Tom Hanks: #1 Theory Tom Uses in Order to Live a Balanced and Fulfilled Life
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When real chats are back, real is back. Got milk? Sometimes life passes in the wink of an eye, and it's like, wow, are we here already? But there's other times in that same wink of an eye you comprehend it. The greatest and most iconic actors of all time. He has starred in dozens of movies over his 40-year career. You know him, you love him. Tom Hanks! If you're just looking at the past and saying, man, that was when it was great. I wish we could go back. No! You never want to go back.

You always have to understand that our best days are still ahead of us. Well, as you keep saying, more will be revealed as well. This too shall pass and more shall be revealed. The number one health and wellness podcast. Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. The one, the only, Jay Shetty.

Tom Hanks, welcome to On Purpose. It's truly an honor and a gift to be in your presence, to have you here. And even the first few moments that we've just exchanged a few thoughts, ideas, and stories, I'm already enjoying your company so much. And I'm so grateful that you took the time to do this. Oh, well, likewise. And I watched here, which is out on November 1st. I have so much that I want to talk about it through and through your lens. And when I was watching it, to me, the theme of home was,

obviously is so strong and apparent. And I wanted to ask you, where do you feel most at home, apart from home? Okay. All right, man. All right. Let's throw deep right off the bat. Because I was so many things lined up with me at my age. I was the third of four. My parents were very preoccupied with all certain, you know, like the positives and miseries of their lives. And

I like to joke that they pioneered the marriage dissolution laws for the state of California, you know, back. They got divorces when only like Zsa Zsa Gabor, you know, or, you know, Nikki Hilton got divorces. My home environment was fluid in that we moved a lot.

And we were suddenly living with a whole different set of people because people, you know, my parents got remarried and whatnot. So that by the time I was seven, I had lived in eight different homes. By the time I was 10, I had lived in 10 different homes. And it's always been like that. So I am not intimidated by it. And I don't think I'm damaged by it at all. As a matter of fact, my brother died.

who I did not live with. He lived in the same town and in one of three houses all his life. And I consider myself the lucky one, you know, just by the nature of so much stuff that I've seen and so much stuff that I've been able to experience and be comfortable with. Now,

Look, I'm 68, so I went through, I witnessed everything. Whatever drug thing that you want to go, I wasn't a participant in an awful lot of that because I was so, I was kind of like entertained by the new rules of whatever we were and here's a new school and here's a new apartment complex and now we're living in a bona fide neighborhood. And I was not intimidated by all of that stuff and I was also comfortable with

perhaps in a way that's not healthy in some ways, of being a new guy in a new circumstance, sizing up a room, sizing up a school, figuring out, all right, what's the easiest way to get comfortable here? Part of it is being open, kind of like taking over, cracking a few jokes, not getting in trouble.

And that's different from, I would say, like my older brother, who was very shy. And we were connected at the hip through all of this stuff. And it was not great for the other members of my family. But there was just something about the roll of the dice, number three of four, right there when the parents are too busy with all this other kind of stuff. And...

My siblings were not much older than I was, but older than I was. They were social beings long before I was. I didn't become a social being until I was like seven years old or whatnot. And by that time, I had lived in very many places. So long-winded conversation. I love it. Where do I feel at home most? I'm going to say now, at the age of 68, with some collection of my immediate family.

Wherever we are, provided we are, and I don't mean to be good at laughing, you know, provided we are laughing at perhaps the absurdity of it or dealing with the cruelty of it or sometimes just the surrealistic aspect of, did somebody tell me how we ended up here exactly? Can someone do that right now?

So I – now, that's not necessarily a strength because along with that came, dude, I travel light. And I can travel light emotionally. I'm done. There's stuff that I cannot control. I have left many a wonderful atmosphere or a loving atmosphere or a friendly atmosphere.

And like Ernie Banks, the ballplayer for the Chicago Cubs, without ever looking back, without thinking, oh, things were really wonderful back then. I wish I was back there. Jay, I don't think I've ever thought that. Wow. Now, is that great? Is it facile? Or is it so mercurial that maybe you...

Maybe you shouldn't trust me. Does it feel like, it feels like and sounds like a healthy detachment. There is a type, okay, let's talk about that. Because there is a version of detachment that means that you can navigate, say like, can I say assholes? Of course, you can say whatever you like. So you can navigate assholes. And, you know, I think my experience is about 90% of the people

that you come across pretty decent folks. 5% are assholes. And I'll say 5% are sociopaths, you know? And you cannot avoid that other 10%, those two 5%. And my, the ability to detach from those circumstance, without a doubt, a good thing. But

The habit then I think of choosing isolation from the other 90% because what can I rely on at the end of the day? I can only rely on what I can fit in either my emotional suitcase, an actual suitcase, or the back of my car. And that lingers for a very long time. So I think the healthy aspect of it has been a great aid to me.

As well as the tendency to want to be isolated, to not need anybody. Put it that way. To not want anybody. Because that's just what I learned. Life is easier if you don't need anybody. And it can be a lot easier if you want nothing more than what's in the back of the car.

But that can be a solitary life. And a lot of times being solitary can be confused with being lonely. And it...

being lonely can lead to anger and resentments and stuff that you got to work through. And okay, at the 68, you know, a lot of those years have been dealt with dealing with the latter and enjoying the former at the same time. Well, I think what you rightly said is that there's this binary feeling of if you're detached, you're lonely or disconnected, or you might be at the other end, codependent and attached and not have the ability to operate

in a solitary state. So how have you

almost so beautifully between the two of being able to confidently say you've been detached in the right ways. And then at the same time, you have this beautiful relationship with your wife. You have long-term friendships with people in the industry, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg. People I worked with. Yeah, people you worked with. So how does that dance work? Because I do think that the magic is in the dance, not in the choice. I'm going to say that I got very, very, very lucky with,

uh, be being in the right place at the right time and recognizing something that was just for me. All right. You go back to this, just go back to school, you know,

People say show business is like high school with money. High school is like show business without money. You know, it truly was. And when I was, when I, look, I just went to school and my joke was we moved around so much that whenever, you know, at the end of the school year, my dad would stand me out on the driveway and say, son, your school is somewhere in that direction. Yeah.

Just walk that way. And when you see kids your own age, just follow them and they will lead you to whatever school you are supposed to go to. The school was a social kind of like place for me. And every now and again, there might be a moment that landed in my intellectual pursuit, if that makes sense.

I can't say I really loved going to school, but I certainly loved the hang of going to school. That's a different thing. Subject matters, that was a role that history was great sometimes. Some reading was great, but I was no artist. I was no, you know, I was no mathematician. You know, I kind of like geography because you could visualize a map and know where like Sri Lanka was or, you know, the difference between Cambodia and Thailand.

But when I was in high school and had no idea what I was supposed to do with my time, other than, you know, maybe go to Young Life, you know, hang out, you know, hang out with, you know, some sort of psychological, theological, you know, brothers. But other than that, sign up for class, maybe do your homework on the bus on the way to school and what, run track? I don't know. What are you supposed to do?

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

And I said, what, really? And so, you know, we went, we went up to school at night to see him. And I'd never been in my high school at night. Looks different at night, right? Then I sat there and there was, you know, a bunch of people in the auditorium. And then they came out and did this play. And I thought, wow.

This is school? You can do this at school? School isn't this thing just to survive. This isn't this thing just to fill up your time, to leave as soon as you can and get there at the latest. Oh, no, I never cut class. I didn't do that because in some ways the hang of school was too much fun. But when I saw that there was this kind of discipline that I had already been thinking of in my head,

That just changed everything. When you suddenly have a reason to go and do something, and the reason is in a pursuit of something that you cannot find anywhere else, right? That my, I got to say, my junior and senior years of high school, I have been living that same exact life and excitement ever since. I'm not kidding. The idea of auditioning for the first, like...

Our great instructor, our teacher, he wanted to do real plays because he loved to do the scenic design for it. So we did Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams. How about that? 16-year-old, 17-year-old kids playing Night of the Iguana. Then we did Shakespeare. They did musicals as well. Those were always popular. But suddenly having this tantalizing thing that's like if you have an imagination and

And if you're not afraid of getting up in front of people, which I was not, some people can't get up. It was a bunt for me. I did it without even thinking. That gave a purpose and a pursuit that was much, much bigger than anything else that had been in my life. Now, I have a friend of mine from the same era. James is his name.

I met him in fifth grade and he said to me he was going to be a draftsman. He was going to be an engineer. He's going to design buildings. And he did. That's what he's been doing all this life. I knew people at the same age that said, "Well, I really love to cook." And they have written cookbooks and they've run their own catering companies.

