#232 John Rich - Big & Rich Country Star Performs Unreleased Song LIVE

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest-paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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John Rich, welcome to the show.

Thanks for the invite, man.

We have been in the same room at the same time many times and never connected.

I know, man.

I've been looking for a little bit of time.

This is pretty crazy.

Well, every time I see you, you're talking to somebody.

I don't want to interrupt you.

So are you.

You're always surrounded.

But, man, we got so much to talk about.

I want to do a life story on you.

And then I've been,

I really started paying attention to you probably around 2020.

And I was like, oh, man, I really like what this guy's saying.

What got your attention in 2020?

I don't remember exactly what it was.

And I don't remember the exact timeframe, but I just remember you,

you know, you started speaking out about a lot of the stuff that's going on.

And

I just have a ton of respect for any celebrity type, whether that's Hollywood, music industry, sports, whatever.

There's just not that many people that go against the grain.

And

you are a man that I think, I don't think I know.

You stand by your values and beliefs, and you do not waver on that for what appears to be anything.

When I watch so many other people in the industry, you know, they just, they just, they go with the grain.

They don't care about their values and beliefs.

And, you know, for lack of a better term, they seem to sell their soul.

And

you are the exact opposite of that.

So, I appreciate it.

And I know a lot of people appreciate you stepping up.

That's very kind.

I appreciate you saying that.

My pleasure.

You know, saying

being whether it's with your music or an interview or social media or whatever,

saying something that you know is going to upset your handlers, but you say it anyway,

will it affect your bank account?

Yes, it will.

It will affect your opportunities.

Yes.

You know what else it affects?

Good sleep.

It affects your sleep.

You sleep better at night, or at least I do, knowing that

somebody with a checkbook wasn't able to keep me from saying, I didn't look at that as leverage on me to keep me from saying what I needed to say.

Because I'm an American, by God.

That's what I am.

And I'm allowed to talk if I want want to.

And you're allowed to not pay me if you want to, by the way.

You're allowed to take things away from me, but if I'm willing to give that up, let's go.

And what kind of sacrifice is that compared to what people have given up for this country since day one?

It's nothing.

I like good sleep.

And I like to set an example for my two sons who are teenagers now that when you get out in this world, you don't back up.

If you know it's the truth and you know that's what the boss wants you to do, you do it.

Doesn't matter what they take away from you.

Don't even give it a thought.

So I look at it from all those various angles, and that gives me the confidence and the

soul fire to go out there and

make those statements and say what needs to be said.

I love that, man.

How fast did you start seeing that affect your business?

So it was prior to 2020 when I came on your radar.

It was in the

20 teens, probably 2010, around in that range when Obama became president.

You saw Music Row.

A lot of the original guys that were running those labels from back in the day, which were actually country music fans and they were mostly all patriotic guys and really talented and they were country music to the core.

They started replacing those people with

people from LA, people from New York.

They would bring in,

you know, a New York guy to replace the Nashville guy at, for instance, RCA Records or something.

And then when the new guy comes in, he would start changing the culture of that label, which bled all the way down into the artists and it bled all the way down into the publicity departments and what kind of songs you were allowed to cut and not cut, what interviews you were allowed to do, who you were allowed to interview with.

Holy shit.

I started getting in trouble with the label because I was doing interviews with Sean Hannity.

Like I'd go on Fox News and Sean would want me to come on and talk about the tea party, for instance.

I actually went down and played with Sean.

I played a song at the first big tea party rally in Georgia.

It was 20, 30,000 people.

And my record label went absolutely insane that I did that.

You're going to upset half your audience.

And of course, they've got their money invested in you to go sell records to everybody.

And from their perspective, I'm alienating people.

I said, Well, you've got liberal artists that are out here saying all kinds of stuff that I don't like.

You're not worried about them.

They go, That's not the point.

It was the point.

And so I realized.

What do you mean, that's not the point?

That's what they would say.

I guess what they mean by that's not the point is, we own you, we own your voice, your likeness, your music.

And if we say we don't want you to do it, that's the point.

It's like, do as I say, not as I do.

It's like when you ask your parents, well, why can't I do that?

And they said, because I said so.

That's how they treat you.

So it's like an

indentured servitude type of existence.

So when it started stepping in on what they were telling me I was allowed to say and not say,

and what kind of lyrics I was allowed to put on a record, that's when I realized, okay, we're turning a corner here that I'm not okay with.

But then at the same time,

listen, I grew up my whole life wanting to be on country radio, play the grand old opera, write hit songs, country music, man.

That's what I wanted to do.

It's my American dream.

And my vehicle to do that is this big record label.

So if I lose that,

do I lose the American dream by losing that?

And that's what artists are looking at.

You wonder about the ones that don't say anything.

That's literally what they're looking at.

So you really only see the bigger established artists that are too big to cancel, too big for the, they make too much money for the record label, for the label to drop them.

Jason Aldean's a great example.

I remember when they attacked his wife on Instagram, they, the woke mob, attacked his wife.

And I remember him texting me going, basically, you see what they're doing to my wife?

Yeah.

What do you think I ought to do?

Something along those lines.

I said, what would you do to anybody else that attacked your wife?

He goes,

you know, the music world ain't going to like that.

And I said, I'm telling you, man, if you come out swinging, you're selling 30,000 tickets today, you'll be selling 60,000 tickets this time next year because the Patriot crowd will come to your back.

And to his credit, man, he came out and just put his dukes up and here he comes swinging.

And you saw the fallout, right?

Everybody freaking out about Jason Aldean and he's hanging out with Trump or he put out this song, try that in a small town, and all these kinds of things.

And he is doing stadium shows now because people appreciate authenticity in this country.

Be an American.

And if you want to be a lefty American, be a lefty American.

Okay.

I mean, I have more respect for hardcore lefties that'll unapologetically come out and say the most insane, in my mind, the most insane things I've ever heard, but at least they're convicted enough to go say it.

So we need those people on the other side with enough conviction to counteract that.

There just ain't a whole bunch of us.

Have you, I mean, have you seen anybody else that starts to make the switch?

I mean, you saw Carrie Underwood, all she did was show up and sing america the beautiful at the inauguration she crushed that of course she did i don't know what was with no music yeah remember the music got messed up yep i remember they were like where's the track we can't get it to play and carrie just goes i'll sing it a cappella yeah because she's a freak of nature talent she doesn't need any help that's a real that's a real artist and so she sings it but then what happens the next day

Everybody in pop culture attacking Carrie Underwood that she's, you know, singing for a a fascist or whatever they said.

And that's what happens.

So you have to be prepared for that.

If you even dip your pinky toe into that, they're going to come at you.

Man.

So that's what artists are looking at, if you're wondering why some of them don't say anything.

It's sad.

It's sad to see it.

But we'll dive into this a little bit more later.

Everybody starts off with an introduction here.

All right.

I know.

I watch your show all the time.

Can't wait to hear it.

Right on.

John Rich.

Son of a Baptist preacher.

Your faith inspires your music, including your recent hit single, Revelation.

Multi-platinum country music singer-songwriter, best known is one half of the iconic duo, Big and Rich.

Former bassist and co-lead vocalist for the band Lone Star, where you contributed their early success in the 1990s.

Successful solo artists with albums like Son of a Preacher Band.

Entrepreneur who founded the Redneck Riviera brand, including a popular whiskey line and bar in Nashville and in Las Vegas, hosted the CMT reality show Gone Country and appeared on programs like The Celebrity Apprentice, co-founded Old Glory Bank, a financial institution focused on serving conservative values and protecting against debanking, supporter of veterans and first responders, and a vocal advocate for American freedoms.

You're a husband, father of of two boys, and most importantly, a Christian.

That's pretty good.

I'll take it.

Right on, man.

So, John, I figured

I'd love to pray with you.

Okay.

You want to lead it?

Well, it's your house.

All right.

Let's do it.

Jesus, we just want, we just want to.

We just want this story.

You know, John came from nothing in childhood, and

my purpose of this interview is just to show that the American dream is still alive and well and to bring hope to all kinds of people, not just in this country, but throughout the world, to know that there's always a way out of poverty and

there are no limitations.

And I just

want to thank you for

bringing me and John together today.

And I just hope this turns into a flourishing friendship.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Amen.

Ain't starting better than that.

That's right.

That's right.

Everybody gets a gift.

Check in with the boss.

You got any gifts?

Everybody does get a gift.

Yes.

Well, I brought you a gift.

I love gifts.

So it's like, like you could add anything else, but it's not big.

It's small.

But the only other person I've given this to is the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

And I figured he had probably been given everything.

He had never been given this.

And his eyes widened up and he goes this is going in my office in a very particular spot so i ran across a couple of these

a while back i've saved them they've been in my safe for specific people that i know love our country as much as i do and have sacrificed for the country so what this is

this is an original worn World War one victory mode.

No way.

You've probably seen pictures of these.

I doubt you have one.

I do not.

So that's all right.

You ain't going to hurt it.

That thing's been all over the world.

So

what's interesting on that coin is when you flip it over, you'll see all the countries that were our allies during that war.

And notice they didn't call it World War I because how could there be World War I if you hadn't had World War II yet?

Interesting thought.

So

if you read what it says, it'll tell you what they called that war.

And our allies were China, Japan, Russia, all these countries, which got me to reading like, wow, I never even considered that.

But that one says France.

So that means that was worn by a U.S.

soldier that had fought in France.

Man,

the Great War for Civilization.

The Great War for Civilization.

So that's about

100 plus.

Man, China.

Yeah.

Back when China was an ally.

Back when China was an ally.

Yeah.

Man, thank you.

You're welcome.

This is getting framed.

I figured you'd have a good spot for this.

This is getting framed, and it'll be hanging in here.

I love stuff like that.

That's so ancient and over a century old to know that

some man had that on his chest.

Some man was in France killing Nazis, actual Nazis, and he was part of us winning that war.

And

like I said, you have one and Pete Heckseth has one.

So thank you, John.

Yes, sir.

That means happy to give it to you.

That's awesome.

Thank you.

Yes, sir.

Well,

man,

you've outdone me.

Vigilance League gummy bears.

Oh, awesome.

Made in the USA, made up in Michigan.

No funny business.

Legal in all 50 states.

You're not going to feel weird.

We actually had a guy email in.

It's like, I've gone through three bags of these.

I still don't

feel anything.

It's like.

It's just candy, buddy.

You'll feel it in the morning.

I appreciate that.

Can I let my kids eat it?

Oh, yeah.

We'll give you a bunch more all right give me a bunch more thank you i love that bag it's got all the bad in there sugar red dye you know all the stuff everybody hates but you haven't given one to rfk yet i guess no yeah actually i did they did give him one but they'll probably be illegal in all 50 states or by the end of the year and then um appreciate that got you another thing okay i know you're a gun guy and a huge second amendment supporter so i got a buddy over at sig his name's jason all right and uh i told him you were coming on.

He's a huge fan.

He wanted me to.

He wanted me to get holy smugs, man.

Thank you.

You got your FFL.

Can we sign this over today?

Well, we'll sign it over in a couple days.

But

I go like this.

Hopefully, you don't have one already.

I do not have.

Wow.

Look at the grip on that thing.

So that is the SIG Sour P211 GTO.

Good lord.

It's SIG's first

go-around of a 2011.

That thing is smooth as butter.

Oh, wow.

Is that a Hollison?

That is SIG's new optic as well.

It looks like it, yeah.

I don't know about you, but I like the circle around the dot.

You know, some guys just like the dot.

Yeah.

I actually like

being able to see the circle.

I don't know why.

That is beautiful, man.

Yeah, my carry is

just a

43X.

Really?

Yeah, 43X, but I've got a

Shield Arms makes an aftermarket mag for that.

That's a 15 plus one.

So it'll actually hold 16 rounds in a very small.

So it's easy for me to conceal wherever I've got it.

Nice.

But, man, this is beautiful, man.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Wow.

Maybe we'll break that in on the break here.

Okay.

Cool.

Thank you.

See what you got, John.

Yeah, well, I ain't got what you got.

I've seen you standing there on your videos.

You go, we're about 80 yards away.

Let's see if I can hit it.

And you're just like,

bang.

And then you hear ping.

I'm like, oh, come on, man.

Yeah, I can't do that.

Well, we'll get you talking.

Absolutely beautiful.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

And tell that gentleman I said, thank you.

I will.

Jason will be

very happy that you like that.

Thank you, Jason.

Incredible.

All right, John.

I didn't get that when I interviewed with Piers Morgan.

That's crazy.

Pierce didn't give you a gun.

I know.

How odd.

It's so crazy.

But

so, yeah, I want to start off with your life story, and then we'll move into some

various topics that are going on today.

I know

your latest debacle with the Tennessee, with the TVA.

We'll get into that.

But where did you grow up?

So I was born in West Tennessee.

My parents met at college in West Tennessee.

My dad's a Texan from the Panhandle of Texas.

So basically where Amarillo is, there's a little town 60 miles from here called Pampa, Texas, P-A-M-P-A.

I was born in West Tennessee when I was four years old.

We moved to Texas.

So I don't remember living in Tennessee back then.

So I grew up in Texas, up in the Panhandle.

And it's flat.

It's windy.

It's tornado alley.

I mean, that's where it's at.

It is a different part of Texas.

It's not Dallas or Houston or Austin.

It's where the actual cowboys live up there.

And

my great uncles and all the men that came back after World War II that lived up there, you know, they had those lines in their faces so deep you could plant tomatoes.

Damn.

You know, from being in the sun.

Yeah.

So they worked oil rigs out there.

They were farmers.

And my Granny Rich is from Pampa, Texas.

Dust Bowl days.

She was born during the Great Depression while simultaneously experiencing the Dust Bowl days.

So think about that.

Great Depression is bad enough, but in that area of Texas, also the Dust Bowl days.

So those are the types of people I was around growing up, which has a pretty dramatic impact

on a kid.

Yeah.

Like a lot of they liked to work.

It wasn't like, man, I had to work hard today.

It's like, we got a lot of good work done today.

Like I'm going to eat some dinner, go to sleep.

and we're going to get back up and do it tomorrow.

Like it was energizing to them and gratifying to them to go out and work really hard.

Man, you don't hear that much anymore these days.

You really don't, unfortunately.

But there is a great sense of accomplishment when you've worked really hard.

Let's say you're splitting wood, something simple, but it's hard.

It's hard to do.

And you went from 45 red oak stumps that are now no longer there and you look over there and there's this beautiful stack of red oak ready for the winter.

Light up that fireplace at Christmas and you realize and you're sore all over and sweating and bug bites and all that.

And you go, that's a beautiful stack of wood.

And you did something.

I think it's something that a lot of especially young people miss these days is they don't understand the gratification you get from doing something hard.

Yeah.

Manual labor.

I really think it's not good for your head to not do manual labor on some level.

I don't think so either.

I mean,

go mow the grass.

Do something.

Go run a weed eater for three or four hours and tell me how you're feeling.

Do you have your kids do manual labor?

Yes.

What kind of stuff do you have them doing?

They help me split wood.

They run weed eaters.

They'll go out and I'll say,

we don't hire people to put mulch down at our house.

We go to the mulch yard with my truck and trailer.

They'll load in 9, 10, 11 yards of mulch,

which is quite a bit.

Yeah.

And get to the house and we got pitchforks and wheelbarrows.

And I'll say, invite two of your buddies over.

I'm hiring everybody to lay this mulch today.

And I'll be right here doing it with you.

And so it takes all day to do it.

And when it's over, they all get paid and they're all just beat from pushing a wheelbarrow up a hill a hundred times, you know.

But then they feel, they go, well, it looks good, doesn't it, Dad?

I go, it looks perfect.

It looks better than the guys I hired to do it a few years ago.

That's why I don't hire them anymore.

It looks better when we do it because we own this land.

And someday you're going to own this land and you need to know every square inch of this land.

The land's alive and you own it.

You need to know how to take care of it, what it is, where all its spots are, good and bad.

You need to improve your land.

Like you need to own it.

It's part of who you are is the land.

And they really last onto that.

And so they take a lot of pride in doing things that improve the surroundings of where we live.

Man, I love that.

When'd you start that?

How old were they?

Probably Probably they're 15 and 13 when they were about 8 and 10.

When they were big enough and had enough on them where they could pick something up.

Nice.

Yeah.

Did you grow up doing hard work?

Big time.

Love work.

I mean, we were running,

oh, it was a half acre or bigger garden in the panhandle growing.

beans, jalapenos, tomatoes, watermelons, cantaloupes, corn.

I mean, and so out there,

it's so windy that you have to dig really deep rows when you plant those seeds.

And you build it because it's so flat, you can't get the water.

If you lay a hose in a row,

you can't get the water to move down the row.

So you actually have to find a spot of land that's a little bit tilted.

or even build your rows up a little bit.

So when you lay that water hose at the top, it'll run all the way down the row down to the end.

And then you finish watering that row, you lay it in another row, right?

And And you're weeding it, and you're shooting jackrabbits that are out there trying to eat your cantaloupes and all that stuff.

And

yeah, I have a little garden in town right now.

Nothing big, but I always like to have something I can go pick.

I picked some cayennes this morning at my house.

Nice.

Nice.

Yeah.

What else were you into as a kid?

You know, guitar, the guitar for me was

my

thing.

My dad taught me how to play guitar when I was about five years old that was one of his extra jobs would give guitar lessons my dad's really great singer really strong guitar player and um

one of his side jobs was giving those lessons and one day he he asked me said

john daniel which is what they all called me until i was not that long ago my grandmother called me john daniel until the day she died John Daniel,

you want to go with me to guitar lessons?

I said, yeah, dad.

So I jump in the car and go down there.

And he's got seven or eight adults sitting in a semicircle.

And he's going to give them a lesson.

He kind of hands me a little cheapy guitar and says, just follow along with what we're doing.

He gave me the page that they were all looking at.

And I'm following along and I'm picking it up.

Well, after two or three of those lessons, I was picking it up real fast.

And he realized, you're pretty good at that.

You're like ahead of a lot of the adults I'm teaching.

So then he really started to teach me some stuff.

And by the age of probably seven, seven and eight years old, the worst punishment you could give me would be to not let me have my guitar.

That's the worst.

It's

seven or eight years old.

Like today, it would be take away the kids' video game or take away their iPad.

For me, it was take that guitar away.

So I would sit in my room.

We had these, you probably remember these,

like a jam box where

you could play the radio, but it also had a cassette deck.

So if you'd hit play and record at the same time, it would record whatever you're hearing on the radio.

Oh, yeah.

I used to do that all the time man yeah so you'd be like time you'd be waiting waiting for the song to come on boom hit both of them yeah so i would do that and then i would spend the next week listening to that particular song over and over and over till i could play everything in that song and that's how i got that's how i got better at guitar no kidding yeah

you grew up i mean if i remember correctly you grew up in a trailer Did you grow up in a trailer?

It was a double-wide.

So it, you know, your idea of what a trailer is is not what I would say I lived in.

It's manufactured housing is what I would call it.

But yeah, it's a double wide.

But, you know, my dad,

there were weeks that my dad, my dad's a preacher, but my dad would work sometimes over 100 hours a week, over 100.

So some of the jobs he would do,

especially getting started out there in Texas, he was a night watchman at Amberland National Bank on the weekends.

So he's walking all night long.

He would slop dogs,

guitar lessons.

He worked for several car dealerships.

Matter of fact, he got a big break after he's a really great salesman.

He got a big break and became general manager of the big Nissan dealership.

Now, when that happened in Amarillo, we moved from where we were living into a brand new brick house with a concrete slab and 10 acres and a horse barn.

Nice.

Right.

But there were times I watched my dad really have to dig deep and make sure he's got four kids,

make sure that everybody had what they needed and everybody did have what they needed.

But you watched your dad work that hard.

I remember him coming in, like on a, he would walk the bank on a Sunday night and we're getting up at 6 a.m.

to go to school on Monday morning.

And there's my dad walking in with his uniform.

Sits down in his chair.

And me and my two little sisters would grab his boots, everything we had, try to get his boots off his feet because they were swelled up like balloons from walking the bank all night.

Wow.

He'd sleep three or four hours and he'd get up and he'd head to the car dealership or he'd head to go do whatever other job he was doing.

But, you know, to his credit,

no plates hit the floor.

You know, you hear about spinning plates.

Plates didn't hit the floor.

How did you, I mean, how did you and your brother,

brothers and sisters, brothers?

I got two younger sisters and a younger brother, so I'm the oldest of four.

Right on.

Yep.

How did you guys handle that?

I mean, I work my ass off.

I work my ass off, and I always worry about, you know, I got enough time with the kids.

I got enough time with the family.

So I'm curious, you know,

how did you guys feel about your dad working so much?

Did you understand what he was doing?

I did.

I understood that he was hustling because.

You got four kids and you got to keep everything going.

Even at a young age, watching him work like that, I'm like, man, that dude is just, it was unreal how much he was working.

But I'll give you like a story on him tell you tell you maybe give you some insight on me just knowing this about him he didn't like any of the schools in amarillo he didn't like them even even the the little christian school that he had me going to

he didn't he didn't like it 100 he saw some issues with that so he said you know what um i'm just going to make my own school and so He found, I think it was a couple of World War II Army barracks sitting off somewhere outside of Amarillo.

Used to be a big Air Force base out there.

LBJ, I think, had a big base out there.

I could have the details wrong.

But anyway, it was some old barracks.

They were going to get rid of them.

And he brought two of them out and got some other men together.

And they spent about a year or so connecting those buildings and completely remodeling these buildings.

And this is when we were in the double wide and started a school.

called Tierra Grande Christian School.

So the area of town we lived in was called Tierra Grande, Big Earth.

And that's where I went to third and fourth grade.

No kidding.

Yes, sir.

And so, you know, in later years, I said, why did you go through all that?

He goes,

there wasn't a school in Amarillo I thought was good enough for you to go to.

So I built my own school

and hired teachers and got other people to enroll.

And he ran a successful school there for a couple of years.

Now that's some

that's some drive.

That is.

Yeah.

That's a dad that cares about what's happening with his kids.

Is he still alive?

He is.

Yeah, he just had his birthday, 73.

Man.

Yeah.

Happy birthday.

Happy birthday, dad.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

So music became part of your life.

You became really good at the guitar, seven, eight years old.

Dad works his ass off.

What kind of manual labor,

what kind of work were you doing as a kid?

Well, so when he was slopping hogs, I would go slop hogs with him.

So he would take me along on his jobs.

I was the,

you ever slopped hogs?

No.

Okay.

So they give the kid the job of basically the hog farmer would go to the grocery stores when their bread and milk would expire.

And so you would get these pallets of moldy bread and pallets of clabbered milk, gallon jugs of milk.

Okay.

And so my job had this, this concrete wall.

My job was to take bags of bread and smack them against the wall and throw the plastic away and smack them and smack, say, 100 loaves of bread,

and then take a snow shovel and dump them off into a bucket.

And then you had a razor, like an X-Acto knife, and you pick up the clabber of milk and you cut the top of the milk off and chunk, chunk, blah, blah, blah into a bucket.

And then throw it away and then cut another one into 100 gallons of milk.

And then they would blend those two things and put vitamins in it.

And then the men would go out and they would actually slop the hogs.

So I'm standing in the back prepping the slop right on man yeah right on yeah and it was interesting i mean you got

hog operations are interesting some of those hogs are seven eight hundred they look like seven eight hundred pounds massive tusks i saw i saw them eat each other attack each other kill each other yeah damn you know in the wizard of oz when he said tell dorothy don't climb up on that fence because you don't fall in the pig pen well there's a reason because they'll eat you damn damn but i love that i got to do stuff like that.

I mean, it's so vivid in my mind.

You know, I was eight, nine, ten years old doing that.

It didn't seem bad to me at all.

It seemed, I was working with my dad, so I thought it was cool.

And again, it goes back to doing manual labor, doing hard work.

There's a lot of gratification you get out of that and you learn things and

right, you get to take credit for something looking better or something getting done.

I did a lot of manual labor.

I didn't slop hogs.

But what about your mom?

Who is your mom?

So she's a Tennessean.

My parents were married about 18 years.

I got divorced when I was going into my senior year of high school.

She was like a, you know, she could type real fast.

So she was like a paralegal and,

you know, did her job on the side.

It was, it was a lot of effort going on back in those days.

