Premium Episode 112: Get MyPilled with Mike Lindell (Sample)
From crack addict, to born again Christian, to infomercial pillow millionaire, to member of President Trump’s inner circle, to self-immolating in public. We take a look at Mike Pillow AKA Mike Lindell, his "documentary" Absolute Proof and his Christian dominionist message.
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Welcome, listener, to the 112th premium chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Get My Pilled with Mike Lindell episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokotansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Mike Lindell is a Minnesota hero who went from crack addict to born-again Christian to infomercial pillow millionaire to member of President Trump's inner circle.
Even after Lindell got banned from Twitter and Trump left the White House, he continued to lead a futile fight on behalf of the ex-president, spreading conspiracy theories in his quote-unquote documentary, Absolute Proof.
Today we're going to take a look at how Lindell used a pillow company to push his Christian Dominionist worldviews, become friends with Donald Trump, and eventually self-immolate in the public sphere.
Mike Lindell has an interesting story, and that's really, I think, the entire secret to his success.
I mean, he's not just a man with a pillow company.
He's a man with a pillow company who has an amazing Horatio Alger-style pull-himself-up-by-his-bootstraps kind of journey.
And so, really, it seems like his pillow company, as we're going to see, is really kind of a way to kind of push his personal testimony in sort of the evangelical Christian sense.
According to Lindell, achieving his success required overcoming a lifelong lack of self-esteem, which he traces back to his Paris divorce when he was seven years old.
After high school, Lindell enrolled in the University of Minnesota, but dropped out after just a couple of months.
At his five-year high school reunion, Lindell felt intimidated by his peers with college degrees and families.
To impress his classmates, he told astonishing tales about his life, such as the time he crashed a motorcycle and had a parachute malfunction while skydiving on the same day.
He also claimed that mafia bookies came to his house to collect 20 grand worth of bad sports bets.
He says that he had a short-lived career as a professional Las Vegas card counter.
All in all, he estimates that he has had 14 different near-death experiences, and he often enjoys recounting these tales when he appears on programs such as this particular Christian program.
I'm sure there's many other times, but, uh, you know, I didn't count like, uh, on a trip to Mexico, get my head cut off by the, you know, got in between these cartel wars or, but I've had everything.
I've had a parachute not open.
I've had a motorcycle crash.
I've had a car crash where I actually seen myself outside of, you know, Like they say, out of body experience type thing.
I've seen that all, but for me, I almost got kind of complacent going, wow, God's got a bigger purpose for me.
I can take as long as I want.
My sister told me in 2008, she goes, you know, you've got to stop standing in front of semis.
God's going to pick someone else, you know, because I would, I would use it against him going, well, I can just, I can, you know, procrastinate, you know, if he's got this big plan for my life.
Lindell told the Star Tribune this.
I would tell these stories that were so over the top and they were true because I didn't have anything else good to say.
I did it to bring up my self-worth and get attention so I wouldn't have to talk about not having a family or girlfriend.
Dude, he's literally doing real life message board stuff.
He's like, yeah, no man, I'm totally banging my wife.
And he's just posting memes, stories that he's made up.
Yeah, stories that he made up.
But also, it's a little weird where it's like, oh, yeah, I just told these stories about my incredible near-death experiences with the Mexican cartel, as if these are somehow less interesting than stories about your wife and girlfriend.
I mean, it's very strange.
It's obviously what's happening is that he's bullshitting.
He's making up these stories for attention.
Mm hmm.
I would like to see Anton Chigurh kind of chase Mike Lindell down and with that air gun that they use to put down cattle.
Just kind of just hold a pillow to Mike Lindell's head and watch his **** roll over his kitchen.
Over the next two decades, Lindell poured himself into various entrepreneurial enterprises, including raising a herd of feeder pigs, running a carpet cleaning and lunch wagon business, and buying a couple of bars.
Now, all the while, he was struggling with both substance and gambling addiction.
He's cool.
Yeah, I know.
He's all over the place.
Really, the pillow thing is like the wrong turn.
He could still be out there counting cards and ripping people off for a drink.
Lindell eventually got the idea for MyPillow in 2004.
He says that he got the idea in a dream.
He enlisted his kids to help create a logo and a prototype.
Now, the prototype used foam shredded into small, medium, and large chunks that would interlock.
This unique selling proposition was basically claimed that it could be shaped like down, but its springiness offered more support.
At first, Lindell couldn't persuade the big box stores about the pillow's potential, so he started selling the pillows at an Eden Prairie mall a few months later.
Sales started to improve once he started selling at home shows, expos, and fairs.
Lindell loved telling people how his invention could help them.
