April 18, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:02:34
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Jim Acosta was sitting 10 feet from me and he bad-mouthed me saying I was a PR stunt that I did. | ||
| that he played me directly a PR stunt to get to promote my pillow. | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report Lockdown Edition. | ||
| Remember, everybody, you can get all of our videos totally ad-free and early at rubinreport.com. | ||
| And joining me today is an American businessman, entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of MyPillow, Mike Lindell. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| Thanks for taking the time, my friend. | ||
| I've wanted you on for quite some time, and then over the last couple weeks, you went from a guy that's kinda hard to get to a guy that's impossibly hard to get, and now I've got you in a hotel, and we're gonna take advantage of the time. | ||
| So everybody knows. | ||
| What happened a couple of weeks ago with you at the White House and the brouhaha, and as I was saying to you off camera, watching the media go after you was so consistent with what I've seen about so many of my guests who have dared to take an opposition opinion that mainstream allows for. | ||
| But I wanna hold that for a little bit, because your backstory, what you've been through in your life is pretty incredible, and it's a true story of perseverance, actually. | ||
| So could you just, I know you've told the story many times before, but could you just back us up and tell us the Mike Lindell story, and then we'll get to everything happening in 2020? | ||
| Absolutely, and by the way, you talk about, after I said that at the White House, at the Rose Garden, I've had over 80 interviews now since then. | ||
| It's brought this platform that God's given me, just huge. | ||
| Just when I think it can't get any bigger, it gets bigger. | ||
| But you go all the way back. | ||
| For my story, it begins back, I guess, with my new book, What Are the Odds? | ||
| From Crackhead to CEO. | ||
| But it takes me back to, I was seven years old, my parents divorced, and that's when divorces weren't common. | ||
| I got moved into a new school two hours away, And I was the only kid in the whole school that was from a divorced family. | ||
| And I felt like right away it started manifesting. | ||
| I didn't fit in. | ||
| I would do things. | ||
| I remember climbing out of a moving bus window to show up and jump into the ditch. | ||
| We had snow in Minnesota, luckily. | ||
| And everyone, you know, they would go, wow, can you believe you did that? | ||
| It would be these crazy things. | ||
| Or I wouldn't talk to them. | ||
| I was very shy in that respect. | ||
| But I thought to myself, There's something different about me. | ||
| I just felt different. | ||
| I didn't fit in with any one group. | ||
| And this kept going on and on throughout high school. | ||
| And if I'd go traveling anywhere, if I'd be anywhere, I didn't even date really in high school because of that. | ||
| It was just this unworthiness spirit when I look back now. | ||
| But I was at my five-year reunion. | ||
| I worked the last two jobs I had back then. | ||
| I worked for someone. | ||
| I worked at a grocery store and a drive-in movie theater. | ||
| If anybody out there don't know what that is, it was a big theater. | ||
|
unidentified
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We pulled up in our cars. | |
| I went to one drive-in movie in my entire life. | ||
| I saw a RoboCop in about 1989 or so at a drive-in. | ||
| Yeah, it was a big thing back when I was growing up. | ||
| I worked there for seven years. | ||
| It was voted the number one place to work back then, by the way, if you were to work for someone. | ||
| And it was fun. | ||
| But anyway, then I went to college at the U of M, and the first quarter, I dropped out. | ||
| I was still working the two jobs, and then I just dropped out. | ||
| And right away, you know, I was addicted to compulsive gambling, and I started drinking about 17, actually late for, you know, 16 or 17. | ||
| But we got to our five-year reunion, and I remember getting there, and of course, I was probably high and been drinking, And anyway, all of these guys had either started families, graduated from college, started their careers, or they'd kept the same job and moved up the corporate ladder already. | ||
| So I was upset with myself that I wasn't where I was, where I knew I could be. | ||
| Everybody was ahead of me. | ||
| I thought, wow, I am, you know. | ||
| But what I did is I took over that whole reunion and told them about all these stories that were true. | ||
| I owed the mafia money, $20,000. | ||
| They came to break my arms. | ||
| For football bets. | ||
| I had, uh, when I was 17, I got like 18 tickets on a, on a motorcycle and two days out running the cops. | ||
| Um, you know, I went to go skydiving, fell asleep on that motorcycle, crashed it, was bound and determined to finish, you know, it was all banged up and bound and determined to get down to Stanton, Minnesota and finish this skydiving jump. | ||
| It was my ninth jump and my parachute didn't open. | ||
| I had a streamer hit the ground and all these things, but I'm telling everyone at the reunion and they're just going, wow, wow. | ||
| Well, nobody, I didn't hear anything about anybody else, but I got home that night and I laid in bed and it was just a deep sadness came over me that I really wanted what they had, you know, and I had fallen into this thing. | ||
| It was like, where's my life going? | ||
| And, and, um, you know, well then it's about 1982 or 83. | ||
| Um, you know, I did different things. | ||
| I then it was became a card counter, a professional card counter. | ||
| My uncle, I worked on his farm, raising pigs. | ||
| I guess that was the last job I had for someone. | ||
| And I decided, well, I'm going to raise pigs myself. | ||
| Why am I working for him? | ||
| So I went and bought all these feeder pigs, put them in a semi-residential area, and the bottom fell out of the market. | ||
| That was a disaster. | ||
| But I tried all these entrepreneurial things on the same parallel track as I tried cocaine. | ||
| And when I tried cocaine, it was instant. | ||
| I could be where I wanted to be. | ||
| False courage. | ||
| I had this, you know, that masked any pain I had. | ||
| I felt like I was on top of the world. | ||
| It didn't matter what anybody thought of me. | ||
| I was, you know, I felt better about myself. | ||
| It was all these big lies, but, but I was a very functioning addict then, cocaine addict, for 20 years until it switched to crack in the early 2000. | ||
| But during that time, I ended up getting, I married the girl of my dreams. | ||
| I had four kids, a very functioning addict. | ||
| And which, you know, addiction affects everyone, no matter how many forks you eat with. | ||
| People that say, oh, they're addicts in the street. | ||
| That's what they perceive an addict at. | ||
| Well, most of your addicts, I hate to say it, are functioning. | ||
| They're in the corporate world. | ||
| They're in the, they, you know, I was afraid of talking to anybody that had a suit and a tie on. | ||
| I wasn't as good as them, you know, but, but they were just as many problems as, as anybody does. | ||
| Well, anyway, the, It got to be, um, I was always an entrepreneur. | ||
| I ended up having a bar for 13 years and that bar was probably a bad place for an addict, but, but I, um, I tried different things in the bar. | ||
| You know, I learned a lot there with that entertainment and advertising and stuff, you know, um, different things that a lot of the stuff I learned there, you know, I'd learned, um, you know, the entrepreneurship I really took up, but it also was a bad place for my addictions. | ||
| And then it switched to crack in the early 2000s. | ||
| And then I could not do what I was doing with the bar anymore because crack's a different drug. | ||
| It's not a social drug. | ||
| You're tweaking out windows. | ||
| And, and it was, um, it took all my friends down that were on crack very fast. | ||
| And I said, I'm never going to be like them. | ||
| And, and, uh, I ended up one of the worst ones, if there is such a thing, but in, in 2000 was about to, so I had to sell the bar in 2003. | ||
| And that was a circumstance beyond my control, but it was going down anyway. | ||
| It was going down the backside with the crack. | ||
| And about 2004, in the middle of the night, one night, I had a dream of the name MyPillow. | ||
| Now, I had always, my whole life, searched for, I had problems with pillows. | ||
| When I was 16 at that grocery store, I actually had a, went out and took one of my first paychecks and went out, looked around and, you know, I don't know, a department store and bought a $70 pillow in 1970. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That's a seriously expensive pillow adjusted for inflation. | ||
| Yeah, you adjusted it. | ||
