475: With Much Wisdom Comes Much Sorrow. The More Knowledge, The More Grief. With Oliver Anthony Music, Chris Lunsford
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This is Jocko podcast number 475 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Everything is meaningless. What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north. Round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.

All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, and what has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, look, this is something new?

And that right there is some scripture.

from the book of Ecclesiastes, one of the wisdom books from the Old Testament. And it contains reflections and guidance on the meaning of life and of labor and the pursuit of happiness. And it can be found, of course, in the Bible. But some of it can also be found embedded in the tracks of a country folk western honky-tonk gospel Americana album called Hymnal Hymnal.

"Of a Troubled Man's Mind" by Oliver Anthony Music. And the album, like that book from the Bible, reflects on life, work, pain, and happiness. Oliver Anthony Music is the creation of Christopher Anthony Lunsford, who is the first and only person in history to debut with a number one song on the Billboard charts without any prior chart history of any kind.

That song was called Rich Men North of Richmond. It was released in August of 2023 and the song struck a chord with people, helped people feel heard. And Chris has continued to be heard himself. He's released a dozen singles and in fact he was the first male songwriter to chart 13 songs simultaneously in the top 50 digital song sales while alive. 'Cause Michael Jackson did it and Prince did it but they were both dead.

And he released this new album. I guess it's not that new now, but "Hymnal of a Troubled Man's Mind." He's toured all over the world. Obviously his music more popular than most people would have predicted. And about that music, he said, "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're being 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. And with that, it's an honor to have Christopher Anthony Lunsford of Oliver Anthony Music here with us tonight to share some of his wisdom and lesson learned. Chris, man, thanks for joining us. It's good to meet you finally. I know you and I were trading texts for a while, for a long while, trying to make this happen. You've been a little bit busy. I've been a little bit busy.

Welcome. Just a little bit busy for both of us, yeah. Yeah. Let's get into it, man. Let's talk about just growing up. What was that like? Where were you at? Man, you've... Just listening back to what you... Well, that verse you read and then what you just said kind of took me back a second because I've been so...

The last three or four months, I've been so engulfed in all these sort of crazy escapades I've been on that I guess we'll touch on later in this episode. But it was like, I remember that quote. And what was, yeah, just to touch for a second on that, that original catalog of music that charted was so crazy that it charted because they were literally all off an Android phone. They weren't even from a studio, but they were...

I would write those songs and then that video that ultimately, the MP3 version that I got uploaded, that was right after I wrote the song. It was more or less like the tangible medium, they call it. It was just supposed to be something so people couldn't steal the song if I wanted to go play it in a bar or something like that. And they were...

And so going back to what we kind of talked about before we started this episode, like the fact that it was able to reach that kind of achievement, it just, it's, it's because there, because I do genuinely believe in that. Like I said, that purpose we talked about that, I guess we'll get into later of what all were, hopefully all this will end up, but it's just, to me, it's just shocking to hear that, to, to be reminded of that. And,

Yeah. It all happened so crazy like that at the very beginning. But before you got here, I was talking to Echo Charles and Echo Charles doesn't play any musical instruments. I, of course, are.

But I said, hey, you know, I was talking about a little text conversation that you and I were having. I said, look, dude, I'm a GCD guy. That's where I'm at, you know? And you said, hey, Richmond's only four chords, right? And then I got in here. I was kind of telling Echo that story. And I was telling him, like, it's true.

you know, three, four, five chords is what songs are made of. And then he pulled up a video. What was that video you pulled up? Axis of awesome. The axis of awesome. The four chords. And he's showing me this video where this guy's just going from hit song to hit song to hit song. And he's playing the same four chords, but just singing this, this song's over him. And it's so true. But you think about, you know, I think about like, uh, right now, AI, uh,

Because you would think, okay, well, what do I want to do today? Oh, I know what I want to do. I want to make a hit song. So, you know, chat GPT, write me a hit song and it's going to kick out, you know, GCD and cool. Now start playing that and you and make some lyrics. Now you have a hit song, but it doesn't work that way. Like there's a it's almost like, you know, they can't recreate life, right?

You know they can't recreate. Like they know what's in a cell. They know all the little chemicals and atoms and molecules that are in a cell, but they can't make that thing come alive.

And that's what I feel like for music or for art. You can put all those chemicals in there. You can put those parts in there, but there's some thing, there's some spark that it, it, if it doesn't have it, it ain't going to work. Yeah. And I, I pray that we can maintain that level of discernment in the long run, because I do think, I do think now that it's been, there's been multiple generations of people being just so immersed in,

in digitalization, whether it's like when we were, you know, I was born in 1992. So I grew up in the cell phone, the developmental age of cell phones and computers becoming more available. And then, you know, now it's to the point where most kids, they learn off a tablet in school. I fear that there may come a time and we may be close to it to where we may not have the cognitive ability to discern things.

true human, human created art from great example is, um, as much as Randy Travis was one of my favorite, that was my grandma's favorite country singer. And I can remember riding in the car with her as a kid and, uh, and just, she would just be jamming Randy Travis. And, but you know, they did an AI, they had an AI generated Randy Travis song that I think actually charted and everything. And,

a lot of people didn't know the diff, you know, it's, it terrifies me to see where maybe it's going to go. It's like, where did they source it from? It was a song that was written, I think in the eighties and they, they, they AI generated Randy Travis's voice over it or, or AI aided the voice, you know, but, um, so I don't know. I don't know if we can count that because even that right there has like a little bit of, there's a little bit of human in there. There is. Yeah. Right. And,

Yeah, it's definitely interesting to think about. Generally speaking, it does work. I agree with you about that. I think...

I think that we have this sort of, we're very complex creatures, you know, like more complex than anyone ever tells us and probably more than anyone even really realizes. But, um, I mean, even to your point with the verse that you read at the beginning, like with more wisdoms, there's more suffering. And it seems like the more, the more that we know about ourselves, it only, it seems to only destroy us more than it does strengthen us in certain ways. But, um,

I do think there's like this and you know, maybe it's not even that we would lose the ability to discern but just that we're we just start we've become we have become almost disconnected even with our own selves if that makes sense like We're we seem to be so immersed in something here or out. It's like we never how many people really take the time to like, you know There's so many little things going on you have we don't know how to grow our own hair and and

And you think about like our gut biome and how many little things there are alive in there that affect our whole nervous system and how we think and our emotional state and all of that. And it's just, we're very complex creatures that we... Yeah, you got to be able to tap into it too. I know I've, I talk about this thing of squeezing your brain. Okay, so if you want to make something...

Sometimes you have something that just kind of it just bubbles to the surface Maybe that's what it's like for you when you write a song and it just kind of bubbles to the surface and you have this Spark this idea and you go you go write it down and it's cool But I would venture to guess even with that. So like I've written books, right and The books obviously the nonfiction books are are not the same thing but like right Nick even the kids books or a novel or

You have this little idea that truly is like a spark. It's just something that comes from nowhere. But in order to make it into something, you gotta squeeze your brain. You gotta squeeze, you gotta squeeze out, what do you say, like frosting out of one of those things that they have in a bakery. - Sure. - You know what I'm saying? - Oh yeah, exactly. - Or toothpaste, like getting that last bit of toothpaste out. You gotta, it takes work. The song isn't gonna write itself. So it takes some level of work to get that song out.

and it takes a level of work to get a book out or to get a screenplay out or to create an invention. You have some idea in your head that you think it's good.

but man, you got to squeeze your brain and make it work. Where do you think that idea comes from? Like that's what, that's what, so this is, it's funny you say that guy, I like the squeezing analogy. And I think about, it seems like there's so many things that maybe we, I don't know if we understand them in our subconscious and it just takes that time to, for it to like come into realization. But it seems like, well, in the same way that when you have a problem, you don't understand if you go and talk to somebody about it, you're, it's almost like you're able to, you're able to squeeze it into your,

into your, into existence almost, but it's there somewhere already. You're it's almost not in some cases, it seems like you're not so much creating it. You're just, you're, you're able to observe it or you're able to, to extract it if that makes more sense. Yeah. I think that you're definitely writing that from my opinion, writing about stuff is a way to kind of organize your thoughts. And I've, I had the

Unfortunate experience of writing a lot of eulogies for guys that died and I realized kind of after or maybe in the middle of writing eulogies for guys that died that it was very helpful it was very helpful and in processing the grief and the sadness and the anger and like taking those things and kind of like okay, let me write about how I'm feeling and it was beneficial and

And I actually did that. One of my friends died who was very close with my whole family. And my son, who was probably like 13 or 14 at the time, he got a little bit, you know, he came home one day and he said, you know, I can't stop thinking about Seth. And I'm having trouble concentrating in school. And so I was like, okay, write, write, write down. You know, I actually told him to write a letter to Seth's mom and explain what you miss about him, what you loved about him and all that. And he did it. And after that, he never talked to me about it again.

And you know, he's, that's been a long time now, but I think that,

Letting those things out somehow is very beneficial And I think when you don't let those things out when you keep minute can turn bad But to your original question is what is the spark? Yeah, I think I think that's a mysterious thing because I think it's sort of like the fact that we can't create life We can put all those chemicals together But you can't make that cell start to split and divide and turn into a baby like it does work You know as much as as much as we know exactly what's in there. We can't make that happen. I

And so I think that's that's probably why it's so valuable and this is actually something that I've had a change in heart of over the last year and that is I used to tell people and I still do and this is still part is still accurate and

Is that a good idea? I'll say if you have a good idea, but you don't execute that idea means nothing, right? I've said that to a million people because it's true like you can have the best idea for a song or a book or an invention If you don't do anything with it doesn't matter no one cares but the other end of the spectrum is that idea if it's a good idea has Value because no one can manufacture it. You can't manufacture a

you can't manufacture inspirato. Have you ever watched tenacious D before? Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So that, that one episode on HBO where they're like,

They have to come up with a new song. And for the place where they play open mic night, Echo Charles, the manager there is like, yeah, you guys can play again, but you need a new song. And so they go, okay. So they have a week to write a new song. And they're trying to manufacture Inspirato. And guess what, Echo Charles? You can't do it. No, not it's hard. Straight up. Can't do it. Can't do it. So...

Did anyone after your first song came out was like, all right, make more of those songs. They had to. Yeah. Well, the timeline of events with the songs was really that all those other songs were already uploaded from my phone through DistroKid, which is just like a service that anybody can use to upload to Spotify, Pandora, Apple. It's like...

Um, there's a few other services beside distro kid, but in the, in the modern age, you don't need anyone to help you upload music. You can just do it right off of your phone. And so all of those songs were already there. And then Richmond came after the fact, even funny enough, I had been stalking the guy from radio WV for like six months. Cause I knew if I could just get on that YouTube channel with the song, all I wanted to do was just quit my job. I was, I was working in, I was on job sites all day and industrial plants and stuff. And, um,

Like some of the stuff we talked about, like the Dodge reports and the, like, I just, all that stuff was just driving me. I just wasn't what I wanted to do. And so my goal was, you know, we'd, we'd sold, we were living, I had a nice little house that I bought. I had like maybe 15 grand in equity on, it was all I could do to buy the place. And, um, my goal was for us to just get my family and go off grid somehow. I had kind of like fallen into that sort of thing. Like everybody else had, this was like 2000, probably 17 when I first started pursuing this. Um,

So 2019, I sold our house. I bought some land with a little bit of equity I had and we parked a camper on it.

How long was the camper? How big? It was a 27 foot. Now at the time I didn't have any kids. I didn't have custody of my oldest and I didn't have the two little ones. So it was just me and my wife. And so it was pretty easy. But it got complicated really quick with kids and everything else. But all I wanted to do was just not, I just didn't want to have to work a stupid job every day. And I wanted to be able to spend more time with my family and spend more time like being a real human being and not just get stuck in this cycle. So how old are you when this is going down?

I'm 32 now. So it was like probably in my late twenties, you know, and you got to think I had been, uh, the, the, really the moment when I realized that, that, that I was, that I needed to figure something out was when I was, um, when I was 19, I was working at this paper mill called rock 10, which is now called West rock. And there was a guy in there named Shane who, uh,

He was working in the position that I had been hired for. He was on first shift and I was on third shift, but he had been working there 18 years and I was 19 and we were making basically the same amount of money. And I had a GED. I didn't have any real practical skill or anything. And I was like, I'm going to be Shane. Like this is it. Like this is as far as I'm going to get. And so that was really this. That was my motive was just to get out of that, just to try to get out of that cycle. But that was when you're 19? Yeah.

Yeah. But, and then, but then you stayed in that cycle for how long? Well, I worked, um, well, when I had a bad accident there, I fell and, uh, and I had, I had a bad head injury. I was in the hospital for, I don't know how long it was. It was a big blur, but, um, there was about a six month period where I could hardly walk. I just hit my head on concrete. I blacked out. I don't know what happened. I don't know if I, if I passed out, I guess we were working 12 hour shifts. Like I wasn't getting enough sleep, you know?

It's three. Like those when you work and like, I'm sure there's people that will comment on this that have been in that cycle. But when you're working, like at the time we were working six days a week, 12 hour shifts, cause we were shorthanded and it was third shift. And I wasn't getting enough sleep when I was at home. Cause it's hard to sleep during the day. You've got other things you got to do and all. And so like, I was probably running on a few hours of sleep every night. And I can remember, you know,

I can remember on our three in the morning lunch shift sometimes, like you start to like see little, you know, you're almost like starting to dream while you're awake kind of thing. So I think, I think that's probably something, I don't know exactly what caused it, but I passed out at work, hit my head real bad. Um, and there was about a period of six months where just, it was challenging to walk. Like I lost my equilibrium and my short term memory was just terrible. I had some like inflammation and stuff from the injury. And, um, so that's when I got out of that, that plant work and I ended up going into the more into the construction industry and,

And I just, my goal was just to keep working ourselves up the ladder just long enough until I could figure out something else I could do. Like we were looking at, I'd started to get goats. We were going to,

getting into this land clearing business and like people will rent goats out to clear their property with. And we were like, we had started to rent out campsites on hip camp. It's like this app, like Airbnb where people would come out and camp on my land. And I was just trying to figure out whatever I could do to get to break out of that cycle where I didn't have to go work for somebody else every day, you know? Um,

So that was really my motivation with the music was like, get the music out there, get it uploaded on DistroKid to where I had a tangible medium where people couldn't just steal the songs and go claim them as their own. And I would just try to get on Radio WV, get one little song on there, get 50,000 views from it. And then I could at least go to a bar and book a gig and be like, look, I'm on Radio WV. Like it was just enough of a validation to where somebody would book me at a bar for 300 bucks. And that was, that's, I'd be totally content doing that. That was the goal, you know?

What were you doing to Radio WV or just tagging them, like calling them, rending letters? I was that guy like, hey, look at my video, you know, like, and emailing them. And I looked up his business license on Manta and sent him a letter in the mail. And like, I was doing everything I could do. And finally, that's called stalking, by the way.

I used the word stalking. Yeah. But I just knew, I just had this feeling if I could just, and I had no idea. I thought radio WV was like an organization with like 20 people that work there. And this guy Draven was just the owner or the manager or whatever. So, so anyway, I never forget this podcast. Yeah. Everything you perceive things to be so much more complex than they really are, you know, because they're presented. So they're presented so well, you just assume there must be this huge team behind it. And,

So I never forget. Did you have any success with the goats? Did you have any success with the camping on your land? Like was any of that stuff? Hip camp was good. Yeah. It stayed, I mean, it stayed packed. So you were, so were you starting to see an opportunity to get out of your job that you didn't like besides music?

Well, it was a complicated situation because, um, aren't they all because of my wife being in veterinary med, she's a, uh, she's a veterinary technician. And so she had student loans from that. And so we were trying to get like all of her debt consolidated and get every, like that was our, you know, but yeah, I think if we, if we could have got, I think realistically in probably about a five year timeline, I could have gotten her debt paid off.

And we could have lived off of just probably hip camp and a few other little things and just live very modest. Going back to childhood, when did you start playing guitar? How old were you? So my grandma taught me GC&D when I was like a little kid. Like I said, Randy Travis was her favorite. She was in a little band in the 50s, I think, that played on the radio in Hopewell, Virginia, like in the little town where she grew up. My grandma was like my...

I've had a close relationship with my parents, but as far as family or just mentorship goes, it was my grand... It was her and my grandpa were like... They were it. They were like my idols. So I wanted to be like them. And they were just... How old were you when you learned GCD? Five or six years old. Oh, okay. Yeah, like early. We would do like... Because a lot of the Randy track... A lot of those 90s country songs were three or four chords. They're real easy to play. And we would do a lot of like...

like In the Garden. The first song I learned was Three Wooden Crosses. That's just such a simple little song. I think it's like CG and a couple little chords. But yes, she got me into it early on, and it was just something I just kind of did with her just for fun. Did you keep playing when you were growing up? Not really. The only time I can remember...

really, I would goof off with it every three or four months or six months or something, just sitting around, but I never took it seriously. I did. Uh, I can remember when I was like 12 or 13, I thought I tried to do this thing called a, uh, what do they call it? Colgate country showdown. And it was like this little lame, like country singing competition thing. And I, I tried it twice and never made it past the first round, you know, I got roasted. So I just gave up on it. I was probably like 12 or something. And

I didn't really do a whole lot else with it for a while. Where was the Colgate Country Showdown? Well, I think they happened all over the country. It was kind of like a miniature. It was like the same concept as American Idol almost. And you got voted off the island quick? It's funny. I can remember. Yeah, it's so funny because... Were you doing cover songs? It was in...

Yeah, you just played one song, and like 30 people would get up there and play a song, and the judges would vote. There was always some little clean-cut kid that they're like perfect, already in like their little country and western crap, and they always got it. And I was like – and I suck. I didn't deserve to win it anyway. But I do remember back then, like I did – I guess what I'm saying is I did probably have like that imaginative –

of going out and doing, you know, I didn't take it seriously back then. So then when did you start playing guitar like, hey, I'm going to try and make a go at this? Well, oddly enough, you know, Brian, who you met, who's a friend of mine, I would go out and hang out with him like in my, I didn't drink until after I was 21. I didn't touch alcohol until I was, I think I had my, I had like a Bud Light lime when I was like,

Two months after turning 21, it was the nastiest thing ever. And so I didn't start to drink until maybe 23 or so. I had a friend of mine who was a welder who we hung out all the time and he drank Guinness. So I started getting into drinking Guinness. I was just slamming Guinness. Like I was a Guinness drinking machine. And so I met this guy, Brian, who I started to hang out with a lot and

He was the – he's the HOA president of the craziest neighborhood you've ever been in. And so, like, he was like a part – it's a HOA neighborhood, but, like, the most partiest neighborhood. And it's a lot of military families and stuff. So I would go down there, and they would have a guitar. And at some point, I would pick it up drunk and just start playing songs. And, like, that was probably, like –

2015-ish when we started to hang. No, I think we met probably a little bit after that. But somewhere in that window of time, it was just like getting drunk and playing at parties and people saying, oh, you're really...