While pitching his pillow, he says he felt comfortable talking to strangers without being high on drugs.
But as the product was gaining traction, Lindell's business and his personal life were on the skids.
His wife of 20 years had left him, he filed for bankruptcy, and he was still addicted to crack cocaine.
Finally, according to his own story, Lindell's primary drug dealer staged an intervention and ordered others to cut him off.
He claims that his dealer said this, If some crazy white guy with a mustache wants drugs, don't sell it to him.
I don't believe that.
What drug dealer says is like, don't, don't, don't sell to our best customer.
This guy is going to go on and he's going to sell so many pillows that are going to change the world.
I've seen this.
And I'm going to use them to smuggle crack into Mexico.
I did.
I took psilocybin, and I had a vision.
And that vision was a revolutionary pillow.
And if we fuck this up, we're going to be doing the world a disservice.
Lindale talked to a newly sober friend about getting clean.
He embraced religion and prayed that he'd be rid of the desire for drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes.
He says that after this, through the power of Jesus, his cravings vanished.
The business's big sales came shortly after he got clean.
Now, sales specifically exploded thanks to Lindell's famously cheesy infomercials.
The first one aired in late 2011 with Lindell dressed in his signature blue button-up shirt and cross around his neck.
The half-hour long commercial involved him gesticulating wildly and raving about MyPillow.
Here, we can also see his patented kind of stream-of-consciousness talking style.
What it does, it puts you in a deep REM sleep, which is a healing sleep.
It's also your most comfortable sleep.
When you get comfortable at night, that's what sends you into the REM.
That's when your cervical nerves, your neck, is lined up.
And interesting enough, with my theory on this, this theory was brand new, and it's true, and it's real, and everybody knows that now that's out there, because you've all done that with your arms, folded your pillows, and done all this stuff, and flip-flopped all night like a guppy.
Here, You stay with my pillow.
Wherever you set this pillow, it's gonna hold exactly for you as an individual.
With my pillow, by keeping all those things in your neck straight, you get the best sleep of your life every single night, and I guarantee it.
It's interesting, he's not a slick salesman, right?
I think that's part of his charm, is that because he seems like your dad's friend, someone you might meet at church, but he also talks in this really rambling, not particularly rehearsed way.
He seems pleasantly pilled, basically, at this point.
And according to his own story, when he first did this MyPillow infomercial, they had him reading lines from a teleprompter, and it was Awful.
He was getting feedback from the, you know, the head of the network or the head of the sort of station that was saying, you know, this is the worst guy we've ever had.
They tried it a bunch of times with the teleprompter and he just couldn't do it.
And the magic really hit when he, you know, convinced them to take the teleprompter away and just let him kind of, you know, prophesize about the pillow and all that stuff.
And so it's really, it's funny.
It turned out that the late night infomercial was the perfect medium to sell pillows.
Insomniacs watching television helped turn my pillow into an overnight sensation.
The company grew from 5 employees to 500 in a little more than a month.
Whoa.
It's insane.
He did like, it's kind of direct sales too, right?
I mean, of course.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's, that's how he's doing it.
He's kind of convincing these people that they're on a journey with him.
Yeah, apparently, I mean, he got a lot of his circle to start working for him.
He says he gave jobs to people he knew from casinos, people who needed a second chance, and once, as the story goes, a consolation prize to a romantic suitor.
Right, so this woman wanted to fuck Mike, but she was like... But instead, work for him.
You wanna sell pillows?
Yeah, you wanna sell some pillows instead.
No, Mike.
I want you to put the pillows down on the bed over there.
By early 2012, Lindell's pitch became the country's top infomercial and the MyPillowGuy became a household name.
It is funny, though, that we do have famous salespeople in this country.
Occasionally, if someone's good enough and they're charming enough and they sell something like OxiClean or they sell some sort of, you know, cloth, then they can get famous and well-beloved for doing nothing but pitching to us.
I wonder how many of the 500 people made no money or even lost money.
Because that's the real story is that it's all on commission.
And so, you know, you just get a large amount of people and you don't have to pay them anything if they don't succeed.
You're just playing the numbers game.
So it makes sense to then recruit from casinos and random places.
In 2016, Lindell caught the attention of Donald Trump.
The then-presidential candidate invited the Pillowmaker to a one-on-one meeting.
Lindell became an open supporter of Trump, and that brought him increased attention from the national press.
Interesting relationship.
I really want to know what the hell's going on there.
He bought that meeting.
That's what happened.
Oh.
No, for sure.
MyPillow donates a certain amount, and it's like, in exchange, you get to sit down with President Trump and tell him, as all big donors do, what you want.
