Navigating New Frontiers: A Military Tech Overhaul with Chris Kirchhoff

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show on the Choose Yourself Network. Today on the James Altucher Show. I have a writing practice, and what that sort of means is you detach yourself from the outcome, and you're looking at the long picture. Somebody says to me, Steve you're going to live to be 97.8 years old, are you going to be writing the last day of your life? I'd say yes, and I don't give a s**t if it sells or not. I'm in it, it's not about an object, it's about the doing of something every day. I have a trainer at the gym, and I was saying to him something like, yeah this is a habit, you know getting here every day, and he says, it's not a habit, it's your life. I think, if you watch Ridley Scott's movie, he is like a master of this, at least visually. It's like every scene, there'll be some other stuff happening, you know, in the background or or whatever that kinda keeps you interested, you know. So anyway, those are like Like Blade Runner, what what's an So Ridley Scott, made Blade Runner. What's an example? I didn't draw a blank here, but, does Harrison Ford We're the scene where, Harrison Ford as, whatever his name is, Deckard, is in his apartment and, what's her name, Sean Young, the replicant girl, has come over. And there's a moment when Harrison Ford sits down at the piano and you sort of wonder, and he can play, and and he also has some photographs of his family. And when if you remember, we've seen photographs that Sean Young had that were fake photographs to to make her believe that she had a real past. And when you see those photographs, you wonder, is Harrison Ford a replicant? You know, how did he learn the piano? Did he really know how to play the piano or did they just kinda give this to him? And those photographs that he has, are they fake photographs? And I don't think it's very clear even in the end of the movie if he is a replicant or not, you know. I think in a way he is, you know, but but that's a great example I think of. There's always something else is happening, because what was really happening in that scene was he was sort of falling in love with her and she was coming to him because she had just found out that she's a replicant. That was the main thrust of that scene. Right? If you remember it. Yeah. Yeah. And then he's fighting his own internal battle. And so the external is he's got a job to do, which is kill all these replicants. The internal battle is he's not only is he maybe realizing they're more human like than he thought, like he's falling in love with her, but perhaps he's realizing he might he he feels human and yet he might be a replicant. Right. Or even if he doesn't realize it, we in the audience are starting to think it, you know? We're thinking, you know, does he not realize this? You know, could he be? So do you con when you're right now many people who are gonna listen to this podcast have have seen Blade Runner. Well, they should also happen to go see it right away. Not only that, it's being rebooted anyway with, Ryan Gosling playing the, Harrison Ford character. Yeah. No kidding. Sounds great. Yeah. Yeah. Could be. Expecting it. I don't know, actually. Hopefully Ridley Scott again. So but, in your and when you write a novel now or even a nonfiction book, do you consciously think I need more than one thing going on at a time? You know, I almost always forget that. But when I remember it, I try to do something like that. Yeah. Like, what's an example? I'm trying to think of it in the knowledge. I know I did it, like, many times in the knowledge where a scene will seem to be going one way, and then at at the very end, something will happen. And that'll spin it in a different in a different way, and you'll realize that the scene was about something else. But I can't I'm just blanking right now on what it Well, a great one would be the beat up scene, but I don't wanna give away too much because there was obviously You can give it away. So so well well, the main character, you, stretch quote unquote stretch, gets beaten up by the bad guys. So you have that that that that moment that has to be hit in a private eye novel. You are completely at the at the mercy of the antagonist, but also your your partner, in kind of this detective story, Tito, at the moment, he also gets beaten up, but something else is really happening at the same time involving that character that we don't really realize until later. Right. And also, what I thought you were gonna say is at the very end of that scene, this is to answer your question, the character that is beating him up is called the Russian. And at the very end of the scene, the Russian kind of says to him, who the f**k are you? And Stretch realizes that the guy has no accent, you know, that he's not a right you know, or at least it plants the idea. The final line of the chapter is the Russian is as American as apple pie. Right? So that's a a little twist. That's an example of an action scene that that that keeps the story moving by a by a new revelation at the end of it that you didn't think was gonna happen. So let's I wanna take it to a completely other genre, but at the same principles, sales. So Great. You know, how does a salesman have something have 2 things going on at the same time? What does it even how does