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July 5, 2018 - Dr. Oz Podcast
44:09
What William Shatner Wants You to Know About His Health

William Shatner has notched up an impressive 50-plus years in front of the camera, with no signs of slowing down. In this interview, Captain Kirk himself is revealing things about his health, and his inspiring career as an actor. What he says has kept him healthy all these years just might surprise you! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Time Text
You have to understand that Elizabeth has been my savior on many levels.
Has this wonderful curiosity about many things, especially about health.
Said there's this great doctor.
I would love him to be our doctor, she said.
And he talks about poop.
And I laughed and laughed.
Hey, everyone. everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz.
And this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Now we corralled at one of my biggest heroes.
I'll tell you right up front, it's William Shatner.
Wow, thanks.
I'll tell you why.
He's here with his beautiful wife Elizabeth, and of course, joined by Lisa as well.
And I'll tell you why.
Like many people...
Absolutely influenced by Star Trek.
And I'm unabashed in my support.
He says influenced, he means obsessed.
Not a little bit.
But I actually remember going to the History of Television Museum here in New York City.
And you can actually get the old Star Trek shows there.
And I just sat there one full day.
I knew one of the people that was running the place and just watched them all.
And you realize what a high quality program it was.
Not because it was science fiction-y and any young male might have been interested in it.
But you actually tackle a lot of social topics that folks who aren't aficionados of the series may not appreciate.
We'll talk about that a little bit.
We'll talk about some of the things you've done since then.
But I want to start off with just a very straight up question.
Have you ever seen Galaxy Quest?
I did.
But I'll tell you what was interesting to me about Galaxy Quest.
They had studied your series so beautifully that they were able to pick on several things.
And my kids, who never really understood Star Trek, and I've got four of them, all watched the movie and they immediately began to get curious about this series.
And there are all kinds of fun scenes.
There's the one scene where the ensign is behind the equivalent of Captain Kirk in that show.
And they're walking into a dangerous setting and the guy who's walking behind the captain says, I'm going to die, I'm going to die.
And the captain says, be calm, you're not going to die.
He says, I'm not going to die, what's my name?
Give me my name.
And of course the captain doesn't know his name.
He says, I don't have a name, that means I'm going to die.
And sure enough, there was an unnamed crewman in one of the scenes, he was a goner.
The guy with the red shirt who always died when we went down there.
Was that your life?
Was that my life?
What do you mean?
That obsession with the Star Trek thing, those conventions?
No, no.
No, no.
Was that my life?
No.
Do people follow you around?
Oh, well, they do, but I mean, that isn't my life.
I try to avoid that.
Star Trek was a job that I would go to, and then at the end of three years it ended, and that was it.
Several years later, when it went into syndication, and this younger audience that you're talking about, your kids, and found it and enjoyed it, and the ratings would go up, then they'd syndicate it more, and suddenly the show became a hit six or seven years after it was cancelled.
Boston Legal ended.
It was a two-hour finale, and it was really very good, and the critique I'm hearing is really wonderful, and I knew it was a wonderful script, so it ended, okay?
It is as unlikely that six or seven years from now, That Boston Legal becomes a movie, as it was when Star Trek was over, and then suddenly became movies and a whole variety of other things.
So let me just, for sake of completion, talk a little bit about what you're doing now, and then I want to go back to the very beginning.
You know, I know you have an agenda about talking to me and to my wife, Elizabeth, who's here with us, and I want to follow that agenda, because I don't want you to be...
You may have a surgery this afternoon, and to be altered in your course might be very bad for the guy who's going to be sliced open.
And I will tell you anything you want to know.
But I also want to tell you that I wanted to interview you, because Elizabeth brought me to you from the Oprah show.
She said, this Dr. Oz is one of the great doctors.
I want him to be our doctor.
Because we have a variety of interests in medicine, which...
Alternative medicine.
I've been reading the last several years a lot of alternative stuff.
And Dr. Williams and Dr. Sinatra and all those things.
And I voraciously have devoured that in the interest of health and what are the answers?
I mean, I know it's an art form and there are no direct answers, but...
A considered opinion on alternative medicine was something we were seeking.
Isn't that true, Lizzie?
It's absolutely true.
Seeking just not only preventative and Western medicine, but Just the whole mind-body connection and trying to find a group of doctors or a doctor that's doing that consciously in Los Angeles.
And that is a pressure.
I mean, how do you handle that?
If you're seeking that, where do you go?
So we're coming to you to find out where.
They're going to interview you now.
