Senator Cory Booker On Unity, Hope & Healthy Food

The Rich Roll Podcast. When my kids walk into a bodega in Newark, they can get a Twinkie-like product cheaper than an apple because we as a society have said we're going to subsidize everything in that Twinkie-like product and not the apple. I've had the great privilege of speaking with many people who are making a real difference in the world. And today's guest certainly fits that description.

A headline grabbing former mayor who says he's the only vegan in Senate history. Cory is a graduate of Stanford University where he played varsity football. Cory is the former mayor of Newark, New Jersey. He was a 2020 presidential candidate and is currently a leading voice in the United States Senate. Congratulations, Senator. Welcome. I got a couple more things I would very much like to mention before

we dig into this one, but first. I believe in responsible supplementation. No matter how dialed in your diet, most people, surprisingly, are nonetheless deficient in certain key nutrients, blithely ignorant to this fact until a blood test reveals the truth. But I'm also sensitive to how complicated and confusing responsible supplementation can be, which is why I love AG1 by athletic reans, which is a comprehensive and very

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your wrist, providing you with optimal daily exertion levels based on your personalized recovery metrics. as a lifelong athlete, I've learned over the many years to go on feel, but whoop has shown me that often my feel, what I'm feeling in my body, doesn't always match with what is going on with my physiology. and that insight has been invaluable in tailoring my output and rest to increase

the consistency of being at my best. So if you want to learn more and check it out, go to whoop.com, whop.com, and enter code rich roll to save 10% off any membership today. That's whoop.com and use code rich roll to save 10%. In this conversation, we discuss Corey's path to public service. We talk about the divided nature of politics today. And we also talk about a

and even on a national level. The power that you always have over and over again is to choose how you are going to respond. Are you going to double down on the darkness or the negative frequencies? Or are you going to be like the heroes we elevate in this country that will choose faithfulness or hopefulness or ultimately the highest frequency of all love? It was a

true honor to spend a couple of hours with Senator Booker. I have been inspired by his example as a public servant for many, many years. He is a man who truly walks his talk. I was quite moved by what he shares in this exchange and I hope you find it as meaningful as I did. So here we go. This is me and Senator Cory Booker. I

can't tell you how excited I am to have you here today. We made it happen. I've been wanting to meet you for so long. So I'm just thrilled that you're here today. Yeah, I told my staff I was going to try not to make a fool out of myself and fanboy all over you. I dreamed of having a conversation with you a lot. And Spotify is

which I love. I've been listening to you. They give me my most listened to songs every year. Bruce Pringstein, Stevie Wonder, kind of thing. But the podcast now they've been saying, so last year you were my number one most listened to podcast. I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what to say about that. There's a saying you probably know it's about friendship. And

it says a true friend is somebody that knows the song of your heart. And we'll sing it to you when you've lost the tune. And we don't know each other personally, but I cannot tell you how many nights and my staff knows it. Sometimes we'll wake up up at 4 o'clock in the morning, and I'll go to you and it's like having a friend resonate the

values that are important to you. I just find this for a long time found this kinship with you that I don't even know you, but you have really helped me in my own life journey and my life path. So it's incredibly meaningful to me to hear that. It's like emotional to hear that because we just do this thing and it's very abstract. Like I do it

and then I go home and I see numbers and I know people are listening to me. I'm not listening to it and watching it, but to get that kind of feedback is like, you know, that's my nourishment. So I appreciate that. And on the subject of values, like I am, you know, just somebody who has so much respect for, you know, how you kind of comport

yourself in the world, not just as a senator as a representative of your constituents, but as a human being, as a man, how you kind of model healthy masculinity, how you model. Leadership and how you really walk your talk in terms of the things that are important to you and the positions that you take often difficult positions in terms of your activism and the kind of

positive change that you're trying to actualize in the world. And what I admire about you is your guy who has been so courageously vulnerable. And I think that in that vulnerability, you've showed the best of who you are. And I was telling my team on the way here. And again, I feel like I again, this is the first time meeting, but I feel like I know

you so, so well. I'm surprised we, because we overlap the sample. I think we did. Well, I graduated in 89. Yeah, so we were 91. So we were there two years at the same time. Yeah, and to the extent that we were in the training room at the same time, you was a swimmer. Me as a football player, we may have, we may have, maybe bumped

into each other. Well, we shared the weight room. Yeah. It's different times. Yeah. But you have been so open about your own journey of mistakes, brokenness, struggling with addiction. And I, many ways I think that the, the people I come to admire the most are those who have lost pretense and affectation and are, are learning to be comfortable on the truth that they've lived, which is

often we all carry with us trauma shame, pain. And I think the more at peace we are with that as a part of our growth, the more we're able to touch other people in their authentic space. And you do that so eloquently and persistently that is a gift to everybody. I think who listens. Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, I've discovered that it, that's how you

breathe trust and and community. And it's an antidote to loneliness, you know, because everybody is going through something. And I don't care how they, characterize their life on Instagram or how great something might look on the outside or the, the, the ways in which we project or judge a person based upon how they present to us. You know, nobody gets out of life alive. And we

all have our private struggles. And, you know, part of what I, what I try to do is to try to tap into, you know, the core of humanity that we all share. So we can find that commonality. And I think that that's something that you would, you know, agree is an important thing, particularly in, you know, how you navigate, descent, and how you speak about the

division that we're experiencing in America right now. And you're kind of recipe for repairing that in terms of like building bridges rather than, you know, kind of, you know, dropping explosions here and there. Yeah. And it's hard. It's harder and harder in a, in today's context where, we have as a, Tara Broxess, a sort of severed belonging that, you know, we're a species that's evolved over

millennium. In these really tight knit nurturing communities, where you're known, where you're seen, where you're connected. And we have a society now, which we're not, not as connected. I think this some data recently came out about men, and how we have less friends than we've ever had, at least from an American context. And that really is, there's a, there is a unspoken perhaps unfually realized agony

and all of that that I think feeds a lot of dysfunction in our, not just with individuals, when you feel isolated and alone and lacking connection. But I think if we're in the larger society as well. And this is being aggravated by our larger political context, which is so much right now affected by concentrated corporate culture that has their own urgency, which is, you know, we're

far more shareholder profit driven than we've ever had. There have been, there was a time when my dad was coming up. In fact, the corporations had multiple shareholders, not just the, people actually own it, but the community in which they're in and the employees. And so what that has driven is this unbelievable urgency to keep people's eyes on screens. And I just really worry about us

and how we're going to get out of this trap, that the way people often think about getting eyes on the, on the screens is driving us further apart from each other or accessing our, our sense of our rage or, or this culture of contempt. And so in politics, I'm on, on my team is often talking about, how do we scratch that record? How do we get

out of this trap where we're viewing American fellow Americans as enemies or threats to the point where we consider them existential threat. If you win, it can end, I mean, the end of this nation. Both sides have that kind of rhetoric. And it's creating this environment where I say metaphorically, it's like, this nation has this ship. That is one of the best ships in the entire

fleet of other countries ships. And we're way out ahead. And we've been doing things that have been the marvel of humanity for a long time. Whether that we used to be from 1940s to the early 1970s, the biggest expansion of middle class people. We had a doubling of median income. The Black White Wealth gap was shrinking. We've done things in humanity from mapping the human genome

to a, a defying gravity and getting to the moon. But now our ship is in danger. And I see this in many ways in Washington, D.C. when we look at measures of competitiveness, but that's not the best measure. But we're in danger because we're fighting each other so much that our ship is stalling. We're threatening to put holes in the ship and be overtaken. And so

how do we heal that? How do we get out of that trap? And we think a lot about that. And one is just trying to be that change. And I have definitely made mistakes in my political career where I have fallen in the trap of demonization. And there are times when I've been able to find creative ways out of that. I often say to my best

teachers in life have been Donald Trump. And a guy named Sharp James, who were my two, you know, Sharp James was my sort of nemesis. There was a documentary made about my campaign to try to become mayor of the city of Newark called Street Fight. And he brought out the best of me and at times the worst of me. And there are, with Donald Trump, I

say the same thing. He's brought out some of the uglier corners that I had to work on as well as some of the better things. And so you embody this so much. It's the self-work that ultimately makes us the best external leaders when it comes to making change and making a difference. And so I appreciate the compliment, but I'm still working on this. How do we

solve this trap and by solving it for myself? Sure. I mean, those types of extreme personalities can be a mirror reflecting back what you need to work on within your life. Because that's the only thing that you can truly control. But in thinking about the landscape, clearly, you know, we all live in this attention economy. And what traffic is outrage. And, you know, politics is certainly

at the, you know, core of this ecosystem in which pushing buttons and, you know, saying, you know, sort of being oppositional rather than solution oriented is what, you know, kind of, you know, creates traction on the internet and gets people energized and all of that. And to kind of stand as a counterpoint to that and say, I'm not going to be complicit in that economy. And

I'm going to, you know, sort of stand on my own two feet and speak up for the values that, you know, I espouse. And instead of casting aspersions, talk about solutions is something that gets kind of denigrated in the algorithm doesn't get the mind share that it should. So it's the harder way to do that. It's just what did you compete with when you said, but

you did have the right to n? Maybe%. I don't know. And that's how I did it, you know, it's the kind of an idea that you, you know, get your idea. And I can't really Piadamilie, but put it anywhere. And I think when you actually talked to me so you know, you know, like and live like that, I hope that what so much you do. The

agricultural committee, I just when I got to Washington, I just never imagined I would be looking at food systems. Yeah. But as a precursor to that, I wanted to travel out and meet rural farmers because I really do believe there is a spiritual and a, and a material truth to King's ideal that he wrote about in the letters in the Birmingham jail. There were all caught

in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a common garment of destiny that injustice anywhere is indeed. I'll throw it to justice everywhere. And so rural towns in America are really, really suffering. And the farming and agriculture, as we know it, if we went back four generations, what's going on now? Our ancestors might even consider it a perversion of the ideals that really helped to build

this country. And so we went out to just meet with farmers, a lot of Republican farmers. And I remember going to this one farm where the guy, my, my Sherpa, the guy bringing me around told me, later, the guy didn't even want me in this house. He called them up and said, we're a Christian family. We can't have Cory Booker in our house, which is, which

is like, I, you know, I'm a Christian, not that that has anything to do with it. But so I get out of my car. And I kind of feel this like tension towards me with the guy. And he takes me down to his farm area shows me his cows and everything. And I'm horribly corny. My staff allows me one dad joke a day. So here goes.

