The Daily Stoic - Steven Pressfield, Robert Greene, Jack Carr, Meg Mason, and Adam Hochschild on Writing

Episode Date: January 7, 2023

Ryan looks back on some of the best interviews of 2022 about writing. Featuring Steven Pressfield on what it takes to build discipline and why it’s so important, Robert Greene on our natural tendency as humans to take the path of least resistance, Jack Carr on how your character impacts your work, Meg Mason on how important it is to develop taste as a writer, and Adam Hochschild on how history can inform the push for change in the present.🎓 Sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge to create better habits in 2023: https://dailystoic.com/challenge✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes. Something to help you live up to those four Stoke virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down,

be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. As we wind up the year, I like to do some best of episodes, things worth revisiting, hearing again, Stoic advice from people who have been there, who have their own spin or ideas or takes on it, which is what we're going to talk about in today's episode. I'm bringing you Stephen Pressfield who's talking about overcoming the dreaded resistance building discipline and why that's so important.

We're going to talk to the novelist, Meg Mason, about how you develop your taste in her beautiful book, Sorrow and Bliss. We're going to talk about the novelist and former Navy seal Jack Carr about how your character impacts your work. We talk to one of my heroes, the great Robert Green, on how often we take the path of least resistance and his work on the sublime. And we're going to talk to the activist and historian,

Adam Haaschild, about how our understanding of history can inspire us to change the future. And then just a reminder, the daily stoic new year, new you challenge is up. People have been signing up like crazy. It's one of my favorite things that we do here at daily stoic. I'm going to be doing the challenges with all of you, course as I always do and it's going to be bigger and better than ever this year. You can sign up at dailystoke.com slash challenge. I hope to see you in there as Epic Titus says how much longer are you going to wait to demand the best of yourself?

Well, let's do that in 2023 together and enjoy this episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I mean, most of what we do is not so great, right? It's certainly like the first time through. But what's really hard to me is sitting there and staying there, you know? And the other thing that I have found, in other words, I don't try to, and I'm sure you're the same, I don't torture myself with, is this good? You know, as I'm writing a sentence, I'm writing a paragraph, the main thing is, is just to keep the ball moving. And at the end of the day, and I know at the end of the week, at the end of the month, you're going to have something. You might have to redo it. The big danger for

me is falling off the wagon, is losing the momentum. That's the most important thing to me in a book is keeping going. I'm a big believer in multiple drafts of things. I don't know how many drafts you write, but I will write 15, 16, 17 drafts. So when I'm on draft two or three, I'm not torturing myself about, is this great. I'll get the words right, you know, on the 17th crack. But really, my only thing each day is, am I gonna set my ass down and put in the time? And I think that applies to anything, physical fitness, anything at all.

Why do I think about that? It's like, if it exists, I can edit it to be good. If it does not exist, I cannot edit it. Right. Exactly. There's no such thing as writing. There's only rewriting. Yes. You know? Well, and they're, do you like that rule? It's like a couple crappy pages a day. Have you heard that? I do like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, or there's another thing that somebody told me it was like, uh, start a sentence with, and the bad version, maybe you even told me this, and the bad version is, and then you start writing it. And sure enough, the bad version becomes a good version

after about 10 times. I've talked about this. One of the things I do is, so I have a research assistant that helps me and obviously editors also. So as I'm writing a sentence, I might go, I don't even sometimes complete the sentence. Like I'll, like, like, let's say I was talking about, you talk about

Moshe Diane. So I was, let's say I knew something about him and I'd be like, Moshe Diane in the midst of the, and I'm like, wait, is the war in 65? Yes. I would just say in insert, blah, blah, blah. And I'll come, I feel in the details later. Yes. So I don't even want to do the momentum of like stopping to get the facts, right? Because the facts can always be corrected, but the gist of the sentence or the momentum

of what you're trying to put down is more important than like getting it perfect. Yes, exactly right, in my opinion. It's the magic of TK, to come, but the other thing in all sort of seriousness, and I'm just thinking about this as we're talking about it, when I'm working on a scene or something, there's always a level of fear that you're going into, right?

And that makes you want to stay on the surface and not sort of really, you know, imagine yourself into that moment or push whatever's going to happen in the moment. And so that's why I agree with you, Ryan, that if you noodle around too much with, is this the right word? That's an excuse to give into that fear, much better to write some shitty sentence that does go into this, that shines that light on the dark spot because you can always come back to it. Yeah. And it is, it's crazy, you don't even talk about fear and writing, but I think it's huge. It's a big, big part of it. And it's just very overcoming that fear is everything.

Very few people would, and maybe that's what's so insidious about it. Very few people would characterize their perfectionism or wanting to get it right as being based in fear. Because they're like, no, I just care so much, but that's actually what it is. It's prevent the surface is more comfortable. So if you get bogged down, you're comfortable. True. It's like, I would say it's a form of resistance. There's a diabolical voice of resistance

telling you, oh, get that sentence right. Man, get it right. And what it's trying to do is to keep you from getting deep. That's right. Yeah, there's a turning talking about writing here. This is interesting. Well, there's a Bible verse that I was, I heard recently, I'm pushing it, but it's something about how when you're plowing a field, if you look back to see the field that you plowed, you're not fit for the kingdom of God.

This is the thing. Oh, yeah, I like it. And I was trying to think about what that means, and then I think what it is is that if you're plowing, so your force is pulling the plow, you're standing behind it. If you stop to look back to see if it's straight, right, it will, you'll lose it will curve in the future. So that the, the, the paradox there is by inspecting or feeling proud of or, you know, trying to fine tune what you just did, you not only is it already done.

So it doesn't matter. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like you were actually costing your like now the horse is veering to the left or right because you've taken your attention off the task in front of you, which is the most. Yeah. And they yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I grids great. I agree. Plutar probably said that. No, this is the Bible. Oh, it's the Bible. Yeah, yeah. But the idea that you just show up, do the thing, don't sweat it too much. It's weird.

