Rob Schneider On The Cost Of Telling The Truth

People do feel fear, like they can't say what they want because they know there's repercussions to it. I had people who would pay money to come and insult me to my face, and I got so much shit for that, death threats and things, and it's not fun because the people that you know, the people that you care about, they get those death threats too. They try to stop you from continuing to make a living doing what you love. It is irrational. It is dangerous. It's evil, but we must proceed. It's worth fighting for. You have to make a choice, and you have to make a sacrifice. You have to be willing to risk everything.

You and I are now doing something together with King Global. Why did you say yes to this and what felt worth putting your name behind? Because this has been a thing we've been talking about for a while now.

Well—

And you just fell in love with it.

Well, Joe and I have been talking for a long time about a lot of different things. And finally, let's do this. And the really cool thing about this venture is gold, and silver mine venture is it just sounds fun 'cause it's in a ghost town. And it's like, what do you mean a ghost town? I've never been to ghost town. It's a Western town. I bought a town. I never knew anybody even bought a town. So all of a sudden, you know, I know absolutely nothing about it. And that's the most exciting part of it.

Yeah.

It's just to go into something. And I literally found myself with a hat the other day, literally a construction hat. And I'm short enough to begin with, and I'm ducking, going into this cave where people were digging and finding gold and silver and rocks and risking their lives to find a way to potentially make it rich or whatever their dreams were. And I really connected with that. And these people are all gone. All those people who mined in there, they're all dust themselves. And so I kind of relate to the temporariness of it all. And to extend their dreams in a sense is something I didn't think I'd be doing. So that's exciting. And I think while it's important at your, especially where you're at, Tommy, to say no, which is a very, very valuable tool. At my place where I'm at, I'm saying yes. I'm saying yes to things that I normally would never have done. I was asked to go to Hungary to campaign for Viktor Orbán. Yes. And I think he's a terrific leader, and he's protected that country. But that's all the young people have ever known. In 16 years, he's been the leader there. And he got defeated horribly. And I hope it wasn't my fault. But I went and talked to the university students, 'cause that's who, you know, wanted a change. But change for change's sake isn't necessarily the right thing you do, or the best thing for them. And I just said, "Be careful, because when you change, The idea that you could change back could be illusory. You may not be able to change back to what that was. And so just be careful what you're giving up. And we'll see. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, you gotta turn it over to God and go, okay, Hungary, I hope you don't get invaded with migrants like the rest of Europe. I hope you keep your sovereignty and culture. And it's a very, very 1990s safe, cool place, hunnay. So that's one. I'm going to Panama. I'm gonna go to El Salvador. I'm gonna go to Argentina. I'm meeting, I volunteered to do some work for the government. I just, I went back to DC, to State Park and volunteered. So wherever, if there's something you need for me to do, I don't know what, I'm not very, you know, educated or talented, but I'll put my time into it. So I wanna do more with the time that I have, spend time with my family. And so I'm interested in that. But at the same time, there is something about comedy. There is something about being involved in the culture or being able to have, I wouldn't say sway, but I would say a mouthpiece in the culture, you become a target. You become a target. This is something we talked about, thanks to Joe Polish Polish. We did our first podcast. I never saw myself doing a podcast, but Joe had encouraged me to do it and said, "It's all ready for you, Rob." So we did, and that was yesterday. First one, yeah. With Andrew Doyle, the great British Professor and thinker and comedian. And first thing I said is I said to myself, just like those questions you asked, what don't you want to talk about? What scares you? What would you never tell anybody? And I said, well, I'm going to start with that. My teen— my teenage daughter said to me, Well, you know, I was kissing her goodnight. She said, "Dad, are you going to get murdered like Charlie Kirk? Are they going to kill you like they killed Charlie Kirk, your friend Charlie Kirk?" And I'm like, "Well, I wasn't expecting that." So what is it? Why is our culture at such a haughty place where you could take such an angelic, gifted, Man who just wanted to have conversations, where someone, a rhetoric or whatever, hate, was able to get to a place that man's life is taken at 31 years old. Most talented young man I'd ever met.

Wow.

I don't have an answer for that. I said, I'm gonna do everything I can But I said, "There are some things worth dying for." Yeah.

Well, I mean, you recently were wearing a bulletproof vest, right, at one of your talks.

We had a riot at the— I mean, I asked Charlie, and I was very suspicious of Charlie. We've talked about this before. I was like, "What is this kid?" He's 28. They go, "What? What do you mean? Why does he want to meet me? What is this about?" I'm always thinking what the angle is. And his angle was he's a Christian. His angle was he loved his country. Somebody, they try to put the terms Christian and nationalist as if that's a bad thing. But no, what he is, he's a Christian and a nationalist. He's not a Christian nationalist. A Christian is someone who believes in forgiveness and that we get there through the grace of God. We don't get there by ourself. And that it is up to us to be a reflection of God's light. That isn't to be a wuss and just bend over. It's about forgiveness, but it's also, it's about being strong too. As Christ said, "Trading your cloak for a sword." This isn't the pacifist religion. And so, and what he wants to do is bring us closer because this is a nation founded on Christian, Judeo-Christian principles. Absolutely. Now they had argued, but they'd argued about their different sects of Christianity, our founding fathers, sects, S-E-C-T.

Yeah.

