Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain | Lex Fridman Podcast #469

The following is a conversation with Oliver Anthony, 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 Lansford. 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 Freedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Christopher Lford, or as many of you know him as Oliver Anthony.

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 had for about 5 people in the audience, plus me.

Well, you were there. I’d have been doing it, too, if you were out there like, “Oh, that’s Lex Fridman.”

No, man. He was this big dude on a keyboard, just giving it 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 play his heart out. That’s why I love open mics.

Some people still aspire to be famous when they play open mics, but some people maybe have given up, or maybe they never wanted to be famous. They’re just there for the pure artistry of it. And you said you started out playing open mics. What, at shady bars? What was that like?

Well, yeah. Real quick, before I forget, a great example of a guy who had that same mindset and was able to maintain it really well is 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. He could go out and tour and play mandolin for anybody he wanted to, but 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, a lot of them were really embarrassing. There were a couple I remember. There were times where I’d go up and try to do 1 song, get halfway through the next song, and be so nervous by that point that I couldn’t remember any of the words. There were a couple of times—I remember there was 1 time in particular—that I just walked off halfway through the song, put my guitar in the case, and left. I couldn’t even stay in there. Just a total freak-out. Just embarrassment.

I never drank in bars, either. I wasn’t really a social drinker. I was just there to try to do the mic, so I was a little out of place anyway. I feel kind of out of place in a bar to start with.

This was back when you could smoke in bars. There’s a whole vibe to it: people smoking, drinking, and bombing in a place like that when the audience is like 5 people and they’re bored.

Yeah, there was 1 like that. It was in Moka. 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. 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 types of spots.

You did covers. What’d you play? What was your go-to back then?

It was, like, “Fishing in the Dark” by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, or any of those old Hank Jr. songs, or any of those bar-type David Allan Coe songs, like “You Never Even Call Me by My Name.” I haven’t even played any of those in forever now. But those were the ones where you’d get people singing along and stuff. That’s what I’d always try to do.

That song you performed, “Take Me Home, Country Roads”—how does that go? “West Virginia...”

Yeah, it’s a good song. John Denver was just 1 of those guys that—who knows where he would have gone long-term if he hadn’t passed? But you know what’s a fun song that I love? I shouldn’t, but I love “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” I think what I liked about John Denver was that he let himself be a little bit corny, in the spirit of having fun with it.

There’s a great example: there’s this older guy that not a lot of people have heard of named Roy Clark. My farm is about a mile down the road from Roy Clark’s old farm. He used to be on Hee Haw. I don’t know if you ever heard of that old show from the ’60s or whatever, but he was a crazy dude. He could pick up any instrument. There are videos on YouTube of him; he would just sit there, pick anything up, and rip it to death. But he would always be really silly about it. He never took himself too seriously.

Some people go to the fun place. Some people go to the dark place. Country can do both. You more often go to the dark place—to the pain.

Yeah. Well, especially with some of the new songs that are coming out, I don’t know what they’ll be. I don’t know what country is anymore, anyway. I don’t know that many people who listen to the type of music that I grew up listening to who probably listen to country radio anymore. I think there are quite a lot of people who have sort of disowned that space.

In commercialized country, you only really get what sells, and a lot of what sells isn’t necessarily what matters.

Well, you had that whole experience where they take what you recorded and polish it, quote-unquote, try to make it perfect, and in so doing destroy the soul of the thing. Probably that happens with these big artists. They’re so famous; it’s like a machine. What the machine does is overpolish things, and so the raw power of the person, the uniqueness of the person, and the soul of the person are gone if you do that.

Yeah. I think professionalism—applying the tactics of corporate America to anything that is fundamentally artistic—is not going to end well.

They’re all individually brilliant, but together this corporate speak comes out. The soul of the people dissipates. It disappears. Why are you all pretending that life is not terrible and beautiful, and that you’re not both scared shitless and excited? This guy is going through a divorce; this person just fell in love. You’re getting the intensity of life with this corporate 9-to-5: “Hi, John, it’s great to see you today.” “Oh, you too.” “You as well.” “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.

Well, they’re there to fill a role contractually. If they bring too many of their human elements into that, then they jeopardize their sense of security. It’s all just out of fear. It’s out of fear of losing your job. I mean, it’s the reason why all the songs say Oliver Anthony and not Christopher Lunsford on them. It’s fear.

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—the impossibility of having a single-income household or anything else. But when you find a decent-paying job that you can do without it torturing you every day, that’s a pretty important thing now.

It’s pretty easy to turn yourself into a robot for 8 or 10 hours a day out of fear. 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. You’ve just got to do your best not to 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, there was this whole big thing of people talking about quiet quitting, where they were just going to go to work but not really do anything. But that hurts me so much. It hurts me when you just stop—when you’re there but you’re not really there. That makes me so sad.

Yeah. And then they wonder why these companies slowly kind of fall apart and disintegrate, because they’re so worried about structure. I mean, God, man, even in America today, our culture has become so corporate because so many big corporations own and manage everything that we live under, like food, agriculture, health care, and social media.

It’s all in corporate structures, and it’s almost like a lot of the problems we find ourselves in now with society are just because of that. It’s almost like corporate HR has been implemented into our whole thought process of everything.

I think that’s kind of what you’re touching on, though. It’s hard to be a human and be a good little corporate employee at the same time.

As our whole society moves more toward becoming basically one big corporation, 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. I've talked to great engineers about this.

Jim Keller is a legendary engineer. Elon Musk is another example. You need—I don't know what's a nice term for it—but you need the asshole, because you want to get to the ground truth of things, to the first principles of things: How do we simplify? How do we make it more efficient? How do we move faster? How do we get shit done? That has no place for this kind of polite speak. Other great team members swoop in and repair the damage that the tornado has done.

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 a documentary has been following me around since the very first show in August 2023? His background was doing promotional videos for Boeing, like for their new spacecraft, to pitch it to whoever. 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.

I think it's exactly what we touched on: that thought process of dehumanization within companies. I think that's what ultimately causes it. 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 much like—he was telling me, even just with his protocols and some of the people he worked with, everything's just very—lightly touch everything. No one touches anything too hard.

It's not just HR; it's also this managerial class, where Bob from one department has to schedule a meeting with John from another department and Debbie. They have to have a meeting 2½ weeks from now, and then there's paperwork. That bureaucracy that's created in the managerial class just slows everything down.

One of the things that slowing everything down does is really demotivate the people who are actually doing the shit—the people on the ground, the engineers who are building stuff. It's, again, soul-wrenching to be excited, show up, and then hit this wall of paperwork. You have to wait for John and Debbie, and I forgot the third guy's name—I kind of imagined him in my head—to have a meeting. Then you slow down, and you disappear in terms of that fire, that passion that's required to create big things.

So, yeah, because they don't believe in the leadership. If they don't believe in that leadership, then why the hell would they be motivated? I remember 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; that's probably where I remember seeing it, one of his books.

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 didn't necessarily agree with them himself. It's really hard to take orders and go and have human spirit, especially in something that's innovative. If you're working for a company where you just think everybody's dumb—I can certainly relate to that.

In my old job, that's all we did: We spent half our day talking about how dumb we thought everybody above us was. It's easy to fall into that in the corporate world, and so the morale gets terrible. Everyone suffers as a result of it—the people at the top who are implementing all that dysfunction, and the people at the bottom. It's not good for anybody.

I had thought that, now that I'm doing this, I could escape from that, but that exact same mentality, that dysfunction, and that inefficiency—I still battle it every day.

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—to cut through the bureaucracy, the bullshit that's ultimately just a machine that steals money and doesn't really get anything done. 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, 3 years, really—but recently especially. He always texts in this very high-testosterone way, like, “You good, bro? Just checking in.” He's a good man. He's obviously an inspiration to millions of people, but also just a good human being himself.

So maybe one thing that we feel similarly about—I'm just... I would imagine you way more than me—is feeling like, wow, I have the ability to influence, or the ability to either bring truth or improve people's lives. Every word that you say sometimes matters so much, and you're just like, “Man, I'm an idiot. I don't know.” I would have never guessed—we were kind of talking about that before—how this would have turned into all this, but it is a weight that you bear whether you really even acknowledge it or not.

Yeah, and I think the songs you've created speak to the human condition, to the struggle of everyday working people in a society where the elites try to take advantage of those working people. You're 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, misrepresented, and lied about from different angles. The turmoil, the intense chaos of that—it disorients you. It disorients me, too. It gives me this feeling like I generally, just like you said, think of myself as kind of an idiot, not really knowing what I'm doing.

