Rod Blagojevich argues his 14-year prison sentence stemmed from political persecution, not crimes, after refusing to cooperate with prosecutors like Patrick Fitzgerald and James Comey over fabricated charges tied to post-2008 Senate seat negotiations. He details FBI wiretapping, selective trial evidence (omitting 98% of tapes), and systemic manipulation, comparing his ordeal to Trump’s resilience against legal attacks. Blagojevich credits prison hardship—including Bible study and mentorship from a musician inmate—for personal growth, but criticizes the criminal justice system’s lack of rehabilitation, citing examples like Alice Marie Johnson’s pardon and Freeway Ricky Ross’s transformation. His upcoming book, Vindication, challenges mainstream narratives, while he advocates for reform, questioning NATO’s 1999 Kosovo bombing and U.S.-Serbia tensions. Ultimately, he frames his experience as proof of institutional corruption and the need to dismantle entrenched power structures. [Automatically generated summary]
And, 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.
And after listening to you on Tucker's show, I was like, oh, Jesus.
Like, It was such an eye-opening podcast and such a disappointing one, too.
It 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.
And it was just, oh, corrupt politician goes to jail.
He went to jail.
He must be guilty.
And then you hear your take on it, like, oh, God.
It's very disturbing.
And I just wanted to show you this just before we get rolling.
Biden just released A bunch of people.
Multiple Chinese spies and an individual convicted of possessing child pornography.
You know, I spent almost eight years in prison for politics, not for crimes.
I'm happy to answer any questions you have about any of it, because I didn't do it.
It was all politics.
But 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.
They tried me twice after the first trial where they failed to convict me on their fake corruption charges.
They were floating 18 months.
And, 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.
The system is rigged.
And 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.
So the prudent thing, the safe thing, was to, you know, cut your losses and, you know, take the short period of prison time.
But I felt, you know, I wasn't a businessman.
I suppose if I was a businessman facing something like that, you'd make a business decision, you cut your losses, you realize...
They're bleeding you financially.
You can't afford lawyers.
This is going to be an endless thing.
It was already three years at that point that we had been fighting it.
But I was the governor, twice elected by the people.
And the United States Oats don't mean a lot to some people.
It sounds like a bunch of bullshit to say I swore in the Holy Bible.
I just couldn't do it.
I knew it was all bullshit.
It was all corrupt.
They knew it was all corrupt.
And it was all an effort to try to get me to admit it.
And if I admitted it, then the truth would never come out.
They can never be exposed for what they did.
And 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,
unidentified
we saw that the head of the FBI just stepped down and Kash Patel is going to come in and he wants to clean house.
I was elected the first Democratic governor of Illinois in November 2002 after 26 years of Republican governors.
I 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.
And I knew it, which meant we got to be super extra careful because these people are scrutinizing us.
On the one hand, I felt good.
That puts pressure on people around me.
People are doing work for me to do the legal things and not cross lines.
I never imagined that the FBI and the Department of Justice...
And these U.S. attorneys who come out of the best schools would be so corrupt and dishonest.
I felt like, okay, they'll look and see how we do things.
If we make some mistakes along the way, we'll make adjustments.
So they chased me for five years.
And by the time they taped my phones, it was no surprise.
There was all kinds of pressure at that time because they'd gotten a guy...
Who was close to me and Obama, a guy by the name of Tony Oresko, who they probably convicted him of things that weren't crimes either.
They were squeezing him to say things about me and Obama.
He wouldn't do it.
They put him into solitary confinement for three years to get him to invent crimes against us.
He wouldn't do it.
This guy's a stand-up guy.
Obama sold him out, and he did more for Obama than he ever did for me.
But I knew all of that.
And 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.
How could they not?
Because they were chasing me.
They so much wanted to get me.
And Obama and I both were in their crosshairs in the very beginning.
But I think the politics of the changes, his political fortunes improved, and he looked like he was going to be the next president.
I think we're good to go.
What 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.
It was Obama on election night.
He 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.
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So, Obama was...
So how did he try to negotiate?
When he wanted this person to take his Senate seat, what was set?
But 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.
In this particular case, it was a labor boss.
By the name of Tom Balinoff, he came up to me election night in November 2008. That was the election you voted for, Obama.
You and I are both guilty of that.
And I was there that night.
Chicago was magical, you know, historic.
And it was great in the sense that finally America, you know, crossed a significant barrier.
A black person can be elected president of the United States.
Every black child growing up can now look and say, one day maybe I can be that.
You know, there's the American dream and opportunity.
So in that sense, it was a beautiful thing.
So this Balinov guy comes up to me and he says, Barack called me last night.
He said I was pumping gas in this gas station in the South Loop area downtown Chicago.
Barack called me last night.
He said it was around – he even told me at the time like around 6.30 or 7 at night.
And he asked me to come to you.
He would like you to appoint Valerie Jarrett as his successor to the Senate.
He wanted me to know what you want.
I wonder if I can come and see you so we can discuss this.
I said, sure, call me tomorrow.
Now, that's totally legal and appropriate.
He's not suggesting anything illegal.
Obama just wants to make a political deal.
But what happened was they criminalized it against me.
So 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.
And by then I had gotten used to trying to know what was coming so I can brace myself, you know.
And, you know, they pick all the unflattering stuff.
But none of it's criminal.
And if you add it, you put the rest of the calls in there, it fills out the context.
So in this one particular call, I asked my lawyer Quinlan's name.
Hey, Quinlan, what's the rule again on residency requirements?
How long do you have to live in Illinois to be a senator?
And he said, just one day.
And you got to be 30 years old and you can be a naturalized citizen or American board citizen.
So 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?
She comes to Illinois for one day, I'll make her a senator and maybe I could fuck her.
And 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.
And did they read it or play it when you said that?
If 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?
I think part of it has to do with, a lot of it has to do with the actual U.S. attorney.
His name is Patrick Fitzgerald.
He and James Comey are real close.
It'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.
That they're this new political place in American government.
They are so dangerous to our freedoms in this country.
I think it was largely that.
He had convicted the previous governor, Republican governor, Ryan, of crimes that he had committed when he was the Secretary of State of Illinois.
And so now he could be the first guy in history to get two straight governors.
And I think it was that.
I 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.
That's why they invented the crimes from those conversations.
And 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?
The side that refuses to play 98% of the tapes that they made?
Or the guy that's saying, play them all?
Warts and all.
There's unflattering calls where I say stupid things, or, you know, I'm angry, or whatever the case may be, or I'm using profanity.
They replayed those.
But play those tapes.
