Writer of Braveheart | Randall Wallace - Jordan B Peterson Podcast S4 E19

hello if you have found the ideas i discussed interesting and useful perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book beyond order 12 more rules for life available from penguin random house in print or audio format you could use the links we provide below or buy through amazon or at your local bookstore this new book beyond order provides what i hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful as well as being immediately implementable and practical beyond order can be read and understood on its own but also builds on the concepts that i developed in my previous books 12 rules for life and before that maps of meaning thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast [Music] i'm pleased today to be able to talk to mr randall wallace he's an american novelist screenwriter director producer and songwriter who came to exceptional prominence above his normal prominence let's say by writing the screenplay for the historical drama film braveheart in 1995. his work on that film earned him a nomination for the academy award for best original screenplay and a writer's guild of america award in the same category he has since directed films such as the man in the iron mask in 1998 we were soldiers 2002 secretariat 2010 which i just watched with my wife last night and heaven is for real 2014. he's also written seven novels including the new york times bestseller pearl harbor and has founded hollywood for habitat for humanity and one of the things i'd like to point out to everyone who's watching or listening to begin with is it's really easy to list off uh um achievements in a in a row novelist screenwriter director producer songwriter but each what's quite remarkable and worthy of note is that each of those is very difficult and unlikely so it's it's very hard to be a novelist you have to be able to write well and then you have to be fortunate and you have to have the right connections and you have to time the market properly and then to repeat that seven times is is is quite a spectacular and unlikely feat but then to combine that with success as a screenwriter which is perhaps if anything even more difficult than writing a novel that's successful because so many people have to participate in moving an idea from its initial inception through the screenwriting process to to full production as a movie and then release it's a unbelievably complicated and unlikely affair director that's impossible producer and songwriter as well and so the conjunction of all those things the conjunction of seven rare events is an extraordinarily rare event and one of the things that really made me interested in talking talking to mr wallace today is i'm very curious about how he managed that what what his life how his life has been set up so that that became possible so so welcome and thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me oh thank you jordan i'm i'm absolutely thrilled to be with you thank you let me start by asking you what what you're working on now everyone's locked down with coved and what what what's your what are your plans for now in the future um about two years ago uh because i'm a workaholic uh the the the ism in my family is workaholism and and i i i have that burden it it produces a lot of help and advantage sometimes but it's also a burden and about two years ago i decided to take a sabbatical the first one in my life and go to rome for five weeks i wanted to see what it was like to to be in a place long enough i'd i've lived in paris for a while but working on a film which is 16 hour days for months on end and i've lived in a couple of different visited a number of foreign countries but i wanted to be in a place with some room with some time to to reflect and get away and i thought rome would be perfect and we went to rome and uh i have three sons and at one time or another all three were there but we were sitting together on the piazza nirvana and um looking at us at a fountain and um and i said to one of my sons wouldn't it be cool if the pope could escape through some of the secret tunnels that we know were in the vatican and and get out and walk around rome as a normal citizen and and and one of my other sons said yeah and maybe kick ass and then my other son said you mean the pope is batman and i went wait a second and uh and suddenly an idea was born and uh out of a kind of a fun exchange i had friends who were members of opus dei the the ultra orthodox catholic organization and and they they took us through the vatican and introduced us to the swiss guards and i began to think about how profound an experience it is that a man would be would be deemed by his church to be the the holy father the representative of god on earth what kind of crushing weight would that be what kind of humility would it require and and a story began to spin its way into into my life i have a friend who's a devout catholic and he he won't take communion because he can't make perfect contrition i'm not a catholic by the way i grew up a baptist but he can't um he can't fulfill the requirements to take communion because he can't honestly say he's gonna refuse to stop living in sin with the woman he's with who he has a child with so he's cut off from communion and no matter how much i say to him about the protestant view of none of us deserve god's love we're we're saved only by grace um it it doesn't it doesn't penetrate his his sense of obligation and requirement and and insufficiency to take communion and i began to think about what if you had a pope who was absolutely committed to the the reformation of the church but he he believed that maybe god was not going to bless his efforts unless he became a better man and to become a better man he had to own his own sins and and his deepest sin his greatest guilt pertains to a young woman who was the child of one of the swiss guards who who tried to protect the popes when john paul the the second was shot four times in the stomach in vatican square other popes have died under mysterious circumstances and the idea that these two people come together on the night when assassins stormed the vatican to kill the pope and they have to try to escape through the bowels of the vatican while they're confronting their darkest secrets and their darkest fears and faith that just sounded like the kind of movie i want to do and for the first time in my career i felt comfortable in saying to people who are who are who have the financial means to invest in movies that i was willing to let them invest as one of my sons said i could never let friends invest in movies because it would destroy me the sense of responsibility to to get their money back to them but in this i had every confidence that this was the kind of movie the audience throughout the world really wants to see the kind of theme that pertains to everyone uh that it would be it would be the the classic thing we want a hit movie that really meant something uh and that's the movie i'm preparing now um planning to shoot in rome in september uh have an incredible team assembled um still assembling other people to do it but but that's that's what's right in my sights right now well in a thousand years that isn't a plot that i would have guessed [Laughter] well jordan here's another thing that that pertains and it's another of the reasons i'm i'm so enriched by by your experience by your journey which i feel is is just starting and it's that when you start to direct there's the the metaphor for me is like you're crawling into a pipe and that pipe is 18 months long and you're going to crawl through sludge and sometimes even sewage and there's no turning around and it's it's all on your shoulders and you have to keep going and to stay connected with what i need to stay connected with to survive which begins with my family it's extremely difficult the the you're in a war you're in you're in a battle and i've done a number of movies about fighting about men who lead other other men in battle and it's consuming it's all-consuming general moore the man that we were soldiers was about mel gibson portrayed him he he led the air cavalry in the largest battle in vietnam and he loved his family profoundly but from the moment he left fort benning georgia to go to vietnam till the day he returned more than a year later he never wrote a single letter except to one daughter he wrote he wrote her a letter back because she had written him but other than that he never called his wife and he loved his wife with ev every fiber of his being but he felt he had to he had to keep every second focused on how he kept his men alive and in that sense of how responsibility can can crush us is is profound for me well i've suggested to people quite constantly and and generally it's been a suggestion that people take to heart that the sustaining meaning in life is to be found through the adoption of responsibility but that is the flip side of it is that there's always the possibility that you pile on too much and that you don't manage to move forward under the load and that's a danger and i've seen people who are talented fall prey to that talented and hardworking fall prey to that and it is definitely a great advantage to be surrounded by people that love you and to have a family and all of that so that you can take some comfort when you have the opportunity to do that so that that screenplay that you're describing that's going to be you said that'll start filming in the fall assuming that we defeat kovid and all of that yes and so what what drew you to the idea in some sense of putting the pope in an what sounds like an action movie i mean i have a friend who writes action uh novels and he's quite interested in using all of the elements plot development in particular but also character development that are part of mass entertainment in say in the thriller genre which is very close to the superhero genre i suppose to investigate thoughtful matters in depth to marry what's entertaining and gripping which always has an archetypal element otherwise it wouldn't be entertaining and gripping to to something that's serious and i suppose and so it sounds like there's something like that well i could see that thread running through all of your work um that the marriage of mass attraction which is certainly necessary for the success of a movie but also the exploration of deeper themes and ethical themes yes and i i feel that one without the other is pale um an abstract discussion of values uh is interesting to me intellectually but i want to know how it's defined in action um and an action movie uh in which no one learns anything and no one's required to to grow and sacrifice is empty i i've been asked why i make war movies and i always say i don't i make love stories i want to know what you love enough to sacrifice your life for if necessary um it's funny jordan in high school of all the things you know when when the seniors in at least in america i assume in other places but they're voted different superlatives and i was voted most responsible and i found that the the least sexy uh title you could possibly have i i once said to a woman i was dating that that in high school i was voted most responsible and she laughed and said i was voted best legs and i thought well maybe that's the way it works the most responsible guy is supposed to get the the girl with the best legs but um but for me it's like um well i'm sorry this is sort of scattered but um whenever i'm listening to you i'll find unexpected treasures um you'll say something in your in your lectures that will cause me to to see some aspect of my life that i hadn't interpreted fully and one for me was when i was in high school i was younger than most of my classmates and um and i saw a lot of bullying and i experienced some and when i went to college and there'd be incidents like you know a linebacker from the football team would get drunk and some some [Music] sort of scholarly student on the face and crush its jaw and i decided i was going to really learn to fight and i studied karate and i became a karate teacher and i won some championships and when i tried and i was also in i was a religion major and i went to seminary and i put myself through seminary teaching karate and that would make people laugh they'd think it's an anomaly but i'd say well when you were talking about nietzsche uh saying you know you make a moral choice if you make a choice because you're afraid to make the other choice it's not a moral choice now i didn't know much about nietzsche when i was in college i i just thought he was a german thinker who didn't know how to spell his last name what did this guy do it but uh but it was that way for me i thought if i walk away from a fight i want i want to know as much as i could know that it's not because i'm being a coward it's because i'm choosing to walk away that i'm that i'm capable of of hurting someone and if i have to fight i want to be capable of doing it and that to me all ties in with the notion of the complexity of of a choice and and we're we're entertained in a movie we're captivated i should say more by by seeing the the connection between action and meaning well meaning grounds out in action right something isn't meaningful as far as i can tell unless it has implications for action yes and or or the alternative is that it has implications for perception because something meaningful can change the way you look at something but the consequence of that is that the framework within which you act is going to change and so it grounds out in action and and i mean i've