Rod Blagojevich is a former Illinois governor, removed from office in 2009 and imprisoned for corruption in 2012. Following his sentence commutation by President Donald Trump in 2020, Blagojevich has worked as an author, speaker, and political commentator. https://x.com/realBlagojevich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
sir i'm good nice to meet you i really enjoyed you on tucker carlson show shout out to tucker uh it was a very eye-opening podcast and you know uh whenever someone is uh convicted of you know any any political figure any person of power that's uh convicted of corruption you automatically assume that they're guilty and after listening to you on tucker 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 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. You're 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. I think he's released – how many people has he pardoned today?
I saw a number of 1,500.
He's going ham. Everybody can get their – sign your checks, send them in, let's go. Wow. Wow. Possession of child pornography should be like you shouldn't be able to pardon for stuff like that. It's like there are certain things. It's like, come on.
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. Why would they do that?
They were squeezing me and pressuring me because they wanted me to basically say I did something that I didn't do. They wanted me to plead guilty to non-crimes.
So they want to scare you by putting you in with dangerous people.
Yeah. And and they really punished me because I fought back in a way that no one really does, except for Trump. I mean, I was fighting back when they brought those charges against me everywhere and I was calling them criminals.
And what did they expect you to do? They expect you to just take a sentence, a lower sentence, right? Confess. What did they offer you?
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 cut your losses and take the short period of prison time. But I felt, 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, you know, these oaths don't mean a lot to some people. It sounds like a bunch of bullshit to say I swore on the Holy Bible. as the governor to preserve, protect the rule of law, the constitution. I just couldn't do it. And 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 criminalize political things.
If the truth comes out, they're going to be facing some sort of accountability, hopefully one day, and hopefully now with the new administration, they'll reform the laws.
Well, you saw that the head of the FBI just stepped down.
Yep.
And Kash Patel is going to come in and he wants to clean house. Let's take it back to the beginning. So I know they were bugging your phones, but you kind of knew they were bugging your phones, right?
You know, when you come out of Chicago politics, which is a politics that probably has a larger proportion of corruption than other- That's how they got JFK elected. Other places, yeah. Right? Yeah.
The mob was involved in that.
Yeah. That's well done. The River Awards made the difference. Mayor Daley, the first Mayor Daley, was holding back the counting of those votes until he saw what Southern Illinois Republican area came up with. And once those votes were counted, then he let those River Awards come out and Giancana, people like that were really instrumental in electing Kennedy.
And then when Bobby Kennedy started going after Giancana, as the attorney general, they felt betrayed.
Rightly so.
Yeah, of course.
A deal's a deal, right?
I mean, apparently the father made the deal, right? But with me, I always felt that there was a possibility that not only would they be listening, but that somebody would set you up. And through the years in politics, people would. They'd come to you and offer you things that you knew were illegal. And you didn't do it because it was illegal, but also you felt this could be a setup.
This could be the FBI trying to entrap you into doing something. And that's a common thing. Not an uncommon thing.
So what was the first charge that was brought against you? Or if you could just bring us back to the moment when you knew they were coming after you.
I was elected the first Democratic governor in 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, OK, 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 it changed as his political fortunes improved and he looked like he was going to be the next president. And these people, these U.S. attorneys get appointed by the president. And these were Bush-appointed, Cheney-appointed prosecutors. And it's very unusual that the previous administration's prosecutors stay in office.
When the new president comes in, they leave, as you see with Trump and the other parties, people come in. But these people stayed in. And when they arrested me,
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 points to the Senate. Pause for a second.
Hold that thought.
Jamie, there's feedback.
You hear that? You hear that vibe? It was on the last podcast, too. Really? Yeah. This episode is brought to you by the Farmer's Dog. Dogs are amazing. They're loyal. They're lovable. Just having Marshall around can make my day ten times better. I'm sure you love your dog just as much, and you want to do your best to help them live longer, healthier, happier lives.
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Go to vivobarefoot.com slash joe-rogan to learn more and get 20% off your first vivos with promo code JR20. Gone. Just ended. What was that? Yep. That's it. Okay. All right. We're back. So Obama was, so how did he try to negotiate? Like what, when he wanted this person to take his Senate seat, like what, what, what, what was set? How did it go down? How do things like that work?
You use third parties, emissaries between two people.
So he doesn't have to meet with you so you can say Obama asked me. You have other people, so there's plausible deniability.
To some extent, that's part of it, of course. 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 people like or respect. In this particular case, it was a labor boss. by the name of Tom Balanoff, 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 Balanoff guy comes up to me and he says, Brock called me last night. He said I was pumping gas in this gas station in the South Loop area, downtown Chicago. Brock called me last night. He said it was around – he even told me 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 they criminalized Barack Obama trying to force his pick for Senate seat and you accepting it.
Obama wasn't trying to force it. He was trying to make a deal to persuade me to do it. Or what would you get out of that? That's what we discussed for six weeks, and the FBI was talking about that. And we discussed all kinds of crazy ideas, a lot of good ideas. Spent two days talking about the possibility of appointing Oprah Winfrey. What? You might appreciate this. Yeah, I know.
She's from Chicago.
Do you remember when Trump won? Was NBC or one of these fucking people tweeted out, this is our president, and it was Oprah?
No, I didn't know that.
Yeah. See where you find that. Like a major network tweeted out, this is our president. Wow. I was like...
Okay. So we spent six weeks talking about all kinds of ideas because this was, to quote me, fucking golden. I'm not giving it up for nothing. We got a chance to do something with this. And all of these ideas and thoughts were discussed with my governor's lawyer on all those calls, largely because I knew these people were chasing me. They wanted to be sure whatever decision I made, it was legal.
We didn't cross lines or make a mistake. Maybe I missed something. And, you know, this was unique. And so I explored all kinds of ideas. I even spent one conversation. I think you might appreciate this. They played this at court in my first trial. My wife sitting there, loving, dutiful, devoted, faithful wife, sitting in a courtroom every single day at both trials.
And the media is in there every day. And they could do whatever they want, these prosecutors. The judge was their guy. And so they're playing all these tapes out of context. They're not allowing me to play tapes. We want to fill up the context. They only play 2% of the tapes. They denied 98% of them. To this day, those tapes are covered up because all kinds of people are on those calls.
There wasn't anything illegal about it. But Rahm Emanuel, Harry Reid at the time was the Democratic leader – every possible big-time Democrats on those calls with me. But to go back to some of these crazy ideas, I was trying to appoint someone who was black but not in politics. I was looking for a military hero of some sort. Everybody wanted me to make them senators, you can imagine, in politics.
I wanted to think outside the box, and we were testing all these ideas, including Oprah.
And I'm talking to my lawyer Quinlan and I say there is NBC nothing but respect for our future president
If that's the case, I'm going to do what Ellen DeGeneres did. I'm going to move to England.
I'm not going to move to England. I'm just going to mock NBC. So what does it say? Yesterday, a tweet about the Golden Globes and Oprah Winfrey was sent by a third-party agency for NBC Entertainment in real time during the broadcast. It is in reference to a joke made during the monologue and not meant to be a political statement. We have since removed the tweet. Right. Okay.
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 they pick all the unflattering stuff. But none of it's criminal.
And if you put the rest of the calls in there, it fills out the context. Of course. So in this one particular call, I asked my lawyer, Quinlan's his 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-born 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. I'm joking around. Right. Well, they play this, you know, in court. Oh, boy. And there's my wife sitting right there, you know. Oh, boy.
And I look ahead and I'm looking at the clock and there's like 10 minutes to go before noon where the judge is going to recess for lunch. And I'm thinking if I could just get there before they play this tape, I could at least, you know, kind of prepare her for what's coming. Right. And I made it. And so I tap her on the knee and I kind of showed her the book and I said, look, I was just kidding.
And her reaction was, what are you, 16? Right.
Well, that's the same thing as like the grab them by the pussy comment. It's like guys talk like that. It doesn't mean they mean it. Guys talk like that all the time for fun. It's not, you know, you could say it's misogynist. It's this. It's just shit talking. It's what guys do. And they know that the other person doesn't mean it. That's why it's funny to say.
Yeah, and let's face it, most of us like that stuff.
Yeah, we like joking around about stuff like that.
No doubt.
It's fun. And the object. And everybody would laugh. And even if you never did anything or never even intended to do anything, you'd say something like that to get a rise out of your friends.
So years would go by, and I'm sitting in prison. I'm making one of my nightly calls home, and my wife's on the phone. And that Billy Bush tape came out. What a slimy thing to do to Trump, right? It comes out, and everybody's writing him off as a president. He can't win. Pressured by his party to get out of the race.
And my wife was offended by it, and she's telling me, you have two young daughters. How could you possibly defend this? And I said, let me take you back to a day in court, okay? Before you judge somebody else, look at your own husband. And I told her about the Halle Berry thing and what I said. And I said, this is, you know, as you explained it.
And I think people have to realize that so many of these things that are taken out of context are taken out of context for a reason. It is to mislead the public and prejudice them against things.
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. There's just, and did they read it or play it when you said that?
Both.
Yeah.
Yeah.
People talk shit like you can't pretend that that's what they actually mean. You know, it's one thing if you get someone planning a crime, but everyone knows that people talk that way. You just pretend they don't because they don't a professional setting.
Yes. Look, I spent 2,896 days because of what they did and how they did it.
So if you just went along with whatever they asked and didn't ask for any political bartering, you think nothing would have came of this?
