Hollywood Star Reveals Why Actors Are Afraid to Speak Out - Zachary Levi | PBD Podcast #872

Zachary Levi opens up about the career and personal costs of speaking out in Hollywood, why he believes conservative actors stay silent, and how childhood trauma shaped his life. He also shares the unlikely path to Shazam and his vision for an independent studio that protects human creativity from AI. 👞 Get the NEW Billionaire Suede Loafer: https://bit.ly/4ym5oRA 🍫 Get The FLB 1's NOW IN CHOCOLATE: https://bit.ly/4gXlv0X 👕 SHOP THE ICON COLLECTION: https://bit.ly/3TuUU3x Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: https://bit.ly/4kSVkso Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP 👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: https://bit.ly/4lzQph2 🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj 🇰 KALSHI: http://kalshi.com/pbd SUBSCRIBE TO: @VALUETAINMENT @BetDavidConsulting @vtgenz @ValuetainmentComedy ABOUT US: Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  They're just looking for ways to destroy you.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  But the road to being a superhero hasn't always been a smooth one for Levi. He admittedly dealt with.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  And then all of these buzz feeds and everybody else starts writing these hit pieces, fabricating all kinds of things about who I am.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  How much did it cost you?

• 0:15Speaker 00

  Oh, it's cost me a lot. But God uses all of that. God used every one of those, you know, ingredients to make the soup that is me.

• 0:23Speaker 02

  Are there a lot of conservatives that flat out will never talk about their politics in Hollywood?

• 0:28Speaker 00

  None of your business. I mean, listen, man, I it because Hollywood, you can't step out of that narrative. But this time with Bobby, with Tulsi, J D Vance, with Elon, with that whole dream team. And if we don't go this way, if we go the other way, we are in dire straits if that happened.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  I read it somewhere that Shazam maybe was not going to happen with you.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Hollywood was a big part of what put me in the place that I was in, into lots of unhealthy activities and relationships and a lot of abusive powers in Hollywood. We're just like a cog.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  How much of this critics going from 90 to 49 was just because of comments you made publicly?

• 1:02Speaker 00

  There was a massive smear campaign that came after me and my mom, my stepdad and our family friend were there waiting for me to have like an intervention. And my mom looked at me and she said, you know what, Zachary, I'd be happier today if you were dead.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  So I'm going to ask you an indirect way of helping our guys, our production team that works so hard, get a raise. Do you want to help them get a raise? This is how you can help us out. Forty nine percent of you watch our podcasts that our editors work so hard, producers, cutters, all of them, our production team, 32 of them that work here, they work very, very hard to deliver a good quality to you. If you enjoy our show and you want to help this thing get bigger, so we can take our talent that we have in-house to support this production all the time and maybe even give them a raise, then please subscribe to the channel. That allows us to get more viewership and indirectly it makes bigger opportunities for our current team that we have. Thank you so much. Zachary Levi, how are you?

• 2:03Speaker 00

  I'm doing well.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  We're finally doing this.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  I know, we're finally getting to meet in person. We've talked on the phone.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  We've talked on the phone.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Well, the first time was what? I was, I was on Joe, you called me afterwards at Rogan.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  I think I, yeah, I slid into your DMs on Instagram or something. I saw you on Rogan.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  You had an idea, you were like, I'm thinking about doing this and it, it was all an idea conversation.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  I think so. It was probably, I legitimately don't remember exactly, but given my life and what I've been trying to build for, you know, the last 25 years, it might've been Wildwood, the, the, the real estate development I'm doing in Austin, like a movie studio, living community, was that what I was talking to you about?

• 2:40Speaker 02

  We were talking about a social media company and what if we create the community? But you know what impression I got is this guy's different. He's not just an actor because you know, you'll get messages, people, hey, I agree with you here.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  Sure, yeah, yeah.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  I don't know if I agree with you here and you'll have a good conversation with them. But, uh, you know, there's been a couple of guys that I talked to, like Vince, Vince Vaughn and I had a long conversation together one time. I'm like, this guy, one of my favorite actors, I can, I love the work he does.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  But also wicked smart.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Oh my God, the guy is brilliant.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  Wicked smart.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Who is this guy?

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  And, uh, you know, he, he just kind of loves his passion and what he's doing.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  But I enjoyed the conversation that you and I had and I said, yeah, this guy's different. And of course now we're having this sit down here in the, in the great state of Florida. All right, in the great state of Florida.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  So a question for you, we, by the way, the audience missed one of the best conversations we had about Zodiac signs. Because both you and I are Libras.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  You're September.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  The best.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  The best, hands down, it's, it's, it's been studied and documented. Uh, you're nine 29, I'm 10 18.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  A question, so I watch you. Of course, we're going to talk about the movie that came out and there's some interesting correlation with the movie. Uh, watched it last night, that's, uh, you know, with my kids, my 10 year old daughter was glued. She couldn't, I'm like, babe, we gotta watch this before the Yankees game begins. So we watched the whole thing. We'll get to that with Tommy Lee Jones, the great list of actors in the movie. But I watched you, I'm like, okay, so this guy's an A lister actor. You've done Shazam, okay? You, you've done a lot of different things, even going back in the days when you had your show that you were doing that did very well, I think you guys were on for Chuck for like five, six seasons you were on and. But, but there's a part, there's two different types of actors that I see in Hollywood

• 4:22Speaker 02

  who think for themselves, maybe they're libertarians, maybe they're independent, maybe they have some conservative leanings. But, uh, they have to ask a question at one point, do I continue just doing the acting job? Or all these questions that I have on my mind, is there something bigger for me? So then I see correlation with you and Reagan, okay? You're a bigger actor than Reagan, Reagan didn't do it as big as you've done. You've done bigger movies than he's done, you've done bigger blockbuster deals. He wasn't necessarily an A lister as, as an actor. Um, although he was a good actor, even if you read about it of, of folks. Is there anything in here with Zachary Levi that's beyond just Hollywood? Cause if it's just Hollywood, you wouldn't give your opinion on COVID, you know, taxes and all this other stuff.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Oh, man. Um,

• 5:13Speaker 00

  listen, I, I, I, I think that, um, I think it's, I think it's folly to build your identity, um, out of your career. Not that that's not a part of your identity or a part of what God has put you on this planet to do. But first and foremost, God puts us on this planet to make this planet a better place. I believe. And I, uh, and I've always believed that ever since I was a kid, I have a very deep love for humanity, for all of humanity. And I believe that whatever platform God gives me, or any of us for that matter, we are stewards of that platform, we are stewards of our, of our gifts and our blessings,

• 5:53Speaker 00

  our talents, our treasure, and we ought to leverage all of that to the means that we can in order to go make this a better world for everybody who's living in it. Now, obviously that becomes subjective. Some people think a better world is this and some people think a better world is that. Um, but, you know, so I, because I care about all that more than I care about my acting career, although I very much do care about my acting career.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  You do, you do care about that more than your acting career.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I think we have to. I think we have to, I mean, I, I hate that we all love sitting around spitting out these idioms of, of like, you know, evil happens when good men do nothing. We all want to believe that, we all say these things, but then where are the good men when something needs to be done? And in this last election, and when it came to COVID and the vaccines and all of those things, I had eyes to see and ears to hear. I was watching all this stuff go down and I was like, listen, we've got to speak out. There is truth that's being buried, there is darkness at work, and we must as good men stand up and say and do things in order to thwart that. Otherwise the evil will just steamroll all of us.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  How much did it cost you?

• 7:07Speaker 00

  Oh, it's cost me a lot. It's cost me a lot.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Can you monet, can you quantify it? What it?

• 7:11Speaker 00

  Uh, I mean.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Fifty million?

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Oh, as far as money is concerned, oh, I don't, honestly, I mean, prob, millions, certainly. I mean, you know, I was Shazam two and Harold and the Purple Crayon and I was doing like, you know, bit larger studio movies and I'm not doing larger studio movies now. I'm doing, I'm still working, thank God, I'm very grateful for the people, Angel Studios, who by the way is a great example of trying to make a better version of Hollywood.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  They're super necessary.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  They're so necessary.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Super necessary.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  This is why capitalism works.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  And I have confidence in the future because of guys like this.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so I'm very grateful for the Harmon brothers and everybody at Angel who sees who I am, sees my talent, also is grateful for me stepping up and, and speaking out, right? And I think there's a lot of people at a lot of the other legacy studios that might even agree with me, but they're still living under, in fear. Because Hollywood, you can't step out of that narrative. You can't step out of the narrative, I mean, to, to, to even suggest that somebody might vote for anyone other than Kamala in the last election. Cause I was a Bobby Kennedy guy, I mean, that's what got me into all of it. I was all Bobby.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  And I knew that he needed to get the, into the position at least that he's in right now. I wanted him to be the president, but for him to be head of HHS and to be leading that charge and doing the things that I think are absolutely necessary for the health and wellbeing, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually of this nation and this world. I think that Bobby Kennedy and the people that he's assembled over there are doing an excellent job. It's difficult, there's a lot of pushback, there's a lot of bureaucracy, as you know, but I think they're still doing a good job, given, you know, the, the, the conditions that they're in. But to even, even when I came out for Bobby, I was getting pushed back in Hollywood. He was a lifelong Democrat that was fighting big corporations and doing good things. And yet he wasn't the narrative.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  We, we can't, he's crazy as, you know, the, the, the magazines went from loving this guy as the Kennedy and all of this stuff. And then as soon as he started to go against the grain of the pharmaceutical, you know, industrial complex and the power behind that and all of the money that they spend on advertising on all the news networks and all, well, then they're going to come after him. And they did, and anyone associated with them, they're going to come after us too. And then once that coalition with him and Trump happened, I was like, all right, I didn't vote for Trump the first two times. But this time with Bobby, with Tulsi, with J D Vance, with Elon, with that whole dream team. I'm like, to me, this is a no brainer. And if we don't go this way, if we go the other way, we are in, we were already in dire straits.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  We would be in far deeper, dire straits if that happened.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in that moment, because the first, first glimpse of you being vocal was the comments you made about COVID, right? In January of, uh.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  About Pfizer, but yeah.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Right, about Pfizer, it was about Pfizer that you made. And that was two months, that's January of, I don't, 22, 23, and as Shazam comes out.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  A couple of months later.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Couple of months later, March of 23, and the first Shazam, you got 80 something percent, I even have the numbers, so I wanted to see if there was a correlation. Your first Shazam's reviews were, uh, exact critics, uh, 90%. Okay, audience was 81%.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  So 90%, I watched Shazam, I got four kids, I, I watched it multiple times. So 90%, 81%.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Right. The second Shazam, critics dropped from 90% to 49%. But audience went from 81% to 85%.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  So people can say whatever they want to say, when we go watch movies on Rotten Tomatoes, we look at what the audience says, if the audience like it or not, critics. So January 29th, you make the comments about Pfizer, March 17, 23, Shazam two comes out, Fury of Gods opened. Nine 24, year later, year and a half later, you publicly endorse Trump. How much of this critics going from 90 to 49 was just because of your comments you made publicly?

• 11:07Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't know for sure, but I would say, I would, I would say it certainly was a part of that. Listen, it's all very subjective. If a critic really liked the first one and didn't like the second one, just because of its execution artistically, whatever, like, that's fine. I think that there's parts of the first one that obviously was, it was very unique at the time. It was, you know, it's, it's Tom Hanks in Big meets Christopher Reeve's Superman. I mean, it was a dream role. I loved playing it. I loved doing the second one as well. But I can, I would also, you know, accept that there are people that just literally, genuinely critically, they didn't like the second one more. However, there

• 11:46Speaker 00

  was a massive smear campaign that came after me after I, you know, to me, made not even that crazy of a tweet. It was, it was somebody that I saw in my For You, it wasn't even somebody I followed, but it was somebody that I, that I saw in the For You and they had made a tweet, a comment saying, you know, something along the lines of Pfizer is a, Pfizer is, is doing more bad in the world than they are good now, or something like that, right? Um, yeah. Do you agree? Do you agree or not that Pfizer is a real danger to the world? And I responded hardcore agree. What they were doing, what they continue to do. And by the way, and I followed this with an example that wasn't even COVID vaccine

• 12:28Speaker 00

  related. It was this massive $4 billion, you know, class action lawsuit that they had to pay out because they amongst, along with all of the other pharmaceutical companies for far too long, have been cooking the books with all of their statistics and data. This, this idea of like a peer reviewed, have you gone on a deep dive of peer reviewed? The peers, these peers are people that are getting paid to go only through the cherry picked data that the pharmaceutical company even shows them. They're not going through all of the data. They're only going through the cherry pick stuff, right? You understand this. So

• 13:03Speaker 02

  All of this is documented. Bobby Kennedy, the book he wrote, with all the documentation in the back. So, you know,

• 13:09Speaker 00

  So, so all of that. So I'm like Pfizer's clearly a danger to the world as all of them are because they don't value us more than their own bottom line. That is a danger. So anyway, I tweeted that. I got a lot of pushback. I got a lot of people on, involved in the studio and the team and everybody like, you gotta take that down. And I was like, listen,

• 13:26Speaker 02

  David Sandberg called you. Hey, take it down.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  David Sandberg did not call me. No.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Okay. So he, he, he didn't call you and say, take it down, don't do this.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  No, I, I, I won't, I don't want to get into names, but I will say that there were enough people involved in the project.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Why are you, why are you ruining this? The movie's about to come out. This is bad.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  They're asking me to take it all down. And I said, listen, I go, if I take it down, first of all, what I wrote is not wrong. And by the way, a lot of people acknowledge, like, we understand what you're saying and, you know, we know you, but this, because what happened was I put that out and then all of these, you know, the buzz feeds and everybody else starts writing these hit pieces. By the way, fabricating all kinds of things about who I am and what I've said and what I've done and all of that, because they're just looking for ways to destroy you. Using that apparatus of legacy media and social media and all of these things to come after you because you dared step out of the narrative and question the company that is making this miracle vaccine that's saving all of these

• 14:22Speaker 00

  lives. And a lot of that, most of that is bullshit. It's a psyop. We have been lied to for a long time, including, I believe, throughout the pandemic. But they came after me. People involved with the project said, hey, can you take this down? I go, listen, you and I both know that if I do take this down, this doesn't stop. In fact, it will just amplify what they're doing because they see blood in the water. Now they're going to come for me even more.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  And I'm like, no, I'm sorry. Like, I should not have to cower. We should not have to cower to these people that are only driven out of darkness and lies and are trying to destroy people.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  At that moment, when you're going through this, like, do you remember the, do you remember when you were at?

