YouSaid · the spoken record

Cory Booker

lines on the record: 133
first: 2017-04-10
most recent: 2017-04-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Most states can legally discriminate against you. I can deny you a job just because you have an arrest, even if you were as clear of the charges. Most people don't realize that FBI records are so bad that a large percentage of the FBI background checks come back wrong. I think the majority of them come back wrong. So you may have been cleared or your charges, but that employer who doesn't, you don't even know they're looking at it, thinks you still had something wrong. But the American Bar Association identified 40,000 collateral consequences if you have been convicted of a nonviolent drug offense. So remember, two of the three last presidents, felony drug use they coped to, not just some pot Obama and Bush, felony drug use. There are presidents, a lot of congress people the same, but if you're a kid in Newark, you got caught for a nonviolent drug offense doing something stupid that we did that Stanford students, Princeton students are doing, they can't get a Pell grant, they can't get food stamps, they can't get business licenses. I had a guy begging me when I was mayor of Newark. Why can't I get a cab license?”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was out in Rikers, and these are kids missing six months to a year before they're even adjudicated. There's a documentary, Jay-Z just did about Khalif Browder who spent two years plus in jail for stealing a backpack. And most people don't realize that in jail what we do to kids, other countries call torture, which is solitary confinement. Talk about life experiments, and we've heard about this. He's a great guy you should interview who wrote an amazing book about what he did with trying to cope with being stuck in solitary. But psychologists now conclude, in fact,”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in a nation where almost one in three adults now has an arrest record, for you and I right now, we get arrested, we have the means with which it's not going to change our lives, might change my politics, but it won't change our lives. The problem with inner cities, and I saw this when I went out to Rikers Island, you get arrested, you can't even afford the bail.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Drug laws, friends of mine on senior cut day kicked open a liquor store that was closed. They couldn't use their fake IDs. So they stole cases of beer, got caught. That's breaking and entering. That's a felony. Very little consequence besides our parents and others maybe getting upset. But my friends and I are all going on with our lives raising families. Very different justice system for doing the exact same things that you experience in many places in our community. Our criminal justice system now is overly targeted towards poor people. At Stanford, at Princeton, nobody was getting stopped in frisk coming home. And by the way, if they did from a frat party, they would find drugs. No FBI operation right now saying, how are we going to get those college kids and break their drug ring when I know on college campuses from Adderall to X to these things? You can get them sometimes on a smartphone. But in the inner city, those things become literally the difference between you making it in life and don't.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had lots of clams and the like, but now it is, I'm not exaggerating this, it is literally an agent, a super fund poisoned with Agent Orange, all kind of other dioxides from years of corporations despoiling the river, literally stealing from future residents of Newark and calling it profits in their present. And so now imagine this. You've got schools that have deteriorated. You've got a physical environment that's toxic. You have large concentrations of poverty. And then you have something on top of that, which most Americans don't realize, which I mentioned earlier, but let's just understand it, called the criminal justice system. This is why I love from the Koch brothers or the Heritage Foundation on the right to Democrats like me all agree because of this reality that I now know from my own experiences. My friends in Harrington Park, New Jersey, in Old Japan High School I went to, and I hope they don't get mad at me for saying this, but we broke a lot of laws.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you and I both know you don't even be bled poisoned, just elevated blood lead levels affects your brain where your executive function. All of that, but it's not just the lead paint, the air, because now you've created cities. Again, where did we choose to build highways and roads that the oxygen is so bad that you have asthma levels that are three and four times as high in urban areas? That's not even done yet. I remember when I wanted to try to get rid of the food deserts in Newark, big campaign. I just finally got a Whole Foods we just opened, got supermarkets, but we also said, let's create urban agriculture. We're going to create acres and acres of farms in Newark, which we did successfully and got guys coming home from prison men and women coming over prison jobs. But we also said, wait a minute, we want to dig in the ground. And the state said, you can't dig in the soil. It's got too much lead. So imagine this now. Your air quality, your soil quality, and what about the river that 100 years ago, immigrants from Ireland and Eupicories could, if you were poor, you could still go into the river. And it was the commons, right? You couldn't get fish out of, you could get...”