Steven Pressfield: The War of Art - Lex Fridman 知识图谱

Lex Fridman (01:40.520)

This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

Steven Pressfield (01:43.760)

I recently considered renaming this podcast

Lex Fridman (01:46.400)

but decided against it.

Steven Pressfield (01:48.080)

AI is my passion, and in some sense,

Lex Fridman (01:51.200)

this podcast is not as much about AI

Lex Fridman (01:53.560)

but more about a journey of an AI researcher

Lex Fridman (01:56.000)

struggling to explore the human mind,

Steven Pressfield (01:58.640)

the physics of our universe,

Lex Fridman (02:00.280)

and the nature of human behavior,

Steven Pressfield (02:02.320)

intelligence, consciousness, love, and power.

Lex Fridman (02:07.240)

I will continue to return home to the technical,

Steven Pressfield (02:09.640)

computer science, machine learning,

Lex Fridman (02:11.080)

engineering, math, programming,

Lex Fridman (02:12.920)

but also venture out to talk to people

Lex Fridman (02:15.760)

who had a big impact on my life

Steven Pressfield (02:17.840)

outside the technical fields.

Lex Fridman (02:19.880)

Writers like Steven Pressfield and Stephen King,

Steven Pressfield (02:24.120)

musicians like Tom Waits,

Lex Fridman (02:26.520)

political leaders like, well, you know who,

Lex Fridman (02:31.520)

and even athletes.

Lex Fridman (02:33.720)

I hope you join me on this journey.

Steven Pressfield (02:36.040)

As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now

Lex Fridman (02:38.360)

and no ads in the middle

Steven Pressfield (02:39.520)

that can break the flow of the conversation.

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Click on the links, buy all of the stuff.

Steven Pressfield (02:44.520)

It's the best way to support this podcast.

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This episode is supported by the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Steven Pressfield (02:50.880)

Go to jordanharbinger.com slash Lex.

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It's how he knows I sent you.

Steven Pressfield (02:55.760)

On that page, there's links to subscribe to it

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on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere else.

Steven Pressfield (03:00.840)

I've been binging on this podcast.

Lex Fridman (03:02.920)

Jordan is a great human being.

Steven Pressfield (03:05.480)

He gets the best out of his guests,

Lex Fridman (03:07.200)

dives deep, calls them out when it's needed,

Lex Fridman (03:10.080)

and makes the whole thing fun to listen to.

Lex Fridman (03:12.360)

He's interviewed Kobe Bryant, Mark Cuban,

Steven Pressfield (03:15.400)

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Gary Kasparov, and many more.

Lex Fridman (03:18.960)

I just finished listening to his recent conversation

Steven Pressfield (03:21.200)

with Mick West about debunking conspiracy theories.

Lex Fridman (03:24.920)

This topic can be both fascinating and frustrating

Steven Pressfield (03:28.400)

on both sides, but in this conversation,

Lex Fridman (03:31.320)

Jordan thread the needle beautifully,

Lex Fridman (03:33.400)

and so it turned out to be a great listen.

Lex Fridman (03:35.840)

I highly recommend it.

Steven Pressfield (03:37.800)

Again, go to jordanharbinger.com slash Lex.

Lex Fridman (03:40.880)

It's how he knows I sent you.

Steven Pressfield (03:42.840)

On that page, there's links to subscribe to this show

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on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere else.

Steven Pressfield (03:49.680)

This show is presented by Cash App,

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the number one finance app in the App Store.

Steven Pressfield (03:54.480)

When you get it, use code LexPodcast.

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Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin,

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and invest in the stock market with as little as $1.

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Since Cash App allows you to buy Bitcoin,

Steven Pressfield (04:06.520)

let me mention that the cryptocurrency

Lex Fridman (04:08.480)

in the context of the history of money is fascinating.

Steven Pressfield (04:11.960)

I recommend Ascent of Money as a great book on this history.

Lex Fridman (04:16.080)

Debits and credits on ledgers started

Steven Pressfield (04:18.480)

around 30,000 years ago.

Lex Fridman (04:20.720)

The US dollar created over 200 years ago,

Lex Fridman (04:23.800)

and the first decentralized cryptocurrency

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released just over 10 years ago.

Lex Fridman (04:28.320)

So given that history, cryptocurrency's still very much

Lex Fridman (04:31.240)

in its early days of development,

Lex Fridman (04:33.440)

but it's still aiming to,

Lex Fridman (04:34.880)

and just might redefine the nature of money.

Lex Fridman (04:38.840)

So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store

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or Google Play, and use the code LexPodcast,

Steven Pressfield (04:44.840)

you get $10, and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST,

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an organization that is helping advance robotics

Lex Fridman (04:51.320)

and STEM education for young people around the world.

Lex Fridman (04:55.200)

And now, here's my conversation with Steven Pressfield.

Steven Pressfield (05:00.520)

Modern society in many ways dreams

Lex Fridman (05:03.240)

of creating universal peace,

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and yet war has molded civilization

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as we know it throughout its history.

Lex Fridman (05:10.760)

So let's start at the high philosophical level.

Lex Fridman (05:16.280)

If you could imagine a world without war,

Lex Fridman (05:18.800)

how would that world be different?

Lex Fridman (05:20.440)

Perhaps put another way, what purpose has war served?

Lex Fridman (05:25.920)

Why do we fight?

Lex Fridman (05:27.400)

I think we're basically the same creatures internally

Lex Fridman (05:31.760)

that we were in the cave, right?

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In tribal society, back for however many,

Steven Pressfield (05:39.440)

you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of years,

Lex Fridman (05:41.840)

which means that we're in the dynamic in our mind

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is a kind of an us versus them dynamic

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where our tribe is the people,

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and everybody else are whatever, you know?

Lex Fridman (05:54.760)

And I don't see that,

Steven Pressfield (05:57.000)

I don't think that's changed one iota over the centuries.

Lex Fridman (06:01.520)

It's just a question of how one might sublimate

Steven Pressfield (06:06.360)

that urge to compete.

Lex Fridman (06:10.120)

When you're a martial artist, you know,

Steven Pressfield (06:12.760)

a great part of your day I'm sure is dedicated

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to reaching that place of total commitment

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and in the face of competition,

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in the face of adversity, et cetera, et cetera,

Steven Pressfield (06:25.120)

which is, I think, natural and great for the human race

Lex Fridman (06:28.920)

on an individual basis.

Lex Fridman (06:30.960)

So the hope that I have, if there is any hope,

Lex Fridman (06:35.680)

personally, I don't think the human race

Steven Pressfield (06:37.040)

is gonna be around very long,

Lex Fridman (06:38.920)

but would be in sports

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or in other kind of sublimated activities

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where people can act out their need for conquest

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or aggression or so forth,

Lex Fridman (06:53.200)

but at the same time relate to their opponents

Steven Pressfield (06:56.080)

as human beings, and when the game is over,

Lex Fridman (06:58.360)

you know, you embrace your competitors, stuff like that.

Lex Fridman (07:01.320)

So you think war was inevitable, it's a part of human nature

Lex Fridman (07:06.840)

as opposed to a force, a creative force in society

Steven Pressfield (07:11.960)

that served a benefit.

Lex Fridman (07:14.160)

Well, I'm sure it has benefited, you know,

Steven Pressfield (07:17.280)

spreading cultures and mixing cultures and stuff like that,

Lex Fridman (07:21.000)

but I think the urge to conquest,

Steven Pressfield (07:26.440)

if you think about Alexander the Great

Lex Fridman (07:28.040)

or Julius Caesar or Napoleon or anybody like that,

Steven Pressfield (07:30.360)

or even individual, or if we even think about

Lex Fridman (07:33.080)

one of the plants that we're looking at right outside,

Steven Pressfield (07:36.240)

I mean, if you let a particular plant have its way,

Lex Fridman (07:39.120)

it would take over, you know, the whole hillside.

Lex Fridman (07:41.520)

And certainly in the days of Alexander the Great, let's say,

Lex Fridman (07:47.080)

there were, who knows, over the face of the earth,

Steven Pressfield (07:50.760)

hundreds of little kingdoms, China, Japan,

Lex Fridman (07:54.240)

you know, Asia, Europe, wherever,

Lex Fridman (07:56.480)

and every prince that grew up dreamt of conquering

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his neighbor and conquering a neighbor after that.

Steven Pressfield (08:04.580)

That seems to be a universal human imperative,

Lex Fridman (08:11.120)

at least in the male of the species.

Steven Pressfield (08:14.040)

So...

Lex Fridman (08:14.880)

The war is just a realization of that imperative.

Steven Pressfield (08:16.920)

I think so.

Lex Fridman (08:18.320)

So you've written about Spartans in the Battle of Thermopylae,

Steven Pressfield (08:22.120)

you've about Alexander the Great,

Lex Fridman (08:23.520)

about the Six Day War in 67 in Israel,

Steven Pressfield (08:28.160)

against Egypt, Jordan, Syria.

Lex Fridman (08:30.360)

What war, not just out of those, but in general,

Lex Fridman (08:35.280)

do you think has been most transformative for the world?

Lex Fridman (08:38.880)

Well, these are great questions, Lex.

Lex Fridman (08:40.680)

Tough, easy ones, right?

Lex Fridman (08:42.560)

I mean, I wish I knew more about the Mongols,

Steven Pressfield (08:47.120)

because I certainly, from what little I know,

Lex Fridman (08:49.660)

I think that was a very,

Steven Pressfield (08:51.360)

their conquests were very transformative,

Lex Fridman (08:54.200)

bringing cultures in a horrible, bloody way together.

Lex Fridman (09:00.520)

But gosh, what's then the most transformative?

Lex Fridman (09:05.180)

Maybe the Roman conquest,

Steven Pressfield (09:07.480)

establishing the Roman Empire and bringing that culture.

Lex Fridman (09:10.680)

Maybe Alexander the Great's wars

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that united east and west, at least for a minute.

Lex Fridman (09:19.280)

So building of empire.

Lex Fridman (09:20.760)

Do you have a sense, so there's wars,

Lex Fridman (09:23.680)

I mean, the Six Day War is not about building empires.

Steven Pressfield (09:30.280)

It's about deeply held religious, cultural conflict

Lex Fridman (09:39.180)

and holding the line, holding the border.

Lex Fridman (09:42.680)

And then there is conquests, like the Mongols,

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that, what is it, some large percentage of the population

Lex Fridman (09:48.800)

is a descendant of Genghis Khan, I believe, right?

Lex Fridman (09:52.240)

So that has transformative effects.

Lex Fridman (09:54.360)

And then World War II, I mean, personally,

Lex Fridman (09:56.800)

and my family and so on, had transformative effects.

Steven Pressfield (09:59.800)

Let me ask you this, Lex.

Lex Fridman (10:01.080)

Why are you, what are you trying to get at

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with these questions?

Lex Fridman (10:04.880)

What is this kind of the theme that you're aiming at?

Steven Pressfield (10:09.180)

Well, I talked to Eric Weinstein,

Lex Fridman (10:11.680)

and he said everything is great about war

Steven Pressfield (10:13.800)

except the killing.

Lex Fridman (10:15.300)

And there's a romantic notion of war.

Steven Pressfield (10:21.660)

Certainly there's a romantic notion of being a warrior,

Lex Fridman (10:23.920)

but there's a romantic notion of war

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that somehow there's a creative force to it,

Lex Fridman (10:32.200)

that because we fight, out of that fighting comes culture,

Steven Pressfield (10:37.280)

comes music and art, and more and more desire to create

Lex Fridman (10:42.280)

with the societies that win.

Lex Fridman (10:45.780)

And to me, war is not just, hey, I have a stick

Lex Fridman (10:51.020)

and I want your land.

Steven Pressfield (10:53.380)

It's some kind of, like it has echoes of the creative force

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that makes humans unique to other animals.

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Like, war is, it can't be just four people

Lex Fridman (11:09.740)

or 10 people or 100 people.

Steven Pressfield (11:11.620)

You have to have thousands of people agreeing,

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usually thousands or more, for something so deeply

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that you would be willing to risk your own life.

Lex Fridman (11:22.980)

And there's a romantic notion to that.

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And because you've written so well and passionate

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about some of these, I wanted to see,

Steven Pressfield (11:29.940)

because I don't have any answers,

Lex Fridman (11:31.220)

I wanted to untangle that.

Steven Pressfield (11:32.780)

If there is a reason we fight that's more than just anger

Lex Fridman (11:37.780)

and hate and a way to conquer.

Steven Pressfield (11:43.280)

Well, let me take it from a completely different side.

Lex Fridman (11:47.480)

I don't think that I, in writing about war,

Steven Pressfield (11:51.580)

am really that interested in war per se.

Lex Fridman (11:55.240)

I'm more interested in the metaphor.

Steven Pressfield (11:58.400)

I think for me, I'm really writing about my own internal

Lex Fridman (12:02.860)

war and the war against myself and against my own resistance,

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my own negativity, all of those things

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that spirituality would be the opposite of.

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So I'm not really an expert on war.

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It's not like talking to Jim Mattis

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or to Victor Davis Hanson or whatever. To me, the human being,

Lex Fridman (12:37.840)

we are spiritual beings in a physical envelope.

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And there's an automatic terrible tension within that.

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And which creates a war inside ourselves.

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So the outer war, when I think about the Israeli army

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standing up to, whatever, 10 to one odds

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or whatever it was, that is a metaphor to me

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of the fight we're fighting inside ourselves.

Steven Pressfield (13:10.080)

For me, the six day war was, as you know,

Lex Fridman (13:12.360)

my feeling was it was about a return from exile.

Steven Pressfield (13:15.600)

It was sort of the culmination of the reestablishment

Lex Fridman (13:19.480)

of the state of Israel, which had never really

Steven Pressfield (13:22.040)

been completed because the holiest places

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of the Jewish people were in the hands of their enemies.

Lex Fridman (13:27.260)

So now, on the other hand, Alexander the Great's conquests,

Lex Fridman (13:31.580)

I think, were a whole other different scenario

Steven Pressfield (13:34.280)

where the metaphor was that Alexander's father, Philip,

Lex Fridman (13:39.520)

I think created the First Nation, capital N Nation,

Lex Fridman (13:43.360)

and he created a sort of a pathway for these guys

Lex Fridman (13:48.280)

who were mountain men and basically barbarians,

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Macedonians, and by creating this army

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and this dream of conquering the world,

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which Alexander took to the, you know, really enacted,

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he gave them a way of rising out of themselves,

Steven Pressfield (14:10.080)

of transcending themselves, not just individually,

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but as a people.

Lex Fridman (14:14.040)

So that would go along with what you're saying, Lex,

Lex Fridman (14:16.400)

of a certain creativity to it.

Lex Fridman (14:20.840)

But again, that's not, for whatever,

Lex Fridman (14:24.640)

and I'm just realizing this as I'm answering this,

Steven Pressfield (14:27.720)

that's not really what's interesting to me

Lex Fridman (14:29.380)

about these stories.

Lex Fridman (14:31.360)

And the Spartans, what was a whole, at Thermopylae,

Lex Fridman (14:34.580)

that was a whole other kind of metaphor of war.

