Ep. 83 - The Game of Life with Michael Collins

Whatever you do, do not lie to yourself, and when you know that you're lying to yourself, you need to stop. Don't lie to yourself. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. Welcome to episode 83 of Synchronicity. My guest this week is Michael Collins. I met Michael back in March when we did this Mindwave live event in Los Angeles with Yoshino, Justin Hopkins, all of the MindPod network podcasters, and had a phenomenal time out there. And I met Michael, who was a friend of Yoshinos, and we played board games the entire last day. Well, card games, really. Last day I was in Los Angeles, we played some splendor, we played some bang, we played some seven wonders, and I got a chance to know Michael as you do when you're playing kind of board or interactive games, you really get a sense of who someone is as a person and what they're about.

And I was struck with how inquisitive, friendly, easygoing, and smart Michael was. So I was like, "Hey man, when I get back to New York, how about we record a podcast?" And he was like, "Yeah man, I'm super into it." So this is that, that's what you're going to hear after this. We touched on a lot of things in this episode, really how curiosity and inquisitiveness and awareness, because Michael talks about you here in the early, he has memories of being a young child in the crib, like my memories don't really start kicking in until I was maybe like four or five flashes, fragments. I cannot say that I was abundantly aware and can recall what I was going through them.

But Michael Cannon, he seems to have carried this awareness with him throughout his entire life. And one area this really developed into his life is understanding how to get good at something. So whether it was soccer, when he was a soccer star, whether it was gaming, you know, he was in esports, professional gamer, or whether it's just kind of pursuing inner development and trying to understand what makes people tick, Michael has a real talent for discovering and inquiring about what's going on here, and when applied to kind of inner development or uncovering what's actually going on, I think it could be particularly beneficial too.

So you heard in that early little teaser there thing of Michael speaking, one of his key pieces of advice here is to not lie to yourself. And I think that's a great principle to apply to all aspects of life. Just don't lie in general. And I've mentioned this on the podcast before I'm sure, but lying is exhausting. I remember when I was a younger, not little kid, I think I would lie well into my teenage years. I lied all the time. I had lied to my friends about, you know, not being able to hang out when I wanted to be alone, I had lied to my teachers about doing homework, I had lied to my parents about skipping school or God knows what, and it was just exhausting to have to keep up with all of these lies.

It doesn't feel good to lie. You know that. I don't have to tell you this stuff. But one thing Michael and I talk about here is how insidious lying to yourself can become because when you start believing your own bullshit, it really hurts you in a lot of substantial ways and this can be, you know, not acknowledging shadow aspects of yourself, negative qualities, which we all have, right, like, that's not, I never, the reason I do not ever position or pretend to be any type of spiritual teacher is I got my own shit going on. When I got it all figured out, you will hear me say, I'm ready to be a teacher, but I'm not close.

But, you know, not acknowledging those aspects of yourself can be a fundamentally very, very bad thing to do. That's the best way I think I can say that. But Michael, really, we just, listen, I'm going to cut it off here. I always go on too long at the beginnings. I know there's a lot of episode here. I just want to get to a few quick things before I do get to the episode. One is I'm now on Patreon. If you want to become a patron of this show, you can contribute as little as $3 a month and help me get some more episodes out, speaking of which, because I got some very generous contributors on Patreon, which you can find the show, patreon.com/synchronicity, because I got some generous sponsors, including Patrick Nemchik, who continues to get his name shouted out because he contributed $100.

Amazing, you are, Patrick. Basically, I'm going to turn this show into five or six episodes a month, so we were doing a weekly, which was four a month. Now you can expect at least five, probably six. So I'm ramping up the production here. I'm having a ton of conversations. Part of the reason I'm doing this is people have been asking for more episodes, and the other reason is I have been having so many conversations with really excellent and awesome people. I'm developing a backlog, and I don't want to wait too long to put some of these out there. So it seems to be, we'll see if it drives me totally insane or not, but I don't think it will.

That's it. That's all I'm going to do for the beginning part of this episode. There's all the other stuff in the outro if you really want to tune into that. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode with Michael, just a hell of a dude. I don't think he has a website to check out, but if he does, I'll make sure to get that out to you in the email or something that goes out. By the way, if you want to join the Synchronicity community either on Facebook or the email community, syncpodcast.com will get you everything you need to know about the show. We're growing all over the place, having a great time.

