Tom Hanks: #1 Theory Tom Uses in Order to Live a Balanced and Fulfilled Life

What does a balanced life look like for you? Are you getting enough time to recharge? Today, Jay engages in a deeply reflective conversation with legendary actor, filmmaker, and writer Tom Hanks. With a career spanning over four decades, Hanks is renowned for his roles in iconic films like Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan, Cast Away, and The Green Mile, earning him two Academy Awards. Tom opens up about his unconventional childhood, moving frequently and adjusting to new environments, which shaped his adaptability and taught him the art of letting go. As he reflects on his career, he discusses how he continues to find purpose and depth in his work, emphasizing the joy of collaboration and the importance of staying curious. Together, Jay and Tom discuss how certain locations hold emotional weight, becoming symbols of comfort or life-changing reflection. They also touch on generational wisdom, the role of luck, and finding joy in small, shared experiences. With his characteristic humor and humility, Tom offers listeners a glimpse into his contemplative nature and the lessons he's learned over the years, reminding us all of the power of presence and community. In this interview, you'll learn: How to Find Comfort in Solitude How to Embrace Life's Unexpected Changes How to Connect Across Generations How to Trust Your Instincts and Take Risks How to Stay Curious at Any Age How to Discover Purpose in Your Work How to Show Up Fully in Relationships How to Find Wisdom in Life’s Challenges How to Pursue Meaning over Perfection Life isn’t about having all the answers; it’s about embracing the unknown with openness, honoring the journey, and finding meaning in each moment, each experience, and each relationship. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 01:17 Early Life Lessons: Childhood, Change, and Resilience 05:37 Mastering the Art of Detachment 10:15 Discovering Theater and Passion in High School 18:56 Can We Create Our Own Luck? 21:35 Exploring the Sacred Sites of Jerusalem 27:03 Owning Your Mistakes and When to Take Personal Responsibility 30:52 The Third Space: Finding Balance Beyond Work and Home 37:03 Fathers and the Lasting Impact on Their Sons 38:42 Nurturing Kids’ Interests for Genuine Growth 42:59 The Value of Academic Ambition 45:21 Capturing the Present: Finding Magic in Every Moment 52:46 Reflections on Seeing Your Younger Self in the Movie 55:03 Finding Presence in Everyday Life 58:04 The Freedom of Following Your True Desires 01:04:25 Imagining the Dream Life: Building a Path to Fulfillment 01:07:29 Themes of Time and Place in the Film Here 01:09:01 The Fascination with Reaching the Moon 01:11:04 Unraveling a Deep Fascination with WWII 01:18:01 Becoming America’s Most Trusted Voice 01:21:07 Grateful for the Blessings of Family 01:22:04 Observing Life’s Passing Moments 01:27:42 Honored with Greek Citizenship 01:31:31 Tom on Final Five Episode Resources: Tom Hanks | Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

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• 0:45Jay Shetty?

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• 1:28Jay Shetty?

  and it's clinically shown to enrich the gut microbiome. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro at drinkag1.com/onpurpose. That's drinkag1.com/onpurpose. This episode is brought to you by Vinted. Value can be found anywhere, even in the clothes sitting untouched in our closets. That's where Vinted comes in. Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes you no longer want and get more value out of them. Whether you're running out of space, moving, or simply updating your wardrobe. Listing items is a quick and simple process and once something sells,

• 2:12Jay Shetty?

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• 2:35Speaker 01

  Sometimes life passes in the wink of an eye and it's like, wow, are we here already? But there's other times in that same wink of an eye, you comprehend it all.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  One of the greatest and most iconic actors of all time.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  He has starred in dozens of movies over his 40 year career. You know, I'm in love with Tom Hanks.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  If you're just looking at the past and saying, man, that was when it was great. I wish we could go back. No, you never want to go back. You always have to understand that our best days are still ahead of us.

• 3:06Jay Shetty?

  Well, as you keep saying, more will be revealed as well.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  This too shall pass and more shall be revealed.

• 3:12Speaker 04

  The number one health and wellness podcast.

• 3:15Speaker 05

  Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. The one, the only Jay Shetty.

• 3:21Jay Shetty?

  Tom Hanks, welcome to On Purpose. It's truly an honor and a gift to be in your presence, to have you here. And even the first few moments that we've just exchanged a few thoughts, ideas and stories. I'm already enjoying your company so much and I'm so grateful that you took the time to do this.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Likewise.

• 3:39Jay Shetty?

  And I watched here, which is out on November 1st. I have so much that I want to talk about it through and through your lens. When I was watching it, to me, the theme of home obviously is so strong and apparent. And I wanted to ask you, where do you feel most at home apart from home?

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Okay, all right, man. All right, let's throw deep right off the bat. Because I was, so many things lined up with me at my age. I was the third of four. My parents were very preoccupied with all certain, you know, like the positives and miseries of their lives. I like to joke that they pioneered the marriage dissolution laws for the state of California, you know, back, they got divorces when only like Jean Jean Gabor, you know, or, you know, Nikki Hilton got divorces. My home environment was fluid in that we moved a lot. And we were suddenly living with a whole different set of people because people, you know, my parents got remarried and whatnot.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  So that by the time I was seven, I had lived in eight different homes. By the time I was 10, I had lived in 10 different homes. And it's always been like that. So I am not intimidated by it and I don't think I'm damaged by it at all. As a matter of fact, my brother, who I did not live with, he lived in the same town and in one of three houses all his life. And I consider myself the lucky one, you know, just, just by the nature of so much stuff that I've, that I've seen and so much stuff that I've been able to experience and be comfortable with.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Now, uh, look, I, you know, I, I'm 68, so I went through, I, I witnessed everything, you know, whatever drug thing that you want to go. I, I wasn't a participant in an awful lot of that because I was so, um, I was kind of like entertained by the new rules of whatever we were. And here's a new school and here's a new apartment complex and now we're living in a bona fide neighborhood. And I was not intimidated by all of that stuff and I was also comfortable, perhaps in a way that's not healthy in some ways, of being a new guy in a new circumstance, sizing up a room, sizing up a school, figuring out, all right, what, what's the easiest way to get comfortable here?

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Part of it is being open, you know, kind of like taking over, cracking a few jokes, not getting in trouble. And that's different from, I would say, like my older brother, who was very shy and we were connected at the hip through, through all of this stuff. And it was not great for the other members of my family, but there was just something about that, the roll of the dice, number three of four, right there when the parents are too busy with all this other kind of stuff. And, and, uh, my, my siblings were not much older than I was, but older than I was. They were social beings long before I was. I didn't become a social being until I was like seven years old or whatnot. And by that time I had lived in very many places. So you're a long-winded conversation.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  I love it. Where are, where, where do I feel it? Why do I feel at home? Most. I'm going to say now, at the age of 68, with some collection of my immediate family, wherever we are, provided we are, and I don't mean to be good laughing, you know, provided we are laughing at perhaps the absurdity of it, or dealing with the cruelty of it, or sometimes just the surrealistic aspect of, did somebody tell me how we ended up here exactly? Can someone, can someone do that right now? So I, now, that's not necessarily a strength, because along with that came, dude, I travel light. And I can

• 7:34Speaker 01

  travel light emotionally, my, I'm done. There's stuff that I cannot control. I have left many a wonderful atmosphere, or a loving atmosphere, or a friendly atmosphere, and like Ernie Banks, the, you know, the ballplayer for the Chicago Cubs, without ever looking back, without thinking, oh, things were really wonderful back then, I wish I was back there. Jay, I don't think I've ever thought that.

• 8:01Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Now, is that great? Is it facile? Or is it so mercurial that maybe, maybe you shouldn't trust me?

• 8:10Jay Shetty?

  Is it, is it, does it feel like, it feels like and sounds like a healthy detachment?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  There is a type, okay, let's talk about that, because there is a version of detachment that means that you can navigate, say like, can I say assholes?

• 8:28Jay Shetty?

  Of course, you can say whatever you like.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  So you can navigate assholes. And, you know, I, I think my experience is about 90% of the people that you come across, pretty decent folks, 5% are assholes. And I'll say 5% are sociopaths, you know? And you cannot avoid that other 10%, those two 5%, and my, the ability to, to detach from those circumstances, without a doubt, a good thing. But...

• 9:00Speaker 01

  The habit then, I think, of choosing isolation from the other 90%, because what can I rely on at the end of the day? I can only rely on what I can fit in either my emotional suitcase, an actual suitcase, or the back of my car. And that, and that lingers for a very long time. So I, I think the healthy aspect of it has been a great aid to me, as well as the, the, the tendency to want to be isolated, to not need anybody, put it that way, to not want anybody. Because that's just what I learned. Life is easier if you don't need anybody.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  And it's, can be a lot easier if you want nothing more than what's in the back of the car. But that can be a solitary life. And a lot of times, being solitary can be confused with being lonely. And it, lonely can, being lonely can lead to anger and resentments and stuff that you gotta work through. And, okay, at the 68, you know, a lot of those years have been dealt with, dealing with the latter and enjoying the former at the same time.

• 10:09Jay Shetty?

  Well, I, I think what you rightly said is that there's this binary feeling of, if you're detached, you're lonely or disconnected, or you might be at the other end codependent and attached and not have the ability to operate in a solitary state. So how have you danced almost so beautifully between the two of being able to confidently say you've been detached in the right ways? And, and then at the same time, you have this beautiful relationship with your wife. You have long-term friendships with people in the industry, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, you have, you have-

• 10:42Speaker 01

  People I worked with.

