#765: Chris Sacca and Scott Glenn

27:12This is a superpower of mine. I can literally, from air compressors to ditch witches to anything you need, Milwaukee Sawzalls, 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 disqualify, 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.

27:46And 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 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.

28:28And I think there is something incredibly formative about that experience of having the humility that comes from having asked for help. The best managers in the world are people who are great at asking for help and realizing that makes them a more powerful CEO than a less powerful CEO or more powerful manager than a less powerful manager. 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.

29:01You actually care about yourself. And 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, you know. And that's temporary, glorious forever. Yeah, no, it's true. so I did an Ironman 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 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 yeah it was funny it was just just two years ago I found this in my garage and it's really it's been weighing on me and particularly this week turning 40 so I was 19 I was 20 years old actually I was 20 I was living in Ireland going to school there I spent two out of my four years abroad while at the school of foreign service at Georgetown and 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're 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 11 30 a.m every day it was like second and third meal with stout and by that point i'd still never heard of investment banker i definitely never heard of venture capitalists.

31:04And so I just write in there, I said, I don't know what the job is called, but I know it's going to involve a lot of talking on the phone, a lot of negotiating, a lot of yelling at people, high risk, high reward, unbelievably high stakes. 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 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.

32:04If you, 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? 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.

32:36And I'm just there for the check, but a graduation speech is intense. That's a 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? Not necessarily a titan of business, but just interesting, compassionate, adventuresome people who just go for it, who are up for it.

33:14And 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 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.

33:48And 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 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 too. 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.

34:31And 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. So one question that I'd love to ask is when you were sort of in your most recent sweet spot of wealth accumulation, whether that was related to what you did with Twitter or otherwise, were there any particular shifts or routines, habits that helped you sort of maintain that peak output or achieve what you did? 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, was able to work it back out to zero by 2005.

35:18And since then, you know, 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 a, you know, an angel and venture investor.

35:56Like, how do you, how do you manage a venture practice from up in Lake Tahoe? And yet what I realized was that being in the city, I was just playing defense the whole time. 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 just reacting to everything rather than actually going out and playing offense.

36:30And 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 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 there were a couple 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.

37:13And 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.

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38:52And 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. I have an embarrassment of riches here. We could start just about anywhere, but I thought I would start with saying that I'm in part so happy to be having this conversation because even among all of the hundreds of people I've interviewed, if we look at people in their 30s and 40s, they don't check career, fitness, and relationships, but you seem to have 50-plus years checking all three of those boxes.

39:46It's hard to find three out of three in the young guns who have sort of wide open field ahead of them, and I want to dig into that, but I thought I would start with Idaho because we're sitting here in your home. It's been a long time since I've been here and you have elk in the backyard. This is not what most people imagine when they think Hollywood star. How did you end up in Idaho? A bunch of years ago. So we've been up here for, I'm not sure the exact number, but in the mid to high 40 years, we were living in LA. my wife probably throws on the wheel as well as any two dozen people on the plan.

40:30She's really a good potter. She was accepted to a summer workshop, was invitation only, to the best ceramic artist in this country. And it was going to last all summer long. And we were living in L.A. We had a place in Topanga. So she said we had a VW van, typical hippy-dippy, live out of the back of it. She was going up with our two daughters to do this workshop, and she said, well, you're going to come with me. And I went, no, you know, I'm waiting for the phone to ring to tell me whether I've got a job or not. And she said, does the phone really have to ring for you to kick you in your ass to go anywhere?

41:14can't you just do something on your own? And I went, I don't know. And she said, well, you can, because there's a group of people who are leaving from a place she wasn't sure where, as it turns out, was Chalice, Idaho, that they're leaving on the following dates, which was like a week after her workshop started. She said they're going into an area called the Bighorn Crags, the biggest primitive area in the contiguous United States, bigger than anywhere except Alaska. And they're going to be doing high mountains. This is in July. They're going to be doing high mountain traverses in snow and ice for three days.

41:52Then they're going to be going down into a little valley and climbing rock faces and naming them for the geodesic survey. It's being led by a guy named Eric Ryback, who's the first, at that time, the only person ever to walk the whole Pacific Coast, the trail from Canada down to the bottom of Baja. And she said, you're going with them. You know, I was a rock climber at the time, so she knew that about me. 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.

42:35So we got here, and I started hiking up Baldy. Now, we come from sea level to here. So I got altitude sickness the first day and puked my guts out about four or five times. At any rate, I had about a week to try to get ready. And then she drove me north to Chalice. I think there were seven people on this trip with us. So I met Eric Ryback and these people I was going to be hanging out with for the next few weeks. and we drove 90 miles on a dirt road to the Cobalt Ranger Station where you didn't tell them where you were going. You just told them when you expected to be back. And if you weren't back inside, I think the cushion was three days, they were going to send people out to look for you.

43:22And at the time, it's probably still true, the Bighorn Crags, no internal combustion allowed at all. So if Forestry Service had to go in and open up trailheads, They had to go in with mules, two-man cross-cut saws, because you couldn't turn on a film. That wouldn't work. So we did that, and I hadn't been off on my own, alone, with the exception of once that I won't talk about. But I've been in that situation, and it was just so much fun and so cleansing, and so it was just the best. and I thought I knew how to rock climb, but there was a guy named Tony Jones there who was a great rock climber who sort of took me under his wing and took me into 5.11++ stuff.

44:13The 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, and it was like two weeks, and a little over two and a half weeks of doing this. I said to Tony, I got to give you some money or something. I mean, you've been giving me, and he said, come on, I had a great time. I said, what can I do for you? And he said, you can do this. When you go back to L.A., tell everybody how horrible Idaho is. Tell them it's a tick fever state, it sucks, and you had a bad time.

44:49I said, why should I do that? 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. But what I discovered, this sounds woo-woo and whatever, but I don't really give a shit because it's true. It was like the family fell in love with each other again. I had been sort of living in the blues in LA because of what I do for a living. and all that fell away up here. When you came to Idaho, roughly how old were you and where was your career at that point?

45:30I was probably 38, 39, like that, late 30s. And had you already had a sort of inflection point in your career at that point? I had done a ton of work in New York, mainly street theater, improv, off-off Broadway. And then we moved to 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.

46:19But 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, you're not doing that. And on the surface, I would say, well, what do you know?

47:03But the reality was underneath it, I suspected maybe they were right. And I didn't know what I was doing in terms of a camera. On stage or doing improv in the back of an alley, yeah, I could do that. So I had no self-confidence. And then I did Apocalypse Now and wound up working my choice. Francis thought, I think incorrectly, but he thought that he owed me because he thought I saved his life in the Philippines. So I went over to do a small part and he said, I'll write you whatever you want because you filled up a helicopter in a rainstorm with nothing getting in the gas and you kept me from drowning in a river so we might come back okay fine that's nice he said what do you want and i said i want to be in the end of the movie and he said you can't be in the end of the movie scott it's absolutely completely cast well yeah wait there is a part you could do, but you'd be like a glorified extra.

48:02Play Colby, the guy who came up river in front of Martin Sheen. And I understood because of the way I've learned everything in my life that's important to me is you learn by apprenticeship, not from a book or going to school. At least I can't. And I thought at the end of the movie, I'm going to be around the person who, in my mind, is far and away the greatest American, probably the greatest movie actor that ever lived, Marlon Brando. And I'm going to be around this guy and just being around him. And Dennis Hopper, who's a lunatic, but brilliant. And Martin Sheen. And the end of this movie is an experience that will change my life.

48:46And it did. I told Francis later on that I got the greatest gift you could give any artist in the Philippines, which was self-confidence. So when I came back, before we went up to Idaho, I was basically locked out of Universal because along with self-confidence, I came back with a huge amount of arrogance. And now I remember I did one audition and they said, you know, you're not really very good. We want to give you things to work on. And I said, what the fuck do you know? Who have you worked with? Because I was just doing improvs and work with Marlon Brando, Victorio Storaro, Francis Coppola, Dennis Hopper, and they accepted me as an equal.

