Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Stephen Pressfield,
00:00:03 author of several powerful nonfiction
00:00:06 and historical fiction books, including The War of Art,
00:00:10 a book that had a big impact on my life
00:00:12 and the life of millions of people
00:00:15 whose passion is to create in art, science, business,
00:00:20 sport, and everywhere else.
00:00:22 I highly recommend it and others of his books on this topic,
00:00:26 including Turning Pro, Do the Work,
00:00:30 Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, and The Warrior Ethos.
00:00:35 Also, his books Gets a Fire about the Spartans
00:00:38 and the Battle of Thermopylae, The Lionsgate, Tides of War,
00:00:42 and others are some of the best
00:00:44 historical fiction novels ever written.
00:00:48 As some of you know, I don’t shy away
00:00:50 from taking on a big, difficult challenge.
00:00:53 One of the hardest for me and for millions of others
00:00:56 is the discipline of staring at an empty page every day,
00:01:01 pushing on to think deeply, to create,
00:01:04 despite the millions of excuses that fill the head.
00:01:08 In his work, Stephen has articulated this struggle
00:01:11 better than anyone I’ve ever read.
00:01:15 Quick summary of the ads.
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00:01:40 This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
00:01:43 I recently considered renaming this podcast
00:01:46 but decided against it.
00:01:48 AI is my passion, and in some sense,
00:01:51 this podcast is not as much about AI
00:01:53 but more about a journey of an AI researcher
00:01:56 struggling to explore the human mind,
00:01:58 the physics of our universe,
00:02:00 and the nature of human behavior,
00:02:02 intelligence, consciousness, love, and power.
00:02:07 I will continue to return home to the technical,
00:02:09 computer science, machine learning,
00:02:11 engineering, math, programming,
00:02:12 but also venture out to talk to people
00:02:15 who had a big impact on my life
00:02:17 outside the technical fields.
00:02:19 Writers like Steven Pressfield and Stephen King,
00:02:24 musicians like Tom Waits,
00:02:26 political leaders like, well, you know who,
00:02:31 and even athletes.
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00:03:00 I’ve been binging on this podcast.
00:03:02 Jordan is a great human being.
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00:03:07 dives deep, calls them out when it’s needed,
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00:03:12 He’s interviewed Kobe Bryant, Mark Cuban,
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00:03:24 This topic can be both fascinating and frustrating
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00:03:33 and so it turned out to be a great listen.
00:03:35 I highly recommend it.
00:03:37 Again, go to jordanharbinger.com slash Lex.
00:03:40 It’s how he knows I sent you.
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00:04:51 and STEM education for young people around the world.
00:04:55 And now, here’s my conversation with Steven Pressfield.
00:05:00 Modern society in many ways dreams
00:05:03 of creating universal peace,
00:05:06 and yet war has molded civilization
00:05:08 as we know it throughout its history.
00:05:10 So let’s start at the high philosophical level.
00:05:16 If you could imagine a world without war,
00:05:18 how would that world be different?
00:05:20 Perhaps put another way, what purpose has war served?
00:05:25 Why do we fight?
00:05:27 I think we’re basically the same creatures internally
00:05:31 that we were in the cave, right?
00:05:34 In tribal society, back for however many,
00:05:39 you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of years,
00:05:41 which means that we’re in the dynamic in our mind
00:05:46 is a kind of an us versus them dynamic
00:05:48 where our tribe is the people,
00:05:52 and everybody else are whatever, you know?
00:05:54 And I don’t see that,
00:05:57 I don’t think that’s changed one iota over the centuries.
00:06:01 It’s just a question of how one might sublimate
00:06:06 that urge to compete.
00:06:10 When you’re a martial artist, you know,
00:06:12 a great part of your day I’m sure is dedicated
00:06:14 to reaching that place of total commitment
00:06:21 and in the face of competition,
00:06:23 in the face of adversity, et cetera, et cetera,
00:06:25 which is, I think, natural and great for the human race
00:06:28 on an individual basis.
00:06:30 So the hope that I have, if there is any hope,
00:06:35 personally, I don’t think the human race
00:06:37 is gonna be around very long,
00:06:38 but would be in sports
00:06:43 or in other kind of sublimated activities
00:06:47 where people can act out their need for conquest
00:06:51 or aggression or so forth,
00:06:53 but at the same time relate to their opponents
00:06:56 as human beings, and when the game is over,
00:06:58 you know, you embrace your competitors, stuff like that.
00:07:01 So you think war was inevitable, it’s a part of human nature
00:07:06 as opposed to a force, a creative force in society
00:07:11 that served a benefit.
00:07:14 Well, I’m sure it has benefited, you know,
00:07:17 spreading cultures and mixing cultures and stuff like that,
00:07:21 but I think the urge to conquest,
00:07:26 if you think about Alexander the Great
00:07:28 or Julius Caesar or Napoleon or anybody like that,
00:07:30 or even individual, or if we even think about
00:07:33 one of the plants that we’re looking at right outside,
00:07:36 I mean, if you let a particular plant have its way,
00:07:39 it would take over, you know, the whole hillside.
00:07:41 And certainly in the days of Alexander the Great, let’s say,
00:07:47 there were, who knows, over the face of the earth,
00:07:50 hundreds of little kingdoms, China, Japan,
00:07:54 you know, Asia, Europe, wherever,
00:07:56 and every prince that grew up dreamt of conquering
00:08:01 his neighbor and conquering a neighbor after that.
00:08:04 That seems to be a universal human imperative,
00:08:11 at least in the male of the species.
00:08:14 So…
00:08:14 The war is just a realization of that imperative.
00:08:16 I think so.
00:08:18 So you’ve written about Spartans in the Battle of Thermopylae,
00:08:22 you’ve about Alexander the Great,
00:08:23 about the Six Day War in 67 in Israel,
00:08:28 against Egypt, Jordan, Syria.
00:08:30 What war, not just out of those, but in general,
00:08:35 do you think has been most transformative for the world?
00:08:38 Well, these are great questions, Lex.
00:08:40 Tough, easy ones, right?
00:08:42 I mean, I wish I knew more about the Mongols,
00:08:47 because I certainly, from what little I know,
00:08:49 I think that was a very,
00:08:51 their conquests were very transformative,
00:08:54 bringing cultures in a horrible, bloody way together.
00:09:00 But gosh, what’s then the most transformative?
00:09:05 Maybe the Roman conquest,
00:09:07 establishing the Roman Empire and bringing that culture.
00:09:10 Maybe Alexander the Great’s wars
00:09:13 that united east and west, at least for a minute.
00:09:19 So building of empire.
00:09:20 Do you have a sense, so there’s wars,
00:09:23 I mean, the Six Day War is not about building empires.
00:09:30 It’s about deeply held religious, cultural conflict
00:09:39 and holding the line, holding the border.
00:09:42 And then there is conquests, like the Mongols,
00:09:45 that, what is it, some large percentage of the population
00:09:48 is a descendant of Genghis Khan, I believe, right?
00:09:52 So that has transformative effects.
00:09:54 And then World War II, I mean, personally,
00:09:56 and my family and so on, had transformative effects.
00:09:59 Let me ask you this, Lex.
00:10:01 Why are you, what are you trying to get at
00:10:03 with these questions?
00:10:04 What is this kind of the theme that you’re aiming at?
00:10:09 Well, I talked to Eric Weinstein,
00:10:11 and he said everything is great about war
00:10:13 except the killing.
00:10:15 And there’s a romantic notion of war.
00:10:21 Certainly there’s a romantic notion of being a warrior,
00:10:23 but there’s a romantic notion of war
00:10:26 that somehow there’s a creative force to it,
00:10:32 that because we fight, out of that fighting comes culture,
00:10:37 comes music and art, and more and more desire to create
00:10:42 with the societies that win.
00:10:45 And to me, war is not just, hey, I have a stick
00:10:51 and I want your land.
00:10:53 It’s some kind of, like it has echoes of the creative force
00:11:02 that makes humans unique to other animals.
00:11:05 Like, war is, it can’t be just four people
00:11:09 or 10 people or 100 people.
00:11:11 You have to have thousands of people agreeing,
00:11:14 usually thousands or more, for something so deeply
00:11:20 that you would be willing to risk your own life.
00:11:22 And there’s a romantic notion to that.
00:11:24 And because you’ve written so well and passionate
00:11:27 about some of these, I wanted to see,
00:11:29 because I don’t have any answers,
00:11:31 I wanted to untangle that.
00:11:32 If there is a reason we fight that’s more than just anger
00:11:37 and hate and a way to conquer.
00:11:43 Well, let me take it from a completely different side.
00:11:47 I don’t think that I, in writing about war,
00:11:51 am really that interested in war per se.
00:11:55 I’m more interested in the metaphor.
00:11:58 I think for me, I’m really writing about my own internal
00:12:02 war and the war against myself and against my own resistance,
00:12:10 my own negativity, all of those things
00:12:13 that spirituality would be the opposite of.
00:12:20 So I’m not really an expert on war.
00:12:23 It’s not like talking to Jim Mattis
00:12:25 or to Victor Davis Hanson or whatever. To me, the human being,
00:12:37 we are spiritual beings in a physical envelope.
00:12:43 And there’s an automatic terrible tension within that.
00:12:48 And which creates a war inside ourselves.
00:12:53 So the outer war, when I think about the Israeli army
00:12:58 standing up to, whatever, 10 to one odds
00:13:02 or whatever it was, that is a metaphor to me
00:13:07 of the fight we’re fighting inside ourselves.
00:13:10 For me, the six day war was, as you know,
00:13:12 my feeling was it was about a return from exile.
00:13:15 It was sort of the culmination of the reestablishment
00:13:19 of the state of Israel, which had never really
00:13:22 been completed because the holiest places
00:13:24 of the Jewish people were in the hands of their enemies.
00:13:27 So now, on the other hand, Alexander the Great’s conquests,
00:13:31 I think, were a whole other different scenario
00:13:34 where the metaphor was that Alexander’s father, Philip,
00:13:39 I think created the First Nation, capital N Nation,
00:13:43 and he created a sort of a pathway for these guys
00:13:48 who were mountain men and basically barbarians,
00:13:54 Macedonians, and by creating this army
00:13:59 and this dream of conquering the world,
00:14:03 which Alexander took to the, you know, really enacted,
00:14:07 he gave them a way of rising out of themselves,
00:14:10 of transcending themselves, not just individually,
00:14:12 but as a people.
