Steven Pressfield: The War of Art | Lex Fridman Podcast #102
steven pressfield do the work productivity writing spartans artificial intelligence agi ai ai podcast artificial intelligence podcast lex fridman lex podcast lex mit lex ai lex jre mit ai
Steven Pressfield is a historian and author of War of Art, a book that had a big impact on my life and the life of millions of whose passion is to create in art, science, business, sport, and everywhere else. I highly recommend it and others of his books on this topic, including Turning Pro, Do the Work, Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, and the Warrior Ethos. Also his books Gates of Fire about the Spartans and the battle at Thermopylae, The Lion's Gate, Tides of War, and others are some of the best historical fiction novels ever written.

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EPISODE LINKS:
Steven's Website: https://stevenpressfield.com/
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
5:00 - Nature of war
11:43 - The struggle within
17:11 - Love and hate in a time of war
25:17 - Future of warfare
28:31 - Technology in war
30:10 - What it takes to kill a person
32:22 - Mortality
37:30 - The muse
46:09 - Editing
52:19 - Resistance
1:10:41 - Loneliness
1:12:24 - Is a warrior born or trained?
1:13:53 - Hard work and health
1:18:41 - Daily ritual

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 The following is a conversation with Steven Pressfield, author of several powerful nonfiction and historical fiction books, including The War of Art, a book that had a big impact on my life and the life of millions of people whose passion is to create in art, science, business, sport, and everywhere else. I highly recommend it and others of his books on this topic, including Turning Pro, Do the Work, Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, and The Warrior Ethos. Also, his books Gates of Fire about the Spartans and the Battle of Thermopylae, The Lions Gate, Tides of War, and others are some of the best historical fiction novels ever written. As some of you know, I don't shy away from taking on a big, difficult challenge. One of the hardest for me and for millions of others is the discipline of staring at an empty page every day, pushing on to think deeply, to create, despite the millions of excuses that fill the head. In his work, Steven has articulated this struggle better than anyone I've ever read. Quick summary of the ads. Two sponsors, The Jordan Harbinger Show and Cash App. Please consider supporting the podcast by going to JordanHarmiger.com slash Lex and subscribing to it everywhere after that and downloading Cash App and using code LexPodcast. Click on the links, buy all of the stuff. It really is the best way to support this podcast. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. I recently considered renaming this podcast but decided against it. AI is my passion. And in some sense, this podcast is not as much about AI but more about a journey of an AI researcher struggling to explore the human mind, the physics of our universe and the nature of human behavior, intelligence, consciousness, love and power. I will continue to return home to the technical, computer science, machine learning, engineering, math, programming, but also venture out to talk to people who had a big impact on my life outside the technical fields. Writers like Steven Pressfield and Stephen King, musicians like Tom Waits, political leaders like, well, you know who, and even athletes. I hope you join me on this journey. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. Click on the links, buy all of the stuff. It's the best way to support this podcast. This episode is supported by The Jordan Harbinger Show. Go to JordanHarbinger.com slash Lex. It's how he knows I sent you. On that page, there's links to subscribe to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and everywhere else. I've been binging on this podcast. Jordan is a great human being. He gets the best out of his guests, dives deep, calls them out when it's needed and makes the whole thing fun to listen to. He's interviewed Kobe Bryant, Mark Cuban, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Garry Kasparov and many more. I just finished listening to his recent conversation with Mick West about debunking conspiracy theories. This topic can be both fascinating and frustrating on both sides. But in this conversation, Jordan thread the needle beautifully. And so it turned out to be a great listen. I highly recommend it. Again, go to JordanHarbinger.com slash Lex. It's how he knows I sent you. On that page, there's links to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and everywhere else. This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the app store. When you get it, use code LexPodcast. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App allows you to buy Bitcoin, let me mention that the cryptocurrency in the context of the history of money is fascinating. I recommend Ascent of Money as a great book on this history. Debits and credits on ledgers started around 30,000 years ago. The US dollar created over 200 years ago. And the first decentralized cryptocurrency released just over 10 years ago. So given that history, cryptocurrency is still very much in its early days of development, but it's still aiming to and just might redefine the nature of money. So again, if you get Cash App from the app store or Google Play and use the code LexPodcast, you get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to First, an organization that is helping advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Steven Pressfield. Modern society in many ways dreams of creating universal peace. And yet war has molded civilization as we know it throughout its history. So let's start at the high philosophical level. If you could imagine a world without war, how would that world be different? Perhaps put another way, what purpose has war served? Why do we fight? I think we're basically the same creatures internally that we were in the cave, right? In tribal society, back for however many, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, which means that we're in the dynamic in our mind is a kind of an us versus them dynamic where our tribe is the people and everybody else or whatever, you know? And I don't see that, I don't think that's changed one iota over the centuries. It's just a question of how one might sublimate that urge to compete. I mean, you're a martial artist, you know, a great part of your day I'm sure is dedicated to reaching that place of, you know, of total commitment in the face of competition, in the face of adversity, et cetera, et cetera, which is I think natural and great for the human race on an individual basis. So the hope that I have, if there is any hope, personally, I don't think the human race is gonna be around very long, but would be in sports or in other kind of sublimated activities where people can act out their need for conquest or aggression or so forth, but at the same time relate to their opponents as human beings that when the game is over, you know, you embrace your competitor and stuff like that. So you think war was inevitable. It's a part of human nature as opposed to a force, a creative force in society that served a benefit. Well, I'm sure it has benefited, you know, spreading cultures and mixing cultures and stuff like that. But I think the urge to conquest, if you think about Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or Napoleon or anybody like that, or even individual, or if we even think about one of the plants that we're looking at right outside, I mean, if you let a particular plant have its way, it would take over, you know, the whole hillside. And certainly in the days of Alexander the Great, let's say, there were, who knows over the face of the earth, hundreds of little kingdoms, China, Japan, you know, Asia, Europe, wherever, and every prince that grew up dreamt of conquering his neighbor and conquering a neighbor after that. That seems to be a universal human imperative, at least in the male of the species. So- War is just a realization of that imperative. I think so. So you've written about Spartans in the Battle of Thermopylae, you've about Alexander the Great, about the Six Day War in 67 in Israel against Egypt, Jordan, Syria. What war, not just out of those, but in general, do you think has been most transformative for the world? Well, these are great questions, Lex. Tough, easy ones, right? I mean, I wish I knew more about the Mongols, because I certainly, from what little I know, I think that was a very, their conquests was a very transformative bringing cultures, you know, in a horrible, bloody way together. But gosh, what's then the most transformative? Maybe the Roman conquest, you know, establishing the Roman Empire and bringing that culture. Maybe Alexander the Great's wars that, you know, united East and West at least for a minute. So building of empire. Do you have a sense, so there's wars, I mean, the Six Day War is not about building empires. It's about deeply held religious, cultural conflict and holding the line, holding the border. And then there is conquests, like the Mongols, that what is it, some large percentage of the population is a descendant of Genghis Khan, I believe, right? So that has transformative effects. And then World War II, I mean, personally, and my family and so on, the transformative effects. Let me ask you this, Lex, why are you, what are you trying to get at with these questions? What is this kind of the theme that you're aiming at? Well, I talked to Eric Weisstein, and he said everything is great about war except the killing. And there's a romantic notion of war. Certainly there's a romantic notion of being a warrior, but there's a romantic notion of war that somehow there's a creative force to it. That because we fight out of that fighting comes culture, comes music and art and more and more desire to create with the societies that win. And to me, war is not just, hey, I have a stick and I want your land. It's some kind of, like it has echoes of the creative force that makes humans unique to other animals. Like war is, it can't be just four people or 10 people or 100 people. You have to have thousands of people agreeing, usually thousands or more, for something so deeply that you would be willing to risk your own life. And there's a romantic notion to that. And because you've written so well and passionately about some of these, I wanted to see, because I don't have any answers, I wanted to untangle that. If there is a reason we fight that's more than just anger and hate and wanting to conquer. Well, let me take it from a completely different side. I don't think that I, in writing about war, am really that interested in war per se. I'm more interested in the metaphor. I think for me, I'm really writing about my own internal war and the war against myself and against my own resistance, my own negativity, all of those things that are, that spirituality would be the opposite of. So I'm not really an expert on war. It's not like talking to Jim Mattis or to, you know, Victor Davis Hansen or whatever. To me, the human being, we are spiritual beings in a physical envelope. And there's a automatic terrible tension within that and which creates a war inside ourselves. So the outer war, when I think about the Israeli army standing up to, you know, whatever, 10 to one odds or whatever it was, that is a metaphor to me of the fight we're fighting inside ourselves. For me, the Six-Day War was, as you know, my feeling was it was about a return from exile. It was sort of the culmination of the reestablishment of the state of Israel, which had never really been completed because the holiest places of the Jewish people were in the hands of their enemies. So now on the other hand, Alexander the Great's conquests, I think were a whole other different scenario where the metaphor was that Alexander's father Philip, I think created the first nation, capital N nation. And he created a sort of a pathway for these guys who were mountain men and basically barbarians and Macedonians and by creating this army and this dream of conquering the world, which Alexander took to the, you know, really enacted, he gave them a way of rising out of themselves, of transcending themselves, not just individually, but as a people. So that would go along with what you're saying, Lex, of a certain creativity to it. But again, that's not for whatever, and I'm just realizing this as I'm answering this, that's not really what's interesting to me about these stories. And the Spartans, what was a whole at Thermopylae, that was a whole other kind of metaphor of war. That was a sort of a willingly going to one's own death for a greater cause, just like to me, the Spartans at Thermopylae enacted as a group, what Jesus Christ enacted as an individual, a sacrifice of their lives for the greater good. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's how I see it. I do feel like, you know, I get invited to speak to Marine Corps groups and things like that all the time, and I decline because I don't really feel like I'm a spokesman for the warrior class or anything like that. That's not what's interesting about it to me. But didn't you just say, with war as a metaphor, that we're all essentially in various ways warriors? If we think of it in terms of Jungian archetypes, and think of our life at least as males, and the earliest archetypes that kick in are the youth and the wanderer and the student and that kind of thing, and then at some point around age 15 to 20, whatever, the warrior archetype kicks in, and we wanna play football, we wanna do martial arts, we wanna join the special forces, we wanna hang out with our buddies, that's our great bond, we wanna test ourselves against adversity and so on and so forth. But at some point, that archetype, we move beyond that archetype, and we become fathers and teachers and so on and so forth. And then there are many archetypes beyond that towards the end. So I'm interested in the warrior archetype, but not to the be all and end all of everything else. In my book, The Virtues of War, have you read that? There's a character named Telemann whose actually, it's a long story, but when he's with Alexander's army, and when they arrive in India, he becomes fascinated by the gymnastophists, the fakirs, the naked wise men, the yogis. And he says to Alexander that these guys are warriors beyond what we are, even though they do nothing because they are inside their own selves all day long. If we go to the Six Day War, you write about, in Lionsgate, you write about the Six Day War in Israel. I think of the wars you've written about as the one we're still in many ways in the midst of today. Yes. So what is at the core of that conflict in Israel? The Israeli-Palestinian conflict? I mean, today it's the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it echoes of the same conflict in that part of the world with Israel. What is, in your sense, the nature of that conflict? What can we learn about society and human nature from that conflict? That is one of the hottest conflicts that still goes on today. Well, when I was working on the Lionsgate, about the Six Day War, I wrote in the introduction that this was not gonna be a multi-sided story. I was taking it entirely, I'm a Jew, I identify with the Israeli people, I was gonna see it entirely from their side. Yes. So that's probably not what you're asking, but to me, the Six Day War and that whole, it's a piece of land that's holy to at least three religions and probably more. And from the Jewish point of view, it's where the state of Israel, it's where David founded Jerusalem, it's all where the 12 tribes were, et cetera, et cetera, where Moses came and brought the people. So to me, the Six Day War was about, as I said, a return from exile, from diaspora after 2000 years. Now, obviously, from the Palestinian point of view or the Saudi Arabian point of view or whatever, it's a whole other scenario. Religion is at the core of this conflict in some ways, but religion, please. Religion and racial slash ethnic tribal identity. I mean, again, what is a Jew? Is a Jew somebody that believes in the religion or is it somebody of a certain race that race arose in a certain place? Same thing as a Muslim. What is a Muslim? Do they believe in Muhammad or whatever? Or did they arise in a certain place and a certain ethnicity? Because if we landed from Mars, we couldn't tell a Jew from a Palestinian, could we? Just looking at them, you could easily mix them and you'd never know. And the specifics of the faith is not necessarily the thing that defines a person. No, I don't think so. So you'd be, like many are, a secular Jew living in Israel and still have a strong bond. Definitely, definitely. In fact, almost all of the Jews, the fighters that I spoke to from the Sixth Table were secular and it really was not a religious thing with them as much as it was a national thing. So having spent time in Israel, how's the world where military conflict is directly felt as opposed to maybe if we look at the US where it's distant and far away, how is that world different? How are the people different? It's very different, as you know. I've never been to Israel, actually. Oh, you haven't? Haven't felt it. Well, you should definitely go. I mean, here in the United States, where when, like an incident like Charlottesville comes up, you know, where people are chanting, Jews will not replace us, blah, blah, blah, the impulse in the Jewish community is to think of, well, how can we reach out to the other side? You know, how can we either show them that we are human beings like they are and show them that we care for them, et cetera, et cetera? That's the sort of distant from war. From, if you're in Israel, and you know, like if you and I were Israeli citizens right now, you would be a fighter pilot or a tank commander or whatever, you know, you would not just be, you know, working at MIT or whatever. And I would be in the army too. And so from their point of view, they say, all those people who hate us, can I curse on this? Of course. On this thing? Fuck them, we'll kill them. We'll kill them. You know, if they dared across the line, and that's their whole different point of view. To me, it's actually a healthier point of view. You think so? Yeah. There's no, so let me ask the hard question is, well, maybe it's an impossible question, is how do we resolve that conflict? In Israel and- In Israel or- Anywhere? Anywhere where the instinct is to