#102 – Steven Pressfield: The War of Art

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. Support this podcast by supporting these sponsors: – Jordan Harbinger Show: https://jordanharbinger.com/lex/ – Cash App – use code “LexPodcast” and download: – Cash App (App Store): https://apple.co/2sPrUHe – Cash App (Google Play): https://bit.ly/2MlvP5w This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter https://twitter.com/lexfridman, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman/, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman, Medium https://medium.com/@lexfridman, or YouTube https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/artificial-intelligence/id1434243584, follow on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/2MAi0BvDc6GTFvKFPXnkCL, or support it on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. OUTLINE: 00:00 – Introduction 05:00 – 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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Stephen 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,

• 0:40Lex Fridman?

  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, Stephen 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.

• 1:21Lex Fridman?

  Please consider supporting the podcast by going to jordanharbinger.com/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.

• 2:07Lex Fridman?

  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

• 2:48Lex Fridman?

  by the Jordan Harbinger Show. Go to jordanharbinger.com/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, Garek 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,

• 3:30Lex Fridman?

  Jordan threaded the needle beautifully, and so it turned out to be a great listen. I highly recommend it. Again, go to jordanharbinger.com/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 cryptocurrency in the context of the history of money is fascinating.

• 4:11Lex Fridman?

  I recommend A Scent of Money as a great book on its 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.

• 4:55Lex Fridman?

  And now, here's my conversation with Stephen Pressfield.

• 5:17Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  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 a... The dynamic in our mind is a kind of an us versus them dynamic, where our tribe is the people and everybody else are 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.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  That urge to compete, you're a martial artist, you know, that, 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 going to be around very long, but would be in, in sports or in other kind of sublimated activities where people can act out their need for conquest or aggression

• 7:08Speaker 01

  or so forth, but at the same time relate to their opponents as human beings and when the game is over, you know, you embrace your competitor and stuff like that.

• 7:18Lex Fridman?

  So you think war was inevitable, it's a, it's a part of human nature, as opposed to a force, a creative force in society that served the benefit?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sure it has benefited, you know, spreading cultures and mixing cultures and stuff like that, but I think the, 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, over the face of the earth, hundreds of little kingdoms, China, Japan, you know,

• 8:11Speaker 01

  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, a universal.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Human imperative, at least in the male of the species.

• 8:30Lex Fridman?

  War is just a realization of that imperative.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 8:35Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Well, these are great questions, Lex.

• 8:57Lex Fridman?

  Tough, easy ones, right?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I wish I knew more about the Mongols. Because I certainly, from what I've, what little I know, I think that was a very, their conquests were very transformative, bringing cultures, you know, in a horrible, bloody way together. But, um, gosh, what's then the most transformative? Maybe the Roman conquests, you know, establishing the Roman Empire and bringing that culture. Maybe Alexander the Great's wars that, uh, you know, united East and West, at least for a minute.

• 9:36Lex Fridman?

  So building of empire, do you have a sense? So there's wars, I mean, the, uh, the Six Day War is not about building empires. It's about deep, how 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, that transformative effects.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Let me ask you this, Lex. Why are, what are you trying to get at with these questions? What is this kind of the theme that you're, you're aiming at?

• 10:25Lex Fridman?

  Well, I, I talked to Eric Weinstein and he said, everything is great about war, except the killing. And, uh, 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.

• 11:10Lex Fridman?

  It's some kind of, like, it has echoes of the creative force that makes humans unique to other animals. Like, wars, 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.

• 11:49Lex Fridman?

  If there is a reason we fight that's more than just anger and hate and wanting to conquer.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  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, so I'm not really an expert on war.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  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, and which creates a war inside ourselves. So the outer, the outer war, when I, 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

• 13:24Speaker 01

  of the fight we're fighting inside ourselves. It, 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

• 14:07Speaker 01

  and basically barbarians, 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, 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, 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,

• 14:51Speaker 01

  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, for the greater good. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's how I, 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.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  It's not, that's not what's interesting about it to me.

• 15:41Lex Fridman?

  But didn't you just say with war as a metaphor that we're all essentially in various ways warriors?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  If we think of it in terms of Jungian archetypes, and think of our life as, 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 want to play football, I want to do martial arts, we want to join the special forces, we want to hang out with our buddies, that's our great bond. We want to 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, and teachers and so on and so forth.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  And then there are many archetypes beyond that towards the end. So I'm, I'm interested in the warrior archetype, but not to the be all and end all of everything else. You know, there's a, in, in, um, in my book, The Virtues of War, I, have you read that? There's a character named Telamon, who's actually, it's a long story, but, uh...

