#937 - Jeremy Renner - How To Overcome The Worst Pain Of Your Life

Are you sick of people asking you how you are?

No, no, no.

I mean, it's,

well, there's a real honest answer that comes behind it, right?

Whether they're asking or not, you know, you get a real honest answer.

And

sometimes it's in the inopportune times.

I remember doing a podcast, but it was over Zoom, right?

And

the technical issues that were happening to set it up and the thing and what mic to use and how to use this.

I mean, I'm not the tech guy.

guy.

And I was getting very frustrated and I was getting probably pretty angry.

And like the beginning of this podcast was probably pretty awful.

I was quite, quite a cunt.

But they asked you, look, I'm sorry.

I'm just going to work through this and a thing.

I'm not going to tech.

And I just,

I just have this real, realist, honest way to kind of live.

So I'm not sick in the long, long, the long way to answer this.

Yeah, I'm not really sick of people asking how I am because I just really do tell them.

And if they do care about, you know, if it's, it's, if it's about the recovery or if it's about just sort of my health or even mental health,

you know, I don't care how they intend it.

I just sort of explain kind of how I am in a really truthful, honest way.

It's quite beautiful.

Have you always been like that?

I've always been pretty direct, but I don't think I'd be as open and revealing.

I'm much more open and revealing because of having to focus on myself so much.

Why do you think that is?

No time to obfuscate or sort of play the social more game.

Yeah, I was never good at that, man.

I'm in a crowd of people.

I'll get anxiety and, you know, I'd have to like medicate with alcohol or something to sort of calm the nerves of being around so many people.

I always think if it's going to be a fire, so many people are going to die and people are going to get hurt.

People are kind of terrible to each other in large crowds.

The more people in a room, the respect level for humanity kind of diminishes.

Yeah, the more humans they are, the less humane they are.

Exactly.

And I just refuse to be in that environment because I think it's disgusting.

That behavior, I'm very affected by it and very sensitive to it.

So I just choose not to be in those environments.

It sounds like you've got, I don't know, a little bit of a nervous disposition.

I think I would say that that's my kind of background too.

Thinking, sometimes overthinking,

looking for potential errors and issues and maybe being a little bit sensitive to the energy of what's going on around you.

Definitely very sensitive.

I've always been an observer and quite insular in kind of

my thoughts and things.

I'm not a talker of small things.

I can't really have any quite small, trivial talk.

I certainly can have a good time and tell jokes and da-da-da, but most of the conversations I have are quite in-depth or quite thoughtful or spiritual or psychological,

emotionally driven, connective, sort of tissue.

Not just sort of like, let's just talk about

the Starbucks order.

I mean, I just don't belong in that conversation.

You know what I mean?

But that's just me, right?

So I just, you know, when I know those things about myself, I just try to put myself not in those situations.

So I don't set myself up to fail.

Is there a challenge with wanting that level of openness, that level of emotional connection, vulnerability, but also having an additional level of scrutiny?

Lots and lots of attention, press, people caring, so on.

These kind of two things are a little bit at odds there.

Yeah, but not now.

It used to be because

the platform was to

be a famous person talking about a movie or some work you did.

This is not that, right?

I'm here today to talk about health and wellness and overcoming obstacles.

And it's nothing more human than so it feels much more personal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's more,

I think, exciting because I think

there are

willing ears.

I don't have to force, hey, I'm here to tell you about this Avenger movie.

And here I played.

There was a lot of willing ears for the Avenger movie.

Yeah, there was a lot of willing ears, but I couldn't really talk about anything.

And then, you know, you're kind of, I thought you were selling something, but you're kind of selling something.

This, I'm not, man.

I really am not.

And it's,

there's, I think, I still am not sure

how and why there is

interest in something and me dying, coming back, perhaps.

You know, I don't really know what's interesting.

I can tell you why it's interesting to me.

When you know why it's interesting to me, is that I'm not fucking dead.

That's why it's really cool, man.

I don't know for anybody else, they're still alive.

They're all doing great.

For me, I'm happy just to kind of keep moving through my days and getting better.

And that's really exciting to me.

That makes me feel quite alive.

Did it feel

it sounds like one of the byproducts of movie stardom is a bit of constriction then?

then a level of constraint that must be day-to-day.

Hello, sir.

You need to be awake in the trailer at this time.

We need to have you in hair and makeup by then.

These are the lines.

These are the scenes.

This is sit in the seat.

Hang on.

Sorry, the DP's fucked it again.

You're going to have to sit back down for another 90 minutes while he tries to fix the lighting.

Yeah.

But then as you spread out into the public world as well, it's this is pretty carefully controlled.

We need to be focused toward the movie, like box office, box office, box office.

In that way, has this been a

sort of break glass moment that's allowed you to sort of really step outside of yourself and not feel so constrained by just being the movie person?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's been that way for a minute, but now there's sort of a sort of byproduct of this change,

this shift from,

you know, being famous for XYZ, for whatever it is for people,

and then now it kind of wipes it wipes away, at least temporarily, that it's more about the man that I am, but I've I've overcome some obstacles and not that I have a fake bow and arrow in a movie.

You know, it's

something much more real and something really quite tender and beautiful.

I get these amazing exchanges on the street instead of like the rude sort of in the middle of spaghetti dinner, you know, with my daughter taking selfies that I owe them apparently.

It's now like, well, glad you're here.

You fought through something really amazing, whatever.

It's like really thoughtful, amazing, almost like sort of fortune cookie lines of like just beautiful um sentiments that are connective and not like

i deserve a selfie

it's it's really flipped on its head and it's quite beautiful it's it's the you not the character yeah yeah and that's what makes this kind of exchange so great i don't know i have no idea what i'm going to talk about or have anything really to say except i can have a conversation about real things and if you have certain things you know you write down like i think this is interesting or let's talk about this.

And

I can do that because all I have to do is be me.

And that's, that's the coolest thing to be.

But I don't typically get to do that because I'm out, like you're saying.

Is it some other sort of kind of like when your life's planned out every 10 minutes and you know, you get a bathroom break and I could, I can be me and go to the house.

Yeah, your bathroom breaks are scheduled.

Hell yeah.

You're kidding.

Sometimes they're not.

Right, okay.

Just hold it in.

Especially if you're going press tours and things like that.

Yeah, yeah.

It's pretty, it's pretty crazy, but you know,

do the things you love, man.

That's it.

Just do the things I love and don't worry about it.

I uh

I wonder how many

I wonder how many other guys and girls from your industry have this sort of odd cathartic daydream of something happening to them that kind of relinquishes them.

I'm not

yeah, I don't

fueled the kids.

What is it that you really admire about Jeremy's career?

Well, you know, the Avengers thing was was all right, but that bit where he got ran over by the snowplow, that really was peaking.

Yeah.

It is.

It really is, man.

I mean, I highly recommend it.

At least if the outcome is my outcome.

Yep.

I don't recommend it, right?

It's excruciating.

But the amount of gifts that came from such a thing, I think, are,

I guess to me, I mean, it's all my life is and what it's filled with gratitude and love and truth and

pure joy.

It's just really clear, like all the white noise is gone.

And

for someone to have that in their life,

do you have to die to do it?

No.

It's part of the reason why I wrote the book.

There's a lot of things I did learn and maybe other people can.

And there's a lot of people that struggle.

I got some life hacks to help you with struggle and pain and pain management,

all those type of things.

Even as a famous person, there is some like probably, I think could be some envious things to, like you said, from it, because there was a lot of great things that came from such a horrific moment.

But I'd, again, I'd do it again in two seconds for the right reason.

I'd probably

not jump back on that machine this time.

I don't know what I'd do.

What were you actually trying to do?

You were trying to stop it from hitting.

To crush, from crushing my nephew.

Nephew.

Yeah, I have from this big giant snowblade, and you're just going towards him.

And he was at the truck that was perpendicular.

It was going to trying to crush him

so you jumped up to get the cockpit to try to stop it right

yeah it knocked me off and it hit the wrong button and it knocked me off and it went forward on him i'm off on i'm off on the screen so the machine's running on its own now

that's never happened so yeah

yeah so i probably wouldn't jump back on the machine or maybe i would you know yeah you know you don't get the opportunity to think and reflect back on what you do you know you just do it or don't and that i'd rather be me than my nephew you know what i mean I don't want to deal with like the haunting images of on New Year's Day, my nephew split in half, you know.

Yeah,

it's strange thinking about these people that come up to you and they see you.

They see something that's really true to you.

And I don't know, I wonder how many people, how many other people, even if it's not as performative as being an actor, have this sense of having to show up as someone.

And when someone comes up and says, well done, there's a degree of hollowness to the praise because this is me, but it's me as a performer.

It's not me, right?

Right.

I'm aware that this is an artistic outlet for you.

It's a calling that you have in life.

Somebody's a musician.

Somebody's

a presentation, a coach that goes into businesses.

Somebody's a PT, whatever.

I really loved what you did with my wife's transformation for her wedding or whatever.

Thank you so much.

It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but like...

What about me?

Yeah, as a media.

You just have to, yeah.

Look,

there's great things that come with being famous, and it allows a lot of freedoms and a lot of more choices as for hopefully doing something you love to do.

Hopefully, you're not famous for like being a serial killer or something, right?

But being, you know, in the world, if you're a famous football player or whatever the heck it is, you just have to sort of

take take, you know, yeah, that's going to be a feeling.

You're not going to be seen and witnessed, but how, and how they see you, like, I like to be, I'm glad I'm seen as the, at least they're picking out the right roles.

Oh, I love you in this.

I love you in the hurtlock.

I love you in the town.

I love you.

They're not picking out something from, from, you know, back in 94 or something.

They're picking out the right ones.

I'm like, good, I'm glad you like me for those ones.

I'm happy about those movies too.

And yeah, there's, there's, I don't take emptiness with it.

Like, I look at it from like

it's, it's, you have to sort of uh filter through, uh, this is what they know you as.

You know what I mean?

And not, and, and then you go at the end of the day, and there's too much of it.

You're like, okay, look, I just need to, I can only have much tolerance to deal with, okay, I'm still a human being.

I can't, I'm just not this cardboard cut out of me, right?

That people know me as.

So that's why, you know, I just, but I make decisions about that.

Like, I'll stay home more often or I, I have to, unless I have a lot of tolerance in my tank of tolerance to like, so I can emotionally accept this and have my time.

And I'm touched and pulled and fingered and all sorts of weird things happen.

Is that you got to have enough tolerance to be fingered?

Yeah, to be fingered.

Now, I don't get none of the, yeah, it's not so bad.

