Guy Fieri: Losing My Sister Gave Me Purpose | Forward Progress

0:01Having uncontrolled eosinophilic esophagitis or EOE can mean you're stuck in many ways, like cutting your food into tiny pieces. Or stuck chewing food for a long time. Dupixin Dupilumab, a prescription medicine for patients one year and older weighing at least 33 pounds can help with that. It's a breakthrough treatment that can reduce inflammation in the esophagus and improve swallowing. You can get with this or you can get with that. How about this? Dupixent is not a steroid. It proactively treats EOE so you can get ahead of it. Severe allergic reactions, including skin reactions, can occur. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or wheezing or swelling of your face, mouth, tongue, or throat.

0:42Tell your doctor of new or worsening joint aches and pain or a parasitic infection or asthma. Don't change or stop other treatments without talking to your doctor. Feeling stuck with EOE? Start treating with Dupixent. Talk to your gastroenterologist or allergist today about Dupixent. Learn more at Dupixent.com or call 1-844-DUPIXENT. Every game day you show up for your team. Now it's your time. We go V. We go V. Ask your prescriber about We Go V. Semaglutide Injection 2.4mg, a GLP-1. Call 1-833-4-WEGOV or visit wegovy.com to view the medication guide and to learn more about We Go V. Why wait? We go V.

1:29Hey, it's Graham. Our past in-depth guests have shared so many inspirational stories about overcoming adversity and tackling the darkest and most challenging times in their lives. We're sharing one of those moments in today's Thursday podcast in the hope that it provides a blueprint for any difficulties you might be facing. This week, Guy Fieri.

1:55I want to ask you about your sister Morgan. You have said you credit a lot of your success to the education that she gave you. How so? My sister had a different, you know, when you battle cancer at four years old, she had cancer at four, survived it. You guys spent time living at the Ronald McDonald house. So the great thing was, is that was in Ronald McDonald's house was first starting in San Francisco. My parents went down a lot of times, brought a lot of furniture down, did a lot of things to help. But we lived in our car a lot. My sister got cancer again when she was 38. Vegan, vegetarian, massage therapist, single mom, couldn't live a healthier life, African dance, gorgeous, gets melanoma, a derivative of what's called Wilms tumor, this tumor that she had as a child.

2:46And here we go in this battle. Oh my God. That was the worst thing to ever be around. And to think of her, you know, leaving Jules, my nephew, it was just horrific. But my sister would say, I'm coming over for dinner. And she wasn't a bossy redhead. She wasn't mean, but she just had her thing like, I'm, you know, coming over for dinner. Could we just have something other than grilled vegetables with balsamic glaze and basmati rice because that's what I'd make her every time. You know, I'm making everything else for everybody else. And then she's like, I just don't want that because it's what you make every time.

3:23Wow. So I had to like, okay, well, I guess a cauliflower steak, but make it like piccata. Okay. So that really just taught me a lot. And then she had to work within a real serious pH diet because of the cancer and no sugar because cancer loves sugar and all these different things. And so I just really spent a lot of time trying to cook the right way for her. But her strength, knowing that she was dying and knowing that she was leaving her kid and knowing that it was happening, I just watched. I mean, I don't know what you look like when you're a general in the face of battle and they're attacking and there's no positive win.

4:08I mean, this woman was just steadfast and stuck to it and held on. And it was just, it was pretty amazing. And the thing was, is it taught me a lot about, I never, I thought you died. Creepy, I don't know. She was, she laid in mourning. We laid in mourning for two days. Shrouded in flowers in the living room. We had a luncheon. Kids played. People took pictures with her. That was the oddest, creepiest thing in the world I thought would ever happen. It was the most beautiful, amazing, most dignified thing I could ever imagine happening to somebody. It changed my whole way of looking at death. How so?

4:57It wasn't, I don't know. I just thought the body, I don't know. I don't know what happened. Maybe it's because of movies or something. You just thought it was not a beautiful thing. And it wasn't like I wasn't letting her go. I know that her energy, like her soul, the spirit had left. But it was this thing of celebrating. It was like total respect of the person. How did your parents get through that? Oh, Jesus. I don't think they ever got through it. I don't think they ever got through it. I don't think of anything that there is worse to do to somebody than for them to survive their child passing.

5:44I mean, I just, I can't fathom it. I'd completely lose my s***.

