Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist - Michael J. Fox (2020)

Episode Date: March 21, 2021

Michael J. Fox was just 29 years old and at the peak of his acting career when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, but he continued to work in movies and television before stepping away to create his now-famous research foundation. In this week’s “Sunday Sitdown,” Willie Geist gets together with Fox to talk about his new book “No Time Like the Future” in which he reveals a recent breaking point in his 30-year fight against the disease. (Original broadcast date: November 22, 2020)  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. My thanks as always for clicking and listening along. I've got a really special one for you this week, special because you know him and love him from all of his work in movies and on TV. Special for me, I have to say up front, because of the work he's done on Parkinson's disease. This is, of course, the great Michael J. Fox. I don't need to lay out his resume for you, family ties, back to the future, Teen Wolf, Spin, Spin, City, rescue me, the good wife. You know all of that about him. But it's what he did after his diagnosis with Parkinson's disease at the age of 29. He was a kid when he was diagnosed with Parkinson's

disease, newly married to his wonderful wife, Tracy. They had a young son named Sam. And the world came down on him that day when a doctor told him he had Parkinson's disease. Didn't talk about it publicly for many years. Eventually at the age of 40, ends up retiring from acting and putting all of his focus on the Michael J. Fox Foundation. So my father, Bill Geist, has had Parkinson's disease for 30 years, which is about the same period of time Michael J. Fox has had it. And around the same time, they both were diagnosed in the early 90s. So I love his movies. I love his TV shows, but I love him more for what he's done, raising a billion dollars through the Michael J. Fox Foundation. I should tell you, in full disclosure, since my dad went public with his diagnosis, I am on the board of the Michael J. Fox

foundation. So I obviously have an incredible soft spot for Michael J. Fox. But what a guy, what a career. More importantly, what a life. He's got a new book out just now that talks about all of this. And it talks about all of the hope and the optimism that he's carried along these 30 years and outward facing to the public that he's doing okay and that you can live with this disease. And he talks in the book and writes in the book about losing some of that optimism and how he got it back. I hope you enjoy this conversation right now on the Sunday Sit Down podcast with the great Michael J. Fox. It's great to see you, my friend. Good to see you. You look great. You've been through the wars, but you've come out okay.

Well, you know a little something about that. How has this quarantine been for you these last few months? What's it been like? It's been amazing. We went into quarantine in March. I think it was March just after St. Patrick's Day, just before Elmont Hill here in New York. And we were out in the suburbs on Long Island. And it was an amazing time for us because our family were all together.

And it was just like Ozzie and Harriet. It was like we had jigsaw puzzle out and everybody did do pieces. They walked by and tricks. He made these great meals. And we'd sit around and have these long conversations afterwards. My kids are all young adults. And we have these long conversations about society and social justice and the pandemic. And it was amazing time.

But at the same time, too, we were all aware that. This other reality was happening in other places like New York where families were separated and people were dying in hallways that couldn't, the loved ones couldn't get to them. So it made it all the more precious what we had. And it was an amazing time. It was also an amazing time to write a book. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. I mean, everyone's like, what did you get out of the pandemic?

Did you write a book? Did you get a new hobby? You literally sat down and wrote a book. But the thing about it that was strange was that I'm writing about myself. I mean, to the extent when I used a dental. I mean, it was like so navel-gazing. And the world is falling apart around me. And I can't mention it because it doesn't happen within the time frame of my book.

Right. So I made, went out of my way to write an epilogue and go out of my way. It was right in my way. I wrote an epilogue where I kind of put it in that context. Because I'm sure it colored what I wrote and how I wrote. Sure. I started to get more, because I was writing about optimism and the loss of optimism and my temporary loss of optimism.

And it was kind of fueled me as I was writing about it. The return to positivity, it was during that time. And I just felt confident that we'd get through it. And it's kind of like people say with the book that it's almost like if I'd known this was going to happen, I would have written this book. But I didn't because we're going through hard times, but we always go through hard times. Everyone's got hard times. Yeah. You've written a few other books before, Michael. So what was it about this moment and this time that you wanted to sit down? Because there's a lot of new stuff in here. I mean, people who think they know your story and know everything about you. We learn new things about you as we read through this. So why did you want to sit down and write this?

