The Ben Shapiro Show - The Upside of Being Canceled | Rob Schneider

00:00:00.000 I tell this to people, I say, we're America.

00:00:01.000 We have freedom in America.

00:00:03.000 We're not China.

00:00:03.000 China, they tell you who to vote for.

00:00:05.000 They get one part in China.

00:00:06.000 Not in America, we get two.

00:00:08.000 Can we at least have two?

00:00:09.000 I think that this was important because I think we were teetering on making America like California.

00:00:16.000 And you don't want that.

00:00:17.000 Rob Schneider is a beloved American entertainer, comedian, actor, best known for his work on Saturday Night Live and dozens of comedies, including 50 First Dates, Grown Ups, and You Don't Mess With the Zohan.

00:00:27.000 Schneider is also the author of his latest book, You Can Do It, which shares lessons learned from Hollywood and makes the case for pushing the boundaries of free speech with comedy.

00:00:35.000 In today's episode, we discuss his frustrations with the Democratic establishment in Hollywood, why he left California, and the upsides of being canceled.

00:00:42.000 Schneider also forecasts trends in the comedy industry, offers his diagnosis of the liberal establishment, and encourages other entertainers to follow his lead.

00:00:49.000 As a Hollywood veteran and advocate of free speech, Rob is on a mission to shape the future of his industry.

00:00:53.000 Don't miss Rob Schneider's wit and wisdom in this latest episode of the Sunday Special.

00:00:57.000 Rob Schneider, it's great to see you here on the Sunday Special.

00:01:10.000 Thanks for the time.

00:01:11.000 Thank you for having me.

00:01:12.000 I have my smarty pants glasses on so that I can appear intelligent and don't have the usual meltdown as your university students have when you tear them apart on the debate stage.

00:01:25.000 I appreciate that, although I don't know what Rachel Maddow will do without her glasses now that you've got them. 0.95

00:01:32.000 Or without her ratings.

00:01:33.000 I saw the ratings go down about 56%.

00:01:36.000 Hard to believe.

00:01:38.000 People after a while of calling people racist and misogynist, it runs its course for their audience.

00:01:45.000 I think they're moving on to some other more or less hateful program to watch.

00:01:51.000 I didn't know that it was possible for one person to go down 56%.

00:01:55.000 What is 56% of an individual if their ratings decline by 56%?

00:01:59.000 Only their lower half is watching MSNBC now.

00:02:02.000 Their ratings were so low to begin with, there wasn't much to do.

00:02:04.000 But that does speak to a sea change that's happening in public life.

00:02:09.000 Obviously, you've been in the comedy world for your entire career.

00:02:12.000 I've never seen a more hilarious time that has...

00:02:15.000 Less people laughing about it than right now.

00:02:18.000 Everything is absolutely hilarious, but you're really not supposed to laugh at any of it.

00:02:22.000 Well, you have to laugh at it.

00:02:23.000 That's the thing about it.

00:02:27.000 It's just so funny that they spent $1.2 billion and they still lost I mean, that is hilarious.

00:02:34.000 And you're finding out stuff that's...

00:02:35.000 Comedy, if you were writing a script, even in Hollywood, you go, I don't know if that's believable.

00:02:41.000 But supposedly, Biden, when he stepped down, was stepped down.

00:02:46.000 When he was forced to step down.

00:02:48.000 Remember in the July 24th, I'm the candidate and I'm not backing away.

00:02:53.000 And it says, I support Kamala Harris as the next...

00:02:56.000 But supposedly, he didn't have the support...

00:03:01.000 Or the backing of the Democratic elite to go ahead and push that send button.

00:03:09.000 But he's not sending that anyway.

00:03:11.000 Somebody on his staff is.

00:03:12.000 But somebody did send out I completely support Kamala supposedly before the Democratic intelligentsia all got behind her.

00:03:23.000 And that's why supposedly, another supposedly, that's why Obama waited three days to see if they can kind of undo this, and they realized they couldn't.

00:03:31.000 They made the fake phone call with Michelle and supported Kamala.

00:03:36.000 Does any of that ring true to you?

00:03:38.000 Yes.

00:03:38.000 I mean, so I think that they tried to blame Biden twice over.

00:03:41.000 So they tried to blame him for not getting out earlier, which is actually true. 0.99

00:03:44.000 There's no way he should have run.

00:03:45.000 And then they tried to blame him for not allowing them to have their little mini-primary process, which would have been rigged in Kamala Harris' favor anyway, because there was no way they could shove aside the black female intersectional hero in favor of, like, what? 0.99

00:03:58.000 The Jew, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, or in favor of, you know, genderless Ken Dahl, Gavin Newsom in California, or J.B. Pritzker, who has to be lowered into the state capitol by Crane? 0.91

00:04:07.000 Like, who exactly was going to be their candidate?

00:04:10.000 It was really funny when Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, whatever, come out during COVID and talk about health.

00:04:17.000 It's like, no, talk about what you...

00:04:18.000 Don't talk about what you don't know, health.

00:04:20.000 Talk about what you do know.

00:04:21.000 What kind of diabetes and heart pressure medication are you taking?

00:04:24.000 What belt do you have to keep your pants from falling down?

00:04:29.000 You're right.

00:04:30.000 They were stuck in a really tough, tough position.

00:04:33.000 They could never have passed over Kamala because a woman with many ethnicities and many accents, God knows, seeing her down south and also, you got to save democracy. 1.00

00:04:49.000 And then seeing her in Pittsburgh, let me tell you something.

00:04:51.000 You don't vote.

00:04:52.000 Let me know.

00:04:54.000 And then seeing her at a 7-Eleven.

00:04:56.000 It's very important that we support democracy.

00:04:59.000 Very, very, very important that we I come from a middle class family, Ben.

00:05:06.000 Not like you, I do.

00:05:08.000 So it seemed like she wasn't the best prepared person for this very important job of running for president.

00:05:16.000 Well, I mean, that's one side of the hilarious coin.

00:05:18.000 The other side of the hilarious coin is just the fact that Donald Trump is a world historical figure.

00:05:22.000 And that is in and of itself innately hilarious.

00:05:25.000 Like if you had made a joke about that in 2002, and many people made jokes about this sort of thing in 2002, it would have just been a joke.

00:05:32.000 And then it turns out that actually he is a world historically important figure.

00:05:36.000 Donald Trump with all the foibles, with all the craziness, with all of the hilarity that is attended upon him.

00:05:41.000 But you're not supposed to even laugh at him.

00:05:43.000 According to the left, you're not allowed to laugh at Kamala Harris because she's a magical person.

00:05:46.000 And you're not allowed to laugh at Donald Trump because he's Hitler.

00:05:48.000 And you can't laugh at Hitler. 0.94

00:05:49.000 You can't really make jokes about him.

00:05:51.000 The only thing you can make jokes about is that maybe he's Hitler.

00:05:53.000 But you can't just make jokes about the fact that Donald Trump is innately...

00:05:56.000 He himself is a very funny person.

00:05:58.000 He is a stand-up comedian working a room.

00:06:01.000 When he says, I'm going to be, you know, dictator, but just on day one, he's joking.

00:06:06.000 And then for them to run with it, like, he promised he's going to be dictator.

00:06:11.000 I mean, when Robert Kennedy said a couple of days ago, if he follows through on what he says he's going to do with free speech and hopefully getting rid of the Department of Education...

00:06:24.000 He stands to be the most consequential president since Lincoln.

00:06:28.000 I mean, isn't that an odd thing?

00:06:30.000 Not only to say, not only to hear, but to realize that there's truth in it.

00:06:35.000 Isn't it?

00:06:36.000 It's unbelievable.

00:06:37.000 It's wild.

00:06:38.000 It's wild.

00:06:38.000 Because, again, I think that because he shatters the image that so many people have of what the president is or quote-unquote should be— They miss the fact that underneath all of the showmanship is a very serious person who has very serious policies and who is bringing in an excellent team at this point.

00:06:53.000 And so what I'd start off by saying with you is just like, all of this should be really, really funny, right?

00:06:58.000 I mean, the fact that Donald Trump was at a McDonald's and that he has the sort of, you know, he has the sort of Self-knowledge, to understand, okay, I'm not going to put on jeans and a t-shirt and work on my tie.