Steven Pressfield (14:37.540)

That was a sort of a willingly going to one's own death

Lex Fridman (14:42.540)

for a greater cause, just like, to me,

Steven Pressfield (14:46.140)

the Spartans at Thermopylae enacted as a group

Lex Fridman (14:49.340)

what Jesus Christ enacted as an individual,

Steven Pressfield (14:52.220)

a sacrifice of their lives for the greater good.

Lex Fridman (14:57.540)

I don't know if that answers your question,

Lex Fridman (14:58.900)

but that's how I see it.

Lex Fridman (15:01.100)

I do feel like, you know, I get invited to speak

Steven Pressfield (15:04.340)

to Marine Corps groups and things like that all the time,

Lex Fridman (15:07.780)

and I decline because I don't really feel

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like I'm a spokesman for the warrior class

Lex Fridman (15:15.540)

or anything like that.

Steven Pressfield (15:18.860)

That's not what's interesting about it to me.

Lex Fridman (15:24.860)

But didn't you just say, with war as a metaphor,

Lex Fridman (15:28.540)

that we're all essentially, in various ways, warriors?

Lex Fridman (15:33.180)

If we think of it in terms of Jungian archetypes,

Lex Fridman (15:36.900)

and think of our life at least as males,

Lex Fridman (15:40.900)

and the earliest archetypes that kick in

Steven Pressfield (15:44.060)

are the youth and the wanderer and the student

Lex Fridman (15:46.540)

and that kind of thing, and then at some point

Steven Pressfield (15:48.700)

around age 15 to 20, whatever,

Lex Fridman (15:52.180)

the warrior archetype kicks in,

Lex Fridman (15:54.460)

and we want to play football, we want to do martial arts,

Lex Fridman (15:56.700)

we want to join the special forces,

Steven Pressfield (15:58.860)

we want to hang out with our buddies,

Lex Fridman (16:00.340)

that's our great bond, we want to test ourselves

Steven Pressfield (16:03.140)

against adversity and so on and so forth.

Lex Fridman (16:05.360)

But at some point, that archetype,

Steven Pressfield (16:07.920)

we move beyond that archetype,

Lex Fridman (16:09.740)

and we become fathers and teachers and so on and so forth.

Lex Fridman (16:14.620)

And then there are many archetypes beyond that

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towards the end.

Lex Fridman (16:18.380)

So I'm interested in the warrior archetype,

Lex Fridman (16:23.460)

but not to the be all and end all of everything else.

Lex Fridman (16:30.800)

In my book, The Virtues of War, have you read that?

Lex Fridman (16:34.780)

Well, there's a character named Telamon,

Steven Pressfield (16:37.460)

who's actually, it's a long story,

Lex Fridman (16:39.460)

but when he's with Alexander's army,

Lex Fridman (16:44.380)

and when they arrive in India,

Lex Fridman (16:46.820)

he becomes fascinated by the gymnosophists,

Steven Pressfield (16:51.860)

the fakirs, the naked wise men, the yogis.

Lex Fridman (16:55.620)

And he says to Alexander that these guys

Steven Pressfield (17:00.020)

are warriors beyond what we are, even though they do nothing

Lex Fridman (17:06.380)

because they are inside their own selves all day long.

Steven Pressfield (17:11.940)

If we go to the Six Day War,

Lex Fridman (17:17.400)

you write about, in Lionsgate,

Steven Pressfield (17:19.640)

you write about the Six Day War in Israel.

Lex Fridman (17:22.900)

I think of the wars you've written about

Steven Pressfield (17:24.680)

as the one we're still in many ways in the midst of today.

Lex Fridman (17:28.220)

Yes.

Lex Fridman (17:29.540)

So what is at the core of that conflict in Israel?

Lex Fridman (17:35.860)

The Israeli Palestinian conflict?

Steven Pressfield (17:37.860)

I mean, today it's the Israeli Palestinian conflict,

Lex Fridman (17:40.820)

but it echoes of the same conflict

Steven Pressfield (17:44.420)

in that part of the world with Israel.

Lex Fridman (17:47.340)

What is, in your sense, the nature of that conflict?

Lex Fridman (17:53.500)

What can we learn about society

Lex Fridman (17:55.060)

and human nature from that conflict?

Steven Pressfield (17:57.180)

That is one of the hottest conflicts

Lex Fridman (17:59.820)

that still goes on today.

Steven Pressfield (18:01.780)

Well, when I was working on the Lionsgate

Lex Fridman (18:04.700)

about the Six Day War, I wrote in the introduction

Steven Pressfield (18:10.740)

that this was not gonna be a multi sided story.

Lex Fridman (18:14.180)

I was taking it entirely, I'm a Jew,

Steven Pressfield (18:17.620)

I identify with the Israeli people,

Lex Fridman (18:20.140)

I was gonna see it entirely from their side.

Lex Fridman (18:23.740)

So that's probably not what you're asking,

Lex Fridman (18:27.100)

but to me, the Six Day War and that whole,

Steven Pressfield (18:34.060)

it's a piece of land that's holy

Lex Fridman (18:35.780)

to at least three religions and probably more.

Lex Fridman (18:39.620)

And from the Jewish point of view,

Lex Fridman (18:43.760)

it's where the state of Israel,

Steven Pressfield (18:46.220)

it's where David founded Jerusalem,

Lex Fridman (18:47.780)

it's all where the 12 tribes were, et cetera, et cetera,

Steven Pressfield (18:50.700)

where Moses came and brought the people.

Lex Fridman (18:52.900)

So to me, the Six Day War was about,

Steven Pressfield (18:58.820)

as I said, a return from exile,

Lex Fridman (19:00.780)

from diaspora after 2000 years.

Steven Pressfield (19:03.380)

Now, obviously, from the Palestinian point of view

Lex Fridman (19:06.580)

or the Saudi Arabian point of view or whatever,

Steven Pressfield (19:09.340)

it's a whole other scenario.

Lex Fridman (19:12.060)

Religion is at the core of this conflict in some ways,

Lex Fridman (19:14.980)

but religious beliefs.

Lex Fridman (19:15.980)

Religion and racial slash ethnic tribal identity.

Lex Fridman (19:20.980)

I mean, again, what is a Jew?

Lex Fridman (19:23.060)

Is a Jew somebody that believes in the religion

Steven Pressfield (19:26.220)

or is it somebody of a certain race

Lex Fridman (19:28.380)

that race arose in a certain place?

Steven Pressfield (19:31.700)

Same thing as a Muslim.

Lex Fridman (19:32.740)

What is a Muslim?

Lex Fridman (19:33.580)

Do they believe in Muhammad or whatever?

Lex Fridman (19:37.260)

Or did they arise in a certain place and a certain ethnicity?

Steven Pressfield (19:40.500)

Because if we landed from Mars,

Lex Fridman (19:43.020)

we couldn't tell a Jew from a Palestinian, could we?

Steven Pressfield (19:46.260)

Just looking at them,

Lex Fridman (19:47.740)

you could easily mix them and you'd never know.

Lex Fridman (19:50.020)

And the specifics of the faith

Lex Fridman (19:52.260)

is not necessarily the thing that defines a person.

Steven Pressfield (19:54.700)

No, I don't think so.

Lex Fridman (19:56.340)

So you could be, like many are,

Steven Pressfield (19:58.140)

secular Jew living in Israel

Lex Fridman (1:00:00.860)

where Adam and Eve decide to sort of take matters

Steven Pressfield (1:00:04.660)

into their own hands and acquire knowledge

Lex Fridman (1:00:10.180)

that until then, God had said,

Steven Pressfield (1:00:12.180)

I'm the only one that's got that knowledge.

Lex Fridman (1:00:14.620)

And of course, once they have acquired that knowledge,

Steven Pressfield (1:00:17.940)

they're cast out into the world you and I live in now,

Lex Fridman (1:00:21.540)

where they do have to deal with that fear

Lex Fridman (1:00:23.260)

and they do have to deal with all that stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:00:26.380)

The human condition.

Steven Pressfield (1:00:27.820)

The human condition and the meaning and the purpose comes

Lex Fridman (1:00:31.780)

from the resistance being there

Lex Fridman (1:00:36.700)

and the struggle to overcome it.

Lex Fridman (1:00:38.540)

To overcome it, right.

Lex Fridman (1:00:39.940)

And also the other aspect of it is that

Lex Fridman (1:00:43.420)

it's not real at all.

Steven Pressfield (1:00:45.220)

It's not even like it's an actual force.

Lex Fridman (1:00:48.180)

It's all here, right?

Lex Fridman (1:00:50.540)

So the sort of,

Lex Fridman (1:00:55.420)

in a way, it's sort of a surrender to it, you know?

Steven Pressfield (1:01:00.300)

You know, or it's just a sort of like turning on the light

Lex Fridman (1:01:05.180)

in a dark thing.

Steven Pressfield (1:01:06.020)

It's like, oh, it's gone.

Lex Fridman (1:01:09.180)

But not quite because it's never really.

Steven Pressfield (1:01:11.420)

Because it comes back again tomorrow morning.

Lex Fridman (1:01:13.260)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (1:01:14.100)

So you have to keep changing light bulbs every day.

Lex Fridman (1:01:17.780)

So what's been, maybe recently, but in general,

Steven Pressfield (1:01:20.820)

maybe in your life, what's been the most relentless

Lex Fridman (1:01:24.180)

or one of the more relentless sources of resistance

Lex Fridman (1:01:26.820)

to you personally?

Lex Fridman (1:01:28.220)

I mean, it's always the same.

Steven Pressfield (1:01:30.620)

It's about writing for me

Lex Fridman (1:01:33.660)

and evolving within my own body of work, you know?

Steven Pressfield (1:01:38.660)

It never goes away, it never gets any less.

Lex Fridman (1:01:43.860)

Do you have particular excuses,

Lex Fridman (1:01:45.540)

particular justifications that come out?

Lex Fridman (1:01:49.900)

No, it's always the same.

Steven Pressfield (1:01:51.540)

Well, I would say it's always the same,

Lex Fridman (1:01:53.260)

but it's really not because resistance is so protean,

Steven Pressfield (1:01:56.260)

you know, it keeps changing form.

Lex Fridman (1:01:58.340)

And as you move to hopefully a higher level,

Steven Pressfield (1:02:02.460)

resistance gets a little more nuanced

Lex Fridman (1:02:04.460)

and a little more subtle trying to fake you out.

Lex Fridman (1:02:07.220)

But I think you learn that it's always there

Lex Fridman (1:02:11.980)

and you're always gonna have to face it, so.

Steven Pressfield (1:02:14.380)

I mean, your battle is sitting down

Lex Fridman (1:02:18.780)

and writing to some number of words to a blank page.

Lex Fridman (1:02:23.940)

Do you have a process there with this battle?

Lex Fridman (1:02:28.060)

Do you have a number of hours that you put in?

Lex Fridman (1:02:31.500)

Do you sit down?

Lex Fridman (1:02:32.340)

Yeah, I'm definitely a believer

Steven Pressfield (1:02:34.940)

that even though this battle is fought

Lex Fridman (1:02:37.460)

on the highest sort of spiritual level,

Steven Pressfield (1:02:40.060)

that the way you fight it is on the most mundane,

Lex Fridman (1:02:44.060)

I'm sure it's like martial arts, must be the same way.

Steven Pressfield (1:02:46.860)

I mean, I go to the gym first thing in the morning

Lex Fridman (1:02:49.980)

and I sort of am rehearsing myself.

Lex Fridman (1:02:54.900)

The gym is called resistance training, right?

Lex Fridman (1:02:57.180)

You're working against resistance, right?

Lex Fridman (1:02:59.180)

And I don't wanna go, I don't wanna get out of bed,

Lex Fridman (1:03:01.620)

I hate that, but I'm sort of fortifying myself

Steven Pressfield (1:03:06.580)

to be ready for the day.

Lex Fridman (1:03:09.700)

And like I said, over Knockwood, over years,

Steven Pressfield (1:03:13.740)

I've learned to sort of get into the right kind of mindset

Lex Fridman (1:03:17.100)

and it's not as hard for me as it used to be.

Steven Pressfield (1:03:20.060)

The real resistance, I think, for me,

Lex Fridman (1:03:22.180)

and I think this is true for anybody,

Lex Fridman (1:03:23.580)

is the question of sort of what's the next idea?

Lex Fridman (1:03:27.820)

What's the next book?

Lex Fridman (1:03:29.100)

What's the next project that you're gonna work on?

Lex Fridman (1:03:31.500)

And when I ask that question, I'm asking it of the muse.

Steven Pressfield (1:03:35.820)

I'm kind of saying, what do you want me,

Lex Fridman (1:03:38.020)

or I'm asking it of my unconscious.

Steven Pressfield (1:03:40.420)

If we're looking at Bruce Springsteen's albums,

Lex Fridman (1:03:43.260)

it's kind of, well, what's the next album?

Steven Pressfield (1:03:45.060)

Now he's on Broadway.

Lex Fridman (1:03:46.420)

That was a great idea, right?

Lex Fridman (1:03:49.980)

Where'd that come from, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:03:51.900)

But, and then for him, what's after that, you know?

Steven Pressfield (1:03:55.740)

Because that body of work is already alive.

Lex Fridman (1:04:03.980)

It already exists inside us,

Steven Pressfield (1:04:07.020)

kind of like a woman's biological clock,

Lex Fridman (1:04:10.340)

and we have to serve it.

Lex Fridman (1:04:12.340)

And we have to, otherwise it'll give us cancer, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:04:17.740)

I don't mean to say that if anybody has cancer

Lex Fridman (1:04:19.460)

that they're not, you know what I mean?

Lex Fridman (1:04:21.180)

It'll take its revenge on us.

Lex Fridman (1:04:24.060)

So the next resistance to me is sort of,

Lex Fridman (1:04:27.180)

or a big aspect of it is, what's next?

Steven Pressfield (1:04:30.100)

You know, when I finish the book I'm working on now,

Lex Fridman (1:04:31.780)

I'm not sure what I'm gonna do next.

Lex Fridman (1:04:33.460)

And I see at the same time you have a kind of,

Lex Fridman (1:04:37.740)

you have a sense that there's a Bruce Springsteen

Steven Pressfield (1:04:42.660)

single line of albums.

Lex Fridman (1:04:45.980)

So like, it's already known somewhere in the universe

Lex Fridman (1:04:49.420)

what you're going to do next, is the sense you have.

Lex Fridman (1:04:51.900)

In a sense, yes.

Lex Fridman (1:04:53.460)

I don't know if it's predetermined, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:04:55.940)

But there's something like that.

Steven Pressfield (1:05:00.220)

Yeah, I'd like to believe that there's,

Lex Fridman (1:05:03.380)

well, it's kind of like quantum mechanics, I guess.

Steven Pressfield (1:05:06.460)

Once you observe it, maybe once you talk to the muse,

Lex Fridman (1:05:11.020)

it's one thing for sure.

Steven Pressfield (1:05:13.580)

It was always going to be that one thing.

Lex Fridman (1:05:15.540)

But really, in reality, it's a distribution.

Steven Pressfield (1:05:19.260)

It could be any number of things.

Lex Fridman (1:05:20.780)

Yeah, I think so.

Steven Pressfield (1:05:21.620)

There's alternate realities.

Lex Fridman (1:05:22.820)

Alternate realities, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:05:24.100)

But they're not that far apart.