49:29What have you done? You've done this and this. You can't even fucking direct traffic. So they kicked me out of Universal. So now we're back from Idaho. And I'm sitting watching television, smoking a joint. And Carol walks into the living room and says, babe, what's wrong? And I say, what do you mean? I'm fine. She said, no, you're crying. And I reached up and there were tears coming out of my eyes. I was on television at a Beretta I'd done. And I pointed at it and I said, you're supposed to get better at what you do, not worse. That's the crappiest acting I've ever seen. I was so much better doing street theater in New York.

50:09What'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 them and do to this day. And I said to Carol, I said, well, how would you and the girls feel if we moved back to Idaho? And she said, what will you do up there?

50:50And I said, I met somebody who told me that if I gave him three years, he would apprentice me to be in backcountry, cross-country ski guide and hunting guide. And I'll do that. And she said, will you quit acting? I said, no, I'll do Shakespeare in the Park in Boise if I can get a part. I'll do that kind of stuff. But I can't go back to New York with my two daughters this young and subject them to the life of a street actor. So we came up here with that in mind. It was a super cold year. We came up with a friend of Carol's and mine. He was a commercial director, but sort of feeling the same kind of burnout in LA that I felt.

51:36So the two families decided we'd come up here and try to figure out what to do in Ketchum, Idaho. No real idea. We were up here. Inside two weeks, I get a call from a friend of mine, a guy named Rupert Hitzig, who said, I'm doing a movie in Mexico. The way I knew Rupert was he and I were in the same platoon in the Marine Corps. So Rup 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.

52:16It starred Rod Steiger, Burt Lancaster, Amanda Plummer, and Diane Lane. Those were the stars. And I had a teeny tiny little part is one of Burt's, it was the Doolin-Dalton gang, Western. And I was told by a lot of people when I went down there that you're going to love Rod Steiger. He works the same way you do. He's a member of the Actors Studio and your kind of guy, but watch out for Burt Lancaster. He's an old school movie star. He'll get in your key light. He'll screw you up. He'll intentionally ruin two shots so they'll have to go to his close-up. Just watch out for him. So we go to Mexico.

52:57First 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 he's, boy, did he see Carol. And he said to her, so what do you do? And she said, I'm a potter. He said, you got any pictures? And she says, she has some little slide pictures of stuff she'd done. He looked at them and I could see something changing him. And he looked at her and he said, God, I love this stuff.

53:44I only have the work of one other ceramic artist. Would you throw me 11th place or 12th place dinnerware set? It was her first commission ever. And she said, yeah, yeah, I will. Later on, many months later, she found out the other ceramic artist that he owned was named Picasso. Wow. So the next day, and he kind of was like, I wasn't even there. So the next day, we're on the set getting ready to do some scene. It's a group shot. At the end of the first take, Bert walks over to me and he said, so Scott, has anybody ever taught you the difference between working with a close-up camera lens and being on stage?

54:25He 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 Men Cont. He was the real deal.

55:05I love Bert. It was like what people had told me about Rod and Bert was like, he could flip it around. It's totally flipped. So on the way home, this is a long... We get all the time in the world to have my coffee. So we're coming back from Mexico. We went to Paramount 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.

55:46We walk into his office. He looks at me. He said, I can't believe you're coming in here. He said, I just realized you're perfect for this part in this movie I'm directing. it's the bad guy but you're perfect for it just hang around town for two or three more days meet the star who has cast approval didn't tell me who it was who has cast approval and the producers here at paramount and i think we can make this happen and i said screw that i don't go to anybody's office like a piece of meat anymore i just made two thousand 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 Ackerwell and Carol and I are out of here.

56:28So we left. We came back up to Idaho. About two weeks later, maybe a little less, I get a call from Jim and he said, okay, now I'm on location in Houston. Paramount doesn't know who you are. They don't want you to, they want Ryan O 'Neill to do this part or maybe Sam Shepard, but I'm going to send you a plane ticket to come down here. I think we can make this work. I've told Irving Azoff, the music guy who's also a producer about you, and he likes the idea. You've got to meet him. I think we can make this happen. And I said, no, don't send me a plane ticket. I don't want them to have their hooks into me, even for a plane ticket.

57:08I'll get my GMC Jimmy. I'll drive to Houston. I'll see you down there. And I said, just tell me what the part is. And he said, a bank robber and a bull rider. And I went, okay. So I drive down to Houston. On my way to Houston, I stop off just in front of Huntsville Prison, where I knew the character I played spent some time. And I'm going to be a little shady about this because I kind of have to be. So I'm sitting there in my jimmy, and I hear familiar voices out of the dark saying, hey, Vato, what are you doing? And I look over in there. when he was alive in another part of my life, I knew Freddie Fender, the country western singer, whose real name was Baldi Marguerta.

57:57And Freddie was in a family that picked everything illegally. That was his background. And he hung out with these two guys who were for real pistoleros, the real deal. And these two guys were there. And they said, what are you doing here, man. 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 got to 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.

58:42Like he said, you got to get a hat sticker or something, not a tattoo, but something on you that says 13 and a half. Because that's the number that gets us in here. And we all have it. And I said, what's that stand for? And he said, judge, jury, and a half-assed lawyer. So I said, okay. And he said, and you got to get tattoos on your forearm, nuestra familia. I said, but I'm not a Latino. He said, neither am I, and showed me that he had that. What did that refer to, our family? Like, what was the meaning of that? That's the in-prison organization of Latinos. Ah, I see, I see. He was adopted into.

59:22So 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 a hundred times a day from now on, hopefully a thousand. I get down to Houston.

1:00:01Jim said, So I'm going to make this happen. but I met the actress who had never played the lead in a big movie, Deborah Winger. And both she, John Travolta, Irving Azoff, and Jim Bridges always all kind of like shoved me down Paramount's throat. And Jim said, this movie is going to change your life. You'll never have to audition again after you do it. And he told me the truth. I didn't believe it. But in those days, it was Urban Cowboy. Yeah. And the part was Wes Hightower. It was funny because when I read the script, I thought, all I have to do is be honest with this character. I'm not going to go for big moments.

1:00:43Because 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's a real bank robber, a real ex-con, and a real bull rider. And if I just get close to it, I'll look like a diamond in a bucket full of rhinestones. Not because I'm particularly good, but it was almost like a setup. So anyway, that happened, and I didn't have to audition. I auditioned once since then for a part that's not a big part in a movie I really wanted to do, and the director said, no, no, at that point, I don't want you to do it.

1:01:35So I went to a cattle call under an assumed name, auditioned for it and got that part. But since I did Urban Cowboy, my life has changed. And I thought I was offered the lead in some TV series while I was in Texas, because in those days, dailies were shared by everybody in the business. So I turned them all down because I thought, I don't want to leave Idaho and move back to LA. I love my life in Idaho. I love, I didn't know how to ski, but I was learning how to ski and I was climbing and I was hiking and I was shooting and I was riding motorcycles and all the things I really love to do. 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.

1:02:28The 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 but I was terrified if I left it alone and put it down, it'd be like a bar of soap and I'd try to pick it up and I wouldn't. So I lived that part 24-7. got arrested, got in trouble. I was Wes Hightower the whole time. I remember at one point I came back to, we had an apartment in the Galleria, and I came back, and none of Carol's clothes were, there was no presence of them in the apartment, and there had been when I had gone to work that day.

