How to Overcome Inner Resistance | Steven Pressfield

Steven Pressfield: For years, when I was struggling and could never get it together, I realized that 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, that 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.

Steven Pressfield: An amateur will, right? An amateur gets a bad review or bad response of this, and they just crap out, "I don't want to do this anymore." A professional plays hurt. Like if Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan, if they've tweaked a hamstring, they're out there, you know? They'll die before they'll be taken off the court. Whereas an amateur, when he or she confronts adversity, will fold.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: "Oh, it's too cold out, you know, I've got the flu." Da-da, that kind of thing. An amateur worries about how they feel. Like, "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 Steven Pressfield.

Andrew Huberman: Steven Pressfield is an author of numerous historical fiction and non-fiction 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.

Andrew Huberman: Perhaps it's because Steven 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 Steven really understands how to persevere and overcome inner doubt and procrastination, and turn creative blocks into important creative works. As you'll hear during today's episode, Steven doesn't talk in inspirational slogans or metaphors.

Andrew Huberman: So none of this "get after it," or you know, "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.

Andrew Huberman: 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 Steven'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, Steven 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.

Andrew Huberman: Steven is not only very accomplished, he's also truly wise and generous. And today, he shares a wealth of practical wisdom with us. 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 Steven Pressfield.

Andrew Huberman: Steven 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.

Andrew Huberman: "First War of Art," and 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 that they claim is you. I'm going to assume it's you. And I recommend accepting that it's you, even if it's not, because it's a beautiful quote.

Steven Pressfield: I'm laughing already.

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, "The more important to your soul's growth, the stronger the resistance will be." Which, for me, was very counterintuitive.

Steven Pressfield: Uh.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: Because we all imagine the creative process as one of being inspired, "Ah, 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's growth, the stronger your resistance will be. Interesting.

Steven Pressfield: Well, that's 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 at all like what the fantasy was, "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.

Steven Pressfield: Make us procrastinate, make us go to the beach, make us just give in to distractions, so on and so forth. But the weird principle is, and this is why I always say, if you want to know which one of three or four projects that you should do, you should do the one you're most afraid of.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Because that fear is a form of Resistance with a capital R.

Steven Pressfield: And 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 it's 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 kind of stand up to that resistance. They're trying to push them away from doing their project, whatever it is.

Andrew Huberman: 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: Yeah. 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, and the shadow is going to be-- The tree is your dream, whatever it is, right? A book, a movie, whatever. And the shadow is the resistance you're going to feel, and they're directly proportionate to each other.

Steven Pressfield: 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 don't want to-- I'm not good enough to do this," et cetera, et cetera, that's a good sign, in that it says that the tree, your dream, is really big, and so you have 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: Mm-hmm.

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.

Steven Pressfield: You know, I think 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 until I get out of this and just be a regular civilian again." But as I've grown and lived through the artist life of writing, being in a room with your own demons for two or three years at a time.

Steven Pressfield: I've learned that kind of the virtues that you learn in the military are the same virtues that you have to call upon to live that war of art, the war inside your head. You know, the virtues of stubbornness, of the willing embracing of adversity, of patience, of selflessness, and of courage, because it's about fear.

Steven Pressfield: And so yeah, it's influenced me tremendously, and I found, sort of 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, A, your current physical regimen? By the way, everybody, Steven 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 5:00.

Andrew Huberman: Quarter to 5:00 AM, which is why I see him from time to time, because I'm not there at quarter to 5:00.

Steven Pressfield: You're coming in. I'm going home.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, 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. With all the discussion about longevity, you are living proof. So what? 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: Aah, 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, right? So, 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, right? We all know about that.

Steven Pressfield: 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, so it's for-- I've got like... I think we have a mutual friend in Randy Wallace, right? Do we have-

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Randy has this thing, Randall Wallace, who wrote "Braveheart" and, as secretary, directed that and many others.

Steven Pressfield: He has a thing in the morning that he calls little successes, and 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." You know, so going to the gym for me is that. It's not so much about the physical aspect of it.

Steven Pressfield: It's the rehearsal for kind of facing like it's-- So, 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, you know, there we go. 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: F***, no. I mean, can we say that here on in?

Andrew Huberman: Sure. Yeah. Absolutely.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Absolutely not. It's a drag. I hate to go, you know?

Andrew Huberman: You prefer to stay in bed?

Steven Pressfield: Absolutely, and I wish I could stay in bed, you know? But on the days I do stay in bed, Sunday, I don't feel so good about myself, you know? I wish I had gone to the gym.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: 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?

Andrew Huberman: So, I do, and I always have.

Steven Pressfield: Wow.

Andrew Huberman: I have noticed in the last maybe two or three years that occasionally I have to push myself a little bit more. I loathe rest days, but they are important.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman: You know, I do believe in taking one full day off per week, letting my body recover.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman: But that's the problem, is that I really enjoy working out. And so, by the time I'm done working out and then I shower up, and I eat, and I'm sitting down to do some work, I'm like, "Oh, now comes the really hard workout."

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: But I noticed that I learn things during those workouts, provided that I don't have my phone with me.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: I might listen to music on my phone, sometimes a podcast or an audiobook, but I do my very best not to be on social media or text during those workouts.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: You know, I think exercise takes our brain and body into these unfamiliar states.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: And I think that our unconscious mind geysers stuff up.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: And 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: Do you have a capture method for ideas, whether or not you get them during workouts or in the middle of the night?

Steven Pressfield: I don't have during workouts.

Andrew Huberman: Okay.

Steven Pressfield: I don't seem to get ideas during workouts, but I completely agree with that, you know. They're those ideas, when they 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, right? Your ego is involved, and somehow it opens the pipeline, and things burble up, and you always think, "Oh, I'll remember that," but you forget.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: It's like a dream, you know?

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: They just go away. So yeah, I mean, I'll just dictate it into my phone. I mean, my phone now is full of stuff that I've got to transcribe, but I couldn't agree more with that.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

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: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: And we don't.

Steven Pressfield: It's amazing how they go away, you know?

Andrew Huberman: They just evanescent.

Steven Pressfield: They're evanescent, you know?

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

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

Steven Pressfield: See, I'm a different believer. I don't believe it's really coming from the subconscious.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: I'm a believer in the goddess. I'm a believer in the muse. I think it's coming from someplace else, you know? And that they're playing with us a little bit, you know? Like, I know Steven Spielberg says, "When an idea comes," he says, "It whispers rather than shouting," which is his way, I think, of saying, you know, it's a very subtle thing that goes away very fast, you know? And you have 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: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Well, you know, if you go back to the ancient Greeks, right? "The Iliad," or "The Odyssey," or any of those other great works always start with an invocation of the muse, right?

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Homer writes, "Goddess, tell this story," you know? And basically, the artist is stepping or taken his ego out of the picture and saying, "I'm not the one that's going to tell you this story about ancient Troy.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: "The goddess will tell through me," so they're sort of asking, "Help me, show me," you know, that kind of thing. And I had a mentor. Rob, we were talking about that earlier, a guy named Paul Rink. He's like, can I get into the weeds on this thing, Andrew?

Andrew Huberman: Please.

Andrew Huberman: Please.

