Steven Pressfield: The Hero’s Journey, Resistance, and Becoming the Artist You’re Meant to Be [From the Archive]

[00:00:01] This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. Presenting the Archive. Classic episodes that remain timeless. The raw, unfiltered conversations from the early days in which people shared their failures and showed us exactly how they rebuilt everything from the ground up.

[00:00:36] So, one of my favorite all-time guests, Steven Pressfield. I don't even know how to begin with you. I'll just say, you've written like a gazillion books. What's the number? Like 20, 15? I think it's up to 20 now. Yeah. I'm right about there with you. Although your books have had great success. The Legend of Bagger Vance was also a movie. And then what was brilliant about The Legend of Bagger Vance is described in your other book, The Authentic Swing, where...

[00:01:03] And I describe these two books to everybody. The Authentic Swing is about how you use the ancient Hindu story of the Bhagavad Gita, the most famous story in Hinduism, the most important story of Hinduism, I should say. And use that almost beat by beat to write The Legend of Bagger Vance. I stole it, in other words. Yeah.

[00:01:23] Right. Which is... I'm gonna get to that because it's very interesting. So The Legend of Bagger Vance, if I remember correctly, I read it several years ago. It was a 1920s golf tournament in Georgia. And essentially, it's amazing how, again, you read that. It's the Bhavagad Gita, but set in 1920s golf. It was a golf setting in Georgia. It was so brilliant. And the caddy is like Krishna and, you know, the main young golfers like Arjuna.

[00:01:51] Yeah. And it was just beautiful. And then the reason I like that is because when I started blogging around 2009, 2010 and telling my story... You know, at first I was writing a lot about finance, but then I stopped all that and I was then writing my story. I realized something very interesting, which is that if you look at a lot of these ancient texts, you know, not only great storytelling, but great wisdom.

[00:02:16] And if you apply it to another avenue, I'll give you an example. I took the Yoga Sutras, written in 500, you know, 300 or 400 BC. And I took one line, which is kind of impediments to enlightenment in yoga. And there's nine of them. And so I wrote a blog post, the nine things that will prevent you from being an entrepreneur. And I didn't give any credit to the Yoga Sutras, but word for word, I took those nine things and then described how to apply.

[00:02:43] And it became like my most popular article of the year. No kidding. Yeah. Because when, and what's amazing is, and this is what you did for the Bhagavad Gita. If a story has been focused grouped by 3,000 years of history and a billion people, it's probably a pretty good story structure. And so you just took that story structure and did the legend of Bagger Vance with it. Yeah. Let's just make something up. You don't need to cite it either. Right. Yeah. Like one person in a thousand gets it, you know.

[00:03:08] And not only do you not need to cite it, you could then later, like 15, 20 years later, write an entire book about how you did it. Yeah. So you get like two books for the price of one. And it's been done more times than we think. I mean, you remember the movie, The Warriors? Yeah. That was about the gangs in New York. Yeah. Great movie. So that's taken straight from Xenophon's, you know, Anabasis. Oh, I know that. Totally ripped off, including the name Cyrus and the whole thing, you know. You know, it's kind of almost a cliche to say Star Wars follows the beats of the arc of the hero.

[00:03:37] Like that's kind of well known. So what I want to talk about is you have collected four mini books, which I think are brilliant. The first one's called How Does a Story Start? The second one's called What Is Your Story About? And then the other two I have, these two I have right in front of me, the other two I have in PDF. So I want to talk about those. I want to talk about, you know, you have this beautiful way of describing what is a good book and what is good writing and what, and what is the artist's journey.

[00:04:04] And I want to talk about those, but I want to talk about it not only in the context of, for listeners who want to create a work of art, but, but also where are we in our own stories? Are we the heroes or are we the, the red shirts? Meaning, you know, on Star Trek, you know, whoever wears the red shirt, when they beam down to the planet, you know, those guys are dead by the end of the story. So are you Captain Kirk or are you one of the guys who beams down with everybody and you're just dead by the end?

[00:04:33] So, so, cause I think I, you kind of imply in these things that everybody is a hero of their own story. I don't think that's true. I think some people get the call to action and never respond to it. They have the opportunity to be the hero, but they don't respond. I'm sure that's true, but you know, they should respond, you know, and sooner or later everybody does. I think, I don't know. Look at your own story. You were a cab driver here. You were trying to be a writer unsuccessfully. You, I think you mentioned you, you worked for 28 years writing before you published your first novel.

[00:05:03] Something like that. Now 20 books later. Yeah. However you define success, I could define it for you and say you're a success. Cause you know, that's the thing you talk about, which is what is success. And we can talk about that later. But what if you had never really gave up? I mean, you know, in order to be the hero, you, you have to give up things. You know, you talk a little bit in one of your, the little books about physics and how, you know,

[00:05:28] often energy we put in one area, like let's say self-doubt comes back to us in another area, which is self-belief. If as you conquer that self-doubt, you get self-belief. But what if you had never given and sacrificed the things you did? You might not have been the hero of your story. I guess that's true, James, in the sense that, I mean, like we're talking about the hero's journey, right? That starts with the hero, quote unquote, in the ordinary world, whatever that means, stuck in their job, stuck in their, whatever it is.

[00:05:57] And then comes, according to Joseph Campbell, the call to adventure, right? Some sort of summons or your life breaks down or whatever it is. And immediately after that, in the myth, is the refusal of the call, right? Like Luke Skywalker, when he first gets called to go with Obi-Wan Kenobi, he says, I don't want to do it, you know, or Odysseus, when he's summoned to the Trojan War, he does that whole thing where he pretends to be crazy and sows the field with salt.

[00:06:26] Peter Parker, when he uses his Spider-Man abilities to just perform in a boxing ring until his mentor, his Uncle Ben. Believe it or not, I've never seen Spider-Man, but if you say that, well, that's exactly true. Forget the movies, just the comic books. You know, Uncle Ben died and said, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. And finally, he says, I'm going to be a superhero instead. So then the hero's journey doesn't really start, as you say, until somebody does respond to the call.

[00:06:55] So if they don't respond to it, then you're right. They're not the hero of their own lives anymore. Right. But I don't think it's ever too late to respond to that call. Right. Well, that's a good point, too. As you point out with the artist's journey, there's more than one journey you can have in life. Yeah, many, many journeys. Right. So I want to get into that, but I love the phrase that after the call to action, the hero is going from the ordinary world to the extraordinary world. So think about it in terms of like Luke Skywalker and Star Wars.

[00:07:22] He's this whining little brat working on a farm on this desert planet. And then suddenly, boom, he's on spaceships. He's got lightsabers. He's training in the forest and he rescues the princess. You know, that's the extraordinary world. Yeah. Well, I'm just actually I'm taking that from other people's books. I'm sure you've read The Writer's Journey. Oh, you mentioned I have not read that one.

[00:07:46] I'm blanking on the author, but Vogler, he was a real story consultant kind of a guy at Disney or Pixar, probably still is, you know, like a real high level type of guy. And he talks about Vogler. OK. Ah, yeah. Really good book. Highly recommended. I think he's the one that I kind of stole that concept from that act one of a story, Star Wars or whatever, is the ordinary world. It's the kind of before world. I'm stealing that one from Blake Snyder.

[00:08:16] Yeah, Save the Cat. From Save the Cat. And then once the hero responds to the call, they immediately enter. They cross the threshold and becomes act two. And then they enter the extraordinary world. Or I think that Blake Snyder calls it the inverted world, which is a sort of a whole interesting thing. And that's act two and then on to act three in the climax. So in our lives, right? I think when we answer the call, whatever that is, and you've done this, I know a million

[00:08:44] times that you've sort of deliberately done it, like giving all your stuff away. Right. I mean, that was in a way, if I understand it rightly, a way of forcing yourself out of an ordinary world into an extraordinary world. And that was what you wanted to accomplish, right? Right. Well, yes. And there's backstory in that it wasn't like I was forced to do it, but there was a call to action part of it. But you could force yourself to do that in that sense. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:09:11] And so I think there's always, as you call it, the resistance in the artist journey, there's always some resistance that you can't just say, okay, I'm going to dive headfirst into the extraordinary world because I love it. No one really wants to at first. Like I didn't think to throw all my things away and dive into this. It's kind of a set of circumstances happened, which made it like, okay, here I go. Uh-huh.

