CHRIS: Hello and welcome to Middlebury Five-O. I am your host, Officer Chris Mason. And with me in the studio today, I am very excited to have my old buddy, Matt Ready. Welcome to the show, Matt.
MATT: Glad to be here.
CHRIS: And we’ve known each other for many a long year. We go way back.
MATT: Yeah, over 20 years.
CHRIS: Back to our misspent youth.
MATT: Exciting college days.
CHRIS: We met at the University of Maryland.
MATT: We did, during my sophomore year, I think.
CHRIS: And this is your second appearance on this show. So for those avid viewers of Middlebury Five-O, the die-hard fans who never miss an episode, your face will be somewhat familiar.
MATT: Yeah, they should immediately recognize me.
CHRIS: They’ll probably recognize you anyway from your being so famous because you’re a hospital commissioner.
MATT: I am. I’m an elected politician. Commissioner in Jefferson County, WA. Been in office about two-and-a-half years. And I’m a bit of an activist. Active in the Occupy movement before I was a hopsital commissioner.
CHRIS: So, does it make you uncomfortable being around a police officer in uniform?
MATT: No, not uncomfortable. Anyone that knows me as an activist — especially one that knows me from the Occupy activist world and other such activities such as starting my own podcast called the Mindful Activist might be really curious what the heck I’m doing here with you and what the heck we’re going to talk about. Because there’s a lot of police subjects that are very hot subjects in the world today, in the U.S.
CHRIS: Well a lot of tension.
MATT: A lot of tension. A lot of crazy events and confusion.
CHRIS: If you were to think of us as archetypes and me being in uniform as a police officer and you being an activist, those are very opposed archetypes — as they’re generally portrayed or thought of.
MATT: I don’t know if “opposed” is the word.
CHRIS: There’s a tension there.
MATT: There’s some interesting contrasts in our life experiences and the groups of people that we associate with. Although my life is kind of in tension because I’m an elected politician and an activist, and those two worlds are kind of a strange contrast.
CHRIS: Do you feel your identity is split as a consequence of that? Do you feel yourself divided?
MATT: Not my identity. I really just feel I’m an activist who is using politics as just a tool to try to change the world in a better way. But it is strange that when you run for office and you’re a public figure, you have this public image and I know some people are completely unaware of my activist side, so they just have this public image of an elected official and hospital commissioner and they don’t really understand the activist part. So, I feel very aware when I am bringing both of those things out. And kind of my activist side has been a little bit quiet the last two-and-a-half years since I have been in office as I try and adjust to what I can do while I’m in office as a politician. But it’s starting to come back out. I’m going to be much more visible and public with that side of me. So, it’ll be interesting to see how that goes.
CHRIS: I often feel like there are these different aspects of me and they collide in various surreal ways.
MATT: As a police officer, what do you consider your identity? If you were to describe yourself?
CHRIS: I would say that it’s a very fluid thing. I don’t think of identity as a very fixed thing. I think a lot of people imagine that there is a core piece of who they are that is just fundamental and unchanging, and that they shift in various ways, but that’s at the perimeter of who they are, that’s at the periphery. But the essential self remains pretty consistent throughout their lives. I don’t really hold that view at least as it applies to myself. So, I feel like I have deeper threads, more established aspects of my personality, but even some of those have shifted over the years. So, who I am, my identity, is kind of what I am absorbed in, what I am doing in the moment. And there have been different chapters to my life for sure. And the most recent one involves me being a police officer. That was not what I anticipated doing in previous chapters.
MATT: Well, what if you were going on Charlie Rose or something and he was going to introduce you —
CHRIS: I have no idea who that is.
MATT: I believe — Charlie Rose is a very famous interviewer on PBS. He has a very nice table like this. It’s kind of what you’re trying to be.
CHRIS: Thanks, thanks. I think I’ll watch it if this guy is like a total —
MATT: It’s like a talk show.
CHRIS: You could be insulting me and I won’t even know it.
MATT: I don’t think it’s an insult. It’s a mark of real achievement to get on Charlie Rose. You know, politicians. And he does entertainers. He’ll interview anyone. But it’s kind of like going on David Letterman except he’ll interview you for I think an hour sometimes and he’ll really go into stuff. So, I’m just sort of curious, if you were gonna be interviewed, would you want him to be like, “This is Chris Mason. He’s a cop”? Is that what you would want to hear? Or would you want to be like, cause you were sort of like a poet/artist at some point.