Oh, no, no. I would have. Oh, you mean just political bartering?
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 happen?
No, I think they were going to do whatever they did to get me no matter what. Why? Because they had spent so much time and money, five years.
But why did they do that? Why did they come after you?
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, well, 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, 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 it. 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 fined him this fucking insane amount of money and tried 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 that understands property values in that area, that's preposterous to say that place is only $18 million.
It's a fucking enormous property and the most expensive real estate in the United States, or one of the most expensive places for real estate. 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 past 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.
Well said. 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. No one 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 then 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.
As they should be.
Look at this guy, Andrew Weissman on CNN. He's got a big spot at CNN, the legal expert. You ever see this guy?
No.
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 in 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.
What were they accusing this company of?
Obstruction of justice, that they were destroying records and stuff. And that would have been a crime had they done it after they'd been subpoenaed. But they weren't subpoenaed. They had a right to do whatever they wanted with their records before anybody compelled them to produce them. It was obstruction of justice.
And what was the accusation? What were they trying to get them on?
saying that they were destroying documents and evidence.
About what, though?
About the accounting work for Enron, which was a real scandal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I saw the smartest men in the room.
Yep.
That documentary, like, jeez. Anybody who doesn't believe in conspiracies, watch that.
Jeff Skilling was in the prison with me.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah, he got a big sentence, and then eventually they found prostitute 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 Socks and Mr. B and V and G and all kinds of guys.
I bet you met a lot of characters.
All kinds. I'm writing a book about it. It's a story that starts with one president and ends with another. And there's a governor in prison with gangster disciples, seen a lot of cartel drug dealers, pedophiles. That's what I meant to tell you. I was in there with something like 400 pedophiles. Jesus. Murderers, bank robbers.
What do they do with the pedophiles in jail?
They're a protected class in prison because everybody would fuck them up because of the nature of a lot of their crimes. Some of them are worse than others. Some are like this guy that got pardoned by Biden, which is unbelievable, where they're into child pornography. But some were far worse than that. They harmed children.
So how do they protect these people?
You get more than canceled if you even say something bad to them. You can't offend them. You can't call them a name.
What?
That's their way of policing the other inmates who hate them and resent them.
Really? So they're protected.
Yes.
Because the thing that people always loved about pedophiles going to jail is like, oh, there's going to be some jail justice.
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 pedophile. 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 have committed murder. There were 2% white-collar.
skilling one of them one governor me right um but those pedophiles the sex offenders if you can't call them pedophiles and the derogatory term allowed to call them pedophiles can't call them pedophiles you can't call them chomos that's the inside prison name for these guys it's a chomo chomo so i'm there day two in prison i got 14 years ahead of me they give me a 14 year sentence i mean trump pulled me out of there after eight and uh
I'm in there, second day. As you can imagine, I write about this in the book. It's a hard experience, a long, hard journey. It's heartbreaking in so many ways for me and my family. And hard. But, you know, I'm learning the ropes. I've got all my fellow inmates there. And I'm hearing this phrase, this term, it's called, you know, chomos, fucking chomo. You know, that guy, you know, he's a chomo.
They'd say that. And I'd say, what's that? And they told me. And so I was with one of my...
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case manager or somebody. They were giving me more of the information I needed for the stuff I had to learn as a new inmate. And I mentioned, so who are these Chumos? And she goes, you can't say that. It's not Chumo. And she whispered, it's Chomo.
You can't say that.
That's strictly forbidden here. If you say that, you'll go to the SHU. Now, what's that? I have to ask her. Well, the SHU was Special Housing Unit, SHU. The vernacular was SHU, solitary confinement. And the way they police the inmates and punish them to varying degrees is you get thrown in solitary confinement. So if you just say CHOMO, that'll land you in solitary confinement. For how long?
Maybe a week. Jeez.
Yeah. So how...
Yeah.
That's so crazy that they protect pedophiles.
Yeah. 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 there.
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 nonviolent and they're right. Their stuff was nonviolent. These guys really harmed children, the ones that touched children, not the ones who just looked at the pornography.
How did they justify you being in this high-security prison? Like why would they put you in with pedophiles and murderers and gangbangers? Why would they do that? Obviously to squeeze you, but how do they pass that through?
Anybody who gets a sentence of over 10 years has to do time, and you can't be in a camp. Certain people can't be in camps. For example, any kind of violent offender cannot be in a camp. Pedophiles cannot be in a camp. That's good. And camps don't have fences. There's not iron gates that lock you in.
I mean, I went from a 50,000 square foot governor's mansion to a six foot by eight foot prison cell. I mean, it's real prison like in the movies. Those iron gates shut you in, you know. And you're restricted in your movements. And you're with some badass guys, you know, interesting guys. And I met a lot of guys I really liked.
But they did it because they purposely gave me a sentence above 10 years to force me to go into a shithole prison and to try to not just squeeze me, but to punish me. And the punishment was because I had the temerity. to fight back. You know, who was this guy? He was only twice elected governor of the fifth largest state to challenge us. And I fought back.
And, you know, frankly, the beauty of it is that had I not fought back the way I did, Trump would have never known me. He saw me on television fighting back. I mean, I fought back in ways that predated him the way he does. And it wasn't by design. It was just I felt like, Jesus, I didn't do anything wrong. And they know it. This is politics. And, you know, this is wrong. Bad for our country.
I can't give in to this. And by the way, if I'm right, they are criminals. I have to fight back. And so I was on all these TV shows, everything. And Trump saw me in the David Letterman show, I think. And by the way, when they do this to you and they arrest you like they did, they arrested me at 6 o'clock in the morning in my house. And it was a super sensational press conference.
It was international news. Back then in December of 2008, there were two assholes. And the two biggest assholes in the world were me, and Bernie Madoff because they arrested him like a day or two after me. I don't even remember this. And it was, you know, I just had to fight back. And so I was. But you can't make a living. They threw me out of office.
And you learn who your friends are in politics and not a single one of them. You know, they all ran for the hills to protect themselves. They all voted to throw you out because the politics of it was bad at that time.
Boy, that's a time where podcasts would have come in handy.
yes imagine you can go on a podcast and just lay out the whole case and exactly what's going on and even play tapes you can't play tapes i'll tell you why you could never because they're recorded because they put a court seal on it they arrested me they play me saying this is golden and i give it enough for nothing but they don't play what comes after it right right if it says i want 100 million dollars in a swiss bank account which by the way the current governor pritzker would 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.
Unless it comes from my independent recollection. I can't release them.
So you can't talk about what's on those tapes unless it comes from your own personal recollection. Right. So you can talk about the tapes. You just can't play them. Correct. And you can't quote them.
I can quote what I remember personally, and I remember some of it, of course.
But at least you could have laid out your version of it so people could hear it. And it would put pressure on them.
And I was doing it not on podcasts, but I was doing it on the Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS Morning. Nightline, Dateline, all the shows.
The problem with those shows is it's such a short segment. That's right. Exactly. You don't have enough time to lay out the environment, how it works, what really goes on in politics, what's normal for how these deals are made.
Well said. Yes, exactly right.
So this person that Obama wanted, whatever happened to that person?
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 Balanoff, 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. 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. And 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 the law.
Either Balanoff's lying and he perjured 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.
He does it a lot. Balanoff, this guy, what would be his motivation for saying that Obama wanted you to do that?
The theory is, among a lot of political insiders who know how it works, that he was an emissary for Rahm Emanuel, who became Obama's chief of staff. He was a member of Congress. I had a pretty good relationship with him. He's all over the FBI tapes with me.
And so that Obama never said anything about it, but Rahm Emanuel said something to him.
Rahm Emanuel asked him to do it and instructed him to tell him that Barack himself had asked him to come. This is just a theory. A theory. 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, is 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 US Senate, she won't be in Rahm's way to have more of a voice and more say in the direction of Obama's administration. Now this is a theory. It's a theory.
Interesting theory. So what's day one like in prison?
I write about that in detail in my book. It's like chapter three or chapter four.
Have you published this book yet?
No, it's coming out. It's going to come out, I hope, by spring. I hope I get it done. I'm almost done.
You have a publisher and everything?
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. I haven't done it yet, but... 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 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 ingrate and who sold out his friend Tony Rescoe, 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 Rescoe. Obama did. And Resco is a kind-hearted person, and he wants to help his friend Obama.
So 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 could 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 road on your fence.
And then when Resco suffers 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, for three years.
He saw the Sun one hour a day and then when he got out of there he does he tries to do a burp beep and He faints because he's so skinny and so weak after three years of that and this fucking Obama did nothing to help him It's unbelievable so opposite of the kind of guy Trump is I mean I didn't do anything for Trump and he helped me He just saw something wrong.
And I think I think he kind of liked me on celebrity apprentice He liked the way I was fighting back. I know that and But he fired me on that show and freed me from prison. He's historic. He fired and freed the same guy. Even Lincoln didn't do that.
Day one, do you have hope it's going to be overturned in an appeal? What are you thinking when you get in there?
Yeah, boy, it's a great question. 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 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. Life. Yeah. Jesus Christ. I never took a penny. They don't even say I took a penny. It was all talk about politics. So, you know, I got home faster.
That sort of stuff quickens your pace a little bit, you know?
Yeah.
But that period was the hardest. 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 climb it 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 OJ Simpson.
