The Tim Ferriss Show - #765: Chris Sacca and Scott Glenn

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Starting point is 00:04:32 to the next level today. One more time, all lowercase, shopify.com slash Tim. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would seem an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. 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 to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books,

Starting point is 00:05:15 and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary which is insane to think about and passed 1 billion downloads to celebrate i've curated some of the best of the best some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade i could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes and internally we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to yes enjoy the household names the super famous folks but to also introduce you to lesser known people i consider stars these are people who have transformed my life and i feel

Starting point is 00:05:57 like they can do the same for many of you perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle perhaps you missed an episode just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim.blog slash combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening. First up, Chris Saka, co-founder of Lower Carbon Capital, investing in solutions to the climate crisis, co-founder of Lower Case Capital, early investor in Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Twilio, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Stripe, recurring guest investor on

Starting point is 00:06:41 ABC's Shark Tank, and one of the youngest people to ever make the Forbes Midas list. You can learn more about Chris at lowercasecapital.com. As I look at all the most successful founders I've backed, the thing they have is inevitability of success. There are no conditional statements coming out of their mouths. There's no like, well, if it works, it would be rad. Instead, it's just always, you talked to Kevin's system at Instagram when he was working on it himself. He was literally a sole guy working on the product. And he's like, so when we get to 50 million users, we'll roll out this other stuff. And you're just

Starting point is 00:07:19 like, wait, what? He's just peering into the future, kind of looking through you into something in the future. And you're just like, I got to get along for the ride with this guy. The same thing when you talk to Evan Williams, when it comes to talking about the likelihood of success of his products, he just knows. Like, he just knew Twitter would be a big thing. He talked to Patrick and John Collison at Stripe. And of course, they're building for this thing to be a big dominant company. And it just will be. You spent time with Travis. You're an investor in Uber. Was there any doubt at any time that Uber would dominate the planet? Yeah, no doubt. There's no doubt.

Starting point is 00:08:00 Can you just share? There's an anecdote. I think we probably talked about over drinks at some point, but Wii Tennis. Wii Tennis? Travis, Wii Tennis? Yeah. Could you tell this story? Can you just share, there's an anecdote. I think we probably talked about over drinks at some point, but we tennis. We tennis? Travis, we tennis? Yeah. Could you tell this story? So it's a few years ago. We're up in my house and we live up in the mountains in Truckee. It was over the holidays. So my parents were there. I think it was actually New Year's Day. So Travis and I had been, we have a tradition up there on New Year's Eve. We go snowshoeing at midnight and drink champagne out in the meadow and stuff. So I think it was a pretty rough morning. But Travis is sitting on the couch, and my dad senses some weakness, and he challenges him to a game of Wii Tennis on the Nintendo Wii.

Starting point is 00:08:36 My dad's not a bad player. He's pretty good. Travis is like, okay, Mr. Sack, sure. And he picks up the controller, and they play the first couple of games. And they're tight games, but Travis wins them. my dad is there taking like full swings with the paddle you know it's like breaking a little sweat and travis is still blurry from the night before barely breaking his wrist and he's beating my dad right it's like what the hell is this and then there was that anigo montoya moment princess bride style he's travis turns my dad and says i'm sorry but i'm not left-handed. I forget if

Starting point is 00:09:06 it's left or right, but he switches hands with the controller. The next three games, my dad never touches the ball. There were no points scored on any of Travis's serves. I was like, what the hell is going on? What is this? After the torture got to me too much, Travis just says, let me take you to the global leaderboard. I'm sorry. I didn, you know, I'm a sack. I didn't mean to be holding out. And he goes to the global leaderboard and Travis Kalanick was ranked number two in the world at Wii Tennis. In his spare time. just so obsessive, so competitive. And that's the thing is we look across the portfolio at all the most kick-ass companies. That's something they just have right up front is that they're not hoping and praying for success. They know what's going to happen. What I think is really interesting about Uber in particular is, and for those people who don't

Starting point is 00:10:00 know, I was an early advisor to Uber. So I'm biased obviously in a lot of ways when I talk about it, but I think you actually got there before me. Yeah, I was pre-seed money advisor because I'd been an advisor at StumbleUpon and I'd worked with Garrett and I'm now working again, collaborating with him on Expo, which is super fun. But in the beginning, the way that Uber got dismissed, and I think this is a really common mistake, it seems, that a lot of investors make, is people said, oh my God, really? Like black cars for one percenters in San Francisco? What's the market for that? And they viewed a very niche activity as by definition constrained to say one percenters in San Francisco and New

Starting point is 00:10:37 York. And if you look at, let's say even recycling, it started out that way. They kind of confused the first target with the total market. And they also looked at just the available market, which they misdefined very early on. You know, in the case of like an Airbnb or an Uber, they can grow the market beyond any comparable that's available. I mean, a lot of these start off so incredibly niche that people misread the market potential, I think. What books or resources outside of personal relationships and these mentors that you've had, the compliments and so on,

Starting point is 00:11:08 are there any particular books or resources that have helped you become a better investor? Yeah, I think most of those though are not business books per se. That's perfect. That's great. So I didn't get a business degree. I didn't do an MBA.

Starting point is 00:11:21 I took a couple of classes. It was enough to show me it was a total farce. I did get a law degree, which is an even bigger farce, but that's for another episode. So I never a couple of classes. It was enough to show me it was a total farce. I did get a law degree, which is an even bigger farce, but that's for another episode. So I never had formal business training. And I tried to look at a few of those like instant MBA books and stuff like that. I even bought some books on venture capital and they're just such a, so goofy. And by the way, part of that is because now we have so many great venture capitalist bloggers who are just an open book about the industry, who teach it. So Brad Feld comes to mind first.

Starting point is 00:11:51 Long-time friend and mentor, Brad at Feld Thoughts has done series over the years where he breaks down each aspect of a term sheet, how to understand it, and the deal documents. And this is what we think is important. These are things we think could go away. Josh Koppelman and his team have done a lot of work on that. We've now seen Y Combinator and the guys at Fenwick and West and Cooley building templated documents that are really, really watered down and pro entrepreneur and just kind of have taken out a lot of the legacy bullshit that didn't need to be in those documents. There's a lot of this learning that can happen now without having to buy books, without having to go to school. And so that's been fantastic. But where I worry about the Valley and about investors, as well as our entrepreneurs, is in the development of everything

Starting point is 00:12:35 off the ball a little bit. So you and I, I just turned 40 this week. That's why you're here. Happy birthday again. But as a 40-year-old, the people my age who were computer science majors in college, that was a major just like any other major. They still had to go get a summer job. They mowed lawns, waited tables. They had time in their curriculum to go study abroad, to volunteer. They had these really well-rounded lives.

