On this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, former Illinois Governor Rahm Emanuel sits down with Tucker Carlson to discuss his time in prison, the corruption charges he faced, and why he chose to admit to the crimes he committed.
00:00:21.000And, you know, whenever someone is convicted of, you know, any political figure, any person of power that's convicted of corruption, you automatically assume that they're guilty.
00:00:34.000And after listening to you on Tucker's show, I was like, oh, Jesus.
00:00:39.000Like, It was such an eye-opening podcast and such a disappointing one, too.
00:00:45.000It was so disturbing to hear your version of the story, which was so different than the version that was, you know, put out on the media.
00:00:53.000And it was just, oh, corrupt politician goes to jail.
00:02:02.000But the first three years, almost three years, they put me in a higher security prison and I'm in there with Crips and Bloods and Gangster Disciples and Sinaloa Cartel drug dealers.
00:02:46.000And, you know, there were a lot of people in my team, like my lawyers, who thought that might be the prudent thing to do because you really can't beat these people.
00:02:56.000And when they really want to get you, they'll just keep trying you and they'll get their judge to work with them and they'll ultimately convict you as they did me by using unlawful standards to criminalize things that are legal in politics and government.
00:03:08.000So the prudent thing, the safe thing, was to, you know, cut your losses and, you know, take the short period of prison time.
00:03:16.000But I felt, you know, I wasn't a businessman.
00:03:18.000I suppose if I was a businessman facing something like that, you'd make a business decision, you cut your losses, you realize...
00:03:49.000And it was all an effort to try to get me to admit it.
00:03:52.000And if I admitted it, then the truth would never come out.
00:03:54.000They can never be exposed for what they did.
00:03:56.000And because I wouldn't do it, and I fought back, because if I'm right, and I know I am, and they were doing to me what they ultimately ended up doing to Trump, weaponizing their uncontrolled power and unlimited resources to Well,
00:04:18.000we saw that the head of the FBI just stepped down and Kash Patel is going to come in and he wants to clean house.
00:04:52.000Mayor Daley, the first Mayor Daley, was holding back the counting of those votes until he saw what Southern Illinois Republican area came up with.
00:04:58.000And once those votes were counted, then he let those River Wars come out.
00:05:02.000And Giancana, people like that were really instrumental in electing Kennedy.
00:05:06.000And then when Bobby Kennedy started going after Giancrona.
00:05:09.000As the Attorney General, they felt betrayed.
00:05:43.000So what was the first charge that was brought against you?
00:05:48.000Or if you could just bring us back to the moment when you knew they were coming after you.
00:05:53.000I was elected the first Democratic governor of Illinois in November 2002 after 26 years of Republican governors.
00:06:01.000I first learned that they began to look into my administration and people around me in December of 2003. And I had been governor for 10 months and they were already looking.
00:06:14.000And I knew it, which meant we got to be super extra careful because these people are scrutinizing us.
00:07:15.000And so at the time when they began wiretapping my phones, which was late October 2008, everything I talked about doing with regard to the appointment of Obama's successor to the United States Senate, I felt it was very possible they were listening.
00:08:03.000What they wanted me to do was to basically say that I was guilty of trying to sell a Senate seat, and I was trying to sell it to another guilty party, who was the guy who started the whole thing, by the name of Barack Obama, who wanted to buy that Senate seat, because that's where the whole thing began.
00:08:18.000He sent an emissary to me to suggest a political deal, because he wanted this woman named Valerie Jarrett to be appointed to his Senate seat, the governor appoints the Senate.
00:08:25.000Pause for a second and hold that thought.
00:08:52.000Like, just having Marshall around can make my day ten times better.
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00:10:58.000You use third parties, emissaries, to treat two people.
00:11:03.000So he doesn't have to meet with you, so you can say, Obama asked me.
00:11:07.000You have other people, so there's plausible deniability.
00:11:09.000To some extent, that's part of it, of course.
00:11:11.000But there's other dynamics that also, it's just a little bit easier to kind of test the mood of the other person if you have a third party who both the people like or respect.
00:11:20.000In this particular case, it was a labor boss.
00:11:22.000By the name of Tom Balinoff, he came up to me election night in November 2008. That was the election you voted for, Obama.
00:13:26.000We got a chance to do something with this.
00:13:28.000And all of these ideas and thoughts were discussed with my governor's lawyer on all those calls largely because I knew these people were chasing me.
00:13:36.000I wanted to be sure whatever decision I made, it was legal.
00:13:38.000We didn't cross lines or make a mistake.
00:15:05.000I'm just going to mock NBC. So what does it say?
00:15:08.000Yesterday, a tweet about the Golden Globes and Oprah Winfrey was sent by a third-party agency for NBC Entertainment in real time during the broadcast.
00:15:15.000It is in reference to a joke made during the monologue and not meant to be a political statement.
00:15:23.000So anyway, so I'm at the first trial they're playing these tapes and they had to give you these transcript books so you can see in writing what you can actually hear when they play the tape.
00:15:33.000And by then I had gotten used to trying to know what was coming so I can brace myself, you know.
00:15:38.000And, you know, they pick all the unflattering stuff.
00:15:59.000And you got to be 30 years old and you can be a naturalized citizen or American board citizen.
00:16:04.000So I say, because we were not finding the black military hero, why doesn't somebody go to California, ask Halle Berry if she'd like to be a United States senator?
00:16:13.000She comes to Illinois for one day, I'll make her a senator and maybe I could fuck her.
00:17:46.000And I said, let me take you back to a day in court, okay?
00:17:50.000Before you judge somebody else, look at your own husband.
00:17:53.000And I told her about the Halle Berry thing and what I said.
00:17:56.000And I said, this is, you know, as you explained it.
00:18:00.000And I think people have to realize that so many of these things that are taken out of context are taken out of context for a reason.
00:18:05.000It is to mislead the public and prejudice them against things.
00:18:09.000And that context aspect of it is very important because there is such a difference between a statement and someone tapping a phone while people are having a private conversation and talking shit.
00:18:22.000And did they read it or play it when you said that?
00:18:59.000I would have – oh, you mean just political bartering?
00:19:01.000If they came to you and said Obama would like you to put this person in as senator, if you just agreed to it, you think none of this would have happened?
00:19:09.000No, I think they were going to do whatever they did to get me no matter what.
00:19:28.000It's this sort of FBI, DOJ type people who've become part of today's Department of Justice, and they feel like they're a power center of their own right.
00:19:38.000That they're this new political place in American government.
00:19:41.000They are so dangerous to our freedoms in this country.
00:19:46.000He had convicted the previous governor, Republican governor, Ryan, of crimes that he had committed when he was the Secretary of State of Illinois.
00:19:55.000And so now he could be the first guy in history to get two straight governors.
00:20:01.000I think he wanted to leverage Obama to keep him in office so he could finish the job and get me after investing five years And he came up with nothing.
00:20:09.000That's why they invented the crimes from those conversations.
00:20:12.000And if anybody doubts this, and I fully understand why people would, the question I'd ask people is, will you tell me what side is lying?
00:20:20.000The side that refuses to play 98% of the tapes that they made?
00:20:24.000Or the guy that's saying, play them all?
00:20:41.000They wouldn't even let me play them in court in the second trial, even though they promised that I would.
00:20:45.000I could play them if I testified at the second trial.
00:20:49.000And so I got up on the stand, Joe, and the judge had promised, on the 20th of May 2011, I thought this was the day I'd be vindicated.
