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

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Speaker 3 Sometimes life passes in the wink of an eye and it's like, wow, are we here already? But there's other times in that same wink of an eye, you comprehend it all.

Speaker 1 One of the greatest and most iconic actors of all time.

Speaker 2 He has starred in dozens of movies over his 40-year career.

Speaker 4 You know him, we love him.

Speaker 3 Tom Hanks!

Speaker 3 If you're just looking at the past and saying, man, that was when it was great. I wish we could go back.
No!

Speaker 3 You never want to go back. You always have to understand that our best days are still ahead of us.

Speaker 5 Well, as you keep saying, more will be revealed as well.

Speaker 3 This too shall pass and more shall be revealed.

Speaker 3 The number one health and wellness podcast.

Speaker 5 Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty.
The one, the only Jay Shetty.

Speaker 5 Tom Hanks, welcome to On Purpose. It's truly an honor and a gift to be in your presence to have you here.

Speaker 5 And even the first few moments that we've just exchanged a few thoughts, ideas, and stories, I'm already enjoying your company so much. And I'm so grateful that you took the time to do this.

Speaker 3 Kind of likewise.

Speaker 5 And I watched here, which is out on November 1st. I have so much that I want to talk about it through and through your lens.

Speaker 5 And when I was watching it, to me, the theme of home obviously is so strong and apparent. And I wanted to ask you, where do you feel most at home? Apart from home?

Speaker 3 Okay. All right, man.
All right. Let's throw deep right off the bat.
Because I was so many things lined up with me at my age. I was the third of four.

Speaker 3 My parents were very preoccupied with all certain, you know, like the positives and miseries of their lives. I like to joke that they.

Speaker 3 pioneered the marriage dissolution laws for the state of California, you know, back. They got divorces when only like Jean-Jacques Gabor, you know, or, you know, Nikki Hilton got divorces.

Speaker 3 My home environment was fluid in that we moved a lot and we were suddenly living with a whole different set of people because people, you know, my parents got remarried and whatnot.

Speaker 3 So that by the time I was seven, I had lived in eight different homes. By the time I was 10, I had lived in 10 different homes.
And it's always been like that. So

Speaker 3 I am not.

Speaker 3 intimidated by it and I don't think I'm damaged by it at all. As a matter of fact, my brother, who I did not live with, he lived in the same town and in one of three houses all his life.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I consider myself the lucky one, you know, just by the nature of so much stuff that I've seen and so much stuff that I've been able to experience and be comfortable with. Now,

Speaker 3 look,

Speaker 3 I'm 68, so I went through, I witnessed everything, you know, whatever drug thing that you want to go.

Speaker 3 I, I wasn't a participant an awful lot of that because I was so, um, I was kind of like entertained by the new rules of whatever we were. And here's a new school and here's a new apartment complex.

Speaker 3 And now we're living in a bona fide neighborhood. And I was not intimidated by all of that stuff.
And I was also comfortable, perhaps in a way that's not.

Speaker 3 healthy in some ways, of being a new guy in a new circumstance, sizing up a room, sizing up a school, figuring out, all right, what's the easiest way to get comfortable here?

Speaker 3 Part of it is being open, you know, kind of like taking over, cracking a few jokes, not getting in trouble. And that's different from, I would say, like my older brother, who was very shy.

Speaker 3 And we were connected at the hip through all of this stuff. And it was not great.

Speaker 3 for the other members of my family, but there was just something about the roll of the dice, number three of four,

Speaker 3 right there when the parents are too busy with all this other kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 my siblings were not much older than I was, but older than I was. They were social beings long before I was.
I didn't become a social being until I was like seven years old or whatnot.

Speaker 3 And by that time, I had lived in very many places. So you're long-winded conversation.
I love it.

Speaker 3 Where do I feel at? Why do I feel at home

Speaker 3 most?

Speaker 3 I'm going to say now, at the age of 68, with some collection of my immediate family, wherever we are, provided we are, and I don't mean to be good at it, laughing, you know, provided we are laughing at perhaps the absurdity of it or dealing with the cruelty of it, or sometimes just the surrealistic aspect of, can somebody tell me how we ended up here exactly?

Speaker 3 Can someone, can someone do that right now? So I,

Speaker 3 now that's not necessarily a strength because along with that came, dude, I travel light and I can travel light emotionally.

Speaker 3 I'm done. There's stuff that I cannot control.
I have left many a wonderful atmosphere or a loving atmosphere or a friendly atmosphere.

Speaker 3 And like Ernie Banks, the ball player for the Chicago Cubs, without ever looking back. Without thinking, oh, things were really wonderful back then.
I wish I was back there.

Speaker 3 Jay, I don't think I've ever thought that. Wow.
Now, is that great? Is it facile? Or is it so mercurial that

Speaker 3 maybe you shouldn't trust me?

Speaker 5 Does it feel like it feels like and sounds like a healthy detachment?

Speaker 3 There is a type, okay, let's talk about that because there is a version of detachment that means that you can navigate,

Speaker 3 say like, can I say assholes? Of course, you can say whatever you mean. So you can navigate assholes.
And, you know, I think my experience is about 90% of the people

Speaker 3 that you come across are pretty decent folks. 5%

Speaker 3 are assholes. And I'll say 5% are sociopaths.

Speaker 3 And you cannot avoid that other 10%, those two 5%. And

Speaker 3 the ability to detach from those circumstances, without a doubt, a good thing.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 the habit then, I think, of choosing isolation from the other 90%,

Speaker 3 because what can I rely on? At the end of the day, I can only rely on what I can fit in either my emotional suitcase, an actual suitcase, or the back of my car.

Speaker 3 And that lingers for a very long time. So I think the healthy aspect of it has been a great aid to me, as well as

Speaker 3 the tendency to want to be isolated, to not need anybody, put it that way, to not want anybody, because that's just what I learned. Life is easier if you don't need

Speaker 3 anybody. And it can be a lot easier if you want nothing more than what's in the back of the car.
But that can be a solitary life. And a lot of times being solitary can be confused with being lonely.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 being lonely can lead to anger and resentments and stuff that you got to work through.

Speaker 3 And okay, at the 68, you know, a lot of those years have been dealt with dealing with the latter and enjoying the former at the same time.

Speaker 5 Well, I think what you rightly said is that there's this binary feeling of if you're detached, you're lonely or disconnected, or you might be at the other end codependent and attached and not have the ability to operate in.

Speaker 5 a solitary state. So how have you danced almost so beautifully between the two of being able to confidently say you've been detached in the right ways?

Speaker 5 And then, at the same time, you have this beautiful relationship with your wife. You have long-term friendships with people in the industry, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg.
You have

Speaker 5 people I worked with. Yeah, good new words with.
So, how does that dance work? Because I do think that the magic is in the dance, not in the choice.

Speaker 3 I'm going to say that I got very, very, very lucky

Speaker 3 being in the right place at the right time and recognizing something

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 was just

Speaker 3 for me.

Speaker 3 All right, let you go back to, let's just go back to school. You know, people say show business is like high school with money.

Speaker 3 High school is like show business without money. You know, it truly was.

Speaker 3 And when I was, when I look, I just went to school and my joke was we moved around so much that whenever, you know, at the end of the school year, my dad would stand me out on the driveway and say, son, your school is somewhere in that direction.

Speaker 3 Just walk that way. And when you see kids your own age, just follow them and they will lead you to whatever school you are supposed to go to.
The school was a social kind of like place for me.

Speaker 3 And every now and again, there might be a moment that landed in my intellectual pursuit, if that makes sense. I can't say I really loved.

Speaker 3 going to school, but I certainly loved the hang of going to school. That's a different thing.
Subject matters, that was a role that history was great sometimes.

Speaker 3 Some reading was great, but I was no artist. I was no, you know, I was no mathematician.

Speaker 3 You know, I kind of liked geography because you could visualize a map and nowhere like Sri Lanka was or, you know, the difference between Cambodia and Thailand.

Speaker 3 But when I was in high school and had no idea what I was supposed to do with my time,

Speaker 3 other than, you know, maybe go to young life, you know, hang out, you know, hang out with, you know, some sort of psych

Speaker 3 theological, you know, brothers. But other than that, sign up for class, maybe do your homework on the bus on the way to school and what, run track? I don't know.
What are you supposed to do?

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 there was a theater teacher. There was a theater department at this high school.
And actually, this guy I had known since sixth grade was playing Dracula

Speaker 3 in the high school play.

Speaker 3 And I said, what? Really? And so, you know, we went. We went up to school at night to see him.
And I'd never been at my high school at night. Looks different at night, right?

Speaker 3 And then I sat there and there was

Speaker 3 a bunch of people in the auditorium. And then they came out and did this play.
And I thought,

Speaker 3 this is school?

Speaker 3 You can do this at school. School isn't this thing just to survive.
This isn't this thing just to fill up your time, to leave as soon as you can and get there at the late. I don't know.

Speaker 3 I never cut class. I didn't do that because in some ways the hang of school was too much fun.
But when I saw that there was this kind of discipline that

Speaker 3 I had already been thinking of in my head, that just changed everything.

Speaker 3 That just, when you suddenly have a reason to go and do something, and the reason is in a pursuit of something that you cannot find anywhere else, right?

Speaker 3 That my, I got to say, my junior and senior years of high school, I have been living that same exact life and excitement ever since. I'm not kidding.
The idea of auditioning for the first,

Speaker 3 like

Speaker 3 our great instructor,

Speaker 3 our teacher, he wanted to do real plays because he loved to do the scenic design for it. So we did

Speaker 3 Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams. How about that? 16-year-old, 17-year-old kids playing Night of the Iguana.
Then we did Shakespeare.

Speaker 3 They did

Speaker 3 musicals as well. Those were always popular.

Speaker 3 But suddenly having this tantalizing thing that's like, if you have an imagination and if you're not afraid of getting up in front of people, which I was not,

Speaker 3 some people can't get up. And

Speaker 3 it was a bunt for me.

Speaker 3 I did it without even thinking.

Speaker 3 That gave a purpose and a pursuit. that was much, much bigger than anything else that had been in my life.
Now, I have a friend of mine from the same era, James is his name.

Speaker 3 I met him in fifth grade, and he said to me he was going to be a draftsman.

Speaker 3 He was going to be an engineer. He was going to design buildings.
And he did. That's what he's been doing all of his life.

Speaker 3 I knew people that at the same age that said, well, I really love to cook. And they have written cookbooks and they've run their own catering companies.

Speaker 3 That is what, that's the same sort of thing that I landed upon without really knowing it.

Speaker 3 Because my parents were divorced, I spent a lot of time traveling to and from

Speaker 3 where my mom lived in this small town or where my dad lived

Speaker 3 in Oakland, in the Bay Area.

Speaker 3 And those hours on a greyhound bus, starting when I was seven, seven or eight years old, five hours of just daydreaming, five hours of looking out the window, five hours of looking at people passing cars,

Speaker 3 trains going by, farms and whatnot, buildings within it. The natural preponderance I had to sit there quietly and imagine what was going on.

