To the newsmakers podcast, I'm Billie Hollowell, and this is a show where we go behind the headlines every day to bring you an interview with a pastor, entertainer, politician, or other notable news figure. And this is a show, again, it's daily, but it's based on our weekly TV show, which is also called Newsmakers. You can watch it on the CBN News channel and also on our YouTube page. And on this show, every day, we dive deep. It's a little more longer form with one of the people who you will often see on our Newsmakers show or across the CBN News platforms. On today's newsmakers, we'll be sitting down with actor and comedian Rob Schneider. We'll be talking about his faith journey, some of his new projects, and why he is so open and vocal about politics and social issues. We're also going to get into some other really fascinating topics like forgiveness. No further ado, here is Rob Schneider. Rob, appreciate you joining me today, a lot to dive into. We're going to talk about Chip, Chilla, but I want to talk about culture first because you had a post recently on on X, formerly known as Twitter, where you talked about forgiveness and you talked about faith. And I have to tell you, I found, I actually wrote a column about this because I thought it was incredibly moving what you wrote. What sparked that in you to share that message? Well, a foundation in God, I think Jesus only lets you stray so much. And I think at a certain point, he grabbed me again and hugged me. And I think it's important to the feeling that I had and that foundation to, for whatever silly movies I've made and for whatever reason, people seem to think anything I say is interesting or funny. I guess people call it a platform, I don't know what you call it. I wanted them to, if you are thinking about looking for something in life, a foundation that isn't in sand where it could be blown away, and if you have a family, then if you have that foundation in something beautiful and something like Christianity, I mean, there are other religions out there that say, well, kill your enemy, hate your enemy and there are infidels and we have a religion that says love your enemy, love thy neighbor as thyself. I think that's love others. What a beautiful way to go through life. Well, and your message captured that, I mean, your message really captured when you went through each person and the types of people who maybe you were rallying against before during COVID, but you had this sort of reflective tone, it was really powerful seeing you juxtapose those things. Well, there were people that very angered me. Thank you. The, you know, when Bruce Springsteen, nothing, I didn't name names there, I shouldn't name names now, but when he, when it made me so angry that he would eliminate or not allow and to exclude and if anything in Christianity, it's welcoming everyone. There's no exclusion. It's not like, well, green-eyed people aren't allowed. So to exclude those people from his Broadway play, a Broadway show was, it seemed to me, and then it seemed angry and it made me angry and then I had to dig underneath what's that anger and then I have to know why is he angry and why am I allowing myself to get angry and where is the forgiveness there and you have to know that what it is is I can't interpret what other people are feeling and a lot of what people were feeling was fear and they're also feeling like they had to get along and that's pretty common. And so if I am going to lead my life and be an example as Christ compels us to do, then I have to do it even if it hurts, even if it stretches how I used to feel and that and and forgiveness. And once you forgive, the beautiful thing about forgiveness is isn't the person, it's you. You end up feeling better. Yeah. Yeah. It has nothing to do with that other person you're mad at, right? You're releasing yourself from that anger and that frustration and that resentment. You mentioned kind of coming back to God. What was your faith journey? What has it been traditionally and what was it that brought you back around? Well, I remember being so, so devoted to Christianity as a, you know, literally as a 16 year old boy that I would have dreams of Jesus Christ. And then I did stray like many Christians do stray and I think, but there was a continuing pull back knowing where I needed to be and to be home. And then a very, very strange confluence of things, you know, I married a Catholic and she was very patient with me and she's been the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. And you know, Catholicism and Christianity is in Europe is declined. But in South America, it is still very strong. My wife from Mexico, and there is a real strong faith in Christianity that has not diminished. Yeah. And I think it's because life is hard there. And I think that the, they need to, there is a necessity to, to, to, for hope and for strength and, and with that strength, whether you have less, if you know that you have a foundation in God and I think you, you will be, you'll be happier. And I think if you take a look at totalitarian countries and friends of mine, Elliot Baskin, who was from the former Soviet Union that had, was godless, it was hopeless. There was hopelessness there. And this atheistic thing, which is, which is basically pervaded the world is atheism. And this idea that, you know, things just blew up and, and there is just, and this, the, the universe is things bumping into things and expanding and that, that we as human beings are just this freak of accident that happened, that, that this empathy and compassion and love that we feel is just this accident that happened and there's no reason for it and nothing will come of it. And eventually the universe will just be a series of black holes. And, and I would just go, well, wait a minute, there's no science behind that. And that is a bleak, horrible