#233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving

Cory Booker (@corybooker https://twitter.com/corybooker) is an American politician and the junior United States Senator from New Jersey https://www.booker.senate.gov/. I generally have an allergy to politics, but Cory's story is endlessly fascinating (e.g., he's faced down death threats from gangs, run into burning buildings, and much more), and we have a few years of history together. We cover a lot in this wide-ranging catch-up conversation, including his diet, lessons from early mentors and athletics, routines, books that have had an impact, learning how to "street fight" in New Jersey after receiving a Rhodes Scholarship, and much more. Cory began his political career as a city councilor from 1998 to 2002 in Newark, New Jersey's largest city. He later served as mayor of Newark, which under his leadership entered its biggest period of economic growth since the 1960s -- the first new downtown hotels were constructed in forty years, the first new office towers in twenty. He then won the Senate Democratic primary in August of 2013, and then won the general election on October 16, 2013, becoming the first African-American U. S. Senator from New Jersey. Cory is also the author of The New York Times bestseller United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1101965185/offsitoftimfe-20. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did! This episode is brought to you by Exo Protein https://www.exoprotein.com/tim. These guys are making protein bars using cricket protein powder. Before you look disgusted, I bet they taste better than any protein bar you've ever had before! With recipes that were developed by a three-Michelin-star chef, the bars are paleo-friendly, with no gluten, no grains, no soy, no dairy, and they won't spike your glycemic response. In fact, they're less processed than any other protein bars you'll find. Exo Protein https://www.exoprotein.com/tim is offering a deep discount to Tim Ferriss Show listeners. If you go to ExoProtein.com/Tim https://www.exoprotein.com/tim, you can try a sampler pack with all of the most popular flavors for less than $10. This is a startup with limited inventory that sells out all the time, so act fast https://www.exoprotein.com/tim! This podcast is also brought to you by FreshBooks https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email. FreshBooks is the #1 cloud bookkeeping software, which is used by a ton of the start-ups I advise and many of the contractors I work with. It is the easiest way to send invoices, get paid, track your time, and track your clients. FreshBooks https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email tells you when your clients have viewed your invoices, helps you customize your invoices, track your hours, automatically organize your receipts, have late payment reminders sent automatically and much more. Right now you can get a free month of complete and unrestricted use. https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email You do not need a credit card for the trial. To claim your free month and see how the brand new Freshbooks can change your business, go to FreshBooks.com/Tim https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email and enter "Tim https://www.freshbooks.com/pages/tim?ref=11864&utm_source=tim-ferriss&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=2016&utm_content=email" in the "how did you hear about us" section. Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  No, this isn't an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by ExoProtein. That's Exo like the exoskeleton in Aliens. And they make the only bars, meal replacement bars or pre-workout bars in my case, that I have in my house. You can hear the crinkling of coconut, which I'm going to get back to. They're making protein bars using cricket protein powder. And many of the CrossFit mutants and high performers out there are eating these. I am also eating them, generally pre-workout. And I bet they taste better than any protein bar you've ever had. And why is that just one of the benefits? Well, they're exceptionally high in complete protein. They're minimally processed, much less processed than most, say, whey protein isolate and packed full of nutrients, including calcium, omega-3s, and so on.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  For those people who are interested, also very sustainable. So this is part of the reason I ended up investing in the company. The United Nations estimates that crickets are 20 times more resource efficient per pound of protein than cows, for instance. ExoProtein was created by a three Michelin-starred chef and two Ivy League grads. They have made a line of protein bars that will, I think, really blow your mind. And some of my friends who are journalists have even tested them with glucose monitors to see what the glucose response is, because they have a little bit of carbs in them. And it was flat line, provoked no huge glucose or insulin response whatsoever. So, there you go. You have that.

• 1:49Tim Ferriss?

  They combine the cricket protein with simple ingredients like cocoa, almond butter, and so on, to create a bar that ticks just about every box you could possibly care about. They're paleo, gluten-free, soy-free, dairy-free, low glycemic, no refined sugar. The list goes on. They are my go-to bars. And for all of you guys listening, Exo is offering a sampler pack. Of their four most popular flavors for less than $10 while supplies last. And that's not an infomercial while supplies last. The last time they were on the podcast, this sold out in about a week. So I recommend you check it out. They're startup, very limited supplies. Go to exoprotein.com, E-X-O-P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com forward slash Tim.

• 2:31Tim Ferriss?

  And you can be one of the first to try the future of protein. So check it out, exoprotein.com forward slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. Man, oh, man, do a lot of listeners of this podcast and readers of mine love FreshBooks. To the extent that I ended up meeting with the CEO not very long ago. Why are they so popular? Well, they are the number one cloud accounting software designed exclusively for self-employed professionals. That's many of you and used by more than 10 million people. You can send invoices, track your time and get paid very, very quickly, which suits the needs of a lot of freelancers, a lot of entrepreneurs and beyond. You can take pictures of receipts. You can link your credit card and debit card.

• 3:15Tim Ferriss?

  So all the things you buy automatically appear in your FreshBooks in the right category. So on and so forth. Makes taxes easy, makes invoices easy, makes your life easier. And also, in fact, I'd recommend a PDF. They didn't ask me to read this part, by the way. They put together a PDF a while back called Breaking the Time Barrier, subtitle, How to Unlock Your True Earning Potential. So you can search for Breaking the Time Barrier. A lot of people ask me, how can I get a four hour work week with a service business? And the story in that ebook, it's PDF, is the short answer. It's really, really good. So I think you should also check that out. So Breaking the Time Barrier, check it out. But also, why not test out FreshBooks?

• 3:55Tim Ferriss?

  Claim your 30 day unrestricted free trial at freshbooks.com forward slash Tim and enter Tim Ferriss, two R's and two S's, in the how did you hear about us section. That sounds like we're going to get very little tracking. That's a lot of work, but just go to freshbooks.com forward slash Tim and try it out because it is a very good product and I think you will find it simplifies your life. Enjoy.

• 4:23Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job, each and every episode, to deconstruct world-class performers from many, many different areas and try to connect the dots. So they may come from chess, entertainment, athletics, or otherwise military, for instance. But what are the common habits, the favorite books, the routines that you can apply to your own life? That is what I tried to tease out. And this episode, we have a very special guest. He was highly, highly, highly requested, has been requested for years by thousands of you at this point. Cory Booker, that is C-O-R-Y, @CoryBooker on Twitter and elsewhere,

• 5:04Tim Ferriss?

  is an American politician and the junior United States Senator from New Jersey. Now, I want to say right up front, I generally have an allergy to politics, and long-term listeners know this. I very seldom dig in and try to penetrate that world. But, a few things. Number one, Cory and I actually go back a ways, so we've spent time together. Second, his story is endlessly fascinating to me. For instance, he's faced down death threats from gangs, run into burning buildings, and much more, aside from all of the official stuff that you see. And that, I think, is worth mining. He's also very well-spoken and very well-educated, and pulls from many different disciplines. We cover a lot in

• 5:46Tim Ferriss?

  this wide-ranging catch-up, which we did in person in Austin Tejas, including his diet lessons from early mentors in athletics, routines, most impactful books, the books he's gifted the most to other people, learning how to "street fight" in New Jersey after a Rhodes Scholarship and a fantastic education, and much, much more. Cory began his political career, as some of you probably know, as a city councillor from 1998 to 2002 in Newark, New Jersey's largest city. He later then served as mayor of Newark, and under his leadership, Newark entered its biggest period of economic growth since the 1960s. The first new downtown hotels were constructed in 40 years, the first new office towers

• 6:28Tim Ferriss?

  in 20 years, et cetera, et cetera. He then won the Senate Democratic primary in August of 2013, and then won the general election on October 16, 2013, becoming the first African-American US Senator from New Jersey. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. I always enjoy spending time with Cory. So without further ado... Here is Cory Booker.

• 6:55Tim Ferriss?

  Cory, welcome to the show.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  It's a pretty amazing being here, actually.

• 6:59Tim Ferriss?

  I am so thrilled to finally be sitting here with you to have this conversation. We met many years ago and I've wanted to get you on the podcast ever since I realized the podcast was going to be more than drinking too much with my one or two closest friends in San Francisco and embarrassing myself.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  I love the drunk taking questions.

• 7:17Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, the drunk dial episodes.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, the drunk dial episodes would be great. But, but this is one of those moments where literally when my team, my, my team that works with me in the Senate says to me, you know, Tim wants to have you on your show. It's like this like moment where I'm like, wait a minute. I see this show as sort of like you having pretty masters of their domains on this show. And the fact that I want to be on a show, I have this severe problem of imposter syndrome. I am not worthy after a list. I'm a huge fan of your show. It has literally influenced my life in a very significant way, as you did. In fact, when we met at Dialogue, we met on Dialogue, I was way overweight and you took the time to stand with me as everybody left, we were at some table and just coached me for 10 minutes. I then went on to lose, it was probably the best shape I had been in until more recently.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  But you just coached me and I just followed your gospel and I got myself in shape. And that, by that point, I was like, this guy changed my life and I just became a fan, read the four hour work week, read the four hour body. Seth just got me your most recent book. So I'm just thrilled to be here. Not sure if I'm worthy.

• 8:16Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I think you're worthy and more than worthy. And I have so many questions that I was waiting to ask you, whether in person, just over dinner or on the podcast. So I figured, why not just do it on the podcast? And I wanted to ask you to start maybe at the beginning because I came into this not knowing a whole lot about your upbringing and childhood. Could you tell us a little bit about your parents?

• 8:44Speaker 03

  So I hit the lottery to be born to these two amazing American folks who both have tough backgrounds, you know, they're black people who were born, you know, in the, in the, in the 30s, basically. And so growing up under Jim Crow and my father, especially very poor, single mom to a mother who couldn't take care of him, then a father, a grandmother that couldn't take care of him. And I've now, since I was on this great show called Finding Your Roots. So I actually now know about my roots going back to the 1600s in America, actually amazingly. But for my, that sort of branch of the family, my father is poverty, poverty, poverty, slavery. And so these parents that came from tough environments, but both were fortunate enough to get to a college. And through the interventions of

• 9:29Speaker 03

  a lot of really great people, especially my father, it was a community of people when his mom couldn't take care of him, that took him in and bent the branches of my family towards college and ultimately towards being middle income, pitched in money. I don't know what their ROI is on those people. They gave like a buck to my dad to get his first semester's tuition paid for and then work his way through college. But incredible amounts of individual kindness got my dad to college. And then, hey, great. You land in college right during the civil rights movement and you got black people, white people, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, all pouring into the South for you to basically give you equal opportunity in this country. So doors started opening up to blacks that never had been before. My parents both get to Washington DC after college and my dad, thanks to, again, the

• 10:12Speaker 03

  activism of blacks and whites, you know, Christians, Jews, Republicans and Democrats, who were just saying that these companies kind of got to start hiring black people and companies opened their doors. So my dad became the first black salesman for an oil company, first black buyer, I think, for a department store. Then he became IBM's first black salesman for the entire Virginia area. And what happens when you let people at the table to have a fair chance to compete, he kicked ass. Excuse me. He just, sexy, you know, he's like their top 5% of their global salesman and gets promoted to New Jersey with his new wife. And at that point, I was four months old. So we moved to Jersey. That's how my sort of Jersey origins come.

• 10:50Tim Ferriss?

  So I've spent a good amount of time in Jersey and we're going to get to Jersey. We're going to spend a lot of time on Jersey, I suspect. What were some of the Lessons or sayings that you found most impactful or have retained from your parents?

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Well, look, I mean, James Baldwin says that children are never good at listening to their elders, but they never fail to imitate them. So I've learned that my parents said certain things that I abided by because that's how they lived. And then my parents told me a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't embody because they didn't live in allegiance to what they told me to do. So, look, my parents embodied this interesting ethic. They were very entrepreneurial people. They were very business minded people, but they also almost felt like they just had this debt to society because they knew the extraordinary acts of love and kindness that got there. I mean, my dad's work ethic and my mom's work ethic is I get older, I more appreciate my mother. I don't think I appreciate as much as young, but my father was one of these guys that would,

• 11:49Speaker 03

  like, if it was a snow day and I'm like in first grade, all excited, the first sound I would be woken up in the morning, like 5:00 AM, my dad shoveling the driveway when everybody's staying home because he was going to go to work and be the first person to work no matter what. And so, you know, my dad, even though he had this incredible work ethic and climbed the ladder into middle class, you know, through the sheer grit that he had, he also had this understanding that like, if it wasn't for lots of thousands of people that you don't even know, I wouldn't be here. And so my dad had this powerful story he told that got more dramatic the older I got. I mean, I'm walking around, by the time I'm 18 years old, like I'm thinking I'm the greatest gift of the world. I'm a two position high school, you know, all state

• 12:33Speaker 03

  high school football player, all American high school football player, president of my class. Like, I'm thinking I'm somebody my father would look at me and say, you know, boy, don't you dare walk around this house like you hit a triple. You were born on third base. You know, it's like, you, you, you think you're special? You know how many people? And I would get the lecture, you know? And it was easy for him to do that lecture because he knew that I knew that I was very different than my peers in the sense of I was black, as my father called us. We were the four raisins in a tub of sweet vanilla ice cream. We were definitely. Not the norm in terms of race in the in the town. And so then he could easily tell me how I got there. Look, when my parents moved to New Jersey, I grew up in the northeastern county, the one