Speaker 3 That fueled me into realizing that there's this thing that there's actually a discipline and a trade and an art and a,

Speaker 3 what's the word I'm looking for? And

Speaker 3 I'll just say it again, a pursuit that is, let's put on a show, let's tell a story. That came along and bang, that was it.
And I'm telling you, it's the same exact now as it was then.

Speaker 3 did you write on those journeys or was it mainly I wanted to write specifically but I did not literally I did not have the I did not have the scholastic example I did not learn the tools because I just wanted to fake it you know at the last moment yeah now I started writing about about 20 years ago by just incorporating the work that an actor does that is not told to anybody, that is not spoken.

Speaker 3 That actually was a form of writing that

Speaker 3 came about. And I was sort of like instructed on

Speaker 3 how that comes along. But without putting it down on paper, I had malleable, cohesive narratives in my head for all of this stuff.
And I just thought, well, isn't that what everybody does?

Speaker 3 That's the way you do this, right? Because it's not just showing up on time and learning your words and

Speaker 3 doing what you're told.

Speaker 3 There is something beyond that. And

Speaker 3 the beyond that was always 15 times greater than the actual physical showing up.

Speaker 3 I can't discount enough the power of the hang. You want to hear a story?

Speaker 3 Here's a short story. Okay, here's a short man.

Speaker 3 Darlene Love. You know who Darlene Love is? Legendary singer.

Speaker 3 singer,

Speaker 3 a fantastic, fantastic Motown artist, among other things.

Speaker 3 We were, I was on the Christmas show of the old David Letterman show, and every year he brought her along to sing It's Christmas, this fabulous rendition with a big orchestra and male choruses.

Speaker 3 I saw her there and I said, Oh, my, I'd seen her on the David Letterman show for like six or seven years.

Speaker 3 And I said, I met her and I said, I, Miss Love, I cannot believe that I am on the show with you.

Speaker 3 You are, you, you have been belting out, you know, so, so many moments of the soundtrack of my life that I'm just thrilled that you're here and I'm glad that you're still doing it.

Speaker 3 And she looked at me and said, Tom, I'm just here for the hang.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I completely got that because the hang, the interaction with everybody, dealing with the attractiveness of those 90%,

Speaker 3 avoiding or learning how to negotiate around those other 5%,

Speaker 3 the jerks and the evil people. Ain't that just living? know, ain't that, ain't that better than being alone in a room when you don't have a thought in your head?

Speaker 5 Well said. Yeah, absolutely.
I was wondering, you talked about luck a lot there. Can we all become a bit more lucky?

Speaker 3 The fellow who ran the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, Vincent Dowling, I worked for him for three years, and he's the number of people that loved that man and worked with that man.

Speaker 3 He touched a great many people's lives. He said,

Speaker 3 it's the most unfair business in the world. That's one aspect of it.
Because so much of it requires being in the right place at the right time by choice and by sacrifice.

Speaker 3 You know, that's not easy to do. I feel that I was fortunate that from, as we spoke about, from that upgrade bringing, I had no, I had no qualms about, hey, let's go.
I got enough money for gas.

Speaker 3 Let's, the,

Speaker 3 I drove across the country with four other people

Speaker 3 one time.

Speaker 3 And then the next year I drove across across the country by myself did not bat an eye no and there are people that listen they just can't do that you know there is a degree of security and fear and uh intimidation that that can go along with what putting yourself in the right place at the right time

Speaker 3 and along with that will come all it's a look it's a 50 50 you can okay it's a 50 50

Speaker 3 have you heard this great thing i'm no mathematician but when i heard this i thought that's actually a principle for living.

Speaker 3 Jay, if I had a quarter and I flipped it and it came up heads five times in a row, what are the odds that it's going to come up heads a seventh time,

Speaker 3 sixth time in a row?

Speaker 5 Is it still 50-50?

Speaker 3 It's absolute 50-50. Just because something has happened doesn't mean it's going to.
Just because you're in a place doesn't mean that's where you should be. So along with luck,

Speaker 3 shouldn't the other requirement be

Speaker 3 faith or some degree of disconnected to it, to whatever the end result is going to be? You're going to have to be.

Speaker 3 I was talking to a friend of mine and he said, he read somebody, I don't know who it was, but someone wrote down,

Speaker 3 you have to be all right with what's going to happen.

Speaker 3 And I just went,

Speaker 3 well, okay.

Speaker 3 Thanks for that. Yeah.
All right. Let's let's try to do that.
So you have to be all right with what's going to happen right or wrong. Disaster, disease, you know, whatever.

Speaker 3 You have to be all right with

Speaker 3 what is going to happen with some degree of faith and luck that what happens after that is the best thing that could possibly be.

Speaker 5 What's helped you get closer to that? That sounds hard.

Speaker 3 It is.

Speaker 5 It sounds impossible, Lord.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm going to say that age, in all honesty, experience, you know, that thing of what has not destroyed me only makes me stronger. And look, let's not discount the power of getting your ass kicked.

Speaker 3 You know, and I'm not just, you know, suddenly not professionally as well. All sorts of, you know, all sorts of personal things go along that give you a bloody nose and bust your teeth.

Speaker 3 And you have to go through those metaphysically. perhaps physically.
I made this movie where

Speaker 3 I rode a scooter, Vespa.

Speaker 3 And so because of that, I wrote a Vespa for about two years until I realized that I had been so close to killing myself on this thing, making a stupid

Speaker 3 thing, that I'm going to give up this Vespa.

Speaker 3 This was a smart thing to do that only came about because I learned

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 sometimes a hair's breadth between

Speaker 3 cracking up or falling down or needing that crash helmet or not. So it is a degree of

Speaker 3 that experience. And also being i think open to some of the most

Speaker 3 basic i don't want to say philosophical uh

Speaker 3 truths but

Speaker 3 i have been to the holy land i have seen the sites that are um

Speaker 3 precious uh divine i was i was actually working this a long time ago this was before the great many of the great problems that were going there and um i was driving back

Speaker 3 being driven to Jerusalem. I was with a guide and I said, hey, so

Speaker 3 Moshe,

Speaker 3 tell me about where we are. And he says, okay, I will tell you.
This is

Speaker 3 we are bound by a kibbutz. This is a very old kibbutz.
You know kibbutz? Yes, this is a very old one. It's been there for a very long time, very popular.
And now we are coming up with a Moshav.

Speaker 3 You know what Moshav is? Moshav is not like a kibbutz, it's different, more

Speaker 3 socialist, less comfortable. But this is also much like that.
And people live there and they work and they farm. And this is where David killed Goliath.
And coming up here, where God is.

Speaker 3 Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Speaker 3 Back to Kara. Just a little.
Back this out. Did you just say this is where David killed Goliath? Yes, he says.
There's a little sign there. It said in English and Hebrew and Arabic.
This is.

Speaker 3 Well, tell me about that. Okay, well, okay, there you see the valley, yes, okay.
And on one side was the uh the Philistines, Philistines, Philistines, yes. They were, they were there, okay.

Speaker 3 And David and the Israelites were

Speaker 3 here. And they sent down to the middle

Speaker 3 the Geant, the

Speaker 3 giant, yes, yes, the Goliath, yes.

Speaker 3 And David goes and says, I will fight this man. And he puts the stones and

Speaker 3 he kills him. And I said, this is the place.
He said, yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm not going to argue with that.

Speaker 3 Absolutely not going to argue with that. So moved along.

Speaker 3 And I've, you know, you visit great cathedrals and whatnot. I've been all places around the world, some of the great faiths.
And we were in.

Speaker 3 We were in Japan, the family and I. We had this fabulous guy that was driving us around.
And he took us to some Buddhist places, some Shinto shrines.

Speaker 3 And there was was a big tree at one of them,

Speaker 3 at

Speaker 3 one of the temples, the shrines. And people would write down prayers on these on

Speaker 3 wooden signs, and they would hang them up like ornaments. So this tree is just covered with a million prayers.
Beautiful, kind of like sensibility. And he wrote down something and he hung it up.

Speaker 3 And I said, you know, Oshi, what did you write? He says, oh, I wrote here, I'll show you. And it was in Japanese, you know, the language.
And he says,

Speaker 3 this means I will never know all I need to know.

Speaker 3 That's all we talked about, you know, at dinner later on. Did you know what to say?

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 the ongoing education of we're never going to know what we need to know. More is always going to be revealed.
And

Speaker 3 this too shall pass.

Speaker 3 That governs absolutely everything.

Speaker 3 If you are having the greatest time in your work, this too shall pass. if you are successful

Speaker 3 this too shall pass if you are sick if you are experiencing great tragedy and great drama great difficulty this too shall pass now i don't know if i'm still answering the question you asked

Speaker 3 uh this was educated to me over the course of my 20s and 30s and 40s or 50s at a time when you think that no what you have to do is have a master plan you got to stick to the plan you got to lay your head down you got to fight for it you got to compete yeah okay there's times when you know you got to do that other kinds of stuff.

Speaker 3 And other times you just kind of like got to roll over and say, I surrender, you know, just I will never know all I need to know. And I'll never be able to do all that I should do.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Does that make sense?

Speaker 5 It does make sense. It does make sense.

Speaker 5 And I appreciate you saying that it comes with wisdom and age and experience, because I used to have a mentor who sadly passed away during the pandemic, but he would always replay, he would always repeat to me, there's no substitute for maturity.

Speaker 3 And it was

Speaker 3 no shortcut to it.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Yeah, the maturity was just something.

Speaker 3 And yet, didn't you know somebody when you were young who was the same age as you that had it?

Speaker 5 Absolutely.

Speaker 3 Oh, I came across all sorts of people like that. Yeah.
And I just said,

Speaker 3 first of all, what makes you so special? And what makes you so smart? What makes you so calm? You know?

Speaker 5 What was it? Did you ever figure it out?

Speaker 3 I haven't the vaguest idea. You know, some combination, I would probably say, of connection, you know, a connection to a family, a connection to, you know,

Speaker 3 perhaps a heritage that goes along with that. That, you know,

Speaker 3 some friend of mine, we were, we went to their

Speaker 3 son's bom mitzvah.

Speaker 3 And I'm not Jewish, but I said, you got bomb mitzvah. Oh, yeah, of course I got bomb mitzvah.
And he said, and he said, let me tell you something about the bom mitzvah.

Speaker 3 This is what's great about it, because my 13-year-old son, when he's getting bom mitzvah. And I told him, I said, after this, my son, your sins are your own.

Speaker 3 He's 13. But this is the, you know, and there's studies of, you know, there's examples of that all through all sorts of cultures and all sorts of histories

Speaker 3 that said there is a time when you and you alone are responsible for everything that that goes on, goes on in your life.

