The Rich Roll Podcast - The War of Art: Steven Pressfield

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

We all experience it. That invisible, self-sabotaging force that lives between you and your most expressed self. Today’s guest calls it ‘Resistance’. He’s cracked how to overcome it—and the process required to birth your best work. Meet author Steven Pressfield—a man who has profoundly impacted my life and how I pursue creative expression. A former Marine, Duke graduate, and journeyman of countless jobs, Steven had been writing in obscurity for three decades before his first published novel became a smash success. Molded on archetypes lifted from the Bhagavad Gita, The Legend of Bagger Vance made it’s way all the way to the big screen, starring Matt Damon and Will Smith. Now revered for his creative prolificacy, Steven has 20 books to his name, including the military novels Tides of War and Gates of Fire, currently on the curriculum at the Naval War College and West Point. More relevant to today’s discourse, Steven has authored some of the most impactful books ever written on the fundamentals of pursuing a creative life. Collectively, The War of Art, Do The Work, and Turning Pro are books I’ve read and make a point to re-read annually. Practical treatises on the human relationship with authentic expression, they provide a disciplined approach to birth the work we were born to create. Steven’s latest offering, A Man At Arms, is a historical novel about the Roman Empire, a reluctant hero, and the rise of Christianity in First Century Jerusalem. Cinematic in it’s sweep, think Gladiator meets The Road Warrior. A personal hero, meeting Steven has always been a dream. Today he shares his story. And it’s everything I hoped it would be. Steven will tell you that creativity isn’t about talent. It’s about discipline. But it’s also about reverence for the mystical—courting The Muse to connect with that inimitable force that breathes beyond our conscious awareness. However, The Muse only shows up when you respect the grind as sacred. An excavation of this process, this conversation is an absolute masterclass on all things creativity, served up with a healthy dose of perseverance, persistence, patience, and the heavy lifting required to eliminate distraction and make manifest the dormant, authentic voice within. It’s also about dispelling the myth that great art is the purview of the chosen few. Or that it comes easy to those so touched. We all have something worthy to say. We can all benefit from learning how to better express our truth. “Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.” The spirit of this exchange is to empower this ideal. FULL BLOG & SHOW NOTES: bit.ly/richroll584 YouTube: bit.ly/stevenpressfield584 Final note: Some unfortunate construction noise next door periodically invades the audio dojo. Apologies for the distraction. I hold Steven and his work in the highest regard. My hope is that this conversation will leave you feeling the same. Peace + Plants, Rich

Resistance is this negative force of self-sabotage that will work against us anytime we try to move from a lower level to a higher level, ethically, morally, creatively. If you have an idea for a book, if you have an idea for a podcast, if you have an idea for this studio or something that you want to do, a voice will come into your head immediately that will say, who are you to put this thing together? This has been done a million times and it's been done better than you ever could do or ever would do. You're too old, you're too young, you're too fat, you're too skinny, you don't have enough education, you have too much education, etc., etc.

And that negative force is universal. I can tell you from the thousands of emails I've got, and not only is it universal, but it's the same voice in all of our heads. You know, it may be tailored a little bit to you or to me, but it's the same voice. And when we hear this voice in our head that says, you're not good enough, it's all been done, et cetera, et cetera, what makes that so powerful against us is we think it's our own thoughts. We think, oh, that's me assessing the situation objectively, but it's not. It's this other siren voice, this force that's just out there, that's a fact of nature. And once we can say, oh, that's not me, that's just out there, that's a fact of nature.

And once we can say, oh, that's not me, that kind of is the key to the whole thing. I'm Steven Pressfield, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How you guys doing? Welcome to the podcast. Good to be with you. To share this digital liminal space that is somehow real, but if you think about it, doesn't actually exist in three dimensions, but hey, man, we are here. And this is exciting for me because Steven Pressfield is a bit of a personal hero of mine and a guy who without knowing it has had a profound impact on my life, my career,

and how I think about and pursue creative work. For those unfamiliar, Stephen is a writer with something like 20 books to his name. You might be familiar with his first novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, which landed on the big screen with Matt Damon, or maybe you read Gates of Fire, which is on the curriculum at West Point and Annapolis. Stephen is also a screenwriter, a former screenwriter, I should say. And of most importance to me,

Stephen is the author of inarguably some of the most important books I've ever read on pursuing a creative life. Landmark books that I recommend and talk about all the time on the podcast, like The War of Art, a book I I recommend and talk about all the time on the podcast, like The War of Art, a book I've read and reread at least a dozen times, Do the Work and Turning Pro, which together are all about overcoming resistance to self-expression and bringing a disciplined approach to birth the work you were born to create.

This is an absolute masterclass on all things creativity, served up with a healthy dose of perseverance, persistence, patience, and the heavy lifting required to eliminate distraction, slay resistance, and make manifest the dormant, authentic voice within. But before we get dirty, we're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts

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quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating

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option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay. So, one of the many things about this guy, Steven Pressfield, is that he wrote for 27 years before his first book was published, holding something like 21 jobs along the way. It took him 17 years before he even got his first paycheck for writing. So this is a guy who knows a thing or two about grit, perseverance, playing the long game, the process required to give birth to a dream, the war that we all wage with ourselves that he calls resistance. And the thing is, creativity isn't about talent. It's not about being touched. It's about discipline. It's about showing up. It's about respect for the mystical, courting the muse, connecting with something beyond our conscious awareness,

something that doesn't show up without putting in the work and then respecting that grind as something sacred. Anyway, Stephen's got a new book out. It's a historical novel about the Roman empire, a reluctant hero, the rise of a new faith set in first century Jerusalem. It's called A Man at Arms. It's quite the book, sweeping, cinematic, and quite immersive. So today we break it all down

from finding your voice to falling in love with the process, the pernicious nature of resistance and how to overcome it, and the common ground shared between warrior and artist. I hold this man and his work in the highest regard. I can't thank him enough for the gift that he has given me personally. And I'm super honored to have him on the show and share this conversation with you guys today. Final note, unfortunately,

there was some construction going on next door during the podcast,ologies for that. There was nothing we could do about it, but hopefully it's not too distracting. All right, let's get it on. to have you here. It's such a privilege and such an honor. Before we get into it, there's a little bit of construction next door. They told us they were going to knock it off, but we'll see how that goes. So for people that are listening or watching, if you hear some sawing in the background, not much we can do about it. We're just going to have to live with it. But in any event, this is a long time coming. Let me say the same thing to you, Rich, while we're at it, that I've been really looking forward to this for a long time. I've admired your stuff, your books, this work you do. And we only live a few miles apart.

I know. I just drove over the hill. So this is a real thrill for me. I'm a little nervous and I'm looking forward to it. I'm nervous too. First of all, thank you. I can't tell you how flattering that is to hear from somebody like yourself because, you know, of all people in my life,

like I don't know of anyone who's had a more profound impact on my life and on my career and how I think about what it is that I do than yourself, at least of people that I've never met before. Like your work has been so tremendously influential and impactful on me personally. And I just wanna thank you for that

because I really believe that I would not have done any of the things that I've done in my life had I not come across your amazing work. Yeah, and that's just a fact. I'm not embellishing. That's not an exaggeration in any regard. I vividly remember I got out of rehab in 1998 and was really grappling with who I wanted to be

and who I was and the decisions that I had made. And the Artist's Way was introduced to me and I started working that program. And that was my first introduction to trying to connect with something deeper inside of myself and the process of doing the morning pages really unlocked something in me. I wasn't sure what that was yet, but I knew I had

this instinct that I had a creative spark inside of me, that there was something there to be mined and to be paid attention to. But I was looking for how to kind of amplify that a little bit more or dig a little bit more deeply into what that might be when I was introduced to the war of art. And it was through my friend, Sasha Gervasi, who's a screenwriter, who's been on this podcast a couple of times. Have you ever met Sasha? No, no.

He's the biggest evangelist of your work. Now, were you working as an entertainment lawyer? I was a lawyer at the time. Yeah, and I was, Sasha's one of my better friends. And he was a big proponent of morning pages and the artist's way. And he's like, you gotta read this book. He always had it in his hands.

He always had it like next to his journal. And he was talking about it constantly and he gave it to me. And Sasha, this was around the time where Sasha was having his first real big success as a screenwriter. He had written the screenplay for The Terminal, which Steven Spielberg directed with Tom Hanks.

So it must've been maybe, it was around 2000, 2002 is when The War of Art came out, right? Maybe a little bit later than that, I can't remember exactly. He lent me his copy and it just, it just, it blew my mind. It blew my mind. And the idea that you could put a face and place a shape on this idea of resistance

and start to think about strategies and tactics for tackling it was revelatory for me. And it really just unlocked something inside of me that led me on this path and empowered me to write Finding Ultra and to start this podcast and to do all the things that I do today. So thank you for that. All right, you're welcome.

It's gotta be, obviously I'm not the only one who's said something like that to you. This work has been profoundly impactful on so many people, which places you squarely in the seat of, you know, the kind of guru role. And so I'm interested in how that lands for you as somebody who's, you know, a practitioner, a writer, and, you know, that's your thing, right?

Ah, yes, that's a really interesting question, Rich. It's like, I wrote The War of Art in like two months, you know, it just kind of came out of me like that. And it really is something that I sort of had done verbally, maybe 20 or 30 times with friends. Friends would come to me and say, I know I've got a book in me. Can you talk to me and help me? And I'd sit up with them till two in the morning, kind of telling them, you know, there's this force out there, this negative force called resistance. And the first thing you're going to have to do is overcome it before you can do anything else. And I would try to psych people up, you know, to do their thing. And of course, nobody ever did it, right? But so I thought, let me just write this book. And then when someone comes to me like that, nobody ever did it, right? But so I thought, let me just write this

book. And then when someone comes to me like that, I'll just say, here, read this, you know? And I never, at the time, it took a while for it to kind of catch on. And then, you know, people started writing to me and kind of asking and putting me in the role of a mentor or something like that, which I really am not comfortable with. And from time to time, people have said, you could take this on the road. You could do a, you know. This could be your whole life.

You could do this. And I said, absolutely, I do not want to. I'm a writer, I'm writing fiction. This is what I want to do and what I've been trying to do my whole life. And so that, I've always feel uncomfortable with that. To me, the best way of communicating what's in that book is through a book, you know? And when I talk about it, I'm never quite comfortable doing that. I mean, I'm happy to do it with you for your listenership. Yeah, and we're definitely going to do that. We're definitely going to do that today Yeah. I mean, I'm happy to do it with you if you will, for your listeners.

Yeah. And we're definitely going to do that. We're definitely going to do that today. But I think what you're keying into there is the fact that a core thesis of the book is this idea of self empowerment. Like you have to be your own guru, right? You have to take agency and control over this path that you're blazing for yourself. And it's not about a guru or a teacher. And when you become the locus of all that energy, that's really antagonistic to the ideas that are set forth in the book itself.

And I'm sure you've got this too, Rich. Like when somebody puts you in the role of a guru or a mentor or somebody that are looking for advice, and I've done this myself from the other side, they're giving away their power, you know? And when I've done it from the other side, I can feel I'm giving away my power. Why am I asking this guy or this gal what to do?

You know, what do they know about me? One of the things that I, people sometimes write me long emails, you know, talking about their addiction or whatever it is, whatever their issues are, right? And what I've finally kind of come to say to people is sit down and get into a kind of a calm place and then read that note over yourself

as if somebody else had written it to you. Because almost always within these kind of, you know, expressions of self-loathing or agony, the answer's right there. It's just leaping right out of the page that some project that they wanna do, some book they wanna write or whatever it is. And of course, that's been my story too.

