Candace x Hunter Biden: The Interview

Hunter Biden. Welcome to the Candace Owens show. It's wonderful to be here. People are just going to be like, how on earth did this happen? Right now I got to give them a bit of a backstory. So I went to dinner with a fellow podcaster, and we were just talking about interviews, because we don't do too many interviews on the show. He first asked me what was the best interview I ever did, and I said, without question, the USS Liberty survivor, Phil Tourney. And then he said, what would be your top interview that you'd want to do? And I said, oh gosh, we're in such a different time now, I'm just not interested in politics, it would have to be something so different. And then I said, actually, Hunter Biden. I said that to him. I watched your sit-down with Andrew Callaghan, and it was kind of the most refreshing interview that I had seen in politics for a very long time, because we're so used to being gaslit about various things happening. Everyone's trying to hide stuff. We read a lot about you, but we didn't really hear anything from you. So this was kind of the first time, but I heard you in your own words just totally owning your addiction issues, also going after Jake Tapper and George Clooney, when we were kind of expecting the typical Democrat, like, these are great guys, Jake Tapper should win a Pulitzer. It wasn't what I was expecting. And then that person just sort of made this happen. So I want to get into the Hunter Biden story. I will say to the audience right now, I have already made the pledge, right when I got on the phone with you, that obviously I'm not going to make you say anything bad about your father, because that would just be completely demonic. Everyone knows my opinions, my political perspectives, they're already out there. He is your dad, so that is separate. There's no way I possibly could. Of course. But there's a lot to be said about you, and a lot that hasn't been said about your journey, and I want to start with just one question for the culture. The cocaine that was found at the White House. Was it yours? No. Not only was it not mine. Number one, thank you for having me here. One of the reasons is to be able to answer these questions. The one thing I am, after six years of this, I've been sober since June 1st of 2019. Clean and sober, verifiably so, by the Bureau of probation, in which I was drug tested randomly over the course of two years while I went through my trials and things like that. But beyond that, to directly answer your question, I wasn't even there. Not only there, but people have to understand where that cocaine was found, the visitors entrance underneath. That is where visitors come in, and they come over from the old executive office building staff to go to the Oval or the chief of staff's office or to the offices in the West Wing. It was found in a cubby right outside of the situation room. There's no possibility, not even remotely, beyond the fact that I wasn't even there. I spent probably, over the course of four years, maybe 25 days at the White House, 25 nights, 30 if I'm being fair. It was an easy target, and understandably so. I've been probably the most famous addict, and famous person, by grace of God, in recovery for going on seven years. I definitely thought you were on drugs while your father was in the White House. I don't know, but I think it might have just been the timing of the laptop coming out and then people just assuming that you were still on drugs. That might have been why in our heads we thought that. I think that it was that they purposely conflated it. I wrote a book which came out in April of 2021, in which I did something that very few people similarly situated to me do, in which I was 100% frank about the fact that not only was I an addict, not only was I an alcoholic, I don't really see the distinction between the two, but I was a crack addict. I was a degenerate crack addict. I've heard you call me a crackhead many times, and the truth of the matter is I was a crackhead. I say that not to shock people. Crack cocaine carries such a stigma to begin with, but I say it because I think there are so many people. I think that at any given time there are 30 million Americans who are either in active addiction or in recovery. There's not a single person I know who hasn't been impacted by addiction at some level, personally or with someone one degree of separation from them that they love. Least of all me. Part of that, one of the reasons I'm here, is that the stories that you tell about that, about your family, that is where the common ground is. A friend of mine gave me this quote about two years ago and it's become my mantra. It's attributed to Mother Teresa. If you want to change the world, go home and love your family. That is my everything now. And part of that is not just the family you have by blood and birth, but also the community that you're inextricably tied to. For me that community is the recovery community, people who are still sick and suffering from addiction. The biggest reason I wanted to talk to you, beyond the fact, and this is not me blowing smoke, I think that regardless of whether I agree with you, you're probably the most effective communicator I've ever heard behind a microphone, and it's really driven me crazy. It's really making me mad. I was saying to you before we started rolling that this was something I noticed when I would cover various topics, whether pornography, drugs, drinking, how many men would write and say they were suffering with various things, and yet they don't often speak about how they're quietly suffering, whether with addiction to pornography or to drugs. I don't think there are enough conversations about it. So when I watched that interview of you just laying it out there, something most people try to hide or are shameful of, I was like, there actually just needs to be more dialogue about it. I grew up with tons of addicts in my family. I have people in my family who are still addicted. There is a natural anger people have when they believe, and I think this was part of the anger I had toward you before I heard you speak about your addiction, that when somebody has money and political connections, that somehow removes them from going through these barriers in life. When I grew up, you have uncles addicted to crack, cousins doing crack, experimenting with meth and drugs. And then you see someone with a life of privilege, and for some reason in your mind you wrongly go, that can't happen. And it did happen. I'd like to hear how you got addicted. What was actually the story, your path toward addiction? Thank you for asking me about it, I really mean it. It's one of the things that traps people. I can only speak about myself, but people who are addicts or in recovery find out really fast that you're not as terminally unique as you think you are. One of the things really important about addicts talking to each other is that realization. Because one of the things that traps you in your addiction is shame. You, like me, are Catholic, and we have learned that guilt is an appropriate emotion. Guilt is an appropriate response to something when you've done something wrong, and you're supposed to atone for it, and seek forgiveness, whether the forgiveness comes from an individual or not. That's the lesson. Only through seeking that forgiveness can you release yourself from that guilt. That's appropriate. Shame is not. Shame is absolutely corrosive. Shame is you telling yourself that you're not worthy, that you're never going to be worthy, that the things you've done you can never be redeemed from. And I've done horrible things in my addiction in terms of my relationships and decisions I made, and more than anything just removing myself from being present for the people who love me. What happened to me, and I really mean this, is that the exposure, not piecemeal, but the total exposure, my entire digital footprint stolen from me, a 20-year digital footprint, every text message, every picture, all the things you'd be ashamed of, became front-page news for four years, five years, beginning in 2019. It forced me into a choice. The choice was, do I get out of bed and live, or do I die? It became that much of a dichotomy. And I chose to live. It wasn't easy, and maintaining sobriety in that kind of a pressure cooker is often the thing that triggers you, but something broke me in a good way, which was that I no longer have any fear. Sitting down with you is an opportunity for you to see me as a human being and not Hunter Biden laptop, and the pictures that Congressman Greene put up in Congress, or the New York Post. I think I was on the cover of the New York Post in one year more than anybody in the history of the paper. And none of it was good. But what it's given me is the opportunity to own it all, to own all of my story without shame or fear, realizing that I have a community of people out there I want to be of service to. I really mean that. And part of it is by me being honest about it. The hardest thing for any addict to do is not only get honest with the people they love, but to get honest with themselves. Until they can really see themselves for who they