CHRIS: I am. I am. And sometimes, I share my poetry as a police officer.
MATT: On this show?
CHRIS: Well, generally not on this show. That hasn’t come up. I could do that. I could do a poetry show one day. That would be awesome.
MATT: Great ratings, yeah. People would love that.
CHRIS: That would draw the crowds in.
MATT: I think probably most of the police department, everyone there, would be really transfixed by that.
CHRIS: They would. They would. I started sharing my poems on Facebook. I have an official-like Officer Mason Facebook page, and one of the things I do with that is out up poems. Sometimes they’re my own poems and sometimes they’re other people’s poems. And I did get some feedback from other police officers within the department.
MATT: Yeah.
CHRIS: Yeah.
MATT: They liked it?
CHRIS: We’ll just leave it at that.
MATT: Well, it was mostly limericks, right?
CHRIS: Limericks are really my specialty.
MATT: You’re very good at rhyming.
CHRIS: So, my poetry tends to veer towards the existential.
MATT: In my experience, you veer towards the existential. We did meet as philosophy majors. Most of our early history is philosophical coversations about the meaning of life and how we are sure one day you’re going to be a cop and I’m going to be an elected politician.
CHRIS: I think that was basically the gist, the writing on the wall. So, speaking of the meaning of life, what’s the meaning of life, man? After all of those philosophical conversations, mincing around in the woods of Maryland in the wee hours of the morning, contemplating life and your place in the universe, and all the things you’ve learned after that. Obviously, that was the most fertile part when you were spending time with me. Probably you picked up a few things since then.
MATT: That was the only time in my life I was really alive. And since then, I’ve been sort of like a zombie. It’s just been a slow death.
CHRIS: But now you’re feeling a bit more vivified as they say.
MATT: Well, I’m with you.
CHRIS: Reanimated.
MATT: I’m in the process of publishing a book on some of these lessons that I’ve had over the course of my life and I still basically believe as I did in college, sort of in the spirit of Henry David Thoreau, that life is about happiness. That’s your fundamental challenge and that is to figure out how to take this vessel that you’re in and take it on a journey that helps you grow and flourish and be satisfied and happy with your life. And I think if you do that, you will help yourself learn and do things and produce things that will be good for the world and you’ll help other people be happy.
CHRIS: But that’s not the goal necessarily. Personal joy, is it? And then if other people are made happy along the way, then so be it.
MATT: Oh, you mean the goal is not to make other people happy?
CHRIS: Right. That’s not intrinsic to it. You’re just thinking like —
MATT: It happens.
CHRIS: — as part of the process of making yourself really joyful and enriching your own life and being as full a person as you can be. And the people around you will experience some of that joy and be drawn along and drawn into it.
MATT: Yeah. And, actually, it’s evolved beyond that. I found that what really gets me excited and really inspires me is really looking at the world at large and really looking at the state of happiness of people all over the world and looking at that like a problem that I sort of find as a personal challenge of how can I affect that, how can I influence the way the world at large works, whether just in the U.S. or beyond. In fact, in a way, I’m more inspired… I sort of look at all the misery in the world.
CHRIS: All of it. Like, every shred of misery.
MATT: Yeah. There’s misery in the U.S. There’s miserable situations. But there’s places on earth that are really miserable. The type of stuff that we don’t really like to say out loud — the horrible stuff that is happening in these war torn countries in some of the poorest nations on earth. Unspeakable things being done to women and children, and men of course. But I see that as, like, I want to figure out how do we make things better in wealthy countries like the U.S., and then how do we get our act together so much that we really are as a country as we interface with these really impoverished and war torn countries, how do we really become a positive influence, that we infect them with positive things, with elegant, rational, democratic principles and structures, that we are really helping spread good ideas that teach respect and economic and political decision-making systems that actually help these places become better.
CHRIS: A lot of people would
argue that we don’t have a particularly good track record attempting to accomplish that. Because certainly, the U.S. in the past has tried to make the world a better place —
MATT: I don’t think it has.
CHRIS: — by imposing it’s will upon other countries. [Crosstalk] You think it’s just a bunch of evil people who are trying to make the world miserable?
MATT: I don’t think they’re trying —
CHRIS: They’re spreading democracy to other countries. You don’t think that, as a stated goal, you don’t believe that that’s what they’re actually trying to do is democratize other countries. I’m think back through the 50s, 60s, and 70s, when the U.S. was tinkering with other governments and taking out leaders.