They were at my house at 5.30 in the morning when I kissed my little girl's 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, my two daughters. The hardest thing I've ever did was saying goodbye to them. But you 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 uh and then when i got on the at the airport there was this big gaggle of media there and then when i get on the plane these are on the plane they bought tickets so i can't even like you know get give it a second to think about what just happened me saying goodbye to my family and 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 I 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 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 of prominence in politics and government and in the media 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 wasn't necessarily saying... 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, and I get greeted by all these inmates, and I was a – 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 and 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. And
um 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 my stock with the fellow inmates number one i was a quasi you know sort of a so i was a celebrity inmate they just saw me coming into prison nobody gets walks into prison live tv and the bigger part the more important part was i got what they call a 14 piece that's the vernacular of our 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. And they hate the snitches. Snitches are bitches who get stitches. Right? That's what they said. Sure.
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 me. These were drug dealers and bank robbers and tough guys, all tatted up, tough guys.
Their gangs would be tatted on their heads and stuff or on their biceps. Did you have to join a gang? I write about how the correctional officers wanted me to actually join the white group, the Aryan Brotherhood guys. The correctional officers?
Why did they want you to do it?
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 Blagojevich, report to the lieutenant's office. And they explained to me, this was my first full day. My second day there 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. But 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 is 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 it – 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. His name was, I thought it was Sadness too. Exactly. Because I'm looking around, 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.
And 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're putting 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 to tell 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 of 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. and 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. And 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. No one gave a fuck.
Really?
Yeah. Yeah, it didn't matter at all.
Wow.
Yeah.
Well, was it because that guy was so respected?
Yeah. I think that was a lot of it. And, you know, not everybody likes you, and some people really dislike you, and there were guys in prison who really didn't like me. But for the most part, I had a lot of, you know, I had low approval ratings after I got arrested, as they were investigating me when I was governor, but I had pretty high approval ratings in prison with my fellow inmates. Yeah.
So how did you get into the Bible? Because that was a big part of your conversation with Tucker.
Fuck.
And then the lights go down. Then the lights are out. Now suddenly you're swallowed up in blackness and darkness. And we're locked in. I earn bars. You can't get out. And here I am with all these prisoners and inmates, you know, and I just left my family at 5.30 in the morning. I'm not going home tonight or tomorrow night or next week or next month or next year, right?
God willing, I win my appeal, but that might be three years. But even that I was fearful after seeing the criminal justice system and how rigged it was. Deep down, I knew I was a dead man. I knew that from the beginning when they did what they did. I just felt like I had to fight.
Do you think there's anything you could have done that would have gotten you out of all of this?
I could have pled guilty and got less of a sentence. There's no doubt about that.
But what about if you just, when they came to you with that senator, if you said, sure, we'll hook that up.
No, no, no. I don't think that was- They were still coming for you. No. And they wanted me to snitch on Obama. And they arrested me at six in the morning. 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 there while 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 product 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 wild animal to send me a message.
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.
That's what I think they did. So it's a lot of chess.
Yes.
There's a lot of moves and counter moves and people are used as pawns.
Correct. They're political power centers. Here's the danger to the American people and to our democracy. They're not supposed to be that. They're supposed to do justice. They're supposed to represent the people. They're not supposed to be a political power center. 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. 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.
So everybody knows how the game is played, so everybody has to play the game.
Correct. 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. Sounds like Hollywood. Is that right?
Isn't it kind of the same thing? I mean, that's what they do whenever anybody gets in trouble in Hollywood.
Yeah, you're right. Yeah.
Well, that's just cowards. There's a lot of cowards. And a lot of people have a reason to be cowards. It's fearful. They're scared. It's a dangerous system, especially the justice system. It seems very dangerous. And this is not to malign people. Good people because there's there's I know people I've met people in the FBI. I met great people in the CIA. I know them. They're great people.
That's it's it's just what you were saying. Absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. And when people get into positions of power and influence in this this chess game, so it's getting played, they can make all sorts of rationalizations if there's no checks. We'll be right back. because Blinds.com has revolutionized the game.
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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 going to 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...
Right.
Rod's in jail.
Yeah. It's like your chief of staff and your governor's lawyer and all your friends, people that worked with you and got rich on you. Their choice is, I have to look at my little boy who's three years old and his future, or do I try to defend my boss? Right. Of course. And they make the decision, understandably, for their families.
Yeah. Well, and I think a lot of people go into, whether it's politics or law enforcement or into the federal government. There's a lot of people that go into it with very good intentions, but then you see over time they get corrupted by the environment that they're in.
That's right. They become part of a buddy system. It happens with politicians all the time. You get elected back home in Austin, Texas, and then you go to Washington and get co-opted by the system because you're young and you don't really know, or you're new and you don't know. They show you the ropes, and the ropes are controlled by that deep state, that establishment of...
of the long-term members of Congress, the people in the different agencies, the staffers. And it's a whole different world there. And it's basically them against us. There is a deep state. In state government, federal government, it's really almost... Even in law enforcement.
I mean, especially corrupt law enforcement. Did you ever see that documentary? What is it? District 75? Is it Precinct 75? Yeah.
I think it's the 5-7.
The 5-7. Is that what it is? The 7-5 or the 5-7? There's a gentleman named Mike Dowd. We had him on the podcast as well. 7-5. 7-5. 7-5. On first day... He's a cop. He watches the cops kill a guy. And they essentially say to him, he jumped, right? And he's like, okay, he jumped. It's like one of those situations where like, okay, I guess this is this business that I'm a part of now.
I wanted to be a cop. Now I'm a cop. And then he runs with it. Next thing you know, he's selling drugs and kidnapping people. It's a fucking crazy documentary. He's a fun guy. I mean, obviously did terrible things, went to jail, but the documentary is so fucking crazy.
What's it called?
The 7-5, right? The 5-7? 7-5. 7-5. 7-5. You just told me. That's it. That's the documentary. Michael Dowd. Yeah. It's fantastic. It's a really good documentary. And, you know, you just realize, like, Jesus. Obviously, the... Cocaine Crisis in Miami is another great example of that. And one of the best documentaries about that is Cocaine Cowboys. Fantastic documentary. I can't recommend it enough.
One graduating class of the police academy in Miami, they all either went to jail or were murdered. The entire graduating class. Yeah. That's how corrupt it was. It was just off the charts, cocaine and money everywhere, chaos and murder everywhere.
Yeah. Yeah. You see that here again, the stuff we're talking about, it's so important that this justice system gets reformed. 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.
Oh, they definitely were. They were dirty cops.
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. 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 get stuck in Genesis. So-and-so's beginning so-and-so.
I'll put this on the side. I can't. 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'll 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 there 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, oh, 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.
And 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 and I was reading a lot of other books. And I'd get visits maybe a couple of 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, stretch it 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 looked 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. Maybe in some ways, you know, it was good for me.
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? 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 inquisition, your inquisitive nature rather, 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. I mean, 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 you could ever meet. Like a real Christian. Like I've met some real Christians. Like my friend Alan who runs a homeless rehabilitation community here in Austin.
It's like the guy is just a real Christian. I mean he lives with these people. That's right. He's just like really walking the walk. He's not doing it for money. He doesn't have a mega church. He doesn't drive a Rolls Royce. He's a regular person who really is acting – like the Christian from the Bible, like the best example of a Christian from the Bible.
Bible talks about false prophets because people are human nature.
Yeah, there's a lot of us that are false prophets.
Well, but I mean, some of these, we call them jailhouse Jesuses. Some of these guys, you know, they'd walk around with their Bible, tote their Bible, and they were stealing, you know, and rip you off.
We talk about that. We talked about that in terms of psychedelics the other day. There's spiritual narcissism.
I think the same sort of spiritual narcissism that encompasses these preachers that talk in front of stadiums full of 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 here. No doubt. That's the false prophet. It's a danger. 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 You know, 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.
There's something I bought a building out here, you know My my podcast or 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 and 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. And 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 to escape from West Hollywood because they were looking for him.
Because, you know, the cult awareness network and they started, you know, 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. That's literally in the Bible. That's a false prophet.
That's right. By the way, congratulations on your magnificent success. Thank you very much. And you're a comedian too, huh?
Yeah, I do a lot of different things.
Wow. You know, I was stuck when you were on the rise. So when I came home, I didn't know who you were. I hope you don't kick me out of the room.
No, no, I don't care. I'm happy now that people don't know who I am.
When I can talk to someone and they don't know who I am, I'm like, this is great. But it wasn't long before I got home, I would say within a couple of days, that I got this thing called an iPhone. What's this? And this guy Joe Rogan had this big deal on this podcast. I said, Joe who? And they told me. It's remarkable. That's crazy.
So you went to jail before iPhones?
Yeah.
Wow. 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.
Yeah.
That might be one of the most, that's bigger than the laptop, I think. I think it's the most impactful. I think the invention of the iPhone is probably one of the most impactful things human beings have ever created. Not necessarily in a great way, but sometimes in a great way.
Oh, yeah.
You know?
Yeah, no, no.
There's a lot of great things about it, but the invention of the smartphone is, for all good or bad, you missed it. And that's really crazy.
Yeah, it's crazy. Can I go back just briefly to the spiritual end of it all? You can go where you want. I just want to say that, look, I consider myself, I think I have testicular virility. You know what I mean? You got balls. Yeah, I really do. I know I do. And I have a certain toughness to me. But I'll tell you something. 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 Victor 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 in
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. 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. Does that make sense?
It does. Do you think the experience of being in jail as horrible as it is made you a better person?
