How to Overcome Inner Resistance

00:00:00.000 | For years when I was struggling and could never get it together, I realized that at one point that

00:00:05.900 | I was just thinking like an amateur and that if I could flip a switch in my mind and think like a

00:00:11.480 | professional, that I could overcome some of the things. A professional shows up every day. A

00:00:17.680 | professional stays on the job all day or the equivalent of all day. A professional, as I said

00:00:24.420 | this before, does not take success or failure personally. An amateur will, right? An amateur

00:00:30.480 | gets a bad review, bad response of this, and they just crap out. I don't want to do this anymore.

00:00:34.520 | A professional plays hurt. Like if Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, you know, if they've tweaked the

00:00:41.380 | hamstring, they're out there, you know. They'll die before they'll be taken off the court. Whereas

00:00:46.400 | an amateur, when he or she confronts adversity, will fold. Oh, it's too cold out, you know, I've got

00:00:54.180 | a, I've got a, you know, I've got the flu, that kind of thing. An amateur worries about how they

00:01:00.580 | feel. Like, oh, I don't feel like getting out of bed this morning. I don't feel like really doing my

00:01:06.000 | work today. A professional doesn't care how they feel. They do it. So an amateur has amateur habits

00:01:12.900 | and a professional has professional habits. Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science

00:01:18.620 | and science-based tools for everyday life.

00:01:25.020 | I'm Dr. Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford

00:01:29.420 | School of Medicine. My guest today is Steven Pressfield. Steven Pressfield is an author of

00:01:34.860 | numerous historical fiction and nonfiction books, including the now iconic War of Art and also the

00:01:40.580 | book Do the Work, which both focus on understanding the forces in our minds that barrier us from being

00:01:46.340 | our most focused, creative, and productive selves, and more importantly, how to overcome those barriers.

00:01:51.740 | Perhaps it's because Steven worked hard physical labor jobs and was in the military prior to becoming a book

00:01:57.260 | author and screenwriter. Or perhaps it's because he published his first book at age 52 that Steven

00:02:03.340 | really understands how to persevere and overcome inner doubt and procrastination and turn creative blocks

00:02:09.260 | into important creative works. As you'll hear during today's episode, Steven doesn't talk in

00:02:14.380 | inspirational slogans or metaphors. So none of this get after it or, you know, you just have to do the work.

00:02:19.420 | Steven Pressfield: Instead, he gets very concrete about how to structure your day, how to frame your

00:02:24.220 | goals and your setbacks, and even how to make your creative environment more conducive to focus and

00:02:29.340 | effort. We also talk about how to capture your best ideas, which, by the way, often occur away from the

00:02:34.300 | work that you're actually trying to do, and how to implement them. So if you have an idea or you're

00:02:39.260 | searching for an idea for a creative project to share with the world, this conversation will be immensely

00:02:44.140 | useful to you. It will also be extremely useful to anyone who suffers from procrastination and

00:02:48.860 | self-doubt, which frankly, I think is all of us at some point or another. I read Steven's book,

00:02:53.660 | The War of Art, some years ago, and I loved it. It transformed the way that I did my science, how I

00:02:57.980 | approached the podcast, and many, many other aspects of life. You'll also notice that at 82 years old,

00:03:03.740 | Steven is incredibly sharp and fit. So we talk about his physical regimen and the important role that it

00:03:08.780 | plays in keeping his mind active, productive, and overcoming resistance. Steven is not only very

00:03:13.980 | accomplished, he is also truly wise and generous, and today he shares a wealth of practical wisdom

00:03:19.740 | with us. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and

00:03:24.300 | research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer

00:03:29.180 | information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that

00:03:33.820 | theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Steven Pressfield.

00:03:39.740 | Steven Pressfield, welcome.

00:03:41.100 | Steven Pressfield: Andrew, it's a pleasure to be here. We're former neighbors, you know,

00:03:44.380 | so we've been talking about this for a while. It's great to be here.

00:03:46.620 | Yeah, I've been wanting to do this for a while. I've been reading your books for,

00:03:50.780 | goodness, a couple of decades now or more. First, War of Art. Then I started through the library.

00:03:59.820 | You've written a lot of books, non-fiction and fiction. It's been super impactful to me and

00:04:05.260 | many other people. I think everybody deals with procrastination. You'll tell us about resistance.

00:04:11.420 | But there's a quote out there. They claim is you. I'm going to assume it's you.

00:04:18.300 | Steven Pressfield: I'm laughing already.

00:04:20.700 | Steven Pressfield: And I recommend accepting that it's you, even if it's not, because it's a beautiful quote.

00:04:25.820 | Steven Pressfield: If it's a good quote, I'll take credit for it.

00:04:27.100 | Steven Pressfield: It's great. And I'd like your reflections on it and what you intended

00:04:32.060 | when you said it, which is, quote, "The more important to your soul's growth, the stronger

00:04:39.500 | the resistance will be," which for me was very counterintuitive. We all imagine the creative

00:04:45.820 | process as one of, you know, being inspired. Oh, this is my soul's work. And having a ton of motivation

00:04:54.060 | to get the work done, a ton of desire and drive. But the more important to your soul's growth,

00:05:00.220 | the stronger your resistance will be. Interesting.

00:05:03.580 | Steven Pressfield: Well, that's absolutely true. And what I meant by that was that

00:05:07.500 | when we conceive an idea for something we want to do, a movie we want to make or a book we want to make,

00:05:15.500 | it's not like at all like what the fantasy was of, oh, I'm really charged up. It's going to be great.

00:05:21.260 | What happens is waves of what I call resistance with a capital R start coming off that keyboard or

00:05:27.980 | whatever it is to try to stop us from doing it, make us procrastinate, make us, you know, go to the beach,

00:05:33.660 | make us, you know, give in to distractions, so on and so forth. But the weird principle is,

00:05:41.100 | and this is why I always say, if you want to know which one of three or four projects that you should

00:05:47.180 | do, you should do the one you're most afraid of, because that fear is a form of resistance with a

00:05:54.060 | capital R. And the more important a project is to your soul's evolution, not to your commercial success,

00:06:01.900 | but to your own evolution as an artist, the more resistance you will feel to it. So in other words,

00:06:08.380 | the thing that you really should be doing is going to be the hardest and is going to punch you in the

00:06:13.580 | face the hardest, which is why so many artists have such a hardcore professional attitude because

00:06:20.540 | they have to have it to be able to kind of stand up to that resistance to trying to push them away from

00:06:26.620 | from doing their project, whatever it is. The more important to your soul's evolution,

00:06:31.900 | the more resistance you're going to experience. But that's the project you should be doing.

00:06:36.540 | Yeah. Here's an analogy that I use sometimes, Andrew, and you may have heard me say this before.

00:06:43.500 | I think about if you can imagine a tree in the middle of a sunny meadow,

00:06:49.980 | as soon as the tree appears, a shadow is going to appear. And the shadow is going to be,

00:06:55.260 | the tree is your dream, whatever it is, right? A book, a movie, whatever. And the shadow is the

00:07:00.540 | resistance you're going to feel. And they're directly proportionate to each other. The bigger the tree,

00:07:05.740 | the bigger the shadow. So when you feel that shadow, you feel that massive reason, oh, I want to quit.

00:07:13.500 | I don't want to, I'm not good enough to do this, et cetera, et cetera. That's a good sign. And then it

00:07:18.780 | says that the tree, your dream is really big. And so you got to do it. That's not the,

00:07:25.500 | you don't want to take a little tree. You want to take the big tree.

00:07:27.820 | You have military training and background. You were a Marine, correct?

00:07:32.700 | Yeah. I was a reservist Marine infantryman.

00:07:35.340 | Mm-hmm. How much does your training as a Marine

00:07:39.580 | impact this concept of resistance and your suggestions for people and your ability to

00:07:47.260 | push through resistance?

00:07:47.980 | A tremendous amount. I think when I was going through bootcamp and infantry training and stuff

00:07:55.260 | like that, I hated it. And I thought, I just can't wait till I get out of this and just be a regular

00:08:00.140 | civilian again. But as I've grown and lived through the artist's life of writing, being in a room with

00:08:09.580 | your own demons for two or three years at a time, I've learned that kind of the virtues

00:08:14.380 | that you learn in the military are the same virtues that you have to call upon to live that war of art,

00:08:23.340 | the war inside your head. You know, the virtues of stubbornness, of the willing embracing of adversity,

00:08:32.220 | of patience, of selflessness, of courage, because it's about fear. And so, yeah,

00:08:38.300 | it's influenced me tremendously. And I found, sort of to my amazement, as I started writing fiction,

00:08:45.660 | that I was drawn to themes of war, even though I've never actually been in a war. But it's the inner war

00:08:54.460 | that interests me, the metaphor of war. So, yeah, a lot. It meant a lot.

00:08:59.100 | Do you think the physical training that you took part in when you were in the Marines has impacted,

00:09:06.380 | A, your current physical regimen? By the way, everybody, Stephen is 82 years old. I see him at

00:09:13.740 | the gym. He's there every morning, very early. What time do you get there?

00:09:18.220 | I get there at quarter to five? Quarter to five a.m., which is why I see him from time to time,

00:09:23.500 | because I'm not there at quarter to five. You're coming in. I'm going home. Yeah. And I sometimes

00:09:27.660 | train there and elsewhere. But you are very consistent. You train very early. So, clearly,

00:09:32.700 | you're in great physical and mental shape. It's awesome to see. You are, you know, with all the

00:09:38.300 | discussion about longevity, you are living proof. So, I am curious about your physical regimen and the

00:09:43.900 | extent to which your physical regimen impacts your ability to lean into and against resistance

00:09:50.620 | to do your creative work at the keyboard or with pen and paper. That's a great question.

00:09:54.380 | Going to the gym early, first thing for me, is a rehearsal for when I get home and I go to sit at the

00:10:05.260 | keyboard and I actually have to face the resistance of working that day, right? So, to me, the gym is

00:10:12.220 | about something that I don't want to do. I hate to get up that early in the morning and get there.

00:10:17.660 | It's something that is going to hurt, right? We all know about that. And it's something that I'm afraid

00:10:23.500 | of because, as you know, there are all kinds of ways you can hurt yourself and embarrass yourself and so

00:10:28.700 | on and so forth. But having done that in the morning, so it's, I've got like, I think we have a mutual

00:10:37.180 | friend in Randy Wallace, right? Do we have? Yeah. Randy has this thing, Randy Wallace, who wrote Braveheart

00:10:43.100 | and his secretary directed that and many others. He has a thing in the morning that he calls little successes.

00:10:49.420 | And what he's trying to do to build momentum for when he's actually going to sit down and write

00:10:53.820 | is, you know, achieve something that he can say, okay, I did something good here. And then I did,

00:10:58.940 | you know, and so going to the gym for me is that. It's not so much about the physical aspect of it.

00:11:05.340 | It's the rehearsal for kind of facing like it. So I feel like when I finish at the gym,

00:11:12.620 | nothing I'm going to do for the rest of the day is going to be as hard as what I already did. So,

00:11:16.940 | you know, there we go. The waves are greased and I can go forward. That's the theory anyway.

00:11:22.460 | So when you wake up in the morning, you're not looking forward to working out.

00:11:25.820 | Fuck no. I mean, we can, can we say that here?

00:11:27.820 | Sure. Yeah. Absolutely.

00:11:28.940 | Yeah. Absolutely not. It's a drag. I hate to go, you know?

00:11:31.580 | You prefer to stay in bed?

00:11:33.020 | Absolutely. You know, I wish I could stay in bed, you know, on, and, but on the days I do stay in bed,

00:11:39.420 | Sunday, I, I don't feel so good about myself. You know, I wish I had gone to the gym. I mean,

00:11:44.860 | you must feel the same way, Andrew, about whatever you do and being an old skateboarder and,

00:11:48.860 | you know, a fitness guy your whole life. What does it, how does it fit in with your regimen?

00:11:54.220 | Well, the problem for me is that I love working out.

00:11:57.100 | Oh, you do. Wow.

00:11:58.380 | I do. And I always have. I have noticed in the last maybe two, three years that occasionally I have to

00:12:05.580 | push myself a little bit more, but I, I loathe rest days, but they are important. You know,

00:12:12.060 | I do believe in taking one full day off per week, letting my body recover. But that's the problem,

00:12:17.980 | is I really enjoy working out. And so by the time I'm done working out and then I shower up and I

00:12:23.740 | eat and I'm sitting down to do some work, I'm like, oh, now comes the really hard workout.

00:12:29.180 | But I noticed that I learned things during those workouts, provided that I don't have my phone with

00:12:38.460 | me. I might listen to music on my phone, sometimes a podcast or an audio book, but I do my very best

00:12:46.300 | not to be on social media or text during those workouts. Because during those workouts, something

00:12:52.140 | always comes to mind that I find useful for elsewhere in life. And it usually pops up during a rest period

00:12:59.180 | between sets. You know, I think exercise takes our brain and body into these unfamiliar states. And I think

00:13:05.260 | that our unconscious mind geysers stuff up and I think it was the great Joe Strummer of The Clash that

00:13:11.500 | said, you know, when you have a thought that feels important, write it down because you think it will

00:13:18.780 | be there later, but certain thoughts and ideas are offered up and they don't last, at least not in that

00:13:25.900 | form. You need to catch them. And so I have a mode of catch usually in notes. Do you have a, do you have a

00:13:30.780 | capture method for ideas, whether or not you get them during workouts or in the middle of the night?

00:13:34.780 | I don't have during workouts. I don't seem to get ideas during workouts, but I completely agree with

00:13:40.300 | that, that, you know, those ideas when they come like in the shower or when you're on the subway or when

00:13:45.900 | you're driving along the freeway, your mind is occupied in something else, right? Your ego is involved

00:13:50.220 | and somehow it opens the pipeline and things burble up and you always think, oh, I'll remember that,

00:13:55.100 | that. But you forget it's like a dream, you know, they just go away. So yeah, I, I mean,

00:13:59.980 | I'll just dictate it into my phone. I mean, my phone now is, you know, full of stuff that I've got to

00:14:04.460 | transcribe, but I couldn't agree more with that. Yeah. There's something about the way that our

00:14:10.940 | unconscious mind, I feel like it kind of tosses things up for the conscious mind to catch.

00:14:15.420 | And in those moments, just like in a dream, we think, oh, I'll remember this later.

00:14:19.740 | Yeah. Yeah. And we don't. It's amazing how they go away. They just, they're evanescent.

00:14:24.700 | They're evanescent. It's a beautiful word and it captures it perfectly.

00:14:28.140 | See, I'm a different believer. I don't believe it's really coming from the subconscious.

00:14:31.660 | I'm a believer in the goddess. I'm a believer in the muse. I think it's coming from someplace else,

00:14:36.940 | you know, and that they're, they're playing with us a little bit, you know, like I know Steven Spielberg

00:14:42.540 | says when an idea comes, he says it whispers rather than shouting, which is his way I think of saying,

00:14:48.780 | you know, it just, it's a very subtle thing that goes away very fast, you know,

00:14:53.340 | and you got to grab it while it's there.

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00:17:20.300 | Tell me more about this from the goddess or the gods or the muse, you know, from outside us or from God.

