Steven Pressfield is a historian and author of War of Art, a book that had a big impact on my life and the life of millions of whose passion is to create in art, science, business, sport, and everywhere else. I highly recommend it and others of his books on this topic, including Turning Pro, Do the Work, Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, and the Warrior Ethos. Also his books Gates of Fire about the Spartans and the battle at Thermopylae, The Lion's Gate, Tides of War, and others are some of the best historical fiction novels ever written.

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
5:00 - Nature of war
11:43 - The struggle within
17:11 - Love and hate in a time of war
25:17 - Future of warfare
28:31 - Technology in war
30:10 - What it takes to kill a person
32:22 - Mortality
37:30 - The muse
46:09 - Editing
52:19 - Resistance
1:10:41 - Loneliness
1:12:24 - Is a warrior born or trained?
1:13:53 - Hard work and health
1:18:41 - Daily ritual

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The following is a conversation with Steven Pressfield, author of several powerful nonfiction and historical fiction books, including The War of Art, a book that had a big impact on my life and the life of millions of people whose passion is to create in art, science, business, sport, and everywhere else.

I highly recommend it and others of his books on this topic, including Turning Pro, Do the Work, Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, and The Warrior Ethos.

Also, his books Gates of Fire about the Spartans and the Battle of Thermopylae, The Lion's Gate, Ties of War, and others are some of the best historical fiction novels ever written.

As some of you know, I don't shy away from taking on a big difficult challenge.

1 of the hardest for me, and for millions of others, is the discipline of staring at an empty page every day, pushing on to think deeply to create, despite the millions of excuses that fill the head.

In his work, Steven has articulated the struggle better than anyone I've ever read.

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Please consider supporting the podcast by going to jordanharbinger.com slash Lex and subscribing to it everywhere after that and downloading Cash App and using code LEXPODCAST.

Click on the links, buy all of the stuff.

It really is the best way to support this podcast.

This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

I recently considered renaming this podcast, but decided against it.

And in some sense, this podcast is not as much about AI, but more about a journey of an AI researcher struggling to explore the human mind, the physics of our universe, and the nature of human behavior, intelligence, consciousness, love, and power.

I will continue to return home to the technical, computer science, machine learning, engineering, math, programming, but also venture out to talk to people who had a big impact on my life outside the technical fields.

Writers like Steven Pressfield and Stephen King, musicians like Tom Waits, political leaders like, well you know who, and even athletes.

As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation.

Click on the links, buy all of the stuff, it's the best way to support this podcast.

This episode is supported by the Jordan Harbinger Show.

On that page, there's links to subscribe to it, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere else.

He gets the best out of his guests, dives deep, calls them out when it's needed, and makes the whole thing fun to listen to.

He's interviewed Kobe Bryant, Mark Cuban, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Garry Kasparov, and many more.

I just finished listening to his recent conversation with Mick West about debunking conspiracy theories.

This topic can be both fascinating and frustrating on both sides.

But in this conversation, Jordan thread the needle beautifully.

And so it turned out to be a great listen.

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Since Cash App allows you to buy Bitcoin, let me mention that cryptocurrency in the context of the history of money is fascinating.

I recommend Ascent of Money as a great book on this history.

Debits and credits on ledgers started around 30,000 years ago.

The US dollar created over 200 years ago and the first decentralized cryptocurrency released just over 10 years ago.

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And now, here's my conversation with Steven Pressfield.

Modern society in many ways dreams of creating universal peace.

And yet war has molded civilization as we know it throughout its history.

let's start at the high philosophical level.

If you could imagine a world without war, how would that world be different?

Perhaps put another way, what purpose has war served?

I think we're basically the same creatures internally that we were in the cave, right?

In tribal society back for however many, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of years.

Which means that we're in, the dynamic in our mind is a kind of an us versus them dynamic where our tribe is the people and everybody else are whatever, you know?

And I don't see that, I don't think that's changed 1 iota over the centuries.

It's just a question of how 1 might sublimate that urge to compete.

You know that a great part of your day, I'm sure, is dedicated to reaching that place of total commitment in the face of competition, in the face of adversity, etc., etc., which is, I think, natural and great for the human race on an individual basis.

So the hope that I have, if there is any hope, personally, I don't think the human race is going to be around very long, but would be in sports or in other kind of sublimated activities where people can act out their need for conquest or aggression or so forth, but at the same time relate to their opponents as human beings and when the game is over, you know, you embrace your competitor and stuff like that.

So you think war was inevitable, it's a part of human nature, as opposed to a force, a creative force in society that served a benefit?

Well, I'm sure it has benefited, you know, spreading cultures and mixing cultures and stuff like that.