Are you guys close?

Not really.

Why not?

Well, are you close with both of your parents?

Yes, I am.

Well, you're a very lucky man.

Yes, I am.

You're a very fortunate man.

My mother figure in my life really was my granny rich.

So that'd be my dad's mother.

You know, without impugning anyone or anything like that, it was

just

the way I was being raised by her was not.

the correct way to raise somebody.

I'll put it to you that way.

I'll give you another example.

I married someone who is the exact opposite of who my mother is.

I mean, totally opposite.

You know, you hear people say, well, you're going to marry somebody like your mother.

You're going to marry somebody like your dad.

And whatever was going on that wasn't right, that just perpetuates itself generation to generation.

And I said, yeah, not in my case.

That's not going to happen.

So I married somebody that.

was the opposite of that, that was the opposite of me in a lot of ways.

A lot of balance between the two of us.

And now we're about to have our 17th anniversary, which is pretty good for anybody, much less a country music singer.

No kidding.

It's almost unheard of, man.

Congratulations.

Thank you, sir.

I appreciate it.

So,

you know, it also becomes part of your life.

I think the way she raised me and the way she was around me hardened me.

It angered me a lot, but it hardened me too.

It made me go like that.

Like it made me understand what that is.

And

as you get older in your life, you got to let a lot of that go.

You got to dump that because you can't have that hanging on you the rest of your life.

But you do pick up things from it that are useful.

For instance, how to exist, as you know,

as a combat guy.

Now, I wouldn't in combat, but the mentality of I'm not afraid to walk into this uncomfortable, perilous situation, whatever it is.

because I've been around them a lot.

Now, on my end, again, that does not even compare to you you and some of the men that have sat in this chair.

But for me, that mentality was there.

It's still there.

And it's why I don't really back up.

I don't mind engaging people when they need to be engaged.

That makes sense?

It does make sense.

I mean, being a man of faith, and I know you have a very strong faith and you know the Bible

really well, I'm just curious.

I mean,

does it bother you that you're not close with her now in these days?

Is she still alive?

She's still alive.

Yeah.

Do you guys ever talk?

I think if, I think if, uh, I think if somebody,

let's say her, if she was ever willing to come forward and admit to all that stuff and apologize for it,

we could, we could kick things back off again.

But when somebody wants to keep it frozen in time and just leave it there,

then the choice of the person who was on the receiving end of that, you have two choices at that point.

One is let it continue to be part of what you think about and let it affect you in really bad ways, which I did for a very long time.

Or two is to you talk to the boss and you say, I want you to take that off of me.

I want that off of my back.

I want it out of my mind.

I want it off of my back.

It is what it is.

There has been no amends made for it and there won't be.

So I'm asking you to take it off of me.

The word would be, deliver me from that.

Get that out of my, what makes me me.

And after asking that for several times and meaning it, one day he just did.

No kidding.

Yeah.

And then I'm able to look back at it and go, well, what are the positives that came out of that?

Not a bunch, but it did turn me into the type of individual that now where I do have control over myself.

And I, you know, I don't

do what I used to do, which we can get into all that.

Google it.

You'll find it.

I'm able to use that and be extremely effective

when it comes to engaging something that needs to happen.

I know we're going to talk about some of those stories coming up, but almost fearless of things.

You just go, yeah, that's not right.

I'm coming straight at them.

You've always been like that.

I've always been like that to a degree.

I think, though, you know, I got saved when I was eight years old.

My dad having church at the house, little kid, got baptized in a horse trough.

So where the horse drank water in our backyard.

Eight years old.

Way on down the road into my adult life as all kinds of things unrolled and I was living as the ultimate prodigal son for a very long time

and reconnected back to him and apologized to him

and

rededicated myself to him and then all that stuff that i had that i had done and learned throughout those years that i was using in the wrong way

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It's interesting how he does that.

Like the question of can a person that doesn't have insatiable ego ever succeed in the music industry?

No.

They can't.

There's something about

the listeners,

any entertainer, whether it's a movie or singers or whatever,

the general public, they're attracted to people that have overpowering,

they'll call it charisma, I would call it ego.

I guess maybe it's a mixture of both.

But that's there and it's extremely destructive.

But can you even accomplish what it is you accomplished if you hadn't had that?

I wouldn't have.

But then

it can eat you down the road.

So the thing is, if you're lucky enough and he gives you enough patience to let you go through all that without you dying or something terrible happening,

you can turn the corner and then all that stuff you got to learn.

And now you can do it on his behalf instead of on your own behalf, which is where I am today.

Love that.

When you say you got saved at eight years old, you got baptized at eight years old.

was there anything specific that had happened that saved you?

Do you have any experiences?

What was it that, why eight years old?

Listening to my dad preach,

he was going through the passage where Jesus said, behold, I stand at the door and knock.

I remember my dad was knocking on a table.

He knock, knock, knock when he said that.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

And if any man hears my voice and opens the door, door, I will come in with him and sup with him, meaning have dinner with him, and he with me.

And I could see that picture in my head, like of Jesus knocking on the door and coming inside our house and sitting down.

And Jesus stand outside the door, and all I've got to do is go over to that door and turn the knob and open the door and he'll just walk in.

I remember thinking that at eight years old, I go.

Well, if he's standing at the door of my heart, of course I want him to come in.

It's Jesus.

And I remember just being hit by that in such a strong way that when my dad had the invitation to come forward, if you'd like to give your life to Jesus, and I'm eight years old and I went like that

and came down.

Wow.

Yep.

I bet he was proud of that.

Kids can give their life to Jesus much easier than an adult because they're not all fouled up.

with

their own issues and problems.

They're kids.

They're innocent still.

It's one of the probably the most aggressive thing Jesus ever said,

and I wish I could have heard it in person in Hebrew, because I bet they would have considered it some cuss words coming out of his mouth,

was, if any man causes one of these little ones to stumble, he'd be better off to have a millstone tied around his neck and cast into the depths of the sea.

Not

if any man caught if any man abuses one of these little ones, if any man kills one of these little ones, if anyone slaps one of these little ones, if anyone causes them to stumble, well, if you go look that up, what that means is mess with them at all because they are in a state of innocence.

It's the most innocent thing that lives on the earth or kids.

He said, you'd be better off dead than to do that.

So when you're eight years old, you're standing wide open.

Right.

That's why kids need to hear the gospel.

Kids need to be told about who Jesus is.

Kids need to understand that because

once you give your life to Jesus, yeah, your life could go off the rails.

It probably will at some point or another and whatever.

Life's a crazy thing.

But he's in there.

And you come back around to him.

He's going, I've been waiting on you.

That's kind of how I feel like it went with me.

Man.

Wow.

Have you stayed rooted in faith throughout the duration of your existence?

Or have you fallen off at all?

Well, I stayed

rooted in it as so much as I knew it and I knew it to be true.

And there were things I would do that were obedient.

But for every obedient thing I would do, there were nine things that were disobedient.

And he'll only let you do that for so long.

And if you're really lucky, he'll only slap you hard enough to knock your teeth out and not knock your brains out.

If you're you're really lucky good way to put it yeah and so you know

when i became a dad i started thinking about i mean we call him the father

he's our father well now i'm somebody's father and so and then i thought and we're created in the image of god we are created in his image well what that means to me is that means every emotion that i feel he feels I'm in his image.

That also means he has a sense of humor, which I find to be a really interesting thing.

I'd love to hear him laugh one time.

But every emotion we have, he also has.

So that means how I feel about my sons

on the absolute perfect and most intense level is how he feels about his sons and daughters.

So mine is an imperfect way, and it is so intense for me.

I would pile them up by the fence as deep as I could get them if they came after my kids.

And so would you.

And so would millions of people that are probably watching this right now.

That's the level of love we have for our kids.

Extrapolate that times infinity.

And that's how God feels about us.

Man, once I had that realization, I went, wow, I'm like looking up going, that's how you think.

So if you're going to discipline your kid,

your kid keeps going out in the street and playing football.

And you have told him 10 times, do not go out in the street and play football.

You get hit by a car, dummy.

And he keeps going out there.

Well, eventually, you're going to have to do something pretty drastic to punish this kid because you don't want him to get hit by a car, right?

Now, you ain't going to kill him.

You're not going to break a bone or something.

You're going to do something.

You're going to snatch him up and something significant is going to happen for his own good.

He looks down at us and goes, I'm looking at my son, John, down there.

I'm going to have to be drastic with this guy.

He is too bullheaded.

He's too fearless of things.

He ain't listening.

I'm going to have to smack him around.

That's why I said, if you're lucky, he'll only knock your teeth out instead of your brains.

Because he can just take you out.

Have you had your teeth knocked out?

No, I've given you every chance in the world.

You're out.

Have you had your teeth knocked out?

Many times.

You got any examples?

He knocked him out a few times and it didn't work.

So like public humiliation,

losing record deals, being fired from from very, very successful situations and take me from riding high all the way down to nobody's calling and can't pay my rent.

That was knocking my teeth out.

Didn't matter.

Wasn't understanding what that was.

Wasn't ready to yield yet.

And so on and on and on it goes.

And

I used my success.

as a hammer to beat the crap out of people with it.

And that goes back to how I was treated as a kid when you talked about me and my mother.

I felt like I was having the crap beat out of me all the time.

So when I finally got the upper hand, I took my own success and it was big success.

Millions and millions and millions of records.

Number one songwriter in Nashville three years in a row at ASCAP.

I was songwriter of the year three years in a row.

That's hard to do.

Wow.

That means my songs got played on country radio more than anybody else's songs in all of Nashville for three years in a row.

Wow.

Right.

So I had that kind of success.

And instead of doing what I would do now with success, which is go out and try to help other people and

do good things with it, I'd go right on.

My hammer just got bigger.

Now who can I hit?

And I'd make sure they knew I had a hammer.

Right?

Wow.

Walk around like a mob boss.

Like

I'm the man.

And what that was i was just dishing out what i had taken interesting yeah interesting yep

but it makes sense when you look at it like that what was the turning point

turning point for me was uh

nothing um

specific other than what i'm about to explain to you meaning i didn't lose some big deal or almost have a car wreck or anything like that.

It literally was this.

I was sitting in a hotel room and that's the way I'm conducting myself like I've been explaining here.

Sitting in a hotel room after a concert and I felt God

vacate me.

Left.

How so?

He just left.

What was the feeling?

Like you had been abandoned in the Arctic Circle.

Gone.

So until that point, I still, it was still in there.

You know, when you give your life to Jesus, you ask the Holy Spirit to come in and he will.

And you can feel it.

I can feel it right now.

You can too.

So imagine that being taken away.

He just leaves.

Like,

bye.

And the same door he walked in, he just walked out and slammed it and you're just sitting there.

Now no more protection for you.

No more patience for you, no more nothing for you.

You're not going to listen.

I'm out.

That doesn't mean I'd have gone to hell if I'd have died, but it means that he's done.

He ain't going to mess with me anymore.

And if you go look back in Psalms, King David had that experience several times.

Like he said, I'm crying out to you, and you will not answer me.

Where have you gone?

Where are you?

Please answer me.

Because David did some really bad stuff.

You know, what he did to Uriah, what he did to with Bathsheba and Uriah and other things that were really, really bad.

I mean, he had Bathsheba's husband killed and battled, put Uriah up on the front lines to make sure he died so he could take his wife.

That's pretty bad.

That's about as bad as it gets, actually.

And

God abandoned him.

That's the word, abandon, abandonment, is what that felt like.

So you get done with a concert.

You're sitting in, what, the green room or sitting?

Sitting in a hotel room, back in my room with my ears ringing, like

symbols in my ears yeah sweating

so what was it like a bolt of lightning i mean was it instantaneous not like a bolt of lightning it was like uh

it was almost like you could like you were looking at yourself from the outside of yourself a little bit like you're sitting there but you feel like you can see the room and you can literally feel like the air just got sucked out of it it just it was a horrible feeling

i bet it's probably what it might feel like if you were drowning Did you know what it was?

Yes.

I knew what it was.

What was your next move?

Went over to the little

end table in the hotel room where they always have a Bible, pulled it out and started reading it, and it didn't make any difference.

It did not help me at all.

Because he was gone.

It's interesting.

It's like maybe if your kid says, I'm going to run away, I'm going to run away.

I'm going to run away.

And then you finally say, Fine, run away.

Here's your bag.

And you shut the door behind him.

What's the kid do at that point?

Oh, now it's real.

Did that happen to you?

Yeah, that's how it felt.

And then what's the kid want to do at that point?

Let me back in the house.

Let me back in the house.

Let me back in the house.

It was like that.

How'd you get him to come back?

I apologized and apologized and apologized for weeks.

And to him?

Yes, to him.

To him.

To him.

This is way past me being around my mother.

This is way, way decades after that.

I apologize to him.

And

then I ran across who is now, without a doubt, my favorite preacher of all time.

It's too bad that he's not alive here anymore.

But Dr.

Charles Stanley.

If you don't know who that is, go look him up.

But I was on YouTube and ran across Dr.

Charles Stanley.

And I'm watching him and he gets into, I forget what he's even talking about.

And I went, that is the best I have ever heard that explained.

What else is on here?

And I find another one and another one and another one.

And I think for a month,

I bet I consumed three or four hundred sermons.

from him just on just one after the next after the next after the next then i'd pull my bible out and read along with him and go through it and go through it and go through it and started reconnecting everything that I had been taught growing up from my dad.

I started understanding it again.

And now as a grown man, I could feel it.

And then one day you wake up and you just feel like,

it's back.

That's how it felt.

Wow.

It was like light switch, light switch off.

Dark room, dark room, dark room, dark room.

Lights just came back on.

Power just came back on.

I could feel him come back in.

And then you felt really weird because when that happens to you, then you walk back out into the same world you were just walking back into, except now everything looks completely absurd and repulsive to you.

Like I had a horrible gambling problem.

Horrible.

You had a gambling problem?

Oh my God.

I was so good at it, John.

So good at it.

If you were that good at it, then it might not be a problem.

I was so good at it at blackjack so i would go in take over an entire blackjack table i'd play all nine seats just me and a dealer and i'd play all nine hands and i would make sure that they didn't use more than two decks

because i could count them if it was two decks i couldn't count them those six deck shoes couldn't you can't count those i couldn't but i count two

And so I was knocking their brains out, man, left and right.

And you go from a $10 bet.

It's like, oh, hope I don't lose my $10 to that.

Now it needs to be a $100 bet.

Now it needs to be a $500 bet.

Now it needs to be a $5,000 bet.

Jeez.

I start getting up in those kinds of numbers where me and Kenny'd pull up at a show, for instance, like in Vegas.

You get out of the car to check in the hotel, and a guy would run up with a clip going, Mr.

Rich, welcome back to Harris.

Here's a $50,000 marker.

It's already been approved.

Just sign your name here.

The chips are in your room.

Wow.

Wow.

That's how much I gambled.

And then one day I was in Tunica, Mississippi, played a concert, took $62,000 off of a blackjack table in about an hour.

I'm telling you, man, I was good at it because I could read, I could, I knew what was happening.

$62,000 in cash, fly back home, woke up the next morning.

Looking at that money, and I realized that is the most disrespectful thing you could possibly ever do.

Like, that's how he was making me feel about that.

You grew up in Amarilla, Texas with your dad working 100 hours a week, keeping everything going.

Can you imagine?

Like, this is him putting this into my head.

Son, can you imagine what your dad could have done with $62,000?

Where did you get the $62,000 to even gamble?

I gave you the $62,000.

I gave you the talent that would allow you to go out here and earn money like that.

And this is what you're going to do with it?

Stick it on a stupid blackjack table and risk it.

Why don't you take $62,000 and go help a bunch of old people eat lunch every day?

Or why don't you go help some kids get out of a bad situation?

Or why don't you go help some military vets?

Or why don't you go, what is your problem?

Is how he was talking to me.

And I went,

that is so disrespectful to what he's given me.

That is like the ultimate disrespect.

And so I took the 62

and I went down to a Ford dealership

because I needed a new pickup.

And I bought, I bought a 2010

four-wheel drive Ford King Ranch pickup and paid cash for it.

Now you should have seen the looks on their faces when I said, all right, here you go.

I'm paying for it with this.

And they open it up and it's just stacks of $100 bills.

They called the police and I said, that's fine.

I've got the receipt from Harris, you know.

And these old ladies back there going one, two, three.

They counted it two or three times.

It was all there.

I had the receipt, got the truck.

Guess what, Sean?

I still own the truck.

I refuse to sell the truck.

No kidding.

Because every time I see the truck, and I drove it yesterday, every time I get in there, I remember

where I was and now where I am.

The truck is a reminder of that to me.

And I stopped cold turkey.

I've not played one-handed cards since 2010.

No kidding.

And I mean, I would take that tour bus two or 300 miles out of the way to go hit an Indian casino somewhere or something.

I mean, it was like a drug addiction.

No kidding.

Yeah, Ed, 100%.

Damn, I had no idea.

Gambling addiction is real.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

And you haven't gambled against it.

Not one hand on anything.

And I've played a ton of places where I could have

done whatever I want.

Did you start giving more after that?

Absolutely.

Immediately?

Yes.

What was the first thing you did?

I don't remember the first thing I did, but I do remember I started looking around for situations that I thought needed help.

St.

Jude was one

that I need to start locking into to like kids fighting cancer is like one of the worst things you've ever seen in your life.

If you've ever been to a hospital like that, you will never be the same.

You will be so glad that your kid does not have cancer

because it's bad enough when you see the kid dealing, then you look over there in the corner, is their parents,

what that mom and dad are going through.

So,

you know,

seeing that, experiencing that,

I went in hardcore with them.

Started helping them raise tens of millions of dollars, donating to them myself.

You can use my house for whatever you want.

Let me know where you want me to go.

So it wasn't just money.

It was my time and effort.

So, yeah, I'm gambling money, but I'm spending a lot of time and effort gambling too.

Why am I spending my time doing that?

Did you have kids at the time?

What?

Did you have kids at the time?

My first son had just been born.

He was born in 2010.

Let's go back to childhood.

So you get baptized today,

hard worker.

Dad's a preacher.

Don't get along with mom.

Four brothers and sisters.

Yep.

Where did we go?

How did you start?

How did the music career take off?

So I never thought in a million years you could make money playing music.

I mean, Amarilla, Texas, the guys I knew that made money were driving combines or riding quarter horses at the Amarilla Livestock Auction or whatever.

Like it was basically agricultural based.

The guitar for me was just something I did for fun and loved to do.

When I was

15,

my mother wanted to move to Tennessee where she's from.

So we uprooted out of Texas and moved to Tennessee.

Started going to school in Tennessee, and I remember meeting this kid at school.

And I said, what's your dad do for a living?

He said, oh, my dad drives Ricky Skaggs' bus.

Now, I was a huge Ricky Skaggs fan.

I'm still a huge bluegrass fan.

I looked at this kid.

I said,

Ricky Skaggs rides on a school bus?

He said,

no, a tour bus.

My dad drives Ricky Skaggs' tour bus.

I I said, your dad personally knows Ricky Skaggs.

He goes,

he drives his bus.

Like, yeah, he's on the bus with him all the time.

I went, and it was like this light bulb moment of, holy cow, all the country music is out here.

Now, we were living in Ashland City, Tennessee out in Cheatham County, but that's only like 30 minutes, 40 minutes from downtown Nashville.

And I had this epiphany.

that all the people I'd grown up listening to and recording off that jam box and learning their music are literally 30 miles down the road from here right now.

And I'm 15, so I'm almost old enough to drive.

So when I turned 16 and could drive, I started entering talent contests in Nashville at honky talks where you got to be 21 to get in.

And I had to beg, steal, and borrow my way in.

The lady that's running the thing, her name's Judy Martin, the Judy Martin Talent Showcase at the broken spoke on Trinity Lane.

I'll never forget it.

I'm 16.

And she goes, son, you're too young to come in here and compete in this.

I'm sorry.

I said, you got to let me in.

You got to let me get up there.

She goes, okay, if you'll sit right next to me and I'm going to bring you a can of Coca-Cola and that's all you're going to drink and you're going to sit right next to me.

If you do that, I'll let you enter.

I'll let you sing.

I said, yes, ma'am, you got it.

So I remember the first one I got into, Trace Atkins was in there.

Tracy Lawrence was in there, like all these guys that went on to be multi-platinum.

And I'm 16

and they're singing, trying to win this prize money or whatever.

That's when I realized, holy cow, this is within my reach to possibly do this for a living.

Damn.

Yeah.

That's pretty cool.

You did that a lot.

I did it.

If there was an open microphone, I was on it.

And how did that develop?

Well, that turned into me getting a lot better fast because,

you know, one piece of advice I give not just entertainers, but I give this advice to anybody is that if you want to be great at something, not just successful, but great

and considered to be great at something, do not compare yourself to the people you are currently competing against.

Compare yourself to the greatest of all time.

So, you could say, well, I'm a pretty good songwriter compared to who all is out here right now.

And you might be right about that.

Matter of fact, you may be the best one compared to who all is out here right now.

But are you as good as Johnny Cash?

No.

You as good as Tom Petty?

No.

Charlie Daniels?

No.

Let's go down the list.

Merle Haggard?

I don't think so.

So if you want to be great,

there's no end to it.

So what I do is I keep Merle Haggard lyrics and Johnny Cash lyrics and stuff.

You saw him.

He stopped loving her today, greatest country song ever written.

I have those lyrics by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putnam written out by those writers and signed by George Jones when he was at my house one time.

Wow.

At my front door, I see it every single day.

And what that does for me as a songwriter is, yeah, you're pretty good.

You can write a hit song, but you ain't written that song.

So I give that advice to everybody, whether you're a soldier, whether you're a teacher, whatever it is that you do in your life, compare yourself to the greatest of all time, and you will never stop improving.

Man, I love that.

I love that.

I do that.

I've just never articulated it.

Choose your competition wisely.

Right.

Yeah, because you're great at what you do.

But in your line of work and what you've done in your history, I'm sure you're aware of other people

that you go, yeah, but I haven't done that.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't watch anybody.

Yeah.

I don't do it because I don't want to.

I feel like that can

inhibit your creativity.

It could influence you to do things that you wouldn't normally do because somebody else is doing it.

So I don't watch anything.

I learn everything from this show,

but

I keep tabs on people, but I don't watch it because I don't want it to be.

Well, let's take something as simple as shooting a gun, right?

So you handed me this incredible pistol,

and you're a great shot, but you're bound to be aware of other guys that are better shot than you are,

right?

That can do things with

a rifle or a pistol that you can't you can't pull that one off right so you go i better keep practicing

that's what i'm saying yeah once you think you're the best that ever did it well what's there to shoot for yeah that's that's a damn good kind of how i look at it maybe it's different because i'm in the creative world

you know yeah that

i mean tom petty johnny cash those kind of guys come on man did you meet them any of them oh yeah who did you meet johnny cash i did dude how was that that?

I met Johnny Cash when I was 19 years old, and I was in the band Lone Star

about 94.

And we got to open for Johnny Cash at a fair in Ohio.

That is cool.

And it was June Carter was with him, the whole thing.

And I'm just on the side of the stage.

I just can't even believe it.

Got one picture with him.

Outside the back.

That's the only time I ever met him.

It's hanging up in the house.

No kidding.

Yeah, my first son's name is Cash.

Just because I think what Johnny Cash, Johnny Cash conveyed more information and more emotion with fewer words than anybody that ever wrote a song.

The way Johnny Cash wrote music, I would say is similar to how David wrote Psalms or Solomon wrote.

like in Proverbs and placed like this, this mass amount of information in like four lines.

That's how Johnny Cash wrote songs.

I mean, that's just God-given ability and just his depth was just unbelievable.

So again,

I will never be Johnny Cash, but I'm going to try.

I'm going to get as close as I can.

Did you ever meet Whalen?

I never met Whalen.

Damn, I'm a huge.

I know Willie.

I knew Christopherson very well.

Haggard knew Haggard very well, but never got to be around Whalen.

That was the odd man out for me.

Who was your favorite icon that you got to know?

Favorite icon I got to know was Charlie Daniels.

Yeah.

I got to meet him.

Did you?

Yes, I did.

How did you feel when you looked him in the eye and talked to him?

Like, he is just an

awesome human being.

