Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - The Ancient Secret to Finally Breaking Free From Your Past - Steven Pressfield

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Back for a second time on Open Books is a living legend: Steven Pressfield!!! He's spent his entire career writing about warriors, and what he told me in this conversation stopped me cold: the only way out of the cycle is through the pain, not around it. This is one of the great writers of our generation, and trust me, you do not want to miss this one. Steven Pressfield is the author of the best-selling novels Gates of Fire and Tides of War, as well as The Legend of Bagger Vance. He is also the author of the classics on creativity, The War of Art and Turning Pro. Get a copy of his brilliant new book, The Arcadian: A Novel. Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. Pre-order my next book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, out on the 17th of September in the UK and the 22nd of September in the US: ⁠https://www.scaramucci.net/allthewrongmoves Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IG Private Wealth.com.

The Madamy Holmes bike for brain health supporting Baycrest returns on May 31st for its fifth anniversary with a new start and finish at the Aga Khan Museum. Join thousands of cyclists as we take over the DVP and Gardner Expressway in support of dementia research and brain health.

Riders of all abilities are welcome and both regular bikes and e-bikes can participate. Bring your friends, family, or corporate team and make an impact. Register today at bikeforbrainhealth.ca. Even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our own despite against our will comes wisdom by the awful grace of God. Through pain, endless pain, comes eventually wisdom. And that's what

releases him in the end. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci, back by popular demand with a brand new novel, award-winning author Stephen Pressfield. The title of the book is The Arcadian. Wow. I mean, what an impressive thing. I mean, it was a very quick read for me, by the way. It's great to have you back on the show. We've spoken about all your other great books. I'm going to get back to some of them as well, because I hand out your books to people. But let's go to the Arcadian. What motivated you to write this? And it's obviously very timely, given everything that's going on in the world right now. And so tell us about the idea and the manifestation. I have a recurring character.

as you know, who is the Arcadian. He is the one-man killing machine of the ancient world, Telemann of Arcadia. And he's sort of a bit of an alter ego for me. And he's been in three other books. Two as a minor character, one called A Man at Arms, where he was full book was all about him. And this is, he is a character that's been doomed

for crimes he committed in the deep past to live lifetime after lifetime always as a soldier. So he kills and he is killed and comes back again again. And this, the Arcadian, is the lifetime where he hopes he will finally escape this kind of wheel of damnation. So that was, you know, a fruition that I really wanted to bring him to. Although, I tell you, I just finished another follow-up of this. a prequel. So in any of that, he's kind of my James Reese character, if you'll forgive that. Listen, I love the character. I want to ask you that, do you believe in reincarnation?

Absolutely, I do. I mean, I hope it's true. You know, when I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to be saying, I hope I get to come back. Okay, so, so what do you think happens? Do you believe in it in the Hindu sense, where you evolve and you move into different eras or are you stuck in the matrix somewhere stephen or how does it how does it work i mean of course i'm just guessing like anybody else but of course we'll say this i mean you have kids so you know that when your children are born they come into this world already with a definite personality right one kid is different from the other complete operating system yeah so you have to ask yourself and it's the same like for kittens or puppies right there they so Where do this come from?

You know, why aren't we all blank slaves? And certainly if you introspect into your own self, you have to say, I must put here for some kind of a reason, right? There are many places I don't fit. There's maybe one place I do fit. I have a calling. There's something where when I get on that track, I feel a wind behind me, right, a following wind. So beyond that, I have no idea. I'm just guessing whether how we do it.

But I do believe there are other lives. Well, the first time I met Telemann was I was a younger man. I was about 36 years old when I read the tides of war. And I see him very differently today than I did. I'm 62 today. So that was 26 years ago. Today is your birthday? No, no, no, no.

