YouSaid · the spoken record

Oliver Anthony

lines on the record: 152
first: 2025-05-20
most recent: 2025-05-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You look at it, there's so many passionate people that are fighting all these different causes just in food. It's the word they use for more or less starvation. It's a more polite, it's called food insecurity. But if you look up just in Virginia, just where I live in Virginia, in the rural areas, how much food insecurity there is and how many empty vacant farms there are. It's like, this is an obvious problem that we should be on Twitter talking about nonstop. Like this is like everyone has to eat, you know. It don't matter what you vote for or what you look like or any of that crap. You can, you know, like.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know if we hate the way music is and all these artists are complaining about the way the venues are monopolized and the ticket sales are monopolized, and let's just go find other places to play music because there's so many people hungry for music in places they don't ever get it.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's like how much fire am I willing to play with? Because I know at some point I am going to get burned from it. I just pray a lot that God, I don't have a lot of self-worth in myself anyway. So I don't really care what they say or do to me or I don't care. I don't even care if I die, whatever. Just don't just protect the people I love is all. That's all I ask of God. I have this dream of just creating this parallel system that sits beside all these stupid systems that we live under, that are all sort of engulfed in this thing that we talked about at the beginning, this type of structure, you know. We're none of us where we're all just robots It's like if we hate”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the fire and the chaos, but also the love and just life. Life is just such a crazy, complicated, beautiful, disastrous thing. And then them is like, it is. It's the power structure. It's the same terrible side of us that created things like the Soviet Union. And it's ultimately what's created this monster that we all live under today, which now is not just doesn't just exist within the confines of the Soviet Union, but seems to almost be a global epidemic.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And powerless, but I just say, no matter how they make you feel online, or when you turn on the TV or when you look at polling numbers or whatever, like when you just look at all this trash that we digest every day, like you're, there's always, there will always be more of us than them. And to see the light in people's eyes when you say that. But the truth is like, and it's like, who is us and who is them? And it's like, Us just represents humanity and all the things we talked about so far, like just.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was terrified. I talked about this a little bit with him too, but I was terrified to even put the song out. I knew I was going to be the subject of scrutiny and judgment. And I knew people were going to like, you know, I kind of knew all that was going to happen. I was like, going back to that, talking about crowds. Stand in front of thousands of people and everybody be in some sense of unity like A lot of times when I end the shows, I'll always. I'll always end with this statement that just says, you know, no matter what, like No matter how you feel when you go online, you know, everyone feels so small and insignificant.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's all I got, though, you know? When you lose that, what the hell are you? And you see it, like you see these celebrity people. You know, they go off the deep end. It's like you got to have, you have to have something in your life to keep you centered and to keep you, um... Your whole perception of reality and like you're just existence in reality as all contingent upon this sort of like this center that you exist in and you have to if you don't have that then you're just flying through space. I mean we're all just riding on this rock that's going who knows how fast”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, we numb ourselves with medications or with alcohol or we scroll on YouTube for four hours a night instead of because we don't want to listen to our conscience. But there is this very intelligent, discerning thing inside of us that's able to tell us what's right and wrong. And it's a spiritual thing, I guess. And I just try to listen to that when I can. I don't know. I just still feel like I haven't done enough. I think you.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I've just tried to make every decision around as best as I can, like what I think the right thing is to do and who knows what the hell the right thing is to do. But I just try to follow. You know, we all have that little voice in us like that. We all have some what, and And I think sometimes we mask, it's hard for us to listen to that little voice, whether it's like, you know, whether it's our gluttony or our lust or our...”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, you got to think a couple months before this. Like, of course, I had a wife and kids that I loved and like I had a lot of really important things to live for, but I didn't have a whole lot to lose. Like none of this was even really real. I didn't care about that. Like, I didn't care to lose this just as quick as I got it. This didn't mean anything to me. It just meant something to me that I could do something for like, you know, It's like, even if I'm not smart enough to figure out how to fix some of my own problems in my life, the fact that I felt like I could help fix somebody else's, like that meant a hell of a lot more to me than any, that's what I didn't want to lose. I didn't want to lose those people's trust or like feel, you know what I mean?”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was all those messages I got? I mean, you can see it in the comment sections of a lot of the videos after everything happened, but people just like felt this spark, like, like, wow, like maybe we actually have a chance to, like, maybe we actually do have some kind of power, you know? Like those people put that song there. Nobody else and, like, gave me the opportunity to make, even without sign anything, I was still able to make millions of dollars and have financial freedom Just felt like I felt like if I was going to do anything like that, that I'd be betraying, like I would be taking those people and almost betraying them somehow, you know, like, uh, I hate the big machine just like everybody else. The last thing I'd want to do is Supported or be a part of it. Like, I want to watch it crash and burn, you know? Like,”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, she's got it, but not a lot of people would record her doing that song. But he's like, I don't know. It just was different. I just thought people ought to hear it. But he's, man, it was a blessing that he came along when he did. It was like, um... Really changed both of our lives.