are, all of it, and decide to love themselves, the cycle is just going to continue. At least in my experience, that's the truth. I want to talk about the first time you got introduced to it, because that's interesting. Describe for people who don't know the difference between cocaine and crack, because crack is more addictive. You got a lot of heat for that. It was fantastic, I was like, well, he's actually very educated on this. It was important to me to make the distinction that there's this idea that there's a special enhancement to powdered cocaine that makes it into crack, that you have to have some technical degree to do that. Let's start at the beginning. I think I'm genetically predisposed to be an alcoholic. I do believe there is a genetic piece of it. I believe my brain works differently as an addict, in terms of the way my synapses fire once they're introduced to the dopamine hit and the serotonin increase that occurs because of an introduction of a substance. I became acclimated and physiologically dependent upon that when I started to drink in earnest in college, which you can control. I made it through Georgetown, went to Jesuit Volunteer Corps for a year, kind of like a domestic peace corps, the JVC, for a year after college. Then I went to Yale Law School. I was married, had my oldest daughter when I was a first-year law student, made it through all of that and through my first years of employment, drinking probably more than most people, but completely functional. One day I woke up when I was 33 years old to my brother calling me and saying, this has got to stop. What he meant was a whole weekend was missing. And I said okay. He drove me to the airport, put me on a plane in New York, and I flew to a place that was started by Eric Clapton called Crossroads in Antigua. I went to rehab. When I came out, my brother picked me up from the airport, drove me to an AA meeting, walked in with me, Dupont Circle in DC. I met my sponsor at that first meeting I ever went to, and I stayed clean and sober for about seven years. And then I relapsed. It was such a mundane, stupid story. I was on a plane by myself. Everything was okay. Things were looking up. Normal life pressures, but it was all good. And that's the insidious thing about addiction and alcoholism. It never goes away necessarily. There's always the answer being presented to you by the thing you trust the most, which is your brain. What it says is, if you don't want to feel this way, or if you want to feel this way even more, I have the answer for you. I was on a plane by myself and I had a drink. That drink in 2010, almost seven years of sobriety, started a cycle of relapse and recovery and relapse and recovery, and it was really hard for me to be honest with the people who loved me. I just wanted to hide it, wanted it to go away. I thought, okay, I'll get through this cycle, I'll sleep it off this weekend, and that's it, I'm done. That would last a week, then three months, then I went back to rehab. I talk about big pharma, which you do all the time. I had shingles and somebody prescribed me like 52 oxy, ridiculous, and I started that, then I started drinking again, the prescription ran out, and the cycle started. But when my brother died, it all fell apart. Beau and I, I don't report that our relationship was unique or that his loss was greater than anybody else's loss of a brother. But when my mom and sister and Beau and I were in that car accident in 1972, and we survived, it was the two of us every day. We're a year and a day apart. We talked every day, except when he was in Iraq, I literally talked to my brother every day. When Beau died, my marriage fell apart after 22 years, for reasons marriages fall apart, which I take a lot of responsibility for. It started a really dark cycle. In the past when I would have these relapses, there was always someone in such proximity to me that I couldn't escape. In this instance Beau was gone. Right after Beau died, I ended up separated from my wife within the month. And my dad, for the first time in my life, who was my rock, was stuck in his own deep grief. I just went down into a hole. I checked myself into a rehab that year, came out, stayed sober for a while, then relapsed, then went into an outpatient program in DC where I went four hours a day, six hours a day. Stayed sober and then relapsed. I came back and admitted to them that I relapsed, and that in this instance I also used cocaine. They said you have to take a drug test. I said I'm not going to take a drug test, because it's not protected by HIPAA in a rehab scenario, which is crazy. They said you can't come back unless you take the drug test. I said I'm going through a divorce, it's not protected by HIPAA, it will become public, I don't want to do this to my family. I'm telling you I used cocaine and I drank, is that not good enough? They said no. For whatever reason, and I'm not blaming them, this is not their fault, I walked out. I knew Lincoln Park was a kind of open-air drug market. I saw a woman who was kind of famous in the area since I'd been in college, literally for 20 years, that I would see in the streets around DC. I went up to her and I said, can I get some crack? And I think basically I said, can you help me commit suicide. I know that now, looking back. It was the coward's way. I really mean that. I was a coward. I didn't go and just do it. I said, let me do it this way and really drag everybody down with me along the way. Let me figure out the way not only to kill myself, but to maybe kill my dad, really hurt my family, particularly my three daughters who adore me and I adore. And I smoked crack. The difference between crack cocaine and powder cocaine is this, and I really truly do not want to give a road map for people to do this, because I swear to God it'll kill you. It's sodium bicarbonate, which is baking soda, water, heat. That's it. That is the entire difference, which allows it to be ingested through smoking. The combination of those things makes it affect your physiology much faster than if you just used powder cocaine through your nose, or in any form other than intravenously. It also allows you to ingest more, faster, than you could by sniffing cocaine up your nose. The combination of combustion, ritual, the way you have to, I can still feel my hands doing it, becomes this ritualistic thing. If you really study addiction, these key components of oral fixation and combustion, it becomes the most ungodly addiction you can possibly imagine, to the point where I was smoking crack, literally, I was either looking for, or smoking, or finding more, for close to a two-year period of time. It took me to places, I wrote all about it, and I got made fun of about it. People think, when I wrote my book, calling through the carpet to find crack cocaine and Parmesan cheese, I know it was a real laugh line, but anybody who's ever been an addict like that, they don't laugh about it. It's devastating to think that you were that person. You can see yourself doing it. Just devastating. What happens in addiction so often is people can't admit that, can't even admit it to themselves, they just block it out. They get 30 days clean, come out, go back into the same exact situation they were in before, and they think, I'm just not going to do it again, I'm going to make it. What will come up is that they'll wake up in the morning and remember that time in the motel, with the prostitute, the party, the drugs, that stole your wallet and all your drugs, and you combed through carpet to see if there was anything there, and you smoke whatever white you found on the ground. It's the shame. Thinking of yourself like that, regardless of who you are, regardless of where you came from, whether your dad's the president of the United States or not, it doesn't matter. They don't admit it to themselves, don't admit it to anyone, never say it. And you know what happens? You never lose it, it sits in the back of your head, and it pops up, and you feel so disgusted with yourself that your brain immediately tells you, regardless of how far away you are from a drink or drug, I know the way not to feel this way. You're going to die if you keep feeling this way, you need to take a drink. That's always how it starts. Alcohol is the most dangerous drug in the world, by virtue of the amount of destruction and devastation that comes personally to the people around alcoholics. I don't find any difference between being an addict and an alcoholic. That's where it started for me. That's my story until I met Melissa, and luckily I've been sober almost seven years now. [Sponsor reads for PreBorn and Nimi Skincare.] When you're in that moment, people don't realize, you don't get to decide what your father does for a living. I think that's probably why people separated too, because there's this idea of what a politician's family is supposed to be. I genuinely understand what those addictions do. I don't think people realize you're not even yourself. It's like a demon, the best way to say it, maybe I'm taking a Catholic take on this, but it's like a full demonic possession when you're in the throes of these drugs. This was a great benefit of A&E doing