Luke Grimes says nobody expected Yellowstone to become this huge

Yellowstone, Taylor Sheridan, and the surprise of success

Joe Rogan opens by telling Luke Grimes how much he loves Yellowstone, framing the conversation around a question Grimes still seems half-stunned by: did anyone know the show would become this big? Grimes says no. He expected it to “find an audience for sure,” especially because Taylor Sheridan was already on a serious creative run and had become “hot in the film business,” but neither he nor anyone else anticipated the scale of the phenomenon. That answer sets up one of the central themes of the episode: major success often looks obvious in retrospect and impossible up close.

The two spend time marveling at Sheridan’s pace. Rogan keeps returning to the same baffled reaction: how does the man even sleep? Grimes agrees that Sheridan is not merely impressive in the usual Hollywood sense but operating on a level that feels “impossible.” He compares the feat of writing roughly 10 television shows single-handedly to a kind of superhuman productivity. The admiration is personal too. Grimes says they remain close and calls Sheridan “an awesome dude,” while also admitting that he worries about him because the volume of work seems almost unsustainable. Yet what fascinates Grimes most is that Sheridan apparently still has a full life outside the work—family, fun, friends—making the achievement even harder to comprehend.

That conversation broadens into a reflection on ambition. Grimes and Rogan both point to Sheridan’s backstory as key. Grimes describes him as someone who was “scrambling around till he was almost like 40,” which makes his rise feel to him like “a real life Rocky story.” Rogan suggests that people who know what it is like to be poor often develop a relentless drive once they finally see a path forward. In Sheridan’s case, they frame it as a man who suddenly had a child on the way and decided to put his foot on the gas without ever lifting it.

They also bond over westerns, especially Unforgiven, which Rogan calls “the greatest western movie of all time.” Grimes agrees. Their reading of that film matters because it mirrors what they admire in Sheridan’s work: a stripping away of mythology in favor of what life, violence, and hardship might have really felt like. Rogan praises Unforgiven for showing “what it was probably really like” when killers, whiskey, fear, and moral decay were not stylized but lived. That realism becomes a lens through which Grimes’s admiration for Sheridan makes sense. Sheridan’s worlds, like Eastwood’s best film, do not merely revisit old forms. They make them feel dangerous again.

Addictive personalities, golf avoidance, and the cost of new obsessions

A playful early thread in the conversation becomes a revealing one when Rogan and Grimes start talking about golf. Grimes jokes that Sheridan’s productivity proves one thing above all: “don’t play golf.” For both men, golf is less a pastime than a trap—a six-hour commitment that threatens to swallow the same mental space currently occupied by acting, music, comedy, fighting, or family. Rogan immediately identifies with that fear. He says he is an addict in the broadest possible sense: once he starts something, it cannot remain casual. He does not take lessons to improve a hobby; he starts wondering whether he should “play in the PGA.”

That admission leads into one of the more revealing character studies of Rogan himself. He explains that he already has this relationship with pool. When he lived in New York, he was playing eight hours a day, entering tournaments, and traveling around. Even now, he says he still plays constantly. Pool became an example of what happens when a skill-based activity hooks his brain: it enters his bloodstream, starts occupying his thoughts, and expands to fill every available margin. That is why he resists golf so strongly. He knows the pattern too well.

Grimes responds by saying he feels “ready for something,” but not golf. It is a small line that says a lot about where he is in life. He has acting, he has music, and he has a young child, but he also sounds like someone aware of the restlessness that comes with creative ambition. Rogan points out that Grimes already has enough on his plate, especially with music and acting competing for energy. Grimes agrees, saying the balancing act is “proving pretty difficult,” especially with an 18-month-old child in the picture.

What follows is a useful distinction between passion and pressure. Grimes explains that music remains psychologically different from acting because acting is the family-supporting day job, while music is the thing he can pursue at the level of pure passion. That difference matters. He can create music without needing it to carry the same economic burden. Touring, however, complicates that. It is not the writing or recording that drains him; it is the practical life of being on the road at age 40, sleeping on a bus, moving city to city, and trying to sustain the machine long enough for the numbers to “pencil out.”

