0:00
(upbeat music)
0:02
- This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
0:21
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:22
Let's get into it.
0:23
All right guys, today we got a return guest
0:25
to the show, his name is Stephen Pressfield.
0:27
He is the author of historical fiction,
0:28
nonfiction in screenplays.
0:30
His first book went super, super mega viral.
0:32
It was The Legend of Bagger Vance,
0:33
which was later turned into a movie
0:35
that was directed by Robert Redford
0:37
and it starred Will Smith, Charlize Theron and Matt Damon.
0:40
His second book was Gates of Fire,
0:42
which is about the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae.
0:44
And the book is on our list of 100 books
0:46
every modern Christian man should read lists.
0:48
It is an absolute classic,
0:49
but those aren't his only classics.
0:50
He has some other ones, a new classic
0:52
that he just added recently, which is a man at arms,
0:54
but he also wrote The War of Art, Turning Pro,
0:57
Do the Work, The Warrior Ethos, Tides of War
0:59
and literally over a dozen other books.
1:01
He's a very, very prominent author.
1:03
He's been on episodes 151 and 182 of this podcast.
1:06
In this podcast, we talk about a new book,
1:08
a new nonfiction book that he has
1:10
that really tries to encourage guys to actually do the work.
1:13
And I know he's written a book called Do the Work,
1:15
but giving guys a little bit more tangible knowledge
1:18
in these bite-sized little chapters
1:19
of how they can force themselves to do these things.
1:21
'Cause again, in this episode,
1:23
we talk about the difference between, you know,
1:24
discipline and motivation.
1:26
We talk about the muse.
1:28
And we get into kind of a deep conversation.
1:29
I pressed him a few times on the muse
1:31
and how he actually prays to the muse
1:33
and what does that mean,
1:34
especially within the context of a Judeo-Christian ethic
1:36
or a Christian worldview that I have.
1:39
But we talk about so many amazing things
1:41
in this particular interview.
1:43
And the thing about his book and about his style
1:45
even during podcasting is there are little nuggets.
1:48
There are little sticky nuggets of facts
1:50
that will help you to just do the things
1:52
that you know you need to do.
1:53
'Cause he even said in the interview,
1:55
like there are times whenever you're just,
1:56
you know the hard thing is the thing
1:58
that will lead you to a good thing.
2:00
But a lot of us choose to not do that.
2:02
Even at one point in the interview,
2:03
he kind of turned it around on me
2:04
and he asked me a couple of questions.
2:06
So I think you guys will enjoy that.
2:07
But I always enjoy my time with Stephen Pressfield.
2:09
He is one of our favorite guys to talk to on the show.
2:11
And every time he has a book that comes out,
2:13
which is a couple of times a year,
2:14
he will be coming back on.
2:15
So guys, without further ado, let's get into it.
2:19
Stephen Pressfield, welcome back
2:20
to Undaunted Life and Man's podcast.
2:22
- Thank you, Kyle.
2:23
It's great to be back.
2:24
- Thanks for having me.
2:25
- Hey, if you keep writing books,
2:26
you know that you can just keep coming back on.
2:28
I think this is your third appearance.
2:30
So, you know, just keep turning them out, okay?
2:32
- Well, then I'll be seeing you every six months
2:34
'cause that's kind of the way it's going.
2:36
- Okay, well, see, that's the thing is,
2:38
and we're gonna get into that today.
2:39
Part of the reason why you're so prolific as a writer
2:41
is because you actually do the work
2:42
of writing No Pun intended for people
2:44
that know your back catalog.
2:45
But I did want to kind of start someplace
2:47
because I don't think I embarrassed you enough
2:50
in the first two times you appeared on the show
2:52
that I want to make you a little sheepish
2:54
from the very, very beginning
2:55
'cause you're a humble guy.
2:56
You like to deflect compliments and things like that.
3:00
But your name comes up all the time
3:03
in the mouths of some very, very prominent people.
3:06
Joe Rogan will mention you once a month
3:08
or once every couple of months and mention your work.
3:11
Jack Carr, obviously, who's having the biggest summer
3:15
possible with the release of his fifth novel
3:18
and the release of the "Terminalist" series on Amazon
3:21
and the rerelease of the "Terminalist" book.
3:23
I mean, he is about to shoot off to the moon
3:26
and he gives you a ton of credit
3:29
and just about every opportunity he gets,
3:31
he mentions Steven Pressfield.
3:33
So how does that make you feel?
3:35
Like, let's dig in a little bit.
3:36
You can be a little bit cocky, that's okay.
3:38
- Maybe I am a humble guy, Kyle,
3:43
'cause it somehow, or maybe this is a character flaw,
3:47
but that certainly doesn't go to my head in any way, you know?
3:52
I mean, I'm happy that stuff I've done, you know,
3:56
has influenced people in a positive way.
3:59
But, you know, it's always on to the next book
4:03
and the next, you know, whatever the next challenge is
4:05
and are you up for that one, you know?
4:08
So that's sort of the way I kind of,
4:13
I don't know, judge myself or rate myself, but in any event,
4:16
thanks for the very kind words, I appreciate it.
4:18
- I'm gonna force you to talk about it a little bit further.
4:20
Has there been a time, because I'll say this,
4:23
I'll put it in the context of me,
4:24
which is a much, much smaller scale compared to you,
4:26
but when someone sends me an email
4:28
and they say, you know, hey, I'm 17 years old
4:31
and your show has meant so much to me,
4:32
I've grown so much as a young man,
4:34
I started listening at the age of 15,
4:35
I don't know what to do with that.
4:37
And then I get a grown man in his 50s,
4:39
that's like, Kyle, I've been listening to your show
4:40
and I'm a more focused husband,
4:43
I'm doing better at work and I'm doing these things
4:44
and I'm like, I just remember,
4:46
I'm just a dude that throws on a black t-shirt
4:48
and hops in front of a microphone a few times a week,
4:50
but the impact I'm having and the impact
4:53
that the show is having humbly is,
4:56
well, it is humbling to me.
4:57
Like, I say that humbly, but it is humbling to me
4:59
because there are times when I'm like,
5:01
man, I don't really wanna record right now
5:02
or I don't really know if this stuff is landing,
5:04
but it is landing.
5:05
So have you had times like that either with someone
5:07
that is prolific or maybe even someone
5:09
to just write you an email or drops you a DM
5:11
or comes up to you on the street where it's like,
5:13
wow, I guess I am having a much bigger impact
5:16
than I ever would have thought possible
5:17
when I was trying to avoid going to Vietnam years ago.
5:20
(laughing)
5:22
- You know, it is humbling, I guess.
5:24
Maybe that's the word, but I think like Seth Goden,
5:29
I know he is, he definitely, his agenda
5:34
as he says himself is to create change.
5:38
He really wants to get his ideas out there
5:40
and change the world, but I don't know about you,
5:42
but for me, like in books like The War of Art
5:45
or Turning Pro or the other books of mine
5:47
that I've had in effect, I'm really writing for myself.
5:51
My motivation, I've heard people say,
5:55
oh, you should, as a writer, you should sort of imagine
5:58
an avatar of your typical reader
6:01
and figure out what you're trying to address to them,
6:04
but I don't do it that way.
6:05
I'm just kind of writing for myself.
6:07
I'm just trying to sort of express the sort of the world
6:11
as I see it, the inner world as I see it.
6:14
And if it helps people, that's great.
6:16
But yeah, it's humbling.
6:19
I really don't know what to do with it.
6:21
- Well, I won't make you keep talking about it,
6:23
but I will say that for me, like I'll get complimented
6:25
off air and you've done so with me.
6:27
You were one of the earliest people
6:28
to compliment my interviewing style.
6:29
And you know, that's very awesome to hear
6:32
from someone like you, but part of my interviewing style
6:34
is I'm not necessarily, I'm thinking about
6:37
what's interesting to me and what's exciting to me
6:40
and what ends up happening is my listener,
6:42
my end user of this podcast is like,
6:44
yeah, I wanted to know that too.
6:46
And every now and then I'll miss the mark and say,
6:48
someone will say, you know, why didn't you ask them this?
6:49
And why didn't you talk about this book
6:50
or this quote or whatever?
6:51
And that's fine.
6:52
But like I think about myself and I try to be inquisitive
6:56
because I know my audience mirrors
6:57
a lot of the same attitudes that I do.
6:59
And if they don't, some of the best compliments
7:01
I ever get are Kyle, I don't always agree with you,
7:03
but in whatever's after the but I'm fine with
7:06
because that means they're still listening,
7:07
they're still engaged.
