October 3, 2024 • 23 mins
Today we explore Matt's worldview. Matt lays out his social and emotional development, and his history of dealing with mental health struggles, addiction, and broken relationships. But the beautiful common line through it is curiosity and a deep desire to make sense of the world. Matt has landed on Eastern philosophy and we are just getting started to understand all that he believes.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
TGI, the global island.
(00:03):
Matt's worldview.
Man, did I learn a lot today.
Matt laid out his upbringing, his childhood, his adolescence, dealing with a lot of mental
health struggles, with addiction, with broken relationships, and the common line through
that, which is curiosity and a deep desire to understand the world.
Matt has landed on Eastern philosophy, and we're just getting started to understand
(00:27):
all that he believes.
Check it out.
So, Matt.
Hello.
Hello.
Hello.
How do you know that you haven't been abducted by aliens, and that every thought you have
was just recreated about five seconds ago?
Oh, dude, I think that would be so cool, and it would explain so much if that really was
true, and I don't know.
But you know what?
Yeah.
I would appreciate that.
All the problems in the world would just disappear.
(00:49):
They would just be a figment of the thoughts that the aliens have given you.
I mean, at all things, they're a figment anyway.
Okay.
So it doesn't matter.
We're going to get to that.
We're going to get to that.
Okay, okay, okay.
Let's get to it.
Who is Matt?
How did you get here?
How did I get here?
Well, from young, I was always changing.
I had no set friend group.
I was not in with a single clique of my generation, like the millennials.
(01:12):
I really never was ascribed to a certain group, and I really went in and out of multiple groups,
both in school and sort of out of school, through sports, through religion, through
any extracurriculars.
I never really could ascribe to a single thing.
This sort of carried itself into graduating high school.
I decided to do what many do of just relying on what their fathers did.
(01:36):
So I decided to go into utility and construction work.
I worked 90 hour work weeks at a time.
Yeah, sometimes it is pretty brutal.
And physical labor.
Physical labor.
You worked for PSE&G?
Well, subcontractor for it.
So there's kind of a path there.
I started out as one of those guys that spray painted the utilities on the ground.
Then I got into the union, where I started to be a flagger for the gas department.
(02:00):
Then I worked again through the union.
If you don't know how unions work, you sort of can go from job to job.
It's not like a traditional job.
But they give you job security.
Exactly.
It's like, OK, you're no longer on gas.
You're going to the water department now.
So I was in the water department, changing water meters for a while.
And then I went eventually to the electrical department, which is where my father is.
(02:21):
While I was in the electrical department, I was really facing a time of depression.
And I did not have the capabilities to understand it or to really express it in a certain sense.
I was dating this girl at the time who, if I really met her now, again, I haven't seen
her since.
I would apologize for my actions being young.
(02:42):
But as we learn on young, unfortunately, some people, we have to go through this.
And I sort of take this as a learning thing to not treat people in this sort of manner.
I understood from young that I could sometimes see how people's lives were, who they thought
they were, and what they did.
And when I was sort of that young male, the typical trope of a young male, doesn't know
(03:06):
what they want to do, is aiming for success, is working this field, but really is not getting
happiness from anywhere, I sort of lashed out at whatever I could.
And my work, working within this company for PSE&G, which is the electrical company, I
eventually had a mental breakdown one day.
And-
How old were you?
(03:26):
Early 20s.
Early 20s.
I want to say like 21, 22.
So right out of high school, you went right into the workforce.
Basically right into it.
And 90 hour weeks working your butt off.
90 hour work weeks working my butt off.
I was dating-
You ever really found any belonging and any specific perspective and you kind of had this
mental health breakdown?
At the time through high school, I wanted to go into the fashion world.
(03:48):
And I ended up going into construction.
And I got made fun of for that because it's like, well, you know, what, you know, that
makes no sense.
You're going to make these electric lines look all pretty?
Yeah, exactly.
No, they were asking me, well, funny enough now, if you look at Bushwick and you look
at the fashions that people are wearing, they were joking with me.
They're like, oh, you came to construction workers to get fashion?
(04:09):
And well, you know, I guess they were just, you know, 10 years ahead of their time.
But besides that, you can kind of see this constant path of like this to that, to like,
you know, not necessarily fitting in, bouncing around.
And then I had this mental breakdown and I went through a lot of therapy with this.
My ex-girlfriend at the time thought I should go to therapy.
And I started to through this.
A traditional clinical psychologist.
(04:31):
Traditional clinical psychologist.
CBT.
PhD.
I wasn't doing CBT therapy.
It was talk therapy.
Sure.
And then she brought, sent me to a psychiatrist.
Gotcha.
Now in this time that I was facing all these mental issues, I saw what people did.
I saw how they diagnosed.
I knew how she diagnosed.
I knew all the tests behind it.
So it wasn't that I fought it, but rather I was-
She read a dilettante in the-
(04:52):
Sort of.
Psychiatry.
Sort of.
I always read the entire time through this.
I liked to read-
Everything.
Everything.
So it was literally whatever I could get my hands on, I would read it.
Sure.
So why-
Why do you think you were like that?
Why do you think you were just so curious?
Well, I was the kid that asked why at everything from a young age.
