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Episode: #765: Chris Sacca and Scott Glenn

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 02:38:54

Episode Shownotes

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited.The episode features

segments from episode #79 "Chris Sacca on Being Different and Making Billions" and #729 "Legendary Actor Scott Glenn — How to Be Super Fit at 85, Lessons from Marlon Brando, How to Pursue Your Purpose, The Art of Serendipity, Stories of Gunslingers, and More."Please enjoy!Sponsors:Momentous high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off)Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: https://shopify.com/tim (one-dollar-per-month trial period)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)Timestamps:[00:00] Start [05:19] Notes about this supercombo format.[06:23] Enter Chris Sacca.[06:53] Traits of founders for whom success, at massive scale, seems predestined.[08:00] Travis Kalanick and Nintendo Wii Tennis.[09:55] Resources for cultivating investing chops, emotional intelligence, and general empathy.[18:37] Chris' evolving concept of success.[22:31] What Chris and his brother Brian's parents did right.[26:47] What Chris looks for when hiring.[29:23] The prophetic notebook.[31:29] Advice to aimless college graduates.[34:06] Two differentiators that shifted the nature of Chris' business[38:16] Enter Scott Glenn.[38:44] Idaho vs. Los Angeles.[44:59] Apocalypse Now, self-confidence soon after.[49:00] Burt Lancaster's movie star lessons.[54:41] The birth and death of Wes Hightower.[1:03:56] Catching the attention of James Bridges.[1:06:12] Scarlet fever.[1:07:57] From Marine to police reporter.[1:12:42] Berghof Studios and parental advice.[1:21:12] Converting to Judaism.[1:24:04] Lao Tzu: the ultimate mystic?[1:28:44] Letting go with Killer Joe.[1:33:20] "Crazy Whitefella Thinking."[1:38:53] Getting out of the way and Erwan Le Corre.[1:42:19] Lessons from the "morally phenomenal" Marlon Brando.[1:46:54] How Scott's childhood bout with scarlet fever informed his life's course.[1:49:33] Daily routines and exercises of an in-shape 85-year-old.[2:05:46] Securing a serendipitous skill set.[2:12:41] Thailand talk.[2:16:46] Increasing surface luck.[2:17:32] How Scott met and fell in love with his wife.[2:23:32] "Just dance."[2:24:14] Mistakenly calling Rudolf Nureyev Russian.[2:26:24] Poetry.[2:30:31] What Laurence Olivier knew about the value of tenacity.[2:32:09] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
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00:02:49 Speaker_02
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00:02:55 Speaker_02
Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide, and I've known the team since 2008 or 2009. But prior to that, I wish I had personally had Shopify in the early 2000s when I was running my own e-commerce business.

00:03:10 Speaker_02
I tell that story in the 4-Hour Workweek, but the tools then were absolutely atrocious, and I could only dream of a platform like Shopify.

00:03:18 Speaker_02
In fact, it was you guys, my dear readers, who introduced me to Shopify when I polled all of you about best e-commerce platforms around 2009, and they've only become better and better since.

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00:04:27 Speaker_02
Shopify.com slash Tim. Go to Shopify.com slash Tim to take your business to the next level today. One more time, all lowercase, Shopify.com slash Tim. I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

00:05:02 Speaker_02
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.

00:05:06 Speaker_02
Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

00:05:19 Speaker_02
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.

00:05:29 Speaker_02
To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes.

00:05:41 Speaker_02
And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.

00:05:54 Speaker_02
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.

00:06:04 Speaker_02
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

00:06:22 Speaker_00
First up.

00:06:23 Speaker_00
Chris Sacca, co-founder of Lower Carbon Capital, investing in solutions to the climate crisis, co-founder of Lowercase Capital, early investor in Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Twilio, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Stripe, recurring guest investor on ABC's Shark Tank, and one of the youngest people to ever make the Forbes Midas list.

00:06:47 Speaker_00
You can learn more about Chris at lowercasecapital.com.

00:06:53 Speaker_01
As I look at all the most successful founders I've backed, the thing they have is inevitability of success. There are no conditional statements coming out of their mouths. There's no like, well, if it works, it would be rad.

00:07:06 Speaker_01
Instead, it's just always, you talk to Kevin System at Instagram when he was working on it himself, he was literally a sole guy working on the product. And he's like, so when we get to 50 million users, we'll roll out this other stuff.

00:07:19 Speaker_01
And you're just like, Wait, he's just peering into the future, kind of looking through you into something in the future, and you're just like, I gotta get along for the ride with this guy.

00:07:30 Speaker_01
The same thing, when you talk to Evan Williams, when it comes to talking about the likelihood of success of his products, he just knows. He just knew Twitter would be a big thing.

00:07:42 Speaker_01
You talk to Patrick and John Collison at Stripe, and of course they're building for this thing to be a big, dominant company, and it just will be. You spent time with Travis, you're an investor in Uber.

00:07:53 Speaker_01
Was there any doubt at any time that Uber would dominate the planet?

00:07:58 Speaker_02
There's no doubt. Can you just share, there's an anecdote, I think we probably talked about it over drinks at some point, but we tennis.

00:08:05 Speaker_01
We tennis, Travis, we tennis? Yeah, could you tell the story please? So it's a few years ago, we're up at my house and we live up in the mountains in Truckee. It was over the holidays, so my parents were there. I think it was actually New Year's Day.

00:08:18 Speaker_01
So Travis and I had been, we have a tradition up there on New Year's Eve, we go snowshoeing at midnight and drink champagne out in the meadow and stuff.

00:08:26 Speaker_01
So I think we were pretty, it was a pretty rough morning, but Travis is sitting on the couch and my dad senses some weakness and he challenges him to a game of Wii Tennis. So on the Nintendo Wii. My dad's not a bad player, he's pretty good.

00:08:38 Speaker_01
Travis is like, okay Mr. Sakashiro, and he picks up the controller. And they play the first couple of games, and they're tight games, but Travis wins them.

00:08:46 Speaker_01
And my dad is there taking, like, full swings with the paddle, you know, and he's, like, breaking a little sweat. And Travis is still blurry from the night before, barely breaking his wrists, and he's beating my dad.

00:08:54 Speaker_01
And my dad's like, what the hell is this? And then there was that Inigo Montoya moment, Princess Bride style, where Travis turns to my dad and says, I'm sorry, but I'm not left-handed.

00:09:05 Speaker_01
Or, you know, I forget if it's left or right, but he switches hands with the controller. And the next three games, my dad never touches the ball. There were no points scored on any of Travis's serves. And I was like, what the hell is going on?

00:09:17 Speaker_01
Like, what is this? After the torture got to be too much, Travis just says, well, let me take you to the global leaderboard. I'm sorry. I got an enemy to be holding out. And he goes to the global leaderboard.

00:09:29 Speaker_01
And Travis Kalanick was ranked number two in the world at Wii Tennis.

00:09:34 Speaker_02
In his spare time.

00:09:35 Speaker_01
Now, Uber was already a thing then. Literally, he was already building a startup. But he's just so obsessive, so competitive.

00:09:43 Speaker_01
And that's the thing, as we look across the portfolio at all the most kick-ass companies, it's something they just have right up front, is that they're not hoping and praying for success, they know it's going to happen.

00:09:55 Speaker_02
What I think is really interesting about Uber in particular is, and for those people who don't know, I was an early advisor to Uber, so I'm biased, obviously. in a lot of ways when I talk about it. I think you actually got there before me.

00:10:07 Speaker_02
Yeah, I was a pre-seed money advisor because I'd been a divisor at StumbleUpon and I'd worked with Garrett and I'm now working again, collaborating with him on Expo, which is super fun.

00:10:16 Speaker_02
But in the beginning, the way that Uber got dismissed, and I think this is a really common mistake it seems that a lot of investors make, is people said, oh my God, really? black cars for 1%ers in San Francisco, what's the market for that?

00:10:29 Speaker_02
And they viewed a very niche activity as, by definition, constrained to, say, 1%ers in San Francisco and New York. And if you look at, let's say, even recycling, it started out that way. They kind of confused the first target with the total market.

00:10:45 Speaker_02
And they also looked at just the available market, which they misdefined very early on. In the case of an Airbnb or an Uber, they can grow the market. beyond any comparable that's available.

00:10:56 Speaker_02
I mean, a lot of these start off so incredibly niche that people misread the market potential, I think.

00:11:02 Speaker_02
What books or resources outside of personal relationships and these mentors that you've had, the compliments and so on, are there any particular books or resources that have helped you become a better investor?

00:11:13 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think most of those, though, are not business books, per se. That's perfect. That's great. So I didn't get a business degree. I didn't do an MBA. I took a couple classes, and it was enough to show me it was a total farce.

00:11:24 Speaker_01
I did get a law degree, which is an even bigger farce, but that's for another episode. So I never had formal business training. And I tried to look at a few of those, like instant MBA books and stuff like that.

00:11:33 Speaker_01
I even bought some books on venture capital, and they're just so goofy. And by the way, part of that is because now we have so many great venture capitalist bloggers who are just an open book about the industry who teach it.

00:11:47 Speaker_01
So Brad Feld comes to mind first. A longtime friend and mentor, Brad at Feld Thoughts. has done series over the years where he breaks down each aspect of a term sheet, how to understand it, and the deal documents.

00:12:01 Speaker_01
And this is what we think is important. These are things we think could go away. Josh Koppelman and his team have done a lot of work on that. We've now seen why Combinator and the guys at Fenwick and West and Cooley building

00:12:12 Speaker_01
Templated documents that are really really watered down and pro entrepreneur and just kind of have taken out a lot of the Legacy bullshit that didn't need to be in those documents There's a lot of this learning that can happen now without having to buy books while having to go to school and so that's been fantastic but where I worry about the valley and About investors as well as our entrepreneurs is in the development of everything off the ball a little bit so

00:12:39 Speaker_01
You know, you and I, I just turned 40 this week. That's why you're here. Happy birthday again. But as a 40-year-old, the people my age who were computer science majors in college, that was a major just like any other major.

00:12:51 Speaker_01
They still had to go get a summer job. They mowed lawns, waited tables. They had time in their curriculum to go study abroad, to volunteer. They had these really well-rounded lives.

00:13:00 Speaker_01
And so working with people my age and older at Google who are computer scientists was great, because they had

00:13:07 Speaker_01
not just these amazing, amazing math and science skills, but a diversity of experience that informed great product decisions, as well as just collegiality.

00:13:17 Speaker_01
What ended up happening is computer science degrees got so popular and so valuable that those kids didn't have to pay for school much anymore.

00:13:26 Speaker_01
And their only work experience was like TA-ing a class, not actually getting their ass kicked digging ditches or anything. And the curriculum was rigorous enough that these guys didn't get to go study abroad.

00:13:37 Speaker_01
And there was no opportunity to go do volunteer work and live in the developing world at all.

00:13:41 Speaker_01
So as a result, I actually found we were starting to have a generation of not just entitled, you know, people talk about the entitlement of the millennials and when it comes to work ethic and stuff, but they weren't just entitled.

00:13:53 Speaker_01
But they just had such narrow-band perspectives on the world. They were missing empathy. So they weren't able to put themselves in the shoes of the folks they might be building a product for, what the problems of the world might be.

00:14:06 Speaker_01
And so I am constantly looking for opportunities for myself and for the founders we work with to broaden the scope that they have on the world such that they can build something on a more informed basis, an emotionally informed basis.

00:14:21 Speaker_01
So I really think empathy isn't, it's a word that's been kind of reduced to signal like, oh, somebody hurt their foot and I feel bad for them. Instead I think much more poignantly empathy is about can I see the world through that person's lens?

00:14:37 Speaker_01
Can I figure out what matters to them? What are they afraid of what's bothering them? What do they think is limiting them right now?

00:14:43 Speaker_01
What's their hope and if I can do that then it's a lot easier for me to build something for them and to sell it to them and to help them and to build a longer-term partnership with that person if you were giving a

00:14:56 Speaker_02
assignment to folks for books or experiences, just kind of a short list for people who want to develop that type of empathy. What would you put on the list?

00:15:06 Speaker_01
One of my favorite books that we give to most founders is Not Fade Away. I think it's like a belly flop pick on the cover. Yeah, belly flop pic. A short life, well lived. Story of Peter Barton.

00:15:18 Speaker_01
So first of all, just on a personal note, that guy's trajectory kind of followed mine. He was a ski bum who suddenly made it big in tech. He was on the board of Yahoo. He worked at Liberty Media.

00:15:27 Speaker_01
And then he hits his 40s and says, OK, I've accomplished what I want to accomplish. I'm dialing it back. I just want to spend time with my family.

00:15:34 Speaker_01
And at that point, and this isn't a spoiler, it's literally how the book starts, he finds out he has incurable stomach cancer. And so the book walks you through his biography as well as the remaining time in his life. You will cry reading this book.

00:15:47 Speaker_01
It is inevitable. If you don't, I'm very worried about you. But you'll definitely cry. It'll be cathartic. But it's the kind of thing where you, it's an exercise in, okay, what's on the mind of

00:15:58 Speaker_01
the person who's dying, and how is he thinking about the impact of his death on his family, on his friends, on his business partners, on his legacy, on the continuing responsibilities as a dad, even in the absence of, you know, even though he's passed on in the next life.

00:16:16 Speaker_01
And it's an entire exercise in perspectives.

00:16:20 Speaker_01
And I think that book will not only leave you feeling incredibly lucky for what we've got here and where we are, but at the same time will sharpen that sense of how do I put myself in somebody else's shoes.

00:16:31 Speaker_01
A similar book that I love, I'm gonna get the title wrong, I think it's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, I think. I remember you told me about this. This book is amazing. So it's written in the second person.

00:16:43 Speaker_01
Which, I don't know of another book like that, but it's just you, you, you. Like, you wake up in this room, like an old role player or something like that online. Dungeons and Dragons, DM is reading to you. You are in a room, there is a sarcophagus.

00:16:56 Speaker_01
Open sarcophagus. No, it's a, but it says you wake up and you basically start the book in a slum in Pakistan. And it's just writing you about how you go through your day and the things that matter to you.

00:17:09 Speaker_01
And it turns out you're kind of entrepreneurial and you're willing to take some risks. And so you start working into other stations in life. And I don't want to give anything else about the book away, but...

00:17:22 Speaker_01
You close that book and you feel like you've walked through 15 to 20 different lives in another world. And I just think more of that would be better for all of us.

00:17:32 Speaker_01
I think it'd be better for our industry, for the depth and the impact of the products we build. I think it'd just be a lot better for getting along with each other.

00:17:39 Speaker_01
So, I mean, you and I have traveled to Ethiopia together, doing work with Charity Water. It's hard to complain about a day's work back here in the United States when you have

00:17:51 Speaker_01
been in a village where they walk three to four hours each way to get water, where the kids are dying because they drink the same water that the cow poops into, where the women don't get an opportunity to go to school because they're carrying the water and on the way they might get eaten by a lion or raped.

00:18:06 Speaker_01
And it's really hard to find yourself complaining about our privileged U.S. life And that's something you could just tell working in a big company like Google. There were the people who would bitch and complain. I'm like, really? Really?

00:18:18 Speaker_01
This is a hard day. Microsoft launched a competitive product, and that's our horrible day. And I just think we'd all be much better off if we were able to find

00:18:27 Speaker_01
opportunities for our CS students to go study abroad, for our MBAs to actually spend some time around poor people, and to start building these more diverse perspectives.

00:18:37 Speaker_02
When you look back on, it's the big four-oh, when you were 30, who came to mind most when you thought of the word successful? And now at 40, who is the person who most comes to mind when you think of the word successful?

00:18:50 Speaker_01
So 30, that's a really, let me think of where I was. So I guess, oh, I was at Google at the time. Who was most successful? Just when you were like, I want to be successful, and the person in your mind who embodied that most?

00:19:03 Speaker_01
I always wanted to be at the center of the deal. And so at that point in my life, I still really admired, for instance, like a John Doerr or Mike Moritz. They were both on the board at Google.

00:19:15 Speaker_01
brilliant guys who use their station in life to gather even smarter people to teach them about things. And then they would use their unique talents for storytelling and making composite kind of ideas come true to build companies.

00:19:32 Speaker_01
They became billionaires as a result. They had great families. They were just well respected by folks. I think I still, that was kind of my definition of success at that point.

00:19:42 Speaker_01
At 40, and what I think my journey from 30 to 40 was about, was to stop trying to define or build some kind of model or have some kind of role model out there and stop trying to define myself externally, because that's a distraction.

00:19:56 Speaker_01
So there are times when you're doing a deal with John Doerr, you're across the table or something, you're like, hey, wait, that was fucked up.