7:08
So I think that's really, really important that
7:10
if it's interesting to you,
7:12
whenever you think about your audience, you know,
7:14
air quotes, your audience, when you imagine
7:16
that they would be reflecting something
7:18
that you're trying to bring out in your work, right?
7:20
- Yeah, but it's the black t-shirt, Kyle.
7:23
That's the thing, that's the key.
7:24
- Yeah, absolutely.
7:25
That's my calling card.
7:27
And people think I own one shirt.
7:30
It's like, guys, guys, like they do make multiples
7:32
of these shirts and they do all fit me.
7:34
But we do need to get into your new book
7:36
because you've got a new book out guys,
7:38
if you're listening this on time,
7:39
it is out, is available, it is in the show note
7:41
so you can go and pick it up.
7:42
So if you would, give us a 30,000 foot overview
7:45
of this new book that you wrote for us.
7:47
- Well, the new book is called
7:48
Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be.
7:51
And it's in the same vein of as the War of Art
7:54
or Turning Pro or Do the Work.
7:57
And, but it comes at it from a slightly different angle.
8:01
And it starts with the idea of,
8:07
if you wanna be a writer,
8:09
you know, people say, oh, I wanna be a writer,
8:10
I wanna be something, you wanna be a writer,
8:12
put your ass in front of one of these things, you know?
8:15
There's magic.
8:16
If you wanna dance, get into the studio.
8:19
If you wanna paint, get up in front of an easel, right?
8:22
So on and so forth.
8:23
There's real magic in physically moving your body
8:28
to the place where your dream can come true.
8:31
And then the book takes it into deeper levels
8:34
and deeper levels than that
8:36
until it becomes fairly spiritual,
8:38
which maybe we'll get into that a little bit
8:40
as we talk today, Kyle.
8:42
But the whole idea of taking your material person,
8:47
your ego, your commitment, the stuff that's physical,
8:51
that's in this world and putting it in the place
8:56
where your calling is, where your dream is,
8:59
where the higher your higher self is,
9:03
that's, if there's an answer, that's it, you know?
9:07
And if there's a reason why we're on this planet,
9:09
if you ask me, that's it too.
9:12
- Absolutely.
9:13
We will 100% dive into some of those heavier topics,
9:16
but to kind of stay, say kind of hovering over the book
9:19
a little bit, there's a couple of interesting things
9:21
about this book.
9:22
The first thing is that guys, when you get it,
9:24
whether you get the digital version or the physical version,
9:26
these are kind of short one page chapters,
9:30
they're almost like journal entries.
9:31
And so like this, I don't know that you necessarily
9:34
should use it this way, but like, if you're a bathroom reader,
9:37
like you could get a couple of chapters knocked out
9:39
of this book.
9:40
Yeah, but don't use it while you're on the toilet,
9:43
just like read it while you're on the toilet.
9:45
But also, my understanding is, is this is your first
9:48
kind of foray into self publishing, if I got that correct.
9:51
So talk to me a little bit about why you wrote it
9:53
the way that you did and then why not putting out,
9:55
put it out with, you know, a publishing house,
9:57
which you've done for a couple of dozen books.
9:59
Well, you know, when I first wrote the War of Art,
10:03
which was like 20 years ago, it was really a short book,
10:07
at least it seemed at the time, like a really short book.
10:10
Now I look at it, it looks like War and Peace.
10:12
It's like so big and so long.
10:14
And people's attention spans have shortened, you know?
10:18
And so, I don't know, the style that the War of Art
10:21
was written in, which was in same sort of short,
10:24
punchy paragraphs, I found to be exactly right
10:28
for this kind of subject.
10:30
And so I've kind of shortened them a little bit.
10:32
And I don't mind at all having a chapter
10:35
that's three sentences long, because I think
10:39
something about this material, the material of digging
10:41
into your own heart and finding where you're going,
10:45
it lends itself to that sort of, I don't wanna say
10:49
parable style, but a really short thing
10:52
that makes you think, you know?
10:53
I would say about this book, like the War of Art,
10:56
that you read a chapter, you gotta kind of stop for a second,
10:59
you know, and absorb it a little.
11:02
It isn't something where you just flow, flow, flow.
11:05
And as far as self-publishing, I have had a company,
11:09
Black Irish Books that published the War of Art
11:13
with my partner, Sean Coyne, but we've sort of gone
11:17
in different directions.
11:19
And so, in order to keep publishing and keep control of it,
11:23
I've had to start my own little company again.
11:26
And that's what, put your ass where your heart wants to be,
11:30
is coming out under.
11:31
And it's also, you know, it's a emblematic of that concept.
11:36
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12:04
- Yeah, absolutely.
12:05
One word that I wrote down as you were describing the book,
12:08
but also as I was reading it is sticky.
12:10
And so sometimes when you have a book that is so dense,
12:13
like maybe you're reading a book about philosophy
12:15
or even history or theology or something like that,
12:18
it's like there's so much packed into these chapters.
12:21
And I'm kind of stupid.
12:22
And so if it's a 10-page chapter or less, I love that book.
12:25
But then you have these tones, these 500-page books
12:28
that are like four chapters and it's like,
12:29
no, I can't possibly get through this entire thing,
12:32
but it's so small and so bite-sized
12:34
that these concepts do become a little bit sticky.
12:37
And right from the beginning of the book,
12:39
and this is helpful to anybody
12:40
who maybe hasn't read some of your nonfiction,
12:43
but you talk about resistance
12:44
and that's capital R resistance.
12:47
And really that's a through point.
12:49
When Joe Rogan mentions you on his show,
12:50
he almost always mentions Stephen Pressfield
12:52
and resistance, like he mentions that in the same breath.
12:55
So talk to us a little bit for those
12:56
that are not familiar with your work.
12:57
What is capital R resistance?
13:00
- That's a great question.
13:01
And I'm gonna go back to this graphic
13:04
that I just showed a little bit.
13:05
When you sit down, if you're a writer,
13:08
then you sit down in front of one of these things.
13:10
- He's holding up his keyboard, gentlemen.
13:12
He's holding it up.
13:13
- You feel radiating off of that keyboard,
13:17
a negative force that is like trying to stop you
13:22
from doing your work,
13:23
trying to make you go to the beach,
13:25
trying to make you go back to bed,
13:27
trying to make you give in to some kind of distraction.
13:29
It's the same sort of principle
13:31
as if you've ever bought a treadmill and brought it home
13:36
and you find it collecting dust in the attic.
13:39
Like why is that happening?
13:41
Why when you join a gym,
13:42
do you find that it's hard to go, right?
13:47
There is a force, a negative force that I'm convinced is,
13:51
first of all, I know it's universal
13:53
because I've gotten thousands of emails
13:56
from people writing into this thing.
13:57
And in fact, I would say,
14:00
if there's any sort of quote unquote secret
14:04
to life or to success,
14:06
it's learning to overcome somehow
14:09
that force of self-sabotage.
14:12
I say it in the War of Art that as a writer,
14:17
the writing is not the hard part.
14:20
What's hard is sitting down to write.
14:23
And what keeps us from sitting down
14:25
is this negative force that I call resistance
14:28
with a capital R.
14:30
- The thing that's interesting about putting it
14:31
in those terms is a lot of people are fighting battles,
14:34
but they haven't defined their enemy yet.
14:36
So imagine being a country that's trying to fight
14:38
your enemies and yet you can't name them.
14:40
Like that kind of gets into the political world,
14:42
which we'll stay out of for today.
14:43
But that kind of reminded me of something
14:45
from chapter 32 of your book.
14:46
'Cause you have a quote in chapter 32
14:48
from a physical trainer named T.R. Goodman
14:50
and it's not habit, it's your life.
14:53
And so that's come up for me in a lot of ways
14:55
'cause people say like,
14:56
"Hey Kyle, what are you training for?"
14:58
'Cause I train a lot physically.
14:59
I essentially work out every day.
15:00
I work out really, really, really hard.
15:02
That's kind of my self-torture and that's kind of like
15:05
I tear myself down to build myself up.
15:07
But it's always the difference between motivation
15:10
and discipline.
15:11
Before I got on here today, I did squat.
15:14
I don't like doing squat.
15:15
I don't like putting a whole bunch of weight on my back,
15:18
squatting down below 90 and then coming back up
15:20
and doing that over and over and over.
15:22
And I work out my garage gym,
15:23
which is not temperature, climate controlled.
15:25
It's already 100 degrees here in Oklahoma this morning.
15:28
And you just deal with it.
15:29
And if it was minus five degrees,
15:31
you go out in the garage and you just deal with it.
15:33
And it never has to do with motivation, Stephen.
