Steven Pressfield

25:10Steven Pressfield:Hmm. There we go. Can you really detach yourself from the outcome of something? Absolutely. You can? Yeah, I couldn't always, but I can now. Ah, what changed? Well, in the beginning of my career, I made a lot of things in a row that were very successful. And then still doing the same things, I did the first couple of things that were not successful. And I realized that those are no less good than the ones that were successful. It's just a different metric. what people think. I'm not playing the what people think game. I'm making the thing that I like and I'm showing it to my friends. And if they like it, great.

25:52And if they don't like it, it's okay. I can sleep well because I know I did everything I could to make it the best it could be. I always use the word greatness. I'm working towards greatness. I didn't know what it meant. Greatness is not sales. It's not reviews. It's not radio airplay. It's greatness. And are you the only judge of that? Well, yes. And what I've come to realize is greatness means it's an offering to God. Ah. And if you're making an offering to God, it's your very best. Your offering to God doesn't change because of airplay.

26:28Steven Pressfield:Ah-ha. It's deeper than that. That's a surface thing. Ah, that's a great thing, Rick, you know? And that's what it's about. In that realm, it's always your best. Because that's like in the Bhagavad Gita, that's really almost the essence of the whole thing, that what you do, that Krishna says to Arjuna, give it to me. Yes. Give that to me. That's the highest form. My friend James Beshara, who actually just lives not too far from here, has this thing from Vedanta that is work without attachment is worship, which I think is really great. And it's sort of, in many ways, it's boiling down religion to like the nut of it.

27:11Steven Pressfield:I think we're really in a deep area here. Yeah. That it's an offering to God in that sense. Yes. And I would put it a slightly different way that when we're working with attachment to an outcome, we're in our ego. We're going, ooh, I want this to be a hit. Ooh, I really want, you know, the girls. I want them, that kind of thing. And no good music ever came out of that. right we have to get to our jungian self or soul and work out of that without that attachment then the good shit comes but to be able to do that is a really tough thing i think when you're young you really are attached to that outcome and you have to evolve through that i think yeah because I was successful early on, I never had that pushback early on.

28:04And then when I did feel it for the first time, it was like, hmm, they don't like everything. That's interesting. I know it's just as good. But then I realized there's so many things that have to go right for something to be successful in the world that have nothing to do with the work. Right. And a lot of times it's because it's bad. Yeah, it's all out of our control. Yeah. I made an album, and it came out the same week as 9-11. All of the focus in the world was on this disaster, and no one cared about a new album. Those things happen. Yeah.

28:39Steven Pressfield:You can't plan on that, and it doesn't reflect on the work at all. No. Of course, it's easy to say that and harder to do. I don't know if you know who Bruce Wagner is. He's a writer of fiction, really good writer of fiction. And I think this was on a podcast and he was talking about this subject. And he was saying how, yeah, I try to do this entirely for myself and what I love and that sort of thing. But he says, I can't help but looking at the bestseller list. Does the muse direct you outside of your writing life? Since our house burned down, yes. I find that I'm reaching for, and that wasn't true before.

29:20Steven Pressfield:I'm reaching for something, some divinity, some source of wisdom. And she's the one for me. Yeah. So I do. How is your relationship with the muse these days? It's always been great. Are you superstitious? Yeah. I mean, but I don't think it's superstition. I think it's reality. Now, is it reality because it goes for everybody? Or is it reality because you believe it? I certainly believe it. And it's certainly reality for me. Yeah. That's as far as I can take it. How much does your day-to-day life and your writing life interact with each other? Like right now, I have this new book coming. So I'm promoting it.

30:06Steven Pressfield:So then that's part of my everyday life. And it really is. But normally, I would say no. I mean, it's like I go into my writing room like you go into the studio. I leave everything at the door. and it's a sacred space. I'm there to work and to serve the muse. And when it's over, the office is closed. I try not to think about it. I leave it. So yeah, so my everyday life doesn't really react that much to my writing life. Do you ever have thoughts about your work after hours that you might note down? Yes, I do. Yeah, definitely. I've always had my phone. You're not actively pursuing it. I'm not, but every now and then, in the middle of the night a dream or something like that?