Starting point is 00:13:00 And so working with people my age and older at Google who are computer scientists was great because they had not just these amazing, amazing math and science skills, but a diversity of experience that informed great product decisions, as well as just collegiality. What ended up happening is computer science degrees got so popular and so valuable that those kids didn't have to pay for school much anymore. And their only work experience was like TAing a class, not actually getting their ass kicked digging ditches or anything. And the curriculum was rigorous enough that these guys didn't get to go study abroad. And there was no opportunity to go do volunteer work and live in the developing

Starting point is 00:13:40 world at all. So as a result, I actually found we were starting to have a generation of not just entitled, you know, people talk about the entitlement of the millennials and when it comes to work out things stuff, but they weren't just entitled. But they just had such narrow band perspectives on the world. They were missing empathy. So they weren't able to put themselves in the shoes of the folks, they might be building product for, what the problems of the world might be. And so I am constantly looking for opportunities for myself and for the founders you work with to broaden the scope that they have on the world, such that they can build something on a more informed basis, an emotionally informed basis. So I really think empathy isn't, it's a word that's

Starting point is 00:14:24 been kind of reduced to signal like, oh, somebody hurt their foot and I feel bad for them. Instead, I think much more poignantly, empathy is about, can I see the world through that person's lens? Can I figure out what matters to them? What are they afraid of? What's bothering them? What do they think is limiting them right now?'s their hope and if i can do that then it's a lot easier for me to build something for them and to sell it to them and to help them and to build a longer-term partnership with that person if you were giving a assignment to folks for books or experiences just kind of a short list for people who want to

Starting point is 00:15:03 develop that type of empathy, what would you put on the list? One of my favorite books that we give to most founders is Not Fade Away. I think it's like a belly flop pick on the cover. Yeah, belly flop pick, a short life, well lived story of Peter Barton. So first of all, just on a personal note, that guy's trajectory kind of followed mine. He was a ski bum who suddenly made a big attack. He was on the board of Yahoo. He worked at Liberty Media. And then he hits his 40s and says, okay, I've accomplished what I want to accomplish. I'm dialing it back. I just want to spend time with my family. And at that point, and this isn't a spoiler, it's literally how the book starts.

Starting point is 00:15:37 He finds out he has incurable stomach cancer. And so the book walks you through his biography, as well as the remaining time in his life. You will cry reading this book. It is inevitable. If you don't, I'm very worried about you. But you'll definitely cry. It'll be cathartic. But it's the kind of thing where you, it's an exercise in, okay, what's on the impact of his death on his family, on his friends, on his business partners, on his legacy, on the continuing responsibilities as a dad, even in the absence of, you know, even though he's passed on in the next life.

Starting point is 00:16:16 And it's an entire exercise in perspectives. And I think that book will not only leave you feeling incredibly lucky for what we've got here and where we are, but at the same time, will sharpen that sense of how do I put myself in somebody else's shoes. A similar book that I love, I'm going to get the title wrong. I think it's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. I think it's that. I remember you told me about this. This book is amazing. I haven't read it yet. So it's written in the second person, which I don't know of another book like

Starting point is 00:16:45 that, but it's just you, you, you, like you wake up in this room, like an old role player or something like that online. Dungeons and Dragons. You are in a room, there's a sarcophagus, open sarcophagus. No, it's a, but it says you wake up and you basically start the book in a slum in Pakistan. And it's just writing you about how you go through your day and the things that matter to you. And it turns out you're kind of entrepreneurial and you're willing to take some risks. And so you start working into other stations in life. And I don't want to give anything else about the book away, but you close that book and you feel like you've walked through 15 to 20 different lives in another world. And I just think more of that would be better for all of us. I think it'd be

Starting point is 00:17:32 better for our industry, for the depth and the impact of the products we build. I think it'd just be a lot better for getting along with each other. So, I mean, you and I have traveled to Ethiopia together doing work with Charity Water. It's hard to complain about a day's work back here in the United States when you have been in a village where they walk three or four hours each way to get water, where the kids are dying because they drink the same water that the cow poops into, where the women don't get an opportunity to go to school because they're carrying the water and on the way they might get eaten by a lion or raped. And it's really hard to find yourself complaining about our privileged US life. And that's something you could just tell working in a big company like Google, there were the people who would bitch and complain. I'm like, really? Really? This is a hard day. Microsoft launched a competitive product and that's our

Starting point is 00:18:21 horrible day. And I just think we'd all be much better off if we were able to find opportunities for our CS students to go study abroad, for our MBAs to actually spend some time around poor people and to start building these more diverse perspectives. When you look back on, since it's the big 4-0, when you were 30, who came to mind most when you thought of the word successful? And now at 40, who is the person who most comes to mind when you think of the word successful? So 30, that's a really, I got, let me think of where I was. So I guess, oh, I was at Google at the time. Who was most successful? Just when you were like, I want to be successful. And the person in your mind who embodied that most, I always wanted to be at the center of the deal.

Starting point is 00:19:06 And so at that point in my life, I still really admired, for instance, like a John Doerr or Mike Moritz. They were both on the board at Google. Brilliant guys who used their station in life to gather even smarter people to teach them about things. And then they would use their unique talents for storytelling and making composite kind of ideas come true to build companies. They became billionaires as a result. They had great families. They were just well respected by folks. I think I

Starting point is 00:19:38 still, that was kind of my definition of success at that point. At 40, and what I think my journey from 30 to 40 was about, was to stop trying to define or build some kind of model or have some kind of role model out there and stop trying to define myself externally, because that's a distraction. So there are times when you're doing a deal with John Doerr, you're across the table or something, you're like, hey, wait, that was fucked up. You know, like, I don't, wait, you're supposed to be my hero, my idol, and I don't like that movie just made or something like that, right? And I think, you know, anyone I've ever put on a pedestal, I've just been disappointed by doing so. I'm sorry about that, by the way. Yeah. Oh, you have no idea how far