this concept translate to the notion of sales? I should ask that of you because you're you know more about that than than I do. Well, I would say we would know the same amount. You've sold movies. You've sold novels. You've sold Yeah. But it's usually my agent that sells them and I don't have to do anything. You have to sell it to the agent. You have to convince them. So so okay. I'll say, you're you're building a a small relationship at the same time that you're building a bigger relationship. So I'm not gonna sell you something that, is just gonna you know, just to get money right now because money is just a byproduct of a much bigger relationship that we could build that could eventually result in other projects or 20 years down the road. Who knows what what could happen? So so that's what's happening. That's a great example. The 2 stages in sales. Uh-huh. And moving the action forward, I can sell you something that works that you trust me. I build trust. So, you know, somebody that's working. Sale. Right. So and I'm I I think with with any genre of life, there's there's more than one thing going on and you have to be aware of it. And a lot of it is about building trust. Because if you have the card chase where the action doesn't move forward, the audience, without maybe realizing consciously, is going to lose trust that this is a story that's interesting to them. True. So if if, you know, in the in the porn example, if they're just having sex, then you could say to yourself, well, I gotta just watch some video of 2 people have a sex tape as opposed to a a porn movie. Yeah. So, you know, so so now what made you decide, okay, I've written all these books about the resistance and challenging resistance and overcoming them. What made you decide to fictionalize it and and tell your own story of dealing with the resistance in the seventies? That's another great question. I mean, that the sort of internal story of the knowledge, which of sort of of me becoming a writer, turning pro, really getting that turning the corner from just screwing around and screwing everything up to actually becoming a pro is something that I've I've had in my mind for a long time and I wanted to tell that story. But I've never been able to figure out how to do it, that it wouldn't be boring. It wouldn't be ordinary. It wouldn't be, you know, just, you know, a writer's story. And, again, why where do ideas come from? I don't know. That's it kinda came into my mind, and then the idea to do it as a sort of a Big Lebowski type of there's always, for me, 2 elements. There's always, you know, like, a Bhagavad Gita is like, I loved it. I always loved it. You know, it's a great classic story, but then almost why why not do it as a golf story? Oh, now there's two elements that fit together and they work, you know? And so I think in in this case, it was the the Big Lebowski story on top of that story that I'd always wanted to tell. And I thought, you know, maybe I could make this work, and and and it would be interesting. And and again, there's the there's the two concepts, but also that's related to this other thing you write about, which is the internal becoming external. So if it was just a story about a guy struggling to write a novel, that might not be interesting. But if it's a guy who's constantly being distracted by his own choice, taking a job with his boss, the Turk, having problems with women, you know, these are kind of, extensions of this internal battle of not being able to finish a novel. Exactly. And if and if we think of it in cinematic terms, those are visuals. Something we can actually see. A car chase, a guy getting beat up, you know, that sort of thing. Whereas if it's a guy writing a novel, it's just somebody sitting at a keyboard, you know, or struggling sitting in his room like Baskolnikov, you know, tearing his hair off, you know, that's not interesting, and it's not cinematic. I wonder again, like, if you're an employee sitting in a cubicle, your internal battle is often very stifled because you're you're in that cubicle and your boss is telling you what to do. And you feel like, oh, I could be doing more things within this company or I could be an entrepreneur or I could have other ideas that need to be heard. That's kind of calling to you what almost would be you know, how do you how do you break out of that mold so that there is an external story happening? Do you have you you write also about one way to get through this is do what you're most scared of. That's how you kind of get through this resistance. The resistance is kind of calling you the most or pushing you down the most, or you're most scared of. I might be scared to disagree with my boss or scared to pitch an idea to another part of the company. Like, do they should someone do it or Definitely. Anytime there's a there's a fear factor. Of course, it's easy to say, but that's a great thing to do. But, like, here we're we have Seth Godin's book on the table here, his new giant book called The Titan. Now, Seth is a guy, he does that alt NBA thing. He's probably gonna change it now with the alt right out there, but, if if I were in a cubicle, if I could get into Seth's alt MBA program in other words, find a mentor that because maybe your boss in the cubicle won't listen to your great idea. You know, maybe he's very happy keeping you