30:51Steven Pressfield:Do you remember your dreams? I record them, otherwise I would forget them. Do you remember your dreams? Sometimes. Sometimes. Do you believe in dreams? Do you believe they're passing wisdom to you? I think so. I think there's information in them. I don't know if it's usable information or more like a reflection of what's going on, almost like some sort of a journal in a way. Ah, I would say the same thing. I would agree. I think a lot of times my dreams, I do take them very seriously. I think a lot of times they're sort of saying to me, this is what's going on in your inner world, Steve, whether you realize it or not.

31:29Steven Pressfield:You know, you're dealing with this issue. And usually it's pretty dark. Yeah. It's like, oh, fuck. Last time we spoke, there's a quote, something you said, which is, commitment is felt, not reasoned. I'm certainly a believer in commitment. Yeah. That it's sort of, that when the gods look down on us, you when you're working or me when I'm working, what they are asking is, is this fucker committed or not? And if you are, that's the key that opens the lock. So the muse responds to commitment. Yes. Absolutely, I think. and hard work. You can't just be committed theoretically. Has your relationship to writing changed over the course of your life?

32:21Steven Pressfield:Yeah, because for the first third of my writing life, I was running away from writing. Then I was a bum, and I was just learning, and I didn't know anything, and I was no good, you know, and I was getting nowhere. Then it was a period where I started to do some good stuff, but it wasn't really coming from my soul, you know, or wherever that inner authenticity is. And then finally, I did start writing from that center, which is a mystery. Like you say, Rick, I didn't know, and it changes from one to another. But since then, which was like 1995 or something like that. Pretty much everything I've done has been, I'm proud of it.

33:12Steven Pressfield:I'm not ashamed of it. Some failed, some didn't. But I'm writing from my relation with the goddess.

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35:00Are you as interested in writing nonfiction books as you are writing fiction books? No.

35:08Steven Pressfield:They're fun. Yeah, and they're helpful. And they are helpful. And like there's the war of art and then there's like six or seven follow-ups to it. And I've got another one that I'm actually noodling around with right now. And that's fun. But it's not the same, not the same challenge. One is prose and one is poetry. Yeah. There's so much wisdom in the war of art. And the people who read it are writers. And there are a lot of people out there who don't think of themselves as writers who would really benefit from this information. Well, that book is the one that's coming out, The Arcadian, and the next one that I told you about where the planets shift.

35:51Steven Pressfield:Really? So it's not a nonfiction instructional manual. It's a story. Yes. Like The Two Towers or like Tolkien. It's one of those. Yeah. So are all of your fiction books about the war of art also? I think they are in a way. You know, I mean, they're usually, a lot of my books are military, right? Yeah. So it's a literal war. But yeah, I think they all are about the war inside our head. That's amazing, because I always thought of them as really two whole different worlds that you operated in. Yeah. One is about the inner war, and the other is about outer wars. Yeah. Which are the same thing. Tell me about your years of working in New York at an ad agency.

36:38Steven Pressfield:It was my first job, was as an office boy for$105 a week at Gray Advertising in New York. I worked on the Revlon account, which was all cosmetics and that kind of stuff. And all of the copywriters on the account were women. And they were highly, highly paid. And I used to, they'd hand me a sheet of paper and I would have to take it to the art director or something like that. And as I would kind of walk down the hall, I'd look at the copy that they'd written. I said, I can write this shit, you know. So I finally did become like a junior copywriter. but I never lasted more than a year. I had like maybe four jobs.

37:19Steven Pressfield:The first one I had, I had a boss named Ed Hannibal. I was like a junior, junior copywriter and he wrote a novel that was an overnight hit. Wow. And he quit and went on to write other novels. And I thought, well, fuck, why don't I do that? So then I dropped out of that before I was anywhere. And then after that, I would like write novels that never got anywhere, never got published. and I would go back to advertising, work, save money, and then move to someplace cheap, write for two years, run out of money, go back, that kind of thing. I met a lot of great people in advertising because you've got to be like a generalist.

37:58Steven Pressfield:You've got to know a little bit about everything. And there are a lot of really funny people and stuff like that. And I learned a lot there, but I hated it. I would be so depressed at the end of the day coming home from that that I had to like sit down at the keyboard and try to write something. Had your boss who wrote a novel and then quit, had that not happened in your life, do you think you still would have gone into writing novels? I don't think I would have gone into writing novels. And seeing the copy that was written is like, I can do, I see this copy, I can do this. Yeah. Based on those two examples, what would be the kind of places that would be helpful to put yourself to allow good things to happen?

