Steven Pressfield: The War of Art | Lex Fridman Podcast #102

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Steven Pressfield,

00:00:03.000 | author of several powerful nonfiction

00:00:06.040 | and historical fiction books, including "The War of Art,"

00:00:10.120 | a book that had a big impact on my life

00:00:12.920 | and the life of millions of people

00:00:15.240 | whose passion is to create in art, science, business,

00:00:20.000 | sport, and everywhere else.

00:00:22.740 | I highly recommend it and others of his books on this topic,

00:00:26.880 | including "Turning Pro," "Do the Work,"

00:00:30.440 | "Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit," and "The Warrior Ethos."

00:00:35.440 | Also, his books "Gates of Fire" about the Spartans

00:00:38.480 | and the Battle of Thermopylae, "The Lion's Gate,"

00:00:41.480 | "Tides of War," and others are some of the best

00:00:44.520 | historical fiction novels ever written.

00:00:47.480 | As some of you know, I don't shy away

00:00:50.840 | from taking on a big, difficult challenge.

00:00:53.680 | One of the hardest for me and for millions of others

00:00:56.980 | is the discipline of staring at an empty page every day,

00:01:01.600 | pushing on to think deeply, to create,

00:01:04.880 | despite the millions of excuses that fill the head.

00:01:07.440 | In his work, Steven has articulated the struggle

00:01:11.840 | better than anyone I've ever read.

00:01:14.140 | Quick summary of the ads.

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00:01:40.520 | This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

00:01:43.760 | I recently considered renaming this podcast,

00:01:46.400 | but decided against it.

00:01:48.080 | AI is my passion, and in some sense,

00:01:51.200 | this podcast is not as much about AI,

00:01:53.560 | but more about a journey of an AI researcher

00:01:56.000 | struggling to explore the human mind,

00:01:58.640 | the physics of our universe,

00:02:00.280 | and the nature of human behavior,

00:02:02.320 | intelligence, consciousness, love, and power.

00:02:06.420 | I will continue to return home to the technical,

00:02:09.660 | computer science, machine learning,

00:02:11.080 | engineering, math, programming,

00:02:12.920 | but also venture out to talk to people

00:02:15.740 | who had a big impact on my life

00:02:17.840 | outside the technical fields.

00:02:19.900 | Writers like Steven Pressfield and Stephen King,

00:02:24.140 | musicians like Tom Waits,

00:02:26.520 | political leaders like, well, you know who,

00:02:30.560 | and even athletes.

00:02:32.680 | I hope you join me on this journey.

00:02:36.040 | As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now,

00:02:38.360 | and no ads in the middle

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00:03:00.820 | I've been binging on this podcast.

00:03:02.900 | Jordan is a great human being.

00:03:05.500 | He gets the best out of his guests,

00:03:07.200 | dives deep, calls them out when it's needed,

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00:03:12.380 | He's interviewed Kobe Bryant, Mark Cuban,

00:03:15.380 | Neil deGrasse Tyson, Garry Kasparov,

00:03:17.720 | and many more.

00:03:18.940 | I just finished listening to his recent conversation

00:03:21.180 | with Mick West about debunking conspiracy theories.

00:03:24.920 | This topic can be both fascinating and frustrating

00:03:28.380 | on both sides.

00:03:29.980 | But in this conversation,

00:03:31.300 | Jordan thread the needle beautifully.

00:03:33.380 | And so it turned out to be a great listen.

00:03:35.860 | I highly recommend it.

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00:04:06.520 | let me mention that the cryptocurrency

00:04:08.480 | in the context of the history of money is fascinating.

00:04:11.960 | I recommend "A Scent of Money"

00:04:14.000 | as a great book on this history.

00:04:16.060 | Debits and credits on ledgers started

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00:04:20.720 | The US dollar created over 200 years ago.

00:04:23.800 | And the first decentralized cryptocurrency

00:04:26.040 | released just over 10 years ago.

00:04:28.320 | So given that history,

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00:04:54.080 | And now, here's my conversation with Steven Pressfield.

00:04:59.360 | - Modern society in many ways dreams

00:05:03.240 | of creating universal peace.

00:05:05.300 | And yet war has molded civilization

00:05:08.880 | as we know it throughout its history.

00:05:10.760 | So let's start at the high philosophical level.

00:05:15.760 | If you could imagine a world without war,

00:05:18.800 | how would that world be different?

00:05:20.440 | Perhaps put another way, what purpose has war served?

00:05:24.800 | Why do we fight?

00:05:27.400 | - I think we're basically the same creatures internally

00:05:31.740 | that we were in the cave, right?

00:05:34.440 | In tribal society back for however many,

00:05:39.280 | you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of years.

00:05:41.840 | Which means that we're in,

00:05:43.680 | the dynamic in our mind is a kind of an us versus them

00:05:48.360 | dynamic where our tribe is the people

00:05:52.000 | and everybody else are whatever, you know?

00:05:54.760 | And I don't see that, I don't think that's changed one iota

00:05:59.760 | over the centuries.

00:06:01.520 | It's just a question of how one might sublimate

00:06:06.360 | that urge to compete.

00:06:10.080 | You're a martial artist, you know,

00:06:12.720 | a great part of your day I'm sure is dedicated

00:06:14.960 | to reaching that place of total commitment

00:06:19.960 | and in the face of competition,

00:06:23.280 | in the face of adversity, et cetera, et cetera,

00:06:25.120 | which is I think natural and great for the human race

00:06:28.920 | on an individual basis.

00:06:30.960 | So the hope that I have, if there is any hope,

00:06:35.680 | personally I don't think the human race

00:06:37.040 | is gonna be around very long,

00:06:38.920 | but would be in sports

00:06:43.920 | or in other kind of sublimated activities

00:06:47.480 | where people can act out their need for conquest

00:06:51.560 | or aggression or so forth,

00:06:53.220 | but at the same time relate to their opponents

00:06:56.080 | as human beings and when the game is over,

00:06:58.380 | you know, you embrace your competitor and stuff like that.

00:07:01.280 | - So you think war was inevitable?

00:07:04.320 | It's a part of human nature as opposed to a force,

00:07:09.320 | a creative force in society that served a benefit.

00:07:14.120 | - Well, I'm sure it has benefited, you know,

00:07:17.240 | spreading cultures and mixing cultures and stuff like that,

00:07:20.960 | but I think the urge to conquest,

00:07:25.960 | if you think about Alexander the Great

00:07:28.000 | or Julius Caesar or Napoleon or anybody like that

00:07:30.320 | or even individual or if we even think about

00:07:33.040 | one of the plants that we're looking at right outside,

00:07:36.200 | I mean, if you let a particular plant have its way,

00:07:39.080 | it would take over, you know, the whole hillside.

00:07:41.480 | And certainly in the days of Alexander the Great, let's say,

00:07:46.480 | there were, who knows, over the face of the earth,

00:07:50.720 | hundreds of little kingdoms, China, Japan,

00:07:54.240 | you know, Asia, Europe, wherever,

00:07:56.440 | and every prince that grew up

00:08:00.240 | dreamt of conquering his neighbor

00:08:02.520 | and conquering a neighbor after that.

00:08:04.560 | That seems to be a universal human imperative,

00:08:09.560 | at least in the male of the species.

00:08:14.080 | - So war is just a realization of that imperative.

00:08:16.920 | - I think so.

00:08:18.320 | - So you've written about Spartans

00:08:20.200 | in the Battle of Thermopylae,

00:08:22.400 | about Alexander the Great,

00:08:23.520 | about the Six-Day War in '67 in Israel

00:08:26.320 | against Egypt, Jordan, Syria.

00:08:30.360 | What war, not just out of those, but in general,

00:08:35.280 | do you think has been most transformative for the world?

00:08:38.880 | - Well, these are great questions, Lex.

00:08:40.680 | - Tough, easy ones, right?

00:08:42.560 | - I mean, I wish I knew more about the Mongols,

00:08:47.120 | 'cause I certainly, from what little I know,

00:08:49.660 | I think that was a very,

00:08:51.360 | their conquests were very transformative,

00:08:54.200 | bringing cultures, you know, in a horrible, bloody way

00:09:00.000 | together, but gosh, what's been the most transformative?

00:09:05.000 | Maybe the Roman conquests, you know,

00:09:07.480 | establishing the Roman Empire and bringing that culture.

00:09:10.680 | Maybe Alexander the Great's wars that, you know,

00:09:15.480 | united East and West, at least for a minute.

00:09:19.280 | - So building a vampire, do you have a sense,

00:09:22.580 | so there's wars, I mean, the Six-Day War

00:09:26.080 | is not about building empires.

00:09:30.320 | It's about deep, deeply held religious,

00:09:35.320 | cultural conflict and holding the line, holding the border.

00:09:42.280 | And then there is conquests, like the Mongols,

00:09:45.440 | that, what is it, some large percentage of the population

00:09:48.840 | is a descendant of Genghis Khan, I believe, right?

00:09:52.260 | So that has transformative effects.

00:09:54.400 | And then World War II, I mean, personally,

00:09:56.840 | my family and so on, the transformative effects.

00:09:59.800 | - Let me ask you this, Lex.

00:10:01.080 | Why are you, what are you trying to get at

00:10:03.540 | with these questions?

00:10:04.880 | What is this kind of the theme that you're aiming at?

00:10:09.160 | - Well, I talked to Eric Weinstein, and he said,

00:10:12.120 | "Everything is great about war except the killing."

00:10:15.380 | (Lex laughs)

00:10:17.040 | And there's a romantic notion of war.

00:10:20.520 | Certainly there's a romantic notion of being a warrior,

00:10:23.920 | but there's a romantic notion of war

00:10:26.440 | that somehow there's a creative force to it.

00:10:31.100 | That because we fight, out of that fighting comes culture,

00:10:37.200 | comes music and art, and more and more desire to create

00:10:42.280 | with the societies that win.

00:10:45.760 | And to me, war is not just,

00:10:48.320 | "Hey, I have a stick, and I want your land."

00:10:53.340 | It's some kind of, like it has echoes of the creative force

00:10:58.340 | that makes humans unique to other animals.

00:11:05.900 | Like, war is, it can't be just four people,

00:11:09.700 | or 10 people, or 100 people.

00:11:11.580 | You have to have thousands of people agreeing,

00:11:14.700 | usually thousands or more, for something so deeply

00:11:19.700 | that you would be willing to risk your own life.

00:11:22.960 | And there's a romantic notion to that.

00:11:24.900 | And because you've written so well and passionate

00:11:27.460 | about some of these, I wanted to see,

00:11:29.900 | 'cause I don't have any answers,

00:11:31.180 | I wanted to untangle that.

00:11:32.940 | If there is a reason we fight that's more than just

00:11:37.700 | anger and hate and wanting to conquer.

00:11:43.300 | - Well, let me take it from a completely different side.

00:11:47.460 | I don't think that I, in writing about war,

00:11:51.580 | am really that interested in war per se.

00:11:55.260 | I'm more interested in the metaphor.

00:11:57.500 | I think, for me, I'm really writing about

00:12:01.060 | my own internal war, and the war against myself,

00:12:06.060 | and against my own resistance, my own negativity,

00:12:11.980 | all of those things that are,

00:12:14.100 | that spirituality would be the opposite of.

00:12:20.340 | So I'm not really an expert on war.

00:12:23.940 | It's not like talking to Jim Mattis,

00:12:25.740 | or to Victor Davis Hanson, or whatever.

00:12:30.740 | To me, the human being,

00:12:37.860 | we are spiritual beings in a physical envelope.

00:12:42.860 | And there's an automatic, terrible tension within that,

00:12:48.260 | and which creates a war inside ourselves.

00:12:53.180 | So the outer war, when I think about the Israeli army

00:12:58.180 | standing up to whatever, 10 to one odds,

00:13:02.460 | or whatever it was, that is a metaphor to me

00:13:07.460 | of the fight we're fighting inside ourselves.