Speaker 3 I have a friend who is studying

Speaker 3 with a Buddhist monk, you know, a guy who's name, he's literally got his name venerable in his first name. How about that? Wow.
When I was talking to the venerable, you know, whatever,

Speaker 3 and I said, look, I know squat about Buddhism outside of, you know, what I, you know, see on TV shows. So

Speaker 3 what's the deal? And he said, well,

Speaker 3 one of the smartest things I heard from a guy who practices Buddhism is,

Speaker 3 My life used to be nothing but chopping wood and carrying water. And now that I have received some enlightenment, I find that all that is necessary for me to live is to chop wood and carry water.

Speaker 3 And I said, okay, all right, man, that's some high country. And I don't know if you hear that.
Well, I don't know if I had heard that at the age of 22, I would have had the slightest.

Speaker 3 an idea of what it meant. But at the age of 68,

Speaker 3 I think I can get a little bit closer to that.

Speaker 5 Definitely.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think there's two things you brought to mind for me.

Speaker 5 I think one of them's been when I've noticed some of the wiser people that I've met along the way or at a younger age, as you were mentioning, it's always been people who are exposed to more generations.

Speaker 5 And so people who were in their 20s, but knew people who were 70 and spent quality time with them, or people who are in their 50s and spent time with someone who was 18 or 21.

Speaker 5 And that kind of juxtaposition of being surrounded by people that weren't just all your age in the same space. There was a sense of you being able to learn and grow and take and receive.

Speaker 5 I was spending time with a couple that my wife and I have become very close friends with, and they're both 70. And my wife and I are in our mid-30s.
And

Speaker 5 we spent a weekend with them and it was brilliant because I got destroyed at pickleball by this

Speaker 3 70 years. Always good.
A humbling experience.

Speaker 5 It's a huge inspiration for me. Yeah.
He's playing pickleball and tennis for four hours a day and I can barely play for a couple. And so big inspiration.

Speaker 5 But just the life experience and the engagement you get from that. And I think so much of our

Speaker 5 going back to what we were saying about community and even your mention of church there or the Holy Land. I was researching something recently.
I'm writing my third book.

Speaker 5 And something that I came across and I've been playing around with is this idea called the third space theory.

Speaker 5 And what the third space theory lays out is that back in the day, we would have home, we would have work,

Speaker 5 and we would have church. And church was a place you could look back on work and home and reconcile and reflect and think about.

Speaker 3 You can ponder why bad things happen to good people and vice versa. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It was a place spent literally meant for that.

Speaker 3 This is why you come here.

Speaker 5 Exactly. And now what's happened is, let alone three spaces,

Speaker 5 we just have one. So we work from home, we live at home.
And then our third space or the closest thing to it is a television, probably.

Speaker 5 There isn't a separate space. And so it's arguing the fact that there isn't that space almost to have those thoughts, conversations, ideas, insights that may arise.

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Speaker 1 I'm Joanna, founder of MIDI Health. We focus on menopause.
JP Morgan saw our potential and connected us with investors and partners. Now we're scaling fast.

Speaker 1 Visit jpmorgan.com/slash grow without limits. JPMorgan is the bank of the innovation economy.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 7 Only 10 more presents to wrap.

Speaker 1 You're almost at the finish line.

Speaker 8 But first.

Speaker 8 there,

Speaker 8 the last one.

Speaker 6 Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that

Speaker 8 refreshes.

Speaker 3 The generational thing I think is wickedly important. Whether or not, you know, like they don't, you know,

Speaker 3 sometimes it's just the old person that's sitting in the corner, you know.

Speaker 3 But other times it's like, you know, a big, there is some aspect of the big family that is not for everybody, you know, because God knows not everybody wants to come to Thanksgiving sometimes because they don't want to have that same fight again.

Speaker 3 I had a friend who he had, his grandmother was like.

Speaker 3 and already had a nine, like she was 93 or something like that. And she was always just there, you know, just there.

Speaker 3 And at one point, he was

Speaker 3 he was arguing with his parents about not wanting to do so I can't remember what it was didn't matter but everybody was saying why are you doing that why do you what's that about how can you do how can you da da da da blah blah blah and my friend said why

Speaker 3 hey man because life's too short and this 90 year old grandmother is just sitting there and she said no life's not short life is long

Speaker 3 which I interpret as being life is long. So if you're doing something stupid, you know, you're spending a lot of time relishing, you know, living

Speaker 3 inside that stupidity. Yes.
And

Speaker 3 my kids,

Speaker 3 my youngest kids,

Speaker 3 essentially were raised along by us,

Speaker 3 as well as a couple of people that have, you know, been

Speaker 3 employee-like families for members of family, but also their grandparents, their yayen papu, as they say in Greek. People who were never not engaged with them when they were babysitting.

Speaker 3 We never had to have babysitters. We never had to have a nanny.
We didn't have anything like that.

Speaker 3 What we had instead was two generations removed of people speaking Greek to them, asking them questions. What are you doing? From the moment they are toddlers until they're 14 years old.

Speaker 3 What they got from that is so different from

Speaker 3 what I got from mine.

Speaker 3 There is a joke in my family about how bad I am with tools. I mean, as soon as I pick up a screwdriver or a hammer, I start getting cold sweats because my dad had no patience with me.

Speaker 3 About, he never said, Let me show you how to use a, let me show you how to scrape that off. It was always, oh, come on, you knothead.
Don't you know how to sand a board?

Speaker 3 Don't you know the difference between a standard ratch, a socket wrench, and a and a metric? And I never did because nobody said, Let me show you how you do this. You got to learn.

Speaker 3 So that you're talking about something there

Speaker 3 that is,

Speaker 3 it's almost, it's like water on a stone, you know, it just has an effect over time.

Speaker 3 And,

Speaker 3 you know, for in many cultures, you have to look at that and say,

Speaker 3 the more generations around that table with regularity, you know, not just for, you know, three holidays, three holidays a year.

Speaker 3 the richer the lesson is going to be, you know, the deeper the, because you're going to pick up up some stuff just by like an like an old story from, you know, from the old country.

Speaker 3 My father-in-law, dad,

Speaker 3 he was Greek, but grew up in Bulgaria and had to escape the communists and whatnot, which is a fascinating story unto itself.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 he told a story about being told by his dad.

Speaker 3 to take the donkey up to this, you know, up to the mountains and get something and bring it back, knowing that there was the meanest dog on the planet Earth up there that was going to

Speaker 3 try to bite him. He came back.

Speaker 3 Oh, I think of what it was is he said, take the donkey up there. And he didn't want to wrestle with the donkey.
He just wanted to go up there and get it back really fast.

Speaker 3 And on the way there, this dog, you know, nearly mauled him, scared the living daylights out of him. So when he came back down, his dad said, I told you to take the donkey

Speaker 3 because the donkey would scare off the dog. you know like that so you know you don't that's the kind of stuff you got to pick up over time yeah but did you did you have uh

Speaker 5 multiple multiple generations in the home as you were growing up i i felt that for me my my monk teachers became that for me it's because they were older and so sure i had a monk teacher who was in his probably his 60s when i met him i had another who was in his 30s when i first met him and so they became that i wasn't so close to my grandparents and so i didn't really have that same interaction as you as mentioning your children did i didn't really have that with them so i had my parents i had my uncles and aunts but then i think it was really later on when i met those two generations in the monastery that that really expanded my uh breadth of you know human experience it'd be nice if it worked across the board but sometimes you know grandpa's a drunk and you know and uh and grandma does nothing but smoke cigarettes and you know and watch wheel of fortune so maybe it's not always no maybe it's not always

Speaker 5 it can be it can be was You were talking about your experience with your father and, you know, with the tools. And it's so funny because my dad was the opposite.
He was, he was useless at DIY.

Speaker 5 And so I'm useless at DIY. There you go.
And so I have that experience.

Speaker 3 My dad was great. My dad could fix everything.

Speaker 3 There was a story I was talking to my older brother once that he and my dad.

Speaker 3 My dad was like, why in the world are we spending a lot of money for crying out loud? We could get it. We could get electronics kit and make our own amplifier.

Speaker 3 We don't have to go off and pay all this much money. We'd hook it up to a turntable and a speaker.
They already have stereo systems.

Speaker 3 So they got a kit and I saw them working on it together and I was kind of jealous. And

Speaker 3 I'm honestly 40 years later, I said to say, you know, when you made the amplifier with dad, I was really jealous because, oh, man, I wish I would have done anything to trade places with you.

Speaker 3 My dad was so miserable as we were doing it always. You knothead, don't you know? Don't you know how to solder this? It's like, oh, well, you know, it's a perspective of everything.
Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 5 Did you try to, did you try to parent differently? Like, did you kind of

Speaker 3 try to, but I made every mistake.

Speaker 3 You scar the kids somehow in the same exact way. And as they get older, you come back around.
I said, hey, can I talk about what a knothead I was with you for all those years?

Speaker 5 And said, yeah, sure, dad.

Speaker 3 Yeah, been kind of waiting for this.

Speaker 3 Why did you unload? So I know,

Speaker 3 but I would say at the same time, I think there was, you know, does it come up to be 50-50 maybe?

Speaker 3 The attitude and the, you the life that we led, the laughs,

Speaker 3 that stuff's worth its weight in gem-encrusted gold.

Speaker 5 What's something that they've taught you? What's something that they've

Speaker 3 different they all are?

Speaker 3 They are not the same type of human being ever. My youngest at one point said something that was definitely true for him.
And I thought is in fact true for all of my kids, which makes me feel good.

Speaker 3 And that was,

Speaker 3 he was younger. He was like seven or eight.
I said, oh, you know, at one point, let's go down.

Speaker 3 We were New Yorkers, let's go down to the park and we'll take our gloves, we'll throw it around, we'll bat the balls, or we'll just find a place of grass. He said, okay, do that.

Speaker 3 And it got away from me. Didn't happen.
This called that, something happened. And I realized that, oh, the sun's going down now.
And I said, oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Hey, I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 I said we were going to go down in the

Speaker 3 and throw the ball around. It got away from me.

Speaker 3 Forgive me. And he said, no, it's okay, dude.
And he sounded disappointed. That's okay.
I said, well, you know, I feel bad.

Speaker 3 I don't want you to be bored. And he looked at me with a look on his face and said, Dad, I'm never bored.

Speaker 3 And that is, that's curiosity. That speaks to curiosity and drive and also the comfort of where one is in order to feel free, in order to explore whatever world that is.

Speaker 3 And I think I could say that maybe in varying degrees for all the kids, their ability

Speaker 3 to

Speaker 3 pursue their own interests without being prodded, without being forced to,

Speaker 3 I've learned from that because look, there was

Speaker 3 that isolation that I'm, that I was talking about, there was a time when I was so comfortable doing absolutely nothing or, you know, pursuing some brand of, you know, disconnection that wasn't good for me.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 everybody has it in

Speaker 3 some degrees. But you could be of a, with all that you have, with all you kids, with all your advantages, I do not want to hear that you're bored.
And

Speaker 3 they have never said that they're bored.

Speaker 3 They have always had some action thing that was going on, whether I understood their passion for it or not.