And the reason I wrote about resistance was because it was such a force in my life and wiped me out for so many years. Right, right. So we're gonna get into that because it was such a force in my life and wiped me out for so many years. Right, right. So we're going to get into that because it's pretty good. But let's define resistance kind of broadly in the context of how you came to think of it. I call it resistance with a capital R. And like if we had a typewriter or a keyboard in front of me now, or you've got one there with a blank screen or a blank page in it, you would feel, we would feel a force radiating off that page, a negative force trying to push you away from it, right? And it would take, that's what I

call resistance. It would be the same thing as if we went out and bought an exercise bike or a treadmill and we brought it home to the house. And suddenly we realize we're coming up with every excuse in the world not to get on that treadmill. So resistance is this negative force of self-sabotage that will work against us anytime we try to move from a lower level to a higher level, ethically, morally, creatively. If you have an idea for a book, if you have an idea for a podcast,

if you have an idea for this studio or something that you want to do, and I want to ask you about this, Rich, a voice will come into your head immediately that will say, who are you to put this thing together? This has been done a million times and it's been done better than you ever could do or ever would do. You're too old, you're too young, you're too fat, you're too skinny, you don't have enough education, you have too much education, et cetera, et cetera. And that negative force is universal. I can tell you from the thousands of emails I've got. And not only is it universal, but it's the same voice in all of our heads.

It may be tailored a little bit to you or to me, but it's the same voice. And I was never aware of that. When I first started to write as a 24-year-old, resistance just kicked my ass all over the place. And I, you know, I went through a lot of stuff before I finally kind of said to myself, you know what, there's a force out there that's working against me. You know, it's not just something I'm inventing. There is a real force out there, just like gravity, just like, you know, the transit of Venus across the sky.

just like gravity, just like the transit of Venus across the sky. And once I could sort of give a name to it, then I could say, okay, now I have something I can deal with. How can I overcome this? Can I develop habits that will help me overcome it? Can I organize my day in such a way? Can I change my mindset in such a way?

And so anyway, that's kind of my definition of resistance. Well, the first step seems to be disassociating your identity from the resistance itself, because I think what we all kind of do is self-identify with that. That is part of who we are. That's a great way of putting it, Richard. I've never heard that before.

That's exactly it. Well, you have talked about, you know, this idea that exists outside of yourself, right? If you're just thinking, well, I can't do it. This is me telling myself this, as opposed to this external force that we can define as this pernicious entity working at odds with our effort

to climb to that elevated place. But what was it that was like the light switch for you that allowed you to kind of come to that realization? Was it just pain? You know, it was pain, I guess. But you know, I can't actually remember. There was not like a moment when I said that, or if there was to myself, oh, this is resistance.

It just, you know, just over time, I guess. I mean, there was a moment that sort of where things turned around in that way for me, but I don't think I identified a force as resistance. But what you just said, Rich, is exactly right, of disassociating this concept of resistance, this fact of resistance from your own identity. your own identity. Like when we hear this voice in our head that says, you're not good enough, it's all been done, et cetera, et cetera. What makes that so powerful against us is we think it's our own thoughts.

We think, oh, that's me assessing the situation objectively, but it's not. It's this other siren voice, this force that's just out there, that's a fact of nature. And once we can say, oh, that's not me, that kind of is the key to the whole thing. Right. It's so interesting. I think the other thing that happens, I should just share my own personal experience because I don't know what other people's experiences are, but there's this sense that this is not something that other people have to deal with. There are the talented people out there, those that are touched or those for whom the muse

seems to come easy that are able to sidestep this issue of dealing with resistance. And when you read the book and you realize, oh, this is a universality, this is a universal thing, this is something that everybody experiences, whether you're a writer, an entrepreneur, an athlete, and also that it never goes away, which is sort of disheartening, but also comforting in the sense that I'm not alone. Like I tend to look at the world and think everybody is figuring things out in a way that I'm not able to,

which leads to that voice of self-defeatism and that cycle then feeling bad about myself for feeling self-defeated and the, you know, the vicious cycle that ensues that just takes you down the shame spiral where paralysis becomes impossible to overcome. In fact, let me ask you, Rich, you were saying before that when you read

The War of Art, it made an impact on you. What form did resistance take for you at that particular time? And what did you do about it? Well, I mean, when I was writing Finding Old, I mean, I'd never written a book before. So the idea that I could even write a book

seemed daunting to say the least. What is it that I could possibly share that hasn't been said before? I'm not a Olympic champion. I've never won a race. It's not like I'm the most amazing athlete in the world. And my story of addiction and recovery is pretty pedestrian.

Like, so, you know, I would like think, why am I doing this? Who could possibly be interested in this? And the more that I would- And yet the book is fascinating and totally riveted me. why am I doing this? Who could possibly be interested in this? And the more that I- And yet the book is fascinating and totally riveted me. And it's like a seminal book on my bookshelf. I don't know if you noticed, but I dropped in little War of Art references,

not explicitly, but this idea of, when your heart is true, the universe will conspire to support you or the prize doesn't go to the fastest, it goes to the guy who slows down the least, like the fairy dust that gets sprinkled on top of the discipline and the patience and the persistence and all the things that you speak about

that are required to achieve something excellent. But it was really by dint of relying on the principles in the book that allowed me to disassociate from those negative voices and just continue to plow through. But I will say this, and I've said this on the podcast before, so I wrote Finding Ultra in 2012. I've done cookbooks and I have voice and change

and all of that. And those are technically, those are books, but they're not book books, right? Yes, yes. And I would say that the resistance has never been stronger for me in terms of writing what would be considered a follow-up to Finding Ultra or another book book.

And in many ways, this entire podcast venture is like the most colossal form of resistance that I've self-erected to create an excuse for not having to write another book. So I've dove in into this thing and it's become very successful and gratifying and I love it and it's amazing, but it's fairly all consuming.

And now it makes it easier for me to tell myself, well, I don't have time to write another book or do I even really need to? I reach more people on this microphone every week than a book that's gonna take me a year and a half to write. So why do it? So that resistance, this is another thing, like the resistance never goes away.

It basically fills whatever vacancy that you have in your life and adapts to whatever environment you're in to prevent you from accessing that next level of higher consciousness. So you didn't have any resistance to the podcast, to doing the podcast, or did you? Right, because that's like a procrastination or a distraction, you know, in certain respects.

Yes, I know what you mean. Yeah, so I should be writing right now instead of talking to you about writing. But yeah, so the resistance takes many forms. And to this point of the tactile and the mystical, another thing that I really love about it is that what you write about is so rooted in very practical takeaways.

Like, look, you gotta create ritual. You gotta create habits. You gotta be your own self-disciplinarian. You have to have these rules. And here's how you set up your calendar and erect healthy boundaries to protect that thing that's most itself to you. So talk a little bit about that balance between the practical and the mystical. Well, that's absolutely true.

And this must be in ultra fitness events too. I mean, when you write about this, that it's when you get to that point of, you know, the third day of running around Hawaii or whatever it is, you know, your third Ironman in Hawaii, that you start, you know, getting really deeply into yourself, right? That you enter a whole other level, but the way that you get there is through the mundane,

through the training and through one foot in front of another and all of the discipline and the ritual that goes into that. But it is, the creative process to me, this is my experience, is that it's a two-sided thing. On the one hand, there is the practical, the blue collar aspect of the thing. You have to show up every morning. You have to, you know, have habits that reinforce what you're doing. You have to work every day, just like a blue collar guy with a whistle in the factory,

you know, but at the same time, once you sort of get rolling, and it's really like yoga, right? Where the whole concept of yoga is that you use the body to get to the spirit, right? To, as you get deeper and deeper and deeper into a particular pose, things start to happen inside you. And the same thing, certainly in writing and songwriting

and things like that, that once the mundane has been taken care of, you know, the floor has been swept, the table's been cleaned, and you're actually sitting down there an hour one, hour two, hour three, and you know this Rich, pretty soon, you know, things start to happen. Ideas start coming to you. There is a muse, there is a higher level

and your intention and your integrity and your work, your labor, your sweat to go for that higher level gets rewarded. And the higher level does come down to you. And, you know, it's a common place to say that the best pages I've ever written, I don't remember writing them at all, you know? And that's not completely true because you are, you know, you are kind of there, you're doing your thing. It isn't just a magical thing, but you get there through the depth of commitment and of aspiration and of intensity. And another thing, you know,

while I'm blathering on here about this stuff. No, I love it. Keep going. That one of the things that I hate about this era today, the internet era, the social media era, is it's so surface. It's so superficial. It rewards absolute superficiality, right? We go from one clickbait thing to another. We never delve into anything. And if there is a secret to creativity

or to ultra fitness or anything like that. It's depth. It's the opposite. It's kind of, you know, after hour one is different than after 10 minutes. And after hour two is different than after hour one and so on. If you're, as a writer, as you start getting into a scene or something that you're working on, you on, as you get level, level, level down, things start coming. And it's not even mystical. It's just sort of like, well, gee, that guy that I had standing in the corner, that guy should come out here and say something. And then, oh, my God, that really makes it happen. Whereas you wouldn't have thought of that the first 10 minutes into the operation.

Yeah, you gotta blast out all the cobwebs and create that open space that allows for that to come in. And as a writer, that's what you live for. So the structure, the rigor that you put in and the discipline is solely to create that open space for those glimpses to enter, right? And it is true. Like, you know, when I first read The War of Art,

the culture was very different. Now, the level to which we're enticed by distraction is a thousand fold what it was a decade ago, let alone two decades ago, which I think in some regard makes your work more urgent, right? If we can identify an optimistic vein in all of this, it's that we're becoming more aware

of how distracted we are at the same time that we've become more powerless to defend against it. But we're having conversations about that. And we're having conversations with our kids about that because we feel ourselves being pulled into our phones in a way that we realize is alarming. And it's become incumbent upon all of us

to exert a little bit more, a lot more self-discipline around what's important to ourselves so that we can carve that out. And for many, for most, and I found myself in this place, it's a losing battle. You're competing with computer engineers who've studied psychology and know exactly what to dangle in front of you to keep you on that lower plane and prevent you from ascending to your potential. You know, I've always said, you know, if resistance is a real force, and it is, and it's out there, I always have said, if you wanted to make a billion dollars, invent something that lets people yield to their resistance. And the internet and social media, that's it. They invented it.

That's everything that we want, that the distraction that's put in front of us, the clickbait that's put in front of us feeds into this existing force that's there already that wants to distract us from our own, whatever our own calling is inside here. And so I don't think there's any real way around it other than to sort of block it out somehow,

just turn it off, go away from it somehow. I don't think you can dally in that world and defeat it. It's too powerful. Right, but you're on social media and you've got this website that's pretty robust and educational and it's got tons of content. You did this video series on the warrior ethos that's up there.

So you're participating, but I suspect that you have pretty good rules around when you engage and when you disengage. That's true, but I'm also a little bit like what you were saying about the podcast. You know, that stuff is a little easier to do. And I actually need to crack the whip over myself. I've got a book that's waiting to go

and that I'm kind of avoiding at the moment too. Yeah, another one that you're working on right now. Yeah, another one I'm working on now, yeah. Well, I heard you talk about this as well. Something that's unique to the culture at the moment that is new and different from our predecessors is this idea that everybody has to now kind of think of themselves as a brand, right?