| It was probably, it was the most expensive pillow I could find, but it's kind of, it's kind of, you know, what a, it's strange that I buy a pillow way back then to where I'm at now, but I tried it. | ||
| It didn't work. | ||
| I couldn't return it. | ||
| And, um, you know, I just remember that, but it was an endless search for pillows. | ||
| But anyway, I had this dream of my pillow, the name, and I got up and I wrote it all over the house, connecting the Y and the P, I'm all excited. | ||
| One of my daughters comes upstairs about two in the morning. | ||
| She's like 11, 12 years old. | ||
| She goes, what are you doing? | ||
| And I said, I'm going to invent this pill. | ||
| It's been called my pill. | ||
| What do you think of the name? | ||
| It's going to change millions of people. | ||
| It's going to be the most, the biggest thing ever. | ||
| And I didn't even know what was going to be in it yet. | ||
|
unidentified
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She, she grabs a glass of water and she goes, that's really random dad. | |
| But then I just, I went all in. | ||
| I was just like, I kept getting these dreams and, you know, what I wanted was something you could adjust. | ||
| And me and my one son, day after day, he'd get home from school and we would tear and try to, I think we tried over 94 different kinds of foams and things to go in it. | ||
| Nothing did what I wanted to. | ||
| And, but I just wouldn't give up on it. | ||
| And my friends are laughing. | ||
| They're going, Mike's going to invent a pillow. | ||
| And the other ones would say, Hey, if you ever come up with something like that, I might want one. | ||
| Well, it took about a year, year and a half, and we finally had it done. | ||
| And I was so, we had no money left, but we had some pillows. | ||
| And I took the first one, I went into a Bed Bath & Beyond. | ||
| I remember going in there, bringing it in and going, where's your manager? | ||
| Where's your manager? | ||
| And I go, he's over there. | ||
| And I'm talking to him, I go, hey, I got the best pillow ever. | ||
| You can move it and adjust. | ||
| And I didn't really know everything. | ||
| You know, I said, you can wash and dry it. | ||
| But I'm telling him all this, and I'm so passionate about it. | ||
| How many do you want? | ||
| I didn't know anything about retailers. | ||
| So he goes, um, we have one buyer and you don't, you know, and he's not here. | ||
| Well, where is he? | ||
| Well, he's one national bar. | ||
| I was so persistent and passionate. | ||
| He goes, um, you need to leave now. | ||
| I go, no, really? | ||
| How many you want on now? | ||
| And this is the way I went closed door one after another. | ||
| Nobody wanted the pillow. | ||
| Nobody wanted my pillow. | ||
| Someone said, Mike, why don't you do a kiosk? | ||
| I said, how do you spell that? | ||
| And I actually went to the kiosk and I found out something there. | ||
| I was really out of my element because yeah, I couldn't be on drugs and you know, selling or being, you know, which I, which one of the things too, when I did sell a pillow all those times, I never broke trust with the promoters. | ||
| That's a key thing. | ||
| But anyway, so we rented this kiosk in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and I couldn't stand it talking to people straight. | ||
| They'd come up and so it was just, it was shy. | ||
| It was just like, I couldn't, I couldn't talk, and I'm actually hoping new customers would come up, you know? | ||
| It was kind of weird. | ||
| Well, my wife at the time, she worked most of the hours, but the one day I did work, the guy came up, very aggressive. | ||
| He buys one. | ||
| He says, I said, you got a business card? | ||
| He said, this is really unique. | ||
| You got to invent this. | ||
| You got to patent on it. | ||
| I said, it's patent pending. | ||
| And he, I said, oh, I'm all out. | ||
| And I wrote it on a piece of paper, gave him the card, or gave him my number. | ||
| I remember the kiosk being such a failure. | ||
| And I ended up doing, um, um, borrowing money for Christmas presents. | ||
| We had our house mortgage. | ||
| We had nothing left, but we had 300 pillows and that's all we had left. | ||
| Everything was gone. | ||
| And, uh, and that guy called around January 7th that year. | ||
| And he goes, are you the guy that invented this pillow in Minnesota? | ||
| And I said, yeah, he goes, well, he goes, and I knew, I knew I only gave my number to one guy. | ||
| And he goes, well, I run the Minneapolis home and garden show. | ||
| And I save a spot for innovative products. | ||
| This pillow, I've never, I've been sleeping on it. | ||
| It's changed my life. | ||
| And I'm going, wow, you know, I said, yeah, I'll, I'll come in. | ||
| And I borrowed money to actually get into his show. | ||
| And, um, but I got in there and then I put a table up, I put a table, um, out in front of me. | ||
| So the people could come in the booth. | ||
| So I was, I felt more secure, like a security blanket and they came by and That first day, I remembered I changed the booth and I did the selling. | ||
| And it was easy for me then, because they were coming up and I had an agenda. | ||
| I would tell them, just X them out. | ||
| There was no small talk. | ||
| And they would go by. | ||
| And boy, I was selling in that first day. | ||
| Every single one of them, almost, I think that first day, they came back the next day, got back into the home show and told me, came up and said, you know, wow, this fellow did this and said, help me sleep and all this. | ||
| It wasn't about the money for me. | ||
| For the first time, I felt so good inside that I had done something to help somebody. | ||
| And this ties in with addiction and everything, which I can tell you in a minute. | ||
| But from that point on, that started seven years of doing home shows and fairs, going town to town throughout the Midwest and throughout the U.S. | ||
| We'd make them and sell them at these home shows and fairs and just Hours and hours of work, and some shows would be good, some shows would be bad. | ||
| But, um, same parallel track, um, you know, crack cocaine and, uh, and other addiction. | ||
| Well, and then people were taking the company. | ||
| There was so many that were attacking, trying to take the company that we'd have, we'd have someone work for us. | ||
| There was different people, um, you know, coming in that, you know, they seen something there, but they, you know, I did, I did get the patent. | ||
| But they were trying to copy it, everything else. | ||
| We ended up making pillows. | ||
| It got to be 2007. | ||
| We were labeling them in our living room. | ||
| And I never forget looking over at my wife at the time and my son, one of my sons, and I knew that it had gotten so bad we were going to lose everything because these guys were taking the company. | ||
| The lights were going to go out on the house. | ||
| We were losing the house. | ||
| And then my wife left about Two days before the lights went out on the house, she couldn't take it anymore. | ||
| And so I went through, got a divorce, lost everything there. | ||
| The pillow was just a little blip on the radar. | ||
| And then it got to be 2008, and significant things happened in 2008 with the pillow company. | ||
| It was just like a pulse, like somebody with a coma. | ||
| And one of the things, one of the significant things, I was up 14 days. | ||
| With no sleep in Minneapolis. | ||
| And I come out of the room and all three of the biggest drug dealers are standing there. | ||
| And I go, what are you guys doing? | ||
| You know each other? | ||
| They go, we know of each other. | ||
| And they said, you've been up for 14 days. | ||
| You're not getting any more crack. | ||
| And I said, what do you, is this an intervention? | ||
| The guy goes, call it whatever you want. | ||
| Well, two of them left. | ||
| And I said, how much you got left? | ||
| I showed him how much rocks. | ||
| And he sat down to make sure that I did it and went to bed. | ||
| Wouldn't get any more. | ||
| Well, he finally fell asleep right about the time I was running out and I was tweaking it, looking on the floor for carpet, we call it farming, looking for crack. | ||
| He was never as cracked there. | ||
| Well, went back downstairs, headed outside at 2.30 in the morning. | ||
| And it's like bees in every inner city in the country. | ||
| You can get cracking, you can get drugs anywhere. | ||
| You're out there like bees. | ||
| It's like a whole nother, a whole nother world. | ||
| And I'm out there offering money, you know, $20 for a $5 rock. | ||
| Nobody would take it. | ||
| They're looking at me like, what, are you crazy? | ||
| We're not selling to you. | ||
| You know, they didn't threaten anyone on the street. | ||
| If you sell to them, we're going to kill you. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Well, I came back upstairs defeated, walked in there and the dealer says, he's up now. | ||
