Pod Save America - 2020: Cory Booker on radical love and the filibuster

Episode Date: March 20, 2019

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker joins Jon Favreau in studio for a conversation about his presidential campaign, what he learned about politics as Mayor of Newark, and how he intends to pass his agenda and fix our politics if he wins.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. On our special episode today, I sat down with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who is running for president. And we had a great conversation. We talked about his time as mayor of Newark and how that shaped his views on politics. We talked about his message of radical love and a revival of civic grace and how that squares with a Washington that is broken, a Republican Party that is radical, and how he expects to get things done as president. And we had a great conversation about that. So without further ado, here is my conversation with New Jersey Senator and 2020 contender, Cory Booker.

Senator and 2020 contender, Cory Booker. I am here with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who is running for president. Good to have you here. It's great to be with you, man. Thank you very much for taking some time with me. So after you announced last month, I watched Street Fight for the very first time. And for those who don't know, this is the documentary about your first run for mayor of Newark. Yeah. Nominated for an Oscar and then lost to March of the Penguins. That's, I would not have gone that way. Ignominious, I think. And so it's about your sort of narrow loss to Sharp James, who was the mayor of Newark at the time. And I have to say, I have never seen a nastier campaign run against anyone.

I mean, he said, you know, you weren't really black, you were accepting money from the... I mean, some of the things he said were just crazy. Intimidation, harassment. Thuggery, bullying by police. It was incredible. And I watched that, and my question after watching that was, how did you come from that experience and come in general from an experience where you have lived in an inner city for so long with so much pain as you talk about? And have a politics that's about civic grace and radical love. Because I think to myself, after running a campaign like that and having

a campaign like that run against me, I might be pretty angry all the time. I'm wondering how politics in Newark shaped your views. So Newark has been the best life experience I've had. I've lived there more years than I've lived anywhere and moved there when I was very young and still sort of shaping my whole view of the world. And you immediately get confronted with what exists everywhere from suburbs to farm towns is just the brokenness of life. And you meet these unbelievable people who have far more rights to be hateful than I might. You know, the tenant president of the projects I lived in for almost a decade, Ms. Virginia Jones, really one of the greatest heroes of my life. Tough as nails, five feet in a smidgen, but could intimidate you more than a used to that linebacker.

Her son was murdered in the lobby of the building I lived in. I would move into in the projects and you know, she never left. And she worked for the prosecutor. These were low income housing became public housing. And, um, she could have moved a lot of different places. And she taught me one of my best spiritual lessons that hope is the active conviction that despair won't have the last word. And when you see people in a point of utter brokenness, um, evidence, uh, a transformative love, like we saw when the other Emanuel shootings happened in South Carolina, to stand there and say through pain and hurt that I forgive you to this white supremacist. When you see people in my community who have had their

addiction treated with jail over and over and over again. And then they start a nonprofit just to focus on young people in their community. Newark is this town where every day when I'm home, just walking my block, and now I've decided to make reporters who want to do profiles on me to come to my neighborhood where people, neighborhoods that people ignore or don't want to focus on, to walk with me around my community, inevitably these incredible human beings will come out of their cars or I'll knock on doors and bring people in to meet families that speak to the kind of resiliency and fierce love. If people want to say love is soft and Namby, you know, sort of just sort of like, oh, this kumbaya sentiment. I think it's the most ferocious, tough, hard force there is. And it has

transformed Newark, New Jersey. How do you balance sort of the anger that people have at the system, right? There's so much anger. There's so much cynicism out there. And you hear a lot of people say like, I just, you know, someone needs to go blow up Washington, right? Someone needs to change everything with, you know, your view, right? That I think you believe you can absolutely work within the system and create partnerships and find cooperation. Like, how do you, how do you balance that? Well, there's two things. First of all, I just want to really focus on terms as I've learned to do in my days in Newark. Anger is a very good emotion.

And if you're not angry about what's going on in America, then you have some moral dislocation inside your spirit. You should be angry. And in fact, I worry that there's just not enough anger. It should not have taken Donald Trump to trigger the anger and the taking to the streets. Because in my neighborhood before Donald Trump, there was children that could find more easily find unleaded gasoline than unleaded water. In my neighborhood, the whole criminal justice system lost legitimacy when people see folks having a system, as Bryan Stevenson says, it treats you better if you're rich and guilty than poor and innocent. You want to be angry that you live around super fund sites like we do, where because of this

Grover Norquist no tax system, even though Ronald Reagan reauthorized it, Mitch McConnell voted on it back in the day, we didn't reauthorize that small tax on chemical companies. And so now super funds, which were going down, are now proliferating. And we now have longitudinal data that shows that in the United States of America, if you're born around a super fund site, I live around two, that your chance, and they're mostly around low-income communities, disproportionately minority communities, that your chance of being born with birth defects or autism go up about 20%. I mean, I can go through the things that well before Donald Trump that should have had us marching in the streets. But the other word you used is a word I don't like, is cynicism, which I think is just sort of surrender to what's going on. I can't do anything.

What I think American history is a perpetual testimony to the achievement of impossible things by people who didn't surrender to the seduction of cynicism, who said, screw Washington. I'm not going to wait for Strom Thurmond to come to the Senate floor and say, I've seen the light. It's time for those Negro people to have some rights. No. These were folks that said, I don't give a damn. Despair is not going to have the last word. Hate is not going to have the last word. I'm going to do extraordinary things for this country. And so for me- Are you worried that politics has become more cynical? Because it worries me. I hate cynicism too, but I worry that it's... I thought it was cynical when Obama ran in 07 and 08. I was like,

oh, there's a lot of cynicism out there. And now 10 years later, I'm like, ugh. But we're all responsible for that. I mean, this finger pointing, I mean, come on. I've campaigned for lots of presidents since I was a city council person getting called to campaign for lots of presidents. And I would show up in black communities and I would hear the same thing that we say when we see politicians suddenly come into our community, which is why we only see y'all around election time. And we wonder why we have 50% voter turnouts. And we think it's a great thing when it gets up to 60% because we're not speaking to people where they are. And we've seen the Democratic Party and

the Republican Party screw us. And so if you want to combat cynicism, we need to have more people that are speaking to the truth of the experiences that we're having out there. And so you said something that, Corey, you want to work within the system. I do, I have two sort of views of this. I do what I have to do to get shit done. And when I was mayor, I was unapologetic, whether it was with my children or with my communities. There were, I still remember the Trust for Public Land came to me and said, you're the most under-parked city in America. They were just like, you guys have no usable green spaces for your kids. And so my staff was making fun of me. They said, you will pimp a park anywhere you go. I was like, I will name a swing after you. And we

created the largest parks expansion in our city in a century. Now there's parks all over the city of Newark, from pocket parks to the largest city park we built, nine acres. And we did that because we were just unapologetic working within the system. But I also knew that we had to change the freaking paradigm where Newark was literally the butt of jokes on national TV. And if I couldn't change the whole system and get people to reawaken a moral imagination about urban places, then we, it wasn't just working within a broken system, which I will do, but it's about changing people's view, which is the same way I view this election right now. If this election is just about one office and one guy, and everybody thinks we did it, we got rid of Trump, and we go right back to doing the stuff that we were doing in those 2013,