reach out in US and say, F you and the people, yeah. Here's my, here's what I think that the only way that two warring sides or two sides that are opposed to one another, can ever really come together is when there's mutual respect, we'll get just more water. I got it, I got it. When there's mutual respect and they can see each other as equals and when there's mutual fear, you know, where one side says, we don't dare cross a line with this other side and the other side says the same thing. I think then you can kind of reach across that thing and say, okay, we'll stay here, you stay here. We'll mingle in cultural ways and we'll have interchange, you know, winter marriage, da da da da da da. But as soon as one side has no power, as the Jewish people have had no power throughout the diaspora forever, right? Then it's just a human nature. You can see it in Trump and what he does to any vulnerable minority, right? It's, and he's not alone, I'm not blaming him alone. That's human nature. So I do think that that idea of like, fuck you, if you cross the line, we'll kill you, is really a good way, is a good place to start from. Because now you can sit down on opposite sides of the table and say, you know, what do we have in common? How can we, we wanna raise our children, you wanna raise your children, how can we do this in a way that we're not hurting each other? So you kind of said that you need to arrive at a balance, some kind of balance of power. But you haven't spoken to the fact that there's deeply rooted hatred of the other. So is there no way to alleviate that hatred or is that, I mean, what role does love and hate come? I think that hatred can go away, I really do. I mean, if you look at even now that I haven't seen this in person, but they say that the Saudis and the Israelis are collaborating on certain things, you know, by their mutual fear of or antagonism to Iran. I do think that even really long, long, longstanding hatreds and animosities, thousands of years old, can go away under the right circumstances. On what time scale? I mean, for instance, I don't know if it's- Do people have to die, do generations have to die and pass away and new generations come up with less hate or can a single individual learn to not hate? I think a single individual can learn to not hate because it certainly doesn't seem to, over thousands of years doesn't seem to work, you know? We keep thinking that that's gonna happen. But I think it's, we're in a real spiritual realm here when you're talking about that. You're in a realm of, you know, Buddha, Jesus, whatever, something like that, that where, you know, a true change of soul happens. But I do think that's possible. So what do you think is the future of warfare, especially with what many people see as the expansion of the military industrial conflict? To what, do you, I know you're not a military historian. I'm asking more as a metaphor. And do you see us as people continuing to fight? You know, it's a really great question, Lex, because I think now with social media, TV, movies, all of these things that create empathy across cultures, it becomes harder and harder, I think, I think, to totally demonize the other, the way it was in previous wars. I also think, I don't really see an appetite for people wanting to go to war these days. And in a way, I don't know if that's good or bad. It's like everybody's so fat and lazy and so concerned with how many clicks they're getting that, you know, whereas I know at the start of World War I, both the younger generations were eager to go to war. You know, I think it was insane, but it was that sort of warrior archetype that we were talking about before, that generational testosterone, eros thing. Whereas nowadays, I don't know, I mean, it's hard to say there's not gonna be another war because there always are, but it's sort of hard to imagine people getting off their ass these days to do anything. Well, it's funny that you mentioned social media as a place for empathy, sure, but it's, in a sense, it's a place for war as well. For hatred, yeah, true. For hatred, and perhaps, you know, the positive aspect of hatred on social media is that it's somewhat less harmful than murder, and so it kind of dissipates sort of the hatefuls. You get the hate out at a less, on a daily basis, and thereby never boils up to a point where you want to be hated. Never boils up to a point where you want to kill. It's also a really weird thing that's going on, and I don't know if anybody really understands, like with video games, where kids are acting out these incredible horror things, right? But you know that if they cut their finger, they would like freak out, you know? And I also don't think that many of the people that are hateful on social media, if they were face-to-face with the person, it wouldn't, so there's a sort of a two mental spheres happening at the same time, and I don't know how that plays out. Maps to the actual military, how that actually maps to military conflict. Yeah, yeah. Like when you, if you in the United States have a draft, for example, how the populace would respond different than they did in previous generations. Yeah, I think they certainly would. Yeah. Another question, not sure if you've thought about it, but I work on building artificial intelligence systems. In our community, many people are worried about AI being used in war, so automating the killing process with drones and in general, it's being used more and more. I should recuse myself on that one, I really haven't thought about that. You haven't thought about it. I'd rather ask you what you think about it. Well, it's interesting, I mean, because it's so fundamentally different from, if you look at the Battle of Thermopylae. It means just if we talk about the difference between a gun and a sword. I'll tell you one little anecdote. There was a Spartan king, I don't know which one it was, but at one point they showed him a new invention and it could launch a bolt that would, you know, kill someone at a range of 200 yards. And the king wept and said, alas, valor is no more. Because their point of view of war, it was highly ritualized, as you know, and the code of honor was that you were not supposed to be able to kill another person unless you yourself were in equal danger of being killed. And any other way of doing that, even bow and arrow was considered less than manly and less than honorable. And maybe we should go back to that because at least it makes the stakes real and true. And, not that we could. Not, that's the point. You were in the Marine Corps, so we talk about the real, the bloody conflicts, you've written about many of them. So let me ask a personal question. Have you, sort of as writing and in general, have you thought about what it takes to be able to kill a person if you yourself could do it? I have thought about it, yeah. And how that would make you feel? Of course, one never knows. I certainly, I have not been in combat. I haven't killed anybody. But I would imagine in the real world that it would change you utterly forever. Because you can't help but identify with a person that you've just killed. And it's another human being. And I mean, I have a hard time killing a spider. So I would imagine that it's something that warriors understand and nobody else understands. And you've spoken with many. How, I mean, you've spoken with people who've seen military combat. Oh yeah. In Israel. What, have they been able to articulate the experience of killing? It's sort of just what I said. I mean, I've even been thinking of one pilot that I interviewed over there, who was strafing a tank in his Mustang and saw at really low altitude and saw what his bullets did to the guy and could see his face and everything like that, which is even one remove or more removes from an infantryman, what an infantryman does. And he said that, that same thing that I said, that it just changes you and you can never say it, never look at the world or look at anything the same way again. And when that happens at scale, it's thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds, that changes entire societies. I mean, that's what we've seen. At least, but the problem is it doesn't change the politicians back home. Right. How important is mortality, finiteness, the fact that this thing ends to the creative process? So killing and war really emphasizes that, but in general, the fact that this thing ends. It does? It does. And, and. Shit. And on a serious note, do you think about your own mortality? Do you meditate on your own mortality when you think about the work you do? That's another great question, Lex. I actually, I'm 75 and I just was having, I had breakfast in New York a few months ago with a friend of mine who's like my exact same age. And I said to him, I said, Nick, do you ever think about mortality? And he said, every fucking minute of every day. And I was kind of relieved to hear that because I do too. But I actually, I always have, I think. And I think, you know, the fact of mortality kind of gives meaning to life. I think that's why we wanna create. That's why we wanna make a mark of some kind of mortality or, and the other aspect of it is what's on the other side of that mortality. I'm a believer in previous lives. So I sort of, and I, the question I've never been able to answer among many, many others is like, why are we even here? Why are we in the flesh? You know, I sort of, I like to believe that God is not a force, but God is a force. And I think that's why we're on some kind of journey. But I'm not sure why, why we were put in this world where the ground rules are, if you think about animal life, that you cannot live from one day to the next without killing and eating some other form of life. And then you can die and die, and you know, be friends with everybody. So I sort of, I don't get what that was all about, but that's sort of the big issue. Have you read the Ernest Becker's denial of death, for example, is that Ernest Becker's a philosopher that said that the death, that the fear of death is really the primary driver of everything we do. So that's what the- Right, I would agree with that. So to you, you've always thought about even your own mortality. Yes, definitely. And can you elaborate on the reincarnation aspect of what you were talking about, that we kinda, what's your sense that we had previous lives? What, have you thought concretely, or is it a lot of it kind of is? No, I've thought concretely about it. when you see children, young kids, or even dogs and cats, that they come into the world with personalities. You know, and three kids in a family are gonna be completely different and completely their own person. And that person that they are doesn't change over life. And I, you know, there's one of the things that I did in, in my book, The Artist's Journey, is that there were certain things where I tracked or just listed in order, like all of Bruce Springsteen's albums or all of Philip Roth's books, you know, kind of a body of work throughout over, you know, a period of 30, 40, 50 years, you know? And you can see that there's a theme running through all of those things, that it's completely unique to that person. Nobody else could have written Philip Roth's books or Bruce Springsteen's songs. And you can even see sort of a destiny there. So I ask myself, well, where did that come from? What, it seems to be a continuation of something that was, that happened before, and that will lead to something else, because it's not starting from scratch. It seems like there's a calling, a destiny in there already. This gets back to the muse and all that kind of thing. So yeah, it's almost like there's this, let's call it a god, it's passing, it's almost like sampling parts of a previous human that has lived and putting those into the new one. Sampling, this is probably a pretty good word. Taking some of the good, well, you can't take all the good parts, because the bad parts is what makes the person. Right. Let's say you're taking it all together. Okay, this is humans only, or does it pass around from animals, in your view? I don't know, that's above my pay grade, I don't know. Okay, so you talk about the muse as the source of ideas, maybe. Since you've gotten a few glimpses of her in your writing, tell me, what is it possible for you to tell me about her, where does she reside, what does she look like? I mean, you can look at it in many different ways. The Greeks did it in an anthropomorphic way, right? They created gods that were like human beings. But if you look at it from a Kabbalistic Jewish perspective, Jewish mysticism, you could say that it's the soul, the neshamah, right? That the soul is above us on a higher plane, our own, your soul, my soul, and it's trying to reach down to us and communicate with us. And we're trying simultaneously to reach up to it through prayer or through, if you're a writer or an artist, when you sit down at the keyboard, you're entering into a kind of prayer. You're entering into a different state of an altered consciousness, as some may say. You're opening yourself, opening the pipeline, or turning on the radio to tune into the content of the soul. Cosmic radio station. Another way of looking at it, this is, do you ever see the movie City of Angels? The visual of the movie, it was Meg Ryan and Nicholas Cage. Yeah, yeah, I've seen it, yep. And right, the visual of the movie sort of was, Meg Ryan is a heart surgeon. And as she's operating on somebody, suddenly Nicholas Cage in this long duster coat, like Jesse James, appears right next to her in the operating room, and he's an angel. And he's waiting to take out the soul of the patient on the operating table. And she doesn't see him, she's totally unaware of him, and so is everybody else in the operating room, except maybe the guy who's about to die, who suddenly sees him. But I kind of believe that there are beings like that, or if you don't like that, it's a force, it's a consciousness, it's something that are right here right now. And they're trying to communicate to us. And like through a membrane, like tapping on that window over there, they're like right out there. And they carry the future. They are everything that is in potential, all the works that you will do, Lex, your startup, whatever else you're doing, they know that. And it's not really you that's coming up with those ideas, in my opinion. Those things are appearing, it's like somebody knocks on the door and puts it in. I mean, in the Iliad, where gods and goddesses appear along with the human antagonists on the battlefield all the time, right? There'll be Homer flashes to Olympus and then back to the real world. And there's a thing where one Aphrodite, let's say, wants to help Paris. And so she says, well, I will appear to him in a dream, and I'll take the form of his brother. And I'll say, bum, ba, da, bum, ba, da, bum. So that's creatures, beings on one dimension, as the Greeks thought, communicating with, and I believe that that's exactly what's going on in one, whatever analogy you wanna use. But that communication, to which degree do you play the role in that communication, as opposed to sitting at the computer, if you're a writer, and staring at the blank page, and putting in the time, and waiting? So if, in your view, are these creatures basically waiting to tell you about your future? Or is there a choice? How many possible futures are there? How many possible ideas are there? That's a great question. I think there's basically, yes, there are alternatives, degrees within it, but if you look at Bruce Springsteen's albums, how much could he have done really differently? Yeah, you can just see there's a whole impetus going through the whole thing, and nothing was gonna shake him off that. And yeah, maybe the river could have been different, it could have been called something else, but he was dealing with certain issues. His conscious self was dealing with certain issues that were really out of his control. He was drawn, he was called to it, right? Nothing could stop him. And so it is sort of a partnership, I think, the creative process between, and creative impulse that's coming from some other place, or it's coming from deep within us is another way to look at it. Like if we're acorns, and we're growing into oaks. So the conscious artist, who's sitting there at the keyboard or whatever, is applying his or her consciousness to that, but is also going into opening themselves to the unconscious, or to this other realm, whatever that is. I mean, certainly songwriters for a million years have said, you know, a song just came in over their head, right, poems, all they had to do is write. But then, you ever see that thing of Keats' notes for a thing of beauty is a joy forever? It's like covers the entire page, and it's like, you know, he's crossing this out, and that out, and yet, so his consciousness, his conscious mind is working on it. But I do think it's a partnership, and I think that, I know when I was first starting out as a writer, I worked in advertising, and I tried to do novels that I could never do. I was like, really unskilled at getting to that, tuning into that station. I just, I beat my brains out, and was unable to do it, you know, except, and because I was sort of trying too hard, it was sort of like a Zen monk, or a monk of some kind, trying to meditate, and just like constantly, thoughts driving you crazy. But over time, you know, knock wood, I've kind of gotten better at it, and I can sort of let go of those, that part of me that's trying so hard, and so these angels can speak a little more easily through the membrane. Can you put into words the process of letting go, and clearing that channel of communication? What does it take? That's another great question. For me, it just took, it took probably 30 years, and I don't even, I guess I would liken it to meditation, even though I'm not a meditator, but it would seem to me to be one of the hardest things in the world to just sit still and stop thinking, right? And so it's very hard to put into words, and I think that's why these teachers of meditation use tricks, and koans, and stuff like that, but for me at least, I think it was just a process of years of years and years of trying, and finally of beating my head in the wall, and finally little by little giving up that beating of the head. But there doesn't seem to be any trick. Everybody wants a hack these days, and I don't think there is a hack. If you look at it in terms of the goddess, the muse, she's watching you down there, beating your head in the wall, you're like a Marine