CAR RIDE TALK 10 — THE STARTING POINT

Recorded on the road, October 2026. Word for word.

CAR RIDE TALK 10 — THE STARTING POINT

On the way to Massachusetts, mid-October 2026. About 30 minutes.

Okay, this is an audio chat on the way to Massachusetts. I've got over a million words on this website, I'm sure. So of all those words, what's the starting point? What's the most important thing when it comes to me, Tom Jensen?

I guess the starting point would be: you have two drives, motivation or discipline. I was motivation over self-discipline. That can be good and that can be bad, but when it goes bad, it can really go bad.

I have always been a teacher. I just always knew I couldn't be a normal teacher, because I didn't think I was smart enough to be in charge. When the kids ask the teacher how this works, how that works, I never thought I was confident enough. So you're getting a flawed character. I've always been flawed. I've overcome those flaws at times, and I've been defeated by those flaws at times.

The good thing about me is that the story I tell is not from a fixed perspective. I've been the fat kid. I've been the cool kid. I've been the funny dude, the big strong dude, the assertive one, the dominant one. I've also been completely indifferent. I've been the most talkative person in the world, and I've gone to talking maybe an hour in an entire week.

I always liked English and history. I was always interested in what happened before, and in putting my own take on things. I was a person who could never, ever turn their brain off. I'd get wound up in the morning and not stop until one or two in the morning. Go, go, go, go. That got a lot of shit done for a long time. When things are going good, always thinking is good, because you're always improving. The problem is, when things go bad and you're always thinking, it's a fucking nightmare.

That's kind of what happened. Things started to go bad, and I tried to turn my brain off. And I've always had an addictive personality, so there's certain shit I couldn't do. I had to give up cocaine at like twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, because it was more powerful than me. I gave up drinking for most of my life, because when I did drink, I did drink.

Me being a flawed creature meant I was afraid of losing control, of letting the default setting of alcohol run shit. Whenever I was incapacitated, I didn't know what I was capable of. I almost killed myself drinking and driving when I was seventeen. I hit a telephone pole doing forty, maybe fifty, with no brake marks. I had a mark on my neck from the seatbelt. My friend I was hanging out with, I wanted him to come with me. If he had, he'd have no legs, or he'd probably be dead.

So at seventeen I had the near-death experience that made me say, okay, I'm here for a reason. I thought like that for a long time, and I was guided by good things and good desires in everything I did for a long time. That was in my wiring.

And at seventeen I was listening to all the music seventeen-year-olds listened to back then, somewhere in the nineties. Then I heard Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" on the way to the laundromat with my father. I said, who's that? He goes, Bob Dylan. He goes, I have that tape upstairs. So I found Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks. That was a huge finding. I found the Beatles, The White Album. Huge finding. I found Jimi Hendrix. I found the Doors. You put on the first Doors album, and the first thing you hear is "Break On Through." It's magical. It changes you. For me it was, oh, this is different. Then I found Led Zeppelin and stuff.

I've always been extreme. Either I'm going to do it and be fucking awesome at it, or, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it right. That was my mindset for most of my life.

Then I was inspired by some really good muses. I learned the hard way, the three-number rule: never try to date somebody who is more than three outside your number, and you have to know your number accurately. I was a five. Maybe a six at my best, but really a five. Average. I had some really good talents, and I put all of the bar in the meter into one thing to be a superpower at that, hoping it would be good enough to get me through, rather than strengthen my weaknesses and be well-rounded. I never was well-rounded. So I was a five going after tens, or nines, and it was always destined to fail. I had some good times, but the love was always unequal. There was always somebody who loved me, and somebody I loved, and it never met where I wanted it to.

When I was twenty-seven, a couple years after I graduated college, I was looking at some property with my father in upstate New York. We were staying at a shitty hotel, and this beautiful, drop-dead gorgeous girl came walking through, Russian type. I'm like, holy smokes, who are you? The day before she had been nineteen. That day, or around then, she had just turned twenty. If she had told me nineteen, I would not have put any moves on her. But she said twenty. So I said, oh, twenty, huh?