I met him at this thing called...

You might have been there, actually,

the Journey Home Project.

He had this thing going on for veterans, and

that's where I met him.

and uh he was just the nicest guy man everybody loved that dude nice and extremely intense appeared to everybody loved that guy but um yeah and intense how was it meeting him for the first time

kind of like it was meeting cash just because he's just such a

so much gravity around charlie daniels but

later on as i then began to know him um i'll give you an interesting story i had a show called the Pursuit, and that was a show on Fox Business Network.

I did 40 episodes where I would interview people kind of like this

about their pursuit of happiness in America.

And so it was like profile interviews.

I got to interview Charlie Daniels and went out to his farm.

This is during COVID, so this is 2020.

And

we finished the interview.

He goes, hey, Follow me over here.

I'm going to show you this new big old stud horse I just bought.

I said, all right.

So he's chomping on his nicotine gum or whatever.

You know,

we go lean on this bench rail.

He goes, look at that thing, man.

That's something, man.

I go, God, that's what a hell of a horse right there.

He goes, I know, man.

I can't wait to get that thing bred, man.

It's going to be, we're talking about horses.

And he looks at me and he goes,

you know, John boy, I ain't going to be around here forever.

I said, well, how old are you now?

He said, 83.

I said, how many shows you got booked this year?

He said, well, before COVID canceled it, about 120.

Holy shit.

But I ain't going to be around here forever.

I said, oh, I think you're going to be around here for a while.

I mean, come on.

He said, well, what I'm getting at is, man, he said, no, I won't be around here forever.

And he said, we need ones like you to pick that baton up when guys like me are gone and run with it about our country, about our vets.

about God and the Bible and the truth and all those things.

He said, I know that's who you are.

Someday, God, I ain't going to be around.

We need guys like you to run with it.

That was the last interview he ever did.

He died 13 days later.

Holy cow, man.

The last time he was on camera doing an interview was with me.

And the last thing he ever told me was that.

What an honor.

That's an honor, man.

I think about it often.

I'll bet.

Mm-hmm.

You took it in.

You definitely took it in.

Dead serious.

And I'm dead serious.

And you're dead serious.

And there's a bunch of us that are.

But for me,

that encounter was

a big deal.

It stuck with me.

It's interesting when you think about the timing of that, that he felt moved to tell me that right then.

And 13 days later, he passed away.

Man.

Maybe he told 100 people that.

I don't know.

But I know he told me that.

Oh, you're one of them.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, man.

Yeah.

What an honor.

So let's go back to the music career.

So you're 16 years old.

You're playing in honky tonks.

What is that?

When do you start gaining a lot of attention?

Well,

so

my parents got divorced when I was 17,

my junior year of high school.

And

my mother took my two sisters and brother.

and moved them to Dixon, Tennessee, which is where she's from, her hometown.

My dad and I were then stranded back in Ashland City, Tennessee, about 60-something miles away, 65 miles away.

And my dad says, well, my two daughters and my son are now in Dixon.

So I'm going to take a job in Dixon, but still living in Cheatham County.

And I'm living in Cheatham County.

I'm like, well, I'm okay.

So now my dad's going to be working in Dixon.

My brothers and sisters are going to be going to school at Dixon County High School.

I've got to go there.

That's where my family's at.

But I didn't live there.

So I'm driving my 1971 Dodge Dart swinger, which I still own.

Still own it.

And it still looks good.

I was driving that thing round trip every single day, going, doing my senior year of high school at this public school.

Now, up to this point, my dad had us in a little Christian school.

There was maybe 25 kids in my whole class.

I walked into Dixon County High School the first day.

There was over 700 kids in the senior class alone.

so at this point that county only had one high school so everybody went there

i go walking in this building about to throw up that feeling of just nausea scare like just like i've got this list of classes and i don't even know where i'm supposed to go

and this boy comes walking up to me

he looks at me and he goes this your first year I said, yeah.

He goes, what, what are you?

Junior, senior?

I said, I'm a senior.

He goes, you're coming here your senior year.

I went, yeah.

I said, listen, man, can you tell me where this class is?

He goes, oh, yeah, that's the English class.

He goes, I'll walk you down there.

He goes,

when's your lunch?

And he looks at lunch.

He goes, oh, we have the same lunch break.

He goes, I'll tell you what, I'll come find you at lunch too and introduce you to some people.

But I'll walk you down to your class.

So he walks me down to my class.

I go to lunch.

This guy comes over and finds me and he becomes my buddy.

And that's where I got to exist with his friends my senior year.

That guy's name is Jody Barrett.

Jody is now the

Tennessee representative for District 69, which is Dixon County, Hickman County, and Lewis County, and is now running for District 7, U.S.

Congress, which is where Mark Green just vacated.

Jody's running for that.

No kidding.

I know, right?

This is the kid that walks up.

I slept on Jody's couch probably 80 to 100 times that year.

Wow.

So I didn't have to go all the way back home and try to do homework and drive all the way back.

He said, you you can stay on my couch anytime you want.

So

it was during that time that Jodi and some of his friends realized I could sing and play the guitar.

Because how am I going to get a girlfriend, man?

Right?

I don't care what anybody tells you, Sean.

The only reason a guy learns how to play a guitar is to meet girls.

I've always had an inclination.

That was true.

That is what, that's why.

Not big enough to get on the football team, not tall enough to get on the basketball team.

How else can I get a a date?

Oh, maybe I learned how to play some George Strait.

That might do it.

And it did.

And so,

and it did.

And it did.

I won't lie.

And so

I started bringing my guitar.

And at Jody's house, he'd call over a bunch of friends.

I'd sit there and I'd play everything on the top 40.

I'd play everything on the radio.

I could play it.

At that point, yeah.

And so.

Jody says, hey, man,

you ought to go work at Opryland.

You ever heard of Opryland?

Yeah.

So that was the big theme park that was in Nashville.

Huge.

Oh, that was a theme park?

Oh, roller coasters, log rides.

I mean, it was massive.

It's where Hunter Oaks Mall is now.

That entire thing was Opryland.

Opryland USA.

And they had live music throughout the park.

And he says, you should go audition for one of those shows, man.

You'd probably get it.

And I said, oh, man.

You got to be able to dance.

And I said, have you seen the guys on some of those shows?

He's like,

we know there's probably going to be a bunch of good-looking girls at the audition.

I said, well, that is true.

Maybe I will.

So I took the Dodge Dart swinger to Opryland and I'll audition for a show called Country Music USA, where you go on stage and you emulate famous country singers.

So like one guy's Vince Gill and one guy's George Jones and on and on and on.

And

I got the call back, which means I was good enough to get called back.

Got the call back and they said, can you dance?

I said, I can two-step.

They go, can you do anything else?

I went, nope.

They said,

okay, you're hired.

Gave me my paper.

So when I graduated high school at Dixon County High School, I went to work at Opryland USA, which is where I met Dean Sams, who's the guy that put Lone Star together.

All the boys from Texas happened from that Opryland gig.

Wow.

That I would not have taken had my friends not urged me to go do it because it would be good-looking girls down there.

Wow.

Isn't that crazy?

That is wild.

God moves you around in these crazy.

That was a horrible year, man.

Your parents get divorced.

You got to go to a brand new school.

You don't know anybody.

It's like

couldn't get a job.

All the jobs were taken.

How'd you deal with the divorce?

I was glad it happened.

You were glad.

I was glad.

Because

I'd watched it my whole life.

This is just, I couldn't wait to get out of there.

Now, why do you think that your sisters and brother went with your mom?

Well, my brother was too young to have a choice.

Okay.

And I think my sisters wanted to be with their mom.

But me and my dad are like that.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

So I'm like, I'm with you wherever you're at.

That's where I'm going.

Gotcha.

Let me tell you how I made money my senior year.

Yeah.

Because this will be high entertainment for everybody watching right now, guys.

All you guys watching.

What do you do, Sean, when you go to a Tennessee town and you're senior in high school and every single job in the town has been taken because there are thousands of, thousands of teenagers and all their parents own all the businesses and they're all working.

What do you do?

I mean, you pick up a guitar and go to the honky tree.

It's on the sidewalk.

Yeah, I know.

I grew up.

working at car dealerships when I was a teenager because my dad was in the car business.

He was preaching all the time, but he made his money in the car business.

So one of my jobs on many different car dealerships where he was at was detailing cars.

Manual labor again.

And that's like, hey, John, here's a 1969,

you know, Plymouth, New Yorker, which is longer than this room.

And it's red and it's oxidized paint.

And we want you to, here's a box of turtle wax and some rags.

We need this thing shining by this time tomorrow.

Oh, by the way, there's a bunch of tar down in the carpet.

You're going to want to take some gasoline and scrub, get that tar to break up, get that out, like that kind of work.

So I was doing that kind of work, but I got really good at detailing cars.

Matter of fact, I can still detail a car bearing anybody you know.

So across the way from the high school at Dixon County High School, there was this

little used, it wasn't really a car a lot.

It had Peterbilt sitting on it and Kenworth's.

So it had like big rigs sitting on it, but they looked terrible.

I mean, they were like old, worn out.

But he was selling them.

He had white shoe polish, you know, and the windshield.

$3,500.

So I walk in that place and this old man comes out and he said,

Can I help you, son?

I go, I said, Yes, sir.

I said,

How much money would you pay me if I can get that black Peter belt that's all oxidized to shine?

He goes, You can't make that shine.

I go, What if I could?

He goes,

$25.

I went, All right.

I said, Do you got any rags?

You got any turtle wax?

He goes, yeah.

So he hands me a box.

It took me three afternoons after school to shine that Black Peter belt, but it was shiny.

And he erased the $3,500 off and put $4,500 on it.

He goes, you want to hit the rest of them?

I said, not for $2,500.

He goes, how much do you want for him?

I said, $50.

He goes, that's fair.

So I did the rest of them, but he was out of trucks.

That was it.

So one of the kids I met at school had this derelict older brother.

It was about like 21, 22,

and, you know, pot-smoking guy, always had a beer in his hand.

And I told the derelict older brother, I said, hey,

how much beer can you buy with this $50 right here?

He goes, depends on what kind of beer.

I said, the cheapest beer you can get.

He goes, that's probably natural light.

I said, or bush light.

I said, well, whatever it is, buy as much beer as you can.

Bring it to me, and you can keep a six-pack for doing it for me.

He goes, you're serious?

I went, yeah.

He goes, okay.

So he goes down.

He buys like several cases of beer.

I give him his commission.

I open up the trunk to my 1971 Dodge Dark swinger, baby blue with a white hardtop.

I put that beer in the trunk.

I find out where the bonfire party is going on that weekend where all the other kids my age are going to be hanging out.

I put it on ice.

I show up out there and I sell beers for $10 a piece.

Damn.

Now I got money.

I got money.

And so I just keep going back to the derelict brother and recirculating the money.

And basically I am bootlegging beer, but it's not really illegal because I'm also underage.

So I thought it through, man.

Like, you know, can you really throw me in jail?

Like the derelict brother could have gotten in trouble, but can I really get in trouble for this?

Maybe I could have.

I i don't know but i didn't you could have because i used to do this exact same thing except i would drink it all you get turns out you get a minor in possession well i guess that's true so where did you get this i don't know yeah so found it in a ditch so i recycled that money and that's how i did it and that's how i did it so they knew if you wanted if you wanted a cold beer go find john entrepreneurial mind at a very young age that's what it was love it love it necessity

well john let's take a quick break and uh when we come back, we'll pick up with Lone Star.

Sounds good.

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All right, John, we're back from the break.

We're getting ready to get into your come up in Lone Star.

Yep.

So the

Lone Star band started from my work at Opryland, where I meet a guy who's also working at Opryland, about 10 years older than me.

I've been doing that job for a while.

And he said, hey, you're from Texas, right?

I said, yeah, I grew up in Amarillo.

He said, well, I got some buddies.

He said, I'm from Garland, Texas, and a couple of my buddies also from Texas.

They're here in Nashville now.

We want to put a band together since we're all from Texas.

And he says,

Would you want to be in the band?

I said, I'd love to be in the band.

And he goes, You play bass, right?

I said,

I mean, sort of.

I mean, I mean, I can play one.

He goes, great, learn these songs.

And he hands me a cassette

of the like top 20 songs in country music that week.

Tells me to learn these songs.

We're having a rehearsal on Saturday.

You're going to meet all the guys.

Okay.

So I go call a friend of mine who is actually a bass player.

And I said, Hey,

I don't have a bass amp.

I don't have anything, really, nor do I really know how to play these songs.

Can you show me some stuff on the bass?

Because I've got a rehearsal in like five days.

I go get with this guy, and he's showing me how to play this bass and how to follow it.

So I practice and practice and practice.

I go to the rehearsal.

I walk in with a pawn store-level bass,

carrying my cable in my hand, no case, no nothing.

And these are all like pro guys out of Texas.

They've been playing the honky talk circuits in Texas for a decade.

So they're legit musicians down there.

And they're looking at me like, looking at Dean going, who is this guy walking in here?

Dean's like, just wait till you hear him sing.

Just wait till you hear him sing.

It's like, okay.

And so I was terrible on the bass, but I was the only guy in the band that could sing higher than Richie McDonald, who's the lead singer of Lone Star.

So songs like, baby, I'm amazed by you, songs like that, huge songs.

That's Richie, incredible singer, and he's high.

But I could go even higher than that.

So I could sing harmony over the top of Richie, and nobody else could.

So they came to me and they said, okay, we'll let you be in the band, but you have got to get better on the bass.

You have got to get better or you can't stay.

I said, I'll practice.

I'll practice mass off, you know.

So I did.

And I planned on going to college at Belmont University.

I had a four-year paid ride to Belmont on a vocal scholarship.

I actually was first chair of first tenor in the all-South choir.

So my Dixon County high school year, the one year I had, they had a big choir.

And I went there again to meet girls.

Right.

But I was good at it.

And I'm singing in Latin.

I'm singing operatic things in Latin.

I don't even know what I'm saying, but I'm nailing it.

And I get first chair, which means number one.

first tenor, which is the highest male voice, all South, all-South choir.

So Belmont gives me a four-year ride so my plan was I'll goof around with these guys a little bit and then I'm gonna go go to college to do what I don't know but I'm gonna go Dean comes to me and he says hey man this booking agent saw us play and he said he can book us about 200 nights this next year all over North America I said

what kind of places he goes oh man like county rodeos holiday in lounges you know just wherever all over the place I said well I'm going to college.

I said, how much money would I make doing something like that?

Dean says, you'll probably make like $500 or $600 a week.

I said, are you kidding?

I couldn't believe it.

Remember, I've been selling beer out of the back of my trunk.

I said, and these guys were really good, too.

So I went back and told my dad, I said, instead of going to college, on a four-year paid ride, I'm going to climb in a van pulling a trailer with guys I barely know and play off-brand casinos, county fairs, holiday-in lounges all over North America.

I remember my dad saying,

are you sure that's a good idea?

I said, well, what I want to do is I want to be on the radio.

I want to play the Grand Ole Opry.

He goes, yes, I know that.

I said, I don't know how going to college is going to make that happen.

And these guys are really, really good.

He said,

okay.

He said, I guess you can always go back.

If it doesn't work out, you can always go back to college.

I I said, that's what I'm thinking.

He goes, okay.

I can only imagine how my dad must have felt with me telling him that at 18, barely 19 years old, preaching his whole life.

You know, my dad went to 30 Mardi Gras in 30 years singing in the French quarter with a guitar around his neck as the parades would come by.

That's who my dad is.

And so here's his son telling him this.

I have such empathy for my dad now that I have my own two sons.

Such empathy for what that man must have endured just with the thought process of that.

I had never been anywhere to speak of, and you're just going to take off and go do this.

But he said, all right, well, give it your best, you know, go get them.

And

we went from playing those holiday inn lounges and all that stuff to about less than two years later, landed a major record deal.

No good.

Yep, with RCA/slash/BNA records, which Kenny Chesney had just been signed to BNA.

Got that record deal.

That was my, I made it moment.

I got a record deal.

Think about it.

It was 20 when we signed that deal.

With the record deal, you also get a publishing deal.

So the publishing deal is the songwriting side, and that's how they did it back in the day, where they'd have kind of both sides of the table.

Which is not a great business model, but it did allow me to get in the room with the absolute best songwriters of that era of of music because I have a record deal.

They'll write with the kid songwriter because they think they might get a cut.

So I get to sit in the room with these monster songwriters and learn how to write a hit song and

just

like a sponge, just everything I could get out of these guys I was writing with.

And that is where I really learned how to write.

What goes into writing a hit song?

It's a mystery as to what makes a song a hit,

but ultimately it's fairly simple.

If you

can say something in your song and create a feeling with that music that connects with enough people, it's a hit.

So it's not like it has to be written this way or it has to be written that way.

There's millions of different versions of songs that have all been hits.

Can you say something

that penetrates Sean Ryan's chest?

He feels it.

Either it makes him feel great every time he hears it, so he's cranking it up.

I want to hear that song 100 times.

Or it makes him think, or it's the perfect song for however he's feeling that day, but it says it so perfectly, it's a hit.

And what you learn is

just because it rhymes doesn't mean it's right.

I get sent songs all the time from up-and-coming songwriters, and they're convinced they've written a hit.

This is a hit.

Everybody in my hometown says so.

I say, okay, let me hear it.

And they'll send it to me.

And it's,

there's elements in there that could be a hit, but it's not top-down.

It's not, it's not bulletproof.

You know, it's true.

Right.

So then I have to tear their song apart and critique them.

And hopefully they can, that's how it was done to me.

I would bring songs in to like a record producer.

And I was convinced this first song I'm going to play him is a hit.

I'm convinced of it.

And he'd go, all right, let's, he'll hit play and sit there and listen to the first verse and then just turn it off and go what else you got i go you didn't even hear the chorus

he goes didn't need to hear the chorus i heard the verse

i go

what does that mean he goes

it was a bunch of cliches that didn't mean anything that was like some of the most boring watered down stuff i've ever like they're brutal music row

i go

well what should i have done he goes well i mean what you're talking about is cool but i mean i've heard it said that way a million times you have to say it in a way nobody's ever said it before so it's the it's it's the words the lyrics are the in country music the lyrics are the thing i i'm what you would call a snapshot writer

so there's all different kinds of writers i would say i'm a snapshot writer and i'm a voyeur writer and i'll explain those two things so a snapshot songwriter is somebody if i'm sitting right here And I pull out an old Polaroid camera and I go,

and I catch whatever's in that frame.

Everything I'm I'm going to write in this song does not exit that frame.

It's that.

So it is, he was wearing a black baseball cap and a big old leather chair.

Military stuff behind him, guns hanging everywhere.

American flag on the wall and a soldier up in the air.

Man.

Baba Baba Baba Ba, like he didn't have a care.

That's how I start the song.

So what that's doing is that's taking the listener and that is putting them in a place.

It's like a, they can see it in their head because you're so descriptive with what you're saying.

They can see, they have a mental image of what that is.

So they, they, they actually go into that place and then you take them down the road and I start telling your story in this song.

And by the time the song is over, it's stuck in their head and they feel like they just experienced what that snapshot was.

That snapshot songwriting.

Wow.

Interesting, right?

That is.

Boyer songwriting is when you step into someone else's shoes and write the song from their perspective.

So an example of that would be

there

was a girl that was our bartender, me and Big Kenny.

It was a blues bar.

We liked to hang out back in the day.

This girl was a bartender.

And one night the lead singer of the band goes, all right, it's last call.

Last call for alcohol.

We're going to call the bartender down here, let her sing the last two songs tonight.

I went, oh, of course the bartender sings.

Every bartender sings in Nashville.

Here comes this girl, hair up in a ponytail,

tank top, got wine stains all over.

She's coming down lighting a cigarette and spitting in a cup and got a Miller light in her hand.

She's walking up, been working a double.

I went, okay.

Gets up on the mic.

This chick hits the mic, and I swear to you, it felt like somebody had burned the oxygen out of the room.

I mean, it was so intense,

so over the top.

I'm looking at Kenny going, did you just hear that?

I mean, I know it's two o'clock in the morning, but my God, he goes, I think she's going to sing another one.

Let's listen closer.

And she sang another one.

I said, okay, this is insane.

Go up to her bar, introduce myself.

She comes, does a couple of demos for me.

And I tell her, I say, hey, you should be on the radio.

You should have a record deal.

Are you a songwriter?

She goes, nah, I ain't a songwriter.

I said, you don't have anything you want to say?

She goes, I got plenty I want to say.

I ain't no songwriter.

Like that.

I said, I'll tell you what, how about you and me get together and let's see if we can write something?

She goes, all right, fine, but I'm not a songwriter.

We get together.

And

as I got to know her better in 45 minutes understanding her story, I was able to

take her story.

And of course, she's right in the middle of it.

And we write a song called Redneck Woman, which wound up being number one for four or five weeks.

And she sold 13 million records on that.

Her name's Gretchen Wilson.

Wow.

Gretchen Wilson.

That's how that started.

Are you serious?

I am serious, man.

Wow.

Right.

So Gretchen and I, now she's

first-class songwriter now.

But in the very beginning, she didn't consider herself that, but she had something to say.

And so my job was step into her shoes.

See it from her perspective and help her get that story on paper and make it rhyme and make it sound like a hit.

And so we did it.

So that's the voyeur side of writing a song, where

it's almost like acting, where you become her for a minute, try to see it from her perspective and turn that into a song.

I mean, how does that feel to

take somebody that's working a, where was this, Broadway?

Printer's Alley.

Printer's Alley.

I mean, what is it like to take somebody?

Wait, Winning Broadway, yeah.

Working a double, spitting, drinking, smoking.

Doesn't sound like she had a whole hell of a lot going for her at the time and turning her into

a mega star.

Well, I didn't turn her into anything.

She turned herself into that.

But

what I got to do is be on the front end and sit with her and become friends with her

and tell her.

Like, here's probably the best thing I ever told her.

Before we wrote Redneck Woman, we're sitting in this little apartment that I could barely afford.

And CMT is on Country Music Television.

And Faith Hill's on there singing, I Can Feel You Breathe, which is this video where Faith Hill is rolling around in satin sheets with her hair all done up.

And it's this

real slicked out video.

And Gretchen's, again, smoking a cigarette, spitting in a cup.

It's about 10 o'clock in the morning.

She goes,

If I got to do that kind of shit right there, I'm never going to make it.

I ain't got a chance in hell if i gotta do that right there

like that i said if you gotta do what you ain't ever gonna make it she goes that she goes i ain't never gonna be that pretty that pop or that slick and this is when it was shania twain faith hill martina mcbride like i mean that was the that was the girl power groups

she said if i gotta be that slick i ain't never gonna make it because i i ain't nothing but a redneck woman

And I said, that's exactly what you are.

I said, Gretchen, who is it that you look up up most to in country music?

And the female side?

She said,

Loretta Lynn.

And I said, what is it you like so much about Loretta Lynn?

She goes, she's by God, tell it like it is.

You ain't woman enough to take my man.

Like, I'll whip your ass if you come in here.

Like, that's Loretta Lynn.

I went, correct.

I said, so, Gretchen, instead of sanding off your rough edges, what's rough about you, put a magnifying glass on it.

If you've got enough guts to say it, if you've got enough guts to tell everybody who you really are in a song, there are 30 or 40 million women out there that are going to go, that's our girl.

And she goes, well, I ain't thought about it like that.

And less than an hour later, we had written Redneck Woman.

Man.

So there's a psychology also that goes into songwriting to make a hit.

Do you know what's going to be a hit when you come out with an album?

Do you know what's going to hit?

Sometimes you do.

And sometimes they surprise you.

The record label thinks they always know what's going to be a hit and they never know.

The artist is the one to ask because they're the ones out playing all the time.

An example of that would be

Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy.

So

record label said that's one of the dumbest songs we've ever heard in our lives.

I said, oh, we know.

Trust us.

We know.

But when we play this song, people lose their minds.

And when we said play it like in a bar somewhere or whatever, people go crazy.

Yes, but guys, nobody's going to take you seriously with a song that is that dumb.

I mean, it's so stupid.

The whole song.

I'm just telling you, people love it.

Akey Break Your Heart was pretty stupid.

I mean, they go, okay, we'll let you put it on the record, but it's never going to be a single.