Now, I think people look at me, or at least least I feel like they look at me with more fragility, so they don't come in, like, throw me around or like smash me around a bit and pull me.

It feels a little different now, which is, which is great.

I'm grad.

I'm great.

Okay.

Happy about that.

Yeah.

So

the kind of elephant in the room, I guess, and I didn't know that you'd gone through your accident.

I didn't know that that had happened.

I was like, you know,

yeah, Jeremy must he did the, and then the series and then the Avengers finished.

And then maybe that that came back.

And there's a series for that.

And oh, yeah, just you know, you kind of weren't there, and then you were.

So, if you hadn't seen this bit in between, if you'd just been watching like the wrong kind of headlines, right, right, nothing would have occurred.

Yeah.

Uh, so for the people that sort of weren't aware of what happened, there's something to do with the snowplow.

Can you give the

overview?

Yeah, the overview.

Um, it was it's a um

uh

well

had my overview,

it was hard enough to recount to write the book, you know.

But it was, you know, now I got to write the trailer.

Okay, so

the settings in Lake Tahoe, and it's New Year's, and we always have my family in New Year's, and we were snowed in for a few days,

sort of Armageddon, snowmagged and we called it, type of thing.

So we had no power, no electricity, nothing.

And we were having a great time.

But New Year's Day, it was going to be sunny.

So I had to clear the driveway so we can get out and get some fresh air and that type of thing and uh in the mountains uh

you know it's you're at 8 000 feet elevation you get a ton of snow so we have like probably 10 12 feet of snow so that's like sand you know you got to move this stuff to kind of

get it out when we're supposed to go skiing and all that stuff ends up having i'm taking the snow cat which is used a snow cat if you don't know what it is it's like a like a tank it moves on the snow it's about 16 000 pounds wet

And it's got a big shovel in the front of it and it usually drags behind it, you know, stuff, but it's like a tank and it turns like a tank or a skid steer.

So it's pretty nimble and it floats on the snow because it has these steel tracks and they're wide.

So kind of like snowshoes, if you will, right?

So you don't sink in it.

But, which is great for that.

But we took it up to the end of the driveway, which is about half a mile long.

We were taking cars that were stuck in the snow and things that were buried.

You don't even know what's underneath all that snow.

So you have to be very careful.

So we're dragging all this stuff out of there.

So we have a driveway.

So we have access to maybe go get food, supplies, something, anything, right?

So we take this snow cat and drag all the stuff out.

The final one was my truck, and we got it to the top of the mountain where there's a plowed driveway and where it's hard and we can actually maneuver a bit better.

And then my nephew just takes the help of my nephew, Alex.

And

so, and we've done this a thousand times.

I mean, it's, this is like mowing the lawn for us up there in the mountains.

It was just a, we were on this, it's kind of a slope, and it was very icy, and we were sliding, and I didn't like it.

I was sliding towards him as he was trying to unhook a chain from this giant machine.

And

so I turned it around to try to talk to him.

Couldn't see him, and I was sliding towards him.

So I backed up.

But again, you have to understand this machine.

You have to see this machine to understand, but you have to step on these giant tracks, the things that roll and move, to get in and out of the machine anyway.

There's nothing else.

There's no little ladder.

There's no form.

There's no ladder.

There's nothing.

You just have to jump onto the giant metal tracks and then you jump into the cab to start driving this thing, right?

Kind of a design flaw, if you ask me, because

it's really unsteady.

Anyway,

it's not really a pedestrian type of vehicle.

This is a

commercial vehicle for

ski slopes, right?

Right.

Typically, people aren't hopping in, hopping out, hooking a whatever.

Yeah, it's a shift.

Yeah, exactly.

And so it's just one of those things.

I have to step out to try to talk to him, to hear him, and all these things.

At any rate, and there's a little toggle switch on the steering column.

That's what will move it forwards and backwards and put it in neutral.

And I just keep going backwards just so I could, I don't slide into him because I can't really see him.

And then in doing so, I'm sleeping on the tracks, hit the button wrong, it threw me off.

And now the machine's rushing towards him.

I have no idea.

I know he's within between the truck, and that's 10 feet away.

I get up as quick as I can, and I just quickly jump back on this machine, or try to jump back in the cab, leaping up and over three feet, these spinning tracks.

And then, you know, I don't make it, and I get caught underneath this machine, and it crushes me.

It rolls over like a tank would run over

a log.

It's, you know, doesn't think,

does it?

And

it didn't crush my nephew,

which is great.

But

that would have been a real double whammy.

Oh, yeah, that would have been terrible.

Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, yeah, wouldn't my body slow it down a little bit?

Probably not.

Probably not.

This thing will climb up a tree.

This thing, it's gnarly.

The power of this machine is quite insane.

It's impressive.

You need it.

It's the only thing that'll kind of operate in that kind of snow, that kind of

just kind of crazy conditions.

And so at any rate,

you can edit this the way you want, but then at the end of the day, I break like 38 bones, my skull cracks open, and my eyeball comes out.

I can see my eyeball with my other eye.

I can't breathe.

I'm awake the whole time during this thing.

And I have to survive for 45 minutes on the ice till I get hella lifted out of there.

And a lot of the book is about, tells you about that experience because there's a lot of things.

There's a death and coming back.

And

there's a lot.

There's a lot of mindset stuff, a lot of fortitude.

Mental acuity is what got me through.

Physical, I mean, there's a lot of things that got me through.

But the power of the mind, I mean, the body is wonderfully responsive to your thoughts, to heal itself, to hurt itself, whatever.

But it's pretty, pretty amazing what the mind can do.

Did you have a practice?

So

meditation?

Yeah, yeah.

Did you have this prior?

Yeah.

Right, okay.

How do you think this situation would have been different, or how well do you think that your practices in advance contributed?

It's hard to know.

I mean, that's why I had to reflect.

That's one thing that was very cathartic about this book is just reflecting back on what prepared me for that situation.

I've been in not near-death experience situations before, but I've been in like

high adrenaline situations.

Do you understand?

How do you react?

Or just how do you react to like things that, you know, a car crash or something, someone gets hit on the freeway and what do you do?

Or you either react or, you know, you go into shock or how people deal with the flow of adrenaline rush through their body.

Right.

And I've always been challenged and I've always come out clear-headed in all those adrenaline rush situations.

So it's hard to know because that's how I've always been.

I like roller coasters, but I'm not like a thrill junkie, really, right?

I'm not like an adrenaline junkie.

But it's just, I just know how my mind reacts in those situations.

I'm always very, very clear-headed about it and an actionable person.

So that helped.

And then,

you know, there was like breathing.

Breathing was like you say meditation.

Well, I was in La Maz class when I was 12 years old when my mom was pregnant.

So, and that all Lamaz is, is preparation for birthing a child,

mitigating, you know, pain, managing your pain.

As you, you know, it's very, very painful for a woman as she's giving birth.

So you use these short breaths and all these sort of things.

You're mentally feeding them ice chips and keeping their attention away from their cervix right and right and do all these sort of things i learned that at 12.

i didn't know that that was going to save my life on the ice as i got ran over by a snow cat right but that was huge in it that's all i was trying to do look if you can't breathe what are you going to do look for your next breath you need to breathe i saw my eye I'll worry about that later.

I saw my twisted legs.

I'll worry about that later.

That'll hurt.

Then I have to find my next breath or this is all, I'm a goner, right?

Everything will start failing.

I'll lose consciousness.

My organs will fail.

I'm dead.

So, you know, yeah, there's a lot of things I think prepared me, but I can only reflect.

I can't say for certainty, right?

How could we?

But yeah, I think there were a lot of things that prepared me, but it was definitely the mental thing.

But through anything, you know, even into the recovery, it's like

the only thing you have control of is your perception of something.

That is it.

You think you could control your body.

You think you can control something, but it starts with your brain and your mind and your spirit of what you believe in,

how you see something is all in your control.

And I'm not like the half-glass, half FMD kind of dude, right?

But it's a version of that.

I could have made it, I could have whined and complained and like, oh, God, I'm never going to work again as an actor.

None of that.

I didn't care about any of that, right?

That had no value to me.

The value was the mental acuity to get through, to find my next breath, to zoom out so big and so wide.

And I keep my perspective there.

I live in a very comfortable, loving, pure life

where I oversimplify the simplicity of life.

Because it is just that simple.

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How long did that 45 minutes feel?

Wow.

It was probably the first 25 that were the toughest because

I don't think an EMT or fire department can get there until like their first half hour.

So the first half hour is rough.

And I died in that time because I got tired.

I just got because doing the equivalent of breathing that we all don't even think about breathing.

It's not even conscious, right?

Because it's sort of reflexive.

It just happens in our body.

But I had to like work, and I was like doing like a one-arm push-up.

It took every piece of physical energy I could do just to exhale a little bit so I can get a little bit more back in.

I was suffocating.

Yeah, it felt like it felt like drowning.

Yeah, in a way.

Yeah, yeah.

I was still getting air.

You can't do that underwater.

But

it was like a bullet constrictor kind of feeling.

Like it just squeezes more.

You blow out air.

It's squeezing you.

And it's because my whole rib cage, my shoulder, all this side of it was just collapsed on my lung that was already collapsed instead of suffocating myself.

So I got, once I had my nephew lift my arm up enough to lift my rib cage off my lung, I could get a little bit more air and it wasn't like suffocating so much.

So I can, it was still excruciating, but to breathe was quite, quite the effort.

And

if you just to take deep breaths for a minute, if you feel lightheaded, you might pass out.

But like, this is just, it's just, it was just exhausting.

And with each exhale exhalation and then inhalation it was just like so did it feel long i don't know i can't answer that it was just like i was waiting for my next breath i was never sure it was going to happen but i was going to will it to happen but you got tired and i got tired

and that's you know

that's when

i just everything just started slowing it actually probably i guess maybe it felt like a long time because it started things started to get slow and consciousness was there.

The neighbors got here by this point.

A lot of things transpired.

It was me, my two neighbors I never met, and my nephew, Alex, there for the first half hour.

They're on the phone call with 911, whatever, and trying to

do everything they can to keep me alive.

And I just got tired, and that's when I was gone.

And then came back.

and I was pissed about it.

And I just, I saw my eyeball again.

I'm like, oh, because it was so great.

I'm like, oh, it was so great.

I was having such a good time.

Because I was going, because I did sort of regulate breathing and then just started to slow.

The heart rate started to low.

It was slow.

It was like 18 beats per minute.

It wasn't just sort of like I just croaked, right?

I just started.

It was just smoothly into it.

It was like just gently away.

And like later,

everyone, it was great.