That phrase introduces another theme that runs throughout the episode: almost every romantic creative pursuit contains a logistical backside. Touring only works financially if musicians keep moving Thursday, Friday, and Saturday because the bus, gear, and band all have to be paid for continuously. Rogan compares it to the one comedy tour he did in 2007, 22 dates in a month, where he would wake up disoriented and have to reconstruct what city he was in from the ceiling above him. In both cases, the cost of obsession is not just time. It is dislocation, repetition, and the risk that the thing one loves becomes a system one serves.

Music at 39, blacking out on stage, and the weight of impostor syndrome

One of the strongest sections of the conversation arrives when Grimes describes beginning a music career far later than most people expect. Rogan asks when he first got on stage to sing, and Grimes answers: 39. Rogan’s disbelief mirrors what many listeners would feel. Grimes had played music before and written songs, but he had never wanted to be “the guy in front of the microphone.” He had been a drummer, someone in the band rather than the face of it. The shift into being a frontman was not the fulfillment of a lifelong performance fantasy. It was a practical consequence of wanting to make the album he knew he had inside him.

The origin story is unusually modern and oddly accidental. While on set one day, Grimes got a cold call from music manager Matt Graham, who told him he knew Grimes was a musician and believed he could get him a record deal. Grimes initially rejected the idea. He says they talked on and off for two years before he began to trust him. Then a deeper emotional trigger changed the equation: his father passed away. Grimes says one of the last messages his father conveyed to him was simple—if there is anything he wants to do while he is here, do it. That became the permission structure. He figured the worst-case scenario was becoming “another actor who made a goofy album,” and decided that was survivable.

The problem was that making the album was only the start. Once the label invests, the artist has to go tour and try to sell it. So Grimes’s first proper live show came not in some tiny anonymous room but in Billings, Montana, for about 1,200 people at the Pub Station. He says he “blacked out” from nerves—not from drinking, but from sheer panic. His knees and hands were shaking, and when the show ended he had to ask others if it had gone okay because he could barely remember being in it. Even more absurdly, his fourth-ever show was Stagecoach. Rogan responds the only way possible: “That’s nuts.”

Grimes describes a severe and ongoing stage fright, especially around music. Acting does not trigger it in the same way because he has more than 20 years of experience there. Music is newer, more exposed, and wrapped up in a stronger sense of impostor syndrome. He says what spins him out is the awareness that people “bought a ticket” to see him, which activates a loop telling him he is not good enough for their money. Rogan relates immediately and argues that nearly every sane person deals with impostor syndrome. In his view, the people who do not are often the least grounded. He jokes that someone like Kanye may never have had it, whereas stable artists almost always do.

The exchange lands because Grimes is candid about the imbalance. He gets “way more” impostor syndrome with music than acting, perhaps because acting has become familiar enough to feel like a craft while music still feels like a leap. Yet the takeaway is not that confidence magically appears. It is that people often move forward despite recurrent fear, not after conquering it.

Oliver Anthony, creative risk, and why Rogan distrusts gatekeepers

The conversation about music careers widens when Rogan brings up Oliver Anthony as the opposite of Grimes’s path. Anthony exploded from nowhere with “Rich Men North of Richmond,” becoming famous before he had even really toured. Rogan says Anthony’s first proper live performance came in front of something like 20,000 people, the result of one song, one guitar, and a field-recorded video that suddenly caught fire. Rogan emphasizes how rare that is, calling it “a rocket.” Grimes acknowledges the uniqueness and says very few people understand what that kind of instant launch would feel like.

Rogan reveals he became friendly with Anthony at the moment the industry started circling him. According to Rogan, labels and executives were throwing enormous offers at him, including advances in the range of $7 million. Rogan’s advice was direct and emphatic: do not sign anything. He told Anthony that real talent does not vanish and that the swarm of interested parties were “vampires” trying to latch onto a sudden moment. The key point is one Rogan has repeated for years in different contexts: a person with genuine skill does not need to sell ownership of that skill in a moment of panic, especially when modern platforms allow artists to reach audiences without as much institutional permission.

That leads Grimes to make an honest distinction between their stories. He says Anthony’s path is how it “should be,” while his own looks less romantic: a successful actor who got a record deal partly because he was already visible. He knows the story is “a little wonky.” But Rogan pushes back and argues that this can be an advantage in disguise. If some people enter expecting “that pretty boy TV star” and wanting to dismiss him, then the music simply has to be good enough to overcome the skepticism. In other words, a less sympathetic narrative may actually force harder work and greater proof.