00:17:29.420 | Well, you know, if you go back to the ancient Greeks, right? Every, the Iliad or the Odyssey or any of those

00:17:37.820 | other great works always start with an invocation of the muse, right? Homer writes, you know, goddess,

00:17:44.380 | you know, tell the story, you know, and basically the artist is stepping or taking his ego out of the picture

00:17:53.660 | and saying, I'm not the one that's going to tell you this story about ancient Troy.

00:17:58.060 | The goddess will tell through me. So they're sort of asking, you know, help me, show me, you know,

00:18:04.300 | that kind of thing. And I had a mentor, you know, Rob, we were talking about that earlier,

00:18:09.500 | a guy named Paul Rink. He's like, can I get into the weeds on this thing, Andrew? Please, please.

00:18:14.700 | And he sort of introduced me to this concept. This was like the first time I tried to write a book,

00:18:20.220 | I was like 27 or something like that. And I, well, I had actually tried and failed before,

00:18:26.140 | but it was the first time I ever finished one. And I used to have breakfast every morning.

00:18:31.100 | This was in Carmel Valley, not so far from where you grew up. And in with my friend, Paul Rink, who was

00:18:37.180 | a, who was a, maybe 30 years older than me. He was an established writer. He knew John Steinbeck,

00:18:42.460 | knew Henry Miller from Big Sur. And he told me about the muses, the Greek goddesses, the nine sisters,

00:18:50.220 | whose job it was to inspire artists, right? The classic image of the muse is Beethoven at the

00:18:57.660 | piano and a kind of a shadowy female figure is kind of whispering in his ear, you know,

00:19:03.340 | bringing him. Right. And so he wrote out for me, my friend, Paul, the invocation of the muse from,

00:19:11.740 | he typed it out on his Remington manual typewriter, the invocation of the muse from the Odyssey,

00:19:17.740 | from Homer's Odyssey, translation by T.E. Lawrence. And I've kept that, it burned up in the fire,

00:19:24.460 | lost it in the fire, but I've kept that for like 50 years. And every morning before I sit down to work,

00:19:32.620 | I say that prayer, you know, out loud and in full earnest, you know, goddess, help me. And I'm

00:19:41.020 | absolutely a believer in that, you know, that, that ideas come from another place and it's our job.

00:19:48.860 | And I don't think it's just subconscious. It's our job to open the pipeline and, and get out of the way.

00:19:56.860 | I love it. I, and I'm totally open to the idea that it's not the unconscious mind or the subconscious,

00:20:03.420 | just whatever people want to call it. Um, I'm sad to hear that this, uh, um, this write-up

00:20:10.460 | of invocation of the muse burned. We should probably just mention that we used to be neighbors. Yeah.

00:20:15.340 | Um, your home burned in the fires, sadly, uh, the home that I lived in, um, it was not my home. I was

00:20:22.460 | renting it also burned in the fires. Um, so my guess is that at some point during today's conversation,

00:20:28.940 | we'll talk about loss of objects and items, but it sounds like this one was pretty precious.

00:20:34.220 | Yeah. It was a sad thing to lose that, you know, but you know, it's, it's in my head, you know?

00:20:38.860 | How long is it? Um, it was on one page, double-spaced. I would say it takes, to recite it takes maybe 90 seconds.

00:20:48.220 | Do you have any, uh, interest or desire in calling it up now or a portion of it? Uh, I'll, I'll call

00:20:55.980 | up just the opening of it because the middle part is Homer sort of describing the whole story of the

00:21:01.580 | Odyssey, but it starts like this. It goes, "Oh, divine poesy, goddess, daughter of Zeus, sustain for me this

00:21:12.460 | song of the various-minded man," meaning Odysseus. And then he kind of goes on to talk about that,

00:21:17.900 | da-da-da-da-da, and at the end it says, "Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings,

00:21:25.340 | O Muse," which I think is a great, you know, make it live, make it come alive in all its many bearings.

00:21:33.100 | And so, you know, that's, uh, thanks to my, my friend Paul, that's been a thing that's been with

00:21:38.860 | me for, you know, 40 years. I love it. Well, we'll provide a link to the full, uh, uh, it's in the

00:21:44.700 | War of Art, actually. I, I wrote this out in the, in the War of Art. I think it's on page 114 or 115.

00:21:50.780 | Yeah. And if anyone hasn't read War of Art, it's an absolute must read. I've read it many times. It's,

00:21:57.340 | have an audio book form, uh, hard copy form. It is awesome. It is just awesome. So when you sit down

00:22:05.260 | to write after you, you've recited this, um, how many times in the first 10 minutes do you think

00:22:12.780 | your mind flits to something else? I mean, you're now a pro, like you've written many books and

00:22:17.500 | you know what to, uh, what is noise and you know what is signal and you know if you really need to

00:22:23.660 | go to the bathroom or if you don't, you know, well, these are, these are the things that pop up,

00:22:27.420 | right? As you pull out resistance comes in, oh, you don't need another glass of water or I'm not

00:22:31.340 | caffeinated enough or there's not enough sunlight coming through my window, whatever. Right. Um,

00:22:35.820 | how many times in the first 10 minutes on a typical day, just give us an average,

00:22:40.380 | uh, do you think your mind flits to, man, like, I wonder what's going on in the news?

00:22:44.540 | That's a great question. You know, like what's going on in the world? I mean,

00:22:48.460 | how many times one, never, never, never. Now that's not to say when I first started

00:22:54.940 | many, many moons ago that I didn't have a lot of that sort of stuff, but I have, I don't know whether

00:23:00.540 | just over the years, um, um, I'm absolutely a believer in, you know, like diving straight into

00:23:07.340 | the pool. You know, I don't sit there for one second, you know, wondering what I'm going to do. I

00:23:11.740 | just plunge right in and, uh, you know, thank goodness I've somehow I've learned how to do it

00:23:17.420 | and I just focus full tilt on it. Uh, so yeah, I don't, I don't have those thoughts at all.

00:23:22.220 | How long do you write in that first bout? Um, maybe an hour. Uh, and then I'll take a little

00:23:29.340 | bit of a break. Um, I love to do laundry. That's my big thing. You know, I'll go, I'll change the,

00:23:35.260 | I'll put it in the laundry at the start, you know, and it'll be the load, the load will be done.

00:23:38.860 | Then I can put it into the dryer. I take a little break and then I come back and start again for,

00:23:42.940 | for another hour. You enjoy it or you enjoy clean laundry or both?

00:23:45.980 | I just, I enjoy the sort of the ritual of it and the craziness of it, you know?

00:23:49.900 | Not me, not one bit. The only thing I enjoy about doing laundry is clearing the lint trap. There's

00:23:53.980 | something very satisfying about that. That's the part I hate. I don't want to do that at all.

00:23:56.780 | Interesting. All right. Well, we're not considering, but we'd make good roommates.

00:23:59.980 | Interesting. So for an hour you're locked in and you're just typing, wait,

00:24:07.420 | how often does your inner critic pop up nowadays versus at the beginning? Meaning the,

00:24:12.300 | I don't know if this is going the right direction. Um, I've heard before that you're just supposed

00:24:16.620 | to create and then edit later. What's your process there? Uh, it almost never comes up. The inner

00:24:22.700 | critic. Again, it used to, you know, used to all the time. It was a terrible struggle I had for years.

00:24:29.420 | You know, you sit down and you think, well, is Hemingway, would Hemingway write this sentence?

00:24:33.340 | You know, right? Or, you know, what will the New York times think when I write, you know?

00:24:37.340 | But eventually over time you learn, you just can't deal with that bullshit. You know, it drives you

00:24:41.580 | insane. You know? So, so no, I don't, I don't let that inner critic come in, you know?

00:24:48.300 | And I'm definitely a believer. Um, at the end of the day, I never read what I wrote

00:24:55.340 | and I never look back on it the next day. Um, I believe in multiple drafts. Somebody taught me

00:25:01.820 | this one time that, uh, think in multiple drafts. Um, this was Jack Epps, the writer of the original

00:25:09.020 | writer of Top Gun. Um, I was working for him on a, on a movie project. And he said, he said,

00:25:15.020 | always think in multiple drafts and, uh, and you can only fix so much in one draft. You can only fix

00:25:23.100 | one thing in one draft. So I usually will think of, and I start a book, maybe 13, 14, 15 drafts.

00:25:30.060 | The last seven or eight will be really small, you know, really slight changes, but I won't look back

00:25:37.340 | on the day's work. So I figure on my next draft, then I'll, then I'll read it fresh and it'll look

00:25:44.220 | a million times, uh, much more clear sense. Is this any good? Because if you do it when it's too fresh,

00:25:50.380 | you start to drive yourself crazy, start to, you know, perfectionism, another form of resistance

00:25:56.140 | comes in. So yeah, that's, that's my process. I know a lot of other people don't do it that way,

00:26:00.540 | but that's the way I do it. I never, when the, when the day is done, the, uh, the bell rings,

00:26:05.820 | the office is closed. That's it. I turn off my mind and just let, let the muse take care of it overnight.

00:26:12.540 | And I don't, I try not to worry about it at all. All I ask myself, I know I'm getting into the weeds

00:26:17.340 | here. No, it's very important that you get into the weeds. Cause I think, um, you've offered many

00:26:22.220 | times through books and, uh, their podcasts, the, the contour and, and a lot of depth, but I think the

00:26:29.180 | more detail, the better, because everyone will do it slightly differently. But I think it's very

00:26:35.020 | important. We rarely hear what people's real processes. So please don't, don't edit yourself

00:26:39.980 | here. At the end of the day's session, all I ask myself is, did I put in the time and did I work as

00:26:48.060 | hard as I can? Quality will take care of itself later, the next draft, the next draft after that.

00:26:54.940 | But I'd never judge it, you know, and it took a long, long time to get to that place to learn that,

00:26:59.820 | you know, cause I would drive myself insane for years and years judging along the way.

00:27:04.620 | How long is the total writing session at, depending on how much laundry you have to do?

00:27:09.980 | Great questions. I used to be able to write for four hours. Now I can only write for about two.

00:27:15.260 | What I tell myself, and I think it's true, is that I can do in two hours now what I used to do in four.

00:27:20.220 | But I stop when I start making mistakes. When I start having typos and things like that,

00:27:28.460 | then it's kind of like a workout at the gym. You know, when you've reached the end, you know,

00:27:31.740 | I'm just going to hurt myself if I do another set, you know, the point of diminishing returns.

00:27:37.340 | So when I get tired, I stop and I don't question it at all. I don't say,

00:27:41.260 | I don't make myself feel bad about, oh, you can get another 10 minutes.

00:27:44.460 | Like Steinbeck used to say that pressing forward at the end of a long day to get just a little bit more

00:27:54.620 | is the falsest kind of economy because you pay for it the next day. And Hemingway used to say,

00:28:01.820 | he always stopped when he knew what was coming next in the story, which I also believe in that too,

00:28:06.620 | because that'll help you in that hairy first moment when you're sitting down,

00:28:11.180 | because at least you know, oh, okay, this is what's going to happen.

00:28:13.500 | Ah, so you leave sort of an ellipse in your mind. So the next morning,

00:28:16.700 | you know exactly where to pick up and that the entry point is a little easier.

00:28:19.900 | Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The analogy to working out is a great one. Years ago, when I started

00:28:28.220 | resistance training, I learned from Mike Menser. I don't know if you ever overlapped with Mike at Gold's.

00:28:32.780 | No. He died some years ago.

00:28:34.140 | Let's just interrupt for a second. They call it resistance training,

00:28:37.420 | which is exactly what we're talking about for art. Yeah.

00:28:41.100 | But please continue. Yeah. Excellent point. Noah, please. You know, there are a lot of theories out

00:28:45.980 | there about resistance training and how best to get muscles to grow and to get stronger, et cetera.

00:28:50.460 | At one extreme is, you know, you warm up and then you do one set to absolute failure. Maybe a second

00:28:55.420 | set you push through. That's kind of the Menser high intensity thing. At the other extreme is it's volume,

00:29:00.300 | just lots and lots and lots. There's been debate about this endlessly and it has to do with all sorts of

00:29:06.300 | factors. But the literature is now coming to a place where it's pretty clear that after warming up,

00:29:11.740 | the first one or two sets that you do are really the most valuable of a given exercise.

00:29:15.900 | Wow. I didn't know that.

00:29:17.020 | Almost certainly you need more than one set. Overall, you certainly do. But it's really the

00:29:22.140 | intensity that you bring. But here's the point that is strongly analogous to what you're talking about.

00:29:27.340 | When you say you used to be able to write for four hours a day, now you do two and you tell yourself

00:29:31.820 | that you accomplish the same amount in those two. That's almost certainly true based on what we

00:29:36.140 | understand about neuroscience and believe it or not, resistance training in the gym.

00:29:41.420 | And the argument is that as you resistance train or write or play volleyball or do any activity,

00:29:51.100 | you develop a better ability to recruit your nervous system to do the necessary work.

00:29:58.860 | You said you didn't used to be able to just sit down and focus for an hour with minimal

00:30:03.660 | interruption in your mind. Now you can. You learned that. The more intensity that we can bring to

00:30:09.660 | something, the more focus we can bring to something, the more taxing it is. Like if I do one set in the

00:30:16.380 | gym with total concentration to absolute failure, which is very difficult to do when you first start

00:30:21.820 | training. You barely know how to do the movement, right? You're still learning. Your nervous system is

00:30:25.980 | still learning. You can't inflict the same stimulus with one set that you can later after you're

00:30:34.300 | practiced. Makes a lot of sense. And so there's this counterintuitive thing that people in the high

00:30:38.140 | performance field are really starting to adopt. And I talk to people in a bunch of different high

00:30:43.020 | performance fields, not just exercise and creative works, that the better you get at something, the

00:30:48.140 | shorter your real work bouts should be and the more intense they should be.

00:30:53.260 | It's almost like a knife that's getting sharper and sharper. You can cut deeper and deeper. Whereas

00:30:57.420 | at the beginning we have sort of a dull blade and we have to route over the same path. So

00:31:02.620 | I think this is a nervous system feature and that's why it transcends physical and mental, creative and

00:31:11.420 | other types of works. Because if you talk to great musicians, they're not practicing 11 hours a day

00:31:17.580 | anymore. They're practicing for three or four extremely focused hours, sometimes divided up by

00:31:24.380 | naps and meals, you know. So in any case, so you put in your two very focused hours with some laundry

00:31:32.780 | in between and then you rack it, you hang it up and you don't look at it. Are you thinking about it

00:31:39.660 | throughout the day? No. But like we were talking about, if an idea comes to me, then I grab my phone

00:31:46.220 | and I dictate that. And let me say one thing here for anybody that's listening to this and would be

00:31:52.540 | want to be writers, aspiring writers. So I'm a full-time writer. I don't have another job. I don't have to do

00:31:59.260 | anything. But yet I can only get two hours of time basically in the day. So if you guys have a full-time

00:32:08.380 | job and kids and a family and a wife or spouse, whatever, if you can squeeze out a couple of hours

00:32:14.380 | a day, you're doing, you're on the same level with me, same level with a full-time writer. So that it is

00:32:21.260 | possible to have a full-time job and still do your artistic thing to a full-tilt version.