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last name Martinez, who was a writer for the Wall Street Journal Education page, her family used a fake address in a different neighborhood to get her kids to school. They were caught. She was pulled out of ironically a journalism class and forced to go back and horrible situations. So a lot of people think, don't realize that a lot of these problems that are existing today are not legacies to slavery. These are legacies to the 50s, 60s, and 70s and 80s that were going on. But they forget the other story of America, which is the literally the creation of toxic zones in our nation. So people don't understand. So when they flee these cities, the corporate America was allowed for years to pollute those cities pretty badly. So in Newark, I used to remind people, literally pollute, literally pollute. So now you're a kid growing up in an environment where you've got lead paint and we had epidemic levels in Newark as well as other kids.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Affordable housing. We now know that poor kids, same poverty, poor kids in middle class neighborhoods do so much better than when you concentrate at all poor kids in poor neighborhoods. So a lot of, and by the way, these were over policies. These were like, we cannot let black people out of neighborhoods. What are we going to do to keep them in? And so that created these ghettos that then became, well, where did the jobs go to? They went outside of the communities. Where did the good schools? Because remember, if everybody leaves a city, their ability to have a tax base to support the education system is not there. And by the way, the tax base has now disappeared. You can't even support police officers or everything. So cities start tumbling downward. And then you create laws to keep people back. So I was shocked when I got to Newark that this Browning suburbs with really great schools would actually hire people, private investigators to say, okay, there's a black kid going to these schools. Let's follow them around to see where they go home. In fact, there's a woman I just saw her again.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Redlining is where it comes from literally what they did on maps. They said, okay, this is a black area, and we're not going to give mortgages and loans to people. We're going to devalue the neighborhoods there. And decisions being made about zoning where we're going to let certain people live. And so you see some of these maps that are still around. This is like part of our history. where at a time where people are starting to fully urban areas, it was a federal policy enabled certain people to move out and get good value for their homes and the like, certain people not. And then it was put on top of that where everything from restrictive covenants to real estate steering, which my family did, to think about this. And New Jersey is a great example of this, but lots of states are, if they decided instead of putting a whole bunch of public housing in one area, like thousands and thousands of units, what if we took every unit, like a Harrington Park, you take four units of...”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We set up this society, unfortunately, and a lot of this was very bad policy, some of it very bigoted policy of redlining and decisions by the Federal Housing Organizations to pack all this poverty in one area.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this was my first experience with lessons that people have learned a lot through activism experience, that if you could bring attention to a problem, you know, look, when Martin Luther King and James Bevel, Dorothy Cott were fighting Bull Connor, if they had tried to fight that battle alone, who knows what the outcome would have been. But he had that fire hoses, he had the dogs and all of that. But by their ability to bring attention to the problem after their demonstrations and the story went viral back in the day where you didn't have social media, but you had the traditional media and suddenly the Soviet Union is mocking our democracy because of what is watching black kids get bit by dogs, people in Iowa, and they're having their dinner and saying, oh my gosh, look at the humanity of us all. We all love each other or have a reservoir of love for each other that once we trigger each other's consciousness or expand each other's moral imagination. Let's just say that it activates us. And so clearly in New Jersey, we...”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was also the circle. I just felt such strength, such power, such energy like I never felt before. And I just felt like I was connecting to who we are as a country, that ideal of e-plurbus unum, that when we all come together, nothing is impossible. And it was a most hopeful moment of my life at that point. And it also gave me a new sense, a renewed sense of mission, that if I could find ways with others to bring people together, we could blow away problems in this country and everybody could benefit.