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Speaker 5 What attracted that isolation and disconnection at that moment in time? What was it that was so appealing about that?

Speaker 3 I think I just had to get used to it because I was number three.

Speaker 3 People ran out of time. You know, they didn't have the wherewithal, the interest.
Because I was so young, but my parents split up, and there were so many other factors that had to go into,

Speaker 3 man, it was logistics and legal thing and time and distance and stuff like that, that I took care of myself and, you know, was satisfied. I think it was a reprieve for them.

Speaker 3 So I just got I just got used to

Speaker 5 occupying myself by being alone yeah and that's really great and it can be really detrimental yeah I can relate to so much of that as well I feel I was the eldest just one of two and my parents you've used this word previously in in other interviews of having your parents had a fractured relationship and so did mine and so there was definitely a sense of I had to build independence, accountability and responsibility very early on because I had to take care of things.

Speaker 5 And I also look back at that as such a strength. And I'm so grateful for it in a kind of weird way because I feel like it made me grow up earlier.

Speaker 5 Not in a way that I felt I lost a childhood or I didn't have amazing experiences. But I'm really happy now when I look back that it gave me strength and courage much earlier.

Speaker 3 But as the older one, did it have some expectations of responsibility put on you?

Speaker 3 Like, where are you going? And you have to be back by now? Were there rules placed upon you?

Speaker 5 No, no rules, no rules for me. More expectations educationally.

Speaker 5 And what was strange, which is so much linked to what I do today, and I've drawn that line fairly often for myself, is I was emotionally depended on by both of them. Okay.
So I became the therapist.

Speaker 3 Wow, that's a coach. That's a burden.
I'm sorry. Yeah, sorry early on.
No wonder you went off for three years to sleep on the floor. Exactly.

Speaker 5 Sleep on the ground. Yeah, yeah.
So

Speaker 5 I'm grateful for it now, though, because I think it gave me the ability to listen closely, be empathetic, understand both sides, care for both.

Speaker 5 Like it gave me that ability to recognize how it takes two to tango and

Speaker 3 I think this is a viable study about where you are in that pecking order. Emmerna now I agreed about it because because I was last and last by like five years, I had no rules.
I had no expedition.

Speaker 3 They had spent so much time trying to establish that with the older, you know, my older siblings. They didn't want to bother with it anymore.

Speaker 3 So if I was gone for, you know, like two weeks, I just didn't come home for two weeks in high school, they knew I was sleeping at somebody's house and doing my homework and getting to school on my own.

Speaker 3 They were thrilled that they didn't have to, you know, they didn't have to discipline me or punish me. They didn't even have to think about me.
I just came and went. uh by myself.

Speaker 3 So but I was not the oldest. You know, I did not have somebody that was establishing the rules and,

Speaker 3 you know, the structure of the family.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that was, yeah, that was different for me, too. I had, I had expectations academically, which is normal in an Indian family, but there weren't any rules for me as well.

Speaker 5 So if I was out and about and doing whatever it was, it didn't matter.

Speaker 3 And so I'm going to, it's the stereotype of the Indian family,

Speaker 3 are you all brilliant students? Do you all work really hard? You finish all your homes?

Speaker 5 You're forced to. Yeah.

Speaker 5 You're forced to prioritize homework. Education is all that matters.
Your social skills, life, relationships don't matter.

Speaker 3 It's all about how well you perform. I'm glad I'm not an Indian, and there's no way I could have been.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's all about how well you perform academically. Your whole life revolves around that.

Speaker 3 Were your parents like high academic achievers?

Speaker 5 I think they'd,

Speaker 5 I would say they did very well for what they had. So my dad became a chartered accountant.
He qualified in England, but he grew up, he was raised in India.

Speaker 5 And my mom never did any more than what you'd study up until age 16. Okay.
And then after that, also became an entrepreneur and became a financial advisor. So they'd both struggled and worked hard to.

Speaker 3 I love it. It was going right where I thought it was until you said, and then became an entrepreneur.
Yeah,

Speaker 5 which I didn't realize growing up that she was an entrepreneur.

Speaker 3 Well, that comes from somewhere of that structure of education and homework done. Exactly.
Even no matter the gender. Exactly.

Speaker 5 Exactly. Exactly.
Definitely. But I was thinking about, as we're talking about your life, I can't help but think about the movie here that I'm so grateful I got to watch

Speaker 5 a couple of days ago, a couple of weeks, no, a week ago now. And I really just felt that it was a work of art.
That's kind of what I took away from it. It was a work of art because,

Speaker 5 rarely, as a film more recently, had me so fixated on,

Speaker 5 first of all, the way it's produced and created is beautiful. And the way it's a pretty deep throw.

Speaker 5 It's so deep, and it's perfect for this conversation that we're having. And even as you're reflecting on all of these scenes in your life, to me, I can't help but project.

Speaker 3 Oh, dear.

Speaker 3 Oh, but you're because, because it was the four of us, you know, Bob, Bob Zamakis, and Eric Roth, and Robin, and I, and everybody, everybody else in it, you know, Paul and every other actor in it.

Speaker 3 We,

Speaker 3 the scenes are very, very specific of a moment in a family's life. Yes.
And everybody was armed for bear. Everybody had a thing.

Speaker 3 that had happened to them that was like that, not necessarily example, but the sensory experience, the emotional connection to every single moment in this thing was really quite resonant for us all.

Speaker 3 And I had to, when I, people say, what are you working on? Oh, I'm making a movie called Here. I say, not H-E-A-R.

Speaker 3 It's H-E-R-E. They said, well, what's it about? I said, it is about how important

Speaker 3 things are when they happen.

Speaker 3 here,

Speaker 3 you know, because you cannot control them. And they are, if you,

Speaker 3 the film, I mean,

Speaker 3 all of the permutations, it goes, you know, we say, oh, the camera stands still in space, but it moves in time, you know.

Speaker 3 Everybody, every character in it is going through that profound thing that happens in a specific moment in their life. And where does it happen? It happens right here.

Speaker 3 So we were always talking about presence, you know, some big aspect of it. And also that we do not know that we're living in a moment of history.
We don't know, you know, they don't know that

Speaker 3 the first tribes, you know, the Native Americans, they don't know that they're Native Americans. They're just living in the moment.

Speaker 3 They don't know they're living 600 years ago, nor do the people that build the house

Speaker 3 that takes place. They don't know that they're living in 1911.
They think that they're just living in the right now of it.

Speaker 3 And that's a type of thing that really is so

Speaker 3 examinable

Speaker 3 in a very specific type of cinema that uh that is the point of what the what the whole movie is that you know that bob and eric fleshed out long before uh uh robin and i came along yeah and along with that comes together the four of us

Speaker 3 have a history that we can go back to. I mean,

Speaker 3 Robin's worked with Bob a couple of times. I've worked with Bob a number of times.
Eric is one friend of mine. We've worked on stuff all the time.

Speaker 3 And every time we've done it, we have a pinpoint of the difference between here at the moment that it happened and now at this moment where we're talking about establishing a whole new other place in time.

Speaker 5 Yeah. I mean, when I was watching it, I couldn't help but think of every place that has been monumental in my life.

Speaker 5 And then think about how many other events must have taken place in that room, in that space that I'm not even aware of.

Speaker 5 And I might even take for granted and not recognize the value of both in my life and previously and of course the future as well.

Speaker 3 Well, I had to wrap my head around this thing that I had never experienced. We lived here.

Speaker 3 I've never lived any place, you know,

Speaker 3 now I've had, I've lived, I have in the same literally home as in three-dimensional structure in time and space. I've had that now for, you know, a couple of decades here.

Speaker 3 But this idea of someone putting so much,

Speaker 3 I don't want to say importance, but having so much emotional centeredness in literally this place in a room by these stairs, through this door. The TV used to be there and there it was there.

Speaker 3 Here's where mom and dad did this. Here's where I did that.
I don't have that.

Speaker 3 Well, I got it, you know, once we got married and, you know, finally, I did, but I didn't get it until I was 35 years old. And my kids have it.

Speaker 3 And sometimes I have to ask them about their perspectives. I moved around so much as a kid.
I looked forward to it.

Speaker 3 When we moved out of the house that my kids had been born in and lived in for the better part, you know, lived in for like 14 years apiece, they were sort of undone by it. And I didn't understand it.

Speaker 3 I literally in the back of my head, if not verbally, said, what's a big deal? You know, how's that

Speaker 3 for a perspective? It is a huge deal if you're actually there. And Richard, you know, Robin and I are characters.
You know,

Speaker 3 I'm born in the house. I grow up in the house.
My kids are born in the house. Our entire marriage and family is spent in that house.
And is it a solace?

Speaker 3 Or is it a boundary that you're never able to get through of?

Speaker 3 Experiencing that and examining that was, oh my Lord. I can't tell you how many, how much conversation.

Speaker 3 This whole movie was just one big ass conversation about what it means. And not so much about what the words are, how we move around.
That's the technical stuff that goes along.

Speaker 3 But every moment that we were off by ourselves, it seemed to me we were trying to weigh this very specific thing of what

Speaker 3 we have all been through in our odd, you know, celebrated, goofy, stupid

Speaker 3 individual lives and what it meant to this, the H-E-R-E aspect of

Speaker 3 this story that we were trying to tell. And Bob particularly, I mean, Bob's, we all, I think, incorporated our own approach to our art form and commercial life to it.

Speaker 3 Bob is a filmmaker is not about to do a shot that anybody could do. you know, and he's not about to tell a story cinematically in ways that have been done before.
He's just built that way.

Speaker 3 He went, well, hell, anybody can do that. You know, he says stuff like that.

Speaker 3 And Eric, as a screenwriter, he's constantly landing on this place where only his words on paper can be tired of spills and stains on your sofa?

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Speaker 4 My name is Nicholas Hertz, founder of Montero Therapeutics. We started working with JP Morgan early on because of their expertise in life sciences.

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Speaker 3 Okay,

Speaker 7 only 10 more presents to wrap.

Speaker 1 You're almost at the finish line.

Speaker 8 But first.

Speaker 8 There.

Speaker 8 The last one.

Speaker 6 Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that

Speaker 8 refreshes.

Speaker 3 Translate this thought process. And Robin and I, you know,

Speaker 3 Paul, everybody in the thing is like, I know the lines turn me loose. Let's go.
Let's go. What are you going to do? Are you going to try that? Let's try that.
Where are you going to just take it?

Speaker 3 You know, this ongoing game of improvisational, emotional football in which you just, and I mean, football is in the international sense. Yes.
Premiership, the championships league.

Speaker 3 It is a ball that is kind of, it's a matter of engines. It's a matter of a curb.

Speaker 3 It's a matter of being in the right place at the right time in order to receive what's given to you and then pass on to somebody else.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it was,

Speaker 5 I know the film uses digital anti-aging technology and you get to see yourself

Speaker 5 many years younger. Was there any special feeling of that?

Speaker 3 No,

Speaker 3 it was kind of great. I mean, because it's a great tool because it's been, you know, people are aged and younged up in movies, you know,

Speaker 3 since...