• 10:43Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, people you worked with. So how, how does that dance work? Because I do think that the magic is in the dance, not in the choice.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  I'm gonna say that I got very, very, very lucky, uh, be, being in the right place at the right time and recognizing something that was just-

• 11:02Speaker 01

  For me. All right, you go back to, let's just go back to school, you know. People say show business is like high school with money. Uh, high school is like show business without money. You know, it truly was. Um, and when I was, when I, look, I just went to school. And my joke was, we moved around so much that whenever, you know, at the end of the school year, my dad would stand me out on the driveway and say, "Son, your school is somewhere in that direction. Just walk that way. And when you see kids your own age, just follow them. And they will lead you to whatever school you are supposed to go to." The school was a social kind of like place for me. And every now and again, there might

• 11:44Speaker 01

  be a moment that landed in my intellectual pursuit, if that makes sense. I can't say I really loved going to school, but I certainly loved the hang of going to school. That's a different thing. Subject matters. That was a role that, history was great sometimes. Some reading was great, but I was no artist. I was no, you know, I was no mathematician, you know. I kind of liked geography because you could visualize a map and know where like Sri Lanka was, or, you know, the difference between Cambodia and Thailand. Uh, but when I was in high school and had no idea what I was supposed to do with my time, other than, you know, maybe go to Young Life, you know, hang out,

• 12:25Speaker 01

  you know, hang out with, you know, some sort of psych, uh, theological, you know, brothers. But, uh, other than that, sign up for class, maybe do your homework on the bus on the way to school and what, run track? I don't know. What, what are you supposed to do? But, uh, the, uh, there was a theater teacher. There was a theater department at this high school. And actually, if, uh, this guy I had known since, uh, sixth grade was playing Dracula in the, in the, in the high school play. And I said, "What? Really?" And so, you know, we went, we went up to school at night to see him. And I'd never been at my high school at night. Looks different at night, right? Then I sat there and there

• 13:09Speaker 01

  was, you know, a bunch of people in the auditorium, but then they came out and did this play. And I thought,

• 13:16Speaker 01

  This is school? You can do this at school? School isn't this thing just to survive? This isn't this thing just to fill up your time? To leave as soon as you can and get there at the late? Oh, no, I never cut class. I didn't do that because in some ways the hang of school was too much fun. But when I saw that there was this kind of discipline that I had already been thinking of in my head, that just changed everything. That just, when you suddenly have a reason to go and do something, and the reason is in a pursuit of something that you cannot find anywhere else, right? That my, I gotta say, my junior and senior years of high school, I have been living

• 14:00Speaker 01

  that same exact life and excitement ever since. I'm not kidding. The idea of auditioning for the first, like, our great instructor, our teacher, he wanted to do real plays because he loved to do the scenic design for it. So we did Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams. How about that? Sixteen-year-old, seventeen-year-old kids playing Night of the Iguana. Then we did Shakespeare. We did, they did musicals as well. Those were always popular. But suddenly, having this tantalizing thing that's like, if you have an imagination, and if you're not afraid of getting up in front of people, which I was not, some people

• 14:45Speaker 01

  can't get up and, it was a bunt for me. I did it without even thinking. That gave a purpose and a pursuit that was much, much bigger than anything else that had been in my life. Now, I have a friend of mine from the same era. James is his name. I met him in fifth grade, and he said to me he was going to be a draftsman. He was going to, he was going to be an engineer. He's going to design buildings. And he did. That's what he's been doing all this life. I knew people that at the same age that said, "Well, I really love to cook." And they have written cookbooks, and they've run their own catering companies. That is what, that's the same sort of thing that I landed upon without really knowing

• 15:30Speaker 01

  it. Because my parents were divorced.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  I spent a lot of time traveling to and from my, you know, where my mom lived in this small town or where my dad lived in Oakland, in the Bay Area. And those hours on a Greyhound bus, starting when I was seven, seven or eight years old, five hours of just daydreaming, five hours of looking out the window, five hours of looking at people passing cars, trains going by, farms and whatnot, buildings. The natural preponderance, I had to sit there quietly and imagine what was going on. That was, that fueled me into realizing that there's this thing that, there's actually a discipline and a trade and an art and a, and a, what's the word I'm looking for?

• 16:18Speaker 01

  And I'll just say it again, a pursuit that is, let's put on a show, let's tell a story. That came along and bang, that, that was it. And I'm telling you, it's the same exact now as it, as it was then. Did you write on those journeys or was it mainly? I wanted to write specifically, but I did not, literally, I did not have the, I did not have the scholastic example. I did not learn the tools because I just wanted to fake it, you know, at, at the last moment. Now, I started writing about, about 20 years ago by just incorporating the work that an actor does that is not told to anybody, that is not spoken.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  That actually was a form of writing that came, came about and I was sort of like instructed on, on how that come, how that comes along. But without putting it down on paper, I had malleable cohesive narratives in my head for all of this stuff. And I just thought, well, isn't that what everybody does? That's, that's the way you do this, right? Cause it's not just showing up on time and, you know, learning your words and, and doing what you're told. There is something beyond that and. The beyond that was always 15 times greater than the actual physical showing up. I can't, I can't discount enough the power of the hang. You want to hear a story?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Here's, here's a story.

• 17:48Jay Shetty?

  Please, please, please.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Darlene Love. You know who Darlene Love is? Legendary singer, you know, singer, a fantastic, fantastic Motown artist, among other things. We were, I was on the Christmas show of the old David Letterman show. And every year he brought her along to sing It's Christmas, this fabulous rendition with a big orchestra and male choruses. I saw her there and I said, oh, oh my, I'd seen her on the David Letterman show for like six or seven years. And I said, I met her and I said, I, Miss Love, I, I cannot believe that I am on the show with you. You are, you, you have been belting out, you know, so, so many moments of the soundtrack of my life that I, I'm just,

• 18:32Speaker 01

  I'm just thrilled that you're here and I'm glad that you're still doing it. And she looked at me and said, Tom, I'm just here for the hang. And I got, I completely, I completely got that because the hang, the interaction with everybody, dealing with the attractiveness of those 90%, avoiding or learning how to negotiate around those other 5%, you know, the jerks and the, and the evil people. Ain't that just living? You know, ain't that, ain't that better than being alone in a room when you don't have a thought in your head?

• 19:04Jay Shetty?

  Hmm. Well said. Yeah, absolutely. I was wondering, you talked about luck a lot there. Can we all become a bit more lucky?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  The fellow who ran the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, Vincent Dowling, I, I worked for him for three years. And he's, he's the, the, a number of people that loved that man and worked with that man. He, he touched a great many people's lives. He said, um, It's the most unfair business in the world. That's one aspect of it. Because so much of it requires being in the right place at the right time. By choice and by sacrifice, you know, and that's not easy to do. I feel that I was fortunate that from, as we talked about, from that upbringing, I had no, I had no qualms about, hey, let's go. I got enough money for gas. Let's, the, I drove across the country with four other people

• 19:57Speaker 01

  one, one, one time, and then the next year I drove across the country by myself. Did not bat an eye. No, and there are people that, listen, they just can't do that. You know, there is a degree of security and fear and intimidation that, that can go along with what? Putting yourselves in the right place at the right time. And along with that will come all, it's a, it's a fifty fifty, okay, it's a fifty fifty. Have you heard this great thing? I'm no mathematician, but when I heard this, I thought, that's actually a principle for living. Jay, if I had a quarter and I flipped it and it came up heads five times in a row,

• 20:39Speaker 01

  what are the odds that it's going to come up heads a seven times, a six times, six times in a row?

• 20:44Jay Shetty?

  Is it still fifty fifty?

• 20:46Speaker 01

  It's absolute fifty fifty. Just because something has happened doesn't mean it's going to. Just because you're in a place doesn't mean that's where you should be. So along with luck, shouldn't the, shouldn't the other requirement be faith? Or some degree of disconnected to it, to whatever the end result is going to be? You're going to have to be, I was, I was talking to a friend of mine and he said, he read somebody, I don't know who it was, but someone, someone wrote down, you have to be all right with what's going to happen. And I just, well, okay.

• 21:25Jay Shetty?

  Thanks for that.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, all right, let's, let's try to do that. So you have to be all right with what's going to happen, right or wrong? Disaster, disease, you know, whatever. You have to be, you have to be all right with what is going to happen with some degree of faith and luck that what happens after that is the best thing that could possibly be.

• 21:47Jay Shetty?

  What, what's helped you get closer to that? That sounds hard.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  It is.

• 21:52Jay Shetty?

  Sounds impossible.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I'm going to say that age, in all honesty, experience, you know, that thing of what has not destroyed me only makes me stronger. And look, let's not discount the power of getting your ass kicked, you know, and I'm not just, you know, suddenly not professionally as well. All sorts of, you know, all sorts of personal things go along that give you a bloody nose and bust your teeth and you have to go through those metaphysically, perhaps physically. I made this movie where I rode a, I rode a scooter, a Vespa. And so because of that, I rode a Vespa for about two years until I realized that I had

• 22:34Speaker 01

  been so close to killing myself on this thing, making a stupid mistake, that I'm going to give up this Vespa. This was a smart, this was a smart thing to do that only came about because I learned, you know, that, you know, sometimes a hair's breadth between, you know, cracking up or falling down or needing that crash helmet or not. So it is a degree of that, that experience. And also being, I think, open to some of the most basic, I don't want to say philosophical truths, but I have been to the Holy Land. I have seen the sites that are.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Precious, divine. I was, I was actually working, this was a long time ago. This was before the great, many of the great problems that were going there. And I was driving back, being driven to Jerusalem. I was with a guide and I said, hey, so, Moishe, tell me, tell me, tell me about where we are. And he says, okay, I will tell you. This is, we are bound by a kibbutz. This is a very old kibbutz. You know kibbutz? Yes, this is a very old one. It's been there a very long time, very popular. And now we are coming up of a moshav. You know what moshav is? Moshav is not like a kibbutz. It's different, more socialist, less comfortable. But this is also much like that.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  And people live there and they work and they farm. And this is where David killed Goliath. And coming up here, we go, I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Back the car up, just a little, back this up. Did you just say, this is where David killed Goliath? Yes, he says. There's a little sign there. It said in English and Hebrew and Arabic. This is, well, tell me about that. Okay, well, okay, there you see the valley? Yes, okay. And on one side was the Philistines, Philistines, yes, they were, they were there, okay? And David and the Israelites were, were here.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  And they sent down to the middle, they're the, the, the, the giyant, the, the giant? Yes, yes, the Goliath, yes. And David goes and says, I will fight this man. And he puts the stones and he kills him. And, and I said, this is the place? He said, yeah. I'm not going to argue with that. Absolutely not going to argue with that. So move along. And I, you know, you, you visit great cathedrals and whatnot. I've been all places around, around the world, some of the great places. And we were in, we were in Japan, the family and I. We had this fabulous guy that was driving us around. And he took us to some Buddhist places, some Shinto shrines.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  And there was a big tree at one of the, uh, at one of the, uh, one of the temples, the shrines, and people would write down prayers on these, uh, on wooden, wooden signs and they would hang them up like ornaments. So this, this tree is just covered with a million prayers. Beautiful, kind of like sensibility. And he wrote down something and he hung it up. And I said, uh, you know, Oshie, what did you write? He says, oh, I, I wrote here, I'll show you. And it was in Japanese, you know, the language. And he says, this, this, this means I will never know all I need to know.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  That's all we talked about, you know, at dinner later on. Did you, did you know what's it? So the, the, the ongoing education of we're never going to know what we need to know. More is always going to be revealed and, uh, this too shall pass. That governs absolutely everything. If you are having the greatest time in your, this too shall pass. If you are successfully, this too shall pass. If you are sick, if you are experiencing great tragedy and great drama, great difficulty, this too shall pass. Now, I don't know if I'm still answering the question you asked.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  This was educated to me over the course of my twenties and thirties and forties or fifties. At a time when you think that, no, what you have to do is have a master plan. You gotta stick to the plan. You gotta lay your head down. You gotta fight for it. You gotta compete. Yeah, okay, there's times when, you know, you gotta do that other kinds of stuff. And other times you just kind of like gotta roll over and say, I, I surrender, you know? Just, I will never know all I need to know and I'll never be able to do all that I should do.