always been what would you fascinated i suppose by the the uh parallelism between nietzsche and dostoevsky because they thought along very similar lines um and but dostoevsky has the advantage over nietzsche in some sense because he can embody his philosophy and characters and that actually allows him to go into more depth i would say than nietzsche which is really saying something because nietzsche went as far down in some ways as anyone i've ever had the misfortune or pleasure to have read but and and and it's so interesting how it works and in in the brothers karamazov um dostoyevsky pits ivan against eliot and ivan is handsome and debonair and he's he's the warrior type that you just described um he's very atheistic and he can put up a pretty good argument you know he he tortures his brother who's a monastic novitiate with uh stories of children locked in outhouses overnight and freezing to death they were punished by their parents which dostoevsky took from a newspaper and said i don't i cannot possibly imagine how there could be a god who was omniscient and and had all the other classic attributes of god who could create a universe where that was allowed to happen even once and ivan it can now debate eliot consistently but eliot's character is such that he wins the argument he loses all the battles in some sense but wins the war and that's something you can really portray when you clothe your ideas and characters or or when the characters are even more i think to the point is when the characters are so profound that they're acting out ideas that you couldn't yet make explicit no one that is one of the things that that narrative does is that it enables us to play out ideas that we're not yet intelligent enough to understand and sometimes the gap between the narrative representation and the explicit understanding can be thousands and thousands of years because we're still unwrapping well we're certainly still unwrapping the bible we're we're unwrapping we're still unwrapping shakespeare there's more depth there than we can than we can understand explicitly and so anything that uses character has that tremendous advantage and then it also there's also this strange ability that some people have in spades to create fictional worlds that are of unbelievable profundity and power and i mean the greatest example of that in the last 30 years in terms of sheer imaginative powers got to be jk rowling and the harry potter series which you know gripped the imagination of the entire planet for for a decade and produced untold wealth and spread literacy everywhere as well she had an un a remarkably creative imagination and something quite mysterious and so you're you're fortunate enough to work at the marriage of ideas and and and drama yes and and you know it's it's really interesting when when you've spoken about dostoevsky and and others uh in some of your lectures i i'm fascinated by him and all the russians i studied russian for four years in college and uh and read some of these in the original my russian wasn't fluent enough for me to really i mean i had to grind through them but tolstoy chekhov chekhov who was a doctor a medical doctor as well as a writer so that that congruence of of a commitment not just in terms of literature but that he used his profession as a doctor to also inform him as a writer he famously said medicine is my is my wife and literature is my mistress and when i tire of one i spend time with the other um and um i and pushkin um who would who would write stories that that were full of thought but the story itself was bigger than any thought he could put around it it was it was more resonant it it carried more um by the way when i listened to your your biblical series it caused me to decide to read through the whole bible and just start to finish and i grew up southern baptist so ever since i could read i've read the bible virtually every day of my life but i'd never read the bible start to finish and there were some books that even when i was a religion major at university i would get to some of the books and go i i can't stay awake for this book i just got to move on but when you really go through it and you see the the old testament as this this incredible saga of a people trying to find the rules that that kept them together as a people and it felt if you disobey these rules then it's going to end badly for us all and the greatest the greatest violation is to erect altars to other gods right let's worship false idols yeah that's the worst one and then along comes jesus who is completely steeped in all that old testament i mean he is he is profound in his knowledge of it and he lives and does and says these things but it's not like it's a philosophy it's a narrative a narrative which i've studied a great deal and i believe is is largely historical or i should say significantly historical i believe these things did happen and then you have saint paul who's trying to make sense of what happened and and and it's mind-blowing to me it's mind-blowing to to read it as a whole and put it into perspective in that having having spent my life in what's mind-blowing about it in in part i mean and i try to speak of the bible not from the perspective of a committed believer and i have my reasons for that um i guess it's partly because i want to concentrate on what everyone can come to see as true i suppose perhaps that's it um but it is remarkable that the bible does in fact make a coherent narrative because we don't understand that it was seek it was written by a very diverse range of people over a span of time that we can perhaps not even imagine it's very difficult to tell how old this the oldest stories in genesis particular are the the the the story of the fall and of adam and eve and cain and abel they bear all the hallmarks of a previous oral tradition that would have existed in a relatively unchanged form for tens of thousands of years and perhaps even longer than that and so they're unbelievably ancient and then parts of it obviously are newer and the written parts are obviously newer than any tentative oral tradition but you have a you have at the bare minimum an unbelievably deep psychological document that weaves itself over centuries into a coherent story and northrop frye i would say he's a canadian literary critic has did more for me than any other particular thinker to help me understand the nature of the narrative because fr fry i suppose he did the same thing or i'm doing the same thing that he did because he preceded me also at the university of toronto um he assessed the bible as a work of literature as a narrative and that to me was never any denigration because narrative a powerful narrative and you talk about this when you talk about braveheart for example because there isn't that much known about william wallace historically but you craft you crafted a narrative that's that was true enough let's say to be unbelievably attractive to people and to motivate them very deeply because it's an affecting movie well and if it wasn't it wouldn't have been so popular um and so there's a there's a truth in narrative that i think is even deeper than historical truth a true like a truly profound narrative truth is like the average of a whole variety of historical truths and so it's the essence of historical truth so it's even more true than his than what we would consider say eyewitness history because eyewitness history is just it's one battle you know and and there's maybe an epic theme in that battle but then imagine that you could look at a thousand battles and you could and you could extract out from that what was canonical about heroic victory across all 1000 battles you see something like that happening in the old testament and the narrative the narrative thread is really quite deep their societies emerge formulate fall off the path worship false idols collapse and then the same thing happens again and the collapse happens and the collapse happens because people become too prideful the kings in particular they don't listen to the voice of conscience they and a prophetic voice arises and says you're wandering off the tried and true path and you're going to be punished terribly for that and generally speaking the kings ignore that and catastrophe breaks free and you see and in the old testament in particular there's the promise of the ultimate state in some sense there's utopian promises that run through it the search for the promised land and then so strangely you see that transformed into something that's not really political in the new testament you see that the promised land becomes the nature of experience as a consequence of a particular form of moral being and and then perhaps that has political implications because people who acted like that would produce a particular state but it's no longer it's it's no longer the dream of establishing the state that will solve all problems it's psychologized and it's it's unbelievably profound and it it's and that's i think you can derive all of that from from the biblical writings without even starting to move on to classically religious territory and and it's and then that does beg the question of course is what does all that wisdom point to in the final analysis and that's when the questions start to become religious yes and it will jordan it that's that's the part to me that um it takes it into a whole whole different realm as you as you say um there's a quote from mary oliver that a friend shared with me recently it's uh keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable and i find that in in a great story in any or any great piece of art uh that surprise is the central currency of its power there's an element of if you will of revelation if you will and i i think it was paul tillich i'm not sure who said that religion is man's way to god and is always erroneous but revelation is god's way to man maybe it's carl bart it's god's way to man and it's always perfect well there's there's a revelatory aspect to any great story when you're telling someone a story and they didn't see coming what just happened that's what makes them awake that's what stabs them broad awake in braveheart so many people said to me it was it was when the woman that william wallace loves when her throat is cut that's when suddenly they knew they were not in a typical action movie um even to the very end of of braveheart um there would have been many people in hollywood and were who thought well that this movie needs to end with his friends swinging in on vines and saving him we we can't end a an expensive historical epic movie with a guy beheaded and disemboweled but that was where it had to end for me but but how we get there and what it says surprised me and surprised the audience too and in that i would think is how it becomes resonant i was uh doing um a charity screening of braveheart a few years ago for the first time in oh two decades to sit in a theater and actually see the movie screened not on television but projected in a a theater and doing it for a charity in austin texas and at the end of the movie i walked up onto the stage to do a q a and the first person who stood up was a young woman in the front row 19 years old she so she wasn't born when braveheart had come out and i was surprised that she stood up first and she said mr wallace i don't have a question i just want to tell you something my fiancee died six months ago and before he died he told me he wanted me to watch braveheart so i would understand the way he loved me and i did i i had to stop i i couldn't go on for several minutes it it shocked me it moved me it surprised me um you said that you write love stories and i guess she put her finger on that hey really profoundly and and the and the idea that that men want to be courageous they want to be willing to sacrifice themselves for what's worth sacrificing for and women want a man like that and they women want to and they they want to be participants in that story in in that same journey for themselves um and and to me it's narrative can give you that more than any abstract explanation of it um i mean i i don't mean to there's a lot to unpack in that i i want to go back to your your discussion of surprise i mean among people who assess information theory there's a strong association between something that's informative and something that's surprising if you can predict it technically speaking it doesn't contain any information and so information always comes in the form of surprise technically speaking and and we are wired to attend to what's informative because that's what updates and teaches us and so then you you said revelation comes in the form of surprise and i would say that's virtually the case by definition isn't it because imagine that you're viewing this narrative through a particular lens you're you're in a you're in a cognitive perceptual structure a frame of reference that you're using to track all the actions and to make sense of them and to make predictions and if something unexpected happens that means that you've just learned that that frame of reference is no longer applicable to the current circumstance and so what that really does mean is that something transcendent at least from the perspective of that current frame of reference has in fact occurred because so that's a mini miracle in some sense right because a miracle is something that doesn't obey the laws that you're currently following that that that that's one way of thinking about it and so a rebel a surprising revelation is a mini miracle and maybe it's because of that it's it it's what it's reminiscent of the fact of the