00:14:14 So that would go along with what you’re saying, Lex,
00:14:16 of a certain creativity to it.
00:14:20 But again, that’s not, for whatever,
00:14:24 and I’m just realizing this as I’m answering this,
00:14:27 that’s not really what’s interesting to me
00:14:29 about these stories.
00:14:31 And the Spartans, what was a whole, at Thermopylae,
00:14:34 that was a whole other kind of metaphor of war.
00:14:37 That was a sort of a willingly going to one’s own death
00:14:42 for a greater cause, just like, to me,
00:14:46 the Spartans at Thermopylae enacted as a group
00:14:49 what Jesus Christ enacted as an individual,
00:14:52 a sacrifice of their lives for the greater good.
00:14:57 I don’t know if that answers your question,
00:14:58 but that’s how I see it.
00:15:01 I do feel like, you know, I get invited to speak
00:15:04 to Marine Corps groups and things like that all the time,
00:15:07 and I decline because I don’t really feel
00:15:10 like I’m a spokesman for the warrior class
00:15:15 or anything like that.
00:15:18 That’s not what’s interesting about it to me.
00:15:24 But didn’t you just say, with war as a metaphor,
00:15:28 that we’re all essentially, in various ways, warriors?
00:15:33 If we think of it in terms of Jungian archetypes,
00:15:36 and think of our life at least as males,
00:15:40 and the earliest archetypes that kick in
00:15:44 are the youth and the wanderer and the student
00:15:46 and that kind of thing, and then at some point
00:15:48 around age 15 to 20, whatever,
00:15:52 the warrior archetype kicks in,
00:15:54 and we want to play football, we want to do martial arts,
00:15:56 we want to join the special forces,
00:15:58 we want to hang out with our buddies,
00:16:00 that’s our great bond, we want to test ourselves
00:16:03 against adversity and so on and so forth.
00:16:05 But at some point, that archetype,
00:16:07 we move beyond that archetype,
00:16:09 and we become fathers and teachers and so on and so forth.
00:16:14 And then there are many archetypes beyond that
00:16:17 towards the end.
00:16:18 So I’m interested in the warrior archetype,
00:16:23 but not to the be all and end all of everything else.
00:16:30 In my book, The Virtues of War, have you read that?
00:16:34 Well, there’s a character named Telamon,
00:16:37 who’s actually, it’s a long story,
00:16:39 but when he’s with Alexander’s army,
00:16:44 and when they arrive in India,
00:16:46 he becomes fascinated by the gymnosophists,
00:16:51 the fakirs, the naked wise men, the yogis.
00:16:55 And he says to Alexander that these guys
00:17:00 are warriors beyond what we are, even though they do nothing
00:17:06 because they are inside their own selves all day long.
00:17:11 If we go to the Six Day War,
00:17:17 you write about, in Lionsgate,
00:17:19 you write about the Six Day War in Israel.
00:17:22 I think of the wars you’ve written about
00:17:24 as the one we’re still in many ways in the midst of today.
00:17:28 Yes.
00:17:29 So what is at the core of that conflict in Israel?
00:17:35 The Israeli Palestinian conflict?
00:17:37 I mean, today it’s the Israeli Palestinian conflict,
00:17:40 but it echoes of the same conflict
00:17:44 in that part of the world with Israel.
00:17:47 What is, in your sense, the nature of that conflict?
00:17:53 What can we learn about society
00:17:55 and human nature from that conflict?
00:17:57 That is one of the hottest conflicts
00:17:59 that still goes on today.
00:18:01 Well, when I was working on the Lionsgate
00:18:04 about the Six Day War, I wrote in the introduction
00:18:10 that this was not gonna be a multi sided story.
00:18:14 I was taking it entirely, I’m a Jew,
00:18:17 I identify with the Israeli people,
00:18:20 I was gonna see it entirely from their side.
00:18:23 So that’s probably not what you’re asking,
00:18:27 but to me, the Six Day War and that whole,
00:18:34 it’s a piece of land that’s holy
00:18:35 to at least three religions and probably more.
00:18:39 And from the Jewish point of view,
00:18:43 it’s where the state of Israel,
00:18:46 it’s where David founded Jerusalem,
00:18:47 it’s all where the 12 tribes were, et cetera, et cetera,
00:18:50 where Moses came and brought the people.
00:18:52 So to me, the Six Day War was about,
00:18:58 as I said, a return from exile,
00:19:00 from diaspora after 2000 years.
00:19:03 Now, obviously, from the Palestinian point of view
00:19:06 or the Saudi Arabian point of view or whatever,
00:19:09 it’s a whole other scenario.
00:19:12 Religion is at the core of this conflict in some ways,
00:19:14 but religious beliefs.
00:19:15 Religion and racial slash ethnic tribal identity.
00:19:20 I mean, again, what is a Jew?
00:19:23 Is a Jew somebody that believes in the religion
00:19:26 or is it somebody of a certain race
00:19:28 that race arose in a certain place?
00:19:31 Same thing as a Muslim.
00:19:32 What is a Muslim?
00:19:33 Do they believe in Muhammad or whatever?
00:19:37 Or did they arise in a certain place and a certain ethnicity?
00:19:40 Because if we landed from Mars,
00:19:43 we couldn’t tell a Jew from a Palestinian, could we?
00:19:46 Just looking at them,
00:19:47 you could easily mix them and you’d never know.
00:19:50 And the specifics of the faith
00:19:52 is not necessarily the thing that defines a person.
00:19:54 No, I don’t think so.
00:19:56 So you could be, like many are,
00:19:58 secular Jew living in Israel
00:20:01 and still have a strong bond.
00:20:04 Definitely, definitely.
00:20:05 In fact, almost all of the Jews,
00:20:08 the fighters that I spoke to from the Six Day War
00:20:12 were secular and it really was not
00:20:15 a religious thing with them
00:20:19 as much as it was a national thing.
00:20:22 So having spent time in Israel,
00:20:27 how’s the world where military conflict is directly felt
00:20:30 as opposed to maybe if we look at the US
00:20:33 where it’s distant and far away?
00:20:35 How is that world different?
00:20:36 How are the people different?
00:20:37 It’s very different, as you know.
00:20:40 I’ve never been to Israel, actually.
00:20:41 Oh, you haven’t? I haven’t felt it.
00:20:43 Ah, well, you should definitely go.
00:20:46 I mean, here in the United States,
00:20:51 where when an incident like Charlottesville comes up,
00:20:56 where people are chanting,
00:20:56 Jews will not replace us, blah, blah, blah,
00:20:59 the impulse in the Jewish community is to think of,
00:21:02 well, how can we reach out to the other side?
00:21:05 How can we show them that we are human beings like they are
00:21:10 and show them that we care for them, et cetera, et cetera?
00:21:13 That’s the sort of distant from war.
00:21:16 From, if you’re in Israel,
00:21:20 like if you and I were Israeli citizens right now,
00:21:23 you would be a fighter pilot or a tank commander or whatever.
00:21:27 You would not just be working at MIT or whatever.
00:21:30 And I would be in the army too.
00:21:33 And so from their point of view,
00:21:35 they say all those people who hate us,
00:21:38 can I curse on this?
00:21:39 Of course.
00:21:40 Can I curse on this thing?
00:21:41 Fuck them, we’ll kill them.
00:21:43 We’ll kill them.
00:21:44 If they dared to cross the line,
00:21:46 and that’s their whole different point of view.
00:21:50 To me, it’s actually a healthier point of view.
00:21:52 You think so?
00:21:53 Yeah.
00:21:53 So there’s no, so let me ask the hard question is,
00:21:57 well, maybe it’s an impossible question is,
00:21:59 how do we resolve that conflict?
00:22:02 In Israel and?
00:22:04 In Israel or?
00:22:05 Anywhere?
00:22:06 Anywhere where the instinct is to reach out in US
00:22:09 and say, F you and the people, yeah.
00:22:13 Here’s my, I think that the only way that two warring sides
00:22:19 or two sides that are opposed to one another
00:22:21 can ever really come together
00:22:22 is when there’s mutual respect,
00:22:24 we’ll get just more water.
00:22:26 I got it, I got this.
00:22:27 When there’s mutual respect
00:22:31 and they can see each other as equals
00:22:33 and when there’s mutual fear, you know,
00:22:36 where one side says, we don’t dare cross the line
00:22:40 with this other side,
00:22:41 and the other side says the same thing.
00:22:43 I think then you can kind of reach across that thing
00:22:45 and say, okay, we’ll stay here, you stay here.
00:22:48 We’ll mingle in cultural ways
00:22:51 and we’ll have interchange, you know, winter marriage,
00:22:54 da, da, da, da, da, da.
00:22:56 But as soon as one side has no power,
00:22:58 as the Jewish people have had no power
00:23:01 throughout the diaspora forever, right?
00:23:04 Then it’s just a human nature.
00:23:07 You can see it in Trump
00:23:09 and what he does to any vulnerable minority, right?
00:23:15 And he’s not alone.
00:23:16 I’m not blaming him alone.
00:23:18 That’s human nature.
00:23:19 So I do think that that idea of like, fuck you,
00:23:22 if you cross the line, we’ll kill you,
00:23:24 is really a good way, is a good place to start from.
00:23:28 Because now you can sit down on opposite sides of the table
00:23:30 and say, you know, what do we have in common?
00:23:33 How can we, we want to raise our children.
00:23:35 You want to raise your children.
00:23:36 How can we do this in a way that we’re not hurting each other?
00:23:42 So you kind of said that you need to arrive at a balance,
00:23:45 some kind of balance of power.
00:23:46 Yeah.
00:23:47 But you haven’t spoken to the fact
00:23:49 that there’s deeply rooted hatred of the other.
00:23:54 So is there no way to alleviate that hatred?
00:23:57 Or is that, I mean, what role does love and hate come?
00:24:03 I think that hatred can go away.
00:24:04 I really do.
00:24:04 I mean, if you look at even now
00:24:07 that I haven’t seen this in person,
00:24:09 but they say that the Saudis and the Israelis
00:24:12 are collaborating in certain things, you know,
00:24:15 by their mutual fear of or antagonism to Iran.
00:24:19 I do think that even really long, long, longstanding
00:24:24 hatreds and animosities, thousands of years old,
00:24:27 can go away under the right circumstances.