We're switching the show here.
I want to apply myself to your questions of me, but will you leave yourself open to some of our questions today?
I would love to.
Let's do them now, because it's a very real question.
Just at the outset, let me say that my personal philosophy on alternative medicine, complementary medicine, it goes by many terms, I usually call it integrative medicine.
Right, exactly.
Just because I don't think that it's outside of the realm of conventional medicine, which is what I was trained with.
But if you think about your life in media, Mr. Shatner, you've made content.
Please, it's Bill.
Bill, can I call you Doc?
You can call me Doc Mehmet.
Hey, you.
Over there.
The content that you've created is broadcast all over the planet.
It's global.
If you think about financial crises, it's a global one.
It's very difficult to isolate one country from another.
Medicine never went through that.
Medicine has stayed remarkably provincial.
It is practiced in a community the way the doctors were taught by their predecessors and influenced by their mothers.
So if my mom...
She talked to me about how to think about the world around me.
She would use logical ways of thinking about the world.
Things you could actually see were things that were real.
And so I became affected by that bias.
So when I became a doctor, I needed to see it to believe it.
Until he met me.
Until I met Lisa.
What did you say?
I said, until he met me.
Oh, right.
And then it all was upside down.
The whole thing degenerated, though.
But the way medicines practice in Shanghai is not just different from New York.
The way medicines practice in Boston differs from Houston.
And so when you talk about the globalization of medicine, it's about incorporating approaches to healing that are distant, outside your realm of comfort.
It stretches us.
And I think that if we can think about integrative medicine as the globalization of this process, moving away from the provincial, then I think everyone gets more comfortable with it.
Right, but the statement that one keeps reading, that mankind practiced medicine Long before the hundred years of modern medicine, if you will.
Since, what is it, Pasteur?
Actually, the modern era of medicine, I would argue, started in 1906. And actually, 1909 to be specific.
And that's when the Flexner Report was published.
And most folks don't realize this.
But prior to that time...
By the way, this is the time of Sinclair and all we're writing about, the horrors of the way the beef industry was slaughtering cattle.
There were all these changes that were occurring in America as industry came under scrutiny.
But doctors until that time were trained as indentured servants.
I'd go out and I'd hang out with a doctor who had already gotten a degree of some kind and they'd spend two, three years letting me follow them around.
Then I would get my own degree.
You didn't have to go to medical school.
And so in 1909, the Flexner Report was published that said, no, that doesn't work.
You have to have some codified, organized way of training doctors.
Otherwise, you don't know what you're getting.
So then, because of that, American universities started getting involved in training doctors.
Now, who did the doctors, the group, line up with?
They didn't go with the humanities department.
They went with the science department.
So it automatically introduced a bias into how we train doctors that was going to be purely scientific.
And there was another influence, too.
Did you read the book, Charlatan?
Yes, I did.
I think charlatan is one of the great stories of our time.
So the AMA began sort of in the 1920s because of this guy on the radio.
This guy was a charlatan.
He was going to put goat...
Thymus.
Different glands from animals.
Well, glands from the scrotum.
Yes, yes, those glands.
Goat lands into men.
And he was advertising on the radio.
And he was out of control.
And there was an FBI. Anyway, it's a great story.
But the burgeoning medical community began to organize around that time.
And it became the AMA, right?
Well, that story, just to follow up on it real quickly, it was actually one of the reasons that country music got so large.
Because they actually would open up these mega studios just over the border in Mexico.
In Mexico, thousands.
A million watts.
A million?
You remember it?
A million watts.
So, in any case, the part about this whole story that was fascinating to me when I started to figure out why we are so Western, you know, blocked off in medicine, because think about the word.
I'm a doctor, right?
The word doctor means teacher.
But I'm also called a physician from the Greek physics, scientists.
But I practice medicine, which is about healing.
Yes.
The very words mean different things.
Right.
But, and more to the point, you're a surgeon.
Yes.
You decided, and we all know that, or it's assumed, that the choice of your specialty is an indication, a light, a tunnel towards your personality.
Right.
So a surgeon is the exact opposite of generalized medicine.
Well, not really.
Here's why.
It's very interesting you say that.
The most superstitious people by far that I know are surgeons.
Really?
Yeah.
If I lose a patient, I throw my underwear away.
There's bad karma in there.
There's something wrong with them.
Everything gets tossed.
Did you do something in your underwear?
Perhaps.
No, no.
When he plays tennis, he always touches the ground before he serves.
Are you serious?
It's fascinating.