What are you hiding?
The side that's hiding is the side that's lying.
And they're hiding it to this day.
They covered up all those tapes.
They wouldn't even let me play them in court in the second trial, even though they promised that I would.
I could play them if I testified at the second trial.
And 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.
He said, look, if he agrees to testify, he can play the tapes to corroborate his testimony.
Because I was a lawyer, and I was also a prosecutor at the state level, Cook County prosecutor.
And 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.
The 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.
And if you don't find any tapes, then you know who's lying.
I knew this, but when the judge said I can do it on the record, I felt beautiful.
I'll testify, and then we'll play the tapes to back up my testimony.
So I get up there, I testify.
Then when it's time to play the tapes, the judge won't allow them.
It was a setup.
And then the prosecutor does exactly what I knew they would do if those tapes weren't heard.
He 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.
You won't hear a single tape, even though there were 102 conversations on that subject.
They were all covered up, and the jury didn't know those tapes existed.
It was a total fucking frame-up in a rigged criminal justice system in a court that was rigged.
And that's today's America.
And why?
What 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.
Yeah, 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.
If it did work, That is such an insanely dangerous precedent to set.
When 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.
There was no victim at all.
And yet they fine him this fucking insane amount of money and try to say that Mar-a-Lago was worth $18 million.
That is just such a slap in the face of anybody that understands...
First of all, anybody understands property values in that area.
It's preposterous to say that place is only $18 million.
It'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.
And there was just so many of these cases over and over and over again that just right in everyone's face.
And very little pushback, no pushback from the media at all.
They 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?
The whole thing is madness.
And all these news organizations Because they don't like Trump are going along with this insanely dangerous precedent.
Because 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?
Is that what you want?
You want us to be a banana Republic just because you don't like Trump?
I mean, it just shows you how many people were willing to sacrifice all of their ethics.
All the things that they believe in, what the Bill of Rights stands for, what the Constitution stands for, fuck all that.
We don't want this guy to win.
Throw it all away.
And then you throw everything away.
Then we have no freedom of speech.
We have no nothing.
It's all gone.
The whole thing is so mind-boggling how short-sighted people are in the name of wanting their side to win.
I 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.
Non-fucking crimes that we make up shit and call them certain things that are sexy sounding, sale of the Senate seat.
That eventually was reversed by the appellate court.
They could never uphold that unlawful standard.
Three fundraising requests where there was no quid pro quo.
I got convicted of that.
None of it was personal corruption.
Nobody said I even took a penny.
And they gave me 14 years because I was fighting against them and exposing them.
So it started, I really believe, with me.
And 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.
And 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.
They'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.
And just because Trump won, because the American people are beginning to get it, doesn't mean we're safe.
The Trump administration, God willing, is going to do something very serious about this.
If 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.
Anyway, 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.
He used a standard that wasn't lawful to get convictions on them.
Eventually, 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.
But the damage was done.
That company went bankrupt.
All those people lost their jobs.
And this Andrew Weissman gets promoted and becomes this legal expert and scholar on CNN.
That guy, Fitzgerald, Comey, and people who do this, Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, they ought to go right to fucking jail.
Yeah, 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.
Along with Smelly and Sox and Mr. B and V and G and all kinds of guys.
Well, there is, notwithstanding their policy, the BOP's policy.
The 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.
Jared got to my prison because it's a prison that has a lot of pedophiles.
Out of the 950 guys, roughly, that I was in prison with there, there were about 300 to 400 pedophiles.
And then there were drug dealers, bank robbers, some guys who committed murder.
There were 2% white collar.
Skilling one of them, one governor, me, right?
But those pedophiles, the sex offenders, you can't call them pedophiles.
Now, I don't want to sound like I'm too liberal or something, but they have to.
Because 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.
So you see this guy that Biden just pardoned or gave clemency to.
Let's hope it was just clemency and not a pardon, my God.
But these sex offenders are getting lighter sentences than the drug dealers or the bank robbers.
And 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.
So drug dealers would argue a lot of it non-violent and they're right.
Their stuff was non-violent.
These guys really harm children.
The ones that touch children, not the ones who just looked at the pornography.
If 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.
That's the one you'd sell it to.
But if I said that, that would be a crime.
But there was none of that.
They covered that up.
So they go to court a couple of days after I'm arrested and they go before their judge and they get a sealed order.
They put a gag on it.
So the tapes cannot be played publicly in court and I can't talk about what's on those tapes.
She became like a top advisor for Obama in the White House.
Now there's a school of thought, there's a theory that's plausible.
Obama publicly said he did not send this labor guy to me.
But Balinov, the emissary, in two trials testified twice under oath that Obama called him.
Obama then was interviewed by the FBI the day or two after I was arrested.
And if you lie to the FBI, they call them 302s, these interviews, it's a crime.
But I've learned that the FBI is really the FBI lie.
And you sit down like I did stupidly.
You talk to these people.
They say you lied and you say they lied.
Who are you going to believe if you're a jury, right?
It's a big mistake to ever trust them, to be honest.
So my advice to anybody out there who's getting chased by the FBI, don't talk to them.
I thought they were the good guys, so I sat down and talked to them.
Well, Obama talked to them.
And every defendant is entitled to relevant evidence that could help him or her defend themselves against criminal prosecution.
But to this day, they would never give us Obama's 302s.
So did Obama really send this guy, like that guy testified to?
Or did Obama Not do it like he publicly said he did.
He said he didn't do it.
So somebody's lying.
Somebody broke a law.
Either 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.
And 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.
And Valerie Jarrett was Michelle Obama's best friend.
And she was a threat to the influence of Rahm and others.
And 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.
It's interesting, the politics of the publishing companies.
I've pre-sold about over 8,000 already.
I haven't even put it out for pre-sale yet.
I'm about to do it.
Blago something books.
Rod Blago books or something.
We haven't done it yet.
But I've pre-sold some to people, friends and others, about 8,000 of them already.
So it's helped me be able to self-publish and create my own little publishing company.
And 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.
He was great to me.
He's a kind guy.
I'll tell you stories about him if you want.
He pulled me out of there.
I love Donald Trump for a lot of reasons.
Of course, because he gave my daughters their father back.
So I write well about him.
He comes across very well.
Obama doesn't come across so good.
He 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.
This guy bought him a lot next to a mansion that he bought after he was elected to the United States Senate.
Obama's, at that time, only had $750,000 they could afford for a mansion.
They wanted to buy the adjoining lot in this real upper-class neighborhood called Kenwood, Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago, by Obama's library.
