South Beach Sessions - William Shatner

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Welcome to South Beach Sessions.

I'm sorry, I'm smiling through this because this is a legitimate delight, not just because this man, a piece of my childhood, is sitting in front of me.

We've got an icon from this planet and beyond, William Shatner.

Big fan.

My wife's a big fan.

And the reason we're big fans beyond the work is your general zest for life.

So it is great to,

you came from around the corner here.

You've been living.

You know, the word zest, if you do lemon zest, for example, you scrape the top off, like the peel.

So is that what I'm doing about life?

I'm scraping the zest off of life.

Maybe that's what I am doing.

Not consciously.

You're still touring.

That's crazy.

No, it's it's yes, it it yes and no.

I mean, it's difficult.

And and and airplanes are difficult.

So if I'm doing cities, I try to book the cities two, three hundred miles apart so I can g be driven uh from one location to the other.

So if the curtain comes down at 11:30, off we go in a car to a venue that's a couple hundred miles away, ideally.

This next tour that I'm going to be doing, or when this is broadcast, I've already done.

In the middle of the tour, there's a jump of about a thousand miles, so we've got to get on an airplane.

These days, getting on an airplane is an absolute nightmare of anxiety.

Just as you and I are speaking,

two airplanes had difficulty.

One was almost hit by another airplane, and the second airplane landed and everybody jumped out on the sliding thing because of some fear of some kind.

I,

as we are talking in this broadcast,

the day before yesterday, was in

Raleigh, North Carolina, and they announced there's a fire in the airport, a bang, get out of the airport, get out, get out now.

And everybody's running around getting out.

I've got roll-on luggage.

And when I'd come into the airport, the escalator wasn't working.

So I took the elevator up to the second floor where you board the airplanes.

Now they're saying, get out, and now I've got to get, and don't use the elevators, elevators, they said.

Now I'm thinking, I've got this heavy roll-on bag, and I'm going to carry it downstairs.

I can't move.

So I sat there, immobile, not knowing quite what to do.

In my immobility,

it was the wisest thing I could have done, because suddenly,

okay, it's a default says, no, it's not a fire.

You can come back, and everybody starts pouring in, grumbling about having to run outside.

And I hadn't moved.

And that's the problem with flying these days.

It's so overloaded that it's a chore, it's not pleasant, and I tried to avoid it.

So I tried driving from one venue to the house.

But what are you doing?

What are you doing at 94 years old at 3 a.m.

in the Midwest, hurdling to another hotel because you're touring, because you must perform?

And that hurdling is H-U-R-T,

not

D,

lurking over barreling.

I'm hurtling.

But

the hurdling.

I was taught to drive fast cars for a number of reasons.

One is for the movies, but also I started to really enjoy going fast around curves.

So I did all these celebrity races.

They teach you fast in, slow out.

Slow in, fast, no wonder I didn't win.

Slow in, fast out, along the limits of adhesion.

So I would drive car, and I'm going to be somewhat

discriminatory right now, an American car, because they're built for comfort and not for going fast around curves.

Even

national highways, which the curves are

have a radiation.

There's a limit to how much of a curve a national road can do.

But at 100 miles an hour in an American car with the limits of adhesion, you can feel the car just beginning to creep up.

You dasn't go any faster.

And so I would be going 100 miles an hour driving the car.

But in the middle of the night at 2 in the morning, there's nobody around.

You don't pass anybody.

And the occasional car coming at you is on the other side of the road.

So you don't pay any attention to that.

I had forgotten, if I'd ever remembered, that cops can measure your speed.

If they're coming the opportunity direction, they can measure your speed going against them.

Apparently, that's what they did.

And so I'm going along at 100 miles an hour.

Suddenly, I see a cherry light flashing.

I pull over, and the cop says, You're going at 100 miles an hour.

I know, sorry, I'm going to get the.

He says, Come into my car.

And I

okay, he taught my license.

He opens, I open the door of the cop car on the passenger side.

And as the light hits me, he looks up and he says, No shit, Shatner.

And he lets me go.

That happens three times on that trip.

No shit, Shatner.

You've got carte blanche.

You have carte blanche to drive as fast as you like through Point Fields.

100 miles an hour is a felony, man.

You know, I thought he was going to cart me off to jail and I'll miss my engagement.

It's going to be very expensive.

He never did that.

That is the zest for life, though, that we speak of.

Well, I played a cop for five years.

So

I I know policemen and I admire policemen.

I think they see that and

they've been very easy on me.

I'd like this to be biographical and I want to go through even your childhood.

But when you think of the status that you have now that endures, I'm assuming from the way television grabbed people 50 years ago is where it is that it started.

When you think of the connection that you have from that television show, Could you have imagined any of that in your wildest dreams?

Nobody imagines, I mean, sick people imagine, I'm going to be loved by, you know, I'm going to be a success.

I'm going to work and I'm going to.

I'm a little

amateur actor in Montreal.

And I started the age of six.

And actually, I've never done anything else.

I've never driven a cab or waited

on people.

I've waited on people, but that was because they were late.

I never delivered a drink.

All I've done

is perform or write or direct or something

related to entertainment.

I've never done anything else.

So I'm blundering around.

My whole life has been a blunder, but a blessed blunder, I guess you could say, because I just

fell into things.

People, would you like to play a policeman?

So I played a policeman for five years.

And so policemen think he must be a policeman or he must know.

And I did go to the academy here in Los Angeles and did a lot of background work and made a lot of friends with patrolmen and

uniformed policemen as well as detectives.

So

a policeman's work is both hugely dangerous and very boring.

And I recognize that.

And I think they see that I recognize that.

And so I'm a fan.

But when you've traveled through what you've traveled through, what is the need in your 90s to be driving across Midwest America to perform

on tour

the way that you performed your life story in 2012 in a one-act,

a one-man play?