• 16:58Speaker 01

  When he's with Alexander's army and when they arrive in India, he becomes fascinated by the gymnosophists, the fuck ears, 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, you know, all day long.

• 17:28Lex Fridman?

  If we go to the Six Day War.

• 17:34Lex Fridman?

  You write about, in Lionsgate, you write about the Six Day War in Israel. I think of the wars you've written about, it's the one we're still, in many ways, in the midst of today.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:46Lex Fridman?

  So, what is at the core of that conflict in Israel?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  The Israeli Palestinian conflict?

• 17:54Lex Fridman?

  I mean, today it's the Israeli Palestinian conflict, but it's echoes of the same conflict in that part of the world with Israel. What is, in your sense,

• 18:08Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Well, when I was working on the Lionsgate about the Six Day War, I wrote in the introduction that this was not going to be a multi-sided story. I was taking it entirely, I'm a Jew, I identify with the Israeli people. I was going to see it entirely from their side. So, that's probably not what you're asking, but to me, the Six Day War and that whole, you know, it's a piece of land that's holy to at least three religions and probably more. And

• 18:58Speaker 01

  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. Moses came and brought the people. So to, to me, the Six Day War was about, as I said, a return from exile, from diaspora after 2,000 years. Now, obviously, from the Palestinian point of view, or the Saudi Arabian point of view, or whatever, it's a whole other scenario.

• 19:28Lex Fridman?

  Religion is at the core of this conflict in some ways, but religion, beliefs.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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? You know, just looking at them. You could easily mix them and you'd never know.

• 20:06Lex Fridman?

  And the specifics of the faith is not necessarily the thing that defines.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  No, I don't think so.

• 20:12Lex Fridman?

  So you could be, like many are secular Jew, living in Israel, and still have a strong bond.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Definitely, definitely. In fact, almost all of the Jews, the fighters that I spoke to from the Six Day War, were secular. And it really was not, you know, a religious thing with them as much as it was a national thing.

• 20:39Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 20:54Speaker 01

  It's very different, as you know, yeah.

• 20:57Lex Fridman?

  I've never been to Israel, actually.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Oh, you haven't?

• 20:59Lex Fridman?

  Haven't felt it.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Ah, well, you should definitely go. I mean, here in the United States.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Where when like as 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, 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.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  And so from their point of view, they say, all those people who hate us, can I curse on this?

• 21:57Lex Fridman?

  Of course.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  On this thing? Fuck them, we'll kill them.

• 22:00Lex Fridman?

  We'll kill them.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  You know, if they dared to cross the line. And that's a whole different point of view. To me, it's actually a healthier point of view.

• 22:08Lex Fridman?

  You think so?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:10Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 22:19Speaker 01

  In Israel and?

• 22:20Lex Fridman?

  In Israel or?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Anywhere?

• 22:23Lex Fridman?

  Anywhere where the instinct is to reach out in US and say, F you and the people, yeah.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Here's my, here's, 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.

• 22:42Lex Fridman?

  I got it, I got this.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  When there's mutual respect and, and, and as, and they can see each other as equals and there's, and when there's mutual fear, you know, where, where one side says, we don't dare cross the 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, 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.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  You can see it in Trump and what he does to any vulnerable minority, right? It's, 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. It's really a good way, is a, 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 want to raise our children, you want to raise your children? How can we do this in a way that's, that we're not hurting each other?

• 23:59Lex Fridman?

  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, what role does love and hate?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  I think that hatred can go away. I really do. I mean, if you look at even, 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, can go away under the right circumstances.

• 24:47Lex Fridman?

  In a, on what time scale?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  I mean, for instance, I don't know if this.

• 24:54Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 25:04Speaker 01

  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 going to happen. But I, 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, a true change of soul happens. But I do think that's possible.

• 25:33Lex Fridman?

  So what do you think is the future of warfare? Especially with what many people see as the expansion of the military industrial conflict. What do you? I know you're not a military historian. I'm asking more as a metaphor.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 25:53Lex Fridman?

  Would do you see us as people continuing to fight?