00:32:29.500 | Excellent point. How important do you think it is for you to start that writing session at more or less

00:32:37.820 | the same time each day? You're not saying two hours in the morning or two hours in the evening,

00:32:42.540 | two hours in the morning or hour in the morning, hour in the afternoon. It sounds like it's very

00:32:47.020 | regimented. I think it's really important. And when life was more predictable for me, I would

00:32:55.660 | always do it. But since the fires and other things like that, sometimes I have to shift time frames

00:33:04.540 | around and be ready to do that. I have a good friend, Jack Carr, the thriller writer who did The Terminal

00:33:12.460 | List and he's a master of writing in airplanes and writing at Starbucks because he's always traveling

00:33:21.820 | and doing all kinds of stuff and just finding the time. God bless him. I don't know how he does it,

00:33:27.820 | you know, and he is incredibly productive. I don't know if I could do that. Maybe I will shift from writing

00:33:37.340 | from 11 to 1 to writing from 1 to 3, but that's about the most, you know, variance I can put into it.

00:33:46.700 | Do you have your phone in the room when you write and is the internet engaged on your computer?

00:33:52.700 | Not at all, you know, no. I mean, my phone is there maybe to dictate a note or something like that, but otherwise,

00:33:59.820 | no, absolutely not. And yeah, I can't even imagine that. Music? No, no music, no. Just the sound of your own

00:34:09.020 | breathing. Yeah, yeah. What's that? Because you're in your own head, right? You're in that universe,

00:34:13.740 | you know? This is what I find so odd about writing is you're in your head, it's your voice in your head,

00:34:22.780 | but you're in a conversation with the potential audience. What is the actual dialogue? Are you

00:34:31.340 | thinking? This gets a little philosophical, but at the end of the day, it's very concrete.

00:34:36.460 | Are you thinking about a conversation with the audience or are you just translating thoughts

00:34:42.220 | into words and the audience doesn't exist yet? I'm very aware of the reader in the sense of,

00:34:50.300 | let's say it's a scene that I'm writing and I know certain things have to happen in this scene.

00:34:59.020 | Character A has to do something, character B, dah, dah, dah, dah. And so I'm trying to put that down,

00:35:05.260 | but I'm thinking, is the reader understanding? Have I got this in the right order for them? Am I boring

00:35:14.940 | them? Did I say that two pages ago and now I'm repeating myself? But I'm not having a conversation,

00:35:22.540 | I'm just trying to make it as easy and as interesting and as fun as I can for the reader.

00:35:31.660 | And I'm always trying to make sure that I'm leading them. I'm seducing them. I'm trying to

00:35:38.380 | reel them in, you know, and not bore them, you know. By the end of this chapter or scene,

00:35:45.420 | I want the reader to be thinking, oh, I can't wait to turn the page and see what happens next.

00:35:49.340 | Growing up, were you a storyteller among your friends? No, I never even thought about it as a kid.

00:35:54.860 | Like you didn't, hanging out with friends, you wouldn't tell a story about what had happened

00:35:58.140 | three days ago. No, I mean, just like anybody else would, but no, I was never like a,

00:36:01.740 | you know, a storyteller or anything. I was not a kid that wanted to be a writer and never thought

00:36:05.900 | about it at all. So you just kind of tripped and fell into all that? I mean, my first job

00:36:11.580 | was in advertising in New York City, right out of college. It's like the Mad Men thing. Yeah. Yeah.

00:36:19.260 | But I guess at the time I thought, oh, I'd love to write a commercial that people said,

00:36:24.620 | oh, that was great. It was so funny. I love that thing. So that sort of got me kind of a little bit

00:36:31.260 | started into the idea of storytelling. And then I had a boss, his name was Ed Hannibal. And he wrote a

00:36:38.140 | book kind of at home and it became a hit, you know, and it was called Chocolate Days, Popsicle Weeks.

00:36:45.660 | And he quit to become like a novelist. And so I thought, well, shit, why don't I do that? You know,

00:36:52.540 | so that was what sort of started me into it, you know, being completely naive and totally stupid,

00:36:58.380 | you know, and having no idea of what I was doing. That's wild. So I imagined you as like the kid who

00:37:04.380 | was always coming in, telling stories, writing in the background. Advertising is pretty interesting

00:37:10.140 | though, because it's the same process. You have to get into the mind of the audience. You have a story to

00:37:17.740 | tell. And I guess with advertising, the goal is a purchase and with writing the ideas,

00:37:23.580 | they, they buy into the next page. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Very similar in that sense.

00:37:29.500 | You know what? Any ads that you recall particularly? No, I was terrible. I was never any good at it.

00:37:34.700 | I never made any money. I was never successful at all. But I met a lot of nice people and I learned a lot

00:37:41.180 | of stuff in that, you know, you said that was in New York city. It was in New York city.

00:37:45.180 | In fact, if I can, if I can hype one of my books, it's a small followup to the war of art calls,

00:37:51.340 | nobody wants to read your shit. And it kind of, a lot of it is about what you learn in advertising,

00:37:57.660 | because nobody wants to read your ads or listen to your commercials or anything like that. And so

00:38:05.500 | one thing you learn in that business is to make it so good or so interesting, so intriguing that people

00:38:15.340 | will overcome their hatred of having to listen to your stupid Preparation H commercial.

00:38:21.180 | Um, so that was, uh, anyway, that was, that was what, that was what got me started, but I was never

00:38:27.340 | a storyteller as a kid. No. I'd like to go back to the quote that we started with,

00:38:32.220 | "The more important to your soul's growth, the stronger the resistance will be." I think many people

00:38:39.100 | will hear that, including myself, and will think, okay, what is, what is my soul's growth? Where does it

00:38:44.860 | want to go? You know, I think when we hear the word soul and growth, particularly when it's about us,

00:38:50.460 | we think like there's going to be this big sign written on the heavens about what we're supposed

00:38:57.100 | to do and we're going to feel compelled to do it, you're saying the opposite. That the thing that we

00:39:01.740 | need to do most sometimes is hidden from us. The muse perhaps can reveal that. And it's through the act

00:39:09.500 | of writing without knowing what the work even is that sometimes we arrive there. So for people that don't

00:39:16.620 | have a crystallized idea yet and they want to explore their creative sense,

00:39:21.740 | they might want to do it through writing. They might want to do it through pottery. They might want to do

00:39:27.500 | it through music. They might want to do it through making movies, any number of things.

00:39:33.580 | What's the translation from the thing you need most is the thing you're resisting most to actually getting

00:39:40.220 | into the process of evolving that thing out of us? It sounds like an extrusion process.

00:39:45.340 | It's a great question. Push semi-solid concrete through a filter. But I want to know what the filter is.

00:39:52.060 | I know that young people today, there's a tremendous amount of pressure on people to find their passion

00:39:59.500 | and follow their passion and so on and so forth. And I know for me, as a young person, I would go,

00:40:04.780 | what the fuck is that? I don't know what it is that I want to do. I'm lost. I'm struggling. But I do think

00:40:12.380 | that we are all born with some sort of, at least one, a calling of some kind. And it may not be the

00:40:21.980 | arts. It may be helping other people through some kind of a non-profit or something, or like what you're

00:40:27.820 | doing, Andrew, you know, where you're bringing neuroscience and the scientific, you know,

00:40:32.300 | to personal development and so on and so forth. I think we do all have some sort of, some sort of

00:40:39.180 | calling. And like, we know it. Like if we could somehow put somebody in here and say, I'll give you

00:40:49.900 | three seconds. Tell me what you should be supposed to be doing. It will pop into somebody's head.

00:40:55.100 | You know, they go, oh, you know, I knew, I know I've always wanted to do, to be a motorcycle,

00:41:00.700 | whatever, you know. So, but then that sort of whisper urge to do this thing is immediately

00:41:09.580 | countered by this force of resistance, you know, because it's trying to stop us. It's the devil.

00:41:15.260 | It's trying to stop us from being our true selves and becoming self-realized, self-actualized or whatever.

00:41:21.180 | So resistance will immediately say to us, like if you were to say, oh, I want to have a podcast and

00:41:25.900 | I want to talk about, you know, science, dah, dah, dah, immediately resistance would say,

00:41:29.660 | who are you, Andrew, to do this thing? I mean, you're a professor, you know, at Stanford, you know,

00:41:34.300 | we don't have any experience doing this. Not to mention it's been done a million times by other

00:41:38.380 | people. They've done it a thousand times better than you. Nobody's going to give a shit. You're going to put

00:41:42.540 | this out or you're going to embarrass yourself. You had a certain level of prestige at Stanford. Now,

00:41:47.420 | you're an idiot. You know, it's going to be that voice, right? Some people actually said,

00:41:51.100 | Stanford's not going to like it. Why would you do this? You're tenured at Stanford.

00:41:56.060 | What, what are you doing? You're, you've, you're funded. Your lab's publishing well. One of those

00:42:00.140 | people was my father, who's also a scientist. My process of pushing back. I rest my case.

00:42:06.300 | Yeah. And the true part here, the really kind of interesting part is a lot of times those voices

00:42:12.460 | will be the voices closest to us, our spouse, our father, you know, because, well, I can get into that.

00:42:20.300 | I'll get into that. And if we, if we want to continue, but in any event, um, so that voice of

00:42:25.580 | resistance will come up. In addition, resistance will try to distract us. You know, it'll try to make us

00:42:31.180 | procrastinate. It'll try to make us yield to perfectionism where we, we noodle over one

00:42:36.140 | sentence, you know, for three days, you know, or we, or fear, all of the other things will stop us.

00:42:41.500 | So many people live their entire lives and never do, and never enact their real calling, you know?

00:42:48.300 | Um, but we were talking about the more important to the growth of your soul. That was what the,

00:42:54.940 | we started with this, right? So that calling, whatever it is to be a writer, a filmmaker,

00:43:00.380 | whatever it is, if we don't do that in our life, we, we, that energy doesn't go away.

00:43:10.860 | It becomes, it goes into a more malignant channel, right? And it shows itself in maybe an addiction,

00:43:21.100 | alcoholism, uh, cruelty to others, abuse of others, abuse of ourselves, porn, you name it. Any of the

00:43:28.060 | sort of vices that people have, uh, because that originally creative divine energy that really wants

00:43:37.900 | to be the odyssey or something like that. If we yield to our own resistance and don't evolve that,

00:43:48.060 | then bad things happen. On the other hand, if we do follow that, we kind of open ourselves up to,

00:43:56.380 | you know, to becoming who we, who we really are. And, you know, a lot of people in the podcasting and

00:44:04.380 | the, uh, human development or whatever they call it, personal development world, they sort of

00:44:08.460 | promise like some sort of nirvana is going to happen if you do X, Y, Z. But what I'm,

00:44:15.020 | what I'm promising is a fuck of a lot of hard work. That's probably never going to be rewarded,

00:44:21.100 | but you'll be on the track that, you know, your soul was meant to be on and God bless you. You can't

00:44:29.580 | ask for any more than that. And sometimes it works out at spectacular levels of whatever income, fame,

00:44:37.100 | whatever it is that people think they might want, but that's not really the thing to chase. We'll talk

00:44:41.820 | about that. Yeah, we'll talk about that. So sometimes it's the lottery of life. Sometimes,

00:44:47.260 | but that absolutely should not be the thing that people are chasing. Yeah. Yeah. I, um, I only know

00:44:53.500 | my own experience and I couldn't help but reflect a little bit on, you know, when I was deciding to do

00:45:01.020 | the podcast and I did get some voices back, like, Hey, like maybe that's, you know, what are you doing?

00:45:06.300 | I, I, um, I had not clinically diagnosed with Tourette's or anything like that, but I felt,

00:45:12.620 | um, at that point that I had a certain amount of knowledge in me, uh, based on 25 years of studying and

00:45:21.180 | research in neuroscience and related fields. And I felt like if I didn't let it out, I was going to explode.

00:45:27.260 | Uh, uh, uh, uh. And so Rob, my producer and my, my bulldog Costello and I went into a small

00:45:33.420 | closet in Topanga and set up some cameras and I exploded onto the, onto the camera. I just like,

00:45:39.500 | I, it just poured out. I think for the entire first year, we were doing almost all solos,

00:45:44.460 | hardly any guests because it was pandemic and we weren't quite sitting down with guests.

00:45:48.700 | Oh, I didn't know. And I don't even remember thinking about the, the hundreds of hours of

00:45:53.660 | preparation. We did hundreds of hours of preparation for each episode, but the just,

00:45:57.500 | I just feel like it was kind of like geysered out. So I think there's some benefit to having,

00:46:03.020 | um, something build up so much within us that it has to come out.

00:46:07.980 | And I can certainly relate to the dangers of suppressing something. I think.

00:46:14.220 | And how old were you when you, when you started that?

00:46:16.380 | 45 years ago.

00:46:17.340 | 45, huh.

00:46:18.060 | Yeah. So I was kind of late to it. No, I had lectured in front of students and given seminars and

00:46:22.300 | lectured in front of donors, which is in some way similar to the podcast in the, in the sense that

00:46:27.740 | you're teaching science often to non-scientists or diverse fields. But for me, it was just inside,

00:46:34.380 | I couldn't, couldn't help it. There was, my only answer was I couldn't help it. And, um, to his credit,

00:46:41.180 | by the way, my dad has been immensely supportive of the podcast. He actually was on the podcast and gave us a

00:46:46.460 | chance to bond and learn about him and, um, and he's a scientist. So I got to learn some physics.

00:46:52.380 | The audience got to learn some physics as well. But, um, but yeah, when you take on something that

00:46:58.060 | people are not familiar with you doing, or they are projecting onto you the sense that they want you

00:47:06.060 | safe and secure, because sometimes it's a, it's a real, um, it's a genuine feeling of support for

00:47:12.700 | somebody, you know, uh, a mother or father or siblings, like, Hey, so you're going to give up

00:47:17.180 | your job as a lawyer to go write movie scripts. Like, and you got three kids and like, uh, they're

00:47:23.020 | scared for you because they don't want to see you take your life off a cliff. Yeah. Uh, what's your

00:47:28.860 | response to that? I mean, there's validity to that obviously. Yeah. But I think what happens, um,

00:47:37.580 | is that each person is dealing with their own resistance, their own calling their own that they

00:47:45.180 | know that they really should be doing. And 99.999% of them are not doing it or are unconscious of it.

00:47:52.940 | Right. It's sort of a niggling thing, but they don't know about it. So then when they see you,

00:47:57.020 | Andrew, starting your podcast, that's a reproach to them. And they say, well, if Andrew can do it,

00:48:04.220 | why can't I do it? You know? And so then it becomes kind of malicious and it's, I don't think

00:48:09.420 | it's deliberately malicious a lot of times, but people will then try to undermine you and say, and,

00:48:16.060 | and under the guise of, uh, we're only looking out for you. We don't want your children to be starving

00:48:21.580 | and in the street. They will try to try to undermine you and stop you from doing it and make fun of you or

00:48:26.940 | ridicule you like, um, the filmmaker, David O. Russell. I don't know if you know who I'm talking

00:48:32.620 | about. He did, uh, the fighter with Mark Wahlberg. I love that movie. He did Silver Linings Playbook,

00:48:37.420 | um, you know, with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. I did not see that one,

00:48:42.620 | but I did see the fighter. And Joy, about the lady who invented the miracle mop with,

00:48:47.180 | which was Jennifer Lawrence. And all of these stories are about sabotage by the people closest

00:48:55.180 | to you, particularly your family. Like in the fighter, Mark Wahlberg is, uh, is this boxer,

00:49:01.180 | right? And he's got seven sisters and he also has an older brother and they're like,

00:49:06.060 | and his mom is his manager and she's like booking him fights where he's outweighed by 20 pounds and he

00:49:11.740 | gets massacred, you know? True story of Mickey Ward. Yeah. Right. And the story is, you know,

00:49:16.140 | he finally meets a girl who's like really supportive of him. But anyway, it's a real theme

00:49:21.580 | that the people closest to us will, will try to, they don't want us, they're happy the way,

00:49:28.140 | you know, we like you, Andrew, the way you are, you know, our son, we know he's working at Stanford.