Meaning I turned 62 in January. You're in your 62 years. Yeah, I'm a Capricorn for all of those are sitting at home. but he doesn't age. And but yet I feel like he's grown up in this book. There's something about him that's different in this book than in the prior two books. So tell me what is different in your mind. This is really the first book where he's been aware of his situation, you know, where he realizes,

oh, I'm I'm on this wheel of damnation. And I want to get off of it, you know, where he starts having flashbacks to the way the book kind of starts or they kind of be the inciting incident, even though it happens about 40 pages into the book, is a horse is appears following him. He's serving as a mercenary in 15th century, Italy, actually. and he recognizes the horse as his horse from 1,500 years ago when he served as a Roman legionary in the Holy Land. And so he's different now because he goes, holy mackerel, what's going on here? Where did this animal come from? How could this possibly be? Why is it here?

Maybe this beast is here to lead me out of this wheel of damnation. So he is a more mature character. Actually, the other book that I'm working on that just fits. finished, Anthony, is like a prequel. Back to sort of the young Delamon, where you kind of see his attitude, his philosophy, how it formed, which that was fun. Well, I mean, there's another thing going on here, and I have to ask you this question, you know, why the Iberian Peninsula in the 1500s? And let me just, I'm going to surmise something and then

ask you to finish the sentence. You've got Christians, Muslims, and Jews are all colliding on the Iberian Peninsula. So this has happened before. We seem to have it happening right now in our own contemporary history. Is that why you chose this period of time? Or what was the reason? No, actually.

I chose it for two reasons. One is that it's at the discovery of the new world has just happened like 15 years earlier. And as you know, that plays a part in the story, right? But the other reason is that During the Roman Empire, Spain was a province of the empire. It was called Hispanias Sateria near Spain. And the legions recruited, specifically the 10th Legion, Caesar's Legion,

recruited from Spain. And this was the Legion that, when Teleman was a part of it, that he committed his great crime that he's being punished for. So by some, you know, by the wheel of whatever it is, he is being brought back to the place where he enlisted 1,500 years earlier. So that's why in Spain. But beyond that, Anthony, sometimes things just strike you, right? As a writer, I don't even know why, you know, it took me a while to even figure out why. You caught it beautifully.

So my follow-up question, though, is this is really a meditation. from violence. This is really, you're trying to get somebody to release the curse that he's under where he's fighting as a Spartan, a Macedonian. You know, we've been fighting. And by the way, we, United States, has been fighting for a generation Stephen Presfield. We've been on the battlefield. The U.S. is now in an active conflict with Iran. We've had ethnic conflicts all over the place, starting with the Gulf War I in 1990. So does this? this cycle of your novel also fit our times? Are we trying to also get a metaphorical release from the generational warfare that we're under? You know, you may be exactly right. And if you are,

I wasn't aware of it. So it may sometimes that happens, right? What the other underlying theme of this story is, given the fact that he is kind of under this curse, is kind of the question, is there justice, karma built into the universe, above and beyond courts of law or anything like that. Do we have to pay for, you know, whatever we've done over a lifetime, over lifetime, or whatever?

Do we? Is there? I like to, I think in the Catholic Church, you have to kind of say there is. And I certainly believe that there is. Like, hopefully the arc of justice, Ben Stor's justice, right? Are you Catholic?

I'm not a Jewish. Jewish. Okay. So, yeah, I'm raised Catholic, so we definitely believe that. But you know what? I grew up in your neighborhood. Right. I'm from Long Island and Westchester County.

I grew up in your... I grew up in you. I've been to more bar mitzvahs than baptisms. I've been... I was envious of all the Catholic kids in class because they got Friday afternoon off to go to religious instruction, you know? I see that. It was a Wednesday for us out on Long Island.

Okay, so let's go to Eastern thought. Because one of the things that maybe we both believe, if I could be, have a presupposition here, is that maybe the cycle does end when the lesson is learned as you're surmising in the book. And so what was it about the Arcadian? What was it about Telemann? And finally, he's being asked to learn something that he couldn't learn in Thermopy. He couldn't learn in my pronouncing right, Haydispas? How do you say it?

