there’s this really easy detour, and it’s just putting your big toe on the trigger.
And it’s like, which one of those are… I don’t know. They both seem… But at that point, your perception of reality is so distorted that you don’t… All the things that would normally compel you to move along, like love and joy and your drive to be that, none of that really, it’s not there for you to even contemplate, if that makes sense. It’s like, that part is almost like, at least for a little while, invisible, and all you see is fear and responsibility, and just this, like I said, I just envision it like a mountain that you don’t really know if you’re even able to climb, and then the other option is just… So, I think that’s probably where a lot of people go, and that’s probably where I was, was just…
Lex Fridman
Yeah, there’s the, it’s not just responsibilities, the immensity of it, the mountain, and I think you’re accurately describing how it happens, which is gradually.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Seeing yourself in a negative light over time slowly suffocates you, and then the burden of the responsibility that piles up. And unfortunately, of course, one of the ways out is to pull the trigger, and the other way out is the Jordan Peterson, back to Jordan, sort of one gradual step at a time, like make your bed. It’s like, start climbing out, the responsibilities before you, one at a time, every single day, just climbing out, and have faith that it will work out.
Oliver Anthony
That was what was so powerful for me about just beginning to open my mind back up to reading just a little bit of stuff, a little bit of stuff from the New Testament, that Jesus said, and some different perspectives and teachings. But an apostle would be in prison, basically being tortured and facing death, but just overjoyed in writing about talking… It’s all about your perspective of things. Like I said, that’s why I never could understand why celebrities or professional… Giving one example of many, a Kurt Cobain type scenario, where you have a guy that’s just immensely talented, just will always be loved by plenty of people, I never could understand why that guy…
Lex Fridman
There’s a ocean of quiet suffering in a lot of, and I think it is disproportionately men, in a lot of men, and they hide it well.
Oliver Anthony
That’s why blue collar workers have such a high suicide rate in all too, and why it is so important to talk to those people when…
Lex Fridman
Yeah, no, could see it in the eyes, and there is a lot of pain there.
Oliver Anthony
Without trying to open up too many doors, I think that’s probably the best way I would describe it, is just a series of really… Just a series of negligent decisions, and also just misperceptions. I think this was an Andrew Huberman thing where he talks about medications and how it’s a lot more likely for somebody to keep their dog on their medication schedule but not themselves. You love your dog, and your dog is just this great little thing, and you don’t see the flaws and the faults and the sin and the disgust in your dog that you do yourself. So, it’s much more likely for people to make sure their dog has their medication every day. But there’s this alarming statistic with just the amount of people that don’t even fill their prescriptions they need filled, or take care of themselves the way they do.
And then, that also, over time, if you quit taking care of yourself and you’re not in good health, and you’re not in a good routine, a long series of doing enough of those things, it’s easy for you to just think that your self-worth is zero. Because if you’re not even willing to have basic hygiene, and eat decent food, and try to take care of yourself, t’s like how on earth are you going to go face all these things that you need to face to get your life better? If you don’t even care enough to do that. But it is, it’s a long tragic road to get to that point, I think. At least in my case. The idea that there was something bigger than me, that loved me, even despite I had all these flaws and problems, and just that I was just such a wretched person, that’s what, at least in my situation, that’s what I think helped put… More than anything.
Like I said, that’s certainly where the motivation to quit the… Once I quit the drinking, it helped a lot because I was able to, even though it was difficult, I was able to actually be able to be honest with myself and reflect on a lot of things that were… And you got to think, like I said, of course, in my case, it was a little unfair of an example because within a month all this stuff had happened, after I quit. But I see it in my friends that have quit, and have tried to turn things around, and it is the most beautiful thing in the world to see somebody come to life again after being in one of those… You’re able to sort of escape this shell of all those terrible things.
And even if you are still in a bad position, and you got 30,000 worth of credit card debt, and you’re working some shit job, and your car doesn’t start half the time, and your girlfriend left you for some other dude… And don’t matter what it is, that little glimmer of hope, that faith that there is a chance, it’s something greater, that’ll push people, you can push them out aside with that. You can do anything with that. And I think it is important to have a good support structure, when you get to that point, I don’t think anybody should have to face that stuff by themselves. And there’s plenty of other people out there that are in the same position, and I think that’s, again, I think that’s why it’s so important for us to try to get reconnected on a personal level, and not just through digital communication.
Because all we see of each other online is the good stuff, very rarely are people posting on Facebook talking about… How could you even? It’s like, all you see is the best of people, but I don’t think we realize that we’re all going through a lot of the same things anyway, the low points and stuff.
Lex Fridman
Guess what happens when you either lose your job or can’t quite figure out a good job, and you’re not making that much money, or you’re basically broke, and you have a girlfriend that’s not happy about you being broke, she’s going to leave you. If it’s a wife, that could face divorce, and the breakups and divorce can break a lot of people even when they’re doing well. And now, when they’re not doing well, well, that’s a rough one. And that basically your support system for a lot of people is the relationship, is the wife. And so, that’s taken the support system from underneath you.
Oliver Anthony
I’ve had good friends of mine, I’ve seen getting destructive relationships, and they’ll start to date a girl and then within a year they’re just a shell of what they were, because sometimes… I do think you have to be careful with your self validation, and the way you perceive yourself, and making sure that it’s you giving yourself that and not somebody else. I do think too it’s… Yeah. How are you supposed to, if you can’t even keep a woman around to love you right, how are you supposed to love yourself? It’s easy to think about that. I’ve seen a lot of men get wrecked in bad relationships and stuff too, it’s tough.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Ultimately, I think, maybe dark to say, but there is a base layer at which we’re alone in this world. You need to be strong by yourself first and foremost. Because sometimes there’ll be times in life where everybody leaves you. The wife leaves you, the job leaves you, and for some people, even people you thought are friends will backstab you. And even then you have to have the strength to find your footing again. That ultimately comes from you, right?
Oliver Anthony
Man, of course, like I said, in all the experiences I’ve been through, I’d be a fool to deny it, but I do think, there is God there that’s always there, but you certainly can self-isolate yourself too, even from that.
Lex Fridman
If you can find faith in yourself, I’ve seen it do wonderful things for human beings. You and God, faith in something bigger than you, yeah, that can give strength to a lot of people. But allowing yourself to derive strength solely from other people can be a dangerous thing. Because people are complicated and they can betray, they can… Just like they fill your life with love, they could also destroy you. That’s also the beautiful thing about life.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, it is.
