Interview with Jesse Ventura
Jesse Ventura is a retired professional wrestler who served as the 38th governor of Minnesota.
Being the Villain
Contents
Max Raskin: You seem like a nice guy…
Jesse Ventura: …not always.
MR: Right — no one's all one thing. But why were you a heel? Why were you a villain when you were a professional wrestler?
JV: Because that was by my choice. Because being a villain allows you to be way more creative.
Being a good guy, you have to be mom, apple pie, and the girl next door. Unless you're a gimmick. And unless you're a former bad guy who's turned good. But initially, oh, I didn't want to be a fan favorite. There's no creativity there.
See, when I came out of the Navy, I went to college for one year on the GI Bill and I didn't have to name a major. I got into theater. In college my freshman year I did Aristophanes' The Birds, a Greek comedy. And in doing that, it led me to realize that's what wrestling is. Wrestling is physical theater.
MR: Which skill is more useful as a politician — entertaining or fighting?
JV: Oh, I would say in the end, it's the ability to fight. Because at some point, the entertainment's got to end.
MR: You ran into my jiujitsu instructor on the street one day, and he said you were just the sweetest person…
JV: …well, that may be because I studied karate for many years.
I was a member of the Japan Karate Association, and I actually fought in the Philippine National Tournament. I achieved a belt rank in the Philippines that was recognized in the United States because they're a universal international organization. The JKA, the Japan Karate Association.
MR: Why should someone be interested in martial arts?
JV: Building self-confidence.
And the stretching. That’s almost the most important thing. The biggest difficulty you face in growing old is your body losing its elasticity. You can't do the splits no more. I used to be able to do full front splits at one time.
Almost Cut My Hair
MR: Why do you have long hair?
JV: Because I'm too lazy to go to the barber. And I don't have enough hair. I think that I should be given a special rate because why should I have to pay full fare at the barber when I've only got half the hair to cut?
I haven't had a haircut since I got out of office. And that's 20 years ago.
MR: Do you think of yourself as a hippie?
JV: I have somewhat a spirit of the hippies, but I don't consider myself one. Because when the hippies were here, I was an active member of underwater demolition SEAL team in the United States Navy, which it's the complete opposite of a hippie.
MR: But it’s interesting because a lot of people you would think wouldn’t be hippies, like right-wingers or soldiers, have this this deep independent hippie streak in them because it’s about freedom.
JV: Oh yeah. I have all that. I probably am a hippie because at the time, and I lived through it, my generation was the hippie generation.
When I got out of the military, the first thing I wanted to do was grow my hair to my shoulders because for four years I wasn't allowed to do that. And I watched my entire generation be allowed to do that.
And now that you've got me onto this subject, I'm going to talk about this. The most traumatic thing I faced when I returned back to the United States after a nine-month deployment was going to my executive officer a week after and asking him if I could immediately get sent back to Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
MR: Why?
JV: I'll tell you why. He looked at me and said, "Well, we can't do that because you have to spend at least six months by Navy regulations before you're allowed to go back in for a second tour of duty.” And he looked at me and said, "What's the problem?"
I said, "Here's the problem, sir."
"My country doesn't consider me an adult or a man. I can't go up the street and buy a beer. I can't vote for the person who sent me to Vietnam because I'm not old enough, and I'm not given the privileges of being an adult." I looked at him, and said, "Sir, I can assure you and my country that I am an adult." They made me one. And what I got out of that was this — we send children to war. Isn't that a form of child abuse? Shouldn't I be able to bring a child abuse case against the United States of America for sending me when they wouldn't grant that I was an adult. I was a child.
And guess what? They haven't changed. You're never going to see another Kobe Bryant. You're never going to see another Kevin Garnett. You're never going to see another LeBron James. Why? Because they made a determination that you can't go from high school to the NBA. That you have to go to college for one year. And I loved what the old center, Jermaine O'Neal, of the Pacers said. Jermaine came out and said, "Wait a minute, I'm confused. You mean you can go die in Iraq, but you can't play basketball?"
That's my post-traumatic stress. The fact my country sends children to war. Isn't that child abuse?
Guarding the Grateful Dead
MR: What was your first memory of being politically independent?
JV: My first memory was that I voted for John Anderson.
MR: Who’s that?
JV: John Anderson was a congressman from Illinois who way back ran as a third party for president. He ran as an alternate choice. And I listened to what he had to say.