15:35
Because if you wait for the motivation bug to bite you
15:38
or to strike you in the tip of your head,
15:42
it's never gonna work for you.
15:43
Like how often are you so unbelievably motivated
15:46
to sit down in front of a keyboard?
15:48
But like motivation is it's part of this movement
15:51
towards the self-helpy kind of new agey understanding
15:54
of motivation.
15:55
It's like, no, no, you have to do the work.
15:57
You have to force yourself to do the work, right?
16:00
- There seems to be a law of life
16:03
that the things that are really good for you hurt, right?
16:07
- All the time.
16:08
- You don't wanna do them.
16:10
Again, it's resistant to set capital R.
16:13
That's what makes it hard, right?
16:14
I'm a gym person too.
16:16
I've been at the gym this morning.
16:17
I've done my thing, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
16:20
And the reason I do it, I'm sure is the same reason you do it,
16:23
that it gets the day going.
16:25
Because when I wake up in the morning,
16:27
my resistance hits me as soon as I open my eyes.
16:32
- Right.
16:33
- The resistance to do the writing for today,
16:36
doing whatever else it is.
16:39
And so for me, physical exercise, again,
16:42
when I say put your ass where your heart wants to be,
16:45
that is the gym for me.
16:46
Putting your physical ass there in the squat rack,
16:50
wherever it is, and doing something you don't wanna do
16:55
gets that rhythm going, gets the mojo going.
16:58
Because you know that that's what you're gonna have to do
17:00
for the rest of the day, is doing things
17:03
you don't really want to do.
17:05
On the other hand, if you did all day long,
17:08
the things that you do wanna do,
17:10
you'd go into the toilet in a week and a half.
17:12
A lot of people live that way.
17:15
- I remember when Jordan Peterson was talking,
17:16
he's mentioned this several times,
17:17
but he's talked to people about their ideal life,
17:20
and they always describe kind of the beach,
17:22
and you know, Pina Coladas and that type of thing.
17:24
And then he's basically like, okay,
17:26
then after two weeks, what are you gonna do?
17:28
Like human beings need struggle,
17:30
but you're absolutely right, Stephen.
17:31
Like the moment my alarm goes off in the morning
17:34
or I hear my son wake up or something like that,
17:36
I think to myself in that exact moment,
17:38
not I have to pee, or, oh, look at all the stuff
17:41
I have to do today, it's like,
17:42
there's no way I'm gonna be able to work out today.
17:43
There's simply no way I'm not gonna be able
17:46
to physically get out of this bed
17:48
and put on my clothes and go to the gym.
17:49
And like the thing is, it's like,
17:50
my gym's not away from me.
17:52
My gym is in my garage, and so I've done all I can
17:55
to tell resistance to go pound sand,
17:57
because resistance is in your car keys,
18:00
and it's in your gas tank,
18:01
and it's in the commute to the gym,
18:03
and it's in the person that you don't like anymore,
18:05
that works out at the same time that you do,
18:07
all that's resistant, so I try to tell guys,
18:09
create as, try to minimize the size of resistance
18:13
as much as possible to kind of bring it down to size,
18:15
and that means taking away those barriers to entry.
18:19
And one of those things you talked about,
18:20
and you kind of teed it up a little bit from the beginning.
18:22
For a lot of people, whether you're an artist,
18:24
or a content creator, or an entrepreneur,
18:27
there's a little bit of resistance
18:29
in terms of where you're located.
18:30
And so you talk about that in the book,
18:31
you talk about how you might need to move
18:33
to one of these hubs if you wanna do a certain thing.
18:35
So maybe there's the current hub for Jiu Jitsu
18:38
is now Austin, Texas.
18:40
Maybe if it's the arts, like theater,
18:42
maybe it's New York City.
18:43
If it's learning how to run cattle, maybe it's Wyoming,
18:47
like there's all these different hubs of things.
18:49
But as soon as I read that, Steven, I gotta be honest,
18:51
I thought, is that actually true though,
18:54
in this post-COVID world that we live in,
18:56
this post-Zoom meeting for everything?
18:58
Look at how you and I are connecting,
19:00
we've never met in person,
19:01
and yet this is our third time hanging out together over Zoom.
19:04
So for a lot of businesses, do you actually have to move?
19:08
Because I'm running this business
19:09
from right in the middle of Oklahoma
19:11
and it seems to be going okay.
19:12
- Yeah, I don't think you actually do have to move
19:15
because in a way, metaphorically, because of the web,
19:19
because of Zoom, because of Zencaster,
19:22
you can make yourself in the hub of things
19:25
just sitting right where you are.
19:27
And also, there's another chapter in the book
19:29
where I talk about Steven King, who lives in Maine
19:33
and he lives in Sarasota, Florida,
19:35
or William Faulkner, who lived all his life
19:38
in Oxford, Mississippi.
19:40
And did they have to go to Paris?
19:42
Did they have to go to someplace like that?
19:44
And the answer is, in a way, they were so committed
19:48
and so true to their own heart
19:51
that wherever they were,
19:52
was like their own personal hotspot, right?
19:55
They brought that with them.
19:56
So it really didn't matter.
19:57
They could go down a Starbucks jack car.
20:00
It's a great guy for doing his writing
20:02
in the craziest places, you know?
20:04
I mean, in coffee shops and in airport, waiting rooms,
20:08
somehow he's able to do that because he's so focused
20:12
that he'd had his own sort of personal psychological hotspot
20:16
that he produces.
20:17
But I will also say that the idea of,
20:20
if you wanna be a dancer, you wanna be a ballet dancer,
20:23
it sure makes sense to go to New York
20:26
or to someplace where there are a number of ballet companies
20:29
where you can get the training
20:31
where you can make friends and so on and so forth.
20:33
But you're right.
20:34
In the post-COVID world of Zoom and Zincaster,
20:37
you can create your own Paris right where you are.
20:42
- And part of it, Steven, is becoming undeniable.
20:44
And so some people will talk about in terms
20:46
of being uncancelable.
20:47
So Joe Rogan's so big, he can't be canceled.
20:50
So there's his third free mention on this show so far.
20:52
But like, part of it is,
20:53
if you're so good at something you can be undeniable,
20:55
one of my mentors is a guy named John Eldridge.
20:57
He wrote basically the seminal Christian men's ministry book
21:00
ever about 20 years ago called "Wild at Heart",
21:02
sold over a million copies.
21:04
Well, he doesn't really travel very much to speak.
21:06
People come to him, you know, a couple of times a year,
21:09
he'll do these conferences and it's like,
21:11
he lives in Colorado, so if you wanna see him speak,
21:13
you come to Colorado, but not just anybody can do that, right?
21:17
Like the best band of all time can probably stay in Vegas
21:21
and you come to Vegas to see them.
21:23
But, you know, for the most part,
21:24
if you want your stuff to be seen,
21:25
you have to go on tour.
21:26
So the point is well taken.
21:28
I did wanna get into chapter 11.
21:30
I thought this was a very interesting part of your book
21:33
because you talk about a guy named Mike Warner
21:35
who was teaching you about how to evaluate material.
21:39
So he kind of taught you to separate the wheat
21:41
from the chaff to a certain degree.
21:43
So overall, just evaluating, you know,
21:45
what's necessary here.
21:46
You talk about how, you know,
21:48
you had some of your books that were so big
21:50
and you didn't think you could cut anything
21:51
and then you shrunk it down and it made it even better
21:54
and you had to go through that process.
21:55
But in addition to evaluating material,
21:57
the lesson I took from that chapter, Stephen,
21:59
was evaluating personal talent.
22:01
'Cause I know that there are a lot of people right now.
22:03
So podcasting is an easy one.
22:04
How easy is it to buy a microphone,
22:07
hook it up to a recorder and then put it out there
22:09
on Apple podcast and Spotify and everywhere else?
22:11
It's super easy.
22:13
The barrier to entry is really, really, really low.
22:15
So what we have now is we literally have millions
22:19
of crappy podcasts from people that should not be talking
22:23
out loud to anybody.
22:25
And that's why their audiences stay small.
22:27
That's why they get frustrated and they quit doing it
22:29
after three months, four months, that type of a thing.
22:32
And so part of it, I think, is because people think
22:34
that just because they can do something that they should,
22:37
right, just 'cause you can go up in front of a group
22:39
of judges on American Idol and sing,
22:42
doesn't mean you're good at it.
22:43
So talk to me a little bit about the lesson
22:45
that Mike Werner taught you in terms of evaluating material
22:47
but also how that spans out to just evaluating
22:49
your overall personal talent level.
22:52
- That's a great question.