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Where you were at when you tweeted that? Were you with a friend that you're like, should I post it? Should I not post it? Were you like, I'm posting this?

• 15:07Speaker 00

  No, I was

• 15:08Speaker 02

  No hesitation.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  I was, I, I was in Steamboat Springs on a little like, uh, snowboard trip with some friends. And I was like laying in bed on Twitter, X, I think it was, was it Twitter still?

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Twitter.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, I think it might have been X.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  No, it's X. October of 22.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, um, I don't know, you know, came across the thing. I'm like, to me, I did not clearly see that this was going to spiral into what it was going to spiral.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Let's just say you don't do that. Okay. Let's just say you don't do that. You don't endorse Bobby. You don't go and support Trump. You don't do all of that stuff.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Is there a Shazam three? Is there?

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Possibly. I don't know. I don't know what that would have ultimately done.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Would you have been in Black Adam? Because there was a scene with you and The Rock in Black Adam. Like, do you think the pressures went all the way there?

• 15:55Speaker 00

  I don't know that I would have been in Black Adam. I, I, there, there was all kinds of other things that were going on at DC at the time that were way above my pay grade. Um, that had nothing to do with any of my decisions. Like, they were restructuring and like, there's, there's a lot of all that stuff.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  There's no correlation between the two.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm not, well, I don't, not entirely. I, I can't, there's no crystal ball. I can't go back and say, by the way, I wish I did have one. I wish I could, even just to see what, how my career would have played out had I kept my mouth shut. But also, Patrick, I mean, listen, we love to sit around and talk about our veterans and our war heroes and, and, and put, give them praise as we should. Thanks and praise for the job that they do, putting their literal, physical life on the line, the sacrifice that they're willing to give in order to secure our liberty, our freedom, our democracy, right? We all love sitting around and talking about that. For the most part, we all. Some people are obviously, uh, very clouded and don't appreciate our armed services. But how can we do that?

• 16:59Speaker 00

  If we ourselves are not willing to, at the very least, sacrifice our career or part of our career? Those people are sacrificing their lives to secure these freedoms. And I'm not willing to step up and say something, even if it means I might lose some jobs. And I have. But is that worthy of going and, you know, again, evil happens when bad, when good men do nothing?

• 17:21Speaker 02

  What, so, so you, you've worked with some big actors, not like you're, you're in it. You were in it. You were with everybody. So it's not like you're not in that arena. Did any of the bigger names who maybe, maybe they're not conservative. Maybe they're not, maybe they're, you know, center left. Maybe they're just pro-choice and, you know, John F. Kennedy type, kind of like your parents before they became Reagan, you know, Reagan Republicans. But they used to be John F. Kennedy Democrats, right? And they come up to you and they're like, hey, I get what you're doing. I went through it as well. Just leave it alone. There's no benefit to doing this. Was there any conversations like that from big names that anybody like a mentor, maybe 20 or senior to come and have that call with you?

• 18:02Speaker 00

  No.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Not at all?

• 18:04Speaker 00

  No.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Would that have changed anything?

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• 21:03Speaker 00

  Maybe, maybe, I don't know. Again, these are all like a lot of woulda, shoulda, coulda, maybes, crystal ball type questions. I don't know. I will say that since making, I know why I made the decision. I prayed on it, I thought about it, and ultimately it was Tulsi Gabbard, who I became friends with, who was, she and Bobby were doing these, you know, town halls leading up to the election, and it was a part of the Trump campaign, right? It was all, that was all now integrated, and they needed moderators at these various stops to, to moderate a conversation with her and Bobby. And would I be willing to do that, to be a part of this movement? And I thought and prayed on that a lot.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  And again, at the end of the day, I was like, well, if I can do this, if this can help to put these people, Tulsi and Bobby, and Elon and JD, and ultimately Trump, into these positions to help this country and keep us at least from completely falling apart, then I'm willing to do that. All of that said, looking at where we're at now, certain ways and policies that I wish the administration would do differently, right? And yet still, we're, I think even where we're at right now is a better position than what, what could have been, had it gone the other way with the election. But there's a lot of things that I don't agree with that are going on right now in this administration or in this world.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  And more than that, I will say, you know, I, I don't know that it's a regret that I feel, but it was a really interesting wake-up call, because I feel, I hoped that on the other side of standing up, that in my other endeavors, you know, trying to build what I'm building in Austin, whatever all of these things are, that there would have been more conservatives that said, absolutely, man, like, you really stuck your neck out to help to protect this country, and we want to invest in you, we want to invest in the things that you're wanting to do.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Did those calls come, or not really?

• 22:57Speaker 00

  No, no, not really. I mean, yes and no. I mean, there's still certain conversations that are still happening right now, but no, I don't feel like at the end of the day...

• 23:05Speaker 02

  I think that money's out there for you. If you go, if you hire a right investment banker, I think that money's out there for you.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  Maybe, yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  I, I, I don't think, if you wanted to go, I'll put you in contact with one guy right afterwards. We've got a 22 billion auto fund. Talk to them and sell them your vision. There's, there's not gonna be a, because these are true believers who also have access to money. I think that money's out there. But to me, the, the place where I went with you, comparisons with Ronald Reagan, good-looking, talk well, confidence, have you sat there and said, maybe it's here, maybe God's speaking to me? Because, you know, McConaughey kind of flirted with it a little bit, like, ah, is he gonna do it?

• 23:43Speaker 00

  Are you talking about getting into the politics game?

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Actually getting into the politics game.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, listen, this goes back to the last time you and I talked, which was, I had just done, because now that, you know, the Pandora's Box was opened and everything, I had crossed the Rubicon, and then Jesse Waters, the LA was on fire, and Jesse Waters had me on a show. I'm pretty sure this is how this timed out. And I was talking about, you know, listen, I live in Texas now, I've been there for nine years, I love living in Texas, I love the Austin area, it's fantastic. But I'm a Cali kid, I grew up in Cali my whole life, lived in Ventura, California, most of my life, and then LA for 15 years. I love California, it is one of the most beautiful places on the planet Earth. It has so much to offer, but it is literally and figuratively burning, right?

• 24:29Speaker 00

  And it was literally burning at that time, and I went on Jesse Waters, and I just spoke my mind about, I think that this is very, very, very poor, if not criminal, leadership within California. And I think that, you know, God gave me the words to speak in that moment, and they were effective, and multiple people, including you, then reached out to me and said, have you thought about running for governor of California? And I think I told you this, on that phone call, which was, I've been asked throughout my life to step into various leadership roles, including getting into politics, or people saying like, have you ever considered getting into politics? Because you would make a really good politician, or whatever. And I think the reason why I get that is because I genuinely, genuinely, genuinely

• 25:12Speaker 00

  care about humanity, I genuinely care about good policy, I genuinely care and believe that good policy comes from both very deep empathy for people, that is balanced by very deep logic. We cannot have one that's overpowering the other. On the left, you have what Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy, and on the right, you have a lot of people that are just brass tacks, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps type of people, that are not recognizing that some people are trying to do that, but very incapable, given where they're at in their life. We have got to see both sides of that. And I believe that God has given me very deep, good portions of both empathy and logic, and I can speak reasonably eloquently. So I understand all that, and the platform that God has given me with my acting career like Reagan did.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  But here's the thing, and this is what I tell everybody and what I told you, if that's where God wants me, then that door has to be flung wide open, and God's gotta pick me up and throw me through it. Because to get into that world is a whole other level of demons and darkness that you have to fight through. Look at what our administration, look what Bobby's having to do, look what all, every single time, a new president, new senators. Also, then I, by the way, I went down the rabbit trail, and I, and I was like, okay, if Patrick's telling me this, and I have a lot of respect for you, and your understanding of the world, and your business acumen and all of that, and judge of character, I'm like, okay, listen, maybe there's something here. And again, I had other people, including friends who knew me for a long time, saying after that Jesse Waters interview, dude, you should run, you should run.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  I talked to people about it, campaign manager type of people.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  And they're like, here's the reality, you can run for a state rep seat, you're gonna get two years, it's gonna cost you, you're gonna have to raise probably, I don't know, five to 20, depending on, you know, what seat you're looking at. And the entire time you're in that seat, you're fundraising for your reelection, because you only get two years. You could go and run to be a senator, you got six years, that's gonna be a $50 million raise, at least. And maybe you have some success, depending on where you're going, but you're still also, like many senators, you're still kind of always in this cycle of staying in a reelection for the next, to stay in that. And for a governor's race, you're gonna need, at the time, the, the person that was advising

• 27:28Speaker 00

  me saying, you're gonna need at least 100 million, and probably more than that, particularly if you're gonna run in California, because Kamala was teasing that she was gonna go run for governor of California at the time. And also, on top of all of that, you won't be able to do business. You are not allowed to own and operate a business if you go into, you know, public leadership like that. And I'm knee-deep in trying to raise money to build this thing, this vision that God gave me, in Austin, Texas, and I've got investors, and I've got partners, and I'm like, I, I don't, this doesn't feel, I don't feel like the peace of God being like, this is the door you need to walk through right now. If that ever happens, if I'm out of place in my life, and it makes all the sense in the world, and God's really showing me, opening that door and throwing me through it, if

• 28:11Speaker 00

  that's my calling in this life, to go be a public servant and a leader in that way, as a legislator in some respect, I would gladly take that job on.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  I, I think, for me, if I was, I'm not in this space, if I was an agent or manager, or if I'm running the RNC, I would have a deep bench of people that I would start brewing now, with a pipeline of five, 10, 15, 20 years. And I'd be having one-on-one conversations with these guys, and I would say, Zach, I think you're a 20, mid-20, 30s, but we got a 10-year plan together. That's why I would do it, because you're young, you're 45, 46, you're, you're gonna be 46, right?

• 28:49Speaker 00

  I just turned 46.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Happy birthday, you just turned 46, my birthday's in two weeks, so you just turned 46, I'm gonna be 40, so I would say, I think it's a 10-year thing, and let's help you make some money and go through it, and the route's gonna be different. I'm having a conversation with my son, I told him, I said, so what's the pinnacle? What do you want to do in life? And he gives it to me. I said, all right, so what other things, because it's not gonna be one, two, it's gonna be one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Okay, great, so let's identify what different ways we can go to seven. So we mapped it out. If you go this, then this, then this, then you can end up here, great. If we go this, so we wrote the, so it's a clear path of how to get to here, if that ever comes along, right? So there's many ways to go through with someone's background like yours, but...

• 29:32Speaker 02

  I wrote this down here about you is, I don't know who I was listening to, you know, on Trump as a talent. Trump is not necessarily the most likable candidate we've had on the Republican Party. That would be Reagan. On the Democratic ticket, it would be Clinton. Two of the most likable guys, just frickin' ridic, even more than Obama, right? On how likable they are. But Trump went against the least likable human being in the history of politics, the first time, which is Hillary Clinton. No one likes her, including Democrats. And then he goes against Biden and he goes against Kamala, which was a terrible candidate and becomes where he's at. Reagan was likable. Uh, you're likable. You, you, this is a real crusade, real cause, because it wasn't a good business decision for you to tweet.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  You know, a guy who was a very famous bodybuilder, he told me all his views and he says, this is what I want to do. And I asked him a question, I said, do you have FU money? He said, no. I said, if you tweet this and you don't have FU money, you better be ready to make money in this space, because you're gonna lose your sponsors. He says, what do you suggest I do? I said, I'm not telling you what to do. If you need FU money, go get some money, then do that. But if you go here, you're gonna lose a lot of money, right? And he says, okay, I'm gonna put it off a little bit, because it's a logical decision when you go through it.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  I, I, listen, I get it. And, and there is a part of me that, again, I, I go back and I wonder, was this the right move? Should I have done that? Listen, I can't, I can't unring that bell now.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  No, I totally get it.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  And, and more than that, though, yes, you could wait to have FU money. Or you can look at what you have, recognize that you have a lot. I have a lot. I've had a lot, which, by the way, does not mean that I don't need to...

• 31:07Speaker 02

  He doesn't have your kind of money.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  Right, right. Well, no, no, but I mean...