00:20:03 Speaker_01
Wait, you're supposed to be my hero, my idol, and I don't like that movie you just made or something like that, right? And I think anyone I've ever put on a pedestal, I've just been disappointed by doing so. I'm sorry about that, by the way.

00:20:15 Speaker_01
Oh, you have no idea how far you've fallen, Tim.

00:20:18 Speaker_01
But so I think for me the exercise has been how much am I gonna define that for myself not by looking at somebody else I recently got to have dinner with next to Bill Gates Bill and Melinda Gates And I had been raised to hate him, you know growing up at Google, you know he's a pretty evil person and I was sitting next in there and I got a chance to basically interview him about how

00:20:38 Speaker_01
they have structured the foundation, how they think about which causes to take on, which challenges to tackle. And I mean, I walked out of there just deeply admiring their work.

00:20:51 Speaker_01
But I think I want to limit it to that and not get into like, is he a great family man? Is he, you know, he's still a son of a bitch when it comes to competing with him in software and his default browser and all his antitrust behavior. But I really,

00:21:03 Speaker_01
So I'm trying to look at people and find one aspect of them that I like. But for the most part, I've had to decide, OK, what's really important to me? That's my wife and my kids. And you know, I'm just not that social anymore.

00:21:14 Speaker_01
I just don't hang out with people that much. I don't go to conferences. I'm just not available for dinner. I would infinitely rather spend that time with them.

00:21:21 Speaker_01
And so that was a priority choice I had to make internally, not because I saw anybody else killing it that way. I think I reflected back on my own parents who opted out of

00:21:31 Speaker_01
much more accelerated career paths so they could spend way more time with me and my brother. And so that's a choice I had to make. But I will say, do you know about the journal I found in my garage?

00:21:41 Speaker_02
I do, and you should mention that. I have a quick, well, observation is if I could spend more time with Crystal instead of me, I would do the same thing. We actually met before you and I met at Fairtex Kickboxing way back in the day.

00:21:55 Speaker_01
I was having a bunch of people down for cocktails. We came down from Truckee into the city, Chris and I did. I was like, let's get a bunch of people together for cocktails. I invite Tim and Tim walks in and he looks at my girlfriend.

00:22:04 Speaker_01
He's like, I think I know him. Like, yeah, sure you do, man. Everyone uses that to try and pick up my then girlfriend, now wife. He's like, no. And then she says, yeah, I think I know you too. And I'm like, oh shit, here she goes.

00:22:14 Speaker_01
Like I'm going to, where's this going? He's such a hunk. What do I have to offer? But, uh, yeah, you guys used to train in kickboxing.

00:22:20 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah. She was hardcore. But I want to pause for a second. I do want to hear about the notebook, for sure, because I think it's amazingly Nostradamus-like.

00:22:30 Speaker_02
But you and your brother, so you and your brother have had very different careers, have done very well, respectively. What did your parents do that you are also trying to do with your kids?

00:22:40 Speaker_01
Yeah, so my brother, Brian Sacca, he's one of the first YouTube sketch stars. He parlayed that into it. He sold some of the first web series ever. Made a shit ton of money building web series and finding commercial partners for them and stuff.

00:22:54 Speaker_01
This has been in movies like, yeah, Wolf of Wall Street. Wolf of Wall Street with Scorsese recently. And then just yesterday, we're allowed to talk about this now, his series on TBS got picked up. So he's going to be a co-star of a comedy series on TBS.

00:23:06 Speaker_01
Pretty funny. Amazing. What did our parents do? Well, first of all, they were just always involved. So my parents took vacations with us. We always went to national parks together. We never went to resort type places. We were just always together.

00:23:20 Speaker_01
And not only did they read with us like most parents, but my mom would pull us out of school to take us to go see an author read at a bookstore an hour and a half away. She would literally just pull us out of school to go to a science museum.

00:23:35 Speaker_01
And so she was a college professor, and so she had a little flexibility in her schedule to yank us out. She would take us to a park called Art Park, I've been in Lewiston, New York. Art Park. Art Park.

00:23:45 Speaker_01
It's a state park in New York State in Lewiston, New York, where the whole thing is dedicated to different art media. And so you can paint there, you can blow glass, you can watch a performing arts troupe, kind of vaudevillian theater and stuff. And

00:23:59 Speaker_01
And in my parents' eyes, that was just as or even maybe more important than going to the public school. And so I think that kind of enrichment and just being shown that people in all these walks of life were important and fascinating.

00:24:11 Speaker_01
You know, I grew up where by the time I got to college, I had never heard of an investment banker. I didn't know that was a job.

00:24:18 Speaker_01
I'd been exposed to writers, to artists, to chefs, to musicians, to engineers, to lots of teachers, to lawyers, to doctors, but it was never, you know, it wasn't necessarily driven in any particular way to kind of get us to a particular career at all.

00:24:36 Speaker_01
I will say there was something else my parents did that's pretty unique and it was called My brother and I refer to it as a sweet and sour summer. So my parents would send us for the... Sounds like a Chinese restaurant. They would, yeah.

00:24:47 Speaker_01
They would send us for the first half of the summer to an internship with a relative or friend of the family who had an interesting job. So at 12, I went and interned with my godbrother, who was a lobbyist in DC.

00:25:01 Speaker_01
So I would go along with him to pitch congressman. I had one tie. And for work, I was a pretty good writer, so I'd write up one page summaries of

00:25:08 Speaker_01
the bills we were pitching and I would literally sit there with these congressmen with these filthy miles, you know, the Alabama senator and stuff like that and watch the pitch happen. And it was awesome. I learned so much.

00:25:18 Speaker_01
I think I built so much confidence and really honed my storytelling skills. But then from there, I would come home and work in a construction outfit with just a nasty, nasty job. I mean,

00:25:29 Speaker_01
Whether it was hosing off the equipment that had been used to fix septic systems, gas and shit up, dragging shit around the yard, filling propane tanks, just being junior guy on the podium, quite literally getting my ass kicked by whichever parolee was angry at me that day for minimum wage.

00:25:45 Speaker_01
I think it was part of their master plan, which is there's a world of cool opportunities out there for you, but let's build within you a sense of not just work ethic,

00:25:55 Speaker_01
but also a little kick in the ass by why you don't wanna end up in one of these real jobs. And so let's see if you can find in yourself the drive to go and do whatever it is to.

00:26:05 Speaker_02
And did they choose, for instance, you had the introduction to say the Godbrother, I think you said, for the lobbying. Did they also help organize the Sour part two to each summer?

00:26:16 Speaker_01
Yeah, so the guy who ran that construction company and equipment rental company is my dad's best friend. He's under strict orders to make sure we had the roughest day.

00:26:24 Speaker_01
They're special treatment Yeah, it was we had we were treated specially shittily So we were we were hammered there and by the way as a result. I know a lot about construction equipment This is this is a superpower of mine.

00:26:37 Speaker_01
I can literally from air compressors to ditch witches to anything you need in Milwaukee, Sawzalls. I literally have incredible amounts of knowledge in that space.

00:26:47 Speaker_02
It also just reminded me of something you mentioned long ago, and I'm not sure if it's still true, but you said one of the things that you look for, and it's maybe not a disqualifier, but in founders is a track record of having had at least one shitty job.

00:27:00 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, I particularly look for that in hiring. So I want people who've lived, studied, traveled extensively abroad. I want people who've been exposed to poor people.

00:27:09 Speaker_01
And by the way, the live study travel works sensibly abroad is because you can get away with a very comfortable life in the United States as an English speaker, particularly as a white person. You never really have to ask for anybody's help.

00:27:19 Speaker_01
You're not being harassed by the police. It's pretty easy pickings. You find yourself.

00:27:25 Speaker_01
overseas, particularly in a place with a non-romance language where you can't make out the signs yourself, and you have to stop and ask for help from complete strangers.

00:27:34 Speaker_01
You literally have to be entirely vulnerable to people you've never met and just expose yourself. And they could send you into a dark alley and beat the hide of you and take your money.

00:27:44 Speaker_01
Or like most people on the planet, they'll be really nice and try to help you even if you don't share a word of English in common.

00:27:51 Speaker_01
And I think there is something incredibly formative about that experience of having the humility that comes from having asked for help.

00:27:57 Speaker_01
The best managers in the world are people who are great at asking for help and realizing that makes them a more powerful CEO than a less powerful CEO or more powerful manager than a less powerful manager.

00:28:08 Speaker_01
I look for people for whom athletics is a big part of their life. I don't think it needs to be team sports necessarily. I think you can be a great individual athlete. Maybe you train with other folks, etc.

00:28:17 Speaker_01
But I think it just shows not only some self-discipline, but also just a value on the introspection that comes with athletics. You actually care about yourself. I think there's a little bit more balance in that life.

00:28:27 Speaker_02
I think it also teaches you to contend with losing and sort of viewing that as feedback and not some type of failure death sentence.

00:28:35 Speaker_01
Sure. And then seeing, I think, the temporary and how temporary pain is, you know, and that's temporary. Glorious forever. Yeah. No, it's true. So I did an Ironman.

00:28:45 Speaker_01
And when I was doing that in the, I had a fever that day, 103 degree fever, but my parents had traveled out to watch the race. And so I didn't want to not do it. And the Advil worked for like the swim and the first part of the bike.

00:28:57 Speaker_01
And then I was just, I was a mess. But I remember thinking no matter what happens, I will be in my bed tonight. And you know, this is a very, very temporary moment.

00:29:06 Speaker_01
In 2009, I rode my bike across the country and I remember, you know, it was 35 days of riding, basically a hundred miles a day. I remember multiple days out there. I'm like, I will be in my bed tonight. And then in the other ear is his voice.

00:29:19 Speaker_01
And then I have to fucking do it again tomorrow. Tell people about this notebook. Yeah, it was funny. It was just two years ago I found this in my garage and it's really, it's been weighing on me, and particularly this week turning 40.

00:29:32 Speaker_01
So I was 19, no, I was 20 years old, actually. I was 20. I was living in Ireland, going to school there. I spent two out of my four years abroad while at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown.

00:29:44 Speaker_01
So I'm living in Ireland, and there was an expat girl in one of my classes, and we were basically flirting with each other by taking a notebook and writing in 10 questions for the other person to answer, and then you'd get it back, and you'd answer 10 questions and write 10 new questions.

00:30:00 Speaker_01
We'd pass back and forth while we were supposed to be studying. 20th century Irish film or something like that. And at one point, one of the questions was, what do you want to be when you grow up? So I'm 20, I'm living in Cork, Ireland.

00:30:13 Speaker_01
We basically would start drinking stout around 1130 AM every day. It was like second and third meal was stout. And By that point, I'd still never heard of an investment banker. I'd definitely never heard of a venture capitalist.

00:30:27 Speaker_01
And so I just write in there, I said, I don't know what the job is called, but I know it's going to involve a lot of talking on the phone, a lot of negotiating, a lot of yelling at people. High risk, high reward, unbelievably high stakes.

00:30:42 Speaker_01
I'm going to do it part-time from the mountains, part-time from the beach, and whatever it is, I'm going to be done with it before I'm 40. And so two years ago, my wife and I are standing in our garage in our mountain house.

00:30:55 Speaker_01
cleaning it out because we're moving some stuff down to our beach house. And I find this old notebook and I'm like, Hey, look at this. And we're flipping through it. And I find that answer. I just really choked up.

00:31:06 Speaker_01
It was incredibly weird self-prophecy that I kind of laid out exactly what my job was. But I also felt a certain amount of pressure, like, so what do I do now that I'm 40? Do I keep doing this job or not, or do I need to listen to the scrolls?

00:31:24 Speaker_02
Like shatter some type of cosmic continuum if you don't follow the prophecy. What would your advice be to college students who are just about to graduate, who have no idea kind of what they should focus on, what they should do?

00:31:35 Speaker_02
Do you have any thoughts, general suggestions that you would make to someone in that position?

00:31:40 Speaker_01
Well, I did give a graduation speech, I think it was two years ago now, at the University of Minnesota, a school I didn't really have any ties to. And they reached out to an agent who hired me for it. And that was daunting, right?

00:31:53 Speaker_01
Because I give speeches all the time, and it's usually to a room full of like Conoco executives in Kissimmee, Florida. I'm just there for the check. But a graduation speech is intense. That's hopefully memorable, hopefully formative.

00:32:06 Speaker_01
Hopefully you're talking to people who have incredibly open minds and it's such a meaningful transition point in their lives. So everyone should go watch it. But what I focused on was be interesting.

00:32:18 Speaker_01
I think you're here for a week where I've gathered my favorite friends and one of the reasons why the week is so fun for everybody is that everyone else here is totally interesting. Right?

00:32:29 Speaker_01
Not necessarily a titan of a business, but just interesting, compassionate, adventuresome people who just go for it, who are up for it. And I think as I look around who I've hired, who I like to work with, who I back, they're interesting.

00:32:44 Speaker_01
They're people you want to be around. You want to spend time with. You want to hear their answers. You want them to influence your thinking. You want them to push you a little bit to try things that you haven't tried. You want them to teach you.

00:32:55 Speaker_01
And if I could give advice to someone who feels like they're looking at a maze of opportunities and none of them is particularly presented or they're not sure how they want to get ahead or distinguish themselves, I think pursuing a course of life that

00:33:09 Speaker_01
embraces interestingness. And by the way, I don't think people are born interesting. I think it's actually something you can accrue. Living abroad, volunteering for a group like Cherrywater and going into the field, taking an actual service job,

00:33:25 Speaker_01
going in and talking to the people around you and having meaningful conversations, including the homeless people, including your neighbors and people who are actually working for wage, getting involved in politics briefly.

00:33:36 Speaker_01
You know, I think I campaigned for Obama a couple times.

00:33:41 Speaker_01
And I was everything from one of his top fundraisers to I actually spent time in the field in Elko, Nevada, which put me into mobile home living rooms of some of the poorest people in the country who somehow are supporting the Republican Party in that election.

00:33:54 Speaker_01
And it was surreal, but it gave me a life perspective that I don't think I would have had otherwise. So I think those kinds of things make for much more compelling people and will start to present career opportunities.

00:34:06 Speaker_02
So, one question that I'd love to ask is when you were sort of in your most recent sweet spot of wealth accumulation, whether that was related to what you did with Twitter or otherwise, were there any particular shifts or routines, habits that helped you sort of maintain that peak output or achieve what you did?

00:34:24 Speaker_01
I mean, you know my personal story. So, I've certainly been fortunate to make a bunch of money in the last few years, but In bubble one, I made a bunch of money. I levered up, lost it all and a lot more, leaving me millions of dollars in the hole.

00:34:38 Speaker_01
I was able to work it back out to zero by 2005. And since then, a lot of work, a few ups and downs, but it's worked out pretty well. And it's looking good for the road ahead, too.

00:34:48 Speaker_01
So that said, I don't think I have a calendaring function or an email function or anything like that that's like a hack, as much as I would point to two things that I think shifted the nature of my business.

00:34:59 Speaker_01
One was that before I had really made any money at all, before I had any business doing this, my then girlfriend who's now my wife, Crystal, and I moved out of Silicon Valley up to Truckee.

00:35:13 Speaker_01
I mean, literally took ourselves out of the game as an angel and venture investor. Like, how do you manage a venture practice from up in Lake Tahoe? And yet what I realized was that being in the city, I was just playing defense the whole time.

00:35:28 Speaker_01
I was taking these coffee meetings, listening to these poor pitches.

00:35:32 Speaker_01
being friendly and kind of obliging people with their ideas, but I'd spend all day in these meetings and I'd get home and I'd be like, shit, I haven't actually accomplished anything.

00:35:41 Speaker_01
I would go to the cocktail and dinner parties I was invited to, but they weren't actually the people I wanted to spend the time with. I was just reacting to everything rather than actually going out and playing offense.

00:35:53 Speaker_01
And so Chris and I moved up to Tahoe and we quite literally built a list of people we wanted to know better. And we just started inviting them to come up and stay with us in Tahoe. You were definitely one of those people, right?

00:36:04 Speaker_01
And you came up and spent a lot of time with us there. I also started writing lists of the companies that I wanted to get to know better. And I just went in deep with them and asked them to come up to Tahoe. And so I was playing offense now.

00:36:16 Speaker_01
And I had a perfect excuse for why I couldn't get coffee with all the randoms. I'm like, hey, I'm sorry. I'm just not in San Francisco. I'm three hours away. There were a couple of obsessives who drove all the way up there.

00:36:25 Speaker_01
But for the most part, I was able to pick and choose the interactions that I thought were going to be most valuable. to me, to my wife, and to my business. And that was a huge shift.

