Mike Lindell details his recovery from crack addiction via faith-based interventions and the "Lindell Recovery Network," contrasting spiritual healing with secular models. He defends Donald Trump against media attacks, criticizes socialist policies as replacing God with government, and outlines plans for a new recovery platform employing former addicts. Lindell argues that America's lack of spiritual foundation drives modern addiction, suggesting only a national crisis could restore faith, while also promoting his MyPillow business and potential 2022 gubernatorial run. [Automatically generated summary]
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Today's podcast may just wear you out.
This is one of the more dynamic men I have ever met.
And you would not think inspiration could come from a pillow.
I mean, you know, those pillows that are monogrammed with cheesy, you know, meaningful phrases like live, laugh, love.
No, a pillow that is so good, the president of the United States became a friend with a guy who makes them.
He is a guy who invented a pillow, an open-cell polyfoam pillow that has transformed many lives.
You have seen him on television, and he believes that all of it from the pillow design all the way to what he's doing today comes from God.
And it's that pillow that is at the center of it.
Out of it, he built a multi-million dollar empire.
He became a celebrity, friends with the president of the United States.
But that's not what that empire is for, as you will hear today.
Part of the inspiration that comes from him is the rise from the very lowest of low of addiction of hard drugs, cocaine, alcohol, crack.
It's the American story of a little boy who, at seven, his parents get a divorce at that time, almost unheard of, and is lost, but then sees the unbelievable possibilities that America offers.
It's really hard to become a multimillionaire.
It's even harder to become a multimillionaire after overcoming a crack cocaine addiction.
And it is also even harder to keep that or to grow that when you are the friend of an outspoken friend of somebody that half the country wants to destroy.
All of his products are made here in America, and the pillow was the cornerstone.
But his next journey take him into addiction recovery, really service, and possibly a governorship.
Today on the podcast, the one and the only Mike Lindell.
The first time I met you, you wore me out.
You have more energy than anyone I think I know.
And you're operating at a thousand miles an hour all the time.
Yeah.
You hear that a lot?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
The Aaron Jerry buddy.
Yeah.
So you're like, it's crazy.
And I want to talk to you about your business.
I want to talk about Trump.
I want to talk about the future.
But I really want to start with, I think the key to you is understanding where you came from.
So tell me about your early life because you, most people don't know this.
And I don't think I've ever said this to a guy sitting across from me in a suit.
You're a crack addict.
Right.
That's a pretty big deal.
Yeah.
And you went through hell.
So give me just the buildup to prior to crack.
Okay.
Well, you know, I came from, you know, these are things I know now that I didn't know then.
Sure, sure, sure.
My family, my mom and dad divorced when I was seven years old.
I was the oldest child.
Divorces weren't common then.
I was the only kid in this new school that was from a divorced family.
A year.
A year.
It was 1968 or something.
So that's really early.
Yeah.
So that manifested into, I can look back now, into either showing off to fit in, like climbing.
You know, I told my friend, watch this, I'll jump out of the window.
The bus is going 40 miles an hour, you know, to just to do things to show off, or I wouldn't talk to people.
I mean, it was very, especially if I didn't know them.
You know, I mean, if I didn't, it took a long time to fit in.
And that all the way through up until I ended up doing cocaine in the early 80s.
All of a sudden, then I did cocaine.
I'm going, wow, I can, you know, it's a masperpain.
It's a mass, because I do believe addiction is not a disease.
I believe it comes from fatherlessness and father wounds, mother wounds.
And I have to tell you, I don't.
Trauma.
I'm a recovering alcoholic and did drugs my whole life up until I was about 30.
And I always say, you know, people are like, it's a disease.
I don't really care if it's a disease or not.
It's still my choice on what I'm going to do with it.
I could be born with, you know, no legs.
Right.
It's what I do with it.
And I think that alcoholism, drug addiction is a way that people, it's at first easier to cope.
Oh, yeah.
When you have something that will ease the pain.
False courage, false courage.
Give you courage to be who you are or who you think you are.
And then it becomes this trap to where I have to have this because I'm not talking just about the addiction.
I'm talking about the mental addiction of I can't perform.
I used to believe I was a better dad because I was drunk.
I read that.
I had the same thing.
There were so many similarities.
I'm going, I can't be anything I did.
If I be pool player, if I was playing pool, I had to be high.
I'm a better player.
I'm a better person.
At my five-year reunion, this is kind of a, I can remember all of them had graduated.
I had never graduated from college.
I only had two quarters, two semesters in dropping college.
They won.
I had so much in common.
And I didn't finish my second one.
But at my five-year reunion, all of them had either graduated from college, started families, had careers, not jobs.
They were moved up.
I had worked at a drive-in movie theater in a grocery store and got fired at the grocery store.
But I took over the reunion telling them about, you know, guys, I owe the mafia 20 grand for football bets.
They came to my house to kill me.
I crashed my motorcycle, fell asleep going skydiving, and my parachute didn't open.
I mean, I took over these.
They were true or not true.
They're all true.
They were all true.
But it was my self-worth.
Wow, I'm the center of attention.
I got home that night and laid in bed, and it was a sadness just engulfed me.
I'll never forget that.
Deep down, all I wanted was what they had.
You know, I can sit here and tear up now just thinking of that person back then, my other self.
All I wanted was that.
And back then, I'm even praying, you know, God, if I, you know, I'm thinking of grandchildren even then because I wasn't where I was at in my life that I knew I could have been.
And it was just very painful.
So what was the hole you were trying to fill?
You know, I don't know.
You know, back, you know, I think.
When your parents got divorced, who'd you live with, mom or dad?
My mom, my mom.
Were your parents kind of cool with each other?
Was it?
Yeah, they were cool.
But my dad, it was like a couple of years there where he was completely gone.
They see him once for six months.
And then my mom remarried to my stepdad.
But it was also, it was also, you know, I guess I can't blame it all on that, but there's different wounds we have as a child.
But that was one of the things that, You know, where I always felt different.
I just felt different from all my classmates.
I, you know, I lived in, I've always lived close to home.
I always felt there's no way I can live somewhere else as strangers.
And, you know, I lived in Las Vegas once for two months.
I was a professional card counter at one time.
And I lived there for two months and never talked to a soul other than the dealer.
It's, you know, because you have an agenda to talk to him.
You know, this went all the way up through, you know, with the pillow.
When I finally invented the pillow, I was turned down everywhere.
And someone said, well, Mike, why don't you do a kiosk?
We did this kiosk.
I could only be there one day.
I hated it because people would come up.
And obviously, I wasn't on crack at the time.
I mean, you know, that day anyway.
Because that's a different drug.
You're so paranoid peeking out windows.
But this guy came up and I couldn't talk to people because they come right up to the kiosk.
They're right in your face.
And I didn't even really know what I had with the pillow, how big it was going to get.
But this guy said, Mike, do you have a business card?
I said, no, I'm all out.
And I wrote on a piece of paper.
I didn't have the business card and gave him the phone number.
Well, we were completely broke and had to borrow money for Christmas presents that year.
That guy called me on like January 10th and said, Are you the guy that invented this pillow in Minnesota?
I said, Yeah.
And he said, Well, this pillow changed my life.
He said, I run the Minneapolis Home and Garden Show.
Would you like a spot in there?
And so I said, Sure.
Now, I didn't know how it was going to work, but I did one thing.
I put a table.
I wouldn't let people in the booth.
So there's a table where they're coming to me.
And I got this like shield, right?
And, you know, I look back now.
You can't get rejected if you don't talk to people.
That was a big thing.
But these people that bought pillows from me that day, then it's like God sent them back the next day.
All of them showed up.
There must have been 10, 15 to told me how the pillow changed their life.
Wow, this pillow changed my life.
And what's it do?
I didn't even know what it did then, you know.
And but it made me feel good inside.
It gave me some self-worth.
It wasn't about the money.
I could care less about the money.
It was about this self-worth.
If I stepped out from behind that table, hey, I got to go.
I owned a bar for 13 years, a small hometown bar.
And I remember people would come in that if no one was in there, just a stranger.
And I would, it wouldn't be like, you know, a typical bartender.
I'd give them a drink, say, let me know if you need anything.
I'd be over in the corner and go, I wish they'd leave if I wasn't high or drunk.
And that was me not wanting to, I thought, I just thought I didn't like small talk.
That was my excuse.
I didn't like small talk.
But it was wounds, unworthiness.
I think unworthiness is that, you know.
It is when I first started to sober up, I was, and I don't know if you were the same way.
I was like, I'm just going to give all my stuff away.
And anything I collect, you know, you're just like, all of a sudden, you go from one extreme to another.
All of a sudden, you're Gandhi and you're like, I'm just going to walk around in swindles.
Right?
And I remember that I used to say, I hate people.
But what I realized, I hated me.
I was so full.
So similar.
So similar.
And then once you discover that, wait, it's a self-worth problem.
And you start to rebuild that.
You're fascinated by other people.
Absolutely.
And you realize it was yourself.
