Tony Robbins and Mo Ramchandani join me to discuss their new film, City of Dreams, directed by Charlie Kirk and starring Amy Poehler. We also talk about the importance of children's rights and the work they do to fight for them. Thank you so much for listening to The Charlie Kirk Show. Please remember to share it with a friend or become a supporter of the show. The show is sponsored by Noble Gold Investments, a company that specializes in gold and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you can protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investing. That's where I buy all of my gold. It's where my gold comes from. I buy it in person, I deliver it around the world, and I give it back to the people who need it the most. I don't own any of the gold I'm giving away. I'm just passing it along. It's not for sale, it's for donation. If you can't afford to buy it, you're not going to get any of it, but if you can do your part to make a difference in the world and you want to give back, then you should do it. You're going to be a better person than you think you can be. Thanks for listening. - Charlie Kirk, CEO and Founder of Turning Point USA, the most important organization in the country, thank you for being a part of something bigger than you know you can change the world. Charlie Kirk - Thank you Charlie Kirk is a great guy, and you should know who you are! - M.A. Thank you for supporting the show, M.R. Ramanchandani - I want you to be part of the movement, not just one of the most powerful people in the most influential people in this country, you'll get a chance to help change the next generation of people in a better place than you'll ever get the chance to be in a place like that, because you'll learn how to do it, and it's not just a good one, it'll be better than that, and that's a good place to be there, because it's a day to help you do it in a way that helps you do that, not only in the next one, and there's more than you can help you know that's not only that, but you'll be there in the rest of it in that place, and they'll get it, they'll help you, too.
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00:01:17.000Okay, everybody, welcome to this episode of The Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:19.000Honored to have two amazing guests with us, one of which has changed my life, and he knows that, and it's worth repeating.
00:01:25.000I've been listening to him for well over 20 years.
00:01:27.000It is Tony Robbins, who could just best be called a force for good in this world, but also executive producer of what we're here to talk about today, City of Dreams, an amazing film, and also Mo Ramchandani, I think I got that right, who's the writer and director of City of Dreams.
00:01:41.000Welcome to you both, welcome to the program.
00:01:46.000Tony, what led you to want to partner with this film and be the executive producer of this very powerful movie?
00:01:51.000Well, about eight years ago, my wife and I, you know, we're involved in all kinds of things, feeding people, because I was fed when I was a child, and we've had the privilege now of feeding over a billion people through our partnership in Feeding America just in the last 10 years.
00:02:02.000So, I've been involved in a lot of projects, and because of that, when I do business programs, I invite the audience that are making more money to say, what are you going to do for the world?
00:02:11.000You're going to be fulfilled by things you give, not just by what you get.
00:02:15.000And one woman got up and shared this story about her own child, a dear friend's child being abducted and so forth.
00:02:22.000And she was crying, talking about she wants to save children.
00:02:24.000And she said, there's an organization that really is making a difference and she wants to sponsor and didn't have enough money.
00:02:29.000And I said, well, how much does it cost to save a child?
00:03:04.000So my wife and I got involved and now we've funded about 51,000 children's rescues during that time.
00:03:10.000But there's only so much you do by yourself and a film can change that.
00:03:13.000So I helped executive produce, uh, you know, another film that you may have seen called the sound of freedom last year and it caught hold, but it also showed it more overseas.
00:03:23.000And I was really interested in not just sex slavery, but labor slavery.
00:03:26.000And because, you know, 10 million, 11 million people come across the border, we know we've lost 325,000 children, the government's reported, but it's just too big.
00:03:35.000People get overwhelmed when they hear numbers like that.
00:03:51.000But while you're doing that, instead of educating someone or preaching to them, you're firing people up and waking them up.
00:03:58.000And so the purpose for me is, you know, if you say, what ended slavery in the United States?
00:04:02.000You know, the number one factor was a person who wrote a book who told the story to everybody.
00:04:07.000You know, Harry Beecher Stowe created Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 because she lost a child and it made her feel for women who were slaves whose children were sold off.
00:04:16.000And so it made her emotionally associated.
00:04:19.000She was mad because a new law got passed that said the people in the North had to send these slaves back.
00:04:24.000So she wrote this book, and it captured the imagination of the country.
00:04:28.000It sold 3,000 copies the first day, 300,000 copies the first year, a million copies in the 1850s the next year.
00:04:42.000So to me, you know, this isn't do that by itself.
00:04:45.000But this film will wake you up to what's really going on, and it'll wake you up that it isn't just numbers coming across the border, what these lives are happening, and I think people will be, I know they will, they'll be deeply moved.
00:04:55.000It's got a 92 score on Rotten Tomatoes, so the audiences are really responding to it.
00:05:00.000It's an incredibly powerful film, and Tony, you're right, it takes, okay, so we hear that there are 320,000 missing kids in the country, according to the Department of Homeland Security, but then it personalized it, because that's just an abstraction, it's a number, okay, it's a statistic.
