475: With Much Wisdom Comes Much Sorrow. The More Knowledge, The More Grief. With Oliver Anthony Music, Chris Lunsford

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Oliver Anthony, born Christopher Anthony Lunsford, is a musician whose raw, heartfelt songs resonate with working-class struggles. Raised in Appalachia, his music reflects personal battles with mental health and the hardships of blue-collar life. A high school dropout, Oliver spent years in industrial jobs before turning to music as an outlet. Living modestly in Virginia, he rejects fame and focuses on creating authentic, unpolished songs that connect deeply with listeners. Through his music, Oliver calls for unity, a return to values, and a renewed connection to faith and community. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 475 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Everything is meaningless.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 0:34Jocko Willink?

  All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.

• 0:45Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 1:05Jocko Willink?

  Is there anything of which one can say, "Look, this is something new"?

• 1:11Jocko Willink?

  It was here already, long ago. It was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.

• 1:24Jocko Willink?

  What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind. I have seen all things that are done under the sun. All of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

• 1:38Jocko Willink?

  For with much wisdom comes much sorrow. The more knowledge, the more grief.

• 1:48Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 2:05Jocko Willink?

  And it can be found, of course, in the Bible.

• 2:09Jocko Willink?

  But some of it can also be found embedded in the tracks of a country folk, western honky-tonk gospel Americana album called 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.

• 2:51Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 3:12Jocko Willink?

  And in fact, he was the first male songwriter to chart 13 songs simultaneously in the top 50 digital song sales while alive, because Michael Jackson did it and Prince did it, but they were both dead. And he released this new album, like 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."

• 3:55Jocko Willink?

  No editing, no agent, no bullshit, just some idiot and his guitar.

• 4:03Jocko Willink?

  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 learns. 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.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Just a little bit busy for both of us. Yeah.

• 4:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, let's get into it, man. Let's talk about just growing up. What was that like? Where were you at?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Man, you've, I just listening back to what you, well, that, 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 like engulfed in all this, and 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, um, and what was, yeah, well, just to touch for a second on that, like those, that original catalog of music that charted was so crazy that it charted because they were literally all off an Android phone, you know, they weren't even from a studio, but they were, I would write those songs and then that, that video that, that ultimately that the MP3 version that I got uploaded,

• 5:17Speaker 01

  that was like, that was right after I wrote the song. That was, it was more or less like the tangible medium, they call it. They 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 re, reach that kind of achievement ages, 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, where hopefully all this will end up. But it's just to me, it's just shocking to hear to, to be reminded of that. And yeah, that it all happened so crazy like that at the very beginning, but.

• 5:53Jocko Willink?

  Before you got here, I was talking to Echo Charles and Echo Charles doesn't play any musical instruments. I of course play guitar, but I said, hey, you know, I was talking about a little text conversation that you were have, 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?

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Axis of awesome.

• 6:30Jocko Willink?

  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. Hit song and he's playing the same four chords, but just singing this, this songs over him. And i- it's so true. But you think about, you know, I think about like, uh, right now, AI. Cause you would think, okay, well, what do I want to do today? Oh, I don't 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, G C D E. 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?

• 7:09Jocko Willink?

  You know, they can't recreate, like they know what's in a cell. They know all the little, uh, 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.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  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 true human, hu- hu- human created art from, great example is, um,

• 8:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:39Jocko Willink?

  Where did they source it from?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:51Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  There is, yeah.

• 8:58Jocko Willink?

  Right? And, yeah, it's definitely interesting to think about.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Generally speaking, it does work, you know, I, I, I agree with you about that. Like, um, it's, 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, we have become almost disconnected even with our own selves.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  If that makes sense, like we're, we seem to be so immersed in something here or out here. It's like, we never, how many people really take the time to, 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, that affect our whole nervous system and how we think and our emotional state and all of that. And it's just, it's, we're very complex creatures that we.

• 10:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you gotta be able to tap into it too. I know I've, um.

• 10:15Jocko Willink?

  I talk about this thing as squeezing your brain. Okay, so if you wanna, if you wanna 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 writing even the kids books or a novel. You have this little, little, 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 like squeeze your brain. You gotta like squeeze, you gotta like squeeze now like, uh, what do you?

• 11:01Jocko Willink?

  Like frosting out of one of those things that they have in a bakery. You know, or toothpaste, like getting that last bit of toothpaste out. You gotta, it takes work. The song isn't, the song isn't gonna write itself. So it takes some level of work to get that song out. And it takes the level of work to get a book out or to get a screenplay out or to create an invention. You know, you have some idea in your head. Uh, that you think it's good, but man, you gotta squeeze your brain and make it work.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Where do you think that idea comes from? Like that's, that's what, so this is, it's funny you say that. 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.

• 11:57Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think that you're definitely right in that. Uh, from my opinion, writing about stuff is a way to kind of organize your thoughts. And I've, I had the.

• 12:23Jocko Willink?

  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 in 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 I actually did that. My 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, I can't stop thinking about Seth and it's, I'm having trouble concentrating in school. And so I was

• 13:05Jocko Willink?

  like, okay, write, write, write down, you know, I actually told him, 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 he 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 them in, it 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 doesn't work, you know, as much as, as much as we know exactly what's

• 13:48Jocko Willink?

  in there, we can't make that happen. And so I think that's, that's probably why it's so valuable. And this is actually something that I've had a, 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, it's still accurate, is, 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, 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.

• 14:33Jocko Willink?

  You can't manufacture, you can't manufacture Inspirado. Have you ever watched Tenacious D before?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:40Jocko Willink?

  Okay, yeah. Okay, so that, that one episode on HBO where they're like, they, they have to come up with a new song. And for the, the, the place where they play open mic night, Echo Charles?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 14:54Jocko Willink?

  The guy, 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 Inspirado. And guess what, Echo Charles? You can't do it. No, you're not, not, not, it's hard.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Straight up.

• 15:09Jocko Willink?

  Can't do it.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Can't do it.

• 15:10Jocko Willink?

  Can't do it. So did anyone, after, after your first song came out was like, all right, make more of those songs. They had to.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the, the, um, the timeline of events with the songs was really that all this, you know, all those other songs were already uploaded with, from my phone to 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 DistroKid, 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 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 because I knew if I could just get on that YouTube channel with the song.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  All I wanted to do was just quit my job. I was, I was working in, I was on job sites all day in 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. So 2019, I sold our house. Uh, I bought some land with the, with a little bit of equity I had and we, we parked a camper on it.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  And

• 16:44Jocko Willink?

  How long was camper? How big?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  It was a twenty seven foot.

• 16:47Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Now, at the time, I didn't have any kids. Um, I didn't have custody of my oldest and I didn't have the two little ones. So it was just, it was just me and my wife. And so it was pretty easy, but it got complicated really quick with kids and everything else. And 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 in this stuck in this cycle.

• 17:09Jocko Willink?

  So how old are you in this is going down?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Um, I'm thirty two now. So it was like probably in my late twenties, you know? And you got to think I'd 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 nineteen, I was working at this paper mill called Rock Ten, which is now called West Rock. And there was a guy in there named Shane who, uh, he had, the, 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 eighteen years and I was nineteen. And we were making this basically the same amount of money. And I had a GD. I don't, I didn't have any real practical skill or anything. And I was like,

• 17:51Speaker 01

  I'm going to be Shane, like for the, like, this is it. Like this is as far as I'm going to get. And, um, so that was really this. So that was my motive was just to get out of that, just to try to get out of that cycle.

• 18:02Jocko Willink?

  But that was when you're nineteen?

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:04Jocko Willink?

  But and then, but then you stayed in that cycle for how long?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Well, I worked, um, well, when I, 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 a, it was a big blur, but, um, there was about a six month period where I could hardly walk. Hey, 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 twelve hour shifts. Like I wasn't getting enough sleep, you know? It's three, like those, when you works 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, twelve hour shifts because we were shorthanded and it was third shift. And I wasn't getting enough sleep when I was at home because it's hard to sleep during the day. You've got other things you got to do and all.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:01Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, you definitely can have hallucinations.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  I think that's probably something, I don't know exactly what caused it, but I passed out of work, hit my head real bad. 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 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 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 gonna get 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.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  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? 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?

• 20:21Jocko Willink?

  What were you doing to Radio WV or just tagging them, like calling them?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Oh, every post. I was that guy like, hey, look at my video, you know, like, and, 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 this-

• 20:38Jocko Willink?

  That's called stalking, by the way.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  It was, I said, 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 worked there. And this guy Draven was just the owner or the manager or whatever. So, so anyway, I never forget-

• 20:53Jocko Willink?

  It's kind of like this podcast.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  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, I was-

• 21:06Jocko Willink?

  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?

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Hip Camp was good, yeah. It stayed, I mean, it stayed packed.

• 21:15Jocko Willink?

  So you were, so were you starting to see of, of an opportunity to get out of your job that you didn't like? Besides music?

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Well, it was a complicated situation because um.

• 21:28Jocko Willink?

  Aren't they all?

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Because of my wife being in veterinary, she's a, 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 and probably about a five year timeline. I could have gotten her debt paid off and we could have lived. We could have lived off of just probably hip camp and a few other little things and just been very, live very modest, you know?

• 21:54Jocko Willink?

  Going back to child, when did you start playing guitar? How old were you?

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Um, so my grandma taught me G C and D when I was like a little kid. Like I said, Randy Travis was her favorite and um, she was in a little band in the fifties, I think, that played on the radio and Hopewell, Virginia. Like in the little town where she grew up and my grandma was like my, you know, like I, I've had a close relationship with my parents. But as far as family or just mentorship goes, it was my grand, you know, it was her and my grandpa were like, they were it. Like, you know, they were like my idols, you know, so I wanted to be like them and I, and they were just.

• 22:29Jocko Willink?

  How old were you when you learned G C D?

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Oh, five or six years old.

• 22:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, like early, we would do like, um, like, cause all the Randy trap, a lot of those like nineties country songs. Were three or four chords. They're real easy to play and we do a lot of like, um, like in the garden and um. Are you know, her, the easiest, the first song I learned was Three Wooden Crosses. Uh, that's just such a simple little song. I think it's like C G and a couple of little chords and. But yes, she got me into it early on and it was just something that we did, something I just kind of did with her. Just for fun, you know?

• 23:03Jocko Willink?

  Did you keep playing when you were growing up?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Not really. Uh, 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, 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 um for for a while. It was.

• 23:41Jocko Willink?

  Where was the Colgate Country Showdown?

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Well, they I think they happened all over the country. It was kind of like an it was like a miniature. It was like the same concept as like American Idol on my list.

• 23:50Jocko Willink?

  And you got voted off the island quick?