I never forget, it was a running joke, but any time I'd play, there was always some drunk old person that would be like, you got to get on American Idol. Every time, everybody was just like, man, you got to do something. There's this guy named David Moore who's probably in his 60s, but I can remember, I jokingly to this day, I remember every time we were drunk hanging out, he'd always say,

He said, Chris, you got to do something with that God-given talent of yours. Like, he would get, like, this far from my face drunk. And I was drunk, too. You know, when you're drunk, everybody gets like this. He said, you got to do something with that God-given talent of yours. Like, all the time, you know. Yeah. It sort of just evolved into that. David was kind of, like, right about this whole thing. And Brian and a few other people just kept pushing me. And I didn't have any original music, really. I think...

the songwriting came, well, the songwriting is exactly what we talked about earlier. It was just a way for me to figure out all the, how to take all of this and put it into words to where it made some kind of sense. And it was just like, in the same way that you're talking about your son writing that letter, like it's just, I was just writing my letter, I guess, you know, it's the same, same, same concept. What kind of music were you into when you were a kid? Really early on was like nineties country and like,

I was obsessed with Tony Bennett when I was a little kid. Uh, like I'm so I love all that. Like, I just love that swing of like that, you know? Um, and then when I got a little older, it was probably, uh, you know, I listened to a ton of stained, um, stained and shine down and, um, and old country stuff. They like David Allen, co Merle Haggard, like just all that, like old, like Waylon Jennings, you know, my going back to my grandma, I can remember as a kid, we, uh,

We used to watch Dukes of Hazzard all the time. And so I'd see Waylon Jennings there with that little guitar. And in a lot of the episodes, he wouldn't show his face because of the legal troubles and stuff. But that's what I kind of fell in love then with a lot of that. When I was a kid, my dad, he got a used car. It was a 1973 Barracuda. And it was actually, if we had that car now, it would be an epic muscle car. It was yellow with the stripe on it and everything. Oh, yeah. And it had an 8-track player.

And my dad liked country music because he went to college down in Texas and he had one eight track. One. And it was Hank Williams. It was. And so I, to this day, know every Hank Williams song, you know, but, and that's why when I, when I first heard you, I was like, Oh, let's do this dude. Sounds like freaking Hank Williams, uh, senior. Um, but,

So you did have a pretty good variety of music. It wasn't like you were just raised on country western. Yeah, no, it was just early 90s. And yeah, definitely Hank Senior Jr. and the Third I'll listen to. Yeah, all that stuff. I'd say probably after the 90s, early 2000s, radio country just kind of started to go... And I just...

I don't listen to country at all. I haven't listened to a new country song that came out other than Jamie Johnson and maybe a handful of others in years. I don't care for it. I kind of joke and say it. I don't know that my... I guess my music's in the country category, but I don't even like to think of that. How do you like my description of your music? What did I say? That was pretty good, right? Freaking... Yeah. It's definitely unique.

It's weird because it's unique music, but it still sounds familiar in a way. I don't know. I'm really excited for you to hear the next... We just recorded... So I've only technically put two songs out since... Two new songs since Richmond. Everything else, like the whole... Basically, the hymnal album was all the cell phone... The halfway put together cell phone versions in their complete format because I just had to do that to at least get that done. Well, you know, like I told you, I just... I went from...

being Mr. And I still am Mr. Nobody, but just as far as like when I go out and I could go to Walmart and I could go to the gas station and all that and everything was just, you know, it was just normal. And, and so that, that original catalog of music was all I really wanted to complete. And then the next song, so basically there was Richmond, the hymnal of a troubled man's mind album, and then, and then, um, cowboys and sunsets and cowboys and sunsets was like my goodbye song. And I was just going to get to the end of that tour. Um,

And just call it. Yeah. And I almost didn't get to the end of that tour. I like, by the time the summer came, I was, I was, um, ready to walk away or like when you say you weren't almost didn't make it to the end of the tour. What do you mean? Um, man, I don't like going like just, I don't like, I didn't, I didn't go to concerts because I don't like big crowds. I get like, it's like I, I,

Somehow my mom, and I didn't used to be like this as a kid. Joe Rogan says that it's because we talked about this on camera and off, and he thinks a lot of it's from the head injury, but I hyper focus on everything. So if there's a hundred people in front of me, my brain's trying to figure out what every single one of them's doing. Like I just get, it's just too much. That's why I like to just sit out in the woods by myself. It's like, it's just because it's somewhere where I don't have to, if that makes any sense, I don't know. So I don't like big crowds. So like I would go see,

I've seen, I went and saw Incubus once and I saw, and I've seen Jamie Johnson twice, I think. And the last time I saw Jamie Johnson, we had to leave after like four or five songs because I just couldn't be, I was just like freaking out. I couldn't be in the crowd. I just couldn't be in that crowd of people anymore. So now that I have to be the guy in front of the whole crowd, it's like, it's bad. I mean, I felt terrible at the Houston Rodeo when we did that because

There was all these bull riders and stuff that I was supposed to, like, I guess, take pictures with and get to meet. And I wanted to meet all of them, and I met a lot of them after the fact. But I'm in the back room, like... And I'm not trying to be dramatic. It's funny to me now, looking back on it, but I was...

I was literally vomiting and like, like in T I was like, I was having a whole, like, I didn't want to get up in front of 60,000 people on some spinning stage. I was like, like, that's like my worst nightmare. Like just cut my legs off or something. Don't make me do that. I was terrified, just total in total fear. And, uh,

These guys are just thinking I'm being a jerk. And I don't know. It's just tough. I can just think back to some of that. But I got about three quarters of the way through it by the time the summer came. Wait, so how did you actually walk out on stage? So I used to train a lot. But I trained MMA fighters. And there would be guys, Tito Ortiz. You know who Tito Ortiz is? Before like a fight.

he would be crying and throwing up. Like he would be that freaking freaked out. And he'd go win. I mean, he obviously did great. When you're puking and crying because you have to go out on stage in front of 60,000 people, like how do you overcome that? What'd you do? I brought my kids along with me. And I would always just go sit with my kids and just think about that I had to do this for them. And if I could just get through it this way, if I could just...

If I could just suck it up for just one year and get through all this, like at least I know they're going to be all right. Like they're going to have – I can leave something for them. And like it was just – it felt like I was doing – I was just doing it for my – and then – but I also –

It's also, like I said, I read all these Facebook Messenger messages I get, and I read my fan mail. I don't reply to all of them, but I do try to reply to a lot of them. There's some really real shit people have told. At these shows, I'll never forget when we went to Europe last year. We were at the first or the second show, and this guy who looks like he could just pick me up with one hand and throw me across the room. I was shocked.

he was just sobbing and like, like hugging me, telling me about how he lost his brother and going through sobriety and all these things. And like, and just talking about how he related to the music and how it helped him so much. And just, I was like, dude, this is like, this is real life. Like I'm, this isn't just some little moment. Like this isn't just some little thing that I, like I have to take this a little more serious. So it's a multi, it's just a, it's a combinations of things. But, um, were you, when you, uh, when all this happened, were you already sober? Yeah.

Meaning were you still drinking? Right after, right before. All right. So July of 23 is when there was a guy who messaged me on Facebook and said, Hey, I know Draven Reif. We used to live together in Missouri. He's the guy that runs the radio WB channel. He's like, I can get y'all connected. So Draven texts me the next day. And then we talked for like less than a week. And it was like,

So right, almost right before it, the, I'm trying to like relive this in my head. Cause I'm, it's like all the things that have happened between now and then, but sometime in that, like in that June window is when I didn't drink. I had like a come to Jesus moment, so to speak. And, and I just, I can vividly remember being on my property and, and I just, and I remember vividly telling God like, or just staying out loud, like I,

I'm sorry that I'm such a piece of shit. And if you can just find something for me to do, I'll go do it. Like, just, just give me a purpose, you know, like, just give me something to do. Like, and I'll, you know, and it was like right after that, that happened. Well, the, the, before Richmond, there was this song dog on it that I put and it, it did okay on Tik TOK. So two different,

A&R dudes hit me up. This guy named Sean Stevens and another one named Stefan Max. And they were both with like Warner or Republic or something. And this was before Richmond. I was still working my job, all that. I was so excited. I called everybody I knew and told them, dude, this guy from Warner Records. You know, I was so excited. Boy, if they would have signed you, they would have been like the heroes of the century for their companies, right? So that was like almost right after saying, like almost within a week of that, that happened.

So then I, so you had a literal come to Jesus, but it wasn't like a come to Jesus, like actual, Hey God. It was just like, I didn't know what, yeah, it was just like, I didn't know. Yeah. I just wanted to figure out what the, what the hell I'm supposed to do. Cause I just didn't, I didn't know, you know? And that's what, that's what made you get sober. And how much were you drinking before that? Were you drinking every day? Yeah. Well, I make, I make wine.

So I have, it's not good to be, but I, I love making homemade wine. So like I would, and I run it, I would run it strong. I would get the, I'd get the, I'd use the wine yeast that would go to 18%. Full Duke's a hazard. Well, it's really easy to make. Actually. It's like a lot of college. The reason I learned how I learned how to make wine actually, um,

from this kid that went to George Washington University in DC when I used to go up there a lot when I was younger like for stupid stuff you know like oh god I'm worried open a whole can of worms up like protest stuff and all that when I was younger and they would make they call it hooch which is why I named my white German Shepherd hooch but hooch is like a slang word I guess what you do is you take Welch's grape juice and you pour a little bit out and you just add your sugar and wine yeast and you put a balloon on the top and stick it in your closet and within a month or so less than a month you've got

that's like 17%. It's like an airlock. So it allows the gas to escape the bottle, but not the contaminants to come in. So you can make like, it tastes like Welch's juice, but it's like 16, 70% alcohol. So that's how I got into it. And then I started doing it with like fruit. And so I was making my own wine. So I would, I'd go out when I get home from work, I'd have a, like a, a lot of times I would just put it in, like, I would just can it. I would just put it in Mason jars, you know, like the wine bottles with the corks and all that. It's just,

So a lot of times it would just be in a jar and I would drink at least one mason jar of that a night. Like I'd get just trash. Like, you know, it wouldn't take much. A jar and a half in and you're like, like you're not at 18%. There's nothing left of you even when you drink every day.

So that was my, and the problem is, is that homemade wine doesn't give you a hangover like cheap liquor or anything else does. So like you can, you can sort of be, you can sort of get drunk on it every night and still wake up at four 30 in the morning and go to work. And you're not like totally hung over if that makes sense. So it was like,

So between that and the, and yeah, that and just staying, just smoking weed constantly, like being high at work and stuff, like, like pulling up at the job site and, you know, smoking before I go out to do what I'm doing. Like just, it was just like, I was just constantly in this state of escapism because I felt like, like sober Chris didn't like the fact that I didn't feel like I was

I just knew I wasn't the person that I was supposed to be or the person I could be. So it was like, it was just easy for me to just stay in that. It's like, I almost just wanted to stay in that state, you know, like that perpetual state of being. And so, so yeah. So the, the drinking stopped. And you did like cold Turkey scenario. Like you stopped a hundred percent. And was there withdrawals or anything like that? Yeah. Yeah. Affirmative. Physical withdrawals. And also like just, just the temptation of it. Like it was,

But you got to think, it all happened so quick that I didn't... So all that happened, and then by the time July came, the Dog On It thing happened. I started going to open mics to try to figure out, because you got to think, I never played on stage. What did the A&M dudes tell you? Did they try and get you to sell your soul? Well, at the time, I had...

1200 monthly listeners on Spotify and 10,000 followers on Tik TOK. I wasn't doing, and I'd never played a gig before, but I'd been open mics, but I wasn't like a real, so all they were trying to do is just like, like, um, like the one guy was, um, the one guy was trying to get me to, he was, he worked with Zach Bryan and they, they were, I remember vividly they were in Oklahoma at the time and he was trying to get me to come out and hang out with him and Zach Bryan and like ride the bus and all this stuff. And I felt like that was going to be like,

the initiation sequence to get me like stuck in. And I just, I had this terrible gut feeling about it. And I, like I wanted to do it so bad, but I just, I just felt like I wasn't supposed to do it. So you actually said no.

So they dangled the carrot of Zach Bryan tour in front of you and you were like, I don't think I would have been able to tour. I don't think I would have been allowed to play with him. I think he just wanted me to come out and experience it and like spend a couple of weeks isolated with them to where they could work out some kind of, and I think I would have probably gotten a really bad deal. Like they would have, I was looking at a contract lately and this initial contract that came from a group of people and it was for all people.

IP, intellectual property, Echo Charles. The contract was like all. My lawyer, I said, hey dude, this says all. What do they mean by all? And he says all. And the thing is,

If I wouldn't had a lawyer look at it, but also if I would have been you know If I didn't have a job or I was totally broke I'd have been like where's the pen let me sign that because you're big yeah And that's where they find people like you're very lucky because if you would have rolled down there They'd have been like all right cool. Hey, you know what all this can be yours You know plus we'll give you you know three grand right now, and you'd be like where's the pen you know? And you know what they were owned all your soul. He's he well

We never got to any of that point in July talking about money or details. It was all very vague. It was like, and it was, like I said, I was thrilled by it. Like the guy, and he was very professional and polite. And there was, I didn't have any bad feelings in that moment. It was just when, when they tried to get, like we had, we had had like a couple of phone calls and emails back and forth before any of the bus stuff. It was just like,

he was telling me about how he had met. He was telling me the whole story about meeting Zach Bryan and how they were trying to get him out of the military to go to, like, he was telling me this whole story about Zach and how they like developed them. And who knows how much involvement he really had with Zach. Like, I don't know. I've never had the chance to meet Zach. And Zach Bryan's like on top of the world. So I don't even want to try to like, but you know, I hate bother. Like even you, I felt terrible. I felt like guilty trying to reach out to you to say, Hey, like, um, but so, but it,

It was easy for me to not want to drink because now I had this thing. It was like I had this carrot I was chasing. And so I went to this open mic at this seafood restaurant. I always joke because the place is out of business now. But the name of the restaurant is – I always joke and say that's what you say when you wake up the next morning from eating the food there. It's called –

I don't know. I'll remember it. It'll pop in my head in like 10 minutes. But that's where I met my guitar player, Joey. He was there. He never did open mics, but he was there trying this girl out to see if she would work for vocals for his band. The two of us met and we're sitting there afterwards. And he he liked what I had done at the open mic and I liked what he did. And I was and that was the night I was supposed to get this phone call from Sean Stevens or no Stefan Max, the other guy.

And I was like, look, this guy's going to call. Like, I was so excited. He wanted to quit his job. I wanted to quit my job. So that was our plan was like, we were just going to do it. And then right after that, the guy from Missouri reached out, said he knew Draven from Radio WV. And like, that was, I mean, it was like everything just fell. Everything just fell into place as soon as I, it was almost,

you talk about like a movie care, like we were talking about the main character, like people thinking they're the main character in a movie or whatever, but it was hard for me in that moment to not feel like that. It was like,

it was supernatural the way everything fell together and you got to understand like, so, so that happened. I met Dre. I talked to Draven on the phone and texted back and forth. And Draven's like, Draven wasn't this guy that ran this big radio company. He was literally flagging on the side of the highway for his buddy's company. Like he was on the side of the highway with a stop slow sign. And I'm in a, and I'm in a plan. We can heart, we had to keep putting the phone down cause we had shit to do. And we'd come back and get on the phone again. And so like that was on a Wednesday and we recorded that weekend and

And I wasn't going to record Richmond. I wanted him to record all my other songs. Richmond only had half of Richmond done. I posted the first half on Tik TOK, but I didn't have the rest of the song finished like that whole second, the whole second verse. So it was like this last minute thing about, we talked on a Wednesday, um,

I finished writing the song. We recorded Saturday and Sunday. We recorded like seven songs Saturday and Sunday. And I think he uploaded like maybe the next Wednesday. Do you have two cameras working? So Draven, Draven runs like a laptop, a little Scarlett solo that you plug your guitar into with a microphone. And then he's got a camera. Usually what he'll do is he'll put a camera on a,

Well, back then, the original set of videos, we did two takes because he only had the one camera. Okay. So he would film me. Because I was watching. I was like, oh, there's two cameras here because there's two different angles. Yeah, well, he's... But he had to do it twice. I don't want to tell... Well, yeah, we've upgraded a little bit since then. But at the time, he only could... It was just the one camera. It's expensive trying to buy all the stuff. So...

All of his sessions up to that point were one camera. And then like he would go back and have you play the song a second time just so he could film it from another angle. And then he would just cut the two together. Now there's two. Now there's like another camera guy, a real mic stand that we don't have to have a cinder block sitting on. So it'll fall over and like things are like a little more proper now. But back then it was like,

But yeah, I just quit the drinking and the weed and he had just quit the weed. He didn't really drink. And the two of us smoked a CBG joint in that tent that I had on my property that night after we filmed Richmond. And we were like talking all about life and all these things we wanted to do. And like that man's like my brother now. Like we talk not every day, but we talk a few times a week. Was he able to quit his job, Draven? Mm-hmm. So and we've kind of like...

Well, there's something like 150 million plays of that song. That right there is pretty good money, right, Echo Charles? Yeah, well, he had had a few other good ones prior to that, too. It was just like for him to – he was also kind of at a point in his life – we both had a lot of parallels, and he had kind of had the same like come to Jesus type of thing. We both were just – we were both at a point where we felt lost and we felt like we didn't know what we were supposed to be doing with the rest of our lives. But we knew there was something we needed to do.

We just hadn't taken it seriously enough to try to figure out what it was. When you're writing songs, so you were writing songs. Did you mass produce songs once you got sober or were those songs kind of already in the hopper? They were already there. Yeah. But that song you finished Richmond basically when you were sober because you finished it that day.

The second verse. Yeah, within two... We talked on Wednesday and we recorded Saturday. So I had like Thursday, Friday to try to finish that. And how big of a channel was Radio WV? It was big enough where I was stalking him. I mean, he had... What was special... But it wasn't big enough for him not to be flagging... What's special about Draven... Well, what's special about Draven wasn't the size of his channel. It was... It's Draven. And the way that he...

I don't know. If you look at some of his other recordings he had done prior to that, like Logan Halstead, for example, just the way he's able to bring out... There's this song, Logan Halstead has Dark Black Coal, and that's the best version of the song that you'll ever hear for the rest of your life. Logan can go record it a million more times, but you can just feel the... I don't know. Draven's like a good director. Draven really cares is what it is. He's not in it for any other reason except that he really...

we were talking about this because he helped me produce my album now. So we are producing real music now with full instruments and equipment and all that we've invested into. We kind of have this dream now of finding artists like the ones that he puts on Radio WV that don't have a following and figure out how can I take somebody like me, how can I find somebody like me who just kind of

is brought into the space and how do we keep them safe from like all the vultures and how do we get their music recorded correctly, get them a good attorney that's not gonna screw them over.

help them with their publicist work and their social media and getting all their accounts verified. And like, you know, I had dudes claiming that they wrote all my songs. I had this guy, um, there was this guy in the UK that had went to, he had registered all of my work in parliament for Canada, the UK and Australia. I had to get an attorney to like take care of all that. Robert Beckley is his name, I think. And, uh, he was saying that he had wrote Richmond North of Richmond about this suburb that's like in London somewhere called Richmond. And like, they had like,

Like how can... And my angel really was Jamie Johnson. Like he came... So after everything blew up, the farm market right down the road from where Brian was in the neighborhood... So hold on. Sorry. The reason I asked you about how big Radio WV is, you getting on Radio WV is not like, oh, now you're set for life. You know what I mean? I just knew if I could get on there, he would be able to record me in a way that I could get...

I don't know. I don't know how to explain it. It was just like I knew I needed to get... I mean, I tried for over a year to get a hold of him. But making it onto Radio V at the time wasn't like, for lack of a better word, like making it big time. Not at all. No, no, no. That's what I want to convey. No, like I said, it was just like... Like I said before, it was like if I could get on there and get 50 or 100,000 views and it was just something so like when I emailed all these bars and all these like... Because you got to think like to just go play...