And they couldn't afford the other lot, so he went to his friend Resco.
Obama did.
And Resco's a kind-hearted person, and he wants to help his friend Obama.
So he pays, like, seven, he pays the list price, like $750,000 for the lot.
The Obamas paid less for the lot with the improvement on it, the big mansion.
Obama now is running for president.
That comes out.
He's got to fix his political problem.
He goes to Resco, and he says, I got to put a fence between the lot and the mansion.
So I can explain to the media that it's your lot, not mine, right?
And he prefers he asks for a wrought iron fence, not just any old fence, not a chain-link fence.
He wants a wrought iron fence because it matches the mansion.
And then he hands Resco a bill for $13,000 for the Rhode Iron Fence.
And 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.
Makes the front page of the Chicago Tribune in August 2008 that he won't do it.
They put him in solitary confinement for three years.
He saw the sun one hour a day.
And then when he got out of there, he tries to do a burp beep, and he faints because he's so skinny and so weak after three years of that.
Look, 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.
In fact, days, a couple of months before the sentence came down, I'm jogging, I'm running through the neighborhoods and I see it.
That was newspapers back then.
It's a newspaper box, front page, big colored picture of me.
I see it.
I'm running past it.
I saw the headline briefly.
I came back running in place.
I see it.
30 years to life.
The prosecutors are asking for 30 years to life on me.
The 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.
One second closer to coming home to your daughters and to your wife, even though it might be 14 years.
And one less second.
You know what I mean?
But at least it's starting now.
You've hit the bottom and now you're trying to get your climate back up just from a time point of view.
But that first day, I'll work backwards.
I'll never forget the first night after that long, long day that I went through.
You know, the media was covering me like I was O.J. Simpson.
They were at my house at 5.30 in the morning when I kissed my little girls goodbye.
My little Annie Banani was eight years old at the time.
She's in her pajamas and she hugs and squeezes me.
And my daughter Amy, she was a sophomore in high school.
She was 15. And we're all in the foyer.
It's all dark because you got all these media trucks around your house.
We live in a neighborhood, a normal neighborhood, just not gated.
And they're all over the place.
And so they look into your house.
So we had to keep the lights off.
Kiss my wife goodbye and my two daughters.
Hardest thing I've ever did was saying goodbye to them.
But you've got to be strong for them.
And you can't show those assholes in the media that you're dying inside.
So you've got to be strong when you step out.
There's all kinds of film footage of that when I left.
And there's a helicopter that follows me.
A news helicopter from my house all the way to O'Hare Airport in Chicago.
Like I was O.J. Simpson in that white Bronco.
I called the chapter my white Bronco moment.
And then when I got at the airport, there was this big gaggle of media there.
And then when I get on the plane, these motherfuckers were on the plane.
They bought tickets.
So I can't even, like, you know, give it a second to think about what just happened, me saying goodbye to my family.
I'll be gone for, worst case scenario, 14 years.
But if I behave myself, it'll be 12 and a half years, right?
Good behavior.
And then I land in Denver.
And they're there.
And so I'm trying to leave the plane.
They're all waiting there at the gate.
And then the people in Denver were really nice at the airline.
I think it was United Airlines.
And they got me out a side door.
And they had a car waiting.
So I was able to leave.
And for a moment, I thought I was away from the media as I'm about to drive to prison.
But no, they caught us.
They caught up with us.
And I got there a little bit early to prison, so I told one of my lawyers who was driving me, you know what?
We're like a half an hour early.
I'm already giving him 14 years.
I don't want to give him 30 minutes more.
Let's stop for a cup of coffee or something.
So we went to this little restaurant, a little fast food place called Freddy's in Denver, the Denver area, Littleton, Colorado.
And it was really surreal because, you know, people knew who I was and they were really warm and loving.
I'm signing autographs.
You'd never know.
I'm about to go to prison for 14 years.
And then the time came to walk in.
And I learned later that Trump was watching this because it was all live on television.
And he had tweeted about it that day.
I mean, I got a million reasons why I love Donald Trump.
I was so alone.
Everybody, a prominence in politics and government and in the media, you know, were calling me all these nasty things.
And here's Trump, the only guy who had some authority and had a following.
Was the only guy saying positive things about me.
They were compassionate.
He was saying that I denied it and I'm entitled to a presumption of innocence.
But there was compassion with Trump.
And he tweets that day.
I learned later.
I didn't know it then, but I learned when I came home that he tweeted that I see him walking into prison.
He gets 14 years.
Murders and rapists get four years.
Do you think this is justice?
I don't.
Just a loyal guy to a guy that was on his show because I don't really know him that well.
But to me, it says a lot about who he is as a person.
But then I walked in.
I get greeted by all these inmates.
People ask me, were you afraid?
I wasn't afraid of anything.
My life was so beaten down by what they did.
I was so disillusioned.
I was angry.
There was bitterness, but I was mostly heartbroken and sad, missing my children, fearful of my children, my wife.
They were left alone.
I couldn't protect them.
People knew where we lived.
The media made sure that everybody saw where we lived because they were always in front of our house.
I was worried about their safety.
I knew I had all those years to do.
Now I'm in prison and all these guys are watching me coming into their world on live television.
So I had two things going for me in terms of my stock with the fellow inmates.
Number one, I was a celebrity inmate.
They just saw me coming into prison.
Nobody walks into prison on live TV. And the bigger part, the more important part was I got what they call a 14-piece.
That's the vernacular of how inmates talk.
He got a 14-piece.
It means he didn't snitch on anybody.
See, anybody who gets a long sentence means they're getting punished because they wouldn't talk about anybody.
The guys who walk in with light sentences become immediately suspect by the inmates, it's the culture there, as snitches.
So I walked in there and I had immediate street cred with those guys.
And they were nice to me.
They 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.
These were drug dealers and bank robbers and, you know, tough guys, all tatted up, tough guys.
You know, their gangs would be tatted on their heads and stuff or on their, you know, biceps.
So in one of the chapters, the early chapters, I wasn't in prison for 27 hours before I broke my first prison rule.
And they called me inmate Plagojevich, you know, to report to the lieutenant's office.
And it had to be explained to me.
This was my first full day.
It was my second day there.
It was after my first full day when I walked in.
And I got a chance to see the prison yard.
And I walked around the yard with a couple of black guys.
One of, both from Illinois, one from the south side of Chicago, gangbanger drug dealer.
Name was Slim.
And another guy named Walter Hill from East St. Louis, Illinois.
And I was their governor.
And they were really nice to me.
And we walked around the track and we were talking about, and I was interested in the facilities, you know.