• 27:12Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Does that make sense?

• 27:13Jay Shetty?

  It does make sense. It does make sense. And I, and I appreciate you saying that it comes with wisdom and age and experience because I used to have a mentor who sadly passed away during the pandemic, but he would always replay, he would always repeat to me, there's no substitute for maturity.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  And it was No shortcut to it, yeah. Yeah, the maturity was just something And yet, didn't you know somebody when you were young, who was the same age as you that had it? Absolutely. Oh, I came across all sorts of people like that. Yeah, and I just said, first of all, what makes you so special? And what makes you so smart? What makes you so calm, you know? What was it? Did you ever figure it out? The vaguest idea, you know, some combination, I would probably say of connection, you know, a connection to a family, a connection to, you know, perhaps a heritage that goes along with that, that, you know, a friend of mine, we were, we went to their, their son's bar mitzvah.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  And I'm not Jewish, but I said, you got bar mitzvah? Oh, yeah, of course I got bar mitzvah. And he said, and he said, let me tell you something about the bar mitzvah. This is what's great about it, because my thirteen year old son, when he's getting bar mitzvah, and I told him, I said, after this, my son, your sins are your own.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  He's thirteen. But this is, you know, and there's studies of, you know, there's examples of that all through all sorts of cultures and all sorts of histories. Yeah. That said, there is a time when you and you alone are responsible for everything that, that goes on, goes on in your life. I, I have a, I have a friend who is studying with a Buddhist monk, you know, a guy whose name, he's literally got his name venerable in his first name, how about that? Wow. When I was talking to the venerable, you know, whatever, and I said, look, I know squat about Buddhism outside of, you know, what I, you know, see on TV shows, so what's the deal?

• 29:17Speaker 01

  And he said, well, one of the smartest things I heard Uh, from a guy precious Buddhism is, um, my life used to be nothing but chopping wood and carrying water. And now that I have received some enlightenment, I find that all that is necessary for me to live is to chop wood and carry water. And I said, okay, all right, man, that's some high country. And I don't know if you hear that. Well, I don't know if I had heard that at the age of 22, I would have had the slightest an idea of what it, but at the age of 68, uh, I, you know, I think I can get a little bit closer to that.

• 29:58Jay Shetty?

  Definitely. Yeah. I think there's two things you brought to mind for me. I think one of them's been when I've noticed some of the wiser people that I've met along the way or at a younger ages, you were mentioning, it's always been people who were exposed to more generations. And so people who were in their twenties, but knew people who were 70 and spent quality time with them, or people who are in their 50s and spend time with someone who was 18 or 21. And that kind of juxtaposition of being surrounded by people that weren't just all your age in the same space. There was a sense of you being able to learn and grow and, and take and receive. I was spending time with a couple that my wife and I had become very close friends with, and they're both 70. And, uh, my wife and I are in our,

• 30:41Jay Shetty?

  in our mid 30s. And we were, we spent a weekend with them and it was brilliant because I got destroyed at pickleball, uh, by the 70.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Always good. Always good. A humbling experience is always a good one.

• 30:51Jay Shetty?

  For me, yeah. He's playing pickleball and tennis for four hours a day and I can barely play for a couple. And so big inspiration, but, but just the life experience and the engagement you get from that. And I think so much of our, going back to what we were saying about community and even your mention of, of church there or the Holy Land, I was researching something recently. I'm, I'm writing my third book and something that I came across and I've been playing around with is this idea called the third space theory. And what the third space theory lays out is that back in the day, we would have home. We would have work and we would have church. And church was a place you could look back on work and home and reconcile and reflect and think about.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  You can ponder why bad things happen to good people and vice versa. Yeah.

• 31:39Jay Shetty?

  Correct.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  It was a place spent, literally meant for that.

• 31:41Jay Shetty?

  Meant for that.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  This is why you come here.

• 31:43Jay Shetty?

  Exactly. And now what's happened is, let alone three spaces, we don't eat, we just have one. So we work from home, we live at home. And then our third space, or the closest thing to it, is a television, probably. There is, there isn't a separate space. And so it's arguing the fact that there isn't that space almost to have those thoughts, conversations, ideas, insights, that.

• 32:06Jay Shetty?

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• 32:49Jay Shetty?

  That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Orange Theory Fitness. One of the best investments you can make is in your own strength. The choices you make today can help shape how you feel for years to come. Orange Theory Fitness provides a one-hour workout to build strength, burn fat, and build muscle with an expert coach guiding you every step of the way. Head to orangestory.com/onpurpose to learn more and get your first class free. Orange Theory Fitness, helping people live longer, more vibrant lives. Terms and conditions apply. See webpage and studio for details. This episode is brought to you by Amtrak.

• 33:33Jay Shetty?

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• 34:00Speaker 01

  May arise. The generational thing, I think, is wickedly important. Whether or not, you know, like, they don't, you know, sometimes it's just the old person that's sitting in the corner, you know. But other times, it's like, you know, a big, there's some aspect of the big family that is not for everybody, you know, because God knows, not everybody wants to come to Thanksgiving sometimes because they don't want to have that same fight again. I had a, I had a friend who, he had, his, his grandmother was like, in, already had a nine, like she was 93 or something like that. And she was always just there, you know, just there. And at one point, he was, he was arguing with his parents about not wanting to do something. I can't remember what it was, didn't matter. But everybody

• 34:45Speaker 01

  was saying, why are you doing that? Why do you, what's that about? How can you do, how can you da, da, da, da, blah, blah, blah. And my friend said, why, hey, man, because life's too short. And this 90 year old grandmother is just sitting there and she said, no, life's not short. Life is long. Which I interpret as being, life is long. So if you're doing something stupid, you know, you're spending a lot of time relishing, you know, living inside, inside that, that stupidity. Yes. And my, my, my kids are my, are my, my youngest kids, essentially were raised along

• 35:26Speaker 01

  by us, as well as a couple of people that have, you know, been employee-like families for, members of, but also their, their grandparents, their yai and papu, as they say in Greek. People who were never not engaged with them when they were. Babysitting. We never had to have babysitters. We never had to have a nanny. We didn't have anything like that. What we had instead was two generations removed of people speaking Greek to them, asking them questions, what are you doing, from the moment they are toddlers until they're 14 years old. What they got from that is so different from what I got from mine. There is a joke in my family about how bad I am with tools. I mean, as soon

• 36:11Speaker 01

  as I pick up a screwdriver or a hammer, I start getting cold sweats because my dad had no patience with me about, he never said, "Let me show you how to use a, let me show you how to scrape that off." It was always, "Oh, come on, you knothed head. Don't you know how to sand a board? Don't you know the difference between a standard socket wrench and a metric wrench?" And I never did because nobody said, "Let me show you how you do this. You gotta learn it." So that you're talking about something there that is, it's almost, it's like water on a stone, you know? It just has an effect over time. And, you

• 36:51Speaker 01

  know, in many cultures, you have to look at that and say, the more, the more generations around that table with regularity, you know, not just for, you know, three holidays, three holidays a year, the richer the lesson is going to be, you know, the deeper, because you're gonna pick up some stuff just by, like an, like an old story from, you know, from the old country. My, my, my father-in-law, dad, he was, he was Greek but grew up in Bulgaria and had to escape the communists and whatnot, which is a fascinating story unto itself.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  But, but, he told a story about being told by his dad to take the donkey up to this, you know, up to the mountains and get something and bring it back, knowing that there was the meanest dog on the planet Earth up there that was going to try to, try to bite him. He came back, oh, I think of what it was, is he, he said, "Take the donkey up there." And he didn't want to wrestle with the donkey. He just wanted to go up there and get it back really fast. And on the way there, this dog, you know, nearly mauled him, scared the living daylights out of him. So when he came back down, his dad said, "I told you to take the donkey."

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Because the donkey would scare off the dog, you know, like that. So, you know, you don't, that's the kind of stuff you got to pick up over time.

• 38:14Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  But did you, did you have, uh, multiple, multiple generations in the home as you were growing up?

• 38:20Jay Shetty?

  I, I felt that for me, my, my monk teachers became that for me because they were older.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Okay, sure.

• 38:27Jay Shetty?

  I had a monk teacher who was in his, probably his sixties when I met him, had another who was in his thirties when I first met him. And so they became that. I wasn't so close to my grandparents. And so I didn't really have that same interaction as you, as mentioning your children did. I didn't really have that with them. So I had my parents, I had my uncles and aunts. But then I think it was really later on when I met those two generations in the monastery that, that really expanded my, uh, breadth of, you know, human experience.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  It'd be nice if it worked across the board, but sometimes, you know, grandpa's a drunk and, you know, and, uh, and grandma does nothing but smoke cigarettes and, you know, and watch Wheel of Fortune. So maybe it's not always.

• 39:06Jay Shetty?

  No, maybe it's not always.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  But it can be sometimes.

• 39:09Jay Shetty?

  It can be, it can be. Was there, you were talking about your experience with your father and, and, you know, with the tools and it's so funny because my dad was the opposite. He was, he was useless at DIY. And so I'm useless at DIY.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Okay, there you go.

• 39:20Jay Shetty?

  And so I have that experience.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  My dad was great. My dad could fix everything. There was, there was a story, I was talking to my older brother once, when, that he and my dad, um, my dad was like, why, why in the world was spending a lot of money? For crying out loud, we could get it. We could get electronics, get, make our own amplifier. We don't have to go off and pay all this much money. We'll hook it up to a turntable and a speaker. There we have stereo system. So they got a kit and I saw them working on it together and I was kind of jealous. And I'm, I'm honestly, 40 years later, I said to, so you know, that when you made the amplifier with dad, I was really jealous because, oh man, I wish I would have done anything to trade places with you. My dad was so miserable as we're doing it always. You knot head, don't you know, don't you know how to solder? It's like, oh, well, you know, it's a perspective of everything.

