The issue for a lot of this music is how they're generating it, right? How AI is taught, correct? Right.

Yeah, so copyright laws in America are very clear.

It says only a human being can own a copyright.

So, for instance, if I write a song, I then register that song with BMI or ASCAP, And we register that copyright, which means it is my property, just like your car is your property or your house is your property.

It's called intellectual property.

So I obtain a copyright.

That then means that those lyrics and that melody belong to me.

AI.

What do you think, guys?

Yeah, it's possible.

I mean, honestly, your opening monologue, Sean, is absolutely spot on.

So AI uses human-created content to train itself on to then plagiarize that human-created content that is all copywritten, by the way, and then those recordings find themselves on iTunes, Apple Music, Amazon, Spotify, and the rest, to which they are then monetized.

So if a human being... sat down and took 10 or 20 songs and picked the best parts of those 10 or 20, created a new song and put it out to be monetized, we would be in a courtroom so fast it would make your head spin.

But when an AI program does it, nothing is done about it.

Here's an interesting fact, and then I'll turn this over to you and Kenny.

There's no soul behind this music.

But are you worried that at some point we're going to get to the place where the line between slop and original is blurred more?

That's a great question.

It looks like we're headed in that direction.

I'll bring up a couple of points.

Let's talk about legalities for a minute.

Now, I'm not an attorney, but I can read.

And I looked up the copyright laws in the United States of America.

Is there an appetite to maybe take some of this to court and challenge the AI companies?

i don't think that's true because i think that even to an untrained ear you can tell ai slop from something like what you guys put out something that is genius and human and brings in the heart element to every piece of music that you put out but are you worried that at some point we're going to get to the place where the line between slop and original is blurred more

That's a great question.

It looks like we're heading in that direction.

I'll bring up a couple of points.

Let's talk about legalities for a minute.

Now, I'm not an attorney, but I can read.

And I looked up the copyright laws in the United States of America.

Is there an appetite to maybe take some of this to court and challenge the AI companies?

What's going on with Jelly Roll? And what are your thoughts on this? Sort of

backlash.

The country music audience, from the beginning of country music, their main attraction to any given artist is authenticity.

It's that the artist... is speaking the truth that they're not just a singer, they're an actual artist.

There's a difference between singers and artists.

Singers kind of chase the tale of culture, they chase the tale of the industry, whatever's popular, that's what they're gonna sing.

Artists, on the other hand, they say what they mean and mean what they say, whether it's popular at the time or not.

seems like he ran to Hollywood and that exactly he was a good little boy, did exactly what they wanted him to do.

She left a very wide swath of history behind her.

Yes, she really did.

I think she's one of those people that you just assume lives forever.

Yeah.

But the truth about that is what's interesting about a musician, especially a songwriter like Dolly Parton, is her music does live forever.

There is an infinity characteristic about somebody like Dolly Parton.

And, you know, a lot of people have been talking about her today and.

Tell us about it.

'Cause I, I'm sure, like every female artist out there, especially the young ones, have to be looking up to this gal, right? But just name a couple of things that if we didn't have Dolly, we wouldn't have had in country music.

The, you know, the big thing she did was when, when country music got complicated, and it's, i- you know, today it, it's gotten complicated again, but then it returns back to its roots, almost like a cycle.

I, I tell young artists out there, "Do not compare yourself to who you're currently competing with.

Compare yourself to the greatest of all time." So if you're an up-and-coming young girl, and you're a singer, and you love Dolly Parton, well, you might be the best up-and-coming young girl singer out there, but are you as good as Dolly Parton? The answer will always be, "No, I'm not," if you're being honest.

Of course not.

And so that keeps you pushing and digging and trying to write better, perform better, treat people better, uh, b- make more out of your talent as you possibly can.

Dol- Dolly Parton, there's a phrase I love, for someone to exhaust their potential.

[dramatic music]

And, and for a while, I couldn't tell you a Dolly Parton song, but I could absolutely pick Dolly Parton out of a lineup, and I think that that speaks to the cultural impact and the American icon that she was.

Yeah, I mean, uh, the thing, the thing about her is, I think from a fan's perspective is, you know, uh, uh, her entertainment, the way she entertained, the movies, um, you know, her personality and her look and all of that.

I mean, there was so many dimensions to Dolly Parton.

But for a guy like me, what I look at, uh, that blows me away the most is her songwriting.

You know, and you're, you're on the radio right now talking to Music City, and there's thousands of songwriters, uh, in this town.

You know, that pencil and paper, that, uh, that original human thought that goes down on the paper is what drives everything else.

And I would bet you that for every Dolly Parton song you could name, there's probably 4- or 500 songs that she wrote that nobody ever heard, that are probably just sitting in notebooks and old cassette tapes and whatever.