• 31:10Speaker 02

  That guy I'm talking to.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  But like, but I'm also, in many respects, because of my monthly nut and everything that I'm doing, I'm also paycheck to paycheck in some ways, right? I don't have the escape velocity that Elon or Joe Rogan or people have. I get that. But also, at some point, that can't be the arbiter of your decision-making. You have got to ask yourself, what is in my soul? And how much do I trust God that if I do step out and I do take a beating for this, which I did in some respects, I lost a lot of friends, which was probably the most disappointing thing about it, because these were some of my friends that I knew for 20 years that I thought, well, they know my heart. They know that I don't stand for everything that Trump does and says, but that I'm making a logical decision here, given the entirety of this team and what I think is going on in this country.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  And yet, they still chose, it's like, they ghosted, they were out. They were not my friends anymore. So, I've taken an emotional, financial toll in all of that. But you can't base it even on that. You've got to say, what is the truth that lay inside of me that must be spoken? Because if enough of us good men don't speak it, then we're gonna get steamrolled one way or the other. And then we're all gonna sit around like the well-meaning Germans in 1930's Germany that sat on their hands being like, well, you know, we didn't know what to do because that was very scary. And it's like, yeah, life is scary. The stakes are scary. But do you trust that God's got your back if you're willing to go take those steps? And I do, at the end of the day.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  And, again, people like the wonderful folks at Angel Studios and other producers and other films that I'm a part of, they have my back. And they see me for who I am. And, and some of them don't even necessarily agree with me politically, but they're not going to go so far as to burn me at the stake, because they also recognize that we live in a country that should offer everyone the freedom of that speech and not just the convenient, agreed-upon narrative that Hollywood might...

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, why don't we do that? I think, you know, for the audience to maybe learn, because you at one point supported Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate, right? Then you went to Marianne Williamson.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Whoever the next Libertarian, was that Marianne?

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Marianne, was, was she a Libertarian-ish? Maybe it was Libertarian-ish.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Whoever ran as the Libertarian candidate, that next one, is who I voted for.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  I voted twice in a row for Libertarians.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  And then it was, and then you went to Bobby, and then Trump, and then Thomas Massey, right? A little bit of Thomas Massey.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  So, walk me through like...

• 33:35Speaker 00

  And now Zach Lane in Iowa, very big on Zach Lane.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  Beautiful. So, what, what, what do you believe in? What, what, what are your values? What are your principles that you believe in?

• 33:42Speaker 00

  I would say that, you know, predominantly, it's a pretty Libertarian viewpoint. I think that, um, one of the beauties of this country and how our founding fathers set it up was in such a way that we had a very small government. We're supposed to have a very small government to handle things that only a federal government and what that would help in its interconnectedness over all of the states to be able to support the states. But I believe in states' rights a lot, a lot. Like, yes, there are some things that should be federal, but most of that should be determined, I think, within states. And I think that we were given this amazing opportunity in that, which should have been 50 different Petri dishes that all got to run their own little experiment within their

• 34:27Speaker 00

  own liberties. And we would have learned a lot by this point if certain states were like, oh, yeah, we're like, you know, no rules and we're, you know, Oregon right now. And I, and you watch, and everybody watches that lesson in real time. You go, oh, maybe that's not what we should do. As opposed to just outlawing things federally right out of the gate. Let these states do these things. You know, listen, I'm a big proponent of plant medicines, right? I think this is a huge thing and a wonderful thing that the, finally, our administration and many people like Bobby and Joe Rogan and, and, um, Brian Hubbard and Americans for Ibragaine, like, I think this is a really good thing. But it's been stigmatized since the 60s, all of this stuff. And we lost a lot of time in being able to do clinical trials on it because of these

• 35:08Speaker 00

  horrible, archaic, uh, uh, federal laws that were against them. Had we allowed even just one state to go do that, we would have seen the miraculous power, healing power of these things a long time ago. So, I believe that. I believe that, you know, we are all given our own liberty. We should be able to live the life that we want to live, so long as our liberty doesn't affect someone else's liberty. It's really not rocket science. That, to me, is the, is the, it might not be the technical foundation of Libertarianism, but from my standpoint, that is Libertarianism. We should live and let live, to the extent that then our liberty starts affecting other people's liberty. That's why I think, you know, when you get to certain hot-button topics like pro-choice

• 35:50Speaker 00

  and pro-life, you know, I think one of the things that a lot of pro-choicers are unwilling to go to is that at some point in the process of separate sperm and egg to fully grown baby, there is another life in you. Now, we can sit around and talk about when does that begin. Lots of people have different ideas about that. I'm not an expert in that. I've heard arguments that it starts at inception and arguments that it's only after, you know, it's viable at 23 weeks, 24 weeks, something like that, and anywhere in between, all of that. But shouldn't we sit down with some really, really intelligent people from both science and spirituality and have our amazing, you know, charrettes and just be like, hey, can we just all at least find some common ground in where we say life begins?

• 36:35Speaker 00

  And that at that point, this is now its own life and therefore it has its own liberties and we must respect those liberties, right? That's where, that, that's a kind of governing principle within me. I think we need to get back to that.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Very cool. Take me back to if I was in 10th grade with you. Who was Zach really via 10th grade?

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Oh, man, 10th grade. I was, um, man, I mean, I, I was like, five, five?

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Stop.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, I didn't hit my growth spurt till the summer between my junior, or my sophomore and junior year. So, in 10th grade, sophomore year, I was, I was still probably like, I mean, definitely five, five, six, maybe, yeah, yeah. I was, I was a little kid. And I was an absolute spaz, um, theater kid, always entertaining. Ever since I was a little kid, I knew I wanted to be an entertainer and I entertained people. And it was a lot, like, I didn't have an off switch, you know? Uh, but fortunately, I found theater and people like me who wanted to always be on and entertain people and, oh, there you go, yeah. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Yeah, look at that kid. Um, and, uh...

• 37:48Speaker 02

  So, were you in drama?

• 37:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh, my God, like endlessly, I was doing all...

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Did mom put you in or you asked?

• 37:53Speaker 00

  No, I, I, that was all me. My parents, my parents, God bless them, I mean, they were struggling with their own things and they were not super involved, to be honest, like in my academics or my life or, it was all stuff that I, I knew deep down in me. I knew at a very young age that God made me to be an entertainer.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  How old were you when you knew...

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Oh, probably four.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  Stop.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  What, what was the first time you entertained and you saw a reaction from people?

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Well, I, I can't, I don't know exactly, but I will tell you that around four, I think, three or four is when most of us as children, when our awareness really comes online. You're, you're aware and alive prior to that, but you're not really connecting dots. And around three or four, the movie really starts. And at that point, I didn't know what an entertainer was, but I knew things in my soul. Like, I, I knew that a smiling, happy person felt good on the inside, right? And I knew that at that point, around three or four, oh, I could intentionally make someone laugh and smile. It doesn't have to just be this accident that I witness happening. I can ape or mimic or do a funny voice or, you know, do weird things with my body and I could evoke these smiles and laughs from people. And I, and I, it was the greatest drug ever.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  I mean, literally. Now, couple that with, I was the middle boy between two girls and a dad that wasn't there and really lost, you know, and needing to find attention to even satisfy my existence in this world. So, but God uses all of that, right? God redeems that. God used every one of those peats, you know, ingredients to make the soup that is me. And so, I didn't know what an actor entertainer was at that age, but I knew that I could do these things that ultimately were entertaining people to go and bring, you know, good, happiness, joy, elevation into the world. And then a few years later, I found out, oh, that's a thing I can do for a living. Oh, that's my job. I'm gonna do that.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  When did you know that? How old were you?

• 39:46Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't know. Again, as soon as my awareness put those dots together, six, seven, I'm watching TV, probably watching Three's Company and watching John Ritter tumble over couches and making people laugh in the laugh track of a sitcom. And I'm like, yes, I want to do that. That's what I'm supposed to go do, yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  Very cool. So, Three's Company, now, were you a good student? Were you a troublemaker? Were you an athlete? Were you a...

• 40:09Speaker 00

  Uh, no, I mean, I was a little bit of an athlete. I, I, you know, played some Little League ball, baseball, growing up. And then in high school, I was actually a springboard diver my freshman year, because I used to have friends that had trampolines and I could do backflips and frontflips and all that. And then so somehow I got wrangled into being a springboard diver, which I did for one year. Wasn't for me. Uh, I really didn't like smacking the water from great heights. Not my, not my idea of fun. Uh, and then my senior year of high school, I, you know, tried out for the volleyball team and I played left bench. Like, you know, I, I wasn't... But then I played a lot of pickup basketball in my 20s and 30s and, you know, I'm, I'm an athletic person, but I was never the athlete. I was the spazzy actor theater kid for the most part.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  Um, and, uh, as far as school is concerned, um...

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Man, I, you know, this is one of the things that I really wish that my parents or there were, there were people in my life that like really noticed me and saw me and invested in me because like I, I, I did, I did well in school and I barely tried. I could memorize, I, as long as, as long as I was even slightly attentive in math class, for example, like, you know, in high school, I had the same algebra teacher my freshman year and my junior year for algebra two. And when I got back to her class, our, our, our grade was broken up into, you know, whatever, 50% of your grade was homework that you did and the grades

• 41:41Speaker 00

  you got on that homework. And then 50% was the testing that you did and the grade you got on the test. And, and I went to my teacher, I was like, how about, and I just negotiated with her. I said, how about I don't do the homework and I only do the tests because the tests are to test you on how well you would have done the homework, right? And she's like, yeah, okay. And I said, so if I just do the tests and I get an A on the test, then you could deduce that I would have gotten an A on the homework. And subsequently, if I got a B, then you could apply the B or C or whatever. And she sat there for a second. She goes, all right, Zach, let's try it. Because I could sit in class and I could watch what she did and I could just absorb what it was. I didn't need to go home

• 42:24Speaker 00

  and practice all of these algebraic formulas because I understood how the formula

• 42:27Speaker 02

  She agreed.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  She agreed. So then I would come in and I would ace my tests and I would therefore get a retroactive A on my homework. And I loved that. That was somebody that actually saw reason in a way that I appreciated and, and recognized that, okay, you do, you do understand this pretty well and you're willing to gamble on

• 42:44Speaker 02

  You made a good argument and she bought it.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Okay, let's do it.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Did she apply that to everybody else or was

• 42:48Speaker 00

  No, it was just, it was just me, as far as I know. But again, like even when I was in sixth grade, I, we had a, we had an assignment to write a poem. And brother, I wrote a fent, it was so good. The poem was so, and I spent so long on it. It was, you know, what I, what did I understand of poetry at that point, other than you rhyme, right? And so I made this whole poem. It was called E's, capital E apostrophe S. And it was just all of these various examples of, you know, the, the, the chameleon hidden, the elephant scene, the Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, like all of this kind of silly stuff, right? But it was so well written that my sixth grade teacher pulled me aside and said, where did you copy this from? This is, you can't, this is plagiarism. I didn't even know what plagiarism was. She goes, you plagiarized this. I said, and by the way, this was a

• 43:33Speaker 00

  teacher that actually liked me. And I begged her, I'm like, I didn't plagiarize this at all. And then she called my mom and she said, your son plagiarized this. And my mom didn't believe me either.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  Stop.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Now, and 100% now, and brother, and I bring it up because it still is a source subject for me because I know that God has given me a lot of talent. And along the way, had people actually been like, there's, we can invest in this. Like you see things in a very different way.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Did you ever go back and confront her or no?

• 44:00Speaker 00

  No.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Never did?

• 44:01Speaker 00

  No.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  See, I had a situation like that with my ceramics teacher, Ms. Rose. I went back and confronted her. Don't ask me why I took ceramics, but I went back.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  I think it's great you took

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I went back and I had a great time. But I went back and confronted, had a conversation with her and as well as the counselor, Ms. Kay. Like, why would you say this? And we just had a great conversation together. Is she, do you know if she's still around or no?

• 44:21Speaker 00

  I don't know. Ms. Morris, if you're around, Rose Hill Junior High.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Contact me. We'd love to see what happens with that visit. Going back to family, you're talking about, you know, mom and dad, you know, the role they're, they played, they weren't that involved in, with you with schooling. They weren't kind of watching you to see, hey, there's something we have, we can build on this, right? Maybe, maybe it helped that you went into entertainment or else you would have gone on a different route. So I, I pulled up a data.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  I thought about that, by the way.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  That maybe that was God literally guiding you. It was, it was, it felt unjust and it was unjust, but then God used that because it's like, yeah, yeah, but I don't need you to go be a poet. I need you to go do this, you know?

• 44:59Speaker 02

  And obviously the world now knows that the creativity was real. It's not like back then it was chat GPT and you went and got it from chat GPT. Imagine kids today that are creative, who, everything they bring, the teacher's like, no, you got it from chat. I'm like, I'm really creative. Look at me. I got some talent. But you know what we pulled up? I, I said, pull up the top 50 greatest actors of all time. And then I want you to ask which one of them had a good upbringing. Okay? Do you know what's the only one that came up with good upbringing out of the 50 actors? And we used AI, multiple AI.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Paul Newman.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Was the only one. Every one of them is like, well, Tom Hanks, but no, his parents also got a divorce. Well, this, I know, but not this. But not this. So there was a follow on. The only one that was kind of like a, you know, reasonable thing was Paul Newman had good parents, you know, kind of grew up. And by the way, I don't know if you know or not, Paul Newman stayed married to the same wife for like 50 plus years and, you know.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  He was a good dude.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  He was a good dude. Yeah. So then I said, do me a favor. Tell me the ones that are raised with phenomenal parents. What do they end up doing? And I want you to give me data. So I pulled up the data, brought up the study and it kind of went through everything on what happens if you have perfect parents, mom and dad stayed together forever, everything is great. Says those kids typically end up becoming dentists, doctors, engineers, that's their path.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  The ones who end up becoming business owners, sales and entertainment had a very difficult upbringing.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Why do you think that is?