• 40:04Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, definitely. Did, did you try to, did you try to parent differently? Like, did you try to avoid some?

• 40:10Speaker 01

  You know, you tried to, but I made every mistake, you know, you, you scar the kids somehow in, in, in the same exact way. And as they get older, you know, you come back around and said, hey, can I talk about what a knot head I was with you for all those years? And said, yeah, sure dad.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, been kind of waiting for this. Why don't, uh, why did you, why did you unload? So I know that, but I would say at the same time, I think there was, you know, does it come up to be 50 50? Maybe the, uh, the attitude and the, uh, you know, the, the life that we led, the, uh, the laughs, you know, uh, that stuff's worth its weight and, you know, gem encrusted gold.

• 40:48Jay Shetty?

  What's something that they've taught you? What's something that they've

• 40:51Speaker 01

  How different they all are, you know, they are not the same type of human being ever. My youngest at one point said something that was definitely true for him. And I thought is in fact true for all of my kids, which makes, makes me feel good. And that was, uh, he was younger. He was like seven or eight. I said, oh, you know, at, at one point, let's, let's go down. We were in New York. So let's go down the park and we'll take our gloves and we'll throw it around. We'll bat the balls. We'll just find a place of grass. He said, okay, do that. And it got away from me. Didn't happen. This called that something happened and I realized that, oh, the sun's going down now. And I said, oh my God, oh my God. Hey, I'm sorry. I said, we were gonna go down in the, uh,

• 41:36Speaker 01

  and, and, uh, throw the ball around. It got away from me. Um, forgive me. And he said, no, it's okay. And he sounded disappointed. That's okay. I said, well, you know, I, I feel bad. I just, I just, I don't, I don't want you to be bored. And he looked at me with a look on his face and said, Dad, I'm never bored. And that is, uh, that's curiosity. That speaks to curiosity and drive and also the comfort of where one is in order to feel free, in order to explore whatever world that is. And I can, I think I could say that maybe in varying degrees for, for all the kids. Their ability to, um, pursue their own interests without being prodded,

• 42:21Speaker 01

  um, without being forced to, I, I, I, I've learned from that because look, there was uh, that isolation that I'm, that I was talking about. There was a time when I was so comfortable doing absolutely nothing or, you know, pursuing some brand of, you know, disconnection.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  That wasn't good for me and I, you know, they, everybody has it in some, some, some degrees, but you could be of a, with all that you have, with all you kids, with all your advantages, I do not want to hear that you're bored. And they have never, they have never said that they're bored. They've, they have always had some action thing that was going on, whether I understood their passion for it or not.

• 43:05Jay Shetty?

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• 43:48Jay Shetty?

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• 44:28Jay Shetty?

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• 45:08Jay Shetty?

  What attracted that isolation and disconnection at that moment in time? What was it that was so appealing?

• 45:14Speaker 01

  I think I just had to get used to it because I was number three. There, people ran out of time, you know? They didn't have the wherewithal or the interest. Because I was so young when my parents split up and there were so many other factors that had to go into, man, it was logistics and legal thing and time and distance and stuff like that. That I took care of myself and, you know, was was satisfied. I think it was reprieve for them. So I just got, I just got used to occupying myself by being alone.

• 45:45Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  And that's really great and it can be really detrimental.

• 45:50Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I can relate to so much of that as well. I felt I was the eldest, just one of two. And my parents, you've used this word previously in in other interviews of having your parents had a fractured relationship and so did mine. And so there was definitely a sense of I had to build independence, accountability and responsibility very early on because I had to take care of things. And I also look back at that as such a strength. And I'm so grateful for it in a kind of weird way because I feel like it made me grow up earlier. Not in a way that I felt I lost a childhood or I didn't have amazing experiences. But I'm really happy now when I look back that it gave me strength and courage much earlier.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  But as the older one, did they have some expectations of responsibility put on you? Did, like, where are you going and you have to be back by now? Were there rules placed upon you?

• 46:40Jay Shetty?

  No rules, no rules for me. More expectations educationally. And what was strange, which is so much linked to what I do today, and I've I've drawn that line fairly often for myself, is I was emotionally depended on by both of them.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 46:57Jay Shetty?

  So I became the therapist, the mediator, the coach.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Wow, that's a burden, I'm sorry. No wonder you went off for three years to sleep on the floor, sleep on the ground.

• 47:05Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, so I I I'm grateful for it now, though, because I think it Gave me the ability to listen closely, be empathetic, understand both sides, care for both of them. Like he gave me that ability to recognize how it takes two to tango.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  I think I think this is a viable study about where you are in that pecking order. I remember now I agreed about it because because I was last and last by like five years, I had no rules. I had no expeditions. They had they had spent so much time trying to establish that with the older, you know, my older siblings. They didn't want to bother with it anymore. So if I was gone for, you know, like two weeks, I just didn't come home for two weeks in high school. They knew I was sleeping at somebody's house and doing my homework and getting to school on my own. They were thrilled that they didn't have to, you know, they didn't have to discipline me or punish me. They didn't have to have to think about me. I just came and went by myself. So but I was not the oldest, you know, I did not have somebody that was establishing

• 48:02Speaker 01

  the rules and, you know, the the structure of the family.

• 48:06Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that was yeah, and that was different for me, too. I had I had expectations academically, which is normal in an Indian family, but there weren't any rules for me as well. So if I was out and about and doing whatever it was, it didn't matter. And so.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  So I'm gonna is the stereotype of the Indian family. Are they are you all brilliant students? Do you all work really hard and finish all your homework?

• 48:27Jay Shetty?

  You're forced to, yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  You're forced to.

• 48:29Jay Shetty?

  You're forced to prioritize homework. Education is all that matters. Your social skills, life, relationships don't matter. It's all about how well you perform.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  I'm glad I'm not an Indian and there's no way I could have been. Oh, Lord.

• 48:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's all about how well you perform academically. Your whole life revolves around that.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Were your parents like high academic achievers?

• 48:48Jay Shetty?

  Well, I think they'd I I would say they did very well for what they had. My dad became a chartered accountant. He qualified in England, but he grew up, he was raised in India. And my mom never did any more than what you'd study up until age 16.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:02Jay Shetty?

  And then after that, also became an entrepreneur and became a financial advisor. So they'd both struggled and worked hard to.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  I love it. It was going. It was going right where I thought it was until you said, and then became an entrepreneur.

• 49:14Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, just yeah, which I didn't realize growing up that she was an entrepreneur.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Well, that comes from somewhere of. That structure of education and homework done.

• 49:24Jay Shetty?

  Exactly.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  No matter the gender.

• 49:25Jay Shetty?

  Exactly, exactly, exactly, definitely. But I was thinking about, as we're talking about your life, I can't help but think about the movie here. I'm so grateful I got to watch a couple of days ago, a couple of weeks, no, a week ago now. And I really just felt that it was a work of art. That's kind of what I took away from it. It was a work of art. Because rarely has a film more recently had me so fixated on. First of all, the way it's produced and created is beautiful and the way.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  It's a pretty deep throw.

• 49:58Jay Shetty?

  It's it's it's so deep and it's perfect for this conversation that we're having. And even as you're reflecting on all of these scenes in your life. To me, I can't help but project.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Oh, dear. Oh, but you're you're because because it was the four of us, you know, Bob, Bob Zemeckis and Eric Roth and Robin and I. And everybody, everybody else in it, you know, Paul and every actor that we. The the scenes are very, very specific of a moment in a family's life.

• 50:25Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  And everybody was armed for bear. Everybody had a thing that had happened to them that was like that. Not necessarily example, but the sensory experience, the the emotional connection to every single moment in this thing. Was really quite resonant for us all. And I had to, when I, people say, what are you working on? Oh, I'm making a movie called Here. I say, not H E A R. It's H E R E. I said, well, what's it about? I've said, it is about how important things are. When they happen here, you know, because you cannot control them.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  And they are, if you, if the film, I mean, all of the permutations where it goes, you know, we say, oh, the camera stands still in space. But it moves in in time, you know, everybody, every character in it is going through that profound thing. That happens in a specific moment in their life. And where does it happen? It happens right here. So we were always talking about presence, you know, some big aspect of it. And also that we do not know that we're living in a moment of history. We don't know, they don't know that the first tribes, you know, the Native Americans, they don't know that they're Native Americans. They're just living in the moment. They're not,

• 51:50Speaker 01

  they don't know they're living, you know, 600 years ago, nor do the people that build the house that takes place. They don't know that they're living in 1911. They're think, they're just living in the right now of it. And that's a type of thing that really is so examnable, examineable in a very specific type of cinema that is the point of what the whole movie is, that, you know, that Bob and Eric fleshed out long before Robin and I came along.

• 52:21Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  And along with that comes together, the four of us have a history that we can go back to. I mean, Robin's worked with Bob a couple of times. I've worked with Bob a number of times. Eric is one friend of mine. We've worked on stuff all the time. And every time we've done it, we have a pinpoint of the difference between here, at the moment that it happened, and now, at this moment where we're talking about establishing a whole new other place in time.

• 52:51Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I mean, when I was watching it, I couldn't help but think of every place that has been monumental in my life, and then think about how many other events must have taken place in that room, in that space that I'm not even aware of, and I might even take for granted, and not recognize the value of, both in my life and previously, and of course, the future as well.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Well, I had to wrap my head around this thing that I had never experienced. We lived here. I've never lived any place, you know, now I've had, I've lived, had in the same, literally, home, as in three-dimensional structure in time and space. I've had that now for, you know, a couple of decades here. But this idea of someone putting so much... I don't want to say importance, but having so much emotional centeredness in literally this place in a room, by these stairs, through this door, the TV used to be there and there it was there, here's where mom and dad did this, here's where I did that, I don't have that.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  I, oh, I got it, you know, once we got married and, you know, finally, I didn't, but I didn't get it until I was thirty-five years old. And my kids have it. And sometimes I have to ask them about their perspectives. I moved around so much as a kid, I looked forward to it. When we moved out of the, of the house that my kids had been born in and lived in for the better part, you know, lived in for like fourteen years apiece, they were sort of undone by it. And I didn't understand it. I, I, I literally, in the back of my head, if not verbally, said, what's the big deal? You know, how's that for, for a perspective? It is a huge deal if you're actually there.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  And Richard, you know, Robin and I are, are characters, you know. I'm, I'm born in the house. I grow up in the house. My kids are born in the house. Our entire marriage and family is spent in that house. And is it a solace? Or is it a boundary that you're never able to get, get through of? That, experiencing that and examining that was, oh my lord. I can't tell you how many, how much conversation. This whole movie was just one big ass conversation about what it means. Not so much about what the words are, how we move around, that's the technical stuff that goes along. But every moment that we were off by ourselves, it seemed to me we were trying to weigh this

• 55:27Speaker 01

  very specific thing of what we have always, what we have all been through in our odd, you know, celebrated goofy, stupid, uh, individual lives. And what it meant to this, the H E R E aspect of, of, of this story that we were trying to tell. And Bob particularly, I mean, Bob's, we all, I think, incorporated our own approach to our art form and, and commercial life to it. Bob is a filmmaker. Is not about to do a shot that anybody could do, you know? And he's not about to tell a story cinematically in ways that have been done before. He's just built that way. He went, well, hell, anybody can do that. You know, he says stuff like that.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  And Eric, as a, as a screenwriter, he's constantly landing on this place where only his words on paper.