We're all like, what is my avatar and what do I represent on the internet and how am I communicating with other people? And beneath that, I suppose, is this idea of individualism, right? As opposed to collectivism. The great generation, they weren't thinking about themselves as brands

or what their individual identity was. They got on a career track and they held that job for their entire professional career. Whereas now we're switching between careers all the time. And it's really about like what's in my best interest. And there's a lot of not so great things about that. But one thing I think, and I've heard you speak about this, that is interesting and somewhat optimistic

is that it does sort of compel you to ask these questions about who you are. Like you're having this dialogue with the internal voice about what it is that you're here to do, what it is that you're here to express. Yeah, the whole concept now of everybody having to be a brand and what is my brand? I don't know exactly where that goes, you know?

But as you say, you know, it's a little bit like the Maslow pyramid, you know, where at the bottom, you're just dealing with your basic needs of food, shelter, whatever. And by the time you get to the tippy top, you're into self-realization and the concept of who am I, why am I here, that kind of thing.

And we're lucky enough now in this world of as bad as things are, at least, you know, we don't have to go out and kill what we need to eat, you know? And a lot of us are at the top or near the top of that pyramid or have the time to do that. And we start asking these questions of,

which is what the war of art's all about, is really, who am I? What is my gift? The actor's question, you understand? Who am I? Why am I here? What do I want? And in a way, what's the point of human life

if we don't ask that question? What is your particular gift? What is mine? What are your kids' gift? Whatever. But I'm not sure where it goes in this world of hyper. Can everybody be a brand? Can everybody have some, be trying to buy other people's books or movies? I don't know. But I was just talking about this yesterday, the concept of, to go to the ancient world a little, in Pericles' funeral oration back in ancient Athens, where he talks about the idea of a citizen

and that he says that I declare of our citizens of Athens that they are the, how do you say it? The rightful Lord and owner of their own person, of his own person. And as opposed to being a serf or a slave or somebody that's in a mass movement or is in a cult or is being, somebody else is guiding them. And I think that it is incumbent upon all of us

to get to that point where we are the rightful Lord and owner of our own person. And at that point, the next question is, how do we do that in a community for the good of the whole planet and for future generations, and not just our own brand and what we can sell, I made t-shirts, we could sell, whatever.

So it's certainly not good to be blind to that, to be unaware of that. But we're sort of at a point now where we're at that tippy top of the pyramid, where we're maybe more obsessed with that than is healthy. And yeah, at what cost? You know, no longer are we facing a death sentence for laying down our shield.

We have lost that connection with the collective wellbeing, right? It's all about like what I need and what I want. We see this being played out with the wars over wearing masks and not wearing masks. And I fear for the cohesion of the greater comedy when that's the only question being asked. Yeah, I mean, maybe it's good in a sense that we're, like you say, we're having to deal with it.

We're becoming aware of it now where we weren't aware of it before. I mean, I do think in America, if you could ask the average bear, they do want to come together. I think people America, if you could ask the average bear, they do want to come together. I think people do want this country to be unified one way or another, or at least to think of each other, not as the devil or the enemy,

but we just are not sure how. We're so polarized and tribalized at the moment. Yeah, well, I mean, that brings up, I was gonna get to this later, but it seems like a good time to talk about it now. As somebody who is so well-versed and steeped in all of these ancient cultures, the warrior cultures, somebody who has written lots of military novels, how do you take all of that tremendous research

that you've done over the years that has seeped into all of your books? How does that impact how you think about where we're at right now, culturally and politically? Well, that's a tough one. We've certainly see a lot of people now who it seems to me, um, have abandoned the idea of honor or integrity. And I'm not sure how that happened, but, uh, if we think back, like my, my dad was in world war two, that was the greatest generation, you know, and there, there definitely was a

concept that, that a man acts in a certain way, and a woman too, right? That there's certain levels that you won't allow yourself to sink to, you just won't go to those places. But somehow in this culture today, we're plumbing new depths of these things, new depths, you know, shame is a great thing that the ancient Spartans were a shame-based culture. And the Japanese, the samurai, is a shame-based culture where there were certain things that you just would not do. You would not go. You would die before that would happen, right? If you were, you know, a samurai, you would kill yourself before you would do that.

And I don't know. Maybe you have an answer to this, Rich. I don't know what happened to the idea of shame and where people are now so shameless that nothing is beneath them. I mean, we had a president that was plumbing new depths of shamelessness every day, and it seemed to be like his superpower in some way. And I don't know. What do you think about that, Richard? What happened? Yeah, I mean, I certainly, I don't know that I have any great insight into that, but I think shame has been trumped by the drive for attention. And what drives attention is drama and strife and pettiness and all these sorts of things, right, that come at the cost of comporting yourself

in a more virtuous manner. Yeah, I guess if you're willing to put a sex tape on Instagram or wherever they put it, that maybe you'll start getting attention. Not you and me, but certain people out there. Right. So I guess that's a big part of it, that if you discard shame,

you can get more attention by just acting in more of a shameless way, doing things that nobody ever did before. And people will look at that, oh my God, look at how they did that. Right, but when I see that, what I think is that person is blind to living an examined life, right?

Which is really at the core of what your work is. I mean, you say there is a war afoot, that war is between you and you, and you're the enemy, right? Like the only war that exists is the war between you and you and it's your job to raise your sword and go to battle with yourself for the purpose of reaching

that higher state of consciousness or elevating yourself and connecting with the more authentic true self within so that you can bring expression to what it is that makes you uniquely you and share those gifts with the world. So talk a little bit about that war with the self. It's the war of art for me.

That's why the title of the book. And I believe that we're all born with a destiny. We're all born with an identity, like Wordsworth's poem, not trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our, we come into this life with an already established identity, whether or not I'm a believer in previous lives, but I don't know, we wanna go down that rabbit hole today.

But in any event, we can go down it, but go ahead. I do think that we, if you have kids from day one, one is different from another, right? They've got an identity and it's there, right? Even kittens and puppies are that way, right? So we have this identity, but then that is kind of crying out like an acorn to become an oak, right? And we have this identity, but we don't know what it is. It's sort of a trick that life plays on oak, right? And we have this identity, but we don't know what it is.

It's sort of a trick that life plays on us, right? We come in and we don't know who we are. And adolescence is like the excruciating moment of not knowing what we are, right? And then again, there is this force of resistance that when we try to ask that question of ourselves, you know, who am I? What do I love, what is my gift? This force of resistance will try to stop us

from examining it. It'll try to distract us. It'll try to push us off into shadow careers or shadow activities or something that's not in that way. And so this is the war that we're fighting is against that negative force to find out who we are and what our gift is. I mean, I always say that, you know, I think I've written like 20 books now,

which is kind of amazing to me since my first book came out when I was 55, right? And it's absolutely true that before I wrote any one of those books, I had no clue that I was gonna write that book. You know, not like, it wasn't like I was sitting, oh, I've got this whole magazine of books, like bullets in a magazine waiting to go.

I had no idea at all. So, but the point of that is that we find out who we are by the works that we find out who we are by the works that we produce. And so, but yet those works as they come along are mysteries to us. We don't know where is it coming from? I never would have thought if you would look at the list at the front of a book of mine of this title,

that title, the other title, never would have thought, oh, that's coming next or that's, you know, it's a mystery to me. So again, that is sort of the war of going forward into the unknown and kind of following the muse, following whatever other, whatever goddess, whatever is coming from another dimension,

that song that's playing in your head when you're on the freeway that nobody else has heard, that's the war. Going and fighting that, and you're fighting it against your own self, against your own self-sabotage that's trying to stop you. So that is, to me, that's kind of the, the coming into who you were already. You already were that, but you just didn't know it.

And through these actions, you realize it and you go, wow, I had no idea I was gonna have a podcast. I had no idea I was gonna be talking to 587 people and writing, finding ultra and finding ultra part two. I had no, or whatever else is out there. Right, but it's in the doing, right? The waging of the war is action-based, right? Whereas I think a lot of people are,

maybe they're pursuing some self-inquiry, but it's an intellectual exercise and they're sort of awaiting the epiphany, you know, the sort of descending idea of who they are before they actually do anything. And by your description and the books that you've written, it's the process that reveals, right? You have to engage with that process and wrestle with it. And it is in that that, you know, you have these discoveries. Exactly. And I think for me, I can tell you that I spent many years in that world inside my head, wasting my time.

It's like therapy. It's like going there, you know, amy, amy, amy, you know? But until you actually start to, once you start to act, like I'm sure it's the same in ultra fitness or anything like that. Once you actually start, then you start to discover things. Right, the path unfolds in front of you. It does.

Slowly, not easily. Yeah, the idea being that what paralyzes many is they wanna see what that path looks like, or at least be able to forecast pretty far down the line before they take the first step. And it just doesn't work that way. You have to take those steps not knowing and trust that the brick will get laid right,

one step in front of you as you go. Yeah, and it is scary. I mean, it is the unknown that we're going through, going into, and it's scary. There's no doubt about it. Right, and part of that war is the battle between that instinct, that seed that I think does live within all of us that's telling us there's something that you're here to do.

I don't know what it is, but it's kind of like this little faint voice in the back of your mind. And then the increasing self-loathing or toxicity that creeps up the more that you ignore that voice, right? Until it becomes more painful to not do it. Right, until it's like until those things cross and you really have what I think is akin to,

somebody who's hit their bottom with drugs and alcohol. I think it's exactly that. Where the pain of the status quo exceeds the fear of that unknown path ahead. Yes, I think it's exactly that. You know, that, and I do think that we have to kind of hit bottom in some sense, before we start on any kind of upward course, you know?

Because resistance is so diabolical and it puts us in denial of whatever it is, like this particular book that I'm working on right now, that I'm starting on now. I had the exact same thing that you were talking about about finding ultra too, whatever it is, or even finding ultra, where I say to myself, who's gonna care about this thing?

Who, this is the dumbest idea. You've established a certain reputation. You're gonna destroy that reputation if you write this thing. It's so dumb. Nobody's gonna possibly, et cetera, et cetera. And I know that I sort of have to hit some kind of bottom where I say, look, I just can't stand this shit anymore.

I can't stand hearing this yammering in my head. I just gotta do this damn thing. Right, and it's funny, I'm laughing because you're the guy who has all the self-awareness around this and yet you're still- It's true for everybody, right? Find yourself in that place, right? Everybody does it.

You know? Well, let's go back. You've led such an interesting, colorful life. I mean, did you, as a young person, did you always know that you wanted to be a writer? I mean, you have this period of your life of essentially being like this blue collar journeyman with all these different crazy jobs. Yeah, no, I never, as a young person, never.

And sort of the gist of the start of that thing, I think you may have heard this story before, but I was working as a copywriter at an ad agency in New York. And I had a boss named Ed Hannibal who quit and wrote a novel. And the novel was a hit. Overnight, he was like a success.

And he quit and went off. And I thought to myself, well, shit, why don't I do that? You know, no problem, you know? So that was the first time that I thought of, oh, I could write. Or that aspiration- Seemed possible. You know, seemed possible to me, or never did even cross my mind before.

And did you immediately go home and start writing, or how did that begin to play out in your life? Pretty much, you know, I sort of, I did quit my job, and I was married, I was living in New York City, and I kind of set out to write this thing, and I had no business whatsoever. I had no clue what writing was, no idea what resistance was, no concept of any of the things.

And I worked on it for about two years, got this close to the end and resistance with a capital R, I just blew up my life. that last one yard to get across the goal line and just acted out. Right. In ways that we don't need to talk about, but that sort of blew that whole thing up. And that kind of set me out in this kind of odyssey of traveling around the country and working these, you know, these crazy jobs that I work. Right, so you blow up your marriage,

you blow up the book in this colossal act of self-sabotage and really fear, right? Was it fear? Absolutely, terror. Fear of success? Fear of failure? Like these are all like kind of close cousins of, they're subsets of resistance. There's resistance, self-sabotage is an aspect of that,

but why does self-sabotage is an aspect of that, but why does self-sabotage become so prominent? And what is the fear that you think drives that, at least for yourself? Like I said, it's the fear of going from a lower level to a higher level. Fear of success, in other words. If I had finished that book, no matter how bad it was, I would have gone to a higher level. I would have been a guy who at least wrote a book, you know, at age 24 or whatever I was at that time. And of course I was completely unconscious of all this, no clue what was going on.