Lex Fridman (1:05:25.460)

I mean, Bruce Springsteen is not gonna write

Lex Fridman (1:05:28.260)

a Joni Mitchell song, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:05:30.620)

No matter how hard he tries.

Lex Fridman (1:05:31.460)

But he still went on Broadway.

Lex Fridman (1:05:32.420)

I mean, he still did that,

Steven Pressfield (1:05:33.860)

which is not a Bruce Springsteen thing to do.

Lex Fridman (1:05:36.320)

So I think you're being, in retrospect,

Steven Pressfield (1:05:39.940)

it all makes sense. I think it is

Lex Fridman (1:05:40.780)

a Bruce Springsteen thing to do.

Steven Pressfield (1:05:41.860)

It's a next sort of evolution for him.

Lex Fridman (1:05:43.740)

Why not take his music to there, you know?

Steven Pressfield (1:05:46.860)

In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense, I think.

Lex Fridman (1:05:50.340)

Yeah.

Steven Pressfield (1:05:51.180)

If you pull it off, especially.

Lex Fridman (1:05:54.100)

Do you visualize yourself completing the work?

Steven Pressfield (1:05:57.620)

Like, Olympic athletes visualize getting the gold medal.

Lex Fridman (1:06:02.780)

Do you, you know, they go through,

Steven Pressfield (1:06:06.080)

I mean, that's actually a really,

Lex Fridman (1:06:08.260)

you can learn something from athletes on that,

Steven Pressfield (1:06:09.940)

is years out,

Lex Fridman (1:06:13.260)

certainly two, three years out,

Steven Pressfield (1:06:15.260)

some people do much longer,

Lex Fridman (1:06:16.620)

every day, you visualize how the day

Steven Pressfield (1:06:19.500)

of the championship will go down to,

Lex Fridman (1:06:24.060)

I mean, everything, down to how will it feel

Steven Pressfield (1:06:25.980)

to stand on the podium and so on.

Lex Fridman (1:06:27.900)

Do you do anything like that

Lex Fridman (1:06:29.860)

in how you approach writing?

Lex Fridman (1:06:31.260)

No.

Steven Pressfield (1:06:32.260)

Because it's. It's always in the moment.

Lex Fridman (1:06:33.580)

Because, yeah, it is in the moment, I think.

Steven Pressfield (1:06:35.700)

Because it's such a mystery.

Lex Fridman (1:06:36.860)

You just don't know.

Steven Pressfield (1:06:37.700)

I think it's different from sports.

Lex Fridman (1:06:39.260)

Right.

Steven Pressfield (1:06:40.700)

Because you don't know the destiny.

Lex Fridman (1:06:41.700)

There's no gold medal at the end.

Steven Pressfield (1:06:43.700)

No.

Lex Fridman (1:06:44.540)

In fact, I would like to think that

Steven Pressfield (1:06:48.540)

as soon as you finish one,

Lex Fridman (1:06:51.220)

the next day you're on the other.

Lex Fridman (1:06:53.580)

And in fact, hopefully you've already started the other.

Lex Fridman (1:06:56.460)

You're already, you know, 100 pages into the other

Steven Pressfield (1:07:00.900)

when you finish the first one.

Lex Fridman (1:07:03.220)

But it is a, it is a,

Steven Pressfield (1:07:08.620)

it's a journey, it's a process.

Lex Fridman (1:07:10.060)

I don't think it is a,

Steven Pressfield (1:07:11.540)

in fact, I think it's very dangerous to think that way.

Lex Fridman (1:07:14.340)

To think, oh, this, I'm gonna win the Oscar, you know?

Steven Pressfield (1:07:20.620)

It's interesting.

Lex Fridman (1:07:21.900)

For the creative process, it might be dangerous.

Lex Fridman (1:07:24.780)

It's a, maybe you can, like, why is that dangerous?

Lex Fridman (1:07:29.060)

Because I kind of know where you're coming from.

Steven Pressfield (1:07:30.900)

Because it's the ego.

Lex Fridman (1:07:32.220)

It's the ego.

Steven Pressfield (1:07:33.060)

Because you're giving yourself over to the ego.

Lex Fridman (1:07:34.980)

You know, I keep saying this myself.

Steven Pressfield (1:07:38.740)

My job, I'm a servant of the muse.

Lex Fridman (1:07:41.580)

I'm there to do what she tells me to do.

Lex Fridman (1:07:44.820)

And if I suddenly think, oh, I'm really,

Lex Fridman (1:07:48.220)

I just wanna, you know, whatever,

Steven Pressfield (1:07:50.100)

the muse doesn't like that.

Lex Fridman (1:07:51.740)

And, you know, and she's on another dimension from me.

Steven Pressfield (1:07:58.220)

I'm trying to square that, because I agree.

Lex Fridman (1:08:01.260)

I'm trying to square that with the,

Steven Pressfield (1:08:04.300)

I think there's a meditation to visualizing success

Lex Fridman (1:08:07.900)

in the athletic realm, to where it focuses,

Steven Pressfield (1:08:12.820)

it removes everything else away,

Lex Fridman (1:08:15.500)

to where you focus on this particular battle.

Steven Pressfield (1:08:18.180)

I mean, I think that you can do that in many kinds of ways.

Lex Fridman (1:08:23.620)

And in sports, the ego serves a more important role,

Steven Pressfield (1:08:29.940)

I think, than it does in writing.

Lex Fridman (1:08:31.580)

And the ego, there's something.

Steven Pressfield (1:08:33.860)

Well, let me, when you say that,

Lex Fridman (1:08:35.940)

I know what you mean, Lex, and I do think there is

Steven Pressfield (1:08:39.100)

a sort of a, you know, it's interesting to watch interviews

Lex Fridman (1:08:43.180)

with Steph Curry, who's such, obviously such a nice guy,

Lex Fridman (1:08:49.780)

but he's got such tremendous self confidence,

Lex Fridman (1:08:54.500)

you know, that it, but it doesn't border on ego so much

Lex Fridman (1:08:58.460)

because he's worked so hard for it, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:09:01.060)

But he knows, so he has visualized.

Steven Pressfield (1:09:04.420)

He has visualized maybe not so much winning, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:09:08.100)

as just him being the best he can be,

Steven Pressfield (1:09:11.740)

him being in the flow, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:09:15.500)

doing his thing that he knows he can do.

Lex Fridman (1:09:18.420)

And I do think in the creative world,

Lex Fridman (1:09:21.260)

yeah, there is a sort of a thing like that,

Steven Pressfield (1:09:23.140)

where you, where, and, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:09:27.180)

a choreographer or a filmmaker or whatever

Steven Pressfield (1:09:29.700)

might be, do an internal thing where they're saying,

Lex Fridman (1:09:35.380)

I can make an Oscar winning movie.

Steven Pressfield (1:09:36.980)

I can direct this movie.

Lex Fridman (1:09:38.700)

You know, I'm banishing these thoughts

Steven Pressfield (1:09:40.700)

that I'm not good enough.

Lex Fridman (1:09:42.020)

I can do that.

Steven Pressfield (1:09:42.860)

I can edit it.

Lex Fridman (1:09:44.220)

I can score it.

Steven Pressfield (1:09:45.420)

I can, you know, bump it, bump it, bump.

Lex Fridman (1:09:47.500)

But, and I don't think that's really ego.

Steven Pressfield (1:09:49.380)

I think that's part of the process in a good way,

Lex Fridman (1:09:53.580)

like an athlete does that.

Lex Fridman (1:09:55.180)

So extreme confidence is what some of the best athletes

Lex Fridman (1:09:58.140)

come with, and you think it's possible to,

Lex Fridman (1:10:02.020)

as a writer, to have extreme confidence in yourself?

Lex Fridman (1:10:04.740)

I do think so, you know, that I'm sure

Steven Pressfield (1:10:07.500)

when John Lennon sat down to write a song,

Lex Fridman (1:10:11.420)

he felt like, shit, I can do this, you know?

Steven Pressfield (1:10:14.260)

I'm not so sure.

Lex Fridman (1:10:16.020)

I think, because the great artists I've seen,

Lex Fridman (1:10:19.660)

and you're haunted by self doubt.

Lex Fridman (1:10:23.340)

It's that resist, I mean, the confidence.

Steven Pressfield (1:10:26.020)

Yes, but I mean, I guess, but even beyond the self,

Lex Fridman (1:10:29.100)

within the self, above the self doubt.

Lex Fridman (1:10:30.940)

Oh, it's the bigger picture of the self belief, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:10:33.900)

Yeah, I'm freaking out.

Steven Pressfield (1:10:35.100)

Yeah, I'm worried that I'm not gonna be able to do it.

Lex Fridman (1:10:36.860)

But, you know, I know I can do this.

Steven Pressfield (1:10:38.460)

Yeah, and when you look at,

Lex Fridman (1:10:39.500)

when you take a bigger picture of it.

Lex Fridman (1:10:41.860)

So the writing process, is it fundamentally lonely?

Lex Fridman (1:10:48.780)

No, because you're with your characters.

Steven Pressfield (1:10:53.540)

You are.

Lex Fridman (1:10:55.700)

So you really put yourself in the world.

Steven Pressfield (1:10:58.300)

Absolutely, you know, I've written about this before

Lex Fridman (1:11:02.420)

that I used to, my desk used to face a wall

Steven Pressfield (1:11:04.740)

instead of seeing, and people would say,

Lex Fridman (1:11:06.460)

well, don't you wanna look out the window?

Lex Fridman (1:11:08.340)

But I'm in here, I mean, I'm seeing, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:11:11.900)

the Spartans, I'm seeing, you know, whatever.

Lex Fridman (1:11:14.700)

And the characters that are on the page,

Lex Fridman (1:11:18.500)

or that you create, are not accidents, you know?

Steven Pressfield (1:11:22.300)

They're coming out of some issue,

Lex Fridman (1:11:24.820)

some deep issue that you have.

Steven Pressfield (1:11:27.300)

Whether you realize it or not,

Lex Fridman (1:11:28.380)

you might not realize it till 20 years later,

Steven Pressfield (1:11:30.260)

or somebody explains it to you.

Lex Fridman (1:11:31.900)

So your characters are kind of fascinating to you.

Lex Fridman (1:11:35.180)

And their dilemmas are fascinating to you.

Lex Fridman (1:11:38.340)

And you're also trying to come to grips with them,

Steven Pressfield (1:11:42.820)

you know, you sort of see them through a glass darkly,

Lex Fridman (1:11:46.300)

you know, and you really wanna see them more clearly.

Lex Fridman (1:11:49.100)

So yeah, no, it's not lonely at all.

Lex Fridman (1:11:52.260)

In fact, I'm more lonely sometimes later,

Steven Pressfield (1:11:55.180)

going out to dinner with some people

Lex Fridman (1:11:56.620)

and actually talking to people.

Lex Fridman (1:11:59.300)

Do you miss the characters after it's over?

Lex Fridman (1:12:03.620)

Let's say I have affection for them,

Steven Pressfield (1:12:06.340)

kind of like children that have gone off to college

Lex Fridman (1:12:09.220)

and now are, you know, you only see them at Thanksgiving.

Steven Pressfield (1:12:12.500)

Definitely, I have affection for them, even the bad guys.

Lex Fridman (1:12:18.860)

Maybe especially the bad guys.

Steven Pressfield (1:12:22.500)

Especially the bad guys.

Lex Fridman (1:12:25.540)

You've said that writers, even successful writers,

Steven Pressfield (1:12:29.060)

are often not tough minded enough.

Lex Fridman (1:12:32.300)

I've read that in the post,

Steven Pressfield (1:12:34.540)

that you have to be a professional

Lex Fridman (1:12:35.820)

in the way you handle your emotions.

Steven Pressfield (1:12:38.500)

You have to be a bit of a warrior to be a writer.

Lex Fridman (1:12:41.740)

So what do you think makes a warrior?

Steven Pressfield (1:12:47.340)

Is a warrior born or trained in the realm,

Lex Fridman (1:12:51.580)

in the bigger realm, in the realm of writing,

Lex Fridman (1:12:53.780)

in the creative process?

Lex Fridman (1:12:55.100)

I think they're born to some extent.

Steven Pressfield (1:12:57.580)

You have the gift, like you might have the gift

Lex Fridman (1:12:59.820)

as a martial artist to do whatever martial artists do,

Lex Fridman (1:13:02.820)

but the training is the big thing.

Lex Fridman (1:13:05.140)

90% training, 10%, 10% genetics.

Steven Pressfield (1:13:09.100)

And, you know, I use another analogy other than warrior

Lex Fridman (1:13:13.740)

as far as writer, and that's like to be a mother.

Steven Pressfield (1:13:16.580)

If you think about, if you're a writer

Lex Fridman (1:13:19.220)

or any creative person, you're giving birth to something,

Steven Pressfield (1:13:21.420)

right, you're carrying a new life inside you.

Lex Fridman (1:13:23.860)

And in terms of bravery,

Steven Pressfield (1:13:26.900)

if your child, your two year old child

Lex Fridman (1:13:30.460)

is underneath a car that's coming down the street,

Steven Pressfield (1:13:33.620)

the mother's gonna like stop a Buick,

Lex Fridman (1:13:35.780)

you know, with her bare hands.

Lex Fridman (1:13:37.900)

So that's another way to think about

Lex Fridman (1:13:41.220)

how a writer has to think about,

Steven Pressfield (1:13:43.380)

or any creative person has to think about,

Lex Fridman (1:13:45.620)

I think, what they're doing,

Lex Fridman (1:13:47.260)

what this child, this new creation

Lex Fridman (1:13:50.220)

that they're bringing forth.

Steven Pressfield (1:13:53.060)

Yeah, so the hard work that's underlying that.

Lex Fridman (1:13:57.100)

I've just, a couple weeks ago, talked to,

Steven Pressfield (1:14:00.620)

just happened to be in the same room,

Lex Fridman (1:14:01.860)

both gave talks, Arianna Huffington.

Steven Pressfield (1:14:03.940)

I did this conversation with her.

Lex Fridman (1:14:08.180)

I didn't know much about her before then,

Lex Fridman (1:14:11.100)

but she has recently been, she wrote a couple books

Lex Fridman (1:14:14.420)

and been promoting a lifestyle

Steven Pressfield (1:14:16.980)

where she basically, she created the Huffington Post,

Lex Fridman (1:14:20.180)

and she gave herself like, I don't know,

Steven Pressfield (1:14:23.140)

20 hours a day just obsessed with her work.

Lex Fridman (1:14:26.340)

And then she fainted, passed out,

Lex Fridman (1:14:29.260)

and kind of, there was some health issues.

Lex Fridman (1:14:31.620)

And so she wrote this book saying that, you know, sleep,

Steven Pressfield (1:14:36.140)

basically you wanna establish a lifestyle

Lex Fridman (1:14:38.860)

that doesn't sacrifice health,

Steven Pressfield (1:14:41.320)

that's productive but doesn't sacrifice health.

Lex Fridman (1:14:43.420)

She thinks that you can have both,

Steven Pressfield (1:14:44.620)

productivity and health.

Lex Fridman (1:14:46.380)

Criticizing Elon Musk, who I've also spoken with,

Steven Pressfield (1:14:49.780)

for working too hard,

Lex Fridman (1:14:51.820)

and thereby sacrificing, you know,

Steven Pressfield (1:14:56.820)

being less effective than he could be.