Oh, Hadaspi, is the river in India, you know, where Alexander finally stopped, yeah. Right. So he can't, he doesn't learn it there. He doesn't learn it on the road to Corinth. So how, what, what is the breakthrough? What is the breakthrough? Is it self-awareness, even?

There's a moment when he says, early con in the book, um, he sort of drafted into the, the latest war that's going on, but he deserts. And when he comes back, and the priest, who's his friend, they ask him, you know, why did you do it? He says, I will never harm another human being again.

So he comes to that. He just unilaterally decides, I'm not going to be the soldier anymore. Whatever, whatever the universe wants to do to me, I'm not going to harm another human being again. So that is a lesson learned. Yeah, it's a lesson learned for him, but it's not a lesson learned for mankind because we just seem to always have not yet. Not yet, exactly.

So that's my question. Is this, can violence ever truly end? Or does it simply change form? Well, it certainly has not even had a glimmer of ending in real life history. But I do believe that over the law, this is really getting mystical. But over the long haul, and it may take another 50,000 years, the human race has got to get to that place. Like, what is that quote? You probably know this.

I don't know exactly to make gentle the savage heart of man. But that, I think, is the end, if we're ever going to get to it, of salvation for the human race. Thank you for tuning in an open book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. Well, I mean, and that's, you know, that's what these say about civilizations.

They say that civilization started zero, and zero is where the civilizations evolved and has sentience, but it also has violence. And so the question is, how long do you need to go through evolution before you realize that the violence is not the answer? and if anything, you know, we can evolve. You know, the phrase is actually associated with Robert Kennedy, and he quoted it in an extemporaneous speech in Indianapolis on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

So it was April 4th, 1968. He was beside himself. And it's actually paraphrased from Escalis, the great Greek tragedian. I know the phrase you're talking about. He's continued. Yeah, but the quote is, to tame the savageness of man

and make gentle the life of this world. Ah. He used the version of it again, and it was carved into his grave at Arlington. So if you visit the grave at Arlington, you'll see it there. But this comes from Escalis' play Agamemnon. If you remember what happens to Agamemnon,

it doesn't end well for him. No, it doesn't. He killed his daughter, Ephogenia. And when he comes back, Clytemestra kills him. She conspires with her son. She more or less tricks her son into helping her kill Agnamenmon. But this is the Greek tragedy, right? This is the sins of the father.

Yeah. Ask to the son, right? In the house of Atreus, you have these sins. And it's an appropriate thing for the candidate. because a lot of people feel like Joe Kennedy's sins pass through them. But the sin is a human sin. And where I'm going to in this is this is a mystical book. It's different from your other books because you're now forcing the viewer or the listener or the reader to get a little mystical with you.

And to think about things in the context of beyond. the temporal. And so was that by design, Stephen, or was that also accident? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That was the whole point. Yeah. Tell us why now. I'd feel that if you have a character that is damned by some force, you have to ask yourself, when can he be released? When does he, has he served his time? And then the question is, what force is enacting this justice? Is it God? Is it something built into the fiber of the universe? And I don't have the answers to this, but I love to explore stuff like that.

So I really want, I want the reader to buy into the fact that it is possible to be cursed to live lifetime after lifetime and that you're, you're trying to learn a lesson and trying to free yourself. And so I do want to take a reader on that journey and hopefully kind of make it pay. painless, you know, not hammer somebody right over the head at the start, but ease you into it. It's a beautiful story, but it's also a story of resistance. And so the war of art, which I think is one of your great books. If someone said to me, I need to be mentored. My first move is, here is the war of art, read this, and then come back and see me. Because what is it? It's about dealing with resistance, right? It's about the fight. Ultimately, Stephen, you and I both know that the struggle starts right here behind our eyes and in between our ears, the struggle with ourselves.