I would say things to him like, sir, your cows are utterly amazing. You know, I know that I talked to every joke I could, but he didn't crack. And we eventually get into his table. And it's his neighbors there. And we start talking about their experience. When I noticed, when we got in that he had the deep to his, the family deep to the land, that

I think he must have gotten way back in the homestead act because it's, you know, like a century old. And everybody worked for farming worked for every generation, but he was now in danger of losing the farm because the economics have changed. So dramatically, you know, you have, instead of many companies selling you inputs, you had one major dominating company in Monsanto, now bear. Instead of

having five companies bidding for his cattle, you had one. In fact, one company dictating price, the, his neighbor was afraid to talk openly about it, because he was afraid of being cut off. And when they sort of explaining their fears and their worries and what this system did, it, it opened me up. And we started talking more. And when they realized I agreed with them. And

then I was going to be pushing legislation to stop this corporate consolidation and create more fair farm systems. This, that's when the tension broke. And we realized we had shared values. By the end, they were calling out as family, we're taking selfies. But so that's, I find that we have far more in common than we don't, but trying to break through to that is a is

a hard thing. And these outrage machines. And I don't mean that I'm not just pitching. Factually, and it's not just social media. But one of my friends is a guy named Van Jones, who had a show called Crossfire and went on that show with Newt Gingrich. And I think Brunei Brown's right, it's hard to hit up close, so pull people in and lo and behold, the

two of them working together, they realize they liked each other. And, and they agreed on things. Like they may have a lot of things they disagreed with, but they found that they had substance and areas of overlap. And they want to talk about it. So they did the last segment called ceasefire. And they got producers who really left them do it. But it got ended. And

so they were going to be more quickly, because ratings were going down. Right. And, and so these corporations who want to keep our eyes on the screen, the easiest sell, not always the best, but the easiest sell. And people like hope or others have, have found ways to tap into the human yearning for inspiration, for hope, for love. But the easier sell off than his fear

and hate and division and moral outrage. And so that's the system that's being supercharged by the devices we have, around the same arousal, we all watched the final episode of a mash. We all watched roots. There's these cultural anchors. But now they're far more fractured. And we can navigate into these worlds in which we are all listening to the same perspective, or all having our ideas

confirmed. And we're all creating common enemies, which is the other organization. And it's a, it's a unique human story, this contest and humanity between those who want to expand the conceptions of us versus them. And those who want to expand the conceptions of just us, justice. And, and it's, and that's the tension that we're in as a, as a, not just as a nation, but as

a planet, frankly, as well. It's a bit of a David and Goliath sort of situation too, because the people who are, who are like yourself, who are waging more against this notion of otherness and outrage are doing battle against algorithms and the siloization and fractured media that is putting people in those positions to kind of, you know, be immune to the kind of message that you're

putting out. And it's, it's disheartening and, and fascinating from a forensic sort of point of view, because I'm so, I grew up in Washington. And I grew up, yeah, I went to high school there in the, in the mid 1980s and sort of an inside the beltway family. And that was a period of time in which, you know, Democrats and Republicans may disagree on things, but

there was a certain level of comedy like comedy, you know, M-I-T-Y, like people got along. Right. It wasn't like a, you know, it wasn't like, I can't talk to you kind of situation. And, you know, it seems like that's no longer the case, although I don't live in Washington anymore, which is concerning from the perspective of trying to create change because change requires consensus. And it

requires a meeting of the minds. And it requires the ability to kind of show up and, and, you know, set your judgments aside and try to just, you know, roll up your sleeves. And get the work done. Right. So first of all, it's not as bad as we perceive. There's a lot of things that get done outside of the glare of what the news wants to

cover that is. But anybody who's been in Washington now, versus, and been there 25 years ago, we'll say, we'll confirm everything you said. It used to be far better. But again, we, I always say that human history is, and American history is in particular, like a constant testimony to the overcoming of seemingly dark, difficult situations that seem implacable or seem impossible to overcome. And I always

try to return it to me as an individual. I could curse the darkness, but, but am I really living up to my ideals to try to change a situation. And, and one drop in a pool can change the, the pH balance or the chemical substance. We are far more powerful agents of frequency change than we know. And so, you know, my team and I, like I

went to Washington and I said, okay, Bill Bradley, one of my great mentors, the Senator from New Jersey years before me, said to me, try to meet with every one of your Republican colleagues just to have dinner with them to get them to know them as human beings. And so I said on this really fun kind of Odyssey, I always say going out to dinner with

Ted Cruz was hard, not because, not because he's a Republican. I'm a Democrat, but because I'm a vegan and he's from Texas, you know, but we did go out to dinner and it was so shocking. People like literally, we stumbled by us when we were walking and every once in a while you would see people taking, I call them stealthy, like taking pictures of the two

of us just because they couldn't believe the two of us were having dinner. But it was something that resulted in showing me that it is worth the effort. Ted Cruz and I have passed legislation together. But one of my favorite moments was when I couldn't really get to a guy named Inhoff, he's just retired, but a Republican right wing guy who has said things on the

Senate floor that I have found offensive. And again, I've brought out and probably done things that he finds offensive. Again, I'm a vegan and he's a guy from a traditional family that I'm sure he sees that in some kind of way. But I go to a Bible study in his office. I hear he has in his hideaway, which are these cool offices closer to the Senate

floor. This more senior at the center, the nicer the hideaway. And so I go into this really nice office to join him for Bible study as a way of trying to make a connection. And as soon as I walk in, I have my implicit bias challenge. I have implicit biases. And my implicit bias was I never expected to see this right wing Republican with a picture

on his mantle, center placed of him and a little black girl in an affectionate embrace. And I call my, more senior senators, older senators, not by their first names, but by their title. So I'm like Mr. Chairman, who dad? And he looks at me and he goes, well, that's my family member. His family adopted this girl out of a very difficult circumstance. He told me this

story. I found it really wonderful and beautiful. I was born with Bible study. Well, months and months later, there's a big education bill going through the United States Senate. That Lamar Alexander, the senator from Tennessee, who's also since retired, was guarding the bill, not letting any amendments on the bill. And I was frustrated, because I had this amendment that I really believed in that would have

helped homeless and foster kids. And I see in half in the well of the Senate. And I remember this story that I wouldn't have known about if I didn't sit down with him. And I summoned that spirit of that little girl. I talked to him and made my pitch about it. And he knew the circumstance that this was going to be a clean bill, no amendments.

But he goes, let me think about this. I walk back to my side of the aisle, sit down in my back bench seat. And I suddenly see this guy charging into the Democratic section. It comes up to me and grunt at me. I'm in and starts to walk away. And I'm like, what do you mean? And he goes, cour out, co-sponsor your amendment. And next thing

you know, we get grassly on board and other big chairman and another person. Then we go to the manager of the bill and say, you know, Lamar, chairman Alexander, we have all these Republicans on. And he left the amendment on. And it's now the law of the land. And so there, there is, this is not a fruitless pursuit. We can never surrender to cynicism, no matter

how much the obstacles, no matter how difficult the forces of corporate consolidation or social media or politics infected with money, we still have an ability not only make change, but enough evidence from history that has worked the fight. And the challenge is, is we externalize the problem so much. And we don't see that every problem we want to criticize, that we may not be to blame

for it, but we have the power and can take the responsibility for doing something about it. And I was trying to reduce the interactions we have all day. So I was traveling last year, and I get interactions in the airports that are often very affirming, but sometimes I was telling people, please send me Mother's Day cards because I get called Mother all the time. Really? Oh

my God. We live in a very, so I was on senators of double. And I've had times where I thought I was going to have to throw down. I was being yelled at people coming at me. It's a much more tense environment, especially since over the last four years or so. But usually they're very, people are extraordinary kind in airports. And often we'll come up and

say, slimmer to you, because I use my social media platforms not to talk about politics always, but to talk about human virtue. And so I'm putting up my, my stuff on the overhead, fighting my seat. People have been really nice to me. And I sit down and a woman, with sitting next to her daughter, 16, 80 years old. And they were from Alabama. And they look

at me and they go, who are you? Are you a professional athlete, which I find very flattering. And I go, no, MMO, United States Senator. And then they want to know what most Americans want to know when they hear about politics is what tribe are you in? And so they asked me, are you a Democrat or a Republican? And then I go, ma'am, I'm a Democrat.

And she goes, well, I should have brought my Trump hat. And she looks very sauer and angry at me. And that's the moment. And we all have those moments. We have them around our family kitchen table sometimes for, for, for Thanksgiving. We have them in our workplace. You have to decide, are you going to dance to that tune or try to change the record? And I

look at her and I surprise her. I go, ma'am, Donald Trump. I go, oh my gosh, he signed two of the biggest bills I've written as a Senator, one that liberated thousands of people from prison called the first step act. And I have the other one that got invested in low income areas. And she was sort of shaken by that, that's how I came. And before

you knew it, we were talking about how the media separating us far more than we are. And by the end of this long flight, we're having fun. We know about each other in a much more personal way. We're firming each other's dignity. Was she ever vote for me? Probably never. But will she maybe have a crack of humanity or maybe like with in-huff, maybe a threat

has been taken, created that can be woven into a cloth that can be made us more whole as a, as a people. That's what we have. That's the challenge we all have every day. But what often happens instead is we fall into the trap of just compounding the frequency and the energy that we are. When I was running for president in Iowa, I was in a

town hall. And I'm running for a stage. And I'm about to jump up on the stage. And I see this big dude, I played tight effort, Stanford. This guy could have believed linebacker for Iowa State. And he goes, dude, I want you to punch Donald Trump in the face. And I look at him and I laugh and I go, dude, that's a felony. And I jump

up on the stage and I use him as an opportunity to talk to this larger crowd about love. And I say, I sort of make a joke about our interaction. And I say, this is how we lose. This is not how we create change. This is how we double down on divisiveness, division, and the culture of contempt. And if you think about us as a people

as the best, I don't think Martin Luther King, James Bevel, Dorothy Akaton, Fred Schottel's Worth, all of those people, in the early 1960s, 1963 spring. I don't think any of those people changed Bull Connor's mind. But they didn't hate him. They didn't beat him by bringing bigger dogs and bigger fire hoses. What they found a way to do, it was to change the frequency of this

country. Through their artistry of activism, they expanded the moral imagination of a nation. They changed the consciousness of a country and did what the real challenge is. King spoke of it, moral equity, said the problem today, what we have to repent for is not just the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people. So

if you and I are good people, what are we silent about? Where are we not living? Before I talk about how bad a Republican is or Trump is, where am I participating in systems that perpetuate injustice? Where am I falling short of my own values? If you work there, you will be surprised at how much that work creates more change than if you spend all your

time condemning a pick your person these days or my side of the out to Santis or Trump or what people might want to say about Biden or others. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp.com slash Rich Roll and get on your way to being your best self. I've been hosting a wellness theme podcast for over 10 years and

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Indeed.com slash Rich Roll Indeed.com slash Rich Roll terms and conditions apply cost for application pricing not available for everyone. Need to hire you need indeed. Yeah, amazing. I mean, that's such an incredible perspective and really powerfully here. I mean, in thinking about that, it's so clear that cynicism as a default is ultimately the lazy, easy choice. But incentives kind of drive us towards that. Right. Let's

be ironic. Let's be defeatist. Let's cast stones at the other side and talk about how bad they are without really doing a proper inventory of where we're at and where we could do better. And a lot of it, you know, in thinking about kind of your work and your story and where we're at. Where you come from, like, this is something you've been practicing for a

long time, like an early kind of inciting incident or inflection point for you was that hunger strike back in New Jersey in your early days as a city councilman, where you had to confront the mayor, who was your kind of antagonist at the time. And ultimately, you know, find a way to, you know, build consensus with this person who you struggled with and succeeding at that

seems to me to be something that kind of taught you like, this is possible. Like in the face of intractable problems, you know, hope is always the answer and doubling down on love and not letting, you know, despair and judgment and cynicism rule your decision making and how you kind of, you know, proceed forward. Look, this was a turning point in my life to be frank.

It was one of the lowest points of my life. And I think that this idea that despair is bad. Look, great despair is a necessary precondition to manifesting great hope. You know, you know, this sort of fear is a necessary precondition to courage. And so I went from 1997 graduating from law school to following the calling of my mom of all people. I was at the

age where I sort of thought my mom had nothing more original to say, but she asked me, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? Like I didn't, I told her I didn't know what I wanted to do after law school. She goes, well, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? And I never forget like being haunted by the question, like,

oh my God, if I knew I was going to be successful, what would I do with my life? And I sort of researching who are the people that most inspire me on the planet Earth? And maybe I can, if I knew I couldn't fail, maybe I'd try to be my own version of them. And I found a young guy then who's now far more known, but

back in the late 90s, he was sort of just doing noble work. His name is Brian Stevenson. Yeah, incredible. Incredible human being. Another one was Mary and right Edelman was on my list. Another guy named Jeffrey Canada. I don't know if you know him. He started something called the Harlem Children's Zone, wrote a book called Fist Stick Knife Gun, a little thin book that's really amazing.

