#765: Chris Sacca and Scott Glenn

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/2de7923133f892cb

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Optimal minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And I'll save your personal question.
Now it's seen it kinda.
A cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endocet.
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers.
From every field imaginable to tease out the habits.
routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply.
And test in your own lives.
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its tenth year anniversary, which is insane to think about.
And past one billion downloads.
To celebrate.
I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favourites.
From more than seven hundred episodes over the last decade.
I could not be more excited.
To give you these super combo episodes, and internally we've been calling these
The super combo episodes.
Because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks.
But to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider
Stars.
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you.
Perhaps
They got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together.
And for the bios of all guests?
You can find that and more at Tim.blog slash combo.
And now, without further ado
Please enjoy.
And thank you.
For listening.
First up
Chris Saka.
Co-founder of Lower Carbon Capital
Investing in solutions to the climate crisis.
Co founder of Lower Case Capital.
Early investor in Twitter.
Uber.
Instagram, Twilio.
Blue bottle coffee and stripe.
Recurring guest investor on ABC's Shark Tank.
And one of the youngest people to ever make the Forbes Midas list.
You can learn more about Chris.
at lowercasecapital dot com
As I look at all the most successful founders I've backed.
The thing they have
is inevitability of success.
There are no conditional statements coming out of their mouths. There's no like well if it works, it would be rad.
Instead it's just always
You talked to Kevin System at Instagram when he was
Working on it himself.
He was literally a sole guy working on the product.
And he's like, So when we get to fifty million users, we'll roll out this other stuff and you're just like
Wait.

Peering into the future, kind of looking through you into something in the future.
And
You're just like, I gotta get along for the ride with this guy.
The same thing when you talk to Evan Williams.
When it comes to
Talking about
the likelihood of success of his products. He just knows.
Like he just knew Twitter would be a big thing.
You talked to Patrick and John Collison at Stripe.
And of course they're building for this thing to be a big
dominant company and it just will be.
You've spent time with Travis, you're an investor in Uber.
Was there any doubt at any time that
Uber would
Dominate the planet.
Yeah.
No doubt. There's no doubt.
Can you just share an there's an anecdote. I think we probably talked about over drinks at some point, but
We tennis. We tennis. Could have it could be tennis. Yeah, could you play the t tell the story. So it's a few years ago we're up at my house and
You know, we we live up in the mountains in Truckee.
It was over the holidays, so my parents were there.
I think it was actually New Year's Day.
So
Travis and I had been we have a tradition up there on
New Year's Eve we go snow shoeing at midnight and drink champagne out in the meadow and stuff, so I think we are pretty
It's pretty rough morning, but
Travis sitting on the couch and my dad
Senses some weakness and he challenges into a game of wee tennis.
So on the Nintendo Wii. My dad's not a bad player, he's pretty good.
Travis like okay, Mr Saka, sure and he picks up the controller.
And they play the first couple of games and they're tight games with Travis Winsem.
And my dad is there taking like full swings with the paddle, you know, it's like breaking a little sweat.
And Travis is still blurry from the night before, barely breaking his wrist and he's beating my dad me. I was like, What the hell is this?
And then there was that Anigo Montoya moment, Princess Bride Stower is the
Travis turns to my dad and says.
I'm sorry, but
I'm not left handed or you know, I forget if it's left or right, but he switched his hands to the controller.
And the next three games my dad never touches the ball.
There were no points scored on any of Travis's serfs.
And I was like, what the hell is going on? Like what is this?
And
after the torture got to be too much, Travis just says, Well let me take you to the global leaderboard. I'm sorry, I got you know I'm a sec I I didn't mean to be holding out and he goes to the global leaderboard.
And Travis Klanick.
was ranked number two in the world at Wii tennis.
In his spare time. Now Uber was already a thing then.
Like that literally he was already building a startup, but he's just so obsessive.
So competitive.
And that's the thing, is we look across the portfolio at all the most kick ass
companies it's something they just have
right up front is that
They're not hoping and praying for success. They know it's going to happen.
But I think is really interesting about Uber in particular.
Is
And for those people who don't know, I was sort of early advisor to Uber, so I I'm biased obviously.
A lot of ways when I talk about it. But I think you actually got there before me.
Yeah, I was a pre seed money advisor because I've been an advisor at Stumble Upon and worked with Garrett and uh I'm now working
Again, collaborating with him on Expo, which is super fun.
But in the beginning, the way that Uber got dismissed, and I think this is a really common
Kind of mistake it seems that a lot of investors make.
is people said, Oh my God, really?
black cars for one percenters in San Francisco, what's the market for that?
and they viewed a very niche activity.
is by definition constrained to say one percenters in San Francisco, New York.
And
If you look at let's say even recycling.
It started out that way.
they kind of confuse the first target.
with the total market and they also looked at just the available market.
Which they misdefined.
very early on. You know, in the case of like an Airbnb or an Uber, they can grow the market.
Beyond any comparable that's available.
I mean a lot of these start off so incredibly niche that people misread the market potential, I think. What books or resources outside of personal relationships and these mentors that you've had, the compliments and so on, are there any particular
Books or resources that have helped you become a better investor?
Yeah, I think most of those though are not
Business books per se. That's great. So I didn't get a business degree. I didn't do an MBA.
I took a couple of classes and it was enough to show me he was a total farce.
I did get a law degree, which is an even bigger farce, but that's for another episode.
So I never had formal business training.
And I tried to look at a few of those like instant MBA books and stuff like that. I even bought some books on Vetcher Capital and they're just such a

So goofy.
And by the way, part of that is because now we have
So many great venture capitalist bloggers
Who are just an open book about the industry who teach it.
So Brad Fowd comes to mind first. Uh
Longtime friend and mentor Brad at Felb Thoughts.
has done series over the years where he breaks down each
Aspect.
of a term sheet and how to understand it and the deal documents and this is what
we think is important and these are things we think could go away.
Josh Copham and his team have done a lot of work on that.
We've now seen why Combinator and the guys at Fenric and West and Cooley building
templated documents that are really, really watered down and pro entrepreneur and just kind of have taken out a lot of the
Legacy bullshit that didn't need to be in those documents.
There's a lot of this learning that can happen now without having to buy books.
Well having to go to school. And so that's been fantastic. But
Where I worry about
The valley.
and about investors as well as our entrepreneurs is in the development of everything off the ball a little bit.
So
Yeah, you and I I just turned forty this week, that's why you're here. Um Happy birthday again. But
But as a forty year old, the people my age who
were computer science majors in college.
That was a major just like any other major. They still had to go get a summer job. They mowed lawns, weighted tables.
they had time in their curriculum to go study abroad, to volunteer.
They had these really well rounded lives and so
working with people my age and older at Google who are computer scientists was great.
Because they had
not just these amazing, amazing math and science skills, but
A diversity of experience that informed
Great product decisions.
As well as just collegiality.
What ended up happening was computer science degrees got so popular.
And so valuable.
That
Those kids didn't have to pay for school much anymore.
And their only work experience was like TAing a class.
Not actually getting their ass kicked taking ditches or anything.
And the curriculum was rigorous enough that these guys didn't get to go study abroad.
And there was no opportunity to go do volunteer work and live in the developing world at all.
So as a result, I actually found we were starting to have a generation
of not just entitled. You know, people talk about the entitlement of the millennials and when it comes to work ethic and stuff, but
They weren't just entitled
But they just had such narrow band perspectives on the world.
they were missing empathy, so they weren't able to put themselves in the shoes of
the folks they might be building a product for.
what the problems of a world might be.
And so
I am constantly looking for opportunities for myself.
And for the founders you work with.
to broaden the scope that they have on the world.
such that they can build something on a more informed basis, an emotionally informed basis. So I really think empathy isn't it's it's a word that's been
kind of reduced to signal like oh somebody hurt their foot and I feel bad for them.
Instead
I think much more poignantly, empathy is
About can I see the world?
through that person's lens. Can I figure out what matters to them? What are they afraid of?
What's bothering them? What do they think is limiting them right now? What's their hope?
And if I can do that, then it's a lot easier for me to build something for them.
And to sell it to them and to help them and to build a longer term partnership with that person. If you were giving a
Assignments to folks.
For books.
or experiences just kind of a short list for people who want to develop that type of empathy.
What would you put on the list?
Most founders
Is
Not fade away.
I think it's like belly flop pick on the cover. Yeah, belly flop pick. A short life well lived. Story of Peter Barton.
So first of all, just on a personal note, that guy's trajectory kinda followed mine. He was a ski bum who suddenly
made it big in tech, he was on the border of Yahoo, he worked at Liberty Media.
And then it hits its forties and says, Okay, I've accomplished what I want to accomplish. I'm dialing it back. I just want to spend time with my family.
And at that point, and this isn't a spoiler, it's literally how the book starts.
He finds out it's incurable stomach cancer.
And so the book
walks you through his biography as well as the remaining time in his life.
You will cry.
reading this book. It is inevitable. If you don't, I'm very worried about you.
But you'll definitely cry, it'll be cathartic.
But it's the kind of thing where you
It's an exercise and okay, what's on the mind of
The person who's dying.
And how is he thinking about the impact of his death on his family?
On his friends.
on his business partners.
On his legacy.
on the continuing responsibilities as a dad even in the absence of, you know, even though he's passed on to the next life.
And
It's an entire exercise.
in perspectives. And I think that book will
you know, not only leave you feeling incredibly lucky for what we've got here and where we are, but at the same time
will sharpen that sense of how do I put myself in somebody else's shoes. A similar book that I love, um
I'm gonna get the title wrong. I think it's how to get
Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, I think is that.
So
It's written in the second person.
Which
I don't know of another book like that, but it's just you. Like you wake up in this room
Like an old role player or something like that online. Dungeons and dragons. You are in a room. There is a sarcophagus.
Yeah.
Open sarcophagus. No. It's uh
But it says you wake up and you basically start
The book.
In a uh slum in Pakistan.
And it's just writing you about how you go through your day.
The things that matter to you.
And
It turns out you're kind of entrepreneurial and you're willing to take some risks and so you start
working into other stations in life. And I don't wanna

You close that book and you feel like you've walked through fifteen to twenty different lives.
In another world.
And
I just think
More of that.
would be better for all of us. I think it'd be better for our industry.
for the depth and the impact of the products we build.
I think it'd just be a lot better if we're getting along with each other. So
I mean you and I have traveled to
Ethiopia together.
Doing work with charity water.
It's hard to complain about a day's work back here in the United States.
When you have
been in a village where they walk three or four hours each way to get water, where the kids are dying.
Because they drink the same water that the cow
Poops into the
where the women don't get an opportunity to go to school'cause they're carrying the water and on the way they might get eaten by a lion or raped and
It's really hard to find yourself complaining about our
privileged US life.
And that's something you could just tell working at a big company like Google, there were the people who would bitch and complain and like really?
Really, this is a hard day. Microsoft launched a competitive product and that's our that's our horrible day.
And I just think we'd all be much better off if we were able to find
opportunities for our C S students to go study abroad, for our MBAs to actually spend some time around poor people.
And to start building these more diverse perspectives.
When you look back on it's the it's the big four oh. When you were thirty, who came to mind
most when you thought of the word successful and now at forty.
Who is the person?
Who most comes to mind when you think of the word successful.
So thirty, that's a really I got let me think of where I was.
So I guess oh I was at Google.
At the time.
Who's most successful?
Just when you were like, I want to be successful and the person in your mind who embodied that most
I always wanted to be at the center of the deal.
And so
At that point in my life I still really admired, for instance, like a John Door or Mike Moritz. They were both on the board at Google.
Brilliant guys who use their