00:49:33.020 | He's doing his thing. We don't want to see him. It may be unconscious. I'm not knocking your dad.

00:49:38.060 | We don't want to see him suddenly burst out of the, uh, the cocoon and become a butterfly

00:49:42.940 | and wing away from us, you know, so they like you the way they are, you know, what you are.

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00:52:35.740 | We've had several clinical psychologists on the podcast, and a resounding theme from them has been

00:52:43.420 | that it is astounding and yet consistent that people will remain in a not-so-great place that

00:52:53.980 | they understand and is predictable in exchange for what they could do, stepping into some new life,

00:53:00.940 | even getting over their anger about something. In fact, I was thinking throughout today's conversation,

00:53:07.900 | I couldn't help but think that perhaps the two most dangerous things to the creative process to

00:53:13.980 | really doing the important work are the many, many things that exist in the world now that basically

00:53:22.300 | sell us the opportunity for free to be angry or to numb out. I mean, again, if people want to drink a

00:53:31.500 | little bit, I'm not going to disparage that. I've done an episode on alcohol. It's not good for you,

00:53:35.340 | but some people can have a couple drinks a week or whatever. Okay, not judging there, but things like

00:53:41.980 | alcohol, like certain forms of social media, and I say certain forms because I do think social media

00:53:47.740 | can be informative and educational in the right context and the right amount, certain forms of media

00:53:53.660 | more generally, the news, any number of highly processed, highly palatable foods, which are not

00:54:01.900 | delicious, but they allow us to kind of numb out, numb out our senses and just kind of mindlessly eat,

00:54:07.340 | and on and on. I feel like anger and numbing out are how the world is trying to pull us away,

00:54:13.980 | and someone gets paid for that. We think we get it for free, but they get paid for that very well.

00:54:20.220 | We give our time, our soul, according to what you're saying, and then more close to us within our inner

00:54:26.220 | circle. People that genuinely care about us are, from what you're saying, kind of in their own

00:54:33.660 | psychological entanglements, and they really care. They want us safe. They want to keep us where they

00:54:39.740 | know they can find us, and as a consequence, it's really tough to even get to the process of resistance

00:54:48.060 | at this point. It's all around us. Yeah. It's all around us. You hit the nail on a lot of heads.

00:54:52.700 | So I feel like, do you think the world is set up now in ways that it's more difficult

00:54:59.580 | to get to that chair and to meet the inner resistance? I phrased it poorly before. There's

00:55:06.380 | resistance all around us. There's in the things that are being sold to us, quote unquote, for free.

00:55:12.060 | The cost is immense. It's true. You're not putting a coin in a slot and pulling a lever,

00:55:18.220 | but it's your time. It's your soul. It's your essence. It's your life. And then it's close to us

00:55:24.700 | with family members and friends and significant others sometimes. Dogs are immune from this. Cats

00:55:30.460 | are immune. They want us to do the real work because they'll be right next to us.

00:55:36.460 | And then with all that, then we sit down, and then the resistance comes up from right up

00:55:41.660 | in the middle. Yeah. It's like, this is a minefield. Yeah. I agree with you completely.

00:55:47.580 | I don't think it's ever been harder. It's like, I always said that if you want to make a billion

00:55:53.660 | dollars, come up with some kind of product that feeds into people's natural resistance,

00:56:00.780 | like potato chips or social media or something, and they did come up with a product and it's called,

00:56:06.380 | you know, the internet, you know, it's called social media. And you're right. People make a lot of money

00:56:12.380 | off of that because they, and I don't think they're even aware of what they're doing or aware of what

00:56:17.980 | they're tapping into, but they're just allowing people, you or me who has a calling that we know we

00:56:25.660 | should be doing. They're allowing us to not do it, to be drawn over here for whatever reason. And I

00:56:33.260 | think a lot of the anger and polarization in politics is about that today, you know, because

00:56:38.620 | people can't face, you know, to sit down and do whatever they were, they were born to do. So it's much

00:56:44.540 | easier to hate the other person over here or get completely caught up in all that rabbit hole of all

00:56:49.580 | that sort of stuff, you know? Um, yeah, it's, uh, to follow your calling is a really hard thing. You

00:56:59.420 | know, it's not, uh, we were born to be by evolution to be tribal creatures, you know, through all those

00:57:08.460 | evolution. And the opposite, the one thing that the tribe hates the most is somebody that goes his own way or

00:57:14.860 | her own way, right? Follows their own thing and doesn't, you know, hew to what the tribe wants them

00:57:20.220 | to do. So for us to do that as individuals is a bitch, you know, and it's, it's usually like what

00:57:27.740 | you said, you sort of exploded out of you when you got, you have to almost reach a, uh, a breaking point,

00:57:34.460 | you know, almost hit bottom in some kind of a sense before it just kind of explodes out of you, because

00:57:40.060 | we'll all resist that so much. It's so scary. It's so interesting. I think it was in high school,

00:57:47.740 | uh, that I first realized how silly humans are. And it was the following at the time I was into

00:57:56.300 | skateboarding. Skateboarding has gone through various evolutions of being popular. Now it's

00:58:01.340 | in the Olympics of being unpopular or being profitable. When I got into it, it was really

00:58:06.380 | unpopular. It had gone through one big, two big waves. There was the kind of Dogtown and Z-Boys wave,

00:58:12.140 | like the back, discovering backyard pools, this kind of thing that the surfers did. Then there was a

00:58:16.540 | second wave for those that care. This was like the classic Bones Brigade wave. There were only two or

00:58:21.100 | three big companies. Tony Hawk was early in this because he was young. His dad, Frank Hawk, ran the

00:58:25.020 | National Skateboard Association. And then it disappeared. Just kind of, you know, that kids

00:58:29.980 | were into soccer, they were into other sports. Skateboarding wasn't a big thing. It was small.

00:58:35.580 | And then, and there was this really kind of weird trend in the early nineties where skateboarders started

00:58:41.580 | wearing really baggy clothes. No one wore really baggy clothes. And I'll never forget because I was part of

00:58:47.580 | that community. We wore these, what now wouldn't even be considered baggy shorts. So we're not talking

00:58:51.820 | about like a deep sag on the shorts, but it was like baggy shorts. And I'll never forget the amount of

00:58:58.460 | teasing and ridicule that we received. People like pull up your pants, you know, by the athletes,

00:59:04.860 | by the cool, by the water polo athletes, the jocks, the everything, but not just at school, but elsewhere.

00:59:11.340 | Leave for the summer, come back. And over that summer, the someone in the world of rock and roll

00:59:20.780 | and in hip hop had kind of picked this up from skateboarding culture and baggy pants and shorts

00:59:28.140 | hit the mainstream. Oh, I never knew that. And the next year, everyone was into it. And that's when the

00:59:33.340 | bell went off. I was like, they don't actually know what they like. Is this is just the essence of peer

00:59:39.100 | pressure? They have no concept of what they actually like. And I think that was a big one

00:59:43.900 | for me. I was like, well, first of all, I thought they're hypocrites and I thought they're idiots.

00:59:48.380 | And then I realized there, but they're none of those things. It's that for most people,

00:59:52.140 | what they like is sold to them. It's, and they're tracking someone else. And so throughout my life,

00:59:59.740 | I've had mentors that didn't know me. I would, I literally have a list of different names. Some,

01:00:04.940 | some of these people live, some of them dead. Amazingly, some of them are now my close friends.

01:00:08.860 | I embarrass them all the time by telling them that they're on this list. But I think that the concept

01:00:14.140 | of mentorship is so much different than the concept of looking to the other members of our species more

01:00:21.340 | broadly for what is cool, what's worth pursuing. How valuable for you have mentors been? I know you're,

01:00:30.380 | you've been a mentor to many people, by the way, you're on the list just to embarrass you. I can show

01:00:34.460 | you that list from, from, from the late nineties, late nineties, two thousands transition. How important

01:00:40.620 | are mentors and how do we differentiate mentors from the voice in our own head? How important is

01:00:47.180 | it to be self-guided versus encouraged and guided by these mentor voices? Because I believe that the general

01:00:52.940 | public is the absolute wrong signal. I think that, I think that signal, takes you off the metaphorical cliff.

01:00:59.980 | Yeah. Mentors have been really important to me. Very important. Um, in fact, I, I wrote a memoir called

01:01:06.860 | Government Cheese. I don't know if you've heard about this one at all, but it's, it's, the chapters are named

01:01:13.180 | after the various mentors that I've had and, um, many, many of them. And a lot of them are not in the writing

01:01:21.340 | world at all. Um, and, um, like my, my friend, Paul, he was in the, in the writing world, but, um,

01:01:29.340 | you know, I had a boss at a trucking company that I worked for that was like a real mentor to me. I once,

01:01:35.500 | I picked fruit in, uh, Washington state, you know, and, uh, as a migratory worker, you know,

01:01:40.140 | for a while, and I had a mentor there. I never even knew his, um, last name. He was a fellow fruit

01:01:45.420 | picker, you know, former Marine from, uh, the show who was at the Chosin reservoir in Korea. I'm sure

01:01:50.300 | nobody listening to this know, knows what that is, but it was like an amazing horror show of heroism.

01:01:56.540 | And anyway, what, what was it about those two mentors that you can, uh, maybe summarize that you

01:02:02.460 | extracted? Was it a work ethic? Was it a style of being? It was, it was a work ethic in both cases.

01:02:09.180 | Um, in, in the one, in the one, again, I'll sort of get a little into the weeds here a little bit.

01:02:14.940 | Please, please. Um, I was, uh, I had gone to a tractor trailer driving school and I got hired and

01:02:21.820 | to work for this, uh, company in North Carolina. And I was, you know, a beginner and, um, I really,

01:02:28.460 | I, I, I fucked up big time one time. I dropped a trailer with like $300,000 worth of

01:02:33.260 | you know, uh, industrial equipment in it. And, and, um, my boss, his name was Hugh Reeves,

01:02:40.940 | uh, took me out to this hot dog place called Amos and Andy's in Durham, North Carolina.

01:02:46.220 | And he sat me down and he said, um, son,

01:02:50.060 | I don't know what trauma, you know, uh, internal drama you're going through. I know you're going

01:02:57.420 | through something, but let me tell you this while you're working for me, you're a professional

01:03:02.540 | and your job is to deliver a load. And I don't care what happens between A and B,

01:03:08.700 | you got to do that. You know, and I was like, well, you know, and I knew he was just absolutely

01:03:14.460 | right. And that, uh, and I thought, man, I got to get my shit together here. You know, I can't.

01:03:19.100 | And so that obviously stuck with me forever. And the, uh, um, my friend John from Seattle in the fruit

01:03:27.020 | picking world was, uh, again, I'm going to do a longer story than probably needs to be here. Um,

01:03:32.540 | in the, uh, in the fruit picking world, at least when I was doing this, it was most of the work

01:03:40.140 | was done by fruit tramps, by guys that like were riding the rails from the old days. And the big, um,

01:03:46.620 | one of the phrases that they, that they use was pulling the pin. Have you ever heard this thing?

01:03:52.300 | And what pulling the pin meant was quitting too soon. Like pulling the pin came from railroad.

01:03:58.300 | If you want to uncouple one car from another, the trainman would pull a heavy steel pin and the cars

01:04:03.580 | would uncouple. So like you would wake up one day in the bunkhouse, six weeks into a season,

01:04:09.180 | and so-and-so would be gone. He'd say, oh, you know, what happened to Andrew? And I'd say,

01:04:12.140 | oh, he pulled the pin. So at the time that I was there, I was trying for the first time to finish

01:04:18.860 | a book and I'd run out of money. And I, this is why I was working to get the money.

01:04:23.340 | And I realized that in my life, I had pulled the pin on everything that I'd ever done on my marriage,

01:04:29.900 | on this, that, the other. And this friend of mine, John would, I, I wanted to quit before the season

01:04:37.420 | ended, you know, and he would not let me do it. You know, he sort of just had a, he, you know,

01:04:43.180 | he just took me under his wing. And so that was another thing that was just drilled into my head

01:04:48.620 | in the sense of, um, am I going to finish this project? Fuck yeah. I'd rather die. I will die

01:04:55.500 | before I'll give up on this project. And it was all because of him. So that, those are two mentors that

01:05:01.100 | weren't writing mentors, but that I used there, those, those lessons stuck with me forever. And I will say one

01:05:08.940 | thing too, for anybody that's struggling with finishing anything, once I did finish that book,

01:05:15.180 | which I did, I've never had any trouble finishing anything ever again. Whereas it was my bet noire

01:05:22.700 | for years. I would fumble on the goal line, you know, resistance, former resistance.

01:05:29.900 | I love that those two guys are, uh, now alive and present in 2025. I don't know, they may still be

01:05:36.940 | alive, uh, in general, but, um, perfectionism, you've talked about it as the enemy. Um, I learned two very

01:05:49.100 | disparate schools of thought in research science. One was no one study can answer everything. So when it,

01:05:57.820 | you know, you get to the point where you have a clear answer, what the data mean, you write it up,

01:06:02.620 | you ship it out, you publish. And I feel very fortunate that I worked for people that encourage

01:06:07.020 | that. Um, because many people get caught up in the idea that every paper has to be a landmark paper.

01:06:13.180 | Actually, that's one of the major causes of scientific fraud, by the way, when people feel that

01:06:17.820 | their papers have to be published in the top tier journals, it's probably the strongest driver of

01:06:23.420 | scientific fraud. Um, there are probably some bad apples that come in and are seeking ways that they

01:06:28.940 | can build narratives to get prizes and stuff. But that, I think they're exceedingly rare that, um,

01:06:33.900 | those people are driven to other fields where there's more money involved, more fame involved.

01:06:37.260 | Mm-hmm.

01:06:37.260 | But in science, a lot of bad stuff comes from people feeling that they have to have a landmark paper.

01:06:43.420 | And I was taught early on, some papers end up in solid journals and some end up in spectacular journals,

01:06:48.940 | and some projects go nowhere. That's just the reality. The key is to figure out which one is

01:06:54.060 | which and, but finish things. At the other end of the spectrum is this idea that if you are able to

01:07:00.620 | make something better, you should. And, uh, this is the reason I delayed my book release for a year.

01:07:07.100 | I felt like I could make it better. There was, there are new data. I want to add illustrations,

01:07:11.580 | but at some point it's got to ship. So, I think we can all agree that perfectionism

01:07:17.180 | is not great because it limits our ability to complete things and ship things off. Sometimes

01:07:22.860 | even our ability to do the work in the first place. But at some level, if we can make something better,

01:07:28.380 | we probably should. That, that's also, you know, part and parcel with meeting resistance and pushing

01:07:35.180 | through it. So, how do you balance those, those two? They're, they're in a strong push-pull for me.