[00:09:39] Again, just like Luke Skywalker, his aunt and uncle were killed by the stormtroopers. And he's like, okay, I got nothing left here. Let me ask you this. Was there a mentor figure at that point? Was there an Obi-Wan Kenobi moment? No. And you know. Even in your own head, a dream or something? No. And I think I always, in the arc of the hero, I sometimes question the mentor aspect and how much of it is necessary.

[00:10:07] But I guess, you know, I've read, I've been reading so many books since I was a kid. That's all I do. And maybe just kind of builds up this. Maybe they were a collective mentor to you in some way. And I was doing my podcast at the, I'd already been doing my podcast for years at that time. And so everybody in the podcast, including you, becomes like a virtual mentor. So I get, I have this kind of part of me that's kind of the mentor part of my brain that I sometimes pay attention to.

[00:10:36] But yeah, I feel like I've been afraid to be in the ordinary world, I think. And I think you felt that, like when you were driving a cab in New York, like, what am I doing here when I really want to be a writer? Like, you know, you metaphorically in some way gave up all of your things and changed your life. Like, what were, what are some of the things you gave up when you began your journey to be the writer and artist you are? Well, a marriage, you know, any sense of kind of security or anything like that.

[00:11:05] Like, I'm sure people are listening to this, what I'm about to say, they've lived through this many times. I used to work in advertising. I worked like three or four different times in advertising here in New York and in LA. And each time I would just do it to kind of save money, so quit and write a book. But at the moment that I was ready to quit, there would always be a scene where my boss, who was usually a friend, would call me into the office. And I'm sure you've had this same scene yourself, where they say to you, don't do this.

[00:11:35] Don't leave. Don't throw your life away. Here, we're going to give you this, an office. We're going to call you a vice president or whatever it is. We're going to give you a raise. And it's that sort of temptation. It's like the devil tempting you. And at the time you think to yourself, well, they're absolutely right. I am crazy. Why am I going to leave and go someplace and write a book that nobody's ever going to want or I'm going to go off on some adventure, stand-up comedy or something that nobody's going to give a shit about?

[00:12:02] But that's that moment of crossing a threshold. And for me, it was like many thresholds. I kind of crossed that one again and again and again to make it stick. Well, again, in the arc of the hero, there are many thresholds, which are exceedingly more difficult until the final clash between the hero and the villain. Yeah. Or even sometimes it's the same threshold just to get the story moving. You know, you sort of go in the extraordinary world and you run back to the safety of the ordinary world.

[00:12:31] But I think you do wind up metaphorically like you did, giving up everything in that sense. Yeah. You know, I'll tell you one story because, again, I think this journey happens. In real life, this journey happens in many times in several ways. But one time in 2009, I had just started a job. I hadn't had a job in many years and this was kind of a trial. I was going to work at a private equity firm to see if I could get back into finance and make money.

[00:13:00] And maybe that was my life's goal was to make money. And I remember I was in a conference room like this and I was in a meeting that I had set up with some potential opportunities. I had a coat on my chair. I got up in the meeting. I said, excuse me, I'm going to go to the bathroom. I left the coat on my chair. I even had my name on my office door at that time. I'd been there three days. And the meeting was so boring. I got up. I said, I have to go to the bathroom. I walked towards the elevator. I took the elevator down 40 floors.

[00:13:29] We're on the 40th floor of like it was the Trump building on Wall Street. Took the subway to Grand Central. Took the train 70 miles north where I was living. And I never again went back or returned. They called constantly. What happened? You left your coat there. We're sitting on the back of the chair. Left my books there. And I just never went back. And then I just figured, you know what? I'm going to write. And I have some money in the bank. And I'm just going to see what opportunities happen. I took a chance. And then I've been kind of writing, blogging ever since.

[00:13:58] So it goes to show you that the hero's journey myth happens in real life. And that's the way it happens. Yeah. But, you know, it's more than just, hey, I'm going to be a hero now. Because. Let me ask you this. At that moment, James, did you have any concept of the hero's journey or anything like that? Zero. Me neither. I mean, I'd never even heard of it at that, you know, at those points in my life. Yeah. I don't think I'd heard of it either because, I mean, I had been writing unsuccessfully for the prior 20 years.

[00:14:27] And I say unsuccessfully because even at that point, I had like five or six books published. But my first four books were novels that never got published. I wrote in the 90s. And then I wrote a bunch of finance books and I didn't care about them at all. And I was writing for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times. And I'm just like, you know what? I hate all this stuff. And I hate working for anybody. I just want to write my story. And that's what I've been doing ever since. So, and a different type of payoff than what you've been doing.

[00:14:56] I haven't written, you know, many great, we haven't even mentioned the titles of your books. You've written many great novels. You have another one coming out. 36 Righteous Men. At the end of the year. But people know you from those books. But people also know you from The War of Art, Turning Pro. Nobody gives a shit about. Nobody wants to read your shit. Yeah, nobody wants to read your shit. There's so many books with like shit and fucking the title now. I know, I know. They're like all bestsellers too. My release has an asterisk.

[00:15:24] Then you wrote The Knowledge, which we spoke about the last time we got together. And The Artist Journey more recently. And now these small books. But again, you step into the extraordinary world, not quite realizing it's extraordinary. It's just scary. Yes. I mean, you were scared, right? Absolutely. I was terrified the whole time. But you know, actually, I've been thinking about something different on this subject. And this may be too obscure for what we're talking about here. Nothing's too obscure. Throw it out there anyway.

[00:15:54] I've been thinking about this in terms of writing movies and writing novels and my own process of as I'm structuring something. You know, what should happen or how does the architecture work? And I think that when in a story, let's say we're writing a story, you and me, and we have a hero who crosses the threshold and enters the extraordinary world, whatever it is.

[00:16:14] I think that what starts to happen at that moment is immediately they become known by others in the story in a completely different way than they ever were known before. You know, pick a dumb story. It's a guy who was just a regular teacher and somebody kidnaps his daughter. And he decides he's going to go get her back, right?

[00:16:39] So at the moment that that character sort of makes that decision and goes to the dark neighborhood to find out, you know, where his daughter was last seen, he immediately, let's say he enters a bar, right? Immediately, people in the story react to him differently and they know him in a different way than he ever was before.

[00:17:00] And he, the character, starts to see himself in a different way, sees it in other people's eyes, sees it in his own demeanor, and that the new way that people are knowing him is his real self. He's gotten, you know, one step closer to who he really is. And then through act two, it kind of unfolds in deeper levels of others knowing him and of him knowing himself, the hero knowing himself.

[00:17:29] So whether that's true or not in stories, I don't know, but I've been thinking about that lately, and I think it's a really kind of interesting idea. Like I would bet when you crossed into the extraordinary world in that moment, that probably almost immediately you started to think of yourself as a different person. And that people started reacting to you in a different way. Am I right? Yeah, that's completely true because I would say in two ways.

[00:17:55] One is I am no longer pandering to other people. So think about it again, Star Wars. Luke is pandering to his aunt and uncle there. He's just doing what they say. And I'm no longer vying for the approval of, let's say, a boss who's going to give me money. You know, so I end up taking his orders instead of following my own internal orders. You should have an identity. Right. That was a sort of a false identity. Right.

[00:18:21] And then at the same time, people react to you differently, not necessarily good or bad. Some people thought I was insane. Whether it was this time or when I threw everything out or when I, you know, I used to work for HBO and then I left that to start a business to be an entrepreneur. This is 20 years ago, 23 years ago. So people looked at me differently then. You know, there's a lot of, again, there's a lot of calls to action. I'm thinking about the story of Breaking Bad. I was just thinking that when you were saying it. You know?

[00:18:49] Because he started to realize, oh, I'm a devious criminal. Yeah. When at first he thought of himself as a mild chemistry teacher. And in fact, you can see that he's empowered by that. Remember in the pilot when he puts together the two gases and makes phosphine gas and there's two criminal, you know, meth dealers that are about to kill him in the trailer? I don't know if you remember that. Yeah, yeah. But it's like he creates, you know, mustard gas or whatever it is and kills him, you know? And at that moment. And at the time he strangles. He becomes a hero to himself, you know? Yeah.

[00:19:17] So I think that's kind of a really interesting, and that's kind of the payoff, or at least a start of the payoff, of knowing yourself in a different way. There's three people involved, right? There's the hero who knows himself in a different way. There's the antagonist or the villains who see him in a certain way. And there's also the audience. So take Breaking Bad as another example. The final scene of season one is him playing poker with his brother-in-law.