MATT: No. I mean you gotta look at who is in charge, who is in power in the U.S. I have a video that I put on my website that sort of describes the power structure in the U.S. like a pyramid — not a pyramid like this, but a very sharp, squeezed pyramid.
CHRIS: Very spiky.
MATT: Right. So, to get up into the power —
CHRIS: The kind of pyramid that you would really not want to fall on.
MATT: More shaped like a thorn. And to get up in the power structure there — I mean, if we are honest with ourselves about how the political system in the U.S. works, it’s not really a democracy. It’s a very corrupt, money-driven system. If you want to get up high in the political system, it’s all about money. Who can you get to give you money for your campaigns, and probably some illegal money transactions are happening, but even without that you need massive donations to become a powerful figure in the political system. That means to get up here you’re talking to corporations and wealthy people, and the only reason they give you money is because you’re promising to do something for them. So it becomes this constant negotiation and quid pro quo situation to climb up that ladder.
And so I mean, it’s an ugly game and I think the people that are drawn to play that game and to really get up into powerful positions and that are good at that game, I think it’s naive to think that they have these amazing motivations to help the world be a better place. They are playing a game that help themselves and they enjoy power, and I’m sure some of them have great . . . some of them care about people and care about society and the world, but they are . . . I mean, power is a corrupting thing. The whole phrase: absolute power corrupts absolutely. And then even if it doesn’t always do that, I think 60 – 80 percent of the time it does, and that means 60 – 80 percent of the people in power are pretty corrupt, and they are the majority over the ones in there that are trying to do noble things. So, it’s a mess. I think it’s . . . The way the U.S. has been making decisions about how it interactions with the world has been largely driven by the self-interest of the people in power.
CHRIS: I think that a lot of those people are motivated or driven by ideology as well. I don’t deny what you’re saying, but even without getting into that and contradicting any of that, I don’t think that ideology is necessarily opposed to that. I think that it is perfectly compatible with that and would even add drive, add motivation to those other impulses. So I would presume that most of the people who have attained power and who have been really good at grasping power would have been able to climb that slippery pyramid with that really nasty poky point.
Ideology is a part of their make-up, a part of their frame, and when they look at themselves, when they assess themselves they think of themselves as fighting for the good, as fighting for a better world. I would argue that often that’s misguided. Like imperial Britain, for instance, when it was spreading its influence across the world, subduing the savages in Africa, I think a lot of those people perceived themselves as spreading civilization to these far-flung remote locations and that being a very positive thing, that they are helping them to become more British, more refined. When we look back at it, when we look back at the spread of imperialism, it seems really horrific the massacres that took place, and it is. To our sensibility, to our modern sensibility it is horrific. I think a lot of the motivation was to do good and make the world a better place, to have a positive influence.
So I was just bringing it back to that initial motivation that you were talking about. When you were describing your vision of combating the misery around the world, making the U.S. more enlightened, a more beautiful place, more of a beacon of hope and positivity, and being able to spread that to other nations, it’s hard not to think of that in imperialistic terms. All the models that I have from imagining that come from the CIA in Nicaragua, or England and India. That’s the framework that I have for a nation trying to make another nation a better place.
MATT: Well, I don’t necessarily think it would be by the nations doing it but the pockets of wealth. I think that’s one of the problems with these pyramids and climbing these pyramids of power is once you climb up it you now have a . . . because you spend so much time climbing this pyramid you have an interest in keeping this power pyramid basically in place: keeping the U.S. as a nation state, and keeping it as an identity, protecting it from . . . I mean, that’s a lot of what happens when you’re in power. You’re thinking what can I do to protect my country at the potential expense of other countries?
So, for me, I look at it as the wealthy people in the world need to be thinking about how can we make the world a better place. It doesn’t matter what nation you’re in. And so one of the things I think can happen is that we can use the Internet which has connected the world in ways that it has never been connected before. In the history of humanity, in the last fifty years, we have suddenly created a world where people all over the earth can communicate and connect and potentially start making decisions together in a way that it was never possible before. And I think if we start, if we figure out a way to do that better then we actually can just sort of start creating a human decision-making matrix or structure that is complete new, completely separate from this power pyramid that are all over earth. We can create this really broad decision-making power structure that has a lot of influence—not necessarily tearing down these other pyramids of power, but maybe actually able to tell these pyramids of power what to do.