It's almost like also, though, by saying, I'm just going to stay on the surface. I'm just going to do it. You're actually giving yourself the freedom to go into it deep because if you're, it's like when you're conscious, when you're too conscious about what you're trying to do, you almost block yourself from doing it. All right. Yes. And I would say when I'm, I'm not trying to say stay on the surface, and not worry about, I'm saying go deep, but just don't worry about getting every comma right. Yes. That's right. Yeah, Churchill said the other way to spell

perfection is paralysis. Yeah, yeah, that was in your book about discipline. I think so, yes. So, which is a great book, right away. Thank you. Thank you. So, here's an interesting thing. So, I was thinking about this too, though. So, I wasn't feeling good and I'm like, you know what, I'm going to force myself to do it. There is this part of me also that feels like sometimes I rush things. So instead of being like, you have time, take a day by day,

you know, pace yourself. How do you think about the difference between like, I gotta do it every day, no exceptions, and also pacing yourself, load management, you're in this for the long haul. I'm definitely a load management kind of a guy. Yeah. Because any kind of a book is like a year, two years, three years or something like that,

and you'll drive yourself insane if you put too much of a deadline. And for me, I've always been a spec writer. You know, I've haven't really done things on deadlines for publishers or anything like that. So I just say, you know, it's going to take two years, it's going to take three years, take your time and do it, you know. Right. And three years is a lot of days and not a lot of days. There's a lot of power in those days, you know.

Yeah, I just something like, I was thinking about this. I was, both my kids refused to nap in their beds. They only nap in the car. Really? And so you're like, okay, I got an hour. Like I need to drive them around for an hour. Right? Well, they sleep.

And then I found myself driving fast. And I was like, but I don't have anywhere to go. Like why am I, like I was driving my son was asleep. So put aside the safety issue of it, which is also real. But I'm driving and I'm getting frustrated that the person in front of me is driving below the speed limit. And I had to catch myself and go,

but I don't have anywhere to be. Literally the whole purpose of what I'm doing is to kill one hour of time. And here I am trying to get that one hour done fastest. And so I kind of think about that with writing too, where it's like, why am I, like I gave myself a year on this. Why am I wondering if I'm behind schedule? Or even the one year is just to made up estimate. Like it takes what it takes, right? Yeah. And when you get to the end, then you're at the end. But there is, if you're, I think, driven or ambitious or a pro, there's this

part of you that wants to just also just do it. And that there's a tension there because Russian almost never produces good work. No, it doesn't. And let me, I'm going to ask you a whole other question. Where do you see yourself 10 years from now? What do you, I mean, you've been on a kind of a role here following a certain course. Where's, where's Devin thought about that? No, I mean, I'd like to just weirdly, I'd like to be doing the exact same thing 10 years from now. Like, if you'd asked me 10 year, my

first book came out exactly 10 years ago this month. And so if you said 10 years in the future, you'll still with my wife, I'm still writing books. I'd be like, that's the dream. You know, like, there's not like a, this isn't like a means to an end. So to go to the point about like that. So there's no need to rush then. Right, exactly. Like I want it, and it may actually be the opposite. There's a significant reason to pace yourself

and think about, hey, if you burn yourself out, you won't be able to do this in town. So I kind of think about like that. You know, Diana and I took a driving trip. I don't know when was it like a year ago or less than a year ago to some of the places that I used to work in North Carolina and Kentucky and places like that for a book because I wanted to see, you know, remember where things were. And of course everything was gone. You know, every building was gone, everything was gone. And it made me think, it's not a subject of going slow

rather than racing how I wish I had paid attention more to what I was doing and what was happening at the time. And this is even a side by this was the era, I've never been a photograph taking person and this was before iPhones and stuff like that. So I have these periods of my life that were like really important to me and I don't have a photo of anything. I don't have a picture of any of the people that I knew. I don't have a picture and it's and I also, you know, I have them here, but not as much as I wish I had them,

you know, and I don't know with this apropole of any. No, they is. Taken, it, it, uh, you know, I look around here. You can't really see you guys can't see what's out here. It's a wonderful little alley with a bunch of little stores that are kind of funky old buildings and cabins. And, you know, I'm trying to sort of take this in, you know, and what we're doing here too, you know, well, there's this stoic practice that marks, really, those kids from epictetus is as you tuck your child in at night, you should say to yourself, like, they will not make it to the morning.

And so there's a haunted, tragicness to that in that Marx really loses like six children before they become adulthood. You imagine just how terrible. But I don't think that's actually what the exercise was about. I think what he was saying is, if that is true, you would not rush through the evening. Right? So why are you trying to get this over with? And I think about that with books too. I like doing this. This is meaningful to me. I like being in this world. This is the dream. What's gonna happen when I finish this one, I'm just gonna start another one.

So why am I rushing through this or anything? Because I guess the Stokes would say when you're rushing, where are you rushing towards? Yeah, right. Like you're rushing away from now towards a thing that, yes, towards the next thing, but what's after the next thing? What's after the... There's only one thing after the next thing.

So you might as well slow down and be here for the thing while you're in it. Whatever that thing is, even if that thing is washing the dishes, you're stuck at the airport. I mean, I have to do that reminder, or I won't do that. Yeah. Another Marcus quote that I think ties in really well with your books. He says, you can't go around expecting Plato's Republic. And what I love about the Stoics, although Seneca is sort of an edge case in that, you know, he's not totally admirable,

but like, the Stoics weren't Sennaka is sort of an edge case in that, you know, he's not totally admirable, but like the Stoics weren't these sort of theoretical philosophers, but they had to be philosophers in the Emperor's Court or in the real world, in the army, in business, in the Roman Empire. Just what does it mean to you when you hear like you can't go around expecting Plato's Republic? You know, Sennaka, first of all, you know, they're trying to like, that maybe Nero wasn't so bad. He did kill his mom. Okay, but for the time that was pretty normal. He only tried to murder his mom several times and was successful, but his mom was pretty evil too.