00:20:55.000He said, look, if he agrees to testify, he can play the tapes to corroborate his testimony.
00:21:00.000Because I was a lawyer, and I was also a prosecutor at the state level, Cook County prosecutor.
00:21:05.000And I know how the system works, and I know that if you get up there and you're saying certain things, and one side has tapes of you saying something, and you're saying stuff, but you don't have tapes to corroborate what you're saying.
00:21:15.000The prosecutor is going to simply tell the jury in closing argument, go back to the jury room and see how many times you hear what he testified to corroborated by those tapes.
00:21:23.000And if you don't find any tapes, then you know who's lying.
00:21:26.000I knew this, but when the judge said I can do it on the record, I felt beautiful.
00:21:30.000I'll testify, and then we'll play the tapes to back up my testimony.
00:21:39.000And then the prosecutor does exactly what I knew they would do if those tapes weren't heard.
00:21:44.000He says, go back into the jury room and see how many times he talked about the Madigan deal, because that was the big deal I was about to make before they arrested me.
00:21:52.000You won't hear a single tape, even though there were 102 conversations on that subject.
00:21:56.000They were all covered up, and the jury didn't know those tapes existed.
00:22:00.000It was a total fucking frame-up in a rigged criminal justice system in a court that was rigged.
00:22:09.000What happened to Trump is so important, they did it to him in those different courts where they got the convictions for things that weren't crimes.
00:22:17.000Yeah, there's multiple things that have changed our timeline and one of the big ones is him being elected because that means they dropped those cases and all that weaponizing of the justice system didn't work.
00:22:31.000If it did work, That is such an insanely dangerous precedent to set.
00:22:37.000When you see things like the documents case or the real estate case, which is the most disgusting one, pretending that Mar-a-Lago, that somehow or another someone was a victim because he overvalued Mar-a-Lago even though he paid all those loans back and the banks profited from it.
00:22:58.000And yet they fine him this fucking insane amount of money and try to say that Mar-a-Lago was worth $18 million.
00:23:03.000That is just such a slap in the face of anybody that understands...
00:23:08.000First of all, anybody understands property values in that area.
00:23:10.000It's preposterous to say that place is only $18 million.
00:23:14.000It's a fucking enormous property in the most expensive real estate in the United States or one of the most expensive places for real estate.
00:23:20.000And there was just so many of these cases over and over and over again that just right in everyone's face.
00:23:26.000And very little pushback, no pushback from the media at all.
00:23:30.000They went along with it as if these 34 felonies for a bookkeeping error that is essentially a misdemeanor that's passed the statute of limitations, and now you're marking it up as a felony, but you can't even identify the felony?
00:23:48.000And all these news organizations Because they don't like Trump are going along with this insanely dangerous precedent.
00:23:55.000Because if that goes through, well, what happens if Republicans get into office and you have some new Democrat that you really love, and this Democrat is a real challenge and a threat to the Republican, and they start doing the same fucking shit that you did?
00:24:38.000I don't want to sound like an egomaniac, but I got to tell you, they got away with it with me, and they got emboldened then to say, we can do it to a democratic governor, the fifth largest state in America, we can get away with it.
00:24:50.000Non-fucking crimes that we make up shit and call them certain things that are sexy sounding, sale of the Senate seat.
00:24:56.000That eventually was reversed by the appellate court.
00:24:58.000They could never uphold that unlawful standard.
00:25:00.000Three fundraising requests where there was no quid pro quo.
00:25:07.000And they gave me 14 years because I was fighting against them and exposing them.
00:25:11.000So it started, I really believe, with me.
00:25:13.000And they got away with it with me and some of the same people, Comey, Fitzgerald, those people were doing it to Trump with Russia collusion stuff.
00:25:19.000And some of the same people that went on and have been doing it as part of a, get this, organized political campaign that came right out of the Oval Office, out of the Democratic National Committee, the DNC, into the DOJ.
00:25:33.000They've corrupted the Department of Justice and the FBI, and they've corrupted the rule of law and the Constitution, and this is no small thing.
00:25:40.000And just because Trump won, because the American people are beginning to get it, doesn't mean we're safe.
00:25:47.000The Trump administration, God willing, is going to do something very serious about this.
00:25:51.000If there's anything that this administration can do to make America great again is to protect our rights and our freedoms and to hold the people that do this accountable and make an example of them, not to be vengeful, but because it's just and because it sends a message to these unaccountable prosecutors who have no check and balance that if they do this and frame innocent people, they're going to be treated the same way as a dirty cop who plants a murder weapon to frame an innocent man.
00:26:22.000Anyway, he was a former U.S. attorney, and he made his name by destroying Arthur Anderson, a company that had all these people working for him, an accounting company nationwide, one of the biggest accounting firms in America.
00:26:33.000He used a standard that wasn't lawful to get convictions on them.
00:26:37.000Eventually, the United States Supreme Court took the case, and they ruled nine to nothing, unanimous, that the standard that Weissman used to prosecute Arthur Anderson was an unlawful standard.
00:27:55.000Yeah, he got a big sentence, and then eventually they found procedural wrongdoing, and he was able to reduce it down from something like 26 years to 14. But he was there with me.
00:28:06.000Along with Smelly and Sox and Mr. B and V and G and all kinds of guys.
00:29:16.000Well, there is, notwithstanding their policy, the BOP's policy.
00:29:20.000The guy that was Jared, the subway guy, he ended up going to the same prison I was in after I worked my way out of that higher security prison, the one behind the barbed wire fence, and got to a camp.
00:29:34.000Jared got to my prison because it's a prison that has a lot of pedophiles.
00:29:38.000Out of the 950 guys, roughly, that I was in prison with there, there were about 300 to 400 pedophiles.
00:29:46.000And then there were drug dealers, bank robbers, some guys who committed murder.
00:31:41.000Now, I don't want to sound like I'm too liberal or something, but they have to.
00:31:49.000Because if left to their own devices, these guys would get so fucked up by the general population who are outraged by their crimes and are also outraged by the fact that a lot of them, a lot of them, got special treatment in their sentencing.
00:32:03.000So you see this guy that Biden just pardoned or gave clemency to.
00:32:07.000Let's hope it was just clemency and not a pardon, my God.
00:32:10.000But these sex offenders are getting lighter sentences than the drug dealers or the bank robbers.
00:32:16.000And if you look at a system of punishment that's supposed to be just and fair and hopefully always tempered with mercy, you'd like to think that there's equal application of the law and that there's some sort of fairness and that when you measure the victims of the certain crimes, that that should be a part of the sentencing.
00:32:34.000So drug dealers would argue a lot of it non-violent and they're right.
00:35:40.000If it says I want $100 million in a Swiss bank account, which by the way, The current governor, Pritzker, had called me to ask me to make him senator because he inherited a billion dollars.
00:36:33.000And I was doing it, not on podcasts, but I was doing it on the Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS Morning, Nightline, Dateline, all the shows.
00:36:45.000You don't have enough time to lay out the environment, how it works, what really goes on in politics, what's normal for how these deals are made.
00:38:14.000Either Balinoff's lying and he purged himself at two trials, or Obama is lying on those FBI 302s, or he lied, which is a crime, or he lied to the public, which all too often politicians do all the time, and Obama's one of them who does it a lot.
00:38:29.000Balinoff, this guy, what would be his motivation for saying that Obama wanted you to do that?