00:13:10.140 | For me, the Six Day War was, as you know,

00:13:12.380 | my feeling was it was about a return from exile.

00:13:15.640 | It was sort of the culmination of the reestablishment

00:13:19.500 | of the State of Israel,

00:13:20.340 | which had never really been completed,

00:13:22.840 | because the holiest places of the Jewish people

00:13:25.660 | were in the hands of their enemies.

00:13:27.300 | So now, on the other hand, Alexander the Great's conquest,

00:13:31.620 | I think, were a whole other different scenario,

00:13:34.340 | where the metaphor was that Alexander's father, Philip,

00:13:39.340 | I think, created the first nation, capital N Nation,

00:13:43.400 | and he created a sort of a pathway for these guys

00:13:48.340 | who were mountain men, and basically barbarians, Macedonians,

00:13:53.340 | and by creating this army and this dream

00:14:01.500 | of conquering the world,

00:14:03.500 | which Alexander took to the, you know, really enacted,

00:14:07.300 | he gave them a way of rising out of themselves,

00:14:10.120 | of transcending themselves, not just individually,

00:14:12.980 | but as a people.

00:14:14.060 | So that would go along with what you're saying, Lex,

00:14:16.420 | of a certain creativity to it.

00:14:19.300 | But again, that's not, for whatever,

00:14:24.660 | and I'm just realizing this as I'm answering this,

00:14:27.740 | that's not really what's interesting to me

00:14:29.420 | about these stories.

00:14:31.380 | And the Spartans, what was a whole, at Thermopylae,

00:14:34.620 | that was a whole other kind of metaphor of war.

00:14:37.580 | That was a sort of a willingly going to one's own death

00:14:43.420 | for a greater cause, just like, to me,

00:14:47.540 | the Spartans at Thermopylae enacted as a group

00:14:50.600 | what Jesus Christ enacted as an individual,

00:14:53.500 | a sacrifice of their lives for the greater good.

00:14:58.500 | I don't know if that answers your question,

00:15:00.220 | but that's how I see it.

00:15:02.300 | I do feel like, you know, I get invited to speak

00:15:05.620 | to Marine Corps groups and things like that all the time,

00:15:09.100 | and I decline because I don't really feel

00:15:11.860 | like I'm a spokesman for the warrior class

00:15:15.580 | or anything like that.

00:15:17.160 | That's not what's interesting about it to me.

00:15:23.020 | - But didn't you just say, with war as a metaphor,

00:15:28.580 | that we're all essentially, in various ways, warriors?

00:15:33.220 | - If we think of it in terms of Jungian archetypes,

00:15:36.940 | and we think of our life, at least as males,

00:15:40.940 | and the earliest archetypes that kick in

00:15:44.060 | are the youth and the wanderer and the student

00:15:46.540 | and that kind of thing.

00:15:47.500 | And then at some point around age 15 to 20, whatever,

00:15:52.180 | the warrior archetype kicks in,

00:15:54.500 | and we wanna play football, we wanna do martial arts,

00:15:56.700 | we wanna join the special forces,

00:15:58.860 | we wanna hang out with our buddies, that's our great bond,

00:16:01.960 | we wanna test ourselves against adversity

00:16:04.060 | and so on and so forth.

00:16:05.360 | But at some point, that archetype,

00:16:07.940 | we move beyond that archetype,

00:16:09.740 | and we become fathers and teachers and so on and so forth.

00:16:14.620 | And then there are many archetypes

00:16:16.380 | beyond that towards the end.

00:16:18.380 | So I'm interested in the warrior archetype,

00:16:23.380 | but not to the be all and end all of everything else.

00:16:27.460 | In my book, "The Virtues of War," have you read that?

00:16:34.780 | There's a character named Telamon,

00:16:37.460 | who's actually, it's a long story,

00:16:39.460 | but he's with Alexander's army,

00:16:44.380 | and when they arrive in India,

00:16:46.820 | he becomes fascinated by the gymnosophists,

00:16:51.820 | the fakirs, the naked wise men, the yogis.

00:16:55.620 | And he says to Alexander that these guys

00:17:00.020 | are warriors beyond what we are,

00:17:03.540 | even though they do nothing

00:17:06.380 | because they are inside their own selves all day long.

00:17:11.380 | - If we go to the Six-Day War,

00:17:14.700 | you write about, in Lionsgate,

00:17:19.660 | you write about the Six-Day War in Israel.

00:17:21.780 | I think of the wars you've written about

00:17:24.660 | as the one we're still, in many ways,

00:17:27.100 | in the midst of today.

00:17:28.260 | - Yes.

00:17:29.540 | - So what is at the core of that conflict in Israel?

00:17:35.860 | The Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

00:17:37.900 | - I mean, today it's the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,

00:17:40.860 | but it's echoes of the same conflict

00:17:44.460 | in that part of the world with Israel.

00:17:47.380 | What is, in your sense,

00:17:49.500 | the nature of that conflict?

00:17:53.540 | What can we learn about society and human nature

00:17:55.740 | from that conflict?

00:17:57.200 | That is one of the hottest conflicts

00:17:59.860 | that still goes on today.

00:18:01.820 | - Well, when I was working on the Lionsgate,

00:18:04.740 | about the Six-Day War,

00:18:06.340 | I wrote in the introduction

00:18:10.780 | that this was not gonna be a multi-sided story.

00:18:14.220 | I was taking it entirely,

00:18:16.380 | I'm a Jew, I identify with the Israeli people,

00:18:20.180 | I was gonna see it entirely from their side.

00:18:23.780 | So that's probably not what you're asking,

00:18:27.120 | but to me, the Six-Day War and that whole,

00:18:33.660 | you know, it's a piece of land that's holy

00:18:35.780 | to at least three religions and probably more.

00:18:39.620 | And from the Jewish point of view,

00:18:43.760 | it's where the State of Israel,

00:18:46.220 | it's where David founded Jerusalem,

00:18:47.780 | it's all where the 12 tribes were, et cetera, et cetera,

00:18:50.700 | where Moses came and brought the people.

00:18:52.900 | So to me, the Six-Day War was about, as I said,

00:18:57.900 | a return from exile, from diaspora after 2,000 years.

00:19:03.380 | Now, obviously, from the Palestinian point of view

00:19:06.540 | or the Saudi Arabian point of view or whatever,

00:19:09.300 | it's a whole other scenario.

00:19:12.020 | - Religion is at the core of this conflict in some ways,

00:19:14.940 | but religious beliefs.

00:19:15.940 | - Religion and racial/ethnic/tribal identity.

00:19:20.940 | I mean, again, what is a Jew?

00:19:23.060 | Is a Jew somebody that believes in the religion

00:19:26.220 | or is it somebody of a certain race

00:19:28.380 | that race arose in a certain place?

00:19:31.700 | Same thing as a Muslim, what is a Muslim?

00:19:33.460 | Do they believe in Muhammad or whatever?

00:19:36.200 | Or did they arise in a certain place

00:19:39.380 | and a certain ethnicity?

00:19:40.500 | 'Cause if we landed from Mars,

00:19:43.020 | we couldn't tell a Jew from a Palestinian, could we?

00:19:46.260 | Just looking at them, you could easily mix them

00:19:48.860 | and you'd never know.

00:19:50.060 | - And the specifics of the faith

00:19:52.260 | is not necessarily the thing that defines a person.

00:19:54.700 | - No, I don't think so.

00:19:56.340 | - So you could be, like many are, secular Jew

00:20:01.060 | living in Israel and still have a strong bond.

00:20:04.500 | - Definitely, definitely.

00:20:05.540 | In fact, almost all of the Jews,

00:20:08.460 | the fighters that I spoke to from the Sixth Day War

00:20:12.020 | were secular and it really was not

00:20:15.020 | a religious thing with them

00:20:19.420 | as much as it was a national thing.

00:20:21.360 | - So having spent time in Israel,

00:20:24.820 | how's the world where military conflict is directly felt

00:20:30.700 | as opposed to maybe if we look at the US

00:20:33.220 | where it's distant and far away.

00:20:35.180 | How is that world different?

00:20:36.380 | How are the people different?

00:20:37.460 | - It's very different, as you know.

00:20:40.300 | - I've never been to Israel actually.

00:20:41.860 | - Oh, you haven't?

00:20:42.700 | - I haven't felt it.

00:20:43.580 | - Well, you should definitely go.

00:20:46.940 | I mean, here in the United States,

00:20:50.260 | where when an incident like Charlottesville comes up,

00:20:56.140 | where people are chanting,

00:20:56.980 | "Jews will not replace us," blah, blah, blah.

00:20:59.260 | The impulse in the Jewish community is to think of,

00:21:02.740 | well, how can we reach out to the other side?

00:21:05.340 | How can we either show them that we are human beings

00:21:10.720 | like they are and show them that we care for them,

00:21:13.180 | et cetera, et cetera.

00:21:14.000 | That's the sort of distant from war.

00:21:17.180 | From if you're in Israel,

00:21:18.860 | like if you and I were Israeli citizens right now,

00:21:24.380 | you would be a fighter pilot

00:21:25.740 | or a tank commander or whatever.

00:21:28.060 | You would not just be working at MIT or whatever.

00:21:31.580 | And I would be in the Army too.

00:21:33.780 | And so from their point of view,

00:21:35.740 | they say all those people who hate us,

00:21:38.780 | can I curse on this thing?

00:21:41.740 | Fuck them, we'll kill 'em.

00:21:44.180 | If they dare to cross the line,

00:21:46.740 | and that's a whole different point of view.

00:21:48.940 | To me, it's actually a healthier point of view.

00:21:52.300 | - You think so?

00:21:53.140 | - Yeah.

00:21:54.660 | - So let me ask the hard question is,

00:21:57.260 | well, maybe it's an impossible question,

00:21:59.380 | is how do we resolve that conflict?

00:22:02.980 | - In Israel and--

00:22:04.180 | - In Israel or--

00:22:05.460 | - Anywhere.

00:22:06.300 | - Anywhere where the instinct is to reach out in US

00:22:09.300 | and say F you and the people, yeah.

00:22:14.300 | - I think that the only way the two warring sides

00:22:19.100 | or two sides that are opposed to one another

00:22:21.500 | can ever really come together

00:22:23.020 | is when there's mutual respect.

00:22:24.740 | We'll get to some more water.

00:22:26.580 | - I got it, I got it.

00:22:27.420 | - When there's mutual respect

00:22:29.180 | and they can see each other as equals

00:22:33.220 | and when there's mutual fear,

00:22:35.660 | where one side says,

00:22:38.780 | we don't dare cross a line with this other side

00:22:41.540 | and the other side says the same thing.

00:22:43.500 | I think then you can kind of reach across that thing

00:22:45.660 | and say, okay, we'll stay here, you stay here.

00:22:48.340 | We'll mingle in cultural ways

00:22:51.620 | and we'll have interchange, winter marriage,

00:22:54.580 | da, da, da, da, da, da.

00:22:56.100 | But as soon as one side has no power,

00:22:58.900 | as the Jewish people have had no power

00:23:01.300 | throughout the diaspora forever,

00:23:03.780 | then it's just a human nature.

00:23:07.660 | You can see it in Trump

00:23:09.380 | and what he does to any vulnerable minority.

00:23:12.380 | And he's not alone, I'm not blaming him alone.

00:23:18.500 | That's human nature.

00:23:19.900 | So I do think that that idea of like, fuck you,

00:23:22.780 | if you cross the line, we'll kill you,

00:23:24.780 | is really a good way, is a good place to start from

00:23:28.180 | because now you can sit down on opposite sides of the table

00:23:30.980 | and say, what do we have in common?

00:23:33.180 | How can we, we wanna raise our children,

00:23:35.140 | you wanna raise your children,

00:23:36.660 | how can we do this in a way

00:23:38.860 | that we're not hurting each other?

00:23:41.140 | - So you kind of said that you need to arrive

00:23:44.660 | at a balance, some kind of balance of power.

00:23:46.780 | - Yeah.