[00:19:47] Brother-in-law is the cop, right? Or the FBI agent? Right. Who's sort of, in a weird way, the villain. He's not a bad guy, but he's sort of the villain in terms of he's trying to capture whoever is doing this. He doesn't know it's his brother-in-law saying, ah, you're just a wimpy teacher. You can't bluff. And then you see very clearly in the last scene, he's bluffing massively and wins. Yeah. And he says, yeah, you're right, man. I can't do anything. And so it's like sometimes the audience sees what the villain didn't yet. The villain took another season or two to really see what was going on.

[00:20:17] Yeah. So it's interesting. It's different time frames the villain might see that something's happening. Although in Star Wars, Darth Vader feels a disturbance in the force. Right, right, because he's so highly advanced. But the other thing about when someone crosses into the extraordinary world and they're known differently is they're attracting different people than they used to attract. And they're repelling different people. Like the people that used to be their people, their people are now repelled by them, right,

[00:20:46] and start to reject them. I bet you had friends that suddenly said, what's the matter with you, Jimmy, you know? I lost friends, family. I lost so much. It was ridiculous. And I couldn't understand them. And I still can't understand it. If you want to go back to the Bible for a second, like Jesus would say, you must leave your father and mother and give away everything you've got and follow me if you want to. You know, there's no halfway thing of doing this. And even he sacrificed.

[00:21:12] Like when there was one time he was praying with his disciples, Mary comes to visit. He won't let her in. He says, this is my family. Kind of a little known story of the Bible. There were points where he rejected, you know, Mary. So he had his own sacrifice. Yeah, yeah. Of course, the definition of the Ark of the Hero is the new testament. Yeah, exactly. It comes from that to some extent.

[00:21:38] So anyway, that was just a thought that I had about people starting to know each other in a different way or the hero knowing himself in a different way once they make that move, that break, that crossing the threshold type of thing into the extraordinary world. In our world as opposed to the story world. I don't know if there's such a difference either. There's not such a difference, but story sticks to, and you mentioned this repeatedly, story sticks to a theme, right? It sticks to one concept. And we can get into that in a little bit, what a theme is.

[00:22:08] But the real world is a little messier. Like again, people know you, like you say, people know you from one context, but now suddenly people know you from another context. And there might be multiple themes happening in your life at once. Like I'm a father, I'm a businessman, I'm an artist. And, but like, for instance, when I started doing standup comedy up to five times a week, there's a little bit of an arrogance when I start viewing myself differently and thinking, oh, I'm a comedian. I haven't been doing it 20 years, like photos on this wall.

[00:22:33] I just had started, but I started viewing myself that way because I was embracing the suck a little bit. To be a writer, I think you have to have a certain arrogance because you have to, for years, suck at it to get good at it. But you have to have something that's compelling you to keep going. Yeah. And a little bit of most of that must be arrogance. Not everyone's mature to think, oh, well, I suck now, but in 15 years, I'm going to be better. Well, they say, I know you know this of being an entrepreneur.

[00:23:01] You have to be ignorant and arrogant, right? Yeah. You have to have no concept of how difficult it is. Otherwise, you'd never do it, right? And then you also have to be incredibly arrogant, which is basically just being dumb and naive and think, well, I can handle this, you know? Sure, I'll just become a brain surgeon, no problem, you know? Well, it's the same thing for writing. Like, you have to think, okay, I'm going to write something. And even though a million books are published a year, everyone's going to want to read what I have to say. Yeah, yeah. Because it's important. Yeah. You know?

[00:23:30] And so you have to have ignorance plus arrogance plus a vision that this particular thing you're saying is important enough to stand out among the million other books that are published that year. Yeah. So you can't think. So that's why when you think about anything else, when you think about money, when you think about fame, when you think about success, when you think about awards, all of that is, I view as part of the resistance because it keeps you from the important thing,

[00:23:56] which is how do I say something more important than the other million people trying to say something? And the other weird thing, I think, and tell me if you have this same experience. When I sort of committed in my mind to become a writer, I had no clue that I had anything important to say. And I still don't have that sense at all. And in fact, if anybody had asked me, I mean, the voice in my head was, how dare you sit down and try to, what do you know? You know? You don't know anything, you know?

[00:24:21] And so I think it takes a crazy sort of, I won't even say arrogance, it's kind of a faith just in your own soul or your own demon or whatever, that somehow it's going to come to you or you're going to arrive at it. If you just, you know, peel back the onion enough that there's something there, even though I certainly never had a clue or that, you know, that I had some kernel of wisdom or goal that I was going to try to deliver to the world.

[00:24:50] I just thought, let me just start. If I can only just start, maybe something will eventuate along the way. Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It would mean so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at Alcantra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

[00:25:20] You know, Jay, I was thinking the other day, I remember back in the late nineties and early two thousands, I was trading, managing money, building businesses. There were spreadsheets everywhere, posted notes on the wall. I was using a ton of different software programs that just didn't talk to each other. And every time someone asked a simple question like, hey, how much cash do we actually have right now? It took three people and more to figure it out. Fast forward to today. And I still see founders living that same nightmare.

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[00:29:17] Well, it's interesting you use the phrase peel back the onion because in these books and in your blog, you talk about going deeper. So you have a concept, a vision. You're starting to write it down. You think you have it. It's a great story. But now go deeper. Like really, what's the deeper level? On the deeper level, like when you're describing what's the theme of the X-Files, you give the subject. Then you give the first theme. You read this very well. Yeah. You know, paranoia might be the first thing.

[00:29:44] And then, oh, aliens were here and the government's hiding from us. And then the third level, aliens are here. They're, they've done some amazingly dark things and the government's hiding that also. And you get, you got to eight different levels of theme as you go deeper and deeper. And even the eighth level, it's not obscure. It's like this idea that we might not know anything about the world around us. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:10] And even just that is a theme, as you point out, that everyone can relate to. Like there are some times where we think we know everything, but everything could just be a simulation or, you know. Right. Like the matrix, you know, what's real. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, so it's just interesting that when you say peel back the onion, I think one of the skills that you develop as an artist or that you've developed as an artist is that not

[00:30:35] necessarily that, oh, you put in the time and you're telling more, more, more important stories, but you're, you, the skill you're developing is going deeper and deeper into the theme of what you're saying. And you have this ability now to go deeper and deeper instead of just telling a fun story. Yeah. But I think that that's just a natural progression for anybody. It's like, as a standup comic, I imagine you're just hoping to find at the start a joke that's going to make people laugh. Right. Right.

[00:31:03] Two rabbis walk into a bar and an alligator comes up to them. Right. But after you've told that joke about, you know, a hundred times, you start to say to yourself, well, what did the alligator represent? I mean, why is it an alligator and not a blue jay? You know, why are they two rabbis? You know, and, and you start to realize that there is something deep in there, you know, and there's something deep in you that made you like that story about the two rabbis and the alligator. And then like in, in the artist's journey, one of the things that I cite, I did a list

[00:31:31] of like the albums that the Rolling Stones did over time, you know, and I've left a few about, but if you know what their first couple of albums were just covers of like Susie Q and stuff like that. Right. They didn't write any original tunes for like, and then all of a sudden you have satisfaction and, and, you know, that sort of stuff. So they're, they're really, you can see that they were scratching at the surface of something at the start that they, they just love, but they couldn't put their finger on it.

[00:32:01] You know, they just knew they loved the blues. They loved Chicago kind of blues, that kind of thing. And then as they got into it deeper and it might not even have been conscious, although I bet it was, they started to ask themselves, well, what is it about the blues that I really like? You know, what is it about Howl and Wolf or whoever it is that they're, that they just love to listen to? And then they start to say, well, how can we do that and do this in a different way? You know? So we're not just aping, you know, those same four chords or whatever the hell it is that blues is made up of. Yeah.

[00:32:31] So I think naturally over time, you do start peeling the onion back. I'll use the Beatles then as an example where you take their first album, which is just filled with these sugary love songs. Like what was the song from the Beatles' first album? I Want to Hold Your Hand or Please Please Me or that kind of stuff. And then the last time they ever recorded for the public together was the famous rooftop concert. And one of the last songs of that was, you know, they go from I Want to Hold Your Hand to Don't Let Me Down.

[00:32:59] And they're not only talking about their romance interests, but the other Beatles. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's a real, and I don't think it's a wisdom that comes with age. I think it's a wisdom that comes with, you know, let's, how can we say something deeper than we said before? How can we plumb the depths of this idea? Yeah. So we love. Bruce Springsteen has been doing that. Yeah. Philip Roth. Is there any artist that has a career over time? Does it? Joni Mitchell? You list all the Philip Roth books. Neil Young. Yeah.