• 23:52Speaker 01

  It's funny. I can remember um yeah, it was it's so funny because uh.

• 23:57Jocko Willink?

  Were you doing cover songs?

• 23:58Speaker 01

  It was in yeah, you you see you just played one song and like 30 people would get up there and play a song and they would and devote the judges would vote and 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 um I do remember back then like I did. I guess I guess what I'm saying is I did probably have like that imagine that imaginative dream of going out and doing, you know, I just I didn't take it seriously back then. Um.

• 24:30Jocko Willink?

  So then when did you start playing guitar? Like, hey, I'm gonna try and make a go at this?

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Well, um oddly enough, you know, Brian, who you met, who's a friend of mine, he I I would go out and hang out with him like in my I'd say 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 line 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 I met this guy, uh, 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.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  And so like he uh he was like a part. It's HOA neighborhood, but like the part most partyous 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 in it. And like that was probably like. 2015 ish when we started to hang or no, I think we met in probably a little bit after that, but somewhere in that window of time, I it was just like getting drunk and playing at parties and people saying, oh, you're really, you know, like, I never forget is like, it was a running joke, but anytime I'd play, there was always some drunk old person that would be like, you gotta get on American Idol or like every time, you know, like, everybody was just like, man, you gotta do something. There's this guy named David Moore, who's like probably in his 60s, but I can remember I, I jokingly

• 26:03Speaker 01

  to this day, I remember every time we were drunk hanging out, he'd always say, he said, Chris, you gotta 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's, everybody gets like this, but he said, you gotta do something with that God given talent of yours, like all the time, you know, it's sort of just evolved into that.

• 26:22Jocko Willink?

  David was kind of like right about this whole thing.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  And, and, and Brian and a few other people just kept pushing me and um, I didn't have any original music really. I think the songwriting came, um, 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.

• 26:51Jocko Willink?

  What kind of music were you into when you were a kid?

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Um, really early on was like 90s country and like, uh, I was obsessed with Tony Bennett when I was a little kid. Uh, like 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 Coe, 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, She was, she, we used to watch Dukes of Hazzard like all the time. And so I'd see Waylon Jennings there with that little guitar and you know, in a lot of the episodes, he wouldn't show his face

• 27:36Speaker 01

  because of the legal troubles and stuff. But that's what I kind of fell in love then with a lot of that and.

• 27:41Jocko Willink?

  When I was a kid, my dad, uh, he got a used car. It was a 1973 Barracuda. And it was actually, if we had that car now, like it would be an epic muscle car. It was yellow with the stripe on it and everything.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 27:56Jocko Willink?

  And it had an eight-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, this dude, this dude sounds like freaking Hank Williams, uh, senior.

• 28:22Jocko Willink?

  But, so that's, you, you, so you did have like a pretty good variety of music. It wasn't like you were just raised on country western.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it was just early nineties. And yeah, definitely Hank, Hank Senior, Junior, and the third I'll listen to like, um, yeah, all that stuff. Like it just, um, I'd say after, like probably after the nineties, early 2000s, radio country just kind of started to go, and I just, like, I don't listen to country at all. I haven't listened to a new country song that came out, other than like Jamie Johnson and maybe a handful of others in years. Like I don't, I don't, I don't care for it. I kind of joke and say it like, I don't, 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.

• 29:04Jocko Willink?

  How'd you like my description of your music? What did I say? That was pretty good, right? Freaking, yeah, it's, it's definitely unique. It's weird because it's unique music, but it still sounds familiar in a way. I don't know.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  I'm really excited for you to hear the neck. We just recorded, so I've only technically put two songs out since Rich, two new songs since Richmond. Everything else, like the whole, basically the hymnal album was all the cell phone, the, the halfway put together cell phone versions, like in their complete format. Cause I just had to do that to at least get that done. Well, you know, like I told you, I just.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  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 gonna get to the end of that tour. And just

• 30:16Jocko Willink?

  Call it.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  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,

• 30:24Jocko Willink?

  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?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Um, Man, I don't like, 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 somehow my mind, and I didn't used to be like this as a kid. Joe Rogan says that it's because we talked about this on, 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, 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, uh, I went and saw Incubus once, and I saw, um,

• 31:15Speaker 01

  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, 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, the Houston, 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 dr- 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 in front of 60,000 people on some spin and stage.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  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 wanted to, and like, 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, like, by the time the summer came and I was just-

• 32:16Jocko Willink?

  Wait, so how did you actually walk out on stage? Uh, so I, when I used to train a lot, not a lot, but I trained MMA fighters. And there would be guys, Tito Ortiz, before, before, you know who Tito Ortiz is?

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:30Jocko Willink?

  He, 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's 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?

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Um, I, uh, my, I had brought my kids along with me and I, I can't, I would always just go sit with my kids and just think about that I had, I had to do this for them. And if I could just get through it this, 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 gonna be alright, like, they're gonna 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 ki- and then, but, but over ti- but I also, it's also, like I said, I've, like, I read all these Facebook Messenger messages I get and I read my fan mail and like, I don't reply to all of them,

• 33:29Speaker 01

  but I do try to reply to a lot of them and like, there's some really real shit people have told, like, and then, and at these shows, like, to ha- I'll never forget when we went to Europe last year, we were at the, I think it like the first or the second show and this like, this guy who looks like he could just pick me up with one hand and throw me across the room, like, I was- 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.

• 34:12Jocko Willink?

  Were you, when you, uh, when all this happened, were you already sober?

• 34:18Jocko Willink?

  Meaning were you still drinking?

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Right after, right before. Alright, so,

• 34:26Speaker 01

  July of twenty-three is when there was a guy who messaged me on Facebook and said, hey, I know Draven Rife. 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,

• 34:52Speaker 01

  I'm trying to like relive this in my head because I'm, it's like, hell of 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, I had like a come to Jesus moment, so to speak and did, and I just, I can vividly remember, being on my property and, and I just, and I, I remember vividly telling God like, or just saying out loud, like, 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. Uh, well, the, the, before Richmond, there was this song Dog On It that I put,

• 35:34Speaker 01

  and it, it did okay on TikTok. So two different, A and 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 like.

• 35:55Jocko Willink?

  Boy, if they would have signed you, they would have been like the heroes of the century for their companies, right?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  So that's, so that was like almost right after saying, like almost within a week of that, that happened. So then I

• 36:08Jocko Willink?

  So you had a literal come to Jesus. Like it wasn't like a come to Jesus, like actual, hey, God.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  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 because I just didn't, I didn't know, you know?

• 36:24Jocko Willink?

  And that's what, that's what made you get sober?

• 36:29Jocko Willink?

  And how much were you drinking? Before that, were you drinking every day?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  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 eighteen percent.

• 36:48Jocko Willink?

  Full Dukes of Hazzard scenario.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Well, it's really easy to make, actually. It's like a lot of college, the reason I learned how, well, I learned how to make wine, actually. 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. Uh, 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'd 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. Wine that's like seventeen percent. 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.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  It tastes like Welch's juice, but it's like sixteen, seventeen percent 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'd get home from work. I'd have a, like a. A lot of times I would just put it in, like in, 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's just. So a lot of times it'd 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 eighteen percent, 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

• 38:14Speaker 01

  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 thirty in the morning, 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

• 38:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:05Jocko Willink?

  And you did like cold turkey scenario? Like you stopped a hundred percent?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 39:10Jocko Willink?

  And was there withdrawals or anything like that?

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Affirmative. With physical withdrawals and also like, just, just the temptation of it. Like it was, you know, it's like, it was, but you gotta think, it all happened so quick that I, like, I didn't, like, so that hap, so all that happened. And then by the time July came, the dog on it thing happened. I, I started going to open mics to try to figure out, cause you gotta think I'd never played on stage.

• 39:39Jocko Willink?

  What did the A and M dudes tell you? Did they try and, you know, uh, get you to sell your soul?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Like, well, at the time, I was, I had twelve hundred monthly listeners on Spotify and ten thousand followers on Tik Tok. I wasn't, and I'd never played a gig before. I'd been no open mics, but I wasn't like a real, so all they were trying to do is just like, like,

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Like the one guy was, um, the one guy was trying to get me to, he was, he worked with Zach Brian 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 Brian 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, I wanted to do it so bad, but I just, I just felt like I wasn't supposed to do it.

• 40:26Jocko Willink?

  So you actually said no. So they dangled the carrot of Zach Brian tour in front of you and you were like,

• 40:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:47Jocko Willink?

  I was looking at a contract lately and this initial contract that came from a, a group of people and it was for all

• 40:58Jocko Willink?

  IP, intellectual property, Echo Charles.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 41:01Jocko Willink?

  The, the contract was like all, I, my lawyer, I, I said, hey dude, this says all, what do they mean by all? And he says all. And the thing is, A, if I wouldn't have had a lawyer look at it, but also if I would have been, you know, if, 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 thing. 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, and 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 would have owned? Your soul.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  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 one, 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 Brian 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 Brian's like,

• 42:15Speaker 01

  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, I felt like guilty trying to reach out to you to say, hey, like, um, But so, but it was easy for me to not want to drink because now I had this thing I was, it was like I had this carrot I was chasing and so I went, I've, I went to this open mic at this seafood restaurant, um, shoot, what was it called? I always joke because the name, the place is out of business now, but the restaurant, 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, um, 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 at. 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,

• 43:01Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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 gonna 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 character, 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,

• 43:45Speaker 01

  it was supernatural the way everything fell together and you got to understand like, so, so that happened. I met Dre, I, 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 had to keep putting the phone down because we had shit to do and we'd come back in on the phone again. And so like that was on a Wednesday and we recorded that weekend. And I wasn't gonna record Richmond. I wanted him to record all my other songs. Richmond, I only had half of Richmond done. I posted the first half on TikTok, but I didn't have the rest of the song finished, like that whole second, the whole second verse of it. So it was like this last minute thing of, we talked on a Wednesday.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:40Jocko Willink?

  What do you have, what do you have two cameras working?

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Um, so Draven, Draven runs like a, 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, we did two takes. Cause he only had the one camera. So he would film me.

• 45:02Jocko Willink?

  Cause I, I was watching. I was like, oh, there's two cameras here. Cause there's two different angles. So.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, he's.

• 45:07Jocko Willink?

  But he had to do it twice.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  I don't want to tell, well, yeah, we've, we've upgraded a little bit since then, but at the time he only could, it was just the one camera, you know, he could like there, 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, um, yeah, I just quit the drinking and the weed and he had just quit the weed. He didn't really drink.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  And the two of us smoked a CBD 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.

• 46:00Jocko Willink?

  Was he able to quit his job? Draven? Hell yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  So, and we, we've kind of like.