intervention, because people could see these moments where people will choose the drug over their family, over their kids, over literally anything. I tend to agree with you that I've wondered if there's something genetic, because I'm not wired that way, or maybe I just haven't found the drug that would do that to me. I've never had something where I was like, oh, I just need to have that again. I've seen friends who have something once and want to do it every second. It's almost like you're made of something different. I'm certain of that, and the science is certain of that. We all can understand addiction at more or less devastating levels. Where's your phone? You basically have a packet of heroin. We all do. You're a junkie. Constantly giving us that dopamine, which, we can get to talking about, because I think we are not nearly as divided as we think we are. I think that bag of heroin in everybody's pocket is feeding them a lot of that division. We can all understand the compulsion to do things that aren't benefiting us, like staying up until 3 in the morning going through your For You page on TikTok. Every mother, father can watch their teenager do that and go, this is awful, I'm going to take his phone away, and then turn back to their own phone. I'm not any better. So we can all understand that compulsion. It's when the compulsion becomes so, the blast radius continues to grow. The difference between being addicted to your phone and being addicted to crack cocaine, I'm not saying they're the same, but at least we can get an understanding of the physiology, the way the brain actually works. It's like the micro versus the macro. Everybody has the micro. You can see the micro impact of it. One of the reasons people are so shocked by my story, and by the way, we're able to conflate. If the New York Post every day for six years runs a picture online, I think they literally at one point did like 1.5 stories of me a day for an entire 18-month period, and it didn't matter what the subject was, it was a picture of me naked with a prostitute, with a crack pipe in my lips. So I don't get mad at people when they go, was that your cocaine? Number one, the White House, this just doesn't make any sense, I had seven Secret Service agents with me at any given time everywhere I went. The idea that I was in the situation room and would decide to drop off cocaine. Beyond that silliness, I don't blame people for not realizing that I have worked my ass off. In this environment, the proudest thing I've ever done is stay clean and sober. Through all of that, every piece of it, both the trials, the accusations, the Alexander Smirnovs and Gal Lufts and Konstantin Kuliks and Lev Parnases and Rudys and Steve Bannons. Is it purely because of the love of the people around me and my willingness to own it all. I'm sitting in front of you, and you're not taking that away from me. That's the beauty of it. The realization at one point is that you can try. I have no fear. No fear. That's why I'm here more than anything. I'm certain we disagree on a lot of stuff, but there used to be a time, Candace, where you and I could sit down together and disagree about tax policy and disagree about the Catholic Church's view on abortion, whatever the subject may be, and still be able to go have a meal together. I talk about that often on my show. Back when I was left-leaning in college, my best friend was Republican conservative. It wasn't so at each other's throats and hating each other and wanting to destroy one another. You could see the good and the bad and go, this is why I have this perspective, and the perspective could change, and that was allowed too. I think about what made a lot of people, including myself, so angry about you, or I guess it wasn't really about you, it was the gaslighting. It was the letter that came from people saying it was Russian propaganda. That is what is driving us crazy about the Epstein files right now. It's what's ironically leading to the collapse of the MAGA support, we don't want to be gaslit. To be fair, it wasn't you, that's why it was so refreshing when you were like, yes, I had a crack addiction, this is me, I did this, I was with hookers. But you weren't speaking for you, and there were literally a bunch of people coming out and saying, this is not real. That is the most infuriating thing, because everyone can connect with addiction. If you had come out, maybe in that environment there would have been a different result, because we were at each other's throats. But that is what made people so angry. It was, nope, he never smoked crack, it wasn't real, the laptop is Russian propaganda. Like guys, what is this? Here's the problem. Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani saved the quote-unquote laptop, which is nonsense. If we can agree on the gaslighting, I will agree on the gaslighting, that there was never a quote-unquote laptop. There was a hard drive, stolen and hacked material, wherever it came from, whether from a Delaware repair shop or, like the partner says, from Dmitry Firtash who was trying to sell a hard drive on the Bidens in Ukraine, that they were looking for before the laptop repair shop guy was ever a twinkle in the eye. Go back and look at the record. Yeah, they should have let me go out and talk. But it was two weeks before the campaign, and then the election was over. Steve Bannon goes on with his buddy Guo, the Chinese billionaire who's now in prison, who got arrested on his boat. Go listen to the recorded conversation in which they say, the laptop, we got him, so we collected all the salacious pictures and put them out there, and then Rudy went out and stood on the steps of the New Castle County Courthouse with Bernie Kerik and said this contains child exploitation. Pure nonsense. So on both sides you have this reaction, which I don't think was necessarily a coordinated reaction, in the sense of, what do you do in two weeks? They come up with this, and I don't get to go out and say, no. But you know what I did? Come April, I write a book and tell everybody, I was addicted to crack, here's my story, here's all the rooms no one would ever want to admit being in that I was in. And it was like a blip on the radar, because everybody was now fighting about whether there was a suppressed story on Twitter, this gaslighting. I am not here to defend anybody. It's part of the political machine where they're like, we have up to two weeks to go to the election, we're going to do this denial, because we can't afford this right now, and then we're going to table this, get past these two weeks. And by that time, first and foremost, your father won. So people are angry, they feel like the election's been stolen, that there was an entire collusion to cover a laptop, which if it was on the other side they may have done too. This is what DC is, it's politics. But that's where the anger came from, it was, how dare you gaslight us. And then people start making you this focal point of it. It was kind of bigger than you at that point. You know what the laptop proved? That I was a crackhead. There you go. By the way, all this other bribery and these other things they investigated up and down during the Trump administration, with a Trump-appointed US attorney, the only US attorney in the country to stay on and continue to prosecute me, who then became special counsel, after I got a plea deal because I paid my taxes late, and I paid them with penalties and interest, and I owned a gun for 11 days while they say I was addicted, and check that box. Everybody has all the information. The Department of Justice has my digital footprint, every text message, every email, and there's not a single one in which you'll find anything that supports the really serious accusations of enriching my father, enriching himself. None of it's there. So I own whatever you want to call it. I own the laptop. We can go through it together, if you're willing to avert your eyes to the tragedy of addiction. The absolute tragedy of it. But there's no space for that in discourse anymore, no space for the nuance of, well, that was addiction, that wasn't corruption. I did not do any business through the entire four years. I became a painter. You know why I became a painter? Because it literally saved my life. I painted my whole life. Melissa instinctively knew that I needed to occupy my hands in early recovery like 12 hours a day, to focus on not the crushing weight of the consequences of years of addiction. So I just sat and painted and painted. I decided to have a show in a gallery and offer my paintings for sale. New York Post comes out and says Hunter Biden is selling his paintings for half a million dollars. I have never sold a painting nor offered a painting for half a million dollars in my freaking life. Everybody knows this, because everybody who bought a painting had to pay about a quarter million dollars to defend themselves before an impeachment hearing. Go read the transcripts of people under oath. The laptop absolutely proved nothing, but it became this cultural touchstone. It embodied the Biden crime family. If you wanted to believe that, if you believe that because you're being told by people you trusted that