The exchange turns into a broader discussion of passion-led careers. Grimes tells Rogan he is “kind of the king of following your passion,” referencing stand-up, martial arts, commentary, podcasting, and broadcasting. Rogan responds that he feels lucky more than strategic. He did many of these things because they interested him, and only later did they become jobs. The podcast in particular began as something fun and weird, not a business. He recalls a moment from the early days when his wife was taking the kids to Disneyland and he stayed back to record because he had promised the audience an episode, even though the show was not making meaningful money yet. Now they laugh about that moment because it looks prophetic in hindsight, but at the time it was irrational fidelity to an unproven thing.

That same pattern appears in his UFC work. He started commentating in 1997 at UFC 12 in a high school auditorium in Dothan, Alabama, after flying there in a propeller plane. The sport was banned from cable and available only on DirecTV. He says there was almost no audience, and people in television thought associating himself with cage fighting would ruin his career. But he did it anyway because the concept itself—different martial arts actually testing themselves—was exactly what he had always wanted to see. For Rogan, real conviction often means looking foolish before the world catches up.

Hollywood conformity, being chosen, and the “velvet prison” of success

The episode becomes especially sharp when the two men compare their experiences in Los Angeles. Rogan says he only came to LA “for money” and never really felt at home there. He had been around fighters, comics, and pool players—people he describes as raw, funny, and real—and then suddenly found himself in a world of actors, producers, and casting agents who seemed fake and predetermined. He says everyone appeared to be speaking from the same invisible script, trying to present a version of themselves they thought would be approved.

Grimes, who lived in LA for 16 years, gives a cleaner and maybe more devastating formulation: it felt like everybody was trying to become the same person, but nobody actually knew who that person was. That line captures their shared diagnosis of the city. It is not simply that people are ambitious. It is that they become moldable. Grimes argues that many have left home, family, comfort, and community behind in order to chase the dream, which means the dream becomes existentially important. Once a person has sacrificed that much, he says, they become easier to shape into whatever the industry wants.

Rogan thinks comedy suffers from a similar dynamic. Comics who start getting television opportunities often begin tempering their material, sanding off the edges to avoid trouble. But the dangerous material is often the funniest. The result is what he calls a “velvet prison”: money, visibility, status, and comfort in exchange for becoming blander and more institutionally manageable. Grimes admits this hits home because he still has a boss, still gets paid by a specific company, and still has to monitor himself. He even says that coming on Rogan’s show creates a little tension because he knows there are things he should probably not touch. Rogan says he can often see that caution on guests’ faces before the recording even begins.

A major structural difference between acting and music drives that pressure. In music, especially now, artists can sometimes bypass gatekeepers entirely. In acting, Grimes says, one still has to be chosen. Someone must cast you, approve you, insure you, and deem you acceptable. That creates a different kind of psychological environment. Rogan suggests that many performers are seeking the attention or affirmation they lacked earlier in life, and Grimes partially agrees, while also saying his own childhood motivation was simpler: he loved movies more than his real life and wanted to “live in the movie.”

The conversation also touches the mechanics of acting itself. Rogan notes that to outsiders it looks deceptively easy because believable acting resembles normal life. What people do not see is the absurd pressure of having microphones in your face, crew watching, and dozens or hundreds of people waiting on you. Grimes then highlights the true masters—Daniel Day-Lewis and Gary Oldman—as examples of people operating in a category so far above ordinary competence that they expose the gap between seeming natural and being transformational. Their praise of James Gandolfini in The Sopranos goes even further: they argue he brought a real sense of menace and inner chaos to the role, something that felt lived rather than performed. Great acting, in their view, is not just imitation. It is contact with something dangerous and true.

Montana, anti-FOMO, and escaping the psychic weather of cities

The geographical center of the conversation shifts to Montana, where Grimes now lives after drifting there during the pandemic. He explains that he and his wife married in November 2019, and because she is from Brazil and he is from Ohio, neither felt anchored to any one obvious home base. He had spent 16 years in Los Angeles and was ready to leave. They tried Austin in late 2019, loved the first two months, and then the world shut down. Locked in an apartment, not knowing many people, they never gave the city a fair chance. Eventually they bought an Airstream, started traveling, and when work on Yellowstone pulled them to Montana, they parked there and “never left.”