| He says, how'd that work out for you? | ||
| He says, give me your phone. | ||
| I'm going to take a picture. | ||
| And he took a picture. | ||
| He said, there's for that book you've been telling us about you're going to write someday. | ||
| And he goes, man, you've been telling us for years. | ||
| That this MyPillow is just a platform for God, and you're going to come back someday, and you're going to help us all out of this addiction world that we live in. | ||
| And we're not going to let you die on us. | ||
| I was their hope, because I told them that all the time. | ||
| Here's the actual, in my book, the actual picture. | ||
| It goes into a hologram. | ||
| You see the bad picture there? | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
|
unidentified
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Unbelievable. | |
| I put that on there. | ||
| So, that was the picture taken in 2008, and then to where I am now. | ||
| And by the way, two of those guys work for me now. | ||
| They're born-again Christians, and none of them sell anymore, so it's come full circle. | ||
| But that year, my son was crying in the driveway. | ||
| He had got back from a hunt trip. | ||
| He's all teared up. | ||
| He was 18. | ||
| He said, this was another place we were in and losing. | ||
| And he said, I go, you coming in? | ||
| He goes, no, Dad, I can't live here anymore. | ||
| I thought I was hiding it from him. | ||
| And I just said, I'm quivering, because it's breaking my heart. | ||
| And I said, I said, yeah, you can go live with your brother. | ||
| You know what, that's no problem. | ||
| And it just like hit me like, you ain't hiding it from anybody. | ||
| And then my son, or my, this guy came in December. | ||
| This is really key to my Lindell Recovery Network, when we talk in a minute. | ||
| My friend came in December. | ||
| There was nothing left. | ||
| I was sitting in the house, all the furniture, everything was gone. | ||
| And he said, Dick comes walking in. | ||
| I go, Dick, what are you doing here? | ||
| Now he was my equal. | ||
| We were the same age. | ||
| We both started cocaine at the same time. | ||
| Very functioning addicts. | ||
| He switched, both switched to crack about the same time. | ||
| And he had quit four years earlier and fell in the Lord. | ||
| And I heard about that and I'm going, but here he shows up and I go, Dick, what are you doing? | ||
| He goes, the Lord led me here. | ||
| He goes, what's going on? | ||
| I go, well, as long as you're here, I got questions for you. | ||
| He said, first of all, is it boring? | ||
| He goes, no man, it ain't boring. | ||
| And I drilled him for an hour. | ||
| I drilled him for an hour because you know what? | ||
| I respected his answer because he's been where I've been and he had made it through somehow. | ||
| It was like my, I call it my hope match in my book. | ||
| Well, a month later I ended up quitting. | ||
| I said on January 16, 2009, I prayed. | ||
| I said, okay, God, there was nothing left. | ||
| I made sure I didn't have any money or anything so that, you know, they say was at your bottom. | ||
| It wasn't really my bottom. | ||
| You know, I think I could have survived without money. | ||
| But I knew if I went without one more day, if I went one more day, I would have two courses on my life. | ||
| One would be my calling, where I'm at today, and if I didn't, if I went one more day, that would be gone. | ||
| It would be whatever real B would be, like on an old drive-in, whatever the second feature would be, wherever that path was taking me, that's where that was going. | ||
| So I said, you know what, I want to wake up in the morning and never have the desire again. | ||
| And I woke up in the morning and all the desires were gone. | ||
| Now I did go to a faith-based center about two months later to find out why I was an addict in the first place, but then things started happening that these miracles, I needed, these guys had taken the company and took all my shows and I needed $30,000. | ||
| I needed it to, and I met these guys, or I met this guy, this is a, this is just a story I tell all the time. | ||
| They, this guy said, Oh, I have some guys who'll take chance and borrow money or whatever. | ||
| And I talked to him a couple of weeks earlier. | ||
| And so they, I meant to meet them. | ||
| I needed the money in the afternoon with 30 grand. | ||
| And I was walking in there with a t-shirt and here I walk in and there's this, I don't know these guys from Adam. | ||
| Here's a CIO, a CIO, a CFO. | ||
| They're all wearing suits. | ||
| I'm scared to death. | ||
| I go in there with a pillow and I go, Hey, you guys, I want to borrow 30 grand. | ||
| I'll pay you back 40 grand within two months. | ||
| I'm going to set up shows. | ||
| I'm going to have the biggest, it's going to be the biggest company in the world someday. | ||
| These guys took my company. | ||
| I used to be a crack cocaine addict. | ||
| And one of the guys said, the CFO, I think, goes, well, we need a quick crack. | ||
| And I said, last Thursday. | ||
|
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And literally, four of them got up and left the room. | |
| It's like, Chartain, for that reason, we're out. | ||
| And the other four ended up giving me the money. | ||
| And I just, you know, they got zapped. | ||
| And I didn't even have a, they didn't even, you know, there was no, they never checked my ID. | ||
| Cause I knew that cause I didn't have a driver's license. | ||
| So I walked out of there with the cash, ended up paying them back. | ||
| But things like that kept happening for the next two years. | ||
| I got up to when I did that, I said my friends and family, we had no money left again. | ||
| And I said, you guys, if we all put in money, I want, I have a dream of the biggest infomercial ever. | ||
| If no box store is going to take us, nobody's going to take us because everybody that bought it at those shows loved it. | ||
| And people would tell other people. | ||
| And, and they, so they put their money and we were told by these, these, uh, these professionals going, Oh, infomercials don't work. | ||
| It's just to get into the box stores. | ||
| I said, well, the box stores don't want me. | ||
| And I don't want to go there. | ||
| I'm going to do it my way. | ||
| And they said, oh, it won't work. | ||
| You need an actor. | ||
| And I said, I want to do it like I did at the shows, with a real audience, make things real. | ||
| The infomercial launched at 3 a.m. | ||
| on October 7, 2011. | ||
| I was living in my sister's basement. | ||
| Everything I had was banked on that infomercial. | ||
| And it aired, and I had 10 employees. | ||
| Now, we had just phones that we were taking, that we had, you know, everybody taking phones, my friends or whatever. | ||
| Within 40 days, we had 500 employees. | ||
| It just exploded. | ||
| I built my own call center. | ||
| We were hiring people off the street. | ||
| They go, Mike, you need to be CEO. | ||
| I go, why do I need to be CEO? | ||
| Let's make pillows. | ||
| They go, we need an HR department. | ||
| I go, that sounds horrible. | ||
| We need a corporate attorney. | ||
| I said, of course. | ||
| And we never missed a beat. | ||
| We never missed up. | ||
| Everybody got their pillows on time, my pillows on time for Christmas, but it just went All right, there's so much there, but I wanna focus a little bit on the fact that it seems like you found your purpose in the midst of an absolutely chaotic time in your life. | ||
| Sounds like personally, family, obviously the drugs and the rest of it. | ||
| When you look back now, do you think you needed all of that craziness to actually find the purpose that now is clearly having you live the life you're supposed to be living? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You know, you see me wear my cross on TV all the time, and I even wore it when I didn't have it on TV, and I would always tell my friends after the bar closed back in the day, I would tell them about, hey, I read about Revelation in the Bible when I was in jail, and I'd be witnessing to them. | ||
| I didn't have God or the Lord-Purse relationship. | ||
| Those guys would quit that day. | ||
| Twenty-eight people quit during those years, and my friends would go, what are you saying to them? | ||
| We're losing friends! | ||
| It was all those times, because I had 14 near-death experiences that would run through in my book. | ||
| I had things that only, you go, in the book, it's like, what are the odds? | ||
| When you have a one in a million happen, a one in a billion, or you push this off just a chance, when you add them up in your own lives, when does it become a miracle? | ||
| For me, I use mathematical odds that God has to be real, because all the stuff that happened to me was impossible. | ||
| Then it got some, my actual day that I did a full surrender, get this, February 18th, 2017. | ||