01:07:40.220 | I think that, uh, it's another great question. I mean, it's so easy to,

01:07:46.780 | as a writer to noodle all day with one paragraph, you know, and, and of course it's obviously, you know, uh,

01:07:53.420 | resistance is watching and laughing at you, you know, oh man, look at this poor idiot. I've

01:07:59.340 | gotten him to completely blow the day on this one thing. So, that sort of perfectionism

01:08:04.620 | is a form of resistance and really has to be avoided at all costs. Um, on the other hand, you do want to

01:08:10.780 | produce something that's really good, you know, and not, but, you know, like Seth Godin,

01:08:16.380 | Godin says, when it's, you know, ship it, right? When it's ready to go, you know, there comes a time

01:08:22.540 | when you know, I'm just noodling with this because I'm afraid of the, uh, response. Is this going to

01:08:27.980 | fail? Is it going to fizzle? Is it going to crash and burn? So, I don't want to ship it out right now.

01:08:33.020 | I had a friend. I tell this story who had, uh, written this deeply personal novel

01:08:40.140 | about, uh, salvaging a ship. He had been in the merchant marine and, you know, I mean, what a great

01:08:47.340 | metaphor that was. And I read it. It was in its, its mailing box back in the days when you typed it

01:08:53.180 | out on a typewriter ready to go and to his agent and he couldn't make himself send it off, you know?

01:08:59.900 | And the, the, the sad part of the story is my friend died. And there, so that was,

01:09:07.020 | I don't know whether that was perfectionism or just fear of, of, um, being judged in the, in the real world.

01:09:16.540 | But, so it's a real vice, perfectionism and, uh, to be guarded against at all costs, I think. But when a

01:09:23.420 | thing is ready to go, let it go. I'd like to talk about death. Uh-huh. Um, you know, I've, uh, great.

01:09:32.140 | Uh, I've listened to and read, uh, Steve Jobs's biography. Um, I think it's spectacular. Um, I had a

01:09:42.380 | particular interest in it because... What's the title? Because I've never read it. I think it's

01:09:46.220 | Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Oh, I see. It wasn't by Steve Jobs. No, it's not an autobiography,

01:09:50.940 | although there was communication with him in the process of writing the book. I think that's the,

01:09:55.020 | that one of the kind of agreements for Isaacson is you have to be willing to talk to him and he can

01:10:00.220 | talk to people in one's life. And, uh, it's spectacular. And, and one of the reasons I was

01:10:04.780 | so interested in it is that, you know, the personal computer came out during my, you know, childhood.

01:10:11.980 | Um, Steve lived in our area. We'd see him around downtown Palo Alto. He'd come into the sports shop

01:10:17.660 | where I worked to get rollerblade wheels and, um, I was a skateboarder, but we had to assemble rollerblades.

01:10:23.660 | It was just part of the job and wagons and things. In any case, um, he, from a very early point,

01:10:30.700 | apparently understood his own mortality. And apparently that was a strong driver for his intense,

01:10:38.380 | uh, drive to create things, to envision things. Um, in some sense, people say it's part of the reason

01:10:45.340 | why he didn't pay much attention to, uh, kind of typical conventions and he was able to

01:10:50.940 | evolve the world and create these incredible, incredible products. Um, devices, I mean, portals,

01:10:57.500 | they're really portals of, of communication and creativity and, um, having a strong sense of one's

01:11:04.620 | mortality seems very useful in that respect. The other end of the spectrum, I have a theory,

01:11:10.060 | which is that all forms of addiction are basically an attempt to try and avoid the reality that we're

01:11:17.100 | going to die to just forget that for moments, shorter or longer moments. And in some sense,

01:11:23.340 | the pursuit of flow states and creative works are an attempt to kind of either forget about that or to

01:11:29.020 | some people want to immortalize themselves. But I think knowing that one is going to die is an

01:11:35.500 | incredible driver. Um, I have always had a lot of energy, but it was only recently on, you know,

01:11:42.540 | on the threshold of my 50th birthday coming up that I realized like, oh, I'm probably at about the halfway

01:11:47.420 | mark, you know, realistically, I'm a biologist. I mean, I think, uh, genetic potential and human

01:11:53.420 | longevity is probably about 120. And with certain practices, maybe you can get out past your, you know,

01:11:59.340 | where one is fated to die by maybe five, maybe 10, maybe 20 years, and maybe new technologies will

01:12:04.620 | come along that will, um, expand that number. But I figure I'm probably about the halfway mark. So

01:12:09.500 | it's kind of nice to have a, like an, oh shit moment because you stop wasting time.

01:12:15.740 | Uh huh.

01:12:16.620 | Like anyone else have wasted time. So how present is your sense of death eventually coming,

01:12:25.180 | hopefully a long time from now, again, you're in spectacularly good health. And, um, so that's important,

01:12:31.340 | but how present is the reaper in your process? And do you think having a real sense that the reaper's

01:12:41.260 | coming is useful?

01:12:42.460 | Yeah, definitely. Um, I was, uh, having breakfast in New York, uh, a couple of years ago with a

01:12:50.220 | friend of mine who's exactly my age, you know, and I asked him, I said, Nick, how often do you think about

01:12:56.220 | your own mortality? And he said every fucking minute of every fucking day, you know?

01:13:01.660 | Well, maybe that's a little bit excessive because it could become paralyzing too.

01:13:04.860 | Yeah. Right.

01:13:05.820 | So, uh, I, I don't know if I, I go that far, but, uh, I'm definitely aware of it. You know,

01:13:13.260 | like Robert Redford died two days ago, right? In his sleep, you know, to me, it was like an immortal

01:13:20.300 | guy that was going to live forever. Um, on the other hand, I have another friend who actually

01:13:25.500 | died a couple of years ago. It was at my, one of my bosses in advertising named Phil Slott,

01:13:30.220 | great smart guy. And he said one time to me that people tell you that life is short,

01:13:36.380 | but really life is long. And like thinking about you, Andrew, that you're 50 years old,

01:13:43.020 | you've got another 50 years ahead of you, you know, so that one has to think,

01:13:48.300 | you know, it's, it can be also a form of resistance. Like for me at my age to think,

01:13:53.900 | well, I'm only going to be around a few more years. I might as well fuck off or, you know,

01:13:57.260 | I don't have to work that hard, you know, but no, cause I'm, I might be around for another 20 years

01:14:02.540 | or more. That's a career. I should, I could write 15 books. I could make them, who knows what.

01:14:08.700 | Um, certainly I have to, which is part of why I go to the gym, you know, to think of,

01:14:15.500 | uh, I don't want to start thinking that I'm on the way down or I haven't got,

01:14:21.020 | you know, life is, life is long. It's longer than we think. And, and we have in the sense of,

01:14:25.500 | it's opportunity to do stuff, but it's also an obligation to, to do stuff, to keep evolving,

01:14:32.060 | so on and so forth. Um, on another, on another sort of side of, I don't know if this was,

01:14:38.940 | this will be confessional for me. I know when, when I was a kid, um,

01:14:45.740 | our family was sort of like the black sheep of our bigger family. Like everybody, all of my uncles and

01:14:53.340 | stuff were all really successful and my dad was kind of struggling, you know? And so it became

01:14:59.500 | a thing in my mind where I said, and it's just looking ahead for how long you're going to live.

01:15:06.780 | I said, I'm going to show these motherfuckers that our family is not what they think they are, you know?

01:15:12.860 | And so I, um, that's been a real driver for me more so than any idea of mortality, even over those long

01:15:21.260 | years where I was getting nowhere that, uh, um, to sort of honor my dad and, um, that I was going to,

01:15:29.660 | you know, hang in there and do something. Yeah. I, I think that's a great opportunity for us to talk about,

01:15:37.660 | um, another kind of resistance, which is actually very adaptive and can propel us forward, which is,

01:15:43.900 | um, having some friction with someone or something, you know, this is a little politically incorrect,

01:15:51.660 | but in one's mind to be able to drive yourself harder. And I think this can take on toxic forms,

01:16:00.220 | but I think it can also be very beneficial. There's this great moment in one of those

01:16:04.620 | Dark Knight movies where the Joker has the opportunity to kill Batman and he says something

01:16:10.140 | like, just kill me. And the Joker says, kill you. I don't want to kill you. You complete me. You know,

01:16:18.060 | it's this moment where the Joker doesn't exist without Batman and vice versa, right? That having

01:16:23.260 | somebody or something that you're challenging yourself to, to, uh, that you're trying to prove yourself to,

01:16:29.740 | sometimes to yourself, um, can be very beneficial and at different times in my career, certainly not now.

01:16:34.700 | Um, and I kind of miss it a little bit to be honest, but at various times in my different careers of,

01:16:41.660 | of pursuits, I should say, um, being in competition can be an incredible driver.

01:16:47.500 | Yeah. I could go into a whole story here, but it doesn't matter. I think that the, it's kind of

01:16:52.460 | evident what, what we're talking about, that having someone that you, you're not going to let get the

01:16:57.980 | best of you, that, you know, you can do better, um, can be very useful. It can also be toxic as we

01:17:04.060 | pointed out, because it's, I feel having experienced that and having one, by the way, not kidding, but,

01:17:11.980 | but that the, the energy that it pulls on here, I'm going to put my physiologist, uh, neuroscience hat

01:17:19.180 | on is, you know, it's more of an adrenal adrenaline type drive than kind of orienting towards your love

01:17:29.100 | of craft. I mean, it's meshed with that, right? Hopefully it's within a craft you love, but to just

01:17:34.860 | be in sheer competition all the time can be depleting. And one has to be really careful with

01:17:40.700 | this stuff. So, um, obviously that got you propelled forward. You're going to prove that your family-

01:17:47.020 | In an unconscious way. It certainly was not, you know, I'm only becoming aware of it now.

01:17:51.180 | Oh, I see. So at the time you weren't aware of it.

01:17:53.100 | I wasn't even aware of it.

01:17:54.060 | Oh, okay. Yeah.

01:17:54.860 | Okay. I was very aware of this friction because the guy and I had like an outright rivalry.

01:18:00.060 | Um, and it was a lot of fun too. Actually, years later, we, uh, shared a coffee and reflected on

01:18:05.420 | how much great work we each got done. Yeah.

01:18:07.820 | In this process.

01:18:08.700 | I mean, if you think about Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, you know, how they kind of made each

01:18:13.580 | other, you know, boom, boom, boom. And now they're the best of friends, you know, which is a great-

01:18:17.340 | Steve Jobs and Bill Gates early on.

01:18:18.460 | Ah, was that true? I didn't know that.

01:18:19.740 | Oh yeah. There was a big competition, especially in the Bay Area where you had a lot,

01:18:22.940 | it was and still remains kind of the seat of tech and computer science. It was like,

01:18:27.900 | is it going to be Windows or is it going to be the Mac operating system? And then when they joined

01:18:32.940 | forces later, that would have been like the Yankees and the Red Sox merging. It's like,

01:18:38.860 | it was a mind bend. You're like, this can't be happening. And all the, all the nerds in the Bay Area

01:18:43.340 | are like, oh yeah, this happened. Next thing you know, everybody's moved on. Um, so I think having

01:18:49.900 | resistance with, with the desire to prove, to prove, to prove oneself, I think can be helpful, right?

01:18:56.940 | Yeah. I think so too. Yeah. Um, you know, my trainer at the gym, T.R. Goodman,

01:19:02.060 | he's trained a lot of professional athletes, particularly hockey players. Um, and a lot of them,

01:19:09.020 | he says, because he got to know him very well, really had a chip on their shoulder about something

01:19:15.820 | or other like my dad, I'm going to show my fucking dad that I could do this thing, you know? And,

01:19:20.540 | and it would drive them. But like you say, it becomes kind of toxic at some point.

01:19:26.700 | You do have to sort of have that come to Jesus moment when you say, well, wait a minute, you know,

01:19:31.740 | let me get a, let me get a handle on this and maybe a little forgiveness here or a little bit of empathy,

01:19:37.100 | a little of, you know, putting myself in the position of this person that I'm trying to show.

01:19:41.580 | Um, Greg Norman's dad, you know, the golfer, you know, that, and so many, there's so many things,

01:19:47.340 | people like that, that, uh, it does become toxic, but it's like you say, it can produce great success

01:19:53.260 | because it drives people. Yeah. Michael Jordan was famously competitive about everything. Yeah.

01:19:59.660 | Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I feel very fortunate that these days I do things and I create out of just a

01:20:06.060 | love for what I do. There's none of that. I never think about another podcaster or, or what other

01:20:11.740 | people, I think about none of that. Truly, I would admit if I did. Good for you. But in the past,

01:20:16.540 | that wasn't the case. That wasn't the case. And, and I think that, um, and at times it brought out

01:20:23.260 | my best and at times it brought out my best, but it made the process much more painful. I think doing

01:20:29.340 | something for love of craft is really important. Yeah. I couldn't agree more.

01:20:33.660 | But as you've pointed out, that process can be painful, even though you love the craft. Yeah.

01:20:38.780 | It's a weird thing. This is a bizarre dark and light. Yeah. Yeah. Braided together. Yeah.

01:20:43.660 | This creativity thing. Yeah. What about feedback from the outside after the thing is done? Uh, reviews,

01:20:51.340 | um, let's talk about King Kong. I mean, you, you've written about the fact that you made this movie

01:20:59.260 | and it wasn't received with, uh, with broad accolades. It was quite embarrassing. Yeah.

01:21:06.700 | But was the movie that bad? Oh, it was terrible. Yeah. It was really terrible. Yeah. Did you know

01:21:10.140 | it was terrible when you released it? No, that was even worse. So you thought it was awesome.

01:21:15.180 | It was King Kong lives. One of the worst movies ever. And I remember that, uh, I, I wrote this with a

01:21:21.660 | partner, Ron Chuset, who was one of the guys who originally did the first alien, the thing where the guy burst,

01:21:27.740 | the alien burst out of that is the guy's chest. That was his along with the whole face hugger thing.

01:21:34.140 | That was his too. So he was like a, a really legendary guy, particularly in science fiction.

01:21:39.340 | And I was kind of his, his junior partner. And, um, when we, we did this movie for Dino De La Renta,

01:21:48.060 | on a contract and when, and when we were done, we thought this is great. This is how crazy we were.

01:21:53.340 | And we invited, you know, all of our friends, you know, to the screening or something. And,

01:21:57.740 | and when it was over, it was like death, deathly silence, you know, and I was telling you before we

01:22:03.020 | did this thing today, the review and daily variety said, Ronald Chuset and Steven Pressfield,

01:22:09.900 | we hope these are not their real names for their parents' sake. So that was, that was definitely and, uh,

01:22:17.340 | a bad moment. But from my point of view, it was the first time I got a movie made

01:22:23.100 | that I was involved with at all. So I had to say, you know, a friend of mine, my friend,

01:22:28.780 | Tony Keppelman took me aside and said, you know, you're in the arena, man, you're taking the blows,

01:22:34.460 | but you're out there doing it. And he was absolutely right. So I, you know, I turned out to be very

01:22:38.540 | grateful to that and I still am grateful to it, but it was, uh, but it certainly was a terrible

01:22:43.500 | review and, uh, kept you, kept you humble. Did you go back and analyze what was wrong with the movie

01:22:49.740 | and what could have made it great? No, it was like too painful to even think about. Yeah.