If there was, say, in the U.S. everyone or the vast majority of the people in the U.S. were actually connected online and able to really, instead of relying on polls. You know, currently that’s how politicians [operate]: they stand up there in their power position and they let CNN or whatever do a poll on a thousand people on some major issue and somehow tells them what the country wants, and they use that as a way to convince people that they are listening to the country. But what if everyone in the U.S. instead of a thousand people actually a million people actually just said what they wanted, and they were able to do that quickly, not like a poll every few weeks, but like everyday they could say what they wanted and they were communicating. It would be very, very hard for the leaders to ignore that. Instead of these polls being a tool that a politician can pull out when they want to listen to some poll it becomes the will of the people actually clear and said and it becomes very, very difficult for a politician to just blatantly ignore that and just pay attention to other influences that are trying to get them to do their bidding.
CHRIS: If it was rendered that explicit then them ignoring it would be a pretty clear indication of . . .
MATT: Yeah. And that’s one of the things I’m trying to build. One of my projects is. . .
CHRIS: So it’s a communication vision and a clarity vision transparency?
MATT: Yeah. I’m trying to create a mass decision-making platform for millions or billions of people to do that, to communicate and say what they want, and have it be a reliable and trusted way to get an idea of the will of the people.
CHRIS: It seems like we’re moving in that direction, somewhat. That national identity, it’s been such a significant part of politics for such a long time, the hum-bug era . . . I mean since we’ve moved away from colonization nation states, I guess. . . from city states as we’ve grown into countries that’s predominated politics, but we’re slowly kind of drifting beyond that. I know there are polls that have been taken, well, not polls, focused upon young people, in particular, and their sense of identity politically is much more global, now. They don’t think of themselves as primarily U.S. citizens, or English citizens, or French citizens or whatever it may be. They think of themselves as citizens of the world. So, that trend it is translated into how people think of themselves.
MATT: Yeah. I actually think in a way it’s inevitable. I think, potentially, technology, we are the only technological civilization that we know about in humanity. If we could study, I can imagine different technological civilization on other planets or throughout time. It may be inevitable that they develop a technology that connects everyone on the planet which overtime, really, wears away the concept of whatever nations are tribal, situations they created in their early history and eventually it becomes a very global identity. Imagine if we colonized Mars or the moon. Those would probably end up being the new . . . I can imagine pretty big identities being revolved around your planet. Earth versus Martians versus Lunars; [inaudible; 25.38; both talking simultaneously]
But we’re no where near that.
CHRIS: Right. I think a lot about community. That’s a big part of my professional life, but it’s a big part of how I think about things, how I perceive things, generally, on a broader level. So, what you’re talking about, essentially, is creating kind of a global community. Maybe that already exists. So kind of harnessing that and expanding it maybe in some direction.
MATT: Yeah. Yeah. It is. You know with the social media networks, Facebook right now being . . . Facebook and Twitter, I suppose being the two biggest. Those are the beginnings of a potential global community. But they are in places like Reddit, Youtube, but they are not made to . . . the people, the architects of it, they’re not motivated by trying to make the world a better place, primarily. There are corporations but they are motivated to serve the interest of their shareholders which is to make more money, so I don’t think we’re going to get out of corporate profit motives the type of platform that really connects humanity in a way that really serves the mass population’s interest. It’s always going to be a web of connecting people and then how can we squeeze this web to get money out of it? How can we squeeze it and move the people so that they buy certain things so that we can get more money out of them?
So I think it’s going to be some sort of open source, egalitarian development system that we are going to have to come up with, a way to create the platform that really takes humanity where it could go to have a much better decision-making system. And maybe it’s not inevitable that we get there. We could probably go a very long time with some very bad systems
CHRIS: I think it will really go off the rails.
MATT: Yeah. And even a good system can be corrupted or co-opted by bad actors. So it’s going to be an interesting next fifty years. A very interesting time for us.
CHRIS: I think that’s for sure. Clearly there are a lot of things that are preventing people from being happy. These broad things—some of the things that you were touching upon earlier. Torture. Massive oppression.
MATT: Yeah. Basic necessities. Basic freedoms.
CHRIS: People not having access to clean water, or access to even rudimentary healthcare, access to education and other enrichment opportunities, real economic hardship where you’re living in houses that are tiny and unsanitary. When I went to India, there was a place where all these houses along the side of a river and they were beaten out of old oil drums. I assumed they contained oil, who knows what was in them. It could have been something even more toxic than that. And they were flattened out into sheets, and they built these little huts out of them along the river, and they were probably about the size of half of this studio. There would be families living in these. It was highly clear there was no plumbing, no basic amenities, things that we take for granted in America. I think that’s how a lot of people in the world live—these conditions that we would regard as just horrifically tough.