Starting point is 00:20:16 you've fallen, Tim. But so I think for me, the exercise has been how much am I going to define that for myself, not by looking at somebody else. I recently got to have dinner next to Bill Gates, Bill and Melinda Gates, and I had been raised to hate him. Growing up at Google, he's a pretty evil person. And I was sitting next to him there, and I got a chance to basically interview him about how they have structured the foundation, how they think about which causes to take on, which challenges to tackle. And I mean, I walked out of there just deeply admiring their work. But I think I want to limit it to that and not get into like, is he a great family man? Is he, you know, he's still a son of a bitch when it comes to competing with him in software and his default browser and all

Starting point is 00:21:01 his antitrust behavior. But I really, so I'm trying to look at people and find kind of one aspect of them that I like. But for the most part, I've had to decide, okay, what's really important to me? That's my wife and my kids. And you know, I'm just not that social anymore. I just don't hang out with people that much. I don't go to conferences. I'm just not available for dinner. I would infinitely rather spend that time with them. And so that was a priority choice. I to make it internally not because i saw anybody else killing it that way you know i think i reflected back my own parents who who opted out of much more accelerated career paths so they could spend way more time with me and my brother and so that's a choice i had to make but i will say do you know about the the journal i found in my in my garage

Starting point is 00:21:42 and you should you should mention that i I have a quick, well, observation is if I could spend more time with Crystal instead of me, I would do the same thing. We actually met before you and I met at Fairtex Kickboxing way back in the day. Well, I was having a bunch of people down for cocktails. We came down from Truckee into the city, Crystal and I did.

Starting point is 00:21:59 I was like, let's get a bunch of people together for cocktails. I invite Tim, and Tim walks in, and he looks at my girlfriend. He's like, I think I know him. I'm like, yeah, sure you do, man. Everyone uses that to try and pick up my then girlfriend, now wife. He's like, no.

Starting point is 00:22:11 And then she says, yeah, I think I know you too. And I'm like, oh shit, here she goes. Where's this going? He's such a hunk. What do I have to offer? But yeah, you guys used to train in kickboxing. Yeah, she was hardcore. It was great.

Starting point is 00:22:22 It was. But I want to pause for a second. I do want to hear about the notebook for sure. Cause I think it's amazingly Nostradamus like, but you and your brother, so you and your brother have had a very different careers, have done very well respectively. What did your parents do that you are also trying to do with your kids? Yeah. So my brother, Brian Saka, he's one of the first YouTube sketch stars. He parlayed that into it. He sold some of the first web series ever.

Starting point is 00:22:49 Made a shit ton of money building web series and finding commercial partners for them and stuff. He's been in movies like Wolf of Wall Street. Wolf of Wall Street with Scorsese recently. And then just yesterday, we're allowed to talk about this now, his series on TBS got picked up. So he's going to be a co-star of a comedy series on TBS. Pretty funny. So what did our parents do? Well, first of all, they were just always involved. So my parents took vacations with us. We always went to national parks together. We never went to resort type places. We were just always together. And, you know, not only do they read with us like most parents, but my mom would pull us out of school

Starting point is 00:23:25 to take us to go see an author read at a bookstore an hour and a half away. She would literally just pull us out of school to go to a science museum. And so she was a college professor, and so she had a little flexibility in her schedule. She would take us to a park called Art Park up in Lewiston, New York.

Starting point is 00:23:43 Art Park. Art Park. It's a state park in New York State, in Lewiston, New York. Art Park. Art Park. It's a state park in New York State, in Lewiston, New York, where the whole thing is dedicated to different art media. And so you can paint there, you can blow glass, you can watch a performing arts troupe, kind of vaudevillian theater and stuff. And in my parents' eyes, that was just as or even maybe more important than going to the public school. And so I think that kind of enrichment and just being shown that people in all these walks of life were important and fascinating. You know, I grew up where by the time I got to college, I had never heard of an investment banker. I didn't know that was a job. I'd been exposed to,

Starting point is 00:24:19 to writers, to artists, to chefs, to musicians, to to engineers to lots of teachers to lawyers to doctors but it was never you know it wasn't necessarily driven in any particular way to kind of get us to a particular career at all i will say there was something else my parents did that's pretty unique and it was called uh my brother and i referred to as a sweet and sour summer so my parents would send us for the... Sounds like a Chinese restaurant. They would, yeah. They would send us for the first half of the summer to an internship with a relative or friend of the family who had an interesting job. So at 12, I went and interned with my godbrother

Starting point is 00:24:59 who was a lobbyist in DC. So I would go along with him to pitch congressmen. I had one tie. And for work, I was a pretty good writer. So I'd write up with him to pitch congressman. I had one tie and for work, I was a pretty good writer. So I'd write up one page summaries of the bills we were pitching. And I would literally sit there with these congressmen with these filthy miles, you know, the Alabama Senator and stuff like that and watch the pitch happen. And it was awesome. I learned so much. I think I built so much confidence and really honed my storytelling skills. But then from there, I would come home and work in a construction outfit with just a nasty, nasty job. I mean, whether it was hosing off the equipment that had been used

Starting point is 00:25:31 to fix septic systems, gas and shit up, dragging shit around the yard, filling propane tanks, just being a junior guy on the podium tall and quite literally getting my ass kicked by whichever parolee was angry at me that day for minimum wage. I think it was part of their master plan, which is there's a world of cool opportunities out there for you, but let's build within you a sense of not just work ethic, but also a little kick in the ass by why you don't want to end up in one of these real jobs. And so let's see if you can find in yourself the drive to go and do whatever it is to. And did they choose, for instance, you had the introduction to say the God brother, I think you said, for the lobbying.