The reason I touch the ground in tennis is because it's a rote movement that sets up the brines.
It stretches the back.
You're a hamstring.
He wears lucky shoes.
I feel better.
I don't want to go to a guy who's depending on luck to cure it.
It's the nature of the beast.
Let me tell you what the real mindset difference is.
The reason I went into surgery, the reason I like to heal with steel.
Heal with steel?
Yes.
It's great.
And by the way, one other thing about surgeons...
You don't want to fade with a blade, though.
Oh, my goodness.
I see a rap tune coming up.
But, you know, surgeons are often an error, but they're never in doubt.
So you have to have the right mindset.
There are many, many times when we're not sure we're doing the right thing.
Your biggest enemy in the operating room is indecision.
Wow.
You know, you're better off making a mistake.
Well, no, it is indecision for your incision.
Yeah.
He's a poet.
See, we knew this.
From Paiseline, we knew you were a poet.
It's haiku.
But now it's like a whole new level.
Well, that's true, I imagine.
You've got to slice.
It must be incredible.
You take the sharp blade that you've ground down.
You're standing there surrounded by people in awe of you.
Your hands are up in the air like in surrender.
And then the palm goes out.
Something is slapped, and you make a slice.
Does music come on?
Oh, sure.
Is that like a conductor?
We actually have...
Bum, bum, bum, bum, slice.
No, you try that like Tchaikovsky usually.
But you know, we actually...
Not made of them.
But we actually play music in the OR for that very reason.
We play different kinds of music when we take the 22 blade or the large scale knife and we slice down the sternum to open the bone.
You take that bandsaw...
And you go through there, you want something just hammering away at you.
You know, Led Zeppelin.
Why?
Because the emotion at that point is an aggressive one.
Is that right?
Wagner.
You're getting in.
Wagner.
I've never heard this.
But when you're doing the actual bypass grafts, for example, when you're sewing with a suture the thickness of a strand of hair.
The arteries together to do the bypasses.
You want Vivaldi, Asia, you know, you want soothing, calming, meditative tunes.
The reason we started doing research on integrative medicine in the operating room initially was because we were doing these high-risk operations where people were just barely staying alive.
But the reason we began to use music, which is the first of the integrative therapies, was one of my perfusionists said, you know, we're playing all these tunes for our benefit.
But the patients are hearing these too.
Of course they are.
So why don't we give them the music they want?
Because they're having a very different experience than ours.
And although they're theoretically asleep, we've learned subsequently, and we did a lot of this research, it was stimulated by integrative medicine research work, that actually people have awareness when they're having surgery.
So although you're asleep in a way that you don't feel the pain, Your implicit memory, your deeper consciousness is awake.
Wow.
So we actually can influence how you think after surgery by what we play in your ears.
By the way, I want to emphasize this.
We never would have done that research if it wasn't for an interest in integrative medicine.
If we weren't trying to figure out if it made a difference to play audio tapes in your ears, we wouldn't have bothered figuring out That placing audiotapes, playing certain types of words could change your mind.
We would do work where we'd say, okay, listen to the following words.
Black.
What word comes to your mind?
What color?
The average American will say white.
But if I put you to sleep, and once you're asleep, I play black, brown, black, brown, only while you're under anesthesia.
When I awaken you, five days later, you're about to go home, and sort of like Columbo, you say, oh!
Mrs. Rosenbaum, before you leave, what color comes to mind, could I ask you, if I say the word black, she'll always answer brown.
Wow.
So now we play word tapes that tell you to take deep breaths, walk early after surgery, trust us, pay our bills, all the things that are...
Critical to our success.
And I just point that out, and we'll come back to this topic after the break, but integrative medicine is not just about incorporating other ideas.
It's about changing medicine, because it opens up a whole vista of opportunities.
And before you go to the break, the headline is, mankind has been practicing medicine for 100,000 years, prior to the 100 years of the AMA. And we were helping with home cures and natural cures long before this.
There's lots more to come, but first, a quick break.
Can I give you a biography just for two seconds?
I'm not going to mention Star Trek again.
I'm enjoying this hearing about you so much.
Police Sergeant T.J. Hooker, of course you all remember him in the early 80s.
A bunch of Emmys, Golden Globe, recently finished up with his last remarkable success story with Boston Legal.
And he's in a news talk show, which I want to come on!
You're the next guest.
If I get an order for another 13, you're on.
Please.
On Tuesday nights at 10, 9 o'clock central on the Biography Channel.
Which is right next to the A&E Channel.
