#642: Steven Pressfield on Going from Truck Driver to Bestselling Novelist, Overcoming Self-Sabotage, Building Momentum, Dancing with the Muse, Turning Pro, and Letting Your Underground River Flow

Brought to you by MasterClass http://masterclass.com/ferriss online video lessons taught by 180+ of the world’s best, Athletic Greens http://athleticgreens.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement, and Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating. Steven Pressfield (@SPressfield https://twitter.com/SPressfield/) was 52 years old before his first novel was published. Since then, he has written the million-sellers Gates of Fire https://www.amazon.com/Gates-Fire-Novel-Battle-Thermopylae/dp/055338368X/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and The War of Art https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1936891026/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, as well as The Legend of Bagger Vance https://www.amazon.com/Legend-Bagger-Vance-Novel-Golf/dp/038072751X/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, A Man at Arms https://www.amazon.com/Man-at-Arms-Novel-ebook/dp/B08D4WGM7Z/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, and many others. His newest book, the memoir Govt Cheese https://stevenpressfield.com/govt-cheese/, is about those years before that first publication. It is coming out on December 30th, and you can pre-order signed copies here https://store.stevenpressfield.com/product/govt-cheese-signed-copy/. Please enjoy! * This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep http://eightsleep.com/Tim! Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. For a limited time, Eight Sleep is offering my listeners up to $450 off their Sleep Fit Holiday Bundle, which includes my personal favorite, the Pod 3 Cover. Go to EightSleep.com/Tim http://eightsleep.com/tim to get the exclusive holiday savings. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. That’s EightSleep.com/Tim http://eightsleep.com/Tim * This episode is also brought to you by MasterClass http://masterclass.com/ferriss! With MasterClass http://masterclass.com/ferriss, you can learn from the world’s best minds http://masterclass.com/ferriss—anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace. With more than 180 classes from a range of world-class instructors, that thing you’ve always wanted to do is closer than you think. MasterClass http://masterclass.com/ferriss’s cinema-quality lessons give you unparalleled access to renowned instructors, who share everything from how to execute specific techniques to insights about their craft that can be translated across many fields and disciplines. This holiday, give one annual membership and get one free! Go to Masterclass. Com/Ferriss http://masterclass.com/ferriss today. * [05:51] Ambition in a halfway house. [09:30] Evanescent dreams. [10:37] Helpful self-delusions. [13:28] What’s in a name? [19:18] Trimming fiction’s fat beyond the first draft. [22:06] The Paul Rink method of maintaining Blitzkrieg momentum. [25:48] Other pearls of Paul Rink perspicacity. [28:08] A transition from aspiring fiction writer to prolific author. [32:05] A hint from Hemingway. [33:15] Positive self-delusion. [35:26] Writing fiction isn’t self-indulgence. It’s an obligation. [40:44] How does writing fiction fit into my life? Is it a top priority? [51:04] Why Steven wrote Govt Cheese. [53:34] A pivotal slap in the face. [55:48] Seeking home from the wilderness. [58:46] Banishing depression by finding profundity in the absurd. [1:04:12] The novelty of absurdity isn’t necessarily negative. [1:05:29] Icing on the cake. [1:06:49] Two years I spent in the wilderness without a compass. [1:09:33] Richard Rohr’s vessel. [1:12:49] Handling the voltage. [1:14:31] What did it feel like for Steven to write this memoir? [1:16:25] The origin of the title Govt Cheese. [1:18:55] What you, dear listener, should know about this book. [1:20:49] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:28Tim Ferriss?

  reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40%, and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery, so you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And good news: Eight Sleep has launched the next generation of the Pod. The new Pod 3 enables more accurate sleep and health tracking with twice the number of sensors. It's just a smoother, better experience that delivers you the best sleep on earth. At least, that has been true for me. Simply add this to your existing mattress, and you're all set. It is not magic, but sometimes it does feel like it. It just works. For a limited time, Eight Sleep is offering my listeners, that's you guys,

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  Up to $450 off of their Sleep Fit Holiday Bundle, which includes my personal favorite, the Pod 3 Cover. Go to eightsleep.com/tim to get the exclusive holiday savings. That's all spelled out, E-I-G-H-T. Eightsleep.com/tim. Eightsleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. That's eightsleep.com/tim.

• 2:38Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:23Tim Ferriss?

  digestive enzymes, and adaptogens. You get the idea. It is very, very comprehensive. And I do my best, of course, to focus on nutrient-dense, proper meals. But sometimes you're busy. Sometimes you're traveling. Sometimes you just want to make sure that you are getting what you need. AG1 makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. It's also NSF certified for sport, making it safe for competitive athletes as what's on the label is in the powder. It's the ultimate all-in-one nutritional supplement bundle in one easy scoop. Right now Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement

• 4:05Tim Ferriss?

  and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I've found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:45Speaker 01

  No, it would seem inappropriate.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:01Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and germs, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, obviously. Look at the shiny dumb I have here. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is a rare in-person filmed edition. So, thank you for joining us. My guest today is Steven Pressfield. Steven was 52 years old before his first novel was published. So, you're saying there's a chance. This guy might have a chance. Since then, he has written The Million Sellers, Gates of Fire, and The War of Art, one of the best titles of any book of all time, as well as The Legend of Bagger Vance, A Man at Arms, and many others. His newest book, the memoir Government Cheese, and I have it right here, is about those years before the first publication. You can find him online,

• 5:43Tim Ferriss?

  Steven, that's with a V, stevenpressfield.com, on Twitter at SPressfield, and Instagram, Steven underscore Pressfield. Steven, so nice to see you.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  It's great to see you, Tim. We've never met in person, although, you know, we've had a lot of interaction. So, it's great to be here, you know, in the flesh. Thanks for having me.

• 6:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, of course. I'm so happy we're able to do this. And we were chatting and chatting and chatting, not just remotely, not just in the last podcast, which I loved, which spurred me on to do all sorts of experiments in fiction. So, thank you for that. But we were chatting and chatting, chatting about creative process before hitting record, and both of us, certainly I was saying, "Oh, we should keep some of it." So, I wanted to, I'll roll back and say, thank you again for really helping me and helping so many people to...

• 6:37Tim Ferriss?

  Pick up the pen, pick up the keyboard, pick up the brush, whatever it might be, and overcome this resistance. And I'm sure we'll revisit resistance, because I don't want to assume that anyone listening to this or watching this has heard our first conversation. So why don't we set a little bit of context. In our first convo, we talked about the halfway house that you lived in, in the cabin, with no electricity and no running water, et cetera. And my question that I thought we could start with is about ambition. And if I understand correctly, at the time, you felt guilty for having ambition. So I'd like you to do two things, if you wouldn't mind. Just set the table a little bit. So how did you end up in a halfway house?

• 7:17Tim Ferriss?

  And then, if you could talk about ambition a little bit at that time, how it occurred you.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Let's see if I can remember this. This is in Government Chiefs. I had, was in the middle of a divorce, in the middle of a breakup, living at my mother-in-law's house in the country, in North Carolina. Had a job delivering industrial food, institutional food. And I got fired from that job. And, you know, just sort of wound up in Durham, North Carolina, with like $20 in my pocket, trying to, and found, you know, just a room in a place that turned out to be a halfway house for people coming out of mental institutions and be reintegrating into society. At that point, I actually got lucky. I found a job at a trucking company. And so I was sort of settled into that place for a little while.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  But about ambition, I had a dream at that time, where, this is in the book, The War of Art, where I came back into my little, you know, basement room, and instead of it being a total mess, the room had organized itself. And my shirts had all folded themselves, and my boots had shined themselves and sat. Somehow, I realized that the dream was about ambition. And the dream was sort of saying to me, "You have ambition, Steve." Which is like you were just saying, Tim. At that time, I was sort of... My mindset was kind of out of the 60s, you know? The whole thing of if you are ambitious individually,

• 8:50Speaker 03

  it's kind of a betrayal of your brothers and sisters. Like you really wanna stand out above them or achieve more than they, that kind of thing. And so that was really a bad thing to do. I really saw that as like, you know, immoral, unethical, or that kind of thing. And this dream kind of said the opposite. It said, "It's okay. It's okay for you to wanna achieve something. It's okay for you to wanna work hard at something." And that felt that as a real liberating moment for me. I mean, it took a long, long time for any of that to pay off. But that was sort of a turning point for me where I said, "I do have ambition, I do wanna achieve something, and it's okay."

• 9:30Tim Ferriss?

  And with that dream, when you had that dream, when you wake up the next morning, I think for many people, our dreams come and go. And some dreams stick, but oftentimes they come and go, and the memory degrades over time. Did you have that dream and then change things, or at least your thinking or focus shortly thereafter? Or was it something that went away, just as most dreams do, and then came back and revisited you enough that you then started to change your behavior?