All I knew was I was in a state of terror and I had to kind of get out of it one way or another. If I had been an alcoholic, I would have, you know, just drunk and wound up in the ditch somewhere. Right, right, right. So you implode your whole life because that's safer than what might happen if you actually finish the book. I think that speaks to just how powerful

the resistance is, right? Yes. And what an unconscious driver it can be. So then you go off across America, holding all these, you worked in a metal institution, you worked on a farm, you did all kinds of stuff, right? And writing along the way, or what was the relationship to writing

during that period of time? No, I mean, it was really a state of running away from it. So I kept, I had my, I lived in my van, I had a 65 Chevy van that I went back and forth across the country 13 times in. And I always had my typewriter with me, but I never touched it. It was like under, you know, I don't know what,

a shirt was wrapped in something or other. But I was just absolutely running away from that. But I didn't know it. You know, if you had asked me, I wouldn't have said I'd have come up with some excuse, some bogus rationalization. But on some deep level, I knew. I knew that, I sort of said to myself,

this was a terrible mistake I made trying to write in the first place. I never should have done it. It was really stupid. But on some other level, I knew this is what, I got to come back to this somehow. I've got this, I got to slay this dragon somehow or it's going to kill me. Right. Well, otherwise you would have just gone back

and worked at the ad agency, right? Yeah. Why did you just, you know, light off onto the terrain, you know, in this sort of Mark Twain kind of way? Well, we're getting into some deep stuff here, Rich, but what happened was, maybe you can relate to this from your own experiences. I remember I had an interview.

I did try to go back to an ad agency. I had an interview with a guy that I had worked with before who had become a boss, blah, blah, blah. And when I went into that interview, I must have stunk with such loserdom or whatever it was that I was like toxic and I could see in people's eyes that they saw this on me. And it was like, get this guy out of here, whatever it is. And I had a couple of more things like that. Didn't take more, many to do that. And I just realized somehow I had fallen out of the bottom of the middle class. You know how if you've been to college and you can speak in polysyllabic words, you will go into a room and people go, oh, this is one of us, et cetera. For whatever reason,

I had kind of fallen through the bottom of it. And the reason that I worked a bunch of blue collar jobs was not like it was any plan of mine. It was like those were the only jobs I could get, you know? Interesting. So, yeah, I just kind of fell through the floor. The floor opened up and I went through the trap door. You went through the bottom. And so you're kind of going from gig to gig, got the typewriter, refused to get rid of it, even though you're not using it.

So walk me up to the point where the pain of this reality that you were experiencing just became too much. And you kind of have this tipping point. Actually, I write about this in the War of Art, but let me, I'll tell you one other little story before we get to that. After, I don't know how many years it was, you know, it was only maybe three or four years.

It wasn't like an endless amount of time of going around the country. I finally, I just kind of gave up on that whole life. I just, part of my, I know I'm going on here. No, no, no, go. One of the concepts I had in my mind came from Jack Kerouac's book, On the Road. And from the whole, this was kind of the 60s and the early 70s.

And I felt like if I could get myself to this mystical place, you know, I could be someone that could walk in anywhere to any situation, I could relate to it, I could find work, I could make friends, da, da, da. If I could just someone that could walk in anywhere to any situation. I could relate to it. I could find work. I could make friends, da, da, da, da. If I could just get to that place instead of being so stuck in my own head

and so afraid and all that sort of stuff. And that was kind of my ideal. And at some point, I was actually in San Francisco and I was down to getting a job as a driving instructor. And for me, that was like the lowest because I had driven trucks. I had done all, somehow driving was my thing for whatever it was.

And I just gave up. I said, I can't do this. I'm not Jack Kerouac. I can't live this life on the road. I'm just, I give up. I'm going home. I'm going back to New York. I'm gonna take the shittiest job I can find.

And I'm gonna try to little by little kind of work my way back into the middle class, however I could. And I was driving across the country back to New York, taking the Southern route. And I met this couple, a cowboy and his wife who had just gotten married and they had all their possessions

in a paper bag between them. And the short version of the story was, we kind of became friends over a couple of days. And he said, I'm going to be work on my uncle's ranch. Why don't you come with me? And I said, I can't ride a horse. I don't know anything about that. I'll teach you, no problem.

And I thought to myself, hmm, a cowboy. I've never been a cowboy. Maybe I should, and I just said to myself, I can't do this anymore. I can't, I can't do this anymore. I've just got to go, I've got to go home. So I did go home. And to keep blathering along here, Rich,

there's a chapter in the War of Art where I talk about this. I got back to New York. I got a job driving a cab and I was in a job tending bar. And I had a little sublet apartment. And one night I was just sitting there and I went into that sort of what I imagine an alcoholic goes into when they really need a drink.

And I just thought, I thought, who could I call? Are there any women I could call and I could kind of go over to their place? Or is there somebody I could, you know, I've just, and I said to myself, I just can't do this anymore. And I pulled out that typewriter. And like I say, this is in the war of art. And I sat down for like two hours,

just typing some story. I don't know what it was. Whatever it was, I threw it away. It was terrible, right? And I went in to wash, there was some dishes in the sink. And as I started washing the dishes, I realized that I was whistling. And I sort of had this sense that like, I was okay.

Then I thought, oh, I can sit down at the typewriter. I'm like a million miles from doing anything good. But finally I can actually sit and try. And like this great weight went off my shoulders at that point. And I thought, you know, it may take me another 30 years, which it did, to do anything decent, but at least I can do it now. And I don't know why I could when I couldn't before, maybe just because I'd tried everything else under the sun. Right, right, right. And I just knew I couldn't try that anymore. Right, what was your self-awareness

around that moment at the time? Nothing more than what I just told you. I just felt like I now can sit at a typewriter and try to work and I'm gonna be okay. I'm not gonna fall off the end of the earth. I'm not gonna go insane. I'm gonna be okay. Right.

To extend the alcoholic analogy. I mean, there's so many similarities. It's sort of like the alcoholic trying everything before finally just giving up and raising their hand and saying, I need help, right? I'm gonna drink only after five o' right? I'm going to drink only after five o'clock. I'm only going to drink beer. You have to do all of that and exhaust all of it before you're so depleted and ready for something new like that change. And in your situation,

taking all of these different jobs, it would be one thing if you were a truck driver, a cowboy, whatever, if that was part of the plan of collecting amazing experiences to write about, but that wasn't what you were doing. These were just, you were just running away from your life essentially. Now you must look back and think, oh, I've got all these rich experiences that I can tap into.

I do think those experiences were important, even though I haven't actually ever tapped into those specific ones. But if I look, you know, I'm a believer in the muse. I believe there's a goddess up there. And if I think of the muse like watching over me at this time, she would say, oh, look at him go down this blind alley.

Look at him go down that blind alley. And then finally, when I come back and I sit down at the typewriter, I think she finally perks up and goes, ah, the son of a bitch is finally sitting down doing what I've been waiting for him to do for all this time. And now from the goddess's point of view, she would say, okay, I'm gonna give him something.

I'm gonna give him an idea. I've been holding back, now I'm gonna help him a little bit. Right, I mean, there is a divinity in being that broken and something to be revered about hitting bottom. And it's something I think about a lot because I'm involved in the recovery community. It's like, do you step in and try to divert somebody from meeting that kind of predicament or is that exactly what they need? I mean, I know in my own case, I've had a couple bottoms and they were transformational and I look back on them with great gratitude.

There was so much pain that I don't want to ever experience that again, but they were the catalyst for the greatest growth experiences that I've ever had. So there is something to be said for standing back and being the observer as opposed to the intervener. Letting somebody hit bottom. Yeah, yeah. Which is one of the things I really loved about finding Ultra, that that really came through. You know, that was absolutely, you know,

that's for real, that's the real thing. Yeah, I still wish it hadn't happened. But yeah, I mean, you can't shortcut somebody's growth trajectory and that applies to the pursuit of art and creativity as well, right? Like something that I really appreciate about what you talk about and write about is the fact that there is no hack here, right? Like we're in this culture where everybody's looking for the shortcut and how can I eradicate all the pain

and just get right to the good stuff. And it just doesn't work that way. And rather than fighting that, just embrace that because that's part of the toil and the joy that contributes to what it is that you're trying to express. It's hard. It's so hard to do though, to keep doing that stuff.

But I remember one moment I was working in the oil fields in Louisiana. And I had this friend that, you know, we lived in this little bunk house together. And his brother, he had an older brother who had also gone through one of these odysseys, right? And he was telling me that, my friend was telling me one day that his brother had finally like gotten out of it odysseys, right? And he was telling me that, my friend was telling me one day

that his brother had finally like gotten out of it. He got married, everything was good. And I said, you know, how old is he now? And I forgot what the age it was, but it was like 18 years, oh God, our age. And I said, oh shit, you mean we gotta go through this for another 18 years? But, you know, I mean, as an entertainment lawyer

and being in the movie business and knowing all that, you know about the all is lost moment, which is the, like in any story, you always gotta sort of take that, your character, the protagonist, to that moment where they hit bottom, right? And at that point, then they can start to come up. And, you know, it's a cliche of movies and of stories,

but it's life, it's real life. Right, the hero's journey. That archetype is so powerful. It obviously is front and center in everything that you do and think about, but what is it like that? Why does that blueprint resonate so deeply in an unconscious way?

Like we understand it, we gravitate towards it. We know it works in terms of storytelling, whether you're writing a novel or a screenplay or a short story. But it's interesting to try to ponder from whence does that come? Like, is it just bred into our DNA as we evolved over the millennia? That's what I think.

I think it is. I think over the millennia from going there from hominids to cavemen and tribal things that life just sort of works in a certain way, right? And I do think it's software that we're born with, that that model, the hero's journey is encoded in whatever, in our DNA, like along with the archetypes. And it exerts an irresistible impulse on us, I think, to live it out. One form or another, I think we all have to have a hero's journey or many hero's journeys, you know,

one after another. And I think a lot of maybe what's is going wrong today in this country is people aren't living out their hero's journey because they somehow they don't have to. It's not life doesn't, life is easy enough now. Right. People can get by that. They don't have to do that. And also, obviously the force of resistance is trying to stop them from doing that. But I would, you know, there's Walker Percy is a great kind of writing hero of mine.

And he wrote a book, I'm blanking on the name of it now, but in the book, it's not the moviegoer. The character is a doctor and he has a couple who come to him and they're a married couple and they're having struggles. And they live like 14 miles away on the other side of a swamp. And he says, tonight when you leave here,

go home through the swamp. Don't drive home, leave your car here. And he sort of compels them onto a hero's journey, a little mini hero's journey through the swamp. And of course they get home and they have the greatest sex they ever had. But there's something to that, that it's easier for us these days to kind of go around the swamp. And we don't even have a kind of an aspiration or an ethic to go through the swamp. It's not like that's, oh, you should do that.

It's you should avoid that. Right, of course. All the kind of cultural machinations point us towards aspiring to a life of comfort, ease, and luxury. And to go back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if your needs are essentially met, then it's just too simple to go to your job

and to lease the car and get the takeout food and watch Netflix and never step outside of that and challenge yourself. And I think too many people, to echo Th to echo Thoreau, like end up leading these lives of quiet desperation because they're not consciously engaging with that thing that I do believe is inside all of us that's yearning to be expressed. Well, let me ask you this, Rich. Isn't kind of ultra endurance sports, isn't that sort of about that where you kind of, endurance sports, isn't that sort of about that?