| I mean, so this was, uh, you know, that's just a few years ago, but I, um, I always had faith, but I didn't have, but to answer your question, everything that happened to me, I say it all the time. | ||
| I would not change one thing if it's not where I'm at right now, because that That convinced me that God was real, and I just turned it over to Him, full surrender, and now I can go out and use my platform. | ||
| I don't have any worries. | ||
| I put all my faith in God, and I can go out and do these things—my evangelism, things to help people. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| This wasn't about selling a pillow. | ||
| It always has been my pillow was the platform, and that's it. | ||
| Yeah, you must've had people from the outside, probably lawyers, PR people, the rest of it, that must've been saying to you, Mike, you know, the pillow's great and all, you can keep selling them, but you probably shouldn't talk about the story that much, the crack that much, religion that much, the other things that clearly are the drivers behind you. | ||
| But did you just ignore those voices all the time? | ||
| And I'm sure you still hear them now. | ||
| Yeah, here's a good one. | ||
| When I first, this first started happening when I wore my cross on TV. | ||
| I was up in Canada on a shopping channel, And it was, I was all by myself, all lonely, whatever. | ||
| And it was just like, like I said, I still had that thing going on where I couldn't talk to people. | ||
| And I was just, I'd rather be alone at that time. | ||
| And anyway, I was breaking every record they ever had. | ||
| And all of a sudden here, somebody lady shows up and it's a 24 hour thing. | ||
| It's grueling. | ||
| You know, you get to sleep for like five hours. | ||
| She walks in my room and she goes, hello, I'm your executive producer. | ||
| And congratulations, you've broken every record here in Canada. | ||
| But I need you to take your cross and tuck it in your shirt or take it off for the rest of the time you're here." | ||
| And I looked at her and I said, and why is that? | ||
| And she goes, that's religious prejudice against other religions or something like that. | ||
| And I just went on a rant. | ||
| I still had a little anger issues then. | ||
| And I just flipped out and I said, because I wanted to leave anyway. | ||
| I'm going, it was like the movie, My Cousin Vinny, when the gal wants to say, you're right, goodbye. | ||
| I go, you're right. | ||
| I'm out of here. | ||
| And I just say, I said, I'm not, that cross is staying there. | ||
| So either you like it or not. | ||
| And she stopped and she just, she goes, well, if you feel that strongly about it, I guess you can leave it on. | ||
| And this is the thing I fought with that. | ||
| People used to call me when I was the only person taking phone calls, doing them home shows and stuff. | ||
| And I did a little public access TV station and they, People would call up and say, you're wearing your cross on TV and they'd be atheists, they'd even be Christians slamming me for it. | ||
| You know, it didn't matter. | ||
| And I'm going, I would argue with them. | ||
| It wasn't about selling a pill then. | ||
| I'm arguing with them and telling them things in the Bible again and things that happened to me that couldn't have been any other explanation. | ||
| They would find Jesus and hang up and I'd go, take that! | ||
| How do you like me now? | ||
| And I'm still gonna say it. | ||
| And then it manifested, you know, it's funny, I'll skip ahead, I gotta tell you this. | ||
| Now when they say boycott Mike Lindell and boycott MyPillow on the trolls and bots on Twitter, the other people say all the time, don't boycott him. | ||
| He goes, he'll double his ads. | ||
| We see enough of that guy. | ||
| I mean, that, when we get in a little bit to what happened to you after the Rose Garden speech, that was an interesting moment because I saw a ton of that. | ||
| All, you know, the media's going after you, and then you look at what regular people are saying, and they're like, yeah, I just bought a pillow, I just bought a pillow. | ||
| People are screenshotting receipts and the rest of it. | ||
| But I wanna talk a little bit more about the business specifically, because the idea that you did, you know, the on-air infomercials and that sort of thing, and that you still do them, It's like there's something about them, like the amount of times that I've watched your infomercials or I remember growing up watching Ron Popeil set it and forget it and all of those things, that spray hair. | ||
| For some reason, even if you weren't going to buy those things, you'd watch them. | ||
| There was something about them. | ||
| Do you think there is some sort of magic to that beyond just being yourself or whatever Ron had? | ||
| What is it about them? | ||
| I think God's given me this platform and for me, For my gift from God to be able to speak and to have that, that's my calling to be that. | ||
| That's beyond anything I'd ever imagined. | ||
| But one of the things is we make them real. | ||
| We do all our own commercials. | ||
| We have other companies. | ||
| We tell them what to do. | ||
| You know, it's just me and a couple of my people inside my pillow. | ||
| We make them real. | ||
| And you know, it's an anomaly. | ||
| No products have made it sustainable on TV. | ||
| Every time you see a MyPillow, it either breaks even, that one exact one either breaks even or makes a little bit, because I don't need the other stores and stuff. | ||
| I did something that's never been done before where you're making, you're directly to the consumer, directly to the public. | ||
| And one of the things is, I think it's the realness of it. | ||
| And, you know, I've been on TV now 2.8 million times. | ||
| I heard that number. | ||
| I had to fact check it. | ||
| I'm going, what? | ||
| You know, it's just like, you know, to me it's beyond anything I've ever seen. | ||
| But once again, that platform, to get that platform of trust and of, you know, of realness, I've never, you know, it's just, this is what we, this is who I am and I'm not going to change. | ||
| And I'm putting it right out there. | ||
| That's why I've always, you won't see one of my commercials where I'm not wearing that cross and people like to see what's real and they, and it transfers over. | ||
| I am who you see on TV. | ||
| I'm not something different. | ||
| That's all can, you know, most of the things you see, like the one back in the man in the mirror, once I'm over by the bed, we used, we had, we had one whole day of taping where I'm, where I'm over there with that couple and the man in the mirror window, you know, that commercial. | ||
| And I'm going, And I'm holding it and I go, you're gonna wake up in the morning and ERT! | ||
| We just let that natural stuff in there and people would see me in the streets and they'd go ERT! | ||
| The jingle's so powerful too, that was cool. | ||
| Well, it's just so obvious, also, that you were ahead of the curve because now, because of podcasts and YouTube and everything else, almost everything in the digital space is direct-to-consumer, right? | ||
| Everybody's using, often, Code Reuben or whatever it might be to sell their products. | ||
| So you, through going deep on television, you actually help model something that now really works online, too. | ||
| Well, you know, and it depends what you pay for the online. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's just like a TV ad on TV. | |
| You know, I'm very blessed all of a sudden that I could not, I could never make, or put any ads on CNN. | ||
| I'll say this straight up. | ||
| I couldn't put any ads there because they were still charging for a bigger viewership from back in the day. | ||
| So I couldn't, it didn't matter what I did, but just recently I was able to break even on them. | ||
| So I'm putting them right here. | ||
| I got one of their hosts saying bad things about me. | ||
| And all of a sudden my commercial comes up. | ||
| Oh, I'm Mike Lindell. | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| Wearing my cross. | ||
| And there you go. | ||
| And that's pretty cool. | ||
| That's about as good as it gets. | ||
| Okay, so let's talk about the CNN hosts and what happened over the last couple of weeks. | ||
| So obviously we're in the middle of coronavirus. | ||
| President Trump gives a speech at the Rose Garden, updating people on what's going on, as he's been doing pretty much every day. | ||
| And then he brings you up. | ||
| Well, first he sort of told people what you were doing, but you know what? | ||
| I'll just tee it up to you. | ||
| I'll just let you tell the whole story. | ||
| What's that morning like? | ||
| Did you know you were going to the Rose Garden? | ||
| I want to bring everybody back here. | ||
| I want to bring it back in time. | ||
| You have to know the part where I quit everything, and how did I end up with me being friends with the President of the United States? | ||
| I think to have that, you kind of grasp what happened there. | ||
| When I quit all my drugs and everything, by the grace of God, I had never voted. | ||