Yeah.
And you realize, oh my gosh, I have so much in common.
Really, you feel that way?
We spend all of our time.
It's such a trick of, well, I know you're religious than me.
It's the same trick that makes us say, shut up.
If they know about you, if they know what you're thinking, they won't like you.
That's right.
And that just piles on, but once you start to say- Just put it out there, yeah.
Everybody right.
And all of a sudden, everybody's like, you are so brave.
And you're like, no, no, you feel that way too.
I'm just dumb enough to say it because I know you're feeling that way.
It's so refreshing to see someone who gets that.
My whole book is that.
That's what I realized.
And people say, when did I realize that?
Just in the last three years, did I find, as I was writing my book, going, wow, this is why I was always fear of rejection.
You can't get rejection.
I wouldn't talk to people.
I was the same way.
I don't like them.
I don't want to talk to them.
I don't like people.
I would think that.
That was the devil telling me, but it was myself.
It was all this stuff down here and these wounds and my self-worth and this on where the devil's lie.
Yeah.
Basically.
So let me go back now.
So when do you start smoking?
I mean, because crack is pretty.
Yeah, crack is.
As Whitney Houston once said, crack is whack.
Right.
Well, let me tell you, you know, people, when I, this is kind of funny, when I started to get real famous, everyone's going, now, Mike, just say you had addiction problems.
Don't say crack.
I said, I went right out there.
No, I was a crack addict because we didn't make fun of anything else.
We didn't say, what do you want?
Heroin?
No, it was, what do you want?
Crack?
I mean, that was how bad it was.
What do you want?
Crack?
That was a joke that people made of it.
And it was the early 2000s.
I had my, I was a very functioning cocaine addict, an addict, a gambler and everything for 20, about, you know, from 84 to about 2001, right around the year 2000.
And I raised a family on a 20-year marriage, raised four kids, and very functioning.
Well, then that switched to crack around 2000.
was one one night was that here's what happened the Funny, a friend of mine came out from up north, and he, we'd always go after the bars closed, we'd go out and we would go to my buddy's house.
We'd all be doing cocaine.
And he came in.
He hadn't been gone for six months.
And these guys took their cocaine and they went in the other room and he goes, what are they doing?
I go, oh, they go in there and they're cooking it up with baking soda.
Navigating Addiction's 12 Steps00:13:57
You have to make the crack.
And I said, then they get paranoid.
It changes the structure.
So now crack is different.
Now they're all peeking out windows.
Anybody that's a crack addict knows the horror of this.
You're not going to be in a bar if you're on crack.
You're going to be hiding out, peeking out windows.
And we looked at each other and he said, I go, yeah, it's terrible.
We don't even talk anymore.
And he goes, and we both made a pact.
We're never going to be like them.
We end up being the worst two.
Really?
It was one fateful night I was at my bar and I was out of cocaine.
And a guy said, he goes, I got some cracks, the same thing.
You know, just try it.
And I had a, just every time I did something, it was like, no, I'm not doing that.
You know, it's worse than what I'm doing.
I'm above that.
I'm above that.
I'm not doing this.
And so I ended up doing it.
And it grabs you.
What crack does, it'll grab you and do this stuff.
You get there instantly.
And it's like you don't have any downfalls.
You can eat on it.
You can sleep.
But then it does this, just the devil's candy.
It flips on you.
And then you're done.
There's a say, I read it somewhere.
It takes 30, or I think it's like 30 years for anyone that's ever touched alcohol, did even one shot for one drink of alcohol to chronic alcoholics.
It would take the average, I think it's 28 years, I read somewhere, for them to, where it finally affects your life.
You know, that's all the way from nobody to cocaine's like three and a half years.
Crack is two weeks.
So that means the only ones that ever, that I've ever seen quit on that after that first time, is it either scares them, that it's so, you know, that it's just off the charts and it scares them.
So they quit.
But once you get that second one, I don't have no one.
In fact, in my book, the drug dealers that when they knew I switched to crack, they looked at me and said, you just ruined your life.
I said, well, don't you know anyone that's ever quit or gone back?
And they go, no.
So, and that kind of challenged me in the fact that I knew someday I would quit.
And when I did, you know, all my friends have quit now.
So I can sit here and say, because I was their hope.
You know, they're saying, wow, if Mike can do it, you know, we can all do it.
And they've all quit.
And we knew who everyone was.
Every single crack addict, you knew who they were.
And I'm not saying, but one thing I want people to know, I'm not saying that anyone can handle cocaine.
Every addiction is an addiction, whether it's overeating, porn.
No, you know what?
And it's amazing.
My mother committed suicide, but she was a drug addict to prescription drugs and tried to get away from them and couldn't get away from them.
And, you know, when it came to it, she committed suicide because her bottom was death.
Everybody's bottom is different.
Luckily, you know, I remember I did cocaine quite a bit for a short period of time until I remember getting up one morning and, you know, blood all over my face and I felt like crap and I thought, what am I doing?
Right.
And I luckily got away from it.
Otherwise, it could have killed me.
Not everybody has those same experiences and same bottoms.
Right.
You know, you know, if we, and to kind of skip ahead, I will say this, but when my Lindell Recovery Network that's coming out, one of the things I have on there is these hope matches, and they're not going to talk about bottoms.
An addict can't relate to someone else's bottom.
You know, if someone says, you know, you got an advertisement for a treatment center or something, you know, well, I was, I rolled my car and killed three people and I quit forever and blah, blah, blah.
Well, an addict either thinks I'm either worse than them or I'm not as bad.
Either one or two.
So all I'm doing is the commonality of the drug.
So you'll put in your age and your addiction and you're going to have all these people.
I have thousands of these two-minute videos where all they're going to say is what they didn't like about the drug.
So like I would do crack.
I didn't like about crack was peeking out windows.
I didn't like running out of chore boy.
I didn't like running out of baking soda.
I didn't like farming.
A crack addict knows what I'm talking about and you see these pictures that you're set free.
These are these hope matches that I'll be talking about.
And because right now it's just sad in this country, addiction is one of the biggest problems we have and it's the most preyed upon by Google AdWords and everybody, you know, you put in addiction, all these secular treatment centers.
Addiction is a disease.
They're preying on the family going, does your loved one have insurance?
You know, boy, you can cash in your 401k for 30 grand.
You know, we can get him help.
And it doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
It's amazing to me.
I mean, you were incur, they were called incurables up until really the 1920s and 1930s.
If you were just an alcoholic, forget drug addict.
You were just an alcoholic.
You were doomed.
You were doomed.
Doomed.
I mean, most people don't know that morphine, no, sorry, heroin was developed by the Bear Aspirin Company as a way to cure alcoholism.
They said two weeks of this and you will not drink again.
Well, of course, it's heroin.
It's like, give me crack, I'll quit gambling.
In fact, that's a lot of stuff going on right now where they're given Suboxone for heroin.
I mean, it's still a drug.
So the thing that Bill W. did is he took religious principles.
Absolutely.
Religious people used to say, that's the devil's firewater.
And don't do that or you're going to go to hell.
Bill took this system and went, well, what is the whole?
Right.
And what is it that Christ and the gospel actually teaches us about?
Absolutely.
And it is the only thing that works.
Anybody who's trying to get off without that 12-step system, which is so biblical, you ain't going to make it.
You ain't going to make it.
And you use Jesus as in that 12 steps.
And I'll tell you, that's why your faith-based treatment, your teen challenges, Salvation Army, Union Gospels.
I have vetted over 3,800 faith-based centers we have in this country.
It took two years.
Every one of them works.
They have 80% and up success.
Secular, like 10% or 15% lower.
There's a reason for that.
You're replacing, here's what happened.
You know, in the 1980s, Glenn, I would go to, I would go, everyone would, you get your DWIs, you'd go to, so you got a lower sentence from the judge.
You'd run to a secular treatment center and you put yourself in, and whether it was outpatient or in, and you're in there and they're going, well, look at all the money you spent and you've hurt your parents or your children and how you're such a rotten person.
You get out of there and you feel worse.
And now I don't have my stuff and it's a ticking time bomb or time bomb waiting for, let's say, Uncle Joe dies and then everyone goes, well, can you blame him?
He went back to alcohol.
Or his wife didn't wait for him or his girlfriend didn't or his kids still hate him.
Well, now, if you didn't feel that, if you didn't feel those, you know, address those, why you were an addict in the first place.
That's what these places do.
That's what the 12 steps, you find out why you were, you know, what manifested into addiction.
It's not just, I mean, then you fill it with Jesus, you'll restore that heart.
Right.
You know, the steps are really terrifying when you're first, you know, at step one.
They're terrifying.
But when you get, for instance, I went through all the 12 steps, but then, and I believed in God and I believed in Jesus and everything.
But it took, for me at least, it took baptism.
And whether it is true or not, it doesn't matter.
You know, Jordan Peterson says this at all.
Doesn't matter.
Now, I happen to believe it's all true.
Absolutely.
But there is something about someone else, a higher power that says you're forgiven.
