The Tim Ferriss Show - #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

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Scott Glenn’s acting career spans nearly 60 years. His impressive film resume includes performances in Apocalypse Now, Urban Cowboy, The Right Stuff, Silverado, The Hunt for Red October, The Silence of the Lambs, Backdraft, The Virgin Suicides, and The Bourne Ultimatum. This year, Scott will return to HBO to join season 3 of The White Lotus.Timestamps for this episode are available below. Links to everything discussed: https://tim.blog/2024/03/27/scott-glenn/Sponsors:Momentous high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off)LMNT electrolyte supplement: https://drinklmnt.com/tim (FREE sample pack with any purchase)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[07:10] Idaho vs. Los Angeles.[13:26] Apocalypse Now, self-confidence soon after.[17:26] Burt Lancaster’s movie star lessons.[23:06] The birth and death of Wes Hightower.[32:22] Catching the attention of James Bridges.[35:42] Scarlet fever.[37:29] From Marine to police reporter.[42:12] Berghof Studios and parental advice.[50:44] Converting to Judaism.[53:36] Lao Tzu: the ultimate mystic?[58:16] Letting go with Killer Joe.[1:02:53] “Crazy Whitefella Thinking.”[1:08:31] Getting out of the way and Erwan Le Corre.[1:11:51] Lessons from the “morally phenomenal” Marlon Brando.[1:16:26] How Scott’s childhood bout with scarlet fever informed his life’s course.[1:19:05] Daily routines and exercises of an in-shape 85-year-old.[1:35:12] Securing a serendipitous skill set.[1:42:13] Thailand talk.[1:46:18] Increasing surface luck.[1:47:04] How Scott met and fell in love with his wife.[1:53:04] “Just dance.”[1:53:46] Mistakenly calling Rudolf Nureyev Russian.[1:55:57] Poetry.[2:00:01] What Laurence Olivier knew about the value of tenacity.[2:01:41] 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.

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The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job every episode to interview world-class performers from different disciplines to tease out the habits, routines, lessons learned, et cetera, that you can apply to your own lives. My guest today is someone I've wanted to have on the podcast for years. We did the interview at his house in Idaho. He has no social media, no website,

and his name is Scott Glenn. He is a legend. Scott Glenn's acting career spans nearly 60 years. His impressive film resume includes performances in Apocalypse Now, Urban Cowboy, The Right Stuff, Silverado, The Hunt for Red October, The Silence of the Lambs, Backdraft, The Virgin Suicides, and The Bourne Ultimatum. I would venture that every single one of you would recognize his face. More recently, Scott has appeared on the small screen as Kevin Garvey Sr. in The Leftovers, the blind sensei Stick in Marvel's Daredevil and The Defenders, and as the retired sheriff Alan Pangborn in Castle Rock. This year, Scott will return to HBO to join season three of The White Lotus. And there is so much more to his story. He has, I would consider it, the gold medal trifecta in terms of mastery

across life. And we'll get into exactly what that means. But I've wanted to have this conversation with Scott for a very, very long time. It took place on his couch, in his living room, and I'll leave it at that. Please enjoy a very wide-ranging conversation with the one and only legendary Scott Glenn. 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 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 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. 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. 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 plan. She's really a good potter.

She was accepted to a summer workshop, was invitation only, to the best ceramic artist 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. So she said we had a VW van, typical hippy-dippy, 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. And I went, no, 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? And I went, I don't know. And she said, well, you can, because there's a group of people who are leaving from a place she wasn't sure where, as it turns out, it was Chalice, Idaho, that they're leaving on the following dates, which was like a week after her workshop started. 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. And they're going to be doing high

mountains. This is in July. They're going to be doing high mountain traverses in snow and ice for three days. Then they're going to be going down into a little valley and climbing rock faces and naming them for the geodesic survey. It's being led by a guy named Eric Ryback, 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 Baja. And she said, you're going with them. 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. 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. 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 Ryback and these people I was going to be hanging out with for the next few weeks. And we drove 90 miles on a dirt road to the Cobalt Ranger Station, where you didn't tell them where you were going. You just told them when you expected to be back. 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. So if forestry service had to go in and open up trailheads, they had to go in with mules, two-man cross-cut saws,

because you couldn't turn on a film. That wouldn't work. So we did that, and it was, I hadn't been off on my own alone 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. 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 plus plus stuff. 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. And a little over two and a half weeks of doing this. I said to Tony, I got to 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. 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. 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. 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 LA because of what I do for a living. And all that fell away up here.