38:45Steven Pressfield:I think people today think, well, let me get an MBA in marketing or something like that. Whereas I think maybe to work in a coal mine, to pick a bad example, but might be the best place for that. Get some hard job. Yeah, something like that. Where you experience life. Yeah. Like I drove tractor trailers for a while. I learned more doing that than I learned doing anything else. But now I want to ask you a question. Go. I know there are a lot of young people out there that hear what you say or maybe what I say too and say, Oh man, I wish I could find my thing like Rick has found his. And they look into their head.

39:27Steven Pressfield:They look around. They go, what is my calling? I just can't find. There's nothing I really love. The world sucks. If you had to give someone like that, a young person like that advice, what would you say? I would say make a lot of things, try things. And I would say what you're describing, I don't know any people like that. I don't know any people who aren't interested in anything and don't like anything. Most people I know like something, whatever it is. They like playing video games, you know, make your own video game. It usually starts with some sort of a passion not related to the idea of work first.

40:07What are you passionate about? Whatever it is. And try making things within that realm of what you're passionate about. And pay attention to the feedback, not so much to listen to the feedback, but just to understand the world better. if someone says i don't like it it'd be better if you did it like this i wouldn't take that as law but it's interesting data in the picture yeah yeah if enough people don't like it that even could be a reason to go further into it it's not good and bad and like and don't like it's like where's the energy? Where's the charge? Where is it combustible? Because the best things are like they have this power to them that seems more than what's holding it.

41:06You pick up two different books. One is exploding with energy and one's dead. They're made from the same materials. They're both filled with words, but some have this like spark in them. And when you read it, you feel it. Lean towards where the energy is, the excitement, the thing that makes you laugh, the thing that upsets you.

41:31Steven Pressfield:I would say, I would add to that, go to the thing that scares you the most. That if you fail that, you would be crushed because that's what's really important to you. That shows you care. It shows you care. Yeah. That's great. Again, that's kind of the theory of resistance, right? Yeah. Resistance is scaring you because it wants you not to do that, not to be a sculptor or not to whatever. Yeah. The other thing I would say to any young person is sometimes it takes a long time. It took me until I was 52 before I really had a book published until I really kind of found myself as a writer. Sometimes it takes time.

42:14Steven Pressfield:Other people fall into it right away, and your first things are hits. That's the other thing is that there's no right or wrong way to do any of these things. Try things, and then depending on what the outcome is, it gives you back feedback of how you want to try it the next time. It's tough these days, though. You know, I think it was a lot easier for us. You could afford an apartment. You could come to move to New York or someplace like that, and you didn't have to have four roommates and live in it. And my heart goes out to young people that are struggling right now. I feel like you can make things wherever you are.

42:50Steven Pressfield:That's true. You can make a movie. You can make a record. You can make anything. Yeah, which is scary, too, because now there's 10 ,000 people doing it. Yeah, I take it as a positive. I think you're more optimistic than I am, Rick, as a general rule.

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44:43Tell me about the connections between the legend of Bhagavad Gita and the Bhagavad Gita.

44:49Steven Pressfield:The legend of Bhagavad Gita was a ripoff. I ripped off the Bhagavad Gita. What is the Bhagavad Gita? The Bhagavad Gita has been called the Hindu Bible. Gandhi supposedly used its principles to free India. And the story of the Bhagavad Gita is essentially a mentor-protege story where the great warrior Arjuna, on the eve of a great battle with chariots and that kind of ancient times, receives spiritual instruction from his charioteer, who happens to be Krishna, in other words, God in human form. And he teaches Arjuna about karma, yoga, duality, non-duality, previous lives, all that sort of thing.

45:38Steven Pressfield:So I just sort of transposed it. Instead of a warrior and a charioteer, it's a golfer and it's caddy. And I love the idea that it was a servant, that when God appears in human form, he doesn't appear as a king or a mighty warrior, he appears as a servant. Like Jesus was a man of sorrows, right? And so I just kind of loved that idea. And I wasn't a big fan of the movie, but the book, I liked. Did it start with the Bhagavad Gita? Right from the beginning, it was always, I'm going to modernize the Bhagavad Gita in today's world in a new context. I mean, you were asking me before if I stole from things, right?