Sometimes I would look at the world and I imagine it would be like a pop-up book.
(05:13):
I always wondered if other people sort of looked at the world in that sense.
I would be waiting for the school bus, for example.
I would look down the street and I would look at mailboxes and I would look at trees and
I would look at cars.
Everything looked peculiar to me.
I saw everything as they were together.
It was sort of this just odd experience of when I was alone outside waiting for the bus
(05:35):
before talking to anyone.
It was just like a voyeur just looking at the world and it just looked peculiar.
I wanted to know what it was.
My parents, as great as they were, did not have the understanding to really relay any
of this information.
So it was kind of on my own.
So I went into books and music.
Music really though was more of the larger one originally.
(05:56):
So you were in this mental health crisis.
You went to the psychiatrist and you were doing talk therapy.
Exactly.
I used this therapist to essentially get drugs so that I could operate at work on Adderall.
And then I would take Ativan, a benzodiazepamine, I believe it's a benzo, to go to sleep.
(06:17):
And this progressed.
And as this progressed, my relationship with my then ex, which I don't think she knew this,
I was abusing these drugs.
And through this, I was eventually, not initially, eventually they were diagnosed me as bipolar.
Granted, when you abuse stimulants, you appear bipolar.
Now I have since visited other psychologists and then psychotherapists and psychiatrists.
(06:42):
And I'm not bipolar.
I simply more had the addiction standard.
But I was trying to escape life.
And I basically was like, oh, perfect.
I'm bipolar.
Give me more drugs.
Sure.
And it just totally worked.
I never took the ad of, well, I did take Lexapro before abusing the drugs and it just did not
agree with me.
Now through this entire time, I was very overweight.
(07:04):
I had very unhealthy habits.
And Jordan Peterson was not the public speaker that he was.
And I wish there was somebody like Peterson at this time to speak it out.
But at the same time, I don't because it forced me to sort of go through this hell.
And working in the construction industry can sometimes be hell.
I mean, I had stuff thrown at me.
(07:25):
People were picking on me simply because of my dad.
Even though everybody's in the union because they know someone, because I'm the son, you
get shit on.
And you just really realize people aren't who they think they are.
So that was sort of a rough throwing into the world.
And this led to my mental breakdown.
And I just couldn't take it anymore.
And eventually my then girlfriend breaks up with me.
(07:46):
We get into a horrible fight.
I never talked to her again.
And my mental breakdown, my drug use, plus this, all sort of just stops.
And I shut down for like a month.
I can't go to work or anything.
And it's from there that I started picking up the pieces of my life.
Now there was probably about two years of depression in which I was going to community
college, oddly getting straight A's, nearly straight A's I should say.
(08:10):
I was abusing marijuana to high health.
I was abusing food and I was abusing marijuana.
Were you off the prescribed medication at that time?
Yes.
I did get off the prescribed.
So you went from that trying to find a new...
Trying to find a new thing.
I was no longer working at the union.
Drug testing was not a concern.
So I decided to smoke weed nearly every day for about two years.
(08:30):
Straight out of...
It was usually a bong too.
I was usually packing like at least, I don't know, I was packing a lot every night.
Felt so repetitive.
It was nothing but seeking pleasure.
And it essentially broke me.
I felt this odd being of succeeding in school while simultaneously feeling awful.
So I decided to make a change.
(08:52):
And through actually music, originally bands like Tool and The Doors, they introduced me
to these classic poets, to these classic psychotherapy.
I actually came to classic psychotherapy, Youngie and Therapy, through Tool, who has
a song called 46 and 2.
(09:13):
So it was interesting.
I was trying to understand these psychedelic bands.
And I was experiencing their psychedelic revelations, getting the source material and then saying,
hey, I'm going to read the source material.
Essentially, I built upon that through Tool, The Doors, System of a Down, Raging Against
the Machine, sort of any band that had some sort of meaning to it.
(09:35):
Philosophical undertones.
Exactly.
I would go to find their source material.
I literally watched The Doors movie that Oliver Stone made, which is very like...
It shows him as a legend, but has a lot of true things in it.
They showed a stack of books.
And I decided to buy every single book that Morrison was reading and read them all.
(09:55):
Not because I wanted to be Morrison, but I wanted to understand his poetry.
It helped to expose me to these far out world views, which eventually led me to the Eastern
views to people such as the spiritual leader, Ram Dass.
So now we're getting into your religiosity.
How do you see religion and spirituality?
(10:16):
How do you make sense of those two words?
They're one and the same thing, but religion almost has an institutional backing to it,
whereas spirituality has more of a deinstitutionalized thing to it.
There's structure and then non-structure.
System individual?
To a certain extent, yes.
(10:37):
When you go to any college campus, like where we went to school, there's a million Christian
clubs.
There's a couple of Jewish clubs.
There's a couple of Islam clubs.
There was a polytheist club.
But there's really been nothing that encapsulates spirituality.
What does that even mean?
And I think that's something that's different to every person.
It kind of makes it difficult to congregate around.
(11:01):
It's very abstract and obscure.
Whereas religion-
Because everyone has a unique thing.
There's no collective narrative or no collective agreements for us to all join together on.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Except if that collective agreement is just we're all going to explore spirituality.