00:05:13.000So, Mo, you have a family story that connects you to this.
00:05:19.000What is your family's history, your father, that makes this more than just a typical Hollywood film?
00:05:26.000Yeah so you know I'm my family originally from a province in Pakistan called Sindh that used to be India and then of course you know when the British left the partition happened and my father was seven years old he was kicked out of his home he had to move into the Hindu majority of India and that's where you know his his my grandfather was a public defender and they didn't have a lot of money and this was a new system so he worked in a sweatshop he worked as a t-boy he worked in sweatshop like conditions and it sort of informed I mean he got out of that And he became, you know, he sort of went, he had the American dream.
00:06:00.000And I will say that that experience though traumatized him.
00:06:04.000And in the film, I based three of the characters on him, the little boy, one of the enforcers, and ultimately the guy that runs the sweatshop.
00:06:12.000Because really for me, I didn't write this initially thinking, you know, when I started writing the movie, this wasn't the hottest issue in the country.
00:06:21.000It was something that you barely heard about.
00:06:23.000For me, I wrote it as a way to forgive my dad, as a way to understand why he was the way he was.
00:06:29.000And so that was deeply personal for me.
00:06:32.000And obviously now it's become this whole thing that I didn't expect.
00:06:37.000Again, you know, I wrote the first draft of the script 10 years ago when I read about the Almonte case in Southern California where there were 72 immigrants trapped in a residential location.
00:06:48.000They couldn't see light for seven years.
00:07:45.000So what I did was I wanted this character to be a metaphor for the 12 million children that are enslaved around the world that don't have a voice.
00:07:57.000He doesn't speak, and the way we learn about him, his goals, his aspirations, his fears, is through his dreams.
00:08:05.000So, you know, even when the movie opens, he ends up, you know, he's playing a game with his friends, and the camera goes around, and we're transported into a soccer stadium, and later, you get to see his nightmares as well, and his hero's journey, because it is a hero's journey.
00:08:17.000It's about a boy who, ultimately, whose voice was lost, and by the end of the movie, he gets his voice back, and he fights back, and he fights, you know, as a Almost modern-day messianic figure.
00:08:29.000I mean, you know, I've always been deeply curious with Christianity after I saw Passion of the Christ, and so that's why his name is Jesus, his mother is Maria, his father is Jose, and even the guy who punishes him, before he punishes him, he washes his hands.
00:08:43.000There are all these little, little allegories and archetypes in the movie that make it a relatable modern-day messianic tale.
00:08:49.000And that's what was really interesting to me, is giving people Hope through the movie.
00:09:13.000Because your life is about improving people's lives, and you've done a great service to
00:09:18.000Billions of people have been impacted literally by all of your work, but that's probably one of the harder ones you ever have to encounter, right, Tony?
00:09:24.000I mean, you deal with people that are suicidal and depressed, but they come to a seminar and they say that they were a sex slave at age eight?
00:09:32.000Well, it doesn't get solved in a minute, as you might guess.
00:09:36.000It has to have an experience where safety and certainty can be returned.
00:09:39.000If you can imagine, human beings, you get more and more crazy the more you think events control you versus you control events.
00:09:47.000That's how our entire self-esteem is wired.
00:09:49.000The more you feel like events control you, the more out of control you feel, the more crazy you feel.
00:09:53.000And so the ability to get somebody back to where you can anchor in their body that sense of certainty, that sense of security, that sense that, hey, that's over.
00:10:11.000We work with several different organizations that do this.
00:10:14.000That don't do it over a period of six months to two to sometimes three years.
00:10:18.000But most of these kids, there's a group I work with in Indonesia, for example, also that does this.
00:10:23.000They're some of the most effective because they use big data and they use what he called AI to track who the kingpins are and get them out.
00:10:31.000But the kids that will go through this process and be rescued, a huge number of them go back in to help us rescue others.
00:10:42.000It's like we can all deal with a horrible today if we have a compelling tomorrow.
00:10:46.000And what gives our life meaning is to serve something more than ourselves.
00:10:49.000You'll never be happy by what you get, but who you become will make you really happy or really sad.
00:10:55.000And so these kids become something more.
00:10:57.000They become rescuers, they become social workers.
00:11:00.000And so that's the ultimate healing that happens when you can take your worst experience of your life And converting to one of the best experiences of your life.
00:11:08.000That's in my own experience, even what really transforms life and makes it worthwhile.
00:11:12.000So the, again, the film is think of this film as a heroic journey, but also a thriller.
00:11:17.000You're on the edge of your seat every moment.
00:11:20.000So it's not preachy, but in the end, boy, you're definitely moved.
00:11:23.000And you know, what's really going on when you're these abstract numbers and you'll be called basically to want to do something, right?