And something brought me back.

It's like, God damn it.

And I saw my eyeball again.

I'm like, oh, dude, I'm in this busted body.

I'm in this busted body again.

I'm like, all right, here we go.

Let's get back into it.

So it wasn't,

no one was, I mean, the CPI would have.

No, yeah, no, no, no, no.

It wasn't for very long.

It was only like, probably, you know, you're my neighbor, because it just happened to my neighbor the day before when she saw her uncle die.

What?

Yeah.

Or, yeah, I think it was her uncle.

No, it wasn't her brother.

I think it was her uncle.

And it just happened to her then.

And she happened to be, worked in the medical field anyway.

So it's kind of a great thing having kind of a nurse be your neighbor.

But

yeah, she said, you're, yeah, I saw, I saw you go.

And yeah, because all your face turns all these colors and it's like a lizard or chameleon or something.

At any rate, so I don't think it was gone for very long, but it doesn't really matter, I suppose.

I guess not long, not dead enough to have, you know, brain dead,

you know, or

whatever.

I don't know, maybe I'm brain dead now.

What does uh I've always, I've always wondered this.

What does looking at your own eye look like?

Uh, you know, it's, it's one of those, it's a queer situation, you know.

Um, it's just like it's looking at your foot facing the wrong direction, and then your other leg, that's not a joint.

It was broken, shattered, like there's twisted all like a pretzel.

I knew that was supposed to hurt.

Did it?

No, it'll hurt later.

I'll worry about that problem later.

And just like the eye, I'm like, oh, man.

And I rolled my face on it.

It was like, at least let me put that thing on ice because I was like laying on the icy asphalt.

So let me ice that thing.

You know, I thought about that, dude, right?

I said it is funny, right?

But that's what I thought about.

I'm like, oh,

let me put that on ice.

And I had my nephew lift my arm just so I can breathe.

It was like conscious, my hyper, hyper-focused, conscious stuff was to survive.

So you have to.

And I went through every checklist of my body.

I have a strong, strong awareness of my body as well as an athlete, as a stunt performer, also as an actor, because it is my instrument to even act.

So I'm very, very aware of my body, how it works, all the things.

So to my knowledge, I don't know all the things, but at least I know the basics of how my body should operate.

So I'm just constantly going through, like, you know, what it really initially felt like for my breathing was like when you get, when you lose your wind, you get kicked in the stomach or punched in the stomach.

It's that suffocating, trying to find your breath, right?

It's what it sounds like on the 9-1 college.

It's like, just,

yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's just, you can't, can't get air in, right?

It's like you're cramping in your diaphragm.

So I kept like, if I get this cramp out of my diaphragm, I can get a deep breath in.

And I mean, this is never coming, but I keep telling myself, okay, as long as, let me relax, let me relax, let me see if I can just get this.

The immediate is get that air in.

If you're not getting air in, your immediate thing you need in your life is air in, right?

Pretty obvious.

so start there so i'm just trying to work through that and getting my body to be in a place so i can get air in and eventually it got to that place where he had to hold it in a very specific my arm up in a specific weight so i can breathe i could start regulating the painful way to now i the new way i breathe the one arm push-up breathing type of thing a lot of effort

And yeah, it's that, but all the mental part of that is the main thing that got me through initially.

That sort of of mental focus.

No one was going to help me breathe, no matter who was there, who could have done it or not.

Nobody could have.

I was the only one that was going to be able to make myself breathe in any way possible.

No one knew exactly what was wrong or how

I was kind of flattened.

My head's crushed, you know, there's blood everywhere.

So they're thinking a whole lot of different things.

I'm like, fuck all y'all.

I just need to breathe in so I can breathe out.

I'd even use expletives to help me laugh.

I didn't swear once.

Oh, I say, I had all these, yeah, it was hookers, whores, and hamburgers.

That I would scream out because the huffing of the H sound would make me laugh.

Hooker, hook, right?

I had to do that to get air out so I can suck air.

And also have a laugh.

That's my eyeball.

That's my twisted-ass legs.

Ah, yeah.

I already died.

What else needs to happen?

This is my body.

It's my body.

I'm owning it.

So

those are the sense of humor I even had, if you can,

in that horrifying, you know, drawn out 45 minutes.

You know?

And then you get it.

There's just no rule book.

There's no like directions in

how to overcome something like that.

Right.

We're not taught how to do anything like that.

You didn't have a blueprint before you.

You just do what you can do.

What do you got?

And everyone says yes to everything.

Do whatever works.

Right.

It's fascinating how much mental clarity you had.

Yeah, yeah.

You had to, had to.

I was dead.

If I passed out, I would have been dead.

I wouldn't be sitting here.

I'd be dead.

You're too far high up in the mountains.

No one could have gotten to me.

Of course, you're so high up in the mountains that even breathing normally, I imagine, is a little bit more.

At 8,000 feet,

at 8,000 feet.

Yeah.

So maybe my body's also prepared for it.

I also have

high amounts of oxygen in my body because I do work on that stuff.

But

there's no one thing, but the mental part of it was the one thing that did get me through at least to the next exhalation.

And then that got me, it bought some time.

You know, I came back for whatever reason.

And then the paramedics got there shortly after.

And then they had to, you know, do the crazy thing on your chest.

They stabbed your chest like at some movie or something.

And what are they, they're trying to re-inflate the lung?

Either that or release pressure.

Right.

Don't ask me.

I'm not, and I didn't go into the details of it.

Yep.

Even after the fact, I had to worry about other things than the scar on my chest.

I could care.

Couldn't care.

But they come in.

It's the guy that's choking on something and they put the

hand in the neck.

Pretty much like that.

I'm like, oh my God, that happened.

But yeah, then they could also get, you know, fentanyl and all that stuff into you and sort of mitigate the pain.

Oh, that's fun.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I think that's when.

Things got a little when they were when they started cutting my clothes off.

I'm like, I relinquish my duties now.

I mean someone else's give my body to you because I did the best I could.

But now I, you know, so I think they're already had me regulating my breathing or using a pump to kind of regulate the breathing a bit more.

So I didn't have to like consciously fight for every breath.

So I just said, I give my body up.

I'm done.

And I just let them go for it.

And thank God for them.

And one was my friend or a friend of my friend, one of my best friends, he was a firefighter.

He is is a fire.

He just retired.

And then the guy that jabbed me and stuff, he had to call my buddy and be like, look, Renner just got hella lifted out of here.

Sorry, we did the best we could.

Dude,

you get that phone call, you know, dude.

It's brutal, man.

So brutal that my friend had to get that phone call.

But at any rate, all these little moments that keep floating back, talking about it, you know,

Such great,

it all represents love to me, you know.

If I catch any feelings, if I

don't get triggered with rage, I don't get triggered with disappointment or sadness ever.

It's triggered with an overwhelming sense of love and gratitude.

Something

I hope never goes away.

I can't imagine it will.

Kind of like alchemy.

Yeah.

To take something like that and to see

all of the love that

came pouring back in.

Yeah.

I mean, it's which it's the ultimate thing that got me through.

It's the only thing you take with you and you die is the love.

It's such a beautiful, beautiful space, place,

and a loving space.

And then you come back around in the ICU, presumably.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And

I was pretty much, I was, yeah, they had to put me in a coma

and get to work.

There's a lot of life-saving stuff they had to do initially.

Don't know about any of those things.

Even to this day, I don't know all the things that they had to do.

Probably don't care.

I don't know.

You know, you have to move my eyeball back in.

I know there's duct tape on my eye.

Again, whatever works, dude.

I mean, what's in my body is just hammers and screws, hammers and screws, and

a pipe that they've hammered through my knee and down here, and screws and plates.

And it's very like sort of just carpentry work.

So, putting duct tape on my face to hold my eyeball back in,

you know, is just as you know, it's just how you do it.

Got to use what you've got.

You use what you got, and that's what they had.

That's what we did, and that's what worked.

My eye, my vision of my left eye is better than my right eye now.

You're kidding, it's better, yeah,

it's amazing.

I don't recommend it.

So

what I'm interested in is when, and you've sort of hinted at this already, when the pain starts to kick in.

Yeah.

Well, that was the initial

from

every synapse is fire.

Everything in your brain is lit up because when you're crushed,

everything was, I didn't never experience a feeling like that in my my life.

It's like if you hit your hammer on your thumb, you're like, oh, motherfucker.

But like on every inch of your body, it's like, what is going on?

There's so much information.

You don't know what to pay attention to.

So that was very confusing.

The pain was everywhere and everything, even like in your spirit,

everything was,

you don't know what was going on.

So it was very confusing.

It was very bright.

A lot of flashing, you know, because

it looks like a lightning strike that happened when my skull cracked and the eye came out,

it's so weird that I'm talking about this.

Yep, yep.

When my skull cracked apart, yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah, because they don't look like it happened, right?

Yep, yep.

Um,

there's like a lightning strike, and you know, the start messing with, I don't know, it was such an overload.

It felt like it was like, you know, you got to turn off the power because there was an overload of information, overload of pain.

All your nerve endings are like on fire.

Like it was like fiery, hot lava.

It was like all these things were happening.

So it's,

and again, the worst part of it is like you got stepped on by an elephant and you can't breathe.

That sort of, you just can't breathe.

That was the worst of it.

It's like, who cares about the rest of this stuff?

I mean, all of it hurt, but I don't even know what that is anymore.

Like pain, pain became my bitch a long time ago.

How so?

It's because it's all a construct in your mind anyway.

It's your body's way of saying, hey, it's trying to preserve itself.

Your body tries to preserve itself by saying there's pain.

Oh, that's hot.

Don't touch it.

Or this is that.

Don't do this.

Try this.

Right.

So

again, mind you, this is not during the accident.

This is after the accident.

And I started to deal with pain in a different way.

And I wrote a whole chapter on it called the agreement

about

having you give me neural pathways.

You can change them for your brain.

How I receive pain is different than how I received it before.

I can still stub my toe and ow, motherfucker, yes, right?

But I understand what it means, what the body's really trying to tell me.

Like when the body gets a break, it instantly swells, tries to create its own cast and do all these sort of things to protect itself.

The body just tries to preserve itself.

It's a miracle what the body does.

It's fantastic.

If you are in alliance and what the body's trying to do and the body realizes, ah, you are listening to me.

Okay, I won't bother you so much anymore.

And that's where we came to the agreement of like, you can't tell me that's painful anymore because that's a metal piece of metal now.

You're not even a bone.

You can say it's broken.

So I have to reprogram my brain from receiving those pain signals in that way.

And it takes a time.

It takes about 28 days to really, really reprogram.