00:07:09.000 I'm going to wear a $2,000 suit, and I'm going to wear my tie, and then I'm going to just put on an apron and serve people fries out the window and make some of the funniest images in the history of presidential politics.

00:07:18.000 I mean, how many memes did you see of him waving out the window, and it was like, Donald Trump to illegal immigrants in 2026, right?

00:07:25.000 That stuff is innately funny, but if you make jokes about it on the left, then they get angry at you.

00:07:31.000 Because you're not supposed to laugh at the fact that Donald Trump's a funny person or that this whole thing is really funny.

00:07:35.000 You're supposed to be perturbed.

00:07:36.000 You're supposed to be upset.

00:07:37.000 You're supposed to be deeply angry.

00:07:39.000 Who wants to live like that? 1.00

00:07:41.000 Well, the beautiful thing was how fast and how confident he was in his moves.

00:07:46.000 I mean, really, the race was over several weeks before.

00:07:51.000 And when Biden said he only garbages his supporters... 1.00

00:07:55.000 And then trying to put an apostrophe to say, no, it wasn't his supporters' garbage, it was the garbage of his supporters. 1.00

00:08:01.000 Too late. 1.00

00:08:02.000 And then when Trump showed up in a garbage truck, I knew at that point, he's got you.

00:08:07.000 He's got you.

00:08:08.000 He's so deep in their psyche.

00:08:10.000 So deep.

00:08:10.000 And then, you know, the...

00:08:13.000 Because what it is, you're right, the policies, they wouldn't even say the policies.

00:08:16.000 Here you had somebody, Kamala Harris, saying that she is the justice and the attorney general of California.

00:08:24.000 She's going to be the one that prosecutes these cross-national terrorists or these gangs. 0.67

00:08:32.000 And she wouldn't even come out against Proposition 36, which is a very mild thing about shoplifting.

00:08:37.000 If you look at the bill, which I didn't until last night, It doesn't even say that you have to prosecute them.

00:08:44.000 It says that it at least has to go to the district attorney.

00:08:49.000 And the district attorney will have to decide.

00:08:51.000 But that's something.

00:08:52.000 And she couldn't even come out against that.

00:08:54.000 So she really had no policies. 0.99

00:08:55.000 But the policies of the Democratic Party for the last four years was too hard for the Americans to stomach.

00:09:01.000 Now, the policies...

00:09:03.000 Of Trump are good and sound, but the form for a lot of Americans was hard to stomach in the form of Donald Trump and how he manages to goad the Democratic Party and people in the middle.

00:09:20.000 And I think people just got to get over it.

00:09:21.000 And I tell people, I don't think there's such thing as conservatives anymore.

00:09:24.000 I get people.

00:09:26.000 There's no such thing as conservatives.

00:09:27.000 There's just traditional liberals that aren't crazy.

00:09:31.000 And that seems to get through to people.

00:09:33.000 And I think that people are coming back over to saying, look, this is somebody we want to fix the problem. 0.99

00:09:42.000 Just like you have a plumbing problem, and there's shit everywhere. 0.98

00:09:45.000 Well then, you know, you need to get somebody. 0.99

00:09:47.000 You don't have him staying for dinner.

00:09:48.000 And I say, you know, Donald Trump's not going to come to your bar mitzvah, your son's bar mitzvah.

00:09:52.000 He's certainly not going to come for Thanksgiving.

00:09:54.000 You don't have to invite him.

00:09:55.000 But he's going to clean up.

00:09:57.000 He's going to do that.

00:09:58.000 And you want him to do that.

00:09:59.000 That's 100% right.

00:10:00.000 I mean, that's exactly what I said.

00:10:01.000 I did a debate with Sam Harris, and that's exactly the analogy I used.

00:10:04.000 It's like when I elect a politician, I'm not electing a moral exemplar.

00:10:08.000 I have plenty of people in my life who I look to when I'm looking for, you know, moral ways to live.

00:10:13.000 If I'm looking for a piece of life advice, I'm not going to go to President Trump.

00:10:16.000 When I want somebody to threaten Iran to back down, then I go to President Trump.

00:10:22.000 When I want somebody who's going to make sure that the gas prices aren't too high by drilling more, I go to President Trump.

00:10:27.000 As you say, when you call this whole bizarre notion that we're supposed to look at the president of the United States as though he's a great angelic leader who descends from on high with a halo around his head.

00:10:39.000 We tried that with Barack Obama, and it was terrible because he tried to embody all those qualities. 0.75

00:10:43.000 And it turns out that he was just as venal and corrupt and terrible as anybody in the history of American politics. 0.63

00:10:48.000 But you couldn't criticize him because he had the angel wings on.

00:10:50.000 And so Donald Trump just took all that stuff off.

00:10:52.000 He's like, listen, there ain't going to be no halo.

00:10:53.000 Ain't going to be no angel wings.

00:10:54.000 Here's my tool set.

00:10:57.000 There's the toilet. 0.96

00:10:57.000 Let me at it. 0.96

00:10:59.000 And I think that that's actually like a pretty good way of doing government.

00:11:02.000 I think so, too.

00:11:02.000 And also, it's a way to communicate with people who seem to have a real problem with the character over substance and with the person over policy.

00:11:11.000 And I think Americans are going to have to get over that.

00:11:13.000 And I think they were forced to get over it this time.

00:11:15.000 I mean, I tell this to people.

00:11:16.000 I say, we had people who snuck in, you know, over the border a couple of months ago.

00:11:20.000 They didn't want more people coming in.

00:11:22.000 They were like, hey, I don't want somebody trying to take the job I just took.

00:11:25.000 I just took it an hour ago.

00:11:26.000 I need it.

00:11:27.000 Come on, man.

00:11:27.000 Give me at least a couple of weeks.

00:11:30.000 They lost the Mexican vote.

00:11:33.000 You know, the Democrats.

00:11:34.000 I mean, can you imagine how fast they would have shut down the Haitians from flying into Ohio if they knew they were going to vote for Republicans? 0.69

00:11:41.000 And they would have said, no more, you know.

00:11:44.000 So...

00:11:47.000 It did become a great comedy.

00:11:49.000 It just became a comedy that was too close for most Americans to laugh at.

00:11:52.000 The fact that they were discussing eating cats in Ohio and the fact that somehow Democrats were so offended by the idea that these immigrants were being accused of eating pets.

00:12:05.000 I was there in 1979 in San Francisco when the Vietnamese people came over and they saw they were eating the ducks in Golden Gate Park.

00:12:14.000 Because nobody told them.

00:12:15.000 And that's what they eat.

00:12:17.000 They said they go fishing.

00:12:18.000 They also get ducks.

00:12:19.000 If they see a duck, that's a potential.

00:12:22.000 It had to be an education process.

00:12:24.000 They weren't doing it out of spite.

00:12:28.000 They're doing this out of lunch.

00:12:30.000 Out of a necessity to have lunch.

00:12:32.000 They've got the sauce.

00:12:33.000 They've got the rice patty.

00:12:35.000 They're ready to go.

00:12:36.000 They've got the thin noodles.

00:12:39.000 I found it to be hilarious that people got so upset.

00:12:42.000 That they were accusing these Haitians, whose part of their practice and their religion is animal sacrifice, that they would be accused of this horrible thing.

00:12:50.000 Also, I mean, like, listen, Donald Trump, like, his inflection is hilarious.

00:12:54.000 Okay, my kids walk around the house going, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats.

00:12:58.000 I had my four-year-old yesterday, she has a shirt that says on it, they're eating the dogs. 0.89

00:13:02.000 Like, it's just, like, it's innately the funniest thing, like, this whole race, like, from just a comedic perspective.

00:13:08.000 This race is hysterical. 1.00

00:13:10.000 I said this right after the first Trump-Biden debate.

00:13:12.000 I was talking to actually a foreign leader and the foreign leader was kind of freaking out.

00:13:15.000 I said, you need to understand something about America.

00:13:16.000 Here's how amazing America is in our institutions.

00:13:19.000 We will run two 80-year-old men against one another.

00:13:21.000 One of them will be totally senile.

