David Senra: belief

Transcript context

…You're working halftime is part of your concern. There's a long story here that will take 30 minutes. My dad sat me down when I was 15. He's like, listen, you don't have to pay rent, but I don't have any money for you. If you want something, you got to go get it. The good thing about my dad, he's a Cuban immigrant, not educated, but the best piece of advice that he ever gave me and my brother was a maxim. He's like, don't half ass things. He does it in a blue collar. He's a truck driver or that kind of thing, where he prides himself on the fact that he'll work 72 hours straight. He never made a lot of money and never had an education. His mom wasn't good or whatever. They had escaped Castro's Cuba. My dad was born in Cuba. You know Patrick's at the end of every Invest Like the Best episode. He's like, what's the nicest thing someone ever did for you? It was a decision that happened way before I was born. My grandfather was in Cuba in 1958. Again, not an educated man. He worked as a butcher and worked in a factory that makes shoes. He's married, he's got a baby, and that baby is my dad. Castro comes to power. He doesn't have a lot of money, he doesn't speak English, and yet he had some kind of insight that I need to get out of here. He goes to a country, picks up, loses everything, not that he had a lot anyways. Goes to a country, knows nobody, and doesn't speak the language. When I sat down, the first thing me and Sam Zell talked about and I think helped bond us to the point where at the end, he said he liked my energy and everything. Hopefully he liked me, I don't know. In his story, I had obviously read his autobiography, and one of the first things me and Sam talked about was, Sam, I understand and empathize with your story. Sam’s story is his dad being Jewish, getting the last train out of Poland before the Nazis bomb it, literally the last train out. 18 members of his family, his dad went around too saying, we got to get out of here, this is not good, they're like, no, we're going to stay. They're all dead. Sam's dad and his mom have a daughter. They get to America. His mom's pregnant. Sam was born in America. In that book, Sam's dad's always telling them, you don't understand how lucky you are to be born here. Again, I understand that mentality because I grew up meeting—Cubans had this thing called Noche Buena. My wife's Colombian, so I'm married into a Colombian family, they do this too. They don't celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day, they do it the night before, it's Christmas Eve. I grew up, for as long as I can remember, I was 8, 7, 10 years old, meeting people that came over on rafts. You would see these things. I've seen these in person. Think about how bad it has to be. It's 50 miles, right?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.