The way Grimes describes Montana is one of the most emotionally clear parts of the episode. He says it is “the best thing that has ever happened” to him because it is the opposite of the LA mind state. The biggest change is not scenery but psychology: “I have no FOMO about anything anymore.” That line lands because it suggests what cities, especially image-driven ones, really consume. They do not just take time. They colonize attention. In Montana, Grimes says, he can think, sleep, read, watch films, write songs, and simply exist without the constant ambient pressure of comparison and proximity.

Rogan gets it immediately. He describes Montana summers as almost magical: green everywhere, mountains visible in all directions, wolves howling, elk herds resting on hillsides, and daylight lasting until 11 p.m. Grimes notes the strange seasonal inversion: endless summer light becomes winter darkness by 4:30 p.m. Yet even that rhythm seems preferable to the frantic sameness of urban life. He says just driving to the grocery store is pleasurable because the landscape itself remains beautiful.

They also discuss the tension locals feel about outsiders. Grimes says friends from California visited with California plates, and when they returned from a hike someone had written “go back” in the dust on the car. Rogan says he saw similar behavior in Montana as far back as 2012, dismissing it as the inevitable behavior of a small percentage of territorial idiots. Both mock the logic that takes pride in simply being somewhere first. Rogan compares it to people who resent a band becoming successful because they liked it better when it was obscure.

More interesting is Grimes’s description of how Montana residents frame identity. He says many proudly announce what generation Montanan they are, which he finds funny and slightly absurd. His son, he jokes, will at least have the right to claim it authentically. But beneath the humor is a more serious idea: place changes the self. Grimes says he drinks coffee every morning looking out at a view that looks like a painting and that it “never gets old.” Rogan agrees, saying that people he knows who live among those mountains often describe them as humbling and centering. For both men, the appeal is not luxury but scale. A bigger natural world shrinks the ego and clears the mind.

Fighting, jiu-jitsu, and why learning violence teaches restraint

The back half of the episode increasingly circles martial arts, and this is where Rogan is most in his element. What begins as Grimes admitting he once tried jiu-jitsu in his late 30s becomes a long reflection on why combat sports remain so compelling. Grimes says the learning curve felt brutal, “like being smothered,” and he could see immediately how much time it would take before the chaos made intuitive sense. Rogan’s answer is nuanced: competence can come in a couple of years if someone trains seriously, but true mastery has endless layers. Even as a black belt, he says, there are people who can completely humiliate him, naming Gordon Ryan as the clearest example.

Rogan describes Ryan as the greatest grappler alive, a man who trains every day, often multiple times a day, and who has reached a level where he writes down the submission he plans to use before a match and then executes it on elite opponents. The point is not hero worship but calibration. There are levels to this skill, and they are far higher than outsiders usually understand. To reassure Grimes that starting late is not futile, Rogan brings up Anthony Bourdain, who got serious about jiu-jitsu at 58. He says Bourdain transformed physically, became obsessed, trained all over the world while filming, and even competed in tournaments. The larger argument is that it is never too late to enter a discipline if one can tolerate humility.

That humility is exactly what Rogan values most. He says jiu-jitsu quickly strips people of fake confidence. He remembers beginning with a taekwondo and kickboxing background and thinking he knew how to fight, only to be mauled and repeatedly submitted once he started grappling. The humiliation was educational. It revealed how helpless he actually was and forced him to start over honestly. Grimes says he encountered some training partners who clearly enjoyed trying to choke out “Casey Dutton,” and Rogan laughs because celebrity creates that dynamic in gyms too. But he insists the answer is not to avoid the art; it is to find good training partners and, ideally, a private coach who can build the fundamentals through drilling before full live sparring.

The philosophy underneath all this is simple and strong: the best thing about learning to fight is that it teaches people not to fight. Rogan says very few of his friends who really know how to fight get into street fights. Real skill removes the need to posture. It also creates a kind of calm pattern recognition. Most untrained people, he says, telegraph everything. If a drunk person wants to swing, he can read the body language before it happens. That is why he has almost never had to use his skills in real life. The confidence is preventive, not provocative.

Their discussion of street violence is sober. Rogan says the terrifying part is not punches but concrete. People die because they get clipped, fall, and hit their head, or because someone keeps stomping after a fight is already over. Both men regard that impulse as evil and senseless. Organized fighting, by contrast, is for Rogan “high-level problem solving with dire physical consequences.” It is brutal, but bounded by consent, rules, preparation, and mutual understanding. That distinction—between discipline and chaos—runs through his whole worldview.