1:03:11And I'm thinking, what's going on? The phone was ringing, I pick it up, and it was Carol. And she said, I'm back in Idaho. I can't handle living with Wes Hightower. So you let me know when he's dead. me and the girls love you. We're up here, but we're not going to put ourselves through this. And I went, okay. And I was about to hang up and she said, wait, before you hang up, I just want to say one thing. I said, what's that? She said two things. Number one, I love you. And number two, I think you're hitting a home run with this and it's going to change our lives. So when I drove back up here in my jimmy, I remember I stopped off in Wyoming at one point.

1:03:52people must have thought i was nuts and i got out of the jimmy i walked down to the side of the road and i took this invisible west hightower and threw him in the ground broke his fucking neck and called carol on a pay phone i said west hightower is dead i'm coming home wow okay okay okay continue and then we're gonna go back to the origin story okay got home we were renting this house with this family that had come up with us. We were sharing this house. We had a bedroom. On the bed were two scripts for the leads and movies for more money than I'd ever dreamed about making. And that was that.

1:04:31So 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 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 Perron, who I'd done a thing called, in New York, it was called Collision Course. It was nine, one acts in the course of a night. And Ed said to Jim, if you're looking for somebody, a young guy who's not going to charge you a ton of money and is perfect for the part, Scott Glenn's the guy.

1:05:14So I got that part and did the movie. So Jim knew me over a period of, in those days, movies took about three months to shoot. Now it's way faster. And I guess whatever it was he saw in me, it was jangled awake when we walked into his office coming back from Mexico. That was where he went, oh my God, something that he saw about me, he wrote the script for Urban Cowboy with Aaron Latham, the guy who had originally written a column in, I don't know if it was the Times, someplace in New York about gillies and bull machines and all that stuff. And then Jim adapted that and wrote the screenplay. I don't know what it was he saw.

1:05:56I remember my screen test. They wanted me to do a scene from the, and I said, I can't do that. I'm not in the part. I don't want to lose it. And Jim said, well, we've got to put you on screen. And I said, and Debra was doing her sexy bull ride at the time. And there were a bunch of guys in the front watching. And I picked out the baddest looking one of all, who was a bandito, Texas. And I said, put the camera on me. And I thought, dear Lord, don't let this go bad, but here we go. And they were watching Debra. And I walked over to him. And I went, hey. And he looked up at me. And I said, you're sitting in my fucking seat.

1:06:36and he looked at me and I thought, what's going to happen? And he got up and walked away. And I went and sat down. That was my screen test. 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 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, the most important single event in my life was scarlet fever when I was nine years old. I wasn't supposed to have survived.

1:07:18There 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. So the needle going in kind of hurts, but then the rest of it going straightens you up. And I didn't realize it was saving my life. So I hated it. But that experience turned me into an athlete, turned me into someone who has learned to not only live with, but fall in love with my fantasies and my imagination.

1:08:00And I don't know if it's true or not. And I don't want to know because it's a fantasy that I, if it's not true, I grew up believing it was that on my mom's side of the family, I was directly related to Lord Byron. When I got out of bed from scarlet fever, and my bones were so soft that they bent, and I limped 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 two things. Number one, I wasn't going to be Walter Mitty.

1:08:39I wasn't going to have an imaginary life. The adventures I was imagining were all going to be true. I was going to make them come true. And one of them was I was going to be a writer, poet, writer. So when I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I enlisted as a six-month reservist. Why did you do that? Because you went from English major to Marine Corps, is that? Yeah, because where I came from, there was nobody dodged the draft. And the draft was happening. So for me, and I knew even with a BA in college, I had so little technical ability. Everybody will tell you about that. If I was smart enough, I would have tried to become probably a naval aviator, but I wasn't smart enough to be a pilot.

1:09:26So where I came from, the choices were three. Marine Corps, 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne. That's it. And then And 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. 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.

1:10:02Your hearing is going to be trash. 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 and summer camp. There were other ways of doing your time of deployments for three months or a month, month and a half, whatever. When I got out of the Marine Corps, I went to see my mom and dad, who were living in Kenosha, Wisconsin. My dad was, at that point, he'd gotten pretty high up in Snap-on tools. When I was born, he was a salesman. So he went from no money and no nothing to, he actually wound up kind of running that company.

1:10:49I went to Kenosha. There was a job opening on the Kenosha Daily News, and I did an interview and lied, as I often do. they said can you type and I went yeah and they said how many words a minute and I said 35 because I knew that's what I needed after the interview they said well you've got the job I came out and there was 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 it 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.

1:11:30And what was the job for? Were you transcribing or what was the job? The job was cover reporter. I got it. I was not very good at what I... So anyway, I'm up in the city room doing that and I hear shots out the window. And it was cold as shit. And I remember I said to somebody in the city room, those are shots. Go out and check them out. And it was like 30 below zero. It was freezing cold. And somebody said, no, that was a car backfiring. 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.

1:12:08And I'm telling you, those were shots. And they said, why don't you go out and cover it? So I went outside, and two blocks from the newspaper at the side of the road was a city patrol car with Mrs. is 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 Batatis, 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, you know, mob hits and all that stuff.

1:12:56And I realized that you do do that, but for every one of those, you do six interviewing a woman 15 minutes after her teenage son has died in a traffic accident. And you're thinking about, do I get a byline? Is this going to be on page one or page two? And I felt like a ghoul. There was a bulletin board with other jobs listed. So I applied for the job of a reporter on the sports desk. I can't even remember the name of the paper, but it was in American Virgin Islands. I got the job and I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone and she lives in Long Island. And she said, when's the job start?

1:13:34And I said, in about six months. And she said, why don't you go to New York and take an acting class. And I went, why? And she said, I'll be honest with you, Scott. I read the stuff that you write, and your description of ideas and action and places isn't bad. It's okay. But your dialogue essentially sucks. It's stiff. Nobody talks like that. The minute you put words in anybody's mouth, whether it's a poem or a short story or whatever, you blow it. If you have to get in front of people and say words, it'll kick you in your ass to start to listen to the way people really talk. And if you're doing theater, you'll be dealing with arguably the best dialogue ever written.

1:14:16So after I got over maybe five or 10 minutes of being angry because she told me the truth, I thought, okay. So I got in my car. I had an old Triumph. I drove to New York, sold the car, got two jobs. I looked up acting in the Village Voice, nothing under A, under B. It said Berghoff Studios. I didn't know anything about it. I called it up, called Berghoff Studios, and this guy named Bill Hickey, who was one of America's greatest character actors, nominated for it. He might have 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.

1:14:57It was, oh, dad, poor dad, mom was hugging you in the closet. I'm feeling so sad was the play. Something I'm completely unsuited for, but it was a little monologue. I worked on it. I go down into the basement of Berghoff's. It was raining outside Wednesday morning, maybe seven or eight people sitting there to watch. I walk in front of Bill Hickey to start this monologue. And for the first and only time in my life, literally a light bulb went off between my eyes. And I thought, holy shit, I'm an actor that fast. And it wasn't like, oh, I'm so fulfilled. It was for the first time, my life made sense to me.

1:15:38My 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 the other students and he said Scott's not going to finish this he's got to go outside walk around the block a couple 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.

1:16:19But 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 that, and he took a second, and he gave me the best advice I could ever have had. He said, son, I don't really know anything about what you're telling me. the only advice I can give you is don't give yourself any deadlines. I said, what do you mean? He said, don't say if I haven't made it in two years, I'm going to sell insurance. He said, that's like starting a race with a lead wheel weight hung around your neck in for a penny, in for a pound.

1:17:02If you love it, make it your life. And I did. And here I am talking to you. I'd love to zoom in on your dad for a second, because it seems like just based on what you've said thus far, that for a company man at that time, that seems like very unexpected advice that would be given, that there wouldn't be any pushback. What do you attribute that to? Why did your dad give you that advice, do you think? Or why did he feel comfortable giving it? Well, my dad grew up in a way that I can't possibly understand, in real serious poverty. I remember he told me at one point, if I ever have money, I'm going to give it to a charity, make it the Salvation Army because they fed us Christmas time.