• 13:14Speaker 03

  that looks at across the Palisades, across the Hudson River at New York, north of the George Washington Bridge. My father basically is like, look, what took us to get here? So my parents, when they tried to buy homes in Bergen County, there's only a handful of towns in this 70 town county, 70 plus town county, that would let blacks move in. And they didn't have laws at the time. People think the north, it was the south that had the segregation laws. No, it was real estate steering. Black family shows up. Let me show you homes in Teaneck or Englewood or Hackensack. You don't want to go up here. So what my parents ended up doing, a group of just, again, blacks and whites joined together to create a storefront operation called the Fair Housing Council. And they would go with blacks, my parents, and send a white couple right behind them. My parents would look at the house, be told it was sold.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  The white couple would come and find out the house is still for sale. And on this house that my parents fell in love with, 123 Norma Road in Harrington Park, New Jersey, they were told it was sold. The white couple came, found it was still for sale. White couple puts a bid on the house. Papers are drawn up. On the day of the closing, my father shows up and a volunteer lawyer, guy named Marty Friedman, a Jewish lawyer who just on his own time, wanted to help black families out. And literally, the real estate agent stands up angrily when he realizes he got caught in the sting operation and doesn't relent, doesn't say, yeah, I broke the law. No, he punches my dad's lawyer in the face and and Always a great response. Right. And puts a dog on my dad, literally digs his dog on my dad. And I always joked that that every time, as I got older and older, the dog got bigger. Eventually, it was like a pack of wolves.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Son, I fought a pack of wolves so you could eat that tuna fish sandwich. But but, you know, then we move into this home. And and so for me, as my father would like say to me, he says, you're, you know, you're drinking from wells of freedom and liberty and opportunity that you didn't dig. You're eating from banquet tables prepared for you by your ancestors. This is the kind of stuff my parents inspired my understanding to recognize that if you have the luck. I just had a Senate hearing last week about Yemen and 3 million internally displaced people, war, it's a country on the brink of famine, which is not something that the UN does lightly, to talk about widespread famine. If you have the fortune, the blessing

• 15:23Speaker 03

  of being born an American, you are in the rarified of rarified heirs in humanity, if you're an American in the 21st century. And what my parents did a good job of sort of bringing fully to my consciousness through the portal and lens of the black experience, but frankly, I don't care if you're Irish-American, if you're Indian-American, this is all of us, how much effort had to go. And it wasn't Abraham Lincoln and FDR, no, it was good folk, ordinary folks who just said, you know what, I may be Jewish, you may be Christian, I may be black, you may be white, but we are in this together and we're gonna, if you're facing an injustice, it's a problem with me. And I would hear, you know, before I even studying this stuff in history, like, you know, son, people stormed beaches in

• 16:08Speaker 03

  Normandy for you, you know, they swept floors for you, they went on freedom rides for you. And so if any mantra, civic sort of family mantra that was there for my brother and I is, yeah, you have an obligation to take the blessings God gave you and work like, work is like the most important thing, like, don't let anybody ever outwork you. And that's, you and I have shared this in sports or what have you, work ethic is important, but like, service has got to be a part of that too. You owe a debt, you can't pay back to your ancestors, you got to pay it forward by paying it to other people.

• 16:41Tim Ferriss?

  So you played ball, you ended up at Stanford.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  I always say I got into my Stanford because of our 4.0 and 1600, 4.0 yards per carry, 1600 receiving yards.

• 16:51Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I was, so you grew up, as I understand it, about a mile or two away from a previous guest, John Crowley. And so he suggested that I ask you about, and I know nothing about football, so I'm getting deep into my, sort of the deep end of my ignorance pool here, but Lou Holtz trying to recruit you.

• 17:17Tim Ferriss?

  So maybe you could provide some context for people who don't even know who Lou Holtz is.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  Well, Lou Holtz is probably one of the greatest American college football coaches of all times. And so I was, in all fairness, because the older we get, the better we were at our sports. But in all fairness, I was probably the most overrated high school football player ever. I was just, people thought I could, you know, part the seas of linebackers and score anytime I wanted to. And it was a lot of hype. I think the song back then by Public Enemy was "Don't Believe the Hype." That was written, I think, about my football career. But, but I had a choice of going anywhere. And I just looked at it. You went to Princeton. And again, this, this idea that like, okay, I, I'm have a chance to get a full scholarship to any college in the country. I'm gonna go as because of my parents wiring to the best

• 18:04Speaker 03

  academic school I can go to. And so I looked at Duke and Stanford and UVA and, but Notre Dame was definitely in that list. And so Lou Holtz is probably one of the most persuasive human beings ever. And I always talk about the fact that, you know, and definitely an embellished story, but going out there and like Lou Holtz, who is a short man, I'm 6'3", and he, I always say he's like five foot and a smidgen. And, but like a booming guy, you look up to him right when you meet him, and he just gives me the best sell you can imagine. We actually go into the Notre Dame locker room, and there's my jersey with my high school number in it. And if you say you're 17, 18 years old, like, this is amazing. And Lou Holtz goes, take a knee. And like, when Lou Holtz tells, take a knee, I'm a Christian

• 18:47Speaker 03

  boy, but I bowed before that man. And then he gives me the best pregame speech I'd ever heard in my life. I mean, he, and he pulls from all history. He's talking about, you know, the Gipper, and, I mean, he even talks about Rudy, for crying out loud. He goes to Rudy. And so I'm like, oh, my God, hyped up. And then he goes, you know, rise, Cory Booker, rise. And it didn't take a muscle twitch. I literally elevated up into the air. And after he told me that, I'm ready to go out and chop down trees. And then Notre Dame, you go through this little tunnel. There's like a four leaf clover there, something you hit. And I don't care if you're black, if you're, you know, if you're from Bangladesh, when you touch that Irish, you, the Irish island. Call you, you feel your Irish ancestry. And so like I'm fully baked.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  Then I walked down through the tunnel and you get on the field and like Holt is still in your ear. It's like as if he's narrating your moment on that field and I'm walking down and like Cory Booker, you're gonna score a touchdown in that end zone. So you get to that end zone. And then you turn around and the field is like a bowl, but there's a building behind the field. It's called, it's their library, I think. And on the field is a picture, is a mural of Jesus Christ with his arms up as if he's saying touchdown. In fact, his nickname is Touchdown Jesus. And the only time you can see it, so I turn around and now I don't care if you're Baha'i Sikh, Christian, Jewish, you see Touchdown Jesus after, after Lou Holtz has pumped you up. It is a conversion moment. And I looked at, and I knew what Jesus wanted from me at that moment.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  He wanted me to score a touchdown in that end zone. So I'm swearing, I'm gonna score a touchdown. And so I get home and my parents are like, where are you going to school? I'm going to Notre Dame. And it took them, you know, psychologists and

• 20:26Tim Ferriss?

  They did deep programming.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  They had to deep program me to eventually get me to go to Stanford when I realized that we played Stanford, we played Notre Dame twice in their, in their end zone. In my senior year, my best career game was against Notre Dame. We were, we weren't even ranked in the top 50. Notre Dame was ranked number one in the country. We were going in, everybody said we were gonna get killed by, I don't know, 10, 20 points. And they score a touchdown, we score a touchdown. We were actually staying with them. And I had this pass over the middle and Todd Light, an All-American corner, I have one move in sports, in all of sports, he must have not watched the film, but it's basically me throwing my hips one way and running the other as quickly as I can. He actually fell down and I'm running towards Touchdown Jesus.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  I'm hearing the, I'm hearing the, the Lord calling to me, this is what I've wanted from you for your life. And I get tackled from behind by some spawn from hell and takes me out. Eventually we scored a touchdown, won the game, but my Notre Dame experience is I love the school. And if anything I learned from that, because we had no right to be in that end zone. I still always tell people, my, my true lesson from that story is that if you have a right team, you can be up against people that are superior athletes, superior intellect or whatever. But a good team, people together can beat any group of great individuals.

• 21:40Tim Ferriss?

  So, okay, that is a fantastic story. We're gonna talk about delegating and team. I think a little bit later because there were some listener questions about that. But I want to talk about persuasion. So you mentioned Lu is very persuasive. I think of you as very persuasive and you're a very gifted speaker. And I think we're going to take a slight left turn. It's going to seem that way, but it's related. We talked a little bit about this before we started recording. So correct me if I'm wrong here, but you ran a student run crisis hotline.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:10Tim Ferriss?

  At Stanford. Could you talk about that? And specifically, I want to know, what did you learn about that experience and what works when you are on a crisis hotline?

• 22:21Speaker 03

  So this is a sort of a crisis hotline called The Bridge at Stanford. And it was probably one of the best life experiences because I was sort of a teenager going into my early twenties. And it was the first sort of nonprofit I ran and this collective of other leaders. It was five of us that lived at the center 24 hours a day would cover the night. And you have to understand, when I just started as a counselor there, I'm this 18 year old or 19 year old young man who, a lot of us, I don't think get this understanding that we are, we've lived our lives in our own lane and we don't necessarily get to pull back the screen and talk to other people about their experiences beyond the niceties we exchange every day. And, and I can't remember who said about, you know, be kind to one another because we're all fighting a hard battle.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  And it might've been Socrates or someone, but it was, it was basically, punched me in my square in my nose about how important kindness and empathy is. Because when I started sitting on that phone and on a Friday night, I was so shaken because we would have rape calls. That I had women that were there. I still remember one credible woman named Allison, who would do, pick up women that were escaping spousal abuse. And there's another counselor there named Daniel Bow, another amazingly beautiful human being. I just had no idea how, again, this is early eighties, early nineties,

• 23:49Speaker 03

  how ignorant I was about gay and lesbian Americans and how many biases that stem from my ignorance. And sitting down and, and having people calling about their experiences coming out and hearing. The truth of people talking about, thinking about killing themselves because they are not attracted to someone of a different sex, or talking about the horrors that they experienced, the abuses they experienced, or eating disorders, and having, being in forms of honest conversation about how just saying something to somebody like, "Hey, you're gaining some weight," you know, something like, and how comments like that can hurt, and, or what it's like just growing up in an environment where you're constantly being told that your worth is

• 24:33Speaker 03

  based upon how much weight you have. And so, I can go on and on and on, but it was one of those places where I felt like Sanford's great, and my course load got great, but I learned so much about empathy, and about listening, and about non-judgmentalism, sort of the fundamental core. I mean, we literally had a rule of what the, sort of, the first five rules of peer counseling that were about empathy, that were about non-judgmentalism, about listening. Do you recall specifically what any of those rules were? Some of them were as simple as be non-judgmental. And that's something that I think, I literally was just talking to one of my closest friends about that yesterday, because they were going

• 25:17Speaker 03

  off about someone who was involved in a protest or something, and how it wasn't sincere, and so on and so forth. And we just don't realize how often we're casting judgment when we know nothing about the person, we know nothing about their struggle, and we just are so quick to judge other people, and how harsh it would be back to us. And to actually be taught to be able to be a counselor to somebody and hold no judgment of them whatsoever, or to suppress that, and just be there to listen, and to be, to give them empathy. And all these are often tags for love. It was a powerful lesson for me. And, and so, I guess

• 25:57Speaker 03

  what I'm saying to you is, I think there's something about persuasion that people often go about it as thinking about, "Well, how am I going to convince you to do something?" And I kind of think about that from the start of, no, it's not about me and what I'm going to do to you to get you to do something. It's actually about me being there for you, and opening myself up to create a safe space for me to actually listen and hear you. And this has been a hard lesson, and I've sort of... You know, when I was living in really a tough environment in Newark, when I first moved there, I was living in some high-rise projects which became public housing, you know, it's

• 26:39Speaker 03

  just like these same lessons that you are, I think you're meant to hear on your journey in life, you know, when you start getting the same thing over and over again, trying to teach you the same, I think the universe sort of tries to do it the easy way first, but that, you know, when you see the same thing coming, but this idea of empathy. And now in our society, and you and I sort of touched on this, I'm one of these people that gets kind of bothered that we've stopped listening to each other. Like, I can't, I wish I could find this study and I asked my team to help me find it, but I remember we were on an airplane, reading a study, and I thought it was USA Today about a public policy position in education, and they said, this is a Democratic position. And immediately, like 80% of Republicans were against it. They didn't even know it. And they flipped it around, Democrats were the same way. They said, this is a Republican policy. 80% of

• 27:21Speaker 03

  Democrats were against it. It just shifted by just labeling it Republican or Democrat. And what I often find, and we're at a point in our society right now where we just have stopped listening to each other and stopped being empathetic, and instead are leading with that judgment. And what the problem with that is, it disables us in our ability to come together, to do the kind of things that need to move our society forward. And that's why I think now more than ever, and I say this in my speeches all the time, in America, we need a courageous empathy, where we really let go of our own ego and tune into another human being, to really listen to them. I may not agree with that Black Lives Matter march, they may offend me, but we're all kind of wired the same way. So why are

• 28:04Speaker 03

  they out there yelling and screaming? Is it because they're bad and I'm judging them? Or am I taking time to really try to surrender my own position for a minute and listen to that person in the Midwest who is a serious Trump supporter, and try to really understand where they're coming from?

• 28:18Tim Ferriss?

  I want to talk about both, and now I might separate these two out, but the empathy and the courage, which are going to be recurring themes. On the empathy side of things, what you just said reminded me on a micro level of what Brian Johnson said to me once, and he described all hands meetings, or town hall meetings for Braintree, which he then sold to eBay for, I want to say $600 million or something like that, $900. At that point, who cares? I mean, it's a big number. And he said that when he had all hands meetings, people were very hesitant to bring up certain problems. And he would stand there, And he would make jokes about himself and mistakes he had made and wait until, as he put

• 29:00Tim Ferriss?

  it, people would bring up the pebble in their shoe. And he said, very often, that's all that was needed to so-called solve the problem was to let, give someone the space and elicit them to talk about the pebble in their shoe. And in the case of the, of the crisis hotline, what are some of the tools that you used to either make people feel better or calm them down? How do you go about doing that when, let's say, even in your own head, you might be subconsciously judging a situation or making assumptions? Are there any particular lines or questions? Because you're no stranger to conflict. You've been in a fair number of street fights.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 29:37Tim Ferriss?

  Not literal, but, oh, I mean, you've certainly had. There's a lot of excitement in, in the biography of Cory Booker. But how do you calm people down, diffuse situations? Are there any particular words or questions or any tactics that you use?

