#729: Legendary Actor Scott Glenn — How to Be Super Fit at 85, Lessons from Marlon Brando, How to Pursue Your Purpose, The Art of Serendipity, Stories of Gunslingers, and More

Scott Glenn’s acting career spans nearly 60 years. His impressive film resume includes performances in Apocalypse Now, Urban Cowboy, The Right Stuff, Silverado, The Hunt for Red October, The Silence of the Lambs, Backdraft, The Virgin Suicides, and The Bourne Ultimatum. This year, Scott will return to HBO to join season 3 of The White Lotus. Timestamps for this episode are available below. Links to everything discussed: https://tim.blog/2024/03/27/scott-glenn/ Sponsors: Momentous https://livemomentous.com/tim high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off) LMNT https://drinklmnt.com/tim electrolyte supplement: https://drinklmnt.com/tim (FREE sample pack with any purchase) AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.) Timestamps: [00:00] Start [07:10] Idaho vs. Los Angeles. [13:26] Apocalypse Now, self-confidence soon after. [17:26] Burt Lancaster’s movie star lessons. [23:06] The birth and death of Wes Hightower. [32:22] Catching the attention of James Bridges. [35:42] Scarlet fever. [37:29] From Marine to police reporter. [42:12] Berghof Studios and parental advice. [50:44] Converting to Judaism. [53:36] Lao Tzu: the ultimate mystic? [58:16] Letting go with Killer Joe. [1:02:53] “Crazy Whitefella Thinking.” [1:08:31] Getting out of the way and Erwan Le Corre. [1:11:51] Lessons from the “morally phenomenal” Marlon Brando. [1:16:26] How Scott’s childhood bout with scarlet fever informed his life’s course. [1:19:05] Daily routines and exercises of an in-shape 85-year-old. [1:35:12] Securing a serendipitous skill set. [1:42:13] Thailand talk. [1:46:18] Increasing surface luck. [1:47:04] How Scott met and fell in love with his wife. [1:53:04] “Just dance.” [1:53:46] Mistakenly calling Rudolf Nureyev Russian. [1:55:57] Poetry. [2:00:01] What Laurence Olivier knew about the value of tenacity. [2:01:41] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:52Tim Ferriss?

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

• 3:37Tim Ferriss?

  taking it daily, typically before podcast recording, as there are various studies and reviews and meta-analyses pointing to improvements in short-term memory and performance under stress. So, those are some of the products that I've been using very consistently, and to give you an idea, I'm packing right now for an international trip. I tend to be very minimalist, and I'm taking these with me nonetheless. Now, back to the bigger picture. Olympians, Tour de France winners, Tour de France winners, the US military, and more than 175 college and professional sports teams rely on Momentous and their products. Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like-

• 4:20Tim Ferriss?

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• 5:02Tim Ferriss?

  That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash TIM and code TIM for 20% off.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question? Well, it is an appropriate time.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:35Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job every episode to interview world-class performers from different disciplines, to tease out the habits, routines, lessons learned, et cetera, that you can apply to your own lives. My guest today is someone I've wanted to have on the podcast for years. We did the interview at his house in Idaho. He has no social media, no website, and his name is Scott Glenn. He is a legend. Scott Glenn's acting career spans nearly 60 years. His impressive film resume includes performances in Apocalypse Now!, Urban Cowboy, The Right Stuff, Silverado: The Hunt for Red October, The Silence of the Lambs, Backdraft, The Virgin Suicides, and The Born Ultimatum.

• 6:18Tim Ferriss?

  I would venture that every single one of you would recognize his face. More recently, Scott has appeared on the small screen as Kevin Garvey, Sr. in The Leftovers, The Blind Sensei Stick in Marvel's Daredevil and The Defenders, and as the retired sheriff Alan Pangborn in Castle Rock. This year, Scott will return to HBO to join season three of The White Lotus. And there is so much more to his story. He-

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Has, I would consider it the gold medal trifecta in terms of mastery across life. And we'll get into exactly what that means, but I've wanted to have this conversation with Scott for a very, very long time. It took place on his couch in his living room and I'll leave it at that. Please enjoy a very wide ranging conversation with the one and only legendary Scott Glenn.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  I have an embarrassment of riches here. We could start just about anywhere, but I thought I would start with saying that I'm in part so happy to be having this conversation because even among all of the hundreds of people I've interviewed, if we look at people in their 30s and 40s, they don't check career, fitness and relationships, but you seem to have 50 plus years checking all three of those boxes. It's hard to find three out of three in the young guns who have sort of wide open field ahead of them. And I want to dig into that, but I thought I would start with Idaho because we're sitting here in your home. It's been a long time since I've been here and

• 7:52Speaker 03

  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?

• 8:03Speaker 04

  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 is probably throws on the wheel as well as any two dozen people on the planet. She's really a good potter. She was accepted to a summer workshop, was invitation only to the best ceramic artists in this country. And it was going to last all summer long. And we were living in LA. We had a place in Topanga. So she said, we had a VW van, typical hippie dippy, live out of the back of it. She was going up with our two daughters.

• 8:47Speaker 04

  To do this workshop and she said, well, you're gonna come with me. And I went, no, I, you know, I, I'm, I'm waiting for the phone to ring to tell me whether I've got a job or not. And she said, does the phone really have to ring for you to kick you in your ass to go anywhere? Can't you 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

• 9:30Speaker 04

  in the contiguous United States, bigger than anywhere except Alaska. And they're gonna be doing high mountain, this is in July, they're gonna be doing high mountain traverses in snow and ice for three days. Then they're gonna 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 Laja. And she said, you're going with him. You know, I was a rock climber at the time, so she knew that about me, but I said, how do you know? She said, because I signed you up.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  So it was like I had no choice in the matter. So we got up here, I tend to overdo things physically, it's just part of my stupid personality. So we got here and I started hiking up Baldi. 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 gonna be hanging out with for the next few weeks.

• 10:53Speaker 04

  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 gonna send people out to look for you. And at the time, it's probably still true. The bighorn crags, no internal combustion allowed at all. So if forestry service had to go in and open up trailheads, they had to go in with mules, two-man crosscut saws, because you couldn't turn on a... That wouldn't work. So we did that, and it was... I hadn't been off on my own, alone,

• 11:38Speaker 04

  with the exception of once that I won't talk about. But then in that situation, 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" plus-plus stuff. The dangerous stuff, he led all of it. So I don't want to pretend that I just instantly did it. But I did do those climbs again and again. And I remember when Carol was gonna come and pick it when we were done, it was like two weeks. And a little over two and a half weeks of doing this. I said to Tony, "I gotta give you some money or something."

• 12:22Speaker 04

  I mean, you've been giving me... And he said, "Come on, I had a great time." I said, "What can I do for you?" And he said, "You can do this. When you go back to LA, tell everybody how horrible Idaho is. Tell them it's a tick fever state. It sucks and you had a bad time." And I said, "Why should I do that?" And he said, "'Cause 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...

• 12:53Speaker 03

  And it's a small town for people who don't have the context.

• 12:55Speaker 04

  But what I discovered, this sounds woo-ah and whatever, but yeah, 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.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  When you came to Idaho, roughly how old were you and where was your career at that point?

• 13:20Speaker 04

  I was probably thirty-eight, thirty-nine, like that, late thirties.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  And had you already had a sort of inflection point in your career at that point?

• 13:29Speaker 04

  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 Baby Maker. And then I did a couple of sort of very small parts in big, important American movies. One was Nashville, Bob Almond's film, and the other was Apocalypse Now. But I was on for a little over seven months. They shot that film, it was, the shooting was a year and a half. So I was a short timer at seven months.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  But that was my experience of working in front of a camera, learning a lot of stuff that stood me in really good stead later on. But what had happened in LA was, okay, I had gone to Universal, I think, to audition. I'd done some TV stuff at Universal. And I'd gone there and because of my experience with Apocalypse, what had happened before is I would go in and I would audition for a TV job mainly at one of the studios, and people would tell me what a crappy actor I was. You squint too much, you're not loud enough, you're not doing this, you're not doing that. And on the surface, I would say, well, what do you know?

• 14:52Speaker 04

  But the reality was underneath it, I suspected maybe they were right. And I didn't know what I was doing in terms of a camera. On stage or doing improv in the back of an alley, yeah, I could do that. So I had no self-confidence. And then I did Apocalypse Now and wound up working, my choice. Francis thought, I think incorrectly, but he thought that he owed me because he thought I saved his life in the Philippines. So I went over to do a small part and he said, I'll write you whatever you want because you filled up a helicopter in a rainstorm with nothing getting in the gas and you kept me from drowning in a river.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  So I went, okay, fine, that's nice. He said, what do you want? And I said, I want to be in the end of the movie. And he said, you can't be in the end of the movie, Scott. It's absolutely completely cast. Well, yeah, wait, there is a part you could do, but you'd be like a glorified extra. Play Colby, the guy who came up river in front of Martin Sheen. And I understood because of the way I 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,

• 16:17Speaker 04

  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 in the end of this movie is an experience that will change my life. And it did. I told Francis later on that I got the greatest gift you could give any artist in 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.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  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 worked with Marlon Brando, Victorio Storaro, Francis Coppola, Dennis Hopper, and they accepted me as an equal. What have you done? You've done this and this? You can't even fucking direct traffic. So they kicked me out of Universal. So now we're back from Idaho. Yeah. And I'm sitting watching television.