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? 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. And then I did a couple of sort of very small parts in big, important American movies. One was Nashville, Bob Alvin's film. And the other was Apocalypse Now that I was on for a little over seven months. 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. Francis thought, I think incorrectly, but he thought that he owed me because he thought I saved his life in the Philippines. 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. 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. Play Colby, the guy who came up river in front of Martin 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. And I thought, at the end of the movie, I'm going to 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 going to be around this guy and just being around him. And Dennis Hopper, who's a lunatic, but brilliant. And Martin Sheen. And the end of this movie is an experience that will change my life. And it did. I told Francis later on that I got

the greatest gift you could give any artist in the Philippines, which was self-confidence. 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 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? Because I was just doing improvs and work with Marlon Brando, Victorio 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. 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. And I reached up, and there were tears coming out of my eyes. I was on television in a Beretta I'd done. And I pointed at it and I said, you're supposed to get better at what you do, not worse. That's the crappiest acting I've ever seen. I was so much better doing street theater in New York. What's happened to me? 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? 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. 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? And I said, I met somebody who told me that if I gave him three years, he would apprentice me to be in backcountry, cross-country ski guide and hunting guide, and I'll do that. And she said, will you quit acting? 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. 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 L.A. that I felt. So the two families decided we'd come up here and try to figure out what to do in Ketchum, 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. 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. You will be shooting for three months. And I got like, I think it was, I can give you 2000 bucks. And I said, great. So Carol and I went to Mexico, and I was warned when I went down there. 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, Western. 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 the kind of guy. But watch out for Burt Lancaster. He's an old-school movie star.

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. 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. 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? And she said she has some little slide pictures of stuff she'd done.

He looked at them, and I could see something changing 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. 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. 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. At the end of the first take, Burt 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. 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 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 wow what an incredible opportunity 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 tough man con he was the real deal i love burt it was like what people had told me about rod and burt was like he could flip it around he flipped so on the way home this is a long we got all the time so okay so we're coming back from mexico they went to paramount to see a friend

of carol's in mind 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 j Jim Bridges, and Jack Larson was his partner, lover, whatever. And they were great guys, super great guys. 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. 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. And the producer's 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, and we're on our way back to Idaho. 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. 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? And I look over, and when he was alive in another part of my life, I knew Freddie Fender, the country-western singer, whose real name was Baldi Marguerta. And Freddie was in a family that picked everything illegally. That was his background. 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. And they went, we don't believe this. 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. He said, no, man, he's a fucking gringo. And I went, okay. So I met this guy who told me enough about the character that I was going to be playing and little things. Like he said, you got to get a hat sticker or something, not a tattoo, but something on you that says 13 and a half. Cause that's the number that gets us in here. And we have it 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 you gotta get tattoos on your forearm Nuestra Familia I said but I'm not a Latino he said neither am I and showed

me that he had that what did that refer to our family like what was the that's the in prison organization i see i see that he was a doctor too 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 showed me. 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. And he said, you're going to 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 going to do that at least 100 times a day from now on, hopefully 1,000. I get down to Houston. Jim said, I'm going to 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 azoff and jim bridges always all kind of like shoved me down um paramount's throat 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 yeah and the part was west high tower it was Urban Cowboy. Yeah. And the part was West High Tower. It was funny because when I read the script, I thought, all I have to do is be honest with this character. I'm not going to go for big moments, right? 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. Yeah, mechanical bull.

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, just 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. So anyway, that happened, and I didn't have to audition. I auditioned once since then for a part that's 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. 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. 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. I love my life in Idaho. 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. 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. So I turned on the TV stuff. 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. So I lived that part 24-7.