• 46:26Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I think that the lowest hanging fruit in deconstructing that is when you don't get the love, the attention, the love, the support that you really deserve as a child, and you, young adult, then you have a whole life in front of you where you're proving something to someone. So an actor, a successful entrepreneur, you have a chip on your shoulder, whether you know it or not, you are trying to prove your worth in this world. Because you are left with a wound from your parents where you did not feel like you were enough to get their attention, to get their affection, to get their investment,

• 47:09Speaker 00

  right? So to me, that's, that's probably the, the root of it. And then there's a lot of things on top of that. But yeah, I would say that that's, that's why you end up with people like myself or like yourself. I don't know what was your upbringing like?

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Very similar to yours. I looked at yours, very similar. So I wrote a book a couple of years ago for, for business planning, it was called Choose Your Enemies Wisely. And I said, the people that I meet that do big things in their lives have three things in common. One, they experience somebody in their lives that gave them unconditional love. Cause you gotta know that exists. I said, and then number two was they, and I shared this with Brady, Tom Brady, because he has that thing as well, right? And number two was one person in your life that no matter what you ever did, you could never win them over. Never. You can make millions, you can put the biggest movie, you can go,

• 48:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  You're never going to win this person over. And the last but not least, you know, those who chose their enemies wisely. They chose the right enemy that brought out the best in them. Some people choose the wrong person, doesn't bring out the best in them.

• 48:11Speaker 10

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• 51:49Speaker 02

  What role did your mom play there?

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Well, unfortunately, my mom, she struggled her entire life with mental illness. I mean, and by entire life, I mean, I, I think that as, I think that mental illness really begins to manifest for men and women in different, you know, generally in different times of life. But for both, as you're getting into your 30s,

• 52:15Speaker 00

  you're, the sheen and the kind of naivete of your earlier life begins to dull a little bit. And, and also the world becomes much more real, your responsibilities in the, in the world, your relationships, your ability, how, how deep you can go into those relationships, all starts becoming very real, right?

• 52:37Speaker 00

  So my mom, as a younger girl, I think, you know, wasn't necessarily, you know, struggling in her mental illness, but she was being traumatized heavily by her mother, my grandmother, as were all of her siblings. She was the oldest of five and they went through lots and lots and lots of trauma, lots of different, mainly psychological abuse, but even some physical. And if you are someone who has dealt with that level of trauma and you are really unaware of, you're not unaware that you've been hurt, but you're unaware of how much that has damaged you and unaware that you, no one else, but you must be the one to go and heal it. And my mom wasn't, and quite frankly, you know, our parents' generation was a different generation.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  The idea of therapy, the idea of talking to a therapist was like a massive defeat, particularly for men, right? No, we gotta hold it together. You know, the idea of going to a shrink was a joke in most movies. Oh, so and so's seeing the shrink and must be in a straitjacket, whatever that is. We have the benefit of being now in this world where mental health and mental illness is steadily and readily talked about as it should be and ways in which we can go heal from it. But my mom, man, you know, she, she didn't heal from her trauma. She got into one marriage that was super dysfunctional, ended in flames. She had us three kids, but we, we grew up with my mom and not our dad. And she was slowly, you know, unraveling ever since she started to have her kids.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  And life was not, you know, coming to her terms. And she was creating a lot of chaos in her life and our lives and the lives of those around her because she was very deeply hurt and could not get anyone to see the pain.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Did she ever share it with you or no?

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, she would talk about how our grandma was a horrible person her whole life and how our dad was a horrible person and how everybody was a horrible person.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  Was it a pattern with everybody or was some of it had some credibility? Like, did she ever say anybody that was great to her or was it a pattern with almost everyone?

• 54:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, no, no. I mean, listen, I think that there, I think it was a pattern with everyone, but there was also credibility, credibility, particularly with her mother, right? But then if you're an injured animal,

• 54:48Speaker 00

  you tend to, either you completely cower and close down and you don't, you're a shell of what you were, or you become kind of ferocious, right? You're, you're hurt inside like a dog who's been abused and they're in a corner and they're, you know, it's that thing. And so my mom was, was a lot of that and, and could only respond well with people that fully agreed with her, fully placated her. If anyone even slightly started to disagree with her, she could turn on them very quickly because what she learned was being wrong equated to not being loved. And that's a really bad trap to fall into. So that meant she would hurt people throughout her life and then people would call her on that.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  And then instead of being able to say like, you know what, man, you're right. I shouldn't have done that. I'm sorry. She had no capability of doing that because it was death to her. If I acknowledge that I hurt this person, then I'm no better than my mom who hurt me and I'm wrong and no one will love me. And so she would just stonewall. So it was really gnarly and that affected ultimately every, every relationship she had in her life. Like her second marriage, that went down in flames. I mean, there was lots of just unhealthy. And then, by the way, adding to all of that trauma, unresolved, unhealed trauma, you start pouring booze and pills into that soup? That's a very, very, very bad soup. And ultimately it's what brought on her untimely demise. At 65, she drank herself to death.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  65, how old were you?

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Uh, 35.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  So this is 11 years ago?

• 56:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  When that happened? Do you remember the phone call?

• 56:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, my uncle Mike called me and broke the news. I was sitting on my couch in LA when I lived there. And cried with him a little bit. I mean, by the way, my mom and I hadn't had a relationship in 13 years at that point.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  Zero communication?

• 56:44Speaker 00

  Not zero, because I was still putting a roof over her head and making sure that she had food and stuff, but like, it was very complicated. It was very, very complicated.

• 56:55Speaker 00

  But I didn't have an emotional well, I, no, no, I didn't have an emotional relationship or, so, so there was reaction, but it happened in very strange, different phases for me. I cried a bit with him on the phone. I immediately then, my uncle asked if, you know, do you want me to call your sisters or do you want to? I was like, no, let me call them. And my older sister was up in Ventura, about an hour and plus away where we grew up. My younger sister was not too far away in LA. And I texted them both. I was like, hey, what are you guys up to right now? I want to see you. Didn't tip it. I wanted to tell them in person. My younger sister was able to drive to me and I sat her down and I told her what happened. And she just, you know, completely fell apart.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  She was the closest to our mom and the most like our mom.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  You know, and they mourned a lot. I didn't, I, I, I was very kind of, you know, together for most, and thank God I was. I was able to, you know, organize all of the funeral and the wake and, you know, all of, all of that stuff. The funeral home, the casket, like all of those things that you never, ever want to have to be dealing with for anyone in your life, even if you were hurt by them tremendously, like I was by my mom. But, but I still had moments where, you know, I probably cried for a couple of days, like two and a half days, and then there were no more tears. And then the funeral and all those things. And then it was only when I went to therapy in 2017 where I had to write a letter to my parents, telling them how I felt.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Now, my mom, my dad was still alive at the time. My mom was dead and it felt like, what am I doing? And I, I go to start writing this letter and brother, it took me probably 10 solid minutes of weeping with a pen in my hand to this pen and paper, like, like not knowing even where to begin, even where to begin, and just weeping and weeping and weeping. And finally, pen to paper, and I just start going and it just releasing like, how dare you treat me and your daughters the way that you did? How dare you do this? How dare you do that? Just, just pouring out of me.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  And I flipped the page and it was completely gone. Like I flipped that page and something literally flipped in my mind and in my heart. And I put the pen back down and the paper. And then what started spilling out of me is just lots of

• 59:25Speaker 00

  mercy, forgiveness, compassion, empathy, because I started to write, but you did this because I know that this happened to you. You abused us unwittingly, unknowingly in ways because you yourself were abused as a child and really messed up. And so it was an incredibly cathartic experience for me, but also was really the beginning of me understanding what it means to, you know, as the Bible talks about, what does it mean to love your enemy and pray for your persecutor? Like, what does that really mean? I don't know many Christians that actually practice that kind of stuff because they don't really understand it. And what it means as far as I'm concerned is recognizing that everybody is doing their best. And we hate to acknowledge that.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  We don't want to believe that the people doing very villainous, monstrous, dark, evil things in the world are doing their best. Clearly they're not, except that.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  People that strap bombs to their chest and go blow up markets and kill innocent people, they think they're doing that to honor God, right? They're wrong. You and I can sit here and absolutely objectively say that what they're doing is not honoring God. Certainly not the God that we serve or we believe in. That is not what God is calling people to do. God is calling us to love one another, get deeper into relationships, see the value that God imbues in every one of us as a child of God, I believe. But those people, since they were little, little kids, were impregnated with really bad lies and programming that leads them to that place. It does not absolve anyone. It didn't absolve my mother of her actions. But I was able to find forgiveness and mercy, recognizing that she was a product of her environment in the same way that we all are, right? So that was my mom.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  That was the journey that I had with my mom.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  You said thirty-six. Thanks for sharing that.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course, absolutely. That's why I love doing great podcasts, because we get to talk about important things.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  Long form, man.

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  You know, it's different for a man to talk about the challenges with their mom than dad. And Bill Clinton one time said, you know, how, you know, there is no winning of talking about what your mom, you know, did or didn't do, because some people are gonna say, well, you know, what about your dad? And what about this? And what about that? But dad's is easier. Mom is more sensitive, because it's your mom. You came from the womb. But also, at the same time, when you're telling that story, thirty-six years old, when she passed, thirty-five years old, you were thirty-five, thirty-six when she passed, thirteen years, so go to twenty-two, did you ever confront her? You know, like in your teens, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-two, did you ever confront and have a serious conversation?

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  Oh, many. Oh, we had many conversations. I mean, the reason why our thirteen years spread of, you know, non-communication that started, because after many, many, many times of myself or other people in our family or friends confronting her, trying to get to a better relationship, but that requires two people being honest about how they may have affected each other and apologizing for that, which she wasn't capable of doing. And then one Thanksgiving, I was, it was Thanksgiving of two thousand two, and I had just started this TV show, it was my first TV show, it was a sitcom on ABC called Less Than Perfect, and I was like, my dreams are coming true, and my mom was calling me on

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  shoot days, I gotta go down and make a whole audience laugh, and she's berating me, calling me a bastard and a horrible son, because I wasn't making her my agent or manager, which she had no position doing, because she felt no purpose in her own life and was...

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  She's asking you to make me the manager?

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, make me, it was crazy. It was crazy talk. And, but ultimately, so we weren't talking for a minute, and then Thanksgiving came up, and I went up to Thanksgiving, and we got through Thanksgiving, and then the very next day, I had to go pick up something that I'd left at their house, and my mom, my stepdad, and our family friend were there, waiting for me to have like an intervention, because my mom and I hadn't really spoken for like a month at that point. And I was like, guys, this is a bad idea. You do not want to do this right now. This is, nothing good will come of this. And they all insisted and insisted and insisted, and I kept pushing back. I said, no, like, we gotta go talk to a therapist, this is not what we need to be doing right now. And then eventually, I was like, fine, okay, let's go. And what ultimately transpired in that conversation was, I called my mom on something that was

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  very real and very factual, and it hurt her. And my mom, and I'll preface this with, my mom was all bark and no bite, in that, her bark was her bite. She would say the most horrendous things to hurt you, so that then you would essentially react or essentially feel like, oh my God, I must be in the wrong if this is how she feels, right? And she would do this throughout her life. And my mom, after I said these things, and again, I wasn't, it wasn't, I wasn't demeaning her, I wasn't, it was just like holding her accountable for this stuff. And my mom looked at me and she said, you know what, Zachary, I'd be happier today if you were dead. And I knew my mom's kind of modus operandi, and I said, and that she would say horrible

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  things, but also she would immediately deny them. Two hours later, if you said, you said this, she goes, no, I never, I never said, I didn't...

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  When is her birthday?

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  October sixth.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  Stop it.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  Brother, another Libra.

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  Are you kidding?

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. A week after mine. Yeah. And by the way, let me just say for the record, and I've said this in my book, and I've said this on, my mother was one of the most incredible people, like the, what made her up? She was dynamic and beautiful and charming and talented, like incredibly intelligent, incredibly intelligent, could have run a Fortune 500 company, but because of her trauma, if you take, if you have a specimen with that kind of power, but you don't guide it, if you don't invest in it, if you don't help it to be a healthy version of itself, then that power, it gets unleashed in bad ways, right? And that's what happened with my mom. So she was very good at denying what she would say, and I, and nobody was recording

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  back then or whatever, and I said, Mom, I looked her dead in the eye, and I said, I want you, for the record, just so everybody here hears that, and remembers what you just said, say that one more time. And my mom said, and I could see, by the way, like, it was really incredible, and kind of scary, because I could see the fear in her eyes. I could see her caught in her lie, that she knew was a lie, she didn't want me dead, but she wanted to hurt me because she was hurting. And I was watching her process it in real time. And she looked at me and she just calmly said, I would be happier today if you were dead. And I looked at her, and I looked at my stepdad and our friend, and I said, I'm never gonna be spoken to this way, in this way, ever again.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  I love you guys, you pick the therapist and I'll pay for them, but I'm never, ever doing this. I'm not doing this anymore until we go get the healing we need. And it took like, I can't even remember, two and a half years for them to finally find a therapist, and I, we finally went, and I was good on my promise. I went, paid the therapist, but the therapist agreed with me, and then they said, oh, he doesn't know what he's talking about, and you know, like, all of, all of these things. So...

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  Do you think, um, did your sisters react to those kind of painful words the same way you did, or no?