Speaker 3 Edison stole George Mellier's film process back in the early 1900s. It was fascinating to watch because it ended up being the tools were so much better that it was a different completeness to it.

Speaker 5 Absolutely.

Speaker 3 You know, we all had, you know, you always have hair and makeup. We went through extensive everything.
You know, they did what they had. At one point, I'm sitting there and Jennifer,

Speaker 3 the fabulous makeup artist, she's just looking at me. She just grabbed both of my ears.

Speaker 3 and then lifted them up and shoved them to the into the top of my head. And I said, what are you doing? She said, oh, Tom, we're working on you being 17.

Speaker 3 And as you age, your ears grow and lower on your head. And so I'm trying to see if I'll be able to glue them up

Speaker 3 on the side. I said,

Speaker 3 have at it, girl.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 all of the tool aspect of it is standard. What was new is that we could see it in real time.

Speaker 3 We didn't have to send it off and wait for a long post-production thing because that was was the deep fake technology that uses some form of AI just to make it much, much faster and immediate.

Speaker 3 And listen,

Speaker 3 one of the things that it shows is just how old I am.

Speaker 3 Because, you know, you got to have posture and energy. And if you're, if everything else about you looks like you're 22 years old, you're going to have to embody a 22-year-old.

Speaker 3 I'm going to tell you right now, it's very hard to leap off a couch in enthusiasm

Speaker 3 as a 67-year-old guy at the time that we did it.

Speaker 5 I didn't even think of that.

Speaker 3 Hey, you know what? Had a lot of tea, had a lot of protein powers,

Speaker 3 got a lot of rest, got a lot of stretching, you know, in order to make that happen.

Speaker 5 Yeah, you mentioned presence there, and that was a theme that definitely struck me. What do you find helps you be the most present today as you're living?

Speaker 3 There are times that I think you have to be oblivious. You have to sort of like enforce it.
You have to not think of things.

Speaker 3 It's crazy, but one of the most basic things I think that I learned probably in junior college when I actually first, Chabot Community College, when he truly did begin to study this kind of stuff, is that the words, what you are saying, has to be so familiar to you that you don't think about it.

Speaker 3 And that is a degree of being oblivious to the specifics of what you're doing. Because if you're trying to get through it, that means self-consciousness.
That means

Speaker 3 you are not getting out of yourself. And self-consciousness is the death of performance.
Ask any actor this thing. It said, if you have a scene

Speaker 3 where you have to go to a deep emotional place, and the only way to do it is to go there. Chances are.

Speaker 3 You have had the most wonderful day of your life prior to that.

Speaker 3 Or it is so much fun to come to work that day. All right.
So that's one thing that you have to do.

Speaker 3 And the other side of it is if you have to be charming and convivial and funny on paper, on stage a day, chances are you're going through some personal hell, you know, off, you know, off camera that you just have to be oblivious to somehow.

Speaker 3 And along with that, there's, I can't discount enough, the joy of the hang. I think what I do for a living, joy does, does, it promotes it.

Speaker 3 And joy, not necessarily being we're all having a great time, we're all, you know, singing campfire songs, but the joy of allying yourself with great collaborators and trusting that they are going to get better stuff out of you that you could possibly bring yourself and being open to just knowing it so well.

Speaker 3 Everybody says, well, what do you mean by, what do you mean, what do you mean by learning the lines? I mean, learning the lines like you know the

Speaker 3 the the lyrics to the best song you ever heard in your life, yesterday, all my troubles seem so far away. Now I need a place that's here to say, oh, I believe in you.

Speaker 3 You got to be able to rattle it off that fast, that easily. It's got to be so much a part of you that you don't have to think about it at all.
If I actually sang the right words to you.

Speaker 5 Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And I feel there's this, it's amazing to see your enthusiasm, excitement, joy, you know, continuing your career.

Speaker 5 when you're even what you just said now of working with people who can get even more out of me and that belief that there's more in you always you've talked about imposter syndrome in the past which obviously i'm sure everyone when they look at you uh find it hard to believe but i i recognize when you've shared it i've heard you talk about it before it's very real it's it's very genuine this feeling of like oh well you know walk us through that how you've been able to constantly believe there's more in you to give more to do more to find somebody wanted me to do a movie all right and it was great and i should have done it it was going to be for a lot of money it would pee and you go somewhere cool you get a good per diem you know all that kind of stuff there was no reason not to do the movie

Speaker 3 except there was something uh that i just said this is not

Speaker 3 the match for me because number one

Speaker 3 I don't have any curiosity about the subject. Now,

Speaker 3 that's not the only reason to do it. But in order to translate the theme of the movie through a performance, there has to be some sort of challenge and curiosity to it.
And I had none.

Speaker 3 That was one thing. But the other part of it, too, I was searching, I was having a one-on-one talk with the director, and I was just, I said, look, I said,

Speaker 3 I don't have the countenance.

Speaker 3 And the director said, countenance? The hell does that mean? I said, there is a thing that we all carry with us. We have a countenance that comes from everything we've said,

Speaker 3 all the work that we've done, all the times that we've either succeeded or failed, because they both go together.

Speaker 3 Failure teaches you a lot more than success does. I'm talking about commercial success.
But that idea that you walk away from a job and you think that we went to a new place

Speaker 3 in order to examine this theme that only we could have done unless we all got together and challenged each other and made it happen.

Speaker 3 And without that type of stretching of one's countenance that you come into,

Speaker 3 that to me is the big Magilla. I still find myself

Speaker 3 completely at the mercy of that instinctive moment of, oh my God.

Speaker 3 That's what I think.

Speaker 3 And the next thing you know, you want to do it and you're talking about it continuously. And there is nothing that anybody says that

Speaker 3 detracts from that

Speaker 3 initial experience.

Speaker 3 Because, you know,

Speaker 3 there's plenty of other things that you can do

Speaker 3 because they're fun.

Speaker 3 My beginnings, the first time I was a professional actor, we were in repertory theater

Speaker 3 with my Vincent Downling at a place called the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, Ohio. And because we were in rep, we did everything.

Speaker 3 We did Hamlet and King John and Othello. At the same time, we were doing fabulous Rip Warren comedies that

Speaker 3 everybody dug. The countenance then

Speaker 3 is exchanged

Speaker 3 between the two.

Speaker 3 And that's something that it's not a burden at all, but

Speaker 3 it is a prism through which a decision has to be made. Going back again to this idea of this, I believe that

Speaker 3 my countenance, look it up, staff, look up countenance for me.

Speaker 3 My countenance is not going to aid the examination of this theme. And movies work when the theme is worthy of being examined by that movie.
And so in that case, you just have to say,

Speaker 3 no, there's, you need somebody that's going to come in there like a, you know, like, like a, like a mad dog and, and devour that bone. And I just, my countenance doesn't match up to that.

Speaker 5 Yeah. It sounds like you've never compromised that.

Speaker 3 Oh, I've compromised plenty of times. Oh, okay.
You know, making mistakes. You know, there was a period of time, look, look at my IMDB.
It might be up in triple digits by now.

Speaker 3 You know, and it was a time where I just said, they are asking me to be in a movie. You don't say no to that.
And that's young. That's the stuff that you do in your 20s and in your 30s.

Speaker 3 And then sometime in there, you start thinking about, no, no, no, no, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

Speaker 3 The greatest decision, by the way, I don't think I've ever said no yet, except by schedule. But now it turns out to be that's where you start shaping

Speaker 3 what, your, your art and the body of work. You have to start, the power is saying no.

Speaker 3 And that's really, that was really hard to do when, you know, everybody thinks you're great, you show up and everybody wants you to do it and everybody says fabulous things.

Speaker 3 But I've compromised, I didn't know I was compromising because I didn't know any better. But there was a moment, I guess, when he said, like,

Speaker 3 you know, I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to, I think I'd be compromising somewhere here. And so the first time I said no to something,

Speaker 3 it was a very, it was, on one hand, liberating. And of course, I might have thought I made the biggest mistake of my life.

Speaker 3 You know, if you take any great, take any great magnificent, take, let's just pull from the, take Faye Dunaway and Lawrence Olivier. They have very specific countenances.

Speaker 3 There is a thing that you will say, oh my God, the countenance of Laurence Olivier really, really, Ozzie Davis, you know, any great that, wow, that countenance matches. Yes.

Speaker 3 And that's, I guess that's what I'm

Speaker 3 saying. There is a, there is like a, you know, some sort of cosmic weight that they carry along with them that makes sense for what they're doing.

Speaker 5 Yeah, for sure. There's a

Speaker 5 listening to you speak about it.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's so relieving to hear that you've compromised sometimes like because it's a relief i think come by my house right a night of compromise you know how about that you want to do that we'll bring the i love it i mean we'll bring the dvds and say this is the dvd of compromise i mean that would be amazing no i think because i think we're so good we we forget that you're used to celebrating and counting someone's wins and hits when they've had so many and you look over the compromises or whatever it may have been and so it's a relief hearing that because your values of how you pick a project, of how you work on a project seem so, so strong and defined now.

Speaker 5 And that's obviously come with time.

Speaker 5 As you were making here,

Speaker 5 was there a particular scene that reminded you of a time in your life that you want to revisit, relive, rethink?

Speaker 3 Eugene O'Neill

Speaker 3 wrote Ah, Wilderness. He wrote that play as the life he would have, he wanted to have.
He wished he had had, the family that he had wished he had. And I always read that.

Speaker 3 June only is a big reason why I became an actor because I saw great productions of his stuff

Speaker 3 back in 1975, 76. And when I finally saw All Wilderness, I was knocked out because it was as delightful a play as it was.

Speaker 3 And I had always heard that he wrote that as, you know, the family that he wished he had.

Speaker 3 I thought about that when I was doing here because there are moments,

Speaker 3 for example, when we're just sitting watching TV and Robin is there, the kids are little and we're just there.

Speaker 3 And we ended up talking about what would be on the TV, you know, and I went right back to, you know, I don't know if it was a Dean Martin show or an episode or something, even down to some of the commercials that we wanted to.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 those moments were transporting for me. but not in a home the way we were picturing it.

Speaker 3 I remember seeing those in an apartment that we lived in for two and a half years when I was walking to school by myself.

Speaker 3 Or the first years, you know, somebody was married to a step spouse that was not the most benevolent human being in the planet Earth, right? Sometimes I remembered sometimes just that gathering around

Speaker 3 like-mindedly, getting the same thing out of a TV show, like an electric fireplace, but it was solace. It was a togetherness

Speaker 3 that belied what was really going on in the house. And there's a couple of those, particularly when the kids are little and Robin and I are in the early years of our marriages,

Speaker 3 that were sublime

Speaker 3 right then and there, because

Speaker 3 we're laughing. It's there.
The kids are being goofy.

Speaker 3 There's a moment that comes along.

Speaker 3 And what I don't think there's a better example of a true sense of family and home and connection in moments that are not Thanksgiving or Christmas morning or a wedding or a kid.