No, I know what you mean. Some people are arguing that maybe Neuralism is bad as a thing. Okay, but rehabilitate Seneca's reputation here a little bit because I feel bad for him. But yeah, I mean Machiavelli has that quote so that if you expect everybody to be good in this world, you're in a lot of trouble You know, what are you gonna do when you deal with people who aren't good? But yeah, you have to be willing to get your hands dirty. So Let's say a classic example like you're there's a cause. It's very important to you like the climate or

You know justice in America, you know racial justice in America all very important issues that we all, most of us believe in. You know, if you, you have to be willing to get down and dirty here because you're playing with politics, you're playing with people who are going to resist, you're playing with major corporations who are going to bust your balls who are going to be incredibly manipulative and downright evil in co-opting your good idea and neutralizing it. So if you want to create something, if you want to actually have results, you have to be willing to get a little dirty and you have to get willing to be strategic, you have to understand that the other side might not be playing by the same rules that you're playing

with. A lot of warfare is with asymmetry, not just of weapons, but of also of ethics, you know, like the Democrats and the Republicans. I know those people are going to rant about that. Or when we put, we're going against Vladimir Putin. These are people who have more options than we do because they're ethically not bound by the same norms. There's self-imposed limitations. The self-imposed limitations

are a one-way street. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, and I talk in my books about two people of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King and how at certain moments where they were so invested in the results of getting the English out of India, of bringing racial justice to America, that they were willing to do things that were actually a bit kind of manipulative, downright manipulative. So, that's where it's, you know. But that's another point too. It's not just that it was manipulative, like, in that they would, they, you know, Martin Luther King deciding, like, hey, we're going to use children in some of these marches, because even though we know they're likely going to be in danger, because it will help.

But I think it's also the key there to me is going just because your cause is right, and this ties in directly to the laws of power, about never appeal to mercy, always appeal to self-interest. Just because your cause is correct or right or just, you can't just expect everyone else to be on board with that. So, they also understood they had to convince people, they had to get them to see something. So, they understood that it just wasn't theirs because they were on the right side of history. Right. And so, he made an exchange where he was putting these children in danger because it was bull

Connor, whoever was the sheriff at the time. You had the wips out and everything. But he knew that it was going to play on television in white people's homes in Chicago, who had kind of, they didn't have an image of America being like this. They never saw the dogs being taken out in the whips and the water cannons. And he was going to put it on your television set, right? Yeah. He was going to make them understand the lies they were telling themselves about sacredness. Yeah. And Gandhi's strategy was exactly the same. They didn't have

television back then. But in his salt march, he literally was inviting his followers to be beaten up clubbed by the English police or whoever it was. And that would be in the newspapers. And English people who were very liberal and thought their country was, you know, the great hope of the world. Be reading in this paper about defenseless people being clubbedbed and it would turn them against the empire, right? So yeah, that's exactly what your point is. Yeah, it's like a might doesn't make right and right doesn't make might. You have to figure out how to sell whatever it is that you're selling and understanding that yeah, most people are indifferent as best, or they have some vested interest in not caring about what you're talking about.

I think about that even as a writer. It's like, nope, not that many people like books. Like it's an uphill battle to get people to read a book. And so you can't just expect that because you care a lot about it, everyone else will care. Right. Well, it's hard. It's not natural for us to get outside of ourselves. Our natural position, which is sort of what I talked about in human nature about our narcissism that we all have, is I have a great idea. Everybody must think it's a great idea.

Right. I think the world is this way and should be this way. Everybody should be feeling that way. It's just natural. But it takes effort to get outside of yourself and to imagine that people come from different cultural backgrounds. They didn't wear a raise like you. They're a different gender.

They're a different race. They have different backgrounds and different belief systems. And I try to think about that. And I also think about the universal qualities that all people share, you know. And so the problem, if you could, if you could boil down the problem with humans into one line, it's the fact that they're always taking the path of least resistance. They don't want to put effort. And it requires effort to strategize, to think of your opponent, to think of what makes them different. It takes strategy, to think of what will persuade them, but will

get people to join your cause. You know, it takes effort to get outside of yourself to see how other people might view it. But we don't want to do that. We want to just be lazy and just assume that everyone's on our side. Yeah, we just want it because it is better for the world. Of course, the world should do it. And that's people do the wrong thing or act in not their self-interest all the time. Yeah. I love this quote and I read it at the beginning of the pandemic and it's been helpful to me. I think kind of connects what you're talking about in the sublime book.

Mark's real estate and meditation. CCC learns from one of his mentors. That the key to happiness is to be free of passion, but full of love. What does that mean to you? I'm not quite sure. I don't know if I can you help me a little bit and then I'll riff. I was taking it as meaning like you're not angry, you're not jealous, you're not frustrated. Like the passions, the sort of negative emotions as the stuff. So love isn't a passion.