I think because I was kind of, I would like James Comey would call it contemporaneous notes. I took a lot of notes at the time. It was happening. Just a brief in a nutshell, what happened was. I've had Parkinson's for whatever, how many years, 30 years, 40 years, 100 years. And I've kind of made a piece with it, and it kind of takes up the room that it takes up. And then I had room left over to do whatever I wanted and thrive in. And it shrinks, but it shrinks at a pace where I can still enjoy what I do. And then I had this thing happen where they found a tumor on my spine. So I had to have surgery on that, and that was to prevent it being paralyzed. But coming out of the surgery, I had learned to walk again.

and I did that and um to some I said and um and then I demanded my family that give me some independence and I had to go into it and we were in vacation in Martha's Vineyard and I had to go to the city to do some work so I said let me go alone and my daughter came with me because she had to go back to work but she she made her leave that night and so I could be alone in the apartment when I woke up in the morning get my breakfast and go to work like I always did and I got up and walking in the kitchen slipped on the towel and it shattered my arm shatter my humorous and it was I was underneath the phone against the kitchen wall on the kitchen floor alone with a broken arm waiting for the ambulance to show up.

My assistant I had reached after phone call to her. And I just got, I was, I was upset, but I was mad at myself. I couldn't believe the amount of fury I had toward myself for being so careless to do this and to let down my surgeons who had put the work in my back and my family had been so patient during all this. And then I started to think about, I don't know. wider scale, I couldn't put a shiny face on it. I couldn't make lemonade out of this. I mean, the fact, I was out of the lemonade business. It just, it was a really difficult time.

And I said that knowing that on the misery index, I'm like a one compared to what some people have gone through and experienced. So I don't compare to that, but we all have our own situations. And mine was untenable at that time. And I got my, I got those pins and plates put of my arm. And I was recovering from that and having to learn to walk all over again with a balance issue because I only had one arm. I just kind of felt more sorry for myself and I'd never done that before. And I questioned my optimism and I questioned that I was a salesman of optimism to other people. And I told the Parkinson's community, chin up, we'll get through it. And who was I to say that? And even though I was, I was sincere, it's a resounding glib

because it's so easy off my lips to say. I was looking up. And so I really questioned it during that time. And then I kind of made, I said, I made notes going through life and things that surprised me like my golf game or my dog. All had, obviously, big things with my family and my work and stuff like that. But just the little things in life that pointed me back to the word gratitude, which is really the thing that makes optimism work. I think reading the book, for people watching or people listening on the podcast who don't know, my father has Parkinson's, has had it. I think he was diagnosed around when you were in 92, so a little after you. So almost 30 years, he's older than you as well.

But reading through this, because I think people watch you publicly and they go, wow, he is optimistic all the time. Like he's living through it. He's got this. And then you read this. And me as somebody who's watched it on the other side, I go, oh, no, like every day is a battle. And the thing we see out in public at the, you know, at the Michael, Fox Foundation gala or the TV interview, whatever, that's the shiny moment.

But man, there's a lot of tough moments, too, that happen every day. And you lead, and what the story just told in the book was something that was unfortunately familiar to me and any Parkinson's family, too, is that you fell. And the part that struck me was that you were mad at yourself, like you just said. Why were you mad at yourself? How did you feel like you'd let other people down? Well, I just had this surgery, really difficult surgery, that Dr. Theodore, I know, John Hopkins had done so meticulous, and I thought if I damaged that in some way,

it was, I was like spitting on a Picasso, you know. And then on a larger level, my family had been so patient. And I always say, slow down. And I'd say, don't tell me to slow down. Don't fall. Yeah, I'm going to fall on purpose. You trip over something, you go, careful. Too late.

You're too late. And all those moments I had with them. And then to be in the kitchen with a broken arm because I've been so stubborn about being independent. And then, you know, and then it happened. And I thought, you're an idiot. They weren't telling you that because they don't love you or because they think you're silly or whatever. They tell you to slow down because they love you and they don't want to get hurt. And they don't know that you can't slow down at that moment because your momentum is overriding your instinct to stop.

So I got to talk about in the book, the theory of the scientific theory, Isman, I think, that you can't measure, velocity and location at the same time. Because by something you pin the location, velocity has moved the past. And that's kind of how I feel sometimes walking and moving. And so it's all an experiment. So, and I knew that. And I knew that when I tripped down the hallway.