00:24:30 In a, on what time scale?
00:24:34 I mean, for instance, I don’t know if there’s some,
00:24:37 do people have to die?
00:24:39 Do generations have to die and pass away
00:24:41 and new generations come up with less hate?
00:24:44 Or can a single individual learn to not hate?
00:24:47 I think a single individual can learn to not hate
00:24:49 because it certainly doesn’t seem to,
00:24:50 over thousands of years, doesn’t seem to work.
00:24:52 You know, we keep thinking that that’s gonna happen.
00:24:55 But I think it’s, we’re in a real spiritual realm here
00:25:00 when you’re talking about that.
00:25:02 You’re in a realm of, you know, Buddha, Jesus, whatever,
00:25:05 something like that, that where, you know,
00:25:10 a true change of soul happens.
00:25:13 But I do think that’s possible.
00:25:16 So what do you think is the future of warfare?
00:25:20 Especially with what many people see as the expansion
00:25:25 of the military industrial conflict.
00:25:27 To what, do you, I know you’re not a military historian.
00:25:32 I’m asking more as a metaphor.
00:25:36 And do you see us as people continuing to fight?
00:25:41 You know, it’s a really great question, Alex,
00:25:43 because I think now with social media, TV, movies,
00:25:48 all of these things that create empathy across cultures,
00:25:55 it becomes harder and harder, I think, I think,
00:25:58 to totally demonize the other,
00:26:02 the way it was in previous wars.
00:26:05 I also think, I don’t really see an appetite
00:26:08 for people wanting to go to war these days.
00:26:12 And in a way, I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
00:26:15 It’s like everybody’s so fat and lazy
00:26:17 and so concerned with how many clicks they’re getting
00:26:20 that, you know, whereas I know at the start of World War I,
00:26:26 both the younger generations were eager to go to war.
00:26:30 You know, I think it was insane,
00:26:34 but it was that sort of warrior archetype
00:26:36 that we were talking about before that,
00:26:38 that generational testosterone eros thing.
00:26:43 Whereas nowadays, I don’t know.
00:26:48 I mean, it’s hard to say there’s not gonna be another war
00:26:52 because there always are,
00:26:53 but it’s sort of hard to imagine people
00:26:55 getting off their ass these days to do anything.
00:26:59 Well, it’s funny that you mentioned social media
00:27:01 as a place for empathy, sure.
00:27:03 But in a sense, it’s a place for war as well.
00:27:08 For hatred, yeah, true.
00:27:08 For hatred.
00:27:09 And perhaps the positive aspect of hatred on social media
00:27:16 is that it’s somewhat less harmful than murder.
00:27:22 And so it kind of dissipates sort of the hatefuls.
00:27:27 You get the hate out at a less,
00:27:35 on a daily basis and thereby never boils up
00:27:37 to a point where you want to kill.
00:27:39 It’s also a really weird thing that’s going on
00:27:42 that I don’t know if anybody really understands,
00:27:43 like with video games where kids are acting out
00:27:47 these incredible horror things, right?
00:27:49 But you know that if they cut their finger,
00:27:52 they would like freak out, you know?
00:27:55 And I also don’t think that many of the people
00:27:58 that are hateful on social media,
00:28:02 if they were face to face with the person, they wouldn’t.
00:28:05 So there’s a sort of two mental spheres
00:28:11 happening at the same time.
00:28:13 And I don’t know how that plays out.
00:28:15 Maps to the actual military,
00:28:17 how that actually maps to military conflict.
00:28:19 Yeah, yeah.
00:28:21 Like if you in the United States have a draft, for example,
00:28:25 how the populace would respond different than they did
00:28:28 in previous generations.
00:28:29 Yeah, I think they certainly would.
00:28:30 Yeah.
00:28:31 Another question, not sure if you’ve thought about it,
00:28:34 but I work on building artificial intelligence systems.
00:28:38 In our community, many people are worried
00:28:39 about AI being used in war.
00:28:41 So automating the killing process with drones
00:28:46 and in general, it’s being used more and more.
00:28:49 I should recuse myself on that one.
00:28:50 I really haven’t thought about that one.
00:28:51 You haven’t thought about it.
00:28:52 I’d rather ask you what you think about it.
00:28:55 Well, it’s interesting, I mean,
00:28:56 because it’s so fundamentally different
00:28:57 from if you look at the Battle of Thermopylae.
00:29:02 It means just if we talk about the difference between a gun
00:29:05 and a sword.
00:29:07 I’ll tell you one little anecdote.
00:29:09 There was a Spartan king, I don’t know which one it was,
00:29:13 but at one point they showed him a new invention
00:29:16 and it could launch a bolt that would kill someone
00:29:20 at a range of 200 yards.
00:29:22 And the king wept and said, alas, valor is no more.
00:29:27 Because their point of view of war,
00:29:30 it was highly ritualized, as you know,
00:29:32 and the code of honor was that you were not supposed
00:29:37 to be able to kill another person
00:29:39 unless you yourself were in equal danger of being killed.
00:29:43 And any other way of doing that,
00:29:44 even bow and arrow was considered less than manly
00:29:50 and less than honorable.
00:29:51 And maybe we should go back to that
00:29:53 because at least it makes the stakes real and true.
00:29:56 Not that we could.
00:30:02 Not that’s the point.
00:30:04 You were in the Marine Corps,
00:30:06 so we talk about the real, the bloody conflicts
00:30:13 that you’ve written about, many of them.
00:30:16 So let me ask a personal question.
00:30:21 Have you, sort of as a writing and in general,
00:30:24 have you thought about what it takes to kill a person
00:30:30 if you yourself could do it in the war?
00:30:33 I have thought about it, yeah.
00:30:34 And how that would make you feel?
00:30:37 Of course, one never knows.
00:30:39 I certainly, I have not been in combat.
00:30:41 I haven’t killed anybody.
00:30:43 But I would imagine in the real world
00:30:47 that it would change you utterly forever.
00:30:51 Because you can’t help but identify
00:30:58 with the person that you’ve just killed.
00:31:01 And it’s another human being.
00:31:02 And I mean, I have a hard time killing a spider.
00:31:07 So I would imagine that it’s something
00:31:09 that warriors understand and nobody else understands.
00:31:15 And you’ve spoken with many.
00:31:16 How, I mean, you’ve spoken with people
00:31:19 who’ve seen military combat in Israel.
00:31:23 What, have they been able to articulate
00:31:26 the experience of killing?
00:31:28 It’s sort of just what I said.
00:31:31 I mean, I’m even thinking of one pilot
00:31:34 that I interviewed over there
00:31:37 who was strafing a tank in his Mustang
00:31:45 and saw, at really low altitude,
00:31:48 and saw what his bullets did to the guy
00:31:50 and could see his face and everything like that,
00:31:52 which is even one remove or more removes
00:31:56 from an infantryman, what an infantryman does.
00:31:59 And he said that same thing that I said,
00:32:02 that it just changes you and you can never say it,
00:32:04 never look at the world or look at anything
00:32:07 the same way again.
00:32:08 And when that happens at scale,
00:32:10 it’s thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds.
00:32:13 That changes entire societies.
00:32:14 I mean, that’s what we’ve seen.
00:32:16 At least it, but the problem is
00:32:18 it doesn’t change the politicians back home.
00:32:20 Right.
00:32:22 How important is mortality, finiteness,
00:32:28 the fact that this thing ends to the creative process?
00:32:32 So, killing and war really emphasizes that,
00:32:37 but in general, the fact that this thing ends.
00:32:42 It does?
00:32:43 It does, and uh.
00:32:46 Shit.
00:32:49 And on a serious note,
00:32:51 do you think about your own mortality?
00:32:53 Do you meditate on your own mortality
00:32:55 when you think about the work you do?
00:32:57 That’s another great question, Lex.
00:32:59 I actually, I’m 75, and I just was having,
00:33:03 I had breakfast in New York a few months ago
00:33:05 with a friend of mine who’s like my exact same age.
00:33:08 And I said to him, I said,
00:33:10 Nick, do you ever think about mortality?
00:33:12 And he said, every fucking minute of every day.
00:33:16 And I was kind of relieved to hear that because I do too.
00:33:22 But actually, I always have, I think.
00:33:24 And I think, you know, the fact of mortality
00:33:31 gives meaning to life, you know?
00:33:32 I think that’s why we want to create.
00:33:36 That’s why we want to make a mark of some kind.
00:33:39 Or, and the other aspect of it is
00:33:43 what’s on the other side of that mortality?
00:33:46 I’m a believer in previous lives.
00:33:49 So I sort of, and I,
00:33:52 the question I’ve never been able to answer
00:33:54 among many, many others is like, why are we even here?
00:33:58 Why are we in the flesh?
00:34:01 You know, I sort of, I like to believe that God
00:34:04 or some force is, we’re on some kind of journey, but I’m not sure why,
00:34:13 why we were put in this world where the ground rules are,
00:34:17 if you think about animal life,
00:34:19 that you cannot live from one day to the next
00:34:22 without killing and eating some other form of life.
00:34:26 I mean, what a demented thing, you know?
00:34:29 Why couldn’t we just have a solar panel on our head
00:34:33 and, you know, be friends with everybody?
00:34:35 So I sort of, I don’t get what that was all about,
00:34:40 but that’s sort of the big issue.
00:34:42 Have you read to Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, for example?
00:34:46 Is Ernest Becker’s a philosopher that said that the death,
00:34:52 that the fear of death is really the primary driver
00:34:57 of everything we do.
00:34:58 So Freud had what the?
00:35:00 Right, I would agree with that.
00:35:02 So to you, you’ve always thought about your,
00:35:04 even your own mortality.
00:35:06 Yes, definitely.
00:35:07 And can you elaborate on the reincarnation aspect
00:35:13 of what you were talking about?
00:35:14 Like that we kind of, what’s your sense
00:35:17 that we had previous lives?
00:35:20 In what, have you thought concretely
00:35:22 or is it a lot of it kind of is?
00:35:24 No, I’ve thought concretely about it.
00:35:27 I mean, it’s very clear when you see children,
00:35:32 young kids, or even dogs and cats,
00:35:36 that they come into the world with personalities, you know,
00:35:40 and three kids in a family are gonna be completely different
00:35:43 and completely their own person.
00:35:45 And that person that they are doesn’t change over life.