00:23:47.620 | - But you haven't spoken to the fact

00:23:49.260 | that there's deeply rooted hatred of the other.

00:23:54.820 | So is there no way to alleviate that hatred or is that,

00:23:58.300 | I mean, what role does love and hate--

00:24:02.900 | - I think that hatred can go away, I really do.

00:24:04.740 | I mean, if you look at even now

00:24:07.140 | that I haven't seen this in person,

00:24:09.700 | but they say that the Saudis and the Israelis

00:24:12.700 | are collaborating on certain things,

00:24:15.220 | by their mutual fear of or antagonism to Iran.

00:24:19.460 | I do think that even really long, long, long standing

00:24:24.460 | hatreds and animosities, thousands of years old

00:24:27.860 | can go away under the right circumstances.

00:24:30.820 | - On what time scale?

00:24:33.220 | - I mean, for instance, I don't know if it's--

00:24:37.620 | - Do people have to die,

00:24:39.380 | do generations have to die and pass away

00:24:41.540 | and new generations come up with less hate

00:24:44.540 | or can a single individual learn to not hate?

00:24:47.380 | - I think a single individual can learn to not hate

00:24:49.580 | 'cause it certainly doesn't seem to,

00:24:51.060 | over thousands of years doesn't seem to work.

00:24:53.380 | We keep thinking that that's gonna happen,

00:24:55.580 | but I think we're in a real spiritual realm here

00:25:00.580 | when you're talking about that.

00:25:02.380 | You're in a realm of Buddha, Jesus, whatever,

00:25:05.900 | something like that, that where a true change of soul happens

00:25:10.900 | but I do think that's possible.

00:25:16.580 | - So what do you think is the future of warfare,

00:25:20.940 | especially with what many people see

00:25:24.340 | as the expansion of the military industrial conflict?

00:25:27.020 | I know you're not a military historian.

00:25:31.640 | I'm asking more as a metaphor.

00:25:35.300 | Do you see us as people continuing to fight?

00:25:40.400 | - You know, it's a really great question, Alex,

00:25:43.740 | because I think now with social media, TV, movies,

00:25:48.740 | all of these things that create empathy across cultures,

00:25:55.220 | it becomes harder and harder, I think, I think,

00:25:58.860 | to totally demonize the other,

00:26:02.100 | the way it was in previous wars.

00:26:05.140 | I also think I don't really see an appetite

00:26:08.820 | for people wanting to go to war these days

00:26:12.100 | and in a way, I don't know if that's good or bad.

00:26:15.180 | It's like everybody's so fat and lazy

00:26:17.620 | and so concerned with how many clicks they're getting

00:26:20.540 | that whereas I know at the start of World War I,

00:26:25.540 | both the younger generations were eager to go to war.

00:26:30.660 | I think it was insane but it was that sort of

00:26:35.660 | warrior archetype that we were talking about

00:26:37.340 | before that generational testosterone eros thing

00:26:42.340 | whereas nowadays, I don't know.

00:26:48.100 | I mean, it's hard to say there's not gonna be another war

00:26:52.220 | because there always are but it's sort of hard

00:26:54.940 | to imagine people getting off their ass these days

00:26:58.260 | to do anything.

00:26:59.420 | - Well, it's funny that you mentioned social media

00:27:01.460 | as a place for empathy, sure, but in a sense,

00:27:05.060 | it's a place for war as well.

00:27:08.020 | - For hatred, yeah, true.

00:27:08.860 | - For hatred and perhaps the positive aspect of hatred

00:27:13.860 | on social media is that it's somewhat less harmful

00:27:20.100 | than murder and so it kind of dissipates

00:27:24.260 | sort of the hateful, you get the hate out

00:27:33.020 | but on a daily basis and thereby never boils up

00:27:37.940 | to a point where you want to kill.

00:27:39.500 | - It's also a really weird thing that's going on

00:27:42.340 | and I don't know if anybody really understands

00:27:43.860 | like with video games where kids are acting out

00:27:47.740 | these incredible horror things, right?

00:27:50.020 | But you know that if they cut their finger,

00:27:52.700 | they would like freak out, you know?

00:27:54.780 | And I also don't think that many of the people

00:27:58.900 | that are hateful on social media,

00:28:02.420 | if they were face to face with the person,

00:28:04.420 | so there's a sort of a two mental spheres

00:28:10.300 | happening at the same time and I don't know how that--

00:28:15.220 | - Maps to the actual military,

00:28:17.260 | how that actually maps to military conflict.

00:28:19.540 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:28:21.060 | - Like if you in the United States have a draft,

00:28:23.780 | for example, how the populace would respond different

00:28:27.460 | than they did in previous generations.

00:28:29.500 | - Yeah, I think they certainly would.

00:28:30.860 | - Yeah.

00:28:31.820 | - Another question, not sure if you've thought about it,

00:28:34.260 | but I work on building artificial intelligence systems.

00:28:38.140 | In our community, many people are worried

00:28:39.780 | about AI being used in war,

00:28:41.740 | so automating the killing process.

00:28:44.120 | With drones and in general, it's being used more and more.

00:28:49.100 | - I should recuse myself on that one,

00:28:50.660 | I really haven't thought about that.

00:28:51.740 | - You haven't thought about it.

00:28:52.580 | - I'd rather ask you what you think about it.

00:28:55.300 | - Well, it's interesting, I mean,

00:28:56.260 | because it's so fundamentally different

00:28:57.980 | from if you look at the Battle of Thermopylae.

00:29:02.060 | It means just if we talk about the difference

00:29:03.900 | between a gun and a sword.

00:29:07.500 | - I'll tell you one little anecdote.

00:29:09.380 | There was a Spartan king, I don't know which one it was,

00:29:13.580 | but at one point they showed him a new invention

00:29:16.740 | and it could launch a bolt that would kill someone

00:29:20.660 | at a range of 200 yards.

00:29:22.420 | And the king wept and said, "Alas, valor is no more."

00:29:28.260 | (laughing)

00:29:29.100 | 'Cause their point of view of war,

00:29:31.500 | it was highly ritualized, as you know,

00:29:33.940 | and the code of honor was that you were not supposed

00:29:38.540 | to be able to kill another person unless you yourself

00:29:42.340 | were in equal danger of being killed.

00:29:44.300 | And any other way of doing that, even bow and arrow,

00:29:47.820 | was considered less than manly and less than honorable.

00:29:52.820 | And maybe we should go back to that

00:29:54.360 | because at least it makes the stakes real and true.

00:29:57.660 | - And--

00:30:00.780 | - Not that we could.

00:30:02.220 | - Not that's the point.

00:30:04.200 | You were in the Marine Corps, so we talk about the real,

00:30:09.980 | the bloody conflicts, you've written about many of them.

00:30:15.560 | So let me ask a personal question.

00:30:20.260 | Have you, sort of as writing and in general,

00:30:24.300 | have you thought about what it takes to kill a person

00:30:28.920 | if you yourself could do it in the war?

00:30:32.740 | - I have thought about it, yeah.

00:30:34.220 | - And how that would make you feel?

00:30:36.900 | - Of course, one never knows.

00:30:39.620 | I certainly, I have not been in combat,

00:30:41.320 | I haven't killed anybody, but I would imagine

00:30:45.580 | in the real world that it would change you utterly forever

00:30:52.780 | because you can't help but identify

00:30:57.780 | with the person that you've just killed.

00:31:01.260 | And it's another human being, and I mean,

00:31:04.300 | I have a hard time killing a spider.

00:31:07.100 | So I would imagine that it's something

00:31:09.860 | that warriors understand and nobody else understands.

00:31:14.860 | - And you've spoken with many.

00:31:16.620 | I mean, you've spoken with people

00:31:19.300 | who've seen military combat in Israel.

00:31:22.780 | What, have they been able to articulate

00:31:26.620 | the experience of killing?

00:31:28.980 | - It's sort of just what I said.

00:31:31.100 | I mean, I'm even thinking of one pilot

00:31:34.600 | that I interviewed over there

00:31:36.580 | who was strafing a tank in his Mustang

00:31:42.860 | and saw at really low altitude

00:31:48.100 | and saw what his bullets did to the guy

00:31:50.860 | and could see his face and everything like that,

00:31:52.900 | which is even one remove or more removes

00:31:56.340 | from an infantryman, what an infantryman does.

00:31:59.180 | And he said that same thing that I said,

00:32:02.000 | that it just changes you and you can never say it,

00:32:04.620 | never look at the world or look at anything

00:32:07.020 | the same way again.

00:32:08.620 | - And when that happens at scale,

00:32:10.700 | so it's thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds,

00:32:13.120 | that changes entire societies.

00:32:14.580 | I mean, that's what we've seen.

00:32:16.540 | - At least it, but the problem is

00:32:18.180 | it doesn't change the politicians back home.

00:32:20.420 | - Right.

00:32:21.260 | How important is mortality, finiteness,

00:32:26.700 | the fact that this thing ends to the creative process?

00:32:32.260 | So killing in war really emphasizes that,

00:32:37.260 | but in general, the fact that this thing ends.

00:32:41.340 | - It does?

00:32:43.860 | - It does.

00:32:44.700 | - Shit.

00:32:49.420 | And on a serious note, do you think about your own mortality?

00:32:53.660 | Do you meditate on your own mortality

00:32:55.540 | when you think about the work you do?

00:32:57.260 | - That's another great question, Alex.

00:32:59.380 | I actually, I'm 75 and I just was having,

00:33:03.500 | I had breakfast in New York a few months ago

00:33:05.660 | with a friend of mine who's like my exact same age.

00:33:08.940 | And I said to him, I said,

00:33:10.660 | "Nick, do you ever think about mortality?"

00:33:12.980 | And he said, "Every fucking minute of every day."

00:33:16.740 | And I was kind of relieved to hear that because I do too.

00:33:21.060 | But I actually, I always have, I think.

00:33:24.700 | And I think, you know, the fact of mortality

00:33:28.700 | is kind of gives meaning to life.

00:33:32.260 | You know, I think that's why we wanna create.

00:33:34.560 | That's why we wanna make a mark of some kind or,

00:33:40.580 | and the other aspect of it is

00:33:44.300 | what's on the other side of that mortality.

00:33:47.380 | I'm a believer in previous lives.

00:33:49.780 | So I sort of, and I,

00:33:53.100 | the question I've never been able to answer

00:33:55.300 | among many, many others is like, why are we even here?

00:33:59.040 | Why are we in the flesh?

00:34:01.940 | You know, I sort of, I like to believe that God

00:34:04.360 | or some force is, we're on some kind of journey.

00:34:10.280 | But I'm not sure why we were put in this world

00:34:15.280 | where the ground rules are, if you think about animal life,

00:34:18.920 | that you cannot live from one day to the next

00:34:22.680 | without killing and eating some other form of life.

00:34:26.800 | I mean, what a demented thing, you know?

00:34:29.820 | Why couldn't we just have a solar panel on our head

00:34:33.120 | and, you know, be friends with everybody?

00:34:35.520 | So I sort of, I don't get what that was all about,

00:34:40.200 | but that's sort of the big issue.

00:34:42.400 | - Have you read the Ernest Becker's "The Null of Death,"

00:34:44.960 | for example?

00:34:46.200 | Is that Ernest Becker's a philosopher

00:34:48.120 | that said that the death,

00:34:52.120 | that the fear of death is really the primary driver

00:34:57.120 | of everything we do.

00:34:58.460 | So Freud had what, the--

00:35:00.480 | - Right, I would agree with that.

00:35:02.440 | - So to you, you've always thought about your,

00:35:04.720 | even your own mortality.

00:35:06.120 | - Yes, definitely.

00:35:07.920 | - And can you elaborate on the reincarnation aspect

00:35:12.920 | of what you were talking about?

00:35:14.800 | Like that we kind of,

00:35:16.400 | what's your sense that we had previous lives?

00:35:19.620 | In what, have you thought concretely

00:35:22.760 | or is it a lot of it kind of is--

00:35:24.920 | - No, I've thought concretely about it.

