How to Overcome Inner Resistance | Steven Pressfield

Andrew Huberman: For years when I was struggling and could never get it together, I realized at one point that I was just thinking like an amateur and that if I could flip a switch in my mind and think like a professional, I could overcome some of the things. A professional shows up every day. A professional stays on the job all day, or with the equivalent of all day. A professional, as I said this before, does not take success or failure personally. An amateur will, right? An amateur gets a bad review, a bad response, and they just crap out. "I don't want to do this anymore." A professional plays hurt. Like Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, if they've tweaked a hamstring, they're out there. They'll die before they'll be taken off the court. Whereas an amateur, when he or she confronts adversity, will fold. "Oh, it's too cold out," or "I've got the flu," that kind of thing. An amateur worries about how they feel. "Oh, I don't feel like getting out of bed this morning. I don't feel like really doing my work today." A professional doesn't care how they feel. They do it. So an amateur has amateur habits, and a professional has professional habits.

Andrew Huberman: Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Stephen Pressfield. Stephen Pressfield is an author of numerous historical fiction and nonfiction books, including the now iconic *War of Art* and also the book *Do the Work*, which both focus on understanding the forces in our minds that barrier us from being our most focused, creative, and productive selves, and more importantly, how to overcome those barriers. Perhaps it's because Stephen worked hard physical labor jobs and was in the military prior to becoming a book author and screenwriter. Or perhaps it's because he published his first book at age 52 that Stephen really understands how to persevere and overcome inner doubt and procrastination and turn creative blocks into important creative works.

Andrew Huberman: As you'll hear during today's episode, Stephen doesn't talk in inspirational slogans or metaphors. So none of this "get after it" or "you just have to do the work." Instead, he gets very concrete about how to structure your day, how to frame your goals and your setbacks, and even how to make your creative environment more conducive to focus and effort. We also talk about how to capture your best ideas, which by the way often occur away from the work that you're actually trying to do, and how to implement them. So if you have an idea or you're searching for an idea for a creative project to share with the world, this conversation will be immensely useful to you. It will also be extremely useful to anyone who suffers from procrastination and self-doubt, which frankly, I think is all of us at some point or another.

Andrew Huberman: I read Stephen's book, *The War of Art*, some years ago, and I loved it. It transformed the way that I did my science, how I approached the podcast, and many, many other aspects of life. You'll also notice that at 82 years old, Stephen is incredibly sharp and fit. So we talk about his physical regimen and the important role that it plays in keeping his mind active, productive, and overcoming resistance. Stephen is not only very accomplished, he is also truly wise and generous. And today he shares a wealth of practical wisdom with us.

Andrew Huberman: Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Stephen Pressfield.

Andrew Huberman: Stephen Pressfield, welcome.

Steven Pressfield: Andrew, it's a pleasure to be here. We're former neighbors, you know, so we've been talking about this for a while. It's great to be here.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I've been wanting to do this for a while. I've been reading your books for, goodness, a couple of decades now or more. First, *War of Art*. Then I started through the library. You've written a lot of books, nonfiction and fiction. It's been super impactful to me and many other people. I think everybody deals with procrastination. You'll tell us about resistance. But there's a quote out there they claim is you. I'm going to assume it's you. And I'm laughing already. And I recommend accepting that it's you, even if it's not, because it's a beautiful quote.

Steven Pressfield: If it's a good quote, I'll take credit for it.

Andrew Huberman: It's great. And I'd like your reflections on it and what you intended when you said it, which is, quote, "The more important to your soul's growth, the stronger the resistance will be," which for me was very counterintuitive. We all imagine the creative process as one of being inspired. "Oh, this is my soul's work," and having a ton of motivation to get the work done, a ton of desire and drive. But the more important to your soul growth, the stronger your resistance will be. Interesting.

Steven Pressfield: Well, that is absolutely true. And what I meant by that was that when we conceive an idea for something we want to do, a movie we want to make or a book we want to make, it's not like at all like what the fantasy was of, "Oh, I'm really charged up. It's going to be great." What happens is waves of what I call resistance with a capital R start coming off that keyboard or whatever it is to try to stop us from doing it, make us procrastinate, make us go to the beach, make us give into distractions, and so on and so forth. The weird principle is, and this is why I always say, if you want to know which one of three or four projects you should do, you should do the one you're most afraid of, because that fear is a form of resistance with a capital R. The more important a project is to your soul's evolution, not to your commercial success, but to your own evolution as an artist, the more resistance you will feel to it. So in other words, the thing that you really should be doing is going to be the hardest and is going to punch you in the face the hardest, which is why so many artists have such a hardcore professional attitude, because they have to have it to be able to stand up to that resistance that's trying to push them away from doing their project, whatever it is. The more important to your soul's evolution, the more resistance you're going to experience. But that's the project you should be doing.

Steven Pressfield: Here's an analogy that I use sometimes, Andrew, and you may have heard me say this before. I think about if you can imagine a tree in the middle of a sunny meadow. As soon as the tree appears, a shadow is going to appear. The tree is your dream, whatever it is, a book, a movie, whatever. And the shadow is the resistance you're going to feel. They are directly proportionate to each other. The bigger the tree, the bigger the shadow. So when you feel that shadow, you feel that massive resistance, "Oh, I want to quit, I'm not good enough to do this," et cetera, et cetera. That's a good sign. It says that the tree, your dream, is really big. And so you got to do it. You don't want to take a little tree; you want to take the big tree.

Andrew Huberman: You have military training and background. You were a Marine, correct?

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, I was a reservist Marine infantryman.

Andrew Huberman: How much does your training as a Marine impact this concept of resistance and your suggestions for people and your ability to push through resistance?

Steven Pressfield: A tremendous amount. You know, when I was going through boot camp and infantry training and stuff like that, I hated it. And I thought, "I just can't wait till I get out of this and just be a regular civilian again." But as I've grown and lived through the artist's life of writing, being in a room with your own demons for two or three years at a time, I've learned that the virtues you learn in the military are the same virtues you have to call upon to live that war of art, the war inside your head. The virtues of stubbornness, of the willing embracing of adversity, of patience, of selflessness, of courage, because it's about fear. So yeah, it's influenced me tremendously. And I found to my amazement as I started writing fiction that I was drawn to themes of war, even though I've never actually been in a war. But it's the inner war that interests me, the metaphor of war. So yeah, a lot. It meant a lot.

Andrew Huberman: Do you think the physical training that you took part in when you were in the Marines has impacted your current physical regimen? By the way, everybody, Stephen is 82 years old. I see him at the gym. He's there every morning, very early. What time do you get there?

Steven Pressfield: I get there at quarter to five.

Andrew Huberman: Quarter to 5 a.m., which is why I see him from time to time because I'm not there at quarter to five. You're coming in, I'm going home. And I sometimes train there and elsewhere, but you are very consistent. You train very early. So clearly you're in great physical and mental shape. It's awesome to see you are, with all the discussion about longevity, you are living proof. So I am curious about your physical regimen and the extent to which your physical regimen impacts your ability to lean into and against resistance to do your creative work at the keyboard or with pen and paper?

Steven Pressfield: That's a great question. Going to the gym early, first thing for me, is a rehearsal for when I get home and I go sit at the keyboard and I actually have to face the resistance of working that day. To me, the gym is about something that I don't want to do. I hate to get up that early in the morning and get there. It's something that is going to hurt. We all know about that. And it's something that I'm afraid of because, as you know, there are all kinds of ways you can hurt yourself and embarrass yourself and so on and so forth. But having done that in the morning, I think we have a mutual friend in Randy Wallace, right?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Randy has this thing, Randall Wallace, who wrote *Braveheart* and directed that and many others. He has a thing in the morning that he calls "little successes." What he's trying to do to build momentum for when he's actually going to sit down and write is achieve something that he can say, "Okay, I did something good here, and then I did..." So going to the gym for me is that. It's not so much about the physical aspect of it; it's the rehearsal for facing it. I feel like when I finish at the gym, nothing I'm going to do for the rest of the day is going to be as hard as what I already did. So the ways are greased and I can go forward. That's the theory, anyway.

Andrew Huberman: So when you wake up in the morning, you're not looking forward to working out?

Steven Pressfield: No. Can we say that here? Absolutely not. It's a drag. I hate to go. I prefer to stay in bed. I wish I could stay in bed. But on the days I do stay in bed, Sunday, I don't feel so good about myself. I wish I had gone to the gym. I mean, you must feel the same way, Andrew, about whatever you do, being an old skateboarder and a fitness guy your whole life. How does it fit in with your regimen?

Andrew Huberman: Well, the problem for me is that I love working out.

Steven Pressfield: Oh, you do? Wow.

Andrew Huberman: I do. And I always have. I have noticed in the last maybe two, three years that occasionally I have to push myself a little bit more, but I loathe rest days, but they are important. I do believe in taking one full day off per week, letting my body recover. But the problem is that I really enjoy working out. And so by the time I'm done working out and I shower up and I eat and I'm sitting down to do some work, I think, "Oh, now comes the really hard workout." But I noticed that I learn things during those workouts, provided that I don't have my phone with me. I might listen to music on my phone, sometimes a podcast or an audio book, but I do my very best not to be on social media or text during those workouts because during those workouts, something always comes to mind that I find useful for elsewhere in life. And it usually pops up during a rest period between sets. I think exercise takes our brain and body into these unfamiliar states. And I think that our unconscious mind geysers stuff up. I think it was the great Joe Strummer of The Clash that said, when you have a thought that feels important, write it down because you think it will be there later, but certain thoughts and ideas are offered up and they don't last, at least not in that form. You need to catch them. And so I have a mode of catch usually in notes. Do you have a capture method for ideas, whether or not you get them during workouts?

Steven Pressfield: I don't get ideas during workouts. But I completely agree with that. Those ideas that come like in the shower or when you're on the subway or when you're driving along the freeway, your mind is occupied in something else. Your ego is involved and somehow it opens the pipeline and things burble up. You always think, "Oh, I'll remember that." But you forget it. It's like a dream. They just go away. So, yeah, I'll just dictate it into my phone. My phone now is full of stuff that I've got to transcribe. But I couldn't agree more with that.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, there's something about the way that our unconscious mind, I feel like it kind of tosses things up for the conscious mind to catch. And in those moments, just like in a dream, we think, "Oh, I'll remember this later."

Steven Pressfield: And we don't. It's amazing how they go away. Evanescence.

Andrew Huberman: Evanescence. It's a beautiful word and it captures it perfectly.