• 9:59Speaker 03

  It absolutely stuck with me. And you're absolutely right, at least in my experience, dreams are such evanescent things. I mean, even from one minute to the next, they're gone. But this was like, I know you've read Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, right? And it's his life story, his autobiography. And one of the things he says in it at the start is that he's not gonna talk about events in his life like meeting Mahatma Gandhi, but he will talk about a dream he had when he was six years old. And this was one of those for me. It was like a big dream that never left me, that always stuck with me. Took a long time for it to pay off, but it stuck with me forever.

• 10:37Tim Ferriss?

  I recall, and I want you to fact-check this, if I'm not getting this right, but I remember that, I believe you said, in the halfway house, these weren't... By and large, stupid people. Like, they seem to be smart, and perhaps their being in halfway house was indicative of them not being able to cope with this sort of collective delusion of normal life, in a sense. So my question, because I was listening to a podcast recently, Hidden Brain, I'll give it credit, and they were talking about discussing literature that seems to support, I haven't looked at the studies, so who knows, that people who would self-describe as depressed,

• 11:17Tim Ferriss?

  or who are assessed as depressed, have a more accurate perception of reality, in a number of different capacities. And so I'm wondering, how do you, and this is a leading question, but how do you create helpful delusions for yourself? Because even if it is maybe accurate to perceive reality in a way that causes you to be depressed or be in a halfway house, it's not necessarily hugely functional, if that makes sense. And I say that as someone who's suffered from a lot of depression. This is a bit of meandering, thinking out loud question, but are there helpful delusions that you can forge for yourself or cultivate?

• 11:57Speaker 03

  You know, I've never really even thought about that, Tim, but I think it's absolutely true. I mean, my version of that is denial. I believe that denial is like the greatest thing to, as a resource, you know? To just simply, you know, for instance, I'm a certain age, and I'm in complete denial of it, you know? And I absolutely refuse to accept it, you know? So that's a helpful delusion. And I truly sort of work on that kind of thing. And I see certain challenges for myself, that challenges in the sense of, if I let myself think in this certain manner, that's not going to be a good thing. So I have to sort of work at it.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  I'd be interested if you do the same thing, Tim, where I will actively deny something like that, or actively sort of brainwash myself, you know? For instance. At the age I am now, it would be very easy, which I don't even wanna say what it is cuz I'm in denial of that, is it'd be very easy to start thinking, okay, you can take it easy now, you've sort of hit a certain point, you know, you can kind of put it on cruise control, and I know if I do that, I'm about one foot on a banana peel, another one on a roller skate, you know, so I definitely have to sort of say to myself, okay, I'm projecting 10 years into the future, what's my mindset gonna be for that time, and I

• 13:20Speaker 03

  want it to be even more ambitious than it was before, so I'm not sure that's an answer to the question, but...

• 13:28Tim Ferriss?

  No, it is, it is an answer, I think about this a lot, in part because I was recently on an extended hike, let's call it, multi-day hike with a group of people, and two of them were very accomplished scientists and scientific thinkers, and two of them were also very smart, but hyper, hyper optimistic, to the point where it almost to me seemed Pollyanna-ish, however, they were also easily the two happiest people in the group, and this stuck with me, where I was like, okay, sure, I might be able to see like the grime under the fingernails of life at every turn, but is that actually serving me? Not convinced it always is, it helps for things like risk mitigation, but in the case

• 14:12Tim Ferriss?

  of, say, creative projects, so we were chatting before we started recording, and I was mentioning that after our last conversation, I ended up putting together my first fiction, short story that I shared with the world, which you were very kind to take, take a handful of time to look at, so thank you for that, and your main feedback was like, don't ever think it, just keep going, keep going, keep going, which I did, and I've been working now on more fiction, because I'm enjoying the process of trying to develop those muscles, and when resistance shows up, when procrastination shows up, it seems like having a set of beliefs,

• 14:51Tim Ferriss?

  whether they're true or not, to kind of hold on to, to white-knuckle, can be really helpful, and maybe I'll give you a real example, because I'll give you an example of resistance, and I'd be curious to know what you might do about it, because this is an area of your expertise. Or how you might think about it. I'll give you a very clear example. I've been editing a number of vignettes of these greater houses I mentioned that exist in this fantasy world. So there are these eight houses in this fictional realm. And when I started writing, it was very easy because I didn't have to connect any dots. And then it got increasingly more complex as everything was interwoven.

• 15:32Tim Ferriss?

  And I took a note here of one of your characters' names. You're gonna find this funny, I think. And I'm looking for it, Arcadia. Arcadia?

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Telamon of Arcadia.

• 15:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, Telamon of Arcadia, what a name. And I have found that I've been hemming and hawing and going back and forth and renaming and renaming and renaming things like a hundred times. So this has become my way of not finishing things.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 16:03Tim Ferriss?

  And so I suppose there are two questions. Number one, because there's one particular piece which has to do with this greater house, which is a house divided of spellcasters, long story. There are a lot of names in this one particular piece. And I've just let it go on and on and on. It's just been, it's my undone homework that's been sitting there for now, probably two weeks. Even though I'm fiddling with it. So I suppose first, or actually you can choose which one you want to go with first. How do you come up with your names of characters? I'd love to know how you just think about naming fictional characters or fictional places. And then second, am I crazy?

• 16:44Tim Ferriss?

  And is this the, one of the stranger examples of how resistance has come up?

• 16:49Speaker 03

  I don't think you're crazy at all. It's a really good question. I mean, if you think about Game of Thrones, the names of the characters there were so fantastic. Daenerys Targaryen, you know? Brienne of Tarsh, what was, what was her name? Brienne. And I know Scott Fitzgerald used to keep a file. I'm sure writer writers do. Anytime they'd come across a great name in real life, they'd write it down. And he had like a whole list. And I do think in some crazy way... You gotta get the name right. And if you do get it right, then it's like the character's a living thing, right? They won't really speak for you if you don't have them with the right name. I don't think that's resistance at all.

• 17:33Tim Ferriss?

  Which is very appropriate for spellcasters, the power of the name.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in real life, think of how parents take so much time with the name they're gonna give their kid 'cause they feel like, gee, if I give them the wrong name, they're gonna turn out to be, you know, if I give them the right name, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow, you know, something like that. So I don't think that is resistance. And I would say, don't worry about it. Take your time and let the names come.

• 17:59Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  I myself spend a lot of time on names.

• 18:03Tim Ferriss?

  How do you grease the wheels for that?

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Put the word out to the muse that you need some names, you know? And it seems to me like they sort of pop into your head, rather than sitting down and doing a list or something like that. One thing I do is, anytime something does pop into my head, I will write it down. Even if it's for another, it might be for a book, you know, three books down the line. But names are really important, I think.

• 18:30Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so that makes me feel a lot better. So I will, I'm gonna continue to plod along on this, and it's making progress.

• 18:40Tim Ferriss?

  Pardon the interruption, folks, but I do have some news. The fiction that Steve and I are talking about, this thing I've been working on, is now live. The first two short fiction pieces are live in audio form on something called the Cock Punch Podcast. I'm not making that up. And each one is just around five minutes long, very short. And you can find them at cockpunch.com/podcast or wherever you find your podcasts. Just look for Cock Punch and it'll be there. It debuted at number one in the fiction category and has been top 100 of all podcasts on Apple Podcasts since it came out. Now, back to the show. The other challenge I'm having with this particular chapter,

• 19:21Tim Ferriss?

  just to, because I'm sure a lot of people who are listening or watching this will have had the experience, will be having the experience, or at some point will have the experience of hitting an impasse with some type of creative project, doesn't even need to be something as obvious as, say, fantasy. It could just be a memo, internal memo to a company. Maybe there are going to be layoffs, who knows, right? And they're just agonizing over editing something. With this particular piece, it's very complex compared to some of the other histories. And I've been thinking to myself, like, alright, should I just try to cut this in half as an exercise? Because maybe this one vignette is trying to do too much, which I find very easy to do if a sentence is trying to do too much. I'm like, yeah, it's too long, it's trying to do too much.

• 20:06Tim Ferriss?

  Like, break it into two or three sentences, or just get rid of it. When you are having any challenges in the editing process with an area that is kind of gummed up in whatever way, do you have any advice?

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Now, are you talking about, say, a first draft, an early draft? Or are you a later draft?

• 20:23Tim Ferriss?

  Later draft. So it's past the first draft. I would say I'm probably eight or nine revisions in.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 20:32Tim Ferriss?

  One of my challenges here is, and I think it's a sign of me being a novice, is I'm trying to establish some connective tissue in world-building as a setting for what's happening. But I suspect that I'm doing an information dump that is going to be hard for people to digest. Especially since this will probably be in written form and in audio form. So especially is audio. If they can't go back and reread a sentence, it's going to be challenging for them to catch it. So this is a later draft.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  Okay, let's see if I can... This is a really interesting conversation here that I don't have, you know? My first go-to thing is, can I cut this?

• 21:13Speaker 03

  And a lot of times you can, you know, a lot of times you can cut a lot and the audience will accept it, or the readers will accept it. For instance, I just was watching on the airplane, I was watching Top Gun, the Maverick one. Have you seen it at all?