Exactly.
So yeah.
And one thing I've noticed, again, spirituality, because I did delve in- delve.
I'm not chat GBT.
(11:22):
I just actually said that one.
I did start looking into all of those Eastern spiritual groups.
And was this the first that you were exposed to those thinkers?
Yes.
Yes, it was.
And so before you got exposed to Eastern ways of thinking, what were your beliefs about
the world?
Because you always said that you were so curious and you were always asking why.
(11:42):
Did you have any concrete beliefs?
So I was raised as a Roman Catholic.
I felt that very forced.
I never found the voice there.
I never aligned with the church.
I never felt welcome.
It felt like work to me to a certain extent.
Now my parents are not all ultra religious.
From this, I turned to atheism and there was no- there really wasn't a assumption of the
(12:07):
world.
I was kind of just barreling through it, like, you know, without any sort of guidance, without
any sort of principle.
It was pleasure seeking, money seeking.
Like I was going shopping, eating drugs.
Those were my addictions at the time.
And they really just kind of took over my life.
(12:30):
And I did not think about any sort of religious sense.
When religion, you know, spiritualness or however you would like to describe it, sort
of came back, was as I started to read these poets, both East and West, read these artists,
listen to music, I started to say, well, atheism isn't it?
And it wasn't that there was this revelation of something else.
(12:52):
It was that I knew this is not it.
But I started searching more directionally for something.
And that's where I essentially kind of fell along the Eastern line.
I found belonging for the first time.
No.
So you never found belonging?
I never found belonging.
I never fully found belonging.
(13:13):
Actually, where do you belong?
Nowhere.
Wherever I am.
But isn't that a philosophical perspective that you feel belonging to?
Well, I'm often accepted wherever I go.
You play these verbal games that all the time.
I play these verbal games.
Well, I'm trying to explain it because you're a walking rhetorical device.
Oh my God.
You know the philosophical thing where they say, imagine it would drive you mad if you
(13:36):
had to question that the ground underneath you wouldn't operate as it does?
Well, to me, the ground never is going to operate as it does.
And I look at everything in that sort of manner.
And that's the most empirical way I can explain that to you.
This was like the beginning of our friendship when you were communicating like this.
(13:56):
And for some reason, it just bothered me so deeply because of how brainwashed I am to
Western empiricism.
I got like neuroscience.
When it comes to that we view the world through values, our brain ascribes meaning to objects
way before we are even consciously aware of that.
So like when you say that you're constantly questioning the meaning and validity of things
(14:16):
from my evidence of the neuroscience, it just feels so counterintuitive.
It is counterintuitive.
It's almost, I would say it's more like a curse, if anything.
Like imagine being ultra aware at quite literally everything that you do.
It really is not helpful to actually getting things done.
(14:37):
And it's interesting because I feel as if I study things that I myself cannot possess,
but I understand greatly.
It's exactly the trope of Alan Watts perfectly describing Zen, yet being an alcoholic that
drunk himself to death.
And you could take this in a couple of different ways.
One of which is that, hey, alcoholism, this is who I am.
(14:59):
Like I could say these addictions, like you know what, they're here.
You can make it an identity.
And not necessarily make it an identity, but just accept that that's the path that you're
on.
Okay.
And not that you don't do anything to try to change it, but if you say, okay, you know
what, I smoked weed tonight, instead of drilling myself and saying, oh, I'm addicted, you know
what, I'm stoned tonight.
Ah, so.
(15:19):
Yeah.
Tomorrow it's, I shouldn't be stoned, but for tonight I am.
And do you believe that that is a healthy way to go?
To go about life.
Because like to be devil's advocate or maybe angel's advocate, you can then justify horrific
behaviors and horrific ways of being in the world by just saying that that is your fate.
It doesn't justify it.
What it does is it tries to bring your awareness back down to it to essentially course correct.
(15:44):
What's happened has already happened and you should try to accept whatever's next.
But sure, but accepting and also wanting to change you believe should be there both.
Well, you want to.
You accept what has happened and what you have done, but you're also, there's a moral
desire to self transcend and be better.
Exactly.
There's a moral desire to change.
There's a moral desire to do better.
(16:05):
There is this moral desire.
Like we all want to.
So speaking about morality, what is your moral understanding of the world?
There is none.
Thanks for listening to the podcast guys.
We're going to wrap it up here.
Yeah.
Do you believe in good and evil?
How do you define those terms?
I think good and evil can only be understood by the society in which you live.
(16:27):
So are you a moral relativist?
You believe that morality is based solely on the cultural understandings of the time
and cultural preferences.
Yes.
So in the tribes of Africa that still practice cannibalism, it is culturally morally right
to practice those behaviors where in Western culture we view that as incredibly inhumane.
And there is no objective right or wrong answer to those questions.
(16:48):
They're just a right or wrong answer based off of the environment in which that behavior
finds itself.
This is definitely where it goes into more of a religious belief almost.
I ascribe to the Eastern idea of that we choose our predicament.
And this is controversial because people always wonder, well, why would someone choose suffering?
And the answer is that to me, this life is a curriculum.
(17:13):
It will never be perfect.
There will never be a true good and evil.
Exactly.