Thank you for the reviews. We're going in and a hundred reviews. That's super awesome. Love you guys. It's really turning into an amazing community, which I will dedicate a whole intro to at one point to talk about what's going on here, but really it's been amazing and genuine, genuine gratitude for you for listening and supporting in whatever ways you have. All right. Now I'm really going to be quiet. Without further ado, here is Michael Collins. It's interesting because you have like a clearly a competitive or not even competitive, but ability to do really well in competition. I mean, I noticed that just from the board games we were playing and then you mentioned you've been a star soccer player.

It's interesting. I'm sure you've reflected on it somewhat kind of the ties. We've started, by the way. This is it. Thank you for coming on, but there is like an interesting thread that kind of runs through that. Have you examined what that is or how you kind of arrive at that mind state or what allows you to slip into it? Yeah. Growing up, I was very aware since I was, so my earliest memories were around three or four years old, laying on the floor as a baby and seeing the sun coming through the living room. Oh, wow. And I remember coming online at that point and taking my hand and seeing my little tiny hand and running it against the sun rays.

And then the next memories were running around at four and five. I was just a very aware kid from early, early early on. And because of that, I was just a real watcher and I watched everything and I tried to understand everything that was around me and I was fascinated with anything physical, like blocks, three dimensional space things, objects, weights. I liked anything with weight. I like I can juggle pretty well and stuff. I never practiced it, I just can do it and understanding thought patterns later, logic patterns. My dad would raise me on chess and he wasn't like a super good chess player, either self admittedly by him, but it was the fact that he would talk me through things, rewind moves, playing things to me and kind of highlighted to me that there's a world outside of just the physical and that there is a, you know, that the predictions can be made in this world and results can be yielded from this from that world in the physical world, if you can tap into it.

I mean, obviously, my own language, that's not what he said, but that's what I took away from it. So I learned how to learn and I didn't have a lot of friends, like my friends, I didn't have too many friends. My siblings didn't really hang out with me, even though my sisters, there were girls and they like to hang out with their friends. And my brother was 14 years older than me. So when I saw him, it was like, oh, this cool rebel guy who's also, he's a punk rocker and he's been playing music ever since he was 16, LA, LA local guy always moving around. And when he would come, it would be like, oh, like that older guy, it's coming up visit.

Not your peer. Right. Right. Right. And he was always cool. And I was like, oh, he's the coolest. And he's like my dad too. He's like, I was called second dad, like, I mean, I call him in my own head second dad. But yeah, so I started to learn that I can, I can look several steps ahead in time because I wrote a loan. I played chess by myself a lot. So I would just sit there and just, you know, I know what move I'm going to make. So I thought it was kind of silly, but my dad told me, no, there's an actual thing to be gained from playing against yourself. And sure, what I ended up doing was taking all these moves and seeing that, no matter what I did, if I kept marrying myself, the person who tend, the person who tend to loss was the one who took the first move.

So I don't know, I always applied that to myself when later when I started taking debate in high school, which was very short lived, there was only one class that I took. But I learned a lot from it. And one of the things I learned from the chess is I can apply that to anything. If I look out several 12 steps ahead, I can gain at least shortly some predictive skills that are highly probable. And then when I played soccer and I played, well, I first, my dad ran me through all the sports. He was a sports guy. He coached basketball for my sisters, both my sisters also played basketball and he coached both their teams.

He also coached softball and he played softball. No one played soccer in my family, but I took to it. And it was pretty fun. I liked the whole camaraderie and running across the field. Yeah, I played soccer when I was younger and I hated it. I remember I got ejected from a game when I was like eight from our county soccer program because a ball got wedged in a little kid's crotch and I was trying to get it out and I was trying to like scoop it out, but like I didn't get it out the first two or three times. So I was just like kicking him really hard and they thought I was doing him religiously, but I wasn't.

I was just excited that I had an opportunity to play with the ball. I like the orange wedges at halftime. That was always fun. That's my favorite part. That's my favorite part of soccer. That was actually one of my favorite part of my body was like, give me those energies. It's the best. I mean, it's like the best thing that you do. So okay, but here's what I'm trying to eke out of you like, how did you go? So chess taught you that there's kind of like a mental or intellectual component of having some logical framework to apply towards not only chess, but everything and life at large. But I know from our conversation and to give people some background here and I'll do it in the intro of course, is we met at the Mindwave event, your friend of Grant, also known as Yoshino.