Yeah, explain this 28-day cycle.

Yeah, it's it's um it's like a lot of cycles, like from a menstrual cycle, a moon cycle, uh human patterns and behaviors, a lot of toxicities to leave your body, take around those times.

But it's just something about

that that 28 days seems to be something congruent in a lot of different versions of our lives.

And with patterns, to really create a positive pattern or take a negative pattern to a positive pattern, it's like 28 days.

And then you don't have to think about it.

It's not a conscious thought anymore.

You don't have to be grudged to stretch every morning.

You're just stretching every morning after 28 days, essentially.

It doesn't have to even be that long.

It could take be less.

But to

it's it's all within your brain and the power within your brain and your mind.

And it takes fortitude.

It takes trust and faith and a whole lot of other bag of goodies that you can't be weak in spirit.

You cannot.

You have to be,

if you don't believe it, then no one's going to believe it kind of attitude.

It's not going to get done if you're not going to do it, right?

You have to do it and believe it.

And

it was a lot, a lot of that came through because I had to walk on my leg.

And my leg had a spiral fracture, spun around, it was shattered.

And so they had to hammer a big uh

a piece of titanium in and just plates and screws and plates and screws and

he said you're gonna have to walk on this thing

otherwise it's gonna be pretty much just like a log stiff thing i'm like all right to keep it mobile yeah to move it all the scar tissue right i have to as you know right you got to keep this thing rocking and moving So I got the okay from the doctor.

It's like, I have to move this thing.

Otherwise, it's going to be just a club leg.

So I started doing it, and my body is screaming at me.

ow ow i step down ow ow ow ow mother ow ow ow it's broken my body's telling me i'm like no it's not so i start yelling at my foot and my leg i'm like look motherfucker sorry about my language

i'm just like look we gotta we gotta we gotta work this out the doc says you're not broken because you're a piece of metal now like i'm literally talking to it like it's a like my appendage of my body is like a like a like a scorned lover or something or like a like a bad dog quality dog yeah you know what i mean it's like what are you doing how would you why would you cheat on me yeah You know what I mean?

You're betraying me.

Essentially, it's such a betrayal.

And so to be so crazy enough to like, to talk about my appendage as a separate thing,

you know,

it was opened up to this idea that I have to really have to change it.

Cause I know with all the things I'm telling you, I knew before, I just like, I have to really work this out.

I'm literally arguing with my leg.

Every day, I'm arguing with my leg many times a day.

Every times I go, I have to go move it, get blood flow through it.

So for blood clots, right?

Scar tissue.

It's all this stuff.

So otherwise I'm threatening.

Dude, I'm going to lop you off.

I'm going to chop you off.

I'm going to get a wooden peg.

I'm going to get a fucking parrot and an eye patch and go live a pirate life, motherfucker.

Either fucking do it or don't.

Like I'm screaming, right?

I'm saying it like I'm saying it now.

Like no joke.

But saying it with that intensity and that belief, dude, because I did also was okay living the pirate life, dude.

I was totally okay with it.

I was just happy I was alive.

I didn't care about acting again.

I was, I'm just happy to see my family there with me, all the people I love around with me.

I didn't care about what the future held for my body in that sense.

You know what I mean?

Or I was willing to do it.

So

I'm threatening my leg to chop it off.

I mean, it's like it's the most insane thing ever.

And I know I'm,

I know that as I'm saying it.

And I reflect back on it it sometimes at night.

And I'm like, dude, that was a good talk we had.

That was a good talk.

You know what I mean?

It's pretty, it's a lonely business, recovery, right?

When you're in a bed alone, you're the only one recovering no matter how many doctors you got, how many people love you, giving you tea, whatever the heck it is.

All that's amazing, but you're the only one that can make you get better.

And that's it, man.

And me and my leg were partners of crime at the time.

And yeah, I'm talking to curtains.

I'm talking all sorts of things.

And

it's quite a lonely space.

But

it was a thing that helped me reprogram the neural pathways and how I receive pain.

And it took about 28 days.

It took about a month of me yelling at my leg as I'm doing physical therapy.

I do, I'm doing it every day.

I did it as soon as I got home.

I was in two ICUs for six days apiece.

As soon as I got home, because I was breaking out of them every day, get me home, get me home so I can sleep.

And as soon as I got home, I'm doing physical therapy.

You know how painful it is, I don't care.

So I got on it real quick.

and uh so so after doing that this having this agreement with my leg all the other things like my ribs and all that stuff kind of fell into place much better than i anticipated i my lungs were like plastic suitcases for all the goop and things that kind of come out of it blood and all this like stuff it's so weird and it was quite a hot mess but as the leg that was really quite quite the issue um because it was the physical therapy part of it.

And that's where that's where I focused all my energy.

And then the rest of the body just kind of fell into place.

It's like I focused on

one bad dog that was pooping on my pillow or something, right?

I'll just focus on the leg.

And then it just,

I just, pain became just something that

I can manage.

Because I know my body sends signals to my brain, but it doesn't mean I have to receive it the same way.

What's your advice to somebody who's currently dealing with pain?

You know, I'm not going to say you have to yell at yet the thing.

I think getting an understanding of it, I think there are other ways.

You know, I think modern medicine is fantastic for the short term, but for long-term and chronic pain, I think there's got to be other ways.

I deal with it all the time, but I certainly don't take pills.

I do injections of peptides, amino acids, vitamins,

maybe

some natural anti-inflammatories, things like that.

I think everybody's got to deal with inflammation.

I think there's a lot of great science that's coming out.

I get a lot of access to people that have been dealing with it for a long time and also been doing it for a long time.

But none of that matters.

What matters is what your body says.

I listen to my body.

My body tells me

what it needs.

And I listen to it.

I pay attention.

And I also talk the fuck off.

Like no joke.

It's a part of me.

It is what I am.

But it is just my spirit living in this vessel.

So I'm going to take care of it the best I can.

So I'm going to listen to it.

And it's going to listen to me, and it does.

And that agreement I have with my body gets me through every day.

How do you know when to listen to it and when to tell it to fuck off?

It starts to scream at me a bit.

It's the volume that it's.

Yeah, yeah, it gets a little louder, or it's it's actually not even that, it's more it's repetitive in nature, not just something like it's not just an afternoon or a stiff morning, it's just a flicker.

It's just like, oh, this has been a week of this repetitive thing.

I'm like, all right,

I gotta help my body out here.

I'm not doing something right.

I'm doing something wrong.

I'm putting something in my body or I'm not,

it's something else, right?

The body, like if you have an injury, usually some other part of your body overcompensates and that kind of stuff.

So you have to really kind of

watch the whole thing.

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Just sink into the

that reframing, that mental reframing around pain a little bit more for me.

Yeah.

Again, somebody, I've,

again, not run over by a snowcat, full Achilles detachment.

Yeah, yeah, fuck.

That was out of here.

That was a motherfucker.

Yeah.

Well, here's the thing.

See,

singular to any one of those, it's way worse than getting ran over by the snowcat.

I because there's only, there's only, yeah, there's only one thing, and it's, it's, it's, I was tested to my limits to my death.

So nothing else can, I don't pop both my Achilles tenons right now, like, eh, whatever.

I'll limp out of here or

waddle out of it.

Right, because the worst thing that's happened to you is the worst thing that you're doing.

Yeah, like this is like, all right, this is going to be a terrible year.

Yeah.

And I know that already, but,

you know, we'll reattach.

They're probably doing six months now.

They got the Aaron Rodgers machine.

They can do.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

But my point being.

With that for me, I resonate an awful lot with the loneliness.

I think this is

one of the things I really want to get an insight

from around you.

Yeah,

the role of patience and

how you deal with loneliness, how you remain sort of mental fortitude.

And you sink into that.

That's interesting.

I think, yeah, especially for you talk about, you know, the Achilles tendon, because it is such a long, ongoing thing.

And then 12-month recovery, man.

It's a real injury.

It's a real damn injury, dude.

It's, and it's like no joke.

Like, you can break any bone and you're done in a month.

And people aren't really that conscious of of it.

And because usually you're just playing sports or you're just getting out of bed and it could pop, right?

It can happen anywhere.

Usually you're doing some kind of athletic, just playing pickleball.

Mine was cricket, which is a much more British way to do that.

But yeah, either way, usually it's not a sexy way to have such a gnarly injury.

But anyway, so people aren't caring.

Like people cared a lot about my injuries because they're very aware of what happened.

Like, oh, yeah, you're playing cricket, you know, whatever.

They kind of made me make funny for it.

But there is a real loneliness

in that.

So I gamify

recovery.

I gamify my pain.

I gamify that loneliness, meaning I set goals.

Daily goals was always like, as long as I'm better than I was the day before.

And I don't, it doesn't have to be a high standard.

It's like, I move my elbow an inch more than I can move it the day before victory.

Right?

So at least it's progress.

It's this, and the setbacks

are fewer because you don't set such a crazy high goal.

I'm going to start, I'm going to run a 4540 at the end of the year.

You know, it's like, come on.

Then you're going to set yourself up a disappointment.

But

so to gamify things and give myself confidence and self-confidence in my loneliness is like getting better.

I'd always push myself.

Even after the PT leaves, I'm doing stuff on my own.

It's a 24-hour job.

It's a 24-hour job.

As long as I get my good sleep, then the rest of it's like, what am I putting in my body and how do I get better every day?

And I hit higher goals and I find ways to heal my family in me getting better.

That helped immensely.

I can remove myself out of the equation and my pain and my recovery because I'm getting better to heal my family.

If I get better, my family gets better.

I'm not getting better even for me.

That was a huge perspective that I had as soon as I woke up from the coma.

I apologized.

I was in the accident.

I said I was sorry.

And I promised my daughter, if you wait for me, I'll get better.

It was like, it was, I released myself of the duties of me wanting to get better for me.

I was getting better for them to heal them because I hurt them.

It was easy.

It was a one-way road of recovery.

There's no other direction to go.

I have to heal my family.

Isn't it strange that we find it easier to do something for us, for other people, than do something for us for us?

Yeah.

And that's a strange quirk of how the humans work.

Yeah.

It's the same thing.

You've probably been in movies where this is actually a scene.

The bad guy wants to get the information out of you.

So they're torturing you and they're doing stuff.

And you're like, no, it doesn't matter.

Then they bring in someone you love.

Yeah.

And he's like, ah.

And that always breaks everybody, right?

Yeah.

And there's an interesting stat around the likelihood that we ensure that we complete a course of antibiotics.

It's around about 50%,

maybe a little bit less.

