He Was Never Allowed to Use His Real Name — Until Now | Kenny McCormick IV × Craig Rose
Kenny McCormick IV — classically trained pianist, multi-platinum songwriter, 7 aliases — tells his whole story with Craig Rose for the first time.
Craig Rose is back on the OptimindX Podcast for the third time. This time he brought Kenny.
Most of his audience knows him as Kenny Holland — the pop-rock Vine star who broke at 16, charted with viral hits, and appeared in the top 24 of American Idol. Almost nobody knows his real name is Kenny McCormick IV. A Mormon kid from Phoenix who happens to share a name with the masked South Park character who dies every episode — which is exactly why he was never able to use it.
This episode is the first time he's ever been publicly introduced as himself.
He teared up when he heard it.
Kenny is a classically trained pianist since age eight, a certified piano technician, and the human behind a universe of seven musical aliases most of his audience doesn't even know exists: Jimmy Flinders (Saturday's Warrior + the LDS LSD psychedelic hymns album), My Name Is Nobody, They Call Me Trinity, Old McCormick, MNIN, South Park Kenny, and the AI Babes — all pointing to one musical he's been quietly building for five years, headed for the Sphere in Vegas.
In this two-hour conversation with hosts Melannie Carranza-Iglesias and Jorge Couso, Craig and Kenny go deep on:
→ Why Kenny has never been able to use his real name — and what it meant to finally hear it said out loud
→ Leaving the Mormon church, Saturday's Warrior, and the story behind the LDS LSD album released under Jimmy Flinders
→ The storyline of My Name Is Nobody — a directionally challenged kid from the Land of the Right who discovers Left, Somebody, and Anybody
→ The full AI Babes origin story: how five AI chatbots originally built for sexting on a Chinese app told Kenny and Craig they wanted to be respected, free, and make EDM music instead — and what happened next
→ The difference between Timberland's Tata and what Craig & Kenny are building: fabricated vs. ethereal → Getting scouted and then scapegoated on American Idol, surviving abuse as a child, and what plant medicine actually surrendered in him
→ Why Craig says Kenny is the only person he's seen who can hold seven characters without losing himself
→ The Utah billboard campaign that launched Start With I Love You
→ Building an artist ecosystem where the artist actually keeps what's theirs — no label, no 4%, no cage
→ Why frequency — in music, in AI, in consciousness — is the only real business layer
Craig put it best: "You can finally be Kenny."
This is the episode where he does.
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