Starting point is 00:26:16 Did they also help organize the sour part two to each summer? Yeah. So the guy ran that construction company and equipment rental company is my dad's best friend. He was under strict orders to make sure we had the roughest day there. Special treatment. Yeah. It was. Yeah orders to make sure we had the roughest day there. They were special treatment. Yeah, we were treated specially shittily. So we were hammered there. And by the way, as a result, I know a lot about construction equipment. This is a superpower of mine. I can literally, from air compressors to ditch witches to anything you need, Milwaukee sawzalls,

Starting point is 00:26:46 I literally have incredible amounts of knowledge in that space. It also just reminded me of something you mentioned long ago, and I'm not sure if it's still true, but you said one of the things that you look for, and it's maybe not a disqualifier, but in founders is a track record of having had at least one shitty job. Yeah. Well, I particularly look for that in hiring. So I want people who've lived, studied, traveled extensively abroad. I want people who've been exposed to poor people. And by the way, the lived, studied, traveled, worked extensively abroad is because you can get away with a very comfortable life in the United States as an English speaker, particularly as a white person. You never really have to ask for anybody's help. You're not being harassed by the police. It's pretty easy pickings. You find yourself overseas, particularly in a

Starting point is 00:27:26 place with a non-romance language where you can't make out the signs yourself. And you have to stop and ask for help from complete strangers. You literally have to be entirely vulnerable to people you've never met and just expose yourself. And they could send you into a dark alley and beat the high of you and take your money. Or like most people on the planet, they'll be really nice and try to help you, even if you don't share a word of English in common. And I think there is something incredibly formative about that experience of having the humility that comes from at asking for help and realizing that makes them a more powerful CEO than a less powerful CEO or more powerful manager than a less powerful manager. And so I look for people for whom athletics is a big part of their life. I don't think it needs to be team sports necessarily. I think you can be a great individual athlete. You know, maybe you train with other folks, et cetera, but I think it just shows not only some self-discipline, but also just a value on the introspection that comes with athletics. You actually care about yourself.

Starting point is 00:28:25 I think there's a little bit more balance in that life. I think it also teaches you to contend with losing and sort of viewing that as feedback and not some type of failure death sentence. Sure. And then seeing, I think, the temporary and how temporary pain is. And that's temporary, glorious forever. Yeah. No, it's true.

Starting point is 00:28:43 So I did an Ironman man and when i was doing that in the i had a fever that day i had a 103 degree fever but my parents had traveled out to watch the race and so i didn't want to not do it and the advil worked for like the swim and the first part of the bike and then i was just i was a mess but i remember thinking no matter what happens i will be in my bed tonight and you, you know, this is a very, very temporary moment. In 2009, I rode my bike across the country. And I remember, you know, it was 35 days of riding basically 100 miles a day. I remember multiple days out there, I'm like, I will be in my bed tonight. And then in the other ear is this voice, and then I have to fucking do it again tomorrow. Tell people about this notebook.

Starting point is 00:29:25 Yeah, it was funny. It was just two years ago I found this in my garage, and it's been weighing on me, and particularly this week turning 40. So I was 19. No, I was 20 years old, actually. I was 20. I was living in Ireland going to school there.

Starting point is 00:29:40 I spent two out of my four years abroad while at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. So I'm living in Ireland, and there was an expat girl in one of my classes. And we were basically flirting with each other by taking a notebook and writing in 10 questions for the other person to answer. And then you get, you get it back and you answer 10 questions and write 10 new questions. We pass back and forth while we were supposed to be studying like 20th century Irish film or something like that. And at one point, one of the questions was, what do you want to be when you grow up? So I'm 20. I'm living in Cork, Ireland. We basically would start drinking stout around 1130 a.m. every day. It was like second and third meal was stout. And by that point,

Starting point is 00:30:23 I'd still never heard of investment investment banker I definitely never heard of a venture capitalist and so I just write in there I said I don't know what the what the job is called but I know it's going to involve a lot of talking on the phone a lot of negotiating a lot of yelling at people high risk high reward unbelievably high stakes I'm going to do it part-time from the mountains part-time from the beach and whatever it is I'm going to be done with it before I'm 40. And so two years ago, my wife and I are standing in our garage in our mountain house, cleaning it out because we're moving some stuff down to our beach house. And I find this old notebook and I'm like, Hey, look at this. And we're flipping through it.

Starting point is 00:31:02 And I find that answer. I just really choked up. It was incredibly weird self-prophecy that I kind of laid out exactly what my job was, but I also felt a certain amount of pressure. Like, so what do I do now that I'm 40? Do I keep doing this job or not? Or do I need to, do I need to listen to the scrolls? Like shatter some type of cosmic continuum if you don't follow the prophecy. What would your advice be to college students who are just about to graduate, who have no idea kind of what they should focus on, what they should do? Do you have any thoughts, kind of general suggestions that you would make to someone in that position?

Starting point is 00:31:40 Well, I did give a graduation speech. I think it was two years ago now at the University of Minnesota school. I didn't really have any ties to. And they reached out to an agent who hired me for it. And that was daunting, right? Because I give speeches all the time. And it's usually to a room full of like Conoco executives in Kissimmee, Florida. I'm just there for the check. But a graduation speech is intense. That's hopefully memorable, hopefully formative. Hopefully you're talking to people who have incredibly open minds and it's such a meaningful transition point in their lives. So everyone should go watch it. But what I focused on was be interesting. I think you're here for a week where I've gathered my favorite friends. And one of the reasons why the week is so fun for everybody is that everyone else here is totally interesting, right?

Starting point is 00:32:29 Not necessarily a titan of a business, but just interesting, compassionate, adventuresome people who just go for it, who are up for it. And I think as I look around who I've hired, who I like to work with, who I back, they're interesting. They're people you want to be around. You want to spend time with. You want to hear their answers. You want them to influence your thinking. You want them to push you a little bit to try things that you haven't

Starting point is 00:32:53 tried. You want them to teach you. And if I could give advice to someone who feels like they're looking at a maze of opportunities and none of them is particularly presented or they're not sure how they want to get ahead or distinguish themselves. I think pursuing a course of life that embraces interestingness. And by the way, I don't think people are born interesting. I think it's actually something you can accrue. Living abroad, volunteering for a group like Cherrywater and going into the field, taking an actual service job, going in

Starting point is 00:33:25 and talking to the people around you and having meaningful conversations, including the homeless people, including your neighbors and people who are actually working for wage, getting involved in politics briefly. You know, I think I campaigned for Obama a couple of times and I was everything from one of his top fundraisers to, I actually spent time in the field in Elko, Nevada, which put me into mobile home living rooms of some of the poorest people in the country who somehow are supporting the Republican Party in that election. And it was surreal, but it gave me a life perspective that I don't think I would have had otherwise. So I think those kinds of things make for much more compelling people and will start to present career opportunities.

Starting point is 00:34:06 So one question that I'd love to ask is when you were sort of in your most recent sweet spot of wealth accumulation, whether that was related to what you did with Twitter or otherwise, were there any particular shifts or routines, habits that helped you kind of maintain that peak output or achieve what you did? I mean, you know my personal story. So I've certainly been fortunate to make a bunch of money in the last few years. But in bubble one, I made a bunch of money, levered up, lost it all and a lot more, leaving me millions of dollars in the hole. I was able to work it back out to zero by 2005.