And it is, the idea of nationalism is dangerous only in the sense of when it is expansive, as in National Socialism. We need the peace of the Sudetenland because we are growing. These are Germans. So there's, we need the peace of France, you know. But nationalism is necessary when your country is in danger, when it is in threat, when your culture is in danger. And Charlie sensed that very much. And that's what we talked about incessantly more than anything else, the culture under attack from within. And— And that is when you need to stand up and protect your culture and say there are things worth saving for and there are things worth dying for. As Bobby Kennedy said to me, you know, I mean, your children, Not live in slavery is one of very high on top of that list. And I'll translate, what are you saying there? It's high in the list, making sure your children don't live in slavery. This country is unique. And the idea that 250 years ago, you're talking about a time, Tommy, 250 years ago, that wasn't that long ago either. If you look at the history, according to the Gauls in France, their French Revolution is like the 1950s when you look at look at their history. Just our history is short. I tell people in Los Angeles, we have a hot dog stand that's a monument 'cause California's so yum. So it is something that we have to deal with. I want to bring the temperatures down as much as I can. And I have to be careful about my rhetoric. We have to all be careful. And the saddest thing for me about that was to see the mischaracterizations and the idea that young people— it was, I believe, FIRE is a media organization that did a survey with young people. Shocking to me was that a decade ago, 10 years ago, just a short 10 years ago, if you asked young people, would it be okay to use violence to silence somebody? Whose speech he didn't approve of, or quote, hate speech, which is, how do you define that? And it was 99.9%. Now it's 36% of these people that were surveyed said that they felt it was okay to use violence to silence somebody for somebody's speech. That's alarming. I wanna know what's behind that. That's just, that's very disturbing. And I think we need to do everything we can to heal that.

Well, so what are you trying to build now that you want to outlast you? Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out. And if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description, or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Well, I think the idea that this, the culture and this culture of freedom in our democratic republic, that it's just gonna continue unaided and that the culture of free speech debate and the idea that, as we talked about before, you don't get friction from smooth, you get it from, you know, some of the best ideas you're gonna get from the worst ideas. I mean, when I do any of the writing we had from The Simpsons, whenever they would punch up the silly movies that I used to make and hopefully will make again, they would preface a lot of the times, "Here's a terrible idea. I'm gonna give you a bad idea of what I'm trying to get. Here's what I'm trying to get to, but here's a bad version of that." 9 times outta 10, that's the one we'll use. But what it does is it lets everybody go, "Look, bad ideas are welcome." Yeah. Because maybe that's the idea that'll get us to a good idea. And if people are afraid to say things, not just in your company, not just put in the culture, let's come up with good ideas and let's not be afraid to talk about the elephant in the room. Sometimes this idea that, you know, whether with Social Security, which is great if everybody's working and few people are taking out, but now the baby boomers getting older, All taking out, very few people putting in. That's a system that's gonna collapse. So you're not, it's about allocation. How are we gonna allocate that? What are we gonna take? You know, the idea of just like, mom, dummy in New York, we're just gonna take from white people. You know, we're gonna take from these people who have it. Well, okay, are you gonna reallocate? But then who's gonna pay? What's gonna happen when they move? Our partner at King Global told me a stunning statistic. He said 40% of the 1%ers, the highest earners in Canada, have left Canada. So who's going to continue to pay? Up 40%, I believe now, of all workers in Canada work for the government. At what point does that collapse? To what point does that become the 51st state by incest? It is a banger. So what I would like to have a return to traditional values. Traditional values just mean parents, where you can watch some TV, a TV show without grandma running out of the room vomiting and with the kids being able to watch something. I mean, I made a lot of movies that truthfully my grandmother probably would not have loved. You know? And I gotta go, "Why didn't I do that?" And I don't know, just 'cause I thought it was funny for me. And that's all you can really do. Intellectually, you can think, well, what do you think will make most people laugh? What can we— and you can think of intellectually, that might work, but you don't know because there's no real— that's an intellectualizing. Intellectualizing. One, do you think could help our business? But if you got an idea that's instinctive, you go, oh, I got it. Every time somebody, everybody go in the room goes to that because there's a visceral physical reaction to this idea. And they go, "Well, I want to hear that idea." And Adam Sandler is a key point to that. He still has that 14-year-old id, that 14-year-old boy, like, "Ooh!" And that's why he's a billionaire and still making movies. And he still has that. He loves it. He loves it. I mean, he calls like, "What do you think about this?

What do you think?

We're going to be doing this, the new movie we're going to shoot in Rome." I guess the roundabout way of answering the question, I would like for us to know that this idea of freedom that we have here, this idea of an open society, we really need to protect. And I wouldn't want to say that what I've learned is that there are The encroachment on it that Charlie talked about just shortly before his death, Charlie Kirk, was the most dangerous thing affecting our culture and our nation and affecting everything that we're going to do is the encroachment of the green and red alliance. And if we don't pay attention to that, nothing, Tommy, God bless you and your business. But if we don't get involved and try to fix this, if we don't acknowledge that this is a real problem, the red and green alliance simply being is just communism redressed as manners and this woke thing, which is a forever revolution. The idea of taking down the freest country in the history of the world is to have revolution after revolution. I call it the superficial revolution, 'cause there's always something to complain about. So keep the revolutions coming, keep 'em coming about everything. Protest about everything you can to break down the very fabric of the country, to break down family unit, to break down structures of what's working, to invade— Mm-hmm. Infiltrate academia. After colleges got infiltrated in 1970, completed by 1990 by the French intellectual ideas of woke, then they got into, by 1990, they were into the K through 12. And so, you know, one of the things that Charlie and I were, you know, we gotta get the next generation. That's one thing I talked to Erica Kirk. We did a speech, a talk together on stage. Last month. And I want like the new kids, the high school kids are coming. We gotta get to them. And that's when Charlie Kirk was able to really do was get debate on campus. That's why he was murdered because he was effective. There was a 22.5% bump to young people being conservative at the university level. That never happened in our nation's history. And that man, Charlie Kirk, is mostly, is largely responsible for that. I mean, Scott Pressler helped a lot in Pennsylvania, important. And of course, Elon Musk, which sums up what our country, what has to happen in a free market system. Our society is reliant on oligarchs, either good oligarchs or bad.