46:18Steven Pressfield:And I told you about that Empedocles quote. Yeah. The Gita was that too. I read it like 50 times in all different translations. And I just always loved it. And it was always beyond me. I never could quite understand it. And I just thought there's something here. I don't know what it is. But that was a book to me that was total, the muse totally seized me. I hardly revised it once. I think I changed like one paragraph in the whole book. It just sort of just came fast. So it was a mystery. Do you know how it got to the golf aspect of it? Where did that come from? I grew up as a caddy. Okay. So that was sort of, yeah, I don't know, but I don't know how that connection happened.

47:03Steven Pressfield:It happened. No, but you had a personal connection to that. Yeah, absolutely. So that made sense. It's a world you're experienced in. Did you have any other considerations before golf? Could it have been in a different? That was it. Right from the beginning, it was this combination. And I thought when I had the idea that it was a completely dumb idea, totally uncommercial. I thought, I am crazy. to be doing this because nobody's going to be interested in this except me. And in fact, when I pitched it to my agent, my screenplay agent, he fired me. He basically said - As a client. Yeah, he says, as a client.

47:42Steven Pressfield:And he was right. He said, you know, I've been working for years to try to get you into the business. Now you're going to drop out for a year, write this thing. You know, they forget you in Hollywood in two weeks. So he thought it was really stupid too. And he was actually an enthusiastic golfer. He loved golf. But he thought, this is just a dumb idea. So I did too. This is kind of like when I talk about self-doubt, but yet I was seized to absolutely do it. And to my amazement, it sold right away. What do you attribute it selling right away to? I don't know. Maybe I just had so much bad luck for the previous 52 years of my life that maybe it all kind of finally the penny came up heads.

48:23Steven Pressfield:you know, because like it really was, my editor happened to be sitting on a plane next to Jake Eberts, who is a producer of Gandhi, Chariots of Fire, The Mission, a lot of things. And he said, I got a book. We want to read it. And Jake optioned it immediately. And his partner in the Sundance catalog was Robert Redford. So he immediately, the whole thing came together like that. Crazy. So nothing has come together like that since, before or since. I feel like your work has an air of ancient story attached to it. You write new stories, but there's some relevance to the past in what you do. Definitely, yeah.

49:11Steven Pressfield:Well, you know that I believe in the muse. That's the way I sort of imagine where stories and ideas come from. Now, you believe in what you call Source. Yes. With a capital S. And I'm wondering, can you tell me how you perceive that? What is Source and what does it do? Source is a universal intelligence for wisdom that knows all, sees all, and is available to all to access. Some people are better at accessing it than others. And there are things you can do to develop your ability to access it. You could also, some people would call it God. Sometimes I call it God. I both think you can call it God, and you don't have to.

50:03And it's still this, why do things grow? Why are there seasons? How does the natural world work? That's all source information making all that happen.

50:17Steven Pressfield:Source intelligence, I'll call it. Does source have an intention? Is it trying to produce or something? it's a living generative force it's pregnant with the new uh-huh so it it's it's it's evolving or it's it's facilitating evolution in some way because if something's new it would have to be evolving right could be or it also could just be starting from scratch like uh-huh you know we don't know that. I suppose that's true too. How do you perceive your own role when you're working with a band or a group? How does that connect to source? What do you provide? What are you doing? I'm a vehicle for source.

51:09So I'm open and I don't have any ideas of my own. I'm blank. I have no say. and when something strikes me, I feel in my body this energetic pulling forward of interest, I'm the one feeling it, but the reason I'm feeling it is because of source.

51:32Steven Pressfield:Now, let's say we have a group, a band, that comes into Shangri-La. Yeah. And let's say they have not yet evolved whatever album or whatever it is they're hoping to do. Mm-hmm. So you say you're a vehicle for Source, but they're obviously a vehicle too. It's going to come out of them. Absolutely. So how does that collaboration work? I'll think of an example from recently, New Strokes album. And on that album, there were some snippets of song ideas. Sometimes it would be a riff, a little jam on a riff. Sometimes it would have more than one part. Sometimes it would be an A part and a B part. But they weren't full songs.