| I didn't know a liberal from a conservative. | ||
| I didn't know a Democrat from a Republican. | ||
| I knew nothing! | ||
| And I didn't even care. | ||
| I think, well, you know, politics didn't affect me. | ||
| That's what I thought. | ||
| But when I came out of crack addiction and everything, it was like coming out of a coma. | ||
| And I'm going, I look around, I go, what's going on here? | ||
| My friends are all unemployed. | ||
| They're losing their houses. | ||
| I had already lost mine. | ||
| Um, we got a president giving money to an evil empire. | ||
| We got halftime of, of, uh, baseball tournaments for little league and they're giving out first place trophies to everyone. | ||
| I go, what is going on? | ||
| I mean, Everything had changed. | ||
| I'm going, this is crazy. | ||
| Well, anyway, then you get up to 2016. | ||
| I explain a lot more in my book, but I get invited by Donald Trump before he was president to come to New York City to Trump Tower. | ||
| I get there, a private meeting on August 15, 2016. | ||
| Now, I walk in there. | ||
| It was just him and I. He goes, Mike, you always wear your cross. | ||
| You go, yeah, Mr. Trump, this is a divine appointment. | ||
| For some reason, I wasn't nervous. | ||
| He just was, I go, wow, he's just, he's a normal guy, you know? | ||
| And he started telling me all these things about, they had told me, whatever you do, don't tell them you are an ex-crack addict. | ||
| That's one of the first things I told him. | ||
| And by the way, I was an ex-crack addict and, you know, I got him to have this big platform for addiction. | ||
| He goes, I want to wipe out the drugs. | ||
| I want to build a wall. | ||
| They're pouring in. | ||
| He told me about how he wanted to bring jobs back in manufacturing, back here to the U.S., like my pillow. | ||
| And he asked me questions about that. | ||
| I mean, I'm going, That's God. | ||
| Well, he really cares. | ||
| He has no agenda other than he cares about our country. | ||
| I've been everywhere from people that eat with four forks to no forks. | ||
| And I'll tell you one thing I learned in all those years of being in that bar, I could judge character. | ||
| And I'm telling you, he was just genuine. | ||
| I mean, it was amazing. | ||
| I walked out of there a half hour later and I go, he's going to be the greatest president in history. | ||
| I went to his employees because I couldn't believe what I just seen. | ||
| Talked to so many of employees. | ||
| I want everyone to listen to that. | ||
| Every one of them said great things. | ||
| I go, what, is this real? | ||
| He goes, oh, he's the best boss. | ||
| He helped me out personally. | ||
| Every, it was everyone, you could, same thing, same thing. | ||
| From a doorman to a clerk, it didn't matter. | ||
| Now I go back, I want everyone to hear this. | ||
| I go back to Minnesota and I tell my board, I said, you guys, you know, this is right in the heat of the election or the campaign. | ||
| I tell my board at my pillow, I said, You won't believe it. | ||
| I said, he's going to help this country. | ||
| I've never seen anything like it. | ||
| It's going to be amazing. | ||
| And they go, I want to do a press release. | ||
| And I want to go tell people on TV. | ||
| Back then I could do it. | ||
| I could tell the media that I'm walking across the street. | ||
| 20 cameras would show up. | ||
| My board said, I remember my corporate attorney goes, he goes, if you do this, you're going to ruin our company. | ||
| I got mad and I went outside the office and my CMO came out. | ||
| She goes, we didn't get this far by you not listening to God. | ||
| I go, you're right. | ||
| I went back to that board and I said, we didn't get this far, but I may not listen to God, because I felt it was my calling to remind, you know, that I had to back him. | ||
| That it was something I was divinely supposed to do. | ||
| And so I did that press release. | ||
| Now I didn't even tell him what we talked about. | ||
| You would think the press would be, wow, a Minnesota just, you know, random guy that has a great story about being an addict. | ||
| And now he's gotten salvation. | ||
| He's gotten redemption and he got to meet what could be the president. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| None of them called. | ||
| But some of them did contact me. | ||
| They called me a racist. | ||
| They called me everything you could think of. | ||
| The Better Business Bureau in Minnesota took my PELOS rating from an A plus to an F because I ran my buy one get one free too long because that's their own little internal whatever bars. | ||
| They're not a paper play business. | ||
| They're not a bureau. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| And then the lawyers in California attacked me. | ||
| They went after me for all kinds of stuff. | ||
| Had you ever experienced anything like that? | ||
| I mean, you had had your own trials and tribulations, but had you ever seen just by, oh, saying, I'm gonna support this guy, or I like this guy, to watch like a machine go after you? | ||
| Yeah, you know what? | ||
| Nothing like it. | ||
| You know, I could compare stuff back in the day. | ||
| You know, I've had swords to my throat. | ||
| I've had guns to my head. | ||
| You read my book, I've had it. | ||
| It's all happened to me. | ||
| But something like this, where you're going, what did I do? | ||
| You know, it's like, I couldn't believe it. | ||
| I'm going, and then you're trying to destroy my dream, this dream we had gotten so big, and you're trying to destroy it, all my employees. | ||
| That was my hurt. | ||
| I go, they're going to kill us, all my employees. | ||
| I had probably 800 employees or a thousand employees at the time, and they were just attacking, and we were in the news. | ||
| I get, all would come up, even every newscaster when they, when they did this, When BBB took me from an A plus to an F. Every news outlet in the country, I was the story of the year. | ||
| And that was like January 2nd, 2017. | ||
| Every news outlet out there, it didn't matter. | ||
| ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, it didn't matter. | ||
| You know, and they're just slamming me and soundbiting me and making me look terrible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so I learned faster. | |
| Right away, I said, I'm only doing live interviews because you're not going to take it, chop me up. | ||
| Well, but I've gotten used to it. | ||
| I actually, now, It's over. | ||
| Once you get past that, it's too late to close the gate. | ||
| The cows are out of the barn. | ||
| I have grown stronger and I'm not changing. | ||
| You can sit there. | ||
| They, over the past couple of years, every time they say something wrong on Fox or do something there that, or they're not wrong, but say something that they don't like, they'll go boycott my pillow and Mike Lindell. | ||
| And that's when they say, don't boycott him. | ||
| He'll double his ads. | ||
| Well, like I've told them before, I advertise across the board on every station. | ||
| If I had to pick and choose what every host says on cable TV and go, oh, that's subjective there, I'm going, you know what? | ||
| I'm not going to put an ad on you right there. | ||
| I've had CNN and MSNBC badmouth me directly and I still advertise. | ||
| I keep it separate. | ||
| Not only that, you've also doubled down when boycotts have come on for certain hosts, right? | ||
| When they were really going after Tucker, weren't you the one that filled the gap? | ||
| Back with Laura Ingram, she was the first big boycott that they did. | ||
| We ran my ad right at the start of the hour and I just filled it up with my pillow ads. | ||
| I was the only one, basically, for a while there. | ||
| Because I couldn't believe it, you know, what they were doing. | ||
| They're trying, you're trying to tell me and you're telling my employees that, uh, you know, let me see that you never see their faces either. | ||
| He's a, you know, the hidden ones, you know, and, uh, other than, you know, it'll say stuff, but here's what happened in the last week. | ||
| So we got a little rerun here. | ||
| I mean, I never thought that my popular fame could grow any bigger, you know, whatever infamous fame, whatever you want to call it, but. | ||
| I start making masks, I converted my whole company, 75% over to making cloth masks. | ||
| And it was quite a project. | ||
| We had to train all employees, but we did it in like four days. | ||
| Can you just explain a little bit about how you do that? | ||
| I mean, did you have to bring in experts to change machines? | ||
| I made a call to the vice president's office, actually an email, and they sent me right away to Peter Navarro. | ||
| And whenever he was running, and I didn't know who Peter Navarro was, and then he emailed me right back and he directed me to a task force they'd already set up in a little coalition about anybody that was all these different things from masks to gowns or whatever. | ||