That is what – that's the same sort of thing that I landed upon without really knowing it. Because my parents were divorced, I spent a lot of time traveling to and from my – where my mom lived in this small town or where my dad lived in Oakland in the Bay Area.

And those hours on a Greyhound bus, starting when I was seven, seven or eight years old, five hours of just daydreaming, five hours of looking out the window, five hours of looking at

people passing cars, trains going by, farms and whatnot, buildings. The natural preponderance I had to sit there quietly and imagine what was going on, that fueled me into realizing that there's this thing that there's actually a discipline and a trade and an art and a, what's the word I'm looking for?

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

Did you write on those journeys or was it mainly? I wanted to write specifically, but I did not, literally, I did not have the scholastic example. I did not learn the tools because I just wanted to fake it, you know, at the last moment. Now, I started writing about 20 years ago.

by just incorporating the work that an actor does that is not told to anybody, that is not spoken, that actually was a form of writing that came about. And I was sort of like instructed on how that comes along. But without putting it down on paper, I had malleable, cohesive narratives in my head for all of this stuff.

And I just thought, well, isn't that what everybody does? That's the way you do this, right? Because it's not just showing up on time and, you know, learning your words and doing what you're told. There is something beyond that.

the beyond that was always 15 times greater than the actual physical showing up. I can't discount enough the power of the hang. You want to hear a story? Here's a short piece of story. Please, please, please. Darlene Love. You know who Darlene Love is? Legendary singer, you know, singer, a fantastic, fantastic Motown artist, among other things.

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

I saw her there and I said, oh, I'd seen her on the David Letterman show for like six or seven years. And I said, I met her and I said, Miss Love, I cannot believe that I am on the show with you. You have been belting out so many moments of the soundtrack of my life that I'm just thrilled that you're here. And I'm glad that you're still doing it. And she looked at me and said, Tom, I'm just here for the hang. Yeah.

And I got, I completely, I completely got that because the hang, the interaction with everybody, dealing with the attractiveness of those 90%, avoiding or learning how to negotiate around those other 5%, you know, the jerks and the evil people. Ain't that just living? You know, ain't that better than being alone in a room when you don't have a thought in your head? Mm-hmm.

Well said. Yeah, absolutely. I was wondering, you talked about luck a lot there. Can we all become a bit more lucky? The fellow who ran the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, Vincent Dowling, I worked for him for three years. And he's the number of people that loved that man and worked with that man. He touched a great many people's lives. He said...

It's the most unfair business in the world. That's one aspect of it. Because so much of it requires being in the right place at the right time by choice and by sacrifice, you know, and that's not easy to do.

I feel that I was fortunate that from, as we spoke about, from that upbringing, I had no qualms about, hey, let's go. I got enough money for gas. I drove across the country with four other people one time. And then the next year I drove across the country by myself. Did not bat an eye.

And there are people that, listen, they just can't do that. There is a degree of security and fear and intimidation that can go along with what? Putting yourself in the right place.

at the right time. And along with that will come all... It's a 50-50... Okay, it's a 50-50. Have you heard this great thing? I'm no mathematician, but when I heard this, I thought, that's actually a principle for living. Jay, if I had a quarter and I flipped it and it came up heads five times in the row,

What are the odds that it's going to come up heads a seventh time, a sixth time in a row? Is it still 50-50? It's absolute 50-50. Just because something has happened doesn't mean it's going to. Just because you're in a place doesn't mean that's where you should be. So along with luck, shouldn't the other requirement be faith? Yes.

Or some degree of disconnected to it, to whatever the end result is going to be. You're going to have to be. I was talking to a friend of mine and he said, he read somebody, I don't know who it was, but someone wrote down, you have to be all right with what's going to happen.

And I just, well, okay. Thanks for that. Yeah, all right. Let's try to do that. So you have to be all right with what's going to happen right or wrong, disaster, disease, you know, whatever. You have to be all right with what is going to happen with some degree of faith and luck that what happens after that.

is the best thing that could possibly be. What's helped you get closer to that? That sounds hard. It is. It sounds impossible. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to say that age, in all honesty, experience...

You know, that thing of what has not destroyed me only makes me stronger. And look, let's not discount the power of getting your ass kicked. You know, and I'm not just, you know, suddenly not professionally as well. All sorts of, you know, all sorts of personal things go along that give you a bloody nose and bust your teeth. And you have to go through those metaphysically, perhaps physically. I made this movie where I rode a scooter, a Vespa.

And so because of that, I wrote a Vespa for about two years.

until I realized that I had been so close to killing myself on this thing, making a stupid mistake, that I'm going to give up this Vespa. This was a smart thing to do that only came about because I learned, you know, that, you know, sometimes a hair's breadth between, you know, cracking up or falling down or needing that crash helmet or not. So it is a degree of that experience. And

And also being, I think, open to some of the most basic, I don't want to say philosophical truths, but I have been to the Holy Land. I have seen the sites that are precious, divine. I was actually working, this was a long time ago. This was before the great, many of the great problems that were going there. And I was driving back to

Being driven to Jerusalem, I was with a guide and I said, hey, so, Moshe, tell me about where we are. And he says, okay, I will tell you. This is, we

We are bound by a kibbutz. This is a very old kibbutz. You know kibbutz? Yes, this is a very old one. It's been there a very long time. Very popular. And now we are coming up with a moshav. You know what moshav is? Moshav is not like a kibbutz. It's different, more socialist, less comfortable. But this is also much like that. And people live there and they work and they farm.

And this is where David killed Goliath. And coming up here, I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Back the car up. Just a little. Back this up.

Did you just say this is where David killed Goliath? Yes, he says. There's a little sign there. It said in English and Hebrew and Arabic. He says, well, tell me about that. Okay, well, okay. There you see the valley? Yes, okay. And on one side was the Philistines, Philistines. They were there, okay. And David and the Israelites were here.

And they sent down to the middle there the giant, yes, yes, the Goliath, yes. And David goes and says, I will fight this man. And he puts the stones and he kills him. And I said, this is the place. He said, yeah. I'm not going to argue with that. Absolutely not going to argue with that.

So moved along. And I, you know, you visit great cathedrals and whatnot. I've been all places around the world, some of the great faiths. And we were in Japan, the family and I, and we had this fabulous guy that was driving us around. And he took us to some Buddhist places, some Shinto shrines. And there was a big tree at one of them.

uh and one of the uh one of the temples the shrines and people would write down prayers on these uh on wooden wooden signs and they would hang them up like ornaments so this this tree is just covered with a million prayers beautiful kind of like sensibility and

And he wrote down something and he hung it up. And I said, you know, Oshie, what did you write? He says, oh, I wrote here, I'll show you. And it was in Japanese, you know, the language. And he says, this means I will never know all I need to know.

That's all we talked about, you know, at dinner later on. So the ongoing education of we're never going to know what we need to know. More is always going to be revealed. And this too shall pass. Mm-hmm.

That governs absolutely everything. If you are having the greatest time in your work, this too shall pass. If you are successful, this too shall pass. If you are sick, if you are experiencing great tragedy and great drama, great difficulty, this too shall pass. Now, I don't know if I'm still answering the question you asked. You are, you are, yeah. This was educated to me over the course of my 20s and 30s and 40s or 50s.

at a time when you think that, no, what you have to do is have a master plan. You got to stick to the plan. You got to lay your head down. You got to fight for it. You got to compete. Yeah, okay. There's times when, you know, you got to do that other kinds of stuff. And other times you just kind of like got to roll over and say, I surrender, you know, just I will never know all I need to know and I'll never be able to do all that I should do. Yeah. Does that make sense? It does make sense. It does make sense. And I appreciate you saying that.

It comes with wisdom and age and experience because I used to have a mentor who sadly passed away during the pandemic, but he would always repeat to me, there's no substitute for maturity. No shortcut to it. Yeah, the maturity was just something. And yet, didn't you know somebody when you were young?

Who was the same age as you that had it. Absolutely. Oh, I came across all sorts of people like that. Yeah. And I just said, first of all, what makes you so special? And what makes you so smart? What makes you so calm, you know?

What was it? Did you ever figure it out? I have the vaguest idea. Some combination, I would probably say, of connection. A connection to a family, a connection to perhaps a heritage that goes along with that. A friend of mine, we went to their son's bar mitzvah.

And I'm not Jewish, but I said, you got bar mitzvah? Oh, yeah, of course I got bar mitzvah. And he said, let me tell you something about the bar mitzvah. This is what's great about it, because my 13-year-old son, when he's getting bar mitzvah, and I told him, I said, after this, my son, your sins are your own. Yeah.