And just took a quick turn, cocky kind of bouncy turn into the kitchen and hit that tile and just went down. And it just was like, idiot. Idiot. You knew that was going to happen. So it didn't, but it would spark. the long journey back to a place. You know, other things happened.

My father-in-law passed away. He was very important to me. And he was always carrying a message of gratitude. He would always say. His sign off the line to any conversation was, gets better kiddo. And he just get better. So were you, Michael, for all those years,

you talk about losing your optimism. Were you really as optimistic as we thought you were, as you portrayed yourself to be? Yeah, I don't, I don't think, I don't, I've never tried to do better. I don't think you could fake it. It's just what you feel. I just kind of feel like if I'm going to flip a coin 100 times,

it's 51 times going to come up heads. It's going to be okay. It's just, I feel like when I see a situation, like a social situation or political situation or any situation where there's setbacks and obstacles, I always think, how are we going to get out of this? Not are we going to get out of this? of this but and what by what means are we going to get out of this and we are going to

get out of this it's just and so and when we have a progressive disease or progressive condition have you want to praise it you know that that it's not going to get better unless you can't come up with cure which we're working on very hard but but every day can get better every moment can get better and when you and when you struggle as you said as your father I'm sure does with the three steps across the room those three steps are really important and you have to take every step seriously and you have to plant your heel and shift your hips and transfer weight. I mean all this mechanical biokinetics you have to go

through to just go get a cup of coffee. But those seconds that you have to take, that's a second that's a second that's a second that's a second that's a minute so many seconds fly by, how many times you've been to, you know of a sudden parking your car at work and you don't remember driving. I remember the trip. He's done it a thousand times. But if every time you risk falling, every step is precious and every step is noted and time expands. That's one of the things that jumped out at me. I don't know if it'll jump out as much to

people who don't have Parkinson's in their family or in their lives, which is the journey across the room. And it is a journey. If you're in a restaurant, you say, okay, I got to get from here to that chair. I've got to get out of this chair to that exit. And in your case... And then busboy darts in front of you. Right. Right. No, that's right. We need a clean path to get where we're going.

We've learned to sort of be like lead blockers for my dad and get him where he needs to go. And in your case, you've got a thousand people yelling at you and wanted to tell you how much they love back to the future, right? Social distancing is my arm and personally through the cane. Right. And back back. But, yeah, I know people are really sweet and they do approach me. It's the other thing, too. vanity goes out the window.

There's no time for any of that crap. It's just, that's the thing about optimism. It's like, as I talk to you, it's not, I'm not saying, everything's great, everything, it's just like, for me, life is better than the alternative. It's just better than the alternative. And I love, and what I loved about this book was I love telling stories. I was talking about your father,

and he won't take great book, look at the Ozarks, which I loved. And he's just a genuine storyteller. And I think, I read things even in Noah was about his boyhood. And before he had Parkinson's, I read things that, just the way he looks at things sometimes, I say, yeah, I get that. Yeah. Yeah.

You have that same storytelling gift, and you're so funny in here. And I think that's part of the optimism. You got a sense of humor about this somehow. I see, the way I explained, I was talking to Tracy about this other day. And I said, I think it's like depth perception, problem. Not a problem, but like, you have depth perception. Everything is on the same plane. So when I look at something tragic, not tragic necessarily, but not happy, not great, the other side of it comes up with the background and I can see them both on the same level.

I see the good and the bad and the funny and the tragic and I can make a choice. I think, oh, I'll look at the funny. So how did you, Michael, then, get from that place where, as you said, and I love the line, I was out of the lemonade business. I couldn't make lemonade anymore. I lost my optimism because you had that. that year, 2018, and you just listed, you know, you had the surgery for your spine, you had the fall, your father-in-law passed away, and you had a year that would floor anybody else. How did you climb out of that? How did you get back in the lemonade business? I just looked at my family,

and I looked at my friends, and I looked at my dog, and I looked at my doctors, and I looked at my people that watch the show. I got into a thing where I just went wherever I went. I went, I went on this TV binge for a while, and I watched nothing about 50s and 60s game shows and 50s and 50s and 60s Westerns on TV. I found these channels, the stations that played. And I watched for weeks I watched these things.