your election was stolen, that your democracy was thwarted, that the process was unfair, all you had to do, and I get this, is look at the pictures. Doesn't look like a good guy to me. Right, because you weren't a good guy in the pictures. Smoking crack in a motel room with a prostitute. They come out and say, oh, this is all. I admit it all. Not only admit it all, I own it all. I will own everything, the worst of it, all of it. In retrospect, things have changed, times have changed. I was one of the chief people that was really angry about it, and the exact reason why, when I re-examined it, it was the gaslighting. It's the same reason I'm angry with Trump over the Epstein thing. I can't come back from media gaslighting. The Trump thing is worse because it came from his own mouth, but the gaslighting, it wasn't people trying to cover it up, it was like Trump being like, what Epstein files, are we still talking about the Epstein files? Things kind of change with time also, because I was very close with Don Jr. I traveled a lot with him through the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. We talked about it, this corruption, can't believe they denied it, all these photos coming out. And then we get whatever this Trump family is now, and it's like, I think it was a historian who wrote on X exactly how I feel, which is, I wish I could go back to the days where I thought Hunter Biden's art was the most corrupt deal that was done in politics. And now we're going, we stood behind Trump, we fought, we shared the photos of Hunter Biden to the extent that we could, and now we have their family engaged in so many corrupt deals, the meme coins, taking advantage of people. What we actually have is, DC is corrupt, politics is corrupt. I think it is kind of a unifying point, not to excuse the gaslighting of people for two weeks, which made people super angry, but it's a different time where people are going back and examining it. I feel terrible realizing that you were finally clean, and then it's just this humiliation ritual over and over again, of people putting everything out there, and not realizing also your kids are facing the consequences as well, which people do not think about when they publish stories. I was reticent and didn't cover the Christine O'Donnell thing because the first thing that came to mind, do they have kids? These are kids about to go to college. Why are they doing this? Because she's in politics. They don't think about the children. Now that I have kids too, I think, wow, they don't sign up for what I do for podcasting, kids don't sign up for that kind of stuff. Number one though, kids are way more resilient than you think, they're so much tougher. My girls love me deeply, and I can 100% accept that love now, and return it with everything I have to offer. But part of what you're describing is politics in memoriam. Part of it, but something's changed. There is a meanness, a willingness to adopt very un-American tactics against our opponents, because it's become a zero-sum game. It's not just that I disagree with you, it's that you need to be punished, for what you believe. There's this incredible show I really want to meet them one day, it's called The Necessary Conversation, have you listened to that? Incredible. It's a brother and sister who are progressives, one lives in LA, one lives in Austin and runs a bakery, the sister. And a mom and dad, who are ultra-MAGA, in Missouri somewhere. Don't take their caps off. Trump literally can do no wrong, he's playing 4D chess on the Epstein thing, I know he said no war in Iran, but he must have a reason for it. They have this conversation. They have real issues with each other. The daughter gets really mad at the dad, dad, you were a jerk to us when we were kids. But then she has, with her mom who loves animals and taught her about empathy, they would adopt animals. You find out her dad coached all their little league games, she was a softball player, and if a kid couldn't afford the uniform, the dad would quietly go out and buy the uniform. And he's awful on this thing, in terms of the way he speaks to them, he's tough, I don't give a damn, drop a bomb on them kind of thing. But it's so informative, because before, that's a normal family. Before, you and I could meet at a restaurant in Georgetown, your husband and my wife, and have dinner together. With Tucker, I knew Tucker. You could have dinner together and think what Tucker was saying was crazy, and I totally agree and I don't agree with half the stuff he says, but you know what it didn't mean? It didn't mean that I thought he should be tried for treason and executed. And that's what happened to me. I mean that not figuratively, literally. That's what people were saying, and people of real importance were saying it. Those were the words coming out of the mouths, and I'm paraphrasing, of people like Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani, people of authority. It changes everything. How could I even respond, was that cocaine mine? What do you want, do you want me to take a drug test? Because I'm taking a drug test almost weekly for the Department of Corrections and probation. I have a probation officer, I'm on release until trial. Is that the statement you make to the New York Post? It becomes impossible. So what do you do? You realize, and I don't know if you feel this way in your own life, that the real problem is not out there. It's not that person. If I could just get Steve to tell the truth, if I could just get Rudy Giuliani to stop lying about me, if I could just get Konstantin Kulik to say that he wrote the, it's not there. You realize, in order to survive, it's all inside. Every single piece of it is about figuring out how to love yourself and not living in that shame, in order for you to be able to be of service, first to Melissa, to return the beautiful thing she gave me, which was a chance, to be of service to my dad, to return the unconditional love, which is not love without consequences, not love without accountability, it's just knowing that no matter what, even through the consequences and being held accountable, that person still loves me. [Sponsor reads for Ethos and NativePath.] I think that was also what came across in your interview with Andrew Callaghan, where after I watched it, it edited my opinion about that relationship between you and your dad. Since the laptop scandal, in my mind it was a bit cartoonish, where it was, well, you can do whatever you want, go ahead, smoke crack, we're just powerful, we'll cover it, we've acquired so much power. And then when I saw you really defending your dad over this George Clooney thing, I was like, okay, this is just a normal father-son relationship. People can't apply that when you're talking about a president or somebody with access to power, but he just loves his dad, and this is the way any normal person would defend their dad. If they said something about your father, your son, this is so normal. He doesn't care if Jake Tapper's on his side, doesn't care if George Clooney is on his side, that's his dad you're talking about, and he's having a natural reaction that I would have if someone was talking about my dad, my grandparents, my sister, my cousin. Even when they do something wrong. It's like, okay, no, but that's my family member who did something wrong. You have no right, and I will breathe fire on someone. And you're right, now it's getting dirtier, the games people are playing are dirtier, and it is about wanting you to feel unsafe. That is something so new, when you have people posting your address, posting where you are, knowing you have children. For me it was changing my mind on Israel, and suddenly I'm getting the New York Post treatment and all these people coming after me, and I'm going, this is my perspective, you're welcome to debate me on why I feel the way I feel about what's happening in Gaza, but to do these tactics where you're trying to destroy people, that feels very new to me. Let's be honest, I hate that phrase. From my perspective, I know where that started, and that started when Donald Trump from rally stages started the "where's Hunter" call and response, crowds. And then they printed t-shirts and made hats and made mugs of "where's Hunter." And then they showed up at my door. I didn't have any security. I couldn't afford that in my life, particularly at that time, and they literally showed up at my door with bullhorns and MAGA hats. The way they got there is, the New York Post published on its front cover an aerial view of my home with the address, and noted that if you stand on this part of the street you can see, there are floor-to-ceiling windows. And so they showed up. Alyssa was about six months pregnant at the time, she got in the car and sped off, and they followed her and ran her off the road. She panicked, she got in did it again, and they surrounded her. That's new. Similarly to you, before I sat down I heard where you live, the level of security you have or didn't have, what the perimeter of your property is. How the hell do I know that, and how is that even remotely safe? Because you have people who, you basically spoke your truth, and they decided that