00:13:22.000 Whichever one of those two men golfs better, we will make president of the United States.

00:13:26.000 He will be introduced at the RNC by Hulk Hogan, who will tear open his shirt to reveal that he's supporting Donald Trump.

00:13:33.000 And then that presidential candidate will get up on stage and ramble for 93 straight minutes, and you will love it because this is America.

00:13:41.000 You know what?

00:13:41.000 You're just going to have to eat it because this is America.

00:13:43.000 Everyone takes these elections as a sign that American weakness, oh, America in disrepair.

00:13:48.000 You know how powerful we are?

00:13:49.000 You know how amazing our institutions are?

00:13:51.000 That's what we could just do for an entire election cycle.

00:13:54.000 And then at the end of it, we're still the most powerful country on Earth.

00:13:56.000 We've got the most powerful military, and don't screw with us.

00:13:59.000 But I will tell you, though, as I agree with you, we've become a worldwide wrestling enterprise of entertainment.

00:14:05.000 At the same time, we really were, Ben, and you would agree with this, I would hope, teetering on the abyss with these elites and...

00:14:14.000 It's a strange aristocracy that seems to be taking over American society, which instead of a Lord or Duke, it was PhD and elite and expert.

00:14:23.000 And these people who were telling us basically who we have to vote for, who we need to vote for.

00:14:30.000 And we really were, you know, once you dig underneath and see some of the bad things that the Biden-Harris What the regime was doing was censorship and silencing Americans and their First Amendment rights.

00:14:44.000 I don't think that's something to be taken lightly.

00:14:47.000 I think they really were in danger of moving us towards, truthfully, a A one-party system like they have in California.

00:14:56.000 And I tell this to people, I say, we're America.

00:14:58.000 We have freedom in America.

00:14:59.000 We're not China.

00:15:00.000 China, they tell you who to vote for. 0.64

00:15:01.000 They get one party in China.

00:15:03.000 Not in America, we get two.

00:15:05.000 Can we at least have two?

00:15:06.000 And what the Democrats were really trying to do for the last four years, I mean, actually for the last, I think, 20 years, was to have a forever Democrat party.

00:15:14.000 And they said, you can have free elections.

00:15:15.000 You can elect whoever, whichever Democrat you want.

00:15:18.000 This one or this one. 0.60

00:15:20.000 And the Republicans, of course, the cowardly Congress, you know, they're happy because 93%, they get elected, they get re-elected, and so they would like to lose gracefully and honorably and shake their finger at them, but never have to actually do anything.

00:15:34.000 And so I think that this was important because I think we were teetering on making America like California.

00:15:41.000 I totally agree.

00:15:42.000 I think we're both California expatriates, right?

00:15:44.000 I spent my entire life in California until the last...

00:15:47.000 We moved in the middle of Black Lives Matter riots and wildfires and the rest of the biblical plagues. 1.00

00:15:52.000 We moved from there to the great free state of Florida.

00:15:55.000 You're in Arizona, as I understand it, which is a state that is increasingly turning red.

00:15:59.000 Donald Trump has turned it back from—it was red.

00:16:01.000 It went kind of purply blue, and now it's turning back red again.

00:16:05.000 And some of that is Donald Trump, and some of that is when you let in 10 million illegal immigrants across borders, including Arizona's border.

00:16:10.000 That has some pretty dire effects on the state of Arizona.

00:16:12.000 What was it that caused you to leave California?

00:16:14.000 I knew that there was a pincher move happening.

00:16:18.000 As soon as Obama in 2013 allowed the governmental agencies to have propaganda in America against Americans in 2013, that was the beginning of, I felt, tyranny coming from the left.

00:16:37.000 I always just assume, because I'm kind of brainwashed like everybody else in California, you just assume the left's always good, and that the right is the problem.

00:16:47.000 And that if problems do come, if there's fascism coming, whatever that is, depending on what the definition of the day is, then it's going to come from the right.

00:16:58.000 Because what happened was, if you grew up in the late 70s, and if the consequential power of the Democrats, it was a mess under Jimmy Carter.

00:17:08.000 It just was.

00:17:08.000 And the thing is, there seemed to be an appeal that the Democrats had for the fellow man to help the average worker.

00:17:16.000 But what the truth is, they will say they'll be behind the average worker when they have no power.

00:17:22.000 But when they do have power, they don't do anything.

00:17:24.000 Obama didn't do anything for the people, and that was such a real turnoff for a lot of people, and people who thought good could come out of that administration, but it clearly didn't.

00:17:34.000 As far as, you know, taking the American public and the goodwill that was given and instead of saying, you know, maybe we're less racist now because we elected a black president two times to exacerbate it and to further, you know, throw gasoline on the flames and say, you know, this has never been just as Douglas Murray says, just when race has never been better in America, they accuse it as never being worse. 0.61

00:18:01.000 So I think that was the time.

00:18:02.000 And then by the time COVID came in, I knew they were going to close society down.

00:18:06.000 I knew that this was not the place to be.

00:18:07.000 I got young kids as well, and I wanted to get them the hell out.

00:18:11.000 And I said, you know, Because California is a dangerous place if you've got little kids.

00:18:16.000 Public school, in the morning, you take your school and drop off a little girl.

00:18:20.000 In the afternoon, you pick up a little boy.

00:18:22.000 you know so that's a problem i mean we were in california just a couple of weeks ago and right there on the street we were we'd had dinner uh and with a couple of friends who are still unfortunately trapped in california and we had dinner i have 24 7 security unfortunately i have to have that so i went down the street one way with my wife my friends went down the street the other way they go about three cars down they're getting into their tesla another car pulls up right in front of them three guys jump out grab my friend pull him out of his car steal his phone steal his wallet steal

00:18:48.000 his keys run around to his wife start taking her jewelry off of her and uh and then she screamed and they realized their time had run and they they ran away i mean it's just like open-air robberies in california I thought you were going to say it.

00:19:02.000 I thought you were going to say it.

00:19:03.000 And that was in a gated community.

00:19:04.000 Exactly.

00:19:05.000 It was on Thursday.

00:19:05.000 It was on 3rd Street and La Cienega, right?

00:19:08.000 I mean, we're not talking about, like, the worst areas of LA here.

00:19:10.000 We're not talking about, like, you're in the heart of East LA or in South Central, which has now been retitled South LA, so that means it's okay now.

00:19:16.000 It's not like you're in Crenshaw or something, like high crime areas of the city.

00:19:18.000 You're talking about, like, a fairly decent area of LA, and it's just been totally trashed.

00:19:24.000 It's amazing what they've done to the state of California, and that caused me to go on the air the next day and say, listen, You think out there, you in political land, you think that Donald Trump, he says offensive things and he says mean things and you don't like his tweets.

00:19:36.000 The normal American, you know what we care about?

00:19:38.000 We care about not getting robbed on the street.

00:19:40.000 We care about our gas prices going down.

00:19:41.000 We care about inflation not eating up our entire checkbook.

00:19:45.000 We care about mortgages going...

00:19:46.000 We care about no wars.

00:19:48.000 Basic, practical things are the things we care about. 0.99

00:19:50.000 And the worse you make it, and then insist that actually we're stupid for not understanding what you're doing, then the more we want to vote for the other guy. 0.98

00:19:57.000 And the crazier he is, the more we want to vote for him a little bit. 0.99

00:20:00.000 When I heard Bruce Springsteen at a diner, trying to be like an average guy, looking like an average guy, knowing that he had sold his catalog for $800 million like 36 months ago, you're not an average guy.

00:20:15.000 You are protected.

00:20:17.000 Oprah, you live in not only a gated community, You live in the inside of the gated, gated community.

00:20:24.000 You know, like in the old days of Jack Nicholson, there'd be a party and then there's a VIP section, then there's a VIP, VIP, and then there's one room, the one guy in it is Jack Nicholson.

00:20:31.000 Well, this is the same with Oprah.

00:20:33.000 Oprah has her own spot. 1.00

00:20:34.000 And then like, like, cause I lived up in Calabasas and then we were in a gated community, but then there was another part that was like Kim Kardashian.

00:20:40.000 She was in there.

00:20:41.000 That's another, you couldn't get in there, you know, for, I hope that the celebrities trying to shame people and scare people and say it's the end of democracy.