One of the things I was determined to do in prison was to work out a lot and to read a lot.
And 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.
They 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.
They called the euphemism for gangs in prison is cars.
What car do you ride in?
And that they thought that for my own safety, that number one, I shouldn't be walking around with black guys.
I need to be part of a car and I need to join the white car and go see these two guys, Cole and Sadness.
Sadness.
Sandness.
I thought it was Sadness too.
Exactly.
Because I'm looking around, who's Sadness?
Who's Sadness?
I'm looking for Sadness, right?
His name was Sandness and Cole was the leader.
I think he was from Texas.
And they told me that I should go see them.
So out of respect for the police officers, the correctional officers, I said, okay, I'll go see them.
But I made it clear to them, listen, I don't give a fuck.
Because 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.
You want the window open, the other guy wants it closed.
You didn't put the weight back in the weight room like he would have wanted.
There's all kinds of shit that's going to happen, conflicts that develop between guys living close like that.
The way we keep order is we keep the races and the different ethnic groups separated.
They all become part of their individual cars.
You sit with them in a commissary.
I mean at the cafeteria, they call it the chow hall.
You work out with them.
You walk the track with them.
You're polite to the other groups, but you don't really get friendly with them.
Because if you have a conflict with somebody, your car will protect you.
Especially if it becomes a conflict with somebody from another race or another group of people.
In 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.
There were Pacific Islanders and, of course, white guys and sex offenders.
They were their own group.
And so they all pretty much rode in their own cars, their separate cars.
But I told them, look, I don't fear anybody.
If somebody wants to fucking kill me here, in some ways they'll put me out of my misery.
I'm not going to be doing some kind of thing like that.
It's racist.
I'm not doing that.
Whoever's nice to me, I'm going to be nice to them.
And I'll respect your rules.
I won't sit with the black guys or with any Latino guys.
I'll sit with the white guys.
But I'm not going to...
Unless you're ordering me and telling me I can't walk with those guys or talk to these guys, I'm going to keep doing it.
And they say, well, we can't do that because this is an unwritten way that we operate and keep order in prison.
And then they told me something, which I respected.
They said, look, you're not in the real world here anymore.
This is not a place where you could be a civil rights advocate or an activist, a civil rights activist.
This is prison.
You don't have the same rights here that you have out there.
We can't order you not to have relationships or conversations with people from another race.
But we can't order you to stop doing stuff that could be counterproductive to us keeping safety.
So if you're going to sit with somebody outside your race in the chow hall, that's a direct affront to us.
And there are measures that we can take to make sure that you don't do those sorts of things.
And 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.
Eventually, I sat with some of the black guys as time went by, and we actually made a little...
An elder black guy by the name Mr. B. He was originally from Chicago and from Detroit.
He was like the most respected inmate.
He got a 25-year sentence.
He looked like Morgan Freeman, the actor.
He was a lot like him, actually.
Very mature, responsible.
He was the guy a lot of the guys went to for their legal questions because he knew everything.
A real nice man and a gentle man.
And by the time I got there, he had already done like 20-something years.
So he was close to going home.
I'd stay up late at night with him talking in the dormitory portion of the prison where I was first before I got my cell.
But it was important to him that before he left, after 20-something years, that he could actually sit at the child hall with a white guy.
And he liked me because I was from Chicago.
So we did that one day.
I was there probably a year and a half by the time we did that.
And I sat there and everybody looked at us.
We're sitting there.
I'm sitting with the black table.
And then this great movement for civil disobedience and civil rights petered out.
And they arrested me at 6 in the morning, and I read about that, too.
In my house, SWAT teams, 24-member SWAT team around my house.
I'm the sitting governor of the fifth-largest state in America.
I've got a security detail of my own.
But if four hours later I'm in their custody, it's good cop time and they're not being nice to me.
You know, you're not a bad guy.
We hear all these tapes.
You're just a part of Chicago politics.
We think you can help us.
We'd like you to talk about Obama.
We know he wanted to make a deal with you.
Stuff like that.
They're telling me.
It was clear what they wanted to do.
And I said, look, I didn't do anything wrong, and as far as I know, he didn't either.
There's really nothing to talk about.
And then their mood changed, and they sent me to another facility, and they put me in this little cell.
And they had me next to this angry guy that was all fucked up on PCP or something.
He was like a raging or wild animal to send me a message, you know.
And I think they were never going to go after Obama.
But 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.
Let us get this guy.
Keep us in office when you get sworn in on January 20th.
Don't bring in new U.S. attorneys.
Don't bring Democratic U.S. attorneys in.
Keep us Bush U.S. attorneys here.
And you stay out of this and we'll leave you alone.
You know, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Libertarians, yes.
House members, Senate members, the executive branch presidents, yes.
The Supreme Court and the courts, yes.
Checks and balances.
Founding fathers had the wisdom to create a system like that because they know the corruptibility of man.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So they divided power.
That's the beauty and genius of what they did in this country.
They 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.
They didn't foresee that.
The problem is, as a practical matter, because they have such power, the politicians are scared shitless of them.
They 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.
And 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.
It's a dangerous system, especially the justice system.
It seems very dangerous.
And this is not to malign good people because I know people.
I've met people in the FBI. I met great people in the CIA. I know them.
They're great people.
It's just...
What you were saying, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And 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.
This 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.
Especially 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...
You see, here again, the stuff we're talking about, it's so important that this justice system gets reformed.
I'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.
Because 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.
But what if you don't trust those prosecutors, right?
Suddenly the whole system breaks down.
You can't trust anything.
So much at stake in this.
I failed to tell you what that first night was like, and I just should wrap it up very quickly.
But, 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...
My wife comforting my daughters as if I had died because I kind of did.
I was gone.
They were going to grow up without their father.
So all of that's going through my mind.
And then I reached for the Bible that my wife gave me to leave for prison, to take with me to prison.
They don't let you bring anything else in, but they'll let you bring the Bible in.
I've always had a belief in God.
I always believed in prayer.
I was raised in the Serbian Orthodox Christian church church.
But I never read the Bible.
I was just so busy trying to get ahead in life.
You know, I had to go out and make campaign promises, give speeches, kiss babies, shake hands, raise money.
I tried Genesis.
I'd get stuck in Genesis, so-and-so's beginning, so-and-so.
Now suddenly here I am in this deep fucking dark valley and I'm facing 14 years of this.
I'm so alone.
I'm not going to fuck around with Genesis or Deuteronomy or Leviticus or any of that stuff.
I'm going to something right away that might give me some hope.
