Oliver Anthony sang the pain of working America, then refused the machine

Lex Fridman opens by describing the night before: he had been texting Oliver Anthony from an open mic, watching a big man on a keyboard give "Great Balls of Fire" everything he had for five people plus Lex. The player was sweaty, long-haired, and inside his own world. Fridman loves that courage. Some open-mic regulars still want fame; others have given up on it, or never wanted it, and are there for the pure act of playing.

Anthony started in shady bars, and a lot of those nights were embarrassing. More than once he got through one song, froze on the next, walked off halfway through, put the guitar in the case, and left. He was not a social drinker, so he felt out of place before he even bombed. The rooms were the size of the studio they are sitting in, ceiling tiles yellow from decades of smoke. His go-to covers were bar songs that get people singing: Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's "Fishin' in the Dark," Hank Jr., David Allan Coe.

He names a counterexample he does not want to forget: Johnny Staats, a West Virginia mandolin player who has won awards and could tour with anyone, and who still works full-time for UPS. When you meet Staats, Anthony says, you can tell he has a joy that the professional circuit would probably sand off. Fridman notes that country music can go to the fun place or the dark place. Anthony, especially on the newer songs, more often goes to the pain. He is not sure what counts as country anymore, because commercial radio only delivers what sells, and a lot of what sells is not what matters.

Fridman has watched what happens when a recording is "polished" until the soul is gone. Big artists, he says, get run through a machine that over-smooths the raw power and uniqueness of the person. Anthony agrees in stronger terms. Applying the tactics of corporate America to anything that is baseline artistic, he says, is not going to end well. Individually the people inside those rooms can be brilliant. Together, a corporate speak comes out, and the soul dissipates.

The reason, in his account, is fear. Employees are there to fill a role contractually. If they bring too many of their human elements in, they jeopardize the security of a decent-paying job that does not torture them every day. So they spend eight or ten hours as robots, trying not to step on toes in what he calls a dystopian nightmare. He used his grandfather's name, Oliver Anthony, rather than Christopher Lunsford, for the same kind of fear: standing out can cost you. Quiet quitting, the trend of showing up without really being there, strikes Fridman as especially sad. Companies then wonder why they slowly disintegrate.

Anthony pushes the observation up a level. Food, agriculture, healthcare, and social media are owned and managed inside corporate structures, so society itself starts to feel like one big corporation. Corporate HR, he says, has been implemented into the whole thought process. It is hard to be a human and a good little corporate employee at the same time, and nobody wants to set off the HR lady, so it is easier to just beep. Fridman has heard the same thing from engineers. Jim Keller and Elon Musk, in his telling, are the people who insist on ground truth, and that work has no place for polite speak. Other teammates then swoop in and repair the damage the tornado has done.

The documentary filmmaker following Anthony since the first show in August 2023 used to make promotional videos for Boeing. He described a culture of touching everything lightly, of never touching anything too hard. Fridman fills in the rest: Bob from this department schedules a meeting with John and Debbie two and a half weeks out, paperwork accumulates, and the people actually building things hit a wall. Morale dies. At Anthony's old job, he and his coworkers spent half the day talking about how dumb the people above them were. He had hoped music would be an escape. The same mentality, he says, is something he still battles every day.

Fridman has been going through low points of his own, and Jocko Willink keeps texting in a high-testosterone register: "You good bro?" The check-in matters because influence is a weight. Anthony felt it too. Every word can matter to someone, and the person saying the words still thinks of himself as an idiot who never guessed any of this would happen. Fridman loves people and has a general optimism about humanity, so being attacked, misrepresented, and lied about at scale disorients him. When enough people tell you that you do not know what you are doing, you start to want to hide.

Anthony points out that Lex-from-years-ago sat in a different place in society than Lex-now, so every conversation is inherently different even if the man is not. Friends from before treat him a little differently. They bust his balls noticeably less, and Fridman needs that all the time, because that is how his friends show love. Famous friends can still roast him; Joe Rogan does it nonstop, and it feels good. Ordinary public life is altered in smaller ways too. Anthony is a Goodwill junkie who buys the $8 paintings that look like a failed Bob Ross tutorial, ten at a time. Anytime he goes out now, it is going to be a little different than it was.

People tell Anthony he is in politics. He is not sure whether he is or not. The people arguing all day on X and Facebook, he thinks, often have their heart in the right place: they can see things that are wrong. The problem is how to get them out of a four-by-four square. Politics, like Boeing, needs a tornado that sets the rule book aside and asks what is actually wrecking quality of life. Too often the fights are about symptoms. Information arrives pre-sorted by algorithm, so it is easier to stay on the page that never challenges you. That, he says, is cult-like, and human beings are far too complicated for it to work.