Did you get any advice from Dolly Parton on how to deal with that?

I mean, she's been kind of the patron saint of, of Nashville for a long time.

Well, I'll, I'll first say I'm here just in personal capacity today, just singer-songwriter.

And, and, uh, yeah, we just got that message that Dolly Parton passed away.

You know, Dolly Parton is, um, what every artist aspires to be like.

Um, you can see the difference in the artists that are not truly artists.

Like, they don't live it.

They don't ...

AI has been trained on the greats like Dolly Parton and many others, and now AI is churning out country music songs that are in some places topping charts, and people are listening, and it's a threat to what country music is.

[laughs]

And there's a picture I saw one time of my dad, uh, standing there with his guitar singing, and there's parades going by, and there's something on his guitar.

And I go, "What's that on your guitar in that picture?" He goes, "Oh, that's spit." And I went, "Did you spit on your guitar?" He goes, "No, no, no, the parade was spitting on me as they would come by me, and they just kept spitting at me, and spit, spit was all over me and all over my guitar and everything else." And I said, "Why did you keep standing there while they're spitting on you like that?" He goes, "'Cause about one out of 100 would stop and ask me what I'm talking about."

This is the American spirit.

Well, on top of that, it's really stupid business, uh, because you gotta remember These companies, these woke, big liberal companies that we all buy stuff from and use all the time, they base their business models, Brad, on 100% of the customer base.

If they're smart.

Well, that, no, that, they are- Yeah ... whether they're smart in that regard, they build it on, on, we've got 100% of Americans that we're gonna try to sell this product to- Yeah ... or get to use our platform or whatever.

But then as they get down the road and they get really arrogant and get really cocky and they get all this money and power, then they think, "You know what? We're gonna, we're gonna actually go this other direction, and these guys are bad, and we'll survive without them." But the truth is, if you look at their stock prices and you look at their balance sheets, a lot of those companies are running somewhat on the rail.

you? Okay.

Hey, man, go right ahead.

I appreciate that.

All right.

This is Dr. Jordan Peterson here, a quote from him.

What you have in the figure of Christ... is the actual person who actually lived, plus a myth.

And in some sense, Christ is the union of those two things.

I don't take any issue with what you've said.

Tell us why you got involved, brother.

Yeah, Dan, thanks for having me on.

So about a year ago, I engaged in a very public fight with the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority here in Tennessee, where they had a project, a Biden era project that was going to destroy about 6000 acres of farmland, 400 homes, a school district and the main water supply of the county.

Other than that, it was a great project.

Right.

I mean, it was just just a disaster.

And I had no way of fighting them other than to put a spotlight on them and tell America what these guys were trying to do.

Now they got a fighter in you, JR.

John, when did you open Redneck Riviera? What was the inspiration? Was it as busy as it is right now when you opened?

Yeah, so downtown Nashville, Broadway is probably the busiest street in America.

It's busier than Vegas, Times Square.

It's incredible the amount of people that come through here to hear live country music.

In 2018 is when we opened.

But this building you're in was built in 1855.

So these are like pre-Civil War buildings down here that we go in and, of course, secure the outside, the historic nature of it.

Tell us how it's evolved.

Oh, you are now.

I was just gonna be an observer, but yeah, so, you know, hearing, hearing Robert's story really brings it all back to me because, uh, I, too, am a, a, am a survivor.

I call it a survivor of what I consider to be a totally unexpected and unwanted divorce.

Um, and so a lot of these, these things are rushing back to me, and it's been years now.

Uh, but hearing Robert's story just kinda brings me back to some of that.

And I'd say that a couple of the most painful parts is I, I never wanted it.

It was actually the most painful experience of my life.

[laughs]

Uh, is that strange for you that you end up talking politics and culture and have a whole other audience related to that when obviously your passion is music and all the things that, you know, made you the, the star that you are?

Yeah it is, it is a little strange.

Honestly it's not something, uh, I thought first of all anybody would care what I have to say and honestly I don't think they do care what I have to say.

But I think I, I probably do represent, um, a large swath of the country.

You know, my background is not fancy at all.

I'm a high school graduate, grew up in the Panhandle of Texas, double wide trailer, kind of a month to month paycheck kind of a house and, you know, blue collar parents and I chased the American dream.

Music was what I wanted to do and, uh, I was blessed to be able to attain it and do really big things with it.

What finally got you to be speaking up a bit more?

Tell me what's going on.

Yeah, so this all started last year when I, I waged my first battle against TVA for Cheatham County, which is where my brother and dad both have farms, and they were, they were gonna wreck about six thousand acres of farmland, four hundred and twenty houses.

[chuckles] I mean, basically an atomic bomb going off in Milledge County, and I took the fight straight to them.

It got the attention of the president, the attention of Secretary Rollins.