And I went to the 23rd Psalm.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
It makes me lie down in green pastures.
And then I kept reading the Psalms.
And I know the story of David.
And I associate myself with him.
I know I get criticized and maligned by people in the media for saying I'm like David.
I'm not saying I'm not.
I'm not saying I am.
I'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.
I'm thinking he endured that.
Maybe there's hope.
And I'd read his Psalms because they're just prayers to God is what they are from him.
And they were helpful to me.
So I kept reading and I went to Isaiah and the fiery furnace of affliction and how...
Adversity in hard times is God's way of testing us.
It can make us stronger and better.
We learned through those hard lessons, the fiery, you know, through the fire of hard times.
And, of course, then eventually the Gospels.
And the best story of all, in my mind, as a Christian, is the story of Jesus.
And, 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.
And he says, O Father, please lift this cup from me.
I mean, I get choked up just thinking about this.
And he says, but no God, no Father, not my will, your will.
And 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.
So I read it every day for 2,896 days, and I know it in a way I never knew it before.
And I love it, and it brought me so much closer to God.
There 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.
But there were moments years into the process, not those first early years, because they were so hard.
But 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.
I was reading a lot of other books.
And I'd get visits maybe a couple times.
In the beginning, it was like two or three times a year in the beginning.
And then as time went by, it was hard for our daughters.
And I would encourage them not to come because they were in school.
And we were hopeful that we'd get justice in the courts.
And only another few more months, the appellate court will come through.
Don't come.
So now suddenly I'm seeing less and less of them.
But 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.
That's where the prison was.
And then when it would rain, there'd be rainbows.
I 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.
I 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.
And I feel like I'm at a place now where I'm grateful in a weird way for that experience.
I wish it never happened and I have bitterness still.
And I hate the motherfuckers that did it to me and I know I'm not supposed to hate them.
I'm supposed to forgive them.
I'm not that good a Christian.
I hate the motherfuckers.
They belong in jail.
But I have to say that that experience, reading the Bible that way, Maybe it serves a higher purpose.
Well, I think you got the most out of that horrific situation in that regard, right?
And sometimes you have to experience horrific tragedy to experience incredible love.
That's a weird thing to think of, but I think this battle that we have constantly with good and evil and It's a real thing.
Sometimes in your darkest, deepest moments is when you recognize a truth.
There's something there that we all...
Every culture believes in a higher power.
It's very strange, isn't it?
Almost every culture has some sort of belief system about a higher power.
It's something you could say...
You 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.
You could say that.
But 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.
And it's so cynical just to disregard that.
Everybody wants to pretend that they're smarter than they really are.
It's a terrible trait that we all have.
And 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.
And your simple little mind, your desire for order, and to look at this and go, no, you just live and you die.
You don't really know.
You should probably listen to some people that have had profound experiences.
Because there's been a lot of them.
And there's been a lot of them throughout human history.
And to just completely dismiss them as all nonsense, it's just like, that's such a cynical perspective on human beings.
And 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.
People 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.
It's not universally good.
But it's a scaffolding for ethics and morals that I think shapes society in a way that's not really possible with just anarchy.
You need law and order.
You need something you believe in.
That's what keeps us together.
You 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.
God, the people that I've met.
And one of the things about coming to Texas is I meet so many avowed Christians.
So many really proud and intelligent and vocal religious people.
And they're some of the nicest people, like, you could ever meet.
Like, a real Christian?
Like, I've met some real Christians, like this, my friend Alan, who runs a homeless, like, rehabilitation community here in Austin.
We talked about that in terms of psychedelics the other day, the spiritual narcissism.
I 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.
That'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.
There's a shit ton of documentaries on these folks.
It's a real danger that we have in looking for someone smarter than us.
It's a normal pattern of behavior from tribal societies.
All tribal societies had the wisest person who was the leader.
This is the person that everybody trusted.
He's the guy with the most scars.
He knows where the food is.
He knows how to get the fuck away from the enemies.
He knows how to keep order, and he's reasonable in how he governs the village.
Until someone overthrows him, that's your guy.
And we have this hierarchy that we look for in everything.
We really do.
We look for it in all sorts of things.
And if we find it in a false prophet, we'll go with it.
I bought a building out here.
You know, my comedy club is in a place called the Ritz Theater.
It's this beautiful theater from 1927. But before that, I had bought another building that was owned by a cult.
It was a building called the One World Theater.
I didn't buy it.
I was under contract for it.
I spent a bunch of money and got out of it because I watched the documentary on the cult.
I was like, oh, my God.
It was a guy who was a gay porn star and a hypnotist.
who started this cult in West Hollywood.
And 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.
So he changed his name, moved to Austin, and built this theater.
And the cult had already disbanded a bunch.
And 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.
It's a beautiful 300-seat theater, gorgeous place.
And this is the same thing.
It's just a person who convinced all these other people that he had the answers and he was a hypnotist.
He 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.
What 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.
I wasn't strong enough to get through prison by myself.
I needed God.
And 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.
And 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.
How do you deal with those hard times?
Do you embrace the adversity, try to turn it into something good, or do you just give into it?
And so that gave me the purpose I needed in prison.
And I spent a lot of time not just reading the Bible, but reading all kinds of books, because you've got time.
I mean, you've got a lot of time.
I 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.
He lost his wife, his family, through genocide.
He was at Auschwitz and survived it.
But 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.
And that if you could find a why to live, You can find the how.
And my why was my little girls and my wife.
No 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.
Because I didn't raise them.
My daughter did.
I mean, my wife raised our children, our little girls.
And so that gave me real purpose.
And I had those moments when despair would creep in.
It's very natural.
I mean, a lot of blue moments, as you can imagine.
I could never, ever, ever let myself get so down that I would not be active in any given day.
I 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.
Because I love my daughters and I'm doing it for them.
That was my purpose.
I'm not running for government anymore.
I'm not trying to be, you know, successful in the real world because I'm not in it anymore.
My success I'll measure by whether or not I'm strong and tough and I'm productive because I'm doing this for my kids.
That's also why he kept running, even though everybody was coming after him.
You have to be a very particular type of person that has all those legal cases thrown at him.
I 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.
They can't have him at 82 years old trying again.
They're not interested because he became more popular.
When he was gone than when he was president.
And people sort of like towards the end of the four years of Biden had like completely reversed.
So many of my friends, me included, completely reversed how they looked at him.
And then also a lot of it was getting exposed to watching how this propaganda machine marches in step All throughout the media with everything.
You 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.
I'm like, this is crazy.
This is wild to watch.