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  Well, as I came to find out, so it was very, very eye-opening, when I wrote my book Radical Love, which was, you know, really just about my falling apart, going to therapy, and what led me into that therapy, and a lot of this is in that, is in the book. I wrote the book, and then I sent it to my sisters, amongst, you know, some other close people, to read it through and give me their honest feedback on it. And my sisters were like, Zach, I don't remember a lot of these things happening. I don't remember being treated in these ways. And as it turns out, this is not uncommon. You are, you have a very subjective, specific perception of your childhood, how you lived it, and what you were hearing and observing, that doesn't necessarily translate to all of the children.

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  Now, some of that is age, some of that is their perception of the exact moment that happened, some of it is literally only happened to you, the way you were treated, and that they didn't necessarily pick up on, right? So some of it is absolutely corroborated by my sisters, and in other ways, like my younger sister, again, who was most like my mom, who was the baby of the family, she looks back on her life, and she's like, I had it pretty good. Like, I didn't really, I didn't...

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  What's the age difference between this?

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  Two and a half years.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  Okay, so that's not a big age difference?

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  No, not that big.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  And your oldest sister?

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  Two and a half years older.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  So two and a half older, two and a half young?

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  And do you, do you have the personality of your biological father? Like, are you like him?

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  I'm the mutt between the two. My older sister is like our dad, my younger sister is like our mom, and I'm like right in the, in the middle of it.

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  When are the, when are the girls' birthdays? When are they?

• 1:08:20Speaker 00

  Um, my older sister is March 2nd, and then my younger sister is April 20th.

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  So I wonder if how much of this is how Libras, because words have a lot of power in our, in our, in our eyes, so when somebody uses words, we're more literal to be like, wait, you mean this?

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  Versus maybe others are like, ah, she's just pissed, I'm just moving on, it's not a big deal.

• 1:08:41Speaker 00

  Well, listen, like we were talking about before, I definitely think that there's validity to wherever you fall within the signs and the zodiac, and also the Enneagram, as we talked about before. I think all of those things are pertinent to how they were treated, also how they perceived their treatment, all of that stuff.

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  Burning bridges, you know, we'll always hear about, hey, Zach, never burn a bridge, never burn a bridge. You talk to super successful people, they'll say, listen, you better learn how to burn a bridge. You know, because sometimes there's gonna be some moments, was this one of those moments where you said, I gotta burn this bridge with family, or else my dreams are not gonna become reality?

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  Uh, it wasn't so much, or else my dreams won't become reality, it was, although that was tied to it, it's like, if I don't, if I don't put up healthy boundaries, I didn't even really understand what, you know, what I've now learned about even the healthiest of boundaries at that time, you know, most people don't at twenty-one, twenty-two, but I also knew that you can't let people just keep marching into your life and belittling you and saying horrible things about you, and quite frankly, lying about me. My mom and stepdad were very dishonest about who I was to everyone that they would meet for a long time, in their own pain and what they were doing, right? But I knew that regardless of your career and succeeding in career, I wouldn't survive. I wouldn't be able to just flourish as the human being that I was meant to be, if I

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  have that level of toxicity constantly being poured into my life.

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  I know your, your stepdad wrote a letter to you or something like that, you're the worst, you know, forty-page email or whatever it was.

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  It had a preamble, literally, it said preamble, and it had all these categories, it was crazy. He was an incredibly, is an incredibly intelligent human being.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  He's still around?

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  I believe so, yeah.

• 1:10:21Speaker 02

  Okay. But you guys are not in contact, you don't communicate, okay. Do you, do you think that part about entertaining, would you come in and be like, let me see which mom is showing up today? Okay, I know which one it is, let me adjust to you, let me see who's showing up today?

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, that's borderline personality. My mom was absolutely clinical, I mean, she was never, I think clinically tested for it, because she wouldn't go and do that, but from my understanding of what borderline personality is, she was one hundred percent borderline personality with some narcissistic tendencies. And so, yeah, and that means borderline personality is, she might wake up in the best mood ever, and you could do no wrong, and she might wake up in the worst mood ever, and you can do no right.

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  And trying to adjust to this constantly moving target that yeah, you're having to take on lots of different energies and roles as you navigate those very mine, mine filled, you know, areas of your life. It was crazy.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  Did that help you in acting?

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  That's what I'm saying. I think probably, I think God uses all of it. And I think that my ability to have to navigate, well, listen, and even if it didn't necessarily help me with being a better actor, although Lord knows it probably it has, it helps you to understand other people that are borderline personalities and navigating that and Hollywood is full of lots of very interesting and lost people. So, you know, all of it's, I think, a learning lesson for sure.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  Young men, you know, they, they, they nowadays, you know, you hear they're worried about getting married, you know, having kids, buying a house. It's a very different time of these guys, you know, or birth rate is the lowest it's ever been.

• 1:12:06Speaker 00

  Testosterone.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, all of that, right? So what, what did you like, when you went into the dating space about having somebody, I know you, you know, you, you got a kid, right?

• 1:12:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  Building the family, all that. What did you say? You're like, there's three things I'll never do when I'm dating, you know, marrying somebody, you're having a serious relationship. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna do this. Did you make, did you have any not, you know,

• 1:12:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  non-negotiables?

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I think that the, I think for me, like, you just gotta, you gotta really rip the Band-Aid off and be like, well, who, who do you pray to and who do you vote for? And

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  Seriously?

• 1:12:41Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because I think that a house divided is no good for anybody. Like you, you, and, and it doesn't mean we have to have exact, you know, like Christianity is a spectrum of faith. There's a lot of different

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55Speaker 00

  ways that people practice that or other religions that are still God centric that, you know, are you praying to your Creator? Do you have, do you have a humility to, a gratitude toward and a trust in your Creator? Like that is mandatory. I can't be living, I can't be in a relationship with someone who is living a materialistic life that's like, well, this is it and this is done and we're just out for ourselves. No, no, no, no, because I'm not. I need a partner like Maggie in my life who recognizes that I'm not about just serving myself. I'm about serving this world in very large ways. And then also then, how do we raise our children? That's, those have to be things that we infuse

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  into our child and hopefully more that we have. So, you know, philosophically, are you aligned? And I think politically, you have to find some alignment because you have to, there are hot button topics that is like, how do you feel about these things? Because what's the point of us being so divided that if we go to vote, we're just canceling each other out? Or are we, and even aside from the voting, are we pulling in the same direction? Do we want to build the same world for our children and for other people's children? Do we want to build a better future? Do we see a better future as roughly the same type of future? That's what you need to find in a partner. 100%.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  Phew, powerful. Okay. So in, in, in Hollywood, so this is one thing I always wonder myself, I'm, I'm not, obviously not in the space. You'll see a lot

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  Well, you're in the space adjacent. I mean,

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Adjacent. Yeah, adjacent media, but maybe not where the cameras watching for me to act and play part and all of that. I always wonder when I see patterns of, you know, Ryan, is it Ryan Reynolds, who did the movie with Notebook? Who was that with? Rachel McAdams?

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  Oh, Ryan Gosling.

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  Ryan Gosling, right? And then Ryan Gosling does, I think he's with Eva Mendes now.

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  Or even Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, they do the movie, you know, Mr. And Mrs. Smith. And this goes by Humphrey Bogart went through, a lot of actors, Elizabeth Taylor went through this where you go do a movie, in the movie, I am in love with you, the character, right? So for me to really get there, you know, it's, it's for the audience to believe it, you gotta find a way to get into that state, right? And then to disconnect yourself and move on. What's been your experience when you're doing a role and you're, you're in love with this person? Does it ever get to a point that it's so emotional that you can't get out of it?

• 1:15:25Speaker 00

  No, no, not for me.

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  How do you disconnect?

• 1:15:28Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I don't know. Every actor has different methods, right? There's method actors who literally just inhabit those roles and they believe every, they want everybody to call them by their character name, all that stuff. I'm not one of those actors. I think that there's some techniques within method acting that are very helpful, like getting to emotional places and, you know, get, putting that on screen. But I, I try to only inhabit my character in the scene. Once those

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  Cameras are cut, then I'm back to being who I am. And depending on the scene and the gravity of the scene, like, I might need a little bit more warm up or cool down from that. But I'm not, every time I've had an on-screen love interest, either, and, and these are confounding elements, right? Either if there was attraction or something, either they were in a relationship, or I was in a relationship, or we were both in relationships or something like that. And so I wasn't gonna fan that flame anymore anyway. Like that, we're just professionals. We're doing a job. And it's enjoyable, you know, it's like, okay, we get to go pretend like we're in love and kiss or, you know, have this love scene or

• 1:19:28Speaker 00

  whatever it is. That's all well and good, but that's a job. That's, I'm going there to do that. And, and also, you know, like, you don't, you don't piss where you eat. Like, I, I saw so many on-set relationships, particularly on television series, right? Because it's to go and do a movie with somebody and fall in love in a movie, but then you're, the movie's done. So now you can just, you're either continuing in a romantic relationship or not, or whatever. But when you start dating somebody on a series and that doesn't go well, and now you have to work with them every day for the next seven years or what, like, that's a headache I never wanted to find myself in. So, you know, you just, you gotta be smart about all that stuff.

• 1:20:13Speaker 02

  Who, who was it? The show, was it Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis that, I don't know if they were dating. I didn't follow the story closely or not.

• 1:20:21Speaker 00

  No, on that 70's show, they were just friends.

• 1:20:23Speaker 02

  They were just friends.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  But they, they had a lot of love for each other. And then years later on, they reconnected and now they're married.

• 1:20:29Speaker 02

  It actually looks like it's a perfect fit. Like, when you see them, you're like, yeah, that makes sense. You know, that, that makes sense. Yeah. When I watch it, I'm like, man, this was so believable. I, I wonder how you disconnect from this. And to be an actor, you have to have a strong imagination, right? To be able to tap into it. How do you delete that? And be like, no, this is just a job and go. Maybe that's why a lot of people, you know, it, they end up, you know, with the person that they did a movie with. Maybe that's not everybody. And for you, you got a system that works for you.

• 1:21:02Speaker 02

  But for somebody from the outside, I've seen some movies where I say, I really believe these guys are in love.

• 1:21:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  It's that believable.

• 1:21:09Speaker 00

  And listen, sometimes they are, and sometimes they are just in that moment because they're really good actors and they're able to bring themselves to that place emotionally. And invest in that other actor in that scene in a way that as it translates through the screen, us, the viewer are going, I believe that entirely.

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  Do you think it's sustainable to be a, to be a regular actor and make your marriage work? And, and you know, still do these movies where you're falling in love with another woman? Is that sustainable long term?

• 1:21:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we were talking about, you know, Paul Newman. I, listen, I don't know everything that Paul Newman did or didn't do, but they stayed together for 50 years, as you said.

• 1:21:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45Speaker 00

  I mean, Jim Caviezel, and by the way, Neil McDonough, who's in Angel and the Batman with me, right?

• 1:21:51Speaker 02

  Yes, he has certain standards, right?

• 1:21:52Speaker 00

  He and Jim Caviezel both will not kiss a woman that's not their wife on camera. As far as I, I'm pretty, Neil for sure.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:22:03Speaker 00

  Jim, Jim might kiss a woman on camera, but will not do sex scenes. Like he, he's not gonna go, like it can be implied and he's not wrong. You don't have to do some gratuitous sex scene. You can do something where initiation happens, they're kissing and you cut to some beautiful sunset and you imply the next morning.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  What's that relationship with the director and the actor?

• 1:22:23Speaker 00

  What do you mean?

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  Where the relationship, the director says, no, Zach, I want you to do this in this scene. You get to say, I don't want to do it?

• 1:22:29Speaker 00

  Well.

• 1:22:30Speaker 02

  And is that pre accepting the job?

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, no, that, that, these are all conversations you would have before you take the job. You don't take the job. If you read the script and it's saying they kiss, they, you're seeing him in bed, they're rolling, you know, all that stuff. Or, or even aside from sexual stuff, if there are things in a script that you don't like or don't feel comfortable with. And you happen to be in a position where you have enough of authority to make those changes, like Jim would, or Neil, or myself at this point in my career, in the beginning of my career. You're taking what you get. You don't, you don't, there's no, you don't have the leverage, right? But as you can establish yourself and they are coming to you, they really want you a part of this film, then you have the opportunity to say, hey, I really like all of this, except I'd like to change this, I'd like to change that.

• 1:23:13Speaker 00

  And as long as they feel okay with that, then that's what you do. Certainly that's what Neil's done. That's what, what Jim has done. I've done that on plenty of things. Again, not specifically even with, you know, sexual content, although if I feel like there's something in the script. That is just being egregious and gratuitous for no reason, it's not serving the purpose, then it will absolutely have those conversations.

• 1:23:32Speaker 02

  Bring it up. Is there, I know at one point you didn't want to do Shazam, or I read it somewhere that Shazam maybe was not gonna happen with you.

• 1:23:39Speaker 00

  I was given an opportunity to audition for the role of Shazam. For the first film about two months before I ultimately got that job. And when I got the audition slip, the email saying, hey, we've set up an audition for you to audition for this role. I knew about the project. Um, I knew about the character a little bit and I knew that Shazam has. A basically a, a doppelganger, a twin, but is the dark version of him called Black Adam. And at that point, The Rock had already been cast as Black Adam. So I'm reading this, I'm like, they want John Cena, they don't want me. I'm not The Rock's twin, you know?

