Men Are Reading Less Fiction. That’s A Problem. | Steven Pressfield

Men may be looking for answers in all the wrong books. In this episode, Ryan is joined by bestselling author Steven Pressfield https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=steven+pressfield* to talk about how great fiction can teach us about courage, honor, sacrifice, and the human experience in ways that facts and advice often cannot. Steven Pressfield https://www.instagram.com/steven_pressfield/?hl=enis an American author of historical fiction, non-fiction, and screenplays. Steven wrote for 27 years before he got his first novel published. During that time he worked 21 different jobs in eleven states. Steven taught school, drove tractor-trailers, worked in advertising and as a screenwriter in Hollywood. He worked on offshore oil rigs, and picked fruit as a migrant worker. You canfollow him on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/steven_pressfield/?hl=en: @steven_pressfield https://www.instagram.com/steven_pressfield/?hl=en and check out more of his work on his website: https://stevenpressfield.com/ 📚 You can grab signed copies of Steven’s books https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=steven+pressfield* at The Painted Porch https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=steven+pressfield*: Turning Pro https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/writing8?_pos=6&_sid=efa60d874&_ss=rThe Daily Pressfield https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/the-daily-pressfield?_pos=1&_sid=efa60d874&_ss=rPut Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/put-your-ass-where-your-heart-wants-to-be-signed-by-steven-pressfield?_pos=2&_sid=efa60d874&_ss=rThe War of Art https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/war-of-art-break-through-the-blocks-and-win-your-inner-creative-battles?_pos=7&_sid=efa60d874&_ss=rThe Warrior Ethos https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/the-warrior-ethos-signed-edition?_pos=5&_sid=efa60d874&_ss=rA Man At Arms https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/rhmoo22?variant=43148732825853Gates of Fire https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/war11?_pos=3&_sid=efa60d874&_ss=rThe Arcadian https://www.amazon.com/Arcadian-Novel-Steven-Pressfield/dp/1324124253 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️ AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm about to hop on a plane about, I guess the car should be here in about 25 minutes. And I'm reading this, I'm reading this novel, this bit of historical fiction. I don't want to say what it is yet because I don't know if I like it enough yet. But I do love reading historical fiction. I love it. And, and one of my all time favorite writers of historical fiction, probably one of the first great bits of historical fiction I read, and nothing against the Westerns that I read as a kid or whatever, was Steven Pressfield's The Gates of Fire. In fact, I have the last page of the original manuscript signed on my wall, one of my prized possessions. And I think I love that book because, look, there's things that we talk about,

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  but, but what fiction does is it, it shows you, right? That book is honor and courage and shame and sacrifice, loyalty, betrayal, greatness. What it means to keep your word, what it means to fail, what it means to care about something, what it means to be committed to something. What it means to be the kind of person that other people can count on. Look, I think all of us need to watch less news, maybe even listen to fewer podcasts and read more, right? And we need to read more fiction, myself included. I'm not, I'm not lecturing you. I'm lecturing myself here. Cause a good novel puts you inside of a life, puts you inside of a time, a place. It makes abstract virtues feel real. And you can show the consequences of choice.

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  You can show struggle in a way that a lecture or a list, or even one of my books never could. And, and I think Steven Pressfield understands this as well as just about anyone. He's one of my writing heroes, not just his novels, Gates of Fire, A Man in Arms, Tides of War, The Virtues of War. He has this great new one called The Arcadian. And these are books that I think that they're really popular with the military, but, but with people in all walks of life, because they, they talk about some of that old fashioned stuff. And, and Steven Pressfield was out here in, in Texas recently. And we sat down and we talked about why we should read more novels, especially young men, what fiction can teach us and why sometimes stories are a better way of carrying the truth than facts alone. He's got an incredible story. I love his nonfiction too. Turning Pro, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be, The War of Art,

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  The Warrior Ethos, all this stuff is great. He's signed copies of, of many, many, many of them, which you can grab at the painted porch. Steve doesn't just talk about these things. He's lived in a fascinating life. He was in the Marines. He's worked 21 different jobs in 11 states before he got his first novel published. He taught school, he drove tractor trailers, he worked in advertising, he was a screenwriter, he worked on offshore oil rigs, picked fruit. He's just a lovely guy, one of our greats. And if you haven't read him, maybe start with the new one, The Arcadian, or the classic, The War of Art and Gates of Fire. You can follow him on Instagram, Steven underscore Pressfield. Go to StevenPressfield.com and read more. Have the men in your life read more. It'll make you better.