Like to give an example, like to just go play, to go play the little bar in Farmville or the one in Richmond or whatever, like there's a million people just like me who were trying to go book that for three hours for 300 bucks a night. And I had no gigging experience. I had no equipment. I didn't really even know more than probably an hour worth of cover music if I was lucky because I wasn't.

You know what I mean? It's like I didn't have anything to stand on, but I had these – I had put out like – I think Ain't Got a Dollar was the first one, and I had like maybe three or four songs. I Want to Go Home, a few of those. I just knew if I could get Radio WV to record a few of those and put them out there, then I could at least have something to show them. Like, look, I have a little – I've got 1,200 monthly listeners, and I got this song, like, just let me come play your bar. Like, that's what I – that was what the goal was, you know, to –

I just wanted to get away from my job. I was so miserable being there and I just felt so stupid that I was just spending every day making people that I didn't like money and like wasting what little bit of valuable, because life goes by so fast, man. Like,

like you can just look in the mirror and just watch yourself age. It's just like, it just happened so fast. And I just didn't want to get stuck. You know, I just didn't want to get stuck being that I didn't want to be that. I didn't want to be Shane. Like I didn't want to be that guy who was 60 years old. Like I just, I not, what else am I going to do? I can't do anything. Like I'm,

I'm about stupid. Otherwise it's not like I can go, I couldn't go and like, I can't figure out how to, how to wire something as an electrician or do HVAC or, you know, it's like I was just either going to be doing dumb labor jobs or I was going to be trying to figure out how to do something on my own, you know? And, um,

So you record Saturday, Sunday. When does he upload it? I think it was like the next Wednesday. It was quick. I remember I went into work Monday and the guy at work that I was real close with, I remember telling him like, dude, this song is either going to

because Draven was insistent that Richmond was the first one we put out. And I didn't want to put, I knew the song was controversial and I didn't want, I didn't want him. He was, he had already pressured me into recording it. Like I didn't even want to record it because I was, I pictured, I was telling him before we went on the camera, but the whole Oliver Anthony music thing was, you know,

Christopher Lunsford couldn't upload Ain't Got a Dollar on YouTube because Christopher Lunsford is on Dodge Reports and on stuff where if you were to Google Christopher Lunsford, like, and that song pop up. Like, I'm not...

I'm not allowed to go into DuPont or Gerdau or any of these like facilities and plants on THC. They have like a THC policy. So I can't have a song about smoking weed. Like I would have lost my job. I've got three kids. I'd have been totally... So everything was under that name to kind of disguise myself anyway. And so just without, you know, it's just...

And it's so crazy now to go back and think about it all because this whole timeline of events led to us having that very first show at this little farm market right up the road from the neighborhood where I had been getting drunk for years and hanging out with Brian and all them. And Jamie Johnson shows up who, well, like...

The whole mind end of it all was just in the last couple months, I still have my truck from high school. It's a little 99 Tacoma, five-speed manual. I bought it when I was 15. My dad helped me put the down payment on it and all. You know, it's still got Jamie Johnson's CD and the CD player from like...

it's like you just can't make it up, man. It's just... So you were about to say when you rolled back into work. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm so scatterbrained. It's a lot of like... I haven't talked about any of this since it happened. So it's like all that... I'm just remembering all... It's all good, bro. Yeah, I remember I went back into work and I told him, I was like, dude, this song's talking about like...

like Epstein Island and all this stuff. I was like, this is going to be, I was like, I'm totally losing my job. I was like, they're going to fire me like next week. And I'm just, in my mind, I'm picturing that the song is going to totally flop and I'm going to lose my job because of it. And I'm like, so I'm thinking, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm like panicking, freaking out. And, uh, I'll never forget right after he uploaded the song, he called me like right after it went up and it had like a thousand views. If that, like not even that, uh,

And I was sitting in my parents' living room and we played it on the TV, like with their Bluetooth speaker, like their TV speaker, the bar. And I called him back and I was like, dude, I think we should take it down. I don't think it needs to be on there. Like I didn't, I was so scared. I was just so terrified of it being up. Like I, and I didn't really, I don't know. I just, this whole thing, even now, even with what I'm doing now, I'm terrified. Like, because I know, I know what I'm doing. I need to do, but I just, I know that, I know that even,

I know anytime, even if you're doing something that you feel like is right and something that you are called to do or supposed to do, it's like, it's sometimes it's hard to be brave when you don't want to, it's like, it's hard to like, you know, that there's consequences that are going to come with that. Like, you know, that there's risk. There's always risk in anything you do. Like anything that has purpose behind it also sometimes has inherent risk. And I was just, I had to really figure out, do I really want to do this or do I just want to keep working my stupid little job and try to get my debt paid off in 10 years and just,

You know, like, do I want that song out? How long did it take for the song to get traction? Didn't it get like five million views in three or four days or something like that? Yeah, I don't really know the numbers because I didn't I didn't look at it. But I just remember looking at my I remember my tick tock account went like crazy all at once, like because I still had my notifications turned on. You know, I was there's a ton of people like if you look on my tick tock account now, I don't know how many people I follow.

But I was following back everyone who followed me. And when they would message me, I would message them back. Like there's a lot of, I still have friends now that I've now gotten to meet at shows and all who were people I was talking to on Tik TOK, like before everything went crazy. But yeah, it was like, it was just like this little tight knit group I had on there. And then I was like, the phone was just dinging all day and going crazy. And,

And then like people were, people had somehow gotten my number. And I remember there was a guy from a booking agency who was trying to get me like that next weekend to go open for Hank Jr. and all this stuff. And I'm still at my job, you know, and I'm just like, what am I going to do? It was just, it all went nuts at one time. It really did. Yeah. And people who, people at work were catching on to it. And when I go places, people were in like, I

I don't know how long I worked. It was less than two weeks that I worked there before I quit. It was probably about a week and a half. I put my, I put in a two week notice and I left on good terms actually with my boss. And he even, it was really cool. So me and him are actually really cool now. And I, um, but he actually told me, he said, well, if you ever, cause he didn't know, he had never even looked at it. He's like, well, if he's like, if this doesn't work out and you need to come back, he's like, you have a job here. And I was like, that's so solid. Yeah. I was like, that's so cool. You know that he, uh,

But it just all, yeah, it just all happened so fast. And when did you realize like, Oh, okay. So it took you two weeks to quit your job, but you knew almost immediately. Like I can quit my job now. Yeah. I think the first two shows I was, I remember for sure those first two little shows I did, it was Morris farm. That was the one like Jamie showed up and all those people, the big crazy first show. And then when we did Eagle Creek the next weekend, I remember I was still at work then, but it was probably like, right. It was probably within about two weeks. How many people came to Eagle Creek?

We don't know because they were free shows. I just showed up and played. But we estimate, they estimated like 12,000 is what they thought was at the farm market show. So, and that farm market usually has like, up until then, it would have like a couple hundred people there at the most first. You know, it was a farm market on the way to the beach in North Carolina. It was just like this. But I'd been going to that farm market since I was a kid and I was like sentimentally attached to it and I just wanted that to be

I don't know. It just felt like the right place to do the first one to do my very first show. I don't know, but it was nuts. And we did a meet and greet after, I remember I was there for like four hours after the shit, like meeting every, and that's when this whole, it just, I don't know. I still can hear like what those people were telling me about. Like they were just so excited. Like,

That's the thing. It's not me at all. Like I was telling you before, dude, I'm trash. I know like seven chords. A lot of those original songs I don't think even sounded all that. The new album that I got coming out is like the first piece of work that I've done where I'm like, man, this rocks. Before that, I wasn't even a big fan of my own music. It was really just the fact that somebody came along that...

was saying, you got to think I'd been on, I had, I had been working with like real people for my whole life in factories and going and like going in the steel mills and the power plants and like the air conditioning factory I worked at. And even when I worked at McDonald's is like, that's, you don't, you can't,

It's hard for anyone to have real conversations with people when you... Like, you can't just go to a job site and interview people and ask them about, like, what they're struggling with and, like, their finances and their depression and, like, what they're dealing with with their wife and, like, how their company has screwed them over or how this policy that went into place will, like, affect the quality of life for them because of that. Like, they... You get the real story from people when you're there with them and you're... And, like...

You're part of the same ecosystem. It was almost like maybe the only way that Rich... Like, maybe that song was just inspired by a decade of just listening to everybody say, like, the exact same thing almost, you know? Like... And now to have been to Europe and Australia and it's the exact... It's, like, almost the exact same... It's...

It's to your point earlier about, you know, when you don't realize what other people are going through. But in many cases, they're going through the exact same thing you're going through. But there is no hotline, especially like what is a 25-year-old guy supposed to do? What are you going to do? Are you going to call some hotline number and get put on some list? Like I'm not going to – I don't –

I didn't feel like even if I could find a psych, how do you even find a psychologist or some or a therapist to talk to? And how do you even trust him to talk about like, you know, to talk about like these dark things that you're dealing with? And like, I don't know, it's

we're so, again, in my mind, a lot of it goes back to the fact that we're just so immersed in this all day long. It's really difficult for us to have real conversation. And I think that if anything proves it, it's the fact that people are willing to listen to people talk in front of a camera for three and a half hours and be glued to every word of it. Like people need, we are, we are all so lonely and we just, we don't realize how lonely we all are. Like we go find an uncontacted tribe that is discovered in like, and stuff in like,

when they show even the way they live, which has no outside influence theoretically with the rest of the world. What do they do? They're all super in these super tight knit communities and they sing music all day long. Like, like it's not something that we're taught culturally. It's a, it's part of our operating system. Like we need it, you know? And that's what makes me so like, I guess that's now like, that's, that's why I'm on this. That's why now I'm willing to risk all of it again, I guess, and go on this,

this tangent that I'm going on to try to do something different because I, to me, like with music specifically, I look at, I look at like the, that music that I wrote that was crap that was on my phone. And you know, my guitar is out of tune and I'm out of key and let the songs not in time. And like, they just,

by every textbook definition, those songs suck. And if you go on the original, I've got to get sober YouTube video and look at the comments from where I'm sitting under the carport at my camper plane at like, read those comments. Like you just, you can't make that up. Like those people felt something out of that. And that's, that's the kind of music that we need to be putting out. And, but, but,

It's like with everything else, medicine, education, you name it. Things that we really need, people have found a way to pride themselves in the middle of. And it's like a little toll road they set up and they can collect a check every time. But they know- It's like a big toll road. They know people need it. Yeah. Again, before we started recording, we were talking about some stuff. And one of the things I was saying is-

I think one of the things, like what you just said, the appeal of your music is that people go, "Oh, other people feel the same way as I do." And this reminds me, I used to have like seeing new guys going out on missions in the SEAL teams, like a new guy you could see he's real nervous before he goes out on his first mission.

And I'd be like, "Dude, are you nervous?" And of course they'd be like, "No." But you go, "Hey man, well you've gone to the bathroom four times in the last 15 minutes, so something's going on." And basically just say, "Hey dude, yep, it's totally normal. It's totally normal. You're gonna be nervous, of course. You're gonna go out and freaking combat somebody who's trying to kill you. That's fine. That's normal."

And as soon as people realize like, oh, okay, so what I'm feeling is the same as what a lot of people feel. And I think that your music is, hey, what you're feeling right now, you got financial issues, you got freaking drama at work, you got the girls causing problems, you're drunk again, like all these things, like, oh yeah, other people are going through these things. And I think that's very common. And then what you mentioned about

You know you being out of key and out of tune your guitars out of tune and all that stuff you know I was I was talking I have a company called Ashland front we do leadership consulting and There's an opportunity like we speak to a lot of people and there's an opportunity when you speak to people to clean things up to a point where it becomes sterile and as we were kind of moving in that direction and

A few years ago I said hey who here listens the white stripes and people like maybe a little bit whatever and I said and I cuz I heard this interview with Jack White from the white stripes Yeah, and he was talking about how when like a modern pop musician when they make Music when they make they take they sample like a snare drum and they'll hit it a hundred times and I'll find the perfect snare hit and

And then they'll take that, that snare hit, the high hat, the snare hit, the high hat, the crash cymbal. They'll take the perfect one that they want and then they put it into the computer. And so every snare hit is absolutely perfect. And then they do the same thing with their guitar solos. Like they'll take, they'll play that thing 13 times and they'll make little adjustments. They'll get it to auto tune. Like they do all these things. And so you hear something that's clinical and quote unquote perfect and

But going back to what we were talking about earlier, it's almost like it's not human anymore. It's not. So for you to be like, oh, this is just me. My guitar is a little out of tune. My voice is what my voice is. And you're going to have to deal with it. And people go and they can feel that that's a human there. And that's so much more relatable than something that's been synthesized by a computer, in my opinion. Yeah. So that's my... Yeah, I agree with you. And that's my...

My realization is that there are thousands of people who can do all of that better than me. And, and part of this drive that Draven and I have talked about with producing music is we want to like, we want to do that for like, there's a million more Oliver Anthony musics out there. Like I, I'm one of many that could just go and do that. Like there's not, it's just like, even with my own music. So this last album we just recorded, I've, I've recorded it once in Nashville in November and,

And it was with two big producers who were very good-hearted, nice dudes. And I'm not saying... It's not anything negative about them when I say this. But we went into the studio. They brought all these Nashville recording dudes in that were... And we just sat there and we did all the songs just so perfect. And then they went back and dubbed all this crap over it. Trombones, vocal background singers, all these little... All these weird little noises and all this stuff. And when they...

And I hate, I'm just being transparent, but I'm not proud of this. But when they sent me the songs back and I was listening to them and I was, I'm still, I've still got my trusty blue suburban that I was talking about on the Joe Rogan at the time on the Joe Rogan podcast, it had just gotten dropped off the back of a rollback. And so the truck got totaled out, but I bought it back. So I'm still driving the turd. And, uh,

I punched the radio out on it when I listened to the first song because they wouldn't let me listen to any of the rough mixes. They were like, no, no, no, give us a few weeks. A month went by and they sent me these fully mastered mixed songs and they were terrible. They were that. They were perfect little... I don't know, it was just like...

I don't know. I just felt violated by it almost, but I was so upset that I just like punched the radio. And luckily you can buy a radio for a 2007 Suburban for like 50 bucks. So it ain't like, it's like, it wasn't really an expensive mistake, but I was like furious by it. So we just, we just literally went. So I caught, so Draven listened to him. We both agreed that they all sucked.

So we, I've walked away from the project and we went and bought all the equipment that we needed. Now, how did you walk? You can't walk away from a project. That's got to be freaking legally complicated. I assume. I don't do contracts. I just do handshakes.

And I'll cover all the costs associated with the original recording. I'm going to lose, you know, I'll lose 50 grand or something, but I'm not going to put a song out that's not my song either, you know? Yeah, I don't like the sounds of any of what you just said. And they were trying to bully me. Like, they were sending emails to my attorney, like, that weren't very nice. Like, they weren't being very nice, I guess, is all. It wasn't them. It was their attorney not being nice to my...

So I, so Draven and I talked about it and we were like, well, let's just try to do it again and just see what it sounds like. And if it's better, we'll just go with our, well, let's just do it. Let's just go back to doing it the way we did everything else. And so we bought all this equipment. This was just a couple of weeks ago. This was, I can't remember the dates, but it was like, it was literally like two weeks ago. We just went and recorded all this at my house. And I've got a little place near just North of Bluefield, West Virginia now where I stay most of the time. And

Um, we brought everybody in, it snowed like six inches, the power went out. So we're literally in my house. Luckily I got a wood stove in the house, but we're literally in the house with the whole band. You know, we got every room is set up with something. So the fiddles in the one bedroom, I'm in the other bedroom. The drums are in the basement. We just recorded the whole album in my house and it sounds so much better than the original. Like it is so real and vibrant and chaotic and like,

You know, there's probably one of the first songs off of it that I'll put out is, well, like when you get to the solo parts, there's a part where I wanted it to, I wanted the solo to feel like the emotions that I'm feeling in the lyrics. So it's like, it's anxiety at the beginning and then it builds into anger. And so it's like just this most chaotic solo that it goes through that the fiddle and the guitar go back and forth on. And you would never be able to replicate that. Having them go back and play over me. You would never overdub that. Are you playing lead?

for most yeah hell yeah well yeah joey joey does like the crazy i'm usually just rhythm and slide stuff and he's like he yeah he does the solos he does the solo stuff yeah um but it's you know when's the album coming out i have no idea um i'll probably just start dumping well that's the thing now like i don't have yeah i don't have a management company i don't have a publicist it's just like i just whatever it's just me i'll just i don't know like that

Usually there's this whole... In music, when new music... That's part of what was so funny at the beginning with all the songs charting is that most songs to chart have a lot of money invested in them. I don't know if you know... I didn't know this until all this happened, but it's very common for a label to spend up to a million dollars buying their own song, essentially, on the chart to get it up to a certain level. There's a ton of marketing. It's a business like anything else. And so...

But with these, we'll come up with some kind of release strategy and we'll put them out probably in the next... There'll be a song out within a month for sure, the first one. And then we'll just... Because I've only put two new songs out since Richmond. And I did that because, like I said, I thought it was just going to be kind of done and over with. And it's like I tried to let the flame die out and it didn't. And I realized that I was being really... I had this moment...

Not that long ago. And it was it was right around the time that we had to put hooch down. And I realized, like, man, I'm really fucking up not doing this. Like I like I went back and I remembered it's like I just kind of forgot for a minute about how everything had happened up to that point. And like and like what I told God that I was going to do at the beginning, you know.

And like, here I am, I've got, it's like, I just felt like such a coward. It's like, here you are, you've made, you've made your three or $4 million and you can just go live your stupid little life in the woods. And like, like what a coward I am, like Jonah and the whale, you know, like running away from what I'm supposed to do. And, um, so yeah, it's just, I don't know. I, so yeah, so I just, I got, I per-

I had to walk away from a lot of the professional companies that I was using because I was trying to accomplish tasks with those companies that they almost physically couldn't do because it would jeopardize relationships that they already have with the people that I'm effectively trying to compete against, if that makes sense. Or trying to circumvent. I'm not trying to compete against them. This is a...

This thing that I'm going to do is non-profit. It's another way. It's another way of doing things. It's just another way of doing it. But it wasn't like they were even being malicious, I don't think. I think it was just that they couldn't do it because they had other business arrangements that were prioritized over mine. How long was it?