52:16They were just little snippets of ideas. So they would play those ideas and just see where it goes. We wouldn't think about it. We wouldn't discuss it. We wouldn't say, try to do this. We didn't try to do anything. Just play and let it keep going. And then notice what happens. See if anything interesting showed up. Or I can think in one particular case, there was a suggestion of a song that there was only one part and the normal way to go about that would be okay what are going to be the other parts that would be the first thing you do is like we have this part is this a verse or a chorus what's the part that would go with it is there going to be a third part is there going to be a fourth part an outro or an intro or some other part and for some reason again not because i've ever said this before it just seemed obvious to me when they played it for a little while, it's like, what would happen if there are no other parts?

53:11It's just going to be this part. And the only thing that changes is the intensity of playing it. So when you start playing it, it's quiet. And by the end, it's really loud. And the vocals follow that same energy pattern. So it's not song-like structure. It's more like an energetic ride. And we tried that and it turned out really good. Everybody liked it. But I'd never done that before. They'd never done it before. It was just in the moment, something to try. And it could have also gone bad. And that happens all the time too, where let's try it like this. Like that didn't work. You never know. So this real element of play to this.

53:52Absolutely. Yeah. It's all play. It's all experimentation play. It's never, I know how we're going to do it. It's never that. there may be i have an idea of what we can try to start but it's only ever a possible way in and then the feedback that you get from that first experiment tells you ladder softer faster slower

54:14Steven Pressfield:left right abort the mission so it's always so it's always new to you then always it's always a different problem that you've never solved before yeah or sometimes i mean i've been doing it for a long time now so sometimes something comes up it's like this reminds me of something that happened 25 years ago and how we did it that way that time was this do you want to try this this might be helpful but never assume that that's the way it's just anyone who has an inclination of something to try we try it we never judge an idea based on saying the idea we always judge an idea based on, well, play it and let's see what it sounds like.

54:57And then when you hear it, you either like it or you don't. Or you like it but realize it's an even better way.

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57:25Steven Pressfield:When I was working as a screenwriter, I worked with a partner, a guy named Ron Shusette, who did the original Alien with his partner, Dan O 'Banner. He thought of himself as a genius, and in a way, I think he was a genius. And kind of the way it would work, I was like the junior partner of this thing. He was an established guy, and I was a newcomer. was a lot of times I would throw like 10 ideas at him and he would pick the one and he was right almost all the time. And I would sort of, and I still can't answer this. I would kind of marvel. In other words, it sounds like what you do or something.

58:03Steven Pressfield:I would wonder, how did he know? Well, he didn't know. He didn't know. But there was something in him that felt a different energetic charge to that information. It's the same as when you write something, do you ever have the experience of thinking, oh, that's really good? Yes. It's that. And it's not necessarily intellectual. It's some other thing. It's just taste. You just feel it somehow. Yeah. Do you think everybody can feel it or are you someone special that can? No, I think everyone can feel it. so much of our world pushes down our ability to feel it. What's the conventional response to this?

58:50Yes, and none of this has to do with convention. Art and convention don't go together. There's a freedom in the art that happens that is always bucking convention. That's what makes it interesting. So I would say I practiced at it, but I support people practicing it as much as they possibly can in all aspects of their life. Because that's another part of it. It's hard to contain it just to the art world. It's like you're either living your life knowing nothing is impossible, which is the way that an artist sees the world, or you live in a conventional world of do's and don'ts and watch out for that and this is dangerous.

59:36Those established stories, they're not there to help us. They're there to hold us down as artists.

59:44Steven Pressfield:How did you evolve to this place where you were always, as a little kid, were you always thinking in this way? I learned most of being able to talk about it through writing the book. Before writing the book, I didn't understand any of it. It was still instinctually the way I operated. but I didn't understand any of it. And only through years of trying to understand what happens, how does it work, that I got to be able to talk about it in the way that I can. How long did it take you to write the book? It's a creative act we're talking about. Eight years. Eight years, wow. Obviously, it wasn't steadily for eight years.

1:00:26Steven Pressfield:It was bits and pieces. Is that how it evolved? Years of different stages of, you know, collecting ideas, trying to understand them, trying to refine the way that once I could say it at all, then trying to refine the way to say it. And there were big times where it would just hit an impasse of like, okay, I have a thousand pages of really interesting material, but it has no beginning or end and it's impenetrable for anyone other than me to look at. and there were probably two years where it was just in this sort of dead state. I reached out to you. It's like, you know, what do I do? I don't know what to do.