Yeah, you're forgiven.
All of this is taken away.
When you believe that, that's when you can be truly healed.
Without that, you don't, I don't know how you live with the things that were, A, dragging you down, and then all the things you did because of those.
You're just, you end up just feeling like I'm the worst person in the world.
Absolutely.
And that's why your faith-based centers, when people come out of them, or if you're 12 steps using Jesus Christ as your higher power, and when you got that, you have your hearts restored.
You have a foundation, at least, something for, because let me tell you, when you, I don't care if you get out of treatment or whatever, you're not going to get trust right away, as you know that.
You know, who trusted me first?
My drug dealers.
They knew I was never, you know, that I was over.
And it took time to build that trust.
So you're not going to have that.
And so many addicts, so many addicts worry that, trust me, they're ready to set the world on fire.
And then it's not like a country song.
You don't get, and even if you do have Jesus, you don't get your dog back.
Your truck doesn't start.
And maybe your girlfriend or wife or husband doesn't wait for you.
And maybe your kids still hate you.
So it's not a country song going backwards.
I mean, this is, you need to be okay with yourself.
Forgive yourself like Jesus forgave us.
And you get there and now you have this rock foundation and you can move on.
And once you're set free, by the way, I will tell everyone out there, there's no harder work than ex-addicts that have got restored because they're ready to, you know, addiction's hard work, as you know.
People say to me, I'm sure they do too, oh, you work so hard.
You're always doing this.
I go, I love what I'm doing.
Addiction was hard work.
I can think back and put myself in every day just, you know, to do this, just to navigate the addiction.
You know, it was horrible.
Horrible.
And you feel, you know, I tell a story all the time that there was a time where I was down on the ground and I realized you either follow your steps of your mom and kill yourself or you get the heck up.
And I always tell that story that I got up and, you know, the next day it was worse.
You know what I mean?
It doesn't, it's not like, oh, and the next day I was out.
It is so incredibly hard to be able to make that journey.
And I want to ask you, you just mentioned trust.
When you lose everything in your life, which I did, did you lose everything?
Everything.
Everything.
You realize that the only thing you actually own that matters is your word.
Yep, that's right.
Right?
And you so desperately want to look somebody in the eye and say, well, this is really how I feel.
No, I really believe this.
And I want you to address that moment when you realized how important that was and what that felt like and where that led you.
Well, I think that's what actually saved me because, you know, I invented my pillow in 2004 and I quit everything in 2009.
So all throughout when I did shows and fairs for seven years when nobody would take me, I'd be on the road.
I never broke my word to the show promoters.
You know, I kind of kept, I had to, you know, nail by to keep the addiction and keep, I had, I kept my integrity, kept my word.
I think God protected me there because where my pillow was just a pulse, you know, I didn't break that word.
And I think, but I did to a, you know, to a lot of other, a lot of other, you know, if you took that out of the equation, breaking that word, that's hard to get back because you don't.
I remember my best friend breaking a word to him where I had always borrowed money.
I'd always go for my word.
I never would break that with anyone.
Even the drug dealers would give me money plus stuff.
I'd say, I'll pay you back double tomorrow.
And I never would break my word.
My best friend, I ended up, I was in jail.
I got put in jail for some ticket or driving ticket or whatever.
So I didn't have the money to pay him.
So I go, wow, this works out perfect.
You know, he'll be fine that I was in jail.
He completely, he was, it just crushed him that I broke my word.
I could have called him from jail, of course.
I said, well, I was in jail.
You know, I used it for an excuse.
That hurt me breaking my word to him, breaking my word to my kids a couple of times where I can remember my one son tearing up in the driveway and saying, you know, I got to move out.
You know, he was 18.
And that's hurtful.
And those are things you can't bring back.
But it takes time once you're set free.
And that will come back, but it takes time.
You know, we all have an idea of what our dream job looks like, but somebody isn't going to just hand it to you.
Odds are you need at least a bachelor's degree to make that dream a reality.
And I know it's hard to go back and, you know, go back to school while you're working.
I did it when I was 30.
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For me, I made a pact with God.
A Pact With God00:09:42
Take this away from me and I will serve you.
And I will not break my word.
Harder to do with him.
Right, right.
His demands are a little higher.
But I've worked so hard on that.
The political mess, and I don't want to concentrate on this right now, but I would like to touch on that.
Well, yeah, absolutely.
The political mess that we're going through right now.
The only thing that has really deeply affected me is when people say, you're only saying these things for money.
You're only doing this for that.
You're only because that is the only thing I own.
And I know the value of that.
Have you, now that you are friends with Donald Trump, have you gone through that crucible where you have protected that integrity for so long and worked to make sure it's rock solid?
Yeah, I think so.
For example, I had a Republican in the last election want me to do a Digdonor event, and they were pro-choice.
I said, are you crazy?
I'm not doing this.
Well, I'm right in the middle.
I said, there is no middle.
I said, here would be.
And I said, I said, here would be the headlines.
Mike Lindell goes against his Christian values to back a Republican.
I'm done then.
My integrity is gone.
Where I am with God, it just so happens that I'm glad Donald Trump has took the Republican Party, kind of made it the Common Sense Party now, and matching it.
It keeps matching more and more of my Christian values.
And I've been able to keep my integrity.
I just don't back down.
In fact, they say there's a cartoon out that says, Mike Lindell, all the Democrats are in a room and they go, what are we going to do with Mike Lindell?
And they go, what do you mean?
He goes, well, he wrecked half of it.
Didn't you hear?
He wrecked half of his brain when he was on crack.
Now he has no realization of any self-doubt.
And it's kind of a cool thing.
I said that was by Steve Colbert.
I sent him pillows.
I go, thanks, David.
That was a pillow.
But it just kind of tells you where I stand.
I don't think my integrity people know.
When I went into the election.
Does it bother you that knowing that you are like that, does it bother you when people try to smear your integrity when it's not you?
Right.
It did.
Where it did, I got a realization, a slap in the face right away.
In the summer of 2016, now you realize when I came out of addiction, I didn't know anything about politics.
And then when I ended up this, I had a dream one night.
I'd be going to meet Donald Trump in 2015.
And then he ran for president.
And then I'm going, boy, I better learn what everything is.
I never voted.
I didn't know politics were important.
I didn't know anything about politics.
I didn't think they were important.
But when I came out of addiction, I'm going, wow, my friends are unemployed.
Everyone's got lost their houses.
There's a president giving money to an evil empire.
And I go, what did I miss?
I literally am going, what did I miss?
So I come from a blank slate.
And I had, by a divine appointment, I met Donald Trump.
Now, this is the summer of 16, August 15, 2016.
I get invited by him personally to meet him in a private meeting.
And I fly out to New York.
I don't even know if I'd have been to New York before.
And I guess I had.
And I fly out there and it's a half-hour meeting.
And we're talking about, you know, right up, they say, whatever you do, don't tell him you're on crack and don't, you know, an ex-addict and you're never going to meet him alone.
But divine appointments, I end up meeting him alone.
One of the first things I said, I was an ex-crack addict, you know.
But I told him where my passion was.
I was going to have a big platform to help addicts.
And everything he told me, what he was going to do, he liked the fact that I made all my product, your pillows.
And we talked for a half hour.
And I just, I've been around everyone from no forks to four forks.
And I 100% was all in because what an advantage.
I got to see the person, read him, and know that he had no agenda other than to help this country and help us as individuals.
And he didn't ask for money.
This wasn't a money thing.
This was just a real person.
And all these things, I go, wow, if he does all this, this is incredible.
But I walked out of that room, talked to his employees.
And I mean, I went deep, okay?
I'm going, hey, what do you think of your boss?
Everyone, most of them were women and minorities going, this guy's the best.
He personally, they all had a personal story how he had helped him.
So I'm going to go all in.
I flew back to Minnesota and I went.
And now back then I could say to the media, I'm walking across the street and they'd all be there with their microphones, right?
I went to my boardroom and I said, you guys, I'm going to do a press release.
I want to tell everyone about Donald Trump.
I said, this, you know, we got to go all in.
This is mad.
Everything he's going to say he's going to do is amazing.
Well, my board, one guy said, Mike, if you do that, you're going to ruin our company.
And you're like, you know, you're going to ruin half of the country by our pillow.
Walked out of that room and I was mad.
My CMO came out.
She goes, Mike, we didn't get all this way by you not listening to God.
I went back in that boardroom.
I said, we didn't get all this way by listening to God.
I'm doing that press release.
I did it the next day, and none of them took me on.
Six of the venues, six of the outlets from a newspaper to TV, all sent me emails calling me a racist and calling me all this stuff.
I go, what are you kidding?
And they dug up dirt on me that hadn't, that I had already told people, but they dug up all this dirt.
Then when he wins the election, they took me for the better business, but from an A-plus to an F for my pillow.
I mean, I was just attacked and I'm going, God, did I make, I never doubted myself, but I'm going, God, you need to protect me here.