And that was, you know, minor league stuff compared to what happened to him and certainly compared to what happened to you.
But just, I think people are less likely to believe mainstream narratives now.
And we're so fortunate we have other ways, like Tucker's show, where I saw you.
Like, things that aren't approved, you know?
I mean, look, when Tucker was on Fox News, I'm sure there was a lot of things that he wanted to cover that he couldn't.
Like, there was no way, when he was on Fox News, he could have interviewed that guy who says he blew Obama.
Find out how long the Tucker Carlson podcast was with the guy who claims he blew Obama.
Because 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?
I want to know.
I'd be hard-pressed to think I could squeeze an hour out of that guy.
Like, what the fuck are you going to talk about?
How long is that podcast?
Alright, he hung in there as long as he could.
But my point is, again, I'm not standing up for him having that guy on.
I'm not saying that was a good thing.
That's not what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is, that's what he wanted to do.
You know, I watched a little of it.
So that's Tucker with no one telling him what to do.
The 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.
And 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.
Along with independent journalists like Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss and Glenn Greenwald.
You have all these people that are honest.
And you know they're honest.
They're always honest.
They're always giving you the full version of the truth and it's spread like wildfire.
And then you look at the narratives that you see in mainstream media, and like, you're leaving so much out.
You're not talking about that.
You're not talking about why people were upset.
You're not talking about what started it.
You're not talking about the government intervention that was behind it all in the first place.
That was a planned organization, and they leave out everything, because that's not what they're supposed to do.
What they're supposed to do is sell as many stories as they can, but stay within a very confined narrative.
Well, that's why what you're doing – I'm not here to kiss your ass, but I am grateful for being on your show.
It's very nice of you to have me so I can talk about my stuff.
But 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.
It's super common with people that are very good at things.
People 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.
If you're a guy who's just cracking home runs every day and someone wants to play ping pong, like, motherfucker.
I'll figure this ping-pong shit out in about five minutes, and then I'll start fucking you up.
And it's just not true, you know?
There's a lot of people that are really smart people, unfortunately.
And this happens with tough people, too.
Tough people want to pretend they're the only tough person.
They all want to pretend that.
Everybody has this weird thing where they think they're different than everybody else.
And 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.
So 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.
I'm getting hurt and I'm probably going to get stopped.
And you see it in their eyes.
You see they can't believe it's happening.
They never envisioned a time where this guy's gonna knock them out.
And then they're against the cage and you see them getting lit up and you, in my mind, I'm seeing the sparks in front of their eyes.
Because when you get hit, you see sparks.
And if you get hit with like a big shot, like you can't, you don't know where anybody is for a couple seconds.
Your legs aren't working.
I'm seeing it in this person that thought they were so good they could fight this other person.
They didn't see it the way everybody else saw it.
They 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.
I 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.
I'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.
First time I ever got my name, the Chicago Tribune.
Even 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.
It was quite a while before they started accepting even the idea of weightlifting.
For 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.
And Evander Holyfield kind of changed everybody's opinion of it because he lifted weights, moved up to heavyweight from cruiserweight.
I 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.
I 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.
Obviously, 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.
But for just any person listening to this, do something hard.
Just make yourself do something hard all the time.
Just trust me.
You'll feel better.
Your life will work better.
You'll be able to handle things better.
You'll be able to handle disputes better, conversations better, interactions with people better.
To 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.
Joe, can I just say one more thing about Trump on this subject?
Self-love, personal toughness, for sure.
But can I say something else?
This man, I honestly believe this, truly loves America.
He isn't just doing this because he wants to be the president.
He's already been that.
And he's got all this great success.
How do you live the life he's lived?
Give that up.
Go 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.
There'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.
When you go through something what Trump went through and you keep doing it, it's more than just his own self-love.
I truly believe he has a genuine, abiding love in his country.
I think in his mind, I'm guessing, I'm putting this in his mind, kind of thinking about my own kind of experience.
He'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.
When 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.
And 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.
So he gets tackled.
He's got blood coming out of his ear.
Guns grow off.
Guy behind him's dead.
Guy got shot protecting his family.
He stands up and he throws his hand up in the air and says, fight, fight, fight.
I 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.
They'll try to dismiss you.
It's like tall poppy syndrome.
They don't want anybody rising above everybody else.
It 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.
It's instead, pull him down so we can make everybody equal.
It's generally very energetic people who don't have any ambition.
So 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.
There should be...
This is how it should all work.
Everybody should have an equal opportunity to be educated and to pursue their dreams.
But we're not going to have equality of effort.
It's not going to exist, okay?
I can't tell you to do what I do, but I'll tell you what I do, and you could either listen and pay attention.
You could say, oh, look at all the effectiveness.
Look at how he's been able to do so many different things.
How is that possible?
Well, it's all simple.
It's all just hard work.
Not everybody wants to do that.
So if you want a quality of outcome and you don't have a quality of effort, then you have tyranny.
Because 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.
And they don't like when people achieve a higher social status than them or economics.
And physically, there's going to come a point in time when you can't really get better at things because you're getting old.
But you can still do it mentally.
You can still learn more.
You can still pursue hobbies and interests and dreams and things that stimulate you and work towards stuff.
It's a better way to live your life.
Mm-hmm.
And, 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.
I haven't learned from it.
I haven't grown from it.
I don't have anything to show for all my time here.
I'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.
Never figured out puzzles, and here I am.
Fuck.
You know, and those are the people that want equality of outcome.
Those are the people who want equity.
Those are the people that want to shut all the...
Look, there's a lot of hedge fund people that are pretty creepy.
There's a lot of billionaires that are doing shady shit.
My 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.
They're both good kids, our daughters.
My older daughter, Amy, is a therapist, good education.
She would like me to advocate for the Puppy Protection Act.
But 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.
So Patty defied all the odds.
She's made it abundantly clear if I ever run for office again, I'm doing that with my second wife.
I'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.
And there is a bias in the criminal justice system that disproportionately has impacted the black community in a grossly unfair way.
The more common thing, Joe, is the over-sentencing part of it.
Those eight years in prison, I mean, the overwhelming number of the guys I was with, they did it.
They were guilty.
The prosecutors got it right.
What they got wrong was the sentences are ridiculously unfair and wrong, and they don't match up.
And 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.
But every case is different.
Every person is different.
Their backgrounds are different.
Their cause, the reasons for doing things, they're different.
So the system's broken in the sense that they don't take into account other considerations than just these like...
Formulas they follow.
And so as a result, you got these people, disproportionately black but not exclusively, who are doing these long sentences for first-time offenses.