5:55they, we spent a lot of time talking about her, a lot of time honoring her. That was one of the things I tried to do the most is make sure that I kept her top of mind always. You know, like always, and that's the reason I went and got the tattoo of her. And why that tattoo? So we love Mexico. We have a great house down in Mexico that we built, and that's one of the reasons we built it is because we spent a lot of time as a family down there. So it's a candle that reminds me of Mexico. Okay. Okay? So my sister's a redhead. The shroud around her is dragonflies, something we always associated my sister with.

6:27And behind her are all the chakras. So all the chakras are lined up behind her. So my sister was very spiritual, very grounded. And these were just all things. And namaste, which is one of my favorite words now, and if you celebrate the word and understand it. but it's the power in me celebrates the power in you. The God in me sees the God in you. And that was her word. It was her word. End of every message, voicemail, letter, it was namaste. Well, I didn't know what it meant. I had namaste hippie hey. You know, I'd always have something to say about it. And when she was passing that, like that last week, when she was, you know, and all of her friends were coming over, African dance friends that were there in Fairfax.

7:15we're just sitting there talking about stuff and you know you're so vulnerable personally happily vulnerable you know you're willing to listen and learn and get i'm trying to get in touch with like what am i getting ready to experience and all these amazing women and friends of hers were so in touch you know it's like i was coming from a different perspective in life you know i hadn't been as you know just you have different awareness like i could sit there and tell them a million things about other aspects of life and business but they were really into their spirituality. And so they were telling me about namaste and I'm like, of course.

7:48So I went to my tattoo artist, the guy who's done all these tattoos and a great friend of mine, a guy named Joe Leonard. And I said, this is what I want to achieve. And so he drew it up. And so my mom has never been a fan of my tattoos, not negative. And I'm like, Ooh, you did that to your body. Just like, well, you know, why? And every tattoo has, so this was the day the the uh los dias de muerte that after she died that that day i went had this done in honor of her um to recognize her you know to celebrate my sister so yes i came to my sister's burial and we did a green burial which was amazing another epiphany unique situation because shrouded in cloth and buried in the ground no casket no cremation none of that stuff and consistent with what she would have wanted well and the crazy thing was nobody had asked her Well, she was, in that point, wasn't communicating.

8:39And I said, we're going to cremate her. And I'm like, there's no cremating. Aren't she fossil to burn up fuel? You know, she wasn't that kind of like, she wasn't marching and throwing paint on stuff. You know, she wasn't flipping out about it. But she was really, and I'm like, no, no, no, no. We got to do Green Barrel. Like, well, where are we going to do it? Like, well, in Novato. And I'm like, no, because I want to be able to go visit her. I don't want to drive to Novato. So we found out Sebastopol has one beautiful cemetery, really old cemetery. in Sebastopol. And as I said, my dad's there now.

9:09And we had the most incredible ceremony. I mean, just in the two hawks came and it was just, it was just the greatest, greatest time, the greatest emotional family, the whole thing. But I showed up with this tattoo. And my mom says, and I said, what is that? And I said, best tattoo you ever got. She loses her mind. Yeah, sure enough, I have to drag her, my aunt, and a couple of my cousins. They want tattoos. So they go down to Joe Leonard and they get butterflies right here. Namaste. So there's my mom at 65 getting namaste, butterfly, on her wrist. I said, you're so gangster. How did you go about figuring out the process for how to parent Jules?

9:57Well, that was a tough one. That was a tough one. Jules and I weren't as close. I mean, Jules now, in my opinion, is my son. I mean, that's as close as I can say it. He... What about that touches you? Well, so his dad really wasn't in his life or was not in his life. And my sister and I got a dollar from this guy. and he just was really absentee. And I can't ever say negative things about it because Jules is dad. So in some little small way, I gotta be okay with the guy because we wouldn't have Jules. But Jules would come to our house. We'd watch him for the weekend and Jules would eat every bit of junk food or candy or whatever he could get in his face because there was none of that at his house.

10:44Jules is incredibly intelligent, smarter than his own good, especially when he was a little kid because he was conniving. I always had to watch Jules with, you know, the side of my eye, what was going on. So when my sister dies, my parents, we all decide it's best. He lives over at my parents' house. My parents, we live right next door to each other. So it's like he lives with us, but he lives there. And there he's under more of their control, their direction than they is mine. Because he's coming out of Montessori, running around the streets of Fairfax, coming to a little bit more of a regimented environment with us.

11:21and we go through some tough times in high school because he's just smart enough to pull the shit over my parents. He's smart enough to, you know, talk them in circles and I'm catching this stuff and I have to deal with it when problems happen. Now I'm involved. So we go through a few of those. We're going to butt some heads in which way we're going to go and eventually it smooths itself out and off he goes to college. He is so intelligent and so hardworking. He is working as a full-time agent in EDM and traveling and doing that. And he goes to school, he goes to law school four nights a week, four hours a night, and has been doing that for the last two years.