miraculous generally speaking but i would also say your the narrative does something else if it's profound too it doesn't just surprise you it also it also gives you a new frame of reference instantly within which that surprise now makes sense and if it doesn't then you're left unsatisfied by the movie you think oh because i've seen that often in particularly in movies it doesn't seem to happen quite so much in novels where the director and the writer will throw a whole variety of things up in the air and you have it's really compelling and then about three quarters of the way through the movie you think it'll be really something if all of that gets tied together and then it doesn't right it falls flat it doesn't it doesn't end in a manner that that's that that does justice to what's been set up so yeah and you know that's that's that's a classic narrative structure right there's there's a stable state to begin with and then something that disrupts it and throws everything into a state of chaos temporarily and then the establishment of a new state and and a good story definitely does that for us and guides us through that and and shows us that we're the thing that does that as well well like if you take an agatha christie movie or or story there'll be all of these clues and then then hercule perot or we we have a term in screenwriting we call it irving the explainer will show up at the end of the movie to to explain everything and then it all fits in and the sherlock holmes movies will often be that way too to me they become much less fun then the fun is is when you don't yet know the answers but once it's explained it's no it no longer has any magic for me an example would be when i was in college and i was a singer-songwriter and i worked with a friend who was a magician and we would entertain at different gatherings and um he was great at slighted sleight of hand with cards he could do a trick right in front of your face with cards and you'd be gobsmacked and and he would show me how he was doing it and all of a sudden i'd go oh gee that's just um it's so simple and how could i miss that and then he would do the same trick to someone else and i would be watching the trick and i would think oh he blew it he he he slipped he showed them they can see how it's done and they were gobsmacked they didn't understand how it was done so they were amazed but that to me is a difference about a story like you say the agatha christie or or they throw up a whole bunch of parts and they they never come together for a great story it's one that you're left um it's it's vibrating in you and you can't fully explain it you you just know what happened uh i hate to keep referencing braveheart but but i wanted to make a movie and it was my first movie i i wanted to to make a movie that would have people walk out of the theaters the way i walked out of theaters at different times in my life and would say my life will never be the same after what i just experienced there i mean that that's always been what i was look for and that happened with braveheart i had a huge tough scott i mean a burly brawling head-butting scott come up to me after screaming a braveheart and look at me with tears in his eyes and say i will never forget that not ever and and i think of like a story like tolstoy wrote a tale called the wood felling or the wood-felling party and it was about some some russian soldiers who were fighting i believe they were fighting afghan or you know muslim troops in azerbaijan or in the mountains but they they've been in this cold forbidding place for a long long time they've seen all sorts of death and they've gone out to to cut wood and load it firewood and load it into a wagon and a sniper hits one of them in the leg and he's or hits him in the body and he's bleeding to death and he knows he's dying and they load him on the wood wagon to carry him back while he's still alive but he grabs the lieutenant by the collar and says there are letters from my wife in my boot take them and send them back to my wife so she'll have them and the officer says yeah yeah i will but the dying man knows he want because he's seen many men die and just pitched into shallow graves and there's just so much death so he says no take them while i'm still alive and then i know you'll do it so the officer gives the order and they strip off the man's boot and cut through his his pant and unwrap the wrappings around his leg that he's done to keep warm and there are the letters but what the officer sees for the first time in months and months maybe years is the bare flesh of a man's leg this white sunless flesh and it's that that reminds him that this is a human being and tolstoy says he was struck with a terrible dread of the loss of life it and and i thought even i remember i was 18 when i read that that this is what an artist does you you hold up to us when we've become enured immune to the to certain things like you watching women it's one time it's mini skirts another time it's no bras another time it's bare midriffs another time it's something else but you get used to something so nothing nothing it makes you notice and the artist looks for well what can i do that will make people notice to say look here see what you see what's there rather than what you remember yes so there's that interplay with okay there's there is your perception in what you're looking at what you expect like the magic trick if you're expecting one thing and you don't see it or or now you know the trick so now you perceive that's one part of it the other part of it is okay now i have experienced perceived something how do i make sense of that i mean another thing that i've been doing is working on the story for the resurrection which i've studied since well since i was in school the the resurrection has fascinated me more than anything else in part because is i think it's nt right would say if you if you don't think the resurrection is preposterous you're missing the point the the whole point is that this is beyond anything you could imagine you said in a a few weeks ago i was listening to your podcast and i was believe this with that brilliant um i think it's canadian who makes the icons jonathan pagio oh and mind-blowing yeah that was quite the conversation yes and and and jonathan said um that that there's this outside of what what we can imagine that that is going on and you said yes you would have you would never you would never make this up um if you you make a make up this jesus story i even believe that well that's part of the problem with marx's theory that religion is the opiate of the masses it's like okay fair enough i get it and and and it's actually a reasonably intelligent critique you could say well if you wanted to enslave people and and oppress them then you could invent a story and you could use that as a manipulative technique but then you you'd see it seems to me that you'd want a story that was sort of maximally fantasy-like and attractive and so then you're stuck with well why invent hell for example and then you can say well that's where you put your enemies you know so that's kind of convenient but if you take medieval experience seriously it's quite obvious um there's a philosopher in in canada taylor who wrote a wrote about this in a book called sources of the self um medieval people took the idea of hell extremely seriously and tortured themselves with it believe that the fruits of immorality were infinitely terrible and well that isn't something that that you that you that you use as a childish defense against the world in fact fear of hell is actually more intense i would say in some sense than fear of death and i believe that i i think there are things that are if you if the thing you're most afraid of is death you haven't been very afraid because there are things that are far more terrifying than death and certainly well hell is among those uh and i suppose that's the place that you're eternally tortured for for your own immorality maybe perhaps even defined by your own conscience anyways you wouldn't invent that as something attractive to the masses and and there's much of of religious thinking that's like that it it doesn't have the aspect of there's too much burden in it for it to be pure escapist fantasy and there's too much and there's too much about it that's incomprehensible for it to be like what would a cons a conspiratorial machination no it doesn't it's not a hypothesis that that fits the data well at all right well it's a limit case also in some sense like you talked earlier about you said something about sacrifice you know and that well people don't take the idea of sacrifice very seriously i i've looked at the development of the idea of sacrifice in the old testament and one of the things i've come to realize is that one of the great human discoveries was actually that of sacrifice because it was the discovery of the fact that you could modify the present so the future was different so it it signals the discovery of the future by humanity the idea of sacrifice because you become consciously aware perhaps after acting it out for god only knows how long that you can give up something that you're deeply committed to in the present something of extreme value and obtain something of even more value in the future yeah and that's that's the discovery of an entire dimension the temporal dimension it's it's it's a cataclysmic discovery it's on the same order as the emergence of self-consciousness and so and then the i and then mysteries emerge out of that so while some sacrifices work better than others well why well the reaction of being to sacrifice seems to be reflective of the nature of being and that's that that's definitely the case some sacrifices work and some don't just like some games are playable and some aren't and and so sacrifice has value well then the question starts to become well what's of the highest value that you should sacrifice for and what is the ultimate sacrifice and while you can give up something that you own you can give up something that you love you can die for something or you can sacrifice your entire life to it and it seems to me that in some sense the latter the last of those is the ultimate sacrifice to to give up your entire life for the sake of the highest ideal and that is the idea of humanity and then that is the ideal of humanity and that is what everyone admires and that's what we all look for in stories that's what compels us you said well it's the attract it's the basis of romantic attraction and i believe that to be the case that associated with generosity right to share the fruits of your sacrifice and the question arises well what is the ultimate sacrifice and what would be the consequences of that and that's obviously what's being investigated let's say in our religious thinking in in the new testament there's no doubt that that's that's what's being investigated is there a cosmic significance to the idea of sacrifice in in and i i agree with that completely and i believe that that's that that's what is at play when you're making the sacrifice there's this other element of of faith in it the person making the sacrifice is instead of it just being a negotiation central to the sacrifice it seems to me is is a transforming commitment that the person is being transformed and and what he is giving is transforming it's like one of the most commonly quoted lines from braveheart is every man dies not every man really lives um and i didn't um by the way it's pet peeve of mine the uh the other another line from braveheart besides just the scream of freedom uh that that people do that comes from the film but is uh they may take our lives but they'll never take our freedom and that quote is on the wall of the united states air force academy but under it is the name william wallace although william wallace never said that and i keep wanting to write the english department there and say hey listen guys but uh the but the where that quote came from was me thinking okay is it ego is it pride is it stubbornness that keeps william wallace in the dungeon refusing to to submit to the king refusing to ask the king for mercy and maybe buy time in his life so he can survive a while longer and the queen the future queen comes to him with that offer and then she says you'll die it'll be terrible after he has said if i submit to him if i cry out for mercy then everything that is me is dead already and she says she'll die it'll be awful and i was thinking well what can he answer to that and that was every man dies not every man really lives and and it it became that and it in thinking of say jesus at golgotha that if you took a snapshot at golgotha on the day jesus was crucified and you said who's the victor in this picture you probably wouldn't be inclined to say the guy on the middle cross but you might if you stared at the picture long enough you you actually might see it human beings may recognize that that this one here in this way was doing something um beyond all understanding and to me writing a story isn't just me going what will surprise the audience it's i am being surprised by the story because it's coming through to me the the most notable part of that in braveheart was uh i reached the end of the story and and i can see this clearly now although it was more than 25 years ago the the axe is falling toward william wallace's throat and i wrote that on the page and then i thought well we can't see the ax contact his throat and sever his head what do we see now and then i thought well what about to look at this from the point of view of him when he knows he has fractions of a