He's 13. But this is, you know, and there's studies of, you know, there's examples of that all through all sorts of cultures and all sorts of histories. Yeah. That said, there is a time when you and you alone are responsible for everything that goes on in your life. I have a friend who is studying...

with a Buddhist monk, you know, a guy whose name, he's literally got his name venerable in his first name. How about that? Wow. When I was talking to the venerable, you know, whatever it is. And I said, look, I know squat about Buddhism outside of, you know, what I, you know, see on TV shows. So what's the deal? And he said, well, one of the smartest things I heard

from a guy who practices Buddhism is, my life used to be nothing but chopping wood and carrying water. And now that I have received some enlightenment, I find that all that is necessary for me to live is to chop wood and carry water. Yes. Okay. All right, man. That's some high country. And I don't know if you hear that. Well, I don't know if I had heard that at the age of 22, I would have had the slightest.

An idea of what I meant. But at the age of 68, I think I can get a little bit closer to that. Definitely. Yeah. I think there's two things you brought to mind for me. I think one of them's been when I've noticed some of the wiser people that I've met along the way or at a younger age, as you were mentioning, it's always been people who are exposed to more generations.

And so people who were in their 20s but knew people who were 70 and spent quality time with them or people who were in their 50s and spent time with someone who was 18 or 21. And that kind of juxtaposition of being surrounded by people that weren't just all your age in the same space, there was a sense of you being able to learn and grow and take and receive. I was spending time with a couple that my wife and I become very close friends with and they're both 70 and

Uh, my wife and I are in our, in our mid thirties and we were, we spent a weekend with them and it was brilliant because I got destroyed at pickleball, uh, by the 70s. Always good. Always good. A humbling experience. A huge inspiration for me. Yeah. He's playing pickleball and tennis for four hours a day and I can barely play for a couple. And so big inspiration, but, but just the life experience and the engagement you get from that. And I think so much of our,

Going back to what we were saying about community and even your mention of church there or the Holy Land, I was researching something recently. I'm writing my third book and something that I came across and I've been playing around with is this idea called the third space theory. And what the third space theory lays out is that back in the day, we would have home, we would have work, and we would have church.

And church was a place you could look back on work and home and reconcile and reflect and think about. You can ponder why bad things happen to good people and vice versa. Yeah. Correct. It was a place spent, literally meant for that. Meant for that. This is why you come here. Exactly. And now what's happened is let alone three spaces, we don't, we just have one. So we work from home, we live at home. And then our third space or the closest thing to it is a television. Probably there is, there isn't a separate space.

And so it's arguing the fact that there isn't that space almost to have those thoughts, conversations, ideas, insights that may arise. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, we all have those moments where we feel like we're not really showing up as our true selves. Maybe it was a recent meeting or even a casual hangout with friends, but you just couldn't shake the feeling that you had to put on a mask.

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That's betterhelp.com forward slash Jay's top three. Sometimes life can seem challenging and overcoming problems can seem impossible. But when you focus on your problems, it can keep you from seeing the good in your life. One thing that helps me when I need a change in perspective is acknowledging the small wins in life.

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The generational thing, I think, is wickedly important. Whether or not, you know, like they don't, you know, sometimes it's just the old person that's sitting in the corner, you know. But other times it's like, you know, a big, there's some aspect of the big family that is not for everybody, you know, because God knows not everybody wants to come to Thanksgiving sometimes because they don't want to have that same fight again. I had a friend who he had his grandmother was like,

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

And at one point, he was arguing with his parents about not wanting to do something. I can't remember what it was. It didn't matter. But everybody was saying, why are you doing that? What's that about? How can you do that? Blah, blah, blah. And my friend said, hey, man, because life's too short. And this 90-year-old grandmother is just sitting there. And she said, no, life's not short. Life is long. Yeah.

Which I interpret as being life is long. So if you're doing something stupid, you know, you're spending a lot of time relishing, you know, living inside that stupidity. Yes. And my kids are my youngest kids.

who essentially were raised along by us, as well as a couple of people that have been employee-like families for members of family, but also their grandparents, their yaya and papu, as they say in Greek. People who were never not engaged with them when they were

We never had to have babysitters. We never had to have a nanny. We didn't have anything like that. What we had instead was two generations removed of people speaking Greek to them, asking them questions, what are you doing, from the moment they are toddlers until they're 14 years old. What they got from that is so different from –

From what I got from mine. There is a joke in my family about how bad I am with tools. I mean, as soon as I pick up a screwdriver or a hammer, I start getting cold sweats.

because my dad had no patience with me about, he never said, let me show you how to use it. Let me show you how to scrape that off. It was always, oh, come on, you knothead. Don't you know how to sand a board? Don't you know the difference between a standard socket wrench and a metric wrench? And I never did because nobody said, let me show you how you do this. You got to learn it. So that you're talking about something there that is, it's almost like,

It's like water on a stone, you know? It just has an effect over time. And, you know, in many cultures, you have to look at that and say, the more generations around that table with regularity, you know, not just for, you know, three holidays a year,

The richer the lesson is going to be, because you're going to pick up some stuff just like an old story from the old country. My father-in-law, dad, he was Greek but grew up in Bulgaria and had to escape the communists and whatnot, which is a fascinating story unto itself.

But when he told the story about being told by his dad to take the donkey up to this, you know, up to the mountains and get something and bring it back, knowing that there was the meanest dog on the planet Earth up there that was going to try to try to bite him. He came back. Oh, I think what it was is he said, take the donkey up there. And he didn't want to wrestle with the donkey. He just wanted to go up there and get it back really fast and on the way there.

This dog, you know, nearly mauled him, scared the living daylights out of him. So when he came back down, his dad said, I told you to take the donkey. Because the donkey would scare off the dog, you know, like that. So, you know, that's the kind of stuff you got to pick up over time. Yeah. But did you have...

multiple generations in the home as you were growing up? I felt that for me, my monk teachers became that for me because they were older. And so I had a monk teacher who was in his probably 60s when I met him. I had another who was in his 30s when I first met him. And so they became that. I wasn't so close to my grandparents.

And so I didn't really have that same interaction as you as mentioning your children did. I didn't really have that with them. So I had my parents, I had my uncles and aunts. But then I think it was really later on when I met those two generations in the monastery that really expanded my

breadth of, you know, human experience. It'd be nice if it worked across the board, but sometimes, you know, grandpa's a drunk and, you know, and grandma does nothing but smoke cigarettes and, you know, and watch Wheel of Fortune. So maybe it's not always great. No, maybe it's not always great. But it can be sometimes. It can be. It can be. You were talking about your experience with your father and, you know, with the tools and

It's so funny because my dad was the opposite. He was useless at DIY, and so I'm useless at DIY. Oh, there you go. And so I have that experience. My dad was great. My dad could fix everything. There was a story I was talking to my older brother. He and my dad...

my dad was like, why in the world would we spend a lot of money for crying out loud? We could get it. We could get electronics kit and make our own amplifier. We don't have to go off and pay all this much money. We'd hook it up to a turntable and a speaker. There we have stereo systems. So they got a kit and I saw them working on it together and I was kind of jealous and, and,

I'm honestly, 40 years later, I said to say, you know, when you made the amplifier with dad, I was really jealous because I thought, oh man, I wish I would have done anything to trade places with you. My dad was so miserable as we were doing it always. You knothead, don't you know, don't you know how to solder? It's like, oh.

So, you know, it's a perspective of everything. Yeah, definitely. Did you try to parent differently? Like, did you try to avoid some of it? You know, you try to, but I made every mistake, you know. You scar the kids somehow in the same exact way. And as they get older, you know, you come back around. I said, hey, can I talk about what a knothead I was with you for all those years? And said, no.

Yeah, sure, Dad. Yeah, been kind of waiting for this. Why don't you unload? But I would say at the same time, I think there was, you know, does it come up to be 50-50 maybe? The attitude and the, you know, the life that we led, the laughs, you know, that stuff's worth its weight in, you know, Jim encrusted gold. What's something that they've taught you?

How different they all are. They are not the same type of human being ever. My youngest at one point said something that was definitely true for him. And I thought is in fact true for all of my kids, which makes me feel good. He was younger. He was like seven or eight.

I said, oh, you know, at one point, let's go down. We were in New York. I said, let's go down to the park, and we'll take our gloves. We'll throw it around. We'll bat the balls. We'll just find a place of grass. He said, okay, do that. And it got away from me. Didn't happen. This called that. Something happened. And I realized that, oh, the sun's going down now. And I said, oh, my God. Oh, my God. Hey, I'm sorry. I said we were going to go down and throw the ball around. It got away from me. Forgive me. And he said, no, it's okay, dude.

And he sounded disappointed. That's okay. I said, well, you know, I feel bad. I just, I don't want you to be bored. And he looked at me with a look on his face and said, dad, I'm never bored.

