BUILD LEGACIES

“And my mom told this story about how her first meeting, she comes in and there's all these experienced women that have been dealing with alcoholic husbands or drug addict, addicted husbands. She comes in, they go around the room, it's just like an anonymous meeting. And she's like, I just want to get my husband clean, I'm willing to do whatever I have to do to get him clean. And they kind of like pattern on the head. Uh, Oh, that's very cute that you think you can change your husband. You can't, he's not going to get clean unless he wants to get clean and that was, when I learned that from my mom, it was a major life lesson that you're better off doing self-reflection about where you come short. And if you really want to change things and make the world a better place, you, you have to start with yourself. I think it's all you can do. Is, you know, take the plank out of your own eye.”

“My grandmother finds out that my mom's divorcing him. She calls my mom and confronts her, which is interesting, right? Because this is a woman who absolutely participated in the no fault divorce culture. Yes. But she said, why are you divorcing my son? And my mom said Her name was Pat and she said, Pat, uh, he's not getting clean. He doesn't want to be married to me. He doesn' want a family. And grandma Pat hung up the phone. She was, she said I'll handle this. And she sat down with my dad and said, I just want you to know, I'll always love you, always support you. But I never would have divorced her father if he asked me not to. And that was the moment where my dad called my mom and said I don't want get divorced. I want to get clean. And I think at a deep level, he knew that his problems weren't just because he was a wild and crazy guy, he was filling a major hole in his heart from his parents' divorce.”

“I think it was October 2020 I think I did 104 rallies that month. So that's four a day. And I don't mean like, you know, a lunch or a breakfast. I mean, like, you know, 300 to 10,000 people in a room, four times a day, 31 days straight. And it's sort of brutal. And at the end of it, you're like, I just sort of want to be done with it.”

“It was the guys like clout chasing on one side and then kissing your ass on the other. That I didn't appreciate. I had friends that didn't agree with a lot of what we were doing, but they'd still like, I'm writing a check to your campaign because I just believe in you. And even if we don't agree on much politically, like you're still a friend. And like, those guys are great.”

“And so I've had this revelation over the last few years, uh, that the government's bad now it's corrupted, but also the industries are bad. The industries will chew you up and spit you out. And the irony is that there's this false notion of a work life balance. It's total garbage. It's a total lie. And it's meant the entire framing of the work life balance is meant to go to war with life. It is a false dichotomy set up by industries and corporations so that you have to make a choice between your work and your private life. We'll let you take more vacation time, we'll let some paternity leave, but you've got to come back to work and produce value for the company, otherwise you're of no value to us. And it is a way that they have monopolized our actual lives.”

“Honestly, it was the same. You just knew it was a generational talent. You know, I don't know much, but I think, you know, if there's one thing I've probably proven to be fairly decent at in the last decade or so, is sort of just understanding talent. And I recognized it in an instant. I mean, it was literally five minutes. I'm like, okay, interview's over, like you're traveling with me.”

“But one thing, one big change that I've noticed, um, in our society is public parks. Um, public parks are interesting because they're in major cities, uh, and space is finite. So when you decide to put an area up as a public park, you're basically telling people what your top priorities are. 50S, 60s, all that. When we had the massive expansion of parks throughout our country over the last century, up until recently, they were all kids' parks. When you say, I'm going to go to the park, you immediately envision playgrounds and swings and merry-go-rounds, all of that. But today, if you go to inner cities, dog parks are outranking kid parks. The kid parks are empty. Uh, I went to a dog park and I talked to some of the people there and one girl, I asked her, uh, you know, how many dogs she has. She had two, but she's a dog walker.”

“Well, there's one group, I actually, I have a joke for you, I'll try it out anyway, is two priests walk into a bar, one's a Jesuit, the other's a Dominican, they're debating about who the best order is in terms of Catholic priests. And the Jesuit says, well, we were founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola, and we're the most academic, we're smartest, and were founded to combat the Protestants. And saying, sorry, the Dominican priest says, well, I think we have you beat. We were founded by St. Dominic, who founded us to destroy the Albigensians. Who are the Albigencians? When's the last time you've heard of an Albigiencian?”

“But before he opened the pizza restaurant, he was an insurance salesman. And he worked at Prudential Insurance and in the 80s, his parents got divorced. He was a senior in high school and he became a party guy. His dad was a bartender. His mom also worked at bars. They got divorced and it really adversely impacted his life. And he experienced terrible things. I don't want to get into that stuff because it's just, it's, it's actually kind of painful. But he got way off track. He got way out of track. And this is during the 80's at the height of the crack epidemic.”

“Well, I don't have to imagine how it works because I grew up in a trust fund world. So I know exactly how it work. And it works where you become an alcoholic, sleep with the au pair, you're reviled by your children, then you shoot yourself. That's what a life of no working looks like. And then on the bottom end, the welfare world, which is the mirror image of the trust fund, it's the same. It's true despair because a man needs work for meaning in his life. Heat protects and provides. That's where his sense of himself comes. That's his duty, and if he doesn't achieve it, he hates himself. So like a world without work is hell. It's not it's not advisable.”

“A hundred percent. I mean, the best way to honor Charlie's legacy is to actually be out here, to doing this, to be unafraid, to not back down. I know I was supposed to do something with him literally the week after that. And as you mentioned sort of in the intro, you know, I met Charlie, I think he was 19 or just turned 20. And it was 2015 at the beginning of that cycle.”

“I think I've done more hours of congressional testimony, you know, for treason. Right. I mean, you know, a crime punishable by death. That became like my average Tuesday. It was like, oh, they're going to try to kill you again, Don. I'm like, it's fine. Can I catch lunch first?”