Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - You’ll Never Find Peace Until You Fight This Battle - Steven Pressfield

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

Steven Pressfield is the author of The War of Art, which has sold millions of copies globally and been translated into multiple languages. He is a master of historical fiction with Gates of Fire being on the required reading list at West Point and the recommended reading list of the Joint Chiefs. His other books include A Man at Arms, Turning Pro, Do the Work, The Artist's Journey, Tides of War, The Legend of Bagger Vance, Last of the Amazons, Virtues of War, The Afghan Campaign, Killing Rommel, The Profession, The Lion's Gate, The Warrior Ethos, The Authentic Swing, An American Jew, Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t, and The Knowledge. Get a copy of Steven's phenomenal books: The War of Art Gates of Fire Turning Pro The Legend of Baggar Vance The Warrior Ethos The Daily Pressfield Govt Cheese: A Memoir 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. He is the host of the podcast Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci. A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, he lives in Manhasset, Long Island. 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://linktr.ee/anthonyscaramucci Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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shalt thou eat thy bread in the sweat of thy face. It's the nature of life, I think, to confront obstacles, which is what every story is about the hero encountering obstacles. And that it is the nature of life. It's why adversity, as you've said many times, is a transformative. We hate it for mistakes in our life that produce adversity. Resistance again, like war, is the nature of life, unfortunately. You know this as an author.

I've experiences as an entrepreneur. You've got to go through the Shawshank Redemption sometimes. It just sucks, but it is what it is. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is a legend, Stephen Pressfield. He's a world-renowned author. He's the author of War of Art, Gates of Fire,

The Legend of Bagger Vance. And since I read the Bhagavita, I got that one, by the way. Turning Pro, among many others. but listen, I've been a fan of yours for almost 30 years, Stephen. It's truly an honor to have you on the show. Just for people, your background, you're born in Trinidad, raised in a military household, went to Duke University, and then the U.S. Marine Corps.

Of course, that's not a straight line path, but to becoming one of the legendary writers of all time. But take us back, and how did you get so excited about writing? I well first of all Anthony it's really a pleasure to be on here with you you know I'm a big I've been a fan of years for as long as you've been out there and so God bless you for everything you're doing um I think uh you know my first job was in New York probably not very far from where you are right now as in advertising and I had a boss who wrote a novel and it became a hit overnight and he quit left the job you know we'll have to become a writer and I thought well hell why don't I do that so 30 years later, I finally got published. That's how it started. I never dreamed about it as a kid. Well, you've written candidly about all of this and about how long it took you to get that first paycheck as a writer.

I was listening to one of your interviews. He said 17 years. And you talked about all these different jobs. But I'm curious, looking back now, how necessary were those what I guess Winston Churchill would call the wilderness years? in terms of fortifying your writing capability. I think they were absolutely necessary for me. I grew up on Long Island and then in Westchester County in a kind of leave it to beaver type of family.

And I think that I was much too sheltered in terms of being able to know, you know, anything about how the world worked or how my own head worked. So I really did need those kind of wilderness years. Absolutely, you know, the hero's journey type of thing. What impresses me about your writing is it's historical fiction, but there's a lot of truth in what's going on. And also, the human emotion is so real. So where are we getting that from? You know, you describe leaving Paris Island as an example. At least no one could ever send me back here again. And then years later, when you were working as a soldier, I feel like that helped you in gates of fire. Tell us about, some of the things in your background that help to frame the vivid writing.

You possess such an amazing skill for capturing the moment with your fictional character. I think it's a great question, but I think it's not, I don't know if it's true of any other writers or other writers as well, that I'm not sure you draw directly from your experience at all. I think the sort of breaking yourself down type of thing that happens to you when you go from, you know, one bad job to another one to another one, does put you in touch with, you know, I'm a believer of the goddess or the muse in that inspiration coming from some other place. And I do think it's sort of, it helps you to be, to trust your own imagination and to sort of let go. the reins and let stuff come to you, you know. A lot of times I really don't feel like I'm responsible for what's on the page at all. I feel like I'm just sort of letting it come through and letting it come out. No, you know, it's interesting because Dan Brown just wrote a book. I think I had it here called The Secret of Secrets. He says that our consciousness may, may not be

in between our ears and behind our eyes. We may be drawing it. from the universe. Is that more? I've certainly heard that too, and I believe that. I think when they finally figure out what the human brain is about, it's more about shrinking things down to a level that we can handle than it is about being the center of consciousness. I don't believe that the center of consciousness is our brain.