going through an obstacle course, or a martial artist trying to learn, like Uma Thurman doing the casket, trying to make that little four inch punch. The muse or the goddess is just sort of watching going, eh, it's Lex, he's trying, he's trying. I'm gonna come back in another couple of months and see if he's still there, and finally she'll say, all right, he's had it, he's paid his dues, I'm gonna give it to him. So the hard work and the suffering, yeah. But I'm also, being Russian in wrestling and martial arts, we're big into drilling technique. I was also just even getting at, certainly there's no shortcut, but is there a process? So you're in, the process of practice. So you had two, one you had an example of meditation, so it's essentially the practice of meditation. I think so, drill I think is a good way to look at it too. But what are you drilling? You're just sitting and- You're writing, you know? Just writing. You're writing, then you're looking at what you wrote, you know, you're hitting moments when it flows, and then your other hitting moments where you just can't do anything, and you're trying to, from the moments where it flowed, you're trying to come back and look at it and say, what did I do, how did that happen? Where was my mind, you know? But I think it's just a process of over and over and over and over until finally it gets a little bit easier. And did you always, when you read something you write, did you always have a pretty good radar for what's good and not after it's over? After it's written? No. I think I do now, but no, it was always really hard for me to know what was good. I mean, do you edit, the process of editing is the process of looking at what you've written and improving it. Are you a better writer or an editor? How often do you edit? That's another great question, great question, because I do think that in writing, the real process of looking at it is the process that an editor does, rather than what a writer does. The gentleman I was just talking to on the phone is my editor, Sean Coyne, who was the guy who bought Gates of Fire when he was an editor at Doubleday, and who basically when I finish a book, I give it to him. And he gives me, you know, editing doesn't really mean like crossing out commas. It really means looking at the overall work and saying, does it work? And if it doesn't work, why doesn't it work? Is there something wrong here? You know, like if you were building the Golden Gate Bridge, you know, and one span was out of whack, you know, you could, and I think a really skilled editor, which Sean is, understands what makes a story tick. And he also has the perspective that I've lost in something I've wrote, because I'm so close to it, to say, you know, this isn't working and that is working. What kind of advice has he given you? Is it like layout? Like this story doesn't flow correctly. Like you shouldn't start at this point. Or does he even sit back at a higher level and say, I see what you're doing, but you could do better. No, he doesn't do that. Okay. But a lot of it is about genre. And kind of defining what genre you're working in. And I'm gonna get up here to just bring something over here for the camera. This was one where Sean tore this down and made me start from scratch. And what the specifics of it were really, this is a supernatural thriller. That's the genre. Sort of like Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist. And what he made, what he showed me was that I had kind of, I had violated certain conventions of the genre. You know, that, and you just can't do that. You know, it's gotta be, you know, it has to be done the right way. And so he pointed out certain things to me. So he must be a prolific reader himself too, actually. That's such a tough job of editor. Yeah. Again, he was sort of born to do that. He just kind of glommed onto it. But since he was his first job publishing cat thrillers, cat detective, he studied how it works, what makes a story work, et cetera, et cetera. And so he really, he's great. And I think any really successful writer, unless they're utterly brilliant on their own, has gotta have a great editor behind them. But you yourself edit as well. I'm constantly trying to learn from him and teach myself. Everything you see in my blog posts that is about the craft of writing is me trying to teach myself the rules. So that, you know, I'm sure it's the same in martial arts or anything else, right? You try to not be dependent on that other person because it's so painful to make those mistakes. You really feel like, God, I wish I could get it right the first time the next time I do it. Well, in research, we go through that. In research, more than writing. So what you do is a little more solitary. In research, there's usually two, three, four people working on something together and we write a paper. And there's that painful process of where you write it down and then you share it with other. And not only do they criticize the writing, they criticize the fundamental aspects of the approach you've taken. I would think so. So it's exactly like, you know, they would say, you're attacking, you're asking the wrong questions, right? The wrong questions, yeah. And that's extremely painful, especially when you, well, yes, painful and helpful, but there's disagreement and so on. And through that comes out a better product. And if, as you want to still have an ego, but you also wanna silence it every once in a while, so there's a balance. In your book, The War of Art, you talk about resistance with the capital R as the invisible force in this universe of ours that finds a way to prevent you from starting or doing the work. Where do you think resistance comes from? Why is there a force in our mind that's constantly trying to jeopardize our efforts with laziness, excuses, and so on? That's another great question. I mean, in Jewish mysticism, in Kabbalistic thinking, it's called the Yetzir-Hurah, right? And it's a force that if this up here is your soul, of Nehshima trying to talk to you, us down here, the Yetzir-Hurah is this negative force in the middle. So I'm not the only one that ever thought about this. But, and I don't know if anybody really knows the answer, but here's my answer. I think that there are two places where we as human beings can seat our identity. One is the ego, the conscious ego, and the other is the greater self. And the self in the Jungian sense, the self in the Jungian sense includes the unconscious and butts up against what Jung called the divine ground, which what I would call the muse, the goddess, or whatever. And I think, and the ego is just this little dot inside this bigger self. And the ego has a completely different view of life as from the self. The ego believes, I'm gonna give you a long answer here, Lex. No, perfect. The ego believes that death is real. The ego believes that time and space are real. The ego believes that each one of us is separate from the other. I'm separate from you. I could punch you in the face and it wouldn't hurt me. It would only hurt you. And in the ego's world, the dominant emotion is fear because we are all made of flesh. We can all die, we can all be hurt, we can all be ruined, bum, ba, bum. So we are protecting ourselves and even our desire to create as we were talking about before, comes out of that fear of death. The self, on the other hand, the greater self that butts up against the divine ground believes that death is not real, that time and space are not real, that the gods travel swift as thought. And the ego also believes that, I mean the self believes that there's no difference between you and me, that we're all one. If I hurt you, I hurt myself, karma, right? And in the world of the self, of the greater self, the dominant emotion is love, not fear. Now, so I think that, let me, I'll go farther back here, a long way to answer your question. When Jesus died on the cross, or when the 300 Spartans willingly sacrificed their lives at Thermopylae, they were acting according to the rules of the self. Death is not real, no difference between you and me, time and space are not real, predominant emotion is love. So, in my opinion, we as conscious human vessels are in a struggle between these two things, the ego and the self. To me, resistance is the voice of the ego, saying, and it's a fearful voice, because if, when we identify with the self, we move our consciousness over to the self, as artists or scientists opening ourselves up to the cosmic dimension, to the other forces, the ego is tremendously threatened by that, because if we're in that space, that head space, we don't need the ego anymore. So I think resistance is a voice of the ego, trying to keep control of us. You there. In a way, I'll give you a bad example, Trump is the ego. It's probably a very good example, right? Yes, he's, yeah. It's a zero sum world for him, and for anybody that's in that, and the opposite of that would be somebody like Martin Luther King or Gandhi. And that's of course why they all wind up getting assassinated, because that voice, that ego is hanging on to itself and feels so threatened by, I could talk more about this if you want. No, for sure, that's fascinating, it's just, it's interesting why the fear is attached to the ego. I really like this dichotomy of ego and self and that struggle. It's just, ego has a, you know, the self obsession of it, why fear is such a predominant thing, why is resistance trying to undermine everything? The- It's fear, it's out of fear. Let's think about the whole thing in terms of stories. In a story, the villain is always resistance, is always the ego. The hero is always, of course always is not everything, but you know what I mean, pretty much, represents kind of the self. If you think about the alien on the spaceship, that's like the ultimate kind of villain. It keeps changing form, right? First it goes on the guy's face, then it pops out of his chest, but it always just has that one monomaniacal thing to destroy, you know? And just like the ego, just like resistance. And maybe alien is a bad example because Sigourney Weaver has to sort of fight on the same terms as the alien, but maybe a better example might be something like Casablanca, where in the end, the Humphrey Bogart character has to, acting, operating out of the self, has to give up his selfish dream of going off with Ingrid Bergman, Neil Ceylon, the love of his life, and instead puts her on a plane to Lisbon while he goes off to fight the Nazis in the desert. I don't know if that's clear, but in almost every story, the villain is the ego, is resistance, is fear, is that zero-sum thing. And in almost every story, the hero is someone that is willing to make a sacrifice to help others. It's letting go of that fear is what leads to productivity and to success. Yeah. Do you think there's a, this is probably the answer, is either obvious or impossible, but do you think there's an evolutionary advantage to resistance? What would life look like without resistance? That's another great question. I think, I also believe that resistance, like death, gives meaning to life. If we didn't have it, it's gonna be, what would we be? We'd be in the Garden of Eden picking fruit and just happy and stupid. And I do think that that myth of the Garden of Eden is really about this kind of thing, where Adam and Eve decide to sort of take matters into their own hands and acquire knowledge that until then God had said, I'm the only one that's got that knowledge. And of course, once they've acquired that knowledge, they're cast out into the world you and I live in now, where they do have to deal with that fear and they do have to deal with all that stuff. It's a human condition. It's a human condition and the meaning and the purpose comes from the resistance being there and the struggle to overcome it. To overcome it, right. And also the other aspect of it is that it's not real at all. It's not even like it's an actual force. It's all here, right? So the sort of, in a way, it's sort of a surrender to it. Or it's sort of like turning on the light in a dark thing. It's like, it's gone. But not quite because it's not really. Not quite, because it comes back again tomorrow morning. Exactly. So you have to keep changing light bulbs every day. So what's been, maybe recently, but in general, maybe in your life, what's been the most relentless or one of the more relentless sources of resistance to you personally? I mean, it's always the same. It's about writing for me and evolving within my own body of work. It never goes away. It never gets any less. Do you have particular excuses, particular justifications that come out? No, it's always the same. Well, I would say it's always the same, but it's really not because resistance is so protean. It keeps changing form. And as you move to hopefully a higher level, you really start to see that resistance gets a little more nuanced and a little more subtle trying to fake you out. But I think you learn that it's always there and you're always gonna have to face it. So. I mean, your battle is sitting down and writing to some number of words to a blank page. Yeah. Do you have a process there with this battle? Do you have a number of hours? Do you have a number of hours that you put in? Yeah, I'm definitely a believer that even though this battle is fought on the highest sort of spiritual level that the way you fight it is on the most mundane. I'm sure it's like martial arts must be the same way. I mean, I go to the gym first thing in the morning and I sort of am rehearsing myself. Face, you know, the gym is called resistance training, right? I'm working against resistance, right? And I don't wanna go, I don't wanna get out of bed. I hate to, you know. But I'm sort of fortifying myself to be ready for the day. And, you know, like I said, over, knock wood, over years I've learned to sort of get into the right kind of mindset and it's not as hard for me as it used to be. The real resistance, I think, for me, and I think this is true for anybody is the question of sort of what's the next idea? What's the next book? What's the next project that you're gonna work on? And when I ask that question, I'm asking it of the muse. I'm kind of saying, what do you want me or I'm asking it of my own conscious. If we're looking at Bruce Springsteen's albums, it's kind of, well, what's the next album? Now he's on Broadway. That was a great idea, right? Where'd that come from, you know? But, and then for him, what's after that, you know? Because that body of work is already alive. It already exists inside us, kind of like a woman's biological clock and we have to serve it. And we have to, otherwise it'll give us cancer, you know? I don't mean to say that if anybody has cancer, that they're not, you know, but you know what I mean? It'll take its revenge on us. So the next resistance to me is sort of, well, a big aspect of it is what's next? You know, when I finished the book I'm working on now, I'm not sure what I'm gonna do next. And I see at the same time you have a kind of, you have a sense that there's a Bruce Springsteen single line of albums. So like, it's already known somewhere in the universe what you're going to do next is the sense you have. In a sense, yes. I don't know if it's like predetermined, you know? But it's, but there's something like that. Yeah, I'd like to believe that there's, well, it's kind of like quantum mechanics, I guess. Once you observe it, maybe once you talk to the muse, it's one thing for sure. It was always going to be that one thing. But really, in reality, it's a distribution. It could be any number of things. Yeah, I think so. There's alternate realities. Alternate realities, yeah. But they're not that far apart. I mean, Bruce Springsteen is not gonna write a Joni Mitchell song, you know? No matter how hard he tries. He's still going on Broadway. I mean, he still did that, which is not a Bruce Springsteen thing to do. So I think you're being, in retrospect, I think it is a Bruce Springsteen thing to do. It's a next sort of evolution for him. Why not take his music to there, you know? In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense, I think. Yeah. Because if you pull it off, especially. Do you visualize yourself completing the work? Like Olympic athletes visualize getting the gold medal. Do you, you know, they go through, I mean, that's actually a really, you can learn something from athletes on that, is years out, certainly two, three years out, some people do much longer. Every day, you visualize how the day of the championship will go, down to, I mean, everything, down to how will it feel to stand on the podium and so on. Do you do anything like that in how you approach writing? No. Because it's- It's always in the moment. Because, yeah, it is in the moment, I think. Because it's such a mystery. You just don't know. I think it's different from sports. Right. Because you don't know the destiny. There's no gold medal at the end. No. In fact, I would like to think that as soon as you finish one, the next day you're on the other. And in fact, hopefully you've already started the other. You're already, you know, 100 pages into the other when you finish the first one. But it is a, it is a, it's a journey, it's a process. I don't think it is a, in fact, I think it's very dangerous to think that way. To think, oh, this, I'm going to win the Oscar, you know? It's interesting for the creative process that might be dangerous. It's a, maybe you can, like, why is that dangerous? Because I kind of know- Because it's the ego. It's the ego. Because you're giving yourself over to the ego. You know, I keep saying this myself, my job, I'm a servant of the muse. I'm there to do what she tells me to do. And if I suddenly think, oh, I'm really, I just want to, you know, whatever, the muse doesn't like that. Yeah. And, you know, she's on another dimension for me. I'm trying to square that, because I agree. I'm trying to square that with, I think there's a meditation to visualizing success in the athletic realm, to where it focuses, it removes everything else away, to where you focus on this particular battle. I mean, I think that you can do that in many kinds of ways. And in sports, the ego serves a more important role, I think, than it does in writing. And the ego, there's something- Well, let me, when you say that, I know what you mean, Lex. And I do think there is a sort of a, you know, it's interesting to watch interviews with Steph Curry, who's such, obviously such a nice guy, but he's got such tremendous self-confidence, you know, that it, but it doesn't