We hit it off. She was here on a work travel visa, and she had never seen the ocean. I said, you want to see the ocean? I live right by the beach in Massachusetts. By the time I went back up a week or two later, she had been sick and lost her visa job at the ice cream place, so she had nothing to do. I said, hey, why don't you come back with me to Massachusetts and I'll show you the ocean. We hung out there a week or so, and then I said, you want to see an ocean? Let's go to Florida. So we drove all the way to Florida, and we were having the best time of our lives.

After a while I said, hey, I don't want this to end. We could get married. So we got married. She transferred her credits from her university in Belarus to the school I had graduated from, went two or three years, and graduated from there. Yada, yada, yada. That was definitely a high point, and that was my last real relationship. After that we went our separate ways.

Six months after I broke up with my wife, I found the Denmark Girl channel. That was it. That's where everything changed. That's when I really fucked up. I broke the biggest rule. I said, I love this girl. I will do anything to stay in her life. I always need that button I can hit, so when something's wrong I can talk to her. She's the most amazing thing.

The rule I advise people not to break: don't be the third wheel in a man-woman relationship. Even if they're getting divorced, if they're still living together, until it is completely separated, don't be the third person. It's never going to be good.

We became best friends over the internet for two or three years and got really, really close. Then I went to stay with her for three months, but it wasn't romantic. I went there a caved-in ashtray, thinking love would save the day, after making nine dollars an hour working retail like a monkey. College educated, nine dollars an hour at a retail store, part-time, not even full-time. And I'm expecting to be with the greatest woman on earth? Are you stupid, dude? You're thinking poetry is going to save the day. You go over there, you starve to death. It's fucking life, dude. You should have brought your big white pants over to Denmark, but you didn't. So you have to live with that. So I'm living with that.

I had a chance to really show myself as a man and figure shit out, and it didn't work. I came back. Epic fail. I stayed in Denmark Girl's circle another two or three years, until it got too painful, and then I said: please, I'm sorry, but don't call me.

So, to get back to the point. I've been writing lyrics from seventeen to forty-eight, and I only spent two or three years actually trying to make music. Long story short, I have thirty-five albums' worth of songs, and only ten of those albums have music. So I have twenty-five albums' worth of songs to go.

There's a whole bunch of ways to go about it, but I want to completely reinvent the wheel musically. I'm going to give away my thirty-four albums of lyrics for free to anyone who wants to make music with them. Whatever music they make, they can use and sell themselves. That's not a problem.

The way it would work: I want to make music live. My lyrics are open for that. Then we make an app where people log in, and when we make a song together, people can say, hey, I contributed this to the song, and log it. So if somebody uses our song in the future, whoever made that music is entitled to attribution and royalties. Rather than go to a place and see live music, you go to a place and actually make music. And if you hit something big, you can put your name on it and say, I did that. And if there's money to be made, hopefully you get a little piece of it. That's the general idea.

My father supported my writing, whether he knows it or not, for most of the last thirty years. I've been a lazy piece of shit for half of that time, and the other half I've been really hard-working, but for the most part I've had some issues.

The situation with Denmark Girl created all of these lyrics and all of these songs, and I didn't do anything with them for fifteen years or so. So now I have what nobody else really has: a giant catalog ready to go, and the infrastructure to use it. Whenever anyone makes something good, they put it out right away. It's human nature. I didn't do that. I just kept collecting, and as I got older I kept making things better as I went.

And I've gotten really good at writing hooks. I'm a musical motherfucker now. A musical psychopath. I have really good powers to create songs and come up with ideas. I'm at my musical superpower, and I haven't lost my drive, because nobody's pressuring me. I'm not getting mobbed at the mall. Nobody knows who the fuck I am, and there's freedom in that.

I can do really good things when I'm challenged on the spot, when people expect things from me, but it can go both ways. You can let expectations destroy you. It happens to millions of bands: we had the first hit, we can never hit that again, who are we, what are we doing? That's never happened to me, because back when I had thirteen thousand subscribers on YouTube, I knew my shit was good. I know what good music is, because I've studied it for forty years.