• 1:24:16Speaker 00

  Um, and I was also in a very dark place, unbeknownst to me. I was, had all this really gnarly trauma and everything that was unresolved in my life. And so I respectfully passed. I was like, they're not looking for somebody like me. Thanks, but no thanks. This would be a waste of time. Two months later, I am now finishing the therapy, the life-saving therapy that I was doing in Connecticut. And even though I told my team, hey, I'm off grid, I'm getting some healing that I need, I. Guess I get this email from my team saying, hey, there's this other role, it's not Shazam, supporting role. One little quick scene, no pressure, you know, we understand you're off grid, but this came up, if you want to do it, you know, whatever. And that day, it was a Wednesday and I just had a breakthrough in my therapy where I could finally start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

• 1:25:01Speaker 00

  And I emailed back and I said, when do they need this by? And they said, by Friday. Friday rolled around. I was feeling even better. I went to the gym, I came back, I was, I was just feeling good. I was feeling much better about myself. And I was like, you know, whatever, I'll go do this one scene. I put it up on the dresser drawer. Hit record, did a scene. Basically it was by myself. It was like kind of a monologue and I ad libbed a little bit in it. Felt good about it, sent it, one take. I tried to do another one. I kind of bobbled it. I was like, whatever. The first one was fine. Sent the first one. And then a few hours later, I start getting, my phone's blowing up and my team is like, so here's the deal. They love you for this, but also they're saying they haven't cast their Shazam yet and they think you could be their Shazam.

• 1:25:43Speaker 00

  Can you get to LA right now? And I said, no, I can't. I still have a few more days of the treatment that I'm in right now that I owe to myself. So.

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  How long was, how long was the whole thing in Connecticut?

• 1:25:54Speaker 00

  Three weeks.

• 1:25:55Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:25:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, three weeks. And I was just finishing that third week. Uh, and I was like, I can't, I'm sorry. Like if they can wait, then I might be able to do it next week if I, everything discharges well and every, all of my therapists feel like I'm in the right place.

• 1:26:09Speaker 02

  How bad do you need this job at this time? Or you don't really?

• 1:26:11Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean, well, I mean.

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  Financially?

• 1:26:14Speaker 00

  Oh, sure. I mean, the money that could come from that. My career, I was still working, but I wasn't, you know, but. Even more than the money, it's the importance of it. It's the stature of it to go be in a. DC Warner Brothers super titular role in a superhero movie, all of those things and what can come from that. But. You know, Hollywood was a big part of what put me in the place that I was in because of unresolved trauma that I carried with me into lots of unhealthy. Activities and relationships in Hollywood and a lot of abusive powers in Hollywood, a lot of. Producers or executives that don't value us, the actor, and treat us, we're just like a cog.

• 1:26:55Speaker 00

  And how abusive that is and ultimately feels when you have all of this stuff from your own childhood of how you felt that way as a kid. And me railing against that. And I mean, you know, all of that stuff, Hollywood and. And the things that happened to me in my journey there and that, you know, continue to happen on some level, but now I've done a lot of work to be able to navigate that better. So anyway, all that landed me in this therapy. So now it almost felt like, is this? The devil? Is this darkness trying to rope me back in? Like, yeah, I don't know. You've done enough work. You're good. You're good. Now come back here so we can beat you up more. And so I said, sorry, I can't do that. And then that ultimately led to them understanding that. And then me doing a meeting with David Sandberg, uh, via Zoom.

• 1:27:37Speaker 00

  That's Sunday. And on Monday, we did a camera test, but I was still at therapy. We did it through Zoom on iPads. And then they called back out on that Monday and they said. You are a frontrunner for this job, but you've got to be back here by Wednesday to do an on-camera, like in-person camera test. And I prayed about it. I talked to this wonderful woman, Kate, who was like an angel on my shoulders. It was praying for me there the whole time and we prayed together and.

• 1:28:07Speaker 02

  This is still Connecticut?

• 1:28:08Speaker 00

  It's still in Connecticut and.

• 1:28:09Speaker 02

  Was this a Christian retreat?

• 1:28:11Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, no, no. It was a very clinical. I had like. All these different modalities of treatment, a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, dialectic behavioral therapist, meditation therapist, art therapist. Uh, nutritionist, a life coach. I went to the gym three days a week, yoga twice a week, Pilates twice a week.

• 1:28:29Speaker 02

  Drug, this is not trying to deal with drugs?

• 1:28:32Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, not a rehab, like a.

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  This is not like the Betty Ford or whatever, they got in Palm Springs or?

• 1:28:36Speaker 00

  No, this was like psychological healing space. And for what it's worth, at the time. This woman Kate, who I was telling you about is this wonderful Christian woman and an angel on my shoulders who was praying for me. Technically she was not allowed to be doing that. In fact, she told me one day she was driving me to one of my appointments and she said, hey, listen, I just need you to know that if. You know, the administration finds out that I'm praying for you, I could probably lose my job because I'm not technically allowed to do this because they didn't want anybody. Any of these, these kind of companions that were a part of the program to be interfering with any of the therapy. And, uh, and I said, oh no, please don't stop praying for me. I won't tell anybody, but I need you to be praying for me. It's one of the only things keeping me alive right now.

• 1:29:17Speaker 00

  She said, oh no, for sure. And then we drove for a sec longer and then she turns to me, she said, but also know that I would gladly lose my job for you.

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:29:24Speaker 00

  Which was like broke me.

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  How old was she?

• 1:29:27Speaker 00

  I mean, she was, I don't know, maybe 55 at the time or something like that.

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  So, and that was, God used her as a conduit of his love, as of, of, of a mother's love in my life that I needed so desperately in that moment. And to the credit of Privé Swiss, which is the organization that I worked with in Connecticut, to their credit. They, I wrote about all this stuff in my book. They saw that it helped me tremendously and they have now restructured their. Uh, rules so that if a client, if a patient does want prayer of any particular kind, they can receive that prayer. So kudos to them for seeing that it was.

• 1:30:02Speaker 02

  Why is the prayer such a big thing?

• 1:30:04Speaker 00

  Because they just want to make sure that no one is overstepping bounds and interfering with the clinical. Help that you might be getting. So like, for example, if some, you know, if you've got a. A psychotherapist or somebody that's telling you in more clinical terms, like here's something that you need to be doing. But you've got somebody that might be, I don't know, overzealous in their own faith and they're like, we're just gonna pray this out of you and you don't need to do that stuff, you know, you don't want that.

• 1:30:28Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 1:30:28Speaker 00

  And that's not at all what Kate was doing. Kate was respecting all of the clinical help that I was getting and simultaneously.

• 1:30:34Speaker 02

  She's still there?

• 1:30:35Speaker 00

  I believe that she still does. She still does work there. Yeah.

• 1:30:37Speaker 02

  Very cool.

• 1:30:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:38Speaker 02

  So it's, it's, it's interesting. We all have a Kate in our lives, right? Kate's out of nowhere sometimes.

• 1:30:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  Uh, uh, by the way, is this your body or is this the body suit? Like?

• 1:30:47Speaker 00

  It's both. So I put on.

• 1:30:50Speaker 02

  You look jacked.

• 1:30:51Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, the, the suit, so. As soon as I got the job, I was working out five days a week, eating 4,000 calories a day. For like two months and put on 25 pounds.

• 1:31:05Speaker 00

  They they measured me for the suit before I did all of that. And there is padding and all kinds of stuff in there. I mean, obviously, my shoulders look like I'm like a 1930s football player.

• 1:31:15Speaker 02

  But your neck looks like a, that's your neck.

• 1:31:17Speaker 00

  That's my neck.

• 1:31:17Speaker 02

  That's your traps.

• 1:31:18Speaker 00

  Oh, no, 100%.

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  You can't fabricate that.

• 1:31:19Speaker 00

  No, 100%, but they but they also put the suit on top of it, which I really wish they did it because.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  I've been Zach Levi physique Shazam.

• 1:31:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. But in the second one, they realized this was too much and they cut it way down. And so it was much more my own physique and and less. Um, you know, there you go on the very right or that one or on the very right. I mean.

• 1:31:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, you that's a physique.

• 1:31:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  You're in shape.

• 1:31:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was the best shape I'd ever gotten in.

• 1:31:46Speaker 02

  Is this the most money you ever made uh uh in a movie?

• 1:31:49Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no. I mean, they paid me all right, but it it's it's not.

• 1:31:55Speaker 02

  This big, didn't it?

• 1:31:56Speaker 00

  No, no, because I didn't I didn't. From their point of view, I I was, this was the biggest thing I'd ever done.

• 1:32:02Speaker 02

  You're lucky to get this job type of thing in their life.

• 1:32:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. And I was, by the way, like, I'm very grateful that Warner Brothers, DC, New Line, my producer, Peter Safran, David Sandberg, everyone involved. I'm very grateful that they saw in me what I was even struggling seeing in myself. And then they gave me this opportunity and then we got to do it twice.

• 1:32:20Speaker 02

  What's the highest paid movie you've ever done?

• 1:32:23Speaker 00

  Uh, 3 million.

• 1:32:24Speaker 02

  3 million?

• 1:32:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:25Speaker 02

  Which movie was it?

• 1:32:26Speaker 00

  For Harold and uh Harold and the Purple Crayon.

• 1:32:29Speaker 02

  Wow. And that was that was how long ago?

• 1:32:33Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh, I don't know. When we shot that in 23, 23, and then it came out in 24.

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  So 20, is this is this pre the comments about Pfizer or post?

• 1:32:44Speaker 00

  Uh, this was now post. This was now post, but I was already attached to the movie.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 1:32:50Speaker 00

  You know, but then we were in the, I mean, bro, it was such a. It was so wacky. We were shooting this movie um in the pandemic and all of the masking and all the things and, you know, and I it was it was just a nightmare, nightmare.

• 1:33:08Speaker 02

  3 million. Interesting.

• 1:33:12Speaker 02

  You ever seen uh um you ever seen what uh uh what's his name? Uh Denzel Washington said when he was asked about his politics?

• 1:33:20Speaker 00

  No, what did he say?

• 1:33:21Speaker 02

  You've never seen this?

• 1:33:22Speaker 00

  I mean, I maybe I've seen a lot of great quotes from.

• 1:33:23Speaker 02

  Can you pull up this clip? Have you ever done anything with Denzel or no?

• 1:33:27Speaker 00

  No, I'd love to.

• 1:33:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's.

• 1:33:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's an incredible talent.

• 1:33:30Speaker 02

  He is phenomenal.

• 1:33:30Speaker 00

  And I think he's an incredibly intelligent human being, you know?

• 1:33:33Speaker 02

  God, like that that part with Denzel. Uh, I don't know if you can find it or not. Is this the one? Yeah, go ahead. Have you have you seen this clip?

• 1:33:41Speaker 00

  I think I have it. Let's watch it.

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  Play it.

• 1:33:43Speaker 13

  Mr. Washington, you're you're here in DC during an interesting time with the transition uh in the White House. Just wondering who you wound up supporting in the election and why?

• 1:33:53Speaker 14

  Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead now.

• 1:33:55Speaker 15

  Fences.

• 1:33:55Speaker 14

  Fences.

• 1:33:58Speaker 13

  How about how about this? I I don't know if you saw it. There's a fake news story going around. It got thousands of shares online. You saw that? And I just thought you might want to clear it up because people are confused.

• 1:34:09Speaker 14

  What? There's a few words that start with F and end with K. But that one ends with E. But it starts with F.

• 1:34:17Speaker 16

  Yeah, but it's too vague. You gotta be specific right now. F, K, and E.

• 1:34:23Speaker 14

  What was the question?

• 1:34:25Speaker 13

  Well, that was a question. Who who you wound up who you wound up supporting in the election? Presidential election.

• 1:34:31Speaker 14

  None of your business.

• 1:34:33Speaker 13

  None of my business?

• 1:34:34Speaker 14

  None of your business.

• 1:34:34Speaker 13

  Well, I'm only asking because the story was online, but but that's okay. Let me ask you this. What what issue do you hope President-elect Trump tackles? What's number one in your mind uh with the new administration?

• 1:34:47Speaker 14

  I don't know. You know, I'd have to be more informed to just say off the top of my head, the number one issue. I'm not sure. Education, jobs, health. I mean, there's so many. Yeah.

• 1:34:57Speaker 13

  Uh, I want to just ask you, though, about the issue of race relations because the film touches upon that. Uh, right now, under President Obama, over the last eight years, in your mind, has race have race relations improved?

• 1:35:12Speaker 02

  Are there a lot? Are there a lot of conservatives that flat out will never talk about their politics in Hollywood?

• 1:35:18Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:19Speaker 02

  More than we think?

• 1:35:21Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, listen, man, I it.

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• 1:38:18Speaker 00

  I've said this before, and I mean it when I say it. Everyone's on their own journey. Everyone has to go with what they feel God compelling them to do.

• 1:38:28Speaker 00

  And also, at some point, we have to stand and be counted. We have, we have to, we must. I believe that if every single person who actually held some, you know, conservative beliefs, libertarian beliefs, who voted for Trump but would never tell anybody that they voted for Trump, or other conservatives in the past, if every one of those people actually was stood and was counted in Hollywood, it would rock Hollywood. Because everyone would be forced to acknowledge that they're surrounded by people that actually don't agree with all of the nonsense that they're spewing constantly. What happens? Hollywood becomes a really interesting echo chamber because everyone who disagrees with you just doesn't say it.