Fridman brings up one of his favorite moments from Anthony's conversation with Jordan Peterson. They had been shooting the shit about live music, and Peterson veered to Kierkegaard: the crowd is untruth. A crowd's default incentive is to conform to a narrative. The moment a performer speaks to the crowd rather than to the individuals inside it, he is speaking to the lie. Anthony says the point applies to him more than to most. He was not even excited that "Richmond" did as well as it did. In a way it was alarming. The 2024 crowds had a revolutionary intensity he wishes he had captured on camera. People were there for the songs, and also for something they could not find anywhere else.

The song resonated with people who vote differently from one another, which he figures is a terrifying thing if your business is keeping people divided. It was one of the only times he can remember a sense of unity like the days after 9/11, when he was in fourth grade. Left and right were using different words for the same feeling: people in power were screwing the working class. Fridman adds that politeness can be dangerous. There was a lot of politeness in the Soviet Union, and underneath it was Chernobyl. Bureaucracy needs civility and paperwork to function, and atrocities can happen underneath. He quotes Tom Waits: a town needs a little drop of poison. Some swearing, some meanness, some intensity, or the system cannot correct itself. What terrifies Anthony is that the politeness is theatrical. It only emulates the respect a healthy society would actually give.

Fridman asks how the song was written: how many edits, which lines haunted him. Anthony pulls up TikTok instead. In July 2023 he had posted a fragment, just the chorus and the first verse, filmed at the property. The comments were already telling him he was about to blow up. A few days later someone wrote that he should finish it, that it might be real popular. That scrap, he says, was the inspiration. He wrote it because he spent all day on job sites, walking into terrible places, dealing with contractors. For eight years his work in the industrial space was building long-term relationships with blue-collar people. Some days he talked to twenty different people. Sit in a job-site trailer without a news camera, and you hear what actually keeps the country standing.

He does not jot lyrics in a notebook. He records himself on his phone, over and over, sometimes thirty times across two months, until a song exists. For tracks that later charted, including "I've Gotta Get Sober," the process was almost comic: film in the carport where the camper sat, run the clip through a sketchy MP4-to-WAV converter, post it to TikTok, and upload the same audio to DistroKid. Cicadas came in on the recording and felt, to him, like God. He had maybe 10,000 followers. The comments already sounded like people being helped: don't sell your soul, this is the best music I've heard in a long time.

Draven Rife of Radio WV saw the Richmond fragment and said they had to record that one. Anthony told him that was all he had. Rife is younger, writes catchy songs of his own, and has become something like a brother. Radio WV started as a fake plug page for a beard-oil brand Rife was building because haircare felt too saturated. He kept going because he felt called to, and because he wants the recordings to sound the way he likes hearing them, the same instinct as hanging a podcast with whatever light you actually have. Anthony's legal name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford. Oliver Anthony was his grandfather, born into 1930s Appalachia: dirt floors, seven kids, hard times. He used the name as a dedication. He is happy to be called either one.

He posted "Rich Men North of Richmond" on August 8, 2023. He was at work that day. It went to number one, with tens of millions of views and listens. On August 17 he wrote a post Fridman calls beautiful and gangster. Browsing 50,000-plus messages, he said, painted a brutally honest picture: suicide, addiction, unemployment, anxiety, depression, hopelessness. People in the music industry give blank stares when he brushes off $8 million offers. "I don't want six tour buses, 15 tractor trailers and a jet." He does not want stadiums or the spotlight. He wrote the music because he was suffering with mental health and depression. The songs connected because they were sung by someone feeling the words in the moment. "No editing, no agent, no bullshit. Just some idiot and his guitar."

The philosophy behind walking away was those messages. People felt a spark, a sense that they might actually have some power. Those people put the song there, nobody else, and even without signing he was able to make millions and have financial freedom. Signing, he felt, would be taking those people and betraying them. He hates the big machine as much as they do. The last thing he wants is to support it or be part of it. He wants to watch it crash and burn. A couple of months earlier he already had a wife and kids he loved, and not a whole lot to lose. None of this felt real. What he did not want to lose was the sense that he could help fix someone else's problems even if he was not smart enough to fix his own.

He tries to follow the little discerning voice that gluttony, lust, medication, alcohol, and four hours of YouTube are so good at drowning out. Fridman calls him an inspiration on both sides of the transaction: to the people the songs help, and to artists who have to survive the test of fame, money, and power. A lot of people sell a bit of themselves in the wave. Anthony's reply is blunt. That integrity is all he has. When you lose it, what the hell are you? He was terrified to put the song out, because he knew the scrutiny was coming. He still ends shows with a line about the feed making you feel small and powerless: there will always be more of us than them. Then he has to ask who "us" and "them" are. Us is humanity, fire, chaos, love, life. Them is the power structure, the same terrible side of people that built the Soviet Union and now looks to him like a global epidemic.