But his, I went out and met with him, followed him around. And I finally concluded, if I couldn't fail, I would start this organization in New Jersey. And I came from a, you know, very affluent somber relative to where I would move from parents who knew a very different life than I did. My father's born poor in the side. He would tell me, don't tell people

I was poor. Just tell him I was poor. Peel because I couldn't afford to get the two letters. And just imagine that culture shock of now he's raising his kids in this incredibly affluent area as a first black family that moved into the town, where they literally had to get a white couple of poses then to buy the house in 69. And my dad, sort of,

my mom sort of challenging us. What are you going to do to prove worthy of this privilege? So my mom challenges me. What are you going to do if you couldn't fail to address your calling to make the world a better place because I had that vague desire. So I moved to Newark, like Jeffrey on the Canada did find a area that people told me not

to move into low income neighborhood. I live there now where people don't mistake wealth with worth. And there's a great definition of faith. I love that when you come to the end of all the light you know. And you're about to step into the darkness. You have the courage to take that step. That faith is only one of two things is gonna happen either you're a

fine solid ground underneath you or the universe will send you people who teach you out of fly. And so what you're I move into this neighborhood that I found challenging I was living across street from projects that I would soon move into next to an abandoned building that was used for people using drugs. It was a virulent drug trade going on. But these incredible people sort

of surrounded me. Saw that I had this desire. Recognize things to me. I didn't see myself. And before you knew it, I'm now representing these tenant associations. Newark gets its name. Brick City could have used to just be full of brick buildings that were like to breathe bring projects. And this was a central ward where there was just a lot of low income housing and a

lot of public housing. And so I was like, I'm just 10th leaders. He's incredibly noble wise people who had earned the love and respect of their their buildings adopted me and we started doing just stuff I'm so proud of taking on slum lords. One of them ended up getting convicted in federal court. I was proud of my life. I thought I'd done it. I'm now doing

what I want to do. And then they basically cornered me once and said, city halls corrupt. We're gonna run a campaign. I'm like, I'm happy to help you. Now you don't understand. You're gonna be the candidate. Right. You're out of law school running for office in a city where incumbent politicians didn't lose against a guy 40 years older than me. If I would win this race,

I would become the youngest person ever elected. And these incredible people wrapped me in their legitimacy would walk me up and down buildings. And say, you may not know him, but you know me. This is the person we're gonna support. My opponent got the same amount of votes he always got. We brought out a whole new electorate. One of race by a 24 vote like a

few dozen votes. And then it begins the worst year of my life where I get into city hall. The mayor's joking with people. We're gonna drive this kid back to the suburbs. I get out voted eight to one. I went from feeling like I was making a difference in the world. To just this intractable world of politics. I became very angry that politics is not a

way to make change. The mayor was having fun with me. You would put tickets on my car everywhere I parked. You know, I'm like, you know, I parked with other city council people in front of the whole. My driver's license was being suspended. By the municipal court, this was the machine. And I'm on my day that I called my quitting day. I was now making plans

to convince the tent leaders that this was folly. I should go back to being your full-time lawyer. And on that day, I get a call from this incredible woman named Lane's soul, who was the tenant president of these buildings in the northern part of the ward I represented right underneath an underpass called 280, which was a perfect place to deal narcotics drugs. Because people could get

all the way to the city. They would go off the highway, go in like a McDonald's drive through. And I'm not exaggerating. People would line up in their cars, buy whatever drugs they want. Get back on the highway into the sort of Afmoor affluent suburbs. And the security company just thought they newly hired was gonna just like put a gate up and stop. The drug dealers

ripped the gate off lit the guard booth on fire. Security company quit. And now on my quitting day, Ms. Elaine's soul calls me up and says you need to do something about this. And I'm like, what are you talking about? I can't do anything. Come on, we need help. Maybe you can get the police out. I'm like, I can't get the police to stop ticketing my

car for crying out loud. And we start arguing. This woman who walked me through her buildings, an election I won by a few dozen votes, is now trying to tell me that she needs help. And I'm trying to tell her how impotent I am. We start raising our voice at each other. And then she says the most hurtful thing in my life that I think somebody

had said to me at that point. She goes, well, if you can't help us, why did we elect you in the first place? And I slammed the phone down, just respecting my elder, stormed back to where I was living. And all I want to do is get into my apartment in the projects and just hang out with my two best friends, Ben and Jerry, because I

want to drown my sorrows in my addiction food. And the worst thing that I thought could happen to me is that my tenant president, this woman who is a whole chapter in my book, one of the wisest souls I've ever met, I'm walking home. And I grunt to her hello and try to walk past her. And she's just like, boy, don't you walk past me. And

I stop. And I turn around with fury, because she's the source of my problem. She forced me to run for this office. I'm a politician. Politicians don't do anything. I was a community activist, a leader. And she goes, what's she doesn't even, she reads my energy. And what she did first was perfect. She just throws out her arm. And she goes, will you come give Ms.

Jones a hug? And I was like, oh, and I storm over. To her, give her the most instantier hug in the world. And as I let go of her, she grabs me by the arm, she goes, just tell me what's wrong. And I go, you want to know what's wrong? And I vented on her of a year of my life of getting nothing done outvoted eight

to one. This was a mistake that you forced me into. I'm sorry, but you were wrong. And then I start complaining about this terrible violent incident and how Missoule called me for help. And I don't know what to do. And I said it. And you know how this can be when you're in this loop. I said like an incantation. Like a mantra. I don't know what

to do. I don't know what to do. Professing my impotence. And then this woman looks at me like God just talked to her. She almost gasps. And she's like, I know what, I know what you should do. And I'm like excited. Maybe she does. I stopped my pity party. And I go, what should I do? And then she looked at me like with this wise look,

yep, Corey, I know what she should do. But I'm like, don't play with me, Ms. Jones. What do I do? And she leans in as if she's about to tell me words from angels, wisdom from Solomon. And she goes, you should do. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, something. And I was like, I'm like, something that's it. And she goes, yeah, do something. And I storm away

from her, get back to my buildings. Damn elevators don't work. Hike up 16 flights of stairs. Sit on my couch, angry at the world, feeling sorry for myself, having a life that I did not want. And I remember my grandmother's Bible sitting there. And I opened this thing up. And there's a passage that says, if you have faith the size of the mustard seed, you can

move mountains. I've seen it a lot. But I never really noticed this. This is a passage underneath. It says, but sometimes you need to fast and pray. And then I did the thing that that Ms. Jones inspired and changed my life, which I said, I got nothing to lose. I got nothing to lose. And so I go out to garden spires, long story shorter. And I,

I brought a tent with me. And we constructed this tent between the two projects in the drug dealers territory, where the melee had gone on before. Ms. Sewell comes out and sees me. And I go over ready to sort of with shame, apologize to her. And she doesn't let me do it. She runs to me. Like I'm the prodigal son hugs me because she didn't want

me to solve her problems. She just wanted me to show up and care. And there was tears. I'm not crying. She was crying. I'm lying. I was crying. But we talked. And I told her what my plan was. And then I did what politicians have to do. We had to learn how to do this. I called a press conference. And I said, this is the United

States of America, how could people live in fear? Where you don't let your kids play in front of where you live or you don't feel comfortable going to the corner store. And I talked about the incident the night before. And I just said, I've decided not to leave this tent. I'm going to stay there. And I'm not going to eat. I'm going to go on hunger

strike. And I'm going to pray. And I want anybody who wants to pray with me to just pray that we together can find a solution. And the first night was scary. There's four or five of us who volunteered to sleep under the tent together. Mrs. Suule joined us for the first prayer. But I woke up the next morning and the marital started happening. The first was

like these group of guys. I don't remember the eight or so of them come out to me early in the morning. And they say, are you Corey Booker? And I said, yeah. And they go, one of them's like, I grew up in this neighborhood. I'm not letting you be out here alone. We're correctional officers. And they took a position around the tent within two or three

days, hundreds and hundreds of people were coming, offering help. Hospitals came out to do health screenings. One group, we're fitting kids with eye classes who couldn't see black moors, but never been diagnosed. Computers were donated. People built a computer lab for folks to print resumes or kids to use job fairs. You name it. By the 10th day of this hunger strike, thousands of people had come

out. It was an incredible celebration of community under an underpass where people used to ignore. And then the mayor finally came out after being beat up in the newspaper. He comes up to me. With his fire department, police department, inspectors. He brought everybody was rolling deep. And the two of us meet in this circle of humanity hundreds of people. And I look at him and I

suddenly feel the same impulse that Missoule had. And this is my nemesis, but I ran to him and I hugged him. And I'll never forget the moment where I'm holding him tight. This newspaper took a picture of that. That became the big picture in the state's newspaper. But the moment that was most meaningful to me in this hug was, I smelled him. I breathed deep. And

he smelled like an older black guy from my family. And he seemed to be so caught off guard by the hug that he puts away his prepared remarks. And then prophesizes. And we would go on to have a really, really bare knuckle fight for the mayorality a couple of years later. But he prophesized he goes, one day this young man will be the mayor of the

city. We'll lead this city. And there was celebration like I will never forget afterwards. But you don't know this, but this is the 25th anniversary. Of this month, this day, 25 years ago, I was a 20-something-year-old kid knocking one doors with tenet leaders running for the office that would start my political career. And this year, January, I decided to do see if I could break a

10-day fast. So this January, I fasted for 10 days in honor of this improbable journey. I didn't plan on being an elected leader. And every day I would go out and walk the war that I walked. 25 years before to earn the trust of a community that put their faith in me had really no reason to. But thanks to these leaders that loved me or believed

in me. And on the 10th day, I decided to walk from the southern part of the word I represented back to garden spires. I got on the pavement. There's a park that we built, a little pocket park there that we built when I was mayor, daycare center and preschool, read it, hugged a lot of folks. But I needed to sustain in the corner. I was alone

because I wanted to reflect on that moment where former Stanford football player used to be a bench, you know, 350, 360 squat, 600 pounds. But the strongest moment of my life up to that point was when we had the final prayer, a few hundred people. And when I joined hands with these folks, I felt strength like I never did before. And then this overpass, I saw

America. Because before that is a black community. But now this circle is black folks, white folks, Latino, Asian, Indian, believers and nonbelievers, Republican, Democrat, independent, I'm sure priests, rabbis, e-moms, ministers. We were all holding hands for a final prayer. And the praying is beautiful. Arabic and Hebrew. And I've studied faiths. I love God's, I love manifestations of the divine, people, how people understand it. Muslim word,

that means the oneness of humanity that I love. This Hebrew saying, so, this, the key bet, the fit of the whole home. Me, my house, the house of prayer for all nations. But the idea that I had at that moment, that means so much 25 years later was these three words from a dead language that are the hallmark of a country that we now probably think

are hackneyed or what have you. But I get to see these three words every day when I go to work in the United States Senate 25 years later. And that's E plur basuno. I think that the call of humanity and definitely the call of this country is to put more indivisible into a one nation under God. And that moment of my life, where we took a

place that was such, there was such a poverty of empathy, where there was so much power for us to make change. But somehow you have suburb versus city. Sometimes you have highways cutting through neighbor. All these things that separate us that make us think we're weak or unable to solve the biggest problems in the world. When you find creative ways to stitch people together and let

them recognize their oneness, that's when power is unleashed. And it ultimately became the theme of my time as mayor, where I had ugly comments made by people about the city of Newark that we were able to then get to come to the city and be a part of its resurgence. You had the Newarkers that never grave up on their community, combining with everybody from the Manhattan

Institute, a right wing tank tank to businesses, nonprofits, innovators, small businesses, all of us coming together to show America that we could take a city that you think is crime and corruption and violence, but it's ultimately a place where America can thrive. And I always tell people, the American dream isn't real. Everywhere, it's not real anywhere. And I think that was that was that moment from

that pavement to the moment of my last hours as mayor of the city of Newark. It was a continuous theme of the power of community. What an incredibly potent and powerful story. I mean, it's so beautiful. I mean, there's so many kind of threads to pull to, you know, extrapolate meeting out of that. But for me, like it's so moving to hear you tell that story.