• 46:07Jocko Willink?

  Well, there's something like a hundred and fifty million plays of that song. That right there is pretty good money, right? Echo Charles?

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and he had, he had had a few other good ones. Prior to that too, that it was just like for him to fall, he was also kind of in a point in his life. We both had a lot of parallels and he had, 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 ourselves, we hadn't taken it seriously enough to try to figure out what it was, but.

• 46:39Jocko Willink?

  When you're writing songs, so you were writing songs. Did you, did you, uh, like mass produce songs once you got sober? Or were those songs kind of already in the hopper?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  They were already there. Yeah.

• 46:52Jocko Willink?

  And, and, but that song you finished, uh, Richmond, basically when you were sober, cause you wrote it that, that you finished it that day.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:08Jocko Willink?

  And how big of a channel was Radio WV?

• 47:11Speaker 01

  It was big enough where I was stalking him. I mean, he had, um.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  What was special?

• 47:17Jocko Willink?

  But it wasn't big enough for him not to be flagging.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  I don't know. Go, if you look at some of his other recordings he had done prior to that, like Logan Halsted, for example, like just the way he's able to bring out like. There's this song Logan Halsted has Dark Black Coal and that's the, that's the best version of the song that you'll ever hear for the rest of your life. He can, Logan can go record it a million more times, but just, you can just feel the, I don't know.

• 47:47Jocko Willink?

  So Draven's like a good director.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Draven really ca, Draven really cares is what it is. Like he's. Like he's not in it for any other reason, except that like he really like it's. We were talking about this because he, he helped me produce my album now. So we are like producing like real music now with full instruments and equipment and all that. We've invested in the, we kind of have this dream now of like. Finding artists like the ones that he puts on Radio WV that don't have a following and figure out. How can we, how can I take somebody like me? How can I find somebody like me who just kind of. Is, 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 going to screw them over.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  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 could, and my, 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.

• 49:13Jocko Willink?

  Hold on, the reason I asked you about how big, uh, Radio WV is, you getting on Radio WV is not like, oh, now you're set for life. You know what I mean?

• 49:24Speaker 01

  I just knew if I could get on there, he would be able to, he would be able to record me in a way that I could go like, I just, 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.

• 49:36Jocko Willink?

  But, but making it on the Radio V at the time wasn't like, uh, for lack of a better word, like making it big time.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Not at all. No, no, no.

• 49:43Jocko Willink?

  That's what I'm, that's what I want to convey is.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  It was just like, like I said before, it was like, if I could get on there and get 50 or a hundred thousand views and it was just something so like, when I emailed all these bars and all these like, cause you gotta think like to just go play, like to give an example, like to just go play, um, 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 there, 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, cause 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.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  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, 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, 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, cause 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 happens so fast and I just didn't want to get stuck, you know? I just didn't want to get stuck being, 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,

• 51:11Speaker 01

  I not, what else am I gonna 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 gonna be doing dumb labor jobs or I was gonna be trying to figure out how to do something on my own, you know, and, um,

• 51:31Jocko Willink?

  So you record Saturday, Sunday. When does he upload it?

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Like, 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 gonna, 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. Cause 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,

• 52:21Speaker 01

  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 I, so everything was under that name to kind of disguise myself anyway. And so, just without, you know, it's just,

• 52:42Speaker 01

  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'd been getting drunk for years and hanging out with Brian and all them. And Jamie Johnson shows up who,

• 52:59Speaker 01

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

• 53:16Speaker 01

  you know, it's still got Jamie Johnson CD and the CD player from like, it's like you just can't make it up, man. It's just,

• 53:24Jocko Willink?

  So, so you were about to say when you rolled back into work. So it uploads on Wednesday.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  It's all good, man. This is, this is a lot, it's a lot of like, you can, I haven't talked about any of this since it happened. So it's like a lot, all the, like, I'm just remembering all.

• 53:36Jocko Willink?

  It's all good, bro.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember I went back into work and I told him, I was like, dude, this is, I was like, this song's talking about like, like Epstein Island and all this stuff. I was like, this is gonna be, I was like, I'm totally losing my job. I was like, they're gonna fire me like next week. And I'm just, in my mind, I'm picturing that the song is gonna totally flop and I'm gonna lose my job because of it. And I'm like, so I'm, I don't know what I'm gonna do. I'm like, panicking, freaking out. And 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 at, like not even that. 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, their bar.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  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, I don't know. I just,

• 54:29Speaker 01

  this whole thing, even now, even with what I'm doing now, I'm terrified like of, 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 wanna, it's like, it's hard to, like you know that there's consequences that are gonna 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, do I really wanna do this? Or do I just wanna 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?

• 55:12Jocko Willink?

  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?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  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 TikTok 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 TikTok 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 TikTok, 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, I was like, the phone was just dinging all day and going crazy and. And then like people were, people had somehow got 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 Junior and

• 56:01Speaker 01

  all the stuff and I'm still at my job, you know, and I'm just like, what am I gonna 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'd go places, people were in like, 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, 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 you, 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.

• 56:38Jocko Willink?

  Solid.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  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 I.

• 56:45Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think the first two shows I was, I remember for, 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. And I.

• 57:10Jocko Willink?

  How many people came to Eagle Creek?

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Um, we don't know, cause they were, 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 had, 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, 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

• 57:56Speaker 01

  those people were telling me about. Like they were just so excited, like.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  That's the thing, like it's not, it's not me at all. Like ass, 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, 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. Like 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 gotta 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

• 58:44Speaker 01

  a job site, interview people and ask them about like what they're struggling with and like their, 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, this policy that went into a place, 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 in, in like,

• 59:08Jocko Willink?

  You're part of the same ecosystem.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  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, 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, 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, like what is a 25 year old guy supposed to do? What are you gonna do? Are you gonna call some hotline number and get put on some list? Like I, like I'm, I'm not gonna, I don't, I didn't feel, like even if I

• 59:51Speaker 01

  could find a psych, who, 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'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 like when they show even the way

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  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 the song's not in time and like they just, by every textbook definition, those songs suck. And if you go on the original,

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  I've gotta get sober YouTube video and look at the comments from where I'm sitting under the carport at my camper playing it, 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, like with everything else, medicine, education, you name it. Things that we really need, people have found a way to pry 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.

• 1:01:48Jocko Willink?

  It's like a big toll road.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  They know people are, they know people need it.

• 1:01:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, you know, again, before we started recording, we were talking about some stuff and one of the things I was saying is, uh, 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 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. You go, hey, man, well, you've gone to the, you've gone to the bathroom four times in the last 15 minutes. So something's going on. And basically to say, hey, dude, yep, totally normal. It's totally normal. You're going to be nervous. Of course, you're going to go out and freaking combat somebody's trying to kill you. That's fine. It don't like, that's normal.

• 1:02:38Jocko Willink?

  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, you know, your music is, hey, what you're feeling right now? You're, you know, you've got financial issues, you've got freaking drama at work, you've got the girls, you know, causing problems. You're called like, you're drunk again, like all these things. Like, oh yeah, other people are going through these things. And I think that's, that's a very common. And then what you mentioned about, you know, you being out of key and out of tune, your guitar's 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.

• 1:03:22Jocko Willink?

  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, I, a few years ago, I said, hey, who here listens to the White Stripes? And people are like, maybe a little bit, whatever. And I said, and I, cause I heard this interview with Jack White from the White Stripes.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:45Jocko Willink?

  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, they'll hit it a hundred times and they'll find the perfect snare hit. And then they'll take that, that snare hit, the hi hat, the snare hit, the hi hat, the crash symbol. 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.

• 1:04:27Jocko Willink?

  But going back to what we were talking about earlier, it's almost like it's not human anymore.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  It's not.

• 1:04:31Jocko Willink?

  So for you to be like, oh, this is just me. My guitar's a little out of tune. My voice is what my voice is and you're gonna 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.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  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 wanna, like, we wanna do that for, like, there's a million more Oliver Anthony musics out there. Like, I, I'm one of, 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 it was with two big producers, um, who were very good, like, good-hearted, nice dudes.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  And I'm not saying, it's not anything negative about them when I say this. But they, we went into the studio, they brought all these Nashville recording dudes in that were, and we just sat there and we, we did all the songs just so perfect. And they went, 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 the 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.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  And I, and then it just, I don't know, it's 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 two thousand seven suburban for like fifty bucks. So it ain't like, it's like, it wasn't really an expensive mistake, but I was like furious about it. So we just, we just literally went, so I caught, so Draven listened to them. We both agreed that they all sucked. So we, I walked away from the project and we went and bought all the equipment that we needed.

• 1:07:03Jocko Willink?

  Now, how did you walk, you can't walk away from a project. That's gotta be freaking legally complicated.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Well, it's just, I don't do contracts. I just do handshakes and I'll cover all the costs associated with the original recording. I'm gonna lose, you know, I'll lose fifty grand or something, but I'm not gonna put a song out that's not my song either, you know?

• 1:07:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  But we, but we.

• 1:07:23Jocko Willink?

  Sounds of any of what you just said.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  And they were, and they were trying to bully me like they, like they were sending emails to my attorney like that weren't very not, 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, um, I can't remember the dates, but it was like, it was literally like two weeks ago. We just went and recorded all this, um, 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.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  You know, we got, every room is set up with something. So the fiddle's 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, um, Well, like when you get to the solo parts, there's a part where I wanted it to, it, 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.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  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, 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 a, usually there's this whole, you know, in music, when new music, that's part of what was so funny at the beginning with like, with all those songs charting is that like most songs to chart have a lot of money invested in them. Like, I don't know if you know, like,

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  I didn't know this until all this happened, but it's very common for a label to spend, like up to a million dollars buying their own song essentially on the chart, like to get it up to a certain level. There's, there's a, there's a ton of marketing and like, it's a, it's a business like anything else. And so, but with these, we'll, we'll come up with some kind of release strategy and we'll get, you know, 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, cause I've only, I've only put two, two new songs out since Richmond and I did that because like I said, I thought, I thought it was just going to be kind of done and over with in it. And it's like, I tried to let the flame die out and it didn't. And I realized that like I was being really, you know, I had this moment,

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  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 had told God that I was going to do at the beginning, you know?

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  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 four million dollars and you can just go live your stupid little life in the woods and like, like what a coward I am, like Joan 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, 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 was, 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 gonna do is

• 1:11:24Jocko Willink?

  nonprofit. It's another way. It's another way of doing it.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  It's just another way of doing it, but it, 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, that were prioritized over mine, you know?

• 1:11:37Jocko Willink?

  How long was it, I'm wondering how, how long it takes for vultures to attack? How long was it when Richmond came out? How long did it take before you got like a phone call of someone saying, hey, this is, I'm a big, uh, studio exec?