[00:33:29] And you list Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Philip Roth in some of these, and you look at their progression. Philip Roth I was particularly interested in because, you know, you go from Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint to all the way to, I forget what his last book was. I don't know. Indignation was one of the last ones. Yeah, the whole Zuckerman, Unbound, you know. Then you sort of run out of gas sometimes too, you know, sorry to say.

[00:33:51] Yeah, no, I think with him ultimately he ended up being a little disappointed in, you know, his full output. But, you know, there is a kind of a progression where he kind of goes from, you know, a young kid with, you know, kind of the problems of youth and being a little shy and awkward and whatever and, but very sexually, you know, wants to be sexually active to the problems

[00:34:17] of middle age to, you know, kind of these deeper issues about society. Yeah. You know, past the supplement. So he certainly should not be disappointed. He's a great, great artist. Yeah. He did great, great stuff. I'm sure he was always on the short list for the Nobel Prize. Yeah. But he never got it. Yeah. I think that's what disappointed him. As we're talking here, do we, evolving, I'm just asking, are we getting to a theme here? What are we talking about? And we're sort of just winging it. And I'm wondering, are you, are you aware of anything that we're moving toward here? That's a good question. I'm going in two directions. Okay.

[00:34:47] But we'll see which one we end up in. I want to learn more about essentially the art of storytelling, which you described. And by that, I don't mean necessarily writing. Like you referred to music. You also referred to comedy. I was thinking about all these things as, as we were talking. There's also, you can look at it even in a deeper level, like entrepreneurship and business and life and family. But, so I am interested though, in just kind of these very specifics of what you talk about

[00:35:15] in storytelling, but then I'm interested in just how we all can take, find and take that call to action. And then what does that mean for us on either the hero's journey or what you call the artist's journey and the slight differences between them? Can I interrupt you for a minute? Can I interrupt you for a minute? I'm just sort of responding to what you just, you just said here that I haven't even really thought about this before. Yes. So am I, is it different than am I, you know, I know I'm up against some good podcasts.

[00:35:44] You don't go on a lot of podcasts. I keep track when you do. But I think if somebody's listening to this and they're sort of a little bit lost in their life or they're wondering, you know, where, how do I get to that moment? Or is there that moment in my life? I think the answer is yes, because it's built in to your, to your soul from the, from birth. Just like an acorn has got the oak tree in it already.

[00:36:08] I think each one of us is born with a destiny and with a calling and with an individual identity. I'm a believer in previous lives, but even if you don't believe in that, I think you have to agree that we're born as like three or four kids are born in a family. They're all completely different from day one, right? They're not a blank slate. So in other words, I think what I'm trying to say is that inside of us, kind of like a woman's biological clock, something is ticking.

[00:36:37] You know, our hero's journey is sort of ticking and it wants to be lived out. And even if we are avoiding it through fear or whatever it is, or we're living an ultra conventional life or doing what other people expect us or doing what we think we ought to be, that little time bomb is kind of ticking. And, and at some point, or it's maybe another analogy would be a pot or a kettle. It's starting to boil.

[00:37:02] It's going to sort of come to the surface and kind of force itself, erupt itself into consciousness. So that I think in many ways, our lives are sort of living us, if you know what I mean. Our deeper life is living us. And I mean, I don't know what brought you to that moment of giving stuff away or other moments in your life, but I'm sure it was some undercurrent that you might not even have been aware of. I agree with that. And I do think it probably does boil up for people.

[00:37:32] I mean, that's the phrase midlife crisis is kind of that boiling point. But let me ask you, like, did your father, for instance, have a call to action when that took him from the ordinary to the extraordinary? You know, that's a really good question. I wish my dad was here to ask him that. I have a feeling off the top of my head as you, as you ask me that. My dad lived a, I don't want to say a conventional life. He fought in World War II. He, you know, raised a family in the New York suburbs.

[00:37:58] And I think my dad, once they had my brother and me, he kind of gave himself over to raising us. So I don't know if he really, if the call really kind of came for him in that sense. And in a way, it's, it's kind of heroic what he did, but it was a sort of a sacrifice. But I think, I think that's the, that, that's the thing is that not everybody ultimately becomes the hero of their story. And I'm not saying your dad wasn't the hero of the story.

[00:38:28] Like you say, it's heroic raising kids. I think you're right. I think you're right. But like, take, take what the so-called greatest generation, which your dad was a part of in World War II. And, but then the fifties happened where there was this sort of, you know, after the war, we had had enough, that generation had had enough. They got tired. They wanted the benefits of fighting in that war, which was, which was what they thought was the conventional life. Let's even put up the wall around our house to keep out the unconventional. Yeah.

[00:38:56] And, and I think a lot of people, and that's why they were so threatened later on by, you know, the, the late sixties and all the youth movements then and, and so on. I mean, you could make a case that's just coming to me as you're saying this, that, you know, I'm a member of the boomer generation and you could make a case that our generation, this boomer generation acted out the hero's journey of their, of their parents in some way, you know, carried that on.

[00:39:22] I mean, why did that entire generation just sort of freak out in kind of a mass, you know, real social movement that dominated the country for years? Yeah. It's interesting, I guess, because, you know, world war two for many young people was kind of a, this extended transition from youth to maturity. And whereas the boomer generation, many people who didn't go to Vietnam, for instance,

[00:39:50] didn't have that extended break, didn't have that, that intensity of, of fighting in a war. And so instead of just moving into the 1950 style of conventionalism, you were 18, 19, 20. You're like, I'm not doing that because they were 27 when they did it or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. They were done with world war two and then the GI bill. So they were much older. Yeah. And then by 18 or 19, you can't have the white picket fence. So you have youth movements and this that changed the world. And flipped it to the other side.

[00:40:19] If you think about the greatest generation, there were guys that were like 20 years old and 21 years old flying bombers over Germany, you know, that, so they were like propelled into maturity, into incredible maturity or responsible for the lives of so many other people, not to mention destroying other people's lives, that maybe that was an incredible crisis too. They were just forced, you know, they were kind of forced onto a hero's journey before they were even remotely ready for that kind of thing. Well, and think about.

[00:40:48] Mass level too. I mean, think about the literature that came from world war two out of that, not for better or for worse in some cases, but you know, you had. Catch 22. Catch 22, naked and the dead. Yeah. From here to eternity. And then all the, you know, Jewish writers, you know, Primo Levi and everybody, you have Viktor Frankl, you know, on the nonfiction side. It was such an amazing call to action that heroism is almost like a natural output of that.

[00:41:17] And then you have the, the, the fifties where like take a book like On the Road, is there, it's, it's almost, it's a lot more subtle, the call to action and the hero's journey in that book, I think, you know, which was the early fifties or late mid fifties. By the way, I just came from having lunch with my agent, Sterling Lord, who's 98 years old. Sterling Lord is your agent? Made the deal for Jack Kerouac's On the Road for 900 bucks in 1948. That's amazing. Yeah. I didn't know it was 1948. I thought it was a little later.

[00:41:47] I think I'm right. Maybe I'm wrong. So, but whatever, it was around that time, but it's a little more subtle though. He just was like hanging out all around the country. Although he did make that move, you know, to get in the car with Neil Cassidy and Ted West, you know? Yeah. Right. So that was the call to action. You know? Yeah. And that was a hero's journey that he was on. Absolutely. Yeah. And then he met, so, so let's actually, let's actually finish for a second the, what the hero's journey is. Okay.

[00:42:13] So there's, you're in the ordinary world, you get the call to action, you get the mentor who kind of can helps convince you to into the extraordinary world. And then you have the inciting incident as you call it in your books that finally propel you into the extraordinary world. Then what? And then there are various, if you think of, you know, Luke Skywalker's journey, there are various challenges, you know, or think about Conan the barbarian, you know, you meet strange and weird people, shape-shifting people.

[00:42:41] There are people of the opposite sex, mentors, allies, et cetera, et cetera. Then usually like Indiana Jones, you get to the point where you get the gold statue, right? And then the big stone starts coming in. And you're trying to get back home with whatever the, you know, the hero is trying to get back home with whatever it is that they've got. And the bad guys are chasing him. And if you want to go back to the Odyssey, it's Odysseus, you know, trying to get back

[00:43:05] from the Trojan Wars through all the things, you know, Cyclops, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, all of that stuff. And finally, the hero returns home, but doesn't return home empty-handed, returns home with a quote-unquote gift for the people, whatever that is. And that's the end. So the hero's journey ends where it began, in a way. So the hero returns home, but like Dorothy, returns to Kansas, which is in Christopher Vogler's book, The Writer's Journey.