You know, I'm like, I know I'm doing the right thing that I'm supposed to do this.
And then by a series of divine things, an article came out five days after they did that announcement that told my whole story to the country.
And all the country then attacked them.
It stuck up for me.
You know, it was like 95%.
It was this small voice down there that was the bad.
And since that time, it's almost now I can, I've kind of like broke through where I can go on TV now and talk good.
I can speak out for Jesus.
Like I wore my cross on TV.
I got attacked for that too many times.
And now I can speak out for him or speak great things about the president.
And I don't get attacked anymore.
You know, what happens is on Twitter, they'll go, boycott Mike Lindell on my pillow.
And then another guy will say, don't boycott him.
He'll double his ass.
We see enough of that guy.
So it was hurtful then and scary at that time.
But now, you know, I know I'm going, God confirms to me all the time I'm doing the right thing.
You know, when I went out, I was saved on February 18, 2017, when I did a full surrender to Jesus.
I mean, it was after wearing my cross and God chasing me all that time.
But shortly after that, I went out to U.S. Bank Stadium.
There was 50,000 millennials, and I let them in prayer, told five minutes of my story.
Three weeks later, my granddaughter and I are at Valley Fair Amusement Park, and there's all these millennials and these ZBs or whatever they're called now.
They come up and they're going, you know, wow, Mike, I got, you know, you're so inspiring.
I thought Jesus, for my thing, not for the Christian bands and this other stuff.
And it was, I'm going, wow, that was God confirming to me, like when those people came to the pillow that time that I was on the right path.
And finally, my granddaughter says, he's my grandpa.
We need to go on rides.
But it was so, it's been so rewarding to take the platform and break through that and not worry about that anymore.
So let's move to Donald Trump for a second.
In 2016, the guy had no record of any.
You came to him blank.
I came to him from the political realm.
I thought, there's no way this guy who has lived in New York has donated to Nancy Pelosi and all of these people the whole time.
There's no way he's going to do any of these things.
And the promises were so grandiose that I'm like, oh, really?
Because Reagan didn't do that.
You're going to do that.
You've been giving to all the wrong people and you're going to do that.
No way.
And I said the same thing I said after Obama because I was against Obama.
Look, he's our president.
And if he does these things, great, I want to be wrong.
I've never been more happy to be wrong about somebody than with Donald Trump.
The balls that that guy has.
It's amazing.
The things that he has done.
And even I've come to a place to where the thing I still haven't been able to get past is, stop tweeting.
For the love of Pete, stop tweeting.
That actually is a blessing.
Absolutely.
That is drives the press and everyone out of their mind.
Donald Trump is not destroying the press.
They are.
They are.
He's saying, you know who they are?
Let me tell you this.
He sets them off and they become 10 times worse because of that.
And you see it and you're like, wow, he's right.
He is tearing things down because he's a hand grenade.
Absolutely.
How much of that does he really know, do you think?
Well, let me tell you, there's about three things to that question.
One is, I get asked all the time, if you had to say, what's the best thing the president's done so far, one stands above all others?
He smashed political correctness.
Nobody, we couldn't have got anything else done.
know that.
Well, and I and I always say to people, I came to him with a complete blank slate.
I didn't know where he came from with all in New York.
I met the man directly.
Smashing Political Correctness00:14:06
So I'm going, and when I do my due diligence, like I did, I'm all in.
If I'm putting in, if I believe I ain't moving from that space.
So now, you know, but during that journey, especially the first six months and stuff, everyone's going, well, Mike, you were wrong, blah, blah, blah.
You know, they're all just attacking me.
And I'm going, you know, God, I know I heard this.
I'm staying in this space.
But there's some of the things he would do it.
And I would sit there and go, if you look back when he does something, whether it's a tweet or whatever, and then you look what it manifests out to, like you say, you're going, wow, did he plan that?
It's genius.
Right.
You know, one of the things I tell people about Donald Trump is he is a problem solution like no other person.
And he's such a good listener.
He'll listen and take it.
And people don't realize that.
He's not making these things in his head.
He takes, he takes, he listens.
It's like a calculator.
God's gifted him with this mind, but not just problem solution.
He knows what it's going to manifest to.
That's the big thing.
He knows, you know, hey, if I do this, this is a solution.
But he also knows out here what it's going to do.
And a lot of times he won't even tell people that.
He just knows instinctively, or God, you know, this is what it's going to do for us in our daily lives.
Now, when we, you know, he just made me chairman of the Minnesota Trump campaign about two weeks ago.
I'm so excited because now I'm going to do these mini rallies like I did in Michigan and North Dakota, where I go out and I can speak from a blank slate and say, you guys, I bet everything I had on faith in 2016.
Now we have proof of concept.
It's so easy.
All these things.
It's like, you know, look at this.
And I'm not going to say just look at this, this, and this.
And, you know, from Minnesota, I can say, you know, this manifested in your daily life.
You know, for southern Minnesota and our northern Minnesota, the Iron Range, it's the city, though, in Minnesota.
I can do a great example.
Here's all these things that have happened for like the blacks, you know, in the country with the lowest black unemployment.
The highest in the country is Minneapolis.
You know, we have all these things, the highest crime increase, Minneapolis.
We're not where the rest of the country is because of a few things going on in politics in Minnesota.
We don't have to name no names.
It starts with an O and ends with Marr.
Right.
And it also is Keith Ellison.
Keith Ellison.
They're real.
They're blocking the good things, like our opportunity zones, these envision centers, all these things.
I feel it every day there.
We live in Minnesota and people say, how are you going to get her out?
I said, just let her say right now.
Everyone else, she's engaging.
All I got to do is point to her and point to a great city like Detroit where these great things are going on in Detroit.
There's amazing things going on in Detroit.
In fact, I want to make a commercial and go, here's one city that listened, that's doing all these things from the administration.
Here's what is manifest in their daily lives.
I got a lot of things going on in Detroit.
And here's Minneapolis where we haven't listened, where in fact, the rally there.
Remember when our mayor said, stay out, stay away.
I mean, this is what's going on in my home state.
So I'm ready for the fight, and it's going to be exciting.
Bill O'Reilly said something the other day.
He said, I think Bernie Sanders' loss will be the end of the socialist movement.
I don't think so.
I think it's more like Barry Goldwater in 1964, Ronald Reagan, Bill Buckley, that those epic losses early actually galvanized people and created the Reagan revolution later.
Where is this coming from?
What is the solution to this?
I could answer that.
I really believe this because I believe I got this.
I prayed about this and where this was going.
I kind of wish that Bernie goes further into it because I think the Democrats are going to expose what socialism is.
I think they're exposing it.
Here's what it is.
We don't want this, but they're doing it in a way obviously kind of hidden right now to try and put everything into Biden.
But if he gets stronger, they're going to have to say, hey, here's what will happen if he gets there.
They're going to have to start doing their own ads against it.
I have to tell you, I think Trump wants to run against Sanders.
I mean, Sanders.
And the only problem with this is the risk.
The risk.
If something, God forbid, happens.
That would be a disaster.
I think this is set up biblical.
Now I think of this.
I believe, and I don't want anybody out there to get complacent because I want everybody to convince people on the left to come on over to the right.
But I believe Donald Trump will win a landslide.
And when he does, here's what's coming over the next five years.
These two biggest things.
It's like the final frontier thing.
I believe addiction is the biggest opportunity in history for the biggest revival ever.
Again, who's people looking for hope more than addicts or their families?
And everybody's affected right now.
No matter how many forks you eat with, I don't care.
Everyone's affected.
So bringing this country back to God, bringing schools back, bringing this next generation back, that middle generation that didn't have God in the schools, and we had these teachers' unions and these professors teaching this ungodliness.
They're going to look at the example around them and they're going to be kind of squished by two, kind of like, hey, it's going to be more and more people coming on over to reality.
Because this isn't going out.
I've said it before.
So many of them believe that socialism, they don't even know what it is.
They think it's having coffee, you and I, together.
It's being social.
They don't get it.
I mean, they don't understand what it really was.
They haven't been taught.
There's no one teaching it.
There's no one teaching that.
There's no one teaching so many things.
And I think This is where I think in the next five years the president's really going to focus on destroying this addiction.
And then using that to get God back in our schools and your faith-based treatment, all these things.
We talk about the addiction that's going on with opioids now.
What does that look like and what is happening there?
Well, they say that it's actually turned somewhat with the first lady and the president.
They've done so much for it already.
I was there when he signed the opiate bill.
But what it is, you've got a generation that's willing to play Russian roulette because they didn't have God as a base.
They have their self-worth is like you and I when we were addicts, their self-worth.
I often thought once, would I ever do cocaine if it was poison and I could die?
And if you read my book, I actually, yeah, I actually took that chance one time.
And, you know, right after I was poisoned now in Mexico, then not even two minutes later, I did more cocaine.
You know, and so it's such a.
Alcohol people, most people don't understand.
Alcohol is a poison.
It doesn't taste good in its real thing.
There's a reason for that.