The likelihood that we ensure that our dog completes its course of antibiotics is like in the 90s.

So we're significantly better at looking after an animal than we are at looking after ourselves, despite the fact that if we are not functional, the animal's fucked.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And again, with this,

it's so interesting that we can use

somebody else, other people, group of other people, as the motivation for our recovery

in that way.

Yeah, well, I think that's, it's, it's something in the,

I think it's within the limitations of

inner perspective.

It seems like it's the limitations of a human experience, right?

But it's also an act of love.

I mean, the fuel behind that is all love.

So in the spiritual form, that is just

what, you know, we are to be anyway.

In the human form, it's us protecting ourselves.

Like the body's trying to protect itself, right?

And, you know, we try to protect each other.

We were social creatures.

We're a thing.

We try to, right?

Ultimately, people are good.

We're just not situations for us to be good to each other.

Even if you are

doing this because you're going to help to heal your family, you don't want this to be the

defining, lingering memory of what happened, et cetera.

The recovery is still on you.

Finding the solutions is still on you.

And it's also still my body.

Like, I don't want to, I'm not going to hobble around the spinning rock for the next hundred years because now I'm titanium man.

Get out of here.

You're laid awake at night, a couple of weeks, a couple of months in.

It's just one of those normal days.

It's been an all right day of rehab.

It's been an all right day of whatever, but you just, you're kind of deep in the hole.

And

where was your mind going to keep your motivation to keep driving you forward?

I always focused on the things that were better.

Now, not every day all of me was better, but some part of me was getting better.

And that's all I cared about.

Just sitting up was like a giant milestone for me, not peeing in a jar.

That was a great victory for me to go bathroom.

Right.

Just whatever it was, I kept things really simple.

And I made it okay.

That's an amazing thing.

So, because there are days that aren't great, and there's a lot of people that might get stuck in a rut.

You don't even have to be in recovery.

I mean, you can just have a bad day.

But your brain, right,

you can't let it wallow in that.

Just get up off the couch, move, go move your body, oxygen through your system.

It'll help you navigate something just to make a different choice.

And it'd been easy for me to like not have any positive thoughts about things, man.

There's not a lot of help or hope to grab onto.

So I just built the things that I could grab onto.

Like I said, I kind of gamified things.

And

I get, you know, I guess there's, I was just filled with such gratitude, but I wasn't going to to ever

have a low bar set, right?

There's that duality of it.

It's like I wasn't going to like, oh, as long as I can just kind of walk.

They said, if I walked again, if I did, I'd walk funny.

They said, you're never going to run again.

And I said, I wish you would have told me that.

I heard it from my family later on.

I would have been running faster earlier.

just at that challenge.

I'm also that guy.

That fuck you energy.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, that just or the challenge me because I know what I can do, and I know what I can't do, and I know my limitations.

And sometimes I'll, I'll try to, I always try to exceed what, what, um,

I can or can't do.

You have to go to such extremes of your obsessions to really grow, like what cold plunges do for the body, and like even, even extreme hot does just the nerve endings in your body.

Use a lot of heat, vibration for pain.

So I'm about pain, heat, high heat, high

vibrations, great for pain.

Were you using

power plate stuff?

Yeah, power plate stuff.

Because that gets really, really intense vibration.

That's great to just numb the nerve endings.

A really hot bath.

And that's the reason why when you bang, when you stub your toe, like you said earlier on, why'd you rub it?

It's because it's really difficult for the body to receive multiple signals at the same time.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

And it just confuses all the nerve endings, seemingly.

And I don't feel it.

It's like, it's why I got off of pain medication like that.

Yeah, what was your your

relationship?

You know, a lot of people have injuries way less bad than this, and that's the beginning of their road.

Yeah,

I'm glad I had it.

I'm glad it was there.

It was, it was necessary.

I mean, goddamn, was it necessary?

But

it wasn't, I think it was like when I got home switching from epidurals and IVs and all this stuff of writing intravenously, you know, to

deal with your pain management.

And then going on, just now just taking pills, taking oxycontin.

You know,

you get behind on that, you're kind of screwed because then you realize, oh, it's going to take a minute to get through your system.

And

yeah, what's the bit of advice I was given after my surgery?

Never chase the pain.

Yeah, no.

You've got to get out ahead of the pain.

Yeah, yeah.

You've got to stay ahead of it.

Otherwise, you get behind.

Oh, man, it's going to be a bad day or so.

Yeah, it was.

So that happened like that happened once, maybe twice.

But then it was like maybe four weeks in when I was home

and I had a night tear at my, like my mouth is broken and everything, so many breaks in my face and my head and my teeth don't align.

So I had a night tear and then when your teeth don't align, it's easy to crack a tooth.

And I cracked a tooth.

Then I felt pain.

I'm like, wait, I'm on Oxycontin and this is breaking through.

I can't like, yeah,

it was breaking through.

So I'm like, well, then what do I need that oxycontin for and the gabbupentin like i'm out of here so i went emergency extraction put in a post take the thing i'm crying just got so happy that my pregnant dentist would come in and do this for me

and um

got home i said i'm i'm getting off i'm not taking this stuff i took it for the next day for the tooth

uh and then when that felt good

I just said, I'm

cold turkeying this stuff.

And then I cried for like three and a half days straight and shivered and cold sweats and the whole thing

coming off the pain beds.

Tell me what that's way worse than the accident.

Why?

Because how bad coming off that stuff is.

It was just like uncontrollable crocodile tears,

emotionally just out of control, crying.

And it wasn't sad.

I was just crying.

I was doing PT, just doing his bands and stuff, just

sobbing.

I just couldn't stop

sobbing.

And, you know, I was shivering.

I was so cold.

I had all these electric blankets on me like I was coming off heroin or something.

It's actually, I guess, what it is, or something, right?

Oxycontin.

Anyway, after the three and a half days, I talked to the pain management guy, the doctor, and he's like, Yeah, you can't do that, dude.

No one does that.

You got to wean off.

You need two weeks at least to kind of wean off of it.

Both Gabby Petton as well.

All your nerve endings are like feeling everything right now.

I'm like, yeah, I know.

I'm freezing.

I'm shivering and I'm crying.

Well, well, it's okay if you do a little bit.

Yeah, I'm done with it now.

So I'm just going to stay off of it.

Thank God

I got to shake it.

But wow, what a terrible thing to

be hooked on.

Wow.

I mean, if you need that, because then your body gets numbed to that kind of stuff anyway.

Then you need more of it, which is the terrible thing to it.

So it's like, you need to get the fuck off that stuff as soon as possible is my recommendation.

Find other ways.

And high heat, high vibrations, do tremendous things to your nerve endings to mitigate your pain.

And it allowed me to sleep.

That's why I love, I'd take a super, super hot bath as much as I could stand.

And then vibrations, like were my the parts that were really kind of just giving me some achy, achy sort of feelings.

Were you sitting on a power plate?

No, I mean, I was too fragile.

I was still too fragile at that time.

I do it now.

Yep.

But I do it.

I did like the, they have a roller that's a vibrating roller.

Okay.

Super intense.

Just rest.

I put both my knees on, put it under both my knees or both my ankles, ankles and knees.

Oop, nine night, going to bed.

Amazing.

Wow.

If you have any ankle or knee issues, as long as not breaks, as long as if you're healing from breaking, do it.

But

great for nerve endings, tendons, to get blood flow, circulation for your things that are hard to get blood flow through, like tendons, you know, right?

Pretty tough.

All the cartilage areas, all our joints, you know, are all going to fail us anyway.

But I just got every joint screwed early on.

Take me through the big recovery modalities, sort of what contributed to

your rehab.

Because you seem to recover very, given how intense and

sort of catastrophic the injuries are, you recovered really quickly.

Yeah,

I became obsessed.

I had to become obsessed at recovery.

It was my main focus.

And it was awesome because my life was freed from any other obligations, even parenting.

Sadly.

So I have to get this so then I can go back to being a parent.

So I can go back, right?

So I became obsessed at, it's like I said, it was 24 hours a day.

That's all I focused on.

That's all my brain energy went to.

That's all my thoughts went to.

We're all recovery, healing, getting better, even dreaming of my bones growing over this metal pipe and all this stuff.

It was just all that was, I was all in.

with every part of my body, even in my damn dreams about recovering.

So the obsession.

And then it got to a place,

maybe just a few weeks later.

I didn't have

the plastic suitcases for my lungs.

And then I'm sitting up in a thing and I'm in a wheelchair and I'm moving around.

And it's like I'm mobile, I'm getting more blood flow in.

Ah, that's now just getting better faster.

And now it's maybe 16 hours a day of obsession.

And it reduced to 12 and it kept getting less.

By the summertime, it was eight hours a day.

I have to start my morning da-da-da routine and da-da-da-da, dada, all the things, and just keep going, keep going.

And then what my body allowed me to do that was just sort of like not recovery stuff.

I would do life stuff that was like recovery stuff.

I'd go walk in the sand.

Great for your ankles and stability and my hips and knees and all that stuff.

But at least I'm outside in the sunshine at Lake Tahoe, breathing in the air, getting my feet cold.

That's the biggest cold plunge in the world.

That thing is freezing.

And just go in there, and that's awesome.

So I can do that.

So now I'm just doing eight hours.

And I reduced it to maybe four hours by the time I started going back to work.

I'd have to commit to four hours a day, hyperbaric chamber, put O2 throughout my body.

Red light therapy was huge.

I still do these to this day.

I mean, between the high heat stuff and the vibration, the red light infrared beds and the hyperbaric chamber, I'll do this for the rest of my life.

What peptides were you using?

Thymosin alpha, thymosin beta, BBC.

I understand BBC 157,

MOTC, some.

I love MOTC.

Huh?

Mozi is great.

Yeah, yeah.

And there's TB500.

There's,

guys, there's a long, long list of stuff.

I had to do, I had to do, I had to do hormone replacement stuff because my testosterone was at 200.

I had to get that up because I was going to get some energy.

So then I can get in the gym instead of falling asleep in the gym.

So that helped regulating that.

Because, again, I'm 54.

And at that time, you know, I didn't, no one tells you how to get old.

But I guess my testosterone was super low.

And that affects a lot of things in your body,

especially your energy.

So,

yeah, and there's a whole list of different peptides, and I rotate them in and out.

It's not like I do

them all the time.

I just kind of rotate them, just like supplements.

I do the same thing with supplements.

I rotate them in and out of my life.

It'll go for a stretch of two months or three months on, three months off, or that kind of thing, you know, just to get your body to regulate, challenge it, let it try to produce its own HGH, its own testosterone, all those type of things.