Steven Pressfield: And 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, and I used to have breakfast every morning. This was in Carmel Valley, not so far from where you grew up, and with my friend, Paul Rink, who's maybe 30 years older than me. He was an established writer. He knew John Steinbeck and 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, right?

Steven Pressfield: The classic image of the muse is Beethoven at the piano, and a kind of a shadowy female figure is kind of whispering in his ear, you know, bringing him da-da-da-dum, right? And so he wrote out for me, my friend Paul, the invocation of the muse from-- He typed it out on his Remington manual typewriter, the invocation of the muse from the Odyssey, from Homer's "Odyssey," translation by T.E. Lawrence. And I've kept that.

Steven Pressfield: It burned up in the fire, lost it in the fire, but I've kept that for, like, 50 years, and every morning, before I sit down to work, I say that prayer, you know, out loud and in full earnest. You know, "Goddess, help me." And I'm absolutely a believer in that, that ideas come from another place, and it's our job... And I don't think it's the subconscious. 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.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh huh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: But it sounds like this one was pretty precious.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. It was a sad thing to lose that, you know?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: But, you know, it's in my head, you know, so.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: How long is it?

Steven Pressfield: It was on one page.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Double-spaced.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: I would say... To recite, it takes 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 sort of describing the whole story of the "Odyssey."

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: But it starts like this. It goes, "Oh, divine poesy, 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 about da-da-da-da. And at the end it says, "Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, oh muse," which I think is a great-- You know, make it live, make it come alive in all its many bearings. And so, you know, that's-- 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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: It's in "The War of Art," actually. I wrote this out in "The War of Art."

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: I think it's on page 114 or 115.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. And if anyone hasn't read "War of Art," it's an absolute must-read. I've read it many times. I have an audiobook form, a hard copy form. It is awesome. It is just awesome. So, when you sit down to write, after you've recited this, how many times in the first 10 minutes do you think your mind flits to something else?

Andrew Huberman: I mean, you're now a pro. Like, 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. You know, well, these are the things that pop up, right?

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: As you point out, resistance comes in. Oh, you know, I need another glass of water.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Or I'm not caffeinated enough, or there's not enough sunlight coming through my window. Whatever, right?

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: How many times in the first 10 minutes, on a typical day, just give us an average, do you think your mind flits to-- Yeah, like, I wonder what's going on in the news?

Steven Pressfield: That's a great question.

Andrew Huberman: You know, like what's going on in the world? I mean, how many times? One?

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Never.

Andrew Huberman: 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 whether it's just over the years, I'm absolutely a believer in, like, diving straight into the pool, you know? I don't sit there for one second wondering what I'm going to do. I just plunge right in, and, thank goodness, somehow I've learned how to do it, and I just focus full tilt on it. So yeah, I don't have those thoughts at all.

Andrew Huberman: How long do you write in that first bout?

Andrew Huberman: Before you make-

Steven Pressfield: Maybe an hour.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: And then I'll take a little bit of a break.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: 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: Do you enjoy it or you enjoy clean laundry, or both? I mean, we-

Steven Pressfield: I just... I enjoy the, sort of the ritual of it and the craziness of it, you know?

Andrew Huberman: Not me. Not one bit.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: The only thing I enjoy about doing laundry is clearing the lint trap. There's something very satisfying about that.

Steven Pressfield: That's the part I hate. I don't want to do that at all, but...

Andrew Huberman: Interesting. All right. Well, we're not considering, but we'd make good roommates.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Interesting. So for an hour, you're locked in and you're just typing away. How often does your inner critic pop up nowadays versus at the beginning? Meaning the "I don't know if this is going in 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. You know, it used to all the time. It was a terrible struggle I had for years.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: You know, you sit down and you think, "Well, does Hemingway... Would Hemingway write this sentence?" You know, right? Or, you know, "What will 'The New York Times' think when I write..." you know? But eventually, over time, you learn that you just can't deal with that bullshit, you know?

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: It drives you insane.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: You know, so no, I don't let that inner critic come in, you know? And I'm definitely a believer. At the end of the day, I never read what I wrote.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: And I never look back on it the next day. I believe in multiple drafts. Somebody taught me this one time that 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." And you can only fix so much in one draft. You can only fix one thing in one draft.

Steven Pressfield: So, I usually will think of... And I start a book, maybe 13, 14, or 15 drafts. The last 7 or 8 would be really small, really slight changes.

Steven Pressfield: But I won't look back on the day's work because I'll figure on my next draft, then I'll read it fresh, and it'll look a million times, have a much more clear sense, "Is this any good?" Because if you do it when it's too fresh, you start to drive yourself crazy, you start to... You know, 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.

Steven Pressfield: 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 don't try not to worry about it at all. All I ask myself... I know I'm getting into the weeds here, really, Andrew.

Andrew Huberman: This is... 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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: But I think it's very important. We rarely hear what people's real process is.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: So please, don't edit yourself here.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: 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, in the next draft or the next draft after that. But I never judge it, you know? And it took a long time to get to that place, to learn that, you know? Because I would drive myself insane for years and years, judging along the way.

Andrew Huberman: How long is the total writing session, depending on how much laundry you have to do?

Steven Pressfield: Great questions. I used to be able to write for four hours.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Now, I can only write for about two. What I tell myself, and I think it's true, is I can do in two hours now what I used to do in four.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: 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, "I'm just going to hurt myself if I do another set," you know? The point of diminishing returns. So, when I get tired, I stop, and I don't question it at all.

Steven Pressfield: I don't make myself feel bad about, "Oh, you can get another 10 minutes." Like Steinbeck used to say, 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. 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."

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm. The analogy to working out is a great one. 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.

Andrew Huberman: He died some years ago.

Steven Pressfield: But just to interrupt for a second, they call it resistance training, which is exactly what we're talking about for art. Yeah. So, but please continue.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, excellent point. No, please. 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 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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: And there's been debate about this endlessly, and it has to do with all sorts of factors.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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: Oh, I didn't know that.

Andrew Huberman: And 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 accomplished 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.

Steven Pressfield: Oh, I'm glad to hear that. Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Hmm. Hmm.

Andrew Huberman: 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, because you barely know how to do the movement, right?

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: You're still learning. Your nervous system is still learning. You can't inflict the same stimulus with one set that you can later, after you've practiced.

Steven Pressfield: Hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Ah. 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.

Steven Pressfield: Oh.

Steven Pressfield: Well, I feel better.

Andrew Huberman: It's almost like a knife that's getting sharper and sharper. You can cut deeper and deeper.

Steven Pressfield: Ah. Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: Whereas at the beginning, we have sort of a dull blade, and we have to route over the same path.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: So, I think this is a nervous system feature.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: And that's why it transcends physical and mental, creative and other types of works.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Oh.

Andrew Huberman: Because if you talk to great musicians, they're not practicing 11 hours a day anymore.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: They're practicing for three or four extremely focused hours, sometimes divided up by naps and meals.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: So, in any case...

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Huh. Very interesting.

Andrew Huberman: So, you put in your two very focused hours, with some laundry in between.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: 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-time 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 a day.

Steven Pressfield: 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, the 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 an hour in the morning, hour in the afternoon. It sounds like it's very regimented.

Steven Pressfield: It is. 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 time frames around and be ready to do that, you know?

Steven Pressfield: I have a good friend, Jack Carr, the thriller writer who did "The Terminal List," and 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 11:00 to 1:00, to writing from 1:00 to 3:00, 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 when you write?