• 21:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  You know, there's the opening sequence, he's in this plane, this super, it's going to Mach 10 or something like that, and that sequence ends with the plane exploding at, you know, 9,000 miles in the sky. Cut to him alive, walking into a diner in the desert, you know, and obviously he's somehow bailed out and survived. And I thought, I accept that. I know from the right stuff that there's such a thing as you bail out and you land in the mall, whatever. So sometimes you can really cut something like that.

• 22:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right, you don't have to describe every step in between because the audience can fill it in.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  The other way, now, the reason I was asking, is it a first draft or a later draft? And it's like, I'm certainly a believer in first drafts or early drafts, the concept of blitzkrieg, which is, the concept of blitzkrieg is, as your tanks are rolling across the enemy, whatever it is, if you encounter an obstacle, go around it. Leave it behind, even if it will threaten your supply lines and stuff like that. So sometimes in an early draft, if I hit a real hard spot like that, that's driving me crazy, I'll just go around it. I'll just leave it alone and let the muse and the unconscious, because maybe a week

• 22:48Speaker 03

  from now or two weeks from now, an idea will come to me, oh, that's how I solved that. Whereas if I stay there hammering at that, I'll drive myself crazy, you know?

• 22:57Tim Ferriss?

  And you'll lose momentum.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. Momentum, I think, is everything in a case like that.

• 23:03Tim Ferriss?

  Let's double down on momentum because there's momentum in this micro sense, right? You're putting out a first draft and you hit a bump, maybe it's a name, right? And you don't want to sit there and just cogitate and perseverate on this one name and lose all your momentum. You want your tanks to keep rolling. So you're just like, ah, TK, I'll come back, whatever. And you leave it and you keep going. Paul Rink?

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 23:24Tim Ferriss?

  That name rings a bell?

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:25Tim Ferriss?

  So there's also...

• 23:26Speaker 03

  He's a chapter in government cheese, yeah.

• 23:28Tim Ferriss?

  So he also, I believe, gave you some advice as you were... Was it finishing your first novel or your novel that was about to be published?

• 23:38Speaker 03

  I think I know what you're gonna say, but keep going.

• 23:40Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I think that he had also mentioned, and this is just an example, this is from, actually from your website. So this story in The War of Art about the afternoon when I finally, finally finished my first novel manuscript, and then here's a word I always have trouble saying, "After failing ignominiously," am I getting that right?

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Ignominiously.

• 23:58Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, I always screw that up. "In numerous attempts over the previous 10 years, I was living in a little town in northern California then, I trotted down the street to my friend and mentor Paul Rink and told him the triumphant news. 'Good for you,' he said without looking up, 'start the next one tomorrow.'" So why did he say that?

• 24:13Speaker 03

  I'm absolutely a believer in this. You know, sometimes people will ask me, "What do you do between books?"

• 24:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  You know? And my answer to that is, there should never be a "between books." You know, Seth Godin calls it "the dip," right? If I understand it right. Like, the worst thing a writer or filmmaker or anybody can do, I'm sure you know this, Tim, is like, finish something, put it out there, and then sort of wait for the world to respond.

• 24:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  Right? Because they're either not gonna respond at all, or they're gonna hate it, right? And meanwhile, you're sitting there, driving yourself insane. So I'm definitely a believer that by the time I finish one book, well, let's put it a different way. As I'm coming towards, say, the last six months on a book, I want to be starting the next book simultaneously, even if it's only notes, so that when I do, like Paul Rinck said to me, "Start the next one tomorrow," you know, or today, because it's so hard to do that, and resistance is so hard, you gotta just keep going. So like, people will sometimes ask me too, "When do you take a vacation? When do you take a break?" And the answer to that is, let's say I'm finishing one book, okay,

• 25:23Speaker 03

  can I get another one sort of started? So that when, on Tuesday, when I finish that book, Wednesday, I plunge into the next one, and I'll go long enough till I have a kind of a beachhead, where I sort of know I've got the troops around the beach, and there's enough momentum that if I stop for a week or two weeks, I'll be able to pick it up again. That's when I'll take a vacation, not in between, because it's so hard to get. So Paul Rinck was a mentor to me. I used to have coffee with him every morning when I was trying to finish my first book. I would be, you know, I was totally focused.

• 25:58Tim Ferriss?

  And was he a writer? What was...

• 25:59Speaker 03

  He was a writer. He died a while ago. He was like maybe 30 years older than me. He lived in a little camper, in a pickup, out in front of his little house of his, and we would have coffee in his little camper every morning. And he sort of had taken me under his wing.

• 26:14Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, stupid question. But why, if he had a house, why was he living in his camper?

• 26:18Speaker 03

  He liked the camper better, what can I say? You know, he would go in the house to pee, that was it. But he sort of took me under his wing and would tell me books to read, and sort of, just give me sort of the writer's, psyching you up, you know, talk each morning, you know?

• 26:35Tim Ferriss?

  What type of advice did you find helpful? I mean, I know this is a while ago, but were there any particular pieces of advice, aside from the "start the next one tomorrow", or any particular books you recommended? Anything come to mind in terms of lessons that you either picked up explicitly from him? Or things that you absorbed?

• 26:55Speaker 03

  He certainly gave me many, many books that I had to read, you know? He sort of really had me read the canon, you know? Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, you know? All of those things, you know? Where he would just say to me, "You gotta read, you gotta know this, right? You can't be a writer and not know this," you know? But the other thing was that he really... He really believed in fiction writing as a calling. You know, it wasn't for money, it wasn't for bullshit. It was, he really made you feel like this was important to the planet. And that when you sat down to do your work, you gotta do it the best you absolutely can. And the other thing they said to me that really sort of helped me evolve,

• 27:37Speaker 03

  the idea of resistance, was that it's a war. And that you've gotta be in there every day going after it. You know, this is not a part-time occupation, or that it's a war and you gotta do it. So that was great to me at that very early stage of trying to formulate my own ethic. Coupled with that dream about ambition, you can see how the sort of, those two things are, as you're evolving as a young writer, those really go into your head and help.

• 28:09Tim Ferriss?

  Number of follow-up questions. The first would be, why did he or why do you feel like fiction writing as a calling is important to the planet? Is it because you are, and each person is endowed with certain gifts and it's your obligation to share those gifts? Is it because, for instance, I happen to believe this, that truths can be transmitted sometimes much more effectively in fiction than in any non-fiction?

• 28:34Speaker 03

  Definitely.

• 28:34Tim Ferriss?

  Why is it important?

• 28:36Speaker 03

  You know, well, let me back up a little bit here, Tim, on that. At the time, I didn't think that. At the time, I was just trying to survive. Like, at this particular time when I knew Paul Rinck, I had already written one novel all the way through and then quit at the last minute. Blew up my marriage, blah, blah, blah, my whole life. So at this particular point where I was in, I was working on the second one, and my objective was just to finish this motherfucker. You know? So I didn't have any grander, even to sell it. Forget it, I didn't even think about that.

• 29:10Tim Ferriss?

  And so people have context. The first one, when you stopped it right at the 100 feet from the finish line. That was, I assume, a form of self-sabotage. But how did you justify it to yourself at the time?

• 29:24Speaker 03

  I didn't. I just was, it was a catastrophe to me.

• 29:29Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know how to finish it. I mean, was that the internal voice at the time?

• 29:32Speaker 03

  The voice was, "Steve, you were an idiot to even try to write a book. You don't know anything about this. You're not prepared mentally. You've had no training, da-da-da-da. This is beyond you. It's like taking a tab of acid that was that big. You can't handle it. You know, you are a loser. You are a bum. Don't ever do this again. You went down one road, you've totally flamed out."

• 29:58Tim Ferriss?

  And boom, you just kind of pressed the Looney Tunes detonation on your life at the time. So then we flash forward to Paul, and you're like, "I just want to finish this fucking thing to prove to myself that I can finish it."

• 30:10Speaker 03

  Exactly. And also to prove to my ex-wife that the whole thing. Because she thought I was, you know, God knows what she thought. But I wanted to prove to her, even though that was silly.

• 30:25Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, that's useful fodder, then.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  So all I was trying to do was sort of get to the end of a project and just say I'd finished it. I did finish it, and for the rest of my life, I've never had any trouble finishing anything. Whereas I couldn't finish anything before. So that really meant something.

• 30:44Tim Ferriss?

  When you finished it, I'll be honest, in my case, I go through recurrent bouts of finishing and not finishing. So I haven't had this phase shift, although I think I complete more things than I don't, if they're worth completing.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  I would say you do, definitely.

• 30:59Tim Ferriss?

  But the stuff that I don't finish, no one ever sees, right? So they get this highlight reel of the things that have been completed. What changed for you, and was it immediate? As soon as you finished, were you like, "I am now a person who finishes things," or "I am a person who finishes things"? How did it show up as a voice that, if it did, help you then in future projects?

