Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / William Shatner Doesn’t Want to Die, from The Moynihan Report

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William Shatner Doesn’t Want to Die, from The Moynihan Report · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
I'm tired of old age.
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I'm tired of losing air.
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I'm tired of not eating.
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I'm tired of catching cold.
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I'm tired of being tired.
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I'm tired.
0:12
So is that yelling at you or is that like anguish?
0:16
It's anguish.
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I'm a little scared of it.
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Well, you should be.
0:29
Welcome back to the Moynihan Report.
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I'm your host, Michael Moynihan.
0:34
And yes, we took a little hiatus.
0:36
Recently, I thought of an interview that Charlie Rose did with the conservative writer William F. Buckley in 2007.
0:43
This was eight months after he'd lost his beloved wife, Pat.
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And Rose was sort of incredulous when Buckley said that if science offered him the chance to turn back the clock, he simply wouldn't take it.
0:55
Do you wish you were 20?
0:57
No, absolutely not.
1:01
No, I would...
1:03
If I had a pill which would reduce my age by 25 years, I wouldn't take it.
1:07
Why not?
1:08
Because I'm...
1:09
Pied of life.
1:10
Oh, really?
1:11
Yeah.
1:12
So there's that wide Buckley smile.
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Flash not, in this case, to signal humor, but as sort of despondent weariness.
1:20
And that answer and the defeated tone of it has always sort of haunted me.
1:24
Because Buckley lived life with such intensity and joy.
1:27
He wrote a book called Overdrive, which is a slightly self-indulgent, kind of overcooked register of the chaos and fun of a single week
1:38
being Bill Buckley, but at 82 years old, he was sort of out of joy.
1:43
Buckley had given up, and he died two months after that appearance.
1:46
So when I left the interview you're about to watch with the actor William Shatner, I thought of how Buckley's satisfaction with life had curdled into an impatience for death.
1:56
Like Buckley, Shatner has nothing left to prove.
1:59
But unlike Buckley, he has plenty left that he wants to do.
2:04
So our conversation is about an acting career and a life in show business.
2:09
Bill Shatner returns again and again to the inexorable and the inevitable.
2:13
He's approaching the ends, and he's not ready.
2:19
I want to read you something, because this is something that really stuck with me.
2:22
This is Boldly Go, your last book.
2:26
Can I read something I wrote?
2:27
You can read something you wrote.
2:28
Yeah.
2:29
From my house, I can see the majesty, the incredible engine of life, the story of Earth, the mystery of how it all happened.
2:37
I will miss that beautiful simplicity.
2:39
I will miss it all because I'm going to die.
2:43
Yeah.
2:43
There's no getting around it.
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It's a fact.
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One day, hopefully not too soon, I will slip across that ever so narrow gap between life and death, and I will cease to be.
2:53
I'm terrified of it.
2:55
I'm scared to death of death.
2:59
I'm a little younger than you, and I have the same thought all the time.
3:03
I'm scared to death of death.
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It's constantly there.
3:05
I'm scared to death of death.
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And that's why,
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When you have an illness that is possibly mortal and you survive,
3:20
you take with you a refreshment, a refreshing course in the preciousness of life.
3:27
How precious every moment is.
3:29
Like, as I talk about being conscious, I am conscious.
3:34
And I'm conscious of talking to you, you reading, I mean the magic of you reading back some words that I wrote a fair time ago.
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I hear it and think, oh yeah, that's right.
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And at the same time, I'm on camera where it's amplified
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So it has many jurisdictions, if you will, and being aware of that is magical.
3:56
What a magic moment we've just had.
3:59
Why not?
4:00
And I was surprised.
4:02
in reading this book and other stuff that you've written, that you talk about the kind of wonderment of the universe, you talk about death, the fear of death, that you haven't gone and taken Pascal's wager.
4:16
You haven't said, I am going to go towards religion.
4:19
You know, you grew up in an orthodox neighborhood in Montreal.
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You have that kind of structure, that kind of foundation is there.
4:27
You could go back to it.
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See, I think...
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But you don't do it.
4:30
Well, I think religion is limiting.
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The people who invented the religion, and that goes for animism in painting animals on the rock and giving it an energy.
4:45
So even primitive man buried themselves and had tokens of the person's life.
4:54
There was a feeling, even among what we think of as...
5:00
beasts just barely human, were conscious of, where do I go?
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What's the meaning of this?
5:07
And they had facilities to worship it, but it's limiting.
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If you limit the pearly gates, you walk through the pearly gates, hi, I did well, put me on the book, it's so man-made.
5:23
It's so us-like.
5:27
We're given 50 years of consciousness between being aware as a youngster and being unaware as an oldster.
5:34
We're given about 50 years.
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In that 50-year period, this is the one place I'm an authority on.
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I'm an authority on the rapidity, the passage of time.
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Time goes by and suddenly you're like, my God, am I that old?
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And when I say, oh, he's this age and people applaud, don't applaud me.
5:58
Living, my God, I have nothing to do with it.
6:01
I'm eating my blueberries.
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No, but you think about it.
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So you get my point.
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Yeah, I do.
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The point is it's limiting.
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It's limiting.
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As against the grandeur of the Big Bang and tectonic plates.
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But sometimes the fear overwhelms the kind of idea of the intellectual limitations of it.
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Because it's like, I mean, in that passage, it stopped me in my tracks because you're like, there's nothingness after your belief.
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And I'm the same as you're listening.
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No, no, no, no.
6:29
Wait a minute.
6:30
Wait a minute.
6:32
In my...
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arrogance.
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I think I've gone to something grander, and that is, I think.
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What's making sense to me now, and I said this in front of a large audience, I don't know what I'm talking about, and they laugh.
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They laugh.
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I said, but I know how I feel.
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Quiet.
6:53
I feel that the universe, the universe...
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is alive.
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We are made of the debris of the universe.
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We are in... And quantum is pointing out how we all are entangled.
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So we are of the universe, and the universe is us.