you cannot exist, and therefore I don't know what's going to happen, but for some reason I think it's appropriate for me to say, tell you what Candace's address is, who lives there, and the level of security she has. Doing that was one of the most, it was so obvious what he was doing. My dad said to me, I have to stop saying the F word. Well, it was, seriously, that to me was a declaration of war. They know I homeschool my kids, and he's describing the security apparatus, in this rant trying to be impassioned about the fact that I don't support Israel, or whatever his motivation was, there was zero reason to be describing the perimeter of my house outside of wanting someone to get harmed. First of all, I'm not like Tucker Carlson, and I say this to people all the time, that's why I get so worried, because when Tucker gets accosted in public, he just has this total happy warrior demeanor. I will claw someone's eyes out for my kids. We will shoot you. I will shoot you and I will kill you and I will happily go to prison, but before you have one opportunity, I'm not even going to think about whether they're going to hurt my kids. Exactly like Melissa. That's just me. I've said it over and over on my podcast, I will smile in my mugshot, because I did the right thing, and I have no qualms about that. So when he did that, I was like, okay, this little beanie boy, I see exactly what you're doing, the whole world sees what you're doing, you're doing something because you want my children to get harmed. And then if something happens to them, you're going to go, well, I don't know how that happened, as I was describing the perimeter of her home. Which was inaccurate. But that's exactly why they do it. Even if the chance is this small, the reason they do it is exactly that, to make you really afraid, not for yourself, for your four kids, for your family, for the people who work around you. I have the same approach I think Tucker has, which is, I can handle it, I can defuse a situation. Melissa? People will kill you. Yeah, I'll kill you and ask questions later. And she did exactly the same. You know what really worries me? Is that all of a sudden we're all talking about violence. You're talking about violence. Violence is defense, but now you're talking about the violence. And then they go, oh, you're gaslighting us, you're fine, you're really rich, you can take care of yourself. Did you see what just happened to my best friend? We just watched Charlie get. He had a full security apparatus. We still don't know what happened to Charlie Kirk. There's zero interest. That's another thing that for me was, done with Trump. There's no way for someone who came from the inside and watched the work Charlie did to get these people elected. Don Jr. was like a brother to Charlie, literally like a brother. And to see the Trump brothers, to see Donald Trump himself, Cash Patel, who Charlie pushed for to lead the FBI, had him on his podcast, J.D. Vance who came out of nowhere, Charlie was not sleeping to make that happen. To see all these people have zero interest in the obvious holes in the story. Even if ultimately the holes get filled and there's a picture that makes sense, which I put at zero percent chance, the fact that they have zero interest, and they're just accepting the narrative. What this has done to me, I've said this, I'm just done with politics, because I can't even begin to comprehend it, and again, that element of gaslighting, where they're pretending that the people noticing that none of this is making sense are the crazy ones, and everyone else who's like, nope, turn the chapter, a week later it's all solved. And this is how it went down, and none of it makes sense, but just accept this slop. It's the most infuriating thing, and it's fully removed the scales from my eyes, and I've stopped with this left versus right, Democrat versus Republican. I'm like, this is sheer evil versus good. For real. It is good versus evil. They have torn the mask off of this. I said to you before, I pray to God that by the end of this you think of me as a friend, because if anything ever happened to me, I want you and Melissa to team up. You would fit like, oh my God. It's not happening with Harley Kern. The criticism of you for asking the questions, for someone who was like a brother to you, is like, what the F are you talking about? That's what he's talking about, how dare you cancel. He's coming from someone you've attacked, you've had all your criticism, which I have no problem with, and we disagree on so many things, but I listen to you and I go, right on. Epstein, you want to figure out why they don't want to release all the Epstein files? All you have to do is literally look at a picture of Trump standing on his stage at his inauguration and look behind him. It's like every single person. He's protecting his donors, without question. My point is, when are people going to wake up to the fact, and it's not left or right, this is a really horrible group of people pulling the strings that impact us all, and they make us think that because you and I disagree on the graduated tax rate or some social issue, we are sworn enemies, not just sworn enemies, but that I deserve violence. Both sides have woken up, without question. My audience is now split, and I still say what I believe. I haven't changed my position on abortion, I'm Catholic. There's nothing that has changed, I think they're just hearing me for the first time. There was something about the Charlie Kirk assassination where everyone sort of looked up at the machine and was like, wait a second, what is this? They expected Trump to be ride or die. They expected Cash. Wow, this is going to be solved in the clearest way possible, because the entire political apparatus that has the power in the Department of Justice is in the hands of Charlie Kirk's friends. This is it, whoever did this is never going to get away with it, because these are Charlie's friends. And what did we get? They're the people that Charlie Kirk made. He led a youth revolution to get these people elected and in power. He was ride or die. The level of disloyalty, or fear, I don't know what it is. Disloyalty maybe guided by fear, but it's still disloyalty. It's disturbing. I cannot forgive Trump, the Trump family, what they have done or what they have not done for Charlie. I'm full on, call me a conspiracy theorist, I'm like, what is the shame tactic of the day, you're calling me a conspiracy theorist, great, you'd be a fool to believe the stuff they're telling us today. The Charlie assassination has, as crazy as it is, he was so Republican conservative, but I think it's brought people together in a productive way. Look, I'm here and you're here, and I really think that we're not unique, we're very emblematic. Let's put the past, not behind us, I'll explain anything you want, talk about anything you want, but this isn't right. What we're witnessing right now is not right. The level of corruption, the obfuscation, whether it's Butler or Charlie, makes no sense. These things, it's just not right, glaringly not right. It's almost as if they're just saying FU. They're not even trying. We aren't even getting good psyops anymore. It's so disrespectful that we're not even getting a good psyops. We're supposed to believe he survived four assassination attempts? The first president that's ever survived four assassination attempts? They lie to us about things and make a big deal, then they make it want to go away. They're going to keep pretending and telling us that this is a totally normal grieving widow. No one's buying that. This is not how you would react to your husband being shot, this sort of, I'm fine, and two weeks later I fully accept the narrative, I have no interest in anything else, it's over, I forgive him, let's move on. You're asking us to abandon our common sense and our humanity. They're insisting on this, and I'm going, where is this going to go, because we're not doing the thing they want us to do. They are constantly giving us slop. Even the recent White House Correspondents Dinner, there was so much theater to it. And now it's, okay, Secret Service maybe shot each other, and we're going to quietly move on. But Trump needs a ballroom. That's a normal reaction. Hey, there's a shooting, we better get that ballroom. And it's going to cost a billion dollars now, and it's not from donors. It's the constant, talk about gaslighting. Are we even a year into Trump's second term? A little over a year. I don't think there's been, how are we going to do four years of just being gaslit every five seconds, and told that, but MAGA literally is not MAGA anymore. What was actually never Trump, actually pro-Hillary Clinton if you think about it, that's now MAGA. People who have been against Trump the entire time are lecturing us, the Mark Levins and the Ben Shapiros, the Laura Loomers, we're MAGA now. Okay, great, then I'm not MAGA. I've never agreed with these people, I'm opposed to these people's ideas. I am opposed to unleashing an actual lunatic who has had to be Baker Acted and put on psych 5150 holds by her own parents who fear her. Melissa always used that 5150, she's like, that person's going to get 5150, I go, what's 5150? And you're telling us this is MAGA now. It's been a challenging time, because you have to have the humility to admit that I'm quite embarrassed about it. The president of the United States of America has posted images of himself as a king half a dozen times now. When are people going to wake up and go, okay, if that's what you want. And if that's what you want, then I know there is a vast majority of Americans, but some that are really going to have a problem. We all need allies now, because they do have an enormous amount of power. One of the things I always think about is, it's so easy to silence people, it would be particularly easy, the whole cocaine in the White House thing, you can believe whatever you want to believe, but I know my truth, and that's all I can do. And you'd preferred crack anyways. 