[00:43:35] He really gets into that in great detail. But she's a changed person, you know, like Odysseus is a changed person. And then to get to my own book, The Artist's Journey, that's to me when the artist's journey starts. When the hero's journey ends, the artist's journey starts. I thought that was fascinating, actually. Because initially, just hearing the phrase, The Artist's Journey, I assumed what you meant, and you partially meant it, but it was different than how I thought.

[00:44:00] I assumed what it meant is that the artist who finally takes the call to action to become an artist, first you're getting your law degree and maybe you take the law exam, and then finally say, you know what? I want to be a writer or a stand-up comic or an actor. And you take this call to action to be an artist. And I thought you were basically just saying it, I shouldn't say just, but you were basically saying it mimicked the hero's journey. But the subtlety is, is that the artist's journey often most successfully happens when it's

[00:44:28] at the end, when it follows the hero's journey. So we've been through this life experience that's been both horrific and exciting, and you return with a gift. And now you have the tools in place, the life experience and the material to begin the artist's journey, which is, again, now it mimics the hero's journey with one exception, is that you have this life experience. Yes. And it's also, the artist's journey then becomes a question of, what is this gift that

[00:44:58] I'm bringing to the people? Which is another way of saying, if you're a comedian, what's my act? You know, who am I? Am I Andrew Dice Clay? You know, or am I Richard Pryor? Who am I? What's my material, right? Or if you're a painter, it's what am I going to paint? If you're a singer, it's what is my medium of expression? What is my gift? Who am I? And at that point, at least as I am positing the concept of the artist's journey, you're

[00:45:23] no longer racing around the country and having tragic love affairs and, you know, all that sort of stuff, being arrested and things like that. Now you kind of, your life becomes in a way boring. You're sort of settled down and you kind of say to yourself, well, what is my gift? How do I have to live my life for the next week, the next month, the next year to find out who I am? And we were talking about peeling back layers of the onion, you know, and to go deeper and deeper into whatever my gift is.

[00:45:52] Like Philip Roth definitely had a gift, right? He had a theme. He had something he was working on his whole life. Woody Allen, Jackson Brown, you name it. If you look through their works, they're definitely on the same trail. They don't go off that trail very far. And to me, they are on their artist's journey at that point, which is just a peeling back of the onion and a kind of a, on a one sense, I think it's a greater professionalism in the sense of fucking around time is over.

[00:46:20] You know, we've got to, we were on a mission now like the Blues Brothers. And on the, on the other hand, it's, it's an opening oneself up, I think to the muse, to learning to communicate with that other level, that higher level, that mystical level where, you know, where ideas come from. It's almost like the transition from the hero's journey to the artist's journey is in itself a call to action. Yes, it is.

[00:46:46] So like you give us an example, Good Will Hunting, where the Matt Damon character at the end finally admits to himself, I'm a super genius. I need to take advantage of this and create a life based on this. Now you never see what that life is. His story is really just beginning, but that's the end of the movie. And we're satisfied that that's the end of the movie. Even though when you wrote that, I was thinking, yeah, what happened next?

[00:47:12] Like, I want to now see, did he become a great scientist or mathematician? Because what happens next is not very cinematic, you know? What happens next is he goes and sits in a room at Stanford, you know, with a supercomputer or whatever he does, and he's, you know, scribbling out things, you know, mathematical formulas, you know? It's not very cinematic anymore, you know? Well, think about... He's not punching out people in bars and stuff like that. I was thinking about it also in some real world context.

[00:47:39] Like, you know, remember the movie Catch Me If You Can, the story of Frank McNally. Vaguely. It's played by Leonardo DiCaprio. He's a con man, a counterfeiter. He pretends to be a lawyer successfully for many years. He counterfeits money. He does all these crazy things. And this one FBI agent is the villain and is constantly after him and finally catches him, whatever. And that's the end of the movie. It's like this whole journey from youth to the end. He's done all these amazing cons and finally the FBI guy captures him.

[00:48:07] But then after that, it's based on a real story. The real Frank McNally gets out of jail by helping the FBI undercover other counterfeit cases. And like you say, we never really know that full story. That's not in the movie at all. It's maybe like a footnote at the end of the movie. Yeah. But that's his artist journey is, you know, counterfeiting is a form of artistry in some sense. Yes, yes. But his artist journey is, like you say, it's not as cinematic, but it's still very much a story.

[00:48:38] So I wonder, I mean, I'm not, I can't quite really bring it to mind. I can't really remember the story. But I wonder if that career that he embarked on, sort of like being a hacker, you know, exposing other hackers was not his real career. You know, I would just rather see him, you know, he was doing fiction his whole life, right? Right. Creating these phony. I would have rather seen him, you know, become Philip Roth or something like that, you know? Yeah. Or Francis Ford Coppola or something like that.

[00:49:07] I wonder if he had that urge or if he just loved counterfeiting so much. Yeah. That was his passion. Yeah. You know, sometimes I get confused with the journey back, like what that means in a story context, which is at the end of the arc of the hero. So let's take the story of Jesus, for instance. I guess the journey back is like he wait three days go by and he's back from the dead. Luke Skywalker, he comes back and now he's a Jedi or he's at the beginning of his Jedi training. He's fully accepted who he is.

[00:49:36] Rocky, he comes back somewhat of a feeling like a champion. He didn't quite win the championship at the end of the movie, but he feels like it. And the gift that he brings back is, I don't know, he's famous. He's treated differently. I don't know. It got a little confusing to me in that part of the analogy. Yeah. I'm not too sure about that myself, but you could say that that character that they wound up at the end was embedded in the beginning, right?

[00:50:05] They were, it was a sort of a, an unexpressed character that, right? That like within Luke Skywalker, there was that hero, even when he was on Tatooine on the evaporator farm, right? And same with Rocky, right? That's sort of like the theme of that movie was, you know, a bum can be a champ. Anybody bum can be a champ if he's given the chance, right? And he does prove to be a champ, right? In the subsequent movies, you know, I can't quote number two, three, four, and five, but he does.

[00:50:35] I just remember two was the rematch, three was the Russian guy, four, I forget. Yeah. I forget too. Dolph Lundgren came in at some point. Yeah. Mr. T was in there somewhere. I can't quite remember. But yeah. So often the sequels are kind of a little bit the artist's journey. Uh-huh. So, you know. Well, they're sort of cheats. They're sort of reversions of the hero's journey, you know? Well. Of the first hero's journey. Like now you have Rocky is coaching Apollo's son and we're already into the second movie of that, right?

[00:51:05] Right. The second creeds. Creed II. Yeah. So, you know, you talk about in these books the inciting moment, but you just said a phrase earlier which I think is almost equal to the inciting moment. I'm curious about it.

[00:51:34] And it struck me three times. So when you describe Jason Bourne's inciting moment, it's when he says, who am I? And you just said, who am I? You know, and I wonder if that's always the inciting moment when they realize, oh, I'm right in the middle line, that thin, tiny middle line between the ordinary world and the extraordinary world. Which one am I? Am I ordinary or am I extraordinary? And you have to ask this question, who am I at that point? I think you hit the nail right on the head there.

[00:52:02] And it's like sort of what I was just saying before about how things will boil up inside you and spontaneously make you cross that threshold? Because I think that question from birth is the thing that plagues all of us, right? Who am I? Why am I here? You know, and we're, as we grow up, we're presented with various identities, right? We can be a jock. We can be a nerd. We can be, you know, whatever, right? And as we try these on, none of them work, right?

[00:52:30] And we find ourselves in some sort of an ordinary world. We get married. We have a, you know, we have a house or an apartment or whatever it is. But that question, you're absolutely right, I think, James, is who am I? Who am I? And if we're living a life that's not kind of true to who we really are, if we're really a stand-up comic or a writer and we're working on Wall Street or we're doing something like that, that thing is kind of applying pressure internally on us.

[00:52:57] We may feel it in dreams or whatever, or we'll act it out in real life. But I think you're right. Right. When the hero crosses the threshold and goes into the extraordinary world, whether he realizes it or not, or she realizes it or not, the real question they're asking is, is who am I? They may be at the start, they have an idea that I'm going to be X as I enter this extraordinary world. And that might not turn out to be true. You know, by the end, as the layers of the onion get peeled back through experience,

[00:53:26] they sort of come at the end to realize, ah, this is who I am. You know, I thought I was a happy housewife, but I realized I'm going to have to be out alone in the world, raising my kids on my own and finding out who I really am that way. Or like, say, a rapper. He thinks that's the extraordinary world, but ultimately he's not that good at that. But he realized he's great at running a label and shepherding other rappers or something like that. Yeah.