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I always say that change never happens in an instant. You know this even in your own change in your own life. Something you have to keep at and work at. And so the world didn't change. But I always tell people that for me, the most one of the most powerful moments of my life because of problems the Garden Spires didn't go away. And it was something I worked on until eventually I became a mayor, built a park in the area and all this stuff. But the point I always try to tell people is the moment the powerful moment of the whole experience to me was the last prayer where there was now from four or five people praying and shaking on the first day, now there's 100, 200 people. And there was everybody there. I looked at it and this is, I said, this is my America because there was white folks, black folks, Latino folks, Asian folks. There was an imams, rabbis, priests, ministers, young, old, people when they started praying were praying in Hebrew and Arabic and Spanish. And I was the weakest I'd ever been after 10 days of not eating. But, you know, this with fasting.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was so funny because he came out with repaired remarks and he and I would fight bitterly later. But after 10 days of fasting and praying, I looked at him differently. I looked at him like I saw his humanity. I saw that he was a guy and we hugged. And I'll never forget. In fact, my editor wanted me to write this part out because I'll never forget. Smells one of the most powerful triggers to memory. I hugged him and I breathed deep as we were hugging and I smelled him. And he smelled like a family member of mine. I'm like, I was at that point, like a 30-year-old, who's my father's age. And when I smelled him, he felt like older uncles and things like that. We parted him from our embrace, which became the front page of this section of the newspaper. And he put away his prepared remarks and turned and gave an incredible speech. He made promises that he ultimately think he was going to build a park in the area. That stuff never happened. But it was a beautiful moment. Tent came down.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And over 10 days, the world came out. I mean, there were community leaders. I mean, Newark has such a reservoir of strength and love, and people poured out. But then people from a suburban mayor from West Orange came out with his police officers, hospitals started coming out doing health screenings, employers started coming out doing job fairs, people were donating computers. And by the 10th day, the mayor of the city came out”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And you and I both have had conversations with somebody that's in that state. They say they want help, but every time you bring up an idea, they just shoot it down. Oh, that won't, yeah. Because they're not open to possibilities. So long story short, as I go out there to Garden Spires, we set up a big tent. I apologize to Elaine Sewell. Literally, there might have been some hugging and crying between the two of us because we were such close friends. I wouldn't have gotten elected without her. And then I do what politicians love doing. I call the press conference. And I just said, this is the United States of America. People shouldn't live in fear. And I announced that I was going to stay on this pavement and fast as long as it took for something to change. And I would invite people to pray with me. First day was four of us praying and everything. And then I went to bed. First night was scary. Courageous people slept with me underneath it in this what used to be the drug dealers territory. People drew diapers on top of us and it was just a scary night. But I woke up the next morning and a bunch of correctional officers were there and they said, hey, we saw you on the news. You're not staying out here alone.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It gives you the inability to see faint hope amidst glaring problems. But again, a person of faith, I believe that we were made in the image of a creator. And therefore, one of our greatest gifts is to be creative, to think of new opportunities. But if you're so negative and so cynical about the world around you, you disempower yourself and do something about it.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what? I had not, I was too caught up in my drama, too caught up in my script that I hadn't sort of surrendered myself with an open heart. And I decided I was going to fast. And then the idea started flowing. I could do something. And I said, you know what? I'm not just going to fast. I'm going to plop right down in the middle of the drug market and fast. And I'm not going to just fast and pray. I'm going to get a tent. And before you knew it, my mind just started kick-starting. This is the problem most people understand is that despair or cynicism is the worst. I think cynicism, just like despair, is a toxic spiritual state.