But love is some sort of deeper emotion, some better way to go through the world, that of all the passions, that was the one that was okay. Okay, so love is a passion. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's something that, you know, I believe very much so, and it is kind of touching upon the sublime. But all the other passions are very inward moving, right? They're

about you. They're about your anger. They're about your frustration. Yes, you could be angry because some people are doing some really hooked up things to you at some point, right? So it's not completely you, but the emotion is geared towards how you feel and you want to get retribution. someone's hurt you, you want revenge, you know. So it's all very kind of self-centered. But love is the one emotion that forces you outside of yourself, true love, because there can be fake love where you really it's just a form of narcissism where you want people to give you the attention and feed the image you have of yourself. but true love, the ability to get outside of yourself,

and to feel what other people are feeling, which is empathy, and empathy, which is a word I'm afraid that's overused, and I'm getting a little tired of it, I wish we could find a better word, but it's a major theme in the sublime, because the idea is, the highest mental power that we humans have, the source really of our intelligence is what they call theory of mind,

that we are able to place ourselves in the bodies and the minds of other people. It what's made us the supreme social animal, right? So far as to think about what someone else is thinking. Yeah, and it's not only just for love, it's also for fighting your opponent, etc. and for dealing any kind of social situation. But it's the source of all of our intelligence, right? It's the source of our science. A great scientist, like at Einstein, is thinking inside the very subjects he's trying to get into,

right? And that's where his metaphors and analogies often come from because he's able to think about it. Oh, this is like this. Right. Yeah. So that's the source of our power. And so high level empathy where you're able to think inside of other people, to kind of imagine what they're going through, what their feelings are, is to me the highest passion of all, which is a form of love and it is extremely sublime. Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think

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I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo, just the name of you. Now I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki Kiki Pabag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a bad glove. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started. And there's so much I still want to do. So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the baby

this is Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know.

So I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night. But I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen early and app-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. There's a quote about Theodore Roosevelt, I like.

One of the biographers is that Theodore Roosevelt grows up reading about the great beneficiary and decides he wants to be just like them. And so is it the sense that you're sort of reading about all these characters and then you're like, oh, but you can actually, not just I could write about it, but that I could actually do the stuff that they're doing in the books. I think it went the other way, because I knew earlier that I was going to be in the military.

And that was just innate. It was in my blood. Hey, in the blood. It was just something. And it was just something that was drawn towards and I think a lot of that had to do with my my grandfather was killed in World War II But I grew up with pictures of him and his squadron He was a Marine Corps aviator and flew the course air. So that's the plane that had the gold wings that folded up like that He was called off Okanawa in

1945 but I grew up with the silk maps. They used to give aviators back then because if you hit the water with a paper map, it would disintegrate, but a silk map would just get wet, still could use it. And I had his record aviation wings, had all that stuff. And so I just knew that I was going to serve my country in the military. But so that came first. And then I was researching as much as you can as a young kid, researching anything, anything warfare related, and then terrorism and insurgency, researching anything warfare related, then terrorism and insurgency and counterinsurgency and some of the earliest memories of the 1979 Iranian

hostage crisis and the insuing incident at Desert 1 that happened after that. So all those things were just a part of my childhood and I still think of them as very informative events. I can remember the time magazine in Newsweek and the covers of the newspapers of that event, in particular. But then, as I got older, so then when I reached the ripe old bit of 10

and started reading thrillers, then I was like, okay, first military, and then I'm gonna write thrillers, exactly like the kind that I'm enjoying so much today. Yeah, when actually I interviewed Stephen Presfield here before, this has become a book story, it was like the first person that saw it and he was wearing this World War II bomber jacket in the island and it had the maps sewn inside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stephen Pressfield's great. I mean, he obviously has all these amazing books that he had Afghan

campaigned, Gates of Fire, Legend of Backer Vance, but he also has a series of books on creativity and the first one is The War of Art. And I got so much from all of his books in particular, that one and then Turning Pro. They all say essentially you're going to have to sit down and be professional and do the work. Essentially that's what he's saying. Don't get distracted, really. But I remember him saying that you're a professional, you're a writer, sit down and

write. You don't get writer's block because you don't have a trucker getting trucker's block or a dentist getting dentist block. You sit down and you do the work. And so that was, to hear that from him was pretty cool. So I've never had a content with writer's block. And then when I left the military and I was flying to South Africa and then Mozambique

for a research trip, it has occupation on that entry form and so I wrote down author. There you go. So, did you never know? That's when you turned pro in your head. You have to turn pro and so it's just okay, for now it was a special operator for the last 20 years.

Now I'm a writer, now I'm an author. And I think that really helps put things in perspective and makes you sit down and do the work. It's not a hobby, it's not something you're hoping that will happen, You are all in. I was going to ask you about that. So you have this 20-year career in the military. And then you transition to writing. I want to talk about transitions. But I do think writing is easier when you've had a job before or a career before.

Because then you're able to be like, this is a job. I think a lot of people think of creative professions as being this sort of ethereal, fun, the muses visit you, but it's a job and you have to be an operator in it, a professional in it, the way that you would train and practice and show up every day for any other kind of profession. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's interesting because with a family, for those of you

that have kids at home and dogs and you know spouses and all the rest of it, if you're not actually sitting there typing, kind of like maybe if you're not painting, if you're not physically engaged in the act of sculpting something, people think that you're not actually working. That's not the case. That's not the case. You have to think through these things. So for this latest book, I started renting Airbnb's around Park City. And I found this great little log cabin that had a stack of wood outside. So I chop wood out there. I throw it in the wood burning stove.

There was a couch right there, a little table, a kitchen, bedroom bathroom, but that was it. And it was all close right there. So I could go from one thing to the other. And as I was typing away or I started to think I got hungry, I'd go make a sandwich, but I'm still, even though I'm not physically typing, I'm still thinking through what's going on on that written page, thinking through some problems

I need to solve on that written page. So it's still work, but it's interesting when people see you not physically writing, it's like, oh, you're not working right now. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, me. Well, I think you have to let the subconscious work on the thing, right? So it's like there's kind of two phases of doing it.

There's the, I'm intentionally thinking about this, I'm writing just work on the thing, right? So it's like there's kind of two phases of doing it. There's the, I'm intentionally thinking about this, I'm writing right now, and then there's also the, it's in there in the back of my mind. It's working on the equation, the computer is chipping away at it, and then that sort of breakthrough happens when you kind of least expect it. Oh yeah, I mean, you have to be thinking, I mean, you're thinking about it all the time.