00:35:27.560 | I mean, it's very clear when you see children,

00:35:32.560 | young kids, or even dogs and cats,

00:35:36.800 | that they come into the world with personalities.

00:35:40.240 | You know, and three kids in a family

00:35:41.920 | are gonna be completely different

00:35:43.720 | and completely their own person.

00:35:45.440 | And that person that they are doesn't change over life.

00:35:50.440 | And I, you know, there's one of the things that I did in

00:35:56.000 | my book, "The Artist's Journey,"

00:35:59.020 | is that there were certain things where I tracked

00:36:01.760 | or just listed in order,

00:36:02.880 | like all of Bruce Springsteen's albums

00:36:05.400 | or all of Philip Roth's books,

00:36:07.480 | you know, kind of a body of work throughout over,

00:36:09.960 | you know, a period of 30, 40, 50 years, you know.

00:36:13.000 | And you can see that there's a theme running through

00:36:18.000 | all of those things,

00:36:19.600 | that it's completely unique to that person.

00:36:22.760 | Nobody else could have written Philip Roth's books

00:36:25.160 | or Bruce Springsteen's songs.

00:36:28.040 | And you can even see sort of a destiny there.

00:36:31.600 | So I asked myself, well, where did that come from?

00:36:36.000 | What, it seems to be a continuation of something

00:36:40.520 | that was, that happened before,

00:36:42.720 | and that will lead to something else,

00:36:44.400 | because it's not starting from scratch.

00:36:47.000 | It seems like there's a calling,

00:36:51.240 | a destiny in there already.

00:36:53.320 | This gets back to the muse and all that kind of thing.

00:36:56.020 | - So yeah, it's almost like the, there's this,

00:36:59.520 | let's call it a god, it's passing,

00:37:03.280 | it's almost like sampling parts of a previous human

00:37:07.300 | that has lived and putting those into the new one.

00:37:10.820 | - Sampling, this is probably a pretty good word.

00:37:14.040 | - Taking some of the good,

00:37:14.960 | well, you can't take all the good parts,

00:37:16.560 | because the bad parts is what makes the person.

00:37:18.960 | - Right.

00:37:19.800 | - So you're taking it all together.

00:37:21.160 | Okay, is this humans only,

00:37:23.200 | or does it pass around from animals in your view?

00:37:26.320 | - I don't know, that's above my pay grade, I don't know.

00:37:29.600 | - So, okay, so you talk about the muse

00:37:33.200 | as the source of ideas, maybe.

00:37:38.200 | Since you've gotten a few glimpses of her in your writing,

00:37:44.280 | tell me, what is it possible for you to tell me about her?

00:37:49.440 | Where does she reside?

00:37:53.720 | What does she look like?

00:37:54.960 | - I mean, you can look at it in many different ways.

00:37:57.680 | The Greeks did it in an anthropomorphic way, right?

00:38:00.520 | They created gods that were like human beings.

00:38:02.800 | But if you look at it from a Kabbalistic Jewish perspective,

00:38:07.440 | Jewish mysticism, you could say that it's the soul,

00:38:10.320 | the neshama, right?

00:38:11.840 | That the soul is above us on a higher plane,

00:38:14.360 | our own, your soul, my soul,

00:38:16.520 | and it's trying to reach down to us

00:38:19.760 | and communicate with us.

00:38:21.400 | And we're trying simultaneously to reach up to it

00:38:24.680 | through prayer or through, if you're a writer or an artist,

00:38:28.840 | when you sit down at the keyboard,

00:38:31.000 | you're entering into a kind of prayer.

00:38:33.560 | You're entering into a different state

00:38:35.520 | of an altered consciousness, to some extent.

00:38:39.480 | You're opening yourself, opening the pipeline,

00:38:41.960 | turning on the radio to tune into the cosmic radio station.

00:38:46.600 | And another way of looking at it,

00:38:48.280 | this is, did you ever see the movie "City of Angels"?

00:38:53.800 | The visual of the movie, it was Meg Ryan and--

00:38:58.240 | - Oh, Nicholas Cage? - Nicholas Cage.

00:38:59.320 | - Yeah, yeah, I've seen it, yep.

00:39:01.200 | - And right, the visual of the movie sort of was

00:39:04.240 | Meg Ryan is a heart surgeon.

00:39:08.960 | And as she's operating on somebody,

00:39:11.320 | suddenly Nicholas Cage in this long duster coat,

00:39:14.800 | like Jesse James, appears right next to her

00:39:17.680 | in the operating room, and he's an angel.

00:39:19.940 | And he's waiting to take out the soul of the patient

00:39:24.600 | on the operating table.

00:39:26.980 | And she doesn't see him, she's totally unaware of him,

00:39:29.740 | and so is everybody else in the operating room,

00:39:31.820 | except maybe the guy who's about to die,

00:39:33.860 | who suddenly sees him.

00:39:35.460 | But I kind of believe that there are beings like that,

00:39:40.460 | or if you don't like that, it's a force,

00:39:44.620 | it's a consciousness, it's something,

00:39:46.860 | that are right here, right now.

00:39:49.780 | And they're trying to communicate to us.

00:39:53.560 | And like through a membrane,

00:39:57.180 | like tapping on that window over there,

00:39:59.180 | they're like right out there.

00:40:00.740 | And they carry the future.

00:40:03.580 | They are everything that is in potential.

00:40:08.140 | All the works that you will do, Lex,

00:40:11.340 | your startup, whatever else you're doing,

00:40:14.460 | they know that.

00:40:17.780 | And it's not really you that's coming up with those ideas,

00:40:21.420 | in my opinion.

00:40:22.680 | Those things are appearing,

00:40:24.740 | it's like somebody knocks on the door and puts it in.

00:40:28.100 | I mean, in the Iliad, where gods and goddesses appear,

00:40:33.100 | along with the human antagonists

00:40:35.860 | on the battlefield all the time, right?

00:40:37.980 | There'll be Homer flashes to Olympus

00:40:40.900 | and then back to the real world.

00:40:42.540 | And there's a thing where one Aphrodite,

00:40:45.300 | let's say, wants to help Paris.

00:40:47.900 | And so she says, "Well, I will appear to him in a dream.

00:40:52.460 | "And I'll take the form of his brother.

00:40:55.760 | "And I'll say, bum-ba-da-bum-ba-da-bum."

00:40:57.680 | So that's creatures, beings on one dimension,

00:41:02.680 | as the Greeks saw it, communicating with,

00:41:06.620 | and I believe that that's exactly what's going on,

00:41:09.380 | in one, whatever analogy you wanna use.

00:41:12.580 | - That communication, to which degree

00:41:15.900 | do you play the role in that communication?

00:41:20.540 | As opposed to sitting at the computer,

00:41:23.140 | if you're a writer, and staring at the blank page,

00:41:27.180 | and putting in the time and waiting.

00:41:29.500 | So if, in your view,

00:41:34.300 | are these creatures basically waiting

00:41:40.400 | to tell you about your future? (laughs)

00:41:42.980 | Or is there choice?

00:41:44.980 | How many possible futures are there?

00:41:46.740 | How many possible ideas are there?

00:41:48.500 | - That's a great question.

00:41:49.700 | I think there's basically,

00:41:51.500 | yes, there are alternatives, you know,

00:41:55.140 | degrees within it.

00:41:56.820 | But if you look at Bruce Springsteen's albums,

00:41:59.760 | how much could he have done really differently?

00:42:05.860 | Yeah, you can just see there's a whole impetus

00:42:09.620 | going through the whole thing.

00:42:11.400 | And nothing was gonna shake him off that, you know?

00:42:14.120 | And yeah, maybe the river could have been different,

00:42:16.900 | could have been called something else,

00:42:18.700 | but he was dealing with certain issues.

00:42:23.100 | His conscious self was dealing with certain issues

00:42:26.260 | that were really out of his control.

00:42:28.060 | He was drawn, he was called to it, right?

00:42:30.940 | Nothing could stop him.

00:42:32.800 | And so it is sort of a partnership, I think,

00:42:37.340 | the creative process between,

00:42:40.180 | and creative impulse that's coming from some other place,

00:42:43.600 | or it's coming from deep within us

00:42:47.140 | is another way to look at it.

00:42:48.500 | You know, it's like if we're acorns

00:42:50.540 | and we're growing into oaks.

00:42:53.340 | So the conscious artist

00:42:58.220 | who's sitting there at the keyboard or whatever

00:43:01.040 | is applying his or her consciousness to that,

00:43:04.820 | but is also going into opening themselves

00:43:08.960 | to the unconscious or to this other realm,

00:43:11.140 | whatever that is.

00:43:13.140 | I mean, certainly songwriters for a million years have said,

00:43:16.560 | you know, a song just came into their head, right?

00:43:18.940 | Poem, just all they had to do is write it.

00:43:21.020 | But then you ever see that thing where,

00:43:23.940 | of Keats's notes for "A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever"?

00:43:28.340 | It's like covers an entire page.

00:43:29.740 | And it's like, you know, he's crossing this out

00:43:31.980 | and that out and the other thing.

00:43:32.820 | So his consciousness, his conscious mind is working on it.

00:43:36.660 | But I do think it's a partnership.

00:43:39.620 | And I think that,

00:43:41.080 | I know when I was first starting out as a writer,

00:43:43.600 | I worked in advertising

00:43:45.660 | and I tried to do novels that I could never do.

00:43:49.020 | I was like really unskilled

00:43:53.420 | at getting to that, tuning into that station.

00:43:56.760 | I just, I beat my brains out and was unable to do it,

00:44:01.900 | you know, except in, because I was sort of trying too hard.

00:44:05.320 | It was sort of like a Zen monk or a monk of some kind

00:44:08.980 | trying to meditate and just like constantly thoughts

00:44:12.500 | driving you crazy.

00:44:14.260 | But over time, you know, knock wood,

00:44:16.420 | I've kind of gotten better at it.

00:44:18.420 | And I can sort of let go of those,

00:44:22.220 | that part of me that's trying so hard.

00:44:25.500 | And so these angels can speak a little more easily

00:44:31.140 | through the membrane.

00:44:32.420 | - Can you put into words the process of letting go

00:44:36.780 | and clearing that channel of communication?

00:44:40.100 | What does it take?

00:44:41.100 | - That's another great question.

00:44:42.220 | For me, it just took, it took probably 30 years.

00:44:46.460 | And I don't even, I guess I would liken it to meditation

00:44:49.700 | even though I'm not a meditator.

00:44:51.300 | But it would seem to me to be one of the hardest things

00:44:54.740 | in the world to just sit still and stop thinking, right?

00:45:00.620 | And so it's very hard to put into words.

00:45:03.260 | And I think that's why these teachers of meditation

00:45:06.420 | use tricks and koans and stuff like that.

00:45:10.900 | But for me, at least, I think it was just a process

00:45:15.540 | of years and years and years of trying

00:45:17.940 | and finally of beating my head in the wall

00:45:20.580 | and finally little by little giving up

00:45:22.860 | the beating of the head.

00:45:25.140 | But there doesn't seem to be any trick.

00:45:28.020 | Everybody wants a hack these days.

00:45:30.620 | And I don't think there is a hack.

00:45:32.340 | If you look at it in terms of the goddess, the muse,

00:45:37.380 | she's watching you down there,

00:45:39.380 | beating your head in the wall.

00:45:40.820 | You're like a Marine going through an obstacle course

00:45:43.620 | or a martial artist trying to learn,

00:45:45.860 | you know, like Uma Thurman doing the casket,

00:45:48.860 | you know, trying to make that little four inch punch,

00:45:51.340 | you know?

00:45:52.180 | The muse or the goddess is just sort of watching going,

00:45:57.620 | "Alex, he's trying, he's trying.

00:45:59.620 | "I'm gonna come back in another couple of months

00:46:01.380 | "and see if he's still there."

00:46:03.140 | And finally she'll say, "All right, he's had it.

00:46:06.140 | "He's paid his dues.