He has a dream of a parallel system sitting beside the ones he thinks are broken. If artists hate the way venues and tickets are monopolized, go find other places to play, because plenty of towns are hungry for music they never get. In rural Virginia he sees food insecurity next to empty farms, while half the country is obese on bad food. That is an obvious problem, and it does not require a greasy-haired corporate schmuck's permission to fix. Fridman hears in the music a soundtrack to the American habit of revitalizing itself when the bullshit piles too high. Anthony adds that the country's diversity was a strength long before the word was hijacked: people who spoke different languages and practiced different religions did not cross an ocean for a camping trip. They were tired of kings telling them what they were allowed to believe.

Fridman wants to take a months-long road trip through small-town America and talk to construction workers, plumbers, waitresses, oil-rig crews: people who do something real, who do not make much money, and who have a richness that is rarely shown. Anthony has been hearing from those people for years. So many of the messages, even in the last couple of days, start with "Hey, I'm a nobody." The people who built, preserve, and maintain the structure everyone else lives inside have the least representation. Meanwhile, he says, some of the most dimwitted people are idolized on television. His friend Jocko, who is not the SEAL, works seventy or eighty hours a week on the Chesapeake Bay tunnel job. He has been on heights Anthony would not climb and underground in places Anthony would not go. Almost nobody will ever know.

The craziest place he ever worked was Perfect Air in Marion, North Carolina, a commercial air-conditioning factory, now closed, that did not pay well. The hiring pool was people with criminal backgrounds who could not get jobs elsewhere, or idiots who dropped out of high school, which is how he puts himself at eighteen among coworkers in their fifties and sixties. Those people, he says, were far more interesting than most celebrities, who strike him as boring, airheaded, and unrelatable. A woman named Denise worked the assembly line beside him. She and her husband had been manufacturing methamphetamine; he took the fall and went to prison, and she was on probation. Aside from that, she was a very sweet lady, a character in the best way. Drive two and a half hours southwest of Northern Virginia, Anthony says, and you are on another planet. That is America to him. Modern country music is often just people emulating those people.

Trades are dying in part because they are not popular in the culture: agriculture, plumbing, electrical work, mining, underwater welding. Shed light on them, he thinks, and you could change how the country perceives the work and even make it cool. Early on he wanted to do prison shows and rehab shows, to immerse himself in the mental state of those rooms; the idea got stalled and he wants to pick it back up. A man in West Virginia with land beside Anthony's works at Lowe's full-time and wants to sell so he can put cabins up, because his nineteen-year-old son needs heart surgery. All most people will ever see is the guy pulling lumber. Behind that is a father trying not to lose his son. Anthony's larger dream, if any legacy remains, is organizing and protecting the people who still fill the old role of the church: catching those who have fallen off the tiny boat.

Fridman asks for the full story of the lowest point, before the music, before the blowup. Anthony says it is almost not about where you are. It is about where you perceive yourself to be. He dropped out of high school at seventeen, ran away from home, and has always had an authority problem. He did not want to listen to his parents or go to college; he wanted to move into the mountains. He got a girl pregnant and had his first child at eighteen, or just about to turn nineteen, while working at the air-conditioning factory with convicted felons. From there everything was reactionary. He jumped from job to job, like most everybody else, until he quit believing in himself. Facing that in the mirror was harder than getting drunk and doing the bare minimum. You do not really care if you live or die.

His definition of depression is an overwhelming sense of numbness. Nothing that mattered before matters. You cannot find meaning, purpose, or excitement in anything. With men who commit suicide, he thinks it is almost never one bad day. You think negatively about yourself for weeks and months, you skip the things you are supposed to do, and pretty soon you have built a mountain of mismanaged, neglected stuff. Climbing it looks enormous. On the other side is an easy detour: putting your big toe on the trigger. Friends he has lost often seemed fine. Men mask it. At that point love and joy are almost invisible. All you see is fear, responsibility, and a mountain you are not sure you can climb.