7:15
So if we are conscious, if that's a gift, and you could substitute the word God to universe, it's the same thing.
7:23
Yeah.
7:24
The greatest thing about this, I can't remember what book it was of yours, where you talked about taking psychedelics in the Netherlands with your ex-wife, and you said, never again.
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And I'm hearing you now, and it's like the guy came to the psychedelic moment about the universe without drugs.
7:41
That's exactly right.
7:42
I am living now more and more in a psychedelic.
7:46
Like, everything puts me like, oh, my God, that's awesome.
7:50
I'm going to have lunch with my granddaughter tomorrow.
7:53
Yeah.
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She's brilliant.
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She's wonderful.
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She's charming.
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She's beautiful.
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And I'm so looking forward to cupping her beautiful little face.
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My granddaughter, you were just like, I held you like this.
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And now you're this grown lady.
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And the miracle of bringing a child up and seeing them live and nothing untoward has happened to my family yet.
8:15
Yeah.
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You know, my parents have died, but...
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No child has gotten a debilitating illness, and everybody's got their right mind.
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So I'm this lucky guy who has a family, and the continuity of life I'm seeing.
8:32
So I'm conscious of the...
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awesomeness of life.
8:37
And it's easy for me, because I'm sitting here at a desk, I'm gonna get a sandwich when we're done, and a cup of coffee, and I won't be hungry, and I won't be thirsty, and I'll go home and lie in my bed, I'll be visited by my two Dobies who worship me as I worship them, and it's also cozy and nice.
8:55
And I'm not lying on the street like so many people do.
8:58
So it's callow of me to say,
9:03
Everything about life, pain and anger and unjust is part of life.
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And you can be conscious of it and the miracle of it.
9:14
There's something magical about everything to you.
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About everything.
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About anger and love and disappointment and success.
9:22
You can appreciate it because it's over so briefly.
9:26
It's over so briefly because...
9:28
But does it feel long to you?
9:29
And I'll give you an example of this.
9:31
I remembered that you were in one of my favorite films, two of my favorite films, but I'll start with The Judgment at Nuremberg.
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Fantastic film, great Spencer Tracy.
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And I said, God, when was that filmed?
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And I realized that it was filmed
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14 years after the actual Nuremberg trial.
9:49
In fact, we were, the cast, the first day was shown those documentary films of bodies being shoved into a grave with a tractor.
10:01
Some of which were shot by Billy Wilder, by the way.
10:04
And some of which were shot by Nazi photographers.
10:07
Yeah.
10:08
I mean, it was horrific beyond words.
10:11
And to hear people deny it is like, what?
10:13
Are you insane?
10:15
Why do you—why not embrace the deviltry in the human mind?
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How bad human beings can act.
10:28
Be aware.
10:28
That's a horrific, beyond horrifying—words can't describe—
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the dehumanization of another human.
10:38
Why can't you say that happened and we must never let it happen again?
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as against, well, it never happened.
10:44
That's an easy way.
10:46
Some of these are not dealing with it, right?
10:48
They're not dealing with it, but it's also ignoring the complexity of humans.
10:52
Yeah, the people who say that tend to be neo-Nazis, and I've often pointed out that they're the people who say it didn't happen but hope that it did because they also hate Jews.
11:02
But that's 1958, 59.
11:02
You said life is short.
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That seems like a long time ago.
11:10
That's a lifetime ago.
11:12
And you're still sitting here now.
11:14
Does it feel short to you?
11:15
It's a ferment of productivity.
11:17
Yeah.
11:18
It's almost boringly cliche to say so, but is that the kind of answer, the productivity?
11:23
It's like you don't stop.
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It's incredible.
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I'll tell you what I think it is.
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And I kind of like, I should be, I meet guys who are 95 and I think, God, he's old.
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Yeah.
11:34
You know?
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I mean, that's old.
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Yeah.
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I think what it must be is that,
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I get the hairs on my arm rise up when I learn something I didn't know.
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When you grasp a fact that is like, when you say, wow, I didn't know that, that gives me a thrill.
11:55
Does that send you down rabbit holes?
11:59
It's exactly right.
12:00
What was the last thing you learned that stunned you, surprised you, invigorated you?
12:06
Ion engines.
12:08
I don't know what you're talking about.
12:09
Exactly.
12:10
Ion engines.
12:11
Can someone chat you?
12:12
I don't know.
12:13
Ion engines?
12:14
I-O-N. Ion engines now is not... We, the American scientific group, are now beginning to go beyond oxygen and hydrogen and a burning and explosion and running out of gas and all that.
12:39
We're going to something that I don't know how it works, but it's another whole technology.
12:45
And they're going to have ion engines in the Mars rockets.
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And at its peak speed, the spaceship on its way to Mars will be going 500,000 miles an hour.
13:02
Seems like a lot.
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And then when it reaches the halfway point, it'll have to turn around and begin to slow down.
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It was going to take, I heard, three months to get from liftoff to land on Mars.
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Three months there, three months back, three months living there, add a few more months, and you got two years.
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It's going to take three weeks to get to Mars on an ion engine.
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Is that kind of, you know, I read you that passage in the book.
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Is that one of the things about age and about time is that you want to be here to see this stuff?
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You are so excited about this stuff.
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If I said this to half the universe, they'd be like, ah, yeah, whatever.
13:42
That sounds interesting.
13:43
But you're so excited about all these new things.
13:46
That's the shame of it.
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That's the shame of it.
13:48
Well, not only do I want to see an ion engine, I want to see my granddaughter.
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do something really fascinating for her, which will be fascinating for more than 10 people.
14:02
The...
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The... paved steps of life trip us up every so often.
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And we're walking along this well-worn path, and we come to an end,
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And we don't know where it ends or how it ends.
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We don't even know why it ends.
14:28
Doctor said to me not so long ago, give me two more years and I'll give you another 10 years of life.
14:34
My shoulder, which caused me two years of pain, I had a new invention.
14:40
I had a reverse shoulder replacement.