Even smarter people.
To teach them about things.
And then they would use their unique talents for storytelling and
making composite kind of ideas come true to build companies. They became billionaires as a result. They had great families. They were just well respected by folks. I think I still
That was kind of my definition of success at that point.
At forty.
And what I think my journey from thirty to forty was about.
was to stop trying to define
Or build some kind of model or have some kind of role model out there and stop trying to define myself externally,'cause that's a distraction.
So there are times when you're doing a deal with John Door.
across the table or something like Hey wait, that was fucked up. You know, like I don't
Wait, you're supposed to be my my hero, my idol, and I don't like that movie dismayed or something like that, right? I think
You know, anyone I've ever put on a pedestal I've just been disappointed by doing so.
I'm sorry about that, by the way.
Oh, you have no idea how far you've fallen, Tim. But so I think for me, the exercise has been how much am I gonna define that for myself? Not by
Looking at somebody else. I I recently got to have dinner with
Next to Bill Gates, Bill and Melinda Gates.
And I had been raised to hate him, you know, growing up at Google.
Yeah, he's he's a pretty evil person.
And I was sitting next in there and I got a chance to basically interview him about how
They
have structure the foundation.
how they think about which
causes to take on, which challenges to tackle.
And
I mean, I walked out of there just deeply admiring their work.
But I think
I wanna limit it to that and not get into like is he a great family man? Is he you know, he's still a son of a bitch when it comes to competing with him in software and
his default browser and all his antitrust behavior. But I really
So I'm I'm trying to look at people and find kind of one aspect of them that I like. But for the most part I've had to decide, okay, what's really important to me.
That's my wife.
And my kids and you know I I'm just not that social anymore. I just don't hang out with people that much. I don't go to conferences. I'm just not available for dinner. I would infinitely rather spend that time with them.
And so that was a priority choice. I had to make it internally, not because I saw anybody else killing it that way. You know, I think I reflected back on my own parents who
Who opted out of
much more accelerated career paths so they could spend way more time with me and my brother. And so that's a choice I had to make. But I will say, do you know about the
The journal I found in my
I do, and you should you should mention that. I have a quick well
Observation is if I could spend more time with Crystal instead of me, I would do the same thing. Uh we actually met before you and I met at Fair Tech's kickboxing way back in the day. Well well, I was having a bunch of people down for cocktails. We came down from Truke into the city, Crystal and I did.
I was like, let's get a bunch of people together.
Her cocktails. I invite Tim and Tim walks in and he looks at my girlfriend. He's like, I think I know you. I'm like, Yeah, sure you do, man. Everyone uses that to try and pick up my then girlfriend, now wife. He's like, No, I th and then she says, Yeah, I think I know you too and I'm like, Oh shit, here she goes. Like, I'm gonna Where's this going? He's such a hunk. What do I have to offer to
But uh yeah, you guys used to train in kickboxing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. She was hardcore.
But
I wanna pause for a second. I do want to hear about the notebook for sure,'cause I think it it's uh
Amazingly Nostradamus like but you and your brother. So you and your brother have had very different careers, have done very well respectively
What did your parents
do that you are also trying to do with your kids.
Yeah, so my brother Brian Saka
He's one of the first.
U two.
Sketch stars.
He probably that into he sold some of the first web series ever made
shit ton of mone building web series and finding commercial partners for them and stuff.
Wolf movies like yeah, Wolf of Wall Street. Wolf of Wall Street was Corsesa recently. And then just yesterday we're allowed to talk about this now. He his series on TBS got picked up, so he's gonna be uh
Co star of a comedy series on T B S pretty funny.
So
What did our parents do? Well, first of all, they were just always involved, so
My parents took vacations with us. We always went to national parks together.
We never went to resort type places. Uh we were just always together.
And
you know, not only are they read with us like most parents, but my mom would pull us out of school
To take us to go see an author read.
at a bookstore.
An hour and a half away. She would literally just pull us out of school
to go to a science museum. And so she was a college professor and so she had a little flexibility in her schedule.
Yank us out. She would take us to a park called Art Park.
Up in Lewiston, New York.
Art park. Art park. It's a state park in New York State in Louis, New York, where
the whole thing is dedicated to different art media and so you can paint there, you can blow glass, you can watch
A performing arts troop kind of
Vaudevillian theater and stuff and
In my parents' eyes that was just as or even maybe more important than going to the public school.
And so I think that kind of enrichment and
Just being shown that people in all these walks of life were important and fascinating.
You know, I grew up where by the time I got to college I had never heard of an investment banker.
I didn't know that was a job.
I'd been exposed to the
to writers, to artists, to chefs, to musicians.
to engineers, to lots of teachers, to lawyers, to
Doctors.
But it was never.
Yeah, it w it wasn't necessarily driven
in any particular way to kind of get us to a particular career at all.
I will say there was something else my parents did that's pretty unique, and it was called uh
My brother and I refer to it as a sweet and sour summer, so
My parents would send us for the
Sounds like a Chinese restaurant. They would. Yeah.
They're sent us for the first half of the summer to
an internship with a relative or friend of the family who had an interesting job. So
At twelve I went interned.
with a uh my god brother who is a lobbyist in DC
So I would go along with him to pitch congressman. I had one tie.
And for work I was a pretty good writer, so I'd write up one page summaries of
the bills we were pitching and I would literally sit there with these congressmen with these filthy miles, you know, the Alabama Senator and stuff like that, and watch the pitch happen. And it was awesome.
I learned so much. I think I built so much confidence and really honed my story telling skills, but then
From there I would come home and work in a construction outfit.
With just a nasty, nasty job. I mean
Whether it was
hosing off the equipment that had been used to fix septic systems, gasing shit up, dragging shit around the yard, filling propane tanks.
Just being junior guy on the potum tone.
quite literally getting my ass kicked by ever whichever parolee was angry at me that day.
Yeah, for minimum wage.
I think it was part of their master plan, which is there's a world of cool opportunities out there for you.
But let's build within you a sense of
Not just work ethic.
But also um
A little kick in the ass by why you don't want to end up in one of these real jobs.
And so let's see if you can find in yourself the drive to go and do whatever it is to
And did they choose, for instance, uh you had the introduction to say the Godbrother, I think you said, for the lobbying.
Did they also help organize the the source?
Part two to each summer. Yeah. So that the guy I ran that construction company and equipment rental company is my dad's best friend.
He's under strict orders to make sure we had the roughest day there. Special treatment. It was w we were treated specially shittily. So we were we were hammered there. And by the way, as a result, I know a lot about construction equipment. This is this is a superpower of mine.
I can literally from air compressors to ditch witches to
Anything you need in Milwaukee sawz.
I literally
Have incredible amounts of knowledge in that space. It also just reminded me of something you mentioned long ago, and I'm not sure if it's still true, but you said one of the things that you look for, and it's maybe not a disqualifier, but in founders, is
A track record of having had at least one shitty job.
Yeah.
Well I particularly look for that in hiring. So I want people who've lived, studied, traveled extensively abroad.
I want people who've been exposed to poor people.
And by the way, the Live Study Travel Works extensively abroad is because
You can get away with a very comfortable life in the United States as an English speaker, particularly as a white person. You never really have to ask for anybody's help. You're not being harassed by the police.
It's pretty easy pickings.
You find yourself
overseas, particularly in a place with a non romance language where you can't make out the signs yourself.
And you have to stop and ask for help from complete strangers. You literally have to be
Entirely vulnerable.
to people you've never met. It's just expose yourself.
They could send you into a dark alley and beat the hide you and take your money.
Or like most people on the planet, they'll be really nice and try to help you.
Even if you don't share a word of English in common.
And I think there's something incredibly formal about that experience of having the humility that comes from having asked for help.
The best managers in the world.
are people who are great at asking for help and realizing that makes them a more powerful CEO than a less powerful CEO or
More powerful manager than a less powerful manager. And so
I look for people for whom athletics is a big part of their life.
I don't think it needs to be team sports necessarily. I think you can be
a great individual athlete, you know, maybe you train with other folks, et cetera, but I think it just shows not only some self discipline
But also just a value on the introspection that comes with athletics. You actually care about yourself. And I think there's a little bit more balance in that life.
It also teaches you to contend with
Losing.
And sort of viewing that as feedback and not some type of
failure, death sentence. Sure. And then seeing I think the temporary and how how temporary pain is
Yeah, and that's temporary.
Glorious forever. Yeah.
I did an Iron Man and when I was
Doing that in the
Yeah, I had a fever that day. I don't know.
hundred and three degree fever, but my parents had traveled out to watch the race and so I didn't want to not do it.
And the Advil worked for like the swim and the first part of the bike. And then I was just I was a mess. But I remember thinking no matter what happens, I will be in my bed tonight.
And
Yeah, this is a very, very temporary moment.
In two thousand nine.
I rode my bike across the country.
And I remember
No, it's thirty five days of riding, basically a hundred miles a day.
I remember multiple days out there, I'm like
I'll be in my bed tonight.
And then in the other ear is this voice, and then I have to fucking do it again tomorrow.
Tell people about this notebook.
Yeah, it was funny. It was just just two years ago I found this in my garage and it's really
It's been weighing on me, and particularly this week turning forty.
So I was
Nineteen.
I was twenty years old, actually. I was twenty.
I was living in
Ireland.
going to school there. I spent two out of my four years abroad.
Well it.
the school foreign service at George Town and
So I'm living in Ireland and there was an expac girl in one of my classes and we were basically flirting with each other by f taking a notebook and writing in
Ten questions for the other person to answer and then you get
You get it back and you
answer ten questions and write ten new questions. We pass back and forth while we were supposed to be studying like
twentieth century Irish film or something like that. And
At one point one of the questions was, What do you want to be when you grow up?
Some twenty.
I'm living in Cork, Ireland. We we basically would start drinking Stout around eleven thirty A. M. every day. It was like second and third meal with Stout.
And
By that point I'd still never heard of an investment bank or I definitely never heard of a venture capitalist. And so I just write
And there I said I don't know what the
What the job is called.
But I know it's gonna involve a lot of talking on the phone, a lot of negotiating, a lot of yelling at people.
High risk, high reward.
Unbelievably high stakes.
I'm gonna do it part time from the mountains.
part time from the beach and whatever it is.
I'm gonna be done with it before I'm forty.
And so two years ago.
My wife and I are standing in our garage and the
Or mountain house.
Cleaning it out because we're moving some stuff down to our beach house.
And
I find this old notebook and I'm like, Hey, look at this and we're flipping through it and I find that answer.
I guess
Really choked up.
It's
incredibly weird self prophecy that I kind of laid out exactly what my job was.
But I also felt a certain amount of pressure, like
So what do I do now that I'm forty? Do I keep doing this job or not, or do I need to
Do I need to listen to the scrolls?