You have the need to tell everyone.

I'm not telling anybody.

I'm working.

And you know,

the aging,

the aging brain, you hear that phrase, and

people talk about what happens to your head when you're.

But everything they say is if you're active, if you're

involved in life,

in the

dirt of life, if you're mucking around in the mud,

trying to live like you did when you were 20,

your brain grows.

It's a muscle.

Well, it's neurons, but

it's strengthened by exercise, by giving yourself problems.

And these are problems.

I just had an experience that was unlike anything I've ever done

a month or two ago.

I had been to the South Pole,

and I had been hired to do what you and I are doing right now, to talk and expand on whatever I might know.

And they had also asked Neil deGrasse Tyson to do the same thing.

And so we were on board ship for a couple of weeks together, and we combined forces and we started doing shows together.

Now, he's a very erudite guy.

He's an expert,

a source of

information about space and about

what stars are doing.

A modern-day representative for the science of the stars and space,

our most famous advocate, not unlike what you were on television in

66.

I wish I had said that.

That's exactly what he is.

He's a bright, affable, lovely man, and I got to know him.

So when we came home, when I came home to Los Angeles, and he lives in New York,

I thought, what an adventure that was.

And I had boned up a little bit on the three explorers who

made it their business to

try and get to the South Pole.

And only one of between Amundsen, Scott, and Shackleton, the only one who made it was Amundsen, the Norwegian.

And so I knew their life story, and I knew some of the philosophy.

I knew why one had made it and two hadn't.

And then I began to think:

why would somebody want to go to the South Pole,

which is a desert, it's arid,

it's a snowbank.

Why would you want to go from one snowbank to another?

There's nothing there, there's no wildlife.

Oh, look, there's a wildlife there.

There's something going on two, three miles beneath your feet, but it's all ice.

There's nothing there.

Why would you want to go?

Why

and now I've said that with passion.

Now do it academically.

Why would you want to go to the South Pole?

Why don't you want to go up to Everest, Mount Everest, or discover a new mountain or go under the...

I mean, there's

so many places you could explore.

Why the South Pole?

I began to write about that.

I'm thinking, my God,

what's the reason for exploration?

Why do we explore?

Why did that guy come off the tree and say, oh, it's better here on the ground?

Why?

I began to write about that.

Then I contacted Neil.

I said, you know, the subject of exploration,

why don't we.

And I think I'm remembering correctly.

I may be pausing in giving credit to Neil and the producer Daniel Fox.

But in any case, what evolved was, why explore?

Let's do exploration spiritually, medically, and geographically.

Let's talk about that.

And my first question would be, why the hell are we going to Mars?

Okay.

And

it's an academic question.

Why are we going to Mars?

Why are we...

But there's a valid...

Why are we going to Mars?

Why, if we send people, are we risking?

And it's a huge risk because the meteorite, when they unfurled the.

I'm talking a lot here.

Are you?

Well, but you just said that.

No, but I'm following you.

And I want to, I'll tether you to something here because you said in the middle of this, you said, give yourself problems.

You say, give your mind problems.

Challenge.

So you've got it.

So I'm giving myself the problem of discovering why we're discovery.

I mean, my curiosity is: why would these

people,

these

sophisticated explorers, choose to go to the South Pole.

Or

why live?

I mean,

really,

why are we going to Mars?

One-sixth, the gravity dust storms that last

months, there's no water,

there's nothing there.

You're not going to transport a billion people to go farm

Mars.

There's no reason to go to Mars except discovery.

Except

putting your name like Magellan did on the Magellan Straits, and suddenly you're immortal.

So you're saying the secret to life, because I know a lot of people ask you this, that you have some secrets, is discovery.

Keep yourself so curious.

Exactly.

Keep yourself so curious that you want to live forever because you never want to stop learning.

There's so much.

What I have fallen, not this month, but several years ago, fallen in love with learning, fallen in love with discovering discovery.

It's it's

do you read,

I'm sure, novels and stuff, and as do I.

And there's nothing more

adventuresome and entertaining and miraculous as history, as mankind's story, as the

unity of nature, of the

interlapping

lives

of everything on Earth.

I mean, just the story of Earth is so

entertaining to discover that you can be fascinated for the rest of your years on Earth just discovering.

Find yourself in daily awe once you get to the point of awe and wonder of Earth and its interconnectedness.

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I was introduced, I thought, to another side of you when I read a quote of yours from space, having returned from space.

I know it had a poignancy that reached a lot of people for whatever the reason was.

You're in space as a symbol for American television in space.

You're going as the oldest person to have ever gone into space, and what comes over you is a profound sadness that you articulated with great eloquence.

Can you take me through what you were expecting and what happened there?

Well,

the

original thought was, what an adventure.

I had gone up to

Seattle to visit with Bezos

to talk about my being in the first launch.

And they thought it was a good idea.

Then COVID hid.

And the next thing I read, Jeff himself is going up with his brother,

a lady astronaut who never did get into space space, and a kid.

Some kid.

I should really find out who that was because

I never have.

So he went first, and then they invited me to come up in the next launch.

And I thought about it, you know, there was publicity about the first thing, but then I thought, just the experience to going up there, because there's no question the second launch is now boring.

Who cares?

And even Bezos' trip didn't attract that much attention.

So I agreed to go.

And

the story of my going, you know, they got me there a day early.

And I said, what am I doing here?

There's nobody here.

And they said,

let's go to the gantry, they suggested.

Let's go to the gantry.

It's 20 miles away.

So we hopped in a car and went to the gantry.

There's the gantry.

Blue Origins launch pad is a mile in the air, about 4,000 feet in the air.

Then they they had a gantry that's 11 flights up.

Now let's walk up the gantry.

So I'm now I'm at 4,000 feet, walking up 11 flights of stairs.

Now finally I get to the top.

I'm out of breath.