• 29:52Speaker 03

  So there's definitely a tactic, and I want to talk about that. But just to, to give, just to give more affirmation of what Brian was doing. So I wrote a book the year before last called United. And I wanted to, the best reaction I was hoping for people read the book and say, wait a minute, this is not what a politician would write. Because I wanted to write about, and there's five or six major instances in a book, or maybe actually a lot of more smaller ones of like, this is me being a jerk. I mean, this is me being a royal ass. And these, or this is a big mistake I made. And I don't mind being a little vulnerable here, because I find that that vulnerability actually creates a climate for all of us to learn. Often, I think it's bad when we create, when we put

• 30:34Speaker 03

  people on pedestals. I think it's so much better when we, and that's why I like biography, when we see people, like Lyndon Johnson was a jerk in terms of the way he treated other people. And when you, Martin Luther King, like I, Cornel West always talks about it, the Santa Clausification of Martin Luther King. He was a complex man with flaws. And I think that makes it more accessible and real when you realize that. So I think that what he was doing with this, creating an environment where, let me tell you what I did that was really dumb. It gives people a safe space for them to start sharing and build more effective teams when you have that kind of connections. But In terms of a tactic for counseling, which is a tactic that we all know already, those of us who practice this,

• 31:19Speaker 03

  who've been up at night, you can't sleep, you have anxiety, and you open a book and you just write down what you're anxious about. Suddenly, it actually helps. It's a really good way of... Suddenly, it's reeling on the paper, and it's a really good way to get to a point where you go from the emotional anxiety of it all to suddenly seeing it in a more objective way. Not that it still doesn't have emotional triggers and the like, but you see it in a more objective way. I'm sure you've probably done that yourself.

• 31:44Tim Ferriss?

  I actually very routinely do something called morning pages, which is effectively trapping that those anxieties and monkey mind-generated insecurities or emotions on paper so that I can get on with my day.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Right. And so, and most of us don't understand how, in our own lives, something simple... We allow our minds to do things to us that are horrible. We are worst... The most important conversations you have every day are the ones you have with yourself that you're not even often aware of.

• 32:16Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great way to put it.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  And we're driving ourselves often insane with these scripts. And we're not even... Sometimes they're just a little bit below the consciousness of the scripts we're running. And sometimes when you take a pause... This is why just breathing in and out, just taking a moment to remember to breathe, or meditation is a tool that I love, that you talk about also. But writing something down. So, in a counseling setting, often what moves a person to call a crisis hotline is they're at a peak moment of emotion, or distress, or worry. And that's where the active listening comes in, where you're really... People have this misidea about being a counselor, that they're somehow going in and they're getting great advice. I can't solve your problems,

• 33:02Speaker 03

  but you are equipped. And as a... From a person of faith, I really don't believe the universe puts anything on you or God puts anything that you can't handle. Sometimes you need to know the right people to go to, or the right person to ask. But I think what's the tactic of just allowing somebody to talk and being a good filter or paraphraser back to the person? So, maybe it's not physically... You're writing it down, but your the person's beginning to hear themselves and be able to sort through what's going on and make help them sort of start to see strategies that they could be pursuing to make themselves better. We all have so much more wisdom inside of us than we give ourselves credit for.

• 33:37Tim Ferriss?

  I want to flash forward and given the memento like scripting or lack of scripting in these conversations. I'm sure chronologically it will be challenged, but we'll jump around a little bit. We, as we were doing a sound check before we started and I asked you what you had for breakfast today and he said, I'm fasting today. Now I have, as you know, a deep interest in fasting and I, I thought that we might touch on a 10 day hunger strike and correct me if this is inaccurate, but as I understand it was to bring attention to open air drug dealing and related violence and so on at the time. Can you place us in terms of what you were doing at the time and why you chose to take that approach?

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Right. So your, your, your question is so many things I want to talk about with you because the whole concept of fasting and the benefits of fasting. So want to talk to you about it because I've learned so much from you about it already and now it's become a regular part of my practice.

• 34:27Tim Ferriss?

  How do you fast?

• 34:28Speaker 03

  So I, I, to take you through the Tim Ferriss effects on my life, which are many. You, you are such a good soul because you make yourself vulnerable. I think that's one of your attributes. You know that you are a schmuck at times like we all are and, and you admit that. Which is again, that makes, makes me feel a brotherhood with you. But yet you have like my father, that dog at work ethic where you're willing and also a

• 34:55Speaker 03

  a willingness to hurl yourself off cliffs.

• 34:58Tim Ferriss?

  With my MRI is going to test.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  Yes. And I find, and by the way, my, I'm in a profession that does not like risk. You know, politicians, it's like, what is the least amount of risk that I can have because I don't want to offend anybody. God forbid. You have no problems. I think you're good at that, but I think that that's when my best times learning, and we can get back to the 10 day hunger strike because this was a big moment, when I take the greatest risks and I just hurl myself off, off, and that was out of lack, out of desperation, but I love the fact that you're willing to use yourself as a, to, to embrace this idea that I don't have all the answers, I'm going to try to learn something. And I've followed you through a lot of your journeys and learned a lot myself and hacks, shortcuts by learning from you. And so you go to that moment where we met and talked deeper

• 35:45Speaker 03

  years ago, it was 2009, I think, where you helped me get my physical health back because it's something, I've always seemed to be willing to sacrifice my physical health and my own well being and relationships, this, this terrible view I've had to fight where it's all about the service, it's all about the mission, but that self-care I've, I'm, I've learned as I've gotten wiser is so much important. It's like Stephen Covey's sharpening the axe, like, but most of us forget that. So I then went back and gained a ridiculous amount of weight and was over like 300 pounds again. And it was a few of my friends talking to me about intermittent fasting that was a, a tactic, obviously there's a lot more going on when you're in that moment, but it was a great

• 36:27Speaker 03

  tactic to use. And it was everybody from a congresswoman to who was hearing this. And a lot of people started giving me that information. It was, it was Ezra Klein, I had a pod, I was on his podcast and we started talking about it and he was just talking about not eating until noon most days or 11 a.m. if I remember exactly. So I decided I hurled myself into trying it. And the more I tried it, the, I found it so many benefits to my life of doing two to three days a week of intermittent, so as they call intermittent fasting, 500 calories or less a day. And so I can talk to you about all the benefits I've found, but your podcasts about the subject matter, about everything from cancers to Alzheimer's.

• 37:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  But more important.

• 37:10Tim Ferriss?

  D'Agostino, probably.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  That was exactly it. But I remember that you said something on one of your podcasts about the stress you used to have to be if you missed a meal, like, oh God, where am I going? I'm in the airport, I missed breakfast, where am I going to get this? And how much peace I have now where even on days I'm eating, I'm like, wait a minute, I've gone three days. Without eating, why am I stressing over that? Or just the mind space that clogs your head about thinking about food and all the time that suddenly I get a more zen-like path. And my chief of staff, who's sitting in here to leap at me, should I say something that he's unhappy with? But he, like, I, on days that I eat, I get that three, four o'clock exhaustion where I need a nap. On days I'm fasting, I don't feel the need to me that. So I can go on about intermittent fasting. And I'm one of these people, again, like you in my life, there've been moments where I just said,

• 37:56Speaker 03

  I'm going to try something for three months, like the coming of vegetarian. It was, I was a peak athlete at the time. And I just said, I'm going to try this and see what it does to my body. And I stayed with vegetarianism first and foremost. I'd like to say it was for the environmental, ethical. My body just jumped to a whole new level of performance when I first shifted to becoming a vegetarian. So that was the first thing that sort of like, wow, this feels great. But this is something I tried in my life that has intermittent fasting that really works. It's very different than the 10 day hunger strike. And you've inspired me with, you said you now do some days with just water. As you see me here drinking this green.

• 38:32Tim Ferriss?

  Green juice. Yeah, no, well, there are different ways to go about it. So we'll, we'll get into fasting for a second. So there are those who, like Walter Longo, for instance, the researcher who's talked a lot about the fast mimicking diet, which is generally, I think it is fewer than 500 calories per day for anywhere from, say, three to five days. And I've, I've tended to go more in the water fast direction, maybe allowing some fats like coconut oil or MCT oil, which is something that, say, Dominic D'Agostino, who's the PhD who first talked about fasting on the podcast, or Peter Tia, another, in that case, an MD example. But let's, let's talk about 10, because 10, 10 is a serious, that's a serious commitment.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 39:18Tim Ferriss?

  And.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  Right. And I don't know, like, the one thing you do that I, I have not been able to is testing your blood and seeing if you're hitting ketosis. And I listen to all that and saying to myself, dear God, Tim, I can't get my blood tested. But, but.

• 39:29Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I can tell you, 10 days, you're in ketosis.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  But, but you have to, just before I get into this 10 day fast. Chief of Staff and I were in the Middle East. We were, I was, I went, wanted to go to Iraq and meet with, you know, we're meeting everybody from the Prime Minister to leader of the opposition and we're in Baghdad. And I just, when I get there, I decide, you know what, I'm going to do, entire time I'm here, just gonna fast. And it was this almost spiritual sort of experience when you're, you know, sort of dealing with real, very serious issues. And it, but it's still, I was amazed at how much energy I had, how much clarity of thought. And I, and I hope that as you do with your life and inspire me to do with mine, is that people just try stuff. And don't put it at such a level on it, if you, if it's like noon and you're fasting, you suddenly start eating,

• 40:17Speaker 03

  don't hate yourself. And, but I just hope, I think it's the kind of stuff we should do is we should experiment with it. Why Gandhi's autobiography? What, what is it? It's the title of it, My Experiments with Truth. And I think we all should take things, not just in fasting, but, you know, I'm a, I'm a very, I'm a, I'm a Christian. But, you know, I said, you know what, I'm gonna do a little bit to study Islam. I hear all this talks about Islam, let me study it. Just doing little experiments in your life to learn, to grow, to, to help understand. I think it's just an incredible way to learn. And, and actually, at the end, other end of experiments that I do with my life, I always find myself better and more enriched.

• 40:53Tim Ferriss?

  Let me jump in for one second, because I want to underscore what you just said. Those experiments can take many different forms. So it could be, say, a three-month experiment with vegetarianism. It could be a one-day experiment with fasting. And obviously, folks listening, I'm not a doctor, neither of us are doctors, don't play doctors on the internet, so talk to your medical professional. But, all that I've said, experiments can also take the form, and I do this a lot when I journal, of thought experiments. So one of the more productive brainstorming sessions that I observed recently was about, I would say, a group of 15. And the moderator started because there were a lot of heated topics that were gonna come up, political or otherwise. And he said, "Let's start with everyone, each person will go around the room,

• 41:37Tim Ferriss?

  thinking of one of their most deeply held beliefs, taking the opposite viewpoint, and then justifying it or explaining why it's correct."

• 41:47Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 41:48Tim Ferriss?

  So assuming, taking one of your deepest held beliefs, taking the opposite, and then actually giving a compelling argument. And this is something that I believe has the nickname steel manning, as opposed to straw manning right now. And Darwin actually did this. In Origin of Species, to prepare for the onslaught of criticism that he would receive, he predicted and preempted many of the positions his critics would take, did not dismiss them, actually made them the strongest versions of those criticisms that he could, and then addressed them in the book, so that he would be prepared. And so that was one of the experiments that I most enjoyed, observing as a moderator, to set the tone, which I thought was really productive.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  Again, great, and you can't interview all the great people on this podcast, because many of them have died, but we didn't even left clues for this, how they experimented. Like Ben Franklin, he didn't mean to write his autobiography, he wanted to write a note to his family about, hey, this is what I've learned in my experiments. And so he would take one theme, just imagine if we all said, okay, today, I'm going to look at the idea of gratitude and figure out through this experiment. Mark Zuckerberg said, okay, I'm gonna have a year where every day I say thank you to somebody and write those notes. These are glorious sort of journeys, odysseys, to see where it leads you, and it doesn't always do it. And you're right, they can be just one moment. You know what, it's Sunday, this is my day of faith, and I'm going to honor God by not going to the church I go to all the time.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  And maybe I'm gonna go down into Camden, New Jersey, and go to a black church, or maybe I'm gonna go to a Latino church, or let's stay crazy, maybe I'm gonna go to a mosque or synagogue, just to experience that and meet different people. So we get caught in these grooves, and we're playing the same record over and over again. And just doing one thing different, we may not like it, but it actually is gonna stretch and broaden us, it actually change our, as you know, I know you've studied a lot about brains and how we work, just by changing the synapses of that normal routine, even if something as simple as I both have read about, don't drive the same way to work every day. There are collateral benefits that brain scientists will say to you that benefit your life in other ways.

• 43:53Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, definitely. And I'm not gonna forget about this hunger strike, we're getting to it, folks, but we might end up in a more interesting place by taking some detours. But the name Phil Zimbardo came up before we started recording, and for those people who don't know, he Was one of the lead investigators, if not the designer of the protocol, the Princeton, the Stanford Princeton, oh my god, let's try English again, the Stanford Prison Experiment.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Which is profound.

• 44:19Tim Ferriss?

  Which is profound. And many experiments afterwards that showed how you could influence good people to behave in evil ways, or neutral people to behave in evil ways. And there are some really interesting studies that have looked at so-called good Samaritans and how you can impact their behavior based on a feeling of urgency and so on. But the point I was going to make is that he encourages people to do what he calls the deviant-for-a-day experiment. And it's, in effect, doing something that is so out of character, or so socially odd, that people will, might criticize you, or at least look at you in an unusual way. And the example he gave was encouraging his students to put, much like, I think it's

• 45:03Tim Ferriss?