• 56:18Jay Shetty?

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• 57:30Jay Shetty?

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• 58:03Speaker 01

  Can translate this, this thought process. And Robin and I, you know. Paul, everybody, everybody in the thing is like, I know the lines turned me loose. Let's go, let's go. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna try that? Let's try that. Where are you gonna go? Just take it, you know? This ongoing game of improvisational emotional football in which you're just, and I mean football, this is the international sense.

• 58:26Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Premiership, the championship league. It is a ball that is kind of, it's a matter of inches, it's a matter of a curve, it's a matter of being in the right place at the right time in order to, to receive what's given to you and then pass on to somebody else.

• 58:39Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it was, I know the film uses digital anti-aging technology and you get to see yourself many years younger. Was there any special feeling of that?

• 58:52Speaker 01

  No, it was, it was kinda great. I mean, because it's a great tool. Because it's been, you know, people are aged and younged up in movies, you know, since Edison stole George Milyer's film process back in the early 1900s. It was fascinating to watch because it ended up being, the tools were so much better that it was a different completeness to it.

• 59:15Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  You know, we all had, you know, you always had hair and makeup. We went through extensive everything, you know, they did, at one point, I'm sitting there and Jennifer, our fabulous makeup artist, she's just looking at me. She just grabbed both of my ears and then lifted them up and shoved them to the, into the top of my head. And I said, what are you doing? She said, oh, Tom, we're working on you being 17. And as you age, your ears grow and lower on your head. And so I'm trying to see if I'll be able to glue them up. On the side, I said, have at it, girl. So that, all of the tool aspect of it is standard.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  What was new is that we could see it in real time. We didn't have to send it off and wait for a long post-production thing because that was the deep fake technology that uses some form of AI just to make it much, much faster.

• 1:00:18Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  And immediate. And listen, what, what it, one of the things that it shows is just how old I am. Uh, because you know, you gotta have posture and energy. Uh, if you're, if everything else about you looks like you're 22 years old, you're gonna have to embody a 22 year old. I'm gonna tell you right now, it's very hard to leap off a couch in enthusiasm, uh, as a, as a, as a 67 year old guy at the time that we did it.

• 1:00:45Jay Shetty?

  I didn't even think of that.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Hey, you know what? Had a lot of tea, had a lot of protein bars, you know? Got a lot of rest, got a lot of stretching, you know, in order, in order to make that happen.

• 1:00:56Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, you mentioned presence there, and that was a theme that definitely struck me. What do you find helps you be the most present today as you're living?

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  There are times that I think you have to be oblivious. You have to sort of like enforce it. You have to, uh, not think of things. It's crazy, but one of the most basic things I think that I learned, probably in junior college, when I actually first, the Shaboo Community College, when he truly did begin to study this kind of stuff, is that the words, what you are saying, has to be so familiar to you that you don't think about it. And that is a degree of being oblivious to the specifics of what you're doing. Because if you're trying to get through it, that means self-consciousness. That means you are not, you are not getting out of yourself and self-consciousness is the death of performance.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Ask any actor this thing. It's that if, if you have a scene, where you have to go to a deep emotional place, and the only way to do it is to go there. Chances are, you have had the most wonderful day of your life prior to that. Or the, it is so much fun to come to work that day. All right? So that's one thing that you have to do. And the other side of it is, if you have to be charming and convivial and funny on paper, on stage a day, chances are you're going through some personal hell, you know, off, uh, you know, off camera, that you just have to be oblivious to somehow.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  And along with that, there's, I can't discount enough the joy of the hang. I think what I do for a living, joy does, it promotes it. And joy not necessarily being we're all having a great time, we're all singing campfire songs. But the joy of allying yourself with great collaborators and trusting that they are going to get better stuff out of you that you could possibly bring yourself. And being open to just knowing it so well. Everybody says, well, what do you mean by, what do you mean by learning the lines? I mean, learning the lines like you know the lyrics to the best song you ever heard in your life, Yesterday, all my troubles seem so far away. Now I need a place that's here to stay. Oh, I believe in you.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  You gotta be able to rattle it off that fast, that easily. It's gotta be so much a part of you that you don't have to think about it. If I actually sang the right words to Yesterday.

• 1:03:24Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And I feel there's this, it's amazing to see your enthusiasm, excitement, joy, you know, continuing in your career when you're, even what you just said now of working with people who can get even more out of me. And that belief that there's more in you always. You've talked about imposter syndrome in the past, which obviously I'm sure everyone, when they look at you, find it hard to believe. But I recognize when you've shared, or I've heard you talk about it before, it's very real, it's very genuine, this feeling of like, oh, well, you know. Walk us through that, how you've been able to constantly believe there's more in you to give, more, to do, more to find.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Somebody wanted me to do a movie, all right? And it was great. And I should have done it. It was gonna be for a lot of money, it would be, and you go somewhere cool, you get a good per diem, you know, all that kind of stuff. There was no reason not to do the movie.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  Except, there was something that I just said, "This is not the match for me." Because, number one, I don't have any curiosity about the subject. Now, that's not the only reason to do it. But in order to translate the theme of the movie through a performance, there has to be some sort of challenge and curiosity to it. And I had none, that was one thing. But the other part of it, too, I was searching, I was having a one-on-one talk with the director. And I was just, I said, "Look," I said, "I don't, I don't have the, I don't have the, I don't have the countenance." And the director said, "Countenance? What the hell does that mean?"

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  I said, "There is a thing that we all carry with us. We have a countenance that comes from everything we've had. All the work that we've done, all the, all the times that we've either succeeded or failed, because they both go together. You, you, failure teaches you a lot more than success does. I'm talking about commercial success. But that idea that you walk away from a job and you think that we went to a new place in order to, in order to examine this theme that only we could have done unless we all got together and challenged each other and made it happen. And without that type of stretching of one's countenance that you come into, that's, that to me is the, that's, that to me is the big mcgilla.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  I still find myself completely at the mercy of that instinctive moment of, "Oh, my God! That's what, that's what I think." You know, and the next thing you know, you want to do it, and you're talking, talking about it continuously. And there is nothing that anybody says that... detracts from that initial

• 1:06:16Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  initial experience. Uh, because, you know, other, other, you know, that there's, there's plenty of other things that you can do. Because they're fun. I mean, my, my, uh, my beginnings, uh, the first time I was a professional actor, we were in repertory theater, uh, at, uh, with my Vincent Dowling, at a place called the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, Ohio. And because we were in rep, we did everything. We did, we did Hamlet and King John and Othello. At the same time, we were doing fabulous rip roaring comedies that everybody, everybody dug. The countenance then is exchanged between them, between the two.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  And that's something that I, it's not a burden at all, but it is a, uh, it is a prism through which a decision has to be made. Going back again to this idea of this, I believe that my, my countenance, look it up, staff, look up countenance for me. My countenance is not going to aid the examination of this theme. And movies work when the theme is worthy of being examined by that movie. And so in that case, you just have to say, uh, no, uh, there's, uh, you need somebody that's going to come in there like a, you know, like, like a, like a mad dog and, and devour that bone.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  And I, I just, my countenance doesn't match up to that.

• 1:07:47Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it sounds like you've never compromised that.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  Oh, I've compromised plenty of time.

• 1:07:51Jay Shetty?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Well, you know, making mistakes, you know, there was a period of time, look, I, look at my IMDB. It might be up in triple digits by now. You know, and there was a time where I just said, they are asking me to be in a movie. You don't say no to that. And you, that's young. That's the stuff that you do in your twenties and in your thirties. And then sometime in there, you start thinking about, no, no, no, no, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. The greatest decision, by the way, I don't think I've ever said no yet.

• 1:08:15Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Except by schedule, but now it turns out to be that's where you start shaping. Um, what your, your art and the body of work, you have to start, the power is saying no. And that's really, that was really hard to do when, you know, everybody thinks you're great. You show up and everybody wants you to do it and everybody says fabulous things. But I, I've compromised, I, I didn't know I was compromising because I didn't know any better. But there was a moment, I guess, when you said like, ah, you know, I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to, I think I'd be compromising somewhere here. And so the, the first time I said no to something, um, it was a very, it was, it was on one hand liberating.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  And of course I might've thought I made the biggest mistake of my life. Uh, you know, I, if you take any great, take any great magnificent, take, let's just pull from the take Faye Dunaway and Laurence Olivier, they have very specific countenances. There is a thing that you will say, oh my God, the countenance of Laurence Olivier. Really, really Ozzy Davis, well, you know, any great that wow, that countenance matches.

• 1:09:23Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  And that's, I guess that's what I'm.

• 1:09:26Jay Shetty?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  There is a, there is like a, you know, some sort of cosmic weight that they carry along with it. That makes sense for what they're doing.

• 1:09:33Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, for sure. There's a, listening to you speak about, I mean, it's so relieving to hear that you've compromised sometimes. Like because it's a relief.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  Come by my house, we have a night of compromise, you know? How about that? You want to do that? We'll bring the.

• 1:09:49Jay Shetty?

  I love it.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  We'll bring the DVDs and say, this is the DVD of compromise.

• 1:09:53Jay Shetty?

  I mean, that'd be amazing. No, I think because I think we're so good, we, we forget that you're used to celebrating and counting someone's wins and hits when they've had so many and you look over the compromises or whatever it may have been. And so it's a relief hearing that because your values of how you pick a project, of how you work on a project seems so, so strong and defined now, and that's obviously come with time. As, as you were making here, was there a particular scene that reminded you of a time in your life that you want to revisit, relive, rethink?