2012, 2010. We're not going to be okay. We're not only not going to be okay, but those things I listed before, environmental injustice, economic injustice, criminal injustice, we'll still be doing something. We have to figure out a way to expand the moral consciousness. And it's the same thing in the rural areas. I've started my campaign in the States going to the rural areas. You know, we see an existential crisis in this country when our suicide rates, opioid addiction, or having a life expectancy go – life expectancy is going down for all Americans. It's going down for white men. The farmer suicide rate is as high as it's been since the Great Depression. The vast disappearance of the independent family farm.

Carolina in a black community where they're dealing with one of the most horrific environmental injustices I've ever seen in, in, in Duplin County, where you have these massive CAFOs and corporate agriculture, and, and, and they take these massive lagoons of pig shit and they spray it over fields that happened to be in black communities. I could take you down there and show you the stuff misting into neighborhoods where people crowded into a room to tell me that they can't open their windows, they can't run their air conditioning, they have respiratory diseases, cancers. But those farmers there, they're contract farmers. They're one step short of being sharecroppers because these corporations, Smithfield, one of the biggest ones, now an international conglomerate, Chinese-owned company, has put the farmers in a situation where

they're so deeply in debt, they're just struggling to stay ahead, and they're trapped in a broken system. And so one of the things that's happened in America, in this slice and divide culture we have, is it the urban voter or is it the rural voter? Is it the factory? We talk in ways that slice and divide our country, and we are forgetting that that's the systems now, the suffering of that contract farmer or the rural African-American person is directly connected to a broken system that why my folks who work full-time jobs and catch extra shifts and still go to my corner bodega and use food stamps and find a Twinkie product cheaper than an apple. and find a Twinkie product cheaper than an Apple. We are all caught in the same broken system. And it's the fact that we have the delusion of separateness, the dangerous delusion that we are separate from each other, that is undermining our whole civic space and our ability to solve problems.

And so what I'm telling people in this election is, not only as a guy who went through a street fight, not only do we need to beat Donald Trump, but the way to beat Donald Trump is not to do Trump-like tactics. The incredible youth, the young people that marched against Bull Connor in May of 1963 in Birmingham, they didn't bring their own fire hoses and their own dogs. They called to the moral consciousness of a country. They got folk woke so that after their very first protest, thousands of people, suddenly celebrities and incredible Dick Gregory, Joan Baez, everybody was running down to Birmingham and segregation fell within days. They were able to awaken the moral conscience of this country because one of the biggest things I worry about in America is our tolerance. We preach tolerance in America. We're a tolerant nation. Go home tonight and tell somebody you live with that you tolerate them. And to me,

I think the problem is tolerance. Number one, it is a cynical aspiration to be a tolerant country, but I'm more concerned about the fact that we've grown too tolerant with the suffering of our neighbors thinking that that somehow is not affecting directly your life. And so for me, if this election is just about Donald Trump, fine. I want to beat him. If I'm president on the first day with my pen, I'll restore the transgender military service. I'll go back to some of the things he's done, mercury rules, methane rules. I can do a lot as your chief executive, but I'm not running just for that. I'm running to wake up

the moral consciousness of our country to confront injustices and understand that the only way we've ever solved mass injustice in this country, from the workers' rights movement, taking people from sweatshops and child labor

to workers' rights and public education, which both are being eroded right now, all the way to the civil rights movement. All of those things had to be done by creating broader coalitions of people, Republican and Democrat. I'm literally sitting before you right now because a Republican town in New Jersey, when my parents in 1969, I was just a baby, were denied housing because of the color of our skin. They were kept being told by real estate agents that our homes were sold. It was this coalition of folks, black folks, white folks, Christians, Jews, Republicans, and Democrats that didn't think, okay, we can't solve the, they didn't surrender to the cynicism of housing discrimination in America.

They did some extraordinary stuff. They literally did a sting operation. A white couple bid on the house after my parents were told it was sold. They literally did a sting operation. A white couple bid on the house after my parents were told it was sold. They set up a closing. On the closing, the white couple didn't show up. My dad did and a lawyer who ends up getting, literally my father, him walked in and the real estate agent gets up and punches my dad's lawyer in the face, sticks a dog on my dad. And so you have to understand growing up as I did too, two civil rights activist parents who were rough on me.

They're like, boy, don't walk around this house like you hit a triple. You were born on third base. I did what my parents told me to. I got all these degrees from various schools. And my dad's like, boy, you got more degrees in the month of July, but you ain't hot. Life ain't about the degrees you get. It's about the service you give. And you owe a debt in this country.

And that's why I moved to Newark, New Jersey. And the very first thing I started doing was housing rights, housing organizing, taking on slumlords that the cynics said, you can't beat this guy. They had connections to City Hall. They were powerful guys. Well, we organize folks. And that's where strength comes from. And we've lost that in America right now, where people are suffering and hurting and feeling like they're isolated. People, whether they're suffering with addiction or mental health, suffering like they're isolated. People, whether they're suffering with addiction or mental health, suffering because they're a mom of a special needs kid that is barely holding on because they can't afford childcare and they're working two jobs and they can't afford housing. But we're not separated. We're not suffering alone. There is mass suffering going on in our

society right now, but we're failing to see that we're in this together. And this election is not about waking us up to that common cause. I sat in a diner in Iowa with a guy with a Make America Great Again shirt on. And at first I got the same bullheaded hitting, but I sat next to him and talked for a little while and spoke to his pain. And by the end, he was hugging me. If we can't start breaking through these lines that divide us and affirm the common bond, I think we're going to be stuck in a broken politics for a long time. I think the next five years of our politics in America is going to determine the next 50 years of our politics. And we've got to change course. So there's part of me that thinks there is, change course. So there's part of me that thinks there is, you know, a difference between trying to reach out to Republican voters, disaffected Republicans, campaigning everywhere, talking

to everyone, which I deeply believe in. There's a difference between that and sort of the official Republican party in Washington. Thank you for saying, thank you for adding that. Yeah. Because I think when we use lazy labels and just say Republicans, well, now you're roping in a whole bunch of people. No, and I never, yeah. Yeah, they get defensive. Then they lock into their tribe. Right. Yes.