So those things, maybe not always, but often would get in the way of people experiencing joy. So, a core aspect of your mission, of your ideology, your vision, what drives you is to remove some of these impediments. But what is joy? What is it that gives you . . .? Those are the negative things. Those are the things that are standing in the way, but what is happiness? Do you experience happiness if get rid of all those things? If you had all your needs taken care of? If you have clean water, enough to eat? Shelter? Are you then happy? Or does happy have a positive component to it? Is it something that you actually have to reach for and strive for?
MATT: Yeah. Well no, I mean, having your necessities taken care of is not a guarantee of happiness. I mean, I think happiness is much more. It’s a very subtle thing and in a way, you’re really ultimately incredibly limited to how much you can affect the happiness of another being. I mean, lots of people have family members who have money, have jobs, but there are so many things that can make you miserable. So many addictions or fears or just the desire for love and companionship and not figuring out how to satisfy that. The way I’ve talked about it is there’s an internal world and an external world. In the internal world where I actually think it is more important than the external world and it’s really the place where you have the most power, but the internal world, you’re largely on your own for how you figure out how to, what will it take to actually make myself really feel good about life and feel good about the world. The tools and activities you do to try to deal with that are very different than the external world. For me, it’s meditation. It’s sort of my primary tool for sorting through that, for exploring that, looking at what’s alive in me, what forces are going on, what things feel out of place or discontent and trying to then figure out what can I do or change to make myself feel happier about life. And really that process is what drew me to activism, but not in the sense that if I can help everyone on earth have clean water it will make me happy. It was just sort of an extension of the things I was doing that were making me happy.
CHRIS: So a broadening of that?
MATT: Yeah, and it’s also about connection, cause I think part of happiness is you see other people that are like, maybe not happy, but they’re fired up about life and they’re doing things that are interesting, and then if you join forces with them or you connect with them, it’s still almost kind of selfish cause you’re like feeding off their joy and energy and it’s like feeding you [laughter], but a lot of the people doin-
CHRIS: You make it sound so vampiric, like they’re sucking the energy, you know.
MATT: It’s very mutual often.
CHRIS: Symbiotic. [laughter]
MATT: Yeah, it’s a symbiotic thing.
CHRIS: [inaudible 33:49] [laughter]
MATT: Exactly. I mean I don’t have a problem with the vampire analogy.
CHRIS: They get a bad rap. [laughter]
MATT: Yeah, I mean you are basically feeding off the energy of others, but, generally, you’re giving back.
CHRIS: [inaudible 34:08] Surely, that’s a pretty good trade-off. [laughter]
MATT: Well, I don’t really see how that metaphor, that part of it, doesn’t really-
CHRIS: We might be drifting. [laughter]
MATT: Yeah, we’re drifting a little bit. What were we talking about?
CHRIS: One thing that I find, something that I’ve thought about a lot is, here we are in this nation that is astoundingly wealthy, just astonishingly rich, the U.S. I talk to my daughter about this a lot. I have a daughter who’s 12 years old, and it’s come up frequently. I’ve done a lot of traveling to third-world, I’ve seen a lot of really severe poverty, so I try to tell her, ‘you know, you live in a really rich country and you are really rich.’ She’s like, ‘We’re not rich. We live in a two-bedroom condo. I know people who have these really huge houses and have pools in their backyard. We’re not even remotely rich. We’re barely better than poor’ is her perspective. So I try to convey some perspective, like there are people who are richer than us in the U.S. but on an international level, we are fabulously rich, and there’s even charts you can find on the internet that will gauge your wealth and give you a percentage internationally. I think, we’re in the top 1% of wealthy people internationally. So I bring this up on my phone and I show her, ‘look, you’re in the top 1% of most wealthy people in the world. You just stop whining about there being nothing to eat in the fridge.’
MATT: I’m sure that works very well.