Isn't that right, sir? Absolutely. Okay, so, so, so when I read about Telemann and I think about the war of art, I feel like that's the resistance. And then how do you finally get past the resistance? Tell us what the, what the breakthrough is. I think in one way what we're talking about here is the ego and the soul, right? The material, our existence on a material plane and our existence on a higher plane. And we were talking about violence. Violence is a product of the ego, right? You know, talking about certain people that we know, but the ego leads us to violence.

Right. The only real cure in the end for each of us as an individual and for the human race as a whole is to move however we do it to the level of the soul. On the level of the soul, there's only one emotion and that emotion is love. But can we get there? We're mired in this body and this material ego, right, that has to defend itself and stand up for its position and gets, et cetera. etc. So that's really Telemans' Odyssey through this story. I'm tempted to talk

about that Bobby Kennedy speech that day, which I thought was fantastic and there's no such this is the other thing that he said from Agamemnon. Forgive me this doesn't really have to do with it. No, it's important. I want to hear it. I mean he says, and even

in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until against our own despite against our will comes wisdom by the awful grace of God, which in a way is when the Greeks knew what they were talking about, right? I mean, is there anybody doing anything like that today? But that's sort of Telemons passage.

Through pain, endless pain, comes eventually wisdom. And that's what releases him in the end. So God bless Bobby Kennedy for number one for knowing that and then for being able to say it at that horrible moment after the assassination of Juan Luther King. Well, I mean, the thing about all of this for me, you know, when I was in school, I was a classics minor. And so I didn't read the Greek versions of this, but I read all of Escalis, Sophocles, Euripides. and in the lessons of reading that is you better learn quickly in life how to deal with tragedy because your life is going to be filled with loss, right, Stephen? The 35-year-old version of Stephen Pressfield is no longer with us,

nor is the 35-year-old version of Anthony Scaramucci. Long gone, Stephen. And so we have to deal with loss up until the final day where we lose ourselves. And I think the lessons there is can you deal with it? and still be at peace. Isn't that fair to say, sir? I would say absolutely. And that's again, like what,

the only way you can deal with that is on the level of the soul, not on the level of the ego, right? Because the ego is going to lose, you know, we're all going to eventually, like you say, we lose this body and we lose this life. And God bless Tufts for teaching you that, well, that's where the faith comes in. That's where the faith comes in, right?

You know, you know, gates of fire, I mentioned to you last time we were together, one of my old boss is John Hurdle, U.S. Marine. He gave me the book. And then I learned from some of my friends at West Point that it's on the reading list for both all the people at West Point, but also the Joint Chiefs. American service members have used your book as more of a moral vocabulary for over two decades. And I think you know that it should make you very proud of that. Let's talk about the Arcadian.

How does it fit in? what do you want readers of the Arcadian, the ones that are still in the fight, still fighting, Stephen? What do you want them to take from the book about laying down the sword? I think that the process is an evolution, a hero's journey,

that starts with violence and ends with love, which really was kind of what the Spartan ethic was about, that thermopoly, you know, the sort of the theme of that story was the opposite of fear is love, right? And so that is the journey, I think, that Telemont is on, and all people in this book are on, of getting from the easy answer, which is violence, to the really hard answer, which is quite a Christian answer, really. And this is really a Christian book of forgiveness and of love, and self-forgiveness. I think that's the letters that Paul wrote about love of all things.

The most important is love. And to truly love, you have to accept the human frailty and you have to accept human weakness. And you can't be overly righteous about it. And not only that, with others, we're also with yourself, with yourself, right? You've got to forgive yourself. I mean, but, but, but, but, Stephen, the, uh, the work is heaven. influenced by your philosophical view of life. And so tell us a little bit about your, not only your writings, but your readings. What are you reading? You know, because Ryan

Halliday, I listened to your interview with him on his podcast. I love Ryan, who's our new stoic, if you will. What are you reading? And what are the words of other authors that have influenced you the most? Well, I'll tell you what I'm reading right now. I'll have to reach here. I don't know. Have you ever heard of this book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds by Rudolf Steiner? No. It's really very telemonian in a way. It's about the occult, which is really just mystical, the same things Christianity, Judaism, all the great religions have of how do we reach that? In other words, I'm not really reading novels right now. I'm more interested in that sort of soul passage to whatever the higher dimensions are.