But it's those interruptions that take you away from it, that make you focus on something else for a minute. For me, that's, I don't know how it is for everybody else, but for me, that's the real killer. I need to be, it doesn't matter if I have just a blank, a blank white wall in front of me, that's fine. It doesn't have to be a great beautiful view of mountains or an ocean or anything like that.

Blank wall is fine. As long as it's quiet and there's no interruptions. And for those who went to work during COVID at home, they might be able to relate to the fact that if you have a home office and you close that door, for whatever reason, it acts as a magnet for children, for dogs, for everybody. It's just like, I don't know what it is.

Like they don't want to talk to you when the door's open, but it's closed, it's like, so that's just kind of, kind of how it goes. And everybody had to experience a little bit of that, especially in the early days of COVID, I think. Yeah, so talk to me about the transition, because when I talk to athletes and people who are in the Armed Forces, that's the big transitioning

out to the new thing, which I actually think they have a sort of a unique set of experiences that can help people, because we're all transitioning from one thing to another new role. How did you think about, you know, sort of that, like, special forces too, I can identify as a writer, walk me through that transition for you. Yeah, I was very lucky and then I knew what I wanted to do. A lot of people, I don't think they really know.

And if they think they know, they know maybe from a movie or from maybe a book that they read or something they heard from somebody else. And then they devote, let's just take law. So you're transitioning from something and you saw law on order on TV or you, you know, you read a junk ration book or a Scotch or a row book and you're like, how am I going to do that? And then you spend this time in law school and then you get to your first firm or you go into your DA's office or whatever.

And it's not quite what it was like when you watched the movie in the firm. Right. And then you're like, well, I've invested all this time. It's not really what I thought, but I guess now I'm going to pay back this loan or I'm going to have a family and a child and all this stuff. And you're just off you go. And you're kind of in this thing that wasn't really your calling or you thought it was. What was your calling for a while? Right. Like sometimes we do things. There's a season or a phase of your life. And then that phase ends and you have to do

that next thing. Yeah, yeah. So I was just very lucky that I knew that writing was my thing. It was already my passion. I already spent so many years essentially giving myself an early education in the art storytelling by reading all these books, growing up. My mom introduced me to Joseph Campbell, and here with a thousand faces through this series of interviews that Bill Moir's did with Joseph Campbell called the power of myth in 1988. But I was enthralled because as a kid, he talked about how it inspired George Lucas for Star Wars and this mythology that here was journey and all this. So I took that on board very early. I didn't find that later in life and then say, I mean, I can work this into a story or something like that. Maybe I should get this writing thing to try. This foundation was already built. So that foundation was built with reading as a fan, even though I was

studying it, I didn't look at it as studying it. I just looked at it as coming at it from a fan's perspective. And then I had this study of warfare. So I'm studying all these warfare and terrorism and insurgencies and counterinsurgencies academically. And then I get into the SEAL teams and then September 11th happens and I go to Iraq and I go to Afghanistan. And then I get to practically apply that warfare. And so now as I'm getting out, I have that foundation that's been built up over all these years. And now I can put all of that into my writing. So it becomes very personal even though it's complete fiction.

I get to go and think about if my character gets ambushed, let's say, in Los Angeles, California, I can go think about Baghdad 2006 and think about what it was like to get ambushed there, and I can take those feelings and emotions and then apply them to a completely fictional narrative. So it rings true. I don't have to go track down a sniper from Ramadi in 2006

and then ask them questions and then have those answers get filtered through whatever biases or preconceived notions or maybe other books or movies I've read about sniping or about that that about Ramadi in 2006 I can just directly translate what it was like to drop over the wall of our compounding move into the city with a small sniper team and I can just put that directly into the novel without any sort of filters so So I was lucky and that I knew what I wanted to do. My passion is writing, my mission is taking care of my family. That gives me my purpose driving forward.

And I think a lot of people, regardless of what they do, whether they're coming from special operations or they're coming from a professional sports team or their Olympic athlete, and they didn't make the team for the first time and they've been devoted that for so long. Or maybe a death of a loved one, a divorce, just a job transition.

Any of those things, I think it's so important to identify that passion and that mission so you can find that purpose and move forward. Yeah, I don't know if I would phrase that as lucky to me that's strategic, right? So I think it's like the worst time to, the worst way to find a new job is to first quit your old job, right? Because now you don't have the, like, I think about it as like, you gotta figure out the next thing, so you can train, so you can think about it. So also, the education can be subsidized.

Like, I tell this to even the people that I work, that work for me is like, whatever you do next, like, there should be like a year period where you've decided to do that thing, and then what can you get out of that time? Like, I spent a year at American Apparel very clearly, I was going to leave to become a writer, but Robert Green was like,

what are you gonna do with this year? Right, how is that year going to subsidize and educate you and set in motion the stuff that you're gonna need? So you're not starting on day one where like, I'm building this thing from scratch, right? You wanna learn the things, see the things, save the money, et cetera. You gotta start the transition before you scratch, right? You want to learn the things, see the things, save the money, et cetera. You've got to start the transition before you leave, right? Before you jump,

I hate this, I don't want to do this, I'm leaving, then I'm going to figure out that thing. I think you start the transition early. Oh, yeah. I was very fortunate in that in the military, once you tell them you're getting out, so I started it as enlisted and then I became an officer and as an officer, you drop your papers and tell them you're getting out and essentially you go on this other pile and you go in that pile of now it's your time to get out and you're kind of off our radar and you go stand in line at medical, you go stand in line at dental, you go to these transition program things, you get read out of secret programs, you turn in gear and before you do any of that thing those things because

it's gigantic bureaucracy, you stand in line to make your appointment to come back and do those things. Sure, sure, sure. So I had a little time, exactly. So I had this time, I was in this other pile where I'm not really on anyone's radar, and that gave me time to write. So I had exactly what you're talking about there this time, and I made use of that time to write that first book and make it as good as I possibly could. You tell this story in the beginning of the book, it opens, the woman is at the party and shoving the egg roll in her mouth.