down, doing whatever it is you're doing, but there's there could be somebody else out there that could be a mentor to you, another boss in another job that where you might have the chance to do it. I mean, I remember I once say, you know who Chris Matthews is on TV? Yeah. Hard rock. Yeah. He does the commencement speaking, like, at graduations. Right? And he said something I thought was really great, and, I guess he does this every year. He gives the same speech every year. He said, get a seat at the table. And what he meant by that was even if you have to be an intern or, you know, in some kind of slave capacity, if you can get in the door, like, get into the William Morris mail room, you know, be an assistant for somebody that's actually doing something, And I think there's a lot to be said for that, you know? You know, but but, like, take that example, working in the mail room. Let's say you're 51 years old and you have other responsibilities. What's another way? What's another way to get a seat at the table? Well, in in that case, I, you know You have to brainstorm on it. I I'm not really sure. I mean, me at 51, remember I've been trying to write novels for, like, 30 years. So it wasn't like I just woke up in the morning and decide and did something, you know. It was, you know, the accumulation of a lot of effort and and and work and people that I've met, you know. I had an agent, I had a lawyer, I had, you know, bum ba da bum. Right. So so so in some sense, your life has this arc of the hero. Right? You're a cab driver. Everybody's does. Yeah. Everybody's does. So then you finally take this call to action. You move out to LA and go to Hollywood, and you have many mentors. You have the, the the writers that you are partnering with, even this porn director, your your agents, you know, publishers. And then you have virtual mentors too. I mean, you you are referencing hundreds of books in all of your books that you've that you've read and studied. Yeah. It's true. So so It's a great source of mentors is books and movies. Any any form of art or any form of, success or entrepreneurship, you know? And then a lot of you know, we haven't discussed this this much because we've been focusing on The War of Art and kind of your self help stuff. But you, also have written these novels that are amazingly historical, Gates of Fire being the most prominent, about, you know, the Spartan 300 against the Persians. And, it seems also you heavily you you had interests that were completely unrelated to writing. You had history interests about, in particular, the Greeks and Spartans and so on, and you were able to translate that into fiction. Well, this is kind of interesting, James, is that I really did not have an interest in that. I mean, a little bit. You know, I only got interested after reading your fiction on it. But I, you know, I sort of had read some of those books for fun, Herodotus, and stuff like that, but by no means would I did I know anything about it. But after The Legend of Agri Vance, book number 1, I had to come up with book number 2, and I had no idea what it was possibly gonna be. And I just sort of, you know, there was a little section in Herodotus about the Spartans, and I thought, well, let me try this, but I had no so what I'm getting at here is there are forces, positive forces in our life. The muse, you know, is is leading us And until I started to write that book, which led to, like, 5 others, I had no clue that I even cared about this or was interested in it. But once I kind of, you know, I answered that call, it's like those doors sort of opened. And suddenly, you know, I woke up, you know, 6 or 7 years later, and I had, like, 5 books on this subject. And I and I really to this day, I say to myself, where did that come from? You know? And again It was a previous life if you wanna know the truth, but, But those books were it could be because those books are so heavily researched. It feels like you're there. Like, I don't even know I I would be too lazy to get all those details that you get into those books. And now, they're like, you know, mandatory reading at military academies. So were you surprised when that happened? I was. Yeah. I I had no idea. You know, people don't call you up and tell you that, you know. I'm just reading a book now that a friend of mine had bought turned me on to called News of the World. Have you heard about this? No. Well, it's kind of a western, and it's just loaded with details. And I I love that. And, because it makes it so vivid. So actually a female writer and she talks about this one character, he pulls out his pistol and it's a slocum. Whoever heard of a slocum right away, I said, what are you doing with this slocum? You know, and he gives gives, the guy a different pistol that I also never heard of and it really makes it so vivid. You really feel like, geez, you know. I mean, partly you say she did her research, but also you feel like you're really there, you know. That's the way and she does things like describing the way mud comes off of the of a wagon wheel as it goes through these muddy streets and it's, you know, just so perfectly observed. It's like a cinematic detail like a Ridley Scott. Ridley Scott would get that on camera and you'd go, wow, that's exactly how a truck tire turns when it's going through the, you know, and like you say, trust. As