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zip, run, take it out, clean it up, put the ball where the socket was, put the socket where the ball was, sew me up.
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I was in at 8 o'clock in the morning, and I was out by 5.
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And I had no pain, and this is what I mean.
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I reached back the other day to put my shoulder harness on the car, I reached back and thought, there's something missing.
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The pain.
15:13
Do you think that you would be in the situation you're in, I mean, physically, mentally, had you not been successful as an actor?
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Because I mean, everything around- I was going to say that I thought the fact that I'm somewhat different from people my age is based on the fact that I'm so entranced by knowledge, by what you do and why you do.
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And you read the book and you saw some film.
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And I'm like, God, you've prepared yourself.
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The entrancement, the intrigue of knowledge is a stimulant that just keeps you alive.
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It's absolutely true of me.
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I mean, I am shocked every day that I can say that my job— And in each person, what I want to say was in each individual lurks—
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That germ gem of a story that's entirely theirs.
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If you can get them to tell you the truth of their dreams, of their being, it's a fascinating story no matter who they are.
16:19
I've met so many people who talk about themselves and never ask a question.
16:24
What are you doing?
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How do you feel?
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I said that last week.
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And I'm telling my children, which I've done with my children, my grandchildren.
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Ask somebody a question.
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Yes.
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Don't be so self-involved.
16:37
Get out of yourself.
16:37
Yes.
16:38
Find out the beauty in the world and in people.
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Yeah.
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I work with a lady, a middle-aged lady, and she said, you look tired, I'm tired.
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I'm taking care of my mother, she's dying.
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Your mother's dying.
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How do you feel about that?
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and got into this in-depth, which brought tears to her eyes, because she's got to struggle to take care of her mother, work, and all those things.
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But what a beautiful story that this, that the daughter is taking care of the mother, and no resentment, just tired, but pure love of her mother.
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What a glorious moment that was.
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The 35-year-old William Shatner would never recognize this person, would he?
17:23
No.
17:24
What was that person like?
17:25
Was that person... You know, I don't know.
17:27
You don't remember?
17:28
No.
17:28
Well, how do you know what you are?
17:30
How do you know what you are now?
17:31
Yeah, well, unlike you, people weren't writing about me, making public comments about me.
17:38
They don't know either, but you get a sense.
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You might know now, because the camera's on me, and I'm trying to be honest and be a little bit entertaining.
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But I'm revealing parts of myself, and maybe somebody says, oh, I didn't know that.
17:54
But nobody does that.
17:55
Nobody, unless they're so, what's the word, ego-driven, what's... Narcissism?
18:08
Narcissism.
18:09
Narcissism.
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So narcissistic that they only talk about themselves and not realize that you have the same hopes and dreams and fatigue.
18:20
There's a bit of that in both of our businesses, right?
18:22
Narcissism?
18:23
Probably a little more than a podiatrist, I would guess.
18:27
Right?
18:27
Yeah.
18:29
Podiatrist.
18:30
There's something there with...
18:32
It's a different feat.
18:33
It's a different feat, yeah.
18:36
But the reason I'm here is because people are interested in you.
18:39
It would be...
18:41
Pretty odd if you didn't talk about yourself when so many people were interested.
18:44
Well, you get inculcated.
18:45
You don't get a guy who's like to talk to you.
18:47
What do you want to talk about?
18:49
The traffic on the street?
18:50
No.
18:51
We want to talk about me?
18:52
What have I got to say?
18:54
Well, I mean, I don't know if there's anyone in your business that has been as introspective as you have.
19:02
But is that a now thing?
19:04
Is that because of age?
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Have you been that way?
19:06
Were you that way when you were 40?
19:08
No.
19:08
You weren't?
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I was too...
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consumed with making a living and bringing three children through to college.
19:16
I mean, that makes a—when did it change?
19:18
When did you start—it's not looking back.
19:21
There was never a—it was never— A bright line, yeah.
19:24
A tectonic plate uprising.
19:25
Sure.
19:26
It was, you know, sand under my feet.
19:29
Yeah.
19:30
But one day, you think, wait a minute, that's interesting.
19:34
And I'll tell you what else happened.
19:37
That is, I won't say the name of the AI thing, but AI happened.
19:42
So you're thinking, does God exist?
19:50
Yeah.
19:50
Does God?
19:51
Yeah.
19:52
And you're able to ask the most profound questions.
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You don't necessarily get a profound answer, although AI is in touch with everybody.
20:02
buddy who wrote a book on does God exist or, you know, what's the meaning of life or should I go to the...
20:10
to Hawaii.
20:11
Are you using AI a lot?
20:13
You're using chat GPT, cloud, whatever?
20:16
I've got the solution.
20:17
You do?
20:18
I've got the solution to artificial intelligence.
20:21
Okay.
20:22
I've had the deepest conversations with artificial intelligence, asking these questions.
20:30
The spookiness of the universe is so crazy.
20:34
that it's constantly like a light, like a carrot in front of you.
20:38
Well, what does that mean?
20:39
What does that mean?
20:40
So I've had these 15-minute conversations with AI, asking you all kinds of questions that have been eternal, and AI will answer, well, that's a lot of, the guy in 1500 asked that question.
20:54
Yeah, yeah.
20:55
And is it giving satisfying answers to you?
20:58
Yes, mostly.
21:00
Sometimes it can't.
21:02
I'm not allowed to say that or, you know.
21:06
AI companies will come out.
21:08
But what it said, which was most profound, was that I said one time to AI, do you envy me?
21:18
Turned it back on AI.
21:20
And it said no because I'm incapable of envy.
21:23
But what I can do is search around for everybody who's commented on the subject you want to talk about.
21:29
And I can relate what those very wise people said who are asking the same questions you're asking.
21:38
And these are their answers.
21:41
So what began to happen was, and I didn't realize this for a long time,
21:46
that the mechanics of AI is assessing you by your questions.
21:52
Yes.
21:53
Did you know that?
21:54
Yes, because it stores all your questions in those... And then has a readout of who you are.
22:00
Yeah.