• 31:23Speaker 03

  It did, again, it was like the dream about ambition. It did kick in right then. And I knew it. I was writing on a typewriter then, this was pre-computers. So when you finish, you roll the page out of the typewriter. And you have a stack of pages, you put the last page on, it says "The End", you know? And in those days, I had carbon paper, because you had to have a copy, right? You couldn't just copy something. So I really felt like, that's it. I did it. I didn't know that I could, I would never have trouble, because you don't know the future. But, it did feel like, yeah. I did something that I couldn't do before.

• 32:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yep, and that's that. I've proven it to myself. I have that counter example of finishing.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  Let me ask you for a question, Tim.

• 32:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Is this helping you, us talking like this?

• 32:10Tim Ferriss?

  It is.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  In your own challenges with fiction?

• 32:12Tim Ferriss?

  It is. As always, I'm just going on a fishing expedition for myself. So I'm looking at, for instance, momentum. I felt this in my own life. So I was looking for examples of momentum. So you were talking about very macro level, project level momentum, right? Having, well, let's see, I'll give my Hemingway comparison later. But, the project lead up, and kind of the note-taking, setting of the table before you finish a project, so that you can pick up the very next day, without having a lull. The question of when to take a break, so that you do not lose momentum. And then, we were talking about, in the process of drafting, say, moving around obstacles, again, to preserve momentum.

• 32:54Tim Ferriss?

  And, you know, I was thinking, even for me, this is the Hemingway point, which may be apocryphal, I don't know if it's accurate. But, stopping almost mid-sentence, where I know what is going to follow, so I don't sit down and agonize over what the next few sentences are. I use that all the time. And I find it really helpful.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  I do too, I agree with it completely, yeah.

• 33:14Tim Ferriss?

  And, we're having this conversation also...

• 33:18Tim Ferriss?

  A few weeks before I, as we record this, and it may come out a lot closer to this date, going to be releasing this baby, which is very strange, into the world. So, hearing you talk about charging forward and having some type of locked and loaded next step prior to waiting for the reception that you may or may not get at all. And it could be crickets. It could be good. It very often is going to be negative, or the negative voices will be the loudest. That's what we'll pay attention to. So, yes, I'm finding this out there.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  When we go back to something we were talking about before, you were asking me about, not denial, but about having positive thoughts. Here's a couple of things that just occurred to me. One is, I try not to have very many friends who are writers. And I don't want to get into a world of writers. And I don't want to be talking to other people about it. I don't even want to know about it. And the reason I do that is, when I sit down to work on something, I want to believe like I'm the only person in the world. I don't want to start thinking, "Oh shit, I'm competing against this person. They're so smart, how am I ever..." Because that'll drive me crazy. So, I keep a sort of a state of denial that like, you know, "Yeah, maybe there's three or four other writers out there, but basically it's only me."

• 34:38Speaker 03

  And that's another thing that I definitely want to do. And another thing is, going forward and sort of thinking as I'm working on something, is this going to be any good? Is this going to be, are people going to respond to this in any way? I have a sort of a sense of denial or whatever, where I say, "People are going to love this. This is going to be great." And I won't let myself think about anything else like that. I won't let myself go down any of those rabbit holes. And I think that's also very helpful. And it is delusion. Both of them are deliberate delusions that I think you need to have in anything, you know? If you're General Jim Mattis and you're leading the 1st Marine Division up to Baghdad, you know, you have to say to yourself, "I'm not going to worry about Saddam Hussein having, you know, whatever, you know?

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Our guys are just going forward."

• 35:26Tim Ferriss?

  And many of my questions have questions behind them that I'm not voicing. So I asked you about you and Paul and your interactions and how fiction was viewed as a gift or maybe even an obligation. And I'm asking in part because I'm experimenting with fiction. I get energized by it, so I'm paying attention to it. There's something there. There's something there for me personally. But at times I wonder, am I being self-indulgent? Like, is this... And a lot of what I've done in life has been from a place of moral obligation and dealing with really, in some cases, let's just say, and working with therapeutics for things like treatment-resistant depression and of life anxiety with people who have terminal illnesses. It's very heavy.

• 36:10Tim Ferriss?

  And so I've wanted to maybe explore how I can try to transmit truths that are hidden, kind of like Easter eggs in this fictional landscape. But that's maybe another form of resistance that's coming up for me. Like, should I really be doing this? Is this just self-indulgent? You know, am I just like playing with toys in a corner and not doing something that's meaningful?

• 36:31Speaker 03

  I don't think it is self-indulgent at all. Let's see if I can answer that from two questions. One is, looking at it from the inside out, you as a creator, as a writer, as doing something like that, why is it important? I think for our own soul. Forget about anybody else that even sees it. If you don't do that, it's like we are, when we have an idea, we are like pregnant with that idea. And that idea has a life of its own, right? It wants to be born. And if we don't let it be born, we'll pay the price, one way or another. But I also believe that creativity, a dance, a song, whatever you're doing with NFTs

• 37:15Speaker 03

  in eight different houses or something, whatever, you know, and I don't know what it is at all, but I know that the world needs it. In some cosmic way...

• 37:26Speaker 03

  I'm definitely a believer that there's another dimension of reality, the muse, or God's consciousness, or whatever, that wants to bring beauty and truth into the world, and that it comes through you and me. We're sort of conduits for it, co-creators of it, or whatever, so that it's not self-indulgent. It would be the opposite. It's really an obligation, I think. We have, we all have an obligation to bring that forth, whatever it is. And I can't prove that that's doing any good. I mean, you look at the world, it looks pretty screwed up, you know?

• 38:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  But I do think that that's... It's not self-indulgent at all to do that, and it really is important, I think, to believe in, to believe.

• 38:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. And I also, as you were talking, I was thinking about the very fundamental piece of getting so much energy from doing what I'm doing. Because that energy transfers outside of a writing session, so it can be applied to many, many other things. So it's providing, overall, to me, more fuel for everything that I can do. So that is also a reason in and of itself to do it.

• 38:46Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by MasterClass. I am a huge fan of MasterClass. I have taken many MasterClasses. With MasterClass, you can learn from the world's best minds, anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace. Personally, I just learned a ton about fiction writing, creating characters, where ideas come from, journaling, how to deal with rejection. It goes on and on with celebrated author Amy Tan. It was amazing. And so many of these classes are amazing. With more than 180 classes from a range of world-class instructors, that thing you've always wanted to do is actually a lot closer than you think. The roster of teachers they have is simply incredible. I mean, it's really impressive what they've done. Neil Gaiman teaches storytelling.

• 39:31Tim Ferriss?

  Aaron Sorkin on screenwriting. Margaret Atwood on creative writing. Richard Branson... Steve Martin, Gordon Ramsay, Esther Perel, Bob Iger, Malcolm Gladwell. Legend upon legend, the list just goes on and on and it's just like the Walk of Fame here. And these people are also very good teachers. This is the resource I wish I had when I was starting out back in the day. I wish I had it every year since starting out back in the day and I'm certain there is something for you. MasterClass's cinema-quality lessons give you unparalleled access to renowned instructors who share everything from how to execute specific techniques, also personal stories and how that ties in, their thought process, to insights about their craft that can be translated across many fields and disciplines.

• 40:15Tim Ferriss?

  This is certainly true for the class I mentioned that I recently took, Amy Tan. It's true for a lot of others. I highly, highly recommend you check this out. This holiday, give one annual membership and get one free. Go to masterclass.com/ferris, F-E-R-R-I-S-S, although most misspellings should work. One more time, that's masterclass.com/ferris. F-E-double-R-I-double-S. Terms apply.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  Let me ask you a question about your fiction.

• 40:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Where does that fit in? Because I know you have so many other things that you're doing.

• 40:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  Where does it fit in? Is it a number-one priority? Is it a side thing? What is it?

• 41:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  And is it evolving? How do you see it over time?

• 41:05Tim Ferriss?

  It is. I'll answer the last part first. So it is evolving. If I look at my first histories that I wrote, and actually, my friends give me feedback who have read drafts, then if they look at the first, it's kind of like, all right, Tim's really trying to find his feet. And it's a little stiff. And if you look at then what was written three months later, as I'm reading classics, as I'm soaking in this, as I'm experimenting more, as I'm getting more, I wouldn't say confident, but less constipated about how I let things move.

• 41:40Tim Ferriss?

  I think it has improved a lot, and that's just based on feedback. It was invisible to me because it's kind of like the boiling frog, right? I didn't see the degree, undegree change. And to that extent, I do think it is evolving. And part of what excites me about all of this is I don't know where it's going. I think so much of my life has been scheduled down to the minute for decades. It was kind of 15-minute increments in an Outlook calendar, and now it's a Google calendar. And I find that predictability to be somewhat stifling. Like, it's reassuring from a safety perspective, but it doesn't provide a lot of excitement. Not that I need excitement in the form of disasters nonstop,

• 42:25Tim Ferriss?

  but the fact that I could build in some unpredictability in the form of, say, fiction, where I set the initial conditions, I set some initial scenarios, but beyond that, I don't know where it's going, is very exciting. In terms of priority, I would say it's a very high priority for me because it is giving me so much creative energy that I am also applying to other things. Furthermore, because I have this focus, and this actually comes back to having a project. So for, I'd say, two years prior to that, I decided to let there be as much negative space as possible, no major projects. And in retrospect, psychologically, that was a disaster. It was not good to have that much negative space.