So you proposed some really bold, ambitious policies. Medicare for All, Green New Deal, baby bonds, job guarantee, really great policies. Have you guys explained baby bonds? Because I'm really proud of that. You do it because you should. We've talked about it a little bit before, but you should. So we have persistent inequality in this country. And my team has been looking for levers that can do that.

And we believe in expanding EITC. I can go to a lot of policies. But one of the things that bothers me most about this country is not the persistent wealth gap, which is a problem, but the persistent racial wealth gap. And we have cities in America like Boston where the average white family's wealth is about $280,000. The average black family's wealth is $8. I mean, we are – my father said this to me painfully. He died six days before I was elected to the United States Senate. Most hopeful man I've ever met.

He was born poor in the deep south, segregated community to a single mom who couldn't take care of him. And he comes so far and he said to me, I fear that I've gone to a point in this country where a kid born like me and 70 percent of my kids are born like my dad. Poor to a single mom in a segregated community. New Jersey is, I think, about the fifth most segregated state in the nation because of our very racist laws going into the 1970s that tried to stop black families like me moving into white communities. And he moaned, said a kid born like me would be better off being born in 1936 than today. Now, I'm a data guy. So when I was married, so I was saying, God, we trust, but everybody else bring me data to show me the

numbers. On a lot of indices, my dad's right. And one of them is the fact that the wealth gap was closing between blacks and whites, but now it's back to where it was around the time I was born. So baby bonds basically says that every child born in this country should have a stake in this economy. And wealth is important. People who live paycheck to paycheck know that, that they don't have any wealth to fall back on for emergency or to invest in the kind of things that deepen wealth. Now, black communities were denied programs that people brag about as pathways to the middle class, from GI Bill to Social Security was written in a way to exclude professions where blacks. There's a lot of things that help people sort of build wealth. FHA loans and the like were denied. African-Americans are one of the reasons why we have persistent wealth inequalities today.

And so this would help put a deposit in every child who would get an account, a baby bond. And every year, depending on your wealth of your family, like the EITC measures, you would get up to the youngest kids would get up the poor kids from the lowest income families we get up to $50,000 by the time they're 18 to do things that build generational wealth to start a business to go to college to buy a home and it's one of those levers Archimedes I guess said something like give me the right lever I can change the world this is for those of us who want to see persistent racial inequality addressed in this country it's one of those things that would do that plus for for low income families in general, it would give them a stake and a leg up. Do you see any Republican senators who are in the Senate right now who would give you a vote

for baby bonds, a vote for Green New Deal, vote for Medicare for all, vote for job guarantee? Say you're president, you've got a Democratic House, you've got a narrowly elected, hopefully Democratic Senate. Do you see any Republican senators that would join on the big priorities? I know on some of the small stuff they probably would. Yeah, but John, I see you, I know you're an evangelist

for things like getting rid of- You know where I'm getting. I know exactly where you're going. I can see it a mile away. And so let's just confront this because I may have listened to your podcast one or twice and heard my name evoked as a symbol of the obstruction in the Democratic Party. I am an Obama guy through and through.

You know that. And I am always attracted to like positivity, unifying politicians. I feel like the Republican Party over the last decade has radicalized me a little bit. But it's not radical. And you and I both know the origins of our Senate were not with the filibuster rule. So people should know their history. And so this is what I say to folks like you and a lot of my friends who come to me and had good conversations since I announced my candidacy and got a surprise question about the filibuster in my first moments of being a candidate. I was sort of like, okay, filibuster rule.

Let me tell you what I think. Look, I understand that the erosion of the Senate already has allowed this party to do awful things, Trump tax cut, for example. Right. And if I was president, I want people to know very tactically, let's talk tactics, I will use reconciliation to roll back the Trump tax credits and do the kind of things that I think to have a tax system that reflects our values, our morals, and frankly, is better for our economy. You know, giving a hedge fund

guy to be able to pay lower percentage of his salary in taxes than a teacher doesn't reflect our values, nor does it reflect what's best for our economy. And so when you talk about changing the filibuster rule, I understand that we are heading, right now, we are heading that way. To people on both sides, we are heading that way. You hear Trump calling for the end of the filibuster rule all the time. And I understand that if I am the commander in chief, the president of the United States, fighting a tactical battle, that that is something that we are moving towards. But understand my perspective on this, which comes from decades of living in one of the most vulnerable communities in the country. And if Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Donald Trump for the last two years had complete sway, they wouldn't have just changed policy, which is nice.

They would have hurt people in my community. Literally doing policies that could cause people's death. When we had a Republican governor in the state of New Jersey, just something like attacking Planned Parenthood for women in my community who rely on that Planned Parenthood for their health care. Planned Parenthood had to close end hours, close options. I mean, I know that these policies that people debate, I love when people of privilege say, it doesn't make a difference if I vote or not. I say, come to my neighborhood and see if the outcomes of elections don't make a difference. And to give those three men absolute power to do anything they want, having lived my life as a minority, I like minority rights. And so I will balance that against – and I know because I've had this conversation.

You fire a lot of people up on your podcast who come to me and make very – no, but make very practical arguments. So I'm going to tell you that for me, that door is not closed. me, that door is not closed. But I am also going to tell you that if we can't change the larger civic spaces of our country, like they did in the labor movement, like they did in the civil rights movement, where the consciousness of our country changed, if we don't see this as an opportunity to swing the pendulum from Twitter, trash talking, trolling, hateful politics, where it's just about destroying the other. If we can't get back to a understanding, and by the way, you're talking about reaching out to disaffected Republicans, using that term broadly.