And okay, we're here at the top of the gantry.

Well, let's look over the gantry and look over that.

See that, look at that room that's

got 12 inches of concrete around it.

And what's that?

Well, that's in case something goes wrong.

What?

What could go wrong?

So the next day, everybody comes, and we try and rehearse a little bit

about what we're going to face.

And then we get to the spaceship a couple of days later, and it's venting

what looks like steam, but it's gas.

It's hydrogen.

I said, what's that?

He said, it's hydrogen.

I said, hydrogen.

Well,

anybody over 12 remembers the documentaries about the Hindenburg

burning.

And that guy who was the announcer, whose name nobody remembers, but he was screaming, oh, the humanity of it, and people are dying and running away from it.

I mean, there's a real

newsworthy experience going on in front of your eyes.

An event for the ages is taking place on camera.

And there's a guy, ad libbing, trying to have the words

to

be the equal of the event in front of him.

Can you imagine this spaceship, this lighter-than-air ship, is burning, consumed by hydrogen gas?

Are you admiring his commitment to the broadcast right now?

I'm thinking, what would you do?

You're a broadcaster.

And I would be in a position,

how do you add lid?

My God.

And all he could come up with is the humanity of it.

But

that word humanity meant the world is coming to an end in front of him.

And he comes out with the humanity of it.

And in his voice, the torture.

But you haven't even taken flight yet.

You're just standing forward.

I'm looking at the venting thinking, my God,

the humanity of it.

And then I get in the spaceship, and on the countdown, the guy says, God,

Timas, oh, there's an anomaly.

It's an anomaly.

No.

No, I'm the only one who knows what the word anomaly means.

What's an anomaly?

Anomaly means it shouldn't be, though.

Oh, I see.

There's an anomaly.

Wait, you're not during the countdown?

There's an anomaly?

Yeah, the guy says, T minus 17, T minus 16.

Oh!

There's an anomaly.

He didn't make that sound.

You're making that up.

He didn't make that sound.

No, he didn't make that sound.

No, that's true.

He didn't go up.

He went, oh,

there's an anomaly.

Holy cats, what's an anomaly?

What's going on?

You mean that vending?

Maybe it's caught fire.

No, no.

It's okay.

The anomaly's gone.

T minus 14, T minus 30.

Now he gets to about T minus 10, and this is what he says.

And this is the God's truth, word for word.

All right, we're removing the gantry.

Anybody who wants to get off should get off now.

Can you imagine?

Can you imagine being an astronaut and you're sitting with your back to the ground?

You know, you're looking up at the sky.

You know that this thunderous engine is going to take you to Mars.

And the guy says, if you want to get off, you can get off.

10 seconds.

10 seconds.

Last call.

Right.

Don't envy you.

If you want to get off, man, I would get off if I were you.

You're expecting what?

You're like roller coaster adventure.

I want to live big.

I don't know.

They say weightlessness, and we've learned how to deal with weightlessness by anchoring ourselves to a

five-point harness.

But

600 people, apparently, maybe a few more now, have been weightless.

There's no word for weightless in our language.

There's no comparable experience.

You're in a swimming pool underwater.

That doesn't even,

you know, you're still part of gravity.

Do not have gravity?

And when I undid the five-point harness, when they said, you're okay,

and I floated out of the seat.

Can you imagine?

So,

obviously, we went, we got up.

The Carmen line is.

Let me stop you here, though.

Searching for what?

Before you get up, you're searching for what.

It's not just the adrenaline rush, there's discovery.

What do you so far?

The experience is about what you wanted to be, even with the dark comic humor of interrupting with an anomaly.

And

weightlessness

is an amorphous term.

You can't describe weightless.

You can't say it's like, because there's nothing it's like.

There are no words.

You know, there are

scientists

who look back,

who do digs.

What do you call them?

Archaeological.

There are archaeologists who dig into the ground and discover the history of man, history of the earth, by digging down over the coating of dirt and dust that have happened over the millions of years that Earth's been around.

So

the further down you dig, the more you read the levels of things that volcanic ash and the.

The age of things.

How to measure the age of things.

How to measure the age of the earth and thusly the age of civilization.

Okay?

Archaeologists.

Another way of doing it is by language.

When words entered the language, it is about the time that thing existed.

So the word for horse came into our language, wasn't English, but the antecedents of English, about 10,000 years ago.

So

archaeologists have found bones to

what's the word I'm looking for, To validate the fact that horses came in about 10,000 years ago, but it's also part of the language.

A word called horse entered the language, and we then, well, the horse runs, the horse, and we eat the horse, we'll get on the horse,

and it became a fact.

There are no words for weightlessness yet because nobody's

600 people have experienced it.

There will come a time when Agadoodoo is weightless.

Okay?

Oh, my God, Agadoodoo happened

in 2025.

You say all of this with the purpose, though, of someone who did a spoken word album.

You're saying there are words for everything.

Here, I'm offering you, I've gone to a place only 600 people have been to, and there are no words.

That's right.

Because that sensation, when I loosened

the word, there was somebody,

Audrey, I don't remember Audrey's last name, who's a member of

Blue Origin, was on the trip.

And Audrey says,

We're above the carbon line.

We can get out now.

And I undid my harness.

I floated out of the seat.

And we were warned that would happen, and there was a little ledge on the floor to hook our toes in to keep ourselves in the seat.

I floated out of my seat.

So

when Bezos did it, and there's obviously numerous cameras around the the interior of the spaceship

Bezos can be seen floating on his tummy with his legs akimbo spread out and the camera's looking at his feet.

He's like facing a window in the camera's way.

And the kid is throwing candies at his rear end.

He's having fun.

I saw that.

I thought, that's not what I'm going to do.

I don't care about weightlessness.

I want to see outside the window.

So I ignored it, I floated to the window, held on to

whatever I could at the window, and peered out at the blackness of space.