• 25:58Speaker 01

  You know, it's a really great question, Lex, because 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 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 One,

• 26:42Speaker 01

  the both the younger generations were eager to go to war. You know, I think it was it was it was insane. But it was that sort of warrior archetype that we were talking about before that that generational testosterone eros thing. Whereas nowadays, I don't know. I mean, it's hard to say there's not going to 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.

• 27:16Lex Fridman?

  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 for war as well.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Or hatred, yeah.

• 27:25Lex Fridman?

  Or hatred and perhaps.

• 27:29Lex Fridman?

  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 hateful.

• 27:44Lex Fridman?

  You get the hate out at.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:47Lex Fridman?

  At a, you know, at a less.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:51Lex Fridman?

  On a daily basis and thereby never boils up to a point where you want to kill.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  It's also a really weird thing that's going on. 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, 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, they wouldn't. So there's a sort of a two, two mental spheres happening at the same time. And I don't know how that.

• 28:31Lex Fridman?

  Maps to the actual military, how that actually maps to military conflict.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:37Lex Fridman?

  Like when you, if you in the United States have a draft, for example, what, how the populace would respond different than they did in previous generations.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think they certainly would.

• 28:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Another question, not sure if you've thought about it, but I work on building artificial intelligence systems. In our community, many people worried about AI being used in war, so automating the killing process. The with, with drones and in general, it's being used more and more.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  I should recuse myself on that one. I really haven't thought about that.

• 29:08Lex Fridman?

  You haven't thought about it.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  I'd rather ask you what you think about it.

• 29:12Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's interesting to me 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, and a sword.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Because their

• 29:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  point of view of war 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.

• 30:16Lex Fridman?

  And

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Not that we could.

• 30:18Lex Fridman?

  Not, 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 kill a person? If you yourself could do it?

• 30:49Speaker 01

  I have thought about it, yeah.

• 30:50Lex Fridman?

  And how that would make you feel?

• 30:54Speaker 01

  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 the 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.

• 31:31Lex Fridman?

  And you've spoken with many, how, I mean, you've spoken with people who've seen military combat

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:38Lex Fridman?

  in Israel. What have they been able to articulate? The, the experience of killing?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  It's this, it's sort of just what I said. I mean, I'm even thinking of one pilot that I interviewed over there. Who

• 31:57Speaker 01

  You know, was strafing a tank in his Mustang and saw at really low altitude. And, you know, saw what his bullets did to the guy and could see his face and everything like that, which is even, you know, 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.

• 32:25Lex Fridman?

  And when you, that happens at scale, it's thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:29Lex Fridman?

  That changes entire societies. I mean, that's what we've seen.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  At least it, but the problem is it doesn't change the politicians back home.

• 32:37Lex Fridman?

  Right. How important is mortality? Finite-ness, 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.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  It does?

• 33:00Lex Fridman?

  It does. And.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Shit.

• 33:03Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  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, I do too. But I, actually I always have, I think. And I, I think, you know, the fact of mortality is, kind of gives meaning to life, you know? I think that's why we want to create.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  That's why we want to make a mark of some kind or, and the other aspect of it is what's on the other side of that mortality. I'm, I'm a believer in previous lives, so I, 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?

• 34:15Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Why are we in the flesh? You know, I sort of, I like to believe that God or some force is, 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. I mean, what a demented thing, you know? Why couldn't we just have a solar panel on our head 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.

• 34:59Lex Fridman?

  Have you read Ernest Becker's Denial of Death? For example, is Ernest Becker's a philosopher that said that the, the death, that the fear of death is really the primary driver of everything we do. So Freud had what the?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Right, I would agree with that.

• 35:19Lex Fridman?

  So to you, you've always thought about your, even your own mortality?

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Yes, definitely.

• 35:24Lex Fridman?

  And can you elaborate on the, the reincarnation aspect of what you were talking about, like that we kind of, what's your sense that we had previous lives? What, in what, have you thought concretely or is it a lot of it kind of is?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  No, I've thought concretely about it.

• 35:43Lex Fridman?

  Concretely.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  I mean, it's very clear 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 going to be completely different and completely their own person. And, and, 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.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  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 thirty, forty, fifty 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's it's it seems to be a continuation of something that was that happened before

• 36:59Speaker 01

  and that will lead to something else because it's not starting from scratch. It seems like there's a a calling, a destiny in there already. This gets back to the muse and all that kind of thing.