Lex Fridman
You make yourself vulnerable to other people, you form deep relationships, that means they can also destroy you. So, that’s life. That’s what makes this whole thing… And then you write really great heartbreak songs.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
There’s something valuable about people fucking you over and hardship and all that kind of stuff.
Oliver Anthony
Even the best of us have terrible parts of us. We are all flawed inherently because we’re human. And so, there’ll never be another Garden of Eden on earth, figuratively, where we all just live harmoniously and everything’s great and happy and wonderful, but it’s those basic principles that you talk about, like love and those relationships and those connections that we have that make it all… Because think about it, in a lot of cases it’s like, that’s the position you get in when you get so depressed, and you get so low, is like, what’s the point in even doing all this? It is just, for anyone, it is just so crazy, overly complicated, and exhausting to live, isn’t it? Even in this modern society where we have all these wonderful little conveniences, and we can just have food delivered right to our door, if we want, and all this kind of crap, it’s like people are still more depressed now than they’ve ever been, and all the mental anxiety and all the mental health stuff is just probably just as prevalent as it’s ever been.
People talk about money not making you happy, and it’s easy when you’re… It’s easy when you’re broke to think, man, if I had some money… And of course financial freedom is what you’re really looking for, not an abundance of wealth. But the things that we talk about that make life worth living aren’t things that you can buy, they are things that you obtain through relationships and love and life. And so, it is just an infinitely complex and crazy thing to think about, but that human component of us is what is what’s so important to our long-term existence, our ability to have connection with each other, and the joy we find in that, the purpose we find in that is, it’s not anything that’s replaceable with anything.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I’ve seen that with just seeing the effects of war on people, and basically war strips away everything. You lose your home, you lose everything. And you get to see what’s actually really important, that’s its other people in your life, friends, family. It’s almost cliche to say, but it’s the people you love in your life that make up the essence of what makes life worth living. It’s not the homes, the material possessions, even the job and whatever else, it’s the humans. So, yeah, yeah, it’s important to remember. A lot of us, especially in the United States, under a capitalist system, are chasing money, it’s important to remember what you’re doing it all for. I got to talk to you about your writing process, you’ve written just a bunch of really incredible songs. You say you’re not a good musician, which is hilarious.
Oliver Anthony
Dude, I have zero self-confidence about any… Just about anything. But when I say that, I’m not being funny, I’m like…
Lex Fridman
Do you get nervous when you get on stage?
Oliver Anthony
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I can think about shows coming up and my hands will sweat thinking about them.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, you told me that you haven’t really played the songs for a couple months, old songs-
Oliver Anthony
Since September, yeah.
Lex Fridman
Since September.
Oliver Anthony
Well, dude, think about, I’m not going just sit around and play, I’ve Got to Get Sober for fun-
Lex Fridman
So, you feel the songs when you play them?
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. Man, that’s rough. That’s rough.
Oliver Anthony
A lot of musicians talk about that kind of thing though, right? About this… I don’t know. I’ve heard about that with people, about hating to play songs because of that side of it, but..
Lex Fridman
Oh yeah, I’ve become close friends with Dan Reynolds, who’s the lead singer for Imagine Dragons, and he says every time he performs a song, he has songs that have depression in them and all that kind of stuff, and he says the only real way to do it is to feel it. You can’t just fake it, you have to be in it, you have to really feel the song, as if you’re writing it for the first time. So, as a performer he says that that’s his duty, he has to the audience, but then that takes a toll. That’s not easy to do. Especially with the songs you write. There’s a lot of darkness there in your songs.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah. And I do have some lighter hearted ones too that… The thing is, I’ve only put out, I’m a little funny about… God, I don’t know how many songs I have written that I will probably never do anything with. Probably at least 20 or 30 of them that are just like, I just don’t know why I don’t want to put them out, but just…
Lex Fridman
What does it look like? Do you have a notebook with ideas, or do you mean you have little videos of half-baked songs?
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, I’ve got my old phone, even just that old phone that I recorded all the stuff for TikTok and all on, it’s got loads of little… Just like the way that Richmond one was, where it was in the bathroom, facing the… And I had that. That’s all that, even that one I showed you on there, it had been sitting on my phone probably a couple months before it… That’s why I said, I have too many unfinished songs, it’s exactly what I meant. I’ve got all these little snippets of things, like a little blip here or there. But the writing process is, well, it’s a lot different than I thought most people write, because there’s a lot of people that do these writing rooms and stuff, or you have these co-writes, where they’ll have people sit down, and they sit on the couch and smoke a joint, and they’re like, all right, let’s write this song, and they just start plugging away. And to me, that’s like, I can’t do that, I have to just… It’s like a lot of times the songs come when I’m not prepared for them.
Lex Fridman
You like to be alone.
Oliver Anthony
Well, alone in my head, I could be anywhere in it. Some of them I’ll just be in the shower, and I’m like, scram… Because the thing is, it’s a certain part of your brain I guess, that creates that stuff, or picks it up, or does whatever, but they go just as quick as they come. It’s like when you wake up… It’s exactly like when you wake up, you’ve had this crazy vivid dream in your head, and you wake up and it’s all right there, and then you stop thinking about it for half a second, and then it all goes away, and you’ll never remember it again. You can’t remember your dreams like that, it’s exactly like that. It’s like it’ll be there, it’s perfect, it’s all right… It’s almost like given to you, just perfect, parts of it or the whole thing or whatever. And then, you get into this flow state to where you just, it’s all there in front of you, and you just figure it all out, and it’s like somehow you’ve unlocked this little part of your brain that you don’t even really know how to get to, but you just get to it, and it’s all there, and you figure it out, but man, if you don’t get it, it’s gone. You’ll never get it again. You’ll never even be able to replicate that song ever again. It’s like it’ll just go away. And typically, it’s only maybe the first half of the first verse is what I’ll get, or it’ll be the chorus line I’ll get, and then I’ll build the rest of the song around that, if that makes sense, I guess.
Lex Fridman
Well, the words or the music or the melody, what pops into your head?