Good oligarchs.

Good. Bad oligarchs, bad. He's a good owner. He really genuinely has an interest to improve, to keep free speech, and he cares about culture and humanity. Good oligarch. Bill Gates, maybe not so good. If it's just about profit at any cost, not good. So I mean, as much as I can, I think we need to tell stories and you need to remind people. Really pissed me off. I had a guy who's one of the most successful producers in Hollywood. Who doesn't come out publicly saying that he's a conservative, but he said, "I'm really pissed off, Rob. How can I get involved with you?" And I said, "Well, you can help out and help our company and make some projects." And he said, I said, "What happened?" He said, "I took my kids to Monticello to see where Thomas Jefferson's home, and the guide, the, you know, the," The guy, the national park guide said this, Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, author of the Declaration of Independence, slave owner. I said, what? That's third? Wow. I said, we've got some work coming up for us. And he said, yeah, I don't like this. Who can I call? And I said, well, it's deep. It's deep. So we have to do our part. The idea that like we're just gonna continue, it just, it honestly, two generations, poof, gone. That's why like I was involved. I mean, that's how we met was through, you know, Sherry's beautiful book about "What Men Know About Vaginas," which is just an empty book. But Robert Kennedy was like, you know, You know, we spend 4.5 trillion on chronic health. Nothing else will matter if we don't get a handle on our health. And he's right, including his own. And he's taken care of his health. You know, he's a great example of it. We gotta get a handle on these things. So for me, I can't worry about being rich. I can no longer worry about being a, you know, $20 million movie star, make a $20 million movie. For me, I'm gonna have to divide my time to make as much money as I can to continue one of my favorite habits, eating and sleeping indoors in a, in a— One of the best habits you can have in Arizona with air conditioning that occasionally works. And you need a generator too just in case it doesn't. But at the same time, I'm going to have to balance that with working with the culture, working to make sure that we, this freedom and the traditional values we have, I have to balance that out and I have to spend my time and I have to be putting effort in there. And that's no money in there.

Well, I mean, look, when I first met you, it became clear that you really are committed to, I mean, genuinely helping people. You have sacrificed probably more than any other person I know in entertainment that I had met. I mean, you're willing to put stuff— I mean, you've walked away from stuff, and you have big cojones. I mean, you really do, relative to— you take a stand, and a lot of people don't agree with you. And you, you know, which I'm always curious— I've asked you in different ways about this— but how do you interpret or process the hate that gets thrown your way, or the people that just attack? who you are as a father, who you are as a person. I mean, because, you know, that after a while, it's— that could really hurt someone.

It's cost me everything, to be honest. It has. But it is— it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. And I mean financially, it's affected my family. It has. If you look at what— if you really feel what's happening now with this, you know, the attack from the left and this Islamic creeping of what's happening into our culture, all you have to do is look to see what's happened. The fact that Jordan, the fact that Algeria, the fact that Egypt, the fact that Lebanon, the fact that, you know, Persia, Coptic Christians, all those used to be Christian nations. Mecca was Jewish. So at what point do you see the effect of what's happening and where you decide, I'm not going to do anything? And I just said, well, you know, we have to make a choice and you have to make a sacrifice. And you have to say, well, what are you sacrificing for? Well, you mean you have to sacrifice and you have to be willing to risk everything. If you look at the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, do yourself a favor. Look it up. These people sacrificed everything. They literally gave all their money. If you take a look at the gentleman from New Jersey, John Stockton— Stockton was his name. He gave up everything. His wife went to prison, British prison. He never saw his kids again, died in poverty, gave all his riches. He could have stayed with the British. He could have. A third of the Americans were loyalists, stayed loyal. A third of them were ambivalent, but a third got involved eventually. That was enough to knock off the biggest superpower in the history of the world. And I'm convinced the United States is the spear. I talked about this with Charlie Kirk. He said, there will be— we are the Marines. There will be nobody landing on our beaches to save our ass. There will be no Marshall Plan to bail us out. We are our Marshall Plan. This is it. So at what point do you go, well, this isn't about, oh, I've got to figure out a— the way to— for me to survive until everything collapses? Like, what about your kids? What about your grandkids? How do we pass this on? I took my kids to the military cemetery— American military cemetery outside of Rome. And we walked as many— we spent hours there. As many tombstones, read each tombstone. This guy was a lieutenant colonel. He was 31, died in Italy. This guy, 24, private. This guy's— 19. They gave what Lincoln described as the last full measure of devotion for our nation. You have to sacrifice. And for whatever reason, you know, I will pray. And you have to be careful about this, too, because as far as the hate and that stuff, I don't want to put myself openly, you know, like I knew when I went to the University of Berkeley, because I talked to Charlie. He said, "I want to go to the craziest place. Let's go. Let's see how— what the looniest, craziest woke place we can —where do you want me to go? And he said, well, you're coming with me to the University of Cal Berkeley. I had to go alone. And I invited my two professors who were smarter than me, Andrew Doyle and the great professor Peter Boghossian, to come with me to buttress my arguments with these kids. And the leftists had a riot. They had police out there. The university themselves took 500 tickets. To give it to a leftist organization so 500 seats would be empty. I mean, they were just absolutely horrible. I'm in a lawsuit with them, so I'll be— for a free speech lawsuit, and we're going to see how that goes. But these are things that it's worth fighting for, and I think you're going to pay a cost, but the price to have your children live in slavery or to give up this incredible experiment in freedom, it's teetering, and we saw it teeter under the last administration, where they were able to lock down, close down your businesses. 10,000 businesses under COVID went bankrupt and went out of business, 10,000 restaurants in America. And if they could ruin them, the government can ruin you, and they could ruin everything you've built up, and they absolutely can. It's just, Senator Johnson, I'm going to go to D.C. on January— June 10th to speak.