And that is, that's curiosity. That speaks to curiosity and drive and also the comfort of where one is in order to feel free, in order to explore whatever world that is. And I can, I think I could say that maybe in varying degrees for all the kids, their ability to pursue their own interests is,

without being prodded, without being forced to. I've learned from that because, look, there was that isolation that I was talking about. There was a time when I was so comfortable doing absolutely nothing or, you know, pursuing some brand of, you know, disconnection that wasn't good for me. And I, you know, everybody has it in some degrees. But

You could be of a, with all that you have, with all you kids, with all your advantages, I do not want to hear that you're bored. And they have never said that they're bored. They have always had some action thing that was going on, whether I understood their passion for it or not.

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What attracted that isolation and disconnection at that moment in time? What was it that was so appealing? I think I just had to get used to it because I was number three. People ran out of time. You know, they didn't have the wherewithal, the interest.

Because I was so young when my parents split up and there were so many other factors that had to go into, man, it was logistics and legal thing and time and distance and stuff like that. That I took care of myself and, you know, was satisfied. I think it was a reprieve for them. So I just got used to it.

by occupying myself by being alone. Yeah. And that's really great. And it can be really detrimental. Yeah. I can relate to so much of that as well. I felt I was the eldest, just one of two people

And my parents, you've used this word previously in other interviews of having your parents had a fractured relationship and so did mine. And so there was definitely a sense of I had to build independence, accountability and responsibility very early on because I had to take care of things. And I also look back at that as such a strength and I'm so grateful for it in a

kind of weird way because I feel like it made me grow up earlier. Not in a way that I felt I lost a childhood or I didn't have amazing experiences, but I'm really happy now when I look back that it gave me strength and courage much earlier. But as the older one, did they have some expectations of responsibility put on you? Like where are you going and you have to be back by now? Were there rules placed upon you? No rules, no rules for me. More expectations educationally

And what was strange, which is so much linked to what I do today, and I've drawn that line fairly often for myself, is I was emotionally depended on by both of them. Okay. So I became the therapist. Wow. Oh, wow. That's a burden. Yeah, very early on. No wonder you went off for three years to sleep on the floor. Exactly. Sleep on the ground. Yeah, yeah. So I'm grateful for it now, though, because I think it –

gave me the ability to listen closely, be empathetic, understand both sides, care for both. He gave me that ability to recognize how it takes two to tango. I think this is a viable study about where you are in that pecking order. Every now and then I read about it because because I was last and last by like five years, I had no rules. I had no...

no expedition. They had, they had spent so much time trying to establish that with the older, you know, my older siblings, they didn't want to bother with it anymore. So if I was gone for, you know, like two weeks, I just didn't come home for two weeks in high school. They knew I was sleeping at somebody's house and doing my homework and getting to school on my own. They were thrilled that they didn't have to, you know, they didn't have to discipline me or punish me. They didn't have, you didn't have to think about me. I just came and went, uh,

by myself so yeah but I was not the oldest you know I did not have somebody that was establishing the rules and uh you know the the structure of the family yeah that was yeah and that was different for me too I had I had expectations academically which is normal in an Indian family but there weren't

any rules for me as well. So if I was out and about and doing whatever it was, it didn't matter. And so- So I'm gonna, is the stereotype of the Indian family, are you all brilliant students? Do you all work really hard and finish all your- You're forced to, yeah. You're forced to. You're forced to prioritize homework. Education is all that matters.

your social skills, life, relationships don't matter. It's all about how well you perform. I'm glad I'm not an Indian and there's no way I could have been. Oh, Lord. Yeah, it's all about how well you perform academically. Your whole life revolves around that. Were your parents like high academic achievers? Well, I think they did, I would say they did very well for what they had. So my dad became a chartered accountant. He qualified in England for,

but he was raised in India. And my mom never did any more than what you'd study up until age 16. And then after that also became an entrepreneur and became a financial advisor. So they'd both struggled and worked hard

to i love it it was going it was going right where i thought it was until you said and then became an entrepreneur yeah okay yeah which i didn't realize growing up that she was an entrepreneur well that comes from somewhere of that structure of uh education and homework done even no matter the gender exactly okay exactly exactly definitely but i was thinking about as we're talking about your life i can't help but think about the movie here that i'm so grateful i got to watch

a couple of days ago, a couple of weeks, no, a week ago now. And I really just felt that it was a work of art. That's kind of what I took away from it. It was a work of art because rarely has a film more recently had me so fixated on...

First of all, the way it's produced and created is beautiful. It's a pretty deep throw. It's so deep, and it's perfect for this conversation that we're having. And even as you're reflecting on all of these scenes in your life, to me, I can't help but project. Oh, dear. Because it was the four of us, you know, Bob Zemeckis and Eric Roth and Robin and I and everybody else in it, you know, Paul and every other actor in it.

We, the scenes are very, very specific of a moment in a family's life. Yes. And everybody was armed for bear. Everybody had a thing that had happened to them that was like that. Not necessarily example, but the sensory experience, the emotional connection.

to every single moment in this thing was really quite resonant for us all. And I had to, when I, people say, what are you working on? Oh, I'm making a movie called here. I say, not H E A R it's H E R E. I said, well, what's it about?

I've said it is about how important things are when they happen here, you know, because you cannot control them. And they are if you the film, I mean, all of the permutations where it goes, you know, we say the camera stands still in space, but it moves in time, you know.

Everybody, every character in it is going through that profound thing that happens in a specific moment in their life. And where does it happen? It happens right here. So we were always talking about presence, you know, some big aspect of it. And also that we do not know that we're living in a moment of history.

We don't know, they don't know that the first tribes, you know, the Native Americans, they don't know that they're Native Americans. They're just living in the moment. They're not, they don't know they're living, you know, 600 years ago, nor do the people that build the house that takes place. They don't know that they're living in 1911. They think they're just living in the right now of it. And that's a type of thing that really is so examinable, examinable,

in a very specific type of cinema that is the point of what the whole movie is, that Bob and Eric fleshed out long before Robin and I came along. Yeah. And along with that comes together, the four of us,

have a history that we can go back to. I mean, Robin's worked with Bob a couple of times. I've worked with Bob a number of times. Eric is one friend of mine. We've worked on stuff all the time. And every time we've done it, we have a pinpoint of the difference between here at the moment that it happened and now at this moment where we're talking about establishing a whole new other place in time. Yeah. I mean, when I was watching it, I couldn't help but think of

every place that has been monumental in my life and then think about how many other events must have taken place in that room, in that space that I'm not even aware of and I might even take for granted and not recognize the value of both in my life and previously and, of course, the future as well. Well, I had to wrap my head around this thing that I had never experienced. We lived here.

I've never lived any place, you know, I, you know, now, now, now, now I've had, I've lived, had in the same literally home as in three-dimensional structure in time and space. I've had that now for, you know, a couple of decades here, but this idea of someone putting so much,

I don't want to say importance, but having so much emotional centeredness in literally this place in a room by these stairs through this door. The TV used to be there and there it was there. Here's where mom and dad did this. Here's where I did that. I don't have that.

Oh, I got it, you know, once we got married, you know, finally. But I didn't get it until I was 35 years old. And my kids have it. And sometimes I have to ask them about their perspectives. I moved around so much as a kid. I looked forward to it. When we moved out of the house.

that my kids had been born in and lived in for the better part, you know, lived in for like 14 years a piece. They were sort of undone by it. And I didn't understand it.

I literally, in the back of my head, if not verbally, said, what's the big deal? How's that for a perspective? It is a huge deal if you're actually there. And Richard, Robin, and I are characters. I'm born in the house. I grow up in the house. My kids are born in the house. Our entire marriage and family is spent in that house. And is it a solace or...

Is it a boundary that you're never able to get through? Experiencing that and examining that was, oh my Lord. I can't tell you how much conversation. This whole movie was just one big ass conversation about what it means. Not so much about what the words are, how we move around. That's the technical stuff that goes along.

But every moment that we were off by ourselves, it seemed to me we were trying to weigh this very specific thing of what we have always, what we have all been through in our odd, you know, celebrated, goofy, stupid individual lives and what it meant to this world.

the H-E-R-E aspect of this story that we were trying to tell. And Bob particularly, I mean, Bob's in, we all, I think, incorporated our own approach to our art form and commercial life to it. Bob is a filmmaker.

is not about to do a shot that anybody could do, you know? And he's not about to tell a story cinematically in ways that have been done before. He's just built that way. He went, well, hell, anybody can do that. You know, he says stuff like that. And Eric, as a screenwriter, he's constantly landing on this place where only his words on paper can translate this thought process. And Robin and I, you know, Paul, everybody in the thing is like,

I know the lines. Turn me loose. Let's go. Let's go. What are you going to do? Are you going to try that? Let's try that. Where are you going to go? Just take it. This ongoing game of improvisational, emotional football in which you just, and I mean football is the international sense. Yes. Premiership, the championships league. It is a ball that is, it's a matter of engines. It's a matter of a curve. It's a matter of being in the right place at the right time in order to receive what's given to you and then pass on to somebody else.