00:11:32.000Maybe after you show this clip you can ask Mo a little bit about some of the solutions that are possible that really can put a dent in this.
00:11:42.000If your approach to everyday aches and pains is to mask them, you know, feel better for a few hours only to have the pain return and then repeat the cycle all over again.
00:14:50.000I did go to London School of Economics, so I had some sense of government.
00:14:55.000My idea, which I presented to the Labor Department last year, is I said, look, I worked on Wall Street for about three months and every single Wall Street third party trading office, if Goldman Sachs opens an office in any country in the world and in multiple offices, every single trading office has to have an SEC compliance officer there.
00:16:02.000You know, this is going to be something hard to enforce to get all these major corporations to basically agree to be monitored and penalized financially for every single human rights violation in every single facility.
00:16:16.000So Charlie, the challenge is a lot of these companies.
00:16:19.000A lot of these are really big companies that you and I might really enjoy and like, but they, you know, they subcontract and then subcontractors subcontract.
00:16:27.000So it may not be them actually trying to take advantage.
00:16:55.000And so help me understand why the way we're wired, the way God made us, why this topic and topics like it, we don't seem to care as much as we should.
00:17:48.000You know, the news comes to you in your pocket, and something happens in a country you didn't even know anything about, and somebody drowns, and it's the first thing that you're going to hear about.
00:18:06.000The clothing touching your skin, you're not thinking about that until I mention it.
00:18:10.000The heartbeat, or the sound of something, the smell of things.
00:18:13.000So we mostly delete, distort, and generalize to get through our lives.
00:18:17.000What's useful about movies is when you take this massive problem and you bring it down again to just one human being's life, that's when people connect to their heart.
00:18:27.000When they see and they feel and they have a chance to process it and you're cheering for this person.
00:18:32.000You know, in the end this is like a Rocky film because in the end this kid is the one that fights back against all all odds and you just free himself, he frees everybody else
00:18:40.000And so that set of emotions, it's like, you know, I use this example.
00:19:35.000And now this film that this film though, I think has even potentially more power because it's happening right here.
00:19:40.000Those 12 million children that are in slavery right now around the world, a third of them, are in America and in some first world countries. I mean,
00:19:47.000people don't have any clue. So we need to wake up and the storyteller, this is the most power. The
00:19:54.000storyteller has the capacity to wake people up. Again, that's what, you know, Aria Beecher Stowe
00:20:00.000did with Uncle Tom's Cabin. This is, this is just another one of those hits that hopefully
00:20:04.000wakes people up. And right now, unfortunately, it's also become politicized.
00:20:38.000And what's been a bit frustrating, I know for Mo, is he's not, he wasn't political in making this film, but oh my gosh, we've got, you know, it first came out and it had 100% on Rotten Tomatoes amongst critics and testing.
00:20:50.000The highest rate the studio's seen in five years.
00:20:53.000And then, you know, 92 from the audience itself.
00:20:56.000But then, you know, Variety does an article and they gave him zero out of four stars, you know, and they complained.
00:21:11.000Charlie, I've got to tell you, like Tony said, I've actually been a Democrat my whole life, and today I'll say that I'm a frustrated and confused independent, and I feel that we're incredibly divisive at the moment.
00:21:25.000I don't personally believe in pointing fingers.
00:21:27.000I believe in bringing people together and having conversations.
00:21:30.000That's something that I learned from my hero, Tony Robbins.
00:21:33.000That's the only way change is going to happen.
00:22:11.000And then as the movie came out, It was really interesting.
00:22:15.000We got this scathing review in Variety.
00:22:18.000It started where it looked like what I was told by somebody from the studios, this is a Latino beating down a non-Latino for telling a Latino story.
00:22:27.000Because it was like City of Dreams director squanders top cast.
00:22:32.000Like I had this great cast of actors, all Latin Americans, and it talked about the cinematography and how great everything is, but the story was terrible.
00:22:39.000And it was the tabloid interpretation of what this issue really is.
00:22:44.000And then the same thing happened with Roger Ebert.
00:22:46.000They gave us zero out of four stars and they, in Roger Ebert, they started complaining about,
00:22:50.000well, yeah, they were like, if this movie's mission was to raise awareness, done.
00:23:14.000I was like, are these people, are they serious?
00:23:16.000And then they're upset because I had people from, you know, I had conservatives like Vivek Ramaswamy, who's my Indian brother, And he's a Hindu, and I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, but I love the fact that he wants to make a difference in the world.
00:23:29.000He came on and supported me as well, and I'm getting attacked for that.
00:23:32.000Like it has been so heartbreaking for me.
00:23:36.000And it was only recently that somebody said to me and they didn't want to be quoted.
00:23:41.000They said, Mo, look, you do have liberals.