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Passage that most Christians know called If you have faith the size of the mustard seed, you can move mountains. But the next passage, which I didn't know well at that point, it says, but sometimes you have to fast and pray. And I just thought to myself”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and so, but unfortunately, I'm walking past to get to my apartment, this woman, Miss Virginia Jones, this pain in my neck, this righteous pain in my neck, the tenant leader happens to be standing out in the courtyard. And I literally, as I see her, I'm not in the mood for you, Miss Jones. I need to get back to my apartment and eat my dagnab cookie dough ice cream because it combined the two now. And as I try to walk past her grunting her hello, like a falcon would with like a mouse, she starts playing with me. She don't walk past me. And I'm like, you know, why? And she goes, I turn around and stop. She goes, and she read me right away. She's like, come here and give Miss Jones a hug. I'm like, I walk over and I give her the most insincere hug in the world. Like when you say you're still going to be friends with somebody after you break up with them, it's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I try to turn around. And she grabs me by the arm and she goes, tell me what's wrong.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“280 in New Jersey. So it's a place people drive by but never slow down to look except for by drugs because it looked like a McDonald's drive-thru. People would line up to buy their drugs. So the drug dealers control this area. The security guards were undermining that. They tried to light the guard booth on fire. And so she's like, you've got to do something. And I'm basically, I can't do anything. I just professed impotency. I said, I can't get anything done. What do you expect me to do? She and I start yelling. I'm like, I can't even get the cops to stop ticketing my car. How am I going to get them to come out there? And she basically says to me, like the worst thing she could say to me, and this is not because of her, but it's just I had a wound. She's like, why did we elect you then at all if you can't do anything? And I was done. I lose my temper, raise my voice, hang up on her. And now I storm home to, and you don't have this problem, I do. It's one of my addictions. All I want to do is get back to my apartment in Brick Towers and hang out with my two buddies, Ben and Jerry, and just.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was pressy for him. So people warning me that the police are following me. I'm just scared. And I'm feeling like a failure as a guy who so much of my life has like been afraid of failure. Now I'm first steps into my professional career. I'm failing. And on the lowest day, when I'm getting outvoted all the time on the city council for my great brilliant ideas, of course, people are supposed to just bow down before. I'm being a jerk because one of the moments I admitted a self-righteous jerk to my fellow city council people who I'm supposed to find common ground with the past stuff. So I'm making all these mistakes. I get a call from tenant leader named Elaine Sewell at these other high-rise low-income housing. And she basically says to me, it's off the hook up here. I still remember the movie that summer was a wild wild west. She's like, it's a wow wild west out here. There's a horrible incident where the security guards were attacked by some of the drug dealers in this open air drug market underneath these buildings sat by a tieway.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, my first year, basically Sharp James is toying with me. I mean, the headlines are still there because I pulled them to write this book, so I want to show people I'm not making this up, that I was getting my car ticketed everywhere when I parked in front of City Hall with the other council people. My phones were tapped. This is stuff that you would that sounds almost funny two decades later. My phones were tapped. I wasn't getting anything passed. My own community was getting frustrated with me because all this effort to get you elected. And so I'm ready to quit. I was like, I was more effective as a young tenants rights lawyer than I have been as an elected office. And on my lowest day, one year later, the summer of 1999, I'd been elected in 98. I'm at my wit's end. I've gained weight. I go to bed most nights with pounding headaches. I'm stressed out of my gourd. I feel like people were warning me that the police were following me because I think the mayor might have seen me as a future threat.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Year of high school as a first year city council person. Sharp James, and anybody will tell you this in New Jersey. He was the grandmaster. I was a Padawan Jedi. He was a Jedi. He was, depending on your perspective. Give love to people, but he was a Jedi Knight. And again, we're laughing, and people here might not know it. This period of my life became a document, was a documentary. Whole Street Fight got nominated for Academy Award won the Tribecca Film Festival for Audience Choice. I always say the ignominiously, now as a vegan, it lost to a movie called March of the Penguins. So I always say I make an exception for penguin meat when I'm eating. But this was an interesting moment because...”