It's never going to be on the radio.

We said, okay, well, you know the story.

By the time it's all said and done, people are requesting this song and it's not even a single and it's our big, the biggest song we've ever had.

Man.

So the answer is no you don't but we knew that song was a hit because we knew how people reacted to it but they still got to play it you got to get through the gatekeepers to get it on the radio to find out for sure man man

all right so back to lone star so you guys got your record deal you get into songwriting where does that take you

that took us um

All over the United States.

We were winning Academy Country Music Awards.

I wrote my first song in that first number one song in that band called Come Crying to Me.

That was in 96.

And I remember my dad calling.

I was still living in his basement at that time because why did I need any place to live?

Because I'm on the road 200 days a year.

My dad calls and he says, hey,

we got a check in the mail or got a letter in the mail to you from BMI.

Which was ASCAP and BMI.

At that point, I was at BMI.

They rep all the songwriters and track down the money on songs that get played.

I said, oh, yeah.

Was you want me to open it up?

I went, Yeah, open it up.

I'm somewhere on the road.

He goes,

This can't be right.

I said, What's it say?

And he tells me the number, and it's a six-figure number on this check.

He goes,

This can't be right.

I said, Well, does it have a song title next to it or anything?

And he said, Yeah, it says, Come crying to me.

I said, Well, that's the song I wrote that just went number one.

He goes, Well, you better take 30% of this out out for taxes.

You don't even have a business manager or anything.

And I'm like, yeah, that's probably a good idea.

So I couldn't believe it.

So

that's his response.

You better take 30% out for taxes.

Or the IRS will come get you.

But I was like 22.

And I wouldn't have thought of that.

I would have just spent it all probably.

But

that's where

I was able to take that money and I did think about spending it all.

And I did spend it all.

But what I wound up spending it all on was a house for my Granny Rich and my Papa Rich.

My Papa Rich, a World War II vet,

was

what they now refer to as tunnel rats.

So he was a small-framed American

nutcase with a rifle.

He was so mad at the Japanese,

he hated them till the day he died.

He would not eat rice.

He wouldn't do anything that was anything Asian at all.

And I'm sure you met those old men like that.

Fought that war.

But he's on Social Security, Granny's on Social Security, and they're both still working full-time and paying rent on a house.

Didn't own their house or anything.

And I got that first check, and I went and bought this house and moved out of my dad's house.

We remodeled the basement to this house I just bought.

They lived in the top and I lived in the bottom and that went on for about seven years.

No good.

And that's where I really got to understand the World War II generation was during that lone star period that allowed me to afford to purchase something for them to basically retire them if they wanted to.

How did they, how did, I mean,

that has to feel amazing to be able to do that for your family.

How did they receive it?

They couldn't believe it.

And I remember my pap was like, I can't let you do that.

I can't let you do that.

I said, well, I've already done it.

I've already bought it.

I said,

how many Japanese do you think you killed, Pap?

He goes,

hundreds.

And the caves, I mean, you go down there, you're killing them all.

Hundreds.

I said,

I think

you earned a break at some point.

I said, why don't you just, I said, I tell you what, you keep the yard mode.

Keep the place looking good.

We'll call it even.

He goes, all right, I can do that.

I I said, all right, shook his hand.

Him and my granny moved into that house, and he lived there till he died.

And when he died, we moved her to another spot.

But we used to shoot skeet off that back porch, thousands of clay pigeons off that back porch with my pap.

Got video of it.

He was still hitting them in his, you know, late 70s.

He died at 80 of colon cancer.

But, you know, country music has given me those opportunities to do things like that.

Going into those meetings where they tell me your song sucks.

Well, they were right.

It did suck.

And that pushed me to go forward and write something that didn't suck.

Write something that would be great, that could be a hit.

Thank God for it.

And then it was a hit.

And then I got to do something like that, which is,

I mean, that's just a lifelong memory.

I mean, I got to live basically seven years with both of those grandparents alive.

Wow.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

How's your dad handling your come up

with the rise in fame and the money and

the girls?

Yeah.

It wasn't the Lone Star phase that got him.

It was the big and rich phase that really got my dad.

Really?

Yeah.

That's when it went.

So

I'll finish up on Lone Star.

So Lone Star,

I am in my early 20s.

They're all in their early 30s.

They're all married with kids.

I've got nobody.

I'm writing number one songs and getting six-figure checks, and they're not.

I can barely play a bass guitar.

They're much more talented than me, worked a lot longer and harder than me, but I'm making the money.

And so

there started to be some of this tension going on.

And of course, I just exacerbated that by being an absolute ass a lot of times to these guys and not respecting them like I should.

And it actually wound up with me throwing a punch at the lead singer on the tour bus one night, and it landed and it wasn't pretty at all and two weeks later they fired me from the band

So my name went from John Rich of Lone Star to just back the John Rich

not of Lone Star.

So there was no more notoriety to my name phone stopped ringing whereas before

You want to write you want to produce you want to do all this stuff.

It was constantly going forward The second they fired me, it was over.

You lose your record deal.

You lose your publishing deal.

You lose all your deals.

everything's over lose your road income it's just over like that and there's nothing else to fall back on how'd you deal with that

not well for a little while because

the very next round of music those boys put out had a song called amazed which we talked about which still is one of the biggest songs that's ever been in country music and i remember watching the CMA awards

thinking this last year at this time I was on the stage with those guys, and now I'm in an apartment that I'm about to lose because I can't afford it.

And they're singing amazed on the CMA Awards up for song of the year.

Wow.

I'm dog meat.

Just dog meat.

So, didn't handle that well for a while.

But a good friend of mine in the industry said,

listen,

when things are out of your control, find something that you can still control and control it well and start over.

He said that could be as simple as how many push-ups am I going to do today?

How many phone calls am I going to make today trying to get a job or whatever it is?

Find something you can still control and control it well.

That is a life credo of mine.

So what I could control, Sean, was a pencil.

and a piece of paper.

I could still control that.

And so I pulled that guitar off the wall every day and I started writing songs, writing songs that nobody cared about because I didn't have a publishing deal.

And in the course of about four or five years, I wrote 634 songs.

Holy shit.

That nobody cared about.

But then one day they did because me and this long-haired country boy from Virginia hooked up, called it big and rich.

And our music hit.

And now everybody wants songs that sound like that.

Oh, I have 634 of those.

And that's what led to being the songwriter of the year for three years in a row and all that.

So, in the downtime, that's when you make your bones in the downtime.

When you've had the snot kicked out of you and everything's done, you give up or figure out what you can control and still control it.

Well, some of the best advice I ever got.

So, you, you, did you say six or seven years

without a record deal?

Without a record deal.

It was

98 to

the end of 2003 it was the beginning of 98 to the end of 2003 so it's a full five years yeah

wow with really nothing going on they offered me a little solo deal that sings solo and i said i'll show lone star i'll put out some hits on my own and that neither one of them cracked the top 60 and i was dropped from that deal within six months so Failed in the band, failed as a solo artist.

I thought, well, what, there's nothing left.

That's it.

I mean, what else are you going to do?

So I thought, I guess I'll just be a full-time songwriter.

I can still control that.

But I hadn't thought about duo.

Duo never crossed my mind until I meet the Universal Minister of Love, Big Kenny.

How did you guys meet?

We met in a bar.

Can you believe that?

Shocking.

There was a girl...

is a girl named Cindy Simmons, and she was a rep for Fender Guitars here in Nashville.

And her job was to go out and find up-and-coming talent singers and offer them a Fender guitar to have a Fender endorsement, hoping that maybe like venture cap with giving stuff away.

And maybe one of these turns into Garth Brooks or something, and they'll be a Fender guy.

So her job was to go listen to live music, and the ones that she really liked, she could offer them a Fender guitar.

Well, I knew her, and this guy, Big Kenny, also knew Cindy.

And Cindy had been telling both of us that we needed to meet each other.

I remember her coming to me and she said, you got to meet this guy Big Kenny.

I said, what is his name?

Big Kenny.

I said,

big and fat, big and tall, big and loud.

I mean, what kind of name is that?

She goes, trust me, it would make sense if you saw him.

If you saw him perform, it makes sense.

I go, okay, whatever.

She goes, you need to come down with me, watch him sing one night.

I go, I'm not interested.

Did not care.

He also did not want to meet me.

But eventually, she got me to to come see one of his shows at a place called Douglas Corner here in Nashville, which is no longer called that.

It's right across from Zane's on 8th Avenue.

And Big Kenny was playing a show.

I only went down because Cindy was going to be there.

And I was like, okay, I'll check this guy out.

Well, here he comes, walking out on stage with hair like a lion coming down his back and like, you know, walking all crazy.

And

I mean, I'm like, what is this psychedelic crap I'm looking at here?

I mean, that's what it looked like.

The Hippie psychedelic.

What is this?

And the music was extremely creative.

And I went, well, the guy's got talent.

I mean, I mean, I've never heard music like that before, but it takes talent to do what I just heard.

I went, huh, that's interesting.

At the end of Kenny's show, he goes, Before everybody goes home, I just want everybody to make sure they go home with a little something.

And he reaches down into a big plastic bag full of those hard, individually wrapped pieces of bubblegum that are like pieces of gravel.

And he starts slinging them out in the audience.

And the first tranche of that that comes out, I see one coming and he goes, whop, whop, whop, whop, whop, whop, bang.

Hit me right up underneath my hat, right in the face.

I said, this guy's an idiot.

I'm out of here.

So he goes, no, you can't leave.

You got to meet him.

You got to meet him.

I went.

He's hitting people in the face with bubblegum.

Come on.

I mean, this is ridiculous.

Please, please.

I said, okay, fine.

So I stayed.

Kenny goes, yeah.

Soon he says, we've, you know, she'd want us to meet.

And I said, yeah.

He goes, she says we ought to write a song together.

I go, yeah, I mean, that's, he goes, what are you doing tomorrow?

I said, I'm not doing anything tomorrow.

He goes, you want to meet up like 11 o'clock?

We'll try something.

I went, sure, I guess.

It was like that.

Like two hunting dogs sniffing each other.

So I went over to his house.

wrote a song with him.

The next day we wrote another one.

And then the next day and the next day and the next day and on and on and on.

And that became what is now a 20, 21 year career so far with Big and Rich.

Wow.

So you started liking him right off the bat.

Otherwise you wouldn't have to.

Because I sat in a room with him.

What'd you like about him?

He was very opposite of me.

We've been described as Kenny likes to smell the roses and John likes to mow them down.

And that's very true.

But that was interesting to me because he would say things in a writing session that I'll go, say that one more time.

And he would throw a line out.

I would go,

I think that actually might work.

He goes, I'm telling you, man, it'll work.

And then you put it in the song and it works.

And it's something I never would have thought of.

But then my ability to construct and

my discipline on, remember I'd gone through Lone Star.

So I'd learned how to do this.

I had this side put together.

He had this crazy X Factor stuff going on.

You combine those two things and you wind up with structured craziness,

which is what Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy is.

It's completely insane, but somehow makes sense.

In that wild, yeah.

So we recognize that in each other, that I had a skill set and he had a skill set.

And you put them together, it's not addition, it's multiplication.

It's a force multiplier when you put us together creatively.

Damn.

Yeah.

What was the turning point?

Was it Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy?

Nope.

The turning point was

a thing that Kenny and I put together called the Music Mafia.

Have you ever heard of the Music Mafia?

No.

Oh,

you're going to love this.

So this is in that span of time where Gretchen Wilson is the bartender and, you know, we're making these interesting friends that are all kind of oddball outcast kind of people.

Underdogs.

Underdogs, rough,

too crazy, too rough, two-time loser, like all kinds of people but there were rappers there were spoken word artists there were blues singers there were bluegrass guys all this incredible talent in Nashville around that period of time then we all knew each other and so we would go if you want to hear the bluegrass guy our buddy you know Shannon Lawson you got to go to the place where they play bluegrass if you want to hear the rock band that we're friends with or the blues guy you got to go to that bar.

You want to hear John?

You got to go to that bar.

It was all segregated out.

And we thought, well, this sucks because we don't want to sing together i mean when we're writing songs together we're singing together but no place you can't book all those various things on one stage so we decided well we'll just start our own thing we'll call it the music mafia

musically artistic friends and alliance mafia that's what we called it and so we found the smallest place in nashville called the pub of love which no longer exists it held about 45 to 50 people if you packed it we picked the worst worst night of the week, Tuesday night, went to the owner of the place and said, we think we can bring 30 or 40 people in here on a Tuesday night.

He goes, well, you can just have it if you can do that.

I mean, okay, come on.

So for 72 Tuesdays in a row, we did music mafia on Tuesday nights.

By the time it was over, everybody from Cheryl Crowe to Bon Jovi to Saliva, which was a massive rock band at the time, click, click, boom, that band.

All those artists had been in, and we're looking out in this crowd and there are record label executives sitting next to homeless people watching us sing.

Are you serious?

I am serious.

And then we started getting record deals.

So what we did with Music Mafia is we showed Nashville that there was a change happening in country music, that you could take all different disciplines of music, blend them together, and they actually worked.

They were cohesive.

It's not the rappers are against the country guys and the country guys are against the blues guys and bluegrass is over here.

It was over because we proved it and it was so entertaining to everybody that they couldn't get enough of it.

And so we had to go to bigger venues and bigger venues.

And then Kid Rock found out about it and he said, I want to come to a music mafia.

We're like, come on, Bob.

Bob comes to one and Bob has us come to Detroit and do a music mafia in Detroit, pack this place out.

And everybody gets record deals and everybody gets their shot.

And I would argue that country music has not been the same since Music Mafia showed up.

Because if you'll notice, all your award shows now in country music are what?

Mashups.

Mashups of all kinds of artists.

Mashups, Post Malone is singing with Jason Aldean or whatever's going on.

That was considered heresy back in the day.

Wow.

Yeah, that was like taboo.

Like you guys are a bunch of idiots.

But again, the artists knew where it was going, not the industry.

Wow.

Pretty good story, huh?

That's amazing.

Yep.

You engineered that with these people.

Well, Big Kenny and myself and a couple other musicians that were just great talents.

And we said, this is stupid.

We can't all play together.

Simple as that.

That is pretty damn good.

We didn't think we'd wind up anywhere.

I mean, who's going to sign that?

Gretchen can get off of work from bartending for eight hours, you know, smoking her cigarettes and spitting in a cup and going, give me the microphone.

Here's one me and John wrote last week.

Probably ain't no good, but anyway, I may red, Nick, Woman, and the place goes nuts.

Wow.

That had a feeling.

How unlikely is always.

Yeah.

So you got your record deal out of that?

We did.

We got signed to Warner Brothers Records.

Guy named Paul Worley signed us.

Paul is still, in my mind, one of the best record producers that there ever was in Nashville.

Big old lefty, you know, big old liberal guy, but a monster talent.

And he just loved big and rich.

And he got the job job where he could sign artists at Warner Brothers Records.

And he told me and Kenny, I want to sign you guys.

And we thought he was kidding.

He said, I'm serious.

I want to do this right now.

And we went, okay.

He goes, I'm serious.

I want to sign you guys.

We said, you're for real?

He goes, yes, I'll give you $150,000 record budget.

What?

Kenny goes, can you put a bar tab in that record budget?

He goes, I bet we could probably work that out.

We had a guy at the time named Mark Oswald, who actually still manages us.

And Mark told me and Big Kenny a couple months prior to that, he said, I know you guys think big and rich is a joke.

Like that's what people call y'all when you walk into a bar.

Oh, look, ha ha, it's Big Kenny and John Rich.

It's big and rich.

It's a joke.

I know you guys think that's ha ha.

He said, I actually think that's a real thing.

I think you guys as a duo is actually a country piece of business and country music.

And we both told him he was out of his mind.

I said, I said, Big Kenny, what is that?

And I said, and I've already, I've been fired from a band, had a flop solo deal.

Are you, this is, that's crazy, Mark.

He goes, I'm telling you, man, there's something to it.

Big and rich is a thing.

We're like, okay, well, we appreciate it, but no, thanks.

And then Paul Rurley said, I want to sign you guys.

And so we call Mark and go, Paul Worley just said he wants to sign us as big and rich.

He said, I told you.

Wow.

So Mark became our manager.

Warner Brothers signed us.

And that's when we made that first record.

It was called Horse of a Different Color, and it sold many, many millions of records, and that put us on the map.

Man,

that is cool.

Yeah.

And it was a hockey stick from there.

It was a hockey stick from there.

So again, I'll ask you, how did your dad, you know, how was your dad handling your, your, all the fame that you'd amassed?

Well, that's when it went into rock star mode when Big and Rich hit.

That's when I went into, that's when I started gambling.

That's when I started fighting people and staying up all night and doing crazy stuff and getting thrown off airplanes.

And I mean, just, you know, all that stuff.

And

I'm sure it disappointed him dramatically.

I know it did.

And I have apologized to him since.

Oh, absolutely.

Yes.

Yeah.

Once I turned myself around.

got things straightened back out with the boss um i went back to him and apologized for all that.

He deserved an apology for all that.

He deserved more than that.

But I apologized big time.

Wrote him a letter and apologized so he could read it anytime he wanted to.

Damn.

Yep.

That's what needed to happen.

How bad did it get?

Do you want to go into that?

Was it drinking?

I'm rattling him off right now.

I mean, listen, you're talking.

Early, big, and rich.

We're pulling 200 dates a year.

The first tour that we got literally out of the gate was Tim McGraw called us and said, I want you guys to be the opening act for the middle act on my 85 City tour.

We went, what?

He goes, I think your music is going to explode.

This is before Save a Horse had come out.

And so we're like, let's go.

I call up Cowboy Troy, the big black rapping cowboy from Dallas, Texas, six foot five, 260 pound, world's only black rapping cowboy.

Call up Troy.

He's working at a foot locker down in Dallas.

Yet he's got a master's degree at University of Texas.

But at this this point he's struggling a little bit.

I said, hey, man, you want to come on the bus with Big and Rich and rap?

Oh, by the way, we want to put you on the record.

He goes, are you serious?

I went, yeah.

Put him on the record.

We all go out on the road.

So here's a black rapping cowboy, big candy, John Rich, and a guy who's about this tall that we call two-foot Fred.

He's actually three feet tall, but we call him two-foot Fred to keep his ego under control.

And I'd run into him years before and had kept up with this guy, and he's just this crazy little guy that's like a rock star.

So we took him on the road too.

And so we're rolling down the road with Tim McGraw with this circus of people going on.

And you can just imagine the atmosphere.

I mean, it was bananas.

It was bonkers.

And it wasn't because, you know, you were malicious with it.

You're just, we can't believe what's going on right now.

We're going to have as much fun as we possibly can before this ends.

Damn.

Right?

Damn.

It would be hard to think anybody wouldn't have that angle at it because it did seem absolutely impossible.

Wow.

Did you meet your wife during the come up?

I met my wife in the lone star days.

Oh, really?

Yes, I did.

1996.

How'd you guys meet?

So my wife has her master's degree from Texas A ⁇ M in kinesiology, exercise, physiology.

She grew up living in places like fish camps.

You ever been to a fish camp, South Texas?

No.

Well, whatever the picture you have in your mind is probably what it is.

And I mean, put herself through college, worked at donut shops.

I mean, whatever.

And when I met her in Lone Star, we were playing a little rodeo, and she was a Budweiser girl.

She was a promotional model, and that was part of what she'd do to put herself through college.

So smoking hot, cowboy hat, black leather chaps, bikini top, walking around in a

rodeo.

I'm like, I'm trying to play the bass going,

who is that?

I mean, what in the world just walked in front of the stage?

Like, and the whole band was doing that, like, oh, my

long dark hair, like, like Pocahontas.

You know what I mean?

Like, oh, my, like, brrrr, I don't know what to do.

So

the show is over.

Show is over.

Uh, the Budweiser girls want to get a picture with the band, you know, because it's after the show.

She'll get a picture, and I tried to get her phone number, and she wouldn't give it to me, which is very smart on her part.

But this is back when we all had pagers.

Remember?

On your belt.

Oh, still had rolls of quarters in your car in case you need to make a phone call.

So I said, okay, you won't give me your phone number.

I said, let me put my pager number on the inside of your belt.

She goes, you want me to take my belt off?

I go, well, do you have anything else to write on?

She goes, no.

I said, if you don't mind, she goes.

Okay, fine.

So she takes her belt off and I take a Sharpie out or a marker and I put my pager number on the inside of her belt.

She put it back on.

Two weeks weeks later, I get a page from Houston, Texas, and it was her.

So we didn't get married till 2008.

So I knew her for a long time through all that,

all that span.

And

I've known her a long time.

And she has,

you know, been the counterbalance to my posture towards the world and has probably kept me out of federal prison, to be honest with you.

What was it that, I mean,

if you knew her for that long before, you know, you popped the question, well, what was it?

Because I knew too many guys in country music who got married when they shouldn't have and they were all divorced.

And if they had kids, their kids hated them because they never saw them.

And it wrecked their lives and it was a big mistake.

And I thought about it and I said,

when if I can ever get the music industry's hand off of my throat, and put my hand on their throat, meaning have enough success where I can start telling them what to do.

If I can ever get to that point, I'm going to ask that girl to marry me.

And I didn't really know what that moment would be.

But the moment came when that 634 songs I told you about that I wrote in the downtime, and I had 218 songs recorded.

Wow.

Everybody was calling me for songs.

I had seven songs on Jason Aldean's first record.

No kidding.

Hick Town, Amarilla Skye, Johnny Cash, Why.

I had all these massive And Big Kenny had written on some of those too.

Several of them.

And then all the Gretchen Wilson hits and then all the Big and Rich hits.

And then Faith, writing songs for Faith Hill and having Mississippi Girl was a huge hit.

Like all these songs I wrote, that catalog became very valuable.

And so I decided to sell that catalog of songs and I sold my catalog.

And at that point, I knew

I can now say no if I want to.

I can say no.

I can take the leash off.

And that's when I picked up the phone and flew down to Texas and we got married and 17 years in coming up here in December.

Congratulations.

I'd rather be an older dad than to have done it younger and exploded everything.

You know?

Like I was always very analytical about those types of things.

Watching guys that I respected a great deal look like they were miserable because they were.

Even though they had a lot of hit songs and all that stuff, they were divorced and their kids didn't like them.

And

who are you going home to?

Like, why are you out here beating yourself up to go home to what?

Your dog or your Ferrari or whatever it is you're going home to.

I don't want to live like that.

And I knew I'd mess it up.

How'd you pop the question?

How'd you propose?

My wife will be real happy to hear that I'll tell this story because I don't think it's ever, nobody's ever asked me that question in interviews.

So congratulations.

Got to that point where I got that catalog sold.

And at that point, she was doing a lot of

car shows.

So she was doing, she was like, the Infiniti XQ3 is a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And she's standing in Chicago and Houston and Vegas and New York.

She's like way up the ranks with that company.

And

every year I would call September 29th.

I just picked the day out of thin air.

One day I was with her and I said, what's the day today?

And she goes, September 29th.

I go, well, today's your day.

Today's your day.

She goes, what does that mean?

I said, whatever you want to do today, we're going to go do that.

Whatever.

She goes, what do you mean, whatever?

She don't like to shop.

She's like very frugal.

And I go, buy some clothes, take it wherever you want to go eat, whatever.

Call your girlfriends.

I don't care.

I'll pay for everything.

We started, it was kind of became a thing.

So I flew down on September 29th.

when she was at a car show in Dallas.

I had called her boss two weeks prior to that and told her boss, she won't be working for you in two weeks.

So you need to find somebody else.

She goes, Why won't she be working for me?

I said, because I'm going to ask her to marry me and I'm going to retire her.

She goes,

okay.

I said, I'm serious.

Find somebody else.

She goes, okay, I'll find somebody else.

Flew down there, got a key to her hotel room, packed up all of her bags, had everything sitting by the door.

Was wearing a suit.

I had

two bottles of champagne.

One was for us and one was for me because I was so, I was so freaked out, nervous.

I mean, just like, oh, I'm going to die.

And I had written a song for her and I had it on my laptop ready for her to hit play, had the ring, had the whole thing.

She walked in the room.

She goes, hey, what's going on?

She goes, why is all my stuff packed?

I go, just sit down, drink this, and hit play.

Sit down, drink this,

and hit play.

