Drunk Politics, Entrepreneurs, & Raising Kids

Today we’re going to talk about drunk politicians, because she just loves talking about this and I love talking about this. He listened to me time and time again. Krista Hilton is a conservative single mom and entrepreneur in Portland, Oregon, and the owner of the brand drunk Republic. You need to go check this stuff out because it’s amazing. On Instagram at the Krista Hilton, Krista. 

 

Yay, thanks for having me.

 

I’m excited. I’m pumped up. I mean, even beforehand, we were talking and my energy level is like a spike through the roof right now because we’re gonna have some amazing, real conversations, and I wouldn’t even say that they’re like political conversations. They’re just real. Human conversations about people that happen to own political offices. Right? These types of Convos are typically I hate when like, oh, you know, you’re right, your left, whatever. Yeah. How about we just be human, and just yeah, have real talk. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. How are you?

 

I’m good. I’m great. I’m just hanging out in rainy Portland. Super fun.

 

That’s interesting. I love it. How did you come to start the show? Drunk Politics.

 

I had a business and it centered around helping small business owners gain control their lives again, like helping them with inventory and kind of finding the holes on where they were losing money. And when Coronavirus hit I just kind of had to shut down because all of my clients couldn’t pay me because they had to shut their doors. Everybody had a physical space. But in order to try to help them I read the whole Cares Act, andthen I started watching all the press conferences and I was like, what the actual f is our government actually up to? So it just kind of kicked off from there.

 

After you read the entire  Cares Act which was long AF. I looked through most of it. I can’t put myself up there with you. I read all of it, but I skimmed through so much of it, and there were so many things that were just kind of hidden in there too. Yeah. What are some of the things that stuck out with you? 

 

They were like how much money we give to different foundations that feel like they don’t really need it, and the amount of money that just goes to places with no accountability. And some of the studies that are done always get me like I just made up data. Yeah, like maybe data or there’s one actually we funded. It wasn’t the Cares Act or something else but it was pigeons, gambling and that was actually here in Portland, like $500,000 went to that why?

 

Wait, you’re talking like a bird? Like, like gambling on pigeons? What’s a pigeon gamble?

 

Google, this is somebody on the team here. Google this and like, put it up on my screen please. Because we need to find this out and solve this mystery of pigeon camping.

 

Is that like Lewis and Clark College? I think maybe it was that one of the colleges here in Oregon. Yeah, it was really bad. I’m Rand Paul does a Festivus report every year and he puts in like the most obscene things the government spends money on and it was actually in his report

 

Pigeon gambling that’s so crazy. All right, we’re gonna figure out what that is. But this was in the Cares Act like it was dollars that were earmarks.

 

I don’t think this was in the Cares Act, okay, but just are out of control. Government spending in general, but that was for that was in this year’s like, Festivus report. So I think it was in the last two years that we gave money to that.

 

That’s crazy. That’s just crazy. $500,000 you’re saying that’s insane. There’s a lot of things that are that I know that are just embedded in some of these bills, like even in the $1.5 trillion bill that was just passed a little while ago, that are just sort of there and nobody really reads through but they’re things that not necessarily hold up different sides or a bill from getting passed in the House or the Senate. It’s just like personal pet projects. It’s a team of some members of the House of the Senate.

 

Yeah, they’re just ushered right on in. It’s crazy, and I think a lot of it has to do with special interests and lobbyists, and it’s gonna scratch his back, and I mean, the amount of money we spend doing that is crazy.

 

No doubt, no doubt that with some of the things that are going on right now with different overseas wars, obviously with Ukraine and all that. I mean, at the time we’re recording this, they just passed some more aid, and it was interesting, because this was funny because I was on your Instagram page, and we’re just on the heels of when President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the US Congress, you know, and I think this was from that but can I’m gonna play this here real quick. The low tech way this was hilarious, right? The articulate Speaker of the House was funny and also just WTF at the same time.