See, I'm fiscally conservative, but I'm socially liberal. Where do I go? You tell me. If you're fiscally conservative and socially liberal, which of these two parties do you embrace? Neither. We need a party for us, which is the majority. We're made to pick.
Jerry Garcia, of the Grateful Dead, I love his quote, he said, "If you're made to pick the lesser of two evils, it means you're still picking evil."
MR: Were you a Deadhead?
JV: No. But I will say this — they were the easiest band to bodyguard.
MR: You were a bodyguard for the Grateful Dead?
JV: Yeah.
MR: I’m a huge fan. What was that like?
JV: It was between '78 and '81 and I was recovering from some minor knee surgery. A friend of mine asked if I would be interested in bodyguarding the rock bands when they came to town. He said I’d sit right down in front in the pit, get paid 25 bucks, and get to watch the show. I thought, well, hell, that's my music anyway. So I did the Rolling Stones in '78 and '81. I did Foreigner, I did Marshall Tucker, Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen.
The whole gambit. And the Grateful Dead was the easiest. I sat on the side before the Dead went on and talked with Phil Lesh for a half hour, because we had a mutual friend. You know who that friend was?
MR: Who?
JV: Bill Walton. He's a Deadhead.
MR: Wow.
JV: Bill's a Deadhead.
MR: Why were the Dead so easy to bodyguard for?
JV: They're the easiest because all the other fans rush the stage. The Deadheads dance in the aisles. And they all know each other. They follow them.
MR: Did you ever take acid?
JV: No. Me personally, no.
MR: Did you ever experiment with psychedelics ever?
JV: I've tried mushrooms.
JV: The greatest concert I ever went to was Led Zeppelin on chocolate mescaline.
MR: How was it?
JV: Oh, indeed that night there was a stairway to heaven.
RFK Jr.
MR: There’s a lot going on with alternative candidates right now — RFK Jr., Marianne Williamson, Vivek Ramaswamy. Are any of these candidates speaking to you?
JV: Robert F. Kennedy is. He just called me this week.
MR: Can you talk about what you said to him?
JV: Sure. I don't hide a lot. I didn't commit to anything, but I told Robert I was very happy he's in the race. I'm a believer we need more than two choices. I'm an admirer of my good friend Ralph Nader. And Ralph always said it's the two-party dictatorship. And that's exactly what it is. And this country would be far better served having three- or four-party dictatorship because that wouldn't be a dictatorship.
I'm happy Robert's in the race. I haven't endorsed him. I have to see where he stands on a lot of issues.
But I'll put it this way — you won't see me endorsing Biden or Trump.
MR: What is your issue right now?
JV: In the words of Lynyrd Skynyrd, I’m a very simple man. I'm anti-Republican to the hilt right now because of the fact they attempted a coup d'etat. They attempted to take over the government and they stooped to violence to do it in the end. They all belong in jail. 600 of them have all went already. And why isn't it the leader going yet?
MR: What about the war?
JV: I'm very anti-war. I've lost two jobs because of it. I lost my job at MSNBC and I lost my job on Russian TV all because of fricking war.
MR: Is the war in Ukraine an issue for you right now?
JV: It's an issue for me to defend Ukraine.
I met Putin. Before I signed with Russia Today, they flew me and my wife to Russia. And Putin was the keynote speaker at the 10th anniversary of RT America. At the end of the night, he walked over to me, held his hand out, said, "Thank you, Governor."
I said, "You're welcome, Mr. President…for what?"
"For joining Russian Television America."
"That's okay. I appreciate that."
"I just want you to know you will have complete artistic control and you can say anything you want."
"Well, I appreciate that. Thank you." And I can say, for the four years I was on, he was a man of his word. To my knowledge I never got edited. I said what I felt like saying. And I was taken off the air actually by the United States sanctions because Russia couldn't operate or use the banks. So our sanctions took me off the air. And the last show I did, I yelled to the Russians to get the hell out of Ukraine.
And I want to finish by saying, I don't know what happened to the guy I met. Because the Putin I met seemed like he wanted to be friends with us. And I don't know what occurred in that four years that changed everything.
Live Free or Drive
MR: You spoke at Ron Paul’s famous Rally for the Republic — how do you feel about Ron Paul today and your libertarian side?
JV: I love Ron Paul. Only problem I got with libertarians is they tend to go a little too far. I remember I was speaking one time when I was governor, and there was a group of libertarians. I started talking about transportation issues, and they started to boo me. So I stopped talking, and I looked at them, I said, "Wait a minute…you're telling me government shouldn't be involved in transportation?"