If it tastes like water, everybody would be dead.
Right.
And it is a poison.
You are poisoning your body.
Right.
And yet we still do it.
We still do it.
I really think it's because that generation that you got that whole generation there that didn't have, they didn't have God.
They didn't have a foundation.
We were reaching out for something self-worth.
They're just, it's a block.
And this whole, you know, let's go have cry rooms.
I mean, I mean, you know, these different things, they don't have anybody to lean on.
And they don't, what I'd say to people out there right now, this is, I will say this.
If you have an addict out there, or if you are an addict and you're in that age group, I want you to look at, everybody knows someone that's died.
Everyone does now.
Somewhere, you know, you've heard about it or you're someone very close.
I had very close people to me die.
But we also know people that have made it through.
And look at them for that hope.
These addicts need hope.
These kids need hope that, hey, I can get out of this, whatever it is, this self-worth thing or this hopelessness.
That's what they're looking for, something to hang on to, hope.
So they're not just masking pain, but I don't even think it's even a false courage so much anymore as it is.
They have nothing.
What are we living?
What are we here for?
If you don't believe in a higher purpose than yourself, this gets pretty empty.
It gets very empty.
It's tough.
It's just there's nothing to it.
Right.
It's very empty.
And then you have all these things like all these, they get caught up in a world of, you know, where's the joy?
You know, I think that's the biggest thing.
Now you bring it back to politics.
I can bring it back.
I'm going, you know, one of the things, I never thought politics affected anything.
That affects everything.
And it certainly affects like the stuff I'm doing for the Recovery Network.
It affects everything to do with our Christianity.
Everything to do.
It shouldn't.
It shouldn't, but it does.
But it does.
The way our founding was originally, America was.
It didn't.
It did, right?
Now it affects.
Everything.
So that's what I was saying.
And these kids need hope.
And when someone dies, a friend of yours dies, and you're doing, I had two people a few years ago very close to me.
The one died in the guy's arms.
And four months later, he died of the same thing.
It's like, you know, there's no, because there was nothing inside.
There's something empty inside.
You know, I think it was Marx or Lenin who said that religion is the opioid of the masses.
I actually think that's a self-diagnosis on socialism because your God becomes government.
And these kids are looking for things.
They want to make a difference.
They don't want to live a life of empty consumerism.
And what they are doing is they're being told, well, if you crush these people who use this kind of language, you're doing good.
Eventually, all of that is empty because it's a lie.
Because it's a lie.
It's a lie.
And you wait till that happens.
We haven't seen nothing yet.
That's what I'm saying.
You're exactly right.
You're looking for someone to fill that self-worth.
So if you're out there, I'll get a good example.
I did the movie on Planned.
And I was out in California at the red carpet and they had all these protesters.
They pulled me over, Mike, can we get your picture?
And I came over there to them.
And these guys, and I took pictures with these kids and these protesters.
A lot of them were paid, by the way.
They told me, we're just paid.
We could care less, whatever.
But a lot of them were doing it.
It was something to do.
It made them feel like they were part of something to fill that emptiness.
I sat there and talked to them all.
By the time I was done talking, they all wanted to turn in their signs and go, what are we doing here?
But I can't, it's hard to go person by person.
And I think what's going to happen is they need to see over the next five years that there is hope and you're filling your self-worth in a better way, which is, that's what I said from the beginning here.
Addiction is the biggest.
I was with a billionaire guy about four months ago.
And he was Louir talking about my recovery network.
But he broke out.
He said, Mike, you know, in order for people to get back to God in our country, it would take the Great Depression because everybody has to be bad before you have hope and reach out to Jesus.
Like when we've been there and going, you know, please, God, get me out of this.
I'll never, you know.
And I said, right off the cuff, I said, no.
I said, the Great Depression, they had God.
They were praying for food and stuff, physical things.
We had the greatest opportunity in history being addiction because there you're saving souls.
You're looking for, you're deep down.
Where's that?
You're looking for hope.
Showing that God is that hope.
And this is what's going to happen over the next five years.
These kids and these people that have this emptiness about them that are looking for, because what you just said.
Once they realized that they were fighting for something that wasn't real or that was wrong, think of then how they're going to hit and just feel terrible inside.
But you know what?
We made mistakes.
You did it.
Yeah, we made mistakes.
I want anyone out there, you know what?
It's okay.
I wouldn't change anything in my life.
People ask me all the time if I wouldn't be sitting across from you right now.
And I mean that.
So this is something that I often think of.
I teach class in my church and I say this all the time.
And I don't know if people who haven't been there can really get this.
I really needed the atonement.
I needed forgiveness.
I needed baptism.
I mean, I desperately, it was that or death.
Yes.
I needed it.
People are like getting baptized and they're like, okay, well, I don't know.
I would not wish that part of my life on anyone ever.
I would not choose to do it again.
But I don't know if you can really, truly be the person you are until you've been thrown up against the wall and it's do or die.
And then you know who you are and you have real strength.
Absolutely.
So who would you be, do you think, now, if you hadn't have had that?
You know, I don't know.
In my book, I get to on January 16, 2009, where I said, I knew that day when you talk about bottoms, I make sure I didn't have any money.
You know, that'd be the greatest comeback with God.
All things are possible.
But the next day, I instinctively knew that there were two, it was like I worked at a drive-in theater and the second feature that was going to come on would either be A, my calling, or B, whatever that would be.
Okay.
So I've thought about that many times.
January 16, 2009: Two Hours Later00:07:30
Wait, back up, back up.
Tell me about, tell me, because you're telling me about the turn, the point, the pivot point.
The pivot point.
Tell me what, take me to that day.
This was January 16, 2009.
I mean, earlier that year, things had to happen that year where I knew that I had this big calling, that, you know, that God had this big plan for me.
And I didn't.
Where did that come from?
Where did that come from?
I would get these.
It came from different.
Here's an example.
The drug dealers did an intervention on me in the spring of 2008.
Drug dealers.
I came out of the room and three of the biggest dealers in Minneapolis are standing there and they're going, and I'm downtown in the worst part of Minneapolis because I had a warrant out for my arrest and I've been up for 14 days with no sleep.
And they said, we're cutting you off.
You've been up for 14 days.
And I said, I've only been up for 12.
And they're, you know, like that's better.
Yeah, that's better.
And I said, what, is this an intervention?
They said, call it what you will.
Now, two of them left.
One of them went down to the street and got the word out and said, you know, if you see some crazy white guy with a mustache, you're not selling him anything.
And this is in my book.
These two of the guys work for me now, by the way, are born-again Christians now.
But two of them, they leave, and this guy finally went to sleep.
I was already down to looking on the ground.
We call it farming, looking for, because I was out of crack.
And I headed down the streets, two o'clock in the morning.
I couldn't buy crack anywhere.
I spent an hour, and I'm very resourceful.
I'm going, you know, person to person.
They're going, no way, man, you're not getting anything from me.
And came back upstairs, and he's waiting up for me.
And he said, give me your phone.
He says, I'm taking a picture.
You've been telling us you're going to write a book and that my pillow, now this is this close.
He said, you've been telling us my pillow is just a platform for God and that you're going to come back and help us all someday.
And, you know, that you're our, you know, I was their hope and to get out of this addiction and everything.
He said, to get out of this addiction lifestyle we're leading.
And I would tell them that all the time.
I had 28 of my friends quit on their last day.
We'd be at the bar after the bars closed.
We'd be doing cocaine or whatever.
And I'd be telling them about end times and Mark of the Beast I read about when I was in jail in the Bible.
And they'd quit and find Jesus.
And I'm going, my friends are going, will you quit talking to me?
We're losing friends.
And then things happened in 2008.
I had four calls one night.
I'd been on this little public access channel.
I'd never been on TV other than that.
And she'd air it.
This Christian lady would air it once in a while at 3 in the morning.
And I get a call at 6 o'clock that night.
I lost, everything was gone by then to my other house, this house.
And I'm all by myself out in this wooded farmhouse.
And I said, I get this call.
And she goes, are you the guy I seen on this Channel 6?
I said, yeah.
She goes, well, you have a big calling.
I got this in prayer, and God wants me to pray with you, if that's okay.
I said, sure.
She prayed for about 45 minutes.
I'd mute her and do my line once in a while, you know.
And about two hours, I ended a call with her.
And two hours later, I get another call.
Yeah, you're the guy that I've seen on Channel 6.
She says, God told me what you're doing is important and never give up.
And I want to pray with you.
She prayed for two hours.
Okay.
And I know these people to this day now.
But then at three in the morning, this guy calls up and he goes, at three in the morning, he says, are you the guy I've seen on Channel 6?
He says, I don't believe in God, but I keep getting this dream that I'm supposed to call and tell you what you're doing.
It's so important.
I hope my dreams stop now.
You jerk.
And he slams the phone down.
Eight o'clock in the morning, I answer the phone.
I go, you don't want to buy a pillow, you want to pray.
And she goes, How do you know?
I said, It seems to be the thing tonight.