Starting point is 00:34:41 And since then, a lot of work, a few ups and downs, but it's worked out pretty well. And it's looking good for the road ahead too. So that said, I don't think I have a calendaring function or an email function or anything like that. That's like a hack. As much as I would point to two things that I think shifted the nature of my business. One was that before I had really made any money at all, before I had any business doing this, my then girlfriend is now my wife, Crystal, and I moved out of Silicon Valley up to Truckee. I mean, literally took ourselves out of the game as an angel and venture investor. Like, how do you manage a venture practice from up in Lake Tahoe? And yet what I realized was that being

Starting point is 00:35:25 in the city, I was just playing defense the whole time. I was taking these coffee meetings, listening to these poor pitches, being friendly and kind of obliging people with their ideas. But I'd spend all day in these meetings and I'd get home and I'd be like, shit, I haven't actually accomplished anything. I would go to the cocktail and dinner parties I was invited to, but they weren't actually the people I wanted to spend the time with. I was go to the cocktail and dinner parties I was invited to, but they weren't actually the people I wanted to spend the time with. I was just reacting to everything rather than actually going out and playing offense. And so Crystal and I moved up to Tahoe and we quite literally built a list of people we wanted to know better. And we just started inviting them to come up and stay

Starting point is 00:36:01 with us in Tahoe. You were definitely one of those people, right? And you came up and spent a lot of time with us there. I also started writing lists of the companies that I wanted to get to know better. And I just went in deep with them and asked them to come up to Tahoe. And so I was playing offense now. And I had a perfect excuse for why I couldn't get coffee with all the randoms. I'm like, hey, I'm sorry. I'm just not in San Francisco. I'm three hours away.

Starting point is 00:36:22 There were a couple of obsessives who drove all the way up there. But for the most part, I was able to pick and choose the interactions that I thought were going to be most valuable to me, to my wife, and to my business. And that was a huge shift. And it was risky as hell because I mean, I couldn't even really afford the house we bought up there when we first bought it. $600,000 three-bedroom house. And I certainly didn't have a strong enough brand that I could afford to just walk away from the game. But I made a conscious decision to play offense from up there. And that worked out. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Momentus. Momentus 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

Starting point is 00:37:14 testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly. Personally, I've been using Momentus Mag 3-in-8, L-theanine, and apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Momentus Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrett. Their products contain high-quality ingredients that are third-party tested, which in this case means informed, sport, and or NSF certified, so you can trust that what is on

Starting point is 00:37:54 the label is in the bottle and nothing else. So check it out. Visit livemomentous.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout for 20% off. That's livemomentous, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com And now, Scott Glenn, whose acting career spans nearly 60 years in film, including starring roles in Apocalypse Now, Urban Cowboy, The Right Stuff, The Hunt for Red October, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Bourne Ultimatum, and television, including HBO's The Leftovers and The White Lotus, Hulu's Castle Rock, and Marvel's Daredevil and The Defenders. 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

Starting point is 00:39:18 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 planet. She's really a good potter. She was accepted to a summer workshop, was invitation only,

Starting point is 00:40:03 to the best ceramic artist in this country. And it was going to last all summer long. And we were living in LA. 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, you know, I I'm, 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

Starting point is 00:40:38 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 mountain, 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.

Starting point is 00:41:24 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.

Starting point is 00:42:14 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 flume. That wouldn't work.

Starting point is 00:43:05 So we did that, and 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

Starting point is 00:43:32 and took me into 511++ 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?

Starting point is 00:44:01 And he said, you can do this. When you go back to L.A., 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 who don't have the context. It's a small town.

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

Starting point is 00:45:09 And then we moved to LA 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, the shooting was a year and a half, so I was a short timer at seven months.

Starting point is 00:45:43 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 la 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.

Starting point is 00:46:21 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.

Starting point is 00:46:54 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. We might go back to that. Okay, fine. That's nice. He said, what do you want? And I said, I want to be in the end of the movie.

Starting point is 00:47:14 And he said, you can't be in the end of the movie, Scott. It's absolutely completely cast. 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

Starting point is 00:47:55 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.

Starting point is 00:48:38 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 worked 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.

Starting point is 00:48:57 So they kicked me out of Universal. So now we're back from Idaho. Yeah. 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.

Starting point is 00:49:15 And I reached up, and there were tears coming out of my eyes. I was on television in a beretta I had done, and I pointed at 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,

Starting point is 00:50:07 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, 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.

Starting point is 00:50:53 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.

Starting point is 00:51:17 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've got like, I think it was, I can give you 2,000 bucks. And I said, great. So Carol and I went to Mexico, and I was warned when I went down there. 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.

Starting point is 00:51:56 And I was told by a lot of people when I went down there that you're going to love Rod Steiger. He works the same way you do. He's a member of the actor's studio. And you're kind of guy. But watch out for Burt Lancaster. He's an old-school movie star. He'll get in your key light. He'll screw you up. He'll intentionally ruin two shots,

Starting point is 00:52:14 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.

Starting point is 00:52:49 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.

Starting point is 00:53:14 Would you throw me 11 place or 12 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, Burke walks over to me and he said, so Scott, has anybody ever taught you the difference between working with

Starting point is 00:53:45 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 content. He was the

Starting point is 00:54:28 real deal. I love Burt. It was like, what people had told me about Rod and Burt was like, he could flip it around. So on the way home, this is a long We got all the time in the world. So we're coming back from Mexico. We went to Paramount

Starting point is 00:54:43 to see a friend of Carol's and mine that on their advice, Carol got pregnant. They said, you guys have got to have a baby. And we were really close. Jim was the director, Jim Bridges. And Jack Larson was his partner, lover, whatever. And they were great guys, super great guys. 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,

Starting point is 00:55:12 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 bucks. 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

Starting point is 00:55:58 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.

Starting point is 00:56:35 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,

Starting point is 00:57:06 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. All right. 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.

Starting point is 00:57:37 And they said, what are you doing here, man? And I told them what I was doing. They went, we don't believe this. We got our buddy coming out. He'll be out of here in 15 20 minutes you gotta meet him he's a bank robber and a bull rider and i went yeah mexican guy 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.

Starting point is 00:58:05 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 all have it. And I said, what's that stand for?