In fact, to obtain a utopia, it will probably cause the most evil out there.
So is cannibalism wrong?
Well, in our society, yes, absolutely it is.
But is cannibalism wrong in Africa?
Well, that depends.
(17:33):
I mean, yes.
I'm more saying do you believe that there is an ethical framework that's objective,
that is outside of your understanding of it, that it doesn't cease to exist when you stop
thinking about it?
And the answer actually is good and evil actually exists in the world objectively outside of
our understanding of it, the same way that two plus two equals four outside of our understanding
(17:54):
of it.
The moon still exists even when we're not looking at it.
Do you believe that there is a moral framework of the world and good and evil are metaphysical
properties of reality that exist outside of us talking about them?
Or is it just created by us talking about them?
There is no real objective framework for morality and ethics.
And we're all just trying our best based off of our emotions.
(18:16):
If you look at morality as a survival instinct, it's moral like in the Japanese sense where
you must do honor.
The story of the samurai is ordered to kill a thief and he goes out to kill the thief,
but the thief spits on the samurai.
So the samurai decides not to kill the thief and instead has another samurai kill the thief
by order of the emperor or shogun or whomever.
(18:37):
Now the reason that this samurai did not kill is because initially he was going to kill
because it was his duty to, but he did not because he became angered by it and he found
that he was going to kill out of anger.
But that samurai is going off of some sort of external moral framework.
Exactly.
That I ought not to kill out of anger.
(18:57):
I ought to kill out of duty.
And because I'm recognizing my moral position right now, I must self-censor myself from
committing this behavior.
I don't think that all native tribes were some hippies higher above us, but many of
them did have elders and shamans in order to spread this wisdom throughout the society.
So you could say there's certain morality that is beneficial for society to survive,
(19:22):
but then you could say that there is morality through wisdom which is passed down.
In the case of...
But that wisdom that's passed down is helpful for survival and that's why it's being passed
down.
There's an evolutionary selection for that.
I'm more asking you, do you believe in any external moral framework of the world?
I believe in the Tao.
Describe your understanding of the Tao.
That in which that can be named as the Tao is not in the internal Tao.
(19:45):
If anyone's confused, the reason why we're laughing is because Matt loves to speak metaphorically.
But it's not entirely metaphorical.
It is sort of the ultimate being.
It's this listening through practice, through these experiences in life.
I tried to logically think my way out of things, logically get my way through addiction, to
(20:08):
get what I wanted, to get pleasure.
It was very physical.
Pragmatic?
I wouldn't say pragmatic because it's not pragmatic to pursue pleasure all the time.
It's not pragmatic to smoke a bowl every night and get McDonald's every day.
There's nothing pragmatic about that.
It wastes money and you kind of kill yourself.
In the long run, but to the short term pleasure seeking mind, it's the easy way out.
(20:30):
It's the easy way out and it's a waste though.
But doesn't have long term utility.
I want to understand your understanding of the Tao in the way that you think I'll best
understand it.
Try to use as much logical deductive reasoning as you possibly can.
If you listen to yourself, deep down and listen, and I think Jordan Peterson says this, if
(20:51):
you sit on the edge of your bed and you say, what can I need?
What do I need to change in life?
Oftentimes there's this answer.
It just arises.
I can sit on the edge of my bed and say, what am I not doing?
And the first thing that comes forth is said, well, you're not visiting your grandparents
enough.
And that is so true.
And you know, I'm not.
And essentially the voice of conscious.
(21:13):
Exactly.
It's like this voice.
It comes from nowhere to a certain extent, but it's a super ego, bro.
It was trying to, but it's not even just the brain itself.
Okay.
So do you believe that that voice has metaphysical properties to it?
Do I believe that it's beyond the physical?
I think it's manipulated by the physical science.
(21:33):
So do you believe that our brain is an antenna that connects to a higher metaphysical world,
basically transmit the information?
No, I mean, it's not connected to anything.
Is it all just produced through the physical, physical brain cells?
We are the universe experiencing ourselves.
You say so much in one line.
It's like, you have to unpack this.
I have to unpack.
Going to like the Alan Watt object versus subject distinction.
(21:56):
You believe that the object and the subject are the same thing and that the brain produces
this illusion that we are actually one with the universe.
And yes, and anything that is trying to point to it is only what is trying to point to it
and it is not itself the eternal thing.
That is the issue with the ego.
Can you say that one more time?
Anything that is not the thing is only trying to point to it is not the eternal thing itself.
(22:19):
That is why the ego.
Okay, so like a proxy for something that's more true than the world.
Well, it's not something that you can even describe as real.
Where do my thoughts essentially come from?
I'll get back to that one in 30 years.
I don't know.
I'll never have the answer to that one.
To sum up on my views, I'm trying to expand upon the path that Aldous Huxley was taking
(22:42):
with perennial philosophy.
I'm trying to understand Eastern philosophy and internalize the messages that they have.
Really embody these teachings in a manner that helps me to align myself in which the
path that the still small voice within essentially guides me upon.
(23:02):
Got you.
So you're trying to find congruence with the voice inside with the conscious fate that
you are.
I'm trying to listen to the impulses, living them, experience them, and internalize them.
Well, I think this conversation illuminated more questions than it did answer them.