She goes, what is happening?

I go, just please do it.

So she sat down, took a sip, and hit play.

And the song was the story.

The song was what I was there to do.

And then I gave her the ring, and she said, yes.

And then we hopped on a plane, flew down to Houston, where she's from, and all her friends, and everybody was loaded up in a steakhouse.

And we went down there and celebrated it.

And a year later, my first son was born.

A year later.

A year later.

You got to think, man, we had waited.

You know, we'd waited a long time.

She'd been, I'd been seeing her at that point for seven years.

How old were you?

36.

36?

So 17 years,

you got people throwing themselves at you.

You're an

insanely famous musician.

What's the secret to a successful marriage?

With all that going on, you've kept it together.

A lot of people don't.

It has to be your job, your profession has to become

just totally secondary.

And like for real, you mean it.

Like it actually is secondary.

It's like,

well, if that went away, I'll just figure out something else to do.

To get to the point I was at, though, required everything I had every single day, 24-7.

You don't write 634 songs in five years if it's not what you were thinking about literally every waking minute of your day.

There's no room for anything else.

But once I had accomplished that and got over that hurdle, I was, like I said, you're never free until you can say no.

Larry Gatlin told me that of the Gatlin brothers.

Larry Gatlin said, John boy, you ain't ever free until you can say no.

And no is a complete sentence.

You need to start saying no to people, John.

Just say no.

I'm not going to do that show.

No, I'm not going to take that writing appointment.

No, I'm not going to produce that record.

Just start saying no.

I said, well, Larry, I can't say no.

I said, there's all kinds of people depend on me saying yes to shows and all that stuff.

He goes, well, don't you hire talented people?

I go, yes, sir.

He goes, well, if you start saying no, you say no too many times and they leave you, don't you think they'll find somewhere else to work?

I said, yeah, yeah, they would.

They're the best.

He goes, start saying no.

You're not free until you can say no.

It was those hurdles that I got over that I knew it was time I could get married because I could say no.

And I'm like, I felt like if I never did anything else in the music industry, I hit every mark I ever wanted to hit, plus a bunch of other marks I didn't think were even possible.

I'd smoked all the marks.

If it ended today, I'm cool with it.

This now becomes my professional hobby.

Now, we're going to move into things.

We're going to go from success to significance.

How do we make that transition?

Because they're not one in the same.

Success.

to significance.

Where I live today and what I spend my time doing,

what I am focused on is significance, not success.

That's when you become a dangerous animal.

How long did it take you to implement the say and no factor?

When did you develop the confidence to say, I'm not doing that?

About a year because I knew it was going to impact a lot of people financially to do that.

You know, these days, me and Big Kenny, we pull around 40 to 50 cities a year.

And back then, we were pulling 150.

Wow.

So think about cutting your income stream by two-thirds.

And you've got bus drivers and tour managers and band and crew and your singing partner.

And that's a lot of people.

That was a big decision.

Yep.

You guys made that together?

Nope.

No, you made it.

Unilateral decision.

She would never ask me to do that.

I didn't mean you and your wife.

I meant you.

I mean Kenny.

No.

That was you.

That was me.

How'd he take it?

It worried him.

You know,

I told Kenny, well, maybe if there's fewer big and rich shows, the price will go up.

Did it?

He goes, let's hope to God.

It did.

Currently, Big and Rich in 2025 is booking for,

I'm not going to go into numbers, but it is is significantly more than what it was when Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy was the biggest song in the United States of America.

No kidding.

Yeah.

We have moved into that realm of

nostalgic, big and rich, rock and roll country music that people remember and love and they want to hear it and you can only get it there.

We're still the only act that does that.

There's not another version of us.

I kind of tell people we're like the country version of Parliament Funkadelic.

Like George Clinton, we want the funk.

Got to have that funk.

Well, if you want to hear that song and feel that energy, you got to go see P-Funk.

Well, if you want to feel the energy that Big and Rich and Cowboy Choi do, you got to come to our show.

And so when we limited the amount of shows,

everything went up and nobody got hurt.

And that was just him taking care of all that.

Because I knew he was telling me, you cannot work that hard and be a successful husband

and daddy.

Can't do it.

You just can't.

And I let you accomplish all that and you hit your marks.

So

now go over here.

Right.

So that's what it did.

Wow.

I'm learning from you right now.

Are you?

Yeah, I'm learning.

And I'm new with this whole damn thing.

Real new.

I mean, I just started this five years ago.

It's five years ago when you...

got down on your knees.

It's five years ago that I started the podcast.

It's about two years that I got down.

Two years.

Two years.

Yeah.

It takes years to,

you'll never, you'll never fully understand how this is supposed to work, ever.

But it takes,

as each year clicks by, if you're serious about figuring it out and hanging around people that have done it longer than you, which is what I continue to do.

you'll start learning more and more about it.

Man, life starts making a lot more sense.

A lot more.

And it's interesting too, when things happen out of nowhere, out of left field that used to just absolutely send you into a tailspin, you're able to go, why'd you just let that happen?

Like, what was the point of that?

Not what the is going on.

It's like,

really?

What was that about?

Because I know there's a reason why you let that happen.

And then you go on here a little bit down the road and you go, oh, that's why that happened because this couldn't happen if that was still in place.

He has to tear a piece off to be able to add the new piece on.

Nobody likes to get their arm ripped off unless he's going to replace it with a bionic arm that can pick up 10 times the weight.

Then I might take that arm.

That might be kind of cool, but it hurts to get your arm ripped off.

Yes, it does.

Yeah,

I mean,

I always keep him at the forefront.

You know, I always do.

Even before

I came to, I mean, my intentions were always

were always to help and to make it about the person sitting across from me, not about me.

And it's,

you know, because of him, you know, it served me well.

And,

yeah.

Well, that's actually in the spirit of who Jesus was.

Jesus was not about him.

He was about us.

He was about everybody else.

He allowed his own creation to torture him to death.

He allowed human beings that that he created to torture him to death.

He could have went, it's over, and just erased the entire thing and started over.

But he didn't do that.

He said, if I don't do this,

it's all lost.

They're all lost.

I have to do it.

I have to let my own creation murder me.

You know, Jesus wasn't murdered for something that he did.

He was murdered for things that he said.

He never hurt anybody.

Isn't that wild?

It is.

I mean, that's how you know he was God, because any human that had the ability to stop something like that would have.

It's a damn good point.

It's a damn good point.

Yeah.

When did you start?

You know, we kind of touched on this at the very beginning, but, you know, I think

everybody

noticed how

the country music scene kind of started to change.

When did you start to see the change?

When they brought out the drag queens.

When was that?

Late 20 teens, they started dragging out.

You know, you turn on an award show and you go, why are there drag queens on the CMT awards?

What is going on right now?

I mean, like, what?

Because country music is family-oriented.

It's like mom and dad and the kids and everybody gets around.

They go, hey, the CMA awards are on, or ACM awards are on.

And then they started dragging in all this cultural stuff that you're going, what is happening right now?

What about the country music and who was the best singer this year?

And they got away from that and went straight into woke culture.

And that came from the top down.

Now, that came from those record execs that were coming in from other places.

Part of the war that they were waging on culture through the woke side of it was to use music as part of the war.

Because what will penetrate a human being faster than a really good song?

Nothing.

I mean, music just goes right through you.

It's just way better than a book, way better than a podcast, way better than a singer, way better than a movie.

Music is like, we know what music is.

It's powerful.

And so they used the music industry, all genres, including country music, to try to press that

down on people and shut everybody up that wouldn't go along with it.

And they shut up a whole bunch of them.

They did.

Yeah.

They did.

It's sad to see.

It backfired on them in country music.

It did?

Yes, big time.

So there is no such thing as the CMT Awards anymore.

That used to be a huge deal.

Country Music Television was like MTV Awards, CMT Awards.

And when they drug out...

When the drag queens came out on the CMT Awards at the end of the show,

I think the next year they had to have it as a streaming show.

and now there's not even a CMT Awards.

It affected it within one year.

Nobody watch it again.

They got Dixie chicked.

They got Bud Lighted.

People had enough of it.

It just went, well, it's the last time we're watching that.

Click.

What was the conversation behind the scenes with

fellow artists?

There had to be a lot of talk about what the hell is going on.

Like, dude, I don't know how much longer I can keep keep it down.

I mean, have you seen what they're doing?

I mean, like, everybody's hush-hush talking about it in green rooms and tour buses and just horrified at the stuff that is being pushed on them and how

the image of country music was being pushed hard in that direction like that.

And they're like, well, what are you going to do about it?

I mean, if you say anything about it, they're going to drop you.

Like, yeah.

But I was in the position at that point that

I had already stepped away from record labels and you can't drop me because I don't have a contract.

Like I told you early on, I don't have any contracts.

So I was kind of an outlier that I could actually come and say things and nobody can really hurt me with it because I don't work with you people anymore.

That's really where Aldean, I think, is head and shoulders up because he does still have a record deal.

He is still part of that music industry complex that's out there, but he just still does it like he wants to do it.

I mean, mad respect for Jason Aldean.

Have you seen a shift back to the core of what it was?

You have?

When did that start?

About a year ago.

Do you think you started that?

I mean, you, you, that's another thing.

When I, when I noticed, and I can't remember what the first

solo,

I'm not a country, I'm not a music guy, so excuse the verbiage here, but when you started to go solo and you started speaking out and writing stuff like revelation, I mean,

did you, do you think you had a major impact in that shift?

I don't think so.

I do know that the industry was watching what I was doing and that my songs like, yes, Revelation was one.

There was one called Progress where the line of the song said, stick your progress where the sun don't shine.

Ode to Joe Biden.

I had another one called Earth to God that was during the pandemic.

I mean, I had songs like that that were becoming the number one most downloaded songs, not in country, but all genres.

In all genres.

All genres.

So like if you go to iTunes, you go to Apple Music, there's John Rich,

Rich Records, which is a P.O.

box,

and Earth to God or Progress.

or Revelation.

And it wasn't in the country chart.

It was the all genre chart.

So I remember Progress, for instance, sat there for two weeks.

Number two was Beyonce and number three was Lizzo.

And I'm at one.

Holy shit.

Right.

So you don't think you had a well, they made that shift.

There's an appetite for this.

We didn't realize the appetite was that big.

Maybe they looked at it.

I don't know.

I don't talk to these people, but I know they saw it.

Everybody looks at those charts.

So maybe they went, oh, the appetite.

Probably a combination of knowing their audience was starved for that type of content and that people were changing the channel and changing the radio station en masse.

They were getting Budlighted.

The fans were responding.

There's a difference in being canceled and what capitalism is.

Being canceled means that a small group of people tell Sean Ryan, you're done, click, and they just cancel you and your audience never had a say.

When the audience decides they're going to turn you off, that's capitalism.

We don't want to drink Bud Light anymore because they stuck a dude on the can.

So we're going to start drinking something else.

Now I'm a Coors guy.

Now I'm a Miller guy.

Now I'm whatever.

That's not cancellation.

That's capitalism.

That's you guys made a marketing move.

It didn't work.

And here's your backlash.

That's how music works a lot of the times.

I think the audience's revolt against country music and maybe them seeing some of what I was doing and how that was hitting as big as it was.

Maybe it was a combination of several of those things.

Can't really be sure.

Did you start getting calls from other artists other than Jason all the time?

Other artists?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, a bunch of them.

You started doing that?

Dude, you're sitting at number one on the all genre chart right now.

I said, I know it's crazy, right?

They go, how did you do that?

What did you say?

I say, I call friends of mine who have podcasts and, you know, people that, you know, social media people that I'm friends with.

You know, there's everybody from Benny Johnson to cat turd.

I mean, I got friends.

And so

if I record a really good song and it's compelling and I call up all my friends and they'd be a good friend back and say, yeah, man, we'll hit the repost on that.

Then it's up to the music if the music will go because they can watch it on social media, but downloading it, that's on them.

And so when enough people download that thing and it becomes the number one most downloaded song in progress case for two weeks, that was substantial.

That was a big, that was actually a really big win.

Man.

It was shocking to me.

I was astonished by that, to be honest with you.

But it told me, oh, yeah, there's a lot of people who feel exactly like I feel out there.

And country music is not delivering them the music they want to hear.

Because if you put progress on country radio nationwide, God only knows how big that song gets.

But it was never played on any terrestrial radio stations.

Man, that's not.

They wouldn't touch it, but it's number one.

That is wild.

I know.

And

none of the record labels reached out about any of them.

Oh, God, no.

Didn't he?

What would they say?

Congratulations.

You're sitting at number one without us?

No.

I would think their greedy minds.

I think that people like that don't have a soul.

Some of them don't.

There's definitely some that don't, for real.

And then the rest of them are just.

trying to play the game within the industry.

It's kind of like look at what Hollywood's doing.

They're starting to change their programming.

They're starting to move towards content that Americans actually want to see instead of

the Snow White remake that nobody cares about or

the crazy new version of Star Wars that you're going, I don't want my kids watching that.

You know what I mean?

People are just, once they flop enough times in a row, business capitalism kicks back in and they go, you know what?

This is not working.

Man, I hope Hollywood doesn't revive itself.

I think they are so lost, they don't know what the hell to do anymore.

They are.

And people boycotted it.

They've quit.

They've let go of their streaming services and they all come.

They're dropping like flies.

They all come.

I bet Kimmel's next.

Yeah.

I mean, Kimmel ain't any different than Colbert.

That's the same.

That's the same deal.

I think that's why Fallon had Greg Duttfeld come on.

Oh, really?

I know Fallon.

I've known Fallon for a long time.

Long time.

And

Fallon has never struck me as whack job like Colbert was, dancing around with the needle on his head and all that.

Fallon would never do that.

I still think Fallon's a lefty, yeah, but he ain't that.

And so for him to bring Gutfeld onto his show kind of broke the wall.

It like ripped the veil for a minute.

And it was the biggest ratings he had had in years just by having Greg Guttfeld on his own.

Yeah, yeah.

They're starting to bend.

I just wish they'd just keep going down the same damn road they're going up.

Most of them are going to.

It's disgusting.

It's disgusting.

And as artists, you don't need them.

Do you need Hollywood, Sean Ryan?

You know, I thought I did.

When I started this, I couldn't get anybody to pay attention.

The first podcast I ever did, we hit the top 100 on the Apple charts, released it at Christmas of 2019.

Still couldn't get any,

I guess, of course, still, because it was brand new, but it's been a a hockey stick ever since.

And I couldn't get an agent.

I couldn't get a manager.

I couldn't get an advertiser.

Nothing would happen.

And then about the time everybody started paying attention, it was too late.

I didn't realize it was too late.

It took me about six months to realize this entertainment industry is a fucking joke.

People just, they just talk to you.

They call you.

They waste your fucking time.

They talk about all this shit.

They want to piece your action for doing nothing.

Yeah, and nothing happens.

So I fired everybody, fired all the managers, fired all the agents.

Get the fuck out of here.

Going to work with you.

I'll make contact with whoever I want to make contact with on my show.

And we've been doing that, I guess.

I came to that realization last year.

And

I guess never say never, right?

But I don't think I'm ever going back.

Why would you give up anything that you've got right now?

Do you like the way things are today?

You can fucking bring anything to the table.

That's what I'm saying.

Otherwise, i wouldn't be sitting here but you get to invite guys like me and i they all call up

they all call up and like we're the best we're the best yeah we're the best at what we do this is the best agency and it just got to the point where i was like cool you know what all of you guys say every single one of you all the top you know what is wme cna uta all those it just got to the point where i was like cool all you motherfuckers say the exact same damn thing how about you put something in my lap and say, this is why we're the best, rather than this fucking USAR salesman shit.

If you don't have anything, get out.

What'd they say to that?

Well, then it was talk to this person, talk to this person, we'll get the CEO.

I'm like, I don't give a shit about the CEO.

I don't fucking care about any of you.

Present me with something or get the fuck out of here.

They weren't used to talking to a military man.

So,

and

then, you know, back, I mean, just going back to,

you know, you're talking about being, being a father and a husband and being a good husband and a good father and how you have to say no to stuff.

I learned that fairly early on.

And I don't do, I'll do a speaking event here and there, but all these people want me to do the speaking circuit.

And I'm like, I'm not doing it, man.

That's just more time.

You are going to starve me.

of my time with my wife and my kids by with with with dangling money in front of me that I won't even have fucking time to spend because you've got me so damn busy.

So I'm not doing it.

There you go.

You bring it here to the Nashville, Middle Tennessee area, and I'll think about doing it.

But I am not fucking going on the road, not doing it.

You are, yeah, you're so far ahead of the game to understand that.

A lot of people can't ever get to that point.

You got one shot to raise good kids, be a good husband.

And I do not want to fuck that one up.

And

so when I, when, you know, and it was me,

I mean, when I first started it, it was just me and my wife in the attic of my house.

And

then along came

three guys that I call my,

the, the, the OG crowd.

And it was just.

us three for years just fucking grinding grinding grinding and and i started to feel like i was starving my wife and my kids and i i still feel like that a little bit to this day

But

so I started building it out and started, I'm still learning how to relinquish a little bit of control.

But when I put my team together, I said, no entertainment people.

I don't need bookers for my podcast.

I don't need agents.

I don't need any of this shit.

Hired a COO that's

been fucking amazing, producer, Jeremy.

You know, we went to your house and

those two are both academy grads and

all my friends, like, you need the right manager.

You need this.

I was like, no, if you've touched entertainment, don't even fucking apply.

So

I don't want the typical podcast roadmap.

I don't want any of that stuff.

I want a total,

I just want a unique business.

We make our own, whatever.

You get what I'm saying.

If I had a record deal, Sean, the last five songs I put out would have never been heard.

And they all were at number one.

They would have never been heard.

They would be turned into the label and they would go, that's nice, and stick it on the shelf.

And that's it.

You'd never hear it.

And for me, music is my weapon of choice.

That's my weapon of choice.

Music.

What I can say in a song, how many millions of people I can get to understand something or think about something.

That's mine.

That guitar is like how you handle a pistol and a rifle.

That's mine.

That guitar.

that pencil and that paper.

You know, it's crazy how powerful a pencil and a piece of paper is.

It's the most limitless thing probably God ever created.

If you think about the Constitution of the United States, it started out as blank paper until someone picked up a pen and began to write.

Now we have a country.

You think about the Bible.

Men and women inspired by God picked up something to write with and began to write down what they were being told to write down.

And now we have the Bible.

You come to me as like just a songwriter guy, but I'm looking at a blank piece of paper and I can put whatever I want to put on that or wherever I feel moved to put on that.

And then we'll see what happens.

But it is the most wide open thing ever.

And to ever allow the industry to take that freedom and that limitlessness away from you is a crime.

If you can afford to say no, you got to say no.

Even if you can't afford to say no, if they go too far with it, it, you have to say no anyway.

Because you can't live to your full potential if the things that you're coming up with are never going to be heard.

Right?

Oh, yeah.

Like all the great thoughts you may have, all the things you have to offer, if somebody's over your head going, I'm not going to let you go past this mark.

Well, then what's the point?

What's the point in even being here?

Well, I love how you've done it.

Thank you.

That's why I was pumped to come on here because I'm like, I'm proud of you.

I've been watching it and you've done it your way.

It's about as American as it gets.

That's why people like to watch you.

That means a hell of a lot, man.

Yeah, well, that's just the truth.

Especially coming from you.

Thank you.

Yes, sir.

So

what was the first, what do you call it?

Solo?

Am I saying it?

What's the first?

The solo stuff that you're doing,

it's passionate topics that you're writing and singing about.

Yeah, I'm not really writing party songs.

No.

I've got a bunch of those.

You can hear them at the Big and Rich show.

So how do these come to you?

Earth to God came to me because it was 2020.

This is when the riots are all happening.

They've got everybody locked down.

All the concerts got stopped.

My kids are trying to learn virtually.

They're telling us to keep your mask on.

All that crap's going on.

The world's on fire.

It looks apocalyptic.

And one morning I woke up

like the fifth day in a row, I hadn't taken my pajamas off because why?

Because nope, you can't go anywhere anyway.

I'm like,

this is,

this is not right at all.

And I had this image that popped into my head of like an old man, like a World War II guy, sitting in front of one of them old CB radios where the microphone comes up like this, like...

like on MASH.

Remember that show, that old CB and they're pressing the button?

Like like a guy hailing God through a CB radio.

That's what was in my head.

Going, press the button, earth to God, come in, God.

Boop, earth to God, come in, God.

That's what was in my head when I woke up.

And I went,

earth to God, come in, God.

And I thought, well, he's right there.

I'm like, I talk to you all the time.

I know you're right there.

Like, he's literally right there.

You just have to,

you have to reach out to him, SOS him.

And he will respond.

He'll go, this is God.

Come back, Earth.

And I thought, wow, what a thing.

And I just went, okay, I got to grab a guitar.

And that one felt like I had been hit on the back of the head with a hammer.

Like, bang, right this.

And so I just went and grabbed a guitar.

I told my wife, I'm going to be upstairs for a minute.

And about an hour later, I had Earth to God.

And I put that one out.

And the whole place just went, yes,

that's the lyric we we needed to hear.

And I'm not putting them out to get another plaque on the wall.

That just

doesn't really mean anything to me at this point.

It's how many millions of people can I get to hear something that I think they should hear.

Earth to God was the first strike on that one.

Like, bam, it hit.

And then the second one was progress.

And that's when Biden's in the White House and gasoline's going through the roof.

And I don't remember your lumber, like a two by four costs $24 or whatever it was.

And I went, man,

if this is progress, things can stick their progress with the sun don't shine.

As I'm walking around the Home Depot talking and mumbling to myself and went, sat in my truck, and I went, oh, that's a song.

Stick your progress where the sun don't shine.

Keep your big mess away from me and mine.

If you leave us alone, well, we'd all be just fine.

So stick your progress where the sun don't shine.

I wrote that down on a piece of paper in my truck and went home, called a couple of songwriting buddies still during COVID, got on the computer and we wrote the verses and I put it out and it was number one for two weeks and knocked Lizzo and Beyonce Beyonce out.

Then came

Revelation,

which is I think maybe when you really probably saw what I was swinging at and

this song

is not even a song.

Yes, it has music and yes I'm singing it.

But what the lyrics of that song are are taken directly from the pages of the Bible itself.

I just figured out how to make them rhyme.

That's all it is.

It is, this is what it says, make that into a song where people can absorb what this is saying through music.

And

as you watch

very wicked people,

extremely vile, wicked human beings.

that

carry out the devil's mission on this planet, because that's their daddy

that's their father the father of lies is what he's called but they believe that he's going to win in the end that's why they serve him and they are more devout than almost any christian you will ever meet the real the real mccoy

satan worshipers are so devout

I mean, it'd put a Christian to shame, their level of devoutness.

Most Christians.

They are dead serious about it, and they believe they're they're going to win.

And so the battle of good and evil, when you start talking about, is that real, it ain't like the battle of good and evil like in Star Wars.

It's legit

good and evil.

And

evil believes it will win.

And so that spiritual warfare that the Bible talks about in many, many, many places is as serious as a heart attack.

We are only separated, it says, from the spirit by what's referred to as the veil.

There's a thin veil between you and I sitting here right now, physically looking and speaking to each other, and literally whatever else is standing in this room that has been assigned to you and I to make sure we accomplish what it is we're supposed to accomplish.

There's some big old muscled up whatevers angels standing around us because we belong to him and we're doing what he tells us to do.

So we got a security team.

Right?

We can't see them, but you can see the results of what happens.

So things that happen in the spirit then manifest into the flesh, like wars in heaven, wars in the spirit, struggles that are going on that are just on the other side of that veil manifest themselves in culture and

in war and in all kinds of things that happen on the earth.

Well, I had never heard that talked about in a song.

How do you even make a song about that?

Where do you begin?

Right.

But I thought,

I've got a chorus rolling in my head, and I know where that came from.

So I'm going to sit down and see what happens.

And again, it was less than two hours, and I had this song Revelation written.

You wrote that in less than two hours?

I mean,

you talk about bolt of lightning.

Yes, sir.

And then I pulled out my iPhone.

and sang it into my voice notes and then put my earbuds in and walked around the house for over an hour with it on repeat just listening to it over and over and over and chill bumps are coming up on my arms.

And that's my voice.