border on ego so much because he's worked so hard for it, you know? But he knows, so he has visualized, he has visualized maybe not so much winning, you know, as just him being the best he can be, him being in the flow, you know, doing his thing that he knows he can do. And I do think in the creative world, yeah, there is a sort of a thing like that, where you, where, you know, a choreographer or a filmmaker or whatever might be, do an internal thing where they're saying, I can make an Oscar-winning movie, I can direct this movie, you know, I'm banishing these thoughts that I'm not good enough. I can do that, I can edit it, I can score it, I can, you know, bump it, bump it, bump. But, and I don't think that's really ego. I think that's, that's part of the process in a good way, like an athlete does that. So extreme confidence is what some of the best athletes come with. And you think it's possible to, as a writer, to have extreme confidence in yourself? I do think so, you know, that I'm sure when John Lennon sat down to write a song, he felt like, shit, I can do this, you know? I'm not so sure. I think, because the great artists I've seen, and you're haunted by self-doubt. It's that resistance, I mean, the confidence. Yes, but I mean, I guess, but even beyond the self, within the self, above the self-doubt. Oh, it's the bigger picture of the self-belief. Yeah, I'm freaking out, yeah, I'm worried that I'm not gonna be able to, but you know, I know, I can do this. Yeah, and when you look at, when you take a bigger picture of it. So the writing process, is it fundamentally lonely? So. No. Because you're with your characters. You are. So you really put yourself in the world. Absolutely. You know, I've written about this before, that I used to have, my desk used to face a wall instead of seeing, and people would say, well, don't you wanna look out the window? But I'm in here, I'm seeing the Spartans, I'm seeing, you know, whatever. And the characters that are on the page, or that you create, are not accidents. They're coming out of some issue, some deep issue that you have, whether you realize it or not. You might not realize it till 20 years later, or somebody explains it to you. So your characters are kind of fascinating to you. And their dilemmas are fascinating to you. And you're also trying to come to grips with them, you know, you sort of see them through a glass darkly, you know, and you really wanna see them more clearly. So yeah, no, it's not lonely at all. In fact, I'm more lonely sometimes later, going out to dinner with some people, and actually talking to people. Do you miss the characters after it's over? Let's say I have affection for them, kind of like children that have gone off to college, and now are, you know, you only see them at Thanksgiving. Definitely I have affection for them. Even the bad guys. Maybe especially the bad guys. Especially the bad guys. And you've said that writers, even successful writers, are often not tough-minded enough. I've read that in the post. That you have to be a professional in the way you handle your emotions. You have to be a bit of a warrior to be a writer. So what do you think makes a warrior? Is a warrior born or trained in the realm, in the bigger realm, in the realm of writing, in the creative process? I think they're born to some extent. You have the gift. Like you might have the gift as a martial artist to do whatever martial artists do. But the training is the big thing. 90% training, 10% genetics. And you know, I use another analogy, other than warrior, as far as writer, and that's like to be a mother. If you think about, if you're a writer, or any creative person, you're giving birth to something, right? You're carrying a new life inside you. And in terms of bravery, if your child, your two-year-old child is underneath a car, is coming down the street, the mother's gonna like stop a Buick, you know, with her bare hands. So that's another way to think about how a writer has to think about, or any creative person has to think about, I think, what they're doing. What this child, this new creation that they're bringing forth. Yeah, so the hard work that's underlying that. I've just a couple weeks ago talked to, just happened to be in the same room, both gave talks, Arianna Huffington. I did this conversation with her. I didn't know much about her before then, but she has recently been, she wrote a couple books, have been promoting a lifestyle where, she basically, she created the Huffington Post, and she gave herself like, I don't know, 20 hours a day, just obsessed with her work. And then she fainted, passed out, and kind of, there was some health issues. And so she wrote this book saying that, you know, sleep, basically you wanna establish a lifestyle that doesn't sacrifice health, that's productive but doesn't sacrifice health. She thinks that you can have both, productivity and health. Criticizing Elon Musk, who I've also spoken with, for working too hard, and thereby sacrificing, you know, being less effective than he could be. So I'm trying to get at this balance between health and obsessively working at something, and really working hard. So what Arianna is talking about makes sense to me, but I'm a little bit torn. To me, passion and reason do not overlap much, or at all sometimes. Maybe I'm being too Russian, but, I feel madness and obsession does not care for health, or sleep, or diet, or any of that. And hard work is hard work, and everything else can go to hell. So if you're really focused on whether it's writing a book, it should, everything should just go to hell. Where do you stand on this balance? How important is health for productivity? How important is it to sort of get sleep, and so on? I'm on the health side. I mean, there was a period of my life when I was just, I had no obligations, and I was just living in a little house, and just working nonstop, you know? But even then, I would get up in the morning, and I would have liver and eggs for breakfast every day, and I would do my exercise, whatever it was, but although I was still doing 18 hours a day, but I'm definitely, I kind of think of it sort of like an athlete does. I'm sure that like Steph Curry is totally committed to winning championships and stuff like that. But he has his family, he sees his family, the family is always there. He, I'm sure he eats, you know, perfect, great stuff, gets his sleep, you know, gets the training, whatever a trainer does to him for his knees and his ankles and whatever. So I, or Kobe Bryant or anybody that's operating at a high level. So I do think I'm from that kind of the health school. The good thing about being a writer is, you can't work for many hours a day. You know, four hours is like the maximum I can work. I've never been able to work more than that. I don't know how people do it. I've heard of people do 10, 12, I don't know how they do it. So that gives you a lot of other time to do it. Optimize your health. Yeah, optimize your health, because you need to. You're in training, you know, you're really, you're burning up a lot of B vitamins when you're working here. Yeah, but. Maybe it's a Russian thing with your legs. Well, it's not even a Russian thing. I mean. It also may be youth, you know. At 35, you can be crazy. You know, that's what they keep telling me, but I'm pretty sure I'll be at it still at a later time too. I think it has to do with the career choice too. I think writing is almost, from everything I've heard, it's almost impossible to do it more than a few hours really well. The, when you start to get into certain disciplines, like with Elon Musk and me, engineering disciplines, that really there's a lot more non-muse time needed. Right, right, right. So the crazy hours that you're talking, that you often are talking about have to be done. And it doesn't. I think that's true. Yeah, so there's still the two, three hours of muse time needed for truly genius ideas, but it's something I certainly struggle with. But yeah, I hear you loud and clear on the health. So what does a perfect day look like for you if we're talking about writing an hour by hour schedule of a perfect day? I get up early, I go to the gym, I have breakfast with some friends of mine. What's early by the way? That's like how early? 3.15. AM. AM. So we're talking really early. Really early. Now I'm crazy early, it's ridiculously early. Yeah. But, and I haven't done that always, but that's kind of what I'm on now. So I'm in bed like when I'm with my nephews that are like four years old and three years old, I'm in bed before them. Okay, you gotta beat. You wake up, sorry, you said exercise first. Yeah. And what does that look like? What's exercise for you? I go to the gym. Okay. I have a trainer, I have a couple of guys that I work out with, and I'll, you know, it's maybe an hour, maybe a little more. I'll do a little warmup before, stretching afterwards, take a shower, go have breakfast. But it's an intense kind of a thing that I definitely don't wanna do that's hard, you know? So you feel like you've accomplished something. First thing. Yeah. That's a big accomplishment of the day. But at the same time, it's not like so hard that I'm completely exhausted, you know? And then I'll come home and handle whatever correspondence and stuff has to be done. And then I work for maybe three hours, and then I just sort of crash. The office is closed, I turn the switch, I don't think about any, I don't think about anything. I don't think about the work at all. Do you listen to, oh, you mean afterwards? After work, once the office is closed. But during, so this was like 12 to three kind of thing? Something like that, yeah. Something like that, okay. You listen to music? No. Do you have anything? But that's just me, I mean, I don't think, you know, but somebody could do it a million different ways. It's fascinating, you know, the, I mean, you've also, of most, of many writers, you've really, like I've read Stephen Kington writing, you've optimized this conversation with the muse you're having. Not optimized, but you've at least thought about it. So what's, can you say a little bit more about the trivialities of that process of, like you said, facing the wall? What's, do you have little rituals? You mean like the granular aspect of it? The granular aspects, yeah. I do have little rituals. I do have all kinds of, which I'm not even gonna tell you about. Sure. But the one thing, and I don't wanna like to talk about this too much because it sort of jinxes things, I think, but the one thing I do try to do is when I sit down, I immediately get into it. First, second. Yeah. I don't sit and fuck around with anything. I immediately try to get into it as quickly as I can. The other thing is that writing a book or screenplay or anything like that is a process of multiple drafts. And it's the first draft, that's where you're most with the muse, where you're going through the blank page. Like right now I'm on, I don't know what, the fifth or sixth, seventh draft of the thing I'm working on. So I've got pages already written and I'm kind of reading them afresh as I go through the story. So it's not quite where I am now. It's not quite a deep muse scenario. Partly it is, but it's also sort of bouncing back and forth between the different, between the right brain and the left brain. I'm kind of looking at it and trying to evaluate it. Then I'm going into it and try to change it a little bit. When, do you know, sit down, get right into it? Do you know the night before of what that starting point is? I always try to stop. And I learned this, I think Hemingway wrote about this or John Steinbeck or one of the, or maybe both of them, to always stop when you kind of know what's coming next. So that you're not at a, facing a chasm, you know? Yeah. Okay, so, and afterwards when you're done, the office is closed. The office is closed. I let the muse take care of it, you know? And I don't want to, and I think it's a very unhealthy thing to worry about it or think about any creative process. You don't, like at a long walk later, think about- Yeah, then I will sort of keep my mind open to it, but I won't be like obsessing about it. Right, okay. Because actually on walks, sometimes things will pop in your head, you know, and you'll go, oh, I should change that. But that's not your ego doing it. That's the deeper level. Okay, so how does the day end? So go- In terms of writing? So yeah, the writing, well no, the writing, the office door closes, and then the rest of the day, just do whatever the hell. Maybe go out to dinner. My girlfriend is not here now. She's in New York working. We'll make dinner or whatever. Go out to dinner, something like that. And maybe I'll read something, nothing heavy. And I go to bed pretty early, and the gym is a big thing for me. I'll already, sorry, probably like with you with martial arts, the night before, I'll be visualizing what I have to do the next day, and getting myself psyched up for that. And then I'll just conk out like a light and wake up at the crack of dawn. So looking out into the future, this year, next few years, what do you think the muse has in store for you? I don't think you can ever know. It's probably something along the same, I really believe, you know, there's that exercise where they say to you, visualize yourself five years in the future, then write a letter from that person to yourself. I don't believe in that at all, because I don't think you can, you know, there's a line in, out of Africa that God made the world round so that we couldn't see too far ahead. You just don't know as a writer or as a, I personally, you know, I never knew, my first book was A Legend of Bagger Vance. I hadn't, before that happened, I had no clue that I was gonna be writing anything like that on that subject, anything at all, no clue until it just sort of came. And then when that was done, people said, well, you gotta write another one. I had no idea what it was, which was gonna be Gates of Fire. No clue. So if somebody had sat me down at the start of that and asked the question, I would have been crazy to have said it. So I just hope as the future unfolds, that I'm open to it, you know? Well, I think I speak for a lot of people in saying that we look forward to what that future looks like. Stephen, thank you so much for talking today. It was fun. You got the best job in the world going around talking to people that you wanna talk to and that they will talk to you, you know? So thank you for doing it. Hey, thank you for the great questions you made me think. I've certainly got a bunch of questions I never ever answered before. Awesome, thank you so much. So thanks a lot. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Stephen Pressfield and thank you to our sponsors, The Jordan Harbinger Show and Cash App. Please consider supporting the podcast by going to jordanharbinger.com slash Lex and downloading Cash App and using code Lexpodcast. Click on the links, buy the stuff. It's the best way to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled without the E, just F-R-I-D-M-A-N. And now let me leave you with some words from Stephen Pressfield. Are you paralyzed by fear? That's a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb. The more scared we are of a work or a calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
 The following is a conversation with Steven Pressfield,
 author of several powerful nonfiction
 and historical fiction books, including The War of Art,
 a book that had a big impact on my life
 and the life of millions of people
 whose passion is to create in art, science, business, sport,
 and everywhere else.
 I highly recommend it and others of his books on this topic,
 including Turning Pro, Do the Work,
 Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, and The Warrior Ethos.
 Also, his books Gates of Fire about the Spartans
 and the Battle of Thermopylae, The Lions Gate, Tides of War,
 and others are some of the best historical fiction novels
 ever written.
 As some of you know, I don't shy away
 from taking on a big, difficult challenge.
 One of the hardest for me and for millions of others
 is the discipline of staring at an empty page every day,
 pushing on to think deeply, to create,
 despite the millions of excuses that fill the head.
 In his work, Steven has articulated this struggle
 better than anyone I've ever read.
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 I will continue to return home to the technical,
 computer science, machine learning,
 engineering, math, programming,
 but also venture out to talk to people
 who had a big impact on my life
 outside the technical fields.
 Writers like Steven Pressfield and Stephen King,
 musicians like Tom Waits, political leaders like,
 well, you know who, and even athletes.
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 And now here's my conversation with Steven Pressfield.
 Modern society in many ways dreams
 of creating universal peace.
 And yet war has molded civilization
 as we know it throughout its history.
 So let's start at the high philosophical level.
 If you could imagine a world without war,
 how would that world be different?
 Perhaps put another way, what purpose has war served?
 Why do we fight?
 I think we're basically the same creatures internally
 that we were in the cave, right?
 In tribal society, back for however many, you know,
 hundreds of thousands, millions of years,
 which means that we're in the dynamic in our mind
 is a kind of an us versus them dynamic
 where our tribe is the people
 and everybody else or whatever, you know?
 And I don't see that,
 I don't think that's changed one iota over the centuries.
 It's just a question of how one might sublimate
 that urge to compete.
 I mean, you're a martial artist, you know,
 a great part of your day I'm sure is dedicated
 to reaching that place of, you know,
 of total commitment in the face of competition,
 in the face of adversity, et cetera, et cetera,
 which is I think natural and great for the human race
 on an individual basis.
 So the hope that I have, if there is any hope,
 personally, I don't think the human race
 is gonna be around very long,
 but would be in sports
 or in other kind of sublimated activities
 where people can act out their need for conquest
 or aggression or so forth,
 but at the same time relate to their opponents
 as human beings that when the game is over,
 you know, you embrace your competitor and stuff like that.
 So you think war was inevitable.
 It's a part of human nature as opposed to a force,
 a creative force in society that served a benefit.