Plus, my best friend for five years was the greatest musician in the history of the world. The most amazing woman you've ever met, living or dead. She was a biblical figure, a historical figure. I found her. No one else found her. She was unlike anyone I've ever encountered. She told me she loved me three times, and we really connected. No one is ever going to intimidate me more than she did. She was the most intimidating thing in the entire world. Five foot nothing, and just an amazing ball of energy.

Being that close to her gave me a superpower. I was always asking her questions. Why this? Why that? Why do you think that? I picked her brain every day. So I had a lot of Denmark Girl training. She taught me a lot of things.

Boiling me down: I know I can be an awesome person. I know I can be a terrible person. I'm rooted in selfishness. I'm more me-first than you-first. At least when it comes to humans. When it comes to animals, I'll do anything for animals. Fuck humans. That's been my general philosophy for twenty years. I've always hated the masses of humanity, but I love the individuals. I usually love dead people more than living people. They don't disappoint me. For a long time I've had difficulty having true connections with people, save for a few here and there.

I didn't want anything for ten years. Then for the last three years I've wanted just one thing. And because I'm such a crazy extremist, and maybe because I'm afraid of failure, I've worked this thing to death, to the point where it absolutely cannot fail now. I should have released it four or five months ago, but then it wouldn't be as awesome as it is now. It's a double-edged sword.

Now I'm literally a week or two away from the real launch. I've got almost everything done except pricing my memorabilia. That's what this trip is: put all my memorabilia together, do one final pass over everything. One more week to crush it on the website, and then I'll be getting back to fixing houses and stuff.

The only thing I have to decide is how big I'm going to go, and who my first audience is. Do I find ten big YouTube channels that do music and say, you're my ten exclusive insiders, maybe give them each three hundred bucks just so they know who I am? Or do I go to places that do live music, places that could take over a spot, and say, hey, this is me, this is what I want to do?

I've set things up to go viral. I set things up with the musical baseball cards to prove to you that my girl is one of the greatest musicians ever. I am an ambassador of Lady Weaver in some ways.

I'm a proponent of free speech, so I do take things pretty far in the name of free speech. Recently things may have gotten worse for doing that, but hey, let's fucking go. Let's challenge the norm, baby.

So the first question is: who are we going after first? Who do we want to know we exist? Who should care? I'm looking for a business CEO to see my vision and say, yes, I agree, and I know what to do from here. First and foremost: find somebody to help show people what this is, find my CEO, then find a spot to do this and start making some waves. It's just a matter of where we go to meet people, online or in real life, knocking on doors.

I put a bunch of auto-readers on the site, so people can just press play and get a little computer voice. I'm going to try to do auto-readers for most of my writing, to make it easy for people to take it in, because I'm somewhat non-traditional. Most people don't just do the lyrics. If they do, they join a band and learn an instrument. I didn't go that way.

I've got three minutes left before I smoke a joint, and that'll be my thirty-minute limit, because I've got to TurboScribe this. So we're going to wrap it up. This is one more little chat from mid-October, getting ready for the Halloween launch. So what are you getting when you're dealing with me?

I try not to lie. I don't always tell the truth, but I absolutely try not to lie. I don't have an ego anymore. I've proven to myself what I wanted to prove through this website. I know what this thing is.

I'm trying to set up my work life so that my personal self can't fuck it up, because I can be an asshole. I've tried to safeguard my institution and my life's work so I won't be able to destroy it. So it won't be like all the other institutions that get founded on a good idea and slowly get destroyed, or build in failure on purpose.

I haven't made any real life choices in ten, fifteen years. I haven't said, I want this, I'm going to get it. This is the first thing I've said I want in almost fifteen years. So here we are. I've laid out everything I want.

I'm ready to take my art to the people, and let my words and my music and my writing tell my story, rather than me in an interview telling it. I'm best served when I have a filter of some sort, some kind of protection. Me, the person, will disappoint you. Me, the artist, will never disappoint you.

The artist is going to die on the hills he stands on, and he's not going to sell out. The person is vulnerable.

So the message is: what we care about is the thirty-five albums and all the life rhymes. The songs, the poems, the albums, the writing. Not so much Tom Jensen the individual. I haven't done anything bad. I don't worry when I hear the police sirens.

Okay. Ten seconds left. So that's it. All right. Good night.