I don't give myself chill bumps.

So it wasn't about me singing it.

It was like, that's it.

Like it was like,

it was him putting it through me onto that page and go, I want people to hear this.

I want you to say that.

I can read you the lyrics.

You want to hear the lyrics?

Absolutely.

For people that haven't heard it.

And if anybody wants to go, just go on YouTube and look up John Rich.

Revelation.

It says, Dancing in the flames, the people cursed his name, bowed at the altar of the father of lies.

But there's a number to their days and all their evil ways.

The Lord's going to turn away from all their cries.

Oh, Revelation, I can feel it coming like a dark train running.

Oh, get ready, because the king is coming.

The king is coming back again.

Brimstone upon their heads, millstones around their necks.

They'll feel the shaking when the trumpet sounds.

And no matter where they hide, there'll be nowhere to run when Jesus puts his mighty foot on the ground.

Oh, Revelation, I can feel it coming like a dark train running.

Oh, get ready because the king is coming.

The king is coming back again.

And then it tags a song with, So wrote the prophet John, who wrote Revelation, So wrote the prophet John before his days were done.

The king is coming and it won't be long.

My love it.

That's the lyrics of Revelation.

So

all of that is what it says, what the Bible says.

It says that

they will be utterly and completely destroyed in the end.

But up until that point, they're running ravenous and loose all over this earth.

It says the devil roams around as a ravenous beast seeking who he may destroy, who he may devour, is what it says.

He roams around like a ravenous lion seeking who he may devour.

That's what you're seeing in culture, Sean.

That's what you're seeing when you turn on the TV.

That's what you're seeing when you see these maniacs out in the street and people doing things that seem impossible that a human could even conceptualize what that is.

What they're doing to kids.

What they're doing to fellow human beings, it seems impossible.

And it is impossible because a human being was not meant to do that.

They're only doing that because they are possessed by the spirit of their father, just like I am possessed by the spirit of mine.

So I am capable of doing things that a human being is not capable of doing because it's not me doing it.

It's his power and authority.

If I'm willing to let him exert himself through me, that big things can happen.

On the flip side, the ones that are devoted to their daddy, Satan, the devil himself, Lucifer, the dragon.

When they devote their lives to him, he's able to accomplish things through them.

He can dwell within them.

He can make things happen happen outside of their own ability, too.

Yes, that's what I mean, like things that happen in the spirit manifest in the flesh.

Yeah, right.

Yep, God and the devil are fighting, and they possess their own people, and the people are us, and so our spirits are now working at the behest of whoever it is you're with, and that plays out out here in the street.

Now, when you're talking about

the Satan worshipers that you're, that you're, that you had mentioned earlier, that that

are so devout, it would,

more devout than, than, than the everyday Christian.

I mean, have you,

I've heard about this.

I've talked about it.

I know that there are people that

trade things for power, sacrifices, child sacrifices, all that kind of stuff.

But

I've never really seen it.

I've heard about Bohemian Grove.

Right.

I know this runs rampant in Hollywood, the P.

Diddy shit, music industry.

Have you seen it?

No, not with my physical eyes.

I have not.

Have you ever been approached?

I've been approached and invited to everything you can think of.

How does the approach happen?

Do you know what it's going to be?

Most people don't.

And that's why they go the first time because

it's pitched to you like this.

Hey, man, congratulations on the career you're doing great your song rather year three years in a row you guys just sold seven million records

um hey i'd like i'd like for you to be my guest my personal guest and this is like a head of a record label or the head of some big company or another really famous famous person like some big-time guy

and they will come to you with that and go you be my guest I'm going to take you there.

I'm going to introduce you to everybody.

It's going to be the greatest networking you've ever done in your life.

It's going to, your career is going to explode.

You're going to have opportunities you never even thought were possible because of the people you're going to meet, and I'm going to make sure that they know how great you are.

So what are you doing,

you know, the second weekend of October?

That's the pitch.

So how in the hell is anybody supposed to know there's a problem with that?

It doesn't sound like there's a problem with that at all.

It sounds like, wow, what an opportunity.

And then they'll get them into those places.

And from what I've heard from people who have been in those places, they say all manner of horrible things start breaking out in there.

And you're going, what am I?

What is going on?

But now you're in it.

Now you're standing there.

Now it's happening.

And

I think it's a control mechanism.

Now you're on video.

They got you on video.

Control mechanism.

It's a way to co-opt people that they think

have sway and have swing and have popularity or whatever.

And then I guess ultimately it can be a way to blackmail people, get them to do things they want them to do.

And when I was

a teenager, I remember my dad preaching about the importance of discernment,

that discernment is a very serious thing to ask for, to pray for, to discern things, because the devil is so slick, he is literally one degree off of perfection with the way he presents things.

Like he's the greatest counterfeit of all time.

He's the greatest.

It's like almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

And so the question is, how do I know what I'm looking at?

The answer is, you don't know what you're looking at.

You don't have the capacity as a human being to understand what you're looking at.

You don't possess that.

But the Holy Spirit does.

And so if you've given your life to Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit enters your life, the Holy Spirit is repulsed by those things.

Whereas your physical being may not even know there's anything to be repulsed about.

The Holy Spirit is absolutely not only repulsed, but enraged.

Like that's the enemy.

So I have asked for that.

I have prayed for that since I was a late teen.

Even in my crazy years and all that, I would still, when I would pray, I would pray for that discernment.

And I pray for it all the time now.

But you tell me this.

Let me ask you a question.

Have you ever walked into a room of people people and these are all upstanding, upstanding people, and everybody in the room is supposed to be there?

And you shake maybe 30 or 40 hands that night.

And out of the 30 or 40 hands, two or three of them just make your skin crawl when you shook their hand and looked in their eyes.

You ever had that happen?

Oh, yeah.

And you don't know why.

Because they look just like everybody else you just shook hands with.

But there's something about that one.

I just went, ugh.

You can feel it.

Well, I bet, especially in the last two years,

since you got saved, gave your life to Jesus, and he's in you now, I bet it's just to the max.

But especially if you ask for discernment, he will grant you that.

And then you'll be able to

stay away from those landmines.

I mean, you will, but you got to ask for it.

Oh, I do.

I've turned a lot of things down.

I can't imagine who comes up to you looking like they're perfect.

The perfect handshake.

And you're going, ah, something ain't right about that.

Yep.

Happens a lot.

Yeah.

And also the, the,

I've learned to look out for the favors.

I want to help you.

Uh-huh.

Why do you want to help me?

Right.

What do I owe you after you do this?

I mean, I don't ask that anymore.

I just, I don't need any favors.

Right.

So, and I think that's how, I think that's, I think that's how it works.

I think

you get introduced, you get some favors, and then those favors need to be repaid later on.

And then you're fucking trapped.

Sometimes even the association with someone, whether they did you a favor or not, the fact that they're able to say, he came and did this for me, or he came and did that for me or whatever.

And then people that know that that's a bad guy.

Now associate you with a bad person, even though you have no idea that's a bad person.

You see what I mean?

And so if you get that feeling, your skin starts to crawl around somebody, you're correct.

You may never know the reason why your skin crawled, but you can trust that it's real.

I mean, I see it in politics.

I see it in politics.

Oh, which is the worst?

You know, the favor brokering that goes on behind the scenes.

I mean, just to come up

before the election, interviewed a lot of people that wound up in the administration or close to the administration or whatever, a lot of them.

And

I could see some of the favors that are going on behind the scenes now, things that they want me to do for them.

And I'm like,

I'm the one that did you a fucking favor.

I put you in front of millions of people.

I don't need to give you any more fucking favors.

Right.

And

I can see like some of the favors, man, that it's like

because somebody voted for you, somebody got you confirmed, somebody got you in the administration.

Now

they should just be doing that shit anyways.

Now I got my leash on you.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yep.

And that's minuscule shit.

I can't even imagine how big the favors get.

Look at the Epstein stuff.

Oh, there's no telling.

There's no telling.

I mean, it's rampant.

And, you know, Epstein's one of them, and there's thousands of Epstein types out there.

They're everywhere.

And that's the

thing about God, how he thinks.

You know, if you go, you're reading it.

I love the verse that says, I am the same yesterday, today, and forever.

My word does not change.

So meaning however he dealt with stuff.

at the very beginning of what we know to be the beginning until today.

He does not care that we all now have iPads.

He doesn't care now that we all have AI or that we all have whatever.

He is going to deal with you the same way he dealt with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Pharaoh, Daniel, all the way down through all the way up to John and Sean.

He will not treat it any differently than he ever has.

So ask yourself this question.

Then how has he treated countries or let's call them empires back in the day

who mass abuse children?

What's the one thing Jesus said that I said earlier in this interview?

That's the most aggressive thing, at least written down, that the man ever said.

You'd be better off to die than to mess with one of these kids.

You'd be better off dead.

Well, that's what the Son of God said.

And what are we doing in this country?

And what's been going on for a very, very long time concerning kids?

Unborn kids and kids that are born.

And what do they do to those kids?

And we know it's at levels that nobody can even comprehend.

And that's just what we know about.

That's Lord knows what we don't know about.

And so I wonder, you know, everybody's got their plans on

we're going to beat the Democrats and we're going to change this and we're going to fix this and we're going to stop, you know, we're going to right the ship and all that.

Okay.

If he lets you,

you will.

Because he can flip this table upside down anytime he wants to.

Ask Noah.

He can flip it upside down

without with a thought.

He can flip it upside down.

The whole thing.

And he has a propensity to do things like that.

When you go back in the Old Testament and look at Moses and Pharaoh,

Moses goes to Pharaoh and he says, let my people go.

We all know the story.

And

Pharaoh says, no.

And then a plague hits.

Something bad happens.

Noah goes back.

Noah.

Moses goes back and says, let my people go.

And then it says, but God hardened Pharaoh's heart.

Which tells me Pharaoh might have been of the mind, you know what?

I've had enough.

Fine.

You guys go on and get out.

No, it says God hardened his heart, hardened Pharaoh's heart so he wouldn't let him go.

Why?

So God could bring the next one and the next one and the next one and the next one.

to show his people and the Egyptians that I am real.

I am God.

Only I can make these things happen.

Not you.

You're not going to go in here and work out a deal in the back room and your people get let go.

No, I'm going to make Pharaoh say no, so then I can show you guys who I am again because you forgot who I am.

I'm going to remind you who I am.

So where my head goes with all this is when is God going to remind America who he is?

When is that going to happen?

I feel like it's coming.

I feel like it's coming too.

And I feel like we've earned it.

When is God going to remind America who he is?

Woo!

The most blessed nation in the history of nations, the freest nation, the richest nation.

And look what we've done with it and allowed to go on in this country.

I mean,

back in the old books, Old Testament, they didn't do anything near what we're pulling off.

So if he's the same yesterday, today, and forever, and his word does not change, it's coming, my man.

It's coming at some point.

You better make sure you're hooked up with him when it does.

That's where my head's at these days.

I watch all the stuff on TV like everybody else.

I'm like, well,

maybe they can figure something out.

We don't have mushroom clouds over our heads here, but I'm going.

It's really just going to depend on what he allows to happen.

Right?

Mm-hmm.

I mean, the stuff with the kids, I know that's

very important to you and me as well.

I've covered it several times on the show.

We just had Tim Tebow on not too long ago.

Oh, I love Tim.

Amazing.

Tim and I are

some of the conversations I've had with him.

The stuff that that can ball your eyes out what that man knows about.

Yep.

Yep.

He's a saint.

Yes, he is.

My friend Ryan Montgomery, Jared,

Victor Marks.

We've had a lot of guys on to discuss

child abuse, sexual exploitation, rape.

I mean

child sacrifice, all that kind of stuff.

And this is one of your next things, right?

One of your next solos.

Yeah, so I've, well, I've got a song that's been written now for about six months called The Righteous Hunter.

And this happened because I saw a video clip of Sean Combs.

on camera on an award show somewhere and he looked right into the camera with all the spotlights going on and he said

I own your kids I own their souls and he's looking into the I own their souls I determine what they listen to I determine what clothes they wear I own their souls he said that yes he did I'll send you the clip and you're looking right at the devil I mean his eyes are just like

and I saw that and I went oh is that right is that right Diddy

you own my kids souls huh

and I thought to myself is anybody going to say something about that?

Anybody in the news?

Any preachers?

Hello, any of the big preachers?

Joe Osteen, where are you at?

Anybody going to stand up and say, hey,

you're a child of the devil and

you don't own any of our kids' souls.

And I hope God takes you to hell sooner than later.

Is anybody going to say that?

No.

No?

Just going to roll on down the road.

Well,

buy my book.

Buy my book.

Put more money in the plate.

No, no preachers.

No preachers calling that out.

And it made me so furious to hear him say that.

I go, so music is his weapon of choice.

Well, me too, big boy.

And I ain't near as well known as Sean Combs, not by a long stretch.

But my daddy can beat up his daddy.

And it ain't even a fair fight.

It ain't even a fight.

And so that led to...

A song called The Righteous Hunter.

And I started thinking about, and I would ask you to think about this, and every dad or mother watching this right now,

is there anything you would not do to keep another adult from putting their hands on your kids?

Anything out of bounds?

Nothing.

Right.

But

their arrogance and their level of wickedness and devoutness.

to their father has got them to a point where they'll just stand right out there in broad daylight and tell you,

I own your kids' souls, and there's nothing you can do about it.

So that led to the writing of a song that has a lyric that is,

it's,

it hits so hard, I haven't put it out.

I'll put it to you that way.

I haven't put it out yet.

I got to figure out what the video is to this song.

And matter of fact, when I wrote it, I was thinking about it's talking from a dad's perspective.

I thought, who would be a good dad in the video The Righteous Hunter?

And you know who came to mind?

You.

You came to mind.

You came to mind.

You popped in my head.

I went,

he's a dad.

He's a Christian.

And he's a lethal individual if you mess with his family.

I went, hmm.

But I haven't released it.

So we can talk about that at some other time.

But I think you would be absolutely colossal as the dad

in a video like that.

Well, that's an honor to hear you say that.

Thank you.

See that look on your face right now?

That's the look.

I don't think they understand.

I don't think the people that talk about our kids like that and that do horrible things to kids, I don't think they have any touchstone whatsoever to what an actual mom or dad that loves their kids will do to them.

And you know why I don't think they have a touchstone to that reality?

Because they hate kids.

They try to kill them all before they're born.

That's number one.

If they are born, they try to co-opt them, twist them, break them, move them, abuse them, sexualize them, whatever they do.

That is their way of hurting God.

When Jesus Christ said, this is what I love the most, these children,

then how can they hurt Jesus the most?

How can the devil inflict the most pain possible?

How can he make Jesus cry the most?

Hurt the kids.

That's why they're doing it.

Damn.

That's why they're doing it.

And so here we are in our little short lifespans watching this go down, and we know one from the other.

What are we supposed to do about it?

Well, I can't go out and round up 3.2 million pedophiles in the United States.

But I can write a song that

hopefully parents hear that and go, you know what?

That's exactly how I feel.

And they start to bow up and stiffen their backs up a little bit and go, yeah, come on and try it one time.

Like parents need to be coming out in full force against this stuff and go, you try that on my kids and I'll kill you in the front yard.

Now, I've seen Trump say

anybody that sexually abuses a child should receive the death penalty.

Now, he said that in the campaign, that he was going to make that a federal statute, that they receive the death penalty.

And it hadn't happened yet,

But it should.

Yes, it should have happened a long time ago.

Should always have been now.

Yeah.

I know that's a heavy subject, but we're surrounded with it.

Oh, yeah, we are.

It is everywhere.

And a lot of times it's people you never suspect.

It might be that.

Preacher that didn't seem quite right.

It might be that school teacher that's

that sheriff, that judge, that whoever.

I mean, a lot of times it's people in places of authority that are running these things that have this cover of a life that seemed like well that person would never do that

it's not the scuzz bucket guy you see sitting on the sidewalk most of the time the u.s is the top country that uses

we have the most

sexual exploitation cases kiddie porn all of that stuff.

We are the world leader in it.

And you think he ain't going to smack us over that?

You think he's just going let us?

I think he's already smacking us over that.

I think that's some of what we're doing.

We may be beginning to.

My country's crumbling,

it's divided in just about every subject that you can

bring up:

politics, race, gender, everything.

Yeah, religion.

Divide it, divide that,

that

we're in a bad spot.

Subsets of subsets of subsets.

Has anybody ever sang a song on your show before?

No.

I brought a guitar.

If I could be so bold.

I would love it.

Because I've never sang The Righteous Hunter to anybody

other than family members and people that are around me that I know well.

But I've never sat on a camera and ever sang this song.

It's not out.

You can't download it.

There's no...

Nothing.

But I would be really curious what your audience especially would think of this song.

And I ain't got no band or nothing or everything, but if I, you mind if I play it, I would like to play it.

I'd be honored.

Okay, cool.

Let's do it.

You want to hear it?

Yes.

It's called The Righteous Hunter.

Evil runs around this town undercover, looking for a soul to take.

but they better stay away from the righteous hunter,

or hell is all they'll pay.

Cause I can see you around the corner, and I know you're coming.

If you had any sense, you'd run.

But you ain't got a clue what a daddy will do.

Better give your soul to Jesus while I get my gum.

You better give your soul to Jesus while I get my gun

They try to steal away our sons and daughters Shrouded in the shadow of night

But we fight with protection of the Heavenly Father

We ain't scared to die

And I can see you around the corner and I know you're coming If you had any sense, you'd run.

But you ain't got a clue what a daddy will do.

Better give your soul to Jesus while I get my gun.

Better give your soul to Jesus while I get my gun.

Recall the words that Jesus said.

Better off with millstones around their necks, and we pray.

Not our will, but thine be done, bring an end to the reign of the wicked oneness we claim in your name.

And I can see you around the corner, and I know you're coming.

If you had any sense, you'd run.

run

but you ain't got a clue what a daddy will do better give your soul to jesus while i get my gun

you better give your soul to jesus while i get my gone

evil runs around this town undercover, looking for a soul to take.

But they better stay away from the righteous honor,

for hell is all they'll pay.

That's it.

That is amazing.

Do you know what I think?

What do you think?

I think that's going to be the biggest thing you've ever done.

That's awesome.

Congratulations.

Well, it's unreleased.

It's just in my head and now on your show.

But I would like to hear what people think about that because

just hearing what you have to say about it means something.

You know, when you sit on a song like that, banging around in your own head, going, do I need to put that out or not?

And if so, when and how and all of that, you don't write that song twice.

You know, that's a

one shot.

I've never heard a song written about what's happening to our kids or what parents would actually do to somebody that tried to, an actual real mom or dad.

But I think it needs to be said.

I think the bad guys need to need to know where we stand with them.

That's really what my problem is, is that

nobody has clearly enough stated to them, you come from my kids.

and you're going to die.

And

that's it.

They shouldn't be able to walk out on stage and say, I own your kids' souls.

And we just

walk on by.

Right?

Forget about even being an American for a minute.

What about just being a dad or a mom?

We let people talk like that about our kids with no rebuttal?

No.

I don't and you don't.

And I bet there's millions of, I know there's tens of millions of us that won't.

So yeah, that's what that song is.

If you want to be the dad in the video, man, can you imagine that song and you're in your house and they're trying to find your kid and you're praying all night long?

Man.

Those are the kind of things, Sean.

I am grateful that God took away my record deals, my publishing deals, that he cut my arms and legs and almost cut my head off.

So he could rebuild me without...

my former attachments and problems and habits and alliances and loyalties and all of that and rebuild me

without those things, but with the same skill set intact, which is what I just did for you right there, and be able to go out here with however many years I got left in my life to cause as much utter damage as I possibly can to the wicked people in this world.

It tells us in the Bible, God says, I will use you as a battle axe.

to tear down the strongholds of hell itself.

Meaning, he views some of us as weaponry.

The axe cannot swing itself.

It could cut that tree down, but somebody's going to have to pick it up and swing it.

Well, if I'm an axe, my job is to make sure I'm the sharpest,

fastest axe on the block.

I'm as sharp as fast as I can possibly be.

So I'm prepared.

So when the boss decides I'm ready to pick that axe up and I'm going to tear that thing down and I'm going, I'm here.

He picks it up and here we go.

Like that is my mindset as a Christian these days.

It's not to

say pretty nice things that make other Christians happy and feel good all over and feel good inside.

That's not my job.

Now, everybody's job is not my job.

That's a really interesting thing, too.

Paul talks about Christians as the body, as the church.

He says,

what good is the eye if it doesn't have a foot?

What good is the hand if it doesn't have an eye?

Like, somebody's an eye, somebody's a foot, somebody's a hand, somebody's a pinky,

somebody's an eyelash, somebody's fine-tuning, and somebody's blunt force trauma.

Like it takes, it's a toolbox of humanity that belong to him that he uses as a unit and as a team.

That's why we're supposed to know each other and supposed to identify in each other.

What are you built for?

What am I built for?

What is she built for?

And who's the enemy?

Them?

And so how do we all put our armaments together and our talents together and move as a unit against these people man i never really thought of it like that to be honest with you paul laid the whole thing out in new testament yeah go read that

he refers to the body of christ as literally a body eye hand foot and think about it what good is an eye if the eye goes i want to walk through that door but i don't have a foot i can't walk i can see it but i and the foot goes well i can walk there but i'm blind can't see where i'm going

it all has to work together so christians real christians all have different skill sets.

We're all different.

We're in categories.

Mine

is songs like that,

where I get to swing a gigantic sledgehammer.

I hope people cry.

I hope other people get, I hope their back stiffens up and they go, you know what, enough.

And I don't know if that song will do that or not.

I know it makes me feel that way.

I mean, you feel that you're being utilized to do this.

I feel that he

took all those years in my life, allowing me to get really good at what it is I'm good at.

And back then, it was used to make money and get famous and do a bunch of things like that.

That is no longer the point of why I have that skill set.

Now I have that skill set to do what it is I feel like he wants me to do and say.

And you go back to how I was raised, you know,

growing up in an environment where it was,

you know, we talked about how I was raised around my mother and stuff, and it made me, it was like dukes up all the time.

And I don't mean physically, she wasn't slapping me around, but it was just, it was a very, very tenuous environment.

But it gave me that posture, I think, just in my spirit as a person.

And so now, as a grown man, and I've got a wife and kids,

and I hear some jackass demoniac like Sean Combs saying he owns owns my kid's soul.

And I know who that is speaking.

That ain't even Sean.

That's whatever demon lives inside of Sean Combs speaking through his eyes and through that camera and right to me.

And I'm going, oh, I know who you are.

You're the one that's already been defeated.

You work for the loser.

That's who you work for.

We work for the one that created all you monsters and will ultimately destroy you all.

But God's interesting because he likes to see his people put themselves in harm's way for him or be willing to be put in harm's way, be willing to be put in positions that they are not comfortable being put in.

Why?

Because it shows that they have faith.

I walk up to this chair before I sat down in it.

I looked at the chair and I went, that's a really nice leather chair.

I'm 100% sure that chair will hold me up when I sit down in it.

That means I believe the chair will hold me up.

I believe it.

100% I believe that.

Until I sit down in the leather chair in your studio, I don't have faith that the chair will hold me up.

When I sit down in the chair and no longer am I holding up my own weight, everything I have is resting on this.

And guess what?

It hasn't dumped me out in the floor yet.

So I was correct.

I have faith the chair will hold me up.

Believing and having faith are two completely different things.

If you think that...

You were chosen to do this.

Why do you think you're the one?

I don't think I'm the one.

I think I'm one of many probably out there right now that are from their own angles are coming.

But I do think it's very important that we find each other,

have conversations like this,

no more messing around.

Let's call it what it is.

What are you good at?

Well, you're a military guy.

Is everybody in the unit all good at just one job?

No, you've got all different kinds of guys that do all different kinds of things.

I mean, I know for a fact, and some of the Special Forces units, guys I know, some of them are chemists.

Chemists?

I meet the one guy.

He goes, yeah, I'm a chemist.

I go, a chemist?

Can I ask what the reason is behind that?

He goes, yeah.

So if I walk into a building,

I can scan the room very rapidly.

And even if it's household items, I can see that if their components are in a certain room, that they could have made a gas bomb or explosive or something out of what I see in the room.