Speaker 3 They are when you're just sitting around on a Thursday night, you know, content and

Speaker 3 happy and nothing is happening except the sense of presence that's there.

Speaker 3 There's a couple of them. Yeah, it's funny that you should ask that because I realize now that

Speaker 3 the amount of suggestions we all had for how we would sit there, what would be on the TV, what we had done just before,

Speaker 3 was coming

Speaker 3 right out of our individual lives, from Bob, from Eric, certainly from Robin and myself.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it felt so real.

Speaker 5 It feels so real.

Speaker 5 Every scene, every conversation, every event feels so real.

Speaker 3 One of the things that we learned because it's shot in this very specific

Speaker 3 aspect ratio

Speaker 3 camera position is that everything works. Everything.

Speaker 3 If you're in the scene, even if you're not talking, you are registering in a way that warrants attention.

Speaker 3 The stuff that is on the walls, I can't say enough about the TV. Here's something goofy.
I walked onto the set one day, and it was from a period from, you know, early 1960s or something like that.

Speaker 3 And the TV was an old General Electric TV that was the same model we had

Speaker 3 when Apollo 8 flew around the moon.

Speaker 3 This was the TV we had. It was all black and white thing with General Electric.
It had this big channel changing knob on the side. It was like that.
And it was the same maple cabinet. It wasn't big.

Speaker 3 It was just not much, you know, it was on legs and it had the cloth speaker, said General Electric, and the thing like that. And I immediately took a picture of it and I sent it to my siblings.

Speaker 3 And I said, you recognize this? And they all said, ah, that's a TV from the Johnson house. You know, it was like that.
So it had these kind of like talismans that came along with it.

Speaker 3 That

Speaker 3 oddly enough,

Speaker 3 they were both great to see and bittersweet to remember. Does that make sense?

Speaker 5 Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Speaker 5 I know you're fascinated by space. Do you have any desire to go to the moon?

Speaker 3 Oh, you know, if they were going to do a thing where, you know, regular blokes could just go up and go around it. I mean,

Speaker 3 I'd take that. You would? Oh, yeah, just to do it.
But, oh, yeah, I think we'll.

Speaker 5 I'm sure Elon Musk would love to take that.

Speaker 3 Oh, I'm not going with him, but he's not going there anyway. They're just going up now.
But I've met, I've talked to the, I've talked to the crews that are in line to make the next

Speaker 3 orbit around the moon that could happen as early as 25, 26.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 man, oh man, I just say, hey, if you need someone just to clean up and crack jokes, so you got room in there, give me a call.

Speaker 3 I'll get down to whatever weight requirements are necessary because I wouldn't pass it up.

Speaker 3 But I said, but but only if all of the windows are clear, because a lot of times they have gone up and the windows get kind of like messed up because of zero gravity and the vacuum outside and the building material.

Speaker 5 Right. Was that fascination only from movies? Is that where it came from?

Speaker 3 No, no, that came from, I was right smack dab. And

Speaker 3 I was that educatable generation for which it was, space travel was, the embodiment of every discipline that we were studying. Current events, politics, physics, art,

Speaker 3 engineering, math. It was all wrapped up all into one.
It was on

Speaker 3 TV regularly. I was just, I was the,

Speaker 3 of course, now you're going to think about this, but the idea of being alone in space in a spacesuit, it was kind of mirroring my life when I was like seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 years old. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's, I don't know if you saw that movie, Fly Me to the Moon recently.

Speaker 3 No, I did not, but it's, you know, know, it's streaming in the new movie economy, so I know it'll be there for a thousand years.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I just watched it recently. It was fascinating.

Speaker 3 It's a little bit of a conspiracy theory really didn't happen yet. Yeah.
Normally, I hate that kind of stuff, but it's good quality people. So I'll try to do it.

Speaker 5 Exactly.

Speaker 5 I'd love to get your thoughts on it when you see it. Yeah.
And your other fascination is world wars.

Speaker 3 Well, this is another thing that goes back to

Speaker 3 the study of it.

Speaker 3 Let me put it to you this way.

Speaker 3 I was born in 1956.

Speaker 3 That's 11 years after the war is done. So essentially, everybody who is an adult in my life

Speaker 3 had memories of those years, whether they went to war or not. They had memories of the, what I like to call the emotional stasis

Speaker 3 of the early 1940s, in which

Speaker 3 go back again, they did not know the war was going to end.

Speaker 3 In 1943, they had no idea how long the war was, who was going to live, who's going to die, who's going to win, who's going to not, who's not, who's going to come back.

Speaker 3 1943, if you're alive, they're not saying, hey, don't worry about it. The war is going to be over in just another 18 months.
They don't know that.

Speaker 3 And that was a palpable thing that was passed on to me because

Speaker 3 when it came around time to get to know the life stories of a teacher, a friend of my dad's,

Speaker 3 you know, parents of

Speaker 3 my pals.

Speaker 3 They would talk about those years, their youth, in three distinctive parts, three acts of their lives, you know, which might have been picking up on because, you know, some sort of story sense.

Speaker 3 When they were kids, it was before the war.

Speaker 3 When my dad was in high school, it was before the war. When he was working on a farm, listening to the radio and worried about, you know, not being able to afford the dentist.
it was before the war

Speaker 3 then there was well that was during the war it's a whole different storytelling process the whole different guidelines of the narrative well you have to understand that was during the war that was 42 was during the war and their daily life was completely different than what it had been.

Speaker 3 There was less of things. There was this fear of this unseen enemy possible attack.
There were blackouts. They couldn't get cling peaches.
They didn't have birthday cakes as much.

Speaker 3 It was during the war. And also say, well, where were you? Oh, well, that was during the war.
Well, where were you? Well, I was in a battalion.

Speaker 3 You know, I was, I was, you know, my dad was in the South Pacific. He was a machinist.
And he would never have been in the South Pacific as a machine if it were not for the war.

Speaker 3 Then the rest of their lives, when we show up, you know, when this next generation shows up, when their kids show up, all this stuff happened. And again, the narrative has completely changed.

Speaker 3 We have to understand. That That was after the war.
So on one hand, there was something to celebrate. But on the other hand, there was, guess what?

Speaker 3 Life became one damn thing after another in a different way than it had been before the war.

Speaker 3 And, you know,

Speaker 3 the people that you, the people who did it well, you know, the...

Speaker 3 the storytellers, the teachers, or even the friends of my dad's when we're sitting around and everybody's relaxed on a Thursday night and they're drinking beers, you know, and they're talking about when they're getting to know each other.

Speaker 3 The stories from any one of those acts I thought were fascinating, were

Speaker 3 ponderable.

Speaker 3 Because as a seven-year-old, I'm hearing my dad and my mom and other people talk about when they were seven years old with the magnifying glass and the division of, well, that was before the war.

Speaker 3 We did not know what was coming down the pipe. Then everything else that goes along with it.
I still can't quite get past the fact that

Speaker 3 in

Speaker 3 1964, the Beatles are on the Ed Sullivan show.

Speaker 3 And my dad is of the generation of just 20 years prior. The war was not yet over.
And they had no idea when they were ever going to come home.

Speaker 3 And now these four kids are up on there singing, yeah, yeah, yeah, and playing guitars and stuff like that. And

Speaker 3 everybody's making a big deal about it. Part of it is, never saw this coming, never would have, never.

Speaker 3 And in a lot of ways, now us younger generation did not have the same attention span for

Speaker 3 what they had been through. I mean, until the, you know, you can talk about Elvis Presley all you want.

Speaker 3 Rightly so.

Speaker 3 He was a massive generational force, changed the world in a lot of ways. But still, vis-a-vis.
A World War II generation.

Speaker 3 The Beatles come along in 1964, and it's almost as though the last vestige of that generation carries import, you know, has weight that we can pay attention to, even though I've, you know, I've never stopped studying of it because at the end of the day, it's just great storytelling.

Speaker 3 You want to talk about great protagonists, antagonists? You want to talk about the irony? You want to talk about

Speaker 3 the

Speaker 3 schizophrenia of what can happen in good and bad? World War II is about as good as you're going to get. And also, here's this other thing that's ridiculously satisfying about it.

Speaker 3 It ended.

Speaker 3 There was a time when it was all done. And wars now go on for generations, and they go on for decades.
And

Speaker 3 there are no moments when, you know, the swords are... pounded into plowshares.

Speaker 3 Not that that happened in, you know, 100% in 1945.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 it seems as though, like, not that it's any comparison with the events that took place, but our language of this generation has become pre-pandemic during the pandemic. About that.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 you could probably look at it. There was a moment, certainly the AIDS crisis came along and the pandemic of the AIDS.
That certainly altered all of society in the same way.

Speaker 3 You could talk to an awful lot of guys who will say, well, you know what I'm saying? That was before AIDS.

Speaker 3 That means more. And yeah, you would say the same thing about certainly the COVID pandemic.
We went through something

Speaker 3 that, I mean, my, look, I got grandkids who are now talking about their lives. And well, that was during COVID.
And so they didn't go to school and they didn't see their friends.

Speaker 3 They were trying to do things online. It was really different.
And now COVID has let go. And guess what? Now they're just getting on with the rest of the tasks of growing up with their lives.

Speaker 3 So they too.

Speaker 3 you know, it might be a little young to remember, you know, before COVID, but they do. So yeah.
So what's going to be next, do you think?

Speaker 3 What's going to be that next three-act structure to our uh to our collective history well as you keep saying more will be revealed as well there's uh this yes this too shall pass and more shall be revealed and we will never all know of everything that we need to know yeah in uh you've been seen as the um or even in a poll voted the most trusted man in america that's something there's an anomaly in the vote-taking process there how does after all the times i've lied to everybody oh no this is a great movie yeah by all means come see this movie.

Speaker 3 That was a lie sometimes.

Speaker 5 How do you deal with that kind of a movie?

Speaker 3 Oh, you know, I don't know. There's, there's a, um,

Speaker 3 yeah, okay. You know, I get it.
That's good. I guess that comes around to perhaps the thing that I was talking about countenance-wise.
You know, if you were going to take somebody who is

Speaker 3 who is an artist and say,

Speaker 3 who's the scariest person alive? You know,

Speaker 3 you'll come off with, you know, I don't know.

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Speaker 3 You know, Vincent Price, you know, whatever. I'm an artist.
I'm a storyteller. And I think I'll take that as

Speaker 3 a testament to, I guess, the veracity that I brought to my craft, my choice. I'd like to think that, you know, you go all in on a story, on and say, hey, sit down.

Speaker 3 You might be interested in hearing this, is that

Speaker 3 this is an onyx exchange

Speaker 3 between

Speaker 3 myself and the audience. And if it's an honest exchange, then you could come to trust them.
You know, that's not a bad thing. That's not a bad thing.

Speaker 5 Absolutely. And it's quite magical, actually.
I mean, trust in that way.

Speaker 5 Of course, you know, know, Hollywood success, you've spoken about it so many times, which is why we haven't dived into it. And then, you know, a happy, healthy marriage.