I'm wondering how long it takes for vultures to attack. How long was it when Richmond came out? How long did it take before you got a phone call of someone saying, hey, I'm a big studio exec? Oh, the president of record labels were at the first show. I don't want to speak out of context. I don't know what his job role, but there was big, very high-level people

from Republic and Warner and a few of the other ones at the very first show that Jamie was at. Do they, do they, uh, just, do they give you an offer on the spot? Are they like walking up to you? Like, Hey, I'm going to make your dreams come true. I got it. Here's a check. What does this need to be? Is it that kind of thing? Um, well, there was only the, there was only one that gave me a verbal amount of what an advance would be for off the get. A lot of them just wanted to, they were all very polite. They're just like sales representatives is all they are. So they,

I never, I never, there was a, yeah, there was a few offers that went out. Like it, basically what they'll do is they'll offer you in advance, which is just, it's like what it is is it's just a loan more or less. You know, they'll give you $3 million up front, but then,

They own your intellectual and they're going to make all that money off the back end. And then like that album that I recorded in Nashville, I would have had to put that out. Like I wouldn't have had a choice. They would have owned it. You know, then this whole catalog and music is going to be out for the rest of my life that I don't even want out. Like that'd be tortured me. Like, and that happens to a lot. There's a lot. And there's other artists that have spoken out about how that's happened to them, but it's, it's a common, it's not like any of it. Story of,

Did you know that story? Like, I've always known that story that guys like Meatloaf, you know Meatloaf? Yeah. Like Meatloaf, he made however many albums and the original album Meatloaf was such a huge, massive, like triple platinum, whatever. And he didn't make any money from it because somebody came and he signed some contract that said, you know, what do we own? We own it all. And there's a bunch of stories like that with people getting screwed over. I would have gotten screwed if Jamie Johnson wouldn't have come to the first show and said,

You got to understand, I quit my job, but it takes 90 to 120 days to start getting paid for digital streaming sales. So I didn't get a check off of Richmond until like around Christmas time was when I got my first check. And I quit my job. We had like a few thousand dollars saved up. The first two shows I did were free. So I had no cash flow coming in. I didn't have nothing. And then, yeah, it was easy for people to throw money around. But right out the gate, what he did was he got me in contact with his attorney. And his attorney was like,

His attorney was really cool. He didn't make me pay a dime until I started having... He worked for me for free for basically three months. But if I hadn't had that attorney, man... I just want to tell the story. I don't even want to say this on a podcast, but I do want people to understand how psyched out I got from the very beginning. But I had a relative...

who owns a couple small businesses like he offered at the very he like we're family and he offered to help me set all of my register I didn't have any of my songs registered like I said that's how that Robert Beckley guy or whatever was able to get me in the UK I didn't have anything trademarked I had the uploads from DistroKid thank God that was the only thing I had but I didn't have anything actually registered I didn't have any of my music published officially and

He went and set all that up for me, but he made himself 3% owner of all my intellectual property when he did it. And he said he had to do that in order to sign things on my behalf, but he would take it back off, but then he wouldn't take it off. So like that same attorney from Jamie, like save me even from my own family, like, like one of my own relatives ripping me off. And like, that was within the first two months. So like, how am I supposed to trust anybody then? Like if my, like, if that's, they just, yeah. And like, I, and I,

I don't know. I've matured a lot from this, even thinking about freaking out at those shows and stuff. I don't, I, um, yeah, like I've just, this whole thing is just, if there's one thing that I've learned from all of it is like they, everyone speaks about it. You've spoken about it in Jordan Peterson and other things, but like the only way to overcome fear and develop yourself is to, is like to face it, you know? And, and I can say that like, I, I am a much better person right now than I was a year ago from having gone through like,

it does in the long run, as long as you can just maintain enough of a level of discernment to not fall into a pit. And if you're just able to just figure out how to get through it,

There is a huge reward at the other side of it. Like there's wisdom now that I would have never been able to have if I hadn't went through those things. Yeah, no, I'm kind of, I'm very impressed and surprised in the fact that like, I can't imagine the money that people were offering you as an advance to say, hey, just sign this dotted line right here and you don't have to worry about anything else and just go ahead and sign this, go ahead and sign this. And here you are, you just quit your job. Like the fact that you came out of that in the position you're in where you,

didn't sign those things and you don't, you know, nobody owns you or your intellectual property is freaking amazing. So then where did it go from there? So now did you, now you need money at some point. Did you guys just set up a tour? How did that work? So Brian was like,

All these emails and offers were coming, like for doing different gigs and stuff. And so like we just went and took some like sketchy gigs without really knowing what we were doing. And like there was this one bluegrass festival I did in Kentucky where they like,

just gave me a briefcase full of cash for doing the show. Like it was just like, it was just like, it was the wild West for the whole fall, but it was enough money to where I could pay everybody and just have enough to get, to get by on. And then I think, like I said, the first, the first check from Richmond came through, like the first, the first big transfer came over from distro kid in December. And, uh,

I didn't even know what to do with it. I, I call, I ended up, I was able to get ahold of the guy who was the president of distro kid. I think he's just now on the board now, but I was able, I, I like,

I got his cell phone number and called him and told him, don't give this money to anybody unless like I was afraid somebody was going to hack into my district account and like take the money out. And you got to think, man, I was making 80 grand a year. And that first check that came in was like 800 something. Like it was a paralyzing amount of like it wasn't money that I like. I didn't know what to do. I was like I was paralyzed in fear from it, you know, like. And that's from everything from Spotify, from Apple. That's digital streaming. Yeah. All digital streaming.

Well, since I write all my own songs and technically I'm the label and technically I'm able to collect from all those different avenues. So it is. So like most artists make their money touring, but I actually made just as much money off streaming last year as I did touring. And part of that's also because I was running my tour at the lowest margin I could to where I knew I wasn't going to lose. Yeah.

I don't know who does. I wanted a $25 ticket option because I knew what it was like to not only not have any money, but probably have three grand on a credit card. Like, there's people out there who are not only broke, they're broke and upside down. They don't have $200 to go watch a show. And, like, if anybody needs to go see music, it's the guy who's got $3,000 in credit card debt. It's not the dude that's got a million dollars in the bank. So, like...

And people thought I was just a dumbass for doing $25 tickets. Even the professional people were just thinking it was so stupid. And I was just, but man, there was this, there's been so many times where I've like doing the meet and greets after the shows where there was people who came up and you could tell like they didn't have any money. Like they're not people that would go to a, like their kids were in rough looking clothes and they were in like a beater ass car. But they were there and they were like. They were pumped. They were, yeah. And in cases like,

I don't know. I've never seen so many adults cry as I've seen in the last, like I didn't, I don't know. Like I've never had, I don't know. You know, Jordan Peterson talked about this one time a long time ago and I, I didn't understand what he meant until now I'm in this position. But Jordan was talking about like, I, he may have used the word burden, but it's not a burden to me. But just when you, when, when, when another grown person comes to you as a complete stranger and tells you things that,

They probably have never told anybody else, even their partner or any like and they're and they get in that emotional state and they're like and they're telling you that and they trust you with that. You'd have to be a psychopath to not carry that a little bit yourself and to like and to not and to not feel obligated to try to make some kind of I don't know. Like, I don't know how you're not supposed to. Like, I still think about those some of those people that I talk to. Like, I just.

I don't know. They're normal. A lot of them are like big, tough guys that you would never even think had a care in the world. And they're like, they're one more bad day away from just wanting to end up, you know, I don't know. Yeah. Then you're doing that. How many, how, like how many, what was your touring schedule? Like how often were you playing? Um, well, so I used, I used you. So what happened was, was I was, I was with Brian and we were just like cash suitcase in our shows and like winging it. And,

That worked up until there was one gig we went to book at a place. And every show has a contract you sign before the tickets go on sale. And that way I can see like what the tickets are going to be sold out. It has like a like the payout of what the show will do, estimated costs, what I'm going to make, what the venue is going to make, all that kind of stuff.

Well, we had a show that they sent a contract proposal over. It never got signed. I never agreed to do the show, but somehow the show still got put on sale and tickets were getting sold at like this crazy price that was never agreed upon.

And so after that, I realized like, I can't, I got to find somebody who knows what they're doing to handle this. And my attorney was like, my attorney is like, you're going to just get burnt. You got to have somebody in the middle that understands how, like, is this, it's surprisingly complicated. That's why I want to do this thing I'm trying to do. Cause it's right now, like just even to be an artist and book a show is like, you got to have an attorney to do it basically, or a professional agency doing it for you. Like it's, it's a lot of, those contracts are like very complex, you know, and there's a lot of money at stake. And,

So I ended up getting a booking agency and they helped me put that, put that tour together for this past year. So it was like, it was a lot of weekend runs, which, which this year, when I go out and do runs this year, I'll probably do them more two or three weeks. Like we'll go out, we're going to do a big West coast tour for 2025. So we'll go, we'll be on the road for over a month and a bus, you know, I've got like a two week run in Canada we're planning. So we'll be in Canada for like two weeks on a bus. Same way with,

you know, this Europe, Europe is going to be a month long run and Australia will be two weeks. Like I'm trying to do them more where they're not a lot of artists that tour out of Nashville. My understanding is Nashville is a little more centrally located. You can go out and do weekend runs that way, but everybody that my whole bands in Virginia, my only person that I have out of Nashville is my fiddle player, Billy Contreras. Everybody else is just people that live. They're all people I knew from before, you know, my whole, the rest of them.

So it's hard to leave out of Virginia, go do two shows in Michigan and Missouri or something. It was like we were just all over the place, you know, home for three days and then right back out again. It wasn't very effective the way it was. It was kind of inefficient the way we ran around this year. And I also didn't have a lot of control over it because all the venues have waiting lists, basically. Like if you want to play Red Rocks, for example...

Red Rocks is an extreme example, but just the one that comes to mind. Really, any of the venues usually already have a couple people in line. So when you want to book, like if I wanted to go play the Pittsburgh Amphitheater again, there's probably three or four people who are already in line for every available day, especially on the weekends. So it's kind of like,

There's a lot more demand than there is supply right now in the venue world, I would say, from what I've observed, at least at the level, at the size of venues I'm playing. Like, I'm not doing any big... The biggest shows I'll do is like 10,000 seats or something like that, you know? How many gigs did you do on tour that first run? Like, how many shows did you do? I don't even know. Was it like 20 or was it like 100? It was like...

I don't know how many shows we did in 2024, but it had to have been probably like 50, more than 50, I'd say. When you walk out on stage and you're all freaking, you don't like people. I love the people. But I'm saying that's just got to be the craziest feeling when you walk out and you have 10,000 people singing the words to your songs.

That's got to be a pretty freaking crazy thing for you. Yeah, like the first one I vividly, well, I couldn't believe even at that very first show we did, right? Which is right after, it's within two weeks of Richmond blowing up. Of course, those people that went back and listened to all the other songs, but even at the very first show, everyone there knew almost every song.

And I was like, that's when I, you know, and that kept happening. And that's when it started to realize that this wasn't just like, this wasn't just going to go away like in the next few minutes, which I would, like I said, I was kind of like, I don't know. I don't know what I was thinking. Part of me is just, it was out of, it was mostly fear based, but part of me just kind of wanted it to go away. Cause I just didn't know what to, you know, I just didn't know what to do. Did you get more used to it? Now I'm, now I'm pretty, now I'm okay with it. Yeah. Now it's like, uh, I mean, I'm still terrified before I go out there, but, um,

It's not like that. Like the Houston rodeo was the worst, probably one of the worst ones. But, and you can watch, like if you watch the Houston rodeo, correct me if I'm wrong, but you look, you played, you played the guitar at Brian's parties, like on the block or whatever. Yeah. But as far as you, you missed an entire maturing process as an artist, uh,

of doing like, oh, I'm playing a club with 100 people. The first paid gig was... And technically it wasn't... I mean, they gave me... I think they gave me like $1,000 just to cover my cost. But that Morris Farm show, yeah, that was technically my first gig. Like that was my first official gig and that was 12,000 people. 12,000 people that know the words to all your songs. You see what I'm saying? That's a weird... That's a weird place to go from... But the shows isn't where it's so weird. It's the everyday real life. It's the like... Like...

So Labor Day weekend, every Labor Day weekend, I invite a bunch of people to my property and we all camp out and ride four wheelers and shoot guns and just fellowship stuff. And I had to go to Farmville Walmart to get hot dogs and like some other crap, you know. And this is right after I go to the I've been in that Walmart a thousand times. But that time I had to the store manager had to come out and shake my hand and I had to take all these pictures and people were following me out in the parking lot and like

That's when it's like, that's, that's the part that feels weird. Not so much the show. I can, I can, um, yeah, the shows aren't so weird feeling. It's the every, it's like the rest of it. It's like, and I forget, like I said, I've got, I'll go stay, I'll go stay at our farm for a couple of weeks and work on stuff. And, you know, I know of course that all this music stuff's going on and I'm involved in it and I'm having to like get on conference calls and emails and stuff. But,

I'm just able to be Chris. And then I go out and try to get gas. And I'm like, oh, man. It's like almost... I don't know. It almost feels like sometimes I'm like a fugitive on the run or something. I've always got to... Because you just don't know. You were talking about earlier about people waiting outside of that guy's apartment to take pictures with him. It's kind of like sometimes you just...

90% of the time they're like very, a lot of times you walk away from those conversations better than you were before you start. Like a lot of times it's a, it's a very rewarding thing, but every once in a while it's a malicious thing or it's like a, I don't know. Sometimes people are just, they're just, they're just like stalkers, you know? Like, and it's not, it's not good. Like you. Yeah. And you're not, you're not blending in too. Cause how tall are you?

Well, my running joke is that I'm 5'11 on Wikipedia, but I'm probably like 6'. I think my driver's license is 6'6", so I'm probably like really 6'5 or something. I don't know. So 6'5, freaking bright red hair, bright orange beard. Like you're not blending in anywhere. You know, like people are going to identify you from long range. Yeah. Yeah.

The shows is, you know, the thing at the shows that's crazy. The one thing that, that, so like imagine doing the show, you know, being on stage for an hour and 45 minutes in front of five or 10,000 people. And then especially towards the end of the show, that's when we really get connected. Cause there's,

A lot of times towards the end of the show, I'll read something out of scripture and we'll do a couple of the more serious songs. And then usually Richmond. And then we might do an encore after Richmond. But Richmond's always like... Richmond and I Want to Go Home and maybe a couple others. Everybody's always really into them. So you feel this connection with thousands of people at one time. And then everything goes away. And you're just in the... You're just like...

going to take a shower in the locker room before you go to leave to go. And it's like, you go from all that to like, to, to being by yourself. That's a very, that's a, that is an interesting feeling. Like that's something that you don't know. That's a feeling you wouldn't experience otherwise. You know, like no way to, for a normal person to experience that. Was it feel lonely? Like empty? Yeah.

gratified, satisfied? Like what's the, what's the vibe when you're sitting alone in the bus after you just freaking made 10,000 people cry? Hmm. Um, well part of the, I feel like I feel hopeful for the future that cause when you're with thousands of people who you feel like are just normal everyday people who aren't

Like, like I said, even, I mean, that's why like anything sports or anything is so captivating to people or why people will go pay $300 a ticket to go to a Zach Bryan concert. Cause they're in a, they're in an amphitheater with 60,000 other people or whatever who feel the same way they do. At least they all have something in con where like I said, like in a world where it seems like everybody's at on end with each other and angry about something like there is there.

again it goes back to like the same reason why tribes sing music together and are so close there's there is like a there's certainly a very rewarding experience to be able to be a part of that but I always just feel like I'm a part of it I never feel like I'm I never really feel like I'm the guy on stage I guess I just feel like I'm experiencing this moment with all those other people you know like I don't ever feel like I'm the guy on the stage I guess and it's a weird feeling but um

Yeah. The loneliness is like, like I said, the difficulty, the challenging part comes when you're not at the shows. Like, like I said, every relationship you have changes because even though I'm Christopher Lunsford, my friends, my family, my neighbors, the people I've known 15 years, new people I meet, like I'm Oliver Anthony to them. Even if I am just still Chris to them, I'm different, you know? And I can, it's like, it's kind of the same thing. Like they talk about

You read about people who win the lottery and then their whole life falls apart because everybody treats them different. Everybody wants something from them. It's not necessarily anybody wants it. I'm not saying it like that. To me, this Oliver Anthony music thing is like a project that I'm working on. It's not me. I'm not Oliver Anthony. I'm just that guy that wrote that song. And I have a million other parts of my life that can... You'd be surprised how little of...

the actual music space occupies my head on a daily basis. Like I'm, there's a lot of other things. Of course, a lot of them have been enabled now because of that music project that I'm working on, but it's not like I live in that world all the time either. So it's been challenging. I said, it's been challenging. It's been challenging recentering myself in my relationships with people. And because, um,

Cause it's like, I'm almost in a, it's like, I'm in a different reality. Like everyone's dip, my social interaction, the way I engage with people, the things we talk about, like it's all, you know, it's just been a learning curve, but, um, yeah, it's like you're in a new environment that you've got to adapt to, you know? And that was that whole process last year. Like I fell apart last year. I gained, uh,

I was up to 280 pounds. I was anxious all the time, wasn't getting any sleep, just taking terrible care of myself. Like I said, I was just in the whirlwind of it. And now it's like the last two or three months I've been working out every other day and running and eating right. I'm down to like 245 pounds. I'm getting my head right again. I've got this whole mission that I'm on now with this thing this year. I'm through it. But again, coming out on the other side of it,

I'm a much better person than I was before. And I feel like now I can, I feel like now I can take on the world and I can do all these things that I wanted to do back then. I just had to like, I had to like, I had to mature as a, as an, as a, I had to like, it was like, I don't know, you know, Draven and I both joke about it cause he's went through a lot of transition in his life now because of what happened. But like, we're like, we're trying to be men now. You know, we were just, we, like we weren't men before. I don't know. We weren't like, we had, we hadn't like accepted,

There's a certain part in your life. And I guess for you, like when you, that's probably the beauty of, of enlisting in the military is like, it helps you get there quicker, but without that guidance and discipline and without that sense of purpose, there's people who are 50 years old who are still just boys. Like there's like a, I don't know. I don't, I'm not well spoken enough to be able to, to like, but I guess you know what I'm saying? No, I know a hundred percent what you're saying. It's very, because I've, I've explained that or thought about that before from the military perspective is like,

It's awesome because you enlist in the military and you are now a productive, self-efficient member of society. Self-sufficient member of society. Like you have medical coverage, you have a paycheck, you have a place to live, and you have food. Which is actually huge. Like having all those things organized when you're 18 years old is pretty impressive. So...

Yeah, for a normal person that doesn't do that, they got to go out and make all those things happen. It can be a lot harder to become a self-sufficient human. And what you're talking about is like when you're avoiding being a self-sufficient, productive human, you can put that off for a long time. And it sounds like

what the place that you were at was like oh i know i'm not the self-sufficient human i should be i'm gonna cover up that with you know some some freaking want homemade wine there's yeah there's people though that like in my case i was 18 working a full-time job i had my own apartment i was renting you know i even had some money put away and all like there was never a time if you looked at me on a textbook that my life was necessarily like that i wasn't

But it was just that I wasn't, I was just, I was just doing what I needed to do to pay the bills. And I wasn't pursuing my, it's like, I wasn't fulfilling whatever my purpose was. Like, I think, I think. It's like you were treading water. Yeah, exactly. So your head's above water, but you're not making any progress. But most all of us do for a long time. You know, like everyone I know that works a, that works a job like that, they have something like, you know, it's, and this is like, this goes back to just,

watching you and Jordan Peterson videos and other things, but you realize at a certain point in your life that we all have this great idea. We all have this spark. Going back to what we talked about at the beginning, we all have this spark that we can light and ignite and run with. People have the most brilliant ideas, but all they do their whole life is just talk about the ideas. They never actually...

it's terrifying to move forward. It's terrifying to move forward with what you believe your purpose is because then if you fail, then like, then what are you going to do? It's easier to just be a failure and just accept it and mask it with, with whatever it is. If it's food, like for me, definitely if it's,

Before, it was alcohol that I got masked with. But then it's like... But if it's not alcohol, it's food. It's porn. It's gambling. Or just not managing your money correctly and just buying a bunch of shit you don't need to fill. It's like there's all... Whatever it is, everybody's got that void. It seems like... I don't know. But we all certainly have a spark. We all certainly have the capability to create a better place. And I think...