What helped him open his mind was a little of the New Testament: apostles in prison, facing death, writing with joy. Perspective, he says, is the whole game, which is why a Kurt Cobain-type story still baffles him. Andrew Huberman's observation stuck: people will keep a dog on its medication and skip their own, because they do not see the flaws, the sin, and the disgust in the dog that they see in themselves. Stop taking care of your body long enough and self-worth goes to zero. The idea that something bigger than him loved him despite the wretchedness is what motivated him to quit drinking. In his case the timeline was almost unfair: within a month, all of this happened. He has watched friends come back to life with nothing more than a glimmer, even with $30,000 in credit-card debt, a job they hate, a car that will not start, and a girlfriend who left. That faith can push a person a long way. Nobody, he thinks, should have to face that mountain alone.

Fridman adds that losing a job and then a partner can yank the entire support system out from under a man. Anthony has watched friends enter a relationship and, within a year, become a shell, because they were borrowing self-validation from someone else. There is a base layer, Fridman says, at which you are alone and have to be strong by yourself. Anthony would be a fool to deny God in the experiences he has had, but you can isolate yourself from that too. Money does not buy the things that make life worth living. War, Fridman has seen, strips away homes and possessions and leaves the same residue: the people you love. Anthony still gets nervous before shows. His hands sweat. He has not really played the old songs since September, because feeling them is the only honest way to do it, and that takes a toll. Songs arrive like dreams. If you do not catch them, they are gone. He will not force truck-beer-girl songs to fill a quota.

If someone is at the suicidal edge, Anthony's practical advice is to go outside. In 2019 he sold a modest house, found 92 acres in Virginia for about $1,100 an acre, and started paying $600 a month on the land. He bought a camper for $750 off a hunt club in Waverly, dragged it up a mile off the road, financed a little Kubota at zero percent, and recut an old logging road. It put a serious strain on the marriage. It was also, he says, when he really started to live, and the beginning of his restoration. His grandfather's generation was trying to make enough to pay the tax on land by growing tobacco. Two generations later, Anthony felt called to get back toward that purity: raising animals, putting them in the freezer, watching living things grow.

He has since bought a permaculture farm that had sat idle for six or seven years, with herbs, an orchard, and blueberries. The dream is to make it the optimal place for a human mind to repair itself: the right animals, food, trees, wildlife, noises, and smells. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came out to the property early on, and the idea was to launch a kind of healing center once Kennedy's other fights eased. Whether that partnership happens or not, the goal stands. They have laying birds and meat birds, pigs, sheep, and goats; cattle, Wagyu and Angus, are planned for spring. Large-animal therapy for veterans is something he wants on the land because it is relaxing and rewarding in a way he cannot get from a screen.

What he finds in nature, and cannot find in the civilized world, is certainty. Civilization is despair, disorganization, chaos, unstructured and uncertain. Nature has systems all the way down to the microbial life in soil. Bacteria fix the ground, plants restore nutrients, trees bring birds. There are literal tornadoes, but watching the structure restores his faith that something bigger than him is at work. Sitting by a creek with no road noise, in stillness, watching the earth do its thing, is the strongest medicine he knows. Fridman spent a day and a night alone in the Amazon, which he puts at an eleven if a Virginia creek is a three: an orchestra of insects, birds, and monkeys, quiet only in the sense that there is no machinery. A distant chainsaw, when it comes, is an undeniable symbol of what civilization does to the woods. Anthony's monkey brain, watching trees knocked down for subdivisions, wants to burn it all down. He cannot describe the feeling except that it is not good.

Technology is a gift with a missing fence. Anthony can open YouTube to learn how to change the brake shoes on his truck, click a short, and be four videos deep watching someone throw a pie before he remembers the brakes. Fridman hates what that dopamine loop does. Prolonged time in nature, days away from the internet, feels like the opposite, and he does not like what X and Instagram do to the soul. Anthony's version is that the feeds emulate what healthy humans need and then deliver only the instant-gratification slice. The long-term fulfillment never arrives.

The strange mercy of the present, he says, is that it is a breath of time. Ordinary people have theoretical access to nearly all the world's information, and they still remember what life was like before. AI still needs us more than we need it, for a very short period. If that breath leaves, he believes the change is irreversible, even if it takes two or three more generations. His proposal is almost comically concrete: look at what actually trends, wood-splitting, plumbing, blacksmithing, and figure out how to offer those things as real-life experiences. Fridman takes it as a duty to pierce the Silicon Valley bubble, and also the anti-tech bubble. The tools are coming either way. The question is how to build them without dragging civilization into a black hole of engagement, where instead of reading Dostoevsky you watch someone shake on Instagram and feel horrible five minutes later.