UFC obsession, old-school legends, and the terrifying glamour of combat

Rogan’s love of combat sports expands into history and aesthetics. He explains why he remains more captivated by MMA than by almost any other sport: it distills competition to one-on-one stakes. Grimes says that is exactly why he struggles to fully love football despite understanding the rules—team sports diffuse responsibility, while fighting leaves no one to blame and no place to hide. Rogan agrees, though he says he has grown to appreciate football more since moving to Texas. Still, if fights are on, he is watching fights.

He paints the fight experience vividly: world-class athletes standing in little gloves and a cup, in front of 20,000 people, after 18 weeks of camp, while the cage door is bolted shut and the referee asks if they are ready. It is one of the rare moments in sports where existential fear is not metaphorical. That is why he remains fascinated by the psychology of it. He says he used to get sick before tournaments because he could not sleep, and he notes that many elite fighters are rarely 100% healthy by fight night. Torn ACLs, broken feet, infections, bad knees, damaged hands—injury is normal, not exceptional. He cites Francis Ngannou beating Ciryl Gane on a blown ACL and Alex Pereira winning despite a broken foot and serious knee issues as examples of the absurd pain tolerance built into high-level fighting.

Rogan also turns to examples of fighters whose aura won half the battle before the first punch. Anderson Silva, in his prime, could beat opponents at the weigh-ins because they looked at him and visibly doubted themselves. Mike Tyson, he says, may be the scariest boxer he has ever seen. He describes a period from roughly 1986 to 1990 where Tyson was so destructive that people bought the pay-per-view already expecting a knockout and only hoped it lasted long enough to feel worth the money. He then explains why Tyson became Tyson: the mentorship of Cus D’Amato, whom he describes as not just a trainer but a hypnotist and psychological architect; an immense film library of boxing history; and total mental programming from age 13 onward.

That transitions naturally into a broader observation about modern skill development. Today’s fighters grow up watching endless footage of the sport and can imitate elite techniques from childhood. Rogan compares this to music, where an eight-year-old can now absorb so much information online that they may surpass older generations technically at a startling age. In combat sports, that has led to dramatic evolution. He points to fighters like Lomachenko and Usyk in boxing, and the Dagestani wave in MMA and Muay Thai, as evidence that certain systems and cultures are now producing athletes with impossible-looking pattern recognition and discipline.

Fedor Emelianenko gets special attention. Grimes says he used to watch Fedor before auditions because his stoicism calmed him. Rogan calls Fedor one of the all-time greats and praises how unassuming he looked despite being perhaps the most dangerous man alive. In Japan, during the PRIDE era, Fedor fought in front of crowds as large as 90,000 in a country where MMA was once bigger than anywhere else in the world. Rogan’s memory of attending a UFC in Japan highlights something he loves deeply: the audience there was so knowledgeable and respectful that they would go silent during technical exchanges and audibly react to things like a guard pass. For him, that kind of literacy elevates the experience from spectacle to art.

Hunting, elk mountains, grizzlies, and the medicine of wild places

The conversation’s final long movement moves outdoors. Grimes talks about hunting whitetail from a young age in Ohio, then discovering how radically different elk hunting in Montana is. He assumed some overlap, then got wrecked by the reality. On his first bow hunt near Dillon, Montana, camping on public land with the contractor who built his house, he says he had to “tap out” on day four because his legs stopped working. That image—a physically capable actor discovering mountain hunting’s indifference to ego—fits the broader themes of the episode perfectly.

Rogan lights up here. He talks through his own elk conditioning routine: Tabata sprints on an Airdyne bike, weighted step-ups, heavy farmers carries, all focused on one goal—being able to get over a hill for a shot. There are no mountains in Austin, so he has to simulate them. Elevation makes everything harder, and clothing strategy matters too. Both men stress that in mountain hunting you must dress to start cold. If you begin warm, you will sweat, and if your layers are wrong, especially cotton instead of merino wool, that sweat can become a serious problem once temperatures swing from 0 degrees in the morning to 50 or 60 later in the day.

Rogan describes elk hunting as one of the most thrilling forms of difficulty he knows. The animals are moving, the wind matters, the approach matters, and then there is the sound—the bugling that he says would make a first-time listener think there are “demons in the woods.” He loves the combination of fitness, stalking, stress, and precision: doing everything right only to have one tiny mistake ruin the shot. But he also loves the reward afterward: bringing home meat and grilling elk steaks while already thinking about next season. The phrase he uses for the overall effect is memorable: being out there is “like a vitamin that you didn’t know you needed.”