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. Then there's also just the chemistry of the brain. You shake up the brain a little bit, and it starts getting weird. On many fronts, it can get real lonely when you're getting attacked, when you're kind of fucking things up. In many ways, it can get lonely.

So you get a text from Jocko like, “You good?” Yeah, yeah. I have good friends. Andrew Huberman's been great. Rogan's been great.

Well, you know, Lex, you were in a different place in society however many years ago than you are now. 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, 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.

That can be tricky, too, when you've spent your whole life—from the time you're 3 years old and you're starting to play with other kids, developmentally learning how to share and how to interact, playing on the playground with kids and learning how to set rules and boundaries, basically learning how to fit into society. You have this whole learning pattern up until whatever point in time when success happens, and then all that shifts pretty dramatically, all in a relatively short period of time.

How do you think managing your previous friendships has been? How has that been tricky for you?

It's been tough. I value deep, close, long-term friendships, and I have amazing friends, but they certainly do treat me a little differently. They bust my balls noticeably less. You need that sometimes. I need it—not sometimes, all the time.

First of all, it's how dudes show love: making fun of each other, at least my friends. When you watch women interact, they're often really positive toward each other: “Oh, you look great.” Watch dudes interact—close friends—and there's just busting each other's balls, making fun of each other.

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—Rogan roasts me nonstop. It just feels good. I sit there and get made fun of, and it's great. It's great. I still do it all the time. It's just a different experience now.

I'm like a Goodwill junkie. Most of my clothes are from Goodwill, but I have this addiction to buying paintings from Goodwill—the $8 paintings where it looks like somebody was following along with a Bob Ross video and it didn't work out quite right. I buy every one of those. I'll go in there and buy 10 of them. So even anytime you go into public now, you know it's going to be a little different than it was.

Jelly Roll

You know, I don't know if that makes sense or not.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, hey, you're trying to deal with all of it. When you talk to world leaders, when you step into politics a little bit—and you apparently stepped into politics, even though you never meant to, because 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.

So, yeah, 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—as far as the people who sit on the internet all day and argue about stuff on X or Facebook and all—I do think their heart is in it for the right reasons. They observe that there are 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 a 4-by-4 square? How do you get them out of this same kind of box? They're entrapped in the same kind of box that the people at Boeing might be with that structure. You know, it's the tornado metaphor, but it applies in politics too. There needs to just be a tornado through politics, and we need to lay all this other stuff aside and 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.

I mean, if Jordan Peterson were here, he would tell us about fire and how important that is, and burning. It is all the same water, fire, and ice metaphor, and there would definitely be a connection to the Bible. Then we would receive a 3-hour lecture, and it's true. It is all true. It's all 100% accurate.

That's the crazy thing. But it all ties into that same thing. In politics now, it's almost like there's a rulebook that you have to follow, and if you can't agree with this, then you also can't agree with that. Maybe it's the way that we receive information about what's going on in the political landscape. It's always so biased.

The way we receive information is contingent upon this algorithmic system that we live under, where we're fed certain subcategories. It's easy to fall into that because you don't like hearing things you disagree with. 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.

That'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 kind of a cult-like thing. It's like, “Here's what we all agree with,” and if you don't, then go and get—I mean, we're far too complicated for it to really work that way.

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.

Yeah, Søren Kierkegaard, the philosopher. I love Jordan so much.

I do too. He just goes to Carl Jung now. And there's this idea from Kierkegaard that the crowd is untruth. When you look at the crowd, there's something that loses the humanity and 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. 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's perspective, the moment you speak to the crowd, you're speaking to the lie that is the crowd, according to Kierkegaard. It's pretty hardcore. Kierkegaard is pretty hardcore. Jordan's pretty hardcore.

But that is true. Specifically in my case, it probably applies more than it does in a lot of cases with crowds and music. Talking about Richmond, I wasn't necessarily even excited that “Rich Men North of Richmond” did as well as it did. In a way, it was almost alarming that it did so well.

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 2024.

Man, you mean the size, the intensity?

The intensity. It was revolutionary, almost.

A song of revolution. Yeah, I think of “Redemption Song” from Bob Marley. That song just connected with people. There's something there.

Well, so many people identified with different elements. Like I said, it goes back to when we were first talking when we got here, but it was crazy how, 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.

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. It was one of the only times that I can think of where there was that much of a sense of unity among people who otherwise wouldn't have had it.

I think about 9/11 when I was a kid. I was in 4th grade, but people just put everything aside for a little while. It was kind of like, there are bigger problems that just aren't in our face. If they're in your face for just a second or two, you realize how hard it is in your mind to create a graph that's got all these problems.

We argue about a lot of these problems, but if you were to really stand back and look at all the problems we spend time focusing on on the internet versus all the things that are affecting us, and probably at our core really piss us off, it's got to be very disproportionate.

The reason it got the reaction it did is because, no matter what we're upset about or what we think needs to be different in the world, our opinions of things, how we're raised, or what our parents taught us, I think we all feel a little bit out of control in this new society.

We probably all feel like we're falling into this corporate power structure where none of us are—we all are just robots. We're not allowed to be ourselves and be human, almost. There were enough people feeling that: people on the left feeling like the people in power are fucking over the working class, and people on the right feeling the exact same thing with different words assigned to it.

The deep state fucking over middle America, whatever the narratives are.

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's a lot of politeness in the Soviet Union.

Yeah. Great example.

Underneath that, it's like Chernobyl, which is this nuclear power plant that melted down. I feel like bureaucracy needs politeness, civility, and paperwork to function, and then atrocities can happen underneath that. People in power, with a smile on their face, can just do horrific things.

Mm-hmm.

And then give propaganda that looks like it's rainbows and sunshine and unicorns. People who are rude—I’m starting to awaken to this a little bit—you need a little bit of Tom Waits. He says, “I like my Tom with a little drop of poison.” You need some poison, some swearing, some meanness, some bullshit, some intensity to shake up a system.

When it converges toward this polite bureaucracy, atrocities can happen and be hidden away. What's probably the most terrifying to me is that politeness is just theatrical. It emulates the respect that we would normally give each other in society if we were healthy and functional.

What was the process of writing that song? It really spoke to the pain and anger of millions of people, so there's magic there. How many edits? How many lines did you write? Were there any lines that you were tormented by or haunted by—coming back and thinking, “Should I do it this way, this way, or that way”?

I don't know. Can you pull TikTok up on this? If you go to my page, go down chickens, go. Yeah, go down pre-“Rich Men North of Richmond.”

This is so cool to see the evolution. There it is. Okay, so that's it. Play that.

That's all I had. I have too many unfinished songs.

Yeah, play that. Click that and play it.

“Sell my soul. 724 bullshit so I can sit out here back home.”

If you read through this, it's so funny. Everybody's like, “You're about to blow up.”

That's all I had. I just had that.

You should probably finish this one. It might be real popular.

That's a post from a few days later. That was in July.

Fuck. That's so inspiring, man.

So that's what I had.

That's so inspiring.

That's, like, a couple weeks before I posted the final.

Well, that's all I had written at that point. In my mind, that's what the inspiration for the song was: that little bit. I wrote that because I was on job sites all day, going into all these terrible places to work and dealing with different contractors and stuff.

You were talking about wanting to go and talk to blue-collar people and all. That's what I did for work, basically, for 8 years: 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. I think that's probably what it was. It was how I felt, but also how a lot of other people felt. It just seemed like the truth.

So you jot it down, even the details, like in a notebook? Those words?

No, it's always just on my phone. I would just keep recording. If you were to go back to TikTok and look at any of those original videos—the songs that ended up charting, like the ones that were on there that charted with “Rich Men North of Richmond,” like “I've Got to Get Sober”—that's literally what I did.

This is my carport where my camper was. I took this video, went to some sketchy MP4-to-WAV file transfer thing, ripped the audio off of this video, put this on TikTok, and then put that on DistroKid. That was the song.

Basically, this would have been the first time I played “I've Got to Get Sober” all the way through. I would just keep writing it and working on it, writing it and recording myself. Maybe I would record myself 30 times over the period of 2 months. You know what I mean?

When you say “writing,” you mean in your head, not actually typed out or written down, right?

It was mostly just videos over and over. I'm just trying to figure out how to make it.

All these audio files from the videos are what ended up on Spotify and all that. You know what I mean?

It's cool to see these videos before you blew up. This is a good song. You're playing it, guys. What is this at the end?

Yeah, yeah. These were all—

“Don't sell your soul, brother. This is the best music I've heard in a long time.”

