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

Lex Fridman introduces his guest as a Virginia singer-songwriter who first gained worldwide fame with the viral song Rich Men North of Richmond. Fridman presents him as a voice for working-class people who struggle in modern American life, and as someone who speaks for many who are "voiceless."

The stage name is a tribute. The artist's legal name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford, and Oliver Anthony was his grandfather's name. He uses it as a dedication to his grandfather and to the 1930s Appalachia where his grandfather was born and raised, a place he sums up as "Dirt floors, seven kids, hard times." Fridman notes that he is happy to be called by either name. Fridman also says he has gotten to know him since the recording and describes him as "down to Earth, humble, and a good man who deeply feels the pain of the downtrodden." That is the host's personal testimony, not something the conversation itself shows.

The conversation opens with an anecdote. The night before, Fridman watched an open-mic performer play Great Balls of Fire on keyboard for about five people plus Fridman himself. Fridman admires the performer for "just giving it everything," and guesses that the man has no interest in fame. In Fridman's view, open mics hold both people who still hope to become famous and people who have given up on that, or never wanted it, and are there "for the pure artistry of it." Anthony first jokes that the performer may have been playing harder because Fridman was in the room.

Anthony offers his own example of that mindset: Johnny Staats, a mandolin player from West Virginia. Anthony calls him one of the best, says he has won many awards, and notes that he still works full-time for UPS even though he could tour with anyone. Anthony links Staats's joy to that choice, but he leaves the thought unfinished, so his full argument is implied rather than stated.

I remember there was one time in particular that I just walked off halfway through the song, and put my guitar in the case, and just left.

Anthony describes his own early open mics as mostly embarrassing. He would get through one song, get so nervous halfway through the next that he forgot the words, and at least once he walked out mid-song. He also felt out of place because he never drank in bars and was not a social drinker; he was only there for the mic. One of his regular spots was a tiny bar in Matoaka, near where he lived, about the size of the recording room. It has since closed. He remembers ceiling tiles yellowed from smoke. Fridman adds that this was the era when smoking in bars was still allowed.

His set was bar-friendly covers picked to get people singing along. He names Fishing in the Dark and the Nitty-Gritty Band, old Hank Jr. songs, and David Allan Coe's You Never Call Me By My Name. He says he hasn't played any of them "in forever."

The two bring up Take Me Home, Country Roads and Thank God I'm A Country Boy. Fridman admits he loves the second one even though he feels he "shouldn't." Anthony says he liked that John Denver let himself be "a little bit corny in the spirit of having fun with it," and wonders where Denver's career would have gone had he not died. Anthony's other example is Roy Clark of Hee Haw, whose old farm is a mile from Anthony's. He describes Clark as able to pick up any instrument and "just rip it to death" while never taking himself too seriously. He dates Hee Haw loosely: "from the ’60s, or whatever."

Fridman observes that country can go to "the fun place" or "the dark place," and says Anthony more often goes toward pain. Anthony agrees, especially about some of his new songs, then questions the genre label itself: "What is country anymore anyway?" He believes many people who grew up on the music he grew up on have stopped listening to country radio and have "disowned that space." He gives no evidence beyond his own impression.

In commercialized country, you only really get what sells, and a lot of what sells isn’t necessarily what matters.

Fridman brings up Anthony's experience with a recording that was "polished" in an effort to make it perfect, and says that process can "destroy the soul of the thing." He speculates that the same thing happens with very famous artists, because the industry runs like a machine that over-polishes until the person's raw power and uniqueness are gone. Anthony widens the point: applying "the tactics of corporate America" to anything that is "baseline artistic is not going to end well."

Fridman then talks about corporate life more broadly. He says the people in it are "all individually brilliant," but together they produce corporate speak, and the soul "dissipates." He asks why people pretend life is not "terrible and beautiful," when one colleague is going through a divorce and another has just fallen in love, and he mimics the polite nine-to-five exchange "Hi, John. It’s great to see you today." He also checks himself, asking "Why am I whining?" He compares himself to a Bukowski type of character and concedes that the people involved are nice, good people. His critique is aimed at the system, not at individuals.

Anthony explains corporate blandness as fear. In his view, employees are there "to fill a role, contractually," and bringing too much of their humanity into it puts their sense of security at risk.

It’s all just out of fear. It’s out of fear of losing your job.

He ties this directly to his own pseudonym: that fear is "the reason why all of the songs say Oliver Anthony and not Christopher Lunsford on them." He hedges his historical comparison. He wasn't working in the ’40s or ’50s and assumes jobs were "probably pretty miserable back then" too. He also passes on the common claim about how hard it now is to have a single-income family household as something people "talk about," without endorsing specific figures. His firmer claim is that a decent-paying job that doesn't torture you every day is now a valuable thing to hold onto.

That pressure, he argues, makes it easy to "turn yourself into a robot for eight, or 10 hours a day." Workers hide parts of themselves that may not be accepted in what he calls the "dystopian nightmare" they go to every day, and they try not to stand out. He mentions the "quiet quitting" trend he saw online while still at what he calls his "lame job," which he describes as people continuing to show up but not really doing anything. Fridman says that kind of being there without really being there makes him "so sad." Anthony's conclusion is that companies obsessed with structure "slowly fall apart, and disintegrate."

He then extends the argument to American society as a whole. Because large corporations run food, agriculture, healthcare and social media, he suggests that "corporate HR has been implemented into our whole thought process of everything." He frames this as his opinion ("I think") rather than as a documented finding.

It’s hard to be a human, and be a good little corporate employee at the same time.

As society moves toward becoming "basically, one big corporation," he says, the path of least resistance is to avoid upsetting "the HR lady" and go "beep boop." His summary: "We’re all turning into robots."