CHRIS: Yeah she’s just like, ‘Ah, this is just total nonsense, I refuse to believe this.’ [laughter] But we are. We’re astoundingly rich, and there are people who are definitely not doing well, people who are really struggling. As a police officer, I interact with a fair number of those people professionally. So, people who are struggling with really severe mental health, maybe not getting the treatment they need, or other issues, medical issues, people who really don’t have enough to eat, people who’re grappling with addiction issues or children in those households whose parents are grappling with addiction issues. These are real severe problems, but, generally, even if you’re fairly poor in America, generally you’re going to have enough to eat, you’re going to have a place to live, you’re going to have a fairly clean, sanitary environment, you’re going to have access to education. You’ll have these things. So it seems like in the U.S. we should all be blissfully happy. We have these things. We’re living in the Promised Land. This is the land overflowing with milk and honey. We have everything. I know I have everything and I’m not considered wealthy by American standards. I have everything I could need. I don’t want for anything. Yet, it seems like in the U.S. there’s an epidemic of misery. It seems rare to encounter someone who’s like ‘yeah, I’m totally blissfully happy.’ Nobody’s gonna be blissfully happy all the time but even to encounter people like ‘yeah, you know, I generally feel like I’ve got it pretty good and I’m joyful.’ There’s so many people struggling with depression and chronic anxiety. It doesn’t seem like there’s any connection at all between having the wealth and experiencing the joy almost.
MATT: I wouldn’t say there’s no connection. I mean, if you don’t have the necessities of life, you’re at a massive disadvantage, and if you don’t feel safe going out of your home, or if you have violent oppression in your world, it’s very, I can’t even imagine how hard it is to have a happy life.
CHRIS: But it seems like depression should be a rarity. Well, not depression cause it’s a clinical condition, but being miserable should be this wild exception.
MATT: I don’t know. Life is hard so-
CHRIS: I interact with a lot of– I’m a really bad interviewer. [laughter] I spend a lot of time with students. I’m a school research officer. I spend a lot of time in high schools and I talked to a lot of students and what I hear over and over again from students is ‘school is such a hateful thing, it really sucks, it’s like being in prison.’ They draw that analogy again and again and again. ‘It’s like being in prison.’ And when you think about that in international terms, comparing it to the deprivation in some of these countries and you think about what’s actually a prison.
MATT: What’s actually a prison. Yes! [laughter]
CHRIS: And I work in Middlebury. I interact a lot with the teachers, with the guidance staff, and these are adults who are dedicated to enriching the lives of their students, for the most part. I mean, some of them are a little bit burned out and maybe don’t have as much drive as they could. But, for the most part, these are gifted individuals, intelligent individuals, who have a lot to share, who are committed to making their students’ lives better and richer. Yet, that’s the perspective, that’s the view.
MATT: I think for me it comes down to your internal world and it’s just that your internal world is such a challenge to figure out how to deal with our emotions, how to deal with our desires and our fears and there’s different solutions societies have come up with to try to help big populations navigate that. Organized religion is one solution that has some things going for it for making a population of people deal with their internal world, but it’s very authoritarian and telling people this is what all of these things inside you mean or this part of what you’re feeling means God is talking to you. But there’s a reason it’s used and it has been used throughout history because it can give people a structure for how to deal with their internal world and tell them, well, this is what the meaning of life is, this is what the path is, this is what you should care about and actually tell them, you’re happy because you’re doing this, this and this and you’re going to go to Heaven. But in our modern age, organized religion, at least in the U.S., it seems to have become, at least for a portion of the U.S., become far less powerful and so people are now, it depends what do they use instead of religion to figure out how they navigate this stuff and do their parents have a way to really teach them how to navigate your internal world.
CHRIS: I mean, there’s still a lot of deeply religious people in some parts of the U.S. where certainly a large portion of the people are deeply religious and there are people who are deeply nationalistic as well. I think we talked about that before, but these are things that provide a lot of identity, a sense of identity, a sense of meaning in people’s lives and I think you’re right that for a large segment of the population, these things are no longer relevant. They don’t have as much force as they used to have or no force at all. They’re really failing to…
MATT: But what it really comes down to, the challenge of every human life, is you have to figure out what’s actually important and you might have religions telling you one thing is important, you have maybe nationalistic people telling you this is what’s important and you have every friend, every person you know, telling you what is important and you have to actually decide what is important. And if you’re not going to just surrender the authority of that decision to another person or organization and just say, I’m going to trust this book or this person to tell me what’s important, you’re going to take the weight of that on yourself to decide what’s important, then you’re at the point every existential philosopher that’s ever lived and trying to figure out what the heck is life about. What’s important? What’s going to make me happy and how do I get there?
CHRIS: Well, that’s the essence of existentialism right there is that struggle to generate meaning without relying upon authority.
MATT: And a lot of those existential philosophers were not incredibly happy.
CHRIS: They didn’t come across as such, no.
MATT: No.
CHRIS: There was a lot of angst. That’s kind of the character and the literature of the philosophy. But there’s heroism there too.