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's talk about running somebody for city council. It's one of those times where you're standing in the line who volunteers? Everybody steps backwards and you're the person. So before you know it, I'm the candidate. And I won the Central Ward of Newark, which if you go visit me in my Senate office, that's the map behind me that still sits there. Who got me into politics, this place with an abundance of public housing, overwhelmingly black and Latino, folks who put their faith in me before they even knew me? Because this is about a year after I moved to the neighborhood, before they even knew I was a known commodity, they said, we're going to take a risk on you. And the reason why the hunger strike ended up is because I get elected in a year later. I am at the Nadier, the lowest point of my professional life where I felt like a failure. I wasn't getting anything done. The mayor of the city, who was like, if I'm just a novice in politics, if this is like my freshman year.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd walk past people in the stairwells when the elevators weren't working, wondering occasionally for somebody was alive or not, trying to nudge them, you'd see feces in the hallways. Mice, I can tell you all the challenges of living these buildings, but yet there was such a sense of community created there that still years later the buildings are gone. There is still a reunion being held. And the alumni from those buildings, because of the spirit in that community, go on to do incredible things. like I'm sure you do, try to write checks at the end of the year to people who are doing great things. One of them is to a guy, police officer from those buildings grew up in those buildings who still does things. And so that's, I had gotten to politics because, okay, so fast forward, me and Miss Jones are and other tenant leaders are taking on the slum lord who eventually got convicted in federal court, fighting noble battles. But their residence in that building and numbers of others are really frustrated that they don't think the city is being responsive to their concerns and needs.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm here to learn. Not here to help. I'm here to learn. And I sat on this woman's couch and watched what I just was in awe of. People would come to see her with problems. And she would help people with rent. Somebody needed a job. I mean, she was held this community. Her son in the 80s before I arrived got murdered in the lobby of the building that I lived in that I eventually would live in. She and I probably were the two people that were some of the highest income earners in there. We could have lived anywhere. But she, literally, after her son is murdered, stayed in those buildings, remained the tenant president, held that community together with the force of its will. Those buildings don't, I'm living in that neighborhood still, but those buildings aren't there anymore. They still have a reunion every year. I mean, think about this. These were buildings when I lived in them for eight years. Heat and hot water irregular, homeless people or worse sometimes collapsed.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a reflection of what you have inside of you. If you're one of those people who only sees darkness and despair, that's all this ever going to be. But if you're one of those stubborn people who every time you open your eyes, you see hope, opportunity, love. If you see the face of God, then you can be somebody who helps me. She leaves me.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That doesn't deal well with people like at least the attitude I had at that point because Ms. Virginia Jones, the tenant president, sort of looks at me when I'm telling her how much I'm going to help her. And she looks at me with this cynical, almost just like, I don't have time for this, you know. And so she did this like experiment with me where she takes me to hound to the middle of Martin Luther King Boulevard. And again, I'm this, you know, yeah, law student. I'm here to help you. And she goes, what do you see? What do you mean? She goes, what do you see in this neighborhood? And I just describe it just the way I did to you, you know, crack house and, you know, drug operator. I describe the neighborhood. And she just looks angry and she says, you can't help me. And she starts walking away. I run after her. I grab this woman from behind very respectfully. And I say to her, what are you talking about? I don't understand. And she says to me, words that change my life. She says to me, boy, you need to understand something. The world you see outside of you.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For my book, and went back and interviewed drug dealers from the 90s. But this was a hot place to sell drugs because one guy who was probably a guy that should have been in corporate America, he ran the drug operation here, just found a way to get very cheap high quality product. And so I had moved into the middle of this not realizing that I was in probably one of the most violent drug markets. I knew it was bad, but I didn't know it was as bad as I when I went in. And when I actually interviewed this guy and some of the other drug dealers, they had set things up in a way that, I mean, you know, I was with a person who was helping me record a lot of the interviews. It just sounded like New Jack City. So I'm in the middle of this. And I go with this arrogance to this, to the tenant leader. I'm now living in the neighborhood. I'm thinking, ha, ha, I'm here, you know, and riding on my white knight, on my horse, you know, and da-da-da. And Newark is just an amazing city.