Yeah. Senator— Johnson.

Senator Johnson. He just released information that what the government lied about. The government knew that it was causing myocarditis. They knew, they just said, let's just fudge the numbers. So your own government's gonna lie to you. Your own government lied to you, told you that this vaccine was going to do this or X, or you wouldn't get, you know, if you get this, and they absolutely lied. Absolutely lied. And I really was, if we don't kick out that government, that Biden, and nobody wouldn't admit that his brain didn't work. And I was going around the country saying, if Biden was a dog, you'd put him down. As you would. You know, those dogs are so old, there's snots coming out their eye and they look at you like, please kill me. I just pooped in my own food bowl. What more information do you need? So I'd be going around and just pissing people off as wherever I could. And believe me, they tried to cancel me, whatever. And I don't believe in such a thing as cancel. If you have Jesus Christ in your— and know that he's taken care of the most important thing, that he paid the price for you, there's nothing human beings can do to you. All his apostles were killed except James. And as a matter of fact, upside down crucifixion. Like, I don't— they didn't feel like they should die the same way even as Jesus did. Put me upside down. I'm not worthy of that. So I think in that place, I do feel free, and I do feel like God has a plan, and I do feel like I want to follow it. But I have to be careful. And you brought up something interesting, which is like, what are the costs? The vanity. Why am I doing it? Is it for my own attention? Yeah. And I have to be honest. Is it my own so I can prove enough so this kid who never went to college, "I'm smart too. I can look up stuff." How much of it is vanity? 'Cause that's not helpful either. And how much of it is like, "I'll show you," or "I'll blah, blah, blah." And you have to let go of the hate. Don't return hate with hate. We're not gonna win the cancel culture with more canceling. There's a famous story that, if you heard it, forgive me, but Robert De Niro had a confrontation with me at Saturday Night Live, and he was angry. And I guess he looks at social media, because I've criticized him. It's like, you know, it's easy for Oprah and Robert De Niro to be, you know, open borders policy and support, you know, the Democratic policies, because they live in gated communities and they have, you know, guards, you know, and they're millionaires, they fly private. You don't relate to anything. And I guess he must have seen some of this. [SPEAKING SPANISH] And he took umbrage to it. And he was angry and he got in my face. And I literally, I really held his arm and I just told him, I said, "I love you." And he went— And I said, "No, I really love you. I love you." And he said, "Okay, okay." That was it. So I mean, it's gonna have to be through love. And I have to be careful because I can get as angry as anybody. Me. And I can get mad and there's things I can— like our president, I could tweet something mean too to Iran if I wanted to, you know. But what does it serve me? What does it serve the bigger thing? That's why Abraham Lincoln was such a— you know, he famously wrote letters to McClellan, General McClellan at night saying, "You— I can't believe—" And he would write at the bottom of it, "Not sent." The next morning, when that emotion was lifted, he would say, "What am I trying to achieve here?" And he'd write another letter in that exact vein to achieve what he wants to. And we all have to be cognizant of that. But for whatever reason, the silly movies I've made have put me in a position where, you know, I have a mouthpiece. I can't go anywhere, any airport anywhere, you know? I'm not flying private like Robert De Niro and and Oprah Winfrey. But I can't go to any place that people don't say, "Thank you for speaking for our culture. You're one of the good guys," or whatever that means. But people do feel fear, like they can't say what they want because they know there's repercussions to it.

What's the ratio of people that will say negative things to you, insult you, attack you versus people that are like, "Good job"?

Well, it's funny. I had people who would pay money to come and insult me. To my face. And I said, well, if they paid the money, you know, they've earned it. And that was during COVID when I said, you can just say no to this experimental gene therapy. And I got so much shit for that, death threats and things. And it's not fun because the people that you know, the people that you care about, they get those death threats too. The people that they try to— Yeah. They try to stop you from continuing to make a living doing what you want. And it is irrational. It is dangerous. It's evil. But we must proceed. I mean, the ratio was pretty hard against me, even recently, when I said we need to do conscription, you know, we need to have people volunteer, we need to have young people. Right. As soon as the Iran War is about to start, say, hey, let's have the draft back. You want a war? OK, let's have everybody's son. Not these, like, everybody, ah, how dare you, you don't, ah. Well, somebody's going off right now to those aircraft carriers. 2,500 Marines, that's somebody's kid. So let's have everybody's kid. No exceptions. No exceptions. Nobody who could sign and say, well, I'm becoming a foot surgeon. —"So I need to spend—" No. Everybody across the board. And it doesn't have to just be the military. It can be, you know, you can volunteer for overseas. You know, if you want to dig ditches and help clean water in Africa, absolutely. If you want to do stuff for the old people that are aging in our society, absolutely. But military should be an option and should be part of it, too, just like Switzerland, just like Israel. People were furious, left, especially the right. Libertarians were the worst, to be honest. How? We— I thought you were on— I said, no, I'm not on your side. I'm not on anybody's side. I'm on America's side. And this needs to happen. And we need to have conscription. Because what we could do in that same time is take them out of those universities, take them out of the high schools where they're being manipulated, and you put them in the military. And in the foxhole, there is no atheists. There are no separate people. There is a group, a unity. There is a one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice, as you and I are in this together. If we're going to survive this, we've got to work together as a team. And we need that. We need to remind people that you're just not in this. This idea of rights without duty needs to be corrected in this country. You have a duty. You don't just get rights. The idea that somebody can come over here and just, you know, sneak over and you have automatic rights and benefits, No. The last gigantic wave that came over here of immigration, which ended in 1921, these people came from Poland, they came from Italy, they came from Yugoslavia, they came from Ireland. They didn't speak very good English. They were like, "America, we here, U-S-E-R-A. America, America." They had American flags. They were American. Well, my mother came here from the Philippines. Just, she couldn't afford to get here on her own. She literally, she had a classmate that was sick. She came over with her classmate that was sick. And that's what flew them, she had to take care of, to get treated in America. That's how she came to the States. Her father was an American soldier, so she was an American citizen. But that's how she came here. And she was, anytime somebody said anything against America, "Get out! This is the greatest country, you don't understand!" You know? We do take it for granted. I do think we have to— you have to put yourself out there. 90% hate on that one.