And the idea that it all tracks back to your frustration and somebody saying, do something. And you trying to identify like anything that you could do that is within your power without knowing where that would lead. And then to see kind of the ripple effect of just taking a simple, kind of action and the lesson being that we are all people of agency with more power

than we allow ourselves to believe. And when we recognize this and take responsibility for that, and then channel it into some kind of civic action, you know, whatever were capable of doing or using our voice for good, we can't anticipate the chain reaction that that causes. And, you know, to me, you stand to somebody, you're an exemplar of that. Like, you know, I mean, I think

that's the way I'm going to do that. Like, yes, you have this huge platform, but you're always talking about how, you know, we all have our platforms. And you're always encouraging people to find ways to use our voices to speak up. And, you know, to kind of voice the world that we would like to see, you know, manifest and to do those small things because the

small things end up becoming the big things. Yeah. But I don't want to candy coat this. I mean, the world is full of wretchedness and pain. And you and I are both examples of people that have a lot of shame and mistake and hurt when I was running for president, I the last days of my campaign, we knew we were, it was coming to a close,

but I went to the New York Times editorial board and interview anyway. And this is sort of in many ways, my backyard paper, we're right across the river. And it was the end of the interview. And they said, we have speed questions. We've been asking every candidate and they thought they were going to do a speed round. But I still remember they asked me, what's something

you really regret? And the first thing I thought of was, again, I have a lot of things that if I could go back in life, I'd do differently. I don't regret them in the sense that I've learned from them. But there are things that you can't undo that you've done or mistakes that you've made that break you. And I tell people all the time, I, New

York broke me like literally to the point where you have those kind of gut wrenching hurt. And for me, it was this, I told the New York Times, I said, look, I was, I, so I would go on from that was 99,000 the story. I just told you, I would go on and battle the mayor in this election in 2002, which I would lose the Oscar

nominee documentary about it. I was joke because it lost in the Oscars to March of the Dagnamp Penguins for an hour out. But then I had four years to wait until the next time I ran. I went right back to work doing sort of nonprofit work in New York. But during that period, I'm living in the high-rise projects. It was just tough years, tough buildings to

live in. But the community misjointed me. The Jones was our 10th leader. It would rally around me in such profound ways. But this building I lived in had this, even those heat and hot water were regular and all these things. But there are so many good people. And one of the groups of good people I love are these kids living in those buildings, you know, eight

years. I watched these kids grow up from grade school and high school. And one night I come home and I smell marijuana. Now inner city black kids do not have the same margins to experiment with drugs that Stanford students do. I mean, the facts are true. There's no difference between blacks and whites for using marijuana or you name the drug. But black kids are like four

times more likely to be arrested for it. And if I had arrest, my parents are lawyers and all these kind of things. There would be station house adjustments. Low income black kids don't have that. So I knew there was crisis. And so I saw some tagging in there that concern me. So I was like, fellas, I come home every night. We joke before I go upstairs.

We used to have these great powwows in the lobby. But I said, let's go out. Let's do something. And they're like, what do you guys want to do? Let's go to dinner and they say, let's go to the movies. And I said, whatever made the mistake of letting you choose a movie. Do not go see saw to or three or four. And it was this amazing

thing. We went out. I brought them to the diner, brought other friends together. And again, like my mom, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? I asked some questions about their dreams, aspirations. And they were incredible dreams. And to me, I thought very achievable. In fact, I remember one of these kids, Hassan Washington, who was my dad. The similarities between my dad and

this incredibly unmanored eerie, they both were born to single moms, both raised by their grandmothers, both born below the poverty line, both had wicked senses of humor, evidences of genius, charismatic leaders. And I remember his to me was, I think he said something like I want to be on an automotive repair place. And every kid that talked to me, I know somebody that does that. I'm

going to hook you guys up with mentors and try to help you out. But it was right on the eve of round two with Sharp James. I'm running for mayor. And so I don't follow through on these things with these kids. In the back of my mind, I said, after this election, six, seven months later, I was just so busy chasing after my brass ring, my

dream to leave this city. And I would come home at night. And these kids were the most grace-filled kid. They would joke with me. They would cheer me on. They would hold up signs. They would tell me they're going to vote for me. They were too young. But every night, they would lift me up. I get elected. I win this time. Newark has, I won in

a summer where there was rising murder rates. The city was just having a lot of challenges. And I was intent on being everywhere. And so I was working these around the clock. If there was a murder on a sidewalk, I would show up to the shooting, give street-level sermons about we're going to be better than this, talk about what we can do together, that we would

drive this murder rate down, which we did. But a month into my office, time I get elected, there's a shooting on court street in Newark. I run to the shooting. I get there. There's a body covered. There is another one loaded in an ambulance. And it's right in front of a senior citizen building. A lot of people outside. And I do that. I barely acknowledge the

death on the sidewalk, but I minister to the living. And that day goes on. And early days in the new office, I get home that night to try to steal a few minutes of sleep, pull out my blackberry, cycling through the reports that I wanted to look at. And there's the crime reports. And I see the homicide. And then I see the name on the homicide

report, the dead body. And it was Hassan Washington. And that is something that's broken to me that will never fix. And I remember the, just the feeling you stare at something long enough and you hope and you pray that you can make it change just by looking at it. And everything collapsed on me. And I remember this gut, because my dad would joke with me as

a kid about his life, and how you owe debts that you can't pay back that you've got to pay forward. And so here, the universe put my father, just as smart as my dad, just as charismatic as my father, everything that my dad was. Better than me in so many ways, this young man, the universe put it in front of me. My dad would say that

he was saved by his community. But for people that went out of their way. And here he was put on my foot with steps. And I didn't, I didn't do all that I could seeing the signs. And his funeral, I describe it in a way that carcans back to dark chapters. Because for me, it was in Perry's funeral home and the basement of that funeral home.

Narrow steps going down. You feel like you're descending in the whole of a ship. And there is my community chained together, wailing and moaning and swaying back and forth, looking at what is an American weekly, if not daily event, which is another black boy in a box. And I am choking in the space. And people are coming over to me now the father of the city.

And I can't, I can't help them because I'm lost in shame. I'm lost in hurt. And I'm embarrassed to tell you, I was so suffocating, I ran out of there. Told my security detail. We're leaving. Get into my brand new city SUV back to my new office, this palatial mayor's office. Slam the door shut, sit on the couch. And for my first time as mayor, not

the last, just weep into my hands. And just pray to God that I could somehow make up for this. As we're having this, because this world has made them feel like they're going to feel lesser than because of who they are. There are people hurting at a kitchen table so they don't know how the economics are going to work. There is real pain and hurt. And

the answer isn't to buck up and be positive. The answer is to confront it. And to somehow, if you're fortunate enough, like I am, or you are, or we all are at some point, to find a way to connect and let people know that you're not alone, that we're all broken. We all effed up multiple times. We're broken as we are. Ultimately, those cracks and those

jagged edges we all have, perhaps make it better to fit together with other people who are just as broken and fractured to create a stronger hole and a better bond that gives hope. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I was listening to your conversation with Jane Goodall who wrote the book. You know, she wrote a book about hope, right? You guys had a frank conversation about

the nature of hope and, you know, the idea that real hope is what you do in the face of being truly tested, right? And this idea that hope is the conviction that you said something like hope is the conviction that despair doesn't get the last word. Right. So it's like, it ain't easy. It's fucking hard. And, you know, the vulnerability with which you just shared that

story and the pain, you know, the kind of the spiritual psychic pain that that must have caused you knowing that it wouldn't have been that hard for you to extend a hand and perhaps help that kid and maybe divert that situation from happening is something that you'll take to your grave. Right. And the flip side of this is this delusion that something doesn't matter. You know,

everything matters. Like you may say a kind word to somebody. Like my brother on Thursday, I thought he had another stroke and my brother's my hero. He's like the better booker by far. And so I'm in the Senate. My staff is calling me trying to desperately get to me. And I see this like emergency. I'm thinking like, okay, I forgot to vote on the floor or

something like that. And no, they're trying to get to me because my sister was calling me that my brother had a stroke. And so I find the news. And now I'm in fear. Like I don't know what I'll do with my I should make my brother sign a contract that I get to die before him. So I'm now rushing, dropping everything. Veronica takes me to the

train. She's like, knows how desperate I am to get from Washington DC to New Jersey. The train gets canceled. My incredible team member calls me up and says, I'm sorry, there's one flight, one seat, it's first class. It's going to cost you, you know, ex thousands of dollars. I'm like, put it on my credit card. I need to get to New Jersey. So this moment from

my time, getting to the airport, to getting to my brother's bedside. I'm panicked. I'm scared. I'm imagining all of the worst case scenarios and trying to fight them back. But nobody knows that as I'm walking through airports where everybody's recognizing me. And I will never forget this moment where we land. And it's, it's, I have to get out on the tarmac. Usually you go through the,

and I come down the tarmac and there's a people mover that's going to drive me there. And I get on the people mover. And I sit down and people are recognizing me. But I've got all the swirl in my head. And then the men and women that work on the tarmac see me inside. And they come in. And almost as if some divine angel was saying

this, they didn't say hi, man. They come over in a line, like three or four of them to hug me. And every hug, I leaned into in a way that I never had before because God, that's what I needed right then. Those people had no idea. They thought whatever they thought, they were holding me together. To get to my brother's bedside. And we don't know. We

pass people every day. And we don't know the power of one generous act of decency that's helping someone hold it together. When they're facing whatever personal crisis they are. And just to not worry everybody. He ended up not having a stroke. It was a seizure of hiding the ball. My brother is going to be okay. He had some seizures, which are as I've learned or not,

like a stroke. It's no damage. He's going to recover. But we'd forget the power we have every single day to be used by the universe in some way that we will never even understand the results of. And the best story of my life, which I think about all the time, is this white guy on a couch in March, almost of the day that we're recording this

in 1965. March 7th. Watching TV, starting a law firm, busy on the way. He is hell watching a movie called Judgment at Nuremberg. They cut away from the movie. And he sees a bridge in Alabama called the Edmund Pettis Bridge. And he watches these people get beaten. These nonviolent marchers, led by John Lewis, beaten with Billy Clubs, tear gas, horses charging in. And he saw Paul

by what he's seeing that he says I got to go to Alabama and then laughs at himself. He can't afford a plane ticket, not to mention Colossus Business. And so he flops down. And then thanks for himself. Well, I'm not going to allow my inability to do everything to undermine my determination to do something. And so he says to his calculation, he can do one hour

a week of pro bono work. You and I know the legal profession. It doesn't seem like that much. One hour more of pro bono work. And so he calls around and he finds his woman named Lee Porter's young woman. Now she's 94 years old back then. She was ahead of the Fair Housing Council in New Jersey, in order to New Jersey. Now at 94 years old,

she's ahead of the Fair Housing Council in New Jersey. And he's like, you need some legal help. And she's like, how will you thank you Jesus I do? They go on this guy to develop these sting operations where black families go look at homes. And if they're turned away, they send a white couple of volunteering. Long story short, black family comes in, turned away from home.