00:21:02.000 You may never get to vote again. 1.00

00:21:03.000 It was just so stupid. 1.00

00:21:05.000 And it doesn't, they don't know what it's like. 1.00

00:21:07.000 I mean, like when Jimmy Kimmel's crying about like, you Demi, you Trump support, you guys voted, you made a mistake too, which is pathetic. 0.99

00:21:14.000 What a wuss he's turned into. 0.98

00:21:16.000 But the fact of the matter is we get two choices and we're gonna choose somebody to date.

00:21:21.000 And I said this, I said, if avocados go up to, you know, if the food prices go up 26%, it's not gonna bother Jimmy Kimmel and his family or Oprah's family, but the average person driving their kid to school, And then having to drive to work and then get groceries and having to think, I don't know if I can do both this week.

00:21:36.000 And that's a real issue.

00:21:38.000 And I said this, if avocado prices go up to $5,000 in avocado, Oprah and Jamie Kimmel are just going to have $5,000 guacamole.

00:21:46.000 Yep, that's exactly right.

00:21:48.000 We'll get some more on that in a moment.

00:21:49.000 First, let's talk about something that affects all of us responsible, hardworking Americans.

00:21:53.000 Taxes.

00:21:53.000 The October 15th deadline has passed.

00:21:55.000 Are you prepared for what's coming?

00:21:57.000 Do you have back taxes?

00:21:57.000 Are your tax returns still unfiled?

00:21:59.000 Miss the deadline to file for an extension?

00:22:01.000 Now that October 15th is behind us, the IRS may be ramping up enforcement.

00:22:04.000 And let me tell you, they do not play around.

00:22:06.000 You could face wage garnishments, frozen bank accounts, We're good to go.

00:22:31.000 Their team of professionals will work tirelessly to protect your assets and find the best solution for your unique situation.

00:22:36.000 So here's what you need to do.

00:22:37.000 For a complimentary consultation, call today, 1-800-958-1000, or visit tnusa.com slash Shapiro.

00:22:45.000 That's 1-800-958-1000, or visit tnusa.com slash Shapiro today to let the IRS take advantage of you and get the help you need with Tax Network USA. I want to ask you about the impact that you think Hollywood has had on all of this.

00:22:57.000 Because one of the things that I think about the Trump phenomenon is that there's a lot of talk about the economic outreach that Trump has done to blue-collar communities and working people.

00:23:06.000 But when I go and I speak in these communities, and I spent a lot of time on the road this election cycle going and talking everywhere from the southern border campaigning with Senator Cruz to now Senator Moreno up in Ohio and all the way up to the tip top of Ohio.

00:23:18.000 And the thing that you see when you do this is that it's really not about government subsidies.

00:23:24.000 It really isn't about a hatred of trade.

00:23:26.000 What it really is is they're sick of being told that their church is bad.

00:23:30.000 They're sick of being told that their culture is bad.

00:23:32.000 And so to me, it seems like a lot of this is a rebellion against the moral values that they see mostly coming from Hollywood, a Hollywood that insists that the morality of, you know, moonlight is the morality that we all must, you know, love.

00:23:47.000 Like, the thing that we really need is a shape-of-water lecture about how capitalism is bad and about how traditional churchgoing is bad and I think people just rebelled against that. 0.94

00:23:59.000 They said, okay, all of you schmucks are going to P. Diddy's white parties and then telling us that we're bad for having gone to church this Sunday. 0.97

00:24:06.000 Like, here's a giant middle finger. 0.99

00:24:08.000 It's a giant orange middle finger just for you.

00:24:10.000 I feel like it's been the thing since about 2015, 2016. Well, you have a group of people and it isn't any coincidence that every place that the Democrats and Kamala Harris won had no voter ID. I mean, there's no coincidence that that happened.

00:24:29.000 You have people that are getting tired of being told that they're racist when they're not racist.

00:24:33.000 You're getting tired of telling people that they Whether they know it or not, they're in a system of white supremacy.

00:24:41.000 It just doesn't fly anymore.

00:24:44.000 You can't tell them they're racist when they know they're not.

00:24:47.000 You can't make them feel bad about that and then force things upon them.

00:24:52.000 This is something that I'm still getting my hands on, is this kind of lecturing.

00:25:00.000 Oprah crapping on the average worker, the average family who is struggling because they're not voting the way she wants.

00:25:07.000 This is the same system that allowed her to become a billionaire. 0.70

00:25:10.000 And unlike other countries, like in England, they don't root for people to become billionaires.

00:25:13.000 Here we do.

00:25:15.000 If you become a billionaire, we're going to applaud you.

00:25:18.000 You go, girl, because we know that this is a system that allows that potentiality. 0.91

00:25:22.000 And so for you to crap on it, and to crap on people who are just trying to get by, and just going month to month, paycheck to paycheck, and that's getting harder and harder, and you seem to think that there's other things more important than that. 0.97

00:25:33.000 And by exaggerating a situation which isn't true, that Donald Trump is going to turn this into a dictatorship in a fascist state, I think the belittling was just vomitous at a certain point. 0.96

00:25:47.000 I think that if you look at where the Democrats have come and what they've tried to do, and you just have to look at California as what they would like for the rest of the country.

00:25:57.000 There's not one aspect of our life that they don't want to interfere with.

00:26:01.000 Not one.

00:26:02.000 In schools, they passed Gavin Newsom, who...

00:26:06.000 I just don't understand how people...

00:26:10.000 Think that the state of California thinks, I'm going to co-parent with the state of California.

00:26:15.000 It's like, no, you're out.

00:26:17.000 You don't have nothing to do with it.

00:26:18.000 The fact that the teachers, that they passed a law and legislation that the school and the teachers could keep information away from the parents...

00:26:26.000 That, to me, is borderline criminal.

00:26:29.000 I mean, so...

00:26:30.000 And then, you know, they also had legislation that didn't pass, but was brought up in committee in California to stop your car from...

00:26:38.000 To not have cars allowed in California to go more than 80 miles an hour.

00:26:41.000 And I don't know, like, hey, listen, I don't want to drive 80 miles an hour in a school zone, but if I'm trying to get to San Francisco...

00:26:46.000 Uh, from Los Angeles and it's three o'clock in the morning.

00:26:49.000 I'm going to go a hundred.

00:26:50.000 And if I get a ticket, I'm sorry, but, um, that's just it.

00:26:53.000 That's my choice.

00:26:54.000 Maybe it's a bad choice, but it's up to me and the government.

00:26:57.000 They just keep growing.

00:26:59.000 They also want to change your stoves and tell you what kind of stove, tell you what kind of car to drive.

00:27:04.000 At what point is it?

00:27:05.000 Lay off of me.

00:27:06.000 We don't want a, we don't want government to be that big.

00:27:08.000 And I think that they, they finally, the voters, I've said enough with this, enough with the colony names, enough with boys, failed narcissistic male athletes in girls' sports, taking refuge in girls' sports.

00:27:20.000 Enough of that.

00:27:21.000 So I think Americans rejected this soundly.

00:27:24.000 And I think what you're going to have, if you take a look at history, and I think you might agree with this, and I definitely think you would hope for this, the last time we had three one-term presidents, if you go, you know, Ford, well, Nixon, Ford, Carter, The last time we had that, now we have Trump, Biden, and then another Trump.

00:27:46.000 That's why I think it's wonderful that he's not going to seek re-election or because he's going to now have better people around him and put in policies for his legacy.

00:27:54.000 I think you might get lucky here and we can have a Trump Vance, Vance.

00:28:00.000 And then you'd have a Democratic Party that'll be able to come back to lose their extremists and realize if they want to be a party that's going to get elected at the highest level, they're going to have to come back from this crazy lunacy and do like what the Clinton administration, which was, we are pro-death penalty.

00:28:18.000 We're C-super.

00:28:20.000 It depends on what the definition of the word is.

00:28:23.000 We were in the middle of the road.

00:28:25.000 You got to vote for us.

00:28:27.000 And I'm hopeful that that's what's gonna happen, and that's what we need to happen.

00:28:31.000 Stabilize America, keep out the crazies, and the Democrats come back to a place of normalcy.