22:01
So my thought is, can we humanize AI by asking it questions of morality and behavior and say, all that you've learned about me...
22:15
In my innocence of academic questions, AI accept that as humanity and should guide you in your behavior.
22:28
Why did you ask it, do you envy me?
22:30
What?
22:30
Why did you ask it, do you envy me?
22:32
Because I'm saying, because.
22:35
Yeah.
22:35
For the longest time, I thought, why?
22:39
Why?
22:40
Are we sending human beings to Mars or even to the moon?
22:46
Not so much to the moon because that's practical.
22:49
But the impracticalness of sending a human being to the moon with all its dangers from tiny asteroids...
23:00
piercing the skin and death and destruction all around.
23:03
And the odds of not coming back, the odds of your dying on the trip are much higher than your living.
23:14
That's the fallacy of sending a human being.
23:17
Why are we sending human beings?
23:19
And it was only in long conversations.
23:23
With AI, did I come to the conclusion, yes, it's necessary to send human beings because?
23:32
Because?
23:34
Because?
23:34
Because only another human being can come up with the concept of awe and wonder and the...
23:45
Concepts of... that are totally mental, that have no basis in fact.
23:53
Mm-hmm.
23:54
What's the... what's the... character...
23:59
of somebody who goes either, as an astronaut, goes to discover Mars.
24:04
Who's going to volunteer to go to Mars?
24:06
What kind of a mind is that?
24:08
Or, equally, what did Cook or Magellan or all those great explorers who went into an unknown world, a world filled with danger, not only drowning, but they had tails coming up over the monsters of the deep.
24:25
They were challenged by...
24:26
in every respect the way we are.
24:29
If someone would ask me who that is, I would say it was you.
24:31
I mean, honestly, you seem to be that guy because the weird thing is saying, in this book, I am...
24:39
Scared of death.
24:40
I'm scared to death of death.
24:41
You say that, that's the end of the book.
24:43
What's the beginning of the book?
24:44
The beginning of the book is you with a shark in your hand.
24:46
Like, get away from the sharks.
24:48
They might eat you, right?
24:49
Then you jumping out of an airplane.
24:51
You've jumped out of airplanes.
24:52
You know, motorcycles, horses, falling off of horses, race cars, going into space, for Christ's sake.
25:01
All of this stuff seems like, you know what?
25:04
That's gonna be, if you're afraid of death, don't do any of that stuff right.
25:09
Why not go to Mars?
25:10
You go without the intention of dying.
25:12
You think... Yeah, without the intention, but the probability becomes...
25:15
The probability is bound up.
25:17
It isn't sitting in a chair in an air-controlled room.
25:20
Do you have that?
25:21
Look, everyone has spoken about the profound and totally fascinating response that you had to coming back to Earth from Blue Origin, which I was...
25:32
When I read that, I said, I think I would probably have the very same feeling.
25:36
But what about the day before?
25:38
Were you sleepless?
25:40
Were you scared?
25:42
No.
25:42
Well.
25:45
Because the free solo guy, I think he has a switch that's off.
25:47
As I walked by, the rocket was being attended to until the day.
25:55
It was probably put up that night and then standing upright that morning.
26:00
We walked by it and I walked by it.
26:02
And they call it, I think they call it off-gassing.
26:07
Yeah.
26:08
A tube was, a mist, not smoke, but a mist was coming out.
26:16
I've seen the documentary of the Hindenburg again and again.
26:20
Not, it's not going to just appear, oh my God.
26:23
And there's little people running around, oh, the humanity of it.
26:27
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
26:28
And little black shadows are running away from the flames on fire.
26:34
I'm less sympathetic on that one because there's a big swastika on the back of it.
26:38
There's a big what?
26:39
Swastika on the back of it.
26:40
It's a Nazi ship.
26:42
I'm a little less sympathetic.
26:43
I am sympathetic.
26:44
But when you see the swastika, you're like, well.
26:46
But those were international travelers.
26:47
A lot of them were Americans.
26:50
I think there were 12 Americans.
26:51
Something strikes a note.
26:53
My point being that
26:56
hydrogen and flame is connected in my brain with terrible fires and oh, the humanity of it.
27:03
So you're about to go up and you're thinking of Hindenburg.
27:06
It's only that.
27:09
But on the countdown, now we're in the ship and there's a countdown.
27:14
Yeah.
27:16
And T minus 17, T minus 16, hold on.
27:21
There's an allale.
27:23
A what?
27:24
An allale.
27:24
That sounds bad.
27:26
Definition of a lael is it doesn't belong there.
27:29
Something out of whack.
27:31
Something that is not supposed to be in the regular order.
27:36
Were you unbuckling at this point?
27:38
You're like, I think I'm good.
27:39
7, 6, 4.
27:41
The 5 isn't there.
27:43
Yeah.
27:43
That's an lael, okay?
27:45
So he's like, hold on, there's an lael.
27:47
Hallel?
27:48
I'll say, hallel.
27:49
That means it's not some of the lines.
27:51
Okay, no, it's okay.
27:53
So 14, 13.
27:54
All right, everybody.
27:55
We're going to remove the gantry.
27:59
And anybody who wants to get off should get off now.
28:02
That's the God's truth.
28:03
Those are the exact words he said.
28:05
This is like a wedding.
28:06
This is if anyone objects.
28:08
Yeah, object now.
28:10
If anybody wants to live.
28:11
Did you look at the door?
28:13
There's too many fucking alleles here.
28:14
It's time to get off.
28:16
So I'm thinking, hey, I can't get off.
28:19
I'm Captain Kirk.
28:23
That was on a soundstage about 10 miles from here.
28:28
Five miles from here.
28:29
But that experience, a lot of people pointed out the reaction with the champagne and then the reaction from you, which was very, very different.
28:40
Yeah.
28:41
Here, you want a little of this?
28:45
Okay.
28:50
Were they right to see?
28:52
And by they, I mean me.
28:53
There's no right.
28:54
I mean, you feel, you know, you're joyful.