So I'm excited to get more into that, to learn more about your world view.
(23:23):
Thanks for sharing today, Matt.
No problem.
Thanks for having me.
TGI, the global island.
(00:03):
Matt's worldview.
Man, did I learn a lot today.
Matt laid out his upbringing, his childhood, his adolescence, dealing with a lot of mental
health struggles, with addiction, with broken relationships, and the common line through
that, which is curiosity and a deep desire to understand the world.
Matt has landed on Eastern philosophy, and we're just getting started to understand
(00:27):
all that he believes.
Check it out.
So, Matt.
Hello.
Hello.
Hello.
How do you know that you haven't been abducted by aliens, and that every thought you have
was just recreated about five seconds ago?
Oh, dude, I think that would be so cool, and it would explain so much if that really was
true, and I don't know.
But you know what?
Yeah.
I would appreciate that.
All the problems in the world would just disappear.
(00:49):
They would just be a figment of the thoughts that the aliens have given you.
I mean, at all things, they're a figment anyway.
Okay.
So it doesn't matter.
We're going to get to that.
We're going to get to that.
Okay, okay, okay.
Let's get to it.
Who is Matt?
How did you get here?
How did I get here?
Well, from young, I was always changing.
I had no set friend group.
I was not in with a single clique of my generation, like the millennials.
(01:12):
I really never was ascribed to a certain group, and I really went in and out of multiple groups,
both in school and sort of out of school, through sports, through religion, through
any extracurriculars.
I never really could ascribe to a single thing.
This sort of carried itself into graduating high school.
I decided to do what many do of just relying on what their fathers did.
(01:36):
So I decided to go into utility and construction work.
I worked 90 hour work weeks at a time.
Yeah, sometimes it is pretty brutal.
And physical labor.
Physical labor.
You worked for PSE&G?
Well, subcontractor for it.
So there's kind of a path there.
I started out as one of those guys that spray painted the utilities on the ground.
Then I got into the union, where I started to be a flagger for the gas department.
(02:00):
Then I worked again through the union.
If you don't know how unions work, you sort of can go from job to job.
It's not like a traditional job.
But they give you job security.
Exactly.
It's like, OK, you're no longer on gas.
You're going to the water department now.
So I was in the water department, changing water meters for a while.
And then I went eventually to the electrical department, which is where my father is.
(02:21):
While I was in the electrical department, I was really facing a time of depression.
And I did not have the capabilities to understand it or to really express it in a certain sense.
I was dating this girl at the time who, if I really met her now, again, I haven't seen
her since.
I would apologize for my actions being young.
(02:42):
But as we learn on young, unfortunately, some people, we have to go through this.
And I sort of take this as a learning thing to not treat people in this sort of manner.
I understood from young that I could sometimes see how people's lives were, who they thought
they were, and what they did.
And when I was sort of that young male, the typical trope of a young male, doesn't know
(03:06):
what they want to do, is aiming for success, is working this field, but really is not getting
happiness from anywhere, I sort of lashed out at whatever I could.
And my work, working within this company for PSE&G, which is the electrical company, I
eventually had a mental breakdown one day.
And-
How old were you?
(03:26):
Early 20s.
Early 20s.
I want to say like 21, 22.
So right out of high school, you went right into the workforce.
Basically right into it.
And 90 hour weeks working your butt off.
90 hour work weeks working my butt off.
I was dating-
You ever really found any belonging and any specific perspective and you kind of had this
mental health breakdown?
At the time through high school, I wanted to go into the fashion world.
(03:48):
And I ended up going into construction.
And I got made fun of for that because it's like, well, you know, what, you know, that
makes no sense.
You're going to make these electric lines look all pretty?
Yeah, exactly.
No, they were asking me, well, funny enough now, if you look at Bushwick and you look
at the fashions that people are wearing, they were joking with me.
They're like, oh, you came to construction workers to get fashion?
(04:09):
And well, you know, I guess they were just, you know, 10 years ahead of their time.
But besides that, you can kind of see this constant path of like this to that, to like,
you know, not necessarily fitting in, bouncing around.
And then I had this mental breakdown and I went through a lot of therapy with this.
My ex-girlfriend at the time thought I should go to therapy.
And I started to through this.
A traditional clinical psychologist.
(04:31):
Traditional clinical psychologist.
CBT.
PhD.
I wasn't doing CBT therapy.
It was talk therapy.
Sure.
And then she brought, sent me to a psychiatrist.
Gotcha.
Now in this time that I was facing all these mental issues, I saw what people did.
I saw how they diagnosed.
I knew how she diagnosed.
I knew all the tests behind it.
So it wasn't that I fought it, but rather I was-
She read a dilettante in the-
(04:52):
Sort of.
Psychiatry.
Sort of.
I always read the entire time through this.
I liked to read-
Everything.
Everything.
So it was literally whatever I could get my hands on, I would read it.
Sure.
So why-
Why do you think you were like that?
Why do you think you were just so curious?
Well, I was the kid that asked why at everything from a young age.
Sometimes I would look at the world and I imagine it would be like a pop-up book.
(05:13):
I always wondered if other people sort of looked at the world in that sense.
I would be waiting for the school bus, for example.