But things like this kept happening.
And my friend came to me where I finally came to me in December.
He was my match.
We had both done cocaine at the same time in the 80s.
We had both switched to crack in the early 2000s.
And I heard he had found the Lord, and I hadn't seen him in four years.
And he came popping in like beaming somebody in from Star Trek.
I go, Dick, what are you doing here?
And he goes, The Lord led me here.
He goes, What's going on?
And I said, I said, You know, as long as you're here, I got some questions.
And the first thing I asked him was, Is it boring?
He said, No, man, it ain't boring.
And I needed to know meaning I'd drugs.
Or, you know, I didn't mean with God.
I don't think, you know, but either way, it was the same thing.
You know, he, he, but I drilled him with questions for two hours because only he, of anyone else who came into my life there, he was my hope because we were equal in every way.
Okay.
A month later, on January 16, 2009, that's when I knew that that was the end of the line.
Where if I woke up the next day, now would it be, was it my bottom?
Yeah, like I said, made sure I didn't have any money left or anything, physical bottom, but you know, but I knew my calling would be gone.
I would lose that option forever.
So where I would be would either be dead or I would be, you know, even if I had to quit, even if I had to quit two days later, I knew the calling was going to be gone.
I just knew that, that that was it.
It was like, you know, God saying, okay, I've waited too long.
You know, my sister had called me up and she says, you know, you have a big calling.
God's, you know, God's tired of you standing in front of semis and thinking you can live through anything.
I used my calling, knowing I was called, to tell God, you know what, you picked me for this.
This sounds horrible that I'm going to be doing all this and I'm not going to have my drugs.
So I procrastinate.
I procrastinated for almost a year, maybe even longer, knowing that I had this calling and, you know, going, okay, but so in other words, I waited to the last minute.
We've done that before.
So I've absolutely done that.
And I've had that same feeling.
I had the same feeling when I was eight years old, had it my whole life.
Right.
And there came a point to where I really truly believe I heard in a very compassionate way.
Right.
It's okay.
I'll get somebody else.
Right.
Right.
And it was kind of like that.
Yeah.
It was not like, you know, damn you.
It was like, I get it.
I've waited, but I'll get somebody else.
And my thing was there, I said, you know, God, I want to wake up in the morning and never have the desire for any of it again, ever.
And I woke up in the morning.
It was like Groundhog Day.
I'm going, wow, something's different.
The desire was gone.
I've never, you could have put me in a crack house that day.
I wouldn't have done.
The desire was gone.
That's conversion.
Yeah, that, yeah, I mean, that was just radical.
I mean, there was no desire for crack, cigarettes, alcohol, anything.
It was gone.
But, you know, then things start happening.
But two months later, I did go to a faith-based treatment center out of my church to find out.
I felt led to go there.
I'm going, why am I going here?
I quit, you know, to find out why I was an addict in the first place.
And I had been in so many treatment centers.
And I walked in there the first day and I'm going, you know, I did this much.
I'm being all grandiose.
So how many days I stayed up?
They go, we don't care about that.
The first thing he said was, tell us about your father.
I go, what are you talking about?
In your childhood.
I said, I have a fine childhood.
How dare you bring this up?
But seeds were planted there that actually brought me all the way up to, like I say, February 18, 2017, when I went into a thing.
It was actually called Operation Restore Warrior.
It's actually for veterans.
And I went in there with hope that I could a full surrender.
And then I got, you know, I actually got baptized in the Jordan River.
You know, I mean, these things that happen real fast for me in 17, it was kind of like, I met a gal in 2014 and she said, Kendra says, you don't have a personal relationship with Jesus.
You're just believing in, you know, you're, what do you mean?
Operation Restore Warrior00:14:38
I wear my cross on TV and it's not a pose.
And I'm, you know, people would call me up.
This is crazy.
Within 2011, 12, 13, when I got so big, so fast, and or in 14, 15, 16, I guess was really bigger.
But people would call me up and go, when I was the only call center, and I'd answer and they'd go, you're wearing your cross on TV and this would be some atheist or whatever.
And I would sit there and spend an hour with them on the phone and they'd be saved.
I go, there, take that.
And I'm not saved yet.
So tell me before, I got to go back.
Where did, and I don't want this to sound like an infomercial, but you know, because when you were coming on to do commercials on my show, full disclosure, he's an advertiser of mine.
No, my pillow is an advertisement.
Yeah, my pillow is.
But I was dreading this meeting because I got a MyPillow sent to my house.
And I tried it and I hated it.
And it wouldn't have been anything I would have ever bought.
I would have never purchased a MyPillow because it's that crazy guy on TV with the pillow.
And I like the down and I like all of that stuff.
But I just could, you know, just sleep horribly.
I got it.
I hated it.
Right.
I hated it.
And I don't advertise for things I don't like.
Right.
Ability is on there.
And I'm sitting there going, How am I going to navigate this water?
Is here?
And I walk in and within a minute, you said, you hate my pillow.
And I hadn't really, I was being kind and I was like, I know.
And you knew it.
You hate my pillow.
And I was like, yeah, I do.
Then you said, you got the wrong size.
You got the wrong size.
You got the wrong size thickness.
So you sent it to me.
I, again, this is not a commercial.
But it's incredible.
I sleep with it every night.
It's not something I even.
It's just, I would have never thought.
And I wouldn't have thought that there was that much change.
And it fluffs up.
I just put my hands through it.
You adjust it for you.
Yeah, you just put your hands through both ends.
Does that what people do?
You adjust it for you as an individual.
And it stays that way.
What the hell is this?
I am fascinated by how.
And I've sold 46 million now.
But when you talk about what you just said there, it's all about keeping your neck straight at night.
And this is, you know, when God gave me, God first gave me the dream of this.
It was the name My Pillow.
I got upstairs in 2004 and my pillow all over, like making a logo.
I'm going, this is going to be so cool.
My daughter came upstairs.
She's like 11 years old.
She goes, what are you doing, Dad?
I go, I'm going to invent this pillow.
It's going to be called My Pill.
It's going to change the world.
And she grabbed her glass wash.
She goes, that's really random and went back downstairs.
But as I didn't even know, I kept getting these downloads and dreams.
It took about a year to invent, and it's never changed since we finally had it invented.
The only thing that changed about 10 months was invented, but I wanted it to have everything.
I wanted to wash and dry it.
You couldn't wash and dry pillows back then.
And so it was back to the drawing board and went completely broke.
It's mortgaged my house just to be able to make it last 10 years.
I wanted to take every problem solution into the pillow.
I wanted it to have everything.
As long as you're making something that's going to be the best ever, I wanted it to be every single person.
If you went down the streets and said, what would you like in a pill?
I want one that you could adjust.
Here it is.
I want one that stays cool.
Here it is.
I want one you can wash and dry.
Here it is.
I want one made in the USA.
Here it is.
Every answer I wanted to be a yes.
And what patent?
Oh, yeah.
I got a patent.
And here's what happened.
I'm going to tell you the patent.
When I was turned down everywhere, I actually went into a bed bathroom beyond when I had it invented.
I said, how many do you want?
I got the best pillow in history.
Where's your manager?
And the guy, he literally came up to me and said, you need to leave now because I was so passionate.
I'm going, what do you, he goes, you need to get out of here.
And I was, you know, we realized I was.
And anyway, so what happened then in 2006 or five, I think it was six, I was doing the Minnesota State Fair.
Very interesting.
I had my three jars of my patented fill up there.
And there's a guy to my right wearing a suit.
And he didn't fit in this fair, right?
I'm selling some pillows.
And he came walking up, and he was an executive from a big betting company.
And he said, you're the guy that invented this pillow.
And he says, yeah.
And he told me who he was.
He said, well, we checked this out.
And this stuff lasts 10 years.
It could even be longer.
Now, mine was theory, right?
I'd got dreams.
I'd go, wow, I'm glad somebody checked it out, right?
And he goes, this pillow, he goes, he goes, do you have a patent?
And I said, no, not yet.
And he said, he goes, well, let me tell you this, they'll never, ever see big retail.
And I go, what do you mean?
He said, the average person buys 40 pillows in a 10-year period.
It's one of the biggest industry where you just, they don't work.
And he said, what's going to happen is he named the big companies.
They all start with an S. They're going to go around you.
They're going to get that patent and never put this on the market like the cars that got 200 miles to the gallon.
And those words rang in my ear.
When he walked away after that conversation, I got on that patent or whatever.
I got, you know, it was patent pending, but I'm going, I got to get this.
And I did get that patent.
And because one of the things I want to tell inventors out there, too, you know, patents, big companies, this one thing I have, my new platform coming out, mystore.com, that's going to change.
It's going to be a safe place for entrepreneurs because our products get corruptly taken in this country by companies that they'll copy them.
You'll see the box stores.
They all have these little monopolies.
Wow, there's my product I invented.
And so it's going to be a safe place for that.
But when you get a patent, now they're overturning them in our, you know, which the president will take care of this.
They're overturning 80% of our patents.