00:38:36.000The theory is, among a lot of political insiders who know how it works, that he was an emissary for Rahm Emanuel, who became Obama's chief of staff.
00:39:04.000And the theory is plausible in that what would be the motivation for Rahm to do that was that as the new chief of staff with Obama and in the power game of politics, which is something he knows real well and I know, People want to be close to the king.
00:39:22.000And Valerie Jarrett was Michelle Obama's best friend.
00:39:25.000And she was a threat to the influence of Rahm and others.
00:39:29.000And if you get her kicked upstairs to the U.S. Senate, she won't be in Rahm's way to have more of a voice and more say in Obama, in the direction of Obama's administration.
00:40:14.000But I've pre-sold some to people, friends and others, about 8,000 of them already.
00:40:18.000So it's helped me be able to self-publish and create my own little publishing company.
00:40:22.000And the reason I'm compelled to do it is because I've gone to some of the New York publishing houses and they are so anti-Trump that if you say something nice about Trump, and he comes across really well in my book, I was on his show.
00:40:51.000He doesn't come across as evil, but he comes across as a very selfish, very calculating politician who missed an opportunity to be a great president and instead divided our country, and who's a snake, and an ignorant, and who sold out his friend Tony Resco, who bought him a lot.
00:41:05.000This guy bought him a lot next to a mansion that he bought after he was elected to the United States Senate.
00:41:10.000Obama's, at that time, only had $750,000 they could afford for a mansion.
00:41:14.000They wanted to buy the adjoining lot in this real upper-class neighborhood called Kenwood, Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago, by Obama's library.
00:41:23.000And they couldn't afford the other lot, so he went to his friend Resco.
00:41:28.000And Resco's a kind-hearted person, and he wants to help his friend Obama.
00:41:46.000He's got to fix his political problem.
00:41:48.000He goes to Resco, and he says, I got to put a fence between the lot and the mansion.
00:41:54.000So I can explain to the media that it's your lot, not mine, right?
00:42:01.000And he prefers he asks for a wrought iron fence, not just any old fence, not a chain-link fence.
00:42:06.000He wants a wrought iron fence because it matches the mansion.
00:42:09.000And then he hands Resco a bill for $13,000 for the Rhode Iron Fence.
00:42:13.000And then when Resco suppers for three years in solitary confinement because he won't lie about Obama or me, he sends a letter to the federal sentencing judge saying they're squeezing him to say stuff about both of us.
00:42:23.000Makes the front page of the Chicago Tribune in August 2008 that he won't do it.
00:42:27.000They put him in solitary confinement for three years.
00:43:14.000Look, the hardest period during this whole thing was the months after the conviction to the day that you surrender because now you know you're going away and you're fearful it's going to be long.
00:43:23.000In fact, days, a couple of months before the sentence came down, I'm jogging, I'm running through the neighborhoods and I see it.
00:43:58.000The moment I stepped into prison, I write in my book that one advantage of crossing the threshold in the prison was that with every now, with every tick of the clock, you're one second closer to this nightmare, this Kafka's nightmare finally being over.
00:44:14.000One second closer to coming home to your daughters and to your wife, even though it might be 14 years.
00:49:16.000They actually gathered together what little beans they had and went to the commissary to get me necessities for my first week, toothbrush, toothpaste, shower shoes, just a very nice kind thing to, you know, me.
00:49:32.000These were drug dealers and bank robbers and, you know, tough guys, all tatted up, tough guys.
00:49:36.000You know, their gangs would be tatted on their heads and stuff or on their, you know, biceps.
00:50:37.000And we walked around the track and we were talking about, and I was interested in the facilities, you know.
00:50:41.000One of the things I was determined to do in prison was to work out a lot and to read a lot.
00:50:46.000And eventually I read the Bible a lot, like if you want to talk about that at some point, because that was so meaningful to me.
00:50:53.000They called me in the next day because the word got out that I was walking the track with black guys, and it was explained to me by the authorities there that prison's a very segregated place, that the unwritten policy in order to keep order is that people need to be part of their own cars.
00:51:10.000They called the euphemism for gangs in prison is cars.
00:51:44.000And they told me that I should go see them.
00:51:47.000So out of respect for the police officers, the correctional officers, I said, okay, I'll go see them.
00:51:51.000But I made it clear to them, listen, I don't give a fuck.
00:51:53.000Because they told me, look, when you get into a conflict with somebody and it's inevitable because you're in prison with a bunch of guys for a long time, there's going to be all kinds of disputes.
00:52:01.000You want the window open, the other guy wants it closed.
00:52:04.000You didn't put the weight back in the weight room like he would have wanted.
00:52:07.000There's all kinds of shit that's going to happen, conflicts that develop between guys living close like that.
00:52:12.000The way we keep order is we keep the races and the different ethnic groups separated.
00:52:17.000They all become part of their individual cars.
00:52:29.000You're polite to the other groups, but you don't really get friendly with them.
00:52:33.000Because if you have a conflict with somebody, your car will protect you.
00:52:36.000Especially if it becomes a conflict with somebody from another race or another group of people.
00:52:41.000In the prison I was in, there were a lot of black guys, a lot of Latinos, a lot of guys from Mexico, seen a lot of drug cartel people, a lot of Native Americans.
00:52:50.000There were Pacific Islanders and, of course, white guys and sex offenders.
00:53:48.000You don't have the same rights here that you have out there.
00:53:51.000We can't order you not to have relationships or conversations with people from another race.
00:53:56.000But we can't order you to stop doing stuff that could be counterproductive to us keeping safety.
00:54:02.000So if you're going to sit with somebody outside your race in the chow hall, that's a direct affront to us.
00:54:08.000And there are measures that we can take to make sure that you don't do those sorts of things.
00:54:13.000And I respected the fact that they said it was to keep order, and it was the culture, and pretty much everybody in the prison system accepts it anyway.
00:54:22.000Eventually, I sat with some of the black guys as time went by, and we actually made a little...
00:54:26.000An elder black guy by the name Mr. B. He was originally from Chicago and from Detroit.
00:54:31.000He was like the most respected inmate.
00:55:43.000There were guys in prison who really didn't like me.
00:55:46.000But for the most part, I had a lot of, you know, I had low approval ratings after I got arrested as they were investigating me when I was governor.
00:55:53.000But I had pretty high approval ratings in prison with my fellow inmates.
00:58:06.000And then their mood changed, and they sent me to another facility, and they put me in this little cell.
00:58:12.000And they had me next to this angry guy that was all fucked up on PCP or something.
00:58:17.000He was like a raging or wild animal to send me a message, you know.
00:58:22.000And I think they were never going to go after Obama.
00:58:27.000But what they wanted to do was they wanted to go to him and say, I was willing to cooperate against Obama and then leverage that and have Obama then tell him, look, just leave us alone.
00:59:31.000That's the beauty and genius of what they did in this country.
00:59:34.000They did not foresee coming out of the executive branch would be this tumor, this cancer, that really started picking up steam in the 1920s, federal law enforcement, and that it would grow and that the tactics and the methods they used to go after Al Capone or later on, you know, Carlos Escobar and El Chapo and people like that, that they would actually use against governors and presidents.
01:00:00.000The problem is, as a practical matter, because they have such power, the politicians are scared shitless of them.
01:00:05.000They don't want to stand up to them because they're afraid these people will trump up shit against them and just make shit up or get something they might have done and made it bigger.
01:00:14.000So everybody knows how the game is played, so everybody has to play the game.