  Ash Wednesday, when people will put, say, ash on the forehead, but do, put a mark on your forehead, and just walk around all day, and even if people try to take it off of your forehead, which they probably will, refuse to do that and keep it on, just so you become more comfortable with discomfort. And that could, though, deviant-for-a-day, could take the form of, say, going to a church you would never think of going to, or change your routine in such a way that maybe, I met someone recently who took, and this is a, can be a complicated subject, but he routinely does not give money to homeless people, but will invite them to dinner, and have an entire dinner with homeless people, and he's done this, I want to say, half dozen to a dozen times. So, let's just say hypothetically

• 45:45Tim Ferriss?

  that you earmarked, for me, it's usually Saturday, so I do these experiments. And I met someone, a technologist recently, who's decided, even though he's not particularly religious, he is Jewish, but he's going to observe the Shabbat, and from, I think it's sundown to sundown, for one day a week, on the weekend, he's not going to use any technology whatsoever. Because he realizes how dependent he has become, and distracted he has become, based on that. Hunger strike, I promise.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Hold on, I just, because you, the problem with you is you give these, like, first of all, when you talk about Stoicism, and this idea of dressing for one day in rags, I mean, there's such a power of teaching ourselves to be more empathetic to people might have different experiences. So I was a Stanford student who did graduate work in sociology, and just watching actual experiments, I experimented myself, like, there was a Experiment, I think you can still get the video of it where you have rooms full of different people that all sit in one cohort, a bunch of guys, and you put two or three women in there and just watch how many times a woman tries to speak and gets cut off versus the men in the room, then they try to speak and get it. And so it made

• 46:54Speaker 03

  me, even if you do 50/50 in the room, it just made me suddenly wake up and start looking for that pattern in my own conversations that I had. It was a really mind-blowing experience to me. Another study, another experiment we did where, this one, we wore the experiments in the room where we all had to reach into a bag and we pulled out a chip and the chip was yellow, green, or yellow, blue, or red, let's say. And it decided the station we had in this game, whether you were the upper class, middle class, or lower class. And this is the game, and the rules of the upper class were great. They really benefited us. And so we knew what the game was. Okay, this is like class society, but we quickly in the upper class made its laws that protected us, you know, and the

• 47:37Speaker 03

  lower class people. But what was interesting about the game more than that was that the groups who sat in different areas, the animosities amongst players that began, I mean, the anger and the defensiveness and the shouting, it descended into a very bad place, to the point at the end of the experiment where they said, okay, I want everybody to take their chips, throw them on the ground, stamp on them. They had us do a bunch of exercises to get that Purge. purge you. And so just like Zimbardo's prison experiment, as well as this, I think the group, the game was called Star Power or something like that, how quickly we fall into these roles. And so for me, I had this one experience where I went from living in affluent suburbia to living in a housing project. Can you explain for people what the catalyst for that was?

• 48:22Speaker 03

  So it was the parents I described to you, and you know, and you know, I was really affected when I was at Stanford by working in East Palo Alto. And it was literally It's incredible. I mean, the contrast is just incredible. And for me, just literally you cross these tracks into East Palo Alto, especially at that time. Now you've got a Four Seasons or whatever there. It's gentrified in some ways. But for me, you know, I need to get my haircut as a black guy. There's no place on Stanford's campus. I was used to having black hair. So my first time was just going to find a barber. That's when I had hair and You and me both. Yeah, but but then I started my freshman summer after my freshman year, started working in a place called the Onyx Harris Community Center, which technically is East Menlo Park. But it was a similar community and and I found such a connection with these kids. And I basically

• 49:07Speaker 03

  said, okay, this is my life work. I want to work in cities. And so I worked everywhere from East Harlem to East Palo Alto. When I was at Yale, helping to run legal clinics. And just felt a kinship and a connection with what I thought my sole mission was, which was I when I say these words, liberty and justice for all, you know, I always say to people, before you tell me about your religion, first show it to me and how you treat other people. Well, our civic gospel in this country, what are the things? We all know the words, the Declaration of Independence, or at least we all know a lot of those words. We know the words to our pledge. We know the National Anthem. But those words actually have power and meaning. And and is it just like religious texts that we read and then we go out on Sunday and cut driver off and flip them off? Or are we living with grace that Christ or whatever your religion

• 49:50Speaker 03

  is commands? And I think we have a civic gospel as well. We are pledging allegiance to this ideal of liberty and justice for all. But most Americans don't know that we have a justice system that by its definition treats you better if you're rich and guilty than poor and innocent. Because if you and I get arrested for the exact same crime, I'm wealthier than you. You're a poor white guy from wherever you're from. I can get out, I can bail myself out. But you're stuck in the jail, sometimes for months. People don't realize this. Some people say for months. So if you really believe in that ideal of liberty and justice for all, what are you doing? What'd you do today to to live that civic gospel? And so for me, and again, this is just from my own path. What I saw was that I so benefited from this

• 50:33Speaker 03

  country. And I didn't have you've interviewed people in the military, which I have this, you and I are both wired this way that we see people in uniform and just very drawn to them. And however, when you meet some of the guys you've interviewed, and see what they've gone through and see what they've done for this country, they have a level of sort of patriotic ideal that Is lived in a way that I revere. But I also have that same thing for people that take themselves out of their, their privilege and say, you know what, I believe those words that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And I'm going to do whatever I can to commit myself. So people, you, you and I both have friends that did Teach for America.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  You know what, I'm going to go off and make a lot of money, but for two years of my life, I'm going to do the Peace Corps, I'm going to do TFA, I'm going to do something. And anyway, I had all these ideals and I think the challenge in all of us in our life is to try to live lives of the best integrity we can, where we live in accordance to our ideals. And low and behold, though, Newark, New Jersey flipped the script on me and basically said to me, you think you're coming here to serve. You know, I was a 20, whatever I was, 26, 27 at the time. You think you're coming here to serve, you think you're coming here to help, we're going to flip this script on you. I always say I got my BA from Stanford, but my PhD on the streets of Newark. And this actually leads me to the hunger strike where I decided that I was going to move into the toughest area and literally as I'm moving in.

• 51:58Tim Ferriss?

  Was this before or after the city council?

• 52:01Speaker 03

  No, I'm a Yale Law student.

• 52:02Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, this is Yale Law student.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm a Yale Law student and I start, and again, I worked one summer in East Harlem. I mean, I'm, I'm very much engaged in what I think are some of the frontiers of our democracy, but I'd never really been a part of the community. You know, a lot of us, I would volunteer, work, work, then I go back to my dorm, you know, at Yale, you know? So I just said, you know what, I want to live my life. I want my professional life to be a part of a community. And here I am, I'm a United States Senator and I have the privilege of going back to probably one of the wealthiest communities of all the senators to go back to. Median income is $14,000 per, per individual, but I live in a community that blows me away every day.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  I see Americans with a fealty to the ideals of this country, literally in the grassroots or in the trenches of the fight for our democracy every single day. So it's, I love when reporters or whoever wants to come and walk around my neighborhood and see great people who often are stereotyped or misunderstood because we don't, we wall ourselves off in America. We often don't cross these lines, unfortunately, in our society. So long story short is I move on to the South End of Martin Luther King Boulevard. In Newark, and I'm moving, literally as I'm moving in, my big Italian best friend from 4th grade, guy named Chris McGarrett, helping me carry stuff in, we come back to the store, my stuff is stolen. And, and I'm like, Welcome to the neighborhood.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, welcome to the neighborhood. And unbeknownst to me, but the abandoned home, I shouldn't say this, I did actually know this at the time, but the abandoned home next to me is where you see, again, real great cross-section of American life, because drug addiction knows no race or, or, or socioeconomic status boundaries. So, people are coming into this community to buy drugs. I didn't realize, I've now learned a lot more about the drug market even than when before, than when I was mayor, because I went back to write a lot about this for my book, and went back and interviewed drug dealers from the 90s. But this was a hot place to sell drugs, because one guy, who was probably a guy that should have been in corporate America, he ran the drug operation here, just found a way to

• 54:10Speaker 03

  get very cheap, high-quality product. And so I had moved in the middle of this, not realizing that I was in probably one of the most violent drug markets. I knew it was bad, but I didn't know it was as bad as I, when I went in and when I actually interviewed this guy and some of the other drug dealers, they had set things up in a way that, I mean, you know, I was with a person who was helping me record a lot of the interviews, just sounded like New Jack City. So I'm in the middle of this, and I go with this arrogance to this, to the tenant leader. I'm now living in the neighborhood, and I'm thinking, ha ha, I'm here, you know, and riding on my white knight, on my horse, you know, and da da da. And Newark is this amazing city that doesn't deal well with people, like, at least the attitude I had at that point, because Ms. Virginia Jones, the tenant president,

• 54:55Speaker 03

  sort of looks at me when I'm telling her how much I'm gonna help her, and she looks at me with this cynical, almost just like, I don't have time for this, you know. And so she did this like, experiment with me, where she takes me down to the middle of Martin Luther King Boulevard, and again, I'm this, you know, yeah, law student, I'm here to help you. And she goes, what do you see? What do you mean? She goes, what do you see in this neighborhood? And I just describe it just the way I did to you, you know, crack house, and, you know, drug operators. I described the neighborhood, and she just looks angry, and she says, you can't help me. And she starts walking away. I run after her, I grab this woman from behind, very respectfully, and I say to her, what are you talking about? I don't understand. And she says to me, words that changed my life.

• 55:39Speaker 03

  She says to me, boy, you need to understand something. The world you see outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside of you. If you're one of those people who only sees darkness and despair, that's all it is ever gonna be. But if you're one of those stubborn people, who every time you open your eyes, you see hope, opportunity, love, if you see the face of God, then you can be one, somebody who helps me. And she leaves me there. You know, sort of looking at my feet, thinking to myself, okay, grasshopper, thus ended the lesson. And I went back and I just was like, okay, I'm here to learn, not here to help, I'm here to learn. And I sat on this woman's couch and watched what I just was in awe of. People would come to see her with problems,

• 56:24Speaker 03

  you know, and she would help people with rent, somebody needed a job. I mean, she was, held this community. Her son in the eighties, before I arrived, got murdered in the lobby of the building that I lived in, that I eventually would live in. She and I probably were the two people that were some of the highest income earners in there. We could have lived anywhere. But she, literally after her son is murdered, stayed in those buildings, remained the tenant president, held that community together with the force of its will. Those buildings don't, I'm living in that neighborhood still, but those buildings aren't there anymore. They still have a reunion every year. For, I mean, think about this. These were buildings when I lived in them for eight years. Heat and hot water, irregular, homeless people or worse, sometimes collapsed. I'd walk past people in the stairwells when the elevators weren't working,

• 57:07Speaker 03

  wondering occasionally if somebody was alive or not, trying to nudge them. You'd see feces in the hallways, mice. I could tell you all the challenges of living in these buildings, but yet there was such a sense of community created there that still, years later, the buildings are gone, there is still a reunion being held. And the alumni from those buildings, because of the spirit in that community, go on to do incredible things. Like I give, like I'm sure you do, try to write checks at the end of the year to people. Who are doing great things. One of them is to a guy, police officer from those buildings, grew up in those buildings, who still does things. And so that's, I hadn't gotten into politics because, okay, so fast forward, me and Ms. Jones are, and other tenant leaders are taking on the slumlord that, who eventually got convicted in federal court, fighting noble

• 57:52Speaker 03

  battles. But their residents in that building and numbers of others are really frustrated that they don't think the city is being responsive to their concerns and needs. There's talk about running somebody for city council. You know, it's one of those times where you're standing in the line, who volunteers? And everybody steps backwards and you're the person. So, so before you know it, I'm, I'm the candidate. And I won the Central Ward of Newark, which if you go visit me in my senate office, that's the map behind me that still sits there. Who got me into politics? This place with an abundance of public housing, overwhelmingly black and Latino, folks who put their faith in me before they even knew me. Cause this is about a year after I moved to the neighborhood, that before they even

• 58:33Speaker 03

  knew I was a known commodity, said, we're gonna take a risk on you. And the reason why the hunger strike ended up is because I get elected and a year later, I am at the nadir, the lowest point of my professional life, where I was, felt like a failure. I wasn't getting anything done. The mayor of the city, who was like, if I'm just a novice in politics, if this is like my freshman year of, of, of high school, as a first year city council person, I'm Sharp James was, and anybody will tell you this in New Jersey, he was the grand master. I was a Padawan Jedi. He was a Jedi.

• 59:06Tim Ferriss?

  Vader.

• 59:07Speaker 03

  He was, depending on your perspective, let's give love to people, but he was a Jedi knight. And, and, and, and again, we're laughing and people here might not know it. This period of my life became a document, was a documentary.

• 59:18Tim Ferriss?

  Street fight, right?

• 59:19Speaker 03

  Called Street Fight. I got nominated for Academy Award, won, won the Tribeca Film Festival for Audience Choice. I always say the ignominiously, now as a vegan, it, it lost to a movie called March of the Penguins. So I always say I make an exception for penguin meat when I'm eating. But, but this was an interesting moment because.

• 59:36Tim Ferriss?

  Feathered sausages, as they're known.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  As they're known. You and I are gonna get letters from the Humane Society.

• 59:41Tim Ferriss?

  You guys can all mail those to Brian Callen, a comedian, he's the one who came up with them.

• 59:46Speaker 03

  And so my first year, basically, Sharp James is toying with me. I mean, and the headlines are still there because I pulled them to write this book. So I want to show people, I'm not making this up, that I was getting my car ticketed everywhere. When I parked in front of City Hall with the other council people, I was, my phones were tapped. This is stuff that you, that sounds almost funny, you know, two decades later, but my phones were tapped. I wasn't getting anything passed. My own community was getting frustrated with me because we, all this effort to get you elected. And so I'm ready to quit. I was like, I'm, I was more effective as a young tenants rights lawyer than I have been as in elected office. And on my lowest day, one year later, the summer of 1999, I'd been elected in 98. I'm at my wits end. I've, I've gained weight.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  I have pounded, I go to bed most nights with pounding headaches. I'm stressed out of my gourd. I feel like people were warning me that the police were following me because I think the, the mayor might have seen me as a future threat, um, which was prescient and, and for him. So people warning me that, that the police are following me. I'm getting, I'm just scared and I'm, I'm feeling like a failure for, for, uh, uh, for, as a guy who so much of my life has like been afraid of failure. And now I'm first steps into my professional career, I'm failing. And on the, on the lowest day, when I'm getting outvoted all the time by, on the city council for my great brilliant ideas, of course, people are supposed to just bow down before. I'm being a jerk as I, one of the moments I have been admitted, a self-righteous jerk to my fellow city council people who I'm supposed to find common ground with the past stuff.

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  So I'm making all these mistakes. I get a call from tenant leader named Elaine Sewell at these other high-rise, uh, low-income housing. And she basically says to me, it's off the hook up here. I still remember the movie that summer was a Wild Wild West. She's like, it's a Wild Wild West out here. There was a horrible incident where the security guards were attacked by some of the drug dealers in this open air drug market underneath the, they, these buildings sat by a two, highway 280 in New Jersey. So it's a place people drive by, but never slow down to look, except for buy drugs because it looked like a McDonald's drive-through. People would line up to buy their drugs. So the drug dealers controlled this area. The security guards were undermining that. They, they tried to light the guard booth on fire. And so she's like, you gotta do something. And I'm basically, I can't do anything. I just professed impotency. I said, I can't get anything done. What do you expect me to do? She and I start yelling.