00:35:50 And I, you know, there’s one of the things that I did in my book
00:35:58 The Artist’s Journey is that there were certain things
00:36:00 where I tracked or just listed in order,
00:36:02 like all of Bruce Springsteen’s albums
00:36:05 or all of Philip Roth’s books, you know,
00:36:07 kind of a body of work throughout over, you know,
00:36:10 a period of 30, 40, 50 years, you know.
00:36:13 And you can see that there’s a theme running through all
00:36:18 of those things, that it’s completely unique to that person.
00:36:22 Nobody else could have written Philip Roth’s books
00:36:25 or Bruce Springsteen’s songs.
00:36:28 And you can even see sort of a destiny there.
00:36:31 So I ask myself, well, where did that come from?
00:36:36 What, it seems to be a continuation of something that was,
00:36:41 that happened before, and that will lead to something else
00:36:44 because it’s not starting from scratch.
00:36:47 It seems like there’s a calling, a destiny in there already.
00:36:53 This gets back to the muse and all that kind of thing.
00:36:56 So yeah, it’s almost like the, there’s this,
00:36:59 let’s call it a God, it’s passing,
00:37:03 it’s almost like sampling parts of a previous human
00:37:07 that has lived and putting those into the new one.
00:37:11 Sampling is probably a pretty good word.
00:37:14 Taking some of the good, well, you can’t take
00:37:15 all the good parts because the bad parts
00:37:17 is what makes the person.
00:37:19 Let’s say you’re taking it all together.
00:37:21 Okay, this is humans only, or does it pass around
00:37:24 from animals in your view?
00:37:26 I don’t know, that’s above my pay grade, I don’t know.
00:37:29 So, okay, so you talk about the muse
00:37:33 as the source of ideas maybe.
00:37:39 Since you’ve gotten a few glimpses of her in your writing,
00:37:44 tell me, what is it possible for you to tell me about her?
00:37:51 Where does she reside?
00:37:53 What does she look like?
00:37:54 I mean, you can look at it many different ways, right?
00:37:57 The Greeks did it in an anthropomorphic way, right?
00:38:00 They created gods that were like human beings.
00:38:03 But if you look at it from a Kabbalistic Jewish perspective,
00:38:07 Jewish mysticism, you could say
00:38:09 that it’s the soul, the neshama, right?
00:38:11 That the soul is above us on a higher plane,
00:38:14 our own, your soul, my soul,
00:38:16 and is trying to reach down to us and communicate with us.
00:38:21 And we’re trying simultaneously to reach up to it
00:38:24 through prayer or through, if you’re a writer or an artist,
00:38:28 you know, when you sit down at the keyboard,
00:38:31 you’re entering into a kind of prayer.
00:38:33 You’re entering into a different state
00:38:35 of an altered consciousness to some extent.
00:38:39 You’re opening yourself, opening the pipeline,
00:38:41 or turning on the radio to tune into
00:38:44 the cosmic radio station.
00:38:46 And another way of looking at it, this is an,
00:38:49 did you ever see the movie City of Angels?
00:38:53 The visual of the movie, it was Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage.
00:38:59 Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen it, yep.
00:39:01 And right, the visual of the movie sort of was
00:39:05 Meg Ryan is a heart surgeon.
00:39:08 And as she’s operating on somebody,
00:39:11 suddenly Nicolas Cage in this long duster coat,
00:39:14 like Jesse James, appears right next to her
00:39:17 in the operating room, and he’s an angel.
00:39:19 And he’s waiting to take out the soul
00:39:23 of the patient on the operating table.
00:39:27 And she doesn’t see him, she’s totally unaware of him.
00:39:29 And so is everybody else in the operating room,
00:39:31 except maybe the guy who’s about to die,
00:39:33 who suddenly sees him.
00:39:35 But I kind of believe that there are beings like that,
00:39:42 or if you don’t like that, it’s a force,
00:39:44 it’s a consciousness, it’s something
00:39:46 that are right here, right now.
00:39:49 And they’re trying to communicate to us.
00:39:54 And like through a membrane,
00:39:57 like tapping on that window over there,
00:39:59 they’re like right out there.
00:40:00 And they carry the future.
00:40:03 They are everything that is in potential.
00:40:08 All the works that you will do, Lex,
00:40:11 your startup, whatever else you’re doing,
00:40:14 they know that.
00:40:17 And it’s not really you
00:40:19 that’s coming up with those ideas, in my opinion.
00:40:22 Those things are appearing,
00:40:24 it’s like somebody knocks on the door and puts it in.
00:40:28 I mean, in the Iliad, where gods and goddesses appear,
00:40:33 along with the human antagonists
00:40:35 on the battlefield all the time, right?
00:40:37 There’ll be, you know, Homer flashes to Olympus
00:40:40 and then back to the real world.
00:40:42 And there’s a thing where one Aphrodite,
00:40:45 let’s say wants to help Paris.
00:40:47 And so she says, well, I will appear to him in a dream.
00:40:52 And I’ll take the form of his brother
00:40:55 and I’ll say, bump, bump, bump, bump.
00:40:57 So that’s creatures, beings on one dimension,
00:41:03 as the Greeks saw it, communicating with,
00:41:06 and I believe that that’s exactly what’s going on,
00:41:09 in one, whatever analogy you want to use.
00:41:12 That communication, to which degree
00:41:17 do you play the role in that communication?
00:41:20 As opposed to sitting at the computer,
00:41:23 if you’re a writer, and staring at the blank page
00:41:27 and putting in the time and waiting.
00:41:30 So if, in your view, are these creatures
00:41:39 basically waiting to tell you about your future?
00:41:42 Or is there choice?
00:41:44 How many possible futures are there?
00:41:46 How many possible ideas are there?
00:41:48 That’s a great question.
00:41:49 I think there’s basically, yes, there are alternatives,
00:41:54 you know, degrees within it.
00:41:56 But if you look at Bruce Springsteen’s albums,
00:42:01 how much could he have done really differently?
00:42:05 Yeah, he would, you can just see
00:42:08 there’s a whole impetus going through the whole thing.
00:42:11 And nothing was going to shake him off that, you know?
00:42:14 And yeah, maybe the river could have been different,
00:42:16 could have been called something else,
00:42:18 but he was dealing with certain issues.
00:42:23 His conscious self was dealing with certain issues
00:42:26 that were really out of his control.
00:42:28 He was drawn, he was called to it, right?
00:42:30 Nothing could stop him.
00:42:32 And so it is sort of a partnership, I think,
00:42:37 the creative process, between the creative impulse
00:42:41 that’s coming from some other place,
00:42:45 or it’s coming from deep within us
00:42:47 is another way to look at it.
00:42:48 You know, it’s like if we are acorns
00:42:50 and we’re growing into oaks.
00:42:53 So the conscious artist,
00:42:58 who’s sitting there at the keyboard or whatever,
00:43:01 is applying his or her consciousness to that,
00:43:04 but is also going into opening themselves
00:43:08 to the unconscious or to this other realm,
00:43:11 whatever that is.
00:43:13 I mean, certainly songwriters for a million years
00:43:16 have said, you know, a song just came into their head,
00:43:18 right?
00:43:19 A poem, just all they had to do was write.
00:43:21 But then, you ever see that thing where,
00:43:23 of Keats’s notes for a thing of beauty is a joy forever?
00:43:28 It’s like covers an entire page,
00:43:29 and it’s like, you know, he’s crossing this out
00:43:32 and that out, and he has to go.
00:43:33 His consciousness is, his conscious mind is working on it.
00:43:36 But, so I do think it’s a partnership.
00:43:39 And I think that, I know when I was first starting out
00:43:42 as a writer, I worked in advertising,
00:43:45 and I tried to do novels that I could never do.
00:43:49 I was like, really unskilled at getting to that,
00:43:54 tuning into that station.
00:43:56 I just, I beat my brains out and was unable to do it,
00:44:01 you know, except in,
00:44:03 because I was sort of trying too hard,
00:44:05 it was sort of like a Zen monk or a monk of some kind
00:44:08 trying to meditate and just like constantly thoughts
00:44:12 driving you crazy.
00:44:14 But over time, you know, knock wood,
00:44:16 I’ve kind of gotten better at it.
00:44:19 And I can sort of let go of those,
00:44:22 that part of me that’s trying so hard.
00:44:25 And so these angels can speak a little more easily
00:44:31 through the membrane.
00:44:32 Can you put into words the process of letting go
00:44:36 and clearing that channel of communication?
00:44:40 What does it take?
00:44:41 That’s another great question.
00:44:42 For me, it just took, it took probably 30 years.
00:44:46 And I don’t even, I guess I would liken it to meditation,
00:44:49 even though I’m not a meditator.
00:44:52 But it would seem to me to be one of the hardest things
00:44:54 in the world to just sit still and stop thinking, right?
00:45:00 And so it’s very hard to put into words.
00:45:03 And I think that’s why these teachers of meditation
00:45:06 use tricks and koans and stuff like that.
00:45:10 But for me, at least, I think it was just a process
00:45:15 of years of years and years of trying,
00:45:17 and finally beating my head in the wall.
00:45:20 And finally, little by little giving up
00:45:22 the beating of the head.
00:45:26 But there doesn’t seem to be any trick.
00:45:28 Everybody wants a hack these days.
00:45:30 And I don’t think there is a hack.
00:45:34 If you look at it in terms of the goddess, the muse,
00:45:37 she’s watching you down there,
00:45:39 beating your head in the wall.
00:45:40 You’re like a Marine going through an obstacle course,
00:45:43 or a martial artist trying to learn,
00:45:46 like Uma Thurman doing the casket deal,
00:45:49 trying to make that little four inch punch, you know?
00:45:54 The muse or the goddess is just sort of watching,
00:45:56 going, it’s Lex, he’s trying, he’s trying.
00:45:59 I’m gonna come back in another couple of months
00:46:01 and see if he’s still there.
00:46:03 And finally, she’ll say, all right, he’s had it,
00:46:06 he’s paid his dues, I’m gonna give it to him.
00:46:09 So, the hard work and the suffering, yeah.
00:46:13 But I’m also, being Russian, in wrestling and martial arts,
00:46:18 we’re big into drilling technique.
00:46:21 I was also just even getting at,
00:46:24 certainly there’s no shortcut.
00:46:26 But is there a process?
00:46:28 So you’re, that can be, the process of practice.
00:46:33 So you had two.
00:46:35 One, you had an example of meditation.