You've got to have the public sector; you've got to have the government involved in regulating transportation.
2024
MR: Let me ask you about 2024. I'm sure you're not going to be announcing this on my newsletter, but are you going to sit this one out or are you going to get involved?
JV: I don't know. I have no idea. People will say, run, run, run.
Do you know when I ran for governor, do you know how many paid people there were on my campaign?
MR: How many?
JV: One. The campaign manager left his private sector job. We paid him the equivalent of what he would've made.
Everybody else was a volunteer.
MR: So could you do it this time?
JV: I don't know. Here's the gorilla in the room. The gorilla in the room is getting ballot access in all 50 states. I would tell you right now, if I had ballot access in all 50 states right now, in 2024, you'd be talking to the next president.
MR: So you would run if you had ballot access?
JV: No. I just said you'd be talking to the next president. I didn't say I was running.
MR: Well, you’d have to run if you were going to be the next president.
JV: I didn’t even say whether I would…I'm just saying I can beat Biden and Trump if I got ballot access in all 50 states.
MR: Is there too much entertainment in politics today?
JV: Well, one thing good for me was I didn't have to buy name recognition. Most of these people have to raise millions of dollars just for people to know their name. Jesse Ventura don't got to do that. I can talk about issues. Because I don't have to go out there and say, "I'm Jesse Ventura, remember me?"
MR: So you think to get name recognition people have to be more entertaining than they should be?
JV: No, they have to spend tons of money.
My father said to me one time, “All politicians are crooks.” And I looked at my dad and said, "Come on." And my dad only had an eighth-grade education. A laborer who worked for the Minneapolis Street Department.
“They can't all be crooks. You can't lay a blanket statement like that."
"Oh, yes I can."
"Okay, tell me why."
“They're all crooks because they spend a million dollars for a job that only pays a hundred grand a year.
One of my regrets in life is that my mother and father had passed before I became governor. But my mother predicted it.
When she was on her death bed and getting down to her final days, all the friends came and she warned them I was going to do something big. She told them to watch out for me. And then she passed.
The Body’s Parents
MR: What was your relationship with your parents like?
JV: Great. I was a latchkey kid. Two working parents. My parents were gone to work when I went to school. And when I got home, they still weren't home from work. I learned how to take care of myself. My parents taught me how to be an individual, how to be responsible. And because of that, we lived very modestly in Minneapolis, but with two working parents, you know what the tradeoff was?
MR: What?
JV: We had a lake cabin.
MR: Can you tell me about your parents?
JV: My mom was a nurse. She ended up running surgery at North Memorial Hospital in Minneapolis. My father was a laborer for the city of Minneapolis Street Department, had six bronze battle stars in World War II and lived. He fought in North Africa, Normandy, Battle of the Bulge, Remagen Bridge, Anzio, and Berlin. He was with the tank destroyer unit under General Patton.
MR: If you could say one thing to your parents now what would you say?
JV: I would tell my mom, “Thank you, Mom, for teaching me never to have debt.” Because my mom, she ran the money of the house, and we were never in debt, and we had a new car every four years.
MR: And what about to your dad?
JV: With my dad, I would tell my dad, simply, “Dad, thank you. Everything you've told me about life…you get smarter every day.”
I came home and told my dad, "Dad, we got to be in Vietnam." And my dad, who had six bronze battle stars in World War II, looked at me and said, "Oh yeah, you think so?"
"Yep."
"They teaching you that in school?"
"Yeah."
"That's the biggest bunch of bullshit I've ever heard."
Now I'm at a loss here because I like school when I was at it. I was an athlete. I didn't have bad experience. School for me was great. My teachers who I respect are telling me this, and here's my father telling me it's the biggest bunch of bullshit.
And I said, "Dad, we got to be there to stop the domino effect of communism. If communism takes over there, it's going to keep going and it's going to end up here." My dad goes, "You want to know what the Vietnam War is? Somebody's making big money. That's the only reason we're in Vietnam.”
I was fortunate enough to come home. My dad was still alive. I came up to him, and I said, "Dad, I want to tell you something. You were right and I was wrong." And my dad looked at me and said, "Well, I tried to save you, but sometimes, son, you got to learn on your own."
Regrets
MR: If you could take back one thing that you've said in your whole career what would it be?