I have been fascinated, as I'm sure every human being to one degree or another, about what's going on in the universe.

The incredible amount of energy, the

mystical,

unknowable forces at work in the universe that fascinate anybody who thinks about it.

And the more you know about it, and the more I began to acquire knowledge through my association with Neil Tyson,

the more

incomprehensible, the more awe of not just the forces on earth, but the incomprehensible forces in the universe.

So, what you're saying is you fly by where it is that Bezos and his child were playing because you want a view of um

of space of everything

that very few people have ever had and and to see if there are unsettered space.

You're not just in the uh the i uh

what's the the desert the ac aca

the academ

the the the very dry desert in Brazil or Argentina.

Forgive me, it's not

anyway, that desert.

Famous desert.

Famous desert where all the telescopes are, because it's dirt-free, it's dust-free.

I'm got a view far superior to that desert.

I'm looking out at

the clearest

view of space that anybody can have.

And there's nothing there.

There's no moon.

There's no stars.

It's just black.

It's palpable black.

It's black.

Have you ever been in a cave where they close the door and the cave is now black?

Have you ever been in one of those...

Yeah, I know that where you're so alone.

You can't see anything.

You can't.

You know, they talk about your hand in front of your face.

You can't see anything.

And you kind of lose your balance because you have nothing to identify with.

That black, that

the other word that comes to mind is palpable black.

You can almost touch it, you can almost feel it pressing against your face.

It's so black.

That's how black it was.

And there was no shining star, there was no mystical star

to

focus on.

It was just plain black, like as black as

a blackboard.

Then I turned back to where we had been.

And I could see

the wake of the spaceship through air.

I never heard anybody talk about that.

Like a submarine going through the water leaves a wake, and you can see if you've got a film, if you've got a camera on it, the w the the water is disturbed by the body of the submarine going through it.

That's what this spaceship was doing to the air.

It was leaving a wake.

I looked back and thought, man, nobody's ever talked about that.

Then I saw

the blue orb that,

what's his name, talked about,

and the beige of

the

Texas desert, and the white clouds.

And I'm a private pilot, was, I'm not current now,

but I know at 12,500 feet, two miles, really.

the

oxygen gives out, you need oxygen above two miles.

We're 70 miles above that, and the first two miles have oxygen, and after that, there's no oxygen.

And I'm looking at the desert of Texas, and I know that

volcanic activity five billion years ago began,

and in that five billion years,

the erosion of the volcanic,

the molten

rock,

became dirt, fertile enough to grow stigmas on.

But really, you got a handful.

You got six inches, twelve inches of arable earth.

Arable earth.

And then you've got the water in the ocean.

So you've got the air, the water, and the earth.

The miracle of those three things on this rock,

it began as a rock and coagulated with other rocks and became the earth.

And then something brushed up alongside it and knocked off a hot chunk and it became the moon.

Why sad?

Why profound sadness between that black and between

because that miracle

that is the earth,

that is all those colors, all that fertility of the earth, all that clarity in the water, is gone.

Our bodies are swimming in plastic.

We've got bits of plastic floating in our blood.

Everybody,

everything alive.

When plastic was invented a hundred years ago, I don't remember who did it.

You were there.

You were there.

You were there when it was on my birth.

They held a plastic cup to get the

pretty much close to the dream.

I mean, it's not that frog.

That's right.

It is.

You were born right after the Great Depression.

Actually, within the Blake Depression.

I can recall my father coming home harried as a best dude.

In any case, what I'm going to say is that

I've done a lot of I've been an ecologist for a long time and preaching the global warming and what we're doing to the

but I never saw it with such clarity as I did in that moment.

And

every time I talk about it, I well up because I'm so conscious of the miracle of our earth and our life.

The fact that you and I are speaking English and communicating,

communicating a thought.

I'm telling you a deep, deep thought in my head, an existential thought in my head.

And I'm communicating it to you, and I see you're receiving it.

I see your eyes, and you're receiving it.

And hopefully, people listening to me in their ears, the miracle of your cochlear implant and

the miracle of hearing is allowing this thought, the miracle of the thought that your brain has accepted the thought.

There's a miracle broadcasting is a miracle.

Everything is a miracle

of

life.

This miracle is being jeopardized by

our

inability to recognize the miracle.

And that's what I thought.

And I had this overwhelming grief.

And when I landed, I got out.

I found myself not just tears, uncontrollable weeping.

What's the matter with me?

With all these cameras on me,

you know, I had to go sit down and think, what?

And then because in my life, like everybody else, grief has entered into my life, I recognized what I was feeling.

And what am I feeling?

I'm in mourning

for this

miraculous thing we call earth.

Beyond that, it would seem that you're also in mourning because if you're examining at all in any way your own mortality, you're shaking your fists almost literally from on high with huge gratitude for every step.

How could you be so ungrateful?

How, with all you've learned now in your life, how you human beings can you be so ungrateful?

You've seen that with great insight, and I thank you for that because that's what I was doing.

That's what I tell my kids when I speak to people like yourself, and I get a chance to broadcast if I'm asked about it.

I try to remind people

the interconnectiveness of life.

Everything is related.

Everything is related.

There is an overlap

of the miracle of life in everything.

Even I'm beginning to think in

inanimate objects.

Early on, I I think it's less popular now, animism, but the early functions of religion, the miracle of life occurring to primitive man, they didn't know, they looked up at the sky, and the Greeks thought it was like a blanket with pinholes in it, and all.

Nobody knew what they were looking at, but they were mystified, early man.

So they said everything has a spirit to it, and that's animism.

There's another name for it, but animism.

Everything had a life force.

And they worshiped.

They drew pictures of the animals they were going to kill because they worshiped the spirit that was in the animal.

I think that was right.

I think as we graduated to monotheism and Abraham and Zoroastra, whoever were the founders of the idea of there aren't many gods, there's one God.