I would look down the street and I would look at mailboxes and I would look at trees and
I would look at cars.
Everything looked peculiar to me.
I saw everything as they were together.
It was sort of this just odd experience of when I was alone outside waiting for the bus
(05:35):
before talking to anyone.
It was just like a voyeur just looking at the world and it just looked peculiar.
I wanted to know what it was.
My parents, as great as they were, did not have the understanding to really relay any
of this information.
So it was kind of on my own.
So I went into books and music.
Music really though was more of the larger one originally.
(05:56):
So you were in this mental health crisis.
You went to the psychiatrist and you were doing talk therapy.
Exactly.
I used this therapist to essentially get drugs so that I could operate at work on Adderall.
And then I would take Ativan, a benzodiazepamine, I believe it's a benzo, to go to sleep.
(06:17):
And this progressed.
And as this progressed, my relationship with my then ex, which I don't think she knew this,
I was abusing these drugs.
And through this, I was eventually, not initially, eventually they were diagnosed me as bipolar.
Granted, when you abuse stimulants, you appear bipolar.
Now I have since visited other psychologists and then psychotherapists and psychiatrists.
(06:42):
And I'm not bipolar.
I simply more had the addiction standard.
But I was trying to escape life.
And I basically was like, oh, perfect.
I'm bipolar.
Give me more drugs.
Sure.
And it just totally worked.
I never took the ad of, well, I did take Lexapro before abusing the drugs and it just did not
agree with me.
Now through this entire time, I was very overweight.
(07:04):
I had very unhealthy habits.
And Jordan Peterson was not the public speaker that he was.
And I wish there was somebody like Peterson at this time to speak it out.
But at the same time, I don't because it forced me to sort of go through this hell.
And working in the construction industry can sometimes be hell.
I mean, I had stuff thrown at me.
(07:25):
People were picking on me simply because of my dad.
Even though everybody's in the union because they know someone, because I'm the son, you
get shit on.
And you just really realize people aren't who they think they are.
So that was sort of a rough throwing into the world.
And this led to my mental breakdown.
And I just couldn't take it anymore.
And eventually my then girlfriend breaks up with me.
(07:46):
We get into a horrible fight.
I never talked to her again.
And my mental breakdown, my drug use, plus this, all sort of just stops.
And I shut down for like a month.
I can't go to work or anything.
And it's from there that I started picking up the pieces of my life.
Now there was probably about two years of depression in which I was going to community
college, oddly getting straight A's, nearly straight A's I should say.
(08:10):
I was abusing marijuana to high health.
I was abusing food and I was abusing marijuana.
Were you off the prescribed medication at that time?
Yes.
I did get off the prescribed.
So you went from that trying to find a new...
Trying to find a new thing.
I was no longer working at the union.
Drug testing was not a concern.
So I decided to smoke weed nearly every day for about two years.
(08:30):
Straight out of...
It was usually a bong too.
I was usually packing like at least, I don't know, I was packing a lot every night.
Felt so repetitive.
It was nothing but seeking pleasure.
And it essentially broke me.
I felt this odd being of succeeding in school while simultaneously feeling awful.
So I decided to make a change.
(08:52):
And through actually music, originally bands like Tool and The Doors, they introduced me
to these classic poets, to these classic psychotherapy.
I actually came to classic psychotherapy, Youngie and Therapy, through Tool, who has
a song called 46 and 2.
(09:13):
So it was interesting.
I was trying to understand these psychedelic bands.
And I was experiencing their psychedelic revelations, getting the source material and then saying,
hey, I'm going to read the source material.
Essentially, I built upon that through Tool, The Doors, System of a Down, Raging Against
the Machine, sort of any band that had some sort of meaning to it.
(09:35):
Philosophical undertones.
Exactly.
I would go to find their source material.
I literally watched The Doors movie that Oliver Stone made, which is very like...
It shows him as a legend, but has a lot of true things in it.
They showed a stack of books.
And I decided to buy every single book that Morrison was reading and read them all.
(09:55):
Not because I wanted to be Morrison, but I wanted to understand his poetry.
It helped to expose me to these far out world views, which eventually led me to the Eastern
views to people such as the spiritual leader, Ram Dass.
So now we're getting into your religiosity.
How do you see religion and spirituality?
(10:16):
How do you make sense of those two words?
They're one and the same thing, but religion almost has an institutional backing to it,
whereas spirituality has more of a deinstitutionalized thing to it.
There's structure and then non-structure.
System individual?
To a certain extent, yes.
(10:37):
When you go to any college campus, like where we went to school, there's a million Christian
clubs.
There's a couple of Jewish clubs.
There's a couple of Islam clubs.
There was a polytheist club.
But there's really been nothing that encapsulates spirituality.
What does that even mean?
And I think that's something that's different to every person.
It kind of makes it difficult to congregate around.
(11:01):
It's very abstract and obscure.
Whereas religion-
Because everyone has a unique thing.
There's no collective narrative or no collective agreements for us to all join together on.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Except if that collective agreement is just we're all going to explore spirituality.
Exactly.
So yeah.
And one thing I've noticed, again, spirituality, because I did delve in- delve.
I'm not chat GBT.
(11:22):
I just actually said that one.