Steven Pressfield: Not at all. No.

Andrew Huberman: Both of those are...

Steven Pressfield: I mean, my phone is there maybe to dictate a note or something like that.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: 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: Yeah. What's that?

Steven Pressfield: Because you're in your own head, right? You're in that universe, you know?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm. 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.

Andrew Huberman: 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?

Steven Pressfield: 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 always, I'm trying to make sure that I'm leading them. I'm seducing them. I'm trying to reel them in, and not bore them, you know?

Steven Pressfield: 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: No. I never even thought about it as a kid.

Andrew Huberman: Like, 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 a storyteller, or anything. I was not a kid that wanted to be a writer. I never thought about it at all.

Andrew Huberman: Hmm. So, you just kind of tripped and fell into all this?

Steven Pressfield: I mean, my first job was in advertising in New York City, right out of college.

Andrew Huberman: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: This is like the "Mad Men" thing.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: 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 loved 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, you know? And it was called "Chocolate Days, Popsicle Weeks," and he quit to become a novelist.

Steven Pressfield: And so I thought, "Well, s***, why don't I do that?" You know? 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 the kid who was always coming in, telling stories, and you were writing in the background.

Steven Pressfield: No, not at all.

Andrew Huberman: Advertising's 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.

Andrew Huberman: Something like that.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, yeah. Very similar in that sense, you know?

Andrew Huberman: Any ads that you recall particularly enjoying working?

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

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 S***." 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.

Steven Pressfield: 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, anyway, 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?" You know, 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.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Andrew Huberman: 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?

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: I mean, 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 f*** is that? I don't know what it is that I want to do," you know? "I'm lost. I'm just struggling." But I do think that we are all born with some sort of a, at least one, a kind of calling of some kind.

Steven Pressfield: And it may not be the arts. You know, 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.

Steven Pressfield: Like, 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. You know, they go, "Oh, I know I've always wanted to be a motorcycle..." Whatever, you know? But then 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.

Steven Pressfield: 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, "Well, who are you, Andrew, to do this thing? I mean, you're a professor at Stanford. You 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 s***. You're going to put this out there, you're going to embarrass yourself. You had a certain level of prestige at Stanford, now you're an idiot." It's going to be that voice, right?

Andrew Huberman: And 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're funded, and your lab's publishing well." One of those people was my father, who's also a scientist. My process of pushing back on that...

Steven Pressfield: I rest my case.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: 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. I'll get into that if we want to continue. But in any event, so 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.

Steven Pressfield: So, many people live their entire lives and never enact their real calling, you know? But we were talking about the more important to the growth of your soul, that was what we started with this, right?

Steven Pressfield: So, that calling, whatever it is, to be a writer, a filmmaker, or whatever it is, if we don't do that in our life, that energy doesn't go away. It becomes... It goes into a more malignant channel, right?

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: And it shows itself in maybe an addiction, alcoholism, cruelty to others, abuse of others, abuse of ourselves, porn, you name it.

Steven Pressfield: Any of the sort of 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.

Steven Pressfield: 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 podcasting, and the human development, or whatever they call it, personal development world, they sort of promise like some sort of nirvana is going to happen if you do X, Y, Z.

Steven Pressfield: But what I'm promising is a f*** of a lot of hard work that's probably never going to 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.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Right.

Andrew Huberman: We'll talk about that.

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

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

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Sometimes. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Sometimes. But that absolutely should not be the thing that people are chasing.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

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, maybe that's... What are you doing?" I'm 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.

Steven Pressfield: Ah. Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: It just poured out. I think for the entire first year, we were doing almost all solos, hardly any guests, because it was a pandemic, and we weren't quite yet sitting down with guests.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

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 the just... 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: And I can certainly relate to the dangers of suppressing something. I think that you...

Steven Pressfield: And how old were you when you started that?

Andrew Huberman: Forty-five years old.

Steven Pressfield: Forty-five. Ah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, so I was kind of late to it. Now, I had lectured in front of students and given seminars, and lectured in front of donors, which is in some ways similar to the podcast in the sense that you're teaching science often to non-scientists or diverse fields.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: But, for me, it was just inside. I couldn't help it.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: He actually was on the podcast.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: And gave us a chance to bond and learn about him.

Steven Pressfield: Oh, that's great.

Andrew Huberman: And he's a scientist, so I got to learn some physics. The audience got to learn some physics as well.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: But, yeah, 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 real, it's a genuine kind of feeling of support for somebody, you know?

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: 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?"

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: And you got three kids, and they're scared for you because they don't want to see you take your life off a cliff.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: What's your response to that?

Steven Pressfield: I mean, there's validity to that, obviously.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: But I think what happens is that each person is dealing with their own resistance, their own calling, that they know that they really should be doing, and 99.999% of them are not doing it, or are unconscious of it, right?

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: 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?" You know? 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.

Andrew Huberman: I did not see that one, but I did see "The Fighter."

Steven Pressfield: And "Joy," about the lady who invented the Miracle Mop, which was Jennifer Lawrence.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: And all of these stories are about sabotage by the people closest to you, particularly your family.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Like in "The Fighter," Mark Wahlberg is this boxer, right? And he's got seven sisters, and he also has an older brother, and they're like... And his mom is his manager, and she's booking him fights where he's outweighed by 20 pounds and he gets massacred, you know?

Andrew Huberman: True story of Micky Ward.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Right. Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: And the story is he finally meets a girl who's 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, you know, "We like you, Andrew, the way you are." You know, "Our son, we know he's working at Stanford, he's doing his thing, we don't want to see him..." It may be unconscious. I'm not knocking your dad. "We don't want to see him suddenly burst out of the cocoon and become a butterfly and wing away from us," you know? So, they like you the way they are, you know. 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm, mm.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: It's not good for you, but some people can have a couple drinks a week or whatever. Okay, 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 in the right amount.

Andrew Huberman: 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, numb out our senses, and just kind of mindlessly eat, and on and on.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: I feel like anger and numbing out are how the world is trying to pull us away.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: And someone gets paid for that. We think we get it for free, but they get paid for that very well.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: We give our time, our soul, according to what you're saying.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Andrew Huberman: It's all around us.

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

Andrew Huberman: So, 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."

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: The cost is immense.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: They want us to do the real work because they'll be right next to us.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: And then with all that, then we sit down, and then the resistance comes up from right up in the middle.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: It's like this is a minefield.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. It is. 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, you know? It's called social media. And you're right.

Steven Pressfield: People make a lot of money off of that because they... And I don't think they're even aware of what they're doing, or aware of what they're tapping into, but 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, you know? Because people can't face to sit down and do whatever they were born to do.

Steven Pressfield: So, it's much easier to hate the other person over here, or get completely caught up in all that rabbit hole of all that sort of stuff, you know? Yeah. To follow your calling is a really hard thing, you know? We were born to be, by evolution, to be tribal creatures, through all this evolution.

Steven Pressfield: 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 hue to what the tribe wants them to do. So, for us to do that as individuals is a b****, you know? And it's usually like when you said you sort of exploded out of you when you got... You have to almost reach a breaking point, you know?