It's like my favorite scene, a lot of people's favorite scene in the novel. And when my wife told me to read it, she was like, you're going to like this scene at the beginning. It feels like it should be on curb your enthusiasm or something. My question is, how does that story happen? Is this something you observe in the course of your life and you squirl it away in a notebook and then as you're thinking about the scene to open a novel, it comes perfectly

or is this something that just comes to you as you're sitting down and writing? There's definitely squirreling that goes on. I think that's just the way that as you're sitting down and writing. There's definitely squirreling that goes on. I think that's just the way that if you're a writer and I don't mean if you're a publisher, I just mean if that's your natural proclivity, you are a collector of the scenes and fragments. In my case, there's no notebook,

but they're just obviously something, I have the most diabolical short-term memory for just any logistical, domestic, quotidian details, but if I see something funny or overhear some conversation or fragment of something I've read, it's definitely there's obviously some file in my brain where it's kept, but I don't know how it is that it comes back when you need it. You know what is it about the mind that suddenly will throw up that exact fragment from Unified Latin Years ago?

But I think as far as I have been able to work out, I think it is something connected with the sitting down and sort of being in the posture of writing. So whether or not you have anything, I think when you're sitting there, it must open some channel and also once you get, you know, people will say, I haven't had any inspiration yet, but possibly that's because you weren't sitting down. And there's something there that just you're kind of almost ready to receive, if that doesn't sound too kind of wooer. And

also in terms of gathering what you need, you just, everything starts to look like something when you're kind of writing. So there's also a scene in the book where Martha talks about going to the optometrist and he falls off his rolling stool and she kind of gets glasses because she can't bear the pathos of the situation, wants to make him feel better. And that was something that I was at the optometrist like the day before and he didn't fall off the stool, but I remember he was rolling really fast, it was the treatment room and I was like what if he did fall off, you know, and it's the tiniest scenario but then the next day you need

it and there it is. So it's a strange answer but that's all I've been able to work out about how it all works. Yeah, Stephen Pressfield who wrote The War of Art who talks about how you have to put your ass where your heart wants to be. And there is something about sitting in the place and you can, Tony Morrison is talked about, like you make the connection, you untact and there is something out, you put yourself in the right spot, you follow the routine.

And it does, it comes from somewhere and nowhere at the same time. It's exactly right. Like, it's an art and a science, but also Ann Patchett has written about if you want to play the cello and be a cellist, why would you think that you didn't need to practice? And it's the same with writing, just because you can type doesn't mean that you can write without practice. And it's really true. You need to put in, I mean, I don't know if it's 10,000 hours, but you need to kind of be there just to practice the form and eventually you get better and better. And one day you might even like a single sentence and not have an existential crisis

about your gaping void where your talent should be, which is refreshing. That is a very hard thing to understand as a writer where like you want to work so hard to get your first thing done. And then when you look at the arc of your career, you're like, oh, the first two were garbage and they were leading me to the third, like for me, my third book was the one where I was like, I think, obviously there's moments I'm proud of in the first book and the second one. But it's really the, actually not that dissimilar with yours. You've done a few other books and then this one sort of blew up But if you could have gone back and told your earlier self that your first two books, which you slaved away You're so proud on and then you gave interviews about that actually those were warm-ups and they're like they don't even matter That's like the who'd be heartbreaking those were warm-ups and they don't even matter. That's like the heart breaking.

Saurambus is my third book, my second novel. The first novel, which is called Yubi Mather, which is actually about to come out in the UK, I haven't read it since it came out, but I have described it as my training novel where I was learning the really technical stuff, like how to move time forward and how to get in and out of a flashback

and those kind of things that I know some people, stuff, like how to move time forward and how to get in and out of a flashback. And those kind of things that I know some people, you know, the people who write their wonderful bestseller first off and that they're 25, you know, good on them. I'm so impressed that for me, it was much more learning the functions, which is that's fine. I guess it's different for everybody, but lately definitely, especially when I was writing Soren Bliss, I could feel there were things I could do with language that I wouldn't have known how to do before,

you know, really mechanical things in a sentence that I'd just sometimes write it, and I was like, oh, that's the product of the work, so I wouldn't have known how to get that sort of done previously. So I guess it's an evolution. I think it's the confidence that comes with basic confidence. Like since you've gone from beginning to end on a book, you now know that you can do that. And then you're able to be both more conscious and less self-conscious on the next ones because you're like, this

is a thing, this is how it works, it takes this long. People seem to think I'm an novelist, yeah, exactly. I can't sort of deny that I am. I run it clean though, having written a novel before and thinking, oh, I'll be able to do that again. I did take a little year-long tangent in terms of writing something that was really horrible. And I think one of the battles with that manuscript that never got published, thank goodness I didn't want to pursue that line by the time I got to the end of it and was very happy to drag it to the trash in one sense. I think the battle was, why is this not coming again? You know, I've done this before. I thought that kind of guaranteed that I could, but there are

separate pitfalls, I suppose, with every story that you're trying to tell, and you do hear novels talk a lot about how each book is a different challenge. It demands to be told in a different way if you don't want to keep reproducing what you've done before. So that was really hard to get my head around because I thought, you know, I had done my training. I knew you had to sit down, I knew you had to turn up and stay there, but that didn't work for me that time for some reason. And I think that was because I think the problem that was building and building is that I was trying to be novelistic and I was trying to be clever and I was trying to be impressive and literary, and I just ended up in absolute knots. And it wasn't until I gave that away. I decided to just,

I suppose, write how I talk is the closest way of describing it. It was then that it kind of unlocked something and I was able to start again with that kind of pacing. Yeah, it's like you can't think about what other people are going to think about this or that sucking away like resources from actually being in the moment of what you're supposed to be doing. Totally. Am I publisher who I do orait, did a sort of mini intervention

on me just after I trashed that manuscript and was telling her that I quit and I was never gonna try again. It was all too painful. And she said, the reason this has happened to you is because you look at what other people are doing. Look at Hillary Mantell and Ian McEwan and anyone along those lines.