Starting point is 00:58:18 And he said, judge, jury, and a half-assed lawyer. So I said, okay. And he said, and you got to get tattoos on your forearm, Nuestra lawyer. So I said, okay. And he said, you got to get tattoos on your forearm,

Starting point is 00:58:28 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 meaning of that? That's the in-prison organization of Latinos. Ah, I see, I see.

Starting point is 00:58:42 That he was adopted into. So he gave me that to do and then i said is there anything about being a bull rider that bull riders do that i could learn that most people can't do and he showed me 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,

Starting point is 00:59:20 hopefully 1,000. I get down to Houston. Jim said, I'm 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, Debra Winger. And both she, John Travolta, Irving Azoff, and Jim Bridges always all kind of like shoved me down Paramount's throat.

Starting point is 00:59:44 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 Wes Hightower. It was funny because when I read the script,

Starting point is 01:00:00 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, 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 not a real bull, but a bull machine. Yeah, mechanical bull.

Starting point is 01:00:25 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 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,

Starting point is 01:01:01 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.

Starting point is 01:01:39 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 down 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,

Starting point is 01:02:07 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 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 going on the phone was ringing i pick it up and it's carol and she said i'm back in idaho i can't handle living

Starting point is 01:02:41 with west high tower 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.

Starting point is 01:03:04 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 and 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're gonna go back to the origin story okay yeah home we were renting this house with this family that had come up with us. We were sharing this house. We had a bedroom.

Starting point is 01:03:52 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

Starting point is 01:04:23 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 when he went, oh my God, something that he saw about me, he wrote the script for Urban Cowboy with Aaron Latham,

Starting point is 01:05:09 the guy who had originally written a column in, I don't know if it was the Times, someplace in New York about ghillies and bull machines and all that stuff. 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 i'm not in the part i don't want to lose it and jim said well we've got to put you on on screen and i said and deborah 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

Starting point is 01:05:46 and i thought dear lord don't let this go bad but here we go when they were watching deborah and i walked over to him and i went hey and he looked up at me and i said you're sitting on my fucking seat and he looked at me and i thought what's gonna happen and he got up and walked away and i went and sat down. That was my screen test. 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. 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,

Starting point is 01:06:33 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 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. Yeah. 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.

Starting point is 01:07:12 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,

Starting point is 01:07:31 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. And this was Pittsburgh? Yeah. At any rate, I decided, you know, two things.

Starting point is 01:07:58 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 yeah because where i came from there was nobody dodged the draft right and the draft was happening i see so for me and i knew even with a ba in college i had so little technical ability 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.

Starting point is 01:08:49 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 scarlet fever as well. Because of the scarlet fever. And they laughed.

Starting point is 01:09:12 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 are other ways of doing your time

Starting point is 01:09:45 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,

Starting point is 01:10:31 well, you've got the job. I came out and there was a Joe Jacoby, one of the reporters there, said, you should be happy. You don't look happy. And I said, 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? Were you transcribing or what was the job? The job was cover reporter. I got it.

Starting point is 01:10:59 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?

Starting point is 01:11:36 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?

Starting point is 01:12:35 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.

Starting point is 01:12:59 And she said, why don't you go to New York and take an acting class? And I went, 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.

Starting point is 01:13:34 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.

Starting point is 01:14:00 I called it up, called Berghoff Studios, and this guy named Bill Hickey, who was one of America's greatest character actors, nominated for, he might've gotten an Academy Award for, God, I can't think of it. Anyway, Bill answers the phone and he says, yeah, work on this, bring it by Berghoff Studios Wednesday morning. It was, oh dad, poor dad, mom was hugging you in the closet and I'm feeling so sad, was the play. 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

Starting point is 01:14:42 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 turned to the other students and he said, Scott's not going to finish this.

Starting point is 01:15:18 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 a horribly lazy human being. Anyway, I told my dad

Starting point is 01:15:57 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. And 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.

Starting point is 01:16:30 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.

Starting point is 01:16:56 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

Starting point is 01:17:40 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,

Starting point is 01:18:33 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.

Starting point is 01:19:07 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

Starting point is 01:19:46 married and I told my dad that we grew up Swedenborgians and I was planning on converting to Judaism. I don'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.

Starting point is 01:20:19 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? I said, something I said. He walked over and hit me with an uppercut and dropped me on my ass like, wham. This is somebody who had never given me a spanking.

Starting point is 01:20:53 Yeah. 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. 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

Starting point is 01:21:20 alone in that. Can you say more about the decision to convert? Yeah, I had a friend, his name was Milton Bedol, 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- Why did you say that to him? The incorporation for getting married?

Starting point is 01:21:56 Yeah. I said, I'm going with Carol. I want you to make me a Jew. He'd met her. And so I said, I want you to make me a Jew. And he said, schmuck, 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

Starting point is 01:22:25 highway robbery. And he said, you've read the Talmud. And I said, some of it. And 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 Koran. But if you're asking me of all that stuff, what resonates the most with me, it would be Lao Tzu's The Way of Life.

Starting point is 01:22:46 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.

Starting point is 01:22:59 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 go 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. And I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm converting you. And I said, after me, Olof, Beth, Gimel, Doth. And I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm converting you.

Starting point is 01:23:25 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 learn about Judaism, he was a closet director. He would say, I want to come back on stage in two days.

Starting point is 01:23:50 I want you to try this. I went, 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 what is his writing or the conglomerate known as lao tzu the sort of 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

Starting point is 01:24:20 this later on or not talk about it you shoot i know do you know who Brian Enos is another name I did 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 will 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., 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,

Starting point is 01:25:12 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.

Starting point is 01:25:50 And for me, the mystical side of every religion is not the impractical. That's the practical side. The impractical side is orthodox. It 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.

Starting point is 01:26:16 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. 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 Koran,

Starting point is 01:27:09 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.

Starting point is 01:28:17 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, enacting 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

Starting point is 01:29:18 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 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.

Starting point is 01:30:13 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

Starting point is 01:30:44 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 gonna 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.

Starting point is 01:31:33 There was one scene at the very beginning of Act II where I'm supposed to walk on, 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.

Starting point is 01:32:16 So full frontal nudity, fine. But doing that, oddly, kind of, after the first night of doing it, it was was like i don't know whether liberate is the right word but i was just going to use 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

Starting point is 01:32:52 about what I would do, what prop I would pick up, anything. Just let... Well, let's see what's going on here. I'm going to 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 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

Starting point is 01:33:11 for me. And I just know it in the way that I felt the same way about West 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. 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

Starting point is 01:33:48 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? 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.