 

I know that we can’t go there. Peyton is trying to make the trap so that we go in and that’s the beginning could be the beginning of World War Three. A Putin totally irresponsible using weapons that are not allowed under the Geneva Canet invented Putin who threatens current use of chemical weapons, nuclear and the rest. So they know that we can’t but it’s the ask now. He was this morning. More or less if we can’t have an if we can’t have a no fly zone. Let us have our own and we need the airplanes to come in.

 

That was just a portion of it. What is she saying? What is she even saying?

 

She doesn’t know what she’s saying half the time.

 

I know.

 

How are we allowing this? I don’t understand how all of the people in Congress let her speak and think this lady’s fine?

 

Yeah, I know. And I was like, did you watch the State of the Union? I watched it. Yeah. And it was at the beginning of it, you know, and I’ll say this out loud. It’s okay. out to the world. Okay, the first 20 minutes of it when and I completely respect the office of the president. You know, and even so, you know, with things that are going on, let’s be real. Even with Ukraine, Russia, these are really really tough decisions right now because they are decisions that could affect American lives and the weight of that on anybody whether you agree with the current president’s politics or views on anything or not, that’s still just again, it’s human. Like I was saying, the weight of those decisions is just insane. And when he got up there, and he started talking about some things, you know, at first, the first 20 minutes of it, I was like, Who is this guy? Because it was actually articulate, yeah, and energetic and onpoint in almost everything that you couldn’t even argue with because they just made sense that he was saying, but then it was after about 20 minutes. I don’t know if his teleprompter broke, or maybe there was an injection.

 

It was sent of his stamina. I know.

 

Yeah, exactly. But it dropped off so fast, and that wasn’t the weight of anything at that moment. And I’m curious, it’s, uh, you know, what is going on and how do we fix it? You know, this is what caused you to start your podcast to begin with drunk politics. And is there something that you can see that’s like a clear path is a big question, a clear path to get back to how the government should work for us as the American people.

 

Basically, all of the people in office right now just need to go like we need a new batch of people that are on the same page that actually care about getting things done for the American people, because I think there’s very few left that haven’t bought into the whole political career. I mean, because I didn’t really realize until I started doing this, that it’s a whole industry. I mean, running for office and all of the campaign managers and like all of the things that back that is a whole industry and it’s like a multi billion dollar industry. It’s not going away anytime soon, unless we stop it.

 

Yeah, I’m with you. I hear you on that. There’s different things, you know, that have been proposed. You know, the President has a term limit, but term limits don’t necessarily exist. In Congress. You know, there’s representatives that have been serving for you know, 30 years something like that same with Senator so to happen. Yeah, it’s it you start to lose touch with what’s actually going on, but I understand the experience factor because you’ve been in that role now for a while, but still, how do you inject fresh perspectives? When is that the case?

 

Yeah, I think there needs to be term limits, and I think that if you have never worked in the private sector, you have no business being an office because you don’t really have a good clear touch with reality like there’s no reason that someone should major in politics, and then have a career in politics. Why? Like, you, you don’t even know how the real world works. At that point.

 

You’re not talking about our friend Bernie Sanders, are you?

 

I mean, his ideas are cute. You know, they’re, like, cute. Cute that you think that you understand human nature? Like that’s cute, but like it’s never gonna work.

 

Okay, he produces some good memes, right?

 

Oh god.

 

What’s the best? Totally there’s something that I know that you talk about too, which is parents and school choice. Yeah, and I love talking about anything on both sides. I mean, on the show, just to hear people out because I think that’s similar to Joe Rogan. I just like to hear what people think. Yeah, yeah. So what are your thoughts around that? Because I know that you’ve got some pretty good ones.