• 37:12Lex Fridman?

  So, yeah, it's almost like the there's this, let's call it a god, is passing, it's almost like sampling parts of a previous human that has lived and putting that those into the new one.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Sampling is probably a pretty good word.

• 37:30Lex Fridman?

  Taking some of the good, well, you can't take all the good parts because the bad parts is what makes the person.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:36Lex Fridman?

  Let's say taking it all together. Okay, this is humans only or does it pass it on from animals in your view?

• 37:42Speaker 01

  I don't know. That's above my pay grade. I don't know.

• 37:45Lex Fridman?

  So, okay, so you you talk about the muse as the source of of ideas, maybe. Since you've gotten a few glimpses of her in your writing, tell me, let me, what is it possible for you to tell me about about her? Where does she reside? What does she look like?

• 38:11Speaker 01

  I mean, you can look at it many different ways, right? 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 Neishama, right? That the soul is above us on a higher plane, our own, your soul, my soul, and is 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, you know, when you sit down at the keyboard, you're entering into a kind of prayer. You're entering into a different state of, of an altered consciousness, to some extent.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  You're opening yourself, opening the pipeline, or turning on the radio to tune into the cosmic radio station. Another way of looking at it, this is, did you ever see the movie City of Angels? The visual of the movie, it was Meg Ryan and Nicholas Cage.

• 39:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, I've seen it, yep.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  And right, the visual of the movie sort of was Meg Ryan is a, 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, 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, that there are beings like that. Or, if you don't like that, it's a force, it's a consciousness,

• 40:02Speaker 01

  it's something that are right here, right now. And we, and they're trying to communicate to us.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  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, they know that. And it's not really you that's coming up with those ideas, in my opinion. Those things are appearing, you know, 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

• 40:52Speaker 01

  the battlefield all the time, right? There'll be, you know, 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 bumpa, bumpa, bumpa. So that's creatures, beings on one dimension, as the Greeks saw it, communicating with, and I believe that that's exactly what's going on in one, whatever analogy you want to use.

• 41:29Lex Fridman?

  That, that communication, to which degree is, uh, 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? What, so i- if, uh, in your, in your view, is, are these creatures basically waiting to tell you about your future? Or is there choice? How many possible futures are there? How many possible ideas are there?

• 42:05Speaker 01

  That's a great question. I think there's basically, yes, there are alternatives, you know, degrees within it. But I, if you look at Bruce Springsteen's albums.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  How much could he have done really differently? Yeah, he would, you can just see, there's a whole impetus going through the whole thing. And nothing was going to shake him off that, you know? And yeah, maybe the river could have been different, it could have been called something else. But, but he was dealing with certain issues. His conscious self was dealing with certain issues that were really out of his control. He was, he was drawn, he was called to it, right? Nothing could stop him. And so it is sort of a partnership, but I think the creative process between the, and creative impulse that's coming from some other place.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Or it's coming from deep within us is another way to look at it. You know, it's like if we're acorns and, 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, whatever that is. I mean, certainly songwriters for a million years have said, you know, a song just came into their head, right? Poem, just all they had to do is write. But then, you ever see that thing where of Keats's Notes for A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever?

• 43:44Speaker 01

  It's like covers an entire page and it's like, you know, he's crossing this out and that out and the other song. So his consciousness is, his conscious mind is working on it. But I, so I, 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, and I tried to do novels that I could never do. I was like,

• 44:08Speaker 01

  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 in, 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.

• 44:49Lex Fridman?

  Can you put into words the process of letting go and clearing that channel of communication? What does it take?

• 44:57Speaker 01

  That's another great question. For me, it just took, it took probably 30 years. And I don't even, I would, 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 and years and years of trying and finally of beating my head in the wall and finally little by little giving

• 45:39Speaker 01

  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, you know, like Uma Thurman in the casket, you know, trying to make that little four inch punch, you know?

• 46:10Speaker 01

  The muse or the goddess is just sort of watching going, Lex, he's trying. He's trying. I'm gonna come back in another couple of months and see if he's still there.

• 46:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  And finally, she'll say, alright, he's had it, he's beaten, he's paid his dues. I'm gonna give it to him.

• 46:26Lex Fridman?