I did start looking into all of those Eastern spiritual groups.
And was this the first that you were exposed to those thinkers?
Yes.
Yes, it was.
And so before you got exposed to Eastern ways of thinking, what were your beliefs about
the world?
Because you always said that you were so curious and you were always asking why.
(11:42):
Did you have any concrete beliefs?
So I was raised as a Roman Catholic.
I felt that very forced.
I never found the voice there.
I never aligned with the church.
I never felt welcome.
It felt like work to me to a certain extent.
Now my parents are not all ultra religious.
From this, I turned to atheism and there was no- there really wasn't a assumption of the
(12:07):
world.
I was kind of just barreling through it, like, you know, without any sort of guidance, without
any sort of principle.
It was pleasure seeking, money seeking.
Like I was going shopping, eating drugs.
Those were my addictions at the time.
And they really just kind of took over my life.
(12:30):
And I did not think about any sort of religious sense.
When religion, you know, spiritualness or however you would like to describe it, sort
of came back, was as I started to read these poets, both East and West, read these artists,
listen to music, I started to say, well, atheism isn't it?
And it wasn't that there was this revelation of something else.
(12:52):
It was that I knew this is not it.
But I started searching more directionally for something.
And that's where I essentially kind of fell along the Eastern line.
I found belonging for the first time.
No.
So you never found belonging?
I never found belonging.
I never fully found belonging.
(13:13):
Actually, where do you belong?
Nowhere.
Wherever I am.
But isn't that a philosophical perspective that you feel belonging to?
Well, I'm often accepted wherever I go.
You play these verbal games that all the time.
I play these verbal games.
Well, I'm trying to explain it because you're a walking rhetorical device.
Oh my God.
You know the philosophical thing where they say, imagine it would drive you mad if you
(13:36):
had to question that the ground underneath you wouldn't operate as it does?
Well, to me, the ground never is going to operate as it does.
And I look at everything in that sort of manner.
And that's the most empirical way I can explain that to you.
This was like the beginning of our friendship when you were communicating like this.
(13:56):
And for some reason, it just bothered me so deeply because of how brainwashed I am to
Western empiricism.
I got like neuroscience.
When it comes to that we view the world through values, our brain ascribes meaning to objects
way before we are even consciously aware of that.
So like when you say that you're constantly questioning the meaning and validity of things
(14:16):
from my evidence of the neuroscience, it just feels so counterintuitive.
It is counterintuitive.
It's almost, I would say it's more like a curse, if anything.
Like imagine being ultra aware at quite literally everything that you do.
It really is not helpful to actually getting things done.
(14:37):
And it's interesting because I feel as if I study things that I myself cannot possess,
but I understand greatly.
It's exactly the trope of Alan Watts perfectly describing Zen, yet being an alcoholic that
drunk himself to death.
And you could take this in a couple of different ways.
One of which is that, hey, alcoholism, this is who I am.
(14:59):
Like I could say these addictions, like you know what, they're here.
You can make it an identity.
And not necessarily make it an identity, but just accept that that's the path that you're
on.
Okay.
And not that you don't do anything to try to change it, but if you say, okay, you know
what, I smoked weed tonight, instead of drilling myself and saying, oh, I'm addicted, you know
what, I'm stoned tonight.
Ah, so.
(15:19):
Yeah.
Tomorrow it's, I shouldn't be stoned, but for tonight I am.
And do you believe that that is a healthy way to go?
To go about life.
Because like to be devil's advocate or maybe angel's advocate, you can then justify horrific
behaviors and horrific ways of being in the world by just saying that that is your fate.
It doesn't justify it.
What it does is it tries to bring your awareness back down to it to essentially course correct.
(15:44):
What's happened has already happened and you should try to accept whatever's next.
But sure, but accepting and also wanting to change you believe should be there both.
Well, you want to.
You accept what has happened and what you have done, but you're also, there's a moral
desire to self transcend and be better.
Exactly.
There's a moral desire to change.
There's a moral desire to do better.
(16:05):
There is this moral desire.
Like we all want to.
So speaking about morality, what is your moral understanding of the world?
There is none.
Thanks for listening to the podcast guys.
We're going to wrap it up here.
Yeah.
Do you believe in good and evil?
How do you define those terms?
I think good and evil can only be understood by the society in which you live.
(16:27):
So are you a moral relativist?
You believe that morality is based solely on the cultural understandings of the time
and cultural preferences.
Yes.
So in the tribes of Africa that still practice cannibalism, it is culturally morally right
to practice those behaviors where in Western culture we view that as incredibly inhumane.
And there is no objective right or wrong answer to those questions.
(16:48):
They're just a right or wrong answer based off of the environment in which that behavior
finds itself.
This is definitely where it goes into more of a religious belief almost.
I ascribe to the Eastern idea of that we choose our predicament.
And this is controversial because people always wonder, well, why would someone choose suffering?
And the answer is that to me, this life is a curriculum.
(17:13):
It will never be perfect.
There will never be a true good and evil.
Exactly.
In fact, to obtain a utopia, it will probably cause the most evil out there.
So is cannibalism wrong?
Well, in our society, yes, absolutely it is.
But is cannibalism wrong in Africa?