Steven Pressfield: 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.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: Skateboarding has gone through various evolutions of being popular, now it's in the Olympics, of being unpopular, of being profitable. When I got into it, it was really unpopular. It had gone through two big waves. There was the kind of "Dogtown and Z-Boys" wave, discovering backyard pools, this kind of thing that the surfers did.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Andrew Huberman: His dad, Frank Hawk, ran the National Skateboard Association. And then it disappeared. Just kind of kids that were into soccer, they were into other sports, skateboarding wasn't a big thing. It was small. And then 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: And I'll never forget, because I was part of that community, we wore these, what now wouldn't even be considered baggy shorts. So, we're not talking about, like, a deep sag on the shorts, but it was like baggy shorts.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: And I'll never forget the amount of teasing and ridicule that we received. People were like, "Pull up your pants."

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: By the athletes, by the water polo athletes, the jocks, everything.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: But not just at school, but elsewhere. 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 that.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: And I think that was a big one for me. Well, first of all, I thought, "They're hypocrites."

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: Then I thought, "They're idiots." And then I realized they're none of those things. It's that for most people, what they like is sold to them.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: 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 are alive, some of them dead. Amazingly, some of them are now my close friends.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: I embarrass them all the time by telling them that they're on this list.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. [unintelligible]

Andrew Huberman: 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?

Steven Pressfield: Well, that's a great question.

Andrew Huberman: Because I believe that the general public is the absolute wrong signal. I think that signal takes you off the metaphorical cliff.

Steven Pressfield: I agree with you there.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Mentors have been really important to me, very important. In fact, I wrote a memoir called "Govt 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. Like my friend, Paul, he was in the writing world.

Steven Pressfield: 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, who was at 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. Anyway.

Andrew Huberman: They'll look it up.

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 f***** up big time one time. I dropped a trailer with like 300,000 dollars' worth of industrial equipment in it.

Steven Pressfield: And my boss, his name was Hugh Reeves, took me out to this hot dog place called Amos "N" 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.

Steven Pressfield: And I don't care what happens between A and B; you got to do that." And I was like, "Well," you know. And I knew he was just absolutely right, and I thought, "Man, I got to get my s*** together here," you know? And so, that obviously stuck with me forever.

Steven Pressfield: 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.

Steven Pressfield: "Pulling the pin" came from railroad, if you wanted 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 and you'd say, "Oh, what happened to Andrew?" And they'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 and this is why I was working, to get the money.

Steven Pressfield: 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, you know? And he would not let me do it, you know? He sort of just took me under his wing. And so, that was another thing which is drilled into my head in the sense of, "Am I going to finish this project? F*** yeah. I'd rather die; I will die before I'll give up on this project." And it was all because of him.

Steven Pressfield: So, those are two mentors that weren't writing mentors, but that I used their... 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.

Andrew Huberman: Hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Whereas it was my bête noire for years. I would fumble on the goal line, you know? Resistance, form of resistance.

Andrew Huberman: I love that those two guys are now alive and present in 2025.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: They may still be alive, in general. But perfectionism. You 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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: When people feel that their papers have to be published in the top-tier journals.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: It's probably the strongest driver of scientific fraud.

Steven Pressfield: Makes sense.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: Those people are driven to other fields where there's more money involved, more fame involved.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: The key is to figure out which one is which but finish things.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: 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 was new data, I wanted 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.

Andrew Huberman: 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 that's another great question. I mean, it's so easy, as a writer, to noodle all day with one paragraph, you know? And, of course, that's obviously, resistance is watching and laughing at you, you know? "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.

Steven Pressfield: On the other hand, you do want to produce something that's really good, you know? But like Seth Godin says, "Ship it," right? When it's ready to go, there comes a time when you know, "I'm just noodling with this because I'm 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 and, I mean, what a great metaphor that was.

Steven Pressfield: 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, you know? 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. So, 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: You know, I've...

Steven Pressfield: Me too.

Andrew Huberman: Great. I've listened to and read Steve Jobs' biography.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: I think it's spectacular. I had a particular interest in it because...

Steven Pressfield: What's the title? Because I've never read it.

Andrew Huberman: I think it's "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson.

Steven Pressfield: Oh, I see. Oh, I see. It wasn't by Steve Jobs.

Andrew Huberman: It's a phenomenal bio.

Andrew Huberman: No, it's not an autobiography.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: Although, there was communication with him in the process of writing the book.

Steven Pressfield: Ah, okay.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: And one of the reasons I was so interested in it is that the personal computer came out during my childhood.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Ah, uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: Devices, I mean, portals. They're really portals of communication and creativity.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: And 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're going to die, to just forget that for moments.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: Shorter or longer moments.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: And in some sense, the pursuit of flow states and creative works are an attempt to kind of either forget about that, or 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, "Oh, I'm probably at about the halfway mark." You know, realistically.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I'm a biologist.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I mean, 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 ten, maybe twenty years. And maybe new technologies will come along that will expand that number. But I figure I'm at probably about the halfway mark. So, it's kind of nice to have like, an "Oh, s***" moment, because you stop wasting time.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: Like anyone else, I've wasted time. So, how present is your sense of death eventually coming? Hopefully a long time from now. Again, you're in spectacularly good health, and so that's important. But how present is the reaper in your process?

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: And do you think having a real sense that the reaper's coming is useful?

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, definitely.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

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

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

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Right?

Steven Pressfield: 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, you know? To me, he 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. It was 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 like thinking about you, Andrew, that you're 50 years old, you've got another 50 years ahead of you, you know?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, God willing.

Steven Pressfield: So that one has to think it can be also a form of resistance. Like for me at my age to think, "Well, I'm only going to be around a few more years, I might as well f*** off, or I don't have to work that hard." You know? 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.

Steven Pressfield: 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, you know? 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.

Steven Pressfield: On another sort of side, I don't know if this was... Maybe 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. Like everybody, all of my uncles and stuff were all really successful, and my dad was kind of struggling, you know?

Steven Pressfield: And so, it became a thing in my mind where I said, and this just looking ahead for how long you're going to live. I said, "I'm going to show these motherf****** that our family is not what they think they are," you know? 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, to sort of honor my dad, that I was going to hang in there and do something.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm. 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. Now, this is a little politically incorrect, but in one's mind, to be able to drive yourself harder.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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."

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: And the Joker says, "Kill you?" He's like, "I don't want to kill you. You complete me."

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: It's this moment where the Joker doesn't exist without Batman, and vice versa.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Huh.

Andrew Huberman: Right?

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: That having somebody or something that you're challenging yourself, 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 careers, of pursuits, I should say, being in competition can be an incredible driver.

Steven Pressfield: Mm. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: And 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.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I feel, having experienced that, and having won, by the way. No, I'm just kidding. I'm not kidding. But that 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.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: I mean, it's meshed with that, right?

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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...

Steven Pressfield: In an unconscious way.

Andrew Huberman: Mm.

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

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

Steven Pressfield: I wasn't even aware of it. No.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, okay.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Okay. I was very aware of this friction, because the guy and I had an outright rivalry.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: 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, which is great.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates early on.

Steven Pressfield: Ah, was that true? I didn't know that, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, yeah. There was a big competition, especially in the Bay Area where it was, and still remains kind of the seat of tech and computer science.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: It was like, "Is it going to be Windows, or is it going to be the Mac operating system?"