I don't base that on anything, Anthony. I really don't know. But it does feel like we're receptors at the center of a much larger field. And that, you know, we're trying to tune our radio to the cosmic radio station if we're artists of any kind or anybody that depends on creating a world of one kind or another, whether it's dance or music or writing or whatever. Yeah, it's a good segue into the war of art because, you know, in that we're fighting ourselves, right? We're fighting our inner enemy. Tell us about the inner enemy. Tell us about some of our embedded survivors' instinct for cynicism and negativity that the artist has to overcome to really shape their identity, shape their dreams, etc.

Well, I think one of the things, if you're a writer at all or any other thing, when you sit down in front of one of these things, you can feel a force, a negative force radiating off that. resisting you, right? It's going to make you say, well, maybe not today. Let's do this tomorrow. Let's go to the beach. Let's, you know, whatever. Distracting ourselves. And that force, that negative force that I call resistance with a capital R because it resists us is like the first thing, I think, that any kind of creative person has to overcome. Forget about any story you want to tell, any music you want to write, if you can't overcome that force of self-sabotage, you're not going to get anywhere at all. So the war of art, that book of mine, is really about the war between your ears, you know? And in fact, let me ask you, do you experience this to yourself in your work,

and your podcasting and your stuff that you do? Do you feel that negative force of resistance? Well, I would say not only do I experience that, I think it's, ancestral. I think my whole family has experienced. You have to remember, I come from a family of rural farmers, coal miners. These are people that were working in low-level day jobs in Italy. They got themselves the United States to become coal miners or masons. And so I think that there's always that level of can't-doism that you have to hit this override switch of can-doism and you have to build a consistent habit. I could very easily, Stephen, be a cash potato.

Let's put it that way. Couldn't we all? Or could very easily take it on less ambitious enterprises. But I think what I got out of that book, The War of Art, was that everybody feels that way. I think it was a comforting book, by the way. I think it was therapeutic. You know, I have two children that are in the arts.

One is a performance singer and actress. She's been on tour with Andre Abocelli. She played Christine in Fants with the Opera. My son is a 26-year-old aspiring film director, and both of them have been plagued with the self-doubt, the self-talk going in the wrong direction. And I gave them copies of your book. I think what happens when you read your book, you find comfort.

There's a loneliness to being an artist. There's a loneliness to being an entrepreneur. and a creative. And I think what you share in the book is that there is a journey, as you say. There's a hero. We're going to get to back or Vance at a second, but there's a hero's journey in all of us. And if we follow the signs and follow the calling, it's going to be a much more interesting life. You know, and we won't have a lot of regrets, even if we've made a lot of mistakes. Why would I follow you? I could relate so much to your story that you, you know, of your life and everything like that.

A lot of mistakes, Stephen, but you know, and somebody asked me this morning, why you made two very big mistakes. How do you live with it? I said, well, you left out the 98 things that I got right. I mean, I mean, we're going to make a lot of mistakes, you know. But how is your view of humans, you know, how they confront or avoid resistance? How has that changed over the years from your perspective? How do you think it will continue to evolve? I'm not sure about other people. I can only. talk about myself, you know. But one thing I can say, when I originally wrote the War of Art and they kind of put out the idea of resistance as an internal battle, I thought like, I'm the only one who's experiencing this. Or maybe it's only writers. And to my amazement, of course, it was just across the field, you know, comedians, dancers, photographers, and particularly entrepreneurs, because they're, you know, as you know, you're alone in a room trying to figure out how are you going to sell something or make something. But for myself, resistance hasn't changed at all in like 50 years. You know, it still hits me first thing in the morning. It's still

something I have to overcome from the minute I open my eyes. And the only change really is it's gotten a little more diabolical and a little more nuanced in terms of faking me out, you know, but it never goes away. You have to slay the dragon every morning. I'm sure you would agree with that. No, no question. Listen, there's a snooze button in all of us. I mean that metaphorically, right? We're just going to hit the snooze button, worry about it tomorrow. But, you know, there's a, you know, I don't know.