00:46:39 So it’s essentially the practice of meditation.
00:46:41 Is you sitting here?
00:46:42 I think a lot of drill, I think,
00:46:44 is a good way to look at it too.
00:46:45 But what are you drilling?
00:46:48 You’re just sitting and?
00:46:50 You’re writing, you know?
00:46:51 Just writing.
00:46:52 You’re writing, then you’re looking at what you wrote,
00:46:55 you know?
00:46:56 You’re hitting moments when it flows, you know?
00:47:00 And then your other hitting moments
00:47:02 where you just can’t do anything.
00:47:03 And you’re trying to, from the moments where it flowed,
00:47:07 you’re trying to come back and look at it and say,
00:47:08 what did I do?
00:47:09 How did that happen?
00:47:11 Where was my mind, you know?
00:47:13 But I think it’s just a process of over and over
00:47:16 and over and over until finally it gets a little bit easier.
00:47:22 And did you always, when you read something you write,
00:47:26 did you always have a pretty good radar
00:47:28 for what’s good and not after it’s written?
00:47:33 No.
00:47:33 I think I do now.
00:47:37 But no, it was always really hard
00:47:42 for me to know what was good.
00:47:45 I mean, do you edit, the process of editing
00:47:49 is the process of looking at what you’ve written
00:47:52 and improving it.
00:47:54 Are you a better writer or an editor?
00:47:56 How often do you edit?
00:47:57 That’s another great question.
00:47:59 Great question.
00:48:00 Cause I do think that in writing,
00:48:01 the real process of looking at it
00:48:03 is the process that an editor does
00:48:05 rather than what a writer does.
00:48:08 The gentleman I was just talking to on the phone
00:48:10 is my editor, Sean Coyne,
00:48:12 who was the guy who bought Gates of Fire
00:48:14 when he was an editor at Doubleday.
00:48:16 And who basically when I finish a book, I give it to him.
00:48:21 And he gives me, you know,
00:48:23 editing doesn’t really mean like crossing out commas.
00:48:29 It really means looking at the overall work
00:48:34 and saying, does it work?
00:48:36 And if it doesn’t work, why doesn’t it work?
00:48:39 Is there something wrong here?
00:48:41 You know, like if you were building the Golden Gate Bridge,
00:48:44 you know, and one span was out of whack, you know,
00:48:46 you could, and I think a really skilled editor,
00:48:50 which Sean is, understands what makes a story tick.
00:48:54 And he also has the perspective that I’ve lost
00:48:58 in something I’ve wrote, cause I’m so close to it,
00:49:01 to say, you know, this isn’t working and that is working.
00:49:06 What kind of advice has he given you?
00:49:07 Is it like layout?
00:49:09 Like this story doesn’t flow correctly.
00:49:12 Like you shouldn’t start at this point.
00:49:15 Or does he even sit back at a higher level and say,
00:49:18 I see what you’re doing, but you could do better.
00:49:22 No, he doesn’t do that.
00:49:24 But a lot of it is about genre
00:49:28 and kind of the defining what genre you’re working in.
00:49:32 And I’m gonna get up here to just bring something over here
00:49:37 for the camera.
00:49:39 This was one where Sean tore this down
00:49:42 and made me start from scratch.
00:49:44 And what the specifics of it were really,
00:49:47 this is a supernatural thriller.
00:49:50 That’s the genre.
00:49:51 Sort of like Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist.
00:49:55 And what he showed me was that I had violated
00:50:00 certain conventions of the genre.
00:50:05 And you just can’t do that.
00:50:08 It’s gotta be, it has to be done the right way.
00:50:12 And so he pointed out certain things to me.
00:50:18 So he must be a prolific reader himself too, actually.
00:50:22 That’s such a tough job of editor.
00:50:26 Yeah.
00:50:26 Again, he was sort of born to do that.
00:50:28 He just kind of glommed onto it.
00:50:31 But since he was his first job publishing
00:50:36 cat thrillers, cat detective books,
00:50:43 he studied how it works, what makes a story work,
00:50:46 et cetera, et cetera.
00:50:47 And so he really, he’s great.
00:50:48 And I think any really successful writer,
00:50:52 unless they’re utterly brilliant on their own,
00:50:55 has gotta have a great editor behind them.
00:50:57 But you yourself edit as well.
00:51:00 I’m constantly trying to learn from him and teach myself.
00:51:03 Everything you see in my blog posts
00:51:07 that it’s about the craft of writing
00:51:09 is me trying to teach myself the rules
00:51:12 so that, I’m sure it’s the same in martial arts
00:51:15 or anything else, right?
00:51:16 You try to not be dependent on that other person
00:51:21 because it’s so painful to make those mistakes.
00:51:24 You really feel like, ah, I wish I could get it right
00:51:27 the first time the next time I do it.
00:51:29 Well, in research, we go through that.
00:51:30 In research more than writing,
00:51:33 so what you do is a little more solitary.
00:51:35 In research, there’s usually two, three, four people
00:51:38 working on something together and we write a paper.
00:51:41 And there’s that painful process of where you write it down
00:51:44 and then you share it with other.
00:51:46 And not only do they criticize the writing,
00:51:49 they criticize the fundamental aspects
00:51:53 of the approach you’ve taken.
00:51:54 I would think so.
00:51:55 So it’s exactly like they would say you’re attacking,
00:51:58 you’re asking the wrong questions, right?
00:52:01 And that’s extremely painful, especially when you,
00:52:03 well, yes, painful and helpful,
00:52:06 but there’s disagreement and so on.
00:52:09 And through that comes out a better product.
00:52:12 And if you want to still have an ego,
00:52:15 but you also want to silence it every once in a while,
00:52:17 so there’s a balance.
00:52:19 In your book, The War of Art,
00:52:21 you talk about resistance, what the capital R,
00:52:24 as the invisible force in this universe of ours
00:52:27 that finds a way to prevent you from starting
00:52:32 or doing the work.
00:52:36 Where do you think resistance comes from?
00:52:39 Why is there a force in our mind
00:52:40 that’s constantly trying to jeopardize our efforts
00:52:44 with laziness, excuses, and so on?
00:52:46 That’s another great question.
00:52:48 I mean, in Jewish mysticism, in Kabbalistic thinking,
00:52:53 it’s called the yetzer hurrah, right?
00:52:55 And it’s a force that if this up here is your soul
00:52:59 of Neshama trying to talk to you, us down here,
00:53:03 the yetzer hurrah is this negative force in the middle.
00:53:06 So I’m not the only one that ever thought about this.
00:53:08 But, and I don’t know if anybody really knows the answer,
00:53:11 but here’s my answer.
00:53:13 I think that there are two places
00:53:18 where we as human beings can see our identity.
00:53:21 One is the ego, the conscious ego,
00:53:24 and the other is the greater self.
00:53:27 And the self in the Jungian sense,
00:53:30 the self in the Jungian sense includes the unconscious
00:53:33 and butts up against what Jung called the divine ground,
00:53:37 which what I would call the muse, the goddess, or whatever.
00:53:40 And I think, and the ego is just this little dot
00:53:43 inside this bigger self.
00:53:45 And the ego has a completely different view of life
00:53:52 from the self.
00:53:53 The ego believes, I’m gonna give you a long answer here.
00:53:56 No, perfect.
00:53:57 The ego believes that death is real.
00:54:01 The ego believes that time and space are real.
00:54:05 The ego believes that each one of us
00:54:07 is separate from the other.
00:54:09 I’m separate from you.
00:54:11 If I could punch you in the face and it wouldn’t hurt me,
00:54:14 it would only hurt you.
00:54:16 And in the ego’s world, the dominant emotion is fear
00:54:21 because we were all made of flesh.
00:54:23 We can all die.
00:54:24 We can all be hurt.
00:54:25 We can all be ruined.
00:54:26 So we are protecting ourselves
00:54:28 and even our desire to create,
00:54:30 as we were talking about before,
00:54:32 comes out of that fear of death.
00:54:35 The self, on the other hand,
00:54:37 the greater self that butts up against the divine ground
00:54:40 believes that death is not real,
00:54:42 that time and space are not real,
00:54:44 that the gods travel swift as thought.
00:54:48 And the ego also believes that,
00:54:51 I mean, the self believes that there’s no difference
00:54:53 between you and me, that we’re all one.
00:54:55 If I hurt you, I hurt myself, karma, right?
00:55:00 And in the world of the self, of the greater self,
00:55:03 the dominant emotion is love, not fear.
00:55:07 Now, so I think that, I’ll go farther back here,
00:55:11 a long way to answer your question.
00:55:14 When Jesus died on the cross,
00:55:17 or when the 300 Spartans willingly sacrificed their lives
00:55:22 at Thermopylae, they were acting
00:55:25 according to the rules of the self.
00:55:28 Death is not real.
00:55:30 No difference between you and me.
00:55:32 Time and space are not real.
00:55:33 Predominant emotion is love.
00:55:36 So, in my opinion,
00:55:39 we as conscious human vessels
00:55:44 are in a struggle between these two things,
00:55:46 the ego and the self.
00:55:48 To me, resistance is the voice of the ego saying,
00:55:53 and it’s a fearful voice,
00:55:55 because if, when we identify with the self,
00:56:00 we move our consciousness over to the self
00:56:03 as artists or scientists opening ourselves up
00:56:06 to the cosmic dimension, to the other forces,
00:56:10 the ego is tremendously threatened by that.
00:56:13 Because if we’re in that space, that head space,
00:56:18 we don’t need the ego anymore.
00:56:20 So I think resistance is a voice of the ego
00:56:23 trying to keep control of us.
00:56:27 In a way, I’ll give you a bad example, Trump is the ego.
00:56:31 That’s probably a very good example, right?
00:56:33 Yeah.
00:56:35 It’s a zero sum world for him,
00:56:38 and for anybody that’s in that.
00:56:41 And the opposite of that would be somebody
00:56:43 like Martin Luther King or Gandhi.
00:56:46 Gandhi, yep.
00:56:47 And that’s, of course, why they all wind up
00:56:49 getting assassinated.
00:56:51 Because that voice, that ego, is hanging on to itself
00:56:55 and feels so threatened by,
00:57:00 I could talk more about this if you want to.
00:57:01 No, for sure, that’s fascinating.
00:57:04 It’s just, it’s interesting why the fear is attached
00:57:07 to the ego.