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Yeah, it was...

I know the film uses digital anti-aging technology and you got to see yourself many years younger. Was there any special feeling of that? No, it was kind of great. I mean, because it's a great tool because it's been, you know, people are aged and younged up in movies, you know, since Edison stole George Melies' film process back in the early 1900s.

It was fascinating to watch because it ended up being the tools were so much better that it was a different completeness to it. Absolutely. You know, we all had, you know, you always have hair and makeup. We went through extensive everything, you know. They did what they had at one point. I'm sitting there and Jennifer, our fabulous makeup artist, she's just looking at me. She just grabbed both of my ears.

and then lifted them up and shoved them into the top of my head. And I said, "What are you doing?" He said, "Oh, Tom, we're working on you being 17."

And as you age, your ears grow and lower on your head. And so I'm trying to see if I'll be able to glue them up on the side. I said, have at it, girl. So all of the tool aspect of it is standard. What was new is that we could see it in real time. We didn't have to send it off and wait for a long post-production thing because that was the deep fake technology that

that uses some form of AI just to make it much, much faster and immediate. And listen, one of the things that it shows is just how old I am. Because you got to have posture and energy. And if everything else about you looks like you're 22 years old, you're going to have to embody a 22-year-old. I'm going to tell you right now, it's very hard to leap off a couch in enthusiasm.

as a 67-year-old guy at the time that we did it. I didn't even think of that. Hey, you know what? Had a lot of tea, had a lot of protein bars, got a lot of rest, got a lot of stretching in order to make that happen. Yeah. You mentioned presence there, and that was a theme that definitely struck me. What do you find helps you be the most present today as you're living? There are times that I think you have to be oblivious. You have to sort of like enforce it. You have to

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

to the specifics of what you're doing. Because if you're trying to get through it, that means self-consciousness. That means you are not getting out of yourself and self-consciousness is the death of performance. Ask any actor this thing. If you have a scene where you have to go to a deep emotional place and the only way to do it is to go there, chances are

You have had the most wonderful day of your life prior to that. Or it is so much fun to come to work that day. All right? So that's one thing that you have to do. And the other side of it is if you have to be charming and convivial and funny on paper, on stage, chances are you're going through some personal hell off camera that you just have to be oblivious to somehow. Mm-hmm.

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

And joy not necessarily being we're all having a great time, we're all singing campfire songs, but the joy of allying yourself with great collaborators and trusting that they are going to get better stuff out of you that you could possibly bring yourself and being open to just knowing it so well. Everybody says, well, what do you mean by learning the lines?

I mean, learning the lines like you know the lyrics to the best song you ever heard in your life. Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now I need a place that's here to say, oh, I believe in you. You've got to be able to rattle it off that fast, that easily. It's got to be so much a part of you that you don't have to think about it at all. If I actually sang the right words to yesterday. Yeah.

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And I feel there's this, it's amazing to see your enthusiasm, excitement, joy, you know, continuing your career when you're, even what you just said now of working with people who can get even more out of me and that belief that there's more in you always, you've talked about imposter syndrome in the past. Yeah.

which obviously I'm sure everyone, when they look at you, find it hard to believe. But I recognize when you've shared or I've heard you talk about it before, it's very real. It's very genuine, this feeling of like, oh, well, you know, walk us through that.

How you've been able to constantly believe there's more in you to give, more to do, more to find. Somebody wanted me to do a movie, all right? And it was great. And I should have done it. It was going to be for a lot of money. It would be in, you know, go somewhere cool. You get a good per diem, you know, all that kind of stuff. There was no reason not to do the movie, except there was something that I just said, this is not

the match for me because number one I don't have any curiosity about the subject now that's not the only reason to do it but in order to translate the theme of the movie through a performance there has to be some sort of challenge and curiosity to it and I had none that was one thing but the other part of it too I was searching I was I was having a one-on-one uh talk with the director and I was just I said look I said I don't I don't have the

I don't have the countenance. And the director said, countenance? What the hell does that mean? I said, there is a thing that we all carry with us. We have a countenance that comes from everything we've said, all the work that we've done, all the times that we've either succeeded or failed because they both go together. Failure teaches you a lot more than success does. I'm talking about commercial success.

But that idea that you walk away from a job and you think that we went to a new place in order to examine this theme that only we could have done unless we all got together and challenged each other and made it happen. And without that type of stretching of one's countenance that you come into –

That to me is the big McGillicuddy. I still find myself completely at the mercy of that instinctive moment of, oh, my God!

That's what I think, you know? And the next thing you know, you want to do it and you're talking about it continuously. And there is nothing that anybody says that detracts from that initial experience. Yes.

Because, you know, there's plenty of other things that you can do because they're fun. I mean, my beginnings, the first time I was a professional actor, we were in repertory theater with my Vincent Dowling at a place called the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, Ohio.

And because we were in rep, we did everything. We did Hamlet and King John and Othello. At the same time, we were doing fabulous rip-roaring comedies that everybody dug. The countenance then is exchanged between the two. And that's something that it's not a burden at all, but it is a prism through which a decision has to be made.

Going back again to this idea of this, I believe that my countenance, look it up, staff, look up countenance for me. My countenance is not going to aid the examination of this theme. And movies...

work when the theme is worthy of being examined by that movie and so in that case you just have to say uh no uh there's uh you need somebody that's going to come in there like a you know like like a like a mad dog and and devour that bone and i i just by countenance doesn't match up to that yeah it sounds like you've never compromised that

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

And it was a time where I just said, they are asking me to be in a movie. You don't say no to that. That's young. That's the stuff that you do in your 20s and in your 30s. And then sometime in there, you start thinking about, no, no, no, no, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. The greatest decision, by the way, I don't think I've ever said no yet, except by schedule. But now it turns out to be that's where you start shaping your

what your, your art and the body of work, you have to start. The power is saying no. And that's really, that was really hard to do when, you know, everybody thinks you're great. You show up and everybody wants you to do it. And everybody says fabulous things, but I've compromised. I didn't know I was compromising because I didn't know any better, but there was a moment, I guess, when you said like, ah,

You know, I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to, I think I'd be compromising somewhere here. And so the first time I said no to something, it was a very, it was, it was on one hand liberating. And of course I might've thought I made the biggest mistake of my life. You know, if you take any great, take any great magnificent, take, let's just pull from the take Faye Dunaway and Laurence Olivier.

They have very specific countenances. There is a thing that you will say, oh my God, the countenance of Laurence Olivier, really, really, Ozzie Davis. Well, you know, any grade that, wow, that countenance matches. Yes. And that's, I guess that's what I'm talking about. Yes, yes, yes. There is like a, you know, some sort of cosmic weight that they carry along with it that makes sense for what they're doing. Yeah, for sure. There's a, listening to you speak about

I mean, it's so relieving to hear that you've compromised sometimes. It's a relief. Come by my house. We have a night of compromise. How about that? You want to do that? We'll bring the DVDs and say, this is the DVD of compromise.

I mean, that'd be amazing. No, I think because I think we're so good. We forget that you're used to celebrating and counting someone's wins and hits when they've had so many and you look over the compromises or whatever it may have been. And so it's a relief hearing that because your values of how you pick a project of how you work on a project seems so, so strong and defined now. And that's obviously come with time as, as you were making here, uh,

Was there a particular scene that reminded you of a time in your life that you want to revisit, relive, rethink? Eugene O'Neill wrote Our Wilderness. He wrote that play as the life he wanted to have, he wished he had had, the family that he had wished he had. And I always read that. Eugene O'Neill is a big reason why I became an actor because I saw great productions of his stuff

uh back in 1975 76 and when i finally saw all wilderness i was knocked out because it was as delightful a play as it was and i'd always heard that he wrote that as you know the family that he wish he had i thought about that when when i was doing here because there are moments for example when we're just sitting watching tv

And, you know, Robin is there, the kids are little and we're just there. And we ended up talking about what would be on the TV, you know, and I went right back to, you know, I don't know, it was a Dean Martin show or, you know, an episode of something, even down to some of the commercials that we wanted to. And those moments were transporting for me, but not in a home the way we were picturing it.