When I step back and I look at all of the things that I've read from you, there's something in there about the ancient battlefield, and there's something in there about the modern inner struggles. and there's a warrior code in there, you know, that you possess. And so, again, let's make it specific to you. Tell us about the warrior code. And if you had it distill it, what is it? Well, first I would say that, I mean, a bunch of my fiction stuff is about actual war,

particularly in the ancient world. But then the war of art, which is really about the war between your ears. So I definitely see life as a battle, life as a war. We wake up in the morning and there's an enemy right across from us. And it never lets us go. And the virtues of a warrior, I think, are the same virtues of an artist or an entrepreneur or anybody that's on their own. You know, patience, courage, the willing embrace of adversity, love of one's brothers, love of the enemy. All of those things are the same.

whether you're a warrior fighting with a sword or somebody that's trying to make an album or make a movie or sing like your daughter, you know. It's a doggy dog struggle inside our heads, you know, day after day. That's just the way it is. That's life, I think. Marcus Aurelius said, I know you're a fan of him, you know, he said life is warfare and a journey far from home. and I couldn't agree more. And also, you know, the Joseph Campbell stories about the trials and tribulations of being the hero.

And what comes with being the hero is the setback show and how you deal with it. I want to go to the legend of bagger Vance because, and I want you to tell me about the baga, if I'm pronouncing it right, you know. I read it. I read it a long time ago. One of my professors at Tufts gave it to me, told me, needed to read it. And so I read it.

And then the legend of Bagger Vance came out. I was like, oh, my God, this is so clever. So tell me about your first reading of the historical Hindu text. And tell me your idea about converting it into a golf story. And I want to learn about Robert Redford, too, before this is over. But go ahead. Let's start with those two things first. Well, Bhagabad Gidid is the story of the great warrior Arjuna.

and the eve of a battle and his charioteer is Krishna. In other words, God in human form. And the whole story of the Bhagavadid is kind of a mentor-protege story where Arjuna's charioteer kind of gives him spiritual instruction throughout the course of the story. And he talks about such things as duality, and non-duality, karma, yoga, previous lives, et cetera, et cetera.

In other words, really getting right down to the most primal level of stuff like that. So as I'm reading that, if you're a writer, you're always looking for stories you can rip off, right? You're always looking for structures that you can steal from. And so when I thought, what really appealed to me about Bhagavad Gita and that whole story was that God, i.e. Krishna, appears to us and to Arjuna as a. servant, right? He's the charioteer. He's working for Arjuna, which is much like the Christ story, right? It's a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and so on and so forth. So I thought, having grown up in a little bit of a golfing environment, I thought, why not tell a story about

a great golf champion and his caddy is God or is, you know, another servant, right? The guy who carries his back. So that's, so that was how I sort of figured. Let me just steal the structure and I'll flip it over into a different story. And by the way, when I had this idea, Anthony, I thought, this is the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life. It's completely uncommercial. Who's going to care about this? But I was just seized by it and just had to do it. Look, I'm not a golfer, but I love the book and I love the movie because of the trials and tribulations.

So when they call you up and they tell you they want to make a movie of the book, what say you? Well, the first thing, that first phone call I got was me getting fired. And this was by Robert Redford's producing partner, Jake Ebert. It's a wonderful guy who did Gandhi Charity of Fire. And after he fired me, because Robert Redford wanted to make the movie himself, wanted his movie, not me. I had to thank Jake because it was the first time I'd ever been fired, where they actually told me I was fired.

And I didn't have to read about it at a paper. you know, a few days later. So, but... So they wore passive-aggressive. No, not at all. But did you like the movie? Did you like the interpretation? No, I didn't.

No, I didn't. The book in the movie? Yeah, most authors don't, by the way, so I'm not surprised by that. I think once you cash the check, you're not entitled to bitch about it. So I won't say anything. I was very happy that they made the movie and grateful to everybody that did it. I, you know, like every other writer, I think, I wish it had been a little bit different. Yeah, listen, I respect.

that the only person that I have found that like the movie adaptation was Mario Puzzo, primarily because he wrote the screenplay and he was so involved in the movie. Well, that was a great book. Right. So do you find that writing about a slower sport like golf versus war required more patience? No, not. I mean, writing is its whole other world, you know? It always requires patience, and it also requires kind of a,

a letting go of your own expectations and kind of plunging in and just sort of letting it rip, you know? But no, so the slowness of it didn't make any, it really is a war story. You know, that's, you know, it doesn't seem like it, but it is. When you talk about ego and you talk about controlling ego, which is true in sports, war, professional development, and people, when you're out there speaking, sir, people say, okay, Stephen, what have you learned in your life about ego and eubris? And how would you educate me or coach me?