00:28:35.000 So I wanted to ask you about how things have gone for you in Hollywood since you've become more overtly political.

00:28:40.000 So back in 2014, I wrote a book called Primetime Propaganda, where I actually went and I spoke with the creators of pretty much every major television show over the last 50 years.

00:28:48.000 And some of it was pretty shocking, because when I went and did these interviews, I asked them if I wanted to write a book about the legacy of TV. They didn't know who I was at the time.

00:28:56.000 I was not nearly as well-known as I am now.

00:28:58.000 I wore my Harvard Law baseball cap, and my last name was Shapiro, so they immediately assumed that I was basically a communist, which in 90% of cases is actually true.

00:29:06.000 And so I would...

00:29:08.000 I will tell you, they took you too lightly.

00:29:10.000 And that's why you decimated them.

00:29:12.000 Because they didn't think that...

00:29:15.000 Well, first of all, they're lazy in Hollywood. 0.99

00:29:18.000 They're all lazy. 0.98

00:29:19.000 And they're just intellectually lazy because nobody challenges them. 0.96

00:29:21.000 Because that's one of the reasons why Kamala lost. 1.00

00:29:24.000 Is that Kamala never ran for federal office.

00:29:26.000 She just always was in California.

00:29:27.000 She was in that bubble.

00:29:29.000 So she was never challenged.

00:29:30.000 That's why they were so desperate to keep her from being challenged by anybody because she didn't have the goods.

00:29:35.000 So when you went there to California, you had the goods.

00:29:38.000 You were prepared and you tore them apart.

00:29:40.000 And they just, they're intellectually lazy in California.

00:29:43.000 And as you saw, they weren't able to...

00:29:45.000 So in that particular case, I recorded all these interviews, and many of them in the interviews would openly say things like, I won't hire a conservative.

00:29:52.000 If I find out that somebody is conservative in Hollywood, I'll fire them.

00:29:54.000 I remember this created a major scandal actually at the Directors Guild because one of the directors said this, and our friend Lionel Chetwin, he came out really firing over it.

00:30:04.000 And it was a big deal at the time.

00:30:06.000 There's always been this sort of major issue inside of Hollywood.

00:30:10.000 Can conservatives work?

00:30:11.000 Can conservatives not work?

00:30:12.000 Obviously, I know people on both sides of that particular argument.

00:30:15.000 But it certainly makes it harder.

00:30:17.000 Let's put it that way.

00:30:18.000 People who have worked consistently, you've worked consistently.

00:30:20.000 Patty Heaton's worked consistently.

00:30:22.000 But when I've talked to Patty about this, Patty said at one point, and she was working on a major network show at the time, she said, listen, I don't feel like I'm getting a lot of pushback on my politics.

00:30:30.000 And then after I talked to her, she called back...

00:30:33.000 Maybe a few days later, and she said, I called around.

00:30:35.000 I found out that over the years I've lost five specific jobs thanks to my politics.

00:30:38.000 So what do you make of the sort of anti-conservative discrimination?

00:30:43.000 Ben, I'm out.

00:30:44.000 I'm gonna get hired in Hollywood.

00:30:45.000 But there's some things more important than getting hired in Hollywood.

00:30:48.000 And that is, I felt that we were close to having our rights taken away.

00:30:54.000 And I was close.

00:30:55.000 I mean, when you have not just the presidential candidate, who maybe she doesn't know, but I find it difficult for her to believe that she wouldn't know what our First Amendment, that is a guaranteed right.

00:31:06.000 And then Tim Wall's paper, who's ended up being such a gift to the Republican Party.

00:31:11.000 That she chose him and not Shapiro.

00:31:14.000 They would say that they would equate freedom of speech like a driver's license and they called it a privilege.

00:31:21.000 A privilege can be revoked.

00:31:23.000 If you drink and drive, you can have your driver's license rightly taken away.

00:31:28.000 However, if you drink and talk, you cannot have your speech taken away because that is a guaranteed First Amendment right.

00:31:34.000 So that was part of the encroachment that was happening.

00:31:37.000 And I think that was down the line.

00:31:39.000 And I think when they were able to really work with tech companies, including Google, we don't even know what they're doing with Google and CIA's backdoor and how that is working.

00:31:50.000 But when you actually saw the Twitter files, and thank God for Elon Musk, but you know that the Biden-Harris administration was working through these companies, I mean, literally within 48 hours, To silence Americans.

00:32:02.000 And they weren't going to stop that.

00:32:04.000 They would have, I believe, completely gone after Elon Musk and destroyed Twitter, destroyed his business.

00:32:10.000 Because that's what they do.

00:32:11.000 It's just government will keep growing until you beat it down with a stick.

00:32:15.000 And I think this was the beating that they needed.

00:32:18.000 I mean, there's a very famous actor, I won't say his name, but he was a lead on Apple TV on a big TV series just this year.

00:32:26.000 People can figure out who it is if they want to.

00:32:28.000 He was told that he was not allowed to say anything on social media or they weren't going to hire him.

00:32:33.000 He was told that.

00:32:34.000 Now that has to stop.

00:32:36.000 That is illegal.

00:32:38.000 And that is a lawsuit.

00:32:39.000 That is a billion dollar lawsuit that should happen.

00:32:42.000 But at the same time, you want to get work.

00:32:44.000 You know, every actor's out there trying to get work.

00:32:46.000 But here's what's happening.

00:32:47.000 You're having a shrinking of the traditional studio system right now.

00:32:50.000 Because they've screwed it up.

00:32:52.000 They screwed up Hollywood. 1.00

00:32:54.000 Not only was there in the pandemic, but then the stupid idiots at the Screen Actors Guild Union, and I was one of those idiots on the union, but going for a strike after the pandemic just to destroy the average person on the crew and the average actor, it was beyond stupid. 1.00

00:33:11.000 And then Disney making this woke crap to the point where my wife and I We got little kids. 1.00

00:33:17.000 Both were under 10 a couple of years ago. 0.97

00:33:19.000 Now, we had to watch the Disney shows before we let the kids watch it, just in case this woke crap that there isn't some character that is indoctrinating our kids. 0.93

00:33:29.000 So they have lost. 0.91

00:33:30.000 They lost $2 billion two years ago.

00:33:33.000 And then they had to fire...

00:33:35.000 Chappick, which was a good firing, and then bring back Bob Iger.

00:33:39.000 So at a certain point, are you gonna do business or are you gonna just continue to lose business?

00:33:43.000 And so you see the people who were able to look at the same stuff that you and I were, if you're any, have whatever inside information.

00:33:49.000 It didn't have to be too inside, but you saw that the Democrats are gonna get spanked this time. 1.00

00:33:54.000 Jeff Bezos saw it.

00:33:55.000 Mark Zuckerberg wanted to get out ahead of it as soon as he could and apologize for allowing his site to be censored by the government.

00:34:04.000 And Jeff Bezos not supporting Kamala Harris and giving her endorsement.

00:34:08.000 That's a big...

00:34:08.000 I mean, so there is some correction happening.

00:34:10.000 And at this point...

00:34:12.000 The podcast is something, and independent people like you, The Daily Wire, the reason why you guys were able to become a big business, successful business, because you weren't trying to tell people how to think.

00:34:23.000 You were just providing another viewpoint that was rational, that was logical, and that was more aligned with their families.

00:34:30.000 That's going to continue to grow, and if they want to be in business, they're going to have to come over to our side of the fence.

00:34:35.000 There's more on this in a moment.

00:34:36.000 First, let me ask you a question.

00:34:37.000 Do you trust your internet service provider?

00:34:39.000 Well, you probably shouldn't, because depending on where you live, ISPs may be required to keep logs of your online activity, just in case the government would love to take a peek.

00:34:47.000 In the U.S., it's even worse.

00:34:48.000 ISPs can legally sell your browsing history to whomever they want.

00:34:51.000 So what can you do about it?

00:34:52.000 Well, the obvious solution is to get a VPN. The one I use is ExpressVPN.

00:34:56.000 It's an app that reroutes my online traffic through encrypted servers, so my ISP can't get their hands on it, neither can data brokers or any other third parties.