 

My son is almost 12, and we pulled him out of public school and put him in private school. I really think that the public school system has just absolutely lost its marbles, and throwing a fit at school board meetings has worked for some districts when there’s parents that care, but like in our district here in Portland no one attends the board meetings or shows up to watch even like on YouTube or the zoom calls or anything because they’re still not meeting in person. Or at least they weren’t. But I really feel like if everybody just pulled their kids out of school and talked to each other, and we’re like, Okay, well if we can’t afford to go to private school, then we’ll create homeschool pods, and we can share the responsibility. But if we all pull out at once, it would crash the entire public school system because they can’t survive without our money and they get money for each child.

 

Yeah, they sure do. I don’t know how it works in Oregon, but in the state of Illinois, which is where I’m from, which is very, it leans left. We’ll just put it that way. Yeah, yeah. The public school system is funded by property taxes, and I don’t know if that’s the same in the state of Oregon. Is it? Yeah. Yeah, it is. So our kids aren’t in an online private school, you know, and it’s done with a lot of self paced videos and then there’s also some live classes. They’ve been in it even before the Coronavirus pandemic, you know, about a year and a half prior to that. It was the best decision that I think his parents have ever made, and it was fantastic. Now I also recognize that that’s not necessarily the case or availability for everybody because even though it’s not, it’s not homeschool. It’s really like an online private school, and the cost associated with it can be prohibitive to some, but it’s not as much as like imperson private school, and my kids are involved in theater and sports and a lot of other things so there’s never issues with socialization that was like the one of the biggest things that people start to judge on immediately. It’s like listening, I can go to Starbucks and invite their friends or go to a movie. You know, they say, you can still see people this is freakin 2021 2022 Okay, but what I didn’t quite grasp until everything hits because it you’re right because it but still taking our kids out. We still have to pay the same amount of property tax whether our kids are using the public school system or not. There is no credit we get back. It’s just an additional expense.

 

Right? We don’t benefit at all, but the way that it works is they don’t get that money from your property taxes. Like they get money per student. So interesting, okay, if they’re like, let’s say each student is worth like 15 or 20 grand a year. So that’s it. I mean, it’s a lot. It’s like everyone that’s pissed off, which is a lot of people pulling their kids out at the same time. I mean, enrollment goes down and they’re hurting for money. The only reason they haven’t hurt money yet with all the kids that have come out of the school is because they were under an emergency situation. Where they were using like 2018 or 19 numbers. But once they have to start using the real numbers, it’ll be really interesting to see what kind of a deficit the schools are actually in because so many people have just said, eff it, and I think the school choice is a great idea because then you’re taking that money and you’re able to get like a tax credit or whatever, for the cost of that public, private school. I mean, that you want to put your kid in.

 

Yeah, so if the schools don’t get the money, you’re still being billed the same amount of property tax. Where does that money go? I don’t know. That’s a good question. Huh? That’s it. Yeah. That’s so interesting. But getting that money back to Yeah, school choice. I can understand that. I’ve exercised my choice. Because we do have a choice as parents of course to do what we feel is best for our kids. That’s just yeah, that’s just frickin America. Hello.

 

Yeah, I know, the illusion and let the delusion that people have that like the school system is put there to teach our kids like life No, it’s not. It’s there to teach them math and reading and stupid shit like that. You don’t mean to teach my kids values really like that. That’s my job.

 

Yep. Oh my god. Yes. You’re gonna get me started on this right on, you know, and that’s where the dinner conversations come into play, and that’s, you know, because I’ve even done appearances on TV on ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox around bullying. You know when that I mean it’s still a big thing in schools, but it’s like parents can sometimes abdicate their responsibility to parent their kids, and this is where I actually feel bad for the public school system because parents are not stepping up into their natural roles as parents, and then could just pass that on and expect the administration of the public schools and the teachers to fill that role for them. You know, and that’s allowing somebody else’s views and ethics rather than what yours are as parents. Somebody is going to give your kids their views and their perspectives. Yeah. Do you want it to be you or do you want it to be somebody else? That’s the choice parents make, and that has nothing to do with what school system they’re in either if they’re in public or private school. Exactly.