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He says he just wants it to sound like the way he likes hearing it, which kind of makes sense, you know? Like, it's kind of in the same way talking about when we were talking about setting the cameras up and a professional would tell you you needed three lights. And you're like, well, I think it would work with that he's just kind of like, well, it'll just work like this.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he started it just to do this beard thing with and then like, I don't know, he just kind of felt called to like keep going with it and it just sort of naturally progressed.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That dude will sit there and he'll just be sitting there at like two in the morning and he'll just all of a sudden do this little thing and he's got like the most amazing first part of this like song or we just started to co-write together like in the last few months so I'm really excited for that but if you go to his this is really funny too I'm sorry Draven I love you man so go to videos and This is what's so awesome about Draven. He was originally working for this lady who was trying to develop different types of hair care products, but he thought the market was too saturated. So he was going to get into beard oil. So he created Radio WV as like a fake plug page for his burly boy beard brand he was working with. So like if you look at Yeah, like that very first video. Yeah.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he's just a little bit younger than I am, and he wrote music and played, and he's got some of his, if you look up Draven Rife, he's going to kill me for even saying this, but he's got some pretty, dude. If he was like a pop singer, he would be like, he can write the most catchy stuff ever.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He probably is like, he's probably like my best friend now. We hit it off with this and we're like, we're like brothers now, I guess.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reach out to me to record, and he's like, Yeah, he's like, No, we got to do that one. And I was like, dude, that's all I got.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this video got uploaded and then driven from Radio WV would have gotten a hold of me in between this and that. He watched this and was like, dude, he said, we got to record that one. And like I said, I didn't have it all. I just had whatever was in that video is all I had written. I think it was just the chorus in the first verse. Draven saw that video”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just trying to figure out how to make it, yeah, but that's what all these are like the audio file from all these videos is what ended up on Spotify and all that. You know what I mean?”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literally, what I did was this video I took at my property. This is my carport where my camper was. I took this video, I went to some sketchy, virus-ridden MP three to wave to wave file transfer thing. I would rip the audio off of this video, put this on TikTok, and then put that on Disrocade, and that was the song. But basically, like this would have been the first time I played I've got to get sober all the way through. Like I would just keep writing it and working on it, writing it and recording myself. And maybe I would record myself 30 times over the period of like two months. You know what I mean?”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's always just on my phone. I would just keep recording. You were to go back to TikTok and look at any of those original videos. So, like the songs that ended up charting, let's say, like the ones that were on there that charted with Richmond, like this I've got to get sober. So literally.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These just terrible places to work, like dealing with different contractors and stuff. You were talking about wanting to go and talk to blue-collar people and all this, like, that's what I did for work basically for eight years was build long-term relationships with people in blue-collar. I was in the industrial space. So I would talk sometimes, I'd talk to 20 different people a day, you know. When you sit in a job site trailer and talk to a group of dudes and you're not there with some news camera, you're just there as like a random dude. Like you hear so much about what really goes on behind the scenes of the structure of what builds this country and keeps it going. And I think that's probably what it was. It was just how I felt, but also how I guess a lot of other, like, you know, it was just, I don't know, it just seemed like the truth. So.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's all I had. Yeah, that's all I had written at that point. Like, in my mind, that's the inspiration for the song was that little bit. And I wrote that just because I was on job sites all day and, you know, going into like...”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's probably the most terrifying to me is that that politeness is just theatrical. Whereas it emulates the respect that we would normally give each other in society if we were healthy and functional”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you really just stand back and look at all the problems we spend time focusing about on the internet versus all the things that are affecting us, like that really at our core even piss us off, it's got to be very disproportionate. And like the reason it got the reaction it did is because we all, like no matter what it is that we're upset about or what we think needs to be different in the world or our opinions of things or how we're raised or what our parents taught us, it's like I think we all feel a little bit out of control in this new society. We all feel like we're probably. We probably all feel like we're falling into this kind of like corporate power structure where none of us where we all are just robots. We're all just, we're not allowed to be ourselves and be human almost, you know?”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was one of the only times that I can think where there was that much of a sense of unity among people who otherwise wouldn't. I mean, I think about 9-11 when I was a kid. I was in fourth grade, but God, man, people were just like people just put everything aside there for a little while. And it was kind of like, there's bigger problems that just aren't in our face. Man, if they're in your face just for a second or two, you realize like. It's hard in your mind to create a graph that's got all these, but you know, we argue about a lot of these problems, but if you were to really look at them like.