Which is right next to the A&E Channel, in case you lose it on the dial.
Biography in general, you know, it's cool to get inside someone else and understand what made them who they were.
And that's why I'm looking...
On this program to do to you.
I do my pre-interview of you, although we don't do pre-interviews.
We just start talking like this and edit down the finest moments.
So, here's the thing.
He's totally taken over.
No, no, I'm not taking over.
This is the burning question for a lot of people like Elizabeth and me.
Talk about alternative medicine.
You get alternative ideas, concepts.
And one of the things you hear about is doctors that are trained in modern science, modern doctors that belong to the AMA, will We'll say the most expensive urine is the vitamins and minerals you're taking, in addition supplements you're taking, and it's the most expensive urine because it doesn't do any good.
And then you get this whole group of other AMA doctors, Western trained doctors, let alone The millions of people in China and India who are doing folk home remedies.
That's not quite the word to express what they're doing.
Traditional Chinese medicine.
Ancient folklore that they used for thousands of years to heal the very things we're trying to heal here in Western America.
But doctors change their mind, too, because if you asked anyone 10 years ago, they would have told you taking vitamin D was a waste of time.
And now they're all shoveling it down your throat.
So they do...
Vitamin D and vitamin C, for that matter.
Yeah, but a lot of doctors aren't.
The jury's still out with the Western doctors.
They're still not.
They're saying, oh, vitamin C, you just piss it out.
It's that kind of argument.
So, yes, do you guys have an opinion on that?
Yeah, I have a very strong opinion.
But before I forget, by the way, Up Till Now, which is your new autobiography, he's got this very studly-looking picture of you when you're 16 years of age.
Yes.
For all the female listeners out there, Elizabeth, I don't know if you saw this picture before you got married.
Several of them.
That's not the only one, but yes.
But the reason you look like that is because you grew up in Canada getting enough sun so that you got some vitamin D in your body because you would not have developed that way.
The fact of the matter is all these vitamins that you're asking about are essential to our existence.
The challenge occurs in two areas.
Number one, can you get it from the environment or from the foods?
That's really the only real argument.
Everyone knows you have to have vitamins.
So we did a survey about On realage.com, which is the website that Mike Roizen, who's my, we write all these review books together.
He's my book writing partner.
And this is, you know, 25 million people that fill out these surveys.
So it's pretty comprehensive.
And we estimate that less than a tenth of a percent of people in North America get enough nutrients from the foods they eat, either because they eat the wrong foods or because our food supply has changed so drastically.
A tenth of one percent?
Yes.
Now, you might argue, and you have, that you pee it out.
So what difference does it make?
You pee out your chemotherapy, too.
You pee out your antibiotics.
So the fact that you clear it from your body doesn't mean it doesn't work while it's in your body.
Now, vitamins do need to be taken in split doses.
And by that I mean you take half in the morning, half in the evening, because you do urinate them out.
So in order to keep a good level in your bloodstream, you should take the vitamins you take and divide them.
I don't believe in really expensive vitamin programs.
I think many folks overdo it, but the basics of vitamins, A, B, C, D, and E, the key five vitamins, with D being the most important, that's why sun exposure is so critical to our well-being, combine that with some basic minerals, calcium, magnesium in particular, and then the third pill is omega-3 fats.
That's the regimen.
Those three pills, which cost you a buck or two a day...
And CoQ10.
Well, if you're the average person, then you take different circumstances.
You'll need other vitamins as well, or higher doses of some.
If you have any kind of heart issues, CoQ10, absolutely.
But for general energy metabolism...
You tailor your vitamins to who you are.
And what you don't hear, for example, is if you're taking statins, which is now the most popular thing, and that recent survey where you take a statin even if you don't need it, and it'll improve your health.
I mean, how controversial is that?
It's not controversial for me.
Don't do it.
I don't think you should do it.
By the way, the real question you need to be asking yourself, if you're out there listening to this program, is how many people like me Need to be treated for one to benefit?
That's the question you should be asking your doctor.
Say that again?
If you're on any medication, how many people like me need to be treated in order for just one to benefit?
So, for example, if I was going to take a commonly used drug like a statin, that number might be very, very low, which is a good thing.
So you have to treat 10 people for one like me to benefit because you're using it for the right reasons.
But if you use it for the wrong reasons, you might have to treat 500 people to get one to benefit.
And that's the best way for us to really assess whether you should be taking a pill or not.
And combine that with one other fact.
Institute of Medicine data, well described.
If you're on more than six medications, you're going to have a drug-drug interaction.