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Eugene O'Neill.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Wrote All Wilderness. He wrote that play as the life he would have, he wanted to have. He wished he had had, the family that he had wished he had. And I always read that. Oh, you know, you know, there's a big reason why I became an actor because I saw great productions of his stuff back in 1975, 76. And when I finally saw All Wilderness, I was knocked out because it was as delightful a play as it was. And I'd always heard that he wrote that as, you know, the family that he wished he had. I thought about that when I was doing here because there are moments, for example, when we're just sitting watching TV and, you know, Robin is there, the kids are little and we're

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  just there. And we ended up talking about what would be on the TV, you know? And I went right back to, you know, I don't know, it was a Dean Martin show or, you know, an episode of something, even down to some of the commercials that we wanted to. And those moments were transporting for me, but not in a home, the way we were picturing it.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  I remember seeing those in an apartment that we lived in for two and a half years when I was walking to school by myself. Or the first years, you know, somebody was married to a step spouse that was not the most benevolent human being in the planet Earth, right? Sometimes I remembered sometimes just that, that gathering around, like-mindedly getting the same thing out of a TV show, like an electric fireplace, but it was solace, it was a togetherness that belied what was really going on in the house. And there's a couple of those, particularly when the kids are little and Robin and I

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  are in early, early years of our marriages, that were sublime right then and there because...

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  We're laughing, it's there, the kids are being goofy, there's a moment that, there's a moment that comes along. And what, I don't think there's a better example of a true sense of family and home and connection in moments that are not Thanksgiving, or Christmas morning, or a wedding, or a kid. They are when you're just sitting around on a Thursday night, you know, content and, and, and happy, and nothing is happening except you, the sense of presence that's there.

• 1:13:00Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  There's a couple of them, that's funny that you should ask that, because I realize now that the amount of, the amount of suggestions we all had for how we would sit there.

• 1:13:10Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  What would be on the TV, what we had done just before, was coming right out of, right out of our individual lives, from Bob, from Eric, certainly from, from Robin and myself.

• 1:13:22Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it felt so real. It, it feels so real, every, every scene, every conversation, every event feels so real.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  One of the things that we learned, because it's shot in this very specific, you know, aspect ratio, you know, camera position, is that everything works, everything. If you're in the scene, even if you're not talking, you are registering in a way that warrants attention. The, the stuff that is on the walls, I can't say enough about the TV. Here's something goofy. I walked onto the set one day, and it was from a period from, you know, early 1960s or something like that, and the TV was an old General Electric TV that was the same model we had.

• 1:14:10Jay Shetty?

  No.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  When Apollo 8 flew around the moon. We had, this was the TV, we had this old black and white thing with General Electric, it had this big channel changing knob on the side, it was like that. And it was the same maple cabinet. It wasn't big, it was just not much, you know, it was on legs and it had the cloth speakers, it said General Electric and things like that. And I immediately took a picture of it, and I sent it to my siblings, and I said, "You recognize this?" And they all said, "Ah, that's a TV from the Johnson house!", you know? It was like that. So it had these kind of like talismans that came along with it. That, oddly enough, they were, they were both great to see and bittersweet to remember. Does that make sense?

• 1:14:51Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, for sure, for sure. Do you, I know you're fascinated by space, do you have any desire to go to the moon?

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  Oh, you know, if they were gonna do a thing where, you know, regular blokes could just go up and go around it. I mean, I, I'd take that.

• 1:15:03Jay Shetty?

  You would?

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, just, just to do it. But, oh, yeah, I think.

• 1:15:07Jay Shetty?

  I'm sure Elon Musk would love to take.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm not going with him, but he's not going there anyway. You know, they're just going up now, but I've, I've met, I've talked to the, I've talked to the crews that are in line to make the next orbit around the moon that could happen as early as twenty five, twenty six. And, man, oh, man, I just say, hey, if you need someone just to clean up and crack jokes, you got room in there. Give me, give me a call. I'll get down to whatever weight requirements are necessary because I wouldn't pass it up. But I said, but only if all of the windows are, are clear. Cause a lot of times those, they have gone up and the, the windows get kind of like messed up because of zero gravity and the vacuum outside and the building material.

• 1:15:53Jay Shetty?

  Right. Was that fascination only from movies? Is that where it came from?

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  No, no, that came from, I was right smack dab in, I was that, I was that educatable generation for which it was, space travel was the embodiment of every discipline that we were studying. Current events, politics, physics, art, engineering, math. It was all, all wrapped up all into one. It was on TV, TV regularly. I was, I was just, I was the, the, of course, now you're gonna think about this, but the idea of being alone in space in a space suit, it was kind of mirroring my life when I was like seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven years.

• 1:16:33Jay Shetty?

  Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's, I don't know if you saw that movie, Fly Me to the Moon recently.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  No, I did not, but it's, you know, it's streaming in the new movie economy, so I know it'll be there for a thousand years.

• 1:16:43Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I just watched it recently. It was fascinating.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  It's a little bit of a, the conspiracy theory really didn't happen yet.

• 1:16:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  Normally I hate that kind of stuff, but it's good quality people.

• 1:16:53Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, exactly. No, I'd love to get your thoughts on it when you see it. Yeah. And your other fascination is world wars.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Well, this is another thing that goes back to the study of it. Let me put it, let me put it to you this way. I was born in nineteen fifty six. That's eleven years after the war is done. So essentially, everybody who is an adult in my life. Had memories of those years, whether they went to war or not. They had memories of the, what I like to call the emotional stasis of the early 1940s. In which, go back again, they did not know the war was going to end. In 1943, they had no idea how long the war was, who was gonna live, who was gonna die,

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  who was gonna win, who was gonna not, who was gonna come back. 1943, if you're alive, they're not saying, "Hey, don't worry about it. The war's gonna be over in just another 18 months." They don't know that. And that was a palpable thing that was passed on to me. Because when it came around time to get to know the life stories of a teacher, a friend of my dad's, you know, parents of my pals. They would talk about those years, their youth, in three distinctive parts, three acts of their lives, you know, which I'd been picking up on because, you know, some sort of story sense. When they were kids, it was before the war.

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  When my dad was in high school, it was before the war. When he was working on a farm, listening to the radio, and worried about, you know, not being able to afford the dentist. It was before the war. Then, there was, well, that was during the war. It's a whole different storytelling process. The whole different guidelines of the narrative. Well, you have to understand, that was during the war. That was 42, it was during the war. And their daily life was completely different than what it had been. There was less of things. There was this fear of this unseen enemy possible attack. There were blackouts. They couldn't get cling peaches. They didn't have birthday cakes as much. They, it was during the war.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  And also, say, "Well, where were you?" "Oh, well, that was during the war." "Well, where were you?" "Well, I was in a, you know, I was, I was, you know, I was, my dad was in the South Pacific. He was a machinist. And he would never have been in the South Pacific as a machinist were not for the war." Then the rest of their lives, when we show up, you know, when this next generation shows up, when their kids show up. All this stuff happened, and again, the narrative has completely changed. We have to understand. That was after the war. So on one hand, there was something to celebrate. But on the other hand, there was, guess what? Life became one damn thing after another in a different way than it had been before the war.

• 1:19:51Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  And, you know, the people that you, the people who did it well, you know, the, the storytellers, the teachers, or even the friends of my dads when we're sitting around and everybody's relaxed on a Thursday night and they're drinking beers, you know, and they're talking about when they're getting to know each other. These, the stories from any one of those acts, I thought were, were fascinating, were, uh, were ponderable because as a seven-year-old, I'm hearing my dad and my mom and other people talk about when they were seven years old with the magnifying glass and the division of, well, that was before the war. We did not know what was coming

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  down the pipe. Then everything else that goes along with it. I still can't quite get past the fact that, uh, in nineteen, nineteen sixty-four, the Beatles are on the Ed Sullivan Show. And my dad is of the generation of just twenty years prior. The war was not yet over. And they had no idea when they were ever going to come home. And now, these four kids are up on there saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, and playing guitars and stuff like that. And everybody, everybody's making a big deal about it. Part of it is, never saw this coming, never would have, never. And in a lot of ways, now us younger generation did

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  not have the same attention span for what they had, what they had been through. I mean, uh, until the, you know, you could talk about Elvis Presley all you want, rightly so. He was a, he was a massive generational force, changed the world a lot of ways. But still, vis a vis. A World War II generation. The Beatles come along in nineteen sixty-four and it's almost as though the last vestige of that generation carries import, you know, has, has weight that we can pay attention to, even though I've, you know, I've, I've never stopped studying of it because at the end of the day, it's just great storytelling. You want to talk about great protagonists, antagonists, you want to talk about the irony, you want to talk about the, the, the, uh,

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  schizophrenia of what can happen and good and bad. World War II is about as good as you're going to get. And also here's this other thing that's ridiculously satisfying about it. It ended. There was a time when it was all done and wars now go on for generations and they go on for decades and there are no, there are no moments when, you know, the swords are pounded into plowshares. Not that that happened in, you know, hundred percent in nineteen forty-five.

• 1:22:35Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. It seems, it seems as though like, not that it's any comparison with the events that took place, but our language of this generation has become pre-pandemic during the pandemic.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  About that, yeah. Yeah. You could, you could probably look at it. There was a moment, certainly the AIDS crisis came along and the pandemic of the, of AIDS, that certainly altered all of society in the same way. You could talk about, you could talk to an awful lot of guys who will say, well, you understand that was before AIDS, you know, that, that means a lot. And yeah, you would say the same thing about certainly the, the, the COVID pandemic. We went through something that, I mean, my, look, I got grandkids who are now talking about their lives. Well, that was during COVID.

• 1:23:16Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  And so they didn't go to school and they didn't see their friends. They were trying to do things online. It was really different. And now COVID has let go and guess what? Now they're just getting on with the rest of the tasks of growing up with their lives. So they too, um, maybe, you know, might be a little young to remember, you know, before COVID, but they do. So, yeah. So what's going to be next, do you think?

• 1:23:38Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  What's going to be that next three act structure to our? To our collective history.

• 1:23:44Jay Shetty?

  Well, as you keep saying, more will be revealed as well.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  This, yes, this too shall pass and more shall be revealed and we will never all know of everything that we need to know.

• 1:23:53Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and you've been seen as the, or even in a poll, voted the most trusted man in America.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  And there's an anomaly in the vote taking process. After all the times I've lied to everybody, oh, no, this is a great movie. Yeah, by all means, come see this movie. That was a lie sometimes.