He has the artist decoded podcast. We met the day of the event, but also the next day we played board games for like eight or nine hours, which is I think a tremendous way to get to know someone. It's really you just get to learn what they're about and some of the questions you would ask me on our smoke breaks were like pretty deep profound stuff and you were putting me on to a ton of people like Jordan Peterson and how, how, what were the leaps or the transition points from going from the intellectual transcending the physical to now some dimension of either esoteric, a cult or spiritual dimension, like where, where did that start to or where did that come from?

It's just a natural byproduct of your general awareness because being aware as a baby is fucking nuts. You know, like I definitely do not remember being aware at that age. So what do you ascribe that to? Oh, wow. Wow. You can, you can ask some really good questions, man. Jeez, that's a really good question. Um, yeah, I'm taking it exactly from where, where, where, where we left off. I was raised Catholic and I went to Catholic school and that, that whole process taught me a lot. My dad was very, they considered themselves Catholics, but he, he was very much a man of logic and, and reason first.

And, and so when I questioned him about religion, he would tell me, you need to be there. It's for your education. It's good. Just please try to, to, to fit in and I go, okay, you know, he, he was begging me. He's like, you can't keep moving schools because I was getting kicked out. To me, I, I wanted to become a priest because I thought a priest was a Jedi Knight, like similar to Star Wars. Right. And, and because they said that, I mean, they literally said they're about truth and justice. Am I okay? Well, what is truth and justice? The closest image I, that my brain could get was a Jedi. So superimposed it and I was like, Oh, well, duh, you know, they're servants of the people, they're servants of, of their community and the people around them because also my further evidence was that's exactly how you describe Jesus.

Right. So then why are all your actions contrary to this? Why, why are they about money? Why are they about career status? And I didn't necessarily blame them. It was just, I had questions. Right. Questions. I would ask those questions without any intention of, of, of any ideology or personal gain of my, of my own. Right. And it seemed to just really piss them off and every single time and I didn't know what it was. I was genuinely a naive child growing up. Um, I thought, you know, the best in people and I thought the best in everything. And it took me a lot, a lot of my youth to get hit in the head a lot from more malicious and in nefarious people, right, in order to figure that out.

And then I had to take that into account. And so that whole process of going through that in the eighth grade, knowing that I'm there for multiple reasons, for multiple, multiple dimensions of one, I'm here, because I had a good science class, you know what I'm, you know, I had really good teachers. Right. And to separate that. So I had to come to grips with that, there's multitudes to, to our reality and that this is just reality. It's just something you have to deal with and cope with. I'm kind of like Heidegger's primordial coping, right, um, I, which I, which I, I subscribe to for the most part, which is what, can you explain that to me?

I'm not familiar. Um, he, he has the idea that, um, and he's a phenomenon. I know he is. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not abundantly familiar with his work and writings and thinking, um, the primordial coping idea is that, um, shit happens to you from the outside world and you have to cope with it in some way. And depending on how you cope with that, uh, is at the beginning process of your lens, uh, your lens for your worldview. And that this is constantly happening and that this is the world, you know, coming in and then you, you, that's how somebody can, you know, it's people who lie to themselves or generally have a, a bad habit of lying to themselves can get into a habit of altering their worldview lens of, of, and just every lens that consecutively comes from new experiences that they gain.

So they meet a new person and they're being friendly and this woman has a habit of seeing jealousy in every single woman that she sees. So then she paints her as being jealous with every word that she says. And then that's how her lens gets crafted and she can't get out of it. I see. It's an interesting theory. I think I basically agree with it, but I wonder, you know, I always, I have a sneaking suspicion or intuition that the things that we see out there in the world ultimately is less like they're coming into our orbit and more like we're drawing them in. There's some psychic connection there and that's why there's ultimately not a differentiation between the inside and the outside.

I'm abundantly fascinated with the connection of the inner world affecting external reality, you know, material reality. I absolutely, I mean, this podcast is called synchronicity because in no small part that that is a often very often occurring phenomena, which is, you know, something out there happens in the world that corresponds specifically to some internal thought or process or feeling that's called synchronicity. So there is a connection. Lots of people have looked at it over the years. I am personally of the belief that we're in constant connection, like you said, and this interconnectedness in general that creates our reality.