I like to think that it did. I think I'm more humble. I think. I was never good at that.
Sometimes that's what bites people in the ass. I always say that about Trump. 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 with. 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 because And we're so fortunate we have other ways, like Tucker's show where I saw you, like things that aren't approved.
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. This guy, Tucker Carlson is such a wild boy. He's got a guy on for like, how long was that podcast?
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? All right, 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. 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 again,
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 don't you're not talking about that. You're not talking about what why people were upset and I'll talk about what started it You're not talking about the government intervention.
It was behind it all in the first place and I was a planned organization and I think 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 and
Exactly right.
And most of that narrative is heavily progressive, left-leaning until that's not popular anymore. And when that falls out of favor, folks, when that becomes non-profitable, they're going to go the other way. The country will move more right. It'll be more right in the media even if it becomes profitable.
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. I think most people do. People do, but the government and the power centers. It's just when it's not convenient for them.
And the fact that there's these rules. We should have rules that apply across the board if we wanna progress as society. And one of those rules, the most important rule, the reason why it's the First Amendment, you have to be able to talk about things. You're gonna get things wrong. You're gonna be poorly informed. You're gonna have biased opinions.
Hopefully, someone who is more informed has a more objective and more honest opinion, more accurate opinion, and then hopefully you're strong enough that resonates with you and you can put your ego beside you and go, you know what? This is me wanting to be right. This is my ego. The correct thing is what these people are saying.
Let me tell you why I thought what I thought and how I was wrong and apologize. And that doesn't mean you're weak. It just means you, like everyone else in the world, sometimes is wrong about things. Like, I have a friend of mine. I don't want to say his name. Very, very nice guy. One of the smartest fucking people I know. And I have these fascinating conversations with him.
And then one day, he tried to explain to me why something works in the UFC, why something else doesn't work anymore. I go, stop. Because stop, you're going to ruin my opinion of you. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Don't say this. Don't say this to me. I've been working for the UFC for 25 fucking years. Don't say this to me. You don't know what you're saying.
You're saying nonsense. He's like, really? I go, yes. This is total nonsense. Here's an example why it's nonsense. This guy violates that rule. You can't tell. There's a specific group of movements that are all designed to fuck people up. Any one pattern can be successful given the individual and his abilities and his competency in whatever skill set that is. There's no one skill set.
You can't run around saying one skill set trumps all. It doesn't work like that anymore.
Listen, that's interesting.
This is brilliant people. So this is a brilliant person talking out of his ass.
Because they're people. They have their own prejudices and their biases, right?
Also, they like to be smart. Smart people like to be smart. Exactly. They want to be the smartest guy in the world. Always. They're smart about some things. There's only a term for that. where like really intelligent people erroneously believe they're intelligent about everything.
Conceited ignorance.
It's like that.
Yeah. Right. Socrates called it conceited ignorance. And by the way, they made him trick the hemlock and kill him because supposedly he was corrupting the youth of Athens in Greece. He probably was too. But he was also challenging confessional thinking.
Yes, of course.
Which is what we're talking about, which is necessary in a free society.
Yes. Dunning-Kruger effect. That's right. Cognitive bias when individuals with high competence in one area overestimate their knowledge and abilities in unrelated fields. Yeah, it's exactly what it is. Well, I don't have that problem. 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.
Interesting.
There's a lot. Like, I'm the fucking man. Sure. 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. 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. Interesting. 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.
Yeah.
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 is going to knock them out. And then they're against the cage and you see them getting lit up.
And 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 anymore. 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.
You know, they didn't see that they were past their prime or they didn't see that this is a bigger weight class or whatever the variables are that lead to like a devastating loss.
Yeah, like Duran and Hearns in the 80s. They mismatched the size and Hearns knocked him out in the second round.
Yeah, that was Tommy Hearns in his prime, man. Because you've got to realize Duran did go full 12 with Hagler when Hagler was in his prime. But Hagler had a respect for Duran that I think almost was unfortunate. Because like, Durant, for people who don't know.
He was too small compared to them.
It wasn't just that Hagler in his mind. Durant was like one of the legends.
Yeah, rightfully so.
I mean, quitting with Sugar Ray Leonard was horrible and it ruined his reputation. But if you could just take that fight away and look at every other, look at his body work. What he did to Ken Buchanan when he was a lightweight.
Right.
People don't even understand. Roberto Durant started out his career at 135 pounds. Went up and won the middleweight title. You have to understand how fucking crazy Roberto Duran was. When he beat Davey Moore, was that super welterweight? It was either 154 or 160. He beat Davey Moore, who was in his fucking prime.
That was in L.A., wasn't it?
I don't know where it was. I watched it on TV.
June 20th, 1980. Duran Leonard in Montreal. Do you remember that? Yeah, sure. I love Duran. I met Duran once when he was training for that Davey Moore fight in L.A. 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 to Chicago Tribune. That's amazing. Last time they ever said anything nice about me.
See, that's a hard thing to do.
You learn about life because you have no teammates. It's just you in there.
If you won the Golden Gloves. That is a very- I didn't win the Golden Gloves.
I fought in the Golden Gloves. Yeah.
Even fighting.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah, exactly. The other dude's trying to kick your ass.
It's such a weird feeling.
How old were you when you started?
I started fighting when I was 15.
And what was the impetus? What got you interested?
Well, I got picked on a lot. I was a small kid.
Right.
And I was always moving. We were always moving to new neighborhoods.
Oh, yeah.
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I got pushed around a little bit, like teenage boys do to each other, but I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all. And so I was like, look, I'm not growing. So it's like, what can I do to stop this fear that I have of conflict? I was terrified of conflict with kids because I did not know what to do. I had no training, no martial arts, and the only sport I'd ever played was baseball.
And so I started doing martial arts, and I became obsessed.
Was it taekwondo?
Yeah. Well, I first started with karate. I was going to this place called Esposito's Karate in Newton, Massachusetts. It might still be there. He was like the town legend. He was this black belt guy who was awesome, who taught this very popular school. But it was hard for me to get there. I didn't have a car. I was a kid. And so I would have to take a bus and walk a mile.
It was like too much, especially in the winter. But I found this Taekwondo place in Kenmore Square in Boston, and the T would go right to it. I'd only have to walk a mile to get to the T, and then I'd get on the T. So I would do that every day. The T is public transportation? Exactly. So every day, I'd walk a mile, get on the T. After school? After school.
As soon as school's over, I'd go right from my house, I'd grab my gym bag, and I'd go to the gym. I went every day. Great. So then, like, when I was in high school, I was traveling around the country fighting in tournaments. It was the weirdest shit. It's like I went from being terrified of fighting to, like, fighting all the time. Like, all the time. We were flying to Ohio.
And, you know, I couldn't drive. I was 16 at the time. So I was with all these other guys. And most of them were, like, grown men. And we would all go. And I was competing as a grown man. I was competing as a rowman when I was like 15. What weight class were you? I won the state championship the first year at 140, but it was way too hard for me to weight the weight.
And I was doing it like a moron. The guys who do it today, they really know what they're doing. I just stopped eating. I just stopped eating and stopped drinking water. And then I'd get in the shower and I'd shadow box in the shower when it was steaming hot. So I was trying to drain my body of weight. And then I'd have to fight that day, by the way. You'd have to fight the day you won.
And you're so tired. Yeah. Yeah. So I won the States one year doing that, but I realized, like, I can't do this anymore. And I also tried being a vegetarian. I tried a bunch of stuff. And then the next year, when I was 18, then I started eating. Then I went up to 150. I think it was 55 or 54. I forget what the weight class was, but it was 50-something. I went up to that, and then I got way better.
I was much, much, much better.
What was a typical training day like? Hours. So when would you do it? The whole day. Okay.
It was all day. The moment I would get home from school, I'd usually eat something real quick, grab my bag.
What would you eat?
Like a banana? What would you eat? I didn't eat good. I was retarded. I would eat a bowl of cereal. I was a kid. Yeah, right. Yeah, of course. And I didn't have a lot of guidance. My parents both worked. So I fend for myself. Whatever's in the house, I'd eat that. And then I'd get on the T and head out and go train. And so-
So how much time between when you ate and when you actually got working out?
An hour. Yeah. So while you were traveling, you're digesting. Yeah. Because it takes like an hour to get there at least. It takes like a half hour to walk and then 20 minutes on the train.
So you got a trainer there. You got a coach. Yeah. You got other guys.
Well, yeah, yeah. And then I started teaching. That was a big thing too.
But what would you do? What would your workout be? Would you –
Well, you would always start up, but mostly we'd start with technique, right? So most of the time you would start with just straight kicks. You would just practice kicks. And you're also warming up, so you go through a whole warm-up routine. You'd practice your kicks, like, mostly just for form. So you'd practice kicks.
And then you would practice kicks with specific, they would call it like a one step. Like you would come at me with a thing and I would practice stepping to the side and countering. You'd practice that way. Then you would do sparring. And we sparred almost every night. And some of the sparring was fucking horrific.
We just sparred like rounds? Yeah. Three minute rounds?
Three minute rounds, generally.
Yeah.
And you're sparring, you know, all these people that are bigger than you, stronger than you. And I was a kid.
Right, right.
And then you would heavy bag work. Heavy bag work was always at the end. When you were exhausted, you'd work on your power. And then there were some days we just came in and only worked on technique. You didn't spar. Those are good days. You could just only work on your power, like heavy bag work, drills, speed, speed drills, focus mitts.