• 3:20Ryan Holiday?

  I was reading somewhere, they were talking about that young men aren't reading enough fiction, that like sort of muscular masculine fiction used to be, you know, you have your Hemingways and you're, you had these great sort of larger than life writers. Not only was that an aspirational occupation for people, but that the fiction was speaking to what it means to be a man, what it means to be a human being, and that that's not what it is today. Like, most of the bestselling fiction writers are women and most of the fiction is written for women. I would put you up as an exception to that. But how do you think about the role of fiction in people's lives?

• 4:02Steven Pressfield?

  Well, that's really interesting. I haven't even thought about that, but it's, it is true. You think about James Jones, you know, From Here to Eternity, or John Irving and all the stuff that he did. And actually, that sort of male writer has now really, really fallen into disrepute. It's like, it's a bad thing, right?

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  I just reread all James Salter's novels. Do you know who that is?

• 4:23Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah.

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  A fighter pilot who leaves, he has a Russian MiG to his name. Like, he leaves the air force to be a novelist. And that's not a career trajectory so much anymore.

• 4:35Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, sure isn't. But I certainly think those, those pieces of fiction were formative for me.

• 4:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:42Steven Pressfield?

  I mean, now it's like male fiction is sort of like telling the story of your struggle with drug addiction, or, you know what I mean?

• 4:52Ryan Holiday?

  All the novels are about young novelists living in New York City.

• 4:55Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, really. Or they're serial killers, or whatever they are, you know? I wonder what that's about. I haven't really thought about that. I mean, it's, I guess it's the masculinity, quote unquote, has been so, you know, whatever, deplatformed that it's almost embarrassing. It's like, for me, writing Gates of Fire and setting a story in ancient Greece with the Spartans, part of the reason I did that was so you could talk about honor with a straight face.

• 5:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 5:25Steven Pressfield?

  If you wrote a contemporary story.

• 5:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:28Steven Pressfield?

  And some character says something, you know, well, we have to stand, you know, they get laughed out of the room, you know? But yet, readers, particularly men and women too, want that, you know? So to put it in ancient characters' mouths, that kind of dialogue, and write, written in a sort of an archaic format, it works. Finally, you can say something like that. And then people are moved to tears, you know, and people are, you know, so.

• 5:54Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, if you'd written a nonfiction book about honor, that might have sold, even if it was a big hit, it might've sold 50,000 copies or 100,000 copies. But you put it in a novel and it's, it's sold millions of copies over it, and it would have been very much of its moment, right? Like, if you'd written that nonfiction book, it would, when did you write Gates of Fire?

• 6:16Steven Pressfield?

  1998 or '06 or something like that?

• 6:19Ryan Holiday?

  It would have a 90s feel to it, you know? And you read Gates of Fire because it's, it's not just a novel, but it's a novel set in the past. It has a timelessness to it that allows it to reach not just a bigger audience, but I think, as you said, reach, reach them in a much more earnest, emotional way.

• 6:38Steven Pressfield?

  I think it, I think it does, or, or books like that, you know? Yeah. The idea of like, when you said writing a book about honor, I mean, it's like, I would even dream of it.

• 6:46Ryan Holiday?

  That would be lame.

• 6:48Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, it would be, couldn't be, yeah.

• 6:50Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and, and there'd probably be some imposter syndrome as the author, like, who am I?

• 6:55Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, right.

• 6:56Ryan Holiday?

  Who am I to lecture you?

• 6:57Steven Pressfield?

  Unless you're Jim Mattis, you can't, he's like the only guy, or you know, McRaven or somebody like that. That's about the only people who could do it.