MATT: Yeah, and honesty. They’re really trying to be honest and some of them are like, we honestly believe life sucks and it’s absurd, everything is meaningless and some of them, I think, sort of then went from that to, well, therefore, life can be anything and we can define its meaning. I don’t know how well they embodied that in their actual lives because I didn’t know them personally.
CHRIS: You didn’t hang with Camus?
MATT: No, no.
CHRIS: Dostoyevsky was a little before your time?
MATT: Yeah, and Dostoyevsky didn’t come off as incredibly happy to me.
CHRIS: Not the best dinner guest, no.
MATT: No, but the one who did is Thoreau. That is one of the reasons why I love Henry David Thoreau because it’s almost like you have to take as a premise that life is a gift and it is an amazing, glorious gift. It’s like, and I’m going to try to suck the marrow of life, you know? It’s almost like a thing you take on faith.
CHRIS: Like sucking the juice out of life.
MATT: Yeah, it’s all about the juice of life.
CHRIS: It comes back to the juice, I guess. But if you wanted advice about how to be happy, if that was something you were genuinely going to somebody seeking advice on that, it wouldn’t make much sense to trust the advice of somebody who was miserable.
MATT: Well, of course, and that’s why I’m drawn to writers who clearly are happy or they’re showing joy in what they’re doing and I kind of feel like fundamentally and this is something that does come up in meditation and you think about being mindful in a moment with someone or in any moment, you always have a choice of choosing a more positive outlook on the moment or choosing a more optimistic– It’s like, I could be talking to you and being like, this is so boring, you know, and this guy is droning on and on.
CHRIS: All the viewers are like, damn, yeah. Dude, I’m with you. I can’t believe he’s still talking and he has that annoying accent.
MATT: Yeah, he keeps interrupting the really interesting guest. But the amazing thing about the present moment is that the present moment is like a moment of magic. This conversation could go anywhere and even if you are doing everything you can to drive this conversation into the most boring area possible, I’m here too.
CHRIS: I just want to get back to the juice.
MATT: Well, see, maybe you don’t understand what the juice really is and I have a better idea and I can use what I say or not say to try to and I can be optimistic about it. I can say like, there is potential here for a really interesting interaction. There is potential here I could learn something from this moment and that’s a choice. It’s a choice to say I’m going to take my attention and look at the window towards something better in this moment versus the window towards all of the bad places it could go. Really, the universe is almost always split in two. There’s always a better direction to go and a worse direction to go. If you’re focusing on the worst direction and just fretting that and regretting it the whole time, you’re going to go where your attention is. And it may be that the best place for this moment to go is for me to get up and leave and if that’s the case, than you can get up and leave. You know, I could do that if I was really irritated or I felt like there was nothing to be gained from this.
CHRIS: But there’s potential for something sublime.
MATT: Yeah, and that’s a basic thing of meditation, where’s your attention? You know, they teach you to train on your breath or look at a candle or whatever, but that’s really just teaching you to take control of your attention. Are you going to pay attention to the subjects you don’t want to go into and talk about or are you going to try and see through the fog of what’s going on and what do you want to talk about? What is interesting? And then there’s always the choice of whether or not you talk. It’s a great way to reclaim what’s going on in the moment, is just to shut up and you don’t have to respond when someone talks to you.
CHRIS: So I think that we should just sit here in silence for the next 15 minutes.
MATT: Well, that’s something I’m going to do on my podcast. It’s called the Mindful Activist, but we’re going to talk about activism, but when I interview people, like this is one of the last interviews I did, I told this young woman I was interviewing that don’t feel rushed to answer my question, I don’t care if we have two minutes of silence while you really think about what you want to say. But it’s so hard to do that when the camera is rolling because if we sat here for 15 seconds of silence, we’d both feel like– It’d be like a rebellion, no one would watch anymore, the awkwardness would just rise and rise and rise. But I think awkwardness is like a pathway to growth. You know, if you think about it, if you’re like a tree, there’s growing pain. Awkwardness is just a type of growing pain. I think there’s actually great potential there in awkwardness. We shouldn’t be so afraid of it, we should sink into it.
CHRIS: Channel our middle school selves.
MATT: Yeah, you’re growing a lot in middle school. There’s awkward moments.
CHRIS: But talking about silence though. I think of our relationship, our connection together and I think of my path to happiness. Happiness is also very important to me. I think it’s something that we share as a basic kind of outlet, that basic perspective. And a lot of my first forays into joy–
MATT: Sorry, were you talking?