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: And then when they joined forces later, that would've been like the Yankees and the Red Sox merging.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Ah. Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: It was a mind bend. You're like, "This can't be happening."

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: And all the nerds in the Bay Area are like, "Oh, yeah, well, this happened." Next thing you know, everybody's moved on.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: So, I think having resistance, with a desire to prove oneself, I think can be helpful, right?

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. I think so too.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: 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 them very well, really had a chip on their shoulder about something or other, like, "My dad, I'm going to show my f****** dad that I can do this thing," you know? And it would drive them, but like you say, it becomes kind of toxic.

Steven Pressfield: At some point, you do have to sort of have that come-to-Jesus moment when you say, "Well, 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."

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Greg Norman's dad, the golfer, there's so many people like that it does become toxic. But like you say, it can produce great success, because it drives people.

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

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Everything.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Yeah, I feel very fortunate that these days I do things and I create out of just a love for what I do.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: There's none of that. I never think about another podcast, or what other people... I think about none of that.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: Truly. I would admit if I did.

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

Andrew Huberman: But in the past, that wasn't the case.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: That wasn't the case, and I think that at times it brought out my best, and at times it brought out my best but it made the process much more painful.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: I think doing something for love of craft is really important.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. I couldn't agree more.

Andrew Huberman: But as you've pointed out, that process can be painful, even though you love the craft.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: It's a weird thing.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Yeah, it is, isn't it? Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: This is a bizarre dark and light braided together, this creativity thing.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

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.

Steven Pressfield: It was quite embarrassing, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: But was the movie that bad?

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

Andrew Huberman: Yeah?

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

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.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: 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.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Along with the whole face hugger thing, that was his too. So, he was a really legendary guy, particularly in science fiction. And I was kind of his junior partner. And we did this movie for Dino De Laurentiis, 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, you know?

Steven Pressfield: And I was telling you before we did this thing today, the review in "Daily Variety" said, "Ronald Shusett 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.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: So, I had to say, and 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, at 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 it 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 too painful to even think about. Yeah.

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. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: What was the budget for the movie?

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

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: I don't know what it was then, but it was a big budget. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: In the millions.

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

Andrew Huberman: Wild.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. 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, you know? And if you can... I think it's good to get sort of an objective cross-section, you know? Some things go out there and they sink without a trace. Some things, people really love.

Steven Pressfield: But the bottom line is, like Paul Rink said to me, "Start the next one today," you know? Because it's 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.

Andrew Huberman: With creative works, or anything that our name is closely attached to, it's a challenge, right? 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.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: It's kind of funny.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: And in science, the lab is named after you.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: You know, Huberman Lab, or whatever lab.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I always thought the lab should be named after a particular scientific quest. That's how they do it in other countries.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: I think that's a lot more elegant, and it also teaches a lesson to the students and post-docs that you're after discovery. It's not just about your career.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: 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... Watson and Crick.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: And it's always been this way.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Ah, uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: Initially, the podcast would come out, you'd get a bunch of great comments,  and you'd get some nasty ones, and then you're like, "Oh, that really hurts."

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: You podcast every week, two episodes a week, or an episode every week, and pretty soon that stuff just flies right by.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, right. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: The signal, the noise it just goes way down.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: 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. It all becomes just noisier in general.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: 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?

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: And also, so much of it has to do with, in anything that you put out, with timing. Is this ready the moment... 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.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: And so, you can only ask, did you do your best?

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: 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.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: And I'm going to do this until they take me out, you know? 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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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?

Steven Pressfield: But let me say, on both of them, it took years for either of them to reach any kind of level.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, sorry.

Andrew Huberman: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: Hmm.

Steven Pressfield: And neither of them were overnight successes. There wasn't any of that fanfare. Nothing, really.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Finally, maybe eight or ten years later, you realize, "Oh, this thing is percolating along pretty good," you know?

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: So, that's a whole different sort of... There wasn't that much dopamine coming in to me on that.

Andrew Huberman: That's probably a good thing.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, I think so.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I mean, the whole notion of one-hit wonders, like bands that get... There's that great movie with Tom Hanks about that.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I forget what the title is.

Steven Pressfield: "That Thing You Do!"

Andrew Huberman: "That Thing You Do!" It's a perfect example of that. And there are these one-hit wonders, or kids that they blow up, they get one song, then it's... gone.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: There's actually an incredible movie that, if you don't mind, I'll just mention to people, that I wish everyone would see. It's a documentary that I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival years ago called "My Big Break."

Steven Pressfield: Oh, I never heard of it. Huh.

Andrew Huberman: And it's a true story of four guys living in an apartment in Los Angeles who all want to become actors. And I won't give any more information about it, but let's just say one of them becomes immensely successful. I won't talk about what happens to the other three. But the takeaway from the movie, and this is not a spoiler, is that everybody gets their big break at some point.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: Most people blow it.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: And they don't blow it because they can't do the thing. They blow it because they can't handle that it's happening, and it gets in the way of their creative process, or their essence.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: It's an awesome documentary.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: I bet. Oh, really?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: "My Big Break," huh?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, yeah.

Steven Pressfield: All right. I'll have to check that out.

Andrew Huberman: Fantastic documentary. And I think anyone that wants to get good at anything should see it.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: I certainly learned a lot from it. Okay, so you're not paying attention to the criticism.

Steven Pressfield: I'm trying not to. I'm human, and you know.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Sure.

Steven Pressfield: But definitely the ideal is to really move beyond that.

Andrew Huberman: I went to college with Jack Johnson, you know, the guitar player? He's a very successful musician.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: And years ago, we connected and he was telling me about his life, because I knew his now wife. She went to college with us. And he was telling me about his kids. And 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.

Steven Pressfield: Ah. Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: To really humble himself on a daily basis, doing house chores, cleaning the toilet, whatever it is, especially the days after big festivals, where he just had immense crowds, and that he'd built these sort of self-regulatory processes.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Hey, good for him. That's great.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Ah, great.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Wow. Good for him.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: It sounds like you...

Steven Pressfield: It's like a very Zen sort of story, like when the master would say, "Sweep the corner," you know?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. We grew up in Hawaii.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: We grew up in Hawaii, so he's got that--

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: He always had this mellow. It was amazing.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: From day one of college, he was way cooler than everybody.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: And super nice.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: So, he didn't act cool. He was just cool because he was just Jack.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: Great surfer, great guy, his wife's awesome.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: He picked up a guitar. He was in a college band that was okay. He was like a backup. He wasn't even the main guy.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: And then I was in graduate school one day, and I think I got iTunes. And I look, and it was like, "Jack Johnson." And I called a friend and I was like, "Jack Johnson's on iTunes."

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: They're like, "You haven't noticed?" I was like, "No, I've been nose down in the lab."

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: He's a really big deal. And, I mean, he's been a really big deal for a very long time.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: Incredibly humble, incredibly kind, and self-regulates.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Steven Pressfield: Good for him.

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

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, I mean, 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, you know? Third-party validation, as Shawn Coyne, my business partner...

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Which I have to give him credit before we forget. The title "The War of Art" was not my title.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: It was Shawn Coyne's title.

Andrew Huberman: He handed that to you.

Steven Pressfield: He gave me that title, yeah. We published the book together. His little company published it, but that was his title.

Andrew Huberman: Great title.