Fridman offers a counterpoint from engineering. Citing conversations with Jim Keller, whom he calls "a legendary engineer," and Elon Musk, he argues that teams need someone abrasive, which he reluctantly calls "the asshole," to cut through politeness and get to "the ground truth of things, to the first principle of things." That person asks how to simplify, how to be more efficient and how to move faster. Fridman doesn't claim this person is enough alone: "other great team members swoop in, and repair the damage that the tornado has done."

Anthony responds with secondhand material and openly says he is unsure: "I’m not super well-versed about all this." His source is the man making a documentary about him, who has followed him since his first show in August of ’23 and previously made promotional videos for Boeing's new spacecraft. Anthony says that, from what he's heard, Boeing is having many problems now, and that the filmmaker compared Boeing with SpaceX in terms of dehumanization inside companies.

Anthony carefully presents the link as a possibility, not a conclusion: "I don’t know if there’s a connection there, or not." His impression is that Boeing lacks "that tornado." He relays the filmmaker's description of the company's protocols and people as "Lightly touch everything. Don’t touch anything too hard." This is anecdotal evidence passed along by a third party. Neither speaker gives specifics about Boeing's actual problems.

Fridman closes the section by widening the target beyond HR to "this managerial class." He describes Bob from one department having to schedule a meeting with John and Debbie from others two and a half weeks out, followed by paperwork. He argues that the bureaucracy this creates "just slows everything down."

Fridman says slowing everything down “really demotivates the people that are actually doing the shit.” He means the engineers on the ground who show up excited and then “hit this wall of paperwork.” He describes them waiting for meetings with imagined colleagues (“John and Debbie and I forgot the third guy’s name that I imagined in my head”) until they lose “that fire, that passion that’s required to create big things.”

Anthony turns this into a question of whether workers believe in their leaders: “if they don’t believe in that leadership, then why the hell would they be motivated?” He recalls Jocko Willink talking about this. He thinks it was probably in one of Willink’s books. Willink stressed how important it was for the people below him in rank to believe in the orders he gave them, “even if he necessarily didn’t agree with them himself.” Anthony adds that it is hard to take orders and keep your human spirit, especially in innovative work, if you think everybody at the company is dumb.

God, at my old job, that’s all we did is we spent half our day just talking about how dumb we thought everybody was that was above us. It’s easy to fall into that in a corporate world.

Anthony says the damage reaches everyone. When morale gets terrible, “the people at the top who were implementing all that dysfunction suffer, and the people at the bottom.” He had hoped his new career would let him escape that. He says the same mentality, dysfunction and inefficiency are still there: “I still battle it every day.” Fridman replies that it “takes unique characters to lead the way.” He says such people are needed in the music industry to cut through bureaucracy that he calls “the machine that steals money, and doesn’t get anything done really.” Neither man gives specific examples here of the music-industry bureaucracy they mean.

Fridman praises Jocko Willink. He says he has had “lots of low points for myself over the past, shit, three years really, but recently, especially.” He says Willink checks in on him by text in “his very high testosterone way”: “You good, bro? Just checking in.” He calls Willink an inspiration to millions of people and “a good human being himself.”

Anthony names a feeling he suspects they share, though he imagines Fridman feels it “way more than me.” It is the sense of having the ability to influence people, to bring truth or to improve people’s lives, while knowing that “Every word that you say sometimes matters so much.” Then you think, “Man, I’m an idiot.” Anthony says neither of them would have guessed that things would turn into all this. He calls it “a weight that you bear, whether you really even acknowledge it, or not.”

Fridman says Anthony’s songs speak to “the struggle of everyday working people in a society that has the elites, that try to take advantage of those working people.” He says that has a big, positive effect on many people. He also says it brings attacks: Anthony gets “attacked, and misrepresented and lied about from different angles.”

Fridman then talks about his own experience. Being attacked and lied about by a very large number of people disorients him “Because I love people, I have a general optimism about humanity.” He already thinks of himself as not really knowing what he is doing. So when many people tell him “You’re correct. You don’t know what you’re doing,” he says “you start to want to hide.” He wants to hide from the world and from himself. He also points to “the chemistry of the brain”: shake it up a little and “It starts getting weird.” He says it can get “real lonely” when you are being attacked and “fucking things up in many ways.” Against that, he names friends who have supported him: Willink, Andrew Huberman and Joe Rogan.

Anthony says fame changes every interaction around a person, “even if you aren’t any different.” This applies to old friends and to new people alike. He describes the social learning people do from about age three: playing on the playground, learning to share, setting rules and boundaries, and learning to fit into society. He says that whole pattern shifts “pretty dramatically in a relatively short period of time” once “success” arrives. He puts the word in quotation marks. He then asks Fridman whether managing his previous friendships has been tricky.

Fridman says it has been tough. He values “deep, close, long-term friendships.” His friends are amazing, but they treat him a little differently: “They bust my balls noticeably less.” Anthony says you need that sometimes. Fridman corrects him: “Not sometimes. All the time.” Teasing, he says, is how men show love, “at least, my friends.” He offers a gender contrast, saying first that he is “going to get in trouble.” He says women are “often” very positive toward each other, while close male friends are “nonstop making fun of each other.” He says famous friends make this easier because they still tease him: “Rogan roasts me nonstop,” and he enjoys it.

Anthony gives a smaller example of the same change. He calls himself “a Goodwill junkie.” He says most of his clothes come from Goodwill, and he has an “addiction” to buying “the $8 paintings” that look like someone was following a Bob Ross video “and it didn’t work out quite right.” He buys about 10 at a time. He still goes, but says “any time you go out into public now, you know it’s going to be a little different than it was.”