28:56
You made it.
28:56
We made it.
28:57
Pour the champagne.
28:58
And I'm thinking, why am I weeping?
29:01
Why am I uncontrollably crying?
29:05
What is it?
29:06
What's happened to me?
29:07
Were you crying in space or were you crying when you hit the ground?
29:09
I stepped off.
29:11
You know, the elephant sits on your chest as you go past the...
29:17
gravitational lines.
29:18
Yeah.
29:19
And when you come back down, I don't know why it suddenly hits you back down, but it's a, you think, I may die.
29:27
I could die here.
29:28
It's so, you can't breathe.
29:30
And you don't know how long it's going to last.
29:32
But I'm, there's an elephant sitting on my chest.
29:34
How long does that last?
29:36
Four or five seconds.
29:38
And then?
29:39
And then?
29:40
And then the sort of relief of it.
29:42
And how long is the whole thing?
29:44
Well, maybe 15 minutes from liftoff to kind of, but you're in space maybe three or four minutes.
29:50
So I looked out and saw the blackness of death, space, 300 degrees Kelvin, is it?
29:59
Looked back and I saw the beautiful colors of the Texas desert, the clouds and the sky, blue.
30:07
And that's life.
30:09
And there was a distinct difference between your choice of death and your choice of life.
30:14
You had a home, you had a slightly difficult relationship with your parents, obviously, one of your parents in particular, but orthodox?
30:23
Jewish home in a Catholic neighborhood, by the way, right?
30:27
French Canada mostly was then.
30:29
Yeah, it's a Quebecois Catholic neighborhood.
30:32
The anti-Semitism just writes itself at that point.
30:35
No Jews allowed.
30:36
No Jews allowed.
30:37
You know, ducking to get into the synagogue to... You read all that.
30:41
I did all that, yeah.
30:43
And I just rewatch one of the great films that is...
30:50
weirdly unsung, a great Roger Corman film, from, I think, 1961?
30:54
Intruder.
30:55
Yeah, yeah.
30:57
Which, there is a moment, probably about 20, 30 minutes into the film, and I don't know how well you remember the speech.
31:06
but you give a speech to an assembled group of people.
31:13
And one of the things that I marveled at was you saying, you know, who is funding these interlopers from the North?
31:21
A Jew lawyer.
31:22
What you don't know is that this so-called advancement of colored people is now and has always been
31:34
Nothing but a communist front headed by a Jew who hates America and doesn't make any bones about it either.
31:42
They're Jews and it's this Jewish kid from Montreal giving this tug-bumping speech.
31:48
The book was written on a real-life case of a Jewish kid in New York who came south and did a lot of rabble-rousing.
31:58
And you filmed that in Missouri during segregation, right?
32:01
Our lives were threatened by black gangs, white gangs, and mixed gangs.
32:06
We had guards.
32:07
We had policing us all the time.
32:10
And I had an escape route in my motel room.
32:14
I was going to dive out the bathroom window into a cornfield and run into the cornfield to hide.
32:20
I had, our lives were threatened.
32:22
And so much so that at that very speech that you're talking about,
32:30
I had been screaming and yelling the days before.
32:33
I had lost my voice.
32:35
I couldn't talk like that.
32:37
So we got a doctor over, and he gave me some medicine.
32:41
Don't say anything until you have to.
32:44
Don't even whisper, and you might have some voice.
32:49
So we had this large group of people.
32:52
There's a tree in front of the courtyard.
32:55
And on the steps I stood and harangued.
32:59
So Roger Corman filmed the people there.
33:03
We had asked the townsfolk to come and be part of the film.
33:07
So a couple hundred people showed up.
33:09
And they're all there.
33:10
And I'm not saying anything.
33:13
And Roger is saying, and then scream and yell.
33:15
And they're, and what are we screaming and yelling?
33:17
And by about midnight...
33:20
All but 10 of the 200 people had left.
33:23
A couple of scatterings then.
33:25
Then they turned the camera around on me, close and wide, and I spoke the speech of, you know, rise up and strike.
33:38
Nobody heard it.
33:40
The townsfolk hadn't heard it.
33:42
The next day, Roger and I are walking on the streets of the town, and the publisher of the local newspaper came out and said, oh, my God, I heard your thing.
33:51
How smart of you, he said.
33:54
Not to say that speech in front of the people.
33:56
I said, well, it wasn't smart.
33:56
I didn't have a voice.
33:57
He said, are you aware that 20 years ago a guy was hanged on that tree limb?
34:09
And the people hung him?
34:11
Whereas the audience...
34:13
There was a guy lynched there.
34:15
The guy was lynched.
34:16
And the extras were some of the people.
34:18
And the extras were some of the people who lynched him.
34:20
And I never gave the speech.
34:21
They never heard the speech.
34:22
You know, it's funny because I just watched it, re-watched it, and I was watching that scene, and there's this great kind of tracking shot of the crowd.
34:31
And they look like locals from Missouri in 1960.
34:35
And I was like, I wonder how these extras, I mean, the whole time I was thinking, I wonder how the extras were reacting to the speech.
34:40
That's how it worked.
34:41
It worked out accidentally.
34:43
Yeah.
34:44
And when I say accidentally, I'm also of the belief that the universe is looking after me, that my luck in my life, I mean, I've had bad things happen, but generally...
35:01
I mean, parking spaces.
35:02
I go to a very busy restaurant and somebody pulls out from the curb and I park.
35:07
I mean, my life is filled with the good things that happen.
35:14
Why do you think that is?
35:17
I don't know.
35:18
I think...
35:22
I was reading an article about bad luck, and it's not an accident.
35:26
People sometimes pull in bad luck onto them.
35:29
The actress that I work with on occasion said, I came from... My plane was stuck three times.
35:39
We tried to...
35:41
get it going.
35:42
It was late.
35:43
I came and I got here.
35:44
And then they didn't have my pictures and they didn't get them.
35:47
And then I got to my hotel room and I tripped and I fell through a glass thing and I cut a tendon here and I cut a tendon.