00:46:08.480 | "I'm gonna give it to him."

00:46:09.820 | - So the hard work and the suffering, yeah.

00:46:13.580 | But, you know, I'm also being Russian

00:46:16.940 | in wrestling and martial arts.

00:46:18.780 | We're big into drilling technique.

00:46:21.140 | I was also just even getting at,

00:46:23.260 | certainly there's no shortcut.

00:46:26.380 | But is there a process?

00:46:28.100 | So you're at,

00:46:28.940 | the process of practice.

00:46:33.420 | So you had two.

00:46:35.660 | One, you had an example of meditation.

00:46:39.020 | So it's essentially the practice of meditation.

00:46:41.860 | Is you--

00:46:42.700 | - I think so.

00:46:43.520 | Well, a drill I think is a good way to look at it too.

00:46:45.980 | - But what are you drilling?

00:46:48.220 | You're just sitting and--

00:46:50.220 | - You're writing, you know?

00:46:51.780 | - Just writing.

00:46:52.620 | - You're writing, then you're looking at what you wrote,

00:46:55.540 | you know?

00:46:56.380 | You're hitting moments when it flows, you know?

00:47:00.660 | And then your other hitting moments

00:47:02.620 | where you just can't do anything.

00:47:03.740 | And you're trying to, from the moments where it flowed,

00:47:07.060 | you're trying to come back and look at it and say,

00:47:08.520 | "What did I do?

00:47:09.740 | "How did that happen?

00:47:11.520 | "Where was my mind?"

00:47:12.780 | You know?

00:47:13.780 | But I think it's just a process of over and over

00:47:16.300 | and over and over until finally it gets a little bit easier.

00:47:21.160 | - And did you always, when you read something,

00:47:25.300 | when you write, did you always have a pretty good radar

00:47:28.660 | for what's good and not after it's written?

00:47:32.160 | - No.

00:47:33.900 | (laughing)

00:47:34.940 | I think I do now, but no.

00:47:38.620 | It was always really hard for me to know what was good.

00:47:44.360 | - I mean, do you edit?

00:47:47.060 | The process of editing is the process of looking

00:47:50.900 | at what you've written and improving it.

00:47:54.100 | Are you a better writer or an editor?

00:47:56.420 | How often do you edit?

00:47:57.740 | - That's another great question.

00:47:59.260 | Great question, 'cause I do think that in writing,

00:48:01.940 | the real process of looking at it

00:48:03.700 | is the process that an editor does,

00:48:05.940 | rather than what a writer does.

00:48:08.060 | The gentleman I was just talking to on the phone

00:48:10.380 | is my editor, Sean Coyne, who was the guy

00:48:13.080 | who bought "Gates of Fire" when he was an editor

00:48:15.580 | at Doubleday, and who, basically,

00:48:18.460 | when I finish a book, I give it to him.

00:48:21.180 | And he gives me, you know, he,

00:48:24.820 | editing doesn't really mean like crossing out commas.

00:48:29.540 | It really means looking at the overall work

00:48:34.180 | and saying, does it work?

00:48:36.340 | And if it doesn't work, why doesn't it work?

00:48:39.060 | Is there something wrong here?

00:48:40.980 | You know, like if you were building the Golden Gate Bridge,

00:48:44.540 | you know, and one span was out of whack, you know,

00:48:46.580 | you could, and I think a really skilled editor,

00:48:50.260 | which Sean is, understands what makes a story tick,

00:48:54.860 | and he also has the perspective that I've lost

00:48:58.220 | in something I've wrote, 'cause I'm so close to it,

00:49:01.060 | to say, you know, this isn't working, and that is working.

00:49:06.020 | - What kind of advice has he given you?

00:49:07.700 | Is it like layout, like this story doesn't flow correctly,

00:49:12.700 | like you shouldn't start at this point,

00:49:15.180 | or does he even sit back at a higher level and say,

00:49:19.380 | I see what you're doing, but you could do better?

00:49:22.460 | - No, he doesn't do that.

00:49:23.380 | - Okay.

00:49:24.220 | - But a lot of it is about genre,

00:49:28.180 | and kind of defining what genre you're working in,

00:49:32.620 | and I'm gonna get up here to just bring something over here

00:49:37.100 | for the camera.

00:49:37.940 | This was one where Sean tore this down

00:49:42.540 | and made me start from scratch,

00:49:44.540 | and what the specifics of it were really,

00:49:47.820 | this is a supernatural thriller, that's the genre,

00:49:51.380 | sort of like "Rosemary's Baby" or "The Exorcist,"

00:49:55.980 | and what he showed me was that I had violated

00:50:00.460 | certain conventions of the genre,

00:50:02.540 | and you just can't do that, it's gotta be,

00:50:09.440 | you know, it has to be done the right way,

00:50:12.700 | and so he pointed out certain things to me.

00:50:17.060 | - Um, so he must be a prolific reader himself too, actually.

00:50:22.060 | That's such a tough job of editor.

00:50:26.060 | - Yeah, again, he was sort of born to do that,

00:50:28.620 | he just kind of glommed onto it,

00:50:30.540 | but since he was, his first job publishing, you know,

00:50:36.900 | cat thrillers, you know, cat detective books,

00:50:42.820 | you know, he studied how it works,

00:50:45.300 | what makes a story work, et cetera, et cetera,

00:50:47.140 | and so he really, he's great,

00:50:49.020 | and I think any really successful writer,

00:50:52.380 | unless they're utterly brilliant on their own,

00:50:55.380 | has gotta have a great editor behind them.

00:50:57.820 | - But you yourself edit as well.

00:51:00.140 | - I'm constantly trying to learn from him and teach myself.

00:51:04.020 | Everything you see in my blog posts

00:51:07.660 | that is about the craft of writing

00:51:09.500 | is me trying to teach myself the rules,

00:51:12.940 | so that, you know, I'm sure it's the same in martial arts

00:51:15.700 | or anything else, right?

00:51:16.940 | You try to not be dependent on that other person,

00:51:21.800 | 'cause it's so painful to make those mistakes.

00:51:24.340 | You really feel like, "God, I wish I could get it right

00:51:27.060 | "the first time, the next time I do it."

00:51:29.140 | - Well, in research, we go through that.

00:51:31.060 | In research, more than writing,

00:51:33.140 | so what you do is a little more solitary.

00:51:35.800 | In research, there's usually two, three, four people

00:51:38.340 | working on something together, and we write a paper,

00:51:41.240 | and there's that painful process of where you write it down

00:51:44.240 | and then you share it with other,

00:51:46.460 | and not only do they criticize the writing,

00:51:49.980 | they criticize the fundamental aspects

00:51:53.420 | of the approach you've taken.

00:51:54.960 | - I would think so.

00:51:55.800 | So it's exactly like, you know, they would say,

00:51:58.020 | you're attacking, you're asking the wrong questions, right?

00:52:00.300 | - The wrong questions, yeah,

00:52:01.140 | and that's extremely painful, especially when you,

00:52:03.700 | well, it's painful and helpful,

00:52:06.260 | but there's disagreement and so on,

00:52:09.380 | and through that comes out a better product in the end.

00:52:12.620 | If, 'cause you want to still have an ego,

00:52:15.680 | but you also wanna silence it every once in a while

00:52:17.960 | so there's a balance.

00:52:19.880 | In your book, The War of Art,

00:52:21.480 | you talk about resistance with a capital R,

00:52:24.720 | as the invisible force in this universe of ours

00:52:27.880 | that finds a way to prevent you

00:52:30.400 | from starting or doing the work.

00:52:34.460 | Where do you think resistance comes from?

00:52:39.120 | Why is there a force in our mind

00:52:40.840 | that's constantly trying to jeopardize our efforts

00:52:44.060 | with laziness, excuses, and so on?

00:52:46.600 | - That's another great question.

00:52:48.300 | I mean, in Jewish mysticism, in Kabbalistic thinking,

00:52:53.180 | it's called the yetzir hara, right?

00:52:55.440 | And it's a force that if this up here

00:52:58.480 | is your soul of Neshamah trying to talk to you,

00:53:01.600 | us down here, the yetzir hara

00:53:03.920 | is this negative force in the middle.

00:53:06.000 | So I'm not the only one that ever thought about this,

00:53:08.520 | but, and I don't know if anybody really knows the answer,

00:53:11.520 | but here's my answer.

00:53:13.000 | I think that there are two places

00:53:18.380 | where we as human beings can seat our identity.

00:53:21.600 | One is the ego, the conscious ego,

00:53:24.880 | and the other is the greater self.

00:53:27.440 | And the self in the Jungian sense,

00:53:30.200 | the self in the Jungian sense includes the unconscious

00:53:33.640 | and butts up against what Jung called the divine ground,

00:53:37.400 | which what I would call the muse, the goddess, or whatever.

00:53:40.560 | And I think, and the ego is just this little dot

00:53:43.360 | inside this bigger self.

00:53:45.480 | And the ego has a completely different view of life

00:53:50.480 | as from the self.

00:53:53.680 | The ego believes, I'm gonna give you a long answer here.

00:53:56.960 | - No, perfect.

00:53:57.920 | - The ego believes that death is real.

00:54:01.300 | The ego believes that time and space are real.

00:54:05.200 | The ego believes that each one of us

00:54:07.960 | is separate from the other.

00:54:09.840 | I'm separate from you.

00:54:11.240 | I could punch you in the face and it wouldn't hurt me.

00:54:14.400 | It would only hurt you.

00:54:16.200 | And in the ego's world, the dominant emotion is fear,

00:54:21.200 | because we are all made of flesh.

00:54:23.480 | We can all die.

00:54:24.320 | We can all be hurt.

00:54:25.160 | We can all be ruined, bump, and a bump.

00:54:26.840 | So we are protecting ourselves and even our desire to create

00:54:30.960 | as we were talking about before

00:54:32.400 | comes out of that fear of death.

00:54:35.040 | The self, on the other hand, the greater self

00:54:37.840 | that butts up against the divine ground,

00:54:40.000 | believes that death is not real,

00:54:42.520 | that time and space are not real,

00:54:45.000 | that the gods travel swift as thought.

00:54:47.480 | And the ego also believes that, I mean,

00:54:51.640 | the self believes that there's no difference

00:54:53.920 | between you and me, that we're all one.

00:54:55.480 | If I hurt you, I hurt myself, karma, right?

00:55:00.080 | And in the world of the self, of the greater self,

00:55:03.660 | the dominant emotion is love, not fear.

00:55:06.300 | Now, so I think that, let me, I'll go farther back here.

00:55:10.800 | I'll try a long way to answer your question.

00:55:13.000 | When Jesus died on the cross,

00:55:17.560 | or when the 300 Spartans

00:55:20.920 | willingly sacrificed their lives at Thermopylae,

00:55:24.120 | they were acting according to the rules of the self.

00:55:27.560 | Death is not real, no difference between you and me,

00:55:32.360 | time and space are not real, predominant emotion is love.

00:55:36.000 | So, in my opinion, we as conscious human vessels

00:55:41.000 | have, are in a struggle between these two things,

00:55:46.560 | the ego and the self.

00:55:48.160 | To me, resistance is the voice of the ego,

00:55:51.920 | saying, and it's a fearful voice,

00:55:55.580 | because if, when we identify with the self,

00:56:00.480 | we move our consciousness over to the self,

00:56:03.080 | as artists or scientists,

00:56:05.620 | opening ourselves up to the cosmic dimension,

00:56:08.040 | to the other forces,

00:56:10.920 | the ego is tremendously threatened by that,

00:56:13.320 | because if we're in that space, that head space,

00:56:18.280 | we don't need the ego anymore.

00:56:20.480 | So I think resistance is a voice of the ego

00:56:23.960 | trying to keep control of us.

00:56:27.280 | In a way, I'll give you a bad example, Trump is the ego.

00:56:31.560 | - That's probably a very good example, right?