00:57:08 I really like this dichotomy of ego and self
00:57:12 and that struggle.
00:57:14 It’s just, ego has a, the self obsession of it.
00:57:20 Why fear is such a predominant thing?
00:57:25 Why is resistance trying to undermine everything?
00:57:29 It’s fear, it’s out of fear.
00:57:32 Let’s think about the whole thing in terms of stories.
00:57:34 In a story, the villain is always resistance,
00:57:41 is always the ego.
00:57:42 The hero is always, of course, always is not everything,
00:57:46 but you know what I mean?
00:57:47 Pretty much represents kind of the self.
00:57:50 If you think about the alien on the spaceship,
00:57:53 that’s like the ultimate kind of villain.
00:57:55 It keeps changing form, right?
00:57:57 First it goes on the guy’s face,
00:57:58 then it pops out of his chest,
00:58:00 but it always just has that one monomaniacal thing
00:58:05 to destroy, you know?
00:58:07 And just like the ego, just like resistance.
00:58:12 And maybe alien is a bad example
00:58:15 because Sigourney Weaver has to sort of fight
00:58:18 on the same terms as the alien,
00:58:20 but maybe a better example might be
00:58:23 something like Casablanca,
00:58:24 where in the end, the Humphrey Bogart character
00:58:28 has to, acting, operating out of the self,
00:58:32 has to give up his selfish dream
00:58:37 of going off with Ingrid Bergman,
00:58:39 Neil Salon, the love of his life,
00:58:41 and instead, you know, puts her on the plane to Lisbon
00:58:46 while he goes off to fight the Nazis in the desert.
00:58:50 I don’t know if that’s clear,
00:58:51 but in almost every story,
00:58:54 the villain is the ego, is resistance, is fear,
00:58:59 is that zero sum thing.
00:59:01 And in almost every story,
00:59:03 the hero is someone that is willing to make a sacrifice
00:59:09 to help others.
00:59:11 It’s letting go of that fear
00:59:13 is what leads to productivity and to success.
00:59:15 Yeah.
00:59:18 Do you think there’s a,
00:59:20 this is probably the answer is either obvious or impossible,
00:59:25 but do you think there’s an evolutionary advantage
00:59:28 to resistance?
00:59:31 Like, what would life look like without resistance?
00:59:36 That’s another great question.
00:59:38 I think, I also believe that resistance, like death,
00:59:43 gives meaning to life.
00:59:44 If we didn’t have it, it’s gonna be, you know,
00:59:48 what would we be?
00:59:49 We’d be in the Garden of Eden,
00:59:51 picking fruit and just happy and stupid, you know?
00:59:56 And I do think that that myth of the Garden of Eden
00:59:58 is really about this kind of thing, you know,
01:00:00 where Adam and Eve decide to sort of take matters
01:00:04 into their own hands and acquire knowledge
01:00:10 that until then, God had said,
01:00:12 I’m the only one that’s got that knowledge.
01:00:14 And of course, once they have acquired that knowledge,
01:00:17 they’re cast out into the world you and I live in now,
01:00:21 where they do have to deal with that fear
01:00:23 and they do have to deal with all that stuff.
01:00:26 The human condition.
01:00:27 The human condition and the meaning and the purpose comes
01:00:31 from the resistance being there
01:00:36 and the struggle to overcome it.
01:00:38 To overcome it, right.
01:00:39 And also the other aspect of it is that
01:00:43 it’s not real at all.
01:00:45 It’s not even like it’s an actual force.
01:00:48 It’s all here, right?
01:00:50 So the sort of,
01:00:55 in a way, it’s sort of a surrender to it, you know?
01:01:00 You know, or it’s just a sort of like turning on the light
01:01:05 in a dark thing.
01:01:06 It’s like, oh, it’s gone.
01:01:09 But not quite because it’s never really.
01:01:11 Because it comes back again tomorrow morning.
01:01:13 Exactly.
01:01:14 So you have to keep changing light bulbs every day.
01:01:17 So what’s been, maybe recently, but in general,
01:01:20 maybe in your life, what’s been the most relentless
01:01:24 or one of the more relentless sources of resistance
01:01:26 to you personally?
01:01:28 I mean, it’s always the same.
01:01:30 It’s about writing for me
01:01:33 and evolving within my own body of work, you know?
01:01:38 It never goes away, it never gets any less.
01:01:43 Do you have particular excuses,
01:01:45 particular justifications that come out?
01:01:49 No, it’s always the same.
01:01:51 Well, I would say it’s always the same,
01:01:53 but it’s really not because resistance is so protean,
01:01:56 you know, it keeps changing form.
01:01:58 And as you move to hopefully a higher level,
01:02:02 resistance gets a little more nuanced
01:02:04 and a little more subtle trying to fake you out.
01:02:07 But I think you learn that it’s always there
01:02:11 and you’re always gonna have to face it, so.
01:02:14 I mean, your battle is sitting down
01:02:18 and writing to some number of words to a blank page.
01:02:23 Do you have a process there with this battle?
01:02:28 Do you have a number of hours that you put in?
01:02:31 Do you sit down?
01:02:32 Yeah, I’m definitely a believer
01:02:34 that even though this battle is fought
01:02:37 on the highest sort of spiritual level,
01:02:40 that the way you fight it is on the most mundane,
01:02:44 I’m sure it’s like martial arts, must be the same way.
01:02:46 I mean, I go to the gym first thing in the morning
01:02:49 and I sort of am rehearsing myself.
01:02:54 The gym is called resistance training, right?
01:02:57 You’re working against resistance, right?
01:02:59 And I don’t wanna go, I don’t wanna get out of bed,
01:03:01 I hate that, but I’m sort of fortifying myself
01:03:06 to be ready for the day.
01:03:09 And like I said, over Knockwood, over years,
01:03:13 I’ve learned to sort of get into the right kind of mindset
01:03:17 and it’s not as hard for me as it used to be.
01:03:20 The real resistance, I think, for me,
01:03:22 and I think this is true for anybody,
01:03:23 is the question of sort of what’s the next idea?
01:03:27 What’s the next book?
01:03:29 What’s the next project that you’re gonna work on?
01:03:31 And when I ask that question, I’m asking it of the muse.
01:03:35 I’m kind of saying, what do you want me,
01:03:38 or I’m asking it of my unconscious.
01:03:40 If we’re looking at Bruce Springsteen’s albums,
01:03:43 it’s kind of, well, what’s the next album?
01:03:45 Now he’s on Broadway.
01:03:46 That was a great idea, right?
01:03:49 Where’d that come from, you know?
01:03:51 But, and then for him, what’s after that, you know?
01:03:55 Because that body of work is already alive.
01:04:03 It already exists inside us,
01:04:07 kind of like a woman’s biological clock,
01:04:10 and we have to serve it.
01:04:12 And we have to, otherwise it’ll give us cancer, you know?
01:04:17 I don’t mean to say that if anybody has cancer
01:04:19 that they’re not, you know what I mean?
01:04:21 It’ll take its revenge on us.
01:04:24 So the next resistance to me is sort of,
01:04:27 or a big aspect of it is, what’s next?
01:04:30 You know, when I finish the book I’m working on now,
01:04:31 I’m not sure what I’m gonna do next.
01:04:33 And I see at the same time you have a kind of,
01:04:37 you have a sense that there’s a Bruce Springsteen
01:04:42 single line of albums.
01:04:45 So like, it’s already known somewhere in the universe
01:04:49 what you’re going to do next, is the sense you have.
01:04:51 In a sense, yes.
01:04:53 I don’t know if it’s predetermined, you know?
01:04:55 But there’s something like that.
01:05:00 Yeah, I’d like to believe that there’s,
01:05:03 well, it’s kind of like quantum mechanics, I guess.
01:05:06 Once you observe it, maybe once you talk to the muse,
01:05:11 it’s one thing for sure.
01:05:13 It was always going to be that one thing.
01:05:15 But really, in reality, it’s a distribution.
01:05:19 It could be any number of things.
01:05:20 Yeah, I think so.
01:05:21 There’s alternate realities.
01:05:22 Alternate realities, yeah.
01:05:24 But they’re not that far apart.
01:05:25 I mean, Bruce Springsteen is not gonna write
01:05:28 a Joni Mitchell song, you know?
01:05:30 No matter how hard he tries.
01:05:31 But he still went on Broadway.
01:05:32 I mean, he still did that,
01:05:33 which is not a Bruce Springsteen thing to do.
01:05:36 So I think you’re being, in retrospect,
01:05:39 it all makes sense. I think it is
01:05:40 a Bruce Springsteen thing to do.
01:05:41 It’s a next sort of evolution for him.
01:05:43 Why not take his music to there, you know?
01:05:46 In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense, I think.
01:05:50 Yeah.
01:05:51 If you pull it off, especially.
01:05:54 Do you visualize yourself completing the work?
01:05:57 Like, Olympic athletes visualize getting the gold medal.
01:06:02 Do you, you know, they go through,
01:06:06 I mean, that’s actually a really,
01:06:08 you can learn something from athletes on that,
01:06:09 is years out,
01:06:13 certainly two, three years out,
01:06:15 some people do much longer,
01:06:16 every day, you visualize how the day
01:06:19 of the championship will go down to,
01:06:24 I mean, everything, down to how will it feel
01:06:25 to stand on the podium and so on.
01:06:27 Do you do anything like that
01:06:29 in how you approach writing?
01:06:31 No.
01:06:32 Because it’s. It’s always in the moment.
01:06:33 Because, yeah, it is in the moment, I think.
01:06:35 Because it’s such a mystery.
01:06:36 You just don’t know.
01:06:37 I think it’s different from sports.
01:06:39 Right.
01:06:40 Because you don’t know the destiny.
01:06:41 There’s no gold medal at the end.
01:06:43 No.
01:06:44 In fact, I would like to think that
01:06:48 as soon as you finish one,
01:06:51 the next day you’re on the other.
01:06:53 And in fact, hopefully you’ve already started the other.
01:06:56 You’re already, you know, 100 pages into the other
01:07:00 when you finish the first one.
01:07:03 But it is a, it is a,
01:07:08 it’s a journey, it’s a process.
01:07:10 I don’t think it is a,
01:07:11 in fact, I think it’s very dangerous to think that way.
01:07:14 To think, oh, this, I’m gonna win the Oscar, you know?
01:07:20 It’s interesting.