second to live what would he look for where would he turn his eyes would he look at the acts what would he do and he would know that his friends were there so i wrote in the last instant of his life william wallace turns his eyes to his friends who were stephen and hamish and i did not know jordan until that instant that there between them was her the wife he had lost and i wept and i had no sense that anybody else was going to relate to that story i have a friend named jack bernstein who's a comedy writer he wrote ace ventura the original ace ventura and and and jack is different from me in almost every way if you put our traits on paper words polar opposites and he's the one i i always take my first drafts to and say i know this is a mess but is there anything here and he read braveheart and we sat down to have breakfast and and for him to give me his notes and he said this is the best thing of yours i've ever read and and i was completely blindsided i had had no sense that anybody would like it that particularly him that it had any value but the story surprised me and i think therefore that revelatory quality was love i think it happens in music what what makes music magical is not that it's what we if it's just the same beat the same monotony the same chord changes we've heard the same lyrics we've heard it it doesn't open us up at all but when it's a when it's just enough different that we notice the difference and are drawn into it now if it's too different you know a when i was in school and took music classes and they're telling us about a tonal this and that and abstracts it it had no life no heart at all but when i listen to beethoven i can just feel the feel the swelling of his heart and um in in here hundreds of years later yes well you hear something great and you follow it and then there's a move of genius and out of that greatness comes something that's even greater and you're so you're so satisfied by that because you can see what's greater emerge from what's great but you can also see that that's characteristic of humanity you're participating in that yes emergence of what's better in this surprising manner yeah one of your new rules is um uh is to take a room and make it beautiful and i love that i love that rule i mean that that it seems so simple um but it it that is one of the richest ones for me i i had that's my favorite chapter of all the of all of both books i would say i'm happiest with that one wow yeah well i i had an incident um a few years ago and i got an infection mrsa and i was misdiagnosed and um a doctor a friend um and and my doctor gave me two medicines which actually caused it to inflame even more and um and a week later i was at the mayo clinic and they were discussing amputation of my right hand you write about that in in this book yes yes living the braveheart life this is an autobiography or partly an autobiography yes and i was i was trying to make sense of of that experience for me and one way i did was to say i don't want to just like have a hand and do hand exercises i want to celebrate having hands and i decided i would learn to play the piano i mean learn to really play the piano and i went out and and made a kind of sacrifice and kind of a crazy thing i bought a fabulous piano way way beyond anything i deserve or my playing merits but having that instrument i did that with a suit when i went on tour i i spent like eight thousand dollars on a suit and it was more money than i'd ever spent on a car like you know i was just it was horrified by it but i thought well i'm going to put everything i have into this and yeah start with this and did you find that it was well worth it definitely worth it no doubt about it and and kind of goes with uh with one of your very first rules about you know walk with your shoulders back and your chest out and it's like you you when you when you dress well you're a different person well i felt i owed it to my audience it was like if they were going to come and see me i was going to do everything i possibly could to set the stage properly yes and and you know it's all those little gestures matter well they're not just little gestures right so it's there that was a that was a mark of faith in some sense it it certainly violated my sense of fiscal propriety right you know and i i i wasn't sure how i could justify it i guess partly the justification would be if the lectures were good enough you know but i i was at least moving in that direction and like i said i never regretted it at all it was exactly the right thing to do well there's money to do it for yourself it's i think it's easier to do it for a loved one than for yourself and it it it it calls to mind the the new testament incident of the woman breaking the the the box of ointments and and anointing jesus's feet to say um this will be remembered always and you always have the poor and you can always help the poor but this is something that will last and i thought about it that's a very strange story that one isn't it it's one you think would have been edited out long ago yes absolutely if the the uh editors would have said no no maybe this is not not one we should have but um when i was in germany i was in germany the first time um when i was about 26 and i was in a really rough time of life i'd lost a job i was very much lost and i had thought i'd rather spend my last dollars to go to europe than to sit alone and worry so i'd taken a trip alone to europe and i went to see norshchwanstein in december the castle that mad king king ludwig ii had built in bavaria and what i learned there was that uh it had nothing to do with the architecture of the day the the the trends the principles of of of sensible building it was kind of a crazy indulgence based on his love of opera and and of grand romantic gestures and it nearly bankrupted the treasury to do it but almost from day one it became a huge financial success well that's one of the things that's so stunning about europe is that there isn't anything that's more valuable than beauty yes and i mean i mean that from the cold-hearted conservative um capitalist perspective it's stunning how valuable beauty is like the most valuable artifacts in the world are paintings i know ex you know accepting things like chips to make or factories to make chips but single artifacts paintings are worth 150 million dollars at the at the upper end and ancient manuscripts that that that are that are works of of timeless art and it looks like an investment in beauty is one that pays off as long as the thing remains in existence i mean i don't know how much everything in europe that's beautiful cost but it was plenty but it's paid back in spades and is only going to become increasingly more valuable as the past becomes more and more scarce which is happening very very rapidly yes so i mean these countries have more tourists than people yes and it's all a consequence of art and beauty well in rome there are something like 150 cathedrals if you if you went to or it's enough that if you went to three or four a day in a month you couldn't visit them all and and everyone you walk in takes you to a different place which is exactly as they they were intended to do i thought your your podcast with juliet uh folger program yeah ogre was fascinating to have the interplay between the writing and and the the well the depth of the thought that then connected with turn this into an actual visual visual image i mean that's hard it's hard for me when i've written a character to accept a human actor as being that character they say that um david lean when he was directing dr zhivago didn't want to stay in the same hotel as some of his actors because he like julie christie was his lara and dr zhivago he didn't want to see her with a martini in her hand smoking a cigarette he he wanted to to direct the movie seeing her as this pristine object of love this this woman this subject of love and um and i think it's hard for i i was fascinated to hear the process of the way you work together to create those images and i thought the images were stunning and really resonant for you know when you're reading it you look forward to seeing the next illustration to to tee you up for the for the next chapter as you you see it and then as you're reading you're starting to understand the image more and that that's incredibly rich yeah well i was hoping and i think it happened that that adds another dimension you know you have the explicit rules let's say that's the explicit philosophy and then you have the implicit philosophy which is the story but then you have something that's even more implicit which is the image and the the story is richer than the explicit rule and the image is richer than the story but the image isn't as clear and neither is the story right so you you move from focused clarity but a rather narrow representation to what's extremely broad and all-encompassing and you lose something when you move in either direction right but having all of it at the same time well it gives you the advantages of all three kinds of representation yes and that's that that to me leads us back to the to the power and the resonance of art that that any piece a painting a piece of music a movie a story resonates through through all of it i when i when i was a child my um my father was extremely frugal but he loved music and he got i guess he got a deal on one of the first stereo sets it was a huge thing speakers were separated and had a turntable and he bought a collection of classical records because they were basically giving it away nobody wanted it in memphis tennessee and and he brought those records home and in one one side of one lp was the 1812 overture and i would turn that on and turn the volume up as loud until my mother would scream at me and and just be caught up in that i could see the battle i could see the armies moving i could feel the winter i could um you know here's napoleon's coming and and the the cannons are going and the the russians are fighting back and um and it it had dimensions beyond the simple things of of of notes and and what was audible and i think that that's that that's a big part of the uniqueness of your work there's one thing and i'm sorry if this sounds like a fan club but but when i heard you speaking in the last several podcasts and and read the the the preface of your your new book and to to look at all you've been through um all you've been through lately it it really spoke to me about what is required if you're gonna go do something different if you're gonna bring in maybe if you just kept your mouth shut about anything outside of your own area of course you were you know in toronto you were you were speaking about it what it didn't feel like it was outside your your own area to say wait a second uh you're asking me to to violate some things that i think are to are violations um you could have just been a good boy and sat in your seat um i could have been a good boy and and tried to write um an action-adventure movie set in the present day and not write something crazy like something about somebody that was was beheaded and disemboweled 700 years ago or this upcoming movie about the pope yeah it's going to set some people's hair on fire no doubt and i i you know there's a part of me well i hope it's it's important enough to do that but you're you're combining you're saying it everything's relevant that what these philosophers were talking about what these artists were painting what these musicians are doing what filmmakers are doing this is all something that's is trying to get us that way no that's what the cathedral represents you know it's it's it's it's an expression in stone of this yearning to to bring the material world into harmony with the spirit it's something like that and that's what music does as well and there's this this proclivity within us to strive upward and the cathedral i mean the cathedrals they're absolutely amazing these lattice-like structures of stone there's something about the harmonious interplay of shadow and light that's key to it as well it's it's like the opening up of dark matter to the light that pours in that's all embodied in the architecture and and and i i i can't say and neither can anyone else what that ultimately represents and then to bring music into that space and and tradition it's all pointing upward to something to to the direction that we're supposed to go it's it's so terrible to see these buildings empty out i mean thank god that they're being preserved in some sense by the tourists who come there driven by a sense of awe but we we can't inhabit them anymore the way that we used to and that's a that's a terrible thing it means there's a kind of ideal that we that we're no longer we're no longer pursuing perhaps we're no longer pursuing it it seems like a catastrophe to me no one really knows how to revitalize it though unfortunately so well the i think one of the problems to me when when i was in paris working on men in the iron mask i would want on a sunday morning to to go to a mass and it was very difficult to find [Music] well for one thing in a baptist we would church would start at 11 o'clock on a sunday morning and the masses aren't like that but go into say the cathedral saint-germain and there was no one there it was uh it's magnificent ancient cathedral and and you know a few tourists and the place the place didn't feel dead the architecture was alive but but it it was very difficult to have a congregation and a congregation is what the church of course is supposed to be it's it's a collection of people who are united and and indifferent it's you know it's a