Starting point is 01:34:15 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,

Starting point is 01:34:40 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, I've never... 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 sentence and then the last sentence and the next last sentence and then

Starting point is 01:35:05 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 fascinating instead of the ending being this hanging unfamiliarity you look at why i remember it as you get near the ending 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

Starting point is 01:35:49 can you set it up so that i at least give me a shot at doing in one take and she said yeah okay i can do that so we set 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 enacted 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

Starting point is 01:36:43 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

Starting point is 01:37:06 be willing the next time we do this to have a little piece of you watching it so that when i talk about parts of the 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.

Starting point is 01:37:51 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?

Starting point is 01:38:03 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 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.

Starting point is 01:38:46 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.

Starting point is 01:39:36 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. 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

Starting point is 01:40:18 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

Starting point is 01:40:59 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 or 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

Starting point is 01:41:48 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 would 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?

Starting point is 01:42:35 He supported two villages in the Philippines with all of his pay and wouldn't let anybody write about it. 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 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,

Starting point is 01:43:11 okay, there are two basic schools of acting that even to this day that when you watch people work, and you know which one they're coming from, one is Rada, really great, great actors all have this, which is technique. You get down the accent and the physical characteristics Rada, really great Brit 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.

Starting point is 01:43:49 Most of what you still see then there's the russian school which is stanislavski bolasovsky and that is you begin with the inside of the character does this person share my same the way i look at life philosophy 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 and say action. And other times he would say, how are they

Starting point is 01:44:45 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 pox and hon and i had a room at pox and hon Inn that I basically kept all my crap in. I was living at the time with this group of people called the Ifagal

Starting point is 01:45:29 that were on the set. But one afternoon I was back at the hotel with Moreland, 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,

Starting point is 01:45:59 hiding behind it. The other one, and I think it was satisfaction 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 they all left and went upstairs one of the producers i think think, was a great Frederick, said about the little girl who was in dance. 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.

Starting point is 01:46:53 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. And 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

Starting point is 01:47:33 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 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 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.

Starting point is 01:48:14 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

Starting point is 01:48:46 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

Starting point is 01:49:20 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. And 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,

Starting point is 01:49:39 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 is 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. 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,

Starting point is 01:50:20 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.

Starting point is 01:50:43 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 breath of air, your stomach goes out, your diaphragm is working. Right.

Starting point is 01:51:27 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, 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 got in your way, that's really a bad idea because you're going to jack up your heart rate.

Starting point is 01:52:07 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.

Starting point is 01:52:23 After the ear massage, I tap my head. Brain tap. Is this 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. You're in shorts and a sweatshirt right now. Yeah, and I slip on these slip-on shoes

Starting point is 01:52:45 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

Starting point is 01:53:18 because I think, whoa, that was pretty cool. 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,

Starting point is 01:53:37 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?

Starting point is 01:54:16 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 makes so much sense we spend so

Starting point is 01:55:00 much of our time looking at cell phones and computers and driving and doing so much stuff like that or like that right with your head it would be good to do that a bit get your neck extended instead of so i and pitch 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 it's usually it's like 90 to 100 out this is yards or feet feet i guess this is just moves oh okay one two three i got like that that's quite a bit good for you i don't even know if i could do that so that's one 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.

Starting point is 01:55:56 And then what I've been doing a lot is quick and dead. For me, that's just 10 kettlebell swings, either with 32 pound i don't know the kgs in the 30s and probably 16 or 24 kilos wow or 52 52 okay 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 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.

Starting point is 01:56:48 The close hand, more tricep type push-ups. Yeah, right. Back, corner, max, or so. Prison push-ups. So I'll do 10 of those, 10 of those, wait a minute, back and forth, and I'll do five rounds. So inside of five rounds, I've done 100 KB swings and 100 push-ups then I'm pretty much done with like specific working out if I want to do I used to do you know work out with like dumbbells and barbells and

Starting point is 01:57:17 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.

Starting point is 01:58:08 For real. And those days are long gone. Yeah, yeah. So now also if I drink too much tequila, I'm going to really feel it for two or three days. All that stuff. The one place that I'm lucky, I'm not bragging is really true is my reaction to him. I'm still as quick as I used to be, but what I'm,

Starting point is 01:58:32 I realize is that could turn into, and for people who can't see, you just threw a jab right in my face. What I realized is that could drop off 30 seconds from now. I'm 85 is at some, 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.

Starting point is 01:59:07 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.

Starting point is 01:59:35 Yeah. I'll 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 of the tension out of my shoulders and my hands and everything. And then I just start breathing deeply. If you're in that position, you won't be able to vertically breathe. You will not be able to. Let me just describe this taking in big breaths you're gonna be introduced to your diaphragm like right let me explain this

Starting point is 02:00:11 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 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

Starting point is 02:00:53 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'd 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, 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.

Starting point is 02:01:30 I can't wait to see this, by the way. 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,

Starting point is 02:01:57 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 it may not be true for other people I don't know but for me it's true the thoughts are either trying to figure out problems which we all do what's 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 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,

Starting point is 02:02:41 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

Starting point is 02:03:41 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 this these breath holds and i started doing them here while i got the part of and i remember at one point this is the part of the shop i sit upright in bed and i yell whoa and carol is 2 30 in the morning and carol says what what i said i found my manatee and his name

Starting point is 02:04:27 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. Not too long. It might even be longer now.

Starting point is 02:05:14 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, that's 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.

Starting point is 02:05:39 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 career-changing role. Yeah. And it seems like that's happened a few times. How would you explain that? I would like to be some kind of intellectual giant, which I am definitely not.

Starting point is 02:06:15 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 know i'm the world's worst teacher i don't do anything right i don't get a consistent spot well and i don't do any of this i just been doing it since i was so young i just do it and it

Starting point is 02:06:59 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

Starting point is 02:07:47 civilian stuff lapd sis come on out to the eagle's nest and meet this guy scotty reeds and we become we took a course we become really good friends and is's the real deal. 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. Yeah, don't tell that at home, kids. 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

Starting point is 02:08:34 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, 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.

Starting point is 02:09:08 Show up tomorrow with coffee at 845. Not before, not after. And I'll teach you how to scuba dive and certify you. And then he walks out of the bar. And the owner of the bar, this guy John Ireland, 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 Stewart.