Really, really great to work on your body from a cellular level out.

Using the NAD?

Yeah, yeah, I do that every day.

Wow.

Every day.

Sub Q.

Yeah, sub-Q.

And also, I am.

And I don't do it through the

IV because it just takes too long to go through that suck.

You know?

It's not nice.

It's not nice.

Sub-Q

NAD is.

I feel that, dude.

It's like a shot of coffee.

It's really good.

Yeah, yeah.

And I also feel like the light version of it

can do your stomach.

You're like, oh, gosh.

But it's only for 10 seconds.

It's not for light.

It's nice once it goes.

25 minutes.

I had this theory about NAD that one of the best parts of NAD was it finishing.

It wasn't actually the effect.

I've just been in stomach discomfort.

Yeah, precisely.

Precisely, precisely.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah, because I don't know many things that you put in your body that immediately make you feel good.

Like an IV, like

an IV, that's an instant thing.

You're getting hydrated pretty instantaneously.

You're getting great vitamins.

You can smell the vitamins, vitamin C in your

light push.

Yeah.

So that you feel pretty instantly and you feel good.

Not much else I can think that I've done.

And I do everything,

everything.

Maybe a hot bath.

And that's only because you get out of it and you're like, okay, I'm not in pain.

Like a cold plunge.

Otherwise they say like, oh yeah, dude, you feel so good getting out.

Yeah, you feel good getting out of that because you're not dying anymore.

That's why it feels good.

It doesn't feel good ever.

Does it feel good?

No, it feels like hell.

So So by getting out, you're just not dying anymore.

Your body's screaming, I'm dying, I'm dying.

Cold proteins release, cold shock proteins, right?

We all know this that do it.

I don't do a lot of cold plunges because I think you have to kind of, I do those when needed.

I do, there's a crowd chambers, you know, I'd rather do that.

Crowd chamber, I felt

being a little bit more effective.

You know what I mean?

You like the hyperbaric?

Hyperbaric, I love.

I love it because it does take a little bit more time, but I can do my, yeah, I can do emails, a cup of coffee, because I can sit in a chair just like this and not just sit there and be like, I'm in some treatment.

I'm like, forget it.

I would never do it.

But

I'll just biostack in there.

I'll do a red light mask in there.

I'll do whatever I can to do multiple things because I do many things all throughout the day.

How is it?

Like, again, I would have these things on right now.

Yeah.

Well, but it'll mess up with the mics.

How is it that your face looks like your face?

Why does your face look like your face if

so much destruction?

Interestingly enough, interestingly enough, nothing,

the only skin that broke was on the back of my head, and that's where all the blood was gushing.

Because it,

when it got ran over, it went to my cheekbone pressure, and the back of my skull here.

That was where the rollover pressure went.

So that's why I broke this cheekbone and it floating around.

It broke my orbital and then my jaw.

So this, and then my jaw broke in three places.

And then the crack here.

All the other marks on my body are scars from the surgeries to put the metal in.

So

it was more, it was more the end sides of my body that were crushed.

And luckily, like the one of my ribs poked my liver, but that because it broke in two spots.

So there's a couple of gaps.

Like there was like 14 breaks and only six ribs.

So several pieces of my rib cage were just gone.

Floating.

Yeah, just missing around.

So,

what was it?

We're talking about it.

I can't remember.

Oh, yeah, my face.

So

once the swelling went down, they can see where

the real damage is really just to my jaw because it's hard to fix your jaw, apparently.

And also, my teeth got pushed in, the molars, so nothing sits right.

That's still the same case now.

Yeah, yeah, forever.

Wow.

Yeah.

They can't palate expand.

I think we risk losing the teeth.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm going to lose them all anyway from all that trauma.

Hold on to them.

So I'm going to hang on to them while I can.

And I still got a decent smile.

Everything's fine.

It's just when I bite down, it's like chewing and eating is just not that enjoyable.

You got to be careful with what foods you eat then.

I'm only careful with foods I eat just

what I want to put in my body, you know?

And I'm not really a stickler about things.

I'm just conscious about what it is.

Yeah,

I like eating steak.

But I don't try to chew on stuff too much.

Like gummo, never chew gum.

Like, I've put a gun about it.

What a price that you're gonna have.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm interested in.

So, anyway, the swelling, with your eye, how does that go back in?

There was so many ways that I should have an eye patch or a glass eye or something at this point, right?

Because of the orbital nerve didn't get pinched in the

crack.

Any nostril tissue, no damage to like since anything behind the eye or any of the

nerves.

It's a miracle.

It's a miracle.

It's the best way that this could have happened.

It's a miracle.

Essentially, it's just like moving it back in and duct taping it, and this

swelling went down and it started operating again.

Yeah, it was crazy.

Yeah, so I think, I mean, there's, I don't know, there's a little unevenness with, I don't care.

My face is my face.

I still look the same, I guess, for the most part.

And there's no like plastic surgery or anything that had to happen.

It was all internal.

Like they put in, they put the plates in my eye and my cheekbone.

They said, we don't have to do it, but because your face is, you know, you're living,

we're afraid maybe you'll lose your cheekbone if we don't support it with a metal plate.

And they just went inside my mouth and cut open all under the skin and put these plates in.

Wow.

You know, so then

I had screws in my skull and then my jaw to kind of rubber band it to heal the jaw.

And then that was it.

And then that was it.

It's a, it's pretty harrowing how they get these screws out, though.

They just like get a screwdriver from Home Depot and they just rip them out.

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I'm interested in how you avoided becoming a victim of this.

How would I ever be a victim?

Well, you've had this thing happen to you, which you didn't choose to.

I wasn't even victimized.

How could I be a victim?

You understand how this

narrative plays in people's minds.

I'm telling you my perspective.

That's how.

If ever I have been victimized, I still never be a victim.

Certainly it doesn't even apply to this incident.

I made the choice.

I don't regret my choice.

I'm only saddened

by that.

I put so much terror in my family's life.

My nephew cannot unsee the things I did not see.

He saw the blood gushing, holding my arms,

squatting to hold it in a certain position for 45 minutes, my eyeball out, legs twisted up.

Just calm, cool, collected, partial shock.

But you can't unsee it.

along the long list of all the other things that have happened transpired because of it so there's no there's no um it's it's always my perspective and that's what i have control of and there's it's i i'm i refuse to be haunted i refuse to hobble around i refuse to and it's not going to happen my will will not let it happen

but i what is it i i i it's not gonna happen

like if i believe i can fly and sprout a propeller out my ass, trust me, a propeller is about to come out and I'm going to propel around this room.

I believe it's physically impossible, so I don't believe it.

But that will,

the reality is you build it.

You can build your own reality.

If you don't,

you can become victimized or a victim, but you have to be sort of active in your believing and you're doing and your heart and your will.

And your will is a thing.

It's your life force.

So

it started with not wanting to

hurt my family.

You know, I wouldn't want to be on their side

looking at me in the bed or hearing about it.

My mom heard about it on the phone call.

How about that phone call?

Had a 13-hour drive to get to my hospital bed in the snow and the eyes.

It's brutal.

So, yeah, there is no me in any of this, man, except getting better version of me.

You know, there's no being victimized or victim mentality in it.

There's impossible.

It's impossible.

It's just a square peg round hole.

It doesn't fit here.

It doesn't apply.

Or at least I make it not apply if it does.

How's this changed your outlook on life now moving forward?

It's quite the same.

It's a lot better

because there's less obstacles.

And that's where the white noise is gone.

The things that I gave credence to or gave great value to are wiped away.

What like?

Everything outside the basic things that I want in my life, time, shared experiences with people I love,

laughter.

When I oversimplify a simple life,

again, a very complicated, busy life I have, but I keep

the white noise out.

I don't listen to the, it's like the idea of like reading the comments or reading your reviews or like, I never did really anyway, but a version of that, you know, what that is for an individual.

What it is for me is

not giving so much energy to my career.

I do.

Obviously, I mean, I was working a year after the incident and I'm on second season, right?

It's fourth season right now, but I give energy to it, right?

But maybe how much energy?

Maybe I'm more married to central part of my life is my health and wellness.

Everything else falls into place.

I'm filming in Pittsburgh right now to get better.

And then I happen to be filming Mayor Kingstown season four.

But I'm there to get better.

My garage is filled with workout equipment, hyperbaric chamber, my red light, but all these things, my fridge, I brought

a sack with my peptides and things.

Like I'm committed to my health and my wellness.

It is a central part of my being and it has to be.

And I like it and I love it and I want it to be.

So that simplicity, like it doesn't make, then I don't get busy doing a bunch of other dumb stuff, you know, whatever, like what I would normally might do.

And it's way better because life is much simpler.

And that, that's the only thing that's really changed.

It's just like, I just don't give so much energy and get myself away to just things that I don't want anyway.

You know, I already have everything I want in my life anyway.

You know, especially as like

I've like had many careers.

I have many careers and I do a lot of things.

And like, so I always had that drive to do stuff, right?

As an independent sort of be my own boss and go do things, right?

And

you, and you knew what that's like.

I think any athlete knows what that's like.

I think any businessman knows what's that like.

But when do you stop and really get to enjoy it?

When work becomes the central part of your life, but then you don't get to reap the benefits of all the hard work, then what the fuck is the point?

So now I'm doing the point.

I'm working hard still, but I start with living the life first, doing a life first that I want to live.

And then,

you know, prioritizing what, right?

I reprioritize it.

I think it's the best way to say it.

It's like I just put the priorities of me and my health that I didn't do before.

I might wash my face once a week, you know,

go to the gym, brush my teeth, basically.

But like, now I do like the complete opposite of that.

Now I do so many things to,

for my health and my wellness from the cellular level on out, you know?

And it feels good, dude.

Oh my God.

It feels amazing.

And then I'm so much better with everybody else.

I can sit here in this room and not be in any pain.

I can be in a good mood with you.

I can do this all day long, you know?

Is that different to how you were before?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

This would be a chore.

This would be work.

This would be time away from my daughter.

I'd be here with a chip on my shoulder.

I should be with my daughter right now.

No, she's with me all the time now.

I have her in my pocket.

I give her little

peanuts down there once in a while.

I just take her out.

You know what I mean?

Spirit she's with me all the time.

So I have that perspective.

I'm not an angst of not being with my family or loved ones.

Pretty amazing sort of perspective to have.

And I try to hold on to those.

It's a much lighter, more loving place and space to be.

I'm interested in

the way that your mindset changes going from

going from having to be so self-focused to selfless-focused

and then sort of moving between these two, right?

Because there's a tension.

It feels like there's a tension here.