And you think that's more valuable because it's harder or impossible, in my case, because you can't do it, that you think it must have more merit than what you can do. And the other place I've gone wildly wrong is thinking that literary meant serious, and then I would have to strive to keep jokes out. I mean, not jokes, but you know, the sort of abstract and absurd things

that I personally find funny, I really worked hard to make sure they didn't get in and they didn't. And so that was part of the reason it was awful. And there was something in that that when I sort of almost surrendered and when I'm just, okay, well, I can only do what I can do. And I'll have to believe that it has merit of its own. And that was again, another massive step towards getting on the right track. That is something I've noticed since I opened the bookstore that I have. It's like I like a very specific type of book and then my wife tends to read more novels like yours and then the one she really loves, I end up reading. But you can see these kind of waves, not of like what's in the books, but of whatever people in publishing have decided covers are supposed to look like this season.

And it's almost always derivative of what has sold well. In my space, this was a couple of years ago, when Mark Manson put the subtle art of not giving a fuck, then all books had to have blanked out curse words on the cover, like watch how much people are just like, well, I don't know what I should be doing. So I'm just gonna do how much people are just like, well, I don't know what I should be doing. So I'm just going to do what other people are doing.

Yeah, but it's so interesting. I've wondered about that so much because there's definitely, there was actually a story in the Guardian newspaper a little while ago that was talking about the trend at the moment, which Surin Bliss is a part. Apparently it was at the vanguard, thank goodness, but of this woman reclining or prone or her head is against the wall, a forehead, and I'm sort of thinking, I mean, A, this poor woman, and she just can't stand up, someone needs to splint her legs. But I mean, surely the contents of all of those books is so various. I know it's part of just wanting to locate it,

you know, in a certain category of fiction, but I think it really does a disservice to authors because it makes it look like these are all variations on a theme, and they could be so different in terms of the actual contents. I think it's a shame that that tends to happen. Yeah, it's like everyone suddenly fall in love with pastel covers on novels, and the irony of it is that when you do what everyone else is doing and you're right, you're at the vanguard of it So when everyone's copying you they think that that's safe But it's like ironically you make yourself heart less likely to stand out because you look like everything And it ages so fast. Yeah, because if it's a trend it will come and then it will crash out And so it's one of those things that in two years time, this poor woman is going to look

extremely 2021 slash 2022. So I think if you can, I suppose a classic cover or just something that's unique into itself is that's what I'm always going to ask for. Once I get, you know, hopefully more established demand when such as you know my reputation. You know what I think it is too, and I felt this on my first book, whereas like here's what I had my sense of what I wanted to do.

And then you're kind of strong in it, but you don't wanna be egotistical or a dick, so you're just like, well, this is what I think. And then someone will come along and be like, well, the sales staff says, and you're like, yeah. Of course, they know what they're doing. And I'll defer because they've done this a million times. I've done it never.

And they seem to feel really strongly in this direction. Exactly. As you say, you don't want to be difficult. But I think what I always used to believe before I was novelist, I assume that every author adores their cover and that it's to their taste and it's not. And of course, you don't want to be difficult, but at the same time, I think you do as the author,

you do have much more of an instinct to some degree. I know you can't anticipate the market, like somebody in sales, but I just think you need to feel that it represents the book because what I always think is these covers last and really it's like getting a tattoo and you're not necessarily going to want that barbed wire tattoo around your bicep forever, but you're going to get it. It stays. It never, ever goes away. And the cover of my first book, I just, I kind of wins. You know, it wasn't to say it was wrong, but it just,

I didn't like it and I kind of went with it and deferred and I now can't even have a copy of that book in the house because I slightly shudder every time I see it. I mean, it's 2012, so we've also moved on, but it's such a fascinating area. So take me back to London in the 1780s, 12 men meet in a print shop. What happens? Okay. This was a moment that May 22, 1787, when there was also another meeting going on on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and Philadelphia, the Constitutional Convention. But I think in a way the Constitutional Convention, of course, has been remembered and celebrated forever.

But we've forgotten about this remarkable meeting that took place, May 22, 1787. Here's what it was. The British Empire at this time was the world's greatest slave trading and slave owning country. Half the ships, half the captive Africans who were transported in chains across the Atlantic, traveled on British ships. And a huge number of them and a huge number of them went to work once they crossed the Atlantic throughout the 18th century and British colonies. Those in the American South, the 1787 had just become independent and much more lucratively as far as the British Empire was concerned on the Caribbean islands, which produced the oil of the 18th century, namely sugar.

So Britain was the world's greatest slave trading power. The meeting that happened on that day in a Quaker printing shop in downtown London was a group of 12 people who came together determined to bring slavery and the slave trade in the British Empire to an end. And it was as unusual as if a meeting determined to end the reign of the oil and gas industry happened today in Saudi Arabia or in Putin's Russia. It was the last place you would expect this to happen. Because this was a world that took slavery for granted. If you had stood up on a street corner in London in 1787, or in most places in what the new United States, people would have said, well, slavery is kind of a fact of human life. It may be unfortunate, but the Romans had slaves, the Greeks had slaves that existed for thousands of years.