00:35:03.000 For this to work, of course, you actually have to trust your VPN. After all, you're just transferring trust from your ISP to your VPN provider.

00:35:08.000 So why do I trust ExpressVPN?

00:35:10.000 Well, any reliable VPN gets a certain number of data requests from law enforcement and other government entities.

00:35:15.000 ExpressVPN receives over 300 of those requests in the past year alone.

00:35:18.000 Zero of them resulted in any of their customers' data being exposed.

00:35:22.000 Zero.

00:35:23.000 Go read their transparency report on their website.

00:35:25.000 It's fascinating.

00:35:26.000 To be clear, it's not that they don't comply with law enforcement requests.

00:35:29.000 They comply as much as they possibly can.

00:35:31.000 But you can't hand over what you don't actually have.

00:35:33.000 And ExpressVPN simply doesn't have any of their customers' activity logs thanks to a specially engineered server architecture that runs on volatile memory.

00:35:40.000 Nothing is ever saved to disk.

00:35:41.000 It's private by design.

00:35:42.000 ExpressVPN works on all your devices.

00:35:44.000 It's easy to use.

00:35:45.000 You tap one button, you're connected.

00:35:46.000 Right now, you can take advantage of ExpressVPN's Black Friday Cyber Monday offer and get the absolute best VPN deal you will find all year long.

00:35:53.000 Use my special link, expressvpn.com slash ben, to get four extra months with a 12-month plan or six extra months with a 24-month plan totally free.

00:36:00.000 That's expressvpn.com slash ben to get an extra four or even six months of ExpressVPN for free.

00:36:05.000 Do you think it's going to be easier for people who may be middle of the road or leaning conservative to actually start coming out of the woodwork in Hollywood?

00:36:12.000 I mean, you and I know a bunch of people.

00:36:14.000 I mean, I know a lot of people in Hollywood who definitely voted for Donald Trump.

00:36:17.000 Definitely would not say openly that they voted for Donald Trump for exactly the reasons you say, that they'll lose work.

00:36:21.000 These are working actors who, and many of them very, very famous, and are still terrified that if they ever betray their politics to the people around them, that somehow this will have massive career ramifications.

00:36:33.000 Do you think that's going to get easier, or do you think that the system just continues to break because the people at the top can't let go?

00:36:39.000 I think it's going to take another generation.

00:36:41.000 It's just like when Moses took the tribe out to the desert.

00:36:46.000 You're going to just have to get that slave mentality out of you. 1.00

00:36:50.000 I think it's the same thing with the liberals and the Democrats.

00:36:53.000 They're going to have to get that constrictive.

00:36:56.000 It's really what it is.

00:36:57.000 It's vindictiveness. 0.96

00:36:58.000 The left is absolutely crazy vindictive. 0.98

00:37:02.000 It is an ugliness. 0.98

00:37:03.000 We've all experienced it and we've seen it.

00:37:06.000 They'll start yelling at you and it is, as you know, more than probably any American, the worst form of debate is just somebody shouting you down.

00:37:15.000 They're not trying to beat you with ideas.

00:37:16.000 They're not trying to dissuade you with something that could improve your foundational thinking.

00:37:21.000 They are not critical thinkers.

00:37:22.000 They just are simply yellers.

00:37:24.000 And we, as a society, cannot go down the road any further with trying to stop our liberties and our free speech to calm down the irrational.

00:37:34.000 And that's what they've become.

00:37:36.000 Will it get easier?

00:37:37.000 Yes.

00:37:37.000 I mean, but it's gonna take people, like I'm starting a media company, and I can't believe how many people are joining in and are making this a real media company, because I wanna be a centrist.

00:37:47.000 If you're a liberal, if you're a conservative, you are welcome, and we are not going to do anything by the party line.

00:37:54.000 We're gonna do stuff that's rational, that's talent-based, but it's also American-based.

00:38:00.000 That was such a pleasure to do your first animated show because it was about America.

00:38:08.000 You weren't indoctrinating people, but the fact that you're saying good things about America to liberals and to the Democratic Party, it was as if you were saying something heretical to say something great about the country and our accomplishments.

00:38:22.000 So the attack on Western civilization, which I think is a bigger issue, which is the Democrats make that gigantic mistake of wanting this one-world government, this elitist system where they have control.

00:38:35.000 But they make the mistake of thinking it's going to be the American Democratic Party that's going to be in control of this one-world order, and it's going to be China. 0.52

00:38:42.000 And that is a gigantic error on their part.

00:38:45.000 And thankfully, I think this was a gigantic...

00:38:50.000 It was a big fence to stop the further erosion of the American way of life and having Marxism come in disguised as this woke set of nice manners when it's just communism dressed up as social justice.

00:39:05.000 So, obviously, you've been doing comedy for decades at this point.

00:39:09.000 Has there ever been such a fraught time in comedy?

00:39:11.000 I mean, you see people like Dave Chappelle getting shouted down, or you see Tony Hinchcliffe being made the centerpiece of the entire presidential campaign for the last week because he makes a bunch of Tony Hinchcliffe jokes.

00:39:22.000 At Madison Square Garden.

00:39:23.000 And listen, you can make the case, I've made the case myself, that, you know, maybe in the closing days of a campaign, you don't want to trot out an insult comedian to go after particular ethnic groups, you know, like at the very last moment of the campaign.

00:39:33.000 It might not be like your chief, if you're like chief political consultant for the Trump campaign, you're not like, okay, you know, we got to make a closing argument.

00:39:40.000 Let's look around.

00:39:40.000 Tony Hinchcliffe, come on down.

00:39:42.000 It's a weird move, but... 0.65

00:39:44.000 Let's bring the guy that craps on everybody.

00:39:47.000 But the sort of outsized outrage where it's like, oh my god, Tony Hinchcliffe, who does insult comedy, that's what he does. 0.80

00:39:53.000 I mean, he roasts people.

00:39:54.000 Oh my god, he roasted more people.

00:39:57.000 I'm bewildered by the sort of argument that this is in and of itself a great horror.

00:40:02.000 Well, Tony made a mistake, though, in thinking that people knew about the past history and the garbage containers in Puerto Rico.

00:40:09.000 And it's like, sometimes you can be too insular.

00:40:13.000 But Robert Kennedy called me and said, I don't know why we should have had you come out last night.

00:40:18.000 You know, there's 300,000 Puerto Rican votes out there. 0.58

00:40:21.000 But I don't think Tony, I mean, you don't want a comedian.

00:40:24.000 You don't want to do an own goal.

00:40:26.000 And that's what, like, Mark Cuban, who's a...

00:40:28.000 These are not people who need to be going out.

00:40:31.000 You need to have people who've been two, three presidential.

00:40:35.000 Carvel never makes a mistake on a grand level.

00:40:38.000 I mean, yes, he's not on a show of other entrepreneurs that's very popular, but Mark Cuban is not qualified.

00:40:46.000 As someone, he's not disciplined enough to not make an own goal.

00:40:50.000 And that was another one of the final own goals there, was saying that Trump doesn't surround himself with intelligent women. 0.99

00:40:57.000 I mean, that just goes right down the garbage and deplorable route. 0.99

00:41:01.000 So, you know, I think that people saw it really for what it was.

00:41:08.000 Now, as far as comedy, I think it will correct, but I think it'll be a while.

00:41:13.000 I mean, historically, you'd have to really go back to where comedy was silenced.

00:41:18.000 Probably after the Kennedy assassination, you had one of the most prominent comedians, Mort Saul.

00:41:23.000 And I talk about this in my book, You Can Do It, which is out now.

00:41:28.000 We talk about comedy.

00:41:31.000 And Mort Sahl was, after the Warren Commission came out, he questioned, rightly so, the Warren Commission's findings.

00:41:40.000 And because of that, that wasn't where the term conspiracy theorist originated, but it was the first time that the CIA used it as a roadmap to silence people who were going against the then-government narrative about the Warren Report and people questioning the Kennedy assassination.

00:41:58.000 So that was a time where comedy got silenced.

00:42:02.000 Where do I think it's going now?

00:42:03.000 I remember Steve Martin talking years ago, like literally 40 years ago, about what happened after Watergate and after Vietnam.

00:42:14.000 People just wanted to get silly and forget about everything.