Got arrested, got in trouble. I was Wes Hightower the whole time I remember at one point I came back to we had an apartment in the gallery 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 and thinking what's? 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 Wes Hightower. So you let me know when he's dead. Me and the girls love you. We're up here, but we're not going to 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. I said, what is that? She said, two things.

Number one, I love you. And number two, I think you're hitting a home run with this, and it's going to 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. And I got out of the jimmy i walked down to the side of the road and i took this invisible west high tower and threw him in the ground broke his fucking neck and called carol to pay phone i said west high tower is dead i'm coming home wow okay okay okay continue and then we going to go back to the origin story. Okay. Got home. 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. 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? 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? 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 Perrone, who I'd done a thing called in New York, it was called Collision Course. 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 going to 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. 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. 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 gillies and bull machines and all that stuff. 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. 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. 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 Debra, and I walked over to him, and I went, hey.

And he looked up at me, and I said, you're sitting in my fucking seat. And he looked up at me and I said, you're sitting in my fucking seat. And he looked at me and I thought, what's going to happen? And he got up and walked away. And I went and sat down. That was my screen test. 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 AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of

vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. 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 acting enter the scene for you? And I read a bit about Berghoff. 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 that I wasn't supposed to have survived. 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 but it's interesting. 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 in straightens you up. 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 I've learned to not only live with, but fall in love with my fantasies and my imagination. 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. When I got out of bed from scarlet fever, my bones were so soft that they bent and I limped like for almost 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. Number one, I wasn't going to be Walter Mitty. I wasn't going to have an imaginary life. The adventures I was imagining were all going to be true. I was going to make them come true. And one of them was I was going to be a writer, poet, writer. So when I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I enlisted as a six-month reservist.

Why did you do that? Because you went from English major to Marine Corps, is that right? Because where I came from, there was nobody dodged the draft. Right. And the draft was happening. I see. dodged the draft. And the draft was happening. So for me, and I knew even with a BA in college, I had so little technical ability. Everybody will tell you about that. 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 choices were three. Marine Corps, 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne. That's it. 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 scleral fever as well. And they laughed. They said, you're going to be an enlisted Marine. You're going to boot camp at Parris Island. You're

worried about your hearing. People are going to scream at you the whole time you're there. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. And what was the job for this was, were you transcribing or what was the job? The job was cover reporter. 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. And it was like 30 below zero. It was freezing cold. And somebody said, no, that was a car backfire. And 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. 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 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.

And next to her, Dorothy Batatas, 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. So they made me a police reporter. And I thought being a police reporter would be really cool because I'll cover mob hits and all that stuff. 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? 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 American Virgin Islands. 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? 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. 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. 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, so I got in my car. I had an old Triumph. 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 said Berghoff Studios. I didn't know anything about it. I 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 them 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 i'm feeling so sad was the play something i'm completely unsuited for but it was a little monologue. I worked on it. I go down into the basement of Berghoff's. It was raining outside. Wednesday morning, maybe seven or eight people sitting there to watch. I walk in front of Bill Hickey to start this monologue. And for the first and 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. 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. And then he it and he started laughing and he said, that's right, you're one of us. 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. 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. Because being in the service, in a lot of ways, can be rough and 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. And I like that because I really am lazy. I'm 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. 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. I said, what do you mean? He said,

don't say if I haven't made it in two years, I'm going to sell insurance. 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. 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. 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? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. So he left the world that he was in and started selling Bluepoint tools that morphed into Snap-on tools. 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. 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. 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 close to who he was, was him. Thank you for sharing that. And how would you describe your mother, her character, what you absorbed from her? 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. 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 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. 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 events. I don't have any excuses. I grew up in the most functionally family, straight out love. My dad never hit me except for once in my life. 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. And she said, please, son, I'm asking. I said, no. And my mom teared up and started going.

My dad walked in the door, and he said, why is your mom crying? And I said, something I said. 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. So the next time my mom wanted me to do something,

if she even started to go, I said, okay, mama. I'm doing it. 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. Can you say more about the decision to convert? Yeah, I had a friend.