Oliver Anthony
The emotion, I guess, the words. Sometimes it’s a phrase, like one thing I will do is, especially out in the country, people say the craziest things, and so sometimes I’ll jot down a little bit of… I will sometimes on my phone take a little note, if somebody says something real crazy that I’ve never heard before, and then maybe one day it’ll just pop in my head, like, oh… I don’t know. It’s very random though. I don’t sit and just try to write songs, that’s why I haven’t just been dumping out, even though I have been writing a lot of songs, I haven’t just been dumping out all this crazy music. I don’t want to force it, I don’t want to do truck, beer, girl songs. I don’t want to force songs, I don’t want to like…
Lex Fridman
Do you have any truck, beer, girl songs? Because that would be an interesting-
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, I’ve got this silly one about this guy in West Virginia that, he’s the most laid back… Because I always get in my head and go over analytical about stuff, and get real serious sometimes about things, and he’s like, buddy, you just got to take a drag off this thing. And he’d always peer pressure me into taking a hit off a joint or something, and he just didn’t take life so seriously. So, I’ve written this song about, it’s called Dr. Dan, and it’s about… He’s a doctor, but he’s not a conventional doctor. That’s a silly one that I’ll put out. So, I do have some silly ones like that.
Lex Fridman
That’s great.
Oliver Anthony
I have a couple funny ones that I’ll never, ever, ever probably play to the public, but I played them at the Mothership, only because nobody has their phones in there. But right after we did Rogan, somehow I got connected with Tom Segura right after Rogan, and we went over to the Mothership and I got to meet him. And I love Adam [inaudible 01:29:52], he was on the thing with Norm McDonald is how I got introduced to him, that show Norm McDonald had. But he just, he’s an awesome dude. And so, we ended up at the Mothership, I think it was the evening after the Rogan podcast, and Tom’s like, “Well, they’ve never had live music in here,” he’s like, “You could be the first one.” And I was like, whatever. And so, we only had one guitar, and I had my guitarist, Joey, with me. So, Ron White was there, it was Tom Segura and then Ron White that night.
And Ron took Joey in his car, drove him across town to his house and grabbed another guitar, and came back, and we got up there and we did two really silly songs, and then Richmond, in between Tom’s set and Ron’s set. And I was, again, that was one of those moments in my life where I was like, what? What is this? What is this crazy reality I’m in? But I have some funny. Because when I wasn’t playing the open mics… Well, like Brian that you met, a lot of my guitar playing was spent at places like his house, and we were all heavy drinkers, and we were just sitting around at a party playing or whatever. And so, I definitely liked the silly stuff too. But I was really in my head when we were talking about being low, and what I would suggest people to do if they’re in that point.
Nature
But if I was, not to flip this, but it just popped in my head, but probably what I would tell anybody to do if they’re suicidal and thinking about, if they’re to that point, is just to go find somewhere in nature and go… I missed this step when we were talking about things, but selling my house and buying that property and putting a camper on it and trying to go into this whole off grid thing, really, I don’t know, it does a lot of good for you being reconnected to nature. We are a part of it, but…
Lex Fridman
Oh yeah, I went to the jungle for that reason, being out in nature in every way is beautiful. I say you got some… Maybe that’s what I need to do is get some goats. I saw-
Oliver Anthony
I got two I can give you.
Lex Fridman
I have more questions, why are you giving them so easily? Are there issues I need to know about?
Oliver Anthony
Well, they’re goats. Yeah.
Lex Fridman
There’s no free lunch, man. You got goats, you got all kinds of animals. So, what’s the story of you out in the woods, what were you doing out there?
Oliver Anthony
No comment. I’m just kidding. Just trying to escape this dystopian nightmare that we’re all living under. It was just a form of escapism, I guess. But well, yeah, I think in such a short period of time, my grandfather grew up, they were in a survival estate trying to make enough money to pay the tax on their land, growing tobacco, and then here I am, in this digital world, two generations later, and I’m just like, something’s not… I just felt called to try to figure all that out, and how to get back into that. There’s such a purity to, man, if you raise an animal and kill it and eat it… And I’m not talking about Ted Nugent style, but just raising meat, birds, and pigs, and stuff, and having the ability to put those in the freezer and cook them for dinner, they taste so much better.
But it’s just, I don’t know how to describe it, but it just brings me joy, being able to grow stuff, and even just flowers and everything else, just watching stuff that’s alive that is just such a… What we’re doing now is I bought this permaculture farm that hadn’t been operational in six or seven years, and they did a lot of herbs, they had a big orchard, blueberries, but my dream there is to create this space that’s the optimal place for humans to go, to fix their mind. So, what’s the animals and the food that I can have there, and the trees that I can plant, and the certain types of wildlife that I can bring in and attract, the noises and the sounds and the smells that are optimal for a human to be in, in order to fix whatever it is.
I had the opportunity to meet Robert Kennedy Jr early on with all this, and he actually came out to my property and all, and we’re still… I think the idea is that we’re going to launch this healing center thing out there, once they get through all the mess, they got their hands full a little bit right now with things. But whether I go that route or not, it’s like, that’s my goal is to basically create a place that people can go and fix their mind and find the optimal thing. We’ve got laying birds, and meat birds, so we get our eggs and meat, and then we’ve done pigs, and sheep, and goats, and then I’m going to start, I’m going to get cattle in the spring, so we’ll start doing Wagyu, and Angus, and playing around with… And I want to get some funny stuff too. Large animals have a lot of, there’s all these large animal therapies out there for mental health, with vets and stuff, it’s something really relaxing and rewarding about being in that space.
Lex Fridman
What do you find out there in nature that you can’t find anywhere else? Can’t find in the “civilized world?”
Oliver Anthony
Well, everything in civilization seems so, everything we’ve talked about, it seems so… There’s such a level of despair and unorganization and chaos and just all these terrible parts of life that seem so unstructured and just so uncertain. But in nature, everything is certain, everything has a system. Even on the microbial level of soil, there’s this intricate system, and soil fixes it, the bacteria fixes the soil, and you can grow certain types of plants to restore certain types of nutrients, and then that can grow certain types of trees, and then that can bring in certain types of birds, and it’s like this whole big… Nature is just this whole big beautiful system, like Earth is just such an intricate complex system that is structured. And although there is chaos, there’s literal tornadoes, like the metaphor we were using earlier, there are literal tornadoes in nature, and other things, but there’s a piece about observing the structure there.