way to go through life. I mean, if there is such a thing as love, as compassion, as empathy, it's because you found it in other people. And if it exists in our universe, and as my good friend Norm McDonald said, my dear friend Norm McDonald, he said, it is, we are merely, we're not a big part of the universe, we're just a fraction of it. So how much more so the rest of the universe, if it exists, it is endemic to a universe. And then there, there was something behind all this thing, and that is love and love is God. And that's the creation of everything. When you take a look at the flowers and the spermazoa, there's way too much of it that seems to be necessary for those flowers to continue. It seems to be there's not a necessity for all the stars and the skies. There seems to be a celebration of existence. Yeah. And I think what we are is God's desire for us to experience and find out who that we're part of the whole thing, and it's to get to, if you're looking at it from a purely Zen or Buddhist perspective, it's to evolve from a place of, to where the universe wanted to experience itself in a higher state of consciousness. I mean, the rocks have consciousness, very low consciousness. We have very high consciousness. And then I think that, you know, for what, you know, for me, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, He worked on this script and it's been five years now about the Shroud of Turin, and the last draft that I wrote, which is based on a true story, I didn't write. It was just, I was just, you know, when everybody works in the creative arts, you just, there's an antenna. You don't know how it's coming or what it's coming, but I found myself for nine days just writing this last draft and it was, it's beautiful. And then when you dig into the Shroud of Turin, which is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, you realize that it could not have possibly been, as they say, a Medieval, medieval forgery. And so well, then what is this? They said, well, they, the people who were doing the calculations for the testing of this, the carbon dating, they did not put into their calculations, the French nuns and the devotion of the French nuns, who in the 16th century repaired. Can you imagine the nuns, how, and their devotion, knowing that this was the birth, this was the death cloth, that their, their savior, that their Lord was, was, was wrapped in how delicately they would work for each strand. And they defrenched at this thing, the French nuns did this thing called an invisible weave. And so that, when they did the cutting, that threw off the carbon dating. And that's why when they did it, they tested it in several areas, the further that they went into the cloth, the further back in time they went to 14th, 13th and 12th century. If they would have kept going, not part of that cloth, they would have gone to 2000 years. The only reason that cloth exists is because it's Egyptian linen. It's, it's, it's incredibly fascinating that the Shroud has captivated people. So you, you were working on it. You've worked on a script about this. The Shroud of Turin, yeah, we want to make this movie, and I will say it's been very difficult to make the movie, and there are, you know, there, there's a reason why the Shroud of Turin in Turin, Italy is surrounded by the highest concentration of devil worshipers in the world. They've tried to destroy it several times. What the Shroud of Turin ultimately is, um, is the receipt. That's why it's such an important thing. It's at the receipt of the, the price that was paid by Jesus Christ. You forget, for all of humanity. I mean, I, I couldn't, I couldn't work on this and couldn't see this without, uh, being so moved by it. And um, I really want to, uh, this movie is getting closer to being made now, and I want to play the Benedictine monk and this woman, this divorced woman of two kids, and together they did prove to the scientist that this is a real, that he did admit that this is the birth, this is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. And I mean, that, that, that I couldn't, at that point, I couldn't no longer just continue to live my life thinking, well, this doesn't affect me. So how could it not? It's proof. So this project also sort of infused your faith then and catapulted it forward. Well, it, it became, and then because, and then as Jesus does, he's a little nudge, a little nudge, a little nudge. When they use the word inspire and comes from the Greek, it doesn't mean like inspiration in Speratu, in, in Latin, and it goes back to the Greek. It doesn't, it's, it's real definition is God's breath. God doesn't whisper say, okay, you got to go to church now, okay, Jesus Christ is real. This actually happened. This is not a myth. You need to have a foundation, you know, God doesn't work that way. Inspiration, inspire comes from God's breath. God's breath. It's not even a whisper. It's not a word. It's a breath. It's like, what was that? Did I feel that? And that's God's love for you and God could put his hand down and make everybody. But God wants us to come to him, have our own volition. That is the greatest, there's the great gift and, and I couldn't ignore it anymore. And I just, again, things started happening one after another after another and then the lockdown happened and then I saw organized evil and people coerced into doing things and then closing churches while they, well, they kept open strip clubs and marijuana places and liquor stores. At a certain point, you realize that there is a darkness that every hundred years or so, uh, befalls the earth and human beings and you better be prepared for it. But don't be, I'm not, be diligent, but don't be fearful and, and that is very important to not be fearful because you don't make good decisions obviously with what happened during the COVID, the, you know, the decisions