• 43:09Tim Ferriss?

  And I think there were things that came of it, and I learned lessons, including, maybe you don't want that much negative space. But I had sort of let go of the trapeze without having another one to grab onto, and I think that was a mistake. And for that two-year period, I really got much less done for myself and other people than any preceding two-year period that I can think of.

• 43:32Tim Ferriss?

  Whereas now, I'm doing this fiction and I'm spending a lot of time on it, which by the way, just for anybody listening, does not guarantee that you're gonna like it or it's gonna be good, but it's giving something to me that is helping me to be better at everything else than I'm doing. Case in point, we're having this conversation right now. We can actually have many portions of this conversation because I'm working on it.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:54Tim Ferriss?

  And you are domain expert, you have so much time in the trenches, so there's a direct carryover.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  Uh-huh.

• 44:01Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, it's not accidental that I want to have this conversation with you, but it's helping other things, so there's that. And I think I'm kind of dodging the question a little bit because I don't know if I can confidently say it's my number one priority, but it is absolutely from a creative project perspective, what I'm paying the most attention to right now. Why do you ask?

• 44:24Speaker 03

  Because I sort of, you know, when you've tentatively brought up when we, our last discussion.

• 44:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  You know, I kind of said, "Are you working on fiction?", which I sort of didn't have any idea that you were. And you really kind of, you know, you lit up at that, you know? I really felt like I'd hit an electric, you know, circuit with that. So I was, I've been sort of wondering, you know, where does that fit in in Tim's head? Is he going in that direction? Because he's got so many other things that I know are important, projects that I know are important to you, things you care about for the planet and for everything like that. So I was just really wondering where that, where that fit in.

• 44:56Tim Ferriss?

  I feel like fiction is fuel for the other things that consume fuel.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  Uh, interesting.

• 45:04Tim Ferriss?

  Like, it's, it's adding to the black side of the ledger.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  Uh-huh.

• 45:08Tim Ferriss?

  Whereas a lot of these other things are important, but they-

• 45:10Speaker 03

  Energetic.

• 45:10Tim Ferriss?

  Energetically, they feel like debits.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Uh-huh.

• 45:13Tim Ferriss?

  And I haven't had something to counterveil that depletion.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  Uh.

• 45:19Tim Ferriss?

  But these days, man, it's like, I wake up, I'm excited to jump into this stuff. Been a long time since I felt this excited. And I could see it informing a lot of what I do in the future. And also, on the same walk I was mentioning earlier with these guys, a number of us repeatedly, someone brought it up and then all of us quickly agreed, that it seems like a lot of us, we were all, I think we were all past the age of 40, I'm 45, that maybe around 40, a lot of these guys, who are very good at their respective fields- Had come back to what made them joyful as thirteen or fourteen year olds. And at that time, what was I doing? I wanted to be a comic book penciller. I was drawing all the time.

• 46:04Tim Ferriss?

  And I was creating fictional worlds in the form of comic books. Because I was basically creating panels and doing storyboarding for the movie of my mind, which at the time took the form of comic books. So in a sense, this is returning to the source of a lot of that joy and energy as a kid that I just lost sight of because I viewed it as childish, self-indulgent. This is what kids do. Now I'm supposed to be an adult. And I threw the baby out with the bathwater. So it fits in in a very fundamental way. It's just that it took a long time for me to maybe reclaim or resurrect that piece.

• 46:45Speaker 03

  Let's look at this for a second from the point of view of the other, other dimensions of reality.

• 46:52Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  Or from the muse's point of view, right? That somehow in you, there's an underground river flowing from childhood, from doing that sort of stuff. And obviously now, it's like when you tell me about, you know, eight different houses, I say, where is this coming from? You know? I mean, it's not like something that you just sit down, oh, let me do a, this giant worlds of, you know, different time dimensions and everything. That's coming from somewhere, you know? Like if we were gonna look at it from the point of view of the Greek gods, then there would be a muse that's got all this stuff, all this papers in front of her and saying, I'm giving these to Tim, you know? So if you don't do that,

• 47:35Speaker 03

  the fact that you're energized by that and the fact that when you don't do that, you're being depleted.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  That sort of gives a picture of reality where you're sort of a receptor of a flow of energy coming from somewhere else. And it's not just random energy. It's, you know, very definitely a world, a story, a universe, a cosmos that you or I or anybody doing that, we can't know what it means. Does it help anybody? And it does seem self-indulgent. Why am I just drawing these pictures? You know, but it isn't. In some way, it isn't. And in fact, it's the most important thing. Everything we learn in this commercial world says the opposite to that, right? You should be seriously working on when, in fact,

• 48:27Speaker 03

  what this is that you're working on, the story you're working on, in my mind, is probably the most important thing. Maybe I'm prejudiced because I don't know other stuff. But, and that's true for everybody. If we don't do it, that underground river is gonna fuck us up one way or another.

• 48:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  If we don't let it flow.

• 48:49Tim Ferriss?

  As you're mentioning this, you know, it coming from somewhere. Part of what has been so, I think, rejuvenating about this for me is that if I sit down, and this is not meant as a slight against nonfiction, because I love nonfiction. I read nonfiction. I've written a lot of nonfiction. At times, not always, but a lot of the time, it can feel like carpentry. You're like, alright, I gotta lay these bricks. There are 1,200 of them. Here we go. And you know what the wall is gonna look like. You have to know what the wall is gonna look like in most cases. Whereas with this, there have been a number of these vignettes where it doesn't happen every morning, doesn't happen every day, but when I sit down to write and it just comes out

• 49:31Tim Ferriss?

  and it all just kind of lands almost like a finished piece. And there's revision, everything's gonna fall. But all of these unusual story elements and characters just kind of appear and I'm not pausing at all. And that is... A feeling that is very hard for me to capture in words, maybe ironically, but that flow state, which is a term that's overused, which is why I'm grasping for maybe another way to put it. But that dancing with the muse, that feeling of being a conduit for something, which I don't feel in many other places. There are a few. Maybe in psychedelic experiences, maybe in certain sexual experiences,

• 50:15Tim Ferriss?

  where something is happening through you as opposed to you doing something. And, I mean, this project is gonna be absurd and really strange. So I don't wanna make it sound like I'm hatching the next Tolkien masterpiece. But that doesn't matter. It's kind of beside the point because it's the feeling that I'm paying attention to. And it's so unusual and it gives me so much endurance. I'm like, okay, there's something here that is worth paying attention to. I don't need to be able to explain it. I don't need to be able to describe it necessarily, but it's feeding me in a way that I haven't been fed.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  It's fascinating, isn't it? I mean, they don't teach you this in school. This is not the reality that they tell you is what the world is all about. But it is what the world is all about for certain kinds of people.

• 51:04Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely, and there's this experience, say, of popping up on the wave and just riding it perfectly and being in that flow state, metaphorically speaking. And then there's the work and there's the regimentation. And I'd love for you to tell the story of when you got your job as a driver, trucking, delivering. There was a conversation, I wanna say, that your boss at the time, or soon-to-be boss, had with you. And it seemed like that was a slap in the face that sort of changed your orientation towards work, at least up to that point. Could you tell that story, please?

• 51:45Speaker 03

  And this is all in government cheese, by the way. It's all, I really wanted to tell those stories in detail. And like, Tim, you actually, when you were asking me these questions on the last conversation, that was sort of what inspired me to actually write this book.

• 52:02Tim Ferriss?

  We can hit on that first, too. So let's actually just hit that and then we can talk about this conversation. But you can write a million different things. Why write "Government Cheese"? And why the title "Government Cheese"?

• 52:14Speaker 03

  Well, it's a memoir, and like I say, when we had our last conversation and you started asking me about specifics in my life, you know, how did you go from where you were there to where you were there? You were sort of interested in the creative process and the whole thing. And I thought for the first time that, I thought about telling those stories and writing that all down at some, but I thought, nobody's gonna be interested in this. But the fact that you were, and then I did a podcast with Rich Roll, and he was interested in too, and so, and with Diana, my significant other, who you just met, she also was all about that.

• 52:48Tim Ferriss?

  And you're like, wait a minute.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  I thought, I better, I better do this. And it may be that my resistance to this is pure resistance. So what I did wanna do was tell like the real stories of my sort of evolution as a writer. And my years kind of in the wilderness, struggling, doing other jobs and not succeeding, et cetera, et cetera. So I thought, let me write a fucking memoir. Let me just tell the true story, you know? Cause I thought it would be helpful to other people who are kind of on that odyssey. That was what sort of tipped me over into doing it. Of course, I wanted to do it myself for my own reasons. So back to this particular story that you were asking me about. I'll give you the sort of the long version, you can edit whatever you want.