Where you kind of, you don't have to do that. You deliberately choose this adversity, this real extreme adversity, and you deliberately choose to put yourself through that. Isn't that kind of what it's about? It's kind of a hero's journey. Well, yeah, because we're not living Telemann's life, right? We are in this situation where you have to craft that for yourself.

Yeah, artificially. You see Spartan races and Ironmans and all of these things because there is something deeply embedded inside of us that seeks out that challenge that is not presenting itself in our life because our lives are too easy. And I just, you know, I don't know that when I first got involved in ultra endurance, I had conscious self-awareness around that,

but something was driving me in that direction. But, and I write about this in Finding Ultra, I mean, it was really a spiritual journey, not a physical, everyone's, oh, the physicality of it, or it was a mental challenge, but it was really a spiritual challenge. And when I think of your work, like I think of, I think of Bagger Vance

and I think of the Bhagavad Gita and I think of Krishna and Arjuna and that relationship and Bagger's relationship in the book and, you know, how the caddy is trying to get the master to connect with that deepest part of who he is. And that comes about only through the crucible of challenge and the stripping away of all the artifice

that stands in between you and who you really are. And in my context, it wasn't golf, it was ultra endurance, which is a different, I didn't have a bagger telling you know, telling me what to do, but the sheer process of undergoing such a difficult physical journey was my means of stripping away all of that so I could communicate with a different part of who I was.

And it worked. It worked. It was transformational. It was work. And like I said, I didn't consciously know that I was doing that at the time in the same way that you weren't sure what you were doing when you finally sat down at the typewriter

and banged out a few pages. Yeah, I would say that the hero's journey embedded, encoded in your DNA, demanded to be lived out. At least I'm sure you'd had many others before that. But in this particular case, you were sort of drawn to ultra endurance and maybe you didn't know why, just like I've been drawn to things and I don't know why.

But I think it's that imperative that's inside us, that instinct. Why does a salmon swim upstream? Or why do birds migrate across whatever it is? I think it was something like that. It was really the best part of you, the best part whatever it is? I think it was something like that. It was really the best part of you, the best part of your soul, I think,

calling to you and saving your life and leading you on this transformational journey that worked, that actually created change. It did work, but it was catalyzed by a bottom and a tremendous amount of pain, right? And short of somebody meeting their version of that for themselves, they're otherwise faced with this choice of living life out in this matrix-esque pre-programmed way

or choosing to bring adversity in their lives. And that's difficult to do if you're not in pain. Yes, yes. Right? Right. So that's difficult to do if you're not in pain. Yes, yes. Right? Right. So when somebody comes to you and says, you know, I know I'm not, I'm not, I'm just not quite as fulfilled as I'd like to be,

but they haven't really sunk to any kind of, you know, traumatic depths, making that leap is more difficult than the person who's really, you know, up against it. Yeah, I think it's impossible to make that leap. You think it is impossible? It's like the choice is always there. That choice is available.

It is possible, but for some reason, we're just not gonna grab at it. Until the pain reaches unendurable levels. Why does it have to be that way? I don't know, why is it? The world would be better if everybody could grab onto that rope a little bit sooner, maybe. Yeah.

I don't know. Yeah. This plays into the warrior ethos. So how do these two things like cohere for you? Like the artist's life, the pursuit of creativity, the grappling with the resistance, the walking through the difficult things. How does that match up with how you think about

the warrior path and how that plays out in your novels? And you recently did this like series on your website and on YouTube of talking about this. Well, my second book was Gates of Fire, which is about the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, not the book that the movie 300 came from. A better version of that, which is taught at Annapolis. Yeah, it's taught at various-

West Point and places like that, right? Because it's an expression of the warrior ethos. But when that book, like I said to you before, Rich, I had no idea that book was coming, no idea that I wanted to write it. It just sort of appeared, you know? And I was seized by it and had to do it. It just sort of appeared, you know, and I was seized by it and had to do it. And I found myself writing like the next four books were really sort of warrior books,

you know, about Alexander the Great, about the Amazons, about, you know, various other things. And it was various other warrior cultures. And it was a surprise to me. It's like I say to myself, well, why am I writing about this? It's not like, you know, I'm not a Navy SEAL. Why did I write about this? And I think that it's the inner war, the writer's war, the artist's war that we were talking about, that in a way, to face the blank page, to write a book, to write a movie, to write whatever it is, or ultra endurance, things like that, you have to be a warrior. One way or another, you've got to take the warrior virtues, which I would name as courage, patience, camaraderie, love for one's brothers and sisters, selflessness, and very important, the willing embracing of adversity. And there are a lot of other virtues, but those virtues that a warrior, a Spartan warrior or Alexander the Great would use for enemies out there, the artist or the endurance athlete uses those virtues to get against the enemies in here, right? When you're on your fourth Iron Man in a row and every fiber of your being

is screaming out, stop, stop, you know, this is insane. You're having to call upon something, right? And I think it's that sort of, that warrior mentality, the same thing that, you know, the Spartans called on when the day three at Thermopylae, whatever. So I guess, again, I was sort of drawn to write these books and I didn't even know why, but I think I was kind of reinforcing for myself in a way that kind of code, that code of honor, that sense of shame, and that ability to kind of endure and to keep going forward into the unknown. Yeah, the idea of being regimented, of having a core code of ethics

to which you organize your life is what's required to express yourself as an artist, which I think is anathema for somebody who's unfamiliar because they think, oh, artists are just, they're free thinking and they just create and it's all very flowery. Whereas you've imposed almost a military discipline and structure upon this process to demystify it

so that you can allow for the mystical to enter. And how that plays into what it means to be a warrior. It's like the warrior's obstacles are external. The artist's obstacles are internal, but the warrior on the battlefield has to have mastery over that sense of self, that like interconnectedness in order to combat those external forces of resistance. Yes, and the other thing is that I think

in a military context, usually that discipline or that mastery is imposed from without, right? You've got sergeants or lieutenants or whatever that are teaching you or that, and you're in a structure that is shaming you and making you go forward, right? From outside, externally. Whereas, and I think this is one of the reasons

why a lot of guys and gals who leave the military have hard time, is when you make the switch to being an artist or an entrepreneur or a fitness athlete, that now becomes self-discipline. Right. Nobody's giving you the orders. Self-reinforcement, self-validation, you know, and that's a big, hard change to make. You know, that's a whole other dimension of reality. Right. You're not accountable to the lieutenant or the general or whoever, but only to yourself. The other thing, and I'm sure this is true in endurance sports too,

is there's an element of drudgery in this, right? And being able to embrace the drudgery, you know, to train, you got to go out on the trail, you know, you got another day, I got to get up, you know, right? Same thing in writing or any creative enterprise. There are times when it's just a slog, you know? Right. But again, that's a kind of a warrior virtue too. You know, the warrior learns to, you know, the soldier learns to just keep shoveling,

keep digging the ditch, you know? It's no fun, there's no glamor, but- Whistling on the chain gang. Yeah. Yeah. But that's how anything is created, right? Is it not? Yes. I mean, you have to show up day in and day out

and most days aren't so great. And every once in a while you get that spark and it's awesome and you live for that. But really it is about falling in love with the process. It's not about the accolades or the destination or the end point or the goal or crossing any finish line. It is truly just about the accolades or the destination or the, you know, the end point or the goal or crossing any finish line. It is truly just about the showing up. Now, did you always feel that way, Rich, or was that something that you learned when you were doing, you know, all of those Ironmans

and stuff? Did you have that attitude or was that something that you learned when you were doing all of those Ironmans and stuff, where did you have that attitude or was that something that evolved through the course? No, I mean, I didn't get into it to like beat people or win races. I really, I did have enough self-awareness around it to know that I was getting into it as a process of self-discovery. I'm competitive with myself, not with anyone else.

But I learned, I love the suffering and the mental and physical, you know, challenge of the whole thing. And I learned that as a young person, as a swimmer. So I had that kind of language for myself before I got into ultra endurance and understood deeply that it's about process and the slog. Like that's how I got to where I got as a swimmer.

That's how I achieved academic, like anything good that I've ever done has been about that. So that wasn't a lesson that needed to be taught to me. I've always gotten that. And that's how I've approached the podcast and everything else that I've done. Like I'm good at grinding. Like if I have a talent, it's not athletic.

It's just, I'm willing to suffer and work harder than the next guy and put in the grind when no one's looking. And I think that's the secret sauce. And I've said this many times before, but most people really wildly overestimate what they can do in a year or so and overestimate what they can do in a year

and wildly underestimate what they can do in a decade. And as somebody who didn't publish their first book until they were in their fifties and now has 20 books, you're a living testament to that sentiment. Yeah, I'm with you, Rich, I'm a grinder. I feel like if that's a talent, if I have any talent, it's that. But I am willing to get at the grindstone

and just keep hammering. When I think of a younger version of you, I think of Ryan Holiday who actually introduced us. Thank you for Ryan for making the introduction. But that's a guy who shows up for the page every day. He's very clear that this is what he's here to do. He's here to write books and he doesn't get caught up in all the stuff that swirls around it.

Like as soon as a book's done, he's onto the next book and the guy's cranking out a book a year. And I see the same discipline and approach to craft that you have. Yeah, I'm amazed that Ryan does that at such a young age. It's unbelievable. Really, how did he do that? I don't know.

I don't know the level, it's discipline. He has a structure and a system and he's transparent about it. He's like, I get these cards and I have these, this is how I do it. And then when it's done, I put it in this box. And I think there's something magical and important. And you talk about this in the war of art about ritual and respect for ritual.

Like those little things that seemingly don't mean anything actually might be the most important things. Definitely. I'm definitely a believer in that, in habits. I say that an amateur has amateur habits and a pro has professional habits. And that's all the difference in the world. Did you ever see that documentary,

history of the Eagles, about the band, the Eagles? No, uh-uh. Well, I'm gonna tell you a little story from that. that documentary, History of the Eagles, about the band, the Eagles? No, uh-uh. Ah, well, I'm gonna tell you a little story from that. This is Glenn Frey was telling this story, that when he was like a young guy, just starting out, he roomed with J.D. Souther, who was another, they were alike together,

and they had an apartment right above Jackson Brown's apartment. And this is before any of them had had any success at all. And he could hear from his apartment above Jackson Brown's, he would hear Jackson Brown going through the piano, playing the piano. And he would play like he was working on a song and he would play it one time, play it again, play it again. And he would stop occasionally to make tea

and he had like a whistling tea, Jackson Brown would. And this was a kind of a punctuation point for Glenn Frey listening to this. You know, oh, there he goes to make another pot of tea. And then he would go back and play that same thing again. And just 20 times, 30 times. And what Glenn Frey said was, that was, I learned that's how you write a song.

You know, it doesn't just come out of the air. Right. You know, that he worked, Jackson Brown worked it over and over until he had it exactly the way he wanted. And that it was a grind. Yeah. It was, you know, the daily one step in front of another.

And I just thought that was a great story. So true. He wasn't struck by lightning and this perfect song just- Maybe he was struck by lightning when he first got the flash of what that melody was, but then it took forever to get it down exactly the way he wanted it.

Right, so let's talk a little bit more about that transition between amateur or dilettante and turning pro, right? Which is the great follow-up to the war of art. Like this difference in, it's really a mindset shift, right? Like, am I doing this as a side thing or is this who I am? And if so, what is my relationship to the work I wanna create?