And to me, it helps remind and restore my faith that there is something bigger than me, that… Yeah. And there’s a spiritual side to it that I don’t know that I can really correctly articulate, but man, sitting out in the woods with some creek flowing by you, and just sitting in stillness, where you don’t hear anything, there’s no traffic from a road, there’s no… You’re just there in stillness and just watching the Earth do its thing, it’s just…
Lex Fridman
I’ve gotten a chance to spend a day and a night alone deep in the Amazon jungle.
Oliver Anthony
That’s my dream, man. God.
Lex Fridman
You basically take the woods and the creek and the quiet, let’s put that a three on a scale of one to 10, the Amazon jungle is like an 11, because you’re not just listening to the creek, you’re listening to a lot of different species of animal having sex, or trying to kill each other. And you’re just like, birds, monkeys, just everything. And the floor full of insects, bigger kinds of ants murdering smaller kinds of ants, it’s an orchestra of insects. But it’s quiet in the sense that there’s no machinery. The really dark thing about the Amazon rainforest, that sometimes depending on where you are, you’ll sometimes hear in a distance the sound of a chainsaw, you’ll hear… And it pierces the day because there’s just no machinery anywhere around. But once you hear it, it is this undeniable symbol of what human civilization does to nature.
Oliver Anthony
It pains me seeing woods get knocked down and residential subdivisions taking their place. The monkey part of my brain wants to just go burn it all down, it’s just not good. I don’t know, I just instinctually observe it as being not good. And I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but I’m with you. That was, like I said, that’s why I felt so compelled, I had this little house that I had maybe a little bit of equity in, and it was in 2019, and the housing market was up, and I was like, I sold our little house and got that… I was able to find 92 acres for like 1100 an acre, and so I still had to finance it, but it was at least barely within my… And so, that’s what we did. I was paying 600 a month on the land, and I bought a little camper for $750 off this hunt club in Waverly, Virginia, and drug it up there, and that’s what we had. And went and bought a little, I got a little Kubota tractor for 0% financing, and was cutting…
This property was a mile off the road, so I had to cut basically recut in an old logging road and stuff. And you want to talk about putting a strain on your marriage, that’ll do it, buddy, is selling your modest little rancher and doing that. But man, that’s when I really started to live. And I think probably that was the beginning point of the restoration of me. And I feel bad that a lot of people just don’t even know what that’s like to be on a farm or be out in nature, and I can’t imagine just living in a suburb or a city your whole life and never getting to experience that. It’s good that we have all this technology, it’s great, and the science and the innovation is important, and even the fact that you can go on YouTube and look up how to do almost anything is important.
It’s just that there isn’t a clear definitive line between what’s beneficial and educational, and what’s predatory and harmful. And so, it happens to me all the time, but I could go on YouTube and look up how to change the brake shoes on my truck or something, and if I click on a Short of somebody doing it, I automatically go to the next video, and I may be three or four videos deep before I catch… I’m watching some lady throw a pie at somebody, and then pretty soon I’m like, wait, I’m changing my brake, that’s the only issue with it.
Lex Fridman
And then, you’re just doom scrolling and it does something to your mind, it just completely takes the humanity away.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
It is really horrible. That dopamine thing does something in my mind that I hate, which really is the opposite of nature. The feeling I remember being out in nature, and not just a hike, a hike is good, but for prolonged periods of time, several days away from the internet. Away from all that. What is that? I don’t know what that is. But I don’t like what X, Twitter, are doing, I don’t like what Instagram is doing, whatever that is, I don’t think that’s good for the soul. I’m not sure.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, it’s emulating things that we need to be healthy humans, but it’s just feeding it visually and audibly to us, but it’s not giving us the… It’s giving us the instant gratification of it, but it’s not giving us the long-term pleasure or fulfillment of it. Like I said, and the beauty is we’re in this weird period in time, it’s a breath of time that we’re in, where we are able to conceptualize and observe what life was like in that transition point that’s got us up till now. And we also have the… Because in order for all this to continue to evolve, even with AI, it needs us more than we need it right now, still, for a very short period of time. But we have access to nearly all the information that the world has, theoretically, but we also still have the perception and the memory of what life was like before it.
And so, this is a very short window of time, like a breath of time, where I think we can find a way to incorporate this into normal life, but I think if that breath leaves us, I don’t know, I think it’s… I believe, I truly believe it is irreversible. And that’s just going to be the end of us, and it could take two or three more generations to get to that point. But I think why don’t we find people that are way smarter than me. And look at all the things that trend on social media, the videos that everybody watches, I don’t know what it is, if it’s wood splitting and plumbing and blacksmithing and doing something with… Let’s find all the things that people are attracted to online, that they obviously are interested in, and just figure out a way to have them in real life for people to immerse themselves in.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s the transitionary state, and one of the responsibilities I take very serious, because I agree with you, is I tried to pierce the bubble that is the San Francisco, that is the Silicon Valley, that is the people that build these technologies, they often live a bit in a bubble. That said, the people that criticize tech folks also live in a bubble. And to, first of all, piercing bubbles in general is good for people to get along, to understand each other, because people that say all technology is evil, unfortunately, even if that’s true, which I don’t think it is, it’s coming. It’s going to be built.
And so, you have to figure out how to do it in a way that preserves our humanity, that doesn’t drag us into this black hole of just maximizing engagement, maximizing this dopamine thing, where instead of reading Dostoevsky, which I should be doing, I’m looking at some girl shaking her ass on Instagram, and then feeling horrible about myself five minutes later. That, at scale is what seems to be happening. And so, reminding ourselves that this is not the way to steer human civilization to progress, to flourishing.
Oliver Anthony
The problem is I think we’re wasting a lot of our bandwidth. We only have so many minutes in the day to even use our brains, and our brains can only do but so much in a day anyway. And when we’re wasting any of it on just that, it’s like, I see it, in my own professional opinion, as the world is becoming just a little more, in the last decade or two, as the world becomes a little more dreary and dark, and more problems happen, and city streets become more littered, and jobs are… All these kinds of problems that we all argue about all the time, as they become more prevalent, it’s like the internet and just the visuals of the internet become so much more immersive, and video games are so much more…
Everything’s so much better, everything’s improving at lightning speed in technology, and it’s degrading in society, and in the real world. And somehow there’s got to be a way to find a balance there. But right now, it seems like as technology becomes more immersive and addictive and interactive, the way these algorithms feed us exactly what we want, and there’s so much psychology, and just so much research that goes into making them as addictive as possible, it’s like the real world kind of sucks.
Oliver Anthony
… tip is possible. It’s like the real world kind of sucks. Cities that were beautiful and thriving are now falling apart, and have all kinds of problems that are being unaddressed, and lack of leader… It’s like there’s got to be some kind of way, and so it’s easy for us to feel more and more inclined to escape into the digital realm because the digital realm is becoming more fun while real life is becoming less fun, and there’s got to be some kind of way to balance between the two.
I’m with you. I’m not against technology at all. I think evil most certainly existed long before there were computers and in even more treacherous ways. Now we have the ability to do… Like I said, we’re in a very temporary state right now in 2025, where the general public has access to basically all the information there is, and artificial intelligence, and just immense, and the ability that a guy can just set a bunch of cameras up, and start doing podcasts, and have even just the fact that your platform could be created is immensely powerful. It probably never existed in world history up until now, but we also still have… The problem is if we just keep going without being careful about losing the real world aspect of it, is that at some point we’re just going to get so lost and so immersed in this space, we’re not even going to know what we’re missing out on. All there’s going to be is Girls on Instagram. All there’s going to be is that.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I’ve been trying to figure it all out. I just did a super long podcast with Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games who created Fortnite. He created Unreal Engine, a lot of interesting video games, revolutionary video games. So I don’t know if you know, but Fortnite is this gigantic video game where people go into an online world and they shoot stuff. It’s fun. It’s not like Call of Duty intense, militaristic, raw, real kind of shooting. It’s more fun shooting at each other. But at first I was skeptical, is that a good way to hang out with friends? But then I got to do it with people that I’m actually friends with in physical reality, and you get to hear each other’s voice, and you just talk, and talk shit about each other together.
It’s basically a phone call, honestly, with some visuals. It’s not about the visuals, it’s about the phone call and it just makes it a little more convenient to connect regularly. But I think you do need to remember that all of that only works if you’re consistently returning to physical reality. In this case, taking the, quote, unquote, “Guy trip.” Not the Brokeback Mountain style, but just friends. Just friends, a trip out in nature together, like dudes on a hunting trip, or just fishing, or just hanging out in physical reality together. We should not forget the importance of that.
Oliver Anthony
You talked earlier about loneliness. I think that got brought up at some point, but I do think that’s a problem that’s caused a lot of our symptoms is that we are all very lonely. Even though we all seem to be so well-connected digitally, we are all so lonely. You got to think, Modern Warfare 2 was a big thing. I was supposed to be in class of 2010, so you can think when I was in whatever grade, eighth grade or whatever, Call of Duty was the thing. I’ve certainly, trust me, I’m not saying that I… I’m right in this space of digital immersion with anybody else. I’ve been there and seen it, but I’ve wasted who knows how many hundreds of hours on Modern Warfare 2, and I really built some great friendships from it.
There’s a place for all that stuff. We have this innate responsibility to, again, it just goes back to talking about our founding fathers, and the way this country was created, and the importance of what it did for the world. And my understanding is that it was the first time ever that people got together and agreed that, like you said, every man was equal. Because they were created in the image of God, they had uninalienable rights that no government could take away from them, and that’s really important. There won’t be Fortnite if we don’t worry about that. And honestly, just the collapsing in our structure with the mental health with our youth, and the suicide rates with our blue collar workers, and all these things we’ve touched and talked about, those are all just things, we just need more time together in real life to fix those problems.
Those are just things, like I said, I make the joke, but there’s never been argument that I’ve… There’s never been one dispute with my wife that I’ve been able to figure out how to fix through a text message or a… It takes being in person with people and having human connection to fix any problem and to heal anything. And so it’s difficult. It’s not anybody’s fault that we’re like that. We’re not even able to really get to know each other and understand each other through the internet. We almost have to be together in person to even just get each other’s point of view and perspectives on things, and-
Lex Fridman
Yeah, fuck the division that the internet creates. Honestly, like the left and the right, it is been a nightmare for me just to watch because I see the very simple reality that we’re in it together and that there is a lot more commonality between people. It seems cliche to say, but it’s like now that needs to be said more than ever because when you look on X, it feels like everybody’s divided, but we’re not. [inaudible 01:50:35]-
Oliver Anthony
Well, and people are always going to think differently too, just in our structure and the way we… Again, it goes back to that Jordan Peterson lecture about, I think in Maps of Meaning where he talks about people who think more conservatively or more liberally about things. It’s been applied to politics, but it’s based more in psychology than anything. Some people are going to think more inside the box and some people are going to think more outside the box, but we have to have both in order to have a healthy society.
Lex Fridman
Oh, and also the thing that bothers me, your song, Rich Men North of Richmond, a lot of people, so a pretty even split, people on the left and the right in terms of friends of mine, and sadly, they’ve drifted towards the extremes a bit. Those on the left definitely have developed a case of Trump derangement syndrome. Those on the right seem to think that every person on the left is a radical leftist. It’s hilarious to listen to people talk. It’s like everybody’s lost their mind it feels like. But also on top of that, people on the right see Trump as this savior, as this figure who could do no wrong, who’s going to restore freedom in America and all… You can do a full list of really positive things, and to me, he’s yet another rich man north of Richmond. Biden, Trump, it’s all the same thing.
Now, some might be able to do more good than others, but ultimately they’re in positions of power, and power corrupts, and those in those positions often forget about the everyday person, the working class, and they leave them behind, ultimately serve the people that are close to them and sometimes serve themselves to maintain power, to grow their power. I think the good thing you can say about them is they, and I could say that about both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, is that they really love their family. I could say that one of the things that I love about both people is that they genuinely love their family. And it was always heartwarming to me to see how much Joe Biden loves his family, and honestly just do anything for his family. And the same is true for Trump, and that just reminds you that they’re human beings. Yeah, all that to say is we need to see the humanity in each of us, and to some degree always distrust the people in power.
Oliver Anthony
The power that people have only exists because we allow it, whether willingly or just through our own negligence. But I think that’s the important thing is, like I said, there’s always more of us than there will be of them. There’s always more nobodies than there ever will be people at the top.
Lex Fridman
Fuck yeah, man. Fuck yeah.
Oliver Anthony
We just have to figure out what to do with that and how to… And I think this is, like I said, a short window of time where we can still figure that out.
Three-legged cat
Lex Fridman
I got to ask you about something before I forget. I think I saw on Instagram you talked about a three-legged cat. Is that a real thing?