I'll know how to tell the guys, put on your mask or step out of the building or all kinds of things.

If I don't see it, then I don't see it.

He said, but I know like that fast what I'm looking at, that's on top of I do this, I'm also a chemist.

I went, that's really interesting.

So

if it's spiritual warfare, that's the words we use and it calls it that, spiritual warfare, that means that the devil has his ranks.

He's got generals and he's got, he's got all the way down to privates.

He's got the whole thing.

He's got specialists.

They're really good at this.

They're really good at that.

He's got his ranks.

And then God has his ranks.

He has his too.

And then there's us, and we're in the middle.

And so God's army and the devil's army, what are they fighting over?

Us.

The devil wants us.

The devil wants us.

He wants to get every last one of us so there's no reason for Jesus to come back.

He's trying to get every last one of us.

I feel like there are opportunities that are presented,

but there's only so many people that are paying attention, and you're paying attention.

But I think the opportunities are everywhere, and you just have to be paying attention, know when the door is open, and have the courage to walk in.

I don't necessarily

think that people are chosen for specific tasks.

I think the tasks are always there,

and it just takes that person that is really paying attention,

that's

operating slow enough to pay attention to the details and what's going on around them, not just people and

everything.

And,

you know, I'm sure I've missed more of them than I've ever captured, but I think that's how it happens.

Yeah, I mean, it's until he comes back,

it's not going to stop.

It's going to ramp and ramp and ramp and ramp.

and so

i mean back in scripture it says uh as it were in the days of noah so shall it be in in the end times of the coming of the son of man meaning jesus they go look back in the days of noah what was going on and i know you've covered this on your show i've seen it but people talking about how fallen angels came to the earth and they bred basically made babies with human women and and the point of that was that they that if the devil could pollute the entire human race, Jesus could never be born.

So he wins.

The devil gets to win.

He got to pollute them all where they're not fully human anymore.

That was the point of Genesis 6 was to try to knock them all out.

And God says, it grieves me that I made mankind in the first place.

Like, you know what?

I'm sorry I even made you rascals down there.

I'm going to wipe the whole thing out.

This is horrible.

It grieved him.

That's back to created in the image of God.

God experiences grief.

Yes.

he does.

He was grieved and it says, but Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

There's one guy left in his family that had stayed intact.

And so he told Noah, build the boat.

I'm going to destroy this whole place.

He goes, build a what?

And they mock Noah incessantly for 100 plus years or whatever.

He's building this boat.

And they're going, what an idiot.

Look at Noah.

But it also says they were.

They were eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage during the days of Noah.

So it was not apocalyptic before the flood.

Everything was rolling on pretty normal other than the whole place was just completely devoured with wickedness.

But daily life was going on, which is very interesting because when you think about the end times, you think apocalypse.

You think, you know, some Hollywood movie, it's

the zombies and it's like...

Everybody's living in a cave or whatever.

That's not what it's going to be.

As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be at the sign of the coming of the Son of Man.

So that means right before he comes back, people are going to be eating and drinking and marrying and giving and marriage and going on about life.

They're just going to be completely wicked, the vast majority, other than what he refers to as the remnant, which is the Christians that have managed to stay alive, that haven't been killed in this period of time in the Great Tribulation.

And then he comes back.

That's a lot to think about.

Because if you don't read it and read exactly what it says, if you only lean on the preacher to tell you what it means, you're going to have to assume that he's just got it down and crossed your fingers that he didn't miss anything.

But if you go read it yourself and think logically for a minute, you'll come to the conclusion I just came to.

As it was in the days of Noah.

Well, how was it in the days of Noah?

Let's go read it.

Oh, all these.

Well, I always figured that

before Jesus came back, it'd be an apocalypse.

Wasn't that apocalypse before the flood?

Is that not a wild thought?

That is.

Yeah.

I remember realizing that one day and went, huh?

Well, that's interesting because you think, well, I don't know Jesus is about to come back because that's when all the mushroom clouds will be floating around and we're all barely getting by and living like, you know, the walking dead out here.

That's not what it says.

There's so many things in the Bible like that that have just been.

skewed, tilted a little bit, not just read clearly and put together that even a lot of Christians have a lot of cloudiness about what they're really looking at.

Do you feel there is a resurgence of Christianity happening right now?

I do feel like that.

I do too.

Yeah.

I've seen it.

My son went to a Wednesday night get together with kids his age at a Christian parents' house.

They have this thing on Wednesday nights, and eight teenage girls got baptized in the swimming pool that night.

Eight.

Are you serious?

Eight 10th-grade girls.

Eight of them one night.

Wow.

Yes.

And then I've seen videos of these college campuses where they're pulling in pickup trucks and putting tarps on them, filling them up full of water, and they're out there baptizing each other.

Thousands.

Thousands of them.

So yeah,

I think there's no doubt about it.

You're seeing it happen.

And you know what brings that on, Sean, is the more pain and the more wickedness comes into the world, the more people start to become aware that it's there.

And if wickedness is real, then so is righteousness.

If the devil is real and we see him for real, there he is.

This is what he does.

This is the devil.

Then Jesus is real.

He's also real.

And I think that realization is hitting people that this is not a game.

This is not a fairy tale.

This is actually real.

I can see it.

I can feel it.

And then they got a choice to make at that point.

And you're right.

A lot of people are giving life to God right now.

They are, man.

I see it more and more

every day.

All the time.

Yep.

And I also see the other side growing, too.

I mean, you know,

two Easters ago,

I got baptized.

Yep.

Man, that was awesome.

That was awesome.

The old man passes away.

The old Sean is dead.

The new Sean comes out of the water.

Right.

I mean,

what is more epic than that?

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

I love that song, man.

I appreciate it.

The Righteous Hunter.

Maybe Mel Gibson will do a movie called The Righteous Hunter.

Maybe he will.

I would like to see a movie about that, actually.

Me too.

you know the biggest interview I've ever done

was

about that

not about that but it was about child exploitation and and sex trafficking and

it was this kid Brian Montgomery really good friend of mine now but nobody had ever heard of this guy I just I was scrolling doom scrolling Instagram one day and I saw this guy and he was talking about how he had cracked into this pedophile website to download the user base to get it to authorities

when he's doing it there was a guy holding up a phone with his 12-year-old daughter in a bathtub that said wait do you see what me and my friends will do to her and he got that to

he he he took that got it to the fbi And the FBI said, we ought to arrest you for cracking into that.

He said, great, come arrest me, but maybe go save that 12-year-old first.

Yeah.

Never heard from him again.

Two years later, the same guy gets arrested in Denver airport with another 12-year-old.

Are you saying he never went and got him?

And

it was on some

very small MMA podcast because he had a sidekick with him, this guy that he would corner people.

He would bait people into coming

thinking they were going to meet up with a 11-year-old girl or something, and he would video them at Walmart.

And he would be the guy, you know, and then he'd have his MMA buddy there to whip their ass if they, if they did anything.

And I was just like, how the fuck is nobody giving this kid any attention?

And so I got in touch with him and I was like, hey, come on here.

It'll probably get shut down.

And I might ruin my entire career over this because, you know, at the time I knew, you know.

YouTube, Facebook, any social media outlet that you don't talk about.

It's like the forbidden topic.

And I was like, like, I don't care.

I'm going to put it on the line.

And if it all gets taken away from me, I know I did it, you know, that it happened for a good cause.

And

he came out.

We did the interview.

Demonetized it.

Didn't want to,

I was like, anything that we can do to get big tech off of this, you know, not dive in and look at it.

We'll do.

So demonetized it.

No money, nothing.

Biggest interview I ever did.

It's got like 10 million views.

When you look at all the clips and everything else, hundreds of millions of views.

And,

you know, what I love about Ryan is he didn't come here to get exposure.

He didn't come here to sell anything.

He just came here to talk about what was going on.

And, you know, at the time, I was very naive about how prevalent this was in the world, but not just the world, in the United States.

And so I said,

all right, I want to see how long this takes.

So I said, you got your laptop here.

You're a hacker.

Get in any

website, social media form.

I don't care.

I want to see how long this shit takes.

It's like a live hacking.

It wasn't even hacking.

He just made a screen name.

He is a hacker.

See how fast he could get into the mix.

I was like, just get into the mix.

He goes, all right, I'm making the screen name Ashley 13, New Jersey.

Five seconds.

He had a 40-something-year-old dude wanting to fuck a 13-year-old girl at a Walmart, New Jersey.

And I had him screen record it and we played it live on the show.

And

so in that interview, I mean, we had exposed how this was happening.

We had scared the shit out of pedophiles.

We had

got the FBI's attention.

They started stalking him him afterwards and

educated parents, you know, on how this and kids, on how this, it was like the perfect storm of all these things that it converged.

And the interest was, I mean, he's still like, it's still just going.

And

that's what I think that song's going to do, man.

Good for you for right now.

Well, we should make it, you know,

we should make every penny of every download that comes in go to somebody like Tebow, somebody that's actually busting these animals.

I don't want to make nothing on it.

Like do something huge

with that thing.

I did a live stream with Homeland Security earlier this year

about their

education program they have for parents and teens about being online.

because my wife and son had been to a

like a mother-son meeting and they had a DHS agent come into the school and he's showing them here's how predators get you guys on Instagram and Facebook and Roblox and video all these video games all this stuff

and my wife was so rattled by that and my son came home and started changing settings on his phone I mean it like had an immediate impact I said my god what did he tell you and so she starts walking me through it and I said you get a phone number on this guy I can find it so she did I called him I said hey it's John Rich.

I'm the country singer guy.

And I said, what you told my wife and son needs to be heard by millions of people.

He said, I agree.

We just don't know how to do that.

We go to schools, churches, you know, nickel and dime.

He said, but Mr.

Rich, here's the thing.

Last year we had 36 million

reports

of kids being targeted online.

That's 3 million a month.

And that's just who had enough sense to report it.

He said, so,

yes we'll take you up on that so i had the dhs come to my house and we set up a live stream and president trump retweeted it reposted it and it wound up racking up many millions of views but i basically had the dhs agent just sit there and had parents and teenagers all looking at their laptops going through this one hour thing but when you start hearing numbers like 36 million

That's what I'm telling you, man.

I mean,

you better make sure you're fighting tooth and nail against these bastards.

I mean, every single day, there better not be a shy bone in your body.

If you're a Christian,

I don't care if you play the piano at church.

I don't care if you're the nicest lady in town that brings cookies to the kids.

That's fine.

But on this subject, you better be as vicious as a wolverine.

You better come at them with everything you've got and make sure everybody knows.

That's how you feel about it.

Because it really sickens my stomach to know that there's tens of millions of Christians in this country who are not screaming about it.

Yeah,

I think that this stuff has been so in the shadows for so long that people just didn't realize how prevalent it was.

But it's not now.

It's not now.

Everybody, if you're paying attention at all,

you know it's real now.

Yep.

It's uncomfortable for people to look at it.

They want to act like, I don't want to think about that.

The police will handle that.

The FBI will handle that.

There's too many of them.

36 million approaches on social media in one year.

I mean, there ain't enough cops in the world.

It's going to take the general public deciding that they're going to make moves like Ryan, like the guy you're talking about.

I'm sick of it.

I'm going to do what I can do.

Right?

Yep.

Yep.

Sorry to get wound up about that.

Again, music is my weapon of choice.

And we'll see what that thing does.

Your reaction to it helps me to understand maybe what I should do with it.

Well, I think you're going to to get a bigger reaction when this releases.

But

nice work, man.

Give your soul to Jesus while I get my gun.

Love it.

Yeah.

Let's take a break.

All right.

Sounds good.

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Let's get back to the show.

All right, John, we're back from the break.

Got heavy there, but I want to talk.

That was heavy stuff.

I want to talk about TVA and what's going on with that.

So I know you got involved in that.

We had a discussion at your place a couple weeks ago about it and

what is going on there.

The Tennessee Valley Authority.

So a lot of people may not know what that is, but TVA

is basically controls the power grid in all of Tennessee, but in

big sections of seven different states.

It was started in 1933 by FDR, the famous socialist president of the United States.

And FDR set up the TVA in such a way that they only answer to the president of the United States.

So they're a federal entity

that answers to the president

and they're able to take private money from, like when you pay your electric bill here in Tennessee, part of that money is going to the TVA, even though they're a federal entity.

So it's this hybrid

monster of a,

I guess you could call it a company, but it's federal.

I mean, that's the problem.

And

it's the same way today that it has been since since 1933.

And they are absolutely

vicious when it comes to dealing with American citizens.

So when they want to do a project, they will show up in force.

And when I say force, I mean bulletproof vests, loaded weapons, the whole nine yards, and show up in somebody's yard and say,

We're coming on your property to do destructive testing.

And the landowner's going, no, you're not.

And they go, yeah, we are.

And if you say no again,

here's a lawsuit, and we're going to basically bankrupt you in court and we're going to come on your land anyway.

So it's like imminent domain, but done

in a brutal, brutal manner.

And so this,

I knew those kinds of stories, but I never dealt with them, never had anything come close enough to me where I'd actually seen it myself.

There's a little county in Middle Tennessee called Cheatham County, C-H-E-A-T-H-A-M, Cheatham.

It's like Cheatham.

And it's a rural county, lower to middle income.

My dad lives there.

My brother has a farm there.

My Granny Rich

ran her business there, died, Cheatham County.

I went to high school out in Cheatham County for three years, 9th, 10th, and 11th.

So I know those people.

And My brother, the farmer, says, have you heard what TBA is doing right here in Cheatham County?

I said, no, what are they doing?

He said, they're wanting to drop a 900 megawatt methane gas plant with 10 acres of lithium batteries storage.

And he told me the address.

I said, do what?

They're putting it there?

He goes, yeah.

I said, how many houses are over there?

He said, about 500.

He said, and also five schools.

are within five miles of this place.

And also, it's right on top of the main water supply for Aston City and Pleasantview, Tennessee.

I said, how can they do that?

He goes, I don't know, but they're doing it.

Like they're taking people's land.

They're showing up.

Like they're showing up full force.

I said, okay, let me dig into this.

So I started digging around and I find one of the locals there who was dealing with him.

And sure enough, man,

this lady

is next door neighbors to this really old lady

named Mrs.

Nicholson.

She's about 88 years old and has dementia.

And she lives on a family farm that's been in their family for more than a century.

So they refer to that as a sentry farm.

And the lady that ran over there when TVA showed up grabbed her GoPro, her camera,

and filmed the TVA marching across this woman's field, walking up into her yard.

I counted at least 10 vehicles.

It looked like an ATF raid.

And here's these guys standing out there all tough with their bulletproof vests and their loaded guns standing there.

And this guy's going, now we're going to have to come on your property now.

da, da, da, da, da.

And the old lady looks into the camera and says, you think you own something?

You don't own nothing.

She snapped out of her dementia for about 10 seconds and said that into the camera.

Well, this lady I found and was talking to showed me that footage.

And I'm telling you, my blood ran cold.

It ran like ice.

I got so mad.

that in America, this can happen.

And when I saw that old lady, I thought about my Granny Rich because she kind of had that look, that country-worn,

hard-working old lady look.

And I said, hmm.

Well,

I wonder if we could shove them out of this county.

They go, you don't shove TVA out of nothing.

And they were right.

The attorneys that I talked to said TVA has never lost a battle against citizens in court ever.

We'll roll that clip right now.

They're talking about putting those up.

Oh, I know what they are up here.

Yes.

You think you own something, you don't own nothing.

I'm the only child, and I forget how many acres I got.

I go to Spring Creek.

Do you have somebody who takes care of it for you?

Farms it.

Okay.

Has it tobacco and things like that?

Because obviously if they've cleaned up and made themselves at home.

Yeah, they don't.

They don't lose.

I said, well, let's see how they deal with public shame and humiliation and scrutiny.

She goes, what are you going to do?

I said, can you introduce me to some of these other neighbors that have experienced this?

She goes, yeah, George Wade's right down the road.

I said, great.

I'll go grab my iPhone and my selfie stick.

And so I did.

Went out and met Mr.

Wade and his wife.

He's close to 80 years old.

And he looks like Wilford Brimley, but with red hair.

Remember Wilford Brimley?

No.

Big old money.

He looks like a Walrus, like just gruff-looking guy.

I sat down with Mr.

Wade,

turned that thing on, and let him tell the story.

And then I started commenting, and I posted that on X, just on my X channel there.

And in three days, it had like 4 million views just on that.

I went, oh, okay.

And I'm tagging TVA and everything.

I'm going to go do another interview.

So I went out and interviewed another person.

Then I interviewed another one.

And then another one.

And then I interviewed the mayor of the county.

And then I interviewed the mayor of Pleasantview, Tennessee.

And I start posting these videos.

Local news starts picking up on it.

Next thing you know, I get a unknown caller coming in on my phone and I answer it and it is Secretary Rollins, head of the USDA, Department of Agriculture.

I'm like, well, hello.

She goes, I hope you don't mind.

I got your number from somebody else.

I said, that's fine.

She said, let me ask you something.

I'm watching this TVA fight.

How much farmland is involved with this?

Because they're running pipelines, transmission lines.

I said, yes, ma'am.

How much farmland?

I said, it's a little over 6,000 acres.

6,000 acres?

That it was going to tear up.

She goes, yeah,

that's not okay.

She said, tell you what,

let me dig into this further.

Well, the next day, you see her commenting on one of my ex posts

on it.

She just puts all caps on it at Sec Rollins.

I said, okay, well, that got everybody.

That got...

local news, local radio, everybody's talking about it.

And then

I get a visit from the head of

the senior vice president of government relations for the TVA.

So he's the mouthpiece for the TVA.

He's a good old country boy.

Talks like this, Sean.

Now, you know,

we're all good around here.

Like that.

That's how he talks.

Came to my house.

I knew he was coming.

I said, bring him.

Let's go.

I can't wait to talk to this guy.

So I sat him down there at my house right where you were not long ago when we first met.

And I looked at him and I said, explain to me why in America you can bring bulletproof vests and guns and 10 to 12 vehicles on an old lady's property and demand access to her century-old farm when you don't have a warrant or probable cause.

That's my first question for you.

Now, John, I mean, we do have a force out there because sometimes, as you can imagine, we run into resistance.

So I said, oh, I bet you do run into resistance.

I bet you do.

And, you know, you just never know.

So we got to make sure we're protected.

I said, well, I tell you what, you've got two weeks to get out of Cheatham County.

From an 88-year-old woman.

Yeah.

I said, you got two weeks.

With dementia.

You got two weeks to get out of Cheatham County.

I said, or I'm going to rebrand the TVA to the United States of America.

I'm going to rebrand you

to what you actually are.

And I said, every time your name is Googled for the next 20 years, TVA, horrible press is going to come up on the TVA, page after page after page.

You will never get out from under it.

You got two weeks.

And I said, and at the end of the day, if we can't push you out on our own, I'll have to call this number.

And then I showed him President Trump's number.

Because that's who you answer to.

I said, what do you think President Trump would say to you or anybody else at the TVA if I showed him the video of you on that old lady's property with guns and bulletproof vests demanding access with no warrant, no probable cause?

What do you think president would say?

You think he'd fire every last one of you, starting with you?

I think he probably would.

Maybe we should call him right now.

Let's just call him right now.

Huh?

He won't.

I said, oh, I bet.

I said, you got two weeks.

And then he left.

They left.

No, he left my house.

He left my house.

Two weeks tricked by

lawsuits coming in left and right on all these farmers, all these old people, all these just 70, 80 lawsuits.

Half the people being sued didn't even have enough income to provide counsel for themselves.

So they were walking into the courtroom with no attorney against a $500,000 a year retained attorney for the TVA trying to argue their case, just slaughtering these people.

I said, okay, well,

that's it.

I'm going to have to write a song about it.

And I told him I would.

I said, if you don't get out of Cheatham County in two weeks, his name's Justin Meyerhoffer.

I said, Justin, if you're not out of Cheatham County in two weeks, I'm going to write a song and I'm going to put it out and I'm going to have millions of Americans singing TVA next to the word devil.

I'm going to have millions of people comparing you to the devil in a song and video.

I don't think he believed I'd do it.

I think he thought, oh, John will be on tour.

He'll get busy.

He'll forget whatever.

Two weeks click by.

They didn't get out.

Lawsuits keep piling up.

They're charging forward.

So I wrote the song, went in the studio and recorded it, shot the video to it, went out in that neighborhood of those farms, shot it on those farms where that dirt was.

And it's so beautiful out there, where it was all going to take place.

And as I'm working on all that, I get a text from the President of the United States.

And he says, Basically,

we're killing the project.

The project's not going to happen.

Then Secretary Rollins, the project's not going to happen.

So I'm seeing these texts and I went, okay, when's TVA going to say the project's not happening?

And the very next day, they put out a post on X and says,

due to listening to our

customers in Cheatham County, we've heard you and we're abandoning the project in Cheatham County and looking for a more suitable place.

to put it.

And what really happened is the President of the United States and Brooke Rollins kicked their ass is what happened.

And so

this week, that song hits.

It's called The Devil in the TVA.

And the song was inspired by Mrs.

Nicholson's statement of, you think you own something, but you don't own nothing.

I took what she said, and that's the first line of the chorus.

Man.

You think you own something, but you don't own nothing.

When the government man comes around, puts his dirty old boots on your ground and laughs at your protest with a gun and a bulletproof vest.

He don't care what you have to say.

He's just going to do it anyway.

And he'll smile and grin and then take your farm away.

He'll tear it all to hell right in your face.

Now the devil ain't got nothing on the TVA.

That's the chorus.

So anybody watching that wants to go check that one out, go get it.

Go get it.

It is a populist song

that,

unfortunately, too many Americans have had to survive and some of them didn't.

This onslaught of the TVA.

I find them to be unconstitutional.

I wish something would happen.

I mean, there's more to this, too, because if I remember correctly, you reached out to a mayor in another part of Tennessee that had an abandoned power plant or something, right?

Yeah.

So in West Tennessee, as I start this.

With the lines already.

Right.

So

as I start popping TVA in the nose over and over, and everybody's seeing this, I start getting phone calls from people I've never met.

And one guy goes, hey,

about 90 minutes from here in Humphreys County,

there is over a square mile of land that's already owned by the TVA that already has pipelines running under it, transmission lines running over it.

Used to be a giant coal plant there that Obama tore down.

Obama tore it down.

And they never put anything there.

And they don't have to touch Cheatham County.

Please come back to our county.

We lost so many jobs when that thing went away.

We lost our grocery stores.

We had to consolidate our schools.

Gas stations, like like just gutted our county.

You tell TVA we'd welcome them back with open arms.

And I did tell them that, and they didn't care.

And so I told Brooke Rollins about that.

And she said, you know what?

You need to speak to the energy department.

So put me on an interview with the energy department with the mayors of those two rural counties.

And now they're talking.

And I think they're probably going to develop.

get TVA to develop something out there.

Trump wants power.

You got places to put it.

But TVA has stood in the way.

They'd rather tear up brand new ground than use ground they've already got, which begs the question why.

They won't answer that question.

But again, it's one of those things that if

I guess if I ain't going to stand up and do it, it ain't going to happen.

I mean, the neighbors are screaming bloody murder, but they don't have a platform where anybody can hear them screaming.

You know, you've run across lots of situations like that.

You've got a big platform.

You've got to stop spending money on the Taliban.

Right?

We're close.

You're close.

Still sitting on the Senate floor.

I mean, so I think you and I have that in common.

We see something and we're like, I can't believe I'm the guy that's, I can't believe I'm the guy that's going to swing at them, but here we go.

Yep.

And you swing.

So they have now abandoned the project.

We beat them.

The song is out.

The devil in the TVA.

And in the video, I use the actual neighbors and farmers and everybody that lives in that area.

They're in the video with me.

I love that.

So it's really cool.

I love that.

why why do you think that they didn't just utilize the old plant because because there's more to it i remember you were telling me that all the power lines were already running out of there they didn't have to do any of that right they just needed to re-outfit the abandoned project all the infrastructure was there probably why anybody does anything sean money

i mean you know you're going to build billion dollar project

there's and my brother-in-law owns a concrete company oh yeah well my sister works for a pipeline company, and oh, yeah, well, my like that.

It's that it's that good old boy behind the scenes.

Everybody's sitting around figuring out how we can all make a bunch of money on the government.