that were made were done from place of fear, not science and not logic and not what was best for children. So, um, but I am buoyant about it because I, I know that the, um, this battle has been already won. It's just, we're going to have to go, yeah, like that, Father Ripper said, Jesus already won. This is just all this is just a mop up mission. Yeah. Well, that's, and that's a nice part of a prophecy too. You kind of know how the story ends, but you got to get there, right? So it's, you got to get there and you got to suffer through it, but that's what's supposed to happen. Right. We're not supposed to be easy and as opposed to just, you know, how do you just be a challenge? I got to ask you because, you know, being so vocal, you've had an incredible career. You've done everything. You're hilarious. You've made movies. You've done TV. And you've done it all. Thank you. No, it's true. I mean, but, but how hard has it been, and maybe it hasn't been, how impacted have you been by being so vocal on faith, on policies, those sorts of things? Well, I think I've been very lucky to have a career. I didn't, you know, my parents didn't come and show business. My dad had a like a little tiny company where he did loans on second deeds of trust and he worked out his own business and he's the only one who graduated high school. His father could barely read, you know, came from Prussia. My mother was, you know, a World War II traumatized World War II survivor of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. So I was raised by it, you know, this. And so I don't feel any obligation to any ideology that is really not based in something to improve humanity. So I don't feel like I'm missing out or being excluded. I don't need their approval. I've made a very good living and show business and I have been touring and doing stand up comedy for most of the last 10 years and I don't really get work in Hollywood anymore. But I'm not looking for it and I don't feel like that's something I need. I mean, I made 50 movies. I mean, it was another 10 more, what's that going to take? Right. Exactly. You've done it all. That's the thing, right? That's why I become a, you know, a bludgeon for the, or become a, people who have tried to attack me. Let them. I mean, what can they do? I mean, that's the beautiful thing about, you know, the faith and Jesus Christ. If he came, if he came back, they would try to do, they would try to do the same thing again to him. Why? Because he forces you to look at your own, your own lies, your own falsehoods and what you are not living up to. I mean, that is a, and, and also at the same time releases you from guilt and from releases you from a, the idea that you have to work this and do all these things to, you know, in your life from a place of, of servitude as a, as a, as opposed to a place of love. Yeah. If you get there, and if you get there, then there's a certain strength to it, but that strength is going to be challenged because what it does, it forced other people to look at themselves and it isn't a, it isn't a place that there's a reason why Christianity is attacked. Oh, absolutely. You have to, you have to re-examine everything about yourself. And as you're saying for Christians, once other people see that you have this thing, it convicts them, right? And then you've got this chain reaction of conviction that, you know, at either yields people becoming believers or it yields an anger in people who are offended by that internally. They don't even realize why sometimes. Well they, they don't, but it does come from a place. I mean, what it does is it brings up things and the stuff that it brings up is important because that's how Christ works. Yeah. No, absolutely. And, you know, I have to tell you too, you have this fun new project and you know, I could talk for three hours with you about the stuff. We could. And I just want to say, I had an 11 o'clock, hi, oh yes, we're going to make it work. Can I just put you on hold for two minutes and we just want two minutes, it was going to finish up. Hang on just for one second. Okay. All right. Thank you. Sorry. He's just have an 11 o'clock. I'm sorry. I've sent you too long. No, no, but this, it's important because I do think like with the TV series Chip Chiller that we're doing on the daily wire, it is, they realize that there is an indoctrination happening in the media that is undermining the last bastion of freedom in the world truthfully, which is the United States of America. And if they can undermine that, then it can all go. I mean, the only reason we escaped COVID is because the United States and the Second Amendment, we had guns and the government knew they can only push us so far as the United States opened and got free. So did the rest of the world. Yeah. So it's important to maintain that. And what the daily wire entertainment wants to do is entertain people in 48 states that are not California and New York. That is a powerful, powerful thing to do. And I'm very proud to be able to be with them so that people can watch this, you know, the TV series and say, Hey, I can relax. I don't have to watch it beforehand to see what, you know, indoctrination is trying to happen from Hollywood. So in that sense, I'm very happy and it's a pleasure to work with them. Well, we're looking forward to pushing people there. Rob, we appreciate your time. And by the way, the daddy daughter trip is a movie that's coming out that's also a really nice little family movie on Amazon downloads and it's at Walmart. And I hope people get a chance to see that it's available now. That's all for today's Newsmakers podcast. Be sure to tune in for the next episode of the show and also head over to the CBN News YouTube channel and the CBN News channel to watch Newsmakers every week. We'll see you soon. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