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
What’s the story behind the three-legged cat? And the reason I want to ask you that, first of all, I want to hear the story, and second of all, I want to read to you one of my favorite Bukowski poems afterwards-
Oliver Anthony
Nice, okay.
Lex Fridman
… about another cat. All right, what’s the story?
Oliver Anthony
I had this cat lady neighbor who’s a real sweet lady, but older lady lives in a single-wide trailer, has probably got, I don’t know, 30 or 40 cats-
Lex Fridman
Nice.
Oliver Anthony
… that she feeds at her house.
Lex Fridman
Nice.
Oliver Anthony
It was a rainy Saturday morning. It was pouring down rain. It was like eight o’clock in the morning on Saturday. It was going to be a great day, I was going to… And then I hear this lady yelling, “There’s this cat stuck in my car.” She’s all freaking out and don’t know what to do. And like I said, my wife’s a veterinary technician or whatever, so she’s got a little bit more sense about animals than any of us. But we go over there and the lady’s tried to start her car, and there’s this kitten that was up under the hood, and she started the car and the cat, basically, it basically almost ripped its whole front leg off already. There was just a little bit still attached, like some tendon or whatever, but the leg was wrapped up under the water pump, the pulley of the water pump, knocked the belt off.
There was no way to save this leg on this guy, but the cat was pinned upside down, and so we ended up grabbing a… We asked the lady if she had a knife in the house, so she gave us this terrible looking knife, but it’s all that we had. I was like, we were trying to get this done. So, yeah, my wife was the one that did it, but we got the rest of the stuff cut, and got the cat out. And I don’t know, I was over a grand we spent getting this cat’s, getting it properly sutured or whatever to where the cat could have a healthy recovery and all. But I’m one of those type of people, I couldn’t just let this little… I’m not going to go, they were going to just go put the cat down or whatever, the lady. So, yeah, I named her hop.
So that’s my little cat and it hops around, but it was one of those things where… Yeah, I don’t know. Great example with animals though. I guess it’s the same way with people. I just always see the best and I just couldn’t-
Lex Fridman
Yeah, that’s one of the most amazing things about humans. It’s irrational to spend that much money on this cat, right? Because there’s so many other cats that are suffering, and dying, and so on, but that’s what makes humans really special. We see the person or the creature suffering in front of us and we’re willing to move mountains to save that person. It’s irrational, maybe it doesn’t make sense because the allocation of money and effort might not be correct, whatever. We just don’t give a shit.
Oliver Anthony
The reason that we’re willing to do it for a cat, like I said, it’s just like the thing with the dogs about giving the dogs your medication by not yourself. So we see all the flaws, and all the problems, and all the disagreements, and all the anger we have with each other. Just like you said, your friends on the right and the left, and stuff. And we could show that kind of compassion, and we do. Humanity does from time to time, show that kind of… But we could show that just undeserved, just love to each other too. Love is like, it’s funny you talked about how both of those presidents, you could say they at least love their family, but love is like, I think everyone’s capable of love. It’s probably the most powerful thing there is, even beyond hate I think is… But it is crazy with… It comes out of us so easily with animals because, to us, they’re just these innocent little lives. We don’t have anything against them. They don’t talk. They don’t have political views. They’re just little creatures, but the reality is we’re all just creatures like that.
Lex Fridman
Yeah. We do that with human children, but we don’t do it enough with adults who are also kinds of children. We’re still fucking lost in this world. So I got to read you this.
Oliver Anthony
[inaudible 01:57:57].
Lex Fridman
It’s got to be one of my favorite poems. It’s called The History of One Tough Motherfucker by Charles Bukowski. And people should go look at videos. There’s videos of Bukowski doing interviews with a cat by his side, and that’s the cat he’s talking about. All right, it goes like this, “He came to the door one night, wet, thin, beaten and terrorized, a white, cross-eyed, tailless cat. I took him in and fed him and he stayed, grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway and ran him over. I took what was left to a vet who said, ‘Not much chance. Give him these pills. His backbone is crushed, but it was crushed before and somehow mended. If he lives, he’ll never walk. Look at these x-rays, he’s been shot. Look here, the pellets are still there. Also, he once had a tail, somebody cut it off.’.
I took the cat back. It was a hot summer, one of the hottest in decades. I put him on the bathroom floor, gave him water and pills. He wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t touch the water. I dipped my finger into it, and wet his mouth, and I talked to him. I didn’t go anywhere. I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to him, and gently touched him, and he looked back at me with those pale, blue crossed eyes. And as the days went by, he made his first move, dragging himself forward by his front legs. The rear ones wouldn’t work. He made it to the litter box, crawled over and in. It was like the trumpet of possible victory blowing in that bathroom and into the city. I related to that cat. I had it bad, not that bad, but bad enough. One morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and just looked at me. ‘You can make it,’ I said to him. He kept trying, getting up, falling down.
Finally, he walked a few steps. He was like a drunk, the rear legs just didn’t want to do it, and he fell again, rested than got up. You know the rest. Now he’s better than ever, cross-eyed, almost toothless, but the grace is back and that look in his eyes never left. And now sometimes I’m interviewed, they want to hear about life, and literature, and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed, shot, runover, de-tailed cat, and I say, ‘Look. Look at this.” But they don’t understand. They say something like, ‘You say you’ve been influenced by Celine?’ ‘No,’ I hold the cat up, ‘Influenced by what happens, by things like this, by this, by this.’ I shake the cat, hold him up in the smoky and drunken light. He’s relaxed. He knows. It’s then that the interviews end. Although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures later, and there I am, and there’s the cat, and we’re photographed together, he too knows it’s bullshit, but that somehow it all helps.”
So when you posted about the-
Oliver Anthony
I love that.
Lex Fridman
… the three-legged cat, there you go. And I think of your music and your life story in the same way. It’s just been through some shit, just like Bukowski. Neither of you two have been through what that cat’s been through, but that’s life. That’s what it’s all about. I was wondering if you could play a couple songs for me.
Oliver Anthony
Sure. Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman
Okay, cool. Do you want to take a break or no?
Oliver Anthony
No, I’m good. We might take a break just for me to get this figured out, but…
Lex Fridman
A bathroom break real quick.
Oliver Anthony
Of course, yeah.
Lex Fridman
Where is the guitar? No, positionally.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, I think this will be fine.
Lex Fridman
So ghetto.