I mean, for me, having defined resistance as this negative force, then the next question becomes, well, how do you get around it? You know, how do you overcome it? And for me, it was the idea of turning pro, by which I mean that not that you only will work for money from now on, because usually if you're an artist or a writer

or whatever, nobody's giving you any money anyway, right? But it's the concept of thinking, if I'm an amateur and I run into adversity, I'm gonna fold, right? Because I'm not really in it. I'm just doing it for fun, right? Or if I'm not in the mood, I'm not gonna work today. Or if I've got problems with the family or whatever money,

I'm gonna blow off today's work or today's workout or whatever. But a professional, if you think about Kobe Bryant, you think about Tom Brady, think about Michael Jordan. I mean, a professional shows up every day, does his work every day, plays hurt, doesn't let anything stop him. And not that a professional doesn't take a day off

every now and then, but a professional loves it so much that they are willing to commit wholeheartedly to it and to give themselves totally over to whatever their aspiration is. Yeah, and it's the relationship to those obstacles that's different, right? The obstacle is the way, or the obstacle becomes the way

as opposed to the impediment that's gonna get you to quit. And that's the big difference. And again, it's what you were talking about process. It's a practice. It's a today, tomorrow, the next day, the next day, what we can do in a year, what we can do in 10 years. It's not just getting to some particular imagined goal.

Oh, I'm gonna win the Oscar. My life is gonna change. It's a lifetime commitment, things that we're talking about. And I think what you did brilliantly is also give the reverence to these creative pursuits that they deserve in terms of what's required to do them well, right? We all understand that if you're Tom Brady or you're Michael Jordan,

like you're showing up no matter what, you're putting in crazy amounts of work, like your level of dedication is insane. But for some reason, we don't think about writing or standup comedy or even entrepreneurial, like all these other endeavors don't demand that same level of respect. We all think, well, I can, you saw your boss wrote a book. You go, oh, well, how hard can it be? I'm gonna write a book. Or you see a guy get up on stage and tell a joke. You think it's easy.

And so we don't have the respect for the craft that we would for what a great athlete does. Yeah, I mean, everybody thinks they can write. Everybody thinks they can tell a joke, you know, everybody, but nobody thinks that they could be a brain surgeon or they could be a concert pianist. You know, they get that, but they don't get the other thing.

But, and of course I was that way at the start too. Like I said, I thought, how hard can this be? Yeah, it's hard. Well, you had to live it out so that you could write the book and tell all of us so we could save a little bit of time. How does the resistance show up for you now? Well, you shared that one example,

but with your level of self-awareness, you must be able to see it coming a mile away compared to most people. Yes and no. It still rises. It's still so diabolical. Resistance is so diabolical and so nuanced that, like I was saying before,

this one book that I'm working on, I'm hearing that voice in my head, this, well, your writing's really dumb, nobody's gonna care, da, da, da, da, da, da. But I do have a rule that I have learned and that I believe, and that is that the stronger the resistance that you feel, the more important it is that you do that,

whatever it is you're resisting. Yeah, talk a little bit about that more, because that's really powerful. Another mantra that I say is that resistance comes second. Now, if this is, if we imagine that we were taking, if this is our dream, our novel, our startup or whatever it is, and we set it out in the sunshine on a field or a flat thing like this, immediately a shadow is going to fall from this thing. This is the dream and resistance is the shadow.

So the shadow is exactly proportionate to the dream. So that if it's a big dream, it's going to be a big shadow. So in other words, the more, if you're feeling, and I say this to myself, as I'm talking about this thing, the more resistance I feel to something, the more certain I can be that there's a big dream there and that I've got to do it. If it's a little dream, you don't have any resistance at all, you know? So in other words, when you're feeling that horrible resistance, it's a good sign. Right. It shows there's something there. But it makes it all the harder, right? The bigger the dream, the more the fear around it. Yeah, that's true, but that's life, right?

And the larger the resistance, the more difficult it is to tackle. And then the more toxicity you experience by ignoring it. Like everything gets ratcheted up. But it's like the universe is knocking on your door saying, you gotta wake up and pay attention to this. Yes. But what, again, what is the dream? The dream is some sort of unfolding of who you are. If it's a company that you want to start, if it's a nonprofit, it's a podcast, if it's an ultra endurance thing,

that's your soul unfolding, your self unfolding and revealing in a good way, revealing like a flower blooming, revealing what's there. And that's what we're here to do, I think. So whatever the pain is, that's life to get to there. Right. Well, how do you communicate that to somebody who, to go back to the example of somebody who's not in a tremendous amount of pain, to tell that person,

you're here to express who you uniquely are. He's like, I'm banking a good paycheck. I get to, I lease a nice car. Like, what do you mean? I really don't like to answer that question and it's trying to bothers me when people ask me that question. And there is no answer to it.

It's when they hit bottom, when they're really ready, then they'll do it. And they won't do it before that. Right, so another reason to get out of the way and allow them their own process. Yeah, exactly. I think it's one of the most thankless things in the world to try to help someone in a state like that.

Cause like when they're ready, when I'm ready, when you're ready, we'll do it. The mentor will present himself or herself. Yeah. So walk me through a day in your life in terms of how you structure things so that it's conducive to your art. Well, let me take you back pre-COVID

because it's a little different now. I'm slacking off a little more than I should. Oh, wow. I would have thought it would have been the opposite. No, no. But pre-COVID, and when we get back to this, I'm like a gym person,

and I would get up really, really early and go into Gold's in Venice and work out hard, not as hard as you, but hard for me. Probably harder these days. And then I'd go to breakfast every morning, you know, with a bunch of guys my age, a bunch of geezers that I hang out with. And then I'd go home.

It's now maybe 8.30, something like that. Take care of whatever correspondence there is, you know, whatever emails, as little as possible. And then I'll sit down and really do the work, whatever it is. And turn everything off. And, you know, lock the work, whatever it is, and turn everything off and lock the door. I used to be able to work for four hours.

Now I can maybe work for three. And then when I'm done with that, I'll clean up whatever needs to be done. And then I'm from the school of the office is closed after that. I turn off my brain. I don't dwell on it. I don't think I leave it up to the muse and just do whatever we can in the evening, go to dinner or something like that

and start again the next day. Do you still keep with the- I'm very definitely thinking of it over a year at a time. Do you still use the paper calendar? Oh yeah, I do that. And you mark down your workouts or how many hours you wrote that day,

that kind of thing. Which is important, I think, you know, to record what you did that day, you know, not in great detail or anything, but just, it's a little bit like journaling, only I just do it really simple. I just say, you know, I've worked on this, I worked this many hours, enough, boom, I did it. And somehow that nails it down. I kind of say, and I do that with workouts too.

I'll kind of say, well, what did I do today? I mean, you probably do that too, Rich, right? When you write it down, cause it sinks in. Yeah, also if you're working towards a goal, like so the equivalent would be, there's a race on the calendar or this is when you have to turn the manuscript on, right? And you kind of backpedal from there

and fill in the calendar going backwards, knowing what you need to do. But like, there's something about the tactile experience of writing it down as opposed to just knowing it or having it in a digital calendar that not only makes it more real, but also it enhances your emotional attachment and engagement to the whole process, I think.

I mean, for me, it's self reinforcement. You know, I don't have any boss or a sergeant at the end of the day that says to me, good job, Steve, you did that. You know, so I gotta do that myself, right? And it's the same way. And for me, when I write it down that I did this work or I did this,

that's kind of, if I can look at a calendar, I got a month there and I did this workout or I did this, that's kind of, if I can look at a calendar, I got a month there and I can see check mark, check mark, I can see like 30 check marks, I go, that's pretty good. You know, when, if I have big gaps, I go, oh man, I better, you know, crank it up a little bit here. But I think we need all the reinforcement we can get. Yeah.

How much of that regimented mentality, I mean, you were in the Marines, right? Does it come from military experience? Not really, no. I think it just comes from doing the work in the real world. Right, and you just figured out your own way for it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've got in my closet,

I've got calendars going back to like 19- And you keep them all, right? Yeah, I keep them, yeah. Well, let's talk about the new book. A Man at Arms is coming out in March. This is quite the adventure. It's your return to the ancient world after a spell. And this great character that shows up

in many of your books, Telemann, who's this archetypal silent warrior figure. And I'm about 100 pages into it. I'm really enjoying it. And what's amazing to me reading this is just the level of detail. Like I really feel like I am in first century Judea and your command over what that would feel like I am in first century Judea

and your command over what that would feel like, what it would smell like, the experience of being in that place is unbelievable. Like the amount of research I can't imagine that you would have had to put into being able to fully grok like what that world was like at that time. Well, of course, a lot of it is fiction. You know, a lot of it, you know,

you're trying to just kind of create a world. Like if you were creating the world of Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, right? You're creating a world. But I spent a bunch of time in Israel researching another book. And so that kind of gave me, and in Jerusalem. So that kind of gave me a feel for Jerusalem, so that kind of gave me a feel

for what it's actually like there, what it feels like. And towards Sinai, the Sinai Desert, where this story takes place. And, but, you know, actually I'm reading, right now I'm reading The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's book from, and it's just like the 10th time I've read it. And he is an absolute master of detail and stuff like that.

And like, if he's talking about, you know, they're going fishing and he talks about how they walk over this hill and there was a church on the side and then the water went over the stiles and the dam like that. And we had the fish and we got the ferns. We lay the ferns down and the layers of fish on top of them.

And then we dug up the water. And as you're reading it, layer and layer and layer of detail, you really get immersed in it. And particularly when they're visual details. So that you say, wow, I feel like I'm there, I'm fishing with the guy, I know exactly what it feels like.

So I definitely very much try to do that. It's like a movie, right? If Ridley Scott is blocking out a scene, I mean, there's nothing in that scene that's an accident, right? Every prop, every ray of light, everything is, you know, the smoke, whatever it is, is there to immerse you, the reader, and create, or the viewer,

and create the illusion that you're actually there. So when you were in Israel, did you sort of drive south and track this route a little bit to get a sense of the landscape? I didn't because you couldn't cross into Egypt, but I did as far as you could go in Israel, yeah. But I actually, I wasn't thinking about this. This book came like four years after the other one,

but you know, everything is grist for the mill. And what I learned in Israel sort of, you know, it's all in the computer somewhere. Right, right, right. Yeah. Right, and I love the kind of structural setup of the mute little girl and the warrior. And you just, you know that this relationship

is gonna flower. You wrote a blog post about this. It's all about like, how do you get to, I love you. And you can see that coming. And it feels to me, I mean, it's very cinematic. It's sort of like, it's like gladiator meets the road or something like that. You know, as they-

It's pretty good, I like that. Traips across this landscape, you know, as they traipse across this landscape, you know, on this crazy adventure that has a lot to do with, you know, the early years of Christianity and the Roman empire. And it's beautifully rendered. I mean, one of the, you were talking about, get to, I love you.

Let me just talk about that just for a second, because it's sort of a, I mean, your entertainment background, I'm sure you've heard this or thought about this, but a lot of stories, a lot of movies are basically about get to I love you, by which I mean the final moment that we're building to. Let me go back a minute. You start with two characters that are as far apart as you can possibly make them, right? They hate each other or for whatever reason,

they're opposite. It's a cop, it's a criminal. If it's a love story, it's the guy and the gal, whatever it is. And the whole point of the story is to get them to the point where they can, if not literally say, I love you, there's a gesture or something like that at the end.

And we, when we're watching this or reading it, like you say, you could see it coming. That's sort of what kind of pulls us through the story because we know it's gonna happen at the end. Yeah, you know it and yet you can't look away. It's like this tractor. You want it. And again, our life is like that, right?