[00:53:52] You know, it reminds me, there's this TV show crashing on HBO, which is about an up and coming comedian as he finds his voice. And he, he auditions to perform in a certain comedy club. And the woman who's the booker who has to pass him, she said, no. And she said, you have to answer these questions. Who am I? Why am I? Why now? Which is, which is related to what you point out as Boris Dennis Glasky's right. Questions of drama with a slight twist.

[00:54:20] But yeah, I thought that was interesting that the who am I is in the inciting moment. The why am I kind of gets figured out shortly afterwards. Like, do I really want to save the princess? Am I a good Jedi? Am I a bad Jedi? You know, and then the why now is kind of the story. Uh-huh. You know, and I'm just curious your thoughts on that. Because again, that, that, when I thought about that from a comedian point of view and what, what you brought up earlier, there's a whole spectrum of comedians.

[00:54:48] There's ones who they perform downstairs every day. They say their setups, their punchlines, everybody laughs, everybody goes home. But then there are the ones who, those are the ones you really know from the specials and the movies and everything, who really go deeper on that question of who am I, why am I, and why now? Like a Dave Chappelle or whoever, or Chris Rock or whatever. Or who, I think, I would say, who am I, why am I here, and what do I want?

[00:55:15] Which I think are the three Stanislawski questions. Maybe I'm wrong. But, you know, you could pick any of those. Any questions. I wrote it down. Hold on. But, of course, they're the same questions that you and I ask ourselves in our real life. Right? That's our whole, who am I, why am I here, what do I want? Yeah. Who am I, why am I here, what do I want? You're right. I mean, certainly in a scene, if we're actors in a scene, right? What do I want? I want to find out where you've taken my daughter, you know? And you can't play the scene unless you know that, right? Right.

[00:55:45] So, take Liam Neeson in Taken. Which, by the way, I've never seen the movie. I don't think, I haven't even seen the movie. I don't think you need to see the movie. Right. Because you... We get it. Basically, he has some skill set that's dangerous and his daughter's stolen and the kidnappers don't care. Yeah. So, who am I? I'm a seriously dangerous guy who's trying to live a normal life. Yeah. But you might pull me into being dangerous again. Why am I here? You kidnapped my daughter.

[00:56:15] What do I want? I want her back or all hell's going to break this. Right. And that, you describe it with that scene. Again, I've never seen the movie, but now I do. And it's interesting, but let's look at like Lawrence of Arabia, where he kind of had to discover who he was. Yeah. That's a great one. You know, a great example. Just as you were saying that, James, have you seen that show Deep State? No. Which I think, you know, it's really the exact same scene as Take... It's the same thing as Taken, you know? He's a spy. He's retired. They start fucking with his family.

[00:56:45] And, you know, it's like he's pulled back into that world and he turns out to be a major ass kicker, you know, that kind of thing. So, I think in the Liam Neeson analogy, even though you haven't seen the movie, sort of the real thing is that his real nature is he is an ass kicker, you know? He's really not a guy that can pretend to be an insurance salesman or whatever. It's a little bit like Breaking Bad, you know? Once they get over that side, they finally find out that this is who he really is, you know? Or Jason Bourne. Yeah. Same thing. Same thing.

[00:57:14] Look, I think the purpose of drama and the purpose of storytelling and the purpose of a writer is to create these safe spaces where people living in the ordinary world could practice being in the extraordinary world. Completely. And to encourage them to take the step and go across that threshold, you know? Right. Like, obviously, I can't grab a lightsaber and blow up the Death Star because there probably isn't such a thing.

[00:57:41] Or if there was, it was in a galaxy a long, long time ago. Yeah. So, it's over. But being, you know, being forced, being encouraged by this story that I'm safely experiencing in a theater to ask these life-deepening questions is really important. Like, who are you? Steve, I'm asking you. Yeah. I'm asking you personally. You're asking me now? Yeah. Well, as I say in one of these little books, I am a servant of the muse.

[00:58:08] That's who I've sort of, through many incarnations, have come to decide. That's my identity. That's who I am. And so you're here basically to create these stories or the way I just put it, to create these safe spaces for people to experience the extraordinary. And what do you want? Which is an interesting question because you talk about what does success mean. And I think it's very complicated in the world of the arts or in any world really, but it's

[00:58:37] particularly complicated in the world of the arts where some of it's subjective, some of it's objective, like money and awards. So, what do you want? How do you answer that question? I want to kind of follow that same journey that I'm on. I mean, I'm a believer in the muse. I believe that there are, there's another dimension of reality above this dimension. And there's, it corresponds to a deeper part of our soul or is our soul, our neshama. And that that part of ourselves, when I talked about before about something boiling up or

[00:59:06] pressure building, I think that that part of ourselves, it's like a super tanker going through the water where you can only see like the top iceberg top of it, but underneath the water, there's all this, you know, all this fuel is going along there. So that part of us, in my view, is, is our real self. You know, we were, the surface thing doesn't have anything to do with anything. And we were born with that deeper part. And this, this is my view of life, right?

[00:59:36] And in the terms of, of an artist, one of the reasons I, I guess it was in the artist's journey that I did those lists of Bruce Springsteen's albums and Bob Dylan's, Joni Mitchell's and everything. So you can see kind of the progression of them. And so you can see that they're sort of pulled along like that. Sometimes I think of it, you know, what windsurfing is or kite surfing where you have that kite overhead and it's attached by lines to a guy on a surfboard and the kite pulls them along. I think to me, that's the muse. That's this other level.

[01:00:06] And it's pulling us along. And we may think we're in charge of our life, but I don't think we are at all. And our job is simply to follow that. And so I sort of go from one project to the next as the goddess delivers them to me. And my job, as I see it, is to be ready with the tools and the equipment, you know, the professionalism so that I know how to type and I know how to get an agent and I know

[01:00:33] how to, you know, keep from freaking out when things get a little too intense. And you know the skills of writing, skills of telling a story. Right. I painfully learned over many, many years, such as I have learned them. But at the same time, the other skill is to open up the pipeline to that and to have faith in that, to believe in that because you can't see it, you can't taste it, you can't touch it. And all around you are people telling you it doesn't even exist. So believing in that. So I say I'm a servant of the muse.

[01:01:03] I'm not a writer for hire. I'm not going to work on, you know, the Sopranos or whatever the hell is out there. I'm following my own star, just like Philip Roth did or Woody Allen does or Jackson Brown does or whatever it is. It's very interesting because I love this view because it focuses on the process rather than the outcomes. And I'm always a big believer that you can't go for outcomes because as you're doing the process, you're learning more.

[01:01:29] Anyway, the outcomes you started with might change as you learn and gain more knowledge of your, of your craft. You even say in, I think it's in one of these books where before you start a writing session, you pray to the muse. So it's almost like you're channeling this other energy, this other side of yourself, the superhero side of yourself. You're channeling that in order to do your work instead of being focused on, Oh, I'm going

[01:01:55] to be respected by my peers, or I'm going to get this award, or I'm going to move up in status in the bestseller list, you know, by being on the New York times list. You mentioned that this is a deep part of us to have, to be drawn to this, this higher energy and it's kind of pulling at us. But a lot of people are also drawn primarily to what is my hierarchy and what is my status in that hierarchy. That's also primal from a biological point of view, as opposed to a spiritual point of view.

[01:02:23] So sort of avoiding that biological point of where am I in, what's, what hierarchy am I in, in this primate, you know, society I'm in, and what's my status in that? You're, you're, you're trying to avoid that. Yeah. I'm reading a really interesting book right now called Falling Upward by Richard Rohr. Have you ever heard of this? R-O-H-R. And he is a Franciscan monk. It's a very short book, kind of like the War of Art.

[01:02:51] What his philosophy or what he, the point he's making is that he divides life into two halves, first half of life and second half of life. And in the first half of life, he says, our natural concerns are hierarchy, who, you know, getting the job, establishing an identity in the world, a family, whatever it is, who, you know, that sort of thing. What he calls it like creating the container. And then in the second half of life, you ask yourself, well, what goes into the container?

[01:03:20] And so I think when you're, when you're an artist and you're on that artist journey, at least from my point of view, I know many, many artists pursue Oscars and, you know, that sort of stuff, acclaim and all that kind of thing. Money means a lot to them, status, hierarchy, so forth. It doesn't mean anything to me. And I kind of will whip myself if I find myself starting to think those thoughts, because I think the goddess hates those thoughts and, you know, really disapproves of them.