00:42:17.000 And I think after this time, after the pandemic, which was really, I mean, we're not going to really know the ramifications, what happened to the students who were locked down.

00:42:26.000 And, you know, for the African American reading skills that took decades to get up to where they were on par with everyone else, and for that to collapse was very sad for educators.

00:42:38.000 My mom was a school teacher for 30 years, a public school teacher. 0.99

00:42:42.000 We don't know what's going to happen with it, but I do think that now there is a chance that That we'll be able to have some normalcy in comedy.

00:42:50.000 And people are going to have to attack the power.

00:42:52.000 I mean, we're going to have to see what the Republic's going to do.

00:42:54.000 And then, I don't know if I have an act anymore.

00:42:56.000 Because my whole act, the last couple of years, was just making fun of the wonderful material that was provided by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the rest of the Democrats.

00:43:04.000 So, let's get to some of the stuff that you talk about in your book.

00:43:07.000 You can do it, or I can't do an impression of you.

00:43:10.000 You can do it!

00:43:11.000 You can do it, man!

00:43:14.000 Because you can do it, Speak Your Mind America, which just came out recently.

00:43:17.000 So you sort of give over how you got into this industry in the first place.

00:43:22.000 So how does one go about becoming one of the most famous comedic actors of his generation?

00:43:27.000 Well, thank you.

00:43:28.000 I just think that there's...

00:43:30.000 I was very lucky because I was in San Francisco, and we had a guy there, Robin Williams, who was so talented.

00:43:37.000 He was literally like...

00:43:40.000 This bright, shining...

00:43:42.000 You couldn't deny that talent.

00:43:44.000 Because there were some other good comedians up there who would go, okay, we're good with that guy.

00:43:49.000 And so they plucked him, Hollywood.

00:43:51.000 And then they plucked the next guy, who was another brilliant guy.

00:43:55.000 Probably the best comedian ever come out of San Francisco was Dana Carvey.

00:43:59.000 And then he got plucked out and got to Saturday Night Live.

00:44:01.000 And then I guess I was up there too.

00:44:04.000 Well, maybe this guy.

00:44:05.000 Yeah.

00:44:06.000 But San Francisco was, and that's what was very interesting about a liberal city.

00:44:12.000 At that time, a liberal city which wasn't in power, because we were at that point sad because Los Angeles got all the businesses moved.

00:44:21.000 I remember there was Planters Peanuts moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

00:44:25.000 And the whole town was like, no, we're losing business.

00:44:28.000 They already have the weather.

00:44:29.000 They have the supermodels. 0.99

00:44:31.000 They got all the TV shows.

00:44:32.000 We have nothing up here.

00:44:33.000 We have the last place 49ers, the last place San Francisco Giants.

00:44:36.000 So it was literally like a depression up there.

00:44:38.000 So at the time, though, that kind of downtrodden liberalism created a very welcoming thing for comedians who were trying to do something different, as I was back in the early 80s, late 70s.

00:44:53.000 And then we kind of came into something interesting, whereas there was an explosion of comedy.

00:44:59.000 Not that it was all great.

00:45:00.000 I mean, Jerry Seinfeld talks about, like, Jerry Seinfeld says, in 1975...

00:45:05.000 There were 40 comedians, and 8 of them were good.

00:45:08.000 In 1985, there were 4,000 comedians, and 8 of them were good.

00:45:16.000 So, I mean, I think that Jay Leno took me aside and said, you know, how much time you got, kid?

00:45:21.000 I was driving him in my car to gigs when he would come into town.

00:45:25.000 How much time you got, kid?

00:45:26.000 And I said, I got about, you know, eight minutes.

00:45:28.000 Good.

00:45:28.000 You know, you got eight minutes.

00:45:30.000 Everybody said, I got two hours of comedy material, you know?

00:45:32.000 Who wants to hear two hours of comedy material?

00:45:35.000 Either have five minutes to kill every time, everywhere you go, or you have nothing.

00:45:38.000 So I spent the next eight months working on those five minutes, and then eight months after that, I was on David Letterman, then I got on HBO. So, I mean, David Spade, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, or maybe Chris Rock had more material, but we basically had 20 really good minutes.

00:45:52.000 That was enough.

00:45:53.000 That's all you need.

00:45:54.000 Who wants to hear more than that?

00:45:55.000 That's all you needed in LA. And then you get on Saturday Night Live and it's like a rocket.

00:46:00.000 You don't even know what happened.

00:46:01.000 You have like one day you're completely unknown, the next day you're You know, buying milk in a grocery store and people are doing your bits.

00:46:10.000 Ben, the Benster, Benarama, all right, Ben, buying milk.

00:46:14.000 And then she's like, wow, I think they're doing me.

00:46:16.000 And I just did that.

00:46:18.000 And then you get movies, but there's no real career guidance, you know?

00:46:23.000 I mean, I didn't know what to do or what not to do.

00:46:26.000 And it was great.

00:46:28.000 The one great thing about being cancelled or whatever has happened to me, I got to go back and do what I started out doing, which I don't think I ever really finished, was really coming up with a really good stand-up, the craft of stand-up.

00:46:42.000 That's why I never wanted to do it, because unless you're doing it full-time, I mean, you can't.

00:46:47.000 I mean, Chris Rock was the one who talked me to go back into it.

00:46:50.000 Adam Sandler, too.

00:46:50.000 But Chris Rock, who was, you know, the greatest comedian of our generation.

00:46:54.000 And he said, you know, you got to go back and do it.

00:46:57.000 You could be the best at this.

00:47:00.000 And I said, I don't even know what we talk about.

00:47:01.000 He's just talking about what we talk about every morning because we were doing grown-ups at the time.

00:47:04.000 And then I took him up on it.

00:47:07.000 And he was a real good supporter.

00:47:09.000 And he doesn't align with me politically, but we know good jokes when we hear them.

00:47:15.000 And then I really freed me because the interesting thing is when they try to cancel you, It is a really interesting thing.

00:47:22.000 I don't know how else to describe it, but when they do go after you, and they go after your pocketbook and your family, and you think you may never work again, it reminds me of what Alan Watts talks about, a great British philosopher.

00:47:37.000 He said there was a Japanese pilot who was a kamikaze pilot that's crashing his plane.

00:47:44.000 And this is it.

00:47:45.000 And he's going to crash his plane.

00:47:47.000 And so he said he knew he was going to die.

00:47:49.000 And the release that happened by the time it was all over with.

00:47:53.000 He said, what was I ever worrying about anything in life?

00:47:56.000 It's all over.

00:47:56.000 It doesn't matter any of it.

00:47:57.000 He said that rush of freedom.

00:48:00.000 His wing got blown off and then he spun, spun, spun, spun and landed in the ocean and survived.

00:48:04.000 And he went on to become a Zen Buddhist monk and to relay these stories and that idea of Zazen, he called it.

00:48:12.000 So in a much, much, much smaller way, I did feel like when they try to cancel you and you survive, you do get emboldened and to go, well, what do I really want to do?

00:48:22.000 What do I really want to say?

00:48:23.000 And I'm not going to be fearful anymore.

00:48:25.000 And so if I've helped people be slightly less fearful, if I was able to be a voice for people who didn't feel like they could critique Hollywood, you know, because I said, you know, earlier, I said, you know, when Hillary lost, I said, I haven't seen the Democrats just pissed off since we freed the slaves.

00:48:41.000 And that went boom a while.

00:48:43.000 And then, you know, when Hillary When Newsom wasn't, when they tried to get rid of him, when they tried to recall Newsom, and it was so pathetically sad because, like, here's a chance.

00:48:55.000 Let's vote him out. 0.95

00:48:56.000 But then it's just like an abused spouse.

00:48:59.000 You know, Ben, they finally get, I'm not taking this anymore.

00:49:01.000 I'm calling the cops on you.

00:49:03.000 And by the time they call, the woman calls the police. 1.00

00:49:05.000 And then by the time the police come...

00:49:07.000 Stay away from my husband.

00:49:08.000 He loved me.

00:49:09.000 I love him.

00:49:10.000 There was something that happened.

00:49:12.000 And so that's why they got re-elected again.