collection of sinners um acknowledging their sins and i i think that that is a fascinating thing to me about how we keep um well it's so surprising it's also so surprising that those hundreds of years ago when those buildings most of those buildings were built that those cultures would dedicate themselves to such great cost to produce these absolutely spectacular impossible buildings made out of stone or brick these these these they're like a dance in stone they're so magnificent and then to fill them with with the greatest of artworks and and to to to bring the light in in the most colorful possible ways and then to bring the music in to set the scene and then to have everyone come in and commit to at least not being as bad as they were right like it was a joint moral enterprise that everyone was involved in you can be as cynical about that as you want and and talk about you know sunday christians and all of that but an hour a week to contemplate how it is that you should be living your life or to become in tune with your conscience once again which at least the confession can offer that um and and and then to see that so much effort was poured into that it's amazing that that over occurred and and then it's also equally amazing that we've stopped doing it because you might think well wouldn't wouldn't we be interested in jointly coming together and saying well here's how we're inadequate and here's how we're conceptualizing what would be ideal and couldn't we move together toward that and i was talking to bishop baron this week and about this issue about the the loss especially in the catholic church of young people and it seems that there's a great adventure there that isn't being communicated properly and and and it's a terrible loss for all of us what do we have to replace that you know i've talked to the new atheists especially sam harris and it's not like i don't understand their arguments it's not like i don't have sympathy for them for that matter but there's nothing poetic or artistic or magnificent about the alternative yes right it loses it loses it loses there's something that just disappears it's the it's that artistic ineff ability there's no room there's no obvious room for that in the say the enlightenment world view i i'm an admirer of stephen pinker for example um and he falls into the enlightenment rationalist camp um and in his book the language instinct he talks a little bit at the end about culture philosophy music art and all of that religion even for that matter to some degree but it's like a throwaway chapter at the end whereas by my way of looking that's the whole book all of that that artistic endeavor and that shades into the religious endeavor and that that's the scent that's not some side effect of human cognitive development quite the contrary it's the central feature and i agree with jordan when when you're speaking with julia the the most recent uh podcast i heard the uh it reminded me her her description of her life reminded me of uh an experience i had in russia i was in saint petersburg and we were doing a a scout um for a film i wrote called love and honor based on a novel that i wrote and and we were finished with the scout we had seen everything that that we were scheduled to see and this young woman who was in her early 30s a russian woman asked if there was anything else we'd like to see because we had some time and i said well i'd love to see some of your churches and she got this quizzical look on her face she was surprised that and a hollywood director would ask that and she said well i'll take you to my church and i said you've got a church and she said oh yes i'm christian and i said but you grew up when that was discouraged even almost illegal or your parents christian and she said no um their mother's a confirmed atheist or her father was baptized as a child but he's also an atheist and so i said well how did you become christian and she said there was no beauty i was a young girl walking around and nothing was beautiful and one day i passed the church and i could see candlelight in it and heard music coming out and i went in and i kept going and i kept going and i became a christian and and and that to me says so much um and people have no idea they have no idea that's why i wrote chapter eight they have no idea how much they're starving for beauty yes like it's it's a hunger that goes far beyond well let's not say that it doesn't have to go beyond material hunger but it it no matter how well fed you are without some relationship to beauty there's too much suffering in the world for it to be viable it's the ant it's along with truth it's the antidote to to suffering it's not opt it's not uh optional right it's crucial and you can tell that by its economic value for those who are hard-headed it's like you can't point to anything with more economic value period the end and so well some weeks back when you were you were i felt really working your way back that that that work and engagement and in your calling is helping to heal and sustain you you said something along the lines of that that you wondered why in the christian community and religious community people were telling you that your work means so much you know why why it it it's it's somewhat overwhelming to realize that so many people are drawing from you and and i think i can it is completely it is i i today i was sitting on a bench with my friend who walks with me and this kid came up to me and he said apologies for interrupting you but i was listening to your podcast while i was walking down the street and i saw you here he said and he started to tear up right away he said five years ago i was suicidal and i was i've been listening to your lectures on a regular basis he said an hour and a half a day which seems like an overdose to me he said he's invented prosthetic limbs and has helped all sorts of disabled people and is on his way to mit it's like just a random meeting on the street you know yes yes and thank god for that too much yes of course it is but i tell you and like i know you like to understand you know that's the the um there's something else you said a couple weeks back about i i want to i want to understand why i want to understand why this story makes sense and and i do too but the what of it all that to me gets at the why of it all but the what of it all is that you speak to people like me and like others who who know this this experience of more who know who know what it is to stand in awe to to feel the awe of a moment and you combine all the different elements of of perspective of thought of experience and you you validate or endorse that that people who choose faith and who seek courage and sacrifice as crucial divine values are not idiots it's i think that that's and it's no accident that crucial and cross are the same thing yes yes exactly and and and you know we we go through this thing of well um you're just you're you're choosing an opiate and and to me it's like well um the the alternative is not attractive too i when i started working on the pope story i came across a a statement that i believe is one of the um talk show guys late night talk show guys had said conan o'brien i believe it was but he said that uh pope francis had made a pronouncement that he thought even atheists could go to heaven and in gratitude atheists have said um that the pope when he dies is welcome to enter their endless void of nothingness so well that you know the problem with that worldview is in some sense that endless void of nothingness confronts us right here and now yes exactly that i i try to tell people i'm i'm not so much concerned about life after death as life after birth um jesus said come that you can have life and have it more abundantly and and i'm not trying in a movie to to espouse my particular dogma i don't believe in my own dogma my you know my own dogma is is is limited and and i'm not i'm not trying to think that when i was in school and i'd study systematic theologians and i remember asking my mentor who was the head of the department um what is really the point what what are they trying to do and you said well they're they're trying to have a system of understanding that that holds up from every angle but well how's that working out for them because ultimately you get into do you have faith or not when i write a story it's it's i've got to jump in and trust and i don't know where they'll lead but i know that to not jump in is is death and so for me it's like the old testament says you know i set before you life and death choose life and and that to me is what i i hope my work's about and i'm damn sure it's what your work's about um i want to talk i want to talk about your life as well because it's it's i'm very curious to see how these things are managed so you you grew up in tennessee is that correct yes yes and so tell let's start there and tell me and you worked you worked with an animal show in in florida oh in in nashville so nashville in nashville so so yeah my father was from lizard lick tennessee and um um the the men in my father's family are alton elton dalton lyman gleam and herman thurman and clyde thurman it sounds like it sounds like a group of names from lizard lick and by the way brilliant people um my father's cousin um gleeman was verner von braun's right-hand man at the redstone arsenal in huntsville alabama he was a genius mechanical engineer building the the rockets and um his uh there wasn't a whole lot of education the previous generation of his family but they were brilliant men and my mother skipped two grades in school and dreamed of being a writer but she didn't tell me that until i was grown my grandmother had a country store one room country store made of wood that my grandfather had salvaged from the wreck of a tennessee riverboat and i sat in the back of that store on the desk i'd fashioned out of sacks of pig feed and wrote my first story and i just always loved to write when the other kids would groan when the teacher would say okay we're going to write we're going to free write write a write a passage write a theme right now how did your parents respond to that interest of yours that interest in writing well so so my parents my my mother was the artist my father loved singing but he was extremely practical he had worked full-time since he's 14 years old while going to school but he he had full-time jobs during the depression and and he scraped for every dollar he was incredibly frugal so he it was his greatest dream that my sister and i could get an education which he and my mother had not been able to get higher education though they read everything my mother read everything particularly my father was a great salesman if if you sent my father to your enemies anywhere they'd call up and say i'm sorry i'm going to knock it off uh he was my father could just he loved people but he was afraid of me having a um an airy fairy kind of career one that that would be impractical and when i was in college i started a little record company and i had a local hit um i started my own record company i sold the records i went to the stores and went to the radio stations and and i had an encouraging hit what kind of equipment did you use um i i it was just me and a guitar but it was in the folk era and i and i found a studio in i went to school at duke in in durham north carolina and there was a studio in greensboro uh and one in winston-salem so i'd make the drive over there and make a recording you know save my money and and make a have a three-hour session and make a couple of of sides of a record and and put it out and i met chris christopherson who is absolute genius songwriter wrote me and bobby mcgee and many others and he was a rhodes scholar and an airborne ranger and a boxer and he was the kind of renaissance manly man that i aspired to be that i related to and he came to duke for a concert and i got to meet him backstage and i told him how much i loved writing and and singing and he said man you've got to go to nashville and he was thoroughly drunk at the time but i thought okay that and he didn't know me at all but i seized on that advice and i heard about a park a theme park opening up called opryland and they were looking for summer workers and i went over and auditioned and i did a a a comedy song that i'd written as a kind of a parody of a country song um tammy wynette had had a hit about a couple who spell things so their children don't understand what's going on and it was called the i d-i-v-o-r-c-a i remember that yeah all right so yeah you're from an area that they had country music oh yes definitely well so i wrote a song called me and the d-o-g and um and they offered me a permanent job as manager of animal shows and i had a piano playing pig uh named pigarachi and i had a duck that played the drum and i named him bert backquack and i had 8 000 people a day see that show and and i put it together i hesitate to ask what the pig could play the piano he would play happy birthday but but the way we had it worked he was there was a sequencer it was the early days of the moog synthesizer and we had a sequencer so that wherever he hit on the keyboard or rooted and i put a little um sparkly bow tie on him and he had a white uh chest and a black uh main body and white hooves so he looked like he was in a tuxedo see this is the difference this is one of the differences between canada and the united states that sort of thing happens in the united states that would never happen here oh it was awesome it was yes it was awesome and well uh there's a theatrical element to the united states that always just stuns me when i