 

Well, you know, it’s 2022, and I think that like a lot of parents need to just wake up and realize our kids are getting information from so many different places, and if you’re not actively talking to your kids about hard stuff, they’re not going to know how to decipher that FF information if they get it from school or they get it from social media or whatever. So the more that we are open with our kids, the better off they are.

 

Yeah, yeah. How do you maintain that because you have a 12 year old? How do you maintain that communication with your dude? So dude, right?

 

Yeah. Well, we live in Portland and we live downtown and so we started seeing people doing drugs on the street really early and some people judge me for allowing that to happen, and my dad’s a drug addict.

 

They were judging to see it.

 

Yeah, like being around an environment where that like homelessness and the and the drugs and all of that was taking place, and my rebuttal to that as well. He’s never gonna end up underneath a bridge and he’s never gonna stick a needle in his arm. Because from an early age we’ve just talked about these people’s life choices. This is why you don’t have a grandpa that you see. Like this is real. Life stuff, and it doesn’t have to be heavy. What we as parents put our own shit on our kids. So if we’re coming at it with like, this heavy attitude, and oh, this is a really big deal, then that’s what our kids are going to get from us. But if we’re like, well this is life. 

 

These are facts. And this is how we’re going to move on from it and maybe you don’t want to do that. Then they handle it a lot better. And so since we’ve had that open line of communication his whole life he’s come to me when he would hear something in his public school. Like, one time, his teacher told him that Trump was holding kids at the border and taking them away from their parents. And I was like, whoa, okay. Well, since you want to talk about this, let’s talk about the other side and then you can decide what you think. Right, and at the end of it all he was like, so basically, no one knows what’s going on. Like second graders. Yes, yes, that is what I’m saying. Very good.

 

Kids are freaking intelligent, aren’t they?

 

We don’t give them enough credit.

 

Right on and that’s just because of you, I commend you because you just laid out all the information in front of your son and said, Here you pick. Here’s what, here’s what everybody says is going on, and of course, you can go and find everything. else you’d like to research it yourself. You can get access to Google. What do you think of his response? That’s brilliant. Basically, nobody knows what’s going on? Yep. And that’s why I started my podcasts on Yeah. So Oh, man. That’s incredible. I love it. Yeah. So let’s get into entrepreneurship. Real quick. You know, you’re an entrepreneur, what is it that you do as an entrepreneur?

 

Well, I started this business and then I also do property management stuff with a partner in a property management company, and we just started a maintenance company. So I’m really ADHD and I like to have my hands in 17 different things at one time, or else I don’t feel like a whole person. So that’s been my entrepreneurial journey. But I did own a salon for 10 years, from like, 19 to 29. And then I did real estate and I’ve done like, like, securities and life insurance and all of that. Lots of sales. But this is a journey that I like the best so far, this whole, like, social movement that I have going on with drunker public,

 

For sure, and that’s an entrepreneurial journey as well. Yeah. You said that you’re ADHD and I think, as you said, that I think I need to have there’s so many entrepreneurs that say that they are, you know, and I’ve never actually labeled myself that way. There’s people that told me it’s like, yeah, you could be, and I think I need to have an expert on the show about that. Because I don’t know. Because if we weren’t the way that we are maybe ADHD is actually a superpower for an entrepreneur if that’s a real thing, right? So to where we’re able to see so many different possibilities at the same time. And we can actually go after 17 Different things just to see which one, which like one of those 17 is actually going to work and let the other 16 fail, so that we can actually be successful and just crush it in a way beyond anybody else just because that one thing worked when we had the balls to go after to even think up 17 things and go after all 17 At the same time.

 

Yep. You know,

 

If I’m ADHD, bring it on.