Steven Pressfield: So, God bless him.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, God bless him. Titles matter.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, they do.

Andrew Huberman: Titles matter.

Steven Pressfield: "Eat Pray Love." It doesn't get better than that. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: "The Body Keeps the Score."

Steven Pressfield: Ah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: No other book in the field of psychology, biology, or 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: Ah.

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

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

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, you know? And a lot of times, other people have titled stuff for me.

Andrew Huberman: Mm.

Steven Pressfield: It's really hard to come up with a great one. Yeah. I don't know what the secret is at all. Sometimes it pops out along the way.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. I don't know.

Andrew Huberman: I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function. Last year, I became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. Function provides over 100 advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily health. This snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health, hormone health, immune functioning, nutrient levels, and much more.

Andrew Huberman: They've also recently added tests for toxins, such as BPA exposure from harmful plastics, and tests for PFAS, or forever chemicals. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors who are expert in the relevant areas. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had elevated levels of mercury in my blood.

Andrew Huberman: Function not only helped me detect that, but offered insights into how best to reduce my mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, I'd been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC, acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification. And I should say, by taking a second Function test, that approach worked. Comprehensive blood testing is vitally important. There's so many things related to your mental and physical health that can only be detected in a blood test.

Andrew Huberman: The problem is, blood testing has always been very expensive and complicated. In contrast, I've been super impressed by Function's simplicity and at the level of cost. It is very affordable. As a consequence, I decided to join their scientific advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try Function, you can go to functionhealth.com/huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to "Huberman Podcast" listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman to get early access to Function.

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. And I was talking to a friend of mine, who's a bodybuilder, and he was talking, and he was just saying to me the other day, he said, "I don't believe in balance. The work/life balance, you know?" And I'm kind of that way too, you know? If you want... I mean, I take my hat off tremendously to Kobe Bryant for being such a family man. Obviously loved his kids, loved his wife, but yet was obsessed with basketball to the nth degree.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Somehow, he did it, and able even to go beyond that, and be helpful to people and so forth.

Steven Pressfield: But I do think that at some point, if you're going to pursue your calling, whatever it is, you've got to pursue it with both feet. And so, 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, you know? But there are a lot of things that I've missed in life, including having kids. But I don't regret it, you know? That's the nature of the game, I think.

Andrew Huberman: Well, you have a rich and full life.

Steven Pressfield: I mean, I have an unbalanced life, but for me, it's what I've chosen, you know?

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: This is like that great speech in "The Godfather Part II" where... Is it Lee Strasberg who played the equivalent of Meyer, not Meyer Lansky, the real whatever, I forget what his name was, but he was talking about when...

Andrew Huberman: Hyman Roth.

Steven Pressfield: Hyman Roth, Hyman Roth.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: And he had this scene with Michael Corleone where he talks about Moe Greene, his protégé, that they grew up together, "Somebody put a bullet in his eye, and I never asked who did it because I said to myself, 'This is the life we've chosen.'" And that's how I look at it.

Andrew Huberman: It's interesting...

Steven Pressfield: It was a great scene, too.

Andrew Huberman: It is a great scene. God, those movies are so good.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: The first two, anyway.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Talk about a flop on the third.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. 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, you know?

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: More's the pity.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, exactly.

Steven Pressfield: Now we're paying the price, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: But Michael Jordan, you know, Kobe Bryant, I mean, these people had, as you pointed out very... Well, maybe Kobe was a bit more balanced, but an immense number of hours devoted to craft. But I feel like if you grow up in the United States, at some point, you get the message that that could be you.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: Right?

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: That's different. And I know, because my dad's from South America, and I have family from Europe, and I've been exposed to the fact that not every kid around the world grows up getting the message in their ear all the time like, "Hey, that could be you."

Steven Pressfield: Hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: "You just have to find your thing and devote yourself."

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: Then 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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: And I think what we're saying here is that, or what I'm hearing is that it's by definition that if you're going to go for a high peak, that your life is not going to be balanced.

Andrew Huberman: Sort of like Edmund Hillary, first to climb Everest, he was gone for a long time. They didn't have cell phones.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: I imagine if he had a family, they didn't even know if he was going to come back.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: That's not balance.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: That's not balance at all. They weren't handing out checks at the top of Everest.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: So, this idea that pursuing one's craft at the expense of something else, is that something that you 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.

Steven Pressfield: And nothing worked until I found... pursuing my craft. That worked for me, you know? At the end of the day, I felt, "Okay, I've earned my place on the planet doing this," whereas other things, at the end of the day, I would just be crazy, you know? So, I was sort of led to that.

Steven Pressfield: It was like, "Thank God I found something that I can hang my hat on." That was a long time ago. And over the course of those years, from time to time, I asked myself, "Is this still working for you, or should you be evolving into something beyond this?" But it is still working for me, and there is... I don't really have a bucket list of stuff, you know? If somebody gave me a billion dollars, I'd just give it away, you know?

Steven Pressfield: So, yeah, it just was, for me... And again, it's not even about peak success, because I haven't had peak success at all. I've had enough success to pay the rent, which is good enough for me, you know?

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: I'm doing what I want to do, and I don't have to do something else. So, for me, it's really a sort of pursuit of what I feel like I was put on the planet to do. And it's always been a surprise, too. Book to book to book, I never... Each one is a surprise, which is another sort of weird counterintuitive thing. It isn't like, "Oh, could you do a five-year plan?" "I'm going to do this, and then this." No. If something comes, it presents itself, it comes in from the goddess, and there it is, you know?

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: And 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: Yeah. And 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, or that's this or that's that. I mean, nowadays I have more, quote, unquote "famous" friends, and a lot of them have trauma, a lot of them don't.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: Some of them are really happy.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: And a lot of them have...

Steven Pressfield: It's kind of disappointing, isn't it?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. And a lot of them have what I call kind of more of a bento box life, where their career is the main entree, and then there's some other little things, and they have relationships of different kinds, animals, or people.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: And some people, the relationship bin is bigger.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: And their career is less of a focus, and they seem very happy.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: So, this notion of balance is a peculiar one that people... Whatever bento box people seem to exist in, they sort of like to project onto others.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: How much time do you spend on social media?

Steven Pressfield: Maybe an hour a day.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: It's a vice which I've got to definitely stop doing.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: But I will go through Instagram and do that, just kind of...

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: As far as communicating with people, very little, you know? My email, I'm done with my email in two minutes in the morning, you know?

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm. But I do think it's great that it's you on social media, that it's your voice for your content.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: I think that's great, because I think that there's a real thing to that.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: People now can get in near direct contact with the creators that they're inspired by.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Which is great. And with other people that are doing whatever they're doing.

Andrew Huberman: I think it is great.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: One thing that I really appreciate about all your work is that there doesn't seem to be a consistent theme. Some of them overlap, right?

Steven Pressfield: Right.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: But there are a lot of different themes in there. Before we move to some of the themes that perhaps people are not expecting, that I'd like to parse with you, 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, whatever it is, then the question becomes, "Well, how do you overcome this thing?"

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: And 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 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, that I could overcome some of the things.