You're going to have a side effect from it.
And does that include vitamins?
Yeah.
Well, it includes, not vitamins, but it includes anything that's outside what the body naturally has.
Aspirin, cold medicine, anything that you take over the counter.
And what about bioidentical medicines and nano?
We're hearing all about nano and bioidentical.
Now, does a bioidentical count as a medicine?
I would count bioidentical as a medicine only for one reason, in that it's a different amount than your body naturally is making.
And so there's always the possibility that we're giving you too much.
Or something else is going on in that beautiful cascade of events that maintain your homeostasis, your balance in life.
So you're actually shifting that balance a little bit.
Now you may want that because you may want more libido, you may want more energy.
There are reasons, very defensible reasons, and I actually like bioidentical hormones and I'm supportive of their being used appropriately more widely than they are today.
But they definitely count as one.
But again, take an example of the typical male who's got belly fat.
If you've got belly fat on, you're going to develop high blood pressure, odds are.
You're going to develop high lousy LDL cholesterol, odds are.
And you're going to develop some insulin resistance, so you'll get some level of high blood sugars.
Those three things, which are called the metabolic syndrome, usually require four, sometimes five medications to treat.
But you already get your sixth litmus, so you either lose the weight, or you start taking the five medications.
Losing the weight, it gives you longevity, which is why we push this issue so much, because I don't think we're going to change healthcare in Washington.
We're going to change it in our homes.
You spoke earlier, Bill, about the fact that for millennia, for all known history, we've had healers that have made things work pretty well.
The reason that people live long in the countries that are called the blue zones, Okinawa, Sardinia, Costa Rica, Noma Linda, California, which is one of the blue zones.
Really?
Yeah.
Tibet.
Some parts of Tibet.
But the reason that these people live so long is not because they have access to what I do in open heart surgery.
And if I get rid of all the cancer in America, we'd live for 2.8 more years.
I mean, that's so small.
Statistically.
Statistically.
It's the frailty.
That hurts us.
When we get frail and we get cancer, we die.
If we're vigorous, we might still have a problem with the cancer, but we'll weather the storm more easily.
Same for heart disease or any other problem you may have.
So the real lesson in alternative medicine, and the reason I'm so supportive of the integration of medicine, is number one, it emphasizes more than any other advance in medicine that it's up to you.
Not because it's your fault, but because only you can do it.
And I think that's the big message that integrative medicine is carrying forward.
Well, that and the knowledge of how to do it.
Well, then you've got to learn it.
Yes, you have to become enlightened.
And the doctors who, you know, you're talking about Lebanon, Indiana, the doctors there have to know it and teach it and purvey that knowledge to their patients.
But Bill, do you know how we learn in medicine?
We learn in two ways.
Once we finish medical school.
I talked about the Flexion Report, and we're educated in scientific institutions, and that's all great.
Once we finish our training, we learn in two ways.
A drug rep comes in and gives us a newest study.
I'm being very frank about this.
Which has been funded by that drug company.
Yes, and by the way, there's no evil empire here.
Everyone out there listening, you've all invested in the stock market, and those funds, your pension funds, they're all invested in companies.
Drug companies do a great job building new medications that change life, but they're in the business to prove that their products work and disseminate that knowledge.
That's what they do.
They can't make money doing that.
Of course they make money.
They're in the business of making money just like any other company.
That's not bad.
It's not evil.
But the reality is they're going to study things that they think might be able to be profitable.
You don't want to invest in a company studying if vitamin C cures cancer because they're going to prove it and someone else is going to profit from it.
So that's just how the system is.
So I'm not trying to blame anybody.
I'm just stating the facts.
So the first way doctors learn...
It's because someone walks into our office and says, look at this great new study done on 25,000 people.
It cost $40 million to do.
It proves that this drug works for this ailment a lot of times.
And so now all of a sudden you're trained to use that drug for that ailment.
The other way we learn, which is the more authentic way, is through our patients.
That is how healers and shamans and The priest and any other healer always did it historically.
So when we take care of somebody and they share their insights with us, when they're a smart patient, we learn.
So if you're out there listening right now and you've got insights about coenzyme Q10 and you want to share those with your doctor, don't be bashful.
That's how we learn.
And every other patient that that doctor sees benefits because you took a few moments to educate your physician.
Well, and just apropos of that, I think anybody taking a statin, which I'm taking, Needs to know that CoQ10 is absolutely essential, and in my own immediate family, people who are taking statins had leg cramps, and to the degree of saying this is impossible, within a week or two of taking CoQ10, we're relieved of those very things.