00:23:43.000You have Michael Phillips who won an Oscar for a taxi driver and Close Encounters as an EP.
00:23:48.000You have Tony Robbins, you have, but you do have the VEC.
00:23:51.000And it doesn't matter how many of these like, you know, liberals you have.
00:23:54.000The truth is you are pointing at the biggest vulnerability of one of the two largest political parties
00:25:04.000But you know what's so crazy is the audiences love it.
00:25:08.000I mean, that's like, go look at the ratings, you know, it's got an A rating and cinema rating, you know, 92 and rotten tomatoes from the audience.
00:25:18.000So hopefully more and more people will be exposed and people like you, Charlie, Getting people to know what this is about that they don't have to go to be educated.
00:25:24.000It's not a documentary It's a it's a film that takes you on a wild ride But at the same time it'll it'll move you emotionally and it's about something that really matters to all of us our kids As students begin heading back to school, I want to tell you about a great learning opportunity.
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00:26:31.000These types of films usually are actually ones that are most celebrated in Hollywood, that have a missional component, where it's not just Superman, Superwoman, you know, Avengers 92, or Fast and Furious 76, right?
00:26:44.000It's something that has some sort of redemptive quality Either one of you, can you speculate, is there something I must have missed?
00:26:52.000I'm a very political person, obviously, but that's not what we're here to talk about today at all, and I didn't ask a political question.
00:26:56.000Is there something I missed in this film that makes it so verboten where Roger Ebert says you get zero out of four stars?
00:27:05.000Yeah, well I have two things I can say to that, right?
00:27:44.000And I don't care how long it takes, at some point they're going to have to come to the reality of the situation.
00:27:50.000And what I think it does is when you go and watch a movie, one like this, it's going to emotionally trigger you.
00:27:56.000And if it aligns with your ideals and values, you're going to support it.
00:28:00.000And if it doesn't align with your ideals and values, you're going to reject it, like anyone.
00:28:06.000It's like Tony Robbins going to someone who doesn't want to grow and change, who isn't ready for that yet, and trying to get them to take action in their life.
00:28:13.000They're going to go, Oh my God, this guy's not a good guy.
00:28:22.000And I think number two is, I don't want to say his name, but I spoke to someone who was a senior advisor to the Biden administration for Latino rights and other rights.
00:28:34.000And at that time, the movie was called Dreamer.
00:28:43.000And he goes, well, because that's going to, you know, that's the whole Obama act.
00:28:48.000And You're going to point a further finger at what happens to Dreamers, which, you know, the Dreamer Act was supposed to protect these children, and you're going to point a further finger and you're not going to get support at all from the left, which is why I actually changed the title to City of Dreams.
00:29:05.000I thought that the movie was emotional enough and powerful enough That we wouldn't be rejected.
00:29:11.000But seeing now what's happening, I mean, Tony will tell you, we've had a bunch of influencers come back to us and say they're being shadow banned on Instagram.
00:29:20.000There were all these rumors on Twitter that AMC was turning people away.
00:29:24.000And the CEO of AMC actually came out and made a statement, which to me was, you know, ridiculous.
00:29:31.000Like, I can't believe that this is happening in the same week that Donald Trump Jr.
00:29:36.000And I don't understand why We're not able to look at these people because whether it's Donald Trump Jr.
00:29:43.000or whether it's Mark Cuban and Gavin Newsom, it doesn't matter.
00:29:46.000At the end of the day, they're human beings and we can all agree that, you know, modern day slavery is wrong.
00:29:52.000But I think because of the election year and because the way the mainstream media, I mean, I'll tell you something, man.
00:29:59.000We haven't been invited to mainstream media.
00:30:01.000Like, we have not gotten one mainstream media interview.
00:30:04.000You know, we were supposed to go on Morning Joe, and then it was canceled.
00:30:08.000And that's also kind of unheard of for a movie like this that's released by Roadside Attractions, which is one of the most liberal companies in Hollywood.
00:30:17.000Howard and Eric, who run it, are good friends of mine.
00:30:54.000What did you learn in the exploration of this film?
00:30:57.000What you did not know prior that you now know that you want the audience to know?
00:31:01.000I didn't realize that the... I was familiar with the slavery of children for sex trafficking, but I didn't realize how big it was here in the United States for labor.
00:31:10.000Like you said, the very first, you know, story he read about, and then he got all these other ones that were sent to him by a friend of the Labor Department, Was, you know, 70 children underground, working in a sweatshop, never seeing light for seven years.
00:31:23.000I mean, these are, you know, I thought of a sweatshop as a bunch of people working really hard and they're, you know, they go home at night type of thing.
00:32:43.000You know, she was also in Sound of Freedom, so there is a lot that people can do.
00:32:47.000And I hope that those who watch this movie get angry and join me and Tony and everyone on our team to save and protect these innocent children.