Trump pardoned a woman named Alice Marie Johnson, first-time nonviolent offender, drugs.
They gave her a life sentence.
It was probably a lot of drugs.
A life sentence.
And after 20 years, Trump pulled her out, saved her.
And a lot of this came from the 1994 crime bill that Joe Biden sponsored and Bill Clinton passed.
My 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.
There'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.
It's in Europe, but it's a gateway to the Middle East, and a lot of the political dynamics internationally are at play there.
But the Serbs and the Serbian people were allies with the United States in both world wars.
They love America.
They want to improve relations with America today after we bombed them.
This was May of 1999. And I went, I was a young congressman there.
I was the only Serb.
The Serbs are a small group of the United States and they don't have any political clout.
But Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Jackson and I went there because three American soldiers were taken prisoner by the Serbs during the war.
And 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.
I 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.
This was the Milosevic government at the time.
And we got the soldiers home.
But what I like to talk about with regard to Serbia is it's a country in the Balkans that follows a Judeo-Christian tradition.
It's very much like Israel in the sense that it's in a place where they're standing up for those sorts of things.
And 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.
All the sides do it.
There's no one side that is...
Crystal clean on those issues.
They'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.
So these are complicated issues.
But 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.
And this government that's there today very much wants to reopen relations with the United States and have better relations.
It's a growing economy.
They're doing very well economically because they're good, hardworking people.
And it's interesting.
In a poll recently of European countries, in this presidential election, Trump versus Kamala Harris, the Serbian people had the highest support of Trump.
Something like 59% of the Serbian populace supported Trump in the last election, better than any other European country.
And so whatever I can do to be helpful to my, you know, the place my father came from.
You're talking about entrenched interests within government and outside of government.
You're talking about what I call the political-industrial complex.
It exists in Washington.
It exists in state governments like in Springfield, Illinois.
It's the usual people.
And the two parties are split on some issues, but they play the game within certain parameters.
And 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.
The 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.
This is very real.
It's very real in every part of government.
It'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.
The weaponized Department of Justice, very real.
I'm a living testament to that, and so is Trump.
Very real.
The bureaucracy that's entrenched, that you have a hard time moving, these government employees, many of whom now are even going to the office.
They're working from home.
They are entrenched.
They're hard to move.
So this is going to be real hard.
It's going to be constant war.
They're going to fight back, and they're going to keep trying to do to Trump what they've been doing.
And I think the opportunity for the Trump administration, for President Trump, Trump and Lincoln are the only two presidents who never got a honeymoon.
In Lincoln's case, the southern states seceded and left.
Trump wasn't quite that bad.
But no one's been treated as a new president as terribly as Trump has been treated by the Democrats in Washington.
Because he's a real threat to change things.
And he's a guy who's actually trying to keep his promises.
And these appointments, they're very different.
They're very unusual.
But they show he learned the lesson that you can't trust those Washington insiders because they'll infiltrate your government.
And they'll be the ones who will try to not carry out your orders.
They'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?
What about Shapiro?
What about all these different people?
What about them running?
Let's see what their solutions to these things are.
She's already said she's not going to do anything different.
You've been lied to over and over again by the establishment Democrat Party and their allies in the media.
That's a very serious threat.
My daughters are fearful of some of this.
And that Donald Trump is this rotten guy and he's not those things.
They've been demonizing him for so long and this is on purpose.
This is part of the political strategy.
And eventually, most of the people saw through it.
And 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.
So thank you for that, because I think that's part of saving America before America could become great again.
Why do the Democrats seem to think America's not so great?
We've had a lot of problems.
There'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.
They've been screwed.
But in spite of it all, this is a country that offers the opportunity we talked about and corrects those mistakes.
But the problem, I think, in some respects today with the Democrat Party is now it's a question of reversing.
It's no longer – let's judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
And I think the Republicans didn't do themselves any justice by reversing Roe v.
Wade.
Because I think wanting that reversed is what put this fear in everyone that you're coming after women's reproductive rights.
That men, based on religious ideals, are going to tell women what to do with their bodies.
If that didn't happen, I think it would have been an even bigger victory for Trump.
Because 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,
but 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?
So you have ovulation apps, and these ovulation apps you say when you had your period, and it keeps track of when you're ovulating.
That if a woman had one of those apps and was living in a state because Roe v.
Wade'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.
New York's a very different country than this, but we all agree that we can travel back and forth.
So then you leave me the fuck alone.
You don't know what I'm doing in this state, and I don't want you...
If 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...
That's fucking terrifying, and that I think cost a lot of votes.
And maybe it's a wrong perception, maybe it's an extreme version of it, and I'm exaggerating, but I don't trust people.
I don't trust people that have power over people.
And I think the less power people have over people, the better.
I think if you want people to have less abortions, make more birth control available.
Make it available everywhere.
You know, education, but that's not going to help because kids are crazy.
You get horny, you go nuts.
But 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.
We would have them at the gas station.
We'd get abortions everywhere.
Like, there would be no babies.
It's a very complicated decision for someone to make.
And Joe Biden ironically said it best a long time ago.
And the people on the other side, the pro-lifers, these are good people who genuinely believe that this is the killing of a baby.
What Roe v.
Wade had said in this decision, you know, it broke it down into trimesters.
And within the first trimester, that's a life and being, but it's not a human being.
And that always seems sensible to me.
But 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?
Yeah, 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.
Stops by, says goodbye to her, leaves, didn't plan his getaway so good.
They get him within, I don't know, 10-15 minutes.
Didn't take long.
He's apprehended.
He's got no defense.
There's all these witnesses.
Saw it all.
So his lawyers correctly say, we better just ask for mercy.
Don't even pretend you didn't do it.
Plead guilty.
Prosecutors want 20 years in prison for socks.
Okay?
And they mostly always get what they ask for, these federal prosecutors.
The defense lawyer recognized the judge was like 83 years old or something.
They 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.
She tells the story about how kind he was to her in the midst of this bank robbery.
The 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.
And 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.
But he's getting all this pushback from the politicians.
And he had a problem because he had called Zelensky in Ukraine.
And the Democrats were going to impeach him over that telephone call, which was absolutely the right thing for him to do.
Because 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.
That's probably...
Perhaps 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?
That's all he did, and they impeached him over it.
So now I'm on hold.
But 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.
I had to go back.
Understandably, Trump did the right thing for political purposes.
The White House did.
But they put me back in the kitchen.
One of the cops there felt like, who's this guy?
I think he is some special inmate because the president almost pulled him out.
We're going to show this asshole.
He ain't no big deal.
They put me back in the kitchen at 4 o'clock in the morning.
You got to be there.
You wake up at 3.30 washing pots and pans for eight hours a day.
I want to be successful, make money, things are good, have a best-selling book, maybe God willing, who knows.
I'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.
Oh, and the black community in particular, and the cynical part of the Democrat Party.
And it really started here in Austin, from a guy from this area here in Austin, Texas, named Lyndon Johnson.
And there were so many good things about his Great Society programs, but he was motivated by politics.
Yes, there's poor people that we must help.
But it wasn't just that.
He said, this will ensure that we get the end vote for a whole generation.
We'll get the end vote.
He didn't say it like that.
He said the whole word.
And that's how the Democrats have approached the black community ever since.
And 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.
They cannot afford to lose.
90 to 95 percent of a safe vote for them if they're free.
Because 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.
And they were like, what the fuck is this?
Like, what about us?
Like, there was a lot of people in Chicago that were up in arms about that.
And they just pump all kinds of money into it, and they need money.
But 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.
So they're locked into that special interest politics and control of the teachers' unions that have that kind of influence.
We have so much money to send to all these countries in foreign aid.
We just gave a billion dollars to Africa in case they get hit by storms for natural disasters.
What?
How much would it cost?
How much would it cost to fix every school in the country?
How much would it cost?
It can't be done.
Okay.
Are you telling me it can't be done with $39 trillion?
If I gave you $39 trillion, do you think that you could fix every school in the country?
I bet you could.
I bet you have a lot of money left over.
Okay.
So let's forget the $39 trillion because that's ridiculous.
But what's the number?
How 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.
Taking our standing where we are internationally, which is very low now, and raising it back up to the top.
How do we do that?
How much would it cost?
Just help me out.
Help me out.
It's not insurmountable.
Like, if I said $39 trillion, you'd be like, yeah, you could definitely do it.
Yeah, you could definitely pay people so much money.
Because there's all kinds of entrenched obstacles that won't let you do the necessary reforms to make the teachers teach the kids better.
Of course.
Okay?
So money is a part of it, sure.
But it is less of a part than actually...
Having some sort of system of accountability so that there's actually results.
Unfortunately, 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.
It's all about their members and the teachers.
And so they resist any kinds of changes that would maybe make for the classroom environment to be more conducive to teach a child.
Things 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.
And then test scores alone aren't the best evidence of whether or not a child is learning.
So there's these are complicated things.
You have to have the money necessary to do it, but it doesn't have to be an astronomical sum.
They've got to change the way they are teaching our children.
And I think you can learn from other countries and see what other countries are doing successfully and try to bring that here.
The problem you get is the politics in America and the Democratic Party.
It's controlled by many different interest groups and the teachers unions, the education association.
Those unions have an unbelievable amount of sway and Democratic candidates are afraid of them, plus they need them to win.
So the complications are more administrative than they are money.
And the concern of taxpayers that you keep throwing money, good money after money that's not working, is a legitimate one.
Look, I could have done more on this issue when I was governor, when I had that power.
We 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.
So 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.
The more people that we have that are highly educated, the less losers, the less crime, the less everything.
The more people participate, the better the dream gets, the more competition there is.
The 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...
They build coalitions.
So the teachers union is a powerful group.
By 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.
And 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.
And then couple that with some of the, you know, some of the more progressive interest groups, the LGBTQ perhaps.
The 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.
The concerns they have are very different, and they don't match up, but they've got these coalitions.
So 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.
But 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.
And it's black kids who are disproportionately getting screwed.
And then there's also the factor of they're growing up in crime-ridden neighborhoods and they're probably not getting enough nourishment.
There's a lot of factors that would also inhibit your ability to even absorb information, the stress and the trauma.
So what you really got to do is fix all that in cities.
That's another thing.
How 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?
But not in their neighborhoods is where the crime's taking place.
It's in those poor neighborhoods.
They're the victims of the crimes.
It's so upside down, it's so wrong.
But you know what's happened?
Because of the politics of things and their relationships, they've ignored or actually butchered common sense.
And 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.
And 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.
And 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.
If 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?
If 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.
Yeah, 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.
How 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.
All these things can be corrected.
I feel like I can be helpful in something like that.
I don't know enough about all the details, but I'm very suspicious of that, the profit motive in private prisons.
For example, the commissary stuff, that's been privatized, things along those lines.
I don't know enough about that.
My feeling is probably not, but maybe you can do some version of that.
By contracting out to some private companies to come in and educate inmates, which might be interesting.
Bring 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.
Practical things.
Privatize some of that, that might be worthwhile.
That could work.
But as it is right now, government doing it, they're not doing it.
By 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.
Really?
I feel like I was the best governor in Illinois history for the shit that I did for regular people.
Healthcare for every child, free public transportation for our seniors, for the disabled.
Mammograms and pap smears for underserved women.
And if we find cancer, we get it treated and save their lives.
This thing called open road tolling where commuters can go without, you know, having to pay tolls.
They've got a transponder where they can go all across the country.
We're the first in the country to do that.
All kinds of stuff where an average citizen says, this governor did this for me.
I can't think of a fucking thing any of my other governors have ever done for anybody I know.
If you can think about, you know, what has Governor X done for me that I feel in real life?
You've got to undo some of those guidelines, because these judges are required by law to whack a guy.
Because 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.
Those things are taken into consideration when they have these guidelines that the judges have to follow.
They were pushed by prosecutors to give them the tools to go after criminal behavior.
So, for example, I'm sitting at Jailhouse Rock before 110 inmates who the day before I see in the yard are all muscled up.
They're all big muscle guys.
They got tats all over, right?
And they got interesting hairstyles.
You know, some of them, Fu Manchu, you know, they look like Genghis Khan, some of them, right?
You got these racist Nazi guys with swastikas tatted on them, right?
And they're all of a sudden on this particular day, they're wearing caps and gowns.
And 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?
We 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.
A drug dude who went to Berkeley, the music school in Boston.
Really great musician.
His name's Ernie.
I don't want to say his last name to embarrass him.
Great guy.
He was like my music mentor.
And I learned that if you practice singing, I'm not a singer, but you can actually improve.
And it was like a way where we would practice for hours a day where I wasn't in prison for those five hours.
I was focusing on trying to get good at something.
But 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.
And 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.
The aggressor got more criminal charges against him and got sent to an even higher prison.
The victim, thank goodness, survived.
Fucked up.
He was bloodied up and all of that.
The third party that intervened, the peacemaker, saved a life.