 Well, I'm sure it has benefited, you know,
 spreading cultures and mixing cultures and stuff like that.
 But I think the urge to conquest,
 if you think about Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar
 or Napoleon or anybody like that,
 or even individual, or if we even think about
 one of the plants that we're looking at right outside,
 I mean, if you let a particular plant have its way,
 it would take over, you know, the whole hillside.
 And certainly in the days of Alexander the Great, let's say,
 there were, who knows over the face of the earth,
 hundreds of little kingdoms, China, Japan, you know,
 Asia, Europe, wherever, and every prince that grew up
 dreamt of conquering his neighbor
 and conquering a neighbor after that.
 That seems to be a universal human imperative,
 at least in the male of the species.
 So-
 War is just a realization of that imperative.
 I think so.
 So you've written about Spartans in the Battle of Thermopylae,
 you've about Alexander the Great,
 about the Six Day War in 67 in Israel
 against Egypt, Jordan, Syria.
 What war, not just out of those, but in general,
 do you think has been most transformative for the world?
 Well, these are great questions, Lex.
 Tough, easy ones, right?
 I mean, I wish I knew more about the Mongols,
 because I certainly, from what little I know,
 I think that was a very, their conquests
 was a very transformative bringing cultures, you know,
 in a horrible, bloody way together.
 But gosh, what's then the most transformative?
 Maybe the Roman conquest, you know,
 establishing the Roman Empire and bringing that culture.
 Maybe Alexander the Great's wars that, you know,
 united East and West at least for a minute.
 So building of empire.
 Do you have a sense, so there's wars,
 I mean, the Six Day War is not about building empires.
 It's about deeply held religious, cultural conflict
 and holding the line, holding the border.
 And then there is conquests, like the Mongols,
 that what is it, some large percentage of the population
 is a descendant of Genghis Khan, I believe, right?
 So that has transformative effects.
 And then World War II, I mean, personally,
 and my family and so on, the transformative effects.
 Let me ask you this, Lex, why are you,
 what are you trying to get at with these questions?
 What is this kind of the theme that you're aiming at?
 Well, I talked to Eric Weisstein,
 and he said everything is great about war
 except the killing.
 And there's a romantic notion of war.
 Certainly there's a romantic notion of being a warrior,
 but there's a romantic notion of war
 that somehow there's a creative force to it.
 That because we fight out of that fighting comes culture,
 comes music and art and more and more desire to create
 with the societies that win.
 And to me, war is not just, hey, I have a stick
 and I want your land.
 It's some kind of, like it has echoes of the creative force
 that makes humans unique to other animals.
 Like war is, it can't be just four people or 10 people
 or 100 people.
 You have to have thousands of people agreeing,
 usually thousands or more, for something so deeply
 that you would be willing to risk your own life.
 And there's a romantic notion to that.
 And because you've written so well and passionately
 about some of these, I wanted to see,
 because I don't have any answers,
 I wanted to untangle that.
 If there is a reason we fight that's more than just
 anger and hate and wanting to conquer.
 Well, let me take it from a completely different side.
 I don't think that I, in writing about war,
 am really that interested in war per se.
 I'm more interested in the metaphor.
 I think for me, I'm really writing about my own internal war
 and the war against myself and against my own resistance,
 my own negativity, all of those things that are,
 that spirituality would be the opposite of.
 So I'm not really an expert on war.
 It's not like talking to Jim Mattis or to, you know,
 Victor Davis Hansen or whatever.
 To me, the human being,
 we are spiritual beings in a physical envelope.
 And there's a automatic terrible tension within that
 and which creates a war inside ourselves.
 So the outer war, when I think about
 the Israeli army standing up to, you know, whatever,
 10 to one odds or whatever it was,
 that is a metaphor to me of the fight
 we're fighting inside ourselves.
 For me, the Six-Day War was, as you know,
 my feeling was it was about a return from exile.
 It was sort of the culmination of the reestablishment
 of the state of Israel, which had never really
 been completed because the holiest places
 of the Jewish people were in the hands of their enemies.
 So now on the other hand, Alexander the Great's conquests,
 I think were a whole other different scenario
 where the metaphor was that Alexander's father Philip,
 I think created the first nation, capital N nation.
 And he created a sort of a pathway for these guys
 who were mountain men and basically barbarians
 and Macedonians and by creating this army
 and this dream of conquering the world,
 which Alexander took to the, you know, really enacted,
 he gave them a way of rising out of themselves,
 of transcending themselves, not just individually,
 but as a people.
 So that would go along with what you're saying, Lex,
 of a certain creativity to it.
 But again, that's not for whatever,
 and I'm just realizing this as I'm answering this,
 that's not really what's interesting to me
 about these stories.
 And the Spartans, what was a whole at Thermopylae,
 that was a whole other kind of metaphor of war.
 That was a sort of a willingly going to one's own death
 for a greater cause, just like to me,
 the Spartans at Thermopylae enacted as a group,
 what Jesus Christ enacted as an individual,
 a sacrifice of their lives for the greater good.
 I don't know if that answers your question,
 but that's how I see it.
 I do feel like, you know, I get invited to speak
 to Marine Corps groups and things like that all the time,
 and I decline because I don't really feel like
 I'm a spokesman for the warrior class or anything like that.
 That's not what's interesting about it to me.
 But didn't you just say, with war as a metaphor,
 that we're all essentially in various ways warriors?
 If we think of it in terms of Jungian archetypes,
 and think of our life at least as males,
 and the earliest archetypes that kick in
 are the youth and the wanderer and the student
 and that kind of thing, and then at some point
 around age 15 to 20, whatever,
 the warrior archetype kicks in,
 and we wanna play football, we wanna do martial arts,
 we wanna join the special forces,
 we wanna hang out with our buddies, that's our great bond,
 we wanna test ourselves against adversity
 and so on and so forth.
 But at some point, that archetype,
 we move beyond that archetype, and we become fathers
 and teachers and so on and so forth.
 And then there are many archetypes beyond that
 towards the end.
 So I'm interested in the warrior archetype,
 but not to the be all and end all of everything else.
 In my book, The Virtues of War, have you read that?
 There's a character named Telemann
 whose actually, it's a long story,
 but when he's with Alexander's army,
 and when they arrive in India,
 he becomes fascinated by the gymnastophists,
 the fakirs, the naked wise men, the yogis.
 And he says to Alexander that these guys
 are warriors beyond what we are,
 even though they do nothing
 because they are inside their own selves all day long.
 If we go to the Six Day War,
 you write about, in Lionsgate,
 you write about the Six Day War in Israel.
 I think of the wars you've written about
 as the one we're still in many ways in the midst of today.
 Yes.
 So what is at the core of that conflict in Israel?
 The Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
 I mean, today it's the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
 but it echoes of the same conflict
 in that part of the world with Israel.
 What is, in your sense, the nature of that conflict?
 What can we learn about society
 and human nature from that conflict?
 That is one of the hottest conflicts
 that still goes on today.
 Well, when I was working on the Lionsgate,
 about the Six Day War,
 I wrote in the introduction
 that this was not gonna be a multi-sided story.
 I was taking it entirely, I'm a Jew,
 I identify with the Israeli people,
 I was gonna see it entirely from their side.
 Yes.
 So that's probably not what you're asking,
 but to me, the Six Day War
 and that whole, it's a piece of land that's holy
 to at least three religions and probably more.
 And from the Jewish point of view,
 it's where the state of Israel,
 it's where David founded Jerusalem,
 it's all where the 12 tribes were, et cetera, et cetera,
 where Moses came and brought the people.
 So to me, the Six Day War was about, as I said,
 a return from exile, from diaspora after 2000 years.
 Now, obviously, from the Palestinian point of view
 or the Saudi Arabian point of view or whatever,
 it's a whole other scenario.
 Religion is at the core of this conflict in some ways,
 but religion, please.
 Religion and racial slash ethnic tribal identity.
 I mean, again, what is a Jew?
 Is a Jew somebody that believes in the religion
 or is it somebody of a certain race
 that race arose in a certain place?
 Same thing as a Muslim.
 What is a Muslim?
 Do they believe in Muhammad or whatever?
 Or did they arise in a certain place
 and a certain ethnicity?
 Because if we landed from Mars,
 we couldn't tell a Jew from a Palestinian, could we?
 Just looking at them, you could easily mix them
 and you'd never know.
 And the specifics of the faith
 is not necessarily the thing that defines a person.
 No, I don't think so.
 So you'd be, like many are, a secular Jew living in Israel
 and still have a strong bond.
 Definitely, definitely.
 In fact, almost all of the Jews,
 the fighters that I spoke to from the Sixth Table
 were secular and it really was not a religious thing
 with them as much as it was a national thing.
 So having spent time in Israel,
 how's the world where military conflict is directly felt
 as opposed to maybe if we look at the US
 where it's distant and far away,
 how is that world different?
 How are the people different?
 It's very different, as you know.
 I've never been to Israel, actually.
 Oh, you haven't?
 Haven't felt it.
 Well, you should definitely go.
 I mean, here in the United States, where when,
 like an incident like Charlottesville comes up,
 you know, where people are chanting,
 Jews will not replace us, blah, blah, blah,
 the impulse in the Jewish community is to think of,
 well, how can we reach out to the other side?
 You know, how can we either show them
 that we are human beings like they are
 and show them that we care for them, et cetera, et cetera?
 That's the sort of distant from war.
 From, if you're in Israel,
 and you know, like if you and I
 were Israeli citizens right now,
 you would be a fighter pilot or a tank commander
 or whatever, you know, you would not just be, you know,
 working at MIT or whatever.
 And I would be in the army too.
 And so from their point of view,
 they say, all those people who hate us,
 can I curse on this?
 Of course.
 On this thing?
 Fuck them, we'll kill them.
 We'll kill them.
 You know, if they dared across the line,
 and that's their whole different point of view.
 To me, it's actually a healthier point of view.
 You think so?
 Yeah.
 There's no, so let me ask the hard question is,
 well, maybe it's an impossible question,
 is how do we resolve that conflict?
 In Israel and-
 In Israel or-
 Anywhere?
 Anywhere where the instinct is to reach out in US
 and say, F you and the people, yeah.
 Here's my, here's what I think that the only way
 that two warring sides or two sides
 that are opposed to one another,
 can ever really come together is when there's mutual respect,
 we'll get just more water.
 I got it, I got it.
 When there's mutual respect and they can see each other
 as equals and when there's mutual fear, you know,
 where one side says, we don't dare cross a line
 with this other side and the other side says the same thing.
 I think then you can kind of reach across that thing
 and say, okay, we'll stay here, you stay here.
 We'll mingle in cultural ways and we'll have interchange,
 you know, winter marriage, da da da da da da.
 But as soon as one side has no power,
 as the Jewish people have had no power
 throughout the diaspora forever, right?
 Then it's just a human nature.
 You can see it in Trump and what he does
 to any vulnerable minority, right?
 It's, and he's not alone, I'm not blaming him alone.
 That's human nature.
 So I do think that that idea of like, fuck you,
 if you cross the line, we'll kill you,
 is really a good way, is a good place to start from.
 Because now you can sit down on opposite sides of the table
 and say, you know, what do we have in common?
 How can we, we wanna raise our children,
 you wanna raise your children, how can we do this
 in a way that we're not hurting each other?
 So you kind of said that you need to arrive at a balance,
 some kind of balance of power.
 But you haven't spoken to the fact
 that there's deeply rooted hatred of the other.
 So is there no way to alleviate that hatred or is that,
 I mean, what role does love and hate come?
 I think that hatred can go away, I really do.
 I mean, if you look at even now
 that I haven't seen this in person,
 but they say that the Saudis and the Israelis
 are collaborating on certain things, you know,
 by their mutual fear of or antagonism to Iran.
 I do think that even really long, long, longstanding
 hatreds and animosities, thousands of years old,
 can go away under the right circumstances.
 On what time scale?
 I mean, for instance, I don't know if it's-
 Do people have to die, do generations have to die
 and pass away and new generations come up with less hate
 or can a single individual learn to not hate?
 I think a single individual can learn to not hate
 because it certainly doesn't seem to,
 over thousands of years doesn't seem to work, you know?
 We keep thinking that that's gonna happen.
 But I think it's, we're in a real spiritual realm here
 when you're talking about that.
 You're in a realm of, you know, Buddha, Jesus, whatever,
 something like that, that where, you know,
 a true change of soul happens.
 But I do think that's possible.
 So what do you think is the future of warfare,
 especially with what many people see as the expansion
 of the military industrial conflict?
 To what, do you, I know you're not a military historian.
 I'm asking more as a metaphor.
 And do you see us as people continuing to fight?
 You know, it's a really great question, Lex,
 because I think now with social media, TV, movies,
 all of these things that create empathy across cultures,
 it becomes harder and harder, I think, I think,
 to totally demonize the other,
 the way it was in previous wars.
 I also think, I don't really see an appetite
 for people wanting to go to war these days.
 And in a way, I don't know if that's good or bad.
 It's like everybody's so fat and lazy
 and so concerned with how many clicks they're getting
 that, you know, whereas I know at the start of World War I,
 both the younger generations were eager to go to war.
 You know, I think it was insane,
 but it was that sort of warrior archetype
 that we were talking about before,
 that generational testosterone, eros thing.
 Whereas nowadays, I don't know, I mean,
 it's hard to say there's not gonna be another war
 because there always are,
 but it's sort of hard to imagine people
 getting off their ass these days to do anything.
 Well, it's funny that you mentioned social media
 as a place for empathy, sure,
 but it's, in a sense, it's a place for war as well.
 For hatred, yeah, true.
 For hatred, and perhaps, you know,
 the positive aspect of hatred on social media
 is that it's somewhat less harmful than murder,
 and so it kind of dissipates sort of the hatefuls.
 You get the hate out at a less,
 on a daily basis, and thereby never boils up
 to a point where you want to be hated.
 Never boils up to a point where you want to kill.
 It's also a really weird thing that's going on,
 and I don't know if anybody really understands,
 like with video games, where kids are acting out
 these incredible horror things, right?
 But you know that if they cut their finger,
 they would like freak out, you know?