You'd have these pads, these paddles that people hold and you'd throw kicks at the paddles. And you're just all working on making it so it just has no telegraph. It just goes off. You're trying to have it just go off like a switch. And so you're just constantly drilling it as if you're competing. And then you'd go on the weekends, you'd go compete somewhere.
Would you run at all? Do any road work or pushups?
Yeah, I ran. I did. But, you know, honestly, I hated running and I spent so much time training already that my endurance was fine.
Yeah.
And I would do rounds in the bag. I always felt like rounds in the bag were better endurance anyway because that was like what you were going to actually do.
No doubt.
Other than getting hit.
Of course. But would you do like ab work and stuff, work your core, get that strong?
Yeah, I would do sit-ups, and I would do push-ups, and I would do chin-ups and shit like that, but not a whole lot of things. Most of it was heavy bag training and sparring. That alone is a great workout. 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 Burt 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. It was awesome.
And everyone was like, hey, maybe weightlifting just makes you stronger. And now they all do it. It's kind of funny. Almost all those guys have some kind of. strength and conditioning routine now.
Yeah. So what do you do now to stay in shape? You're addicted to it because it's your lifestyle.
I think I'm addicted to it for mental health reasons too.
Me too. I know what you mean.
I think doing something difficult is very important, especially if it's self-administered. Do something really hard and it makes the rest of your day easier. And it also is just, you know, Andrew Huberman has talked about this. There's a specific area of your brain. And when you do uncomfortable things, that area of your brain grows.
And when you're sedentary and you're not doing shit, that area of your brain actually shrinks. So it enhances your ability to do difficult things by doing difficult things regularly. So it's not just like, oh, I'm addicted to it. It's like, no, it's a vitamin. Like, you should do it. Like, you should do it. It makes your brain more resilient.
Like, doing hard things, like, oh, I like to just lay on the couch. Bitch, I do too. Everybody does. Everybody likes to lay on the couch. That's not the point. The point is it's not good for you.
Listen, what you're saying is so true. Again, back to my prison experience, among the things that helped me get through it was that emotional pain and the heartache that you're feeling. I found by throwing myself into hard physical exercise really helped me soften that, lessen that emotional pain, that heartache, and it just made me feel better. Less hurting.
I hurt less by 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. You know what I mean? Yeah. So what you're saying makes perfect sense to me. Yeah.
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. Do something hard.
You'll have more love in your heart, less hate. Yes. Yeah.
The friendliest people that I know are all killers. Interesting. They're all killers. That's interesting. The friendliest people that I know. If you met, like, some of my friends that fight in the UFC, if you didn't know who they were and you met them, they're the most lovely people. Like Daniel Cormier, my...
he's the he does color commentary with me so it's me and Daniel and this guy John Anik we're all very tight Daniel was a middleweight champ excuse me light heavyweight champion and heavyweight champion he was a two division world champion and was dominating in a weight class that in In Strikeforce, he didn't even belong in heavyweight. He's like 5'11". He's not a big guy.
He's just such an insane tank of a human being. And his wrestling was so insane. And his just will was so insane. He dominated. Dominated two different divisions. He was a killer. The nicest fucking guy you'd ever meet in your life. If you're hanging around with him, you would never believe. You would never believe that he could pick up anybody in the room and smash them on their head.
You would never believe it. You would think he's just a sweetheart of a guy.
So because of my limited, very limited boxing experience, I got to know boxers. And recently I helped Tommy Hearns, helped Trump get Tommy Hearns' endorsement. And Hearns spent some time with me in Chicago. The nicest guy. This guy was such a fucking badass fighter, as you know.
Oh my God, Tommy Hearns in his prime was an assassin.
Yeah, but on a personal level, gentle, God-fearing, soft-hearted, what you're describing with the guys that you know. And a lot of the guys I knew from the boxing world in Chicago, a lot like that. The guys who had a lot more success than me because I was just the best. I was a middling guy who did it for one year. But I know exactly what you're saying.
Can I say something about tough guys and Trump real quick?
Sure.
To go back to Trump, because the point you made I thought was really interesting, that you've got to have that kind of self-love to endure all of the shit they threw at him, and you've got to.
Well, you have to be a psycho. He's kind of a psycho. You have to be the type of person that tweets, I hate Taylor Swift, like a psycho. It's just a maniac mindset. But without that, you don't keep fighting. They tried to kill him twice. That's right. And one of them nicked his ear. And there were literally people online doubting whether or not he got hit. You see blood coming off of his ear?
Yeah.
People were saying it was staged so that he could avoid prison. I mean, I heard prominent people say these things.
Yes.
Some prominent woman tweeted that he got shot because he's trying to get out of jail, out of going to jail. I don't care what you were trying to say. That's such an insane take on a former president who's running for office again being assassinated. You should be against assassinations. Assassinations are horrible. It's against the law. It's one of the most horrific. No matter what did he do?
He paid off a lady? Is that what he did? You think you should get shot in the fucking head for that?
Well said.
What did he do? What did he do that you think he deserves getting shot in the fucking head?
Yeah.
And this complete lack of appreciation that the whole thing is rigged. The whole thing is corrupt. That's not good for you either. It's not good for anybody. Just because you label yourself a liberal, you can't watch them throw the Constitution in the toilet. You can't just sit back and watch them because, yeah, that's good. They're doing it against Trump. Oh, he got shot. Good.
Are you fucking crazy? People getting shot is good? How are the love people, the progressive people, the people on the left, how are they like, I wish that guy didn't miss? How are they doing that? Because that's how lost we've gotten with this mainstream political narrative. They feed you what you're supposed to think and you never have the ability to think it out for yourself.
It's like groups of people just going through the information and coming to a conclusion as a country. Instead, you have to be on fucking a car...
Yeah.
Like in prison.
That's right.
And you got to be with this group.
A thought car. A thought car.
It's basically the same thing.
That's exactly right.
You're in a gang. You're just not in the Aryan race.
Well said.
You're in the fucking left wing progressives.
Right.
Exactly. And they'll fucking turn on you. They'll all turn on each other. They do it all the time because they're all just scrambling for stature.
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 is supposed to be.
Does that make any sense? It does. 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 is dead. Guy got shot protecting his family.
He stands up and he throws his hand up in the air and says, fight, fight, fight. That's not fake. Right. That's in the moment after getting hit by a bullet, covered by the Secret Service, guy behind him is dead. How many gunshots had rung off? Nine shots between the snipers killing him, him shooting. I think he shot three times.
Yeah, right.
And then he fight, fight, fight. That's in the moment. That's right. That's in the moment. That's right. Everybody loves America, including people that aren't in America, which is why so many people are sneaking over to America, okay? There's not a whole lot of people sneaking into Libya. Everybody loves America.
Why?
It's the shit.
Why?
But it's the shit because of personal freedom. And because you can be somebody here.
That's it. No matter who you are. You can be Joe Rogan, a kid who's 15, getting on the public transportation to do kicking and martial arts and become what you are. You can be me.
You can be anything you want. You could be a doctor, a lawyer, an author, a painter, a musician. You can do anything you want.
And no other place in the world offers it like this place does.
And this place celebrates it.
That's right. Opportunity.
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. Like they'll try to dismiss you. It's like tall poppy syndrome. They don't want anybody rising above everybody else.
Very discouraging. Well, that's the socialist mindset. That's the new Democratic Party today. 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 sorting your life out and pursuing something for yourself. 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. 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 economic status. They get angry. Why not me? Hmm.
There's a lot of that. That's a part of what the whole appeal to socialism. Of course, there's like the beautiful appeal that like there's a lot of things that are socialist in this world that are great. Like the fire department is essentially a socialist establishment. Right. We all pay for the fire department. We all agree that the fire department should act immediately when there's a fire.
We're all paying into it. And it's great. We could have other things like that, too. That should be how education is. That should probably be how the police force is. That's all great. But as soon as you want a quality of outcome, you're ignoring a quality of effort. Right. It's of course, some people were born rich. Of course, it's not fair.
Of course, some people are born in broken homes and it's harder for them. Of course, the fucking games rigged. It's not fair.
Right.
But everybody, even given the worst of circumstances, it's at least not stopped from pursuing dreams.
You see, in my life experience, what I've learned, the fun part, really more the fun part is the journey, less so the destination. When I look back on the success I've had in different places in life, like being the governor of Illinois, not so easy.
Yeah.
It was nice to be that and have that power and be able to do it for serve good purposes. But it was more fun actually trying to get there, working hard and overcoming the obstacles. The quest. Yeah, and the competition of it all, right? The quest. In any aspect of life, I think it's, frankly, embrace the quest. And if you love what you're doing, you pursue what you love, success will ensue.
You don't have to chase success. Just be great at what you do.
Hopefully. There's no hold fast rules, but hopefully success will come.
Yeah, well said. But even if you don't have success, the fact that you gave your best at something should be a version of success that you can be happy with.
For sure. At least you learn from that, and maybe you could apply those lessons to other things. It's not like there's an end to this. And everybody wants to look at it like there's some sort of a finish line. I'm telling you, it's not real. There's no finish line. It doesn't exist. You should just enjoy this moment and enjoy the whole process of whatever you're trying to do in life.
Because there's never going to be a time where you're like, I did it. It's over. That's not real. I'm here to tell you, someone who's had the number one podcast for like six years or something like that, it's not real. There's no end. There's no like, I made it. It doesn't exist. And if it does exist, you're missing out on the whole point.