Well, that depends.
(17:33):
I mean, yes.
I'm more saying do you believe that there is an ethical framework that's objective,
that is outside of your understanding of it, that it doesn't cease to exist when you stop
thinking about it?
And the answer actually is good and evil actually exists in the world objectively outside of
our understanding of it, the same way that two plus two equals four outside of our understanding
(17:54):
of it.
The moon still exists even when we're not looking at it.
Do you believe that there is a moral framework of the world and good and evil are metaphysical
properties of reality that exist outside of us talking about them?
Or is it just created by us talking about them?
There is no real objective framework for morality and ethics.
And we're all just trying our best based off of our emotions.
(18:16):
If you look at morality as a survival instinct, it's moral like in the Japanese sense where
you must do honor.
The story of the samurai is ordered to kill a thief and he goes out to kill the thief,
but the thief spits on the samurai.
So the samurai decides not to kill the thief and instead has another samurai kill the thief
by order of the emperor or shogun or whomever.
(18:37):
Now the reason that this samurai did not kill is because initially he was going to kill
because it was his duty to, but he did not because he became angered by it and he found
that he was going to kill out of anger.
But that samurai is going off of some sort of external moral framework.
Exactly.
That I ought not to kill out of anger.
(18:57):
I ought to kill out of duty.
And because I'm recognizing my moral position right now, I must self-censor myself from
committing this behavior.
I don't think that all native tribes were some hippies higher above us, but many of
them did have elders and shamans in order to spread this wisdom throughout the society.
So you could say there's certain morality that is beneficial for society to survive,
(19:22):
but then you could say that there is morality through wisdom which is passed down.
In the case of...
But that wisdom that's passed down is helpful for survival and that's why it's being passed
down.
There's an evolutionary selection for that.
I'm more asking you, do you believe in any external moral framework of the world?
I believe in the Tao.
Describe your understanding of the Tao.
That in which that can be named as the Tao is not in the internal Tao.
(19:45):
If anyone's confused, the reason why we're laughing is because Matt loves to speak metaphorically.
But it's not entirely metaphorical.
It is sort of the ultimate being.
It's this listening through practice, through these experiences in life.
I tried to logically think my way out of things, logically get my way through addiction, to
(20:08):
get what I wanted, to get pleasure.
It was very physical.
Pragmatic?
I wouldn't say pragmatic because it's not pragmatic to pursue pleasure all the time.
It's not pragmatic to smoke a bowl every night and get McDonald's every day.
There's nothing pragmatic about that.
It wastes money and you kind of kill yourself.
In the long run, but to the short term pleasure seeking mind, it's the easy way out.
(20:30):
It's the easy way out and it's a waste though.
But doesn't have long term utility.
I want to understand your understanding of the Tao in the way that you think I'll best
understand it.
Try to use as much logical deductive reasoning as you possibly can.
If you listen to yourself, deep down and listen, and I think Jordan Peterson says this, if
(20:51):
you sit on the edge of your bed and you say, what can I need?
What do I need to change in life?
Oftentimes there's this answer.
It just arises.
I can sit on the edge of my bed and say, what am I not doing?
And the first thing that comes forth is said, well, you're not visiting your grandparents
enough.
And that is so true.
And you know, I'm not.
And essentially the voice of conscious.
(21:13):
Exactly.
It's like this voice.
It comes from nowhere to a certain extent, but it's a super ego, bro.
It was trying to, but it's not even just the brain itself.
Okay.
So do you believe that that voice has metaphysical properties to it?
Do I believe that it's beyond the physical?
I think it's manipulated by the physical science.
(21:33):
So do you believe that our brain is an antenna that connects to a higher metaphysical world,
basically transmit the information?
No, I mean, it's not connected to anything.
Is it all just produced through the physical, physical brain cells?
We are the universe experiencing ourselves.
You say so much in one line.
It's like, you have to unpack this.
I have to unpack.
Going to like the Alan Watt object versus subject distinction.
(21:56):
You believe that the object and the subject are the same thing and that the brain produces
this illusion that we are actually one with the universe.
And yes, and anything that is trying to point to it is only what is trying to point to it
and it is not itself the eternal thing.
That is the issue with the ego.
Can you say that one more time?
Anything that is not the thing is only trying to point to it is not the eternal thing itself.
(22:19):
That is why the ego.
Okay, so like a proxy for something that's more true than the world.
Well, it's not something that you can even describe as real.
Where do my thoughts essentially come from?
I'll get back to that one in 30 years.
I don't know.
I'll never have the answer to that one.
To sum up on my views, I'm trying to expand upon the path that Aldous Huxley was taking
(22:42):
with perennial philosophy.
I'm trying to understand Eastern philosophy and internalize the messages that they have.
Really embody these teachings in a manner that helps me to align myself in which the
path that the still small voice within essentially guides me upon.
(23:02):
Got you.
So you're trying to find congruence with the voice inside with the conscious fate that
you are.
I'm trying to listen to the impulses, living them, experience them, and internalize them.
Well, I think this conversation illuminated more questions than it did answer them.
So I'm excited to get more into that, to learn more about your world view.
(23:23):
Thanks for sharing today, Matt.
No problem.
Thanks for having me.
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