22:53
I mean, now evaluating material for that,
22:55
that's, I don't know if that quite relates to this, Kyle,
22:58
but in that case, it was, it actually was my writing partner
23:02
at the time, a guy named Ron Schusette,
23:04
who did the original "Alien" and "Total Rico" and stuff like that.
23:07
And the way it would sort of, I learned from him was,
23:10
I would throw like 10 ideas at him.
23:13
It was just the two of us working.
23:14
And he would reject nine of them, right at,
23:16
nah, nah, nah, it's so good.
23:18
And then he picked the one.
23:19
And when I, and over and over, I would say he was right.
23:23
That's the one good idea.
23:25
Why couldn't I pick that one idea?
23:27
Why was I confused with the other nine?
23:30
And I think that over time, when you're with somebody
23:33
that just has an instinct for that,
23:35
you begin to sort of imbibe it otherwise.
23:37
Now, talking about podcasting and stuff like that,
23:41
in a way, I think it's good that a lot of people
23:44
are doing it because the wheat will be separated
23:47
from the chaff as time goes along.
23:49
But one of the things I've learned in my own career,
23:52
it took me like almost 30 years from the time I left a job
23:57
to try to start to write until I had a novel published.
24:01
And so what was going on through all that time?
24:03
I was doing a lot of [inaudible] writing.
24:05
I was that podcaster that shouldn't have invested
24:10
in a microphone, but the truth is, you get better.
24:15
Over time, you get better.
24:17
You were probably a natural right away, Kyle,
24:20
but a lot of people are not.
24:21
A lot of people take their time.
24:23
And in any event, I applaud anybody that tries that,
24:27
that tries podcasting or something like that.
24:29
Maybe that's not their exact mentee,
24:32
maybe they'll shift and find something else,
24:35
but at least it's brave to put yourself out there.
24:38
But I wanted to ask you a question in your own life.
24:40
Okay, yeah.
24:41
And you were just talking about how you get up in the morning
24:43
and the first thing you do is you work out
24:45
whether you don't want to do it or not.
24:47
- Right.
24:47
- Was there a moment for you in your life
24:51
when you sort of realized that that would work for you
24:56
or were you always like that?
24:58
- So I didn't grow up in a militaristic family.
25:02
I didn't grow up in a highly disciplined family
25:04
for anything other than like homework.
25:06
Like I would get, if I got bees on my report card,
25:08
I would be grounded, like especially if it was a class
25:11
that I could get an A in, right?
25:13
But for me, it was actually because when I was younger,
25:18
I was always athletic, but I was very overweight as a kid.
25:22
I was very active, but my family fed me really awful,
25:26
terrible food, maybe they didn't know any better,
25:28
maybe they hated me, I don't know.
25:30
But I was very, very overweight as a kid.
25:32
And so I was constantly being made fun of for my weight.
25:36
And around like eighth, ninth grade,
25:39
just like what happens with a lot of boys is you grow upwards.
25:42
Like in one baseball summer, I had three different pairs
25:45
of cleats because my feet were growing so fast.
25:48
Like I had nine or 10 ingrown toenails at a time
25:50
because my feet were going faster than my toenails, right?
25:53
And so I'm a little bit skinnier.
25:55
I'm getting attention from girls.
25:57
Like my athletic friends are looking to me
26:00
for a little bit of that.
26:01
And then I guess, I remember Steven,
26:03
even when I was a little kid, I was really into pro wrestling
26:05
and you had Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior
26:07
and Macho Man Randy Savage.
26:08
And these were these Adonis looking like men.
26:10
And I remember just looking at the magazines
26:12
being like, oh man, one of these days whenever I'm a big kid,
26:16
like I'm gonna have muscles like that too.
26:18
And so I guess it was always an aspirational identity,
26:21
but then it kind of turned into,
26:23
this is what disciplined people do.
26:25
They do hard stuff that no one else is willing to do.
26:29
And so part of it is competitive.
26:31
It's like whenever you're asleep,
26:33
whenever you're hitting the snooze button,
26:34
I'm up and I'm getting after.
26:37
And so it's kind of that inner FU,
26:39
I'm gonna do it regardless of whether you tell me
26:40
I should or not because I don't work out with anybody.
26:43
I don't have a trainer telling me what to do.
26:45
It is all me.
26:46
So if I don't work out, nobody knows about it.
26:49
Accept me.
26:49
And I'm unwilling to lead a lifestyle
26:52
that's gonna be accepting of taking three or four weeks off
26:55
just because I feel like it.
26:57
- Ah, okay, great answer.
26:58
Thank you.
26:59
- Well, hey, I mean, we can keep turning this interview
27:02
around if you like, I thought this was my show, Stephen.
27:04
But you can ask me, you can ask me whatever you want.
27:07
You have carte blanche, but I do have another question
27:09
for you because it actually relates to your answer
27:11
about chapter 11, because in chapter 14,
27:14
I mean, I mean, again, it took you decades
27:16
before you were a success, as it were.
27:19
But you know, you talk about people being unwilling
27:22
to unconditionally, like dedicate themselves
27:25
to their work, right?
27:27
And it brought up for me that there are a lot of people
27:30
that especially in the era we live in now,
27:32
if they don't succeed immediately,
27:33
they're like, they throw their hands up,
27:35
like, what's going wrong?
27:36
Like, there's another podcaster that, you know,
27:38
he's like, man, I've been doing this podcast
27:39
for like six months and it's not taking off.
27:41
What am I doing wrong?
27:42
Like a whole six months, really?
27:44
Like, gosh, you know, batten down the hatches, you know,
27:47
stop the presses.
27:48
This guy's been trying hard for six months.
27:50
And I think a lot of us have that idea.
27:53
And when I tell people about wanting this,
27:54
when they want to start a podcast first,
27:56
the first thing I tell them, I was like, don't,
27:58
please don't, like we don't need any more.
27:59
But if you do decide to do that,
28:01
like are you willing to do it every single week,
28:04
releasing one episode a week for three years
28:07
before you get more than a hundred downloads?
28:09
Are you willing to do that?
28:10
Because it might seem foolish during those three years
28:13
of doing that, but it's putting in the reps.
28:15
And it may, you may end up going viral one day
28:18
and you may be stuck with a couple of hundred listeners.
28:21
Are you okay with that?
28:22
And that's when people start to really evaluate themselves.
28:25
And that kind of brought up again,
28:27
the unconditionally dedicating yourself to your work.
28:30
And Steven, if I'm being honest,
28:31
I gotta say, most people are just not willing to do that, right?
28:34
- No, they're not.
28:35
I mean, of course, that's kind of in our culture these days,
28:38
particularly the recent culture, last 10 years,
28:42
last 15 years, the idea of instant success, right?
28:46
That's what you hear about.
28:47
You hear about somebody that produces a sex tape
28:50
and it goes viral, or they do some dance in their bedroom.
28:55
So I'm hoping your old girl does a dance.
28:58
And the next thing you know, she has 10 million listeners.
29:01
I mean, we never had that sort of thing before,
29:03
before the web, right?
29:04
And this sort of fantasy that you can succeed overnight.
29:09
And it's just, it's absolutely not true.
29:13
If I were to say anything, well, I'll tell you a story.
29:15
This is a workout story.
29:16
Like I say, I'm a gym person just like you.
29:20
And a few years ago, I fell off the wagon
29:23
for like three or four months.
29:25
And I was like kind of in despair over that, over myself.
29:29
You know, what a bum I'd become.
29:31
And I was talking to a friend of mine, a woman
29:33
who was also a gym person.
29:34
She said to me, you know, Steve,
29:36
she said the gym for us, this is a lifetime commitment.
29:41
We're gonna be doing this when we're 90.
29:42
So don't feel bad.
29:43
You fell off the wagon, you're gonna get back on.
29:46
You're probably gonna fall off the wagon again
29:48
three or four years from now.
29:50
So don't just take it in stride.
29:52
You're a human being.
29:53
You're entitled to screw up.
29:55
This is a lifetime commitment.
29:56
And that's a great question to ask anybody
29:59
who wants to start anything, a podcast or, you know,
30:02
filmmaking, you name it, whatever.
30:04
Are you, are you in this?
30:05
Are you committed to this for life?
30:08
Because if you're not,
30:10
Joe Rogan is certainly committed to whatever it is.
30:12
And that's why he's doing what he's doing.
30:15
So I think, you know, that the,
30:19
this idea that there's an instant hack
30:22
is a real unhealthy thought to have put it.
30:25
If I had kids, well, the first thing I would do
30:29
is erase that, delete that from their, their mind,
30:33
because it's real destructive.
30:35
(upbeat music)
30:36
LinkedIn is great at connecting you
30:38
with the world's largest professional network.