  So the hard work and the suffering, yeah. But, you know, 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, it can be, the process of practice. So you had two. One, you had an example of meditation. So it's essentially the practice of meditation. Is you.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  I think so. Drill, I think, is a good way to look at it, too.

• 47:02Lex Fridman?

  But what are you, what are you drilling? You're just sitting and.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  You're, you're, you're writing, you know?

• 47:08Lex Fridman?

  Just writing.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  You're writing, you're, then you're looking at what you wrote, you know? You're hitting moments when it flows, you know? And you're, and you're, and in 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, what did I do? How did, 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.

• 47:38Lex Fridman?

  And did you, did you always, when you, when you read something you write, did you always have a pretty good radar for what's good and not after it's written?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  No. I think I do now, but, but no. It was always really hard for me to know what was good.

• 48:02Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 48:14Speaker 01

  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 Double Day. And who, basically, when I finish a book, I give it to him. And he, and he gives me, you know, he, he, 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?

• 48:57Speaker 01

  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, 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, you know, this isn't working and that is working.

• 49:22Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 49:38Speaker 01

  No, he doesn't do that.

• 49:40Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  But a lot of it is about genre and kind of the defining what genre you're working in. And I'm going to 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 kind of, I had violated certain conventions

• 50:18Speaker 01

  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, he pointed out certain things to me.

• 50:33Lex Fridman?

  So he must be a prolific reader himself too, actually. That's such a, it's such a tough job of editor.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Again, he was sort of born to do that. He just kind of glommed onto it and, and, but since he was, his first job, publishing, you know, Cat for ilerst, you know, cat detective. But, you know, he's studied how it works, what makes a story work, et cetera, et cetera. And so he really, he's, he's great. And I think any really successful writer, unless they're utterly brilliant on their own, has got to have a great editor behind them.

• 51:14Lex Fridman?

  But you yourself edit as well.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  I'm constantly trying to learn from him and teach myself. Everything you see in my blog posts about, that it's 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, 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.

• 51:45Lex Fridman?

  Well, in research, we go through that. In research, more than writing, so what you do is a little more solitary.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 51:52Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  I would think so. So it's exactly like, you know, they would say, you're attacking, you're asking the wrong questions, right?

• 52:17Lex Fridman?

  The wrong questions, yeah. And that's extremely, you know, painful, especially when you, well, yes, painful and helpful, but there's disagreement and so on. It's, and through that comes out a better product in the end.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:30Lex Fridman?

  If, if, because you want to still have an ego, but you also want to silence it every once in a while, so there's a balance. In your book, The War of Art, you talk about resistance, with a capital R, as the invisible force in this universe of ours that finds a way to prevent you from starting or doing the work.

• 52:53Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 53:03Speaker 01

  That's another great question. I mean, in Jewish mysticism, in Kabbalistic thinking, it's called the Yetzer Hara, right? And it's a force that if this up here is your soul of Neishama trying to talk to you, us down here, the Yetzer Hara 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 see our identity. One is the ego, the conscious ego, and the other is the greater self.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:13Lex Fridman?

  No, perfect.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  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, bump, bump, bump. So we're 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,

• 54:56Speaker 01

  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,

• 55:40Speaker 01

  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 have, 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

• 56:19Speaker 01

  as artists or scientists, opening ourselves up to the cosmic dimension, to the, to the other forces, the ego is tremendously threatened by that. Because if we're, if we're in that space, that headspace, 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. That's probably a very good example, right? You know? It's a zero-sum world for him. Yes. And for anybody that's in that. And the opposite of that would be somebody like Martin Luther King, or Gandhi. Gandhi, yep.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  By, um, I could talk more about this if you want.

• 57:18Lex Fridman?

  No, for sure. That's, uh, 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 the self and that struggle. It's just, um, ego has a, you know, the self obsession of it. Why, why, uh, fear is such a predominant thing. Like, why is resistance trying to undermine everything?

• 57:46Speaker 01

  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, 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 all always just has that one monomaniacal thing to, to, to destroy, you know? And, uh, just like the ego, just like resistance.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  And maybe alien is a bad example because Sigourney Weaver has to sort of, um, fight on the same terms as, 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, his selfish dream of going off with Ingrid Bergman, Neil Solon, the love of his life. And instead, you know, puts her on the plane to Lisbon while he goes off to fight the Nazis and, you know, in the desert.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  I don't know if that's clear, but in, uh, 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.

• 59:28Lex Fridman?