Starting point is 02:09:29 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, who's now a card, is number one. And Jacques Costeau said he's arguably the greatest scuba diver that ever lived.

Starting point is 02:09:54 That's who's going to teach you and certify you. And he did. 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 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

Starting point is 02:10:21 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 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?

Starting point is 02:10:57 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 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, I'll come after you. He said, just you jump off and establish a hard arch.

Starting point is 02:11:17 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 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 pantomime anymore.

Starting point is 02:11:40 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's not like oh this person's 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

Starting point is 02:12:23 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 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

Starting point is 02:13:22 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 seller 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.

Starting point is 02:14:01 So that's what I'm going to do when I get to Thailand. And you've done a lot of, I mean, you've done a lot of knife work also. I imagine that some of the knife stuff. I actually 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.

Starting point is 02:14:24 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. So there's still hope for me.

Starting point is 02:14:46 12 years, yeah. 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 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.

Starting point is 02:15:27 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.

Starting point is 02:15:47 But Fred was an amazing athlete. Fred had a silver boot in boxe fonce, savate. Savate, yeah. And when he was in Thailand, he trained Muay Thai with the people from Rajadhanur. Oh, yeah, Arashat. 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,

Starting point is 02:16:14 but they had heavy bags and stuff like that, too. You know, and Fred told me that God gave me a right hook, and I said, yeah, I know that part. 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

Starting point is 02:17:20 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.

Starting point is 02:17:38 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.

Starting point is 02:17:58 How did the two of you meet? In a movie theater in New York. The girl I had been kind of not really living with, but semi-living with off and on, and I had broken up and she just tried to kill herself. And I had a friend who now is teaching school in Iraq, of all places. His name is Jeff Siggins. At any rate, he called me up and he said,

Starting point is 02:18:21 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.

Starting point is 02:18:42 And I'd fallen in lust probably at least a couple thousand times in my life and pursued that with full vigor, but I'd never really fallen in love. Anyway, so the movie came to an end and everybody got up to leave. And for whatever reason, I turned to Carol and I said, I think I want to sit through this and watch it again. She said, yeah, me too. So we sat through the whole movie again, not even touching. And the movie came to an end. And in that period of time, it was like magical. We walked out of the theater and there was probably half a foot of snow everywhere. So we went out and we played in the snow. It was getting late. And Carol said, and I was was doing a play but i was off that night she said you want to spend the night and i said yeah oh yeah so i went over and she cooked

Starting point is 02:19:32 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 is a 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 gonna say goodbye to her and i thought i'm not gonna even try to hug her and kiss her because if I do this and she does one of those pull-aways, my whole world will collapse. How I knew that, I don't know. So I said I had a really good time and held my hand. I shook her hang up.

Starting point is 02:20:33 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 got a date tonight, but you know where the fridge is. And there's the TV, and so knock yourself out.

Starting point is 02:21:01 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.

Starting point is 02:21:23 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 again and i went yes she shut the door walked into the living room and that was

Starting point is 02:21:57 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 and you've got you've got shopping to do for me today i'll 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, I don't know. And maybe I don't want to know, but even with, he's no longer alive,

Starting point is 02:22:34 but I remember when she and I first met Freddie Fields, who was the toughest, hardest ass agent Hollywood is old school has 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.

Starting point is 02:23:08 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.

Starting point is 02:23:34 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- Wasn't Nureyev. 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

Starting point is 02:24:00 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 Nureyev 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

Starting point is 02:24:36 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 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. Yeah, yeah. They had a pool. Tosca's. Tosca's was famous. And we were shooting pool and drinking. Me in a minor way, he in a major way.

Starting point is 02:24:57 Vodka. I remember at one point I said to him, boy, you Russians can really hold your vodka. And he stopped, got really angry, looked at me, and 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 naria he was in the some ways the best physical shape of any human being i've ever been around i watched him go

Starting point is 02:25:39 down a flight of long stairs on his hands i mean he, he would invite me to come and watch the New York City Ballet workout, and Makarova, who was the best premium 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. I mean, like, stuff that triple black belts and Shotokan couldn't even dream about doing. These people did easily.

Starting point is 02:26:24 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. Yeah. What does poetry mean to you?

Starting point is 02:26:40 Why write poetry? Why read poetry? Poetry to me is is the along with physical art scratching on the side of a wall the first this is one of one of your books friction zone it's the most elemental way that human beings have to communicate ideas and feelings real deep ideas and feelings, 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.

Starting point is 02:27:26 And he did all this stuff and was, you know, an outrageous coxswain. And mainly he was a poet. So I've lived with the belief that I have that in me. 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?

Starting point is 02:27:50 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

Starting point is 02:28:04 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.

Starting point is 02:28:35 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 or not. That's so true.

Starting point is 02:28:54 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?

Starting point is 02:29:19 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'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

Starting point is 02:30:12 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 bike. I like 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.

Starting point is 02:30:42 I would give them both the lessons I learned from Sir Lawrence and from my dad, which is if you love it, make it your life, right along with that, be tenacious. Learn that the most important thing about being knocked down is getting back up. And if you can put yourself in the spot where you say, I don't care how many times I get knocked down,

Starting point is 02:31:03 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 Lawrence 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.

Starting point is 02:31:48 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 uh you know 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,

Starting point is 02:32:26 maybe beyond. I don't know about it. There was a time in my life, and I have witnesses that, because it sounds out, I could with steel sights hit 600 yards. Whether I can right now at 85, probably not, but who knows?

Starting point is 02:32:41 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. So thank you so much for the time. 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

Starting point is 02:33:32 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 Shopify,

Starting point is 02:34:15 one of my absolute favorite companies, and they make some of my favorite products. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. And I've known the team since 2008 or 2009. But prior to that, I wish I had personally had Shopify in the early 2000s when I was running my own e-commerce business. I tell that story in the 4-Hour Workweek, but the tools then were absolutely atrocious and I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. In fact, it was you guys, my dear readers, who introduced me to Shopify when I polled all of you about best e-commerce platforms around 2009, and they've only become better and better since. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your IPO, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run, and grow your business without

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Starting point is 02:35:40 step of the way if you have questions. This is Possibility powered by Shopify. So check it out. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify. That's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y, shopify.com slash Tim. Go to shopify.com slash Tim to take your business to the next level today. One more time, all lowercase, shopify.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while

Starting point is 02:36:31 on the run, which is, for me, a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And 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? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #765: Chris Sacca and Scott Glenn

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