00:56:33.880 | - You know, it's a zero-sum world for him,

00:56:38.840 | and for anybody that's in that,

00:56:41.360 | and the opposite of that would be somebody

00:56:43.980 | like Martin Luther King or Gandhi,

00:56:46.540 | and that's of course why they all wind up

00:56:49.420 | getting assassinated, because that voice,

00:56:52.360 | that ego is hanging on to itself,

00:56:55.280 | and feels so threatened by,

00:56:59.080 | I could talk more about this if you want.

00:57:01.720 | - No, for sure, that's fascinating,

00:57:04.160 | it's just, it's interesting why the fear

00:57:07.360 | is attached to the ego.

00:57:08.960 | I really like this dichotomy of ego and self

00:57:12.260 | and that struggle.

00:57:14.120 | It's just, ego has a, you know,

00:57:18.760 | the self-obsession of it,

00:57:20.560 | why fear is such a predominant thing,

00:57:25.400 | why is resistance trying to undermine everything?

00:57:29.140 | - It's fear, it's out of fear.

00:57:32.040 | Let's think about the whole thing in terms of stories.

00:57:34.800 | In a story, the villain is always resistance,

00:57:40.880 | is always the ego.

00:57:42.960 | The hero is always, of course always is not everything,

00:57:46.960 | but you know what I mean, pretty much,

00:57:48.600 | represents kind of the self.

00:57:50.600 | If you think about the alien on the spaceship,

00:57:53.680 | that's like the ultimate kind of villain,

00:57:55.360 | it keeps changing form, right?

00:57:57.240 | First it goes on the guy's face,

00:57:59.000 | then it pops out of his chest,

00:58:00.860 | but it always just has that one monomaniacal thing

00:58:05.360 | to destroy, you know?

00:58:07.760 | And just like the ego, just like resistance.

00:58:12.600 | And maybe alien is a bad example,

00:58:15.560 | because Sigourney Weaver has to sort of fight

00:58:18.680 | on the same terms as the alien,

00:58:20.880 | but maybe a better example might be

00:58:23.160 | something like "Casablanca",

00:58:24.800 | where in the end, the Humphrey Bogart character

00:58:28.920 | has to acting, operating out of the self,

00:58:32.520 | has to give up his selfish dream

00:58:37.360 | of going off with Ingrid Bergman,

00:58:39.520 | Neil Salon, the love of his life,

00:58:41.520 | and instead, puts her on a plane to Lisbon,

00:58:46.320 | while he goes off to fight the Nazis in the desert.

00:58:49.400 | I don't know if that's clear,

00:58:52.120 | but in almost every story,

00:58:54.880 | the villain is the ego, is resistance, is fear,

00:58:59.440 | is that zero-sum thing.

00:59:01.840 | And in almost every story, the hero is someone

00:59:05.480 | that is willing to make a sacrifice to help others.

00:59:11.320 | - It's letting go of that fear

00:59:13.680 | is what leads to productivity and to success.

00:59:15.960 | - Yeah.

00:59:16.800 | - Do you think there's a,

00:59:20.480 | this is probably the answer is either obvious or impossible,

00:59:25.880 | but do you think there's an evolutionary advantage

00:59:28.760 | to resistance?

00:59:31.400 | Like what would life look like without resistance?

00:59:35.800 | - That's another great question.

00:59:38.400 | I think, I also believe that resistance, like death,

00:59:43.200 | gives a meaning to life.

00:59:44.760 | If we didn't have it, it's gonna be, what would we be?

00:59:49.480 | We'd be in the Garden of Eden,

00:59:51.040 | picking fruit and just happy and stupid.

00:59:54.600 | And I do think that that myth of the Garden of Eden

00:59:58.880 | is really about this kind of thing,

01:00:00.840 | where Adam and Eve decide to sort of take matters

01:00:04.680 | into their own hands and acquire knowledge,

01:00:09.680 | that until then, God had said,

01:00:12.200 | "I'm the only one that's got that knowledge."

01:00:14.640 | And of course, once they've acquired that knowledge,

01:00:17.960 | they're cast out into the world you and I live in now,

01:00:21.560 | where they do have to deal with that fear

01:00:23.280 | and they do have to deal with all that stuff.

01:00:25.920 | It's the human condition.

01:00:27.800 | - It's the human condition, and the meaning

01:00:29.960 | and the purpose comes from the resistance being there

01:00:34.960 | and the struggle to overcome it.

01:00:38.560 | - To overcome it, right.

01:00:39.960 | And also, the other aspect of it is that

01:00:42.400 | it's not real at all.

01:00:45.240 | It's not even like it's an actual force.

01:00:48.200 | It's all here, right?

01:00:50.560 | So the sort of, in a way, it's sort of a surrender to it.

01:00:55.560 | - Yeah, surrender to its reality.

01:01:00.560 | - Sort of like turning on the light in a dark thing.

01:01:06.000 | It's like, it's gone.

01:01:07.120 | - But not quite, because it's never really--

01:01:11.160 | - Not quite, 'cause it comes back again tomorrow morning.

01:01:13.280 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:01:14.160 | So you have to keep changing light bulbs every day.

01:01:17.840 | So what's been, maybe recently, but in general,

01:01:20.840 | maybe in your life, what's been the most relentless

01:01:24.200 | or one of the more relentless sources of resistance

01:01:26.840 | to you personally?

01:01:28.240 | - I mean, it's always the same.

01:01:30.640 | It's about writing, for me,

01:01:32.320 | and evolving within my own body of work.

01:01:38.680 | It never goes away, it never gets any less.

01:01:44.440 | - Do you have particular excuses,

01:01:46.240 | particular justifications that come out?

01:01:50.520 | - No, it's always the same.

01:01:52.200 | Well, I would say it's always the same,

01:01:53.880 | but it's really not because resistance is so protean.

01:01:57.320 | It keeps changing form.

01:01:59.040 | And as you move to, hopefully, a higher level,

01:02:03.200 | resistance gets a little more nuanced

01:02:05.080 | and a little more subtle, trying to fake you out.

01:02:07.880 | But I think you learn that it's always there

01:02:12.040 | and you're always gonna have to face it.

01:02:14.440 | - I mean, your battle is sitting down

01:02:18.840 | and writing to some number of words to a blank page.

01:02:23.840 | Do you have a process there with this battle?

01:02:28.120 | Do you have a number of hours that you put in?

01:02:31.600 | Do you sit down?

01:02:32.440 | - Yeah, I'm definitely a believer

01:02:35.000 | that even though this battle is fought

01:02:37.560 | on the highest sort of spiritual level,

01:02:40.140 | that the way you fight it is on the most mundane,

01:02:43.160 | I'm sure it's like martial arts must be the same way.

01:02:46.920 | I mean, I go to the gym first thing in the morning

01:02:50.080 | and I sort of am rehearsing myself.

01:02:53.280 | The gym is called resistance training, right?

01:02:57.280 | You're working against resistance, right?

01:02:59.280 | And I don't wanna go, I don't wanna get out of bed.

01:03:01.680 | I hate that, you know?

01:03:02.780 | But I'm sort of fortifying myself to be ready for the day.

01:03:09.480 | And like I said, over Knockwood, over years,

01:03:13.800 | I've learned to sort of get into the right kind of mindset

01:03:17.160 | and it's not as hard for me as it used to be.

01:03:19.920 | The real resistance I think for me,

01:03:22.200 | and I think this is true for anybody,

01:03:23.600 | is the question of sort of what's the next idea?

01:03:26.900 | What's the next book?

01:03:29.120 | What's the next project that you're gonna work on?

01:03:31.520 | And when I ask that question, I'm asking it of the muse.

01:03:35.860 | I'm kind of saying, what do you want me,

01:03:38.040 | or I'm asking it of my unconscious.

01:03:40.460 | If we're looking at Bruce Springsteen's albums,

01:03:43.280 | it's kind of, well, what's the next album?

01:03:45.080 | Now he's on Broadway.

01:03:46.440 | That was a great idea, right?

01:03:48.120 | - Yeah, that was a great idea.

01:03:50.040 | - Where'd that come from, you know?

01:03:51.840 | And then for him, what's after that?

01:03:54.920 | Because that body of work is already alive.

01:04:00.800 | It already exists inside us,

01:04:07.080 | kind of like a woman's biological clock.

01:04:09.520 | And we have to serve it.

01:04:12.420 | And we have to, otherwise it'll give us cancer.

01:04:17.800 | I don't mean to say that if anybody has cancer,

01:04:19.520 | that they're not, but you know what I mean.

01:04:21.280 | It'll take its revenge on us.

01:04:24.120 | So the next resistance to me is sort of,

01:04:26.360 | or a big aspect of it is, what's next?

01:04:30.520 | When I finish the book I'm working on now,

01:04:31.840 | I'm not sure what I'm gonna do next.

01:04:33.840 | - But see, at the same time, you have a kind of,

01:04:36.240 | you have a sense that there is a Bruce Springsteen

01:04:42.720 | single line of albums.

01:04:46.040 | So it's already known somewhere in the universe

01:04:49.480 | what you're going to do next, is the sense you have.

01:04:51.960 | - In a sense, yes.

01:04:53.520 | I don't know if it's predetermined, you know?

01:04:55.960 | But there's something like that.

01:04:58.460 | - Yeah, I'd like to believe that there's,

01:05:03.440 | well, it's kind of like quantum mechanics, I guess.

01:05:06.480 | Once you observe it, maybe once you talk to the muse,

01:05:11.040 | it's one thing for sure.

01:05:13.600 | It was always going to be that one thing.

01:05:15.560 | But really, in reality, it's a distribution.

01:05:19.280 | It could be any number of things.

01:05:20.800 | - Yeah, I think so.

01:05:21.640 | There's alternate realities.

01:05:22.840 | - Alternate realities, yeah.

01:05:24.120 | - But they're not that far apart.

01:05:25.480 | I mean, Bruce Springsteen is not gonna write

01:05:28.320 | a Joni Mitchell song, you know?

01:05:30.640 | No matter how hard he tries.

01:05:31.480 | - He still went on Broadway, I mean, he still did that,

01:05:33.880 | which is not a Bruce Springsteen thing to do.

01:05:36.360 | So I think you're being, in retrospect,

01:05:40.000 | it all makes sense. - I think it is

01:05:40.840 | a Bruce Springsteen thing to do.

01:05:41.880 | It's a next sort of evolution for him.

01:05:43.780 | Why not take his music to there, you know?

01:05:46.880 | - In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense, I think.

01:05:50.400 | - Yeah.

01:05:51.440 | - If you pull it off, especially.

01:05:53.080 | Do you visualize yourself completing the work?

01:05:57.600 | Like Olympic athletes visualize getting the gold medal.

01:06:01.140 | Do you, you know, they go through,

01:06:06.080 | I mean, that's actually a really,

01:06:08.240 | you can learn something from athletes on that,

01:06:09.960 | 'cause years out, certainly two, three years out,

01:06:14.960 | some people do much longer, every day,

01:06:17.660 | you visualize how the day of the championship will go,

01:06:22.300 | the down to, I mean, everything,

01:06:24.660 | down to how will it feel to stand on the podium and so on.

01:06:27.900 | Do you do anything like that in how you approach writing?

01:06:31.220 | - No.

01:06:32.260 | - It's always in the moment.

01:06:33.580 | - Because, yeah, it is in the moment, I think.

01:06:35.700 | Because it's such a mystery, you just don't know.

01:06:37.620 | I think it's different from sports.

01:06:39.260 | - Right.

01:06:40.700 | 'Cause you don't know the destiny.

01:06:41.700 | There's no gold medal at the end.

01:06:43.700 | - No, in fact, I would like to think

01:06:48.060 | that as soon as you finish one,

01:06:50.320 | the next day, you're on the other.

01:06:53.620 | And in fact, hopefully, you've already started the other.

01:06:56.500 | You're already, you know, 100 pages into the other

01:07:00.920 | when you finish the first one.

01:07:03.260 | But it is a,

01:07:08.660 | it's a journey, it's a process.

01:07:10.100 | I don't think it is a, in fact,

01:07:11.940 | I think it's very dangerous to think that way.

