Lex Fridman: commitment

Transcript context

…I remember I was at work that day when it went up. Yeah. So it blew the fuck up, straight to number one on the charts. Tens of millions of views and listens. And a few days later on August 17th, you made a post that I thought was pretty gangster. It was beautiful and gangster. So one of the things you said is, “It’s been difficult as I through the 50,000-plus messages and emails I’ve received in the last week. The stories that have been shared paint a brutally honest picture. Suicide, addiction, unemployment, anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and the list goes on.” And then you went on to write “People in the music industry give me blank stares when I brush off $8 million offers. I don’t want six tour buses, 15 tractor trailers and a jet. I don’t want to play stadium shows. I don’t want to be in the spotlight. I wrote the music I wrote because I was suffering with mental health and depression. These songs have connected with millions of people on such a deep level because they’ve been sung by someone feeling the words in the very moment they were being sung. No editing, no agent, no bullshit. Just somebody and his guitar. The style of music that we should have never gotten away from in the first place.” So huge props for that, for walking away from lucrative multi-million dollar record deals, and I’m sure the money that was just coming your way. Huge props. Moments happen where the world tests you, and integrity is what you do in those moments. So huge props for that. What was your philosophy? What was your thinking behind that? It was all those messages I got. I mean, you can see it in the comment sections of a lot of the videos after everything happened. But people just felt this spark like, “Wow, maybe we actually have a chance to …” Maybe we actually do have some kind of power. Those people put that song there, nobody else, and gave me the opportunity to make, even without signing anything, I was still able to make millions of dollars and have financial freedom and … I felt like if I was going to do anything like that, that I’d be betraying … I would be taking those people and almost betraying them somehow. I hate the big machine just like everybody else, and the last thing I’d want to do is ever support it or be a part of it. I want to watch it crash and burn.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.