They get back to the Fair Housing Council. They send the white couple out. It's still for sale. White couple of bids on the house. The bid is accepted. Papers are on the day of the closing. The white couple that's in show up. The black man does volunteer lawyer walk into the house confronted by the real estate agent. They think they're going to be one day. They

didn't because the real estate agent punches the lawyer in the face, sticks a dog on the black man. And long story short, eventually the family moves in because owners of the home decide to sell directly to them. And then 43 years later, the youngest kid from that family becomes America's fourth ever properly elected black person in the United States Senate me. I got a chance to

talk to that lawyer, unfortunately right before he died. And with great emotion, thank him. I'm just sitting on the couch for thinking to himself, I can do an hour of pro bono work. None of us understand what our actions are doing in the immediate context of history. But all of us are part of this lattice where you can't move without affecting the strings of that elegant

lattice that could ultimately move over space and time to affect outcomes that you're not realizing. Nothing is in vain. Nothing you do is you useless or unaffecting. And one of the quotes I love all the time is the most common way people give up their power is not realizing they have it in the first place. And one small act like a pebble in a pond sends

out ripples beyond your imagination. Yeah, that's. Again, more profundity. I mean, there's a profound spirituality in that. And there's something very just empowering about being reminded of that truth, you know, that we all matter. And that again, the little things. The big things and to not dismiss ourselves and to really invest in our own agency. Yeah. And I, as I said, my social media we try

to post things. Not about Paul. You wouldn't expect from a politician. So the last year, you're the motivational guru. We didn't know we needed. It's crazy. You got your on this run streak. And then you're you're like, Oh, it's like you that timeless wisdom. I love that. I'm these videos every single day. But the guy I the guy I had on that I met at an

event, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's this. Incredible astrophysicist. And I've seen him a few times. I like to tease him because I'm a, you know, I, again, I believe that there's magic in the universe. But I love that there's this incredible intersection between science and spirituality that just excites me. You know, quantum physics is fascinating to me. And but anyway, I love to tease him because he's

I think an avowed. I know you threw a zinger at him about spirituality. I was like, Oh, I wonder what he's going to say because I, you know, I know how he kind of handles that. Yes, terrain. But I had seen him before that. And before I turned on my camera, I put him on the spot. It's science, right? We go at night. We stand up

and we look at the stars. And I asked him, like, how far are those stars away? I said, hundreds of billions of light years. And he goes, no, Cory millions of light here. I said, I'm like, okay. And I said, it's true, though, that some of those stars that we see is that are there or actually dead and gone long time ago. But because it takes

the light and energy from those stars, millions of years to travel to us, we see them as if they're still there. And he's confirms this. And I go, well, that's very spiritual. I am light and energy. And I'll be dead and gone. Just like Arthur Lessman is dead and gone, just like Frederick Douglass is dead and gone. Ella Baker's dead and, you know, Harriet, but the

energy they gave all there's still stars. It still guide us like North stars today. That's very spiritual. We all are infinity. Our bodies may die, but the energy we put out into the world can never, ever stop. And so that's what I like to think about to ground myself, whether you're atheist scientists, the energy I choose today, into put into this world is energy that I

hope my great grandchildren or someone else's great, we'll get a chance to bathe in. And so the one choice I have every day is my attitude. It's my energy. You know, the work of Victor Frankl, who I used to know by heart, but paraphrase him, he said, we were in the concentration camps. Remember, those people who shared their only piece of bread, even though they themselves

were starving, who comforted others, even though they were suffering the same fate. It's a great test of the greatest of all human freedoms to choose your attitude, or I would say energy in any given set of circumstances. And so I lean on those people in my world who nurture and source even when I'm at my wits end, or broken, that find a way still to help

me not let despair have the last word to choose hope. And again, I keep bringing it back, but my, you know, Newark, I can never repay my community for all that they've given me. It's such a special place. I just love places that other people often demean or degrade. There is a nobility in my city of the people that actually live there and love it and

fight for it. And I write about this moment in my book, you know, we have a real problem in America with just needless violence, gun violence. More people have died in my lifetime, you know, in my early 50s of gun violence, and have died in all the wars America has been in combined. And whatever side you are of the debate, the reality is we all should

have a moral obligation to stop this level of carnage. And so again, living in an African-American community where there are so many generational contributing facts, factors to the problems of violence, you tend to see it unfortunately too much. And a lot of the kids that were with Hassan Washington are dead now, Hassan was not the only person that's murdered. But I'll never forget in that time

between losing the morality, winning the morality, and it's just walking in my neighborhood. And a kid was shot trying to revive them, trying to hold them together, traumatic the glorification we do of violence. It is ugly. It has grew when somebody has gunshot wounds. And I have no training. But I'm trying to clear foamy blood from the kid's mouth holding him together. And it was another

point on my journey where I was ready to be done. And where I felt such anger towards this country, where we swear oaths, we say liberty and justice for all. But I couldn't understand how we have created such a routine. It's normalized this level of violence in carnage seen in no other place on the planet unless it's in a war. We in America, stop paying attention

to gun violence. And I remember that night trying to scrub this kid's blood off my hands and just feeling such vicious anger about this situation, broken again, waking up the next morning. And there is this misjones. And I'll never forget when she sees me and holds me. And she just says over and over again to me as I cry, stay faithful, stay faithful, stay faithful. And

they just words, right? But I'm not going to say that I'm not going to be a man. And it wasn't about religion, but here was this rock, a woman whose own son was murdered in the building in which I lived, who has seen everything that I've seen, who's hurt. This wasn't my child. This was a kid I knew or kid I encountered. No matter what you're

going through. And I guess this is the point I'm trying to drive home here. The power that you always have over and over again is to choose how you are going to respond. What are you going to say to this world? Are you going to double down on the darkness or the negative frequencies? Or are you going to be like the heroes we elevate in this

country? My greatest heroes, someone that despite the richness, the pain, the hurt that will choose faithfulness or hopefulness, or ultimately the highest frequency of all love. Yeah. And as I understand it, that woman, she stayed in the apartment building, right? And you asked her like, why are you still here? Like, well, I'm in charge of Homeland Security. She could have left, but she's exercising her, you

know, she's taking responsibility for this situation. And that's a really incredibly indelible and powerful example of exactly what you're talking about. Right. And you and I have this privilege that we get thin. I love this song, Everyday People by Sline the Family Stone. There's a real reality I get to see is everyday heroes. That there are Americans every day, that like Miss Jones, who do things

that are beyond heroic. And they should be our anchors. And when I was mayor, I would, you know, there was a guy that would stop and see the graffiti on one of our main arteries and Newark regular Joe, but he started buying paint and would just stop and paint a little bit the attendance. He paint for ten minutes and transform this place into an ugly site

to being someplace where people didn't have to look at that filth. I'd see a guy who used to stimulus check back in the days that I think it was Bush to buy a lawnmower and bags and rakes and took an area that drug dealers were using to sell in his neighborhood, never confronted them, never vilified them, but would walk into their territory gently and start mowing

the lawn and raking the leaves made it look like the White House lawn. And eventually the drug dealers left on their own accord and he became a hero in this community. You know, I could go through a thousand of these stories. I had a terrible situation where a woman had a hostage situation. Her boyfriend jumps out of the window, gets wounded, but now she's in there

with a gun and a child. And I'm talking to my police director about how to get her out and everybody's safe, the child's safe. And you hear these gunshots go off and through the phone, I hear them. And I hear again, police officers screaming, go, go, go. They're running into a building with no situational awareness. And they get up to the top of the stairs and

unfortunately the woman has committed suicide, shot the baby through a pillow. And these men and women try to render aid to the child. They just risk their own life. Go to home, whatever that home situation has come back to work the next day to try to help people. So I had this rare perch where I was often being the point to the guy is married to

the city, but I presided over a city with thousands and thousands of stories of people in the toughest of circumstances. They were willing to put themselves on the line to love the high neighbor. And so whenever I get down or whenever I'm facing fear or hurt or frustrated because I can't get this bill passed, that seems to make a lot of sense or get my colleagues,

even in my own party, to sign on the bill that stopped the overuse of antibiotics in our system. I just simply need to reset to people in tougher, harsher circumstances. That somehow still seem to manifest the highest of human virtue. And that's like a practice. You'll bring yourself back to that memory or root yourself in that kind of experience to remind yourself of why you're doing

it. I love to use the word practice because we all need to take on. I would call it a spiritual practice. All of us have to do things that can nurture and nourish us in order to be the best we can at manifesting this frequency. My great chief of staff, Veronica, this extraordinary woman is on the plane with me reading from a spiritual book about how

do you protect your frequency? How do you protect your energy? Because you've got to have practices. And I know I know I am a much better. My uncle says sleep is a weapon. And whether you want to use that language or not, he's right. When I'm sleeping, I'm far more sharp and far more effective. I know that I need exercise. When I'm off the wagon and

bearing my sorrows in vegan ice cream, I'm not at my best as I feel when I get up in the morning and I meditate and I pray and I journal and I read and I run and get that surge of endorphins and feel like I could take on the world. I do think, and this is why I love listening to you, doing things that feed your

soul and surrounding yourself with people that challenge you to be better and to be better at yourself and not to take yourself too seriously and ground you. Those are the kind of practices that we all should be seeking. And the pandemic did something for me. I realized that since we were all separate, I had to be more active in cultivating community, intentionally creating community. And I

know that when you surround yourself with the kind of people that make you better, you're better off. So I, one of my close friends, Abe, I, we, and I agreed to start studying Torah together. I'm this Christian guy, but we said, he's one of the people I admire most in the world. And let's call in a rabbi and do some virtue studying. My cousins who I

grew up with that were like brothers and sisters, let's create a well-being book circle. And we created that. The club has grown this eight of us now that we meet weekly. And those are the kind of things that are part of the practice of life. And to slow down enough to say, what are the ingredients I need to face a difficult world? Because shock waves are

going to come. Tragedy is going to come. You're going to wake up in the morning. What are the things that you need? They're going to keep you grounded, help you build moral muscle and spiritual resilience. And we should think about those things. And if we write those ingredients down, how do you incorporate them into your daily routine? Yeah. I mean, you're a caretaker for others. You're

living a life of service, but your ability to serve to your maximum capabilities is toggle to your ability to exercise self-care. Right? Like you can't, if you're not taking care of yourself, you're not going to be able to be the servant that you aspire to be. Right. And it's hard. And I listened to you and you're some funny saying's like you wouldn't tell alcohol, you know,

just do it moderation. And I'm learning my lines. And I'm learning when I fall off the wagon and go through long periods where I'm not doing something. But this has been a great few years to try new things. Like, you know, trying to run every day. You're on the run streak still. I am on those. So thanks to somebody shout out to hella. Yeah. Who I

met through who I met through you. You have influenced my life more than you know. Trust me. When you like credited him, tell it and I were texting. Did you see Corey? Yeah. Like, are you guys going running it? No, we haven't. You haven't. But I ran through COVID. I ran with I was in India and had this horrible thing happen to my stomach with that

we should not describe. But I ran then I ran last night was one of my toughest ones because early morning, you know, three and a half hours of sleep and at night. Going out and running in my staff loves to pick a hotel that's like on hills. So when I finished the full year, talk about doing small incremental things that build momentum. And then like, I'm

going to do a hundred pushups a day, which, you know, back in my athletic days, it would have been hard. But the first day I was doing it, it's like three sets of three. And then by, you know, I was did something that my chief of staff again. She's amazing. But we joke with each other all the time. I did something. I was just down at

the border, looking at the crisis there. And I'm just feeling so jacked that I challenge a Marine to a push up contest because it's, you know, these incremental things that really give you momentum. Creating streaks. Creating habits. It's so empowering. And again, I credit you with a lot of this inspiration. Well, that's amazing to hear. Thank you. Do you have anxious thoughts? I mean, who doesn't,

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week. So to learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on meal planner on the top menu on my website. I want to shift gears a little bit. You mentioned earlier how you're sort of an unlikely candidate to be this sort of advocate for food policy reform. This is what you thought you would be getting into. But this has become really central to

your platform and your activism, your advocacy. And it's interesting because on its face, you think, well, food, food, food, this doesn't seem to be in the bull's eye of what Cory would be. It's a little bit of a concern about, but when you kind of telescope out, you realize, like, food is everything. It encapsulates all the issues that you care about most. So talk a little

bit about how you got interested in food systems and food policy and kind of, you know, where we're at right now in terms of what this looks like. Yeah. So I have an amazing team member named Adam Zipkin who's been with me for my whole, pretty much my whole career who was in Washington and basically said to me, we need to be on the agriculture committee.