• 7:04Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, even in my, I don't do fiction exactly, but I, I try to tell stories about the ideas. Because it's a way in as opposed to.

• 7:14Steven Pressfield?

  Do you ever think you will write fiction someday?

• 7:16Ryan Holiday?

  I have, I have a novel idea. I want to tell you about it.

• 7:19Steven Pressfield?

  Not on camera.

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  Not on camera. It's a weird idea. I was curious about your advice on it. But yeah, the, the novel as a way of, of teaching is obviously how we learned most lessons for all of human history. I think you miss something when that goes away.

• 7:35Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, I think, I didn't answer your question, I think, but I definitely believe fiction, not even as teaching. I think it's, it's more than that, you know? I mean, now, of course, we have movies like Star Wars has certainly influenced a bazillion people, or Harry Potter, or something like that. But a novel obviously lets you get into the head of a character or multiple characters that you never could in any other medium, other than maybe movies, you know? You know, that's what makes people really learn something, I think, you know? Really let it sink in.

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:08Steven Pressfield?

  Like a legend, like a myth, you know? It's a character. It's a human being.

• 8:12Ryan Holiday?

  Because then to carry you through the novel is usually, it's usually like the two virtues or values, or whatever it is, fighting each other out. Who are you rooting for? Who's going to win? What's going to happen? Where's this going to take this person? That's what the novel allows us to do.

• 8:27Steven Pressfield?

  And you get involved emotionally, right? You start rooting for somebody, you know, oh my God, don't let that happen, you know, that kind of thing.

• 8:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Steven Pressfield?

  And that's where things sink in. Plus, I don't know, from my point of view, it's just fun.

• 8:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Yeah, I did this piece a couple of months ago where, I wasn't talking about novels so much, but I was, I was talking about some of those poems, like Longfellow's A Psalm of Life, or Invictus. In the 19th century and 20th century, there were these kind of like, even muscular masculine, like earnest poems too, about like the struggle and the fight. I mean, Kipling's famous, obviously has a lot of racist poems too, but, but If is such a famous example of like, an encapsulation, a distillation of like, the values of what we're, you want a, a young person to do. And like, I don't read a lot of poetry now, but if I walk to the poetry section of a bookstore, that's not what most of the poems would be about.

• 9:20Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, I'm sure, yeah.

• 9:21Ryan Holiday?

  And most of them would not be for young men.

• 9:24Steven Pressfield?

  Yes, too bad.

• 9:26Ryan Holiday?

  It is.

• 9:26Steven Pressfield?

  By the way, I saw, I don't know, it was on a talk show or something, it was Michael Caine.

• 9:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 9:31Steven Pressfield?

  And he read, did you see this?

• 9:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 9:33Steven Pressfield?

  When he read that If.

• 9:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 9:35Steven Pressfield?

  And it was, you know, brilliant. I mean, brought you to tears, you know?

• 9:39Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, man. I had this crazy experience. Anthony Hopkins read a couple of my books. And he would, for a while, he was emailing me and I, I told him that I was reading one of these poems to my kids and he like, sent me audio of him reading it. When you have a poem and then it's read by some like incredible voice.

• 9:57Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah.

• 9:57Ryan Holiday?

  Like when you, like, yeah, If by Michael Caine is crazy. There's a bunch of like, really, like poems you thought you got emotionally, and then a really good voice.

• 10:08Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 10:09Ryan Holiday?

  And it just hits you at this whole other level.

• 10:11Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah. Have you had Anthony Hopkins on the podcast?

• 10:14Ryan Holiday?

  No, but I.

• 10:15Steven Pressfield?

  Better get him.

• 10:17Ryan Holiday?

  I would have him on in two seconds. Yeah, I'm in his, in his memoir. He wrote about one of the exchanges. It was crazy. Someone was like, you know, you're in, that can't possibly be real. But yeah, I just feel like so much modern fiction is like, these kind of unlikable anti-heroes, or it's like.

• 10:37Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, where did that come from?

• 10:38Ryan Holiday?

  These whiny losers, you know, who are in publishing, trying to. It's like, I don't need to read any more novels about aspiring novelists cheating on their wives in New York City, or whatever it is.