But I think the urge to conquest, if you think about Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or Napoleon or anybody like that, or even individual, or if we even think about 1 of the plants that we're looking at right outside.

I mean, if you let a particular plant have its way, it would take over the whole hillside.

And certainly in the days of Alexander the Great, let's say, there were, who knows, over the face of the earth, hundreds of little kingdoms, China, Japan, Asia, Europe, wherever, and every prince that grew up dreamt of conquering his neighbor and conquering a neighbor after that.

That seems to be a universal human imperative, at least in the male of the species.

So- War is just a realization of that imperative.

So you've written about Spartans in the Battle of Thermopylae, about Alexander the Great, about the 6 Day War in 67 in Israel, against Egypt, Jordan, Syria.

What war, not just out of those, but in general, do you think has been most transformative for the world?

I mean, I wish I knew more about the Mongols, because I certainly, from what little I know, I think that was a very, their conquests were very transformative, bringing cultures, you know, in a horrible bloody way together.

But gosh, what's been the most transformative?

Maybe the Roman conquest, establishing the Roman Empire and bringing that culture, maybe Alexander the Great's wars that united east and west at least for a minute.

So building a vampire, do you have a sense, so there's wars, I mean the 6 Day War is not about building empires.

It's about deeply held religious, cultural conflict and holding the line, holding the border.

And then there is conquest, like the Mongols, that what is it, some large percentage of the population is a descendant of Genghis Khan, I believe, right?

And then World War II, I mean, personally, and my family and so on, the transformative effects.

Why are you, what are you trying to get at with these questions?

What is this kind of the theme that you're aiming at?

Well, I talked to Eric Weinstein, and he said everything is great about war except the killing.

Certainly there's a romantic notion of being a warrior, but there's a romantic notion of war that somehow there's a creative force to it.

That because we fight, out of that fighting comes culture, comes music and art, and more and more desire to create with the societies that win.

And to me, war is not just, hey, I have a stick and I want your land.

It's some kind of, like it has echoes of the creative force that makes humans unique to other animals.

Like wars, it can't be just 4 people or 10 people or 100 people.

You have to have thousands of people agreeing, usually thousands or more, for something so deeply that you would be willing to risk your own life.

And because you've written so well and passionate about some of these, I wanted to see, because I don't have any answers, I wanted to untangle that.

If there is a reason we fight, that's more than just anger and hate and wanting to conquer.

Let me take it from a completely different side.

I don't think that I, in writing about war, am really that interested in war per se.

I think for me, I'm really writing about my own internal war and the war against myself and against my own resistance, my own negativity, all of those things that are, that spirituality would be the opposite of.

It's not like talking to Jim Mattis or to, you know, Victor Davis Hanson or whatever.

To me, the human being, we are spiritual beings in a physical envelope.

And there's an automatic terrible tension within that, which creates a war inside ourselves.

So the outer war, when I think about the Israeli army standing up to whatever, 10 to 1 odds or whatever it was, that is a metaphor to me of the fight we're fighting inside ourselves.

For me, the 6 Day War was, as you know, my feeling was it was about a return from exile.

It was sort of the culmination of the reestablishment of the state of Israel, which had never really been completed because the holiest places of the Jewish people were in the hands of their enemies.

So now, on the other hand, Alexander the Great's conquests, I think, were a whole other different scenario where the metaphor was that Alexander's father, Philip, I think created the first nation, capital and nation, and he created a sort of a pathway for these guys who were mountain men and basically barbarians, Macedonians, and by creating this army and this dream of conquering the world, which Alexander took to the, you know, really enacted, he gave them a way of rising out of themselves, of transcending themselves, not just individually, but as a people.

So that would go along with what you're saying, Lex, of a certain creativity to it.

But again, that's not for whatever, and I'm just realizing this as I'm answering this, that's not really what's interesting to me about these stories.

And the Spartans, what was a whole at Thermopylae, that was a whole other kind of metaphor of war.

That was a sort of a willingly going to one's own death for a greater cause.

Just like to me, the Spartans at Thermopylae enacted as a group what Jesus Christ enacted as an individual, a sacrifice of their lives for the greater good.

I don't know if that answers your question, but that's how I see it.

I do feel like, you know, I get invited to speak to Marine Corps groups and things like that all the time, and I decline because I don't really feel like I'm a spokesman for the warrior class or anything like that.

That's not what's interesting about it to me.

But didn't you just say, with war as a metaphor, that we're all essentially in various ways warriors?

If we think of it in terms of Jungian archetypes, and think of our life as, at least as males, and the earliest archetypes that kick in are the youth and the wanderer and the student and that kind of thing.

And then at some point around age 15 to 20, whatever, the warrior archetype kicks in.

And we wanna play football, I wanna do martial arts, we wanna join the special forces, we wanna hang out with our buddies, that's our great bond, We wanna test ourselves against adversity and so on and so forth.

But at some point, that archetype, we move beyond that archetype.

And we become fathers and teachers and so on and so forth.

And then there are many archetypes beyond that towards the end.

So I'm interested in the warrior archetype, but not to the be all and end all of everything else.

book, The Virtues of War, have you read that?

There's a character named Telamon, who's actually, it's a long story, but when he's with Alexander's army, and when they arrive in India, he becomes fascinated by the gymnosophists, the fakirs, the naked wise men, the yogis.

And he says to Alexander that these guys are warriors beyond what we are, Even though they do nothing because they are inside their own selves, you know, all day long.

If we go to the Six-Day War, You write about, in Lionsgate, you write about the 6 Day War in Israel.

I think of the wars you've written about as the 1 we're still, in many ways, in the midst of today.

So what is at the core of that conflict in Israel?

I mean, today it's the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it's echoes of the same conflict in that part of the world with Israel.

What is, in your sense, the nature of that conflict?

What can we learn about society and human nature from that conflict?

That is 1 of the hottest conflicts that still goes on today.

Well, when I was working on the Lion's Gate about the Six-Day War, I wrote in the introduction that this was not gonna be a multi-sided story.

I was taking it entirely, I'm a Jew, I identify with the Israeli people, I was gonna see it entirely from their side.

So that's probably not what you're asking, but to me, the 6 Day War and that whole, you know, it's a piece of land that's holy to at least 3 religions and probably more.

And from the Jewish point of view, it's where the state of Israel, it's where David founded Jerusalem, It's all where the 12 tribes were, et cetera, et cetera, where Moses came and brought the people.

So to me, the 6 Day War was about, as I said, a return from exile, from diaspora, after 2,000 years.

Now obviously, from the Palestinian point of view, or the Saudi Arabian point of view, or whatever, it's a whole other scenario.

Religion is at the core of this conflict in some ways.

Religion and racial slash ethnic tribal identity.

Is a Jew somebody that believes in the religion or is it somebody of a certain race that race arose in a certain place?

Or did they arise in a certain place and a certain ethnicity?

Because if we landed from Mars, we couldn't tell a Jew from a Palestinian, could we?

You could easily mix them and you'd never know.

And the specifics of the faith is not necessarily the thing that defines

So you could be, like many are, secular Jew living in Israel and still have a strong bond.

In fact, almost all of the Jews, the fighters that I spoke to from the Sixth Day War were secular and it really was not a religious thing with them as much as it was a national thing.

So having spent time in Israel, how's the world where military conflict is directly felt as opposed to maybe if we look at the US, where it's distant and far away.

I mean, here in the United States, where when like an incident like Charlottesville comes up, you know, where people are chanting, "'Jews will not replace us,' blah, blah, blah." The impulse in the Jewish community is to think of, well, how can we reach out to the other side?

You know, how can we either show them that we are human beings like they are and show them that we care for them, et cetera, et cetera.

From if you're in Israel, and you know, like if you and I were Israeli citizens right now, you would be a fighter pilot or a tank commander or whatever.

You know, you would not just be, you know, working at MIT or whatever.

And so from their point of view, they say, all those people who hate us, can I curse on this?

If they dare to cross the line, and that's a whole different point of view.

To me it's actually a healthier point of view.

So there's no, so let me ask the hard question, is, well, maybe it's an impossible question, is how do we resolve that conflict?

Anywhere where the instinct is to reach out in US and say F you and

Here's my, I think that the only way that 2 warring sides or 2 sides that are opposed to 1 another can ever really come together is when there's mutual respect.

When there's mutual respect and they can see each other as equals, and when there's mutual fear, you know, where 1 side says, we don't dare cross a line with this other side, and the other side says the same thing.

I think then you can kind of reach across that thing and say, okay, we'll stay here, you stay here.

We'll mingle in cultural ways and we'll have interchange, you know, winter marriage, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

But as soon as 1 side has no power, as the Jewish people have had no power throughout the diaspora forever, right?

You can see it in Trump and what he does to any vulnerable minority, right?

And he's not alone, I'm not blaming him alone.

So I do think that that idea of like, fuck you, if you cross the line, we'll kill you, is really a good way, is a good place to start from.

Because now you can sit down on opposite sides of the table and say, you know, what do we have in common?

How can we, we want to raise our children, you want to raise your children, how can we do this in a way that we're not hurting each other?

So you kind of said that you need to arrive at a balance, some kind of balance of power.

But you haven't spoken to the fact that there's deeply rooted hatred of the other.

So is there no way to alleviate that hatred?

Or is that, I mean, what role does love and hate come?

I think that hatred can go away, I really do.

I mean, if you look at even now that I haven't seen this in person, but they say that the Saudis and the Israelis are collaborating on certain things, by their mutual fear of or antagonism to Iran.

I do think that even really long, long, longstanding hatreds and animosities, thousands of years old, can go away under the right circumstances.

There's some, do people have to die, do generations have to die and pass away and new generations come up with less hate or can a single individual learn to not hate?

I think a single individual can learn to not hate because it certainly doesn't seem to, over thousands of years, doesn't seem to work.

We keep thinking that that's gonna happen.

But I think it's, we're in a real spiritual realm here when you're talking about that.

You're in a realm of Buddha, Jesus, whatever, something like that, that where a true change of soul happens, but I do think that's possible.

So what do you think is the future of warfare?

Especially with what many people see as the expansion of the military industrial conflict.

Do you see us as people continuing to fight?

You know, it's a really great question, Alex, because I think now with social media, TV, movies, all of these things that create empathy across cultures, it becomes harder and harder, I think, I think, to totally demonize the other, the way it was in previous wars.

I also think I don't really see an appetite for people wanting to go to war these days.

And in a way, I don't know if that's good or bad.

It's like everybody's so fat and lazy and so concerned with how many clicks they're getting that, you know, whereas I know at the start of World War I, both the younger generations were eager to go to war.

You know, I think it was insane, but it was that sort of warrior archetype that we were talking about before that, that generational testosterone eros thing.

I mean, it's hard to say there's not gonna be another war because there always are, but it's sort of hard to imagine people getting off their ass these days to do anything.

Well, it's funny that you mentioned social media as a place for empathy, sure.

But in a sense, it's a place for war as well.

For hatred, and perhaps the positive aspect of hatred on social media is that it's somewhat less harmful than murder.

And so it kind of dissipates sort of the hateful, you get the hate out at a less, on a daily basis and thereby never boils up to a point where you want to kill.

It's also a really weird thing that's going on that I don't know if anybody really understands, like with video games, where kids are acting out these incredible horror things, right, but you know that if they cut their finger, they would like freak out, you know?

And I also don't think that many of the people that are hateful on social media, if they were face to face with the person, it wouldn't, so there's a sort of a, 2 mental spheres happening at the same time.

How that actually maps to military conflict.

Like if you in the United States have a draft, for example, how the populace would respond different than they did in previous generations.

Another question, not sure if you've thought about it, but I work on building artificial intelligence systems.

In our community, many people are worried about AI being used in war, so automating the killing process.

With drones and in general, It's being used more and more.

I'd rather ask you what you think about it.

Well, it's interesting, I mean, because it's so fundamentally different from if you look at the Battle of Thermopylae.

It means just if we talk about the difference between a gun and a sword.

There was a Spartan king, I don't know which 1 it was, but at 1 point they showed him a new invention and it could launch a bolt that would kill someone at a range of 200 yards.

And the king wept and said, alas, valor is no more.

Because their point of view of war, it was highly ritualized, as you know, and the code of honor was that you were not supposed to be able to kill another person unless you yourself were in equal danger of being killed.

And any other way of doing that, even bow and arrow was considered less than manly and less than honorable.

And maybe we should go back to that because at least it makes the stakes real and true.

You were in the Marine Corps, so we talk about the real, the bloody conflicts.

Have you, sort of as writing and in general, have you thought about what it takes to kill a person if you yourself could do it?

But I would imagine in the real world that it would change you utterly forever because you can't help but identify with the person that you've just killed.

And I mean, I have a hard time killing a spider.

So I would imagine that it's something that warriors understand and nobody else understands.

I mean, you've spoken with people who've seen military combat in Israel.

Have they been able to articulate the experience of killing?

I mean, I'm even thinking of 1 pilot that I interviewed over there, who was strafing a tank in his Mustang and saw at really low altitude and saw what his bullets did to the guy and could see his face and everything like that, which is even 1 remove or more removes from an infantryman, what an infantryman does.

And he said that same thing that I said, that it just changes you and you can never say it, never look at the world or look at anything the same way again.

And when that happens at scale, it's thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds, that changes entire societies.

At least it, but the problem is it doesn't change the politicians back home.

How important is mortality, finiteness, the fact that this thing ends to the creative process?

So killing in war really emphasizes that, but in general, the fact that this thing ends.

And on a serious note, do you think about your own mortality?

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Steven Pressfield: The War of Art | Lex Fridman Podcast #102