Host Steve Bannon interviewed MyPillow CEO and Founder Mike Lindell in a full hour-long exclusive.
Bannon: I want to bring in now someone that conservatives don’t need to be told who he is. Mike Lindell has been at the forefront of not just supporting the conservative movement, conservative causes, and conservative media. But more importantly, he really took the fight on this election fraud and really stood up. And took incoming. And so I want to make sure we go through the day and explain exactly what that is. Mike, briefly, I don’t know if all of our audience knows who you are because we are a global show. It’s one of the reasons the podcast is so big.
And this Lao Bejing. It’s all 100 Names in China. Its working-class people throughout the world support the MAGA agenda. They are nationalists and populists in their own countries. Working-class people. Middle-class people. Your story is so amazing and particularly of what you built and what they are trying to destroy because you stood up as a free man and wanted to have your thoughts and opinions out there. Walkthrough your story briefly. I know you went through some tough times. Walkthrough where you’ve really come through in life.
Lindell: I was an ex-addict. Everything from compulsive gambling to crack cocaine. And God set me free of that on January 16, 2009. And at that point, I invented MyPillow in 2004. So I had these true tracks. I was a very functioning addict for a while in the 80s and 90s but then it turned into crack cocaine and it started bringing me down. I pretty much had lost everything and people were taking stuff from me. A lot of it was betrayal. When I came out of addiction I’m going, what did I miss?
I never thought politics had to with anything in my life and it didn’t affect me. But I looked around me and my friends were losing their homes. There was a president giving money to an evil empire. All these things had changed. What’s going on here? In the summer of 2016, Donald Trump reached out to me when he was the then-candidate Donald Trump in a private meeting in New York City on August 15, 2016. And when I met him I walked in and it was just him and I.
We talked about bringing the jobs back because I make MyPillow here. Right now I have 2,500 employees. And he says, I want to bring the manufacturing back to the U.S. And I said you know I used to be a crack cocaine addict and I’m going to have this platform to help addiction and get millions of people out of addiction. He said I’ll stop the drugs pouring in. It was just an amazing conversation with him about all the things he was going to do.
I thought, wow, he’s going to be the greatest president ever. It was problem and solution. It all sounded great. And I go wow if he kept those promises it would be amazing. (Inaudible talk) And they all said he’s a great leader. He’s done something for me personally. He’s a great boss. So I kind of validated everything that I had just seen. I went back to my home state in Minnesota and I told all the press and the media that I had a meeting with Donald Trump and it was crickets. (Bannon chuckles)
Nobody said anything. And then the attacks starting coming. They called me a racist. They called me everything. I knew I was on the right path then and I went all in. That’s when I realized now after four years of battling the media and fighting for this country and backing the greatest president that I believe that we’ve ever had.
Bannon: Mike, hang on one second. I just want to go back in time for something. I want to talk about building the company and what you’ve built and the employees. And we’ll get back to the Trump part of it. You said you’re life changed on the 16th of January 2009. Can you share with the audience what exactly that was and how a guy who obviously started a business that was a compulsive gambler, was a crack addict and was doing all this? What was that incident that changed your life?
Lindell: I knew that if I waited one more day that my calling would be gone. My calling would be gone. I knew My Pillow was just a platform for God and that something big was going to happen. I had a big calling on my life. I even had the drug dealers doing an intervention on me at one point. And to quickly tell that, I was downtown Minneapolis in Minnesota there and staying down there I had a warrant out for my arrest, which I was found innocent on later.
I had come out of the room and been up for two weeks with no sleep. And I came out and they said we’re cutting you off. You’ve been up for two weeks and you are not buying anymore crack. And I said, what is this an intervention? They said, call it what you want Mike. Two of them left and then one of them fell asleep by the time I was carpet farming for crack.
And I went down to the street in Minneapolis and I couldn’t buy it anywhere. They completely shut me down. I come back upstairs and here’s what he said. He goes, you’ve been telling us for years that this My Pillow thing is a platform for God and you’re going to come back sometime when you quit and you’re going to help us all out of this addiction world we’re living in.
And two of these guys are born again Christians that work for me now. So I had all that happen. But on January 16, 2009, I prayed that I would be freed of the desire. I said, okay. God, I want to be freed of this desire and I’ll do this platform. Whatever you got lined for me I’ll give it all to you. I woke up the next day and the desire was gone.
I never looked back. I did go to a faith-based treatment center from our church about two months later and found out why I was an addict in the first place. But those were great seeds that were planted there for me. And I ended up doing a full surrender to God and Jesus on February 18, 2017. So God has played a huge role in where I’m at now. I give it all to God as a matter of fact. But I’ll tell ya, from that point on, when I came out of addiction there My Pillow, my business was just a little blip on the radar.
Bannon: Hang on. Before I get to that. You are saying that it was you dealers or the guys getting you crack that were also addicts that you were so far gone and over the top that they actually did the intervention for you to say, hey, you’ve got to stop this or you are going to be gone. And two of those guys are now born again Christians and work with you?
Lindell: Yes that’s right. You’ve got to realize that I would tell them this all the time. You guys, I have this calling and I would talk about the books in the Bible that I read about when I was in jail. I would tell all my friends all the time, even the dealers. So I was like their hope. They really believed me. I was so transparent all the time and I still am. They really believed me. So I was like their hope. And Mike if you can get out of this we need somebody to lead us out of this so to speak. And it’s great. Now I have this Lindell Recovery Network that’s going to be this huge platform that’s helping millions get out of addiction now.
Bannon: Your prayers, I just want to make sure. You were a compulsive gambler. Compulsive crack cocaine. All of it. And through prayer, that burning desire that it’s so overwhelming to so many people in the nation and so many people throughout the world because they just can’t do it because of their own human willpower. You are saying through prayer, you woke up one day and that desire was totally gone?
Lindell: The desire was gone. I want to be clear here. Two months later I went to a faith-based treatment center. I wanted to find out why I was an addict in the first place and if there was an answer to that. Here’s what I know now. From childhood, people get wounds. They get trauma. Fatherlessness. My parents divorced when I was seven years old back when divorces weren’t common. So I got put into a school where I was the only kid from a broken home. So I felt like an outcast.
I felt like I didn’t fit in. I was very shy. I couldn’t talk to people. I would show off to fit in. I would say, hey watch me jump out this school bus window and do things either one extreme to another. And to try to fit in. I think that’s the common thing here that is people, we get drugs and addictions. I don’t care what it is. They mask pain. They give us false courage.
All these things that addictions do is just a cover-up. Fear of rejection. If you don’t talk to people you don’t get rejected. And I really believe that the key to this is God is Jesus. And that’s what’s worked. If you look at faith-based treatment centers, they work 80 percent and above. Secular treatment centers are five percent below. And that’s a fact. You can’t lie on that.
Listen to the full interview here:
https://pandemic.warroom.org/2021/01/21/episode-672/
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