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  I'm like, I can't even get the cops to stop ticketing my car. How, how am I going to get them to come out there? And she basically says to me, Like the worst thing she could say to me, and this is not because of her, but it's just I had a wound. She's like, why did we elect you then at all if you can't do anything? And I was done. I lose my temper, raise my voice, hang up on her. And now I storm home to, and you don't have this problem, I do. It's one of my addictions. All I want to do is get back to my apartment in Brick Towers and hang out with my two buddies, Ben and Jerry. And just like eat myself into a food coma and go to bed.

• 1:02:35Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I'm familiar with the cookie dough mixture, self-medication. No.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  Yes. And so, but unfortunately I'm walking past to get to my apartment. This woman, Ms. Virginia Jones, this pain in my neck, this righteous pain in my neck. The tenant leader happens to be standing out in the courtyard. And I literally, as I see her, I'm sorry, I'm not in the mood for you, Ms. Jones. I need to get back to my apartment and eat my dang nap cookie dough ice cream. Cause they combine the two now. And as I try to walk past her grunting her hello, like a Falcon would with like a mouse. She starts playing with me. She's, don't walk past me. And I'm like, you know, why? And she goes, I turn around and stop. She goes, and she read me right away. She's like, come here and give Ms. Jones a hug. And I'm like, I walk over and I give her the most insincere hug in the world. Like when you say you're still going to be friends with somebody after you break up with them, it's just like, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  And I try to turn around and she grabs me by the arm and she goes, tell me what's wrong. And I just got like angry. I'm like, you want to know what's wrong? You want to know what's wrong? And I vented on her, probably blaming her a little, this is not working. I'm a city, you know, I'm in this office. I'm not getting anything done. I'm getting, it was like the cry me a river, woe is me kind of speech. And then I ended with what's happening to Elaine Sewell and Gordon Spires and literally said, I don't know what to do. I don't, I must've repeated, I don't know what to do, like three times. And then finally she looked like a lightning bolt had hit her. She suddenly gets really excited. She goes, oh my gosh. I go, I stop. Like she erased my script and my pity party. And she's like, I know what you should do. And I'm like, you know what? This is kind of a wise woman occasionally. She pulls some amazing gem out.

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  And I'm thinking, maybe she has hope for me. I'm like, what do I do? And she goes, I know exactly what you should do. And I go, I heard you. What should I do? And then she repeats it. Yep. I know what you should do. And I'm like, Ms. Jones, I don't have time to play.

• 1:04:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Enough foreplay. Yes. What's the plan?

• 1:04:23Speaker 03

  And she looks at me, she leans in and she goes, you should do, and I'm like, yeah, yeah. She goes, you should do something. I'm like, that's it? And if my mama didn't raise me right, I probably would have said some un- un- un- wrong things to her. I storm off to my building, elevator's not friggin working. I climb sixteen flights of stairs, practically kick open my door, plop down on my couch. And if you walk into my office today, I still have like the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran, the Torah, the Bible. Bible's sitting there next to me in my apartment. I open it up and there's this passage that most Christians know called, if you have faith the size of the mustard seed, you can move mountains. But the next passage, which I didn't know well at that point, it says, but sometimes

• 1:05:06Speaker 03

  you have to fast and pray. And I just thought to myself, you know what? I, I had not, I was too caught up in my drama, too caught up in my script, that I hadn't sort of surrendered myself with an open heart. And I decided I was gonna fast. And then the idea started flowing. I could do something. And I said, you know what? I'm not just gonna fast. I'm gonna plop right down in the middle of the drug market and, and fast. And I'm not gonna just fast and pray, I'm gonna get a tent. And before you knew it, my mind just started kickstarting. Like, this is the problem most people don't understand, that despair or cynicism is the worst. I think cynicism, just like despair, is a toxic spiritual state. Agreed.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  It, it like, it, it, it, it, it gives you the inability to see faint hope amidst glaring problems. But it, but, but, I'm again, a person of faith, I believe that we were made in the image of a creator, and therefore, one of our greatest gifts is to be creative, to think of new opportunities. But if you're so negative and so cynical about the world around you, you disempower yourself and do something about it. Well, you're only gonna see the problems and not any of the solutions. Right. And you and I both have had conversations with somebody that's in that state. They say they want help, but every time you bring up an idea, they just shoot it down. Oh, that won't, yeah. Because they're not open to, to, to, to possibilities. So, long story short, as I go out there to Garden Spires, we set up a big tent, I apologized to Elaine Sewell, literally, there might have been some hugging and crying between the

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  two of us, because we were such close friends, I wouldn't have gotten elected without her. And then I do what politicians love doing, I call the press conference. I just said, this is the United States of America. People shouldn't live in fear. And I announced that I was going to stay on this pavement and fast as long as it took for something to change. And I would invite people to pray with me. First day was four of us praying and everything. And then I went to bed. First night was scary. Courageous people slept with me underneath it. And this, what used to be the drug dealer's territory. People threw diapers on top of us and it was just a scary night. But I woke up the next morning and a bunch of correctional officers were there and they said, hey, we saw you on the news. You're not staying out here alone. And over 10 days, the world came out.

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  I mean, there were community leaders. I mean, Newark has such a reservoir of strength and love and people poured out. But then people from a suburban mayor from West Orange came out with his police officers. Hospitals started coming out doing health screenings. Employers started coming out doing job fairs. People were donating computers. And by the 10th day, the mayor of the city came out and it was so funny because he came out with prepared remarks and I, it changed. He and I would fight bitterly later, but after 10 days of fasting and praying, I looked at him differently. I looked at him like I saw his humanity. I saw that he was a guy and we hugged. And I'll never forget, in fact, my editor wanted me to write this part out because I'll never forget.

• 1:07:58Speaker 03

  Smell is one of the most powerful triggers to memory. I hugged him and I breathed deep as we were hugging and I smelled him. And he smelled like a family member of mine. I'm like, I was at that point like a 30 year old. He was my father's age and when I smelled him, he felt like older uncles and things like that. We parted up from our embrace, which became the front page of this section of the newspaper. And he put away his prepared remarks and turned and gave an incredible speech. He made promises that he ultimately, like he was going to build a park in the area. That stuff never happened. But it was a beautiful moment. We, tent came down. And I always say that change never happens in an instant. You know this even in your own life, change in your own life. Something you have to keep at and work at. And so the world didn't change.

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  But I always tell people that for me, the most, one of the most powerful moments of my life, because the problems that garden spiders didn't go away. And it was something I worked on until eventually I became a mayor, built a park in the area and all this stuff. But the point I always try to tell people is the moment, the powerful moment, the whole experience to me was the last prayer. Where there was now from four or five people praying and shaking on the first day, now there's 100, 200 people. And there was everybody there. I looked at and this is, I said, this is my America because there was white folks, black folks, Latino folks, Asian folks. There was an imams, rabbis, priests, ministers, young, old, people when they started praying were praying in Hebrew, and Arabic, and Spanish. And I was the weakest I'd ever been after 10 days of not eating,

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  but you know this with fasting, but I think it was also the circle. I just felt such strength, such power, such energy like I'd never felt before. And I just felt like I was connecting to who we are as a country, that ideal of e pluribus unum, that when we all come together, nothing is impossible. And it was the most hopeful moment of my, of my life at that point. And it also gave me this, a new sense, a renewed sense of mission, that if, if I could find ways with others to bring people together, we could blow away problems in this country and, and everybody could benefit.

• 1:09:57Tim Ferriss?

  I want to ask what you learned from that because it seems to me, and I, I don't like when people put words in my mouth, so I don't want to put words in your mouth, but that you found an option when you thought there were no options, right?

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:10Tim Ferriss?

  And I'd love to know how, what you learned from that and how it impacted maybe later decisions. You could just say, maybe I'm making too complicated, what you learned because to me, there are a couple of takeaways and I'm taking notes for those people who can't see me because you can't, it's audio. I constantly take notes. So I'm circling things, I'm highlighting things that A, you, you also forced the mayor to respond.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:10:35Tim Ferriss?

  Right? Because you were calling attention to something. So if you couldn't go through official channels, you could use the court of public opinion.

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:43Tim Ferriss?

  To, to for, to force his hand to respond, right? And I would just love to know what you, what you learned from that experience that, that maybe became part of your repertoire or set of options later.

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  Well, so, so this was my first experience with lessons that people have learned a lot through activism and experience that if you could bring attention to a problem, you know, look, when Martin Luther King and James Bevel, Dorothy Cotter were fighting Bull Connor, if they had tried to fight that battle alone, who knows what the outcome would have been. But he had the fire hoses, he had the Dogs and all of that, but by their ability to bring attention to the problem after their demonstrations. And and the story went viral back in a day where you didn't have social media, but you had. You know, you had the traditional media and suddenly the Soviet Union is mocking our democracy because of what they're. Watching black kids get bit by dogs, people in Iowa sit there having their dinner and saying, oh, my gosh, look at the humanity of us all. We all love each other or have a reservoirs of love for each other.

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  That once we trigger each other's consciousness or expand each other's moral imagination, let's just say that it activates us. And so. Clearly in New Jersey, we we set up this society, unfortunately, and a lot of this was very. Bad policy, some of the very bigoted policy of redlining and decisions by the federal housing. Organizations to pack all this poverty in one area. What is redlining? Redlining is where it comes from literally what they did on maps. They said, okay, this is a black area. And we're not going to give mortgages and loans to people. We're going to devalue the neighborhoods there. And decisions being made about zoning where we're going to let certain people live. And so you see some of these maps that are still around. This is like part of our history.

• 1:12:27Speaker 03

  Where at a time where people were starting to flee urban areas. It was it was it was a federal policy enabled certain people to move out. And get good value for their homes and the like, certain people not. And then it was it was put on top of that where everything from restrictive covenants to. Real estate steering, which my family did to think about this in New Jersey is a great example of this, but lots of states are. If they decided instead of putting a whole bunch of public housing in one area. What like thousands and thousands of units? What if we took every unit like a Harrington Park, you take four units of affordable housing? We now know that poor kids, same poverty, poor kids in in middle class neighborhoods do so much better.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  Than when you concentrated all poor kids in poor neighborhoods. So a lot of and by the way, these were overt policies. These were like. We cannot let black people out of neighborhoods. What are we going to do to to keep them in? And so that created these ghettos that then became, well, where do the jobs go to? They went out. Side of the communities where the good schools, because remember if everybody leaves a city, their ability to have a tax base to support the education system is not there. And by the way, the tax base has now disappeared. You can't even support police officers or everything. So cities are tumbling downward and then you create laws to keep people back. So I was shocked when I got to Newark that surrounding suburbs with really great schools would actually hire people, private investigators to say, okay, there's a black kid going to these schools.

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  Let's follow them around to see where they go home to. In fact, there's a woman, I just saw her again, last name Martinez, who was a writer for the Wall Street Journal education page. Her family used a fake address in a different neighborhood to get her kid to school. They were caught. She was pulled out of ironically a journalism class and, and, um, and, and forced to go back and, and horrible situation. So a lot of people think, don't realize that a lot of these problems that are existing today are, are not legacies to slavery. These are legacies to the 50s, 60s and 70s and 80s, what were going on. But they forget the other story of America, which is the, literally the creation of toxic zones in our nation. So people don't understand.

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  So when they flee these cities, corporate America was allowed for years to pollute those cities pretty badly. So in Newark, I used to remind people, literally pollute, literally pollute. So now you're a kid growing up in an environment where you've got lead paint in your, in your, and, and we had epidemic levels in Newark as well as other kids. So you and I both know, you don't even mean lead poison, just elevated blood lead levels affects your brain where your executive function. Yeah, your oxygen carrying capacity and all of that. All of that, but it's not just the lead paint, the, um, the air, because now you've created cities. Again, where did we choose to build highways and roads that, that the oxygen is so bad that you have asthma levels that are three and four times as high in urban areas. This is not even done yet.

• 1:15:17Speaker 03

  I remember when I wanted to try to get rid of the food deserts in Newark, big campaign. I just finally got a Whole Foods, we just opened, got supermarkets, but we also said, let's create urban agriculture. We're going to create acres and acres of farms in Newark, which we did successfully and got guys coming home from prison, men and women coming home with prison jobs. But we also said, wait a minute. We want to dig in the ground and the state said, you can't dig in the soil. It's got too much lead. So imagine this now, your air quality, your soil quality. And what about the river that 100 years ago immigrants from Ireland and you pick areas could, if you were poor, you could still go into the river. And it was a commons, right? You can get fish out of, you could get, we had lots of clams and the like.

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  But now it is, I'm not exaggerating this, it is literally an agent, a super fund, poisoned with Agent Orange, all kind of other dioxides from the years of corporations just spoiling the river, literally stealing from the future residents of Newark for, and calling it profits in their present. And so now imagine this, you've got schools that have deteriorated. You've got a physical environment that's toxic. You have large concentrations of poverty. And then you have something on top of that, which most Americans don't realize, which I mentioned earlier, but let's just understand it, called a criminal justice system. This is why I love from the Koch brothers to the Heritage Foundation on the right, to Democrats like me, all agree because of this reality that I now know from my own experiences. My friends in Harrington Park, New Jersey, in Old Man High School I went to,

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  and I hope they don't get mad at me for saying this, but we broke a lot of laws. Okay, drug laws. Friends of mine on senior cut day kicked open a liquor store. It was closed, they couldn't use their fake ID, so they stole cases of beer, got caught. That's breaking and entering, that's a felony. Very little consequence, besides our parents and others maybe getting upset. But my friends and I are all going on with our lives, raising families. Very different justice system for doing the exact same things that you experience in many places in our community. Our criminal justice system now is overly targeted towards poor people. At Stanford, at Princeton, nobody was getting stopped and frisked coming home. And by the way, if they did on a, from a frat party, they would find drugs. No FBI operation right now saying, how are we going to get those college kids and break their drug ring?