I've sat with labor leaders. Half of their base literally will say to me, half of my base voted for the party that wants to destroy Davis-Bacon, that wants to make every state a right-to-work state. That's not a big leap to get a person who identifies a Republican, just the base of our party, the labor base, we're losing them. So I don't think that we are that far away from in these next five years of America to having a revival of civic grace and having a more courageous empathy that understands that the farmer, the factory worker, the inner city mom working two jobs have common cause again. And in the same way that this brilliant marketer, I mean, he put the best carnival barkers to shame with the way he has branded and campaigned and spoken to folks.

If we can't have a commander-in-chief that understands, like I had to as a mayor, that it's not just about my tactical decisions with my city council, but I've got to change the entire perception of my city and urban issues and attract institutional capital back to my city that wouldn't even invest in Newark. To take companies, when I started talking about ending food deserts by bringing supermarkets back into the neighborhood, I'm not joking. I went to a supermarket convention and they laughed at me. I had to change the larger sentiments around Newark. And right now in America, I will join you, John. Should I be president of the United States? Come back to the White House. I'm not joking. I'm serious. Come back to the White House. Help me with the tactician. Help me to figure out what we have to change to get things done. But join me in the larger cause of our country because you and I,

before you know it, my days in politics will be over. Look, when I'm Trump's age, it'll be between 2040, 2050. What will America look like by 2050 if we don't change our politics, sincerely, with where we're going? No, that's, look, that's my whole issue. And so my whole issue is not just changing the things that are happening in the Senate that have allowed for these right-wing judges to be done. They got rid of the filibuster rule in the Senate. They got rid of the blue slip process. I know I'm talking technically, but as a Judiciary Committee member,

senators no longer have a say. They literally are sitting as a circuit court judge that Menendez and I were not even allowed to meet with from New Jersey. My question is, I think you would agree that sometimes the media is like, oh, if only Republicans and Democrats in Washington would – By the way, call out the media.

Right. Well, that's a whole – I mean, no, it's not. It is. And don't call them the enemy of the people. Right, right. But I watch what they give oxygen to. Right.

They're giving – Van Jones once told me this story that they had in Crossfire, they had this idea, at the end they're going to do Ceasefire and talk about where they agree. I'm sure that didn't fly us. It did not fly on CNN because the people who took over the show, Vandos told me, the people that took over the show afterwards, the producers,

you know you want to end on a high in audiences and they had that seamless transition where one host talks to the next host so that you don't lose audience. They were ticked off because the Ceasefire segments went way down in terms of ratings. This is probably what I'm talking about. Like, I don't think this is an issue of personalities, right?

Like, if only Obama had more drinks with Mitch McConnell, things would have been. There are clearly incentive structures for Republican politicians that we need to change right now. One of those is the media, right? There's a conservative media machine that incents them. There's no false equivalency here at all because it's far worse on their side of the aisle. But there are incentive structures on our side as well. There are, but they feel,

they right now, Republican politicians, feel more afraid of a primary challenge than they do a general election challenge. And part of that's because of gerrymandering. When primary became a verb, the Republican Party changed dramatically. And I'm wondering how we change the incentive structure for the Republican Party.

I remember Obama always used to say to me during the 2012 election, if we win this election, the fever will break in Washington. Finally, the fever will break. The fever did not break. And it has not broken. And I'm going to tell you again, all I know is about being a grassroots organizer. I beat the machine in Newark through grassroots organizing. Texas is a blue state. It's not voting that way yet because we haven't built a state

party. I was shocked in Iowa and New Hampshire, I'm not the best fundraiser in the world, but that I led outside candidates raising money in those two states. And they were incredibly appreciative. Well, dear God, you don't think that the issues we're talking about right now in Iowa, where they haven't just assaulted Davis-Bacon, they found a loophole. They literally were pushing a law that says if you file a workman compensation claim and you lose the claim, then you can be held criminally liable. I mean, the stuff they're doing to public education on that, and I was having honest talk with the folks when I was in Iowa this last week, that we can get a president, but if you don't change your legislature, if you don't build most of these issues we're talking about, I can do some things

about public education when I'm a president. I can fully fund special needs education. I can create a tax relief for teachers who reach in their own pockets and give money, as I see in Newark all the time, thousands of dollars, hundreds of dollars for their kids. I can forgive loans for people who are willing to teach in rural areas, urban areas. I can do a lot of that. But fundamentally, there's an assault going on in public education in your state that only can be stopped by electing folks. I believe fundamentally, and maybe I'm wrong, but I'm willing to, if I'm president of the United States, this is where I'm starting. There are all these people that want to support a new president. I'm going to tell folks, what we need to do is create a 50-state organizing strategy to start preparing

for 2022, when people like Mikey Sherrill and all these other folks are going to have their back against the wall that shouldn't if we organize, because I've seen this in the response to Trump. The response to Trump has been, hey, let's organize. I met with this amazing table of women leaders in my state, and there were women I've known for a long time, heads of organizations like NOW, and then there was these young millennial women who had thousands of people in New Jersey organized on their Facebook page who openly admit some of them to me as I meet them around the country that I wasn't that engaged or involved before Donald Trump. And if we don't sustain that kind of organizing, we could turn Texas, heck, I think

we could turn Texas in 2020, but definitely in 2022, just by organizing people. You go to communities like Newark or Wayne County, where Detroit is, or Philly, and really engage with African-American community. I'm talking in the way we do in Newark when we were organizing elections, talking to their issues, actually connecting them to the policies that can help our communities. You are going to get African-American turnout to go up in midterm elections. And so I understand a lot of what you're saying is because we look at the way things have gone in the past. But one of the things I hated most when I was mayor of the city of Newark is people would tell me, you can't do something because we tried this and it didn't work. Or this is the way we've always done it and it's never worked.

It takes new approaches, creative thinking to create real transformations. And forgive me for going on, but I just want to just give you this example of we're the internet generation. We have tools our parents never had. I was sitting at home watching The Tonight Show when Conan O'Brien was on it. And he did what ticks me off the most is when people kick communities that are already down. And he said, I hear Newark, New Jersey has this new health care program. I was really proud. I was able to drive prescription drug costs down in my city in a community and get people into primary care, which is really good for health and driving down health care costs.