I do, why I say I agree with it basically is, you know, maybe that's the underlying premise there, but the actual dualistic universe thinks out, you know, we do have a problem. We have a relationship with external stuff and I do think we have to cope or craft our particular lenses to kind of process or filter reality. I mean, we think we were talking about this, but we all take it for granted, but what we experience is external reality is just filtered through a very small part of our brain, you know, so we can make sense of the patterns and rhythms and intensity of what's going around us. So I'm not to get off track, but I find that to be a fascinating principle and it makes a lot of sense because people do filter reality out there through their particular lenses.

So I think we were getting at, correct me if I'm wrong, is that being able to cultivate multiple perspectives, because you're talking about the dimensions of your lives in school, you know, was obviously something that helped you, but continue, I didn't mean to cut you off. Oh, no, no. And then that perfectly fits in because I often think about that too. I am very much into different horror writing and like Lovecraftian things and not even just in the horror aspect, but life coming in, everyone's, you know, subsets about life coming from afar. But I think it's more likely that you have competing life coming from within that seems to be the pattern for DNA, you know, it seems to low, low, low to high.

So yeah, and I often think about, you know, consciousness communicating with us would most likely occur in our dreams before it would ever occur in physical contact. So the lighter the body, right, and the dream body is obviously has less density than the physical body. And I don't even mean to get too woo-woo or esoteric here. We're just saying when you're dreaming and you know you're dreaming, you know, sometimes you can go through walls or you can float a little bit or you can do crazy shit. That's what I mean by it's lighter, you know, you can take that as an actual dimension of reality, which many people do, including myself, including, you know, and pick or choose any wisdom tradition from South America to India, you know, Tibet to wherever you want to go.

North America, you know, dream bodies are viewed as absolutely real states of consciousness and also with their own functionality too. And I think the lighter, the less gross material, you know, the grosser the reality, the more material it is, the more solid it is, you know, the harder it is to do things, right? We want to go, you know, quench our thirst, we have to go find physical water or something with water in it and ingest it into our body. In a dream, it can be as simple as I'm thirsty, you manifest something in front of your face, you even drink it, or you just think that you're not thirsty and you're not.

So, you know, the dimensions of reality are more flexible as we kind of start going into less physical things and I absolutely believe that dreams, I mean, this is a whole big thing. I'm helping my friend, Stephen Camp, have put together a course on dreams. I mean, I find them have always been fascinated with them and think they are functional in so many different ways. But again, sorry to cut you off. No, no, no, no, no, it's good. I agree with you because I think I actually refer to you because I've read like a life in its origins and the serpent, I forgot the full name of the book, but in a couple of other things, and I've come to this conclusion that the classification of life on this planet should, if you really want to classify it correctly, it would have to begin at the DNA level.

Right. And because that's what everything that has life on this planet has, if you removed everything that had DNA from it, you would be left with primarily rock, water, you know, the major chemicals. Yeah. Yeah. Elements, correct. And so you see that like, oh, you know, you drop DNA into this, it has, you would have to first, you know, categorize it. What are the characteristics of DNA? Well, it has the ability to replicate itself into different forms to the point that it can do it to the point that it can become its own food source to itself. You know, and you think about the snake eating its own tail, you're like, oh, the rainbow serpent.

It literally is DNA. Like that was the, that was the literal translation physically in an image of what DNA is. Okay, it eats itself, it's on tail, like in childhood space, it's rainbow in color, kind of makes sense. But I call ourselves, I think, I try to think in terms of DNA aliens first, the four humans, because that's how I thought it was a sentient species. And I came over here, I'll be like, oh, this planet has one species on it called DNA. And these are, we are characteristics of it, you know, so it somehow created an environment to create life, stepping up to the point that it created our brains to this way.

So there's some sort of predetermined path there, which we know the way that DNA is structured. And it's a blueprint like nature, just the technology in DNA itself is, is enough of a mystery. Like, if we really want to understand the universe, let's start with DNA first. And then, and then work our way out because that's going to tell us this thing can travel through space, what's his face, the guy Francis Crick, who wrote the, he's the one who coined the theory on panspermia. And he's also the guy who co-discovered DNA with the help of LSD. What's panspermia? The theory that life can move from planets via vehicles like asteroids.