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and so many people identified different elements. Like I said, it goes back to when we were kind of talking when we first got here, but it was crazy how it was almost like at the beginning along with the scrutiny and some of the other things, it was a lot of different people like almost fighting over me or fighting over it because it resonated with different, it resonated with people who voted differently than each other, which is probably a pretty terrifying thing if you're in the business of keeping people divided and angry at each other.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that is true. I mean, but specifically in my case, I mean, really. It applies more than it probably does in a lot of cases with crowds and music. You know, talking about Richmond, I wasn't necessarily even excited that Richmond did as well as it did. It was like, in a way, it was almost like alarming that it did so well, you know, and so those crowds that show up, like maybe they do like my music, but I also think they're there for something There is something bigger about it. I mean, I wish I would have done a better job of having people there at shows to capture some of those crowds I had in twenty four man. You mean that?”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or like expand your thinking, it's easy to just, it's kind of like a cult-like type of thing. It's like, you know, here's, this is what we all agree with. And if you don't, then go and get, you know, like, but we're far too complicated for it to really work that way”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all 100% accurate. Yeah, that's the crazy thing. But it all ties into that same thing. In politics now, it's almost like there's a rule book that you have to follow. And if you can't agree with this unless you also agree with that, you know, it's like, and maybe it's like the places, the way that we receive information about what's going on in the political landscape is always so biased. It's like the... Well, it's contingent upon this algorithm, this algorithmic system that we live under where we're fed. It's like we're almost fed certain subcategories. And it's easy to fall into that because you don't like hearing things you disagree with. And so it's a lot easier to just turn the TV on or go on Facebook and look at whatever page posts things that you know you're going to consistently agree with.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you get those people out of a 4x4 square and they're entrapped in the same kind of box that the people at Boeing might be with that struck? You know, it's too it's the tornado metaphor. I mean, but it applies in politics too, like there needs to just be a tornado through politics and we need to figure, we need to just like lay all this other stuff aside and just figure out what's really pissing everybody off, what's really affecting our quality of life. A lot of times we're arguing over the symptoms of problems instead of identifying the problems, if that makes any sense. I mean, if Jordan Peterson were here, he would tell us about fire and how important that is and burning. But it's all the same.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like saying that I'm not in politics. People are like, well, of course you're in politics. And I don't know whether I am or not, but just, um, I do think a lot of people in politics Like, as far as People who sit on the internet all day and argue about stuff on X or on whatever Facebook and all like, I do think their heart is in it for the right reasons. They observe that there's a lot of things wrong in the world that they'd like to see different. It's just”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I still do it all the time. It's just a different experience now, but I'm like a goodwill junkie. Like most of even my clothes were from goodwill, but like I have this. I have this addiction with buying paintings from Goodwill. Like the $8 paintings where it looks like somebody was following along with a Bob Ross. Video and it didn't work out quite right. I buy every one of those. I'll go in there and buy like 10 of them. And so just even, you know, anytime you got into public now, it's just like you know it's going to be a little different than it was. You know, I don't know if that makes sense or not.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the time you're three years old and you're starting to play with other kids and like developmentally learning like how to share and how to interact and you're on the, you're playing on the playground with kids and learning how to like set rules and boundaries and how to like basically fit into society and like so you have this whole learning pattern up until whatever point in time when success happens and then it's like all that shifts pretty dramatically in a relatively short period of time and So like how do you how do you think like managing your previous like previous friendships or your like you know how has that been tricky for you or like”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, Lex. Have her many years ago was in a different place in society than Lex is now. And so it's like every conversation you have or every relationship you have is inherently different, even if you aren't any different. Friends that you had from before maybe or even just new people you meet, your interactions with them are going to be a lot different than if this wasn't a thing. And so it's like that can be tricky too. When you've spent your whole life.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe one thing that we felt similarly, I would imagine you way more than me is just feeling like. Like, wow, I have the ability to influence or the ability to. To either bring truth And you're just like, man, I'm an idiot. Like, I don't know, you know, like I would have never guessed. I mean, we were kind of talking about that before, about like, I would have never guessed that it would have turned that this would have turned into all this, but it is a weight that you bear, whether you really even acknowledge it or not, you know, like”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who are implementing all that dysfunction suffer, and the people at the bottom. It's like it's not good for anybody. I had thought now that I'm doing this that I could escape away from that, but that exact same mentality and that dysfunction and that inefficiency I still battle it every day.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because they don't believe there's a lack of leadership, and if they don't believe in that leadership, then why the hell would they be motivated? I mean, I remember, um, A while back watching Jocko Wilnick talk about that when he was in leadership, when he was leading his guys. I think he mentions it in his book as probably where I remember seeing it. One of his books. And he talks about how important it was for the people under him in rank to believe in what he was, the actions he was giving them, even if he necessarily didn't agree with him himself. It was like it's really hard to take orders and go and like to have human spirit and especially in something that's innovative and not if you're working for a company where you just think everybody's dumb. I mean, I can certainly relate with that. I mean, God, that's all in my old job. That's all we did was we spent half our day just talking about how dumb we thought everybody was that was above us. You know, it's like it's easy to fall into that and the corporate world. And so, yeah, the morale gets terrible. And everyone suffers as a result of it, you know? Like the people at the top.