01:00:18.000And then when you get, you're the one on the wrong end of it, all your friends in politics, they run for the hills, they abandon you, and then all of a sudden, they're kissing your ass the day before you're arrested, and the next day they're maligning the shit out of you.
01:01:03.000What you were saying, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
01:01:06.000And when people get into positions of power and influence and this chess game starts getting played, they can make all sorts of rationalizations if there's no checks and balances.
01:01:16.000This is why there has to be checks and balances and there has to be oversight to keep people from their own devices, to keep people from their own horrible instincts that we have as human beings.
01:01:26.000Especially if you've done some shady shit because other people have done some shady shit and that's how everybody sort of worked their way up the ladder and then all of a sudden you get to a position where like, hey, you're gonna have to do something that you really don't agree with but this is how the game is played and then next thing you know...
01:02:02.000Well, and I think a lot of people go into, whether it's politics or law enforcement or Into the federal government.
01:02:09.000There's a lot of people that go into it with very good intentions, but then you see over time they get corrupted by the environment that they're in.
01:04:36.000You see, here again, the stuff we're talking about, it's so important that this justice system gets reformed.
01:04:43.000I'm so excited about the fact that Trump, the people he's picking, Pam Bondi, he's a great person, he's got a good record, Patel.
01:04:51.000Because if we don't trust the criminal justice system, when you tell me a story about those dirty cops, and I'm sure that's absolutely what they were, and that those who prosecuted them were right to do it.
01:05:11.000I failed to tell you what that first night was like, and I just should wrap it up very quickly.
01:05:15.000But, you know, there I was in this darkness and so all alone and so heartbroken, so fearful and worried about my kids and my wife and what it was like for them, imagining in my mind...
01:05:24.000My wife comforting my daughters as if I had died because I kind of did.
01:06:36.000I'm simply saying I looked at his example and I got strength from that because he was being chased by Saul and he's in the caves for like 11 years or chasing him.
01:07:00.000We learned through those hard lessons, the fiery, you know, through the fire of hard times.
01:07:05.000And, of course, then eventually the Gospels.
01:07:07.000And the best story of all, in my mind, as a Christian, is the story of Jesus.
01:07:11.000And, you know, here he is in the Garden of Gethsemane, and he's saying to God, because he's so afraid, because he knows what's coming, what they're going to do to him.
01:07:17.000And he says, O Father, please lift this cup from me.
01:07:21.000I mean, I get choked up just thinking about this.
01:07:23.000And he says, but no God, no Father, not my will, your will.
01:07:28.000And then he steals himself for what he's got to face, takes on all the suffering that he goes through, and the humiliation, everything else.
01:07:35.000So I read it every day for 2,896 days, and I know it in a way I never knew it before.
01:07:41.000And I love it, and it brought me so much closer to God.
01:07:45.000There were moments, as crazy as this sounds, and I'm not running for anything, so I'm not here to try to win Christian evangelical votes or anything.
01:07:53.000But there were moments years into the process, not those first early years, because they were so hard.
01:07:58.000But after I was there for year six, year seven, and I'd read the Bible like that every day, And I was really working out.
01:08:24.000So now suddenly I'm seeing less and less of them.
01:08:26.000But I'd have moments, and I was lucky because I was in Colorado, which is a beautiful place with great weather and blue skies and snow-capped foothills of the Rockies.
01:08:37.000And then when it would rain, there'd be rainbows.
01:08:41.000I believe these are godly things, and I'd sometimes get done with a run or something, and I'd walk that track stretching a little bit, and I'd see that beautiful rainbow, and I could almost feel the presence of God.
01:08:52.000I know it sounds like bullshit for people who don't know that, But when you've been beaten down so much and you're so fucking alone, I look for God and I really believe I found Him.
01:09:02.000And I feel like I'm at a place now where I'm grateful in a weird way for that experience.
01:09:07.000I wish it never happened and I have bitterness still.
01:09:10.000And I hate the motherfuckers that did it to me and I know I'm not supposed to hate them.
01:10:18.000You could be very cynical and you could say that's just human beings looking for order in an orderless, chaotic place and that your creativity and your inquisitive nature leads you to constantly search for a daddy in the sky.
01:10:37.000But I've talked to too many people that have had these sort of like you've had these breakthrough moments in life where you come into contact with something by opening yourself up to it.
01:10:50.000And it's so cynical just to disregard that.
01:10:54.000Everybody wants to pretend that they're smarter than they really are.
01:10:57.000It's a terrible trait that we all have.
01:10:59.000And that prevents you from, especially secular people, atheists, people that are like acknowledged atheists, prevents you from even considering the idea that there's something to this that you're not getting.
01:11:13.000And your simple little mind, your desire for order, and to look at this and go, no, you just live and you die.
01:11:29.000And there's been a lot of them throughout human history.
01:11:32.000And to just completely dismiss them as all nonsense, it's just like, that's such a cynical perspective on human beings.
01:11:40.000And then there's also the fact that Look, I'm not saying bad things haven't been done in the name of religion because they most certainly have.
01:11:48.000People have been slaughtered, wars have been started, people have been demonized and othered to the point where you're allowed to kill them because they believe the wrong thing.
01:12:18.000You could be a brilliant, intelligent person who's just unusually compassionate and live your whole life without religion and still be an excellent contributor to society.
01:13:39.000We talked about that in terms of psychedelics the other day, the spiritual narcissism.
01:13:43.000I think the same sort of spiritual narcissism that encompasses these Preachers that talk in front of stadiums filled with people and fly private jets and drive Rolls Royces.
01:13:52.000That's the same sort of thing as a guru who wants to take you to the jungle to give you drugs or someone who wants you to join their sex cult or someone who wants you to join their yoga thing where no one works anymore and you all grow your own food and this is your guru.
01:14:10.000There's a shit ton of documentaries on these folks.
01:15:21.000It was a guy who was a gay porn star and a hypnotist.
01:15:24.000who started this cult in West Hollywood.
01:15:27.000And then after Waco popped off, this guy had escaped from West Hollywood because they were looking for him because the Cult Awareness Network, and they started, after Waco, they're like, "Jesus Christ, how many of these cults are out there?" They were targeting this guy.
01:15:38.000So he changed his name, moved to Austin, and built this theater.
01:15:42.000And the cult had already disbanded a bunch.
01:15:45.000And my friend Ron White, the comedian, told me, because he had performed it, he turned it into a concert venue, this theater, that this guy had his cult followers build him so he could dance in front of them.
01:15:55.000It's a beautiful 300-seat theater, gorgeous place.
01:16:02.000It's just a person who convinced all these other people that he had the answers and he was a hypnotist.
01:16:08.000He was really good at fucking with people and really good at like talking people into certain states of mind and they all believed in him and they wasted decades of their life.
01:17:00.000What a fascinating blip in time that is, if you really look at it in terms of impactfulness, like a piece of technology that completely changed the world.
01:17:54.000And it was that, my love for my daughters and my wife, I could never possibly give and I had to survive and somehow find my way home, however long it might take.
01:18:03.000And I had to do it in a way where I could be so strong and be constructive and actually plant seeds for a better life later on where whatever I did, my little girls can see that, you know, God forbid when tough times come, because it comes to all of us.
01:18:17.000How do you deal with those hard times?
01:18:18.000Do you embrace the adversity, try to turn it into something good, or do you just give into it?
01:18:22.000And so that gave me the purpose I needed in prison.