I watched somebody, I won a dead or alive with Steve McQueen, which by the way, my mother was watching on the night she wanted to labor with me. My dad couldn't get it to leave the TV until the show was over. Is that right? So I like that.

Steve McQueen has that effect on people. Steve McQueen is connected to me. Clasmic boy. But I was doing all the silly television watching and I was saying, what am I doing? And then I kind of realized that, I was watching, like, this happened before I was born, these shows most of them. And I kind of realized I'm part of that continuum. I'm like one of those guys that I'll be survived by my reruns. And so that was kind of like, gave me a little bit of dash of immortality. And then I just would find things that I'd think about my dog and I'd think about how like there's a, there's a seerchin and,

In the South Pacific, they can live to be 250 years old, and my dog probably won't make it to 14. And how fair is that? Who did I see about that? And just all these things popped up in my golf game. In fact, like walking, I have to go through this list of, okay, put the hips forward, put the shoulders back, put the left foot out,

follow with the right transfer weight, and all that stuff. And the same thing, stay still over the ball. People say, say, the people always say that to me, stay still over the ball. I'm like, I can't stay still with my soup. You want me to stay still over the ball. You go through this swing list, same way I go through the walking list. So all these things were connected, and they were all, and they all pointed me toward how grateful I was.

My interaction with my kids, they're all smarter than me, and they're all better looking than me, and they're all taller than me. And so I look up to them. And your wife, Tracy, who you write about a lot in this book. Well, Tracy's amazing. Tracy's, I was thinking about it the other day that Tracy is like, like people always say what device I have to use, the caregivers. And I love caregivers and I love the sacrifices they make and things that they do. But I hesitate to put Tracy in that category because Tracy knows enough that she knows a lot about this disease.

You know a lot about it because she's there in the front lines with me every single day. But she never pretends that she has. She never pretends to know as much as I know. She always leaves room for the fact that because I have it, you can know. everything you want about Parkinson's. If you don't have Parkinson's, I know more than you. You can be the biggest scientist at the biggest institution, and I know more about Parkinson's than you do.

But it doesn't mean I don't want your help. It doesn't mean I don't want your wisdom, but I know intrinsically things that you can't know. And Tracy knows that, and she always gives me room for that. And the other thing Tracy does is she has that same funny thing. If there's something funny, let's get to the funny. We'll deal with the tragic later. Right.

Let's just have a good time with the funny right now. I think most people know the story that you guys met on family ties. You get married. You have a son, Sam. And a short time after that, you're diagnosed at 29 years old at Parkinson's disease. And you write about that moment in the book and coming home and telling Tracy about that. When you think back on that day and that news washing over you, I mean, you're on a rocket chip to the moon with your career and everything you're doing. Did it feel like something was ending right there?

Was your career over? What did that feel like? Well, the guy said to me, actually, it was a really brief, for the momentousness of it, it was a very brief, doctors that he did standard tests, you know, driving test, basically. And I failed. And he said, you have onset Parkinson's disease. And instead of getting that in my mind, for I figure what that meant, he said, but you have 10 years left to work probably.

10, you have 29. Yeah. I mean, 10 years after work, I had that many jobs lined up now. And it was real. But the thing about it, there was shocking for Tracy and I, or tough for Tracy and I to deal with, was that we didn't know what it meant. Because I had twitching pinky and a shoulder.

I mean, how does that add up to Parkinson's disease? But as I assume, I know if there's a progression, and it's a steady progression. I've been lucky because for the moment as I've had it, I'm so pretty functional so yes you are but it's um it's it's it's a long road it's a long slog and we didn't know what was head we just knew like I would say we knew a bus was coming we didn't know when when it was and how fast it was going but we knew it was going to hit us at some point and we didn't know what's expecting so I I I want the things I always love Tracy for is that

at that moment she didn't blink and she hasn't since has she no it's It's not the kind of thing. I know, Mike. It's not the kind of, I know. It's just funny. No, I know, but it's not the kind of thing you can do without a partner, is it? No, it's really great to have a partner. It's really great to have a partner.

It gives you the benefit of the doubt. You know, it's much more than, I mean, she's beautiful. She's sexy. She's great. She's funny. But she's staring with me in the trenches. You know, it's like talking. I have a picture talking to me.