• 10:51Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah.

• 10:52Ryan Holiday?

  But there's something, I think, done right, there's something earnest about the medium that's very moving. But they tend not like, yeah, you hear about these novels that win these awards and then you look at the sales and you're like, so like.

• 11:05Ryan Holiday?

  6,000 copies. You know, it's not even actually speaking to a large audience. Not that that's always the metric of whether it works or not, but like, you know, your F. Scott Fitzgeralds and your Hemingways and those, they were trying to, to speak to people, you know, and they did.

• 11:22Steven Pressfield?

  I've never quite understood this phenomenon that there are certain writers and movie makers too, that are like the darlings of the critics, you know? And you can never shake, shake that in any way.

• 11:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Steven Pressfield?

  And I don't know, I don't know what it's, it's, it's woke.

• 11:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 11:38Steven Pressfield?

  In some sense.

• 11:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 11:39Steven Pressfield?

  Although I'm not sure, you know, in a bad sense, you know?

• 11:42Ryan Holiday?

  There's something about like, yeah, if you read like what the New York Times, like your novel will sell more copies than most of the books reviewed in the New York Times. Most of the novels reviewed in the Times over the next three or four months, right? Cause you have an audience, you've done this a long time.

• 11:58Steven Pressfield?

  I hope so.

• 11:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, but they would never think to review this novel.

• 12:01Steven Pressfield?

  Oh yeah, no chance.

• 12:02Ryan Holiday?

  And, and so I do think that does create some of the media backlash and some of the resentment and, and where it's like, the things that is celebrated in the media or in the culture or the elites is not even close to matching.

• 12:18Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah.

• 12:18Ryan Holiday?

  What people want and like and know is good.

• 12:21Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, but there has to be kind of a middle area too between.

• 12:24Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 12:25Steven Pressfield?

  You know, but it's also like the, when movie critics write the 12 movies you should see, right?

• 12:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 12:32Steven Pressfield?

  You never heard of any of them, right?

• 12:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, or what, what's nominated for best picture is like a bunch of movies you haven't even heard of.

• 12:37Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's a, obviously there's a, a space for discovering great, underappreciated things, but there's also something I think about the medium or, or the culture where the people that are writing novels are almost deliberately not trying to speak to a wide or ordinary audience.

• 12:59Steven Pressfield?

  That are praising these things are trying to show how smart they are.

• 13:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 13:04Steven Pressfield?

  That they get something that you and me don't get, you know?

• 13:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, but I think generally people should read more fiction and fiction should reach a larger, general audience.

• 13:15Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, although I understand why people don't, you know?

• 13:17Ryan Holiday?

  What do you mean?

• 13:18Steven Pressfield?

  I think people will say, oh, it's made up, it's not real. I want something that, that, you know?

• 13:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Steven Pressfield?

  And, you know, it's tough to argue against that, but except made up stuff, a lot of times is realer than real.

• 13:31Ryan Holiday?

  It gets closer to the, the, the big truths.

• 13:35Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, when it's right, it is, you know?

• 13:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 13:37Steven Pressfield?

  It does.

• 13:38Ryan Holiday?

  And, and I would put in the middle category, I talk about Plutarch a lot, like most of what Plutarch tells us is probably not true. Right? Where you read, um, history, the Peloponnesian War, none of those speeches happened.

• 13:51Steven Pressfield?

  You mean in Thucydides?

• 13:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, the words of this.

• 13:54Steven Pressfield?

  How do you know that?

• 13:55Ryan Holiday?

  Well, because he wasn't there.

• 13:57Steven Pressfield?

  Ah, I mean, the way I heard it was that he went to great pains if he wasn't there to talk to people who were there and who were, who were eyewitnesses.

• 14:07Ryan Holiday?

  There was never a recording of Periphe's funeral oration, right? So, so, so what we have is Thucydides' version of it, which I would say gets close or closer to the, the, the big T truth. Even if it's not the literal.

• 14:27Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Ryan Holiday?

