Hi there, I'm Jason Gots, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

Since 2008, Big Think has been bringing you big ideas in small concentrated doses from some of the most creative thinkers and doers around.

On Think Again, we take ourselves out of our comfort zone,

surprising my guests and me, your host, with unexpected conversation starters from our

interview archives, ideas that we didn't necessarily come here prepared to discuss.

I'm very, very happy to be here today with William Shatner, the William Shatner. He created the role of Captain James T. Kirk on the original Star Trek and won two Emmys

and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Denny Crane on the practice and Boston Legal.

He's also written nearly 30 best-selling books of fiction and nonfiction and released two awesome albums of music with the artist Ben

Folds and others including Henry Rollins who's been on this show. His newest book,

Zero G, co-authored with Jeff Rovin, is a science fiction terrorism thriller set in

the year 2050. It begins with an unnaturally powerful tsunami that destroys most of the coast of Japan

and follows FBI field agent Samuel Lord as he attempts to unravel the mystery. Welcome to think

again, William. Thank you. That was a long introduction, but very, very well done. Thank you very much.

I want to talk about your book, but before we do that, as I am a long-time Shakespeare fan, and I know you started out in Shakespeare, I wanted to come out of left field and ask you whether you have a favorite character, play, speech, etc. of Shakespeare. Any favorite thing of Shakespeare? I wondered if we could start there. A favorite

Shakespeare character. Character, play, speech, moment, anything. Well, I guess I have to point at

Henry V in which I understudied Christopher Plummer, who was playing Henry Vth at Stratford many, many years ago.

And in the repertory, especially this repertory at Stratford, you open a play and then the

next morning, after you've opened, you start rehearsals on a new play, and then you do that

for four weeks and then open that, and maybe a third and a fourth,

so that the understudy rehearsals would be delayed until you finished opening new plays.

And about the third or fourth day, I was asked to go on stage as the understudy

because Chris was ill for a moment, and they asked me to go on, on and I had never not only had I never rehearsed it

...