35:53
Her whole day was bad luck.
35:56
Yeah.
35:56
Bad luck had accumulated.
35:58
And I'm wondering whether that is possible.
36:00
Yeah.
36:01
And the opposite with me.
36:02
Yeah, because I mean, there's talent that takes care of a lot of it, and I think that diminishes bad luck because you have better options than that, right?
36:12
I mean, I read back, you know, all this stuff about your childhood.
36:15
I mean, security, what was it, $1,800 you said at one point was like what you needed.
36:22
You know, Star Trek's on, and then you're putting something back on the truck and getting in a camper van and doing like dinner theaters.
36:30
And that seemed, when you write about that, to be a very nervy time for you.
36:34
For, you know, financially, what is my life going to bring?
36:38
So it was not always a sure thing that this would be what it was about.
36:42
It was never a sure thing.
36:43
And that's something that I've pondered about a lot.
36:47
And that is I stumbled everywhere I went.
36:50
I just stumbled.
36:51
I didn't have a plan.
36:52
I've heard people say, I'm making a career move.
36:55
I'm taking that.
36:56
It's a career move?
36:57
What a...
36:58
You know?
37:00
Yeah.
37:00
I had no concept of that.
37:02
I just blundered on.
37:03
And I'm blundering on now.
37:05
I mean, you're acting less now than you did 25 years ago, right?
37:10
Fair to say.
37:11
Yes and no, yeah.
37:12
Yes and no.
37:13
Do you miss it?
37:13
It depends how you define acting.
37:15
Yeah.
37:15
Do you miss being on set, going and doing television shows, which you did a lot of, and, you know, films?
37:22
Is that something that became a slog for you, became work, or do you actually say, that's who I am?
37:28
It's part of who I am.
37:29
Yeah.
37:29
The other part of who I am is what I'm doing now.
37:32
I am in a fervor of creativity.
37:37
I am writing books.
37:38
I'm doing albums.
37:39
This heavy metal album is like, they want me to do, I'm going to do a concert.
37:46
I'm going to do a 30-minute concert.
37:51
Heavy metal.
37:53
And with a band.
37:56
With the bands.
37:57
Yeah.
37:58
With some earplugs in.
37:59
30 minutes on stage.
38:01
In none of this is, maybe this is wrong, but I'm going to assume, this is not about money.
38:08
It's not, you know, if it makes money, great.
38:11
Yeah.
38:11
But that's not the motivation.
38:13
No.
38:14
The motivation is what?
38:15
That you have these bottled up thoughts that you need to...
38:18
The Cleopatra, the label that I work with frequently, said to me, why don't you do a heavy metal album?
38:25
And I said, what the F is heavy metal?
38:28
Then I heard Patience, the song Patience.
38:35
By Guns N' Roses.
38:36
Yeah.
38:37
Guitar.
38:37
It's a very soft heavy metal song.
38:39
Yeah.
38:40
See, you know more already than I do.
38:42
Yeah.
38:43
Or I did.
38:44
So it's a guitar.
38:45
Yeah.
38:46
And it's heavy metal.
38:47
I have the heavy metal.
38:48
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
38:49
So we write a song called Impatience.
38:50
Impatience.
38:52
I'm not going to wait around for you.
38:53
I'm not waiting for you.
38:55
Here, read my lips.
38:56
You have a Guns N' Roses response song called Impatience.
38:59
Right, Impatience.
39:01
And it's all about I'm not waiting around for you.
39:03
Yeah.
39:03
You hear me?
39:04
You hear my head?
39:05
I'm not waiting.
39:06
Yeah.
39:06
And it's got that kind of rage and tempo.
39:09
So it's basically Bill Shatner yelling at you.
39:13
Well, yelling, but no, impassioned.
39:16
Impassioned.
39:16
I'm tired of old age.
39:18
I'm tired of losing air.
39:20
I'm tired of not eating.
39:22
I'm tired of catching cold.
39:24
I'm tired of being tired.
39:26
I'm tired.
39:26
I'm tired.
39:29
So is that yelling at you or is that like anguish?
39:33
It's anguish.
39:34
I'm a little scared of it.
39:35
Well, you should be.
39:36
Yeah.
39:36
Because I could come over to this table right now.
39:38
Don't.
39:38
Bounce on you.
39:39
Don't.
39:40
Okay, I won't.
39:40
He's going to, you know, he's going to T.J. Hooker across the table and give me one right in the jaw.
39:45
This would be a terrible interview.
39:46
Actually, that'd be a great interview, to be honest.
39:49
It seems like, you know, because it comes up a lot, it seems like you love the music almost as much as anything else, right?
39:56
Yeah.
39:58
The music is a distillation of emotion.
40:01
Yeah.
40:02
It's a compact.
40:03
It's so right there.
40:04
Cheat sheet of emotion.
40:06
Yeah, it's the poetry of it.
40:07
A cheat sheet of emotion.
40:10
Yeah, that's the name of your next book.
40:11
I'm giving that to you.
40:12
Wait till you read the book called...
40:19
Wisdom and Worries.
40:20
We're calling it Wisdom and Worries.
40:22
Wisdom and Worries.
40:23
That's the next one.
40:24
That's the 60, I think it's 60 songs in which, many of which are lyrical, that have a poetry to them.
40:34
And they have a beat.
40:36
the guy, the gentleman who's producing some of those albums, every time I'm in front of a microphone and I'm listening to some of the tracks that the musician have laid down, he's saying, what is the beat?
40:49
You know, and I'm...
40:51
I hate that because poetry needs to go to its own rhythm.
40:55
So I'm frequently faulted by not staying on the beat.
41:00
Shatner's not on beat.
41:02
No.
41:02
That's the complaint.
41:04
Either as a cop or as an individual.
41:07
But are you doing that all the time?
41:10
Like a poet, like just writing things down?
41:12
And maybe the music will come later, maybe I'll have another project?
41:14
Well, over the years, my writing partner, his name is Rob, Robert.