Like, so anyway, I'm going to the store and eat phone now. Okay, I'm going to the market. I'm getting, are you okay? Okay, so I'm getting cheese and I'm getting bread, I'm getting baguettes. Don't get up. Stay there for a second. I'm taking the station wagon. Not do you care.

You guys, and then you didn't go public for about seven years after that, which is, again, I keep going back to this, was very familiar to me. My dad, because he worked in television, said, how do I handle this? Do I tell my boss? Do I tell my audience? And he didn't for a long time. What was that calculus for you?

I used the same thing. I parsed it out. First of all, my family and close friends, I told him. And then I thought to have a business associates that had a right to know because they had a stake in me. Yeah. And we went ahead with our business anyway. But other than that, I didn't tell him because I had a thing, especially when I started doing Spin City, and it was starting to get to where I had to make a decision. because if I didn't make the decision,

Tap was going to make the decision from me, and then all this misinformation wasn't going to get out there. And so I thought I'd better tell it straight. And this was before out of the Internet. So if you wanted to get something out there, you told Barbara Walters and People magazine, so that's what I did. Yeah.

And I was worried that the audience would not be able to laugh if they knew that I had that situation happening. Right. They wouldn't find it funny that they find it sad. But they laugh. They still laughed. And so I finished Spin City and I decided to start the foundation and put my energy in that direction. But over time, I started to do the scrubs and shows and ended up doing The Good Wife for 26 episodes.

That was really great kind of like second career because it was fun because there was no financial imperative. There was no ego behind it. It just was just fun to do. Acting is fun. And you want a nanny for that. I mean, that turned into a real... I wouldn't name for rest of me. Yeah.

But I had some nomination. But that's all because of the talent of those people. Yeah. It's talented people. You throw yourself in that crowd, you can have... You can just rise because... Well, you said, you know, you stepped away from acting. You started the foundation, and then Scrubs comes along.

And you start getting these jobs where you can bring Parkinson's with you to the job, where you weren't sort of fighting it on set. And you tell... I was reading the story where you're, I guess, on Spin City, where you're punching yourself, in the arm to try to make your arm stop and all these hoops you had to jump through just to go out and shoot a scene You didn't have to do that anymore because the world knew Yeah, it's a key thing to the mention the punching the arm That's the other side of it. That's the said where you used to say somehow I'm responsible for this

Yeah, but but but but you come to eventually come to a place where you go I'm not I didn't do this This is just the way it is and it's something that happened to me. It's not something that I'm suffering from It's my it's my reality and and and I find that be it's just a bit Apart from gratitude, the partner of gratitude is acceptance and surrender. And it's not, I quit. It's just like, okay, I realize when I'm up against you, and I recognize the fact of it. I accept that it is what it is.

And I look for it, it takes up this much space in my life. But I have this much space left over in my life. What am I going to do with that? If I don't accept this, it's just an amorphous blob that gets into every, creep in every cranny of my life. But if I say, this is what I have, this is real. just because I accept it doesn't mean I can't endeavor to change it. I can make an effort to make it different, but I have to accept that this is way it is right now.

And the more I do that in life, like instead of pounding my arm, just say, well, that's doing that and maybe one day the drugs will kick in and it'll stop doing that. But I'm not going to beat myself up, literally beat myself up for it. And then that's what I returned to underneath the phone that day on the kitchen floor. It was beating myself up again. So I had to, I'm back to beating myself up again. I've got to find the root back to gratitude and acceptance. You talked about starting the foundation 20 years ago, which is amazing.

A billion dollars for research, which is mind-blowing. What's it been like for you? Does it feel like pressure to be the face of this disease? When I say Parkinson's, your name is the first that always comes up. I think I'll leave. Well, yeah, but I mean, but Michael J. Fox Foundation is the preeminent organization. and you carry it with such grace and you're always out talking about it. There's a lot of people like you that are close to our mission and help us out so much.

Well, we do a small part, but it's through your leadership. So when you started that, you never could have imagined what you'd built. There's the scene in the book a couple of years ago at the gala where you and Tracy are up there and you just looked out and you almost forgot where you were for a second. God, look what we've done. Look what we've done. It's amazing. You see all those people assembled out.