 And I also don't think that many of the people
 that are hateful on social media,
 if they were face-to-face with the person,
 it wouldn't, so there's a sort of a two mental spheres
 happening at the same time,
 and I don't know how that plays out.
 Maps to the actual military,
 how that actually maps to military conflict.
 Yeah, yeah.
 Like when you, if you in the United States
 have a draft, for example,
 how the populace would respond different than they did
 in previous generations.
 Yeah, I think they certainly would.
 Yeah.
 Another question, not sure if you've thought about it,
 but I work on building artificial intelligence systems.
 In our community, many people are worried about AI
 being used in war, so automating the killing process
 with drones and in general, it's being used more and more.
 I should recuse myself on that one,
 I really haven't thought about that.
 You haven't thought about it.
 I'd rather ask you what you think about it.
 Well, it's interesting, I mean,
 because it's so fundamentally different from,
 if you look at the Battle of Thermopylae.
 It means just if we talk about the difference
 between a gun and a sword.
 I'll tell you one little anecdote.
 There was a Spartan king, I don't know which one it was,
 but at one point they showed him a new invention
 and it could launch a bolt that would, you know,
 kill someone at a range of 200 yards.
 And the king wept and said, alas, valor is no more.
 Because their point of view of war,
 it was highly ritualized, as you know,
 and the code of honor was that you were not supposed
 to be able to kill another person
 unless you yourself were in equal danger of being killed.
 And any other way of doing that,
 even bow and arrow was considered less than manly
 and less than honorable.
 And maybe we should go back to that
 because at least it makes the stakes real and true.
 And, not that we could.
 Not, that's the point.
 You were in the Marine Corps, so we talk about the real,
 the bloody conflicts, you've written about many of them.
 So let me ask a personal question.
 Have you, sort of as writing and in general,
 have you thought about what it takes to be able
 to kill a person if you yourself could do it?
 I have thought about it, yeah.
 And how that would make you feel?
 Of course, one never knows.
 I certainly, I have not been in combat.
 I haven't killed anybody.
 But I would imagine in the real world
 that it would change you utterly forever.
 Because you can't help but identify with a person
 that you've just killed.
 And it's another human being.
 And I mean, I have a hard time killing a spider.
 So I would imagine that it's something
 that warriors understand and nobody else understands.
 And you've spoken with many.
 How, I mean, you've spoken with people
 who've seen military combat.
 Oh yeah.
 In Israel.
 What, have they been able to articulate
 the experience of killing?
 It's sort of just what I said.
 I mean, I've even been thinking of one pilot
 that I interviewed over there,
 who was strafing a tank in his Mustang
 and saw at really low altitude
 and saw what his bullets did to the guy
 and could see his face and everything like that,
 which is even one remove or more removes
 from an infantryman, what an infantryman does.
 And he said that, that same thing that I said,
 that it just changes you and you can never say it,
 never look at the world or look at anything
 the same way again.
 And when that happens at scale,
 it's thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds,
 that changes entire societies.
 I mean, that's what we've seen.
 At least, but the problem is it doesn't change
 the politicians back home.
 Right.
 How important is mortality, finiteness,
 the fact that this thing ends to the creative process?
 So killing and war really emphasizes that,
 but in general, the fact that this thing ends.
 It does?
 It does.
 And, and.
 Shit.
 And on a serious note, do you think about your own mortality?
 Do you meditate on your own mortality
 when you think about the work you do?
 That's another great question, Lex.
 I actually, I'm 75 and I just was having,
 I had breakfast in New York a few months ago
 with a friend of mine who's like my exact same age.
 And I said to him, I said, Nick,
 do you ever think about mortality?
 And he said, every fucking minute of every day.
 And I was kind of relieved to hear that because I do too.
 But I actually, I always have, I think.
 And I think, you know, the fact of mortality
 kind of gives meaning to life.
 I think that's why we wanna create.
 That's why we wanna make a mark of some kind
 of mortality or, and the other aspect of it is
 what's on the other side of that mortality.
 I'm a believer in previous lives.
 So I sort of, and I, the question I've never been able
 to answer among many, many others is like,
 why are we even here?
 Why are we in the flesh?
 You know, I sort of, I like to believe that God
 is not a force, but God is a force.
 And I think that's why we're on some kind of journey.
 But I'm not sure why, why we were put in this world
 where the ground rules are, if you think about animal life,
 that you cannot live from one day to the next
 without killing and eating some other form of life.
 And then you can die and die, and you know,
 be friends with everybody.
 So I sort of, I don't get what that was all about,
 but that's sort of the big issue.
 Have you read the Ernest Becker's denial of death,
 for example, is that Ernest Becker's a philosopher
 that said that the death, that the fear of death
 is really the primary driver of everything we do.
 So that's what the-
 Right, I would agree with that.
 So to you, you've always thought about
 even your own mortality.
 Yes, definitely.
 And can you elaborate on the reincarnation aspect
 of what you were talking about, that we kinda,
 what's your sense that we had previous lives?
 What, have you thought concretely,
 or is it a lot of it kind of is?
 No, I've thought concretely about it.
 when you see children, young kids, or even dogs and cats,
 that they come into the world with personalities.
 You know, and three kids in a family
 are gonna be completely different
 and completely their own person.
 And that person that they are doesn't change over life.
 And I, you know, there's one of the things that I did in,
 in my book, The Artist's Journey,
 is that there were certain things where I tracked
 or just listed in order,
 like all of Bruce Springsteen's albums
 or all of Philip Roth's books, you know,
 kind of a body of work throughout over, you know,
 a period of 30, 40, 50 years, you know?
 And you can see that there's a theme
 running through all of those things,
 that it's completely unique to that person.
 Nobody else could have written Philip Roth's books
 or Bruce Springsteen's songs.
 And you can even see sort of a destiny there.
 So I ask myself, well, where did that come from?
 What, it seems to be a continuation
 of something that was, that happened before,
 and that will lead to something else,
 because it's not starting from scratch.
 It seems like there's a calling, a destiny in there already.
 This gets back to the muse and all that kind of thing.
 So yeah, it's almost like there's this,
 let's call it a god, it's passing,
 it's almost like sampling parts of a previous human
 that has lived and putting those into the new one.
 Sampling, this is probably a pretty good word.
 Taking some of the good, well,
 you can't take all the good parts,
 because the bad parts is what makes the person.
 Right.
 Let's say you're taking it all together.
 Okay, this is humans only,
 or does it pass around from animals, in your view?
 I don't know, that's above my pay grade, I don't know.
 Okay, so you talk about the muse
 as the source of ideas, maybe.
 Since you've gotten a few glimpses of her in your writing,
 tell me, what is it possible for you to tell me
 about her, where does she reside, what does she look like?
 I mean, you can look at it in many different ways.
 The Greeks did it in an anthropomorphic way, right?
 They created gods that were like human beings.
 But if you look at it from a Kabbalistic Jewish perspective,
 Jewish mysticism, you could say that it's the soul,
 the neshamah, right?
 That the soul is above us on a higher plane,
 our own, your soul, my soul,
 and it's trying to reach down to us and communicate with us.
 And we're trying simultaneously to reach up to it
 through prayer or through, if you're a writer or an artist,
 when you sit down at the keyboard,
 you're entering into a kind of prayer.
 You're entering into a different state
 of an altered consciousness, as some may say.
 You're opening yourself, opening the pipeline,
 or turning on the radio to tune into the content of the soul.
 Cosmic radio station.
 Another way of looking at it, this is,
 do you ever see the movie City of Angels?
 The visual of the movie, it was Meg Ryan and Nicholas Cage.
 Yeah, yeah, I've seen it, yep.
 And right, the visual of the movie sort of was,
 Meg Ryan is a heart surgeon.
 And as she's operating on somebody,
 suddenly Nicholas Cage in this long duster coat,
 like Jesse James, appears right next to her
 in the operating room, and he's an angel.
 And he's waiting to take out the soul of the patient
 on the operating table.
 And she doesn't see him, she's totally unaware of him,
 and so is everybody else in the operating room,
 except maybe the guy who's about to die,
 who suddenly sees him.
 But I kind of believe that there are beings like that,
 or if you don't like that, it's a force,
 it's a consciousness, it's something
 that are right here right now.
 And they're trying to communicate to us.
 And like through a membrane,
 like tapping on that window over there,
 they're like right out there.
 And they carry the future.
 They are everything that is in potential,
 all the works that you will do, Lex,
 your startup, whatever else you're doing,
 they know that.
 And it's not really you that's coming up with those ideas,
 in my opinion.
 Those things are appearing,
 it's like somebody knocks on the door and puts it in.
 I mean, in the Iliad,
 where gods and goddesses appear
 along with the human antagonists
 on the battlefield all the time, right?
 There'll be Homer flashes to Olympus
 and then back to the real world.
 And there's a thing where one Aphrodite,
 let's say, wants to help Paris.
 And so she says, well, I will appear to him in a dream,
 and I'll take the form of his brother.
 And I'll say, bum, ba, da, bum, ba, da, bum.
 So that's creatures, beings on one dimension,
 as the Greeks thought, communicating with,
 and I believe that that's exactly what's going on
 in one, whatever analogy you wanna use.
 But that communication, to which degree
 do you play the role in that communication,
 as opposed to sitting at the computer, if you're a writer,
 and staring at the blank page,
 and putting in the time, and waiting?
 So if, in your view,
 are these creatures
 basically waiting to tell you about your future?
 Or is there a choice?
 How many possible futures are there?
 How many possible ideas are there?
 That's a great question.
 I think there's basically,
 yes, there are alternatives, degrees within it,
 but if you look at Bruce Springsteen's albums,
 how much could he have done really differently?
 Yeah, you can just see there's a whole impetus
 going through the whole thing,
 and nothing was gonna shake him off that.
 And yeah, maybe the river could have been different,
 it could have been called something else,
 but he was dealing with certain issues.
 His conscious self was dealing with certain issues
 that were really out of his control.
 He was drawn, he was called to it, right?
 Nothing could stop him.
 And so it is sort of a partnership, I think,
 the creative process between,
 and creative impulse that's coming from some other place,
 or it's coming from deep within us
 is another way to look at it.
 Like if we're acorns, and we're growing into oaks.
 So the conscious artist,
 who's sitting there at the keyboard or whatever,
 is applying his or her consciousness to that,
 but is also going into opening themselves
 to the unconscious, or to this other realm,
 whatever that is.
 I mean, certainly songwriters for a million years
 have said, you know, a song just came in over their head,
 right, poems, all they had to do is write.
 But then, you ever see that thing of Keats' notes
 for a thing of beauty is a joy forever?
 It's like covers the entire page,
 and it's like, you know, he's crossing this out,
 and that out, and yet, so his consciousness,
 his conscious mind is working on it.
 But I do think it's a partnership,
 and I think that, I know when I was first starting out
 as a writer, I worked in advertising,
 and I tried to do novels that I could never do.
 I was like, really unskilled at getting to that,
 tuning into that station.
 I just, I beat my brains out, and was unable to do it,
 you know, except, and because I was sort of trying too hard,
 it was sort of like a Zen monk, or a monk of some kind,
 trying to meditate, and just like constantly,
 thoughts driving you crazy.
 But over time, you know, knock wood,
 I've kind of gotten better at it,
 and I can sort of let go of those,
 that part of me that's trying so hard,
 and so these angels can speak a little more easily
 through the membrane.
 Can you put into words the process of letting go,
 and clearing that channel of communication?
 What does it take?
 That's another great question.
 For me, it just took, it took probably 30 years,
 and I don't even, I guess I would liken it to meditation,
 even though I'm not a meditator,
 but it would seem to me to be one of the hardest things
 in the world to just sit still and stop thinking, right?
 And so it's very hard to put into words,
 and I think that's why these teachers of meditation
 use tricks, and koans, and stuff like that,
 but for me at least, I think it was just a process
 of years of years and years of trying,
 and finally of beating my head in the wall,
 and finally little by little giving up
 that beating of the head.
 But there doesn't seem to be any trick.
 Everybody wants a hack these days,
 and I don't think there is a hack.
 If you look at it in terms of the goddess, the muse,
 she's watching you down there,
 beating your head in the wall, you're like a Marine
 going through an obstacle course,
 or a martial artist trying to learn,
 like Uma Thurman doing the casket,
 trying to make that little four inch punch.
 The muse or the goddess is just sort of watching going,
 eh, it's Lex, he's trying, he's trying.
 I'm gonna come back in another couple of months
 and see if he's still there,
 and finally she'll say, all right, he's had it,
 he's paid his dues, I'm gonna give it to him.
 So the hard work and the suffering, yeah.
 But I'm also, being Russian in wrestling and martial arts,
 we're big into drilling technique.
 I was also just even getting at,
 certainly there's no shortcut, but is there a process?
 So you're in, the process of practice.
 So you had two, one you had an example of meditation,
 so it's essentially the practice of meditation.
 I think so, drill I think is a good way to look at it too.
 But what are you drilling?
 You're just sitting and-
 You're writing, you know?
 Just writing.
 You're writing, then you're looking at what you wrote,
 you know, you're hitting moments when it flows,
 and then your other hitting moments
 where you just can't do anything, and you're trying to,
 from the moments where it flowed,
 you're trying to come back and look at it and say,
 what did I do, how did that happen?
 Where was my mind, you know?
 But I think it's just a process of over and over
 and over and over until finally it gets a little bit easier.
 And did you always, when you read something you write,
 did you always have a pretty good radar
 for what's good and not after it's over?
 After it's written?
 No.
 I think I do now,
 but no, it was always really hard
 for me to know what was good.
 I mean, do you edit, the process of editing
 is the process of looking at what you've written
 and improving it.
 Are you a better writer or an editor?
 How often do you edit?
 That's another great question, great question,
 because I do think that in writing,
 the real process of looking at it
 is the process that an editor does,
 rather than what a writer does.
 The gentleman I was just talking to on the phone
 is my editor, Sean Coyne,
 who was the guy who bought Gates of Fire
 when he was an editor at Doubleday,
 and who basically when I finish a book, I give it to him.
 And he gives me, you know,
 editing doesn't really mean like crossing out commas.
 It really means looking at the overall work
 and saying, does it work?
 And if it doesn't work, why doesn't it work?
 Is there something wrong here?
