Dr. Peter Weller
speaker
668 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Peter Weller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Is that the heralding, and I'm paraphrasing what Leo said, the heralding of any book is a violation of the first commandment.
Look, I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. And that includes books, man. Or images or anything or sacrosanct objects or whatever. And the book is not the God. And I said, oh, Leo, how many Jews and Christians have you said that to? He goes, Peter, not many. Because it angers them. That's so interesting. He says there is no holy book.
The book is only the writing of the... So the next thing I do, I'm at UCLA at the time. By the way, the only reason why he called me is because he heard from the Met and all the hoity-toity people at the Met. Because he goes into the Met and said, oh yeah, Leo Steinberg. This is the Metropolitan Museum in New York. You understand? This is one of the apexes of sophistication of art.
From Phoenician chariots all the way to whatever, to Vermeer. And Leo says, oh yeah, Leo will come in once in a while and he'll hold forth on someone. I go, what do you mean hold forth? He says, well, he'll walk about Duccio, who's a medievalist, Spatial Theory, to the figurative lines of Peter Paul Rubens. I go, oh my God. Was somebody going to call this son of a bitch for me?
And finally get a call. Is this Peter Weller? The actor who is working on PhD? And he asked me that question. I go back, do you think, how do you find your own jam with regards to many different passionate points. And my answer is this, what my dad said, A, stay out of bars. That's a good one. That's a really good one. Because bars will just waste you. It doesn't necessarily waste your time.
My brother decided to drink again and went to the bars. And he said, look, I'd rather spend time in bars with my Vietnam vet friends. So get off my back. That's his choice, man. And he died of alcoholism. So you know what? That's his choice. That's another thing. I can't save people Who are not looking for answers. Me, I'm looking for answers.
But that's just me. And so I say, A, find out what you're really passionate about. And by the way, that's written in Sanskrit. Find out what you really want to do and do that. That's not 21st century hypo blah. Find out what you really want to do and do that. And then when you're doing that, if you find out something else you really want to do, do that. But here's the other thing.
Jane Bolker, I never met Jane Bolker, but I certainly liked her, wrote a book called Writing Your Dissertation or Anything in 15 Minutes a Day. She interviews about 185 people. And I took her workshop because I was not going to finish a dissertation. Are you kidding me? I'm not going to. I got work to do, man. It's movies. I'm going to sit down and write a dissertation.
I got the ideas and I pitched it and I passed the exams and whatever. But to sit down and write it?
No way. Ugh.
Sit around and write 286 pages and 215 images. No, I'm not going to do that. And then somebody says, read this book. Okay, this is the thing about how to follow many passions. To get back to your point, Jane Bolker's book basically interviews, and this is a short form of it, the people that she interviewed, be it what you do, which is interview journalism.
be it what Casey does, whether it's social media journalism, whether it's like social studies or academics or film scripts or whatever, the people that she interviewed, and it was all based on the fact that she could not write a dissertation, and then she went to interview these people, like, what was your secret? They all got three things in common, almost every single one of them.
One is, A, they write the second they get up.
Whether they get up at 6 a.m., okay... Or noon.
Okay, so Leo wrote late and would crash late and watch TV, and he would get up at noon. Leo Steinberg was a noon guy. Boom! Right.
Maya Angelou, same thing, man. She's interviewed all the way. Okay, Gore Vidal, he liked to sip, and he would hit the hay by 9 o'clock. 5 o'clock, boom. My friend Barry Fonero, the writer of the Golden Girls, same thing.
5.30.
Second you get up. No internet, no phone, no talk to the kids, no nothing. Into the room. Maybe you make the coffee. That's it. That's the only thing you let off for, man. That's A. B. You commit to a very small amount of time.
15 minutes.
Yeah. I took the workshop. And this woman stands up, a Jane Bulker aficionado, and goes, commit to 15 minutes. She said, I'll tell you, 15 minutes will turn into 20 or 30 or whatever. But commit to 15 minutes. Get in there before you take the kids to school, before you do this, blah, blah, blah. Get in there and do your 15 minutes. And I mean, 15 minutes turns into an hour and a half in a second.
Showing 221–240 of 668 · page 12 of 34
← Previous
Next →