00:36:37 Speaker_01
And it was risky as hell, because, I mean, I couldn't even really afford the house we bought up there when we first bought it, $600,000 three-bedroom house.

00:36:45 Speaker_01
And I certainly didn't have a strong enough brand that I could afford to just walk away from the game. But I made a conscious decision to play offense from up there. And that worked out.

00:36:58 Speaker_02
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Momentus.

00:37:04 Speaker_02
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00:37:14 Speaker_02
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00:38:17 Speaker_00
Scott Glenn, whose acting career spans nearly 60 years in film, including starring roles in Apocalypse Now, Urban Cowboy, The Right Stuff, The Hunt for Red October, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Bourne Ultimatum, and television, including HBO's The Leftovers and The White Lotus, Hulu's Castle Rock, and Marvel's Daredevil and The Defenders.

00:38:43 Speaker_02
I have an embarrassment of riches here. We could start just about anywhere, but I thought I would start with saying that I'm in part so happy to be having this conversation because...

00:38:55 Speaker_02
even among all of the hundreds of people I've interviewed, if we look at people in their 30s and 40s, they don't check career fitness and relationships, but you seem to have 50 plus years checking all three of those boxes.

00:39:10 Speaker_02
It's hard to find three out of three in the young guns who have sort of wide open field ahead of them. And I want to dig into that, but I thought I would start with Idaho because we're sitting here in your home.

00:39:23 Speaker_02
It's been a long time since I've been here and You have elk in the backyard. This is not what most people imagine when they think Hollywood star How did you end up in Idaho a bunch of years ago?

00:39:37 Speaker_04
So we've been up here for I'm not sure the exact number but in the mid to high 40 years We were living in LA My wife probably throws on the wheel as well as any two dozen people on the planet. She's really a good potter.

00:39:55 Speaker_04
She was accepted to a summer workshop, was invitation only, to the best ceramic artists in this country. And it was going to last all summer long. And we were living in L.A., we had a place in Topanga.

00:40:10 Speaker_04
So she said we had a VW van, typical hippie-dippie, live out of the back of it. She was going up with our two daughters. to do this workshop, and she said, well, you're going to come with me.

00:40:25 Speaker_04
And I went, no, you know, I'm waiting for the phone to ring to tell me whether I've got a job or not. And she said, does the phone really have to ring for you to kick you in your ass to go anywhere? Can't you just do something on your own?

00:40:40 Speaker_04
And I went, I don't know. And she said, well, you can, because there is a group of people who are leaving from

00:40:48 Speaker_04
But a place she wasn't sure where, as it turns out, was Chalice, Idaho, that they're leaving on the following dates, which was like a week after her workshop started.

00:40:59 Speaker_04
She said they're going into an area called the Bighorn Crags, the biggest primitive area in the contiguous United States, bigger than anywhere except Alaska.

00:41:07 Speaker_04
and they're going to be doing high mountain, this is in July, they're going to be doing high mountain traverses in snow and ice for three days.

00:41:15 Speaker_04
Then they're going to be going down into a little valley and climbing rock faces and naming them for the geodesic survey.

00:41:24 Speaker_04
It's being led by a guy named Eric Reibach, who's the first, at that time, the only person ever to walk the whole Pacific Coast, the trail from Canada down to the bottom of Oahu. And she said, you're going with him.

00:41:39 Speaker_04
You know, I was a rock climber at the time, so she knew that about me, but I said, how do you know? She said, because I signed you up. So it was like I had no choice in the matter. So we got up here. I tend to overdo things physically.

00:41:55 Speaker_04
It's just part of my stupid personality. So we got here and I started hiking up Baldy. Now we come from sea level to here. So I got altitude sickness the first day and puked my guts out about four or five times.

00:42:11 Speaker_04
At any rate, I had about a week to try to get ready, and then she drove me north to Chalice. I think there were seven people on this trip with us. So I met Eric Reibach and these people I was gonna be hanging out with for the next few weeks.

00:42:26 Speaker_04
And we drove 90 miles on a dirt road to the Cobalt Rangers station, where You didn't tell them where you were going, you just told them when you expected to be back.

00:42:38 Speaker_04
And if you weren't back inside, I think the cushion was three days, they were going to send people out to look for you. And at the time, it's probably still true, the Bighorn Crags, no internal combustion allowed at all.

00:42:52 Speaker_04
So if Forestry Service had to go in and open up trailheads, they had to go in with mules, two-man crosscut saws, because you couldn't turn on a frame. That wouldn't work. So we did that, and it was, I hadn't been off on my own alone

00:43:12 Speaker_04
with the exception of once that I won't talk about, but been in that situation and it was just so much fun and so cleansing and so it was just the best.

00:43:24 Speaker_04
And I thought I knew how to rock climb, but there was a guy named Tony Jones there who was a great rock climber who sort of took me under his wing and took me into 511++ stuff.

00:43:36 Speaker_04
The dangerous stuff, he led all of it, so I don't want to pretend that I just instantly did it, but I did do those climbs again and again. And I remember when Carol was going to come and pick it when we were done, it was like two weeks.

00:43:49 Speaker_04
and a little over two and a half weeks of doing this, I said to Tony, I gotta give you some money or something. I mean, you've been giving me... And he said, come on, I had a great time. I said, what can I do for you? And he said, you can do this.

00:44:02 Speaker_04
When you go back to LA, tell everybody how horrible Idaho is. Tell them it's a tick fever state, it sucks, and you had a bad time. And I said, why should I do that? And he said, because I don't want people coming up here.

00:44:17 Speaker_04
So when Carol drove me back into Ketchum, I felt like I was entering lower Manhattan. It was like noise and people. And it's a small town for people who don't have the contacts.

00:44:28 Speaker_04
It's a small town, but what I discovered, this sounds woo-wah and whatever, but I don't really give a shit, because it's true. It was like the family fell in love with each other again. I had been sort of living in the blues in L.A.

00:44:43 Speaker_04
because of what I do for a living. And all that fell away up here.

00:44:48 Speaker_02
When you came to Idaho, roughly how old were you and where was your career at that point? I was probably 38, 39, like that, late 30s. And had you already had a sort of inflection point in your career at that point?

00:45:02 Speaker_04
I had done a ton of work in New York, mainly street theater, improv, off-off Broadway, and then we moved to L.A. for me to do the first film I ever did, which was called Babymaker.

00:45:15 Speaker_04
And then I did a couple of sort of very small parts in big, important American movies. One was Nashville, Bob Alban's film, and the other was Apocalypse Now, that I was on for A little over seven months.

00:45:35 Speaker_04
They shot that film, it was, the shooting was a year and a half, so I was a short timer at seven months. But that was my experience of working in front of a camera, learning a lot of stuff that stood me in really good stead later on.

00:45:51 Speaker_04
But what had happened in L.A. was, okay, I had gone to Universal, I think, to audition. I'd done some TV stuff at Universal, and I'd gone there, and because of my experience with Apocalypse,

00:46:08 Speaker_04
What had happened before is I would go in and I would audition for a TV job mainly at one of the studios, and people would tell me what a crappy actor I was. You squint too much, you're not loud enough, you're not doing this, you're not doing that.

00:46:23 Speaker_04
And on the surface, I would say, well, what do you know? But the reality was underneath it, I suspected maybe they were right. And I didn't know what I was doing in terms of a camera.

00:46:33 Speaker_04
on stage or doing improv in the back of an alley, yeah, I could do that. So I had no self-confidence. And then I did Apocalypse Now and wound up working my choice.

00:46:47 Speaker_04
Francis thought, I think incorrectly, but he thought that he owed me because he thought I saved his life in the Philippines.

00:46:54 Speaker_04
So I went over to do a small part, and he said, I'll write you whatever you want, because you filled up a helicopter in a rainstorm with nothing getting in the gas, and you kept me from drowning in a river. So I went, okay, fine, that's nice.

00:47:11 Speaker_04
He said, what do you want? And I said, I want to be in the end of the movie. And he said, you can't be in the end of the movie, Scott. It's absolutely completely cast. Well, yeah, wait, there is a part you could do, but you'd be like a glorified extra.

00:47:25 Speaker_04
Play Colby, the guy who came up river in front of Morton Sheen. And I understood because of the way I've learned everything in my life that's important to me is you learn by apprenticeship, not from a book or going to school. At least I can't.

00:47:44 Speaker_04
And I thought, at the end of the movie, I'm gonna be around the person who, in my mind, is far and away the greatest American, probably the greatest movie actor that ever lived, Marlon Brando. And I'm gonna be around this guy

00:47:57 Speaker_04
and just being around him, and Dennis Hopper, who's a lunatic, but brilliant, and Martin Sheen, and in the end of this movie, is an experience that will change my life, and it did.

00:48:10 Speaker_04
I told Francis later on that I got the greatest gift you could give any artist in the Philippines, which was self-confidence.

00:48:19 Speaker_04
So when I came back, before we went up to Idaho, I was basically locked out of Universal because, along with self-confidence, I came back with a huge amount of arrogance. And now, I remember I did one audition,

00:48:36 Speaker_04
And they said, you know, you're not really very good. We want to give you things to work on. And I said, what the fuck do you know? Who have you worked with?

00:48:42 Speaker_04
Because I was just doing improvs and work with Marlon Brando, Vittorio Storaro, Francis Coppola, Dennis Hopper. And they accepted me as an equal. What have you done? You've done this and this. You can't even fucking direct traffic.

00:48:57 Speaker_04
So they kicked me out of Universal. So now we're back from Idaho. And I'm sitting watching television. smoking a joint. And Carol walks into the living room and says, babe, what's wrong? And I say, what do you mean? I'm fine. She said, no, you're crying.

00:49:15 Speaker_04
And I reached up and there were tears coming out of my eyes. I was on television in a Beretta I had done. And I pointed at her and I said, you're supposed to get better at what you do, not worse. That's the crappiest acting I've ever seen.

00:49:29 Speaker_04
I was so much better doing street theater in New York. What's happened to me?

00:49:34 Speaker_04
And I started thinking, and that night at dinner I said, you know, what I've turned into in LA, and I'm horrible at it, is a show business politician, which is, what am I up for, who do I know, what openings and parties can I go to to network and make

00:49:52 Speaker_04
And I used to think, what makes this person tick? Why are they doing what they do? What belief system are they coming from? All that stuff that I really cared about then and do to this day.

00:50:05 Speaker_04
And I said to Carol, I said, well, how would you and the girls feel if we moved back to Idaho? And she said, what do you do up there?

00:50:13 Speaker_04
And I said, I met somebody who told me that if I gave him three years, he would apprentice me to be a backcountry, cross-country ski guide and hunting guide, and I'll do that. And she said, will you quit acting?

00:50:30 Speaker_04
I said, no, I'll do Shakespeare in the Park in Boise if I can get a part. I'll do that kind of stuff, but I can't go back to New York with my two daughters this young and subject them to the life of a street actor.

00:50:45 Speaker_04
So we came up here with that in mind. It was a super cold year. We came up with a friend of Carol's and mine. He was a commercial director, but sort of feeling the same kind of burnout in LA that I felt.

00:50:59 Speaker_04
So the two families decided we'd come up here and try to figure out what to do and catch them Idaho. No real idea. We were up here. Inside two weeks, I get a call from a friend of mine, a guy named Rupert Hitzig, who said, I'm doing a movie in Mexico.

00:51:17 Speaker_04
The way I knew Rupert was he and I were in the same platoon in the Marine Corps. So Rupert said, I'm producing a movie in Mexico, and I can give you a small part in it.

00:51:26 Speaker_04
You will be shooting for three months, and I got like, I think it was, I can give you 2,000 bucks. And I said, great. So Carol and I went to Mexico. And I was warned when I went down there.

00:51:38 Speaker_04
It starred Rod Steiger, Burt Lancaster, Amanda Plummer, and Diane Lane. Those were the stars. And I had a teeny tiny little part as one of Burt's, it was the Doolin Dalton gang, the Western.

00:51:52 Speaker_04
And I was told by a lot of people when I went down there that you're going to love Rod Steiger. He works the same way you do. He's a member of the Actor's Studio, and you're kind of guy, but watch out for Burt Lancaster. He's an old school movie star.

00:52:08 Speaker_04
He'll get in your key light, he'll screw you up, he'll intentionally ruin two shots so they'll have to go to his close-up. Just watch out for him. So we go to Mexico. First day there, El Presidente Lobby Hotel in Mexico.

00:52:25 Speaker_04
I meet Rod Steiger, and I rarely openly dislike somebody when I meet them. But I wouldn't say it was hate at first sight, but it was certainly dislike at first sight.

00:52:39 Speaker_04
And then, a little bit later, Burr Lancaster comes into the lobby, and to be really honest, he hardly saw me at all, but boy, did he see Carol. And he said to her, so what do you do? And she said, I'm a potter. He said, you got any pictures?

00:52:55 Speaker_04
And she had some little slide pictures of stuff she'd done. He looked at them, and I could see something change in him. And he looked at her, and he said, God, I love this stuff. I only have the work of one other ceramic artist.

00:53:10 Speaker_04
Would you throw me 11th place or 12th place dinnerware set?" It was her first commission ever, and she said, yeah, yeah, I will. Later on, many months later, she found out the other ceramic artist that he owned was named Picasso. Wow.

00:53:27 Speaker_04
So the next day, and he kind of was like, I wasn't even there. So the next day, we're on the set, getting ready to do some scene. It's a group shot.

00:53:37 Speaker_04
At the end of the first take, Burke walks over to me and he said, so Scott, has anybody ever taught you the difference between working with a close-up camera lens and being on stage? He said, I know you've done street theater, I can tell. I said, no.

00:53:52 Speaker_04
He said, I didn't think so. He said, you know, I'm not going to bullshit you. I seriously was watching you and I think you've got something, but.

00:54:01 Speaker_04
if you'll permit me to be a gigantic pain in the ass over the next three months, I'll teach you whatever I know."

00:54:08 Speaker_02
Wow, what an incredible opportunity.

00:54:10 Speaker_04
So he taught me about how to work with a camera and how to... I mean, he was an amazing guy. He was an aerialist who traveled across the country with a carnival and to make drinking money fought people in Toughman Con. He was the real deal. I love Bert.

00:54:30 Speaker_04
It was like, what people had told me about Rod and Bert was like, we could flip it around. So, on the way home, this is a long... So, we're coming back from Mexico, we went to Paramount to see a friend of Carol's and mine,

00:54:47 Speaker_04
that on their advice, Carol got pregnant. They said, you guys have got to have a baby. And we were really close. Jim was the director, Jim Bridges, and Jack Larson was his partner, lover, whatever. And they were great guys, super great guys.

00:55:04 Speaker_04
So we wanted to just say hi to him on our way back to Idaho. We walk into his office. He looks at me, he said, I can't believe you're coming in here." He said, I just realized you're perfect for this part in this movie I'm directing.

00:55:21 Speaker_04
It's the bad guy, but you're perfect for it. Just hang around town for two or three more days. Meet the star who has cast approval. He didn't tell me who it was who has cast approval.

00:55:32 Speaker_04
and the producers here at Paramount, and I think we can make this happen." And I said, screw that. I don't go to anybody's office like a piece of meat anymore. I just made 2,000 bucks, and we're on our way back to Idaho.

00:55:45 Speaker_04
I just wanted to tell you I love you, and I hope you and Jack are well, and Carol and I are out of here. So we left, we came back up to Idaho.

00:55:54 Speaker_04
About two weeks later, maybe a little less, I get a call from Jim, and he said, okay, now I'm on location in Houston. Paramount doesn't know who you are, they don't want you to, they want Ryan O'Neill to do this part, or maybe Sam Shepard.

00:56:09 Speaker_04
But I'm going to send you a plane ticket to come down here. I think we can make this work. I've told Irving Azoff, the music guy who's also a producer, about you, and he likes the idea. You've got to meet him. I think we can make this happen."

00:56:24 Speaker_04
And I said, no. don't send me a plane ticket. I don't want them to have their hooks into me, even for a plane ticket. I'll get my GMC Jimmy, I'll drive to Houston, I'll see you down there." And I said, just tell me what the part is.

00:56:39 Speaker_04
And he said, a bank robber and a bull rider. And I went, okay. So I drive down to Houston. On my way to Houston, I stop off just in front of Huntsville Prison, where I knew that the character I played spent some time.

00:56:56 Speaker_04
And I'm going to be a little shady about this, because I kind of have to be. So I'm sitting there in my jimmy, and I hear familiar voices out of the dark saying, hey, Vato, what are you doing?