Steven Pressfield: See, I'm a different. I don't believe it's really coming from the subconscious. I'm a believer in the goddess. I'm a believer in the muse. I think it's coming from someplace else. And that they're playing with us a little bit. Like I know Steven Spielberg says when an idea comes, he says it whispers rather than shouting, which is his way of saying it's a very subtle thing that goes away very fast. You got to grab it while it's there.

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Andrew Huberman: Tell me more about this from the goddess or the gods or the muse, you know, from outside us or from God.

Steven Pressfield: Well, if you go back to the ancient Greeks, every work like the *Iliad* or the *Odyssey* or any of those other great works always start with an invocation of the muse. Homer writes, "Goddess, tell the story." Basically, the artist is stepping or taking his ego out of the picture and saying, "I'm not the one that's going to tell you this story about ancient Troy. The goddess will tell it through me." So they're sort of asking, "Help me, show me," that kind of thing. I had a mentor, a guy named Paul Rink. He sort of introduced me to this concept. This was like the first time I tried to write a book. I was like 27 or something like that. Well, I had actually tried and failed before, but it was the first time I ever finished one. I used to have breakfast every morning in Carmel Valley, not so far from where you grew up, with my friend Paul Rink, who was maybe 30 years older than me. He was an established writer. He knew John Steinbeck, knew Henry Miller from Big Sur. And he told me about the muses, the Greek goddesses, the nine sisters, whose job it was to inspire artists. The classic image of the muse is Beethoven at the piano and a kind of shadowy female figure whispering in his ear, bringing him the music. So he wrote out for me, my friend Paul, the invocation of the muse from the *Odyssey*, from Homer's *Odyssey*, translation by T.E. Lawrence. And I've kept that. It burned up in the fire, lost it in the fire, but I've kept that for like 50 years. Every morning before I sit down to work, I say that prayer out loud and in full earnest. "God has helped me." I'm absolutely a believer in that, that ideas come from another place. It's our job to open the pipeline and get out of the way.

Andrew Huberman: I love it. I'm totally open to the idea that it's not the unconscious mind or the subconscious, whatever people want to call it. I'm sad to hear that this write-up of Invocation of the Muse burned. We should probably just mention that we used to be neighbors. Your home burned in the fires, sadly. The home that I lived in, it was not my home, I was renting it, also burned in the fires. So my guess is that at some point during today's conversation, we'll talk about loss of objects and items, but it sounds like this one was pretty precious.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, it was a sad thing to lose that. But it's in my head.

Andrew Huberman: How long is it?

Steven Pressfield: It was on one page, double spaced. I would say it takes, to recite it, maybe 90 seconds.

Andrew Huberman: Do you have any interest or desire in calling it up now or a portion of it?

Steven Pressfield: I'll call up just the opening of it because the middle part is Homer describing the whole story of the *Odyssey*. But it starts like this: "O divine poesie, goddess, daughter of Zeus, sustain for me this song of the various-minded man," meaning Odysseus. And then he kind of goes on to talk, and at the end it says, "Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, O muse," which I think is a great line. Make it live, make it come alive in all its many bearings. So, thanks to my friend Paul, that's been a thing that's been with me for 40 years.

Andrew Huberman: I love it. Well, we'll provide a link to the full script. It's in *The War of Art*, actually. I wrote this out in *The War of Art*. I think it's on page 114 or 115. And if anyone hasn't read *War of Art*, it's an absolute must read. I've read it many times. It's an audio book form, a hard copy form. It is awesome. So when you sit down to write after you recited this, how many times in the first 10 minutes do you think your mind flits to something else? I mean, you're a pro now, you've written many books, and you know what is noise and you know what is signal, and you know if you really need to go to the bathroom or if you don't. These are the things that pop up as you pull it out. Resistance comes in: "Oh, you need another glass of water," or "Not enough caffeine," or "There's not enough sunlight coming through my window," whatever. How many times in the first 10 minutes on a typical day, just give us an average, do you think your mind flits to, "Man, I wonder what's going on in the news," or what's going on in the world? I mean, how many times? One, two, never?

Steven Pressfield: Never. Now that's not to say when I first started many, many moons ago that I didn't have a lot of that sort of stuff. But I have, I don't know, over the years, I'm absolutely a believer in diving straight into the pool. I don't sit there for one second wondering what I'm going to do. I just plunge right in. Thank goodness I've somehow learned how to do it. I just focus full tilt on it. So yeah, I don't have those thoughts at all.

Andrew Huberman: How long do you ride in that first bout before you make it?

Steven Pressfield: Maybe an hour. And then I'll take a little bit of a break. I love to do laundry. That's my big thing. I'll put in the laundry at the start, and the load will be done. Then I can put it into the dryer. I take a little break, and then I come back and start again for another hour.

Andrew Huberman: You enjoy it, or you enjoy clean laundry, or both?

Steven Pressfield: I enjoy the ritual of it and the craziness of it.

Andrew Huberman: Not me, not one bit. The only thing I enjoy about doing laundry is clearing the lint trap. There's something very satisfying about that.

Steven Pressfield: That's what I hate. I don't want to do that at all.

Andrew Huberman: Interesting. All right. Well, we're not considering, but we'd make good roommates. So for an hour, you're locked in and you're just typing. How often does your inner critic pop up nowadays versus at the beginning? Meaning the, "I don't know if this is going the right direction." I've heard before that you're just supposed to create and then edit later. What's your process there?

Steven Pressfield: It almost never comes up, the inner critic. Again, it used to, all the time. It was a terrible struggle I had for years. You sit down and you think, "Well, would Hemingway write this sentence?" or "What will the *New York Times* think when I write?" But eventually over time you learn you just can't deal with that bullshit. It drives you insane. So no, I don't let that inner critic come in. I definitely am a believer, at the end of the day, I never read what I wrote and I never look back on it the next day. I believe in multiple drafts. Somebody taught me this one time: think in multiple drafts. This was Jack Epps, the original writer of *Top Gun*. I was working for him on a movie project, and he said, "Always think in multiple drafts. You can only fix so much in one draft. You can only fix one thing in one draft." So I usually will think of, and I start a book, maybe 13, 14, 15 drafts. The last seven or eight will be really small, really slight changes. But I won't look back on the day's work because I figure on the next draft, then I'll read it fresh and it'll look a million times more clear. "Is this any good?" Because if you do it when it's too fresh, you start to drive yourself crazy. You start to, perfectionism, another form of resistance, comes in. So yeah, that's my process. I know a lot of other people don't do it that way, but that's the way I do it. When the day is done, the bell rings, the office is closed, that's it. I turn off my mind and just let the muse take care of it overnight, and I try not to worry about it at all.

Andrew Huberman: I know I'm getting into the weeds here, really.

Steven Pressfield: No, it's very important that you get into the weeds, because I think you've offered many times through books and other podcasts the contour and a lot of depth. But I think the more detail, the better, because everyone will do it slightly differently. I think it's very important. We rarely hear what people's real process is. So please don't edit yourself here.

Andrew Huberman: At the end of a day's session, all I ask myself is, "Did I put in the time and did I work as hard as I can?" Quality will take care of itself later, the next draft, the next draft after that. I'd never judge it. And it took a long, long time to get to that place, to learn that.

Andrew Huberman: Because I would drive myself insane for years and years, judging along the way.

Steven Pressfield: How long is the total writing session depending on how much laundry you have to do? Great question. I used to be able to write for four hours. Now I can only write for about two. What I tell myself, and I think it's true, is that I can do in two hours now what I used to do in four. But I stop when I start making mistakes. When I start having typos and things like that, then it's kind of like a workout at the gym. You know, when you've reached the end, you know, I'm just going to hurt myself if I do another set. The point of diminishing returns. So when I get tired, I stop and I don't question it at all. I don't make myself feel bad about, "Oh, you can get another 10 minutes." Like Steinbeck used to say that pressing forward at the end of a long day to get just a little bit more is the falsest kind of economy because you pay for it the next day.

Andrew Huberman: And Hemingway used to say he always stopped when he knew what was coming next in the story, which I also believe in that too because that'll help you in that hairy first moment when you're sitting down because at least you know, "Oh, okay, this is what's going to happen."

Steven Pressfield: Ah, so you leave sort of an ellipse in your mind so the next morning you know exactly where to pick up and the entry point is a little easier.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, exactly. The analogy to working out is a great one. And years ago when I started resistance training, I learned from Mike Mentzer. I don't know if you ever overlapped with Mike at Gold's.

Steven Pressfield: No. He died some years ago. Let me just interrupt for a second. They call it resistance training, which is exactly what we're talking about for art.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: But please continue.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, excellent point. So, you know, there are a lot of theories out there about resistance training and how best to get muscles to grow and to get stronger, et cetera. At one extreme is, you know, you warm up and then you do one set to absolute failure, maybe a second set you push through. That's kind of the Mentzer high intensity thing. At the other extreme is volume, just lots and lots and lots of sets. There's been debate about this endlessly and it has to do with all sorts of factors. But the literature is now coming to a place where it's pretty clear that after warming up, the first one or two sets that you do are really the most valuable of a given exercise.

Steven Pressfield: I didn't know that.

Andrew Huberman: Almost certainly you need more than one set. Overall, you certainly do. But it's really the intensity that you bring. But here's the point that is strongly analogous to what you're talking about. When you say you used to be able to write for four hours a day, now you do two and you tell yourself that you accomplish the same amount in those two. That's almost certainly true based on what we understand about neuroscience and, believe it or not, resistance training in the gym. And the argument is that as you resistance train or write or play volleyball or do any activity, you develop a better ability to recruit your nervous system to do the necessary work. You said you didn't used to be able to just sit down and focus for an hour with minimal interruption in your mind. Now you can. You learned that. The more intensity that we can bring to something, the more focus we can bring to something, the more taxing it is. Like if I do one set in the gym with total concentration to absolute failure, which is very difficult to do when you first start training. You barely know how to do the movement, right? Your nervous system is still learning. You can't inflict the same stimulus with one set that you can later after you're practiced.

Steven Pressfield: Makes a lot of sense.

Andrew Huberman: And so there's this counterintuitive thing that people in the high performance field are really starting to adopt. And I talk to people in a bunch of different high performance fields, not just exercise and creative works, that the better you get at something, the shorter your real work bouts should be. And the more intense they should be. It's almost like a knife that's getting sharper and sharper. You can cut deeper and deeper. Whereas at the beginning, we have sort of a dull blade and we have to, you know, route over the same path. So I think this is a nervous system feature. And that's why it transcends physical and mental, creative and other types of works. Because if you talk to great musicians, they're not practicing 11 hours a day anymore. They're practicing for three or four extremely focused hours, sometimes divided up by naps and meals. So in any case, you put in your two very focused hours with some laundry in between and then you rack it, you hang it up and you don't look at it. Are you thinking about it throughout the day?