30:41
But it can't connect you with motivation
30:42
on a Monday morning.
30:44
LinkedIn can help you get insights
30:45
from your professional community.
30:47
But it can't give you any insight
30:48
into why Dave's is still talking on mute.
30:51
And while it can't stop your boss
30:52
from bringing tuna for lunch,
30:54
LinkedIn can help bring your career to the next level.
30:57
LinkedIn is the network that works for you.
31:00
Visit linkedin.com to learn more.
31:02
- Well, it is destructive.
31:06
And just to be honest, I struggle with that as well,
31:09
because I will see people that are in my own humble opinion,
31:12
not nearly as talented at doing the whole podcast thing,
31:16
but depending on who they're married to,
31:17
or depending upon what viral moment they had,
31:20
all of a sudden their audience is half of what mine is
31:22
in a week, and it took me five years to build,
31:24
like that kind of a thing.
31:25
So again, it's that competitiveness,
31:28
but a lot of it's envy and I have to really check myself
31:30
and be like, look, this is not destroying them.
31:33
They don't even know I exist.
31:34
Here I am wasting my time and effort
31:36
lamenting the fact that they're where they are,
31:38
and I'm where I am.
31:39
And so I think it's good to always put yourself
31:40
in that particular place.
31:41
But one thing that also brings up from me, Steven,
31:43
is in chapter 31, I think the name of the chapter
31:46
is a lifetime, one hour out of time.
31:49
And someone brought this up.
31:50
I can't remember who did it exactly.
31:52
I'd love to be able to give them credit,
31:53
but they were talking about it in terms of Christianity.
31:56
They were like, oh, it was a Dale Partridge.
31:58
So he's a theologian and author and all these types of things.
32:00
He runs relearn.org.
32:02
But he said, it's not how many years you've been a Christian.
32:05
It's how many hours.
32:07
And I think about it also in terms of jujitsu.
32:09
Like I've been training jujitsu for about five years,
32:13
but how many hours is that?
32:14
Because I know people that have been training jujitsu
32:16
for five years that have trained three, four,
32:18
five times the hours, the amount of time that I've done out.
32:22
And so like for me, I'm trying to change that paradigm
32:25
in my brain of like, Steven, you've been an author
32:29
for how many years?
32:31
- 50 years.
32:32
- 50 years.
32:33
- At least trying to be.
32:34
Let's put it.
32:35
- Right.
32:36
But that's the exact point.
32:37
Is there a people that have been an author for 50 years
32:40
that don't have nearly the amount of hours put in?
32:43
And so I think for all of us, it would be much more beneficial
32:47
for us and to our art or our work that we're producing
32:50
if we think about it in terms of hours, not years.
32:52
Does that make sense?
32:53
- Yes.
32:54
But let me say this, kind of the point I was really trying
32:57
to make there was, let's say you have a dream
33:02
that a calling that you're driven to do,
33:05
but you're married, you have a family,
33:07
you have a job, you have obligations, whatever it is.
33:10
And you just can't find the time to do it full time.
33:14
Can you do it one hour a day?
33:17
And my answer to that is yes.
33:20
Because as I say, the muse, the goddess
33:25
doesn't measure the amount of time that you put in.
33:30
She measures the commitment.
33:32
She asks herself, is this person in that one hour
33:36
really putting her heart and soul into what they're doing?
33:39
Are they really committed?
33:40
In that case, the goddess will help us, you know?
33:44
So I do think that it's absolutely possible.
33:48
And for me, for years too, when I would work a full time job,
33:51
I would just come in on weekends and do my writing then
33:54
to the office on weekends, or I come home
33:56
and get in an hour, something like that.
33:58
So it is possible to be a full time artist one hour a day,
34:03
even though it doesn't seem to make sense, but it's true.
34:09
And another thing I want to say,
34:11
let me throw this at you too, Kyle.
34:13
Yeah, like right now, this is to encourage anybody
34:16
that has a limited amount of time.
34:18
Right now, I'm a full time writer.
34:20
I have nothing else that I do.
34:22
But it turns out that with all the things you have to do,
34:26
correspondence, doing a podcast, when it all comes down to it,
34:31
I wind up getting maybe two hours a day
34:34
that I can actually sit down the keyboard and work.
34:37
So, you know, I can have a full time job
34:41
and still carve out two hours.
34:43
So if you're one of those people
34:46
that can only get a couple of hours a day, you can do it.
34:49
You know, anything at all, you can do it.
34:51
I think it goes back to aspirational identity
34:53
like what we were talking about
34:54
in your very complimentary of Jack Carr.
34:55
I think you even talked about in the book
34:57
where Jack Carr spends a lot of time writing,
34:59
but he also spends a lot of time responding to direct messages,
35:02
to doing podcasts, to going on interviews,
35:04
to going on tour, making his face available
35:06
and his attitude available.
35:08
But if you're just really into his writing,
35:10
he may think, oh man, I bet he has so much time to write.
35:12
But if you hear him talk about it,
35:13
he has to literally peel himself away from his life
35:17
and go into seclusion to different places
35:19
in order to get the book done.
35:20
He has a computer that's separate
35:22
from his normal computer
35:23
that doesn't even have access to the internet, right?
35:26
So basically he can just write on that laptop
35:29
and it's very, very important for him.
35:30
So I think that's a good point.
35:31
But you made it about halfway into the interview
35:33
before you mentioned the muse.
35:34
And I'm glad you did because I got some questions
35:37
about the muse.
35:38
So I'm gonna read a couple of quotes here.
35:39
So from chapter 40, this is called commit to serving heaven.
35:42
So here's the quote.
35:44
The first thing I do when I enter my office each morning
35:46
is say a prayer to the muse.
35:48
I say it out loud in dead earnest.
35:50
And then in chapter 71, you have this quote here.
35:53
And alcoholics anonymous, they call it a higher power.
35:56
I've never been completely comfortable with that term.
35:58
But I certainly believe that the material dimension
36:01
that's capital M capital D material dimension
36:03
upon which you and I dwell
36:05
is not the only level of reality that exists.
36:08
Where do ideas come from?
36:09
If we're honest, you and I,
36:11
we have to admit that we don't know,
36:12
except that ideas don't come from us.
36:15
A song by Tom Waits, a novel from Elizabeth Gilbert.
36:18
Both artists will confess immediately
36:20
that ideas came to them.
36:23
So this, I kind of wanna break this down a little bit further.
36:26
Because obviously you were very open about this.
36:28
You know, I'm a Christian.
36:29
You know, I'm all these different things.
36:30
And so I believe in the Judeo Christian God,
36:32
I believe a Middle Eastern Jew, you know,
36:34
when he was 33 years old that he was crucified
36:36
on a Roman cross at the behest of the Jews
36:38
and that he rose three days later.
36:39
In 2000 years later, here I am talking about him.
36:42
I believe that with every fiber of my being.
36:44
So you're not there.
36:45
You don't necessarily believe in that.
36:47
But you're not where some people are,
36:49
where they're completely shut off
36:51
to things outside the material world.
36:53
You're not a strict materialist in that way.
36:56
So give me a little bit more
36:58
in terms of what you think about that next dimension
37:01
or what that looks like.
37:02
Because a lot of people stop well before that.
37:05
They don't really acknowledge.
37:06
They just assume the idea came to them because, you know,
37:09
hey, we used to be monkeys and before that,
37:11
we used to be fish and that idea came to me
37:13
because I have to survive and that's okay.
37:14
So I'm just gonna give you a little bit of runway.
37:16
Let's chat about that.
37:18
- Okay, that's a great question, Kyle.
37:19
Now let me say, talk about the muses themselves
37:23
in Greek mythology, what they were.
37:24
- Right.
37:25
- The muses were nine sisters, goddesses.
37:29
The daughters of Zeus, the king of the gods
37:33
and nimosene, which means memory,
37:36
which is pretty interesting.
37:37
And each one of the nine muses was in charge
37:40
of a different art, dance, music, epic poetry,
37:43
so on and so forth.
37:45
And the job of the muses was to inspire artists
37:49
here on the earth, right?
37:51
And the classic picture that we have today
37:54
would be like Beethoven at the piano
37:57
and there would be this kind of mysterious female force
38:00
right at his ear, kind of whispering in his ear.
38:04
So that's the way the Greeks thought about it.
38:06
They sort of anthropomorphized everything.
38:09
But one of the things you find as a writer,
38:13
or any kind of an artist, where every day you're sort of,
38:16
you're dealing with what's my next idea?
38:21
Let's say I start a book.
38:24
I've got an idea for the opening scene.