01:07:14.260 | To think, oh, this, I'm gonna win the Oscar, you know?

01:07:20.700 | - It's interesting.

01:07:21.980 | For the creative process, it might be dangerous.

01:07:24.400 | Maybe you can, like, why is that dangerous?

01:07:29.120 | Because I kind of know where you're going--

01:07:30.820 | - 'Cause it's the ego.

01:07:32.300 | - It's the ego.

01:07:33.140 | - Because you're giving yourself over to the ego.

01:07:35.060 | You know, I keep saying this myself.

01:07:38.780 | My job, I'm a servant of the muse.

01:07:41.660 | I'm there to do what she tells me to do.

01:07:44.900 | And if I suddenly think, oh, I'm really,

01:07:48.300 | I just wanna, you know, whatever,

01:07:50.180 | the muse doesn't like that.

01:07:51.780 | And, you know?

01:07:54.300 | And she's on another dimension for me.

01:07:56.760 | - I'm trying to square that, 'cause I agree.

01:08:01.320 | I'm trying to square that with the,

01:08:04.380 | I think there's a meditation to visualizing success

01:08:07.980 | in the athletic realm, to where it focuses,

01:08:12.900 | it removes everything else away,

01:08:15.580 | to where you focus on this particular battle.

01:08:18.260 | I mean, I think that you can do that in many kinds of ways.

01:08:23.260 | And in sports, the ego serves a more important role,

01:08:28.700 | I think, than it does in writing.

01:08:31.660 | Any of the ego, there's something--

01:08:33.940 | - Well, let me, when you say that,

01:08:36.020 | I know what you mean, Lex.

01:08:37.300 | And I do think there is a sort of a,

01:08:40.260 | you know, it's interesting to watch interviews

01:08:43.260 | with Steph Curry, who's such, obviously such a nice guy,

01:08:48.060 | but he's got such tremendous self-confidence,

01:08:54.100 | but it doesn't border on ego so much,

01:08:58.540 | because he's worked so hard for it, you know?

01:09:01.140 | But he knows, so he has visualized.

01:09:04.500 | He has visualized maybe not so much winning,

01:09:07.260 | as just him being the best he can be,

01:09:11.820 | him being in the flow, doing his thing

01:09:16.780 | that he knows he can do.

01:09:18.100 | And I do think in the creative world,

01:09:21.320 | yeah, there is a sort of a thing like that,

01:09:23.220 | where you, where a choreographer or a filmmaker

01:09:28.940 | or whatever might be, do an internal thing

01:09:33.940 | where they're saying, I can make an Oscar-winning movie,

01:09:37.020 | I can direct this movie, you know?

01:09:39.100 | I'm banishing these thoughts that I'm not good enough.

01:09:42.060 | I can do that, I can edit it, I can score it,

01:09:45.420 | I can, you know, bumpity-bumpity-bump.

01:09:47.540 | But, and I don't think that's really ego.

01:09:49.420 | I think that's part of the process in a good way,

01:09:53.620 | like an athlete does that.

01:09:55.220 | - So, extreme confidence is what some

01:09:57.420 | of the best athletes come with.

01:09:59.580 | And you think it's possible to, as a writer,

01:10:02.940 | to have extreme confidence in yourself?

01:10:04.780 | - I do think so.

01:10:05.700 | You know, that I'm sure when John Lennon sat down

01:10:09.900 | to write a song, he felt like, shit, I can do this, you know?

01:10:14.300 | - I'm not so sure.

01:10:16.060 | I think, 'cause the great artists I've seen,

01:10:20.140 | you're haunted by self-doubt.

01:10:23.380 | It's that resistance, I mean, the confidence--

01:10:26.060 | - Yes, but I mean, I guess, but even beyond the self,

01:10:29.100 | within the self, above the self-doubt--

01:10:30.980 | - Oh, it's the bigger picture of the self.

01:10:32.580 | - Is self-belief, you know?

01:10:33.940 | Yeah, I'm freaking out, yeah, I'm worried

01:10:35.900 | that I'm not gonna be able to do it,

01:10:36.900 | but you know, I know, I can do this.

01:10:38.500 | - Yeah, and when you look at,

01:10:39.580 | when you take a bigger picture view of it.

01:10:41.940 | So, the writing process, is it fundamentally lonely?

01:10:46.940 | - No, because you're with your characters.

01:10:55.260 | You are.

01:10:56.100 | - So, you really put yourself in the world.

01:10:58.380 | - Absolutely, you know, I've written about this before,

01:11:02.460 | that I used to, my desk used to face a wall,

01:11:04.780 | instead of seeing, and people would say,

01:11:06.500 | well, don't you wanna look out the window?

01:11:08.380 | But I'm in here, I'm seeing the Spartans,

01:11:12.740 | I'm seeing whatever, and the characters that are on the page,

01:11:17.740 | or that you create, are not accidents, you know?

01:11:22.360 | They're coming out of some issue,

01:11:24.860 | some deep issue that you have,

01:11:27.340 | whether you realize it or not.

01:11:28.420 | You might not realize it 'til 20 years later,

01:11:30.300 | or somebody explains it to you.

01:11:31.940 | So, your characters are kind of fascinating to you,

01:11:35.220 | and their dilemmas are fascinating to you,

01:11:38.380 | and you're also trying to come to grips with them,

01:11:42.860 | you know, you sort of see them through a glass darkly,

01:11:46.340 | you know, and you really wanna see them more clearly.

01:11:49.140 | So, yeah, no, it's not lonely at all.

01:11:52.300 | In fact, I'm more lonely sometimes later,

01:11:55.200 | going out to dinner with some people,

01:11:56.660 | and actually talking to people.

01:11:58.220 | - Do you miss the characters after it's over?

01:12:02.540 | - Let's say I have affection for them,

01:12:06.340 | kind of like children that have gone off to college,

01:12:09.240 | and now are, you know, you only see them at Thanksgiving.

01:12:12.500 | Definitely, I have affection for them.

01:12:16.160 | Even the bad guys.

01:12:18.680 | (laughing)

01:12:20.860 | - Maybe especially the bad guys?

01:12:22.500 | - Especially the bad guys.

01:12:23.800 | - You've said that writers, even successful writers,

01:12:29.100 | are often not tough-minded enough.

01:12:32.340 | I've read that in a post,

01:12:34.540 | that you have to be a professional

01:12:35.820 | in the way you handle your emotions.

01:12:38.460 | You have to be a bit of a warrior to be a writer.

01:12:41.740 | So, what are, what do you think makes a warrior?

01:12:47.340 | Is a warrior born or trained in the realm,

01:12:51.580 | in the bigger realm, in the realm of writing,

01:12:53.780 | in the creative process?

01:12:55.100 | - I think they're born to some extent.

01:12:57.580 | You have the gift, like you might have the gift

01:12:59.840 | as a martial artist to do whatever martial artists do.

01:13:02.820 | But the training is the big thing.

01:13:05.140 | 90% training, 10% genetics.

01:13:09.100 | And, you know, I use another analogy, other than warrior,

01:13:13.740 | as far as writer, and that's like to be a mother.

01:13:16.580 | If you think about, if you're a writer,

01:13:19.220 | or any creative person, you're giving birth to something,

01:13:21.420 | right, you're carrying a new life inside you.

01:13:23.860 | And in terms of bravery, if your child,

01:13:28.860 | your two-year-old child is underneath a car,

01:13:32.140 | is coming down the street,

01:13:33.580 | the mother's gonna like stop a Buick,

01:13:35.780 | you know, with her bare hands.

01:13:37.900 | So that's another way to think about

01:13:41.220 | how a writer has to think about,

01:13:43.380 | or any creative person has to think about, I think,

01:13:46.060 | what they're doing, what this child,

01:13:49.460 | this new creation that they're bringing forth.

01:13:51.760 | - Yeah, so the hard work that's underlying that.

01:13:57.100 | I've just, a couple weeks ago, talked to,

01:13:59.760 | just happened to be in the same room,

01:14:01.860 | both gave talks, Arianna Huffington.

01:14:03.940 | I did this conversation with her.

01:14:05.900 | I didn't know much about her before then,

01:14:11.100 | but she has recently been, she wrote a couple books,

01:14:14.420 | and been promoting a lifestyle where,

01:14:18.220 | she basically, she created the Huffington Post,

01:14:20.260 | and she gave herself, like, I don't know,

01:14:23.180 | 20 hours a day, just obsessed with her work.

01:14:26.620 | And then she fainted, passed out,

01:14:29.300 | and kind of, there was some health issues.

01:14:31.660 | And so she wrote this book saying that, you know, sleep,

01:14:36.180 | basically you wanna establish a lifestyle

01:14:38.900 | that doesn't sacrifice health,

01:14:41.360 | that's productive but doesn't sacrifice health.

01:14:43.500 | She thinks that you can have both, productivity and health.

01:14:46.420 | Criticizing Elon Musk, who I've also spoken with,

01:14:49.860 | for working too hard, and thereby sacrificing,

01:14:54.700 | you know, being less effective than he could be.

01:14:59.420 | So I'm trying to get at this balance

01:15:02.100 | between health and obsessively working at something,

01:15:06.820 | and really working hard.

01:15:09.100 | So what Arianna is talking about makes sense to me,

01:15:12.140 | but I'm a little bit torn.

01:15:13.580 | To me, passion and reason do not overlap much,

01:15:17.140 | or at all, sometimes.

01:15:19.140 | Maybe I'm being too Russian, but.

01:15:20.880 | (laughing)

01:15:22.980 | I feel madness and obsession does not care for health,

01:15:26.340 | or sleep, or diet, or any of that.

01:15:28.620 | And hard work is hard work,

01:15:32.860 | and everything else can go to hell.

01:15:34.200 | So if you're really focused on, whether it's writing a book,

01:15:37.420 | it should, everything should just go to hell.

01:15:40.900 | Where do you stand on this balance?

01:15:43.140 | How important is health for productivity?

01:15:45.300 | How important is it to sort of get sleep, and so on?

01:15:49.340 | - I'm on the health side.

01:15:51.360 | I mean, there was a period of my life when I was just,

01:15:56.440 | I had no obligations, and I was just living

01:16:00.900 | in a little house, and just working nonstop, you know?

01:16:05.340 | But even then, I would get up in the morning,

01:16:07.260 | and I would have liver and eggs for breakfast.

01:16:10.460 | Every day, and I would do my exercise, whatever it was.

01:16:13.780 | But although I was still doing 18 hours a day.

01:16:16.820 | But I'm definitely, I kind of think of it

01:16:20.420 | sort of like an athlete does.

01:16:22.180 | I'm sure that like Steph Curry is totally committed

01:16:27.180 | to winning championships and stuff like that.

01:16:29.980 | But he has his family, he sees his family,

01:16:32.180 | family is always there.

01:16:33.740 | He, I'm sure he eats perfect, great stuff,

01:16:38.940 | gets his sleep, you know, gets the train,

01:16:43.940 | whatever a trainer does to him for his knees

01:16:45.900 | and his ankles and whatever.

01:16:47.340 | So, or Kobe Bryant or anybody that's operating

01:16:51.180 | at a high level.

01:16:52.620 | So I do think I'm from that kind of the health school.

01:16:55.040 | The good thing about being a writer

01:16:57.520 | is you can't work very many hours a day.

01:17:00.860 | You know, four hours is like the maximum I can work.

01:17:03.860 | I've never been able to work more than that.

01:17:05.600 | I don't know how people do it.

01:17:06.860 | I've heard of people do 10, 12, I don't know how they do it.

01:17:11.220 | So that gives you a lot of other time to do it.

01:17:14.700 | - Optimize your health.

01:17:16.220 | - Yeah, to optimize your health.

01:17:17.060 | 'Cause you need to, you're in training.

01:17:18.780 | You know, you're really, you're burning up

01:17:21.300 | a lot of B vitamins when you're working here.

01:17:23.500 | (laughing)

01:17:24.540 | - Yeah, but.