Right. Like shatter some type of cosmic continuum if you if you don't follow the prophecy.
What would your advice be to
college students who are just about to graduate.
who have no idea kind of what they should focus on, what they should do. Do you have any
Thoughts, kinda general suggestions that you would make to someone in that position?
Well I did give a graduation speech.
I think it was two years ago now.
At the University of Minnesota school I didn't really have any ties to
And they reached out to an agent who hired me for it.
And that was
Daunting, right?'Cause I give speeches all the time and it's usually to it.
Room full of
Like Conoco executives in Cassimi, Florida, and I'm just there for the check.
But a graduation speech is intense. That's uh hopefully memorable.
Hopefully formative. Hopefully
You're talking to people who have incredibly open minds and it's such a
meaningful transition point in their lives. So
I want you to go watch it. But
What I focused on was be interesting.
I think
You're here for a week where I've gathered.
My favorite friends.
And
One of the reasons why the week is so fun for everybody is that everyone else here is totally interesting.
Right, not necessarily a Titan of a business.
But just interesting, compassionate, adventures people.
Who just go for it, who are up for it.
And I think
is I look around who I've hired.
Who I like to work with, who I back.
They're interesting.
They're people you wanna be around, you wanna spend time with, you wanna hear their answers, you want them to influence your thinking.
You want them to push you a little bit to try things that you haven't tried. You want them to teach you.
And
If I could give advice to someone who feels like
They're looking at a maze of opportunities and none of them is particularly presented or
They're not sure how they want to get ahead or distinguish themselves.
I think pursuing
A course of life that
embraces interestingness. And by the way, I don't think people are born interesting.
I think it's actually something you can
A crew.
Living abroad.
volunteering for a group like Cherry Water and going into the field.
Taking an actual service job.
Going in
and talking to the people around you and having meaningful conversations, including the homeless people, including
your neighbors and and people who are actually working for wage
Getting involved in politics briefly. You know, I think
I I campaigned for Obama a couple of times.
And I was everything from one of his top fundraisers to I actually spent time in the field in Elco, Nevada, which put me into
We have mobile home living rooms of some of the poorest people in the country.
who somehow are supporting the Republican Party in that election. And it was
It was surreal, but it gave me a life perspective that I don't think I would have had otherwise. So
I think those kinds of things make for much more compelling people and will start to present career opportunities.
So one question that I'd love to ask is when you were sort of in your
most recent sweet spot of wealth accumulation, whether that's related to
What you did with Twitter or otherwise.
Were there any particular shifts or routines?
habits that helped you kind of maintain that peak output.
Or achieve what you did.
I mean you know my personal story, so I
Certainly been fortunate.
To make a bunch of money in the last few years, but
And bubble one, I made a bunch of money.
Levered up.
lost it all and a lot more, leaving me millions of dollars in the hole, was able to work it back out to zero by two thousand five.
And
Since then.
Yeah, a lot of work, a few ups and downs, but it's worked out pretty well.
And it's looking good for the road ahead too. So
That said.
I don't think I have a calendaring function or an email function or anything like that. That's like a hack.
As much as
I would point to two things that I think shifted the nature of my business. One was
That
before I had really made any money at all, and before I had any business doing this
My then girlfriend is now my wife, Crystal, and I've moved
Out of Silicon Valley, up.
to Trucky.
I mean literally took ourselves out of the game as a
you know, an angel and and venture investor. Like how do you
How do you manage a venture practice from up in Lake Tahoe?
And yet what I realized was that being in a city
I was just playing defense the whole time. I was taking these coffee meetings, listening to these poor pitches
being friendly and kind of obliging people with their ideas, but
I'd spend all day in these meetings and I'd get home and I'd be like shit, I
I haven't actually accomplished anything.
I would go to the cocktail and dinner parties I was invited to, but they weren't actually the people I wanted to spend the time with.
I was just reacting to everything, rather than actually going out and and
And playing offense. And so Chris and I moved up to Tahoe.
And we
Quite literally built a list of people we wanted to know better.
And we just started inviting them to come up and stay with us and talk.
You were definitely one of those people, right? And you came up and spent a lot of time with us there.
I also started
writing lists of the companies that I wanted to get to know better.
And I just went in deep with them and asked them to come up to Tahoe.
And so I was playing offense now.
And I had a perfect excuse for why I couldn't get coffee with all the randoms and like hey, I'm sorry, I'm just not in San Francisco, I'm three hours away.
There were a couple of sessives who drove all the way up there.
But for the most part
I was able to pick and choose the interactions that I thought were gonna be most valuable.
To me to
My wife.
Into my business.
And that was a huge shift and it was risky as hell'cause I mean I couldn't even really afford the house we bought up there when we first bought it.
Six hundred thousand dollar three bedroom house.
And I certainly didn't have a strong enough brand that I could
afford to just walk away from the game.
But
I made a conscious decision to play offense from up there.
And that worked out.
I
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And now.
Scott Glenn.
whose acting career spends nearly sixty years in film.
Including starring roles in Apocalypse Now.
Urban cowboy.
The right stuff.
The hunt for Red October.
The silence of the lambs.
And the born ultimatum.
And television.
Includes The Leftovers and The White Lotus.
Hulu's Castle Rock.
And Marvel's Daredevil
And the defenders.
I have a an embarrassment of riches here. We could start just about
Anywhere, but I thought I would start with saying
That I'm
In part so happy to be having this conversation because
Even among all of the hundreds of people I've interviewed, if we look at people in their thirties and forties.
They don't check career fitness and relationships, but you seem to have fifty plus years.
Checking all three of those boxes.
It's hard to find three out of three in the young guns who
have sort of wide open field ahead of them and
I wanna dig into that, but I thought I would start
With
Idaho.
Because we're sitting here in your home.
It's been a long time since I've been here.
And
You have elk in the backyard.
This is not what most people imagine when they think
Hollywood star.
How did you end up
In Idaho.
A bunch of years ago, so we've been up here for
I'm not sure the exact number, but in the
Mid to high forty years.
We were living in LA.
My wife is
Probably throws on the wheel as well as any two dozen people on the planet.
She's really g a good potter.
She was accepted to a uh summer workshop was invitation only to the best ceramic artist.
In this country.
And it was gonna last all summer long.
And we were living in LA, we had a place in Topanga.
So she said
We had a VW van typical hippy dippy live out of the back of it. She was going up with
Our two daughters.
And she said well
You're gonna come with me.
And I went
No, I you know, I I'm I'm waiting for the phone to ring to tell me whether I've got a job or not. And she said, Does the phone really have to ring for you?
To kick you in your ass to go anywhere.
Can't you just do something on your own? And I went, I don't know. And she said
Well you can.
Because
There's a group of people who are leaving from
Well place she wasn't sure where, as it turns out was Chalice, Idaho.
That they're leaving
On the following date, which was like a week after her
Workshop.
She said they're going into an area called the Bighorn Crag, so the biggest primitive area in the contiguous United States, bigger than anywhere except Alaska.
And they're gonna be doing high mountain this is in July, they're gonna be doing high mountain traverses in snow and ice for three days.
Then they're gonna be going down into a little valley.
and climbing rock faces and and naming them for the geodesic survey.
It's being led by a guy named Eric Ryback, who's the first
At that time the only person ever to walk the whole Pacific coast.
The trail from
Canada.
Down to
The bottom of the
Uh-huh.
I should say you're going with them.
Yeah, I was a rock climber at the time, so
She knew that, but I mean that.
I said, How do you know? She said,'Cause I signed you up.
So it was like I had no choice in the matter.
So we got up here
I tend to overdo things physically. I've just
Part of my stupid personality. So we got here.
And I started hiking up
Baldy. Now we come from sea level to here.
So I got
altitude signals the first day and
puke my guts out about four or five times.
I had about a week to try to get ready, and then she drove me north to Chalice
I think there were
Seven people on this trip with us. So I met Eric Ryback under these people I was gonna be hanging out with for the next few weeks.
And we drove ninety miles on a dirt road to the Cobalt Ranger station where
You didn't tell them where you were going, you just told them when you expected to be back.
And if you weren't back inside I think the cushion was three days.
They were gonna send people out to look for you.
And at the time it's probably still true.
The big horn crags, no internal combustion allowed at all.
So if uh forestry service had to go in and open up trailheads
They had to go in.
With mules.
Two man cross cut saws.
Because you couldn't turn on a phone.
That wouldn't work.
So we did that.
And it was
I hadn't been
Off on my own alone.
With the exception of warrants that I won't talk about.
But
Then in that situation it was just so
Much fun and so cleansing and so
It was just the best.
And
I thought I knew how to rock climb, but there was a guy named Tony Jones there who was a great rock climber who sort of took me under his wing and
Turn me into
five eleven plus plus stuff. The dangerous stuff he led all of it. So I don't wanna pretend that I just instantly did it. But I did do those climbs again and again.
And I remember when Carol was gonna come and pick it when we were done, it was like two weeks.
And little over two and a half weeks of doing this.
I said to Tony
I gotta give you some money or something. I mean you've been giving me he said
Come on, I had a great time.
I said, What can I do for you? And he said, You can do this. When you go back to LA
Kill everybody.
How horrible Idaho is. Tell him it's a tick fever state. It su it sucks and you had a bad time. And I said, Why should I do that? He said
'Cause I don't want people coming up here. So
When Carol drove me back into catch him, I felt like I was
Entering lower Manhattan.
It was like noise and people and
And it's a small town for people who don't have the country.
This sounds woo wah and whatever, but yeah, I don't really give a shit.
Because it's true.
It was like the family fell in love with each other again.
I had been
Sort of.
Living in the blues in LA because of what I do for a living.
And all that fell away up here.
When you came to Idaho, roughly how old were you and where was your career at that point?
I was probably
Thirty eight, thirty nine, like that, late thirties.
And had you already had a sort of inflection point in your career at that point?
I had done a ton of work in New York, mainly street theater, improv, off Broadway.
And then we moved to LA for me to do the first film I ever did, which was called Babymaker. And then I did
a couple sort of very small parts in
Big important American movies. One was Nashville.
Bob Alman's film.
And the other was Apocalypse No.
That I was on for
A little over seven months. They shot that film. It was the shooting was a year and a half. So I was
A short timer at seven months.
But that was my experience of working in front of a camera.
Learning a lot of
Stuff that
Stood me in really good stead later on. But what had happened in LA was
Okay.
I had gone to
Universal, I think, to audition
I'd done some
T V stuff at Universal.
And I gone there and because of my experience with apocalypse
W what had happened before is I would go in and I would audition for a T V job mainly at one of the studios and people would tell me what a crappy actor I was.
You squint too much, you're not loud enough, you're not doing this, you're not doing that.
And on the surface I would say, Well what do you know? But the reality was underneath it I suspect that maybe they were right.
And I didn't know what I was doing in terms of a camera.
on stage or doing improv in the back of an alley, yeah, I could do that.
So I had no self confidence.
And then I w did Apocalypse Now.
And
Wound up working
My choice.
Francis thought
I think incorrectly, but he thought that he owed me because he thought I saved his life in the Philippines.
So I went over to do a small part and he said, I'll write you whatever you want.
Because
You filled up a helicopter in a rainstorm.
with nothing getting in the gas and you kept me from drowning in a
River.
Okay, that's nice.
He said, What do you want? And I said, I want to be in the end of the movie And he said
You can't be in the end of the movie, Scott.
It's
Absolutely completely cash. Well yeah, wait, there is a part you could do, but
You'd be like a glorified extra. Play Colby the guy who came up River in front of
Martin Sheet.
And I n
Understood because of the way I
I've learned everything in my life.
That's important to me is
You learn by apprenticeship.
Not from a book or going to school.
At least I can't.
And I thought
At the end of the movie I'm gonna be around
The
person who in my mind is far and away the greatest American, probably the greatest movie actor that ever lived, Marlon Brando.
And I'm gonna be around this guy.
And just being around him.
And Dennis Hopper, who's a lunatic, but brilliant.
And Martin Sheen and the end of this movie
It's an experience that will change my life. And it did.
I told Francis later on that I got the greatest gift you could give any artist in in the Philippines, which was
Self confidence.
So I when I came back
Before we went up to Idaho
I was basically locked out of Universal because
Along with self confidence I came back with a huge amount of arrogance.
And now I remember I did one audition.
And they said, You know, you're not really very good. We want to give you things to work on. And I said, What the fuck do you know? Who have you work with? Because
I was just doing improv and work with Marwan Brando, Victorio Sturaro.
Francis Coppola, Dennis Hopper
And they accepted me as an equal.
What have you done?
You've done this and this, you can't even fucking direct traffic. So they kick me out of Universal.
So now we're back from Idaho. Yeah.
And
I'm sitting watching television.
Smoking a joint.
And Carol walks into the living room and says, Babe, what's wrong? And I say
What do you mean? I'm fine. She said no, you're crying.
And I reached up and there were tears coming out of my eyes. I was on television in a beretta I had done.
And I pointed it out and I said.
You're supposed to get better at what you do.
Not worse.
That's the crappiest acting I've ever seen him. I was so much better doing street theater in New York.
What's happened to me?
And I started thinking
And that night at dinner I said, You know, what I've turned into in LA
And I'm horrible at it, is a show business politician, which is
What am I up for? Who do I know? What openings and parties can I go to to network and make
And
I used to think what makes this person tick?
Why are they doing what they do? What belief system are they coming from?
All that stuff that I really

And do the
To this day.
And I said to Carol.
I said, Well how would you and the girls feel if we moved back to Idaho?
And she said.
What do you do up there?
I met somebody who told me that
If I gave him three years.
He would apprentice me to be an a backcountry, cross country ski guide.
And Hunting Guide and
I'll do that and
She said, Will you quit acting? I said, No, I'll do Shakespeare in the Park and Boise if I can get a part.
I'll do that kind of stuff, but
I can't go back to New York with my two daughters this young.
And subject them to the life of a
Street actor.
So we came up here with that in mind.
It was a super cold year. We came up with a friend of Carol's and mine.
He was a commercial director, but sort of
feeling the same kind of burnout in LA that I felt. So the two families decide we come up here
And try to figure out
What to do in Catchem Idaho. No real idea.
We were up here
Inside two weeks I get a call from a friend of mine, a guy named Rupert Hitchig
And I'm doing a movie and uh
In Mexico
The way I knew Rupert was he and I were in the same platoon in the Marine Corps.
So Rupe said, I'm producing a movie in Mexico.
And I can give you a small part of it. You will be shooting for three months and I got like w I think it was uh I can give you two thousand bucks. And I said, Great.
So Carol and I went to Mexico.
And I was warned when I went down there.
It starred Rod Steiger, Burt Lancaster, Amanda
Plummer and Diane Lane. Those were the stars.
And I had teeny tiny little part.
Is one of uh Bert's
It was the Duel and Dalton gang, Western.
And I was told by a lot of people when I went down there that you're gonna love Rod Steiger, he works the same way you do.
He's a member of the actors studio.
And
your kind of guy, but watch out for Bert Lancaster. He's an old school movie star.
You'll
Get in your key light, he'll screw you up, he'll
Intentionally ruin two shots so they'll have to go to
His close up.
Just watch out for him, so
We go to Mexico, first day there, El Presidente
Wabi hotel in in Mexico.
I need Rod Steiger and I
I rarely
openly dislike somebody when I meet them.
But
I wouldn't say it was hate at first sight, but it was certainly dislike at first sight.
Mm.
And then a little bit later Bert Lancaster comes into the lobby.
And to be really honest, he hardly
Saw me at all, but he's boy did he see Carol.
And he said to her, So what do you do?
And she said.
I'm a Potter, he said, You got any pictures? And she says she has some little slide pictures of stuff she'd done.
He looked at them.
And I could see something change in him.
And he looked at her and he said.
God, this I love this stuff.
I only have the work of one other ceramic artist.
Would you throw me eleven place or twelve place dinnerware set?
Was her first commission ever and she said
Yeah.
Yeah, I will.
Later on, many months later, she found out the other ceramic artist that he owned was named Picasso.


Wow.
So the next day.
And he kind of was like I wasn't even there. So the next day we're on the set.
Getting ready to do some scene.
It's a group shot.
At the end of the first take, Burke walks over to me and he said
So Scott, has anybody ever taught you the difference between working with a close up
Camera lens and being on stage. He said, I know you've done street theater, I can tell right.
I said no. He said I didn't think so.
He said, You know, I'm not gonna bullshit you.
I seriously was watching you and I think you've got something, but
If you'll permit me to be a gigantic pain in the ass over the next three months, I'll teach you whatever I know.
Wow, what an incredible opportunity.
So he taught me about how to work with a camera.
And how to
I mean he was an amazing guy. He was an aerialist
Who traveled across the country with a carnival
And to make
Drinking money.
Foug people in Toughman con
He was the real deal.
I love Bur w it was like
What people had told me about Rodenbert was like flipped for the totally flipped.
So in the way home this is a long
We got all the time in the world. So we're coming back from Mexico.
We want to
Paramount.
To see a a friend of Carol's and mine.
That on their advice
Carol got pregnant. They said you guys have gotta have a baby.
And we were really close. Jim was the director, Jim Bridges.
And Jack Larson was his
Partner, lover, whatever. And they were great guys. Super great guys.
So we wanted to just say hi to him on our way back to Idaho. We walk into his office
He looks at me, he said.
I can't believe you're coming in here. He said you I just realized
You're perfect.
For this part in this movie I'm directing.
It's the bad guy, but
You're perfect for it. Just hang around town for two or three more days.
Meet the star who has cast approv didn't tell me who it was, who has cast approval.
And uh producers here are Paramount.
And I think we can make this happen, and I said, Screw that.
I don't go into anybody's office like a piece of meat anymore. I just made two thousand bucks.
And we're on our way back to Idaho.
I just wanted to tell you I love you and
I hope you and Jack are well, and Carol and I are out of here.
So we left. We came back up to Idaho.
About two weeks later
Maybe a little less. I get a call from Jim and he said, Okay, now I'm on location.
In Houston.
Paramount, doesn't know who you are. They don't want you to they want Ryan O'Neill to do this part, or maybe Sam Shepherd.
But I'm gonna send you a plane ticket to come down here. I think we can make this work.
I've told Irving Azov
the music guy who's also producer about you and he likes the idea
You gotta meet him.
I think we can make this happen. And I should
No.
Don't send me a plane ticket. I don't want them to have their hooks into me even for a plane ticket. I'll get my GMC Jimmy, I'll drive to Houston and I'll see you down there.
And I said

A bank robber and a bull rider.
I wanna okay.
So
I drive down to Houston on my way to Houston, I stop off
Just in front of
Huntsville prison.
Where I knew the the character I played spent some time.
And
I'm gonna be a little shady about this'cause I kinda have to be, but so I'm sitting there in my Jimmy
And I hear
familiar voices out of the dark saying, Hey Vato, what are you doing?
And I look over and there
When he was alive.
In another part of my life I knew Freddy Fender.
The country western singer.
His real name was Baldy Marquette.
And Freddy
was in w a family that picked
everything illegally. That was his background.
And he hung out with these two guys who were for real
Just a layer of.
The real deal.
Um
These two guys were there.
And they said, What are you doing here, man? And I told them what I was doing. They went
We don't believe this. We got our buddy coming out. He'll be out of here in a
Fifteen, twenty minutes, you gotta meet him.
He's a bank robber and a bull rider.
And I went to Mexican guy said no, man, he's a fucking gringo.
And then went.
Okay.
So I met this guy.
Who told me
Enough about the character that I was gonna be playing.
And little things, like he said
You gotta get a hat sticker or something, not a tattoo, but something on you that says thirteen and a half.
'Cause that's the number that gets us in here, and we all have it.
And I said, What's that stand for? And he said, Judge, jury
And a half ass lawyer.

So I said okay.
And you gotta get tattoos on your forearm. Nuestra familiar I said but
I'm not
A Latino, he said, Neither am I.
And showed me that he had that.
What did that refer to? Our family.
Like what was the in prison organization of Regina.
But
Mm-hmm.
So he gave me that to do and then I said, Is there anything about being a bull rider
The bull riders do.
That I could learn
That most people can't do, and he showed me.
He said, Yeah, when you tie off your glove.
Since you're gonna be using your dominant hand to wrap
The
raw height around, you're gonna have to use your non dominant hand and your teeth
And he said
You're gonna have to do it a lot of times.