Speaker 5 And how did you know Rita was the one? Like, that's, you know, how did you know?

Speaker 3 Divine providence,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 maybe it's kind of like the same thing that happened when I was in school and in high school. And I said, this can be school.

Speaker 3 There was a thing with

Speaker 3 Rita where I just thought, wait, it could be like this. It could be like just sitting around.

Speaker 3 It could be like a carefree union. I didn't know that.
How about that? Honestly, I had not truly experienced that somehow. And when it's there,

Speaker 3 you just kind of go, oh,

Speaker 3 I'd like to say, and then, you know. And then we met and I said, and, you know, and then that was that.
Okay. Yeah.
That's pretty much it. Then you get on with it.
And, you know, years later,

Speaker 3 no small amount of,

Speaker 3 no small amount of me saying things like, oh, let me get this straight. You know, there's a lot of plenty of plenty of examples of that going on, you know, with so much so that, oh, here goes dad,

Speaker 3 oh, here goes dad with a let me get this straight. Why would it work for me? argument.
I pull it out. I pull it out all the time.
And, you know, we

Speaker 3 do. She does too.
And that's the exchange. Yes.
And it's, it remains glorious. And

Speaker 3 you can't create it anywhere else. Can't fake that.

Speaker 5 Yeah. There's that beautiful acceptance speech that you have in 2020 when you talk about how a man is blessed with this beautiful family.
Oh, he has in front of him when you're in tears.

Speaker 3 That, you know, you can't.

Speaker 3 Number one, I am a sap. Number two,

Speaker 3 you don't expect, you think you're going to be able to get up and, you know, get away with it. Some you think, oh, and I'm going to get up.
I'll be some straight shooting.

Speaker 3 I'll see some great stuff but then I just you look down and you know there's my wife and there's you know there's you know a combination of all my kids sometimes four or five you know they're all just there and what do you see I see little babies you know

Speaker 3 and I you know I you know I see I see this this woman that has put up with so much stuff and it just you know the life flashes before your eyes a little bit and there's that there's that moment of surrealism where it's like can somebody explain to me how this happened I'm I'm not quite sure.

Speaker 5 And here does the same thing, the movie, here, H-E-R-E.

Speaker 5 Yeah. There's a sense of you're watching your life flash back.

Speaker 3 What I really loved, okay, this, I guess we have to be careful about spoiler alerts.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so we don't

Speaker 3 want to go there. But I think that it ends up examining this truth that sometimes life passes in the wink of an eye.
And it's like, wow, are we here already?

Speaker 3 But there's other times in that same wink of an eye, you comprehend it all. And I think that's what the, that's what the, the movie works towards, if I can be so bold.

Speaker 3 And in many ways, that was the theme that we were all working towards. And even in the perfectness of just the word, it happened here.
This is where that happened.

Speaker 3 Have you been, have you ever been in like a really super historic place?

Speaker 5 Yes, a few times, yeah.

Speaker 3 Where something went down. Now, maybe it's something from thousands of years ago, or maybe it's something that you witnessed on TV yourself.
You go to like you go to like Washington, D.C.

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 stood on the, you know, look, I made a movie in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I couldn't believe that was happening.

Speaker 3 And then years later, I'm going back and there is a plaque at the top of the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which is where Martin Luther King stood.

Speaker 3 And I have since gone back and read about that extraordinary day that did not happen by accident. In fact, it was originally going to be a protest.
It was going to be a sit-in.

Speaker 3 And the powers at Be all got together and said, rather than make it a protest of a sit-in, make it a march.

Speaker 3 And suddenly also things happened like there were plenty of bathrooms lined up. There were sandwiches that was made for people.
There were social services. There were cops.

Speaker 3 There were army men standing by ready in case it was going to be a riot. And in 1964, 63, a riot was definitely a possibility.
It would have been a massive amount of civil unrest.

Speaker 3 And instead, it was all of these speakers. Marlon Brando was there for it.
Charlton Heston was there along with everybody else.

Speaker 3 Martin Luther King was, everybody could only speak for seven minutes because they did not want it to run over and become unruly.

Speaker 3 So every, everybody who spoke spoke for seven minutes, and that includes the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.

Speaker 3 And there's a reason that plaque is, that, that plaque is there in order to, in order to place it and to be there and see it, then just envision everything. It's a powerful place,

Speaker 3 powerful, powerful, spiritual. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Are there other places you've been to like that or revisited multiple times to decode and discover?

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 I'll tell you, I'll tell you one uh who cares what i said on other podcasts um when we when we were doing um believe it or not when we were in philadelphia because i was making philadelphia kids were you know i uh our only had three kids there and some of them were with us and we were we it was a freezing cold day we had a day off so we went and saw the sites including um independence hall the liberty bell you know a whole bit what are you going to do in philadelphia you're going to go do that you're going to see the liberty bell you're going to go like that and independence hall being a famous place and it's still in the same joint, and it still holds the same, you know, dimensional structure to it.

Speaker 3 You know, maybe a lot of everything might have been, you know, recreated, but nonetheless, there it is. And we were up in the Senate building and

Speaker 3 the Senate room, you know, because it had Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Senate right there.

Speaker 3 And we were there and the.

Speaker 3 It's a national park and the Ranger said,

Speaker 3 if you look at all of this stuff is reproductions except that chair, you know, which is the original chair. It's wow, it looked the same.
It looked like a chair to me.

Speaker 3 So he said, that chair, that's an original chair. And it looked exactly like the same.
He said, all this other stuff has been recreated to the best of its authenticity. And that's a riser there.

Speaker 3 And he said, that spot

Speaker 3 in front of

Speaker 3 the dais,

Speaker 3 John Adams was sworn in as the second president of the United States.

Speaker 3 taking the place of George Washington,

Speaker 3 was the first time in recorded history when the rule of a sovereign nation was passed to another without bloodshed and him not being a relation. It said something like that.
And the head,

Speaker 3 I said, we are in holy ground.

Speaker 3 Nobody died. The king is dead, long lived the king.
No one was murdered, butchered. The hordes didn't come in and take away.
No one was passing it on to his son in order to go on.

Speaker 3 There was no relation between John Adams and George Washington. The only thing that happened was this modicum of a thing they called democracy, which wasn't really democracy.

Speaker 3 I mean, women couldn't vote. If you were a slave, you were only three-fifths of a human being.

Speaker 3 The only people that actually voted were a bunch of white men, property owners, who originally didn't want to pay their taxes to the crown.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 look what happened there. I mean,

Speaker 3 I've been

Speaker 3 plenty of cool joints and

Speaker 3 this idea, not unlike the place where martin luther king stood the idea that was communicated right there was tantamount to being in you know some version of the holies of holies a you know a precious shrine a place of great faith and hope

Speaker 3 i mean speaking to that impact you received uh honorary greek citizenship oh yeah uh for i got a passport for your amazing work there well yeah yeah look we just love you know we love greece and you know it is the home country to uh to my wife's family.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it, well, you can do it.

Speaker 3 This is something

Speaker 3 that we do that do in Greece. You know, you go off to some other island, you're swimming somewhere, you're on a boat,

Speaker 3 and you can kind of like

Speaker 3 pivot, and all you see is land,

Speaker 3 sea, and sky.

Speaker 3 There's no sign of humanity. And you go like,

Speaker 3 this is exactly what it's looked like

Speaker 3 for 110,000 years. You know, this is exactly what this island was here in this exact same port.
And by the way, there's a port right there, which was, you know, places of antiquity or that.

Speaker 3 But to be able to look at something that is unscarred exactly as it was, it's like looking at primordial forests, like going back in time.

Speaker 3 And you see this aspect of the sky and the wind and the aridness of it, but the power of

Speaker 3 a ship in order to get there.

Speaker 3 I've done that any any number of places, you know, great historical places like that. And it ends up, it makes you feel really, really teeny tiny sometimes.
It's like, who are we?

Speaker 3 But, you know, specs in the course of all of this.

Speaker 3 It's like standing under, you know, a big massive sky and finally seeing on a really super dark night the, you know, our galaxy or the, you know, the Milky Way, our solar system.

Speaker 3 And it's like, wow, I haven't been out of town for a while. I forgot how big that sky is and that that's a part of this.

Speaker 3 It's important to go through that.

Speaker 5 So important. So important.

Speaker 3 Have you ever seen a solar eclipse?

Speaker 5 I'm sure I've kind of, but not, I'm not, yeah.

Speaker 3 Not the last one, but the one prior to it, we made sure that we were in the path of totality and we saw it. And oh my

Speaker 3 God,

Speaker 3 it

Speaker 3 you, I cannot talk no special effect in any movie has ever had the same impact or effect on anybody who takes a look at what that is. You feel as though you are witnessing

Speaker 3 God, the, you know, the clockworks of God. And it's, they can predict it.
They know what it's going to be. And every step of it is, you cannot fathom what you are seeing.

Speaker 3 And it made me feel on one hand, it made us all feel, on one hand, really super tiny.

Speaker 3 but at the other hand, magnificent because we're a race that knew when it was coming and could predict it, could make sure we're there watching. It was really marvelous.
What was that?

Speaker 3 When you read it, there was like these paths. You know, you can look at it on a map.
We just made sure that we were up in the panhandle of Idaho in order to take a look at it.

Speaker 3 People were just parking their cars willy-nilly everywhere in order to be, they were driving from, you know, hundreds of miles on either side of it in order to get to this very specific path of totality.

Speaker 3 And it is, man. It is, it is a totally immersive experience.
Don't miss it if you can.

Speaker 5 Okay, next one. Tom, it has been such a joy spending time with you today.
I feel so grateful to have been able to hear stories, be taken on adventures and learn life's lessons.

Speaker 3 My mind, it's been

Speaker 3 a delightful conversation.

Speaker 3 I've learned, I've loved hearing about your history, you know, how you got there. Very kind.
For the oldest boy of a, what is it, a fractured marriage between

Speaker 3 Indian mom and dad?

Speaker 3 I think you've done well in your pursuit.

Speaker 5 Thank you. I'm very grateful.
We end every on-purpose episode with a final five. These have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum.

Speaker 3 One word to one sentence maximum, yeah, which I will probably

Speaker 5 break the rules. So don't worry if you do.
Okay.

Speaker 5 But Tom Hanks, these are your final five. The first question is: What is the best advice you've ever heard or received?

Speaker 3 Throw date, baby.

Speaker 5 And why?

Speaker 3 If you're going to do it,

Speaker 3 do it.

Speaker 3 If you have the chance, do it.

Speaker 3 Don't pause.

Speaker 3 Instinct, man. If you've got an instinct, go at it.
Throw deep.

Speaker 5 I love that. Second question.
What is the worst life advice you ever heard or received?

Speaker 3 Do Fantasy Island.

Speaker 3 I didn't take it, but there was no reason to do Fantasy Island.

Speaker 5 That's great. Question number three, how would you define your current purpose?