JV: Well, I guess I'd want to take back the whole Playboy interview. And the reason is this: When Playboy came to me, I took the attitude of, “Well, these are Playboy readers, so you can talk fairly openly because they're people who read and buy Playboy magazine probably on a general basis. So I did the interview that way. And I got backstabbed a little because the mainstream media took little quotes that I said in Playboy, and they put them on the front page of the newspaper. Now that's equivalent to taking the pictures in Playboy and putting them on the front page of the newspaper. Playboy's an adult magazine meant for adult readers. And for the media to take things out of context from Playboy and put them on the local media front page, I thought was totally out of line on their part. So I guess what I'd want to do, I'd rather have not done the Playboy interview and faced what the media did to me afterward for it.
I was asked to apologize to the state of Iowa for something I said. I had a group of Russian students came to the Capitol, and I spoke with them. And I was explaining to the Russian students how the 50 states were, and how there's rivalries between the states, especially the ones that are close together, like Minnesota and Iowa. So I sat in front of the Russians and the media there, and I told an Iowa joke, which you hear in Minnesota all the time. And I suppose Iowa has jokes about us.
MR: What was the joke?
JV: The joke was this. I said, how many Iowa freshmen at the University of Iowa does it take to screw in a light bulb?
MR: How many?
JV: Well guess. How many University of Iowa freshmen does it take to screw in a light bulb?
MR: Two?
JV: No, the answer's zero. It's a sophomore course.
They printed that. Governor Vilsack of Iowa called me and demanded I apologize to the people of Iowa.
MR: What's that phone call like?
JV: Me saying, "Governor, you got to be kidding me. Call me when you have something serious, and don't bother me with bullshit again."
MR: It was a real call? I mean, it was a real call?
JV: Yes. He called to ask me to apologize to the people of Iowa.
JFK
MR: Which conspiracy theory are you the most certain about?
JV: I'm most certain that Lee Harvey Oswald did not shoot John F. Kennedy.
MR: And who do you think did it?
JV: I don't know.
That ain't the question.
They just exonerated those two gentlemen for allegedly killing Malcolm X, right? I've demanded the same thing be done for Lee Harvey Oswald now. Let's exonerate him once and for all and state that he did not shoot President Kennedy in the head. Because he didn't.
Walk Don’t Run
MR: What do you do for exercise today?
JV: Well, I got my hip done in '08. And I got what was called a new technique then, hip resurfacing. And my surgeon, Dr. Trousdale of the Mayo Clinic, was considered the renowned orthopedic surgeon in America. And Dr. Trousdale told me he doesn't think anyone over 40 should run. Now, that's a bold statement. And here's why: It's the pounding. Pound, pound, pound every step you take. He said it's going to rattle your body apart, orthopedic-wise. You're going to end up a mess. He said, today you got the elliptic machine. It's running without the pounding.
I listened to him, believe it or not, and switched to the elliptic machine. I lift weights, but I do 10 repetitions and I just lift not to get big anymore. But last year on the elliptic machine, because we were kind of stuck in doors yet from the pandemic, on the elliptic machine last year I did 960 miles. I did 960 miles last year on the elliptic machine at age 70.
MR: Do you listen to music while you're doing it?
JV: I'm ready for the Price is Right. Any car Drew Carey brings on the Price is Right, I know how much it is. And also now I watch Leave it to Beaver. I just met Jerry Mathers a week ago.
MR: Wow.
JV: I met the Beaver. He's 75 years old now. Very short. Still looks like the Beaver, but 75.
MR: So I want to ask you about your diet — what do you eat?
JV: In the morning, I eat GNC’s powdered meal replacement. I drink it with water, and it gives me at least 25 grams of protein, all the vitamins and minerals I need, and blah, blah, blah. And what's good is that it makes it so you don't get hungry for at least four to five hours when you drink one. Then I'll eat a thing of yogurt, and I'll take two ounces of lemon juice.
Then in the afternoon, I'll eat my second GNC food replacement. And then at night time, I eat totally normal. I eat dessert, I eat everything.
But the key for me, and I'm now down to 218 pounds and I got a six pack of abs. And the key to all of this, and I'll tell everybody, is so simple: If you want to lose weight and get buffed, all you got to do is eat anything you want and drink water. There's an old cliche amongst Arnold, myself, and the old bodybuilders of old, there was an old cliché — get all the calories from what you eat, not what you drink.
People that go to Starbucks and get one of these fancy coffee things that are like 800 calories…you would have to go run five miles just to burn that off. So if you watch what you eat, you don't have to train like a madman.
MR: This has been such a pleasure.
JV: Are you ready for this…
…the pleasure was all yours. Haha!