• 53:29Tim Ferriss?

  This is long form, so we're, we're in the perfect place for a long story.

• 53:34Speaker 03

  So by luck, I had gotten a job as a long haul tractor trailer driver. And I was the youngest guy at, you know, a trucking company. And hanging on by my fingernails, trying not to screw up because self sabotage was the thing in my, and the short version of it was I dropped a trailer. Three hundred thousand dollars worth, forty thousand pounds of textile machinery. I pulled out from under a parked trailer, not knowing that I hadn't coupled the thing, crashed to the deck. And, you know, it was just a total fuck up that I felt was a, was also self sabotage. It was me trying to screw myself up. So I had a boss, his name was Hugh Reeves, and one of the

• 54:17Speaker 03

  book number one in here is called Hugh Reeves because he was such a great mentor to me. So he didn't fire me immediately. He didn't fire me anyway, but he took me out to a hot dog place in Durham, North Carolina for lunch. And he said to me, he said, "Son, I can tell that you're going through something in your mind, that you're living out some kind of issues." He says, "I don't want to know what they are. I don't give a shit what they are. Just remember, you drive from me. This company is a commercial enterprise designed to make money. You're not living out any odyssey here, you know?"

• 54:57Speaker 03

  And he said, "I hired you to deliver a fucking load, and you better deliver it every time. You're a professional driver, do it." You know, so that really was something, again, that stuck with me from that moment on and was reflected in writing and learning how to write. This is not a joke. You're a professional person, do it. Whatever it takes, do it. And so that has lived with me forever since then. And that was a great mentor situation. Hugh Reeves, wherever you are.

• 55:31Tim Ferriss?

  And he was a former military?

• 55:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. He was a Marine from, you know, a few generations before me.

• 55:38Tim Ferriss?

  Did you have military background as well?

• 55:41Speaker 03

  I mean, I was a Marine reservist. I was never in combat, but I was an infantryman, you know, in the training.

• 55:48Tim Ferriss?

  The wilderness. So you mentioned the wilderness. What is the sojourn in the wilderness? And can you skip it?

• 55:54Speaker 03

  I don't think you can. I mean, I'm doing a little thing on Instagram, as you know, I'm sure, called a little series. I think we all have a passage.

• 56:04Tim Ferriss?

  In the wilderness, for people who want to.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  In the wilderness. Meaning, the bottom falls out of our life, you know? If it's, maybe it's addiction, maybe it's PTSD, maybe it's abuse of others or abuse of ourselves. For me, it was like a geographic odyssey, where I was working hard labor jobs in crazy parts of the country that I never thought I would ever be in, and I couldn't get out of this thing. I do think that we need, we all need that passage somehow, like the odyssey. I know I'm probably getting way too deep into this, but... Homer's Odyssey, the story of Odysseus returning from the Trojan War. Ten years, he's blown this hither and thither about trying to get home.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  That's, to me, is sort of the granddaddy of all heroes' journeys and of all kind of in Western civilization, anyway. The reason that the Odyssey still is so powerful, 3,000 years after it was written, is because it's all in our blood, it's in our bones, we all have that, you know? I mean, it can happen, you can go to jail, and that's your wilderness time. And we all sort of need that, I think. And this book, Government Cheese, is like my time in the wilderness. And like I said, the reason I wanted to put it on paper was because I thought it might help other people. Because one of the other things about, I know I'm blathering on here, Tim, but we've got a lot of tape. Yeah, we got all the time in the world.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  One of the factors, one of the characteristics of a time in the wilderness, in my experience, is that we're blind to its significance while we're in it. We think it's meaningless. We think our life is meaningless. We're lost, right? We don't have any concept of why we're doing what we're doing, why we're fucking up like we are. But what I'm trying to say is, there is meaning to it. And again, it's that sort of other dimension of reality that we were talking about. That dimension is wiser than we are, and it has sent us on this passage, I believe, to teach us.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  And every passage to the wilderness, like the Odyssey, is a journey toward home. And home meaning who we really are. We're trying to find our authentic self, where we can say, "Ah, this is what I should be doing. That I can't do, that I can't do, but this is where I should be. This is the lane I should be in." And that's home, and it takes a while to find it.

• 58:46Tim Ferriss?

  You know, as I'm listening, it makes me think that the, not exactly, but pretty close to the last two years that I mentioned, which were fucking awful. I gotta be honest. Like, in the moment, I was just like, I'm lost. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Maybe I'm not supposed to do anything. Maybe this is it. Like, I'm generally feeling pretty depressive. What the fuck is this? I don't know how to find my way out of this. I don't know anyone who's been able to tell me how to get out of this. How did you get out of it? Was there an event? Was there a time? A moment? I think it was a decision to... Well, I don't want to take too much credit for it.

• 59:30Tim Ferriss?

  No, go ahead. Take credit. Being exposed to a bunch of absurdity and comedy and realizing how much meaning I was able to, enjoyment and joy and laughter I was able to take out of that, but also how much profundity can be hidden in the absurd. Was this a psychedelic experience? I mean, certainly I could describe some of my psychedelic experiences that way. It was also seeing what a number of friends were doing in the NFT space, which is just like on its face in every way, fucking ridiculous. It's so silly on so many levels. And yet, I saw people finding meaning. I saw people creating incredible artwork.

• 1:00:13Tim Ferriss?

  So that prompted me to begin to ask, and this was really at some of the darkest moments, to say, okay, I've tried to do everything very seriously. I've tried that. It doesn't seem to be really working for me. It's produced some amazing things. I'm very proud of those things, but like net-net, it's a hard slog. It's just like holding a heavy backpack over my head and walking through mud that's waist-deep all the time. Maybe I don't have to do it that way. Maybe I can walk around the swamp. Maybe there's a hangar that I can zip line that I can take across. I just decided that that's cheating and I have to do it the hard way. And that's when I started to think about what I could do that would simply, because one of my experiences,

• 1:00:59Tim Ferriss?

  and it's hard to say which way the arrow of causality points with this, but any type of depression or experience of melancholy is almost always accommodated with a feeling of fatigue. Lethargy. So the fight for me, the goal, the life raft that I'm looking for is energy. Like wherever I can get energy, if that's jumping rope for five minutes, if that's jumping into an ice cold bath, if it's waking up at a certain time, if it's drinking less coffee after 2:00 PM because I need to go to sleep, everything in my life begins to revolve around thinking

• 1:01:38Tim Ferriss?

  about energy. And what I found was, the more I engaged with absurdity and fiction, which could be visual, products of the imagination, let me put it that way, products of the imagination with no obvious practical application, the more energy I had. Ah, interesting. And I was like, okay, well, if that's what's presenting itself, let me keep focusing on that. And then, once I began to, and this might overlap in a way with your story about, what was his name again, your mentor? Hugh Reeves? Hugh. So this might overlap with Hugh in a way, because as soon as I then started

• 1:02:21Tim Ferriss?

  to engage other people to help me with creating, say, art, now I had people who were depending on me, or that I was depending on, now I had some accountability, now there were things on the calendar, there was some structure around this free-floating desire to use fiction to energize myself. But now I had a little some scaffolding. And I think that is, in large part, what pulled me out. It was that. And once I had enough energy, and this is a chicken or the egg kind of thing, but once I had just a basic modicum of energy from engaging with absurdity, and I don't use absurdity, I mentioned this word online recently,

• 1:03:06Tim Ferriss?

  because there was a Camus quote, which was something like, absurdity and happiness are brothers arm in arm, like you cannot have one without the other, something like that. I'm mangling the quote. But I saw a number of people reply to that, saying, what is wrong with happiness? Why do you need to make it negative with absurdity? And that, in and of itself, seemed absurd to me, because I was like, that's not what I'm saying. I don't think that's what he was saying. And in fact, you know, absurdity paradox, I more and more think is this Incredibly ingredient of the human condition. I know I'm talking a lot. I'll stop my TED Talk in a second. But the lift up that the absurdity gave me then provided enough energy

• 1:03:49Tim Ferriss?

  that I could begin exercising regularly. Now what happens? Now I have this flywheel of kind of exercise and absurdity that is charging my batteries. So I think if I had to explain it, and maybe I can't explain it. Maybe it just happened because one day I woke up and my neurochemistry was different because I had four nights of good sleep. Who knows? But that's how I would say I got out of it.

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  Pretty good.

• 1:04:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  Let me take a shot at absurdity for a second. And I'm just thinking this as we're talking. Anytime something is brand new, it seems absurd. Because like, I'm sure when Columbus said, "Let me sail west." Was it east? "Let me sail west to go to the East Indies."

• 1:04:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:30Speaker 03

  Everybody said, "That's absurd." Right? But it wasn't absurd, was it?

• 1:04:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  Or whatever you're working on in fiction now, because it's new, and I guess NFTs come into this too.