We couldn't do it this year, obviously. because, and we tried to be messed with some virtual replacements, but they're all virtual. Yeah. And they didn't, nothing matches that, that time of having all, our gala we have every year is, there's not so much of a continuation of fundraising. We don't fundraise at the gala. We just enjoy and relax and celebrate the work that we've done over the course of the year. And, and yeah, that moment, Tracy and I give this little speech and we've devolved into Sunny and Cher. It's devolved into this. This is bantering, but, and so I missed, I missed, she, took a shot at me and I missed it because I was looking out of the crowd and just looking at these faces.

I mean, everyone from patients and their families and our board and the supporters and the doctors and the scientists and the researchers and then and everybody, I'm sure I'm forgetting some group of people and the talent that come to support us. it's just a great moment and it's the same way that I look at a piece of paper that says you know we've been responsible for 17 active therapies that are now being used that we never thought of before we

we funded a billion dollars in research it's amazing we're still I always tested this is our 20th year if we knew it was going to be 2020 we would have started a year earlier a year later because this year it really blows.

We can skip this year and celebrate it next year. But we still managed to give I like $60 million in grants this year. It's incredible. With all this stuff going on. Yeah. It's accredited. Well, you know Debbie Todd and. Amazing team.

Just amazing people of leadership. And that's the thing, too, that people should know about the foundation. I'm in a lot of conversations and I had big ideas like no one. no, what do you call it? Endowment. Yeah. No endowment. The money comes in and goes out.

Science is ahead of the money. Let's get up to the science. And things like that. But when it comes to minutia, splitting cells and figure out whether alpha synuclion can be visualized to be MRIs or any of the stuff that we're working on, I don't, I know.

I know that we got best people on it, doing the best work they can as quickly as they can. and with real purity of motive. Yeah, there's a story you tell in the book about your impact. I think you're coming home from Baltimore to New York. You stop at a... Like a Cineabon or something like. Yeah, it's in the big things that are excuses for giant bathrooms.

Yeah, exactly. Right, exactly. And a man comes up to you. You say, okay, here comes a fan, I get it. And he says, I have PTSD, and you've really helped me. And it was that moment that I'd just come back from me. I had the cane and he came over and he saw my cane. He said, I'm sorry. And I said, I had this back thing.

And I'm thinking, am I going to explain this whole thing to this guy? And he said, no, I just want to tell you. PTSD and I'm getting help. I'm getting help and it's really working. And I want to thank you for your, however you put it. And it was a great moment. I just said, these are the things that put it back in scale. These are the things that bring us back to gratitude.

And we can have that effect on each other. In a way, it's like, why I write this book, why share this stuff? It's like, it's not prescriptive. I'm not telling anybody what to do. I'm not telling anybody how to think or how to be. I'm just telling you what works for me and what my experience was. And if I don't share it, what good is it? When you hear something like that from that guy outside the Sinabund,

what does that feel like? Do you understand how much you, helped people? It's more a feeling than I thought. It's more a feeling than I thought. It's more an emotion than a reaction. It's just that you just kind of go, oh, yeah, I get it. I get it.

It's bigger than that. It's bigger than, you know, he started up by saying he was been watching Spin City, which I thought was really funny and cool. And it's kind of a thing that someone might say. And it quickly shifted it, just shifted. And it just became this moment where I was kind of like, oh, how lucky am I? and I can do that.

I never knew this guy. I never met him before. I won't meet him again. And yet he gave me something by telling me I gave something to him. It's not easy to be as optimistic and positive as you are. Just listening to you talk and knowing firsthand someone what's like to live with this. Well, I say in the book, one of the things I was feeling guilty about perhaps commodifying hope and selling people a bundle of goods.

I thought, you know, when I talk about optimism, when I talk about positivity, this is pre-the-accent, I was sincere, but I resounding glib because it came trips so easily off my tongue. I can think now from the floor, getting up from the floor, I'm learning to walk again, and embracing my family, and being, ultimately in this moment of pandemic, pan, how I say it wrong?

Pandemic? Pandemic. Yeah. that it's real. I really feel lucky. I really feel lucky. What's your message to people, not just with Parkinson's,

but anybody who's struggling because you fought this so hard for so long? I don't know. See, I don't have much advice. People are other than just, as painful as it is, just try to try to understand what's going on. And it's just, everything's temporary.

Everything's going to change. Every circumstance leads to one of the choice. And every choice leads to one of the circumstance. And you can, if you're active, don't quit. Don't quit. Do you get tired, Mike, of people asking you how you're doing? You talk a little bit in the book about going to that hotel. And every year you go, the guy's kind of eyeball you in and saying, how are you doing?

