Randy Blythe
speaker
593 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 15 Apr
Randy Blythe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If I don't stop that anxiety, it's just going to ruin everything. And I think society in general is riddled with anxiety, perhaps not entirely because of, but I think...
this constant to negativity is accelerating this sort of anxiety hangover we all wake up with every day i think and it's for me it's a process of trying to stay present and trying to stay cognizant of what the reality of my situation is and looking at that realizing that in this moment i'm okay and then
If there's anything I can do to alleviate the suffering of other people, then I can take action, right? If I'm calm and looking at myself and looking at my situation with clear eyes, then I can actually take action. think and plan and do something to actually make the situation better rather than just sit here clutching my pearls and wringing my hands. Like, this is so terrible.
This is so terrible. And I'm guilty of that. I am, but I'm trying so hard to fight against that. And I mean, right before this conversation, we're talking about the wildfires in LA and I, for the last five, six days, I've constantly checking on my friends and remembering someone else, as I said, and I've felt like this overwhelming anxiety and I've wanted to make things better.
And I was talking to my girlfriend right before this and we've donated some money trying to figure out what I can do. But I realized, oh yeah, I'm going on this book tour. And it's hard for me to promote, to feel like I'm promoting a book tour and I'm promoting my new book when all these horrible things are happening. Then I realized she had this great idea.
She's like, donate the proceeds from your Los Angeles show to one of the charities that is helping people right there. And then I talked to my manager and he's like, yeah, you could do the three California shows because I'm going to do three California shows. And then I contacted my friends at this podcast, The Dollop, and I asked them about it. What charity?
So I'm like, what do you think about Habitat for Humanity for Los Angeles? So now I've got these three shows in California that I'm going to donate any money I make to Habitat LA. And I can only do that because I'm thinking and remaining calm and looking for a solution, not completely consumed by fear and anxiety. But it's a process, dude. It's a fight every day. It's a fight.
Well, it started out that area, Malibu, the Palisades is extremely wealthy. The homes that were on the beachfront were destroyed. These belong to wealthy people, but there are also normal people that live out there too. And there are working class people who were displaced. It's not just movie stars and so forth. And I think that's something that is a bit of a misconception.
I have friends who live all around there. And luckily, none of my friends have lost their house, but they've had to evacuate. I have a friend who's on tour right now as a comedian. And His house is under fire watch. It's like, okay, I hope my home is still there when I get back. And this is a working class comedian. He's not a bazillionaire or a rich guy. It's heartbreaking.
And no, I'm sorry to hear about your house. I am from a coastal area myself. I grew up in Tidewater, Virginia and Cape Fear, North Carolina. And hurricanes come. They definitely come. I've done some. Once again, it's a matter of looking at what you can do. A few years ago, Down in Brunswick County, North Carolina, in Cape Fear, a hurricane came and ripped through and destroyed a lot of things.
And so I stopped and asked myself, okay, how can I help? And I have a buddy who is a member of a disaster relief team. He's a New York City firefighter for years. And in his spare time, he goes in and does disaster relief. And his team came down to North Carolina. to do some relief. And since I have a lot of connections in the area, I went on social media and found out
through locals where things were most needed and set up a distribution center. Because the Red Cross is a great organization, but there's a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of red tape. It's very slow moving. And my buddy, he's a former Marine, New York firefighter. He has no time for all that. It's time to get supplies to people. So I went and used my connections in the area to set up the stuff.
And then the next thing you know, we're in a flooded out trailer park delivering emergency relief. Boom, like that. And it's because I was able to think and use my mind. And I hate to keep coming back to alcohol. When I'm numbing myself from the chaos and the bad things in the world or whatever by just pouring alcohol and doing drugs because I don't like the way it is, I am combat ineffective.
I cannot do anything. And it's not always fun trying to figure out a solution to these issues or at least a way to... help or try to make the world a better place. But for me, I have to have a clear head. I have to be able to face things, the good, the bad, and the ugly without that sort of substance filter over. Otherwise I can't do anything.
I no longer feel, I think within the last 10 years, I had the urge to drink once and it hit me out of the blue at a traffic light. All of a sudden I was like, I want a beer. It was crazy. It just came out of nowhere. So I immediately called some friends of mine who are sober and I told on myself. I was like, I just thought about drinking and it passed. And it's like, of course you did.
You're an alcoholic, right? You haven't had a drink in 14 years, but... It is my belief that once I drank myself into the state of alcoholism, I cannot safely drink again. Therefore, every now and then, naturally, an alcoholic would think about drinking. For me, except for this one time, I think in the last 10 years, I seriously had a slight urge to do it, and it passed. It's not...
I'm fighting against this desire to drink, right? That sort of compulsion has been lifted from me. And it's just my normal state now is sobriety. And I don't think about it that much unless I'm discussing it in a context like this with someone else who has quit drinking or who wants to quit drinking. So for me, once I removed this alcohol, though, I did have to face myself.
And there's a saying amongst the sort of sobriety community that what do you get when you sober up a horse thief? A sober horse thief. You still have to look at yourself. And not that I've ever stole a horse. I'm not that cool. I'd like to think I'm like a Comanche Raider or something. But the fact of the matter is that I'm still looking at myself when I'm sober.
When I remove this alcohol, it's not like everything's immediately better. And I'm looking at myself and I'm forced to deal with my shortcomings. And I found myself... Particularly in the beginning, it's not as bad now trying to replace the alcohol with other things, which I justified as being not as harmful. For instance, for me, it's buying books.
And I have gotten much better about this, but I used to have a very bad book problem to the point where I was going to the bookstore every day for a while and buying books because I'm looking. A lot of times about self-help books, right? I have a massive collection of which I've read 20 pages of each one. And I'm like, ah!
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