01:22:53.900 | When was the last time you watched it? Oh, not since when it came out, which was like 1980

01:22:59.020 | something or other. Yeah. What was the budget for the movie? A lot of it was a big budget. Yeah.

01:23:03.820 | Um, I don't know, I don't know what it was then, but it was, it was a big budget. Yeah. In the

01:23:07.580 | millions. Oh yeah. Yeah. A lot of special effects. I mean, you know, a King Kong movie had to, yeah.

01:23:13.100 | Wild. Yeah. So that was terrible. But, uh, I'm definitely a believer that the ideal is

01:23:20.620 | to not listen to anything that anybody says about what you did and to judge it only yourself, you know?

01:23:29.340 | And if you can, I think it's good to get a sort of an objective cross section, you know, some things

01:23:35.900 | go out there and they sink without a trace. Some things people really love. Um, but the bottom line

01:23:42.140 | is like Paul Rink said to me, start the next one today, you know, as soon as you fit it, because it's a

01:23:48.940 | lifelong, like we were telling us for the love of the game. It's a lifelong practice. And you know,

01:23:55.100 | a professional does not take success or failure personally, but keeps on going and does the next

01:24:02.860 | one and the next one and the next one. With creative works or anything that our

01:24:08.060 | name is closely attached to it, uh, it's a challenge, right? I mean, a book with the author's name there,

01:24:15.740 | a movie with the, you know, producers and the directors there and the actors, a podcast. I mean,

01:24:21.500 | almost every major podcast is named after the podcaster. It's kind of funny. And in science,

01:24:26.460 | the lab is named after you, you know, Huberman lab or whatever lab. I always thought the labs should

01:24:32.380 | be named after a particular scientific quest. That's how they do it in other countries. I think that's a

01:24:37.660 | lot more elegant. And it also teaches a lesson to the students and postdocs that you're after discovery.

01:24:44.460 | It's not just about your career. Um, unfortunately in the United States, we promote this notion of the

01:24:51.340 | independent investigator. It's all about the individual or maybe small group of two or three of

01:24:57.500 | them cracking some really difficult, not Watson and Crick. And it's always been this way. It's terrible. It's a

01:25:03.660 | feature that if I had a magic wand and I don't, I would abolish. But when our name is closely attached to something,

01:25:11.660 | feedback that's great, feels pretty good. And if you're a self critical, hard driving person,

01:25:17.820 | feedback that's negative can hurt. I will say my experience is that the larger volume

01:25:25.420 | of negative feedback that you get day in and day out, the less of an impact it has, you know,

01:25:30.780 | initially like podcasts would come out, you get a bunch of great comments and get some,

01:25:34.300 | some nasty ones. And then you're like, Oh, that really hurts. You know, you podcast every week,

01:25:39.580 | two episodes a week or an episode every week. And pretty soon that's just as stuff just flies right

01:25:44.620 | by the signal, the noise, it just goes way, way down. So I offer that to people because the more you

01:25:51.020 | put out there, the more feedback you get and the less of an impact the feedback has. But the positive

01:25:56.940 | feedback also, it's just, it becomes just noisier in general. So now when you sit down to write a book,

01:26:03.260 | you must see some level of feedback. You want to know, is it selling? Is it doing well? Is it not

01:26:09.340 | doing well? And, but it sounds like you don't analyze why it might've done well or not. Well,

01:26:15.020 | you just assume, you know, that's where you were at in that point in time and that's where they're at.

01:26:18.780 | Yeah. I don't analyze it because I don't know if you can ever even figure it out. And also so much

01:26:23.900 | of it has to do with, in anything that you put out with timing, are people, you know, is this,

01:26:30.300 | you know, ready the moment, you know, how much does it get, did it get promoted? Did it get,

01:26:36.780 | you know, did people even know it existed? There's so many factors that are above and beyond whether it

01:26:42.780 | was actually good. And I said, you can only, you can only ask your, you know, did you do your best?

01:26:49.660 | You know, did you leave it all on the floor? And if you did, and that's all you can ask.

01:26:56.540 | But again, it's for me, it's a lifelong practice and I'm going to do this till they take me out,

01:27:04.140 | you know, and whatever the next one is, I'll do that.

01:27:07.180 | It's clear. You're not going to pull the pin.

01:27:10.860 | No, I'm not going to pull the pin.

01:27:11.980 | Good. Dopamine dynamics in the brain would tell us that if you have a big success,

01:27:17.180 | say a book or a movie or an album, what have you, that the next thing, no matter how well it goes,

01:27:25.580 | is not going to feel that great unless it exceeds the previous thing. This is just the laws of dopamine

01:27:31.100 | circuitry that exist in all of us. I didn't write the script. It's hardwired.

01:27:39.260 | Of all your books, which one got the most public acceptance and praise?

01:27:44.380 | It's either The War of Art or Gates of Fire.

01:27:47.260 | Okay. What book came after that?

01:27:49.180 | But on, let me say on both of them, it took years,

01:27:54.460 | years for that, for either of them to reach any kind of level. Neither of them were overnight

01:28:02.300 | successes. It wasn't any, you know, any of that fanfare, nothing really. Finally, like maybe eight

01:28:10.300 | or 10 years later, you know, you realize, oh, you know, this thing is percolating along pretty good.

01:28:14.860 | You know, so that's a whole different sort of, there wasn't that much dopamine coming in to

01:28:19.900 | me on that. That's probably a good thing. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I mean, you know,

01:28:24.860 | the whole notion of one hit wonders, like, you know, bands that get, you know, there's a great movie with

01:28:29.980 | Tom Hanks about that. I forget what the title is. That Thing You Do. That Thing You Do. It's a

01:28:34.940 | perfect example of that. And, you know, these one hit wonders are kids that, you know, they blow up,

01:28:40.620 | they get one song, it's gone. There's actually an incredible movie that, if you don't mind,

01:28:45.340 | I'll just mention to people that I wish everyone would see. It's a documentary that I saw at the

01:28:52.220 | Tribeca Film Festival years ago called My Big Break. And it's a true story of four guys living in an

01:28:59.740 | apartment in Los Angeles who all want to become actors. And I won't give any more information

01:29:06.540 | about it. But let's just say one of them becomes immensely successful. I won't talk about what

01:29:13.020 | happens to the other three. But the takeaway from the movie, and I'm not, this is not a spoiler,

01:29:17.900 | is that everybody gets their big break at some point. Most people blow it. And they don't blow it

01:29:25.100 | because they can't do the thing. They blow it because they can't handle that it's happening.

01:29:29.180 | And they, it gets in the way of their creative process or their essence. It's an awesome documentary.

01:29:35.820 | Oh, really? My Big Break. Yeah. Fantastic documentary. And I think anyone that wants to

01:29:41.020 | get good at anything should see it. I certainly learned a lot from it.

01:29:45.660 | Okay. So you're not paying attention to the criticism. I'm trying not to. I'm human,

01:29:51.820 | you know, but definitely the ideal is to really move beyond that.

01:29:57.500 | I went to college with Jack Johnson, you know, a guitar player. He's a very successful musician.

01:30:02.380 | And years ago we connected and he was telling me about his life because I knew his now wife,

01:30:08.380 | she was, went to college with us and he was telling me about his kids. And, and it was so clear from

01:30:12.860 | everything he was telling me that he had created methods to not really come in contact with just

01:30:22.780 | how big he had gotten, like to really like humble himself. Good for him. On a daily basis, doing house

01:30:30.620 | chores, cleaning the toilet, whatever it is, you know, especially the days after big,

01:30:36.220 | big festivals where he just, you know, had immense crowds and, you know, that he'd built these sort

01:30:41.980 | of self-regulatory processes. It sounds like- It's like a very zen sort of story.

01:30:46.060 | Yeah. We grew up in Hawaii. The master would say, sweep the corner, you know, yeah.

01:30:49.740 | We grew up in Hawaii. So he's, he's got the, he always had this mellow. It was amazing. From day one of

01:30:55.580 | college, he was way cooler than everybody and super nice. So he didn't act cool. He was just cool.

01:31:01.580 | Cause he was just Jack, great surfer, great guy. His wife's awesome. Picked up a guitar. He was in

01:31:07.500 | a college band that was okay. It was like a backup, but he wasn't even the main guy.

01:31:12.940 | And then I was in graduate school one day and I, I think I got iTunes and I look and I was like,

01:31:18.780 | Jack Johnson. And I called a friend. I was like, Jack Johnson's on iTunes. They're like, you haven't

01:31:22.860 | noticed. I was like, no, I've been nosed down in the lab. He's a really big deal.

01:31:26.540 | And he's, I mean, he's been a really big deal for a very long time. Incredibly humble, incredibly kind

01:31:32.140 | and self-regulates, you know. Good for him. Yeah. External validation sounds like

01:31:38.780 | it's an enemy for you as much as criticism is an enemy. Yeah. I mean, I certainly don't

01:31:44.140 | believe in it at all. I think it's a seductive thing. That's only going to pull you in the wrong

01:31:48.620 | direction. You know, yeah. Third party validation as my partner, Sean Coyne, my business partner,

01:31:55.660 | Sean Coyne, which I have to give him credit before we forget the title. The War of Art was not my

01:32:01.420 | title. It was Sean Coyne's title. He handed that to you. He gave me that title. Yeah. We published,

01:32:07.260 | we published the book together. His little company published it, but that was his title. So God bless him.

01:32:14.620 | Yeah. God bless him. Titles matter. Yeah, they do. Titles matter. Eat, pray, love.

01:32:19.180 | How does that, it doesn't get better than that. Yeah. The Body Keeps the Score. Ah, yeah. No other

01:32:25.820 | book in the field of kind of psychology, biology, wellness has like resonated in people's minds as

01:32:35.420 | much and as long as The Body Keeps the Score. Because it's just an awesome title. Yeah, it is. It's a great one.

01:32:41.180 | Yeah. How much or how often do you think about book titles? Is it at the end, during?

01:32:46.140 | At the end, but I find that they're really hard, you know, and a lot of times other people have titled

01:32:51.020 | stuff for me or I've, you know, it's really hard to come up with a great one. Yeah. I don't know what

01:32:58.620 | the secret is at all. If it's sometimes it pops out along the way. Yeah. I don't know.

01:33:05.180 | I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function. Last year, I became

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01:34:52.460 | access to function. Do you think that personal sacrifice at the level of relationships

01:34:59.020 | is necessary to be a successful artist of any kind? Certainly in my experience, yes. And I was talking

01:35:10.780 | to a friend of mine who's a bodybuilder and he was talking, he was just saying to me the other day, he

01:35:19.660 | said, "I don't believe in balance, the work-life balance." I'm kind of that way too. I take my hat

01:35:33.500 | off tremendously to Kobe Bryant for being such a family man, obviously loved his kids, loved his wife,

01:35:39.340 | but yet was obsessed with basketball to the nth degree. Somehow he did it and able even to go beyond

01:35:47.820 | that and be helpful to people and so forth. But I do think that at some point, if you're going to

01:35:56.860 | pursue your calling, whatever it is, you got to pursue it with both feet. And so that might lead to

01:36:07.980 | an unbalanced life. So that means telling people you're going to bed early. You go to bed very early.

01:36:15.900 | I go to bed early, but it's just my own quirkiness. But there are a lot of things that I've missed

01:36:21.980 | in life, including having kids. But I don't regret it. That's the nature of the game, I think.

01:36:30.300 | Well, you have a rich and full life. I mean, I have an unbalanced life, but to me, it's what

01:36:36.140 | I've chosen. This is like that great speech in "The Godfather Part Two," where, is it Lee Strasberg who

01:36:47.500 | played the equivalent, not Meyer Lansky, the real whatever, I forgot his name was. But he said he

01:36:55.980 | was talking about one. Hyman Roth. Hyman Roth, Hyman Roth. And he said, he had this scene with Michael

01:37:02.140 | Corleone where he says, he talks about Moe Green, his protege that they grew up. Somebody put a bullet

01:37:08.220 | in his eye. And I never asked who did it because I said to myself, this is the life we've chosen.

01:37:15.100 | And that's how I look at it. It's interesting. It was a great scene too.

01:37:20.380 | It is a great scene. God, those movies are so good. The first two anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Talk about a flop

01:37:28.620 | on the third. Yeah. Yeah. In the United States, we celebrate high achievers and people that really

01:37:38.220 | break off from the pack. It's really the essence of the United States in terms of how it was,

01:37:43.420 | Yeah. More's the pity. Yeah, exactly. Now we're paying the price. Yeah.

01:37:49.180 | But Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, I mean, these people had, as you pointed out,

01:37:54.700 | well, maybe Kobe is a bit more balanced, but immense number of hours devoted to craft.

01:38:00.620 | But I feel like if you grew up in the United States, at some point you get the message that

01:38:05.740 | that could be you, right? Yeah.

01:38:08.300 | That's different than, and I know because my dad's from South America and I have a family from Europe,

01:38:14.940 | and I've been exposed to the fact that not every kid around the world grows up getting the message in

01:38:22.460 | their ear all the time. Like, hey, that could be you. You just have to find your thing and devote yourself.

01:38:28.860 | And then now there seems to be a bit of a pivot where people focus on, you know,

01:38:34.620 | the flaws of those high achievers had and that they weren't perfect. And I think what we're saying here is

01:38:40.540 | that, or what I'm hearing is that it's by definition that if you're going to go for a high peak that your,

01:38:46.620 | your life is not going to be balanced. Sort of like, you know, Edmund Hillary first to climb Everest,

01:38:52.780 | he was gone for a long time. They didn't have cell phones. I imagine if he had a family, they didn't

01:38:56.780 | even know if he was going to come back. That's not balance. That's not balance at all. They weren't

01:39:01.740 | handing out checks at the top of Everest. So this idea that, you know, pursuing one's craft at the expense

01:39:08.540 | of something else, is that something that you've carefully analyzed along the way? Or do you feel you've

01:39:13.980 | been driven by some force inside you to just keep leaning into creative works? And if things have to

01:39:20.060 | gently or not so gently fall off the side, so be it. I have tried in my life, various

01:39:29.100 | other endeavors, including love, marriage, a straight career, you know, a blue collar career,

01:39:41.500 | always trying to find something that at the end of the day, I could lay my head on the pillow and have

01:39:47.580 | peace of mind. And nothing worked until I found, you know, pursuing my craft. That worked for me.

01:39:57.980 | You know, I could, at the end of the day, I felt, okay, I've earned my place on the planet doing this,

01:40:05.900 | whereas other things I would, at the end of the day, I would just be crazy, you know. So I was sort

01:40:11.180 | of led to that. It was like, thank God, I found something, you know, that I can, you know, hang my

01:40:16.860 | hat on. And over, that was a long time ago. And over the course of those years, I sort of, from time to

01:40:21.980 | time, I asked myself, is this still working for you? Or is this, are you, did you, you know, should you

01:40:26.540 | be evolving into something beyond this? But it is still working for me. And it, there is, I don't

01:40:33.820 | really have a bucket list of stuff, you know, if somebody gave me a billion dollars, I just give it

01:40:38.860 | away to, you know. So yeah, it just was for me. And again, it's not even like about peak success,

01:40:48.780 | because I haven't had big success at all. You know, I've had enough success to pay the rent,

01:40:53.980 | which is good enough for me, you know, I'm doing what I want to do. And I don't have to do something

01:40:58.860 | else. So it is, for me, it's really a sort of pursuit of, of, of what I figure like I was put

01:41:06.380 | on the planet to do. And it's always been a surprise too. Book to book to book. I'd ever,

01:41:12.780 | each one is a surprise, which is another sort of weird counterintuitive thing. It isn't like,

01:41:19.580 | oh, could you do a five-year planning on this and this? No. You know, something comes,

01:41:24.620 | it presents itself. It comes in from the goddess and there it is, you know, and then you do it.

