Hakki Akdeniz: The Once Homeless Immigrant Who's Donated 200k Slices of Pizza (Pt 1)
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
iHeartPodcasts
4.5 • 11.4K Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2024
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Turkish immigrant Hakki Akdeniz ended up homeless in New York City after a friend didn't keep his promise to help him settle there. Through hard work and a ton of normal folks supporting his greatness, Hakki has built a food empire with 20 restaurants that includes Champion's Pizza and frozen pizza that's in 1,600 stores! This walking billboard of the American Dream has 35 million followers on Instagram and it’s largely because of his incredible generosity. We celebrate all of this as part of our Supporting Greatness series.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | People they're welcome for me. I always told them, you know, like when people come to our store and you know, they said that homeless do not ever give them hard time. Please if you guys give them a hard time you give me hard time. |
| 0:18.0 | When homeless people come to you and they ask you food that are hungry you don't feed them you don't give the food and it kind of drinks like sodas or whatever like whatever they want it |
| 0:28.8 | If you don't if you know like kick them out and you don't respect them there's only one way I can |
| 0:34.6 | fire to you I don't get you gonna sue me because this is like I have like handbook |
| 0:38.6 | and this one of my roots I made it I put in my handbook two slice of kind of soda so it doesn't cost me nothing you know |
| 0:45.4 | that it's like it doesn't cost you nothing you know we have like 15 stores like |
| 0:50.0 | Champion how many people that can come I saw like 100 big deal. |
| 0:59.0 | Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, I'm a father, and I'm an |
| 1:06.5 | entrepreneur and I've been a football coach in inner city Memphis. And the last part, well, it accidentally led to an Oscar for the film about our team it's |
| 1:15.5 | called Undefeded guys I believe our country's problems will never be solved by a bunch of |
| 1:22.4 | fancy people in nice suits using big words |
| 1:24.9 | that nobody ever uses on CNN and Fox but rather an army of normal folks us just |
| 1:31.8 | you and me deciding, hey, maybe I can help. And today, we've got a |
| 1:37.6 | powerful feature from our special series supporting greatness, where we've interviewed not so normal folks like Mike Rowe and |
| 1:46.6 | Medal of Honor recipient David Bellavilla, but instead of blowing smoke up their, you know what, we celebrate the normal folks and unsun heroes |
| 1:56.9 | who supported them and helped shape their life and the support of their greatness. |
| 2:03.0 | And the reason our guest, |
| 2:05.0 | Hockey Act Dennis, said mistreating the homeless |
| 2:09.0 | is like mistreating him is because he was once homeless until normal folks supported him. |
| 2:17.0 | Today, hockey has 35 million followers on Instagram, and it's largely because of his incredible |
| 2:25.2 | generosity. I cannot wait for you to meet hockey right after these brief |
| 2:30.7 | messages from our generous sponsors. Every family has skeletons in their closet. Mine certainly does. Ones that go back a hundred years, and reach thousands of miles back to our hometown |
... |
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