Uh, they started to weigh in on it, and we were able to push the TVA out of that county.

Well, it wasn't long after that, President Trump called me and said, "Hey, John, I wanna, I wanna appoint you to a board seat on the TVA.

There's nine board seats." And I said: "I really appreciate that, but I'm gonna have to decline." And, and the president says, "You're telling me no?" [chuckles] I said, "W- I'm telling you respectfully no, and here's why.

Um, let me ask you a little, how did you get into the banking business? And I know you went into this business with a bunch of people I know, including Ben Carson, uh, and congratulations, but this is a bank designed to appeal to conservatives that have been de-banked by certain institutions.

I'm also looking into this every day, researching this stuff, and that's really the arrogance behind their belief.

Well, there's, there's historical precedence, though, Nino, behind that thought.

Um, when, when you go back to the, the initial war, the war in heaven, that's the first one, and then the second one was in, in the days of Noah.

So in the days of Noah, uh, Lucifer wanted to make sure that Jesus Christ would never be born.

'Cause if he could keep Jesus from being born, he would never have to deal with, with being defeated.

So what did he do? He polluted the entire Earth with...

Go read Genesis 6.

I mean, it's like they're really digging their heels in, like they feel they're gonna win.

But in all honesty, for any parent out there, for anyone who has a child in their life who they love, I feel like this is, I mean, for lack of better terms, this is singing their tune.

Yeah, you know, the problem is that while parents, and me included until not that long ago, while we're watching the news or watching the football game, your kids are sitting right behind you with their iPhones and their iPads and their video games, and they are communicating with people online that they think are their age and interested in what they're interested in.

And then after a few days of that, they find out, nope, that's a predator.

And then all kinds of bad things happen.

The DHS reports that in the past 12 months, there were 36 million reports filed with them from parents saying their child had been targeted online.

Think about that number.

That's three million a month on average in the United States.

It's such a great message, John.

Why is this song that's going to be stuck in my head now for the next two months? Why was that something that came to you?

So I can tell you that on X, just at John Rich on X, my little X page, it's now over a million views.

Beautiful.

Just on X.

So YouTube, I don't really screw with YouTube that much because they don't like guys like me.

So I kind of go to X and other places.

But yeah, you can watch the whole video there.

How do you do that?

Mm.

And so the line in the song says, "You better give your soul to Jesus while I get my gun." It's a very aggressive l- lyric, but I believe it is representative of the American parent's resolve and wrath, if necessary, to these predators.

36 million reports in 12 months came to the DHS.

Think about that number.

Over three million a month.

These are the reports of parents reporting that their children had been targeted online, whether it be through apps, the internet s- or video games, by sexual predators.

36 million in 12 months.

Yeah.

Yes.

It goes deep down into your subconscious.

I don't know where it goes.

I have thousands of them in my head.

Uh, but it goes deep down in there and I just decided that I was, I was disappointing the man, disappointing the Lord, that he gave me this ability and then gave me a massive platform of people.

I mean, tens of millions of people know my music.

So, I already have their attention.

How do you pray?

(cheering)

(sings) Said goodbye to his mama as he left South Dakota, To fight for the red, white and blue.

He was 19 and green, With a new M16, Just doing what he had to do.

He was dropped in the jungle, Where the choppers would rumble, With the smell of napalm in the air.

And then the sergeant said, "Look up ahead." Like a dark evil cloud, Twelve hundred came down, On him and 29 more.

Well, they fought for their lives, But most of them died, In the 173rd Airborne.

On the eighth of November, The angels were crying, As he carried his brothers away.

Hell yeah.

Right, right.

The real Nino never dies.

From the ...

And the second you die, the second that dies, the second this dies ...

It says to be absent from the flesh is to be present with God.

Boom, just like that.

There's no purgatory, there's none of that nonsense.

Gosh.

(laughs) That's right.

But, uh, when we dug deeper, we found that out.

I think that's what really broke them.

I don't think it was the, the logo thing.

I think it was digging down into it and they went, "Oh, crap.

We're exposed." And there were a lot of people doing that, digging deep and, and finding that stuff out.

You know, I, I call it being Dixie Chicked.

(laughs)

Uh, tell me about The Devil and the TVA, which we just listened to.

Well, so there's a small county in Tennessee, kind of a blue-collar county called Cheatham County, Tennessee, and it's actually where I went to high school when we moved, uh, here from Texas.

My brother has a small farm there.

My dad has a little blueberry farm there.

I still have land there.

And the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority, uh, put out plans to put a 900-megawatt methane gas plant right on top of five school districts, about 600 houses, and 6,000 acres of farmland, right in the middle of this county.

And they picked that county because nobody had enough money to hire attorneys to try to fight back.

So, whose idea was it to do this and put this plant in? Was that a state decision, a federal government decision?