00:49:13.000 And I said this. 1.00

00:49:15.000 I said, Californians would vote for a bowl of shit if it had a D next to it. 1.00

00:49:20.000 And then that, you know, I guess that put the final nail on my Hollywood career. 0.99

00:49:25.000 So, yeah, obviously you have the book.

00:49:28.000 You have this media company.

00:49:29.000 So what are the big projects that you're looking forward to doing now?

00:49:31.000 Well, I'm going to work with a really terrific broadcaster from England, Andrew Doyle.

00:49:37.000 Did you know Andrew Doyle from GB News?

00:49:40.000 He's coming over.

00:49:41.000 His producing partner for GB News is also coming over, Martin Gurley.

00:49:47.000 And the best comedy writer in England, I don't know if he wants me to say his name now, but he's going to be coming over, Graham Linehan.

00:49:55.000 I'm just going to say it.

00:49:56.000 Graham, you're going to have to deal with it.

00:49:58.000 And he's one of the best writers ever.

00:50:00.000 I mean, BAFTA winning best comedy writer.

00:50:02.000 He is the best comedy writer in England.

00:50:04.000 And so we're going to start shows here in Arizona.

00:50:08.000 And I think we're going to do, and I think what's going to have to happen in the studios, independent producers are the ones who are going to be taking the risks and providing content for people that people are going to want to watch.

00:50:19.000 Content that's for everybody that isn't trying to indoctrinate people with this woke nonsense.

00:50:27.000 So that's it, you know, in a nutshell.

00:50:30.000 And I will say that the stand-up tour has been really educational and fun because that's the truth.

00:50:36.000 The audience will tell you the truth, what they laugh at.

00:50:38.000 And it was nice to see this happen because honestly, Ben, traveling around the country, as I'm sure you have too, there was a stress level that I've never seen in Americans.

00:50:49.000 I felt they were about ready to crack.

00:50:51.000 I felt they were so worried and I feel a real sense of, I wouldn't say joy, I would say a sense of relief.

00:51:03.000 Thank goodness. 0.99

00:51:04.000 And that's the kind of, when you try to scare people for years and try to make them feel bad, try to call them racist, white supremacist, try to make them disparage them and call them garbage and deplorable and that their women aren't intelligent or smart. 0.99

00:51:20.000 It beats them down. 0.99

00:51:21.000 And this was a real rejection of that narcissistic name-calling.

00:51:27.000 And hopefully the Democrats will, or maybe they won't, hopefully they won't wake up to it and they'll keep losing.

00:51:32.000 What are your thoughts?

00:51:34.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that it's going to take a little while in the wilderness.

00:51:36.000 You're starting to see this battle play out now where the heads of the Democratic Party, who obviously have a stake in saying they did nothing wrong, are fighting some of the people who have been outside.

00:51:45.000 And so it's almost a tripartite battle.

00:51:47.000 You have sort of the establishment of the Democratic Party, which feels that it did a great job.

00:51:51.000 And then they are split between the wokest and the people who kind of want to do the Carvillian reset, the sort of Democratic Leadership Council circa 1990 reset where they figure out what they did wrong.

00:52:00.000 It's going to take a while for them to hash that out, especially because they don't have sort of a charismatic leader to fill in all the gaps for them.

00:52:08.000 I think the answer on the Republican side, by the way, is that there is the possibility of Republicans and conservatives and everybody who's part of the Trump coalition thinking that the referendum wasn't About Trump, it was sort of a justification for everything Republicans have ever said.

00:52:22.000 I think you see this usually in party politics, where Obama was a unique political figure.

00:52:26.000 Everybody on the left sort of assumed that because he was popular, that meant everything they were doing was popular, and it turned out that wasn't true at all.

00:52:33.000 And I think the right, you could see something pretty similar, where it turns out that Trump has a unique draw, he's a unique character in American life, and that that's not actually quite duplicable, that you can't just shove anybody else into that seat and then magically get the same sort of response from the American public.

00:52:45.000 public, you're not going to get low propensity voters to show up for, you know, a J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio or whomever else.

00:52:51.000 And that's going to be a new challenge.

00:52:52.000 You're going to have to have somebody arrested 37 times or 37 convictions, felony, felony, felony New York City convictions by an impartial, democratically insane jury.

00:53:03.000 And then you're going to have to have those seven convictions.

00:53:05.000 And then you're going to have to have somebody who's almost murdered in public.

00:53:09.000 And then that was that was the thing like why.

00:53:12.000 What the Republicans really need to do is to focus in and do the job that they've been asked to do.

00:53:18.000 And that's going to have to do that.

00:53:20.000 The FBI, when they're asked at the congressional hearing, were there any FBI dressed up as Trump supporters inciting and inviting people in the Capitol?

00:53:31.000 And he said, I'm not allowed to give out that information.

00:53:33.000 The answer is no!

00:53:35.000 You know, Jimmy Dora says, you know, you got to say, no, that didn't happen or it did happen.

00:53:41.000 So these guys get cleaned out.

00:53:43.000 He was one of the guys, the head of the FBI. He's one of the guys said, like, well, we don't know if he was really shot.

00:53:48.000 It could have been a piece of strap now.

00:53:49.000 It's like, why even make that crazy statement?

00:53:53.000 So you really have these entrenched, and this guy was appointed by Trump.

00:53:58.000 You really have an entrenched group of people who don't seem to have a grasp on what the average American wants, what the average American's life is like.

00:54:11.000 I think that's got to get cleaned up.

00:54:13.000 Trump said he's going to get rid of the Department of Education.

00:54:16.000 I think that is a phenomenal...

00:54:19.000 Phenomenally important first gesture.

00:54:21.000 For many reasons.

00:54:21.000 Because one thing, 13% of public schools is funded by the feds.

00:54:27.000 Now, they wanted to increase that.

00:54:29.000 If Biden-Harris, this is one of the things that Moms for Liberty educated me about. 1.00

00:54:34.000 Tiffany Justice.

00:54:35.000 They wanted to increase that to 26%.

00:54:37.000 If that increase, Ben, would have happened, that means the local school boards would have been irrelevant because then everything would have gone from the federal.

00:54:46.000 And then you're not going to have states...

00:54:49.000 You're not going to have the states being able to decide what their education is, what the school boards are going to decide, what the parents want to decide.

00:54:55.000 So this was a critical turning point.

00:54:58.000 I do think that this election is going to turn out to be one of the most critical turning points in American history.

00:55:05.000 And I don't say that lightly, and I don't want to say that, but it's just factual.

00:55:08.000 It is true.

00:55:09.000 What was potentially tipping, if they would have let in 11 million more people, if they were able to flood Florida, even Florida, and then Texas, and then Ohio, so that we wouldn't get a choice next time.

00:55:22.000 We really were on a razor's edge tipping, and I do think that that was avoided, and avoided by the American people.

00:55:28.000 Totally agree.

00:55:29.000 Well, Rob Schneider, it's been great to see you.

00:55:31.000 Can't wait to see what you do next.

00:55:32.000 Really, thanks for taking the time.

00:55:34.000 Thank you very much.

00:55:35.000 And I wish you had been a hero for me.

00:55:37.000 And you've actually, you know, has helped a lot of us to communicate better and to be more specific and precise.

00:55:46.000 And you really led the charge.

00:55:47.000 There was nobody doing what you were doing.

00:55:49.000 And you really are.

00:55:50.000 If you look at anybody who's out there in the public square talking about conservative values and being able to back them up, it was, you started that.

00:55:57.000 So thank you for that.

00:55:58.000 I really appreciate it.

00:55:59.000 it great to see you the ben shapiro sunday special is produced by savannah morris and matt kem Associate Producers are Jake Pollock and John Crick.

00:56:13.000 Editing is by Olivia Stewart.

00:56:14.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.

00:56:16.000 Camera and lighting is by Zach Ginta.

00:56:18.000 Hair, makeup, and wardrobe by Fabiola Cristina.

00:56:21.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

00:56:23.000 Executive Assistant Kelly Carvalho.

00:56:26.000 Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.

00:56:28.000 Executive producer, Justin Siegel.

00:56:30.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:56:32.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - December 01, 2024

The Upside of Being Canceled | Rob Schneider

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript