The Rich Roll Podcast - Senator Cory Booker On Unity, Hope & Healthy Food For All

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

Senator Cory Booker is the former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, a 2020 presidential candidate, and currently a leading voice in the United States Senate. My conversation with Cory covers his path to public service, the divided nature of modern politics, how to lead by example with love and faith, and a topic that is near and dear to both of our hearts: food policy reform. Senator Booker has been fiercely advocating to reinvent our food systems to address food insecurity and rising rates of lifestyle disease incident to poor nutrition. He also calls out the many ills of factory farming, including soil depletion, climate degradation, species extinction, animal suffering, and food injustice—working tirelessly to ensure that every American has access to healthy, affordable food. Ultimately, this conversation is all about embracing the power we all possess to catalyze substantive change—and shouldering that responsibility to drive change within ourselves, in our communities, and even on a national level. It was a true honor to spend time with Senator Booker. I have been inspired by his example as a public servant for many years—he is a man who truly walks his talk—and I was quite moved by what he shared in this exchange. I hope you find this episode as meaningful as I did. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Whoop: http://www.whoop.com/ Athletic Greens: https://www.athleticgreens.com/richroll BetterHelp: BetterHelp.com/richroll Indeed: Indeed.com/RICHROLL Calm: http://www.calm.com/richroll Plant Power Meal Planner: https://meals.richroll.comNative: nativedeo.com/rrp Peace + Plants, Rich

The Rich Roll Podcast. When my kids walk into a bodega in Newark, they can get a Twinkie-like product cheaper than an apple because we as a society have said we're going to subsidize everything in that Twinkie-like product and not the Apple. I've had the great privilege of speaking with many people who are making a real difference in the world. And today's guest certainly fits that description. Democratic Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. Senator Cory Booker. A headline-grabbing former mayor who says he's the only vegan in Senate history. Cory is a graduate of Stanford University where he played varsity football.

Cory is the former mayor of Newark, New Jersey. He was a 2020 presidential candidate and is currently a leading voice in the United States Senate. Congratulations, Senator. I got a couple more things I would very much like to mention before we dig into this one, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their

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and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. In this conversation, we discuss Corey's path to public service. We talk about the divided nature of politics today. And we also talk about a topic that is near and dear to both of our hearts, food policy reform. Ultra processed foods now compose two thirds of the calories

in the diets of our children and teens. The underlying theme of this conversation, however, is really about how we can all embrace the power we all possess to catalyze substantive change and then shouldering that responsibility to drive change within ourselves, within our communities, and even on a national level. The power that you always have over and over again is to choose how you are going to respond. Are you going to double down on the darkness or the negative frequencies, or are you going to be like the heroes we elevate in this country that will choose faithfulness or hopefulness or ultimately the highest frequency of all love. It was a true honor to spend a couple hours

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

I can't tell you how excited I am to have you here today. We made it happen. I've been wanting to meet you for so long. So I'm just thrilled that you're here today. Yeah, I told my staff I was gonna try not to make a fool out of myself and fanboy all over you. I've dreamed of having a conversation with you a lot. And Spotify is which I listen to you. They give me my most listened to songs every year. And you know, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder kind

of thing. But the podcast now they've been saying so last year, you were my number one most listened to podcast. I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what to say about that. There's a saying you probably know, it's about friendship. And it says, a true friend is somebody that knows the song of your heart and will sing it to you when you've lost the tune. And we don't know each other personally,

but I cannot tell you how many nights, and my staff knows this, I sometimes will wake up at four o'clock in the morning, can't fall back asleep, and I'll go to you. And it's like having a friend resonate the values that are important to you. I just find this, for a long time,

found this kinship with you that I don't even know you, but you have really helped me in my own life journey and my life path. So it's incredibly meaningful to me to hear that. It's like emotional to hear that because we just do this thing and it's very abstract. Like I do it and then I go home and I see numbers and I know people are listening to it and watching it, but to get that kind of feedback is like, you know, that's my nourishment. So I appreciate that.

And, you know, on the subject of values, like I am, you know, just somebody who has so much respect for, you know, how you kind of comport yourself in the world, not just as a senator, as a representative of your constituents, but as a human being, as a man, how you kind of model healthy masculinity, how you model leadership, and how you really walk your talk in terms of the things that are important to you and the positions that you take, often difficult positions, in terms of your activism and the kind of positive change that you're trying to actualize in the world. I mean, we're all journeying, right? And so, you know, I always say we're all mountain ranges. We all have peaks and we all have valleys. And a lot of your work is trying to get your peaks to go higher

and get your valleys to become level. And what I admire about you is you're a guy who has been so courageously vulnerable. And I think that in that vulnerability, you've showed the best of who you are. And I was telling my team on the way here, and again, I feel like I, again, this is our first time meeting, but I feel like I know you so, so well.

I'm surprised we, because we overlapped at Stanford. We did, I think we did. Well, I graduated in 89 and you were 91, right? So we were there two years at the same time. Yeah, and to the extent that we were in the training room at the same time, you as a swimmer, me as a football player,

we may have, you know. Maybe bumped into each other. Well, we shared the weight room at different times. Yes. So, you know. But you have been so open about your own journey of mistakes, brokenness, struggling with addiction. And I, in many ways, I think that the people I come to admire the most are those who have lost pretense and affectation and are learning to be comfortable in the truth that they've lived, which is often we all carry with us,

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

breed trust and community. And it's an antidote to loneliness, you know, because everybody is going through something and I don't care how they characterize their life on Instagram or how great something might look on the outside or the ways in which we project or judge a person based upon how they present to us. Nobody gets out of life alive and we all have our private struggles. And part of what I try to do is to try to tap into the core of humanity that we all share so we can find that commonality. And I think that that's something that you would, you know, agree is an important thing, particularly in, you know, how you navigate dissent and how you speak about the division that we're experiencing in America right now and your kind of recipe for repairing that

in terms of like building bridges rather than kind of dropping explosions here and there. Yeah, and it's harder and harder in today's context where we have, as Tara Brock says, a sort of severed belonging that we're a species that Brock says, a sort of severed belonging that, you know, we're a species that's evolved over a millennium in these really tight-knit, nurturing communities

where you're known, where you're seen, where you're connected. And we have a society now which we're not as connected. I think there's some data recently came out about men and how we have less friends than we've ever had, at least from an American context. And that really is, there is a unspoken, perhaps unfully realized agony in all of that,

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

which is we're far more shareholder profit-driven than we've ever been. There was a time when my dad was coming up, in fact, that corporations had multiple shareholders, not just the people that actually own it, but the community in which they're in and the employees. And so what that has driven is this unbelievable urgency to keep people's eyes on screens. And I just really worry about us and how we're going to get out of this trap, that the way people often think about getting eyes on the screens is driving us further apart from each other or accessing our sense of outrage or this culture of contempt. And so in politics, my team is often talking about how do we scratch

that record? How do we get out of this trap where we're viewing fellow Americans as enemies or threats to the point where we consider them existential threat. If you win, it can mean the end of this nation. Both sides have that kind of rhetoric. And it's creating this environment where I can say metaphorically, it's like this nation has this ship that is one of the best ships in the entire fleet of other countries' ships. And we're way out ahead, and we've been doing things that have been the marvel of humanity for a long time. Whether we used to be, from the 1940s to the early 1970s, the biggest expansion of middle-class people.

We had a doubling of median income. The black-white wealth gap was shrinking. We've done things in humanity from mapping the human genome to defying gravity and getting to the moon. But now our ship is in danger. wealth gap was shrinking. We've done things in humanity from mapping the human genome to defying gravity and getting to the moon. But now our ship is in danger. And I see this in many ways in Washington, D.C., when we look at measures of competitiveness, but that's not the best measure. But we're in danger because we're fighting each other so much that our ship is stalling. We're threatening to put holes in the ship and be overtaken. And so how do we heal that? How do we get out of that trap? And we think a lot

about that. And one is just trying to be that change. And I have definitely made mistakes in my political career where I have fallen in the trap of demonization. And there are times when I've been able to find creative ways out of that. I often say two of my best teachers in life are, have been Donald Trump and a guy named Sharp James, who are my two, you know, Sharp James was my sort of nemesis. There was a documentary made about my campaign to try to become mayor of the city of Newark called Street Fight. And he brought out the best of me and at times the worst of me. And there are, with Donald Trump, I say the same thing. He's brought out some of the uglier corners

that I had to work on, as well as some of the better things. And so you embody this so much. It's the self-work that ultimately makes us the best external leaders when it comes to making change and making a difference. And so I appreciate the compliment, but I'm still working on this. How do we solve this trap by solving it for myself? Sure. I mean, those types of extreme personalities can be a mirror

reflecting back what you need to work on within yourself, because that's the only thing that you can truly control. But in thinking about the landscape, clearly, you know, we all live in this attention economy and what traffics is outrage. And, you know, politics is certainly at the, you know, core of this ecosystem in which pushing buttons and, you know, saying, you know, sort of being oppositional rather than solution-oriented is what, you know, kind of creates traction on the internet and gets people energized and all of that. And to kind of stand as a counterpoint to that and say, I'm not going to be complicit in that economy and I'm going to, you know, sort of stand on my own two feet and speak up for the values that, you know, I espouse. And instead of casting aspersions, talk about solutions is something that

gets kind of denigrated in the algorithm, doesn't get the mindshare that it should. So it's the harder road, right? And I would imagine in Washington, that can be frustrating. I mean, that's an understatement. And I have many chapters of that frustration where I'm feeling like I'm banging my head against these implacable walls that divide us as a society. When I go out in the public in America, I just find a lot more community or connection. If you can break through the politics of it all, and I know we'll get to talk about this, but I have shifted to the Ag Committee, which is something I never thought I would do, the Agricultural Committee. When I got to Washington, I just never imagined I would be

looking at food systems. But as a precursor to that, I wanted to travel out and meet rural farmers, because I really do believe there is a spiritual and a material truth to King's ideal that he wrote about in the letters from the Birmingham jail, that we're all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a common garment of destiny, that injustice anywhere is indeed a threat to justice everywhere. And so rural towns in America are really, really suffering. And the farming and agriculture as we know it, if we went back four generations, what's going on now, our ancestors might even consider it a perversion of the ideals that really helped to build this country. And so we went out to just meet with farmers, a lot of Republican farmers. And I remember going to this one farm where the guy, my Sherpa, the guy bringing me around told me later, the guy didn't even want me in this house. He called him up and said, we're a Christian family. We can't have Cory Booker in our house, which is like, I'm a Christian, not that that has anything to do with it. But so I get out of my car and I kind of feel this like tension towards me

with the guy and he takes me down to his farm area, shows me his cows and everything. And I'm horribly corny. My staff allows me one dad joke a day. So here goes. I would say things to him like, sir, your cows are utterly amazing. You know, I milked every joke I could,

but he didn't crack. And we eventually get into his table and it's his neighbors there. And we eventually get into his table and it's his neighbors there. And we start talking about their experience. When I noticed when we got in that he had the deed to his, the family deed to the land that I think he must've gotten way back in the Homestead Act because it's, you know, like a century old and everybody worked for, farming worked for every generation, but he was now in danger of losing the farm

because the economics have changed so dramatically. You know, you have, instead of many companies selling you inputs, you had one major dominating company, Monsanto, now Bayer. Instead of having five companies bidding for his cattle, you had one. In fact, one company dictating price,

his neighbor was afraid to talk openly about it because he was afraid of being cut off. And when they started explaining their fears and their worries and what this system did, it opened me up and we started talking more. And when they realized I agreed with them and that I was going to be pushing legislation to stop this corporate consolidation and create more fair farm systems, that's when the tension broke. And we realized we had shared values. By the end, he was calling out his family, we're taking selfies. So I find that we have far more in common than we don't, but trying to break through to that is a hard thing. And these outrage machines, and I don't mean that, I'm not

just pitching factually, and it's not just social media. One of my friends is a guy named Van Jones, who had a show called Crossfire, and went on that show with Newt Gingrich. And I think Brene Brown's right. It's hard to hate up close. So pull people in, and lo and behold, the two of them working together, they realized they liked each other. And they agreed on things. They may have had a lot of things they disagreed with, but they found that they had substantive areas of overlap. And they wanted to talk about it. So they did the last segment called Ceasefire.

And they got the producers to agree to let them do it. But it got ended quickly because ratings were going down. Right. And so these corporations who want to keep our eyes on the screen, the easiest sell, not always the best, but the easiest sell, and people like Oprah and others have found ways to tap into the human yearning for inspiration, for hope, for love. But the easier sell often is fear and hate and division and moral outrage. And so that's the system that's being supercharged by the devices

we have. Fractured media, where we all, you and I grew up around the same era, so we all watched the final episode of MASH. We all watched Roots. There's these cultural anchors, but now they're far more fractured and we can navigate into these worlds in which we are all listening to the same perspective. We're all having our ideas confirmed and we're all creating common enemies, which is the otherization. And it's a unique human story, this contest in humanity between those who want to expand the conceptions of us versus them and those who want to expand the conceptions of just us, justice. And that's the tension that we're in, not just as a nation, but as a planet, frankly, as well. It's a bit of a David and Goliath sort of situation too,

because the people who are, like yourself, who are waging war against this notion of otherness and outrage are doing battle against algorithms and the siloization and fractured media that is putting people in those positions to kind of, you know, be immune to the kind of message that you're putting out. And it's disheartening and fascinating from a forensic sort of point of view, because I grew up in Washington and I grew up, I went to high school there in the mid-1980s and sort of an inside the beltway family.

And that was a period of time in which, you know, Democrats and Republicans may disagree on things, but there was a certain level of comedy, like comedy, you know, M-I-T-Y, like people got along. Like it wasn't like a, you know, it wasn't like a, I can't talk to you kind of situation. And, you know, it seems like that's no longer the case, although I don't live in Washington anymore,

which is concerning from the perspective of trying to create change because change requires consensus and it requires a meeting of the minds and it requires the ability to kind of show up and set your judgments aside and try to just roll up your sleeves and get the work done. Right, so first of all, it's not as bad as we perceive.

There's a lot of things that get done outside of the glare of what the news wants to cover that is. But anybody who's been in Washington now and been there 25 years ago, will say, will confirm everything you said. It used to be far better. But again, I always say that human history is, and American history is in particular,

like a constant testimony to the overcoming of seemingly dark, difficult situations that seem implacable or seem impossible to overcome. And I always try to return it to me as an individual. I could curse the darkness, but am I really living up to my ideals to try to change a situation? And one drop in a pool can change the pH balance

or the chemical substance. We are far more powerful agents of frequency change than we know. And so, you know, my team and I, like I went to Washington and I said, okay, Bill Bradley, one of my great mentors, the Senator from New Jersey years before me, said to me, try to meet with every one of your Republican colleagues, just to have dinner with them, to get to know them as human beings. And so I set out in this really fun kind of odyssey. I always say going out to dinner with them, to get to know them as human beings. And so I set out in this really fun kind of odyssey. I always say going out to dinner with Ted Cruz was hard,

not because he's a Republican, I'm a Democrat, but because I'm a vegan and he's from Texas, you know? But we did go out to dinner and it was so shocking. People like literally stumbled by us when we were walking. And every once in a while, you would see people taking, I call them stealthies, like taking pictures of the two of us just because they couldn't believe the two of us were having dinner. But it was something that resulted in showing me that it is worth the effort. Ted Cruz and I have passed legislation

together. But one of my favorite moments was when I couldn't really get to a guy named Inhofe, he's just retired, but a Republican right-wing guy who has said things on the Senate floor that I have found offensive. And again, I've probably done things that he finds offensive. Again, I'm a vegan. And he's a guy from a traditional family that I'm sure he sees that in some kind of way.

But I go to a Bible study in his office. I hear he has in his hideaway, which are these cool offices closer to the Senate floor, this more senior the center, the nicer the hideaway. And so these cool offices closer to the Senate floor, this more senior, the center, the nicer, the hideaway. And so I go into this really nice office to join him for Bible study as a way of trying to make a connection. And as soon as I walk in, I have my implicit bias challenge. We all have implicit biases. And my implicit bias was I never expected to see this right-wing Republican with a picture on his mantle, center-placed, of him and

a little black girl in an affectionate embrace. And I call my more senior senators, older senators, not by their first names, but by their titles. So I'm like, Mr. Chairman, who dat? And he looks at me and he goes, oh, that's my family member. His family adopted this girl out of a very difficult circumstance. He told me the story. I found it really wonderful and beautiful. And then went on with Bible study. Well, months and months later, there's a big education bill going through the United States Senate that Lamar Alexander, the Senator from Tennessee, who's also since retired, was guarding the bill, not letting any amendments on the bill. And I was frustrated because I had this amendment that I really believed in that would have helped homeless and foster kids. And I see Inhofe in the well of the Senate. And I remember this story that I wouldn't have known about if I didn't sit down with him.

And I summoned that spirit of that little girl and walked to talk to him and made my pitch about it. And he knew the circumstance that this was going to be a clean bill, no amendments. But he goes, let me think about this. I walked back to my side of the aisle, sit down in my back bench seat. And I suddenly see this guy charging into the Democratic section. He comes up to me and grunts at me, I'm in, and starts to walk away. And I'm like, what do you mean? And he goes, Corey, I'll co-sponsor your amendment. And next thing you know, we get Grassley on board, another big chairman and another person. Then we go to the manager of the bill and say, Lamar, Chairman Alexander, we have all these Republicans on and he left the amendment on and it's now the law of the land. And so this is not a fruitless pursuit. We can never surrender

to cynicism, no matter how much the obstacles, no matter how difficult the forces of corporate consolidation or social media or politics infected with money, we still have an ability to not only make change, but enough evidence from history that is worth the fight. And the challenge is, is we externalize the problem so much. And we don't see that every problem we want to criticize, that we may not be to blame for it, but we have the power and can take the responsibility for doing something about it. And I always try to reduce it

to interactions we have all day. So I was traveling last year and I get interactions in the airports that are often very affirming, but sometimes I always tell people, please send me Mother's Day cards because I get called mother all the time. Oh my God.

We live in a very, threats from senators have doubled. And I've had times where I thought I was gonna have to throw down. I was being yelled at people coming at me. It's a much more tense environment, especially since over the last four years or so. But usually they're very,

people are extraordinarily kind in airports and often will come up and say, slimmer to you, because I use my social media platforms, not to talk about politics always, but to talk about human virtue. And so I'm putting up my stuff on the overhead, finding my seat, people have been really nice to me. And I sit down and a woman was sitting next to her daughter,

60 and 80 years old. And they were from and a woman was sitting next to her daughter, 60 and 80 years old. And they were from Alabama. And they look at me and they go, who are you? Are you a professional athlete? Which I find very flattering. And I go, no, ma'am, I'm a United States Senator. And then they want to know, what most Americans want to know when they hear about politics is, what tribe are you in? And so they ask me, are you a Democrat or Republican? And I go, ma'am, I'm a Democrat. And she goes, well, I should have brought my Trump hat. And she looks very sour and angry at me. And that's the moment.

And we all have those moments. We have them around our family kitchen table sometimes for Thanksgiving. We have them in our workplace. You have to decide, are you going to dance to that tune or try to change the record? And I look at her and I surprise her. I go, ma'am, Donald Trump. I go, oh, my gosh, he signed two of the biggest bills I've written as a senator.

One that liberated thousands of people from prison called the First Step Act. And I described the other one that got investment in low-income areas. And she was sort of shaken by that. That's how I came. And before you knew it, we were talking about how the media is separating us far more than we are.

And by the end of this long flight, we're having fun. We know about each other in a much more personal way. We're affirming each other's dignity. Will she ever vote for me? Probably never. But will she maybe have a crack of humanity? Or maybe like with Inhofe, maybe a thread has been taken, created,

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

and I'm about to jump up on the stage and I see this big dude. I played tight end for Stanford. This guy could play linebacker for Iowa State. And he goes, dude, I want you to punch Donald Trump in the face. And I look at him and I laugh and I go, dude, that's a felony. And I jump up on the stage and I use him as an opportunity to talk to this larger crowd about love. And I say, you know, I sort of make a joke about our interaction. And I say, this is how we lose.

This is not how we create change. This is how we double down on divisiveness, division, and the culture of contempt. And if you think about us as a people as the best, I don't think Martin Luther King, James Bevel, Dorothea Cotton, Fred Shuttlesworth, all of those people in the early 1960s, 1963, spring, I don't think any of those people changed Bull Connor's mind. But they didn't hate him. They didn't beat him

by bringing bigger dogs and bigger fire hoses. What they found a way to do, it was to change the frequency of this country. Through their artistry of activism, they expanded the moral imagination of a nation. They changed the consciousness of a country and did what the real challenge is. King spoke of it more eloquently than I could. He said, the problem today, what we have to repent for is not just the vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people.

So if you and I are good people, what are we silent about? Where are we not living? Before I talk about how bad a Republican is or Trump is, where am I participating in systems that perpetuate injustice? Where am I falling short of my own values? If you work there, you will be surprised at how much that work creates more change than if you spend all your time condemning, oh, pick your person these days on my side of the aisle, DeSantis or Trump, or what people might want to say about Biden or others. Yeah, amazing. I mean, that's such an incredible perspective and really powerful to hear. I mean, in thinking about that, it's so clear that cynicism as a default is ultimately the lazy, easy choice. But incentives kind of drive us towards that, right?

Let's be ironic. Let's be defeatist. Let's cast stones at the other side and talk about how bad they are without really doing a proper inventory of where we're at and where we could do better. And a lot of it, you know, in thinking about kind of your work and your story and where you come from, like this is something you've been practicing for a long time, like an early kind of inciting incident or inflection point for you was that hunger strike back in New Jersey in your early days as a city councilman, where you had to confront the mayor, who was your kind of antagonist at the time, and ultimately, you know, find a way to, you know,

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

Look, this was a turning point in my life, to be frank. It was at one of the lowest points of my life. And I think that this idea that despair is bad, look, great despair is a necessary precondition to manifesting great hope. You know, this sort of fear is a necessary precondition to courage. this sort of fear is a necessary precondition to courage. And so I went from 1997 graduating from law school to following the calling of my mom, of all people. I was at the age where I sort of thought my mom had nothing more original to say,

but she asked me, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? Like I told her I didn't know what I wanted to do after law school. She goes, well, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? And I never forget like being haunted by the question. Like, oh my God, if I knew I was going to be successful, what would I do with my life?

And I started researching who are the people that most inspire me on the planet earth. And maybe I can, if I knew I couldn't fail, maybe I'd try to be my own version of them. And I found a young guy then who's now far more known. But back in the late 90s, he was sort of just doing noble work. His name was Bryan Stevenson. Sure, incredible. Yeah, incredible human being. Another one was Marion Wright Edelman was on my list.

Another guy named Jeffrey Canada. I don't know if you know him. He started a company called the Harlem Children's Zone, wrote a book called Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, a little thin book that's really amazing. But his, I went out and met with him, followed him around, and I finally concluded if I couldn't fail,

I would start this organization in New Jersey. And I came from a very affluent suburb relative to where I would move from parents who knew a very different life than I did. My father's born poor. He would tell me, don't tell people I was poor. Just tell them I was PO, P-O, because I couldn't afford the other two letters. And just imagine that culture shock of now he's raising his kids

in this incredibly affluent area as the first black family that moved into the town where they literally had to get a white couple that poses them to buy the house in 69. And my dad sort of, my mom sort of challenging us, what are you gonna do to prove worthy of this privilege? So my mom challenges me, what are you gonna do if you couldn't fail

to address your calling to make the world a better place? Because I had that vague desire. So I moved to Newark like Jeffrey Canada did. I'd find an area that people told me not to move into, low-income neighborhood. I live there now where people don't mistake wealth with worth. And there's a great definition

of faith I love that when you come to the end of all the light you know, and you're about to step into the darkness, you have the courage to take that step, that faith is knowing one of two things is going to happen. Either you'll find solid ground underneath you or the universe will send you people who teach you how to fly. And so here I move into this neighborhood that I found challenging. I was living across the street from projects that I would soon move into next to an abandoned building that was used for people using drugs. It was a virulent drug trade going on. But these incredible people sort of surrounded me, saw that I had this desire, recognized things in me I didn't see in myself. And before you knew it, I'm now representing these tenant associations.

Newark gets its name Brick City because it used to just be full of brick buildings that were like Cabrini-Bring projects. And this was a central ward where there was just a lot of low-income housing and a lot of public housing. And these tenant leaders, these incredibly noble, wise people who had earned the love and respect of their buildings

adopted me and we started doing just stuff I'm so proud of, taking on slumlords. One of them ended up getting convicted in federal court. I was proud of my life. I thought I'd done it. I'm now doing what I want to do. And then they basically cornered me once and said, City Hall's corrupt. We're going to run a campaign. I'm like, I'm happy to help you. No, you don't understand. You're going to be the candidate. And here I was less than a year out of law school, running for office in a city where incumbent politicians didn't lose against a guy 40 years older than me. If I would win this race, I would become the youngest person ever elected.

And these incredible people wrapped me in their legitimacy, would walk me up and down buildings and say, you may not know him, but you know me. This is the person we're gonna support. My opponent got the same amount of votes he always got. We brought out a whole new electorate, won a race by 24 votes, like a few dozen votes. And then it begins the worst year of my life where I get into city hall.

The mayor's joking with people, we're gonna drive this kid back to the suburbs. I get outvoted eight to one. I went from feeling like I was making a difference in the world to just this intractable world of politics. I became very angry that politics is not a way to make change. The mayor was having fun with me.

He would put tickets on my car everywhere I parked. I'm like, I parked with other city council people in front of the city hall. My driver's license was being suspended by the municipal court. This was the machine. And I'm on my day that I call my quitting day. I was now making plans to convince the tenant leaders

that this was folly. I should go back to being your full-time lawyer. And on that day, I get a call from this incredible woman named Elaine Sewell, who was the tenant president of these buildings in the northern part of the ward I represented, right underneath an underpass called 280, which was a perfect place to deal narcotics, drugs, because people could get off the highway, go in like a McDonald's drive-thru, and I'm not exaggerating, people could line up in their cars, buy whatever drugs they want, get back on the highway into the sort of more affluent suburbs. And the security company just thought the newly

hired was going to just like put a gate up and stop. The drug dealers ripped the gate off, lit the guard booth on fire. Security company quit. And now on my quitting day, Miss Elaine Sewell calls me up and says, you need to do something about this. And I'm like, what are you talking about? I can't do anything. And she's like, well, come on, we need help. Maybe you can get the police out. I'm like, I can't get the police to stop ticketing my car for crying out loud. And we start arguing. This woman who walked me through her buildings in an election I won by a few dozen votes is now trying to tell me that she needs help. And I'm trying to tell her how impotent I am. We start raising our voice at each other. And then she says the most hurtful thing in my life that I think somebody had said

to me at that point. She goes, well, if you can't help us, why did we elect you in the first place? And I slammed the phone down, disrespecting my elder, stormed back to where I was living. And all I want to do is get into my, you know, apartment in the projects and just hang out with my two best friends, Ben and Jerry, because I want to drown my sorrows in my addiction food. Right. And the worst thing that I thought could happen to me is that my tenant president, this woman who is a whole chapter of my book,

one of the wisest souls I've ever met, I'm walking home and I grunt to her hello and try to walk past her. And she's just like, boy, don't you walk past me. And I stop and I turn around with fury because she's the source of my problem. She forced me to run for this office. I'm a politician. Politicians don't do anything. I was a community activist, a leader. And she goes, what's, she reads my energy. And what she did first was perfect. She just throws out her arm and she goes,

will you come give Ms. Jones a hug? And I was like, oh, and I storm over to her, give her the most insincere hug in the world. And as I let go of her, she grabs me by the arm. She goes, just tell me what's wrong. And I go, you wanna know what's wrong? And I vented on her of a year of my life of getting nothing done, outvoted eight to one. This was a mistake that you forced me into. I'm sorry, but you were wrong. And then I start complaining about this terrible violent incident and how Missoula called me for help and I don't know what to do.

And I said it, and you know how this can be when you're in this loop. I said like an incantation, like a mantra. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. Professing my impotence. And then this woman looks at me like God just talked to her. She almost gasps. And she's like, I know what you should do. And I'm like excited. Maybe she does. I stopped my pity party and I go, what should I do? And then she looked at me like with this wise look. Yep, Corey, I know what you should do. And I'm like, don't play with me, Ms. Jones. What do I do? And she leans in as if she's about to tell me

words from angels, wisdom from Solomon. And she goes, you should do, and I'm like, yeah, yeah, something. And I'm just like, I'm like something, that's it? And she goes, yeah, do something. And I storm away from her, get back to my buildings. The damn elevators don't work. Hike up 16 flights of stairs, sit on my couch,

angry at the world, feeling sorry for myself, having a life that I did not want. And I remember my grandmother's Bible sitting there and I opened this thing up and there's a passage that says, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move mountains. I've seen it a lot, but I never really noticed

there's a passage underneath that says, but sometimes you need to fast and pray. And then I did the thing that Miss Jones inspired and changed my life, which I said, I got nothing to lose. I got nothing to lose. And so I go out to Garden Spires, long story shorter, and I had brought a tent with me.

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

She just wanted me to show up and care. And there was tears. I'm not crying. She was crying. I'm lying. I was crying. But we talked and I told her what my plan was. And then I did what politicians have to do. You got to learn how to do this. I called a press conference and I told her what my plan was. And then I did what politicians have to do. You gotta learn how to do this. I called a press conference and I said, this is the United States of America. How could people live in fear where you don't let your kids play in front of where you live or you don't feel comfortable going to the corner store?

And I talked about the incident the night before. And I just said, I've decided not to leave this tent. I'm gonna stay there and I'm not gonna eat. I'm gonna go on a hunger strike and I'm gonna pray. And I want anybody who wants to pray with me to just pray that we together can find a solution. And the first night was scary. There's four or five of us who volunteered to sleep under the tent together. Ms. Sewell joined us for the first prayer. But I woke up the next morning and the miracle started happening. The first was like these group of guys, I don't remember, eight or so of them come out to me early in the morning and they say, are you Cory Booker?

And I said, yeah. And one of them's like, I grew up in this neighborhood. I'm not letting you be out here alone. We're correctional officers. And they took a position around the tent. Within two or three days, hundreds and hundreds of people were coming, offering help. Hospitals came out to do health screenings. One group were fitting kids with eyeglasses who couldn't see blackboards but never had been diagnosed. Computers were donated. People built a computer lab for folks to print resumes or kids to use. Job fairs, you name it. By the 10th day of this hunger strike, thousands of people had come out. It was an incredible celebration of community under an underpass where people used to ignore. It was an incredible celebration of community

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

And I look at him and I suddenly feel the same impulse that Ms. Sewell had. And this is my nemesis, but I ran to him and I hugged him. And I'll never forget the moment where I'm holding him tight. This newspaper took a picture of that. That became the big picture in the state's newspaper.

But the moment that was most meaningful to me in this hug was I smelled him. I breathed deep and he smelled like an older black guy from my family. And he seemed to be so caught off guard by the hug that he puts away his prepared remarks and then prophesizes. And we would go on to have a really, really bare knuckle fight for the mayorality a couple of years later. But he prophesized. He goes, one day this young man will be the mayor of this city, will lead this city. And there was celebration like I will never forget afterwards. But you don't know this, but this is the 25th anniversary of this month,

this day, 25 years ago, I was a 20-something-year-old kid knocking on doors with tenant leaders running for the office that would start my political career. And this year, January, I decided to do, see if I could break a 10-day fast. So this January, I fasted for 10 days in honor of this improbable journey. I didn't plan on being an elected leader. And every day I would go out and walk the ward

that I walked 25 years before to earn the trust of a community that put their faith in me, had really no reason to, but thanks to these leaders that loved me or believed in me. And on the 10th day, I decided to walk from the Southern part of the ward

I represented back to Garden Spires. I got on the pavement. There's a park that we built, a little pocket park there that we built when I was mayor, a daycare center and preschool. Read it, hugged a lot of folks, but I needed to stand in the corner and be alone

because I wanted to reflect on that moment where former Stanford football player, used to be able to bench, you know, 350, 360, squat 600 pounds. But the strongest moment of my life up to that point was when we had the final prayer, a few hundred people. And when I joined hands with these folks, I felt strength like I never did before. And in this, under this overpass, I saw America because Because before that, it was a black community. But now this circle is black folks, white folks, Latino, Asian, Indian, believers and non-believers, Republican,

Democrat, Independent, I'm sure, priests, rabbis, imams, ministers. We were all holding hands for a final prayer. And the praying is beautiful, Arabic and Hebrew. And I've studied faiths. I love God's, I love manifestations of the divine, how people understand it. There's a Muslim word that means the oneness of humanity that I love. There's Hebrew sayings,

ki be ti be tefil o la ho ho mi, may my house be a house of prayer for all nations. But the idea that I had at that moment that means so much 25 years later was these three words from a dead language that are the hallmark of a country that we now probably think are hackneyed or what have you. But I get to see these three words every day

when I go to work in the United States Senate 25 years later, and that's e pluribus unum. I think that the call of humanity and definitely the call of this country is to put more indivisible into a one nation under God. And that moment of my life where we took a place that was such, there was such a poverty of empathy, where there was so much power for us to make change, but somehow you have suburb versus city. Sometimes you have highways cutting through neighborhoods.

All these things that separate us, that make us think we're weak or unable to solve the biggest problems in the world. When you find creative ways to stitch people together and let them recognize their oneness, that's when power is unleashed. And it ultimately became the theme of my time as mayor, where I had ugly comments made by people about the city of Newark, that we were able to then get to come to the city and be a part of its resurgence. You had the Newarkers that never gave up on their community, combining with everybody from the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing

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

And I think that was that moment from that pavement to the moment of my last hours as mayor of the city of Newark. It was a continuous theme of the power of community. What a incredibly potent and powerful story. I mean, it's so beautiful. I mean, there's so many kind of threads to pull to extrapolate meaning out of that.

But for me, it's so moving to hear you tell that story and the idea that it all tracks back to your frustration and somebody saying, do something, and you trying to identify anything that you could do that is within your power without knowing where that would lead. And then to see kind of the ripple effect of just taking a simple action.

And the lesson being that we are all people of agency with more power than we allow ourselves to believe. And when we recognize this and take responsibility for that, and then channel it into some kind of civic action, you know, whatever we're capable of doing or using our voice for good, we can't anticipate the chain reaction that that causes. And, you know, to me, you stand as somebody, you're an exemplar of that. Like, yes, you have this huge platform, but you're always

talking about how, you know, we all have our platforms and you're always encouraging people to find ways to use our voices to speak up and, you know, to kind of voice the world that we would like to see, you know, manifest and to do those small things because the small things end up becoming the big things. Yeah, but I don't want to candy coat this. I mean, the world is full of wretchedness and pain. And you and I are both examples of people that have a lot of shame and mistake and pain. And you and I are both examples of people that have a lot of shame and mistake and hurt. When I was running for president, the last days of my campaign,

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

And the first thing I thought of was, again, I have a lot of things that if I could go back in life, I'd do differently. I don't regret them in the sense that I've learned from them, but there are things that you can't undo that you've done or mistakes that you've made that break you. And I tell people all the time, Newark broke me, like literally to the point where you have those kind of gut-wrenching hurt. And for me, it was this, what I told the New York Times,

I said that, look, I was, so I would go on from, that was 99, 2000, the story I just told you, I would go on and battle the mayor in this election in 2002, which I would lose. The Oscar nominated documentary about it, I was joke because it lost in the Oscars to March of the Dagnab Penguins, for crying out loud. And, but then I had four years to wait until the next time I ran. I went right back to work doing sort of nonprofit work in Newark. But during that period, I'm living in the high-rise projects.

It was just tough years, tough buildings to live in. But the community, Ms. Jones was our tenant leader, would rally around me in such profound ways. But this building I lived in had this, even though it was heat and hot water, we're irregular and all these things,

but there were so many good people. And one of the groups of good people I love were these kids living in those buildings, you know, eight years. I watched these kids grow up from grade school into high school. And one night I come home and I smell marijuana. Now, inner city black kids do not have the same margins

to experiment with drugs that Stanford students do. And I mean, the facts are true. There's no difference between blacks and whites for using marijuana or you name the drug, but black kids are like four times more likely to be arrested for it. And an arrest, you know, if I had arrested, my parents would have lawyers and all this kind of things would be station house adjustments. Low-income black kids don't have that. So I knew there was crisis. And so, and I saw some tagging in there that concerned me. So I was like, fellas, I come home every night. We joke before I go upstairs. We

used to have these great powwows in the lobby, but I said, let's go out, let's do something. And they're like, I go, what do you guys want to do? Let's go to dinner. And they said, let's go to the movies. And I said, whatever, made the mistake of letting them choose a movie. Do not go see Saw 2 or 3 or 4. And it was this amazing thing. We went out, I brought them to the diner, brought other friends together. And again, like my mom, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?

I asked them questions about their dreams, aspirations, and there were incredible dreams. And to me, I thought very achievable. In fact, I remember one of these kids, Hassan Washington, who was my dad. The similarities between my dad and this incredible young man were eerie. They both were born to single moms, both raised by their grandmothers, both born below the

poverty line, both had wicked senses of humor, evidences of genius, charismatic leaders. And I remember his, to me, was, I think he said something like, I want to be on an automotive repair place. And every kid that talked to me, I know somebody that does that. I'm going to hook you guys up with mentors and try to help you out. But it was right on the eve of round two with Sharp James, I'm running for mayor. And so I don't follow through on these things with these kids. In the back of my mind, I said, after this election, six, seven months later, I was just so busy chasing after my brass ring, my dream to leave this city. And I would come home at night and these kids were the most grace-filled kid. They would joke with me. They would cheer me on.

They would hold up signs. They would tell me they're going to vote for me. They were too young. But every night they would lift me up. I get elected. I win this time. Newark has, I won in a summer where there was rising murder rates. The city was just having a lot of challenges and I was intent on being everywhere. And so I was working these around the clock. If there was a murder on a sidewalk, I would show up to the shooting, give street level sermons about we're going to be better than this, talk about what we can do together, that we would drive this murder rate down, which we did. But a month into my office, time I get elected, there's a shooting on Court Street in Newark. I run to the shooting. I get there. There's a body covered.

There is another one loaded in an ambulance. And it's right in front of a senior citizen building, a lot of people outside. And I do that. I barely acknowledge the death on the sidewalk, but I minister to the living. And that day goes on, early days in the new office. I get home that night to try to steal a few minutes of sleep, pull out my BlackBerry, cycling through the reports that I wanted to look at. And there's the crime reports and I see the homicide. And then I see the name on the homicide report, the dead body. And it was Hassan Washington. And that is something that's broken to me

that we'll never fix. And I remember just the feeling, you stare at something long enough and you hope and you pray that you could make it change just by looking at it. And everything collapsed on me. And I remember this gut because my dad would joke with me as a kid about his life

and how you owe debts that you can't pay back, that you've got to pay forward. And so here the universe put my father just as smart as my dad, just as charismatic as my father. Everything that my dad was, better than me in so many ways, this young man, the universe put him in front of me.

My dad would say that he was saved by his community, but for people that went out of their way. And here he was put on my footsteps and I didn't do all that I could seeing the signs. And his funeral, I describe it in a way that harkens back to dark chapters. Because for me, it was in Perry's funeral home, in the basement of that funeral home, narrow steps going down. You feel like you're descending into the hull of a ship and there is my community chained together, wailing and moaning and swaying back and forth, looking at what is an American weekly, if not daily event, which is another black boy in a box. And I am choking in this basement.

And people are coming over to me, now the father of the city. And I can't help them because I'm lost in shame. I'm lost in hurt. And I'm embarrassed to tell you, I was so suffocating, I ran out of there. Told my security detail, we're leaving. Get into my brand new city SUV, back to my new office, this palatial mayor's office, slam the door shut, sit on the couch.

And for my first time as mayor, not the last, just weep into my hands and just pray to God that I could somehow make up for this sin. And so I get emotional, but this ain't easy, you know? And I don't wanna ever like people say, oh, you know, you're so full of hope.

Real hope is scarred. Real hope is wounded. Real hope has had to be resurrected more than once. It's not Pollyannish stuff. In America right now, there are kids considering suicide as we're having this because this world has made them feel lesser than because of who they are.

There are people hurting at a kitchen table so they don't know how the economics are gonna work. There is real pain and hurt. And the answer isn't to buck up and be positive. The answer is to confront it and to somehow, if you're fortunate enough like I am, or you are, or we all are at some point, to find a way to connect and let people know that you're not alone, that we're all broken. We all effed up multiple times, but as broken as we are, We all effed up multiple times,

but as broken as we are, ultimately those cracks make it, and those jagged edges we all have, perhaps make it better to fit together with other people who are just as broken and fractured to create a stronger whole and a better bond that gives hope. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I was listening to your conversation with Jane Goodall, who wrote the book of, you know, she wrote a book about hope,

right? And you guys had a frank conversation about the nature of hope and, you know, the idea that real hope is what you do in the face of being truly tested, right? And this idea that hope is the conviction that, you said something like, hope is the conviction that despair doesn't get the last word, right? So it's like, it ain't easy. It's fucking hard. And the vulnerability with which you just shared that story and the pain, the kind of spiritual psychic pain that that must've caused you, knowing that it wouldn't have been that hard for you to extend a hand and perhaps help that kid

and maybe divert that situation from happening is something that you'll take to your grave. Right, and the flip side of this is this delusion that something doesn't matter. You know, everything matters. Like you may say a kind word to somebody. Like my brother on Thursday, I thought he had another stroke. And my brother's my hero. He's like the better booker by far. And so I'm in the Senate. My staff is calling me, trying to desperately get to me. And I see this like

emergency. I'm thinking like, okay, I forgot to vote on the floor or something like that. And no, they're trying to get to me because my sister-in-law is calling me that my brother had a stroke. And so I find the news and now I'm in fear. Like, I don't know what I'll do with my, I should make my brother sign a contract that I get to die before him. So I'm now rushing, dropping everything. Veronica takes me to the train. She's like, knows how desperate I am to get from Washington DC to New Jersey. The train gets canceled.

My incredible team member calls me up and says, I'm sorry, there's one flight, one seat. It's first class. It's gonna cost you X thousands of dollars. I'm like, put it on my credit card. I need to get to New Jersey. So this moment from my time getting to the airport to getting to my brother's bedside,

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

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

they didn't say hi, man. They come over in a line, like three or four of them to hug me. And every hug I leaned into in a way that I never had before, because God, that's what I needed right then. Those people had no idea. They thought whatever they thought. They were holding me together to get to my brother's bedside. And we don't know. We pass people every day. don't know the power of one generous act of decency that's helping someone hold it together when they're facing whatever personal crisis they are. And just to not worry everybody,

he ended up not having a stroke. It was seizures. I'm hiding the ball. I should have said that at the top. My brother is going to be okay. He had some seizures, which are, as I've learned, are not like a stroke. It's no damage. He's gonna recover, but we forget the power we have every single day to be used by the universe in some way that we will never even understand the results of. And the best story of my life, which I think about all the time, is this white guy on a couch in March,

almost to the day that we're recording this, in 1965, March 7th, watching TV, starting a law firm, busy as hell, watching a movie called Judgment at Nuremberg. They cut away from the movie and he sees a bridge in Alabama called the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And he watches these people get beaten,

these nonviolent marchers led by John Lewis, beaten with billy clubs, tear gassed, horses charging in. And he's so appalled by what he's seeing that he says, I got to go to Alabama and then laughs at himself that he can't afford a plane ticket, not to mention close his business. And so he flops down and then thinks to himself, well, I'm not going to allow my inability to do everything to undermine my determination to do something. And so he says to his calculation, he can do one hour a week of pro bono work. You and I know the legal profession. It doesn't seem like that much. One hour more of pro bono work.

And so he calls around and he finds this woman named Lee Porter. It's a young woman. Now she's 94 years old. Back then she was the head of the Fair Housing Council in New Jersey, Northern New Jersey. Now at 94 years old, she's head of the Fair Housing Council in New Jersey. And he's like, do you need some legal help?

And she's like, hallelujah, thank you, Jesus, I do. They go on, this guy, to develop these sting operations where black families go look at homes. And if they're turned away, they send a white couple volunteering. Long story short, black family comes in, turned away from a home. They get back to the Fair Housing Council. They send the white couple out. It's still for sale. White couple bids on the house. The bid is accepted. Papers are drawn up. On the day of the closing, the white couple doesn't

show up. The black man does. Volunteer lawyer walk into the house, confronted by the real estate agent. They think they won the day. They didn't because the real estate agent punches the lawyer in the face, sticks a dog on the black man. And long story short, eventually the family moves in because the owners of the home decide to sell directly to them. And then 43 years later, the youngest kid from that family becomes America's fourth ever popularly elected black person in the United States Senate, me. I got a chance to talk to that lawyer, unfortunately, right before he died. And with great emotion, thank him for not just sitting on the couch,

for thinking to himself, I can do an hour of pro bono work. None of us understand what our actions are doing in the immediate context of history. But all of us are part of this lattice where you can't move without affecting the strings of that elegant lattice that could ultimately move over space and time to affect outcomes that you're not realizing.

Nothing is in vain. Nothing you do is useless or unaffecting. And one of the quotes I love all the time is the most common way people give up their power is not realizing they have it in the first place. And one small act like a pebble in a pond sends out ripples beyond your imagination. Yeah, that's again, more profundity.

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

we try to post things, not about, you wouldn't expect from a politician. So the last- No, you're the motivational guru. We didn't know we needed you. Like, it's crazy. You got, you're on this run streak and then you're like spitting out-

Well, it's guys like you that motivate- Timeless wisdom on these videos every single day. But the guy I had on, that I met at an event, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's this incredible astrophysicist. And I've seen him a few times. I like to tease him because I'm a, you know, I, again,

I believe that there's magic in the universe, but I love that there's this incredible intersection between science and spirituality that just excites me. You know, quantum physics is fascinating to me. And, but anyway, I love to tease him because he's, I think, an avowed atheist. I know, you threw a zinger at him about spirituality. I was like, oh, I wonder what he's gonna say,

because I know how he kind of handles that terrain. But I had seen him before that, before I turned on my camera and put him on the spot. It's science, right? We go at night, we stand up and look at the stars. And I asked him, how far are those stars away? I said, hundreds of billions of light years. And he goes, no, Corey, millions of light years.

And I'm like, okay. And I said, it's true though, that some of those stars that we see that are there are actually dead and gone a long time ago. But because it takes the light and energy from those stars millions of years to travel to us, we see them as if they're still there. And he confirms this.

And I go, well, that's very spiritual. I am light and energy. And I'll be dead and gone, just like Arthur Lessman is dead and gone, just like Frederick Douglass is dead and gone, Ella Baker's dead and gone, but the energy they gave off, they're still stars that still guide us like North Stars today. That's very spiritual. We all are infinity. Our bodies may die, but the energy we put out into the world can never, ever stop. And so that's what I like to think about to ground myself,

whether you're an atheist scientist. The energy I choose today to put into this world is energy that I hope my great-grandchildren or someone else's great-grandchildren will get a chance to bathe in. And so the one choice I have every day is my attitude. It's my energy. You know the work of Viktor Frankl, who I used to know by heart, but paraphrase him. He said, we who are in the concentration camps remember those people who shared their only piece of bread, even though they themselves were starving, who comforted others,

even though they were suffering the same fate. It's a great testimony of the greatest of all human freedoms to choose your attitude, or I would say energy, in any given set of circumstances. And so I lean on those people in my world who nurture and source,

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

And I write about this moment in my book. We have a real problem in America with just needless violence, gun violence. More people have died in my lifetime, in my early 50s, of gun violence than have died in my lifetime, you know, in my early 50s of gun violence than have died in all the wars America's been in combined. And whatever side you are of the debate, the reality is we all should have a moral obligation to stop this level of carnage. And so, again, living in an African-American community where there are so many generational contributing

factors to the problems of violence, you tend to see it, unfortunately, too much. And a lot of the kids that were with Hassan Washington are dead now. Hassan was not the only person that's murdered. But I'll never forget in that time between losing the mayoralty, winning the mayoralty, and just walking in my neighborhood,

and a kid was shot, trying to revive him, trying to hold them together. Traumatic. The glorification we do of violence. It is ugly. It is gruesome when somebody has gunshot wounds. And I have no training, but I'm trying to clear foamy blood from the kid's mouth, holding him together. And it was another point on my journey where I was ready to be done. And where I felt such anger towards this country where we swear oaths, we say liberty and justice for all, but I couldn't understand how we have created such a routine. It's normalized this level of violence and carnage seen in no other place

on the planet unless it's in a war. We in America have stopped paying attention to gun violence. And I remember that night trying to scrub this kid's blood off my hands and just feeling such vicious anger about this situation. Broken again, waking up the next morning, and there is this Ms. Jones. And I'll never forget when she sees me and holds me, and she just says over and over again to me as I cry, stay faithful, stay faithful, stay faithful. And they just words, right?

But, and it wasn't about religion, but here was this rock, a woman whose own son was murdered in the building in which I lived, who has seen everything that I've seen, who's hurt, this wasn't my child. This was a kid I knew or a kid I encountered. No matter what you're going through,

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

someone that despite the wretchedness, the pain, the hurt, that will choose faithfulness or hopefulness or ultimately the highest frequency of all love? Mm, yeah, and as I understand it, that woman, she stayed in the apartment building, right? Yes. or hopefulness, or ultimately the highest frequency of all love. Yeah, and as I understand it, that woman, she stayed in the apartment building, right? Yes. And you asked her, like, why are you still here? And she said something like,

well, I'm in charge of Homeland Security, right? Like, she could have left, but she's exercising her, you know, this is, she's taking responsibility for this situation, and that's a really incredibly indelible and powerful example of exactly what you're talking about. Right, and you and I have this privilege that we get seen. I love this song, Everyday People by Sly and the Family Stone.

The real reality that I get to see is everyday heroes. That there are Americans every day that, like Miss Jones, who do things that are beyond heroic, and they should be our anchors. And when I was mayor, I would, you know, there was a guy that would stop and see the graffiti on one of our main arteries in Newark, regular Joe, but he started buying paint and would just stop and paint a little bit. He had 10 minutes, he'd paint for 10 minutes and transform this place into an ugly site to being someplace where people didn't have to look at that filth.

I'd see a guy who used the stimulus check back in the days that I think it was Bush to buy a lawnmower and bags and rakes and took an area that drug dealers were using to sell in his neighborhood, never confronted them, never vilified them, but would walk into their territory gently and start mowing the lawn and raking the leaves, made it look like the White House lawn. And eventually the drug dealers left on their own accord and he became a hero in his community. I could go through a thousand of these stories. Police officers, I had a terrible situation where a woman had a hostage situation. Her boyfriend jumps out of the window, gets wounded, but now she's in there with a gun and a child.

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

shot the baby through a pillow. And these men and women try to render aid to the child. They just risk their own life. Go to home, whatever that home situation is, come back to work the next day to try to help people. So I had this rare perch where I was often being appointed to the guy as mayor of the city, but I presided over a city with thousands and thousands of stories of people in the toughest of circumstances that were willing to put themselves on the line to love thy neighbor. And so whenever I get down or whenever I'm facing fear or hurt or frustrated because I can't get this bill passed, that seems to make a lot of sense sense or get my colleagues, even in my own party,

to sign on a bill that stopped the overuse of antibiotics in our system. I just simply need to reset to people in tougher, harsher circumstances that somehow still seem to manifest the highest of human virtue. And that's like a practice. You'll bring yourself back to that memory

or root yourself in that kind of experience to remind yourself of why you're doing it. Yeah, but I love that you use the word practice because we all need to take on, I would call it a spiritual practice. All of us have to do things that can nurture and nourish us in order to be the best we can at manifesting this frequency. My great chief of staff, Veronica, this extraordinary

woman's on the plane with me reading from a spiritual book about how do you protect your frequency? How do you protect your energy? Because you've got to have practices. And I know I am a much better, my uncle says sleep is a weapon. And whether you want to use that language or not, he's right. When I'm sleeping, I'm far more sharp and far more effective. I know that I need exercise. When I'm off the wagon and burying my sorrows in vegan ice cream,

I'm not at my best as I feel when I get up in the morning and I meditate and I pray and I journal and I read and I run and get that surge of endorphins and feel like I can take on the world. I do think, and this is why I love listening to you, doing things that feed your soul and surrounding yourself with people that challenge you to be better and to be better at yourself and not to take yourself too seriously and ground you.

Those are the kind of practices that we all should be seeking. And the pandemic did something for me. I realized that since we were all separate, I had to be more active in cultivating community, intentionally creating community. And I know that when you surround yourself with the kind of people that make you better, you're better off.

So one of my close friends, Abe, he and I agreed to start studying Torah together. I'm this Christian guy, but we said, he's one of the people I admire most in the world and let's call in a rabbi and do some virtue studying. My cousins who I grew up with that were like brothers and sisters, let's create a wellbeing book circle.

And we created that. The club has grown this eight of us now that we meet weekly. And those are the kinds of things that are part of the practice of life. And to slow down enough to say, what are the ingredients I need to face a difficult world? Because shockwaves are going to come. Tragedies are going to come. You're going to wake up in the morning. What are the things that you need that are going to keep you grounded, help you build moral muscle and spiritual resilience? And we should think about those things. And if we think about those things.

And if we write those ingredients down, how do you incorporate them into your daily routine? Yeah, I mean, you're a caretaker for others. You're living a life of service, but your ability to serve to your maximum capabilities is toggled to your ability to exercise self-care, right? Like you can't, if you're not taking care of yourself, you're not gonna be able to be the servant that you aspire to be.

Right, and it's hard. And I listened to you and you're, some funny sayings, like you wouldn't tell an alcoholic, you know, just do it in moderation. And I'm learning my lines and I'm learning when I fall off the wagon and go through long periods

where I'm not doing something. But this has been a great few years to try new things, like trying to run every day. You're on the run streak still, right? I am on the run streak. Thanks to somebody- Shout out to Hela.

Yeah, who I met through you. You have influenced my life more than you know. He's the best, man. Trust me, when you credited him, Hela and I were texting, I was like, did you see Corey? Yeah, like, have you guys gone running yet together? No, we haven't.

You haven't, but I ran through COVID. I ran with, I was in India and had this horrible thing happen to my stomach that we should not describe. But I ran then, I ran, last night was one of my toughest ones because early morning, you know, three and a half hours of sleep

and at night going out and running. And my staff loves to pick a hotel that's like on hills. So when I finished a full year, talk about doing small incremental things that build momentum. And then like, I'm gonna do a hundred pushups a day, which, you know, back in my athletic days, it would have been hard. But the first day I was doing, it's like three sets of three.

And then by, you know, I did something that, my chief of staff, again, she's amazing, but we joke with each other all the time. I did something. I was just down at the border looking at the crisis there. And I'm just feeling so jacked that I challenged a Marine to a push-up contest because it's these incremental things that really give you momentums, creating streaks, creating habits. It's so empowering. And again, I credit you with a lot of this inspiration. Well, that's amazing to hear. Thank you. I want to shift gears a little bit. You mentioned earlier how you're sort of an unlikely candidate for to be this sort of advocate for food policy reform right this isn't what you thought you would be getting into but this has become really central

to your platform and and you know your activism your advocacy and it's interesting because on its face you think well food food's like you know this doesn't seem to be kind of in the bullseye of like what Corey would be concerned about. But when you kind of telescope out, you realize like food is everything. It encapsulates all the issues that you care about most. So talk a little bit about how you got interested in food systems and food policy and kind of, you know, where we're at right now in terms of what this looks like. Yeah. So I have an amazing team member named Adam Zipkin, who's been with me for my whole, pretty much my whole career, who was in Washington and basically said to me,

we need to be on the agriculture committee. And I laughed at him. And I don't know what that quote is. At first they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they hate you, whatever. I think I went through all those stages. They mock you at one point. Yeah, yes, yes. But eventually I end up on the ag committee because he argued, and rightfully so, that every issue I care about intersects with our food system.

In fact, everything intersects with our food system. And he and I both sort of became vegetarians and then vegans around the same evolution, which gets you reading about food. And I understood I went from a junk food vegan to trying to be a more plant-based person, but it gives you windows into your food system. So in short, we are a country in a health crisis that we're not speaking about. We are the wealthiest country in the world, but we have some of the highest rates of diet-related diseases that are mushrooming in cost

in just a handful of years, or like five, are spending on diabetes. It's gone up 25%. Half our population now is diabetic or pre-diabetic, but it's not just diabetes. It's Alzheimer's, heart disease, strokes. And so one out of every $3 in our government right now is being spent on healthcare, close to one out of five of our dollars in our economy. And I, you know, ran for president

where the debate people wanted to have was how do you provide healthcare? But it's almost like saying it's like, well, how do you mop up the floor when the water faucet's never turned off? Should we talk about why we need so much healthcare? Yes. So 80% of that spending is for diet-related diseases. And I'm all for freedom. I want this country to eat what you want. But we have designed a system in which the things that we tell you not to eat are being subsidized. And the things we tell you to eat, we don't subsidize at all. So when my kids walk into a bodega in Newark, they can get a Twinkie-like product cheaper than

an apple because we as a society have said we're going to subsidize everything in that Twinkie-like product and not the apple. In fact, fruits and vegetables get about 7% of our ag subsidies, while the commodity crops that go to the corn syrup and the things that, again, are not making us healthy or to feed animals get the most of our subsidies. And everybody along the chain is getting hurt. Farmers are getting hurt right now. Their suicide rates, I think, are two or three times higher than the average American.

The independent family farmer is being eviscerated. People are losing their farms in utter numbers. Again, it's a massive consolidation. Small amounts of companies are controlling our food system, and they're benefiting from ag policies designed in the 1950s by people who thought, let's just make calories readily available and that can stay on shelves forever. When we know a lot better about nutrition now, this food system that we have is being done in a way that is all about those commodity crops, which now are being doused with chemicals that we have is being done in a way that is all about those commodity crops, which now are being doused with chemicals that we don't fully know what it does to our bodies.

But you and I both have glyphosates in our blood, other endocrine disruptors, because we've created this roundup ready crops and seeds, which are hurting our ecology, streams, rivers, full of these chemicals, runoff of, we're losing quality of our soil. So farmers are losing, the ecology is losing, climate change is one of our biggest contributors to the problem. All these climate activists seem to always forget that our food system is one of the major contributors to that. Farmers could be leading us out of that with us incentivizing them to do farming practices, cover crops and other things that preserve soil, nutrient-rich soil, biodiverse soil,

as opposed to the dirt that's created when you douse it in glyphosate. So it's a climate change issue. It's an ecology issue. It's about our farmers, but it's also about our food workers. People who work in our food system, first of all, overwhelmingly undocumented immigrants from our farms that are picking most of the food we eat, even to our slaughterhouses, which are more corporate concentrated than during the time of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. So you go all the way to the end users. As a guy that you know, Ron Finley says in South Central, he says in South Central, we got drive-bys and drive-throughs,

and the drive-throughs are killing more people than the drive-bys. The number one killer of African-Americans is diet-related diseases. So this food system is so broken, it's hurting us in every single way from the farmers who are producing our food, who now get 14 cents on the dollar

of every consumer dollar spent because of, again, massive corporate concentration all the way down to very, very sick population. And so I think we as a society, no matter whether you're right or left, I told you about the cattlemen who are getting hurt by this system, all the way to the people in communities like mine, we need to begin to expand consciousness about that this is not a fait accompli, that this system is by design producing the results that we're seeing, where pharmaceutical companies

are making incredible profits, where literally I was shocked when I saw this that a major health organization says, well, obesity in children is such a bad thing, we are advising them to have their stomachs stapled. So we have created a system where people are profiting off of it, but the rest of us all are losing.

And we can redesign it so farmers thrive and consumers thrive in health. Because we know, as you've said many times on your show, food is medicine. I can show you study after study that for taxpayers, if you're fiscally conservative, what a return on investment if you make fresh fruits and vegetables accessible for people with diabetes or hypertension or the like. And so I want to be a disruptor now. I want to find ways to take the next farm bill,

which is coming, and see what ways we can make improvements on it to begin to show people there's a better way. There's so much change that we need right now. And it is true. When you kind of canvas the current situation, everybody's losing except the people in the C-suites of these giant food conglomerates and perhaps the lobbyists who are on retainer, right? Like this is a clusterfuck, you know,

bar none in terms of trying to, you know, kind of create any kind of meaningful change. It's an intractable problem and it's super entrenched, right? But what's interesting about it is it really is a bipartisan issue. Like the people that are suffering are blue and they're red and we should all be very concerned about this and we can all benefit and gain

from looking more closely at what is actually going on, where the money is flowing, who is being harmed, and not for nothing, the long-term consequences of not addressing this problem, which will ultimately bankrupt the country. Because if you think healthcare is expensive and inaccessible now, what is it going to look like if, you know, these curves towards, you know, greater and greater diabetes rates and obesity and heart disease and the like, they're only going to continue to escalate. And then it becomes a national security issue. Like there is nothing that is not impacted by this. It all goes back to food. And what's interesting when you look at the history of it going all the way back to like the Homestead Act and the original, you know, rationale behind the farm bill, right?

Like good intentions. Let's have cheap food for everybody that lasts on the shelf. Like, these are good things. We need this to combat, you know, our hunger issue, right? But here we are today. It's a very different situation. And we have a farm bill situation that's perpetuating the problems rather than eradicating them. And I know that you've put a couple pieces of legislation on the table right now to redress this. It's a very exciting time

because the farm bill is up for vote, I think in September this year, right? I hope, we hope, yeah. We don't, it's not like, how does it, I don't even know how that works. And the legislation that you've kind of authored or co-authored, is that part of the farm bill? Or how, I don't know that I fully understand

how this works. Yeah, so you have these big things called reauthorizations, you know, the FAA reauthorization, but the farm bill's every five years. It's, the whole thing is up again. But it's kind of like five to seven years. Like it's vague. Yeah, it could take longer to get done.

But there is usually these must pass bills. It's gonna eventually pass, but there's a whole bunch of fighting involved in it. And a lot of bipartisan work. And so we're trying to find things that we can tweak in different places that might have big results. Like there's something, and again, I hate to speak Washington speak, but called the Gus Nip

program. What is that? That is like to incentivize people. One part of the farm bill is what you call food stamps, but SNAP, supplemental nutrition assistance program, where what can you do with your SNAP dollars? Well, there's a program that was created that would allow people to go to farmer's markets and urban farms. Because you used to not be able to use them for anything healthy. Yes. Right.

Yes. We can buy as much sugar water as you want, but there are other things that you couldn't do. Well, once we realized that we can create incentives, you can get, Gus Nip allows you to get double bucks. And so in Newark, when I was mayor, we were able to create an entire city block as a farm.

And I went back recently, I hadn't been there in years and was blown away by what they've created in this space. And I went to see what I could buy with, you know, $10 and it blew anything away that I could get in like Whole Foods or the organic section of other places. And then they told me, well, you would get double this with your food stamps. Now I tried to live, did a horrible job, but I wanted to show how hard it was to live and feed yourself on the $2.14 a day that they,

or I'm not sure exactly what it is now, but the little bit of money you get per meal or for the day. But this was unbelievable to me. And I met a group out there, you know, the documentary Food Inc. Sure. Well, they're filming Food Inc. too. And so I went to talk about this challenge that we have of these mushrooming costs where

we will, you say someday, it's soon, where the amount of money we spend on healthcare, because these diseases are mushrooming, the one that people don't talk about enough is Alzheimer's, which you and people you've had on have talked about being type three diabetes because it's so connected to our diet as well. I went out to talk to them about that. And we didn't plan it this way, but these African-American elder women come out and want to share their stories.

One woman had a gut issues where she said that her prescription drugs were costing $700 a month. She was paying $100 of it. That was her co-pay. And so I assume taxpayers were paying the rest of it. And she said that she started sourcing all of her food from this incredible farm in a low-income section of the city. And her doctor's like, miracle cure. You don't need your prescription drugs. She became healthy. An octogenarian, she has a great Twitter handle, Instagram handle, like vegan octogenarian or something like that. 80-year-old woman who had

diabetes for years and years and years became a vegan, sourced her food from the farm. It went away. Her diabetes went away. And so that's the crossroads I think we're on. We do not understand how bad it's going to get in 10, 20 years if we don't do something about this crisis. But there's ways in the farm bill that if we start to make changes, I think we can create even more constructive disruption. But to your point, there are very powerful lobbies that are trying to protect the status quo who don't want to see change in these areas. And they often have influence on both sides of the aisle. Like, you know, my team, we stopped taking corporate contributions

and C-suite from oil companies or pharma. But I try to often tell people the most influential lobby is food, big food, because they are on both sides of the aisle. It's, I mean, it's probably not as big as defense though, right? Or is it on parity with that? I would actually,

you just trumped me a little bit because defense is, defense lobbyists- Hard to beat defense. It is really hard. This is why I vote against defense bills. But how does, sorry, go ahead. No, I'm just joking because it's happened again.

Democrat, Republican presidents, they often put their budgets in for defense and Congress takes it, okay, the, go ahead. Well, I'm just joking because it's happened again. Democrat, Republican presidents, they often put their budgets in for defense and Congress takes it, okay, the military is asking for this. Let's add, you know, whatever billions of dollars onto it because, you know, the military is not asking for things that are made in my district or what have you. I still remember one of my funny experiences

was going to John McCain's ranch. It was another guy being very close to, on the odyssey of meeting with everybody. When I went to his office, we had a very emotional first meeting and he kind of took me under his wing and was so kind to me. So he started inviting me

to these annual policy conferences at his ranch and I was out there and I couldn't eat anything at his big barbecue one night because everything was saturated in some animal product. You know, the vegetables were butter and mayonnaise. And so I just didn't eat, but I was comfortable, really happy to be in this policy conference. And as I'm driving away in a golf cart, the guy's taking me back to where

I was staying on his ranch. He says, did you enjoy the food, Senator? I'm like, I actually really didn't have any food because nothing was vegan. And he's like, oh my God, can we help you get food? And I go, sure. And he goes, well, I think Senator McCain's probably asleep, but maybe we can break into his back door and go into his kitchen. I'm like, break into John McCain's house? Yeah, I'm in. I'm from Jersey, baby, let's go.

And so we go there, we didn't have to break in, but because he was sitting up late talking to a former secretary of the Navy, and I sit there with my peanut butter and carrots or whatever I was eating, and just listen to these two wise men talk about what they were calling the corruption in our military that we have. We're spending so much more and not getting the effectiveness we should because we're just a failure to focus on taxpayer return for investment. And so I just think this is where I think my party gets it wrong or doesn't say it enough.

We really have got to start talking about reforming systems, creating more transparency, less sort of these opaque worlds in which all this corruption can thrive. And I think that we need a reimagining of what government is, because we have a government right now that in so many cases would rather pay so much more on the back end of a problem as opposed to make more strategic investments on the front end. And this brings us back to food. When I talk to people at the

State Department, when I talk to people in the military and look at their threat analyses, they are going to tell you that one of the great crises we have is food insecurity that often causes political instability, that often causes migration crises. A lot of the challenges we have at the border, you could say, are coming from political instability over the years in some of these countries, some of which America has had a role in. But there's also just the craziness of the weather destroying agricultural crops, creating poverty. There's something going on on the planet that we can't isolate ourselves from as a country.

And I love what General Mattis says. If you stop the State Department funding for certain programs, then buy me more bullets. The way you stop crime in communities like mine in Newark or pick your city, I still remember heading with the head of the FBI and saying, how do we solve this problem? And when I was first weeks, I was mayor, he goes, we don't solve this problem. Mayor, he said to me, we treat the symptoms of a problem. Whether it's in the United States starting to own up to issues of addiction and mental health,

which we fill our prisons with these folks, so much more expensive, so much more human misery, as opposed to finding interventions on the front end. Planetarily, if we don't start finding ways to intervene in countries that are at risk, in programs we know have return for taxpayer dollars that help with food innovations, access to food security, and more, we are going to pay so much more on the back end of these problems. And so that's enlightened empathy that understands that this isn't charity, it's a self-interest we have to play a role of creating a more healthy planet. And in America, stop creating an environment where we deal with our crises in hospital emergency rooms or in prisons or in jails, but starts to say, how can we create a more beloved

community where we're making investments that are not just in human well-being to help human flourishing, but actually make us a safer society, a more beloved country, and a nation that is more evidencing its best values in how we treat one another through our policies and through our individual behaviors. When it comes to food systems, however, that solution rests in dismantling a corporate conglomerate system of factory farms and CAFOs that are depleting our soils and reaping the benefits of subsidies and producing foods that are making us ill

on the sort of shoulders of taxpayers who actually incur the risk when things go sideways, like combating that or, you know, kind of innovating new systems is a tough mountain to climb, right? And so you, as somebody who sits on the Senate, you know, Agriculture Committee, like, are you an outlier voice on that committee? Is there consensus building happening right now? Are there solutions on the table about how to effectively achieve this to repair our soils and to get people to appreciate the benefits of more kind of locally oriented agricultural sources? I know you talk

about like the robustness of dispersing our food systems because COVID, if it taught us anything, it taught us how fragile it is. Global systems of food. The concentration of our, yeah, the globalization of our food system actually makes us very, very sensitive and fragile in times of crisis. Yeah. Look, we have produced legislation going right at this factory farm system that is indefensible. They do a lot, these ag-gag laws, to stop Americans from knowing.

Yeah, you were talking about transparency. We don't know anything. We're legally prevented from actually being able to understand what's actually happening. Right, and they literally cover it over. If you go to these massive concentrated animal feeding operations, these CAFOs, they're literally covering them over.

They are these sort of, they're acting in ways that are affronts to the values of their consumers, putting beautiful pictures on their packaging of, you know, these pastoral days of past. Or days that reflect more what the regenerative movement's doing than what is actually happening with most of the meat that we're producing. They're doing things to animals that would disgust many of their consumers. So I could go on about factory farming. We have put forward legislation, but this is something you know about Washington. Ultimately, change does not come from Washington. It comes to Washington. Like we didn't get the great suffrage legislation because in 1919, a bunch of men came to the Senate floor and said, okay, fellas, I guess what?

Let's let those women have a right to vote. It came because of activism of conscious expansion. We didn't get civil rights legislation because one day Strom Thurmond came to the Senate floor and said, I've seen the light, let those Negro people have the right to vote. We came because of activism that was so, as I said before, these artists of activism that opened the eyes of the average Americans who could

not no longer sanction the segregation. We are in that same moment right now where we share the same values about our food system. We could have a focus group here of any background of Americans. Moms want healthy foods for their kids. They often are confused by the corporations that try to confuse them with their labeling and their marketing. Moms want healthy food. You give them the options,

they're gonna choose healthy foods for their families. But we need to continue to let people understand what's happening in their food system. When I can talk to other colleagues of mine in Congress and say things that sort of blow their mind that they didn't realize are happening, or just tell stories, what it did for me to go to Duplin County, North Carolina, and see what Smithfield, one of the companies, is doing down there with these contract farmers who themselves are trapped in these horrible tournament systems where they're living like sharecroppers. But I had never seen with my own eyes these massive CAFOs that then underneath have grates where these caged animals who can barely move or turn around,

move or turn around, then have their feces and urine flow through these pipes into these massive lagoons of waste that are then sprayed on fields. But just like when you spray your fire hose, stuff mists. And then you meet with people, desperate Americans, who've lived on that land for generations. In this case, black communities that have been on that land since slavery, say to you their property values have crashed. They have respiratory problems, diseases. They can't open their windows. They can't run their air conditioning or put their clothing on the lines. And the hell that they're going through as a result of this aberration of the way we're raising livestock, you can't help but break open your empathy and

feel compelled that we have to change the system. It doesn't have to be this way. I can still enjoy whatever I want to eat from systems that are healthy, that add to our well-being, that don't oppress or exploit people, that don't drive people who have a proud heritage in their family of raising livestock now to their knees living like sharecroppers. But the problem we have right now exploit people, that don't drive people who have a proud heritage in their family of raising livestock now to their knees living like sharecroppers. But the problem we have right now is not enough Americans realize how deeply broken this system is and how we're all losing. And so what I'm trying to do and what people like you are doing, because I've learned a lot from years ago starting to listen to what you all are doing, is this is the 1950s in the civil rights movement.

I had the, and I hope I'm not getting in trouble for outing him, the head of the NAACP saying, you had mentioned to me, Corey, one of these food summits, civil rights food summit, because a lot of the civil rights organizations, when they would come to me and they would say, this is our agenda for black America. And I'd be like, where's the food?

The number one killer of African-Americans is because you have more fast food restaurants in African-American communities. People are not having it their own way though. You know, there's no happiness in a lot of these happy meals that they're having. Why aren't we having conversations where we're moving activist groups?

And I don't care who you are. I gave a speech to this amazing coalition of farmers, of health advocates, livestock farmers getting together with animal rights people. We need to strengthen these coalitions, build this consciousness so that Americans are saying no more. Why are you putting my life in danger by overusing antibiotics? Why are you doing things that don't comport? You and I remember the dolphin cause that got Americans all up and they tried to change the way they were doing this fish. Why aren't we demanding that this factory farming stop in this country and us begin

to do things that localize and regionalize our food systems, make them stronger, healthier, and more elevating to the success of families and farmers and everybody in between. Yeah, yeah. The disproportionate impact that this system is having on underprivileged communities, communities of color, I mean, it's deplorable. And yet-

But I'm sorry to interrupt you, because so the United Farm Workers invited 100 senators to come work a day in the fields next to a farm worker. Two of us responded. Alex Padilla here in California said, I will do it. And me, it took us like over a year to schedule this. And I go out in these fields. It was brutally hard work, hunched over, picking lettuce, doing all these things. I think my chief of staff who's here

and team took joy filming me. I'm in pretty good shape, but it was brutal work. I was sore for well over a week. But what's interesting to me is I talked to these mostly women, and my Spanish is pretty good, and most of them are undocumented. And they have horrible stories of sexual harassment, wage theft. What does it mean to have to work away from your children in ways that are wrong? The challenges of sending money, working like we did, and then sending money back, just the usury rates that are charged.

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

But he says something to me that shook me because he's like, this is the owner of the farm. He says to me, he goes, well, yeah, Corey, America has throughout its history had the people that work in their fields not having any say in their political systems. You would understand that as a black guy. And all of a sudden it like gave me chills. I'm like, oh, my God, this guy is going all the way back to slavery. went through what I did, side by side with these other human beings, listening to their stories of sexual exploitation, economic exploitation, to know that this injustice is baked into our food system, would say enough is enough. We need to change this. And we can do it in a way that's not going to actually raise costs for families. That's the thing that most people don't understand,

going to actually raise costs for families. That's the thing that most people don't understand, that there's a lot of corporate taking going on where they're exploiting a system and draining more and more out of the system. And the people getting hurt are not just the agricultural workers, go to a rural town. One of my partners on some of this legislation is an unlikely guy, but he's the only farmer in the United States Senate. This incredible Senator named John Tester in Montana, which is a red state, but he's a moderate guy who survives, seems every reelection effort. And he has a joke and I got to get the exact right,

but it goes something like this. He goes, when I was growing up in my town in Montana, our high school had like 2000 kids. We had like three banks in our downtown and five bars. And he goes, now we've got like 200 kids in our town because of all the corporate consolidation. We have like 200 kids in our high school. There are no more banks. And there's only one bar that's hanging on because I go there and drink all the time. And what he just tells is the hollowing out of our rural communities because,

again, multinational corporations are what used to sustain thriving diverse communities, farming like our great grandparents did, are now being run by these massive multinational corporations that are doing everything they can to protect this broken farm system. So we can change this, but the first step goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning.

Individuals like you and I and people that are listening saying, before I'm going to just point fingers at the CAFOs and these companies, what can I be doing to better send r 1950s of the ultimately victorious civil rights movement, where what they were doing was raising consciousness all along the way of the injustices. Well, we have to do this because to me, the injustices run deep in the exploitation and the hurting of farmers and the hurting of our atmosphere. This is a big, big problem that I'm hoping more people can take the time to learn about and connect themselves to. Well, I appreciate you shouldering the responsibility of attempting to educate people. It is so complex and there is no aspect, as we said earlier, of society that is untouched by this, right? And it isn't a blue or a red thing. The farmers are hurting. They're being exploited. The workers are being exploited.

The consumers are being exploited. Our health is being impacted. The environment is being degraded. The animals are being horribly, you know, it's just terrible across the board. And I do believe in change. And I do think that, you know, that education piece will and is already

creating a grassroots movement of excitement and energy around this type of change. And then there's you, you know, sitting where you sit, who gets to initiate legislation, who gets to talk about the antitrust implications of all of this, who gets to, you know who gets to talk about the antitrust implications of all of this, who gets to, you know, kind of convene hearings

where you get to confront these corporations and ask them the hard questions, all of which trickles down into more education and more energy and more activism. But we want to tell you a strange sign, though, that is getting out there. So we, you know, we stopped taking corporate dollars and corporate PACs and all that.

So we do a lot of these emails that you might get from people trying to raise money. So we just think it's almost affirming to us that we'll send out emails with, I think incredibly Barbara Streisand sent out an email with us that was very successful. We'll try to talk about every issue to see if we can get individual small dollar contributions

because ultimately, and the ones that get the best return are about the food system. There is an audience out there. The best performing posts we often have are talking about the food system. So I know some of it might be because these are the people that are drawn,

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

We have to create incentives that drive the positive change. And right now, all of the incentives are driving us in the wrong direction and just making this problem even more intractable. And when it comes to campaign finance reform and the whole K Street complex, help us understand how that works. What is the shadowy business of being a lobbyist?

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

And then there's the old joke, you know, don't hate the player, hate the game. The game is designed in certain rules and people are playing their parts. And if we can change the rules of the game, you're going to get a lot different result. So yes, we live in a nation right now, especially since Citizens United, that to run for a congressional seat or a Senate seat takes an ungodly amount of money. We're the only nation I know that does it this way. Where we're in 2023,

we have a November 2024 presidential election and people are already out there raising money for what's gonna be an interminably long campaign. You know, in a parliamentary system in England, they're like set an election three months later, it's over. And so corporations right now have a corrupting influence. If you read Citizens United, which is one of the more shocking decisions, which opened up the floodgates, all of this dark money, even they said, well, we should disclose it, we should have,

forget it. It's a corrupting system that we have right now that if you have two candidates that each raise $25 million, that's still often a fraction of the total money spent because now corporations without their fingerprints on it can dump millions of dollars. I watched one congressperson I know was doing good at like a week before his election. Then a corporation just came in and dumped all these horrible negative ads, accusations against them. And they narrowly lost their election. And so there are certain things that I,

that I think we should be all fighting for that are technical fixes to our democracy that would produce better results. Whether you're Democrat or Republican, you would want that change. And one of them is has to be like, we were the fourth Senator to take the Citizen United pledge to give up corporate PAC money and the whole thing. And I'm trying to show people you can live without it and depend upon small dollar contributions. But hey, before you contribute to

somebody, ask them, have they taken the pledge too? We've got to somehow disconnect our elected leaders from this corporate money and get them to pass laws that end the Citizens United. There's other things that we got to change too, though. I mean, how we draw district lines and from this corporate money and get them to pass laws that end the Citizens United. There's other things that we got to change too, though. I mean, how we draw district lines and gerrymandering. And again, this is not a partisan thing. You see gerrymandering on both sides of the aisle, but it disenfranchises people.

It creates a democracy where, as I said, voters don't get to pick their elected officials. Elected officials get to pick their voters. So there's system designs, just like our food system is designed to get the outcome we're seeing. Our political system, there's things we could do better.

Like I've become enamored recently with rank choice voting. And I'm starting to look at it in working that when you go in, you don't just vote for your top choice, you vote for your second choice and your third choice,

which could have, I know in my side of the aisle, like when Hillary Clinton was running, if you just took the Jill Stein people that could have ranked Hillary as a second choice, it's something that could have pulled her over the top. So I just hope people, again, everything we are enjoying in this incredible privilege to be the rare 4% of the population on the earth that call themselves American, It should come with obligations and responsibilities. One of which is how do you leave this nation better than when you inherited it? How do you leave our democracy stronger than when you inherited it? And we now have a democracy that's straining a little bit.

I don't think there's anything that's happening now that's unprecedented. If you read history, it's a very precedented time. There've been other times that our democracy has felt like it was on their brink to people or where extremism was rising. But the question always comes back to you as an actor. What are you willing to do about the challenges? And something we should do, and I get frustrated sometimes when people tell me, oh, politics, I'm not, oh, it's just too,

I don't want to get involved. I'm sorry, well, if you abdicate your responsibility from being engaged in the civic space, you are contributing to the problems you say you don't like and making things worse because ultimately you get the leaders that you deserve. And one of the reasons why bad people, and I hate to put that in that way,

I put it in quotes, but bad people are elected is because good people don't vote and don't participate. Yeah, the silence is just as potent as what you say. Yeah, and again, it's good people who do nothing. Those are the folks that are, the letters from the Birmingham jail, which I think people should reread once a year,

was King not writing to racists or segregationists. He was writing to people of faith that were criticizing him for his activism and wanted to really believe that those were the people that were the real threat, not the people that were simply perpetrating the segregation. It was, why are so many people sitting on the sideline and luxuriating in the benefits and the blessings of their good fortune and not understanding that their complicity was what was sourcing the sustainability of the problem. Well, Senator, I want to be considerate of your time. We should probably wrap this up, but before I let you go, on that note of kind of our civic responsibility and assuming that,

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

or how to use their voice specifically? Well, I'd love to work with you to put some things in the show notes that might give people links and ways to get involved. Every dollar you spend in your life is a vote. And I'm trying to think more about everything from where my clothing comes from to where my food comes from. And if you have the flexibility to make choices, you can endorse a lot of good practices that are starting. You had a guy, again, you've turned me on to a lot of people over the years. One of them, this guy I love, Zach Bush. I'm seeing him later this week. You hang out with the people I want to hang out with.

Are you around on Friday? I wish, now I wish I was. That guy is incredible. He's been in my office and sat with a bunch of senators. I got him a handful of senators, but I love what he says. Like we often think that we have to attack the darkness and don't realize that we could just be more light ourselves. And so I just hope people just do a rigorous interrogation of themselves every once in a while. You don't have to do it every day, but what are the practices I can change? Because that's where you can make a difference. So we'll give practical things.

I'll give you the names of legislation that we're working on that you could ask your representative or what have you. But my biggest thing, and you and I, even when we were in college, they would have groups get together to talk about some issue. And everybody would leave feeling better about themselves. But not say, again, it's not about what others are doing. It's what about what I'm doing. And I'll end, if I can, now that I've told you too many stories, but to tell you one of my favorite moments of shame, which you will hopefully give me absolution for. But I have this great man in my life named Kevin Batts, who was among my security detail police officer

when I was a security detail. And when I left City Hall, he's like, I want to stay with you on your team. So I literally hired him on my sentence team. And he's one of these guys that helps with a lot of security issues and support when I'm back home. So he's been driving me around for a long time.

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

because I did not know at this point in my life that McDonald's french fries are not vegan. That they douse them in meat juice or something like that. I mean, you know, it's an easy mistake. Okay. Yes. Yeah. So we're driving past a McDonald's just three blocks from my house. And he looks at me in the rear view mirror and he sees the shame in my eyes and he turns into the drive-thru without anything being said. And the flesh is weak. I need these French fries. And I go into the thing and I order these two large French fries. Now I am one of the biggest, we're probably the lead in descheduling psychedelics.

You've had some great shows about the power of descheduling marijuana. And yet somehow I think that McDonald's french fries should be scheduled because they sprinkle them with something. I'm just so happy. I get these things, I'm holding them like I'm, you know, my precious.

And I want to give them back to my- Powerless. Yes. And, but as we start to drive, I see a guy in a trash can rooting around. And I look in the rear view mirror, eyes meet, no words said, he stops, he knows me. And I reel in my window and say, hey man, what's up? And I realized my tone of my voice wasn't respecting his dignity. And then I sort of shifted, came in a different way. I said, sir, is there anything I can do to help you? And he turns around and goes, I'm hungry. And as I always say, you gotta follow your faith. And my religion says something about

if you have two McDonald's French fries and your neighbor has none, you gotta give him one of your fries. I call it the Sermon on the McMount. I hand him this McDonald's French fries out the window. We seem like we're gonna have a beautiful exchange. He seems happy to receive them. I feel good about myself.

And I now want to get home because there's nothing worse than cold McDonald's french fries. But then he asks me, he goes, do you have any socks? And I know people who experience homelessness. This could be a big thing. But I don't carry extra socks in my car. And I sort of look to my left and right vainly. And I say, sorry, I'm sorry, I don't. And he said, okay. He stepped away holding one of the fries and I roll up the window and I turn

for Kevin to drive and he doesn't drive. He doesn't read the signs. He puts the car in park, reaches between his legs on the steering wheel, kicks off his shoes, takes off the socks he's wearing and hands him out the door. The guy looked like he received a bar of gold. And I'm sitting back there thinking to myself, I'm the senator that runs around talking about kindness and decency and love and living your values. But in this moment, I didn't think to take off my damn socks. When I'm three blocks from my house, I have socks in my drawer I probably haven't even worn yet. And so what I try to remind myself is that this is that word you said earlier. It is a practice that trying every day to get up, to live your values is something that's not hard, but it demands of us that whether we stumble, we fall, we just get up every day and try our best to live our light.

And a life of that, it's not a straight line. It takes stumbles. You get hit. You get knocked down. But getting up every day and trying to practice kindness, decency, and love, I think that that's the highest calling of life. Whether you are an elected leader, whether you are a coach, whatever you have, that to me are the people,

people who live that kind of life. Those are the people that help light my path, like Kevin Batts, that encourage me in my way. Well, I think you stuck the landing with that one beautifully put. I appreciate that. That's a really powerful reminder. And before we sign off, I wanna just acknowledge you for your example

and the light that you emit and the example that you set for so many people. Brother, I- let me just finish. No, I can't take it from you. Come on. I think the things you say, good or bad, what you say about other people is more of a reflection of who you are

than of who you're talking about. You are truly, truly one of the great inspirations. To have you as a source in my life is incredible. You've been at this for years now. I feel like I know you because I listened to you for so long. So I appreciate that you're keeping me on kindness. But today, please let me just say on behalf of your listeners, on the path for people to look at the privilege that I have now gotten to meet you, you are amazing, humble, kind, and the wisdom you bring out from others

and that you share on a regular basis is making this world a better place. And it's definitely made me a better man. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. And you're always welcome back here. I wanna come out and hang out with my,

for the discreet vegan or Zach's push. Maybe we should start a podcast together. Let's do dinner. Let's do dinners and open up the mic. All right, thanks, Matt. Thank you. Cheers. Thank you.

Peace. Plants. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today,

visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show

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which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets, courtesy of Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and AJ Akpodiete. Thank you, Georgia Whaley,

for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.