I remember seeing those in an apartment that we lived in for two and a half years when I was walking to school by myself. Or the first years, you know, somebody was married to a step spouse that was not the most benevolent human being in the planet Earth, right? Sometimes I remembered sometimes just that gathering around like-mindedly getting the same thing out of a TV show.

like an electric fireplace, but it was solace. It was a togetherness that belied what was really going on in the house. And there's a couple of those, particularly when the kids are little and Robin and I are in the early years of our marriages, that were sublime right then and there because we're laughing, it's there, the kids are being goofy, there's a moment that comes along

And what I don't think there's a better example of a true sense of family and home and connection in moments that are not Thanksgiving or Christmas morning or a wedding or a kid. They are when you're just sitting around on a Thursday night, you know, content and happy. And nothing is happening except the sense of presence that's there.

There's a couple of them. It's funny that you should ask that because I realize now that the amount of suggestions we all had for how we would sit there, what would be on the TV, what we had done just before, was coming right out of our individual lives, from Bob, from Eric, certainly from Robin and myself. Yeah, it felt so real.

It feels so real. Every scene, every conversation, every event feels so real. One of the things that we learned, because it's shot in this very specific aspect ratio camera position, is that everything works. Everything. If you're in the scene, even if you're not talking, you are registering in a way that

that warrants attention. The stuff that is on the walls, I can't say enough about the TV. Here's something goofy. I walked onto the set one day, and it was from a period from early 1960s or something like that. And the TV was an old General Electric TV that was the same model we had

No. When Apollo 8 flew around the moon, we had, this was the TV. We had this old black and white thing with General Electric. It had this big channel changing knob on the side. It was like that. And it was the same maple cabinet. It wasn't big. It was just not much, you know, it was on legs and it had the cloth speaker. It said General Electric and the thing like that.

And I immediately took a picture of it and I sent it to my siblings. And I said, you recognize this? And they all said, oh, that's a TV from the Johnson house. You know, it was like that. So it had these kind of like talismans that came along with it. Um,

Oddly enough, they were both great to see and bittersweet to remember. Does that make sense? Yeah, for sure, for sure. I know you're fascinated by space. Do you have any desire to go to the moon? Oh, you know, if they were going to do a thing where, you know, regular blokes could just go up and go around it, I mean, I...

I'd take that. You would? Oh, yeah, just to do it. But, oh, yeah, I think it would be... I'm sure Elon Musk would love to take that. Oh, I'm not going with him, but he's not going there anyway. They're just going up now. But I've met, I've talked to the crews that are in line to make the next...

orbit around the moon that could happen as early as 2526 and uh man oh man i just say hey if you need someone just to clean up and crack jokes you got room in there give me give me a call i'll get down to whatever weight requirements are necessary because i wouldn't pass it up but i said but only if all of the windows are are clear because a lot of times those they have gone up and

the windows get kind of like messed up because of zero gravity and the vacuum outside and the building material. Right. Was that fascination only from movies? Is that where it came from? No, no, that came from, I was right smack dab in, I was that, I was that educatable generation for which it was, space travel was the embodiment of every discipline that we were studying. Current events, politics, physics, art, science,

engineering, math. It was all wrapped up all into one. It was on TV regularly. I was just, I was the, of course, now you're going to think about this, but the idea of being alone in space in a space suit, it was kind of mirroring my life when I was like seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 years old. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's, I don't know if you saw that movie, Fly Me to the Moon recently. It's

No, I did not. But it's streaming in the new movie economy, so I know it'll be there for a thousand years. Yeah, I just watched it recently. It was fascinating. It's a little bit of the conspiracy theory really didn't happen yet. Normally, I hate that kind of stuff, but it's good quality people. Yeah, exactly. I'd love to get your thoughts on it when you see it. And your other fascination is World Wars. Well, this is another thing that goes back to...

The study of it, let me put it to you this way. I was born in 1956. That's 11 years after the war is done. So essentially, everybody who is an adult in my life had memories of those years, whether they went to war or not. They had memories of what I like to call the emotional stasis of the early 1940s.

In which, go back again, they did not know the war was going to end. In 1943, they had no idea how long the war was, who was going to live, who was going to die, who was going to win, who was going to not, who was going to come back. 1943, if you're alive, they're not saying, hey, don't worry about it. The war is going to be over in just another 18 months. They don't know that.

And that was a palpable thing that was passed on to me because when it came around time to get to know the life stories of a teacher, a friend of my dad's, you know, parents of my pals.

They would talk about those years, their youth in three distinctive parts, three acts of their lives, you know, which might have been picking up on because, you know, some sort of story sense. When they were kids, it was before the war. When my dad was in high school, it was before the war. When he was working on a farm, listening to the radio and worried about, you know, not being able to afford the dentist, it was before the war.

Then there was, well, that was during the war. It's a whole different storytelling process. The whole different guidelines of the narrative. Well, you have to understand that was during the war. That was 42 was during the war and their daily life was completely different than what it had been. There was less of things. There was this fear of this unseen enemy possible attack. There were blackouts. They couldn't get cling peaches. They didn't have birthday cakes as much. They

They, they didn't, it was during the war. And also say, well, where were you? Oh, well, that was during the war. Well, where were you? Well, I was in a, you know, I was, I was, you know, I was, my dad was in the South Pacific. He was a machinist and he would never have been in the South Pacific as a machiner were not for the war. Then the rest of their lives, when we show up, you know, when, when this next generation shows up, when their kids show up, all this stuff happened. And again, the narrative has completely changed. We have to understand.

That was after the war. So on one hand, there was something to celebrate. But on the other hand, there was, guess what? Life became one damn thing after another in a different way than it had been before the war.

And, you know, the people that you, the people who did it well, you know, the, these storytellers, the teachers, or even the friends of my dad's when we're sitting around and everybody's relaxed on a Thursday night and they're drinking beers, you know, and they're talking about when they're getting to know each other. These, the stories from any one of those acts I thought were, were fascinating, were, were ponderable because, you know,

As a seven-year-old, I'm hearing my dad and my mom and other people talk about when they were seven years old. With the magnifying glass and the division of, well, that was before the war. We did not know what was coming down the pipe. Then everything else that goes along with it. I still can't quite get past the fact that in 1964, the Beatles are on the Ed Sullivan show.

And my dad is of the generation of just 20 years prior.

The war was not yet over. And they had no idea when they were ever going to come home. And now these four kids are up on there singing, yeah, yeah, yeah, and playing guitars and stuff like that. And everybody's making a big deal about it. Part of it is never saw this coming, never would have, never. And in a lot of ways, now us younger generation did not have the same attention span as

For what they had what they had been through I mean until the you know, you could talk about Elvis Presley all you want and rightly so he was a he was a massive generational force changed the world a lot of ways but still vis-a-vis

a World War II generation. The Beatles come along in 1964, and it's almost as though the last vestige of that generation carries import, has weight that we can pay attention to, even though I've never stopped studying of it because at the end of the day, it's just great storytelling. You want to talk about great protagonists, antagonists. You want to talk about the irony. You want to talk about the sensibility

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

There was a time when it was all done. And wars now go on for generations and they go on for decades. And there are no moments when the swords are pounded into plowshares.

Not that that happened in, you know, 100% in 1945. Yeah. It seems as though, like, not that it's any comparison with the events that took place, but our language of this generation has become pre-pandemic.

during the pandemic about that yeah yeah you could maybe you could probably look at it there was a moment certainly the aids crisis came along and the pandemic of the uh of aids that certainly altered all of society in the same way you could talk about it you could talk to an awful lot of guys who will say well you understand that was before aids you know that that means and yeah you would say the same thing about certainly the the the covid pandemic we went through something that

I mean, look, I got grandkids who are now talking about their lives. Well, that was during COVID. And so they didn't go to school and they didn't see their friends. They were trying to do things online. It was really different. And now COVID has let go. And guess what? Now they're just getting on with the rest of the tasks online.

of growing up with their life. So they too, um, you know, it might be a little young to remember, you know, before COVID, but they do. So, yeah. So what's going to be next, do you think? Yeah. What's going to be that next three act structure to our, uh,

to our collective history. Well, as you keep saying, more will be revealed as well. There's a, this, yes, this too shall pass and more shall be revealed. And we will never all know of everything that we need to know. Yeah. In a, you've been seen as the, um, or even in a poll voted the most trusted man in America. There's an anomaly in the vote taking process. After all the times I've lied to everybody. Oh,

no, this is a great movie. Yeah. By all means, come see this movie. That was a lie. Sometimes. How does, how do you, how do you deal with that kind of, Oh, I, you know, I don't know. There's, there's a, um, yeah. Okay. You know, I get it. That's good. I guess that comes around to perhaps the thing that I was talking about, uh, countenance wise, you know, if you were going to take somebody who is, who is an artist and say,

who's the scariest person alive? You'll come off with, I don't know, Vincent Price, whatever. I'm an artist. I'm a storyteller. And I think I'll take that as a testament to

I guess the veracity that I brought to my craft, my choice. I'd like to think that, you know, you go all in on a story on and say, hey, sit down. You might be interested in hearing this, is that it's an honest exchange between myself and the audience. And if it's an honest exchange, then you could come to trust them. You know, that's not a bad thing. That's not a bad thing.