 You know, like if you were building the Golden Gate Bridge,
 you know, and one span was out of whack, you know,
 you could, and I think a really skilled editor,
 which Sean is, understands what makes a story tick.
 And he also has the perspective that I've lost
 in something I've wrote, because I'm so close to it,
 to say, you know, this isn't working and that is working.
 What kind of advice has he given you?
 Is it like layout?
 Like this story doesn't flow correctly.
 Like you shouldn't start at this point.
 Or does he even sit back at a higher level and say,
 I see what you're doing, but you could do better.
 No, he doesn't do that.
 Okay.
 But a lot of it is about genre.
 And kind of defining what genre you're working in.
 And I'm gonna get up here to just bring something over here
 for the camera.
 This was one where Sean tore this down
 and made me start from scratch.
 And what the specifics of it were really,
 this is a supernatural thriller.
 That's the genre.
 Sort of like Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist.
 And what he made, what he showed me was that I had kind of,
 I had violated certain conventions of the genre.
 You know, that, and you just can't do that.
 You know, it's gotta be, you know,
 it has to be done the right way.
 And so he pointed out certain things to me.
 So he must be a prolific reader himself too, actually.
 That's such a tough job of editor.
 Yeah.
 Again, he was sort of born to do that.
 He just kind of glommed onto it.
 But since he was his first job publishing
 cat thrillers, cat detective,
 he studied how it works, what makes a story work,
 et cetera, et cetera.
 And so he really, he's great.
 And I think any really successful writer,
 unless they're utterly brilliant on their own,
 has gotta have a great editor behind them.
 But you yourself edit as well.
 I'm constantly trying to learn from him and teach myself.
 Everything you see in my blog posts
 that is about the craft of writing
 is me trying to teach myself the rules.
 So that, you know, I'm sure it's the same in martial arts
 or anything else, right?
 You try to not be dependent on that other person
 because it's so painful to make those mistakes.
 You really feel like, God, I wish I could get it right
 the first time the next time I do it.
 Well, in research, we go through that.
 In research, more than writing.
 So what you do is a little more solitary.
 In research, there's usually two, three, four people
 working on something together and we write a paper.
 And there's that painful process of where you write it down
 and then you share it with other.
 And not only do they criticize the writing,
 they criticize the fundamental aspects
 of the approach you've taken.
 I would think so.
 So it's exactly like, you know, they would say,
 you're attacking, you're asking the wrong questions, right?
 The wrong questions, yeah.
 And that's extremely painful, especially when you,
 well, yes, painful and helpful,
 but there's disagreement and so on.
 And through that comes out a better product.
 And if, as you want to still have an ego,
 but you also wanna silence it every once in a while,
 so there's a balance.
 In your book, The War of Art,
 you talk about resistance with the capital R
 as the invisible force in this universe of ours
 that finds a way to prevent you from starting
 or doing the work.
 Where do you think resistance comes from?
 Why is there a force in our mind
 that's constantly trying to jeopardize our efforts
 with laziness, excuses, and so on?
 That's another great question.
 I mean, in Jewish mysticism, in Kabbalistic thinking,
 it's called the Yetzir-Hurah, right?
 And it's a force that if this up here is your soul,
 of Nehshima trying to talk to you, us down here,
 the Yetzir-Hurah is this negative force in the middle.
 So I'm not the only one that ever thought about this.
 But, and I don't know if anybody really knows the answer,
 but here's my answer.
 I think that there are two places
 where we as human beings can seat our identity.
 One is the ego, the conscious ego,
 and the other is the greater self.
 And the self in the Jungian sense,
 the self in the Jungian sense includes the unconscious
 and butts up against what Jung called the divine ground,
 which what I would call the muse, the goddess, or whatever.
 And I think, and the ego is just this little dot
 inside this bigger self.
 And the ego has a completely different view of life
 as from the self.
 The ego believes, I'm gonna give you a long answer here, Lex.
 No, perfect.
 The ego believes that death is real.
 The ego believes that time and space are real.
 The ego believes that each one of us
 is separate from the other.
 I'm separate from you.
 I could punch you in the face and it wouldn't hurt me.
 It would only hurt you.
 And in the ego's world, the dominant emotion is fear
 because we are all made of flesh.
 We can all die, we can all be hurt,
 we can all be ruined, bum, ba, bum.
 So we are protecting ourselves and even our desire to create
 as we were talking about before,
 comes out of that fear of death.
 The self, on the other hand, the greater self
 that butts up against the divine ground
 believes that death is not real,
 that time and space are not real,
 that the gods travel swift as thought.
 And the ego also believes that,
 I mean the self believes that there's no difference
 between you and me, that we're all one.
 If I hurt you, I hurt myself, karma, right?
 And in the world of the self, of the greater self,
 the dominant emotion is love, not fear.
 Now, so I think that, let me, I'll go farther back here,
 a long way to answer your question.
 When Jesus died on the cross,
 or when the 300 Spartans willingly sacrificed their lives
 at Thermopylae, they were acting according
 to the rules of the self.
 Death is not real, no difference between you and me,
 time and space are not real, predominant emotion is love.
 So, in my opinion, we as conscious human vessels
 are in a struggle between these two things,
 the ego and the self.
 To me, resistance is the voice of the ego,
 saying, and it's a fearful voice,
 because if, when we identify with the self,
 we move our consciousness over to the self,
 as artists or scientists opening ourselves up
 to the cosmic dimension, to the other forces,
 the ego is tremendously threatened by that,
 because if we're in that space, that head space,
 we don't need the ego anymore.
 So I think resistance is a voice of the ego,
 trying to keep control of us.
 You there.
 In a way, I'll give you a bad example, Trump is the ego.
 It's probably a very good example, right?
 Yes, he's, yeah.
 It's a zero sum world for him,
 and for anybody that's in that,
 and the opposite of that would be somebody
 like Martin Luther King or Gandhi.
 And that's of course why they all wind up
 getting assassinated, because that voice,
 that ego is hanging on to itself
 and feels so threatened by,
 I could talk more about this if you want.
 No, for sure, that's fascinating,
 it's just, it's interesting why the fear
 is attached to the ego.
 I really like this dichotomy of ego and self
 and that struggle.
 It's just, ego has a, you know,
 the self obsession of it,
 why fear is such a predominant thing,
 why is resistance trying to undermine everything?
 The-
 It's fear, it's out of fear.
 Let's think about the whole thing in terms of stories.
 In a story, the villain is always resistance,
 is always the ego.
 The hero is always, of course always is not everything,
 but you know what I mean, pretty much,
 represents kind of the self.
 If you think about the alien on the spaceship,
 that's like the ultimate kind of villain.
 It keeps changing form, right?
 First it goes on the guy's face,
 then it pops out of his chest,
 but it always just has that one monomaniacal thing
 to destroy, you know?
 And just like the ego, just like resistance.
 And maybe alien is a bad example
 because Sigourney Weaver has to sort of fight
 on the same terms as the alien,
 but maybe a better example might be something
 like Casablanca, where in the end,
 the Humphrey Bogart character has to, acting,
 operating out of the self, has to give up his selfish dream
 of going off with Ingrid Bergman,
 Neil Ceylon, the love of his life,
 and instead puts her on a plane to Lisbon
 while he goes off to fight the Nazis in the desert.
 I don't know if that's clear,
 but in almost every story, the villain is the ego,
 is resistance, is fear, is that zero-sum thing.
 And in almost every story, the hero is someone
 that is willing to make a sacrifice to help others.
 It's letting go of that fear
 is what leads to productivity and to success.
 Yeah.
 Do you think there's a,
 this is probably the answer,
 is either obvious or impossible,
 but do you think there's an evolutionary advantage
 to resistance?
 What would life look like without resistance?
 That's another great question.
 I think, I also believe that resistance, like death,
 gives meaning to life.
 If we didn't have it, it's gonna be,
 what would we be?
 We'd be in the Garden of Eden picking fruit
 and just happy and stupid.
 And I do think that that myth of the Garden of Eden
 is really about this kind of thing,
 where Adam and Eve decide to sort of take matters
 into their own hands and acquire knowledge
 that until then God had said,
 I'm the only one that's got that knowledge.
 And of course, once they've acquired that knowledge,
 they're cast out into the world you and I live in now,
 where they do have to deal with that fear
 and they do have to deal with all that stuff.
 It's a human condition.
 It's a human condition and the meaning
 and the purpose comes from the resistance being there
 and the struggle to overcome it.
 To overcome it, right.
 And also the other aspect of it is that it's not real at all.
 It's not even like it's an actual force.
 It's all here, right?
 So the sort of, in a way, it's sort of a surrender to it.
 Or it's sort of like turning on the light in a dark thing.
 It's like, it's gone.
 But not quite because it's not really.
 Not quite, because it comes back again tomorrow morning.
 Exactly.
 So you have to keep changing light bulbs every day.
 So what's been, maybe recently, but in general,
 maybe in your life, what's been the most relentless
 or one of the more relentless sources of resistance
 to you personally?
 I mean, it's always the same.
 It's about writing for me and evolving within my own
 body of work.
 It never goes away.
 It never gets any less.
 Do you have particular excuses,
 particular justifications that come out?
 No, it's always the same.
 Well, I would say it's always the same,
 but it's really not because resistance is so protean.
 It keeps changing form.
 And as you move to hopefully a higher level,
 you really start to see that resistance
 gets a little more nuanced and a little more subtle
 trying to fake you out.
 But I think you learn that it's always there
 and you're always gonna have to face it.
 So.
 I mean, your battle is sitting down
 and writing to some number of words to a blank page.
 Yeah.
 Do you have a process there with this battle?
 Do you have a number of hours?
 Do you have a number of hours that you put in?
 Yeah, I'm definitely a believer that even though
 this battle is fought on the highest sort of spiritual level
 that the way you fight it is on the most mundane.
 I'm sure it's like martial arts must be the same way.
 I mean, I go to the gym first thing in the morning
 and I sort of am rehearsing myself.
 Face, you know, the gym is called resistance training,
 right?
 I'm working against resistance, right?
 And I don't wanna go, I don't wanna get out of bed.
 I hate to, you know.
 But I'm sort of fortifying myself to be ready for the day.
 And, you know, like I said, over, knock wood, over years
 I've learned to sort of get into the right kind of mindset
 and it's not as hard for me as it used to be.
 The real resistance, I think, for me,
 and I think this is true for anybody is the question of sort
 of what's the next idea?
 What's the next book?
 What's the next project that you're gonna work on?
 And when I ask that question, I'm asking it of the muse.
 I'm kind of saying, what do you want me
 or I'm asking it of my own conscious.
 If we're looking at Bruce Springsteen's albums,
 it's kind of, well, what's the next album?
 Now he's on Broadway.
 That was a great idea, right?
 Where'd that come from, you know?
 But, and then for him, what's after that, you know?
 Because that body of work is already alive.
 It already exists inside us,
 kind of like a woman's biological clock
 and we have to serve it.
 And we have to, otherwise it'll give us cancer, you know?
 I don't mean to say that if anybody has cancer,
 that they're not, you know, but you know what I mean?
 It'll take its revenge on us.
 So the next resistance to me is sort of,
 well, a big aspect of it is what's next?
 You know, when I finished the book I'm working on now,
 I'm not sure what I'm gonna do next.
 And I see at the same time you have a kind of,
 you have a sense that there's a Bruce Springsteen
 single line of albums.
 So like, it's already known somewhere in the universe
 what you're going to do next is the sense you have.
 In a sense, yes.
 I don't know if it's like predetermined, you know?
 But it's, but there's something like that.
 Yeah, I'd like to believe that there's,
 well, it's kind of like quantum mechanics, I guess.
 Once you observe it, maybe once you talk to the muse,
 it's one thing for sure.
 It was always going to be that one thing.
 But really, in reality, it's a distribution.
 It could be any number of things.
 Yeah, I think so.
 There's alternate realities.
 Alternate realities, yeah.
 But they're not that far apart.
 I mean, Bruce Springsteen is not gonna write
 a Joni Mitchell song, you know?
 No matter how hard he tries.
 He's still going on Broadway.
 I mean, he still did that,
 which is not a Bruce Springsteen thing to do.
 So I think you're being, in retrospect,
 I think it is a Bruce Springsteen thing to do.
 It's a next sort of evolution for him.
 Why not take his music to there, you know?
 In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense, I think.
 Yeah.
 Because if you pull it off, especially.
 Do you visualize yourself completing the work?
 Like Olympic athletes visualize getting the gold medal.
 Do you, you know, they go through,
 I mean, that's actually a really,
 you can learn something from athletes on that,
 is years out, certainly two, three years out,
 some people do much longer.
 Every day, you visualize how the day
 of the championship will go,
 down to, I mean, everything,
 down to how will it feel to stand on the podium and so on.
 Do you do anything like that in how you approach writing?
 No.
 Because it's- It's always in the moment.
 Because, yeah, it is in the moment, I think.
 Because it's such a mystery.
 You just don't know.
 I think it's different from sports.
 Right.
 Because you don't know the destiny.
 There's no gold medal at the end.
 No.
 In fact, I would like to think that as soon as you finish one,
 the next day you're on the other.
 And in fact, hopefully you've already started the other.
 You're already, you know, 100 pages into the other
 when you finish the first one.
 But it is a, it is a,
 it's a journey, it's a process.
 I don't think it is a, in fact,
 I think it's very dangerous to think that way.
 To think, oh, this, I'm going to win the Oscar, you know?
 It's interesting for the creative process
 that might be dangerous.
 It's a, maybe you can, like, why is that dangerous?
 Because I kind of know-
 Because it's the ego.
 It's the ego.
 Because you're giving yourself over to the ego.
 You know, I keep saying this myself,
 my job, I'm a servant of the muse.
 I'm there to do what she tells me to do.
 And if I suddenly think, oh, I'm really,
 I just want to, you know, whatever,
 the muse doesn't like that.
 Yeah.
 And, you know, she's on another dimension for me.
 I'm trying to square that, because I agree.
 I'm trying to square that with,
 I think there's a meditation to visualizing success
 in the athletic realm, to where it focuses,
 it removes everything else away,
 to where you focus on this particular battle.
 I mean, I think that you can do that in many kinds of ways.
 And in sports, the ego serves a more important role,
 I think, than it does in writing.