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  Oh, the president of record labels were at the first show. Like the, I don't want to speak out of context. I don't remember, I don't know what his job role, but there was, 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.

• 1:12:09Jocko Willink?

  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 gonna make your dreams come true. I got it. Here's a check. What does this need to be? Is it that kind of thing?

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  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 go. A lot of them just wanted to, they were all very polite. They're just like sales representatives, is all they are. So. Um, 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 three million dollars upfront, 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've 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 of 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.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:13:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's the story of, did you know that story? Like I've always known that story that guys like Meatloaf, you know Meatloaf?

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Jocko Willink?

  Like Meatloaf, he, he made however many albums and, 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.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  I would have, I would have gotten screwed if Jamie Johnson wouldn't have come to the first show and 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, um, like around Christmas time was when I got my first check. So we, and I'd quit my job. We had like a few thousand dollars saved up. I, the first two shows I did were free, so I had no cash flow coming in. I didn't have nothing. And then, yeah, people are, it's, it was easy for people to throw money around. So, but right out the gate, what he did was he, he got me in contact with his attorney and his attorney was like, his attorney was really cool. He didn't, he didn't make me pay a dime until I started having, like he, he worked for me for free for basically three months.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  But if I hadn't had that attorney, man, like, I mean, I, this is, I, I, I just want to tell the story. So like this isn't, I don't even want to say this on a podcast, but I do want it to just, I want you to, I want like people to understand like, how, how psyched out I got from the very beginning, but I had a, I had a relative. Who owns a couple of 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

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  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 saved 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 all. So like, how, how am I supposed to trust anybody then? Like if my, like if that's ages. Yeah. And like I, and 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,

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  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, there's wisdom now that I would have never been able to have if I hadn't have went through those things, but.

• 1:16:17Jocko Willink?

  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. You don't, you know, nobody owns, owns you or your intellectual property is, is freaking amazing. So then where did it go from there? So now did you, now you need money, uh, at some point, did, did you guys just set up a tour? How did that work?

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  So Brian was like, all these emails and offers were coming like for different, doing different gigs and stuff. And so like we, we just went and took some like sketchy gigs without really knowing what we were doing. And like, there was one, 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 DistroKid 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 DistroKid. I think he's

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  just now on the board now. But I was able, I, I like, got, 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 gonna hack into my DistroKid account and like, take the money out. And you gotta 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?

• 1:18:07Jocko Willink?

  And that's from everything from Spotify, from Apple.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  That's digital streaming, yeah.

• 1:18:12Jocko Willink?

  All digital streaming.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  Well, since I write, since I've, 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, I actually made just as much money off streaming last year as I did touring, you know, just, and, and part of that's also because my, because I was running my tour at the lowest margin I could to where I knew I could, where I wasn't gonna lose. Like, I don't know who does, I, I wanted a $25 ticket option because I'm, 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

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  watch a show. And what, 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, and, 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 was this, I, 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 and that, but they were there and they were like,

• 1:19:32Jocko Willink?

  They were pumped.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  They were, yeah. And in, and in cases like, I don't know. I've never seen so many adults cries 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 I, it's not a burden to me, but just,

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  when you, when, when, when another grown person comes to you as a complete stranger and tells you things that they probably had 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, I don't know how you're not supposed to like, I still think about those, some of those people that I talked to, like I just,

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  I don't know if they're normal. A lot of them are like big tough guys that you would never even think had to care in the world. And they're like, they're one more bad day away from just wanting to end off, you know?

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know.

• 1:20:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Then you're do, doing that. How many, how like, how many, what was your touring schedule like? How often were you playing?

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  Um,

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  well, so I used, I used you. So what happened was, was I was, I was with Brian and we were just like cash suitcaseing our shows and like winging it. And that worked up until there was one gig we went to book at a place and, um, 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 gotta find somebody who knows what they're doing to handle this.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  And my attorney was very like, my attorney is like, you're going to just get burnt. You gotta have somebody in the middle that understands how like, is it, it's surprisingly complex. That's why I want to do this thing I'm trying to do, because it's right now, like just even to be an artist and book a show is like, you gotta 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, um, it was a lot of weekend runs, which, uh, 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.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  So we'll go, we'll be on the road for over a month in 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 band's in Virginia. My, the 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.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  It wasn't very effective the way it was, it was kind of inefficient the way we were. The way we ran around this year and 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, you have to, Red Rocks is an extreme example, but just the one that comes to mind. Like any of the, any of the, really any of the venues usually already have a couple of people in line. So like when you want to book, like if I wanted to go play the Pittsburgh Amphitheater again, there's probably three or four people that have it. All right. Who are already in line for like every available day, especially on the weekends. So it's kind of like you're so, there's a lot more demand than there is supply right now in the venue world, I would say, from what I've observed.

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  At least at the level, at the, at the size venues I'm playing like this meet, like I'm not doing any big, the biggest shows I'll do is like 10,000 seats or something like that, you know?

• 1:23:59Jocko Willink?

  How many gigs did you do on tour that first like run? Like how many shows did you do?

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  I don't even know.

• 1:24:04Jocko Willink?

  Was it like, was it like 20 or was it like a hundred?

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  It was like in 2020, 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.

• 1:24:16Jocko Willink?

  Well, well, when you walk out like on stage and you're all freaking, you're, you don't like people.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  Well, I love the people. Well.

• 1:24:27Jocko Willink?

  What I'm saying, like that's just gotta be the, the craziest feeling when you walk out or when, when you have in 10,000 people singing the words to your songs. That's gotta be a pretty freaking crazy thing for, for you.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, like the, the first, the first one I vivid, well, even I was, I couldn't believe in it that even at that very first show we did, right? Which is right after, it's within, within the two weeks of Richmond blowing up. This, 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 I, 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 because I just didn't know what to, you know?

• 1:25:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  I just didn't know what to do.

• 1:25:23Jocko Willink?

  Did you get more used to it?

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:25:39Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:45Jocko Willink?

  But as far as you, you missed an entire maturing process as an artist of doing like, oh, I'm playing the club with a hundred people.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  The first paid gig was, and technically it wasn't, I mean, they gave me, I think they gave me like a thousand dollars just to cover my costs, 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.

• 1:26:08Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  But the, but the shows isn't where it's so weird. It's the everyday real life. It's the like, 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 uh, I had, 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, 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's 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,

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  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 kinda, I just, I'm, I'm just able to be Chris and then I, and then I go out and try to get gas and like, and I'm like, oh man, it's like almost like, like, I don't know. It's almost like, it almost feels like sometimes I'm like a fugitive on the run or something like, I'm always, I've always got a, you know, cause you just don't know. And like, there's like, you were talking about earlier about people waiting outside of that guy's apartment to take pictures with him. It's kinda like sometimes. He just ninety percent of the time they're like very, a lot of times you walk away from those conversations.

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  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 we they're just we they're just like stalkers, you know? Like it's not, it's not good like you.

• 1:27:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and you're not, you're not blending in too, because how tall are you?

• 1:28:00Speaker 01

  Well, I my my running joke is that I'm five eleven on Wikipedia, but I'm like, I'm probably like six. I think my driver's license is six six, so I'm probably like really six five or something, I don't know.

• 1:28:11Jocko Willink?

  So six, five freaking bright red hair, bright orange beard, like you're not, you're not blending in anywhere. You know, like people are gonna identify you from long range.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, the shows is, you know, the thing at the shows that's crazy, the one thing that that.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  So like imagine doing the show, you know, being on stage for an hour and forty five minutes in front of five or ten thousand people. And and then especially towards the end of the show, that's when we really get connected because there's. A lot of times towards the end of the show, I'll read something out of scripture and like we'll do a couple of the more serious songs. And then, you know, usually Richmond and then we might do an encore after Richmond, but we've Richmond's always like, you know, Richmond and I want to go home. And maybe a couple others, everybody's always really into them. So you feel this connection with like 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.

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:29:21Jocko Willink?

  There's no way to for a normal person to experience that. Was it feel lonely, like empty, gratified, satisfied? Like what's the, what's the vibe when you're sitting alone in the bus? After you just freaking made ten thousand people cry?

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  Hmm. Um, well.

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  Part of it, I, I feel like.

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  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, 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

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  like they talk about, you read, you read about people who win the lottery and then like their whole life falls apart, cause everybody treats them different, everybody wants something from them. And it's not necessarily anybody wants, like I'm not saying it like that, but it's just, like I'm so, to me, this Oliver Anthony music thing is like a project that I'm working on. It's not me. Like, I'm not Oliver Anthony, you know, I'm not, like, I'm just, I'm just some guy, like I, I'm just that guy that wrote that song, you know? And I have a million other parts of my life that can, like, 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.

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  So it's been challenging, I said, it's been challenging, it's been challenging re-centering myself in my relationships with people and because. Cause it's like I'm almost in a it's like I'm in a different reality like everyone's 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.

• 1:32:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's like you're in a new environment that you got to adapt to, you know?

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

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

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  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 because 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?

• 1:33:48Jocko Willink?

  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, what, 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 for a normal person that doesn't do that, they gotta go out and make all those

• 1:34:31Jocko Willink?

  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 going to cover up that with, you know, some freaking want homemade wine.

• 1:34:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:35:30Jocko Willink?

  It's like you were treading water.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  It's yeah, exactly.

• 1:35:32Jocko Willink?

  Above water, but you're not making any progress.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  But but most all of us do for a long time, you know, like, everyone I know that works 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, like, that we all do have, we all have this great idea, like, we all have the spark, you know, going back to what we talked about at the beginning, we all have the spark that we can light and ignite and run with. And, you know, 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 gonna do? It's easier to just be a failure and just accept it and

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  mask it with, with whatever it is, if it's food, like, for me, definitely, if it's, you know, before it was, it was alcohol that 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, or just not managing your money correctly and just buying a bunch of shit, you don't need to fill that. It's like, there's all, you know, whatever it is, everybody's got that void. It seems like, and I don't know, but we all sort of, we all certainly have a spark. We all certainly have the capability to create a better place. And I think. I think my my vision is is like finding a way to get to get all those sparks together and

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  get all the get all those people connected it like in the real world and not like we're never gonna we're never gonna accomplish real change in this world and we're never gonna really address all of these problems that we endlessly complain about if we just keep going on X and Reddit and Facebook and Instagram and talking we can talk about until we're black and blue in the face but it's like just I don't know I think you just gotta 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 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

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  our operating system we 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 wanna I have this vision of creating this these spaces this this network this like

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  this web of these 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 mains they want everything to sound perfect now I understand and they want they're more worried about putting on a production than than than those people listening to real music and the and like it makes me out my blood 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

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  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 a common practice at festival series and even with big bands and stuff 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.