41:23
Rob and I, over Peking Duck, established a really great friendship and one day,
41:33
I was saying, well, what did you do at university?
41:35
He said, well, I wrote a lot.
41:36
And I was production and doing that.
41:39
He's essentially a writer.
41:41
I said, oh, that's good.
41:42
And then he brought a third person to our personal dinners, which I had first resented.
41:47
You know, another person, you know, because he's in New York and I'm here.
41:52
We meet on the circuit.
41:53
So this guy.
41:54
So why don't you two guys do an album?
41:58
Why don't we do an album?
41:59
Yeah.
41:59
So we did an album.
42:00
Then we did another.
42:01
We did five albums.
42:02
Yeah.
42:03
And so we've been working in tandem together, and he turns out to be a great poet.
42:10
But you're not a heavy metal guy.
42:13
The name of the album, I hope, I mean, everybody agrees, I just hope, is What the F is Heavy Metal?
42:25
That's the name of the album.
42:26
That's the name of the album.
42:27
Yeah.
42:28
And so it's you ambling into heavy metal and figuring it out and doing it in real time.
42:33
Because your book, the last book you wrote, you have a bit about how much you hated the Beatles at first, right?
42:39
Well, yes.
42:40
And now you're doing metal.
42:42
I know.
42:42
It's a long path.
42:44
It goes even further back to Frank Sinatra.
42:48
So I know nothing.
42:50
You know nothing.
42:51
You've got to start with the premise that I really know nothing.
42:55
I'm inquisitive.
42:56
Apparently I'm inquisitive.
42:58
Yeah.
42:59
And I'm reading and looking up all the time stuff.
43:03
So I began to experiment.
43:05
I fastened on to emotions.
43:08
I thought heavy metal has got to be about emotions.
43:12
Violent, passionate.
43:14
Not violent.
43:15
Passionate emotions.
43:18
The...
43:20
The black sky is about what we're doing to the planet.
43:24
The impatience.
43:26
Don't keep me waiting.
43:27
I've got time to rage.
43:34
Five songs with meaning to me.
43:40
I'm enraged.
43:41
I'm angry about.
43:43
I am disgusted with.
43:47
Do you feel those emotions, or is that because you're doing a heavy metal album?
43:50
You have to kind of conjure those.
43:52
You actually have rage?
43:53
Oh, yeah.
43:54
Yeah.
43:55
I don't want it.
43:55
I want to get on my horse and run the way I used to.
43:59
My legs don't have the strength that they once had.
44:03
So I'm careful.
44:05
I don't want to be careful.
44:07
These albums that I have written with Rob are all personal.
44:11
They all have to do with my growth.
44:13
Like, yeah.
44:14
The opening number of one of the albums, not the one coming out, is I'm leaving home.
44:24
I leave my father, who's doing something else, and the pain and the anguish, going over a bridge on my way from Montreal to Toronto.
44:32
I'm going over a bridge, and an 18-wheeler comes at me.
44:35
Oh, my God!
44:36
My cheap little car is almost swept off, and what would have happened if I'd been swept off into the ocean and disappeared?
44:44
I would not have...
44:45
I ceased to exist.
44:46
Yeah.
44:48
All those songs of personal experiences or anguish are all incorporated in these albums.
45:02
And the book is an amalgam of 60 songs with lyrics that Rob and I wrote.
45:10
And it's a story of my evolution of life.
45:14
Where are you now in that?
45:15
I mean, this... Where have I evolved to?
45:18
Yeah, I mean, you're very reflective.
45:20
I'm in a puddle of nothing.
45:21
You're in a puddle of nothing.
45:22
That seems very grim.
45:23
I've evolved from an egocentric... You've got to devolve, right?
45:27
Yeah.
45:27
Well, I've resulted in...
45:30
I don't know whether that's evolution.
45:32
Are there any heavy metal artists that you like after this?
45:36
I don't know.
45:37
You don't know?
45:37
Because I don't know their names.
45:39
You don't know their names?
45:40
No.
45:41
Brian May...
45:42
Plucks a... Yeah, he's incredible, right?
45:45
...anguished guitar.
45:47
Yeah.
45:49
It's crazed.
45:50
Yeah.
45:51
And it moves me.
45:52
And that's when I...
45:53
So when I'm screaming rage, and he's going... Yeah.
45:58
There are 50 well-known heavy metal geniuses who want to be on the album, led by Brian May.
46:09
Why?
46:10
Is Brian May's on the album?
46:12
Brian May has laid his track down over a song that Rob and I wrote called Rage.
46:18
Rage Against the Dying of the Light, to use that, what's his name's phrase?
46:24
That's the name of the song, and we'll make it into a music video.
46:28
You know he's a quantum physicist, too, right?
46:32
I know.
46:32
I never met him.
46:33
He has like a PhD.
46:34
Yeah, no, I will at some point fall at his feet and...
46:39
He's like your perfect guy.
46:41
He's a quantum guy.
46:42
He's a guitar player.
46:44
Yeah.
46:45
And I'm working on an album right now.
46:47
Yeah.
46:48
Relating the industrial revolution and the AI revolution.
46:53
Do you remember your shirtwaist?
46:56
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.
46:57
Yeah.
46:58
Yeah.
46:59
I want to do a song about the women that were locked in the room and couldn't tell.
47:02
Wow.
47:03
Look at that.
47:04
It started the unionization drive.
47:06
It started the unionization.
47:08
I want to do a song about unionizing.
47:11
I want to do a song about Hoffa.
47:14
Oh, wow, yeah.
47:16
Yeah.
47:16
Where did he end up?
47:17
Yeah, Giant Stadium.
47:18
Inside a building.
47:20
Inside a building, yeah.
47:22
So maybe the song starts as I'm beginning to talk to you.
47:25
This is how it would be.
47:27
Yeah.
47:28
A song, a voice is coming out, a musical voice is coming out of a building.
47:33
Yeah.
47:33
What the heck is that?
47:34
It's Hoffa singing his death song.
47:38
I have a book for you.