I think my vision is finding a way to get all those sparks together and get all those people connected in the real world. We're never going to accomplish real change in this world, and we're never going to really address all of these problems that we endlessly complain about if we just keep going on X and Reddit and Facebook and Instagram. We can talk about it until we're black and blue in the face, but it's like...

Just, I don't know. I think you just got to get all like those people just need to get together in person. And the only way I can conceptualize the only thing that I can think, and it goes back to the theory with the uncontacted tribes is,

But I don't care what uncontacted tribe you go visit. I'm sure music and food are on the list of things that they do. And I think universally, like our operating system, we my my joke now is that if you don't like music or food, you're probably a robot. And so, you know, everybody eats and everybody listens to some kind of music. So I want to I have this vision of creating this these spaces, this this network, this like this web of these things.

of these spaces where, where there is like genuine music without backing tracks, without, because going back to what you said about in the studio with everything being perfected, like it happens on like, and it's not, it's bad, you know, it's bad, but it happens more than not probably like, like because the labels, the main, they want everything to sound perfect. And I understand they want, they're more worried about putting on a production than, than,

then those people listen into real music and the, and like, it makes me out my blood, but it made my blood boil because I've heard it three or four times now. But when I, when I was talking to people in the professional space about the backing tracks and the drum loops and the, and like some of the vocal augmentation and some of the other things that's like common, like it's common practice at festival series and even with big bands and stuff, um,

oh, well, they don't know the difference anyway. They just, they're, you know, they want to hear it that way. And it's like, I don't think they do. I think they want to, I think they want to hear, like they want to, they're not, they're there to do everything we just, we talked about with music, like that power of music. And so, otherwise just watch, just listen to the freaking music.

or go watch the YouTube video. Like, no, you want to see a human do the thing and freaking connect. And exactly, Metallica is a great example because, you know, if you look at any Metallica video on YouTube, there's a few people in the comments that are joking about how like they missed a few notes or like something about their, but like,

they're one of the most incredible bands of all time and still draw huge crowds because they get up there and they play the damn songs with real instruments and they do mess up a little bit because they're human beings and everybody like you're going there and you're really seeing Metallica. Like you want to see it. You want to see it with a few notes missed. Like that's it. Like that's the real thing. You know, uh, they're just one example of many of like, there's a lot of great. So like, yeah. How, how do you get, how do you get real music into a place without, without,

how do you get real music into a place without all the augmentation and without all the thrills and all the frills? And how do you do it in a way that's affordable enough where the people who really do need that music, who are probably in most cases, not financially well off doing it. Like I would love to see a study. I know there's no way to probably, but like,

Think about... I don't know if we can do a study, but I can give you my opinion. That's for sure. And I know Echo can chime in too. I wonder how many people that go to concerts have credit card debt. It's probably 80%. Like, I don't know. Well, that's just America. I know. Yeah. That's just America. That's an unfortunate place that people get themselves to. It's like...

It happens, man. Like you go in paycheck to paycheck and all of a sudden it's Christmas time. I know. It's like you want to get that thing for your daughter. It's like, well, I'm going to get that thing for my daughter. You know, people just, it sucks. It's a reality. Yeah. But there's some kind of way that we can, there is some kind of way that we can teach people how to be more financially responsible in real life. And there's ways that we can teach people skills still in real life. Like in my mind,

- Well, they're actually getting taught the opposite, right? 'Cause when they go onto Instagram, what they see is like an expensive watch. And they're like, okay, that's what I need is the expensive watch. Okay, let's get on my credit card and get the expensive watch. Instead of learning that, oh no, you don't need that expensive watch, you can just get a Timex and you'll be GTG. - I was in, so,

When I was eight, you know, when I, so I dropped, I dropped out of high school and moved to Western North Carolina. And that's where I had the kid at 18. And that's where I had the injury and all that. And that town that I lived in was one of the ones that was affected by the flood. How come you dropped out of high school? I don't know. It was halfway through my senior year. I just, I just wanted to get, I don't know.

I don't know. I have this like impulsive thing sometimes. Like I have a problem with authority, I guess. Or especially back then. I mean, I still do, I guess, because I can't... I still can't fit in line. Oh, you 100%. Don't guess. Don't guess here, man. You 100% got a problem with authority. But I just got... I don't know. The thing that really... I guess the thing that set me off was like I had this...

my history teacher was like this my history teacher acted like his shit didn't stink and was always and come to he ended up having an affair with one of the other teachers there and it was this whole big thing and they like I don't know I just and there's a few other things to it too but it was very impulsive I just I I dropped out of high school and basically ran away from I didn't my parents didn't want me to leave but I just you know what I mean I was just ready to get out of there and go I just didn't want to do it I just I didn't want to graduate I didn't want to go to college I just wanted to

go figure out who I was, I guess. I don't know. And I don't know. I didn't have a plan or anything. I was just an idiot. You know, it's not like I'm saying I didn't even I don't know that I'm even saying I made the right decision doing it. But but yeah, there's no there's no practical skills being taught to like like I guess it was like, what am I going to get out of this?

Like, and especially now it's even worse now, but now like in public school, most of the kids, like I said, they're taught everything off of a tablet. Like a lot of it's already like predetermined curriculum and it doesn't teach them how to manage money or like how to fix little things around. Like it doesn't teach them how to like to do any of that stuff. It's like it almost, they're very people, kids are very vulnerable when they go out into the world now. And that's why they are so easily preyed upon by like credit card debt and a lot of these other like

influences from social media and stuff. And I think we have, I think that we are the last species alive that knows what life was like before all of like,

Like kids were so much happier in school in the 2000s than they are now. Like just watch a bit, like there's tons of these videos where it shows like these old, like retro camcorder videos of kids in school, like in the early 2000s. And man, they were so vibrant and like they just had so much life in them. And now kids just seems, and I don't know, kids just seem so dead now inside. And so they're like, and there's studies. I mean, there's a, um,

I'm going to mess the title of the book up, but there's a book about the anxious. It's like you, the anxious, it's about the anxious minds of youth. There's, I don't know what the title of the book is, but in it, one of the things it refers to is like when they started adding front cameras to phones, like in that same year, like,

teenage girls, their self-reported like self-harm and suicide rates shot. Like there's a direct core correlation with youth. Anytime that technology advanced and negative side effects with youth, whether it's like ADHD or if it's depression, suicide, like, and, and it's, it's, it negatively affects us as adults too. But now that it's went on for at least two generations and we're on to like the third generation, um,

You know, there was a study that was talked about on Andrew Huberman about how, like, I think the example given was, I'm speaking all out. I'm just speaking out of thin air here, so I might mess something up. But our DNA and our sperm can change from life experience. Like, if you were to have had a kid at 18 and then go off to war and experience trauma and come back and have another kid, the DNA in your sperm changes.

that develops that second kid. And to my understanding is different than the first. Our experiences literally changed the DNA in our sperm because it's almost like our body's way of protecting our, you know, it's a, it's a survival mechanism is all it is. And you read about things like the, the taxi, the taxi drivers in London that have to memorize all the roads and they can take an MRI scan of their brain before and after. And,

And it's visibly different. And there's tons of other studies like this too. I've seen one of cops with that where like after a cop's been a cop for a long time, there's some part of your brain that like signifies trust. And over time, like cops, they're just not trusting anybody anymore because constantly they're dealing with people that are, you know, trying to freaking screw them over and attack them or whatever. So we should really have, we should as a,

like as a species, like this isn't even an American problem. This is a, this is like a global epidemic, but we should look at, we should think about the average screen time that the average human person in the digitally connected world spends on their phone and their tablet and their computer. Like that's changing us. It has to change us. If mem, if memorizing roadways in London changes us or being a cop changes us or, and like, and it can literally change our DNA and stuff like,

what, what does multi-generational digital immersion do for us as a species? Like I fear that we'll come to a point soon if we aren't, we're so dependent on these phones. I bought a flip, I bought a Verizon flip phone from Walmart, like in November when we, when we, when I had to put my dog down, I just was, I didn't want to be on the phone. I didn't want to do conference. I just, I just needed some time to like get my head straight. And so I was pretty much on a flip phone for a couple months. And, um,

Man, it was like quitting drinking. It was like that difficult, you know? Like it's highly addictive. It regulates our mood. It regulates like...

when you get on YouTube shorts and scroll for an hour, think about all the different things, all the different experiences your mind believes it's went through and all the different, all the different levels that are affected by that. Like the big ones we talk about is serotonin and dopamine, but there's all these different things that are. And so, so doing that, do that for two or three generations. Like we are going to, we're going to become, I believe like dependent on these devices in order for us to,

You can see it all like the writings on the wall. Like I, I believe that somebody smarter than me could look at most all the symptoms that we're currently experiencing in society that we're trying to fix. Like all these things that have popped up in the last 20 years that, that are just destroying us and our family. Like,

our households and our marriages and our, the way our, you know, our kids and the way they, and it's like, it's obvious to me that our minds are, they're, they're not made to be, like they're made to live in, in the, like in the real world and be immersed in it. But as our, as the real world continues to become more dim and dull and hopeless and like

you know, it seems like so many people do have a very hopeless perspective right now about the future. And as the world becomes a more dull and dim place, the internet becomes more vibrant and exciting and immersive and real. And it's like, we, we need that cognitive, we need like that attention and that time and that bandwidth that we're spending here. We need it here. Like the reason this is all falling apart is because we're all spending our time. He like,

- Well, it's like junk food. I think you made this up, Echo Charles. It's just junk food, right? It's junk food for your brain. And junk food tastes good and it feels really good at the moment and you really like it. And after you have some fudge rounds by the bags over and over again, then actually maybe a steak doesn't taste as good anymore. Even though that steak is the apex food to eat,

Now that you're addicted to the sugar with the fat on it, all encompassed with the flavor and the salt, they do everything perfectly in a fudge round. You're like, oh, this is all I want. Just pour it into my mouth. You know, I'm going, my brain's always all over the place. We'll go back. I'm not trying to deter. But real quick, because I like the little fudge round thing in there.

So I told you that I had to write the second verse of Richmond after I talked to Draven and we had like two days to do it. So I was in the dollar general, um, on Hoffheimer road and Dinwiddie and the buying stuff. And, um, the, there was a lady in front of me who was like morbidly obese with her grandchild and their whole cart was full of junk food. And that was one of the things in it was fudge rounds. And that's like where that verse, but like, but it was funny cause I

I had to go back and explain myself with that verse because it wasn't like I was knocking that lady for buying all that junk food. It was just like, that lady has an EBT card and this is all she can even... They just don't even... Nobody teaches us even what to eat. I guess even what to eat, we don't even really know. We don't really know what's in our food. As soon as I started... As soon as we started slaughtering our own pigs and meat birds and stuff and eating that food and then go to Walmart and buy chicken, Tyson chicken is not...

You'll never catch me eating Smithfield or Tyson again. It's almost fake. But anyway, I just thought that was funny. I wanted to just bring that up briefly. But in our – yeah, I think that it's – I think a lot of our dysfunction and a lot of the symptoms that we're experiencing are just simply because our minds cannot run long-term on this system of like – and these –

And also, it's more complex than that too because with the introduction of AI, like we talked about, it's like these devices are learning. AI is learning from us as we stay so immersed in it. I mean, in theory, it's like if these...

if these phones do what they say and you know, it's like in theory, this like very intelligent operating system can watch simultaneously where millions and millions of people go and where they eat and how long they sit in a parking lot after they do this. And they're talking on the phone with like, it's able to study. It's almost like playing God. It's able to watch like the behaviors and the conversations and the,

the thoughts almost of like millions of people simultaneously. So like we're, I don't know, we're almost like, I don't know. I don't think, I just don't believe that we can survive as a species unless we find a way. And the only way that we'll ever, I mean, like you can ban TikTok and you can demon, demonopolize something else. And you can, you can change porn, like Virginia changed the law. So Pornhub, you have to be over 18 to get on the platform. Um,

I mean, what 13-year-old isn't going to just download a VPN and get on porn? We're trying to correct all these issues. The way a parent would try to discipline their child and the child knows 10 ways to get around it. It's like the gun laws when they make a gun law that says you can't have a quick reloading magazine and so you got to put this thing on and the gun makers go, okay, cool, here's a way to get around that thing that does the exact same thing. So we'll never fix it again.

That way, like there's all we have to make the real world more appealing than Instagram and Facebook and TikTok. And we have to find a way for people to be able to constructively talk about all these things are important that are important without just doing it on Reddit or on X. Like so. So this year, like my whole. So this is your thing. So my thing. This is your thing right now. This is the this is the rural revival project, right? This is it.

Yeah, I like it. Which is also your tour, right? They're the same kind of, they're intertwined. The Rural Revival Project and Oliver Anthony Music Tour, this go-round, these things are kind of entwined. It's kind of a launch point. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, we've only done one show so far in Morgantown, and it was like last minute thrown together. So the

We've only officially done one show, but even at that, like it was the best, the best show I've done since all this happened was that Morgantown show. Like even just in my, just even the way I, when I walked away from it, I felt better. Like I felt fulfilled from it. I mean, we like baptized people there and everything. It was crazy. It was like nuts. But yeah, I, I envision this. I want to take my platform and my audience and the people who, who also want change in the world, like who also have sent the people who have sent me all these messages that I've read and like,

Who like, don't even like the fact I just knew, I just know we're in trouble. If people are just counting on some idiot like me to try to figure out how to make a dent. Like I know we're in trouble if somebody is like thinking that, but no, yeah, I'm going to start, I'm going to start finding these places to do shows that haven't had me. I'm going to find these towns, like instead of doing the Pittsburgh amphitheater,

we're going to find a city within 45 minutes or an hour of it, or a little town or whatever that hasn't had music or traffic or any kind of economic stimulus brought into it in 10 years or whatever. And I'm going to find these other bands and these other artists that I've met along the way. And I'm going to see if, cause a lot of them are tired of the live nation ticket master monopolies. And they're tired of like, and you see people on the internet all the time. Musicians like, I mean, going back to Zach Bryan, I'm not trying to keep bringing him up, but like

I think he has an album or something about tick. Like he, I think one of his albums is, or one of his tours or something was like negatively about against tick. Like he doesn't like ticket master either. And he's at the top of the tick, the ticket selling hierarchy. He,

I want to create this festival series that it's a nonprofit and it can go, it can end up becoming anything. It's just a model. Like people could, we, there could be 10 other people to start a festival series too. And like, it doesn't just have to be this one, but it's going to a town within an hour of where the monopolized music venue is. Are they going to be outdoors? They'll be both. Like one of the ones we're looking at doing indoors is in Bramwell, West Virginia. It used to be a town with the most,

It was the town with the most millionaires in it, I think, in the whole country at one point. Like coal millionaires. It was a very rich town at one time in West Virginia. And now it's like totally dead. Like half that. Yeah, it's terrible. It's terrible poverty. Wyoming County right beside it is one of the poorest counties in the whole country right now.

Like it's terrible. So we're- And that's from the coal mines getting shut down? Yeah. So there's a- Yeah, and drugs and everything else. It's just- It's a comp- But-

We're going to, there's an old school there that's been closed for a while and we're going to, we're trying to set one up in May to do in this, in the old gymnasium there. And, and the idea is, is that we could like this gymnasium, for example, we'll figure out how to do the ingress egress, figure out how many people we can set up in there, get a stage going, the equity and the infrastructure that we obtain by doing the show will stay with the venue forever.

And then a town that is literally owes back taxes to the federal government right now because they're like they owed. I think they just paid it off. But the town of Bramwell owed like over $100,000 to the federal government like in taxes because they had a mayor and bezel money and stuff. And they don't have any income coming in. That is the whole reason I got connected with them in the first place. But now the dream is like Bramwell will have a gymnasium that they can go book anybody at any time and pay.

Because the venue space itself is not for profit, there is no incentive for them to sign a contract with Live Nation and become another one of those venues. And if every show I do from now on is that, and I bring other artists in and other people, then it's like, imagine this network of all these places that have long-term economic stimulus and also have a place where people can go and like,

and do all these things in the real world where we don't have the opportunity to do them now. Like we're talking about, so when I was in, when I was in Western North Carolina, I met this group of people, um, through Savage Freedoms. Does that ring a bell? I think I have heard of that before. Yeah. Uh, they were running the, basically they were there doing what agencies weren't like they were pulling bodies out and it was really, it was tough, but,

I was able to connect with those guys and actually rode on an airdrop with them and spent a lot of time with those. Most of them were special forces vets who had jobs and families and everything that they had just like

they still came anyway. Like one of the guys there was, he thought he was going to lose his job because his boss needed him to come back to work. But there was like, they had pulled a dozen bodies out of a pile of debris that day and Swananoa. And he's like, I can't go home. Like I've got to be here doing it. And like they were there for free doing it. And I believe that it's actually our, I believe that one of the ways that we solve all of this in this country, like the lack of leadership, the pro like, it seems like so complex. Like it seems too complex. You can't, I don't believe,

We want to vote once every four years, and we hope that that's going to fix everything. But there's all these little things that we can do along the way. Part of this festival series, I hope to find a way to help empower the special forces vets because a lot of them are proven capable leaders that can – if they were put in a position of leadership and empowered to be able to make change, they would. And the proof's in the pudding. They were there –

They were there like sacrificing everything to try to help a town that they had never even been in because they felt called to do it because there was the town needed leaders and they came and did it. And like, I want to go to all these towns. There's a gentleman there I met named Justin Neal and a few other guys who I've gotten involved now on this board for this rural revival thing. But every town we go to,

Before we go do the show, we're going to have an investigative journalist go find out what corruption is going on there, what problems there are. Is it just things that the town needs? Is it things that the people there need? Is there a story there that needs to be told? We want to find the veterans that are there who... Bro, you'll have a freaking mini-series out of every town you go into. You know what I'm saying? You start looking for the corruption and what's going on with the locals. What's keeping these people from living a fulfilled and good life in these towns? What can we do to make their life better? Maybe it's like...

you know, maybe, and I'm just speaking out of thin air. Cause I don't know who would fill this position, but like, maybe we find somebody from Dave, the Dave Ramsey network who can be there to like help financially coach those people. And maybe we have like, like I've, um, I've been working with this gentleman named Graham Merriweather who does, and I'm Joel Salatin. And, um, I even had a conversation with Mike Rowe about this, but I'm, I want to bring in,

Like when you go to this festival series, I want there to be like a farm or two there that can introduce like because people can grow a lot of food on their own just in their backyard and like and I want to get kids excited about like how to grow food and can and like be out in the outdoors. And but really all I want to do is just build spaces that good people can come and do good things in real life.

without that and and the reason why it will be successful is there isn't a ball and chain of money tied to it like i'm not there to make a like i'm not there to to make a profit margin it's it's done for all the right reasons so like i believe if enough good people come together for all the right reasons that that all of this can just i i but i believe that's our path i believe that's our only path forward is for us is for good people to gather together and help one another and um

So the three pillars of this idea is truth, fellowship, and music. And I believe, yeah, that's like my purpose. And it's still very much in the infancy stages. Like I said, probably our next show will be sometime in March. But basically, yeah. Whereabouts? Probably the first show will be in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, which is where I got my GED at. And their whole town was devastated there.

And then another component of it is, you know, like Joe, when I first, when Richmond first happened, it was the day after the Farm Market show is when I was getting ready to do the Joe Rogan podcast. And he actually called me and we had like a 30 minute conversation. And I was telling Joe then that I just was going to take all the money from Richmond and donate it to a charity because I didn't want the money. I didn't need it. I just wanted it to go do some good.