His name was Milton Bedot, 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. 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. He loved theater, and I went to see him, and I said, I want you to make me a Jew. He said, you know, I'm-

Darrell Bock Why did you say that to him? In preparation for getting married? Kevin Patton Yeah. I said, I'm going with Carol. I want you to make me a Jew. He had met her and so I said, I want you to make me a Jew. And he said, schmuck, I'll lie for you. I'll tell her parents that I did it and I won't do it.

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? 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. I said, I think it's a book with a lot of wisdom, as is the Bible,

as is the Quran. But if you're asking me of all that stuff, what resonates the most with me, it'd be Lao Tzu's The Way of Life. He said, I'll find a rabbi that'll do it for you. I went, okay. I started walking out of the show. 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?

And I said, because I met this woman. I love her. And we want to travel. And I don't want to 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. If there was no anti-semitism you and i wouldn't be having this talk and he said sit down so i sat down and he said after me all of beth gimaldoth i said what are you doing he said i'm converting you 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. 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. Oh, man. Okay. I'm not going to say no to the guy. Abraham Ephraim Ben Avraham is my Jewish name. You mentioned Lao Tzu. Why does that resonate? Why does his writing or the conglomerate known as Lao Tzu? 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 i did 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. And for me, spiritually, that's what Lao Tzu is saying.

So it's this sort of diminishing of the self or dissolution of the self? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Carbon dating says to the Bible, the Talmud, and the Quran, 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, somebody lived in the belly of a whale. Well, 2,000 years ago, you look at something 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? Yes, I do believe that. Talking about that dissolution from a firsthand experiential perspective, like a mystic, have you ever experienced, say, in acting, a role playing you as opposed to the other way around?

Yes. 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. 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. 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. 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. The only part that was choreographed originally was there was a big fight at the end. 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.

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. Fifteen 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. 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. 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 that I was going to fuck up my back, to kick it out of the way. The only place to kick it was the first aisle of the theater. So we told people when they came to see his play, this is a projectile aisle. You may not get a heavy object landing on your lap, or you may. You for sure are going to be covered with fried chicken and ketchup and fake blood. There's no question, so don't wear suits that you care about. 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. There was one scene at the very beginning of Act II 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. 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. 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, after the first night of doing it, it was like, I don't know whether liberate is the right word. I was just going to use that word. or 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.

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. The next performance, I didn't make any decisions about what i would do what prop i would pick up anything just well let's see what's going on here

i'm gonna live in this space i know that i am this character 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 that I felt the same way about Wes Hightower and Urban Cowboy so that was Killer Joe the next time it happened I was doing Leftovers and I had 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, and 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 going to be just you, Scott, all just you in Australia. 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. I know you've got a dog. I'm going to ask you about your dog. Sure. But I was reading this book called Don't Shoot the Dog. 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. 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.

For example, if you've got something long to memorize, and I'm thinking, holy shit. So what she said in that was, it'll take longer initially, but it's the perfect way to memorize something really long. Start at the end. The last sentence, and then the last sentence, and the next last sentence, and then like that. 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 okay I know I'm a nating instead of the ending being this hanging on the stairs you look at why remember it as you get near the end you become more and more comfortable and more and more comfortable. 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. 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 them one take? 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 David Gopalil, but he doesn't say anything. So he just sits there and listens. So we start doing this scene 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. 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? 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. 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. 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 that I want to change, 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. 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.

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. 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 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. Let's just go for it. 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'd literally look in the mirror and I'd say, stay out of the way. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. At any rate, I just realized after that day with Vince and the key that I had to play in the character, I'm going to 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. 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. And with that, I realized from the get-go, just stay out of the way, both because the director was going to let me do whatever I really wanted. I would make the physical. If I was supposed to pick up a drill and drill a hole in the wall, I'd do that. But how I was going to do it, whether it was going to be the same again and again, whether it would match, I wasn't even going to not even think about that a little bit to a great extent because I am lazy. And then the part that I was doing in Eugene the Marine 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. 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. 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. And more importantly, way more importantly, I think with acting is you don't have a past. And more importantly, way more importantly, I think with acting is you don't have a future, which means plans on what you're going to do in the scene dissolve and then finally disappear. So what I had with that movie was finally

what just wound up being with the crew as my very small audience every single take was a one-act play called now 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 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 or it's not in the movie but there's one point where i killed dennis hopper and i was working on the scene and marlin came came over to me. He said, Scott, just because they call it acting doesn't mean you have to act.