you're the viewer and you're watching a Ridley Scott movie, you go, I trust this guy. He's telling me the truth. He's tell you know, that's another piece of reality that, I'm gonna stay with this movie for another 30 seconds. I'll give it another 30 seconds. You know? You know, do do you think, like, like, with Gates of Fire and Legend of Bagger Vance, both of those are period pieces. Obviously, they're historical. The knowledge, not as much, that's placed in your not present, but your present of 19 seventies. Do you think they have a different And you even narratively, you do those different. Like, so in in both Gates of Fire and Legend of Bagger Vance, you kind of have a narrator who's off to the side of the action, who's describing the action. In the knowledge, it's actually happening to the main hero. Mhmm. Was there any decision making there involved? That's a really astute question. I give you a lot of credit for that one. The, I'll I'll take I'll take base of that. Because in both cases, Legend of Bag of Ice and Gates of Fire, there are the the stories are narrated by intermediary characters for a very specific reason. And it's like in, the Spartan culture is so alien, you know, to our world that, at least I felt, if you plunge the readers into it straight with, like, a third person narrator or with a first person narrator, it would be impossible to grasp. But if you bring, it's told through the eyes of a young boy who doesn't know anything about that culture and who's introduced to it almost like Oliver Twist or Pip or a character like that. And so as he learn he he's makes it accessible for the reader. As through his eyes, we, the reader, don't feel so dumb as things are being explained to us about this crazy culture that's almost like a science fiction culture, you know. And, the same thing was true for The Legend of Ager Vance. In in that case, it was sort of like the story was sort of magical realism. You know, I was gonna ask the reader to believe some things that were really far out. Right? And, so I thought, again, an intermediary character of a young boy, which sort of like the character of Scout in, right, To Kill a Mockingbird. An innocent young boy is allowed to if you see it through his eyes, crazy stuff can happen to and a young boy sort of accepts it. You know? And, so so that was that was why those those things were done that way. Let's stop to take a quick break. We'll be right back. At any given point, I'm just thinking about my own Hang up just for one second. You're you're always allowed to Great Gatsby was told by Nick Carraway. Right? Another intermediary character that really, if you think about it, that story would never have worked, you know, if it had been Gatsby telling the story or if it had been told in the 3rd person. But coming from this this intermediary character that because the world was so so larger than life, you know, you needed a guy that was just a regular guy that sort of found himself. He's Daisy's cousin. Right? That's how he gets into the thing. That's how Gatsby enlists him to take him over and introduce him to Daisy, you know. And and we and so we, the reader, are carried in like that into this larger than life world. Or another example is, that I've cited before, Mutiny on the Bounty, the book, where they have this the authors created this fictional midshipman, didn't exist because, again, the story was so larger than life. Fletcher Christian and Captain Bly, you know, how are you gonna get into that? Whereas with this kind of young guy that's sort of like Oliver Twist gets, you know, gets enlisted, you know, he goes down to the to the ship, sees the ship for the first time, you know, he doesn't really know his way around, it it works. Sorry to interrupt there, James. No. No. Throw that in there. But but but that brings up to mind, like, take your book to knowledge and take Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Okay? So it's Hemingway's first book. It's kind of, Was that his first book? That's his first his first novel. He had a collection of short stories. No kidding. I didn't realize that. So great. Maybe The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a collection of short stories? Or no. No. Men Without Women was a collection of short stories before Sun Also Arrives. Oh. And, but in that case, you know, it's very similar to the knowledge in the sense that here is a character talking about something that happened to him, you know, in in his case, a few years previously, in your case, a couple decades previously. And maybe in The Sun Also Rises, and you allude to this that this could be a danger when you're writing about yourself, you could get too close to it and peep and kind of talk about things that people aren't going to see in the same way as you and not realize. Right. So in Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises, as opposed to The Old Man in the Sea, which was clearly a much better book, The Sun Also Rises, he gets too close to it and his kind of hatreds and prejudices sort of come out in that book as opposed to keeping the ego out of it. How did you deal with that danger in the knowledge? I'm not really sure how I did. Just that, you know, I've I've been in my own body long enough. Had I tried to write that book in my thirties, I would have been much too close to it, and I would