00:57:08 Speaker_04
And I look over and there, when he was alive, in another part of my life, I knew Freddy Fender, the country-western singer, whose real name was Baldy Marueta. And Freddy was in a family that picked everything illegally. That was his background.

00:57:28 Speaker_04
And he hung out with these two guys who were, for real, pistoleros. The real deal. And these two guys were there, and they said, what are you doing here, man? And I told them what I was doing. They went, we don't believe this.

00:57:42 Speaker_04
We got our buddy coming out. He'll be out of here in 15, 20 minutes. You got to meet him. He's a bank robber and a bull rider. And I went, yeah, Mexican guy. They said, no, man, he's a fucking gringo. And I went, OK. So I met this guy.

00:57:59 Speaker_04
who told me enough about the character that I was gonna be playing, and little things, like he said, you gotta get a hat sticker or something, not a tattoo, but something on you that says 13 and a half, because that's the number that gets us in here, and we all have it.

00:58:17 Speaker_04
And I said, what's that stand for? And he said, judge, jury, and a half-assed lawyer. So I said, okay, and he said, and you gotta get tattoos on your forearm, Nuestra Familia. I said, but I'm not a Latino.

00:58:32 Speaker_04
He said, neither am I, and showed me that he had that.

00:58:35 Speaker_02
What did that refer to, our family? Like, what was the meaning of that?

00:58:39 Speaker_04
That's the in-prison organization of Latinos.

00:58:41 Speaker_02
Ah, I see, I see. That he was adopted into.

00:58:45 Speaker_04
So he gave me that to do, and then I said, is there anything about being a bull rider that bull riders do that I could learn that most people can't do? And he showed me.

00:58:57 Speaker_04
He said, yeah, when you tie off your glove, since you're going to be using your dominant hand to wrap the rawhide around, you're going to have to use your non-dominant hand and your teeth

00:59:09 Speaker_04
And he said, you're gonna have to do it a lot of times to the point where you can go without even thinking about it. So I went, okay, I'm gonna do that at least 100 times a day from now on, hopefully 1,000. I get down to Houston, Jim said,

00:59:26 Speaker_04
I'm gonna make this happen. I met the actress who had never played the lead in a big movie, Deborah Winger. And both she, John Travolta, Irving Azov, and Jim Bridges, all kind of like... shoved me down Paramount's throat.

00:59:44 Speaker_04
And Jim said, this movie is going to change your life. You'll never have to audition again after you do it. And he told me the truth. I didn't believe it, but in those days, it was Urban Cowboy. And the part was West High Tower.

00:59:58 Speaker_04
It was funny, because when I read the script, I thought, all I have to do is be honest with this character.

01:00:04 Speaker_04
I'm not gonna go for big moments, because if I'm honest with it, I'll jump off the screen at people, simply because this movie is about oil workers and blue collar workers who dress up like outlaw cowboys on weekends to go in and ride not a real bull, but a bull machine.

01:00:25 Speaker_04
And I'm going to play a guy who's a real bank robber, a real ex-con, and a real bull rider. And if I just get close to it, I'll look like a diamond in a bucket full of rhinestones. Not because I'm particularly good, but it was almost like a setup.

01:00:46 Speaker_04
So anyway, that happened, and I didn't have to audition. I auditioned once since then for a part that, not a big part in a movie I really wanted to do, and the director said, no, no, at that point, I don't want you to do it.

01:00:58 Speaker_04
So I went to a cattle call under an assumed name, auditioned for it, and got that part. But since I did Urban Cowboy, my life has changed.

01:01:07 Speaker_04
And I thought I was offered the lead in some TV series while I was in Texas, because in those days, dailies were shared by everybody in the business. So I turned them all down because I thought, I don't want to leave Idaho and move back to LA.

01:01:25 Speaker_04
I love my life in Idaho. I love I didn't know how to ski, but I was learning how to ski, and I was climbing, and I was hiking, and I was shooting, and I was riding motorcycles, and all the things I really love to do.

01:01:39 Speaker_04
And plus, I could really cleanly think about and concern myself with the art of acting, and not, who do I know, and where am I going, and I've got this cool place in Malibu, or any of that stuff. The politics and the show.

01:01:53 Speaker_04
So I turned down the TV stuff,

01:01:56 Speaker_04
When I'd been in Texas, Carol had, she hadn't left me, but I knew at a certain point when I was playing Wes Hightower that I had the character, but I was terrified if I left it alone and put it down, it'd be like a bar of soap, and I tried to pick it up, and I wouldn't.

01:02:13 Speaker_04
So I lived that part 24-7. got arrested, got in trouble. I was West Hightower the whole time.

01:02:21 Speaker_04
I remember at one point I came back to, we had an apartment in Galleria, and I came back and none of Carol's clothes were, there was no presence of them in the apartment, and there had been when I had gone to work that day.

01:02:33 Speaker_04
And I'm thinking, what's going on? The phone was ringing, I pick it up, and it was Carol. And she said, I'm back in Idaho. I can't handle living with West Hightower. So you let me know when he's dead.

01:02:47 Speaker_04
me and the girls love you, we're up here, but we're not gonna put ourselves through this." And I went, okay. And I was about to hang up and she said, wait, before you hang up, I just want to say one thing. And I said, what's that? She said, two things.

01:03:04 Speaker_04
Number one, I love you. And number two, I think you're hitting a home run with this and it's gonna change our lives. So when I drove back up here in my Jimmy, I remember I stopped off in Wyoming at one point People must have thought I was nuts.

01:03:17 Speaker_04
And I got out of the Jimmy, I walked down to the side of the road, and I took this invisible Wes Hightower and threw him in the ground, broke his fucking neck. And called Carol on a pay phone and I said, West High Tower is dead. I'm coming home.

01:03:33 Speaker_02
Okay. Okay. Okay. Continue. And then we're going to go back to the origin story. Okay.

01:03:38 Speaker_04
Yeah. We were renting this house with this family that had come up with us. We were sharing this house. We had a bedroom on the bed were two scripts for the leads and movies for more money than I'd ever dreamed about making. And that was that.

01:03:53 Speaker_02
So here I am in Idaho. We're going to go back in time. We're going to slowly rewind because I have a couple of follow-up questions. One is, Jim Bridges, what did he see?

01:04:05 Speaker_02
What gave him the feeling or the confidence to say, this is going to change your life? What do you think it was? Was it that setup that you talked about?

01:04:11 Speaker_04
I had done my first movie with him and I got the movie. I came out here and I met him, but I didn't audition for the part. There was a director, Ed Peron, who I'd done a thing called, in New York, it was called Collision Course.

01:04:25 Speaker_04
It was nine one acts in the course of a night. And Ed said to Jim, if you're looking for somebody, a young guy who's not gonna charge you a ton of money and is perfect for the part, Scott Glenn's the guy. So I got that part and did the movie.

01:04:39 Speaker_04
So Jim knew me over a period of, in those days, movies took about three months to shoot. Now it's way faster. And I guess whatever it was he saw in me, It was jangled awake when we walked into his office coming back from Mexico.

01:04:55 Speaker_04
That was where he went, oh my God, something that he saw about me, he wrote the script for Urban Cowboy with Aaron Latham, the guy who had originally written a column in, I don't know if it was the Times, someplace in New York about ghillies and bull machines and all that stuff.

01:05:15 Speaker_04
And then Jim adapted that and wrote the screenplay. I don't know what it was he saw. I remember my screen test. They wanted me to do a scene from the, and I said, I can't do that. I'm not in the part. I don't want to lose it.

01:05:28 Speaker_04
And Jim said, well, we've got to put you on screen. And I said, and Debra was doing her sexy bull ride at the time. And there were a bunch of guys in the front watching. And I picked out the baddest looking one of all, who was a bandito, Texas.

01:05:44 Speaker_04
And I said, put the camera on me, and I thought, dear Lord, don't let this go bad, but here we go. And they were watching Deborah, and I walked over to him, and I went, hey. And he looked up at me, and I said, you're sitting on my fucking seat.

01:05:59 Speaker_04
And he looked at me, and I thought, what's gonna happen? And he got up and walked away. And I went and sat down. That was my screen test.

01:06:09 Speaker_02
If we go way back in time, and this is just based on what I researched online, but it seems like initially you were not born out of the womb dreaming of being an actor. It seems like you wanted to be a writer. Yeah. And how did

01:06:25 Speaker_02
acting enter the scene for you. And I read a bit about Berghoff.

01:06:30 Speaker_04
I wanted to be a writer. And if I look back on my whole life, the most important single event in my life was scarlet fever when I was nine years old. I wasn't supposed to have survived.

01:06:41 Speaker_04
There was one weekend when the doctors told my mom and dad to get a plot. And what saved my life was crystalline penicillin. I don't know if you've ever had that, a shot of it, but it's interesting.

01:06:52 Speaker_04
Because usually with most shots, it's the needle going in that hurts, and it's fine. Crystalline penicillin is like thicker than engine grease. So the needle going in kind of hurts, but then The rest of it going straightens you up.

01:07:09 Speaker_04
And I didn't realize it was saving my life, so I hated it. But that experience turned me into an athlete, turned me into someone who has learned to not only live with, but fall in love with my fantasies and my imagination.

01:07:23 Speaker_04
And I don't know if it's true or not, and I don't want to know, because it's a fantasy that I—if it's not true, I grew up believing it was, that on my mom's side of the family, I was directly related to Lord Byron.

01:07:36 Speaker_04
When I got out of bed from scarlet fever, my bones were so soft that they bent, and I limped like for almost

01:07:42 Speaker_04
four years, but it turned me into an athlete, because I was just embarrassed about the way I looked, and I was in a neighborhood where it wasn't good to be physically frail. This was Pittsburgh? Yeah. At any rate, I decided, you know, two things.

01:07:59 Speaker_04
Number one, I wasn't gonna be Walter Mitty. I wasn't gonna have an imaginary life. The adventures I was imagining were all gonna be true. I was gonna make them come true. And one of them was I was going to be a writer, poet, writer.

01:08:13 Speaker_04
So when I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I enlisted as a six-month reservist.

01:08:19 Speaker_02
Why did you do that? Because you went from English major to Marine Corps, is that it? Yeah.

01:08:23 Speaker_04
Because where I came from, there was nobody dodged the draft. And the draft was happening. I see. So for me, and I knew even with a BA in college, I had so little technical ability, and everybody will tell you about that.

01:08:41 Speaker_04
If I was smart enough, I would have tried to become probably a naval aviator, but I wasn't smart enough to be a pilot. So where I came from, the choice is worth three. Marine Corps, 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne. That's it.

01:08:57 Speaker_04
And then a friend of mine said, well, you can be airborne and a Marine both. And then I was worried about my hearing, because I've been legally deaf since I was 10 years old, because of scarlet fever as well. And they laughed.

01:09:12 Speaker_04
They said, you're going to be an enlisted Marine, you're going to boot camp at Parris Island, and you're worried about your hearing? People are going to scream at you the whole time you're there.

01:09:21 Speaker_04
And then you're going to be shooting automatic weapons without your hearing protection. Your hearing is going to be trashed. Don't worry about it. So that was my reason.

01:09:31 Speaker_04
So I did my six months in the Marine Corps, and this was the 60s, where if you were a reservist, you didn't really have to make weekend meetings in summer camp.

01:09:43 Speaker_04
There were other ways of doing your time of deployments for three months or a month, month and a half, whatever. When I got out of the Marine Corps, I went to see my mom and dad who were living in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

01:09:57 Speaker_04
My dad was, at that point, he'd gotten pretty high up in Snap-on Tools. When I was born, he was a salesman. So he went from no money and no nothing to, he actually wound up kind of running that company.

01:10:12 Speaker_04
I went to Kenosha, there was a job opening on the Kenosha Daily News, and I did an interview and lied, as I often do. They said, can you type? And I went, yeah. And they said, how many words a minute? And I said, 35, because I knew that's what I needed.

01:10:30 Speaker_04
After the interview, they said, well, you've got the job. I came out and there was Joe Jacoby, one of the reporters there, said, you should be happy. You don't look happy. And I said, well, I'll tell you the truth. I lied.

01:10:41 Speaker_04
I don't know how to type at all. And he said, me and one other reporter will cover for you, Scott. For two weeks, you go to adult education at the public high school and learn how to type.

01:10:53 Speaker_02
And what was the job for, this was, were you transcribing or what was the job? The job was cover reporter.

01:10:59 Speaker_04
I got it. I was not very good at what I, so anyway, I'm up in the city room doing that and I hear shots out the window and it was cold as shit. And I remember I said to somebody in the city room, those are shots, go out and check them out.

01:11:14 Speaker_04
And it was like 30 below zero, it was freezing cold. And somebody said, no, that was a car backfire. I said, Vapor lock. Cars aren't even starting now. And there's most stuff in life I don't know, but I just got out of the Marine Corps.

01:11:30 Speaker_04
And gunfire, I do know. And I'm telling you, those were shots. And they said, why don't you go out and cover it?

01:11:36 Speaker_04
So I went outside, and two blocks from the newspaper at the side of the road was a city patrol car with Mrs. Hockadall, the chief of police's wife, sitting in the driver's seat with her husband's pistol smoking in her lap.

01:11:53 Speaker_04
And next to her, Dorothy Batadas, who was the chief of police's secretary slash mistress with half her head blown away. It was my story. It was the biggest story, obviously.

01:12:09 Speaker_04
So they made me a police reporter and I thought being a police reporter would be really cool because I'll cover, you know, mob hits and all that stuff.

01:12:19 Speaker_04
And I realized that you do do that, but for every one of those, you do six interviewing a woman 15 minutes after her teenage son has died in a traffic accident. And you're thinking about, do I get a byline? Is this going to be on page one or page two?

01:12:38 Speaker_04
And I felt like a ghoul. There was a bulletin board with other jobs listed, so I applied for the job of a reporter on the sports desk. I can't even remember the name of the paper, but it was in the American Virgin Islands.

01:12:49 Speaker_04
I got the job, and I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone, and she lives in Long Island, and she said, when does the job start? And I said, in about six months. And she said, why don't you go to New York and take an acting class?

01:13:04 Speaker_04
And I went, why? And she said, I'll be honest with you, Scott, I read the stuff that you write and your description of ideas and action and places isn't bad. It's okay. But your dialogue essentially sucks. It's stiff. Nobody talks like that.

01:13:22 Speaker_04
The minute you put words in anybody's mouth, whether it's a poem or a short story or whatever, you blow it. If you have to get in front of people and say words, it'll kick you in your ass to start to listen to the way people really talk.

01:13:34 Speaker_04
And if you're doing theater, you'll be dealing with arguably the best dialogue ever written. So after I got over maybe five or 10 minutes of being angry because she told me the truth, I thought, okay.

01:13:46 Speaker_04
So I got in my car, I had an old Triumph, and I drove to New York, sold the car, got two jobs. I looked up acting in the Village Voice, nothing under A, under B, it's at Berghoff Studios, I didn't know anything about it.

01:14:00 Speaker_04
Call it up, call up Berghoff Studios, and this guy named Bill Hickey, who was one of America's greatest character actors, nominated for, he might have gotten an Academy Award for, God, I can't think of it.

01:14:13 Speaker_04
Anyway, Bill answers the phone, and he says, yeah, work on this, bring it by Berghoff Studios Wednesday morning. It was, oh dad, poor dad, mom was hugging you in the closet and I'm feeling so sad, was the play.

01:14:26 Speaker_04
Something I'm completely unsuited for, but it was a little monologue. I worked on it. I go down into the basement of Burghoff's. It was raining outside. Wednesday morning, maybe seven or eight people sitting there to watch.

01:14:40 Speaker_04
I walk in front of Bill Hickey to start this monologue, and for the first And the only time in my life, literally, a light bulb went off between my eyes, and I thought, holy shit, I'm an actor. That fast. And it wasn't like, oh, I'm so fulfilled.

01:14:56 Speaker_04
It was, for the first time, my life made sense to me. My proclivity to daydream, my laziness in a lot of areas, everything made sense like that. And Bill saw it, and he started laughing, and he said, that's right, you're one of us.

01:15:13 Speaker_04
And then he turned to the other students and he said, Scott's not going to finish this. He's got to go outside, walk around the block a couple of times and think about things. I went outside, there was a pay phone on Bank Street.

01:15:27 Speaker_04
I called my mom and dad, I got my dad on the phone, I said, I'm not going to the Virgin Islands, I'm not going to be a director. they were terrified I would go back into the service, which I actually was thinking about doing.

01:15:37 Speaker_04
Because being in the service, in a lot of ways, can be rough and, you know, all that stuff. But in other ways, it's very easy, because you don't have to make decisions about what you're going to wear, what you're going to do, what you're going to eat.