That's a comment from before you blew up.

Yeah. I think I had about 10,000 followers or something. What a fucking song. That's a good one.

You have to think, that was when I quit drinking. The troubles in the world were knocking me back off my feet.

That's coming from your heart right there. Just imagine the thousands of people you helped with that.

But it ain't going to happen tonight

So pour them down strong until I drown

And if I wake up tomorrow, when that sun comes back around

I'll be wishing I was sober

It's so crazy how those cicadas and stuff come in. I just felt like it was a godsend. I don't know how to explain it. That's just off my phone. All that stuff's just there, you know?

And the bottle, it's 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 set me free

I'll go on the hill

That's a genius of a song. That's genius, brother. That's genius.

It's just crazy to think about.

And what's this one right before? What is this?

Oh, yeah. So that's probably the—

And this is a nice recording.

Got it. Yeah. So this video got uploaded, and then Draven from RadioWV would have gotten ahold of me in between this and that. He watched this and was like, “Dude, you got—” He said, “We gotta record that one.”

I didn't have it all. Whatever was in that video was all I had written. I think it was just the chorus and the first verse. Draven saw that video, and I said, “We gotta do this one.” He reached out to me to record, and he's like, “Yeah.” He's like, “No, we got to do that one.” I was like, “Dude, that's all I got.”

Tell me about that guy, Draven.

He's probably my best friend now. We hit it off with this, and we're like brothers now, I guess. But you talk about what he's doing for country music, for music in general, for discovering talent—for how he clearly sees something in people.

He's a little bit younger than I am. He wrote music and played, and he's got some of his own stuff. If you look up Draven Riffe—he's going to kill me for even saying this—but he's got some pretty good stuff. He can write the most catchy stuff ever. If he was like a pop singer, he would be like a.

Let's go. Yeah, click on—I don't know. You go.

All right. That's him.

Yeah.

I was 10 years old, walking underneath the blanket of West Virginia snow

Then I walked right by a “No Trespass” sign

Saw the grass look green across the property line

Bye-bye, bye-bye

You know, he could probably be really famous.

Well, he's got a certain look. That dude will sit there—we'll just be sitting there at 2 in the morning—and all of a sudden he'll do this little thing, and he's got the most amazing first part of a 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 videos and go to “Oldest first,” this is really funny, too. I'm sorry, Draven. I love you, man.

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. He created RadioWV as a fake plug page for the Burly Boy Beard brand he was working with.

If you look at that very first video, it's got all his beard products. There are multiple ones like that. He started it just to do this beard thing, and then I don't know—he just kind of felt called to keep going with it. It naturally progressed.

Yeah, that, too, is inspiring. You start out one way, and then you discover something really special.

He's got an eye for how to bring out the best in people. I don't know what it is—the audio side and the video side. He says he just wants it to sound the way he likes hearing it.

Which kind of makes sense. It's the same way we were talking about setting the cameras up. A professional would tell you that you needed 3 lights, and you're like, “Well, I think it would work with that.” He's just kind of like, “Well, it'll just work like this,” and does it in a way that he likes. Just do it for yourself.

He does it because he loves it, and you can see it shows.

Yeah. You can see it in there.

And there's some good talent, like this new lady you were showing me, Gabriel.

Yeah, she's got it. Not a lot of people would record her doing that song, but he's like, “I don't know. It just was different. I thought people ought to hear it.”

He's a blessing. It was a blessing that he came along when he did. It really changed both of our lives.

We've got to talk about that. You posted the song “Rich Men North of Richmond” on August 8, 2023. I remember I was at work that day when it went up.

Yeah.

It blew the fuck up, straight to number 1 on the charts: tens of millions of views and listens. A few days later, on August 17, you made a post that I thought was pretty gangster. It was beautiful and gangster.

One of the things you said was, “It's been difficult as I browse 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.”

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 6 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 some idiot and his guitar. The style of music that we should have never gotten away from in the first place.”

Huge props for that, for walking away from lucrative, multimillion-dollar record deals and all the money that was coming your way. Moments happen where the world tests you, and integrity is what you do in those moments. What was your philosophy? What was your thinking behind that?

It was all those messages I got. You can see it in the comment sections of a lot of the videos, but people just felt this spark, like, “Wow, maybe we actually have a chance. Maybe we actually do have some kind of power.”

Those people put that song there—nobody else—and gave me the opportunity to make it. Even without signing anything, I was still able to make millions of dollars and have financial freedom.

I just felt like, if I was going to do anything like that, I'd be betraying them. 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 be supported by it or be a part of it. I want to watch it crash and burn, you know?

See, this is the really important thing: whether it was betrayal or not, we'll never know. But you felt like it was. To have the integrity to walk away from the bag of money when you felt that way, that's fucking epic.

It was also—you've got to think—a couple of 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 if I lost this just as quickly as I got it. This didn't mean anything to me.

It just meant something to me that I could do something for somebody else. 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 meant a hell of a lot more to me than anything. That's what I didn't want to lose. I didn't want to lose those people's trust or feel like I had betrayed them. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I've just tried to make every decision, as best as I can, around what I think the right thing is to do. Who knows what the hell the right thing is to do? I just try to follow—we all have that little voice in us. I think sometimes we mask it. It's hard for us to listen to that little voice, whether it's our gluttony or our lust, or whether we numb ourselves with medication or alcohol, or scroll on YouTube for 4 hours a night 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. It's a spiritual thing, I guess. I just try to listen to that when I can. I don't know. I still feel like I haven't done enough.

I think you did a lot. I think you're an inspiration. You have helped a huge number of people. 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, and power also are. 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 their soul a bit, give away a bit of their integrity, or give away a bit of the spirit that made them who they are. You get caught up in the wave of it, you know? To keep holding on to that, that's a powerful thing. That's a really powerful thing.

Yeah, that's all I've got, though. When you lose that, what the hell are you? You see it. You see these celebrity people that just go off the deep end. You've got to have something in your life to keep you centered and to keep your whole perception of reality—and your existence in reality—together.

It's all contingent upon this sort of center that you exist in. If you don't have that, then you're just flying through space. I mean, we're all just riding on this rock that's going who knows how fast.

You said something, I think, to Jocko that I really liked: “Everything that has purpose behind it comes with risk.” In that moment, you were taking a hell of a risk.

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 react to it. I kind of knew all that was going to happen, and I was terrified.

Going back to talking about crowds, to stand in front of thousands of people and have everybody be in some sense of unity is incredible. A lot of times when I end the shows, I always end with this statement: “No matter how you feel when you go online, everyone feels so small and insignificant and powerless. But 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 look at all this trash that we digest every day—there will always be more of us than them.”

To see the light in people's eyes when you say that is incredible. But the truth is, who is us and who is them? Us just represents humanity and all the things we've talked about so far—the fire and the chaos, but also the love and just life. Life is such a crazy, complicated, beautiful, disastrous thing.

Them is 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. It doesn't just exist within the confines of the Soviet Union anymore; it seems to almost be a global epidemic. That song became the rebel call against that, against the power structures that create it.

It's like, how much fire am I willing to play with? I know at some point I'm going to get burned by it. I just pray a lot that God—I don't have a lot of self-worth anyway, so I don't really care what they say or do to me. I don't even care if I die. Whatever. Just protect the people I love. That's all I ask of God.

I have this dream of creating a parallel system that sits beside all these stupid systems that we live under, which are all sort of engulfed in this thing we talked about at the beginning—this type of structure where none of us are really free, where we're all just robots.

If we hate the way music is, and all these artists are complaining about the way the venues are monopolized and the ticket sales are monopolized, then let's just go find other places to play music. There are so many people hungry for music in places that don't ever get it.

If you look at it, there are so many passionate people fighting all these different causes. Just in food, food insecurity is the word they use for more or less starvation. It's a more polite term; it's called food insecurity. If you look at just Virginia, where I live, especially in the rural areas, at how much food insecurity there is and how many empty, vacant farms there are, this is an obvious problem that we should be talking about nonstop on Twitter.

Everyone has to eat. It doesn't matter what you vote for, what you look like, or any of that crap. Why are we living in a country where half of us are obese and eating shit food and don't know any better, while the other half of us don't have food? It's just a lack of leadership that's caused dysfunction. 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. If they don't like it, fuck them.

In all domains of life—from food to the music industry, honestly, to education, and to government itself—all of it. Your music is also the soundtrack to that spirit that makes America great, of 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.”

That inspiration that created this country came from years of people living under tyranny. We've forgotten 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—was a comment I made 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 from what it really means.