Well, first of all, I have heard you talk about this a lot. And it always rings a bell. I'm really, you know, really proud of you that you can speak about it so candidly and honestly. But certainly from the artist's point of view, when you're sitting down trying to write something, whether it's music or whatever, you've got to get rid of the ego because nothing good comes out of the ego. you know, it just has to go away completely. That's in many ways. Not to interrupt you, sir, bro, why, and I agree with you, by the way, and I talk about

this all the time, but why does nothing good come out of the end? Tell us. You know, it's sort of, it's kind of a mystery, you know. If you think about Beethoven, da, da, da, da, da, there's no way he sits down and goes, oh, that's what I'm going to do. That has to come to him from somewhere, right? He hears it in some mysterious way. And the more he would try to do that with the ego, right, I'm going to write a great freaking symphony, the harder it gets.

I saw an interview with Bob Dylan, and he was talking about what, I forget what the lyrics were, Masters of War, something like that. But he kind of rattled him off. And there are these fantastic lyrics. And he says, there's no way you can write that. That just has to, you just have to hear that. And so even he was impressed with the stuff that he put down. So the ego has to go away. In fact, I would say that's the real artist skill that takes so many years to develop,

which is sort of similar to the skill of a monk that's meditating or something, of making the ego go away. Easier said than done, really hard. Okay, it's a follow-up question. So when the ego doesn't go away, problems present. themselves. So, I mean, and the Greeks have told us this for thousands of years. So give us some of the litany of problems that happen for people where the ego is

centric as opposed to remove. Well, look at politics, at the world that you know a lot about. I mean, that is kind of the supreme example of ego maniacs. You know, it almost seems like in order to succeed at politics, you have to be completely in your ego. which is like the worst place you could possibly be in terms of making decisions or anything like that. So that when you get of somebody like Lincoln or Churchill, that they have transcended that, you know, that orientation, whatever it is. Yeah, I don't know how we could ever have politics and have it work because it seems to be you have to have this massive,

to get into it. And once you're there, you know, the, the goddess is not talking to you anymore. And some of these people are wounded, you know, and they're trying to cleanse themselves or they're looking for some type of adoration from society that they don't feel inward. And that's, that's also contributing to the problems of all of it, Stephen. I want to go to some great leaders that you write about, Alexander Leonidas or Leonidas. But they're interesting because they're phenomenal leaders, but they also walk dangerously close to Eubris. And so where is the line between greatness and service of something higher and then greatness that collapses under the weight of your ego? Well, that's a hell of my question.

But certainly, I wrote a book called The Virtues of War that was sort of about Alexander the Great and told in the first person by him, which was, an experience to do that. But, you know, the Greeks had this concept. I know you know this of the daemon, D-A-I-M-O-N, that the same concept in Latin was the word genius, right? And Alexander, I think, in my projection of who he was, really felt that he was like two people, that he was possessed by this daemon that was greater than he was,

you know, that was capable of saying, I'm going to conquer the world and able to do it. But he was also afraid that this Damon was kind of like a wild horse that you couldn't necessarily ride, that was always on the brink of like running away with him. And he felt that his Damon was smarter than he was, was braver than he was, but that also had a quality of monstrousness to it.

and that that there was no check on his daemon. And I think that happens to a lot of people that dare incredibly, you know, great things. I'm sure you know a bunch of them in the political world. Now, he at least had it balanced since his tutor was Aristotle. And so he sort of grew up with a certain schooling and rationality. and self-awareness and stuff like that that could help balance. But even in the end, towards the end of his life, he was loosing it. He used to stay up all night sacrificing to the God fear.

Now, try to imagine what that must have meant, you know. So, but I believe that the concept of the daemon has a lot to do. You know, it's the word demon, right? It's in us. You know, this is the other thing about the greatness of your books, You know, like if you read Herman Hessa, the German writer, and he writes about Damien, he talks about the Subraxis, right? There's a there's a ying and a yang in us. There's good parts of us, and there's bad parts of us, and we're fighting with both.

And, of course, we try to go in denial, Stephen, and pretend that the bad part of us doesn't exist, you know. That's for other people. They have the bad parts. That human nature isn't for us. But down deep, we know a part of the disaster. And the weird part is that the Damon is both. You know, it's not, you know, the good part is on one shoulder, the angels on one shoulder, the devil's on the other. It's kind of the demon is also the source of creativity.