when i go there because it's almost completely lacking in canada and not to our advantage i might also add well i tell you jordan when i went to nashville and i left i left duke i left i had done one year at the seminary i was head of the religion majors committee i was kind of a leader among students and and i was kind of i hate to put it this way but i was sort of the golden child of my parents hopes that you know i was going to go be a doctor a lawyer um and right the classic game of of parents who want education for their children but aren't educated themselves yes of course and and i had actually spoken with my my the pastor of my home church the one i grew up in and and he asked me if i felt the call to be a pastor when i was majoring in religion and i i just studied religion because it fascinated me um and it seemed more relevant and at that time i hadn't settled on becoming a writer and what what year were you in university when was this what year i graduated in 71 i was in seminary until 72. so you were doing you were studying religion right at the height of the hippie era essentially oh yeah absolutely and did you have hippie leanings or were you buttoned down conservative type at that point well i i i would say i was more conservative but i but school was a time for me to to try to be open like when you talk about the personality traits of openness yeah well you're very open so well i hope i am um well it shows you wouldn't you you wouldn't be driven to create that way and you wouldn't have attained this level of success across these multiple disciplines and in the diverse range of your activities that's all emblematic of of high high levels of trade openness right so multiple interests interest in philosophy interest in fiction interest in art the capacity for aesthetic experience all of that is deeply biologically rooted all of that it's a real it's a really fundamental trait the reason i i i wonder about uh the the various interplays of my traits is that at that time i was also considering going into the marine corps and being a platoon leader in vietnam which is the are you an orderly person yes oh yes okay and and a hard worker you said that right at the beginning so you're very high in conscientiousness that's orderliness and industriousness and very high in openness and that makes you a complex personality because openness tilts people towards liberalism and radicalism but conscientiousness tilts them towards traditionalism and and conservatism and so you have to marry those two opposites right rare combination of traits like the extreme levels in any traits are rare but if you take the extremes of two traits and bring them together that's particularly rare and yes and conscientiousness and openness fight to some degree because if you're creative you like to break things but if you're orderly you don't really like the mess yes absolutely and in fact jordan i i think that that's that that conflict within me has been the source of of a lot of distress um and depression i felt i i started to get depressed when i was in nashville and part of it was that i i felt very alone i didn't have many peers i didn't have people with whom i could that i shared musical interests with i that i could have a conversation about kierkegaard might i have a i have three sons and my youngest is named sauron after kierkegaard um nobody that i was around had any idea what soarin meant or was or although i hadn't named him that then but when i went to nashville i knew that i was i was flying in the face of what my parents had sacrificed mightily for me to have and it was really distressing for me and i i made a vow that two things wouldn't hold me back a lack of effort or a fear of failure so i would plunge in and wherever i had an opportunity i would do the best i could i was working 60 70 hours a week at the animal show at the theme park but i got up every morning at 4 30 and would write a song every day okay so that's okay so that's the the first thing i'd like to highlight because i am interested in what's made you successful across these multiple domains and part of it is while the fortune that the marriage of openness and conscientiousness there's a paradox there but that that capacity for dedicated work and discipline conjoined with creativity that can make both of them move very very rapidly yeah well like i got signed to nashville's biggest music publisher and they considered me really prolific ideas a song a day that's and did you decide you were going to do that you're going to get up at 4 30 in the morning you're going to write a song so how did you because are you waiting around for inspiration or you just write the damn song right i if i dragged my butt out of bed at 4 30 in the morning i was going to write a damn song and yes and and and i actually learned later that that was too much but i didn't know it then i felt i have to you have to do too much before you figure out how much is enough exactly to be when you're young that's the time to figure out what's too much because you can actually tolerate it yeah you can overload yourself and then pull back well i was living in a one bedroom apartment in a nice apartment building i mean it was clean it was safe but i had no furniture i was sleeping on the floor i didn't want to spend any money on furniture and i saved my money and after about two years i felt i wasn't getting anywhere i wasn't having any songs recorded you know i wasn't i was making a little money and with this publishing company but not much and and i was making a pretty good salary at the theme park but i'd saved my money and i decided i was not being successful because i wasn't committed enough i had a picture of beethoven which is a rather iconic picture of him holding a notepad and frowning up at the sky and and i thought okay i'm going to be like beethoven i'm going to commit completely and i i quit my job and i spent all day every day alone in my apartment i almost never went out no friends no social life at all just writing studying practicing all day every day and after about four or five months of that i had a breakdown and i mean really like panic attacks couldn't eat um debilitating depression uh you extra are you extroverted yes yes so that would have been very hard on you that isolation yeah i mean i i i'm like my father i'll i'll go into a restaurant and i'll get to know the busboys and i hug everybody and kovitt's been bad on me but um it was it was raining every single day there'd been 14 straight days without a patch of blue sky and i decided if i don't see some blue sky i'm going to kill myself and i loaded everything i could carry in a toyota and i drove to california by myself and got out here and kept trying to write songs ultimately got a job because i was still running my own little music company and that impressed some people in in the music business that i would that that i could walk into an office without a calling card without a company name talked to the secretary get past the receptionist get my songs to the producers and they were impressed with that and and they offered me a job i was at a at a music major music publisher for about a year and then they had you had you graduated from duke at that point oh yeah yeah how old were you when you went out to california 25. okay okay and um and then um and why california apart from the sun i mean were you going there because it was hollywood because it was did you go to l.a yeah went to l.a but they had a they had a music scene in la that so it was music was either london which i didn't have the money to go to in new york which i thought they're going to hate me up there i'm just i'm a southern christian they're they're going to hate me and nashville i didn't really love country music one brilliant music publisher listened to my songs once and and he was so elegant and thoughtful and he he looked at me and he said do you love country music and i said well i really respect it and he went nah it's not what i asked you he said if you don't love it it's not going to work here and don't sell your soul for pennies and i thought well la is the only place where there they're that the kind of music that i seem to like besides london is happening and i'll go out and try it out there and what did you like at that point who were you listening to guys like cat stevens um i you know i thought he was an incredible blend of of surprising music and ethereal powerful lyrics um i also love neil diamond who to a lot of my friends seemed real cheesy but i thought you know the taproot manuscript oh gosh that god that's a great album i was thinking that was my favorite album ever that's that's head and shoulders above anything else he ever made and it's arranged so brilliantly it's got one pop song on it which really doesn't belong but the rest of it is it's really quite brilliant that oh suleiman is just incredible and it works very well as an album as a totality it's great my my wife loved that when she was a kid grade five and i listened to it through her and i've listened to it you know from time to time ever since it's brilliantly arranged too and yes which is quite striking absolutely that was my favorite album ever probably cool well lots of people who are watching this won't have heard of that so i would regardless of your opinion of neil diamond you should listen to taproot manuscript because yes he did a lot of things in there that paul simon did about 20 years later bringing in the african music and so brilliantly it was very creative that album oh absolutely and so that's so cool that that's your favorite album yeah that's who else you saw cat steven so you like the those were very melodic um very lyric based um who else were you listening to van morrison um i really loved van morrison and um and of course i like the beatles but i i really like the rolling stones too and i thought they were not underrated how could you say they were underrated but like if you listen to sympathy for the devil in the line i wrote a tank in the general's rank when the blitzkrieg raged and the body stank yeah that's a killer song that i defy anybody show me a lyricist that writes with more power than that yeah he was somewhere else when he wrote that that's that's that's uh that's a pretty pretty dark song but i wasn't in a band and i um and i i wasn't it was it felt that i was trying to get my arms around too much that i i didn't know how to go from sitting in a i lived in in los angeles i lived in an attic over a garage it was built in it was a it was nicely built in but i could only i'm six foot two i could only stand upright in the very center of the apartment because the roof was so slanted and um but i had a piano and i i worked all day and on on songs but i just i wasn't i wasn't having any success then and i met a woman who became my wife and her father was absolutely brilliant he had been a prisoner of war in world war ii he was a bombardier navigator and he was shot down in 1942 or early 43 so he was a prisoner of war for a couple of years stalaglift iii and he'd written a screenplay about his experiences he was um close friends with william peter blatty they had been they had worked exorcist yes and blatty was also a genius and they had worked as a an intelligence unit counter intelligence unit during the korean war and they were friends and bladdy's success with exorcists kind of inspired my father-in-law and he'd written a screenplay and i'd never seen one and when i picked it up it was on her coffee table and and the form lit me up jordan because it didn't have the sort of pompous uh nature of so much modern fiction when the the writer's trying to show off his knowledge um it it it it had there was an essential nature like when you talk about how to write and all the the editing to get down to the essence screenplays have to do that they were like songs and that every word has to count and all you can really portray effectively in a screenplay is what you see the character do and what you hear the character say so what that character is thinking has to come through in what which gets us back to that how is thought manifest in in the concrete world and i decided to try that and how are you how are you surviving at that point you were writing music were you were you employed by this this this the offices that you had walked into uh yeah i i i had a job for a for a year and that they paid me well and i was extremely frugal so that i mean i i didn't drink i didn't smoke i didn't i i didn't eat out you know i i made beans and stuff and uh so i was able to i was able to get along and once in a while my mother would send me a little money and my father would call me and say don't miss any meals but he wanted me to not suffer but he wanted me to under to undergo the cost of my choices yeah well it's really hard when you're a parent to know how much to help your kids you know oh gosh you can easily over help them yeah oh yeah it's a real problem oh it's a it's it's such a hard question um is you you want to you steal from them if you take their problems away right you deprive them of deprivation yes yes and do you deprive them of the of the of the solution that they might come to on their own too well i i landed a job with architectural digest the phone rang out of the blue one day that i i wrote a novel and got it published over the transom by a publisher called gp putnam's sons oh it's a great publisher that you must have been thrilled oh gosh i was over the moon and um and my thought was i didn't have an agent but i thought i want if i i want to write my own novel before i take a class on novel writing or you