01:15:50 Speaker_04
And I like that, because I really am lazy. I'm a, like, horribly lazy human being. Anyway, I told my dad that, and he took a second and he gave me the best advice I could ever have had.

01:16:02 Speaker_04
He said, son, I don't really know anything about what you're telling me. The only advice I can give you is don't give yourself any deadlines. And I said, what do you mean? He said, don't say if I haven't made it in two years, I'm gonna sell insurance.

01:16:19 Speaker_04
He said, that's like starting a race with a lead wheel weight hung around your neck. In for a penny, in for a pound. If you love it, make it your life. And I did, and here I am talking to you.

01:16:30 Speaker_02
I'd love to zoom in on your dad for a second, because it seems like, just based on what you've said thus far, that for a company man at that time, That seems like very unexpected advice that would be given, that there wouldn't be any pushback.

01:16:46 Speaker_02
What do you attribute that to? Why did your dad give you that advice, do you think? Or why did he feel comfortable giving it?

01:16:50 Speaker_04
Well, my dad grew up in a way that I can't possibly understand, in real serious poverty. I remember he told me at one point, if I ever have money, I'm going to give it to a charity, make it the Salvation Army, because they fed us Christmas time.

01:17:06 Speaker_04
they had a cow in a vacant lot that three blocks of people used for milk. So I'm not going to go into, I don't want to divulge too much, but my dad was involved in as hard a life as you can imagine and did well in that life.

01:17:23 Speaker_04
So my dad's background was he dealt with really poor Irish, Jewish, black, Italian. and all of them involved in gambling and booze, none of them involved in drugs. They were all people.

01:17:42 Speaker_04
My dad's best friend who raised me as much as my mom and dad did was a black Cherokee, super honorable, super loving, super gentle, but also somebody you wouldn't want to fuck with.

01:17:57 Speaker_04
So that was my dad's background when he met my mom and she said, basically, if you even curse around me, we're not going to be together and you can't do anything illegal.

01:18:07 Speaker_04
So he left the world that he was in and started selling Bluepoint tools that morphed into Snap-on tools.

01:18:15 Speaker_04
He told me later on, when I was still struggling as an actor, and the thing that I'm sad about, but I can't do anything about it, is he never saw me being successful. My mom did, but my dad was dead by the time.

01:18:27 Speaker_04
But he told me, he said, when he started doing really well with Snap-on Tools, he said, I keep running into these men who are lawyers and doctors, and they're not happy, because they're doing, their father's dream, not their dream.

01:18:46 Speaker_04
And he said, the only advice I can give you about having kids is when you have kids, don't dream their dreams for them. Do not do that. So he was an unusual guy. To be very honest, the only human being I've ever met in my life

01:19:02 Speaker_04
close to who he was, was him.

01:19:06 Speaker_02
Thank you for sharing that. And how would you describe your mother, her character, what you absorbed from her?

01:19:14 Speaker_04
Filled with love, unconditional love. When I think back on it, my mom and dad played tennis. My mom also grew up really, really poor.

01:19:24 Speaker_04
Her dad died when he was in his 30s, but she had a rich super aunt who never gave the family money, but gave her things like ballet lessons. And so my mom was a dancer, and I think back on it, she was a loving, physical artist.

01:19:43 Speaker_04
It was like when I remember when Carol and I were going to get married, and I told my dad that we grew up Swedenborgians, and I was planning on converting to Judaism. I didn't want her to have a target on her back that I didn't have on mine as well.

01:19:59 Speaker_04
And my dad's answer was, man should do what the woman wants. So that was my mom and dad. I mean, what I will say about growing up with them is we hear all these people talk about growing up in these dysfunctional families. I don't have any excuses.

01:20:14 Speaker_04
I grew up in the most functionally family. Straight out love. My dad never hit me except for once in my life.

01:20:22 Speaker_04
I remember my mom wanted me to take this girl to a dance, junior high, and she was the daughter of a friend of hers, and I went, ooh, I know she was a little hefty, whatever. I didn't want to do it. And I said, no, I don't want to do it.

01:20:35 Speaker_04
And she said, please, son, I'm asking. And I said, no. And my mom teared up and started going, huh. My dad walked in the door and he said, why is your mom crying? And I said, something I said.

01:20:45 Speaker_04
He walked over and hit me with an uppercut and dropped me on my ass like wham. This was somebody who had never given me a spanking. And he looked down at me, he said, make your mom cry, you're going down and walked away.

01:21:01 Speaker_04
So the next time my mom wanted me to do something, if he even started to go, I said, okay, mama.

01:21:11 Speaker_02
So let's come back to the conversion to Judaism. I'd love for you to say a little bit more about that. You mentioned if Carol was going to have a target on her back, you didn't want her to be alone in that.

01:21:20 Speaker_02
Can you say more about the decision to convert?

01:21:23 Speaker_04
Yeah, I had a friend, his name was Milton Beddow, and I've lost touch with him. I don't even know if he's alive or dead, but he was a rabbi in a shul in the Upper East Side in New York, and he was a friend of mine.

01:21:34 Speaker_04
He had been a rabbi in a shul in Charleston, South Carolina. He'd been in some of the first bus sit-ins. He'd been in shootouts with the KKK, and I believe he dropped a couple of those. And he was my friend.

01:21:47 Speaker_04
He loved theater, and I went to see him, and I said, I want you to make me a Jew.

01:21:52 Speaker_02
He said, you know, I'm a... Why did you say that to him? in preparation for getting married?

01:21:56 Speaker_04
Yeah. I said, I'm going with Carol. I want you to make me a Jew. He'd met her, and so I said, I want you to make me a Jew. And he said, schmuck alive for you. I'll tell her parents that I did it and I won't do it."

01:22:08 Speaker_04
And I just went, it's not, her parents don't have anything to do with it. And he said, I'm a conservative rabbi. I don't really believe in conversions that much. What do you know about the Talmud?

01:22:20 Speaker_04
And I said, if a man teaches his son no trade, it is as if he taught him highway robbery. And he said, you've read the Talmud. And I said, some of it. He said, do you accept it as the Word of God? And I went, no, not really.

01:22:33 Speaker_04
I said, I think it's a book with a lot of wisdom, as is the Bible, as is the Koran. But if you're asking me of all that stuff, what resonates the most with me, it would be Lao Tzu's The Way of Life. He said, I'll find a rabbi that'll do it for you.

01:22:48 Speaker_04
I went, okay. I started walking out of the show, and he said, hey, wait a minute, asshole, turn around. So I did, and he said, you're not doing it for the Talmud, you're not doing it for her parents, why do you want me to convert you?"

01:23:00 Speaker_04
And I said, "'Cause I met this woman, I love her, and we wanna travel, and I don't wanna be going anywhere in the world where somebody's pointing a gun at her and not at me for the same reason, period, that's it.

01:23:13 Speaker_04
If there was no antisemitism, you and I wouldn't be having this talk." And he said, sit down. So I sat down, and he said, after me, Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Doth. And I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm converting you.

01:23:25 Speaker_04
And I said, well, you just told me you wouldn't. He said, nobody has ever given me that answer to that question. He said, if you want to take this on, that way I'm duty-bound to convert you." And then he kind of converted me.

01:23:40 Speaker_04
I was doing an off-Broadway play at the time, so he would go down, and when I would go to the shul to, like, learn about Judaism, he was a closet director. He would say, I want to come back on stage in two days, I want you to try this one.

01:23:52 Speaker_04
I went, oh, man, okay, I'm not gonna say no to the guy.

01:23:58 Speaker_02
Abraham Ephraim Ben-Avraham is my Jewish name. You mentioned Lot 2. Why does that resonate? What is his writing or the conglomerate known as Lot 2?

01:24:09 Speaker_04
It feels like an honest description of of inner and outer truth the way I know it. It just resonates with me that, I mean, we can talk about this later on or not talk about it. You shoot, I know, do you know who Brian Enos is? I know the name.

01:24:27 Speaker_04
So he wrote a book called Practical Shooting Beyond Fundamentals. And it's about when you enter the space of doing something, the less thought that can be involved and the more you're just present in the now, the better it will be.

01:24:45 Speaker_04
Doing martial arts and boxing, wrestling, all that stuff, I just realized at a very young age that if I wanted something to work out well physically, the best thing I could possibly do is watch my body do it. not make any decisions at all.

01:25:03 Speaker_04
So, you know, if somebody does this, then you do that. I never bought that in martial arts. Given where I grew up, I knew that wasn't true.

01:25:11 Speaker_04
Number one, if anybody who predicted what would happen in, let's say, a physical confrontation, if they were making the prediction, one thing for me was very clear about them. They'd never been in one.

01:25:24 Speaker_04
Now I believe that that's not just true of that kind of stuff, but it's true of pretty much anything you do physically. If you have muscle memory, let your muscle memory alone. It'll do it so much faster and cleaner than you ever will.

01:25:37 Speaker_04
And for me, spiritually, that's what Lao Tzu is saying.

01:25:42 Speaker_02
So it's this sort of diminishing of the self or dissolution of the self?

01:25:47 Speaker_04
Yeah, I mean, it's like Lao Tzu is the ultimate mystical. And for me, mystical, the mystical side of every religion is not the impractical. That's the practical side. The impractical side is orthodox. That says, this is a whole other thing.

01:26:04 Speaker_04
And I'm just an actor and I'm not that bright, so I'm just saying this, but I believe that orthodoxy right now is under fire and diminishing quickly. It's in the rearview mirror.

01:26:16 Speaker_04
And people like Mike Johnson even complain about going to fundamentalist evangelical church and seeing less and less people in the pews. The reason for that, I believe, is because orthodoxy is not practical.

01:26:33 Speaker_04
Orthodoxy says, take absolute, for real, the words that are written in these books. Well, if you want to save orthodoxy, forget about banning books about LGBTQ or blacks or Latinos.

01:26:50 Speaker_04
If you want to save orthodoxy, ban the teaching of these three following subjects—math, physics, chemistry—because under the harsh light of science, Orthodoxy doesn't work.

01:27:03 Speaker_04
Carbon dating says to the Bible, the Talmud, and the Koran, all of which get kind of close to the same date as the age of the earth, carbon dating says, yeah, you'll miss that one by only around 170 million years. Whoops.

01:27:23 Speaker_04
Somebody lived in the belly of a whale. Well, 2,000 years ago, you look at somebody as big as a whale, you save as possible. Biology says this thing can barely swallow anything bigger than a minnow. Guess what? It never happened. Whoops.

01:27:37 Speaker_04
But mysticism says all of this is poetry to tell you from God how to live your life, how to be an honorable, just person, how to have a family, all of which I completely believe. Absolutely.

01:27:52 Speaker_04
So, to me, Lao Tzu is the ultimate mystic, because in my mind, what mystics in orthodoxy are looking essentially at doing the opposite thing.

01:28:05 Speaker_04
Orthodoxy is saying, if I bow to Mecca, or if I eat fish on Friday, or if I live kosher, when I die, I'll be cool. My ego will be cool. I'll be fine. I will be fine. Mysticism tries to dissolve the ego altogether.

01:28:27 Speaker_04
Do I believe when I die Scott Glenn will be around? No. But do I believe there's something in me that's a point of view that's a point of view of you two guys and the cloud outside and elk running?

01:28:41 Speaker_02
Yes, I do believe that. Talking about that dissolution from a first-hand experiential perspective, like a mystic, have you ever experienced, say in acting, a role playing you as opposed to the other way around? Yes.

01:28:57 Speaker_04
Could you describe what that's like? The first time it happened was Urban Cowboy. I translated it wrong. I translated it as fear of leaving this character alone. The second time it happened was doing an off-Broadway play called Killer Joe.

01:29:20 Speaker_04
And I just realized that up until one part of Killer Joe, it was a crazy play where we were allowed, the director realized that the acoustics were so good in the Soho Playhouse that we could turn our back on the audience and be heard, we could walk off stage and be heard.

01:29:37 Speaker_04
So he thought, to make this really spontaneous and organic, I'm going to allow anyone to do whatever they want. There's not going to be any blocking at all, none. The whole thing took place in a trailer on the outskirts of Dallas.

01:29:51 Speaker_04
So if, as a character, in the middle of a conversation, you felt like walking down the hallway offstage to take a leak, you did. So it was completely open like that.

01:30:04 Speaker_04
The only part that was choreographed originally was there was a big fight at the end, and we brought in a guy from the opera to choreograph the fight, and he choreographed a great fight scene, but it didn't look right next to how loose the rest of the play was.

01:30:20 Speaker_04
So we realized we had to improv the fight as well. Mercifully, the people in the cast had circus skills. We knew how to pratfall and stuff like that. But everybody got hurt doing it.

01:30:33 Speaker_04
15 minutes before half an hour, we'd come on stage and we'd say, okay, tonight, this chair's a breakaway, this will shatter, this is real.

01:30:40 Speaker_04
And the deal that we had was, like, if you came up behind me and grabbed the back of my hair and pulled me, I would fall backwards.

01:30:48 Speaker_04
But since I couldn't see what I was falling into, it was the obligation of the person pulling me to kick, if there was a chair or something, I was gonna fuck up my back, to kick it out of the way. The only place to kick it was the first,

01:31:02 Speaker_04
aisle of the theater. So we told people when they came to see his play, this is a projectile aisle.

01:31:09 Speaker_04
You may not get a heavy object landing on your lap, or you may, you for sure are gonna be covered with fried chicken and ketchup and fake blood, there's no question, so don't wear suits that you care about.

01:31:23 Speaker_04
So anybody over the age of 25 avoided those seats, and the kids fought to get them. So that was sort of the way the play worked.

01:31:33 Speaker_04
There was one scene at the very beginning of act two where I'm supposed to walk on stage, it's dark, and this guy is trying to get in, he's drunk, and he's trying to get in the front door, but I don't know who it is, and I've moved in at that point, and I'm in bed with a young girl.

01:31:48 Speaker_04
So I come out in the dark, grab him, slam him down on the ground, and I've got a .45 automatic, and I'm wearing a watch. and the lights come up, and then everybody else wanders on stage who's in the trailer. My wardrobe is a 45 automatic and a watch.

01:32:07 Speaker_04
At one point, Tracy Letts said, Scott, when people walk on stage, all I see is your ass. You're trying to, you live at this place. So full frontal nudity, fine, but doing that, oddly, kind of,

01:32:23 Speaker_04
After the first night of doing it, it was like, I don't know whether liberate is the right word, but I realized that after that, and Tracy forced me into that spot, the best thing I could do with the play was just let it happen. Just let it happen.

01:32:40 Speaker_02
So that was Killer Joe. When you say let it happen, how does that change how you approach the next performance? You decide to let it happen,

01:32:49 Speaker_04
The next performance, I didn't make any decisions about what I would do, what prop I would pick up, anything. Well, let's see what's going on here. I'm gonna live in this space. I know that I am this character.

01:33:03 Speaker_04
I even told Tracy, I said, I know other people have played this part at Steppenwolf, where it started in Chicago, but you fucking wrote this for me. And I just know it. in the way that I felt the same way about West Hightower and Urban Cowboys.

01:33:18 Speaker_04
So that was killer Joe. The next time it happened, I was doing leftovers.

01:33:23 Speaker_04
and I'd been in two seasons of The Leftovers, and I'd gone from just being a character to Damon Lindelof calling me up with Mimi Leder, the producer, she directed most of them, and Damon wrote it, and they said, we want you to be a regular member of the cast, we're doing the last season in Australia, and I think the second or third episode is gonna be just you, Scott, all just you in Australia,

01:33:53 Speaker_04
And I've written the longest monologue I've ever written. I'm so lucky. So I said, what is it, two pages long? He said, no, seven. I went, holy shit, seven pages. And he sent it to me. At the time he sent it to me, I was reading this book.

01:34:08 Speaker_04
I know you've got a dog. I'm going to ask you about your dog. But I was reading this book called Don't Shoot the Dog.

01:34:15 Speaker_02
Excellent book. Isn't it a great book? It is the top recommendation always for people who are considering getting a dog for any type of training. It is an excellent book.

01:34:24 Speaker_04
If we weren't holding mics, I'd argue. So I'm reading Don't Shoot the Dog, and the section I'm reading is where she says positive reinforcement can help you train your dog your husband or your wife, your friends, even yourself.

01:34:45 Speaker_04
For example, if you've got something long to memorize, and I'm thinking, holy shit, here's my... So what she said in that was, it'll take longer initially, but it's the perfect way to memorize something really long.

01:35:00 Speaker_04
Start at the end, the last sentence, and then the last sentence, and the next last sentence, and then like that.