Isn't that remarkable?
And it is so frequently occurring, and folks don't know that, and we've mentioned it on this show numerous times.
I am telling you that I don't understand why the drug company doesn't combine statins and CoQ10.
Oh, it's happening.
Yeah, but why does it take him 10 years?
That gets in the issues of patents and the like, but that for sure is happening.
And also, use of vitamin C and E, which is also commonly used by folks on statin drugs, needs to be cut down because the statin drugs work very much as an antioxidant and as an anti-inflammatory agent.
And that action of a statin is inhibited by high-dose vitamins C and E. So if you're going to take a statin drug, you need to take lower doses of vitamin C and E. Now, I'm just bringing this up because these are the kinds of insights you're out there listening, you know, 10 million of you out there hearing the story, you listen to it, take it home, talk to your docs about it.
It gets a couple of those physicians to think about it differently and all of a sudden the movement starts happening.
Now, William Shatner, born in Canada, has a childhood that somehow gets them into acting.
Walk me through, forget about, you know, your vision for what your future was going to be.
What would drive someone with an otherwise promising future to go into acting?
Well, if you're talking about me specifically, I never had any other fate in mind.
I was six, and I was in a camp play, and I was very effective, apparently, and the audience was crying, and it was Sunday, parents' day at the summer camp, and my mother and father were there, and somehow I moved the audience.
Whereupon the end of the play, my father's picked me up.
I can still visualize being in my father's arms, saying, this is my son Billy, and everybody goes, oh, Billy, you were so good.
And I don't remember looking around, but I must have looked around and thought, hey, this is hot stuff.
I did that up there, and look at the kudos, look at the love I'm getting.
And I was six, and I never wanted, pretended, studied anything else.
And to my father's...
Disturbance.
Chagrin.
I'm trying to think of a stronger word than chagrin.
And not quite a murderous rage.
But he didn't want me to because nobody made a living being an actor in his knowledge.
And my fate was sealed.
And so that was my dedication from that moment on.
We're going to talk about your post-Star Trek life, because it's been a remarkable one, and it's chronicled in Up Till Now, which is a great title, by the way, of your new autobiography that just came out.
But the Star Trek experience is one that at the time, and I've heard you tell others this, you weren't aware of how impactful it was going to be at the time.
How could you have been?
But as you look at some of these shows, they were so perfect for that era.
And, you know, they addressed some of the post-World War II optimism that the country had.
There was a true belief that science and cooperation could cure all.
That happened in medicine, too.
We really thought, when I went into medicine, I really thought that once I went through the process and learned it all, that I could cure anything.
And then one day, of course, you all die.
I knew that, but I'd cure everything until then.
When did it sort of strike you that what you were doing was just right on target, that it would resonate with the average American and Canadian?
It never struck me that way, but to broaden the horizon of what you're saying, 40, maybe now 50 years ago, I read Rachel Carlson's Silent Spring.
I was in on the concern of the environment before people became aware.
I have a friend, a doctor friend here in New York, who was part of the commission, I forgot now, I knew all the details at one time, examining what smoking does to the lungs, and And the discovery of, oh my God, lung cancer is caused by smoking.
I was in on the beginning of that because of my association with some of the people here.
Had you smoked?
I had smoked, but I didn't give up smoking for that reason.
I gave up smoking because one of my girls, when I went to hug her, said, Daddy, you smell?
I said, I smell?
Yeah.
What do you mean I smell?
Yeah, I smell.
And vanity was my motivation.
I just stopped smoking.
I wasn't addicted because I was able, apparently, to just throw the cigarettes away, and that was 30 years ago.
The Rocketman video, you're just totally engulfed.
The Rocketman video?
Is that what you said?
Yes.
Have you introduced that to this?
Well, it's just all smoke.
All smoking all the time.
I was trying to be Frank Sinatra.
I know, it was very good.
That's great.
That's great.
I spoke, but I didn't inhale.
That's right.
No, actually, I was noticing that.
But there were some times, and again, this was actually, there was a nice retrospective done at one of the museums here in New York, looking at the historical significance of Star Trek.
You remember the one where the guy was half black and half white?
Yes, that was one of the great shows.
Yeah, it was.
See, those are the kind of dramas where you don't preach But there's no question.
I mean, it enters your subconscious if you're not conscious.
Oh, look at that.
He's half black, he's half white, and there's no difference.
Just for the audience, a few of you who haven't seen this, so there's two fighting tribes or populations.