We meet somebody and we're trying to, whether we want to or not, come to some understanding, come to some bond. And that's kind of what keeps it going. And I think that if you look at it at the deepest, deepest level, if you want to look at it at a level of faith or spirituality, you know, it's God. It's getting to the belief in a loving divinity. Or if you wanna stay at a lower level of just human to human, that's getting to the point where love is greater than fear or greater than anger. And if we wanna be in politics today,

we're in the United States as far away from that as we could possibly be. And I think we all want that in some, but we don't know how to get there. Hmm. Well, does it not begin- It didn't mean to change it to politics. Yeah, well, it begins with a willingness

to try to grapple with, you know, that dormant higher self within, right? And one of the ways that you've kind of gotten at that subject is by analogizing it to golf, like this idea of the authentic swing. Like no matter who you are, like everybody has their own swing. You can never master anybody else's swing.

If you try to change your swing, you can't do it. Everybody has their default swing, right? And that's sort of a metaphor for our unique blueprint that we all come into the earth with and are on this path to expressing that. Yeah, our authentic self. And in this story, A Man at Arms, the book that you have in front of you there,

it's really the hero, Telemann, who is like this one man killing machine of the ancient world, like the Clint Eastwood, man with no name. You can tell at the start of the story, he's this ultra hardcore kind of solitary warrior that he's looking for some, it's not, he isn't complete. His philosophy is too dark.

It's too selfish. It's too ego driven. And so the point of kind of get to, I love you through that story is, I won't spoil anything for you or, but that's kind of what the evolution that you can feel is inside him. He's trying to get to his authentic self,

whatever it is, and he's not there yet. Right. And I think all stories are about that. He's got all these layers, protective layers around him. He's a man without a country. He's there for the dollar and he's a survivor, right? He's able to make his way in the world in accordance with his warrior code, but he's an outcast.

And so there's something missing, right? And this girl you know is going to complete that for him. Which is really sort of a classic character. It's like a classic Raymond Chandler, private eye is sort of that kind of character. It is a Western. It is a Western, absolutely is a Western. Or a Clint Eastwood character in a Western

or a John Wick character in a contemporary thing is, you know, it's a similar sort of thing. It's like in movies, you know, we've seen this character, we've seen that story, but it's always fresh and it's always new. Well, you're a big proponent of stealing what works and using those as templates to create structure for your work

with the Bhagavad Gita and Bhagavad Gita. Was there something that you relied upon for A Man at Arms? Definitely. I mean, I definitely- Not gonna say. Well, I'll say a little, at least a little. I certainly thought of it absolutely as a Western,

even though it said in the first century AD. And the reason that I wanted it to be kind of a journey across the Sinai Desert was I thought that's kind of like the road warrior, the post-apocalyptic or a Clint Eastwood or John Wayne movie where there's always the wide open, the cruel lawless wasteland, right? Where a- You're gonna happen upon marauders

and all kinds of crazy obstacles. Which is again, sort of like the hero's journey that you or I go through, right? Or it all even comes back to being a writer or being an endurance athlete. It's a kind of a wasteland that the individual sort of enters for his own reason and undergoes ordeals

towards some form of transformation at the end. And that's, so I definitely thought of this absolutely as a Western and even watched Westerns, like you do when you're writing movies, you're trying, what can I steal from the Wild Bunch? What can I steal from the searchers? So yeah, so I definitely thought of it that way. And why do you keep going back to Telemann

as this character? He recurs in your work time and time again. Like, what is it about this guy that you just feel so connected to that you have to keep writing about? It's a great question. I don't know the answer to it because in some way, this is the character of all the characters that I've written about

that I feel the closest kinship to in some way. And I also never planned this character. You know, when he appeared in, he's been in like three other books and he just sort of appeared on the page and he appeared in fully formed formed like he had a philosophy, you know, when he would start to talk and I wasn't even, I wasn't in charge of that. He had a philosophy and I sort of thought to myself, I wonder what, I wish I could talk to him. What does he think below that?

Why did he think that? Why does he believe this? And so, I don't know, there must be something in me that relates to, it's a metaphor somehow. I'm not sure what it is. Telemann appears, not to go too deep into this, but he appears, he can't seem to die. He appears in one century

and he comes back in another century and he hasn't aged. And he's in a whole different place. So he's sort of like somebody that's stuck in an archetype, like the universal soldier that's condemned to come back and fight war after war after war. And I mean, in a way that's- Or like Kung Fu. Yeah, exactly.

I hadn't even thought about that, but that's it. Or a lot of these Western heroes are sort of timeless archetypes, right? A Clint Eastwood character or something like that. It seems like they fought in war after war after war and they're going to do it again. So somehow, again, I don't know the answer to this question, Rich, I don't know why he's fascinating to me,

but just like you were talking about doing another book of Finding Ultra, I know I'm going to have to do another book with this guy, right? And I'm dreading having to actually get to that deep level. Well, you know, what I see in the character is a guy whose experiences in the world have maybe not embittered him, but calcified him, right?

And out of self-preservation has created these protective walls around him. He's not gonna allow his emotions to be impacted by anything external. So he's effective in surviving and has these aspirational warrior abilities, and yet he's broken and in pain, right? And so there's an opportunity to heal that somehow. And that can take shape in any number of journeys that this person goes on. Yeah. I mean, there's an opportunity to heal that somehow. And that can take shape in any number of journeys that this person goes on.

Yeah. I mean, there's a moment where, as you know, he takes on an apprentice, a young boy. Right. And they have a couple of mules as they're crossing this desert. And at some point, Telemann says something kind to the young boy about the mules.

And the boy says, shall we name them? Should we give them names, these mules? And he says, no. He says, I'm sorry, I even know your name. Right, but the kid was so excited that Telemann was even talking to him because this is the silent, strong, silent guy who's clearly the mentor

who's gonna teach this young person his ways of the world, but he's gonna do it sparingly and only when he feels like doing it, right? Yeah. Cool, so the book comes out late March, right? Or March 2nd. Oh, March 2nd, yeah, that's exciting. So I'm sure you'd be doing some other podcasts

and talking about it. It's very cinematic too. Has there been any interest from- Not yet. The movie business yet? I don Has there been any interest from- Not yet. The movie business yet? I don't know if anybody even knows it exists yet. Do you still keep a toe in that world or no? Not really.

I let my subscription to the Hollywood Reporter lapse when like five years went by and I never saw my name. Do you still have like a talent agent in Hollywood or that's in the past? I have a books to movies agent in New York, Jody Hotchkiss, but I don't have, you know how it is when your hair turns gray, your career's over and Hollywood has a screenwriter. Look at Ridley Scott, you just talked about him.

The guy's like 80, he's got two massive movies that he's shooting like back to back coming up, I think. Wow, is that right? Yeah, it's crazy. How old is Ridley now? He's definitely getting up. 81 or something? Yeah, he's definitely in his 80s. God bless him. Which is insane, right?

God bless him. Well, I do wanna, can we tell the story about Frank Williger and Bagger? Because it's so good. And I think it- How do you know Frank's name in this? I told you I was an entertainment lawyer. Some roots back in that.

Because I think it's really, it's inspiring and instructive about what it means to honor that voice within you and dial out the external voices that are perhaps leading you astray. Well, Frank Williger was my agent and he's a wonderful guy and we were friends. And the way that we used to work is

when i because i was basically a spec screenwriter you know i'd write something on spec and uh if i'd had two or three ideas i'd go into frank's office and he would give me like two hours and i'd pitch him the ideas and he would tell me you know no you't do that. Fox is doing a movie like that now, you know, or he'd kind of give me the marketplace take on things. So anyway, I went into him one day, the idea for The Legend of Bagger Vance came to me just out of nowhere. I was seized by it in my first book. And I said to him, Frank, I've got good news and bad news. And the good news is I've got a new idea. I'm really hot to do it. And the bad news is it's a book.

It's not a movie. And so Frank had been really working hard on my behalf to kind of get me out there into the town and people knew who I was. So he was completely pissed off at me, you know, because he said, I've done all this work. If you take a year off to write a book, all that work is down the tubes, you know?

And so I asked him, can you help me get an agent in New York, a literary agent? And basically, you know, he basically fired me. He just wouldn't do it, you know? And so I just said, you know, screw this. I'm writing it. I don't care. You know, I'm just seized by it. And so we parted ways at that point. And I went ahead and wrote the book. The idea being like, A, what do you mean you're gonna write a book? Like I just put all this work into cultivating your- He's right, he was right.

Your name in the screenwriting business and it's gonna be about golf? Yeah, about golf. It's like, no, that's not gonna work. And you walk away from all of those opportunities when you were getting some success and on the precipice of really breaking through in a big way to go off on this crazy tangent

to write this book and everybody told you, you were insane. And I told myself that too. What was that, like what was going on inside of you that felt so compelled to make that decision? I was just seized by this story, Rich. You know, I just, and when I look back on that, you know, today I would really block out a story and figure out, you know,

with that book, I just kind of just let it go. You know, and even when I look at it now, it's structured in a really kind of crazy way, but I think it works, at least the book works. I don't think the movie worked, but I was just seized by it. I had no choice. I just had to do it.

In the authentic swing, you talk about, it's sort of a behind the scenes look at how the book came about and ultimately the movie came about. What is it about? Can you speak to how golf works for you as this analogy for these other ideas? Cause it's, it does, like it's counterintuitive and yet it completely makes sense when you explain it.

First of all, I know that people who are not into golf, it seems like the dopiest sport in the world. Yeah, I'm not into, I'm like, I'm not into golf at all. Like I have a hard time understanding, although I watched the tiger documentary and I was riveted by that. Well, they say about golf and it's really, really true that with almost any other sport,

if you don't play it and you see it, like say motor racing or surfing or mountain climbing, even if you don't play it, you can look at it and go, oh, that looks kind of cool. Look at Laird Hamilton going down that, but golf is an exception. You look at golf, you go, it's a bunch of white guys wearing plaid pants. It seems like the fat guys is Donald Trump. It's like the most poor, but trust me, it's a great sport. And to prove it, Michael Jordan loves it. john elway loves it you know tom brady so anyway um the one thing about golf you were talking about the authentic swing before is like i had two friends when i was a kid identical twins who played golf and the amazing thing to me

was they had absolutely completely different golf swings I thought, shouldn't they have the exact same swing? They're the same DNA. And it is true that in some crazy way, we're born with a swing. Before we ever pick up a club, you have a swing. I have a swing. Everybody around here has a swing. And you cannot change that swing. If you think about golfers like Fred Couples or Jim Furyk that have these crazy loopy swings, they didn't evolve that through study.

So to me, the idea of the authentic swing and finding your authentic swing is the equivalent of your authentic self. It's what we were talking about before about being born with a gift and that's it. And so a lot of us, like in golf, people will try to mold themselves into some perfect kind of a swing and it never works. And the real answer is, if you can, to find your own authentic swing and then fine tune it so that you don't have bad habits in there.

And so I think that's the same thing in writing, in art or anything in life is finding who we are. We already are that thing. And if we can just find it and be it, but that's the hardest thing in the world. That's why they say, know thyself is like the hardest thing in the world to do. Right, but that's what we're here to do, right?