Lex Fridman (1:14:59.380)

So I'm trying to get this balance between health

Lex Fridman (1:15:04.420)

and obsessively working at something

Lex Fridman (1:15:06.780)

and really working hard.

Lex Fridman (1:15:09.060)

So what Arianna is talking about makes sense to me,

Lex Fridman (1:15:12.100)

but I'm a little bit torn.

Steven Pressfield (1:15:13.540)

To me, passion and reason do not overlap much

Lex Fridman (1:15:17.100)

or at all sometimes.

Steven Pressfield (1:15:19.080)

Maybe I'm being too Russian,

Lex Fridman (1:15:20.340)

but I feel madness and obsession does not care for health

Steven Pressfield (1:15:26.300)

or sleep or diet or any of that.

Lex Fridman (1:15:28.580)

And hard work is hard work,

Lex Fridman (1:15:32.220)

and everything else can go to hell.

Lex Fridman (1:15:34.180)

So if you're really focused on whether it's writing a book,

Steven Pressfield (1:15:37.420)

it should, everything should just go to hell.

Lex Fridman (1:15:40.860)

Where do you stand on this balance?

Lex Fridman (1:15:43.120)

How important is health for productivity?

Lex Fridman (1:15:45.280)

How important is it to sort of get sleep and so on?

Steven Pressfield (1:15:49.300)

I'm on the health side.

Lex Fridman (1:15:52.520)

I mean, there was a period of my life

Steven Pressfield (1:15:54.940)

when I was just, I had no obligations

Lex Fridman (1:15:59.980)

and I was just living in a little house

Lex Fridman (1:16:02.260)

and just working nonstop, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:16:05.300)

But even then I would get up in the morning

Lex Fridman (1:16:07.220)

and I would have liver and eggs for breakfast every day,

Lex Fridman (1:16:10.940)

and I would do my, you know, exercise, whatever it was.

Lex Fridman (1:16:13.760)

But although I was still doing like 18 hours a day,

Lex Fridman (1:16:16.800)

but I'm definitely, I kind of think of it

Steven Pressfield (1:16:20.380)

sort of like an athlete does.

Lex Fridman (1:16:22.140)

I'm sure that like Steph Curry is totally committed

Steven Pressfield (1:16:27.620)

to winning championships and stuff like that.

Lex Fridman (1:16:29.940)

But he has his family, he sees his family,

Steven Pressfield (1:16:31.640)

you know, the family is always there.

Lex Fridman (1:16:33.700)

He, I'm sure he eats, you know, perfect, great stuff,

Steven Pressfield (1:16:38.900)

gets his sleep, you know, gets the training,

Lex Fridman (1:16:43.700)

you know, the whatever a trainer does to him

Steven Pressfield (1:16:45.300)

for his knees and his ankles and whatever.

Lex Fridman (1:16:47.320)

So I, or Kobe Bryant or anybody

Steven Pressfield (1:16:49.820)

that's operating at a high level.

Lex Fridman (1:16:52.580)

So I do think I'm from that kind of the health school.

Steven Pressfield (1:16:55.020)

The good thing about being a writer

Lex Fridman (1:16:57.500)

is you can't work very many hours a day.

Steven Pressfield (1:17:00.820)

You know, four hours is like the maximum I can work.

Lex Fridman (1:17:03.820)

I've never been able to work more than that.

Steven Pressfield (1:17:05.580)

I don't know how people do it.

Lex Fridman (1:17:06.820)

I've heard of people do 10, 12, I don't know how they do it.

Lex Fridman (1:17:11.220)

So that gives you a lot of other time to do it.

Lex Fridman (1:17:14.780)

Optimize your health.

Steven Pressfield (1:17:16.180)

Yeah, to optimize your health.

Lex Fridman (1:17:17.020)

Because you need to, you're in training, you know?

Steven Pressfield (1:17:19.020)

You're really, you're burning up a lot of B vitamins

Lex Fridman (1:17:22.260)

when you're working here, aren't you?

Steven Pressfield (1:17:24.500)

Yeah, but.

Lex Fridman (1:17:27.020)

Maybe it's a Russian thing with you, Lex.

Steven Pressfield (1:17:28.860)

Well, it's not even a Russian thing.

Lex Fridman (1:17:30.460)

It also may be youth, you know?

Steven Pressfield (1:17:32.260)

At 35, you can be crazy.

Lex Fridman (1:17:35.380)

You know, that's the thing, they keep telling me,

Lex Fridman (1:17:38.060)

but I'm pretty sure I'll be added still at a later time too.

Lex Fridman (1:17:44.060)

I think it has to do with the career choice too.

Steven Pressfield (1:17:47.100)

I think writing is almost, from everything I've heard,

Lex Fridman (1:17:51.580)

it's almost impossible to do it

Steven Pressfield (1:17:52.700)

more than a few hours really well.

Lex Fridman (1:17:56.860)

When you start to get into certain disciplines,

Steven Pressfield (1:17:58.820)

like with Elon Musk and me, engineering disciplines,

Lex Fridman (1:18:02.660)

that really there's a lot more non muse time needed.

Steven Pressfield (1:18:09.300)

Right, right, right.

Lex Fridman (1:18:10.140)

So the crazy hours that you often are talking about

Steven Pressfield (1:18:17.140)

have to be done, and it doesn't.

Lex Fridman (1:18:20.660)

I think that's true.

Steven Pressfield (1:18:22.260)

Yeah, so there's still the two, three hours of muse time

Lex Fridman (1:18:26.060)

needed for truly genius ideas,

Lex Fridman (1:18:27.820)

but it's something I certainly struggle with.

Lex Fridman (1:18:34.620)

But yeah, I hear you loud and clear on the health.

Lex Fridman (1:18:39.500)

So what does a perfect day look like for you

Lex Fridman (1:18:44.180)

if we're talking about writing?

Steven Pressfield (1:18:46.740)

An hour by hour schedule of a perfect day.

Lex Fridman (1:18:51.340)

I get up early, I go to the gym,

Steven Pressfield (1:18:54.340)

I have breakfast with some friends of mine.

Lex Fridman (1:18:57.380)

What's early by the way?

Lex Fridman (1:18:58.660)

Let's, like how early?

Lex Fridman (1:19:00.180)

3.15.

Steven Pressfield (1:19:02.020)

A.M.

Lex Fridman (1:19:02.860)

A.M.

Lex Fridman (1:19:03.820)

So we're talking really early.

Lex Fridman (1:19:05.300)

Really early.

Steven Pressfield (1:19:06.180)

Now I'm crazy early, it's ridiculously early.

Lex Fridman (1:19:08.980)

But, and I haven't done that always,

Lex Fridman (1:19:10.900)

but that's kind of what I'm on now.

Lex Fridman (1:19:15.740)

So I'm in bed, like when I'm with my nephews

Steven Pressfield (1:19:19.140)

that are like four years old and three years old,

Lex Fridman (1:19:21.260)

I'm in bed before them.

Steven Pressfield (1:19:22.660)

Okay, you got a beat.

Lex Fridman (1:19:25.020)

You wake up, sorry, you said exercise first.

Steven Pressfield (1:19:28.340)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:19:29.700)

And what does that look like?

Lex Fridman (1:19:30.780)

What's exercise for you?

Lex Fridman (1:19:32.100)

You go out to the gym?

Steven Pressfield (1:19:32.940)

I go to the gym.

Lex Fridman (1:19:35.220)

I have a trainer, I have a couple of guys

Steven Pressfield (1:19:37.380)

that I work out with, and I'll, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:19:40.980)

it's maybe an hour, maybe a little more.

Steven Pressfield (1:19:43.180)

I'll do a little warmup before stretching afterwards,

Lex Fridman (1:19:45.660)

take a shower, go have breakfast.

Lex Fridman (1:19:49.260)

But it's an intense kind of a thing

Lex Fridman (1:19:51.620)

that I definitely don't wanna do that's hard, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:19:55.860)

So you feel like you've accomplished something, first thing.

Lex Fridman (1:19:57.980)

Yeah.

Steven Pressfield (1:19:58.980)

That's a big accomplishment of the day.

Lex Fridman (1:20:00.460)

At the same time, it's not like so hard

Lex Fridman (1:20:02.540)

that I'm completely exhausted, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:20:04.940)

And then I'll come home and handle whatever correspondence

Lex Fridman (1:20:10.100)

and stuff has to be done, and then I work

Lex Fridman (1:20:11.580)

for maybe three hours, and then I just sort of crash.

Steven Pressfield (1:20:15.580)

The office is closed, I turn the switch,

Lex Fridman (1:20:18.900)

I don't think about anything.

Steven Pressfield (1:20:21.340)

I don't think about the work at all.

Lex Fridman (1:20:23.420)

Do you listen to, oh, you mean afterwards?

Steven Pressfield (1:20:25.660)

After work, once the office is closed.

Lex Fridman (1:20:27.620)

But during, so this was like 12 to three kind of thing?

Steven Pressfield (1:20:31.020)

Something like that, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:20:31.860)

Something like that, okay.

Lex Fridman (1:20:33.540)

You listen to music?

Lex Fridman (1:20:34.660)

No.

Lex Fridman (1:20:35.500)

Do you have anything?

Lex Fridman (1:20:36.340)

But that's just me, I mean, I don't think, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:20:38.500)

but somebody could do it a million different ways.

Lex Fridman (1:20:40.500)

It's fascinating, you know, the,

Steven Pressfield (1:20:43.580)

I mean, you've also, of most, of many writers,

Lex Fridman (1:20:47.820)

you've really, but like I've read Stephen Kington writing,

Steven Pressfield (1:20:51.900)

you've optimized this conversation

Lex Fridman (1:20:55.180)

with the muse you're having.

Steven Pressfield (1:20:56.420)

Not optimized, but you've at least thought about it.

Lex Fridman (1:20:59.700)

So what's, can you say a little bit more

Steven Pressfield (1:21:02.660)

about the trivialities of that process,

Lex Fridman (1:21:05.900)

of the, like you said, facing the wall?

Lex Fridman (1:21:10.700)

What's, do you have little rituals?

Lex Fridman (1:21:13.340)

You mean like the granular aspect of it?

Steven Pressfield (1:21:15.300)

The granular aspects, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:21:19.540)

Is there?

Steven Pressfield (1:21:20.380)

I do have little rituals, I do have all kinds of,

Lex Fridman (1:21:21.740)

which I'm not even gonna tell you about.

Steven Pressfield (1:21:22.940)

Sure.

Lex Fridman (1:21:23.780)

But the one thing,

Lex Fridman (1:21:28.980)

and I don't wanna like talk about this too much

Lex Fridman (1:21:30.740)

because it sort of jinxes things, I think,

Lex Fridman (1:21:32.460)

but the one thing I do try to do is when I sit down,

Lex Fridman (1:21:37.140)

I immediately get into it, first, second.

Steven Pressfield (1:21:41.060)

I don't sit and fuck around with anything.

Lex Fridman (1:21:43.660)

I immediately try to get into it as quickly as I can.

Steven Pressfield (1:21:47.300)

The other thing is that writing a book

Lex Fridman (1:21:50.180)

or screenplay or anything like that

Steven Pressfield (1:21:51.420)

is a process of multiple drafts.

Lex Fridman (1:21:54.060)

And it's the first draft

Steven Pressfield (1:21:56.060)

that's where you're most with the muse,

Lex Fridman (1:21:58.780)

where you're going through the blank page.

Steven Pressfield (1:22:00.620)

Like right now I'm on, I don't know what,

Lex Fridman (1:22:02.820)

the fifth or sixth, seventh draft

Steven Pressfield (1:22:04.260)

of the thing I'm working on.

Lex Fridman (1:22:05.860)

So I've got pages already written

Lex Fridman (1:22:09.260)

and I'm kind of reading them afresh

Lex Fridman (1:22:12.140)

as I go through the story.

Lex Fridman (1:22:14.820)

So it's not quite where I am now.

Lex Fridman (1:22:17.460)

It's not quite a deep muse scenario, partly it is,

Lex Fridman (1:22:22.540)

but it's also sort of bouncing back and forth

Lex Fridman (1:22:25.900)

between the different,

Steven Pressfield (1:22:27.100)

between the right brain and the left brain.

Lex Fridman (1:22:28.500)

I'm kind of looking at it

Lex Fridman (1:22:29.500)

and trying to evaluate it.

Lex Fridman (1:22:31.620)

And then I'm going into it

Lex Fridman (1:22:33.060)

and try to change it a little bit.

Lex Fridman (1:22:35.140)

And when, do you know,

Steven Pressfield (1:22:37.100)

sit down and get right into it,

Lex Fridman (1:22:38.580)

do you know the night before

Lex Fridman (1:22:40.860)

of what that starting point is?

Lex Fridman (1:22:43.540)

I always try to stop.

Lex Fridman (1:22:46.220)

And I learned this,

Lex Fridman (1:22:47.060)

I think Hemingway wrote about this

Steven Pressfield (1:22:48.260)

or John Steinbeck or one of the,

Lex Fridman (1:22:49.940)

or maybe both of them,

Steven Pressfield (1:22:51.180)

to always stop when you kind of know what's coming next.

Lex Fridman (1:22:54.780)

So you're not at a facing a chasm, you know?

Steven Pressfield (1:22:58.220)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:22:59.460)

Okay, so and afterwards when you're done,

Steven Pressfield (1:23:02.260)

the office is closed.

Lex Fridman (1:23:03.340)

The office is closed,

Lex Fridman (1:23:04.180)

I let the muse take care of it, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:23:05.700)

And I don't want to,

Lex Fridman (1:23:07.380)

and I think it's a very unhealthy thing

Lex Fridman (1:23:09.740)

to worry about it or think about any creative process.

Lex Fridman (1:23:14.420)

You don't, like on a long walk later, think about?

Lex Fridman (1:23:18.700)

Yeah, then I will sort of keep my mind open to it,

Lex Fridman (1:23:22.220)

but I won't be like obsessing about it.

Lex Fridman (1:23:24.340)

Okay.

Steven Pressfield (1:23:25.180)

Because actually on walks,

Lex Fridman (1:23:26.660)

sometimes things will pop in your head, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:23:28.380)

and you'll go, oh, I should change that.

Lex Fridman (1:23:31.340)

But that's not your ego doing it,

Steven Pressfield (1:23:33.560)

that's the deeper level.

Lex Fridman (1:23:36.300)

Okay, so how does the day end?

Lex Fridman (1:23:38.620)

So go. In terms of writing?

Lex Fridman (1:23:39.820)

So yeah, the writing, well no,

Steven Pressfield (1:23:41.540)

the writing, the office door closes

Lex Fridman (1:23:45.220)

and then the rest of the day just do whatever the hell.

Steven Pressfield (1:23:49.740)

Maybe go out to dinner,

Lex Fridman (1:23:51.020)

my girlfriend is not here now,

Steven Pressfield (1:23:52.420)

she's in New York working,

Lex Fridman (1:23:53.540)

we'll make dinner or whatever.

Steven Pressfield (1:23:56.100)

Go out to dinner, something like that,

Lex Fridman (1:23:57.380)

and maybe I'll read something, nothing heavy.

Lex Fridman (1:24:02.940)

And I go to bed pretty early,

Lex Fridman (1:24:04.660)

and the gym is a big thing for me.