| Kind of like, let's set this up so people can have their questions answered. | ||
| So I called them the first question. | ||
| I said, what are the, what are the measurements? | ||
| Is there a restriction that I have to know about? | ||
| Cause obviously I have to worry about getting sued by frivolous lawyers in California. | ||
| Let's not forget that. | ||
| So, I had to make sure everything was, you know, was right. | ||
| In the meantime, I already said I'm doing this. | ||
| So my, my employees, they're very good at scaling. | ||
| I've had some of the same team. | ||
| We're like a big family. | ||
| We just started going. | ||
| We took the sewing machines, moved them, made them eight feet apart. | ||
| Um, we had to, um, had to move racking. | ||
| We had to make sure that I had to make sure that we had the right fabric. | ||
| It was a blessing, but my pillow fabric was perfect for it. | ||
| We just had to not do two processes of printing and other things. | ||
| So we had to do a different process, but it wasn't a big switch. | ||
| And then I had to get elastic. | ||
| I first, I bought the wrong elastic and had latex. | ||
| So I had to dump that, get the right elastic. | ||
| There was a little shortage for one day, but I was determined I was going to get it. | ||
| And then we, uh, we had a biggest, really expensive cutting machine so we could cut the patterns. | ||
| And we were up and making masks in three days. | ||
| Everyone was training. | ||
| They're up to get close to 10,000 the first day. | ||
| And we, we, we added two shifts. | ||
| A friend of mine, a lot of them had to be laundered, a commercial laundromat. | ||
| I was up until 12 every day setting the foundation until midnight, starting again at five in the morning. | ||
| Well, then I get an email from the vice president's office and said, could you come out and be involved in a roundtable? | ||
| Like I was involved in one in 2017, first time I was ever in the White House and for Made in America. | ||
| Well, they said, and we'd like you to help write some remarks. | ||
| And I'm going, okay, they got to get approval. | ||
| I'm going, what do I need remarks for a round table for? | ||
| So I actually, the remarks are here and these are the type ones here. | ||
| These are the type remarks. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I type them up and send them out there. | ||
| And I wasn't even real particular. | ||
| They wanted remarks of what we were doing and specifically about what my pillow was doing. | ||
| I'm going, okay. | ||
| I don't really, you know, that's fine. | ||
| I don't really need to brag about what I'm doing to help the country, but I'll do it. | ||
| You know, it sits in a round table. | ||
| And so, I fly out there, we get to the round table and there's all the five CEOs that are there, the vice president, a couple of guys down at the end, I forget who they were. | ||
| And we go around the table and each one, well, this one's doing respirators and this one's, and I said, we're doing masks. | ||
| And, but I wasn't looking, nobody was looking at their remarks or whatever, you know, I didn't even see any papers out. | ||
| And I'm going, so then the president came in and it's a good half hour of everyone saying what they're doing. | ||
| You guys, well, you know, can you make more? | ||
| You know, what are your plans? | ||
| And we get done, and the president gets up, and they all get up. | ||
| And I said to the vice president, I said, we didn't read our remarks. | ||
| He goes, oh, no, no, they're for outside. | ||
| The president might call you up to them. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So now we go into the other room towards the Oval Office, and the president, he's showing all the CEOs, kind of get a little mini tour here. | ||
| And then he sits down, he's got to read his speech with the vice president. | ||
| And we're sitting over here at this table. | ||
| And I thought, you know what? | ||
| I'm reading the remarks. | ||
| I go, you know what? | ||
| I want to give a message of hope to the people. | ||
| And so I start writing on the back. | ||
| And, you know, if you can see my scribbles, there's little arrows that go down and stuff. | ||
| And we wrote it. | ||
| I thought I would rewrite it on a clean piece of paper. | ||
| I just get done with the last thing. | ||
| I mean, there's crossed out and everything. | ||
| And they go, OK, we're going out to the Rose Garden. | ||
| And I'm going, what? | ||
| I'm going, OK. | ||
| So all I said was, God, please let me read my writing. | ||
| The president calls me up first. | ||
| I mean, I came right up. | ||
| We didn't practice this. | ||
| So I didn't know we were all going to go around the end. | ||
| So he called me up first and I went straight up. | ||
| So I think they held the other CEOs back. | ||
| So it was just him and I, and here's a guy that has so much nervousness of speaking. | ||
| Now I did my, um, my throat, I'd had, I had vocal cord surgery just a week before. | ||
| So I was a little raspy like I am now. | ||
| And, um, And I get up there and I read them, and then I just felt, you know, led. | ||
| I got turned around. | ||
| I said, Mr. President, do you mind if I read something off the cuff now? | ||
| And he said, yes. | ||
| And then I read that, you know, God gave us grace on November 18, or November 8, 2016. | ||
| You know, and I just read that, you know, talked about that we, the nation had turned its back on God, and we should spend this time, you know, reading the Bibles, getting back in the Word, and spending time with our families. | ||
| And I said, we're all going to get through this. | ||
| With this great administration and everybody's prayers, and everybody combining, we're all in this together, and we're gonna be stronger and safer than ever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You would have think I shot somebody. | |
| Okay. | ||
| So you do all this, it's impromptu, he's letting you do your thing, you talk about God, you're making, I think at one point you were making 50,000 masks a day, right? | ||
| Yeah, you're doing that right now. | ||
| So you finished the speech, and did you even think about it or realize what was about to come your way? | ||
| Like, did it even cross your mind? | ||
| No, do you know what? | ||
| It was just, it was like, to me, it didn't feel like, you know, it didn't, I didn't think it'd be a shot heard around the world. | ||
| And we went back into the White House, and the first inkling I got that it might be real big was the vice president came to me, and he goes, he was just, wow, Mike, you know, He goes, you've opened up the, you know, opened up the heavens. | ||
| I mean, people are going to, you know, you just, it was just, I don't even remember what he said, but he was just, I could just tell he just loved it. | ||
| I'm going, good. | ||
| I got a little confirmation that it was okay. | ||
| You know, the president never said a thing about it. | ||
| You know, he was talking to the CEOs and us and, and, um, we go to, when I, when I left the white house, I finally, you got my phone back. | ||
| See, they have your phones. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I opened up my phone and turn it on. | ||
| I had 750 text messages. | ||
| I didn't know that many people had my phone number. | ||
| And I'm going, what happened? | ||
| I looked at Twitter and there's thousands. | ||
| I looked at my Facebook and it had blown up. | ||
| I had 2000 emails. | ||
| I mean, it was just, and I'm trying to drive and get to him going, well, I had to pull over. | ||
| I was just going, I call them friends. | ||
| I go, what happened? | ||
| They go, don't you know, everybody's talking about it. | ||
| And I'm going, really? | ||
| So for that point, I've done 80 some interviews as of today, every day, all day. | ||
| I've gotten calls from Israel. | ||
| My friends in Australia, they said it was on top of all the news. | ||
| And the Taiwan paper was the cover of their national paper. | ||
| This was like you'd think it was. | ||
| And, you know, one of the good things is there, I'm glad I asked the president because everybody knew he had no idea, you know, he had no idea. | ||
| So, You know, people that said, oh, you're mixing church and state or church and God or whatever, God and the government. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I did that. | ||
| So what are you going to do? | ||
| Put me in jail? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry. | |
| Right, well, you also didn't, the government didn't force anyone to listen to you. | ||
| People could either hear you and believe or enjoy what you say or not, so be it. | ||
| But now, okay, but now talk about just the media reaction, because I'm sure you're getting a lot of love from nice quarters, and it must be nice to hear the vice president say some nice things. | ||