And I'm going to laugh at him. And I don't know what that quote is. I first say laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then they hate you. Whatever. I think I would do all the state. At one point. Yes. Yes. And, but eventually I end up on the ag committee because he argued and rightfully so that every issue I care about intersects with our food

system. In fact, everything intersects with our food system. And he and I both sort of became vegetarians and then vegans around the same evolution, which gets you reading about food. And I understood I went from a junk food vegan to trying to be a more plant-based person, but he gives you windows into your food system. So in short, we are a country in a health crisis

that we're not speaking about. We are the wealthiest country in the world. But we have some of the highest rates of diet-related diseases that are mushrooming and cost. And just a handful of years or like five are spending on diabetes. That's going up 25% half our population. That was diabetic or pre-diabetic. But it's not just diabetes. It's Alzheimer's, heart disease, strokes. And so one out of

every $3 in our government right now is being spent on health care close to one out of five of our dollars in our economy. And I ran for president where the debate people wanted to have was how do you provide health care. But it's almost like saying it's like, well, how do you mop up the floor when the water bosses never turned on? We talk about

why we need so much health care. Yes. So 80% of that spending is for diet-related diseases. And I'm all for freedom. I want this country eat what you want. But we have designed a system in which the things that we tell you not to eat are being subsidized. And the things we tell you to eat, we don't subsidize at all. So when my kids walk into

a bodega in Newark, they can get a Twinkie-like product cheaper than an apple. Because we as a society have said we're going to subsidize everything in that Twinkie-like product and not the apple. In fact, fruits and vegetables get about 7% of our ag subsidies. Well, the commodity crop. The crops that go to the corn syrup and the things that, again, are not making us healthy or

to feed animals, get the most of our subsidies. And everybody on this along the chain is getting hurt. Farmers are getting hurt right now. There's suicide rates, I think, are two or three times higher than the average American. The independent family farmers being eviscerated. People are losing their farms at other numbers. Again, it's a massive consolidation. Small amounts of company are controlling our food system. And

they're benefiting from ag policy. They're benefiting from ag policies designed in the 1950s by people who thought, let's just make calories readily available and that can stay on shelves forever. When we know a lot better about nutrition now, this food system that we have is being done in a way that is all about those commodity crops, which now are being doused with chemicals, that we don't

fully know what do those sort of bodies. But you and I both have glyphosates in our blood, other endocrine disruptors, because we've created this roundup of already crops and seeds, which are hurting our ecology, streams, rivers, full of these chemicals, runoff of, we're losing quality of our soil. So farmers are losing, the ecology is losing, climate change. It's one of our biggest contributors to the problem.

All these climate activists seem to always forget that our food system is one of the major contributors to that. Farmers could be leading us out of that with us incentivizing them to do farming practices, crevice crops and other things that preserve soil, nutrient-rich soil, biodiverse soil, as opposed to the dirt that's created when you've thousand in glyphosate. So it's a climate change issue, it's a ecology

issue, it's about our farmers, but it's also about our food workers. People who work in our food system, first of all overwhelmingly undocumented immigrants from our farms, they're picking most of the food we eat, even to our slaughterhouses, which are more corporate concentrated than during the time of upthinston clairs of jungle. So you go all the way to the end users. As a guy that, you

know, Ron Finley says in South Central, he says, in South Central, we got drive buys and drive throes, and the drive throes are killing more people than the drive buys. The number one killer of African Americans is diet-related diseases. So this food system is so broken, it's hurting us in every single way, from the farmers who are producing our food who now get 14 cents on

the dollar of every consumer dollar spent, because of, again, massive corporate concentration all the way down to very, very sick population. And so I think we as a society, no matter you're right or left, I told you about the cattlemen who were getting hurt by this system all the way to the people and communities like mine, we need to begin to expand consciousness about that this

is not a fate of complete, that this system is by design producing the results that we're seeing, where pharmaceutical companies are making incredible profits, where literally I was shocked when I saw this, that a major health organization says, well, obesity and children is such a bad thing, we are advising them to have their stomach stapled. So we have created a system where people are profiting off

of it, but the rest of us all are losing. And we can redesign it. So farmers thrive and consumers thrive in health, because we know, as you've said a many times on your show, food is medicine, I can show you a study after study, that for taxpayers, if you're physically conservative, what a return on investment if you make fresh fruits and vegetables, accessible for people with

diabetes or hypertension or the like. And so I want to be a disruptor now, I want to find ways to take the next farm bill, which is coming and see what ways we can make improvements on it to begin to show people there's a better way. There's so much change that we need right now. And it is true. Like when you kind of canvas the current

situation, everybody's losing except the people in the sea, sweets of these giant food conglomerates and perhaps the law of the obvious who are on retainer, right? Like this is a clusterfuck, you know, bar none in terms of trying to, you know, kind of create any kind of meaningful change. It's an intractable problem and it's super entrenched, right? But what's interesting about it is, it really is

a bipartisan issue. Like the people that are suffering are blue and the red. And we should all be very concerned about this. And we can all benefit and gain from looking more closely at what is actually going on, where the money is flowing, who is being harmed. And you know, not for nothing, the long term consequences of not addressing this problem, which will ultimately bankrupt the

country. Because if you think healthcare is expensive and inaccessible now, what is it going to look like if, you know, these curves towards, you know, greater and greater diabetes rates and obesity and heart disease and the like, they're only going to continue to escalate. Well, if you look at the culture, it becomes a national security issue. Like there is nothing that is not impacted by this.

It all goes back to food. And what's interesting when you look at the history of it going all the way back to like the Homestead Act and the original, you know, rationale behind the farm bill, right? Like good intentions. Let's, let's have cheap food for everybody that lasts on the shelf. Like these are good things. We need this to combat, you know, our hunger issue, right?

But here we are. Today, it's a very different situation. And we have a farm bill situation that's perpetuating a problem, the problems rather than eradicating them. And I know that you've, you've, you've put a couple pieces of legislation on the table right now to address this. It's a very exciting time because the farm bill is up for vote. I think in September this year, right? So

yeah, we hope, we hope. Yeah. We don't, it's not like how does I don't even know how that works and the legislation that you've, you've kind of authored or co authored. Is that part of the farm bill? Or I don't know that I fully understand. Yeah. So you have these big things called reauthorizations, you know, FAA reauthorization, but the farm bills every five years, it's the

whole thing is up again. But it's kind of like five to seven years. Yeah. It's vague. Yeah. I could take longer to get done. But there is usually these must pass bills. It's going to eventually pass. But there's a whole bunch of fighting involved in it. And, and, and a lot of bipartisan work. And so we try to, we're trying to find things that we can

tweak in different places that might have big results. Like there's something. And again, I hate to speak wash and speak because the gusts knit program. What is that? That is like to incentivize people. One part of the farm bill is what you call food stamps, but snap supple. Right. The nutrition assistance program. We're what can you do with your snap dollars? Well, there's a program that

was created that would allow people to go do farmers markets and urban farms. Because you used to not be able to use them for anything healthy. Yes. Right. Yes. And we can buy as much sugar water as you want. But there are other things that you couldn't do. Well, once we realize that we can create incentives, you can get gusts and impolite as you get double

bucks. And so in Newark, when I was mayor, we were able to create an entire city block. As a farm. And I went back and reason I hadn't been there in years. I was blown away by what they've created in the space. And I went to see what I could buy with, you know, $10. And it blew anything away that I could get in like whole

foods or the organic section of other places. And then they told me, well, you would get double this with your food stamps. So I tried to live, did a horrible job. But I wanted to show how hard it was to live and feed yourself on the $2.14 a day that they, or I'm not sure exactly what it is now, but the little bit of money you

get per meal or for the day. But this was unbelievable to me. And I met a group out there. You know the documentary food ink. Sure. Well, they're filming food ink too. And so I went to talk about this challenge that we have of this, these mushrooming costs where we will, you say, some day it's soon where the amount of money we spend on healthcare, because

these diseases are mushrooming. The one that people don't talk about enough is Alzheimer's, which you and people you've had on have talked about being type three diabetes, because it's so connected to our diet as well. We don't have to talk to them about that. And we didn't plan it this way, but these African American elder women come out and want to share their stories. One woman

had a gut issues where she said that her prescription drugs were called costing $700 a month. She was paying $100 of it. That was her copay. And so I assumed taxpayers were paying the rest of it. And she said that she started sourcing all of her food from this incredible farm in a low income section of the city. And her doctors like Miracle Cure, you don't

need your prescription drugs. She became healthy. When I went to engineering, she's in great Twitter, Instagram handle, like vegan, octogenarian, something like that. 80 year old woman who had diabetes for years and years and years became a vegan. And then sourced her food from the farm, it went away. Her diabetes went away. And so that's the crossroads, I think, we're on. We do not understand how

bad it's going to get in 10, 20 years if we don't do something about this crisis. But there's ways in the farm bill that if we start to make changes, I think we can create even more constructive disruption. But to your point, they're very powerful lobbies that are trying to protect the status quo. Who don't want to see change in these areas. And they often have

influence on both sides of the aisle. Like, my team, we stopped taking corporate contributions and see sweet from oil companies or pharma. But I try to often tell people that the most influential lobby is food. Because they are on both sides of the aisle. It's probably not as big as defense, though, right? Or is it an on parity with that? I would actually you just trump

me a little bit because defense is defense law hard to beat defense. It is really hard. It's a lot of audience defense bills. Because sorry, go ahead. Well, I just was joking. It's happened again. The Democratic Republic of President, they often put their budgets in for defense. And Congress takes it. Okay, the military is asking for this. Let's add, you know, whatever billions of dollars on

to it. Because, you know, the military is not asking for things that are made in my district or what have you. I still remember my funny experiences was going to John McCain's ranch. It was another guy being very close to on the Odyssey of Meeting with Everybody. When I went to his office, we had a very emotional first meeting. And he kind of took me under

his wing and was so kind to me. So he started inviting me to these annual policy conferences as a ranch. And I was out there. And I couldn't eat anything at his big barbecue one night. Because everything was saturated in some animal product. You know, the vegetables of a butter and mayonnaise. And so I just didn't eat. But I was comfortable really happy to be in

this policy conference. And as I'm driving away in a golf car with the guys taking me back to where I was staying on his ranch. He says, you enjoy the food center. And I'm like, I actually really didn't have any food. Because nothing was vegan. He said, Oh, my God. Can we help you get food? And I go, he's sure. And he goes, well, I think

Senator McCain's probably asleep. But maybe we can break into his back door and go into his kitchen. I'm like, break into John McCain's house. Yeah. I'm in. I'm from Jersey, baby. Let's go. And so we go there. We didn't have to break in. But because he was sitting up late talking to a former secretary of the Navy. And I sit there with my peanut butter and

carrots or whatever I was eating. And just listen to these two wise men talk about what they were calling the corruption in our military that we have. We're spending so much more and not getting the effectiveness we should. Because we're just a failure to focus on taxpayer return for investment. And so I just think this is where I think we're going to be. My party gets

it wrong or doesn't say it enough. We really have got to start talking about reforming systems, creating more transparency, less sort of these opaque worlds in which all this corruption can thrive. And I think that we need to reimagining of what government is. Because we have a government right now that in so many cases would rather pay so much more on the back end of a

problem as opposed to make more strategic investments on the front end. And this brings us back to food. When I talk to people at the State Department, when I talk to people in the military and look at their threat analyses, they are going to tell you that one of the great crises we have is food insecurity that often causes political instability that often causes migration crises.