Steven Pressfield (1:24:08.260)

I'll already, sort of probably like with you

Lex Fridman (1:24:10.660)

with martial arts, the night before,

Steven Pressfield (1:24:12.020)

I'll be visualizing what I have to do the next day

Lex Fridman (1:24:16.340)

and getting myself psyched up for that.

Lex Fridman (1:24:20.020)

And then I'll just conk out like a light

Lex Fridman (1:24:22.140)

and wake up at the crack of dawn.

Steven Pressfield (1:24:24.340)

Okay, so looking out into the future,

Lex Fridman (1:24:28.140)

this year, next few years,

Lex Fridman (1:24:30.940)

what do you think the muse has in store for you?

Lex Fridman (1:24:34.900)

I don't think you can ever know.

Steven Pressfield (1:24:37.680)

It's probably something along the same,

Lex Fridman (1:24:40.060)

I really believe there's that exercise

Steven Pressfield (1:24:43.740)

where they say to you,

Lex Fridman (1:24:45.780)

visualize yourself five years in the future

Lex Fridman (1:24:48.180)

and write a letter from that person to yourself.

Lex Fridman (1:24:50.820)

I don't believe in that at all

Steven Pressfield (1:24:52.300)

because I don't think you can,

Lex Fridman (1:24:54.460)

there's a line out of Africa

Steven Pressfield (1:24:57.220)

that God made the world round

Lex Fridman (1:24:59.340)

so that we couldn't see too far ahead.

Steven Pressfield (1:25:03.660)

You just don't know as a writer or as a person,

Lex Fridman (1:25:09.140)

I never knew, my first book was A Legend of Bag of Ants.

Steven Pressfield (1:25:12.860)

I hadn't, before that happened,

Lex Fridman (1:25:14.740)

I had no clue that I was gonna be writing anything like that

Steven Pressfield (1:25:17.900)

on that subject, anything at all, no clue,

Lex Fridman (1:25:20.900)

until it just sort of came.

Lex Fridman (1:25:22.260)

And then when that was done,

Lex Fridman (1:25:24.460)

people said, well, you gotta write another one.

Steven Pressfield (1:25:25.780)

I had no idea what it was,

Lex Fridman (1:25:27.200)

which was gonna be Gates of Fire, no clue.

Lex Fridman (1:25:30.160)

So if somebody had sat me down at the start of that

Lex Fridman (1:25:34.660)

and asked the question,

Steven Pressfield (1:25:37.220)

I would have been crazy to have said it.

Lex Fridman (1:25:39.660)

So I just hope as the future unfolds,

Steven Pressfield (1:25:44.080)

that I'm open to it.

Lex Fridman (1:25:48.080)

Well, I think I speak for a lot of people

Steven Pressfield (1:25:51.300)

in saying that we look forward to what that future looks like.

Lex Fridman (1:25:54.780)

Stephen, thank you so much for talking today, it was fun.

Steven Pressfield (1:25:57.380)

You got the best job in the world going around

Lex Fridman (1:25:59.200)

talking to people that you wanna talk to

Lex Fridman (1:26:01.940)

and that they will talk to you.

Lex Fridman (1:26:04.220)

So thank you for doing it.

Steven Pressfield (1:26:05.300)

Hey, thank you for the great questions you made me think.

Lex Fridman (1:26:07.460)

I've certainly a bunch of questions

Steven Pressfield (1:26:08.820)

I've never ever answered before.

Lex Fridman (1:26:10.980)

Awesome, thank you so much.

Lex Fridman (1:26:11.820)

So thanks a lot, great.

Lex Fridman (1:26:12.780)

Thank you.

Steven Pressfield (1:26:14.180)

Thanks for listening to this conversation

Lex Fridman (1:26:15.700)

with Stephen Pressfield,

Lex Fridman (1:26:17.020)

and thank you to our sponsors,

Lex Fridman (1:26:19.260)

the Jordan Harbinger Show and Cash App.

Steven Pressfield (1:26:22.540)

Please consider supporting the podcast

Lex Fridman (1:26:24.300)

by going to jordanharbinger.com slash lex

Lex Fridman (1:26:28.060)

and downloading Cash App and using code lexpodcast.

Lex Fridman (1:26:32.300)

Click on the links, buy the stuff,

Steven Pressfield (1:26:34.580)

it's the best way to support this podcast.

Lex Fridman (1:26:37.620)

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,

Steven Pressfield (1:26:39.980)

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Lex Fridman (1:26:42.140)

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Steven Pressfield (1:26:43.540)

or connect with me on Twitter at lexfreedman,

Lex Fridman (1:26:46.660)

spelled without the E.

Steven Pressfield (1:26:48.900)

Just F R I D M A N.

Lex Fridman (1:26:52.220)

And now let me leave you with some words

Steven Pressfield (1:26:54.100)

from Stephen Pressfield.

Lex Fridman (1:26:56.060)

Are you paralyzed by fear?

Steven Pressfield (1:26:58.180)

That's a good sign.

Lex Fridman (1:26:59.660)

Fear is good.

Steven Pressfield (1:27:00.900)

Like self doubt, fear is an indicator.

Lex Fridman (1:27:03.980)

Fear tells us what we have to do.

Steven Pressfield (1:27:06.900)

Remember one rule of thumb,

Lex Fridman (1:27:08.860)

the more scared we are of a work or a calling,

Steven Pressfield (1:27:12.300)

the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Lex Fridman (1:27:15.340)

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Lex Fridman (20:01.980)

and still have a strong bond.

Lex Fridman (20:04.100)

Definitely, definitely.

Steven Pressfield (20:05.540)

In fact, almost all of the Jews,

Lex Fridman (20:08.460)

the fighters that I spoke to from the Six Day War

Steven Pressfield (20:12.020)

were secular and it really was not

Lex Fridman (20:15.020)

a religious thing with them

Steven Pressfield (20:19.460)

as much as it was a national thing.

Lex Fridman (20:22.540)

So having spent time in Israel,

Steven Pressfield (20:27.220)

how's the world where military conflict is directly felt

Lex Fridman (20:30.700)

as opposed to maybe if we look at the US

Lex Fridman (20:33.220)

where it's distant and far away?

Lex Fridman (20:35.180)

How is that world different?

Lex Fridman (20:36.380)

How are the people different?

Lex Fridman (20:37.460)

It's very different, as you know.

Steven Pressfield (20:40.300)

I've never been to Israel, actually.

Lex Fridman (20:41.860)

Oh, you haven't? I haven't felt it.

Steven Pressfield (20:43.620)

Ah, well, you should definitely go.

Lex Fridman (20:46.940)

I mean, here in the United States,

Steven Pressfield (20:51.460)

where when an incident like Charlottesville comes up,

Lex Fridman (20:56.140)

where people are chanting,

Steven Pressfield (20:56.980)

Jews will not replace us, blah, blah, blah,

Lex Fridman (20:59.260)

the impulse in the Jewish community is to think of,

Lex Fridman (21:02.740)

well, how can we reach out to the other side?

Lex Fridman (21:05.820)

How can we show them that we are human beings like they are

Lex Fridman (21:10.820)

and show them that we care for them, et cetera, et cetera?

Lex Fridman (21:13.380)

That's the sort of distant from war.

Steven Pressfield (21:16.660)

From, if you're in Israel,

Lex Fridman (21:20.020)

like if you and I were Israeli citizens right now,

Steven Pressfield (21:23.860)

you would be a fighter pilot or a tank commander or whatever.

Lex Fridman (21:27.540)

You would not just be working at MIT or whatever.

Lex Fridman (21:30.980)

And I would be in the army too.

Lex Fridman (21:33.220)

And so from their point of view,

Steven Pressfield (21:35.220)

they say all those people who hate us,

Lex Fridman (21:38.180)

can I curse on this?

Steven Pressfield (21:39.500)

Of course.

Lex Fridman (21:40.340)

Can I curse on this thing?

Steven Pressfield (21:41.700)

Fuck them, we'll kill them.

Lex Fridman (21:43.420)

We'll kill them.

Steven Pressfield (21:44.260)

If they dared to cross the line,

Lex Fridman (21:46.660)

and that's their whole different point of view.

Steven Pressfield (21:50.020)

To me, it's actually a healthier point of view.

Lex Fridman (21:52.260)

You think so?

Steven Pressfield (21:53.100)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (21:53.940)

So there's no, so let me ask the hard question is,

Steven Pressfield (21:57.220)

well, maybe it's an impossible question is,

Lex Fridman (21:59.700)

how do we resolve that conflict?

Lex Fridman (22:02.980)

In Israel and?

Lex Fridman (22:04.140)

In Israel or?

Lex Fridman (22:05.420)

Anywhere?

Lex Fridman (22:06.260)

Anywhere where the instinct is to reach out in US

Lex Fridman (22:09.260)

and say, F you and the people, yeah.

Lex Fridman (22:13.900)

Here's my, I think that the only way that two warring sides

Steven Pressfield (22:19.060)

or two sides that are opposed to one another

Lex Fridman (22:21.460)

can ever really come together

Steven Pressfield (22:22.980)

is when there's mutual respect,

Lex Fridman (22:24.660)

we'll get just more water.

Steven Pressfield (22:26.540)

I got it, I got this.

Lex Fridman (22:27.380)

When there's mutual respect

Lex Fridman (22:31.300)

and they can see each other as equals

Lex Fridman (22:33.260)

and when there's mutual fear, you know,

Steven Pressfield (22:36.740)

where one side says, we don't dare cross the line

Lex Fridman (22:40.300)

with this other side,

Lex Fridman (22:41.500)

and the other side says the same thing.

Lex Fridman (22:43.460)

I think then you can kind of reach across that thing

Lex Fridman (22:45.620)

and say, okay, we'll stay here, you stay here.

Lex Fridman (22:48.340)

We'll mingle in cultural ways

Lex Fridman (22:51.580)

and we'll have interchange, you know, winter marriage,

Lex Fridman (22:54.580)

da, da, da, da, da, da.

Lex Fridman (22:56.060)

But as soon as one side has no power,

Lex Fridman (22:58.860)

as the Jewish people have had no power

Lex Fridman (23:01.300)

throughout the diaspora forever, right?

Lex Fridman (23:04.460)

Then it's just a human nature.

Steven Pressfield (23:07.620)

You can see it in Trump

Lex Fridman (23:09.300)

and what he does to any vulnerable minority, right?

Lex Fridman (23:15.380)

And he's not alone.

Lex Fridman (23:16.500)

I'm not blaming him alone.

Steven Pressfield (23:18.460)

That's human nature.

Lex Fridman (23:19.860)

So I do think that that idea of like, fuck you,

Steven Pressfield (23:22.700)

if you cross the line, we'll kill you,

Lex Fridman (23:24.740)

is really a good way, is a good place to start from.

Steven Pressfield (23:28.140)

Because now you can sit down on opposite sides of the table

Lex Fridman (23:30.940)

and say, you know, what do we have in common?

Lex Fridman (23:33.100)

How can we, we want to raise our children.

Lex Fridman (23:35.100)

You want to raise your children.

Lex Fridman (23:36.620)

How can we do this in a way that we're not hurting each other?

Lex Fridman (23:42.460)

So you kind of said that you need to arrive at a balance,

Steven Pressfield (23:45.180)

some kind of balance of power.

Lex Fridman (23:46.740)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (23:47.580)

But you haven't spoken to the fact

Lex Fridman (23:49.220)

that there's deeply rooted hatred of the other.

Lex Fridman (23:54.820)

So is there no way to alleviate that hatred?

Lex Fridman (23:57.300)

Or is that, I mean, what role does love and hate come?

Steven Pressfield (24:03.260)

I think that hatred can go away.

Lex Fridman (24:04.100)

I really do.

Steven Pressfield (24:04.940)

I mean, if you look at even now

Lex Fridman (24:07.140)

that I haven't seen this in person,

Lex Fridman (24:09.700)

but they say that the Saudis and the Israelis

Lex Fridman (24:12.700)

are collaborating in certain things, you know,

Steven Pressfield (24:15.220)

by their mutual fear of or antagonism to Iran.

Lex Fridman (24:19.420)

I do think that even really long, long, longstanding

Steven Pressfield (24:24.420)

hatreds and animosities, thousands of years old,

Lex Fridman (24:27.700)

can go away under the right circumstances.

Lex Fridman (24:30.660)

In a, on what time scale?

Lex Fridman (24:34.540)

I mean, for instance, I don't know if there's some,

Lex Fridman (24:37.340)

do people have to die?

Lex Fridman (24:39.220)

Do generations have to die and pass away

Lex Fridman (24:41.380)

and new generations come up with less hate?

Lex Fridman (24:44.340)

Or can a single individual learn to not hate?

Steven Pressfield (24:47.180)

I think a single individual can learn to not hate

Lex Fridman (24:49.420)

because it certainly doesn't seem to,

Steven Pressfield (24:50.860)

over thousands of years, doesn't seem to work.

Lex Fridman (24:52.940)

You know, we keep thinking that that's gonna happen.

Lex Fridman (24:55.340)

But I think it's, we're in a real spiritual realm here

Lex Fridman (25:00.740)

when you're talking about that.

Steven Pressfield (25:02.140)

You're in a realm of, you know, Buddha, Jesus, whatever,

Lex Fridman (25:05.660)

something like that, that where, you know,

Steven Pressfield (25:10.460)

a true change of soul happens.

Lex Fridman (25:13.380)

But I do think that's possible.

Lex Fridman (25:16.340)

So what do you think is the future of warfare?

Lex Fridman (25:20.700)

Especially with what many people see as the expansion

Steven Pressfield (25:25.140)

of the military industrial conflict.

Lex Fridman (25:27.340)

To what, do you, I know you're not a military historian.

Steven Pressfield (25:32.500)

I'm asking more as a metaphor.

Lex Fridman (25:36.420)

And do you see us as people continuing to fight?

Steven Pressfield (25:41.380)

You know, it's a really great question, Alex,

Lex Fridman (25:43.740)

because I think now with social media, TV, movies,

Steven Pressfield (25:48.740)

all of these things that create empathy across cultures,

Lex Fridman (25:55.220)

it becomes harder and harder, I think, I think,

Steven Pressfield (25:58.820)

to totally demonize the other,

Lex Fridman (26:02.080)

the way it was in previous wars.

Steven Pressfield (26:05.100)

I also think, I don't really see an appetite

Lex Fridman (26:08.780)

for people wanting to go to war these days.

Lex Fridman (26:12.060)

And in a way, I don't know if that's good or bad.

Lex Fridman (26:15.140)

It's like everybody's so fat and lazy

Lex Fridman (26:17.580)

and so concerned with how many clicks they're getting

Lex Fridman (26:20.500)

that, you know, whereas I know at the start of World War I,

Steven Pressfield (26:26.420)

both the younger generations were eager to go to war.

Lex Fridman (26:30.900)

You know, I think it was insane,

Lex Fridman (26:34.500)

but it was that sort of warrior archetype

Lex Fridman (26:36.540)

that we were talking about before that,

Steven Pressfield (26:38.540)

that generational testosterone eros thing.

Lex Fridman (26:43.540)

Whereas nowadays, I don't know.

Steven Pressfield (26:48.060)

I mean, it's hard to say there's not gonna be another war

Lex Fridman (26:52.180)

because there always are,

Lex Fridman (26:53.940)

but it's sort of hard to imagine people

Lex Fridman (26:55.780)

getting off their ass these days to do anything.

