#102 – Steven Pressfield: The War of Art

Lex Fridman Podcast

Lex Fridman

Technology, Society & Culture, Philosophy, Science

4.7 • 13.6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2020

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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

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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
05:00 – Nature of war
11:43 – The struggle within
17:11 – Love and hate in a time of war
25:17 – Future of warfare
28:31 – Technology in war
30:10 – What it takes to kill a person
32:22 – Mortality
37:30 – The muse
46:09 – Editing
52:19 – Resistance
1:10:41 – Loneliness
1:12:24 – Is a warrior born or trained?
1:13:53 – Hard work and health
1:18:41 – Daily ritual

Transcript

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0:00.0	The following is a conversation with Stephen Pressfield, author of several powerful nonfiction
0:06.0	and historical fiction books, including The War of Art, a book that had a big impact on
0:12.1	my life and the life of millions of people whose passion is to create in art, science,
0:19.2	business, sport, and everywhere else.
0:22.7	I highly recommend it, and others of his books on this topic, including Turning Pro,
0:29.3	Do the Work, Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, and The Warrior Ethos.
0:35.7	Also his book Gets a Fire about the Spartans and the Battle of Thermopoly, The Lionsgate,
0:41.5	Ties of War, and others are some of the best historical fiction novels ever written.
0:47.7	As some of you know, I don't shy away from taking on a big difficult challenge.
0:53.8	One of the hardest for me and for millions of others is the discipline of staring at
0:59.0	an empty page every day, pushing on to think deeply to create despite the millions of
1:05.8	excuses they filled ahead.
1:08.5	In his work, Stephen has articulated this struggle better than anyone I've ever read.
1:15.2	Quick summary of the ads, two sponsors, the Jordan Harbanger Show and Cash App.
1:21.6	Please consider supporting the podcast by going to JordanHarbanger.com slash Lex and
1:27.2	subscribing to it everywhere after that and downloading Cash App and using code Lex Podcast.
1:34.1	Click on the links by all of the stuff.
1:37.3	It really is the best way to support this podcast.
1:40.6	This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
1:43.7	I recently considered renaming this podcast, but decided against it.
1:48.2	AI is my passion.
1:50.4	In some sense, this podcast is not as much about AI, but more about a journey of an AI researcher
	...

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