100%, I would not have forgotten it in a cubby, not if you're crawling on the floor. The situation room, which I've never been in before. But my point is, what if they, what if I'm flying back to LA and I go through security and they find drugs in my bag? Who would believe me, that I'm still clean and sober? No one. I could take drug tests and prove it, I pack my bag in front of a witness everywhere I go, so that at least I would be able to say that. Here's the crazy part. The idea that I would think there is a government in power capable of doing that says everything anyone needs to know about where we are. The idea that you feel unsafe in the United States of America because you disagree with the current administration on an issue that 70% of Americans agree with you on. We all can agree, we need to stop the wholesale murder of a population in Gaza. Whatever you think about my father's policies, do you know one thing he didn't do? He didn't greenlight turning Gaza into a Trump golf course, with the maitre d being Jared Kushner, with $4 billion in Saudi money. It's despicable. They did the deal before. When he posted that, here's what Gaza could be, I could have my name on a building, and I was like, dead children. You're literally saying this is all going to be fine because we're going to put up a Trump resort. Positively despicable, tasteless, indefensible. And it's not a joke. Jared, it wasn't a joke, and that is the deal. They're doing it out in the open, it's not as if they're hiding it. They are making deals as they go. You had such a problem with me, I didn't do any business. The paintings. I didn't do a single business. Every single person that bought a painting from me during the time my dad was in office, I had two shows and probably sold a total of 20 paintings, 13 of them to my best friend. And that's it. And they had a problem with me as being this emblem of corruption. These guys: Don Jr. got the single largest loan guarantee from the Department of Defense ever handed out, over $600 million, for a fusion energy company, of which he has zero experience. Jared Kushner, who's never run a private equity fund, now has a $4 billion private equity fund, with 80% of the money coming from the Middle East, which he continues to raise as he is the ambassador at large on behalf of the Trump administration, not as a political appointee, but simply as a son-in-law of the president, to come to a peace deal of a war in Iran that they started, that has cost the economy billions of dollars, for a war nobody wanted, that every president before him was pressured by the Israelis to get into, and every single one, regardless of what you think of them, from Jimmy Carter through President Reagan, through both of the Bushes, through Clinton, through my dad, said, you're out of your damn minds, and here's the reason why, this is what's going to happen. So who benefits right now? The people making trades of billions of dollars on market manipulation that occurred, and we all know it, it's literally out in the open. You will not get to scream at me, I'm so far off the Trump train. It's embarrassing, because we got behind him as the answer to corruption. We thought he was going to be this outsider, he's going to go to DC, drain the swamp. And then he became the Loch Ness Monster. There's something about that swamp, you get swimming in it, people do this. And yes, it has been for Israel. Not to say Trump wasn't pro-Israel, most presidents are pro-Israel when they go in there, and when they go anti-Israel they kind of end up dead, or they get kicked out, if you want to talk about Nixon and the scandal of Watergate, which I revisited and think had a lot more to do with his shifting viewpoints. I was pro-Israel generally speaking, not very educated about the topic. It's this level of corruption, when you are willing to let real Americans be harmed, their day-to-day lives harmed, suffering at the gas pump, groceries expensive, all so you could further enrich. How much more money does the Trump family need? Don't you just want to have a legacy of being a good president? I have to say about the cryptocurrency thing, I think there's incredible promise in cryptocurrency. I believe in the meme token. I'll do something one day to create a community, there are really good reasons to do it. I happen to be kind of a crypto guy, because of my understanding. I think there's incredible freedom in a world in which we've been controlled by banks. If you have the same problem I have with big pharma, banks, the Fed, where does money come from kind of thing, I truly believe in what Satoshi, the manifesto of Bitcoin. But that's just me. Regardless, my point is, they had such an opportunity. I'll give you this, I want you to look at the conspiracy. Go look up Gal Luft and Alexander Smirnov. They're the two principal individuals who made the only claim that people hung their hat on, in Congress and elsewhere, as it relates to my dad and corruption, bribery. One of them is a fugitive from justice, wanted by Interpol and the United States government, Gal Luft, who is a former IDF officer, believed to be living in Israel as a fugitive, which Israel will not help us locate. The other one is Alexander Smirnov, who is a known Israeli intelligence agent. Those are the two people. One was in a prison in the United States, serving six years, and they can't find him. He is on furlough, but no one knows where he's been furloughed to. The only passport he has is an Israeli passport. There are forces, that I used to say, oh, this is nonsense. Have you ever read The Devil's Chessboard? Yes, Allen Dulles, looking into the CIA. I read this book Chaos that then led me to Devil's Chessboard. It's on our list for books to read for the book club. It'll knock you. Chaos, the CIA, the Manson stuff, that was the one that knocked me, and I was like, what is going on with our government? You realize what the CIA is capable of, and you think it's all a conspiracy. I think that's what they're fearful of, that people will have awakened to that. So when they're trying to throw red meat now, the left, the right, it's just not landing the same anymore, because we just realized that there is a devil's chessboard. In terms of the left, you think I'm going to defend the DC elite of the left? They crushed my dad. When they saw their chance, they did everything in their power to push him out. You know why? Because he was never part of that club. He was never part of the Epstein class. He lived in Delaware. You can think whatever you want about my dad, but my dad never bought a stock or a bond, because he made a commitment in 1972 when he was 30 years old, after Watergate, never to own a stock or a bond. My dad was the poorest person to enter the presidency, not poorest, he had money, he'd written a book and done well, but he had the least amount of wealth entering the presidency in modern years, since 1900, than anybody. When he was in the United States Senate, he was the poorest man in the Senate, not poor, he made over $170,000 averaged over 45 years, but not just the Senate, of 535 members of Congress, he was never part of that club. That's what I wish they knew. I am not here to defend the DC elites of my own party, I think they're just as complicit in all this. Without question, the Nancy Pelosis. What's your opinion on Kamala then? Do you like her? You like, you didn't, definitely. No, you know what, I did, and I don't want to say anything. I didn't know the vice president that well. She was always nice to me personally. The other thing people think is that I was living at the White House. I literally didn't leave my home, because it was really hard to leave. I stayed in the hill that I lived on, until the fires came. I was with Beau, with Melissa, trying to make it through, not just making it through, thriving, making it through what would otherwise have seemed like a horrible life from any outsider's perspective. So I'm not dodging the question, but I don't want to throw the vice president under the bus, because I have no reason to. She did nothing personal to you, she was nice to you. Never did anything personal to me. I think she is, kind of the machine stuff. I'm tough enough to realize that's part of when you get to politics at that level. People have a misperception of me, that for 50 years I was a crack addict and I was that picture. I