CHRIS: I was going to start talking about juice again.
MATT: Yeah, I’m still with you.
CHRIS: They were very solitary pursuits. Bringing that silence into myself, that kind of empty space and then expanding outward from there and one of the great things about the connection that I have with you, it was a bit bromantic when we were back in college.
MATT: Yeah, it was, like total Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but crusty.
CHRIS: We’d go for long hikes out in the woods at night and we would talk a lot for sure. We would share our ideas. We were excited, we were young, very enthusiastic. But one of the things that we did a lot together was just be silent. We’ve spent a lot of time being very quiet together. It’s rare to be able to do that with someone.
MATT: Comfortable silence with someone is such a gift. But if you think about that, what does that say about, if you’re in social bubble with someone, there cannot be silence. One of you has to be talking and then there’s this obligation that you have to be listening to what they’re saying. And there are some people that are like, if you’re in the bubble, there has to be talking or communication going on and they get very upset if you are not responding to their social cues appropriately, and then they start to reinforce and change your behavior. And you have to then decide am I going to comply with their expectations? And so it becomes, when you’re in their bubble, you’re like, oh, I’m complying with social expectations. And it’s such an uncomfortable situation. So yeah it’s magical to have a friendship where, or a relationship where you can talk or one of you can just stop talking and be silent for a long period of time and then start talking again and pick up on some thread. We would have different threads going, different topics, and never knew which thread one of us would pick up. It helps to be doing interesting stuff together, like walking through the woods or sitting by a campfire then if you’re just sitting in your dorm room or sitting out in public or something.
CHRIS: So is there any moment that stands out as iconic. When you think of joy, is there an image that flashes into your mind? I know there have been so many moments, so many interactions with beauty and times when you’ve drifted into this. I’ve been there for a lot of those moments, where you’ve drifted into a deeper sense of the sublime, but is there one that’s really iconic for you?
MATT: Ultimately it’s dancing. I think dancing is a great metaphor for life and I think it is actually one of the most enjoyable activities in life. Whether it’s dancing alone or dancing in a group of people. And another that comes to mind is doing art, and I really have gotten absorbed in doing a painting or something. And often I’m doing a lot of dancing while I’m doing it. I’m listening to music, I’m painting and then I dance around the room. And it seems like the best times in my life usually, whether it’s writing or even computer programming, I often will take dance breaks, because I feel that joy of life, it’s like you have your entire body move. And then while you’re dancing it helps the brain work and helps you think through stuff.
CHRIS: I like dance as a metaphor because there’s a degree of control, there’s a rhythm to the movements, to the way that you’re moving,the way that your body is responding to the stimulus, but there’s a degree of chaos as well. So it’s this mixture, it’s organic. And when it feels really good, you hit that kind of sweet spot where those two things are perfectly blended. I love that about art as well. When I’m creating a painting or even a poem, which is fairly straight, you’re using language, there’s a part which is really well thought out and very conscious and trying to express a particular idea, but there’s also an aspect of it when it’s good, where it just feels like the words are coming from somewhere else and I’m making these bizarre connections on different levels. This kind of intersection of the controlled and the chaotic.
MATT: Yeah. And that’s why I prefer the sort of free-form chaotic dancing as opposed to very structured formal dancing.
CHRIS: Although I’d like to see you in the outfits for ballroom dancing.
MATT: I’m sure I’d look good in them. But there’s a form of dance I’ve been learning called fusion dancing. Basically, they’ve taken swing dance and all these other forms of partner dancing and they’ve fused them all together, but they just create a couple of rules, a couple of basic guiding principles. And so you and your partner know these basic guiding principles. Again, you could do whatever you want, but you also have these subtle little hand signals and stuff to lead into complicated swing dance and lifts and all sorts of stuff. That’s another thing that I’ve been exploring.
CHRIS: Well, it’s been fascinating chatting with you. Even after having had so many conversations with you in the past, just sitting down and talking with you now there’s things to discover.
MATT: Yeah. It’s so interesting how the camera affects. It just creates this energy of what are we going to talk about while we’re being potentially listened to by the 10 or 20 people that watch this show. Literally tens.
CHRIS: I’ll share it on my website and that might double the viewers.
MATT: Maybe in time, maybe someday, over the next 10 years, you’ll make 10 to 20 viewers.
CHRIS: So until next time, drive safe, and may all your mischief be of the lawful persuasion.