01:18:24.000And I spent a lot of time not just reading the Bible, but reading all kinds of books, because you've got time.
01:18:31.000I read a book three times, and I talked about this to Tucker Carlson called Man's Search for Meaning by a guy named Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who had gone through Things a million times worse than anything I went through.
01:18:42.000He lost his wife, his family, through genocide.
01:18:47.000But he said that the last of the human freedoms, after everything's been taken from you, the last of the human freedoms is our freedom to choose our own attitude in any given set of circumstances.
01:18:58.000And that if you could find a why to live, You can find the how.
01:19:05.000And my why was my little girls and my wife.
01:19:07.000No matter how hard this was going to be, I had to survive this, I had to endure it, and I needed to do it in a way where it would be the best possible way to do it that could help raise my daughters from afar.
01:19:28.000I mean, a lot of blue moments, as you can imagine.
01:19:30.000I could never, ever, ever let myself get so down that I would not be active in any given day.
01:19:37.000I had to go out there and run those miles and lift the weights, do push-ups, whatever it was, read those books, do the stuff I would write about.
01:19:44.000Because I love my daughters and I'm doing it for them.
01:20:20.000That's also why he kept running, even though everybody was coming after him.
01:20:25.000You have to be a very particular type of person that has all those legal cases thrown at him.
01:20:31.000I mean, if he lost, and he lost those cases, and then he lost the run for presidency, he very well might wind up in jail.
01:20:39.000They can't have him at 82 years old trying again.
01:20:44.000They're not interested because he became more popular.
01:20:48.000When he was gone than when he was president.
01:20:51.000And people sort of like towards the end of the four years of Biden had like completely reversed.
01:20:57.000So many of my friends, me included, completely reversed how they looked at him.
01:21:01.000And then also a lot of it was getting exposed to watching how this propaganda machine marches in step All throughout the media with everything.
01:21:11.000You know, me in particular having turned on me during the COVID years for being someone who got healthy without taking the vaccine and they wanted to get me removed from Spotify.
01:22:02.000He's got a guy on for like, how long was that podcast?
01:22:05.000Find out how long the Tucker Carlson podcast was with the guy who claims he blew Obama.
01:22:10.000Because just even being able to sustain a conversation with a guy who wants to talk about smoke and crack and blowing Obama How many minutes can you do?
01:22:51.000So that's Tucker with no one telling him what to do.
01:22:54.000The Tucker Carlson show, he does whatever he wants, he interviews whoever he wants, he comes up with the questions he wants, he has real conversations that didn't fucking exist before.
01:23:04.000And now that it does exist, and a guy like Tucker, who was the number one guy in news to begin with, now he's independent.
01:23:11.000Along with independent journalists like Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss and Glenn Greenwald.
01:23:18.000You have all these people that are honest.
01:24:09.000It'll be more right in the media, even, if it becomes profitable.
01:24:14.000Well, that's why what you're doing – I'm not here to kiss your ass, but I am grateful for being on your show.
01:24:18.000It's very nice of you to have me so I can talk about my stuff.
01:24:21.000But no, this is what you're doing and Tucker Carlson and so many of you podcasters who are out there offering another place for people to get information in the free exchange of ideas in a free country that cherishes free speech supposedly but no longer does.
01:25:09.000Hopefully, someone who is more informed has a more objective and more honest opinion, more accurate opinion, and then hopefully you're strong enough.
01:25:21.000That resonates with you, and you can put your ego beside you and go, you know what?
01:27:37.000It's super common with people that are very good at things.
01:27:41.000People that are very good at things, any one thing, like if you're a wizard at basketball, you probably think you're way better at playing pool than you really are.
01:28:17.000Everybody has this weird thing where they think they're different than everybody else.
01:28:22.000And that's what leads them to be champions, but that is also what makes it incredibly difficult to come back from a devastating loss for some of these guys.
01:28:31.000So if they fight a guy and, you know, they've been the fucking man for years, and all of a sudden they're in there with this guy and you're like, oh my god, I'm getting hurt right now.
01:28:40.000I'm getting hurt and I'm probably going to get stopped.
01:29:03.000I'm seeing it in this person that thought they were so good they could fight this other person.
01:29:10.000They didn't see it the way everybody else saw it.
01:29:13.000They didn't see that they were past their prime or they didn't see that this was a bigger weight class or whatever the variables are that lead to a devastating loss.
01:29:23.000Yeah, like Duran and Hearns in the 80s.
01:29:25.000They mismatched the size and Hearns knocked him out in the second round.
01:29:29.000Yeah, that was Tommy Hearns in his prime, man.
01:29:32.000Because you've got to realize Duran did go full 12 with Hagler when Hagler was in his prime.
01:29:38.000But Hagler had a respect for Duran that I think almost was unfortunate.
01:30:35.000I met Duran once when he was training for that Davey Moore fight in LA. And what you're saying about martial arts and boxing, there's so many life lessons experiencing that in the ring.
01:30:45.000I'm not here to say that I'm some great fighter like you were, but I fought the Golden Gloves when I was in high school.
01:30:50.000First time I ever got my name, the Chicago Tribune.
01:31:05.000Even just getting into the ring, having the courage in your fucking underwear to step through those ropes with those stupid shoes on and big pads over your head and you realize you're gonna just throw your hands at some other dude who's trying to KO you.
01:36:54.000It was quite a while before they started accepting even the idea of weightlifting.
01:37:00.000For a long time, boxers, we were just talking about this the other day with Bert Soren from SorenX, and he was saying that boxers were told that if they lifted weights, they would be really stiff until Evander Holyfield came around.
01:37:13.000And Evander Holyfield kind of changed everybody's opinion of it because he lifted weights, moved up to heavyweight from cruiserweight.
01:38:41.000I found by throwing myself into hard physical exercise, it really helped me soften that, lessen that emotional pain, that heartache, and it just made me feel less hurting.
01:38:53.000I hurt less by feeling Forcing physical pain on myself by running 10 miles, for example, on my first Christmas day because it was so brutal emotionally that I had to be at this shithole place for Christmas.
01:39:07.000Obviously, your situation was very extreme, and you needed relief in any way you could find it, through Jesus, through exercise, through everything, through constantly being aware.
01:39:17.000But for just any person listening to this, do something hard.
01:39:21.000Just make yourself do something hard all the time.
01:39:43.000If you met, like, some of my friends that fight in the UFC, if you didn't know who they were, and you met them, they're the most lovely people.
01:41:21.000To go back to Trump because the point you made I thought was really interesting that you got to have that kind of self-love to endure all of the shit they threw at him and you got to.
01:44:01.000Go into that shithole business I was in that I know all too well to have to deal with all these phony fucking politicians and suffer these assholes, these duplicitous hypocrites in your party and the other party, which is what most of them are.
01:44:13.000There's a lot of good ones, but more of them than not are full of shit, they're weak, they're cowardly, and they go along with the kind of trends that you were just talking about.
01:44:22.000When you go through something what Trump went through and you keep doing it, it's more than just his own self-love.
01:44:27.000I truly believe he has a genuine, abiding love in his country.
01:44:30.000I think in his mind, I'm guessing, I'm putting this in his mind, kind of thinking about my own kind of experience.
01:44:37.000He's saying to himself, if I have to go down fighting for my country, I'm going to do it, and I think that helps motivate him to get stronger and tougher.
01:44:45.000When he is convinced that it isn't just about his ego or himself, but it's something higher and bigger, like what America's supposed to be.
