My guest today, Werner Herzog is a trailblazing filmmaker. He's also an actor,

and author and a poet. But more than anything, he's a character, he's a free thinker, and he's a lifelong

rulebreaker. So I said, two things I really will teach you, number one, lock picking, and number two foraging of documents.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Leavitt.

The people portrayed in Werner Herzog movies often walk a tight rope between genius

and madness.

Reading his recent memoir entitled

Every Man for Himself and God Against All,

one can't help but think that

Ferner Herzog himself isn't so different. So, Verda, you've had a truly remarkable life and you tell your story in a new memoir entitled Every Man for Himself and God against All.

And what you've done is all the more amazing because you were born into extremely difficult circumstances.

Born in Germany during World War II,

raised in a tiny remote village in Bavaria by a single mom,

I think it's almost impossible for people living in today's world to imagine what your childhood was like.

Could you paint a picture?

Well, actually I was born in Munich, but I was only two weeks old when there was carpet

bombardment on Munich and everything around destroyed

and my mother finds me in my cradle

with a thick layer of glass shards and debris and bricks upon me.

So she got frightened and grabbed my older brother and me and fled into the mountains.

So we were some sort of refugees or displaced people and of course not easy to

grow up because it was deep poverty nothing was there we had for example no running water. You had to go to the well with a bucket.

...