• 1:39:07Jocko Willink?

  No, they don't.

• 1:39:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:39:15Jocko Willink?

  Well, otherwise, just wa, just listen to the freaking MP3 or go watch the YouTube video. Like, no, you want to see a human do the thing and freaking connect.

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  How do you get real music into a place without all the augmentation and without all the thrills and, 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.

• 1:40:23Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 1:40:28Speaker 01

  I wonder how many people that go to concerts have credit card debt. It's probably 80%, like, I don't know, there's.

• 1:40:33Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's just America. That's just, yeah. That's just America. That's the 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. And it's like, you want to get that thing for your daughter. It's like, well, I'm gonna get that thing for my daughter. You know, people just, it sucks. It's the reality.

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  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. So, uh.

• 1:41:10Jocko Willink?

  Well, they're actually getting taught the opposite, right? Cause when they go on to 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 out 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.

• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:41:41Jocko Willink?

  How come you dropped out of high school?

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  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, cause I can't, I still can't fit in line like.

• 1:42:01Jocko Willink?

  You 100% don't get, then go guess here, man, you 100% got a problem with authority.

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  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, um. 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, 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, 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 saying, even saying I made the right decision doing it, but, um.

• 1:42:52Speaker 01

  But.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no, there's no practical skills being taught to, 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.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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,

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  one of the things it refers to is like when they started adding front cameras to phones, like in that same year, like early teenage girls, their self-reported, like self-harm and suicide rates shot like, there's a direct 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,

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  and, and it's hap, 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.

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  You know, there's this, 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, I might miss something up, but um, but our, our DNA and our, and our DNA and our sperm can change from life experience, like, 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. That develops that second kid and to my understanding is different than the first. Our experiences literally change 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.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  And you read about things like the taxi, the taxi drivers in London that have to memorize all the roads and, and they can take an MRI scan of their brain before and after. And it's visibly different and there's tons of other studies like this too.

• 1:45:53Jocko Willink?

  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 is a signifies trust. And over time, like cops, they're just, 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.

• 1:46:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:46:31Speaker 01

  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 of months and um, man, it was like, it was like quitting drinking. It was like that difficult, you know?

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  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 writing's on the wall. Like, 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.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  Like, all these things that have popped up in the last 20 years that are just destroying us and our fam, 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, he, 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.

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  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, like.

• 1:48:53Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's like junk food. I think, I think you made this up, Echo Charles. Like, uh, it's just junk food, right? It's junk food for your brain, you know? And junk food tastes good and it feels really good at the moment and you really like it. And after you have some, uh, fudge rounds, like, by the bags over and over again, then, then actually, like, maybe a steak doesn't taste as good anymore. You know, even though that steak is the apex food to eat, now that you're addicted to the sugar with the fat on it, you're 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, just poured into my mouth. Just.

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  You know, I'm going, I, my brain's always all over the place. We'll go back. I'm not trying to deter, but real quick, because I laugh, 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. On Hoffheimer Road in 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 it was but it was funny because 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 like this is all

• 1:50:17Speaker 01

  she can like this is all she can even like they don't they just don't even that who nobody teaches us even what to eat like I guess that like even what to eat we don't even really know we don't really know what's in our food like 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 like Tyson chicken is not like I'll you'll never catch me eating Smithfield or Tyson again like it's almost fake but anyway I thought this thought that was funny I'm I wanted to just bring that up briefly but but in our like 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

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  long term on this system of like and in these and and also it's it's more complex than that too because with the introduction of AI like we talked about it's like these devices are are learning AI is learning from us as we stay so immersed in it it's learning AI I mean in theory it's like if these if these phones do what they say and you know that 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

• 1:51:37Speaker 01

  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 simultaneous 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 will ever, I mean, like, you can ban TikTok and you can 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. I mean, what 13 year old isn't going to just download a VPN and get on porn. Like, we're trying to like, correct all these issues like we're on age, like we're, like, the way a parent would try to discipline their

• 1:52:20Speaker 01

  child and the child knows 10 ways to get around it. Like, you know, like if my-

• 1:52:24Jocko Willink?

  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 gotta 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. Yeah.

• 1:52:36Speaker 01

  So we'll never fix, we'll never fix it 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-

• 1:52:59Jocko Willink?

  So this is your thing?

• 1:53:00Speaker 01

  So my thing-

• 1:53:01Jocko Willink?

  This is your thing, right now. This is the, this is the Rural Revival Project, right? This is it.

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, like it-

• 1:53:08Jocko Willink?

  Which is also your tour, right?

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  It'll, so-

• 1:53:11Jocko Willink?

  They're the same, kinda, they're intertwined.

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:14Jocko Willink?

  The Rural Revival Project and Oliver Anthony Music Tour, this go around, these things are kind of intertwined. It's kind of a launch point. Is that right?

• 1:53:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, we've only done one show so far in Morgantown and it was like, last minute thrown together. So that, we've, 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 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 it, like, I

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  know we're in trouble if somebody's like, thinking that I, but no. Yeah, I'm gonna start, I'm gonna start finding these places to do shows that haven't had mu- I'm gonna find these towns, like instead of doing the Pittsburgh amphitheater, we're gonna find a city within forty-five 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 ten years or whatever and I'm gonna find these other bands and these other artists that I've met along the way and I'm gonna see if, because a lot of them are tired of the Live Nation Ticketmaster monopolies and they're tired of like, and you see people on the internet all the time, musicians like, I mean, going back to Sac Brian, I'm not trying to keep bringing him up, but like, he, I think he has an album or something about ticket, like, I think one of his albums is,

• 1:54:52Speaker 01

  or one of his tours or something was like negatively about, against ticket, like, he doesn't like Ticketmaster either and he's at the top of the ticket, the ticket selling hierarchy. I wanna 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 ten 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.

• 1:55:18Jocko Willink?

  Are they gonna be outdoors?

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  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 millionaires per, 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 rich, it was like, it was a very rich town at one time in West Virginia and now it's like, totally dead, like, half the, like, um,

• 1:55:43Speaker 01

  yeah, it's a, it's ter, like, it's terrible with those, 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-

• 1:55:52Jocko Willink?

  And that's from the coal mines getting shut down?

• 1:55:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a, yeah, and drugs and everything else, it's just, it's a, it's a comp, but we're gonna, there's an old school there that's been closed for a while and we're gonna, 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. 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 they just paid it off, but Bram the town of Bramwell owed like over a hundred thousand dollars to the federal government like and taxes because they

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  had a mayor embezzle money and stuff and they don't have any income coming into that was 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 because it's because the center it 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 I can do, if I can, 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

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  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 through Savage Freedoms. Does that ring a bell?

• 1:57:32Jocko Willink?

  I think I have heard of that before.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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 gonna 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 in Swanona and he's like, I can't go home. Like, I've got to be here doing. And like, they were there for free doing it. And I believe that it's

• 1:58:15Speaker 01

  actually our, I believe that one of the ways that we solve all of this in this country, like, the lack of leadership, the like, it seems like so complex, like, it seems too complex, you can't, I don't, we, 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. Like, I, I, part of this festival series, I hope to find a way to help empower like, the special forces vets, because.

• 1:58:42Speaker 01

  There are, a lot of them are, 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 that's, and it, and it's, the proof's in the pudding, like, 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. I've, there's a gentleman there I met named Justin Neal and a few other guys who I've, 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 gonna have like an investigative journalist go, find out what corruption's going on there, what problems there are. Is it just things that the town needs? Like, is it things that the people there

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  need? Is there a story there that needs to be told? We want to find the veterans that are there who, who-

• 1:59:30Jocko Willink?

  Bro, you'll have a freaking mini-series out of every town you go into. Like, you know what I'm saying? You start looking for the corruption and, you know, what's going on with

• 1:59:38Speaker 01

  the locals- Like, what's, like, what's keeping these people from living a fulfilled and good life in these towns? And like, what can we do to, like, make their life better? And maybe it's like, you know, maybe, and I'm just speaking out of thin air because 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, I've been working with this gentleman named Graham Meriwether, who does, and Joel Salatin, and I even had a conversation with Mike Rowe about this, but I'm, I want to bring in, like, when you go do 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

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  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, um, and, and I believe, and I, I, yeah, that's like my purpose.

• 2:01:05Speaker 01

  And it's still, it's still very much of it in the infancy stages. Like I said, our, probably our next show will be sometime in March. But basically, yeah. Whereabouts? Probably the first show will be, uh, in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, which is where I got my GED at. And their whole town was devastated there. And then, and then another, another component of it is, um, you know, like Joe, when I first, when Richmond first happened, it was the day, 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. Cause I didn't want the money. I didn't need it. I just wanted it to go do some good.

• 2:01:50Speaker 01

  And he said, don't do that. Just keep the money and then do good with it when the time comes. You know, cause you don't really know where your money's 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 what, the first property that I'm going to use as part of this is this permaculture farm that I bought and right just south of Farmville.

• 2:02:15Speaker 01

  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 and, 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, I'm creating this space that will be open up to the public that like, uh, Robert Kennedy Jr. Calls it a healing center, but I, I'd almost call it more of a grounding center, but it's just a place that people can come and like, get out in the woods and reconnect and learn how to grow their own food and just work with large animals. And like, it's a therapeutic thing, but it's also just like a reconnecting. Man, it's so, it's just so incredible to be, I mean, speaking from experience, the guy who sold his house,

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  bought some land and spent a lot of time on that land. Like I found myself out in the woods and found myself reconnecting in nature. And like, like it's, there's more.

• 2:03:07Speaker 01

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

• 2:03:52Speaker 01

  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

• 2:04:36Speaker 01

  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, and do that enough times, like, it will be unstoppable. 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?

• 2:05:00Jocko Willink?

  No, that's epic. You know, we have a factory up in Maine, in Farmington, Maine, which is awesome and it's a great place. Maybe we could think about doing a one up there and then we have another one down in Ashboro, 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, like a job that is a skill, working in a factory, doing something that like you like doing.

• 2:05:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:26Jocko Willink?

  Whether it's people that are weaving material, work in the looms, people that are sewing, like it's honorable, awesome work that people like doing. And a lot of people don't, you know, if you're a, 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, a good job that pays good and like you're doing something productive for America. So, that'd be pretty cool.

• 2:05:53Speaker 01

  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 Billy was a, was a Marine and I don't, you know, I'm just, I, I don't know if Billy, Billy is probably going to be pissed that I even mentioned him on this podcast, but he's like a hero to me. Like he, you know, he certainly, he was in the Middle East, his, 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,

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  you know, Billy deals with a lot of stuff because of that and like, and like you,

• 2:06:31Speaker 01

  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 the stuff that they're just like, somehow they're just immune to all of it, but like.