And in Britain, they also would have said, you know, without the slave labor economy, how are we going to get sugar for RT? Plus, if you end this system, you're going to put 30,000 British sailors on those slave ships out of work. You're going to put 30,000 British sailors on those slave ships out of work. You're going to put plantation owners into bankruptcy. It's an idealistic dream. Forget about it. Yet, five years after this meeting in the London printing shop, 300,000 Britons were participating in a sugar boycott,

refusing to buy slave grown sugar for their tea in their coffee. 400,000 people in England had signed petitions to parliament demanding an end to the slave trade, and that was more people than were then eligible to vote in Great Britain, because the franchise was highly restricted. So I'm fascinated by this movement, which in the space of five years

invented every technique of political organizing we use today. For example, the idea of something we don't want to give any thought to, of people from different religious denominations uniting to work together for a secular end. I mean, every American political group does that, but this was extremely unusual in Britain of the 18th century. The idea of a national civic action group with its headquarters in the nation's capital and Chapters scattered in cities around the country also hadn't really been done before

They invented the political poster and we've all seen it. It's that image of the top-down diagram of a slave ship that shows slaves bodies packed together almost like sardines and hundreds of bodies packed into one ship. That poster came from the anti-slavery activist studying a specific ship called the Brooks Home Port of Liverpool, and it's actually rather conservatively drawn because it shows fewer bodies of slaves than we know from shipping records were actually carried in that ship. So they invented the political poster, they invented the idea of a logo for a political movement.

Their logo showed a kneeling slave in, surrounded by the legend, am I not a man and a brother? And later, when women's anti-slavery societies were formed, and the women societies incidentally were always much more radical than those of the men's, that was replaced by the image of a woman slave, kneeling in chains, and the legend, am I not a woman and a sister? These folks virtually invented the consumer boycott,

the refusal to slave grown sugar. So a fascinating movement that was the wellspring of many, many movements since then. I love the story and I love that it sets up in the intro of your book, just an absolutely extraordinary sentence, which I have thought about many times and say, Reddit, you said, the campaign in England was something never seen before. It was the first time a large number of people became outraged and stayed outraged for many years over someone else's rights. That's right, that's right.

There had been nothing like this. People had fought for their own freedom, of course. Again and again, slave revolts throughout history, revolts of people wanting independence for their national or ethnic group. But the idea of going to bat for somebody else's rights, particularly somebody of another color and another part of the world, this was something new. Yet, I think if we don't have the ability to do that, there is no hope for us on this planet because we can't just be agitating for our own self-interest.

Well, yeah, you mentioned the similar meeting occurring roughly at the same time across the Atlantic. And what is interesting about that, if you contrast Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and John Adams and these other people who you could argue are outraged and are coming together and staying organized in all these things. The difference between those two groups is those 12 men in the shop in London, they have almost no stake in the fight, right? None of them are freed slaves, none of them have been wronged by slavery really in any way. That, what's so fascinating is just how little they had in the way of personal grievance against this system.

And yet they set out to attack one of the most critical institutions in the entire British Empire. Yeah, but I think we have to act this way because you can say, you know, if we're gonna solve the most extreme problems facing us on this planet right now, for instance, the problem of global warming, you know, we can't wait until the community where we live gets too hot to live in.

We have to recognize that that's already happening in other parts of the world. Maybe it will happen to our children and grandchildren, but the fact that it's not happening to us is not an excuse not to act. But it's interesting just how revolutionary that idea is, right? You talk about Thomas Clarkson. He's asked to write this sort of schoolboy essay

about that question, you know, is it right or wrong for a human being to own another human being? And, you know, he competes to write this essay, but as you sort of present it, he's interested in getting a good grade more than he really is interested in probing the philosophical nature of that question. And it's not until after he wins that he sort of stops and thinks, hey, yeah, actually, is it right or wrong to own a human being? And I was just struck by yeah, how, how little people had pondered such an existential and moral question. It's true. People took it for granted because slavery was not only something that underlay

the whole Atlantic economy at that time, you know, with these slave plantations in the Americas, you know, not just in the Southern United way of how the old world exploited the new with the labor of people from Africa. And it had always been there. And people took it for granted. People took it so much for granted that a major slave plantation on the island of Barbados, the Codrington plantation, was owned by the Church of England. And they actually kept very good records, and we know exactly how many slaves were there, how they were punished, how they were burnt to death, and so forth. And you know, to think about all these clergymen sitting around and having their board meeting in London and not morally questioning

this. Today, it seems outrageous to her, but it is something that people took for granted. And then the remarkable Thomas Clarkson came along and kind of lit a fuse to this movement. We should talk about him a bit. We should. Although I think it's interesting just how long this moral blind spot has existed in human beings. I've talked about this in regards to the Stoics. There's this interesting contrast, right? The two perhaps most prominent Stoics in history are Marcus Aurelius,

the emperor, and then Epictetus, who's a Roman slave. And okay, we get why Marcus Aurelius doesn't question slavery, right? It underpins the whole empire in Rome, just as it does for Britain. But what's so interesting about Epictetus, who at this time, Roman slavery dictated that you could not be freed until you'd spent 30 years in servitude. So he spends his 30 years, he becomes this philosophy, right? He gives these lectures. But nowhere even does Epictetus seem to question slavery, right? So there is this strange historical blind spot.

There were exceptions here or there, but it just does seem like almost all of humanity, including in some cases, the slaves themselves seems to just accept this horrible status quo without thinking not even whether it was right or wrong, but whether anything could be done about it even if it was wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, human beings everywhere have trouble questioning a system that they've grown up with because we tend to take for granted something that our parents and grandparents took for granted. And I think

Americans right now are wrestling with, you know, our unlimited use of fossil fuels. Sure. And we feel there's something that is subversive or terrible or threatening if this is going to be taken away from us. That too, I think, is as imprisoning in its way as the concept of slavery was. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoog Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you.

It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say. Thank you. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.