  It's letting go of that fear is what leads to productivity and to success.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:35Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there's a

• 59:39Lex Fridman?

  this probably the answer is either obvious or impossible, but do you think there's an evolutionary advantage to resistance? Like, what would life look like without resistance?

• 59:53Speaker 01

  That's another great question. I think, I also believe that resistance, like death, gives a meaning to life. If we didn't have it,

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  it's gonna be, you know, what would we be? We'd be in the Garden of Eden, picking fruit and just happy and stupid, you know?

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  And I do think that that myth of the Garden of Eden is really about this kind of thing, you know, 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 have 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.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  The human condition.

• 1:00:44Lex Fridman?

  The human condition and the meaning and the purpose comes from

• 1:00:51Lex Fridman?

  the resistance being there and the struggle to overcome it.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  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

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  in a way, it's sort of a surrender to it, you know?

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  You know, or

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  sort of like turning on the light in a dark thing. It's like, it's gone.

• 1:01:25Lex Fridman?

  But not quite, because it's never really.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Not quite, because it comes back again tomorrow morning.

• 1:01:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, 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?

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  I mean, it's always the same. It's about writing for me. And evolving within my own body of work, you know? It never goes away, it never gets any less.

• 1:02:01Lex Fridman?

  Do you have particular excuses, particular justifications that come out?

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  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, you know? It keeps changing form. And as you, as you move to hopefully a higher level, 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.

• 1:02:31Lex Fridman?

  I mean, your battle is sitting down and writing to some number of words to a blank page.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Lex Fridman?

  Do you have a process there with this battle? Do you have a number of hours that you put in?

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  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. You know, the gym is called resistance training, right? You're working against resistance, right? And I don't wanna go, I don't wanna get out of bed, I hate to, you know? So, but I'm sort of fortifying myself to, 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,

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  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, when I ask that question, I'm, I'm asking it of the muse. I'm kinda saying, what do you want me? Or I'm asking it of my unconscious. If, if we're looking at Bruce Springsteen's albums, it's kinda, well, what's the next album? You know, now he's on Broadway. That was a great idea, right?

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Where'd that come from, you know? But, and then for him, what's, what's after that? You know? Because that, that body of work is already alive. It already exists inside us, kinda 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?

• 1:04:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  But you know what I mean? It'll give, it'll do, it'll take its revenge on us. So the next resistance to me is sort of, or a big aspect of it is what's next? You know, when I finish the book I'm working on now, I'm not sure what I'm gonna do next.

• 1:04:50Lex Fridman?

  And see, at the same time, you have a kinda,

• 1:04:54Lex Fridman?

  you, you have a sense that there is a Bruce Springsteen single line of albums. So like, it's, it's already known somewhere in the universe, what you're going to do next is the sense you have.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  In a, in a sense, yes. I don't know if it's like predetermined, you know? But it's, but there's something like that.

• 1:05:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'd like to believe that there's a, well, it's kinda like quantum mechanics, I guess. Once, once you observe it, maybe once you talk to the muse, it's, it's, 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.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. There's alternate realities.

• 1:05:39Lex Fridman?

  Alternate realities, yeah.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  But they're not that far apart. I mean, Bruce Springsteen is not gonna write, you know, a Joni Mitchell song, you know? No matter how hard he tries.

• 1:05:48Lex Fridman?

  He still went on Broadway. I mean, he still did that, which is not a Bruce Springsteen thing to do. So I think, I think you're being, in retrospect.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:06:03Lex Fridman?

  In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense, I think.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Lex Fridman?

  Cause he, if you pull it off especially. Do you visualize yourself completing the work?

• 1:06:14Lex Fridman?

  Like Olympic athletes visualize getting the gold medal.

• 1:06:19Lex Fridman?

  Do you, you know, they that's 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 some people do much longer. Every day you visualize how the day of the the championship will go. The 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?

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:06:48Lex Fridman?

  It's always in the moment.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:55Lex Fridman?

  Right. Yeah, because you don't know the destiny. There's no gold medal.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  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, a hundred pages into the other. When you finish the the first one, but it is it is a.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  To think, oh, this, I'm gonna win. The Oscar, you know?

• 1:07:37Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting for the creative process, it might be dangerous. It it's it's a maybe you can like, why is that dangerous? Because I kind of know.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  It's the ego. It's the ego. 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 I'm there to do what she tells me to do. And if I'm suddenly think, oh, I'm really, I just wanna, you know, whatever. Muse doesn't like that.