01:41:29.260 | So it's clear it's in your nature to create things and to discover what it is

01:41:34.780 | you need to create. I can't help but feel that like we're all here to do something particular

01:41:43.580 | to us. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And I think a lot of times if people don't have a balanced

01:41:49.340 | life, people assume, oh, well, that's trauma. And sometimes it is and, or that's this or that's

01:41:55.900 | that. I mean, nowadays I have more, you know, quote unquote, famous friends and, and a lot of them have

01:42:02.060 | trauma. A lot of them don't. Some of them are really happy. Yeah. And a lot of them have disappointing.

01:42:07.500 | Yeah. And, and a lot of them have what I call it kind of more of a bento box life, like they're,

01:42:12.220 | but where their career is, you know, the, the main entree. And then there's some other little

01:42:17.500 | things and they have relationship and of different kinds, animals or people. And,

01:42:24.620 | and some people, the relationship bin is bigger and their career is less of a, less of a focus and they

01:42:31.180 | seem very happy. So this notion of balance is a, is a peculiar one that people, whatever bento box

01:42:39.260 | people seem to exist in, they, they sort of like to project on others. How much time do you spend on

01:42:45.260 | social media? Maybe an hour a day, you know, I sort of, it's a vice, which I've got to definitely

01:42:52.380 | stop doing, but I will go like through Instagram and do that, you know, just kind of, as far as like

01:42:58.140 | communicating with people, very little, you know, like my email, I'm getting, I'm done with my email

01:43:05.260 | in like two minutes in the morning, you know. But I do think it's great that it's you on social media,

01:43:11.500 | you know, that it's your voice for your content. I think, I think that's great because I think that

01:43:17.580 | there's a real thing to that. People now can get in near direct contact with the creators that they're

01:43:24.300 | inspired by. Which is great. I think it is great. And with other people that are doing whatever they're doing.

01:43:26.620 | Yeah. One thing that I really appreciate about all your work is that

01:43:30.620 | there doesn't seem to be a consistent theme. Some of them overlap, right? But there are a lot of

01:43:40.380 | different themes in there. Before we move to some of the themes that perhaps people are not expecting

01:43:45.580 | that I'd like to parse with you. Talk about turning pro and the concept of being a professional.

01:43:51.420 | If we accept the idea of resistance with a capital R, that's our own internal tendency to

01:44:00.460 | sabotage ourselves when we try to set out to write our book or do our movie or follow our calling, whatever

01:44:07.660 | it is, then the question becomes, well, how do you overcome this thing? And what worked for me

01:44:14.940 | was the idea of turning pro. For years when I was struggling and could never get it together,

01:44:21.180 | I realized that at one point that I was just thinking like an amateur. And that if I could

01:44:26.700 | flip a switch in my mind and think like a professional, that I could overcome some of the things. Like

01:44:32.940 | when I think of a great pro, I think of Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan or Tom Brady or somebody like that.

01:44:44.300 | So like a professional, some of the characteristics of a professional as opposed to an amateur.

01:44:48.780 | A professional shows up every day. A professional stays on the job all day or with the equivalent of all

01:44:58.780 | day. I mean, a lot of us who have jobs, our professionals in our jobs. But when we come home at night and we try to,

01:45:05.260 | you know, start our band or, you know, our fiddle band, we flame out on that. Because we can't sort of

01:45:12.540 | carry over that professional attitude. A professional, as I said this before, does not take success or failure

01:45:20.460 | personally. An amateur will, right? An amateur gets a bad review, bad response of this and they just crap out.

01:45:25.740 | I don't want to do this anymore, right? A professional plays hurt. Like if Kobe Bryant,

01:45:32.860 | Michael Jordan, you know, if they've tweaked the hamstring, they're out there, you know. They'll die

01:45:37.340 | before they'll be taken off the court, you know. Whereas an amateur, when he or she confronts adversity,

01:45:44.860 | will fold. Oh, it's too cold out, you know. I've got a, you know, I've got the flu, that kind of thing.

01:45:52.940 | Another thing, an amateur worries about how they feel. Like, oh, I don't feel like getting out of bed

01:46:01.420 | this morning. I don't feel like really doing my work today. A professional doesn't care how they feel.

01:46:06.700 | They do it, right? So an amateur has amateur habits and a professional has professional habits. And my

01:46:14.540 | book, Turning Pro, is about that, flipping that switch in your head that costs no money. You don't

01:46:21.900 | have to take a course. You don't have to get certified. All you have to do is sort of say to yourself,

01:46:27.500 | if you can do it, and it ain't easy, okay, I'm going to attack this thing, whatever it is now,

01:46:32.700 | as if I were Kobe Bryant, you know. Would he quit, you know, when he didn't feel like doing it?

01:46:38.780 | Absolutely not. So, and, oh, here's another aspect of Turning Pro that worked for me.

01:46:44.940 | I had, like, about a 10-year career as a screenwriter, as we talked about with King Kong Lives.

01:46:50.300 | And one of the things you learn is that screenwriters, a lot of times, will have their one-man

01:46:59.420 | corporations. And they will not sign a contract as themselves. You know, it won't be Andrew Huberman

01:47:06.780 | on the contract. It'll be your corporation, Huberman Lab, FSO, for services of Andrew Huberman.

01:47:14.940 | And I really love that idea of thinking of yourself as a two-part thing. You're the CEO of this thing,

01:47:22.940 | and then you're also the guy that does the work. And I would find that if I was just thinking of myself

01:47:29.580 | as the guy that's doing the work, I have a hard time pitching my ideas. I'm sort of too shy. But if

01:47:37.900 | I'm the CEO of my company, of my corporation, I'm a pro, I can go in there and pimp the hell out of it,

01:47:43.900 | you know? So that idea of looking at yourself as a professional kind of takes all judgment out

01:47:51.340 | of any failures that we've had. We don't blame ourselves anymore for procrastinating or being

01:47:56.700 | perfectionists or giving into fear or self-doubt or anything. We just say, "Well, okay, I did that

01:48:02.300 | when I was thinking like an amateur, but now I'm going to think like a pro." And a pro just doesn't

01:48:07.340 | doesn't yield to that stuff. So that's a mind shift, a mindset shift that really helped me a lot.

01:48:16.860 | I love that. I mean, so much of that feels is nested in taking oneself seriously.

01:48:23.180 | Yeah. You know, I think when people hear the words taking oneself seriously, they think,

01:48:27.020 | "Oh, well, someone's going to be heavy. They're never going to joke, no sense of humor." But that's

01:48:30.700 | not what I'm referring to. I wish people would take themselves more seriously, including their creative

01:48:36.860 | sparks inside of them. You said there's no cost to turning pro. I agree there's no monetary cost.

01:48:46.380 | You can decide to flip that switch. I would argue, and I'm not arguing against, because I don't think

01:48:51.180 | that... No, I know what you're going to say. I agree with you. I think there's a huge cost,

01:48:56.060 | and the huge cost I'm referring to is the one of how people around you react when you start taking

01:49:03.020 | yourself seriously. Yeah. I mean, I don't need to go into the story. I've done it elsewhere,

01:49:07.260 | but I was an unimpressive high school student. Thank God for my high school girlfriend going off to

01:49:12.780 | college and discovering that, and then thank God for the biology teacher that turned me on to biology.

01:49:17.900 | Thank God for Harry Carlyle. But I had the drive, but certainly it wasn't organized in the right ways.

01:49:24.700 | But when I switched from being a fun guy to be around in a lot of context to the guy that is

01:49:33.100 | absolutely going to ace the exam, no matter how much work I have to put into it, that's absolutely going

01:49:39.340 | to be in the gym three days a week. That's absolutely going to get my sleep in it. You get a lot of flack,

01:49:45.980 | especially in your late teens, early 20s. Now, I did go out and party then. I never drank a lot,

01:49:51.500 | but I went to parties. Across the years, I did fewer and fewer social things. Even as a graduate student,

01:49:58.300 | postdoc, and junior professor, at meetings, everyone would go to happy hour. I would go work out if I

01:50:05.020 | hadn't done it that morning. And I would go to sleep at night instead of staying up late talking in the bar,

01:50:11.340 | because great interactions would happen in those bars, scientific discussions and so forth. But the

01:50:16.460 | next morning, I wanted to be on point during the seminar and be able to learn and be able to contribute.

01:50:22.140 | And so the big cost is not everybody likes that because they feel it as pressure. It's sort of like

01:50:28.220 | if you're eating well, you're eating healthy, people pay more attention to the ways they are not eating

01:50:35.580 | healthy and they will do everything they can to try and make you feel bad about that. We see this in mass.

01:50:41.180 | We see this in culture. There are extremes of body dysmorphia and people taking fitness to

01:50:49.740 | extremes that aren't healthy or anything to extremes. But we see people being basically not shamed, but

01:50:58.540 | ridiculed for being serious about their health. It's nuts, but it's all about them. It's very clear.

01:51:06.460 | It's all about their own unwillingness to give up the second chocolate croissant or to feel like

01:51:12.860 | maybe they're not as fit as the people around them. I mean, when standards around you are at risk of

01:51:18.860 | rising, that can be really scary to people. Yeah. We were talking about that earlier, Andrew,

01:51:24.700 | when I was saying that it becomes when you start eating healthy and sleeping and getting up early and

01:51:30.700 | stuff. It becomes a reproach to your friends who know that they're not doing that, know they should

01:51:36.540 | be doing that. And they say, "Who's this guy to do that?" And then they will try to sabotage you and

01:51:41.980 | undermine you and ridicule you. And so you're right. Turning pro does have a cost. A lot of times,

01:51:49.100 | you know, if you take that course, you have to leave people behind. You know, people who were your

01:51:53.820 | friends, you can't be friends with them anymore, you know? Because a lot of times, groups of friends

01:51:59.500 | will have an unspoken kind of compact among them that we're all going to stay mediocre. That's the deal,

01:52:07.660 | right? And in fact, Good Will Hunting, that was what that movie was about, right? That the

01:52:15.580 | Matt Damon character was this mathematical genius, right? And his buddies, all of his,

01:52:24.140 | you know, fist fighting Boston South E guys were, had this compact. They were all going to stay,

01:52:29.340 | you know, kind of blue collar guys. And we're all going to be buddies. We're going to have a wonderful

01:52:33.660 | time, you know? And then there's that great scene at the end of the movie where Ben Affleck,

01:52:37.900 | his best friend says to him, you know, if I come back 20 years from now and you're still here,

01:52:43.660 | I'm going to kill you because you won the lottery. You got this thing and this gift and you got to use it.

01:52:50.220 | So there are those kind of packs that people make. We're all going to stay mediocre

01:52:54.940 | right here where we are. And if you, Andrew, try to rise above, you'd be the tall poppy.

01:52:59.820 | Somebody's going to, you know, cut you off. So sometimes we do have to leave people behind,

01:53:04.380 | you know? Well, the good news is, and I can say this from experience, that there are people waiting

01:53:11.340 | for you who have high standards that are, make excellent friends. And many of the people that

01:53:17.820 | at one point we feel we've left behind later come back and ask for ways to better themselves,

01:53:25.500 | physically, creatively, et cetera. Yeah, I think the notion of dominant culture is one that my dad

01:53:34.940 | internalized in me really early on. One of the things I love about being a professor at Stanford

01:53:40.300 | is you look to your right or you look to your left and people are awesome. People are going, it's, it has,

01:53:47.100 | if anything, I mean, you know, it's the issue that you go, well, how much pressure is this? And,

01:53:51.340 | you know, I would say actually very little from the outside. Everyone who's a faculty member at

01:53:57.740 | Stanford is putting so much pressure on themselves to live out their vision of what they're trying to

01:54:02.540 | create. I mean, it's spectacular. I've got colleagues that I could tell you about multiple domains of life

01:54:07.100 | where they're just 11 out of 10, right? And some, it's only one. And in some, they have more challenged

01:54:13.660 | personal lives like anything else. And in some, they seem to just do it all. But the, I think

01:54:19.180 | the notion, a former guest on this podcast, who's a tier, former tier one operator, DJ Shipley said,

01:54:27.660 | you never want to be the big fish in the small pond. That's the worst place to be. It's the most

01:54:32.940 | uncomfortable, sad, low growth place to be. You want to be surrounded by people who are really striving,

01:54:40.140 | really pushing themselves. Your standards go up and you get better and you realize

01:54:44.860 | all sorts of wonderful things about who you can become. I think that's one good feature of social

01:54:50.140 | media now, which is that people can find mentors. They can find people who are not giving the illusion

01:54:57.660 | of being perfect. That's true.

01:54:58.540 | You know, we used to think that famous people were perfect. Nowadays, the more famous you are,

01:55:03.180 | the harder it is to control your reputation. And I think that's in some ways a good thing. It has its

01:55:07.900 | darker side, but the idea that nobody's perfect, it's just that people are emphasizing or de-emphasizing

01:55:14.220 | certain aspects of life. So, but yeah, I think turning oneself pro, which is, as you pointed out,

01:55:21.340 | something that people can just do for themselves, is really about taking yourself seriously and

01:55:25.180 | taking life seriously. And that brings me to a bigger question, which is so much of what you talk

01:55:32.460 | about, this is why I love it so much, is about the practical. We started off talking about like what you

01:55:38.380 | do and when and how, and how you close out a session and how you reopen a session. But it seems like you're

01:55:44.540 | also very connected to the spiritual aspects of the creative process and that you really bookend these,

01:55:51.020 | for lack of a better phrase, that you really bookend the two aspects of the creative process. Because for

01:55:55.900 | many people, they hear about creativity and it can seem kind of mystical and almost like trying to grab

01:56:01.820 | fog. Many times the process is like trying to grab fog. So you've given a lot of extremely practical

01:56:07.740 | advice. But when it comes to the kind of spiritual higher order stuff, if you will, the muse, how large

01:56:18.220 | a role does that play in your reflections about where you're going? Because it sounds like you believe

01:56:24.220 | that a lot of this stuff is not us, it's coming through us.