have been too insecure as an individual and and as a writer. And I'd have been I'd have been wanting the reader to like me, my character too much. I wouldn't have had the distance on it, but I think I've got the the distance on it now on on my own self that I could sort of create a character that was me, but it wasn't, you know, I had it wasn't really me, you know. It was I had some distance on it. There there's there's a common bias related to this, which is like an entrepreneur's deal with this. If you start a company and invest your own time and effort into it, you think it's great. Even if it might not be, your brain just can't handle the fact that it's it might not be great because I oh, I put all this time into it. It must be good. So I think that's the danger when when any when you do any passion, whether it's a book or a painting or or singing or sales, you think, oh, I must have done good because I'm the one who did it. Yeah. And you have to have some distance somehow. Which again is the difference between an amateur and a professional. An amateur is so close to it that that he or she will make that mistake. A pro, as I say in Turning Pro, can distance herself from her instrument. Like if you think about Madonna, I was talking about in in that book, you know, the persona that she creates on the stage, I mean, she knows she's not that persona. She's, you know, very carefully crafting that persona and then it's a performance because she's a pro, you know. And Seth, who we're talking about Seth Godwin's biggest giant Titan book over there, he has this saying that I think is really great where he goes, this might work, this might not work. That's kind of his attitude when he launches a venture. So what he means is he has distanced himself as a professional from the next yo yo dine or the next Titan or whatever it is. He goes, hey, you know, it might not work. I think it's a good idea, but, you know, this could go out there and, you know, lay an egg. So that sort of suggests also that you kinda have to figure out how to make small experiments, which you can't with a novel. A novel takes Or you can make big experiments as long as you're willing to pay the price and as long as you can afford it. So what are other kind of, almost catch phrases of the of the warrior or the pro? Because I'm I'm equating the 2. They're the same thing. I don't know. Can you make that question any narrower? What what's what's what's another technique for for turning pro? So there's kind of showing up every day. There's distancing yourself from it, you know, in the sense that you could say it might work and it might not, and then I gonna try the next thing. What's the or there's learning new things, so kind of learning the language of other things that you can bring back to the thing you want to be pro in. Which, by the way, I think we made up in this conversation. Wasn't quite in turning pro, but I think that I think you could go deeper into that one potentially, but Well, here's another way of looking at it, which is probably not exactly turning pro. But, the the concept of having a practice is like when you say having a practice and people have, I've I've written this and people have gotten this wrong, so let me be clear about what I'm talking about. Sometimes someone will say she has a yoga practice or he has a martial arts practice, and what that means is she gets up every or every time of day and does an hour of real yoga, goes to wherever it is, and that and, you know, and, you know, enters in the proper spirit, gives yourself up to the to the thing, and does it every day, no matter what. That's a kind of a concept that a pro has. Tom Brady has a has a football practice. I have a writing practice. Twyla Tharp has a dancing practice or a choreography practice. And what that sort of means is you, detach yourself from the outcome and you're looking at the at the long picture. Somebody says to me, Steve, you're gonna live to be 97.8 years old. Are you gonna be writing the last day of your life? I'd say yes. And I don't give a s**t if it sells or not. I mean, I'm I'm in it, like, someone will say you have a meditation practice. And meditation is about sitting, right, as they say in the Zen world. Right? The practice is about the sitting. It's not about achieving enlightenment or it's not about an object. It's about the doing of something every day, going to the gym, running, whatever it is. So a great way to look at, as an entrepreneur or whatever it is, I'm sure that Seth in some way or another says, I'm gonna be inventing, you know, new businesses and new stuff. It doesn't matter really what it is, but there's a new trolley coming down the track all the time and he's gonna put it out there, and like he says, this might not work, this might work. He's he's he's detached from the outcome of the individual event because it's his practice, it's his life. I have a trainer at the gym, and I was saying to him something like, yeah, this is a habit, you know, getting here every day. He says, it's not a habit, it's your life. And at some point, that's what, you know, it becomes. A practice becomes, it's your life. This is what you do. I'm sure Twyla Tharp gets up, you know, and she's in the studio doing her thing, and she'll be there until, you know, her knees completely give out, you know. And even after that, she'll