You're showing up to make yourself better to help to heal everybody else.

You've got you that also needs to be served

an awful lot.

And yeah, it feels like there's a

dynamic that's going on here between.

Yeah, I don't know what what the future holds to be honest with you brother um

the the giant shift was which is it's hard to say

you know because it because it's to me it's always it's like it's like an airplane right and you lose you use um

pressure in the in the cat in the cabin right and the things come down you're supposed to put it on yourself then your kid well every parent's gonna be like no you put it on your kid first

That's been me, you know, raising my daughter.

I'm always going to look after and do the best for my daughter.

And just like we brought up earlier about how we like to take care, it's easier to take care of everybody else instead of yourself.

And it's such like such a martyrdom kind of thing.

It doesn't really help us.

But if we fill our own

water first, right, fill us first, and then we can serve others better.

So I have to work that every day.

I work that every day because my instinct is to always do something for somebody else first, right?

So the practice is that, like I told you, like the idea of like, oh, wait, I went to Pittsburgh to film Mary Kingston.

No, I didn't.

I went there to go work with a great PT there.

They got a great medics there.

And da-da-da-da, do all my health and wellness.

And then I got to go back on set and create jobs and have a lot of good time on the show.

Like all that.

It's secondary.

It's just the way I think about it.

You could look at it like, yeah, I went there.

Of course, I went to go film there.

Otherwise, I wouldn't be in Pittsburgh.

But no, I'm going there because I, you know what I mean?

I take control of like

it.

So I don't feel like I'm victimized by my job.

Like my job is removing me from my health and wellness.

No, I can't do that.

Same with anything.

So I think starting with taking care of myself, because again, because I have to, again, I wouldn't do this if it didn't get ran over, if I didn't fucking die.

Sadly,

my health and mental health and spiritual health would be depleted.

No matter how much I tried.

So thank God I got crushed.

Because now I take care of myself very well and I take care of others even more so.

It's interesting what you said about

the hamster wheel that you get on the priority of a job, of a calling, of something that's really important to you.

My friend Bill wrote a great book, Die With Zero, and in it he says, delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification.

And I think a lot of people that are super, super driven, they get caught in that trap.

I got lots of positive reinforcement from the job that I do.

I get accolades, I get recognition, I get value.

I keep you along.

It keeps you hooked along.

Correct.

Yeah.

I'm spinning on this hamster wheel waiting for the day when I arrive.

At what?

At something.

I'm going to continue to manyana, manana, filling my cup.

I'm going to keep on pushing down, taking a little bit of time.

And I wonder as well whether a good bit of that is that

a very busy life, a very chaotic life, doesn't actually force you to turn inward and go, is this actually what I'm supposed to, am I spending my life in the best way that I can?

It's like, well, look at how important I am.

Look at how busy I I am.

I can't be wasting my life.

Look at how back-to-back the country is.

I've got my toilet break scheduled in, 12 or 5.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, you you see different countries where capitalism isn't like the forefront of your existence.

Some monetary things, some status, some jobs, some cars, some object, right?

Where it's more, you know, you go to Japan and it's more sort of Buddhist sort of thinking.

And

there's capitalism there for sure.

But you go to Italy, there's capitalism there too, but there's also a love of life.

Way more cigarettes.

Yeah, exactly.

There's wine, and they close their shop at two and go take a nap.

Or there's just, you know,

there's a balance that can happen.

America doesn't.

America has such a strong sort of sense of capitalism, but it's also, you know,

a strong country for that very same reason.

From industry is one thing, but then I think we lose sight of,

you know, the American dream is it needs to shift.

It can shift.

We don't have to.

It's, you know,

just it's interesting time just this inform time of information that we have we could get so connected to everyone on the planet with all this information and you know i found you know not disenchantment with um the american dream that maybe i knew in the 80s which is like go to college with a thing and get damaged and get a porsche and whatever the heck it was as a young dumb boy in the 80s you know um It's certainly shifted as I've matured as a man and now gotten older, but I like I have no regrets.

And that came from dying and being in the hospital.

I said, I wrote two goodbye notes, one to my family, one to my daughter.

And I had no regrets.

And I was so ready to go

again

because I was on machines.

And I'm like, oh, man, I think they're going to pull the plug on me at this point.

But

it's nice to get that confirmation that you don't have regrets.

So I'm going to keep going with that idea and keep living to it.

I must be doing something right.

So I'll continue with

ways I was thinking because that confirmation was just a great, great gift to receive, along with no bad days.

You know, I'm not going to get any bad days the rest of my life.

That's pretty awesome.

Well, who knows?

I want to live a long time because I know what a bad day feels like.

I can have maybe a bad moment.

I could find frustration.

You'd be hard-pressed if you get any rage out of me.

That's just.

Was that something that you had before?

No.

That wasn't a ragey guy.

No.

No, me neither.

But just like, you know, just the idea of like, you know, what you, when you see, you get, you have to know the limits, right?

And then reach beyond the limits, test it beyond my limits, and dying and coming back, it's like, all right, there's a different sort of, oh,

also, I, I got to see behind the curtains.

You know, I know what happens.

And like, it's super exciting, wonderfully peaceful, super electric,

magnificent.

It's everything, there's no time, place, or space.

It's like all that, you know, it's like, oh, that's just a knowingness just in the back of my mind.

Wow, that's, that's amazing.

And there's a long list of amazing gifts that kind of came with that.

But going from like, oh, wait, your capitalism, the thing, they're like, that's the spinning rock that we're on.

And you can, if I keep zooming out,

that's where I start.

Then I can get back in.

Once I find I'm too microed into something, like my blinders are on and information is limited.

I'm like, what am I doing here?

I'm giving too much credence to something that has no value.

And that's what I did a lot.

I think that's what a lot of us do all the time.

Because we have the freedom, the luxury of where we are in our lives of, you know, to pay a lot of attention to stuff that doesn't have value.

You know, how many colors of toenail polish are there?

For God's sakes, or whatever, the minutiae of what are we doing here?

So let me zoom out.

Let me zoom out a little bit.

Let me aggregate what actually matters here and then

go back in, re-engage into conversation, re-engage into my life, re-engage into whatever I was doing before, because we can get a little caught up.

We can get caught up.

I feel like there's a ticking clock and the things that pressure and all these things we either we put on ourselves or society can put on us.

And I relieve myself of all those duties.

I am relieved.

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How do you think about balancing your desire to be professionally a very competent actor pushing your limits creatively in terms of the way that you show up because that does require obsession with the micro sure you win in the weeds when it comes to stuff like that yeah uh especially i'm sure there'll be more movies and yeah i think that i think that'll take time i think i'm

i can swallow the idea

um

i didn't think i was going to go back to work i had to live life in in reality, not in fiction.

It's hard for me to go back.

But it meant a lot.

I was around a lot of love.

So then that felt good.

What was the first day back on satellite?

I mean,

it was very difficult.

All of it was very, the energy levels were very low.

I had like a couple good hours where I was awake enough to perform.

It was a character I knew very well.

And so that part was easy enough.

I had to do a stunt as well.

A little challenging, but worked through it.

But all the working through with stunt guys and even the director all set up the cameras, did that, that it was all just acts of love.

So that was what felt great.

Everyone was happy that I was

back.

So yeah, I took it as it felt, it felt very loving and a very loving set and an amazing group of people.

So that's why I'm back again.

You know, and it's pretty awesome.

And I think it's, it's just, it's a, to me, it's also to make a statement.

I was tired of, you know,

just doing recovery.

I got recovery down to eight hours at that point a day.

And I had to reduce it to about four hours to start working.

But I said, I think I'm ready.

I think it's time.

I got to get back on the world.

I can't just be,

you know, some like gym rat, some recovery rat.

Like a gym rat, it'd be like a recovery rat.

I mean, that's all I'm doing.

I'm obsessing on recovery.

I got to do something else.

I got to participate in life.

And like, why not do it with these people?

There's a kind of fragility associated with that focus on recovery that never actually leads to you going back out into the real world.

You know what I mean?

Right.

Well, that's also, yeah, it becomes kind of futile at that point, right?

Well, then, what do I get to set my goals to do?

You know, I think I was ready.

I was definitely very social all throughout that, you know, so I was getting that, I was getting fed that part.

But yeah, just kind of get it back out in the world.

And, and, and the world was really wonderful to me, you know, insularly with the set.

And then even people I met out about, you know, I got wonderful treatment by people wherever I went.

And wow, what a, that just, that love that I would get just further, it just filled up my gas tank to get better, get stronger, do better, be better.

And, uh, but it all starts with me.

I'm not doing it for anybody, right?

I'm filled with the things I need to do for myself.

And there's zero selfish bone in my body.

You know what I mean?

And I always had that.

And I don't know if it's YouTube, but or if it was just a general thing, it feels selfish to take care of yourself.

So that, oh, I need to take care of everybody else, right?

I don't know if that's,

but it certainly does, it doesn't even come across.

I never, there's not a selfish bone in my body, and I know it no matter what, how much time I spend on myself.

You know what I mean?

What would you say to someone who is deep in the hole, some sort of recovery, complex illness,

injury, and

they just haven't got that same fire that they need?

Yeah, I know, man.

You need people around.

You need a support system, emotionally support you.

Even if they're just there in the background, you hate them.

You hate hearing their voices in the other room as they're playing games.

And my family was doing that.

I didn't resent that.

I would just love hearing their voice there, the rumblings in the other room as I was in there with rubber bands and stuff and doing my thing.

They'd be happy if I wheeled out and joined them.

But I had, there's always love and support.

You know, you got to have, you need a community almost, you know.

Maybe that's why they have like, you know, treatment centers.

There's lots of other people going through struggles.

There's, you know, but you know, you're not alone, right?

You have to believe that you're not alone and you can't do anything all by yourself.

And

that kept pushing me to keep going because I had a lot of help and that help I interpreted his love.

And that was just all the few I needed.

So I would say

find support.

I mean, if you're, gosh, if you're a person alone in a hospital, you know, wow, you got nurses there.

You got it, you got a team there that's trying to help you, you know, help them help you, help your body help you.

You're not alone because you have your body.

Create as a separate thing.

It's a new girlfriend or new boyfriend or whatever you want it, new dog.

It's a new separate entity that you get to work with.

Separate your body from yourself,

from your mind.

Then you can work together to get better because they work together wonderfully.

If, right, that's a great dialogue to have.

That was very clutch for me

in my loneliness of it.

But it's very, very effective for neural pathways.

Making new pathways for yourself.

To treat your body like something that needs instructing?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or to treat it with respect.