Steven Pressfield: Like when I think of a great pro, I think of Kobe Bryant, or Michael Jordan, or Tom Brady, or somebody like that. And so, a professional, some of the characteristics of a professional, as opposed to an amateur.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: A professional shows up every day.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: A professional stays on the job all day, or the equivalent of all day. I mean, a lot of us who have jobs are professionals in our jobs, but when we come home at night and we try to start our band, or our fiddle band, we flame out on that, because we can't sort of carry over that professional attitude. A professional, as I said this before, does not take success or failure personally. An amateur will, right?

Steven Pressfield: An amateur gets a bad review, a bad response of this, and they just crap out, "I don't want to do this anymore." Right? A professional plays hurt. Like, if Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, if they've tweaked a hamstring, they're out there, you know? They'll die before they'll be taken off the court, you know? Whereas an amateur, when he or she confronts adversity, will fold.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: "Oh, it's too cold out. I've got the flu," that kind of thing. Another thing, an amateur worries about how they feel. Like, "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, right?

Steven Pressfield: So, an amateur has amateur habits, and a professional has professional habits. And my book, "Turning Pro," is about that, 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 sort of say to yourself, if you can do it, and it isn't easy, "Okay, I'm going to attack this thing, whatever it is now, as if I were Kobe Bryant." Would he quit when he didn't feel like doing it? Absolutely not.

Steven Pressfield: Oh, here's another aspect of turning pro that worked for me. I had about a 10-year career as a screenwriter, as we talked about with "King Kong Lives," and one of the things you learn is that screenwriters, a lot of times, will have their one-man corporations, and they will not sign a contract as themselves. It won't be Andrew Huberman that's on the contract. It'll be your corporation, Huberman Lab, FSO, for services of Andrew Huberman. And I really love that idea of thinking of yourself as a two-part thing. You're the CEO of this thing, and then you're also the guy that does the work.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: And I would find that if I was just thinking of myself as the guy that's doing the work, I have a hard time pitching my ideas. I'm sort of too shy. But if I'm the CEO of my company, of my corporation, I'm a pro, I can go in there and pimp the hell out of it, you know?

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: So, that idea of looking at yourself as a professional kind of takes all judgment out of any failures that we've had. We don't blame ourselves anymore for procrastinating, or being perfectionists, or giving into fear or self-doubt or anything.

Steven Pressfield: We just say, "Well, 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." So, that's a mind shift, a mindset shift that really helped me a lot.

Andrew Huberman: I love that. I mean, so much of that feels... is nested in taking oneself seriously.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: You know, I think when people hear the words, "Taking oneself seriously," they think, "Oh, well, someone's going to be really heavy. They're never gonna joke."

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh, right. Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: "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. I would argue, and I'm not arguing against, because I don't think that you're pushing this, but I think there's a huge cost.

Steven Pressfield: No, I know what you're going to say, and I agree with you.

Andrew Huberman: And the huge cost I'm referring to is the one of how people around you react when you start taking yourself seriously.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I mean, I don't need to go into the story. I've done it elsewhere. But I was an unimpressive high school student. Thank God for my high school girlfriend going off to college, and discovering that, and then thank God for the biology teacher that turned me on to biology.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: Thank God for Harry Carlisle.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: I had the drive, but certainly it wasn't organized in the right ways. But when I switched from being a fun guy to be around in a lot of contexts, to the guy that is absolutely going to ace the exam no matter how much work I have to put into it, that's absolutely going to be in the gym three days a week, that's absolutely going to get my sleep, you get a lot of flak, especially in your late teens, early 20s.

Andrew Huberman: Now I did go out and party then. I never drank a lot, but I went to parties.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: But across the years, I did fewer and fewer social things. Even as a graduate student, postdoc, and junior professor, at meetings, everyone would go to happy hour. I would go work out if I hadn't done it that morning. And I would go to sleep at night instead of staying up late talking in the bar, because great interactions would happen in those bars, scientific discussions, and so forth, but the next morning, I wanted to be on point during the seminar and be able to learn and be able to contribute.

Andrew Huberman: And so, the big cost is that not everybody likes that, because they feel it as pressure. It's sort of like if you're eating well and you're eating 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.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: We see this en masse. We see this in culture, you know? There are extremes of body dysmorphia, and people taking fitness to extremes that aren't healthy, or anything to extremes, but we see people being basically not shamed, but ridiculed for being serious about their health. It's nuts. But it's all about them. It's very clear. It's all about their own unwillingness to give up the second chocolate croissant.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Or to feel like maybe they're not as fit as the people around them. I mean, when standards around you are at risk of rising, that can be really scary to people.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: We were talking about that earlier, Andrew. And I was saying that when you start eating healthy, and sleeping, and getting up early and stuff, it becomes a reproach to your friends who know that they're not doing that, know they should be doing that, and they say, "Now, who is this guy to do that?" And then they will try to sabotage you, and undermine you, and ridicule you, and so you're right, turning pro does have a cost. So a lot of times, if you take that course, you have to leave people behind.

Steven Pressfield: People who were your friends, you can't be friends with them anymore, you know? Because a lot of times, groups of friends will have an unspoken kind of compact among them that, "We're all going to stay mediocre." That's the deal, right? And, in fact, "Good Will Hunting." That was what that movie was about, right? That the Matt Damon character was this mathematical genius, right? And his buddies, all of his fist-fighting, Boston Southie guys had this compact. They were all going to stay kind of blue-collar guys, and "We're all gonna be buddies, and we're going to have a wonderful time."

Steven Pressfield: And then there's that great scene at the end of the movie 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."

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: "Because you won the lottery. You got this thing, and this gift, and you've have to use it."

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: So, there are those kinds of pacts that people make. We're all going to stay mediocre right here where we are.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: And if you, Andrew, try to rise above, you'll be the tall poppy. Somebody's going to cut you off. So, sometimes, we do have to leave people behind.

Andrew Huberman: Well, 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.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: And 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.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I think 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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: People are going... It has... If anything, I mean, it's the issue that you go, "Well, how much pressure is this?" And I would say, actually, very little from the outside. Everyone who is a faculty member at Stanford is putting so much pressure on themselves to live out their vision of what they're trying to create.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: I mean, it's spectacular. I've got colleagues that I could tell you about, multiple domains of life where they're just 11 out of 10s, right?

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: I mean, in some it's only one, and in some they have more challenged personal lives, like anything else, and in some, they seem to just do it all. But I think the notion... A former guest on this podcast, who is a former Tier 1 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: You want to be surrounded by people who are really striving.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: They're really pushing themselves. Your standards go up, and you get better, and you realize all sorts of wonderful things about who you can become. I think that's one good feature of social media now, which is that people can find mentors. They can find people who are not giving the illusion of being perfect.

Steven Pressfield: That's true. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: We used to think that famous people were perfect. Nowadays, the more famous you are, the harder it is to control your reputation.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: And I think that's in some ways a good thing. It has its darker side, but the idea that nobody is perfect, it's just that people are emphasizing or de-emphasizing certain aspects of life.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: So, but yeah, I think turning oneself pro, which is, as you pointed out, something that people can just do for themselves, is really about taking yourself seriously, and taking life seriously.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: And that brings me to a bigger question, which is, so much of what you talk about, this is why I love it so much, is about the practical. We started off talking about what you do, and when, and how, and how you close out a session, and how you reopen a session.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: But it seems like you're also very connected to the spiritual aspects of the creative process. That you really bookend these, for lack of a better phrase, that you really bookend the two aspects of the creative process.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: Because for many people, they hear about creativity, and it can seem kind of mystical, and it's almost like trying to grab fog.