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Often are stereotyped or misunderstood because we don't, we wall ourselves off in America. We don't cross these lines, unfortunately, in our society. So long story short is I move on to the south end of Martin Luther King Boulevard in Newark and I'm moving literally as I'm moving in, my big Italian best friend from fourth grade, guy named Chris Magaro helping me carry stuff in. We come back to the star. My stuff is stolen. And I'm like, welcome to the neighborhood. Yeah, welcome to the neighborhood. And unbeknownst to me, but the abandoned home, I shouldn't say this, I did actually know this at the time, but the abandoned home next to me is where you see, again, real great cross-traci section of American life because drug addiction knows no race or socioeconomic status boundaries. So people are coming into this community buy drugs that I didn't realize I've now learned a lot more about the drug market even than before I was mayor because I went back to write a lot about this.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And again, I worked one summer in East Harlem. I mean, I'm very much engaged in what I think are some of the frontiers of our democracy. But I never really been a part of the community. You know, a lot of us, I would volunteer, work, then I go back to my dorm, you know, at Yale, you know. So I just said, you know what, I want to live my life. I want my professional life to be a part of a community. And here I am. I'm a United States senator and I have the privilege of going back to probably one of the wealthiest communities of all the senators to go back to, median income is $14,000 per individual, but I live in a community that blows me away every day. I see Americans with a fealty to the ideals of this country literally in the grassroots or in the trenches of the fight for our democracy every single day. I love when reporters or whoever wants to come and walk around my neighborhood and see great people.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was at 20, whatever I was, 26, 27 at the time. You think you're coming here to serve, you think you're coming here to help. We're going to flip this script on you. I always say I got my BA from Stanford, but my PhD on the streets of Newark. And this actually leads me to the hunger strike, where I decided that I was going to move into the toughest area. And literally as I'm moving in.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you meet some of the guys you've interviewed and see what they've gone through and see what they've done for this country, they have a level of sort of patriotic ideal that is lived in a way that I revere. But I also have that same thing for people that take themselves out of their privilege and say, you know what, I believe those words that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And I'm going to do whatever I can to commit myself. So people, you and I both have friends that did teach for America. You know what? I'm going to go off and make a lot of money, but for two years of my life, I'm going to do the Peace Corps. I'm going to do TFA. I'm going to do something. And anyway, I had all these ideals. And I think the challenge in all of us in our life is to try to live lives of the best integrity we can where we live in accordance to our ideals. And lo and behold, though, Newark, New Jersey, you flipped the script on me and basically said to me, you think you're coming here to serve?”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over your religion as commands. And I think we have a civic gospel as well. We are pledging allegiance to this ideal of liberty and justice for all. But most Americans don't know that we have a justice system that by its definition treats you better if you're rich and guilty than poor and innocent. Because if you and I get arrested for the exact same crime, I'm wealthier than you. You're a poor white guy wherever you're from, I can get out. I can bail myself out, but you're stuck in the jail sometimes for months. People don't realize this. Some people say for months. So if you really believe in that idea of liberty and justice for all, what are you doing? What'd you do today to live that civic gospel? And so for me, and again, this is just for my own path, what I saw was that I so benefited from this country and I didn't have, you've interviewed people in the military, which I have this, you and I are both wired this way that we see people in uniform and just very drawn to them and have.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then I started my freshman summer after my freshman year started working in a place called the Onetic Harris Community Center, which technically is East Bentle Park, but it was a similar community. And I found such a connection with these kids. And I basically said, okay, this is my life work. I want to work in cities. And so I worked everywhere from East Harlem to East Palo Alto. When I was at Yale, helping to run legal clinics and just felt a kinship and a connection with what I thought my sole mission was, which was when I say these words liberty and justice for all, you know, I always say to people, before you tell me about your religion, first show it to me and how you treat other people. Well, our civic gospel in this country, one of the things, we all know the words of the Declaration of Independence, or at least we all know a lot of those words. We know the words to our pledge. We know the national anthem. But those words actually have power and meaning. And is it just like religious texts that we read? And then we go out on Sunday and cut driver off and flip them off? Or are we living with grace that Christ or...”