  Recording. And so, so what I mean is that I think also historians have taken as their job to capture literally what happened and everything has to be footnoted. And if it, if it can't be footnoted or verified, they'll spend a lot of time trying to, to disprove it when really the, the purpose of history is actually the same purpose as literature. Do you know what I mean? Like the purpose is to capture the essence of what happened and to, to, to trans, to communicate the lesson of the event and the personality and the struggle.

• 15:04Steven Pressfield?

  I mean, you must be dealing with this with the Stockdale book, you know, every day, right?

• 15:09Ryan Holiday?

  But I even think in my, in the stories that I'm writing in the book, sometimes I'm, I, I know it didn't literally happen that way. Or, um, there's, there's this story that I tell in, uh, writing right now. Do you know the, the story of Regulus, the, um, the Roman general?

• 15:25Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, who turned himself in after, yeah.

• 15:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:27Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Ryan Holiday?

  And, and.

• 15:28Steven Pressfield?

  That is an amazing story. Yeah.

• 15:30Ryan Holiday?

  There's not that much proof that it happened. It was a story told over and over and over again in these different ones. Cincinnatus is another great example. You know the story of Cincinnatus?

• 15:39Steven Pressfield?

  No, no.

• 15:39Ryan Holiday?

  He's the Roman general, Rome, Rome's army is basically captured or on the verge of defeat. And so there's an old Roman general named Cincinnatus who they make dictator of Rome to save the country. And he, he leaves his retirement, he saves the Roman army and he lays down his powers 17 days later and returns to his farm. And it's this myth, Cincinnatus, that, that Washington is referring to when he resigns his commission and then when he leaves the presidency. So it's not like we have monuments and, and scrolls and documents. Uh, there's not a lot of historical evidence for Cincinnatus.

• 16:22Ryan Holiday?

  But it doesn't matter because generations of Romans believed in the myth of Cincinnatus to the point that it, it was true enough that 2,000 years later.

• 16:31Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Ryan Holiday?

  Washington makes it as a model. So, so.

• 16:34Steven Pressfield?

  If it wasn't true, it should have been true.

• 16:35Ryan Holiday?

  Exactly, exactly. It's like, if it wasn't true, you would have to invent it. So I'm telling the story as per the ancient sources. I'm telling you what the ancients believed. I'm not adding details and inventing things. You know, I'm, I'm making it real by describing, I don't know, the, the sea, the wind at its back, you know, I'm, I'm coloring the story, but I'm, I'm not telling the story and then going, and by the way, this is bullshit and an idiot if you believe it, because I think the essence of that story is really important.

• 17:07Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah.

• 17:08Ryan Holiday?

  So I, I think there's, there's nonfiction and fiction, and then there's, there's actually kind of a fluid.

• 17:15Steven Pressfield?

  What is the thing from, uh, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance? The quote of, uh, if you have a choice between the fact and the legend, print the legend?

• 17:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Steven Pressfield?

  I forgot.

• 17:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Steven Pressfield?

  Whether that was a line from the movie or was a true.

• 17:28Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 17:28Steven Pressfield?

  Newspaperman said that, I don't know.

• 17:30Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 17:31Steven Pressfield?

  But I'm from that school too.

• 17:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 17:33Steven Pressfield?

  Print the legend, you know, it's a lot more fun.

• 17:36Ryan Holiday?

  But, but, but the, yeah, the purposes of those, across those three different types, the mission is the same, which is you're supposed to teach people things that, about the human experience, I think ultimately. If not, why are you doing it?

• 17:52Steven Pressfield?

  Yeah, like Braveheart is a great example of that, you know? Who knows what the actual story of William Wallace is?

• 17:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 17:58Steven Pressfield?

  But I'll take the movie anytime.

• 18:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, totally. Hey there, just a heads up, I'm going to be on tour this fall. You can see me in Australia, in New Zealand in October, in August, I'm mixing my months up here, but in August you can see me in Chicago, in Minneapolis, in Detroit. Then I'll be on the East Coast sometime in November and December. Anyways, grab tickets to that, dailystoiclive.com. Hope to see you there.