So when people say draft Rob Schneider.

Yeah. Well, then I volunteered. I don't know what I can do, but I volunteered. I went to the State Department. I said, "Whatever you want me to do." I can't announce what I am going to do, but you'll hear about it. I promise you, you will hear about it.

What's interesting is, so in Genius Network last week, Hazard Lee, who flies F-35s, he's an Air Force pilot, he's gonna retire here in a few months, and he just mentioned, he goes, "Yeah, I volunteered. If I need to go to Iran, I will." And we had a whole discussion about what you're willing to sacrifice for.

Whatever they need, I mean, I'm willing to do it. I mean, I'm going to do it. I'm invited to speak to the ambassador in Panama in the fall. I'm talking to other people in the State Department. I go, I mean, I'll do whatever. I'm not qualified to do anything, but whatever you guys— I'll sweep the floor of an aircraft carrier.

Well, I think you already are doing it. And it's interesting, too, because even if someone agrees or not with part, all, some of whatever percentage they want to say. I just admire the courage because what I think the people that love you and admire you and come up to you is they're just— they see a courageous human that is willing to make sacrifices to do that. Where does that courage come from?

Oof. Huh. Wow. I remember my dad turning off the cable and like disconnecting it. And we lived in a mountainy area in Pacifica, which is like below San Francisco. And he just said, "I am not paying another dime to the cable company." And I said, "Then we don't have TV." We were trying to put— we got nothing on our TV. We had to put like literally, We took, I swear, it's like we took a coat hanger and another coat hanger and tried to get like Channel 11. You know, we could get like zzz, zzz, all snowy, but you kind of get an image. And you know, when you're 11, TV is your life. That is it. It's like Macaulay Culkin says in Home Alone 2, TV is my life. And it was. So he turned it off because the cable company, During the Super Bowl, the cable went out. And he said, "This is the biggest game. You've got to give us a discount for, like, you know, for the time we lost." And they said, "Well, for the month, it was only out for, you know, for 65 minutes, so we'll prorate that 65 minutes into 31 days." "Yeah, but I'm not watching TV at 2:00 in the morning. This is the biggest game." And that was it. He took it. "I'm not paying another—" So we didn't get cable. And that was it. So we're going to make that sacrifice. He's going to make that sacrifice for us. And he did that. And then he found out that, like, all you had to do is have the numbers to pay for your IRS, for taxes. In other words, a piece of paper. If it has the bank number and your account. He said, OK. So he said— and this is taxes in the late '60s. I don't know if you realize how high taxes in America was. The high rate, I believe, was in the high 60s to 70%. This is the late '60s, the height of Vietnam War. And so he took his t-shirt, a big jacket, the biggest shirt he can get, and he painted on there his number, and he painted the bank account. And he said, here's my shirt. Take the shirt off. I'm giving you the shirt off my back. That's what you're taking from me.

Mm.

Because the IRS was supposed to be a temporary thing that Woodrow Wilson put in, the worst the worst of our progressive presidents. And that it was like, "No, it's just going to be temporary." The government, once they take your money, once they start an avenue of taking your money, it'll never stop. That's why we have to always be careful of that government. So he did that. And my mother, you know, she— you know, as we talked about before, she paid for her school by— She found money that the Japanese hid in a cave in the Philippines that they— and she also had these things she thought could be valuable because they were metal pineapples, she thought. Hand grenades is what they turned out to be.

Oh.

So I think there was something about a fight that— and I'm little, so I had to learn to fight at a young age, successfully or unsuccessfully. You know, you got to stand up for yourself. And I just felt a— when somebody tells me to do something, I go, why? Who really is behind this? And then I remember like some parents came up to me and they told me that their children were injured by these drugs. And they said— and I go, what? By these vaccines. And they said their— They're autistic. And I go, what is that? And then he had to look up what autism was. It came from a 1930s doctor who described these kids who just turned off. And one of the things where they first started seeing it was in the people who were taking seeds and preserving seeds in this industry. And they were using mercury. Mm-hmm. And so this was a mercury-related thing where they would come— the guy would come home with dust and it would affect the unborn child and affect the kids. So, you know, and I did— I testified in the state legislature in California. And that was the beginning of the end of my film career. [LAUGHTER] But it was the right thing to do. I don't regret it. It led me down this road. But just because you're down a road that's less financial or whatever, you know what? You have to just kind of— you got to trust. And you— but I believe those parents, and I still do. And finally, we have somebody, you know, Robert Kennedy, is let's talk about these kids' health. We can't just have— I mean, the thing about our— how democracies fall eventually, we have a very unique system. Our people go, "Well, what do you think protects America?" What is the protection for our freedom?