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And for me, just literally, you cross these tracks into East Palo Alto, especially at that time. Now you've got four seasons or whatever there. It's gentrified in some ways. But for me, I need to get my haircut as a black guy. There's no place on Stanford's campus. I was used to having black hair. So my first time was just going to find a barber when I had hair.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Prison experiment, as well as this, I think the group, the game was called Star Power or something like that, how quickly we fall into these roles. And so for me, I had this one experience where I went from living in affluent suburbia to living in a housing project.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. This one, we were the experiments in the room where we all had to reach into a bag and we pulled out a chip. And the chip was yellow, green, or blue or red, let's say. And it decided the station we had in this game, whether you were the upper class, middle class, or lower class. And this is the game. And the rules of the upper class were great. They really benefited us. And so we knew what the game was. Okay, this is like class society, but we quickly in the upper class made laws that protected us, you know, and the lower class people. But what was interesting about the game more than that was that the groups who sat in different areas, the animosities amongst players that began. I mean, the anger and the defensiveness and the shouting, it descended into a very bad place to the point at the end of the experiment. I said, okay, I want everybody to take their chips, throw them on the ground, stamp on them. They had us do a bunch of exercises to get that purge you. And so just like Zimbabwe.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The problem with you is you give these, like, first of all, when you talk about Stoicism and this idea of dressing for one day in rags, I mean, there's such a power of teaching ourselves to be more empathetic to people who might have different experiences. So I was a Stanford student who did graduate work in sociology and just watching actual experiments, not experimenting myself. Like there was a experiment, I think you could still get the video of it where you have rooms full of different people that all sit in one cohort, a bunch of guys, and you put two or three women in there and just watch how many times a woman tries to speak and gets cut off versus a time, the men in the room, and they try to speak and get. And so it made me, even if you do 50-50 in the room, it just made me suddenly wake up and start looking for that pattern in my own conversations that I had. It was a really mind-blowing experience to me. Another study, another experience.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different people so We get caught in these grooves and we're playing the same record over and over again and just doing one thing different, we may not like it, but it actually is going to stretch and broaden us. It actually change our, as you know, I know you've studied a lot about brains and how we work just by changing the synapsis of that normal routine, even to something simple as I both have read about don't drive the same way to work every day. There are collateral benefits that brain scientists will say to you that benefit your life in other ways”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, great, and you can't interview all the great people on this podcast because many of them have died, but we even left clues for this, how they experiment, like Ben Franklin. He didn't mean to write his autobiography. He wanted to write a note to his family about, hey, this is what I've learned in my experiments. And so he would take one theme. Just imagine if we all said, okay, today I'm going to look at the idea of gratitude and figure out through this experiment. Mark Zuckerberg said, okay, I'm going to have a year where every day I say thank you to somebody and write those notes. These are glorious sort of journeys, odysseies, to see where it leads you and it doesn't always do it. And you're right. They can be just one moment. You know what? It's Sunday. This is my day of faith. And I'm going to honor God by, you know, not going to the church I go to all the time. And maybe I'm going to go down into Camden, New Jersey, and go to a black church, or maybe I'm going to go to a Latino church. Or let's say crazy. Maybe I'm going to go to a mosque or a synagogue just to experience that and meet the...”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should take things not just in fasting, but I'm a very, I'm a Christian, but you know what? I'm going to do a little bit to study Islam. I hear all this talks about Islam. Let me study it. Just doing little experiments in your life to learn, to grow, to help understand. I think it's just an incredible way to learn and actually at the end of the other end of experiments that I do with my life, I always find myself better and more enriched.