01:17:25.480 | - Maybe it's a Russian thing with you, Lex.

01:17:28.860 | - Well, it's not even a Russian thing.

01:17:29.900 | I mean--

01:17:30.740 | - It also may be youth, you know?

01:17:32.260 | At 35, you can be crazy.

01:17:35.420 | - You know, that's what they keep telling me,

01:17:38.060 | but I'm pretty sure I'll be at it still at a later time, too.

01:17:43.060 | I think it has to do with the career choice, too.

01:17:47.100 | I think writing is almost, from everything I've heard,

01:17:51.540 | it's almost impossible to do more than a few hours

01:17:54.740 | really well.

01:17:56.340 | The, when you start to get into certain disciplines,

01:17:58.780 | like with Elon Musk and me, engineering disciplines,

01:18:02.620 | that really there's a lot more non-muse time needed.

01:18:07.620 | - Right, right, right.

01:18:10.100 | - So the crazy hours that you're talking,

01:18:13.620 | that you often are talking about have to be done.

01:18:18.620 | And it doesn't--

01:18:20.060 | - I think that's true.

01:18:22.100 | - Yeah, so there's still the two, three hours of muse time

01:18:25.900 | needed for truly genius ideas,

01:18:27.680 | but it's something I certainly struggle with.

01:18:32.300 | But yeah, I hear you loud and clear on the health.

01:18:37.300 | So what does a perfect day look like for you

01:18:44.220 | if we're talking about writing?

01:18:46.740 | An hour by hour schedule of a perfect day.

01:18:49.200 | - I get up early, I go to the gym,

01:18:54.380 | I have breakfast with some friends of mine.

01:18:57.380 | - What's early, by the way?

01:18:58.660 | That's, like, how early?

01:19:00.340 | - 3.15.

01:19:02.100 | - AM. - AM.

01:19:03.860 | - So we're talking really early.

01:19:05.340 | - Really early.

01:19:06.220 | Now, I'm crazy early, it's ridiculously early.

01:19:09.020 | But, and I haven't done that always,

01:19:10.940 | but that's kind of what I'm on now.

01:19:13.740 | So I'm in bed, like, when I'm with my nephews

01:19:19.180 | that are, like, four years old and three years old,

01:19:21.260 | I'm in bed before them.

01:19:22.700 | - Okay, you gotta be, you wake up,

01:19:26.180 | sorry, you said exercise first.

01:19:28.380 | - Yeah.

01:19:29.700 | - And what does that look like?

01:19:30.820 | What's exercise for you?

01:19:32.180 | You go out to the gym?

01:19:33.020 | - I go to the gym.

01:19:33.840 | I have a trainer, I have a couple of guys

01:19:37.420 | that I work out with, and I'll, you know,

01:19:41.020 | it's maybe an hour, maybe a little more.

01:19:43.180 | I'll do a little warmup before, stretching afterwards,

01:19:45.660 | take a shower, go have breakfast.

01:19:47.400 | But it's an intense kind of a thing

01:19:51.660 | that I definitely don't wanna do that's hard, you know?

01:19:55.860 | - So you feel like you've accomplished something,

01:19:57.500 | first thing. - Yeah.

01:19:59.020 | - That's a big accomplishment of the day.

01:19:59.860 | - But at the same time, it's not, like, so hard

01:20:02.540 | that I'm completely exhausted, you know?

01:20:04.940 | And then I'll come home and handle whatever correspondence

01:20:10.100 | and stuff has to be done, and then I work

01:20:11.580 | for maybe three hours, and then I just sort of crash.

01:20:15.580 | The office is closed, I turn the switch,

01:20:18.900 | I don't think about anything, I don't think about the work

01:20:22.360 | at all.

01:20:23.380 | - Do you listen to, oh, you mean afterwards?

01:20:25.660 | - After work, once the office is closed.

01:20:27.620 | - But during, so this was like 12 to three kind of thing?

01:20:31.020 | - Something like that, yeah. - Something like that, okay.

01:20:33.540 | Do you listen to music? - No.

01:20:34.980 | - Do you have anything? - But that's just me.

01:20:37.060 | I mean, I don't think, you know, but somebody could do it

01:20:39.340 | a million different ways. - It's fascinating.

01:20:40.500 | It's fascinating, you know, the, I mean, you've also,

01:20:45.500 | of most, of many writers, you've really,

01:20:48.880 | but like I've read Stephen King's writing,

01:20:51.900 | you've optimized this conversation

01:20:55.180 | with the muse you're having.

01:20:56.420 | Not optimized, but you've at least thought about it.

01:20:59.700 | So what's, can you say a little bit more

01:21:02.660 | about the trivialities of that process of,

01:21:06.240 | like you said, facing the wall?

01:21:10.660 | What's, do you have little rituals?

01:21:13.300 | - You mean like the granular aspect of it?

01:21:15.300 | - The granular aspects, yeah.

01:21:17.000 | Is there-- - I do have little rituals.

01:21:20.660 | I do have all kinds of, which I'm not even

01:21:22.300 | gonna tell you about. - Sure.

01:21:23.700 | - But the one thing, and I don't wanna like

01:21:28.700 | talk about this too much 'cause it sort of

01:21:31.340 | jinxes things, I think, but the one thing

01:21:33.020 | I do try to do is when I sit down,

01:21:37.140 | I immediately get into it, first second.

01:21:41.060 | I don't sit and fuck around with anything.

01:21:43.700 | I immediately try to get into it as quickly as I can.

01:21:47.300 | The other thing is that writing a book or screenplay

01:21:50.740 | or anything like that is a process of multiple drafts.

01:21:54.060 | And it's the first draft that's where you're most

01:21:57.580 | with the muse, where you're going through the blank page.

01:22:00.660 | Like right now, I'm on, I don't know what,

01:22:02.900 | the fifth or sixth, seventh draft of the thing

01:22:04.940 | I'm working on, so I've got pages already written.

01:22:09.340 | And I'm kind of reading them afresh

01:22:12.180 | as I go through the story.

01:22:14.860 | So it's not quite where I am now.

01:22:17.500 | It's not quite a deep muse scenario.

01:22:21.060 | Partly it is, but it's also sort of bouncing back and forth

01:22:25.940 | between the right brain and the left brain.

01:22:28.580 | I'm kind of looking at it and trying to evaluate it.

01:22:31.660 | Then I'm going into it and try to change it a little bit.

01:22:34.780 | - Do you know, sit down, get right into it,

01:22:38.660 | do you know the night before of what that starting point is?

01:22:43.620 | - I always try to stop, and I learned this,

01:22:47.020 | I think Hemingway wrote about this, or John Steinbeck,

01:22:49.300 | or maybe both of them, to always stop

01:22:52.580 | when you kind of know what's coming next,

01:22:54.820 | so that you're not at a, facing a chasm, you know?

01:22:58.260 | - Yeah, okay, so and afterwards, when you're done,

01:23:02.300 | the office is closed.

01:23:03.420 | - The office is closed, I let the muse take care of it,

01:23:05.300 | you know, and I don't want to,

01:23:07.420 | and I think it's a very unhealthy thing

01:23:09.780 | to worry about it or think about any creative process.

01:23:14.460 | You don't, like on a long walk later, think about--

01:23:18.740 | - Yeah, then I will sort of keep my mind open to it,

01:23:22.260 | but I won't be like obsessing about it.

01:23:24.380 | - Right, okay.

01:23:25.220 | - 'Cause actually on walks,

01:23:26.740 | sometimes things will pop into your head, you know,

01:23:28.380 | and you'll go, oh, I should change that.

01:23:30.380 | But that's not your ego doing it, that's a deeper level.

01:23:35.280 | - Okay, so how does the day end?

01:23:38.620 | So go-- - In terms of writing?

01:23:39.820 | - So yeah, the writing, well no, the writing,

01:23:43.180 | the office door closes, and then the rest of the day,

01:23:47.100 | just do whatever the hell.

01:23:48.540 | - Maybe go out to dinner, my girlfriend is not here now,

01:23:52.460 | she's in New York working, we'll make dinner or whatever,

01:23:56.100 | go out to dinner, something like that,

01:23:57.420 | and maybe I'll read something, nothing heavy.

01:24:01.300 | And I go to bed pretty early,

01:24:04.700 | and the gym is a big thing for me.

01:24:08.300 | I'll already, probably like with you with martial arts,

01:24:11.500 | the night before I'll be visualizing

01:24:13.700 | what I have to do the next day,

01:24:16.380 | and getting myself psyched up for that.

01:24:20.060 | And then I'll just conk out like a light

01:24:22.180 | and wake up at the crack of dawn.

01:24:24.380 | - So looking out into the future,

01:24:28.140 | this year, next few years,

01:24:30.960 | what do you think the muse has in store for you?

01:24:33.360 | - I don't think you can ever know.

01:24:36.660 | It's probably something along the same,

01:24:40.080 | I really believe there's that exercise

01:24:43.780 | where they say to you,

01:24:45.820 | visualize yourself five years in the future,

01:24:48.220 | and write a letter from that person to yourself.

01:24:50.860 | I don't believe in that at all,

01:24:52.340 | because I don't think you can,

01:24:54.500 | there's a line out of Africa that,

01:24:57.980 | God made the world round

01:24:59.380 | so that we couldn't see too far ahead.

01:25:01.920 | You just don't know as a writer or as a person.

01:25:09.180 | I never knew, my first book was "A Legend of Bagger Vance".

01:25:12.180 | Before that happened, I had no clue

01:25:15.920 | that I was gonna be writing anything like that

01:25:17.880 | on that subject, anything at all,

01:25:19.640 | no clue until it just sort of came.

01:25:22.240 | And then when that was done,

01:25:24.440 | people said, "Well, you gotta write another one."

01:25:25.760 | I had no idea what it was,

01:25:27.200 | which was gonna be "Gates of Fire".

01:25:28.880 | No clue.

01:25:30.160 | So if somebody had sat me down at the start of that

01:25:34.640 | and asked the question,

01:25:37.220 | I would have been crazy to say it.

01:25:39.660 | So I just hope, as the future unfolds,

01:25:44.100 | that I'm open to it, you know?

01:25:46.420 | - Well, I think I speak for a lot of people

01:25:50.380 | in saying that we look forward to

01:25:53.220 | what that future looks like.

01:25:54.780 | Steven, thank you so much for talking today.

01:25:56.460 | It was fun. - Hey, it's a great,

01:25:57.380 | you got the best job in the world

01:25:58.720 | going around talking to people that you wanna talk to

01:26:01.900 | and that they will talk to you, you know?

01:26:04.220 | - So thank you for doing it.

01:26:05.300 | - Hey, thank you for the great questions.

01:26:06.720 | You made me think.

01:26:07.560 | I've certainly a bunch of questions

01:26:08.820 | I never have answered before.

01:26:10.980 | - Awesome, thank you so much. - So thanks a lot.

01:26:12.500 | - Great. - Thank you.

01:26:14.180 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

01:26:15.700 | with Steven Pressfield.

01:26:17.020 | And thank you to our sponsors,

01:26:19.260 | the Jordan Harbinger Show and Cash App.

01:26:22.540 | Please consider supporting the podcast

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01:26:36.680 | If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,

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01:26:46.640 | spelled without the E, just F-R-I-D-M-A-N.

01:26:51.160 | And now let me leave you with some words

01:26:54.060 | from Steven Pressfield.

01:26:56.040 | Are you paralyzed by fear?

01:26:58.160 | That's a good sign.

01:26:59.640 | Fear is good.

01:27:00.860 | Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator.

01:27:03.940 | Fear tells us what we have to do.

01:27:06.840 | Remember one rule of thumb.

01:27:08.820 | The more scared we are of a work or a calling,

01:27:12.280 | the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

01:27:15.300 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

01:27:19.940 | (upbeat music)

01:27:22.520 | (upbeat music)

01:27:25.100 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Steven Pressfield: The War of Art | Lex Fridman Podcast #102

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