A lot of the challenges we have at the border, you could say are coming from political instability over the years of some of these countries, some of which America has had a role in. But there's also just, you know, the craziness of the weather, destroying agricultural crops, creating poverty. There's something going on the planet that we are, we can't isolate ourselves from as a country. And

I love what General Mattis says, if you stop the State Department funding for certain programs, then buy me more bullets. The way you stop crime in communities like mine in Newark or pick your city. I still remember heading with the head of the FBI and saying, how do we solve this problem? And when I was first weeks, I was mayor and he goes, we don't solve

this problem. And he said to me, we treat the symptoms of our problem. Whether it's in the United States, starting to own up to issues of addiction and mental health, which we fill our prisons with these folks, so much more expensive, so much more human misery as opposed to finding interventions in the front end. Planetarily, if we don't start finding ways to intervene in countries that

are at risk, in programs we know have returned for taxpayer dollars that help with food innovations, access to food security and more. We are going to pay so much more in the back end of these problems. And so that's enlightened empathy that understands that this isn't charity. It's the self interest we have to play a role of creating a more healthy planet. And in America, stop

creating an environment where we deal with our crises in hospital emergency rooms or in prisons or in jails, but starts to say, how can we create a more beloved community? We're making investments that are not just in human well-being that help human flourishing, but actually make us a safer society, a more beloved country, and a nation that is more evidenting its best values and how we

treat one another through our policies and through our individual behaviors. When it comes to food systems, however, that solution rests in dismantling a corporate conglomerate system of factory farms and CAFOs that are depleting our soils and reaping the benefits of subsidies and producing foods that are making us ill on the sort of shoulders of taxpayers who actually incur the risk when things go sideways, like combating

that or kind of innovating new systems is a tough mountain to climb. So you, as somebody who sits on the Senate agriculture, the Agriculture Committee, like, are you an outlier voice on that committee? Is there consensus building happening right now? Are there solutions on the table about how to effectively achieve this to repair our soils and to get people to appreciate the benefits of more kind

of locally oriented agricultural sources? I know you talk about the robustness of dispersing our food systems, because COVID, if it taught us anything, it taught us how fragile it is. The concentration of our, yeah, the globalization of our food system actually makes us very, very sensitive and fragile in times of crisis. Yeah, look, we have produced legislation going right at this factory farm system that is

indefensible. They do a lot, these ag-gag laws, to stop Americans from knowing. Yeah, you were talking about transparency. We don't know anything. We're legally prevented from actually being able to understand what they mean. And they literally cover it over. If you go to these massive, concentrated animal feeding operations, these CAFOs, they're literally covering them over. They are, these sort of, they're acting in ways that are

a, a, a fronts to the values of their consumers, putting beautiful pictures on their packaging of, you know, these pastoral days of past, or days that will reflect more what their regenerative movements doing than what is actually happening with most of the meat that we're producing. They're doing things to animals that would discuss many of their consumers. So I could go on about the factory farming.

We have put forward legislation, but this is something you have, you know, about Washington. Ultimately, change does not come from Washington. It comes to Washington. Like we didn't get the, the great suffrage legislation, because in 1919, a bunch of men came to the Senate, Florence said, okay, fellas, I guess, well, let's let those women have a right to vote. It came because, of activism, of conscious

expansion, we didn't get civil rights legislation, because one day, strong firm and came to the Senate, Florence said, I've seen the light, let those Negro people have the right to vote. We came because of activism that was so, the, as I said before, these artists of activism that opened the eyes of the average Americans who could not lo and longer sanction the segregation. We are in

that same moment right now, where we share the same values about our food system. We could have a focus group here of any background of Americans. Moms want healthy foods for their kids. They often are confused by the corporations that try to confuse them with their labeling and their marketing. Moms want healthy food. You give them the options. They're going to choose healthy foods for their

families, but we need to continue to let people understand what's happening in their food system. When I can talk to other colleagues of mine in Congress, and say things that sort of blow their mind that they didn't realize are happening, or just tell stories. What did it, what it did for me to go to Duplin County, North Carolina, and see what Smithfield, one of the companies,

is doing down there with these contract farmers who themselves are trapped in these horrible tournament systems where they're living like sharecroppers. But I had never seen with my own eyes these massive CAFOs that then underneath have grates where these caged animals, they really move or turn around, then have their feces and urine flow through these pipes into these massive lagoons of waste that are then sprayed

on fields. But just like when you spray your fire hose, stuff mists, and then you meet with people, desperate Americans, who've lived on that land for generations. In this case, the black communities that have been on that land since slavery, say to you, their property values have crashed. They have respiratory problems, diseases, they can't open their windows, they can't run their air conditioning or put their

clothing on the lines. And the hell that they're going through, as a result of this aberration of the way we're raising livestock, you can't help but break open your empathy and feel compelled that we have to change the system. It doesn't have to be this way. I can still enjoy whatever I want to eat from systems that are healthy that add to our well-being, that don't

oppress or exploit people that don't drive people who have a proud heritage in their family of raising livestock, now to their knees living like sharecroppers. But the problem we have right now is not enough Americans realize how deeply broken this system is and how we're all losing. And so what I'm trying to do and what people like you are doing, because I've learned a lot from

years ago, starting to listen to what you all are doing, is this is the 1950s in the Civil Rights Movement. I had the, and I hope I'm getting in control for outing him, the head of the NAWCP saying you had mentioned to me Corey one of these food summits, Civil Rights Food Summit, because a lot of the Civil Rights Organizations when they would come to me,

and they would say, this is our agenda for Black America. And I'd be like, where is the food? The number one killer of African Americans is because you have more fast food restaurants in African American communities, people are not having it their own way though. You know, there's no happiness in a lot of these happy meals that they're having. Why aren't we having conversations where we're

moving activist groups? And I don't care who you, I gave a speech to this amazing coalition of farmers, of health advocates, livestock farmers getting together with animal rights people, we need to strengthen these coalitions, build this consciousness so that Americans are saying no more. Why are you putting my life in danger by overusing antibiotics? Why are you doing things that don't comport? You and I remember

the dolphin claws that got Americans all up and they tried to change the world. They're way they were doing this fish. Why aren't we demanding that our this factory farming stop in this country and us begin to do things that localize and regionalize our food systems, make them stronger, healthier and more elevating to the success of families and farmers and everybody in between. Yeah. Yeah. The

disproportionate impact that this system is having on, you know, underprivileged communities, communities of color. I mean, it's deplorable. And but nobody yet, but I'm sorry. But because so the United Farm Workers invited 100 senators to come work a day in the fields. Next to a farm worker, two of us responded. Alex Padilla here in California said, I will do it. And me, it took us like

over a year to schedule this. And I go out in this, in these fields. It was brutally hard work. Hunched open. I was over picking lettuce, doing all these things. I think my chief of staff who's here and team took joy filming me. I'm a pretty, I'm pretty good shape. But it was brutal work. I was sore for well over a week. But was interesting to

me as I talked to these mostly women. And my Spanish is pretty good. And all of them are, most of them are undocumented. And they have horrible stories of sexual harassment, wage theft. What does it mean to have to work? Work away from your children in ways that are wrong. The challenges of sending money, working like we did, and then sending money back, just the user

rates that are charged. All these issues, as we're going through this process of me trying not to faint out there. And I'll never forget getting back to this farmer was really reputable. He was telling me stories about what other folks were doing to a lot of these workers, the levels of exploitation. And most Americans don't know most of the food we consume. Is being picked or

harvested or what have you by people that live in the shadows. But he says something to me that like shook me because he's like, this is the owner of the farm. He says to me, he goes, well, yeah, Corey America has throughout its history had the people that work in their fields, not having any say in their political systems. You would understand that as a black

guy. And all of a sudden it like gave me chills. I'm like, oh my God, this guy is going all the way back to slavery. And so I know the average American, if they were to go and went through what I did, side by side with these other human beings, listening to their stories of sexual exploitation, economic exploitation, to know that this injustice is baked into

our food system would say enough is enough. We need to change this. And we can do it in a way that's not going to actually raise costs for families. That's the thing that most people don't understand. There's a lot of corporate taking going on where they're exploiting us. And that's the thing that we need to do. We need to have a lot of money in our

system and draining more and more out of the system. And the people getting hurt or not just the agricultural workers go to a rural town. One of my partners on some of this legislation is an unlikely guy. But he's the only farmer in the United States Senate. This incredible Senator named John Tester in Montana, which is a red state, but he's a moderate guy who survives

seems every reelection effort. And he has a joke. And I got to get the exact right. But it goes something like this. He goes, when I was growing up in Montana, we had like three banks in our downtown and five bars. And he goes, now we've got like 200 kids in our town, because of all the corporate consolidation. I like 200 kids in our high school.

There are no more banks. And there's only one bar that's hanging on because I go there and drink all the time. And what he just tells us is the hollowing out of our rural communities, because again, multinational corporations are what used to sustain thriving diverse communities, farming like our great-grandparents did. Are now being run by these massive multinational corporations that are doing everything they can to

protect this broken farm system. So we can change this. But the first step goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning. Individuals like you and I and people that are listening saying, before I'm going to just point fingers at the KFOs and these companies, what can I be doing to better send ripples out of empathy and understanding to all aspects of this system?

What can I do to raise consciousness and join it? Because I feel like we're in the 1950s of the ultimately victorious civil rights movement, where what they were doing was raising consciousness all along the way of the injustices. Well, we have to do this because to me, the injustices run deep in the exploitation and the hurting of farmers and the hurting of our atmosphere. This is

a big, big problem that I'm hoping more people can take the time to learn about and connect themselves to. Well, I appreciate you, shouldering the responsibility of attempting to educate people. It is so complex. And there is no aspect, as we said earlier, of society that is untouched by this. Right. And it isn't a blue or a red thing. The farmers are hurting. They're being exploited.