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  When I know on college campuses from Adderall to X to, you know, to these things, you can get them sometimes on a smartphone, but in the inner city. Those things become literally the difference between you making it in life and don't. And in a nation where almost one in three adults now has an arrest record. For you and I right now, we get arrested, we have the means with which it's not going to change our lives. It might change my politics, but it won't change our lives. The problem with inner cities, and I saw this when I went out to Rikers Island, you get arrested, you can't even afford the bail. Yep. I was out in Rikers and these are kids missing six months to a year before they're even adjudicated. There's a documentary Jay-Z just did about Khalif Browder, who spent two years plus in jail for stealing a backpack.

• 1:18:13Speaker 03

  And most people don't realize in jail what we do to kids, other countries call torture, which is solitary confinement. Talk about life experiments, and we've heard about this. There's a great guy you should interview who wrote an amazing book about what he did with trying to cope with being stuck in solitary. But psychologists now conclude, in fact, over 50% of the suicides of juveniles in prisons are kids that were in solitary confinement. Over 60% when kids, if you include kids that just got out of solitary confinement. So now you have a criminal justice and a praise upon the poor. And by the way, you and I are both guys of means. But in America right now, there's no difference. Drug dealing and drug usage is sort of equal amongst races in America. In fact, young white men have a little higher levels according to some studies of dealing drugs.

• 1:18:56Speaker 03

  But if you're black in America, you're going to be arrested for that usage, 3.7 times more likely than someone's white. So now you get these poor areas, toxic physical environment, designed to be poor because of the compacting in public housing in those certain areas. Now you get a criminal justice system that is focused on them, not in my town where I grew up. Right. Where we're going to get arrest records. And by the way, most people, Americans, don't know that if you get arrested in America, most states can legally discriminate against you. I can deny you a job just because you have an arrest, even if you was clear of the charges. Most people don't realize that FBI records are so bad that a large percentage of the FBI background checks come back wrong. I think the majority of them come back wrong. So you may have been cleared of your charges, but that employer,

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  you don't even know they're looking at it, thinks you still had something wrong. But the American Bar Association identified Forty thousand collateral consequences if you have been convicted of a nonviolent drug offense. So remember, two of the three last presidents felony drug use they cop to, not just some pot. Obama and Bush felony drug use. There are presidents, a lot of congresspeople are the same. But if your kid in Newark, you got caught for a nonviolent drug offense, doing something stupid that we did, that Stanford students, Princeton students are doing, they can't get a Pell Grant, they can't get food stamps, they can't get business licenses. I had a guy begging me when I was mayor of Newark, why can't I get a cab license? I didn't, it was 18 years ago and I was just caught with a little bit of drugs. You can't get a job at Burger King in Newark.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  So I say all this just-

• 1:20:27Tim Ferriss?

  Unless I jump in, oh no, go ahead.

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  No, the conclusion of all this is, is that, you know, that that's sort of what got me into fighting against a lot of this stuff and finding like the, like the, the concrete of garden spires where I did the hunger strike, learning that, you know, if I try to fight these battles without creating unusual coalitions, basically if I could create unusual coalitions, I can get unusual results. And getting, if I can awaken people to the facts of what's going on, if I can appeal to people's moral imagination, I can tap into a tremendous amount of energy. And it was, for Newark, I had to hack the system.

• 1:21:12Speaker 03

  This, in many ways, what I did with, with being, the hunger strike taught me that if I could think of ways to sort of hack the system and get people to pay attention that weren't paying attention before, I can, I can actually make tremendous things happen very quickly. And so I became mayor at the worst time to be a mayor of an American city, during the Great Recession, which is a Great Depression. I had a guy who was my friend, and I know I say that and my, some of my Democrats friends get mad at me, but Chris Christie is my friend. I can write a dissertation on our disagreements, but I said, you're the mayor of the, I'm the mayor of the largest city, you're the governor of the biggest state, let's not focus on where we disagree, let's see if we can find some things we can work together on, because if I don't, I'm just gonna be screaming at you from the outside, as opposed to sitting at the table with you and finding things that at least two Americans can find,

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  six or seven things we can work together on.

• 1:21:59Tim Ferriss?

  And just to pause, everybody should rewind that and listen to the exact wording of that. Five to 10 times.

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:07Tim Ferriss?

  I think because it's useful.

• 1:22:08Speaker 03

  And my funniest Chris Christie story is not funniest, but most instructive to me was when I press got mad at me was it was marriage equality was gay marriages being voted on, something I'm strident about equal justice under the law, Chris Christie stridently against and it's being voted on the United States Senate, excuse me, this in the state senate in New Jersey. And I had a meeting, I didn't plan it this way, scheduled with Chris Christie in Trenton, in his office on the same day that all this is happening. So imagine this protesters outside, media outside, I'm going in to meet with Chris Christie. And everybody's thinking, the guy who raised the first person ever raised the pride flag in front of city hall in Newark, the guy that refused to perform marriages when I was mayor, because I'm not going to marry anybody unless I can marry everybody. I'm marching in to meet with Chris Christie and everybody's like, yeah, he's going in there to give Chris Christie hell.

• 1:22:52Speaker 03

  Really, I'm marching in there with him because I'm working on a $300 million project in downtown Newark that had places for schools, that had affordable housing, that I brought together an unusual coalition, unions pledging to me to do apprenticeship programs for my kids. Goldman Sachs, God forbid, because they were the few, one of the few people I can get to get capital for the project. It was amazing coalition to benefit my city, to create jobs and the like, and he's critical to getting it done. So I'm going to meet with him and I come out and people, the press is like putting the microphones in my face, did you give it to him on this? And I'm like, I could have sat there for my entire one hour I had with the governor of the state of New Jersey and fought with him and we would have changed neither of each other's minds.

• 1:23:35Speaker 03

  But by focusing on something, and I'm not saying there's not a time and place, Chris Christie has not been soft on me on things he disagrees with, publicly criticized, even when I'm senator, he's still publicly criticized me on things and I haven't been soft on him. But in that precious time I had with him, I wanted to get this Dagnap project done so I could get jobs for people who tomorrow or the day before they needed to go to work. And that was what was important.

• 1:23:57Tim Ferriss?

  So this, this, I think it was, glad I didn't interrupt you, sorry for attempting where I was going to go is exactly where you helped me segue, which is something that we chatted about very briefly before recording. And feel free to wordsmith this because I scribbled it down very quickly, but we're becoming reactivists, not activists. So for people who listen to, for instance, when you were talking about all of these various problems, there are many people in this country and certainly around the world who feel Overwhelmed, disempowered, like it's all just too much that they can't do anything. And then they become, or they take on the cynicism that we already talked about as being

• 1:24:40Tim Ferriss?

  very toxic and contagious also. How would you suggest if people care about a specific issue, they want to do good, but let's say they have a full-time job, what makes someone a good activist?

• 1:24:56Speaker 03

  Well, so great question, and I'm just trying to figure out how to approach this, which is, I guess there's two things that are coming bubbling up in me. And the first is, again, life lessons that you and I have talked about in our past, but more, you've talked about with like, what, I just find that if I, every day if I get up and I can focus on and keep clarity on what the mission is, what is my purpose today? And even back to the time, I credit my success in college from failure. Okay, so I got, and life does this to me a lot, beats me down to like the basic elements of my being, like you and I both probably been through that where you just, I mean,

• 1:25:39Speaker 03

  Newark did that to me a lot, just broke, I think from our brokenness, it's also necessary to be broken because that's often when the light gets in. It's like when we're shining armor and stuff like that, nothing's penetrating, but sometimes it takes us getting broken down. And so my first brokenness in my post 18-year-old life was getting to Stanford as this big hyped football player and failing and just like sinking on the depth chart to the, coach had to dig a little hole and write my name really low on the ground because that's how far on the depth chart I was. And just getting into a fight on the football field, I'm not a fighter, I'm a guy that-

• 1:26:11Tim Ferriss?

  Fight meaning punch, punch?

• 1:26:13Speaker 03

  Oh my God, yeah, I went at it. And because you often, most people, I always say this to kids when I'm saying, if you bump into somebody in a hallway and you're in a great mood, that's just a bump in the hallway. But sometimes when you have a lot of anger and you bump into somebody, you take all the anger from all other areas of your life and you focus in on that person. And so I was just feeling like a failure, like on the football field and anxious and nervous and fearful because you get there at Stanford for- Football, you get there like around, you know, God, August and school doesn't start in Stanford to like September, October. And so I'm fearing this reality that the truth is, I was not the greatest student, not as great as the kids I'm with these brainiacs going to come to. And I thought to myself, I'm not competing on the football field. I'm about to go in the classroom,

• 1:26:57Speaker 03

  get out to get just kick my butt kicked by these smart kids from around the globe who are, who should be Stanford students. I'm an imposter. I got here as an overhyped football player who's not good enough to compete in school. And I'll never forget the moment I really was contemplating leaving Stanford before the school even began and running, tucking tail and running. And I pulled out of my notebook, a piece of paper and just clarified I and basically put values down, statements of who I am, what I stand for, and what am I trying to achieve? And the goals then became in my, you can talk to my college roommate is still a dear friend. I'd have a whiteboard up, entire college career.

• 1:27:40Tim Ferriss?

  In the dorm room.

• 1:27:41Speaker 03

  In the dorm room. And I put it in code because I didn't want people to know what my goals were with my goals.

• 1:27:46Tim Ferriss?

  So I have to ask, so what would be an example of a goal? If you don't remember, you can make something up. And then what would the code say?

• 1:27:54Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:27:55Tim Ferriss?

  Cause I'm guessing it wasn't just like pig Latin or something.

• 1:27:56Speaker 03

  No, no, no. The code would be like, like I was really, I wanted to transform my body. And, and so some of the goals were very specific, like I'm going to weigh this much. I'm going to run this 40 time. I'm going to bench this much. And I'm going to do everything I can to get to these numbers. So, and academically, it's the same thing. I'm taking this course load, what like, I'm going to decide beforehand what grade I want to get and what I'm willing to do to get to that grade. And I found in college, it was this liberating experience because I realized if I was willing, and I have a good book in me, if you ever want to co-write this book, how to get straight A's in college. How to get straight A's in college if you're a dumb

• 1:28:36Speaker 03

  Sounds like a winning title. Yeah. Because I just realized, you know this, everything's a hack, right? Everything is the strategy that you have and how much like, like, um, forgive me Maya Angelou, forgive me Alice Walker, I can't remember who said it and there's a curse in it, but I'm pretty sure it's Alice Walker.

• 1:28:57Tim Ferriss?

  I'm from Long Island.

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  So this is the quote, "If you want to fly, you've got to give up the shit that holds you down." Now, the power of that is that most of us want things, but we're not willing to give up something to get it. What I learned in college, it still serves me now, is what am I willing to sacrifice? Am I willing to sacrifice? And in college, for me, that wasn't a complicated life. There wasn't anything that I was willing to give up for the two things I wanted to excel in, academics and athletics. And so, once I realized that and really got it clear, then I could do it. So, so what happened to me? So, why did I become an A student when in high school I was a B student? Well, it's simple, because when everybody else on Friday and Saturday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday night was going to parties, I realized if I do everything, what everybody else is

• 1:29:42Speaker 03

  doing, I'm going to get the same results. If you want things that other people don't have, you've got to be willing to do the things other people don't do. And so, I said, "I'm going to go to the library for three or four hours. I'll still go to the party at 11 o'clock or 12 o'clock, but I'm going to do things that other people aren't doing, study. I'm going to learn little hacks. If the paper's due on the 7th, I'm going to find out who's grading my paper and give them a roughed quote, quote, rough draft at the first, but really the first, I gave my best effort. Like, this is the best thing I could put together here." And I found out that the TAs would say, I'd say, "Here's some of my ideas. Could you read this over, tell me if I'm on the right track?" And they would then tell me the pathway I needed to take to take that B paper to an A paper. I could go through all the things I did to come out of a Stanford and be qualified to get a Rhodes Scholarship.

• 1:30:26Speaker 03

  But what I'm saying to you, more importantly, going to this idea of activism, and I do this all the time, and especially because in politics, there are so many forces trying to erode your moral core. I look pointing to my chief of staff, because we just went through one of them on drug imports, where we got castigated publicly, we ended up getting to where we were in a place that With our values for the importation, for the rightful importation of drugs from Canada. But if I didn't know my moral core before that, I would have veered way off course. And so what I'm saying, what college did for me, it said, if you can focus in on what's important and cut everything else out and then find people who can teach you. And what I did there, and the joke I always say is like, on the football field, there was a guy named Jeff James,

• 1:31:07Speaker 03

  like this great wide receiver, and I studied him, he didn't know it, but I watched what he did. I mean, I literally would begin copying the way he dressed for to go out on the field. Like, his towel was a certain way. I watched, at the end, I used to go back and sulk that I was so low on the depth chart. But I started seeing that the superstars on our team, they were going to the gym when everybody else was going to the training table, transformed my body, made the California All-Strength Team by going in and doing all the extra work. In the classroom, what I did is I just looked at who were the smart people? And I saw smart people have better habits than me. They sit different places than I used to sit when I was in class. And so for anything you want to do in life, except for maybe being in politics, which I can talk to you about, it was harder for me then, I always look for a model. What are they doing right?

• 1:31:52Speaker 03

  What can I innovate upon that they're doing so that I can find a way to do it even better? And then, by the way, share with other people your results. Tell them about your story and so on and so forth. So, let's get back to activism right now. One thing I have to get off the shoulder, and I don't want to be a complainer, but I know, and I know your audience wonderfully, is you have Republicans that listen to you, Democrats who, this is a wonderful, one of the greatest podcasts in America, and I'm not just trying to blow your head up, because one of the few spaces in America where people from different political parties come to listen to the same guy. And that's great, that right now, and there might even be some Republicans listening right now that like, God, who's he got this week? A Democrat, I usually don't listen to, but it's Tim, I'll give this guy a shot, you know?

• 1:32:36Speaker 03

  So this is a wonderful space that right and left are listening to. But let's just take it from people on my side of the aisle who are so upset about Trump right now. And one of the things that bothers me right now is because what we don't understand is before Trump,

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  Right or left, why weren't we so disturbed before this about the injustices in our country? That super fund site in Newark, by the way, there's super funds in every single state in the nation. Ronald Reagan was one of the last presidents to reauthorize a cleanup mechanism for this. Mitch McConnell, the current leader of the Senate, voted for it. It was to take polluting industries into a teeny tiny tax, no difference, teeny tiny tax, to fund super sites. Well, we're now in a different era where, God bless Ronald Reagan, but a lot of things he did, we currently don't necessarily want to do. So that has lapsed and nobody's willing to reauthorize it. So what's happened to super funds in America? They've gone up. We have more super fund sites now. They're increasing. Can you, can you reiterate what a super fund?