I'll be the judge of how you're doing. No, it's just funny. Sometimes I want to go, like, really? you want to know, pull up a chair. I'll give you 45 minutes of it. If you want to short answer, I'm feeling great. Take it, accept it and move on. Yeah.

But if you really want to know, I'll find a bench. Pull out some medical charts. I mean, you're, Mike, you're only 59 years old. So what do you look, what do the next 20 years look like for you when you think about it? I never thought anybody would ever say that to me. You know, only 59 years old. I don't know. Tracy's kind of, Tracy's kind of the age and emotion in our family.

wherever she wants to go, we go. And then gladly, she's such an appetite for life. So I don't know, I'm sure there's less of adventures a lot. She got me down. In the book, I talk about she got me to go to Africa. When I was coming off this broken arm and this hole in my spine and all this stuff. And come on how she got me in Africa. I said, I'm not going to Africa.

She said, yeah, we're going to go to Africa. I'm like, I can't walk. I can't, I can't. And as I talk about in the book, it's a leopard. chases me. You know, you don't have to run faster than the leopard, you just have to run faster than me. And you can do that at a walk. So it's just embracing life and moving on. Whether it's a trip not now, a trip to the corner store, if I'm on foot, now as exciting as a trip across the Santergeti, it's brought with peril as is being confronted by a leopard.

When you flip through the TV and maybe you catch an old episode of Spin City or Family Ties or Back to the Future's On, what do you think when you see that kid, that guy, that young actor? Does that feel like two lifetimes ago? I wonder what's on SportsCenter. You know, a quick story about that. I've been asked that before and I really thought about it. When I wrote my second book, I think it's in a second book. And I thought about it and I thought, what do I think like? Because I generally don't hang with it long.

I note it and I remember the moment of the time or some contemporaneous thing that happened around then. I hope my children were or whatever. But it's pretty brief. But I wonder how Ali felt when he saw himself as a young man, you know, brash and loud and active and balletic and amazing. And I wondered what he thought. So I called Lonnie.

And I said, and this is when he was still alive. I said, what does the champ think when he sees all that old footage of himself? You know, man, does it make him sad? Does it make him a whistle? And she said, he loves it. He watches it all day. He loves it. Really?

I thought, that's great. He can embrace that and realize that's him. Regardless of what. So I get that a little bit from my work is that I recognize me in it. And I think when I don't recognize me, me and it, it wasn't successful. It wasn't good. Right, right.

Well, your legacy's firm. My kids who were 13 and 11, they know all the movies. They love Teen Wolf. So you've got, you got another generation of that. They love Teen Wolf. What, what do you go wrong as a parent?

Teen Wolf? Come on. I'm a kid of the 80s. That's like a top 10 movie. It was a lot of fun. I was, I was, say, like, I tell the story about being in a, you know, A dressing room in a trailer in Pasadena were shooting Teen Wolf.

And I was sitting in the dressing room and I had this yak hair on my face, glued on my face, and these rubber prosthetic pieces. And I was sucking my lunch or a straw. It was like some kind of protein shake or something. And he was feeling miserable and saying, what have I done in my career? What have I done? How did I end up being a werewolf?

And then I heard some production guys talking outside about another production company that was scouting locations in that same neighborhood. It was for a new movie, Steve and Spielberg movie called Back to the Future. And I heard about that and I heard Chrisman Glover, who I knew was doing it. I'm not a competitive actor. I don't. People are the other guys, but damn, Chris, I got in this movie and I didn't even hear about it. And five weeks later, I was in it.

Come on. Really? Yeah. I did not know that story. So you made a phone call after you heard it was? No, no. I just let it go. I heard it was going.

And Gary Goldberg called me in his office and said, I didn't tell you. this, but a couple months, a couple weeks ago, a couple months ago, they came to me and asked me if you could do this movie for Bob Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg, and I said, I couldn't let you go because we had a season to do. And, and I said, I understand that. And he said, but they've come back to me because the actor they were working with, they wanted to make a change. And he gave me the script. Wow. And it was just like that. I thought he was firing me when he called me to his office. I thought he'd seen the werewolf more than.