• 1:08:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  And, you know? And she's on another dimension for me.

• 1:08:14Lex Fridman?

  I'm trying to square that because I agree, I'm trying to square that with the.

• 1:08:21Lex Fridman?

  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, the ego, there's something.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Well, no, 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.

• 1:09:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Who's such, obviously such a nice guy.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  But he's got such tremendous self-confidence. You know, that it, but it's, 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. And, you know, a choreographer or filmmaker or whatever might. Be.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  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, I can edit it, I can score it, I can, you know, bump it, bump it, bump. But I, 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.

• 1:10:11Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:10:31Lex Fridman?

  I'm not so sure. I, I, I think, uh, I, because the great artists I've seen, you're haunted by self doubt. It's that resist, I mean, the confidence-

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Yes, but, I mean, I guess, but even beyond the self, within the self, above the self doubt-

• 1:10:47Lex Fridman?

  Oh, it's the bigger, the bigger picture-

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  The self belief, you know? Yeah, I'm freaking out, yeah, I'm worried that I'm not gonna be able to do it, but, you know, I know, I can do this.

• 1:10:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and when you look at, when you take a bigger picture of it.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Lex Fridman?

  So, uh, the writing process, uh, is it fundamentally lonely?

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  No, because you're with your characters. You are.

• 1:11:12Lex Fridman?

  So you really put yourself in the world?

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You know, uh, I've, 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, I'm in here, I'm, you know, I'm seeing, you know, the Spartans, I'm seeing, you know, whatever. And the characters that are on the page, or that you create, are not accidents, you know? 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, to, um, come to grips with them, you know?

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  You sort of see them through a glass darkly, you know? And you really wanna see them more clearly.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:12:16Lex Fridman?

  Do you miss the characters after it's over?

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Uh, let's say I have, I have affection for them, kinda 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.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  Even the bad guys.

• 1:12:37Lex Fridman?

  Maybe especially the bad guys.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  Especially the bad guys.

• 1:12:42Lex Fridman?

  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 are, what do you think makes a warrior? Is it, is a warrior born or trained in the realm, in the bigger realm, in the realm of writing, in the creative process?

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  I think, 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, is the big thing. 90% training, 10%, 10% genetics. And, you know, I use another analogy other than warrior to, 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.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  So that's, that's another way to think about how, how a writer has to think about, or any creative person has to think about, I think, what they're, what they're doing, that what this, this child, this new creation that they're bringing forth.

• 1:14:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so the hard work that's underlying that, I've just, a couple of weeks ago, talked to, just happened to be in the same room, both gave talks, Arianna Huffington. I did this conversation with her.

• 1:14:24Lex Fridman?

  I didn't know much about her before, before then, but she has recently been, she wrote a couple of books and 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, 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 want to 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,

• 1:15:06Lex Fridman?

  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 Ariana 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.

• 1:15:50Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  I'm from on the, on the health side.

• 1:16:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  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, you know, exercise, whatever it was. But although I was still doing like, you know, 18 hours a day, but I, 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, you know, the family is always there.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  He, I'm sure he eats, you know, perfect, great stuff, gets his sleep, you know, gets the, the, the, the train, you know, the whatever a trainer does to him for his knees and his ankles and whatever. So I, or Kobe Bryant or anybody that's a, it'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 it doesn't, you can't work very 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.

• 1:17:31Lex Fridman?

  Optimize your health.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, optimize your health, because you need to, you're in training, you know, you're, you're really, you're burning up a lot of B vitamins when you're working there.

• 1:17:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Maybe it's a Russian thing with you, Lex.

• 1:17:45Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's not even a Russian thing, I mean.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  It also may be youth, you know, at 35, you can be crazy.

• 1:17:52Lex Fridman?

  You know, that's, that's what they, they, 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.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:18:26Lex Fridman?

  So the crazy hours that you're talking, that you often are talking about

• 1:18:33Lex Fridman?

  have to be done. And it doesn't.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  I think that's true.

• 1:18:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so there's still the two, three hours of muse time needed for truly genius ideas, but it's, it's something, something I certainly struggle with.

• 1:18:51Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  I get up early, I go to the gym, I have breakfast with some friends of mine.