I mean—

What comes to mind? Several things.

Well, the right to bear arms.

Okay.

Freedom is—

Which is written on what?

Constitution.

Constitution. So you think— So the Constitution protects us is actually— Okay. So you say the Constitution on paper does, but the Soviet Constitution is extremely good and in some ways better than ours. Didn't protect them though. So a complicated system of checks and balances is what does it. It's very, very hard for one party and one group of people to get everything because we are a republic. So the three branches of government, that division, it's basically we have Sparta and then Athens. We've taken the Sparta, Sparta government, which they had two kings, and they had like a Senate, and then they took the Greek on top of that. I'm sorry, the Roman on top of that Sparta, Athens kind of, and that's the government that we have with these checks and balances so that we have— and that is what— and then we are a republic, so the states also, it's another buttress, because the states could decide if they wanted to shut down. Unfortunately, Ducey kind of gave in. He's a good governor, but he kind of gave in. And even DeSantis, who's our best governor we've ever had in the United States, even he, until he started to do the work and he was brave. And LaPadou, who's this, his surgeon general, they said going against their own, you know, what the medical profession was saying, what the medical establishment was saying, They went against it out of bravery and courage. And that was encouraging to me. You know, so we have to stand up and go, well, you know, they could take these freedoms away and that Constitution was just a piece of paper because there was nothing in there about like, you have the right to bear arms, you have the right to redress grievances unless there's a plague. What? I didn't see that in there. Didn't matter. They took it away. People dealt with it. They shut us down. They shut the world down. And it took a bunch of Canadian truckers to remind us what protesting was again. So it's a piece of paper. But what we can have is they're so complicated and that the breakdown and the system is pretty damn good. It's lasted all these 250 years. I need it. I need it. I need to do everything I can to just reinforce it for whatever time I have. Thank you. And if that costs me financially, if it costs me personally, if it costs me professionally, I'll deal with it. But I want to do everything I can to reinforce that and to remind these kids. I'm going to a university— I'm going to a college this week to speak to kids to remind them about how special and unique these rights are and that the division of these powers is really in the complication of that division. 'Cause everybody says, "Well, Trump, no kings." Well, if Trump was a king, a district court judge, when he stops one of his executive orders, he stops. A king would murder that guy. Certainly a dictator would murder that judge. But he stops, and then he works his way through the courts because we no longer have a legislation that works as a legislative body. That Congress was supposed to not just be worried about insider trading, getting as rich as they could, and worried about reelection, which is 95% of what they do. They were supposed to actually legislate legislation which benefits their constituents and in that, in doing so, benefit the nation as well. What we have now is a legislation that no longer legislates. And so we have an emperor. We have very much a Spartan type of one king, not two, and that this emperor makes executive orders, which has to work its way through the courts, and hopefully that it would get, you know, his executive orders be yay or nay by the legislature— legislation— the legislature. So that's kind of where we're at, you know? And it is a system that's deeply flawed, not supposed to be this way. But it's still a pretty damn good system.

I want to leave some time for questions from some of you. Let me ask you a couple of these and then— what have you changed your mind about in the last 2 years that surprised even you?

I didn't realize the insidious nature of Islam. And Charlie Kirk educated me about that first. He was saying that there is a— this is not— this is— it's not religious. It is a political organization that is bent on— very confident that is bent on conquest. And you don't have to do much research to realize that that's correct. So that is something— And So one of the things that DeSantis is doing, one of the things when I went back east to talk to the State Department was, by the way, they're on it. Our government is very aware of what's happening. And I think the best way to deal with something that is against the, not only against our Constitution, Sharia law, specifically as the backbone of what Islam wants to do everywhere they go is to put this Sharia law eventually in when they get enough numbers and get enough power. It is not only against our Constitution, it's against the Declaration of Human Rights. So I think the best way to defeat and undermine and to take away— that potentiality, no matter how things grow, is to take them out of the financial system. If you are doing something that's against the Declaration of Human Rights, then you are debanked. If you try to put in Sharia law, you cannot use the banking system. If you do something against our Constitution, against women's rights— I mean, women, I mean, just, it's really ugly if you want to get into it. What Sharia law does to women. I mean, literally, Trump had to, you know, to do a post on his social media, "Please don't behead or hang those women," that they were going to do. That is Sharia law in action. And that has every intention of taking over this country. Absolutely. That is something that is not— that was something that I didn't see, because like a lot of people, you know, it's just freedom of religion. Your freedom of religion doesn't trump my right to raise my family the way I want to raise my family in traditional American values, Judeo-Christian values. That's what this nation is founded on. So that is something that— Yeah. We cannot ignore. And if we don't educate our populace about that and if we don't get involved now, just go to Birmingham, England, see what that's like. Go to Brussels. Brussels is now, most of the citizens in Brussels are not native-born. It's a real issue. It's an issue we have to face.

Mm-hmm.

It's an issue that people don't want to talk about, People are like, "That seems uncomfortable." Well, you have to deal with it because it's going to deal with you if you don't.

Wow. Well, the propaganda machine of media in Hollywood, what did Hollywood teach you that was useful and what did you have to unlearn?