01:35:07 Speaker_04
Because what will happen when you get to the beginning of this thing, and you launch into it for real, as you're getting towards the end, it'll become more and more familiar. It'll be like walking home. Wait a minute, I know this street lamp.

01:35:20 Speaker_04
Okay, I know where I'm at. That's fascinating. Instead of the ending being this hanging unfamiliarity. That scares you a little, kind of why I remember it. As you get near the end, you become more and more comfortable and more and more comfortable.

01:35:32 Speaker_04
So we get down to, Carol and I get to Australia, we go to the outback, and we're going to do this scene. It's the first one we're going to do.

01:35:40 Speaker_04
And so Mimi says, we'll do this in bits and pieces, because this is seven pages, there's no way you can do the whole thing in one. And I said, you know what, Mimi? can you set it up so that I, at least give me a shot at doing it in one take?"

01:35:54 Speaker_04
And she said, yeah, okay, I can do that. So we set it up. It's really, it's not a monologue in that it's not me talking to myself. I'm talking to Deva Gopalil, but he doesn't say anything. So he just sits there and listens. So we start doing this scene.

01:36:13 Speaker_04
and we come to the end of it, I hear action, I feel my key light a few times, I hear cut, and Mimi says, okay, that was, first she said, incorrectly, but I'll say it, because I got a big ego, she said, ladies and gentlemen, you just had a master's class in acting.

01:36:32 Speaker_04
She said, okay, so Scott, so when you picked up the tape recorder, and you started to play it, and you welled up, and you started to cry, and you wouldn't let yourself, and you put it back down, What did you do next?

01:36:43 Speaker_04
And I said, what did I do with the tape recorder? She said, what do you remember about what you just did? And I went, not much. She said, you're telling me that so much of you was in that scene, there wasn't enough to step outside.

01:36:58 Speaker_04
You weren't watching yourself at all. And I went, no. And she said, if you can't direct yourself, I can't direct you.

01:37:06 Speaker_04
So would you be willing the next time we do this to have a little piece of you watching it so that when I talk about parts of this that I want to change, we can talk to each other?

01:37:18 Speaker_04
And I said, are you asking me as somebody who has this job and is being told by the director or as an artist? She said, what's the difference? And I said, the difference is I'm a blue collar enlisted Marine. I know how to take orders. You're my boss.

01:37:37 Speaker_04
If you tell me to do it, I'll do it. But if as an artist, you're asking me, will I do it? Artists wait whole lifetimes to be able to have this experience. And if I could have this experience again, fuck no, I don't want to do it. I do not.

01:37:51 Speaker_04
And she said, what if I'm not getting what I want? I said, let's do another take. We'll just do one take after another. She said, it'll wipe you out. It'll exhaust you. I said, no, it won't. Look at me. Am I exhausted? So we did

01:38:04 Speaker_04
three or four more takes of the whole thing. And at the end of it, Mimi said, is this what I'm going to be dealing with for the rest of this episode? And I went, not if you tell me not to. And she said, I'm not going to tell you not to.

01:38:19 Speaker_04
Let's just go for it."

01:38:21 Speaker_04
So we did that whole episode, crazy white fella thinking, and all I would do in the morning when I would wake up, first in the Outback and then later on in Melbourne, was I look, literally look in the mirror and I say, stay out of the way.

01:38:36 Speaker_04
Do not make editorial decisions or try to work for that big moment. I had a manager, his term was having a conversation with Oscar. Have no conversations with Emmy or Oscar. Just stay out of the way of this and let it happen.

01:38:53 Speaker_04
So that was when I really understood being in that spot as an actor. And then it happened to me again with Vince Vaughn doing a series that hasn't come out yet.

01:39:05 Speaker_04
The first season, I don't know if there'll be a second season, the first season will be around August. It's called Bad Monkey. It stars Vince.

01:39:15 Speaker_04
And the first day on the set, working with Vince, I play his dad, and the character is a shaman who talks to manatees and birds flying by in the sky and shit like that.

01:39:28 Speaker_04
At any rate, Vince, after we did the scene, has written like three times, and it felt like it was just taking me. Vince said, okay, we know the scene.

01:39:39 Speaker_04
Scott, would you be cool with just throwing the script out and just winging that scene, what we just did, just completely open-ended, loose? And I went, you mean like I used to do in street theater? Shit, yes.

01:39:52 Speaker_04
And after we did that, I just thought, I'm not going to edit myself or this character that I'm playing because of a key that kind of something that I signed up for a breathing thing with this guy, Erwan LaCour.

01:40:06 Speaker_04
At any rate, I just realized after that day with Vince and the key that I had to play in the character. I'm gonna stay out of the way of this, because it feels so good and so fresh, and I'm lazy, too. I mean, it's taking care of me.

01:40:21 Speaker_04
Why should I work my ass off when the best stuff is just leaving it alone? And then the next job I got after that was something called Eugene the Marine, which is this low-budget thriller that will be coming out sometime in the next year.

01:40:36 Speaker_04
And with that, I realized from the get-go, just stay out of the way, both because the director was gonna let me do whatever I really wanted. I would make the physical, I was supposed to pick up a drill and drill a hole in the wall, I'd do that.

01:40:50 Speaker_04
But how I was gonna do it, whether it was gonna be the same again and again, whether it would match, I wasn't even gonna, not even think about that a little bit, to a great extent because I am lazy, and in the part that I was doing in Eugene the Marine,

01:41:05 Speaker_04
was beyond the lead. It was in a 98-page script. I was in 96 of the pages. So there's no way, I couldn't even memorize, I just hoped that the words would come to me.

01:41:17 Speaker_04
And what I happened on with that was I realized that what gives, in my mind, what gives performances on film their juice and electricity is their degree of spontaneity.

01:41:31 Speaker_04
And complete spontaneity, and I got this from Brian Enos as well about shooting, complete spontaneity is not watching yourself at all. Complete spontaneity is being in the now so completely that you really don't have a past.

01:41:50 Speaker_04
And more importantly, way more importantly, I think, with acting is you don't have a future, which means plans on what you're gonna do in the scene dissolve and then finally disappear.

01:42:04 Speaker_04
So what I had with that movie was finally just wound up being with the crew as my very small audience. Every single take was a one-act play called Now.

01:42:18 Speaker_02
You mentioned Marlon Brando earlier. Was there anything that you gleaned from your time around Marlon Brando or that he taught you, any gems you picked up?

01:42:29 Speaker_04
Aside from his moral behavior, which was phenomenal. What do you mean by that? He supported two villages in the Philippines with all his pay and wouldn't let anybody write about it.

01:42:42 Speaker_04
It's not in the movie, but there's one point where I killed Dennis Hopper and I was working on the scene and Marlon came over to me and said, Scott, just because they call it acting doesn't mean you have to act. I went, okay. What did he mean by that?

01:42:58 Speaker_04
What he meant by that was I was trying to squeeze something out of a moment rather than seeing what the moment was going to present to me.

01:43:05 Speaker_04
And what I learned from watching him was because he had this reputation of being, okay, there are two basic schools of acting that even to this day that when you watch people work and you know which one they're coming from. One is Rada.

01:43:21 Speaker_04
Really great, great actors all have this, which is technique. You get down the accent and the physical characteristics and the wardrobe and the makeup and the dealing with props and get the whole outside perfect and then do the part. That's Rada.

01:43:43 Speaker_04
technique acting, most of what you still see. Then there's the Russian school, which is Stanislavski, Boloslavski, and that is, you begin with the inside of the character.

01:43:56 Speaker_04
Does this person share my same, the way I look at life, philosophy, all that stuff? What emotions are really mine that are also this character's? And if they're not the same, can one be replaced with the other?

01:44:12 Speaker_04
So if something makes me angry about getting on a subway and I'm playing somebody who's angry about not being left money in a will, the audience doesn't know where that anger comes from. So you use the subway because you're not in the other city.

01:44:27 Speaker_04
So Marlin had the reputation of being mainly, if not 100%, the Russian school. I realized around him, he was whatever worked. Sometimes he would take a mirror, make an expression on the mirror, freeze and say, action.

01:44:43 Speaker_04
And other times he would say, how are they lighting this scene? And they would say, is there a way I can put this ear in the dark so you don't see it? Yeah, but what are you going to do? And he put a sound plug in his ear

01:44:55 Speaker_04
and play, not his lines, but the stuff he wanted to cover in improvisation so he wouldn't miss stuff.

01:45:03 Speaker_02
It was audio he had recorded himself. Yeah.

01:45:05 Speaker_04
So he would do anything. And I learned from him that part. But I also got from Marlon his understanding about, okay, so brief little story. Where we were in the Philippines was at a place called Paksinhan.

01:45:20 Speaker_04
And I had a room at Oxenhahn Inn that I basically kept all my crap in. I was living at the time with this group of people called the Ifuga that were on the set.

01:45:30 Speaker_04
But one afternoon, I was back at the hotel with Marlon, with two producers, I think Dennis Hopper, and I think Larry Fishburne was there. So anyway, we're sitting around.

01:45:42 Speaker_04
The table in the hotel, and where you check into the hotel, and a jukebox were all kind of in the same room. This couple came in to check into the hotel, Filipino couple, and they had two little girls with them.

01:45:56 Speaker_04
One was holding her mom's dress, hiding behind it. The other one, and I think it was satisfaction, was playing on the jukebox. The other little girl heard this song, and she came dancing into the place where we were all sitting around.

01:46:11 Speaker_04
sort of miming to satisfaction, and she was magical. And people were laughing, and finally her parents checked in, and they all left and went upstairs.

01:46:21 Speaker_04
One of the producers, I think was Gray Frederick, said about the little girl who was in Dancy, he said, God, that little girl was magical. Someday, that little girl will be a great actress. And Marlon said, great actress? And he said, yeah.

01:46:36 Speaker_04
And Marlon said, you're wrong. It's the other one. They didn't get it, but I immediately understood because that other little girl doing like this was me, who needed the permission of a part to go nuts, to do whatever it was.

01:46:50 Speaker_04
And Marlon was saying the same thing about himself.

01:46:53 Speaker_02
With the quickening that you felt when you realized that you were meant to act, when your life started to make sense, Do you think that was predestined out of the box? Was that informed by your experience with scarlet fever?

01:47:08 Speaker_02
Because I know, I believe you couldn't read at the time.

01:47:11 Speaker_04
Yeah, scarlet fever attacks sometimes all, usually just one of your senses. And they don't know why it does that, but they were trying to protect my eyesight, which turns out to be really good.

01:47:24 Speaker_04
What scarlet fever left me out with was damaged auditory nerves. I mean, I've got hearing aids in now because Carol finally was up here probably five, six years ago.

01:47:36 Speaker_04
She just got tired of screaming at me and having me walk into the room and turning the TV up, like ear splitting loud. She said, you got to get hearing aids. Didn't think I needed them.

01:47:46 Speaker_04
And then I got checked by the audiologist who went behind my back to talk to me. And what happened was he was talking to me. I'm looking at him and I'm hearing fine. He walks behind me and I can't hear him.

01:47:59 Speaker_04
And he told me, he said, that's because you read lips. I thought, no, I don't read lips. He said, oh yeah, you do. And he said, the good news, Scott, is this is not age related. The bad news is you've been suffering this for at least 40 years.

01:48:12 Speaker_04
My suspicion is longer. So that was scarlet fever.

01:48:17 Speaker_02
And do you think that informed, helped shape you into what later became this actor?

01:48:23 Speaker_04
Yeah, or it led me into having, discoveries that I wouldn't have had before. Like when I got out of bed from scar fever, I could take my finger literally and run it in and out of my ribcage. My bones were soft, so I limped.

01:48:36 Speaker_04
I grew up in a neighborhood that was very physical. So out of mortification, if there was a pickup football game, I played. But what I discovered from playing sports and stuff wasn't that I was so good at it, but I actually liked it a lot. I loved

01:48:54 Speaker_04
physicality. Before I got scarlet fever, all my friends were girls. I'd much rather talk about flower arrangements than the NFL. And to some extent, that's still true of me. So scarlet fever just introduced me to a different world that I really loved.

01:49:12 Speaker_04
Marine Corps did too. All of those things, rock climbing with Tony Jones up in the Bighorn Crags, all of that stuff I found out was really fun and put a smile on my face.

01:49:23 Speaker_04
And I don't think if I had never gotten scarlet fever, I don't know that that would have ever happened. I don't know, it did happen.

01:49:30 Speaker_02
Now I'm 85, and here it is.

01:49:32 Speaker_02
So for people who, of course, are listening to this and not seeing any visual, I mean, for the majority of our conversation, you were sitting comfortably cross-legged on a couch, no back support, something that I know 30-somethings who wouldn't be comfortable in that position more than a few minutes.

01:49:47 Speaker_02
What does your physical training look like now, and what would you say are some of the most important types of training or decisions about training that you've made, say, post-40, just to allow this type of durability?

01:50:03 Speaker_04
I always wake up the same way. I wake up, I didn't today, oh, I slept in, but normally, I wake up around 5.30.

01:50:11 Speaker_04
I slept till 7 today, I don't know why, but I come downstairs, I fill up the coffee machine with water, turn it on, clean up the surfaces of all the tables, just because it feels like a good thing to do.

01:50:26 Speaker_04
And then I massage my ears, pull them up as high as possible. I'm not talking about being gentle, not gentle at all. pull them down, and then massage my ears.

01:50:39 Speaker_04
And if I feel any even slightly tender or sore spot, I really go after that as hard as I can. I learned this in a Tai Chi seminar years ago in New York, and I've done it ever since. But anyway, strong, super strong ear massage.

01:50:56 Speaker_04
Then after that, and while I'm doing all this stuff, I'm thinking, I'm making sure that my breath is horizontal and low. What do you mean by horizontal?

01:51:06 Speaker_04
Okay, there are two kinds of breathing that most people, like most Americans, do improperly after the age of, I don't know, two or three. One is we're born breathing horizontally, which means if I say, take a big, in a big breath of air,

01:51:24 Speaker_04
your stomach goes out, your diaphragm is working, and you're not bringing anything into the top of your chest at all. That's horizontal breathing.

01:51:34 Speaker_04
Vertical breathing is where you see the shoulders going up, and we vertically breathe way, way too much, because what vertical breathing will do, aside from the fact that you're not taking in as much oxygen, is it will put tension into your upper body and lower body,

01:51:52 Speaker_04
it'll also jack you into a fight or flight situation.

01:51:58 Speaker_04
So if you do that at a stoplight, because somebody, you know, got in your way, that's really a bad idea, because you're gonna jack up your heart rate, you're gonna jack up your blood pressure, you're gonna screw with your central nervous system.

01:52:12 Speaker_04
So I just try, early in the morning, try to remind myself. Horizontal breathing. Horizontal breathing, and then drop it down low. so that you're feeling the diaphragm. That's all. So I do that. After the ear massage, I tap my head, brain tap.

01:52:28 Speaker_02
Is this also from Chinese medicine? Yes.

01:52:31 Speaker_04
So after I finish tapping, I wash my hands, blow my nose, walk outside, and I'm dressed usually like this. Usually I've got a lighter shirt on.

01:52:42 Speaker_02
You're in shorts and a sweatshirt right now.

01:52:43 Speaker_04
Yeah, and I slip on these slip-on shoes, because this time of year I'll probably be standing in snow and ice. And I open up the garage and I walk outside and I hum. And when I say I hum, any of us can do it easily.

01:52:55 Speaker_04
You put your back teeth together and... I do that eight times and put vibration in my Vega Snare. This is every morning for sure.

01:53:12 Speaker_04
And then I come back in, shut the garage door, and usually then I look at what the temperature was, because I think, whoa, that was pretty cool. Like this morning it was 14. And you're outside in shorts. Yeah.

01:53:25 Speaker_04
You know, I'm not uncomfortable at all, but, you know, I know other people who handle the cold way better than I do, but the humming, you know who does that?

01:53:34 Speaker_04
Buddhist monks do that in the Himalayas, and they do that in way colder weather with robes on. It actually will work if you can do it in a relaxed way. You know, you start to learn sort of to anchor your coccyx, hum, come back in,

01:53:54 Speaker_04
and then take a shitload of vitamins and minerals and crap like that, probably most of which I don't need, but I do it anyway, and then make the bed upstairs, always make the bed, and then I do something physical to finish waking up.

01:54:14 Speaker_04
Today it was baby fit. You know baby fit? I do not know baby fit. Russian special ops do it in the morning. Use your legs first five times with each leg, lying on your back with your arms over your head.

01:54:28 Speaker_04
You use your legs to turn yourself over the way a baby would. And then you use your arms to do the same thing five times, five times. Then you rock back and forth. I do it 20 times. Do it with your neck. I do 10 times usually. And then a low crawl.