Think about how many different people came together just at the founding of this country—people who spoke different languages and came from different cultures, religions, and ways of thinking. So many different people came together to create this place. We've just forgotten about all that.

They didn't all come here because they wanted to ride on some miserable boat and risk their whole lives to go 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 was because they were tired of generations of being persecuted, living under tyranny, and not being allowed to practice their religion.

It's not like they wanted freedom of religion and separation of church and state because they were a bunch of goody-two-shoes who loved going to church every Sunday. It's because they weren't allowed to believe in what they believed in. 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: we've forgotten that we're those people. The same structures that have plagued this country are multinational corporations, and it's the ideology behind them and their structure that's the problem.

Yeah. I mean, it’s multinational corporations. It’s nation-states that are deeply corrupt and authoritarian and ultimately abuse power and create elements of tyranny. From that, the human spirit rises, like I said, with songs like the ones you write or, at the founding of this country, that’s why all these diverse outcasts came together and wrote something as crazy as “All men are created equal.”

What a gangster line. That’s not an easy thing. We take a lot of that stuff for granted now. 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 were also 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 like a gigantic fuck you to the past.

Taking that leap forward really took a lot in an age, at a time when it probably sounded crazy. 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 Revolutionary War until now to try to preserve that idea. So much has happened, and so much sacrifice has been made, and just so many hours of labor and thought and intensity.

Even the 20th century had 2 world wars, and especially in the Second World War, the United States played a very crucial role. There was a lot of ideological battle of ideas going on at that time: the role of war and peace, the role of the United States as the central place for the ideal of human freedom and human rights. Yeah, we continue to innovate.

I’d love to get back to talking about blue-collar people, as you mentioned. Those are some of my favorite people. It was actually really cool to find out that, for many years of your life, basically the way you made a living was talking to blue-collar people and getting their stories.

I’m traveling across the world for a bit, but of course, the world I love the most and am most curious about is the different subcultures and towns of the United States. I took a road trip across the U.S. in my early 20s for several months, and that was a transformative experience for me.

That’s one of the luxuries I have now: the freedom to do whatever the hell I want. I wanted to take a road trip across the United States for several months, and one of the things I wanted to do was talk to people in small towns in middle America. I don’t know what words to put on it, but I wanted to talk to the very people you talked about: construction workers, plumbers, waitresses, oil-rig workers—people who do something real, people who are real, who don’t make much money and struggle, but who have, as you talked about, a richness to them that’s not often revealed and not often talked about.

So maybe you can speak to that—to your time with blue-collar folks.

When I got all those messages—we were talking about this earlier—so many of them, even now, in the last couple of days, have started with, “Hey, I’m a nobody.” 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 have literally built, preserved, and maintained the structure of society that we all comfortably live in have the least amount of representation. They’re ignored just because of the way the social hierarchy exists. But some of the most dim-witted, irrelevant, terrible people are put here and idolized and spotlighted. They’re all over television and all over the internet, and we act like they’re kings and queens, like they’re royalty.

All these people who do jobs that most of us would either be too terrified to do or wouldn’t even have the ability to do—how many people are going to go underwater and weld? If we didn’t have underwater welders, what would we do? One of my best friends, whose name is also Joe, funny enough, worked 70 or 80 hours every week. He’s on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel job now, but the dude has gotten up to heights that I couldn’t get to. He’s gone underground into places I wouldn’t go.

Nobody will ever know. Nobody even knows those people’s stories or what they went through or the kind of lives they lived. They’re the people who create the fabric of society. Even the waitresses and waiters, and all these factory jobs that I worked in—all those people.

The craziest place I ever worked and the craziest people I ever met was this little place called Perfect Air in Marion, North Carolina. It was a commercial air-conditioning factory, which I think is closed now, but they didn’t pay very well. Everyone they hired was either someone with a criminal background who couldn’t get a job elsewhere or an idiot who dropped out of high school and couldn’t work elsewhere, like me.

I was 18 years old, working in this place with people who were mostly in their 50s and 60s. You want to talk about being exposed to a whole other world of people—the stories and everything. Those people are far more interesting than many of the people we consider celebrities.

Most people who are celebrities are pretty boring and airheaded and 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 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? Even in Virginia, if you lived in Northern Virginia and drove 2 and a half hours southwest, you’d be on a whole other planet. The people, the accents, the culture. I feel driven in the same way. I would love to find a way to try to bridge that cultural gap and make those people relevant, because they are some of the most interesting people.

It’s funny because we emulate a lot of those people. Modern country music is a bunch of people emulating those people.

I also love people who have a skill and become masters of that skill. That element is there even if it’s insanely difficult work, like being a miner. There’s skill to that. There are stories there. There’s what it takes to do that.

Some of my favorite humans are engineers, and all they do is solve really hard problems. It’s a pain-in-the-ass job. Anything in the factories is extremely difficult, but 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. And those are trades that are, in many cases, dying because they aren’t popular in culture anymore. Everything from agriculture to plumbing and electrical—those are all areas where, 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.

So, thank you for what you’re doing on that front. Please, if you know people who would be willing to talk, reach out to me.

This was another one of the things I had an idea about early on and thought was getting done, but it wasn’t. I’ve got to go back and try to figure out doing prison shows and rehab shows and all that. I’m really intrigued with going into those places and trying to immerse myself in the mental state those people are in. It’s not talked about a whole lot.

Also, people who get out—ex-convicts, I mean—that’s a hard life. That’s just a hard life, trying to reintegrate back into society.

A lot of those people at Perfect Aire that I worked with were almost all in some form of legal trouble. There was a lady who worked on the assembly line beside me named Denise. She 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. Aside from the meth manufacturing, she was great, and such a character, in such a good way. Denise, let’s talk.

Yeah. Both the plumbers and the coal miners and Denise with the old meth habit—they’re walking the line of how hard surviving is.

You have to do a really hard job and then also live life, which is generally hard. Divorce, kids die, you lose loved ones, medical issues—that can destroy you completely. All of a sudden, something happens, you can’t afford it, and the insurance system destroys people. All of that.

You have to somehow navigate life while working your ass off in a really hard job. Those people have stories. That’s real pain. And from that pain, from that anger, that’s where “Rich Men North of Richmond”—that was it. You could just feel their pain come through with that song and with your other work.

So there’s a landscape of suffering.

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, there's a guy in West Virginia that I talked to who has a piece of property beside mine that he was interested in selling. He has this dream of putting some cabins there and renting them out to people on Airbnb.

He works at Lowe's full-time, but his son is 19 and has heart surgery he's got to have. So he's trying to sell the place for that. All you'd ever see him as is the guy who works at Lowe's, pulling lumber or whatever, but he's got this insanely complex life he's trying to manage. He doesn't want to lose his son. He's just going to sell everything.

At one point in time, maybe the church served that role. When people really fell off track and didn't have a support system, when they were like a tiny boat 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 organize them, empower them, and protect them.

It's rebuilding the community, but in a real way, not in this fairy-tale bullshit where 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. 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, have a good weekend,” like you said. We need all this controversy and turmoil. We need the hell of what that side of the internet brings out in people, but it just needs to be in real life and in a way where we're all at least chasing the same common goal.

That goal is probably that we don't want to starve, 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 into despair and are isolated in it. It's a terrifying world to live in.

It's that principle again. This is a “phone a friend” thing where we can just keep calling Jordan for all these things. He explains there's this principle in the Bible about those who have more receiving more, and those who have less receiving less, kind of a thing. It's a universal law in society, where it seems like the lower you get to the bottom, the fewer resources you have available and the fewer friends you have.

The further you go, it snowballs to where people just hit rock bottom. Then what? When you get out of prison, what are you supposed to do? When you're a veteran with mental health issues, what are you supposed to do? In my mind, that's what the church is supposed to be there for.

Obviously, it doesn't fill that role anymore. To some people, at least religion does a little bit. It gives them a foundation of community and a foundation of hope when they're really struggling.

Yeah. You've gotten thousands of messages, like you talked about, from people. You've gotten to talk to thousands of people about their pain. Through your work and 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?

Sometimes it's not even where you're at in life. It's where you perceive yourself to be in life and what your goals are moving forward. I dropped out of high school at 17 and basically ran away from home. I couldn't—I have always had this authority problem, and I just didn't want to listen to my parents. I didn't want to go to college. I just wanted to move into the mountains. I guess I was running away from responsibility.

I got this girl pregnant and had my first kid when I was 18, or just about to turn 19. Like I said, I was working in an air-conditioning factory with a bunch of convicted felons. From there, everything was just reactionary. I never really had a plan, and I would jump from job to job, just like most everybody else.