1:17:43They 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 to, but my dad was involved in as hard a life as you can imagine and did well in that life. so my dad's background was he dealt with really poor irish jewish black italian and all of them involved in gambling and booze none of them involved in drugs they were all people my dad's best friend who raised me as much as my mom and dad did was uh 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.

1:18:37And she said, basically, if you even curse around me, we're not going to be together and you can't do anything illegal. So he left the world that he was in and started selling Bluepoint tools that morphed into Snap-on tools. He told me later on when I was still struggling as an actor, and the thing that I'm sad about, but I can't do anything about it, is he never saw me being successful. My mom did, but my dad was dead by the time. But he told me, he said, when he started doing really well with Snap-on Tools, he said, I keep running into these men who are lawyers and doctors, and they're not happy because they're doing their father's dream, not their dream.

1:19:23And he said, the only advice I can give you about having kids is when you have kids, don't dream their dreams for them. Do not do that. So he was an unusual guy. To be very honest, the only human being I've ever met in my life close to who he was was him. Thank you for sharing that. And how would you describe your mother, her character, what you absorbed from her? Filled with love, unconditional love. when I think back on it, my mom and dad played tennis. My mom also grew up really, really poor. Her dad died when he was in his 30s, but she had a rich super aunt who never gave the family money, but gave her things like ballet lessons.

1:20:13And 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 I got 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.

1:20:55Straight out love. My dad never hit me except for once in my life. I remember my mom wanted me to take this girl to a dance junior high, and she was the daughter of a friend of hers. And I went, ooh, I know she was a little hefty, whatever. I didn't want to do it. And I said, no, I don't want to do it. And she said, please, son, I'm asking. I said, no. And my mom teared up and started going, my dad walked in the door, and he said, why is your mom crying? 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.

1:21:31And 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.

1:21:47So let's come back to the conversion to Judaism, I'd love for you to say a little bit more about that. You mentioned if Carol was going to have a target on her back, you didn't want her to be alone in that. Can you say more about the decision to convert? Yeah, I had a friend, his name was Milton Bedole, 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 AK, and I believe he dropped a couple of those.

1:22:23And he was my friend. He loved theater. And I went to see him, and I said, I want you to make me a Jew. He said, you know, I'm— By the way, did you say that to him? In preparation for getting married? Yeah. I said, I'm going with Carol. I'm wanting you to make me a Jew. He'd met her, and so, and 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?

1:22:58And I said, if a man teaches his son no trade, it is as if he taught him highway robbery. And he said, you've read the Talmud. And I said, some of it. 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 Quran. but if you're asking me of all that stuff, what resonates the most with me would be Lao Tzu is the way of life. He said, I'll find a rabbi that'll do it for you. I went, okay. I started walking out of the show. He said, hey, wait a minute, asshole. Turn around. So I did, and he said, you're not doing it for the Talmud.

1:23:34You're not doing it for her parents. Why do you want me to convert you? And I said, because I met this woman. I love her, and we want to travel, and I 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, Oluf, Beth, Gimel, Doth. And I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm converting you. And I said, well, you just told me you wouldn't. He said, nobody has ever given me that answer to that question.

1:24:08He said, if you 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. I want you to try this. I went, oh, man. Okay, I'm not going to say no to the guy. so abraham ephraim ben avraham is my jewish name you mentioned loud too why does that resonate what is his writing or the conglomerate known as loud to 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 this later on or not talk about it.

1:24:59You shoot, I know. Do you know who Brian Enos is? I know the name. I do. It starts about... So he wrote a book called Practical Shooting Beyond Fundamentals. And it's about when you enter the space of doing something, the less thought that can be involved and the more you're just present in the now, the better it will be. Doing martial arts and boxing, wrestling, and all that stuff. I just realized at a very young age that if I wanted something to work out well physically, the best thing I could possibly do is watch my body do it, not make any decisions at all. So, you know, if somebody does this, then you do that.

1:25:43I never bought that in martial arts. Given where I grew up, I knew that wasn't true. Number one, if anybody who predicted what would happen in, let's say, a physical confrontation. If they were making the prediction, one thing for me was very clear about them. They'd never been in one. Now I believe that that's not just true of that kind of stuff, but it's true of pretty much anything you do physically. If you have muscle memory, let your muscle memory alone. It'll do it so much faster and cleaner than you ever will. And for me, spiritually, that's what Lao Tzu is saying. So it's this sort of diminishing of the self or dissolution of the self?

1:26:24Yeah, I mean, it's like Lao Tzu is the ultimate mystical. And for me, the mystical side of every religion is not the impractical. That's the practical side. The impractical side is orthodox that says, this is a whole other thing. And I'm just an actor, and I'm not that bright, so I'm just saying this. But I believe that orthodoxy right now is under fire and diminishing quickly. It's in the rearview mirror. And people like Mike Johnson even complain about going to fundamentalist evangelical church and seeing less and less people in the pews. The reason for that, I believe, is because orthodoxy is not practical.

1:27:10Orthodoxy says take absolute for real the words that are written in these books. Well, if you want to save orthodoxy, forget about banning books about LGBTQ or blacks or Latinos. If you want to save orthodoxy, ban the teaching of these three following subjects, math, physics, chemistry. because under the harsh light of science, orthodoxy doesn't work. Carbon dating says to the Bible, the Talmud, and the Koran, all of which get kind of close to the same date as the age of the earth, carbon dating says, yeah, you'll miss that one by only around 170 million years. Whoops. Somebody lived in the belly of a whale.

1:28:03Well, 2 ,000 years ago, you look at somebody as big as a whale, you save as possible. Biology says this thing can barely swallow anything bigger than a minnow. Guess what? It never happened. Whoops. 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.

1:28:54My 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 first-hand experiential perspective like a mystic have you ever experienced say in acting a role playing you as opposed to the other way around yes could you describe yeah what that's like The first time it happened was Urban Cowboy. I translated it wrong.

1:29:44I translated it as fear of leaving this character alone. The second time it happened was doing an off-Broadway play called Killer Joe. And I just realized that up until one part of Killer Joe, it was a crazy play where we You were allowed, the director realized that the acoustics were so good in the Soho Playhouse that we could turn our back on the audience and be heard. We could walk off stage and be heard. So he thought, to make this really spontaneous and organic, I'm going to allow anyone to do whatever they want. There's not going to be any blocking at all, none. The whole thing took place in a trailer on the outskirts of Dallas.

1:30:28So 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, and we brought in a guy from the opera to choreograph the fight. And he choreographed a great fight scene, but it didn't look right next to how loose the rest of the play was. 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 heard doing it.

1:31:09Fifteen minutes before half an hour, we'd come on stage and we'd say, okay, tonight, this chair's a breakaway, this will shatter, this is real. And the deal that we had was, like, if you came up behind me and grabbed the back of my hair and pulled me, I would fall backwards. But since I couldn't see what I was falling into, It was the obligation of the person pulling me to kick, if there was a chair or something, I was going to fuck up my back, to kick it out of the way. The only place to kick it was the first aisle of the theater. So we told people when they came to see his play, this is a projectile aisle.

1:31:46You may not get a heavy object landing on your lap, or you may. You for sure are going to be covered with fried chicken and ketchup and fake blood. There's no question, so don't wear suits that you care about. So anybody over the age of 25 avoided those seats, and the kids fought to get them. So that was sort of the way the play worked. There was one scene at the very beginning of Act 2 where I'm supposed to walk on stage, it's dark, and this guy is trying to get in, he's drunk, and he's trying to get in the front door, but I don't know who it is, and I've moved in at that point, and I'm in bed with a young girl.