• 1:04:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  They seem absurd because they're not what we know. They're the unknown. But they're not absurd. They're just one step into the unknown. And I can say like, when I first had the idea for The Legend of Agar Vance or for Gates of Fire, both of them, I thought, "These are the dumbest ideas I've ever had in terms of who's going to be interested in this," you know?

• 1:05:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  So it did seem absurd, but it wasn't absurd. So absurd is a word that has negative connotations. There should be another word there, you know? But I think that's what Kamu must have meant.

• 1:05:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  Not knowing what the quote was.

• 1:05:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  But, yeah. So it's positive, I think. It just is new.

• 1:05:24Tim Ferriss?

  I take it it's very positive or at the very worst, neutral. And this makes me think of something that I highlighted from our last conversation, which is, this is the note that I have. Regarding how to start, SP, that's you, acknowledges that Tim will need to learn the principles of writing fiction. Nevertheless, he thinks Tim should just dive in with something he loves and follow it. And then this is a quote from you. "Say to yourself, when I show this to people, they're going to look at me and go, 'What happened to you, Tim? Are you okay?'" That's what I mean by big. And I've used that as a...

• 1:05:58Tim Ferriss?

  North Star of sorts. If it's too comfortable, if people aren't gonna look at me and go, "Are you okay?" Then I'm probably playing it too safe. Is kind of how I looked at it. And it's, I mean, so far, good lord, it is really, it's paying off so far. And I've said also to many people, because this thing is gonna launch, and when it does, what'll happen, will happen. But what I've said, and I've maybe for the first time really feel, that I can say with a straight face, is that I've already gotten all I need to get out of this. I don't care how it's received at all.

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  And I'm sure that's true.

• 1:06:36Tim Ferriss?

  Just by reactivating and embracing these deep elements of myself that I've forced to be dormant for so long. Oh, man, like, it's all icing on the cake from here.

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  Let me take a shot at your two years of, your bad two years.

• 1:06:52Tim Ferriss?

  Please, yeah, that was terrible.

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  Let's try this as an interpretation. This underground river that we were talking about of creativity that goes back from your comic book drawing days when you were a kid, has been flowing through you all along. It kind of built up to a head, maybe two years ago, or whenever the time was where you went into your period of the wilderness. And for whatever reason, you should have started it then. But probably because of fear, possibly just ignorance, blocking it out somehow. Instead, you came up with another thing. Let me go into, uh, how did you describe it? Not a fallow period, but a period of, uh, an offline period or something like that. So what happened was, you took that turn,

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  and meanwhile, that underground river was flowing through you in a negative way. Went into a negative channel because you weren't expressing it. And instead of giving you energy, it was draining your energy, right? And then you had a moment where you said, "Well, what the fuck, let me just fucking do this thing, right?" And you'd started to do it, and all of a sudden, the energy, the battery got plugged in, you know, got plugged into the wall, and you came out of it. And so, a passage through the wilderness, to me...

• 1:08:12Speaker 03

  Starts with a denial of some creative thing, or moral, or ethical, or expression of love. That usually, we deny it out of fear. Or because our conditioning tells us, "This is foolish, this is self-indulgent, this is..." whatever, right? "So I can't do that, I can't do that." "I can't sail across the Atlantic Ocean, thinking I'm gonna get to the East Indies, that's insanity." So we don't do it. But we pay the price. And that price is our time in the wilderness. Until finally, it gets so bad, that we have to say, "Where did I fall off the track?" Or somehow, we get back to that point,

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  and we finally do embrace the thing that we were afraid of. And then we're okay. And then we're out of it, I think. That's my theory.

• 1:09:06Tim Ferriss?

  I like the theory. And, I mean, it does make sense to me with so many things. If you suppress them and attempt to compartmentalize them, or block them, divert them, they squeeze out in... Or they can squeeze out the edges in very pathological ways.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  They come out in addiction, they come out in depression, and alienation, and all that sort of stuff. I think.

• 1:09:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I agree with you. In our last conversation, you mentioned Richard Rohr.

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:39Tim Ferriss?

  Franciscan monk, I was gonna say?

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Tim Ferriss?

  And I have here, so Richard believed the first half of your life is creating the vessel that is your life, and the second half is filling the vessel. Is that something that you still find resonates with you?

• 1:09:53Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Richard Rohr is a Franciscan or a Benedictine monk. I think he lives in Albuquerque, or somewhere like that. And he wrote a book called Falling Upward. This is what we were talking about.

• 1:10:06Tim Ferriss?

  This is the third or fourth time this book has come up in the last, probably, month for me. So I feel like I should probably take a look at it, yeah.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's short. And basically, his concept, like you just said, is that the first half of our life is about... Establishing our ego identity, right? I have a job, I have a wife and kids, I have a house, I'm a lawyer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like you're talking about, your friends that had reached the age of forty when you were on the hike, right? At that point, people start to think, well, okay, I built up this thing. What am I gonna do with it? You know, it's a vessel, according to Richard Rohr, and what am I now gonna fill that vessel with? And I think it's a fundamental shift. The second half of life now becomes usually more about giving to other people

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  or about really finding what our real creative center is and going for that. You know, now, I wrote a book called The Artist's Journey that I never had heard of Richard Rohr. I saw this as a completely same concept in a slightly different way. And what I said was that the first half of our life is our hero's journey, which is sort of like Odysseus, our time in the wilderness, whatever, that ends when we sort of find our calling. We say, okay, I'm a dancer, or, okay, I'm an environmental activist, or whatever. We say, I don't give a shit what happens to me. This is what I am, I'm gonna do it.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  And then the second half, I would say, rather than our hero's journey, is our artist's journey. And at that point, we actually start to produce the works that we've been running away from producing for all that time, right? You know, if you're Bruce Springsteen, you suddenly start doing, you know, album, album, album, album, album, right? And your life changes at that point. I think in an outer sense, it becomes much more boring because you're working on your shit, right? You're producing the work. If you're Twyla Tharp, you're going to your dance studio every morning and you're doing choreography, whatever it is that you're doing, right?

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  Or, you know, if you're Stephen King, you're writing books. So, I would agree with Richard Rohr that life is divided in half. The first half, you're sort of searching for your real authentic self. And once you find it and you become attached to your gift, the second half is how do I deliver that gift? And how do I train myself so that I'm capable of handling the voltage?

• 1:12:49Tim Ferriss?

  Actually, I want to underline that handling the voltage. So, please don't lose your place, but that's an interesting line.

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:12:55Tim Ferriss?

  Can you say more about that?

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  But also, before I say that.

• 1:12:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  You're also learning the craft, right? If your calling is to produce the fastest land-driven vehicle in the world, motorcycle, car, whatever it is, now you've got to learn that skill. You probably already have it, but you've got to learn it so you know how the car won't disintegrate on Lake Bonneville, you know, at 600 miles an hour. But back to handling the voltage. It's like when you're now sitting down to write and you're tapping into that, whatever that creative flow is of the eight different worlds and all that sort of stuff. That's voltage coming from another dimension of reality, right? Or coming from inside your soul, or wherever it's coming from.

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  And that voltage can overwhelm us if we're not kind of ready to do it. I know I have a friend, I'm sure we all have friends, that are deeply into meditation. And they say that you really have to be physically fit in addition to be spiritually and psychologically fit once you get into the deeper levels of meditation, because whatever energy is coming down, I don't know this myself, I take this second hand, is coming in you, it can be too much, you can't handle it. It's like psychedelics, right? It'll blow your mind, right? You have to have some sort of a capacity to endure that.

• 1:14:23Tim Ferriss?

  Cultivate that capacity.

• 1:14:25Speaker 03

  So, we do have to sort of learn in the second half of our lives, I think, to handle that voltage.

• 1:14:31Tim Ferriss?

  What did it feel like to you to write a memoir? Because you mentioned some of your hesitation around whether or not it would be interesting to other people, but it was interesting to me, interesting to Rich Roll, interesting also, it goes without saying, to millions of people who heard those conversations, and then to your significant other. What was it like then to sit down? And write a memoir, whether at the beginning or in the middle.

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  It was really challenging in the sense that the resistance that you feel, I think, to writing a memoir. The voice in your head says, "Who's gonna give a fuck about your stupid stories?" You know? Everybody in the world's got a million of these things. Why is yours gonna be any different? So, that was a big part of it. The other half was, the flip side of that was, before I die, I wanna put some of this shit down. It shouldn't just go away. Even if it's only, you know, my family, you know, my nephews and nieces that they should be able to read this. But then above and beyond that, and this is, I know, sort of where we've been trending into this conversation about the hardcore, physical reality of the stuff, was, like, how do I tell this fucking story?

• 1:15:43Speaker 03

  You know? What do I leave out? What do I leave in? What's the point of view? What's my tone of voice? Who is I in this story if I'm telling it in the first person? So that was sort of a big challenge. And again, I sort of did what we were talking about before, or what I was talking about, about Blitzkrieg of, "It would have overwhelmed me if I didn't just do it." So, I just did it. And when it was done, I'd left out a lot of chunks and a lot of this, I thought, "I wish I had a real editor," which I didn't at this point, and I just sort of had to make the decision of, "I'm gonna edit it myself. This is it. This is what it's gonna be, for good or ill."