They go back there and just overturn them.
Are you kidding me?
What do you mean?
Who does that?
Big, big, big companies.
So instead of in America, instead of copying your patent, they go get it overturned.
I mean, this is what's going on in our country right now.
You know, the president's working on this.
But let me tell you.
That's Ben Franklin.
Right, absolutely.
And I'm going to tell you, with the patent, one of the most important things about a patent, even if it's a provisional patent, to get that so you can always make your product yourself because there is that where they can go around you, get it, and never make it, or go around and get it and not stop you from making it.
So that's one of the reasons I got it.
And then with my pillow, they would have copied me or stopped me.
But you know what happened?
In 2011, when I went to film my first infomercial, my friends and family, we all pooled our money.
And I said, we're going to make the biggest.
If no one's going to take us, no box stores would take us.
We went to film this the night before.
And remember, I had very quick talk to people, right?
We're filming this and we're doing a, we're reading off this prompter, reading our lines.
This producer texts the other guy, said, this is the worst guy I've ever seen.
He'll never make it on TV.
Why did you bring me?
He says, he's paying you.
Don't worry about it.
Well, when this exploded, I went from, it aired October 7, 2011.
I was living in my sister's basement.
It aired at 3 in the morning and I had like 10 employees.
40 days later, I had 500.
So it's the thing is, it's too late to close the gate.
The cows are out of the barn.
My pillow got too big too fast.
I've been tried to be copied the name.
They've been attacked every which way, but people know me.
You can't copy me.
People go, we see enough of that guy.
So I'm actually now with my, that's mystore.com when this comes out.
It's going to help entrepreneurs a safe place.
You want to talk about it?
Yeah, yeah, I can talk about it right now.
What it is, it's a platform.
You're going to come out there, like think of a mini Amazon.
And these vendors, you can go there now.
If you have a product out there, you can go there now.
We're vetting American products or entrepreneurs.
It can be, if you can't make it here, obviously you're a good idea or whatever.
So it's a safe place.
We vet them.
I have another company vetting.
And they get up there and you have a platform.
I'm going to bring the eyes.
I'm going to bring all the eyes to the platform.
And then you don't have to fight corrupt Google and Amazon where you're buying AdWords on Google and Facebook from Suckerbuck, from Facebook, all these corrupt places.
It's horrible.
And then Amazon, where you're, there's your product.
It's not even your product.
They're copying my Giza sheets right now.
You put in Giza Sheets and they're not even selling my product.
I only geez a continent.
It's another thing or you don't even get the product at all.
And it's terrible.
They don't vet their stuff on these big platforms.
They don't care about the little guy.
Well, I do.
And I also, now I've told the box stores what I'm going to do to save the box stores from Amazon.
You know, they're crushing them.
I'm going to go to the box stores once we have all these great vetted products.
You're going to see me on TV a lot more now, but that's okay.
But all these, there'll be a section, a my store section, picture cut out where I vetted these products.
These are my store products.
These are good old American USA great entrepreneurs.
And then you're going to go, these stores then will have them.
They can say, hey, we have my store products and get people going into their stores.
And most of them have agreed.
Yeah, we'll do that.
We'll put out a section because they need, everyone likes new names.
They like people coming.
And the box stores are really.
And if they go down, if they go under, what's going to happen is they go down, then your theaters go down, your gas station, everything around there goes down, these big malls.
You know, in Minnesota, we have a lot of big malls.
We're the first mall ever started in America.
But we've got, you know, all these places, it'll end up being ghost towns if we don't do something now.
You know, and Amazon's a monster.
I mean, the U.S. Post Office, wait till they tell the U.S. Post Office that they're going to be doing all their own delivering.
There was a time when Amazon, the U.S. Post Office was delivering a package to someone's house on a Sunday, but I can't get my pillow products delivered.
I mean, the deals that they've made, the president's right, the stuff that Amazon's done is so bad.
And I'm telling you, everyone out there, it's like a monster.
It's like just they're just surrounding.
It's like the movie The Glob or The Thing back in the day, which just keeps getting bigger.
So what do you mean, the post office?
You can't, Amazon.
I think it got stopped, but they was Amazon, you could order on Saturday, and the post office was delivering your product on a Sunday.
You know, it's like an antitrust law.
Why can you deliver Amazon products, but you can't deliver other products from other people that mail?
Like if you and I mail some are other businesses, you know, they do a lot of stuff.
Amazon, what they did, they made deals back with the U.S. Post Office, very bad deals back we made back in the day, and with UPS was one of their biggest.
If you look at a graph now, Amazon's doing their own deliveries.
That's going up.
UPS is going way down.
They said, well, we're going to knock out this partner first.
And then the U.S. Post Office going up because we're subsidizing every single thing ever shipped by Amazon.
The U.S. Post Office, on your tax dollar, we're subsidizing that.
It was one of the worst deals ever made.
And I hope the president took you.
If you look at Bezos and you look at the patents that they have filed recently, they are, and they'll admit it, they are a shipping company primarily.
They're trying to get their algorithm to be so accurate that they can, and they believe it'll be happening in the next couple of years.
That when they have, when they can predict the individual 95% of the time, it has to be over 95.
All these products are just going to be shipped to you because they'll know what you're looking for.
Absolutely.
And they'll just ship it.
So they're a shipping company over everything else.
Yeah, that scares me where that's going.
And it's going to be stopped.
All the Silicon Valley things.
I was on a show the other day, actually, it was a couple months ago, and I had my cell phone, and I was getting interviewed, and they said, and they go, the interviewer says, well, Mike, did you hear about Apple, the CEO of Apple, badmouths Facebook for invading people's privacy?
I go, who does he think he is badmouthed?
And that, I grab my phone and I'm yelling into my phone, hey, Tim, can you hear me in there?
I mean, this is what it's getting to.
They know, you know, where these are going.
These things do need to be broke up, these monopolies or the competition.
Your hardware stores will make it.
They're the one things that are still protected, the hardware stores, because people still go into them and you're not shopping.
It's sad when we're going to have a society where a drone delivers your stuff to your door and nobody's leaving their house.
We're all sitting in there like the movie 1984 or whatever it was.
No, it's more like, I think, WALL-E.
Where the people are just these fat blobs out there and everything's delivered to them.
But I think people ask me all the time about end times.
I said, God gave us grace November 8th, 2016, because everything we're just talking about would have been accelerated tenfold if Hillary would have gone in.
There would have been no and would have been over, you know.
And now we have an opportunity here for the greatest revival in history to bring our country back to God and straighten out these things that are out there.
We have a great president that can silo them out and say, we better fix this before it destroys us, whether that's Silicon Valley, whether that's your Amazon's or your Google's or these things need to be addressed because it's coming.
I talked to a friend of mine who is deeply involved in the government and deeply concerned about what's known as deep state.
It's just a corrupt group of bureaucrats who think they know better than the president and everybody else.
And I said, can we turn this corner?
Can Trump turn this corner?
And he said, my fear is he is so utterly alone that there are just all of these huge bureaucrats that have been around forever.
And he is so utterly alone.
And the problem is so massive.
You think he feels I was watching him at CPAC and I thought he's now, this is why he's successful.
Trump's Need for Continual Confirmation00:04:54
He's the president.
But in his rallies, he's really not.
He's the president, but he's like, he's your friend.
Absolutely.
And he comes across.
And he's just saying, you won't believe what I just did this week.
You won't believe what's happening.
He's talking to you like your friend would talk to you if you were upstairs in his living room.
Absolutely.
You know what I mean?
And so, and I think that's why people trust him.
But he's also in a room where the people trust him.
He's not in those rooms very often where he knows they're not going to violate my trust.
You know what I mean?
And I think he walks out of those stadiums energized.
That is absolutely right.
He needs continual confirmation.
I told the first lady a couple months ago, I said, you know what?
I want you guys to know this.
When I see people on the street, when they come up to me, it's not about a pillow.
The number one thing they say is, thanks for having our presidents back and tell him we're praying for him.
And that means a lot.
That they're behind.
It's a confirmation they're doing the right thing.
And he needs that.
Because you're right, there is times he's completely alone.
But I think that's changing with us as people start get more voicerous out of fear.
Get rid of the fear.
It's okay.
I spent your big business out there.
You know what?
My biggest day at my pillow is the day we're in.
I mean, this is what they should not live in fear of that, oh, it's going to hurt if I say that.
If I say what Donald Trump's saying, you know.
And I just think more and more people are coming over.
You know, why would you not, once they get past that and going, this is where we're at now, I think he feeds off that.
I think it builds his confidence that he's doing the right thing.
Can you imagine if he didn't have that?
You couldn't do it.
You couldn't do it.
The White House would be a prison.
It would be a prison.
And he takes a challenge.
Of course he gets hurt at times where they, you know, these fake things they bring up all the time.
I watched him in it and the way he stepped back.
You know, Obama had this Mussolini kind of pose a lot.
And Obama has this, I mean, Trump has this air to him on television.
