WASHINGTON DC, Jan 19 — If you have a television, you are bound to have seen Mike Lindell, the guy who invented the ubiquitous MyPillow, promoting his product on air. A visit to his website unabashedly notes on its home page that Lindell had “a major cocaine and crack cocaine addiction for years” and that “he quit the addiction in one day and found peace in his life.” In a recent interview with Rebecca Weber, CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens, on her Better For America podcast he went into the detail of that part of his life and his recovery.
As he put it, “I wasn’t saved. I became born again on February 18th, 2017. I always believed in God, that he would always get me through.” It took a while and in the end God heard his prayers and got him through this difficult part of his life, he said.
Lindell then put his focus on his company, particularly his employees, treating every employee like his one and only employee. “Five hundred of my employees have my direct phone number. They call me if there’s a deviation or a block. It’s all about putting people where they’re happy. For one thing I’ve set up in MyPillow the benefit that allows all of our employees to work around their schedules. If they can only work three days or four we’ll accommodate them. Way back in the day, a grocery store I worked at didn’t like it when you wanted time off for someone you’re close to had passed away. If it’s a family member, you can take three days off to grieve but if it’s your neighbor, you better be to work tomorrow. At MyPillow, if something happened, for example if the house of somebody you’re close to is burned down, you can take off as long as you want and we pay for the time you’re gone. We humanized the company. If we find someone who has an addiction we pay them to go for treatment. That’s why we’ve grown as a family.”
Lindell went on to explain that he “didn’t know anything about politics. I didn’t know a filibuster from a Democrat, from a Republican. In the spring of 2015, I had a dream that I would meet Donald Trump, and, he hadn’t even run for president yet. Well, through a bunch of divine appointments, I ended up meeting him on August 15th or August 16th of 2016. There was no agenda. It was just him and me. During our conversation I told him that I used to be a crackhead and that I’m setting up a network called the Lindell Recovery Network. I said that it’s going to be free to people and that I’m going to help people out of addiction and help them to get to God. And he says, yeah, you always wear your cross on TV. He said, are you a Christian? I said, yes, Mr. Trump. And he said he’s going to stop them drugs pouring in, I’m going to build a wall and all this stuff. When the conversation was over I walked out of there and went and talked to his employees. They all said the same thing. Good man. Great boss. They all had an individual story about him, how he had helped them. It was like an American dream on steroids.”
It was during President Trump’s presidency that the U.S. experienced the highest consumer confidence in history and the lowest unemployment, he said. “Now you have just the opposite going on in our country. Everything’s getting destroyed. There’s no sense in keeping our [Mexican] border open, with fentanyl pouring in and people dying daily by overdosing. Our economy is being destroyed, people’s lives are getting destroyed.”
John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.