 

I didn’t know that I was until I was 20. I think I was 30, and it all made sense. after that. I was like, oh, so people don’t forget these things, and I you know, my brain developed ways to make up for certain things I had, you know, different routines and patterns. That I had made up and then I and then I figured out like oh, well wait, my brain is actually processing things differently than other people’s, and the guy that created the Amen Clinics, he’s rad and you should probably get him on your podcast if he does brain scans and he doesn’t diagnose anyone without doing a brain scan, which I think is brilliant because so many people nowadays are misdiagnosed and I think what a friggin concept Yeah, the big pharma medicine grab is oh well psychotherapy and meta medical stuff like just shouldn’t mix. No, it should if you’re going to shove a pill down somebody’s throat. So he’s really into pinpointing, like exactly what’s causing your ADHD or your bipolar or whatever it is.

 

So closer to functional medicine. It’s not attacking the symptoms or the surface level stuff. It’s actually looking for the root cause Yeah,

 

Yeah, so brain scan.

 

That’s awesome. Yeah, brain scans. I love that this show is about ADHD today. We’re jumping all around. So what’s on your mind right now? Right now? What’s next on your mind?

 

No, that’s too much pressure.

 

Oh, man, you know what’s on my mind was actually like, I don’t know a cinnamon roll. It just kind of popped into my head just exactly. That’s gonna happen today. Oh, Lord. Okay. Maybe I should get a brain scan. That’s it. It’s interesting though. Cuz I mean, we could go off of that. But even with, you know, this relates back to politics too. So you see this coming? Full circle, because a lot of full circle it does. A lot of political agendas are very much surface level and special interests, rather than actually looking at the root cause of something. No, I’m still taking everything into account when I say these things, because there’s a lot of weight on these decisions, and there’s a lot of complex issues. Some things are just not as simple as they seem, you know, even coming back to school. 

 

Over the course of the pandemic, there were a lot of parents that could depend on the public school system to actually be a caretaker for their kids and I had never really looked at it. In this perspective, until all of a sudden, those kids were just home, and like double income houses where you had to have two incomes to survive. All of a sudden they had to figure out some kind of child care for their kid or figure out if just one parent is going to work now are we going to suffer? Should the one parent go get a different job, two jobs or three jobs? Because now our kid or kids are home because the Schools are shut down? You know it, there’s complexity to a lot of these things.

 

There really is. I mean, I think, you know, but we’re humans and we adapt so we are throwing a problem, and we just had to figure out a way to deal with it. Like I was lucky because I worked from home anyways. But allowing your child to like play video games all day because you have to work hard, so there was a lot of like, okay, like, Oh, are you doing your homework, all of a sudden, we’re teachers and we’re trying to work.

 

Yeah, you’re just two years later, and I’m forgetting because there was so much remote school that took place, you know, over the past couple years for the public school system, but there was that two to three month period where there was literally nothing. Some of the schools just straight up, shut down. Not teaching any classes whatsoever because they were not ready for something like this.

 

No, they weren’t at all. I remember sitting and listening to my son’s teacher. They were just, I mean, God loves them. They really try trying to get a bunch of like third and fourth graders to like, pay attention is really something.

 

Yeah, no kidding. So how has your son done in the past couple years because he’s 12 Right now, right? What are some new concepts that he’s become aware of? During everything that stays shaken down?

 

I would say that he’s just become really aware of, like, self responsibility.

 

I love that and I mean it.

 

I’m his mom. So he clearly hears what I talk about all the time. So he just kind of thinks like, the world is a little bit fucked, but not in a bad way. Like in an “All right, well, we should probably pay attention to these things,” and he kind of sees both sides to everything and reads between the lines really well so I’m pretty proud of him. He’s really Brainiac smart in like an on the spectrum sort of way. He’s always kind of analyzed everything like that.