• 17:33Speaker 04

  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 had done. And I pointed at her and I said, You're supposed to get better at what you do, not worse. That's the crappiest acting I've ever seen. I was so much better doing street theater in New York. What's happened to me? And I started thinking. And that night at dinner, I said, You know, what I've turned into in LA, and I'm horrible at it, is a show business politician, which is, what am I up for? Who do I know? What openings and parties can I go to to network and make?

• 18:18Speaker 04

  And I used to think, what makes this person tick? Why are they doing what they do? What belief system are they coming from? All that stuff that I really cared about then and do to this day. And I said to Carol, I said, Well, how would you and the girls feel if we moved back to Idaho? And she said, What do you do up there? And I said, I met somebody who told me that if I gave him three years, he would apprentice me to be in backcountry, cross-country ski guide and hunting guide. And I'll do that. And she said, Will you quit acting? I said, No, I'll do Shakespeare in the Park and Boise if I can get a part. I'll do that kind of stuff.

• 19:02Speaker 04

  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 of mine. He was a commercial director, but sort of feeling the same kind of burnout in LA that I felt. So the two families decided we'd come up here and try to figure out what to do in Ketchum, Idaho. No real idea. We were up here. Inside two weeks, I get a call from a friend of mine, a guy named Rupert Hitzig, who said, I'm doing a movie in Mexico.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  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. We'll be shooting for three months. And I got like, I think it was, I can give you 2,000 bucks. And I said, Great. So Carol and I went to Mexico. And I was warned when I went down there. It starred Rod Steiger, Burt Lancaster, Amanda Plummer, and Diane Lane. Those were the stars. And I had a teeny tiny little part as one of Burt's. It was the Duel and Dalton Gang, Western. And I was told by a lot of people when I went down there that you're gonna love Rod Steiger. He works the same way you do. He's a member of the Actors Studio.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  And you're kinda guy, but watch out for Burt Lancaster. He's an old school movie star. He'll get in your key light. He'll screw you up. He'll intentionally ruin two shots so they'll have to go to his close up. Just watch out for him. So we go to Mexico. First day there, El Presidente Lobby Hotel in Mexico. I meet Rod Steiger and I rarely openly dislike somebody when I meet them. But I wouldn't say it was hate at first sight, but it was certainly dislike at first sight. And then a little bit later, Burt Lancaster comes into the lobby.

• 21:10Speaker 04

  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 change in him. And he looked at her and he said, God, I love this stuff. I only have the work of one other ceramic artist. Would you throw me 11 place or 12 place dinnerware set? It was her first commission ever. And she said, yeah, yeah, I will. Later on, many months later, she found out the other ceramic artist that he owned was named Picasso.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 21:54Speaker 04

  So the next day, and he kind of was like, I wasn't even there. So the next day, we're on the set, getting ready to do some scene. It's a group shot. 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? He said, I know you've done street theater. I can tell. I said, no. He said, I didn't think so. He said, you know, I'm not going to bullshit you. I seriously was watching you and I think you've got something, but if you'll permit me to be a gigantic pain in the ass over the next three months, I'll teach you whatever I know.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  Wow. What an incredible opportunity.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  So he taught me about how to work with a camera and how to, I mean, he was an amazing guy. He was an aerialist who traveled across the country with a carnival and to make drinking money, fought people in tough man country. He was the real deal. I love Bert. It was like, what people had told me about Rod and Bert was like, he could flip it around.

• 23:01Speaker 03

  Totally flipped.

• 23:02Speaker 04

  So on the way home, this is a long.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  We got all the time in the world. I have my coffee.

• 23:07Speaker 04

  So we're coming back from Mexico. We went to Paramount to see a friend of Carol's in mind that on their advice, Carol got pregnant. They said, you guys have got to have a baby. And we were really close. Jim was the director, Jim Bridges, and Jack Larson was his partner, lover, whatever. And they were great guys, super great guys. So we went to just say hi to him on our way back to Idaho. We walk into his office. He looks at me, he said, I can't believe you're coming in here. He said, I just realized you're perfect for this part in this movie I'm directing. It's the bad guy, but you're perfect for it. Just hang around town

• 23:52Speaker 04

  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 into anybody's office like a piece of meat anymore. I just made 2,000 bucks. And we're on our way back to Idaho. I just wanted to tell you, I love you and I hope you and Jack are well and Carol and I are out of here. So we left, we came back up to Idaho. About two weeks later, maybe a little less, I get a call from Jim and he 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'Neal to do this part, or maybe Sam Shepard.

• 24:36Speaker 04

  But I'm gonna 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 producer about you, and he likes the idea. You gotta 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. Just to feel indebted. I'll get my GMC Jimmy, I'll drive to Houston, I'll see you down there. And I said, just tell me what the part is. And he said, a bank robber and a bull rider. And I went, okay. So, I drive down to Houston, on my way to Houston, I stop off just in front of Huntsville

• 25:18Speaker 04

  Prison, where I knew the, the character I played spent some time. And, I'm gonna be a little shady about this, cause I kinda have to be, but, so I'm sitting there in my Jimmy, and I hear familiar voices out of the dark saying, hey, vato, what are you doing? And I look over and there, when he was alive, in another part of my life, I knew Freddie Fender, the country western singer. Alright. Whose real name was Baldi Marqueta. And Freddie was in a family that picked everything illegally, that was his background. And he hung out with these two guys who were for real pistoleros, the real deal.

• 26:01Speaker 04

  And, these two guys were there, and they said, what are you doing here, man? And I told them what I was doing, and they went, we don't believe this, we got our buddy coming out, he'll be out of here in fifteen, twenty minutes, you gotta meet him. He's a bank robber and a bull rider. And I went, yeah, Mexican guy said, no, man, he's a fucking gringo. And I went, okay. So I met this guy who told me enough about the character that I was gonna be playing. And little things like he said, you gotta get a hat sticker or something, not a tattoo, but something on you that says thirteen and a half. Cause that's the number that gets us in here and we all have it. And I said, what's that stand for?

• 26:45Speaker 04

  And he said, judge, jury and a half ass lawyer.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  So I said, okay. And he said, and you gotta get tattoos on your forearm, nuestra familia. I said, but I'm not a Latino. He said, neither am I. And showed me that he had that.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  What did that refer to? Our family? Like, what was the meaning of that?

• 27:05Speaker 04

  That's the imprisoned organization of Latinos.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  I see, I see.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  That.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  He was adopted into.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  So he gave me that to do. And then I said, is there anything about being a bull rider? The 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 gonna be using your dominant hand to wrap the rawhide around, you're gonna have to use your non dominant hand and your teeth. And he said, you're gonna have to do it a lot of times to the point where you can go without even thinking about it. So I went, okay, I'm gonna do that at least a hundred times a day from now on. Hopefully a thousand. I get down to Houston. Jim said, I'm gonna make this happen.

• 27:54Speaker 04

  I met the actress who was, 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 gonna 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, right? Because if I'm honest with it, I'll jump off the screen at people,

• 28:36Speaker 04

  simply because this movie is about oil workers and blue collar workers who dress up like outlaw cowboys on weekends to go in and ride not a real bull, but a bull machine. Yeah, mechanical bull. And I'm going to play a guy who's a real bank robber, a real ex-con, and a real bull rider. And if I just get close to it, just close to it, I'll look like a diamond in a bucket full of rhinestones. Not because I'm particularly good, but it was almost like a setup. So anyway, that happened and I didn't have to audition. I auditioned once since then for a part that, not a big part in a movie I really wanted to do.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  And the director said, no, no, at that point, I don't want you to do it. So I went to a cattle call under an assumed name, auditioned for it and got that part. But since I did Urban Cowboy, my life has changed. And I thought, I was offered the lead in some TV series while I was in Texas. Because in those days, dailies were shared by everybody in the, 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 loved 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 loved to do.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  And plus, I could really cleanly think about and concern myself with the art of acting and not, who do I know and where am I going? And I've got this cool place in Malibu or any of that stuff. The politics in the show. So, uh, so I turned on the TV stuff. When I'd been in Texas, Carol had, she hadn't left me, but I knew at a certain point when I was playing Wes Hightower.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  That I had the character, but I was terrified if I left it alone and put it down, it'd be like a bar of soap and I tried to pick it up and I wouldn't. So I lived that part 24/7. Got arrested, got in trouble. I was Wes Hightower the whole time. And I remember at one point I came back to, we had an apartment, a 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'd gone to work that day. And I'm thinking, what's going on? The phone was ringing, I pick it up and it's Carol. And she said, I'm back in Idaho. I can't handle living with Wes Hightower. So you let me know when he's dead. Me and the girls love you.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  We're up here, but we're not gonna put ourselves through this. And I went, okay. And I was about to hang up and she said, wait, before you hang up, I just want to say one thing. 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 gonna change our lives. So when I drove back up here in my Jimmy, I remember I stopped off in Wyoming at one point. People must have thought I was nuts. And I got out of the Jimmy, I walked down to the side of the road and I took this invisible Wes Hightower and threw him in the ground, broke his fucking neck. And called Carol on a payphone and I said, Wes Hightower is dead. I'm coming home.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Wow, okay. Let me pause you for a second. Okay, okay, continue. And then we're gonna go back to the origin story.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  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 in movies for more money than I'd ever dreamed about making. And that was that. So here I am in Idaho.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  What, uh, we're gonna go back in time, we're gonna 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 gonna change your life? What do you think it was? Was it that setup that you talked about?