Without even thinking about it. So I went, Okay, I'm gonna do that at least a hundred times a day from now on.
Hopefully a thousand.
I get down to Hu Houston.
Jim said.
I'm gonna make this happen. I met the actress who was
had never played the lead in a big movie.
Everware.
And both she, John Travolta, Irving Azov and Jim Bridges always all kind of like
Shove me down, um

And Jim said, This movie is gonna change your life. You'll never have to audition again after you do it.
And he told me the truth. I didn't believe it, but
In those days it was Urban Cowboy. Yeah.
And the part was West High Tower.
I thought all I have to do is be honest with this character.
I'm not gonna go for big moments, right?
Because if I'm honest with I'll jump off the screen at people simply because
This movie is about oil workers and blue collar workers.
Who dress up
Like outlaw cowboys.
On weekends to go in and ride not a real bull.
But
Um
Boom machine. Yeah.
Mechanical bad.
A real bank robber.
A real ex con.
And a real bull rider.
And if I just get close to a
Just close to it.
I'll look like a diamond in a bucket full of rhinestones.
Not because I'm particularly good, but it was almost like a setup.
So anyway, that happened and I didn't have to audition. I d audition once since then.

Not a big part in a movie I really wanted to do and the director said no, no at that point.
I don't want you to do it, so I went to a cattle call under an assumed name.
I just shouldn't forget and got that part.
I did urban cowboy, my life has changed.
And I thought
I was offered the lead in some T V series while I was in
Texas.
Because in those days
Daily's were shared by everybody in the
In the business. So
I turn them all down.
Because I thought I don't wanna leave Idaho and move back to
LA. I love my life and I know I love
I didn't know how to ski, but I was learning how to ski
And I was climbing and I was hiking and I was shooting and I was riding motorcycles.
And all the things I really love to do
And plus I could really
Cleanly
think about and concern myself with the art of acting and not
Who do I know and where am I going and I've got this cool place in Malibu or any of that shit.
So I turn down the T V stuff.
When I've been in Texas, Carol had she hadn't left me, but
I knew it.
at a certain point when I was playing West High Tower
that I had the character, but I was terrified if I left it alone.
And put it down, it'd be like a bar of soap and I tried to pick it up and I wouldn't
So I live that part twenty four seven.
Got arrested, got in trouble. I was West High Tower the whole time. I remember at one point it came back to
We had an apartment in a gallery and I came back and
None of Carol's clothes were
There was no presence of them in the apartment, and there had been when I had gone to work that day.
I'm thinking, What's going on? The phone was ringing I pick it up and it was Carol.
And she's I'm back in Idaho.
I can't handle living with West Hightower.
So
You let me know when he's dead.
Me and the girls love you. We're up here, but
We're not gonna
Put ourselves through this.
And
I weren't
Okay.
And I was about to hang up and she said, Wait, before you hang up, I just want to s say one thing and I said what's that? She said two things.
Number one, I love you. Number two
I think you're hitting a home run with this.
And it's gonna change our lives.
So when I drove back up here my Jimmy, I remember I stopped off in Wyoming at one point.
People must have thrived, not
And I got out of the gym and I walked down to the side of the road.
And I took this invisible West High Tower and threw'em in the ground.
Broke his fucking neck.
And called Kara on a payphone. I said, West High Tower is dead.
I'm coming home. Wow. Okay. Okay, okay, continue. And then we're gonna go back to the origin story. Brought home.
We were renting this house with this family that had come up with us. We were sharing this house.
We had a bedroom.
On the bed were two scripts for the leads and movies for more money than I'd ever dreamed about making.
And that was that.
So here I am in Idaho.
What uh we're gonna go back in time. We're gonna slowly rewind'cause I've a couple of follow-up questions. One is Jim Bridges, what did he
See.
What gave him the feeling or the confidence to say, This is gonna change your life? What do you think it was?
Was it that setup that you talked about done my first movie with him and I got the movie
I came out here and I met him, but I didn't audition for the part.
There was a director, Ed Ed Peron, who I'd done a thing called
In New York. It was called collision courses. It was nine one acts in the course of the night.
And Ed said to Jim.
If you're looking for somebody a young guy who's not gonna charge you a ton of money
It's perfect for the part.
Scott Glenn's the guy. So I got that part and did the movie.
So Jim knew me over a period of
In those days movies took about three months to shoot. Now it's way faster.
And I guess
Whatever it was he saw in me
It was jangled awake when we walked into his office coming back from Mexico. That was when he went, Oh my God, I
Something
That he saw about
Me
He wrote the script for Urban Cowboy.
With Aaron Latham, the guy who had originally written uh Column and
I don't know if it's the Times, some place in New York about
Gillies and
Bull machines and all that stuff.
And then Jim adapted that and wrote the screenplay. I don't know what it was he saw.
I remember my screen test.
They wanted me to do a scene from the and I said I can't do that. I'm not in the
F
I don't wanna lose it. And Jim said, Well we've gotta put you on
On screen and I said
And Deborah was
During her sexy.
All right at the time.
And there were a bunch of guys in the front watching and I picked out the baddest looking one of all who was a bandito.
Texas.
And I should put the camera on me and I thought
Dear Lord.
Don't let this go bad, but
Here we go.
When they were watching Deborah and I walked over to him.
Then I went hey.
And he looked up at me and I said, You're sitting on my fucking seat.
And he looked at me and I thought.
What's gonna happen?
And he got up and walked away.
I went and sat down. That was my screen test.

If we go way back in time.
And
This is just based on what
I researched online, but it seems like
Initially you you were not born out of the womb
Dreaming of being an actor. It seems like you wanted to be a writer.
Yeah.
And
How did
Acting.
Enter the scene for you.
And I I read a bit about Berghoff.
If I look back on my whole life, the most important
Single event in my life.
was scarlet fever when I was nine years old. That I wasn't supposed to have survived.
There was one weekend when the doctors told my mom and dad to get a plot.
And what saved my life was crystalline penicillin.
I don't know if you've ever had that a shot of it, but it's interesting.
Because usually with most shots
It's the needle going in that hurts.
And it's fine.
Crystalline penicillin is like
Thicker than the
And you can grease. Yeah. So the needle needle going in kinda hurts, but then
The rest of it going and straightens you up. And I didn't realize it was saving my life, so I hated it. But that experience
Turn me into an athlete, turn me into someone who I've learned to not only live with, but fall in love with my fantasies and my imagination.
And I don't know if it's true or not. And I don't wanna know.
Because it's a fantasy that I
If it's not true, I grew up believing it was that on my mom's side of the family I was directly related to Lord Byron.
When I got out of bed w from scarlet fever, my bones were so soft that they bent and I limped like
For almost
Four years.
But it turned me into a an athlete'cause I was just embarrassed about the way I looked and I
Was in a neighborhood where
It wasn't good to be
Physically frail. This was uh Pittsburgh? Yeah. Mm-hmm.
At any rate I decided, you know
Two things. Number one
I wasn't gonna be Walter Mitty. I wasn't gonna have an imaginary life.
The adventures I was imagining were all gonna be true. I was gonna make'em come true.
And one of them was I was gonna be a writer.
Poet, writer.
So
When I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I enlisted as a six month reservist.
Why did you do that? Because you went from English major to Marine Corps, right?
'Cause where I came from there was nobody
Dodge the draft.
And the draft was happening. I see.
So for me
And I knew even with a BA in college.
I had
So little technical ability and
Everybody'll tell you about that.
If I was smart enough I would have tried to become probably a
Naval Aviator
But I wasn't smart enough to be a pilot.
So where I came from
The choice is worth three.
Marine Corps.
Eighty second Airborne, one hundred and first airborne.
That's it.
And then a friend of mine said, Well, you can be airborne and a marine both
And then I was worried about my hearing because I've been legally deaf since I was ten years old because of Scarlet Fever as well.
And
They laughed.
You're gonna be an enlisted Marine, you're going to boot camp at Paris Island, and you're worried about your hearing
People are gonna scream at you the whole time you're there. And then you're gonna be shooting
Automatic weapons without your hearing protection. It your hearings can be trash.
Don't worry about it.
So that was my reason.
So
I did my six months in the Marine Corps and
This was the sixties where if you were a reservist
You didn't really have to
Make weekend meetings in summer camp.
There are other ways of doing your time.
of deployments for three months or a month
Month and a half, whatever.
When I got out of the Marine Corps, I went to see my mom and dad who were living in Kenosha, Wisconsin. My dad was at that point he gotten pretty high up in Snap On Tools.
When when I was born he was a salesman.
So he went from
No money and no nothing to
You actually wound up kind of running that company.
I went to Kenosha.
There was a job opening on the Kenosha Daily News.
And I
Didn't interview in Wide, as I often do.
Um they said, Can you type? And I went, Yeah and they said, How many words a minute? And I said thirty five'cause I knew that's what I needed.
After the interview they said, Well you got the job, I came out and
There was uh Joe Jacoby, one of the
reporters there said, You should be happy. You don't look happy and I said, Oh, I'll tell you the truth, I lied. I I don't know how to type it all.
And he said.
Me and one other reporter will cover for you, Scott, for two weeks.
You go to adult education at the public high school.
And learn how to type. And what was the job for? I got it. I was not very good at what I
So anyway, I'm up up in the city room doing that and I hear shots out the window.
And it was cold as shit.
And I remember I said to
Somebody in the sitting room, those are shots. Go out and check'em out. And it was like thirty below zero. It was freezing cold.
And somebody said, No, that was a car backfiring. I said
Paperlock. Cars aren't even starting now.
And
There's all most stuff in life I don't know.
But I just
Got out of the Marine Corps and gunfire I do know, and I'm telling you, those are shots. And they said, Why don't you go out and cover it?
So I went outside and two blocks from the newspaper at the side of the road
Was a city patrol car.
Well
Mrs. Hocadal, the chief of police's wife, sitting in the driver's seat
With her husband's
Crystal
Smoking in her lap.
And next to her.
Dorothy Batadas.
Who was the chief of police's secretary
Slash Mistress.
With half her head blown away.
It was my story.
It was the biggest story.
Obviously
So they made me a police reporter and I real I thought being a police reporter would be really cool'cause I'll
Cover, you know
Mob itch and
All that stuff.
And I realize that
You do do that. But you're all for every one of those you do
Six.
Interviewing a woman
Fifteen minutes after her teenage son has died in a traffic accident.
And you're thinking about
Do I get a byline? Is this gonna be on page one or page two? And I felt like a ghoul.
There is a bulletin board with other jobs listed. So I applied for the job of a reporter on the sports desk.
I can't even remember the name of the paper, but it was in an American Virgin Island. I got the job.
And I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone and she lives on Long Island and she said
When does the job start? And I said
In about six months, and she said
Why don't you go to New York and take an acting class?
And I went.
Why?
And she said, I'll be honest with you, Scott, I read the stuff that you write and your description of ideas and action and places
Isn't bad.
But you're
Dialogue.
Essentially sucks.
It's deaf.
Nobody talks like that. The minute you put words into anybody's mouth, whether it's a poem or a short story, whatever
You plava.
If you have to get in front of people and say words
He'll kick you in your ass to start to listen to the way people really talk.
And if you're doing theater, you'll be dealing with arguably the best dialogue ever written.
So after I got over m maybe five or ten minutes of being angry'cause she told me the truth.
I
But okay, so I got in my car, I had an old triumph, and I drove to New York.
Sold the car.
God.
Two jobs.
I looked up uh acting in the village voice, nothing under A, under B, it's at Berghoff studios. I didn't know anything about it. Call it up.
Call program studios.
And this guy named Bill Hickey, who was one of America's greatest character actors
Nominated for he might have gotten an Academy Award for
God, I can't think of the
Answer the phone.
And he says, Yeah, work on this, bring it by uh Berghoff Studios Wednesday morning.
It was Oh Dad, poor Dad, Mom was hugging in the closet, I'm feeling so sad was the play.
Something I'm completely unsuited for, but
I worked on it.
I go down into the basement of Virgoffs, it was raining outside Wednesday morning.
Maybe
Seven or eight people sitting there to watch.
I walk in front of Bill Hickey.
To start this.
Monologue and for the first
And the only time I like literally a light bulb went off between my eyes and I thought, Holy shit, I'm an actor.
That fast.
And it wasn't like oh I'm so fulfilled.
It was
For the first time.
My life made sense to me.
My
proclivity to daydream, my laziness in a lot of areas. Everything made sense
Like that. And Bill saw it.
That's right. You're one of us.
And then he turned to the the other students and he said.
Scott's not gonna finish this.
He's got to go outside, walk around the block a couple of times and think about things. I went outside
There was a
Hey for one.
On Bank Street, I called my mom and dad. I got my dad on the phone. I said, I'm not going to the Verge Honest. I'm not gonna be a director.
They were terrified I would go back into the service, which I actually was thinking about doing.'Cause being in the service in a lot of ways
Can be rough and you know, all that stuff.
But in other ways
It's very easy because you don't have to make decisions about what you're gonna wear, what you're gonna do, what you're gonna eat. And I like that.
'Cause I really am lazy.
I'm like horribly lazy human being.
Anyway, I told my dad that.
And he
Took a second and he gave me the best advice I could ever have had. He said, Son, I don't really know
Anything about what you're telling me.
The only advice I can give you is
Don't give yourself any deadlines.
I said, What do you mean? He said, Don't say if I haven't made it
In two years.
I'm gonna sell insurance.
He said that's like starting a race with a lead wheel weight hung around your neck.
In for a penny, in for a pound. If you love it, make it your life.
And I did.
And here I am talking to you.
I'd love to zoom in on your dad for a second because it seems like
Just based on what you've
Said thus far that for a company man
At that time.
That seems like very unexpected advice.
that would be given that there wouldn't be any pushback. What do you attribute that to? Why did your dad give you that advice, do you think? Or why did he feel my dad grew up in a way that I can't possibly understand, in real serious poverty. I remember he told me at one point
If I ever have money I'm gonna give it to a charity.
Make it the salvation army,'cause they fed us.
Christmas time.
They had a cow in a vacant lot that three blocks of people used for milk.
So
I'm not gonna go into I don't wanna divulge to but my my dad was involved in
As hard a life as you can imagine.
And did well in that life.
So my dad's background was
He dealt with really poor
Irish
Jewish.
What.
Italian.
And all of them
Involved in
Gambling and booze.
None of them involved in drugs.
They were all people
My dad's best friend w who raised me as much as my mom and dad did was
Uh
Black Cherokee
Super honorable, super loving, super gentle.
But also somebody you wouldn't want to fuck with.
So that was my dad's background when he met my mom and she said basically
If you even curse around me, we're not gonna be together.
And you can't do anything illegal.
So he
left the world that he was in and started selling
Blue point tools that morphed into Snap On tools.
He told me later on, when I was still struggling as an actor, and the thing that
I'm sad about but I can't do anything about it. He never saw me being suc My mom did, but my dad was dead by the time.
But he told me, he said.
When he was
Start doing really well with Snap on Tools, he said
I keep running into these men.
who are d lawyers and doctors
And they're not happy.
Because
They're doing
Yeah.
Fathers.
Drain.
Not their dream.
And he said
The only advice I can give you about having kids is when you have kids, don't dream their dreams for them.
Do not do that.
So he was
An unusual guy.
To be very honest, the only human being I've ever met in my life.
Close to who he was.

