Petey USA Leans Into Life

A Thanksgiving reflection on longing and belonging in today's America

Hey Friend — we send our soul-greetings on this Thanksgiving.

This week, Rainn sits down with Petey USA — the beloved indie musician and maker of viral absurdist one-man comedic sketches with a massive following on social media.

As you’ll see, at the top of the episode, Rainn jokingly (yet affectionately) calls him by his “full name”: Peter United States of America. The name fits. Petey channels a very specific strand of America: the white-coded, Midwestern, millennial flavor. The one shaped by youth-group basements and church lock-ins, by warehouse jobs and cheap apartments, by restless humor and an ache for meaning that never fully goes away. It’s the America of contradictions: tender and sarcastic, skeptical and strangely hopeful.

And so, the timing is perfect for this week’s episode. Thanksgiving is, after all, the most American of American holidays — joyful and awkward, beloved and complicated, full of togetherness and tension and gravy and history we’re still figuring out. And maybe that’s the right backdrop for our guest this week, someone who somehow embodies many of the contradictions of this country without claiming to do any such thing.

What makes Petey so compelling is the way he holds opposites in one body. He’s earnest and exhausted. Hopeful and skeptical. Tender and deadpan. He has the slacker’s shrug and the striver’s conscience. He talks about being shaped — “conditioned,” he says — by growing up in the U.S., and it’s clear that the shaping wasn’t simple. His songs carry that mix of sweetness and hollowness that feels instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever come of age in this country. Confusion, humor, melancholy — it’s all braided together in this very American way, like someone who’s been driving all night on I-80 with too much caffeine and too many thoughts.

@peteyusaRoom temp tub time

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Petey expresses a desire many of us can relate to: a quiet ache to be a part of something bigger and structured and steady. Not the content machine of modern life and its branding circus. Not the me-first, fragmented, over-commodified version of American life that late-stage capitalism keeps handing us. But something with rules and rituals and a feeling of “we’re in this together.” He says he used to fantasize about joining the military — and not in the way people think. For him it wasn’t about violence or patriotism. It was the need for order. For comradeship. For a mission. For a place where you’re not drifting through life alone.

The irony is that he also doesn’t actually want that structure. Or at least not all of it. He’s allergic to hierarchy. Suspicious of institutions. A wanderer by temperament. So he lives in the middle of that paradox — craving commitment while moving apartments every year, craving rootedness while living out of suitcases, craving clear answers while writing songs about how unclear everything feels.

If that isn’t America in 2025, what is?

His spirituality sits in the same tension. Petey grew up Christian, went to church every Sunday until one day he didn’t, and nothing happened. No lightning bolt. No existential crisis. Just drift. And yet he talks about church with this complicated tenderness — not the dogma, not the politics, but the warm communal center of it. The singing, the shared meals, the people who show up for each other. He’s honest about the envy: the desire to believe, the comfort it gives others, the way religion can make the world feel less chaotic for a second. He still talks about God, but now God is more like a placeholder for everything he doesn’t have language for yet.

A still from one of Petey’s surreal, absurdist one man sketches.

When he’s not making his soul-stirring indie music, he’s busy making his sweetly absurdist, hilarious, viral TikTok videos. Underneath the humor of his sketches is a rich current of meta commentary on the human condition that can’t quite be put into words. Petey just might be one of the most spiritually honest artists around right now. He longs for structure but resists it. Longs for belief but won’t fake it. Longs for community but moves all the time. Longs for roots but finds mysticism in whales migrating up the California coast and in freshwater lakes that, for reasons he can’t explain, feel even more ancient and mysterious than the ocean. There’s something profoundly American about that too: the search for meaning in motion, in myth, in nature.

Beneath all the political chaos and cultural fragmentation, there’s a quieter spiritual crisis. People aren’t just anxious or polarized — they’re lonely in a way that feels moral and existential. America is going through its own identity crisis. The old story doesn’t work anymore. The new story is still blurry. So we’re stuck in this in-between place, trying to decide who we actually want to be.

And that’s where the small, tender experiments happening everywhere matter: neighborhood gatherings, youth groups, shared projects, circles of reflection, families who try again, friendships that cross lines, people who decide to serve rather than retreat. None of it looks like the grand solutions we’re told to wait for. But all of it is real.

And there’s something else Petey and his following are emblematic of: countless young people are carrying a lot of this shift. Not in the loud, pundit-approved way — but in the quieter patterns of life they’re building. They’re allergic to cynicism in a way older generations sometimes forget how to be. They want community that’s real, not curated. They’re hungry for meaning, but not for dogma. They show up for each other in ways that don’t always make the news but absolutely make a neighborhood.

Petey, whether he means to or not, reflects that too. The millennial version of it. The version that grew up on the edge of church culture and then drifted out of it. The version that learned to be self-sufficient because everything felt unstable. The version that jokes through pain but still secretly wants to belong. In him, you can see the same tension young people all over the country are navigating: how to build something communal without losing themselves, how to believe without pretending, how to grow a soul in a culture that keeps distracting them from having one.

And maybe that’s why his voice resonates — because he’s naming a struggle so many young Americans are quietly living.

Maybe the future — whatever America is becoming — won’t emerge from institutions first. Maybe it will come from people doing exactly what Petey is doing: stumbling toward meaning with sincerity, longing for belonging without losing their independence, asking better questions than the ones they inherited, holding the contradictions with humor and heart, building something communal from the ground up.

Scenes from 12 Baskets Café in Asheville — a glimpse of what real community can look like in America today: shared food, shared work, shared humanity, and a table where everyone belongs.

Which brings us back to Thanksgiving. A day that, like Petey, contains multitudes. A day where America looks at itself — sometimes proudly, sometimes painfully — and still finds ways to gather anyway.

Perhaps we can all relate a bit to Petey — this gentle, bewildered, spiritually searching slacker-striver who somehow reflects the American soul back to itself. And maybe we can allow ourselves to hold our own paradoxes with a little more compassion. We can admit that we’re tired and hopeful, rootless and hungry for connection. We can acknowledge the gaps between who we are and who we want to be — as individuals, as communities, and as a nation — and still believe there’s a path forward.

America has always been complicated. But it has also always been capable of reinvention. And if the next version of this country is going to be more rooted, more connected, more spiritually awake, more human — it might just begin in the same place Petey begins his art: with honesty, curiosity, and the humble desire to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

And if that’s the seed of a spiritual revolution? Well… We’ll take it.

Giving thanks for all of you,

The Soul Boom Team