be there. But think about all these things, like like all these practices and and take your own life as an example. You you you were frustrated for at least a decade, then got into screenwriting, and then you're only mildly frustrated. Then you finally wrote Legend of Bagger Vance. Then you might have gotten frustrated again, like, what do I do next? You know, and Yeah. You're always frustrated. So so what do you think you sacrificed in exchange for having a practice? Everything. I mean, I don't have a family, and I'm sure that that's why. Because I did sacrifice everything for that. And, those those are tough decisions, you know. You know, you you have those you have I have those thoughts, but, no, I don't regret it, you know? I may I made that decision that that this was what was important to me. This was my daemon. This was my call, and this was what I I was gonna do. And so so and this is this is somewhat related, but how does an amateur know that or not I don't wanna call anyone an amateur, but how does someone know, okay, I'm an amateur. I have the I have the self awareness to realize I'm an amateur, and now I need to figure out what it's gonna take to GoPro. Like, how does that moment happen? Say that say that again. How do I get how do I get the self awareness to realize I'm an amateur? Let's say I wanna get better at podcasting, And I and I realize and so how how do I get the self awareness to realize I'm an amateur at this, and now I need to take the next level and go pro? You know, I think in the real world, it almost happens in a cataclysmic way, like Rosanna Cash's dream, you know, or like, how do you realize I'm an alcoholic? And you realize when you wake up at 5 in the morning in the gutter of Wilshire Boulevard, you know, with your own puke all over you, you go to yourself, oh my god, I am an alcoholic, and I better turn pro. I better, you know, get into AA. I better I better deal with this. I think that's what really happens because the human mind, we wanna protect ourselves so much that we will will say, oh, I could stop drinking any time I want to, or I'm real I'm really committed. I'm committed to this job. I'm committed to podcasting. I'm committed to whatever it is, you know. So It's almost like fear becomes big enough in some way that it overrides Exactly. That reptilian mind. Right. Exactly. You just realize it's your life, you know. Your life is going down if you don't make that. I'm sure that's what Rosanna Cash left. When she woke up from that dream, she thought, oh my god, I cannot make another album the way I'm making this one now. This has gotta stop, you know? I can't do it. I've gotta change. You know, and what you mentioned in in one of the books, maybe it's The War of Art, about fear of success. And I always wonder whether this is a real thing or not. Like like, are people really afraid to be successful? You know, that's a great question because, you know, it it seems so counterintuitive. Right? It seems like we're we're always we want to be successful, but I think absolutely it's true. True. And I've never really been able to quite understand why, but I think we're more afraid of success than we're afraid of anything in the world. And I I I know that's true even though I can't quite, you know, articulate why. Well, when when did fear of success stop you from doing something? Or was it something to even it's possible to even know? I think all of all of my resistance was about that, you know. Giving into distractions, sabotaging myself over and over was because I thought I did not consciously, but I thought gee, I might actually succeed at this, you know. I've got the football tucked under my arm. I'm on the 1 yard line. Man, I better fumble this sucker, you know, or I'm actually gonna score a touchdown. And and but but why would you be afraid of that? Is that because of the sacrifice that's implied with turning pro? You know, that's a it's again, that's a question I I'm really not sure what the answer is. I think but I think if we if we succeed, then we have to prove worthy of ourselves, you know? And that's a hell of a scary thing because, like we were talking today, it never ends, you know? We might succeed at creating The Simpsons, but then what are we gonna do after that, you know? And and Right. So suddenly, once you start succeeding, you you're you're you're on the road to hell. Right. Because if you don't, after let's just find something after The Simpsons. It's really sort of the tragedy of, professional athletes, like, once they retire, you know, because there's really you know, you're not gonna be an athlete again at 43. So what are you gonna do, you know? Well, this is why I asked you, and I I The great things about being a writer, you can do it. Well well, this is why I asked you about, like, all of your nonfiction books, like like and I I've listed them a bunch of times, but you you talk about the resistance and about creativity and kind of turning pro and turning warriors. It's all all kind of the same concept, kind of in different rappers. But and you and you tell lots of different stories in each book. But how do you keep reinventing talking about that those ideas, but in slightly different ways to keep it interesting and fresh? Like, how do you reach inside yourself to find new ways to discuss essentially the same thing? Well, again, Even