#469 – Oliver Anthony: Country Music, Blue-Collar America, Fame, Money, and Pain

Oliver Anthony: it's hard to be a human and be a good little corporate employee at the same time. And as our whole society moves more into like becoming a, like basically one big corporation, it's like, You don't want to piss the HR lady off, so it's a lot easier for me to just beep boop. We're all sort of just turning, we're all turning into robots, you know.

Oliver Anthony: I have this dream of just creating this parallel system that sits beside all these stupid systems that we live under, that are all sort of engulfed in this thing that we talked about at the beginning, this type of structure, where none of us, we're all just robots. And it's like if we hate, if we hate the way music is and all these artists are complaining about the way the venues are monopolized and the ticket sales are monopolized, then let's just go find other places to play music because there's so many people hungry for music in places that don't ever get it. ... if you look up just in Virginia, just where I live in Virginia, in the rural areas, how much food insecurity there is and how many empty vacant farms there are. It's like, this is an obvious problem... So like, let's just like, why are we living in a country where half of us are obese and eating shit food and don't know any better? And then the other half of us don't have, like, how does, it's just, it's lack of leadership that's caused dysfunction. And so if we're tired of that, then let's just fix it. Like we don't need anybody's permission. Like that's the whole beauty, like that's the whole beauty of what America is, like we don't, we don't need some greasy haired corporate schmuck to give us permission to go fix all these things that are wrong. Let's just go do it.

Oliver Anthony: the nobodies of the world, if you wanna call them, like that's, it's frustrating that the people who literally have built and preserve and maintain the structure of society that we all comfortably live in, those people have the least amount of representation. They're ignored just because of the way the social hierarchy exists. But some of the most dim-witted, irrelevant, terrible people are put here and are idolized and spotlighted and they're all over television and they're all over the internet and we act like they're kings and queens and like that they're royalty. And then all these people who do jobs that Most of us will be too, either wouldn't have the, even the ability to do... Nobody will ever know, like nobody even knows those people's stories or what they went through or like the kind of lives they lived. And they're like the people who create the fabric of society

Oliver Anthony: I just got to a point where it's just like, yeah, just a very overwhelming sense of numbness. Like nothing really, nothing that mattered before really matters anymore. Like, I guess that's probably, to me, the definition of depression is when all the things you love and care about are just meaningless and you can't find, you really can't find meaning or purpose or excitement in anything, you know? Like, I think, especially with men that commit suicide, it's a prolonged period of that. It's not like they just wake up one day and they have a bad day and they kill themselves. It's like, you self-reflect negatively about yourself and your life, and you don't do the things that you're supposed to do every day for a long enough period of time. And it's like, pretty soon you've built this whole mountain of mismanaged, neglected stuff, for lack of a better word, like this mountain that you have to climb back up in order to fix all these things that you should have been doing all along. And then on the other side of it, it's like, well, I could just die. Like that seems a lot, like it's almost like for, I think from a man's perspective, maybe the friends that I've had that I've lost, it seems like a lot of times you think you'd never see it coming.