Half of them are black on one side of the face and white on the other, and the other half have the same thing, but the opposite sides of their face.
And in the very beginning, you sort of are challenged to figure out what the difference is until they point it out.
And...
We didn't know then, when that show was written, what the DNA tells us about our origins anyway.
We were black to begin with.
Exactly.
And we turned pale and pallid in the higher climes.
I mean, it's just, it's bizarre.
Yes, we didn't understand DNA then, and we understand DNA now, but intuitively, everybody realized that, except for a deeper tan, you're all the same.
There's lots more to come after the break. - Elizabeth, Elizabeth, you've asked about integrative medicine, and I just want to be clear for everyone out there listening that, you know, vitamins, supplements, and herbs, and bioidenticals, these are all part of integrative medicine, and there's alternative approaches.
But the biggest advantage that alternative medicine offers us is a whole new way of thinking about the body.
The role of energy, for example, which we don't measure.
And because we can't measure it, we try to ignore it.
Is that metabolism?
Not just metabolism.
The foundation of traditional Chinese medicine, which is Tai Chi, many of the martial arts, even the acupuncture, these are all based on a belief that there are energy meridian within the body.
And those energy meridian have to be cajoled and manipulated sometimes to give you true vitality, give you the health you desire.
Because in America, we define health as not being in the hospital.
But many of us are out there living at 30% of what we want to be in life.
I want to move those people to 80%.
You're not going to get there just with a pill.
Some of this is going to take actions that are beyond what we can traditionally even acknowledge as possible.
But there's also a psychological element.
Well, yeah, the whole body, mind, spirit thing.
Yeah, I mean, you have to be motivated to get out of bed and go do something.
Yeah.
Whether it's physical or emotional or mental or caring or...
But somebody who's retired, for example, going into that area, I don't understand that.
We're retiring from what?
You're retiring from life.
You want to go sit in a balcony?
What is that?
You may not like your job, so you retire from the job, but you've got to go get another job, whether it pays or not.
Whether it's caring for somebody, some kind of service, some kind of...
So you feel useful and do something with your life and a reason to get out of bed and take three steps out of bed instead of one.
My wife, my vital, healthy, wonderful wife, and I have so many plans to do things that we've never done.
We want to go to the south of France.
We're passionate about our horses, about our dogs, and about our family.
We're...
Emotional commitment is a huge factor in all this life that we're talking about.
Because you can take all the vitamin C you want, but if you're alone and ailing, it's not going to do you any good.
So, let's go back to...
By the way, we were talking earlier about understanding of genetics, but you also had...
Like Khan, for example, which is a very reasonable fear with eugenics and manipulation of the human biology.
Right.
Now, I was writing a book, which I ultimately ended, entitled, I'm Working on That.
LAUGHTER I love it.
And I was in on the tail end of the final decoding of DNA. I went up to upstate California where they were, you remember, there were two groups.
There was the government group and the private group.
They were decoding at the same time.
And within weeks of each other, they had made the final, or what they thought was the final decoding.
I was writing about that, about the DNA and how they were beginning to read it.
So, again, for the millions, certainly hundreds of thousands of years that we, mankind, has been practicing health, we didn't know anything about DNA, and yet they were able to breed animals and yet they were able to breed animals that had the characteristics they wanted without knowing anything about DNA.
How often do you think that art predates science?
I mean, have you thought about these crazy ideas and then people were influenced by them and they crazily had them happen because they didn't know they were impossible?
There is nothing that we can't think of that we could ultimately do.
With enough application, whether that's money and time or just the energy of an individual, nothing that we can't imagine.
And that's our limitation of what we can imagine.
We're so limited by our imagination.
So breaking the boundaries of our imagination is another huge force in the very things we're talking about here.
Because we can only think of four limbs and a head and eyes in the front of our head, other life forms alternative universes.
The concept is metaphysical and we think it's impractical and it doesn't exist because we can't feel it or touch it.
We just merely have to remember that with all the instruments we have, doctor, with all the Electronic devices that you have looked into, we're still seeing a particle of what's out there.
We can't amplify enough to see the full range of light and the full measure of sound and the magnification of matter.
Where does it end?
It goes...
There's a unifying theory out there, and some people call it God.
I don't.
There's a mystery out there.
But we all have to be aware that it is a huge mystery, and all the things we're talking about now are some small part of that application.
Vitamins and C and D and E. We know that's not all there is, but that's all our knowledge and our imagination allows us to see at the moment.
I'll serve on your crew.
But you want a name.