I got to a point where I quit believing in myself. I knew I wasn't fulfilling my purpose, and I wasn't being the best version of myself I could be. The alternative to facing yourself in the mirror and accepting that I'm not a shitty person—I've just let myself fall—is so hard to accept when you've had that fall. It's easier to just get drunk and do the bare minimum you can to keep everything sort of moving along.

You don't really care if you live or die. You don't really care about much of anything. Life is so beautiful when you're a child. You're imaginative and exploratory, and you're learning all these things. You just can't wait to be an adult because you're going to go out and do all these incredible things. Then you face the reality of it.

The pressure and the fear of failure—I think maybe even my own fear of failure—is what drove me. 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 conscience, that little voice in your spirit letting you know you're messing up.

I was wrestling with myself. I got to a point where it was just a very overwhelming sense of numbness. Nothing that mattered before really matters anymore. To me, that's probably the definition of depression: when all the things you love and care about are meaningless, and you can't find meaning or purpose or excitement in anything.

Especially with men who commit suicide, I think it's a prolonged period of that. It's not like they just wake up one day, have a bad day, and kill themselves. 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. Pretty soon, you've built this whole mountain of mismanaged, neglected stuff—a mountain that you have to climb back up in order to fix all these things that you should have been doing all along.

Then, on the other side of it, it's like, “Well, I could just die.” That seems a lot easier. From the perspective of the men I've lost, it seems like a lot of times you never see it coming. I don't know. Maybe that's a general thing, but it seems like a lot of times men mask it better, and you don't pick up on it as much.

I think you dig yourself into a point where 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. I don't know. They both seem—

At that point, your perception of reality is so distorted that all the things that would normally compel you to move along—love and joy and your drive to be that person—none of that is really there for you to even contemplate, if that makes sense. That part is almost invisible, at least for a little while. All you see is fear and responsibility and this mountain that you don't really know if you're even able to climb.

The other option is just so easy. I think that's probably where a lot of people go, and that's probably where I was.

Yeah, I mean, it's not just responsibilities. It's the immensity of it—the mountain. I think you're accurately describing how it happens, which is gradually. Seeing yourself in a negative light over time slowly suffocates you, and then the burden of responsibility piles up.

Unfortunately, one of the ways out is to pull the trigger, and the other way out is the Jordan Peterson approach: one gradual step at a time, like making your bed. Start climbing out. Face the responsibilities in front of you one at a time, every single day, and have faith that it will work out.

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 from the New Testament that Jesus said, and some different perspectives and teachings. An apostle would be in prison, basically being tortured and facing death, but just overjoyed in writing about it, talking about it. It’s all about your perspective of things.

Like I said, that’s why I never could understand why celebrities or professional athletes—for example, a Kurt Cobain type of scenario—where you have a guy who’s just immensely talented and will always be loved by plenty of people. I never could understand why that guy would take his own life. There’s an ocean of quiet suffering in a lot of men, and I think it is disproportionately in men. They hide it well. That’s why blue-collar workers have such a high suicide rate, too, and why it is so important to talk to those people.

Yeah, you can see it in the eyes. There is a lot of pain there.

Without trying to open up too many doors, I think that’s probably the best way I would describe it: just a series of really negligent decisions and also 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 its medication schedule, but not themselves. You love your dog, and your dog is just this great little thing. You don’t see the flaws, the faults, the sin, and the disgust in your dog that you see in yourself. So it’s much more likely for people to make sure their dog has its medication every day.

There’s this alarming statistic with the amount of people who don’t even fill the prescriptions they need filled or take care of themselves the way they do their dogs. Then, over time, if you quit taking care of yourself, you’re not in good health, and you’re not in a good routine, and you’re not doing a long series of 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, eat decent food, and try to take care of yourself, it’s like, why? 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? It is 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 all these flaws and problems, and despite my being such a wretched person—that’s what, in my situation, helped me more than anything. Like I said, that’s certainly where the motivation to quit came from. Once I quit drinking, it helped a lot because I was able—even though it was a pain and it was difficult—to actually be honest with myself and reflect on a lot of things.

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 who 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 situations, when you’re able to sort of escape this shell of all those terrible things.

Even if you are still in a bad position, and you’ve got $30,000 worth of credit card debt, you’re working some shit job, your car doesn’t start half the time, and your girlfriend left you for some other dude—no matter what it is—if at least that little glimmer of hope, that faith that there is a chance at something greater, can push people, you can push a mountain aside with that. You can do anything with that. I think it’s also good—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.

There are plenty of other people out there who are in the same position. 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.

Yeah. Very rarely are people posting on Facebook about the low points. It’s like all you see is the best of people.

I don’t think we realize that we’re all going through a lot of the same things anyway—the low points and stuff. 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 who’s not happy about you being broke? She’s going to leave you. Or if it’s a wife, that could mean divorce. Breakups and divorce can break a lot of people even when they’re doing well.

Yeah, and now when they’re not doing well, that’s a rough one.

Basically, your support system for a lot of people is the relationship, the wife, and so that’s taking the support system from underneath you. I’ve had good friends of mine get into destructive relationships. They’ll start to date a girl, and within a year they’re just a shell of what they were.

Sometimes I do think you have to be careful with your self-validation and the way you perceive yourself, making sure that it’s you giving yourself that and not somebody else. Because I do think, too, it’s like, how are you supposed to—if you can’t even keep a woman around to love you, 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.

Ultimately, I think—maybe it’s 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 will be times in life when everybody leaves you.

The wife leaves you, the job leaves you, and for some people, even people you thought were friends will backstab you. Even then, you have to have the strength to find your footing again. That ultimately comes from you, right?

I mean, of course, in all the experiences I’ve been through, I can’t—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, too, even from that. 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.

Allowing yourself to derive strength solely from other people can be a dangerous thing. People are complicated, and they can betray. Just like they can fill your life with love, they can also destroy you.

That’s also the beautiful thing about life. 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 beautiful. And then you write really great heartbreak songs.

Yeah. You know, there’s something valuable about people fucking you over, hardship, and all that kind of stuff. Even the best of us have terrible parts of us. We’re all flawed inherently because we’re human. There’ll never be another Garden of Eden on Earth, figuratively, where we all just live harmoniously and everything’s great, happy, and wonderful. But the basic principles that you talk about—love and those relationships and those connections that we have—make it all work.

The thing about it is, in a lot of cases, when you get so depressed and so low, what’s the point in even doing all this? 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 can have food delivered right to our door if we want, people are still more depressed now than they’ve ever been. All the anxiety and mental health stuff is probably just as prevalent as it’s ever been.

People talk about money not making you happy. It’s easy when you’re broke to think, “Man, if I had some money.” Of course, financial freedom is what you’re really looking for, not an abundance of wealth. The things we talk about that make life worth living aren’t things that you can buy. They are things that you obtain through relationships, love, and life.

It is just an infinitely complex and crazy thing to think about, but that human component of us is what’s so important to our long-term existence. Our ability to have connection with each other, and the joy and purpose we find in that, is not replaceable by anything.

Yeah, I’ve seen that with just seeing the effects of war on people. Basically, war strips away everything.

You lose your home, you lose everything, and you get to see what's actually important: the other people in your life—friends, family. It's almost cliché to say, but it's the people you love in your life who make up the essence of what makes life worth living. It's not the homes, the material possessions, or even the job and whatever else. It's the humans.

So, 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 a bunch of really incredible songs. You say you're not a good musician, which is hilarious.

Dude, I have zero self-confidence about just about anything. But when I say that, I'm not being funny.

You get nervous when you get onstage?

Oh, yeah. I can think about shows coming up, and my hands will sweat thinking about them.

Hey, you told me that you haven't really played the songs for a couple of months—your old songs—since September.

Yeah, since September. Well, dude, think about it: I'm not going to just sit around and play “I've Got to Get Sober” for fun.

So you feel the songs when you play them?

Yeah.

Yeah, man. That's rough. That's rough. A lot of musicians talk about that kind of thing, about hating to play songs because of that side of it. I've heard people talk about that.

Oh, yeah. I've become close friends with Dan Reynolds, who's the lead singer for Imagine Dragons. He says every time he performs a song—I mean, he has songs that have depression in them and all that kind of stuff—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 singing it, as if you're writing it for the first time.

As a performer, he says that's his duty to the audience. But then that takes a toll.

That's not easy to do, especially with the songs that you write. There's a lot of darkness in your songs.