• 1:19:14Lex Fridman?

  What's early, by the way? Let's like, how early? AM?

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  AM.

• 1:19:20Lex Fridman?

  So we're talking really early?

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  Really early. Now, I'm crazy early, ridiculously early.

• 1:19:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  But, and I haven't done that always, but that's kind of what I'm on now.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:19:39Lex Fridman?

  Okay. You gotta be, you wake up, sorry, you said exercise first?

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:46Lex Fridman?

  And what does that look like? What's exercise for you?

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  I go to the gym. 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 warm up before, stretching afterwards, take a shower, go have breakfast.

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  But it's an intense kind of a thing that I definitely don't want to do, that's hard, you know?

• 1:20:12Lex Fridman?

  So you feel like you've accomplished something first thing?

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:15Lex Fridman?

  That's a big accomplishment of the day.

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  But at the same time, it's not like so hard that I'm completely exhausted, you know?

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:20:40Lex Fridman?

  Do you listen to, oh, you mean afterwards?

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  After work, once the office is closed.

• 1:20:44Lex Fridman?

  But during, so this was like 12 to 3 kind of thing?

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  Something like that.

• 1:20:48Lex Fridman?

  Something like that, okay. You listen to music?

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:20:51Lex Fridman?

  Do you have?

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  But that's just me, I mean, I don't think, you know, but somebody could do it a million different ways.

• 1:20:57Lex Fridman?

  It's fascinating, you know, the.

• 1:21:00Lex Fridman?

  I mean, you've also, of most, of many writers, you've really, like I've read Stephen King's 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?

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  You mean like the granular aspect of it?

• 1:21:32Lex Fridman?

  The granular aspects, yeah.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  I do have little rituals. I do have all kinds of, which I'm not even gonna tell you about.

• 1:21:39Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  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, I do try to do is when I, when I sit down, I immediately get into it. First second.

• 1:21:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  I don't sit and fuck around with anything. I immediately try to get into it as, 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 some other thing I'm working on. So when I'm, I've got pages already written, and I'm kind of reading them afresh as I, as I go through the story. So it's not quite where I am now. It's not quite a deep muse

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  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, and then I'm going into it and try to change it a little bit.

• 1:22:51Lex Fridman?

  When, do you know, sit down, get right into it, do you know the night before of what that starting point is?

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  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 you're not at a, facing a chasm, you know?

• 1:23:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Okay, so and afterwards, when you're done, the office is closed.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:23:31Lex Fridman?

  You don't, like on a long walk later, think about?

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, then I will sort of keep my mind open to it, but I won't be like obsessing about it.

• 1:23:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:23:52Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so how does the day end?

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  In terms of writing?

• 1:23:56Lex Fridman?

  So, yeah, the writing, well, no, the writing, the, the office door closes, and then the rest of the day, just do whatever the hell.

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  Um, 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, maybe I'll read something, nothing heavy, uh, and I go to bed pretty early, and, um, the gym is a big thing for me, I'll already, sort of probably would you like with you with martial arts, the night before, I'll be, 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.

• 1:24:42Lex Fridman?

  So, looking out into the future, this year, next few years, what do you think the muse has in store for you?

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  Uh, 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 you, where they say to you, visualize yourself five years in the future and then write a letter to your, 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, uh, 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 person, you know, uh, 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 going to be writing anything

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  like that on that subject, anything at all, no clue until it just sort of came. And then when I've, when that was done, people said, well, you got to write another. I had no idea what it was, which was going to be Gates of Fire. No clue. So, so if, if somebody had sat me down at the start of that and asked the question, I would have been crazy to have said it, to say it. So I just hope as, as the future unfolds, that I'm open to it, you know?

• 1:26:04Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think I speak for a lot of people in saying that we look forward to what that future looks like. Stephen, thanks so much for talking today. It was fun.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  You got the best job in the world going around talking to people that you want to talk to and that they will talk to you, you know?

• 1:26:20Lex Fridman?

  So thank you for doing it.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Hey, thank you for the great questions. You made me think I've certainly a bunch of questions I never ever answered before.

• 1:26:27Lex Fridman?

  Awesome.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  So thanks a lot.

• 1:26:29Lex Fridman?

  Thank you.

• 1:26:30Lex Fridman?

  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/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 Podcasts, support it on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman, 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?

• 1:27:14Lex Fridman?

  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.