I went, okay. What did he mean by that? 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. 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 brought a really great bread 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 technique acting, most of what you still see. Then there's the Russian school, which is Stanislavski, Boleslavski, and that is you begin with the inside of the character. 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? 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. So Marlon 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 it and say, action. 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 and play, not his lines, but the stuff he wanted to cover in improvisation so he wouldn't miss stuff. It was audio he had recorded himself. 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 in a place called Paxanhan, and I had a room at Paxanhan Inn that I basically kept all my crap in. I was living at the time with this group of people called the Ifiga that were on the set. 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 the table in the hotel, and where you check into the hotel and a jukebox, we're 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. 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, 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. One of the producers, I think, was a great friend, said about the little

girl who was in dancing. 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. 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. And Marlon was saying the same thing about himself. 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? Because I know, I believe you couldn't read at the time. 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. 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. She just got tired of screaming at me and having me walk into the room and turning the TV up, so like ear splitting loud. She said, you got to get hearing aids. Didn't think I needed them. 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 him fine. He walks behind me, and I can't hear him. 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. My suspicion is longer. So that was scarlet fever. And do you think that informed, helped shape you into what later became this actor? Yeah, or it led me into having discoveries that I wouldn't have had before. Like when I got out of bed from scarlet fever, I could take my finger literally and run it in and out of my rib cage. My bones were soft, so I limped. 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 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. 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. 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. Now I'm 85, and here it is. 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. 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? Okay. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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, your stomach goes out, your diaphragm is working, and it's not, and you're not bringing anything into the top of your chest at all.

That's horizontal breathing. 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. It'll also jack you into a fight or flight situation. 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 going to jack up your heart rate. You're going to jack up your blood pressure. You're going to screw with your central nervous system.

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 it. Is this also from Chinese medicine?

Yes. head brain tap it this is also from chinese medicine yes 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 your shorts and a sweatshirt right now 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. You put your back teeth together and I do that eight times and put vibration in my vagus nerve. This is every morning for sure. 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 cold. Like this morning it was 14. And you're outside in shorts. Yeah. Yeah. 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? 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 a hum come back in 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.

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. 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 with your neck. I do 10 times usually. And then a low crawl 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 and what he said was make so much sense 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 with your chin. It would be good to do that a bit. Get your neck extended instead of pitched down. And I do a bear crawl, and I, 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. 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 just moves. Oh, okay, cool. One, two, three, four, like that. That's quite a bit. Good for you. Geez, I don't even know if I could do that.

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. 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. 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. 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 type push-ups. Yeah, right. Back corner maxes are prison push-ups. So I'll do 10 of those, 10 of those, wait got it. The close hand, more tricep type pushups. with like specific working out. 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 and say, can I still do this? 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. 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. 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 yeah so and 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 where that i'm lucky i'm not bragging is really true is my reaction time i'm still as quick as I used to be. 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 realize is that could drop off 30 seconds from now. I'm 85. At some point, that's going to go. And if it does, I'll deal with it. 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, 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. 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 feed up thing over there, I use to... Oh, wow. Yeah, look at that. I know the feed up.

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. And why I'm doing that is that I can then take all 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 let me just start taking in big breaths you're going to be introduced to your diaphragm like right let me explain this for 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. 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 water, put your head in the toilet and then kick your feet up. So you're basically doing a 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. And do you exercise every morning? 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 pace. I would do baby fit in the morning.

That would be pretty much it because I knew I had so much work to do during the day. 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. 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 have to technically figure that out as an actor. 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. He's all about breathing, and the course was all about breathing and meditation. 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 out problems, which we all do. How do I get from here to there? What's two plus two equal?