It's an interesting idea.

It's a good idea.

You seem to live in a way that would suggest that you're realizing that you, as you age, you know more than you ever have, and that makes you know that you know less than you ever have.

I know nothing.

And so, you try insatiably to try to figure out more and more, and you live a vibrant life that goes through

pop culture and space, but still tours in his 90s, looking for problems, looking to stimulate, looking to have the work represent him.

Because, for you said, since you were six, there were no second options.

Are you good at anything else?

Anything else?

I'm a great lover.

All right.

So two great, great things.

You are exceptional since six years old at performing.

Yes.

And you love it, and you're not going to do anything else.

I was thinking of another

ambition.

No, there's nothing.

It's too late.

No, I love.

I love talking to you.

I love the idea of expressing ideas.

I've got nothing in return because this is an interview and you're interviewing me.

But at the same token, I've done talk shows in which I've interviewed people.

I had a talk show called I Don't Understand, and I was just talking to people.

I don't understand because I don't understand anything.

I don't understand anything.

Name a thing, name my fingers.

I'm looking at my fingers.

I don't understand the blood,

the nerve ends,

the dynamics of touch, the sense of touch.

Can you imagine that I put my fingers on this table here and that impression goes to my brain and I read it as a little rough?

It's incredible.

It's a miracle.

But we take it for granted.

We shouldn't be taking this for granted.

We should recognize that everything about us and about life is a miracle.

And to worship in the sense that it is a miracle.

That's how I feel about it.

Does that make you happier today than you've ever been because

you carry yourself with this daily appreciation?

Or is there another time in your life that you would say smooths

the sandpaper of existence?

It

gives an overlay of, yes, this hurt.

The death,

the wounding, the sickness,

whatever it was that is sad,

there is still this other aspect to life.

Life is comprised of both.

There is this, and it's not negative,

pain and sadness and loss

are all things that we all suffer.

But the fact that

whatever died,

the miracle of their existence to begin with, and where they have where they exist now, whether it's an amorphous

bundle of electrons that now re-enter the universe, or whether there's a spirit and a soul.

And I mean, obviously, nobody knows,

but their existence was a miracle, as was their death.

And if you could think of it in that way,

the sadness is

not alleviated, but is mixed.

It is

the sadness can be a mixture of joy

of the life, if it was life, or the sickness.

I mean, you get into difficulty there, but anyway, you grasp the meaning of what I'm trying to say.

That's a nuanced way of saying, no, it's impossible to be the happiest I've ever been right now when I'm carrying this much grief.

When I carry this many scars for things that I've lost, it's impossible for me to say to you, this is the happiest I've ever been, but it's the most perspective I've ever had, perhaps.

That's exactly right.

That all the losses and pains that have been part of all our lives.

The joy of interviewing for me

is that

I now know

that every individual carries with them a story.

Whether it's buried in their existence and they just it's nine to five or in some cases twenty-four hours of labor, sleep.

I mean,

we read about the poverty and this hunger and the and the pain of living in so much of the world.

And yet each one of those people has buried to one degree or another a precious story that is the story of their loves, likes, hates, that if only you could get to,

you could see the miracle of life.

For example,

two examples

of late.

So what I do a fair amount of is I go to,

when I'm free, I go to Comic-Cons

and meet, have an audience,

talk to the audience for an hour or so.

You are a God there.

I am a God.

And not really.

There are a lot of gods.

Well, but there's a whole panoply of gods.

You're the OG in God.

You're one of the originators for whatever Comic-Con would become.

Actually, I was.

I was at the first Comic-Con in New York all those years ago.

But what I'm going to say to you is this:

that a kid,

maybe

18, 19, in a wheelchair,

came up to the line where I was signing some autographs and said,

I've got, and I've forgotten what autoimmune disease he had.

But I lost my ability to talk,

and I struggled to learn to talk.

I struggled to find how to pronounce words again.

And finally, I was able to do it.

And you know what the first word was out of my mouth?

He said, I said, what is it?

He said, Kirk.

Wow.

What an extraordinary story.

The second story is this past week

a

guy of about

twenty five or thirty in a wheelchair wheels up and says

I'd like to tell you that I was a performer, a dancer, a singer, a rap, rapper, till ten years ago, and I was in an accident.

And now I'm paraplegic.

I'm in this wheelchair.

But I know

I'm going to get out of the wheelchair.

I know I'm going to walk.

And you, Shatner, have inspired me to

have that ambition.

I am going to walk and I am going to dance again.

And I said, yes, you are.

I feel it.

You're going to dance.

I promise you.

And the audience went, you know, I mean, we were all crying.

And I had that experience this past week.

And when you asked me, why do I go?

That moment made me alive.

In both those people's lives, I had contributed some small thing.

Aaron Trevor Bowie, you've described, in some ways, what it is that I like about interviewing.

When you talk about the kernel of who someone is and the miracle of communication,

there's understanding.

and I guess I could stop there.

Just there's understanding when you speak of what it is your journey is, and I can ask the questions that perhaps you're so perceptive and you're right into you're listening, and you have an insight of what I'm saying.

It's a joy to talk to you because you

manifest an understanding of what I'm feebly trying to express.

No, you do it very well, but you also have an appreciation for words.

And what I'd like to understand is how you go from

an iconic character that between 1966 and 1969 produces three seasons of television.

It was only three seasons, but they were very long seasons, almost 80 episodes.

You become a television star, and then after that,

you are largely broke.

You lose your home.

You are not whatever it is people would imagine television success would have been from there.

What happened?

Take us through the journey and how you saw it, how you lived it.

In the final analysis, while I was doing Star Trek,

I got a divorce.

And in essence, with all the expenses and alimony and stuff, I was broke.

And there are no residuals.

A year or two later, the union, the Screen Actors Guild,

struggled for payment.