And it got a little national attention. And here comes Conan O'Brien in his monologue. And he says, I hear Newark, New Jersey has this great new health care program. Well, I think the best new health care program for the city of Newark is a bus ticket out of town. I'm the mayor of the city sitting there watching TV, hanging out with my two best friends, Ben and Jerry, and just lost it. But you know what I did? Because this is the reputation of Newark. It's a laugh line. People were cracking up. I hear it about Cincinnati. I hear it about Detroit. I hear it about places where dark and black and brown people live all the effing time, and it pisses me off. But you know what? I'm different.

A generation ago, or not even five years before that, the best angry mayor could have done, and my mayors did that. My previous mayors in Newark did that. Write an angry letter to the network and interns in turn would read it. Or they can call a press conference and only channel 72,

the Bulgarian channel, would show up. But we live in a different era. I went to my office and I sat there behind my desk and I used some humor and I used some straight. I said, look, this is Newark, New Jersey. We are a great city. Bragged about my city. And Conan O'Brien, I'm banning you from Newark's airport. I said, you're on the no-fly list. Try JFK, buddy. And guess what happened? That video went viral. Before I knew it, I'm getting earned media like I never got before. And he plays right

into my hands. He doesn't apologize. He bans me from Burbank Airport. And here we are in LA, and you know that I'm an LAX guy. That's no big deal. But we started this fight that I was getting media like, suddenly, I'm calling supermarket companies, and they've heard about this stuff, and they're answering my call. I'm getting the big banks to talk to me now about investing in a city they ignored because capital in this country is so damn lazy. Five metropolitan areas get the overwhelming majority of investment. By the end of the fight, this kerfuffle that became a national story, as I'm going on Larry King and shows it never going on before, he invites me on his show.

He apologizes and gives $100,000 to Newark Charities. So I'm just saying that as an example of we are a different generation. I sometimes imagine if the civil rights generation had the kind of organizing tools that we have. We've had presidents now from, even Barack is older than I am. We've had presidents now from, you know, even Barack is older than I am. You know, we've had folks from different generations. Our generation can't concede that we are going to be a nation where people with common interests and common pain are cut up and divided. And so I will, I'm not joking about this. If I'm president, John, you're going to be like, that Booker guy is calling me up to help me with tacticians. Of course.

But my challenge to you is going to be, let's use podcasts like this to call shit out. Look at the House bill they just passed that got lost in all the things the media wanted to cover. HR1. HR1. Yeah. Do you know what the polls say about that?

Very popular. Amongst Republicans. Well, but what got me, probably the worst moment of the Obama years for me, or the most frustrating moment, is a background check bill with 90% support in the public, sponsored by conservative Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. And Joe Manchin, no one's idea of a liberal, goes down a couple months after a school shooting. And I was like, if we can't pass something that's that popular among Democrats and independents and Republicans that has bipartisan support, what is happening? Where do we go from there? How do we change that system? Okay, but you understand you're saying this in the context of a guy who grew up with stories about how many freaking times they tried to get civil rights legislation passed.

Yeah. And did anybody say, we tried once and it failed, and so let's not try voting rights or civil rights or Fair Housing Act. They kept fighting and building consensus. And even with the Senate filibuster. Do you worry that our generation is more impatient? I feel like technology has made us a little more impatient.

Impatience is good. We do this all the time. Impatience is good. Cynicism is bad all the time, you know? And it's like, yeah, but... Impatience is good. Cynicism is bad. Anger is good. Okay? Hate is bad. There are differences.

What I'm worried about is that people get disappointed when change doesn't happen fast enough. And then they turn away. And I'm always trying to say to people, like, yeah, it takes a long time. Yeah, yeah. Look, I... You know, Democrats didn't do anything. They failed me, too. And you're like, well, yeah.

But let me tell you my favorite cynical moment. My favorite cynical moment I had recently is, and this is the politics of our, and you know the professional politics. So I'm running for, I'm now running from a urban city. Okay. I'm, and most people don't know this. I'm the fourth popularly elected black guy. Yeah. Black person in the United States history.

Number three was Obama. Number two was Carol Moseley Braun. Number one was Edmund, Edward Brooke. Yeah, right. And so it. And so there hasn't been that many black people in the Senate. And so you get these professionals that come to you and say, well, don't talk about these. You're talking about criminal justice reform everywhere you go. And almost like they're trying to imply to you that this is an issue that's only affecting black people, which, by the way, if you are living in a country that's watched your infrastructure crumble, except for in one area, I was in Poland, and a Polish peer of mine as a senator was telling me, and this was one of those moments I had to control my tight end instincts

and not create an international incident, who was bragging to me about their mass transit or whatever he was talking about, and you Americans, we built out the best infrastructure in all of humanity. While our bridges, tunnels, no broadband, China's building 18,000 miles of high-speed rail, but what we were building out was prisons and jails. Prisons and jails. We were building a new prison or jail in America every 10 days from the time I was in law school to the time I was mayor of the city of Newark. And so here they're telling me, because I'm now running in a state that's overwhelmingly white.

Blacks are 12%, 13%. And they're like, don't talk. We polled the state. Don't talk about criminal justice reform. It's not one of the top two or three issues. You need to talk about X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, leaders don't follow consensus. Real leaders mold consensus. So everywhere I went, from synagogues to wealthy suburbs, Republican communities, Democrat communities, I wanted people to know why this is breaking. So I get to Washington, and then people want to give me a reality check. Well, you can't pass comprehensive criminal justice reform. You can't do it. And I said, OK, this is a challenge to me not to surrender to cynicism. I still remember, and maybe I'm telling you too much, but I knew Chuck Grassley was key,

and I'm like, how can I find some common ground with a guy that I can write a dissertation on my disagreements with? So one day, you know how they're this, like you get to preside over the Senate. Really, it's the most junior guys, but I'm literally sitting there at the Senate. And by the way, it is like one of these things

that will blow your mind if you're a geek, because they have like the gavel that was used from like the 1700s that's still there. You could open it open it up. I'm trying to get some DNA on that thing. Anyway, and I'm watching Chuck Grassley come to the floor. And I've watched him give speeches now that just rankle me. And he starts talking about wind tax credits. And I'm like, wait a minute, common ground. And I go up to him and go, Mr. Grassley, sir, the older senators often tell me, call me by my first name. And I'm like, you are literally, I was watching you like in high school. And we started talking. I go to his office and I said, help me understand why you go to the Senate floor and talk about longer sentences and not short. And it took me years