38:26
Where's the next scene coming from?
38:28
Where's the scene after that coming from?
38:29
Where's the whole concept going?
38:31
And you realize pretty soon that these ideas
38:36
are not coming from you.
38:38
You're not manufacturing them,
38:40
particularly when you get into a place
38:42
like what you would call the zone,
38:44
where you lose all track of time, you're just working.
38:48
And when the day's over, the next day you look at the pages
38:51
and you go, wow, this is really good.
38:53
And it's also feels like it's not coming from you.
38:55
It's like, who put this down there, you know?
38:58
So the idea of saying a prayer to the muse
39:03
at the start of the day,
39:04
and I don't think this is incompatible with Christianity
39:07
or anything like that.
39:08
It could be, you know, saint so-and-so,
39:10
or whatever, somebody in heaven,
39:12
is that you're, you, the artist on this material dimension,
39:17
are putting yourself at the service
39:20
of something at a higher level.
39:22
You know, I'm a believer that like the ninth symphony
39:26
existed in some other dimension before Beethoven wrote it.
39:31
You know, you may not go along with that, Kyle,
39:34
but that's what I believe.
39:35
So that's kind of my life is really
39:40
trying to bring into this material dimension
39:45
via my fingertips something that's already out there
39:49
that wants to be born,
39:51
that's coming from some other dimension,
39:55
which I would call a divine dimension,
39:57
however you want to define it.
39:59
So that's what, that's what the muse is to me.
40:02
And I always say, you know, the muse is a female,
40:06
it's a goddess, right?
40:08
I'd say that it's the only female in my life
40:12
that I've ever been true to unconditionally.
40:15
And she has always been true to me unconditionally.
40:20
So there's something to it,
40:22
even though we can't touch it or feel it
40:24
or taste it or measure it.
40:26
- Yeah, I think that's important.
40:27
I wanted to dig in a little bit further
40:28
because one thing I jotted down as you were talking is,
40:31
I feel the same way sometimes.
40:33
Like people ask me, you know,
40:35
how do I prepare for a podcast and all these different things?
40:37
And one thing that I tell people is like,
40:38
when my podcast comes out,
40:40
especially the ones where I'm just by myself,
40:42
I'm as excited to listen to it as they are
40:44
because I'm not sure what I said.
40:46
Because like, I don't like transcribe my podcast.
40:49
I put bullet points on a sheet of paper
40:51
and I go for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour and a half.
40:54
And like, I'm excited to hear what I said too.
40:56
And every now and then I'm disappointed
40:57
because I misspoke or I said a word incorrectly
41:00
or something like that.
41:01
I said something I didn't mean to say.
41:03
But it's almost like whenever you're sifting through ideas
41:06
and your head is you're trying to make sense
41:08
of the energy in your brain.
41:10
You're trying to make sense of what that means.
41:12
And everybody knows that feeling when you have an idea
41:15
and then you lose it,
41:16
you feel like you've lost something tangible.
41:19
Like you feel like you've lost your watch
41:21
or you've lost your phone.
41:22
I mean, do you kind of feel that way?
41:23
Because whenever I miss an idea,
41:25
I like chastise myself like I misplaced my wallet.
41:28
- Yeah, exactly.
41:29
In fact, I always sleep, you know, with my phone,
41:32
you know, right next to me.
41:33
- Right.
41:34
- Because when I have an idea in the middle of the night
41:36
and I say, it's just like a dream.
41:38
I always say to yourself, well, I'll remember that.
41:40
There's no way I'm gonna forget that.
41:42
And then in the morning you wake up, it's completely gone,
41:44
you know?
41:44
- Yeah.
41:45
- But, so I'm always happy when I write it down
41:47
or I record it.
41:49
And then I go, it's like some friend is giving me an idea.
41:51
So I wear that, I forgot about it already.
41:53
- Right.
41:54
Well, I mean, I text myself constantly.
41:57
And so like, if I get an idea while I'm driving,
41:59
I will turn on voice memos and I,
42:00
it's usually about a podcast.
42:02
Oh, I wanna make sure I make that point.
42:03
Like, and it'll just pop into my head
42:05
or it'll be kind of like a combination
42:06
or a coalescence of a bunch of other people's ideas,
42:09
but it's gonna be said differently through my face.
42:11
And so like, this is how I would say kind of a thing.
42:14
But I do wanna kind of circle back
42:15
to kind of what you were talking about.
42:17
So, "Amanid Arms" is one of the best fiction books
42:20
I've ever read.
42:21
I believe I gave it the award for best fiction book
42:24
or most entertaining book last year.
42:25
It is absolutely fantastic.
42:27
You've written, it's right there in front of you.
42:29
You sent me a bunch of copies.
42:30
That's what we talked about in the last episode guys.
42:32
I'll make sure that's in the show notes
42:33
so you can check out that book as well.
42:35
But without giving too much away,
42:37
one of the center points of that book,
42:40
which has so many lessons in it,
42:41
you know, it has lessons about, you know,
42:43
masculine strength and overcoming
42:46
even personal stoicism.
42:47
And there's so many great lessons
42:49
you can pull from that book, a fiction book of all things.
42:52
But you seem to have, as a manner of speaking,
42:55
within that book, a deep reverence for scripture.
42:59
And by that, I mean the scripture of the Bible, right?
43:02
So we're talking Old Testament, like those types of things.
43:05
And so you're a guy that if you follow you
43:07
on social media, all that, like you'll quote,
43:09
an ancient stoic, you'll quote a Greek philosopher,
43:12
you'll quote the Bhagavad Vida,
43:13
like you'll quote all these different things.
43:16
But that book is dripping with reverence
43:19
for a book that is very exclusive in its worldview.
43:23
Because if you read that book cover to cover
43:25
and understand it theologically,
43:26
it doesn't give room for all these other ways.
43:29
Like Jesus either lived and was resurrected or he didn't.
43:33
There's no nuance as smart, dumb people like to say,
43:37
there's no in between.
43:38
That is either a fact or it's not.
43:40
So talk to me a little bit more about that
43:42
because even for someone who maybe doesn't purport
43:45
to have a strictly Christian worldview, right?
43:48
A way of looking at things.
43:50
You seem to understand how unbelievably important
43:52
the Bible is, correct?
43:54
- Well, I'll say this, like when I was at my lowest ebb
43:59
in my life, I would try to read, to try to help me.
44:04
And I found that almost everything I read,
44:10
even really good books didn't work for me.
44:14
It was like I was a starving man
44:16
and they were feeding me sand.
44:18
But one of the things that did work for me
44:21
was the King James Bible, not the other translations
44:25
which for that old school, great stuff.
44:30
And I found that that certain verses
44:33
would bring me to tears immediately, you know?
44:37
And I felt like I couldn't put my finger on why,
44:40
but I thought whoever put this on paper
44:43
or wherever this came from,
44:45
it's coming from a really, really deep place.
44:48
It's coming from a place that understands
44:52
how desperate a human being can be when they're lost, you know?
44:56
And this is like pure mountain spring water coming to me.
45:00
So I've always had a great reverence for that,
45:02
along with other scriptures and along with Shakespeare
45:05
and other really, really great stuff.
45:08
So do you want me to talk a little bit
45:12
about the origins of this book, "A Man in Arms?"
45:15
Or are-- - Oh, absolutely.
45:17
Like, I mean, we got into it a lot in the last one,
45:20
but I think that's very important,
45:21
especially to what we're talking about now, let's go.
45:23
- Okay, this may be, I mean,
45:24
if you can always edit this out, Kyle, or whatever.
45:26
- Oh, no, no, no, let's keep this going.
45:28
- But "A Man in Arms" takes place, you know,
45:31
about, you know, 20 years after the crucifixion
45:36
injured you in that world where Rome was the dominant force.
45:41
So how this book kind of started for me,
45:43
and bear with me, you guys on this,
45:46
was my niece was getting married
45:50
and she asked me to officiate at it.
45:52
Turns out my brother, her dad, had already married them,
45:56
but I was gonna do it in a public form.
46:00
So I went to the book, "A Common Prayer,"
46:01
and I was looking, you know, for various quotes
46:04
that I could use in whatever I was gonna say.
46:07
And I found that all of the quotes that I pulled out
46:10
came from the same place,
46:12
came from Paul's letter to the Corinthians,
46:14
first Corinthians, you know,
46:17
for now we see through a glass darkly,
46:19
but then face to face.
46:20
And when I was a child, I thought I was a child,
46:22
I speak as a child, et cetera, those things.
46:25
So at some point, I know I'm kind of wandering here
46:28
and I'm not gonna be able to--
46:29
- No, this is good, go.