Like I singing, it's a bad dog is, I think, it's a bad analogy, but it's like, you know, it's just like, it's just a partner.

But you are, you're not helping me out here.

So you got to listen to me.

I'll listen to you if you listen to me.

But it treats

as a respect.

It's still, I respect my body, but I'll tell it to fuck up once in a while.

You know, and it's like, all right, I got you.

I got you.

I got you.

But, you know, I give my body a personality.

Like, it's a, you know what I mean?

It's, uh, I see it.

I see it in my head.

And then we have this relationship.

Now it's just like almost almost unconscious thing that happens.

And nothing, nothing, I get no flare backs or setbacks or anything.

I mean, the worst, and also I never use the word even pain.

I'll use discomfort.

I'll use inflammation, stiffness.

It's the worst thing I can ever say about my body.

But not pain?

No.

I don't know what pain is.

That ain't pain.

Inflammation, stiffness, walking, whatever.

My back's like all out of whack and out of control and whatever.

It's hard for me to get up and down sometimes, but like, it's just all temporary.

It's temporary.

You move through that.

It's a bad afternoon.

It's a rough morning, whatever.

Who cares?

You move through it.

It's temporary.

It's all temporary anyway, isn't it?

Your time on this planet is temporary.

So make it the best you can.

Work through the obstacles as best you can.

Right?

We're all going to get obstacles, no matter how rich you are, how poor you are, how strong you are, or whatever.

We're all going to have problems and obstacles.

How good you are getting over those and through those, how fast and efficient you are with those, yeah, you're going to have more joy in your life.

Leaves a lot more room for joy and laughter and other things you really want.

I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up what, at least to me, as a total noob in this world, a muggle outside of the industry, looks like maybe one of the biggest productions of all time, which was the Avengers series.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

Like, looking back on that,

what was being involved in that production like?

You know,

it removed it initially itself from, you became sort of part of something so collective, it's right, such a collective type of narrative.

The movies I was doing before were pretty more like I was a lead of a movie and the story is told us through my character.

It's just such an ensemble sort of piece.

So you had to rely upon so many things and so many things that didn't even exist.

It was fantasy and this whole green screen and like

people are dressed in checkerboarded outfits and you know so this fantasy world.

And then and then there's something that became really

powerful in knowing that

how much it meant to kids, right?

How like, you know, the wide-eyedness of hope with kids, like, I don't know, it's such a great sort of conduit to kids.

And I love kids.

I'm the oldest of seven.

And it's sort of my birthright just to, you know, to have them or to be with them.

That's why why I have a you know renovations foundation.

I mean, to give hope and opportunity as a kid is really, really important to me.

So, like, it started off there

dressing in costume.

I mean, it looked ridiculous at first.

We're all dressed, you know, there's Hemsworth.

You look a lot like a Hemsworth.

And you put him in, he's got a wig, and he's just, but he's got like a latte.

He's in the store costume.

He's got this

foam hammer, rubber hammer, and this bow and arrow.

And we're all trading around our props.

We're at some Halloween costume.

I was going to say,

what's it feel like when you step out of each each of your respective trailers and you come in and everyone's got the it is to kind of yeah that's when we all because we're all figuring out isn't at the beginning right in the first Avengers we're all kind of figuring out each other and then each other's characters and costumes and uh and then it's just grown into you know a family you know a personal family we have our own private sort of chat and all gone through like you know marriage and divorces and kids and all these things happened over these last 13 years we've been together

and it's also shared on a stage that's almost a significant, culturally significant.

Sort of 22 giant films to make the last one that all led to Endgame, right?

It's quite

significant

thing to have happened over the course of almost 12, 13, 14 years.

And it's awesome to be a part of that.

And I get to take away, again, like I said, it's the great friendships, lasting friendships.

We all have matching tattoos that sort of signify our bond that in this extreme narrative, crazy narrative of superheroes and a strange fantasy world brought us together.

And now I have like really, really amazing, loving friends.

And

I have

great conduit to children to be able to help them.

And

because being famous before s kind of sucked.

It ripped away your sort of

well, yeah, I wouldn't say it's totally sucked, but like it just it it takes away your privacy, all the things.

You don't get to do just normal things.

I'm just a normal dude from kid from Modesto, California.

I want to do the normal shit.

I just don't get to do.

Fine, but I can do other things.

Great.

But, you know, having a voice to kids,

I took my daughter when Endgame came out.

She was five years old.

And I dropped her off at school for the first time.

And she was in kindergarten.

And then as I dropped her off in there, it was kind of nerve-wracking.

I hear my name, Jeremy Renner, be called by some third grader.

I'm like, oh, why does this third grader know my first and last name?

That's Jeremy Renner.

Like you, they're not even saying Hawkeye.

Some day, no, that's Hawkeye.

And I had like 30 kids come chasing me down with cell phones out.

I'm like, what are you doing with cell phones?

First of all, you get, anyway, so I take pictures of them all.

I'm like, get back in, get back in your classrooms.

And I went home, kind of freaked out that all these kids chasing me.

I thought, oh, what a cool thing that is now to have, I can use a celebrity to have a real voice and use it in a proper way, Use it for a good thing.

So

that forever changed my life.

And that's where the foundation came involved.

And I could really make a difference for kids.

It's usually foster youth and disadvantage youth.

And to put a smile on a kids' face is just the best feeling anyway.

And hard to do if I was playing Jeffrey Dahmer.

Hard to do.

Probably couldn't do it if I was doing this role or doing that role or doing that role.

But because I did

something that kids could watch.

Like my daughter never saw any of this stuff.

But these kids were older than whatever.

So anyway, anyway, I had such a conduit to kids, and that became such a beautiful

payday for me.

Because the greatest payday for me,

doing anything in Marvel, was my access to give love to kids, to inspire kids, to give them, especially this foster youth and disadvantaged youth, some opportunities and plant some seeds of hope for them.

Can you remember what your last scene was in the filming schedule for the entire sort of franchise so far?

What was the last thing you did, or the last day that you were on set?

Were you there for the final day of filming overall to give the big?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

We had, yeah, we had all that.

We got all of us together just to do press.

We had to get all the Avengers together because it got quite big at the endgame.

So that was like a big sort of high school reunion kind of feeling.

I'm like, oh my God,

nobody's in costume this time.

But yeah, the last day of filming,

it was a reshoot, I believe, for

Scarlett and I,

her death scene, which is brutal.

But I also did the Hawkeye series, so then that continued on.

Kicks it on, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that kind of continued on.

And, you know, because I'd love to

continue on, but mainly continue on because

I like the character, and I think it can do a lot for more with kids with it.

And

I want to affect a lot of kids.

Was there ever a sense of poetic irony that Hawkeye, given that one of your eyes was out of your head and on the floor, did that pass?

Probably other stuff to focus on during that 45-minute period, but yeah, yeah,

yeah, no, they didn't cut in my head.

Uh, so what are you focused on now?

What's coming up next for you?

Well,

I stick really quite present.

Um, I kind of

try not to let my future get a hold of me

because it did in the past.

So, I focus

the Renovations Foundation.

I have a couple camps that I'm doing.

It's grown quite significantly, which is great.

A lot of support, a lot of community support.

So I'm really focused on that

outside of my mental health and physical health.

And

the foundation is probably second in line as far as priority.

That's a bigger scope of something.

And all my family is involved in the foundation as well, which is so killer.

It's given them

you know, real direction in life as well, my passion to help kids.

So it's really easy.

And my sister, you know, running it.

And then work-wise, yeah, there's a other movie coming out later this year.

I'm excited about The Knives Out is the third one in that.

And then Americanstown's continued on.

People seem to really like that one.

It does well for Paramount Plus.

And I'll probably do one more season for sure, it seems, if people still like it, which I think to do is going to be a pretty killer season.

But outside that,

I'm building a house.

I stay, you know, I'm always building and designing and doing those things.

And

trying not to get too busier than just that.

That's a pretty booked year.

I'm trying not to work anymore for the rest of the year so that I can go focus on the foundation and

helping that grow.

that sort of stuff.

So that's, those are the important things to me.

And my family, of course, you know, I got to go, I can't wait to spend the summer with my daughter.

She loves working

with the foundation and helping the kids.

And it's pretty cool.

Pretty cool to see her growth as an

emotionally intelligent creature.

She's a lovely, lovely human, my daughter's become out to be.

So

very proud.

I'm happy for you, man.

Yeah, thanks, man.

I'm really happy.

I'm really happy.

Jeremy Ranner, ladies and gentlemen, dude, you're awesome.

I think think being able to see somebody sort of publicly go through

a challenge like this is

really important.

It really, really is.

Yeah.

I'm glad it became a public thing.

I'm glad.

I mean, I never wanted it to be

because I woke up and there was like, you know, I was gone for a while.

But by the time I woke up, it was like, it was everywhere.

Right.

And like, that was a private moment between me and my nephew with my family on my driveway.

It's none of your damn business.

And I, you know,

but

I guess I just kind of leaned into it and just made it a, they made it public.

So then I shared a private experience with everybody.

And it was wonderful.

It's, it's, that's where a lot of the narrative grew from me being a man or a brother or just a friend.

Or I wasn't the actor anymore.

I was just somebody that went through something,

something they might be curious about or not, or just someone that's had a lot, right?

So that was, I'm really glad it became such a public thing.

And I'm glad who me being very private typically shared a lot of sort of milestones that I had through social media or through the press.

The press is very like, whatever I said on social media, they just went out and printed everywhere.

And I'm glad I created a lot of wonderful relationships with the public, with fans.

That you can't just, I mean, I'm glad.

I'm so glad for it.

But I tried to do the Diane Sawyer thing and then say, okay, here's what happened.

Now let's move on.

Let me get back to no, no, no.

That was just the beginning.

Write the book, dude, the interviews.

Oh, yeah,

yeah, all this stuff.

So

so even like with this book, it's not going to be, it's just only going to be a chapter.

It's not going to be,

I'm letting this go for the rest of my life.

I'm never going to let this go.

It's just always going to be part of now my DNA.

I mean, it is for me.

And, you know, the importance of it would be maybe less in public, which would be good.

But it's something I can't just shove away anymore.

It's just now become a central part of who I am.

And I'm thankful for that.

Maybe don't do it again.

I'm not going to do that again.

I'm on a snow cat again, but

I'm not let that thing haunt me.

That's not happening.

Jeremy, I appreciate you, man.

Yeah, thanks, brother.

Appreciate it.

Ooh, tasty.

Jeremy Renner made it all the way to the end of that episode.

Well, why not watch The Indian Hawkeye, Naval Ravikan?

Right here.