Steven Pressfield: No, but like we were talking about, if an idea comes to me and I grab my phone and I dictate that. And let me say one thing here for anybody that's listening to this and would be, want to be writers, aspiring writers. So I'm a full writer. I don't have another job. I don't have to do anything. But yet I can only get two hours at a time basically in the day. So if you guys have a full-time job and kids and a family and a wife and a spouse, whatever, if you can squeeze out a couple of hours a day, you're on the same level with me, same level with a full-time writer. So it is possible to have a full-time job and still do your artistic thing to a full tilt version.

Andrew Huberman: Excellent point. How important do you think it is for you to start that writing session at more or less the same time each day? You're not saying two hours in the morning or two hours in the evening, two hours in the morning or hour in the morning, hour in the afternoon. It sounds like it's very regimented.

Steven Pressfield: I think it's really important. And when life was more predictable for me, I would always do it. But since the fires and other things like that, sometimes I have to shift timeframes around and be ready to do that. I have a good friend, Jack Carr, the thriller writer who did *The Terminal List*. And, you know, he's a master of writing in airplanes and writing at Starbucks because he's always traveling and doing all kinds of stuff and just finding the time. God bless him. I don't know how he does it, and he is incredibly productive. I don't know if I could do that. Maybe I will shift from writing from 11 to 1 to writing from 1 to 3, but that's about the most variance I can put into it.

Andrew Huberman: Do you have your phone in the room when you write and is the internet engaged on your computer?

Steven Pressfield: Not at all. No. I mean, my phone is there maybe to dictate a note or something like that, but otherwise, no, absolutely not. And, yeah, I can't even imagine that.

Andrew Huberman: Music?

Steven Pressfield: No, no music, no.

Andrew Huberman: Just the sound of your own breathing.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Because you're in your own head, right? You're in that universe. This is what I find so odd about writing is you're in your head. It's your voice in your head but you're in a conversation with the potential audience. What is the actual dialogue? Are you thinking—this gets a little philosophical but at the end of the day it's very concrete—are you thinking about a conversation with the audience or are you just translating thoughts into words and the audience doesn't exist yet?

Steven Pressfield: I'm very aware of the reader in the sense of, let's say it's a scene that I'm writing, and I know certain things have to happen in this scene. Character A has to do something, character B, da-da-da-da. And so I'm trying to put that down, but I'm thinking, is the reader understanding? Have I got this in the right order for them? Am I boring them? Did I say that two pages ago and now I'm repeating myself? But I'm not having a conversation. I'm just trying to make it as easy and as interesting and as fun as I can for the reader. And I'm always trying to make sure that I'm leading them. I'm seducing them. I'm trying to reel them in and not bore them. By the end of this chapter or scene, I want the reader to be thinking, "Oh, I can't wait to turn the page and see what happens next."

Andrew Huberman: Growing up, were you a storyteller among your friends?

Steven Pressfield: I never even thought about it as a kid.

Andrew Huberman: Like you didn't, hanging out with friends, you wouldn't tell a story about what had happened three days ago?

Steven Pressfield: No. I mean, just like anybody else would, but no, I was never like a storyteller or anything. I was not a kid that wanted to be a writer. I never thought about it at all.

Andrew Huberman: So you just kind of tripped and fell into all that?

Steven Pressfield: I mean, my first job was in advertising in New York City, right out of college. It was like the *Mad Men* thing.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. But I guess at the time I thought, "Oh, I'd love to write a commercial that people said, 'Oh, that was great. It was so funny. I love that thing.'" So that sort of got me kind of a little bit started into the idea of storytelling. And then I had a boss. His name was Ed Hannibal. And he wrote a book kind of at home and it became a hit. It was called *Chocolate Days, Popsicle Weeks*. And he quit to become like a novelist. And so I thought, "Well, shit, why don't I do that?" So that was what sort of started me into it, being completely naive and totally stupid and having no idea of what I was doing.

Andrew Huberman: That's wild. So I imagined you as like the kid who was always coming in telling stories.

Steven Pressfield: No, not at all.

Andrew Huberman: Advertising is pretty interesting, though, because it's the same process. You have to get into the mind of the audience. You have a story to tell. And I guess with advertising, the goal is a purchase, and with writing, the idea is they buy into the next page.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, something like that. Very similar in that sense.

Andrew Huberman: Any ads that you recall particularly enjoying?

Steven Pressfield: No, I was terrible. I was never any good at it. I never made any money at it. I was never successful at all. But I met a lot of nice people and I learned a lot of stuff.

Andrew Huberman: You said that was in New York City?

Steven Pressfield: It was in New York City. In fact, if I can hype one of my books, it's a small follow-up to *The War of Art* called *Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit*. And a lot of it is about what you learn in advertising because nobody wants to read your ads or listen to your commercials or anything like that. And so one thing you learn in that business is to make it so good or so interesting, so intriguing that people will overcome their hatred of having to listen to your stupid Preparation H commercial. So that was what got me started, but I was never a storyteller as a kid, no.

Andrew Huberman: I'd like to go back to the quote that we started with: "The more important to your soul's growth, the stronger the resistance will be." I think many people will hear that, including myself, and will think, "Okay, what is my soul's growth? Where does it want to go?" I think when we hear the words "soul" and "growth," particularly when it's about us, we think there's going to be this big sign written on the heavens about what we're supposed to do and we're going to feel compelled to do it. You're saying the opposite, that the thing that we need to do most sometimes is hidden from us. The muse perhaps can reveal that, and it's through the act of writing without knowing what the work even is that sometimes we arrive there. So for people that don't have a crystallized idea yet, and they want to explore their creative sense—they might want to do it through writing, they might want to do it through pottery, they might want to do it through music, they might want to do it through making movies, any number of things—what's the translation from "the thing you need most is the thing you're resisting most" to actually getting into the process of evolving that thing out of us? It sounds like an extrusion process, like you're trying to push semi-solid concrete through a filter. But I want to know what the filter is.

Steven Pressfield: It's a great question. I know that young people today, there's a tremendous amount of pressure on people to find their passion and follow their passion and so on and so forth. And I know for me, as a young person, I would go, "What the fuck is that? I don't know what it is that I want to do. I'm lost. I'm just struggling." But I do think that we are all born with some sort of at least one kind of a calling of some kind. And it may not be the arts. It may be helping other people through some kind of a nonprofit or something. Or like what you're doing, Andrew, where you're bringing neuroscience and the scientific to personal development and so on and so forth. I think we do all have some sort of calling. And we know it. If we could somehow put somebody in here and say, "I'll give you three seconds. Tell me what you should be supposed to be doing," it will pop into somebody's head. They go, "Oh, I know I've always wanted to be a motorcycle, whatever." So that sort of whisper urge to do this thing is immediately countered by this force of resistance, because it's trying to stop us. It's the devil. It's trying to stop us from being our true selves and becoming self-realized, self-actualized or whatever. So resistance will immediately say to us, like if you were to say, "Oh, I want to have a podcast and I want to talk about science," immediately resistance would say, "Who are you, Andrew, to do this thing? I mean, you're a professor at Stanford. We don't have any experience doing this. Not to mention it's been done a million times by other people. They've done it a thousand times better than you. Nobody's going to give a shit. You're going to put this out and you're going to embarrass yourself. You had a certain level of prestige at Stanford. Now you're an idiot."

Andrew Huberman: Some people actually said, "Stanford's not going to like it. Why would you do this? You're tenured at Stanford. What are you doing? You fund your lab. You're publishing well." One of those people was my father, who's also a scientist.

Steven Pressfield: I rest my case.

Andrew Huberman: My process of pushing back.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. And the true part here, the really kind of interesting part, is a lot of times those voices will be the voices closest to us, our spouse, our father. Because, well, I can get into that. But in any event, that voice of resistance will come up. In addition, resistance will try to distract us. It'll try to make us procrastinate. It'll try to make us yield to perfectionism where we noodle over one sentence for three days, or fear, all of the other things will stop us. So many people live their entire lives and never enact their real calling. But we were talking about "the more important to the growth of your soul." That was what we started with, right? So that calling, whatever it is, to be a writer, a filmmaker, whatever it is, if we don't do that in our life, that energy doesn't go away. It goes into a more malignant channel. And it shows itself in maybe an addiction, alcoholism, cruelty to others, abuse of others, abuse of ourselves, porn, you name it, any of the vices that people have. Because that original creative divine energy that really wants to be the odyssey or something like that, if we yield to our own resistance and don't evolve that, then bad things happen. On the other hand, if we do follow that, we kind of open ourselves up to becoming who we really are. And a lot of people in the podcasting and the human development or personal development world, they sort of promise some sort of nirvana is going to happen if you do X, Y, Z. But what I'm promising is a fuck of a lot of hard work that probably will never be rewarded, but you'll be on the track that your soul was meant to be on. And God bless you, you can't ask for any more than that. And sometimes it works out at spectacular levels of whatever, income, fame, whatever it is that people think they might want, but that's not really the thing to chase.

Andrew Huberman: We'll talk about that.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, we'll talk about that.

Andrew Huberman: So sometimes it's the lottery of life.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, sometimes. But that absolutely should not be the thing that people are chasing.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. I only know my own experience, and I couldn't help but reflect a little bit on when I was deciding to do the podcast, and I did get some voices back like, "Hey, what are you doing?" And I had not clinically diagnosed with Tourette's or anything like that, but I felt at that point that I had a certain amount of knowledge in me based on 25 years of studying and research in neuroscience and related fields. And I felt like if I didn't let it out, I was going to explode. And so Rob, my producer, and my bulldog Costello and I went into a small closet in Topanga and set up some cameras and I exploded onto the camera. It just poured out. I think for the entire first year, we were doing almost all solos, hardly any guests because it was pandemic and we weren't quite sitting down with guests.

Steven Pressfield: Oh, I didn't know that.

Andrew Huberman: And I don't even remember thinking about the hundreds of hours of preparation. We did hundreds of hours of preparation for each episode. But I just feel like it just kind of geysered out. So I think there's some benefit to having something build up so much within us that it has to come out. And I can certainly relate to the dangers of suppressing something. And how old were you when you started that?

Steven Pressfield: 45 years old.

Andrew Huberman: 45. Yeah, so I was kind of late to it. Now, I lectured in front of students and given seminars and lectured in front of donors, which is in some way similar to the podcast in the sense that you're teaching science often to non-scientists or diverse fields. But for me, it was just inside. I couldn't help it. My only answer was I couldn't help it. And to his credit, by the way, my dad has been immensely supportive of the podcast. He actually was on the podcast and gave us a chance to bond and learn about him. And he's a scientist, so I got to learn some physics. The audience got to learn some physics as well. But when you take on something that people are not familiar with you doing, or they are projecting onto you the sense that they want you safe and secure, because sometimes it's a genuine feeling of support for somebody—a mother or father or siblings—like, "Hey, so you're going to give up your job as a lawyer to go write movie scripts? And you got three kids?" They're scared for you because they don't want to see you take your life off a cliff.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. What's your response to that? I mean, there's validity to that, obviously.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: But I think what happens is that each person is dealing with their own resistance, their own calling, their own that they know that they really should be doing. And 99.999% of them are not doing it or are unconscious of it. It's sort of a niggling thing, but they don't know about it. So then when they see you, Andrew, starting your podcast, that's a reproach to them. And they say, "Well, if Andrew can do it, why can't I do it?" And so then it becomes kind of malicious. And I don't think it's deliberately malicious a lot of times. But people will then try to undermine you and say, under the guise of "We're only looking out for you. We don't want your children to be starving and in the street," they will try to undermine you and stop you from doing it and make fun of you or ridicule you. Like the filmmaker David O. Russell. I don't know if you know who I'm talking about. He did *The Fighter* with Mark Wahlberg.

Andrew Huberman: I love that movie.

Steven Pressfield: He did *Silver Linings Playbook* with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. And *Joy* about the lady who invented the miracle mop, which was Jennifer Lawrence. And all of these stories are about sabotage by the people closest to you, your family. Like in *The Fighter*, Mark Wahlberg is this boxer, right? And he's got seven sisters and he also has an older brother. And his mom is his manager and she's like booking him fights where he's outweighed by 20 pounds and he gets massacred. True story of Mickey Ward. And the story is, he finally meets a girl who's like really supportive of him. But anyway, it's a real theme that the people closest to us will try to—they don't want us. They're happy the way we are. "We like you, Andrew, the way you are. Our son, we know he's working at Stanford. He's doing his thing. We don't want to see him suddenly burst out of the cocoon and become a butterfly and wing away from us." So they like you the way you are.

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Andrew Huberman: We've had several clinical psychologists on the podcast, and a resounding theme from them has been that it is astounding and yet consistent that people will remain in a not-so-great place that they understand and is predictable in exchange for what they could do, stepping into some new life. Even getting over their anger about something. In fact, I was thinking throughout today's conversation, I couldn't help but think that perhaps the two most dangerous things to the creative process, to really doing the important work, are the many, many things that exist in the world now that basically sell us the opportunity for free to be angry or to numb out. I mean, again, if people want to drink a little bit, I'm not going to disparage that. I've done an episode on alcohol. It's not good for you, but some people can have a couple of drinks a week or whatever. Not judging there, but things like alcohol, like certain forms of social media. And I say certain forms because I do think social media can be informative and educational in the right context and the right amount. Certain forms of media more generally, the news, right? Any number of highly processed, highly palatable foods, which are not delicious, but they allow us to kind of numb out our senses and just kind of mindlessly eat. And on and on. I feel like anger and numbing out are how the world is trying to pull us away. And someone gets paid for that. We think we get it for free, but they get paid for that very well. We give our time, our soul, according to what you're saying. And then more close to us within our inner circle, people that genuinely care about us are, from what you're saying, kind of in their own psychological entanglements, and they really care, they want us safe, they want to keep us where they know they can find us. And as a consequence, it's really tough to even get to the process of resistance at this point. It's all around us.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. You hit the nail on a lot of heads.

Andrew Huberman: So I feel like, do you think the world is set up now in ways that it's more difficult to get to that chair and to meet the inner resistance? I phrased it poorly before. There's resistance all around us. There's in the things that are being sold to us, quote unquote, for free. The cost is immense. It's true you're not putting a coin in a slot and pulling a lever, but it's your time. It's your soul. It's your essence. It's your life.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: And then it's close to us with family members and friends and significant others. Sometimes dogs are immune from this. Cats are immune. They want us to do the real work because we'll be right next to us. And then with all that, then we sit down and then the resistance comes up from right up in the middle. It's like a minefield.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, I agree with you completely. I don't think it's ever been harder. I always said that if you want to make a billion dollars, come up with some kind of product that feeds into people's natural resistance, like potato chips or social media or something. And they did come up with a product, and it's called the Internet. It's called social media. And you're right. People make a lot of money off of that because they're just allowing people, you or me, who has a calling that we know we should be doing, they're allowing us to not do it, to be drawn over here for whatever reason. And I think a lot of the anger and polarization in politics is about that today, because people can't face sitting down to do whatever they were born to do. So it's much easier to hate the other person over here or get completely caught up in that rabbit hole of all that sort of stuff.

Andrew Huberman: To follow your calling is a really hard thing. We were born, by evolution, to be tribal creatures. And the one thing that the tribe hates the most is somebody that goes his own way or her own way, right? Follows their own thing and doesn't hew to what the tribe wants them to do. So for us to do that as individuals is a bitch.

Andrew Huberman: And it's usually like what you said, you sort of exploded out of you when you got, you have to almost reach a breaking point, you know, almost hit bottom in some kind of a sense before it just kind of explodes out of you because we'll all resist that so much. It's so scary.

It's so interesting. I think it was in high school that I first realized how silly humans are. And it was the following: at the time I was into skateboarding. Skateboarding has gone through various evolutions of being popular. Now it's in the Olympics of being unpopular or being profitable. When I got into it, it was really unpopular. It had gone through one big, two big waves. There was the kind of Dogtown and Z-Boys wave, like the back, discovering backyard pools, this kind of thing that the surfers did. Then there was a second wave for those that care. This was like the classic Bones Brigade wave. There were only two or three big companies. Tony Hawk was early in this because he was young. His dad, Frank Hawk, ran the National Skateboard Association. And then it disappeared. Just kind of, you know, kids that were into soccer, they were into other sports. Skateboarding wasn't a big thing. It was small.

And there was this really kind of weird trend in the early 90s where skateboarders started wearing really baggy clothes. No one wore really baggy clothes. And I'll never forget, because I was part of that community, we wore these what now wouldn't even be considered baggy clothes. So we're not talking about like a deep sag on the shorts, but it was like baggy shorts. And I'll never forget the amount of teasing and ridicule that we received. People were like, pull up your pants, you know, why are you progressing? By the athletes, by the water polo athletes, the jocks, everything, but not just at school, that we received. People like, pull up your pants. Leave for the summer, come back, and over that summer, someone in the world of rock and roll and in hip-hop had kind of picked this up from skateboarding culture, and baggy pants and shorts hit the mainstream.

Steven Pressfield: Oh, I never knew that.

Andrew Huberman: And the next year, everyone was into it. And that's when the bell went off. I was like, they don't actually know what they like. This is just the essence of peer pressure. They have no concept of what they actually like. And I think that was a big one for me. I was like, well, first of all, I thought they're hypocrites. I thought they're idiots. And then I realized, but they're none of those things. It's that for most people, what they like is sold to them. And they're tracking someone else.

And so throughout my life, I've had mentors that didn't know me. I literally have a list of different names. Some of these people live, some of them dead. Amazingly, some of them are now my close friends. I embarrass them all the time by telling them that they're on this list. But I think that the concept of mentorship is so much different than the concept of looking to the other members of our species more broadly for what is cool, what's worth pursuing. How valuable for you have mentors been? I know you've been a mentor to many people. By the way, you're on the list, just to embarrass you. I can show you that list from the late 90s, 2000s transition. How important are mentors and how do we differentiate mentors from the voice in our own head? How important is it to be self-guided versus encouraged and guided by these mentor voices? Because I believe that the general public is the absolute wrong signal. I think that signal takes you off the metaphorical cliff.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Mentors have been really important to me, very important. In fact, I wrote a memoir called *Government Cheese*. I don't know if you've heard about this one at all. But the chapters are named after the various mentors that I've had, many of them. And a lot of them are not in the writing world at all. My friend Paul, he was in the writing world, but I had a boss at a trucking company that I worked for that was like a real mentor to me. I picked fruit in Washington State as a migratory worker for a while. And I had a mentor there. I never even knew his last name. He was a fellow fruit picker, a former Marine from the Chosin Reservoir in Korea. I'm sure nobody listening to this knows what that is, but it was like an amazing horror show of heroism in any way.

Andrew Huberman: What was it about those two mentors that you can maybe summarize that you extracted? Was it a work ethic? Was it a style of being?

Steven Pressfield: It was a work ethic in both cases. In the one, again, I'll sort of get a little into the weeds here a little bit.

Andrew Huberman: Please, please.

Steven Pressfield: I had gone to a tractor trailer driving school, and I got hired to work for this company in North Carolina. And I was a beginner. And I really fucked up big time one time. I dropped a trailer with like $300,000 worth of industrial equipment in it. And my boss, his name was Hugh Reeves, took me out to this hot dog place called Amos and Andy's in Durham, North Carolina. And he sat me down and he said, "Son, I don't know what internal drama you're going through. I know you're going through something. But let me tell you this. While you're working for me, you're a professional, and your job is to deliver a load. And I don't care what happens between A and B, you got to do that." And I knew he was just absolutely right. And I thought, man, I got to get my shit together here. So that obviously stuck with me forever.

And my friend John from Seattle in the fruit picking world was, again, I'm going to do a longer story than probably needs to be here. In the fruit picking world, at least when I was doing this, most of the work was done by fruit tramps, by guys that were riding the rails from the old days. And one of the phrases that they used was "pulling the pin." Have you ever heard this thing? And what pulling the pin meant was quitting too soon. Pulling the pin came from railroad. If you want to uncouple one car from another, the trainman would pull a heavy steel pin and the cars would uncouple. So you would wake up one day in a bunkhouse at six weeks into a season and so-and-so would be gone. He'd say, "Oh, what happened to Andrew?" And I'd say, "Oh, he pulled the pin."

So at the time that I was there, I was trying for the first time to finish a book and I'd run out of money. This is why I was working to get the money. And I realized that in my life, I had pulled the pin on everything that I'd ever done: on my marriage, on this, that, the other. And this friend of mine, John, I wanted to quit before the season ended, and he would not let me do it. He just sort of took me under his wing. And so that was another thing. It was just drilled into my head in the sense of, am I going to finish this project? Fuck yeah, I'd rather die. I will die before I'll give up on this project. And it was all because of him. So those are two mentors that weren't writing mentors, but that I used there. Those lessons stuck with me forever.

And I will say one thing, too, for anybody that's struggling with finishing anything: once I did finish that book, which I did, I've never had any trouble finishing anything ever again. Whereas it was my bete noire for years. I would fumble on the goal line. Resistance, former resistance.

Andrew Huberman: I love that those two guys are now alive and present in 2025. I don't know, they may still be alive in general. But perfectionism, you've talked about it as the enemy. I learned two very disparate schools of thought in research science. One was no one study can answer everything. So when you get to the point where you have a clear answer what the data mean, you write it up, you ship it out, you publish. And I feel very fortunate that I worked for people that encourage that because many people get caught up in the idea that every paper has to be a landmark paper. Actually, that's one of the major causes of scientific fraud, by the way, when people feel that their papers have to be published in the top tier journals. It's probably the strongest driver of scientific fraud. There are probably some bad apples that come in and are seeking ways that they can build narratives to get prizes and stuff, but I think they're exceedingly rare. Those people are driven to other fields where there's more money involved, more fame involved. But in science, a lot of bad stuff comes from people feeling that they have to have a landmark paper. And I was taught early on: some papers end up in solid journals and some end up in spectacular journals. And some projects go nowhere. That's just the reality. The key is to figure out which one is which, but finish things.

At the other end of the spectrum is this idea that if you are able to make something better, you should. And this is the reason I delayed my book release for a year. I felt like I could make it better. There are new data. I want to add illustrations. But at some point it's got to ship. So I think we can all agree that perfectionism is not great because it limits our ability to complete things and ship things off. Sometimes even our ability to do the work in the first place. But at some level, if we can make something better, we probably should. That's also part and parcel with meeting resistance and pushing through it. So how do you balance those two? They're in a strong push-pull for me.

Steven Pressfield: I think that it's another great question. I mean, it's so easy, as a writer, to noodle all day with one paragraph. And of course, it's obviously resistance is watching and laughing at you. "Oh man, look at this poor idiot. I've gotten him to completely blow the day on this one thing." So that sort of perfectionism is a form of resistance and really has to be avoided at all costs. On the other hand, you do want to produce something that's really good. But like Seth Godin says, when it's ready to go, ship it. There comes a time when you're just noodling with this because you're afraid of the response. Is this going to fail? Is it going to fizzle? Is it going to crash and burn? So I don't want to ship it out right now.

I had a friend, I tell this story, who had written this deeply personal novel about salvaging a ship. He had been in the Merchant Marine. What a great metaphor that was. And I read it. It was in its mailing box back in the days when you typed it out on a typewriter, ready to go to his agent, and he couldn't make himself send it off. And the sad part of the story is my friend died. And so that was, I don't know whether that was perfectionism or just fear of being judged in the real world. But it's a real vice, perfectionism, and to be guarded against at all costs, I think. But when a thing is ready to go, let it go.

Andrew Huberman: I'd like to talk about death.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: Me too.

Steven Pressfield: Great.

Andrew Huberman: I've listened to and read Steve Jobs' biography. I think it's spectacular. I had a particular interest in it because—

Steven Pressfield: What's the title?

Andrew Huberman: I think it's *Steve Jobs* by Walter Isaacson. It wasn't by Steve Jobs. It's not an autobiography, although there was communication with him in the process of writing the book. I think that's one of the kind of agreements for Isaacson is you have to be willing to talk to him and he can talk to people in one's life. And it's spectacular. And one of the reasons I was so interested in it is that the personal computer came out during my childhood. Steve lived in our area. We'd see him around downtown Palo Alto. He'd come into the sports shop where I worked to get rollerblade wheels. And I was a skateboarder, but we had to sell the rollerblades. It was just part of the job and wagons and things.

In any case, he, from a very early point, apparently understood his own mortality. And apparently that was a strong driver for his intense drive to create things, to envision things. In some sense, people say it's part of the reason why he didn't pay much attention to kind of typical conventions and he was able to evolve the world and create these incredible products. Devices, I mean, portals, they're really portals of communication and creativity. Having a strong sense of one's mortality seems very useful in that respect.

The other end of the spectrum: I have a theory which is that all forms of addiction are basically an attempt to try and avoid the reality that we are going to die, to just forget that for moments shorter or longer. And in some sense, the pursuit of flow states and creative works are an attempt to kind of either forget about that or to some people want to immortalize themselves. But I think knowing that one is going to die is an incredible driver. I have always had a lot of energy, but it was only recently on the threshold of my 50th birthday coming up that I realized, like, oh, I'm probably at about the halfway mark. Realistically, I'm a biologist. I think genetic potential and human longevity is probably about 120. And with certain practices, maybe you can get out past where one is fated to die by maybe five, maybe 10, maybe 20 years, and maybe new technologies will come along that will expand that number. But I figure I'm probably about the halfway mark. So it's kind of nice to have a like an "oh shit" moment because you stop wasting time. Like anyone else, I have wasted time. So how present is your sense of death eventually coming? Hopefully a long time from now. You're in spectacularly good health. So that's important, but how present is the reaper in your process? And do you think having a real sense that the reaper's coming is useful?

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, definitely. I was having breakfast in New York a couple of years ago with a friend of mine who's exactly my age, and I asked him, I said, "Nick, how often do you think about your own mortality?" And he said, "Every fucking minute of every fucking day."

Andrew Huberman: Maybe that's a little bit excessive because it could become paralyzing too.

Steven Pressfield: Right. So I don't know if I go that far, but I'm definitely aware of it. Robert Redford died two days ago, right, in his sleep. To me, it was like an immortal guy that was going to live forever. On the other hand, I have another friend who actually died a couple of years ago. One of my bosses in advertising named Phil Slott, great, smart guy. And he said one time to me that people tell you that life is short, but really life is long. And thinking about you, Andrew, that you're 50 years old, you got another 50 years ahead of you. So one has to think, it can also be a form of resistance. For me at my age to think, "Well, I'm only gonna be around a few more years, I might as well fuck off, I don't have to work that hard." But no, because I might be around for another 20 years or more. That's a career. I could write 15 books. I could make who knows what. Certainly I have to, which is part of why I go to the gym. I don't want to start thinking that I'm on the way down or I haven't got... Life is long. It's longer than we think. And we have, in the sense of it's opportunity to do stuff, but it's also an obligation to do stuff, to keep evolving, so on and so forth.

On another sort of side of this, I don't know if this will be confessional for me. I know when I was a kid, our family was sort of like the black sheep of our bigger family. All of my uncles and stuff were all really successful, and my dad was kind of struggling. And so it became a thing in my mind where I said, just looking ahead for how long you're going to live, I said, "I'm going to show these motherfuckers that our family is not what they think they are." And so that's been a real driver for me, more so than any idea of mortality. Even over those long years where I was getting nowhere, that to sort of honor my dad and that I was going to hang in there and do something.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I think that's a great opportunity for us to talk about another kind of resistance, which is actually very adaptive and can propel us forward, which is having some friction with someone or something. I know this is a little politically incorrect, but in one's mind to be able to drive yourself harder. And I think this can take on toxic forms, but I think it can also be very beneficial. There's this great moment in one of those *Dark Knight* movies where the Joker has the opportunity to kill Batman. And he says something like, "Just kill me." And the Joker says, "Kill you? I don't want to kill you. You complete me." This moment where the Joker doesn't exist without Batman and vice versa. That having somebody or something that you're challenging yourself to, that you're trying to prove yourself to, sometimes to yourself, can be very beneficial.

And at different times in my career, certainly not now, and I kind of miss it a little bit, to be honest. But at various times in my different pursuits, being in competition can be an incredible driver. I could go into a whole story here, but it doesn't matter. I think that it's kind of evident what we're talking about, that having someone that you're not going to let get the best of you, that you know you can do better, can be very useful. It can also be toxic, as we pointed out, because the energy that it pulls on—here I'm going to put my physiologist neuroscience hat on—it's more of an adrenal, adrenaline type drive than kind of orienting towards your love of craft. I mean, it's meshed with that, right? Hopefully it's within a craft you love. But to just be in sheer competition all the time can be depleting. And one has to be really careful with this stuff. So obviously that got you propelled forward. You're going to prove that your family can. In an unconscious way.

Steven Pressfield: It certainly was not, you know, I'm only becoming aware of it now.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, I see. So at the time you weren't aware of it.

Steven Pressfield: I wasn't even aware of it.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, okay. Yeah. I was very aware of this friction because the guy and I had like an outright rivalry. And it was a lot of fun too. Actually, years later, we shared a coffee and reflected on how much great work we each got done in this process. I mean, if you think about Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, how they kind of made each other boom, boom, boom. And now they're the best of friends. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates early on.

Steven Pressfield: Was that true? I didn't know that.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, yeah. There was a big competition, especially in the Bay Area where you had a lot—it was and still remains kind of the seat of tech and computer science. It was like, is it going to be Windows or is it going to be the Mac operating system? And then when they joined forces later, that would have been like the Yankees and the Red Sox merging. It was a mind bend. You're like, "This can't be happening." And all the nerds in the Bay Area are like, "Oh, yeah, this happened. Next thing you know, everybody's moved on." So I think having resistance with the desire to prove oneself can be helpful.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, I think so, too. My trainer at the gym, T.R. Goodman, he's trained a lot of professional athletes, particularly hockey players. And a lot of them, he says because he got to know him very well, really had a chip on their shoulder about something or other. "My dad, I'm going to show my fucking dad that I could do this thing." And it would drive them. But like you say, it becomes kind of toxic at some point. You do have to sort of have that come-to-Jesus moment when you say, "Oh wait a minute, let me get a handle on this and maybe a little forgiveness here or a little bit of empathy, a little of putting myself in the position of this person that I'm trying to show." Greg Norman's dad, the golfer. There are so many people like that that it does become toxic, but it can produce great success because it drives people.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Michael Jordan was famously competitive about everything.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Everything.

Andrew Huberman: I feel very fortunate that these days I do things and I create out of just a love for what I do. There's none of that. I never think about another podcast or what other people—I think about none of that. Truly, I would admit if I did.

Steven Pressfield: Good for you. That's great.

Andrew Huberman: In the past, that wasn't the case. That wasn't the case. And I think that at times it brought out my best, but it made the process much more painful. I think doing something for love of craft is really important.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. But as you've pointed out, that process can be painful, even though you love the craft. It's a weird thing. This is bizarre, dark and light braided together, this creativity thing.

Andrew Huberman: What about feedback from the outside after the thing is done? Reviews. Let's talk about *King Kong*. I mean, you've written about the fact that you made this movie, and it wasn't received with broad accolades. It was quite embarrassing.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Was the movie that bad?

Steven Pressfield: Oh, it was terrible. Yeah, it was really terrible.

Andrew Huberman: Did you know it was terrible when you released it?

Steven Pressfield: No, that was even worse.

Andrew Huberman: So you thought it was awesome.

Steven Pressfield: It was *King Kong Lives*, one of the worst movies ever. And I remember that I wrote this with a partner, Ron Shusett, who was one of the guys who originally did the first *Alien*. The thing where the alien bursts out of the guy's chest, that was his, along with the whole face hugger thing. That was his too. So he was like a really legendary guy, particularly in science fiction. And I was kind of his junior partner. And when we did this movie for Dino DeLaurentiis on a contract, and when we were done, we thought, "This is great." This is how crazy we were. And we invited all of our friends to the screening or something. And when it was over, it was like deathly silence. And I was telling you before we did this thing today, the review in *Daily Variety* said, "Ronald, you said, and Steven Pressfield, we hope these are not their real names for their parents' sake." So that was definitely a bad moment.

But from my point of view, it was the first time I got a movie made that I was involved with at all. So I had to say, a friend of mine, my friend Tony Keppelman, took me aside and said, "You're in the arena, man. You're taking the blows, but you're out there doing it." And he was absolutely right. So in the end, I turned out to be very grateful to that, and I still am grateful to it. But it certainly was a terrible review and kept you humble.

Andrew Huberman: Did you go back and analyze what was wrong with the movie and what could have made it great?

Steven Pressfield: No, it was like too painful to even think about.

Andrew Huberman: When was the last time you watched it?

Steven Pressfield: Oh, not since when it came out, which was like 1980-something or other.

Andrew Huberman: What was the budget for the movie?

Steven Pressfield: A lot. It was a big budget.

Andrew Huberman: In the millions.

Steven Pressfield: Oh, yeah. A lot of special effects. I mean, a *King Kong* movie, you had to.

Andrew Huberman: Wild. So that was terrible. But I'm definitely a believer that the ideal is to not listen to anything that anybody says about what you did and to judge it only yourself. And if you can, I think it's good to get a sort of an objective cross section. Some things go out there and they sink without a trace, some things people really love. But the bottom line is like Paul Rink said to me: start the next one today. Because it's a lifelong, like we were saying, it's for the love of the game. It's a lifelong practice. And a professional does not take success or failure personally, but keeps on going and does the next one and the next one and the next one.

Steven Pressfield: With creative works or anything that our name is closely attached to, it's a challenge. I mean, a book with the author's name there, a movie with the producers and the directors there and the actors, a podcast. I mean, almost every major podcast is named after the podcaster. It's kind of funny. And in science, the lab is named after you. Huberman Lab or whatever lab. I always thought the lab should be named after a particular scientific quest. That's how they do it in other countries. I think that's a lot more elegant. And it also teaches a lesson to the students in postdocs that you're after discovery. It's not just about your career. Unfortunately, in the United States, we promote this notion of the independent investigator. It's all about the individual or maybe small group of two or three of them cracking some really difficult nut. Watson and Crick, and it's always been this way. It's terrible. It's a feature that if I had a magic wand and I don't, I would abolish.

But when our name is closely attached to something, feedback that's great feels pretty good. And if you're a self-critical, hard-driving person, feedback that's negative can hurt. I will say my experience is that the larger volume of negative feedback that you get day in and day out, the less of an impact it has. Initially, like the podcast will come out, you get a bunch of great comments and get some nasty ones. And then you're like, "Oh, that really hurts." You podcast every week, two episodes a week or an episode every week. And pretty soon that just flies right by. The signal, the noise, it just goes way, way down. So I offer that to people because the more you put out there, the more feedback you get and the less of an impact the feedback has. But the positive feedback also becomes just noisier in general. So now when you sit down to write a book, you must see some level of feedback. You want to know, is it selling? Is it doing well? Is it not doing well? But it sounds like you don't analyze why it might have done well or not well. You just assume that's where you were at in that point in time and that's where they're at.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. I don't analyze it because I don't know if you can ever even figure it out. And also, so much of it has to do with, in anything that you put out, with timing. Are people ready for this moment? And how much did it get promoted? Did people even know it existed? There's so many factors that are above and beyond whether it was actually good. And so you can only ask, did you do your best? Did you leave it all on the floor? And if you did, then that's all you can ask. But again, for me, it's a lifelong practice, and I'm going to do this till they take me out. And whatever the next one is, I'll do that.

Andrew Huberman: It's clear you're not going to pull the pin.

Steven Pressfield: No, I'm not going to pull the pin.

Andrew Huberman: Good. Dopamine dynamics in the brain would tell us that if you have a big success, say a book or a movie or an album, what have you, that the next thing, no matter how well it goes, is not going to feel that great unless it exceeds the previous thing. This is just the laws of dopamine circuitry that exist in all of us. I didn't write the script. It's hardwired. Of all your books, which one got the most public acceptance and praise?

Steven Pressfield: It's either *The War of Art* or *Gates of Fire*.

Andrew Huberman: Okay. What book came after that?

Andrew Huberman: But on both of them, it took years for either of them to reach any kind of level. Neither of them were overnight successes. There wasn't any fanfare, nothing really. Finally, maybe eight or 10 years later, you realize, oh, this thing is percolating along pretty good. So that was a whole different sort of... there wasn't that much dopamine coming in on that. That's probably a good thing.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, I think so.

Andrew Huberman: I mean, the whole notion of one-hit wonders, like bands. There's a great movie with Tom Hanks about that. *That Thing You Do*. It's a perfect example. These one-hit wonders are kids that blow up, get one song, and they're gone. There's an incredible documentary that I wish everyone would see. It's called *My Big Break*, which I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival. It's a true story of four guys living in an apartment in Los Angeles who all want to become actors. I won't give any more information, but let's just say one of them becomes immensely successful. The takeaway from the movie is that everybody gets their big break at some point. Most people blow it. They don't blow it because they can't do the thing. They blow it because they can't handle that it's happening. It gets in the way of their creative process or their essence.

Steven Pressfield: Oh, really? *My Big Break*?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Fantastic documentary. I think anyone that wants to get good at anything should see it. I certainly learned a lot from it.

Steven Pressfield: Okay.

Andrew Huberman: So you're not paying attention to the criticism.

Steven Pressfield: I'm trying not to. I'm human.

Andrew Huberman: Sure. But the ideal is to really move beyond that. I went to college with Jack Johnson, the guitar player. He's a very successful musician. Years ago we connected, and he was telling me about his life. It was so clear from everything he was telling me that he had created methods to not really come in contact with just how big he had gotten. To really humble himself on a daily basis.

Steven Pressfield: Good for him.

Andrew Huberman: Doing house chores, cleaning the toilet, especially the days after big festivals where he had immense crowds. He built these self-regulatory processes. It's a very Zen sort of story. We grew up in Hawaii. The pastor would say, "Sweep the corner." So he's got that. He always had this mellow. It was amazing. From day one of college, he was way cooler than everybody and super nice. He didn't act cool, he was just cool. Great surfer, great guy, his wife awesome. He picked up a guitar. He was in a college band that was okay, like a backup. He wasn't even the main guy. Then I was in graduate school one day, and I saw Jack Johnson on iTunes. I called a friend and said, "Jack Johnson's on iTunes?" They said, "You haven't noticed?" I said, "No, I've been nosed down in the lab." He's a really big deal. He's been a really big deal for a very long time. Incredibly humble, incredibly kind, and self-regulates.

Steven Pressfield: Good for him.

Andrew Huberman: External validation sounds like it's an enemy for you as much as criticism is an enemy.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. I certainly don't believe in it at all. I think it's a seductive thing that's only going to pull you in the wrong direction. Third-party validation... My business partner, Sean Coyne, I have to give him credit before we forget. *The War of Art* was not my title. It was Sean Coyne's title.

Andrew Huberman: He handed that to you.

Steven Pressfield: He gave me that title. We published the book together. His little company published it. That was his title. So God bless him.

Andrew Huberman: God bless him. Titles matter.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, they do. *Eat, Pray, Love* — how does that get better than that?

Andrew Huberman: *The Body Keeps the Score*. No other book in the field of psychology, biology, wellness has resonated in people's minds as much and as long as *The Body Keeps the Score* because it's just an awesome title.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, it is. It's a great one.

Andrew Huberman: How much or how often do you think about book titles? Is it at the end, during?

Steven Pressfield: At the end, but I find that they're really hard. A lot of times other people have titled stuff for me. It's really hard to come up with a great one. I don't know what the secret is at all. Sometimes it pops out along the way.

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Andrew Huberman: Do you think that personal sacrifice at the level of relationships is necessary to be a successful artist of any kind?

Steven Pressfield: Certainly in my experience, yes. I was talking to a friend of mine who's a bodybuilder. He said to me the other day, "I don't believe in balance—work-life balance." And I'm kind of that way too. I take my hat off tremendously to Kobe Bryant for being such a family man. He obviously loved his kids, loved his wife, but yet was obsessed with basketball to the nth degree. Somehow he did it and was able to go beyond that and be helpful to people. But I do think that if you're going to pursue your calling, whatever it is, you've got to pursue it with both feet. That might lead to an unbalanced life.

Andrew Huberman: So that means telling people you're going to bed early. You go to bed very early.

Steven Pressfield: I go to bed early, but that's just my own quirkiness. But there are a lot of things that I've missed in life, including having kids. And I don't regret it. That's the nature of the game, I think.

Andrew Huberman: You have a rich and full life.

Steven Pressfield: I mean, I have an unbalanced life, but to me, it's what I've chosen. It's like that great speech in *The Godfather Part 2* where Lee Strasberg played Hyman Roth. He had this scene with Michael Corleone where he talks about Mo Green, his protege that they grew up with. Somebody put a bullet in his eye. And he said, "I never asked who did it because I said to myself, this is the life we've chosen." That's how I look at it.

Andrew Huberman: It's interesting. It was a great scene. God, those movies are so good. The first two anyway.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Talk about a flop on the third.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: In the United States, we celebrate high achievers and people that really break off from the pack. It's really the essence of the United States in terms of how it was.

Steven Pressfield: More's the pity.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, exactly. Now we're paying the price. But Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant—these people had immense numbers of hours devoted to craft. I feel like if you grew up in the United States, at some point you get the message that that could be you. That's different from other places. My dad's from South America and I have family from Europe. Not every kid around the world grows up getting the message in their ear all the time like, "Hey, that could be you. You just have to find your thing and devote yourself." Now there seems to be a bit of a pivot where people focus on the flaws those high achievers had and that they weren't perfect. I think what we're saying here is that it's by definition that if you're going to go for a high peak, your life is not going to be balanced. Edmund Hillary, first to climb Everest. He was gone for a long time. They didn't have cell phones. If he had a family, they didn't even know if he was going to come back. That's not balance at all. They weren't handing out checks at the top of Everest. So this idea of pursuing one's craft at the expense of something else—is that something you've carefully analyzed along the way? Or do you feel you've been driven by some force inside you to just keep leaning into creative works, and if things have to gently or not so gently fall off the side, so be it?

Steven Pressfield: I have tried in my life various other endeavors, including love, marriage, a straight career, a blue-collar career—always trying to find something that at the end of the day I could lay my head on the pillow and have peace of mind. Nothing worked until I found pursuing my craft. That worked for me. At the end of the day, I felt, "Okay, I've earned my place on the planet doing this." Other things, I would just be crazy. So I was sort of led to that. It was like, "Thank God, I found something that I can hang my hat on." That was a long time ago. Over the course of those years, I asked myself from time to time, "Is this still working for you? Should you be evolving into something beyond this?" But it is still working for me. I don't really have a bucket list of stuff. If somebody gave me a billion dollars, I'd just give it away. It was for me, and it's not even about peak success because I haven't had peak success at all. I had enough success to pay the rent, which is good enough for me. I'm doing what I want to do and I don't have to do something else. It's really a pursuit of what I figure I was put on the planet to do. It's always been a surprise, book to book to book. Which is another weird, counterintuitive thing. It isn't like, "Could you do a five-year plan on this?" No. Something comes, it presents itself, it comes in from the goddess, and there it is. Then you do it.

Andrew Huberman: So it's clear it's in your nature to create things and to discover what it is you need to create. I can't help but feel that we're all here to do something particular to us.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, I think so.

Andrew Huberman: I think a lot of times if people don't have a balanced life, people assume, "Oh, well, that's trauma." And sometimes it is. Nowadays I have more famous friends. A lot of them have trauma. A lot of them don't. Some of them are really happy, and a lot of them have what I call a "bento box life" where their career is the main entree and then there are some other little things. They have relationships of different kinds—animals or people. Some people, the relationship bin is bigger and their career is less of a focus, and they seem very happy. So this notion of balance is peculiar. Whatever bento box people seem to exist in, they like to project on others. How much time do you spend on social media?

Steven Pressfield: Maybe an hour a day. It's a vice which I've got to definitely stop doing. I'll go through Instagram and do that. As far as communicating with people, very little. My email, I'm done with it in like two minutes in the morning.

Andrew Huberman: I do think it's great that it's you on social media, that it's your voice for your content. I think that's great because people can now get in near direct contact with the creators they're inspired by.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: One thing I really appreciate about all your work is that there doesn't seem to be a consistent theme. Some of them overlap, but there are a lot of different themes. Before we move to some of the themes that perhaps people are not expecting, talk about turning pro and the concept of being a professional.

Steven Pressfield: If we accept the idea of resistance with a capital R—that's our own internal tendency to sabotage ourselves when we try to set out to write our book or do our movie or follow our calling—then the question becomes, how do you overcome this thing? What worked for me was the idea of turning pro. For years when I was struggling and could never get it together, I realized that I was just thinking like an amateur. If I could flip a switch in my mind and think like a professional, I could overcome some of the things. When I think of a great pro, I think of Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan or Tom Brady. Some of the characteristics of a professional as opposed to an amateur: A professional shows up every day. A professional stays on the job all day, or the equivalent. A lot of us who have jobs are professionals in our jobs, but when we come home at night and try to start our band, we flame out because we can't carry over that professional attitude. A professional does not take success or failure personally. An amateur will. An amateur gets a bad review and they just crap out. "I don't want to do this anymore." A professional plays hurt. If Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan tweaked a hamstring, they're out there. They'll die before they'll be taken off the court. Whereas an amateur, when they confront adversity, will fold. "Oh, it's too cold out. I've got the flu." Another thing: an amateur worries about how they feel. "Oh, I don't feel like getting out of bed this morning. I don't feel like doing my work today." A professional doesn't care how they feel. They do it. So an amateur has amateur habits, and a professional has professional habits. My book *Turning Pro* is about flipping that switch in your head that costs no money. You don't have to take a course. You don't have to get certified. All you have to do is say to yourself, if you can do it—and it ain't easy—"I'm going to attack this thing now as if I were Kobe Bryant." Would he quit when he didn't feel like doing it? Absolutely not. Here's another aspect that worked for me. I had about a 10-year career as a screenwriter. One of the things you learn is that screenwriters will have their one-man corporations. They won't sign a contract as themselves. It won't be "Andrew Huberman" on the contract. It'll be your corporation, "Huberman Lab, FSO, for services of Andrew Huberman." I love that idea of thinking of yourself as a two-part thing. You're the CEO of this thing, and you're also the guy that does the work. If I was just thinking of myself as the guy doing the work, I have a hard time pitching my ideas. I'm too shy. But if I'm the CEO of my corporation, I'm a pro. I can go in there and pimp the hell out of it. That idea of looking at yourself as a professional takes all judgment out of any failures we've had. We don't blame ourselves anymore for procrastinating or being perfectionists or giving into fear or self-doubt. We just say, "Okay, I did that when I was thinking like an amateur. But now I'm going to think like a pro, and a pro just doesn't yield to that stuff." That's a mindset shift that really helped me a lot.

Andrew Huberman: I love that. So much of that feels nested in taking oneself seriously. When people hear the words "taking oneself seriously," they think someone's going to be heavy, never going to joke, no sense of humor. But that's not what I'm referring to. I wish people would take themselves more seriously, including their creative sparks inside of them. You said there's no cost to turning pro. I agree there's no monetary cost. You can decide to flip that switch. But I would argue there's a huge cost, and that cost is how people around you react when you start taking yourself seriously. I was an unimpressive high school student. Thank God for my high school girlfriend going off to college and discovering that, and thank God for the biology teacher that turned me on to biology. I had the drive, but it certainly wasn't organized in the right ways. When I switched from being a fun guy to be around to the guy that is absolutely going to ace the exam no matter how much work I have to put in, absolutely going to be in the gym three days a week, absolutely going to get my sleep—you get a lot of flack, especially in your early 20s. I did go out and party then, but across the years I did fewer and fewer social things. At meetings, everyone would go to happy hour. I would go work out if I hadn't done it that morning. I would go to sleep at night instead of staying up late talking in the bar. Great interactions would happen in those bars, but the next morning I wanted to be on point during the seminar. The big cost is not everybody likes that because they feel it as pressure. If you're eating well and healthy, people pay more attention to the ways they are not eating healthy, and they will do everything they can to try and make you feel bad about that. We see people being ridiculed for being serious about their health. It's nuts, but it's all about their own unwillingness to give up the second chocolate croissant, or to feel like maybe they're not as fit as the people around them. When standards around you are at risk of rising, that can be really scary to people.

Steven Pressfield: We were talking about that earlier. When you start eating healthy and sleeping and getting up early, it becomes a reproach to your friends who know they're not doing that and know they should be doing that. They say, "Who's this guy to do that?" Then they will try to sabotage you and undermine you and ridicule you. So you're right. Turning pro does have a cost. A lot of times, if you take that course, you have to leave people behind. People who were your friends—you can't be friends with them anymore. Groups of friends will have an unspoken compact among them: "We're all going to stay mediocre." That's the deal. In *Good Will Hunting*, that was what that movie was about. The Matt Damon character was a mathematical genius. His buddies, all of his fist-fighting Boston Southie guys, had this compact. They were all going to stay blue-collar guys and be buddies and have a wonderful time. Then there's that great scene at the end where Ben Affleck, his best friend, says to him, "If I come back 20 years from now and you're still here, I'm going to kill you because you won the lottery. You got this gift and you got to use it." There are those kinds of pacts that people make. "We're all going to stay mediocre right here where we are." If you try to rise above, you'd be the tall poppy. Somebody's going to cut you off. Sometimes we do have to leave people behind.

Andrew Huberman: The good news is, and I can say this from experience, that there are people waiting for you who have high standards that make excellent friends. Many of the people that at one point we feel we've left behind later come back and ask for ways to better themselves physically, creatively, et cetera. The notion of dominant culture is one that my dad internalized in me really early on. One of the things I love about being a professor at Stanford is you look to your right or you look to your left and people are awesome. People are going. Everyone who's a faculty member at Stanford is putting so much pressure on themselves to live out their vision of what they're trying to create. It's spectacular. I've got colleagues in multiple domains of life where they're just 11 out of 10. In some, it's only one domain. In some, they have more challenged personal lives. In some, they seem to just do it all. A former guest on this podcast, a former tier-one operator DJ Shipley, said, "You never want to be the big fish in the small pond. That's the worst place to be. It's the most uncomfortable, sad, low-growth place to be. You want to be surrounded by people who are really striving and pushing themselves." Your standards go up and you get better. I think that's one good feature of social media now—people can find mentors. They can find people who are not giving the illusion of being perfect. We used to think that famous people were perfect. Nowadays, the more famous you are, the harder it is to control your reputation. I think that's in some ways a good thing. It has its darker side, but the idea that nobody's perfect, it's just that people are emphasizing or de-emphasizing certain aspects of life. Turning oneself pro, which is something that people can just do for themselves, is really about taking yourself seriously and taking life seriously. That brings me to a bigger question. So much of what you talk about is about the practical—what you do and when and how, how you close out a session and how you reopen a session. But it seems like you're also very connected to the spiritual aspects of the creative process. You really bookend the two aspects. For many people, creativity can seem kind of mystical, almost like trying to grab fog. Many times the process is like trying to grab fog. So you've given a lot of extremely practical advice. But when it comes to the spiritual, higher-order stuff—the muse—how large a role does that play in your reflections about where you're going? Because it sounds like you believe that a lot of this stuff is not us. It's coming through us.

Steven Pressfield: I absolutely believe that. The creative life is a two-sided thing. One side is the blue-collar, practical aspect of being a professional—you can sit down, you can do your work, you discipline yourself, you know what you're going to do. But the other side is: where do ideas come from? They don't come from us. They come from someplace else. I'm definitely a believer that we live on the material plane here, but there's a plane above us. We're trying to communicate to that plane, and that plane is trying to communicate to us. Our job as artists—if we were in a monastery, the move from here to here would be called prayer. But if we're artists, the move from here to here is the invocation of the muse. It's saying, "Give me an idea. Help me." We on the material plane put ourselves at the service of this higher plane, of our illumined self or whatever you want to call it—the Jungian self—and try to channel it as best we can. Our job here, in terms of being a pro, is to be ready to take that voltage as it comes in. Like Beethoven could play on the piano what he was hearing in his head. That's our job. We have to be able to produce that in material form.

Steven Pressfield: So that's our job. We have to be able to know how to produce that in material form, whatever that is, but it's coming from another place. So I'm absolutely a believer that there are higher dimensions and there's probably a lot of higher dimensions. And I think the Greeks were really kind of onto something in the ancient Greeks in their concept of the muses and the various gods and goddesses that are interacting with this material plane that we're on. That's a way of anthropomorphizing it. I'm sure we could come up with some way in the quantum field or something. You're a scientist. You probably know that it has to do with something. I don't know what. But there is something coming from somewhere, and it ain't us.

Andrew Huberman: Well, I have my ideas about that. Very few of them are grounded in neurons and cells, but they interact with neurons and cells. It's an evolving area. We had a guest on the podcast, David Desteno, who's a professor at Northeastern University, talked about the relationship between science and religion and how acts of faith—not just saying one believes in God, not just saying one believes in a higher order consciousness—it's about acts of faith, prayer, maybe through writing or other expressions that involve action, that those absolutely have positive health benefits. We now know that. But it's really about the acts of faith.

Steven Pressfield: I love that phrase. That's a great one. It's true.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. It struck a chord with me, too, because in biology you learn that you need to understand the names of things—mitochondria, Golgi apparatus—you need to know that, but those are just names. But the real magic in understanding biology and being able to internalize it is understanding things in their verb states, right? Understanding how neurons work, not just as a description, but being able to think about that and visualize it. I think it's the same with ourselves. Clinical labels can be useful, but understanding when one is in a sort of a place, verb actions of gratitude, as opposed to just reciting some gratitude thing. It's subtle, but it's meaningful. Anyway, I don't quite know how to articulate it, but Desteno described this and the data from his laboratory are showing that when people start to think in terms of faith actions—for many people through religious scripture reading or whatever it is, but there are many ways to access this—all sorts of interesting things start to happen at the level of morality, at the level of their own consciousness, at the level of feelings of connectedness that go beyond any kind of simple two plus two equals four outcome. So I totally agree with you. There's something else, definitely something else going on. It's exciting.

I think that, you know, I know you're not a big drinker, neither am I. Maybe that's why you look so young for your age and so robust. Although I think if I were to wager, I'd say it's also because you're pursuing what you love. You're answering your calling.

Steven Pressfield: Certainly.

Andrew Huberman: That's the never-ending source of dopamine.

Steven Pressfield: Ah, is it?

Andrew Huberman: Absolutely, because it's self-replenishing.

Steven Pressfield: Ah, that's a great word, self-replenishing.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, that's clearly the thing. So you don't drink much, but nowadays there's a lot of discussion—and perhaps there always was—about taking things to be able to bridge this plane between the self and this higher order, these messages that we can receive and can come through us. I know a lot of writers drink a lot. There have been a lot of alcoholic writers. I hear that anyway, not that I know anybody.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, I think historically that was true. I think a lot of writers have relied on amphetamines and alcohol to get their work done and nicotine. Nicotine is kind of making a comeback in non-smoked form.

Andrew Huberman: So let's set that aside. But you do this through sheer good old Marine style grit, it sounds like.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, or kind of surrendering to it. Like I'm not a meditator, but from what I gather, that's sort of what meditation is about. So, yeah, just sort of that's how I do it. I'm not even sure how I do it. I just put myself at the service of what I'm trying to do and try to get out of the way as much as I can.

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[Discussion resumes]

Andrew Huberman: Throughout today's discussion, you've mentioned various physical labor jobs. I have a very practical question. How comfortable is the chair you sit in when you write?

Steven Pressfield: Not very comfortable, but I'm only sitting there for a couple hours, so it's okay.

Andrew Huberman: Still?

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: How much do you care that it's not that comfortable?

Steven Pressfield: It probably should not be comfortable, but hopefully you're in your head and you're not really noticing that sort of thing. Why do you ask that question, Andrew?

Andrew Huberman: Because years ago I went online and I was looking at some stuff about writers and there's a very famous writer—I won't mention his name—and he said, "It's very important that you have a super comfortable chair because otherwise you're going to be..." And you know what my first thought was? Even though he's far more successful at writing than I am, I thought that's terrible advice. Because if someone were going to ask me how to do a really clean protein labeling experiment in the lab, immunohistochemistry or something like that, I would make sure that they had everything. I would make sure that the antibodies were fresh out of there. But then I would not want them to even know that there are now kits that can make certain aspects of the process much easier. Because the moment you experience that creature comfort, the more painful the classic way of doing it is. Now, that's not to say I wouldn't embrace new technologies, but this notion of optimization—which sometimes gets thrown at me—is a terrible one with respect to the creative process. Because I believe that if you're thinking about, "Am I comfortable or not? Am I in an optimal place to create?"—we started this podcast in a closet, a small closet with me, Rob, and the bulldog. And we were not thinking about optimizing anything except getting the audio and the visuals just right enough that we could get it out there. So I love, love, love—and I'm not surprised—that you have a slightly uncomfortable chair and that you don't really care so much.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. I agree completely that that advice was really bad. I would go to the absolute opposite. Get the most uncomfortable chair you possibly can have.

Andrew Huberman: Do you think those years of physical labor, Marine training, and your morning ritual of going to the gym have allowed your mind to be more durable by virtue of the fact that you can tolerate a fair amount of physical discomfort that you probably don't even realize because you have no comparison, but that most people would probably buckle under or at least be kind of... like you said?

Steven Pressfield: I don't know. You don't see me at home, Andrew.

Andrew Huberman: Okay. Are you a complainer?

Steven Pressfield: No, I've really tried. I'd never complain at all. I think it's a real vice. It's another form of resistance.

Andrew Huberman: Interesting. Well, Steven Pressfield, this has been awesome. Before we conclude, I do want to ask you, what's your most recent book and what's it about? And if you're willing, maybe give us a little peek behind the veil of what might be coming next.

Steven Pressfield: I have a book coming next June. We were talking about this before. I had a book a few years ago called *A Man at Arms*, which was about a recurring character that I have, who I call the one-man killing machine of the ancient world—kind of the Clint Eastwood of the ancient world—Telemann of Arcadia. That book took place around the time of the crucifixion. Fiction. The new book is one of the aspects of Telemann: he keeps living life after life after life. He's doomed because of crimes he committed in the past to live life after life as a soldier, always as a soldier, always fighting, always killing, always being killed, and so on and so forth. So this new book that's coming out, it's called *The Arcadian*, and it's about his final life. I won't say any more than that, except that it takes place in the past and that it's pretty interesting in how this all sort of plays out. It really kind of goes into what we were talking about before—about are there different levels of reality? In this case, there definitely are different levels of reality. And this character has to deal with them on the field of justice and payback.

Andrew Huberman: Fantastic. Next June.

Steven Pressfield: Next June, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: *The Arcadian*. We'll keep our eyes and ears out for that. Meanwhile, I don't know which book to recommend most, but I love *War of Art*. I love *Do the Work*. There's so many. So I won't ask you to add just one other—*Gates of Fire*. They're all awesome. They're awesome listens and they're awesome reads. People should definitely check these out. It's clear you've had an enormous impact on people's creative process. And these books are also very entertaining to listen to. It's not a bunch of lists.

Steven Pressfield: I hope so.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, they really are. And I'm actually very grateful, I should say, that you didn't have a ton of immediate and big success with your movie, with the King Kong movie, and that *War of Art* took some time. Because I do think everything we know about dopamine dynamics tells us that—who knows—maybe you would not have written the subsequent books. And I look at your work as a body of work. And as a scientist, that's something that I can really appreciate. A body of work is really what makes for an awesome career.

Steven Pressfield: And what you just said about dopamine, I never had thought about it that way. That's sort of a slow release dopamine for me, over many years.

Andrew Huberman: And it compounds the way that you've experienced your wins. I mean, I've got stories that can go on for days about people I knew that had big papers published in *Science* or *Nature* that then disappeared completely. They're just gone. They're completely gone because they couldn't take that the next thing didn't match up to the first thing. This stuff is real. The one-hit wonder thing happens in every field. And that movie, *My Big Break*, really captures it in the realm of acting.

Steven Pressfield: A lot of things we're talking about here today, Andrew, they don't teach you in school. Nobody teaches you about what if you have a one hit—how do you handle it? Nobody even—that topic doesn't come up at all. Or how to handle negative criticism, how to handle positive stuff like that. What's the idea of turning pro? Nobody, you never learn this. And they're all absolutely vital life skills that you hope you encounter mentors along the way that teach you. Because it's not taught in school.

Andrew Huberman: Well, God bless you for stepping up and being that mentor to so many people, including to me. You're on that list. I swear you're on that list. And it's not a long list.

Steven Pressfield: I'm embarrassed.

Andrew Huberman: For the right reasons, I should say. And thank you for coming here today.

Steven Pressfield: Thank you for having me. This has been a real pleasure. We've been talking about this for years. It was great when we discovered we were neighbors.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. I hope we haven't squeezed all the fruit out of the orange here. We can do this again sometime.

Steven Pressfield: Oh, absolutely.

Andrew Huberman: And I see you in the gym. I try and get up a little earlier. Actually, starting after my 50th birthday, I'm going to be a 5 a.m. riser no matter what time I went to sleep. That was something I resolved a few days ago after a different discussion on here. But I feel a strong antidepressant effect of waking up and you just get so much more done. But that getting out of bed when you haven't slept quite as much as you would like is brutal.

Steven Pressfield: And as I said to you before, 50 is nothing at all. You're just a kid. You got another 50 plus years ahead of yourself. So I know when you turn 50, you turn 40, you turn 30, you say, "Oh my God, my life is over." Not so. Take it from me. I'd give my left arm to be 50 again. You got it made.

Andrew Huberman: Awesome. Well, that perhaps is the best birthday gift I could ever receive. Feels good to hear. Happy birthday.

Steven Pressfield: Thank you.

Andrew Huberman: Please come back again. Thanks for doing everything you're doing. I know I do not need to tell you this, but please just keep going. We're all benefiting.

Steven Pressfield: I will if you will.

Andrew Huberman: Deal. All right.

[Closing remarks]

Andrew Huberman: Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Steven Pressfield. To learn more about his work and to find links to his various books, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast, or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled *Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body*. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and it's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. It covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called *Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body*. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Steven Pressfield. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.