Speaker 3 To be present.

Speaker 3 Wherever one is, whoever is one around, be present. Be right there.
Show up. Be present.
Why?

Speaker 3 Because that will teach you then, I think, how

Speaker 3 the difference between telling the truth to the best of your understanding

Speaker 3 and being all right with what happens next, if you can't do that,

Speaker 3 life is going to be be a wasted opportunity, if that makes sense.

Speaker 5 Question number four.

Speaker 3 Are you making these up as you go along?

Speaker 3 No, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 No, no, no. These are all right, okay.

Speaker 5 Yeah, every single question I've asked you today.

Speaker 5 What's something you believe you're learning and evolving into right now, or something that you're tinkering with right now, personally?

Speaker 3 There is

Speaker 3 an addictive quality to examining the past

Speaker 3 that can be counterproductive if you're only doing it in order to wallow in a nostalgia of how easy things were back then. I fancy myself a lay historian.

Speaker 3 Vanity of vanity, all is vanity. There's nothing new under the sun.
Okay, so this stuff has been going on forever.

Speaker 3 If you are not looking,

Speaker 3 if I am not looking for examples of the frailties of the human condition, if I am only looking at the past in in a version of there was an antagonist and there was a protagonist and the protagonist one, missing the point of how

Speaker 3 miraculous the human condition is.

Speaker 3 If you're going to,

Speaker 3 I went to Egypt and I saw all the stuff that tourists see when they see Egypt, right?

Speaker 3 And if you're going to Egypt in order to come up with some, oh, this is the home of great spirituality and there is a a cosmic power here, and this is where, okay, fine, go ahead.

Speaker 3 I'm not going to tell you that's not what's going on. But if you're not also seeing this ongoing friggin mystery

Speaker 3 of what humankind has figured out on its own, you're missing out. You know, there's, there's, yes, they call them the great pyramids.
They weren't necessarily built for great reasons.

Speaker 3 Sometimes they were just built in order to maintain the status quo of the haves and the have-nots.

Speaker 3 When I heard a guy say, the Sphinx, you know, the Great Sphinx,

Speaker 3 you could have been alive

Speaker 3 2,000 years after the Great Sphinx was built.

Speaker 3 And you're still in Pharaohic Egypt. It's still before the common era began.
And guess what? You and nobody else has any idea who built the Sphinx. That's how old it is.

Speaker 3 and that it's bailed as well as it. And if you don't take that and understand, like, man, there's mystery there, who did it, how they did it, that stuff's always interesting.

Speaker 3 The why they did it, that's interesting too. But also, that incredible impact of that the Sphinx will never be explained.

Speaker 3 If you're just there for the nostalgia and you know, you don't want to, you know, ride the camel, get your picture, you can do all that stuff, and that's a blast.

Speaker 3 But there's some, there's something to the past that if you allow yourself just to be soothed by it um

Speaker 3 you're missing out on a great life lesson something that is important as physics or poetry

Speaker 3 so powerful why why do you think we do that i i think because we're looking for um

Speaker 3 a

Speaker 3 we want to feel good about going to sleep at night you know we want to feel as though that there is this uh that there is this this um purpose that outside uh I think,

Speaker 3 outside of the cosmic understanding that, hey, you know what, the universe is indifferent, but the human condition is not. That's what separates us from, you know,

Speaker 3 the chaos theory. We don't have to live in chaos if we choose not to.

Speaker 3 And if we're only looking at the past in order for some degree of, oh, it was so much easier back then. No, it's never been easier.
As I said before, you know,

Speaker 3 no one knows that they're living in the 1400s. They were just live back then.
And

Speaker 3 it might be highfalutin, but what it says is, oh, I'll tell you this, what it says is

Speaker 3 our best days are yet to come.

Speaker 3 We are going to progress from here. And if you're just looking at the past and saying, man, that was when it was great.
I wish we could go back. No,

Speaker 3 you never want to go back. You always have to understand that our best days are still ahead of us.
Otherwise, what's that say of us if we don't move forward?

Speaker 3 It says we gave up or got lazy or ended up putting

Speaker 3 too much power in

Speaker 3 maintaining a status quo that ends up being a division between the haves and the have-nots.

Speaker 5 Absolutely. Well said.
Fifth and final question, we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

Speaker 3 Man, you spring this on me?

Speaker 3 Really?

Speaker 3 I'm looking at a wall of shame of people, you Polaroids of people that have been. They all came up with something for that.

Speaker 5 They did.

Speaker 3 One law

Speaker 3 that everybody had to follow.

Speaker 3 A law.

Speaker 3 Meaning you could be punished if you don't obey this law? Sure.

Speaker 3 Well, it can't be like a philosophical thing like be kind, you know.

Speaker 3 Being kind is in the eye of the both the kinder and the kinde. I would pass a law

Speaker 3 that says

Speaker 3 no one

Speaker 3 is allowed to infringe or prom the right

Speaker 3 in regards to

Speaker 3 what somebody else

Speaker 3 reads.

Speaker 3 That is, no matter how disagreement, whatever that disagreement is, to be free is to think. And the most physical manifestation of thought is in the choosing of what you read.

Speaker 3 So I would say that

Speaker 3 no one is allowed to infringe upon the right to determine,

Speaker 3 figure out what the legal, no one is allowed to infringe upon the right of an individual to read what they choose to read. That would be my, that would be the law.

Speaker 3 Now, take a look at all the societies. Yeah.
You know, I'm

Speaker 3 I'm fascinated by communism, man, because those guys were idiots. They truly were.
And the idea that in East Berlin, you cannot read

Speaker 3 you cannot read

Speaker 3 To Kill a Mockingbird or

Speaker 3 Dr. Zhivago for crying out loud.
The idea that you can maintain order in society by preventing somebody from reading what they want to read, this is madness. This is tyrancy.

Speaker 3 this is, this is, this is draconian. What's the word I'm looking at? That's despotism at its absolute height that you can do that.

Speaker 3 And I think on the opposite of that, absolute freedom to read what you want to read, and along with that, create what you want to create as well. That should be

Speaker 3 the default position of the human condition. And isn't it amazing that it's not? So that would be the law I would pass.

Speaker 5 Powerful, unique, and completely original answers,

Speaker 5 worth waiting for.

Speaker 3 Well, as an author, you know,

Speaker 3 as a guy who writes,

Speaker 3 I'll bow to that.

Speaker 5 Well, Tom, thank you so much. Oh, this was magnificent.

Speaker 3 Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 Oh, it's great.

Speaker 5 Such a pleasure. And I can't wait for everyone to go and watch here on November 1st.

Speaker 3 All right. Yeah, we'll pay that.
Oh, yes. Go ahead.
Now, by the way, you can only see it in the theater.

Speaker 3 Okay, here's the thing.

Speaker 3 This is why Crackstaff is so petrified.

Speaker 3 There is no streaming deal for this movie.

Speaker 3 You're not going to be able to, you know,

Speaker 3 log on, enter your passcode, you know, share it with your friends.

Speaker 3 And are they the only way you're going to, you're going to have to drive to a place and buy a ticket at a certain time and sit in a room with a bunch of strangers

Speaker 3 and watch this movie. It's almost unheard of.
And of course, everybody is petrified that that's going to be the requirements of seeing a movie, but that's the way it's going to be.

Speaker 5 I love it. Theaters are still one of my favorite experiences.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah. It's the, you know, not to continue along with that, but this, there's this thing that we talk about all the time right now.
And I actually believe that podcasts can be an example of it.

Speaker 3 It is the experiential economy, meaning that

Speaker 3 it is one thing, look, everything is a one-on-one.

Speaker 3 You listen to a record, you see a band, but the experience of being with others, as opposed to being in your house or being on your headphones or being like that, being with others has a value to it that in some cases is worth money.

Speaker 3 Okay, that's commerce, but in other cases is to be sought after. My wife and I went to see a play in New York.
It was a revival of Into the Woods.

Speaker 3 And it was more or less right after the pandemic.

Speaker 3 Theaters were back opening again.

Speaker 3 People were essentially living their lives again. There'd been enough, you know,

Speaker 3 everybody gotten enough vaccines and what have you. And COVID wasn't killing as many people as it had.
And so we went to the theater because we knew some people in it.

Speaker 3 And it was, here's this thing happened.

Speaker 3 You know, it's a theater, a mumble to everybody, blah, blah, blah, blah. It sold out, big hit, and mumble, mumble, mumble.
And when the house lights went to half for the first act,

Speaker 3 there was a standing ovation.

Speaker 3 People stood up before a word, before a note had been sung. Nothing had happened.

Speaker 3 What was happening was the show. is about to start and it was a standing ovation.

Speaker 3 And I literally said that's the, that's the experience people are reacting to, the experience of being with strangers or a handful of friends with strangers in a room. And nothing,

Speaker 3 what is going to happen in this room will never be repeated. The only people that will participate in this is the folks that are here right now.

Speaker 3 And movies oftentimes can have that same experience because I can remember going to see 2001 or JAWS or close encounters or aliens or, you know, or full metal jacket.

Speaker 3 I can remember the specifics of all those things. And it's the same experiential experience.
And

Speaker 3 maybe it's part of the economy or maybe it's just part of the great human purchase that we all

Speaker 3 want to participate in. For sure.
Thank you, Tom. Thank you.
Thank you. It's great.
It's a pleasure. And I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 5 If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with Will Smith on owning your truth and unlocking the power of manifestation.

Speaker 3 Anybody who hasn't spoken to their parents or their brother, call them right now. Don't think you're going to have a chance to call them tomorrow or next week.

Speaker 3 That opportunity with my father changed every relationship in my life.

Speaker 3 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 3 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8. Season Zero of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch.

Speaker 3 Head over to globalgamingleague.com. Com, com.

Speaker 3 Global, global, global, global, double, double, global.

Speaker 3 Hey, audiobook lovers. I'm Cal Penn.
I'm Ed Helms. Ed and I are inviting you to join the best-sounding book club you've ever heard with our new podcast, Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.

Speaker 3 Each week, we sit down with your favorite iHeart podcast hosts and some very special guests to discuss the latest and greatest audio books from Audible.

Speaker 3 Listen to Irsay on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow Irsay and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

Speaker 3 What a matchup we got, y'all. This is that classic HBCU vibe.
Non-stop action. The band is rocking and the crowd lick.
Chants echo.

Speaker 5 Thrum beat.

Speaker 3 Everybody's showing that school of pride. Game like this? Yeah, it calls for an ice-cold Coca-Cola.

Speaker 3 Ah, crisp and refreshing. That's a game changer right there.

Speaker 3 Mmm, yeah. That taste always hits the right note, just like a band at halftime.

Speaker 3 And just like that, we're back at it. Passionate fans, school colors everywhere, and an ice-cold Coca-Cola? That's a winning combo.
No matter the sport, no matter the yard, everybody knows.

Speaker 3 Fan work is thirsty work. So grab a Coca-Cola and keep that HBCU pride going.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart Podcast.