Steven Pressfield (26:59.380)

Well, it's funny that you mentioned social media

Lex Fridman (27:01.460)

as a place for empathy, sure.

Lex Fridman (27:03.700)

But in a sense, it's a place for war as well.

Lex Fridman (27:08.140)

For hatred, yeah, true.

Steven Pressfield (27:08.980)

For hatred.

Lex Fridman (27:09.820)

And perhaps the positive aspect of hatred on social media

Steven Pressfield (27:16.700)

is that it's somewhat less harmful than murder.

Lex Fridman (27:22.220)

And so it kind of dissipates sort of the hatefuls.

Steven Pressfield (27:27.580)

You get the hate out at a less,

Lex Fridman (27:35.100)

on a daily basis and thereby never boils up

Steven Pressfield (27:37.900)

to a point where you want to kill.

Lex Fridman (27:39.460)

It's also a really weird thing that's going on

Steven Pressfield (27:42.300)

that I don't know if anybody really understands,

Lex Fridman (27:43.820)

like with video games where kids are acting out

Lex Fridman (27:47.700)

these incredible horror things, right?

Lex Fridman (27:49.980)

But you know that if they cut their finger,

Lex Fridman (27:52.660)

they would like freak out, you know?

Lex Fridman (27:55.860)

And I also don't think that many of the people

Steven Pressfield (27:58.860)

that are hateful on social media,

Lex Fridman (28:02.380)

if they were face to face with the person, they wouldn't.

Lex Fridman (28:05.260)

So there's a sort of two mental spheres

Lex Fridman (28:11.060)

happening at the same time.

Lex Fridman (28:13.180)

And I don't know how that plays out.

Lex Fridman (28:15.620)

Maps to the actual military,

Lex Fridman (28:17.260)

how that actually maps to military conflict.

Lex Fridman (28:19.220)

Yeah, yeah.

Steven Pressfield (28:21.020)

Like if you in the United States have a draft, for example,

Lex Fridman (28:25.380)

how the populace would respond different than they did

Steven Pressfield (28:28.300)

in previous generations.

Lex Fridman (28:29.460)

Yeah, I think they certainly would.

Steven Pressfield (28:30.820)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (28:31.780)

Another question, not sure if you've thought about it,

Lex Fridman (28:34.260)

but I work on building artificial intelligence systems.

Lex Fridman (28:38.140)

In our community, many people are worried

Steven Pressfield (28:39.780)

about AI being used in war.

Lex Fridman (28:41.740)

So automating the killing process with drones

Lex Fridman (28:46.940)

and in general, it's being used more and more.

Lex Fridman (28:49.080)

I should recuse myself on that one.

Steven Pressfield (28:50.680)

I really haven't thought about that one.

Lex Fridman (28:51.740)

You haven't thought about it.

Steven Pressfield (28:52.580)

I'd rather ask you what you think about it.

Lex Fridman (28:55.300)

Well, it's interesting, I mean,

Steven Pressfield (28:56.260)

because it's so fundamentally different

Lex Fridman (28:57.920)

from if you look at the Battle of Thermopylae.

Steven Pressfield (29:02.020)

It means just if we talk about the difference between a gun

Lex Fridman (29:05.020)

and a sword.

Steven Pressfield (29:07.460)

I'll tell you one little anecdote.

Lex Fridman (29:09.360)

There was a Spartan king, I don't know which one it was,

Lex Fridman (29:13.540)

but at one point they showed him a new invention

Lex Fridman (29:16.540)

and it could launch a bolt that would kill someone

Steven Pressfield (29:20.620)

at a range of 200 yards.

Lex Fridman (29:22.380)

And the king wept and said, alas, valor is no more.

Steven Pressfield (29:27.380)

Because their point of view of war,

Lex Fridman (29:30.460)

it was highly ritualized, as you know,

Lex Fridman (29:32.740)

and the code of honor was that you were not supposed

Lex Fridman (29:37.420)

to be able to kill another person

Steven Pressfield (29:39.420)

unless you yourself were in equal danger of being killed.

Lex Fridman (29:43.180)

And any other way of doing that,

Steven Pressfield (29:44.740)

even bow and arrow was considered less than manly

Lex Fridman (29:50.540)

and less than honorable.

Lex Fridman (29:51.700)

And maybe we should go back to that

Lex Fridman (29:53.220)

because at least it makes the stakes real and true.

Steven Pressfield (29:56.540)

Not that we could.

Lex Fridman (30:02.220)

Not that's the point.

Steven Pressfield (30:04.980)

You were in the Marine Corps,

Lex Fridman (30:06.660)

so we talk about the real, the bloody conflicts

Steven Pressfield (30:13.780)

that you've written about, many of them.

Lex Fridman (30:16.620)

So let me ask a personal question.

Steven Pressfield (30:21.180)

Have you, sort of as a writing and in general,

Lex Fridman (30:24.340)

have you thought about what it takes to kill a person

Lex Fridman (30:30.260)

if you yourself could do it in the war?

Lex Fridman (30:33.180)

I have thought about it, yeah.

Lex Fridman (30:34.220)

And how that would make you feel?

Lex Fridman (30:37.940)

Of course, one never knows.

Steven Pressfield (30:39.660)

I certainly, I have not been in combat.

Lex Fridman (30:41.340)

I haven't killed anybody.

Lex Fridman (30:43.140)

But I would imagine in the real world

Lex Fridman (30:47.700)

that it would change you utterly forever.

Steven Pressfield (30:51.720)

Because you can't help but identify

Lex Fridman (30:58.880)

with the person that you've just killed.

Lex Fridman (31:01.280)

And it's another human being.

Lex Fridman (31:02.920)

And I mean, I have a hard time killing a spider.

Lex Fridman (31:07.100)

So I would imagine that it's something

Lex Fridman (31:09.880)

that warriors understand and nobody else understands.

Lex Fridman (31:15.100)

And you've spoken with many.

Lex Fridman (31:16.760)

How, I mean, you've spoken with people

Steven Pressfield (31:19.320)

who've seen military combat in Israel.

Lex Fridman (31:23.160)

What, have they been able to articulate

Lex Fridman (31:26.640)

the experience of killing?

Lex Fridman (31:28.980)

It's sort of just what I said.

Steven Pressfield (31:31.100)

I mean, I'm even thinking of one pilot

Lex Fridman (31:34.600)

that I interviewed over there

Steven Pressfield (31:37.880)

who was strafing a tank in his Mustang

Lex Fridman (31:45.180)

and saw, at really low altitude,

Lex Fridman (31:48.120)

and saw what his bullets did to the guy

Lex Fridman (31:50.880)

and could see his face and everything like that,

Steven Pressfield (31:52.920)

which is even one remove or more removes

Lex Fridman (31:56.360)

from an infantryman, what an infantryman does.

Lex Fridman (31:59.200)

And he said that same thing that I said,

Lex Fridman (32:02.000)

that it just changes you and you can never say it,

Steven Pressfield (32:04.600)

never look at the world or look at anything

Lex Fridman (32:07.000)

the same way again.

Lex Fridman (32:08.640)

And when that happens at scale,

Lex Fridman (32:10.700)

it's thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds.

Steven Pressfield (32:13.120)

That changes entire societies.

Lex Fridman (32:14.600)

I mean, that's what we've seen.

Steven Pressfield (32:16.560)

At least it, but the problem is

Lex Fridman (32:18.200)

it doesn't change the politicians back home.

Steven Pressfield (32:20.440)

Right.

Lex Fridman (32:22.280)

How important is mortality, finiteness,

Lex Fridman (32:28.480)

the fact that this thing ends to the creative process?

Lex Fridman (32:32.280)

So, killing and war really emphasizes that,

Lex Fridman (32:37.800)

but in general, the fact that this thing ends.

Lex Fridman (32:42.760)

It does?

Steven Pressfield (32:43.920)

It does, and uh.

Lex Fridman (32:46.280)

Shit.

Lex Fridman (32:49.400)

And on a serious note,

Lex Fridman (32:51.560)

do you think about your own mortality?

Lex Fridman (32:53.640)

Do you meditate on your own mortality

Lex Fridman (32:55.520)

when you think about the work you do?

Steven Pressfield (32:57.240)

That's another great question, Lex.

Lex Fridman (32:59.320)

I actually, I'm 75, and I just was having,

Steven Pressfield (33:03.480)

I had breakfast in New York a few months ago

Lex Fridman (33:05.620)

with a friend of mine who's like my exact same age.

Lex Fridman (33:08.880)

And I said to him, I said,

Lex Fridman (33:10.720)

Nick, do you ever think about mortality?

Lex Fridman (33:12.940)

And he said, every fucking minute of every day.

Lex Fridman (33:16.680)

And I was kind of relieved to hear that because I do too.

Lex Fridman (33:22.000)

But actually, I always have, I think.

Lex Fridman (33:24.640)

And I think, you know, the fact of mortality

Lex Fridman (33:31.000)

gives meaning to life, you know?

Lex Fridman (33:32.460)

I think that's why we want to create.

Steven Pressfield (33:36.160)

That's why we want to make a mark of some kind.

Lex Fridman (33:39.540)

Or, and the other aspect of it is

Lex Fridman (33:43.980)

what's on the other side of that mortality?

Lex Fridman (33:46.860)

I'm a believer in previous lives.

Lex Fridman (33:49.500)

So I sort of, and I,

Lex Fridman (33:52.780)

the question I've never been able to answer

Lex Fridman (33:54.980)

among many, many others is like, why are we even here?

Lex Fridman (33:58.740)

Why are we in the flesh?

Steven Pressfield (34:01.620)

You know, I sort of, I like to believe that God

Lex Fridman (34:04.060)

or some force is, we're on some kind of journey, but I'm not sure why,

Lex Fridman (34:13.060)

why we were put in this world where the ground rules are,

Lex Fridman (34:17.340)

if you think about animal life,

Steven Pressfield (34:19.980)

that you cannot live from one day to the next

Lex Fridman (34:22.660)

without killing and eating some other form of life.

Lex Fridman (34:26.780)

I mean, what a demented thing, you know?

Lex Fridman (34:29.820)

Why couldn't we just have a solar panel on our head

Lex Fridman (34:33.100)

and, you know, be friends with everybody?

Lex Fridman (34:35.500)

So I sort of, I don't get what that was all about,

Lex Fridman (34:40.160)

but that's sort of the big issue.

Lex Fridman (34:42.380)

Have you read to Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, for example?

Steven Pressfield (34:46.160)

Is Ernest Becker's a philosopher that said that the death,

Lex Fridman (34:52.100)

that the fear of death is really the primary driver

Steven Pressfield (34:57.380)

of everything we do.

Lex Fridman (34:58.420)

So Freud had what the?

Steven Pressfield (35:00.460)

Right, I would agree with that.

Lex Fridman (35:02.420)

So to you, you've always thought about your,

Steven Pressfield (35:04.660)

even your own mortality.

Lex Fridman (35:06.080)

Yes, definitely.

Lex Fridman (35:07.820)

And can you elaborate on the reincarnation aspect

Lex Fridman (35:13.780)

of what you were talking about?

Steven Pressfield (35:14.780)

Like that we kind of, what's your sense

Lex Fridman (35:17.540)

that we had previous lives?

Steven Pressfield (35:20.860)

In what, have you thought concretely

Lex Fridman (35:22.720)

or is it a lot of it kind of is?

Steven Pressfield (35:24.900)

No, I've thought concretely about it.

Lex Fridman (35:27.540)

I mean, it's very clear when you see children,

Steven Pressfield (35:32.860)

young kids, or even dogs and cats,

Lex Fridman (35:36.780)

that they come into the world with personalities, you know,

Lex Fridman (35:40.620)

and three kids in a family are gonna be completely different

Lex Fridman (35:43.700)

and completely their own person.

Lex Fridman (35:45.420)

And that person that they are doesn't change over life.

Lex Fridman (35:50.420)

And I, you know, there's one of the things that I did in my book

Steven Pressfield (35:58.100)

The Artist's Journey is that there were certain things

Lex Fridman (36:00.420)

where I tracked or just listed in order,

Steven Pressfield (36:02.900)

like all of Bruce Springsteen's albums

Lex Fridman (36:05.400)

or all of Philip Roth's books, you know,

Steven Pressfield (36:07.900)

kind of a body of work throughout over, you know,

Lex Fridman (36:10.180)

a period of 30, 40, 50 years, you know.

Lex Fridman (36:13.020)

And you can see that there's a theme running through all

Lex Fridman (36:18.020)

of those things, that it's completely unique to that person.

Steven Pressfield (36:22.740)

Nobody else could have written Philip Roth's books

Lex Fridman (36:25.140)

or Bruce Springsteen's songs.

Lex Fridman (36:28.060)

And you can even see sort of a destiny there.

Lex Fridman (36:31.620)

So I ask myself, well, where did that come from?

Steven Pressfield (36:36.020)

What, it seems to be a continuation of something that was,

Lex Fridman (36:41.220)

that happened before, and that will lead to something else

Steven Pressfield (36:44.420)

because it's not starting from scratch.

Lex Fridman (36:47.020)

It seems like there's a calling, a destiny in there already.

Steven Pressfield (36:53.340)

This gets back to the muse and all that kind of thing.

Lex Fridman (36:56.020)

So yeah, it's almost like the, there's this,

Steven Pressfield (36:59.540)

let's call it a God, it's passing,

Lex Fridman (37:03.380)

it's almost like sampling parts of a previous human

Steven Pressfield (37:07.300)

that has lived and putting those into the new one.

Lex Fridman (37:11.740)

Sampling is probably a pretty good word.

Steven Pressfield (37:14.060)

Taking some of the good, well, you can't take

Lex Fridman (37:15.700)

all the good parts because the bad parts

Steven Pressfield (37:17.500)

is what makes the person.

Lex Fridman (37:19.660)

Let's say you're taking it all together.

Steven Pressfield (37:21.160)

Okay, this is humans only, or does it pass around

Lex Fridman (37:24.060)

from animals in your view?

Steven Pressfield (37:26.340)

I don't know, that's above my pay grade, I don't know.

Lex Fridman (37:29.580)

So, okay, so you talk about the muse

Steven Pressfield (37:33.180)

as the source of ideas maybe.

Lex Fridman (37:39.240)

Since you've gotten a few glimpses of her in your writing,

Lex Fridman (37:44.240)

tell me, what is it possible for you to tell me about her?

Lex Fridman (37:51.680)

Where does she reside?

Lex Fridman (37:53.680)

What does she look like?

Lex Fridman (37:54.920)

I mean, you can look at it many different ways, right?

Lex Fridman (37:57.680)

The Greeks did it in an anthropomorphic way, right?

Lex Fridman (38:00.480)

They created gods that were like human beings.

Lex Fridman (38:03.720)

But if you look at it from a Kabbalistic Jewish perspective,

Lex Fridman (38:07.440)

Jewish mysticism, you could say

Lex Fridman (38:09.440)

that it's the soul, the neshama, right?

Lex Fridman (38:11.800)

That the soul is above us on a higher plane,

Steven Pressfield (38:14.320)

our own, your soul, my soul,

Lex Fridman (38:16.480)

and is trying to reach down to us and communicate with us.