• 1:39:12Speaker 00

  So you think that you're surrounded with people that are agreeing with you constantly when you're railing on Trump or you're, you know, railing on Bobby Kennedy or you're you're doing all railing on Bush previously. People just keep their mouths shut. So then you you as that more liberal person is like, see, everyone agrees with us. But there are so many people that reached out to me during the last election when I was speaking out. Instagram messages that I would get from various.

• 1:39:37Speaker 02

  Big names.

• 1:39:38Speaker 00

  Some significant names. Yeah, man, some significant names. And they would say, thank you. I wish I could do that. I can't.

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

  Do you ever ask them, why can't you?

• 1:39:49Speaker 00

  No, because I know why they can't, because they're afraid.

• 1:39:51Speaker 02

  Of losing the job?

• 1:39:52Speaker 00

  Of losing the jobs.

• 1:39:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:54Speaker 00

  But again, if everyone did it, they I don't think we would because they could.

• 1:39:58Speaker 02

  You think it's a 50% number? You think it's a 40% number?

• 1:40:00Speaker 00

  No, no, I would say I would say there's a solid. I would say there's a solid 25%.

• 1:40:06Speaker 02

  It's still a big number.

• 1:40:07Speaker 00

  It's significant. Are you? I mean, what is it like when it comes to psychology and moving trends? I think you only need like 3% or something?

• 1:40:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, 25 is massive.

• 1:40:14Speaker 00

  It's a massive number.

• 1:40:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:16Speaker 00

  Easily 25% of the industry. And I'm not even talking about like A-list names. I'm talking about like people, work crews. I mean, for example, some of my favorite people on the movie set are the stunt department, right? And just because they're badasses, like all of them are awesome.

• 1:40:33Speaker 00

  I don't know that I know a liberal stunt actor.

• 1:40:37Speaker 02

  Stop.

• 1:40:38Speaker 00

  No, I mean, I'm not saying they're all like diehard MAGA. I'm not saying they're all diehard MAGA, but because they're grounded human beings. They live in the absolute reality of life and death. Like they're working people. They're blue collar people. And they, and they're, you know, and they're into things like guns and motorcycles and things like that's the right. Now, I'm not saying they're not liberally minded stunt people. There are. But I don't know a lot of them. I know a lot of people that in the, and again, that's not even just the stunt department. Grips and electricians and customers and like, there's so many different departments and very artistically minded people, but that are more libertarian or conservative, but they are silent.

• 1:41:20Speaker 00

  They are silent because they feel like they have to be because of the consequences that come with going against the narrative. And then they see somebody like me and unfortunately, all it does is reaffirm that. Because I'm on a, having a conversation with you, talking about the blowback that I got. And so they go, oh, see, I mean, I'm grateful for what he did, but if I did that, you know? And it's a shame, man. It's a real shame.

• 1:41:45Speaker 02

  Who was it? Ricky Gervais, who is doing the, I don't know which award it was. He says, ah, don't worry if Al Qaeda right now started a streaming service, you would tell your agent, hey, let's get ahold of them and see what they're offering. Right? So do you think a part of his message was powerful because what he's trying to say is if the, this is how I take it, if the market opens up and there's enough jobs being offered from both sides, you would very quickly be like, you know what, you know, I can do a movie for conservative. What do you guys offering? 2.8 million, 3.9 million, 6.8 million? But there just isn't enough, which is good that you got companies like Angel doing this.

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

  And also now like, I just don't know if they're going to pay as much as these guys go. So the next thing's gotta be these Angel studio types of companies. Are they going to be able to compete to create a com plan? That pays the actors, the types of money that attracts guys from, I just watched a movie from Angel recently. Who's that big buff guy that hated Trump and

• 1:42:41Speaker 00

  Oh, Alan Richardson.

• 1:42:44Speaker 02

  He just did a movie Runner. Was it called Runner or something like that? Runner. Yeah, I liked the movie and he's not a fan of Trump, but Angel did this. So I'm kind of watching what Angel is doing, what direction they're going. I think maybe their plans long-term is we gotta find a way to, you know, make ourselves seem like we're also open to bringing in other people in. I mean, the movie you were in, Tommy Lee Jones is in it.

• 1:43:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, you got a Neil McDonough. But Whoopi said something, you said something about Hollywood's not mainly conservative. She says, yeah, Hollywood is filled with many conservative. I think you even reacted to this if you want to play the clip.

• 1:43:20Speaker 01

  Know much about the Hollywood history, so let me school you.

• 1:43:25Speaker 02

  She's talking to you.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  We are like America is, we're mixed, we're a mixed bunch. And sometimes it may seem like there's more Democrats and sometimes it seems like there's more Republicans. But the truth of the matter is very few people seem to bite it because they're Republican. Jon Voight, who is working. Dennis Quaid. Dennis Quaid, who is working. People were to stop that. It's, it's more BS. I know you don't.

• 1:44:00Speaker 00

  I mean, Whoopi, I love you. I've, you know, met her a few times doing The View and whatnot throughout the past. And was, by the way, a huge fan of hers and her film career and her comedy.

• 1:44:12Speaker 00

  But I think that Whoopi is

• 1:44:17Speaker 00

  even knowingly being dishonest. How much she's knowingly being dishonest, I don't know, but if she's, if she was really, I think that unfortunately, The View is a perfect example of why this is not true. Who on the, if you have this, you know, it started as let's have all these different voices. The View is only left wing at this point. Every once in a while, they might have a host that holds some kind of a conservative line. But they get shouted down and they're this teeny little minority in that conversation.

• 1:44:49Speaker 00

  She's talking about, by the way, you know, if you go back in Hollywood far enough, there were Reagan, literally, you know? They were more conservatives, more Republicans. That was fine. That is not what Hollywood is now. It is not. It is simply not. And to name Jon Voight and Dennis Quaid, and then she couldn't come up with yet another name of someone who was vocally conservative or, you know, like that's because she can't name them because she doesn't know them because they keep their mouth shut. Because, because they know that there is far too much backlash that comes with that. There is. That's the reality.

• 1:45:25Speaker 02

  Clint Eastwood would be another one that you can't touch or do anything with.

• 1:45:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, but he's, again, he's legacy.

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  He's legacy. Yeah. She's saying a lot of legacy names. Dennis Quaid, we had on here, phenomenal conversation with Dennis Quaid. Wasn't Dennis Quaid married to Meghan Ri, was she? Meg Ryan, right? Yeah, she was married to Meg Ryan. She was also a phenomenal actor. She did a lot of great movies, but

• 1:45:48Speaker 02

  with the direction it's going right now, what do you see happening? Like, what do you think is going to be happening to Hollywood? You think the power of weakening controls? The other day I watched a movie, my dad said, you gotta watch this movie about communism in Hollywood. So I'm like, which movie is this that? So he says, just watch it. It was with Robert De Niro and it was a true, based on a true story. If you type in Robert De Niro communism movie, I don't know if you've heard of this movie. So the story was that back in the days, if you went to a communism, this is it. Yeah. Guilty by suspicion. If you went to a communist party, Hollywood would oust you from making movies. And you have to kind of agree, I'm not a communist or say bad things about him or oust others. And he says, I'm not going to be doing it. And he stopped getting jobs, right?

• 1:46:32Speaker 02

  So some of these liberals are like, well, you guys put us through this when we went to a communist party. Now we're doing it to you. Do you think it's kind of coming back and saying, guys, relax, you can't be bullying people like this? Do you think it'll ever get to a point that nobody cares?

• 1:46:47Speaker 00

  I don't know, man. Unfortunately, I think that we as a global society, but just like humans in general, we want retribution. We want comeuppance. We, too few people want the pendulum to stop swinging. Most people want the pendulum to just keep swinging, but in your favor as much as possible. So like, yeah, they did this to us. So now we're going to get our revenge. Now it's our turn. The pendulum's in our side. It's like, guys, at some point we have to stop it. And if we do stop it, we all live a far better life. That's why I'm not about like, I understand things have been done here and done there.

• 1:47:31Speaker 00

  But we can either keep living in this absolute asinine, back and forth, crumbling way, or we can slow that thing down and let bygones be bygones and recognize that, hey, we, everyone was kind of doing what they thought life was at that point. You know, looking at something like as complicated as like reparations, for example, like looking at the United States and England as being these like horrible countries because they were slave owning countries. Yeah, everyone was. And by the way, it's not even over. There's countries right now in the world that are still about the slave trade. They're doing it. And the sex slave trade is one of the biggest of all.

• 1:48:15Speaker 00

  The United States and England, you know, started the charge and the US was not too far behind in eradicating slavery in this world. And yet somehow we're culpable, we're responsible generations and generations down the line to somehow figure out how to pay reparations to people that were sold by their own people into this. Where, where's the reparations coming from Africa for the people that were rounding up all those Africans and selling them? Where is that? Right? So it's so complicated. If we're just, well, that's the, that's the, that's the lever. That's the pendulum. It's got to swing our way. Or we go, hey, listen, a lot of bad went down. Everyone was involved in that. If anything, we as the United States did a pretty good job of trying to eradicate it in the world. Following England's lead, let's try to find peace now, here, right now.

• 1:49:01Speaker 00

  But that only, that only comes with slowing down this pendulum swing. So I don't know. In Hollywood, what do I think is about to happen in Hollywood?

• 1:49:10Speaker 00

  Alternatives like Angel Studios and others, and hopefully what I'm building in Austin, will be alternatives to the broken system that is Hollywood and won't just cancel people. Look, Alan and I have very different views on Trump, right? Maybe some similar, but clearly he's very vocally anti-Trump and people who voted for Trump and all of that stuff. But I'm, I'm, and also Runner is not an Angel movie in that Angel didn't develop it. Angel acquired it and so therefore, and then they put it on Angel. And Alan and Owen do a great job in the movie and it's an entertaining movie.

• 1:49:44Speaker 02

  Oh, I love that. I thought it was a great strategy that they did that.

• 1:49:47Speaker 00

  Right, so, and what I love about Angel and all of this is they could have, as Mormon conservative people, been like, "Well, we don't like what Alan said and we, so we're not..."

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:49:58Speaker 00

  No, because they said, "No, that's just pushing the pendulum more. Let us allow people to come as long as..."

• 1:50:03Speaker 02

  What I won't like, what I won't like, and I will give my opinion and thoughts on, is I had Bob Chapek on here, Disney's former CEO, he was on a couple of weeks ago. I think when they went, we found a correlation, but between the amount of LGBTQ characters Disney started showing and their stock, this was it, I showed it to him. So this shows how many characters they got, the blue is the characters and then the stock, you know, where the first time, the blue is actually, yeah. And so it's like, "Well, why did you guys do this? Well, this was a two-year, two-year project." If they start trying to be woke, it doesn't matter what the company's name is, they're gonna make a mistake. And I hope they don't, because the temptation is there on how many people are trying to, you know, make sure everybody's happy.

• 1:50:46Speaker 02

  Disney went from being a half a trillion dollar company to 200 billion dollars. Nike, I don't know if you saw what happened with Nike, they were a 261 billion dollar company, Nike. Today's a 50 billion dollar company, because you wanted to go do Colin Kaepernick, Dylan Mulvaney, all this, we saw what happened with Budweiser. As long as they don't go touch that, bring any actor that you, I don't even care if you bring a movie that Kevin Spacey's in it, that, any of these, that's talent, that's raw talent. I listened to R. Kelly till today. I don't listen to R. Kelly because I subscribe to the way he lived. He just, you listen to his music, "Oh, this guy makes some very good music." Michael Jackson, some of the best music, but he was accused with a bunch of different things. So it'll be, by the way, AI, are you concerned about AI or not really? You are concerned about AI.

• 1:51:29Speaker 00

  So this is what I was gonna lead into, so what I'm, what I'm building in, in Austin, Wildwood Studios, oh, there it's on the screen. So this is a vision that Guy gave me a long time ago, which was, if you wanna go make a better Hollywood, you have to go build an independent movie studio that is not just a studio, really it's like a factory town, like, you know, like Hershey's, Pennsylvania. Hershey wanted to make chocolate, he needed a factory, then he knew he needed homes for his workers, schools for their kids, clinics to keep them healthy, because the happiest bees make the tastiest honey. He cared about his workers and he cared about his product, and he built a massive empire out of that, that ultimately led to its own city, you know, it started as a factory town, became its own city. This is the same concept, we're just, the factories in making chocolate, it's making

• 1:52:09Speaker 00

  film, television, movies, or music and video games and anything where the arts and sciences come together. So it's an independent movie studio that allows people like me to have the opinions that I have, speak the truth that I believe I need to speak, without punishment of being banished from Hollywood, and we can actually build community. There's residences here for artists to live full-time, schools for our kids, a farm for us to grow our own food, a self-sustaining, common sense, community for creatives.

• 1:52:37Speaker 02

  How many acres?

• 1:52:38Speaker 00

  Seventy-five right now, but...

• 1:52:39Speaker 02

  Can you go a little bit lower, just to see, so seventy-five acres?

• 1:52:41Speaker 00

  Seventy-five acres.

• 1:52:43Speaker 02

  Any projects pending right now?

• 1:52:44Speaker 00

  Oh, well, listen, I've got LOIs from Angel Studios, Wonder Project, Kingdom Story, like, "If you build it, we will come," you know, and right now we're looking for $15 million in equity to go build our sound stages, so we can start filling that with movies and TV shows.

• 1:52:56Speaker 02

  I'm gonna make one contact to you afterwards, and I think they, if they don't do it, they would know somebody that would entertain the idea.