I need a name so I don't die.
You're wearing a pink shirt.
Doesn't show blood well enough.
All the subtleties of surviving on Star Trek.
So what was the lowest point?
I mean, you've had this wonderful...
The lowest point for you throughout all this.
Of life?
Yeah.
There have been a lot of low points.
People who die on...
Well, death is always unexpected, but death is such a mystery that...
When you love someone and they die, you wonder, what was that?
There was a life that went on, now the life is over.
Is it possible that that is all there is?
And you see death all the time.
And the mystery of death is...
And the contemplation of your own death.
That's...
I don't know whether I'd refer to it as a low time, but it's a frightening time.
Fright is perhaps the lowest time.
And fright of being alone.
And that, I think, is part of the fright of death.
You're going to die and be alone again.
All the things you build up, a career, a family that you surround yourself with for the avoidance of that singular loneliness that we all are essentially...
And when you see it exemplified by somebody you love dying, that certainly is a low point, I suppose, but it is the most fearful part of life, is contemplation of death.
There's a darkness and a blackness that we all, once in a while, are awakened to realize is there.
You know, I know you're aware, seeing people die under your hands, that there are books, and especially the Book of the Dead, is that the one, that describe that you should be conscious of Beautifully
stated.
Yeah.
I'm going to confide something to you guys.
In order to sell the Dr. Oz show and syndication, you have to actually make a little promotional tape.
And there's only one scene in the whole promotional tape that did not involve me.
And it involved my guest today, William Shatner.
And there was a scene in the show, and I wasn't there on set, but I heard about it when the show aired, where Oprah invites you up to the stage.
You sit down and you say, this is where Dr. Oz is!
And you said...
You know, I love Dr. Oz for something like that.
And they took it out, it was perfect, and they snipped it in there.
Because you're so recognizable, so authentic.
But you have to understand, you have to understand that...
Elizabeth has been my savior on many levels.
Has this wonderful curiosity about many things, especially about health.
Said there's this great doctor.
I would love him to be our doctor, she said.
And he talks about poop.
And I laughed and laughed.
Teach me about horses a little bit.
You know, Lisa grew up at a horse farm.
Her mother and she both ride a lot.
Our kids have horses.
And I'm always curious why other people got addicted to it.
All right.
Let me preface this by saying Liz is a horse trainer by trade and was a horse trainer for well more than 20 years, all her life, until she met me and then gave up being a professional.
And then over the number of years it takes to get her status as an amateur, has become an amateur like me, but she's a superb horsewoman.
I've been connected with horses for 25, 30 years.
They're expensive, and you need a little money to...
And especially one horse is never enough, and then you start adding to what you can do.
I have...
Been able to get beyond the techniques of horseback riding, beyond the lessons, beyond the consciousness of being in a saddle, and get into the unconscious participation of the experience of the unity of horse and rider.
The mind-body connection with another species.
I mean, that's a miracle.
And when you can accomplish that, it just releases all kinds of endorphins and you realize how privileged you are to be able to communicate non-verbally, sometimes verbally, with an animal.
I never stop talking.
I'm in the back of a person like, oh, that's great.
It's okay.
It's exactly right.
I never shut up.
That's exactly right.
The horse is talking to you.
You're talking to the horse with your hands, with your legs, with your body.
And all of a sudden you realize that there's this other entity, this other living thing that's saying, I'd like to go now.
No, you can't go.
Well, let's run now.
Okay, let's both of us run.
And you, I have had, now frequently, The experience of thinking, of feeling, that the horse and I are one, and the running horse is me running.
An extension of your own body.
An extension of my own body.
And we do reining.
We're reiners, as well as show horses, which are American Saddlebirds.
We're reiners and quarter horses.
And...
Raining is sort of a dressage, a form of western dressage.
So you're speaking, you're not just on a trail enjoying the trees and enjoying the ground and the sights.
You're on a horse saying, ready, ready, and you know your body is telling the horse, ready, ready, ready, stop and slide.
And the horse slides 30 feet.
And you, like a skier, you suddenly have shushed into the mountain.
And now you're turning and you're moving and you're galloping and you're stopping again.
And you're turning.
You're whirling as fast as a dervish.
And then you're off again.
And it is joyful beyond anything other than this poverty-stricken description.
I'm getting goosebumps.
Anyway, on that note, so wonderful getting to know both of you.
Elizabeth, William Shatner, thanks for joining us.
I hope folks are resonating to all the beautiful prose, poetry, and knowledge you're sharing with all of us in America.
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