• 1:24:12Jay Shetty?

  How does, how do you, how do you deal with that kind of?

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  Oh, I, you know, I don't know. There's, there's a, um, yeah, okay, you know, I get it. That's good. I, I guess that comes around to perhaps the thing that I was talking about, countenance wise, you know? If you were going to take somebody who is, who is an artist and say, uh, who's the scariest person alive, you know, you'll, you'll come off with.

• 1:24:41Jay Shetty?

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• 1:25:24Jay Shetty?

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• 1:25:46Jay Shetty?

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• 1:26:20Speaker 08

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:26:30Speaker 07

  Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:26:36Speaker 05

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:26:41Speaker 07

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:26:44Speaker 05

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:26:45Speaker 07

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only begins October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  You know, I don't know, Vincent Price, whatever. I'm an artist, I'm a storyteller. And I think I'll take that as a testament to, I guess, the veracity that I brought to my craft, my choice. I'd like to think that, you know, you go all in on a story, on and say, hey, sit down, I want, you might be interested in hearing this, is that you're, there's an honest exchange between myself and the audience. And if it's an honest exchange, then you could come to trust them. You know, that's not a bad thing. That's not a bad thing.

• 1:27:26Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. And it's quite magical, actually. I mean, trust in that way. Of course, you know, Hollywood success, you've spoken about it so many times, which is why we haven't dived into it. And then, you know, a happy, healthy marriage. And how did you know Rita was the one? Like, that's, you know, how did you know?

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  Divine providence, you know, maybe it's kind of like the same thing that happened when I was in school and in high school. And I said, this can be school. There was a thing with Reader where I just thought, wait, it could be like this. It could be like just sitting around. That's it. It could be like a carefree union. I didn't know that. How about that? I had, honestly, I had not truly experienced that somehow. And when it's there, you just kind of go, oh, I, you know, I, I, you know, I'd like to say, and then, you know, and then we met and I said, and, you know, and that was that.

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, that's pretty much it. Then you get on with it. And, you know, years later, no small amount of, no small amount of me saying things like, oh, let me get this straight. You know, there's a lot of, plenty of, plenty of examples of that going on, you know, with so much so that, oh, here goes dad. Oh, here goes dad with a let me get this straight. Why would it work for me? Argument, I pull it out. I pull it out all the time and, you know, we, we, we do, she does too. And that's the exchange.

• 1:29:02Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  And it's, it remains glorious and, and you're, and you can't create it anywhere else. Can't fake that.

• 1:29:09Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, there's that beautiful acceptance speech that you have in 2020 when you talk about how a man is blessed with this beautiful family.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:29:17Jay Shetty?

  That has in front of him when you're in tears and.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  That, you know, you can't, number one, I am a sap. Number two, you, I, you don't expect, you think you're going to be able to get up and, you know, get away with it some, you think, ah, I'm going to get it. There'll be some straight shooting. I'll see some great stuff. But then I just, you look down and, you know, there's my wife and there's, you know, there's, you know, a combination of all my kids, sometimes four or five, you know, they're all just there. And what do you see? I see little babies, you know? And I, you know, I, you know, I see, I, I see this, this woman that is put up with so much stuff. It just, you know, life flashes before your eyes a little bit. And there's that, there's that moment of surrealism where it's like, can somebody explain to me how this happened? I'm not, I'm not quite sure.

• 1:30:06Jay Shetty?

  And here does the same thing, the movie here, H E R E.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:11Jay Shetty?

  There's a sense of you're watching your life flashback.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  It, what I really loved, okay, this, I guess we have to be careful about spoiler alerts.

• 1:30:20Jay Shetty?

  I know, I'm trying.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  So we, we don't.

• 1:30:21Jay Shetty?

  I'm trying, I'm trying.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  We don't want to go there, but I think that it ends up examining this truth that sometimes life passes in the wink of an eye. And it's like, wow, are we here already? But there's other times in that same wake of an eye, you comprehend it all. And I think that's what the, that's what the, the movie works towards, if I can be so bold. And in many ways, that was the theme that we were all working towards. And even in the, the perfectness of just the word, it happened here. This is where that happened. Have you been, have you ever like been in like a really super historic place?

• 1:31:07Jay Shetty?

  Yes, a few times, yeah.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  Where something went down. Now, maybe it's something from thousands of years ago, or maybe it's something that you witnessed on TV yourself. You go to, like you go to like Washington DC. And stood on the, you know, look, I made a movie in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I couldn't believe that was happening. And then years later, I'm going back and there is, there is a plaque at the top of the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which is where Martin Luther King stood. And I have since gone back and read about that extraordinary day that did not happen by accident. In fact, it was originally going to be a protest. It was going to be a sit in and the powers that be all got together. It said, rather than make it a protest of a sit in, make it a march.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  And suddenly also things happened, like there were plenty of bathrooms lined up. There were sandwiches that was made for people. There were social services. There were cops, there were army men standing by, ready in case it was going to be a riot. And in 1964, 63.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  A riot was definitely a possibility, would have been a massive amount of civil unrest. And instead, it was all of these speakers. Marlon Brando was there for, Charlton Heston was there along with everybody. And Martin Luther King was, everybody could only speak for seven minutes. Cause they did not want it to run over, become unruly. So every, everybody who spoke, spoke for seven minutes. And that includes the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. And there's a reason that plaque is, that, that plaque is there in order to, in order to place it. And to be there and see it and then just envision everything. Powerful place, powerful, powerful, spiritual.

• 1:32:52Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. Are there other places you've been to like that or revisited multiple times to decode and discover and?

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  Uh, oh, yeah. Um, I'll tell you, I'll tell you one, uh, who cares what I said on other podcasts. Um, when we, when we were doing, um, believe it or not, when we were in Philadelphia, cause I was making Philadelphia. Kids were, you know, I, uh, are only had three kids there and some of them were with us and we were, we, it was a freezing cold day. We had a day off, so we went and saw the sights, including, um, Independence Hall. The Liberty Bell, you know, a whole bit. What are you gonna do in Philadelphia? You're gonna go do that, you're gonna see the Liberty Bell, you're gonna go like that. And Independence Hall being a famous place and it's still in the same joint and it still holds the same, you know, dimensional structure to it, you know? Maybe a lot of, everything it might've been, you know, recreated, but nonetheless, there it is.

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  And we were up in the Senate building and, um, the Senate room, you know? Cause it had Congress, the Supreme Court, the Senate right there. And, uh, we were there and the, the, the, it's a national park and the ranger said, uh, if you look at all of this stuff is reproductions, except that chair, you know, which is the original chair. I said, wow, it looked the same, it looked like a chair to me. So, so that chair, that's an original chair and it looked exactly like the same. He said, all this other stuff had been recreated to, to the best of its authenticity. And that's a riser there. And he said, that spot in front of, in front of the, that, uh, the dais. John Adams was sworn in as the second president of the United States.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Taking the place of George Washington.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  Was the first time in recorded history when the rule of a sovereign nation was passed to another without bloodshed and him not being a relation. Said something like that and the head might, I said, we are in holy ground. Nobody died. The king is dead, long live the king. No one was murdered, butchered. The hordes didn't come in and take away. No one was passing it on to his son in order to go on. There was no relation between John Adams and George Washington. The only thing that happened was this modicum of a thing they called democracy, which wasn't really democracy. I mean, women couldn't vote. If you were a slave, you were only three fifths of a human being. The only people that actually voted

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  were a bunch of white men, property owners, who originally didn't want to pay their taxes to the, to the crown. But look what, look what, look what happened there. I mean, I, I, you know, I've been, you know, plenty of cool joints in it, but they're, they're, this idea, not unlike the, the place where Martin Luther King. The idea that was communicated right there was tantamount to being in, you know, some version of the holies, the holies, you know, a precious shrine, a place of great faith and hope.

• 1:35:46Jay Shetty?

  I mean, speaking to that impact, you received honorary Greek citizenship.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:53Jay Shetty?

  Uh, for,

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  I got a passport.

• 1:35:55Jay Shetty?

  For your amazing work there.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, yeah. Oh, look, we just, you know, we love Greece and, you know, it is the home country to, to my wife's family and, uh, um, it, well, you can do it. Uh, this is something that, that, that we do and that are doing Greece. You know, you go off to some other island, you're swimming somewhere, you're on a boat. And you can kind of like pivot. And all you see is land, sea and sky. There's no sign of humanity. And you're like,

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  This is exactly what it's looked like for 110,000 years. This is exactly what this island was here in this exact same point. And by the way, there's a port right there, which was, you know, a place of antiquity or that. But to be able to look at something that is unscarred exactly as it was, it's like looking at primordial forests. It's like going back in time. And you see this aspect of the sky and the wind and the aridness of it. But the power of, you know, a ship in order to get there. Um, I, I, I've done that, you know, any number of places, you know, great historical places like that. And it ends up, uh, it makes you feel really, really teeny tiny sometimes. It's like, who are we?

• 1:37:13Speaker 01

  But, you know, specs in the course of all of this is like standing under, you know, a big massive sky and finally seeing on a really super dark night, the, you know, our galaxy or the, you know, the, the Milky Way, our solar system. And it's like, wow, I haven't been out of town for a while. I forgot how big that sky is and that that's a part of this. It's like, it's important to go through that.

• 1:37:35Jay Shetty?

  So important, so important.

• 1:37:37Speaker 01

  Have you ever seen a, a solar eclipse?

• 1:37:39Jay Shetty?

  I, I, I'm, I'm sure of kind of, but not, I'm not, yeah.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  Not the last one, but the one prior to it. We made sure that we were in the path of totality and we saw it. And oh my God, it, you, I cannot talk. No special effect in any movie has ever had the same impact or effect on anybody who takes a look at what that is. You feel as though you are witnessing God, the, you know, the clockworks of God. And it's, they can predict it. They know what it's going to be. And every step of it is you cannot fathom what you are seeing. And I, it made me feel on one hand, it made us all feel on one hand, really super tiny.

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  But at the other hand, magnificent, because we're a race that knew when it was coming and could predict it, could make sure we were there watching. It was really marvelous.

• 1:38:34Jay Shetty?

  Where was that?

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  When you read it, there was like these paths, you know, you can look at it on a map. And we just made sure that we were up in the Panhandle of Idaho in order to, in order to take a look at. People were just parking their cars willy nilly everywhere in order to be, they were, they were driving from, you know, hundreds of miles on either side of it in order to get to this very specific path of totality. And it is, man. It is. It is a totally immersive experience. Don't miss it if you can.