So you really are a dance with the devil. And this is true of artists as well. They're messing with this same force that they can't control and that they know is greater than they are that they have to tap into and they have to surrender to, but that they know they're never going to be able to control. and it can run away with them. It's so fascinating. Of course, Hessa's book, Damien, which is about the Damon,

is an explicit rendition of this. I got to take my hat off to you, too, Anthony, as being such a great reader. Every time I see you on Instagram or something, I'm ashamed of myself because I haven't read, you know, 99% of the books you've read, and I feel like, oh, man, I've got to sit down

and get after this. We're going to have you on every week, Press Field, okay? You're being very flattering. We have you on every week, but that's very sweet to me. But I do do a lot of reading. I find that, you know, somebody said it better than me, and I'm paraphrasing that we just don't have enough lifetime to experience all of earth if we're not reading.

We have to get the opinions and the perspectives and the insights and the experiences from other people in the conversation, those that are with us today living and those that have passed that have provided us some insight from the past. Let me ask you, do you actually read the books or are you an audio kind of a guy? Good question. Yes. I'm both. It depends on where I am. If I'm working out or I'm traveling or I'm commuting, I've got something in my ear. A lot of the times I have my earpiece in on airplanes. But if I'm home, I'm usually a reader. And I, you know, I'm usually a book reader as opposed to a Kindle or an eye book reader. But I find that I can get through the books pretty quick. quickly. There's a great expression again. I'm paraphrasing from somebody. You should take your age

and minus it by your age minus 100. So if you're 60 like me or 62, you got to give a book 38 pages. I'd never heard that. If you're 20, you got to give a book 80 pages. Okay, but if you're 80,

you know, you only have to get the book 20 pages. In other words, it's time. It either hooks you or it doesn't throw the book out. So there are a lot of books that I pass on or skim through at this point in my life. But I, but the classics I've, I've been pretty keen on. Your books were very difficult to put down, by the way. One of my old bosses, who was a U.S. Marine, and this is going back almost 30 years ago, I would say it was probably the year 2000, 26 years ago, gave me the gates of fire.

And I read that book and loved it. Of course, it led to the Tides of Ward and some of the other. other books. But he was a U.S. Marine. He had a lot of affection for you. Can I ask what his name was? Maybe I know. Yeah, his name is Jonathan Hurdle. H.I.R. No, I don't. I don't know. He runs, he runs an asset management firm in Philadelphia called Herald Callie. And by the way, when this interview is cut and edited, just to be a big, the big name dropper that I am, I'm going to let them know that I interviewed you because he's a, he's a huge fan of yours. But, you know, in preparation for this, you know, we sat around that, all right, what are we going to ask the legendary Stephen Pressfield?

I guess for me, it's about the following couple of words, okay? I want to say them to you. Discipline, purpose, inner resistance, resiliency, okay? How do you think about those words? And what is the single most important battle people are? failing to fight today. That's a hell of a question. I think you picked some good words as far as describing where, you know, for the first long time in my life, including, you know, as a supposedly an adult, I was just completely lost in space, you know, and couldn't find anything that at the end of the day

gave me peace of mind until I really finally started to commit to try to write, you know. And when you do that, first of all, there's discipline, right? You've got to. have you got to be able to work every single day and go at it like Stephen King does. And I forgot the other words that you laid out there, but they all are exactly true. Yeah, you know, purpose, discipline, inner resistance, resiliency. There's a reason why you're doing it. You have a purpose. And it just, for me, I just found that that was the only thing that would let me have

peace of mind at the end of the day, that every other thing I tried, including love, didn't work, didn't make me feel okay at the end of the day, only by following a kind of, and then in terms of purpose, I sort of felt like I didn't pick any kind of purpose. It picked me. You know, it kind of, I just kept trying, opening this door and that door and that door and nothing worked until, you know, finally sort of just yielding to try to tell stories, let stories come through me. You know, it's interesting, sir, because I never expected to go into politics. And I was a business person, a Wall Streeter. I ended up doing some political fundraising because I grew up in a poor family. I didn't have the contacts. And I don't know how to play golf like Thagger Vance.

So I thought maybe if I went into political fundraising, I could meet influential people. And now, you know, it's become a big part of my light, at least speaking about what I see, the good and the bad, and trying to at least have an open mind towards things, but also speak with direct honesty at a time where there's a lot of intimidation. But is there a book, Stephen, that's calling to you that you're about to write or have thought about writing? I hate to say this, but I've written a bunch of them that I did want to write. right already, but they're, but I, I, they'll be taking me out feet first and I'll still be working.

So I've got a couple that are done right now and I'm working on another one and, you know, the, you know, the goddess, thank goodness, keeps giving me assignments to do. And so I'm just doing it. But one thing I will say, each new book to me is a surprise. It's never like I could plan five years in advance. and almost always when an idea comes to me for a book, my first reaction is, I can't do that. That's not me.