Oliver Anthony
Call Draven and be like, “Help.”
I Want to Go Home (live performance)
Well, I guess I’ll do, if I was going to do anything on here from the older songs that was relatable to everything we’ve talked about, it’d probably be I Want to Go Home.
Lex Fridman
Sounds good. [inaudible 02:02:23].
MUSIC
If it weren’t for my old dogs and the good Lord.
They’d have me strung up in the psych ward.
‘Cause every day living in this new world is one too many days to me.
Son, we’re on the brink of the next world war.
And I don’t think nobody’s praying no more.
And I ain’t saying I know it for sure.
I’m just down on my knees begging, Lord, take me home.
I just wanna go home.
I don’t know which road to go.
It’s been so long.
I just know I didn’t used to wake up feeling this way.
Cussing myself every damn day.
People have really gone and lost their way.
They all just do what the TVs say.
I wanna go home.
Four generations farming the ground.
Grandson sells it to a man from out of town.
And two weeks later, the trees go down.
Only got concrete growing around.
And I wanna go home.
I wanna go home. I don’t know which road to go.
It’s been so long.
I just know I didn’t used to wake up feeling this way.
Cussing myself every damn day.
There’s always some kind of bill to pay.
People just doing what the rich man say.
I wanna go home. But if it weren’t for my old dogs and the good Lord.
Well, they’d have me strung up in the psych ward.
Oliver Anthony
That’s probably one of the first, I don’t know, it’s not the first song I wrote, but one of them.
Lex Fridman
What a song, man. What a song. What a song. What’s the story to that guitar?
Guitar backstory
Oliver Anthony
Well, the guy who made this saved my butt because everything blew up and I was playing that little Gretsch resonator that’s in all the original videos. And my wife had got me that off of Amazon, I think or something, for three or 400 bucks. It’s like just an entry level import, little Gretsch and the pickup never would work right in it. So this string wouldn’t work when you plugged it in. So here we are, everything happens all at once and we’re trying to do these shows. And I think the biggest one I did, so basically what I ended up having to do was go, I bought one of these suction cup rigs that sticks right here, and the mic goes down under here to pick that string up.
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 02:06:31].
Oliver Anthony
And we played a, I think the biggest show I did with it was like 10,000 people, but it was enough to where I couldn’t be doing a $300 guitar with a rigged up thing on it anymore. It just wasn’t going to work. So this guy reached out and Gretsch wouldn’t help me with my… There’s no way to really get ahold of them because they’re such a big company. I finally did get a hold of Diane Gretsch and she’s really nice, and so it’s nothing personal against Gretsch. It’s just at the time I couldn’t get ahold of them. I figured I wouldn’t been able to because everywhere sold out of that Gretsch model when the song blew up. It was a real pop… But I couldn’t get ahold of him. So this guy, Beard Guitar, Paul Beard in Maryland, he reached out, fixed my Gretsch, and then gave me one of these and made it with a… But it’s all handmade and all. It’s like [inaudible 02:07:20].
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 02:07:21].
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, you can whack somebody over the head with it pretty good [inaudible 02:07:24].
Lex Fridman
Yeah, it’s nice and heavy.
Oliver Anthony
But yeah, he makes them all by hand.
Lex Fridman
Nice.
Oliver Anthony
A little family owned place, and-
Lex Fridman
I know nothing about resonated guitars. Is that like, do you play regular acoustic?
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, it’s just basically a regular acoustic, it’s just a full step down. It’s the only difference. I’ve just got it tuned all the way down.
Lex Fridman
Is that it? Because there’s also the… There’s whole vibe to it.
Oliver Anthony
Oh. Oh, yeah. Well, the body’s different. So you can see it’s got a solid, instead of it being a hollow body, like an acoustic, it’s got that. It almost looks like a hubcap, that black plate.
Lex Fridman
And all the chord, that’s all the same. It’s just a step down.
Oliver Anthony
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s just the same. Yeah, I wouldn’t be smart enough to play anything special. It’s just a regular old guitar.
Lex Fridman
I don’t know. There’s a different vibe to it.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, well, I like that-
Lex Fridman
It’s somehow cooler.
Oliver Anthony
Well, I’m real fond of the older music. So where all my family’s from, so my dad was adopted, so I don’t have any… Lunsford’s not really even a real last name to me. It was just my grandparents that adopted my dad. So all of my family’s Ingle, it’s I-N-G-L- E. That’s my real, that’s on my mom’s side of my family. And they’re all from this place about 20 miles from where the Carter family was from. So all that old Virginia bluegrass folk music stuff. And so I was just always attracted to that, and so I like the resonator a full step down because to me, it gives it that old sound. A lot of the instruments back then had bad, dull strings, and they were older, and they were out of a tune a little bit and stuff, and I just, I listen to a lot of that type of music.
So I like the strings being a little out of tune and dull, and not everything, and just that. Yeah, that’s why I was so attracted to it. Plus, some of the old blues players like playing the Dobro and stuff. But that’s why I wanted to get the resonator, was just because of that old… That’s even why I had to use my grandpa’s name as an alias, but that Oliver Anthony Music is really supposed to represent old music from 1930s Virginia or something like… It’s got that type of feel to it, or at least in its core.
Lex Fridman
It feels like from another time, but it also feels timeless.
Oliver Anthony
It’s also that my music catalog is so limited of what I listen to, that a lot of what’s in my head, because you think about when you’re writing songs and coming up with chord progressions and stuff, whether you realize it or not, it’s all being influenced off of other songs. So when you only have a lot of older music, and a little bit of metal and stuff in there, it’s like there’s not really a whole lot. It’s like that. It’s going to sound that way, I guess, just anyway, what’s in your head already, but-
Playing live this year
Lex Fridman
So you’re going to go out there a little bit this year. What are some things you’re looking forward to? You’re going to travel a bit, you’re going to play a bit.