You've got watch Teen Wolf again. Give that fresh eyes. It's a good one. I want a case of beer. Hey guys, thanks for listening to the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Stick around to hear more of my conversation with Michael J. Fox right after the break. Welcome back to the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Now more of my conversation with Michael J. Fox.

So when you formally retire the first time from Spin City, And you say, okay, I think my acting days are behind me. What did that feel like this thing you'd been doing for most of your life going away? I had the foundation to throw myself in right away. We started a foundation literally from nothing. I had finished the Twin City, but we were squatting in our offices there. And you think it's the foundation's initial headquarters because no one did not talk to throw us out.

So we just stayed. And then the events got thrown up. But all my attention was on that. And I didn't even think about acting. When first couple years later, like 92, 93, when people started talking about, actually asked me if I wanted to work, and I think about it, I said, no, I don't want to work. And then I started to work, and then I really enjoyed it. And it meant something new to me.

Like I said, the second career was not, there was no pressure of having to carry a show. There was no, there was no, I was a character actor. Yeah. It was really fun. And I really enjoyed that. And I wrote for a long time. But I write in the book, too, that just recently I did a couple of things. And I had difficulty remember my lines and had difficulty moving around the set.

And I didn't. I talk about the scene in once upon a time in Hollywood. Yeah. Where Leo DiCaprio comes off. He's doing a guest shot on a TV show and he can't remember his lines. And he goes back on the guest show and he braids himself, screams himself and gets all angry. And I found that when I had that moment, I went in the mirror and I went, meh. So I put this on the shelf for a while.

And that was the same way I felt after Spinn City. It's like, I love this. I love doing it, but I can't do it to test my ability right now. Not because I have park on this, but because I'm not focused. And I haven't had the focus. And so the same thing with recently. I mean, I have the life to return to as long as I have my cognitive abilities and my vision and my heart. I'm in life and I'm with it all the way.

Will you continue acting? Yeah, I mean, it suddenly comes up and I can write the lines on the wall. It's really funny that it's a function of age as much as Parkinson's. When I was a kid, I'd look at a 30-page family tie script, and I'd just go down a note. And then you go from that to going, I went, I'm going, I left, just trying to find the article in the line. He'll point you know how to say it.

So it does, things that do cycles and rhythms, and it's just, you just ride them, so they're trying to force them. There is a piece to Parkinson's that people don't realize. You write about it is that cognitive piece, which I think to our family was one of the most surprising pieces because I thought of all the other outward things that you see. But that, that's there too, but, I mean, you seem like you're doing great.

The thing I would say to Tracy, because it drives her nuts, as it would. But I, like, I started to say something, And it makes no sense. And I'll say, it's not because I know that, that, what I wanted, I don't want to say, whale instead of bicycle. I just said whale because I could, and I knew bicycle, and it was in my head, and I couldn't get it out.

The mechanics of my face and my voice, I wouldn't get it out in time. So I'm saying something I know is completely wrong, but I know it's right. It just didn't come out. Right. I just need time for a do-over. And it's, it's, it's, the thing about your father, I'm sure, will attest of this. And you can probably can't do. It's very exhausting.

It's very distracting. Every time, whatever I'm doing, whatever you think I'm doing, I'm doing something else. I'm always, my life is one isometric exercise. I'm always pressuring one part of my body against another part of my body. That's just not to complain. It's just, it is what it is. You either, you know, accepted to move on or get bogged down. I mean, that's the thing.

it's like optimism is a choice, but in a way it isn't. There's no other choice. I don't know if there's any other viable choice than hopefully the best and work toward it. I think so much. Congratulations on the book. It's phenomenal. And thank you for all your help with the foundation.

Oh, please. Foundation and your father's a great inspiration. We're following your lead. You've helped a lot of people. Thank you, Mike. Thank you. My big thanks to Michael for a great conversation and more importantly, for all the work he has done.

done over these last 20 years to fight this terrible disease through the Michael J. Fox Foundation. His excellent new book, No Time Like the Future, is out now. My thanks, as always, to all of you for tuning in again this week. If you want to hear more of our full-length conversations with my guests every week, be sure to click subscribe so you never miss an episode. And of course, don't forget to tune in to Sunday today every weekend on NBC. I'm Willie Geist. We'll see you right back here next week on the Sunday Sit Down podcast.