• 32:38Speaker 04

  I had done my first movie with him and I got the movie, I came out here and I met him, but I didn't audition for the part. There was a director, Ed Peron, who had done a thing called, in New York, it was called Collision Course. It was nine, one act in the course of a night. And Ed said to Jim, "If you're looking for somebody, a young guy who's not going to charge you a ton of money, and is perfect for the part, Scott Glenn's the guy." So I got that part and did the movie. So Jim knew me over a period of... In those days, movies took about three months to shoot. Now it's way faster. And I guess, whatever 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."

• 33:23Speaker 04

  Something that he saw about me... He wrote the script for Urban Cowboy with Aaron Lathan, 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 of that stuff. And then Jim adapted that and wrote the screenplay. I don't know what it was he saw. I remember my screen test. They wanted me to do a scene from the... And I said, "I can't do that. I'm not in the part. I don't want to lose it." And Jim said, "Well, we've got to put you on, on screen." And I said... And Deborah was doing her sexy bull ride at the time. And there were a bunch of guys in the front watching.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  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 Deborah, and I walked over to him. And I went, "Hey." And he looked up at me, and I said, "You're sitting in my fucking seat." And he looked 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.

• 34:38Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement? And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin

• 35:19Tim Ferriss?

  D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A-G-one, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 35:42Tim Ferriss?

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

• 35:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:56Tim Ferriss?

  And how did acting enter the scene for you? And I read a bit about Berghoff.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  I wanted to be a writer. And if I look back on my whole life, the most important single event in my life was scarlet fever when I was nine years old. I wasn't supposed to have survived. There was one weekend when the doctors told my mom and dad to get a plot. And what saved my life was crystalline penicillin. I don't know if you've ever had that, a shot of it, but it's interesting. Cause usually with most shots, it's the needle going in that hurts. And it's fine. Crystalline penicillin is like thicker than engine grease.

• 36:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  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 had learned to not only live with, but fall in love with my fantasies and my imagination. And I don't know if it's true or not, and I don't wanna know because it's a fantasy that I, if it's not true, I grew up believing it was that on my mom's side of the family, I was directly related to Lord Byron. When I got out of bed from scarlet fever, my bones were so soft that they bent and I limped like for almost four years, but it turned me into an athlete because I was

• 37:18Speaker 04

  just embarrassed about the way I looked and I was in a neighborhood where it wasn't good to be physically frail.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  And this was Pittsburgh?

• 37:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. At any rate, I decided, you know, two things. Number one, I wasn't gonna be Walter Mitty. I wasn't gonna have an imaginary life. The adventures I was imagining were all gonna be true. I was gonna make them come true. And one of them was I was gonna be a writer, poet, writer. So when I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I enlisted as a six-month reserve.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Why did you do that? Because you went from English major to Marine Corps, isn't it?

• 37:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, cuz where I came from, there was, nobody dodged the draft.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:02Speaker 04

  And the draft was happening.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  I see.

• 38:04Speaker 04

  So for me, and I knew even with a BA in college, I had so little technical ability and everybody will tell you about that. If I was smart enough, I would have tried to become probably a naval aviator, but I wasn't smart enough to be a pilot. So where I came from, the choices were three. Marine Corps, 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne. That's it. And then a friend of mine said, well, you can be airborne and a Marine, both. And then I was worried about my hearing because I've been legally deaf since I was 10 years old because of scarlet fever as well.

• 38:43Speaker 03

  Because of the scarlet fever.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  And they laughed. They said, you're gonna be an enlisted Marine, you're going to boot camp at Paris Island, and you're worried about your hearing. People are gonna scream at you the whole time you're there. And then you're gonna be shooting automatic weapons without your hearing protection. Your hearing's gonna be trashed. Don't worry about it. So that was my reason. So I did my six months in the Marine Corps, and this was the 60s where if you were a reservist, you didn't really have to make weekend meetings in summer camp. There were other ways of doing your time of deployments for three months or a month, month and a half, whatever. When I got out of the Marine Corps, I went to see my mom and dad who were living in

• 39:29Speaker 04

  Kenosha, Wisconsin. My dad was, at that point, he'd gotten pretty high up in Snap-on Tools. Well, when I was born, he was a salesman. So he went from no money and no nothing to, he actually wound up kind of running that company. I went to Kenosha. There was a job opening on the Kenosha Daily News, and I did an interview and lied, as I often do. They said, can you type? And I went, yeah. And they said, how many words a minute? And I said, 35, because I knew that's what I needed. After the interview, they said, well, you 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, well, I'll tell you the truth, I lied.

• 40:14Speaker 04

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

• 40:26Speaker 03

  And what was the job for? This was, were you transcribing, or what was the job?

• 40:30Speaker 04

  The job was cover reporter.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  I got it.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  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 thirty 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. And I'm telling you, those were shots. And they said, why don't you go out and cover it? So I went outside and two blocks from the newspaper at the side of the road was the city patrol car with Mrs. Hockadahl,

• 41:18Speaker 04

  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 Batatus, 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 realized, I thought being a police reporter would be really cool, because I'll cover, you know, mob hits and all that stuff. And I realized that you do do that. But you're for every one of those, you do six interviewing

• 42:00Speaker 04

  a woman fifteen 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 along an island. And she said, when's the job start? And I said, in about six months. And she said, why don't you go to New York and take an acting class? And I went.

• 42:39Speaker 04

  Why? And she said, I'll be honest with you, Scott. I've 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 into anybody's mouth, whether it's a poem or a short story or whatever, you blow it. If you have to get in front of people and say words, it'll kick you in your ass to start to listen to the way people really talk. And if you're doing theater, you'll be dealing with arguably the best dialogue ever written. So after I got over maybe five or 10 minutes of being angry because she told me the truth, I thought, okay. So I got in my car.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  I had an old Triumph and I drove to New York, sold the car, got two jobs. I looked up acting in the Village Voice, nothing under A, under B, it's at Berghof Studios. I didn't know anything about it. I call it up, call up Berghof Studios and this guy named Bill Hickey, who was one of America's greatest character actors, nominated for, he might have gotten an Academy Award for, God, I can't think of the, anyway, Bill answers the phone and he says, yeah, work on this, bring it by Berghof Studios Wednesday morning. It was, oh dad, poor dad, mom was hugging you in the closet and I'm feeling so sad, was the play. Something I'm completely unsuited for, but it was a little monologue. I worked on it.

• 44:04Speaker 04

  I go down into the basement of Berghof's. It was raining outside Wednesday morning, maybe seven or eight people sitting there to watch. I walk in front of Bill Hickey to start this monologue and for the first and only time in my life, literally a light bulb went off between my eyes and I thought, holy shit, I'm an actor. That fast. And it wasn't like, oh, I'm so fulfilled. It was, for the first time, my life made sense to me. My proclivity to daydream, my laziness in a lot of areas, everything made sense like that. And Bill saw it and he started laughing and he said, that's right, you're one of us.

• 44:46Speaker 04

  And then he turned to the other students and he said, Scott's not going to finish this. He's got to go outside, walk around the block a couple of times and think about things. And I went outside. There was a payphone 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, you know, all that stuff. But in other ways, it's very easy because you don't have to make decisions about what you're going to wear, what you're going to do, what you're going to eat. And I like that because I really am lazy. I'm like horribly lazy human being. Anyway, I told my dad that.

• 45:31Speaker 04

  And he took a second and he gave me the best advice I could ever have had. He said, Son, I don't really know anything about what you're telling me. The only advice I can give you is don't give yourself any deadlines. And I said, What do you mean? He said, Don't say, if I haven't made it in two years, I'm going to sell insurance. He said, That's like starting a race with a lead wheel weight hung around your neck. In for a penny, in for a pound. If you love it, make it your life. And I did. And here I am talking to you.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  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?

• 46:24Speaker 04

  Well, my dad grew up in a way that I can't possibly understand, in real, serious poverty. I remember he told me at one point, if I ever have money, I'm going to give it to a charity. Make it the Salvation Army because they fed us Christmas time. They had a cow in a vacant lot that three blocks of people used for milk. So I'm not going to go into, I don't want to divulge to you, 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.

• 47:07Speaker 04

  And all of them involved in gambling and booze, none of them involved in drugs. They were all people, my dad's best friend who raised me as much as my mom and dad did was a black Cherokee, super honorable, super loving, super gentle, but also somebody you wouldn't want to fuck with. So that was my dad's background when he met my mom and she said, basically, if you even curse around me, we're not going to be together and you can't do anything illegal. So he left the world that he was in and started selling blue point tools that morphed into Snap-on Tools.

• 47:48Speaker 04

  He told me later on, when I was still struggling as an actor, and the thing that I'm sad about, but I can't do anything about 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 was, started doing really well with Snap-on Tools, he said, I keep running into these men who are lawyers and doctors and they're not happy because they're doing their father's dream, not their dream. And he said, the only advice I can give you about having kids is when you have kids, don't dream their dreams for them. Do not do that. So he was an unusual guy.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  To be very honest, the only human being I've ever met in my life, close to who he was, was him.