Thank you for sharing that.
And
How would you describe your mother?
Her character.
What you absorb from her.
Unconditional love.
When I think back on it, my mom and dad
played tennis. My mom also grew up really, really poor.
Her dad died when he was in his thirties.
But she had a rich
Super uh
who never gave the family money but gave her things like ballet lessons and so my mom was a dancer and
I think back on it, she was a loving
Physical
Artist.
It was like when I remember when Carol and I were gonna get married and then I told my dad that
We grew up Sweden Borgians.
And I was planning on converting to Judaism.
I don't want her to have a target on her back that I
Didn't have on mine as well.
And my dad's answer was man should do what the woman wants.
So
That was my mom and dad.
I mean what I will say about growing up with them is we hear all these people talk about
Growing up in these dysfunctional fans.
I don't have any excuses. I grew up in the most functionally family.
Straight out love.
My dad never hit me except for once in my life.
I remember my mom wanted me to take this girl to a dance.
Junior high.
And she was the daughter of a friend of hers and I went, Ooh, I know she was
Little hefty, whatever. I didn't want to do it. And I said, No, I don't want to do it.
Please, sir, I'm asking you. I said no.
And my mom teared up and started going
My dad walk in the door.
And he said, Why's your mom crying? Something I said. He walked over
And hit me with a number cut and drop me on my ass like
Wham.
This is somebody who had never given me a spanking.
Yeah.
And he looked down at me, he said.
Make your mom cry, you're going down.
And walked away.
So
The next time my mom wanted to me to do something, if she even started to go, I said, Mom.

So let's come back to the conversion to Judaism. I'd love for you to say a little bit more about that. You mentioned if Carol was gonna have a target on her back, you didn't want her to be alone in that. Can you say more about
The decision to convert.
Yeah, I had a friend.
His name was Milton Badaux and I've lost touch with him. I don't even know if he's alive or dead, but he was a
Rabbi in a shoe in the Upper East Side in New York, and he was a friend of mine. He had been a rabbi
In Shul in Charleston, South Carolina. He'd been in some of the first bus sit ins
He'd been in shootouts with a KKK.
And I believe he dropped a couple of those.
And he was my friend. He loved theater and I went to see him and I said, I want you to m make me a Jew.
Why did you say that to him?
In preparation for getting married? Yeah. Yeah. I said I'm going with Carol and make me a Jew. He'd met her and he so he and I said, I want you to make me a Jew and he said
Schmuck I'll lie for you. I'll tell her parents that I did it and I won't do it.
Nice one, it's not her parents don't have anything to do with it.
And he said
I'm uh
Conservative rabbi.
I don't really believe in conversions that much.
What do you know about the Talmud? And I said, If a man teaches his son no trade, it is as if he taught him highway robbery.
He said, You've read the Talmud and I said, Some of it.
He said, Do you accept it as the word of God? And I went
No, not really.
I said it's I think it's a book with a lot of wisdom.
As is the Bible, as is the Quran.
But if you're asking me
Of all that stuff, what resonates the most with me would be Lao Tzu is the way of life.
He said, I'll get I'll find a rabbi that'll do it for you. I went, Okay, and I started walking out of the show and he said, Hey, wait a minute So
Turn around.
So I did and he said
You're not doing it.
For the
Talmood, you're not doing it for her parents.
Why do you want me to convert you? And I said'cause
I met this woman and I love her and we want to travel.
And I don't wanna be going anywhere in the world where somebody's pointing a gun at her and not at me for the same reason. Period. That's it.
If there was no anti Semitism, you and I wouldn't be having this talk.
And he said, Sit down. So I sat down and he said, After me, all of Beth Gimmel Doll. I said, What are you doing? He said
I'm converting you.
And I said, Well you just told me you wouldn't He said
Nobody has ever given me that answer to that question. He said if you want to take this on
That way.
I'm duty bound.
To convert you.
And then he kinda converted me.
I was doing an off Broadway play at the time. So he would go down and when I would go to the shoal to like learn about Judaism
He was a closet director.
You would say, I wanna come back on stage in two days. I want you to try this one. Oh man Okay, I'm not gonna say no to the guy.
Abraham Ephraim.
An Avraham.
Is my
Jewish name.
You mentioned Lao Tzu, why does that resonate? Why does his
Writing or the conglomerate known as Lao Tzu, the sort of uh It feels like an honest
Description of
Of inner and outer truth the way I know it.
It's just
resonates with me that
I mean we can talk about this later on or not talk about it.
You shoot, I know. Do you know who Brian Enos is?
So he wrote a book called Practical
shooting beyond fundamentals.
And it's about
When you enter the space of doing something
The less thought
that can be involved and the the more you're just present in the now.
The better it will be.
Doing martial arts and
Boxing, wrestling, all that stuff.
I just realized at a very young age that if I wanted something to work out well physically
The best thing I could possibly do.
Is
Watch my body do it.
Not make any decisions at all.
So
You know, if somebody does this, then you do that. I never bought that in martial arts.
Given where I grew up. I knew that wasn't true.
Number one, if anybody who predicted what would happen in let's say
A physical confrontation.
If they
We're making the prediction one thing for me was very clear about them.
They'd never been in one.
Now I believe that that's not just true of that kind of stuff, but it's true of
Pretty much anything you do physically. If you have muscle memory, let your muscle memory alone. It'll do it.
So much faster and cleaner than you ever will.
And for me
Spiritually, that's what Laud Zo is saying.
So it's this.
Sort of diminishing of the self or
Dissolution of the self.
Mystical.
And for me mystical the mystical side of every religion is not the impractical. That's the practical side. The impractical side
Is orthodox.
It says.
This is a whole other thing. And I'm just an actor and I'm not that bright, so I I'm just saying this, but
I believe that orthodoxy right now
Is under fire and diminishing quickly. It's in the rear view mirror.
And people like Mike Johnson
even complain about going to
Fundamentalist evangelical
Church.
And seeing less and less people in the pew.
The reason for that, I believe
Yeah.
Because orthodoxy is not practical.
Orthodoxy says take
Absolute for real the words that are written in these books.
Well
If you want to save orthodoxy
Forget about banning books about
LGBTQ or blacks or
Latinos.
You want to save orthodoxy, bend the teaching of these three following subjects.
Math.
Physics. Chemistry.

Of science.
Orthodoxy doesn't work.
Carbon dating says.
Two
The Bible.
The Talmud and the Quran.
All of which get kinda close to the same date as the age of the earth.
Carbon dating says.
Yeah, you'll miss that one by only around a hundred and seventy million years.
Whoops.
Somebody lived in the belly of a whale. Well, two thousand years ago, you look at somebody as big as a whale, you say if it's possible.
Biology says this thing can barely swallow anything bigger than a minnow. Guess what? It never happened.
Whoops.
But mysticism says
All of this.
It's poetry to tell you from God how to live your life.
How to be an honorable just person.
How to have a family.
All of which I completely believe.
Absolutely.
So
To me, Lao Tzu is
The ultimate mistress.
In my mind.
What mystics and orthodoxy.
Or looking essentially at
Doing the opposite thing.
Orthodoxy is saying if I
About a Mecca, or if I eat.
Fish on Friday or if I
Live kosher.
When I die, I'll be cool.
My ego will be cool. I'll be fine.
I will be fine.
Mystericism.
tries to dissolve the ego altogether.
Do I believe when I die Scott Glenn will be around? No.
But do I believe there's something in me that's a point of view that's a point of view of
You two guys and the cloud outside and Elk running.
Yes.
I do believe that.
Talk about that dissolution from uh
first hand experiential perspective. Like a mystic. Have you ever experienced
Say in acting a role playing you as opposed to the other way around?
Yes.
Could you describe
Yeah.
The first time it happened
was Urban Cowboy.
I
translated it wrong. I translated it as a as fear of
Leaving this character alone.
Second time.
It happened.
Was
Doing an off Broadway play called Killer Joe.
And I just realized that
Up until one part of Killer Joe
It was a crazy play where we were allowed
The director.
realized that the acoustics were so good in the Soho Playhouse.
That we could turn our back on the audience and be heard. We could walk off stage and be heard.
So he thought
To make this really spontaneous and organic.
I'm gonna allow anyone to do whatever they want. There's not gonna be any blocking at all. None.
The whole thing took place in a trailer.
On the outskirts of Dallas. So if
If as a character you've in the middle of a conversation
You felt like walking down the hallway off stage.
To take a leak. You did.
So it was completely
Open like that.
The only
part that was choreographed originally was there was a big fight at the end and we brought in a guy from the opera
To choreograph the fight and he choreographed a great fight scene, but it didn't look right.
Next to
How loose the rest of the play was.
So we realized we had to improv the fight as well.
Mercifully the people in the cast had circus skills. We knew how to pratfall and stuff like that.
But everybody got hurt doing.
Fifteen minutes before half an hour we come on stage and we say, Okay, tonight
This chair's a breakaway. This will shatter. This is real.
And the deal that we had was like if you came up behind me and grabbed the back of my hair and pulled me.
I would fall backwards, but since I couldn't see what I was falling into.
It was the obligation of the person pulling me.
The care
If there was a chair or something that I was gonna
Buck on my back.
The only place to kick it.
Was the first
I over the theater.
So we told people when they came to see us play.
This is a projectile aisle.
You may not get a heavy object.
landing on your lap. Or you may
You for sure are gonna be covered with fried chicken and ketchup and fake blood.
There's no question, so don't wear suits that you care about.
So anybody o over the age of twenty five avoided those seats.
And the kids fought to get them.
Yeah.
So that was sort of the way the play worked.
There was one scene at the very beginning of Act Two where I'm supposed to walk on sta it's dark.
And this guy is trying to get in the he's drunk and he's trying to get in the front door, but I don't know who it is, and I've moved in at that point.
Um
In bed with a young girl.
So I come out
In the dark, grab him, slam him down on the ground.
And I've got a
Forty five automatic and I'm wearing a watch.
The lights come up.
And then everybody else wanders on stage who's in the trailer.
My wardrobe is a forty five Automatic and a watch.
At one point
Tracy Let's said
Scott, when people walk on stage, all I see is your ass. You're trying to th you live at this place.
So full frontal nudity, fine.
But doing that
Oddly kind of.
Mm.
After the first night doing it, it was like
I don't know whether liberate is the right word, but I realized that after that
And Tracy forced me into that spot.
The best thing I could do with the play was just let it happen.
Just let it happen.
So that was Killer Joe.
When you say let it happen
How does that change how you approach
The next performance. You decide to let it happen.
The next performance I didn't make any decisions about what I would do, what
Prop I would pick up anything. Well, let's see what's going on here.
I'm gonna live in this space. I know that I am this character.
I even told Tracy, I said, y I know other people have played this part
At Steppenwolf, where it started in Chicago.
But you fucking wrote this for me.
And I just know it.
In the way that
that I felt the same way about West High Tower and Urban Cowboys. So that was Killer Joe.
The next time it happened.
I was doing leftovers.
Um
I had been in two seasons of the leftovers and I'd gone from just being
A character.
To Damon Linloff calling me up with Mimi Leder, the producer who she directed most of'em.
And Damon wrote it.
And they said we want you to be a regular member of the cast. We're doing the last season in Australia.
And
I think the second or third
Episode.
It's gonna be just you, Scott.
All just you in Australia.
And I've written the longest monologue I've ever written.
I'm so lucky.
So
I said, What? Is it two pages long? He said, No, seven.
Holy shit, seven pages.
And he sent it to me.
At the time he sent it to me, I was reading this book, I know you've got a dog, I'm gonna ask you about your dog. Sure.
I was reading this book called Uh Don't Shoot the Dog.
Excellent book. Isn't it a great book? It is the top recommendation always for people who are considering getting a dog.
For any type of training. It is an excellent. If we weren't her holding mics, I'd argue it. So I got so I'm reading Don't Shoot the Dog and the section I'm reading
Is where she says
Positive reinforcement.
Can help you train
Your dog.
Your husband or your wife?
Your friends.
Even yourself.
For example, if you've got something long to memorize and I'm thinking, Holy shit, how there's my
So what she said in that was
It'll take longer initially, but it's the perfect way to remember something really long. Start at the end.
The last sentence
And then the last sentence and the next last sentence and then
Like that.
Because what will happen w when you get to the the beginning of this thing and you
Launch into it for real.
As you're getting towards the end, it'll become more and more familiar.
It'd be like walking home. Wait a minute. I know the street lamping instead of the ending.
Being this hanging.
It scares you a can of why remember it as you get near the end and you become more and more comfortable and more and more comfortable.
So we get down to
Car and I get to Australia, we go to the Outback.
And we're gonna do this scene. It's the first one we're gonna do. And so Mimi says
We'll do this in bits and pieces,'cause this is seven pages. There's no way you can do the whole thing in one. And I said, You know what, Mimi?
Can you set it up so that I g at least give me a shot at doing in one take? And she said
Yeah, okay. I can do that.
So he said uh it's really
It's not a monologue in that it's not me talking to myself.
I'm talking to David Gopalil.
But he doesn't say anything. So he just sits there.
And listen.
So we start doing this scene.
And we come to the end of it.
I hear action.
I feel my key light a few times.
I hear cut.
And Mimi says, Okay, that was
First she said.
Incorrectly, but I'll say it because
I got a big ego.
She said.
You just had a master's class in acting.
She said, Okay, so Scott, so when you picked up the tape recorder
And you started to play it and you weld up and you started to cry and you wouldn't let yourself and you put it back down.
What did you do next? And I said, What did I do with a tape recorder?
Ha.
She said, What do you remember about what you just did? And I went
Not much.
She said
You're telling me that so much of you was in that scene there wasn't enough to step outside
You weren't watching yourself at all. I'm like, no.
And she said
If you can't direct yourself, I can't direct you.
So would you be willing the next time we do this
Two
have a little piece of you watching it so that when I talk about parts of the
That I want to change.
We can talk to each other.
And I said
Are you asking me as
Somebody who has this job and is being told by the director or as an
An artist.
She said, What's the difference? And I said, The difference is
I'm a blue collar.
Enlisted Marine.
I know how to take orders.
You're my boss. If you tell me to do it, I'll do it.
But if as an artist you're asking me will I do it?
Artists wait.
Whole lifetimes to be able to have this experience. And if I could have this experience again, fuck no, I don't want to do it.
I do not
And she said, What if I'm not getting what I want? I said, Let's do another take. We'll just do one take after another.
She said, It'll wipe you out. It'll exhaust you. I said, No it won't.
Look at me. Am I exhausted?
So we did
Three or four more takes of the whole thing.
And at the end of it, Mimi said
Is this what I'm gonna be dealing with for the rest of this episode?
And I went, Not if you tell me not to and she said
I'm not gonna tell you not to
Let's just go for it.
So we did that whole episode Crazy White Fella thinking.
And all I would do in the morning when I would wake up
First in the APAC and then later on in Melbourne.
was I look literally look in the mirror and I say stay out of the way.
Do not make editorial decisions or try to work for that.
Big moment.
I had a manager who used to his term was
having a conversation with Oscar. Have no conversations with Emmy or Oscar.
Just stay out of the way of this and let it happen.
So that was
When I really understood
Being in that spot as an actor.
And then it happened to me again with Vince Vaughn.
Doing a series that hasn't come out yet. The first season. I don't know if there'll be a second season.
The first season will be
Around
August.
It's called Bad Monkey.
It stars Vince.
And the first day on the set working with Vince, we did a I play his dad.
And the character is a shaman.
Fox amenatees and