1:32:25So 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 live at this place. so full frontal nudity fine but doing that oddly kind of after the first night of doing it it was like i don't know whether liberate is the right word but i was just going to use that 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 what the next performance i didn't make any decisions about what i would do what prop i would pick up anything just well let's see what's going on here i'm gonna live in this space i know that i am this character i even told tracy i said i know other people have played this part at steppenwolf where it started in Chicago, but you fucking wrote this for me.

1:33:48And I just know it in the way that I felt the same way about Wes Hightower and Urban Cowboy. So that was Killer Joe. The next time it happened, I was doing Leftovers, and I had been in two seasons of The Leftovers, and I'd gone from just being a character to Damon Lindelof calling me up with Mimi Leder, the producer, She directed most of them, and Damon wrote it. And they said, we want you to be a regular member of the cast. We're doing the last season in Australia. And I think the second or third episode is going to be just you, Scott. All just you in Australia. And I've written the longest monologue I've ever written.

1:34:34I'm so lucky. So I said, what, is it two pages long? He said, no, seven. I went, holy shit, seven pages. And he sent it to me. At the time he sent it to me, I was reading this book. I know you've got a dog. I'm going to ask you about it as a dog. Sure. But I was reading this book called Don't Shoot the Dog. Excellent book. Isn't that 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 you weren't holding mics, I'd argue. So I'm reading Don't Shoot the Dog. And the section I'm reading is where she says positive reinforcement can help you train your dog, your husband or your wife, your friends, even yourself.

1:35:22For example, if you've got something long to memorize, and I'm thinking, holy shit, I'm curious. So what she said in that was, it'll take longer initially, but it's the perfect way to memorize something really long. start at the end. The last sentence, and then the last sentence, and the next last sentence, and then like that. Because what will happen when you get to the beginning of this thing, and you launch into it for real, as you're getting towards the end, it'll become more and more familiar. It'll be like walking home. Wait a minute, I know this street lamp. Okay, I know what I'm at. That's fascinating.

1:35:59Instead of the ending being this hanging unfamiliarity. Well, 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? Can you set it up so that I at least give me a shot at doing it in one take? And she said, yeah, okay. I can do that. So we set up.

1:36:35It's really, it's not a monologue in that it's not me talking to myself. I'm talking to David Gopalil, but he doesn't say anything. So he just sits there and listens. So we start doing this scene and we come to the end of it. I hear action. I feel my key light a few times. I hear cut. And Mimi says, okay, that was, first she said incorrectly, but I'll say it because I got a big ego. She said, ladies and gentlemen, you just had a master's class in acting. She said, okay, so Scott, so when you picked up the tape recorder and you started to play it and you welled up and you started to cry and you wouldn't let yourself and you put it back down, what did you do next?

1:37:20And I said, what did I do with the tape recorder? She said, what do you remember about what you just did? And I went, not much. She said, you're telling me that so much of you was in that scene. There wasn't enough to step outside. You weren't watching yourself at all. And I went, no. And she said, if you can't direct yourself, I can't direct you. So would you be willing the next time we do this to have a little piece of you watching it so that when I talk about parts 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?

1:38:04She 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. I said, if I could have this experience again, fuck no, I don't want to do it. I do not. And she said, what if I'm not getting what I want? I said, let's do another take. We'll just do one take after another. She said, it'll wipe you out. It'll exhaust you. I said, no, it won't. Look at me. Am I exhausted?

1:38:40So we did three or four more takes of the whole thing. And at the end of it, Mimi said, is this what I'm going to be dealing with for the rest of this episode? and I went, not if you tell me not to. And she said, I'm not going to tell you not to. Let's just go for it. So we did that whole episode, crazy white fella thinking. And all I would do in the morning when I would wake up, first in the outback and then later on in Melbourne, was I literally look in the mirror and I 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.

1:39:24Have 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.

1:40:13Vince said, okay, we know the scene. And 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.

1:40:55And 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. 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.

1:41:36to a great extent because I am lazy. And in 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 was 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 don't have a past.

1:42:27And 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, we just wound up being with the crew as my very small audience. Every single take was a one-act play called Now. You mentioned Marlon Brando earlier. Was there anything that you gleaned from your time around Marlon Brando? or that he taught you, any gems you picked up? Aside from his moral behavior, which was phenomenal. What do you mean by that? He supported two villages in the Philippines with all his pay and wouldn't let anybody write about it.

1:43:19It's not in the movie, but there's one point where I killed Dennis Hopper. And I was working on the scene, and Marlon came over to me. He said, Scott, just because they call it acting doesn't mean you have to act. I went okay what did he mean by that what he meant by that was I was trying to squeeze something out of a moment rather than seeing what the moment was going to present to me and what I learned from watching him was because he had this reputation of being okay there are two basic schools of acting that even to this day that when you watch people work and you know which one they're coming from one is Rada really great Brit actors all have this, which is technique.

1:44:02You get down the accent and the physical characteristics and the wardrobe and the makeup and the dealing with props and get the whole outside perfect and then do the part. That's Rada technique acting, most of what you still see. Then there's the Russian school, which is Stanislavski, Boleslavski, and that is you begin with the inside of the character. Does this person share my same, the way I look at life, philosophy, all that stuff? What emotions are really mine that are also this character's? And if they're not the same, can one be replaced with the other? So if something makes me angry about getting on a subway and I'm playing somebody who's angry about not being left money in a will, the audience doesn't know where that anger comes from.

1:45:00So you use the subway because you're not in the other. So Marlon had the reputation of being mainly, if not 100%, the Russian school. I realized around him, he was whatever worked. Sometimes he would take a mirror, make an expression on the mirror, freeze it, say action. And other times he would say, how are they lighting this scene? And they would say, is there a way I can put this ear in the dark so you don't see it? Yeah, but what are you going to do? And he put a sound plug in his ear and play, not his lines, but the stuff he wanted to cover in improvisation so he wouldn't miss stuff. It was audio he had recorded himself.

1:45:42So he would do anything. And I learned from him that part. But I also got from Marlon his understanding about, okay, so brief little story. Where we were in the Philippines was at a place called Paxanon. And I had a room at Paxanon Inn that I basically kept all my crap in. I was living at the time with this group of people called the Ifagal 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 were all kind of in the same room.

1:46:26This couple came in to check into the hotel, Filipino couple, and they had two little girls with them. One was holding her mom's dress, hiding behind it. the other one, and I think it was Satisfaction, was playing on the jukebox. The other little girl heard this song, and she came dancing into the place where we were all sitting around, sort of miming to Satisfaction, and she was magical. And people were laughing, and finally her parents checked in, and they all left and went upstairs. One of the producers, I think, was a great friend, who said about the little girl who was in dance. He said, God, that little girl was magical.

1:47:06Someday, that little girl will be a great actress. And Marlon said, great actress? And he said, yeah. And Marlon said, you're wrong. It's the other one. They didn't get it, but I immediately understood because that other little girl doing like this was me, who needed the permission of a part to go nuts, to do whatever it was. And Marlon was saying the same thing about himself. With the quickening that you felt when you realized that you were meant to act, when your life started to make sense, do you think that was predestined out of the box? Was that informed by your experience with scarlet fever?

1:47:45Because I know, I believe you couldn't read at the time. Yeah, scarlet fever attacks sometimes all, usually just one of your senses. And they don't know why it does that, but they were trying to protect my eyesight, which turns out to be really good. What scarlet fever left me out was damaged auditory nerves. I mean, I've got hearing aids in now because Carol finally was up here probably five, six years ago. She just got tired of screaming at me and having me walk into the room and turning the TV up. So like ear splitting loud. She said, you got to get hearing aids. I didn't think I needed them.

1:48:23And 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. She said, oh yeah, you do. And he said, the good news, Scott, is this is not age related. The bad news is you've been suffering this for at least 40 years. My suspicion is longer. So that was scarlet fever. And do you think that informed, helped shape you into what later became this actor? Yeah, or it led me into having discoveries that I wouldn't have had before.