But, you know, it's kind of like in the Old Testament, right, when anybody gets a call from on high, they always say, leave me alone. I don't want to do it. That's how I feel. But then once I kind of get into it, then I suddenly go, wow, this is exactly what I should be doing. It's a mystery.

Listen, I can identify with it, sir. I get the, you're getting called to do something you don't really feel like doing, you know. I mean, it happens so often in life to so many people. All right, well, we're down to the five words in our podcast. So what happens here is my producer and I, you came up with five words. I'm going to say the word and then I'm going to ask you to react to it. You can give me a sentence or two, sort of a roster test. All right.

Okay, ready? So if I say the word art to you, what do you say? In many crazy, mysterious ways, it's the highest form of a human gift that one can give to other human beings. To heal them and great art makes you cry. And tears, to me, are the voice of God. It's interesting, you know, because when I hear the word art, I think, immortality, I think this is the last rendition of human beings. You know, with the art, whether it's a Da Vinci or.

the Venus de Milo, it stays with us, you know, it doesn't leave us. What about the word war? When I say the word war, sir. I feel like that is the nature, I hate to say it, of the human being, and that it's a metaphor for our pat, if you believe, which I suspect you do, that we are spiritual beings having an experience in a material body. war conflict, particularly inner conflict, is the university that we're going through for whatever reason that probably transcends our understanding. But it's the nature of the human being, I'm afraid to say. Yeah.

It's also, you know, if you believe all that, which you know I do, because you've heard me speak about this, there's also a character test involved with everything that's going on right now. and you, you know, because of the mystery, it forces you to really default to what your true character is in settings of war and peace, sir. It's not, you know, you get to see who the person really is, you know. What about the word power? Power to me is really a dirty word. I think if we think of the ego, if what we're living in the, in the dimension of the ego, the currency of the ego is power. And power, in the worst sense, which it always seems to go to, means power over other human beings. And if we want to go back to Jesus, what he did was to

empower other people, right? To be there to heal, to help, to point away, and not to subjugate it to oppress, which is what it seems to be whenever we were in the world of the ego. the world of politics. So powers are really dirty word to me. Well, well, said, sir, resistance. I say the word resistance, you think of what? Again, it's the nature of life. I think when we're cast out of Eden,

and God said to us, you know, henceforth, shalt thou eat thy bread in the sweat of thy face. Thorns and thistles, such elps, fay, blah, blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing. So it's the nature of life, I think, to confront obstacles, which is what every story is about the hero encountering obstacles. And that it is the nature of life. It's why adversity, as you've said many times, is a transformative. We hate it, but or mistakes in our life that produce adversity.

So resistance, again, like war, is the nature of life, unfortunately. on this dimension. No question. You know, and you know this as an author, I have experiences as an entrepreneur. You know, you got to go, you got to go through the shock. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just sucks, but it is what it is. All right, last two words.

Then I'm going to give you the last words, sir, Stephen Pressfield. What do I think about that? That's my, that's a great question. I never even thought about that, but that's my temporary identity in this body. as I'm living this lifetime. But I don't consider it to be me at all. It's just the jacket that I happen, you know, somebody handed it to me as I entered the cafe door.

Who are you? My job, I always say my job, as a servant of the muse, of the goddess, which I think is what every artist is. And all I'm here for, I think, is to be. a channel or a conduit for whatever heaven wants to put through to me. And hopefully it's something positive. I'm in the service of that.

Yeah, such a great. You know, listen, it's such a beautiful thing to say, and it's such a reinforcement of the values that you and I grew up with, sir. And so I, where do you live these days? I live in Los Angeles. All right. We lost our house. and the fires, you know.

Oh, I'm sorry. But that's your way it goes. But if you're ever out here... I'm going to come out and see. I'm out there a lot, actually, so come out and see you. We'll get lunch or dinner together. Please do. It'll be great. My real treat and pleasure, somebody I always wanted to interview.

I really appreciate you coming on, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, the legendary Stephen Pressfield, the War of Art, Gates of Fire, the Legend of Bagger Vance, turning pro among many others. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Anthony. Thanks for having me. I feel the same way about you, and I hope we can get together in person. When a country's productivity cycle is broken, people feel it in their paychecks, their communities, their futures. What does this mean for individuals, communities, and businesses across the country? Join business leaders, policymakers, and influencers for CGs' national series

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