46:31
- But I thought to myself,
46:33
this is now me as a writer,
46:34
thinking about an idea for a book,
46:36
I thought that letter, Paul's letter
46:39
to the Christian community at Corinth,
46:42
which is what it was, that was a real letter.
46:45
He really wrote it.
46:46
Paul, you know, the apostle really wrote it.
46:49
And from the Roman point of view, dominating the world
46:53
as they were, that letter was like an atomic bomb
46:58
because if it got out around to all of the other communities,
47:03
it was going to be the overthrow of Rome
47:05
because spiritual, and in fact, it was.
47:08
In fact, right there was Christian communities
47:10
in Rome itself.
47:12
And eventually when Rome fell,
47:14
that's where now the pope is there.
47:17
So in any man, I just thought Rome learning
47:20
about this letter would have to try to stop it.
47:23
And I thought, there's a story right there,
47:25
a courier delivering this letter,
47:28
bad guys trying to stop it,
47:30
and maybe one hero trying to defend it.
47:33
Anyway, I'm sorry, I've kind of blathered on about that,
47:36
but that's how scripture really worked
47:41
to give this story a real, real meat.
47:44
I mean, when you talk about what's in that letter,
47:47
it isn't just, hey, how you doing, what's happening?
47:49
It's, you know, real explosive stuff, about love.
47:53
It's all about love, right?
47:55
The great, we're now about it as these three,
47:58
faith, hope and charity, but the greatest of these is charity.
48:01
That's powerful stuff.
48:03
- It's absolutely powerful.
48:04
And Stephen, from an apologetics,
48:06
from a Christian apologetics point of view,
48:08
the way that scripture was passed on
48:13
in the first, second and third century,
48:15
and the way Christianity was able to withstand
48:18
the predations of the Roman magistrates
48:20
and things like that,
48:21
that is one of the reasons that we can point to
48:24
as to the importance of the message,
48:25
but also to the longevity and truthfulness of the message,
48:28
because you had so many people that were willing
48:30
to quietly and calmly walk to their desks,
48:34
that they knew were going to be brutal.
48:36
And at that time, it wasn't because of what they believed,
48:38
you know, air quotes, 'cause here we are 2,000 years later,
48:40
it's like, oh, do you believe that?
48:42
It was because of what these people saw,
48:44
'cause we have, you know, from the New Testament,
48:46
we see that Jesus appeared after his resurrection
48:48
to a group of 500 people.
48:50
And so these people were going around not saying,
48:52
"Hey, I believe this, I believe this, you should believe it too."
48:54
It's like, you won't believe what I saw,
48:56
you won't believe what I saw,
48:57
and that carried them through those early years,
49:00
like the absolute unbelievable persecution
49:03
that they suffered,
49:04
but it also kind of goes back to,
49:06
it's interesting for you to say that in times of,
49:09
in low times and hard times for you in your life,
49:12
you found comfort in the King James Bible,
49:15
and in that translation and some of the things therein.
49:18
Now, as you were saying that,
49:19
you were also saying that you couldn't really figure out why,
49:23
like why was this so comforting?
49:24
You just knew that it was,
49:25
it was instinctively you knew that it was.
49:28
My contention, Stephen, would be,
49:30
that was God calling you closer to him.
49:32
That was God saying to you,
49:33
communicating to you through his word,
49:36
saying, Stephen, I'm here, I'm the source of peace.
49:40
I am the source of all the things
49:42
that are good in this world.
49:43
The only reason you know why you're in a bad spot
49:45
is because I gave you a moral law
49:47
with which to differentiate between good things
49:50
and evil things.
49:51
So, as you think further about that time period in your life,
49:55
are you open to the fact that that may have been
49:57
the Judeo-Christian God, basically saying,
50:00
Stephen, I'm here, come closer to me?
50:02
- It certainly could be.
50:03
I would not reject that, Kyle.
50:06
On the other hand, it could also be simply
50:09
the great poetry of the stuff.
50:11
And of, you know, one of the things
50:15
that always would bring me to tears
50:17
is Ruth's reach to Naomi.
50:21
- Would you?
50:22
- Really not any sort of Christian thing
50:25
or any kind of, you know, it's just a statement of love, you know?
50:30
You know, entreat me not to leave the
50:33
or to refrain from following after the,
50:36
for whether thou goest, I will go, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
50:39
That's just an incredible statement of love
50:44
between two people, two women, in fact, you know?
50:47
Not lesbian love, but, you know, a bond between them
50:50
that where you go, I will go.
50:53
And not even death itself can part us.
50:56
So that touched me on that level
51:00
'cause at that time, for me, there was no indication
51:04
in my life that any force or any other human being,
51:07
you know, gave a damn about me.
51:11
So anyway, you know, I won't dispute
51:14
your point of view there, Kyle,
51:16
but I think it was also on just the human level,
51:21
a lot of the stuff that meant a lot to me.
51:26
- Well, and that's a good point as well.
51:28
When you read scripture, like, some scripture is
51:31
historical attestation as to what happened during
51:34
a particular time to a particular people.
51:36
Some of it is poetry, some of it is erotic.
51:40
Like there are a lot of different types of styles.
51:43
In the Bible, Jesus spoke in parables a lot.
51:45
So if you read it just as fiction or non-fiction or history
51:48
in total, you're not really going to hit it.
51:50
And I'll kind of put a bow on it with this
51:51
'cause I want to move on to ask you a few more questions
51:53
before we get you out of here.
51:54
So you obviously have a deep reverence for the scripture.
51:57
Your reverence for the scripture is deeper
51:59
than some Christians that I know.
52:01
It just, the fact that you've internalized a lot of it
52:04
to where you can quote it
52:05
'cause even a lot of Christians can't quote, you know,
52:07
this book that they purport to say is, you know,
52:10
that the word of God.
52:11
But I would love to see you and in my prayer for you
52:13
and I have prayed for you is to move from reverence to belief
52:15
and not just belief in this squishy way.
52:18
Like, oh, I believe in a thing called love.
52:19
I believe in this, I believe in whatever.
52:21
Like this kind of an ethereal thing
52:22
that it doesn't have any tangible meat to it.
52:25
But also for you to pray to Jesus
52:27
as if he was actually resurrected.
52:29
As if he actually was sent to die here for you
52:34
and for your sins to give you a pathway to the Father.
52:37
That would be my encouragement to you.
52:38
And I'm not going to put you on the spot.
52:39
I'm sorry, are you going to do that?
52:40
I'm going to check in with you later on today.
52:42
But I know that you're an amenable guide
52:44
to those types of promptings.
52:46
And so that's one thing that I just wanted to leave you with
52:48
is to pray to him as if he were there and see if he answers.
52:52
Is that fair?
52:53
- Well, I appreciate the thought, Kyle.
52:56
- Okay, fair enough.
52:57
- As a good Jew, you know?
52:58
So well, we'll move off of that.
53:01
And I appreciate letting us go down that rabbit hole.
53:03
A couple more things from your book
53:05
that I found to be very, very interesting.
53:07
And it applies to a lot of other things in the book.
53:09
Chapter 55 of the book, you talk about self-reinforcement.
53:13
Now, that is much different than self-belief.
53:16
And you can do it and just find the motivation
53:19
and be your own, whatever.
53:21
Like it was very, very tangible.
53:23
So talk to us a little bit more about self-reinforcement.
53:26
- Well, we know what, let me define reinforcement first.
53:31
It's like if you were at the gym,
53:33
you were training at the gym and you had a trainer
53:35
and you were doing squats and you did them
53:37
exactly the way you wanted you to do them
53:39
or you moved to a new weight or whatever it was,
53:42
whatever you're weight for that day.
53:43
Your trainer would say to you, Kyle, that's great, man.
53:46
Keep it up.
53:47
You were really getting into your butt on that one.
53:50
You were really stretching the weight on one.
53:51
I saw your feet flat on the floor.
53:53
I saw your knees right in line with your hips.
53:55
You're really, that was great, right?
53:57
That's reinforcement, right?
53:59
And it encourages you a coach, a teacher, a mentor, or whatever.
54:02
In fact, this podcast is kind of a form of reinforcement
54:06
for a lot of people, but there's a difference
54:08
between reinforcement and self-reinforcement.
54:11
And self-reinforce is a lot harder to do.
54:15
One of the things I say in the book is that
54:17
self, the ability to self-reinforce is more important
54:21
than talent in terms of artists or something.
54:24
So like for me, I'm gonna pick this up again.
54:27
Here, I'm alone, just me and this thing.
54:30
At the end of the day, I have to and I literally do,
54:35
reinforce myself for what I did that day.