went to Yale Law School. I served in the Clinton administration. I was chairman of the board of the UN World Food Program, which is the largest humanitarian organization in the world. I served on 16 boards before I ever joined the board of Burisma. I taught at Georgetown for four years, taught at the master's program at the School of Foreign Service. I actually didn't know that. That surprised me too, not to be rude, but I thought you were dumb. Because, maybe because Meghan McCain was on The View for too long, I was like, here we go, just rich political kids, she's just so dumb, and yet she's always here, they're just giving her stuff. There's that perception, rich kids don't work, aren't smart. I was expecting you to be a Meghan McCain. And then when I watched it, I was like, oh wait, he actually has brain cells. Which is remarkable that you didn't kill them all off when you were on crack. As I told you before, I think they got pickled, all the vodka. I was like, this is interesting, he's not a total idiot. There are the stereotypes of rich kids who keep getting handed all these awards in life. I say to everybody, if there's ever anybody in the history of America that benefits from low expectations, it's me. People are like, oh my God, you're not dumb. You didn't pull out your crack pipe yet. That gives you an idea of the level to which I was muted, because they didn't want, you have to subvert yourself to a machine to a certain degree. It wasn't up to me if I wanted to go out and rail at the machine or argue with Jake Tapper, because then I'd become even more of the story. But you give up your voice in that way, and it's incredibly emasculating, particularly when the portrait being painted of you is a ne'er-do-well who never did anything in their life. You want to talk about experience? Go look at my goddamn resume. I have 10 times more experience in 10 times more things, and I am 10 times more well read than either one of the Trump boys, regardless of what you think about them. Now, what I can't do is, I'm not a great shot, and I don't know anything about real estate, and I don't know anything about making money, and that's why I'm about a few million dollars in debt, and I need to change that around in some way at the age of 56. But the portrait that was painted of me has given me this incredible gift, so that I can walk into your house, into your studio, and I guarantee people afterwards are going to go, I still think he's, but my god, he's not, can you believe it, he didn't go do lines in the bathroom. That was my reaction when I watched Andrew Callaghan, I was like, wow, he's actually thought through his addiction, he's talking about the ritual of it, this guy's not an idiot. You do benefit from having exceedingly low expectations. But the first time you spoke, of course you did sort of have to be quiet, because otherwise you would have hurt your father, there's a machine bigger than you that you have to submit yourself to. My dad just said, honey, that was really beautiful parts of it, did you have to use the F-word that much? I was like, coming from you. The thing about my dad though is, at least from the different generations, he never talked to us that way, ever, even around my mom. So I'm trying to curb the F-word for my mom and dad. [Sponsor read for American Financing.] How old were you, by the way, when your mother died in the car accident? Just about three. I was a month away from four. My sister Abby was about 18 months, who my oldest daughter's named after, Naomi. Do you have any memory of her? You know, I don't know for certain whether the things I have, which I believe are memories, are memory, because it would be very rare at that age. I have distinct memories of my mom carrying us around in a picnic basket, and I have a distinct memory of the car, not the accident, but of the car. But I don't know if it's because I've been so steeped in stories. The beautiful part, like everything, have you ever read any of the Gnostic Gospels? You really should. I've listened to you talk about your Catholicism and your faith. I'm a toddler in the faith, and it's so rich. One of the things I've always been a student of, because when I first went to Georgetown, the two closest people after I got to Georgetown were two Jesuit priests, one named Ted Dziak and the other Bill Watson. Both Father Watson and Father Dziak led me into this idea of service. I started a thing called the Jesuit International Volunteers with Father Dziak, and then I went to the JVC because of Father Watson, which is like domestic peace corps, and I did that for a year. When I opened up my own law firm, all my clients were Jesuit universities, because I was friends with presidents of universities just five or six years older than me, who were becoming presidents of St. Joe's and Scranton and Loyola and Detroit Mercy. The Gnostic Gospels were found in Nag Hammadi, written in the period between Christ's death and the first two centuries. There's the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Philip. Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. But what he did, and really what it was about, was not a true transformation of faith, it was a way to consolidate power. He made the Christian bishops, who were 200 years into the very early church, his lieutenants and enforcers as it related to the religion, so he could control the more radical elements of it. That is when they came to an adoption of just four gospels, because there were all these other writings that you could get excommunicated for reading, really beautiful portraits, like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and Jesus's relationship with Mary Magdalene. In one of the texts, I think it's called the Acts of John, there is a thing Christ says, I'm paraphrasing, you must learn to suffer as I do, in order to be able not to suffer. And that is the greatest lesson of everything. It's not having gratitude for all the good things in my life, but having immense gratitude for all of my life. I wouldn't be here, we couldn't have this honest conversation, I couldn't get to know you as a human being, if every single thing didn't occur. I would not feel this gift of being alive on a daily basis the way I do, if I hadn't overcome committing suicide dozens of times in motel rooms, in places I could never afford to be found dead. It's that piece of life, the only way I got it, is when they tore off all my clothes, tarred and feathered me, and put me in the center of town and said, look at him. And I survived. When you survive that, you go, what am I going to do with my life? The number one thing I want to do with my life is take care of me. Basically having the worst moments of your life. I always speak about on my show how a lot of these kids growing up aren't going to know what it was like before social media, where you could make a mistake and have that be over, you got to grow up. Now it's like they're digging, finding people's tweets from when they're 17, they're an idiot, they wrote the N-word once, and they want to hang them when they're 40. I just saw you as a caricature, feeling gaslit by the political machine, convinced it was just the left that partook in this political machine. I really want to say, genuinely, I'm so sorry that I just didn't even consider, he's a crackhead, and that's actually a very relatable thing, and he shouldn't be, to have that, to consider every worst thing you've ever done. I cry very easily, but I just feel like it's not who I want to be, and I think I've come a long way from that. I did partake in just the inhumanity of, look at this guy at the worst moment of his life, with prostitutes, on crack, on drugs, and we should make fun of him because it makes us feel good, or makes us feel like we're somehow beating the machine. It was a really warped viewpoint, and hearing you speak about it today I'm just like, wow, that is so gross that I participated. You have so much, and I mean this in a good way, so much power. I think your audience absolutely trust you. And the reason they trust you is because you've shown an enormous amount of courage speaking your mind, particularly as it related to someone you loved like a brother, and everything that has transpired since then, which is an immediate rejection of power, and knowing that you were just going to get the hell beat out of you. For you to say that to me, I truly mean it, from a purely selfish point of view, it means the world. No, no, no, no. I didn't come here for that. I came here because, you know what, I ask forgiveness every day, without any expectation that I will be forgiven. But I know the people that I hurt, and I still do, and I'm not even remotely perfect, I still screw up. But God, if we could have this conversation and genuinely, authentically believe that, I think just opens the door for a few other people, without being, with all humility, maybe a few other people. And there is a freedom in it too, that your worst moments have just been. You've got me butt naked with the crack pipe. I survived it, and it allows you to return to who you are, because addiction, I wouldn't wish it. Growing up and seeing what it's done to families, seeing a lot of