I do have some lighter-hearted ones, too, that I'll put out. The thing is, I'm a little funny about releasing things. I don't know how many songs I've written that I'll probably never do anything with—probably at least 20 or 30 of them. They're just not songs that I want to put out.

What does it look like? Do you have a notebook with ideas, or do you have little videos of half-baked songs?

Yeah, I've got my old phone. That old phone that I recorded all the stuff for TikTok on has loads of little snippets, like the way that the “Rich Men North of Richmond” one was, in the bathroom. Even that one I showed you had been sitting on my phone for probably a couple of months. That's why I said I have too many unfinished songs. That's exactly what I meant.

I've got all these little snippets of things—a little blip here or there. But the writing process is a lot different from what I thought most people do. There are a lot of people who do these writing rooms and co-writes, where they'll have people sit down on the couch, smoke a joint, and say, “All right, let's write this song,” and then they just start plugging away. To me, I can't do that.

It's almost the opposite. A lot of times, the songs come when I'm not prepared for them.

You like to be alone?

Well, alone in my head. I could be out anywhere. Some of them will just come to me in the shower, and I'll have to scramble, 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. They come and they go just as quickly as they come.

It's exactly like when you wake up and you've had this crazy, vivid dream in your head. You wake up, and it's all right there. Then you stop thinking about it for half a second, and it all goes away. You'll never remember it again. You know, you can't remember your dreams like that. It's exactly like that.

It'll be there, and it'll be perfect. It's almost like it's given to you—just parts of it or the whole thing or whatever. Then you get into this flow state where it's all there in front of you, and you figure it all out. 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.

But 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'll just go away. Typically, it's only maybe the first half of the first verse that I'll get, or it'll be the chorus line. Then I'll build the rest of the song around that, if that makes sense.

The words, the music, or the melody—what pops into your head?

The emotion, I guess. The words sometimes. Sometimes it's a phrase.

One thing I will do, especially out in the country, is write down the craziest things people say. Sometimes I'll jot down a little bit of something or take a note on my phone if somebody says something really crazy that I've never heard before. Then maybe one day it'll just pop into my head. 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 all this crazy music. Even though I have been writing a lot of songs, I haven't been dumping them all out. I don't want to force it. I don't want to do truck, beer, girl songs. I don't want to force songs.

Do you have any truck, beer, girl songs? That would be interesting.

Yeah. I've got a silly one about this guy in West Virginia. He's the most laid-back guy, because I always get in my head, go overanalytical about stuff, and get real serious sometimes. He's like, “Buddy, you just gotta take a drag off this thing.” He was always the one who would peer-pressure me into taking a hit off a joint or something and just try to cheer me up. He didn't take life so seriously.

I've written this song called “Dr. Dan.” He's a doctor, but he's not a conventional doctor. That's a silly one that I'll put out. I do have some silly ones like that.

I have a couple of funny ones that I'll probably never play for the public, but I did play them at the Mothership, only because nobody has their phones in there. Right after we did Rogan, I somehow got connected with Tom Segura, and we went over to the Mothership. I got to meet him, and I love Adam Eget. He was on that thing with Norm Macdonald; that's how I got introduced to him. He's just an awesome dude.

We ended up at the Mothership. I think it was the evening after the Rogan podcast, and Tom was like, “Well, they've never had live music in here. You could be the first one.” I was like, “Whatever.”

We only had one guitar, and I had my guitarist Joey with me. Ron White was there. It was Tom Segura and Ron White that night. Ron took Joey in his car, drove him across town to his house, grabbed another guitar, and came back. We got up there and did two really silly songs, and then “Rich Men North of Richmond,” in between Tom's set and Ron's set.

Again, that was one of those moments in my life where I was like, “What is this? What is this crazy reality I'm in?”

I used to—because a lot of my guitar playing, when I wasn't playing the open mics, was spent at places like Brian's house, you know, the Brian you met. We were all heavy drinkers, sitting around at a party playing or whatever. So I definitely like the silly stuff, too.

But I was really in my head when we were talking about being low and what I would suggest people do if they're at that point. If I was just to—I'm not trying to flip this, but it just popped in my head—what I would tell anybody to do if they're suicidal and thinking about it, if they're at that point, is to go find somewhere else, somewhere in nature.

Yeah. That's what—you know, I kind of missed this step when we were talking about things. Selling my house, buying that property, 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, because we are a part of it.

I've been to the jungle. I went to the jungle for that reason.

Yeah. Being out in nature in every way is beautiful.

I saw you got some goats. Maybe that's what I need to do—get some goats.

You saw I got two? I can give you some.

I have more questions. Why are you giving them away so easily? Are there issues I need to know about?

Well, they're goats.

Yeah, there’s no free lunch, man. How many? You have goats. You have all kinds of animals. So what’s the story of you out in the woods? What are you doing out there?

No comment. No, I’m just kidding. I’m just trying to escape this dystopian nightmare that we’re all living under. It was just a form of escapism, I guess.

You have to think: In such a short period of time, my grandfather grew up in a survivalist state. They were trying to make enough money to pay the tax on their land, growing tobacco. And here I am in this digital world two generations later. Something’s not right. I just felt called to try to figure all that out and how to get back into that.

There’s such a purity to it, man, if you raise an animal and kill it and eat it. 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 just feels—I don’t know how to describe it—but it brings me joy, being able to grow stuff, even just flowers and everything else. Just watching stuff that’s alive is such a beautiful thing.

What we’re doing now is, I’ve bought this permaculture farm that hadn’t been operational in 6 or 7 years. They did a lot of herbs. They had a big orchard and blueberries. My dream there is to create this space that’s the optimal place for humans to go to fix their mind.

What are the animals and the food that I can have there, the trees that I can plant, and the certain types of wildlife that I can bring in and attract? What are the noises, sounds, and 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. We talked, and we’re still—I think the idea is that we’re going to launch this kind of healing-center thing out there once he gets through all the mess. They have their hands full right now with things.

John Lovell

Whether I go that route or not, that’s my goal: to basically create a place that people can go to and fix their mind and find the optimal thing.

We’ve got laying birds and meat birds, so we get our eggs and meat. We’ve done pigs, sheep, and goats, and I’m going to start with cattle in the spring. We’ll start doing Wagyu and Angus and playing around with them. I want to get some funny stuff too.

Large animals have a lot of potential. There are all these large-animal therapies out there for mental health, like with veterans and stuff. There’s something really relaxing and rewarding about being in that space.

What do you find out there in nature that you can’t find anywhere else? What can’t you find in the so-called civilized world?

John Lovell

Everything in civilization seems like there’s such a level of despair, disorganization, and chaos. There are all these terrible parts of life that seem so unstructured and uncertain. But in nature, everything is certain. Everything has a system.

Even on the microbial level of soil, there’s this intricate system. The bacteria fixes the soil, and you can grow certain types of plants to restore certain types of nutrients. Then that can grow certain types of trees, and that can bring in certain types of birds. It’s this whole big, beautiful system.

Earth is such an intricate, complex system that is structured. Although there is chaos—there are literal tornadoes in nature, like the metaphor we were using earlier—there’s a peace in observing the structure there. To me, it helps remind and restore my faith that there is something bigger than me.

Yeah.

John Lovell

There’s a spiritual side to it that I don’t know if I can really correctly articulate. Sitting out in the woods with a creek flowing by you and just sitting in stillness, where you don’t hear anything—there’s no traffic from a road—you’re just there in stillness, watching the earth do its thing.

I’ve gotten a chance to spend a day and a night alone, deep in the Amazon jungle.

John Lovell

That’s like my dream, man.

God, you basically take the woods and the creek and the quiet—let’s put that at a 3 on a scale of 1 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 animals having sex or trying to kill each other. You’re listening to birds, monkeys, everything, and the forest floor is 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.

John Lovell

Yeah.

The really dark thing about the Amazon rainforest is that sometimes, depending on where you are, you’ll hear in the distance the sound of a chainsaw.

John Lovell

Yeah.

It just pierces the day, because there’s no machinery anywhere around. But once you hear it, it’s this undeniable symbol of what human civilization does to nature.

John Lovell

It pains me seeing woods getting 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 instinctively 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, why I felt so compelled. I had this little house that I had maybe a little bit of equity in. It was 2019, and the housing market was up. I sold our little house and was able to find 92 acres for about $1,100 an acre.

I still had to finance it, but it was at least barely within my means. I was paying $600 a month on the land. I bought a little camper for $750 from a hunt club in Waverly, Virginia, and dragged it up there. That’s what we had.