• 2:07:06Speaker 01

  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 they're 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

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  like, I don't know, I just, I just, it 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

• 2:08:29Speaker 01

  lost them once they came back home, you know? Like, so if we can just, I don't know, I, I'm going to find some way to empower those people into position of leadership through this and, and I think like, I don't know, I just think, I 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, and it's based on, it's, 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, in the end, I just envisioned 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, if we stay immersed in the digital world and

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  we, and we, and we stay, we stay stuck in these, in this like algorithmic cycle where everything we worry about is what they want us to worry about. Like, 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 like,

• 2:09:27Speaker 01

  They do, the, the algorithm does a really good job of finding the things that they, that's gonna destabilize us emotionally the most and polarize us the most and they keep it in your face all day long, 24/7. And, and there's all these like real quality of life issues that like, like we're in a cri- 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 gonna fix it, but like, we've gotta 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

• 2:10:12Speaker 01

  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. Oh, yeah. 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, it was a while ago, but his Maps of Meaning course, 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

• 2:10:56Speaker 01

  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, 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

• 2:11:40Speaker 01

  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 reali- 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

• 2:12:21Speaker 01

  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 and what part in the world, everyone that existed before will be forgotten. Like, we are in the worlds, in world history, the United States is probably something that a lot of people will never even know existed. Like in the real, like how many societies existed before us that we have no idea who they even were. Our modern his- 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

• 2:13:03Speaker 01

  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

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  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 it 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

• 2:14:28Speaker 01

  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 this stuff I don't know I just see it popping up more and more and um I just think we're I don't know I just think it's time that we all just get together and just figure out how to fix like let's just fix this thing like let's just quit talking about it and start being about it.

• 2:15:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah I got a friend uh who's a a veteran army guy and and he really gets upset about um you know he wants to help out he wants to he 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 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 going to take four years to get through and vote someone into office

• 2:15:49Jocko Willink?

  that you hope is not going to 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.

• 2:16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah because I um.

• 2:16:10Speaker 01

  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. And 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. Yeah. But so, so I have this theory and it, and Jordan does talk about this too, but I think that, I think there's a word called syzergy. 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,

• 2:16:53Speaker 01

  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 so frustrated, like, it's like this endless battle we're in with politics is because generally people who are, people who vote conservatively or vote more liberally and they're, they also apply that in their own thinking, like it's part of their personality. Like, 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 like the wish.com version, but, but people who think more conservatively are like the type of people who in a business would be the, would be like the CFO. Whereas

• 2:17:35Speaker 01

  the people who think more on the liberal side of the spectrum would be like more of the entrepreneur, like either in, in, in, in 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 it, 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 who, 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.

• 2:18:19Speaker 01

  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 that 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, they, their brains are designed to think outside the box. They're, they're, in many ca, like, the friends that I have that are left are super smart and they're not bad people at all.

• 2:19:04Speaker 01

  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 like, so stalemated, that now they're just, they're like, they've been influenced to, to use that innovation and that thought to kind of just, they're rebell, it's a, 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 concept, like the, 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 Bloc, and then that turned

• 2:19:46Speaker 01

  into this, and it's like, it should just become in 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

• 2:20:02Speaker 01

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

• 2:20:45Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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, you know, that's exactly what that's that's where we're like, that is where we're heading.

• 2:21:29Speaker 01

  But if the thing is, is like, no, that's I, you know, 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.

• 2:22:11Speaker 01

  Like, you know, like, how much time have we spent on the internet? This is 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.

• 2:22:25Speaker 01

  Versus how much there's been about like our food or about our, you know, about, about how we, how we get, how we take care of our veterans or our homeless or how we, 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. Like, let's, let's just get all these people together and just like, let's just take a time out. Like, you guys can go back to arguing in five years, but let's just take five years. Let's all go, 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 interests. 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

• 2:23:10Speaker 01

  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 see, 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 DC and go to some of these protests and stuff and I, 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 governments don't care about them.

• 2:23:53Speaker 01

  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, they want the coun, 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-

• 2:24:16Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 2:24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:24Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're doing.

• 2:24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and our, we're definitely gonna be, we're gonna keep everybody there well hydrated using Jocko's hydrated island orange drinks. So-

• 2:24:35Jocko Willink?

  Right, all men. So when is it, when is the tour kickoff or when is the, when is, when are you gonna start doing these things? You said, you said they're gonna be out here on the west coast at some point. Is there a plan for that yet? You got any locations yet?

• 2:24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the prob, the problem has been that, like I said, I-

• 2:24:49Speaker 01

  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 gotta 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, so yeah, so I've had to go basically do this all completely DIY. I'm going rogue, I guess,

• 2:25:34Speaker 01

  as the cool kids say and uh.

• 2:25:36Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever heard of a band called Minor Threat? Either a punk band from DC?

• 2:25:40Speaker 01

  I haven't.

• 2:25:41Jocko Willink?

  Okay. They're, they're just led, they just, you should look into them because the guy that was the singer, he, he was also in a band called Fugazi. You ever heard of that band? Okay. So he was kind of the, brought a lot of the DIY stuff to his life and, 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, he stuck with that his whole life. You know, he's still doing it. His name is E. Mackay. Yeah. So it reminds me a lot of what you're trying to do, you know, keep prices down, bring people together. Um, you know, the music's different, but the, the attitude is the same and he's been pulling it off for a long time.

• 2:26:22Speaker 01

  Well, this certainly won't be a country festival either. Like I said, like my dream first, my dream first festival would be like, and I don't even need to play necessarily these fest, at all of them. Like it, it could even just turn, but my, my dream would be to have like some crazy mashup with us and some punk rock band and like a rapper or some, like it doesn't, because.

• 2:26:47Speaker 01

  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 a, 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, which was, um, which was, we opened for Sublime. Oh damn.

• 2:27:29Speaker 01

  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 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, um, 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,

• 2:28:13Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 2:28:56Speaker 01

  It's but it it's going to serve the purpose of what church maybe once did at one time, you know, which is like

• 2:29:02Jocko Willink?

  Community.

• 2:29:03Speaker 01

  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 and how to manage their time and how to and how to find secrecy in their families and be able to spend time together as a 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 one or some, you know, like

• 2:29:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:33Speaker 01

  Those are those we 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.

• 2:30:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's like when people more 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 you gotta watch out for becoming that becoming those kind of weirdos.

• 2:30:16Speaker 01

  It's already to that point like 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 tech, 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 going to figure out, you know, like, but you know, it's like that's and AI is is AI is a whole nother kind. I don't see how we're gonna, I 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.

• 2:30:51Jocko Willink?

  Well, because AI can't run the room, can't come to the shows at rural.

• 2:30:56Speaker 01

  Maybe they will.

• 2:30:58Jocko Willink?

  Maybe they will.

• 2:30:58Speaker 01

  See, but that's why I say music and food. Yeah. There's no robots showing up there. That's for sure.

• 2:31:03Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man. Awesome. Um, 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.

• 2:31:13Speaker 01

  There'll be a.

• 2:31:14Jocko Willink?

  We need to coordinate. Hopefully, we can get one of the first song out when this comes out. That'd be pretty.

• 2:31:18Speaker 01

  So all the, yeah, so all the song, 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've, now, 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. I had just talked to like, um, I don't know, like crazy stuff like Shaboo, like I talked to Shaboozie about doing a song with him, which funny enough, like going back to your E minor G C D 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 use 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.

• 2:32:01Jocko Willink?

  Same song.

• 2:32:02Speaker 01

  But yeah, give it a month and.

• 2:32:03Jocko Willink?

  Spark, little bit of soul.

• 2:32:05Speaker 01

  But yeah, that's a little snapshot into my head and I'm, I'm so sorry. I've been all over the place on this podcast.

• 2:32:11Jocko Willink?

  No, man, it's all good.

• 2:32:12Speaker 01

  Just rambling along over here, but.

• 2:32:14Jocko Willink?

  You're, uh, you got that mind of the artist, right? It's, I was over here trying to put it in a box. You're over there just getting after it.

• 2:32:20Speaker 01

  I guess so, yeah.

• 2:32:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's what, that's the way it's got to be in order for something to work, right? Got to have both sides. Where can people find you? So it's, you got Oliver Anthony music.com. You, 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, wherever places is that you want to get into it, right?

• 2:32:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the last thing I'll say is that my, my last plan, my last part of this mastermind scheme this year is because I can't, I can't in good faith. Push stuff on social media and tell everybody to not be on social media. So somehow this year, I'm gonna 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, by the end of this year, the fans will be able to catch the updates through 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.

• 2:33:34Speaker 01

  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 into shorts. I'll 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?

• 2:33:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, that's a tough one. I know I, 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'm not, I haven't figured out how to solve it.

• 2:34:07Speaker 01

  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, it's from Jocko and it's got like what you're, you know, like it's.

• 2:34:27Jocko Willink?

  Well, luckily for you, if you text Jocko Fuel to 24672, you'll get it. So we actually do have that. Yeah.

• 2:34:34Speaker 01

  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. No, I'm just kidding. Well, hey, if I actually text Jocko on my phone, I get, I get a pretty real, it feels just like I'm talking to the real guy now. So.

• 2:34:46Jocko Willink?

  That is the real guy. Right on, man. Uh, Echo, you got any questions?

• 2:34:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, real quick. So G C D E off the top of your, actually kind of for both you guys, I guess, but um, Chris. Do you like, is there any songs off the top of your head that that can play? Just those chords?

• 2:35:06Jocko Willink?

  Dude, that's Richmond, North of Richmond. That's like, literally, it's a ridiculous amount of songs.

• 2:35:11Speaker 02

  No ones that are like, kind of known, you know, like, okay, speaking from the beginner's standpoint, right? Cause that's, you said that's what you.

• 2:35:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:35:27Speaker 02

  A capo? What's a capo?

• 2:35:28Jocko Willink?

  The thing that you asked me about on that guitar over there, and I said, I didn't have a hundred percent solid answer. It's so you can play in a different key, right?

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can just bump it up. And so like, it's like guitar for dummies, like for you, you'll see me do that. Like, I'll just move the cape, cause I, yeah, but so I would say to answer your question, um, G C and D. Which I would say learn, if somebody wants to learn guitar, G C, D and E.

• 2:35:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so.

• 2:35:54Speaker 01

  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. 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 varying 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.

• 2:36:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:34Jocko Willink?

  Then he, you want to play ukulele, right?

• 2:36:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:38Jocko Willink?

  Played ukulele before?