And Rudolph Steiner was kind of a serious guy, not kind of a crazy theosophist or anything like that. And I recommend that book. All right. Well, you know, it's going to bump to the top of my reel-ins. Okay, so you've done this podcast before. And so what we do is we have five words that we end the book. podcast with. And so I need you to give me a few sentences on each of these words. Okay. You're ready? Okay. Okay. If I say the word warrior, what comes to mind? A series of virtues,

above and beyond war fighting that are also shared with a mother or an artist or anything that. And the virtues are, among others, courage, patience, selflessness. the willing embrace of adversity and love of our brothers and sisters and love even of the enemy. And particularly as it applies to mothers, mothers embody those things you would think would be the opposite of a warrior, but it's the same. Sorry, I got a little wordy on that one. No, not at all, but I hear the word mercy in there as well, though. Yes.

Yes. Okay. I don't see too much of floating around in our policy these days. Right. What about heroism? Ah, that's a great one. The journey we're all on is a hero's journey.

And when we stop becoming just passive victims of our life and actually take our life into our own hands, then we stop being a character in a story and we become the hero of the story. And we all, I think, have to do that. That's Telemans Odyssey for sure.

What about the word love, Stephen? Love is the essence of the universe, I believe. And I certainly believe that when we pass beyond this life, if there is another dimension, that that's what it is made of entirely. And if we can live our lives in this material world, according to the rules of that world, then we've really become enlightened. individuals. Hard to do, right? Yes, really hard to do. Who can do it? Why is it so hard to do? Because we're in this body, you know? The ego. It's the ego, no. We're in the material world.

I mean, there's so few people that have done it, you know. Jesus, or I've always thought of the 300 Spartans as kind of the thermopy as the collective version of Jesus in the sense that they knew they were going to die, just like he did, for the greater good, and they accepted it, and they went to their deaths that way, as a group. It's amazing. It's amazing. All right. What about war, sir? War is the nature, in my opinion, the nature of life on the material plane. That inside our own heads, we talked about, you and I talked about the war or aren't, right? We fight a war against ourselves, our own baser nature. And

just as Telemann is a warrior in this material world and finds his way out of it by setting down the sword, I think we all, that's you know, what Robert Kennedy said to make gentle the life of this world. Okay, the last word. I'm going to give you the last word.

The last word is the Arcadian. Uh-huh. Isn't there a little bit of the Arcadian and all of us, Stephen Presfield. Yeah, definitely. I mean, hopefully it's universal. In ancient Greece, Arcadia, it's a province of Greece. It was famous for its mercenaries, soldiers that fought for money,

as opposed to Spartans and Athenians and Argyves and so on and so forth. And Telemont is one who fights for money. In other words, he's just, he's a soldier who fights for the fighting alone and has accepted the Odyssey of a Soldier as the Odyssey. of his life. That's why it's called the Arcadian. It's another amazing story. I'm looking forward to the prequel.

The title of the book is the Arcadian and novel. It's by the legendary Stephen Pressfield. And you got a couple of my friends on the back of the book, too, including David McCloskey, who is one of my podcast buddies. But I got to tell you, sir, it's a phenomenal book. And it's always a pleasure to have you on. I got to have you back for the war of art, if you don't. mind, okay? We're going to book you again if you don't mind. I want people to hear.

I love being on the show with you. You're a hero of mine. I love to watch you on my algorithm, whenever you pop up, which is all the time. Thank you very much. It's great to hang out with you. I'm not too shameful of a person. You know, I have no shame, Stephen. So please please press the heart button when you see me pop up. I need the like button. I do that all the time. All right. Well, I'm grateful to you, sir. Thank you very much. I'm grateful to you. Thanks for having me, Anthony.