| But really, I mean, I was watching it as it happened on Twitter, and the amount of mainstream media people who've never donated a dollar, given up any of their time. | ||
| Oh, the MyPillow guy mocking you, mocking Trump for bringing you on. | ||
| It's a big stunt, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Meanwhile, you're the one. | ||
| I mean, it cost you, you don't have to tell me how much, but I assume it cost you quite a penny to convert the operation. | ||
| Not only that, but what you're then not making in pillows. | ||
| And the rest of it. | ||
| You know, that was God's way of rewarding me for just speaking out his name. | ||
| Because now when that happened, everybody, you know, we had laid off a bunch of people that were on the road doing home shows. | ||
| I have 90-some people that do home shows and fairs like I used to do. | ||
| They had lost their jobs because they were closed and my stores were closed. | ||
| Well, now they could all get on phones. | ||
| The calls are still coming in. | ||
| Yeah, they're still coming in. | ||
| But they could get on phones now and our business went up. | ||
| Like you say, for every one attack, Nine people. | ||
| It's even more than that. | ||
| I think for every one attack, 50 people would go after that guy. | ||
| What's wrong with you? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They would tell that guy, what is wrong with you? | ||
| He's doing great things. | ||
| What have you done? | ||
| And these hosts on MSN, Jim Acosta was sitting 10 feet from me. | ||
| And he bad mouthed me saying I was a PR stunt that I did, that he played me directly, a PR stunt to get to promote my pillow. | ||
| Are you kidding? | ||
| Maybe you didn't listen right, Jim. | ||
| I was promoting Jesus. | ||
| I was promoting Bibles and spending time with our families. | ||
| He got it a little wrong there. | ||
| Maybe he didn't listen to the, maybe he only listened to the first part of the speech, which every CEO went up there and talked about what they were doing for the country. | ||
| And Jim, what are you doing? | ||
| You know, these were the things that was like, you know, and then I went, you know, went on all this media, but it was a good thing because I was on a lot of media too, that when you cut, you know, I was able to take the politics out of it. | ||
| We're all in this together. | ||
| I don't care if you're a Democrat, Republican, you know, liberal, conservative, it don't matter. | ||
| I went on all these outlets from People Magazine to the Washington Post to Fox to, I mean, it didn't matter. | ||
| And they also, their actual outlets treated me right. | ||
| I mean, they actually treated me right. | ||
| There was these hosts, late night hosts. | ||
| One late night host said, we got Mike Lindell coming on tonight from MyPillow. | ||
| He's going to talk about absolutely nothing. | ||
| And, you know, and Saturday Night Live, you know, of course they did their, Ali Baldwin did his, the mess he is, he did his, his, you know, mocking. | ||
| And, but all these, so what I say is this, and I told the president this, I did tell him this, I said, you know, Mr. President, I said, these press releases that you're doing, or these press conferences, I said, people are seeing how great leader you are. | ||
| And I said, his rating is up 60 some percent. | ||
| But I said, I'm going to read you something. | ||
| I said, this guy is a friend of mine. | ||
| I've known him all my life. | ||
| And I said, he sent me this text and it said, Mike, you know, I'm not a big Donald Trump, President Trump fan. | ||
| He's a, he's a never Trumpers what he is. | ||
| He said, but, but you know what? | ||
| God bless him. | ||
| He's doing a champion of a job. | ||
| I think he's turning me. | ||
| And you know what, what's happening is the whole country is, is coming on board and they, they're going to see that having a pragmatic, common sense president Who's an information vacuum cleaner, takes it all in. | ||
| Who, what other president would take and listen to private sector people, take it in from, um, listen to his governor, listen to everyone before he makes decisions. | ||
| But when he, you know, the guy, it's amazing having a businessman. | ||
| I don't call it the Republican party. | ||
| He's changed it to the common sense party. | ||
| You know, if I had to look at politics before he took in, there's things in that party I didn't like. | ||
| He's defined the whole thing. | ||
| This is the way it should be for the people. | ||
| And I want to tell everyone out there too. | ||
| When I left the White House that night, I'm an optimist like you wouldn't believe, but I'll tell you what. | ||
| It went from here, level two, to level 10. | ||
| I mean, the highest it could be. | ||
| Because you know what? | ||
| I was seeing the same thing I've seen before. | ||
| He was making a decision here. | ||
| Some governor, it would have took him six months to do something. | ||
| He did it in four days. | ||
| He said, let me take care of that. | ||
| Let me take care of that. | ||
| Somebody that's making decisions not based on politics. | ||
| He's in the back, he goes, we need to save lives, but we need to get people back. | ||
| It's a, it's the biggest decision he said the other night ever. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| You got to know this. | ||
| Every politician, most of them I've met, and I've met them on both sides. | ||
| These career ones that are out there, they've all their lives, they've made decisions with their own agenda. | ||
| It seems like, and they don't have the people's back. | ||
| And finally, this is what's changed. | ||
| And even people on the left, I don't care what, If you're a liberal or progressive, whatever you are, you're seeing that this is the common sense thing, because this president knows problem-solution, but he's got a God-given talent to know what it's going to manifest to, to help each and every one of us bring joy to our daily lives. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So as a guy that went from an optimist to now, you can call it a super optimist, in the midst of this craziness, and clearly you're loving life right now and things are good and you're still producing the masks. | ||
| As you just said, you had a certain luxury in that because you're successful and not that they couldn't have taken you down, but you had a bit of a cushion there to weather a storm. | ||
| What would you say, because I get this question all the time, I get this from college students, that they're afraid if they say one thing, That goes against what mainstream wants, that they're gonna get destroyed. | ||
| What would you say to a young person that wants to stand up, but doesn't have that cushion or even a family that's gonna defend them or worry that they're gonna lose their job or the rest of it? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| We're getting through that. | ||
| If I just gave you advice three and a half years ago, I would have said, you know what? | ||
| If I'm you, I'm scared too. | ||
| I'm me and I don't ever back down and stuff. | ||
| But now I say, you know what? | ||
| It's happening all around you. | ||
| Now they're the small voice. | ||
| We have to all rise up and be that voice. | ||
| You speak out. | ||
| Your business will be busier if you speak out for what you believe and you don't back down to evil. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| When I said that about God being taken out of our schools and colleges, I meant that. | ||
| These young people are looking for hope. | ||
| Right now is the time of the greatest revival in history. | ||
| We have people out there looking for hope, looking for something to respond to. | ||
| What's wrong with Jesus? | ||
| What's wrong with faith? | ||
| And if you're an addict and you're at home, I want to bring this in too, because that's what my book is, with my addiction. | ||
| If you're an addict and you're at home right now, and you can't even get out, whenever you're in quarantine, whatever it is, and you know what? | ||
| You've all known, everybody knows before this, this massive deaths we were having from heroin and from fentanyl and stuff. | ||
| It's horrific. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| We all know that. | ||
| Now, if you're a 22-year-old opiate addict or heroin addict, you also know one of your friends that made it through your own age, just like I told you about my friend Dick that came to me. | ||
| Now's the time to pick up that phone while you're sitting and reach out to that guy and say, you know what? | ||
| How'd you get through? | ||
| How'd you make it? | ||
| Ask him those questions you can't get in a treatment center. | ||
| Ask him the questions. | ||
| That's the unique counseling you. | ||
| And on the opposite end, if you're somebody sitting at home that's made it through, had your hearts restored, you probably went to a Salvation Army, Teen Challenge, Union Gospel, a faith-based treatment center that works. | ||
| The secular ones, success rate, I don't even want to get into it. | ||