• 1:53:02Speaker 00

  But, part of what I'm trying to do, and you can watch this video later or put this up or whatever, but I talk about it in the video, this was, this has been a vision of mine for literally three decades, but in the last decade, what became very abundantly clear to me is that if we don't build an arc like this to protect human art and entertainment, AI is going to destroy all of it. Because very quickly, already right now, you can be one person who's really good at using Claude or these various AI agents, and you can make an entire movie just by yourself. Now, in some ways, that's very democratizing, right? It's very empowering. Look at us, we don't have the gatekeepers anymore. We, as one person, I can go build this. And I go, "Listen, I hear you, I think that's, that can be really cool, too."

• 1:53:43Speaker 00

  The problem is that you are taking a craft that has been done for hun, you know, well, at least 100-plus years, that involved hundreds of people to make a movie, you are now instantaneously unemploying all of those people and killing all of those crafts. If we don't at least hold on to it on some level, to, to know what it was like to make a movie where you had somebody made costumes and somebody who did lighting and moved cameras, actors, actual actors in these costumes, wearing makeup and pretend, you know, being these characters, that'll become a lost art. And that's not, that's not even just film and television, but like, imagine 50 years from now, when kids open up whatever version of a history book is at that point, and they're looking at these pictures and they go, "Hey, grandpa, what is this?"

• 1:54:26Speaker 00

  And you go, "Oh, that's a guitar." That's a, so we used to have these things called musical instruments, and you would pick this thing up and you would hold it kinda like this and you would strum it, because what's the point of even learning to play a guitar anymore if Suno and all of these other AI music agents are just able to, you just say, "I, I want upbeat pop music that's got a country vibe, that sounds like this and duh, duh, duh, duh, duh." Go. Boom, done. Why does a kid ever even think to become a musician again? If we don't protect the arts. And we must. I mean, we did with ballet, we did with the, with the symphony, you know, pop art started becoming a thing, and we still said, "Hey, let's not lose these things, this is what ma, made us human, this is part of our humanity."

• 1:55:09Speaker 00

  Like, literally, the category of these things is called the humanities. So if we lose the human in the humanities, then what do we have left? So that's part of what I'm trying to build here, and let me tell you, that's not just an altruism, I think it's a market opportunity. Because Patrick, when the rest of the industry is zigging into AI and everything is at your fingertips, right? I think there's gonna be a demographic of the audience that are, is always yearning for the real thing. Look at vinyl records.

• 1:55:41Speaker 02

  Fully agree.

• 1:55:42Speaker 00

  Vinyl records is the perfect corollary. Vinyl records used to be all of the music industry, and then we got 8-tracks and cassettes and CDs and streaming, and very intelligent, but just bottom-line driven people said, "Well, we're just gonna keep doing the new tech, we're not gonna keep making all this antiquated, you know, records and things like that." But some people, who are a little touched in the head, like me, they said, "Yeah, but there's something special about this licorice pizza, and I wanna keep pressing this, I wanna keep making this, because I believe that there will be an audience for this always." Vinyl record sales hit a billion dollars for the first time since 1983, this year. Because people want it. And the, and the deeper we go into this digital rabbit hole, the more people are pushing back and saying, "Where's the real stuff? I want the real stuff."

• 1:56:26Speaker 00

  So at Wildwood, that's what we're intending to do, hold on to the human arts and entertainment, the human, the human arts in general, and provide people a product that is going to become, I think, very special, including live performance, we're gonna have amphitheaters and have stand-up comedy and music and festivals and all of those things, because in-person is going to, I think, skyrocket, is already doing that right now.

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• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  No, I fully, I fully agree. And I love that. I call it Team Human, where we're gonna go back to Team Human. I think there's gonna be cities that are gonna be non-AI cities. There are gonna be restaurants that are gonna be like, wow, 100% no waiters, just come and order your... Some people are gonna go like, no, I wanna go to a restaurant where it's just people I wanna talk to. I wanna go to a waiter, waitress. There's an Uber driver, I don't know if you've seen this guy, that's blowing up on Instagram. He rides with people and while they're getting in, he writes a song and has AI... Have you seen this guy? He crushes it. I don't know if you have this or not anywhere. I cannot get enough of this guy. He does such a great job. He's hilarious as hell. And he'll notice the passenger's name is Moshe.

• 2:00:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:00:12Speaker 02

  He says, "Moshe just got in the Uber," you know, and then he's singing this song. The person's like, "Wait, what?"

• 2:00:16Speaker 00

  How did this song?

• 2:00:17Speaker 02

  How did this... Have you seen these?

• 2:00:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I've seen them, yeah.

• 2:00:19Speaker 02

  Connor, do you have?

• 2:00:20Speaker 00

  And listen, I think it's entertaining and also that's kind of a part of the problem because he's using AI, right? Now, is this ultimately gonna be the end of music?

• 2:00:29Speaker 02

  No, because we-

• 2:00:30Speaker 00

  But it's a part of it.

• 2:00:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think we're gonna go like this and I think we're gonna come back. I think we're gonna go to it. If you have one of them to show, just to see what's going on, like, he's driving the car-

• 2:00:42Speaker 00

  No, I've seen it, I've seen it.

• 2:00:43Speaker 02

  It's crazy. Yeah, okay, anyways.

• 2:00:44Speaker 00

  You can feel the audience later, whatever, but-

• 2:00:45Speaker 02

  So, last but not least, with the movie that you did, so, you know, Angel and the Bad Man, you with Tommy Lee Jones, with-

• 2:00:55Speaker 00

  Neil McDonough, Meg Fraser, who's like a beautiful, brilliant new talent from Australia, yeah.

• 2:00:59Speaker 02

  So, the story behind this, John Wayne did this. This was his first movie he ever did that produced-

• 2:01:05Speaker 00

  That he produced.

• 2:01:06Speaker 02

  Many, many years ago.

• 2:01:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:07Speaker 02

  So, why... Tell me about the story. Tell me about how this happened.

• 2:01:11Speaker 00

  Well, ultimately, I was approached by the producers who said, "Hey, we're doing a remake of this John Wayne classic." It's now in, um, uh, public domain, uh, because it's old enough to now be in public domain. And we love this story. We think it's an evergreen story. Uh, this is a reimagining of it. We're not trying to go shot for shot, tone for tone with John Wayne. I was never going to try to be the Duke. I am not. In the same way that he's not me, right? We're gonna have a different flavor anyway. But now with modern camera techniques, modern directing, modern acting techniques, modern all of these things, we can still tell a beautiful throwback Western with great messaging, redemptive messaging. I mean, it's ultimately who John Wayne played in the original and who I play in this one.

• 2:01:54Speaker 00

  Kurt Evans is a bandit outlaw who's, you know, his moral compass is very, you know, very sketchy. But he has just enough in him, just enough, like Han Solo or Flynn Rider, my character in Tangled. You know, it's like these selfish, you know, bandity, ruffian guys that are charming and they have this thing about them. But then they end up in the circumstance where they get connected to the love of a good woman that changes who they are, that they see that there is something more to life than living it selfishly, that you can live more selflessly and bless people in that process. And it's a much more rewarding and fulfilling experience in this life.

• 2:02:37Speaker 00

  And that's the journey. That's the journey of Kurt and Meg plays Penny who, it's interesting, Angel and the Bad Man, it's almost like a double entendre in that you could see the character of Penny and Kurt as she's the angel and I'm the bad man. But, but really Kurt becomes the angel and the bad man is Neil McDonough's character, Laredo. Um, because-

• 2:03:01Speaker 02

  He did very, he did very-

• 2:03:02Speaker 00

  He's great. And Tommy does great, everybody does great, you know? Um, and so that's it. It's a beautiful story of redemption. It's simple. It's not overcomplicated. It's, you know, family friendly. There's no gratuitous sex or or violence or language or, you know? Um, so it's got a real beauty and simplicity to it.

• 2:03:21Speaker 02

  Where was the shot, by the way?

• 2:03:22Speaker 00

  Santa Fe, New Mexico.

• 2:03:23Speaker 02

  Santa Fe, New Mexico, got it. Which is, you know, a lot of, a lot of, uh-

• 2:03:26Speaker 00

  Westerns and, yeah.

• 2:03:27Speaker 02

  When you were in Santa Fe, did you go to that church that a carpenter built? A 33-year-old man that built the stairs with no nails or anything? You've never heard of this church?

• 2:03:36Speaker 00

  I've seen pictures of it. I didn't know that was in Santa Fe.

• 2:03:38Speaker 02

  It's in Santa Fe.

• 2:03:40Speaker 00

  I'm talking about the one, I'm talking about the one where basically a guy just showed up out of nowhere.

• 2:03:43Speaker 02

  Yes, that's in Santa Fe. That's in Santa Fe.

• 2:03:46Speaker 00

  Man, I gotta go back.

• 2:03:46Speaker 02

  Let me tell you, it's a crazy place when you go to, like, yeah, a 33-year-old carpenter one day came and he built these stairs, not using a single nail and left and disappeared.

• 2:03:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:03:57Speaker 02

  It's that right there, by the way.

• 2:03:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 2:03:58Speaker 02

  That's exactly what it is.

• 2:03:59Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 2:03:59Speaker 02

  And that was in my aunt, my dad's sister, lived in Albuquerque and in Santa Fe. We would go to this place. And, uh, it's a, it's a fact. And by the way, John Wayne, fun fact about John Wayne, uh, is, do you know what high school John Wayne went to?

• 2:04:12Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:04:13Speaker 02

  John Wayne went to Glendale High School. It's the same high school I went to. It was class of 1925 or something.

• 2:04:18Speaker 00

  Wait, Glendale and that?

• 2:04:19Speaker 02

  Glendale in LA.

• 2:04:20Speaker 00

  In LA?

• 2:04:21Speaker 02

  Yes, he was-

• 2:04:21Speaker 00

  You went to high school there?

• 2:04:22Speaker 02

  I went to the same high school, yeah.

• 2:04:24Speaker 00

  So you were 11 years in Iran, how long in Germany?

• 2:04:26Speaker 02

  Uh, 18 months in Germany.

• 2:04:28Speaker 00

  And then immediately over-

• 2:04:29Speaker 02

  Immediately, I come to Glendale, California.

• 2:04:30Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 2:04:31Speaker 02

  I went to Glendale High School and they said, "John Wayne went here." I said, "No way." Yes. So he was the class president, John Wayne.

• 2:04:38Speaker 00

  Shocker.

• 2:04:39Speaker 02

  Shocker, yeah. Uh, he was on the debate team, which I didn't know that. He was on the debate team. And he played football and I think he ended up getting a scholarship to USC.

• 2:04:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:48Speaker 02

  And then, of course, later on, he goes and becomes, uh, who he becomes. And the part of this movie that makes it special for the people that love John Wayne, love movies and love a good story, is this was the first film he ever produced himself. Angel and the Bad Man. And you played the same role that he played.

• 2:05:06Speaker 00

  Yes, but very differently.

• 2:05:08Speaker 02

  Very different, yeah. Very, and by the way, the accent, the way you were having the the moment and who, you know, Penny is like, it's not Penny. It's Penelope. Mom comes in, "Come here, Penny. Go give me some water." You know, like I said, I watched it with the kids right before the Yankees game last night. And my oldest daughter, Senna, was glued to the screen and my five-year-old daughter, they were watching the whole thing. We went, and then the ending is on what happens with Penny. How Penny has the inner-

• 2:05:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:05:37Speaker 02

  bad side to wanna defend what they stood for. And it was actually very good contrast that you get at the end of the story.

• 2:05:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks, man.

• 2:05:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. So we're gonna put the link below. I think the movie comes out, uh, Friday?

• 2:05:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:05:49Speaker 02

  October 9th?

• 2:05:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:05:50Speaker 02

  Comes out October 9th in the theaters. We'll put the link below and, you know, uh, the trailer for, uh, folks to go check out. Any other final thoughts before we wrap up? It's been a great conversation.

• 2:06:02Speaker 00

  Oh, man, yeah, right back at you. No, I mean, you know, we gotta love ourselves and love each other. And that's gonna take a lot of work, but we're worth it and everybody that we meet is worth it ultimately. I heard this once, um, it's the best definition of love I've ever heard. I heard it, I think Rich Rohr, no, who was saying it? It was on Rich Rohr's podcast, maybe. But, listen, it goes back to like Thomas Aquinas and all the way back to Aristotle. And that is, to love is to will the good of the other. It doesn't mean you have to like them. It has, it means that you want the best for their life. Even the people that are doing all of the ill in the world, we have to try to see them as God sees them, want their best, want them to turn around, want them to repent of the things that they're doing.

• 2:06:44Speaker 00

  And if we can do that, we can help bring them to that. If we're just gonna stand in judgment and shame and evil and point fingers, then we're just as bad as the other side who's trying to do the same thing to us. We've gotta break that cycle. We've gotta stop the pendulum from swinging and love is the way that we do that.

• 2:07:00Speaker 02

  To love is to will the good in others.

• 2:07:03Speaker 00

  In the other, yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:04Speaker 02

  Have you read the book Power vs. Force?

• 2:07:06Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:07:06Speaker 02

  It's your kind of a book.

• 2:07:07Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:07:07Speaker 02

  You'd love the book. Brother, this was great.

• 2:07:09Speaker 00

  Thanks, man.

• 2:07:10Speaker 02

  Appreciate you. Anytime.

• 2:07:11Speaker 00

  Thanks, everybody.

• 2:07:11Speaker 02

  Bye-bye, bye-bye.

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