Sometimes life can seem challenging and overcoming problems can seem impossible. But when you focus on your problems, it can keep you from seeing the good in your life. One thing that helps me when I need a change in perspective is acknowledging the small wins in life.

I encourage my team to pay attention to small wins because it helps them see positive outcomes and the steps that they're achieving on the road to a bigger goal. Use the power of small wins to shift your outlook and you will start to see positive changes. State Farm is also there to help you find personal wins and celebrate the small things in life.

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

Of course, you know, Hollywood success, you've spoken about it so many times, which is why we haven't dived into it. And then, you know, a happy, healthy marriage. And how did you know Rita was the one? Like that's, you know, how did you know? Divine providence? You know, maybe it's kind of like the same thing that happened when I was in school and in high school. And I said, this can be school.

There was a thing with Reader where I just thought, wait, it could be like this. It could be like just sit around. It could be like a carefree union. I didn't know that. How about that? Honestly, I had not truly experienced that somehow. And when it's there...

You just kind of go, oh, I, you know, I, I, I, you know, I'd like to say, and then, you know, and then we met and I said, and, you know, and then that was that. Okay. Yeah. That's pretty much it. Then you get on with it. And, uh, you know, years later, uh,

no small amount of, no small amount of me saying things like, oh, let me get this straight. You know, there's a lot of, plenty of, plenty of examples of that going on, you know, with so much so that, oh, here goes dad. Oh, here goes dad with a let me get this straight. Why would it work for me argument? I pull it out. I pull it out all the time. And, you know, we, we,

We do. She does, too. And that's the exchange. Yes. And it remains glorious. And you can't create it anywhere else. You can't fake that. Yeah. There's that beautiful...

acceptance speech that you have in 2020 when you talk about how a man is blessed with this beautiful family oh yeah you're in tears and that you know you can't number one i am a sap number two you i you don't expect you think you're going to be able to get up and you know get away with it so i mean i'm going to get it there'll be some straight shooting i'll see some great stuff but

And I just, you look down and, you know, there's my wife and there's, you know, there's a combination of all my kids, sometimes four or five, you know, they're all just there. And what do you see? I see little babies, you know, and I, you know, I, you know, I see, I see this, this woman that is put up with so much stuff. And you just, you know, life flashes before your eyes a little bit.

And there's that moment of surrealism where it's like, can somebody explain to me how this happened? I'm not quite sure.

And here does the same thing, the movie here, H-E-R-E. Yeah. There's a sense of you're watching your life flash back. What I really loved, okay, I guess we have to be careful about spoiler alerts. I know, I'm trying. I'm trying, I'm trying. We don't want to go there. But I think that it ends up examining this truth that sometimes life passes in the wink of an eye.

And it's like, wow, are we here already? But there's other times in that same wake of an eye, you comprehend it all.

And I think that's what the movie works towards, if I can be so bold. And in many ways, that was the theme that we were all working towards. And even in the perfectness of just the word. It happened here. This is where that happened. Have you ever been in like a really super historic place?

Yes. A few times. Yeah. Where something went down. Now, maybe it's something from thousands of years ago, or maybe it's something that you witnessed on TV yourself. You go to like, you go to like Washington, DC and, uh,

stood on the, you know, look, I made a movie in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I couldn't believe that was happening. And then years later, I'm going back and there is a plaque at the top of the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which is where Martin Luther King stood. And I have since gone back and read about that extraordinary day that did not happen by accident.

In fact, it was originally going to be a protest. It was going to be a sit-in. And the powers that be all got together and said, rather than make it a protest of a sit-in, make it a march. And suddenly also things happened like there were plenty of bathrooms lined up. There were sandwiches that was made for people. There were social services. There were cops. There were army men lined

standing by ready in case it was going to be a riot. And in 1964, 63, a riot was definitely a possibility. It would have been a massive amount of civil unrest. And instead, it was all of these speakers. Marlon Brando was there. Charlton Heston was there, along with everybody else.

And Martin Luther King was, everybody could only speak for seven minutes because they did not want it to run over and become unruly. So everybody who spoke, spoke for seven minutes. And that includes the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. And there's a reason that plaque is there in order to place it. And to be there and say to then just envision everything. It's a powerful place. Mm-hmm.

powerful powerful spiritual yeah are there other places you've been to like that or revisited multiple times to decode and discover and

Oh, yeah. I'll tell you. I'll tell you one. Who cares what I said on other podcasts? When we when we were doing, believe it or not, when we were in Philadelphia, because I was making Philadelphia, kids were, you know, I only had three kids there and some of them were with us. And we were it was a freezing cold day. We had a day off. So we went and saw the sights.

including Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, you know, a whole bit. What are you going to do in Philadelphia? You're going to go do that. You're going to see the Liberty Bell. You're going to go like that. And Independence Hall being a famous place and it's still in the same joint and it still holds the same, you know, dimensional structure to it. You know, maybe a lot of everything that might have been, you know, recreated, but nonetheless, there it is. And we were up in the Senate building and the Senate room, you know, because it had Congress, the Supreme Court, the Senate right there.

And we were there and it's a national park. And the ranger said, if you look at all of this stuff is reproductions except that chair, you know, which is the original chair. I said, wow, it looked the same. It looked like a chair to me. So I said, that chair, that's an original chair. And it looked exactly like the same. He said, all this other stuff has been recreated to the best of its authenticity. And that's a riser there. And he said, that spot.

In front of the dais, John Adams was sworn in as the second president of the United States, taking the place of George Washington. It was the first time in recorded history when the rule of a sovereign nation was passed to another without bloodshed and him not being a relation. It said something like that. And the head, I said, we are in holy ground. Nobody died.

The king is dead long live the king. No one was murdered, butchered. The hordes didn't come in and take away. No one was passing it on to his son in order to go on.

There was no relation between John Adams and George Washington. The only thing that happened was this modicum of a thing they called democracy, which wasn't really democracy. I mean, women couldn't vote. If you were a slave, you were only three-fifths of a human being. The only people that actually voted were a bunch of white men, property owners, who originally didn't want to pay their taxes to the crown.

But look what happened there. I mean, I've been to plenty of cool joints, but this idea, not unlike the place where Martin Luther King stood, the idea that was communicated right there was tantamount to being in some version of the holies, a holies, a precious shrine, a place of great faith and hope. I mean, speaking to that impact,

you received honorary Greek citizenship. Oh, yeah. I got a passport. For your amazing work there. Well, yeah. Yeah, look, we just love Greece. And, you know, it is the home country to my wife's family. And, well, you can do it. This is something that we do in Greece. You know, you go off to some other island, you're swimming somewhere, you're on a boat.

And you can kind of like pivot and all you see is land, sea, and sky. There's no sign of humanity. And you're like, this is exactly what it's looked like.

for 110,000 years. This is exactly what this island was here in this exact same point. And by the way, there's a port right there, which was places of antiquity or that. But to be able to look at something that is unscarred exactly as it was, it's like looking at primordial forests, like going back in time. And you see this aspect of the sky and the wind and the aridness of it, but the power of a ship in order to get there.

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

Specs in the course of all of this is like standing under you know a big massive sky and finally seeing on a really super dark night the you know our galaxy or the Milky Way our solar system and it's like wow I haven't been out of town for a while I forgot how big that sky is and That that's a part of this It's important to go through that so important so important. Have you ever seen a solar eclipse? I

I, I, I'm sure I've kind of, but not, I'm not. Yeah. Not the last one, but the one prior to it, we made sure that we were in the path of totality and we saw it. And Oh my God, it, you, I cannot talk. No special effect in any movie has ever had the same impact or effect on anybody who takes a look at what that is. You feel as though you are witnessing something.

you know, the clockworks of God. And it's, they can predict it. They know what it's going to be. And every step of it is, you cannot fathom what you are seeing. And I, it made me feel on one hand, it made us all feel on one hand, really super tiny, but at the other hand, magnificent because we're a race that knew when it was coming and could predict it, could make sure we're there watching. It was really,

Really marvelous. Where was that? When you read it, there is like these paths. You know, you can look at it on a map. We just made sure that we were up in the panhandle of Idaho in order to take a look at it. People were just parking their cars willy-nilly everywhere in order to be. They were driving from, you know, hundreds of miles on either side of it in order to get to this very specific path of totality. And it is, man. It is a totally immersive experience. Don't miss it if you can. Okay, next one.