• 48:39Speaker 03

  Thank you for sharing that. And how would you describe your mother, her character, what you absorbed from her?

• 48:47Speaker 04

  Filled with love, unconditional love. When I think back on it, my mom and dad played tennis. My mom also grew up really, really poor. Her dad died when he was in his 30s, but she had a rich, super aunt. Who never gave the family money, but gave her things like ballet lessons. And so my mom was a dancer and I think back on it, she was a loving, physical artist. It was like when I remember when Carol and I were gonna get married and I told my dad that we grew up Swedenborgians and I was planning on converting to Judaism. I didn't want her to have a target on her back that I didn't have on mine as well.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  And my dad's answer was, man should do what the woman wants. So that was my mom and dad. I mean, what I will say about growing up with them is we hear all these people talk about growing up in these dysfunctional families. I don't have any excuses. I grew up in the most functionally family, straight out love. My dad never hit me, except for once in my life. I remember my mom wanted me to take this girl to a dance junior high and she was the daughter of a friend of hers and I went, ooh, I know she was a little hefty, whatever. I didn't want to do it and I said, no, I don't want to do it. And she said, please, son, I'm asking. I said, no. And my mom teared up and started going, huh. My dad walked in the door and he said, why's your mom crying?

• 50:17Speaker 04

  And 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.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:27Speaker 04

  And he looked down at me, he said, make your mom cry, you're going down. And walked away. So the next time my mom wanted me to do something, if she even started to go, huh huh. I said, okay, mama. Do it.

• 50:44Speaker 03

  So let's come back to the conversion to Judaism. I'd love for you to say a little bit more about that. You mentioned if Carol was gonna 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?

• 50:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I had a friend, his name was Milton Bedo, 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 sedens. He'd been in shootouts with the KKK. And I believe he dropped a couple of those. And he was my friend. He loved theater. And I went to see him and I said, I want you to make me a Jew. He, he, he said, you know, I'm a-

• 51:26Speaker 03

  Why did you say that to him? In preparation for getting married?

• 51:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 04

  I said, I'm going with Carol. I want you to make me a Jew. He'd met her and he, so, you know, I said, I want you to make me a Jew. And he said, schmuck alive for you. I'll tell her parents that I did it and I won't do it. And I just went, it's not, her parents don't have anything to do with it. And he said, I'm a conservative rabbi. I don't really believe in conversions that much. What do you know about the Talmud? And I said, if a man teaches his son no trade 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.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  But if you're asking me of all that stuff, what resonates the most with me, it'd be Lautzu's The Way of Life. He said, I'll get, I'll find a rabbi that'll do a prayer. I went, okay. And I started walking out of the shul. And he said, hey, wait a minute asshole, turn around. So I did. And he said, you're not doing it for the Talmud. You're not doing it for her parents. Why do you want me to convert you? And I said, because I met this woman. I love her and we want to travel. And I don't want to be, go anywhere in the world where somebody's pointing a gun at her and not at me for the same reason. Period. That's it. If there was no anti-Semitism, you and I wouldn't be having this talk. And he said, sit down. So I sat down and he said, after me, all of Beth Gimel Dath. And I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm converting you.

• 52:58Speaker 04

  And I said, well, you just told me you wouldn't. He said, nobody has ever given me that answer to that question. He said, if you want to take this on that way, I'm duty bound to convert you. And then he kind of converted me. I was doing an off-Broadway play at the time. So he would go down and when I would go to the shul to like, learn about Judaism, he was a closet director. He would say, I want to come back on stage in two days. I want you to try this. I went, oh, man. Okay. I'm not going to say no to the guy.

• 53:31Speaker 04

  Abraham Ephraim Ben Abraham is my Jewish name.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  You mentioned Lao Tzu. Why does that resonate? Why does his writing or the conglomerate known as Lao Tzu, the sort of-

• 53:43Speaker 04

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

• 53:59Speaker 03

  I know the name. I do.

• 54:00Speaker 04

  And so he wrote a book called Practical Shooting Beyond Fundamentals. And it's about when you enter the space of doing something, the less thought that can be involved and the more you're just present in the now, the better it will be. Doing martial arts and boxing, wrestling, all that stuff. I just realized at a very young age that if I wanted something to work out well physically, the best thing I could possibly do is watch my body do it, not make any decisions at all. So, you know, if somebody does this, then you do that. I never bought that in martial arts. Given where I grew up, I knew that wasn't true.

• 54:44Speaker 04

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

• 55:15Speaker 03

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

• 55:20Speaker 04

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

• 56:00Speaker 04

  The reason for that, I believe, is because orthodoxy is not practical. Orthodoxy says, "Take absolute, for real, the words that are written in these books." Well, if you want to save orthodoxy, forget about banning books about LGBTQ or blacks or Latinos. If you want to save orthodoxy, ban the teaching of these three following subjects: math, physics, chemistry. Because under the harsh light of science, orthodoxy doesn't work. Carbon dating says to the Bible, the Talmud, and the Quran, all of which get kind of close

• 56:44Speaker 04

  to the same date as the age of the earth, carbon dating says, "Yeah, you'll miss that one by only around 170 million years." Whoops, somebody lived in the belly of a whale. Well, 2,000 years ago, you look at something as big as a whale, you save as possible. Biology says, "This thing can barely swallow anything bigger than a minnow." Guess what? It never happened. Whoops. But mysticism says, "All of this is poetry to tell you from God how to live your life, how to be an honorable, just person, how to have a family." All of which I completely believe, absolutely.

• 57:25Speaker 04

  So, to me, Lao Tzu is the ultimate mystic, because in my mind, what mystics and orthodoxy are looking essentially at doing the opposite thing. Orthodoxy is saying, "If I bow to Mecca, or if I eat..."

• 57:44Speaker 04

  Fish on Friday, or if I live kosher, when I die, I'll be cool. My ego will be cool. I'll be fine. I will be fine. Mysticism tries to dissolve the ego altogether. Do I believe when I die Scott Glenn will be around? No. But do I believe there's something in me that's a point of view, that's a point of view of you two guys and the cloud outside and elk running? Yes, I do believe that.

• 58:16Speaker 03

  Talking about that dissolution from a firsthand experiential perspective, like a mystic, have you ever experienced, say, in acting, a role playing you as opposed to the other way around?

• 58:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 58:30Speaker 03

  Could you describe?

• 58:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:32Speaker 03

  What that's like?

• 58:33Speaker 04

  The first time it happened was Urban Cowboy. I translated it wrong. I translated it as fear of leaving this character alone. The second time it happened was doing an off-Broadway play called Killer Joe. And I just realized that up until one part of Killer Joe, it was a crazy play where we were allowed, the director realized that the acoustics were so good in the Soho Playhouse, that we could turn our back on the audience and be heard. We could walk offstage and be heard. So he thought, to make this really spontaneous and organic,

• 59:15Speaker 04

  I'm gonna allow anyone to do whatever they want. There's not gonna be any blocking at all, none. The whole thing took place in a trailer on the outskirts of Dallas. So if as a character, in the middle of a conversation, you felt like walking down the hallway offstage to take a leak, you did. So it was completely...

• 59:36Speaker 04

  Open like that. The only part that was choreographed originally was there was a big fight at the end. We brought in a guy from the opera to choreograph the fight and he choreographed a great fight scene, but it didn't look right next to how loose the rest of the play was. So we realized we had to improv the fight as well. Mercifully, the people in the cast had circus skills. We knew how to pratfall and stuff like that. But everybody got hurt doing it. Fifteen minutes before half an hour, we'd come onstage 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

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  my hair and pulled me, I would fall backwards. But since I couldn't see what I was falling into, it was the obligation of the person pulling me to kick, if there was a chair or something that I was gonna fuck up my back, to kick it out of the way. The only place to kick it was the first aisle of the theater. So we told people when they came to see his play, "This is a projectile aisle. You may not get a heavy object landing on your lap, or you may. You for sure are gonna 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

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  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 Two where I'm supposed to walk onstage. It's dark, and this guy is trying to get in, he's drunk and he's trying to get in the front door, but I don't know who it is. And I've moved in at that point. And I'm in bed with a young girl. So I come out, in the dark, grab him, slam him down on the ground, and I've got a .45 automatic and I'm wearing a watch. And the lights come up, and then everybody else wanders onstage who's in the trailer.

• 1:01:36Speaker 04

  My wardrobe is a .45 automatic and a watch. At one point, Tracy Letts said, "Scott, when people walk onstage, all I see is your ass. You're trying to... You live at this place." So, full frontal nudity, fine, but doing that, oddly, kind of...

• 1:01:56Speaker 04

  After the first night of doing it, it was like, I don't know whether liberate is the right word,

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  I was just gonna use that word.

• 1:02:03Speaker 04

  But I realized that after that, and Tracy forced me into that spot, the best thing I could do with the play was just let it happen. Just let it happen. So that was Killer Joe.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  When you say let it happen, how does that change how you approach the next performance? You decide to let it happen.

• 1:02:22Speaker 04

  The next performance, I didn't make any decisions about what I would do, what prop I would pick up, anything.

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  Just let.