The point is you're supposed to be getting better all the time at everything you do.
Yeah, that's right.
It's a constant thing. That's right. 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 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, 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. 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.
And a lot of greed, of course. And it's not fair. It's not to deny that.
I mean, for sure we should keep an eye on people who want to change the weather, for sure. But at the end of the day... We're all just supposed to be human beings with an opportunity to try to succeed. It doesn't mean everybody's going to succeed. That's what's so crazy about this open-ended agreement you have with life. You don't know what's coming up. You don't know what's next.
It's just like how do you respond to it when it happens? And for you, it's one of the most difficult things that a person could go through, and especially because you feel you were innocent.
No, yeah. And so I have purpose in life at this stage. You know, they took everything from me. You know, they passed laws saying I can't run for anything in Illinois. Believe it or not, just me. It's unconstitutional.
You could probably run in Vegas and win. You could be the king of Vegas.
I could. It's a good place, I hear. They would love you. You could totally be the king of Vegas. But, you know, I could... I have a new beginning. A lot of my friends are retired now, you know, and they're retired, and that's fine. But I'm excited about this new beginning I've had. Could you run for president? Yeah, the irony is I could run for federal office.
I could run for president of the United States, but I can't run for alderman in the city of Chicago. Imagine that.
Damn, you're missing out on an awesome gig. Wow. That's crazy.
But I have something to get up every day and chase. I'm lucky that way.
Do you have any desire to be in politics anymore? Is it just too gross? How do you think about it now?
My wife, who is a remarkable person. 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, 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.
I told her I'd try to get it on.
What's the Puppy Protection Act?
Protects puppies. We love dogs. Something to have your listeners consider, the puppy protection act.
How does it protect puppies?
I don't know, but it's got to be good. I didn't read it.
Well, anything that protects puppies. But to me, that sounds like the Patriot Act. Well, it's got to be good.
You're right. Bernie Sanders was right on that. He was the only one who voted against that. I'm looking at him when that happened because I was with him in Congress then.
Well, they named it the Patriot Act. How are you going to say no to that?
I know.
But you name it the Puppy Protection Act.
Right. It's got a good chance of passing with a name like that.
What's in there?
And a younger daughter, she's a big Taylor Swift fan, a Swiftie. They both are. But they're good kids. They're honest kids. They do good in school, like their mother. She raised them great without a father. They've suffered through the politics in my career and so public. And the name is not a common name, Blagojevich. There's just not a lot of us here. There are in Serbia, but not in America.
So everybody knows who their dad is, you know, in the political context. So my wife, Patty, you'll find this interesting. Two days after I was arrested, which was the 9th of December 2008, The Thursday of that week, Vegas was betting. They were taking bets. What are the odds the first lady of Illinois is going to leave the governor of Illinois after he just got arrested? And it was nine to one.
100%.
I know.
Oh, my goodness. You should have made so much money just emptying your bank accounts. Let's go, champ.
It crossed my mind, actually.
Would that be illegal? Maybe they put you back in jail for that.
That's what prevented me from even pursuing that. They might criminalize that. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. 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. You don't have to.
In this day and age, what are you going to do other than this book?
Well, I do different work. I do some business stuff. 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.
Have you ever seen any of my podcasts that I've done with Josh Dubin?
No, but tell me about that. That's criminal justice reform? Yes. Okay.
That's his main objective. Just through the podcast that we've done, multiple people have been released.
Yeah. See, that's very impactful.
He's always highlighting these fucked up cases where people were innocent and massive corruption in the prosecutor's office. You hear about these things, they're so heartbreaking. You just can't believe that someone would be willing- to have people go to jail for 25 to life for something that they know is a lie.
Right.
But you see it over and over and over again.
Right. 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-all sentencing guidelines that the politicians pass. But every case is different. Every person is different. Their backgrounds are different.
Their causes, the reasons for doing things, they're different. So the system is 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. The So I think I do some of that.
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. the way Russia's invaded Ukraine.
Why did we bomb Serbia?
Because they were trying to force the Serbian government to give up a part of their country, Kosovo. Give it up. That'd be like NATO threatening to bomb us to say, give up Texas to Mexico. And the Serbian government said, we're not going to do it.
And so the United States decided to bomb them if they didn't sign an agreement that was made in France called the Rambouillet Agreement that would have put it up to a referendum.
It's really that simple?
There's more to everything, but the complication is the geopolitics of Europe and the Middle East, because Serbia 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. The Clinton administration did that. Took that part of their country away.
What did they bomb?
They bombed Belgrade. They bombed all the big cities.
They just indiscriminately bombed the cities? Did they bomb military bases?
The electrical grid, they bombed military bases. 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 in 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 Axis 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, you know, 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 force 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 the place my father came from. I'm American-born. My mother was American-born.
It sounds like you're bucking for an ambassador to Serbia position.
Oh, no. Oh, no, I'm not. No.
What if he gave it to you? Would you take it?
Unlikely. Oh, come on. No, unlikely I would take it.
Come on. No, unlikely. Come on, fella. No, only if he said to me, look, I really need you, which he won't do.
He's going to sit you down with a Burger King. No, he's into Big Macs, right?
McDonald's. He likes McDonald's.
Yeah. Sit you down.
He likes McDonald's. But there's a new opportunity with Trump and his administration to rethink sort of our policy and some of those old relationships.
No, you understand politics far more than most. What difficulties do they face in implementing real change? So there's all these ideas, the Doge idea, the Department of Government Efficiency, RFK taking over HHS, right? Health and Human Services, is that what it is? And so then Kash Patel with the FBI, Tulsi Gabbard. What is her...
She's the director of national intelligence. That's a huge, huge, huge position.
Yes. So they all have these ideas to eliminate corruption or at least mitigate it and root out all the bad actors and find out what went wrong. Right. What what's in the way of that? What would stop them from being able to do all that?
You're talking about an almost immovable object. You're talking about the deep state. 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, is the first six months to a year, because this time he has a bit of a honeymoon with the voters. He didn't get that in 2016, but this time he has it. He's got wind at his back, because that was a mandate.
People are happy that he won.
Yeah, it was a mandate. He's got that. But he's going to get no honeymoon from the Democrats. And traditionally, presidents get, even the other party will give them the first three to six months before they start pissing all over them. You know what I mean? 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. You know what you really can't trust?
Yeah. The people who make the polls. That's right. Those fucking people, they might as well be psychics. They might as well be that person with the neon sign that's reading cards. You guys were so off. It was so wild because people were so emboldened by them being so off. I'm sure you've seen a lot of these hilarious videos of Democrats who are absolutely sure she was going to win.
We're going to win this. And they're all fired up and cocky and hooting and hollering and making fun of people. And then, bam, you see this landslide.
I'm pretty good at patting myself on the back. I was in that business. So I'm going to pat myself on the back. I called it. I think I'm Tucker. And even before that, I was saying Trump was going to sweep all the battleground states.
I thought it was going to be a lot closer because I thought, you know, until she kept making blunders. Like, if she just never did any interviews and just only did speeches like that first one that she did. That first one she did, like, have you got something to say to me? Say it to my face. And the whole place goes nuts. And you're like, whoa.
Like, she was young and energetic in comparison to him. Like, oh, my God. And then they all got behind her. Yeah. You see all the wind behind the sails of the media. They were all moving in March step. They were all marching together. They were all telling us, she's the best. She's number one. She's going to fix it. And I thought it was working. I really did. I was like, this might work.
Which is, I was fascinated to see. I was fascinated to see the whole machine turn in support of her. The people that had mocked her approval ratings just six months ago. They're making fun of her and how she's largely been quiet. And then all of a sudden, she's our answer.
Yeah. That was propaganda. It was wild. Yeah.
It was wild.
They were propping her up. It was really thin. They did that with Obama. They got away with it then. They propped this guy up to be this demigod that he's not.
Did you see Jill Biden dunking on her in that speech today?
Was it today? I think it was yesterday. She was talking about joy. Is that the one?
Oh, my God. It's amazing. Jill Biden subtly does a Kamala Harris impression, and the audience knows it, and the audience starts laughing. Yeah, which is just like what I want to be a fly on the wall I would have loved to see how that like is essentially a coup went down.
Yes, right That's right is the first time ever someone who didn't get Elected correct through a primary right is somehow or another the representative for the Democratic Party. It's a little kind of dangerous If you really think about in that regard, it's kind of dangerous.
You're right in this lies. It's based on lies. It's not forcing people and It's not the will of the people, and they're just lying to you.
Lying to you. 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. This is kind of crazy. What are we doing?
Right. They took away the rights of the people and the Democratic voters to choose their nominee.
Did you see this one in the back room? Crazy video of this poor girl. She's like hysteric. And she's talking to Kamala Harris and Kamala Harris is talking to her. And she's like, don't worry, we're going to win. We're going to win. And she's like saying this to this poor girl, like a college girl is like full of anxiety and all freaked out and just.
I just get so upset when I watch that because what got in your head that got you thinking that some horrific end to women's rights is coming? What happened?
I'll tell you what happened. You've been lied to over and over again by the establishment, Democrat Party, and their allies in the media, that 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. Which is a good thing, isn't it?
Why wouldn't America want to be great again? Well, it certainly should be. I mean, it's all... And it is great, isn't it? 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, in 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 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, but not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Now it's let's overcorrect.
Let's overcorrect. Exactly.
I think it's a cult. I really do. 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.