01:54:46 Speaker_04
And a bear crawl, you can either do a bear crawl with your butt up in the air or your butt lower than your shoulders. I do it lower than my shoulders. Did you get John into this? And what he said was, makes so much sense.

01:54:59 Speaker_04
We spend so much of our time looking at cell phones and computers and driving and doing so much stuff like that or like that. It would be good to do that a bit.

01:55:10 Speaker_02
Get your neck extended instead of pitched down.

01:55:13 Speaker_04
And I do a bear crawl. Like today, I didn't do that many, because I was thinking about you guys coming over here, and I didn't want... So I just did 12, but usually I do 60.

01:55:25 Speaker_04
When it's warm out, I'll use the lawn out there, and usually it's like 90 to 100 out. This is yards or feet, I guess? This is just moves. Oh, okay.

01:55:35 Speaker_02
One, two, three, four, like that. That's quite a bit. I don't even know if I could do that.

01:55:40 Speaker_04
So that's one thing I'll do. The other is... you know, like a really brief warm-up, when I say brief warm-up, 30 seconds of running in place, swinging my arm, just putting some synovial fluid in my joints.

01:55:56 Speaker_04
And then what I've been doing a lot is quick and dead. For me, that's just 10 kettlebell swings, either with a 32-pound, I don't know the kgs, in the 30s, or a 52. I stopped doing the 52 because I screwed up my muscle.

01:56:18 Speaker_04
I'm learning about more muscles in my body with my old age. But anyway, I do 10 kettlebell swings inside a minute, 10 more inside a minute, wait a minute, get on the ground, do push-ups. Depends on how ambitious I am.

01:56:34 Speaker_04
I'll either do, I rarely do straight push-ups. I'll usually do fist push-ups, or open finger fist push-ups, tri-finger push-ups, or these, which are... Oh, I got it, the close-hand, more tricep push-ups. Yeah, right, back... Prison push-ups.

01:56:53 Speaker_04
So I'll do 10 of those, 10 of those, wait a minute, back and forth, and I'll do 5 rounds. So inside of 5 rounds I've done 100 KB swings and 100 push-ups. Then I'm pretty much done with like specific working out.

01:57:11 Speaker_04
If I want to do, I used to do, you know, work out with like dumbbells and barbells and stuff like that just for the chuckles of it. Every now and then I'll pick up some dumbbells just to play around, say, can I still do this?

01:57:25 Speaker_04
But I avoid that because I'm 85 and I don't want to mess with my joints and tendons and ligaments. And I've discovered that bands work just as well, and they're way more merciful on your body. I mean, at one point, you talk about being 85.

01:57:43 Speaker_04
I absolutely take into account the fact that I'm… And the other thing I realized is that already at 85, my recuperation time is way longer than it used to be. If I do an all-nighter now, it'll take me three days to get back.

01:57:57 Speaker_04
When I was in the Marine Corps, I could get, I'm not exaggerating, I could get 15, 20 minutes of sleep just tying myself to an armored personnel carrier, and I was good for 72 hours. For real. And those days are long gone.

01:58:13 Speaker_04
So now also if I drink too much tequila, I'm gonna really feel it for two or three days, all that stuff. The one place that I'm lucky, I'm not bragging, it's really true, is my reaction time. I'm still as quick as I used to be.

01:58:31 Speaker_04
But what I realize is that could turn into... And for people who can't see, you just threw a jab right in my face. What I realized is that could drop off 30 seconds from now. I'm 85. At some point, that's gonna go. And if it does, I'll deal with it.

01:58:51 Speaker_04
Those are some of the stuff that I do aside from the breathing stuff. I used to think the most important muscles in the body were the butt, the hamstrings, and the quads.

01:59:02 Speaker_04
lower body big muscles, and they're not unimportant at all, but now I believe that easily the most important muscle, you have control. I mean, I guess yogis have control over their heart, so that would work. I don't.

01:59:17 Speaker_04
I can slow my heart rate down, and that's pretty much it. So the most important muscle in my body that I can have control over for sure is the diaphragm. Nothing else even gets close. And that feet up thing over there, I use to... Oh, wow.

01:59:33 Speaker_04
Yeah, look at that. I know the feet up. Yeah, I'll like forget exactly how the diaphragm feels. So I'll invert myself and then drop my heels over so that they're against the wall really gently, as gently as possible.

01:59:48 Speaker_04
And why I'm doing that is that I can then take all of the tension out of my shoulders and my hands and everything, and then I just start breathing deeply. If you're in that position, you won't be able to vertically breathe. You will not be able to.

02:00:04 Speaker_04
So if you start taking in big breaths, you're gonna be introduced to your diaphragm right away.

02:00:10 Speaker_02
So let me explain this for folks because a lot of people listening, a lot of my friends who are former athletes in their 30s or 40s could not do this comfortably, so I want to explain it.

02:00:18 Speaker_02
So imagine there's a device called the feed up, but just for visual purposes, imagine that you took a, let's call it a three inch cushion and put it on your toilet seat, emptied the toilet of water, put your head in the toilet and then kick your feet up so you're basically doing a

02:00:34 Speaker_02
The handstand on your shoulders, you can't shrug your shoulders or be very hard. So you have to then breathe through your diaphragm. So this is what Scott does at 85 just for hashtag life goals for everybody listening.

02:00:47 Speaker_02
And do you exercise every morning?

02:00:49 Speaker_04
No, I guess I kind of do. I was thinking when I was doing Eugene the Marine, all I would do is Well, actually, I did do about 60 paces. I would do baby fit in the morning. That'd be pretty much it because I knew I had so much work to do during the day.

02:01:04 Speaker_04
And a lot of it was super physical as martial arts stuff with training knives and stuff like that. So I'm not compelled to work out every day, but at least every other day. And the diaphragm stuff I use because, like I say, I'm super lazy as an actor.

02:01:22 Speaker_04
So I got this part in bad monkey. I'm playing this shaman. I get the part and then I freak out because I'm thinking, how do I play somebody who talks to manatees? And I don't want to, I don't want to have to technically figure that out as an actor.

02:01:41 Speaker_04
That's going to be way too much work. So Sign me up for this thing with this guy named Erwan LaCour, who does natural movement. You probably know who he is. I do. He also would concur that the diaphragm is the most important muscle.

02:01:55 Speaker_04
He's all about breathing, and the course was all about breathing and meditation.

02:02:00 Speaker_04
And Erwan believes, for me it's true, it may not be true for other people, I don't know, but for me it's true, that thoughts are either trying to figure out problems, which we all do, how do I get from here to there, what's two plus two equal, that kind of thing.

02:02:17 Speaker_04
or it's a conversation that you're writing the script and you're delivering to yourself.

02:02:23 Speaker_02
When you say that, you mean these are like the stories you're creating for yourself?

02:02:27 Speaker_04
Yeah, so this is what Erwan believes. In a breath hold where you feel stress, because the stress you ultimately feel when you're holding your breath is you're afraid you're going to die. You're not because at a certain point

02:02:40 Speaker_04
against your will, your body will take over and force you to breathe. So he believes that if you have one thing to think about and meditate on during that breath hold, you can rewire your central nervous system.

02:02:58 Speaker_04
Now, that sounds like woo-woo stuff to a lot of people, but for me, it actually worked. So he said, Scott, what kind of conversations do you have? Are they basically any one thing?

02:03:09 Speaker_04
I said, yeah, they're minor, being pissed off, being angry at somebody, took my parking place, or making up this confrontation that I may never have with a casting person, but they're pissed off.

02:03:23 Speaker_04
So he said, I would suggest that one of your meditations be peace. go in the other direction.

02:03:31 Speaker_04
So at the end of this course, he gave us this thing, I've got it on my phone, and it's what it is is six breath holds, you decide how long you want them to be, and they shouldn't be killer, but they should be long enough that they're difficult.

02:03:47 Speaker_04
because as Erwin said, keep telling yourself, I'm getting stronger and better with and because of the stress. There are six, and with diminishing amounts of rest between each one. And I do those three times a week.

02:04:02 Speaker_04
Erwan says, don't do them in succeeding days, because it's probably not good for you, and so I don't. But I do these breath holds, and I started doing them here while I got the part of, and I remember at one point- Oh, this is the part of the shaman.

02:04:16 Speaker_04
I sit upright in bed, and I yell, whoa! And Carol, it's 2.30 in the morning, and Carol says, what, what? And I said, I found my manatee, and his name, he's a French guy, his name is Erwan Lacour. What I meditate on are peace, clarity, and focus.

02:04:37 Speaker_04
And when I say focus, I do mean physical focus, like a gun sight. I'll pick a tiny spot on the ceiling, and as I'm holding my breath, I'll focus on that, but try to find the place of meditation that just lets me live there.

02:04:53 Speaker_04
And I started off with doing a minute, I think I was doing a minute 15. Anyway, right now I'm doing a minute 46. Yeah. Performance free dive, and I'll tell you that of record, my longest breath hold is 4 minutes and 15 seconds.

02:05:12 Speaker_04
I see that hook might even be longer now, I don't know. But up here, I'm at 140, but what I'm aiming for, I would like by the time I hit 86, the benchmark for me is two-minute breath holds. Those are real. So, but I'm at a minute 40 right now.

02:05:31 Speaker_04
But what I was gonna say about good luck, and this is just pure good luck, to the point where I almost just accept it now. When I need to learn something, the best teacher in the world materializes right in front of me.

02:05:45 Speaker_02
So I want to ask you about this because it seems like this is going to be a leading question, but it's an uninformed observation. It seems like from L.A.

02:05:55 Speaker_02
to Idaho, you loosen your grasp on something and then this opportunity, this amazing opportunity presents itself for this career-changing role. And it seems like that's happened a few times. How would you explain that?

02:06:10 Speaker_04
I would like to be some kind of intellectual giant, which I am definitely not. I'm probably at average, maybe a little bit above average intelligence, but not much. That's not false modesty. That's for real.

02:06:24 Speaker_04
I mean, if people ask me, am I a good shot with a handgun, my honest answer is above average. A lot, no. above average, but I'm a really good instructor. I can teach anybody, probably to expert level, how to shoot a handgun.

02:06:42 Speaker_04
Am I a good shot with a rifle? Yes, I am. Can I teach people well how to, no, I'm the world's worst teacher. I don't do anything right. I don't get a consistent spot well, and I don't do any of this. I just been doing it since I was so young.

02:06:57 Speaker_04
I just do it, and it works out. My great fortune in life

02:07:03 Speaker_04
and I used to be amazed by it, and now I just accept it, is, okay, I got into the actor's studio by accident, and I got, by accident, Lee Strasberg as my own personal, stand-alone teacher and coach. The best in the world.

02:07:21 Speaker_04
I'd never planned on that happening. It just happened. I'm out at the range shooting, guy next to me is watching me shoot, and he says, you're pretty good at doing this, but I could give you some pointers.

02:07:31 Speaker_04
Come on over to my house tomorrow, and I'll show you what I know. His name was John Shaw, world champion. Kurt Johnstead calls me up when I'm in LA and says, you want to know about

02:07:44 Speaker_04
combat shooting that's not military but the real civilian stuff LAPD, SIS come on out to the Eagle's Nest and meet this guy, Scotty Reitz. And we become- We took a course with Scotty Reitz. We become really good friends. He's the real deal.

02:08:03 Speaker_04
He's my teacher. I'm down in the Baja. This is how stupid I truly am. I'm down in the Baja, and for two years I've been scuba diving without any instruction, and I should be dead. I used my BC at almost 100 feet to rocket myself to the surf.

02:08:23 Speaker_04
So I'm in this bar, and I've just spent a day doing this. Oh man. And I'm talking about it like I'm the coolest person that ever lived, and this guy walks up to me, he's a 60s pot belly guy, and he looks at me and he said, you're a real asshole.

02:08:39 Speaker_04
And for whatever reason, I don't know if it was in his, what about him saying that to me, but I came to attention. And I said, why sir? And he got a big grin, and he looked at me, and he said, okay, you're Army, Airborne, or Marine, which one?

02:08:57 Speaker_04
And I said, Marine Corps, sir. And he laughed, and he said, I'm here with my girlfriend. I'm staying in that room. You show up tomorrow and give me the next six days of your life.

02:09:08 Speaker_04
Show up tomorrow with coffee at 845, not before, not after, and I'll teach you how to scuba dive and certify you. And then he walks out of the bar. And the owner of the bar, this guy John Irwin, walks over to me and I tell him about it.

02:09:24 Speaker_04
He said, do you have any idea who that was? And I said, no. He said, that was James Stewart. I said, James Stewart, like Jimmy Stewart, the actor? He said, no, like Jim Stewart, Divemaster Emeritus at Scripps Institute.

02:09:37 Speaker_04
Jim Stewart, who wrote the syllabus for the Seal Themes. Jim Stewart, who's the only person who can sign the chit that says you're allowed to dive in the Antarctica.

02:09:46 Speaker_04
Jim Stewart, who's nally card is number one, and Jacques Cousteau, it's said, is arguably the greatest scuba diver that ever lived. That's who's going to teach you and certify you. And he did.

02:09:57 Speaker_04
I mean, so, I mean, it's again and again, I'm out here... I'm out here in the summertime and I'm talking about, what does it feel like to be a bird? Because when I was in the service, I never free fall.

02:10:08 Speaker_04
I never did free fall like him and like SF and SEALs do at all. But I've done static line jumps. I'm telling somebody at this cocktail party, this guy walks up to me and he said, you want a free fall? I'll teach you.

02:10:23 Speaker_04
Come over to my house tomorrow afternoon. I'll hang you from my porch. I'll teach you malfunctions and major malfunctions and how to deal with them. And we'll go jumping. And I said, why should I trust you?

02:10:36 Speaker_04
And he said, because I'm four times world champion, I'm the only person allowed to videotape the Golden Knights.

02:10:42 Speaker_04
If you know anything about jumping, videotaping skydivers is easily the most dangerous part because of all the stuff you can... I mean, it's crazy.

02:10:52 Speaker_02
So I said,

02:10:56 Speaker_04
Are we gonna tandem jump?" He said, no, you already told me you're a static line jumper. We'll put a 2x4 on a Cessna, we'll go up, we'll use the 2x4 to launch ourselves out on the strut of the wing, hang on to it. He said, and you'll go first.

02:11:12 Speaker_04
I said, what will you do? He said, I'll come after you. He said, just you jump off and establish a hard arch. And he showed me how to do that. And I said, okay, but then what do I do? And he said, well, I'll jump off, catch up with you.

02:11:24 Speaker_04
I want you to pantomime, but don't do it, pantomime, pulling your ripcord. And you yell to me what your altitude is. We'll go out at hopefully 15,000. And when you hit 3,000, you don't pantomime anymore. You actually pull the ripcord.

02:11:42 Speaker_04
and pump air into the cells of his parachute, and that's the way it'll work. And it did. It worked that way perfectly because he was so good, he would bullet dive down and be as far from me as I am from you right now.

02:11:57 Speaker_04
But I mean, again and again and again, the best person is not like, oh, this person is kind of good at what they do. They're as good at it as anybody on the fucking planet Earth, and they're gonna teach you.

02:12:11 Speaker_04
And the one thing I will say, and hopefully whoever is hearing this will take it to heart, there's part of me that's really a good student. And here's the part of me that's really a good student. I'm willing to fall on my ass in front of people.

02:12:27 Speaker_04
The embarrassment of screwing up and being clumsy and falling on my ass in front of people is not great enough to keep me from doing it. And that's the trick to being a good student.

02:12:39 Speaker_02
Yeah.

02:12:40 Speaker_02
I heard someone say recently, very high performer, I'm blanking on the attribution, but they were taught by a mentor something, and I'm paraphrasing, but they said, in order to be excellent at anything, you have to first be willing to be extremely crappy at it.

02:12:56 Speaker_04
that's so true. I mean, it's like with martial arts, you've done them enough. So I know I'm talking to somebody, the two of you guys understand this.

02:13:04 Speaker_04
Okay, so I'm going to Thailand to do this TV show, White Lotus, but I can't really talk about it because they're very secretive, but I'm gonna be in Thailand.

02:13:13 Speaker_04
So I called up a friend and just because I love the word Krabi Krabong, I mean, it's so cool, Krabi Krabong. Little babies probably like saying it, too. But it's a Thai martial art, and it's the weapons side of Muay Thai.

02:13:29 Speaker_04
When you're really good at it, you use razor-sharp double swords. But when you begin it, it's just rattan sticks. And what I want to do in Thailand is not learn Krabi Krabong or be taught secret moves or any of that.

02:13:44 Speaker_04
I just want someone to show me the absolute Basement seller foundation.