It just turned out that this guy wasn't trying to deregulate the pillow industry.
He wanted, like, a fucking martial law.
Martial law to be instated in a coup, which is so strange.
It is.
This is the interesting thing, because on the one hand, he is a captain of industry.
His estimated net worth, I'm told, is roughly $300 million.
Wow.
Whatever.
I'm not even jealous.
Insanely wealthy.
But he's also super, super pilled, like an extremist Christian.
You wouldn't expect a captain of industry to be.
Yeah, but like you said, his testimonial relies on it.
And his testimonial is kind of at the core of his business model, too.
Yeah, that's right.
That's the reason why he's worth nine figures.
He basically replicates the sweaty energy of televangelists, but for pillows.
So it feels kind of harmless somehow, I think, to Christians?
Especially harmless, just as a pillow.
Just a good night.
Just gonna take some pressure off my neck bones.
After Trump was elected, Lindell spent an Easter weekend at the president's Mar-a-Lago resort, and the New York Daily News dubbed him Trump's new best friend.
Ooh, I bet he'd love that.
At a June 2018 rally in Fargo, Trump called Lindell the greatest and said that Melania and he were both sleeping on MyPillows.
At one point, Lindell even participated in a White House press conference about the pandemic for some reason.
Thank you, Mr. President, for your call to action, which has empowered companies like MyPillow to help our nation win this invisible war.
Now I wrote something off the cuff, if I can read this.
God gave us grace on November 8, 2016 to change the course we were on.
God had been taken out of our schools and lives.
A nation had turned its back on God.
And I encourage you to use this time at home to get back in the Word, read our Bibles, and spend time with our families.
Our president gave us so much hope where just a few short months ago, we had the best economy, the lowest unemployment, and wages going up.
It was amazing.
With our great president, vice president, and this administration, and all the great people in this country praying daily, we will get through this and get back to a place that's stronger and safer than ever.
Lindell has always blended his business promotion with his evangelical Christianity.
This can be seen in a 2017 video he produced called The Mike Lindell Story, An American Dream.
Now, this show was some of the weirdest shit I've ever seen.
It was released on the MyPillow YouTube channel.
This video is partly a rundown of Lindell's life story as told through his Family, friends, and business associates.
Like, they all come onto a stage and do, like, it's like a This Is Your Life kind of show.
In the show, an upbeat blonde woman acts as a host and introduces everyone who has ever known Mike through the years, who praise his accomplishments one by one.
First prop Joe went up.
The introduction to the Mike Lindell story, An American Dream, is very jarring.
It starts off with a Star Wars text crawling along the screen, which is read in the voiceover.
And then it breaks into like big band music and the hosts walking out into a packed and enthusiastic audience.
In this life, we all experience moments sometimes so unique or unusual, we pause and say, wow, what are the odds that happened?
And if something like that happens again, maybe we say, it's just coincidence.
How many once-in-a-lifetime events occur that we leave to simple chance, before we believe that perhaps it's something more?
In other words, at what point do you ask yourself, is it all just luck, or have I just experienced a miracle?
Ladies and gentlemen, join us from the legendary Pantages Theatre here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, And now please welcome to the stage your co-host Jan Carl.
It's an evening with Mike Lindell and we're gonna have or this is this woman is her host.
Like a Christmas special.
Exactly, it's a Christmas special.
She introduces Mike and he talks a bit and they bring out his family and friends and there are tape segments.
Yeah, and they clearly have an applause sign, you know, and kind of like the whole thing is set up like this happens every night, like somewhere in New York, like Wheel of Fortune or something.
By the end of this show, Lindell gets to the point.
His success was a miracle from Jesus, and you should believe in miracles in Jesus, too.
This is a sign he really has gotten over his self-esteem issues or he really hasn't.
By the end of this show, Lindell gets to the point.
His success was a miracle from Jesus and you should believe in miracles in Jesus too.
But what you're really here is to help others.
Yeah, that's right.
But it took me a long time to realize that, that the pillow was just a platform for a bigger purpose and calling.
And, you know, I'm just a regular guy from a small town in Minnesota that was an alcoholic and a drug addict.
And, you know, I know now that there's no other explanation of why I'm here today except that Jesus protected me and carried me through it all.
Otherwise, I wouldn't even be here.
And, you know, my prayer is that after sharing my story, that you will all reflect on your own lives and just Think about all the adversity that we all face and get through, or when good things happen and we tend to chalk it up to good luck or coincidence.
Have you ever considered it might be divine intervention?
Jesus is real, and with God, all things are possible.
Amen to that, right?
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