from with the heroic leadership of Dick Durbin and me trying to be his mini me and running around building consensus and fighting to get things that were really important to me. Like we do things, we're doing things right now, as you and I are sitting here, there are children who haven't even been convicted of things that are in solitary confinement right now, which, which, which psychological professionals call torture. Right. And get this bill with my priorities in there, and we get it done. We get it passed. So what I'm telling you is that that's too slow for me

because it's just, as the act's called, it's a first step. But I tell you, I brought a guy to the State of the Union, Mr. Douglas, who had a life sentence for crack cocaine weighing less than baseball, a life sentence. We liberated thousands of people with that piece of legislation during an era of Willie Horton, where people are getting out of jail. In an era of Willie Horton, we got it done. And so don't tell me that we can't collectively. We've got the best, on our party, the best branding experts

are using them for materialism and corporatism and everything. But don't tell me with the young people I'm meeting out there who are not taking that vote that you talked about that failed in the Senate. You talk to these folks coming out of Parkland and communities like mine who are determined to pass

common sense gun safety. I just believe we can get things done, especially if we can get more folk woke, that they are living in a nation that brags about being the wealthiest country on the planet Earth but has a declining life expectancy, that used to have the best infrastructure on the planet Earth and in the span of one generation trashed that house they inherited from their parents and handing it over. When I talk to groups like this, everybody agrees. I'm not joking. I mean, there may be that 5%, 10% that we can't ever get to.

And so what is our politics going to be? And that's why I'll die on this hill in this presidential campaign. I literally will. Maybe some people are going to want folks to fight fire with fire. I ran a fire department. It's not a really good strategy. I'm going to die on this hill because I want this to be more than about just one guy in one office because my communities were suffering before this guy got elected. And so were factory towns, and so were farm farm towns and so were people that were easily angry and then felt some appeal with some guy that wanted to blame it on Mexicans and Muslims and others. And lied to people about trade because he's not doing anything about it.

Lied to people about Medicare that he just put a budget in that cuts. We can reach back out and get those people together and awaken that worker. And by the way, I cannot stand how we're going to get off to working people. That's not people in my community in Newark. But we can get workers to see common cause. We can get people in different areas of our nation to see common cause. And that's what I want this election to be about again. And by the way, I'm betting you, and I hope to have the chance to prove this, to be the guy that gets to run against Trump, the person that gets to run against Trump.

I bet you that not only is this a strategy that this country needs, I think it's actually the best tactical strategy to beat a bully. Watch Street Fight. I'll show you how that strategy, the strategy of dignity and grace can actually win in the toughest of politics. What I thought about this interview after in the wake of New Zealand and that shooting, because you have this very powerful message of radical love. Like, what do you do as president about rising white

nationalism and xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism? You know, I'm just, how do you, how do you fight that? Because obviously, you know, that has been fueled by Donald Trump, but I know you would agree that's been around far before Donald Trump. And it's been a problem before then. What can you actually do as president about that? So first of all, let's again understand that. And this is why I think it's good to go back and read from the era of which I sprang forth. I'm the child of the civil rights generation.

You know, there's some great books written about King's radicalism. We've created this, as Cornel West says, the Santa Clausification of King. He was a really radical guy who died with 60% disapproval ratings. And I love what he used to say about love. He used to say, you can't legislate someone to love me. And that's why I need you to put some things

in place to protect me. That's why I was so proud that Tim Scott, Kamala Harris, and I were able to push forward an anti-lynching bill through the Senate after hundreds of times trying. And so the first thing a president has got to do is protect people. In the LGBTQ community, we have about 30% of our children reporting not going to school because of fear. We have a Department of Education, and this is one of the reasons I fought so hard against Betsy DeVos, that I knew she was going to trash the Civil Rights Division of the department, literally doing the things to protect from her policies, turning their back on the epidemic of sexual

assault in college campuses, to turning her back on LGBTQ rights and the rights of black and brown vulnerable kids. This is why, as president, not only from the Department of Education Civil Rights Division to the Department of Justice that should be investigating these white supremacist groups that the president of the United States can't even admit that there's rising hate and rising anti-Semitism and rising Islamophobia in this country. And so you have to be a president that speaks to the problems. We have had, since 9-11, I think around 80-ish terrorist attacks on our country. The majority of them have been homegrown right-wing extremist groups.

The majority of those have been white supremacists. For all the billions and billions of dollars we're spending to protect Americans from quote-unquote terrorism, we need to focus on domestic terrorism. to protect Americans from quote-unquote terrorism. We need to focus on domestic terrorism. Would you make sure that you appointed an attorney general who would go after white nationalism? Would you try to increase funding to make sure that we are investigating? So you know Trump has cut funding to investigate white nationalist groups at a time that the violence coming out of these white nationalist groups.

So yeah, I would. And as a lawyer, again, who came up because of the protections that were given by the DOJ. We need to have a Department of Justice that is dealing with violence and crime, including police shootings, which you have big city police chiefs talking about needing to create greater senses of accountability for law enforcement. The Department of Justice could be doing so much to create safety and securities in communities and to restore confidence in the criminal justice system that we are fairly pursuing injustice wherever it exists. We spent a lot of the past month talking about anti-Semitism. And one of the issues raised in the many debates we've had

is really a foreign policy issue. Should Democrats be more willing to call out the Israeli government when there is a prime minister who's made it his policy that there will not be a Palestinian state as long as he is in power? So the short answer is yes. If you're – I don't – whatever the country is, we should have the courage to speak with a moral voice. I often worry that Israel gets a treatment that is not applied to other countries that are, this is why I will never support the BDS movement because I think it is, call out their actions when they're doing things.

But dear God, you're living in a neighborhood where nobody's calling for China, a boycott movement for China, which is doing things to the Uyghurs. I can go through them. But the erosion of the ability for us to even get to a two-state solution is the erosion of a bipartisan consensus we've had in this country for a long time, for a long time. This idea that we should have self-determinations of people, that both Palestinians and Israelis should have their own country and be able to have self-determination. And so on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I have fought against Trump's

administration's efforts to pull back humanitarian support from the Palestinian communities. I've gone to the West Bank. I've seen just access to clean water, to basic human rights. We've got to be there. We've got to be there. We've got to also make sure that Israelis have a right to defend themselves and to keep themselves secure. And we've got to be able to have conversations about things like, oh, that are kind of as complicated as Mideast peace and something more than just slogans and talk about the nuance of these issues and always lead with what our values are. Would you put any additional diplomatic pressure on Israel as president if they refuse to engage in a good faith discussion about a two-state solution? I think that we've had presidents from both parties who have put lots of diplomatic pressure on Israel. And again, it's very hard to negotiate where the leadership in the Palestinian community is not necessarily even leadership you can negotiate with.