Every time you played

a film that I was on or that any actor was on, they got some kind of a residual payment.

That didn't happen for me.

You are one of the most famous people in America at the time, or that show doesn't have the popularity then that it does now?

It didn't have the popularity, but it also wasn't part of the vernacular.

Residual, the word residual.

What do you want to get paid?

Because we're playing it again.

No.

And that went on until two, three, four years after my Star Trek was over.

Then residuals began.

So I never got another payment for all the for all the

usage of the Star Trek that I was on.

I have never been paid for that exposure.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

It is an oh, wow, because it would have been many millions of dollars.

Not that I'm suffering, but it's just a fact.

Well, you were suffering after Star Trek.

You went from Star Trek.

You were the star of that TV show.

And I was living in a cab on a truck because I'd put together a

summer show.

And we went to the Cape Cod to do 13 weeks of a play that I put together with actors.

And I made some money to pay for the truck.

Living in a trailer.

Living in a trailer.

In a cab over a truck.

It wasn't even a trailer.

So that's that,

and the reason for that was my personal life had fallen apart.

And then it took me

quite a while, whatever that definition is, to come back and get another show and make some money enough to pay

for all the debts

to

put through three children through life.

Aaron Ross Ross Powell, I'm not actually interested in the hardship as much as I am in whatever it was, the humbling that went from you being thespian, self-serious actor who would get his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1982, and what you've been since that star went on that Walk of Fame, which seems to be someone in public who's almost

self-deprecating to a fault, always in on the joke of, yeah, I I meant to be an important, huge thespian, but I then learned about life and then learned not to take myself that seriously.

Well,

the whole thing about life is it's a joke, really, isn't it?

I mean, you're born in pain and the struggle, and the mother

screaming and laughing, and you come up,

you're there.

You cry a little bit, and then you suckle a bit, and then you're going to school, and in my case, get beaten up for, you know,

for primary school.

And then you go through loneliness, and being alone, and wondering what's going to happen, and all the bewilderment of young life.

And then

you're into your twenties, and you're wondering what's going to become of me,

and you struggle through that, and then you die.

So, in reality, you could look at life as a joke.

The forces of whatever there are have played an enormous joke on you.

You think your life is important?

I was driving, being driven in Vermont on my way to Ticonderoga to perform upstate New York.

And I'm looking at graveyards on the roadside.

So on a little hillock, hillock, as the road goes through it, you're going through an old graveyard that's hundreds of years old because human beings, the Europeans, have been there for 300 years, 400 years.

And the gravestones closest to the road are the biggest.

So somebody said, okay, I'm dying.

Put my gravestone.

So there's a two-foot, as against a one-foot, we're further back, gravestone.

The vanity of somebody who dying, saying, make my gravestone bigger than the other guys,

the vanity of human life is still there, even though you're dying.

Instead of saying, I'm dying, I hope I contributed.

I've been, and you know,

and for me, I'm going to die with a tree over me because I want my body to nourish something and not take up the space for people who are living.

But everywhere you look, there are graveyards occupying very valuable land that could grow things for the people who are alive to live.

Instead, we've got gravestones.

And so I'm supposed to remember the guy who lived in 1829.

Who's that guy?

1829?

What did he do?

You know, everybody who knew him is gone.

They're looking, you know, I'm going to make my gravestone bigger than his.

I mean, the vanity of life is a joke.

Oh, shit, Shatner's pretty good as a tombstone.

I don't know what you want your legacy.

I don't know what you want your legacy to be.

I don't know what it is that you want.

There's no legacy.

You know what legacy is?

I'll tell you what legacy is.

It's not a name on a building.

It's not a statue.

It's not a hit show which people forget about

six months.

A year later, they said, what was that?

Who's that actor in that show?

The legacy of life is good deeds.

Do something good for somebody else.

That'll reverberate.

Nothing else remains alive.

I mean, you know, you take the name Trump off a building and another name goes on after, you know, six months.

You wouldn't be so cynical as to say, though, that the work doesn't endure because your connection, at least here, we can be cynical about the history of it 200 years from now.

The word endures define endures.

Is that six months or is that ten years?

Well, if ever a hundred years, if everything is fleeting, then nothing endures.

Exactly.

Nothing endures.

Concrete finally erodes.

What doesn't erode is I help an old lady across the street.

That old lady will babysit because of an act of kindness that she felt one day crossing the street.

That endures.

That is a ripple effect.

And if everybody thought that way, think how much easier life would be.

People would get across the street

more safely.

I feel like you're screaming at me right now.

You're just screaming at me because you see through me as the interviewer that you are, filled with your curiosities, that you've had me rattled since you said you were a great lover.

I haven't been the same interviewer since then.

I couldn't do anything.

Think of the vanity of that.

You know, great lover.

He thinks he's a great lover.

I'll tell you who's a great lover.

Dick over there is a great lover.

Before we turned everything on here, you said you've just come off doing what you thought was the bravest thing you've ever done.

And I didn't know what you were talking about.

All right.

So I've come home from the South Pole, and I've gotten to know Neil, the wonderful man, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and a wonderful guy

named Daniel Fox and his wife, Kristen,

who put the South Pole adventure together.

And

I start writing about Curiosity, and then I contact those guys.

I'm doing Curiosity, and

then I think it was Daniel might have said,

let's do that as a show.

And DL said, oh, we'll do a show.

What's the show?

Well, we'll talk about Curiosity.

Well, what do you mean?

Who's going to write it?

No, no, we add Lib.

We add Lib for two hours in front of 3,000 people.

What are you kidding me?

I'm an actor.

What words do I have to learn or write?

What's the prep?

What's the prep?

What's the prep?

How do I make it look natural for you?

We're not ad-libbing here.

What's the prep?

Where's the prep?

No, no, no, no.

We just talk.