• 1:02:30Speaker 04

  Well, let's see what's going on here. I'm gonna live in this space. I know that I am this character. I even told Tracy, I said, I know other people have played this part at Steppenwolf, where it started in Chicago, but you fucking wrote this for me. And I just know it. In the way that, that I felt the same way about Wes Hightower in Urban Cowboy. So that was Killer Joe. The next time it happened, I was doing Leftovers. And I'd been in two seasons of The Leftovers and I'd gone from just being a character to Damon Lindelof calling me up with Mimi Leiter, 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.

• 1:03:16Speaker 04

  And I think the second or third episode is gonna be just you, Scott. All just you in Australia. And I've written the longest monologue I've ever written. I'm so lucky. So I said, what is it, two pages long? He said, no, seven. I went, holy shit, seven pages. And he sent it to me. At the time he sent it to me, I was reading this book. I know you've got a dog. I'm gonna ask you about your dog.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:03:44Speaker 04

  But I was reading this book called, uh, Don't Shoot the Dog.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  Excellent book.

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  Isn't it a great book?

• 1:03:50Speaker 03

  It is the top recommendation always for people who are considering getting a dog for any type of training. It is an excellent book.

• 1:03:57Speaker 04

  If we weren't holding mics, I'd argue. So I got, 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.

• 1:04:13Speaker 04

  Your husband or your wife, your friends, even yourself. For example, if you've got something long to memorize, and I'm thinking, holy shit. So what she said in that was, it'll take longer initially, but it's the perfect way to remember 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.

• 1:04:54Speaker 03

  That's fascinating. Instead of the ending being this hanging unfamiliarity.

• 1:04:59Speaker 04

  It scares you a little while. Remember it. As you get near the end, you become more and more comfortable, and more and more comfortable. So we get down to, Carol and I get to Australia, we go to the Outback, and we're gonna do this scene. So first one we're gonna 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 it up. It's really, it's not a monologue in that it's not me talking to myself. I'm talking to David Gopaleel, but he doesn't say anything. So he just sits there and listens.

• 1:05:44Speaker 04

  So we start doing this scene, and we come to the end of it. I hear action, I feel my key light a few times, I hear cut, and Mimi says, okay, that was, first she said incorrectly, but I'll say it because I got a big ego. She said, ladies and gentlemen, you just had a master's class in acting. She said, okay, so Scott, so when you picked up the tape recorder, and you started to play it, and you welled up, and you started to cry, and you wouldn't let yourself, and you put it back down, what did you do next? And I said, what did I do with the tape recorder?

• 1:06:20Speaker 04

  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?" She said, "What's the difference?"

• 1:07:01Speaker 04

  And I said, "The difference is, I'm a blue collar, enlisted Marine, I know how to take orders, you're my boss, if you tell me to do it, I'll do it. But if as an artist, you're asking me, will I do it? Artists wait whole lifetimes to be able to have this experience. And if I could have this experience again, fuck no, I don't want to do it. I do not." And she said, "What if I'm not getting what I want?" I said, "Let's do another take, we'll just do one take after another." She said, "It'll wipe you out, it'll exhaust you." I said, "No, it won't. Look at me, am I exhausted?" So we did three or four more takes of the whole thing. And at the end of it, Mimi said, "Is this what I'm going to be dealing with for the

• 1:07:44Speaker 04

  rest of this episode?" And I went, "Not if you tell me not to." And she said, "I'm not going to tell you not to. Let's just go for it." So we did that whole episode, crazy white fella thinking. And all I would do in the morning, when I would wake up, first in the Outback, and then later on in Melbourne, was I'd look, literally look in the mirror, and I'd say, "Stay out of the way."

• 1:08:10Speaker 04

  Do not make editorial decisions or try to work for that big moment. I had a manager who used to, his term was having a conversation with Oscar. Have no conversations with Emmy or Oscar. Just stay out of the way of this and let it happen. So that was when I really understood being in that spot as an actor. And then it happened to me again with Vince Vaughn doing a series that hasn't come out yet. The first season, I don't know if there'll be a second season. The first season will be around August. It's called Bad Monkey. It stars Vince. And the first day on the set, working with Vince, we did, I play his dad.

• 1:08:53Speaker 04

  And the character is a shaman who talks to manatees and the birds flying by in the sky and shit like that. At any rate, Vince, after we did the scene, has written like three times. And it felt like it was just taking me. Vince said, okay, we know the scene. Scott, would you be cool with just throwing the script out and just winging that scene? What we just did, just completely open ended loose? And I went, you mean like I used to do in street theater? Shit, yes. And after we did that, I just thought, I'm not going to edit myself. This character that I'm playing because of a key that kind of, something that I signed up for,

• 1:09:37Speaker 04

  a breathing thing with this guy, Erwan La Cour. At any rate, I just realized after that day with Vince and the key that I had to play in the character. I'm going to stay out of the way of this because it feels so good and so fresh. And I'm lazy too. I mean, it's taking care of me. Why should I work my ass off when the best stuff is just leaving it alone? And then the next job I got after that was something called Eugene the Marine, which is this low budget thriller that will be coming out sometime in the next year. And with that, I realized from the get go, just stay out of the way, both because the director was gonna let me do whatever I really wanted. I would make the physical, I was supposed to pick up a drill and drill a hole in the

• 1:10:22Speaker 04

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

• 1:11:04Speaker 04

  And, complete spontaneity, and I got this from Brian Enos as well, about shooting, complete spontaneity is not watching yourself at all. Complete spontaneity is being in the now, so completely, that you really don't have a past, and more importantly, way more importantly, I think with acting, is you don't have a future, which means plans on what you're gonna do in the scene dissolve and then finally disappear. So what I had with that movie was, finally, would just wound up being with the crew, as my very small audience, every single take was a one-act play called Now.

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:12:01Speaker 04

  Aside from his moral behavior, which was phenomenal.

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  What do you mean by that?

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  He supported two villages in the Philippines with all of his pay, and wouldn't let anybody write about it, or, it's not in the movie, but there's one point where I killed Dennis Hopper, and I was working on the scene, and Marlon came over to me, he says, Scott, just because they call it acting, doesn't mean you have to act. Okay.

• 1:12:29Speaker 03

  What did he mean by that?

• 1:12:31Speaker 04

  What he meant by that was I was trying to squeeze something out of a moment rather than seeing what the moment was going to present to me. 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. You get down the accent and the physical characteristics and the wardrobe and the makeup and the dealing with props and get the whole outside perfect and then do the part.

• 1:13:12Speaker 04

  That's Rada technique acting, most of what you still see. Then there's the Russian school, which is Stanislavski, Boloslovsky, 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? 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.

• 1:13:57Speaker 04

  So use the subway because you're not in the other city. So Marlon had the reputation of being mainly, if not 100%, the Russian school. I realized around him, he was whatever worked. Sometimes he would take a mirror, make an expression on the mirror, freeze it and say action. And other times, he would say, how are they lighting this scene? And they would say, is there a way I can put this ear in the dark so you don't see it? Yeah, but what are you gonna 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.

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  It was audio? He had recorded himself?

• 1:14:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, so he would do anything. And I learned from him that part, but I also got from Marlon his understanding about, okay, so, brief little story. Where we were in the Philippines was at a place called Paxton Hunt. And I had a room at Pocahontas Inn that I basically kept all my crap in. I was living at the time with this group of people called the Ifagaw that were on the set. But one afternoon, I was back at the hotel with Marlon, with two producers. I think Dennis Hopper and I think Larry Fishburne was there. So anyway, we're sitting around, the table in the hotel and where you check into the hotel and a jukebox, we're all kind of in the same room.

• 1:15:23Speaker 04

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

• 1:16:08Speaker 04

  And they said, 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.

• 1:16:26Speaker 03

  With the quickening that you felt when you realized that you were meant to act, when your life started to make sense, do you think that was predestined out of the box? Was that informed by your experience with scarlet fever? Because I know, I believe you couldn't read at the time.

• 1:16:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, scarlet fever attacks. Sometimes all usually just one of your senses and they don't know why it does that. But they were trying to protect my eyesight, which turns out to be really good. What scarlet fever left me out with was damaged auditory nerves. I mean, I've got hearing aids in now because Carol finally was up here probably five, six years ago. She just got tired of screaming at me and having me walk into the room and turning the TV up. So like ear splitting loud, she said, you got to get hearing aids. Didn't think I needed them and then I got checked by the audiologist who went behind my back to talk to me. And what happened was he was talking to me, I'm looking at him and I'm hearing him fine.

• 1:17:29Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:17:50Speaker 03

  And do you think that informed, helped shape you into what later became this actor?

• 1:17:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, or it led me into having discoveries that I wouldn't have had before. Like when I got out of bed from scarlet fever, I could take my finger literally and run it in and out of my rib cage. My bones were soft, so I limped. I grew up in a neighborhood that was very physical. So out of mortification, if there was a pickup football game, I played. But what I discovered from playing sports and stuff, it 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 or, and to some extent, that's still true of me.

• 1:18:39Speaker 04

  So scarlet fever just introduced me to a different world that I really loved. Marine Corps did too. All of those things, rock climbing with Tony Jones up in the Bighorn crags, all of that stuff I found out was really fun and put a smile on my face. And I don't think if I had never gotten scarlet fever, I don't know that that would have ever happened. I don't know, it did happen and. Now I'm eighty-five and here it is.

• 1:19:05Speaker 03

  So for people who of course are listening to this and not seeing any visual, I mean, for the majority of our conversation, you're sitting comfortably cross-legged on a couch, no back support, something that I know thirty-somethings who wouldn't be comfortable in that position more than a few minutes. What does your physical training look like now? And what would you say are some of the most important types of training or decisions about training that you've made, say, post forty? Just to allow this type of capability.

• 1:19:35Speaker 04

  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 five-thirty. I slept till seven today, I don't know why, but I come downstairs, I fill up the coffee machine with water, turn it on, clean up the surfaces of all the tables, just because it feels like a good thing to do. And then I massage my ears, pull them up as high as possible. I'm not talking about being gentle, not gentle at all. Pull them down and then massage my ears. And if I feel any even slightly tender or sore spot, I really go after that as hard as I can.

• 1:20:19Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  What do you mean by horizontal?

• 1:20:39Speaker 04

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

• 1:20:57Speaker 04

  Your stomach goes out, your diaphragm is working.

• 1:21:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:21:00Speaker 04

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

• 1:21:45Speaker 04

  So I just try, early in the morning, try to remind myself.

• 1:21:48Speaker 03

  Horizontal breathing.

• 1:21:49Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  Now, is this also from Chinese medicine?

• 1:22:03Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:22:04Speaker 04

  So after I've finished 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.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  You're shorts and a sweatshirt right now?

• 1:22:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I slip on these slip-on shoes because this time of year I'll probably be standing in snow and ice. And I open up the garage and I walk outside and I hum. And when I say I hum, any of us can do it easily. You put your back teeth together and

• 1:22:36Speaker 04

  I do that eight times and put vibration in my vagus nerve. This is every morning for sure. And then I come back in, shut the garage door, and usually then I look at what the temperature was because I think, whoa, that was pretty cool. Like this morning it was 14.

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  And you're outside in shorts?

• 1:22:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm not uncomfortable at all. But, you know, I know other people who handle the cold way better than I do. But the humming, you know, who does that? Buddhist monks do that in the Himalayas. And they do that in way colder weather with robes on. It actually will work if you can do it in a relaxed way. You know, you start to learn sort of to anchor your coccyx. Hum, come back in, 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.

• 1:23:41Speaker 04

  And then I do something physical to finish waking up. Today it was baby fit. You know, baby fit? I do not know baby fit. Russian special ops do it in the morning. Use your legs first, five times with each leg, lying on your back with your arms over your head. Use your legs to turn yourself over the way a baby would. And then you use your arms to do the same thing, five times, five times. Then you rock back and forth. I do it 20 times. Do with your neck. I do 10 times usually. And then a low crawl. And a bear crawl, you can either do a bear crawl with your butt up in the air or your butt lower than your shoulders.

• 1:24:25Speaker 04

  I do it lower than my shoulders. Did you get John into this? And, and what he said was makes so much sense. We spend so much of our time looking at cell phones and computers and driving and doing so much stuff like that or like that. Right, with your head. It would be good to do that a bit. Get your neck extended instead of pitched downward. And I do a bear crawl and I.

• 1:24:50Speaker 04

  Like today, I didn't do that many because I was thinking about you guys coming over here and I didn't want. So I just did 12, but usually I do 60. When it's warm out, I'll use the lawn out there and usually it's like 90 to 100 out.

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  This is yards or feet, feet, I guess?

• 1:25:06Speaker 04

  This is just moves.

• 1:25:07Speaker 03

  Oh, okay, actual.

• 1:25:08Speaker 04

  One, two, three, four, like that.

• 1:25:09Speaker 03

  I got it. That's quite a bit. Good for you. I don't even know if I could do that.

• 1:25:13Speaker 04

  So that's one, one thing I'll do. The other, the other is, you know, like a really brief warm up. When I say brief warm up, 30 seconds of running in place, swinging my arm, just putting some synovial fluid in my joints. And then what I've been doing a lot is quick and dead. For me, that's just 10 kettlebell swings. Either with a 32 pound, I don't know the KGs, in the 30s.

• 1:25:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably 16, 24, 24 kilos. Wow.

• 1:25:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, or 52.

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, 52, okay.

• 1:25:48Speaker 04

  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 pushups. Depends on how ambitious I am. I'll either do, I rarely do straight pushups. I'll usually do fist pushups or open finger fist pushups. Tri finger pushups or these, which are.

• 1:26:20Speaker 03

  Oh, I got it. The close hand more tricep type pushups.

• 1:26:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. Back屈伸 exercise, prison pushups. 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 pushups. Then I'm pretty much done with like specific.

• 1:26:43Speaker 04

  Working out, if I want to do, I used to do, you know, workout with like dumbbells and barbells and stuff like that, just for the chuckles of it. Every now and then I'll pick up some dumbbells just to play or say, can I still do this? But I avoid that because I'm 85 and I don't want to mess with my joints and tendons and ligaments. And I've discovered that bands work just as well and they're way more merciful on your body. I mean, at one point you talk about being 85, I absolutely take into account the fact that I'm, and the other thing I realized is that already at 85, my recuperation time

• 1:27:25Speaker 04

  is way longer than it used to be. If I do an all nighter now, it'll take me three days to get back. When I was in the Marine Corps, I could get, I'm not exaggerating, I could get 15, 20 minutes of sleep, just tying myself to an armored personnel carrier and I was good for 72 hours, for real. And those days are long gone.

• 1:27:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:46Speaker 04

  So, and now also if I drink too much tequila, I'm gonna really feel it for two or three days, all that stuff. The one place where, that I'm lucky, I'm not bragging, is really true, is my reaction to them. I'm still as quick as I used to be. But what I'm, I realize is that could turn into.

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  For people who can't see, you just threw a jab right in my face.

• 1:28:12Speaker 04

  What I realize is that could drop off 30 seconds from now. I'm 85. At some point, that's gonna go. And if it does, that's, I'll deal with it. Those are some of the stuff that I do, aside from the breathing stuff. I used to think the most important muscles in the body were the butt, the hamstrings and the quads, lower body, big muscles. And they're not unimportant at all. But now I believe that easily, the most important muscle, you have control. I mean, I guess yogis have control over their heart. So that would work. I don't. I can slow my heart rate down and that's pretty much it.

• 1:28:54Speaker 04

  So the most important muscle in my body that I can have control over for sure is the diaphragm. Nothing else even gets close. And that feet up thing over there, I use to

• 1:29:05Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. Yeah, look at that. I know the

• 1:29:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I like, I like, forget exactly how the diaphragm feels. So I'll invert myself and then drop my heels over so that they're against the wall really gently, as gently as possible. And why I'm doing that is that 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.

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  Let me just

• 1:29:37Speaker 04

  So if you start taking in big breaths, you're gonna be introduced to your diaphragm like right away.

• 1:29:43Speaker 03

  Let me explain this for folks, because a lot of people listening, a lot of my friends who are former athletes in their thirties or forties could not do this comfortably. So 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. So you're basically doing a handstand on your shoulders. You can't shrug your shoulders or be very hard. So you have to then breathe through your diaphragm. So this is what Scott does at 85, just for hashtag life goals for everybody listening. And do you exercise every morning?

• 1:30:21Speaker 04

  No, I guess I kind of do. I was thinking when I was doing Eugene the Marine, all I would do is, well, actually, I did do about 60 pace. I would do baby fit in the morning. That'd be pretty much it. Because I knew I had so much work to do during the day. And a lot of it was super physical, was martial arts stuff with training knives and stuff like that. So I'm not compelled to work out every day, but at least every other day. And the diaphragm stuff, I use because, like I say, I'm, I'm super lazy as an actor. So I got this part in Bad Monkey. I'm playing this shaman. I get the part, and then I freak out.

• 1:31:03Speaker 03

  I can't wait to see this, by the way.

• 1:31:04Speaker 04

  Because I'm thinking, how do I play somebody who talks to manatees? And I don't want to I don't want to have to technically figure that out as an actor. That's gonna be way too much work. So, sign me up for this thing with this guy named Irwan Lekour, who does natural movement. You probably know who he is.

• 1:31:23Speaker 03

  I do.

• 1:31:24Speaker 04

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

• 1:31:56Speaker 03

  When you say that, you mean these are like the stories you're creating?

• 1:31:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this is what Irwan 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 gonna die. You're not, because at a certain point, against your will, your body will take over and force you to breathe. So, he believes that if you have one thing to think about and meditate on during that breath hold, you can rewire your central nervous system. Now, that sounds like woo-woo stuff to a lot of people, but for me, it actually worked. So, he said, Scott, what kind of conversations do you have? Are they basically any one thing?

• 1:32:42Speaker 04

  I said, yeah, they're minor being pissed off. Being angry at somebody took my parking place, or making up this confrontation that I may never have with a casting person, but they're pissed off. So, he said, I would suggest that one of your meditations be peace. Going the other direction. So at the end of this course, he gave us this thing. I've got it on my phone and it's what it is is six breath holds. You decide how long you want them to be and they shouldn't be killer, but they should be long enough that they're difficult. Because Irwan said, keep telling yourself, I'm getting stronger and better with and because of the stress.

• 1:33:27Speaker 04

  There are six and with diminishing amounts of rest between each one. And I do those three times a week. Irwan says, don't do them in succeeding days because it's probably not good for you. And so I don't, but I do this, these breath holds. And I started doing them here while I got the part of, and I remember at one point,

• 1:33:48Speaker 03

  Oh, this is the part of the shaman.

• 1:33:49Speaker 04

  I sit upright in bed and I yell, wow. And Carol, it's 2:30 in the morning and Carol says, what, what? And I said, I found my manatee and his name, he's a French guy. His name is Irwan Lakour. What I meditate on are peace, clarity and focus. And when I say focus, I do mean physical focus, like a gun sight. I'll pick up 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.

• 1:34:33Speaker 04

  Anyway, right now I'm doing a minute 46. Yeah. Performance freediving will tell you that of record, my longest breath hold is four minutes and 15 seconds. I see what it might even be longer now, I don't know. But up here I'm at 140, but what I'm aiming for, I would like by the time I hit 86, the benchmark for me is two minute breath holds. Those are real.

• 1:34:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's very real.

• 1:35:00Speaker 04

  So, uh, 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.

• 1:35:18Speaker 03

  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, this career-changing role.

• 1:35:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:39Speaker 03

  And it seems like that's happened a few times. How would you explain that?

• 1:35:43Speaker 04

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

• 1:36:25Speaker 04

  And I, 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 is my own personal standalone teacher and coach, the best in the world. I'd never planned on that happening. It just happened. I'm out at the range shooting. Guy next to me 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.

• 1:37:07Speaker 04

  His name was John Shaw, world champion. Kurt Johnston 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 Reed. And we become-

• 1:37:31Speaker 03

  We took a course with Scotty Reed.

• 1:37:33Speaker 04

  We become really good friends and-

• 1:37:36Speaker 03

  He's the real deal.

• 1:37:36Speaker 04

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

• 1:37:56Speaker 04

  So I'm in this bar and I've just spent a day doing this. Oh, man. And I'm talking about it like I'm the coolest person that ever lived. And this guy walks up to me in his sixties, 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?" And I said, "Marine Corps, sir." And he laughed and he said, "I'm here with my girlfriend. I'm staying in that room. You show up tomorrow and give me the next six days of your life.

• 1:38:41Speaker 04

  Show up tomorrow with coffee at eight forty-five, 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, "James Stewart, Jimmy Stewart, the actor?" He said, "No, like Jim Stewart, Dive Master Emeritus at Scripps Institute. Jim Stewart, who wrote the syllabus for the SEAL teams. Jim Stewart, who's the only person who can sign the chip that says you're allowed to dive in the Antarctica.

• 1:39:19Speaker 04

  Jim Stewart, whose NALICARD is number one, and Jacques Cousteau said is arguably the greatest scuba diver that ever lived. That's who's going to teach you and certify you." And he did. I mean, so, I mean, it's again and again, I'm out here. You're like the first jump of skill acquisition. I'm out here in the summertime and I'm talking about, "What does it feel like to be a bird?" Because when I was in the service, I never free fall. I never did free fall like him and like SF and SEALs do at all. But I've done static line jumps. So I'm telling somebody at this cocktail party. This guy walks up to me and he said, "You want a free fall? I'll teach you. Come over to my house tomorrow afternoon. I'll hang you in front of my porch.

• 1:39:59Speaker 04

  I'll teach you malfunctions and major malfunctions and how to deal with them, and we'll go jumping." And I said, why should I trust you? And he said, because I'm four times world champion. I'm the only person allowed to videotape the Golden Knights. If you know anything about jumping, videotaping skydivers is the easily the most dangerous part because of all the stuff you can, I mean, it's

• 1:40:25Speaker 03

  All the things that can go wrong. Yeah.

• 1:40:26Speaker 04

  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 in a Cessna. We'll go up. We'll use the two by four to launch ourselves out on the strut 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 do I do? And he said, well, I'll jump off, catch up with you. I want you to pantomime, but don't do it pantomime, pulling your ripcord and you'll yell to me what your altitude is. We'll go out at hopefully 15,000. And when

• 1:41:10Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:41:30Speaker 03

  Like four feet, three feet.

• 1:41:32Speaker 04

  But 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 of earth, and they're going to teach you. And the one thing I will say, and hopefully whoever is hearing this will take it to heart. There's part of me that's really a good student. And here's the part of me that's really a good student. I'm willing to fall on my ass in front of people. The embarrassment of screwing up and being clumsy and falling on my ass in front of people is not great enough to keep me from doing it. And that's the trick to being a good student.

• 1:42:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:42:29Speaker 04

  That's so true. I mean, it's like with martial arts, you've done them enough. So I know I'm talking to somebody, the two of you guys understand this. Okay, so I'm going to Thailand to do this TV show, White Lotus, but I can't really talk about it because they're very secretive. But I'm gonna be in Thailand. 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 Thai martial art and it's the weapons side of Muay Thai. When you're really good at it, you use razor sharp double swords. But when you begin it,

• 1:43:08Speaker 04

  it's just rattan sticks. And what I want to do in Thailand is not learn Krabi Krabong or be taught secret moves or any of that. I just want someone to show me the absolute basement cellar foundation. What are the moves that you need to be able to? I know they won't be complicated. I know there'll be something that with just pure repetition, I can do again and again. So that's what I'm gonna do when I get to Thailand.

• 1:43:37Speaker 03

  And you've done a lot of, I mean, you've done a lot of knife work also. I imagine that some of the movement-

• 1:43:41Speaker 04

  Knife stuff, I, yeah, actually do know pretty much about it.

• 1:43:44Speaker 03

  Probably translate really well. One thing you should definitely try to do while you're there, if you can, is go to Lumpini Stadium or Rajadamnon to watch the Muay Thai fights.

• 1:43:54Speaker 04

  I've been to both of those places.

• 1:43:55Speaker 03

  Oh, you have?

• 1:43:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I, there, 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 Buddhism, you become an adult at 60. It's the end of the fifth cycle, cycle being 12 years. Yeah. So his birthday was all year long and we lost locations. And so my week and a half or two week job wasn't gonna happen for at least two months. So I said to them, why don't you just keep me here in a hotel rather than spend first class plane tickets back and forth back?

• 1:44:38Speaker 04

  And I bring Carol over and we can go to Phuket and have fun. So we did that. But while I was there-

• 1:44:47Speaker 04

  The movie is kind of a sad movie to me because two of my friends who were in the movie, who played much bigger parts than me, are no longer alive. One was Gregory Hines, who I loved. And Gregory I knew from martial arts, from doing Korean martial arts in New York. He was really good at it. He's the only person I ever saw, on his passport, you know, where you put occupation? His said tap dancer.

• 1:45:12Speaker 03

  That's...

• 1:45:14Speaker 04

  He was amazing. He died of liver cancer. And the other was Fred Ward, who died of Alzheimer's. But Fred was, Fred was an amazing athlete. Fred had a silver boot in box francé, savate.

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  Savate, yeah.

• 1:45:30Speaker 04

  And when he was in Thailand, he trained Muay Thai with the people from Rajanam.

• 1:45:37Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, Rajanam.

• 1:45:38Speaker 04

  And so he brought, well, at one point, remember, he brought me in to work out with those guys. I wouldn't hit palm trees with my hands raised like that, but they had heavy bags and stuff like that, too. You know, and Fred told me that God gave me a right hook. And I said, yeah, I know that part. But we went, Fred and I went across the border illegally into what was then Burma, up in the Golden Triangle at...

• 1:46:05Speaker 03

  Dangerous area.

• 1:46:06Speaker 04

  Three Pagoda Pass. Yeah, so I had had adventures in Thailand and saw a lot of Muay Thai, yeah.

• 1:46:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. The art of eight limbs, beautiful and brutal and very effective art. I want to revisit for a second this luck, because there's luck, differing degrees of luck, and a lot of it's outside of your control, but it seems like there's certain ways you can increase the surface area in your life that luck can stick to. And one is by being a good student, for instance. That increases the likelihood that luck is going to stick to you. Are there any other recommendations you would have for people who want to increase the type of serendipity and luck that you've experienced? Are there any other ingredients that you can play with?

• 1:46:49Speaker 04

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

• 1:47:04Speaker 03

  Let's go, go deep down that rabbit hole then. So, relationship, we've talked about career, we've talked about some fitness, long...

• 1:47:13Speaker 03

  Durable, good relationships with a partner. Any advice for people out there? Because especially in your, I would imagine, in the world of entertainment, this is a rarity. I would have to think. From the outside looking in.

• 1:47:25Speaker 04

  Again, it was my good fortune to just fall completely in love with this woman.

• 1:47:31Speaker 03

  How did the two of you meet?

• 1:47:33Speaker 04

  In a movie theater in New York. The girl I've been kind of, not really living with, but semi-living with off and on. And I'd broken up and she just tried to kill herself. And I had a friend who now is teaching school in Iraq of all places. His name is Jeff Siggen. And anyway, he called me up and he said, we're going to the movies. Murray Hill Cinema. Me and a group of people are going to come with us. And I said, sure. So Carol was one of them. I'd never met her before. I sat next to her in the movie theater. And I just felt these, I didn't touch her or anything. I just felt these waves of, I don't know what it was, but some.

• 1:48:16Speaker 04

  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. She said, yeah, me too. So we sat through the whole movie again, not even touching. And the movie came to an end. And in that period of time, it was like magical. We walked out of the theater and there was probably half a foot of snow everywhere. So we went out and we played in the snow. It was getting late and Carol said, and I was doing a play, but I was off that night. She said, you want to spend the night?

• 1:49:01Speaker 04

  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, it turns into a bed. There are blankets on it. Have a good night. Went back into the bedroom, shut the door and went to sleep. I went, okay. So the next morning, we had breakfast and we played in the snow some more. And I was going to say goodbye to her. And I thought, I'm not going to even try to hug her and kiss her. Because if I do this and she does one of those pull ways. My whole world will collapse. How I knew that, I don't know.

• 1:49:45Speaker 04

  So I said, I had a really good time and held my hand. I shook her hand goodbye. And then for the next week, I would open my, I had predictably a little black book and I would open it up and I would call a phone number and a young woman would answer, hello, hello. And I wouldn't say anything and I would just hang up. And I went through one phone and finally I thought, who are you kidding? You want to see her? That's who you want to see. So I called her up and I told her my TV was broken and there was something I wanted to watch on television. That Saturday night, I think it was, and she said, okay. So I get down to her apartment. She's got makeup on and she's all dressed up and she's, oh, I've got a date tonight,

• 1:50:28Speaker 04

  but you know where the fridge is and there's the, there's the TV. And so have, knock yourself out. And I sat literally two feet away from her. I was so pissed off. I was just fucking really pissed off. If I had been a dog, I would have been growling.

• 1:50:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:44Speaker 04

  So I'm looking at the TV, I'm not watching the TV and I hear the downstairs bell go dong dong. And I hear Carol say, I remember the guy's name to this day, Earl. She said, okay, Earl, I'll buzz you in. And I'm looking at the TV and I'm hearing the front door open and I'm hearing Earl say, whoa, you look hot tonight. And I hear Carol say, listen, Earl, an old friend of my brother's just dropped by. I haven't seen him in a long time. I'm not going out with you tonight. You can see the emotion I'm filled with right now.

• 1:51:20Speaker 03

  You can.

• 1:51:22Speaker 04

  And I went, yes. She shut the door, walked into the living room and that was about 55 years ago.

• 1:51:33Speaker 03

  Wow. Incredible. What would Carol add to this genesis story if she were sitting here with us? What else would she add?

• 1:51:44Speaker 04

  Tell me I was full of shit and wrap it up. And you've got, you've got shopping to do for me today.

• 1:51:54Speaker 04

  This I'll say about her because she's not here right now. And I've seen it with enough people. And what it is about her, I, I don't know, and maybe I don't want to know. But even with, he's no longer alive, but I remember when she and I first met Freddie Fields, who was the toughest, hardest ass agent Hollywood is 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.

• 1:52:39Speaker 04

  I don't know, maybe that's part of it, but that is true about her. People want her to say they're okay. What that quality is in her, I don't know, but it's there, that's for sure. She's funny.

• 1:52:54Speaker 03

  She is funny.

• 1:52:55Speaker 04

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

• 1:53:04Speaker 03

  I have to ask, and I may get the name wrong here. You mentioned Gregory Hines. You spent some time, at least as I understand it, a brief but intense period with modern dance, I think. And let's see if this goes somewhere, playing pool with Nuryev in New York City. Is my game, the name right?

• 1:53:21Speaker 04

  No, that was, that was. 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.

• 1:53:45Speaker 03

  Couldn't go all in.

• 1:53:46Speaker 04

  I ran into Nuryev while we were doing the right stuff in San Francisco and New York City Ballet had moved to San Francisco for the year. And I met him and he had seen Urban Cowboy. And he told me that I was a much realer, better cowboy than John Travolta would ever be. And by the way, John Travolta pretty much sucked as a dancer too. So I remember at one point, we were down in the basement of this place called Toska's, a bar in New York. I mean, I'm sorry, in San Francisco.

• 1:54:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:20Speaker 04

  They had a pool table.

• 1:54:21Speaker 03

  Toska's famous.

• 1:54:22Speaker 04

  And we were shooting pool and drinking. Me, in a minor way, he in a major way. Vodka. I remember at one point, I said to him, well, you Russians can really hold your vodka. And he stopped, got really angry, looked at me, and he said, I am not Russian. And I said, what are you? He said, I'm Latvian. That was the first time it ever dawned on me that these parts of Russia that I thought were kind of, along with Putin, were actually Russian, were more like Ukraine. They had their own identity, their own sense of who they were, and it meant something.

• 1:55:04Speaker 04

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

• 1:55:40Speaker 04

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

• 1:55:57Speaker 03

  I did want to talk about poetry, if that's possible.

• 1:55:59Speaker 04

  Okay, sure.

• 1:56:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:56:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:12Speaker 03

  What does poetry mean to you? Why write poetry? Why read poetry?

• 1:56:17Speaker 04

  Poetry to me is the, along with physical art scratching on the side of a wall.

• 1:56:24Speaker 03

  Oh, look at that. This is one of, one of your books, Frictions of Scott Glenn.

• 1:56:29Speaker 04

  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 Hellespont and fought in Greeks' War of Liberation from Turkey. And he did all this stuff and was, you know, an outrageous coxman and mainly he was a poet. So I've lived with the belief that I have that in, in me. But what happened with Carol was I

• 1:57:11Speaker 04

  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 a, I can say Indian giver because I've got Comanche blood and so I don't mind using the word. If I give something, it's yours. It's not mine. You can rip up those pages and wipe your ass with it. So she said, well, I'm going to publish it, self-publish. So that was Room Service. That's not that book. And then during the pandemic, there was no acting happening anywhere. And then right after that, I had a brief period of time when I could work

• 1:57:55Speaker 04

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

• 1:58:33Speaker 04

  Even to this day, we're like agoraphobic hermits. We have no problem. I don't need the company of anybody. Anyway, that friction zone is kind of what came out of the pandemic. And it's not big, heavy duty. 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. So the metaphor for that just, anyway.

• 1:59:10Speaker 03

  How do you apply that metaphor outside of riding a motorcycle like that?

• 1:59:15Speaker 04

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

• 2:00:00Speaker 03

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

• 2:00:15Speaker 04

  I would give them both the lessons I learned from Sir Lawrence and from my dad, which is if you love it, make it your life. Right along with that, be tenacious. Learn that the most important thing about being knocked down is getting back up. And if you can put yourself in the spot where you say, I don't care how many times I get knocked down, I'm getting back up every single time and going after what I want, that's the answer. I mean, again, I'm at a bar with Lawrence Olivier, who created the National Theatre of England, who was the biggest movie star in the world, was the most creative stage actor in the world and director. He'd done everything. My question to him was,

• 2:01:00Speaker 04

  What is it that you need to make it in this business? Is it timing? Right place at the right time? Is it contacts, knowing the right people? Or is it just working on your skills and becoming better and better at what you do? He said, "My dear boy, none of the above. Develop very strong jaw muscles. Learn how to bite on and not let go." I said, "You're telling me it's just pure tenacity?" His answer was, "Yes. If you're a monk outside the gates with a beggar's bowl and you stay out there long enough, they'll finally get sick of seeing you, open the gates and let you in."

• 2:01:40Tim Ferriss?

  Fantastic. Scott, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:01:44Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 2:01:44Tim Ferriss?

  What fun.

• 2:01:46Speaker 04

  I flabbed away a lot.

• 2:01:47Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 2:02:00Speaker 04

  I don't know about it. There was a time in my life, and I have witnesses that because of sounds out, I could with steel sights hit 600 yards. Whether I can right now at 85, probably not, but who knows? You know, I could get the dragon off down in warm weather. I'm gonna, I'll give it a shot. To use a horrible, horrible metaphor.

• 2:02:25Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'm curious to see if I can get my ass upside down on the feet up after this, after being inspired by your daily routine. So, thank you so much for the time.

• 2:02:37Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. Albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

• 2:03:19Tim Ferriss?

  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/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Momentus. Momentus offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now and I have a few that I use constantly.

• 2:04:04Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:04:49Tim Ferriss?

  you an idea, I'm packing right now for an international trip. I tend to be very minimalist and I'm taking these with me nonetheless. Now, back to the bigger picture, Olympians, Tour de France winners, Tour de France winners, US military, and more than 175 college and professional sports teams rely on Momentous and their products. Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly They also work with Dr. Stacy Sims, who assists Momentous in developing products specifically for women. Their products contain high-quality ingredients that are third-party tested, which in this case means informed and/or NSF certified, so you can trust that what is

• 2:05:33Tim Ferriss?

  on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. And trust me, as someone who knows the sports nutrition and supplement world very well, that is a differentiator that you want in anything that you consume in this entire sector. So, good news. For my non-US listeners, more good news, not to worry. Momentus ships internationally, so you have the same access that I do. So, check it out. Visit livemomentous.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout for 20% off. That's livemomentus, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com/tim and code TIM for 20% off. This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element?

• 2:06:17Tim Ferriss?

  It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike, and I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it, or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, etc., another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low-carb, or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough. And it relates to a bunch of stuff, like a hormone called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low. But suffice to say, this is where

• 2:07:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:07:43Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:08:27Tim Ferriss?

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