The workers are being exploited. The consumers are being exploited. Our health is being impacted. The environment is being degraded. The animals are being horribly, you know, it's just, it's just terrible across the board. And I do believe in change. And I do think that, you know, that education piece will and is already creating a grassroots movement of excitement and energy around this type of change. And

then there's you, you know, sitting where you sit, who gets to initiate legislation, who gets to talk about the antitrust implications of all of this, who gets to, you know, kind of convening hearings where you get to confront these corporations and ask them the hard questions, all of which trickles down into more education and more energy. But you want to have straights of that. Yeah. So

we, you know, we stopped taking corporate dollars and corporate packs and all that. So we do a lot of these emails that you might get from people trying to raise money. So we just think it's almost affirming to us that we'll send out emails with, you know, I think incredibly Barbara Streisand sent out an email with us that was very successful. We'll, you know, try to,

you know, talk about every issue to see if we get individual small dollar contributions because ultimately, yeah. And the ones that get the best return are about the food system. There's an audience out there. The best performing posts we often have are talking about the food system. So I know some of it might be because these are the people that are drawn, but I do think

there's more and more pun intended appetite out there for information and to support people like yourself and others who are really trying to speak truth to power and do something about about this. Ultimately, at the highest level, though, the incentives have to change, right? We have to create healthier incentives. We have to create incentives that drive the positive change. And right now, all of the incentives

are driving, you know, us in the wrong direction and just making this problem even more intractable. And, you know, when it comes to like campaign finance reform and, you know, the whole like case street complex, like, help us understand like how that works. Like, you know, what is the what are we business of being a lobbyist? Like is it somebody lurking in the hallways of, you

know, the these Senate and congressional office buildings waiting to, you know, have a meeting and entice, you know, a representative with vacations and, you know, condos. Like, what is it? What is the reality of that? So I don't want to vilify any. There's lobbyists who come up and lobby for cancer research and lobbyists. So there's, you know, you, you always don't want to cast a broad

net. And then there's the old joke, you know, don't hate the player, hate the game. The game is designed in certain rules. People are playing their parts. And if we can change the rules of the game, you're going to get a lot different result. So yes, we live in a nation right now, especially since Citizens United, that to run for a congressional seat or a Senate

seat takes an ungodly amount of money. We're the only nation I know that does it this way. We're in 2023. We have a November 2024 presidential election and people are already out there raising money. For what's going to be an terminably long campaign, you know, it's our, you know, in the parliamentary system in England, they're like set an election three months later. It's over. And so

corporations right now have a corrupting influence. If you read Citizens United, which is one of the more shocking decisions, which opened up the floodgates, all of this dark money, even they said, well, we should disclose it. We should have forget it. It's a corrupting system that we have right now that if you have two candidates at each race, $5 million that's still often a fraction of

the total money spent because now corporations, without their fingerprints on it, can dump millions of dollars. I watched one Congressperson I know was doing good at like a week before his election. Then a corporation just came in and dumped all these horrible negative ads, accusations against them, and they narrowly lost their election. And so there are certain things that I think we should be all fighting

for that are technical fixes to our democracy that would produce better results, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, you would want that change. And one of them has to be like we were the fourth Senator to take the Citizen United Pledge to give up corporate pack money in the whole thing. And I'm trying to show people you can live without it and depend upon small dollar

contributions. But hey, before you contribute to somebody, ask them, have they taken the pledge to we've got to somehow disconnect our elected leaders from this corporate money and get them to pass laws that end the citizens United. These other things that we got to change too, though. I mean, we draw district lines and gerrymandering. And again, this is not a partisan thing. You see gerrymandering on

both sides of the aisle, but it disenfranchises people. It creates a democracy where, as I said, you know, voters don't get to pick their elected officials elected officials, but they pick their voters. So there's system designs, just like our food system is designed to get the outcome we're seeing are political system. There's things we could do better. Like I've become enamored recently with with rank choice

voting. And starting to look at it, it in working that when you go in, you don't just vote for your top choice, you vote for your second choice and your third choice, which could have, I know in my, sorry, the aisle, like when Hillary Clinton was running, if you just took the Jill spine people that could have ranked Hillary as the second choice, it's something they

could have pulled her over over the top. So I just hope people again, everything we are enjoying in this incredible privilege to be the rare four percent of the population in the earth could they call themselves American. It should come with obligations and responsibilities. Which is how do you leave this nation better than when you inherited it? How do you leave our democracy stronger than when

you inherited it? We now have a democracy that is straining a little bit. I don't think there's anything happening now that's unprecedented. If you read history, it's a very precedent at time. There have been other times that our democracy has felt like it was on their brink to people or where extremism was rising. But the question always comes back to you as an actor, what are

you willing to do about the challenges? And something we should do, and I get frustrated, and as some people tell me, oh, politics, I'm not, I'm not, oh, it's just too, I don't want to get involved. I'm sorry. Well, if you advocate your responsibility from being engaged in the civic space, you are contributing to the problems you say you don't like and making things worse. Because

ultimately, you get the leaders that you deserve. And one of the reasons why bad people, and I hate to put that in that way, I put it in quotes, but bad people are elected as good people don't vote and don't participate. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The silence. Is just as potent as what you say. Yeah. And again, it's good people who do nothing. Those are the folks that

are, the letters in the Birmingham jail, which I think people should reread once a year, was king not writing to racists or segregationists. He was writing to people of faith that were criticizing him for his activism. And wanted to really believe that those were the people that were the real threat, not the people that were simply perpetuating the segregation. It was why are so many people

sitting on the sideline, and and leurrating in the benefits on the blessings of their good fortune, and not understanding that they were, their complicity was, was what was sourcing the sustainability of the problem. Well, Senator, I want to be considerate of your time. We should probably wrap this up, but before I let you go, on that note of kind of our civic responsibility, and assuming that,

like my son, myself, people who are listening to this or watching it are feeling inspired and energized around the idea of perhaps getting a little bit more activated or involved in issues that they care about, then they have historically, and even maybe specifically to the food systems issue, like how do you kind of encourage people to get more involved? Like are there certain things that you

could, you know, advise or recommend people to look into or how to use their voice specifically? I have to work with you to put some things in the show notes that might give people links and ways to get involved. Every dollar you spend in your life as a vote, and I'm trying to think more about everything from where my clothing comes from, to where my food

comes from. And if you have the flexibility to make choices, you can endorse a lot of good practices that are starting. You had a guy, again, you've, you've turned me on to a lot of people over the years. One of them, it's guy I love, Zach Bush. I'm seeing him later this week. You hang out with people I want to hang out with. Are you around

on Friday? I wish, now I wish I was. That guy is incredible. He's been in my office and, and sat with a bunch of senators. I got him a handful of senators. But I love what he says. Like we often think that we have to attack the darkness and don't realize that we could just be more light ourselves. And, and so I just hope people just

do a rigorous interrogation of themselves every once in a, every day. But what are the practices I can change? Because that's where that's where you can make a difference. So we'll give practical things. I'll, I'll, I'll give you the names of legislation that we're working on that you could ask your representative. What have you? But my, my biggest thing, and you and I even when we

were in college, they would have groups get together to talk about some issue. And I would leave feeling better about themselves. But not say it's, again, it's not about what others are doing. It's what about what I'm doing. And I'll end if I can with now that I've told you too many stories, but to tell you, you know, one of my favorite moments of shame, which

I can't say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I can, what you will hopefully give me absolute to four, but I have this great, uh, man in my life, I

named Kevin Bats, who's a, was a mine. My security detail police officer. When I was security detail, when I left city hall, he's like, I want to stay with you on your team. So I literally hired him on my sentence team. And he's one of these guys that, helps with a lot of security issues and support when I'm back home. So he's been driving me around

for a long time. And we've been in this car since 2006. And so he, we don't have to speak. And when I'm back working and trying to return calls, he could just look in the rear view mirror and understand what I'm thinking. He's got this like incredible psychic ability. So we're driving along. And this is where I need some forgiveness. Because I did not know at

this point in my life, the McDonald's franchise are not vegan. They, they, they douse them in meat juice or something like that. You know, it's, it's an easy mistake. Okay. Yes. Yeah. So we're driving past McDonald's just three blocks from my house. And he looks at me in the rear view mirror and he sees the shame in my eyes. And he turns into the drive-through. Without

anything being said. And, you know, the flesh is weak. I need these french fries. And I go into the thing and I order these two large french fries. Now I am one of the biggest, I'm not, we're probably the lead in descheduling psychedelics. You've had some great shows and the power of descheduling marijuana. And yet somehow I think that McDonald's french fries should be scheduled. Because

they sprinkle them with something I'm just so happy. I get these things. I'm holding them like I'm, you know, my precious. And I'm going to give them back to my powerless. Yes. And, and but it's, we start to drive. I see a guy in a, in a trash can rooting around. And I look in the rear view mirror, eyes meet, no word, said he stops. You

know, it was me. And I, real now, I went, I was, hey, man, what's up? And I realized my tone of my voice wasn't respecting his dignity. And, and then I sort of shipped it came in a different way. I said, serves or anything I can do to help you. And he turns around and goes, I'm hungry. And as I always say, you know, you got

to follow your faith. And, you know, my religion says something about if you have two McDonald's french fries and your neighbor has none, you got to give them one of your fries. I call it the sermon on the Macmount. I hand him this McDonald's french fries out the window. We seem like we're going to have a beautiful exchange. She seems happy to receive them. I feel

good about myself. And I now want to get home because there's nothing worse than cold McDonald's french fries. But then he asks me, he goes, do you have any socks? And I know people who experience homelessness. This is a, could be a big thing. But I don't carry extra socks in my car. And I sort of look to my left and right, vainly. And I say,

sir, I'm sorry. I don't. And he said, okay, he stepped away. And I rolled the window and I turned for Kevin to drive. And he doesn't drive. He doesn't read the signs. He puts the car in park, reaches between his legs on the steering wheel, kicks off his shoes, takes off the socks he's wearing and hands him out the door. The guy look like he received

the bar gold. And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, I'm the center that runs around talking about kindness and decency and love and living your value. But in this moment, I didn't think to take off my damn socks when I'm three blocks from my house. And I have socks in my drawer. I probably haven't worn yet. And so what I try to remind myself is that

this is that word you said earlier, it is a practice that trying every day to get up to live your values is something that's not hard, but it is, it demands of us that whether we stop or stumble, we fall, we just get up every day and try our best to live our light. And a life of that, it's not a straight line. It takes stumbles.

You get hit. You get knocked down. But getting up every day and trying to practice kindness, decency and love. I think that that's the highest calling of life. Whether you are elected leader, whether you are a coach, whatever you have, that to me, other people, people who live that kind of life, those are the people that have light my path, like Kevin Bats, that encourage me

in my way. Well, I think you stuck the landing with that one beautifully, but I appreciate that. That's a really powerful reminder. And before we sign off, just I want to just acknowledge you for your example and the light that you admit and the example that you set for so many people. Brother and I, you do, let me just finish. No, I can't take it from

you. Come on. I think the thing you say, the good or bad, what you say about other people is a more reflection of who you are than if who you're talking about. You are truly, truly one of them. Great inspirations. To have you as a source in my life is incredible. You've been at this for years now. I feel like I know you because I listened

to you for so long. So I appreciate that you're keeping me on kindness. But today, please let me just say on behalf of your listeners, on the path of people, don't get the privilege that I have now gotten to meet you. You are amazing humble kind. And the wisdom you bring out from others and that you share on a regular basis is making this world a

better place. And it's definitely made me a better man. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. And you're, you're always welcome back here. I want to come out and hang out with you for the discreet. We need to start podcasting. Yeah. Let's do dinner. Let's do dinners and open up the mic. Alright, thanks, man. Thank you. Cheers. Peace. Let's. Big shout out to the folks at

Woop for making this episode happen. Check out Woop.com to learn more about their top of the line fitness wearables and enter code Rich Roll. Check out to save 10% off any membership. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today. Visit the episode page at richroll.com

where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch. My books finding ultra voicing change in the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. And on YouTube and leave a review and or comment supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social

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