12:06And he's a 4.0 student. And he's not going to be an attorney. He's going to practice business law or entertainment law so he can be the best of the best in his industry. And that's one of my, that was only one of my, that was a little bit of my mandate. You guys all want to be in the will. You all want to get what we built. You're all going to have two degrees. Like check. I think he didn't mean it exactly in the way I meant, but that's fine. I actually did. He was one of my inspirations. I thought, wow, that's a really great way to look at it. And not all the kids want to do it. But the reality of it is Hunter's doing it now.

12:41I think Jules is starting it off. Hunter's at Miami in business. Poor Ryder looked at me and said, I don't know what I know about this. I'm not even in high school. So on the money front, because we've been fortunate to profile a lot of folks through the show, and there always seems to be the struggle with somebody who's uber successful of what you passed down, how you allow your success to create opportunities, but what the balance is between that and dampening motivation. You've said before, you're going to die broke. Give a little context to what the reality of that means. No, my dad's the one that said he would die broke and told me he would leave me nothing, which was awesome.

13:28Because he really did. I mean, they left me nothing. I don't need it. I mean, everything I needed, I got from him. So my thing is philanthropy is super key to my life. Boys are, of course, super key. I want them to all find their goals of what they want to be. Hunter works for Knuckle Sandwich, and he does a fantastic job. He's on the road a lot selling the wine. We have a little wine company called Hunt Ride, Hunter and Rider. Jules wants to eventually have his own agency and represent artists, which I told him he has to give 10 years of doing it for somebody else. But he has to diversify. Can't do it for the same company.

14:04Has to have his degree. So we're setting up like same hurdles, same benchmarks, same achievement strategy that my dad set up for me when I was a kid. So I went and did the corporate world for a long time. He said, you have to do that. You have to understand P &Ls. You have to understand how the corporate world, how to do the structure, how to keep from getting sued, how to do all this stuff. You go do it for somebody else. You learn on their dime. Then when you got it, I'll help you. And they mortgaged their house. I needed$50 ,000. And they were close to retirement. They were retiring, yeah, and they mortgaged their house so I could do it.

14:35I paid them back in six months. I paid them back to 50 grand in six months. But so, no, the thing is I want the kids to have, you know, we have the big ranch. We have the small ranch. We have the Florida house. We have the Mexico. We've got a lot of stuff. You know what my dad said to me when he was like the last week he was alive? I said, Dad, I just want you to know I got all your s*** taken care of. I got everything handled. At the house, my childhood home, how that's being handled. They owned a small restaurant, how that's being handled. Mom, taking over all the bills. I'm paying all the bills.

15:07Got all that handled. Got all your shit handled. And he looks at me and he goes, don't worry about my shit. You're the one with a ton of shit. Who's going to handle all your shit when you die? Don't leave those kids with a bunch of headaches. I'm like, really? That's, and it was very godfather. You know, he's laying in the hospital. He died at home, but he's laying in one of those hospitals. He's like, you're a s***. You got more s*** than anybody. It's pretty funny. One quick favor before you leave. Please consider giving the podcast a rating and review. Those go a long way in helping us reach new listeners.

15:43Thanks for your support. Having uncontrolled eosinophilic esophagitis or EOE can mean you're stuck in many ways, like cutting your food into tiny pieces. or stuck chewing food for a long time. Dupixent Dupilumab, a prescription medicine for patients one year and older weighing at least 33 pounds can help with that. It's a breakthrough treatment that can reduce inflammation in the esophagus and improve swallowing. You can get with this or you can get with that. How about this? Dupixent is not a steroid. It proactively treats EOE so you can get ahead of it. Severe allergic reactions, including skin reactions, can occur.

16:22Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or wheezing or swelling of your face, mouth, tongue, or throat. Tell your doctor of new or worsening joint aches and pain or a parasitic infection or asthma. Don't change or stop other treatments without talking to your doctor. Feeling stuck with EOE? Start treating with Dupixent. Talk to your gastroenterologist or allergist today about Dupixent. Learn more at Dupixent.com or call 1-844-DUPIXENT. Every game day, you show up for your team. Now, it's your time. We Go V! We Go V! Ask your prescriber about We Go V, semaglutide injection 2.4mg, a GLP-1.

17:03Call 1-833-4-We Go V or visit WeGo V.com to view the medication guide and to learn more about We Go V. Why wait? We Go V!