the knowledge of the novel is a way And the muse. The muse tells you. Mhmm. But after I finish each one of those books, I sort of say to him, that's the last, you know, there's not gonna be another one, you know, I've said it, you know, but sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and you have an idea for another way to to look at it, you know, and I and I resist doing those books then. I've done, you know, 4 of them 5, you know, but, it's an inexhaustible subject. Who knows? You know? The muse leads you and presents you with the next assignment. It is inexhaustible because we also have a world that's changing a lot fast I mean, maybe we are. Maybe every generation feels this, but I feel like the world's changing a lot faster. So you you like, when you mentioned you're with nobody wants to read your s**t, yeah, I think you said this actually in a blog post, but, your novel is up against Donald Trump's tweets. So people can either read 1 or the other. And you have to make sure yours is valuable that and entertaining enough as opposed to his Twitter feed. Yeah. And it's hard. So you have to reinvent. Although the the the flip side of that is that what you think at least as I found this. What you think is gonna sell, what you think is gonna be commercial, for me, never is. It's always what I think nobody's gonna be interested in is this is something that they are interested in. Like, one, both for Gates of Fire and for Legend of Bagger Vance, I thought, as I'm working on them, who's gonna care about a mystical golf novel? What could be dumber than that, you know? And so I was amazed when people responded. The same with Gates of Fire. I thought the Battle of Thermopylae that nobody could even spell or pronounce. It's, you know, from I didn't know how to pronounce it till you just 25 100 years ago with names that people can't spell or pronounce. It's not they're not Americans. Why would anybody care about this? And, but, again, I was just sort of driven to do both of those things because not because I thought they would sell, but just I just had to get it. You know, I felt it was in me. I had to do it. And and did you feel like at any point giving up during them, particularly Gates of Fire, which is a longer and denser walk I feel, do Do you ever feel like giving up because, like, oh my gosh. I I who's gonna be interested in it? I had those moments, but, I mean, I those are like moments that you have every morning the minute you wake up. You know, like having a practice or yoga practice, you know, you always have the thought of why do I have to go to the studio, put on a leotard. Yeah. And but so those are the moments that, for me, you just dismiss. As a professional, you just dismiss. So, yeah, I had them all the time, but, you know, you can't pay attention to them. So so Steven Pressfield, author of so many of my favorite books. I mean, not only fiction with, all of your fiction books, I can't list them all, but Legend of Bag of Vans and Gates of Fire are probably the 2 most well known then. The Profession, kind of in a different area. And also the new the new book, The Knowledge about the young Steven Pressfield dealing with his own resistance to being a writer. I highly recommend The Knowledge, But then also just all your other books, The War of Art, Turning Pro, Nobody Wants to Read Your s**t, Do the Work, The War Ethos, and The Authentic Swing. All great books. Reread them all, in preparation for this. Did you really? Yeah. Wow. So including the fiction ones. And, thanks so much for for finally agreeing. I first asked you to call my podcast in 2014. Somebody always responded, he's too busy. He's working on stuff. Finally, jumped on a plane, came out here. Well, James, I gotta tell you, I thank you so much for that we finally did this, and thanks for such great preparation, you know, which, practically nobody ever does, which is why I never do interviews. And don't take that personally. I don't I don't say yes to anybody. So what I'm really glad that I said yes to you was this was a lot of fun and you really, you're we're so prepared for this and asked such great questions. I didn't feel like I was repeating myself, And, it was great. Excellent. If we haven't exhausted our topics completely, we'll do this again sometime. Oh, and also, I recommend people sign up for your email list that you can make it find you at stevepressfield.com. Your email list about your writings, your emails everyday about writing, it's just, brilliant. It's always a must open as soon as I get it. Oh, great. Okay. Thanks for the plug. Thanks, Steven. Bye. For more from James, check out the James Alticere Show on the Choose Yourself Network at jamesalticere.com and get yourself on the free insiders list today. Hey. Thanks for listening. Listen. I have a big favor to ask you, and it will only take 30 seconds or less, and it would mean a huge amount to me. If you like this podcast, please let me know. Please let the team I work with know. Please let my guests know, and you can do this easily by subscribing to the podcast. It's probably the biggest favor you could do for me right now, and it's really simple. Just go to iTunes, search for the James Altucher show, and click subscribe. Again, it will only take you 30 seconds or less. And if you subscribe now, it will really help me out a lot. Thanks again.