01:44:53.000And anybody that would push back against that, I would say, listen, before you even form an opinion, I want you to think about what happened when he got shot.
01:45:17.000Like, that's in the moment after getting hit by a bullet, covered by the Secret Service, guy behind him's dead, how many gunshots had wrung off?
01:46:18.000I have a friend of mine from the UK. When he moved over here, one of the first things he said was, in England, they try to push you down if you try to get ahead.
01:46:34.000That's the new Democratic Party today.
01:46:36.000It isn't about celebrating somebody else's success and saying, hey, I want to be like him, or that guy's success has actually created more opportunities for me to be better off than what I am now.
01:46:45.000It's instead, pull him down so we can make everybody equal.
01:46:48.000It's generally very energetic people who don't have any ambition.
01:46:53.000So they have all this energy and they put their energy into this nonsense instead of like sorting your life out and pursuing something for yourself.
01:47:33.000So if you want a quality of outcome and you don't have a quality of effort, then you have tyranny.
01:47:40.000Because then you have people who are a bunch of energetic people who don't have a lot of ambition and they don't have any talent and they want to control people.
01:47:47.000And they don't like when people achieve a higher social status than them or economics.
01:49:32.000But even if you don't have success, the fact that you gave your best at something should be a version of success that you can be happy with.
01:50:36.000And, you know, some people never get a chance to understand that, and you go through your whole life, and maybe you're following the guru who's the gay porn star, and then all of a sudden you realize, like, I've wasted my experience here.
01:50:51.000I don't have anything to show for all my time here.
01:50:53.000I've just been making mistake after mistake, and I never really figured out how to control my mind, and I never really figured out how to discipline myself into action, and here I am.
01:51:03.000Never figured out puzzles, and here I am.
01:52:48.000My wife, who is a remarkable person, when I think about all these different heroes that I've known, that I've read about in history books, I think about my wife and her quiet way, her heroism, how she kept her home, you know, raised our daughters.
01:53:04.000They're both good kids, our daughters.
01:53:05.000My older daughter, Amy, is a therapist, good education.
01:53:08.000She would like me to advocate for the Puppy Protection Act.
01:54:50.000But when a guy's in prison for more than four years, especially when he has a long time in prison, in more than 90% of the cases, the wife or the significant other leaves.
01:55:15.000I'm actually trying to do some public awareness on issues that are important, like some criminal justice reform stuff, because I've learned the hard way how just unjust the system is.
01:55:24.000And there is a bias in the criminal justice system that disproportionately has impacted the black community in a grossly unfair way.
01:55:31.000Have you ever seen any of my podcasts that I've done with Josh Dubin?
01:56:21.000What they got wrong was the sentences are ridiculously unfair and wrong, and they don't match up.
01:56:28.000And you got a nonviolent offender who first time did something wrong, whether it's a bank robbery or a drug offense or whatever it might be, and they're giving these guys 15, 20, 25 years because they have these One size fits off sentencing guidelines that the politicians pass.
01:56:57.000And so as a result, you got these people, disproportionately black but not exclusively, who are doing these long sentences for first-time offenses.
01:57:04.000Trump pardoned a woman named Alice Marie Johnson, first-time nonviolent offender, drugs.
01:57:25.000My father came from Serbia, and I'd like to try to do what I can to raise public awareness about the place of Serbia in the Balkans, because it's a country that we bombed in 1999, the United States and NATO bombed Serbia without the United Nations approval.
01:58:08.000There's more to everything, but the complication is the geopolitics of Europe and the Middle East, because Serbis and the Balkans is sort of a gateway to the Middle East.
01:58:21.000It's in Europe, but it's a gateway to the Middle East, and a lot of the political dynamics internationally are at play there.
01:58:27.000But the Serbs and the Serbian people were allies with the United States in both world wars.
01:58:56.000The Serbs are a small group of the United States and they don't have any political clout.
01:59:00.000But Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Jackson and I went there because three American soldiers were taken prisoner by the Serbs during the war.
01:59:08.000And no one knew what was going on with those soldiers, and so Reverend Jackson had this stature, and he was close to Clinton, and he went there.
01:59:18.000I went there because I speak the language, because my father came from that country, and I was able to assist him in getting the release of the three soldiers.
01:59:26.000This was the Milosevic government at the time.
01:59:32.000But what I like to talk about with regard to Serbia is it's a country in the Balkans that follows a Judeo-Christian tradition.
01:59:39.000It's very much like Israel in the sense that it's in a place where they're standing up for those sorts of things.
01:59:48.000And the Serbs have felt very betrayed by the United States for choosing to be on the side of countries that were with the excess and with the Nazis in World War II. And those wars down in the Balkans and throughout Europe are wars of ethnic cleansing.
02:00:10.000They're fighting for borders and they're fighting for villages and places where historically one group claims they had a claim to and another group claims they had a claim to.
02:00:21.000But the United States decided to pick sides and forced this country to give up a part of their country with a lot of significant religious monuments there.
02:00:29.000And this government that's there today very much wants to reopen relations with the United States and have better relations.
02:00:41.000In a poll recently of European countries, in this presidential election, Trump versus Kamala Harris, the Serbian people had the highest support of Trump.
02:00:55.000Something like 59% of the Serbian populace supported Trump in the last election, better than any other European country.
02:01:01.000And so whatever I can do to be helpful to my, you know, the place my father came from.
02:02:03.000Yeah, that's a huge, huge, huge position.
02:02:06.000So they all have these ideas to eliminate corruption or at least mitigate it and root out all the bad actors and find out what went wrong, right?
02:02:42.000And the two parties are split on some issues, but they play the game within certain parameters.
02:02:49.000And if somebody wants to think outside the box and challenge that and actually try to shake that up and change the priorities of how it operates, frankly, to actually benefit the people more, because the mindset there, and I know this because I was a congressman for six years and I was a governor for six years, the mindset isn't what we can do for the people back home.
02:03:07.000The mindset really is what the people back home can do for us and for all the different special interest groups that operate and are lunching up on this system.
02:03:15.000It's very real in every part of government.
02:03:17.000It's very real in the military-industrial complex, which is something Tulsi Gabbard and Hexeth and the others who, if they get their positions, are going to be addressing.
02:03:26.000The weaponized Department of Justice, very real.
02:03:29.000I'm a living testament to that, and so is Trump.
02:03:33.000The bureaucracy that's entrenched, that you have a hard time moving, these government employees, many of whom now are even going to the office.
02:03:49.000They're going to fight back, and they're going to keep trying to do to Trump what they've been doing.
02:03:53.000And I think the opportunity for the Trump administration, for President Trump, Trump and Lincoln are the only two presidents who never got a honeymoon.
02:04:23.000In Lincoln's case, the southern states seceded and left.
02:07:12.000This is the first time ever someone who didn't get elected through a primary is somehow or another the representative for the Democratic Party.
02:07:33.000They're hoping that your compliance that you showed through COVID and everything else, they're hoping that's going to go along with this and you're not going to stand up and go, hey, why don't you have a primary?
02:07:59.000They took away the rights of the people and the Democratic voters to choose their nominee and picked them in the back room.
02:08:05.000There's this one crazy video of this poor girl.
02:08:07.000She's like hysteric and she's talking to Kamala Harris and Kamala Harris is talking to her and she's like, don't worry, we're going to win.
02:08:15.000And she's like saying this to this poor girl, like a college girl, was like full of anxiety and all freaked out and just...