That kind of thing. Or it's a conversation that you're writing the script and you're delivering to yourself. When you say that, you mean these are like the stories you're creating for yourself? 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, 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. 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? 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. So he said, I would suggest that one of your meditations be peace. Go in the other direction. 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. Because 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. Erwin 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. I sit upright in bed, and I yell, whoa. And Carol, it's 2.30 in the morning, and Carol says, what, what? 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. 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. 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. Performance free diving will tell you that, of record, my longest breath hold is four minutes and 15 seconds. I see that 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. Yeah, those are very real. So, but I'm at a minute 40 right now. But what I was going to 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. So I want to ask you about this, because it seems like this is going to be a leading question but it's uh an uninformed

observation it seems like from la to idaho you loosen your grasp on something and then this opportunity this amazing opportunity presents itself for this this career changing role yeah and it seems like that's happened a few times how How would you explain that? 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. 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. 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. 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. I just do it, and it works out. My great fortune in life, 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 standalone teacher and coach,

the best in the world. I'd never planned on that happening. It just happened. I'm out at the range shooting. Guy next to me was watching me shoot, and he says, you're pretty good at doing this, but I could give you some pointers. 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 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 Reeds. And we become really good friends. And 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 surface. 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 in his 60s pot-bellied guy and he looks at me and he said you're a real asshole and for whatever reason i don't know if 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? 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. Show up tomorrow with coffee at 8 45 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 just got john early walks over to me and i tell him about it he said do you have any idea who that was and i said no he said that was james stew. I said, Jimmy Stewart, the actor? He said, no, like Jim Stewart, dive master emeritus at Scripps Institute. Jim Stewart, who wrote the syllabus for the SEAL teams. Jim Stewart, who's the only person who can sign the chit that says you're allowed to dive in the Antarctica. Jim Stewart, whose nally card is number one.

And Jacques Costeau said he's arguably the greatest scuba diver that ever lived. That's who's going to teach you and certify you. And he did. I mean, so, I mean, it's again and again, I'm out here. You're like the first dump of skill acquisition. 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.

I never did free fall like him and like SF and SEALs do at all. But I've done static line jumps. So I'm telling somebody at this cocktail party, this guy walks up to me and he said, you want to free fall? I'll teach you. 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 and he said because i'm four times world champion i'm the only person allowed to videotape the golden knights if you know anything about jumping videotaping skydivers is the easily the most dangerous part because of all the stuff you can, I mean, it's crazy.

All the things that can go wrong, yeah. So I said, are we going to tandem jump? He said, no. You already told me you're a static line jumper. We'll put a two-by-four on a Cessna. We'll go up. We'll use the two-by-four to launch ourselves out on the stride of the wing, hang on to it. He said, and you'll go first.

I said, what will you do? He said, you'll go first. 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. 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 pan a mind anymore. You actually pull the ripcord 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 like four feet 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 going to teach you. 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. 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. Yeah. 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 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 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 going to be in Thailand. 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 to say it too. But it's a Thai martial art and it's the weapons side of Muay Thai. 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. I just want someone to show me the absolute basement cellar foundation. 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 going to do when I get to Thailand. And you've done a lot of knife work also.

I imagine that 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 Raja Damnan to watch the Muay Thai fights. I've been to both of those places. Oh, you have? Yeah, 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. And if you know the lesser

vehicle of 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. 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 and back. 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 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. 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.

He was amazing. He died of liver cancer. And the other was Fred Ward, who died of Alzheimer's. But Fred was an amazing athlete. Fred had a silver boot in boxe francais, sauvat. Savat, yeah. And when he was in Thailand, he trained Muay Thai with the people from Rajadhanur. Oh, yeah, Rajadhanur. And so he brought me, well, at one point, I remember he brought me in to

work out with those guys. I wouldn't hit palm trees with my hands or anything like that, but they had heavy bags and stuff like that too. And Fred told me that God gave me a right hook, and I said, yeah, I know that part. But 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.