• 1:33:34Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, these are sites that are so profoundly toxic and dangerous. Living around them is- And it's super fund? Super F U N D, because we created as Congress bipartisan, a fund to clean them up. We said, these are so toxic and dangerous that we are going to take special legislation to clean these up. God bless Reagan for reauthorizing it. God bless Mitch McConnell and others for voting for it. Now it's not, it's lapsed. When I got into Congress, this was a mission for me because New Jersey is the number one state in America for super fund sites, north to south, and they're overwhelmingly concentrated in poor areas. And now we have longitudinal data that we know that unfortunately, children who are born around super fund sites have significantly higher levels of birth defects and autism.

• 1:34:18Speaker 03

  So this is a threat to American children. And it's been going on. Why aren't people more activated about that? I'll give you one more example. And this is a, this is a controversial example because we all like our bacon. But, but, but North Carolina has nine million pigs. Why is that an important number? Pigs create 10 times the, the excrement that a human being does. So they've got the same population of pigs as New Jersey has people, but 10 times the excrement. What do you do with that excrement when you have that kind of factory farming? Well, you, New Jersey's waste, we put it in, human waste, we put it in waste treatment plants, da, da, da. It doesn't poison us. We don't get poisoned by our own crap. North Carolina, what they do is unfortunately, a lot of these pig farms are located in very

• 1:35:03Speaker 03

  poor areas, low-lying areas. And these people who live in those areas didn't invite this stuff in. One, I talked to a Vietnam War veteran, leaves his home to serve in the Vietnam, comes back and is one of these places. What they do is they put all the crap into a lagoons. I've now, just weeks ago, I went down to stand with these people and try to figure out how I can help them in these lagoons. And then they take the excrement and they spray it in the air over what they, what are empty fields. But the problem is, I watched, I stood there and watched as the mist from that stuff floats off the property of the, of the pig farmers. And by the way, the pig farmers, in many ways, don't even own the pigs. They get these pigs delivered by the larger corporations. They have to raise them

• 1:35:44Speaker 03

  for six months and they get picked up. The long story short, this community has horrific cases of cancers and respiratory diseases. They can't open their windows. They can't, they can't run their air conditioning. And every time they try to elect somebody that will represent them, the industry, the, one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington is big ag. These corporate farms, corporate folks will, will just put a lot of money behind people. They'll fight them. And I bring this example up because no human being could have gone where I went, right or left, sat with these people and see what they're enduring and their children are enduring, and not been outraged by it. So why all of a sudden, now that we have a new president, and I don't care if it was Obama or whatever, why have we lost our sense of urgency and our sense of outrage? And the last example

• 1:36:28Speaker 03

  I'll give you is a Chris Christie example. And I, I'm glad I said already, I talked to him a few weeks ago, if you can't find a way to be a friend with another American, I always say patriotism is love of country. You can't love your country unless you love your fellow countrymen and women. And our founders even understood this, a bunch of very different people, at the end of the Declaration of Independence, they, they call to future generations and say, in order to make this country work, we have to have an irrational commitment to one another that makes even, it's irrational, doesn't even make sense. We've got to mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes. And I love this last one, our sacred honor. So if you're one of those people who just because somebody says you're They're a liberal, you call them a libtard.

• 1:37:10Speaker 03

  And I see this is the stuff I read on, just because somebody says they're Republican, you call them a racist, whatever, whatever, whatever. Then you are not honoring our, the vision that, that, that this country was founded upon about that irrational commitment. Team of rivals, right? Yes. And so Governor Christie is, I use him as an example, and I apologize if he's a big listener to this, because I went to go vote in 2008 for, for Barack Obama in Newark, New Jersey, a majority black city. Let's just say he was a little popular in Newark. Lines around the polling places, I go vote there. The woman at the end of the line, I'm rolling deep, I'm the mayor of the city, I got officers next to me, I'm getting out of a fancy SUV. And the woman looks at me, as New Yorkers do, love my city, we keep it real. It's not like, hey, mayor, nice day. She just looks at me, the first thing she says, don't you think you're cutting in this

• 1:37:55Speaker 03

  line now? And I'm like, yes, ma'am. And I waited in this long line. One year later, it's a governor's race in New Jersey. I go to vote. Nobody's there. I walk right in and vote, hug the woman behind the table because she looks lonely. Then the, the results come out. Chris Christie narrowly wins that election. I look at the data. If, if just the cities in New Jersey had turned out a fraction of what they did a year before, and I always tell people, then people are complaining to me, again, I told you I'm mayor during the most difficult hand of cards. I got a Republican governor who is now cutting back on funding, again, New Jersey as a state had terrible problems, and he just said, I'm not gonna fund cities like I used to. So Trenton cuts off a third of their police department, I lay off 12%.

• 1:38:39Speaker 03

  Then we see the, the earned income tax credit, which is a way for working Americans making $30,000, $40,000 a year to get tax breaks. He ends that system, he pulls up, cuts funding to Planned Parenthood, which again, different people on this phone, on this recording might have different views on it, but for Newark, it was one of the best ways for people to get access to preventative care, prevent unplanned pregnancies. People are saying, why is Chris Christie doing this to us? And my response to them is, Chris Christie's not doing this to you. What's happening is, We didn't come out and vote.

• 1:39:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:08Speaker 03

  It is so, so what people don't understand, King said this, and again, nobody's evil here. But he said, the, the problem we'll have to repent for in our day and age is not the vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people.

• 1:39:20Tim Ferriss?

  So could I jump in for?

• 1:39:21Speaker 03

  Jump in, yeah.

• 1:39:22Tim Ferriss?

  All right, so if you were providing, say, a cheat sheet to people listening, maybe, and almost certainly people in the Carolinas who are thinking, my God, that's terrible to my backyard, I want to do something, but I fear, A, it's too overwhelming, B, I won't have an impact, C, maybe I could have an impact, but I don't have the time. If, if you were providing, aside from ensuring that you vote on the things that you claim are of importance to you, what else, if you, if you had a training school for super activists, what, what would some of the tenets be?

• 1:39:58Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, that's, that's the point I guess I was trying to make with some of my earlier comments to you, which is the same point over and over and over again. And it's this idea that Ms. Jones said, I was overwhelmed, I didn't know what to do. And she didn't prescribe things, she said, do something. And the problem is, we often let things feel so big, we allow our inability to do everything to undermine our determination to do something.

• 1:40:21Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:40:22Speaker 03

  And, and what people don't get is that you and I, and I know a little bit about your family history, and you just heard a bit about mine, what if that person in North Carolina, again, my father's home state, said, I can't do anything about segregation, I can't do anything about poverty, I can't do anything about the lack of education for black kids in this town, so it's terrible, somebody should do something about it. Instead, they said, you know what, this is one black kid named Carrie Booker, I'm going to give him a dollar to go to, to school. That act of love had a, had a, literally had a time, space jump that I am sitting here right now, because a small group of poor North Carolina folks in the mountains decided

• 1:41:06Speaker 03

  that I can't change the world, but I can do one thing for one kid. There's a United States senator where he is today because of those acts. And so not one action done in a righteous cause. And look at people who are hacking our politics. Money is one of the most toxic influences in our politics, but yet you just watched Bernie Sanders run a campaign where he didn't ask for one corporate dollar, not because somebody... He said, I only have $5 to give somebody. He said, you know what? I believe in that candidate. I'm going to give $5 to them. Well, all those small actions in the aggregate turned into a tidal wave of of action. So you and I, I don't know if you're like, but I get appeals for money a lot. And if I can't help, I at least let me give a dollar or $5 to show I care about this issue. And it's something important. And that's my hope for anybody listening.

• 1:41:51Speaker 03

  Don't, don't, uh, don't feel powerless ever. I mean, Alice Walker says the most common way people give up their power is believing they have none. We all are so much more powerful than we realize. And, and sometimes if we want to curse the world around us because it's not kind enough, or there's too much cynicism, nothing is going to change about this world unless we do first. And so if that might just be picking, that might just be doing the smallest thing. Like I just spent this week reading about Yemen. I mean, it is awful, god awful what's going on there. But I'm not, I can't get mad at other people for not knowing what's happening in Yemen. But if I say, you know, I'm going to do one thing on my Facebook page. I'm going to post a little bit more about the near famine going on in Yemen.

• 1:42:35Speaker 03

  And I'm going to give people one instruction of an action they can take. If we were all doing that about issues we care about, we would be influencing each other. And so that's what I'm just saying is, is, is I've learned in my life. Again, I got a little cut off, but if you're an activist or if you're a person, what is your life mission state? Why is that not clear? What do you stand for? I don't, I don't even telling people, I don't care if your mission is to go out and make a billion dollars. Are you getting up every single day and at least knowing what your mission is, what your values are and how you're going to fight the good fight as you know it? And are you living in allegiance to that? That's why I always say that civic gospel, you know? And that's why I always say, before you tell me about your religion, show it to me and how you treat other people.

• 1:43:17Speaker 03

  How are you living in accordance to those values that you hold, that you intellectually have? And, and, and be that kind of activist. Don't suddenly. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with suddenly waking up and saying, I reject what's going on, but try to be consistent in what you do, even if it's a small way.

• 1:43:35Tim Ferriss?

  And maybe, I know we're coming up on time in a little bit, but if we have a few more minutes, I mean, I was just going to reiterate and reinforce what you just said, and perhaps it's the word that scares people off activist or activism because it sounds like a full-time job. So if we were to maybe just say, call it being a good person as you define it in accordance with your values and so on, that you could look at it almost like behavioral change of any type. If I'm trying to get someone to change their diet, to take exercise as a new habit, I'm going to want them to do less than they think they can do so they can build momentum in doing very small things. So no, it's not going to be the gym for five days a week, an hour at a time. It's going to be five minutes in the gym twice a week.

• 1:44:20Tim Ferriss?

  Anything beyond that is bonus credit. Diet, great. Fix your breakfast. Everything else you can keep the same. So they build that momentum. And a challenge maybe that I would issue to people listening is if it seems too big, keep ratcheting it down until it seems easy, and then just make that your 30 minutes of being a good person for the week and put it in the calendar for a week from now. And that could be donating $5, $10 to a classroom of donors choose in the town where you grew up. It could be educating yourself for 15 minutes on, say, a site like Quest Bridge, which is another incredible educational nonprofit I'm involved with. Make it small enough so that it's not intimidating. So it's easy.

• 1:44:59Speaker 03

  And that's the gift you gave me back in 2009 when you told me about working out. And I think about you, and I don't mean, again, I feel like this is like I have a little fanboy moments with you, but there are days I can't work out and I say to myself, Tim told me, just raise your heart rate for 12 minutes. And so from my home, where I live in the Capitol, to the Senate office building is a little over a mile. And I don't have to sprint it. I'm telling everybody right now, it's embarrassing, but it's about 12-minute run for me. And I think about you and I'm saying like, look, I'm missing a workout because my chief of staff, closest friend jerk over here, doesn't schedule me time The workout. I'm like, at least I think of Tim. I said, at least I'm going to get 12 minutes in.

• 1:45:40Speaker 03

  And and I'm telling you right now, when it comes to being an activist, if you if it's as simple as this, I really believe that there should be more people being mentors in this world. And I can't be a mentor myself, but I'm going to, once a week on social media, post the link to Big Brothers and Big Sisters. Somebody, one of your circle of friends, if you have more than 100 followers, is one day, and if you post the data, you know, I love data about a one mentor in a kid's life dramatically changes their life outcomes. If one person in the next month that you do that, or two months that you do that once a week, or whatever, one person is a mentor, you've just helped to change somebody's life.

• 1:46:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18Speaker 03

  And so that's how much power you have. You don't even to give the $10 to to Big Brothers, Big Sisters. And so that's what I'm saying. If there's so much we could do that we just don't do because we don't understand. And with this power, you know, I'm holding up my smartphone right now, that we have to connect with people. I found this out as a political scientist, that that more powerful than one of my political ads trying to get somebody to do something is someone posting information to their friends. It affects behavior more than we know.

• 1:46:43Tim Ferriss?

  So just a few very quick closing questions. Because we could talk for hours and hours and hours, and maybe we'll be able to do a round two, because I know we have a lot of of listener questions, which some of which were really fantastic. And I apologize to people who are not going to get to delegating today. We will get to it some other time, hopefully. But what are some books that you have gifted the most to other people?

• 1:47:07Speaker 03

  So I have gifted your book a lot. And I shouldn't say it wasn't the four hour work week. The book of yours, or I'd gift anyone, was a Four Hour Body. I just thought that that there were so many great little hacks in there. Some of them rated R.

• 1:47:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, yes. It is not all family programming.

• 1:47:24Speaker 03

  No, it is not all family efficient, as I realized as I was handing to a teenager.

• 1:47:29Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's why it was taken out of coffee. It also is apparently it just printed in such a way that it flips open to some pretty explicit diagrams. So for those who enjoy adult recreation, also useful. But fair warning.

• 1:47:41Speaker 03

  But that is, and I'm not just, again, I shouldn't, maybe I shouldn't even waste my time saying, because most of these people probably The good folks who listen to you probably have already listened to that. So, look, I, I, I thought Just Mercy, this book written by one of the greatest American heroes that I know, a guy named Bryan Stevenson, who was a death penalty defender. And, and I try to consume as much as I can, so I do a lot of listening to books.

• 1:48:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:02Speaker 03

  And that was one of the biggest books that I handed out.

• 1:48:04Tim Ferriss?

  Just Mercy.

• 1:48:05Speaker 03

  Just Mercy back in, in 2015. It is a beautiful listen. And it's one of those books that, that is a really good story. And it takes you out of your, where you probably are and lets you look into a window of aspects of our, of our society that are really important. I'm trying to think of other books. I'm actually going to just open up my Audible. Oh, you know what a book I loved? A buddy of mine wrote this book. And just for guys who, and men and women, I should say, that want to just work out a lot. The book about living with a Navy SEAL. Do you know what book I'm talking about?