• 2:36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a guy actually, um, there was a fan of mine who made me a, he, 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 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.

• 2:37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:05Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 2:37:15Speaker 02

  It's smaller though, right?

• 2:37:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, it's definitely smaller.

• 2:37:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's like freaking hard.

• 2:37:18Jocko Willink?

  No, no, no, no, no. The spacing between.

• 2:37:21Speaker 01

  You're so jacked, it's gonna be like, it's gonna look like this big when you're playing it.

• 2:37:25Jocko Willink?

  The weird thing is, so I was out, uh, we have a thing, uh, 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 know when we talk about when you're in a leadership position, the tone that you have and you know, the way that you're communicating 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, uh, the guitar, because we were sitting around the campfire. And I said, listen to this. And I played like a, like an 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

• 2:38:07Jocko Willink?

  you showed up. I'm like, see this? This is happy. And then I'm like, now this is, uh, A minor, and it's like, and that's universal. Like you were talking about how you go to different, uh, what is it, tribes that have never been contacted before? They will be able to tell the difference between, uh, 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?

• 2:38:37Speaker 02

  Uh, nope. Nope, that's it. Good to meet you.

• 2:38:39Speaker 01

  Well, likewise, yeah. It's so like, again, you gotta 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.

• 2:38:57Jocko Willink?

  It was funny, when you walked in, you were kinda like looking around, like, it was like,

• 2:39:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's just like, 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 wanna like, sound like an ass kisser, but it's, I, you know, like, I don't, and that's one of the first things everybody asks 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 podcast 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, uh, this is a life moment for me to be able to do this. So, I really appreciate your time. 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.

• 2:39:46Jocko Willink?

  He's a good listener, man. Well, awesome, man. Well, thanks for joining us, man.

• 2:39:51Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:39:52Jocko Willink?

  I 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, I almost started sending you, you know, pictures and, because people don't read, 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 said, but produces like 12 or 15% of all the agriculture in all of America is here.

• 2:40:35Speaker 01

  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 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 is in, 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, when California started to have so many issues and so many, 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

• 2:41:17Speaker 01

  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 that, like this is a beautiful place.

• 2:41:34Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:41:35Speaker 01

  And when I, I was, 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, like, this is America in a big way and.

• 2:41:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And it, look, I think the, the pendulum is about to swing back, you know, in the other direction because, you know, we just had these terrible fire, fires up in LA and.

• 2:42:01Jocko Willink?

  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 you, 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's 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

• 2:42:44Jocko Willink?

  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, hey, it seemed like you were super cool. Like when you were the guy, when people are coming over, they're like, oh my gosh, this is awesome. Wait, I can eat all, 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 like, that's what we're doing in California. And so it feels really good, you know, you're going, ah, 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, in the, in the, uh, fish tank, right? Or the sink or whatever.

• 2:43:29Jocko Willink?

  And you said to yourself, you know what? I, 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, in the fish tank, you're getting kicked out. If you, you know, 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.

• 2:43:50Speaker 01

  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,

• 2:43:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:59Speaker 01

  Like California had all this cultural and like a lot of good, 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 then that means the other side's right. And same way, it happens both ways, you know, but yeah, this, I do think one day California will be a great place to live again, but right now.

• 2:44:24Jocko Willink?

  I don't think it's very far off. Honestly, I think, I think the, 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 the way it should be. And it's a, I, when you come back out, I mean, I'll come see you wherever you're doing shows, you know, I'll roll up and, but man, if you go to Yosemite National Park, bro, it is like awe inspiring.

• 2:44:46Speaker 01

  Well, I think I, I think I told you in the text, but it was funny of all the things that really like opened my eyes to how beautiful California was, was when they were chasing Christopher Dorner. And he was hiding out.

• 2:44:57Jocko Willink?

  Big Bear.

• 2:44:58Speaker 01

  He was hiding out in Big Bear.

• 2:45:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:00Speaker 01

  And like this is, this is just like the, like the bad side of me.

• 2:45:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You had no idea that that was, could exist in California.

• 2:45:07Speaker 01

  I just pictured California just being like dumpsters on fire and like, I don't know. I just, I, 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?

• 2:45:33Jocko Willink?

  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, 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 in, 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.

• 2:46:10Jocko Willink?

  Once it ends, like you get, it ends, like it's just stops and then you get into, I mean, 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, called Death Valley for a reason, but it's, it's, it's nature. Uh, 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.

• 2:46:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46:40Jocko Willink?

  And 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.

• 2:46:51Speaker 01

  Man, 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, hopefully by then I won't be such a fat slob. I can come work out with y'all.

• 2:47:01Jocko Willink?

  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 mats, which is good.

• 2:47:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:47:29Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. No, it's, it's awesome. But it's just, it's just, it's something that brings people together, you know?

• 2:47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:35Jocko Willink?

  It's something that brings people together. Kind of like, I guess you can't put it in the same exact category as, as food and music, because food and music are very universal, but maybe, I don't know, man, scrapping?

• 2:47:47Speaker 01

  Scrapping.

• 2:47:48Jocko Willink?

  You definitely, for boys, I think, yeah. Yeah, yeah, for boys. You know, I just got a new dog.

• 2:47:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:54Jocko Willink?

  Because 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, and when, same when you have like little kids, man, little kids, you give them that little opportunity, they're going to wrestle. You know, especially what opens it up for them is if, 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 can just wrestle in the pool. Yeah. So. It's true. That's good stuff. But I think, um, California is going to make some big changes in my, in my opinion, pretty quickly. I think everyone's kind of.

• 2:48:32Speaker 01

  So the, 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 gotta do something with my life, you know, get back into working out. So I've been eating like, well, 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, um, for like the people who are out of shape, who want to like, who, but it's so diff, 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?

• 2:49:15Speaker 01

  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, 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 eat, 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?

• 2:49:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. If you're gonna, I mean, if you want to get into jujitsu, here's, here's the following process. Do you have a pen? You can write these things down.

• 2:49:52Jocko Willink?

  Oh, don't worry about it. You'll be able to remember. Here's the deal. If you want to start doing jujitsu, go to the jujitsu gym and start training jujitsu. That's what you need to remember.

• 2:49:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50:00Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I think, I think as far as getting on the path for being more healthy, I think, uh, 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, uh, do yoga and don't care what you do. For the, the simplest thing is walking, right? This is simple. Echo Charles has been on a little kick for a little bit now doing his, we, he's stretching the term, calling it roadwork. So roadwork from the boxing world, roadwork, because you go out and you run at four o'clock in the morning, right? Even my freaking daughter, Rana, and my other daughters, they were getting fired up the other day talking about roadwork.

• 2:50:44Jocko Willink?

  Mike Tyson was saying, ba, ba, ba, ba.

• 2:50:48Jocko Willink?

  Like, why are you doing this? He goes, because it, because it sucks. Because this is what we're doing. You know, like you can get fired up for roadwork, but that's legit roadwork. 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.

• 2:51:05Speaker 02

  Work.

• 2:51:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, road work. Explain, because I honestly, explain your.

• 2:51:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51:10Jocko Willink?

  Because I think that's a good place to start. If you were to wake up and go for a road walk.

• 2:51:14Speaker 02

  Road walk. Well, yeah, I still think it's appropriate, road work, the word, because yes, in the boxing world, it's true. Road work, because 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 thirty minutes or something like this, right? And it's gonna 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 audiobooks 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, um, but oh yeah, so super beneficial. It doesn't zap you of your energy too or nothing like that.

• 2:51:58Jocko Willink?

  Gives you energy.

• 2:51:59Speaker 02

  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 fifteen minutes. I just start walking fifteen minutes, audiobook, boom, freaking fifteen minutes, then I walk home, that's thirty minutes.

• 2:52:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, easy.

• 2:52:13Speaker 02

  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, yeah.

• 2:52:22Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, walking, if you could, if you could walk that thirty minutes every morning, then at least it's in, it's getting you going and it's also probably getting your mind in a state of like, alright, I'm doing, like, maybe it gives you some accountability and some kind of point of reference to build off of.

• 2:52:35Speaker 02

  It does a lot of things, to be honest with you. Um, the, the whole reason I started, which I, 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, work out and you know, work out, do all the stuff, good jiu jitsu, you know, sometimes varying levels of activity there. But um, other than that, pretty sedentary, just sitting in front of the computer screen, even though sitting here, we've been like, yeah, mentally, but that physically, this is sedentary work right here that we're doing. So when you can evaluate your day, day to day, it's like, bro, I'm living a sedentary lifestyle, even though I'm working out.

• 2:53:13Jocko Willink?

  Percentage wise, percentage wise, totally sedentary.

• 2:53:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:53:17Jocko Willink?

  Compared to, compared to if we were back at the moving company.

• 2:53:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:20Jocko Willink?

  Like all day we're lifting stuff.

• 2:53:22Speaker 02

  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, bro. It doesn't work like that, you know? So I'm like, alright, 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 a days either, but you just walked for a little bit. Like a lot of people are doing that kind of activity anyway, you know? So it doesn't really register on the tired part of your, your day, but you get the benefits nonetheless, you know?

• 2:53:48Jocko Willink?

  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 pushups, um, you know, pushups, situps, pullups, if you've 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 kind 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, all of a sudden, when they fall down, they can't back, get back up again. Remember that commercial when we were kids, like I've fallen and I can't get up?

• 2:54:28Speaker 02

  Hell yeah.

• 2:54:28Jocko Willink?

  That's a real thing. Cause 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 of 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. And 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 gonna 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 is, how did you, what, 31 right now?

• 2:55:08Speaker 02

  Thirty two.

• 2:55:09Jocko Willink?

  Thirty two years old, bro. Like, you're still at a stage where you

• 2:55:15Jocko Willink?

  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, um, real basic stuff, man. Pushups, situps, pullups, squats.

• 2:55:31Speaker 02

  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, 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 pushups, right? We'll say I'm gonna do 10 pushups. Okay, I got all 10 pushups. Like the next time you do pushups, but you gotta care about that kind of stuff. You know, like you gotta be like, okay, I, I only got nine, that should bother you. You know, you should be like, no, no, I need to do my 10 or 11 or 12. And once you get up to like 15 or something, and then you're only doing 14 one day, that should bother you. Like you should care about that kind of stuff.

• 2:56:15Speaker 02

  And I think that way it'll keep you kinda in the game as like, almost like a little mini mission in your workouts. Rather than, oh my gosh, I gotta gut through this thing and you're looking forward to, you know, for it to be over, which is the case anyway, a lot of times. But if you have that little mission mindset in it, it'll probably, it'll help you stick with it a hundred percent.