[01:03:46] But in the second half of life, you're really asking yourself what, again, who am I? What is my gift? You know, why am I here? And really it becomes, you become much more giving in that second half of life. And empathy and non-judgment becomes much more of a part of it. You're not really competing with everybody to try to beat everybody out. You don't really think, oh, if I can defeat so-and-so, then I'm okay. You're really in a much more giving or teaching or sharing type of frame of mind.

[01:04:16] But I also think that that way of pursuing hierarchical goals, you know, status and so forth, is resistance with a capital R. You know, and if you want to destroy yourself as an artist, do that. Well, and I think that's why so many people who, you know, they feel like they've got to take jobs for the money, and then later on they'll write their novel, and so many of those people get disappointed later in life,

[01:04:44] and they don't end up pursuing their dreams. That's not to say that that can't work. I think people can, for years and years, do jobs for hire for money. I mean, I certainly did. But hopefully at some point they cross over and start to ask themselves, you know, what is the muse talking to me about? What am I here for? And, you know, the one thing I would say, though, is it doesn't have to be defined by first half, second half. You could decide early on, I'm going to, in your case.

[01:05:13] You can be a second half person at age 19. Right, because what you're really talking about there too is skill acquisition. So the faster you get to this point where you're kind of moving beyond the status hierarchy, whether it's in a conventional way for money or whether it's even an artistic way where you want to be on respected by other artists and win awards and have a screenplay made into a movie and be on bestseller lists, the quicker you get past these sort of external man-made goals,

[01:05:44] probably you're cleaning the connection to that higher power that feeds the artistry. And again, whether it's an artist or an entrepreneur or whatever. Yeah. I mean, that's what I would say. People might disagree with me. That's what I would say. But you look at like the best entrepreneurs. They're usually driven not necessarily by, oh, I'm going to make this and a year from now sell it for a billion. They usually have a vision that nobody else had that is bigger than just, I'm going to sell this company for a billion dollars. Yeah, I think so.

[01:06:12] I mean, the guy who started FedEx, you know, had that concept of, is it Nashville or Memphis? Every plane comes into Memphis and everybody thought he was completely crazy. Why should we fly if we're going from Santa Monica, you know, to Venice? Why should the package go all the way to Memphis and then come back? But it was a stroke of genius and it worked. Well, or look at Google. They really were just scientifically trying to come up with a better way to... To bet they're destroying the world. Yeah. Right.

[01:06:37] But initially, there were two graduate students trying to find a slightly better way of categorizing all the pages on the young internet, on the young web at the time. Yeah. And that's a trillion dollar company now. Yeah. And they did want to sell because they were so focused on their vision. They were like, okay, we did it. Let's just sell for a million dollars to... They went to Yahoo and Excite and both rejected them a million dollars. I think they offered a half a million and rejected it. And these guys rejected it. And they're a trillion dollar company. Huh.

[01:07:05] So again, that's why I just make the comparison. If as much as possible you can avoid status hierarchies, it's better for general skill acquisition. Not necessarily first half, second half of life. It could be any age. It could be 50 also. It could be 60. And that's why I also... You know, there's that... I'm curious what you think about like the Anders Ericsson or the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hour rule, which is, you know, it takes 10,000 hours to become, let's say, close to the

[01:07:34] best in the world at something. 10,000 hours of what is called deliberate practice to become the best in the world at something. I think it's true. At least in my experience, it is. So, but I'm wondering though, you know, you've developed various skills where you were able to borrow from one skill set and apply it to another one. So for instance, you wrote screenplays, but first you were writing and trying to write novels for many years, like two decades before you sold your first screenplay.

[01:08:00] So I wonder how much you borrowed from trying to write novels when you started to write screenplays, which is similar skill, but different. Well, I certainly... There's... It's a lot of cross-pollination there, you know? Any form of writing, you know, advertising. I worked in advertising for a long time and it's got to be the same with you. You're in the financial world. You're doing stand-up comedy. You're talking about bitcoins and then you're writing novels and telling stories at the same time. So it's all kind of... It all kind of... It's grist for the mill, you know? It all feeds in there.

[01:08:28] I wonder how far apart two things can be before you can't borrow as many hours. It's like as far as possible and it still works, doesn't it? Because I... At some point a year ago, I kind of figured, who am I? Am I a writer? I realized I'm doing podcasting. I'm doing writing. I'm doing stand-up comedy. I'm doing public speaking. I'm also communicating as part of a... As the face of a business. And yet I can't put 10,000 hours into all of these things or I'll be dead.

[01:08:56] So I kind of felt like the umbrella was sort of a performer, like an entertainer of some sort. And an entertainer with valuable information, like a court jester who speaks the truth. Yeah. And that allowed me to say, okay, now I can borrow 10,000 hours from public speaking and put it into comedy or 10,000 hours from writing and put it into speaking or podcasting or whatever. So you're asking the question, who am I? Yeah. What is my gift, right?

[01:09:26] And I think you're also creating something that has never existed before. There's never been a James Altucher before, right? There's never been anybody doing that thing that you're doing. You know, there are people maybe that are doing something in the same area, but you're kind of, you're inventing yourself as you go along. But I would say to you that the muse, your muse already knows all that. And the more you can listen to her and follow her, which you are following her, you're obviously

[01:09:55] following her because you're a guy that kind of follows impulses and has guts to do it, you know, to leap off the cliff and across into the extraordinary world. So I take my hat off to you. You're inventing yourself as you go along. And it's an interesting process. But you've written about this and you've experienced it for so many years. How would you advise someone listening to this after those senses have been deadened for so many years, for so many of us, how would you suggest they find what that extraordinary, where the...

[01:10:24] Are you really asking me to say that? Yeah. Well, I would say, and I've never really said this either, but if I were advising somebody, step one, I think, would be listen to your dreams. I mean, your real dreams, the dreams that you dream at night. Start journaling them or have a keep a tape recorder because your dreams are coming from your soul, from your higher self, and they'll be trying to communicate to you.

[01:10:49] Or if you don't do that, do any of the other kind of techniques like that young popularized or, you know, active imagination or that kind of thing, sitting down just writing stuff. Try to get to that level, that higher level. But the other thing I would say is to be of good cheer. And because that force, whether you deny its existence or not, is working inside you.

[01:11:17] You know, that biological clock is ticking inside you and it is guiding you. So the only thing I would say overall is get in touch with that more. Any way that you possibly can. I think sometimes I've heard people ask you this. They say, well, where do your ideas come from? Where do you get your ideas, right? And I have a feeling, I can't prove this, but ideas, I think, are coming to all of us all the time. But a lot of us don't have the skill to listen. We're in the shower and idea comes, it comes through.

[01:11:46] Oh, I think I'll start a company that does this. And we've forgotten it by the time we put the soap down, you know? Whereas I think somebody like you or me or people that are sort of professionals in this business or have committed themselves to it, we hear those ideas more. You know, when that idea comes through, we go, oh, shit, that's a great idea, you know? Or, and we, you know, write it down somewhere, even if we come back to it, you know, months later. But again, that's coming from that other dimension. So, uh...

[01:12:14] And just like writing, I think that's a skill. It's a muscle that has to be exercised. Exactly. Just like learning your dreams. I mean, you will, if you try to write down your dreams, for the first month, you're not even going to remember anything, right? They're just going to come and go. But as you start to, you know, actually write them down, wake up, dictate them into a thing, you'll start to remember more and more and more of them. You'll acquire that skill. Do you do that? Just like you're talking about with ideas. Do you do that? Do you write down?

[01:12:43] I do that, absolutely, yeah. And it's very, very helpful. Let me recommend one book. There's a book called Inner Work by Robert Johnson, who is a Jungian psychologist, and he just talked, it's a really short, easy book, almost as short as that, about your dreams and how to analyze them. It's really good. I love that you're recommending books that not only have I not read, but I've never even heard of. Usually everyone's kind of read, you know, there's the same batch of books that go around that everyone's read. Because they're good.

[01:13:12] I'm not complaining about those books, but I love that these are new books now to feed me. Well, within a certain world, everybody knows about this book, but that's certainly, it's one. It's a good one. I recommend it to you. So one thing you mentioned in these books, and I'm going back and forth between kind of like this macro self way of using the hero's journey to help ourselves and the artistry and so on. But then there's also kind of just the technical, okay, this is also how you tell a story.