 

That’s so cool. That’s awesome. I was able to take a look at that. I’m there of course because you see the government in the state that it’s in right now, and you see the school system in the state that it’s in right now, and there’s been a lot of concern, obviously, and probably well, yeah, for good reason. With the generation that’s growing up immediately, you know, and the way that I see it, because you’re describing your kids and I know how my kids are the again they’re in private online school, and I even have them involved in things that we’re doing right now my older two you know, like the podcast my oldest literally edits the show, you know, he’s learned Adobe Premiere over the last two years which is what movies are made them. I have made movies in Adobe Premiere that are out there right now. 

 

Liberty Lockdown, Cyber Crime, they’re documentaries, you can find them on Amazon, Vimeo, they’re out there, right real movies, and he’s using the stuff that Hollywood uses. He’s learned that at, you know, 13 years old and now almost 15 and my daughter, she does the blogs for this show to the blog posts which are transcriptions and so she listens to the whole thing. So they’re embedded in what I’m doing. Yeah. It’s an amazing way to instill my beliefs in parenting and how I see the world in my kids, just by them being in and around us, and I think that’s something that you’ve got to be just proximity you’re keeping your dude in proximity, rather than shutting them off.

 

Yeah, he’s really interested in gaming and stuff, and so he told me the other day, he said, Well, I don’t know if I want to go to college. I said, well, that I’m not going to send you to college. Right? off, you want to go do what you want to do and like you are in a unique position, Brayden, because you can actually not ever have to work again if you play the next like six years, right? So if you’re serious and you don’t want to go to college and you don’t want to be beholden to anyone scheduled and let’s get going on something. So he’s thinking of different podcast ideas right now and he’s learned how to edit videos also. So I think that’s really inspiring and awesome.

 

Cool. Yeah, I know right now my son, my oldest son, has even said to me he’s like, Dad, I think I want to buy my own house. I’m 18. You know, this was like, two years ago when he was 13 or 12. Yeah, I’m like, awesome. Like, like, well, first, there’s just one thing I need. I need you to understand. I’m not kicking you out when you’re 18. I just want to make sure the idea is not coming from you know, he’s like, Oh, no, no, that’s Oh, no, that’s not what I’m thinking. Oh. Okay, cool. You wonder like, Where’s this coming? Is it coming from a really good place to where it’s like you? It’s like, cool. Let’s jump on something. Let’s rock this right, rather than it’s like, what kind of bad environment Am I creating? I’m sure you’ve asked yourself that as a parent here and there.

 

Definitely. Yeah. I’ve wondered that his whole life mate, his dad and I got divorced when he was two, but I was like, Okay, we either work our marriage out, we’re together forever. We love each other and all the things because we’re not getting divorced when he’s 15 or 20. Right? Or we just get divorced now and he knows no difference and so his whole life has been like, did I make the right decision? But then like a year ago, he’s like, “Mom, I just think it would be so weird.” If you and dad live together. I think I would hate it. 

 

My job as a parent is to have a vindication and we’re back kids see all they understand all for real and they’re really on your side as parents.

 

I get along great. So there’s no like, Oh, I couldn’t imagine you guys fighting. No, we get along great. We got divorced or like, Oh, we’ve never had to fight again, but yeah, so he just knows both of us, and it was like, you know, I just I can’t imagine it.

 

Yeah, for sure. We’ve jumped around a lot here. We’ve talked about a lot of things but I want to send everybody it’s cool that you’ve been featured on NewsMax multiple times. I’ve been in the bet on their network many times too, and it just keeps going, you know, drunk politics. How do we find it? We just search that on? Yeah.

 

On Apple. We’re on Spotify. We’re on Google podcasts. Those are the three main ones I heard. I think we’re on I Heart Radio radio, too now. So you can search us there and then you can go to drunk republic.co and his links to everything.

 

Nice. That’s incredible. Krista, this was such a fun conversation and just very real and human. Thank you.

 

Thank you for having me.

 

Important Links:

Cares Act

Ukraine

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine

Bernie Sanders

Portland, OR

Chicago, IL

ADHD

Amen Clinics

Liberty Lockdown

Cyber Crime

Adobe Premiere 

NewsMax