• 2:56:32Speaker 01

  I remember like when I was watching your videos years ago, you know, like you're talking about your routine. Cause there was videos talking about routine that really helped me with what I was, cause I was waking up early in the morning and it 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, 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.

• 2:57:07Jocko Willink?

  And, and then you asked about eating too. And it's like, uh, we, at our gym, there was a guy. 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, he lost weight. And I said, I said, dude, freaking dropping some weight. You dropping down a couple of weight classes? And he's like, yeah, yeah, I dropped 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, you're gonna, you're gonna get out of shape. And if you, you, everyone knows what to eat, like eat, eat things that are

• 2:57:51Jocko Willink?

  good for you. We all know what they are. So just don't eat like an asshole, man. That's the key.

• 2:57:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, yeah, it's, it's just, a lot of people don't realize how bad all that food. Nobody tell, you know, it looks so good and it's so appealing. Not even the junk food, but even just some of this, like, God, 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.

• 2:58:15Jocko Willink?

  The, the, the, 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 dude, my wife is pissed about this stuff. Like she, cause 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.

• 2:59:00Jocko Willink?

  So yeah, you gotta, you're right. You gotta be careful. Just be 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 gotta watch out for that. Anything else, Echo Charles? No. Chris, anything else, brother?

• 2:59:13Speaker 01

  I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for your time.

• 2:59:15Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 2:59:40Speaker 01

  So thank you. It means a lot coming from you. Yeah. Thanks.

• 2:59:42Jocko Willink?

  Bro, thank you.

• 2:59:43Speaker 01

  Appreciate you all.

• 2:59:46Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 2:59:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:59:59Jocko Willink?

  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 texts with him for a while?

• 3:00:08Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 3:00:23Speaker 02

  You're calling it?

• 3:00:23Jocko Willink?

  I'm calling it and I wish I could like somehow, like, uh, put a bet on it, right?

• 3:00:32Jocko Willink?

  But I don't know how to do that.

• 3:00:33Speaker 02

  Can you say the name of the song or no?

• 3:00:35Jocko Willink?

  Hmm. It had to do with a woman, we'll say that.

• 3:00:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 3:00:40Jocko Willink?

  So there you, we noted, is that, is that for, for ver, for, uh, what is it called? To verify my, my hunch?

• 3:00:46Speaker 02

  Well, I know the name of the song and I know how the song went because I listened to it. Agreed, I like it. Um, I'm less of a prophet than you, I think, so I'm gonna, 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%.

• 3:01:03Jocko Willink?

  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 gonna be like a rock and roll, like legend song.

• 3:01:19Speaker 02

  So.

• 3:01:20Jocko Willink?

  That's what I'm here to tell you.

• 3:01:21Speaker 02

  Not to go too, too deep on this particular song, but you ever watched the movie Desperado? Antonio Banderas, he goes.

• 3:01:27Jocko Willink?

  I think I saw parts of it.

• 3:01:28Speaker 02

  eventual. 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.

• 3:01:38Jocko Willink?

  And you liked that song?

• 3:01:40Speaker 02

  Very much so, actually.

• 3:01:41Jocko Willink?

  You can see what I'm saying here.

• 3:01:42Speaker 02

  Yes, I do.

• 3:01:43Jocko Willink?

  That song is gonna be epic. So hopefully it come, be, uh, drop in that thing pretty soon. And it's awesome. He's still got control over his whole, uh, let's say library and life and stuff, so. Very cool. Also, if you're gonna be, um,

• 3:01:58Jocko Willink?

  Getting it done musically, gotta get it done physically.

• 3:02:01Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 3:02:01Jocko Willink?

  You heard him asking like, you know, everybody's got to stay on the path.

• 3:02:05Speaker 02

  Yep, it's true.

• 3:02:06Jocko Willink?

  You can't be rocking out if you're not in shape. So that means you're doing what you gotta do. Means you're getting after it. Even if it's just a road work in the morning, what Echo Charles called Echo Charles road work.

• 3:02:19Speaker 02

  Yep. 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.

• 3:02:27Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. No, no, I get it, dude. I support you. Hey, but if you step it up a little bit more than that.

• 3:02:33Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:02:34Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna need some fuel. Hey, check out Jocko Fuel, jockofuel.com. Uh, speaking of, you could, you could hear Chris spend 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, GNC's, Military Commissaries, Afe's, Hanford Dash Stores in Maryland, Wakeford, Shoprite, HEB down in Texas, Meyer in the Midwest, Wegmans, Harris Teeters, Publix. Just got into Publix down in like the southeast Florida.

• 3:03:04Jocko Willink?

  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, uh, performance oriented gym,

• 3:03:23Jocko Willink?

  sell Jocko Fielder, email [email protected]. 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?

• 3:03:34Speaker 02

  No, I was not going catabolic.

• 3:03:36Jocko Willink?

  Danger?

• 3:03:36Speaker 02

  Well, you know, if you don't drink, if I in this particular situation didn't drink the milk, yeah.

• 3:03:41Jocko Willink?

  Did you lift this morning?

• 3:03:42Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:03:43Jocko Willink?

  Are you lifting after we get done?

• 3:03:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:03:45Jocko Willink?

  Did you walk this morning?

• 3:03:47Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:03:48Jocko Willink?

  No road work for the kid.

• 3:03:49Speaker 02

  Woke up, came here.

• 3:03:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, whatever you need, we got supplements for you. Greens. Creatine, are you on the creatine train right now? How many, how many scoops a day?

• 3:04:00Speaker 02

  One a day, every morning.

• 3:04:02Jocko Willink?

  I'm on two a day.

• 3:04:03Speaker 02

  One, oh damn, okay.

• 3:04:04Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 3:04:04Speaker 02

  So the protocol is, and this is helpful, um, put okay, 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.

• 3:04:15Jocko Willink?

  Are you dry scooping it?

• 3:04:16Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:04:17Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I see what you're doing.

• 3:04:18Speaker 02

  Creatine hydrate packet in the water, that's already, everything already staged, boom, first thing in the morning, every single morning.

• 3:04:24Jocko Willink?

  I'm dry scooping creatine, morning and night.

• 3:04:28Speaker 02

  Okay, I get, alright man, that's a good, cool. But yeah, I like my protocol, it's way more comforting.

• 3:04:33Jocko Willink?

  There you go, Jocko Fuel dot com, get what you need to be jacked and in shape and healthy.

• 3:04:39Speaker 02

  Capable.

• 3:04:40Jocko Willink?

  The whole nine yards. By the way, we were talking about with, with Chris Oliver Anthony, talking about bad foods, go read the ingredients, then read the ingredients on Jocko Fuel.

• 3:04:51Jocko Willink?

  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, gies, jujitsu gies, jujitsu rash guards if you're in the no gie era of your life.

• 3:05:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:23Jocko Willink?

  We're making jujitsu belts now.

• 3:05:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:25Jocko Willink?

  Fuck, I want one. Well, we might be able to make that happen. Uh, actually, you know, cause I've only had one black belt the whole time.

• 3:05:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:34Jocko Willink?

  And it is old, you know what I mean?

• 3:05:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's special.

• 3:05:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, no, definitely, cause you only had one, but I'm getting a new one too.

• 3:05:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, fully.

• 3:05:44Jocko Willink?

  I feel like I need it.

• 3:05:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, especially the origin one, I mean, you know, that's it, yeah, that's, that's the good one for sure.

• 3:05:50Jocko Willink?

  Yep, so OriginUSA.com, everything a hundred percent made in America, hunt gear, workout gear, just everything that you need. Go check it out. OriginUSA.com. Boom.

• 3:06:03Speaker 02

  It's true. Also, Jocko's store called Jocko Store 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, Stand By To Get, so. Get after it. You know, all these notions, we'll call them for lack of a better term. Anyway, you want to represent, that's where you go. JacoStore.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. A lot of people were hitting me up, "Hey, what's up with it?" You know, they're restocked, so boom, hit it. Also, the Shirt Locker, which is a subscription shirt scenario. You get a new design every month. Let me ask you this. This is just for your opinion, your opinion, because this will have no effect because I already

• 3:06:44Speaker 02

  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 the, 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, 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.

• 3:07:14Speaker 02

  Is that appropriate, you think? Or does it come off like, "Ooh, I'm representing the beer brand", you know, like, what do you think?

• 3:07:20Jocko Willink?

  I think it's actually pretty good.

• 3:07:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:07:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I think it's good because it's like, you go, "Oh, yeah, beer. Oh, no."

• 3:07:26Speaker 02

  Nope. Discipline.

• 3:07:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. See, I like it. You don't have the same little, little vibes.

• 3:07:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I didn't know if I was, 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 be, 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.

• 3:07:45Jocko Willink?

  I'm very anti beer at this point in my life.

• 3:07:47Speaker 02

  There you go. There you go.

• 3:07:48Jocko Willink?

  So let's make fun of beer if we can.

• 3:07:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's all on JacoStore.com. Go ahead, yeah, check those out.

• 3:07:54Jocko Willink?

  Also, check out PrimalBeef.com. PrimalBeef.com, from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

• 3:08:01Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna 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 Colorado craftbeef.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?

• 3:08:29Speaker 02

  Of course. I'm down for the beef tallow.

• 3:08:31Jocko Willink?

  What are you, have you cooked with it yet?

• 3:08:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, not the Colorado Craft Beef one, but I'm down.

• 3:08:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's good. It's good because you can use it instead of putting like oil in a pan or butter. No, tallow. Boom, we're good. A hundred percent. So check those out. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also check out jockounderground.com. Also YouTube channels. We got a bunch of them. Check out Psychological Warfare. You can get into that. And then we got some books. I've 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 of the Warrior Kid, check those out. Also, Echelon Front, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to

• 3:09:18Jocko Willink?

  echelonfront.com 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

• 3:09:52Jocko Willink?

  and register and take some of those courses. There's some free courses on there. Just take the free ones. If you don't, if you're like, oh, I don't, 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 families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mamali, she's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate, or you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. Also, check out Heroes and Horses.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 Heroes and Horses.org does. And then also Jimmy May has an organization called

• 3:10:35Jocko Willink?

  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 underscore Anthony underscore Music underscore. He's on Twitter, X, at Ain'tGotADollar. And the one thing that he said he's going to stick with is his YouTube channel, at Oliver Anthony Music. And you can find his, uh, his music wherever you want to find music, whether that's Spotify, iTunes, everything. They got you covered. So check

• 3:11:15Jocko Willink?

  that out. For us, I'm at Jaco.com, and both of us are on social media, whether we're hypocrites or not. Hey, listen, fire can be good, right? Yep. 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, I'm only going to echo, is that Echo Charles? Just be careful. Don't let the thing burn you.

• 3:11:59Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 3:12:44Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 3:13:23Jocko Willink?

  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, out.