Grimes agrees completely. He says the first light of morning, glassing a huge landscape, feels like what hunting is supposed to be. There is no comparison between that and normal life. Rogan expands the point into a larger philosophy: nature works on mental health almost immediately. It narrows focus, strips distraction, and restores a sense of aliveness. The beauty is not separate from the challenge; it is amplified by it.

Predators add another layer. Grimes says one thing Ohio did not prepare him for was the possibility of being eaten by something in the dark. He recounts carrying a 9mm on an early bow hunt and being told by his friend that if he encountered a grizzly, he should use it on himself because it would not stop the bear. Rogan agrees that for grizzlies, 9mm is inadequate and says some dedicated hunters use more serious calibers or 10mm with heavy hard-cast rounds. He then tells a frightening story about encountering a grizzly in Alberta. Unlike black bears, which often seem curious or evasive, this bear looked at him with the unmistakable expression of a predator deciding whether he was edible. He and his guide got out quickly. The takeaway is not macho bravado. It is reverence. Wild places are beautiful partly because they are not arranged for human comfort.

Creativity, substances, AI, conspiracy culture, and the search for what’s real

The closing stretch of the podcast becomes almost a catch-all for the modern mind: songwriting, smoking, drinking, cocaine, AI music, Bigfoot, flat earth, government distrust, UFOs, and whether technology is pulling people away from reality. Rather than feeling random, it coheres around one question: what connects human beings to something real?

On songwriting, Grimes says the process changes every time. Sometimes it starts with a melody, a riff, a lyrical hook, or a phrase. Sometimes he writes alone, and sometimes he goes to Nashville and collaborates. What he loves most is “making something out of absolutely nothing.” Rogan says joke writing feels similar. He writes in essay form, often exploring a topic for 2,000 words before finding one paragraph that contains the useful comic structure. He then tests that fragment on stage, builds around it, and keeps sanding it down. Both men agree that good ideas often do not feel owned so much as received. Rogan references The War of Art and its idea that one must show up daily to honor the muse. Grimes says when he is mentally, emotionally, and physically in a good place—sleeping well, taking care of himself—those ideas arrive more often.

That leads into substances. Grimes admits smoking remains a struggle and says quitting cigarettes will likely require quitting drinking because the two are psychologically linked for him. Rogan says he quit drinking for eight months, then returned to moderate drinking—mainly wine—without sliding back into getting drunk, which he sees as the real problem. Both agree that drunkenness with friends can be some of life’s greatest fun, but it carries a steep cost, especially with kids and work in the picture. Rogan also explains how easy it is for social environments, like his comedy club, to normalize overdoing it. The body eventually sends the bill.

Harder drugs enter the conversation mostly as cautionary examples. Rogan says watching a friend’s cousin get destroyed by cocaine in high school scared him away from it. Grimes says he never even tried it and feels lucky. They both note that modern drug use carries the added risk of fentanyl contamination, making old experimentation much more dangerous now. They also talk about opioid pleasure with a mixture of awe and suspicion, both recognizing how easily something that feels “awesome” can rewire a person’s priorities.

Then comes AI. Grimes says he has heard AI-generated songs that are “incredible” and produced in 10 seconds from a prompt. Rogan finds that eerie but insists it remains derivative—an amalgam of human songs, not a lived expression. Grimes pushes back slightly by noting that much human art is derivative too. The deeper concern, though, is not technical. It is existential. AI learns from the internet, and the internet disproportionately reflects outrage, pathology, and performance. It cannot go to the grocery store and notice that 99% of people are fine. It cannot understand friendship, neighbors, mountain views, or the feeling of driving to shoot with a 70-year-old man who hit a deer on a motorcycle and got back on the bike a month later.

That distinction ultimately ties together their digressions into Bigfoot, flat earth, and government lies. Both men seem aware that modern culture trains people to distrust everything, often for good reason, but also tempts them into fantasy and rabbit holes. Against that, Grimes offers a simple corrective: living in Montana, being outside, being off the phone, and having a child have made him feel more spiritually connected and sane. Rogan agrees. The phone, he says, is “the bridge to crazy.” Nature, work, family, and embodied experience remain the antidote.