It doesn't necessarily speak for all the various factions. So absolutely. But I continually want to remind folks that Hamas and Hezbollah who are plotting every single day to kill Israelis and now that Trump, who says he's strong on Iran, has basically given Iran a highway through Syria with more sophisticated weapons now going to Lebanon. These are existential everyday threats to the Israelis as there are everyday threats for Palestinians just to get basic health care and clean water and base rights. And so there is an urgency for us to play a role in

the Middle East with our most critical ally, the Israelis, so that we can affirm democratic ideals and principles. What do you see as our greatest national security threat? Again, I'm going to tick through things I think are threats, but then I'm going to answer the question in a way that you may now expect, but maybe not. So climate change is a existential threat. When you read military reports about what they expect to happen when I'm Trump's age, what will go on in the planet Earth should we fail to deal with climate change? The instability, the famines, the chaos on the planet Earth that's going to happen. And in the United States, two vulnerable communities like mine, this is an

existential planetary threat that would cause, you think refugee problems are refugee problems now? Right. And we have not seen a hint of what could happen if we don't deal with this issue. So that's definitely a threat. I can tick through more. I think we are going through a planetary battle between authoritarian governments and democratic governments. And democratic governments have had a very tough five or so years, from Brexit to what the Russians are doing aggressively. Talk to people who live in Latvia or Estonia, Lithuania. Ask them if they don't feel like they're in a gray war right now with the Soviets – with – excuse me.

Flashback. With the Russians. So I can go through more threats. I think that for people not to see – How do we win the battle against authoritarianism, rising authoritarianism around the world? Let's win that battle at home first. Let's fight against authoritarian right here, where we have a president that sounds like a guy that's authoritarian, the enemy of the people, even lock her up. I mean, chants like that, we've heard them in our history. People are forgetting that we are coming.

And this is why historical amnesia really bothers me. We've heard the same anti-immigrant rhetoric from a viable national party called the Know-Nothings. Yeah. That came out against the scourge of the invasion of the immigrants. This time they were talking about Irish Catholics. Right. Okay? Yeah.

Every generation, history echoes. We've seen demagoguery. Father Conklin, I could go through the... Every generation has had their demagogues. Right. And we've beat them back in the name of more democracy, not less democracy. And so, first of all, I always say, before you tell me about your religion, first show it to me in how you treat other people. We preach a civic gospel. It's in our songs. We all swear an oath. Think about back in the days where one military would beat the other ones. Swear an oath of loyalty. Oaths used to have a lot of power. We do it every day, not

even thinking about the words we're uttering from our mouth. We say, I swear this oath to liberty and justice for all. Well, we live in a country with rampant injustice, environmental, economic, criminal injustices that when they're revealed make people squirm. I'm talking about even animal rights. I'm sorry, an animal rights guy. They're trying to pass laws so that people won't even see what's going on to animals in this country called ag-gag laws because Americans aren't comfortable with injustice when they see it. But somehow we've stopped seeing it. Let's just focus right here at home. And this gets me to the existential threat

that I really think is the existential threat. Because when a country can't do the things that 80 and 90% of people agree on, and I know you might try to use this as, again, to push me on the filibuster. No, I'm done, I'm done. I'm done. Don't worry. And again, come into my tactical circle, should I be president of the United States, and you and I will have real conversations about it.

Sorry, walking through the Senate, convincing Chuck Schumer and all the rest of them to get rid of me. Yeah. You and I will have real talk about what it's going to take. And your first obstacles don't have to do with Republicans. Right. No, believe me. I know. OK. But for us to be a country right now that has allowed the dangerous delusion of divisiveness, that somehow the woman that works for United Airlines, Latina woman in my city – and by the way, she doesn't work for United Airlines. She cleans her planes.

She delivers her food. But she works for an outsourced company that suppresses her wages, gives her no retirement security, that she has a different cause for her life than the guy in the factory town that just saw his job disappear to a country with no labor protections. Or the farmer who has got a CAFO, as a literal farmer said to me, a Republican farmer was telling me about that the CAFO down the street from him has poisoned his well that he used to drink from and his crick, I think that's pronouncing it right. That's right, it is his crick. That he used to fish from.

That those three people don't have aligned, urgent, common causes that are affecting their lives in the most pernicious, anti-democratic ways, if we can't awaken this country to that common cause, where that Latino, that black factory worker like my grandfather was, UAW in Detroit, that automobile worker now, or that steel worker, or that coal miner or that coal miner that don't have common cars with the farmer, if we can't, in our politics, in our civic spaces, get people back to understanding, that is going to be an existential threat. Because the things that we need to do, I hear your podcast, I'm sorry, use labels like progressive or out there on the left. Where I live, my staff was showing me a tweet I put out when I was mayor calling for healthcare for everybody. These aren't radical ideas to me.

They're efficiencies. They're things that are not at all, but we've allowed our politics to be distorted and shifted in a way where we're doing things that are so stupid. Let me give you an example. Because I had to, there was a big advantage, I think, for the next president to have had to run something. I was a mayor. I had to govern a city, a roughly billion-dollar budget, capital budget. I can go through it, through the worst recession of our lifetime, which, by the way, they call it a recession for the country. For inner cities, it's a depression. I had to make decisions like, I've heard you say

that President Obama, there's no good decisions. There's no good decisions. And they get to your desk. So I laugh at people who call themselves fiscal conservatives. I had to cut my government. There's nobody in Senate. There's county executives there and governors there, mayors there, that cut their governments as much as I cut my government 25% and raise taxes to get through an economic hell and had to figure out a way to bring tens of thousands of jobs to my city. Now, we did. Newark is going through its biggest economic development.

I thought creative ways we, a lot of folks helped us, thought of a way out of that nightmare. But we had to stay in the saddle and make tough as hell decisions. But one of the things that came out of that was me always saying, if we can create uncommon coalitions, we are going to create uncommon results. And in Newark, I had these incredible moments where you had unions and there are some incredible guys from the building trades that I worked with. And we had some tough arguments. Arguments, you know why? Because, again, I'm a black guy living in Newark with a majority black and brown city, and the unions didn't reflect my city.