1:49:05Like when I got out of bed from scarlet fever, I could take my finger literally and run it in and out of my rib cage. My bones were soft, so I limped. I grew up in a neighborhood that was very physical. So out of mortification, if there was a pickup football game, I played. But what I discovered from playing sports and stuff wasn't that I was so good at it, but I actually liked it a lot. I loved physicality. Before I got Scarlet Fever, I didn't, 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.

1:49:49Marine Corps did too. All of those things, rock climbing with Tony Jones up in the Bighorn Crags, all of that stuff I found out was really fun and put a smile on my face. And I don't think if I had never gotten Scarlet Fever, I don't know that that would have ever had. I don't know. It did happen. Now I'm 85 and here it is. So for people who, of course, are listening to this and not seeing any visual, I mean, for the majority of our conversation, you were sitting comfortably cross-legged on a couch, no back support, something that I know 30-somethings who wouldn't be comfortable in that position more than a few minutes.

1:50:24What does your physical training look like now? And what would you say are some of the most important types of training or decisions about training that you've made, say, post-40, just to allow this type of durability? Okay. I always wake up the same way. I wake up. I didn't today. Oh, I slept in. But normally, I wake up around 5.30. I slept till 7 today. I don't know why, but I come downstairs, I fill up the coffee machine with water, turn it on, clean up the surfaces of all the tables, just because it feels like a good thing to do. And then I massage my ears, pull them up as high as possible.

1:51:10I'm not talking about being gentle, not gentle at all. pull them down, and then massage my ears. And if I feel any even slightly tender or sore spot, I really go after that as hard as I can. I learned this in a Tai Chi seminar years ago in New York, and I've done it ever since. But anyway, strong, super strong ear massage. Then after that, and while I'm doing all this stuff, I'm thinking, I'm making sure that my breath is horizontal and low. What do you mean by horizontal? Okay, there are two kinds of breathing that most people, like most Americans, do improperly after the age of, I don't know, two or three.

1:51:52One 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, and you're not bringing anything into the top of your chest at all. That's horizontal breathing. Vertical breathing is where you see the shoulders going up, and we vertically breathe way, way too much. Because what vertical breathing will do, aside from the fact that you're not taking in as much oxygen, is it will put tension into your upper body and lower body. It'll also jack you into a fight-or-flight situation. So if you do that at a stoplight because somebody got in your way, that's really a bad idea because you're going to jack up your heart rate.

1:52:44You're going to jack up your blood pressure. You're going to screw with your central nervous system. So I just try early in the morning, try to remind myself. Horizontal breathing. Horizontal breathing. And then drop it down low so that you're feeling the diaphragm. That's all. So I do that. After the ear massage, I tap my head. Brain tap it. Is this also from Chinese medicine? Yes. 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. And you're in shorts and a sweatshirt right now. Yeah, and I slip on these slip-on shoes, because this time of year I'll probably be standing in snow and ice.

1:53:25And 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 Vegas nerve. This is every morning for sure. And then I come back in, shut the garage door, and usually then I look at what the temperature was because I think, whoa, that was pretty cool. Like this morning it was 14. And you're outside in shorts. Yeah. You know, I'm not uncomfortable at all. But, you know, I know other people who handle the cold way better than I do. But the humming, you know who does that?

1:54:11Buddhist monks do that in the Himalayas, and they do that in way colder weather with robes on. It actually will work if you can do it in a relaxed way. You know, you start to learn sort of to anchor your coccyx, hum, come back in, And then take a shitload of vitamins and minerals and crap like that, probably most of which I don't need, but I do it anyway. And then make the bed upstairs. Always make the bed. And then I do something physical to finish waking up. Today it was baby fit. You know baby fit? I do not know baby fit. Russian special ops do it in the morning. And use your legs first five times with each leg, lying on your back with your arms over your head.

1:55:05Use your legs to turn yourself over the way a baby would. And then you use your arms to do the same thing, five times, five times. Then you rock back and forth. I do it 20 times. Do with your neck. I do 10 times usually. And then a low crawl. and a bear crawl you can either do a bear crawl with your butt up in the air or your butt lower than your shoulders i do it lower than my shoulders did you get john into this and and what he said was make so much sense we spend so much of our time looking at cell phones and computers and driving and doing so much stuff like that or like that right with your head with your good to do that a bit get your neck extended instead of so i and pitched down and i do a bear crawl and I like today I didn't do that many because I was thinking about you guys coming over here and I didn't want so I just did 12 but usually I do 60 when it's warm out I'll use the lawn out there and 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 I'll do.

1:56:19The other is, you know, like a really brief warm-up. When I say brief warm-up, 30 seconds of running in place, swinging my arm, just putting some synovial fluid in my joints. And then what I've been doing a lot is quick and dead. For me, that's just 10 kettlebell swings, either with a 32-pound, I don't know, the KGs, in the 30s. Probably 16, 24 kilos. Or a 52. Yeah, 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.

1:57:08depends on how ambitious I am. I'll either do, I rarely do straight push-ups. I'll usually do fist push-ups or open finger fist push-ups, tri-finger push-ups or these, which are... Oh, I got it. The close hand more tricep type push-ups. Yeah, right. Back corner 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 specific working out. I used to do workout with dumbbells and barbells and stuff like that. Just for the chuckles of it, every now and then I'll pick up some dumbbells just to play where I say, can I still do this?

1:58:02But 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.

1:58:46For 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, it's really true, is my reaction time. I'm still as quick as I used to be. But what I realize is that could turn into— And for people who can't see, you just threw a jab right in my face. what I realized is that could drop off 30 seconds from now. I'm 85. At some point, that's going to go. And if it does, I'll deal with it. Those are some of the stuff that I do, aside from the breathing stuff.

1:59:33I used to think the most important muscles in the body were the butt, the hamstrings, and the quads. Lower body, big muscles. And they're not unimportant at all. but now I believe that easily the most important muscle you have control I mean I guess yogis have control over their heart so that would work I don't I can slow my heart rate down and that's pretty much it so the most important muscle in my body that I can have control over for sure is the diaphragm nothing else even gets close and that feed up thing over there I used to oh wow yeah Yeah, look at that. I know the feet up. Yeah, I'll like forget exactly how the diaphragm feels.

2:00:16So 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. So if you start taking in big breaths, you're going to be introduced to your diaphragm right away. So let me explain this for folks because a lot of people listening, a lot of my friends who are former athletes in their 30s or 40s could not do this comfortably.

2:00:54So I want to explain it. So imagine there's a device called the feet up. But just for visual purposes, imagine that you took a, let's call it a three-inch cushion and put it on your toilet seat, emptied the toilet of water, put your head in the toilet, and then kick your feet up. You're basically doing a handstand on your shoulders. You can't shrug your shoulders or be very hard. So you have to then breathe through your diaphragm. So this is what Scott does at 85 just for hashtag life goals for everybody listening. And do you exercise every morning? No, I guess I kind of do. I was thinking when I was doing Eugene, the Marine, all I would do is, well, actually I did do about 60 pace.

2:01:34I would do baby fit in the morning. And that would be pretty much it because I knew I had so much work to do during the day. And a lot of it was super physical as martial arts stuff with training knives and stuff like that. So I'm not compelled to work out every day, but at least every other day. And the diaphragm stuff I use because, like I say, I'm super lazy as an actor. So I got this part in Bad Monkey. I'm playing this shaman. I get the part. 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.

2:02:18That'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 was the most important muscle. He was all about breathing. and the course was all about breathing and meditation. And Erwan believes, for me it's true, it may not be true for other people, I don't know, but for me it's true, that thoughts are either trying to figure out problems, which we all do, how do I get from here to there, what's two plus two equal, that kind of thing. Or it's a conversation that you're writing the script and you're delivering to yourself.

2:03:00When you say that, you mean these are like the stories you're creating? for yourself? Yeah, so this is what Erwan believes. In a breath hold where you feel stress, because the stress you ultimately feel when you're holding your breath is you're afraid you're going to die. You're not, because at a certain point, against your will, your body will take over and force you to breathe. So he believes that if you have one thing to think about and meditate on during that breath hold, you can rewire your central nervous system. Now, that sounds like woo-woo stuff to a lot of people, but for me, it actually worked.

2:03:40So he said, Scott, what kind of conversations do you have? Are they basically any one thing? I said, yeah, they're minor being pissed off, being angry at somebody, took my parking place, or making up this confrontation that I may never have with a casting person, but they're pissed off. So he said, I would suggest that one of your meditations be peace. Go in the other direction. So at the end of this course, he gave us this thing. I've got it on my phone. And it's what it is, is six breath holds. You decide how long you want them to be. And they shouldn't be killer, but they should be long enough that they're difficult.

2:04:24Because as Erwin said, keep telling yourself, I'm getting stronger and better with and because of the stress. There are six. And with diminishing amounts of rest between each one. And I do those three times a week. Erwan says, don't do them in succeeding days because it's probably not good for you. And so I don't. But I do these breath holds. And I started doing them here while I got the part of, and I remember at one point, I sit upright in bed and I yell, whoa. And Carol is 2.30 in the morning. And Carol says, what, what? And I said, I found my manatee. And his name, he's a French guy. His name is Erwan LaCur.

2:05:09What 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 40. Breath hold. Yeah. Performance free dive, it will tell you, of record, my longest breath hold is four minutes and 15 seconds. I see that might even be longer now. I don't know. But up here, I'm at 140. But what I'm aiming for, I would like by the time I I hit 86.

2:05:59The benchmark for me is two-minute breath holds. Those are real. Yeah, that's very real. But I'm at a minute 40 right now. But what I was going to say about good luck, and this is just pure good luck, to the point where I almost just accept it now. When I need to learn something, the best teacher in the world materializes right in front of me. So I want to ask you about this, because it seems like this is going to be a leading question, but it's 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.

2:06:43And 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. I'm probably at average, maybe a little bit above average intelligence, but not much. That's not false modesty. That's for real. I mean, if people ask me, am I a good shot with a handgun? My honest answer is above average. A lot? No. Above average. But I'm a really good instructor. I can teach anybody, probably to expert level, how to shoot a handgun. Am I a good shot with a rifle? Yes, I am. can I teach people well how to no I'm the world's worst teacher I don't do anything right I don't get a consistent spot well and I don't do any of this I just been doing it since I was so young I just do it and it works out my great fortune in life and I used to be amazed by it and now I just accept it is okay I got into the actor's studio by accident and I got by accident Lee Strasberg as my own personal standalone teacher and coach.

2:07:56The 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 is watching me shoot. And he says, you're pretty good at doing this, but I could give you some pointers. Come on over to my house tomorrow and I'll show you what I know. His name was John Shaw, world champion. Kurt Johnstead calls me up when I'm in LA and says, you want to know about combat shooting that's not military but the real civilian stuff lapd sis come on out to the eagle's nest and meet this guy scotty reeds and we become we took a course we become really good friends and he's the real deal he's my teacher i'm down in the baja this is how stupid I truly am.

2:08:46I'm down in the Baja, and for two years I've been scuba diving without any instruction, and I should be dead. I used my BC at almost 100 feet to rocket myself to the surf. 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 to ever live. And this guy walks up to me in his 60s, pot-bellied guy, and he looks at me and he said, you're a real asshole. And for whatever reason, I don't know if it was in his, what about him saying that to me, but I came to attention. And I said, why, sir? And he got a big grin and he looked at me and he said, okay, you're Army, Airborne, or Marine, which one?

2:09:34And I said, Marine Corps, sir. and he laughed and he said, I'm here with my girlfriend. I'm staying in that room. You show up tomorrow and give me the next six days of your life. Show up tomorrow with coffee at 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. I said, Jim Stewart, Jimmy Stewart, the actor. He said, no, like Jim Stewart, dive master emeritus at Scripps Institute.

2:10:14Jim 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 is now a card is number one. And Jacques Costello said he's arguably the greatest scuba diver there ever lived. That's who's going to teach you and certify you. And he did. I mean, so, I mean, it's again and again, I'm out here. You're like the first dump of skill acquisition. I'm out here in the summertime, and I'm talking about what does it feel like to be a bird? Because when I was in the service, I never free fall.

2:10:45I 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 a free fall? I'll teach you. Come over to my house tomorrow afternoon. I'll hang you in front of 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.

2:11:29All the things that can go wrong. Yeah. So I said, are we going to tandem jump? He said, no, you already told me you're a static line jumper. We'll put a two-by-four on a Cessna. We'll go up. We'll use the two-by-four to launch ourselves out on the stride of the wing, hang on to it. He said, and you'll go first. I said, what will you do? He said, I'll come after you. He said, just you jump off and establish a hard arch. And he showed me how to do that. And I said, okay, but then what will 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.

2:12:07And you yell to me what your altitude is. We'll go out at hopefully 15 ,000. And when you hit 3 ,000, you don't pantomime anymore. You actually pull the ripcord and pump air into the cells of the 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 i mean again and again and again the best person is 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.

2:12:55There's part of me that's really a good student. And here's the part of me that's really a good student. I'm willing to fall on my ass in front of people. The embarrassment of screwing up and being clumsy and falling on my ass in front of people is not great enough to keep me from doing it. And that's the trick to being a good student. Yeah. I heard someone say recently, very high performer, I'm blanking on the attribution, but they were taught by a mentor something, and I'm paraphrasing, but they said, in order to be excellent at anything, you have to first be willing to be extremely crappy at it.

2:13:33That's so true. I mean, it's like with martial arts, you've done them enough. So I know I'm talking to somebody, the two of you guys understand this. Okay, so I'm going to Thailand to do this TV show, White Lotus, but I can't really talk about it because they're very secretive, but I'm going to be in Thailand, so I called up a friend, and just because I love the word, Krabi Krabong, I mean, it's so cool, Krabi Krabong. Little babies probably like saying 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.

2:14:09But 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. 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 stuff, I actually do know pretty much about it. Some of the movement patterns probably translate really well.

2:14:51One thing you should definitely try to do while you're there, if you can, is go to Lumpini Stadium or Rajadhamnan to watch the Muay Thai fights. I've been to both of those. Oh, you have? Yeah. I did a film in Thailand as an actor. I've been in Thailand a few times, but I was there as an actor doing a movie called Off Limits. And it was the king's birthday. And he was turning 60. And if you know, with a lesser vehicle of Buddhism, you become an adult at 60. It's the end of the fifth cycle in 12 years. So his birthday was all year long. And we lost locations. And so my week and a half or two-week job wasn't going to happen for at least two months.

2:15:35So I said to them, why don't you just keep me here in a hotel rather than spend first-class plane tickets back and forth back. 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. 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?

2:16:14His said tap dancer. He was amazing. He died of liver cancer. And the other was Fred Ward, who died of Alzheimer's. But Fred was an amazing athlete. Fred had a silver boot in boxe français, savate. Savate, yeah. And when he was in Thailand, he trained Muay Thai with the people from Arajad and Airm. Oh, yeah, Arajad and Airm. And so he brought me, well, at one point, I remember, he brought me in to work out with those guys. I wouldn't hit palm trees with my hands or anything like that. But they had heavy bags and stuff like that, too. So, you know, Fred told me that God gave me a right hook. And I said, yeah, I know that part.

2:17:01But Fred and I went across the border illegally into what was then Burma, up in the Golden Triangle. Yeah, dangerous area. 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, different 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.

2:17:43Are there any other recommendations you would have for people who want to increase the type of serendipity and luck that you've experienced? Are there any other ingredients that you can play with? If you have the good fortune to fall in love with and find yourself with a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, don't fight her about anything. Because number one, you're going to lose. And number two, she's going to take you in a much better direction than you ever figured. Let's go deep down that rabbit hole then. So relationship. We've talked about career. We've talked about some fitness. Long, durable, good relationships with a partner.

2:18:20any advice for people out there? Because especially in your, I would imagine, in the world of entertainment, this is a rarity, I would have to think, from the outside looking in. Again, it was my good fortune to just fall completely in love with this woman. How did the two of you meet? In a movie theater in New York. The girl I 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, we're going to the movies, Murray Hill Cinema.

2:19:02Me and a group of people are going to want to come with us. And I said, sure. So Carol was one of them. I'd never met her before. I sat next to her in the movie theater and I just felt these, I didn't touch her or anything. I just felt these waves of, I don't know what it was, but some. And I'd fallen in lust probably at least a couple thousand times in my life and pursued that, you know, with full vigor, but I'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.

2:19:40She said, yeah, me too. So we sat through the whole movie again, not even touching, and the movie came to an end. In that period of time, it was like magical. We walked out of the theater, and there was probably half a foot of snow everywhere. So we went out, and we played in the snow. It was getting late, and Carol said, and I 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 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.

2:20:21There are blankets on it. Have a good night. Went back into the bedroom, shut the door and went to sleep. I went, okay. So the next morning we had breakfast and we played in the snow some more. And I was going to say goodbye to her. And I thought, I'm not going to even try to hug her and kiss her because if I do this and she does one of those whole ways, 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 hand goodbye. And then for the next week, I would open my, I had predictably a little black book and I would open it up and I would call a phone number and a young woman would answer hello, hello, and I wouldn't say anything, and I would just hang up.

2:21:10And 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. And I sat literally two feet away from it. I was so pissed off. I was just fucking really pissed off. If I had been a dog, I would have been growling.

2:21:48So I'm looking at the TV. I'm not watching the TV, and I hear the downstairs bell go, and I hear Carol say, I remember the guy's name to this day, Earl. She said, okay, Earl, I'll buzz you in. And I'm looking at the TV and I'm hearing the front door open and I'm hearing Earl say, whoa, you look hot tonight. And I hear Carol say, listen, Earl, an old friend of my brother's just dropped by. I haven't seen him in a long time. I'm not going to hell with you tonight. You can see the emotion I'm filled with right now. I can. And I went, yes. She shut the door, walked into the living room, and that was about 55 years ago.

2:22:37Wow. Incredible. What would Carol add to this Genesis story if she were sitting here with us? What else would she add? Tell me I was full of shit and wrap it up. You've got shopping to do for me today.

2:22:58This I'll say about her because she's not here right now. And I've seen it with enough people. And what it is about her, I don't know. And maybe I don't want to know. But even with, he's no longer alive. But I remember when she and I first met Freddie Fields, who was the toughest, hardest-ass agent Hollywood as old school has ever seen. Within 10 minutes of meeting her, he desperately wanted her approval. I've never seen anybody around her who doesn't want her to say, you're okay. What is that about her? She comes from, I think now it's 30, 35 unbroken generations of Jewish rabbis and Israeli airborne or whatever.

2:23:43I don't know. Maybe that's part of it, But that is true about her. People want her to say they're okay. What that quality is in her, I don't know, but it's there, that's for sure. And she's funny. She is funny. You know, and doesn't take seriously a lot of the stuff I do and laughs at it and keeps sort of like properly puts me in my place. I have to ask, and I may get the name wrong here. You mentioned Gregory Hines. And 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.

2:24:24Is my game the name right? No, that was... It 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 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.

2:25:04And he told me that I was a much realer, a better cowboy than John Travolta would ever be. And by the way, John Travolta pretty much sucked as a dancer too. So I remember at one point we were down in the basement of this place called Tosca's, a bar in New York. I mean, I'm sorry, in San Francisco. They had a pool table. And we were shooting pool and drinking. Me in a minor way, he in a major way. Vodka. I remember one point I said to him, 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.

2:25:51That 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 Nurya. He was, in some ways, the best physical shape of any human being I've ever been around. I watched him go down a flight of long stairs on his hands. I mean, he would invite me to come and watch the New York City Ballet work out. And Makarova, who was the best prima ballerina in the world at the time, I would watch her on point.

2:26:33not coming down from points, 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. 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 these scriptures as poetry slash parables for living.

2:27:15Yeah. What does poetry mean to you? Why write poetry? Why read poetry? Poetry to me is the, along with physical art scratching on the side of a wall. Oh, look at that. This is one of your books, Friction Zone. It's the most elemental way that human beings have to communicate ideas and feelings, real deep ideas and feelings. 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 clubfoot, was crippled, but swam the Hellesponse and fought in Greek's war of liberation from Turkey. and he did all this stuff and was, you know, an outrageous coxman, and mainly he was a poet.

2:28:09So I've lived with the belief that I have that in me. But what happened with Carol was I wrote a poem to her every Christmas Hanukkah time, and at a certain point, on her 50th anniversary, she said, I want to publish these. Is it okay with you? And I said correctly, it's not up to me. I'm not, I can say Indian giver because I've got Comanche blood, so I don't mind using the word. If I give something, it's yours. It's not mine. You can rip up those pages and wipe your ass with it. So she said, well, I'm going to publish it, self-publish. So that was room service. That's not that book. And then during the pandemic, there was no acting happening anywhere.

2:28:55And then right after that, I had a brief period of time when I could work. and then the strike happened. But during the pandemic, which was about two years long, all I could really do, aside from work out and hang out with Carol, was write poetry. I now wouldn't even know if I would call it observations. I leave it to other people to say whether that's poetry or not. I don't know. But the thing about the pandemic that I realized with relationships is a lot of people who were in love with each other had to discover whether they liked each other. And what I discovered with Carol was I liked her better than anybody I knew.

2:29:36Even to this day, we're like agoraphobic hermits. We have no problem. I don't need the company of anybody. Anyway, that friction zone is kind of what came out of the pandemic. And it's not big heavy-duty stuff. You know what friction zone is? Friction zone is where you want to be with a big, heavy motorcycle like a Harley-Davidson to drive it slowly. You're slipping the clutch, constantly slipping the clutch with a little bit of power on it. 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.

2:30:22So when you're riding, 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 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.

2:31:04I 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. 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, I'm getting back up every single time and going after what I want.

2:31:44That's the answer. I mean, again, I'm at a bar with Laurence Olivier, who created the National Theater of England, who was the biggest movie star in the world, was the most creative stage actor in the world, and director. He'd done everything. My question to him was, what is it that you need to make it in this business? Is it timing? Right place at the right time? Is it contacts? Knowing the right people? Or is it just working on your skills and becoming better and better at what you do? He said, my dear boy, none of the above. Develop very strong jaw muscles. Learn how to bite on and not let go.

2:32:27I 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.

2:32:44That's fantastic. Scott, thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you. What fun. I blabbed away a lot. That's the whole point. That's the whole blueprint. And maybe we'll get a chance to go out and shoot again. And for those people listening, I think a little birdie told me that with open sights, you can still hit targets at 400 yards, maybe beyond. I don't know about it. There was a time in my life, and I have witnesses 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? I can get the dragon off down. In warm weather, I'll give it a shot to use a horrible, horrible metaphor.

2:33:29Well, I'm curious to see if I can get my ass upside down on the feet up after this, after being inspired by your daily routine. So thank you so much for the time. Hey guys, this is Tim again. just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday, easy to sign up easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.

2:34:09It'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.

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