01:07:21 For the creative process, it might be dangerous.
01:07:24 It’s a, maybe you can, like, why is that dangerous?
01:07:29 Because I kind of know where you’re coming from.
01:07:30 Because it’s the ego.
01:07:32 It’s the ego.
01:07:33 Because you’re giving yourself over to the ego.
01:07:34 You know, I keep saying this myself.
01:07:38 My job, I’m a servant of the muse.
01:07:41 I’m there to do what she tells me to do.
01:07:44 And if I suddenly think, oh, I’m really,
01:07:48 I just wanna, you know, whatever,
01:07:50 the muse doesn’t like that.
01:07:51 And, you know, and she’s on another dimension from me.
01:07:58 I’m trying to square that, because I agree.
01:08:01 I’m trying to square that with the,
01:08:04 I think there’s a meditation to visualizing success
01:08:07 in the athletic realm, to where it focuses,
01:08:12 it removes everything else away,
01:08:15 to where you focus on this particular battle.
01:08:18 I mean, I think that you can do that in many kinds of ways.
01:08:23 And in sports, the ego serves a more important role,
01:08:29 I think, than it does in writing.
01:08:31 And the ego, there’s something.
01:08:33 Well, let me, when you say that,
01:08:35 I know what you mean, Lex, and I do think there is
01:08:39 a sort of a, you know, it’s interesting to watch interviews
01:08:43 with Steph Curry, who’s such, obviously such a nice guy,
01:08:49 but he’s got such tremendous self confidence,
01:08:54 you know, that it, but it doesn’t border on ego so much
01:08:58 because he’s worked so hard for it, you know?
01:09:01 But he knows, so he has visualized.
01:09:04 He has visualized maybe not so much winning, you know,
01:09:08 as just him being the best he can be,
01:09:11 him being in the flow, you know,
01:09:15 doing his thing that he knows he can do.
01:09:18 And I do think in the creative world,
01:09:21 yeah, there is a sort of a thing like that,
01:09:23 where you, where, and, you know,
01:09:27 a choreographer or a filmmaker or whatever
01:09:29 might be, do an internal thing where they’re saying,
01:09:35 I can make an Oscar winning movie.
01:09:36 I can direct this movie.
01:09:38 You know, I’m banishing these thoughts
01:09:40 that I’m not good enough.
01:09:42 I can do that.
01:09:42 I can edit it.
01:09:44 I can score it.
01:09:45 I can, you know, bump it, bump it, bump.
01:09:47 But, and I don’t think that’s really ego.
01:09:49 I think that’s part of the process in a good way,
01:09:53 like an athlete does that.
01:09:55 So extreme confidence is what some of the best athletes
01:09:58 come with, and you think it’s possible to,
01:10:02 as a writer, to have extreme confidence in yourself?
01:10:04 I do think so, you know, that I’m sure
01:10:07 when John Lennon sat down to write a song,
01:10:11 he felt like, shit, I can do this, you know?
01:10:14 I’m not so sure.
01:10:16 I think, because the great artists I’ve seen,
01:10:19 and you’re haunted by self doubt.
01:10:23 It’s that resist, I mean, the confidence.
01:10:26 Yes, but I mean, I guess, but even beyond the self,
01:10:29 within the self, above the self doubt.
01:10:30 Oh, it’s the bigger picture of the self belief, you know?
01:10:33 Yeah, I’m freaking out.
01:10:35 Yeah, I’m worried that I’m not gonna be able to do it.
01:10:36 But, you know, I know I can do this.
01:10:38 Yeah, and when you look at,
01:10:39 when you take a bigger picture of it.
01:10:41 So the writing process, is it fundamentally lonely?
01:10:48 No, because you’re with your characters.
01:10:53 You are.
01:10:55 So you really put yourself in the world.
01:10:58 Absolutely, you know, I’ve written about this before
01:11:02 that I used to, my desk used to face a wall
01:11:04 instead of seeing, and people would say,
01:11:06 well, don’t you wanna look out the window?
01:11:08 But I’m in here, I mean, I’m seeing, you know,
01:11:11 the Spartans, I’m seeing, you know, whatever.
01:11:14 And the characters that are on the page,
01:11:18 or that you create, are not accidents, you know?
01:11:22 They’re coming out of some issue,
01:11:24 some deep issue that you have.
01:11:27 Whether you realize it or not,
01:11:28 you might not realize it till 20 years later,
01:11:30 or somebody explains it to you.
01:11:31 So your characters are kind of fascinating to you.
01:11:35 And their dilemmas are fascinating to you.
01:11:38 And you’re also trying to come to grips with them,
01:11:42 you know, you sort of see them through a glass darkly,
01:11:46 you know, and you really wanna see them more clearly.
01:11:49 So yeah, no, it’s not lonely at all.
01:11:52 In fact, I’m more lonely sometimes later,
01:11:55 going out to dinner with some people
01:11:56 and actually talking to people.
01:11:59 Do you miss the characters after it’s over?
01:12:03 Let’s say I have affection for them,
01:12:06 kind of like children that have gone off to college
01:12:09 and now are, you know, you only see them at Thanksgiving.
01:12:12 Definitely, I have affection for them, even the bad guys.
01:12:18 Maybe especially the bad guys.
01:12:22 Especially the bad guys.
01:12:25 You’ve said that writers, even successful writers,
01:12:29 are often not tough minded enough.
01:12:32 I’ve read that in the post,
01:12:34 that you have to be a professional
01:12:35 in the way you handle your emotions.
01:12:38 You have to be a bit of a warrior to be a writer.
01:12:41 So what do you think makes a warrior?
01:12:47 Is a warrior born or trained in the realm,
01:12:51 in the bigger realm, in the realm of writing,
01:12:53 in the creative process?
01:12:55 I think they’re born to some extent.
01:12:57 You have the gift, like you might have the gift
01:12:59 as a martial artist to do whatever martial artists do,
01:13:02 but the training is the big thing.
01:13:05 90% training, 10%, 10% genetics.
01:13:09 And, you know, I use another analogy other than warrior
01:13:13 as far as writer, and that’s like to be a mother.
01:13:16 If you think about, if you’re a writer
01:13:19 or any creative person, you’re giving birth to something,
01:13:21 right, you’re carrying a new life inside you.
01:13:23 And in terms of bravery,
01:13:26 if your child, your two year old child
01:13:30 is underneath a car that’s coming down the street,
01:13:33 the mother’s gonna like stop a Buick,
01:13:35 you know, with her bare hands.
01:13:37 So that’s another way to think about
01:13:41 how a writer has to think about,
01:13:43 or any creative person has to think about,
01:13:45 I think, what they’re doing,
01:13:47 what this child, this new creation
01:13:50 that they’re bringing forth.
01:13:53 Yeah, so the hard work that’s underlying that.
01:13:57 I’ve just, a couple weeks ago, talked to,
01:14:00 just happened to be in the same room,
01:14:01 both gave talks, Arianna Huffington.
01:14:03 I did this conversation with her.
01:14:08 I didn’t know much about her before then,
01:14:11 but she has recently been, she wrote a couple books
01:14:14 and been promoting a lifestyle
01:14:16 where she basically, she created the Huffington Post,
01:14:20 and she gave herself like, I don’t know,
01:14:23 20 hours a day just obsessed with her work.
01:14:26 And then she fainted, passed out,
01:14:29 and kind of, there was some health issues.
01:14:31 And so she wrote this book saying that, you know, sleep,
01:14:36 basically you wanna establish a lifestyle
01:14:38 that doesn’t sacrifice health,
01:14:41 that’s productive but doesn’t sacrifice health.
01:14:43 She thinks that you can have both,
01:14:44 productivity and health.
01:14:46 Criticizing Elon Musk, who I’ve also spoken with,
01:14:49 for working too hard,
01:14:51 and thereby sacrificing, you know,
01:14:56 being less effective than he could be.
01:14:59 So I’m trying to get this balance between health
01:15:04 and obsessively working at something
01:15:06 and really working hard.
01:15:09 So what Arianna is talking about makes sense to me,
01:15:12 but I’m a little bit torn.
01:15:13 To me, passion and reason do not overlap much
01:15:17 or at all sometimes.
01:15:19 Maybe I’m being too Russian,
01:15:20 but I feel madness and obsession does not care for health
01:15:26 or sleep or diet or any of that.
01:15:28 And hard work is hard work,
01:15:32 and everything else can go to hell.
01:15:34 So if you’re really focused on whether it’s writing a book,
01:15:37 it should, everything should just go to hell.
01:15:40 Where do you stand on this balance?
01:15:43 How important is health for productivity?
01:15:45 How important is it to sort of get sleep and so on?
01:15:49 I’m on the health side.
01:15:52 I mean, there was a period of my life
01:15:54 when I was just, I had no obligations
01:15:59 and I was just living in a little house
01:16:02 and just working nonstop, you know?
01:16:05 But even then I would get up in the morning
01:16:07 and I would have liver and eggs for breakfast every day,
01:16:10 and I would do my, you know, exercise, whatever it was.
01:16:13 But although I was still doing like 18 hours a day,
01:16:16 but I’m definitely, I kind of think of it
01:16:20 sort of like an athlete does.
01:16:22 I’m sure that like Steph Curry is totally committed
01:16:27 to winning championships and stuff like that.
01:16:29 But he has his family, he sees his family,
01:16:31 you know, the family is always there.
01:16:33 He, I’m sure he eats, you know, perfect, great stuff,
01:16:38 gets his sleep, you know, gets the training,
01:16:43 you know, the whatever a trainer does to him
01:16:45 for his knees and his ankles and whatever.
01:16:47 So I, or Kobe Bryant or anybody
01:16:49 that’s operating at a high level.
01:16:52 So I do think I’m from that kind of the health school.
01:16:55 The good thing about being a writer
01:16:57 is you can’t work very many hours a day.
01:17:00 You know, four hours is like the maximum I can work.
01:17:03 I’ve never been able to work more than that.
01:17:05 I don’t know how people do it.
01:17:06 I’ve heard of people do 10, 12, I don’t know how they do it.
01:17:11 So that gives you a lot of other time to do it.
01:17:14 Optimize your health.
01:17:16 Yeah, to optimize your health.
01:17:17 Because you need to, you’re in training, you know?
01:17:19 You’re really, you’re burning up a lot of B vitamins
01:17:22 when you’re working here, aren’t you?