Right. And these really good people were receptive to me saying that if they're going to build the first hotel in 40 years in Newark, which we built, now we've got four of them. God bless Ras Baraka. That construction is going to have to be done by people. When they drive by that work site, they see folk they know from the neighborhood. And so I got people around the table that were willing to create apprenticeship programs for me, for my kids, that were willing to, okay, agree to 30 hours. Get banks that we malign, okay, and I will malign the behavior that crashed our economy. I will go after them.

I think some independent group looked at people and showed that my record in fighting against big banks, that times I voted with big banks was zero, they said. But when I needed to get institutional capital to build that hotel that could employ hundreds of people in my city, can get my kids in apprenticeship programs, I brought them to the table as well. I brought community leaders to the table because we all are afraid of gentrification. Ross Baraka just had a big conference on it because Newark is now coming back. Our population is growing. When I left Newark to become a senator, for the first time in 60 years, our population was growing. So we want community leaders there to know that they can help us organize. They can help us make sure that this isn't gentrification, that we pass

first source legislation in Newark to say, when anybody's hiring in our city, they have to look to local leaders. They have to agree to hire guys with criminal convictions because, hey, lots of drugs being used on Stanford's campus, but nobody's getting arrested for it. But in my community, I've done this with a reporter before, walk the streets, stop in fellas, asking have they ever been arrested, what have they been arrested for. Most Americans don't realize in 2017 there were more marijuana arrests for possession than all the violent crime arrests. And you just announced yesterday that you want their records expunged, not only marijuana legalized. I get a little upset when people want to talk about marijuana legalization, which I'm all for. Right. I'm all for.

But they don't talk in the same breath about justice, restorative justice, things like expunging records, giving people in prison pathways out, allowing people to benefit from the business opportunities that are being created. Is expunging the record something you need? Is that legislative or is that something that you'd have to pass a bill for that? I'd have to pass a bill. Last question. What do you think the biggest obstacle in the way of fixing this system is? What is the source of all this division and what has happened to our politics? What are you fighting against here? The opposite of justice is not simply injustice. It's apathy, it's indifference, and it's inaction. I am blown away by young people right now in this country and how they want to work in jobs where the companies have values and morals, the creativity, the artistry. But we still see voting rates at 20, 30 percent.

college dad, if you ask them about climate change, if they voted, you would see, and you and I both know that there might be some people in the Republican Party that pander to, or politicians in general, I don't want to point fingers, that suddenly if they know that they're going to face in the next election 50% in the midterm of young people voting, not at 20%, do you think that that would change people's politics real quick? Yeah, that would change incentives. Yeah, that would change incentives. And so there is nothing that is wrong with American democracy that can't be solved with more American democracy. And what I mean by that is that our democracy is not a spectator sport to get more people in the game. And so I understand

that there are people in this country that look at a person like me and it fills them with hate and bigotry. And I see what the Republican Party's voice on Fox News wants to try to make people believe about many of us Democrats. But I just want folks to know that please, please don't make this a small election about one office and one guy and it's bad, it's bad, it's bad. It's the things he's doing are, um, this is a moral moment in America again. And if we can ignite something in this election, if we can have, and if it's not me, if we can have a leader that can ignite other leaders, that could create not a campaign, not an election, but a larger campaign for this country, if we can reconceive ourselves as framers, because if you don't think that Ella Baker and Mary McLeod Bethune and Martin Luther King or let's go to the folks like Frederick Douglass were framers. Yeah.

Because the original framers didn't kind of include them. That's right. That's right. So they were reframers. Yeah. We now have to frame this country again. We have to take full responsibility. There's a choice we have to make every day in our lives. It's to accept things as they are or take

responsibility for changing them. That woman is Virginia Jones. When I asked her after her son was murdered, why do you still stay in these projects? I know where you live and I know the money you make. And she looks at me and goes, why? Almost indignant at the question. She had this defiant love that was always up in your face. Why do you still stay here, Ms. Jones? She looks at me, she goes, because I'm in charge of homeland security. I mean, she knew she couldn't secure the whole world, but she was going to be in charge of homeland security for that block. If more of us say, I'm in charge, I'm not going to, you know,

Alice Paul did not wait for Washington. She's the first person who was ever arrested in front of the White House. Force fed. Force fed when she was in prison because she went on hunger strikes. If we take responsibility for our democracy and make this election a referendum on the direction of this country, a referendum of spirit, a revival of grace, if we can do that in this election, and I'm going to call for this, I'm a progressive, I'm a tactical guy, I was a mayor, I had to figure out how to create safer streets, create better schools, and we did in Newark. But the thing that allowed that to happen was to get everybody from late night talk show hosts, to foundations,

to unions, to reimagine the city with me. Well, we need to reimagine America right now because all the things we hope for and dream for as this country are at stake right now. The planet is in peril. We've been told we have 12 years and clicking. Totalitarianism is on the rise. Our country is being attacked right now by the Russians. We're finding all kinds of insidious ways. I've read the reports of what they want to do. They want to make us suspect the truth. They want to make us lose faith in our institutions. They want to make us be pitted against each other. They literally are. I've watched the bots. They're trying to foist us to make us hate each other more. If we can't now revive that grace, put more, as I always say on the stump,

put more indivisible back into this one nation under God, if we miss this opportunity, yeah, Democrats might win some elections in the future, but we are not going to change the country in the broad scale way we need to do that gives labor back dignity, that makes healthcare a right and child poverty a wrong, that makes not public schools a little

better, but transforms public education and schools into cathedrals of learning for every child, not having their lives determined by the zip codes they're born in. We can do all these things. It's not a matter of can we, it's do we have the collective will. And so I'm going to talk to that spirit in this country amidst more and more cynicism, emits more and more people that just want to blow folk up or tell me that, oh, I hope you punch Donald Trump in the face. I don't know if that's a good look for a former tight end from Stanford, young guy, punching out this or a more elderly president. I want this to be an election that is a referendum of spirit and, and in my opinion, a revolution of spirit in this country. Like I saw from my parents' generation around the civil rights movement.

Like I saw from my grandparents' generation around the labor movement. We can, we can do that again. Well, I very much share that hope and I'm very glad that you're running a campaign like that. I will. I'm,

I'm there. Okay. Corey Booker, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. joining us. Thank you. Appreciate it. Good luck. Thank you so much. Thanks.

All right. Thank you.