Steven Pressfield: Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: And many times the process is like trying to grab fog.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: So, you've given a lot of extremely practical advice, but when it comes to the kind of spiritual, higher-order stuff, if you will, 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. And you're right, Andrew. The creative life, I think, is a two-sided thing. The one side is kind of the blue-collar, practical aspect of being a professional, that 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 that, where do ideas come from? They don't come from us. They come from someplace else.

Steven Pressfield: And so, I'm definitely a believer that we live on a material plane here, but there's a plane above us, and we're trying to communicate to that plane, and that plane is trying to communicate to us. And our job as artists... Like, if we were in a monastery or something, the move from here to here would be called prayer. But if we're artists, the move from here to here is like the invocation of the muse. It's kind of saying, "Give me an idea. Help me," you know?

Steven Pressfield: And 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, whatever we want to call it, and try to channel it as best we can. And our job here, in terms of being a pro, is to sort of be ready to take that voltage as it comes in.

Steven Pressfield: And, like, Beethoven could play on the piano what he was hearing in his head, right? 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 are probably a lot of higher dimensions.

Steven Pressfield: And I think the Greeks were really kind of onto something, the ancient Greeks and 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. I mean, 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 is a professor at Northeastern University. We 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, but acts of faith, prayer.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: For you, maybe it's through writing, or other expressions that involve action... That those absolutely have positive health benefits. We now know that. But that it's really about the acts of faith that-

Steven Pressfield: Hmm.

Steven Pressfield: I love that phrase. That's a great one, and it is true.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. 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.

Andrew Huberman: This is why 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman: It's subtle, but it's meaningful.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: 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-based actions... For many people, it's through religious scripture-reading, scripture, or whatever it is, but there are many ways to access this... That all sorts of interesting things start to happen at the level of morality, at the level of their own consciousness, at their level of feelings of connectedness that go beyond any kind of simple two-plus-two-equals-four outcome.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: So I totally agree with you. There's something else.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: Definitely something else going on.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: It's exciting. I think that...

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: 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, certainly.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

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: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

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

Andrew Huberman: I mean, yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I mean, that's clearly the thing. Clearly the thing.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: I guess so. I guess they do, yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: There are a lot of-

Steven Pressfield: I hear that anyway. Not that I know anybody.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. I think historically that was true. I think a lot of writers have relied on amphetamines and alcohol to get their work done.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: And nicotine.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: Nicotine is kind of making a comeback in non-smoke forms, but let's set that aside.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: You do this through sheer, good old Marine-style grit, it sounds like.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, or kind of surrendering to it.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: I'm not a meditator, but from what I gather, that's sort of what meditation is about, you know? 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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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: Mm-hmm.

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, you know?

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: 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."

Andrew Huberman: Because if someone were going to ask me how to do, I don't know, like, 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 their...

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: Because the moment you experience that creature comfort, the more painful the good old classic way of doing it is.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: 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, "Oh, am I comfortable or not? Am I in an optimal place to create?"

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: We started this podcast in a closet.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: A small closet with me, Rob, and the bulldog.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

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

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

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 I think 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...

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: I don't know.

Andrew Huberman: I feel like you are the opposite of crotchety, you know?

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: A terrible word to be described as, you know?

Steven Pressfield: Yeah. You don't see me at home, Andrew, though.

Andrew Huberman: Okay.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Are you a complainer?

Steven Pressfield: No, I've really tried. I never complain at all. I think it's a real vice.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: It's another form of resistance.

Andrew Huberman: Hmm. 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 in next June.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah, we were talking about this before. I had a book a few years ago called "A Man at Arms," which is 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, Telamon of Arcadia. And that book took place around the time of the crucifixion. Fiction. The new book is...

Steven Pressfield: One of the aspects of Telamon is that he keeps living life after life after life, and he is doomed because of the 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, so on and so forth. So, this new book that's coming out, it's called "The Arcadian," is about his final life.

Steven Pressfield: And I won't say any more than that except that it takes place in the past, and that it's pretty interesting how this all sort of plays out. And it really kind of goes with what we were talking about before about, are there different levels of reality? And 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: Next June.

Steven Pressfield: Next June, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Okay.

Steven Pressfield: "The Arcadian."

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 "The War of Art." I love "Do the Work." I mean, there are so many, so I won't ask you... To add just one other, "Gates of Fire." They're all awesome.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: They're awesome listens, and they're awesome reads.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: 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, or... And that "The War of Art" took some time, because I do think everything we know about dopamine dynamics tells us that, who knows, maybe you would've not 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: A body of work is really what makes for an awesome-

Steven Pressfield: Ah, thank you.

Steven Pressfield: And what you just said about dopamine, I never had thought about it that way. That's true.

Andrew Huberman: Oh.

Steven Pressfield: It's sort of a slow-release dopamine for me over many years.

Andrew Huberman: And, well, it compounds the way that you've experienced your wins. I mean, oh, I've got stories, and can go on for days about people I knew that had big papers published in "Science" or "Nature," then disappeared completely. They're just gone, they're just completely gone because they couldn't take that the next thing didn't match up to the first thing,

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: This stuff is real.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: 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: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: You know, 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... 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?" You never learn this.

Steven Pressfield: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: You're on that list. I swear, you're on that list, and it's not a long list.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Now I'm embarrassed, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: No, well, for the right reasons, I should say.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: And thank you for coming here today, and-

Steven Pressfield: Thank you for having me.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, this has been a real pleasure. It's-

Steven Pressfield: We've been talking about this for years.

Andrew Huberman: I know.

Andrew Huberman: It was great when we discovered we were neighbors.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I really-

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

Andrew Huberman: Oh, absolutely. And I'll see you in the gym.

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I'll try and get up a little earlier.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: That's actually starting after my 50th-

Steven Pressfield: I'll hang out a little later.

Andrew Huberman: Starting after my 50th birthday, I'm going to be a 5:00 AM riser.

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Andrew Huberman: No matter what time I went to sleep.

Steven Pressfield: Ah. Good for you.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Steven Pressfield: Mm.

Andrew Huberman: But that getting out of bed when you haven't slept quite as much as you would like is brutal, but-

Steven Pressfield: Ah.

Steven Pressfield: Ah. It's horrible, isn't it?

Steven Pressfield: Yeah.

Steven Pressfield: And as I said to you before, 50 is nothing at all. You're just a kid. You've 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.

Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Pressfield: Take it from me. I'd give my left arm to be 50 again. You've got it made.

Andrew Huberman: Awesome. Well, that perhaps is the best birthday gift I could have received.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: Feels good to hear.

Steven Pressfield: Happy birthday.

Andrew Huberman: Thank you. 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.

Steven Pressfield: Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman: We're all benefiting.

Steven Pressfield: I will if you will.

Andrew Huberman: Deal.

Steven Pressfield: All right.

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.

Andrew Huberman: 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 comment 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."

Andrew Huberman: This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And 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 pre-sale at protocolsbook.com. There, you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best.

Andrew Huberman: 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 hubermanlab 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 overlap 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 hubermanlab on all social media platforms.

Andrew Huberman: 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.

Andrew Huberman: 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.