Well, I would tell you that the Hollywood is a mouthpiece that is powerful and goes all over the world. I was lucky in the 1990s to be in an industry which controlled 92% of the entertainment in the world. In the world. Hollywood was 92% of all films in the world were Hollywood films in the 1990s. That's how big it was. [SPEAKING SPANISH] You go to France and there'd be like 4 movie theaters, 3 of them would be American movies. And so much so that the French taxed Hollywood 11% under the Clinton administration, 11%. They would take that money, they'd tax American money, take the money from American movies and they'd make little nice French movies like "Three Men and a Baby" and other cute little movies. And they were great. Those movies are great. But then, you know, we had a fight with them. They're like, "Why are you taxing us for that? We're gonna tax your cheese." And then it all, it kind of all ended. So the reach from Hollywood is like, is unbelievable. Like the reach that I have still is phenomenal. It is, you know, I can get to millions of people just from the fact of what I've accomplished or what from people, whatever I've done.

What's your favorite movie?

Whether it's an accomplishment or not, I have a mouthpiece that can do that. So, you know, that comes with a responsibility. I would like to, you know, it's about health, it's about individual rights, it's about freedom. This country was founded on individual rights, not given by the state, but given by God. These inalienable rights were given by God, by our Creator. That's different than the state. So we have, like, this movement to that— the state gives you this. The state, I wanna co-parent with this. I don't wanna co-parent with the state. I want the state out of my life. I want the state to worry about roads, safety, and that's it. Maybe a little bit of health. That's it. I don't want them involved in anything. I don't want them involved in my, in the schools. I don't want them involved, you know, I don't want like the, we gotta get rid of that. Ever since Carter put in the Department of Education, the education's gone through the toilet. Let's not have that. I want parents involved. And I do think I'm still very, very buoyant about what we can do. We had a lot of people waking up because of COVID People, parents started seeing what was there. What is my kid learning? I'm home. He's home. What is that? Why is he learning about pornography at age 8? What is— what kind of indoctrination is happening? So that, I mean, The reach from Hollywood was a gift. The responsibility that I have with that is a real responsibility. What do you do with that? What I don't want to take is Hollywood is a closed system of thought. It is just reinforcing its own echo chamber of an ideology that is illiberal. And it's— Yeah. Very much like academia. You can think, you can have a socialist teaching and you could have academia that where everything is metered out evenly. You can have complete equity within that system 'cause you're not making anything. You're not making garages, garage doors that have to make a profit. You have to be able to pay to get it made. You have to have some guy install it. You have to have some guy sell it. No, it's just all theoretical. And theory without action, theory is just that, theory. You have to see it in action to see if it's working. And so that system of just indoctrinating and putting ideas and forcing ideas onto people was something that I am very vehemently against. And I have to be careful of that, too. I mean, we want to entertain first, but if you're entertaining and indoctrinating them, like I described late-night TV as political indoctrination by comedic imposition. It's no longer jokes. This is policy. They're not laughing at your joke. They're— They're laughing at you. They're applauding that echo chamber of political rhetoric, which is illiberal in its essence. The Democratic Party's gone off the rails. It's an 80/20 issue and they're still pushing it in Maine that boys can play against girls. It's like, what? Why? I mean, the fact that the people that wanna cut off their son's penis are saying that we're the a-holes.

Yeah.

It's like, wow, that is off the rails. So you had a Democratic Party that is just trying to appease the very radical side of them. They're radical. And then that 80%, 90% that don't agree with it, and the Democratic Party themselves, they're being silenced by it. That is a, that's not a party that's gonna improve itself. So I think we need to have, we get two parties in America. I'd like more, but we get two. Can we have two normal parties, or can we have, if you vote for one that's different, does that make you a racist and a Nazi or a white supremacist? So these are the kind of things, the kind of spinning out rhetoric that has to be calmed down so that we can go back to conversation and debate and dialogue instead of violence.

Well, and I had talked to the I think I've talked to you about this before, but how much of your life were you liberal? Were you a supportive liberal?

Most of my life. When you're broke, you better be liberal when you're broke, you know? And then you start making money and go, "What am I paying for? Why am I doing this? What is it?" You know, "Wait a minute." But no, I mean, the old expression is if you're not a liberal in your 20s, you're heartless. But if you're still a liberal in your 50s, you're an idiot. And I mean that in a general sense. In a literal sense and in an actual sense. I mean, at what point do you have— somebody has to pay for some of this stuff. And the idea that we can just pass the buck, if somebody's paying this, it is a reallocation of wealth. Someone has to pay for it. So who? So you have to take from B to pay for A. You just don't just get a continual A and balance. And so it's like, the Democratic Party, the idea that you're just going to continue to pay for everybody to come over and take it from somewhere. Or guess what? You're going to continue to, you know, as they call quantitative easing. I believe the amount was at $37 trillion, which is just an unheard of amount, and that we have— the government can afford to pay 19% interest on the $35 trillion, just the interest, not the principal, and that the difference to 35% is what we owe. We do quantitative easing. So that's a nice-sounding word, easing, quantitative easing. What is that? That's just printing money and shoving that and making our money less valuable. I'm doing a movie this summer, and I asked for the same salary that I got 16 years ago. The devaluation, according to our Department of Labor and Statistics, is 52% since 2009. 50% of your money. So you think, "My house went up 52%." No, it didn't. What is your buying power? What is that money really going to do? So these are things that we have to be aware of. I would still say it's the best system in the world, but if China wasn't a paper tiger and bankrupt, and if Europe wasn't a complete mess, the United States would be in serious trouble. Yeah. The fact that we are the least problematic of countries, but we are still the greatest economy. But I think we are not— there's no realism in our government, even with the Republicans, unfortunately. We're going to have to come to Jesus at a certain moment. And we're going to have to say, we can't afford this stuff anymore. Or we're going to push it off, and then they're going to have to do what— What? Dr. Chris Martin describes as the big zapping. I think I'm paraphrasing. But they're going to— boom— the economic system. The financial system, whether it's going to happen in 2028 or 2030, he believes it will happen in 2028. There will be a zapping of the financial system. This is his theory. In other words, they're going to blame Iran if Iran is still Iran. They're going to blame China if Iran is not around anymore, the mullahs aren't there. They're going to blame North Korea. They're going to blame Russia. And the financial system will be magically zapped, and we'll have to start over. That's his theory. And I thought it was crazy until I really listened to him, and I go, maybe he's not so crazy. So, you know, this is a— get involved, figure it out. He said this to me: Get a couple of months' worth of water and food, and make sure 3 things make civilization. Food, water, socialization. Food, water, make sure you have enough of that, a few months of that. And then socialization, have a community, you know, a group of people who have guns, hopefully. You can go to a place, maybe they got a generator, hopefully, too. And sanitation, that's what makes society. That's those 3 things. Those are the pillars of it. Make sure the guy who's taking your septic tank, make sure he's still going pretty good. And he said, "Keep those things going." And he said that that's the scenario if we fall off the cliff financially.