02:08:24.000I just get so upset when I watch that because what got in your head that got you thinking that some horrific end to women's rights is coming?
02:08:46.000My daughters are fearful of some of this.
02:08:49.000And that Donald Trump is this rotten guy and he's not those things.
02:08:54.000They've been demonizing him for so long and this is on purpose.
02:08:57.000This is part of the political strategy.
02:09:00.000And eventually, most of the people saw through it.
02:09:03.000And you don't give yourself enough credit, but when you had Trump on here and then you eventually made your decision, you swayed a lot of people and made a real difference in that election.
02:09:11.000So thank you for that, because I think that's part of saving America before America could become great again.
02:09:30.000There's wrongs in our history, of course, and the original sin of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation and the treatment of black people in America, that's all very real.
02:10:09.000Because I think wanting that reversed is what put this fear in everyone that you're coming after women's reproductive rights.
02:10:16.000That men, based on religious ideals, are going to tell women what to do with their bodies.
02:10:23.000If that didn't happen, I think it would have been an even bigger victory for Trump.
02:10:28.000Because I think that was one of the most important Subjects when it for women that was one of the most important things that they were willing to draw the line on Because they know where that goes they don't you as soon as you let someone have control over what you can and can't do with your body just like Just to a smaller stem,
02:10:49.000but like we've talked about with COVID with so many different things when people have power and control over people they abuse it and they manipulate it and if you all the sudden have laws so Whether these were unfounded fears or not, women were worried that people would get data from their fertility apps, right?
02:11:07.000So you have ovulation apps, and these ovulation apps you say when you had your period, and it keeps track of when you're ovulating.
02:11:16.000That if a woman had one of those apps and was living in a state because Roe v.
02:11:20.000Wade's been reversed where abortion is illegal and then she travels to another state and has an abortion that she could be prosecuted based on the laws of the state.
02:12:00.000You don't know what I'm doing in this state, and I don't want you...
02:12:04.000If someone has a miscarriage, and then they go visit a state that has abortion laws, and then they get visited by jackbooted thugs that think that they can impose the law and put some girl in jail to send a message...
02:12:45.000But there's a lot of people that make mistakes that if a man could get pregnant, if men could get pregnant, I always said abortion would be an app on your phone.
02:12:54.000We would have them at the gas station.
02:13:57.000But the idea of government doing what you just described, can you imagine a guy like me who's gone through what I've gone through with the government, what it did to me and to my family, not being sympathetic to what you just said about the fear women have?
02:14:19.000You know, I've talked to very intelligent, reasonable people that believe that life begins at the moment of conception, even in the case of race.
02:15:24.000Yeah, and a lot of those people who were demanding those masks and would deny your right to choose whether you have a vaccine or not, the same ones who are very much pro-choice when it comes to a woman's right to choose, but they don't apply the same standard to other things.
02:17:42.000So they all scatter around, but he spies out of the side of his eye, this little old lady in a corner trembling, standing there.
02:17:49.000And at that point, he recognized her, and he puts his bank robbery on pause, puts it on hold.
02:17:55.000And all of a sudden, he goes from this Mr. Hyde character, where he's screaming motherfucker with his assault weapon, to a gentle Dr. Jekyll.
02:18:50.000And they mostly always get what they ask for, these federal prosecutors.
02:18:54.000The defense lawyer recognized the judge was like 83 years old or something.
02:18:59.000They bring this little old lady in as a witness in what they call mitigation, a mitigation witness to say that Sox, the bank robber, had some good qualities.
02:19:09.000She tells the story about how kind he was to her in the midst of this bank robbery.
02:19:29.000And he lectured in my class and he talked about General Grandis Shiloh and he kept telling these guys, the motherfucker was a badass, dude!
02:20:03.000The real Ricky Ross who was selling cocaine, getting it from the government, and selling it in South Central Los Angeles, and not even knowing what he was a part of, funding the Contras versus the Sandinistas.
02:22:17.000And I write in the book about the day it looked like I was going to go home in August 2019. Trump was pulling me out.
02:22:23.000But he's getting all this pushback from the politicians.
02:22:26.000And he had a problem because he had called Zelensky in Ukraine.
02:22:30.000And the Democrats were going to impeach him over that telephone call, which was absolutely the right thing for him to do.
02:22:35.000Because there was evidence, videotape evidence of Joe Biden talking about Burisma and Hunter Biden, his son, and prosecuting, firing the prosecutor, or he's going to withhold a billion dollars of federal money, U.S. money, to Ukraine.
02:22:51.000Perhaps probable cause of a crime, but it's at least reasonable enough for the chief law enforcement officer, the president, to ask this guy, would you look into it?
02:22:58.000That's all he did, and they impeached him over it.
02:23:01.000But when it looked like I was coming out, I was literally transferred out of my camp, and they said, you're going home, Trump's sending you out, sending you home.
02:23:47.000I want to be successful, make money, things are good, have a best-selling book, maybe God willing, who knows.
02:23:52.000I'd like to meet your guy Rick Ross and others, and I'd like to have a foundation that actually does something meaningful, like maybe some sort of vocational training, culinary training for inmates who are coming home, have no opportunities, to learn a skill that they don't teach in prison, but they should.
02:24:07.000You should talk to Josh Dubin as well.
02:27:17.000And that's how the Democrats have approached the black community ever since.
02:27:21.000And it's, yes, we'll help only so much, but we're not going to give the tools or the means to be able to have the same kind of chance and opportunity in the economy where you can actually get up and get out of the neighborhood, get out of the hood, get out of the poverty, and join the middle class, you know, have a business, those sorts of practical things that most everywhere else in America, we have those chances, but ironically, not in the black community, because the Democrats don't want to leave.
02:27:51.00090 to 95 percent of a safe vote for them if they're free.
02:27:55.000Well, I think they lost a lot of it during this election.
02:27:58.000Because a lot of black folks looked at all these illegal aliens that are coming in here getting all these benefits and getting put up in the Roosevelt Hotel and getting free food and getting EBT cards.
02:28:51.000But if you can get 10%, 10% probably would give birth to 20 or 30 eventually.
02:28:56.000I think people would recognize like, oh, there's a path that I can get my children into that will give them a real secure future outside of this.
02:29:04.000And then you've got to do something about law enforcement.
02:29:07.000You've got to mitigate all the gang activity and violence.
02:29:10.000You can't have people growing up thinking that violence is the way and that drug dealing is the way and shooting people is normal.
02:30:16.000I wasn't exactly setting the world on fire.
02:30:18.000Instead of making the schools better, they lower the standards.
02:30:20.000And they just pump all kinds of money into it, and they need money.
02:30:23.000But they don't deny a mother, a single mother with a young child in the black community, a chance to have some choice on where she might want to send her child to school.
02:30:32.000So they're locked into that special interest politics and control of the teachers' unions that have that kind of influence.
02:30:38.000There should be some real concerted effort to raise the standard of all schools, all of them, significantly.
02:30:47.000And again, I keep going to Ukraine, but if we're a country that's like, what are we, a trillion dollars?
02:30:52.000How many trillions of dollars in debt are we?
02:31:34.000How much would it actually cost to just with Like proper planning, a real strategy, and hire the best professionals you possibly can, compensate them well with a goal entirely focused on fixing the education system in America.
02:31:51.000Taking our standing where we are internationally, which is very low now, and raising it back up to the top.
02:32:21.000But it is less of a part than actually...
