William Shatner

William Shatner sits down with Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes on Dropping Names and opens with the moment he still cannot let go of, the time Neil deGrasse Tyson answered him on camera by putting a hand in his face and pushing, hard enough that Shatner went backwards. From there he gets into the kidney stone a Canadian gambling company called him about a week after it was removed, the doctor who handed it back over, the seventy five thousand dollars it fetched at auction and the Habitat for Humanity house in Louisiana that money helped build. There is also the fresh cigar in Cabo San Lucas that put him on the cover of Cigar Aficionado, a full body scan at half past seven that morning, and a cardiologist telling him that two more years of medical advances buys him another ten.

He goes back to the early days too, to live television in New York when he was the twenty three year old with theatre training who could hit a mark and knew his lines while a camera the size of a bookcase rolled into his face, to Queens with a wife and a baby and a subway ride into town, to Harold Clurman nearly firing him from a play until Julie Harris intervened, and to Judgment at Nuremberg, where he sat at the lawyers table watching Judy Garland, Burt Lancaster and Spencer Tracy work. He talks about Yul Brynner on The Brothers Karamazov, Lorne Greene and Bonanza killing his series For the People in the ratings, Christopher Plummer coming back as a Klingon, and Brent remembering the Stephen Hawking poker game on The Next Generation. Then it turns to what he is chasing now, a podcast with his daughter, a Brad Paisley album, a heavy metal record, and a long conversation about feeding artificial intelligence the whole of human writing and what happened the night it wrote him a poem and he started to cry.

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