Tom, it has been such a joy spending time with you today. I feel so grateful to have been able to hear stories, be taken on adventures, and learn life's lessons through your insights. My boy, it's just been a delightful conversation. I've learned, I've loved hearing about your history, you know, how you got there. Very kind. For the oldest boy of a, what is it, a fractured marriage between an Indian mom and dad, you've...

I think you've done well in your pursuit. Thank you. I'm very grateful. We end every On Purpose episode with a final five. These have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum. One word to one sentence maximum? Yeah, which I will probably break the rules, so don't worry if you do. Okay. But Tom Hanks, these are your final five. The first question is, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received? Throw deep, baby. And why? If you're going to do it, do it.

If you have the chance, do it. Don't pause. Instinct, man. If you've got an instinct, go at it. Throw deep. I love that. Second question. What is the worst life advice you've ever heard or received? Do Fantasy Island. I didn't take it, but there's no reason to do Fantasy Island. That's great. Question number three. How would you define your current purpose? To be present. Okay.

Wherever one is, whoever is around, be present. Be right there. Show up. Be present. Why? Because that will teach you then, I think, how the difference between telling the truth to the best of your understanding and being all right with what happens next. If you can't do that, life is going to be a wasted opportunity, if that makes sense. Mm-hmm.

Question number four. Are you making these up as you go along? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All right, okay. Every single question I've asked you today. What's something you believe you're learning and evolving into right now or something that you're tinkering with right now personally? There is an addictive quality to examining the past that can be counterproductive.

If you're only doing it in order to wallow in a nostalgia of how easy things were back then. I fancy myself a lay historian. Vanity of vanity, all is vanity. There's nothing new under the sun. Okay, so this stuff has been going on forever.

If you are not looking, if I am not looking for examples of the frailties of the human condition, if I'm only looking at the past in a version of there was an antagonist and there was a protagonist and the protagonist won, missing the point of how miraculous the human condition is. If you're going to, I went to Egypt and I saw all the stuff that tourists see when they see Egypt, right?

And if you're going to Egypt in order to come up with some, oh, this is the home of great spirituality as there was a cosmic power here. And this is where, okay, fine, go ahead. I'm not going to tell you that's not what's going on. But if you're not also seeing this ongoing frigging mystery of what humankind has figured out on its own, you're missing out, you know, there's

Yes, they call them the great pyramids. They weren't necessarily built for great reasons. Sometimes they were just built in order to maintain the status quo of the haves and the have-nots. When I heard a guy say, the Sphinx, you know, the great Sphinx? You could have been alive 2,000 years after the great Sphinx was built, and you're still alive.

in pharoahic Egypt. It's still before the Common Era began, and guess what? You and nobody else has any idea who built the Sphinx. That's how old it is, and that it's mailed as well as it. And if you don't take that and understand, like, man, there's mystery there. Who did it? How they did it? That stuff's always interesting. The why they did it. That's interesting, too. But also that incredible impact of that

The Sphinx will never be explained. If you're just there for the nostalgia and you don't want to, you know, ride the camel and get your picture, you can do all that stuff and that's a blast. But there's something to the past that if you allow yourself just to be soothed by it, you

you're missing out on a great life lesson. Something that is important is physics or poetry. So powerful. Why do you think we do that? I think because we're looking for a...

We want to feel good about going to sleep at night. You know, we want to feel as though that there is this, uh, that there is this, this, um, purpose that outside, uh, uh, I think, uh, outside the cosmic understanding that, Hey, you know what, you know, the universe is, uh, indifferent, but the human condition is not. That's what separates us from, you know, um,

you know, the chaos theory. We don't have to live in chaos if we choose not to. And if we're only looking at the past in order for some degree of, oh, it was so much easier back then. No, it's never been easier. As I said before, you know, no one knows that they're living in the 1400s. They were just alive back then. And it might be highfalutin, but what it says is, oh, I'll tell you this, what it says is,

Our best days are yet to come. We are going to progress from here. And if you're just looking at the past and saying, man, that was when it was great. I wish we could go back. No, you never want to go back. You always have to understand that our best days are still ahead of us. Otherwise, what's that say of us if we don't move forward? It says we gave up or got lazy or ended up putting...

too much power in maintaining a status quo that ends up being a division between the haves and the have-nots. Absolutely. Well said. Fifth and final question we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? Man, you spring this on me? Really?

I'm looking at a wall of shame of people, of the Polaroids of people that have been, they all came up with something for that? They did. One law that everybody had to follow, a law, meaning you could be punished if you don't obey this law? Sure. Well, it can't be like a philosophical thing, like be kind, you know, being kind is in the eye of the, both the kinder and the kinder. I would pass a law.

That says, no one is allowed to infringe or prom the right in regards to what somebody else reads. That is, no matter how disagreement, whatever that disagreement is, to be free is to think. And the most

Physical manifestation of thought is in the choose choosing of what you read. So I would say that No one is allowed to a fringe upon the right to determine for interrupt figure out what the legal but no one is allowed to Infringe upon the right of an individual to read what they choose to read That would be mine. That would be the law

Now, take a look at all the societies. I'm fascinated by communism, man, because those guys were idiots. They truly were. And then the idea that in East Berlin, you cannot read...

You cannot read To Kill a Mockingbird or Dr. Zhivago for crying out loud. The idea that you can maintain order in society by preventing somebody from reading what they want to read, this is madness. This is tyrancy in its mode. This is draconian. What's the word I'm looking at? That's despotism at its absolute height.

that you can do that. And I think on the opposite of that, absolute freedom to read what you want to read and along with that, create what you want to create as well. That should be the default position of the human condition. And isn't it amazing that it's not? So that would be the law I would pass.

Powerful, unique, and completely original answers. Worth waiting for. Well, as an author, you know, as a guy who writes, I'll bow to that. Tom, thank you so much again. Oh, this was magnificent. Thank you so much. No, it was great. Such a pleasure. And I can't wait for everyone to go and watch here on November 1st. All right. Yeah, we'll pay that. Oh, yes. Go ahead. Now, by the way, you can only see it in a theater. Okay. Here's the thing. This is why I crack staff is so petrified.

There was no streaming deal for this movie. You're not going to be able to log on, enter your passcode, share it with your friends. The only way you're going to have to drive to a place and buy a ticket at a certain time and sit in a room with a bunch of strangers and watch this movie. It's almost unheard of. And of course, everybody is petrified that that's going to be the requirements.

I'm seeing a movie, but that's the way it's going to be. I love it. Theater is still one of my favorite experiences. Oh, yeah. It's the, you know, not to continue along with that, but there's this thing that we talk about all the time right now. And I actually believe that podcasts can be an example of it. It is the experiential economy, meaning that...

It is one thing. Look, everything is a one-on-one. You listen to a record, you see a band. But the experience of being with others, as opposed to being in your house or being on your headphones or being like that, being with others has a value to it that in some cases is worth money. Okay, that's commerce. But on other cases is to be sought after. My wife and I went to see a play in New York. It was a revival of Into the Woods. Mm-hmm.

And it was more or less right after the pandemic. Theaters were back opening again. People were essentially living their lives again. There'd been enough, you know, everybody gotten enough vaccines and what have you. And COVID wasn't killing as many people as it had. And so we went to the theater because we knew some people in it. And it was, this thing happened. You know, it's a theater. Mumble, everybody, blah, blah, blah. Sold out, big hit.

and mumble, mumble, mumble. And when the house lights went to half for the first act, there was a standing ovation.

People stood up before a word, before a note had been sung. Nothing had happened on the... What was happening was the show is about to start, and it was a standing ovation. And I literally said, that's the experience. People are reacting to the experience of being with strangers or a handful of friends with strangers in a room, and nothing...

What is going to happen in this room will never be repeated. The only people that will participate in this is the folks that are here right now. And movies oftentimes can have that same experience because I can remember going to see 2001 or Jaws or Close Encounters of Aliens or, you know, or.

full metal jacket. I can remember the specifics of all those things. And it's the same experiential experience. And maybe it's part of the economy or maybe it's just part of the great human purchase that we all want to

We want to participate in it. For sure. Thank you, Tom. Thank you. Thank you. Such a pleasure. That was amazing. I really enjoyed it. If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with Will Smith on owning your truth and unlocking the power of manifestation. Anybody who hasn't spoken to their parents or their brother, call them right now.

Now, don't think you're going to have a chance to call them tomorrow or next week. That opportunity with my father changed every relationship in my life. There are three types of people listening to this radio ad right now.

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