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we touch base a little bit on Boeing. And of course, they're having a lot of problems now, it sounds like. And he was comparing that with SpaceX or with, you know, like I think it's that exactly what we touched on with that thought process of that sort of dehumanization within companies. I think that's what ultimately causes maybe, I don't know if there's a connection there or not, but it seems like Boeing is a very would be more of that, they don't have that tornado. They're very like H, like he was telling me even just with his protocols and some of the people he worked with, like everything's just very, you know, lightly touch everything. No one, don't touch anything too hard.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think that's because I'm not super well versed about all this, so I'm probably dumb to even mention it, but this guy who's been helping me with doing a documentary, he's been following me around since the very first show, August of 23. His background was doing promotional videos for Boeing, like for on their new spacecraft to pitch it to whoever.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to be a human and be a good little corporate employee at the same time. And as our whole society moves more into like becoming basically one big corporation, it's like you don't want to piss the HR lady off, so it's a lot easier for me to just. All sort of just turning, we're all turning into robots”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so then they wonder these companies just slowly kind of fall apart and disintegrate because they're so worried about structure. And, you know, like, I mean, God, man, even in America today, our culture has become, because so many big corporations own and manage everything that we live under, like food, agriculture, healthcare, like social media. It's all in corporate structures that it's almost like a lot of the problems we find ourselves in now with society, I think, are like It's just because of it's almost like corporate HR has been implemented into our whole thought process of everything, you know, it's like I think that's kind of what you're touching on though. It's like”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too much because maybe part of yourself isn't something that's accepted in this like dystopian nightmare that you go to work at every day and so you just got to do your best to just not step on any toes or do anything that makes you stand out too much. You know, and now it's like, Now, like when you scroll through some of these videos of people, even when I was still working my lame job, it was like there was this whole big thing of people talking about quiet quitting or something like that where they were just going to go to work but not really do anything. But”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're there to fill a role contractually. And if they, I think if they bring too many of their human elements into that, then they jeopardize losing their sense of security. And it's all just out of fear. It's out of fear of losing your job. I mean, it's the reason why all the songs say Oliver Anthony and not Christopher Lunsford on them, you know, like it's fear of it's so difficult to, especially now it seems, I mean, who knows? I didn't, I was never around in the 40s or 50s to work a job. I'm sure they were probably pretty miserable back then. You know, they talk about now like how difficult it is. The impossibility of having a single family household or anything else. But when you find a decent paying job that you can do without it just torturing you every day, that's a pretty important thing now, you know? And so it's pretty easy to just kind of turn yourself into a robot for eight or ten hours a day out of fear of, it's like you don't want to be yourself.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think professionalism in general, like. The tactic, the tactics of corporate America to anything that is. Baseline artistic is not going to end well”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially some of the new songs that are coming out, they'll be. Probably not. I mean, I don't know what they'll be. I don't know. What is country anymore, anyway? I don't know that many people who listen to the type of music that I grew up listening to probably listen to country radio anymore anyway. Like I think there's quite a lot of people who don't. Sort of disowned that space, you know, in commercialized country, you only really get what sells, which in a lot of what sells isn't. Necessarily, what matters.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what I liked about John Denver, he was a little bit like he let himself be a little bit corny in the spirit of like having fun with it. Like great example, there's this older guy that not a lot of people have heard of named Roy Clark, but my farm's like a mile down the road from Roy Clark's old farm, but he used to be on Hehaw. I don't know if you ever heard of that old show from like the 60s or whatever, but crazy dude. He could pick any instrument up. Like there's videos on YouTube of him, but he would just sit there and just pick anything up and just rip it to death. But he would always just be real silly about it. He never took never took himself too seriously, you know.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there was one like that. It was in Matoka. It wasn't that far from where I lived. The place is gone now, but it was about as big as the rumor in here, if that, you know? Like. The ceiling tiles were yellow from where everybody had smoked in it since the beginning. But like, yeah, that was my little spot, those little type of spots. Back then, it was like, I don't know, fishing in the dark, nitty gritty band, or like, um, Of those old Hank Jr. songs, like any of those bar type David Allen Co., like you never call me by my name, any of that kind of stuff. And I haven't even played any of those in forever now, but that was. Of those ones where you get people singing along and stuff, that's what I'd always try to do, you know”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never drank in bars either. Like, I'm not a, I wasn't really a social drinker, so I was just there to try to do the mic. So it was kind of, I was a little out of place anyway. I feel kind of out of place in a bar to start with.”
2025-05-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source