• 1:48:40Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I do know of the book and I'm blanking on the title.

• 1:48:45Speaker 03

  Living with a SEAL, that's what it is. And it's Jesse Itzler, who's just a, if you are a workout guy, and that was, it reminds you of things you already know, that you can push your body and yourself far further than you think.

• 1:48:55Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:56Speaker 03

  And it really was a moment, it was actually right, I think I listened to that around the time I was starting to battle back into shape from being the heaviest I ever was. And it was, it was a wonderful book. And he's going on to write,

• 1:49:08Speaker 03

  to write more books like that. I'm just going through some more of these that are not sort of, I listen to a lot of history and biography, so.

• 1:49:15Tim Ferriss?

  If you were to suggest people to start with one biography, if they've, if they'd like to get into biographies, but are not sure where to start.

• 1:49:25Speaker 03

  So I, I think the, I think Gandhi's autobiography is a profound read.

• 1:49:32Speaker 03

  I think that Parting the Waters is one of the best, Taylor Branch's Pulitzer Prize winning book. If you're an American, it's just a unbelievable story of our, of our country.

• 1:49:45Tim Ferriss?

  Question that you wish more people would ask themselves, or that you wish people would ask themselves more often? Any, any question that you wish people would ask more often?

• 1:49:55Speaker 03

  It's, it's productive for me to do a re-centering a lot. And, you know, I think I even brought this up to Matt, who's, again, my chief secretary, relating to about like, In this context, we were deciding whether to do an interview that is kind of a quirky request that we got. And it was so easy for me to fall back on, okay, well, wait, why am I here in the Senate? What is my mission? And so I do really think that's a really productive thing. If you have an hour just to sit with an open notebook and just say, what am I about? Or what do I stand for? Or what are my most important values? And if you actually can do that, and then actually have an honest conversation about, am I living in accordance to my highest values? What legacy do I want to leave? What

• 1:50:37Speaker 03

  energy do I want to leave on this universe? You know, I sat down with, and now I feel like I'm doing more name dropping, but a guy, a reviewer named Neil deGrasse Tyson. Neil deGrasse Tyson, brilliant guy. Brilliant guy. I hope you have him on the podcast someday. You should have him on. Neil, Neil, you should really come. People would really benefit from, talk about a guy who's nonpartisan. I mean, he's a guy that would give you that lecture about go where the science leads you, whether it's left or right. But he, because I've heard him talk in ways that ticks off, if you're ticking off both sides of the blue pile, you're probably doing pretty good. But he's, we had this conversation because I love, again, I love talking about things from a spiritual perspective. And, but I'm

• 1:51:18Speaker 03

  now finding that science and religion are really, the frontiers of science really are very spiritual. And so in astrophysics, I wanted to confirm this with me, because I was using it in like, major speeches, talking about, you know, stars are millions, if not hundreds of millions of light years away. That's what I wanted to confirm with him. And I had always heard that we're looking at stars at night that have disappeared, but because their light goes on in perpetuity, we see those stars as if they're there, but they're really gone. And so he confirmed all of that. And I said, well, that's powerful, that a being of energy could be gone millions of years ago, but we're still basking in its light, marveling at its glory, feeling its warmth. And I said, we are beings of energy

• 1:51:57Speaker 03

  too. And so this idea that the energy we give off while we're alive, this idea that it dissipates or dissipates, no, I'm sorry, I am basking in the warmth of those men on the beaches of Normandy, as my dad might say, I'm basking in the warmth. Warmth of those people who helped my family buy our first house. And you've got to see yourself as no good deed doesn't resonate. But the problem is we all shrink ourselves. Fear shrinks ourselves, bigotry, hatred shrinks ourselves negativity. But what makes us bigger and bolder is courage and kindness. And we get radiant when we live with those values. So what are your moral values? And, and are you living by your highest, most luminescent self?

• 1:52:41Speaker 03

  And what makes you and understand what your triggers are? When do you get small? When do you get petty and what have you? I think that kind of self work really helps you be more effective in, in, in living out your mission. But you know, and I this, if people get on, if I got in my car and didn't know where I was going, I would just waste energy, raise fuel and what have you. But if you have a, if you know like a laser beam where you're supposed to be headed, if you've taken the time to do that work, when the craziness of life, you can easily fall back. Okay, why am I here as a senator? Why am I here as an entrepreneur? What, what values am I trying to do? And I think we've lost that capitalism is a great example. As a guy who loves a free market, capitalism got lost when we were allowing people in a, in a very unfree market way to force their costs off on society.

• 1:53:25Speaker 03

  Like, most people don't realize that a person working at an IHOP in Newark is you are subsidizing that IHOP by giving that, because I have friends that work at IHOP that live in public housing. It's taxpayer subsidizing. It's, it's, it's outsourcing the costs of paying somebody a living wage to the rest of people in society. Most people don't understand that capitalism, if you really read Adam Smith, he, he has his moral sentiments. He really talks about the larger vision. This is again, and he's a Democrat, the head of AEI is a guy that talks about, we as Americans don't believe capitalism and free markets are the end. We believe it's a pathway to reaching the free market. And, and so what I'm saying is, is we remember why we have capital. And this is why I love people who get perverted in their corporate goals,

• 1:54:10Speaker 03

  where it's just about that quarterly report. Well, if you look at the first entrepreneur, some of the early entrepreneurs in America, they weren't looking at short term views of their company. We've allowed a lot of things to erode our moral compass and, and make us smaller and greater because we don't reset. What are we really about as a society? Why did we form as a nation? What are our guiding principles and, and live in more accordance to those?

• 1:54:32Tim Ferriss?

  Last question, do you have any ask of the audience, something you wish the people listening would do or think about? And where can people find you, say hello, learn more about what you are up to?

• 1:54:48Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, the easiest way to find me is if you have social media platforms is at Cory Booker, C O R Y B O O K E R, on any platform, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. And I try to do my best to live sort of my authenticity on those, on those positions, on those platforms. And I guess my request from people, which is tough today because I think that I do worry about the divisions in our nation. And, and if I'm worrying about something, I'm trying to do something myself to heal those. And that's why when I went to the Senate, I told my state, I'm not going down as a Democratic Senator, I'm going down as a Senator for our state. And I'm going to listen to Bill Bradley, who's one of my mentors, to try to do everything

• 1:55:30Speaker 03

  I can to create working relationships with my Senators. So if Republican Senators like Deb Fischer, who she and I have done such good work together, Senators like Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, done really good work together. Rand Paul, who's a guy people wouldn't imagine, but he and I have done really good work together. And I guess I'm saying that as a preamble to say this, it's a shame that in our society, we're creating divisions that are so deep between us that we fail to see each other or hear each other, back to how we started about non judgmentalism and leading with empathy, with a courageous empathy. And so my request for people is my first, one of my first mentors

• 1:56:13Speaker 03

  in Newark, this amazing tenant leader, led the longest rent strike in our city's history back in the seventies against, he won against the government, it was public housing. He led people in this amazing rent strike, this crotchety, you looked at him, he's, you know, he not dressed in fancy clothes. And, but I watched him at tenant meetings, he's, and you and I have both been in them, whether dorm meetings, whatever, everybody wants their moment and they speak for too long. But I watched this guy. Just look at everybody with these eyes that he was listening to you. And while I'm getting nudging and tired, he's still looking at people. And the irony of his sight was that he went blind. And yet, he would tease me every time I'd see him. I'd say, "Hey Frank, it's Corey." He's like, "I see you."

• 1:56:56Speaker 03

  Anyway, I want to end with my request to everyone. And, you know, and a foreshadowing of what I hope to share with some of the students who I'm going to speak to in a commencement speech in a couple of months. His last words to me were, I walk into his room, he's in hospice. And my ego, which I need to check, is upset. I'm like, this guy, tens of thousands of human beings had hot heat and hot water, or stayed in their homes. Why is he dying without crowds of people? I mean, this guy taught me that that significance is more important than celebrity, that purpose is more important than popularity. He lived a life of great purpose and great significance.

• 1:57:36Speaker 03

  And I'm, and I go into his hospice room after the nurses have told me that it's not going to be long. And he can barely talk and he's got, I don't, I hope many people have not heard, people towards the end of their lives. I saw this with my father and others, it's something, your breath gets really short. And, but yet, he was aware enough to know that I came in the room and I announced myself. And he forces out these words that used to be what he used to tease me. He goes, I say, "Hey Frank, it's Corey." And he's like, "I see you." And I sat time with him, hugged him, and kissed him on the forehead right before I left. And I said to him, "I love you Frank." And his last words to me were, "I love you." And, and I think about that, those, "I see you, I love you, I see you, I love you."

• 1:58:20Speaker 03

  We have lost our way in a, in a sense, in, in, in America, at least many of us, and maybe I'll duplicate myself, that we think the highest calling of this country is tolerance, that we are, we're a nation of tolerance, as if that's a good thing. But tolerance says, if you disappear off the face of the earth, if you're that person in the party and you just disappear, we'd be better off, you know? Or, "I wouldn't be worse off, because I was just tolerating you." But this country, as our founder said in the Declaration of Independence, pledging to each other in a rational commitment. This country says, "We, we were not called for tolerance, we're called for love." To move beyond tolerance to that, because love always sees worth, sees dignity, sees value in the other person and knows actually that if your kids do well, if your kids become an entrepreneur, or an artist, or a teacher,

• 1:59:04Speaker 03

  my kids are going to benefit from that. That is what makes a great society. And we cannot tolerate each other. We cannot tolerate divisions. We have to find ways to stitch this country together with love. And so my request to everybody listening is, you can be fervently against a Republican. You could be fervently against a Democrat. You could be fervently against those people who are marching in the streets, or what have you. My request is that we all try to, all of us, including me, starting with me, try to see each other, our humanity, our dignity, and try to love each other. I see you, I love you. And love demands a surrender of ego for a little while.

• 1:59:49Speaker 03

  It demands courageous empathy, as we've talked about. It demands a surrendering of your position. Not always, but for a moment, let me imagine what it's like to you. Love demands you learning about somebody else. Like, how can I really... I love my Irish-American colleagues, or my Jewish-American colleagues. Have I taken the time to learn about the Irish experience in America, which is one of the great stories of America? The Japanese-American experience? What a great story of America. Have I learned about you? So, you know, this idea, people always say, the biblical sense of knowing each other. But love, not Eros love, but love, Agape love, necessitates knowledge, knowing one another as well. And so I guess that's a long-winded way of saying,

• 2:00:34Speaker 03

  my request for all of us, for people that you think you disagree with, take time to see them and to feel in your heart, a love that Americans should feel to each other. Don't have to agree with each other, always like each other. But do you sincerely believe that patriotism obliges you to love Americans? And if it does, then really try to love, which is not a being verb, it's an active word. It necessitates us acting towards our neighbor with a certain level of commitment.

• 2:01:01Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's the perfect place to end. Corey, thank you so much.

• 2:01:06Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:01:06Tim Ferriss?

  For taking the time.

• 2:01:07Speaker 03

  No, I'm blown away that you would have me on.

• 2:01:09Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, well, it's great to see you again, and I hope that we don't go as long before the next time we see each other. So, thank you again. I really appreciate the entire team making the time.

• 2:01:19Speaker 03

  Thank you, and I'll say this one more time. You are one of the sources of inspiration in my life, and more than just inspiration, education. I've learned a lot from you as a guy. I see you as a peer, but in many ways, you are one of the teachers of my life, and I appreciate you, Professor Ferris.

• 2:01:34Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. Thank you, Corey. Well, you said you were a Padawan at one point earlier. I think you're definitely in that teacher role, and certainly in that leadership role. So, this is a conversation I hope we can continue. And for everybody listening, as always, you can find the show notes for this episode, links to all of the books, documentaries, and many other things mentioned at tim.blog/podcast. You can find links to these show notes for all other episodes there. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me?

• 2:02:15Tim Ferriss?

  Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So, if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com.

• 2:02:58Tim Ferriss?

  That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out, and just drop in your email, and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Fresh Books. Man, oh, man, do a lot of... Listeners of this podcast and readers of mine love FreshBooks. To the extent that I ended up meeting with the CEO not very long ago. Why are they so popular? Well, they are the number one cloud accounting software designed exclusively for self-employed professionals, that's many of you, and used by more than 10 million people. You can send invoices, track your time, and get paid very, very quickly, which suits the needs of a lot of freelancers, a lot of entrepreneurs, and beyond. You can take pictures of receipts. You can link your credit card and debit cards, so all the things you buy automatically appear

• 2:03:43Tim Ferriss?

  in your FreshBooks in the right category. So on and so forth. Makes taxes easy, makes invoices easy, makes your life easier. And also, in fact, I'd recommend a PDF. They didn't ask me to read this part, by the way. They put together a PDF a while back called "Breaking the Time Barrier", subtitle "How to Unlock Your True Earning Potential." So you can search for "Breaking the Time Barrier." A lot of people ask me, "How can I get a four-hour work week with a service business?" And the story in that ebook, it's PDF, is the short answer. It's really, really good. So I think you should also check that out. So "Breaking the Time Barrier," check it out. But also, why not test out FreshBooks? Claim your 30-day unrestricted free trial at freshbooks.com/tim

• 2:04:27Tim Ferriss?

  and enter TIMFERRIS, two R's and two S's, in the "How did you hear about us?" section. That sounds like we're gonna get very little tracking. That's a lot of work. But just go to freshbooks.com/tim and try it out, because it is a very good product, and I think you will find it simplifies your life. Enjoy. This episode is brought to you by ExoProtein. That's exo, like the exoskeleton in Aliens. And they make the only bars, meal replacement bars, or pre-workout bars in my case, that I have in my house. You can hear the crinkling of coconut, which I'm gonna get back to. They're making protein bars using cricket protein powder. And many of the CrossFit mutants and high performers out there are eating these.

• 2:05:10Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:05:54Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:06:37Tim Ferriss?

  And that's not an infomercial, "while supplies last." The last time they were on the podcast, this sold out in about a week. So, I recommend you check it out. They're a startup, very limited supplies. Go to exoprotein.com, E-X-O-P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com/tim, and you can be one of the first to try the future of protein. So check it out, exoprotein.com/tim.