Yeah.
At any rate.
Vince after we did the scene is written like three times
And it felt like it was just taking me
Vince said
Okay, we know the scene.
Scott, will you
Be cool with just throwing the script out and just
Winging the that scene what we just did, just
Completely open ended, loose.
And I went
You mean like I used to do in street theater?
Shit yes.
And after we did that
I just thought I'm not gonna edit myself or uh this character that I'm playing because of
A key that kind of
Something that I signed up for a breathing thing with this guy Irwin Lacour.
At any rate, I just realized after that day with Vince and the key that I had to play in the character.
I'm gonna stay out of the way of this.
Because
It feels so good and so fresh. And I'm lazy too. I mean it's taking care of me. Why should I work my ass off?
When the best stuff is just leaving it alone.
And then the next job I got after that was something called Eugene the Marine, which is this low budget thriller
That will be coming out sometime in the next year.
And with that
I realize from the get go
Just stay out of the way.
Both because
The director was gonna let me do whatever I really wanted.
I would make the physical but if supposed to pick up a drill and drill a hole in the wall, I'd do that.
But how I was gonna do it, whether it was gonna be the same again and again, where it would match.
I
Wasn't even gonna not even think about that a little bit.
To a great extent because I am lazy and in the part that I was doing in Eugene the Marine
was beyond the lead. It was in a ninety eight page script. I was in ninety six of the pages. So there's no way I couldn't even memorize
I was just hoped that the words would come to me.
And what I happened on with that was I realized that what gives
In my mind what gives
Performances on film.
Their juice or electricity
Is their degree of spontaneity.
And
Complete spontaneity.
And I got this from Brian Enos as well about shooting.
Complete spontaneity.
It's not watching yourself at all.
Complete spontaneity is being in the now.
So completely.
That you really don't have a past.
And more importantly, way more importantly, I think with acting, is you don't have a future, which means plans
On
What you're gonna do in the scene.
Dissolve and then finally disappear.
So what I had with that movie was finally what just wound up being
with the crew as my very small audience every single take.
was a one act play called
No.
Ha ha.
You mentioned Marlon Brando earlier.
Was there anything that you gleaned
from your time around Marlon Brando, or that he taught you any gems you picked up?
Aside from his moral behavior which was
Phenomenal.
What do you mean by that?
Supporting two villages in the Philippines with all his pay.
Wouldn't let anybody write about it or
It's not in the movie, but
There's one point where I killed Dennis Hopper.
And I was working on the scene and Marlon came over to me, he said, Scott, just because they call it acting doesn't mean you have to act.
Oh.
Okay. What did he mean by that?
What he meant by that was I was trying to squeeze something out of a moment rather than seeing what the moment was gonna present to me.
And what I learned from watching him was
Because he had this reputation of being
Okay.
schools of acting that even to this day that when you watch people work and you know which one they're coming from
One is
Right.
Really great Brit actors all have this, which is technique.
You get down the accent and the physical characteristics and the wardrobe and the makeup.
And the dealing with props.
And get the whole outside
Perfect.
And then
Do the part.
That's
R
Technique acting.
Most of what you still see.
Then there's
The Russian school.
Which is Stanislavsky, Boloslavsky.
And that
Is
You begin with the inside of the character.
Does this person share my same
The way I look at life, philosophy, all that stuff.
What emotions are really mine that are also this characters.
If they're not the same.
Can one be replaced with the other?
So if something makes me angry about getting on a subway
And I'm playing somebody who's angry about
Not being left.
Money and a will.
The audience doesn't know where that anger comes from, so you use the subway because you're not in the other side.
So Marlin had the reputation of being mainly, if not a hundred percent, the Russian school.
I realize around him he was whatever worked.
Sometimes he would take a mirror make a
An expression on the mirror freezing to say action.
At other times the
He would say, How are they sh lighting this scene? And they would say, Is there a way I can put
This year.
In the dark, so you don't see it.
Yeah, but what are you gonna do? And he put a sound plug in his ear
And play not his lines
But the stuff he wanted to cover
In improvisation.
So he wouldn't miss stuff.
It was audio he had recorded himself. So he would do anything.
And I learned from it.
Him
that part. But I also got from Marlon
His understanding about
Okay, so
Brief little story.
Where we were in the Philippines was it a place called Poxan Hunt.
And
I had a room at Pakshon Inn that I basically kept all my crap in.
I was living at the time with
This group of people called the Ifigaw that were on the set, but
One afternoon I was back at the hotel.
With Morelin with two producers
I think Dennis Harper and
I think Larry Fishburn was there. So anyway, we're sitting around
The table
in the hotel and where you check into the hotel.
And a jukebox were all kind of in the same room.
This couple of
Came in to check into the hotel. Filipino couple.
And they had two little girls with them.
One was
Holding her mom's
Dress hiding behind it.
The other one.
And I think it was satisfaction was playing on the jukebox. The other little girl heard this song
And she came dancing into the

sort of miming to satisfaction. And she was magical.
And people were laughing and
Finally her parents checked in and they all left and went upstairs.
One of the producers I think was
Grey Frederick has said about the little girl who was in Dancey he said, God, that little girl was magical.

That little girl will be a great actress.
And Marlin said
Great actress? And they s he said, Yeah, and Marlon said, You're wrong.
It's the other one.
They didn't get it, but I immediately understood'cause that other little girl doing like this was me.
Who needed the permission of a park.
To go nuts.
To do whatever it was. And Marlon was saying the same thing about himself.
With the
quickening that you felt when you realized
That you were
meant to act when your life started to make sense.
Do you think that was
Predestined out of the box. Was that informed by your experience with scarlet fever? Because I know I believe you couldn't read at the time.
Yes, caral fever attacks
Sometimes all usually just one of your senses. And they don't know why it does that.
But they were trying to protect
My eyesight which
Turns out to be really good.
What scarlet fever left me out w with was damaged auditory nerves.
I mean I've got hearing aids in now because it
Carol Finley, who was up here probably five, six years ago.
She just got tired of screaming at me and having me walk into the room and turning the TV up so like ear splitting loud. She said, You gotta get here and
Didn't think I needed them and then I got
Checked by the audiologist.
Who
Went behind my back to talk to me.
And what happened was
He was talking to me, I'm looking at him, and I'm hearing him fine.
He walks behind me and I can't hear him.
And he told me he said, That's because you read lips. I thought no, I don't read lips. He said, Oh yeah, you do And he said, The good news, Scott, is this is not age related.
The bad news is
You've been suffering this for at least forty years. My suspicion is longer.
So um that was scarlet fever.
And do you think that informed
Help shape you into what later became this actor.
discoveries that I wouldn't have had before. Like
When I got out of bed from scarlet fever I could take my finger, literally and run it in and out of my rib cage.
My bones were soft, so I limp.
I grew up in a neighborhood that was very physical.
So
Out of mortification.
If there was a pickup football game I played.
But what I've discovered from playing sports and stuff wasn't that I was so good at it.
But I actually liked it.
A what?
I loved
Physicality.
Before I got scarlet fever I didn't all my friends were girls. I'd much rather talk about
flower arrangements than the NFL or
And to some extent that's still true of me.
So Scarlett Fever just introduced me to a different world that I
Really loved.
Recorded too.
All of those
Things.
Rock climbing with Tony Jones up in the Bighorn Craggs, all that stuff I
Found out.
was really fun and put a smile on my face. And I don't think if I had never gotten scarlet fever, I don't know that that would have ever happened I don't know, it did happen and
Now I'm eighty five and
Here it is.
So for people who of course are listening to this and not seeing any visual, I mean for the majority of our conversation, you're sitting comfortably cross legged on a couch, no back support, something that I know thirty somethings who wouldn't be comfortable in that position more than a few minutes. What is your
physical training look like now? And what would you say are some of the most
important types of training or decisions about training.
that you've made say
Post forty.
Just to allow this type of terribility. I always wake up the same way.
I wake up
I didn't today, oh I slept in.
But normally.
I wake up
Around five thirty.
I slept till seven today. I don't know why, but
I come downstairs.
I fill up the coffee machine with water, turn it on.
Clean up the surfaces of all the tables.
Just'cause it feels like
A good thing to do.
And then
I
Massage my ears.
pull them up as high as possible. I'm not talking about being general, not general at all.