Lex Fridman (38:21.360)

And we're trying simultaneously to reach up to it

Lex Fridman (38:24.680)

through prayer or through, if you're a writer or an artist,

Steven Pressfield (38:28.520)

you know, when you sit down at the keyboard,

Lex Fridman (38:31.000)

you're entering into a kind of prayer.

Steven Pressfield (38:33.580)

You're entering into a different state

Lex Fridman (38:35.520)

of an altered consciousness to some extent.

Steven Pressfield (38:39.480)

You're opening yourself, opening the pipeline,

Lex Fridman (38:41.840)

or turning on the radio to tune into

Steven Pressfield (38:44.080)

the cosmic radio station.

Lex Fridman (38:46.640)

And another way of looking at it, this is an,

Lex Fridman (38:49.280)

did you ever see the movie City of Angels?

Lex Fridman (38:53.800)

The visual of the movie, it was Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage.

Steven Pressfield (38:59.280)

Yeah, yeah, I've seen it, yep.

Lex Fridman (39:01.200)

And right, the visual of the movie sort of was

Steven Pressfield (39:05.240)

Meg Ryan is a heart surgeon.

Lex Fridman (39:08.960)

And as she's operating on somebody,

Steven Pressfield (39:11.320)

suddenly Nicolas Cage in this long duster coat,

Lex Fridman (39:14.780)

like Jesse James, appears right next to her

Steven Pressfield (39:17.680)

in the operating room, and he's an angel.

Lex Fridman (39:19.920)

And he's waiting to take out the soul

Steven Pressfield (39:23.520)

of the patient on the operating table.

Lex Fridman (39:27.000)

And she doesn't see him, she's totally unaware of him.

Lex Fridman (39:29.720)

And so is everybody else in the operating room,

Lex Fridman (39:31.820)

except maybe the guy who's about to die,

Steven Pressfield (39:33.920)

who suddenly sees him.

Lex Fridman (39:35.480)

But I kind of believe that there are beings like that,

Steven Pressfield (39:42.160)

or if you don't like that, it's a force,

Lex Fridman (39:44.640)

it's a consciousness, it's something

Steven Pressfield (39:46.840)

that are right here, right now.

Lex Fridman (39:49.800)

And they're trying to communicate to us.

Lex Fridman (39:54.560)

And like through a membrane,

Lex Fridman (39:57.200)

like tapping on that window over there,

Steven Pressfield (39:59.160)

they're like right out there.

Lex Fridman (40:00.720)

And they carry the future.

Steven Pressfield (40:03.600)

They are everything that is in potential.

Lex Fridman (40:08.160)

All the works that you will do, Lex,

Steven Pressfield (40:11.340)

your startup, whatever else you're doing,

Lex Fridman (40:14.480)

they know that.

Lex Fridman (40:17.780)

And it's not really you

Lex Fridman (40:19.800)

that's coming up with those ideas, in my opinion.

Steven Pressfield (40:22.680)

Those things are appearing,

Lex Fridman (40:24.740)

it's like somebody knocks on the door and puts it in.

Steven Pressfield (40:28.080)

I mean, in the Iliad, where gods and goddesses appear,

Lex Fridman (40:33.880)

along with the human antagonists

Lex Fridman (40:35.840)

on the battlefield all the time, right?

Lex Fridman (40:37.960)

There'll be, you know, Homer flashes to Olympus

Lex Fridman (40:40.880)

and then back to the real world.

Lex Fridman (40:42.520)

And there's a thing where one Aphrodite,

Steven Pressfield (40:45.280)

let's say wants to help Paris.

Lex Fridman (40:47.880)

And so she says, well, I will appear to him in a dream.

Lex Fridman (40:52.520)

And I'll take the form of his brother

Lex Fridman (40:55.800)

and I'll say, bump, bump, bump, bump.

Lex Fridman (40:57.680)

So that's creatures, beings on one dimension,

Lex Fridman (41:03.520)

as the Greeks saw it, communicating with,

Lex Fridman (41:06.600)

and I believe that that's exactly what's going on,

Lex Fridman (41:09.380)

in one, whatever analogy you want to use.

Steven Pressfield (41:12.560)

That communication, to which degree

Lex Fridman (41:17.600)

do you play the role in that communication?

Steven Pressfield (41:20.500)

As opposed to sitting at the computer,

Lex Fridman (41:23.080)

if you're a writer, and staring at the blank page

Lex Fridman (41:27.120)

and putting in the time and waiting.

Lex Fridman (41:30.640)

So if, in your view, are these creatures

Lex Fridman (41:39.240)

basically waiting to tell you about your future?

Lex Fridman (41:42.960)

Or is there choice?

Lex Fridman (41:44.960)

How many possible futures are there?

Lex Fridman (41:46.720)

How many possible ideas are there?

Steven Pressfield (41:48.480)

That's a great question.

Lex Fridman (41:49.680)

I think there's basically, yes, there are alternatives,

Steven Pressfield (41:54.440)

you know, degrees within it.

Lex Fridman (41:56.800)

But if you look at Bruce Springsteen's albums,

Lex Fridman (42:01.280)

how much could he have done really differently?

Lex Fridman (42:05.840)

Yeah, he would, you can just see

Steven Pressfield (42:08.120)

there's a whole impetus going through the whole thing.

Lex Fridman (42:11.360)

And nothing was going to shake him off that, you know?

Lex Fridman (42:14.080)

And yeah, maybe the river could have been different,

Lex Fridman (42:16.880)

could have been called something else,

Lex Fridman (42:18.960)

but he was dealing with certain issues.

Lex Fridman (42:23.080)

His conscious self was dealing with certain issues

Steven Pressfield (42:26.220)

that were really out of his control.

Lex Fridman (42:28.040)

He was drawn, he was called to it, right?

Steven Pressfield (42:30.900)

Nothing could stop him.

Lex Fridman (42:32.760)

And so it is sort of a partnership, I think,

Steven Pressfield (42:37.320)

the creative process, between the creative impulse

Lex Fridman (42:41.640)

that's coming from some other place,

Steven Pressfield (42:45.360)

or it's coming from deep within us

Lex Fridman (42:47.120)

is another way to look at it.

Steven Pressfield (42:48.480)

You know, it's like if we are acorns

Lex Fridman (42:50.520)

and we're growing into oaks.

Lex Fridman (42:53.300)

So the conscious artist,

Lex Fridman (42:58.200)

who's sitting there at the keyboard or whatever,

Steven Pressfield (43:01.040)

is applying his or her consciousness to that,

Lex Fridman (43:04.800)

but is also going into opening themselves

Steven Pressfield (43:08.960)

to the unconscious or to this other realm,

Lex Fridman (43:11.120)

whatever that is.

Steven Pressfield (43:13.140)

I mean, certainly songwriters for a million years

Lex Fridman (43:16.200)

have said, you know, a song just came into their head,

Lex Fridman (43:18.280)

right?

Lex Fridman (43:19.120)

A poem, just all they had to do was write.

Lex Fridman (43:21.020)

But then, you ever see that thing where,

Lex Fridman (43:23.920)

of Keats's notes for a thing of beauty is a joy forever?

Steven Pressfield (43:28.360)

It's like covers an entire page,

Lex Fridman (43:29.760)

and it's like, you know, he's crossing this out

Lex Fridman (43:32.000)

and that out, and he has to go.

Lex Fridman (43:33.080)

His consciousness is, his conscious mind is working on it.

Steven Pressfield (43:36.660)

But, so I do think it's a partnership.

Lex Fridman (43:39.600)

And I think that, I know when I was first starting out

Steven Pressfield (43:42.800)

as a writer, I worked in advertising,

Lex Fridman (43:45.680)

and I tried to do novels that I could never do.

Steven Pressfield (43:49.040)

I was like, really unskilled at getting to that,

Lex Fridman (43:54.880)

tuning into that station.

Steven Pressfield (43:56.760)

I just, I beat my brains out and was unable to do it,

Lex Fridman (44:01.900)

you know, except in,

Steven Pressfield (44:03.240)

because I was sort of trying too hard,

Lex Fridman (44:05.320)

it was sort of like a Zen monk or a monk of some kind

Steven Pressfield (44:08.980)

trying to meditate and just like constantly thoughts

Lex Fridman (44:12.520)

driving you crazy.

Lex Fridman (44:14.240)

But over time, you know, knock wood,

Lex Fridman (44:16.420)

I've kind of gotten better at it.

Lex Fridman (44:19.280)

And I can sort of let go of those,

Lex Fridman (44:22.200)

that part of me that's trying so hard.

Lex Fridman (44:25.520)

And so these angels can speak a little more easily

Lex Fridman (44:31.140)

through the membrane.

Lex Fridman (44:32.400)

Can you put into words the process of letting go

Lex Fridman (44:36.760)

and clearing that channel of communication?

Lex Fridman (44:40.080)

What does it take?

Lex Fridman (44:41.080)

That's another great question.

Steven Pressfield (44:42.200)

For me, it just took, it took probably 30 years.

Lex Fridman (44:46.440)

And I don't even, I guess I would liken it to meditation,

Steven Pressfield (44:49.680)

even though I'm not a meditator.

Lex Fridman (44:52.400)

But it would seem to me to be one of the hardest things

Lex Fridman (44:54.720)

in the world to just sit still and stop thinking, right?

Lex Fridman (45:00.560)

And so it's very hard to put into words.

Lex Fridman (45:03.240)

And I think that's why these teachers of meditation

Lex Fridman (45:06.400)

use tricks and koans and stuff like that.

Lex Fridman (45:10.880)

But for me, at least, I think it was just a process

Lex Fridman (45:15.500)

of years of years and years of trying,

Lex Fridman (45:17.920)

and finally beating my head in the wall.

Lex Fridman (45:20.560)

And finally, little by little giving up

Steven Pressfield (45:22.840)

the beating of the head.

Lex Fridman (45:26.480)

But there doesn't seem to be any trick.

Steven Pressfield (45:28.000)

Everybody wants a hack these days.

Lex Fridman (45:30.580)

And I don't think there is a hack.

Steven Pressfield (45:34.200)

If you look at it in terms of the goddess, the muse,

Lex Fridman (45:37.360)

she's watching you down there,

Steven Pressfield (45:39.360)

beating your head in the wall.

Lex Fridman (45:40.800)

You're like a Marine going through an obstacle course,

Steven Pressfield (45:43.560)

or a martial artist trying to learn,

Lex Fridman (45:46.080)

like Uma Thurman doing the casket deal,

Lex Fridman (45:49.000)

trying to make that little four inch punch, you know?

Lex Fridman (45:54.040)

The muse or the goddess is just sort of watching,

Steven Pressfield (45:56.400)

going, it's Lex, he's trying, he's trying.

Lex Fridman (45:59.620)

I'm gonna come back in another couple of months

Lex Fridman (46:01.380)

and see if he's still there.

Lex Fridman (46:03.080)

And finally, she'll say, all right, he's had it,

Steven Pressfield (46:06.160)

he's paid his dues, I'm gonna give it to him.

Lex Fridman (46:09.760)

So, the hard work and the suffering, yeah.

Lex Fridman (46:13.560)

But I'm also, being Russian, in wrestling and martial arts,

Lex Fridman (46:18.740)

we're big into drilling technique.

Steven Pressfield (46:21.080)

I was also just even getting at,

Lex Fridman (46:24.560)

certainly there's no shortcut.

Lex Fridman (46:26.360)

But is there a process?

Lex Fridman (46:28.100)

So you're, that can be, the process of practice.

Lex Fridman (46:33.100)

So you had two.

Lex Fridman (46:35.660)

One, you had an example of meditation.

Lex Fridman (46:39.020)

So it's essentially the practice of meditation.

Lex Fridman (46:41.860)

Is you sitting here?

Steven Pressfield (46:42.700)

I think a lot of drill, I think,

Lex Fridman (46:44.100)

is a good way to look at it too.

Lex Fridman (46:45.980)

But what are you drilling?

Lex Fridman (46:48.220)

You're just sitting and?

Lex Fridman (46:50.220)

You're writing, you know?

Lex Fridman (46:51.780)

Just writing.

Steven Pressfield (46:52.620)

You're writing, then you're looking at what you wrote,

Lex Fridman (46:55.540)

you know?

Lex Fridman (46:56.380)

You're hitting moments when it flows, you know?

Lex Fridman (47:00.660)

And then your other hitting moments

Steven Pressfield (47:02.600)

where you just can't do anything.

Lex Fridman (47:03.740)

And you're trying to, from the moments where it flowed,

Steven Pressfield (47:07.060)

you're trying to come back and look at it and say,

Lex Fridman (47:08.500)

what did I do?

Lex Fridman (47:09.820)

How did that happen?

Lex Fridman (47:11.600)

Where was my mind, you know?

Lex Fridman (47:13.780)

But I think it's just a process of over and over

Lex Fridman (47:16.300)

and over and over until finally it gets a little bit easier.

Lex Fridman (47:22.220)

And did you always, when you read something you write,

Lex Fridman (47:26.420)

did you always have a pretty good radar

Lex Fridman (47:28.620)

for what's good and not after it's written?

Lex Fridman (47:33.100)

No.

Steven Pressfield (47:33.940)

I think I do now.

Lex Fridman (47:37.460)

But no, it was always really hard

Steven Pressfield (47:42.860)

for me to know what was good.

Lex Fridman (47:45.680)

I mean, do you edit, the process of editing

Steven Pressfield (47:49.300)

is the process of looking at what you've written

Lex Fridman (47:52.100)

and improving it.

Lex Fridman (47:54.060)

Are you a better writer or an editor?

Lex Fridman (47:56.460)

How often do you edit?

Steven Pressfield (47:57.820)

That's another great question.

Lex Fridman (47:59.300)

Great question.

Steven Pressfield (48:00.140)

Cause I do think that in writing,

Lex Fridman (48:01.980)

the real process of looking at it

Steven Pressfield (48:03.740)

is the process that an editor does

Lex Fridman (48:05.820)

rather than what a writer does.

Steven Pressfield (48:08.100)

The gentleman I was just talking to on the phone

Lex Fridman (48:10.420)

is my editor, Sean Coyne,

Steven Pressfield (48:12.020)

who was the guy who bought Gates of Fire

Lex Fridman (48:14.600)

when he was an editor at Doubleday.

Lex Fridman (48:16.780)

And who basically when I finish a book, I give it to him.

Lex Fridman (48:21.220)

And he gives me, you know,

Steven Pressfield (48:23.860)

editing doesn't really mean like crossing out commas.

Lex Fridman (48:29.580)

It really means looking at the overall work

Lex Fridman (48:34.220)

and saying, does it work?

Lex Fridman (48:36.380)

And if it doesn't work, why doesn't it work?

Lex Fridman (48:39.100)

Is there something wrong here?

Lex Fridman (48:41.020)

You know, like if you were building the Golden Gate Bridge,

Steven Pressfield (48:44.540)

you know, and one span was out of whack, you know,

Lex Fridman (48:46.620)

you could, and I think a really skilled editor,

Steven Pressfield (48:50.260)

which Sean is, understands what makes a story tick.

Lex Fridman (48:54.860)

And he also has the perspective that I've lost

Steven Pressfield (48:58.220)

in something I've wrote, cause I'm so close to it,

Lex Fridman (49:01.060)

to say, you know, this isn't working and that is working.