His unprofessional diagnosis is a fork. In the last decade or two the physical world has gotten drearier, streets more littered, jobs worse, problems less led. The internet and games have gotten more immersive at lightning speed. Escape becomes rational. He is not against technology; evil existed before computers, often in more treacherous forms. 2025 still lets a person set up cameras and build a platform that could not have existed in world history. Keep going without guarding the real-world side, though, and people will not even know what they are missing. All that will be left is girls on Instagram. Fridman tested the other side of that fear with Tim Sweeney of Epic Games. Playing Fortnite with actual friends was basically a phone call with visuals. It works, he thinks, only if you keep returning to physical reality: the hunting trip, the fishing trip, dudes in the woods. Anthony has hundreds of hours in Modern Warfare 2 and real friendships from it. He has never once fixed a fight with his wife by text. That takes a body in the room.

Loneliness, he thinks, is underneath a lot of the symptoms. Digitally everyone is connected; actually everyone is lonely. Youth mental health, blue-collar suicide, the collapse of local structure: those are problems that need more time together in real life. Fridman is tired of watching left and right lose their minds, friends drifting to extremes, Trump derangement on one side and a cartoon of the radical left on the other. To him, Trump and Biden are both, ultimately, rich men north of Richmond. Power corrupts in those seats. The one human thing he will say for both men is that they genuinely love their families. Anthony's close is the same line he uses onstage. The power people have exists because we allow it. There will always be more nobodies than people at the top. This is a short window in which to figure out what to do with that fact.

Fridman had seen a three-legged cat on Anthony's Instagram and wanted the story, in part so he could read a Bukowski poem afterward. A neighbor, an older woman in a single-wide trailer, feeds thirty or forty cats. On a pouring Saturday at eight in the morning she started yelling that a cat was stuck in her car. She had turned the key; a kitten under the hood had its front leg wrapped in the water-pump pulley, almost entirely torn off, pinned upside down. Anthony's wife is a veterinary technician. They borrowed a terrible-looking kitchen knife, cut the cat free, and spent more than a thousand dollars getting the wound sutured so it could recover. They named her Hop. He could not let them put the cat down.

Fridman calls that one of the most amazing things about humans. It is irrational to spend that much on this cat when so many others are suffering. People do it anyway, because they see the creature in front of them and will move mountains. Anthony connects it to the dog-medication problem. Compassion comes easily toward animals because they have no political views and cannot argue back. The reality, he says, is that we are all just creatures like that. Adults remain lost children, and we do not offer them the same undeserved love. Fridman then reads Charles Bukowski's "The History of One Tough Motherfucker," about a tailless, shot, run-over cat that drags itself to the litter box and finally walks. In interviews a drunk Bukowski holds the cat up and says the influence was not Céline. It was this. Anthony's response is quiet: he loves that. Fridman thinks of Anthony's music and life the same way. Both men have been through some shit. Neither has been through what that cat has been through.

Asked to play, Anthony chooses "I Want to Go Home," one of the earlier songs and the one that fits the conversation: old dogs and the good Lord keeping him out of the psych ward, four generations of farm sold to a man out of town, trees down, concrete growing, people doing what the rich men say. The guitar in his hands is a handmade resonator from Paul Beard, who reached out after the cheap Gretsch from Amazon, a $300 or $400 gift from his wife, could not survive a 10,000-person show with a suction-cup pickup. He tunes it a full step down because the dull, slightly out-of-tune quality reminds him of the old Virginia folk and blues around the Carter family country, twenty miles from where his mother's people, the Ingles, are from. Oliver Anthony music, at its core, is supposed to feel like 1930s Virginia.

The touring idea for the year is not the big-city room everyone already books. Take Iowa: find a farm field forty-five minutes outside the city, solve ingress, egress, and security, hire a promoter who knows how to run a professional show, and establish a venue that cannot be put under contract by a monopoly. If musicians are sick of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, he says, start playing fields and main streets, then leave those spaces standing so any artist can use them. Last year's shows of his own almost all had a $25 ticket option. People in the professional space, including some he was working with, scoffed. Kids in hand-me-down clothes came up afterward and said it meant a lot that they could be there.

He will keep covering other bands' expenses so they can come in, help draw a crowd, and leave. He takes the risk of standing the venue up. The space would be owned or managed by the town or the farm, inside a nonprofit, and remain rentable. Twenty of those a year, if that is all he can pull off, would be twenty places that always have music and a center of community, a sanctuary that corporate America cannot pervert. Fridman is headed overseas to see world leaders and, more than that, to see the same humans in very different places. Anthony offers Virginia or West Virginia woods, dogs, and a relatively new experiment with small doses of psilocybin for stage nerves. Out there, looking at soil and trees as a system, he finds a peace he has not found anywhere else, especially now that he looks at it through the lens of God. Meeting in real life, he tells Fridman, was an honor, and Fridman was the person he expected in a good way.