02:32:24.000Having some sort of system of accountability so that there's actually results.
02:32:30.000Unfortunately, in the education system, at least in places like Chicago, for example, the public school system of which I come from, the priority of that union, the teachers' union, is less the children.
02:32:43.000It's all about their members and the teachers.
02:32:45.000And so they resist any kinds of changes that would maybe make for the classroom environment to be more conducive to teach a child.
02:32:53.000Things like merit pay, which is controversial, but they resist even out of hand the chance that maybe you provide bonuses to teachers who are successful in raising up a child's test scores.
02:33:04.000And then test scores alone aren't the best evidence of whether or not a child is learning.
02:33:07.000So there's these are complicated things.
02:33:10.000You have to have the money necessary to do it, but it doesn't have to be an astronomical sum.
02:33:14.000They've got to change the way they are teaching our children.
02:33:16.000And I think you can learn from other countries and see what other countries are doing successfully and try to bring that here.
02:33:21.000The problem you get is the politics in America and the Democratic Party.
02:33:25.000It's controlled by many different interest groups and the teachers unions, the education association.
02:33:34.000Those unions have an unbelievable amount of sway and Democratic candidates are afraid of them, plus they need them to win.
02:33:42.000So the complications are more administrative than they are money.
02:33:47.000And the concern of taxpayers that you keep throwing money, good money after money that's not working, is a legitimate one.
02:33:53.000Look, I could have done more on this issue when I was governor, when I had that power.
02:33:56.000We put a lot of money to the schools, but it was hard for me to be able to get accountability in the politics of it.
02:34:02.000So you think that even if there was some sort of a executive order or some sort of bill that gets passed where they concentrate entirely on raising the standard of education at whatever it costs, like this is a priority for our country.
02:34:19.000The more people that we have that are highly educated, the less losers, the less crime, the less everything.
02:34:23.000The more people participate, the better the dream gets, the more competition there is.
02:34:38.000The teachers union would be the first place, but they see the way the special interest group in government, the special interest groups work in government is...
02:34:50.000So the teachers union is a powerful group.
02:34:53.000By themselves, they would have a hard time stopping that, but they would enlist the support of other groups that they have supported in some of their issues.
02:35:01.000And suddenly you've got not just the teachers unions, but you got the AFL-CIO, you got, you know, the United Auto Workers, you got all these different unions lining up.
02:35:10.000And then couple that with some of the, you know, some of the more progressive interest groups, the LGBTQ perhaps.
02:35:16.000The women, you know, the pro-choice group, Planned Parenthood, those are organizations that have those alliances with the unions, even though their interests, their issues are far apart.
02:35:30.000The concerns they have are very different, and they don't match up, but they've got these coalitions.
02:35:34.000So you have to get over all of that in order to be successful, not to mention the fact that you've got You know, natural resistance to, you know, significant change.
02:35:42.000But if you're looking for a place that's crying out for major reform, all you got to do is look at the performance of kids that come out of public schools and poor neighborhoods and say there's something really wrong here.
02:35:52.000And it's black kids who are disproportionately getting screwed.
02:35:54.000And then there's also the factor of they're growing up in crime-ridden neighborhoods and they're probably not getting enough nourishment.
02:36:02.000There's a lot of factors that would also inhibit your ability to even absorb information, the stress and the trauma.
02:36:09.000So what you really got to do is fix all that in cities.
02:36:13.000How much would it cost to significantly put a dent in crime in all cities and do it in a way where people didn't think you're sending the military in to clean up?
02:36:55.000Because of the politics of things and their relationships, they've ignored or actually butchered common sense.
02:37:04.000And one of the things about the Trump administration that offers hope is that there'll be a restoration of common sense in terms of its approach to things.
02:37:12.000And one of the good things about this last election and with podcasts like yours and these other alternative places where people can get information is that you can think outside the box and start to do new things that are different as opposed to the same old things that give the same old results.
02:37:30.000And I would suggest that if you want to stop crime and end the mass incarceration in America, educate the kids when they're young and give them a chance to have the skills they need so they can do something other than sell drugs.
02:37:44.000If you were a part of the administration, if Donald Trump heard this conversation and said, you know what, I think he's right, and I think we can do something about it, what would you do?
02:39:11.000Like legit, you can say that unironically.
02:39:14.000If my friend Spade, you know, Joe Nairmore is listening, shout out to Joe Nairmore or Walter Hill or G, Gregory Blalock, drug dealer from South Side of Chicago.
02:39:21.000Imagine any other guy who is a former governor saying homies and having it be authentic.
02:39:40.000Yeah, and I try to help them as much as I can now within my limited ability, but the way I can really help is I think I can bring a perspective on how merciless our criminal justice system is, and how we do have a country of mass incarceration, and how this woman, a black woman, wrote this best-selling book called The New Jim Crow, and how it's an excuse and a reason to discriminate against black people based upon their felony convictions.
02:40:07.000How they go to prison, but they're not guided to actually learn the skills that they could use one day when they get out of prison.
02:40:37.000My feeling is probably not, but maybe you can do some version of that.
02:40:43.000By contracting out to some private companies to come in and educate inmates, which might be interesting.
02:40:49.000Bring some private companies in that could teach vocational training, particularly culinary skills, which is very much something where you can get out of prison and have a chance to get a job, maybe get your own restaurant, start your own business.
02:41:06.000But as it is right now, government doing it, they're not doing it.
02:41:09.000By the way, if you want an argument against, you know, socialized medicine, and I believe healthcare is a human right, and I believe I was the healthcare governor, I frankly think, Joe, even though I'm the only governor impeached in Illinois history, and they won't even let my portrait up there in the state capitol, I'm the only one.
02:42:25.000You've got to undo some of those guidelines, because these judges are required by law to whack a guy.
02:42:31.000Because he fits certain criteria, but they don't look at the other stuff in his life, that this guy's never had a crime before, that he's got a family, that he's actually done good works.
02:42:40.000Those things are taken into consideration when they have these guidelines that the judges have to follow.
02:42:46.000They were pushed by prosecutors to give them the tools to go after criminal behavior.
02:42:52.000How much of an effort, once you actually get inside, is there to rehabilitate you?
02:43:59.000You know, some of them, Fu Manchu, you know, they look like Genghis Khan, some of them, right?
02:44:04.000You got these racist Nazi guys with swastikas tatted on them, right?
02:44:09.000And they're all of a sudden on this particular day, they're wearing caps and gowns.
02:44:13.000And here me, the former governor of Illinois, once thought about, believe it or not, as a presidential candidate, I'm about to sing Jailhouse Rock to these guys, right?
02:44:25.000We had practiced for a year, because there was a way to get your bind out of prison was embracing music, and they have a music room there with good acoustics and there was a guy who was I had the head of the music department, an inmate.
02:44:36.000A drug dude who went to Berkeley, the music school in Boston.
02:45:26.000But before I do, I catch the warden, and I had been told sometime before that the warden has the power in a federal prison under certain circumstances where he could actually release an inmate without the court.
02:45:38.000And in one particular case, some guy was slicing up another inmate, almost killed him, and a third inmate intervened and stopped the fight and saved the guy's life.
02:45:49.000The aggressor got more criminal charges against him and got sent to an even higher prison.
02:47:03.000And I'm glad I listened to you on Tucker, and I got a different sense of who you were than what the narrative was that I saw over the media.
02:47:09.000Obviously, I don't know what happened, but I think you're a good dude, and I enjoyed talking to you.