And then massage my ears and if I feel any even slightly
Tender or sore spot.
I really go after that as hard as I can.
I learned this
In a Tai Chi seminar years ago in in New York.
And I've done it ever since. But uh anyway, strong super strong ear massage.
Then after that, and while I'm doing all this stuff
I'm thinking I'm making sure that my breath
is horizontal and low.
What do you mean by horizontal? Okay, there are
Two kinds of breathing the most
People like
Most Americans.
Doing properly. After the age of I don't know, two or three.
One is
We're born breathing horizontally, which means
If I say take a big in a big breath of air.
Your stomach goes out, your diaphragm is working. Right. And it's not and you're not bringing anything into the top of your chest at all.
That's horizontal breathing.
Vertical breathing is
Where you see the shoulders going up and
And w we vertically breathe way, way too much because what vertical breathing will do aside from the fact that you're not taking in as much oxygen
is it will put tension into your upper body.
And lower body.
It also jack you into
A fight or flight situation.
So if you do that at a stoplight'cause somebody you know
Got your way.
That's really
A bad idea'cause you're gonna jack up your heart rate, you're gonna jack up your
Blood pressure.
You're gonna screw with your central nervous system. So I just try
Early in the morning try to remind myself horizontal breathing.
And then
Drop it down low.
So that you're feeling the diet for it.
That's all. So I do that.
After the ear massage I tapp my
Yeah.
Brain tap.
Is this also from Chinese medicine? Yes. Mm-hmm.
So after I finish tapping, I wash my hands.
Blow my nose.
Walk outside.
And I'm dressed usually like this.
Usually I've got a lighter shirt on shorts and a sweatshirt right now. Yeah, and I slip on these slip on shoes'cause
This time of year I'll probably be standing in snow and ice. And I open up the garage and I walk outside.
And I hum.
And when I say I hum, any of us can do it easily. You put your back teeth together
And
U
I do that.
Eight times.
And put
Vibration in my Vegas nerve.
This is every morning for sure.
And then I
Come back in, shut the garage door and
Usually then I look at what the temperature was'cause I think, Whoa that was pretty cool. Like this morning it was fourteen.
And you're outside in shorts.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm not uncomfortable at all.
But you know
I know other people who handle the cold way better than I do, but
The humming.
You know who does that Buddhist
Monks do that in the Himalayas and they do that in
Way colder weather.
With robes on.
It w actually will work if you can do it in a relaxed way.
You know, you start to learn
Sort of to anchor your cocksicks.
Um
Come back in.
Again
Take a shitload of vitamins and minerals and crap like that. Probably
Most of which I don't need, but I do it anyway.
And then make the bed.
Upstairs.
Always make the bed.
And then I do
Something physical too.
Finish waking up.
Today it was baby fit.
In a baby fit.
I do not know baby fit.
Russian.
Special ops do it in the morning.
Use your legs first five time and with each leg. Line
On your back with your arms.
Over your head.
Use your legs to turn yourself over the way a baby would.
And then you use your arms to do the same thing five times, five times.
Then you rock back and forth.
I do it.
Twins.
Do with your n
I do ten times usually.
And then a low crawl.
And
A bear crawl. You can either do a bear crawl with your butt up in the air or your butt lower than your shoulders.
I do it lower than my shoulders. Did you get John into this?
And and w what he said was makes so much sense. We spend so much of our time
looking at cell phones and computers and driving and doing so much stuff
Like that or like that. Right, with your head with your good to do that a bit. Get your neck extended instead of pitch down here. And I do a bear crawl and I
Like today I didn't do that many'cause I was thinking about you guys coming over here and I didn't want
So I just did twelve, but usually I do sixty
When it's warm out I'll use the lawn out there and uh it's usually it's like ninety to a hundred out.
This is yards or feet.
Feet, I guess. This is just moves. Oh, okay. That's quite a bit. I don't even know if I could do that. So that's one one thing I'd do. The other is
You know, like a really brief
warm up. When I say brief warm up, thirty seconds of running in place.
Swinging my arm.
Putting some synovial fluid in my joints.
And then
What I've been doing a lot is quick and dead.
For me, that's just
Ten kettlebell swings.
Either with a thirty two pound, I don't know, the K Gs in the thirties sixteen.
Or twenty four kilos. Wow. Or a fifty two. I stopped doing the fifty two because I screwed up my
muscle I'm learning about more muscles in my body with my old age.
But anyway, I do
Ten kettlebell swings.
Inside a minute, ten more inside a minute, wait a minute, get on the ground, do push ups.
Depends on how ambitious I am. I I'll either do
I rarely do straight push ups. I'll usually do fist push ups.
Or open finger.
Fish push ups.
Try finger push ups or
This one.
Which are
Oh I got it. The close hand more tricep push ups. Yeah, right. Back armor exercise.
Prison push ups.
So do ten of those, ten of those, wait a minute.
Back and forth.
And I'll do five rounds.
So inside of five rounds I've done a hundred K B swings and a hundred push ups.
Then I'm pretty much
Done.
With like specific
Working out if I wanna do
I used to do, you know, work out with like
Dumbbell and barbells and stuff like that.
Just for the
Chuckles of it. Every now and then I'll pick up
Some dumbbells just to play around, say, Can I still do this?
But I avoid that because
I'm eighty five.
I don't wanna mess with my joints and tendons and ligaments.
And I've discovered that
Bands.
Work just as well.
And they're way more merciful on your body.
I mean one point you talk about being eighty five, I absolutely take into account the fact that I'm
And the other thing I realized is that
Already at eighty five, my recuperation time is way longer than it used to be. If I do an all nighter now
It'll take me three days to get back.
When I was in the Marine Corps, I could get I'm not an exaggerating, I could get fifteen, twenty minutes of sleep.
Just tying myself to an armored personnel carrier.
I was good for seventy two hours.
For real.
And those days are long gone. Yeah. So and now also if I
Drink too much tequila. I'm gonna really feel it for two or three days.
All that stuff.
The one place where that I'm lucky I'm not bragging is really true.
is r my reaction to
I'm still
As quick as I used to be.
But what I'm r I realize is that
Could turn into
For people who can't see you just threw jab right in my face.
Thirty seconds from now.
I'm eighty five.
As at some point that's gonna go.
And if it does that's
I'll deal with it.
Those are some of the stuff that I do.
Aside from
The breathing stuff.
I used to think the most important muscles in the body were the butt, the hamstrings and the quads.
Lower body, big muscles.
And they're s not unimportant at all.
But now I believe that easily the most important muscle you have control of
mean, I guess yogis have control over their heart.
So that would work. I don't.
I can slow my heart rate down.
And that's pretty much it.
So the most important muscle in my body that I can have control over
For sure is the diaphragm.
Nothing else even gets close. And that
feed up thing over there.
I used to
Oh wow. Yeah, look at that. I know the feeling. Yeah, I'll like I'll like
Forget exactly how the diaphragm feels.
So I'll I'll invert myself.
And then drop my heels over so that they're against the wall.
really gently, as gently as possible.
And why I'm doing that is that can then take all the tension out of my shoulders and my hands and everything.
And then I just start
Breathing deeply.
If you're in that position
You won't be able to vertically breeze. You will not be able to. Let me just so if you start taking in big breaths.
You're gonna be introduced to your diaphragm right away. Well let me explain this for folks because a lot of people listening, a lot of my friends who are former athletes in their thirties or forties could not do this comfortably, so I want to explain it. So imagine there's a device called the feet up, but just for visual purposes, imagine that you took a
Let's call it a three inch cushion and put it on your toilet seat.
Emptied the toilet of water.
Put your head in the toilet and then kick your feet up, so you're basically doing a
The handstand on your shoulders. You can't shrug your shoulders or be very hard. So you have to then breathe through a diaphragm. So this is what Scott does at eighty five, just
For hashtag life goals for everybody listening. And do you exercise every morning?
No
I guess I kinda do.
I was thinking when I was doing Eugene the Marine, all I would do is
Well, actually I did do about sixty pace. I would do baby fit in the morning. That would be pretty much it,'cause I knew I'd
So much work to do during the day.
And a lot of it was super physical as martial arts stuff with
Training knives and
Stuff like that.
So
I'm not compelled to work out every day, but
At least every other day.
And the diaphragm stuff.
I use because like I say, I'm I'm super lazy as an actor. So I got this part in
Bad monkey.
I'm playing the shaman.
I get the part.
And then I frequently
How do I play somebody who talks to me in the teeth?
And I don't want to
I don't want to have to
technically figure that out as an actor, that's gonna be way too much work.
So
Sign me up for this thing with this guy named Erwan Lacour, who does natural movement. You probably know who he is. I do.
He also
would concur that the diaphragm is the most important muscle. And he's he's all about breathing and the course was all about breathing and meditation.
And everyone believes
For me it's true. It may not be true for other people, I don't know, but for me it's true.
Nope.
Thoughts are
Either trying to figure out problems, which we all do. What's how do I get from here to there, what's two plus two equal, that kind of thing.
Or it's a conversation
That you're writing the script.
And you're delivering to yourself.
When you say that, you mean these are like the stories you're creating. Yeah, so this is what Irwin believes. In a breath hold where you feel stress.
Because of the stress you ultimately feel when you're holding your breath.
Is you're afraid you're gonna die.
You're not.
Because
At a certain point.
Against your will, your body will take over and force you to breathe.
So he believes that if you have one
Fine.
To think about
And meditate on.
During
That breath hold.
You can rewire your central nervous system.
Now that sounds like woo woo stuff to a lot of people, but for me it actually worked.
So he said, Scott, what kind of conversations do you have? Are they basically
And he for one thing I said yeah.
They're minor being pissed off.
Being angry at somebody to my parking place or making up this

Push up.
So he said, I would suggest that you one of your meditations be peace.
Going the other direction.
So
At the end of this course
He gave us this thing. I've got it on my phone.
And it's what it is is six breath holds.
You decide how long you want them to be.
And they shouldn't be killer, but they should be long enough that they're difficult.
Because as everyone said, Keep telling yourself
I'm getting stronger and better with and because of the stress.
There are six.
And with diminishing amounts of rest between each one.
And I do those
Three times a week.
Er one says don't do them in succeeding days'cause it's probably not good for you and
So I don't.
But I do those these breath holds.
And I started doing them here.
While I got the part of
And I remember one time sit upright in bed.
And I yell, Whoa.
And Carol it's two thirty in the morning and Carol says, What, what?
I said, I found my man of tea and his name he's a French guy.
His name is Erwan Lacur.
What I meditate on are peace.
Clarity.
And focus. And when I say focus, I do mean physical focus, like a gunsight.
I'll pick up.
Tiny spot on the ceiling.
And
As I'm holding my breath.
I'll focus on that, but try to find the place of meditation that just lets me live there.
And I started off with doing a minute
I think I was doing a minute fifteen.
Anyway, right now I'm doing a minute
Forty.
Six yeah. Performs free diving will tell you the of record my longest
Breath holders four minutes and fifteen seconds.
I'm sure that look might even be longer now. I don't know.
But up here.
I'm at one forty, but
What I'm aiming for
I would like by the time I hit eighty six the benchmark for me is two minute breath holes. Those are real.
Yeah.
That's very real. So uh
But I'm at a minute forty right now.
Well I was gonna say about good luck.
And this is just pure good luck.

Just accept it, no.
When I need to learn something, the best teacher in the world
materializes right in front of me.
So I w I wanna ask you about this,'cause it seems like this is gonna be a leading question, but it's uh
Uninformed observation. It seems like
From LA to Idaho, you loosen your grasp on something and then
This opportunity
This amazing opportunity presents itself for this this career changing role. Yeah. And it seems like that's happened a few times. How would you explain that?
I would like to
be some kind of intellectual giant which I am
Definitely not.
Average.
Maybe a little bit above average intelligence, but not much.
That's not false modesty. That's for real.
If people ask me
Am I a good
Shot with a handgun. My honest answer is above average.
A lot? No.
Above average.
But I'm a really good instructor. I can teach anybody
Probably to expert level how to shoot a handgun.
Am I a good shot with a rifle? Yes I am.
Can I teach
People well how to no, I'm the world's worst teacher. I don't do anything right.
I don't get a consistent spot well and I I don't do any of this.
I just
Been doing it since I was so young. I just do it.
And it works out.
My great fortune in life
And I used to be amazed by
No, I just accept it is
Okay, I got into the actor studio by accident.
And I got by accident.
Lee Strasberg is my
own personal
Stand alone.
Teacher and coach.
The best in the world.
I'd never plan on that happening. It just happened.
I'm out at the range shooting.
guy next to me who's w watching me shoot and he says you're pretty good at doing this, but I could give you some pointers. Come on over to my house tomorrow.
And I'll show you what I know. His name was John Shaw.
World champion.
Kurt Johnstead calls me up when I'm in LA and says
You wanna know about
combat shooting that's not military, but the real civilian stuff.
L A P D S I S
Come on out to the eagle's nest.
And meet this guy, Scotty Reid.
And we become
We took a course to raise. We become really good friends and
He's my teacher.
I'm down in the Baja.
This is
How stupid I truly am.
Down the Baja.
And for two years I've been scuba diving.
Without any instruction, and I should be dead.
I use my BC.
At almost a hundred feet to rocket myself to the surface.


So I'm in this bar and I've just spent a day doing this.
Oh man.
And I'm s talking about it like I'm the coolest person to ever lived. And this guy walks up to me
in his sixties pop bellied guy and he looks at me and he said
You're a real asshole.
And for whatever reason
I don't know if it was in his
What about him?
Saying that to me, but I came to attention.
No, should
Why, sir?
And he
Got a big grin and he looked at me and he said.
Okay, you're army airborne or marine, which one?
And I said
Bring her, sir.
And he laughed.
And he said.
I'm here with my girlfriend. I'm standing in that room. You show up tomorrow and give me the next six days of your life. Shop tomorrow.
With coffee.
At eight.
Forty five, not before, not after.
And I'll teach you how to scuba dive and certify you. And then he walks out of the bar.
And the owner of the bar, just guy John Ireland, walks over to me and I tell him about it.
He said, Do you have any idea who that was? And I said, No, he said
That was
James Stewart
I said Jim Stewart, yeah, Jimmy Stewart, the actor.
He said no, like Jim Stewart Dive Master Emeritus at Scripps Institute.
Jim Stewart who wrote the syllabus.
For the SEO themes.
Jim Stewart, who's the only person
Who can sign the chit that says you're allowed to dive in the Antarctica?
Jim Stewart.
Who's now he card is number one. And Jacques said is arguably the greatest scuba diver that ever lived.
That's who's gonna teach you and certify you. And he did. I mean so I mean it's again again, I'm out here of skill actors. I'm out I'm out here in the summertime
And I'm talking about what does it feel like to be a bird? Because when I was in the service I never free fall. I d never did free fall.
Like him and I
S F and SEALs do it all.
But I've done static line jumps, so
I'm telling somebody at this cocktail party
This guy walks up to me and he said.
You want a free fall? I'll teach you.
Come over to my house tomorrow afternoon or hang him from my porch.
I'll teach you.
Malfunctions and major malfunctions and how to deal with them.
And we'll go jumping.
And I said
Why should I trust you? And he said, Because I'm four times world champion.
I'm the only person allowed
To videotape the golden knights. If you know anything about jumping.
Video taping
Skydivers is the easily the most dangerous part.
Because of all the stuff you can
All the things that can go wrong. Yeah. So
I said
Are we gonna tandem jump? He said, No, you already told me you was you're a static line jumper.
Well
Put a two by four assessment.
We'll go up.
We'll use the two by four to launch ourselves out on the strut of the wings, hang on to it.
He said you'll go first.
I said, What will you do? He said, I'll come after you.
He said, Just do jump off and establish a hard arch and he showed me how to do that. And I said, Okay, but then what'll I do? And he said, Well jump.
Off.
Catch up with you.
I want you to
Panamine, but don't do it. Panamine.
Pull your ripcord.
You yell to me what your altitude is.
We'll go out
Hopefully fifteen thousand.
And when you hit three thousand you don't pan a mime anymore, you actually pull the ripcord.
And pump air into the
Cells of his parachute and
That's the way it'll work.
It did.
It worked that way perfectly.'Cause he was so good, he would bullet dive down
And be as far from me as I am from you right now.
Like four feet. I mean again and again and again.
The best person not like
Oh, this person's kinda good at what they do. They're as good at it as anybody on the
Fucking planet Earth.
And they're gonna teach you.
And the one
Thing I will say.
And hopefully yeah.
Whoever is hearing this will take it to heart.
There's part of me that's really a good student.
And here's the part of me that's really a good student.
I'm willing to fall on my ass in front of people.
The embarrassment of screw up and being clumsy and falling on my ass in front of people.
Is not
Great enough to keep me from doing it.
And that's the trick to being a good student.
Yeah.
I heard someone say recently.
Very high performer, blanking on the attribution, but they were taught by a mentor something and I'm paraphrasing but they said
In order to be
Excellent at anything, you have to first be willing to be extremely crappy at it.
That's so true. I mean it's like with martial arts you've done them enough, so I know I'm talking to somebody
The two of you guys.
Understand this. Okay, so I'm going to Thailand to do this T V show.
White loaders. But I r I I can't really talk about it because they're s very secretive, but
I'm gonna be in Thailand, so I called up a friend.
And
Just'cause I love the word Krebee Crabone.
I mean it's so cool. Kribi Kurong.
Little
Babies probably like to say it too.
But it's uh Thai martial art and it's the weapons side of Mui Thai.
When you're really good at it, you use razor sharp double swords.
But
When you begin it
It's just rattan sticks.
And what I want to do in Thailand is not learn Krabby Krabong or be taught
secret moves or any of that.
I just want someone to show me
The absolute
Basement Cellar Foundation. What are the moves that you need to be able to
I know they won't be complicated. I know there'll be something that with
Just pure repetition.
I can do again and again. So
That's what I'm gonna do when I get to Thailand. And you've done I mean you've done a lot of knife work also. I imagine that some of the movies do the movement pattern about it. Probably translate really well. One thing you should definitely try to do while you're there if you can, is go to Lumpini Stadium or Rajadomnan to watch the Muay Thai fights. I
Been to both of those before.
I did a film in Thailand
As an actor. I've been in Thailand
A few times, but I was there as an actor doing a movie called Off Limits.
And it was the king's birthday.
And he was turning sixty, and if you know but the lesser vehicle of Buddhism, you become an adult at sixty.
It's the end of the fifth cycle for twelve years. Yeah.
So his birthday was all year long. And we lost locations.
And so my week and a half or two week job
wasn't gonna happen for at least two months.
So I said to them, Why don't you just keep me here in a hotel?
Rather than spend first class plane tickets back and forth back.
And I
Bring Carol over and we can go to Bucat and
Have fun.
So we did that.
But while I was there
The movie is kind of a sad movie to me because two of my friends who were in the movie who played much bigger parts than me
Are no longer alive.
When was Gregory Hines?
Who I loved.
And Gregory I knew from martial arts, from doing Korean martial arts in New York.
He was really good at it.
He's the only person I ever saw. He on his passport, you know, where you put occupation
His said tap dancer. He was amazing. He died of liver cancer. And the other was Fred Ward.
Who died of Alzheimer's?
But Fred was
Fred was an amazing athlete. Fred had a a uh silver boot in
Box full of say.
Savat.
When he was in Thailand he trained Mi Mui Thai with
The people from Russia than um Oh yeah, Iraq. And so he brought me well at one point I remember he brought me into
Work out with those guys. I wouldn't hit
Palm trees with my hands raised like that. But
They they had heavy bags and stuff like that too.
Yeah, and Fred told me that
God gave me a right hook and I said, Yeah, I know that part.
But we went Fred and I went across the border
Illegally into what was then Burma in the g up in the Golden Triangle at uh Dangerous Area. Three Pagoda Pass.
Yeah, so I had had adventures.
In Thailand
And saw a lot of m weah. Oh yeah. The the art of eight limbs beautiful and brutal.
And very effective. All right. I wanna revisit for a second.
This luck because
There's luck, different degrees of luck.
And
A lot of it's outside of your control, but it seems like there's certain ways you can increase the surface area in your life that luck can stick to. And one is by being a good student, for instance. That increases the likelihood that luck is gonna stick to you. Are there any other
recommendations you would have for people who want to increase the type of serendipity
And luck that you've experienced. Are there any other ingredients that you can
Play with?
If you have the good fortune to fall in love with and find yourself with a Jewish girl from Brooklyn
Don't fight her about anything,'cause number one you're gonna lose.
And number two, she's gonna take you in a much better direction than you ever figured.
Let's go go deep down that rabbit hole then. So relationship. We've talked about
about career, we've talked about some fitness.
Long
Durable, good relationships.
With a partner. Any advice for people out there?
'Cause especially in your w I would imagine, in the world of entertainment, this is a rarity, I would have to think.
From the outside looking in.
Again, it was my good fortune to just
Well
Completely in love with this woman.
How did the two of you meet?
In a movie theater in New York.
The girl I been kind of
Not really living with, but semi living with off and on.
And I had broken up and she just tried to kill herself.
And uh
I had a friend who who now is teaching school in Iraq of all places.
His name is Jeff Sigans. At any rate he
Called me up and he said we're going to the movies
Murray Hill Cinema.
Me and the group of people are gonna want to come with us. And I said, Sure.
So
Carol was one of them.
I'd never met her before.
I sat next to her in the movie theater.
And I just felt these w
I didn't touch her or anything. I just felt these waves of
I don't know what it was, but some
And I'd fallen in lust.
Probably at least a couple thousand times in my life.
And pursued that you know with
Full vigor.
But I've never really f fallen in love.
Anyway, so the movie came to an end and everybody got up to leave.
And for whatever reason I turned to Carol and I said, I think I want to sit through this and watch it again She said, Yeah, me too.
So we sat through the whole movie again.
Not even touching.
And the movie.