And he said, don't do that. Just keep the money and then do good with it when the time comes, you know, because you don't really know where your money is going to go if you just donate it away. Yeah. And so I've spent most of the money that I've made on buying property. And the first property that I'm going to use as part of this is this permaculture farm that I bought in right just south of Farmville.

it's about 75 acres and then I just got another 150 acres beside it and I'm going to turn it in. It was the first biodynamic farm in Virginia but it hasn't been in operation in about five years but they grew enough food on there to feed like hundreds of people. Like it's just greenhouses and just, you know, it's a permaculture farm but I'm creating this space that will be open up to the public that like,

Robert Kennedy Jr. calls it a healing center, but I'd almost call it more of a grounding center. But it's just a place that people can come and get out in the woods and reconnect and learn how to grow their own food and just work with large animals. And it's a therapeutic thing, but it's also just like a reconnecting... Man, it's just so incredible to be... I mean, speaking from experience, the guy who sold his house, bought some land, and spent a lot of time on that land. I found myself out in the woods and found myself reconnecting in nature. And there's more...

there's more interesting things just about dirt and all the things like the microbes and the worms and the, and the things you can grow. And so like, it's more interesting than anything you'll find on Facebook. I promise you that you just have to go do like, so that's my two functions is like start this festival series and then start this pilot program farm. And then the idea is, is when we go do the festival series, a lot of the shows are going to be done at farms anyway. And those farms can also turn into,

into this and it'll eventually, hopefully in my, in my imaginative mind, it's like this network of,

of farms that people can go to, to heal and get their mind right and learn how to be self-sufficient and learn real skills. Like, like I'm sure there would be trades people that would want to be a part of this festival series and get people back into like wanting to go do trade work. And like, I'm sure there would be people there that, that would help with mental health, health counseling and financial counseling and all that stuff. But like, there's all these efforts. If you look, there's all these people, there's, there's people who are, who are trying to like,

start their own rehabs and help people out. And there's these people who are trying to help vets with PTSD. And there's people who are trying to teach kids in school. Like everything I'm talking about, there's already thousands of people fighting that effort. I'm just trying to give them a place in real life to do all those things. Like I'm not...

I'm just one person who's not very capable of doing much of anything. But if I've been given the opportunity now, like I said, if, if, if God did give me the opportunity to have this crazy platform and get these accolades that like, I don't deserve at all, like then, then the, then the reason for it is so I can just have the opportunity. If I can bring 10,000 to get people together and do some good with it, like just, and do that enough times, like,

it will be on like, there is no corporate, there's no corporation and there's no, there's nobody that will be able to stop it. You know, like, yeah, no, that's epic. Uh, you know, we have a factory up in Maine, um, in Farmington, Maine, which is,

and it's a great place. Maybe we could think about doing one up there and then we have another one down in Asheboro, North Carolina, which again, just like a bunch of, the thing that's cool about it is a lot of people don't recognize that you can get a job that is a skill that's

Working in a factory doing something that like you like doing yeah, whether it's people that are weaving Material work in the looms people that are so in like it's honorable awesome work that people like doing and a lot of people don't you know if you're a Young kid right now. You know you're 19 20 years old Maybe that's like you like hey, you don't really have a skill set you can actually learn one and you can have a good job and

that pays good and like you're doing something productive for america so that'd be pretty cool and i think that yeah and i think the people who will help the people who will help me more than anything is like i said i just i have a friend of mine named billy and um billy was a was a marine and um i don't you know i'm just i i don't know if billy billy is probably gonna be pissed that i even mentioned him on this podcast but he's like a hero to me like he

You know, he was in the Middle East. He got their... I guess their tank got hit. He was the only one that survived out of his unit to my understanding. And like, you know, Billy deals with a lot of stuff because of that. And like, he's socially awkward like I am. Like, you can tell he just doesn't really fit in in society. But when he... But when they were out there trying to save those people and stuff, like, he was the most cool, calm... Like, I was the one... I was the one that was upset out there. Not him. Like, he...

And then, and I just thought, I don't know. I just thought in my mind, and I think a lot of people do that. Like these, these guys, like these men and women who are like in the military and like tough and go over there and fight and do all this stuff that they're just like, somehow they're just immune to all of it. But like, like those guys at night were like throwing up and crying, you know, like they,

It messed them up just as much as any other human being to have to see all that and do all that and go through it. But they just went and did it anyway because they like that, like their like their calling and their purpose and their like their drive outweighed that fear, you know. But like they have to they are enduring all that just like any of us would if we were to go do it. They're just so like I, I never felt.

I never felt safer or in better company than I did when I was at that Savage Freedoms around all those people because, like, I don't know. I just...

I just realized in that moment, like these are the, these people are going to fit. Like, these are the people who are going to fix our country. Like not some scumbag, not some scumbag mayor. That's going to embezzle money out of the town or not some group of council people who are going to vote in all these stupid laws. And like the people who are going to really save us, I think are like, are the people who, who like dedicated their whole lives to saving us already. Like I,

And instead of us empowering those people to put in a position of leadership, it feels like, it feels like the only system in place right now is to just give them SSRIs and stuff and just like send them on their way. And like, and like those guys were saying that they didn't lose a lot of their friends over there. They lost them once they came back home, you know, like,

So if we can just, I don't know, I'm going to find some way to empower those people into position of leadership through this. And I think like, I don't know, I just think there's enough good people left in the world that if we just find a place for them to all go and gather and like, and it's based on, and we're all there for the right reasons, you know?

I just... I don't know. I just have this vision in my head and it's difficult for me to even like speak it in words because the whole thing is so complex. But in the end, I just envision this network of like... Just... I just...

I don't know. I just don't see a way for us forward. I don't see a way that we're going to survive as a species if we stay immersed in the digital world and we stay stuck in this algorithmic cycle where everything we worry about is what they want us to worry about. People are so mad about things in politics that don't affect their quality of life or anyone's quality of life, really. They're emotionally based. They do...

the algorithm does a really good job of finding the things that they, that's going to destabilize us emotionally the most and polarize us the most. And they keep it in your face all day long, 24 seven. And there's all these like real quality of life issues that like, like we're in a cry. I mean, we really are in this country in a crisis right now. Like, um, you know, our vets, our homelessness, our education, our food, like everything's falling apart. And like,

people complain about it all day long and they want to vote in these systems that they think are going to fix it. But like, we've got to start voting every day to like, you know, like this is like an endless fight. Like this is a fight that we're in. And, um, and there's a lot of, there's a lot on the line. Like I don't, I don't think, and it's not, it's not anyone's fault, but like none of us can really conceptualize how much sacrifice was made for us to be able to sit here and film this podcast today. Right.

And we don't, and I don't think we're able to conceptualize how much evil there really is in the world. Um, you know, we were talking about Jordan Peterson and I think, like I said, his, your episode with him is what introduced me to Jordan Peterson like 10 years ago or whenever y'all filmed. It was a while ago, but his maps of meaning course, um,

Like I would advise anybody in the world to go back and watch that episode with you. And then if they want to dive deeper, go back and look, if you go to Jordan Peterson's YouTube channel and search oldest to newest, his original Harvard or his original lectures from, um, the whatever college in Canada he was in, like where he's got the paper and the projector and all that. And he's like, and he's talking about the Soviet union. And like, I, I don't know. It just,

I don't know. I'm just, like I said, I'm just like, I'm the same guy. Whatever that quote you read at the beginning about how I'm just that dummy or whatever. Like I don't claim to have all the answers, but I just, I know there's an, I just, I've been exposed to enough good people in the last year that I know that there's thousands and thousands and maybe even millions of people who just want this world to go back to the way it was. And they want, like we're too wrapped up in like a,

The thing about the Bible that I was never taught as a kid, you know, I, I got, I went to church as a kid. I got turned off to it. I was so angry about it. And I used to talk about God. And I remember I would talk about like, I would call God like sky daddy and the spaghetti monster and all that. I was very much like, like again, like I was just hated it because to me, to me, God in the Bible was just like another man's way of,

of like putting authority on me or, you know, like trying to create some moral high ground on me. And it wasn't until, until all of this that I was like, I realized, I realized that the Bible is a book that centers society in a way in which it can,

exist functionally and healthy. Like sin is not something that is a lot of fun that people don't want. People don't want us to, it's not like God doesn't want us to sin because he doesn't want us to have fun and sin is fun. Sin is destructive. Sin goes against like just the, the laws of like, like hate and anger and lust and,

and greed and gluttony. And like, these are all things that are bad for society. They're bad for us. And it doesn't matter what time in history at what part in the world, everyone that existed before will be forgotten. Like we are,

In world history, the United States is probably something that a lot of people will never even know existed. Like how many societies existed before us that we have no idea who they even were? Like written history only goes back so far and we know there's all the stuff that existed before that we don't really know a whole lot about.

But that, but those, those words in that book, even though they were written so long ago are still so like, if you read Ecclesiastes and Proverbs and just read about like what Jesus talks about how to live in Matthew, like forget all the rest of it for just a minute and just look at Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Matthew. And like, he's telling you like the reason that you turn the other cheek and the reason you love your neighbor and the reason that you have to do all these things, even though they don't really make sense when you first read them, it's because they help preserve you and they help empower you. It's not like,

The book is there as a guide for us on how to live is what it is. Like sin is something that's not good. We would all love to live in the garden of Eden. Like we would all love to live in a place where there's paradise and there's no pain and there's no suffering. And like, all there is, is just love and good food. And like, I mean, it's like we all, it's like wherever everybody just tries to go on vacation to replicate the garden of Eden for a week.

You know, like, I don't know. Like, and we'll never achieve the Garden of Eden, but we can sure try to like at least identify, at least just, at least just identify that our sin is not something that even helps us. It hurts us more than it does anybody else. Being angry at somebody hurts you more than it does them. Like it, like you're,

it's destroying us. And now, and I do think that like sin is more appealing and more attractive and more available now with the internet than it ever was before. Like go on Instagram without seeing some girl's butt shaking around or seeing like, you know, it was just like,

we've just got to start getting good people together and like and just and i think all i think everything else would just come into place i think this is all part of god's plan like i think there's been like man even like um people who didn't believe in god at all i mean jordan peterson is a great example of that i don't think he was very open about believing in god until very recently but i saw like um there was a song uh ed sheridan put out like a couple weeks ago talking about jesus and all the stuff i don't know i just see it popping up more and more and um

I just think it's time that we all just get together and just figure out how to fix this thing. Let's just quit talking about it and start being about it. Yeah, I got a friend who's a veteran Army guy, and he really gets upset about, you know, he wants to help out. He's always talking about how we need to...

Put new legislation in and he's very but he gets very very frustrated with how difficult that is and I'm always you know Just going back to him saying man just like help out the guy like down the street from you help out your neighbor help out the veteran that you know you see down on the street corner that's begging for like a begging for money like go help that guy and that is

Just as impactful as trying to push through a piece of legislation that's gonna take four years to get through and vote someone in the office that you hope is not gonna get bought out at the last minute and change everything like then like forget all that help your neighbor is The place to start and if like what you're saying if we get a bunch of people that are all trying to help their neighbors We can actually make a big impact. Yeah, because I I

I surprisingly have a fan base on both sides of the political aisle, you know, and honestly, part of that originated because people misunderstood the first video with the comment about Joe Biden. And so there was a lot of people on the left who actually thought I liked Joe Biden. So then they started to become a fan. So I have like so it's so weird that I'm like kind of in the position I'm in. But I have like very far left wing female comedians who joke about things that are like

not the things that like we're in two totally different worlds, but they're actually a fan. But so, so I have this theory in it and I enjoy and Jordan does talk about this too. But I think that I think there's a word called scissor G. I think that is the word that describes it's the, it's where two opposites combine and empower one another. And I think that I think what's happening and I think it's because of the, this algorithm that we're in. But the reason why we're so divided and the reason why it seems like the left is so far left and polarizing and the right is polarizing

It's like this endless battle we're in with politics is because generally people who vote conservatively or vote more liberally, they also apply that in their own thinking. It's part of their personality. I think the analogy used by Peterson is... Again, this is why I just want people to go watch the Maps of Meaning because I'm giving you the wish.com version. But people who think more conservatively are the type of people who in a business would be the...

would be like the CFO. Whereas the people who think more on the liberal side of the spectrum would be like more of the entrepreneur, like either somebody innovative in the company or like maybe even the CEO, you know? And for the same reason why there's so many people that work at a, even though so many people on the left despise Elon Musk now and they think he's, you know, because of X and Twitter and all the polarizing stuff in politics,

I think from the people I've talked to at SpaceX and Tesla that I've met, it sounds like there's more people on the left that work for those companies than on the right. And you would think it would be the opposite, but it's because we need both. Like we need people who,

put everything into boxes and keep it organized and keep it centered. Like we need people who think more conservatively, but we also need people who, who do think outside the box because it's our innovation that takes us forward. But the problem is, is right now we don't have people putting things in boxes and we don't have people figuring out how to add new boxes on. We have people who are like here, like just desperately trying to hold on to keeping things the same. And then I think what's happened is I think that,

a lot of the kids in college that seem to like get this very far left ideology and start to talk about like, you know, like, like just the kids can use a litter. Like there's schools in Virginia where there's litter boxes now, you know, and like,

It's because those people who come up with those ideas and believe them and implement them, their brains are designed to think outside the box. The friends that I have that are left are super smart and they're not bad people at all. They just think way outside of the box, but they don't have a constructive way to think outside of the box and they don't really have a reason to create anything productive because everything now is just so negative and so stalemated.

That now they're just, they're like, they've been influenced to use that innovation and that thought to kind of just, it's a form of rebellion is what it is. Like in the same way that when I was growing up as a kid with the war on terror, you know, you remember the left was very against the Bush administration and that's what sort of originated these concepts, like the rage against the machine type of thing, the Green Day type of thing. And then that maybe became like,

at some point like Occupy Wall Street and then that turned into like Antifa and Black Block and then that turned into this and it's like it's just becoming a more and more form extreme of rebellion but I do think there I do believe in my heart that there's a way to take these like hyper intelligent college kids who currently right now are

sort of like being weaponized and letting them actually really be able to use their innovation and their talent and their creativity to help better. And I do think there's a way for the people on the right who the left despise to

to help keep us centered and focused. And, and, and like, I do think in the same way that a business needs a CFO and a CEO or the way they need a business manager and an innovator, I do think like, that's how our, that's the way our country's like is, it was talked about many of the founding fathers. And by the way, everybody wants to act like the founding fathers were the greatest people in the world. They were human beings too. Like they had flaws. Like,

The fact that they were trying to escape from a country where they didn't have freedom and create freedom, like, that's why we appreciate them. It's not because George Washington was a saint or because of any... Like, we don't even really know any of those people. All we know is what we can read about them. But they wanted... They just wanted people to have...

freedom of speech and freedom of thought because there's no that's that is the pinnacle of how we exist in society if we're not allowed to speak freely we're not allowed to think freely and if we're not allowed to think freely then we're not allowed to create or innovate or do any of these important things that we need to do as a species to be able to move forward to be able to survive and thrive and when we don't do that that's what we get like a

The Soviet Union is the example that everybody uses, but it's like when you really read about the Soviet Union and what those people did to each other, not only what the government did to them, but what those people did to each other out of fear. That's exactly what... That's where we're... That is where we're heading. But the thing is, it's like, no, that's... It's like that's the only difference between me and somebody who probably...

who is just full-on right-wing is like, I do believe in the First and Second Amendment that is traditionally a conservative thing. But I also, I don't see people on the left as being evil or crazy or whatever. I think a lot of them are just

They are highly intelligent people who are creative thinking, but they've just been misguided. And this algorithm has weaponized all of us against each other. And if you get all those people in real life, everyone, I don't care who you are. Like I said, I don't care who you voted for. Like you like food and you like music. And so get those, if you get those people together in real life and, and don't even give them the opportunity to talk politics, they'll find there's a million other things they have in common. Like, you know, like,

how much time have we spent on the internet? This isn't like, I would love to see how much time on social, like how many conversations on social media there's been about, about like about gender, um,

versus how much there's been about our food or about how we take care of our veterans or our homeless or how we figure out how to get people in a position to where they aren't entrapped into debt as soon as they get out of high school. Let's just get all these people together and let's just take a time out. You guys can go back to arguing in five years, but let's just take five years. Let's all just hang out and figure out how do we identify all...

on a local level, how do we identify all the things that are affecting our quality of life and fix them? It's just out of everyone's best interest. Like everyone just, you know, like, I don't know if I'm even making any sense or not, but I just, and I always look at the best in people. And I know people have, I know that not, I know there's a lot of evil in the world and a lot of people, and I understand, like, I know not everybody wants the world to be a happy place. A lot of people just want to watch the world burn. But, you know, honestly, dude, there's a part of me that wants to watch the world burn too. I mean, I,

Like I said, I used to go to Washington, D.C. and go to some of these protests and stuff. And I'm definitely not somebody who likes establishment or authority or any of those things. But at the same time, I do understand like,

I don't know. I just, I just see that we're all being weaponized against each other. And this is a, like, just get us all together and just, you know, I, I don't know. I, I just see, I just see, I see a bigger picture of, of an opportunity for us. And it's like this everywhere in like Europe, man, people in Europe are dealing with the exact same things we are. And they are just, their countries are dying. Their, their, their governments don't care about them. The decisions they make seem like they hurt them more than help them. It's like,

it's almost like the people in charge have malicious intent. Like they don't want that. They want the country, like they want these countries to die somehow, you know? Um, so, but there's so many, I don't know. There's just so many good people left in the world and there, there is a way out. There is a way to fix it. Um,

so that's like my that's like what i'm gonna do now like i there is a way to fix it it's gonna start with the rural revival project coming to a neighborhood near you coming to a farm near you yeah that's what we're doing yeah and our we're definitely going to be we're going to keep everybody there well hydrated using jaco's hydrated island orange drinks so right oh man so when is it when does the tour kick off or when is the when is when are you going to start doing these things

you said they're going to be out here on the west coast at some point is there a plan for that yet you got any locations yet yeah well the pro the problem has been that like i said i've i was i was trying to use management companies and like people in the professional space to help me plan so my very first meeting that i had when i went to nashville for the very first time i met with four different booking agencies and i pitched this idea to all four of them and i picked the one that i thought would do the best job

And they just stalled me for 14 months and it's not their fault. And the people there, like a lot of the people that work at the mind you, I got to clarify this too. A lot of the people that work at the Nashville companies are really good people and they are there for the music. It's not their fault. It's like a very small percentage of people at the very top of the company is what's, it's not the people there. But so it's,

So, yeah. So I've had to go basically do this all completely DIY. Going rogue. I'm going rogue, I guess, as the cool kids say. Have you ever heard of a band called Minor Threat? They're a punk band from D.C. I haven't. Okay. They're just led... You should look into them because the guy that was the singer, he was also in a band called Fugazi. You ever heard of that band? Mm-mm. Okay. So he was kind of the... Brought a lot of the DIY stuff to...

but he started his own record label and he did like all these shows that he'd do. He would play in weird places and charge a dollar to get in. And he stuck with that his whole life. You know, he's still doing it. - That's awesome. - His name is E. Makai, yeah. So it reminds me a lot of what you're trying to do. You know, keep prices down, bring people together.