1:01:05Yeah. And there was a possibility that it would never happen. Now, I didn't, I wouldn't say I quit on it. I just don't know that I would ever find a way in, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. And then eventually a series of events cracked windows in how to present it.

1:01:24Steven Pressfield:Uh-huh. What were you trying to accomplish when you write it? Were you trying to express, give a gift to people that would read it? I wanted to share the information of how good things happen in the recording studio. And I quickly realized it's not just the recording studio. Like the recording studio is where I practice it most often. But it's a way of looking at the world. so it applies outside of music. It's not about music at all, really. I work in music, but the practice is not about music at all. And as I said before, were you always like that, Rick, even as a little kid, or did this evolve at a certain...

1:02:10Well, I will say when I was 14, I learned to meditate. And most of the other kids I went to school with took drugs and drank, and I meditated. And I have a feeling that may have something to do with it, but I don't know. I can't say for sure. But I do know in meditation, I got much more grounded in myself. And through that, when I really like something or don't like something or hear something that everyone agrees with, I'm comfortable not agreeing. You know, I'm comfortable being an outcast, essentially. And I've felt that way my whole life.

1:02:50Steven Pressfield:I'm trying to imagine myself as like if I'm a member of a group and I'm coming here to Shangri-La, you're going to work with us, right? Yeah. And tell me if this is at all what it is. I've heard it said that like a movie director working with an actor, that the best thing that he or she could do is to create an environment where the actor feels safe. that they can really let it out in their performance and not feel like anybody's going to laugh at them or anything like that. Is that kind of what you do? It's definitely one of the aspects is creating the space where you can feel like you can be naked and it's safe and free.

1:03:32There are no boundaries. A truly judgment-free zone, which is also odd. It's a judgment-free zone, yet a lot of the time my job is to be critical. Uh-huh, yeah. So it's like walking that line of like, how do we have this totally free zone where anything can happen and be able to talk about, hmm, this seemed to work better than this. What do you think?

1:03:57Steven Pressfield:And how do you create that safety for a group? I'm quite sure you will not just tell them that. One of the first things I think is that there are no additional people around. There's no audience. there's usually the artist, me, and a technical person. And the technical person usually doesn't say anything. And I usually draw out the artist through conversation, asking them, you know, what's this about? How long would you be working with a group? It could be days, it could be months, it could be years. Wow. There's no right way. And for each artist, it's also different. Some artists need a lot of notes and information from me, and some need practically none.

1:04:47And I'm fine with that. If I don't say a word, if it's coming out well, and if they don't need more than me sitting in the room and allowing it to happen, I'm fine with that.

1:05:00Steven Pressfield:Now, I know you've said that by talking to a band, you say, don't try to write the music that you think is going to be a hit. Yeah. Or don't think about that. Just do what you love. Yeah. Which is sort of the same as acting without attachment to the outcome. Yes. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. No one knows what a hit sounds like. If I ask you what a hit sounds like, you could only give me a reference from the past of what a hit sounds like. True. So if you have the job, I want to write a hit, what's my reference point, something from the past, it'll somehow be a derivative work. It's not so interesting.

1:05:43Usually the one that was a hit last time was not a derivative work. So I don't think you get to it by aiming at it. Somewhere at some point in time, someone made something true to themselves and that became a hit. over the course of my career all the things i've made that were successful i never considered hit radio sales any of those things ever not for a second i always thought about what's the thing i want to hear what's the thing i'm excited to play for a friend that's it i have a friend with good taste i can't wait till he hears this that's it and when it gets to the point where i'm excited to play it for a friend with good taste it's ready to share with the world.

1:06:26It's done. That part happens fast. And that's a new thing. I didn't always know that. I used to maybe think and maybe even overthink things that were good for a long time. Is it the very best version it could ever be? Is there anything else we could ever possibly do? And you decided against that? Like it comes quicker than that. It comes faster. Once it sounds good, we're in a safe zone. And then any additional things we want to try are fine but we always have to a b it back with the first time it sounded good to us and make sure it's better than that uh-huh you know what i'm saying and sometimes it's not and sometimes with the records i make we don't know we're making an album when it's happening we're preparing to make an album but then when we go to make the album it's not as good as the preparation uh-huh so then in those cases the preparation is the album ah that's interesting

1:07:20Steven Pressfield:I was talking to a friend of mine, Frank Oz, and he was saying how in his role as a director, and he was saying that if a script, a movie script, might go through 14, 17 drafts, he'll sometimes say, let me look at the first draft. And then that will be the one, right? Yeah. And it's certainly a phenomenon we've all experienced, right? You catch lightning in the bottle and you try to make it better and better, and it just doesn't happen like that. Yeah, and sometimes it's like a house of cards where you catch lightning in a bottle. You might even think, oh, it's pretty good. I imagine it's going to be really great when it's done.