But when you're watching him in person, that's not what's happening.
No, absolutely not.
And he is, he is actually looking.
I watched him carefully.
He was looking all around the room.
What are people?
I just said something.
Who's for it?
Who's against it?
What's the room telling me?
You know, it's like a very personal focus group with the people that he is that support him.
Absolutely.
Like I say, he's a great listener and he can take it in.
You combine that with the one thing he has that no one else can.
You've got to remember, he was there.
Like when you said, you know, here's this New York businessman.
He's been there.
It's like an addict.
Like you and I have been there.
We can speak out about addiction because we've been there.
He's been to these places with, he's seen this corruptness.
He's seen it with his own eyes.
He's dealt with it.
I think he said one time, you know, yeah, I give money to Hillary, whatever, because, well, she got to come to a wedding or something.
It was some crazy thing.
It's just like you paid off all this corruptness that was legal.
It's a lot of it legal, but it's morally wrong.
You know what I mean?
And he's been there and seen all this stuff with his own eyes, and he knows what needs to be fixed for the common man.
I think people say, you know, do you think with him, it's not all about money?
He's got all the money he's ever needed.
It's about, it's a challenge for him.
He likes the confirmation.
If you're with the one-on-one, he really genuinely cares.
I actually wish I had that as much as he does.
He'll come up, hey, how's it going?
I've talked to people.
I just came from the White House about a week ago.
All this there's Secret Service and there's door people.
There's all these workers.
I probably had a conversation with these six of them and everyone said, how's it going?
He goes, I love it.
One guy had been there just a year.
He's like an internee.
He says, I can't believe it.
He goes, every time he comes by me, he'll say, how's it going?
Remembers my name, you know, and these things.
And it's a personal thing.
And he's not doing it.
Nobody knows doing it.
So he's not doing it for any political thing.
He's doing it because he cares.
And that's, you know, and just like, just like back then when I did stuff, it also makes him feel good inside that he's doing the right thing.
You know what I mean?
When he's getting the feedback.
And so, you know, people can sit there and when we talk about the Twitter and stuff, they say, Mike, boy, he should stop Twitter.
He Does It Because He Cares00:04:14
You know what?
When he's tweeting, there's so many good things that people don't know him about that are going on out here because it's like he doesn't have the house to work with.
So he's got all these great things going on that people don't even realize the stuff he's doing that I know he's doing for like addiction and all these things that he can do with executive orders that these are going on.
They don't even put it in the news because they're so busy worrying about his tweet.
He's the ultimate other hand.
Look over here.
Look over here.
The Republicans are such a disaster.
They've had the greatest misdirection for four years and they haven't used it.
They could have passed anything.
Anything.
Anything.
And the press would have been like, yeah, yeah, whatever.
Everybody's required to have a gun.
Yeah, but have you seen what he's done today, what he tweeted?
They could have passed anything.
Well, you know what?
I do believe, though, I believe in 18 that we got rid of a lot of bad Republicans.
So this will be, I believe everything will come back now, the house and everything.
And then those four years, you wait and how you're going to see what, you know, that's obviously that's our prayer.
That's what we all should be praying for.
Because then the things that, can you, you know, everybody with him and behind him, we could just, one after another, things that what he's done without any help, you know, think what he could do if the Republicans got behind him.
And, you know.
So let's just end it here with what's going to the future.
When do you introduce and launch your initiative to save people from addiction?
Right.
It'll probably be about two months.
I have my book out now.
I'm using, it's called What are the Odds from Crack Addict to CEO?
That book is out there, but it's not out there in a way like you would normally think you can get it.
I self-published.
I'm dealing with all kind of changing that industry.
I even bought my own paper.
I didn't want to give all the money to the middleman.
CBS just yesterday sold CBS Vicom just announced they're selling Simon ⁇ Schuster.
And when I saw that news, I went, of course they are.
Loser.
There is the book printing industry is over.
Why would I, if you have a platform, why would you lose it?
Well, here, you know, and it's unfair, like Amazon, they take 65% for the digital book.
I'm not putting it up there.
Are you kidding me?
I'm not giving him more money.
This money for this book is going to the kingdom.
The Lindell Recovery Network, I put it all in myself.
All the money and everything.
I didn't go out and ask for people's money.
This is going to launch probably about, I'll say at the latest two months, maybe three at the most.
We have the back end.
It's going to be an amazing app and website.
And it's going to set free millions of addicts and employ tens of thousands of ones that have their heart restored.
This is a game changer like you've never seen.
This involves 50,000 churches so far and 4,000 treatment centers, but it's also going to be the best online help in history.
How's it going to employ people?
They'll be the addicts that come out of your long-term treatment.
These guys are going to be, those are going to be my workers, where they'll be, I need customer service.
It's pretty complicated, but I'll tell you that they're going to be.
A second chance.
Yeah, they're going to be.
These are second chance people, but right now, the Salvation Army has been doing this for years.
They employ like 50% from within, and employers grab their employees when they're at their heart restored because there's no better hard worker than an addict that's been restored.
I think you and I are proof of that.
You just work hard.
You love what you're doing.
For the right reasons.
And right now, we're in an employees, it's an employee's market out there.
You can go, even corporate America, people are changing.
They're going, you know what?
I'm not going to work 60 hours a week now so you got above them can get all the credit with the CEO.
You know what?
I'm going to tell them I'm either working a normal 40-hour week or I'm going to go to another company.
We're in a great position right now where everybody's getting higher wages and stuff.
But this platform I'm launching between two and three months, I'm launching my My Store for entrepreneurs in about three weeks.
Shifting Power to Employees00:04:14
And I really, and but I'm, you know, I got three things going on.
Then the president, I'm doing the chairman of the Minnesota Trump campaign.
For me, I've got all three of these going because they all tie together now because it's, you know, I do realize now, this is where now politics make a lot of the things I'm doing even possible.
Like, let's just take the entrepreneur platform.
So many things that the president is doing to protect our entrepreneurs in this country.
I could sit here and listen.
We could talk.
It'd be another hour.
I could tell you all these great things that are going on right now, where before you had about four companies who are monopolizing and taking our good entrepreneurs, and they sit at home, they don't have money to fight it, and they go, wow, I invented this one time, or they have inventions they're too afraid to do anything because they're working and they live in fear that what if I fail when they need a safe place so they don't have that fear of failure.
And that this is going to be a game changer for that.
And it's really exciting that, you know, for me, I give all the glory to God.
God gave me this platform.
You know, it's not about my pillow.
That's just a platform of being to have the integrity and notoriety to be able to do these things and to be able to not put up with these big companies, your Googles of the world and say, you know, the other day I was badmouthing on TV.
My lawyers told me, quit badmouthing Google.
I go, why?
You know, why?
What are they going to do?
Turn me off?
I'll tell the rest of the world how, you know.
So let me ask you this.
Minnesota had a wrestler as a governor.
Right.
Old Jesse.
Crack addict, TV pitch man, entrepreneur is governor in well, everybody wants me.
Everybody wants me to run.
I prayed about it.
And I really, you know, I've even met with a lot of governors saying, what's it like being a governor?
Will I be able to change Minnesota?
Would I be able to help?
And that's 2022.
So I'm really looking at Minnesota this time and saying, you know, we don't have the House legislators, the state legislators.
It's Democrat.
And if that, you know, if we get that flipped and I could really make a difference, you know, and God leads me that way, I'll do it, you know, wherever I'm led.
And so I will tell you right now, we'll see, but I'm not afraid of it one bit.
I told the governors I talked to, I talked to six of them, half-hour private meetings to ask them about this.
And they all said, well, Mike, the hardest part's the campaign.
You're going to get attacked and smeared.
I said, I love that part.
I'm used to that.
I love fighting the other media.
You know, I was at the Iowa caucus with all the, I went there.
It's one of the few non-surrogates or whatever.
They're all there.
And all the congressmen then, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, and everybody was there.
We all went to a different caucus.
I learned what a caucus was, you know.
And anyway, we were all sitting in a booth, and this is the day before.
And I said there was some bad news there.
And Joe is with Jerry Follow Jr. too.
And he says, he says, I'm not talking to them.
They wrote a bad article for me.
They lied.
And I said, I'll go talk to her.
And I walked up and I started talking.
Mike, can I interview you?
I talked for almost 30 minutes.
And these guys are laughing in the booth because she goes, I got to go.
She couldn't take all the good.
Guess what?
Never got printed.
So she wasted a half hour of her time because I'm sorry, I'm only going to tell you good things.
Usually, 90% of the time, I don't badmouth the other side.
They do that to themselves.
I want to get people from the other side and say, hey, you guys, it's just your congressmen and your politicians, you people that are over here.
Come on in.
It's okay.
Quit listening to them.
And I want to get that message out.
And I think that's what we're here for, to get the message out.
And we're in the greatest revival in history.
And in order to get God back to our country, we need to do it through, we need these next five years, at least at this time in this country's history, to all be to back this great president and great administration because we can do a lot for the kingdom if that happens.