I bought a little Kubota tractor with 0% financing and started cutting. The property was a mile off the road, so I had to recut an old logging road and stuff. You want to talk about putting a strain on your marriage, that’ll do it, buddy: selling your modest little rancher and doing that.

But that’s when I really started to live. I think that was probably the beginning point of the restoration of me. I feel bad that a lot of people don’t even know what it’s like to be on a farm or be out in nature. I can’t imagine 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. The science and the innovation are 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.

It happens to me all the time. 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. I may be 3 or 4 videos deep before I catch myself watching some lady throw a pie at somebody. Pretty soon, I’m like, “Wait, I’m changing my brake.” That’s the only issue that I have.

You’re just doomscrolling, and it does something to your mind. It completely takes the humanity away.

John Lovell

Yeah, it’s really horrible. That dopamine thing does something to my mind that I hate, which really is the opposite of nature.

I remember being out in nature—not just on a hike. A hike is good, but being away for prolonged periods of time, several days away from the internet and away from all that. What is that? I don’t know what that is. But I don’t like what X/Twitter is doing. I don’t like what Instagram is doing. Whatever that is, I don’t think it’s good for the soul.

It’s emulating things that we need to be healthy humans, but it’s just feeding them to us visually and audibly. It’s giving us the instant gratification of them, but it’s not giving us the long-term pleasure or fulfillment of them.

We’re in this weird period in time. It’s a breath of time that we’re in, where we’re able to conceptualize and observe what life was like in that transition point that’s gotten us up till now. We also have the perception and the memory of what life was like before it.

In order for all this to continue to evolve, even with AI, it still needs us more than we need it right now, for a very short period of time. 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.

This is a very short window of time, a breath of time, where I think we can find a way to incorporate this into normal life. But if that breath leaves us, I don’t know. I believe that it truly is irreversible, and that’s just going to be the end of us. It could take 2 or 3 more generations to get to that point.

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’re obviously interested in, and just figure out a way to have them in real life for people to immerse themselves in.

Yeah. I mean, it’s a transitional state, and one of the responsibilities I take very seriously, because I agree with you, is trying to pierce the bubble that is San Francisco, that is 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. Piercing bubbles in general is good for people, to get along and 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 5 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 toward progress and flourishing is important. 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. When we’re wasting any of it on just that, it’s a problem.

I see it in my own personal life. Over the last decade or two, the world has become a little more dreary and dark. More problems happen, city streets become more littered, jobs are lost—all these kinds of problems that we all argue about all the time 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 better. Everything’s so much better here.

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, addictive, and interactive—the way these algorithms feed us exactly what we want, and there’s so much psychology and so much research that goes into making them as addictive as possible—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, along with a lack of leadership. There’s got to be some kind of way. 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. There’s got to be some kind of way to balance between the two.

John Lovell

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 an immense amount of power. A guy can just set a bunch of cameras up and start doing podcasts, and have the ability to create a platform like this.

Even just the fact that this platform could be created is immensely powerful. It probably never existed in world history up until now. But the problem is, if we just keep going without being careful about losing the real-world aspect of it, at some point we’re going to get so lost and so immersed in the space that 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.

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 and a lot of interesting, revolutionary video games.

I don’t know if you know, but Fortnite is this gigantic video game where people go into an online world and 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. 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.

You get to hear each other’s voices, 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. 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, a trip out in nature together, like dudes on a hunting trip, or fishing, or just hanging out in physical reality together—is really fun. We should not forget the importance of that.

You talked earlier about loneliness. I think that got brought up at some point, but I do think that’s a big problem that’s caused a lot of our symptoms. We are all very lonely, even though we all seem to be so well connected digitally. We are all so lonely.

You’ve got to think, Modern Warfare 2 was a big thing. I was supposed to have been in the class of 2010, so when I was in whatever grade—eighth grade or whatever—Call of Duty was the thing.

Trust me, I’m not saying that I’m above anybody else in this space of digital immersion. I’ve been there and seen it and done it. 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; it’s just that we have this innate responsibility to—again, it goes back to talking about our Founding Fathers and the way this country was created, and the importance and the value of what it did for the world.

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 unalienable rights that no government could take away from them. That’s really important. There won’t be Fortnite if we don’t worry about that.

Honestly, just the collapse in our structure, with the mental health crisis among our youth, the suicide rates, our blue-collar workers, and all these kinds of things we’ve touched on and talked about—those are all things we just need more time together in real life to fix.

Those are just things—like I said, I make the joke, but there’s never been one argument that I’ve had, there’s never been one dispute with my wife that I’ve been able to figure out how to fix through a text message. It takes being in person with people and having human connection to fix any problem and heal anything.

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 get each other’s point of view and perspectives on things. Fuck the division that the internet creates, honestly. The left and the right has been kind of a nightmare for me just to watch, because I see the very simple reality that we’re in it together and that there’s a lot more commonality between people.

It seems cliché to say, but it needs to be said more than ever, because when you look on X, it feels like everybody’s divided, but we’re not.

Well, people are always going to think differently, too. Just in our structure and the way we think, it goes back to that Jordan Peterson lecture—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.

Also, the thing that bothers me about your song, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” is that a lot of people—there’s a pretty even split between people on the left and the right among friends of mine—and sadly, they’ve drifted toward 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 kind of radical leftist.

It’s hilarious to listen to people talk. It’s like everybody’s lost their mind.

It feels like that, but also, on top of that, people on the right see Trump as a savior, as this figure who could do no wrong, who's going to restore freedom in America. You can make a full list of really positive things.

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. Those in those positions often forget about the everyday person—the working class—and leave them behind. Ultimately, they serve the people who are close to them, and sometimes serve themselves to maintain power and grow their power.

I think the good thing you can say about them—and I could say that about both Donald Trump and Joe Biden—is that they really love their family. One of the things that I love about both people is that they genuinely love their family. It was always heartwarming to me to see how much Joe Biden loves his family. He'd honestly just do anything for his family. The same is true for Trump.

That just reminds you that they're human beings. All that to say, we need to see the humanity in each of us and, to some degree, always distrust the people in power. The power that people have only exists because we allow it, whether willingly or just through our own negligence.

I think that's the important thing. 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. We just have to figure out what to do with that, and I think this is a short window of time in which we can still figure that out.

Before I forget, I think I saw on Instagram that you talked about a three-legged cat. Is that a real thing? What's the story behind the three-legged cat? The reason I want to ask you that is, first of all, I want to hear the story, and second of all, I want to read you one of my favorite Bukowski poems afterward.

I bought another cat.

All right. What's the story?

I had this cat-lady neighbor who's a real sweet lady, but she's an older lady who lives in a single-wide trailer. She's probably got, I don't know, 30 or 40 cats that she feeds at her house.

It was a rainy Saturday morning. It was pouring down rain. It was like 8:00 in the morning on Saturday, and it was going to be a great day. Then I hear this lady yelling, “There's a cat stuck in my car!” She's freaking out and doesn't know what to do.

My wife's a veterinary technician, so she's got a little more sense about animals than any of us. We go over there, and the lady had tried to start her car. There was a kitten up under the hood, and when she started the car, the cat had almost ripped its whole front leg off. There was just a little bit still attached, like some tendon or something, but the leg was wrapped up under the water pump, the pulley of the water pump. It knocked the belt off.

There was no way to save this leg on this cat. The cat was pinned upside down. We asked the lady if she had a knife in the house, so she gave us this terrible-looking knife, but it was all that we had. We were trying to get this done. My wife was the one who did it, but we got the rest of the stuff cut and got the cat out.

I don't know, we spent over a grand getting this cat properly sutured so that it could have a healthy recovery. I'm not one of those types of people who's going to let this little cat be put down. The lady was going to just put the cat down.

I named her Hop. That's my little cat, and she hops around. It was one of those things where—I guess it's the same way with people. I just always see the best.

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the most amazing things about humans. It's irrational to spend that much money on this cat, right? There are 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. The reason that we're willing to do it for a cat, like I said, is just like the thing with the dogs about giving the dogs your medication but not yourself.

We see all the flaws, all the problems, the disagreements, and all the anger we have with each other, just like you said about your friends on the right and the left. We could show that kind of compassion—and we do. Humanity does, from time to time, show that kind of compassion—but we could show that kind of undeserved love to each other, too.

Love is funny. You talked about how both of those presidents, you could say, at least love their family. I think everyone's capable of love. It's probably the most powerful thing there is, even beyond hate. It's crazy how easily it comes out of us with animals because, to us, they're just these innocent little lives.

We don't have anything against them. They don't have political views. They're just little creatures. But the reality is, we're all just creatures like that. 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.