54:38
Just like if I had a trainer, if I had a coach,
54:41
I haven't a mentor.
54:42
I have to have that internal self-talk
54:44
that keeps me motivated because
54:47
you will never make it over the long haul
54:52
without reinforcement of some kind, nobody will, right?
54:55
An army, Napoleon's army invading Russia
54:58
is not gonna get there unless the food comes in
55:02
and the encouragement comes in and so on and so forth.
55:06
So it's a habit.
55:08
They don't teach you this in school.
55:10
You know, they don't teach you what self-talk is
55:14
and that kind of thing.
55:15
But I will definitely take moments
55:18
and reinforce myself every day to tell myself, you know,
55:22
good job, keep it up, et cetera, et cetera.
55:25
And whatever way works for you, for the individual,
55:29
it's very, very important to do.
55:31
It's a missing thing that lets that without it,
55:36
you're struggling.
55:37
- Well, let's talk a little bit more about self-talk
55:39
because, and I've said this before in people,
55:42
people that don't know me,
55:43
they just can't imagine this being true.
55:45
I'm so unbelievably pessimistic, okay?
55:47
That's just kind of who I am.
55:48
That's a bit of my wiring.
55:51
If you heard my self-talk,
55:53
you would be astonished at how negative it is.
55:55
Like part of my, so I love--
55:57
- Let me interrupt before one second.
55:59
- Go ahead, go ahead. - That's self-talk.
56:01
That's resistance.
56:03
That's capital R resistance.
56:05
That's not you.
56:07
That's this force called resistance.
56:10
So in any event, I've got that too, all the time.
56:13
- Right. - Keep going, sorry.
56:14
- Well, no, no, that's great.
56:15
So part of the thing for me is I use that as fuel.
56:20
So this is gonna strike people as inappropriate
56:22
and strike people as rude and mean
56:24
and non-Christian and all those things, right?
56:27
So I have an aerodyne bike, all right?
56:29
So that's one of those bikes that it's arms in the legs
56:31
and it's really, really hard to do.
56:32
It's one of the rogue ones.
56:34
It's really, really robust.
56:36
And I put duct tape on the fan part of it.
56:38
So it's not, you know, cooling me off
56:40
as I'm doing it just to make it worse for me, right?
56:43
Well, on that black duct tape, Steven,
56:45
I wrote D-Bap, D-B-A-P, which means don't be a pussy.
56:50
Because the reason why I do that is
56:53
whenever I'm up here and I'm going,
56:54
and I'm going, I'm going, I'm going,
56:55
and I get tired and my head starts to look down
56:58
and there's so much sweat dripping off me
57:00
right there in my field of vision is D-Bap.
57:04
And that's what I tell myself.
57:05
And again, some people be like,
57:06
oh, that's so negative, you shouldn't do that.
57:08
Like that's like negative reinforcement.
57:10
But for me, I'm like, no, no, no, that is fuel
57:13
because the reason I'm on this bike to begin with,
57:15
this demonic bike to begin with
57:18
is because I want to be better.
57:19
I want to be more resilient.
57:21
And so I know that that's probably not the healthiest thing
57:24
in the world, Steven, but like from your perspective,
57:26
is that okay to kind of have some of that?
57:28
Like that gritty, almost angry self-talk
57:32
to as long as it propels you to something positive?
57:34
- I think it's great.
57:35
That is self-reinforcement by definition.
57:38
You know, okay, if you had a trainer there,
57:41
he'd be standing in your ear
57:43
and putting that into your ear, right?
57:44
If you had a coach, your football coach, your basketball coach,
57:47
whatever it was as you were doing wind sprints, right?
57:50
That's what he's telling you, don't be a pussy.
57:52
Keep going, keep going, keep going.
57:54
And so that is what self-reinforcement is by definition.
57:59
- Yeah, and guys.
58:00
- Yeah, you're on to something there.
58:02
- Well, it's like do that for yourself, guys.
58:04
And I know some people, they need a trainer.
58:06
They literally need a coach.
58:08
Like that's something about them.
58:09
They just don't have that extra level.
58:10
But if you can guys, if you can be your own trainer,
58:13
if you can be your own coach,
58:14
like that's an intellectual exercise
58:17
'cause you need to make sure you're doing things
58:18
that are okay for you and your frame and your age
58:20
and all those different things.
58:21
But also it's gonna save you money
58:23
'cause you're not paying a trainer to do it.
58:24
It's gonna save you time
58:25
'cause you're not gonna have to go meet them
58:26
to do this, that or the other thing.
58:28
But anyway, that's great.
58:29
And guys, there's way more meat on the bone,
58:31
even in this short book.
58:32
There were a lot of stories in there
58:34
that we didn't have time to really get to.
58:35
There were a lot of other topics,
58:36
but those are things that I just wanted to pull out
58:38
to at least make it enticing for those men.
58:40
But I wanna know what you got coming up for the future
58:43
'cause I know you got other projects in mind.
58:44
I know you're always writing,
58:46
so you've got fiction and nonfiction both going.
58:48
For me personally, I wanna follow up to a man in arms, right?
58:52
And so if you release another fiction book
58:53
and it's not a follow up
58:55
so I can know what happened to Telemont,
58:56
I'm gonna be so mad at you, Steve.
58:58
But give me an idea of what we can expect
59:00
for the future from you.
59:01
- Well, I've got two books, two big books
59:04
that are going right.
59:05
One of them is the next book about Telemont,
59:08
the next book about a man in arms.
59:09
- Let's go.
59:10
- You know, so I'm right in the middle of that right now
59:12
and having to self-reinforce quite a bit.
59:15
And another book that's done
59:17
and it will be coming out around Christmas time
59:20
is it's sort of, it's autobiographical.
59:24
It's, you know, anybody who's read my books,
59:28
The War of Art or other books like that,
59:29
I allude to certain periods in my life, you know,
59:33
when I was driving trucks or I was working on oil fields
59:36
or I was in Hollywood or whatever,
59:38
but I've never really written about that straight out, you know?
59:43
And so I thought, maybe it's time for me to do that.
59:47
So this is a book that's kind of sort of a writer's journey
59:52
telling all the parts that you usually don't tell.
59:56
- Well, I'm excited to read that as well.
59:57
And you know, you always have a straight pathway
59:59
to our audience whenever you release something new.
1:00:02
But as for now, that is all for me.
1:00:04
Is there anything you want to get off your chest?
1:00:06
- I'm sure I'll think of it later, Kyle.
1:00:10
But right now, no, I just want to say, you know,
1:00:13
thanks for having me.
1:00:14
And I hope what our conversation has been helpful
1:00:18
to your listeners here.
1:00:20
- It certainly has been to me.
1:00:21
I'm sure it is for them as well.
1:00:23
Steven Pressfield, thank you for coming back
1:00:24
on Undaunted Life of Man's podcast.
1:00:26
- All right, thanks, Kyle.
1:00:27
'Til next time.
1:00:29
- There you go, guys.
1:00:29
I hope you enjoyed the third appearance
1:00:31
of Steven Pressfield on our show.
1:00:32
But before we let you go,
1:00:33
we are going to do a quick resilience boost
1:00:34
at Undaunted Life.
1:00:35
Our mission is equipping men to push back darkness
1:00:37
with content that for just spiritual, mental,
1:00:39
and physical resilience.
1:00:40
So I've got links to all the books that we talked about
1:00:42
on this particular podcast.
1:00:43
We can go to Amazon and pick up copies of those.
1:00:45
I've also got a link to Steven Pressfield's website
1:00:48
and also to his YouTube channel.
1:00:49
You guys should check all of that out.
1:00:51
All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to the show.
1:00:52
We do appreciate it.
1:00:53
Wherever you're listening to this,
1:00:55
please subscribe, rate, and leave us a positive five star
1:00:57
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1:00:58
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1:00:59
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1:01:00
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1:01:02
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1:01:04
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1:01:06
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1:01:08
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1:01:09
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1:01:10
Just go to www.undaunted.life and as always,
1:01:14
we want to thank the band August Burns Red
1:01:15
for allowing us to use their music for our content.
1:01:18
The music on this podcast is our song "Cutting the Ties"
1:01:20
which is off their 10th anniversary
1:01:21
re-recording of their album "Leveler."
1:01:23
The links are in the description.
1:01:25
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
1:01:27
Remember, keep pushing back darkness,
1:01:30
keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical resilience.
1:01:34
Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:01:38
I love the lion, it's all my advice.
1:01:42
I know you want, it's all my side.
1:01:46
You may stand, and I'll find you.
1:01:50
You'll be revived.
1:02:08
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