 And the ego, there's something-
 Well, let me, when you say that,
 I know what you mean, Lex.
 And I do think there is a sort of a,
 you know, it's interesting to watch interviews
 with Steph Curry, who's such, obviously such a nice guy,
 but he's got such tremendous self-confidence,
 you know, that it, but it doesn't border on ego so much
 because he's worked so hard for it, you know?
 But he knows, so he has visualized,
 he has visualized maybe not so much winning, you know,
 as just him being the best he can be,
 him being in the flow, you know,
 doing his thing that he knows he can do.
 And I do think in the creative world,
 yeah, there is a sort of a thing like that,
 where you, where, you know, a choreographer
 or a filmmaker or whatever might be,
 do an internal thing where they're saying,
 I can make an Oscar-winning movie,
 I can direct this movie, you know,
 I'm banishing these thoughts that I'm not good enough.
 I can do that, I can edit it, I can score it,
 I can, you know, bump it, bump it, bump.
 But, and I don't think that's really ego.
 I think that's, that's part of the process in a good way,
 like an athlete does that.
 So extreme confidence is what some
 of the best athletes come with.
 And you think it's possible to, as a writer,
 to have extreme confidence in yourself?
 I do think so, you know, that I'm sure when John Lennon
 sat down to write a song, he felt like,
 shit, I can do this, you know?
 I'm not so sure.
 I think, because the great artists I've seen,
 and you're haunted by self-doubt.
 It's that resistance, I mean, the confidence.
 Yes, but I mean, I guess, but even beyond the self,
 within the self, above the self-doubt.
 Oh, it's the bigger picture of the self-belief.
 Yeah, I'm freaking out, yeah, I'm worried
 that I'm not gonna be able to,
 but you know, I know, I can do this.
 Yeah, and when you look at,
 when you take a bigger picture of it.
 So the writing process, is it fundamentally lonely?
 So. No.
 Because you're with your characters.
 You are.
 So you really put yourself in the world.
 Absolutely.
 You know, I've written about this before,
 that I used to have, my desk used to face a wall
 instead of seeing, and people would say,
 well, don't you wanna look out the window?
 But I'm in here, I'm seeing the Spartans,
 I'm seeing, you know, whatever.
 And the characters that are on the page,
 or that you create, are not accidents.
 They're coming out of some issue,
 some deep issue that you have,
 whether you realize it or not.
 You might not realize it till 20 years later,
 or somebody explains it to you.
 So your characters are kind of fascinating to you.
 And their dilemmas are fascinating to you.
 And you're also trying to come to grips with them,
 you know, you sort of see them through a glass darkly,
 you know, and you really wanna see them more clearly.
 So yeah, no, it's not lonely at all.
 In fact, I'm more lonely sometimes later,
 going out to dinner with some people,
 and actually talking to people.
 Do you miss the characters after it's over?
 Let's say I have affection for them,
 kind of like children that have gone off to college,
 and now are, you know, you only see them at Thanksgiving.
 Definitely I have affection for them.
 Even the bad guys.
 Maybe especially the bad guys.
 Especially the bad guys.
 And you've said that writers, even successful writers,
 are often not tough-minded enough.
 I've read that in the post.
 That you have to be a professional
 in the way you handle your emotions.
 You have to be a bit of a warrior to be a writer.
 So what do you think makes a warrior?
 Is a warrior born or trained in the realm,
 in the bigger realm, in the realm of writing,
 in the creative process?
 I think they're born to some extent.
 You have the gift.
 Like you might have the gift as a martial artist
 to do whatever martial artists do.
 But the training is the big thing.
 90% training, 10% genetics.
 And you know, I use another analogy,
 other than warrior, as far as writer,
 and that's like to be a mother.
 If you think about, if you're a writer,
 or any creative person,
 you're giving birth to something, right?
 You're carrying a new life inside you.
 And in terms of bravery, if your child,
 your two-year-old child is underneath a car,
 is coming down the street,
 the mother's gonna like stop a Buick, you know,
 with her bare hands.
 So that's another way to think about
 how a writer has to think about,
 or any creative person has to think about,
 I think, what they're doing.
 What this child, this new creation that they're bringing forth.
 Yeah, so the hard work that's underlying that.
 I've just a couple weeks ago talked to,
 just happened to be in the same room,
 both gave talks, Arianna Huffington.
 I did this conversation with her.
 I didn't know much about her before then,
 but she has recently been, she wrote a couple books,
 have been promoting a lifestyle where,
 she basically, she created the Huffington Post,
 and she gave herself like, I don't know,
 20 hours a day, just obsessed with her work.
 And then she fainted, passed out,
 and kind of, there was some health issues.
 And so she wrote this book saying that, you know,
 sleep, basically you wanna establish a lifestyle
 that doesn't sacrifice health,
 that's productive but doesn't sacrifice health.
 She thinks that you can have both, productivity and health.
 Criticizing Elon Musk, who I've also spoken with,
 for working too hard, and thereby sacrificing,
 you know, being less effective than he could be.
 So I'm trying to get at this balance between health
 and obsessively working at something,
 and really working hard.
 So what Arianna is talking about makes sense to me,
 but I'm a little bit torn.
 To me, passion and reason do not overlap much,
 or at all sometimes.
 Maybe I'm being too Russian, but,
 I feel madness and obsession does not care for health,
 or sleep, or diet, or any of that.
 And hard work is hard work,
 and everything else can go to hell.
 So if you're really focused on whether it's writing a book,
 it should, everything should just go to hell.
 Where do you stand on this balance?
 How important is health for productivity?
 How important is it to sort of get sleep, and so on?
 I'm on the health side.
 I mean, there was a period of my life when I was just,
 I had no obligations, and I was just living
 in a little house, and just working nonstop, you know?
 But even then, I would get up in the morning,
 and I would have liver and eggs for breakfast every day,
 and I would do my exercise, whatever it was,
 but although I was still doing 18 hours a day,
 but I'm definitely, I kind of think of it
 sort of like an athlete does.
 I'm sure that like Steph Curry is totally committed
 to winning championships and stuff like that.
 But he has his family, he sees his family,
 the family is always there.
 He, I'm sure he eats, you know, perfect, great stuff,
 gets his sleep, you know, gets the training,
 whatever a trainer does to him for his knees
 and his ankles and whatever.
 So I, or Kobe Bryant or anybody that's operating
 at a high level.
 So I do think I'm from that kind of the health school.
 The good thing about being a writer is,
 you can't work for many hours a day.
 You know, four hours is like the maximum I can work.
 I've never been able to work more than that.
 I don't know how people do it.
 I've heard of people do 10, 12, I don't know how they do it.
 So that gives you a lot of other time to do it.
 Optimize your health.
 Yeah, optimize your health, because you need to.
 You're in training, you know, you're really,
 you're burning up a lot of B vitamins
 when you're working here.
 Yeah, but.
 Maybe it's a Russian thing with your legs.
 Well, it's not even a Russian thing.
 I mean.
 It also may be youth, you know.
 At 35, you can be crazy.
 You know, that's what they keep telling me,
 but I'm pretty sure I'll be at it still at a later time too.
 I think it has to do with the career choice too.
 I think writing is almost, from everything I've heard,
 it's almost impossible to do it more than a few hours
 really well.
 The, when you start to get into certain disciplines,
 like with Elon Musk and me, engineering disciplines,
 that really there's a lot more non-muse time needed.
 Right, right, right.
 So the crazy hours that you're talking,
 that you often are talking about have to be done.
 And it doesn't.
 I think that's true.
 Yeah, so there's still the two, three hours of muse time
 needed for truly genius ideas,
 but it's something I certainly struggle with.
 But yeah, I hear you loud and clear on the health.
 So what does a perfect day look like for you
 if we're talking about writing
 an hour by hour schedule of a perfect day?
 I get up early, I go to the gym,
 I have breakfast with some friends of mine.
 What's early by the way?
 That's like how early?
 3.15.
 AM.
 AM.
 So we're talking really early.
 Really early.
 Now I'm crazy early, it's ridiculously early.
 Yeah.
 But, and I haven't done that always,
 but that's kind of what I'm on now.
 So I'm in bed like when I'm with my nephews
 that are like four years old and three years old,
 I'm in bed before them.
 Okay, you gotta beat.
 You wake up, sorry, you said exercise first.
 Yeah.
 And what does that look like?
 What's exercise for you?
 I go to the gym.
 Okay.
 I have a trainer, I have a couple of guys
 that I work out with, and I'll, you know,
 it's maybe an hour, maybe a little more.
 I'll do a little warmup before, stretching afterwards,
 take a shower, go have breakfast.
 But it's an intense kind of a thing
 that I definitely don't wanna do that's hard, you know?
 So you feel like you've accomplished something.
 First thing. Yeah.
 That's a big accomplishment of the day.
 But at the same time, it's not like so hard
 that I'm completely exhausted, you know?
 And then I'll come home and handle whatever
 correspondence and stuff has to be done.
 And then I work for maybe three hours,
 and then I just sort of crash.
 The office is closed, I turn the switch,
 I don't think about any, I don't think about anything.
 I don't think about the work at all.
 Do you listen to, oh, you mean afterwards?
 After work, once the office is closed.
 But during, so this was like 12 to three kind of thing?
 Something like that, yeah.
 Something like that, okay.
 You listen to music?
 No. Do you have anything?
 But that's just me, I mean, I don't think, you know,
 but somebody could do it a million different ways.
 It's fascinating, you know, the,
 I mean, you've also, of most, of many writers,
 you've really, like I've read Stephen Kington writing,
 you've optimized this conversation
 with the muse you're having.
 Not optimized, but you've at least thought about it.
 So what's, can you say a little bit more
 about the trivialities of that process of,
 like you said, facing the wall?
 What's, do you have little rituals?
 You mean like the granular aspect of it?
 The granular aspects, yeah.
 I do have little rituals.
 I do have all kinds of,
 which I'm not even gonna tell you about.
 Sure.
 But the one thing,
 and I don't wanna like to talk about this too much
 because it sort of jinxes things, I think,
 but the one thing I do try to do is when I sit down,
 I immediately get into it.
 First, second.
 Yeah.
 I don't sit and fuck around with anything.
 I immediately try to get into it as quickly as I can.
 The other thing is that writing a book or screenplay
 or anything like that is a process of multiple drafts.
 And it's the first draft,
 that's where you're most with the muse,
 where you're going through the blank page.
 Like right now I'm on, I don't know what,
 the fifth or sixth, seventh draft
 of the thing I'm working on.
 So I've got pages already written
 and I'm kind of reading them afresh as I go through the story.
 So it's not quite where I am now.
 It's not quite a deep muse scenario.
 Partly it is, but it's also sort of bouncing back and forth
 between the different,
 between the right brain and the left brain.
 I'm kind of looking at it and trying to evaluate it.
 Then I'm going into it and try to change it a little bit.
 When, do you know, sit down, get right into it?
 Do you know the night before of what that starting point is?
 I always try to stop.
 And I learned this, I think Hemingway wrote about this
 or John Steinbeck or one of the, or maybe both of them,
 to always stop when you kind of know what's coming next.
 So that you're not at a, facing a chasm, you know?
 Yeah.
 Okay, so, and afterwards when you're done,
 the office is closed.
 The office is closed.
 I let the muse take care of it, you know?
 And I don't want to,
 and I think it's a very unhealthy thing
 to worry about it or think about any creative process.
 You don't, like at a long walk later, think about-
 Yeah, then I will sort of keep my mind open to it,
 but I won't be like obsessing about it.
 Right, okay.
 Because actually on walks,
 sometimes things will pop in your head, you know,
 and you'll go, oh, I should change that.
 But that's not your ego doing it.
 That's the deeper level.
 Okay, so how does the day end?
 So go-
 In terms of writing?
 So yeah, the writing, well no,
 the writing, the office door closes,
 and then the rest of the day, just do whatever the hell.
 Maybe go out to dinner.
 My girlfriend is not here now.
 She's in New York working.
 We'll make dinner or whatever.
 Go out to dinner, something like that.
 And maybe I'll read something, nothing heavy.
 And I go to bed pretty early,
 and the gym is a big thing for me.
 I'll already, sorry, probably like with you
 with martial arts, the night before,
 I'll be visualizing what I have to do the next day,
 and getting myself psyched up for that.
 And then I'll just conk out like a light
 and wake up at the crack of dawn.
 So looking out into the future,
 this year, next few years,
 what do you think the muse has in store for you?
 I don't think you can ever know.
 It's probably something along the same,
 I really believe, you know, there's that exercise
 where they say to you,
 visualize yourself five years in the future,
 then write a letter from that person to yourself.
 I don't believe in that at all,
 because I don't think you can, you know,
 there's a line in, out of Africa
 that God made the world round
 so that we couldn't see too far ahead.
 You just don't know as a writer or as a,
 I personally, you know, I never knew,
 my first book was A Legend of Bagger Vance.
 I hadn't, before that happened,
 I had no clue that I was gonna be writing
 anything like that on that subject,
 anything at all, no clue until it just sort of came.
 And then when that was done,
 people said, well, you gotta write another one.
 I had no idea what it was,
 which was gonna be Gates of Fire.
 No clue.
 So if somebody had sat me down at the start of that
 and asked the question,
 I would have been crazy to have said it.
 So I just hope as the future unfolds,
 that I'm open to it, you know?
 Well, I think I speak for a lot of people
 in saying that we look forward to what that future looks like.
 Stephen, thank you so much for talking today.
 It was fun.
 You got the best job in the world going around
 talking to people that you wanna talk to
 and that they will talk to you, you know?
 So thank you for doing it.
 Hey, thank you for the great questions you made me think.
 I've certainly got a bunch of questions
 I never ever answered before.
 Awesome, thank you so much.
 So thanks a lot.
 Thank you.
 Thanks for listening to this conversation
 with Stephen Pressfield
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 spelled without the E, just F-R-I-D-M-A-N.
 And now let me leave you with some words
 from Stephen Pressfield.
 Are you paralyzed by fear?
 That's a good sign.
 Fear is good.
 Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator.
 Fear tells us what we have to do.
 Remember one rule of thumb.
 The more scared we are of a work or a calling,
 the more sure we can be that we have to do it.
 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.