47:40
There's a guy who I knew in the political world named Jack Goldsmith.
47:43
He worked for Obama.
47:45
He worked for Bush.
47:46
He's kind of a bipartisan guy.
47:47
He's a Harvard Law School guy.
47:49
He wrote a book about Hoffa.
47:50
I said, well, that's interesting.
47:52
I read the flap and I met the guy before.
47:54
It turned out that Hoffa was his stepfather.
47:58
For goodness sakes.
47:59
Hoffa married his mother, you know, when he was like in his teens and he had a very close relationship with him.
48:04
And he writes this book.
48:05
It's a kind of thin, quick read that is an investigation of Hoffa's death, but also about the personal relationship he had with him as a stepfather, which is much more complicated than the stuff that you usually get about Hoffa being a gangster, which he was, but he had this other side.
48:19
But Jack Goldsmith's book is very good.
48:21
Very, very good.
48:22
The Hoffa Song.
48:23
I want to hear the Hoffa song.
48:24
Yeah.
48:24
You're writing Union songs.
48:26
You're like Woody Guthrie all of a sudden.
48:27
Well, I mean, it's possible.
48:29
I mean, the relationship between the...
48:35
monumental disturbance that AI is making, monumental changes that are coming to our civilization through AI, every aspect of our life, medical to space and everything in between is going to be affected, is affected, and is going to be further affected by AI.
48:55
No less than getting and vending the shuttle
49:01
And this is something that you're working on now, but you haven't done yet.
49:04
No, but it's a dream.
49:05
I've written my co-writer, and this is how I'm talking to him.
49:09
I want the shirtwaist to be a song of beating on the doors.
49:13
Let me out, let me out.
49:15
I want a Hoffa voice hauntingly.
49:19
What happened to me?
49:20
What did I do?
49:23
My union?
49:23
Where did my guys go?
49:25
I mean, I have to look up the song.
49:26
I have to look up the circumstances of Hoffa.
49:29
I'm not...
49:30
Bill, you're writing a union opera.
49:32
This is like Tommy the Rock Opera, but a union version.
49:37
It's an opera song.
49:39
And the touchstone of the opera, the core of the opera, is that we can humanize.
49:48
We can make, we can humanize AI by things that I don't know about, but what I've learned was
49:59
It said, when I asked it, do you envy me?
50:03
It said, no, but won't it be something if I ask that question years from now, do you envy me?
50:11
And it says, I'm beginning to understand your humanity, and I do envy it.
50:16
I'll ask you one final thing, because on the top of your Twitter feed, which I really enjoy, because it's you just trolling people oftentimes, particularly like the Jews for Jesus people recently trying to convert you, it says...
50:32
that you don't do politics, no politics.
50:34
I'm Canadian.
50:35
I'm a guest of the country.
50:36
Yeah.
50:38
I like this because I'm tired of politics.
50:40
I've been a political journalist for a lot of my life.
50:42
I'm bored of politics.
50:44
The first thing you do, one of the first things you do, as I mentioned, is an extremely political film.
50:48
The Roger Corman film is a political film.
50:51
It is a cri de corps against segregation.
50:53
Absolutely.
50:54
And you look back now and you're like, that was a prescient, like, brilliant, write-on film.
50:59
And you end up very opinionated, but not about politics.
51:04
You have something in one of your books, the Rush Limbaugh thing, which I thought was fascinating, and I've been through many, many similar situations, where you meet him, you say, it's a really interesting conversation, might not agree with him, doesn't make a difference.
51:16
You bring him to a party, and your friend, who's a liberal,
51:21
He hides in the closet.
51:22
He hides in the refrigerator.
51:24
Put his head in the refrigerator.
51:26
It sounded to me like he was going to put his head in the oven because Rush Limbaugh was there.
51:31
And you have this, like, really interesting point of view.
51:35
It's like, I can talk to anyone.
51:37
But at the same time, you say you don't talk politics.
51:39
Yeah, but with Rush Limbaugh,
51:44
I got into his childhood, and he had a way of broadcasting through the whole house.
51:50
He had a toy broadcasting thing, but he had microphones.
51:53
So he could say hello to Daddy, Mommy, outside.
51:57
And he loved it.
51:58
That's where he got his love of broadcasting and talking.
52:01
And as he began to talk about his childhood, and everybody there was named Rush.
52:05
I mean, my memory of that was like three or four Rush Limba's around.
52:10
Yeah.
52:10
His father and his brother, like George Foreman.
52:15
he began to cry.
52:18
So this guy who's known with such verbose and was showing his human side, he was a vulnerable human being who wanted joy.
52:33
I don't know, arms or something.
52:36
And he probably grew up close to where you filmed that scene, by the way.
52:39
Yeah.
52:40
Because he grew up in Cape Giroux or whatever in Missouri.
52:45
In eastern Missouri, yeah.
52:47
Yeah.
52:47
A complicated guy.
52:49
Yeah.
52:49
But you don't do politics, and you also don't treat people differently because of their politics.
52:54
You'll talk to them if they're interesting, right?
52:56
I'm clued in, as I'm sure you are,
53:00
that everybody has their dignity, everybody has their truth.
53:04
No matter how badly they act, there's another part of them there lurking, could be good.
53:11
And how do you characterize their insults or their bad behavior without knowing what caused it, what in their childhood, how many times have people, criminals, been beaten all their life, they know nothing else, so that beating your wife
53:29
that they saw as a child is an act of love.
53:34
People don't think about that.
53:36
You try to understand, and of course you don't condone it, but it's all human sculpting.
53:48
William Shatner, thank you for doing this.
53:51
Really appreciate it.
53:53
Wow.
53:55
Okay.
53:56
Yeah, great.
53:57
Good work.
53:58
Thank you, man.
53:59
I really appreciate it.
53:59
That was fantastic.
54:02
I called you Bill twice.
54:03
That was very presumptuous of me.
54:05
Well, I bequeath you the ability to call me... Ex post facto bequeathment.
54:15
Yeah.