01:17:24 Yeah, but.
01:17:27 Maybe it’s a Russian thing with you, Lex.
01:17:28 Well, it’s not even a Russian thing.
01:17:30 It also may be youth, you know?
01:17:32 At 35, you can be crazy.
01:17:35 You know, that’s the thing, they keep telling me,
01:17:38 but I’m pretty sure I’ll be added still at a later time too.
01:17:44 I think it has to do with the career choice too.
01:17:47 I think writing is almost, from everything I’ve heard,
01:17:51 it’s almost impossible to do it
01:17:52 more than a few hours really well.
01:17:56 When you start to get into certain disciplines,
01:17:58 like with Elon Musk and me, engineering disciplines,
01:18:02 that really there’s a lot more non muse time needed.
01:18:09 Right, right, right.
01:18:10 So the crazy hours that you often are talking about
01:18:17 have to be done, and it doesn’t.
01:18:20 I think that’s true.
01:18:22 Yeah, so there’s still the two, three hours of muse time
01:18:26 needed for truly genius ideas,
01:18:27 but it’s something I certainly struggle with.
01:18:34 But yeah, I hear you loud and clear on the health.
01:18:39 So what does a perfect day look like for you
01:18:44 if we’re talking about writing?
01:18:46 An hour by hour schedule of a perfect day.
01:18:51 I get up early, I go to the gym,
01:18:54 I have breakfast with some friends of mine.
01:18:57 What’s early by the way?
01:18:58 Let’s, like how early?
01:19:00 3.15.
01:19:02 A.M.
01:19:02 A.M.
01:19:03 So we’re talking really early.
01:19:05 Really early.
01:19:06 Now I’m crazy early, it’s ridiculously early.
01:19:08 But, and I haven’t done that always,
01:19:10 but that’s kind of what I’m on now.
01:19:15 So I’m in bed, like when I’m with my nephews
01:19:19 that are like four years old and three years old,
01:19:21 I’m in bed before them.
01:19:22 Okay, you got a beat.
01:19:25 You wake up, sorry, you said exercise first.
01:19:28 Yeah.
01:19:29 And what does that look like?
01:19:30 What’s exercise for you?
01:19:32 You go out to the gym?
01:19:32 I go to the gym.
01:19:35 I have a trainer, I have a couple of guys
01:19:37 that I work out with, and I’ll, you know,
01:19:40 it’s maybe an hour, maybe a little more.
01:19:43 I’ll do a little warmup before stretching afterwards,
01:19:45 take a shower, go have breakfast.
01:19:49 But it’s an intense kind of a thing
01:19:51 that I definitely don’t wanna do that’s hard, you know?
01:19:55 So you feel like you’ve accomplished something, first thing.
01:19:57 Yeah.
01:19:58 That’s a big accomplishment of the day.
01:20:00 At the same time, it’s not like so hard
01:20:02 that I’m completely exhausted, you know?
01:20:04 And then I’ll come home and handle whatever correspondence
01:20:10 and stuff has to be done, and then I work
01:20:11 for maybe three hours, and then I just sort of crash.
01:20:15 The office is closed, I turn the switch,
01:20:18 I don’t think about anything.
01:20:21 I don’t think about the work at all.
01:20:23 Do you listen to, oh, you mean afterwards?
01:20:25 After work, once the office is closed.
01:20:27 But during, so this was like 12 to three kind of thing?
01:20:31 Something like that, yeah.
01:20:31 Something like that, okay.
01:20:33 You listen to music?
01:20:34 No.
01:20:35 Do you have anything?
01:20:36 But that’s just me, I mean, I don’t think, you know,
01:20:38 but somebody could do it a million different ways.
01:20:40 It’s fascinating, you know, the,
01:20:43 I mean, you’ve also, of most, of many writers,
01:20:47 you’ve really, but like I’ve read Stephen Kington writing,
01:20:51 you’ve optimized this conversation
01:20:55 with the muse you’re having.
01:20:56 Not optimized, but you’ve at least thought about it.
01:20:59 So what’s, can you say a little bit more
01:21:02 about the trivialities of that process,
01:21:05 of the, like you said, facing the wall?
01:21:10 What’s, do you have little rituals?
01:21:13 You mean like the granular aspect of it?
01:21:15 The granular aspects, yeah.
01:21:19 Is there?
01:21:20 I do have little rituals, I do have all kinds of,
01:21:21 which I’m not even gonna tell you about.
01:21:22 Sure.
01:21:23 But the one thing,
01:21:28 and I don’t wanna like talk about this too much
01:21:30 because it sort of jinxes things, I think,
01:21:32 but the one thing I do try to do is when I sit down,
01:21:37 I immediately get into it, first, second.
01:21:41 I don’t sit and fuck around with anything.
01:21:43 I immediately try to get into it as quickly as I can.
01:21:47 The other thing is that writing a book
01:21:50 or screenplay or anything like that
01:21:51 is a process of multiple drafts.
01:21:54 And it’s the first draft
01:21:56 that’s where you’re most with the muse,
01:21:58 where you’re going through the blank page.
01:22:00 Like right now I’m on, I don’t know what,
01:22:02 the fifth or sixth, seventh draft
01:22:04 of the thing I’m working on.
01:22:05 So I’ve got pages already written
01:22:09 and I’m kind of reading them afresh
01:22:12 as I go through the story.
01:22:14 So it’s not quite where I am now.
01:22:17 It’s not quite a deep muse scenario, partly it is,
01:22:22 but it’s also sort of bouncing back and forth
01:22:25 between the different,
01:22:27 between the right brain and the left brain.
01:22:28 I’m kind of looking at it
01:22:29 and trying to evaluate it.
01:22:31 And then I’m going into it
01:22:33 and try to change it a little bit.
01:22:35 And when, do you know,
01:22:37 sit down and get right into it,
01:22:38 do you know the night before
01:22:40 of what that starting point is?
01:22:43 I always try to stop.
01:22:46 And I learned this,
01:22:47 I think Hemingway wrote about this
01:22:48 or John Steinbeck or one of the,
01:22:49 or maybe both of them,
01:22:51 to always stop when you kind of know what’s coming next.
01:22:54 So you’re not at a facing a chasm, you know?
01:22:58 Yeah.
01:22:59 Okay, so and afterwards when you’re done,
01:23:02 the office is closed.
01:23:03 The office is closed,
01:23:04 I let the muse take care of it, you know?
01:23:05 And I don’t want to,
01:23:07 and I think it’s a very unhealthy thing
01:23:09 to worry about it or think about any creative process.
01:23:14 You don’t, like on a long walk later, think about?
01:23:18 Yeah, then I will sort of keep my mind open to it,
01:23:22 but I won’t be like obsessing about it.
01:23:24 Okay.
01:23:25 Because actually on walks,
01:23:26 sometimes things will pop in your head, you know,
01:23:28 and you’ll go, oh, I should change that.
01:23:31 But that’s not your ego doing it,
01:23:33 that’s the deeper level.
01:23:36 Okay, so how does the day end?
01:23:38 So go. In terms of writing?
01:23:39 So yeah, the writing, well no,
01:23:41 the writing, the office door closes
01:23:45 and then the rest of the day just do whatever the hell.
01:23:49 Maybe go out to dinner,
01:23:51 my girlfriend is not here now,
01:23:52 she’s in New York working,
01:23:53 we’ll make dinner or whatever.
01:23:56 Go out to dinner, something like that,
01:23:57 and maybe I’ll read something, nothing heavy.
01:24:02 And I go to bed pretty early,
01:24:04 and the gym is a big thing for me.
01:24:08 I’ll already, sort of probably like with you
01:24:10 with martial arts, the night before,
01:24:12 I’ll be visualizing what I have to do the next day
01:24:16 and getting myself psyched up for that.
01:24:20 And then I’ll just conk out like a light
01:24:22 and wake up at the crack of dawn.
01:24:24 Okay, so looking out into the future,
01:24:28 this year, next few years,
01:24:30 what do you think the muse has in store for you?
01:24:34 I don’t think you can ever know.
01:24:37 It’s probably something along the same,
01:24:40 I really believe there’s that exercise
01:24:43 where they say to you,
01:24:45 visualize yourself five years in the future
01:24:48 and write a letter from that person to yourself.
01:24:50 I don’t believe in that at all
01:24:52 because I don’t think you can,
01:24:54 there’s a line out of Africa
01:24:57 that God made the world round
01:24:59 so that we couldn’t see too far ahead.
01:25:03 You just don’t know as a writer or as a person,
01:25:09 I never knew, my first book was A Legend of Bag of Ants.
01:25:12 I hadn’t, before that happened,
01:25:14 I had no clue that I was gonna be writing anything like that
01:25:17 on that subject, anything at all, no clue,
01:25:20 until it just sort of came.
01:25:22 And then when that was done,
01:25:24 people said, well, you gotta write another one.
01:25:25 I had no idea what it was,
01:25:27 which was gonna be Gates of Fire, no clue.
01:25:30 So if somebody had sat me down at the start of that
01:25:34 and asked the question,
01:25:37 I would have been crazy to have said it.
01:25:39 So I just hope as the future unfolds,
01:25:44 that I’m open to it.
01:25:48 Well, I think I speak for a lot of people
01:25:51 in saying that we look forward to what that future looks like.
01:25:54 Stephen, thank you so much for talking today, it was fun.
01:25:57 You got the best job in the world going around
01:25:59 talking to people that you wanna talk to
01:26:01 and that they will talk to you.
01:26:04 So thank you for doing it.
01:26:05 Hey, thank you for the great questions you made me think.
01:26:07 I’ve certainly a bunch of questions
01:26:08 I’ve never ever answered before.
01:26:10 Awesome, thank you so much.
01:26:11 So thanks a lot, great.
01:26:12 Thank you.
01:26:14 Thanks for listening to this conversation
01:26:15 with Stephen Pressfield,
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01:26:48 Just F R I D M A N.
01:26:52 And now let me leave you with some words
01:26:54 from Stephen Pressfield.
01:26:56 Are you paralyzed by fear?
01:26:58 That’s a good sign.
01:26:59 Fear is good.
01:27:00 Like self doubt, fear is an indicator.
01:27:03 Fear tells us what we have to do.
01:27:06 Remember one rule of thumb,
01:27:08 the more scared we are of a work or a calling,
01:27:12 the more sure we can be that we have to do it.
01:27:15 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.