1:08:01And then any little change you do or anything you try, the whole thing crumbles.

1:08:06Steven Pressfield:Yeah, yeah. Let me get to a deeper question on the subject of source, which I'm really interested in, Rick. What does source imply about the nature of the universe? I know what I would answer in my concept of the muse, but I want to hear what you would say. Well, I think source supplies everything, light and dark. It's universal. I believe like anyone who creates anything, we're making it with a good intention. We all are doing our best in reflection of source. Mm-hmm. Tell me about your spiritual life. It's based around writings, the concept. Like, I believe in the goddess. I believe that things come from another dimension of reality and that here on the material plane, we're stuck in our ego, no good, and that writing has taught me to respect and to invoke the higher plane, where the ideas come from, and that higher plane is the plane of the soul or the plane of the self.

1:09:13Steven Pressfield:And I think that it's our job here in this material plane to live according to those laws, the laws of the higher level. Not that I can do that, but art or creating art or writing is a great discipline. That's my spiritual discipline. Beautiful. And where do you think your interest in ancient things comes from? Wow, that's a great question. I'm not even sure, but boy, I have it, you know? Yeah. I'm at home back there, particularly in ancient Greece, maybe previous lives, something like that, probably. But also I think that was a better world. It had its own corruption, but it's not as corrupted as the modern world is.

1:09:57Steven Pressfield:And I think when you read Homer, you read Thucydides, you read Xenophon, you read Plato, any of those people, at least to me, It's like pure mountain spring water. There's no existentialism. It's not jaded. And they believed in God, in the gods. Yeah, I don't know why I can put my finger on why it appeals to me, but it really, like for one thing, like in Gates of Fire, about the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, I wanted to write about honor. But you cannot write a book set in the modern world about honor because there is none. They'd laugh you out of the room if a character said something. But if you go back to the ancient Spartans and they talk about honor, they can deal with an absolute straight face and the reader can relate to it.

1:10:47Steven Pressfield:And I think that people today who are hungry for something about honor, they immediately glom onto those characters and go, whether they say this or not, boy, I wish I was back there and I could be one of those guys. Have you ever been to Greece? Yeah. Tell me about the experience of walking around there, considering your interests. What's it like? Well, like when I went to Delphi, the Oracle of Apollo, a lot of tourists, that kind of thing. It's kind of out in the country. You know, it's a mountainous sort of region where the priestesses used to go down into a cleft in the earth where vapors were coming up, and they would kind of get high on that, and they would oraculate.

1:11:30Steven Pressfield:and I definitely felt when I was there that those gods are still alive, you know, and Apollo is still here. He hasn't gone away and sometimes, you know, I have a lot of fans in Greece. They'll write to me sometimes and say, we're so screwed up today, you know, what do we need to do? And I answer, I say, forgive me, go back to those gods. Forget Christianity. That was like the worst thing that ever happened to Greece. I mean, Apollo, Zeus, they're there. But also, all of those places have a kind of a magic to me, like the Olympic Stadium. There it is. It's grass. It's not a... Yeah. But just to think of the stuff that happened there.

1:12:11Steven Pressfield:And you can feel the presence when you're there. You can definitely feel the presence. It's still there. Yeah. Yeah. And the weird part is that the Greeks don't really value that as much as like us Americans, if you go to Gettysburg, it's like Disneyland, right? I mean, if they've got Pickett's Charge was here and the people will tell you, whereas you go to Thermopylae, it's like there's a private owner, owns the land. It's a farmer. He's farming the land. I went to Marathon. They have the big mound where all of the bodies are still there from that battle. And the place was empty except for a little kiosk with a lady sitting in there, and I came up and I said, do I need to pay?

1:12:54Steven Pressfield:She just said, go in. Of course, the Acropolis and all that sort of stuff, that they take seriously. But a lot of the stuff, I guess it's so present to them that they don't even think about it.

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