[01:13:38] So you mentioned that the inciting moment, the call to action is like the first pull. And then there's the second pull where that call to action is ultimately resolved after all the conflicts and everything. And maybe just define that a little bit. Okay. This is a sort of a storytelling principle that you might get if you took Robert McKee's course or if you took anybody else's course.

[01:14:02] And like the inciting incident in the Bourne identity is when Matt Damon asked the question, who am I? I don't know who I am. And he acquires his intention in the inciting moment, which is to find out who am I? And then as soon as this is just a, like I say, a storytelling principle. So as soon as that moment happens and we're sitting in the audience watching the movie, we can't help but ask the question, yeah, who the fuck is he? You know? As you put it, now we're along for the ride.

[01:14:32] We're along for the ride. We weren't along for the ride before. It was the setup. We were like mildly curious. It kept us going. But now we're like, okay, take us on the journey. Yeah, because like if you remember, there's a scene early in that movie where he's in Germany or Switzerland or something like that. He doesn't know who he is and he lies down on a park bench to sleep. And these two cops kind of roust him out. Do you remember that? You know, in German or whatever they say something. And he gets up and just beats the crap out of them.

[01:14:58] And it sort of looks at his hands afterward like, you know, I do that, you know? And so he realizes in that moment he is somebody. He does have an identity and he doesn't know what that is. And at that moment, you know, the second pole immediately, the first pole is the question, who am I? And the second pole kind of pops in, which is the answer to that question. Who the fuck is he? And so we are along for the ride. And now we know that he's going to find out eventually. So that pulls us through the movie.

[01:15:27] We know there's a scene coming, right, where he finally, oh, I was, you know, whatever. And so that's that storytelling principle. And then, and then what, what I like you wrote somewhere and I never thought of it this way before, but it's really interesting. B you wrote, you kind of described two things about who are the villain in these stories. And sometimes the villain is an abstract concept. Sometimes the villain is a person, but basically the villain is everywhere all the time.

[01:15:56] Like the villains just constantly, like even after you think the story's over, there's still the villain popping out, like a hand come, the mummy's hand coming out of the ground to grab you one more time when you think the whole story's over. So just villains, villains, villains constantly, which I thought was very interesting. I never thought of the villain that way. I always thought of it more as like a chess game, like my move and your move and my move. And it's, but it's really just the villains constantly hitting you in ways you don't expect. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is like a convention of the thriller genre, right?

[01:16:24] The Stephen King thing where the hand comes up out of the grave and grabs you by the ankle, you know? But I think there are other movies, obviously, when the villain is vanquished. But I have a theory that resistance, my idea of capital R resistance, the thing that stops you from doing your dream, that's the villain in every story. It's just in a different guise. It's that negative force, whether it's the alien or the shark in Jaws or whoever it is that's out there, you know, the devil that never goes away, that's always trying, you know,

[01:16:53] just like you say, it never stops. It's always coming after you. And then you said another thing that was very interesting, which is that we know the hero changes. That's part of the convention is that the hero gets knowledge and learns and then ultimately returns with this new knowledge, the gift. But the villain never changes. And so, but like in Star Wars, Darth Vader changes throughout the course of the three movies. You know, how do you, or maybe... I'm not an expert in all of the Star Wars things, but I would, you could probably make a case

[01:17:22] that in a way Darth Vader is a hero or a hero of certain sub, subplots. I mean, it's what Anakin Skywalker is his real name. I mean... So yeah, maybe we go deeper and we realize there was a deeper villain. Yeah. Which is like... The emperor or the whole concept of the empire that crushes, you know, all independent thought, you know? But are we backfilling that? Like now that it's over, we could say, oh no, Darth Vader wasn't... This was the villain. We thought Darth Vader was the villain the whole time. It was really this. Yeah.

[01:17:50] I mean, off the top of my head, not really knowing, having seen... I would say he's not the villain, you know? He may act as the villain in certain movies or subsections of movies, but I don't think in the end he is. You could probably do that whole story from his point of view, and it would really be kind of a fascinating story, I would think. Well, I think across all the first six movies, they do sort of portray that he is the hero of all six. Luke's the hero of like the last three, and they do sort of say Darth Vader is the hero of all six.

[01:18:20] You also see something very interesting, which is that the final shot is usually similar to the opening shot. And I thought that was interesting because I could think of counterexamples, but let's think of some positive examples. Like the Godfather was an amazing example that you give, which is that it starts off roughly in the Godfather's office, and people are being extra polite to him and treating him like the Godfather and asking him for favors. And then it ends with his son, Michael Corleone, in that same office, and now everyone's

[01:18:49] treating him with that deferential respect. So it's the same scene. And then the door closes on Kay, his wife. But other movies, I'm trying to think, Good Will Hunting was another example. But like other movies- It's not in every movie. It's just an interesting concept as a storyteller to keep in mind. Right. So even metaphorically. Am I going to do this? Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's the hero's journey with the hero coming home, you know? That it all sort of, it's a circular or semi-circular thing. You know, it starts and comes back.

[01:19:19] So given that it's almost so formulized, this arc of the hero, how come everybody can't write a thriller? I don't know. It's a very good question. I mean- I mean, I've tried to write them and failed. So, you know, not everybody can do everything. Like where did you fail at when you were writing a thriller? One of the things I did was I violated the rules of the genre. You know, I didn't really learn the signposts that you had to, the beats you had to hit.

[01:19:46] I kind of cheated and I tried one and it didn't really work. So in addition to the arc of the hero, for each genre, as you guys point out in the story, Greta, Sean Coyne points out, there's kind of beats that you have to hit. So like in the thriller, as opposed to the mystery, in a thriller, the hero has to be completely at the mercy of the villain. Like his life- That's one beat. Yeah. That's one scene that you have to hit. In a mystery, it's not necessarily the case. I think so.

[01:20:11] Again, I'm not an expert in all of these things, but that's one of the beats that Sean taught me that, that there's a scene, the hero at the mercy of the villain scene has to be in there somewhere. You know, it's just a convention that holds true. And if it's not there, then the audience gets pissed off, you know, or the audience feels like, I don't know, it didn't quite work for me. You know, there's something empty. It was something hollow. So why'd you violate, given that you know the rules, why'd you violate the rule? I, cause I didn't know the rules, you know? Well, okay.

[01:20:40] Take a romance now. And you describe the way we were. Again, I'm not an expert in all this stuff, you know, but there are rules. There are conventions. So I like how you described the way we were. It was the movie, it was old movie starring Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford. And you described it in terms of the ins and the outs. So at the beginning and the end, we're kind of, you know, in, we know what happened, what's happening. Like in the beginning, they're going to fall in love. And at the end, they're either in love or they're not, or something happens. Right.

[01:21:08] But in the middle, they get further and further apart as the challenges happen in a romance. And maybe at some point they hate each other. And then somehow they either come back together or things get resolved. Am I describing that right? The ins and the outs? Well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that the opening image and the closing image, the opening scene and the closing scene, ideally will be opposites of each other. You know, they'll accept that they'll look the same.

[01:21:36] Like, as you said, in The Godfather, both scenes are in the same office. But in one, you have the original Godfather, Marlon Brando, sitting in the chair. And at the end, it's Al Pacino sitting in the chair. So almost, if you don't even see the whole movie, if you only see the first scene and the last scene, even though you don't know exactly what happened, you kind of get the sense of what has happened. So ideally, I think an opening and a closing, you know, have that, those qualities. That it's, they look similar, but they're as far apart emotionally as they could possibly

[01:22:06] be. To show that change has happened. That something is, you know, has been revealed. The truth has been revealed. That was already there. And in The Way We Were, this romance, and I actually haven't seen it, I just know what I read in your book. You should see it. It's a great movie. I'm going to. It looks like a great movie. But I'm going to give a spoiler. At the end, they're not together. Right. It's tragedy. It's a sad ending. Yeah. So is that acceptable in the romance? Absolutely. Yeah. You know, it's a happy ending. The couples go off together.

[01:22:36] There are many, many movies where they don't, right? Where, you know, the love story doesn't work. Yeah, because he ended up being, they ended up just sticking to their conventional ways as opposed to... They were just too far apart in the end, you know? I'll just read one or two quotes from you that I really like. No one is born a pro. You've got to fall before you hit bottom. And sometimes that fall can be a hell of a ride.

[01:23:00] And so what you're saying there, if I can understand, is you're describing the artist's journey. You need the hero's journey first. Exactly. Exactly. Thanks again, Stephen, for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. I know you don't do a lot of these. James, thanks for having me. Thanks for the great questions. You made me think. I'm all completely worn out. Good.

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