Oh, yeah, the Art of Eight Limbs. Beautiful and brutal and very effective art. I want to revisit for a second this luck because 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 that increases the likelihood that luck is going to 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? Are there any other ingredients that you can play with? 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 going to lose. And number two, she's going to take you in a much better direction than you ever figured. 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? Because 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 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 the girl i've been kind of not really living with but semi living with off and on and i'd broken up and she just tried to kill herself. And I had a friend who now was teaching school in Iraq, of all places. His name is Jeff Siggins. 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 are going 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 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 some, and I'd fallen in lust probably at least a couple thousand times in my life and pursued that, you know, with full vigor, but I 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. So we sat through the whole movie again,

not even touching. And the movie came to an end 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 so we went out and we played in the snow it was getting late and carol said and i i was doing a play but i was off that night she said you want to spend the night and And I said, yeah. Oh, yeah. 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 are blankets on it. Have a good night. 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 and i was going to say goodbye to her and i thought i'm not going to even try to hug her and kiss her because if i do with this and she does one of those pull aways my whole world will collapse how i knew knew that, I don't know. So I said I had a really good time and held my hand. I shook her hand goodbye. 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. And I went through one phone and finally I thought, who are you kidding? You want to see her. That's who you want to see.

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. So I get down to her apartment. She's got makeup on and she's all dressed up and she said, oh, I've it was. And she said, okay. So I get down to her apartment. She's got makeup on. She's all dressed up. And she said, oh, I've got a date tonight. But you know where the fridge is.

And there's the TV. And so knock yourself out. 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. 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. 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 going out with you tonight. You can see the emotion I'm filled with right now. I can. And I went, yes.

She shut the door, walked into the living room and that was about 55 years ago wow 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. You've 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 want to know. 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, as old school, has ever seen. Within 10 minutes of meeting her, he desperately wanted her approval.

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. 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. 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. 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. Playing pool with Nureyev in New York City. Is my game the name right? No, that was uh 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 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 all in. I ran into Nuriev while we were doing the right stuff in San Francisco and New York city ballet had moved to San Francisco for the year. 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. 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 was famous. And we were shooting pool and drinking me in a minor way he in a major way vodka i remember one point i said to him well you russians can really hold your vodka and he stopped

got really angry looked at me he said i am not russian and i said what are you he said, I am not Russian. And I said, what are you? 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. They had their own identity, their own sense of who they were, and it meant something. It certainly did to Nerea. He was, in some ways, the best physical shape of any human being I've ever been around. I watched him go down a flight of long stairs on his hands. I mean, he would invite me to come and watch

the New York City Ballet workout, and 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. 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. 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. I did want to talk about poetry, if that's possible. Okay, sure. 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. What does poetry mean to you? Why write poetry? Why read poetry? Poetry to me is the, along with physical art scratching on the side of a wall. This is one of your books, Frictions. It's the most elemental way that human beings have to communicate ideas and feelings, real deep ideas and feelings.

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 fought in Greek's war of liberation from Turkey. And he did all this stuff and was an outrageous coxswain, and mainly he was a poet. So I've lived with the belief that I have that in me. 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. 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. 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. 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 hanging out with Carol, was write poetry. 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. 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. And what I discovered with Carol was I liked her better than anybody I knew. Even to this day, we're like agoraphobic hermits. 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? 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. How do you apply that metaphor outside of riding a motorcycle like that? 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 riding a big Harley and you 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. 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. 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 going to dump the metaphor. So we're going to 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. 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. 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. I mean, again, I'm in a bar with Laurence Olivier, who created the National Theater 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,

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? 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 if you're a monk outside the gates with a beggar's bowl and you stay out there long enough they'll finally get sick of seeing you open the gates and let you in 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 maybe we'll get a chance to go out and shoot again. 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. I don't know about it. There was a time in my life, and I have witnesses,, because it sounds out, I could, with steel sights, hit 600 yards. Whether I can right now at 85, probably not, but who knows? I could get the drag off down. In warm weather, I'll give it a shot, to use a horrible, horrible metaphor. 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. 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? Between one and a half and two million people 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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. This episode is brought to you by Momentous. Momentous offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive

health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly. One of the things I love about Momentus is that they offer many single ingredient and third-party tested formulations. I'll come back to the latter part of that a little bit later. Personally, I've been using Momentus Mag3 and 8 L-theanine and apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Momentous Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. I've also been using Momentous Creatine, which doesn't just help for physical performance, but also for cognitive performance. In fact,

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