In that period of time
It was like magical.
We walked out of the theater and there was probably half a foot of snow everywhere.
So we went out and we played in the snow.
It was getting late and Carol said
And I I was doing a play.
But I was off that night.
She said, You want to spend the night? And I said, Yeah.
Oh yeah.
So I went over and she cooked
Spaghetti and meatballs and we had beer.
And at the end of dinner.
She
Went into the bedroom, came out with a pillow, threw it on the couch and said, This is a turns into a bed.
There were blankets on it. Have a good night. Went back into the bedroom, shut the door and went to sleep.
Oh.
Okay.
So the next morning we had breakfast and we played in the snow some more.
And I was gonna say goodbye to her.
And I thought
I'm not gonna even try to hug her and kiss her'cause if I do this and she does one of those pullways.
My whole world will collapse.
How I knew that, I don't know. So
I said I had a really good time and I held my hand, I shook her hand goodbye.
And then
For the next week.
I would open my I have a
Predictably a little black book and I would open it up and I would
Call a phone number and
A young woman would answer hello.
Hello, and I wouldn't say anything and I would just hang up.
I went through one phone and I've got to do it.
And finally I thought, Who are you kidding? You want to see her.
That's who you want to see.
So I called her up and I told her my T V was broken and there was something I wanted to watch on television.
That Saturday night, I think it was, and she said, Okay.
So I get down to her apartment
She's
Got makeup on and she's all dressed up and she's Oh, I've got a date tonight, but you know where the fridge is
And there's the
Nurse of T V and so have knock yourself out.
I shut.
Literally two feet away from I was so pissed off. I was just fucking really pissed off.
Yeah, if I had been a dog I would have been growling. So I'm w looking at the T I'm not watching the T V.
And I hear the downstairs bell go dong dong.
And I hear Carol say
I remember the guy's name to this day, Earl.
She okay, Earl.
A Bas
And I'm w looking at the TV and then I'm hearing that
Fr open and I'm hearing Earl say, Whoa you look hot tonight and I hear Carol say, Listen, Earl.
An old friend of my brother's just dropped by. I haven't seen him in a long time.
I'm not going out with you tonight.
You can see
The emotion I'm filled with right now. You can.
Right? Yes.

She shut the door.
Walked into the living room.
And that was
About fifty five years ago. Wow.
Incredible.
What would Carol
Add to
This Genesis story. If she were sitting here with us.
What else would she add?
Tell me I was full of shit and wrap it up and you got you got shopping to do for me today.
Ha ha.
I'll this I'll say about her because she's not here right now.
And I've seen it with enough people
And what it is about her I
I don't know, and maybe I don't wanna know.
But even with he's no longer alive, but I remember when
She and I first met.
Freddie Fields.
Who was the toughest
Hardest ass agent Hollywood is old school.

Within ten minutes of meeting her,
He desperately wanted her approval.
I've never seen anybody around her who doesn't want her to say you're okay.
W what is that about her? She
Comes from
I think now it's thirty thirty five unbroken generations of
Jewish rabbis.
And Israeli airborne or whatever.
I don't know. Maybe that's part of it.
But that is true about her.
People want her to say
They're okay.
What that quality is in her, I don't know, but
It's there, that's for sure.
She is funny. You know, and
Doesn't take seriously a lot of the stuff I do and laughs at it and
Keep sort of like
Properly puts me in my place.
I have to ask, and I may get the name wrong here.
You mentioned Gregory Hines.
You spent some time.
At least as I understand it.
A brief but intense period with modern dance, I think.
And
Let's see if this goes somewhere. Playing pool with Nuriev.
In New York City? Is my game the name right? No, that was uh I I was
Dancing with a guy named Matt Maddox, who is
Phenomenal. And I remember at one point I said, How do I get better at this?
It was when I quit dancing almost altogether.
He should stop.
Acting.
Stop doing martial arts.
Stop.
Wrestling working out. Don't do anything else. Just dance. You want to get better.
You're at that point right now.
And I quit dancing.
Because I
Couldn't go all in.
I ran into Nuriev while we were doing the right stuff in San Francisco and New York City Ballet had moved to San Francisco for the year.
And I met him
And he had seen
Urban cowboy.
And
Mm.
Told me that I was a
Much realer, better cowboy than John Travolta would ever be.
And by the way, John Travolta pretty much sucked as his dancer too.
So
I remember at one point we were down in the basement of this place called Tosca's a bar in New York. I mean I'm sorry in San Francisco. They had a pool.
And we were
Shooting for
And
Drinking.
Me
In a minor way.
He in a major way.
Vodka.
I remember one point I said to him
Well, you Russians can really hold your vodka and he stopped.
Got really angry, looked at me, he said, I am NOT Russian.
No, I said
What are you? He said, I'm a Latvian.
That was the first time it ever dawned on me that
These parts of Russia that I thought were
Kind of
Along with
Putin.
We're actually Russian
were more like
Ukraine.
They had their own identity, their own sense of who they were.
And it meant something, and certainly did Genuria.
He was in the
Some ways the best physical shape of any human being I've ever been around. I watched him go down a flight of long stairs.
On his hand.
I mean he was

He would invite me to come and watch the New York City ballet work out and they
Makarova.
who was the best prima ballerina in the world at the time. I would watch her
On point.
Not coming down from point, spinning one direction, three directions, four back and forth.
Chain smoking two camels at the same time.
It was the weirdest world because it was a world where there was zero fitness in that way.
And yet they were the
Outrageous athletes. I mean like
Stuff that
Triple back black belts and shot a con couldn't even dream about doing.
These g people did
He's really.
I did want to talk about poetry.
Okay. Sure.
I believe you've written a fair amount of poetry.
What is the and we already spoke earlier a bit as we were discussing Judaism of these scriptures as
Poetry slash parables for living. Yeah.
What does poetry mean to you? Why write poetry? Why read poetry?
Poetry to me is the along with physical
Art scratching on the side of a wall.
Oh.
This is one of the things.
One of your books, Friction's Out.
Elemental way that
human beings have
To communicate
Ideas and feelings.
Real deep ideas and feelings.
And also because as I said, I grew up with
Probably, but I don't want to know for sure.
The myth that I'm directly related to
Lord Byron.
Who had a club foot.
But
Swam the Hellispon and
Fought in Greeks war of
Liberation from Turkey and
He did all this stuff and was
You know, an outrageous
Coxman and
Mainly he was a poet.
Sure.
Belief that I have that in
In me.
But what happened with Carol was I wrote a poem to her every
Christmas Hanukkah time.
And at a certain point
On her fiftieth anniversary, she said I wanna
Publish these. Is it okay with you?
And I said correctly.
It's not up to me.
I'm not uh
I can say Indian giver'cause I've got Comanche blood and so I don't mind using the word.
If I give something, it's yours. It's not mine. You can rip up those pages and wipe your ass with it.
So she said, Well I'm gonna publish it, self publish.
So uh that was
Room service.
That's not that book.
And then
During the pandemic there was no acting happening anywhere.
And then right after that I had a brief period of time when I could work and then the w the strike happened.
But during the pandemic, which was about two years long.
All I could really do
Aside from work out and
Hang out with Carol.
Was write poetry.
I wouldn't even know if I would call it
I leave it to other people to say whether that's poetry or not. I don't know.
But the thing about the pandemic that I realized
with relationships is a lot of people who are in love with each other
Had to discover whether they liked each other or not.
And what I discovered with Carol was
I liked her better than anybody I knew.
Even to this day we're like
Agoraphobic Hermit. We'd have no problem
I don't need the company of
Anybody.
Anyway, that
Friction zone.
Is
Kind of what came out of the pandemic.
And it's not
big heavy duty stuff f you know friction zone is.
Friction zone is where you want to be with a big heavy motorcycle like a Harley Davidson to drive it slowly.
You're
Slipping the clutch.
Constantly slipping the clutch.
With a little bit of power on the
So the metaphor for that just
But anyway. How do you apply that metaphor outside of
Riding a motorcycle like that.
Trusting that
Your body will do the right thing.
So when you're riding a say a big Harley
I can tell you this acomatically.
When you're driving a big Harley and you're going over twenty five miles an hour, you ride like any other motorcycle.
If it's a street bike.
Just remember the following dictum.
Front break.
Until you're really sure about how it works only. Stay away from the rear brake.
Dirt bite the opposite.
Under twenty five miles an hour, if you're going under
Twelve miles an hour.
You keep
The power on, slipping the clutch.
And you will go.
Where your head looks.
If you look down at the ground, I guarantee you you're gonna dump the bite.
I like the metaphor. So we're gonna wrap this up.
I'm wondering.
Just as a way of landing this plane.

And wrapping up, what advice let's just say
Ten years from now your grandkids are listening to this.
And they're wondering what life advice I would give them both the lessons I learned from Sir Lawrence and from my dad.
Which is if you love it, make it your life.
Right along with that.
Be tenacious.
Warren.
That the most important thing about being knocked down is getting back up.
And if you can put yourself in the spot where you say
I don't care how many times I get knocked down, I'm getting back up every single time and going after what I want.
That's the answer.
I mean again
I'm in a bar with Laurence Olivier.
Who created the National Theater of England.
Who was the biggest movie star in the world
was the m most creative stage actor in the world and director. He'd done everything.
My question to him was
What is it?
That you need to make it in this business.
Yeah.
Timing.
Right place at the right time. Is it contacts, knowing the right people?
Or is it just working on your skills?
And becoming better and better at what you do, he said, My dear boy, none of the above.
Develop very strong jaw muscles, learn how to bite on and not let go.
I said, You're telling me it's just
Pure tenacity.
His answer was
Yes.
If you're a monk outside the gates with a beggar's bull and you stay out there long enough,
They'll finally get sick of seeing you open the gates and let you in.
That is fantastic. Scott, thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you. What fun.
I blabed away a lot. That's the whole point. That's the whole blueprint. And uh you know, maybe we'll get a chance to go out and shoot again. And for those people listening, I think uh a little birdie told me that with open sights you can still hit targets at four hundred yards, maybe beyond.
I don't know about well, there was a time in my life and I have witnesses that
Because it sounds out
I could with
Steel sites hit six hundred yards.
Whether I can right now at eighty five.
Probably not, but who knows? I mean, I could get the dragon off down
In warm weather I'm gonna
I'll give it a shot.

Use uh horrible, horrible metaphor.
Well, I'm curious to see if I can get my ass upside down on the feet up after this of uh after being inspired by your daily routine.
So
Thank you so much for the time.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Pulit Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.
It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts.
guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out
Just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser. Tim.blog slash.
Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one.
Thanks for listening.
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So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times.
in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous standards and high quality ingredients.
How many ingredients? 75. And you would be hard pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multi-mineral, superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an antioxidant immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help manage stress. Now I do my best, always.
to eat nutrient dense meals. That is
the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements.
Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible, it is not always easy.
So part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So each morning, AG1.
That's just
Like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sport, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 bad substances. It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop.
So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out.
go to drinkag1.com slash Tim.
That's drinkag1, the number one. DrinkAG1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out.