And to extend the golf metaphor, there is this truth in that it's not about anyone other than yourself and your relationship with yourself. Like you're- Yes. It is the ultimate individual sport, right? And this idea that you talk about of, I forget how you phrase it exactly, but most athletes are reacting

without a forethought in the moment, whether they're hitting a backhand or blocking a jump shot. But in golf, there's stillness, which forces you to engage with your thinking mind, which moves you away from the ability to execute on what you're there to do. And it's all about the process of getting out of your own way, right? And that goes back to the stripping away thing in Bagger with, you know, the, you know, who are you question to eradicate all the noise

so that you can be fully present. Yes. And like, as you're saying, golf is one of the few sports, maybe shooting a free throw or kicking a field goal is a parallel where you do it from a standing start. Like you say, in basketball, you're reacting to somebody or tennis,

the ball's coming, you react to it. And it's easier to do that in motion. It's easier to do it. But from a standing start where your brain starts working, but then there's a whole other aspect of golf that was in this book, The Authentic Swing. And this is kind of a crazy thing and it gets spiritual is that there's really no other sport

where you have a caddy, where you have another caddy, where you have another person standing at your shoulder that technically is your servant, right? You're paying them to carry the bag. But as we all know, the bond between the caddy and a golfer is tremendous. And in the Bhagavad Gita, where you have the great warrior Arjuna, his charioteer is Krishna, i.e. God in human form. And that was the parallel that I drew. So God appears as a servant at your side and a kind of an advisor.

And I think that a lot of Christians who believe in a personal savior related to the character of Bagger Vance that way. But I also do think, if you think about, I know we're getting into deep waters here. No, this is the stuff I love the most. If you think about the Odyssey and Odysseus, as he's on his journey, people forget about this, he's accompanied by the goddess Athena

and he talks to her all the time and she intercedes for him. And anybody that, you know, Martin Luther King or somebody would talk to Jesus all the time, like he was at his shoulder. And so the same thing with Arjuna, the great warrior and Krishna is at his side as an instructor and as a divine archetype. And I do think, this is when I say, I believe in the muse.

And although resistance is the negative side of it, the goddess is the positive side of it. That, you know, when I said I was seized by the story of Bagger Vance and had to write it, that's what that was. It was coming from another. So that was the equivalent of, of a Krishna at your shoulder or Athena or Jesus or whatever. Some entity from another dimension of reality,

from a dimension of potentiality, where do songs come from? Where do ideas come from? Where do books come from? I think there's a lot of reality. So back to golf, the idea in golf that you have this person at your shoulder that guides you. And you can see if you watch a golf tournament, you watch Phil Mickelson or Tiger or whatever, you know, they're taught, they turn to the caddy

all the time. The caddy saves them, you know, in other sports you don't have Michael Jordan can't stop and confer with, you know, or anything like that, right? So I do think that there's a real spiritual aspect to that, or at least a metaphor for something spiritual. Right, right, right. Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why the Tiger documentary was so interesting, hearing the perspective of his caddy. Have you seen that documentary yet?

Yeah, I did, yeah. And then when Tiger fires him and the guy's like, I mean, it's such a sacred relationship. Yeah. That seemed to be a real turning point in terms of how Tiger was approaching the world at that point in his life. I think so.

Yeah. And like, Dustin Johnson, I don't know if you, he's like number one or whatever he is now. His brother is his caddy and they've been like, and he's a real good player too, his brother Austin. And somehow that's in a way a secret to his success that you can see these two brothers are really in it together.

It's not a one man fight, it's a two man fight. Right, right, right. So what happened with the movie, Bagger Vance? It kind of went sideways, didn't it? Yeah, it went sideways. I don't know. I mean, such an amazing cast. Redford directing.

You got Matt Damon, Will Smith, Charlize Theron. Yeah. Sometimes these things just don't work, right? One thing I'll say is I think golf is an impossible story to film. There's only been one good golf movie and that was Caddyshack. You know, just a total force. It's a hard thing to do. I don't wanna say anything negative about anybody. Did Golf in the Kingdom ever get made into a film?

I think it did, but it was a very small movie that, I actually have the disc. I've never been able to put it in the machine. When I was a lawyer, I was involved in, I can't remember who I was representing. I think a producer who was trying to acquire the rights or something like that, but I never knew that it got made.

Yeah, I mean, that's another impossible movie to make because it's so internal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you manifest that cinematically? Right, all right. Well, we gotta wind this down, but I wanna end on, or maybe two things. We can't stay here all day, Rich.

We can, I'm happy to talk to you. I wanna be conscious of your time. Where does talent fall into all of this? That's a great question. I'm really not a believer in talent. I mean, I think that, you know, now I've said this before, people tell me, oh, I'm a talent. But for 30 years, they told me I was a bum.

And I was a bum because I hadn't learned. I didn't know what I was doing. I think obviously you have to have some sort of a gift, right? If you're going to be a runner, you have to have a certain amount of speed, right? But I certainly think in, like you and I are grinders, right? If you're going to be a runner, you have to have a certain amount of speed, right? But I certainly think in, like you and I are grinders, right? And I'm definitely, I believe that work is, for me, 80% of it, maybe more, 85% of it. On the other hand, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, they got talent. Yeah. There are people that have talent.

There are people that do have incredible talent. But there's also a lot of, I mean, you've been in this town a long time. There's a lot of incredibly talented people here who aren't fully expressed or recognized for what they do for other reasons. Yeah. So it isn't always a function of that.

Their talent works against them. Right, right, right, right. We certainly see it in athletics, right? You have a lot of players that come out or they're drafted in the first round for whatever it is and they fizzle. And then Tom Brady was drafted, whatever he was. I forget what he was, but way, way, way at the back. Right. Turns out to be the greatest player of all time. Yeah. So talent can be a negative if you're relying on it too much. If you're a basketball player, football player, and you got speed, you got size, maybe you don't have to do the work.

Sure, but I think we over-index for talent and we under-appreciate the grinders. I think in so many pursuits, whether it's writing or anything else, often the prize goes to the guy who just refuses to walk off the field and just keeps showing up and keeps showing up. Look how long it took you to get your first book published.

I see that time and time again. And it's not sexy. Like that's not the growth hack that everybody's looking for. It's the hardest way to do it, but you learn along the way so that when your persistence meets with some sliver of opportunity,

you're more prepared than you would have been ordinarily. Yeah. And, but again, there's no substitute for that flash from above, you know? Yeah. When it comes in, but then it's when, that's when the grinding pays off because you're ready. You've built the tools for it. And when the inspiration comes,

you're capable of handling it. Yeah, well, it's a good news, bad news thing. Is it not like bad news? Maybe you're not that talented. Good news, you can learn to grind. Like this is a skill set that you can develop that's accessible to you. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. And if you can master that, then you're putting yourself way ahead of 99% of people out there who just aren't willing to put in the

work. So it's really a function of like, how badly do you want it? Exactly. And that goes back to the pain thing, right? Are you in enough pain? Yeah. I hope you are because it's going to be a long road. Yeah. So what is the, if somebody's watching or listening to this, you probably hate this question, but you know, if they're sitting there thinking, I got this thing I want to write, or I have this idea that I want to execute on, and I've just, I've been unable to get out of my own way, but it's like right there for the taking. Like, how do you get people off the dime? Again, I say, as I said, it's the most thankless thing in the world.

Because if somebody's not ready to do it, you know, like I wasn't ready forever and forever and forever. Nobody, anything that someone said to me would have just, I would roll right off me. But when I was ready, and you don't have any clue when that's have just, I would roll right off me. But when I was ready, and you don't have any clue when that's gonna be, I think, then it happened. So one thing I would say to people,

and it's usually younger people, is that, you know, this is what a friend of mine once said to me. People always tell you that life is short, but actually life is long. And if you're 24 years old or 34 years old, I mean, when I was 34 years old, I was still 21 years away from having a book published, even though I've been busting my ass for all that. So I, if I would say to a younger person, take some pressure off yourself, you know, you don't have to, it's all this bullshit in the social media

that there's a hack and you can do it tomorrow. It's, you know, enjoy the trip, you know, pay attention, keep your eyes open on the journey. It'll, when it's ready to happen, it'll happen. That's really powerful advice, I think. You know, I think it also is about rebutting all these cultural and social influences on people. Outside of the hacks, it's just like, here's the path that's laid out in front of you. And if you want to be successful, you go to the school or you get this job and you

work hard and, you know, success looks like X, right? Where in truth, only you know in your heart of hearts, you know, underneath all of these layers, you know, what that's gonna look like for you. And that might take time, but there is something to be said and a lack of appreciation for, you know, doing a walkabout, like, which is essentially what you did, which was your own, you know,

sort of Telemann soul journey of self-discovery in order to return and come back to engage with your personal truth. But it took time and it took you trying lots of different things and giving yourself permission to do that. And I think that's something that more people perhaps did in earlier ages, which is really frowned upon now.

And in truth, when you look at life and say, it is long, why are you in such a hurry? Like there's this idea that if you're, you know, if you have to take one year of school over, you're gonna take a gap year that suddenly you've missed out and the world is gonna pass you by is fucking bullshit. And it's not in people's best interest or in service to, you know, really trying to self-actualize

by telling people that. Yeah. There's so much pressure on everybody today to... I'm glad I'm not... I don't want to say I don't want to be young, but it's a tough... If you're a young person today, the pressure that's put on you and, what's out there in the zeitgeist is, it's really, it's artificial, it's false. It doesn't coincide with our inner reality, with our soul reality. And we have to somehow disabuse ourselves, free ourselves, break out of this spell

that's been cast on us. Yeah, it's very limiting and it's fear-based too, right? It's betting on you being too afraid to do any, like the cost of breaking outside of like this norm is too high. And most people aren't willing to pay that because of the social consequences. And of course, in my thinking about myself,

it wasn't like I decided to do that. It just, I screwed up and it happened to me. Yeah. And I think people are, there's this expectation that when you're 18, you're supposed to know what it is that you wanna do. It's just like preposterous, right? And if you haven't figured that out yet,

like what's the matter with you? Takes a little bit longer. 18, 28, 38, you know, keep going, yeah. All right. Well, cool, how do you feel? I think we did a good job. I gotta say thanks to you, Rich, for being so prepared and making me think here.

And I was really looking forward to meeting you and to having this experience. And it's been everything that I hoped it would be. And I hope that we can keep something going here. And if I haven't totally exhausted, we haven't totally wrung out the lemon, squeezed the lemon. I'm just still trying to calm my nerves

over just having the opportunity to meet you. Like you being here today is incredibly meaningful to me. And I mean that with all of my heart. Likewise, likewise. It's been great. It's really special for me and I appreciate you. And I hope that we can become friends and I'd love to have you back on

whenever you wanna come back on and talk. Consider it done. I mean, anytime. If there's any juice left in the lemon, we can squeeze it. Oh, come on, look at you. I could try to extract lemon juice from you for the rest of my life

and we'd never get to the bottom of it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. A real pleasure. That was great. Steve's new book is called, A Man at Arms, available March 2nd,

out everywhere you find books. Yeah, pretty much everywhere. Check it out. It's really a great read. Thank you for putting that book out there. And if you're interested in all of the things that we're talking about today, pick up The War of Art, Turning Pro,

nobody wants to read your shit. You got all, you know, do the work. You got all these great books, regardless of how it feels to shoulder this moniker, you are a guru of creative expression and you've helped millions of people, myself included, and I can't thank you enough. So come on back and talk to me.

All right, that's great, Rich. Thanks very much. It's a real pleasure to meet you and to be here and I hope we can do it again. Absolutely. Also, if you wanna connect with Steve, stephenpressfield.com. Yeah.

And on all the, you're on Twitter and all those places, right? Yeah. Yeah, cool. I think on Instagram, it's Stephen underscore Pressfield, but I'm sure you can find it. And then on Twitter, Stephen Pressfield. I don't even know.

You don't know. Cool. Thank you. All right, thank you. Bye. Thanks for listening, everybody. For links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com.

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