know i i don't want somebody who's failing at something tell me how to do it and i want to discover what is in me to do what is my way what is my style of doing this and if i write the novel then as well as vince lombardi i believe was the one who said it the more you sacrifice the harder it harder it is to surrender if i write the novel then i will be willing to fight my way through the rejections that will inevitably come to to see it through and i went to the library and got down a bunch of novels and and copied the addresses of the publishers out and had 15 new york publishers and i wrote 15 letters and described my my new novel and asked if they would like to see it and the very first one was gp putnam's sons and they said send us the first three chapters i did they called a week later and said we'd like to see the rest of it right that never happens and uh and then i got 14 rejection letters some of some of which i got after the the book was published and uh um and along in there i um uh i got married and my wife got pregnant and uh my wife got pregnant we got pregnant and she had mormon ancestors uh and she knew because of them she knew the entire genealogy of her family back as far as it could be traced and all i knew was that we were tennesseans i didn't know about scott's irish i didn't know about any of that you know we spoke english so i was like i guess we're english and but she had said to me i never really imagined being a mother but if you get me pregnant you have to promise to take me to europe because she loved to travel and she was a dancer and worked made money was very successful at it and and i was saving my money and i was writing for architectural digest at the time i wrote eight or nine art articles for architectural digest which was interesting because i had been living in an attic over a garage you know multi-million dollar homes uh and um well you probably appreciated them more oh yeah oh yeah in my my my gimmick jordan was most people who are reading this magazine don't have the money that the people who are living in these homes have but there must be some principle of making a place beautiful that is applicable and if i can share that with them and the way the the person who's building the home both the the architect designer and the and the the owner um the way their personalities what is driving their process in all this could be interesting to to the buyers of the magazine whoever would read my article and that seemed to resonate so i would make i'd make nice money doing that and would save it so we went to europe and i had heard that there were wallaces in scotland so we were in london and i suggested a detour to scotland and we were walking into edinburgh castle and there was a statue of a man named william wallace and on the other side of the door flanking the door with him was the statue of robert the bruce and i knew robert the bruce from a bobby burns poem which of course you quote the would send you know the gifty ghias to see ourselves as others see us in your new book um i knew from scots which had with wallace bled i knew the reference to wallace from that robert the bruce poem about robert the bruce so i asked a guard there who is this william wallace and he said he's our greatest hero and i'm elbowing my pregnant wife going greatest hero hunting here that wallet's greatest hero and uh and i said to the blackwatch guard there well was he an ally of robert the bruce and fighting the english and the guard said the magic words that every writer loves to hear he said no one will ever know for sure uh but our legends say that robert the bruce may have been in on the betrayal of william wallace to clear the way for himself to become the king well i didn't know that william wallace had been betrayed but that statement was like hearing that judas iscariot and saint peter were the same person it it made me wonder what if there was something so powerful and profound in the life and death of william wallace that it transformed robert the bruce from a person who would betray his country's greatest hero into this country's greatest king and i thought this is a mind-blowing story but i had a pregnant wife and i had to find a way to feed her to feed her and my new baby and and um and i didn't feel ready to write that story so we came back to los angeles and i got a job working in television and television is an incredible grind it's like running into a freight train yes it's insatiable insatiable and in those days and in these days like if you're on the netflix series it might be 10 episodes a year well in in those days it was 22 episodes a year and my mentor was a guy named steve cannell and he taught me tremendous stuff and but one thing how did you get a job in television uh i i had written a screenplay and a friend of mine i was working out at a gym and i love to work out in fact it it keeps me it keeps me sane and i just i enjoy it i enjoy being in gems and and um and there was a guy there um who was working out really ferociously as well and um he was telling another friend their stories about elvis presley and my father had seen elvis when he was the truck driver and was getting paid like 50 dollars to sing at a supermarket opening and i told him that story that my father saw elvis at a supermarket opening getting 50 bucks and we started chatting and that guy that i was talking with was mike post who is the most successful television composer probably ever absolutely brilliant guy and we hit it off and became friends and and one day he said to me how are you how are you making money you know what do you do and i said well i'm you know i write screenplays and i that's that's what i'm doing now i'm a writer and and he said you ought to meet steve cannell and he was doing mike was doing the music for steve kennel so mike made it his business to get steve to read one of my scripts and eventually a sample of my writing got there what attracted them was they were doing a show about a guy from texas who's basically a well dare i say a [ __ ] kicker and um and i was telling them lizard licks stories right right now and they immediately and you know once i told them about the piano playing pig they were like give this guy an assignment and from my first decision yeah that's definitely a door opening story that one yeah and so i got i and i became he became my mentor and we had a we had a really fabulous relationship for about three years and then we started to get sideways um in and i guess it's an old story that you know a mentor and the mentee the protege you know the protege starts thinking he knows what he's doing and the mentor maybe you know has mixed feelings about it and and i realized i had to leave and and i did and what shows did you work on then um well the first one i worked on was called hunter uh which was a long-running cop drama um also created uh co-created with steve by my friend frank lupo who just passed away about a week ago and they had done a team and um frank and steve had done a team so i worked on a show called hunter in the show called j.j starbuck and another show called uh sunny spoon none of which became big hits but they were all on for about a season um and and and and i made a lot of money doing it i mean i had a i had a beautiful home and german cars in the driveway and a tennis court in the front and a swimming pool yes you said you're a car you said in your book that you're a car aficionado i'm a hillbilly jordan i just like i just like elvis i love them and so um yeah well they were they were in the 60s and 70s 50s as well they were still simple enough so that you could kind of understand them and have an affinity for them you know they've got so sophisticated now and so abstract that it's hard to it's hard to fall in love with them they're great car new cars are so good but they're so good they're kind of not interesting anymore that's right that's right and all my relatives could fix them and tear them apart and and my oldest son restores cars he'll take a junked like 65 mustang and a year later it looks brand new he's he's incredibly gifted with that but deeply satisfying work that yes absolutely but um uh when i left when i left kennel it was terrifying in a sense because i had gone from having no idea where my next dollar would come from to my salary doubling every year for four years and then suddenly having no idea where my next dollar would come from and i couldn't having been steve's protege and then getting sideways with him i couldn't even get a meeting to pitch an idea at a network and i i went to features almost in desperation and and has decided that i would write that story that um so that was still lurking in the back of your mind oh yeah yeah and but but there's a watershed moment in this um i was i've i felt the the the dark voices clutching at my insides you know and screaming through my head and my stomach was nodding up and my hands were trembling and i found i couldn't write and um and i started to get really afraid then because i'd always been able to will myself through that was it was my most remarkable trait was just that sort of scottish stubbornness no matter what the pain is i can take it longer than you can dish it out and um and i was finding that i felt i was betraying my sons and i had that's a terrible feeling though were you you were getting depressed was that what was happening yes yeah that's that well the problem with depression is that it actually saps that will like not only is it painful beyond description often but it goes after the very thing that you would use to fight it yes exactly and my sons were the same age i was when my father had lost his job and had a complete breakdown i mean hospitalized and everything and and i just i felt that that lurking and i got on my knees and i said a prayer and i i mean i did i had nowhere else to go and i got on my knees and i prayed uh what matters most to me right now is my sons yep and and maybe the best thing for them is not that they grow up in private schools and german cars and you know nannies and everything maybe maybe it would be best for them if they lived in a house even one without indoor plumbing the way i lived when my father had his breakdown but my father also showed me how a man gets up and he did get up and he came back to tremendous success and and i thought if that's what you want me to show my sons then please bring it on and please help me bear it but if i go down in this fight i pray i go down not on my knees to hollywood but standing up with my flag flying fighting for what i believe in and i stood up and i wrote the screenplay for love and honor and that got me into the office of a young woman named rebecca pollock who's sydney pollock's daughter cindy [ __ ] directed out of africa jeremiah johnson um three days of the condor and i told her the story of braveheart in about 10 minutes and she went my god go write that and i said do you want an outline or something and she went what i'm going to tell you how to write act 2. go write that and um and that led me into what do you think it was about you that that made doors open for you like that it's it's quite a remarkable theme i mean these are all very difficult enterprises to gain a foothold in and and you tell stories over and over about people offering you the chance was that the salesman the salesman skill that your father had do you think what what was it i i i have to guess jordan because the to see ourselves as others see it is clearly the hard thing but i do think i do think i am am incredibly blessed that i had this salesman father whose heart was as big as the ocean and i had this brilliant mother who was who was absolute steel inside and and tinder i mean she was she was an iron iron hand and a velvet glove and um it makes sense because you think well you need the creativity and you've got that and you need the discipline to work and you've got that but that's not enough you have to be able to market you have to be able to make contact with people you have to be able to communicate with them about your material because otherwise you languish but you have that too yes but i i think there's i think there's something and look you know whenever anyone says oh this was it you know thank goodness i had this gift of god is so self-aggrandizing like you're elevating your your gifts but but i think there was there is a a thing that i didn't create but i have chosen to follow which is there's something about being bold and being willing to take the punch to to be able to walk in it's like when i decided i would write my screenplay first i like i like writing original screenplays without going to a company and saying um like it was an original screenplay what we call a spec screenplay that got me into rebecca's office in the first place that got her to listen about braveheart and there's there's an element of tremendous daring to say i i don't have to have your endorsement or your money to sit down and write this and in fact i like the equation of it to say if i write this and i've made this choice a dozen times in my career if i write it and it doesn't sell i will live with that but i will have written what i believe i will have written what i want i will have written the movie i want to make and if you say you don't want to buy it the next guy might and then you're going to look like an idiot and that that equation that theme comes out quite strongly in secretariat yes yes it does because she pursues that that investment in in her horse and that famous remarkable horse yes single-mindedly and and and and at high risk yes and i i feel that um there's something