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you have to, just before I get into this 10 day fast, my chief staff and I were in the Middle East. I wanted to go to Iraq and meet with, you know, we were meeting everybody from the prime minister to leader of the opposition and we're in Baghdad. And I just, when I get there, I decide, you know what? I'm going to do entire time I'm here just going to fast. And it was this almost spiritual sort of experience when you're sort of dealing with real very serious issues. But it's still, I was amazed at how much energy I had, how much clarity of thought. And I hope that as you do with your life and inspire me to do with mine, is that people just try stuff and don't put it at such a level on it that if you're like noon and you're fasting, you suddenly start eating, don't hate yourself. But I just, I think it's the kind of stuff we should do is we should experiment why Gandhi's autobiography, what is it? It's the title of it. My experiments with truth. And I think we all.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I don't know the one thing you do that I have not been able is testing your blood and seeing if you're hitting ketosis. And I listen to all that and saying to myself, dear God, Tim, I can't get my blood tested.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With vegetarianism first and foremost, I'd like to say it was for the environmental ethical. My body just jumped to a whole new level of performance when I first shifted to becoming a vegetarian. So that was the first thing that sort of like, wow, this feels great. But this is something I tried in my life that has intermittent fasting that really works. It's very different than the 10-day hunger strike. And you've inspired me with, you said you now do some days with just water, as you see me here drinking this green.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was exactly it. But I remember you said something on one of your podcasts about the stress you used to have to be if you missed a meal. Like, oh, God, where am I going to? I'm in the airport. I missed breakfast. Where am I going to get this? And how much peace I have now, where even on days I'm eating, I'm like, wait a minute, I've gone three days without eating. Why am I stressing over that? Or just the mind space that clogs your head about thinking about food and all the time that suddenly I get a more Zen like path? And my chief staff who's sitting in here to leap at me, should I say something that he's unhappy with? But he on days that I eat, I get that three, four o'clock exhaustion where I need a nap. On days I'm fasting. I don't feel the need to meet a nap. So I can go on about intermittent fasting. And I'm one of these people, again, like you in my life. There have been moments where I just said, I'm going to try something for three months. Like becoming a vegetarian, I was a peak athlete at the time. And I just said, I'm going to try this and see what it does to my body.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a great tactic to use, and it was everybody from a congresswoman who was hearing this. And a lot of people started giving me that information. It was Ezra Klein. I was on his podcast and we started talking about it. And he was just talking about not eating until noon most days or 11 a.m., if I remember exactly. So I decided I hurled myself into trying it. And the more I tried it, I found it so many benefits to my life of doing two to three days a week of intermittent, as they call it intermittent fasting, 500 calories or less a day. And so I can talk to you about all the benefits I've found. But your podcasts about the subject matter, about everything from cancers to Alzheimer's, but more important.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And embrace this idea that I don't have all the answers. I'm going to try to learn something. And I've followed you through a lot of your journeys and learned a lot myself and hacks, shortcuts by learning from you. And so you go to that moment where we met and talked deeper years ago. It was 2009, I think, where you helped me get my physical health back because it's something I've always seemed to be willing to sacrifice my physical health and my own well-being and relationships, this terrible view I've had to fight where it's all about the service. It's all about the mission, but the self-care I've learned as I've gotten wiser is so much important. It's like Stephen Cuffy's sharpening the axe, but most of us forget that. So I then went back and gained a ridiculous amount of weight and was over like 300 pounds again. And it was a few of my friends talking to me about intermittent fasting that was a tactic. Obviously, there's a lot more going on when you're in that moment.”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I find, and by the way, I'm in a profession that does not like risk. Politicians, it's like, what is the least amount of risk that I can have? Because I don't want to offend anybody, God forbid. You have no problems. I think you're good at that. But I think that that's one of my best times learning, and we can get back to the 10-day hunger strike because this was a moment when I take the greatest risks and I just hurl myself off. And that was out of desperation. But I love the fact that you're willing to use yourself as a”
2017-04-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #233: Cory Booker -- Street Fights, 10-Day Hunger Strikes, and Creative Problem-Solving · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT