Steven Pressfield on Fear, Resistance, and Finding Your True Calling

What challenge, you know, what enterprise am I most afraid of? For some people, it might be just being alone. For others, it might be putting themselves forward in some way politically or something like that. For others, it might be having a family where you really commit to a spouse and to children and so on and so forth. And for other people, it's a calling in the arts. You know, it's dancing or singing or making movies or pursuing an entrepreneurial adventure of some kind. But I do think we all have a calling, and I think we all know it. We just kind of— we run away from it. You know, if you're forced— if somebody said, I'm giving you 3 seconds to come up with your calling or I'm going to kill you, we all could do it. We sort of know it. It's in the back of our mind. What we're most afraid to do.

Mr. Steven Pressfield, welcome to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. Tell everybody where we are recording from today.

We are in Malibu, California at the Shangri-La Recording Studios, Rick Rubin's recording studios where, um, Part of The Last Waltz with the band was recorded many years ago, and where all kinds of great albums, hip-hop stuff, has been recorded here.

Yeah, and it— you can feel the energy, can't you? It's tangible.

Yeah, yeah. One of the things about this place is supposedly when Rick has a new band in here, brings a new band in here to record an album or something, he repaints all the walls. So there's no vibes from the previous band that was in here, and everything starts fresh. So it's kind of not this room, but other rooms that we've been in.

And he painted it specifically for this interview, I heard.

Yeah, we were.

So today we're talking about The Arcadian, which is a novel that publishes about 1 month from the date of today's recording. Tell everybody, what was the genesis of this book?

Uh, it all came from a quote. from Empedocles, the Greek philosopher, that I found about 40 years ago. And I just knew that there was, there was a book, there was something in here. And I kept that, that quote with me on a piece of paper for all that time. And then finally, about 2 or 3 years ago, the idea to connect it with a character of mine, Telamon of Arcadia, the hero of this, of a couple of previous books. Made it all come together. So the genesis was a quote that I kept with me for years and years.

You kind of glossed over the fact that you kept this quote with you for 40 years, which is a long time. I think people, when they, when they get— when they're struck with inspiration, they typically feel like they have to act on it immediately, otherwise it might escape them. Why didn't you feel that way?

Because I think sometimes, you know, a work consists of 2 or 3 or 4 stages of, of inspiration, and you might have only one link, but you haven't got the next one or the next one after that, which is what was the case with— for me with this quote. I, I knew there was some connective tissue there that was missing, and it just took that long, 35 years or so, before Part 2 appeared, and then I knew, ah, that's what I've been waiting for all this time.

So for the aspiring author in today's audience who needs a little bit more of that patience, if they could just inject it, they would. Is it simply the awareness that art happens in stages and that you need to, you need to sort of submit to the process? Is that what solved it for you?

I think that's exactly true. I mean, I find Books or anything else that I'm working on usually does come in stages, and it comes, you know, it might be over 3 or 4 years.

Mm-hmm.

This particular one was like 40 years, but normally it does take that. You'll have an idea, I'll have an idea, and I'll say, I know there's something in here, but I can't find part 2 or part 3 to hook. So you just have to be patient. It's like the goddess is gonna give it to you. You know, in good time, and you just have to wait for it.

Speaking of the goddess, are you still following through on your practice of summoning the muse each time you sit down to write?

Every day. I'm a big believer, as you know, Nick, in, in, uh, in the muse, the, the Greek goddesses that inspire artists. And, uh, I always say a prayer first thing in the morning, um, invoking the help of, uh, the divinity. And she has never let me down.

And you continue to co-create with her, it sounds like.

Exactly. Yeah, that's how I see it.

Where did you originally find this quote from Empedocles? Do you remember?

I can't even remember. Um, yeah, I must have read it in a, you know, an ancient Greek book or something like that. But I typed it out and I kept it on a piece of paper for all that, all that time.

Help me understand the math. 3 times 10,000 years that a soul shall wander an outcast from felicity. So is that 30,000 years that a soul—

So the quote is— basically the thrust of the quote is it's a law of the universe. This is what Empedocles says in the quote, that any soul, any mortal human being that commits murder or kills anyone else Including a soldier who might do that in war, is condemned by the universe to wander, an outcast from felicity, for 30,000 years, meaning lifetime after lifetime after lifetime. So when I first read that, I thought, there's a story in here somewhere. There's got to be a character that we can follow who's kind of doomed and damned. And, you know, that, you know, so that I was just waiting for that character to appear.

So when you first wrote about Telamon of Arcadia, Telamon was not necessarily somebody who was living multiple lifetimes when you first wrote about him, is that right?

That's right.

So you only attached that narrative later on after some of these other works had been written?

Exactly. Like, I had— I'll give a longer answer than maybe the soundbite will happen here, but In a book called Tides of War was the first time I introduced this character, and that was around— it was set in, let's say, 440 BC. Then I wrote another book a couple of years later set around the time of Alexander the Great, 330 BC, so like 100 years later, and Telamon reappeared unchanged, not aged a day. And so I began to think, how can this guy become— you know, he's sort of by his own will coming forward. And that's where the quote came in. Ah, maybe he's a doomed character who's living lifetime after lifetime. Then I wrote another book called A Man at Arms, specifically about him. And then this new one, The Arcadian, is a follow-up to that one, each one a different lifetime.

Do you personally believe in reincarnation?

I do.

You do?

You know, I don't know how it works. Maybe everything is happening at the same time, but I certainly believe it. I mean, if you look at kids come into this world, your son, your kids, they've already got a personality, right? It's not like they're a blank slate. So, and it's the same for kittens or puppies, right? They have their own personality from day one. So you have to ask yourself, I do, where's that coming from? You know, and it certainly makes sense. that they had a past in some way, and maybe we are, each of us in our lifetime, assigned to learn certain lessons or to evolve from an earlier incarnation. Anyway, I believe in it anyway. It makes a great story.

It does, and you highlight one of the big differences between your nonfiction work on creativity and your fiction work is this question of what if. And so in sci-fi, you highlight What if we were invisible or something like that?

Right.

And then you can kind of work back from that question. So what was the question for this series of books, A Man at Arms, as well as The Arcadian?

That's a great question. And I think any writer is always looking for a what if, you know. What if your father was a spy for the CIA? Da da da da da da. And then the story kind of spools out from this. So. Going back to the Empedocles quote, what if we really are condemned for 30,000 years for some crime? What if we were a soldier, you know, in the Roman legions, and we killed, you know, various people? Would we then have to be damned to live lifetime after lifetime after lifetime? And from that, you know, a story unfolds. Many stories unfold. So that was the what if. What if that's really true?

And do those lifetimes that you're condemned to live out over and over and over again, do they have to happen chronologically or linearly, or can they happen at different points in time, forwards and backwards?

I mean, it's up to the writer to decide that, right? I certainly think it goes back and forth, right? That the earliest one might actually be the latest one. So, but again, that's up to the writer that's making up the story. You know, you pick the rules.

Describe the character of Telamon to our audience. Who is this character?

Telamon is a solitary mercenary soldier of the ancient world, kind of like, uh, the Clint Eastwood gunslinger, the Man with No Name in the spaghetti westerns. And he's a guy who fights only for money. And believes that fighting for a cause is folly, stupidity. He believes that fighting for money gives him separation from a flag or a cause because he thinks they're all phony baloney. But he's basically a Western hero, an isolated individual, a man of violence, and like any kind of gunslinger in a Western, that's what he is.

I've got kind of a funny question for you. If if a man at arms or the Arcadian were turned into a movie today, what actor would you like to? Which actor would you like to play Telemachus?

Ah, well, I do have a favorite, and it's Viggo Mortensen. Just you know, in what was it? The Two Towers. He he was Aragorn, right? And I don't know why, but I just thought he looked great with the long hair. Da da da da. Although that character was a much more noble character than Telamon is. Telamon is a really dark dude, you know?

Yes. And as a result, he's cursed, right? Living out these lives where he kills and gets killed and kills and gets killed. And how can you relate that to the modern world today? So I'm reading this, I'm 32 years old, I'm a young man, I grew up in the United States, but for some reason I can relate to this killer from the ancient world.

Ah, I mean, I believe that we all are damned in a certain— we're all under a curse, even though we might not— it might not be front of mind for us. But if you think about the concept of original sin that tells us we were all, you know, born already born bad, or The Garden of Eden. When God kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, he places a curse on them. Henceforth shalt thou eat thy bread in the sweat of thy face. Thorns and thistles, you know, shall mark your path, for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. And I do think that all of us, even though we may be living seemingly happy lives and that kind of thing, We feel like something is missing, that we somehow have to redeem ourselves. At least I do. That something is not— we are born broken in some way and we are trying to redeem ourselves in some way or another. So that's why I think a damned character appeals to people. It certainly appeals to me when I read those kind of— And a lot of the characters that we see in contemporary fiction, a typical detective like a Philip Marlowe detective, is kind of a damned character. Mad Max, even the Clint Eastwood characters are all sort of isolated individuals that are seeking something. So that's— so I think it's— I think we're all damned one way or another, or we feel it.

Can you describe to me in the most articulate way you can the curse that you feel like you carry?

Ah, that's a great question. I can tell you that what I think the answer for me is, is to do my work as a writer, that my calling, for whatever reason, previous lives, whatever, is to, to to write, to produce a book and another and another and another. And that's, that's the answer for me. So I'm not sure what crime I might have done in the past. I think it has something to do with fear because I'm always afraid. I wake up in the morning afraid. I'm afraid all the way through the day. And I think a lot of us are. And I'm sort of somehow Um, mapping that terrain one way or another for others.

Are you afraid of something exponential or external? Are you afraid of what you're doing that day? Are you afraid of getting in the car and driving somewhere and getting in an accident? What are you— what is the fear? Have you been able to—

It's a great question. I'm not even really sure. It's a sort of an existential dread, and maybe it's just the fear of being aware that you're mortal. And that bad things can happen to you, you're going to die, etc., etc. But I don't know, but it's with me every morning when I wake up. I have to sort of fight it all day long.

There's a pointless joke from the show Criminal Minds a few years ago. One of the characters says, how many existentialists does it take to screw in a light bulb? And the whole audience is silent, and then he's laughing to himself when he says the answer. Nobody understands it. He says, it takes 2, one to screw in the light bulb and one to observe how it symbolizes an incandescent beacon of subjectivity in a netherworld of cosmic nothingness. And I'm like, yeah, that's a good joke.

That's great.

Yeah, I think that readers can relate to this cursed character because you're right, we all feel cursed. in some way, shape, or form. And it does feel like that's just part of being human, doesn't it?

I think it is. I think that, you know, the Gnostics, who I'm not even sure exactly who they were, but they believed that exile was the human condition, which I believe completely. That our— like Marcus Aurelius said, and this is a quote at the start of of the Arcadian, he said, life is warfare and a journey far from home. And what I think he meant by that, although he in real life was far from Rome fighting various campaigns, I think the home he's talking about is beyond the stars somewhere. It's that higher dimension of reality that we— our soul came from to descend to this material world. So I do think we're This material world, we're in exile from, from our real home. And I think we all kind of remember it and sense it, even if we can't prove it. And I certainly feel that way.

Luke and I have talked in the past about this romantic idea that we both have as married men with children of like leaving it all and going out in the wilderness for a month and getting back in touch with that feeling of exile. There's something masculine or romantic about the idea of just being on your own every once in a while, distancing yourself from society. And it does feel like that's an inherent human trait too. Have you ever felt that way?

I have. And I think that the reason we want to go out for a month in the wilderness or for years in the wilderness, I think, is that, that if we could only make our peace one way or another with being in exile, that would be, you know, we're sort of fighting against that feeling constantly all day long, sort of trying to disprove it by success or family or whatever. But I think if we could ever actually make peace with that and say, okay, this is the situation, this is where we are, then that might change things for us. I mean, the Odyssey really Odysseus, his whole time in that is in exile, right? And he's trying to return home. And that's why that thing, that story, that legend, that myth, I think appeals to us because we all can relate to being in that world. Yeah.

Oftentimes I've found that my version of tackling that feeling and trying to achieve that peace has come in the form of meditation. I like a traditional style of meditation. I've done transcendental meditation where I'm just sitting with my own thoughts. 10 years ago when I first started, it was a lot less comfortable for me to do that than it is today. I've found a lot of that peace by thinking about my own thoughts. Yeah, you go out, you insert yourself into isolation, and you just think.

A lot of what we do during the day, I think, is to distract ourselves. from that reality, right? So when you accept that reality and willing to sit in it and really be with it, then there's a certain freedom in that, or at least you're not fighting it, you know, all the time. You know, you're accepting it.

So how do we overcome the curse? How do we find our calling as a human being?

That's a great question. I mean, I think I searched for a long time to find mine. I think in many ways, the question I would ask if I were a young person trying to find the calling, my calling, I would ask, what is it that I'm most afraid of? What challenge, what enterprise am I most afraid of? For some people, it might be just being alone. For others, it might be putting themselves forward in some way politically or something like that. For others, it might be having a family where you really commit to a spouse and to children and so on and so forth. And for other people, it's a calling in the arts. You know, it's dancing or singing or making movies or pursuing an entrepreneurial adventure of some kind. But I do think we all have a calling and I think we all know it. We just kind of run away from it. If you're forced, if somebody said, I'm giving you 3 seconds to come up with your calling or I'm going to kill you, we all could do it. We sort of know it. It's in the back of our mind what we're most afraid to do.

What were you most afraid of? Was it hearing feedback on your writing? Was it— so was it like this fear of judgment?

That's a great question. I'm not even sure I know the answer. I don't think it was that. I think it— because when I started, and for years I consider that as a starting period, I never thought that anything I wrote would ever get any attention anywhere. I never thought it'd be published or anybody. So it wasn't that. I think it was so much entering the kind of the arena sitting down alone in a space and just kind of confronting that blank page, that openness of like, you know, what am I going to do? And probably another fear was that what I would do would be mediocre, would be worthless. I would just be, you know, another lame person trying to do that. I think that was really the fear, that it would be That it would be mediocre and that it would be scary doing that stuff, which it is.

And right now you're releasing The Arcadian. So do you— what number book is this for you?

I think it's like 24 or 25.

Do you still feel that same fear that it's not good enough?

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Even though you've received validation from some of the world's most creative people on the planet telling you, Stephen, your work is amazing, you still feel it?

Yeah, it's like, that's a crazy thing. That validation for me doesn't sink in. I'm still, I still feel just as insecure at the start of a work.

Do you still feel insecure about books that have been out and have been validated, like The War of Art?

No, I don't. That has, you know, those books have, have, uh, you know, been judged in the real world, so I have a pretty good sense of are they valid or are they not. But something new that you're just bringing out, particularly if you're trying to do something you haven't done before or push something into an area you haven't done before, yeah.

Why do you continue to take at-bats? You've already been validated.

You know, you got to keep doing it. It's like what I was saying before, kind of being afraid You have to sort of— or being under a curse, you have to kind of prove yourself kind of again and again. And if I, if I weren't working, I would be nervous, I would be anxious, whereas if I'm working, I'm fine at the end of the day. So it's kind of like an addiction in a sense, but a positive one, like an addiction to fitness or to training or to eating healthy.

Yeah, we, we've talked a lot about that. I am at peace when I am working. And trying to be of value and of service to other people. Where I'm most uncomfortable is with free, unstructured time off at home. I love vacationing. I love adventure and exploring new places. But when I'm at home and I'm in the normal routine, but I'm not using my time wisely, that's when I feel pit in my stomach.

I'm the same way. Yeah. I think, I think if we could interview People across the spectrum, 99% would say the same thing.

99% of people who are aware of the resistance and are trying to fight it. But I also feel like there are a lot of people, Steven, that are asleep at the wheel today. They're just distracted. They're consumed with social media. I feel like that's a big disadvantage for people today.

It is addicting. I mean, even I get addicted to it. Yeah, this— I, if I were a young person today, or if I had children today that I was trying to help them navigate through this crazy new world, it's still getting even crazier with AI and everything. It's tough. I don't know. These feel like the final days in a lot of ways. It's a— it's— yeah, it's tough.

Tell us your thoughts on AI.

Uh, you know, you talked to me about this earlier, Nick, and I sort of thought— the first thing I said was I think AI is the devil, right? That it's here to destroy human life on Earth as we know it. But since then, I've kind of had a couple of friends that are using different versions of AI that I think might be valid. But I do think overall particularly if you're in the arts of any kind and you use AI, you might as well blow your brains out. You know, you absolutely— uh, and I, I don't know exactly why, because I know that AI is a big thing and I'm only aware of a small part of it, you know, but it has no soul. And any kind of art or any kind of living is about soul. We're— I was talking before about the higher level and the lower level of You know, we're trying to get to this level, and AI is very much on this level. So I would be very, very careful about engaging with it at all. And I will never— you know, you'll never see anything from me that is, you know, employs AI, or, you know, I just won't do it.

Oh, I have— let's continue down this for a little bit. One point that I'd like to highlight, and you said this indirectly, is that I do believe there's a difference between intelligence AI is very intelligent and conscious. AI is not— it's not aware of its own feelings. It can pretend to be, and I've heard all of the big AI guys talk about this. It can simulate awareness, but it's not aware. And so that's the difference, and, uh, or one of the many differences. So why won't you use AI to write your books?

You know, I think we all Instinctively wish we had some all-knowing God avatar, whatever, that we could go to and ask a question. You know, are there previous lives? What happens after death? What is the meaning of life? What should I do with my spouse? That kind of thing. So AI kind of fits that bill, right? You can go to chat, whatever it is, and it'll give you some sort of an answer. But where is that answer coming from? It's coming from bogus content, you know, content, the word I hate, written by fallible human beings. So like when I talk about the goddess, the muse, that higher level, I feel like when you— when we can get to that level, we're actually getting a straight answer. What our dreams tell us, I think, comes from a soulful place somehow. Whereas, you know, which is not to say that sometimes ChatGPT won't give us, you know, a pretty good answer to something, but it's not coming from any place that has soul. So, and of course, AI lies to you and competes with you. And, you know, God only knows how it's evolving, like the Terminator. So, yeah.

As a, as a human, I want to buy a book written by a human. And I want to read that human's thoughts. And I feel like there's a lot of AI slop getting posted out there today. Amazon has made the barrier of entry very low with Amazon KDP.

Yeah, yeah.

And so anybody can have ChatGPT write a book, they can upload it, they can stamp their name on it. And I feel like that is the most inauthentic, like, I feel like it's lying. Straight up, I feel like it's the opposite of truth for an author to put their name on content generated by AI and call it theirs.

I agree completely. It is the opposite of truth. And what is it doing to the author herself or himself that she cheated and used this, you know, pushed a button and something came out on the, you know, on the assembly line like a parking ticket out of a parking garage? Yeah, it's cheating, it's lying, and I don't even think it's helpful to do research that way. You know, there's— are you familiar with this documentary called Turn Every Page? It's about Robert Caro, the guy who's written this long series about Lyndon Johnson, the president. He's been doing it for like 40 years, right? And Turn Every Page is about his relationship With his great editor Robert Gottlieb, who just recently died. And the question, the phrase turn every page, was about when Robert Caro is doing his research on Lyndon Johnson, he might get book boxes this big of reports and things from the Texas legislature, whatever. And the question is, do you skip pages? Do you cheat? Do you do some kind of— And the answer that he and Robert Gottlieb decided was you got to turn every page, you got to read everything. So I'm a believer in that. I will only do my own research. And maybe I'm crazy, you know, that's a real inefficient way of doing it. But, um, I think you do have to turn every page. And, and AI is exactly the opposite of that. It's like turn no page, get it simply delivered to you. You know, like something from DoorDash, and then, you know, put it out.

When I was a Boy Scout, we would have to earn our little Boy Scout knife by carving a bar of soap into a bear. And what that would do, Steven, is it would teach us how to handle the knife.

Yeah.

And we would have to show up to class, we would have to earn the right to use the knife, we had supervision, we got to practice. And then eventually you would graduate to owning your own knife. Now, Boy Scouts who earn their own knife are far less likely to cut themselves than the boys in my grade that were just given a knife from their parents.

That's a great story. I never heard that.

Because you had to earn the right, you had to practice. And so you're right, these authors today who could just push a button, put their name on a book and call themselves an author, they're not professionals. Right? They're amateurs.

You know, Robert Greene talks about this a little bit. He talked about wherever he was in school, somehow he had to translate a page of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War out of ancient Greek. And apparently that's like the hardest thing in the world to translate. He said he worked for like— I don't know if you saw this— like for 12 hours straight on 3 paragraphs or something. And in the end, it was like terrible. He got an F on it. But he said the practice of like sitting there and busting your brains trying to make, you know, this other language is probably from outer space. You know, that's paying your dues, and that's what you got to do.

One of the things that I do for my nonfiction business and personal development reading community is I teach people how to get more from the books that they they read. And everybody wants shortcuts. So my version of what you just said, a couple of years ago, people would ask me, what do you think about book summaries?

Ah.

You see all these apps that advertise, oh, you can learn 52 books in 52 days. No, you can't. You can't. Joshua Waitzkin wrote a book a number of years ago called The Art of Learning. And he talks about reading a subject so intensely that it becomes part of your subconscious. And your subconscious, because it understands the material, can look for opportunities to implement it. You can't get that from a book summary. You get that from reading an entire book from A to Z multiple times, ideally.

Multiple times is the question, which is something Ryan Holiday talks about, which I think is really true. It's certainly true for me. I have to read a book. I might read a book 5, 6, 7 times over a course of time, not one back to back. But each time you read it, you get another more out of it, you know. So it is hard, you know, it's work, it's work, and nobody wants to work, right?

Ryan taught me an interesting concept for reading books. Ryan says life is too short to read a bad book. And so he says take the number 100, subtract your age, and that's how many pages you have to read before you know whether or not the book will Solve the problem, build the skills, satisfy the curiosity, whether or not you'll enjoy it.

I don't have to read very many pages.

Well, the older you get, the wiser you have become, or at least that's the idea. So let's talk, let's talk a little bit more about The Arcadian. One of the things that blew me away in the first couple of pages was your level of understanding of a horse. How much research went into understanding Horses, and why do they play such a big role in this book?

Ah, that's a great question. First, I should say that I don't ride horses. I don't know anything about horses. I'm terrified of horses. If they would come up to me, I'm afraid they're going to step on my foot and break all my toes. But I do have a sort of a sense from somewhere that a horse is a really mystical creature, right? Its heart is 5 times bigger or something than the human heart. It produces an electromagnetic field that, you know, horses— just being around horses can heal people of all kinds of things. And that horses being flight animals are super aware of their surroundings. And in this story, in The Arcadian, I wanted a magical horse. I had a horse that was going to be transported 1,500 years from the Roman legions in Judea to Spain, 15th century Spain. So this was a magic horse that was bringing a message to Telamon. In fact, it was Telamon's horse back in the day. So I just kind of wrote this horse as a creature that is hyper-aware of everything. And people that know horses who have read this, they say, wow, that is exactly what horses are like. But I really didn't know that. I just sort of used that because the story demanded it. So I'm not really an expert on horses at all, but they are great. They're fantastic.

That's interesting. So you said something like, you know, don't let the truth get in the way of a good story or something along those lines.

Somebody else said that, but it's true.

Yeah. So, so the story comes first and then you go and you do research that helps support the story, but you're willing to bend reality and and facts a little bit to fit the story.

Definitely. I mean, that's kind of what historical fiction is. That's why it's fiction. If, if, if you and I were academics, if we were professors talking about the Civil War, about ancient Rome, we have to play by the rules of academia. We have— we can't say anything that isn't absolutely true. We have to prove it. But what's great about historical fiction is you can have take a premise like we were talking about, a what-if premise. What if justice could come 1,500 years across time? And so that's the story. That's what the reader wants and is there for. And I think as a creator of fiction, you're always trying to get the reader to buy some really interesting premise, and you have to kind of Presented in a very smooth way. But once— but the reader wants to buy that premise. They want to believe, oh, what if there were previous lives and people were damned and so on and so forth? So that's the story. The story comes first, and the actual historical facts are there to make that story believable. And So I'm really like in The Arcadian, which takes place around 1505 in Spain, there were— the weapon, the gun was called an arquebus, which was like the forerunner of blunderbuss, which had a fuse that you would light and the fuse had to burn down and the gun was so heavy it had to be supported. In any event, It's very important in telling the story that you get those details right, because then the reader will say, okay, I buy that, that's true. Now you tell me a horse traveled 1,500— okay, I'll believe that too.

And you went to Spain and you spent a month in this area that you were writing about?

Yeah, I can't say I was a great researcher in that, but, you know, I wasn't going to libraries or anything like that. But I was trying to kind of grok the landscape and just find, you know, what it felt like. Because it's, you know, if you've been to Spain, it's the same. You know, if you're not in the cities, you go out in the countryside, I'm sure it's exactly what it was like. So that was very, very helpful just to feel like what the hills are like. And, you know, that thing.

There was a scene in A Man at Arms, and I was telling Luke about this on our drive yesterday. I said, Steven, and I'm going to get the context wrong, but Telamon, or you were describing an area where you said, and then if the cloud— if it's not cloudy, you can see something off in the distance. I'm like, how would Steven know that unless you've been there and you've done the research or you've read about it somewhere else, or you made it up, but I believed it because everything else seems so credible?

Yeah, I made that one up. I know what you want me to be talking about. But But the reader doesn't mind.

The reader wants to believe.

It's a magical world. It's a fictional world. It's like Game of Thrones, right? There are dragons. There's the army of the dead. If you're watching Game of Thrones like me, you buy it completely and you want it to be true.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I have a quick side question. This will feel like it's coming out of left field, but do you believe that reading a book like this is a form of resistance?

No, why would it be a form of resistance?

Because it's a distraction or an escape from the work that you're supposed to be doing.

Ah, that's a really good question. I suppose people can escape into reading or into watching stuff on TV, so in that case it might be a distraction. Yeah, but also I hope that a book like The Arcadian, or any book that's like that, is soulful and is giving you sustenance, even if you don't know exactly where. Like we were talking before about how it might take years for all the pieces to fall in place. You might read a book today that 10 years from now you say, oh, I'm going to make a movie about that character, or what, something like that.

Yeah, very true. I would say that's very true. Many of your books— Gates of Fire, Tides of War, The Afghan Campaign, A Man at Arms. These books are about war. Why do you love writing about war?

Because I think that life is war. Life is a battle, right? We were talking before about fear, about a calling that you need to kind of pay your dues each day, and the inner war, the war of art, that happens in between our heads as artists is a war. It requires the same virtues that a warrior needs: courage, selflessness, patience. Think about writing a book that's going to take 3 years or something and you get no payday. The willing embrace of adversity, a warrior virtue, right?

Mm-hmm.

Just like somebody that does Ironmans, right? You have to Right? And all of, all of those virtues of a warrior apply to an artist, I think. And so to write about war, which just sort of came naturally to me even though I've never been in a war, it's a metaphor for our inner, our inner world. And, and it's a metaphor that really works. Like, why are movies about prizefighters so popular? Rocky, Raging Bull. because we all feel that we're in a fight, right? And there it is, you know, there's the ring, there's a guy, you know, like movies about prisoners are always— people love those movies, right? Because we all feel we're in a cage, right? We've been locked up, we, we're waiting for the day of our deliverance. So war is a great metaphor for, for life, I think.

In today's society, it feels like there's a very thin line between claiming victimhood and a lack of agency for your situation versus what you write about, which is taking accountability for it and fighting against it. Talk to me a little bit about that balance.

I can at least talk to that on the subject of Of writing a book or doing some sort of creative endeavor. In the real world, I'm not so great at having agency, but certainly the, the process of, of any kind of creative life— writing a— making a movie, doing a dance, doing a comedy routine— is something— it is all about self-agency, right? Self-belief, overcoming self-doubt. And nobody teaches you that. You sort of have to teach yourself that and reinforce yourself as you go along. And each success, even if it's just a success of getting from A to Z, even if nobody reads it or likes it, it reinforces that. And the more you— it reinforces it, the more you realize this is the nature of life. And not just human life, but animal life. If we're a lion or cheetah or something, you know, we need to do what we got to do each day to feed the pups and the kits, you know.

Yeah, it's funny, if you're watching a documentary about gazelles and a lion eats one, you think, oh, poor gazelle. But if you're watching a documentary about lions and a lion gets a gazelle, you go, yeah! Depends on the perspective you're looking at.

Same time, oh, the poor gazelle, you know. Yeah, but isn't this a crazy world that God gave us where in order to survive from one day to the next, we have to kill another living thing that has a soul and eat it? And, you know, we're killing the mother of little young gazelles. It's a, you know, it's a crazy world that we got put into. It is.

And we look to authors like you to help us understand it and challenge our thinking. What do you think is a more accurate representation of reality, fiction or nonfiction?

Definitely fiction. I'm not sure why I say that other than nonfiction, because it has to hew to the actual provable truth, it's kind of limited. It can't go into that higher dimension of, are there gods and goddesses that are watching us and helping us? You can't do that in nonfiction. I suppose you could if you were writing a metaphysical kind of thing, but in fiction you can absolutely go there, and these other forces can talk to us. And so I do think that fiction has the license to enter other worlds, metaphysical worlds, and that's truer to what I think reality really is.

Do you think all of the characters inside of a book like The Arcadian are representations of you or no?

Um, that's a great question. Uh, in, in, I do believe that— well, let me say this about The Arcadian and A Man at Arms. They, they talk about previous lives, but The individual actor, the individual character, is not alone. According to me, he or she travels as part of a constellation of other characters—five, six, seven other characters—that are there in the next lifetime and the next lifetime and the next lifetime. And and the dynamic kind of remains the same between these characters. Each one is acting out their own odyssey, whatever it is. And I— so I think that each of us is a kind of a constellation of characters, of archetypes, which is true if you read Jung or things like that. You know, there's the warrior, there's the wise man, there's the old woman, the crone, there's the virgin, the young girl, the ingenue, and we're all kind of made up of those. So even if it's not deliberate, which it certainly wasn't with me and the Arcadian, Or any other books, those characters come out. It's like as you're crafting a story, you feel like, oh, I need— there's an element missing. I need an old woman to come in here and bring whatever energy she's going to bring. Otherwise, there's kind of a hole in the story. And that's pure instinct, right? I just need that person. And I think that's why, because we all are. So yes, I do think. They're all aspects of me, as they're all aspects of the reader. Yeah.

I was telling Luke how exciting it was for me not knowing that you were going to do that between these 2 books. So I read A Man at Arms, and then as I started reading The Arcadian, I say, oh, I think that Moriah and Ruth are actually similar, in similar positions supporting Telamon. Like, it's so fun as a reader to start to discover those things.

Oh, that's great that you got it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. As we start to wrap up the interview, Stephen, will there be another book in this series?

Definitely. In fact, I'm finishing it right now. I'm just a few pages from the end right now.

And can you tell everyone— yeah, when, when does it take place?

Ah, the new book. We were talking before, do you jump back and forth in time? The new book is set so far into the past That it's when the continents drifted apart. And in my version of that era, which is totally fiction, there were great civilizations that had access to the occult powers beyond anything that we know today. And so our character, the young Telamon, is back there still dealing with the same issues that And but in a way, it's like a prequel in that we can see where some of the traits and the beliefs that he has in the other books, where he learned them, you know, who taught them to him.

Do you think there will end up being 10 books in this series?

Right now I'd say no. I think, you know, I'm— it's time to move on to something else. But at least there's— there'll be 5.

Well, thank you so much for the interview today. And of course, for everybody that's listening to this interview, go ahead and get a copy of The Arcadian. Although you might listen to me talk about nonfiction all the time, like Stephen, like Stephen said, fiction is a more accurate representation of reality.

All right, cool. Thank you, Nick. That was great.