The music's different, but the attitude is the same. And he's been pulling it off for a long time. Well, this certainly won't be a country festival either. Like I said, my dream first festival would be... And I don't even need to play necessarily at all of them. It could even just turn... But my dream would be to have some crazy mashup with us and some punk rock band and a rapper or something. It doesn't... Because...

like going back to the Pittsburgh analogy, letting the people in Pittsburgh be able to experience a part of their state that they would never otherwise go to. Like they'll be amazed at how awesome that town is that they go to and they'll have no idea how good it is until they get there. And then also being able to bring music from pop culture to those towns and let those people experience that. Like it's bridging a huge gap and it's just, I don't know, it's just,

it's a very exciting opportunity, but yeah, it definitely won't be a country festival. Like my best festival, my favorite festival that I did in 2024 was the levitate music festival in Massachusetts. Um,

which was, um, which was, we opened for sublime. Oh damn. And, uh, that was my favorite. Yeah. Dude, you want to talk, you want to talk about like a cool moment is being on stage and looking over and the dudes from sublime or like video on your set or whatever. That's a cool feeling. Like that was a, but,

But that's kind of the vibe I would think this is going to have is more of like a levitate music festival, not like a country music festival. You know, like it's going to have the immersive feeling of like when you go to like a bluegrass festival, but it's going to have the more of the music of like a.

of like a levitate music festival with, um, and then, like I said, all the other people who can be there to help with things like, cause people just need resources and stuff too. Like if you're a 25 year old dude, you're in, you're in debt, you've got a, you've got a kid that you, that, that you and your fiance, cause a lot of kids now they have a lot like I was, you know, I, I had a kid and never got married. So I was,

trying to raise a kid with a girl I wasn't married with. I didn't have any financial education. I didn't know what the hell I was doing with my life. I was just working in a, like, it would have been great. What am I supposed to, like, you can't just pick up the phone and call somebody. And, you know, you can watch stuff online, like podcasts and videos and stuff, but there just needs to be something in the real world to like, there just needs to be a place. And at one point in time, the church served that purpose. But see, the church is, the reason that church has died so much in this country and lost its way is because

of all the reasons why I was turned off to the Bible in the first place. So like, this is kind of a, this is technically a ministry effort, but it's not a, it's not a church. It's a, it's, but it's going to serve the purpose of what church maybe once did at one time, you know, which is like community, like, let's look out, like, let's just figure out how to fix all the problems that these people have. It's, it's complicated, but it's not that complicated. Like we can teach people how to manage their money and we can teach them how to get good skills and,

And how to manage their time and how to find secrecy in their families and be able to spend time together. Like, just in the average household, I'd love to know, like, how much screen time individually everyone in a family spends versus the amount of time they spend together. It's probably, like, 10 to 1 or something. You know, like...

Those are those. There are so many complex problems that we have in society today that we all talk about and we all identify. And many of them are brought up in politics, but a lot of them are brought up just in society and on social media. But I don't think many of those things are individual problems. I observe most of those as being symptoms of a bigger problem, which is that we have just.

we have to be connected to one another in order to, in order to exist. We can't, we just, and like I said, give it a couple more generations. And like, I don't know that I just don't know. I don't know. I don't see any other way. I don't see any other way forward. It's like when people morph in the future and their neck is bent over and like their eyesight can only see like 18 inches in front of their face. That's what we got to watch out for becoming that, becoming those kinds of weirdos. It's already to that point. Like, and,

in the 90s if you talk to somebody about the idea of them having a chip implanted in them they were talking about how it was the antichrist and freaking out about it and now there's people excited about that opportunity like because because their whole life they've been in their whole life they've been in technology you know like and now Kim Kardashian's got a Tesla bot so who knows what that thing's gonna figure out you know like

But, you know, it's like that's an AI is AI is a whole nother con. I don't see how we're going to. I don't see how AI won't take over the point. I mean, like, really, I just don't see how it's not going to happen. But because I can't run the room, can't come to the shows at rural. Maybe they will. Maybe they will see. But that's why I say music and food. Yeah, there's no robots showing up there. That's for sure. Oh, man. Awesome. That get us up to speed. That's what we're doing.

Anything else? When's the album come out? We're dropping it over the next month or so. We need to coordinate. There'll be a... We need to coordinate. Hopefully we can get one of the first song out when this comes out. That'd be pretty sick. Yeah, so all the songs... I've got, like, I think four that are pretty much done. We've just got to start dumping them. And then now that I'm going to keep doing this thing, I've got, like, a lot of... We've got a lot of music to record, and I want to do some really cool collaborations with other artists along the way, too. Hell yeah.

I had just talked to like, I don't know, like crazy stuff. Like I talked to Shabuzy about doing a song with him, which funny enough, like going back to your E minor G CD thing with Richmond, do you know, I didn't realize it till after the fact. And I don't know which song came out first, but you know, Tipsy and Richmond, North of Richmond uses the same chord. I think even the same chord progression, like exactly. Like, so it just goes to show every song is just like the same song. Yeah. Give it a month. Spark a little bit of soul.

But yeah, that's a little snapshot into my head. And I'm so sorry I've been all over the place on this podcast. No, man, it's all good. I've been just rambling along over here. You got that mind of the artist, right? I was over here trying to put it in a box. You're over there just getting after it. I guess so, yeah. That's the way it's got to be in order for something to work, right? You got to have both sides. Where can people find you? So you got oliveranthonymusic.com.

You got Instagram, which is Oliver underscore Anthony underscore music. You're on Twitter X at ain't got a dollar. And then you got your YouTube channel, which is at Oliver Anthony music. And then you can get your music kind of wherever Spotify places is that you want to get into it. Right? Yeah. So the last thing I'll say is that my, my last plant, my last part of this mastermind scheme this year is because I can't, I can't in good faith, uh,

stuff on social media and tell everybody to not be on social media. So somehow this year I'm going to probably eventually deactivate all those profiles except for YouTube. So I'll have my music on YouTube and on the streaming platforms and I've got an SMS email list that you can sign up for through my website that I haven't started actively posting on yet. Um, but eventually what will happen by the end of this year, um,

the fans will be able to catch the updates to the SMS email list and I'll put the new music on YouTube. And if anybody finds, if anybody wants to post the stuff from the SMS email list on their own, like for example, there's a guy now that takes a ton of my stuff and cuts it up into shorts and puts it all over Instagram and it does really well.

So I don't worry about cutting my stuff up and putting it in his shorts. I just let other people do it. But at some point I probably just won't even be on social media. I think it's like, um, I don't, I don't see how I can preach about us getting off of social media and be on it, you know? Yeah, no, that's a tough one. I know I have, I have that thing too, where I tell people to get off social media.

on social media. I'm literally telling people don't be on social media while I'm on social media. There's some kind of major hypocrite activity going on there. I haven't figured out how to solve it. It would be cool to have like if you had like a Jocko SMS email list that you could sign up for and then like imagine it wouldn't really be you texting them but like how cool would it be if my phone, if I got a notification on my phone and there is an SMS or an iMessage on my phone and it's from Jocko and it's got like

what you're you know like it's well luckily for you if you text jaco fuel to 24672 you'll get it so we actually do have that yeah well i'll have to i'll just have to look at what you're doing and try to i'll just try to copy off of yours i guess i'm just kidding yeah well hey if i actually text jaco on my phone i get i get a pretty real it feels just like i'm talking to the real guy now so that is the real guy right on man uh echo you got any questions yeah real quick

So G C D E off the top of your head, actually kind of for both of you guys, I guess, but Chris, do you like, is there any songs off the top of your head that that can play just those chords? Dude, that's Richmond North of Richmond songs. That's like literally it's a ridiculous amount of songs. I don't know ones that are like kind of known, you know, like, okay. Speaking from the beginner standpoint, right. Cause that's, you said that's what you. Yeah. With G C and D you can do almost anything.

And if you were to buy a capo, see, I didn't know this until, I didn't know this when I was a kid, but with a capo, and I do this. A capo? What's a capo? The thing that you asked me about on that guitar over there. Oh, okay, the cap. And I said, I didn't have a 100% solid answer. So you can play in a different key, right? Yeah, you can just bump it up. So it's like guitar for dummies. Like for...

You'll see me do that. Like I'll just move the cape because I, yeah. But so I would say to answer your question, G, C, and D, I would say learn, if somebody wants to learn guitar, G, C, D, and E. Okay, so it's almost any country, like almost any country song and most pop songs. And if you go on Ultimate Guitar, for example, to look your chords up, if there's a button that'll say transpose and it'll have an arrow up and down. And even if, and there's also another button on there that says simplify. Okay.

So let's say you wanted to learn like whatever popular song, go on ultimate guitar, look it up. There's a good chance that you can hit the simplify button and then transpose up or down. And there's some kind of way to play it with G, C, D and E and maybe like one other chord variating from that. But it's, there's, there's not very many, you know, not very many,

songs that you can't do that with yeah then he do you want to play ukulele right yeah that'd be sweet ukulele before yeah so a guy actually um there was a fan of mine who made me a

he was a welder in a shop and he made me a metal ukulele, welded it together. And I've been playing around. It's sick. I love the ukulele. Well, I've, I've, a lot of people in my age range fell in love with the ukulele because of SpongeBob was like the big show when we were all growing up. And I believe that's got the ukulele on it, but yeah, dude, that'd be sweet. Yeah.

When you play chords, I mean, obviously it's only four strings and the chords are even more simplified than they are in guitar. So it's, yeah, it's smaller though, right? Yeah. Well, it's definitely smaller. Yeah. So it's like freaking hard. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

a consulting company called Echelon Front, and we were talking to people. And we have this thing we do, and we were up at this campfire with these people. And we talk about when you're in a leadership position, the tone that you have, and the way that you're communicating to people.

You have to make sure that you're that you are have the right tone when you talk to people and it's very difficult to Fake it right and then I was playing the guitar because we're sitting around the campfire and I said listen to this and I played like a Like a a and I'm like that's a happy note right and this is universal It's universal and I was just doing this to echo before before you showed up. I'm like see this This is happy, but ring and then I'm like now this is a

A minor, and it's like... And that's universal. Like you were talking about how you go to different... What is it? Tribes that have never been contacted before. They will be able to tell the difference between A and an A minor. Happy, not happy. Like that is a universal thing that shows up. So...

The music is a real thing, Echo Charles. There's something going on there. What else? You got any other questions, Echo? Nope. Nope. That's it. Good to meet you. Likewise. Yeah. It's like, again, you got to think from my perspective, like,

This is just such a surreal moment to sit here with, like after watching countless episodes of you guys, I just don't know if I can even put into words, like how crazy it is to sit here at this table and talk to you. When you walked in, you were kind of like looking around. Like it was like, yeah, yeah. It's just like, Oh, that's cool. This is a day that I'll like for the rest of my life, this will be in the top 10. Like, I just don't know how else to say it. I don't want to like sound like an ass kisser, but it's,

you know, like, I don't know. And that's one of the first things everybody asked me when like random people at the airport and stuff, they'll always talk about a little bit of my stuff. And then they're always like, well, what's Jordan Peterson like, or what's Joe Rogan? Everyone that watches one of these podcasts episodes always dreams about like, oh yeah, if I get on here, this is all the things I would talk about. You know, it's like a, this is a life moment for me to be able to do this. So that's awesome. I really appreciate your time and I appreciate everybody listening to me ramble on for a little while. So it's,

it's been good to articulate a lot of this because I haven't had the opportunity to talk to this with a lot of people other than you know my dog Rufus don't really he doesn't have a lot to say when I tell him he's a good listener man well awesome man well thanks for joining us man yes sir really appreciate it thanks for coming out here to do it I know this is your first time in California we're having a little good you and I were having a little text conversation about what California is like and you know I almost started sending you you know pictures and

Because people don't, when you don't come from California, Echo Charles, you think that all of California looks like Baywatch and Berkeley. Like between those two things, that's what you think it looks like. But as I pointed out in text, you know, California is basically agriculture. The vast majority of the state is agriculture or just straight nature. And produces, I forget the figure that I was like, but produces like

12 or 15% of all the agriculture in all of America is here. California is somehow the, you know, growing up, there was always this expression about, well, everything that happens in California, it'll be to Virginia in 10 years. But California has been sort of the leader in,

of so many things and like so many things have originated from here. It is like probably our most, one of our most important States and isn't. So it's no surprise that it's in such a state of turmoil. And so like, it seems like it's just so mismanaged and so upside down right now. It's kind of like,

Like when California started to have so many issues and so much overregulation and stuff like however many years ago, that should have been a red flag that it was coming everywhere. But I think at the same time, though, I think this is an important – and I hated that I couldn't get on the West Coast last year. But it was – again, I'm working with agencies, and I only have the options that are given to me. And there was no – I just couldn't do a West Coast tour for 2024. I didn't have enough time to plan it.

But California is a state I really plan to focus on this year with even some of the... Like, this is a beautiful place. Oh, yeah. And when I... I was like... My jaw dropped when we walked out of the hotel this morning and just got to see San Diego in the daylight. It is like... You know, I...

I don't know. It's a, it's an Amer like this is America in a big way. And yeah. And it, look, I think the, the pendulum's about to swing back, you know, in the other direction because, you know, we just had these terrible fire fires up in LA and, and,

The mismanagement of those is very clear for everyone to see. And you're also seeing, you know, what what happened up in San Francisco and like all these companies leaving stores shutting down like it's unsustainable. It's just unsustainable. And, you know, it's like eventually imagine if you were a kid and your parents like bought you a house to live in.

And you're like, oh, awesome. And so you start like having people over and you're starting to have parties and more people are showing up. And now like the electric bill is kind of getting higher because people are jumping the jacuzzi and they're also like pouring drinks in the jacuzzi. And all of a sudden you wake up one day and you go, damn, dude, like I'm going to ruin this whole house if I keep going in this direction. I think California is saying that right now. They're just waking up and going, oh, yeah.

Hey, it seemed like you were super cool. Like when you were the guy, when people were coming over, they're like, oh my gosh, this is awesome. Wait, I can eat all I want out of the fridge. Of course you can have what you want out of the fridge. You want some booze, have some booze. Hey, you want to do some drugs? It's all good. Go ahead and do it. You want to, you want to bring your friends over too. And you would like, that's what we're doing in California. And so it feels really good. You know, you're going, oh yeah, we're really cool. We're great hosts. We're going to take care of everybody. But then you look up, you wake up one morning and you go, oh damn.

All my silverware has been stolen. You know what I mean? Like, oh, damn. Somebody took a shit in the fish tank, right? Or the sink or whatever. And you said to yourself, you know what? I'm not going to do this anymore. And you're going to put some rules in place and you're going to be a little bit more sane and you're going to recognize that

Hey, when someone, we're going to have to kick them out. Like if you shit in the fish tank, you're getting kicked out. If you, you just can't, you can't come in here and clean the refrigerator out. You can't do it. So that's where we are. It's a great California is a great example of how

about how both ways of thinking went against each other instead of helping each other. Like, yeah, like California had all this cultural and like a lot of, could a lot of good music came out of here and a lot of new ideas and like a lot of cool stuff. But then it's like, there was also a lot of really stupid ideas, but there was no way for any of those people to admit that they were stupid ideas because, uh,

then that means the other side's right. And same way, it happens both ways, you know. But yeah, I do think one day California will be a great place to live again. But right now... I don't think it's very far off, honestly. I think there's going to be a big shift in the government here in the very near future. And I think it's going to, you know, swing back to where it should be. And when you come back out, I mean, I'll come see you wherever you're doing shows, you know, I'll roll up. But man, if you go to...

Yosemite National Park, bro. It is like awe-inspiring. Well, I think I told you in the text, but it was funny of all the things that really opened my eyes to how beautiful California was was when they were chasing Christopher Dorner. And he was hiding out. He was hiding out in Big Bear. And this is...

This is just like the bad side of me. Yeah, you had no idea that that could exist in California. I just pictured California just being like dumpsters on fire and like, I don't know. I just... All I saw... The only pictures I'd ever seen of it were like LA. Like the... I don't know. I just had this bad... I don't know. I'm just...

You know, there's a lot of people, just a lot of stupid people like me that don't know any better. But yeah, it was a, but yeah, the Christopher Dorner chase. I was like, man, that's a, wherever that is, that's beautiful. Like I probably wouldn't want to run. I probably wouldn't want to be a hostage for Christopher Dorner, but I'll go there once they catch him. You know, what's crazy about that is so that place where he was big bear, that's, that is,

an hour and a half from LA. And when you're certain parts of the mountains, if you go like to the edge, the mountains that are south, you can see all of LA. It's like crazy. You can be up. Like if you look north, you'll see what looks like it could be just unbound nature for as long as you could see. And if you turn around 180 degrees and you look south, you will see

San Bernardino and Los Angeles just this entire sprawl and it's crazy that that exists but that sprawl of LA it once it ends like you get it ends like it's just stops and then you get into I mean this the the Sierra Mountains which are freaking amazing you know you go through Death Valley which is amazing in a different way I mean it's Death Valley for called Death Valley for a reason but it's it's it's nature

And then you go up north, like, man, it's just, that's another thing that's crazy is when you get to San Francisco, people think San Francisco is Northern California. It's actually just the midpoint of California. And a

above San Francisco, there's just nature. It's just nature forever. So yeah, man, when you get out here, hopefully we'll get to spend a little time and I can show you around some of that. I would love, I'd love to come back when you get your, but hopefully by then you'll have your gym rocking again and all that. I'd love to come expect,

hopefully by then I won't be such a fat slob. I can come work out with y'all. Come and do it, man. And jujitsu, that's another thing, you know, I wanted to chime in about four times today, dude. Another thing, jujitsu, man, jujitsu is community. It's contact. It's hanging out. It's three hours, two hours, one hour of hanging out with your friends. You know, if you're Echo Charles, you're spending at least,

at least 50% of the time just sitting around talking to other people on the mat, which is good. - Yeah, I would love to. So you're like the fourth person in two weeks to tell me I need to try it. So I guess it's a sign that I need to try it. - Oh yeah, no, it's awesome. But it's just, it's something that brings people together. It's something that brings people together. Kind of like, I guess you can't put it in the same exact category as food and music, 'cause food and music are very universal.

but maybe, I don't know, man, scrapping, scrapping. You definitely, for boys, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For boys. You know, I just got a new dog. Yeah. Cause of what happened to Odin, my other dog. But you know, uh,

neighbor's dog came over and like they're instantly doing jujitsu like instantly you know and when you have like little kids man little kids yeah little opportunity they're gonna wrestle you know especially what opens it up for him is if there's a pool because a pool like all of a sudden you have padding and you can kind of fight each other

yeah you know what i mean like a shallow pool or something yeah like a shallow pool like we just wrestle in the pool yeah so it's true that's good stuff but i think um california is gonna make some big changes in my opinion pretty quickly i think everyone's kind of so the question that i had for you i guess last before we like so so for like a guy just for other people listening but like for me too because i'd love to know this like

So like in my position, I've, you know, I was trying to, I was like, God, I got to the end of this tour last year. I was like 280 some pounds. I was like, I got to do something with my life, you know, get back into working out. So I've been eating like intermittent fasted and I've been working out basically every other day. My neighbor in West Virginia is like a physical trainer guy. So we've been doing a lot of different, but is there like a,

For like the people who are out of shape, who want to like... But it's so... And it's so hard to find a routine and there's a million different things out there. Like what's the most cut and dry? Like to get... You know, they say it takes 30 days to create a habit because you've got to create that neural pathway. So like it's so much resistance when you get into it. Like what's your... Like what's your advice to like the...