Oliver Anthony
The idea is to go to a town, like let’s just use Iowa as an example. Instead of the big city in Iowa, playing at the venue where everybody books, let’s find a farm field, 45 minutes outside of that big city, figure out the ingress, egress, the security, find a good promoter that can, a show organizer basically that has experience to where it’s still professional and it’s done correctly. But establish a new venue space that can’t be put under contract by a monopoly, that any artist can go play without. If all these musicians are sick of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, then let’s just start playing in fields and on main streets, and set these venues up, and establish them correctly and professionally to where they exist as their own space. And then imagine the economic impact that would provide to a town that otherwise would never… And imagine what it…
You want to talk about trying to give blue collar people some hope, or give them some relatability, or do anything for them. Bring a big band to their town that they would otherwise have to drive an hour and a half somewhere to see and couldn’t even afford the tickets to start with. My tour last year, pretty much every show we did that was mine had a $25 ticket option and everybody scoffed at that. And I was basically made fun of for that by people in the professional space, even people I was working with. They just thought it was so stupid. But you know what? There were people at my shows that came up, and the kids were wearing hand-me-down clothes, and you could tell they didn’t have any money. And they said it meant a lot to them that they could come and that there was a $25 option. And I’ll continue to do these shows like this to where any band that wants to come play the show, all their expenses are covered, and I’m sure there’s some kind of tax write-off component to them for them.
But basically they can come in, do the show, help bring in a crowd. I’m taking the risk, setting the venue up and establishing it. The venue will be owned or managed by either the town, or the farm, or whatever, but it’ll be in a non-profit. And then that space will always exist for people to rent. And the idea is this, man, imagine if I could do 20 of these a year, even if that’s all I can get done. That’s 20 places that will always have music, and will always have a center where people can go and build the sense of community we talked about. It’s almost like a sanctuary if you want to call it that, but it’s just a space that can’t be perverted by corporate America, and just a place where people can go and do all these things that we want to do. What are you excited for this year? Obviously you’re going to travel overseas and sounds like you got some other cool stuff you’re going to do.
Lex Fridman
Yeah, I’m going to see some world leaders, hopefully not end up in prison anywhere. Part of that, honestly, I’m excited, India, to see the same humans, but in very different parts of the world. I’m not a travel guy, but I love seeing humans, that there’s a lot of us humans all over the place, and they’re very different, and they have funny accents, and just funny way of being. So I’m excited to take it all in because I fundamentally love people.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, man, I would definitely say if you’re ever over towards Virginia or West Virginia, either one there, yeah, it’d be cool to spend a couple days out in the woods, or a day out in the woods and do… I’m really new to the whole psilocybin thing, but I have tried a few smaller doses of it, actually to help with being up on stage and all, and it’s an interesting thing, but-
Lex Fridman
It’s great.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, definitely the dogs and the woods part, I got you on that. [inaudible 02:13:59]-
Lex Fridman
I would love to join in. I’ve taken mushrooms a few times and listen, I usually just love everything anyway, but with mushrooms, you just love it a little bit more, especially out in nature.
Oliver Anthony
[inaudible 02:14:10].
Lex Fridman
When I’m look out in nature, I’m just in awe of how incredibly beautiful it is. And just I could stare at a tree for hours, and then you take mushrooms and that tree starts having some more dynamism to it. So it’s just a little boost, but I don’t really care.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, I get into this crazy, like I said, it’s only been a handful of times because I’ve… I don’t know, it’s one of those things where it’s still a little unfamiliar to me, but talking about trees and psilocybin, you start to look in those trees and you think in their relative perspective of time, because they’re constantly moving around and growing, and doing all these things, and you think about in their perspective, maybe we’re just moving way faster than their perception and they’re moving at just a normal speed. It’s just you get into all these crazy trains of thought when you sit out in the woods on that stuff, but-
Lex Fridman
A hundred percent, man. Maybe that’s the history of life. Humans have some chance of destroying 95, 99% of the population when nuclear weapons, and the trees will remain, and they will reconstruct the environment of earth, and help the few humans that remain to survive. And it’ll be the fucking trees that we’d be grateful for, their actual deep, ancient wisdom. So maybe they’re the intelligent ones, maybe we are the idiots.
Oliver Anthony
You’re out in nature like that, and just looking and studying the way all those systems work with soil, and trees, and animals, and how it all just integrates in together so perfectly. It does give you some sense of peace that maybe there is some system at place that’s out of our hands, that can just help us with our faults and our repercussions. And again, for me, just, yeah, I think just being out there, especially now looking at it through the lens of God, it helps. I’ve found no greater peace than just being out in the woods and praying or just trying to focus my mind on that. But yeah, I would love for you to come up there sometime and-
Lex Fridman
I’m 100% will, and visit. See, feeling peaceful out in Virginia in the woods is easy. Try doing it in the Amazon jungle when a-
Oliver Anthony
Oh, dude I-
Lex Fridman
… giant ant crawl and just bites you.
Oliver Anthony
Dude, I would do anything to go to the Amazon.
Lex Fridman
And all the peace is gone. You’re like, “Motherfucker, what is…” And then a second one joins in, kills the first one and bites you again. And then you’re like, “Okay, nature is not all-
Oliver Anthony
Yeah, it’s not.
Lex Fridman
There is harmony to it, but part of the harmony is the violence.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
It’s just the reality of it. It’s sex and violence.
Oliver Anthony
I guess that’s the thing about it though, is it has all the same components of humanity, just almost to a comical level.
Lex Fridman
The real comedy’s the monkeys up in the trees. It’s like little humans and they’re arguing, screaming at each other, throwing stuff, getting into fights. It’s like reality TV, but more pure, more real, more distilled down its fundamentals. We are that. We put on clothes these days, and have fancy words that we say to each other, and look all sexy on Instagram, but we’re the same monkeys, apes.
Oliver Anthony
It’s like the old lobsters, but it really is true. Yeah, we’re all on that same operating system, in a way.
Lex Fridman
Brother, this was a huge honor. I don’t have the words to describe how incredible this was, and I think it was just fun. It was really fun talking to you.
Oliver Anthony
Total honor to be able to come on here for me as well, and especially just to get to meet you in real life and see, you are what I expected you to be, in a good way. You just don’t ever… Yeah, you’re a good dude.
Lex Fridman
[inaudible 02:18:20].
Oliver Anthony
So I appreciate what you’re doing [inaudible 02:18:22]-
Lex Fridman
I got to show you the sex dungeon downstairs-
Oliver Anthony
Nice. Heck yeah, [inaudible 02:18:26]-
Lex Fridman
… where I keep sex slaves, it’s very different. No. Yeah, man.
Oliver Anthony
Yeah.
Lex Fridman
All right. Time to wake up. Let’s go back to reality.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Oliver Anthony. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from George Orwell, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Thank you for listening, and [inaudible 02:18:58] hope to see you next time.