01:56:29.020 | I absolutely believe that. And I, you know, you're right, Andrew. It's a, the creative life,

01:56:36.220 | I think is a two sided thing. You know, the one side is kind of the blue collar practical aspect

01:56:42.540 | of being a professional that, you know, you can sit down, you can do your work, you discipline yourself,

01:56:47.580 | you know what you're going to do. But the other side is that where do ideas come from? They don't

01:56:54.060 | come from us, you know, they come from someplace else. And so I'm definitely a believer that we

01:57:01.660 | live on the material plane here, but there's a plane above us. And we're trying to communicate to

01:57:08.540 | that plane. And that plane is trying to communicate to us. And our job as artists, like if we were in a

01:57:15.180 | monastery or something, the move from here to here would be called prayer. But if we're artists, the move

01:57:21.820 | from here to here is like the invocation of the muse, it's kind of saying, give me an idea, help

01:57:27.180 | me, you know, and, and, and one, we on the material plane, put ourselves at the service of this higher

01:57:35.580 | plane, of our illumined self, or whatever you want to call it, the union self, whatever we want to call

01:57:40.700 | it, and try to channel it as best we can. And our job here to be is to be in terms of being a pro is to

01:57:49.980 | sort of be ready to take that voltage as it comes in. And like, Beethoven could play on the piano,

01:57:58.940 | what he was hearing in his, in his head, right? So that's our job, we have to be able to, to know how to

01:58:05.340 | produce that in material form, whatever that is, but it's coming from another place. So I'm,

01:58:12.380 | I'm absolutely a believer that, you know, there are higher dimensions, and there's probably a lot of

01:58:18.540 | higher dimensions. And I think the Greeks were really kind of onto something in the ancient Greeks in

01:58:25.820 | their concept of the muses and the various gods and goddesses that are, you know, interacting with this

01:58:33.020 | material plane that we're on. I, you know, that's a way of anthropomorphizing it. I'm sure you could,

01:58:38.780 | we could come up with some way in the quantum field or something. I mean, you're a scientist,

01:58:42.940 | you probably know how to, that it has to do with something, I don't know what, but there is something

01:58:47.820 | coming from somewhere and it ain't us. Well, I have my ideas about that. Very few of them are grounded in

01:58:54.940 | neurons and, and cells, but they interact with neurons and cells. It's an evolving area. You know,

01:59:00.220 | we had a guest on the podcast, David Desteno, who's a professor at Northeastern University,

01:59:09.340 | talked about the relationship between science and religion and how acts of faith, not just saying

01:59:15.660 | one believes in God, not just saying one believes in a higher order consciousness, but acts of faith,

01:59:23.500 | prayer for you, maybe through writing or other expressions that involve action, that those

01:59:30.860 | absolutely have positive health benefits. We now know that, but that it's really about the acts of faith.

01:59:38.300 | I love that phrase. That's a great one. And it's true.

01:59:42.220 | Yeah. He, it, it struck a chord with me too, because in biology, you learn that you need to understand the

01:59:49.020 | names of things, mitochondria, Golgi apparatus. You need to know that, but those

01:59:53.020 | are just names, but the real magic in understanding biology and being able to internalize it is

01:59:59.580 | understanding things in their verb states, right? Understanding how neurons work, not just as a

02:00:04.860 | description, but being able to think about that and visualize it. I think it's the same with ourselves.

02:00:08.780 | This is why like clinical labels can be useful, but understanding when one is in a

02:00:15.020 | sort of a place, verb actions of gratitude as opposed to just reciting some gratitude thing.

02:00:21.580 | It's subtle, but it's meaningful. Anyway, I don't quite know how to articulate it, but

02:00:25.580 | Desteno described this and, and the data from his laboratory

02:00:29.660 | are showing that when people start to think in terms of faith-based actions, for many people through,

02:00:38.460 | you know, religious, you know, scripture, reading scripture or whatever it is, but there are many

02:00:43.260 | ways to access this, that all sorts of interesting things start to happen at the level of morality,

02:00:50.220 | at the level of their own consciousness, at their level of feelings of connectedness,

02:00:54.300 | that go beyond any kind of simple two plus two equals four outcome.

02:00:57.900 | So I totally agree with you. There's something else, definitely something else going on.

02:01:01.980 | It's exciting. I think that, you know, I know you're not a big drinker, neither am I. Maybe that's why

02:01:07.980 | you look so young for your age and so robust. Although I think if I were to wager, I'd say it's also

02:01:14.940 | because you're pursuing what you love. You're answering your calling, certainly. That's the never ending

02:01:22.860 | source of dopamine. Ah, is it? Absolutely. Because it's, it's, it's self-replenishing. Ah, that's a

02:01:29.900 | great word. Self-replenishing. Yeah. I mean, it's a, you know, that's the, clearly the thing. I mean,

02:01:34.620 | clearly the thing. So you don't drink much, but nowadays there's a lot of discussion and perhaps

02:01:42.380 | there always was about taking things to be able to act, to bridge this plane between the self and the,

02:01:47.180 | this higher order, uh, these messages that, that we can receive and can come through us. Um, I know

02:01:53.340 | a lot of writers drink a lot. There've been a lot of alcohol, alcoholic writers. Yeah. I hear that anyway,

02:02:00.300 | not that I know anybody. Yeah. I think historically that was true. I think a lot of writers have

02:02:04.380 | relied on amphetamines and alcohol to get their work done and nicotine. Nicotine is kind of making a

02:02:12.380 | a comeback in non-smoke form. So let's set that aside. Um, you do this through sheer good old marine

02:02:20.300 | style grit. It sounds like. Yeah. Or, or kind of surrendering to it, you know, like I'm not a

02:02:27.260 | meditator, but from what I gather, that's sort of what meditation is about, you know? So yeah, just sort

02:02:34.620 | of, that's how I, that's how I do it. I'm not even sure how I do it. I just put myself at the service of

02:02:39.820 | what I'm trying to do and, and try to get out of the way as much as I can.

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02:03:09.260 | cinnamon roll flavor, but I also like the chocolate chip cookie dough flavor. And I also like the

02:03:13.740 | salted peanut butter flavor. Basically I like all the flavors. They're all delicious. Also big news,

02:03:18.860 | David bars are now back in stock. They were sold out for several months because they are that popular,

02:03:23.660 | but they are now back in stock. By eating a David bar, I'm able to get 28 grams of protein in the

02:03:28.780 | calories of a snack, which makes it very easy for me to meet my protein goals of one gram of protein per

02:03:33.740 | pound of body weight per day. And to do so without eating excess calories. I generally eat a David

02:03:39.180 | bar most afternoons and I always keep them with me when I'm away from home or traveling because they're

02:03:43.500 | incredibly convenient to get enough protein. As I mentioned, they're incredibly delicious. And given

02:03:48.300 | that 28 grams of protein, they're pretty filling for just 150 calories. So they're great between meals as

02:03:53.660 | well. If you'd like to try David, you can go to davidprotein.com/huberman. Again, that's

02:03:59.100 | davidprotein.com/huberman. Throughout today's discussion, you've mentioned various physical labor

02:04:05.980 | jobs. I have a very practical question. How comfortable is the chair you sit in when you write?

02:04:11.820 | Not very comfortable, but I'm only sitting there for a couple hours, so it's okay.

02:04:16.780 | Still, how much do you care that it's not that comfortable?

02:04:20.220 | It probably should not be comfortable, you know? But hopefully you're in your head and you're not

02:04:25.100 | really noticing that sort of thing. Why do you ask that question, Andrew?

02:04:29.260 | Because years ago, I went online and I was looking at some stuff about writers and there's a very famous

02:04:35.500 | writer, I won't mention his name, and he said, "You know, it's very important that you have a super

02:04:39.580 | comfortable chair because otherwise you're going to be..." And you know what my first thought was,

02:04:43.580 | even though he's far more successful at writing than I am, I thought, "That's terrible advice." Because

02:04:50.940 | if someone were going to ask me, you know, how to do, I don't know, like a really clean protein

02:04:58.060 | labeling experiment in the lab, you know, immunohistochemistry or something like that,

02:05:01.660 | I would make sure that they had everything. I would make sure that the antibodies were fresh out of it.

02:05:07.340 | But then I would not want them to even know that there are now, you know, like kits that can make

02:05:15.420 | certain aspects of the process much easier because the moment you experience that creature comfort,

02:05:20.700 | the more painful the classic way of doing it is. Now, that's not to say I wouldn't embrace new

02:05:28.140 | technologies, but this notion of optimization, which sometimes gets thrown at me, is a terrible one with

02:05:34.940 | respect to the creative process. Because I believe that if you're thinking about, "Oh, like, am I

02:05:39.660 | comfortable or not? Am I in an optimal place to create?" We started this podcast in a closet,

02:05:46.140 | a small closet with me, Rob, and the bulldog. And we were not thinking about optimizing anything except

02:05:52.700 | getting the audio and the visuals just right enough that we could get it out there. So I love, love, love,

02:05:58.940 | and I'm not surprised that you have a slightly uncomfortable chair and that you don't really

02:06:03.100 | care so much. Yeah. Yeah, I agree completely that, you know, that advice was really bad. I would go

02:06:08.620 | the absolute opposite, you know, get the most uncomfortable chair you possibly can have.

02:06:12.220 | Do you think those years of physical labor, marine training, and your morning ritual of going to the gym

02:06:19.660 | have allowed your mind to be more durable by virtue of the fact that you can... I think you can tolerate

02:06:26.780 | a fair amount of physical discomfort that you probably don't even realize because you have no

02:06:31.020 | comparison, but that most people would probably buckle under or at least be kind of... I don't know.

02:06:38.700 | I feel like you are the opposite of like crotchety, you know? A terrible word to be described, you know?

02:06:44.620 | You don't see me at home, Andrew. Okay. Are you a complainer?

02:06:49.340 | No, I've really tried and never complained at all. I think it's a real vice. It's another form of resistance.

02:06:56.540 | Interesting. Well, Steven Pressfield, this has been awesome. Before we conclude, I do want to ask you,

02:07:05.020 | what's your most recent book and what's it about? And if you're willing, maybe give us a little peek

02:07:13.180 | behind the veil of what might be coming next. I have a book coming next June. We were talking about this

02:07:21.340 | before. I had a book a few years ago called A Man at Arms, which was about... it's about a recurring

02:07:28.620 | character that I have who I call the one-man killing machine of the ancient world, kind of the Clint Eastwood

02:07:34.700 | of the ancient world, Telamon of Arcadia. And that book took place around the time of the crucifixion.

02:07:42.300 | fiction. The new book is one of the aspects of Telamon is he keeps living life after life after life.

02:07:50.860 | And he's doomed because of crimes he committed in the past to live life after life as a soldier,

02:07:58.940 | always as a soldier, always fighting, always killing, always being killed, so on and so forth.

02:08:04.780 | So this new book that's coming out, it's called The Arcadian, is about his final life. And I won't say

02:08:13.740 | any more than that, except that it takes place in the past, and that it's pretty interesting in that

02:08:21.900 | how this all sort of plays out. It really kind of goes what we were talking about before about

02:08:27.260 | are there different levels of reality? And in this case, there definitely are different levels of reality.

02:08:34.140 | And this character has to deal with them on the field of justice and payback.

02:08:39.740 | Fantastic. Next June.

02:08:42.460 | The next June, yeah. The Arcadian.

02:08:44.940 | The Arcadian. We'll keep our eyes and ears out for that. Meanwhile,

02:08:47.900 | you know, I don't know which book to recommend most, but you know, I love War of Art. I love Do the Work.

02:08:54.700 | There's so many, you know, so I won't ask you to add just one other, Gates of Fire. They're all awesome.

02:09:03.980 | They're awesome listens and they're awesome reads. People should definitely check these out. It's

02:09:08.300 | clear you've had an enormous impact on people's creative process. And these books are also very

02:09:14.780 | entertaining to listen to. It's not a bunch of lists. I hope so.

02:09:17.980 | Yeah, they really are. And I'm actually very grateful, I should say, that you didn't have a ton of

02:09:25.180 | like immediate and big success with your movie, with the King Kong movie. And that War of Art took some

02:09:31.820 | time. Because I do think everything we know about dopamine dynamics tells us that, who knows, maybe you

02:09:37.260 | would have not written the subsequent books. And I look at your work as a body of work. As a scientist,

02:09:43.260 | that's something that I can really appreciate. A body of work is really what makes for an awesome.

02:09:48.540 | And what you just said about dopamine, I never had thought about it that way. That's sort of a slow

02:09:53.180 | release dopamine for me, you know, over many years. And well, and it compounds the way that

02:09:58.620 | you've experienced your wins. I mean, oh, I've got stories and go on for days about people I knew that had

02:10:04.780 | big papers published in Science or Nature then disappeared completely. They're just gone. They're

02:10:10.060 | just completely gone because they couldn't take that the next thing didn't match up to the first thing.

02:10:13.900 | You know, this stuff is real. The one hit wonder thing happens in every field. And that movie,

02:10:21.980 | My Big Break, like really captures it in the in the realm of acting.

02:10:26.060 | You know, a lot of things we're talking about here today, Andrew, they don't teach you in school.

02:10:31.500 | You know, nobody teaches you about what if you are have a one hit? How do you handle nobody even

02:10:36.780 | that's the topic doesn't come up at all, or how to how to handle negative criticism, how to handle

02:10:41.980 | positive stuff like that. And what's the idea of turning pro? Nobody, you never learn this, you know,

02:10:48.140 | and they're all absolutely vital life skills that you hope you encounter mentors along the way that teach

02:10:55.580 | you because it's not taught in school. Well, God bless you for stepping up and being that mentor to

02:11:02.060 | so many people, including to me. You're on that list. I swear, you're on that list and it's not a long list.

02:11:07.580 | No, I'm embarrassed.

02:11:08.300 | No, well, for the right reasons, I should say. And thank you for coming here today.

02:11:14.700 | And thank you for having me.

02:11:15.820 | Yeah, this has been a real pleasure.

02:11:16.860 | We've been talking about this for years.

02:11:18.780 | It was great when we discovered we were neighbors.

02:11:20.940 | Yeah. I hope we haven't squeezed all the fruit out of the orange here. We can do this again sometime.

02:11:25.580 | Oh, absolutely. And I'll see you in the gym. I'll try and get up a little earlier. That's actually

02:11:29.820 | starting after my 50th birthday, I'm going to be a 5:00 AM riser, no matter what time I went to sleep.

02:11:38.620 | That was something I resolved a few days ago after a different discussion on here. But

02:11:43.420 | I feel a strong antidepressant effect of waking up and you just get so much more done, you know,

02:11:50.300 | but that getting out of bed when you haven't slept quite as much as you would like is brutal.

02:11:55.980 | And as I said to you before, 50 is nothing at all. You're just a kid.

02:12:00.940 | You know, you got another 50 plus years ahead of yourself. So I know when you turn 50, you turn 40,

02:12:06.380 | turn 30, you say, oh my God, my life is over. You know, not so, you know, take it from me.

02:12:11.340 | I'd give my left arm to be 50 again. You got it made.

02:12:15.580 | Awesome. Well, that perhaps is the best birthday gift I could have received.

02:12:19.020 | It feels good to hear. Happy birthday.

02:12:20.300 | Thank you. Please come back again. Thanks for doing everything you're doing.

02:12:23.580 | I know I do not need to tell you this, but please just keep going. We're all benefiting.

02:12:28.220 | I will if you will. Deal. All right.

02:12:30.780 | Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Steven Pressfield.

02:12:34.460 | To learn more about his work and to find links to his various books, please see the show note captions.

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02:13:14.220 | For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out.

02:13:16.620 | It's my very first book.

02:13:18.220 | It's entitled protocols and operating manual for the human body.

02:13:21.740 | This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years.

02:13:24.140 | And that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience.

02:13:28.140 | And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise, to stress control protocols

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02:13:36.140 | And of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.

02:13:41.420 | The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com.

02:13:45.260 | There you can find links to various vendors.

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02:14:25.580 | in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep,

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02:14:32.940 | We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training.

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02:14:49.740 | Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Steven Pressfield.

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How to Overcome Inner Resistance | Steven Pressfield

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