Wow. That's good.

Dr. David Martin, look him up. He's a very fascinating guy. China is in worse shape than we are. China, by the way, if you look at what America is doing right now by— we just signed an agreement with Indonesia. A defense agreement. We've now neutralized Venezuela and cut off China's— it's the biggest oil reserves in the world. I know Trump likes to say the United States is, but it isn't. Venezuela is. And then we also now have neutered, for the most part, Iran. So we have— if China wants to get aggressive, with their dwindling population that's under a billion now because of the one-child policy— it could be as low as 500 million, we don't know— if they want to get aggressive, the United States now can cut them off from their oil supplies and completely devastate their economy. And that is a fact. And that is an absolutely brilliant, non— mostly non-militaristic way to neuter them. Mm-hmm. That's pretty phenomenal. I will say that's the greatest gift that the Trump administration has done. And hopefully, you know, preventing these lunatics from having a nuclear weapon. I'm against war in Iran. I always have been. But I have to admit, the more that I learn about it, the closer that they— you know, you have to be careful what you hear from the government. You know, I'll never forget Colin Powell with that yellow cake. This is Iraq, and it was complete utter lie. CIA lie. So when they say Iran has 60% enrichment of uranium, you have to take that with a grain of salt. But if we're wrong about that, you can't have another North Korea over there. So as much as I'm— who would want war? But I think neutralizing those people who have hijacked that country for 47 years, who are just a brutal, horrible group of people that massacred 30,000 of their own people. I think that's something that we can't ignore. But at the same time, we can't just go around, as Noam Chomsky says, being the paid police, going around beating up— 'cause there's assholes everywhere if you want. Well, these guys are assholes over here, these guys over here are assholes. So we have to be careful. But I do think it is very telling that the Abraham accords have stuck together with those 13 nations in the Middle East despite Israel and the United States attacking. That is a phenomenal achievement that I don't think any other administration could have done.

I'm going to ask you one more question, then we're going to take an intermission because I want to keep this going because I want to make sure everyone has a chance to ask some questions, but I also want to give I wanna give everyone a chance for a break, so we'll do this one, then we'll take a short break. How do you build something— How do you build something that people who disagree with you still watch?

That's a great question. You appeal to them. I have to, like, I'll be in New York. I really love performing in New York and California because of the potentiality to appeal to liberals. And we have so much more in common than we have We love— this opportunity in this country is unheard of. It really is. No one's swimming to get out of here to go to Cuba. Nobody's climbing over a fence to get into Canada when it's not a Vietnam War. I mean, this is exceptional. So if I can get to them for places where we can agree, and then if I can get them to is to see people laughing at the absurdity of the situation. And get to it quickly. I say, "California, look, I would love to stay in California, but I got little kids. You know, it's dangerous. Public schools are dangerous in California. You know, in the morning I drop off a girl, in the afternoon you pick up a boy." You know? [LAUGHTER] I attack no one. I just talk about the reality of that situation with a joke. And then I talk about how, you know, plastic straws. It's a— because President Trump signed an executive order, literally, his second week, saying to make plastic straws great again. I said, I'm trying to get that so I can frame it, because it's just so absurd where our body politic and this incredible, you know, a nation of Thomas Jefferson, you know, of Alexander Hamilton, of James Madison, of George Washington, of, you know, Benjamin Franklin. Great, incredible statesmen who, thank God, all were at the same time to found this amazing nation, to go up against a superpower, the greatest superpower the world has ever known, the Brits, and defeat them with farmers. Pretty damn good accomplishment. To get to the point where we have an American president who signs an executive order making plastic straws legal, that's a big fall for the culture. And, um— And I remember what it was, California is the first place, 'cause California doesn't want to put in anything that actually helps the citizens. They want to just do stuff that they can just do that doesn't affect anything, that they go, "I did something." So they made plastic straws illegal. And so the joke comes from that. It's like, I remember I was at a party, I was drinking, you know, and somebody said, "Hey, that's messed up." And I go, "What?" That plastic straw. And I go, "Why?" "Because it's a single-use plastic straw." And I went, "So?" So after you're done drinking with it, it's gonna go in the ocean and kill a turtle.

Oh.

Well, then it's not a single-use plastic straw. After I'm done drinking with it, I'm gonna kill a turtle with it. Now, if they don't laugh at that joke, then they're— I can't help you. You can't get them, you know, so.

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