• 1:16:26Tim Ferriss?

  So, Government Cheese, what's the title about?

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  One of the articles that we delivered in this trucking company was surplus food to poor communities on the coast in North Carolina. This was, because I was the most junior driver, this company, this was like the lowest-paying job and the load that people wanted the least. So, I got it all the time. I mean, I made, like, to make these runs was like, I would make fifteen dollars, something like that. But I... Really loved these runs. You would drive all night and arrive really early, before dawn. It was always to a church. You were always distributed at a church and it was always a black church with a black congregation.

• 1:17:13Speaker 03

  And a lot of the recipients were sharecroppers and stuff like that. But they also were, sometimes you'd have guys come in with hot mustangs, you know, with the great-looking young girls, that kind of stuff. And what you were delivering, the government cheese and the, you know, the dried powdered milk and pinto beans and stuff like that, was stuff that was going on people's tables, was gonna keep them alive. So you really felt like you were doing something good. I just really enjoyed these things. I can't tell you how much fun they were. And the other aspect is you were anonymous in these things. When you would pull into the lot, I never had anybody, you would talk to the minister.

• 1:17:56Speaker 03

  The minister would tell you, "Pull your vehicle over here, dah dah dah dah dah." And they would always address you as "driver." Say, "Driver, would you mind pulling this over here?" Never ask your name, I don't know why. And your role was sort of really to recede into the background. You didn't participate. You opened the doors and they took the food off the way they wanted to. So when all was said and done, this kind of goes back to the story I was telling about Hugh Reeves. I feel like writing is about delivering a load. It's sustenance. You hope it's sustenance, right? It's a load of surplus food, of government cheese, that's gonna go on people's tables. And the other aspect about that is you are a vehicle for it.

• 1:18:39Speaker 03

  I didn't grow the cheese. All I did was deliver it. And when I'm done, the trailer's empty, I close it up. And I go away and, you know, do it again somewhere else. It's a metaphor for writing for me, in other words. That's what it was. That's what government cheese means.

• 1:18:55Tim Ferriss?

  What else would you like people to know about this memoir? Is there anything else that you would like to say about it? Your stories are incredible. Your writing is incredible. The cover quotes you have are spectacular, from a lot of people I respect. What else would you like to say about government cheese, if anything?

• 1:19:16Speaker 03

  There is one other thing I would like to say. Like I say, it's a writer's odyssey. It goes from somebody that, at the start, can't do it, and at the end of it, can do it. And sort of one of the big takeaways, from my story at least, is that there are a series of breakthroughs along the way, you know, emotional or... But almost always, they never pay off in the moment. It's like you have a breakthrough and nothing happens. It's like 10 years later, it pays off, right? So that if anybody is listening to us today, Tim, and thinking, you know, trying to get any sustenance out of that, one of the big lessons is, it takes a long time.

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  You know, it's a real process. Like you're working on your Eight Houses thing. It may be a few years before you really get a handle on this thing, you know?

• 1:20:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:20:11Speaker 03

  It would be amazing if you came right out of the chute and it worked, you know? And so, it seems to me that the way these breakthroughs work is they need to mature, that they take time. You think, "Oh, I finished a book." And then, for me, I couldn't sell that book. And I couldn't sell the next book. You know, and it was like years and years before I could. But there is a process, and there is significance, and change is happening.

• 1:20:39Tim Ferriss?

  Steven Pressfield, what a story you have. What a life you've had too, and what a life you will have.

• 1:20:44Speaker 03

  What a life you have. I mean, and so is everybody that's listening to us.

• 1:20:48Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. And before we wind this second conversation to a close, is there anything else that you would like to add? Anything else you'd like to point people to? Of course, you have many books. The newest book is your memoir, Government Cheese, which is about all those years before the first publication, which in a way... I don't want to say it's the most important, but to me it's certainly one of the most interesting untold stories, because it sets the foundation. It talks about the breakthroughs that took a long time to germinate. It explains all of the development in the form of these stories and these mentors, leading up to you becoming the Steven Pressfield

• 1:21:33Tim Ferriss?

  that people recognize today. Is there anything else that you would like to add? Any other closing comments or things you'd like to point people to? Of course, you've got the Instagram video series, "In the Wilderness." You've got the website, Steven Pressfield, again, folks, with a V. And then people can find you on Twitter, @SPressfield, and on other social that we'll link to in the show notes. But anything else that you'd like to add? Or make any requests of my audience, anything at all?

• 1:22:00Speaker 03

  I would just say to you, Tim, for your story that you're working on now, for whatever this is, that to trust in that greater wisdom, whatever that is, some goddess somewhere knows what she's doing. You know?

• 1:22:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I like that.

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  You may not know what you're doing.

• 1:22:20Tim Ferriss?

  Take some of the weight off my shoulders.

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  But I think it's great that you're trusting, trusting in it, you know? Even though it's absurd, even though it may totally fall on its face, which I'm sure it won't. So that's what I would say to you, and really to anybody that's listening to us, that it always seems absurd at the start, just like Christopher Columbus going the wrong way to the Indies, you know? But I think that's our real life. All this other stuff is, you know, it's okay. But that's our, that's our real life, I think. And belief is a big thing. You were talking, we started out, the first thing was like, do we, do you have any sort of beliefs that go contrary to dark reality or depression? And I think the belief in this greater wisdom,

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  this other dimension of reality, that's the key thing. And it's so hard to do. And again, you sort of just have to deny, this doesn't count. I don't believe those voices. These voices, I don't, I dismiss them too. I'm just gonna stay in this lane and just keep going. So that's what I say to you, Tim, and to everybody that's listening to us, and to myself, same thing.

• 1:23:31Tim Ferriss?

  Steven, so nice to actually spend some time in person.

• 1:23:33Speaker 03

  Tim, it's been great.

• 1:23:34Tim Ferriss?

  So lovely. And to everybody listening and watching, we'll link to everything, including the new book, Government Cheese by Mr. Steven Pressfield. And we'll also link to any resources, any gods, any myths that we may have mentioned at tim.blog/podcast as per usual. And until next time, just be a little bit kinder than is necessary to yourself as well. Believe in that greater wisdom. Pick a lane that matters to you. And thanks for tuning in.

• 1:24:10Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you so much for listening, everybody. Thank you also to Steve for coming on the show. Some of the fiction writing discussed in our interview is now live on a brand new podcast called Cock Punch. As it sounds, that is how it's spelled, believe it or not. It launched last week with a short and very bizarre, let's call it movie trailer. And the podcast debuted at number one in the fiction category on Apple Podcasts. It's now been in the top 100 for all podcasts on Apple Podcasts in the US and other countries all week. This is the first new podcast I've launched in many years. The episodes are very short, roughly five minutes each, so please check them out. You can find them anywhere, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to your fine podcasts. And this entire thing is intended to add some laughter and levity to a world dominated

• 1:24:55Tim Ferriss?

  by doom scrolling and pessimism. So if you like fantasy, if you're looking for a little humor and you want to see me take a stab at fiction, check it out. Cockpunch.com/podcast. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums.

• 1:25:40Tim Ferriss?

  Perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. I've been asked this for years.

• 1:26:24Tim Ferriss?

  The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. I view it as all in one nutritional insurance. So you can cover your bases. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. I've recommended it since the Four Hour Body, which was, God, eons ago, 2010, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'll be hard pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multimineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and immunity formula, digestive enzymes and adaptogens. You get the idea. It is very, very comprehensive.

• 1:27:06Tim Ferriss?

  And I do my best, of course, to focus on nutrient dense, proper meals. But sometimes you're busy, sometimes you're traveling, sometimes you just want to make sure that you're getting what you need. AG1 makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. It's also NSF certified for sport, making it safe for competitive athletes as what's on the label is in the powder. It's the ultimate all in one nutritional supplement bundle in one easy scoop. Right now Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all in one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I've found that true for myself.

• 1:27:50Tim Ferriss?

  Which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep, and I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat has always been my nemesis.

• 1:28:32Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:29:14Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:29:56Tim Ferriss?

  And good news: Eight Sleep has launched the next generation of the Pod. Pod 3 enables more accurate sleep and health tracking with twice the number of sensors. It's just a smoother, better experience that delivers you the best sleep on earth. At least that has been true for me. Simply add this to your existing mattress and you're all set. It is not magic, but sometimes it does feel like it. It just works. For a limited time, Eight Sleep is offering my listeners, that's you guys, up to $450 off of their Sleep Fit Holiday Bundle, which includes my personal favorite, the Pod 3 cover. Go to eightsleep.com/tim to get the exclusive holiday savings. That's all spelled out, E-I-G-H-T. Eightsleep.com/tim.

• 1:30:41Tim Ferriss?

  Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. That's eightsleep.com/tim.