That's if that didn't happen, I think it would have been an even bigger victory for Trump.
Right.
Because I think that was one of the most important.
subjects when 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 extent but like we're talking 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 of a 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. Which is... To me, that's terrifying. I agree.
Giving people that kind of power over other people, especially if they're doing something that's legal in that state. The whole idea of states' rights is supposed to be, first of all, we don't need passports to travel from state to state, right? But every state is essentially almost like a little different country that speaks the same language. This is a very different country than California.
I lived in both places. Yeah. You know, there's other places. 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. If I'm not you don't know what I'm doing in this state.
And I don't want you check 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 oppose and put some girl in jail to send a message. Yeah. 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. 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, you know, it's a very complicated decision for someone to make.
And, you know, Joe Biden ironically said it best a long time ago. He said abortion should be legal and rare.
I have a long history as a Democratic governor and congressman supporting a woman's right to choose. I haven't changed my view on it. I'm a huge Trump supporter, but I haven't changed my view on it for the same reasons that you just explained. Not to mention the fact, who am I as a man to tell some woman what she could do with her body?
It gets so complicated. Yeah.
No, it's very complicated. 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?
It's very, very real. I don't think you should let the government ever be involved in the choices you make with your body. I don't think that. And I understand the pro-life perspective. I get it. I've talked to very intelligent, reasonable people that believe that life begins at the moment of conception, even in the case of rape. That's right.
I'm like, okay, I don't agree with you, but I understand where you're coming from. And I could put myself in your mindset and I could see that. I could see how you would think that. I could see how you'd say two wrongs don't make a right. I could see it. I just don't agree with it. And, you know, I don't agree with it because I would not want to be a woman carrying a rapist baby.
I don't give a fuck what you say. And if you want to impose that on a person because you have a different set of beliefs than a person, where does that end? Where does that end?
You know, right.
It gets fucking weird. It gets weird when you let people control people. Think about how many people are yelling at people to wear a mask outside. Where's your mask? People are fucking weird, man. When you give them any kind of control over people, I don't trust them. And that's not like a pro abortion position. That's a pro. I don't trust people and their decision making ability.
And their abuse of power decision. That's what that is. That's my position.
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. I know. It's so fascinating. And it's that inconsistency. My body, my choice. Yeah. Right. Right.
Exactly. Which I agree with, with fucking everything. Right. You know, if you want to get face tattoos, I wouldn't recommend it, but I have a bunch of friends who have face tattoos. I don't know. Jelly Roll's got a bunch of them. I love that guy to death.
Post Malone's got a bunch of them. I love that guy to death. Listen, I did all those years in prison with guys like that.
A lot of nice guys with face tattoos. How many fighters I know with face tattoos?
Yeah.
Fucking great guy. Sean O'Malley. Shout out to my man, Sean. Face tattoos, awesome guy.
There was a guy in prison named Crow. He was clearly a Dodgers fan. How did I know he had a tattoo? Dodgers, right on top of his head. And I sang to this guy and about 110 others at the GED graduation with my prison band, G-Rod of the Jailhouse Rockers.
Oh, wow. That's hilarious. Did you record anything?
No, they didn't allow that.
Oh, that's too bad. That would have been amazing tapes.
Yeah.
Get that on the Internet.
But you couldn't allow that. You couldn't get that in. Damn.
Let them have YouTube channels. But I had to. You know how great that would be? YouTube jail channels. Tell the jail, listen, you can make profits off of this. Why don't you split the profits with the emits? No.
Look, I met a lot of guys. A lot of these guys are not bad guys. They broke the law, and they should be held accountable and have justice but also mercy. And a chance at a second chance.
Also mercy and redemption.
Absolutely. Chance of redemption. Please, let's have more of that. We don't have enough of that. Rehabilitation. Whatever happened to that? Some of these guys have such good hearts. There was this bank robber in prison, Michael Torres. Good guy. His name is Sox. Robbed a bank.
Because he put socks over his face when he robbed the bank? Is that why?
You know, I don't know that, but I have a chapter about him because I taught history with him. He loved General Grant. He wanted to be a lecturer in my Civil War history class. But what he did was he robbed a bank in Central California. You'll appreciate this. His father was a Pentecostal minister.
Oh, my God.
And he walks into this bank. His father taught him to always respect the values of respecting your elders, okay? So he storms into a bank with an assault weapon shouting, motherfuckers, everybody go to the side.
I'm robbing this fucking bank. I'll kill anybody and blow your heads off. If you don't comply, get out.
You don't follow my orders. He didn't say comply, right? So they all scatter around, but he spies out of the side of his eye, this little old lady in a corner trembling, standing there. And at that point, he recognized her, and he puts his bank robbery on pause, puts it on hold.
And all of a sudden, he goes from this Dr. – this Mr. Hyde character where he's screaming motherfucker with his assault weapon to a gentle Dr. – Jekyll. Jekyll, right? Goes to the woman. Okay. Calms her and soothes her and tells her, ma'am, don't worry. This won't take too long. No one's going to hurt you. I won't be long. Let me get you a seat.
And so some guy's sitting in the chair and he says, get up, motherfucker, or I'll fucking blow your brains out. And he ushers her to the seat, sits her down. Then he goes back to the bank robbery, gets all the money. 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. It didn't take long. He's apprehended. He's got no defense.
There's all these witnesses who 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. And the judge gave him 10 years.
Wow.
So his kindness to the old lady and respecting the values of his father saved him 10 years. And he was a great guy to do prison time with. If you've got to do time in prison, Sox was your kind of guy. Fun. And he lectured in my class, and he talked about General Grand at Shiloh, and he kept telling these guys, the motherfucker was a badass, dude.
This guy was a badass, dude. That's hilarious. Yeah, there's good people that make bad choices. Yeah. Yeah, and we've got to throw people away. That's crazy. There's so many people I'm sure that you've met that have a lot of potential. And I've met a lot of people that have been in jail that are amazing people.
Amazing people. They're very resourceful, very enterprising, very smart.
One of my favorite guests that I've ever had on is Freeway Ricky Ross.
Tell me, is that the singer?
No. No, it's the real one. 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. Holy shit.
No kidding. In the 80s.
The whole Oliver North thing. That's freeway Ricky Ross. He was a legend. He was making millions every week. Every week. Millions of dollars. Couldn't read. Couldn't read, was a tennis player, really good tennis player, but not good enough to be pro, but illiterate. Goes to jail. Becomes a lawyer in jail, teaches himself to read.
Was it state prison or federal prison?
I believe it was federal prison.
Yeah, okay.
I believe it was federal prison. Goes to jail and finds out that, because he understands law, that they had used the three strikes rule incorrectly.
Oh.
And that it's supposed to be three separate incidents of felonies. This was three felonies in one incident.
Yeah, right.
And so he got off. Beautiful. He got himself out of jail.
How long was he in?
Oh, he's in a long time. How long is Freeway Ricky Ross in? But he's the nicest guy. He's funny. He's like, you're telling me this guy didn't deserve a second chance?
Yes, exactly.
He's a young kid surrounded by drug dealers.
That's right.
The only people that had any money.
Life sentence was reduced to 20 years. I think he did 20 years. Got out in 2009. Wow.
Where's he at now? He's back in L.A. He just did the podcast recently. How long ago did he do it? Was it last year? I feel like it was this year. Yeah, I know it was this year. What month?
Six months ago.
Six months ago, yeah.
You know what I'd like to do with my new beginning? Make enough money where we can have financial security for my family and my law. I was making $62 a year. Every year for eight years, right? I'm a lawyer. I went to law school. This is what I get for going to college and law school.
What do they pay you for in jail? What do you get paid for?
I was a tutor for my first couple years in the higher prison. And then when I got to the camp, you know, orderly where you mop floors, you sweep floors. Worked in the library for a while. I had all kinds of jobs. Worked in the gym.
How rude is that? They give you a dollar a day.
The worst job was in the kitchen. 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 probable evidence.
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 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. They called me the governor of the dish pit.
Right.
Yeah. So that paid $5.25 a month. That's so crazy. But here's what I'd like to do. I want to be successful, make money. If 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.
You should talk to Josh Dubin as well.
Yeah. You'll help me get a hold of him? Yes, absolutely. I feel like that's my calling. I feel I should do that.
Yeah, I'll connect you guys. I love that guy to death. And that's his main quest in life, you know, to help people. And then he's got so many stories of these people getting out and doing incredible things and helping other people as well. Turning it back around, giving it back, trying to work and educate these young guys and also trying to stop them from doing bad things.
Just give them some life skills so they can make good decisions instead of bad decisions. Because some people are just... Like there's a reality of being trapped by your circumstances. And if you have not experienced that, and luckily I haven't, and I'm very fortunate, but there's a lot of people that do. And to discount that is fucking crazy.
And we take people and we just put them in cages and we forget about them. And it's convenient for us. And just lock them up. Just lock everybody up. Like stop locking people up. What we need to do is understand that we lock more people up than anybody anywhere. And it doesn't make us safer. What we got to do is get to the root of why so many people are getting locked up.
Yeah, that's right.
And we've ignored that. We've ignored that. It's like we're constantly cutting cancerous tumors off. We're not going, hey, why do we keep getting cancer? Like, is there something we could do different? There's a lot we could do different. Think about just the money that we have sent to Ukraine. Imagine if that money just went to rehabilitating the cities in North America. There you go.
How much good could you do with $200 billion in America in a year?
