BJ Penn on The Issues That Made Him Run for Governor of Hawaii

I was so enthusiastic about this and I said, people say don't talk about it, but I said no I'm not here to take the people's money. The money that comes in from the government, I want to put it to programs and I want to make this government, this governor's administration as powerful as it can possibly be. And I want to, you know, it's about holding on to that power too. I've only planned to run for one term because I'm not here to be, I want to be with the people. The manna is with the people. We have the power. I want to be with the people. I'm only planning on going in for one term. Can I ask you this though? What if you don't accomplish everything you want to get done in one term? What if it's more difficult to get through the maze of bureaucracy? I'm here to work with that. I want a strong lieutenant governor. I have the lieutenant governors that I see that are coming in. I want to work well with everybody and endorse who I have to. If the people need me and they say, BJ, let's do it. We need you one more time. Of course I'm going to come and stand up for the people. You know, and that's why I have no problem even doing this in the first place. I would have never had the life that I had if the people of Hawaii didn't support me the way they did. I would have never got to this success and all of these things. I didn't win every fight. I would come home with my face beaten and battered and the people from Hawaii, the people of Hawaii would say, hey, you got to fight again, BJ. You can do it. You're our hero. Come on. Let's show them. You can show all the kids, show everybody. Don't mess with Hawaiians. You know, we can do this. And they've always stood behind me. And I got no problem doing this for them. And it's for our children and for everybody. So I'm just, you know, I'm in and they're going to keep coming after me. They're going to keep throwing whatever they can at me. And let's go. Let's go. BJ, you got to get together with Jerry, with Jesse Ventura. I, yes. I need, I need to talk to, I was, I had it in mind, Jesse the body and Hawaii's got so many different problems with our housing problem, our energy problems. Now everything with the gas and I really want to invite Elon Musk to come over and see if he could help us with Hawaii because it's, it's a landlocked state and you know, everything comes in off the boat and you got everybody talking about the Jones Act. You know what the Jones Act is? No, it's a Jones Act. That's an act that makes all international boats go to California first before they come to Hawaii. They can't just come to Hawaii. This was made back when Hawaii was a territory. So all kinds of different things that a lot of different people talk about, you know, so inefficient. They, they, you know, Hawaii is the most unionized state, but our families all work in those unions. We're all together. So we all have to figure out how to update all of these different things and make them work properly. Do we just bring the boats from, do we, do we build our docks bigger so they can take international boats, but just have our unions be the ones to take, to take all the stuff off their boat. Do you think unions still, you know, control the docks and not other people, not international people controlling our docks? Because of course we want our people from home. Those are our cousins. Those are our family, you know, so whatever, you know, you hear all kinds of different stuff from, you know, the big things in Hawaii right now, the housing, the rising cost of living, you know, the education and, and the, the, this, the rising cost of living is, is what's killing everybody right now. And, and, and we, we have no self sustainability, you know, you see, you know how big the big island is. I believe we could do the right thing. And you know, from, from Waialuku River to Waipio Valley, that's 50 miles of water and farmland. And they're talking about growing a hundred million trees for the climate. I'm saying every tree better have fruit on it then every tree better have food on it. You know, we're stuck dependent on a boat coming in and out and even more, we have to protect our waters. You know, all the water is held in perpetuity to the people of Hawaii, but we almost need to go one step further and, and make it a national treasure. I didn't say a federal treasure. I said a national treasure to the people where you can't just start diverting waters and doing all these things. And I mean, you take half the water from a stream coming down, you kill half the life that was around in that stream, you know, and these are all things that I've seen growing up and that we have to think about our, our sustainability and sustainability, right? Sustain is you're staying in the same place. We need to thrive. We need to move forward. The airplanes come in full. They drop everything off and they go back empty. Why? Why? Why does that happen? It doesn't make any sense. How much change would have to be done for Hawaii to be completely self sustainable? Like, like what kind of industries would you have to put there? Or you never have to get anything off of a boat. Is that even possible? Well, I don't know what, but we would have to figure out what we're going to do with petroleum. But that's, that's why I want to talk to people like, like Elon, you know, that's why I want to people who know different things. You got a lot of sun, but I think solar in its current form. We got a lot of sun. We got a lot of sun. I think solar in its current form is great, but I don't think it's really capable of running a whole city yet. You know? We got a, I don't, I don't know what we have out there. You know, we have to figure out, I mean, the gas is expensive. The gas is expensive in Hilo. Yeah. Gas is expensive everywhere. It's weird. I've never been able to understand that. Right. Is that, did the oil disappear overnight? Where did it go? Where did it all go? You know what you want there? Somebody tried to explain it to me and I glazed over. I was like, I can't pay attention to that. Whenever we go to any of the, like, there's a lot of, like, speaking meetings, right? And I think, hey, this is some real mixed martial arts, this stuff. Because not only do you have to know what you got to do when you get in, well, there's a lot of black and white stuff and that's like freedoms or like basic stuff. And then there's state budgets. You know what I mean? That gets great. Yeah. Great areas. You know, that's where you got to have a lot of people helping you out. You know what I mean? Right.