Lex Fridman (49:06.020)

What kind of advice has he given you?

Lex Fridman (49:07.700)

Is it like layout?

Steven Pressfield (49:09.900)

Like this story doesn't flow correctly.

Lex Fridman (49:12.700)

Like you shouldn't start at this point.

Steven Pressfield (49:15.180)

Or does he even sit back at a higher level and say,

Lex Fridman (49:18.580)

I see what you're doing, but you could do better.

Steven Pressfield (49:22.460)

No, he doesn't do that.

Lex Fridman (49:24.020)

But a lot of it is about genre

Lex Fridman (49:28.180)

and kind of the defining what genre you're working in.

Lex Fridman (49:32.620)

And I'm gonna get up here to just bring something over here

Steven Pressfield (49:37.140)

for the camera.

Lex Fridman (49:39.220)

This was one where Sean tore this down

Lex Fridman (49:42.540)

and made me start from scratch.

Lex Fridman (49:44.540)

And what the specifics of it were really,

Steven Pressfield (49:47.820)

this is a supernatural thriller.

Lex Fridman (49:50.140)

That's the genre.

Steven Pressfield (49:51.380)

Sort of like Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist.

Lex Fridman (49:55.980)

And what he showed me was that I had violated

Steven Pressfield (50:00.460)

certain conventions of the genre.

Lex Fridman (50:05.460)

And you just can't do that.

Steven Pressfield (50:08.300)

It's gotta be, it has to be done the right way.

Lex Fridman (50:12.660)

And so he pointed out certain things to me.

Lex Fridman (50:18.820)

So he must be a prolific reader himself too, actually.

Lex Fridman (50:22.860)

That's such a tough job of editor.

Steven Pressfield (50:26.060)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (50:26.900)

Again, he was sort of born to do that.

Steven Pressfield (50:28.620)

He just kind of glommed onto it.

Lex Fridman (50:31.900)

But since he was his first job publishing

Steven Pressfield (50:36.900)

cat thrillers, cat detective books,

Lex Fridman (50:43.020)

he studied how it works, what makes a story work,

Steven Pressfield (50:46.220)

et cetera, et cetera.

Lex Fridman (50:47.060)

And so he really, he's great.

Lex Fridman (50:48.940)

And I think any really successful writer,

Lex Fridman (50:52.340)

unless they're utterly brilliant on their own,

Steven Pressfield (50:55.300)

has gotta have a great editor behind them.

Lex Fridman (50:57.740)

But you yourself edit as well.

Steven Pressfield (51:00.100)

I'm constantly trying to learn from him and teach myself.

Lex Fridman (51:03.940)

Everything you see in my blog posts

Steven Pressfield (51:07.580)

that it's about the craft of writing

Lex Fridman (51:09.460)

is me trying to teach myself the rules

Lex Fridman (51:12.860)

so that, I'm sure it's the same in martial arts

Lex Fridman (51:15.660)

or anything else, right?

Steven Pressfield (51:16.860)

You try to not be dependent on that other person

Lex Fridman (51:21.740)

because it's so painful to make those mistakes.

Steven Pressfield (51:24.300)

You really feel like, ah, I wish I could get it right

Lex Fridman (51:27.060)

the first time the next time I do it.

Steven Pressfield (51:29.100)

Well, in research, we go through that.

Lex Fridman (51:30.980)

In research more than writing,

Lex Fridman (51:33.100)

so what you do is a little more solitary.

Lex Fridman (51:35.780)

In research, there's usually two, three, four people

Steven Pressfield (51:38.340)

working on something together and we write a paper.

Lex Fridman (51:41.220)

And there's that painful process of where you write it down

Lex Fridman (51:44.220)

and then you share it with other.

Lex Fridman (51:46.420)

And not only do they criticize the writing,

Steven Pressfield (51:49.940)

they criticize the fundamental aspects

Lex Fridman (51:53.380)

of the approach you've taken.

Steven Pressfield (51:54.940)

I would think so.

Lex Fridman (51:55.780)

So it's exactly like they would say you're attacking,

Lex Fridman (51:58.740)

you're asking the wrong questions, right?

Lex Fridman (52:01.100)

And that's extremely painful, especially when you,

Steven Pressfield (52:03.700)

well, yes, painful and helpful,

Lex Fridman (52:06.260)

but there's disagreement and so on.

Lex Fridman (52:09.900)

And through that comes out a better product.

Lex Fridman (52:12.300)

And if you want to still have an ego,

Lex Fridman (52:15.660)

but you also want to silence it every once in a while,

Lex Fridman (52:17.940)

so there's a balance.

Steven Pressfield (52:19.860)

In your book, The War of Art,

Lex Fridman (52:21.460)

you talk about resistance, what the capital R,

Steven Pressfield (52:24.700)

as the invisible force in this universe of ours

Lex Fridman (52:27.860)

that finds a way to prevent you from starting

Steven Pressfield (52:32.660)

or doing the work.

Lex Fridman (52:36.660)

Where do you think resistance comes from?

Lex Fridman (52:39.140)

Why is there a force in our mind

Lex Fridman (52:40.860)

that's constantly trying to jeopardize our efforts

Lex Fridman (52:44.060)

with laziness, excuses, and so on?

Lex Fridman (52:46.580)

That's another great question.

Steven Pressfield (52:48.300)

I mean, in Jewish mysticism, in Kabbalistic thinking,

Lex Fridman (52:53.180)

it's called the yetzer hurrah, right?

Lex Fridman (52:55.460)

And it's a force that if this up here is your soul

Lex Fridman (52:59.540)

of Neshama trying to talk to you, us down here,

Steven Pressfield (53:03.100)

the yetzer hurrah is this negative force in the middle.

Lex Fridman (53:06.020)

So I'm not the only one that ever thought about this.

Steven Pressfield (53:08.540)

But, and I don't know if anybody really knows the answer,

Lex Fridman (53:11.540)

but here's my answer.

Steven Pressfield (53:13.940)

I think that there are two places

Lex Fridman (53:18.380)

where we as human beings can see our identity.

Steven Pressfield (53:21.620)

One is the ego, the conscious ego,

Lex Fridman (53:24.900)

and the other is the greater self.

Lex Fridman (53:27.460)

And the self in the Jungian sense,

Lex Fridman (53:30.220)

the self in the Jungian sense includes the unconscious

Lex Fridman (53:33.660)

and butts up against what Jung called the divine ground,

Lex Fridman (53:37.420)

which what I would call the muse, the goddess, or whatever.

Lex Fridman (53:40.580)

And I think, and the ego is just this little dot

Lex Fridman (53:43.380)

inside this bigger self.

Lex Fridman (53:45.460)

And the ego has a completely different view of life

Lex Fridman (53:52.500)

from the self.

Steven Pressfield (53:53.700)

The ego believes, I'm gonna give you a long answer here.

Lex Fridman (53:56.980)

No, perfect.

Steven Pressfield (53:57.940)

The ego believes that death is real.

Lex Fridman (54:01.300)

The ego believes that time and space are real.

Steven Pressfield (54:05.180)

The ego believes that each one of us

Lex Fridman (54:07.940)

is separate from the other.

Steven Pressfield (54:09.820)

I'm separate from you.

Lex Fridman (54:11.220)

If I could punch you in the face and it wouldn't hurt me,

Steven Pressfield (54:14.380)

it would only hurt you.

Lex Fridman (54:16.220)

And in the ego's world, the dominant emotion is fear

Steven Pressfield (54:21.500)

because we were all made of flesh.

Lex Fridman (54:23.460)

We can all die.

Steven Pressfield (54:24.300)

We can all be hurt.

Lex Fridman (54:25.140)

We can all be ruined.

Lex Fridman (54:26.820)

So we are protecting ourselves

Lex Fridman (54:28.420)

and even our desire to create,

Steven Pressfield (54:30.940)

as we were talking about before,

Lex Fridman (54:32.380)

comes out of that fear of death.

Steven Pressfield (54:35.020)

The self, on the other hand,

Lex Fridman (54:37.020)

the greater self that butts up against the divine ground

Steven Pressfield (54:40.020)

believes that death is not real,

Lex Fridman (54:42.500)

that time and space are not real,

Steven Pressfield (54:44.980)

that the gods travel swift as thought.

Lex Fridman (54:48.300)

And the ego also believes that,

Steven Pressfield (54:51.380)

I mean, the self believes that there's no difference

Lex Fridman (54:53.940)

between you and me, that we're all one.

Lex Fridman (54:55.500)

If I hurt you, I hurt myself, karma, right?

Lex Fridman (55:00.100)

And in the world of the self, of the greater self,

Steven Pressfield (55:03.660)

the dominant emotion is love, not fear.

Lex Fridman (55:07.180)

Now, so I think that, I'll go farther back here,

Steven Pressfield (55:11.340)

a long way to answer your question.

Lex Fridman (55:14.220)

When Jesus died on the cross,

Steven Pressfield (55:17.540)

or when the 300 Spartans willingly sacrificed their lives

Lex Fridman (55:22.940)

at Thermopylae, they were acting

Steven Pressfield (55:25.020)

according to the rules of the self.

Lex Fridman (55:28.420)

Death is not real.

Steven Pressfield (55:30.180)

No difference between you and me.

Lex Fridman (55:32.380)

Time and space are not real.

Steven Pressfield (55:33.580)

Predominant emotion is love.

Lex Fridman (55:36.020)

So, in my opinion,

Steven Pressfield (55:39.860)

we as conscious human vessels

Lex Fridman (55:44.500)

are in a struggle between these two things,

Steven Pressfield (55:46.580)

the ego and the self.

Lex Fridman (55:48.180)

To me, resistance is the voice of the ego saying,

Lex Fridman (55:53.700)

and it's a fearful voice,

Lex Fridman (55:55.580)

because if, when we identify with the self,

Steven Pressfield (56:00.500)

we move our consciousness over to the self

Lex Fridman (56:03.060)

as artists or scientists opening ourselves up

Steven Pressfield (56:06.660)

to the cosmic dimension, to the other forces,

Lex Fridman (56:10.940)

the ego is tremendously threatened by that.

Steven Pressfield (56:13.300)

Because if we're in that space, that head space,

Lex Fridman (56:18.260)

we don't need the ego anymore.

Lex Fridman (56:20.460)

So I think resistance is a voice of the ego

Lex Fridman (56:23.940)

trying to keep control of us.

Steven Pressfield (56:27.260)

In a way, I'll give you a bad example, Trump is the ego.

Lex Fridman (56:31.540)

That's probably a very good example, right?

Steven Pressfield (56:33.860)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (56:35.300)

It's a zero sum world for him,

Lex Fridman (56:38.820)

and for anybody that's in that.

Lex Fridman (56:41.340)

And the opposite of that would be somebody

Steven Pressfield (56:43.940)

like Martin Luther King or Gandhi.

Lex Fridman (56:46.460)

Gandhi, yep.

Lex Fridman (56:47.740)

And that's, of course, why they all wind up

Lex Fridman (56:49.380)

getting assassinated.

Steven Pressfield (56:51.260)

Because that voice, that ego, is hanging on to itself

Lex Fridman (56:55.260)

and feels so threatened by,

Steven Pressfield (57:00.060)

I could talk more about this if you want to.

Lex Fridman (57:01.700)

No, for sure, that's fascinating.

Steven Pressfield (57:04.140)

It's just, it's interesting why the fear is attached

Lex Fridman (57:07.940)

to the ego.

Steven Pressfield (57:08.940)

I really like this dichotomy of ego and self

Lex Fridman (57:12.220)

and that struggle.

Steven Pressfield (57:14.060)

It's just, ego has a, the self obsession of it.

Lex Fridman (57:20.500)

Why fear is such a predominant thing?

Lex Fridman (57:25.340)

Why is resistance trying to undermine everything?

Lex Fridman (57:29.460)

It's fear, it's out of fear.

Steven Pressfield (57:32.020)

Let's think about the whole thing in terms of stories.

Lex Fridman (57:34.740)

In a story, the villain is always resistance,

Steven Pressfield (57:41.540)

is always the ego.

Lex Fridman (57:42.940)

The hero is always, of course, always is not everything,

Lex Fridman (57:46.940)

but you know what I mean?

Lex Fridman (57:47.780)

Pretty much represents kind of the self.

Steven Pressfield (57:50.580)

If you think about the alien on the spaceship,

Lex Fridman (57:53.660)

that's like the ultimate kind of villain.

Lex Fridman (57:55.300)

It keeps changing form, right?

Lex Fridman (57:57.220)

First it goes on the guy's face,

Steven Pressfield (57:58.980)

then it pops out of his chest,

Lex Fridman (58:00.820)

but it always just has that one monomaniacal thing

Lex Fridman (58:05.340)

to destroy, you know?

Lex Fridman (58:07.700)

And just like the ego, just like resistance.

Lex Fridman (58:12.580)

And maybe alien is a bad example

Lex Fridman (58:15.540)

because Sigourney Weaver has to sort of fight

Steven Pressfield (58:18.620)

on the same terms as the alien,

Lex Fridman (58:20.820)

but maybe a better example might be

Steven Pressfield (58:23.100)

something like Casablanca,

Lex Fridman (58:24.740)

where in the end, the Humphrey Bogart character

Steven Pressfield (58:28.860)

has to, acting, operating out of the self,

Lex Fridman (58:32.500)

has to give up his selfish dream

Steven Pressfield (58:37.340)

of going off with Ingrid Bergman,

Lex Fridman (58:39.500)

Neil Salon, the love of his life,

Lex Fridman (58:41.460)

and instead, you know, puts her on the plane to Lisbon

Lex Fridman (58:46.260)

while he goes off to fight the Nazis in the desert.

Steven Pressfield (58:50.420)

I don't know if that's clear,

Lex Fridman (58:51.260)

but in almost every story,

Steven Pressfield (58:54.820)

the villain is the ego, is resistance, is fear,

Lex Fridman (58:59.420)

is that zero sum thing.

Lex Fridman (59:01.780)

And in almost every story,

Lex Fridman (59:03.340)

the hero is someone that is willing to make a sacrifice

Steven Pressfield (59:09.340)

to help others.

Lex Fridman (59:11.540)

It's letting go of that fear

Steven Pressfield (59:13.620)

is what leads to productivity and to success.

Lex Fridman (59:15.900)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (59:18.780)

Do you think there's a,

Lex Fridman (59:20.420)

this is probably the answer is either obvious or impossible,

Lex Fridman (59:25.900)

but do you think there's an evolutionary advantage

Lex Fridman (59:28.740)

to resistance?

Lex Fridman (59:31.420)

Like, what would life look like without resistance?

Lex Fridman (59:36.740)

That's another great question.

Steven Pressfield (59:38.420)

I think, I also believe that resistance, like death,

Lex Fridman (59:43.220)

gives meaning to life.

Steven Pressfield (59:44.780)

If we didn't have it, it's gonna be, you know,

Lex Fridman (59:48.580)

what would we be?

Steven Pressfield (59:49.460)

We'd be in the Garden of Eden,

Lex Fridman (59:51.060)

picking fruit and just happy and stupid, you know?

Lex Fridman (59:56.660)

And I do think that that myth of the Garden of Eden

Lex Fridman (59:58.860)

is really about this kind of thing, you know,