to like all the other slobs like me that want to get their life right and like they want to get I know that it's no easy way to do it but like from just a nutritional standpoint from a workout like what's the most simplistic way to at least introduce it do you think it's to find somebody to mentor like to go to a jujitsu gym or do you think it's

do you what do you think like what yeah if you're gonna i mean if you want to get into jiu-jitsu here's here's the following process do you have a pen you can write these things down um oh don't worry about it you'll be able to remember here's the deal if you want to start doing jiu-jitsu go to the jiu-jitsu gym and start training jiu-jitsu that's what you need to remember yeah i think i think as far as getting on the path for being more healthy

I think one of the best things you can do is before you do anything else in the morning, like get up and then go do something physical. I don't care if you go for a walk. I don't care if you do some weightlifting. I don't care if you do yoga. I don't care what you do. The simplest thing is walking, right? Echo Charles has been on a little kick for a little bit now doing his –

Stretching the term calling it road work so road work from the boxing world road workers You got new right at 4 o'clock in the morning, right? Yeah, even my freaking daughter Rana and my other daughters. They were getting fired up the other day talking about Mike Tyson was saying Why are you doing this because cuz it sucks cuz this is what we're doing, you know Like you can get fired up for road work, but that's legit road work. I

which is hard. That means you're getting up before the sun comes up, you're going out, you're doing it, right? Cool, fired up. Echo's doing Echo's version of road work. It's like road work,

Yeah road work Explain Cause I Honestly Explain your Yeah Cause I think that's a good place to start Yeah If you were to wake up and go for a Road walk Road walk There we go Well yeah I still think it's appropriate Road work the word Because yes in the boxing world It's true Road work But you're training for something Training for a match Or something like this But in life it's a lot more mellow than that Usually

Depends on your life, I guess. But usually it's a little bit more mellow. So we can instead of that freaking, you know, five mile run or whatever, we can just walk for 30 minutes or something like this. Right. And it's going to be super beneficial in all these other ways, even though it's like mellow. It's way more mellow than a freaking run. It does not suck at all, especially if you like audio books or this kind of stuff. It's actually kind of cool.

easy to pick it up as a habit if you have the time. If you're not rushed every day, like some people are rushed every day, I get it, whatever. But, but oh yeah, super beneficial. It doesn't zap you of your energy too or nothing like that. - Actually gives you energy. - Yeah, like you're kind of like flowing after, after. Yeah, if you, and,

it depends on where you live but me for example i started with just 15 minutes i just start walking 15 minutes audiobook boom freaking 15 minutes then i walk home that's 30 easy yeah yeah yeah this is the first thing drink water and just go you know and oh yeah then right there from there you can stack on any simple workout program and

But yeah, walking, if you could walk that 30 minutes every morning, then at least it's getting you going and it's also probably getting your mind in a state of like, all right, I'm doing, like maybe it gives you some accountability and some kind of point of reference to build off of. It does a lot of things, to be honest with you. The whole reason I started, which I think applies to a lot of people is, of course, I just started hearing all the benefits of walking or whatever, but if you kind of,

evaluate your life in my situation. Like I'm pretty sedentary, even though, yeah, I work hard at the workout and you know, workout, do all this stuff. Go to jujitsu, you know, sometimes varying levels of activity there. But, um, other than that, pretty sedentary, just sitting in front of the computer screen, even less sitting here. We've been like, yeah, mentally, but that physically this is sedentary work right here that we're doing. So when you kind of evaluate your day day to day, it's like, bro, I'm living a sedentary lifestyle, even though I'm working out. Yep.

Percentage wise, percentage wise, totally sanitary. Yeah. Compared to, compared to if we were back at the moving company, like all day we're lifting stuff. Exactly. Exactly. Right. So, and your body doesn't know the difference, right? Your body's not like, Oh yeah, you lifted today. Good job. Now you can be healthy, but it doesn't work like that, you know? So I'm like, all right. So then I just started walking and then yeah, all this. So, you know, I can reap all that, the benefits. And like I said, it's not like you're doing these hard two days either, right? You just walked for a little bit. Like a lot of people are doing that kind of activity anyways.

you know so it doesn't really register on the tired part of your your day but you get the benefits nonetheless you know so i think that's a really good like baseline wake up early go for a walk at a minimum and then just figure out like some basic calisthenics to do man like just even doing push-ups um you know push-up sit-ups pull-ups if you got them some squats like and i'm talking with weights i'm just talking like doing squats

just with air. Right. And I think those things right there, if you can't do a pull up, hang on the bar, like those kinds of things, which if you don't do them, you're, you will not be able to do them. Like that's a real problem with life. That's why, that's why as people get older, uh,

all of a sudden when they fall down they can't get back up again remember that commercial when we were kids like i'd fall in the can't get up that's a real thing because if you don't practice getting down and getting back up you know it's you won't be able to do it eventually and i've talked about a couple things where i've had situations in my life where i've had an injury and i couldn't do a certain movement for a while and when i went back to go back and do that movement again i couldn't do it anymore i had to re earn it had to get it back again

you know, and you can get it back again. It's not fun, but it sucks. It hurts your ego. Cause you're like, dude, I used to be able to do this. Nick. Now I can't do it. Yeah. Cool. Well, what are you going to do? Surrender the submit, you know, don't surrender, don't submit. But if you're not careful, you can look up. See one thing that's how did you say what? 31 right now? 32, 32 years old, bro. Like you're still at a stage where you are,

probably have most of your mobility that you would have had when you were 18, right? But now's the time if you don't start, if you don't use it, you'll lose it. This is a simple saying. So real basic stuff, man. Push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, squats. I would add one more element that I think no one really talks about that much that I realized...

it's almost intangible but i'm gonna explain it the best way i can if you care about the workout like some people you know when they get into work kind of you know i want to get in shape they care about being in shape they don't care about the workout so if you if you're like okay i can do i don't know even if you let's say we're starting super i'm gonna do 10 push-ups right we'll say i'm gonna do 10 push-ups okay i got all 10 push-ups like the next time you do push-ups but you got to care about that kind of stuff you know like you got to be like okay i i

I only got nine, that should bother you. You should be like, no, no, no, I need to do my 10 or 11 or 12. And once you get up to 15 or something, and then you're only doing 14 one day, that should bother you. You should care about that kind of stuff. And I think that way it'll keep you kind of in the game as almost like a little mini mission in your workouts, rather than, oh my gosh, I got to gut through this thing. And you're looking forward for it to be over, which is the case anyway, a lot of times. But if you have that little mission mindset,

set in it, it'll help you stick with it 100%. I remember like when I was watching your videos years ago, you know, like you're talking about your routine because there was videos talking about routine that really helped me with what I was, because I was waking up early in the morning and seemed like I just couldn't, I didn't have good time management. But I remember you talking about how important those workouts were in the morning. If you didn't get them, you were just like,

Like, so I think if you can, I think the battle for everyone is getting to that. Like maybe once you get to that point where it's such a habit, then it's like, but it's, it seems like it's like that first, but the 30 minutes of walking, like who, who doesn't want to just go walk for 30 minutes? That seems like such an easy way to get, get over that. Well, thanks. Yeah. I was just, I wanted to ask that while we were here. And then you asked about eating too. And it's like, uh, we, at our gym, there was a guy, uh,

And he had stacked on some weight over the years. Not good weight, by the way. And then one day he disappeared for a while. And he came back and he was like pretty, like he lost weight. And I said, dude, freaking dropping some weight. You dropping down a couple weight classes? And he's like, yeah, yeah. I dropped to like whatever it was, 38 pounds. And I was like, dude, that's awesome. I go, how'd you do it? And he goes, I stopped eating like an asshole.

And I was like, yeah. You know what I mean? I knew exactly what he meant. You know, it's like when you're eating pizza and fudge rounds and the other crap, you're going to get out of shape. And everyone knows what to eat. Like, eat things that are good for you. We all know what they are. So just don't eat like an asshole, man. That's the key. Yeah, well, yeah, it's just a lot of people don't realize how bad all that food. Nobody tells, you know, it looks so good and it's so appealing. Not even the junk food, but even just some of the...

Like I said, even some of the stuff you buy that you think you there's some things that are marketed as being healthy for you that are still like, you know, it's like the way that they do packaging and stuff now is like they just make it a certain color and use a certain font and use like one or two words. And you're like, yo, this must be good for me. And do my wife is pissed about this stuff. Like she because she'll fault. She'll be in the supermarket. My wife's very healthy.

And but she's not like a crazy healthy person, but she's like, you know, she likes to eat what's good and she'll come home and she'll throw stuff away. But, you know, I'll like open to throw away something and I'll see like packaged things in there. And I'm like, wait, why do we throw away food that we bought? You know, and sure enough, it'll be she goes, look at the ingredients and I'll look at the ingredients. And sure enough, a bunch of sugar and a bunch of chemicals. And it's just terrible.

So, yeah, you're right. You got to be careful. Just the packaging, they know how to do it. They know how to make the packaging look like it's healthy, and it ain't healthy. So you got to watch out for that. Anything else, Echo Charles? No. Chris, anything else, brother? I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Right on, man. Well, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for what you're doing to support rural America, which I think is going to be a big deal. And then thanks for making your music. Thanks for sharing your music. I know it was like kind of almost on a whim. It seemed like sometimes that you were uploading that stuff, but I think it's really helping a lot of people connect with other people, connect with their families, connect with their past, connect with their future, connect with themselves, connect with their faith, man. And I think it's awesome. So thank you. It means a lot coming from you. Yeah. Thanks, bro. Thank you. Appreciate y'all. And with that,

Chris Oliver Anthony has left the building however before he left the building he played a he played us one of the new songs oh yeah yeah and I'm gonna go ahead and call this right now look hey did I just hang out with the dude have I been trading text with him for a while would I be considered like I'm I'm a supporter yep 100% but I would not say this I'm about to make a statement the song that he just played us

Is going to be huge. It is going to be huge. I'm calling it and I wish I could like somehow like put a bet on it. Right. But I don't know how to do that. Can you say the name of the song or no?

Had to do with a woman. We'll say that. Yeah. Okay. So there you go. We noted. Is that for, what is it called? To verify my hunch? Well, I know the name of the song and I know how the song went because I listened to it. Agree. I like it. I'm less of a prophet than you, I think. So I'm going to... But I would... Put it this way. If you're absolutely 100, 200% correct, I will not be surprised because I dug it too. 100%. It was freaking...

It was freaking ripping. It was a ripping song. Yeah. It had everything. And it's like, look, it's not going to be a hit song like a pop song. It's going to be like a rock and roll like legend song. So that's what I'm here to tell you. Not to go too deep on this particular song, but you ever watch the movie Desperado?

Antonio Banderas. I think I saw parts of it. Anyway, there's this part right after the shootout scene, one of the shootout scenes, that this rock song kind of plays. It had like the exact same vibe as that song. And you like that song? Very much so, actually. You can see what I'm saying here. Yes, I do. That song is going to be epic. So hopefully it'll be dropping that thing pretty soon. And it's awesome. He's still got control over his whole, let's say, library and life and stuff. So very cool. Also...

If you're going to be getting it done musically, got to get it done physically. You heard him asking, like, you know, everybody's got to stay on the path. Yep, it's true. You can't be rocking out if you're not in shape. So that means you're doing what you got to do. It means you're getting after it. Even if it's just a road work in the morning. What? Echo Charles. Echo Charles road work. Now, keep in mind this road work I'm talking about as it applies to life.

Is a lot more beneficial than just the physical elements of it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. For sure. No, no, I, I get it, dude. I support you. Hey, but if you step it up a little bit more than that, sure. You're going to need some fuel. Hey, check out Jocko fuel, Jocko fuel.com. Uh, speaking of you could, you could hear Chris spent some time in Walmart. You can get Jocko fuel in Walmart, by the way, if you didn't know that you can also get it at Wawa vitamin shop, GNCs, military commissaries, a fees hand for dash doors in Maryland.

Wake Fern, ShopRite, HEB down in Texas, Meijer in the Midwest, Wegmans, Harris Teeters, Publix. Just got into Publix down in like the Southeast Florida. So if you need it, go get it. We're also in a bunch of gyms. We're in gyms, chiropractors. If you're a chiropractor or you own a yoga studio or a jujitsu gym or whatever, powerlifting gym, performance-oriented gym,

Sell Jocko Fielder. Email jfsales at jockofield.com. We got everything that you need. Got energy drinks. We got protein. I saw you drinking a protein during the recording of that last podcast. Were you going catabolic? No, I was not going catabolic. Danger? Well, you know, if you don't drink, if I in this particular situation didn't drink the milk, yeah. Did you lift this morning? No. Are you lifting after we get done? Yes. Did you walk this morning? No. No road work for the kid. Woke up, came here. Yeah.

Well, whatever you need, we got supplements for you. Greens, creatine. Are you on the creatine train right now? How many scoops a day? One a day, every morning. Two a day. Oh, damn, okay. So the protocol is, and this is helpful, the first thing in the morning, water already staged. I got that from you, by the way.

Creatine staged with the water, with the hydrate packets. Are you dry scooping it? No. Oh, I see what you're doing. Creatine, hydrate packet in the water. That's already, everything already staged. Boom. First thing in the morning, every single morning. I'm dry scooping creatine. Okay. Morning and night. Okay. I get it. Hey man, that's a good, cool. But yeah, I like my protocol. It's way more comforting. There you go. JockoFuel.com. Get what you need to be jacked.

and in shape and healthy capable the whole nine yards by the way we were talking about with with chris oliver anthony we're talking about bad foods go read the ingredients then read the ingredients on jocko fuel just do it go take a look we got you covered the clean goods there you go also

Originusa.com. We talk about America. We talk about the revival of America. We talk about bringing people back and bringing manufacturing back. That's what we're doing. Originusa.com. Everything made in America. Pants, jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, geese, jujitsu geese, jujitsu rash guards if you're in the no-gee

Era of your life. Yeah, we're making you two belts now. Yeah Actually, you know cuz I've only had one black belt yeah, and it is old you know, I mean, yeah, but it's special Yeah, yeah. No, definitely cuz you only had one but I'm getting a new one - yeah fully and I feel like I need it. Yeah, I

Yeah, especially the Origin one. I mean, you know, that's it. Yeah, that's the good one for sure. Yep. So, originusa.com. Everything 100% made in America. Hunt gear, workout gear, just everything that you need. Go check it out. Originusa.com. Boom. It's true also. Jocko's store called Jocko's store. This is where we can get our merch. When we're on the path, we want to represent discipline equals freedom. In my case right now, standby to get some. Good one.

get after it you know all these notions we'll call them for lack of better term anyway you want to represent that's where you go choco store.com the hoodies the hoodies quick flip hoodies they're not super heavy by the way they're like they're like a medium light perfect for spring by the way they're restocked there's a lot of people were hitting me up hey what's up with it you know they're restocked so boom hit it um also the shirt locker which is subscription shirt scenario get a new design every month let me ask you this

This is just for your opinion, because this will have no effect because I already sent it. But it's almost like a rebel against drinking scenario. So you know how sometimes there's like parodies, right? I'll do like a parody shirt. Like there's one that's like of a certain candy bar, but it says discipline, right? So it's like a be disciplined rather than eat candy bars, right? It's like an anti-candy bar scenario. There's one of anti-beer. So it looks like a beer brand.

but it says discipline equals freedom instead of the beer. Is that appropriate, you think? Or does it come off like, oh, I'm representing the beer brand. You know, like, what do you think?

I think it's actually pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's good because it's like you go, oh, yeah, beer. Oh, no. No discipline. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. You have the same little. Yeah. Little vibes. Yeah. So I didn't know if I was we I didn't know if we were taking it too far because there's one thing to be anti candy bar. That's like pretty like it's fun, you know, but to bring the beers into it. I don't know. Felt like, oh, wait, am I pushing it?

Maybe I am. Nonetheless, I sent it. I'm very anti-beer at this point in my life. There you go. There you go. So let's make fun of beer if we can. Yeah, yeah. It's all on jockelstore.com. Go ahead. Yeah. Check those out. Also, check out primobeef.com. primobeef.com from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

We're going to have to get Chris out there to have a look around Sean Glass's facilities out there. So check it out, primalbeef.com. We have steak for you. And we also have coloradocraftbeef.com, which is up in Colorado. Both companies, awesome people making awesome steaks. Primal Beef has jerky. Colorado Craft Beef has meat sticks.

And they got beef tallow. Have you heard of this thing yet? Of course. I'm down for the beef tallow. What are you, have you cooked with it yet? Yeah, not the Colorado craft beef one, but I have, no, I'm down. Yeah. It's good. Cause you can use it instead of putting like oil and butter or butter. Nope. Tallow. Boom. We're good. A hundred percent. So check those out. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also check out jocko underground.com. Also YouTube channels. We've got a bunch of them. Check out psychological warfare. You can get into that. And then we got some books. I written a bunch of them.

That just reminded me Chris said something about a book when we were out there talking, but I didn't we didn't discuss it Maybe he's writing a book. I don't know well check it out I've written a bunch of books if you want to know anything about leadership You can check those out a bunch of kids books way the warrior kid check those out Also echelon front we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership go to echelon front comm for details next big event that we have is in San Diego

It's February 23rd through the 25th. These things always sell out, so make sure you go and register. Go to echelonfront.com to register. Also, we have an online training course, or it's actually a whole series of courses, and it is called the Extreme Ownership Academy. You can learn the leadership skills that will help you with every aspect of your life. Go to extremeownership.com.

and register and take some of those courses. There's some free courses on there. Just take the free ones if you're like, oh, I can't afford this. Cool. Just take the free courses. Learn for free. They will help you. Guaranteed to help you. And if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their family, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to americasmightywarriors.org. Also check out heroesandhorses.org.

We know that Chris Oliver Anthony likes to go out into the wilderness and get in touch with himself and his soul. Well, that's what heroesandhorses.org does. And then also Jimmy May has an organization called beyondthebrotherhood.org. Helps SEALs get into the civilian world in a smooth manner. And if you want to connect with us, starting with Chris,

He's at oliveranthonymusic.com. He's on Instagram, oliver__anthony__music__. He's on Twitter, x, at, ain't got a dollar. And the one thing that he said he's going to stick with is his YouTube channel, at oliveranthonymusic. And you can find his music wherever you want to find music, whether that's Spotify, iTunes, everything.

They got you covered. So check that out for us. I'm at taco.com and both of us are on social media, whether we're hypocrites or not. Hey, listen, fire can be good, right? Yep. Sure. Can be good. Cook a steak with it. You can warm your house with it. So it can be good. It can also burn down half of Los Angeles in a real bad way. So let's think of social media as a little fire.

You can use it properly or you can let it destroy your life. So just be careful of that. If you can maintain some control, I'm at Jocko Willink and Echo is at Echo Charles. Just be careful. Don't let the thing burn you. Thanks once again to Chris Oliver, Anthony Lunsford for joining us tonight. Thanks for sharing your stories and your lessons learned. And thanks to all the hardworking people out there across America from the factories to the farms, from the construction sites to the cornfields.

Fixing our power lines, drilling for our oil and gas, building, making, and fixing our great nation. Thank you all for the hard work you do every day. Also, thanks to our service men and women who are out there every day and night, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

24 hours a day 365 days a year they're out there to protect us and our way of life and we thank you same goes to our police law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers Border Patrol Secret Service and all other first responders thank you for being there for us as well 24 hours a day 365 days a year protecting us here at home and everyone else out there going back to the book of Ecclesiastes when times are good

Be happy. But when times are bad, consider this. God has made one as well as the other. It is good to grasp the one and not let go of the other. Some good word from the good book. So stay grounded, everyone. Not too high, not too low. And until next time, Zeko and Jocko.