I got to read you this. It's got to be one of my favorite poems. It's called “The History of One Tough Motherfucker” by Charles Bukowski. People should go look at videos—there are videos of Bukowski doing interviews with a cat by his side, and that's the cat he's talking about.

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

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 the Lord, take me home. I want to 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, cursing myself every damn day. People have really gone and lost their way. They all just do what the TV says.

I want to go home. Four generations farming the ground, grandson sells it to a man out of town. And 2 weeks later, the trees go down. Only got concrete growing around.

And I want to go home. I want to 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, cursing myself every damn day. There's always some kind of bill to pay. People just doing what the rich man says. I want to go home.

Well, if it weren't for my old dogs and the good Lord, they'd have me strung up in the psych ward.

That's probably one of the first songs—I don't know. It's not the first song I wrote, but it's one of them.

What a song, man. What a song. What a song. What's the story of that guitar?

The guy who made this saved my butt because everything blew up. I was playing that little Gretsch resonator that's in all the original videos, and my wife had gotten me that off Amazon, I think, for $300 or $400. It's just an entry-level imported little Gretsch, and the pickup never would work right in it, so this string wouldn't work when you plugged it in.

Everything happened all at once, and we were trying to do these shows. What I ended up having to do was buy one of these suction-cup rigs that sticks right here, and the mic goes down under here to pick that string up. We played—I think the biggest show I did with it was about 10,000 people.

It was enough that I couldn't be doing a $300 guitar with a rigged-up thing on it anymore. It just wasn't going to work. Gretsch wouldn't help me with my Gretsch. There's no way to really get a hold of them because they're such a big company.

I finally did get a hold of Diane Gretsch, and she's really nice, so it's nothing personal against Gretsch. It's just that, at the time, I couldn't get a hold of them. I figured I would have been able to because everywhere sold out of that Gretsch model when the song blew up. It was really popular, but I couldn't get a hold of them.

This guy, Beard Guitars—Paul Beard in Maryland—reached out, fixed my Gretsch, and then gave me one of these. It's all handmade. You can whack somebody over the head with it pretty good.

Yeah, it's nice and heavy.

He makes them all by hand. It's a nice little family-owned place.

And I know nothing about resonator guitars. Is that basically a regular acoustic? Do you play regular acoustic?

Yeah, it's basically a regular acoustic. It's just tuned a full step down. That's the only difference. I've just got it tuned all the way down.

Is that it? Because there's also the whole vibe to it.

Oh, yeah. The body's different. Instead of it being a hollow body like an acoustic, it's got that—it almost looks like a hubcap.

All the chords are the same?

Yeah, it's just the same. I wouldn't be smart enough to play anything special. It's just a regular old guitar.

I don't know. There's a different vibe to it. I like that. It's cooler.

I'm real fond of the older music, especially from where all my family's from. My dad was adopted, so I don't have any Lunsfords. Lunsford isn't really even a real last name to me; it was just my grandparents who adopted my dad.

All of my family's Engle—E-N-G-L-E. That's my real last name, 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. I was always attracted to all that old Virginia bluegrass and folk music.

I like the resonator tuned a full step down because, to me, it gives it that old sound. A lot of the instruments back then had dull strings, and they were older and a little out of tune. I listen to a lot of that type of music, so I like the strings being a little out of tune and dull—not everything being perfect. That's why I was so attracted to it.

Plus, some of the old blues players played the Dobro and stuff. That's why I wanted to get the resonator. Every part of it—even having to use my grandpa's name as an alias—was supposed to represent old music from 1930s Virginia. It's got that type of feel to it, or at least at its core it feels like it's from another time, but it also feels timeless.

My music catalog is so limited in terms of what I listen to. When you're writing songs and coming up with chord progressions, whether you realize it or not, everything is influenced by other songs. When you only have a lot of older music and a little bit of metal in there, there's not really a whole lot else. It's going to sound that way just because that's what's already in your head.

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.

The idea is to go to a town—let's just use Iowa as an example. Instead of playing in the big city in Iowa, at the venue where everybody books, let's find a farm field 45 minutes outside of that big city. Figure out the ingress, egress, and security, and find a good promoter—a show organizer, basically—who has experience, so it's still professional and done correctly.

Then establish a new venue space that can't be put under contract by a monopoly, where any artist can go play. If all these musicians are sick of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, then let's just start playing in fields and on main streets. Set these venues up correctly and professionally, so they exist as their own spaces.

Imagine the economic impact that would provide to a town that otherwise would never have that. 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 to see, and couldn't even afford the tickets to begin with.

My tour last year—pretty much every show we did that was mine had a $25 ticket option, and everybody scoffed at that. I was basically made fun of for it by people in the professional space, even people I was working with. They just thought it was so stupid.

But there were people at my shows who came up, and the kids were wearing hand-me-down clothes. 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.

I'll continue to do these shows where any band that wants to come play has all their expenses covered. I'm sure there's some kind of tax write-off component for them, but basically they can come in, do the show, and help bring in a crowd. I'm taking the risk of 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 nonprofit. That space will always exist for people to rent. The idea is, 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 a center where people can go and build this sense of community we talked about.

It's almost like a sanctuary, if you want to call it that. It's just a space that can't be perverted by corporate America, and 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 it sounds like you've got some other cool stuff you're going to do.

Yeah, I'm going to see some world leaders. Hopefully, I don't end up in prison anywhere. Part of that, honestly, I'm excited about—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. There are a lot of us humans all over the place, and they're very different. They have funny accents and just funny ways of being. I'm excited to take it all in because I fundamentally love people.

If you're ever up toward Virginia or West Virginia—either one—it'd be cool to spend a couple of days out in the woods, or even a day out in the woods, and do that. I was really new to the whole psilocybin thing, but I have tried a few smaller doses of it to help with being up on stage. It's an interesting thing, and it's great.

Yeah, man. The dogs and the woods part—I got you on that. I would love to join in. I've taken mushrooms a few times, and I usually just love everything anyway, but with mushrooms, you just love it a little bit more.

Especially out in nature, I'm just in awe of how incredibly beautiful it is. I could stare at a tree for hours. Then you take mushrooms, and that tree starts having more dynamism to it. It's just a little boost.

But, yeah, I get into these crazy trains of thought. Like I said, it's only been a handful of times because it's still a little unfamiliar to me. When you're talking about trees and psilocybin, you start to look at those trees and think about their relative perspective of time. They're constantly moving around and growing and doing all these things, and you think, in their perspective, maybe we're just moving way faster than their perception, while they're moving at a normal speed.

You get into all these crazy trains of thought when you sit out in the woods on that stuff. But maybe that's the history of life. Humans will have some chance of destroying 95% or 99% of the population with nuclear weapons, and the trees will remain. They will reconstruct the environment of Earth and help the few humans that remain to survive, and it will 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.

When you're out in nature like that and just looking at and studying the way all those systems work—with soil, trees, and animals, and how it all integrates together so perfectly—it does give you some sense of peace that maybe there is some system in place that's out of our hands, that can help us with our faults and our repercussions.

For me, being out there, especially now that I'm looking at it through the lens of God, helps. I've found no greater peace than just being out in the woods and praying or trying to focus my mind on that. I would love for you to come out there sometime, and I 100% will come and visit.

Feeling peaceful out in Virginia in the woods is easy. Try doing it in the Amazon jungle when a giant bullet ant just bites you.

Dude, I would do anything to go to the Amazon, and all the peace is gone. You're like, “Motherfucker, what are you? What is this?” Then a second one joins in, kills the first one, and bites you again. Then you're like, “Okay, nature is not all—”

Yeah, it's not. I mean, there is harmony to it, but part of the harmony is the violence.

Yeah. It's just the reality. It's sex and violence.

I guess that's the thing about it, though: it has all the same components of humanity, almost to a comical level. The real comedy is the monkeys up in the trees. They're like little humans, arguing and screaming at each other, throwing stuff, and getting into fights.

It's like reality TV, but more pure, more real, more distilled down to its fundamentals. We are that, you know?

Yeah. 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. It's like the old lobsters, you know?

But it really is true. We're all on that same kind of operating system in a way.

Brother, this was a huge honor. I don't have the words to describe how incredible this was. I think it was just fun. It was really fun talking to you.

It was a total honor to be able to come on here for me as well, especially just to get to meet you in real life and see that you are what I expected you to be like, in a good way. You're just a good dude, so I appreciate what you're doing.

I got to show you the sex dungeon downstairs, where I keep sex slaves. It's very different.

No.