| They're just to take an insurance money and it's horrible. | ||
| But anyway, if you're someone that's made it through, now's the time to reach out to people you know that are that haven't made it yet. | ||
| They're still on drugs. | ||
| They still need their hearts restored. | ||
| They have wounds. | ||
| Maybe they're fatherless or went through a divorce or never had a father like, you know, that affected me in my life. | ||
| Addiction comes from childhood fatherlessness, wounds, trauma. | ||
| Anyone that says, tells me, oh, it's a disease. | ||
| I don't believe it. | ||
| I've seen it too many times where this happens and it manifests into using an addiction to mass pain. | ||
| Reach out to those people, and we'll make it the biggest AA meeting in the history of the United States. | ||
| Only we'll use Jesus as our higher power, not just some made-up higher power. | ||
| And it'll be amazing. | ||
| And this is what I want everybody to know. | ||
| We're going to get through this. | ||
| And when we get through it, we're going to be just like 9-11. | ||
| 9-11, we were safer and more secure. | ||
| If 9-11 hadn't happened, it's horrible that it happened. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| We were so vulnerable to terrorism. | ||
| And now you go, you went to an airport, you go into arenas and you're checked, you know, they mail checks and everything. | ||
| Well, now when we come out of this, it'll be different, but we'll be protected against an unseen evil for a long time to come. | ||
| And I guarantee that this president, what he's been saying all along, let's bring our manufacturing back to the USA, but let's bring the ones we don't have to rely on China, our medical devices, our medical things we need to survive. | ||
| I got only two more for you, Mike. | ||
| Is there anything that you haven't accomplished that you want to accomplish beyond just continuing the message that you're trying to get out there? | ||
| Well, when this gets over with, I'm launching the biggest, it's called the Linear Recovery Network. | ||
| It's gonna be the biggest. | ||
| It's not gonna help just 5,000 a year. | ||
| It's gonna help millions. | ||
| I can't even tell you how it works. | ||
| It works somewhat like that whole match I talked about. | ||
| I've been working on it for two years. | ||
| I have millions of dollars of my own money into it. | ||
| It's gonna be the biggest. | ||
| Millions off addiction. | ||
| I'm not kidding. | ||
| This is the most amazing platform. | ||
| I believe it's right from God. | ||
| It's a divine thing. | ||
| My book, what I'm doing now, my book, if I even bought my own paper, I printed 3 million copies. | ||
| I self-published. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because I didn't want any mailmen. | ||
| You're not going to find this out in stores. | ||
| This, I'm just, I'm going direct to the people because I'm taking proceeds. | ||
| And this is what's, you know, what's going to work, what's going to help the Lindo Recovery Network get launched to help millions of people and employ tens of thousands of ex-addicts that have gotten their hearts restored. | ||
| Let me tell you about addiction. | ||
| Tell you one more thing about addiction. | ||
| You don't have so many ex-addicts that work for me. | ||
| I'll tell you, people say to me all the time, Mike, you work so hard, you know, wow, you need to take a break. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I don't work hard. | ||
| I love what I do. | ||
| Addiction's hard work. | ||
| Any addict out there, we're the hardest workers ever. | ||
| When you're an addict, you got it just to get the drug, all the things you go through, and you know what? | ||
| You get that person set free, and they're going to set the world on fire. | ||
| They're the hardest workers, and they're these great entrepreneurs, these great minds, and it's amazing. | ||
| So that's one thing I'm doing, and where the platform leads, I don't know. | ||
| I've spoke to big stadiums, 50,000 people stadiums, for a guy that couldn't talk. | ||
| U.S. | ||
| Bank Stadium in Minnesota. | ||
| I spoke to 50,000 millennials. | ||
| I did my 10-minute version of my story, and they had Christian bands, and they had big evangelism speakers, and people I've talked to, probably hundreds of the people that were there, it was my story that resonated with them. | ||
| And that's because people want to hear, it could only be in America. | ||
| In USA, a story where here's a crack addict, that, you know, I'll tell you this, in 2017, When I walked into the White House, the President invited me to a Made in the USA Manufacturers Summit. | ||
| And I remember seeing a picture, I was a big Elvis fan, a picture when I was a kid of Elvis and shaking hands with then President Richard Nixon. | ||
| And I thought, wow. | ||
| I go, Elvis got to see a president to be next president. | ||
| It wasn't about Elvis. | ||
| It was about, wow, he got to be with a president. | ||
| I walked in the White House and guess what's on the wall? | ||
| That picture. | ||
| And I'm going, wow. | ||
| And it's surreal for me. | ||
| And I walked in. | ||
| And I get back to this room, we're having this round table, and I'm just, it's surreal for me. | ||
| Here's this ex-addict. | ||
| I sit down, and my name tag's there, and there's no name tag next to me. | ||
| I said, who's sitting here? | ||
| He goes, the President is. | ||
| Now, he came in, and we sat down, and on national TV, here's me sitting next to the President. | ||
| All my friends that have seen that said, there is no way this crack addict is sitting next to the President of the United States. | ||
| It can only be God, because this isn't real, you know? | ||
| And it's just, for me, it's like, I don't know where the platform's gonna end, but I think we're in the greatest revival in the history of the world. | ||
| And I just take it, we are gonna bring our country back to God, people back to God, because who's looking, when do people look for their faith? | ||
| And they look for it when times are bad, and because they need to get through, and that is the hope. | ||
| And that's what I'm doing. | ||
| My calling, you know, wherever God leads me, wherever that, And I did know by this, when people have asked me, well, Mike, do you want to run for governor of Minnesota and all this stuff? | ||
| I'm, I don't rule that out because you know what? | ||
| I do know that politics now that I didn't know before played more of a role in our daily lives than anything. | ||
| Everything they do in Washington affects what we do daily. | ||
| And this is, and I never knew that before. | ||
| And I don't think a lot of people know that. | ||
| They go, Oh, that's just a bunch of people that argue back and forth. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| And we're going through it now. | ||
| I'll just give one last little thing here, how it affects daily lives. | ||
| That network I'm setting up, the Lindauer Recovery Network, do you know there's 30 some states that have laws on the books that you cannot counsel an addict unless you went to school or to college for four years, swam the English Channel, climbed five trees, did three backflips, all this stuff. | ||
| I'm going, are you kidding me? | ||
| Do you know who I want? | ||
| That person never been an addict. | ||
| Do you know who I want counseling me? | ||
| I want the guy that's been there and made it through and that's it. | ||
| So we've got, I've gotten around. | ||
| I had to get around all that just to launch my network. | ||
| I mean, these are things that block things that could be so good for us every day. | ||
| And, and that's, you know, that's where I'm at. | ||
| I want to, I want to get rid of this country. | ||
| One of the things I'd like to do, the corruptness, you've got the social media, the platforms, you've got the Googles, you've got the lawyers in California suing for nothing, all these things going on. | ||
| An entrepreneur in our country, they can invent something, it gets taken right away. | ||
| I'm setting up a thing that's another thing, mystore.com, it's going to be a safe platform for entrepreneurs. | ||
| Anybody copies one of my entrepreneurs, I'll never sell that place a pillow again. | ||
| There's a lot of things I've got going. | ||
| Well, Mike, I gotta tell you, as an interviewer, I know when someone's phoning it in, and I know when someone's telling the truth and living what they're supposed to be doing, because I can literally feel it through the screen, and I think my audience can as well. | ||
| So I've loved chatting with you, and obviously we'll continue this on many fronts. | ||
| And good luck out there, and you've stood up to the mob, so you're already good to go. | ||
|
unidentified
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I love it. | |
| Bring it on. | ||
| Bring it on. | ||
| Thanks so much, Mike. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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