What do you mean?

We're going to amuse

3,000 people for two hours just talking?

Yes.

How is that possible?

So I went to work and learned about

quantum physics and

the mystery of quantum physics is incredible.

Do you know anything about quantum physics?

No, please.

You're going to take us down this.

My brother would take me down some of these rabbit holes.

Well, I'm telling you, the rabbit hole quantum is existence because quantum explains existence.

And then you have the Newtonian physics, which looks at the big picture, but the little picture of where all the

point is that in the prep for the show, you insisted on prep, and if your prep was going to be learning,

you were going to take curiosity.

You spent weeks drilling.

Learning quantum physics.

Quantum physics and the

mysticism of quantum physics and the

word, the interconnect.

This is you taking your craft seriously and also following all of your curiosity.

I'm going to be on stage with a giant intellect.

What am I going to say?

Well,

what do you you mean by,

you know, I've got a pure.

So I studied the

explorers.

I did background work on

Scott and you over prepared.

All they needed was for you to be you, but you over prepared because you're you.

Right.

And then it got on stage, and the two of us ad-libbed.

two hours and were great.

And I'm sure

I'm saying that if the producers knew enough to put two people who like to talk and entertain with each other, who will prepare, they will be great together, and you can loosen up in the performance because it doesn't have to be strangled.

Exactly.

That's exactly what happened.

And so, as an actor who says, you want me to move down six inches downstage a little to that detail, to somebody who says,

What's the story you want me to?

Well, I'll talk about this and then you talk about that.

It's crazy.

But I want to talk to you about freedom and the freedom of that.

I was asking you about how and where, not that there would be a land post that would say this was the date that I went from self-serious actor to person who can make fun of himself a little bit.

Maybe you've always been that.

I think so.

I didn't, I got the impression that early on in your career that you were aspiring to something.

I was in Canada.

for five years after I graduated university doing theater, doing professional theater.

I think the one theater, theater, the Canadian Repertory Theater in Ottawa, might have been the only professional theater in Canada at the time.

And I was a member of the company.

And I went from there to Toronto, and I went there for three years to Stratford, Ontario, and did classics.

So I was a theater actor for five years.

Well, I was a theater actor since the age of six.

But five years after I graduated, and finally ended up in New York in a show that

in a Marlowe theater thing that

Stratford took for a limited run on Broadway.

And it was that limited run on Broadway that brought me to the attention of the live television people.

Because at that time, live television was very much like the theater.

You had to learn your lines, you had to hit your marks, and when the camera light went on, you had to...

you had to perform.

When that curtain goes up, whether it was a red light or a curtain going up,

you had to perform.

I don't care if you had a headache, I don't care if you have cancer, you've got to perform.

That's what I learned to do.

But never self-serious?

Never.

So I was the light comedian.

I was light comedy all through that five-year period.

Broadway shows that were written with one set.

There's a girl in my soup, the first one that comes to me.

My Broadway shows were written by wonderfully funny

authors with one set.

You didn't have to go to the expense of changing the set.

It all happened in that room.

And that was a perfect show to tour with because you didn't have to carry sets with you.

So I would have imagined if I was going to the Broadway actor, that person, whoever it is you were in your early days, you'd see me being funny.

And okay, so I'd see you being funny, but would I have been able to see, this is going to be somebody who's going to be really good at game shows.

This is going to be somebody who's going to be really good at television commercials.

You shouldn't have known that.

This is going to be somebody who's really good at song and is going to really want to be someone who performs.

This is going to be somebody who knows poetry also and is going to want to meld all of that stuff so that people can see a

complete human being.

The music of the English language.

I've got a new album coming out with Brad Paisley.

Robert Shernow and I wrote the lyrics, and Brad and

Goldsmith have guitar virtuosos.

It's going to be, I think it'll be called

What I Have Loved and all the things that I have loved that have nothing to do with women, has to do with your health, has to do with music, has to do with art.

That if you love art, I love you.

If I love my health,

I can love you.

It's going to be, it's a remarkable album, and it's all about loves that have nothing to do with carnal love.

It's funny that you should say there's not a word for waitlist because I'm not sure there's a word for someone who would inspire someone who can't speak to say the word kirk and also

find comedy in the fact that your gravitas, your weight is something that you're lightening by virtue of being funny around it.

Who's the comp to you?

Who do you look throughout entertainment and say that person reminds me of me and what it is?

Because you say these things aren't enduring and yet I'd argue, perhaps not, but

for someone who admired you as a child, for someone who's part of a childhood that's now gone, but whose wife respects that that man lives life correctly.

That man lives life in the blue zone.

That man knows how to keep life living because

he's on the road in Wichita because he's got to perform because he appreciates that anyone will give him an audience because he's still that small-town actor from Canada who believed

who's grateful that anyone would

would listen to him, sing a song, or know you're verging on the truth there of how I feel.

The fact that I can appear in front of an audience and have an extraordinary time for an hour in front of an audience, ad-libbing, like finding out, why did you ask that question?

What is it in you, the person who asked me a question, and find

their story so entertaining and interesting that

five, six, seven hundred people are sharing the same.

What a funny thing, though.

It sounds like for, I don't know how long you've been touring exactly this way, but it sounds like you're touring as yourself, not as yourself through the work, but just as yourself.

Yes.

But having the courage to do so through experience, both on stage and knowing how you can handle it, and offstage with enough life experience to tell stories that might be entertaining for an hour or two.

Aaron Powell, so the bravest thing when you look at it from the perspective of you're now 94 years old and you just feel like you did the bravest thing you did a few weeks ago,

why is it the bravest thing?

Because there was no net.

There was no, I didn't have a fallback position, which I would like talking to you here.

I mean,

getting a cue from you from a question, and it gives me an answer.

And if I should should not think of an answer, you'll come up.

There's a safety net here in front of you.