You want to hear a real cynical thing about the Democratic Party? Don't forget, I was a Democratic governor. I was the first one to endorse Obama. I supported Nancy Pelosi in the House, okay?
I support her stock trades. Yeah, I didn't know about any of those. Did you go to Pelosi Stock Tracker?
No.
You ever seen it? No.
Oh, it's so good. You're kidding. Yeah.
Oh, my God. No kidding. I'm not really a stock market person. I don't pay attention. But I do know people that are very invested in the stock market, and Pelosi Stock Tracker is legit. Like, you could find out what she's buying, and you should buy it.
That is really, really interesting.
She's a really good stock broker, Rod. Yeah.
I'm going to do that tomorrow because I told you. She's super good at it.
I don't know how she has the time considering she's so busy serving the people. But if she was just a pure stock trader, she'd probably be the biggest of all time. She's that good. Well, probably not. No, I'm telling you.
Because she doesn't have the inside information she has.
No, no, no, no. She's a psychic. She's got talent. She gets it.
I got you.
She gets it.
In any event, we were talking about what? Criminal justice reform? Yes. Oh, and the black community in particular, and the cynical part of the Democrat Party. And it really started 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, right? 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 at 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% of a safe vote for them if they're free.
Well, I think they lost a lot of it during this election 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.
Yes, very real.
Very right.
They're 100% correct.
This is like 100% evidence that these people who are pretending to be on your side don't give a fuck about you. There you go. That's the reality of it. Now, if Trump can demonstrate that he gives a fuck, it'll change the whole narrative. If he can do real things while he's in office, and he seems like a guy who's motivated to do real things. Just...
If you could just get 10% less people winding up in jail, imagine what that is. Imagine what that is. 10% more people that are contributing to society. And that's a minor goal. That's a totally doable thing. That's not unrealistic at all. But if you can get 10%, 10% probably would give birth to 20 or 30 eventually.
I think people would recognize like, oh, there's a path that I can get my children into that will give them a real secure future outside of this. And then you've got to do something about law enforcement. You've got to mitigate all the gang activity and violence. You can't have people growing up thinking that violence is the way and that drug dealing is the way and shooting people is normal.
You've got to – you can't let that flourish and grow. You can't let that happen. And they – for whatever reason, have never fully addressed it. They've never addressed it with the kind of resources that we address so many of our problems.
Because of the politics. And the old Republican Party, they were fine with it. Just let the black community be where it is. Let the Democrats have all those votes. And we'll just scare the shit out of white suburbanites. Tell them that those gangbangers on the south side of Chicago are coming out to your suburb. Right? And they get votes that way. Trump is a very different guy.
And he's rebuilding this Republican Party. It's a political realignment. And he got more black votes than any Republican candidate's gotten since 1976. He's still a long way from it.
Well, I think the whole he's racist narrative just died.
It is such an outrageous accusation by people that project because they're racist. Some of these Democrat policies, they're dressed up as being pro-black, are fundamentally anti-black. Look at the education issue. Schools suck. I went to public school in Chicago. I wasn't exactly setting the world on fire.
Instead of making the schools better, they lower the standards.
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 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.
39?
Whatever it is. Whatever crazy number that doesn't even make sense in my head.
Yeah.
Whatever the number is. Right. 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, you know, 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.
You can't do it for $39 trillion. You know why?
Why?
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. 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 teacher's 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 a child's test scores. And then test scores alone aren't the best evidence of whether or not a child is learning. So 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.
is controlled by many different interest groups in 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. And 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 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. We all strive. Rising tide lifts all boats. Let's fucking go.
I love it.
If they did that, you think the teachers union would be the biggest impediment to actual success?
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've got the... 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, what's...
The pro-choice group that's 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 natural resistance to 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 in 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 their 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.
Like, 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 it up? And, you know, it's not a militarization of cities. Like, there's got to be a way to do it. How much would it cost?
How much? Put some of that money towards more police. And that's the other irony. But you need that. Gangbangers in Chicago outnumber police officers 75 to 1. And where's most of the crime? It's in those poor black neighborhoods. 75 to 1. You know, motherfucking cops and police. So stupid. 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 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 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.
Absolutely. The question is, how would you do it if you were a part of the administration? If Donald Trump heard this conversation and said, you know what, I think he's I think he's right. And I think we can do something about it. What would you do?
On education or on something else?
Well, it would first be, both are connected, right? Crime and education, they're connected. And the lowest income, most crime-ridden communities has the lowest education levels, right? So they're inexorably connected. You can't just deal with education without dealing with crime, so you'd have to do both.
Right. I think I'm an expert on the crime part of it, you know, because I've seen it from both sides. I've lived at both places. I think, you know, look, I'm happy to volunteer my services and to share my experience. But I think on the issue of weaponized prosecutors and the corruption of the DOJ, I don't think anybody knows that subject better than me.
And I'm happy to provide any kind of free advice or suggestions I can have.
So that's the job you want.
But in addition to that, I would say— What job would you take?
What's the dream one? What's the dream conversation?
Well, it's not a job. You ask me, what would I do?
Right.
What would I do?
But isn't there like a title that would allow you to do what you want to do?
I don't know, but I'll just say it isn't just that, though. See, I think I can bring my own experience from the time I had in prison with my homies in there. Like I said, yeah, most of them all did it.
You have homies. You're like one of the few former governors with homies. Like, legit.
You can say that unironically. If my friend Spade, you know, Joe Naramore is listening, shout out to Joe Naramore or Walter Hill or, gee, Gregory Blaylock, drug dealer from South Side of Chicago.
100%.
You feel me, bro?
Yeah.
Like, for real, a guy who hadn't done time to say my homies, like, shut the fuck up. Those guys you play pickleball with?
Yeah, right.
Shut up. But you have actual homies.
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 think you're the perfect person to ask this about. How do you feel about private prisons?
I don't know enough about all the details, but I'm very suspicious of that, the profit motive in private prisons and a lot of the, 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 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 Blagojevich 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 what has Governor X done for me that I feel in real life.
So I think I did those things. But to brag on myself, I just got off message. What were we talking about?
But we were talking about what would you do?
Yeah.
What would be your dream job?
Helping along the lines of that. And again, even volunteering.
But you were talking about criminal justice reform because like who would know about it more than you?
Correct.
Yeah.
Yeah. Correct.
That makes a lot of sense.
You got to go to Congress. You got to change those laws. You 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.
How much of an effort, once you actually get inside, is there to rehabilitate you?
Almost none. Maybe none at all. None. It's adult babysitting.
But is it all self-motivated? If you do want to improve yourself, it's self-motivated.
Yeah. And there's resources where you can do that. I mean, there are places where you can learn. Not enough vocational stuff. Not nearly enough. But you can do that.
But there's no guidance in terms... Do you get counseling?
Counseling, yes.
So that is guidance in some way.
No? I mean, like guidance, what? They don't teach you anything. They'll, you know...
Well, in your situation, you.
But they didn't teach the other guys. I mean, I know enough about that to know that they weren't getting any kind of guidance. The counselors are just giving you guidance on how to deal with the world we're in. No. That place.
And also no motivation to try to improve yourself or to figure out why you got in there.
Yeah, there's some motivation. So, for example, I'm sitting in Jailhouse Rock before 110 inmates who the day before I see in the yard 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 hear 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? The wardens there. Oh, my God.
That's so crazy.
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 good – and there was a guy who was – He had the head of the music department, an inmate, a drug dealer who went to Berklee, 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, right? So there we are a year later.
We had auditioned and won the gig for the Jailhouse Rockers to perform before the GED graduates. And there's the warden, all the brass in the prison, 110 of these badass guys. They had an outside guest speaker to give a motivational speech. I'm stepping up. I'm about to sing my first song by Clint Black called A Better Man. You know? Leave in here a better man. You ever hear that song?
Country song. I don't know if I have. Yeah. 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. The warden sent him home. Wow. He had the power to do that. So I was told this. Now suddenly I'm about to sing Jailhouse Rock, right? There he is. I figure, I think I'll go off the program and ad-lib a little bit. Because I've been on stage before. I know how to do that.
So I look at the warden and I say, I'd like to dedicate this song to the warden.
Please release me, let me go. Because I don't want to be here anymore. Right? That's hilarious. Nobody laughed. Really?
Nobody laughed. The warden's staring at me. All the inmates don't know what to make of it. They were afraid to laugh, you know.
That's hilarious.
But GED is one way where you can get a reduction. You can get good time. So you can spend a little less time in prison. I'll give you maybe, I don't know, several months or maybe a year off your sentence or something. So there are some incentives. Okay. Yeah. Something like that. There should be more of that.
Yeah. Listen, man, you had a wild life, and I'm glad you're out. Thank you. And I'm glad I listened to you on Tucker, and I got a different sense of who you were than what the narrative was that I saw over the media. Obviously, I don't know what happened, but I think you're a good dude, and I enjoyed talking to you.
I appreciate you, Joe. God bless you, and congratulations on your great success.
Thank you. God bless you, too. And this book, is it done? Is it almost done? Do you have a publisher? We kind of glossed over that a little bit, but-
Yeah, so it's Vindication Publishing, my own little publishing company. I've pre-sold 8,000 books, so far so good. The reason I have to do it myself is the New York publishers don't like the good Trump stuff.
Do you have an audio version that you're going to do?
I'm going to do an audio version.
You'll do it, right? Absolutely. All right, thank you.
Thank you very much. Bye, everybody.