It's really on the customers because that's how weird that thing is.

But when it got to Trump, he was like, mm-hmm, that's not good.

So I've actually petitioned the president

to

give me an appointment of a citizen advocate

where I don't work for anybody.

I would answer to him.

And so when these situations come up, I can be eyes and ears and go report to him, hey, here's what's really going on down here that you're not hearing about, and make sure he understands what's happening and try to put a shield up in front of your basic American citizen out there.

No money, no nothing.

I just think that that's something that...

invigorates me to be able to go out there and help people.

You got to remember, I'm, you know, Panhandle of Texas,

grew up, you know,

out there in the dirt.

Those are my people.

I have a high school diploma.

That's the extent of my education.

Well, that's the kind of people you're talking about.

They're getting steamrolled by these trillion-dollar companies.

TVA last year proffered it over $13 billion in one year.

Wow.

But they're going to tell the old lady to get the hell off her farm.

How about you pay the old lady 200 or 300% of what her farm's worth if you have to have it?

instead of taking it?

That would be the right thing to do.

Wouldn't it?

That's what I would say.

So they can just take your, they don't have to pay for it.

So here's the TVA charter.

Okay.

They have a charter that was written in 1933.

TVA can come to your land and they can say,

Sean, look at my bulletproof fist.

Look at my pistol.

We're going to come on your land, tear your land up.

And you're going to go, no, you're not.

Well, we'll see in court.

Fine, I'll see you in court.

You go into court, then you lose.

Then they get a court order to enter your land.

They tear your land up, and then they condemn your land.

And then TBA determines what the value of the land is now worth as it's condemned and had destructive testing done.

Then they make you an offer on what they think the land is now worth as condemned.

And it winds up being around 10 cents on the dollar of what market value is for your land.

So you've got old people whose whole life is tied up in this land.

Literally everything.

And so they take it on 10 cents on.

Now they're going to go

live in a low-rent rest home the rest of their life.

They're going to move in the basement of their kids' house.

Yeah, something.

People don't even know about this.

I'm glad you brought it up because

that should not exist in America like that.

I asked him if Xi Jinping was a secret board member.

That's what I asked the

foghorn leghorn of the TVA sitting at my house.

I said, let me ask you a question, Justin.

Is Xi Jingping a silent member of the TVA board?

I go, because this is the most communistic stuff I've ever seen in my life.

That's straight up communist.

Take somebody's land.

As Americans, being a landowner is what makes you.

That's why people people came here because they were promised they could homestead land, and that's why they came because they weren't allowed to own land where they came from.

That's a basic tenet of being an American is land ownership.

I hate the government, Ben.

It's so twisted.

I fucking hate the government.

But you got a long history of standing up for the underdog, man.

What's the bank that you opened?

There's a bank called Old Glory Bank.

And

this started, it was Dr.

Ben Carson,

Larry Elder, me,

Governor Mary Fallon of Oklahoma, and a bunch of other patriots out there.

And a lot of them from the banking world.

So we all know how woke the bank system is now.

We all know about debanking.

Even President Trump was debanked.

Melania Trump debanked.

They will either cancel all your accounts or they won't let you open one in the first place.

Or they'll shut your credit cards down like Dinesh D'Souza.

They killed, Chase, they killed all his credit cards while he was overseas because they didn't like what he was talking about.

So we knew all that was going on, and something needed to be done.

But what sent it all the way over the edge was: do you remember when the trucker protest was going on in Canada?

All the trucks pulled up into town and wouldn't leave.

Well, the way Justin Trudeau finally broke that was he

called the banks and he said,

find out who that trucker drives for

and freeze all of their bank accounts

and if the trucker's an independent trucker freeze all his personal bank accounts and if the tow trucks refuse to pull him out freeze the bank accounts of the tow truck companies

so they started mass freezing bank accounts and that's what broke it they couldn't access their money And it broke it up, and that was it.

And we looked at that and went, there are people in in high places in america right now that fantasize about that about being able to freeze sean ryan's bank account or john rich's bank account oh they can't they can't wait to do that and so we realized at some point that could happen in our country we need we need to start a new bank to think parallel economy kind of thing We need to start our own thing run by patriots where decisions are made by patriots.

And the whole credo of the bank is you will never be canceled for exercising your constitutional rights.

That's the whole premise of the bank.

Well,

we've been up and running about two and a half, three years now, and it's in all 50 states.

Now there's people everywhere, small business loans, mortgages.

And I'm not a banker.

So it gets off out in the weeds with me a little bit on all of that.

But the premise of the bank being that it won't cancel you for exercising your constitutional rights.

I'm like, we have to have this because it doesn't currently exist.

And God forbid Kamala Harris would have won.

Can you imagine?

No.

Right now, you'd be seeing probably the whole entire sensor machine would go into overdrive and you would probably see things like bank accounts being frozen en masse and all that.

So that's OGlory Bank.

It's oldglorybank.com.

And what's cool about it is when people open up an account, there's a 1-800 number and an actual American answers the phone that speaks legible English.

That's like believe it.

Hello, how may I help you?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, hey, Sean.

Yeah, so what are you having trouble with?

Oh, yeah.

All you got to do is click this and do this.

And is that, did that fix it for you?

Well, great.

Well, call me right back.

My extension is 110.

If you need any more help, thank you.

Appreciate your business.

Tell me another.

It's all AI now.

Everything's AI, AI.

Or they're talking to you from India or somewhere else.

We've actually got American people sitting behind the phones.

What a concept.

Damn, I love that.

I love that.

How fast did that take take off?

It's up 2,000% right now.

It's just screaming.

A lot of people are like they, well, all my business is at Bank of America, but

I'm going to take a big piece of that as a firewall and set it into old glory.

And so that's happening a lot.

It was one company, a gun company, a big one,

that a shooter.

a mass shooter in Texas was using one of their rifles to carry out that shooting.

And so the bank that they were at froze all their transactions overnight all over the United States, all over the world.

So all their transactions were just frozen.

And so they had to go find another bank.

And it took them almost three months to get everything moved over to another bank.

And they lost untold amounts of income.

I mean, it was horrible on their company.

And they came to me and said,

old Glory Bank's up and and running.

Can we move to Old Glory Bank?

And I said,

What kind of money are you rolling?

You know, like, what's your forward rolling money?

And they told me the number.

I said, We ain't that big yet.

If we were, we'd take it.

We ain't that big yet.

We're getting close to being that big now.

So I think you'll see bigger companies coming on board.

And it really bothers the Moynihans of the world, the Bank of America president types.

They really don't like Old Glory Bank, which is how you know it's good.

I bet they don't.

Yeah.

You've done some awesome stuff, man.

Well,

I'm an American.

I got X amount of heartbeats.

Let's go.

What do we got?

Exhaust your potential.

Let's go.

Again,

it's like you said earlier, you never think you'd have this gigantic podcast.

You never thought that.

I never thought I'd be doing half the stuff I'm doing either, but

God opens that door.

If you got enough nerve to run through it, he'll probably open the second door.

You got a lot of courage, man.

Well, I appreciate it.

You too, or half crazy.

You got to enjoy the taste of your own blood in your mouth

a little bit.

I just don't know any other way to live.

It's like, did you just bust my lip?

Oh, okay.

Let's go.

That's right.

That's how I looked at the TVA deal.

I love it, man.

I mean, do you?

I just

do you feel like you have a tremendous amount of courage, or does it just come naturally to you?

I don't know how a person knows if they have a tremendous amount of courage or not.

I don't know how you'd know that.

I know that.

You know that from looking in, from

looking at it from the outside.

I know that if I see people being harmed and they can't defend themselves,

I have no fear of taking on the aggressor.

Even if I know there's very likely I'm going to lose, I have no fear of the loss.

If it's an old lady on a farm, if it's a kid being abused, whatever it may be, a defenseless person

being hurt by a superior entity

that's way bigger than I am, but I know at least I can take a couple of chunks out of them.

At least I can, you got to try.

And so here we go.

And here you go cutting and slicing and you try to.

And, you know, if you're, if it's like the song, The Righteous Hunter, it's called The Righteous Hunter because he's on the right side of the fight.

Well, you're on, if you're, if the fight you're waging is a righteous fight, even if you don't win it, you're doing what you're supposed to do because that's what you're supposed to do.

And then I've got two sons growing up watching everything I do and say.

And when they become young men and move out of my house,

I want them to be able to look back and go, well, how did dad do it?

What did dad do when something big and bowed up like that, but you're on the right side of that fight?

Did dad roll over?

Could you buy dad out?

Could you leverage dad around?

Could you offer dad something and get him to back up or whatever?

No, I never saw him do that.

I go, good.

I hope that's how my boys are.

We need people like that in the world.

We need young people.

Coming up.

When me and you are old guys, we need young men and women who have seen that and know what it means in case our country ever really comes under serious threat.

We need young Americans that understand that.

Set the example.

You got to set the example.

Yeah.

It's why I'm not in the music industry anymore.

Because I could have shut up and kept having hit songs on the radio.

Might have been Songwriter of the Year again, you know.

But

just, I thought,

my boys,

yeah,

daddy will yell at the TV and and he'll scream and holler about those degenerates in the music industry.

But then, man, it was time to go.

He'll soup back up and walk that red carpet with them.

Get up here and pat him on the back and accept his award.

Gross.

Man, good for you for saying that.

Good for you for saying that.

That's great.

We all see it, man.

We all see it on the sidelines, what's happening.

Yeah.

It's fucking pathetic.

Yeah.

It's just, it's gross.

Yeah.

I value good sleep.

We talked about that.

Yeah.

You sleep better, you know, another check ain't going to make you sleep better, but even if you lost and you come home beat up, but you took a good swing at them, that counts.

At least it does to me.

I feel better about it.

You know, I remember talking to Jim Caviesel about this a couple years ago.

He, you know, he did that movie.

And I can't remember the name of the movie.

What the, what was the name of that movie?

It was about trafficking.

Yeah.

They went out to the island and the whole thing.

Yeah.

Yep.

And

we had gotten into a similar conversation.

I just asked him how he did it.

And he said, man, he goes,

I got a lot of, you know, basically he said, I got a lot of cool stuff, cool cars, live in a beautiful house, lots of possessions, whatever.

But he said, on a moment's notice, I'm ready to give it all back because none of it really means anything.

And

I took that and I, you know, I thought about it and I was like,

that's the fucking way to live, man.

Just know there may have come a point in time where you got to give it all back and you got to be okay with it.

And at the end of the day, it's all just shit.

The watches,

cars, this studio,

ready to give it all back.

And that's just how I live, man.

And the fact that you're willing and ready to give it all back is probably why he allows you to keep it.

I think so.

I mean, that verse that says, the love of money is the root of all evil.

A lot of people skip the word love.

They just say money is the root of all evil.

The love of money is the root of all evil.

People that love possessions and love money, they worship it.

That's what

their life's mission is, to rack as much of it up as I can.

He does not like that.

And they may die with it all intact, but what good is that to them the second they step right in front of him?

They're going to go, but Lord, I had $3 billion in the bank down there.

He'll go,

and

what'd you do for me?

Did you do what I told you to do when I told you to do that with that $3 billion?

Well, I had it invested.

He's not going to even have that conversation with you.

This is how it went with Jordan Peterson and I when we had our conversation.

Was Jordan selling all these books about things in the, you know, Moses and Jesus and all these volumes of books speaking about biblical characters and

stories, passages from the Bible spoken about in a psychologically analyzed way, where

the tenets of Jesus Christ, the laws of Jesus Christ, if you live by those laws, you will have a better life.

And that's the basis of Western civilization.

Okay.

So when I had a chance to talk to him, I said,

do you think Jesus Christ is the Son of God?

Do you think he is who he said he was?

Because I've got a video of you and I quoted it to him where you said, if he was actually who he said he would be, it would be the most terrifying thing you'd ever heard in your life.

I said, and you were crying when you said that.

So I know you meant it.

And he goes, well, well, and he kind of, and honestly, to this day, I still don't know

exactly where he stands with it.

But the fact that I don't know where he stands with it kind of tells me something.

There's another passage which I told him.

I said, Jesus said, if you

deny me before men, I will deny you before my father.

You don't recognize me, I will not recognize you either.

And that's the Pharisees, the Sadducees, all the people in the temple, the holy people, the educated holy people.

And they were, you know, they would go, look at all the tithe money I'm giving.

Look at all these gold coins.

I am so generous.

Look at me.

Look at me.

And then the poor widow lady comes up and drops in a half a shekel.

That's all she had.

And Jesus pointed to her and said, That's what I'm talking about.

That's like all she had to give.

And she gave it.

You guys are out here throwing your gold coins around.

He said, You're a bunch of vipers, a brood of vipers.

And then he pulled out a whip and flipped over tables and ran them out.

I mean, Jesus did that.

People think Jesus was like some weak, you know, this,

he was a carpenter.

He was a Hebrew carpenter who said you'd be better off dead than to hurt kids.

And

a bunch of preachers in this temple are a bunch of snakes.

Get out and flip the tables over on them and said, the poor ladies who I'm here to talk to.

Isn't that incredible?

It is.

It is.

There's to know who he was.

I mean, that's him.

Let's talk about the Schofield Bible.

This is the last thing I wanted to bring up with you.

I don't know much about it.

We had a little bit of a conversation.

You like the fuse because you're going to make a lot of preachers mad with this one.

I don't care.

I know.

I don't either.

What do you want to know about it?

Have you dug into it at all?

No.

I've been waiting for this conversation to dive into it.

Okay.

So there is

a term called dispensationalism.

Dispensationalists believe in dispensationalism.

It's basically dealing with

the end time.

So it's dealing with Jesus coming back, what's going to be happening before he comes back, after he comes back.

And before I get into this, I would like to say that

any Christian listening to this,

it doesn't matter if you think I'm right.

about what I'm about to say or you think you're right about what you say as far as your salvation is concerned.

You're not going to go to heaven or hell based on if you are right or wrong on this subject.

Let's start with that.

There was a preacher named John Darby a few hundred years ago, and

he came with the

angle at the end times that the rapture would happen.

The rapture meaning when whoever's left here on earth that are still actually real Christians will be pulled up off this earth before God completely destroys it with fire, with wrath.

He said, I destroyed it the first time with water, the last time I'll destroy it with fire.

So

before he brings his wrath down to that level, he will pull whoever's left, the remnant, as they're referred to, out of here.

Dispensationalism comes in and says that

that rapture that we refer to will happen prior to

all the really, really traumatic things are going to happen in the earth during the Great Tribulation.

That has been laid out in Daniel and Matthew 24 and 2 Thessalonians 2 and a lot of other places.

It's been talked about.

They say John Darby and then Schofield wrote the Bible that backed it up, backed up Darby's angle at this.

The rapture could happen at any second.

The rapture, they would go to the churches and they would say the rapture could happen before this church service is over.

So you better get right right now because it could happen like that in the blink of an eye, which is what it says.

It does say in the blink of an eye.

Boom, just like that.

So what that led to was mass revival.

I mean, people are like,

I don't want to get left behind.

Remember the left behind books?

And so a lot of people got saved and

a lot of things happened that were actually positive things.

A lot of people got saved.

But when you start reading about Matthew 24 to me is the one I've told most people to read.

Matthew 24 is where Jesus is sitting with his disciples and the disciples ask him, Lord, what will be the sign of your coming?

Meaning, what's going to be going on on the earth before you are about ready to come back?

And then Jesus takes the next about 27 verses of Matthew 24 and he says, okay.

This will happen

and then this will happen and then that and then that and then this, and then this, and it's in order, just like this, all the way down through.

And the further it goes into Matthew 24, the harder it gets.

It gets to one point where it talks about the son of perdition will arrive.

The son of perdition is who we would refer to as who's going to be the Antichrist.

The son of perdition

will show up.

And it says,

when he stands in the holy place, when he stands in the holy place, basically pronounces himself to be God.

I am Jesus.

I am God.

I am whatever he's going to say.

It tells the Christians that are still alive at that point to run,

run,

don't fight him, run,

get out.

It says run to the mountains.

It says, woe to the women who were with child or in labor.

to the farmer in the field do not return to your house to grab your cloak.

Run.

Get out.

Well, that ain't the end and then it continues and it goes on and on and on and after it gets way deep into that chapter it says and then you will see the sign of the coming of the son of man meaning that's when you'll see me coming back after all this has happened

then you will see me the reason they stop preaching that is because it's very uncomfortable for christians to have to think about that You mean I'm going to have to go through that?

If I'm still here?

Based on what that says, yeah, that's what it says.

And then I've heard some Christians say, and even some preachers that have attacked me online have said,

God wouldn't make us go through something like that.

God wouldn't do that to us.

And to them, I say, really?

Why don't you go tell that to the underground Christians in communist China right now who are being killed by the thousands?

Why don't you go tell that to the Christians in Syria right now who are being chopped up into pieces in the streets.

Do you think fat, lazy American Christians are better than them?

No,

they are superior to us.

They are willing to worship God and be a Christian when it means they could die for doing it.

And we don't have that problem in the United States.

So to say that God would never make his people go through something like that

is one of the most

ignorant,

spiritually ignorant things a person could say.

That's number one.

Number two is

in modern churches even today, they still don't want, there's a few, but not many.

They don't want to preach that.

Joel Olstein is never going to preach that.

Joel Osteen is never going to say anything that's going to make anybody uncomfortable ever on any level, ever.

He's never going to say anything that would prick the heart or conscience of his congregation and then offer an altar call like Billy Graham did

when he speaks the truth about what Jesus said and what happens if you decide to go the other way and lays out what hell is and lays out what heaven is and lays out what this is and then offers an altar call in those stadiums of people that will come out to see Billy Graham, thousands of people coming down there to pray and give their life to Jesus.

You're not going to see Joel Osteen do that.

And there's a bunch of other preachers like that.

Here's the risk.

The risk in dispensationalism and what I am saying, the difference in the two.

And again, this is not a, you're not going to go to heaven or hell based on which one you think is right.

The risk is

when the Antichrist shows up and I'm still here.

And I go, that's the Antichrist.

When the mark of the beast shows up and they're telling everybody, you got to put this chip in your wrist or you can't buy or sell.

When those things happen and Christians are still here, they're not going to believe that's the Antichrist and they're not going to believe that's the mark of the beast and they're not going to believe any of this stuff because we're still here.

Because if that's really what that was,

he would have already pulled me out of here.

That's the risk.

That was part of the point of Revelation was to bring on that conversation.

And I had it with Tucker Carlson to begin with.

And

that is a real risk.

So I ask Christians to go read Matthew 24.

Go read 2 Thessalonians 2 for yourself.

Read it slowly and read it a few times by yourself.

Just read it

and word by word and see what I am saying in these.

And then you're going to hear preachers go, He was talking about 70 AD when this happened and that, and they tried to twist this thing all the way back to Darby and Schofield and all that.

But just read it for yourself

because

everything that needs to be in place for the tribulation to happen is now here.

My dad's been preaching since the late 1970s.

And he said, John,

myself, other preachers, ministers that I knew, none of us could understand

how a lot of the things in Daniel and Revelation and 2 Thessalonians 2 could even take place.

Like it was like science fiction.

He said, like, for instance, it says you can't buy or sell anywhere on the earth unless you bear the mark of the beast.

He goes, well, how in the world we're thinking, would you be able to monitor every single person on the face of the earth?

That's impossible.

That sounds funny to us now, right?

Because of course you can monitor every single human being on the face of the earth.

Of course you can.

They're doing it right now.

They just haven't weaponized it to that point yet.

He said, This is my dad.

He goes,

we didn't have satellites all the way around the earth back then.

I mean, you can get a cell signal in Uganda in the middle of nowhere now, right?

I mean, you can talk to anybody anywhere.

It talks about how the Antichrist can project his message onto the entire Earth at the same time.

He can basically communicate to the whole planet.

I was like, well, how in the world?

He said, we're all going,

how in the world?

Maybe he's telepathic.

My dad said that.

We all thought, maybe the Antichrist is telepathic.

Maybe he can get in your head and put thoughts in your head and communicate that way.

We just couldn't figure it out.

He goes, now we've all got these.

We talked earlier about the days of Noah, and that's the way it's going to be in the end.

And we talked about in the days of Noah where fallen angels thrown down to the earth, polluted the human race, everybody except Noah and his family, God flooded the earth.

And the point of the devil doing that was to try to derail the birth of Christ.

That was the point.

If we can pollute the entire human race, we messed up the bloodline that will eventually have Jesus Christ being born.

That was the plan.

God saved Noah.

They failed.

Noah starts it over.

Here we go again.

You go to the beginning of the New Testament.

It shows the entire bloodline of Noah all the way through Jesus Christ, all the way through the end.

Beginning of Matthew.

Shows the whole thing.

So the question is,

if it's going to be like it was in the days of Noah and the devil tried to pollute the whole human race, how's he going to try to do it this time?

What's he going to try to do to keep Jesus from coming back where he ultimately loses?

What's he going to do?

Is he going to try to pollute the human race again?

Maybe.

How would you do that?

I don't know.

Tech?

Maybe.

Again, nobody really knows.

These are question marks, but you can read it for yourself and start to put things together.

My whole goal is not to convince anybody of anything.

My whole goal is to make you think for a minute, go read it for yourself, because if you're alive on this earth, when this starts happening and you're a Christian, you need to be able to identify what it is you are seeing.

You need to know that's what that is.

So are you saying if you don't know what it is?

You will step in the hole.

Everybody line up and get your chip.

Well, this can't be the mark of the beast.

We're all still here.

Okay, I'll take my chip.

And what does it say about people that take the mark of the beast?

If you take, anyone who takes the mark of the beast, their name is not written in the Lamb's book of life.

That's the book.

That's everybody that belongs to Jesus that's going to heaven is in the book, the Lamb's Book of Life.

If you take that, you are not written in the Lamb's book of life.

I'd say that's a pretty final move.

So can you imagine?

If you didn't recognize that for what it was because you didn't have the discernment in you and where does discernment come from?

Does it come from you?

Where does it come from?

The Holy Spirit, right.

So if he's not in you and you're not able to discern that and you walk right into that wood chipper, well, there you go.

People need to think about that because, I mean, I'm telling you, with AI coming on board like it is right now,

we're not that old.

Very good chance.

If we live out our years like we're supposed to, I think we see it.

I think about it all the time.

I think we're going to see it.

And I think that's why you're seeing a revival happen amongst people.

I think that's why on my little tiny scale, I get hit with particular songs which allow certain conversations to happen.

I get to sit with guys like you and talk about it in front of millions of people, get them to think about it.

That's my little role.

Because I think it's upon us.

I think it's coming.

I mean, there is, I think about it a lot with a lot of things, but social media, neural link.

I thought about it with the vaccine.

Yeah.

How about that?

What do you think that was?

I took it.

I took it.

That was...

I think that was

see how far you can push people.

I didn't want to take it.

Yeah.

But my my

firstborn

was coming right at that time.

And I was like, man, I can't fucking miss this vaccine.

There was no way you could know.

But

wish I would have never done it.

Well, thank you.

Thank you for the education.

I got one more question for you.

Okay.

I know your sons are, you're very close with them.

You care for them a lot.

What do you have to say to them?

What advice do you have for your sons?

My main thing for them is

there is only one true answer, and

it does not come from yourself, and it does not come from any other human being.

It comes from the one that created you and what words have been written in that book, in the Bible.

As you're going through your life, I would tell my sons.

You're going to hear all kinds of opinions.

You're going to have your own opinions.

You're going to, the Bible tells us to test the spirits, meaning you may really think that's the real McCoy giving you that idea.

But before you move on that, you pray about that and go, am I hearing that correctly?

Is that correct?

Because it may not be.

If you lean on the word and you stay connected to him,

and I mean really connected,

you will live your life out as he wanted you to live it out, which will be above and beyond anything you could ever put together yourself.

And then when you die, I get to see you again.

I love that.

I look forward to seeing you again.

Yeah.

Well, John,

it's been an honor to interview you and get to know you and get your story and opinions and the things that you've done.

It's an honor to sit in this chair where I've seen so many incredible people sit.

And thanks for giving me that honor just to even sit here.

I watch your show.

I know the kind of incredible men and women that have been in this room.

So thank you for that.

You're wonderful.

Yes, I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, boss.

Appreciate it, sir.

Thank you.