But in front of 3,000 people, I'm on my own with Neil.

And

who's ever had libbed a show for two hours

in that guise?

I mean, stand-up comics do 55 minutes.

My guess is you could probably do four hours just based on accrued wisdom and entertainments combined with the personality that both of you like to be seen and heard and

know some of what you don't know as well.

So, if you stumble around, people will give you the grace of, oh, that didn't have to be Aaron Sorkin perfect.

It didn't have to be, every note didn't have to be perfect.

He's just a human being.

Even though I view him as a God, as many people do.

Many people do.

You know this.

People behave.

I don't know what is the greatest compliment.

You gave us a couple of stories.

I don't know what the most meaningful compliment you get is, but it is from the, it's not priceline.

It tends to be from Star Trek, correct?

For whatever the reasons.

Well,

people talk about, you know, they're cops now, they're firemen, they're engineers, the science thing.

It spans a pretty broad,

it comes as a surprise every time I hear it.

I am like astounded.

I am now, I am a doctor because of, I'm no kidding, I affected that person's life.

So

the trajectory of their life was fashioned by something I did.

That's astounding to me.

So, forgive me, I have it wrong.

It's not from Star Trek that the most meaningful compliments are.

Well, I think so.

I think Star Trek, but there are all these other things

that they talk about.

I'm still astonished.

Do you have a work that you are prouder of than all the others?

That you allow yourself to be able to pride.

I don't think in those terms.

When I'm done the job as best I can,

talking to you is everything to me right now.

I'm doing the best I can, being as entertaining as I can and informative,

so that your listeners are glued.

I want you glued to that whatever.

Wherever this is,

wherever you're putting this shit,

move.

You're going to stay to the end.

Whatever YouTube, podcast, Facebook shit this is.

That's what we're doing right now.

Don't move.

That is.

Or you'll be electrocuted.

There's great wisdom, though.

One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is about just what you've learned.

I love that Esquire would reduce people's lives to a single page of what I've learned, but you have real wisdom to give.

So, when I ask you, not in entertainment, but when I ask you, what wisdom would you want imparted?

You know what the wisdom is?

I've discovered the wisdom, and

I touched on it briefly.

Every human being has their story, whether they're

squatting beside a polluted stream drinking the water, or whether they're head of government,

they've got their personal story which is so meaningful, so touching, because it means everything to them,

that if everybody could recognize whether they hear the story or not, but know that that holy

H-O-L-Y, holy human being, has that precious story within them that makes them a valuable human being no matter what their circumstances are.

If one human being could recognize that about every other human being, what a difference that would make in the world.

And that

piece of information, whether it's wisdom or not, has affected me.

And I see people differently now.

I look at them and wonder what their story is and whether I could, in any language, discover it.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: A step beyond that is the simplicity of be kind.

That's it.

But you're saying.

Well, you'd be kind because you'd recognize that their story is as precious to them as yours is to you.

Their humanity, right?

And when that man said, oh, the humanity of it all, I think he meant all of what I've just said.

What a dark note to end on, right there.

Look at this.

A career entertainer.

You finished on the Hindenburg.

That's what you did.

That's WilliamShatner.com is where you go.

He is still touring the United States.

He's an inspiration.

Thank you, sir.

I appreciate the kindness, the vulnerability, and the wisdom.

And the career, by the way.

And the entire...

We didn't even talk that much about Star Trek.

I think the audience is going to be disappointed that I didn't ask you more about it.

I don't think so.

I think, I'd like to think that

the newness of these...

of these impressions, these thoughts, because it's new to me.

It's occurring to me.

Even as I speak to you, I'm able to put it into words.

It's new to me.

Hopefully, it's new to the audience, and it's more entertaining than, oh, yeah.

They were glued.

They were glued.

I'm not saying this was disappointing to them.

I'm saying I suspect they would have liked for me to ask you more questions about Star Trek.

You're promising.

You're promising me this?

All right.

Thank you, sir.

But you've got to bring your father along.

This is what they always say.

It's always, there's always something in they throw at the end of the deal.

And also, I want to meet your father.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you.

Oh, that was delightful.

You know what I failed to ask you, though, that I meant to ask you?

There was one question I meant to ask you, and hopefully we'll just keep airing and they'll throw this in there.

Because you were so great at the game shows, I want to hear the story of what happened on the $10,000 pyramid that ended with you

in the chairs.

Did you have you seen that?

I have not seen the video, but I wanted to ask you because I wanted to pair the video with you breaking down what they uh so i'm on a

there was a time in my life when you could do five game shows you were a great game show contestant i was i mean i i had the same joy of the

the 20 000 question thing

So you had a partner.

So that partner became like...

$10,000 pyramid.

I made you a contestant, even though you, in this particular instance, you're a contestant, but you're also just someone who's great at being on game shows, whether you're partnering with somebody or not, taking it seriously.

And you guys got to.

I'm taking it seriously because I want to make the money for them.

But you got disqualified.

Well,

you got your partner disqualified.

If I remember correctly, what happened was you got the questions and the answers on a screen.

So

I'm me, and you're the contestant.

You can't say a word.

There are certain words you're not allowed to say.

Exactly.

And I say the word word inadvertently, disqualify that person from getting, and I'm so mad at myself, I take that chair and I throw that chair and I take that chair and I thought, and I pitch a fit, half in fun.

Half in fun, my ass.

How many chairs did you throw?

Five.

Four in fun, and what I'm earning.

Thank you, son.

Thank you.

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Mill O'Lite.

Great taste, 96 calories.

Go to Millalite.com slash beach, that's B-E-A-C-H, to find the delivery options near you.

Or you can pick up some Miller Light pretty much anywhere they sell beer.

Cheers to 50 years of Miller Time.

Celebrate responsibly.

Miller Brewing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

96 calories and 3.2 carbs per 12 ounces.