stuff when I was younger, really made me, I can't even imagine. Imagine if you could talk about it, and the person you were confronting is able to say, this is, we got to do something about this, come on everybody, let's do something about it. I want to start an aftercare program for people for free, because the biggest thing that happens is people go to detox, to a recovery center or rehab, and they get out after 30 days and they have nowhere to go. One of the things I'm trying to do is start a free aftercare program. There's one in Kentucky that is a really beautiful model. I've worked with an organization called Breadie, I'm the development director there, and they do tenants rights and homeless prevention. I know what we all can agree on, the people who can't afford to pay their rent need to figure out a way to stay in their houses before it becomes a mother with three kids that are homeless, we know where that leads. These kinds of things are what I want to use what I'm doing for. I also want to make a living, pay my debt, do the things, still make art. I'm going to put all my art on my website, and people can come look at it, if they want to buy it they can buy it, because I don't really believe art becomes art until you share it with somebody, until there's an observer of it. I want to do all of those things, and be able to talk to you, talk to the people, talk to that family from The Necessary Conversation, and say to the mom, the stories your daughter tells you about the way you talked to the animals, it really moves me. The fact that you think I'm the spawn of the devil, maybe we have a discussion about it. It's a caricature, and I have a caricature of me that's been built up for years, so I should have been more empathetic to it, honestly, but when you're in it, you don't really know that you're in it. Not only in it, you're in it to win it, and once everything is put in a political lens, life and death, if we lose this election, this is over. Now I will tell you, we've never had somebody who is supposed to stay longer than they're supposed to. But regardless, we all have a tendency to look at the time we live in and say it's worse than ever, absolutely worse. The fact of the matter is, if you know your history, this is a cycle. There will always be really bad people, we will always be disappointed in the end with leadership, we will always have corruption. It doesn't mean we need to accept it, doesn't mean we don't need to fight against it, doesn't mean that sometimes really good people make the wrong choice. But what it does mean is that I have absolute hope. I really truly still believe in America, even with all of its faults, even after reading The Devil's Chessboard. That's not about Democrats and not about Republicans. If you go back to reconstruction, back to Andrew Johnson, the fact that the United States of America was not truly the United States of America until 1964, this whole thing, but I still really believe in the illusion. The thing that makes me so mad is they have completely torn away that illusion and people feel hopeless. They feel there's no chance to change it. They gave this guy the reins to do it, and he was the one who's going to blow everything up and make it better for everybody. And I kind of go, wait a second, what happened to Charlie? Wait a second, why are we at war again? I think this is actually the most important question, and I'll make this my final question. I'm really interested about your faith life. You're Catholic, raised Catholic, went to Catholic school, you're talking to me about the Gnostic Gospels. You and I should go see the Pope together. I'd love to do that, seriously. I think he's a little mad at America right now. You and I can go see, I was tweeted the same day as the Pope, by the way, by Trump, when he said bad things about me. Well really, let's go to the Vatican, I would love to. My favorite place in the world. I just got back from Italy, I was there two years ago, I did my confirmation. Oh, you did? It was just most beautiful, unbelievable. It was literally the same day that Trump posted the time most vile person of the year. So I felt like even in that there was something divine, because it was looking at fake power, and then the real power of having a cardinal, getting confirmed, being in Italy, the deep history, what outlasts that? There was something so fickle about it, posting this photo of me when I was sick. Talk about humiliating people for sport. Somebody literally sent this to me right before I came in to you, they knew I was going to talk to you, and I promise you I did not plan to do this. It was a prayer: if you are wise and understand God's ways, prove it by living an honorable life. Do good works with the humility that comes from wisdom. But if you are bitterly jealous and there's selfish ambition in your heart, don't cover up the truth with boasting and lying, for jealousy and selfish ambition are not God's kind of wisdom. Such things are earthly, unspiritual, and demonic. For wherever there is jealousy and selfish ambition, there you will find disorder and evil of every kind. The whole first piece of that, when you were just talking, is what's my faith. Prove it by living an honorable life. The thing I recognized is that quote from Mother Teresa. I don't go to mass as much as I used to, I would go to mass every Sunday, never miss a mass, I went to Georgetown. But what I realized is that my real faith is in that belief, just do the next right thing, whether it's the golden rule. That doesn't mean you have to be weak in your empathy, but always be compassionate. I believe in the perennial philosophy. I believe that same exact message, from the Upanishads to the Gospels of Jesus Christ, are all at base, in terms of the red-letter words of each, saying the same thing: love your neighbor like you would want to be loved. It's the hardest thing in the world to do. But that's my faith. And I think there are certain people that arrive at certain times that are messengers of that. I certainly don't agree with the Catholic Church on a lot of stuff, but I'll tell you what, I really am so proud of Pope Francis and now Pope Leo, in terms of the notion of social justice. I think there can be a practical application of that in our leadership. Faith that is used as a cudgel is really dangerous. I know a lot of people I personally love and am very close to who are part of an evangelical church, particularly in the African-American community, but who are horrified by the complicity of a certain section of the evangelical church and what's happening in the world today. To me my faith is very personal, rooted in Catholicism, rooted in the Society of Jesus, the Jesuit church in particular, which they used to always call the black pope, until we finally got a Jesuit pope. And with eyes wide open, too, that the church as an institution is incredibly flawed, and had been, but it's given me an enormous sense of community and belonging, just from a cultural perspective. What I'm going to say is, I really think you should go to confession. You should do that. Oh, don't worry, I've been to confession. You should go to confession and just go back to the root. Go back to the root, there's so much there, you're just not enough, your brain's not enough. Hearing you describe that I can do this, there's something for me about the submission that every mass, just remembering. The beautiful thing. I love it. The beautiful thing is that I have been going to confession for six years. Wow. Right here. Ask me. I like that freedom. You used to feel like the only person you could say this to. And I'm not saying there is not like my impure thoughts that, that's between me and God, but I am saying, that feeling of release that the confessional is there for, is the feeling that when I was finally able to see beyond all the noise that I received, by just existing and getting up every day and looking, turning over and seeing that my wife who saved me, and Joey, and my dad, as a dad, not as president but just as a dad, and my mom and my sister and my aunts and uncles and everybody else, and then the wider circle, my friend George, my friend Franny, my friend Bobby, people that came into my life and never left, and despite it all, when there was nothing in it for them but just grief and ridicule. It's everyday. Ladies and gentlemen, Hunter Biden. Never thought this conversation would happen, and stranger things have happened, and this is truly been one of the most powerful discussions we've ever had, and I think it's because of your journey. You've lived through a lot. You lost your mother, your sister in a tragic accident. You lost your brother to cancer. Maybe for a while lost your dad to the political machine. Lost yourself to crack cocaine. And somehow I gained everything. Gained it all back. I really did. I can't tell you how much it means to me that you would invite me here into your home to be able to have this discussion. I really mean it. I'm really honored, and I'm grateful that you took it, and that you've accepted my apology, because I just feel really shitty about it. Thanks. Guilt is good, like we said earlier. Thank you so much for joining us. Amazing.