• 1:39:00Jay Shetty?

  Okay, next one. Tom, it has been such a joy spending time with you today. I feel so grateful to have been able to hear stories, be taken on adventures and learn life's lessons through your insight.

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  It's been, it's just been a delightful conversation. I've, I've, I've learned, I've loved, loved hearing about your history, you know, how you got there. For, for the oldest boy of a, of a, what is it? A fractured marriage between an Indian, Indian mom and dad? You've, I think you've done well in your, in your pursuit.

• 1:39:32Jay Shetty?

  Thank you. I'm very grateful. We end every On Purpose episode with a final five. These have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum.

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  One word to one sentence maximum. Okay.

• 1:39:42Jay Shetty?

  Which I will probably, I will probably break the rules, so don't worry if you do.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:39:46Jay Shetty?

  But Tom Hanks, these are your final five. The first question is, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  Throw deep, baby.

• 1:39:57Jay Shetty?

  And why?

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  If you're gonna do it, do it. If you have the chance, do it. Don't pause. Their, their instinct, man. If you've got an instinct, go at it. Throw deep.

• 1:40:12Jay Shetty?

  I love that. Second question, what is the worst life advice you've ever heard or received?

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  Do Fantasy Island.

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  I didn't take it, but there's no reason to do Fantasy Island.

• 1:40:27Jay Shetty?

  That's great. Question number three, how would you define your current purpose?

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  To be present.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  Wherever one is, whoever is one around, be present. Be right there. Show up, be present.

• 1:40:44Jay Shetty?

  Why?

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  Because that will teach you then, I think, how the difference between telling the truth to the best of your understanding and being all right with what happens next, if you can't do that, your, life is going to be a wasted opportunity. If that makes sense.

• 1:41:07Jay Shetty?

  Question number four.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  Are you making these up as you go along?

• 1:41:12Jay Shetty?

  No, no, no, no. These are all, no, no, no.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  All right, okay.

• 1:41:16Jay Shetty?

  Every single question I've asked you today. What's something you believe you're learning and evolving into right now? Or something that you're tinkering with right now personally?

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  There is an addictive quality to examining the past that can be counterproductive. If you're only doing it in order to wallow in a nostalgia of how easy things were back then. I fancy myself a lay historian. I vanity of vanity, all is vanity. There's nothing new under the sun. Okay, so this stuff has been going on forever. If you are not looking, if I am not looking for examples of the frailties of the human condition, if I'm only looking at the past in a version of there was an antagonist and

• 1:42:05Speaker 01

  there was a protagonist and the protagonist won, missing the point of how miraculous the human condition is. If you're going to, I went to Egypt and I saw all the stuff that tourists see when they see Egypt, right? And if you're going to Egypt in order to come up with some, oh, this is the home of great spirituality and there was a cosmic power here and this is where, okay, fine, go ahead. I'm not going to tell you that's not what's going on. But if you're not also seeing this ongoing friggin' mystery of what humankind has figured out on its own, you're missing out, you know?

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  There's, there is, yes, they call them the great pyramids. They weren't necessarily built for great reasons. Sometimes they were just built in order to maintain the status quo of the haves and the have-nots.

• 1:43:02Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  And when I heard a guy say, the Sphinx, you know, the great Sphinx?

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  You could have been alive 2,000 years after the great Sphinx was built.

• 1:43:19Speaker 01

  And you're still in pharaohic Egypt. It's still before the common era began. And guess what? You and nobody else has any idea who built the Sphinx. That's how old it is. And that it's bailed as well as it. And if you don't take that and understand like, man, there's mystery there. Who did it? How they did it? That stuff's always interesting. The why they did it? That's interesting too. But also that incredible impact of that. The Sphinx will never be explained. If you're just there for the nostalgia and you don't want to, you know, ride the camel and get your picture. You can do all that stuff and that's a blast. But there's some, there's something to the past.

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  That if you allow yourself just to be soothed by it.

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  You're missing out on a great life lesson. Something that is important as physics or poetry.

• 1:44:14Jay Shetty?

  So powerful. Why, why do you think we do that?

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  I, I think because we're looking for a, we want to feel good about going to sleep at night, you know? We want to feel as though that there is this, that there is this, this purpose. That outside, I think, outside the cosmic understanding that, hey, you know what? You know, the universe is indifferent, but the human condition is not. That's what separates us from, you know, you know, the chaos theory. We don't have to live in chaos if we choose not to. And if we're only looking at the past in order for some degree of, oh, it was so much easier back then.

• 1:44:57Speaker 01

  No, it's, it's never been easier. As I said before, you know, no one, no one knows that they're living, they're living in the 1400s. They were just alive back then. And it might be highfalutin, but what it says is, oh, I'll tell you this. What it says is, our best days are yet to come. We are going to progress from here. And if you're just looking at the past and saying, man, that was when it was great. I wish we could go back. No, you never want to go back. You always have to understand that our best days are still ahead of us. Otherwise, what's that say of us if we don't move forward? It says we gave up or got lazy or ended up putting.

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  Too much, too much power in, uh, in maintaining a status quo. That ends up being a division between the haves and the have-nots.

• 1:45:47Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. Well said. Uh, fifth and final question, we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

• 1:45:58Speaker 01

  Man, you spring this on me? You, really? I, I'm looking at a wall of shame of people that, your polarites are people that have been, they all came up with something for that?

• 1:46:08Jay Shetty?

  They did.

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  One law that everybody had to follow. A law. Meaning you could be punished if you don't obey this law?

• 1:46:20Jay Shetty?

  Sure.

• 1:46:22Speaker 01

  Well, it can't be like a philosophical thing like, uh, be kind, you know? Uh, being kind is in the eye of the, uh, both the kinder and the kindee. I would pass a law that says no one is allowed to infringe upon the right in regards to what somebody else reads.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  That is, no matter how disagreement, whatever that disagreement is. To be free is to think. And the most physical manifestation of thought is in the choose, choosing of what you read. So I would say that no one is allowed to infringe upon the right to determine, for, figure out what the legal, but no one is allowed to infringe upon the right of an individual to read what they choose to read. That would be my, that would be the law. Now, take a look at all the societies, you know? I'm fascinated by, I'm fascinated by communism, man, because those, those guys were idiots, you know? They truly were.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  And then the idea that in East Berlin, you cannot read.

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  You cannot read To Kill a Mockingbird, or, you know, any, or Dr. Zhivago, for crying out loud. The idea that you can maintain order in society by preventing somebody from reading what they want to read, this is madness. This is tyrancy and it's about, this is, this is, this is draconian, what's the word I'm looking at? That's despotism at its absolute height that you can do that. And I think on the opposite of that, absolute freedom to read what you want to read and along with that create what you want to create as well. That should be the default position of the human condition. And isn't it amazing that it's not? So that would be the law I would pass.

• 1:48:27Jay Shetty?

  Powerful, unique, and completely original answers. Worth waiting for.

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  Well, as an author, you know, as a guy who writes, I'll bow to that.

• 1:48:37Jay Shetty?

  Tom, thank you so much.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  Oh, this was magnificent. Thank you so much. No, it's great.

• 1:48:42Jay Shetty?

  Such a pleasure. And I can't wait for everyone to go and watch here on November 1st.

• 1:48:45Speaker 01

  All right. Yeah, we'll pay that. Oh, yes. Go ahead. Now, by the way, you can only see it in a theater. Okay, here's the thing. This is why, this is why crack staff is so petrified. There is no streaming deal for this movie. You know, you, you, you're not going to be able to, you know, log on, enter your passcode, you know, share it with your friends. And the only way you're gonna, you're gonna have to drive to a place and buy a ticket at a certain time and sit in a room with a bunch of strangers.

• 1:49:11Jay Shetty?

  I love it.

• 1:49:12Speaker 01

  And watch this movie. It's almost unheard of. And of course, everybody is petrified that that's going to be the requirements of seeing a movie. But that's the way it's going to be.

• 1:49:20Jay Shetty?

  I love it. Theater is still one of my favorite experiences.

• 1:49:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. It's the, you know, not to continue along with that, but this, this is thing that we talk about all the time right now. And I actually believe that podcasts is, can be an example of it. It is the experiential economy, meaning that it is one thing, look, everything is a one on one. You listen to a record, you see a band, but the experience of being with others as opposed to being in your house, or being on your headphones, or being like that, being with others has a value to it that in some cases is worth money. Okay, that's commerce. But in other cases is to be sought after. My wife and I went to

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  see a play in New York. It was a revival of Into the Woods. And it was more or less right after the pandemic.

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  Theaters were back opening again. People were, people were essentially living their lives again. They'd been enough, you know, everybody gotten enough vaccines and what have you. And COVID wasn't killing as many people as it had. And so we went to the theater because we had, we knew some people in it. And it was, here's, this thing happened. You know, it's a theater, a mumble, everybody, blah, blah, blah, sold out, big hit, and mumble, mumble, mumble. And when the house lights went to half for the first act, there was a standing ovation. People stood up before a word, before a note had been sung. Nothing had happened on the, what was happening was the show is about to start, and it was a

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  standing ovation. And I, I literally said, that's, that's the experience. People are reacting to the experience of being with strangers, or a handful of friends with strangers in a room, and nothing, what is going to happen in this room will never be repeated. The only people that will participate in this is the folks that are here right now. And movies oftentimes can have that same experience, because I can remember going to see 2001, or Jaws, or Close Encounters of the, or Aliens, or, you know, or Full Metal Jacket. I can remember the specifics of all those things. And it's the same experiential experience. And maybe it's, maybe it's part of the economy, or maybe it's just part of

• 1:51:39Speaker 01

  the great human purchase that we all want to, we want to participate in.

• 1:51:43Jay Shetty?

  For sure. Thank you, Tom.

• 1:51:44Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:51:45Jay Shetty?

  Thank you. Such a pleasure.

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  I really enjoyed it.

• 1:51:48Jay Shetty?

  If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with Will Smith on owning your truth and unlocking the power of manifestation.

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  Anybody who hasn't spoken to their parents, or their brother, call them right now. Don't think you're gonna have a chance to call them tomorrow or next week. That opportunity with my father changed every relationship in my life.

• 1:52:12Speaker 08

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:52:23Speaker 07

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:52:29Speaker 05

  What would happen if I stopped going? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:52:33Speaker 07

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:52:36Speaker 05

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:52:37Speaker 07

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 1:52:42Speaker 09

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• 1:52:53Speaker 08

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