02:13:51 Speaker_04
What are the moves that you need to be able to I know they won't be complicated I know there'll be something that with just pure repetition I can do again and again So that's what I'm gonna do when I get to Thailand and you've done a lot of moved a lot of knife work Also, I imagine that

02:14:08 Speaker_02
Some of the movement patterns probably translate really well. One thing you should definitely try to do while you're there, if you can, is go to Lumpini Stadium or Rajadamnan to watch the Muay Thai fights.

02:14:21 Speaker_04
Darrell Bock I've been to both of those places. I did a film in Thailand as an actor. I've been in Thailand A few times, but I was there as an actor doing a movie called Off-Limits, and it was the king's birthday, and he was turning 60.

02:14:39 Speaker_04
And if you know the lesser vehicle Buddhism, you become an adult at 60. It's the end of the fifth cycle in 12 years. So his birthday was all year long and we lost locations.

02:14:51 Speaker_04
And so my week and a half or two week job wasn't going to happen for at least two months. So I said to them, why don't you just keep me here in a hotel rather than spend first class plane tickets back and forth back.

02:15:05 Speaker_04
And I bring Carol over and we can go to Phuket and have fun. So we did that. But while I was there, The movie is kind of a sad movie to me because two of my friends who were in the movie, who played much bigger parts than me, are no longer alive.

02:15:22 Speaker_04
One was Gregory Hines, who I loved, and Gregory I knew from martial arts, from doing Korean martial arts in New York. He was really good at it. He's the only person I ever saw, on his passport, you know where you put occupation? His said tap dancer.

02:15:41 Speaker_04
He was amazing, and he died of liver cancer. And the other was Fred Ward, who died of Alzheimer's. But Fred was, Fred was an amazing athlete. Fred had a silver boot in Boxe Francaise, Savate.

02:15:58 Speaker_04
And when he was in Thailand, he trained Muay Thai with the people from Rajadamnern. And so he brought me, well at one point, I remember he brought me into work out with those guys.

02:16:11 Speaker_04
I wouldn't hit palm trees with my hands or anything like that, but they had heavy bags and stuff like that, too. You know, and Fred told me that God gave me a right hook, and I said, yeah, I know that part.

02:16:24 Speaker_04
But we went, Fred and I went across the border illegally into what was then Burma, up in the Golden Triangle at Three Pagoda Pass. Yeah, so I had adventures in Thailand and saw a lot of Muay Thai, yeah.

02:16:40 Speaker_02
Oh yeah, the art of eight limbs, beautiful and brutal and very effective art. I want to revisit for a second this luck because

02:16:49 Speaker_02
There's luck, differing degrees of luck, and a lot of it's outside of your control, but it seems like there's certain ways you can increase the surface area in your life that luck can stick to. And one is by being a good student, for instance.

02:17:02 Speaker_02
That increases the likelihood that luck is gonna stick to you. Are there any other recommendations you would have for people who want to increase the type of serendipity and luck that you've experienced?

02:17:14 Speaker_02
Are there any other ingredients that you can play with?

02:17:17 Speaker_04
If you have the good fortune to fall in love with and find yourself with a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, don't fight her about anything, because number one, you're gonna lose, and number two, she's gonna take you in a much better direction than you ever figured.

02:17:31 Speaker_02
Let's go deep down that rabbit hole then. So relationship. We've talked about career, we've talked about some fitness. Long, durable, good relationships with a partner. Any advice for people out there?

02:17:45 Speaker_02
Cause especially in your, I would imagine, in the world of entertainment, this is a rarity, I would have to think. from the outside looking in.

02:17:52 Speaker_04
Again, it was my good fortune to just fall completely in love with this woman. How did the two of you meet? In a movie theater in New York.

02:18:02 Speaker_04
The girl I had been kind of, not really living with, but semi-living with off and on, and I had broken up and she just tried to kill herself. And I had a friend who now is teaching school in Iraq, of all places. His name is Jeff Siggins.

02:18:19 Speaker_04
At any rate, he called me up and he said, we're going to the movies, Murray Hill Cinema. Me and a group of people, do you want to come with us? And I said, sure. So Carol was one of them. I'd never met her before. I sat next to her in the movie theater.

02:18:35 Speaker_04
And I just felt these, I didn't touch her or anything, I just felt these waves of, I don't know what it was, but something. And I'd fallen in lust probably at least a couple thousand times in my life. And pursued that, you know, with full vigor.

02:18:51 Speaker_04
But I'd never really fallen in love. Anyway, so the movie came to an end and everybody got up to leave. And for whatever reason, I turned to Carol and I said, I think I want to sit through this and watch it again. She said, yeah, me too.

02:19:05 Speaker_04
So we sat through the whole movie again, not even touching, and the movie came to an end. And in that period of time, it was like magical. We walked out of the theater, and there was probably half a foot of snow everywhere.

02:19:18 Speaker_04
So we went out, and we played in the snow. It was getting late, and Carol said, and I was doing a play, but I was off that night. She said, you want to spend the night? And I said, yeah. Oh, yeah.

02:19:30 Speaker_04
So I went over and she cooked spaghetti and meatballs and we had beer. And at the end of dinner, she went into the bedroom, came out with a pillow, threw it on the couch and said, this turns into a bed. There were blankets on it, have a good night.

02:19:46 Speaker_04
Went back into the bedroom, shut the door and went to sleep. I went, okay. So the next morning, we had breakfast and we played in the snow some more.

02:19:57 Speaker_04
and I was gonna say goodbye to her, and I thought, I'm not gonna even try to hug her and kiss her, because if I do this, and she does one of those pull-aways, my whole world will collapse. How I knew that, I don't know.

02:20:12 Speaker_04
So I said I had a really good time, and I held my hand, I shook her hand goodbye.

02:20:17 Speaker_04
And then for the next week, I would open my, I had predictably a little black book, and I would open it up, and I would call a phone number, and a young woman would answer, hello, hello, and I wouldn't say anything, and I would just hang up.

02:20:33 Speaker_04
And I went through one phone number, and finally I thought, who are you kidding? You wanna see her. That's who you wanna see.

02:20:40 Speaker_04
So I called her up and I told her my TV was broken and there was something I wanted to watch on television that Saturday night, I think it was, and she said, okay.

02:20:49 Speaker_04
So I get down to her apartment, she's got makeup on, she's all dressed up, and she's, oh, I've got a date tonight, but you know where the fridge is, and there's the TV, and so knock yourself out.

02:21:02 Speaker_04
And I sat literally two feet away from her, I was so pissed off, I was just fucking really pissed off. If I had been a dog, I would have been growling. So I'm looking at the TV, I'm not watching the TV, and I hear the downstairs bell go, dong, dong.

02:21:19 Speaker_04
And I hear Carol say, I remember the guy's name to this day, Earl. She said, okay, Earl, I'll buzz you in. And I'm looking at the TV, and I'm hearing the front door open, and I'm hearing Earl say, whoa, you look hot tonight.

02:21:34 Speaker_04
And I hear Carol say, listen, Earl, an old friend of my brother's just dropped by. I haven't seen him in a long time. I'm not gonna help with you tonight. You can see the emotion I'm filled with right now. And I went, yes. She shut the door.

02:21:54 Speaker_04
Walked into the living room and that was about 55 years ago. Wow.

02:22:02 Speaker_02
Incredible. What would Carol add to this Genesis story if she were sitting here with us? What else would she add? Tell me I was full of shit and wrap it up.

02:22:15 Speaker_04
You got shopping to do for me today. This I'll say about her because she's not here right now, and I've seen it with enough people. And what it is about her, I don't know, and maybe I don't wanna know.

02:22:32 Speaker_04
But even with, he's no longer alive, but I remember when she and I first met Freddie Fields, who was the toughest, hardest-ass agent Hollywood's old school has ever seen. Within 10 minutes of meeting her, he desperately wanted her approval.

02:22:49 Speaker_04
I've never seen anybody around her who doesn't want her to say, you're okay. What is that about her? She comes from, I think now it's 30, 35 unbroken generations of Jewish rabbis and Israeli, Arab or whatever. I don't know. Maybe that's part of it.

02:23:08 Speaker_04
But that is true about her. People want her to say, They're okay. What that quality is in her, I don't know, but it's there, that's for sure. And she's funny. She is funny.

02:23:22 Speaker_04
You know, and doesn't take seriously a lot of the stuff I do, and laughs at it, and keeps sort of like, properly puts me in my place.

02:23:31 Speaker_02
I have to ask, and I may get the name wrong here, you mentioned Gregory Hines. You spent some time, at least as I understand it, a brief but intense period with modern dance, I think. And let's see if this goes somewhere.

02:23:44 Speaker_02
Playing pool with Nureyev in New York City? Is my getting the name right? No, that was... Wasn't Nureyev.

02:23:50 Speaker_04
I was dancing with a guy named Matt Maddox, who was phenomenal. And I remember at one point I said, how do I get better at this? It was when I quit dancing almost altogether.

02:24:00 Speaker_04
He said, stop acting, stop doing martial arts, stop wrestling, working out, don't do anything else, just dance. You want to get better. You're at that point right now. And I quit dancing because I couldn't go on.

02:24:13 Speaker_04
I ran into Nureyev while we were doing the Right Stuff in San Francisco, and New York City Ballet had moved to San Francisco for the year.

02:24:21 Speaker_04
And I met him, and he had seen Urban Cowboy, and he told me that I was a much realer, better cowboy than John Travolta would ever be. And by the way, John Travolta pretty much sucked as a dancer, too.

02:24:38 Speaker_04
So, I remember at one point we were down in the basement of this place called Tosca's, a bar in New York. I mean, I'm sorry, in San Francisco, they had a pool. Tosca's is famous. And we were shooting pool and drinking.

02:24:53 Speaker_04
Me in a minor way, he in a major way. Vodka. I remember at one point I said to him, boy, you Russians can really hold your vodka. And he stopped. got really angry and looked at me and he said, I am not Russian. And I said, what are you?

02:25:12 Speaker_04
He said, I'm Latvian. That was the first time it ever dawned on me that these parts of Russia that I thought were kind of along with Putin, were actually Russian, were more like Ukraine.

02:25:27 Speaker_04
They had their own identity, their own sense of who they were, and it meant something. It certainly did to Nureyev. He was, in some ways, the best physical shape of any human being I've ever been around.

02:25:38 Speaker_04
I watched him go down a flight of long stairs on his hands.

02:25:45 Speaker_04
he would invite me to come and watch the New York City Ballet workout, and the Makarova, who was the best prima ballerina in the world at the time, I would watch her on point, not coming down from point, spinning one direction, three directions, four, back and forth, chain smoking two camels at the same time.

02:26:07 Speaker_04
It was the weirdest world, because it was a world where there was zero fitness in that way, and yet they were the outrageous athletes. I mean, like, stuff that triple black belts in Shotokan couldn't even dream about doing. These people did easily.

02:26:24 Speaker_02
I did want to talk about poetry. if that's possible. I believe you've written a fair amount of poetry. What is the, and we already spoke earlier a bit as we were discussing Judaism of the scriptures as poetry slash parables for living.

02:26:39 Speaker_02
What does poetry mean to you? Why write poetry? Why read poetry?

02:26:44 Speaker_04
Poetry to me is the, along with physical art scratching on the side of a wall, the first... This is one of your books, Friction Zone. It's the most elemental way that human beings have to communicate ideas and feelings. real deep ideas and feelings.

02:27:06 Speaker_04
And also because, as I said, I grew up with probably, but I don't want to know for sure, the myth that I'm directly related to Lord Byron, who had a club foot, was crippled, but swam the Hellesponts and

02:27:22 Speaker_04
fought in Greek's war of liberation from Turkey, and he did all this stuff and was, you know, an outrageous coxswain, and mainly he was a poet. So I've lived with the belief that I have that in me.

02:27:36 Speaker_04
But what happened with Carol was I wrote a poem to her every Christmas Hanukkah time, and at a certain point on her 50th anniversary, she said, I want to publish these. Is it okay with you? And I said correctly, it's not up to me.

02:27:54 Speaker_04
I'm not, I can say Indian giver because I've got Comanche blood in me, so I don't mind using the word. If I give something, it's yours, it's not mine. You can rip up those pages and wipe your ass with it.

02:28:05 Speaker_04
So she said, well, I'm going to publish it, self-publish. So that was room service. That's not that book. And then during the pandemic, there was no acting happening anywhere.

02:28:18 Speaker_04
And then right after that, I had a brief period of time when I could work and then the strike happened. But during the pandemic, which was about two years long, all I could really do, aside from work out and hang out with Carol, was write poetry.

02:28:35 Speaker_04
I wouldn't even know if I would call it observations. I leave it to other people to say whether that's poetry or not. I don't know.

02:28:43 Speaker_04
But the thing about the pandemic that I realized with relationships is a lot of people who were in love with each other had to discover whether they liked each other or not. And what I discovered with Carol was I liked her better than anybody I knew.

02:29:00 Speaker_04
Even to this day, we're like agoraphobic kermits. We have no problem. I don't need the company of anybody. Anyway, that friction zone is kind of what came out of the pandemic. And it's not big, heavy-duty stuff. You know what friction zone is?

02:29:19 Speaker_04
Friction zone is where you want to be with a big, heavy motorcycle, like a Harley Davidson, to drive it slowly. You're slipping the clutch, constantly slipping the clutch, with a little bit of power on the, so the metaphor for that just, anyway.

02:29:37 Speaker_02
How do you apply that metaphor outside of riding a motorcycle like that?

02:29:41 Speaker_04
Trusting that your body will do the right thing. So when you're riding, let's say, a big Harley, I can tell you this axiomatically. When you're driving a big Harley and you're going over 25 miles an hour, you ride it like any other motorcycle.

02:29:57 Speaker_04
If it's a street bike, just remember the following dictum. Front brake until you're really sure about how it works only. Stay away from the rear brake. Dirt bike, the opposite.

02:30:08 Speaker_04
If you're going under 25 miles an hour, if you're going under 12 miles an hour, You keep the power on, slipping the clutch, and you will go where your head looks. If you look down at the ground, I guarantee you, you're gonna dump the bike.

02:30:27 Speaker_02
I like the metaphor. So we're gonna wrap this up. I'm wondering, just as a way of landing this plane and wrapping up, what advice, let's just say 10 years from now your grandkids are listening to this and they're wondering what life advice.

02:30:42 Speaker_04
I would give them both the lessons I learned from Sir Lawrence and from my dad. which is if you love it, make it your life, right along with that, be tenacious. Learn that the most important thing about being knocked down is getting back up.

02:30:58 Speaker_04
And if you can put yourself in the spot where you say, I don't care how many times I get knocked down, I'm getting back up every single time and going after what I want, That's the answer.

02:31:09 Speaker_04
I mean, again, I'm in a bar with Lawrence Olivier, who created the National Theatre of England, who was the biggest movie star in the world, was the most creative stage actor in the world, and director. He'd done everything. My question to him was,

02:31:27 Speaker_04
What is it that you need to make it in this business? Is it timing, right place at the right time? Is it contacts, knowing the right people? Or is it just working on your skills and becoming better and better at what you do?

02:31:43 Speaker_04
He said, my dear boy, none of the above. Develop very strong jaw muscles, learn how to bite on and not let go. I said, you're telling me it's just pure tenacity? His answer was yes.

02:31:56 Speaker_04
If you're a monk outside the gates with a beggar's bull and you stay out there long enough, they'll finally get sick of seeing you open the gates and let you in.

02:32:06 Speaker_02
That's fantastic. Scott, thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you. What fun. I flabbed away a lot. That's the whole point. That's the whole blueprint. And you know, maybe we'll get a chance to go out and shoot again.

02:32:21 Speaker_02
And for those people listening, I think a little birdie told me that with open sights, you can still hit targets at 400 yards, maybe beyond.

02:32:27 Speaker_04
I don't know about, well, there was a time in my life, and I have witnesses that, because it sounds out, I could, with steel sights, hit 600 yards. Whether I can right now at 85, probably not, but who knows?

02:32:41 Speaker_04
I could get the Dragon off down, in warm weather, I'll give it a shot. Horrible, horrible metaphor.

02:32:52 Speaker_02
Well, I'm curious to see if I can get my ass upside down on the feet up after this, after being inspired by your daily routine. So, thank you so much for the time. Hey guys, this is Tim again.

02:33:05 Speaker_02
Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

02:33:15 Speaker_02
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page

02:33:26 Speaker_02
that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

02:33:34 Speaker_02
It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

02:33:46 Speaker_02
And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

02:34:01 Speaker_02
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

02:34:13 Speaker_02
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