and obviously we can be we can be projecting this onto the horse but the the metaphor of the movie for me was i actually i wrote the i wrote the song of the end credits um called it's who you are um it's not the prize it's not the game it's not the score it's not the fame when every road looks way too far it's not what you have it's who you are and in that you choose your race and then you run and and i'll i'll say that to myself over and over i say it to myself daily is don't miss the chance to live this day and when i i'm divorced and it was the most wrenching horrific thing of my life and i would i would get out of bed in the morning and drop straight down to my knees and pray for the strength to get through the day and at the end of the day when i would get down on my knees to say thanks i would think well i did have faith today i did get through the day and at least enough to get through the day and and if did that catapult you into depression as well oh yeah oh yeah yeah no i mean it's it sounds like it from what you're relating and and that came through in your book too that that i mean you don't talk about it much but when you touch on it it's quite clear that that was an experience that you know took this the slots out from underneath you yes and and that that uh and i don't i don't talk about it too much because you know there are other people involved but you know it's my family and it was wrenching for all of us but it it may be that the depression also contributed yes you know the the it was so highly probable it's very difficult to live with someone who has a predisposition to depression yeah it's hard and um so yeah it it it certainly it certainly was the fight and within me and um uh but at the same time there was there was something beautiful i mean there were many beautiful things that come out of such darkness um one was um i was putting up christmas lights at the that the house i had moved to to try to rebuild my life and and and my sons i would see my sons three days a week and that was very strained and and and i was trying to make my home look beautiful and i was putting up christmas lights and i was getting really depressed and um i was talking with my therapist as a brilliant guy and and i told him about that and i said you know i can't really date anybody and like i you know i'm not seeing my sons enough and my neighbors don't celebrate christmas and and i'm i'm putting up christmas lights and i'm getting more depressed doing it and he said well how about this you don't put your christmas lights up for your neighbors to see you don't put them up for someone you're dating to see you don't even put them up for your children to see god sees your christmas lights put your christmas lights up for god to see i thought god what what a great way to think of everything we do in our lives like here's here's what it is most if i if i labor in an anonymity if nobody knows it um but i've done it so that god sees it then that's better than if i did something i don't believe in that everybody applauded me for um and um so that that's just been a it's it's a choice i continually have to make and struggle with to affirm but um it's it's the one i really believe in i don't think that people would create anything that was truly original if they didn't think like that you know because if it's original and surprising there's no track record for it there's no proof that it's valid right you have to there's just no option but to take the risk and so if that line of thinking didn't exist then there'd be no way that you would take the risk exactly i mean i was always the kid that maybe that's why creativity and religion religious thinking are aligned so tightly is that you you have to make that leap of faith to produce something that's original virtually by definition yes and despite you you see that again that theme sort of playing out in secretariat because all the advice that is given to the chi chineri chenery is her name right miss chenery she owns this horse remarkable horse and anyone sensible would have sold them because she was going to lose everything including her credibility yes but she didn't and she was right but there was no proof of that to begin with that was a leap of faith and i don't i really don't see how you can do something original without that leap of faith because just as i said there's no track record well jordan i hadn't thought of this at all before this conversation but but it strikes me that there's something um as you mentioned that in common with you and her and when i say how isolating it is to take that leap um i got to know penny i i've i've had the the opportunity to make several movies about people who are still living when the movie's being made and every time i do it i swear i won't do it again because i'd rather be free yes yes but i got to know penny and boy there was fire in that woman and uh she was well into her 90s when we started making secretariat and she was incredibly uh attractive the her her eyes were so full of life and were so direct and um when we went to the kentucky derby together right after the movie was made which was certainly a magical moment you know we just made the movie and now we're going to it's the next running of the kentucky derby and and i got to go with penny and of course penny's in at churchill downs she was she was a rock star and uh you know everybody knew we're making the movie is uh disney movie is going to be seen by a lot of people and and um we we saw the race together and everything builds up at the kentucky derby to the derby itself it's the derby is like the eighth race of eighth or ninth race of a whole day of racing so and then there are races after the derby so when the derby was over it builds this crescendo everybody walked back into the the party rooms and forgot us and i was left out on a balcony just penny and me and uh and we're standing there together and i thought okay this is a sacred moment and um this is probably going to be the last time i see her and she looked down at the horse that it just won they were they had taken the saddle off the horse and we're kind of cooling him down and and she looked down and said that's that's a well well-bred horse um just casual comment and i looked at her and said penny we've come to the end of this movie process and and now it won't it it won't be in the movie uh but tell me what did you not tell me what have you what did you want to say that has never been told what what have you kept from me and she paused and she looked down at the the box seats where she would sit as an owner and she said i sat down there alone every day alone the other owners would tolerate me but they never accepted me and um and i i just thought about that there there's there's that cost of stepping out there of leaping out there alone and and the the thing to me about it is like there's a wreck and you have to believe it's worth doing for itself yeah exactly and in a way you you hope it's worth doing but you don't know i have i have a friend here who's a rabbi named mordecai finley and um you know for anybody as gentile as me it's always fun when i say he's my rabbi and rabbi finley was a marine he's a brilliant thinker and a friend named steve pressfield who's an incredible writer wrote a book called the war of art which you'd be very interested in i think um but steve pressfield was um investigating his own faith he had decided to to to look into spiritual matters and he asked me to go along with him to rabbi finley's lecturers at the university of judaism and a rabbi finley is a very practical guy he's got a son in the marine corps he's got a daughter and israeli intelligence and and he's a tough guy and and he said you know people say follow your heart instead of your head well your heart's the only thing less reliable than your head so that statement sort of sat for a minute and somebody raised their hand and said well then how do we know what to do and rabbi finley paulus for a long time as you do by the way when like like you're considering the the question of fresh it's not like oh here's my pad answer it's like well let me find what what's the true answer right now and he paused like that and he said a couple of times in my life i've been hanging by my fingernails over the abyss and i let go because i couldn't hang on anymore and i fell into the arms of god and he said i didn't know it would be the arms of god when i let go if i had known it it wouldn't truly have been letting go and i was sitting there in this crowd of people going and he looked at me and pointed at me and he goes christians know this christians know grace in our tradition we we have to sort of look for that concept it's there but we have to look for it but he said it's grace and and i think about that it's it's i don't know every time when i sit down that that i'm not wasting my time that i'm not just going to ruin you know a ream of paper or or or that i'm not gonna beggar my children um or i'm not gonna write something that somebody's gonna hate uh but um but my mother had a a saying she gave me when we had just made we were soldiers and my father died as written in my book about at the end of we were soldiers my father passed away he died on 9 11. and uh and we uh after after his funeral and i was back to work um i was calling my mother every day and and i called her and said how are you doing and she said well i'm i'm doing i'm doing okay how are you doing and i said well i'm nervous today and she said why and i said well um you know i've we're testing the movie tonight we're going to have its first public test and she said well why does that make you nervous and i said well there are a lot of people that come to these things intentionally just to be snarky just a just you know the sling mud at you and and when you've put your your blood and your sweat and your tears and your money into a work and you know people are going to do that it kind of makes you nervous yeah and i would say so and my mother said well honey if they crucified jesus christ they're going to be some people that don't like you so jordan if they crucified jesus christ they're going to be some people that don't like you [Laughter] you know i would like to talk to you for another three hours oh but i think that's a really good place to stop i think great and i i really enjoyed that uh and it was it was delightful to hear your stories and and to talk to you and i'm so happy that you decided that you'd participate in this podcast i think people will find it quite interesting so i should ask you what you asked penny is there anything that we didn't cover that you'd like to let people know about you know jordany i think the the big the big thing i'm trying to figure out right now and i again i i draw inspiration from you in this that to you know to be a teaching professor and to to start to lecture and to start to use media and and and to find and and to find an audience in different ways i love making movies and it's it's it's my calling uh but i i love music too and i um and i'm and i'm trying to figure out how to to get it all out how to both to just do it and to let people know it exists and i'm not sure the proper way and in anticipation of doing this i i made a little website for that new song i wrote called praise ye the lord because i think an affirmation right now is what we really need to do look at all that we have going for us instead of being listening to fear um so i'm trying to figure that notion out so um i i'm really going to be watching you to learn from how to do that and uh what what the best way because there's a part of me too that goes i really want to be left alone i don't want to be recognized i don't want to be i don't want to be noticed but i also as the bible says you don't take a candle and put it under a you know a table or under a bushel you know you try to try to show it that's that's a very unfocused thing to say but that's what i'm trying to figure out uh that between you and me personally that's the that's the thing i'm i'm trying to figure out at this stage of my life is what do i do with all the things that i'm doing i don't know the answer i think it's really helpful to let people see into your life a bit you know people are so fascinated with what goes on in in hollywood what goes on with people who are creative to to say what it's been like to talk about that that's interesting and compelling and so and and so we managed to do some of that today and so hooray for that and i'm looking i tell you i'm very much looking forward to this new movie do you have a title for it the swiss guard and and how about a proposed release date any idea it would probably be 2022 and you know i try to make the kind of movie that i would want to see you know that i would want my sons to see that i want the people that i love to see so um it amazes me that that you and your wife watched secretariat and uh that thrills me so i i hope this is a movie that would be worthy of your time to sit down and watch it i'm very much looking forward to it i hope we get to talk again me too jordan let's stay in touch thank you my friend all right thank you [Music] still we in will trust overfear praise the lord sons of rejoice [Music] who keeps his promises [Music] when we are lost who comes and finds us preaching the lord when we are drowning who says cuts the call praise god [Music] my [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 231,951

Rating: 4.9323788 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism

Id: PSkQlc-6vpY

Length: 142min 42sec (8562 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021