And that that's how seeding occurs. Well, what do you think then of this idea that mushrooms are actually the intelligent consciousness that originally populated this world and that the spores would theoretically be able to stay alive and permeate an atmosphere and get into planets from space. And then if you combine that with, you know, the stoned ape theory from McKenna and where our consciousness as homo sapiens really seemed to evolve specifically was when we started domesticating animals. And that's where an area where psilocybin and other mushroom species can thrive. And then that's when we linguistically took these huge quantum leaps from basically, you know, communicating very sparsely to developing languages and symbols and all of these things, which anyone who's done any amount of psychedelics, whether it's mushrooms, LSD, I'm sure DMT, you notice that your linguistic centers are just totally ramped up.

And you know, at a certain point, if you do them to a certain point, like it just sticks. Like I'm sure I don't know, I can't pinpoint it to the exact one, but there is a mushroom trip I took in college, or I had in college where I came out being able to speak a lot better. Like I was just like able to communicate my thoughts like a hell of a lot better free flow, whereas before it wasn't that easy, it wasn't that lucid. So I mean, that's an interesting theory that these things could potentially travel. So what's the conception? Is it like something like DNA or some organism would have gone, traveled potentially on an asteroid from somewhere?

What's the theory there? So Francis Crick put forth the idea that if you look at the strabs of DNA and I could be wrong on this, I'm doing a different layman, I hung out with some researchers at a medical university that I used to work at and do IT for, and I'd get into these long conversations with them about DNA and they recommended some books that I read. And for what I can understand, there's two parts of code. Like the Gatica code is the part that we derived, the blueprint model, which is the part that says like you have blue eyes, you have this, and they understood that because the code looked the same across multiple people and they can tell, this must be the thing for this, but then there's this.

Right. Yes. So it's really small, I think like 1% if that much of DNA, the strand itself, they don't understand how to read that language yet. But the way that I understand how DNA produces and how it's constantly recording, I can't help but feel that it's one giant history and that's what it does. So if you think of it as like a library that we don't know how to read yet, Francis Crick theorize then on that notion that this library is so old that it has to be ancient in comparison to the Earth's age and possibly the solar system. So there's in his, so his idea is that possibly could not have originated from this solar system.

Because it's predates it, right? It predates it. And the system and the machinations of DNA is like, I mean, we are the mystery right now. And from us anyways, you know, understanding who we are and what DNA is, that's going to answer. I figured out like trying to figure out how to ask good questions growing up and how to get how to get to the gist of things that the best thing was to really start to hone down and figure out what is DNA and what is life and what in that relationship to environment. So let me ask you this, this is a very empirical way or deductive way of getting to the root of things, but what does the idea or concept of something like Maya or some sorrow?

Are you familiar with those terms? I've heard them, but I don't quite know the entire histories are there. So the idea of Maya is a Vedic concept, which is that the world as we experience it is essentially illusory, that it is much more akin to a dream like we would lay down and dream than it is actually how we like to think of the substantial real place. This potentially is only, you know, this reality, this three dimensional world, we live in the earth and everything else is really all there is. Maya basically says, I mean, it's a complex cosmology, but essentially that it's created by this feminine energy that kind of is the veil that is over all of our eyes.

So we can't actually see what's going on. And then it also has a function. It's not just like, well, this is some illusory thing. Good luck. And Buddhism, the same idea or similar ideas expressed through the idea of samsara, which is there's six realms of cyclical existence. And the idea is eventually, or the aspiration or intention is to get off the wheel, so to speak, this cyclical six realm existence because it's perpetuated by basically not having a correct view of how things work and you're caught in suffering. And so the six realms, starting at the lowest are the hell realm, the realm of the hungry ghosts, the animal realm, the human realm, the demigod realm, and then the God realm.

And each one corresponds to a particular type of mental affliction, each type of kind of like a negative thing that you would be concerned with and something that dictates kind of the reality around you. So in addition is potentially being thought of as actual places, you know, the human and you can also see that they overlap, like the human world overlaps with the animal world, like we know that happened. So each realm, at least in Buddhism, can be taught thought of as an emotional or psychological state as well. So we can live in each realm being humans. We have the ability to basically mentally travel through any realm.

Like if things are really shitty around you and everything is seeming like, let's say you're in jail and you're getting raped every day, you're in hell. You know what I mean? Your reality is different than my reality right now. So you can actually travel through these things not only physically, but in your own mind. So let's say everything is around you is amazing, but you're super depressed. You're still in a hell realm. You could be in the realm of a hungry ghost where you just can't get enough of whatever you need, which is the hungry ghost realm is typically described as beings with really, really tiny mouths and huge necks and stomachs.

So they can just never be satisfied because to put something in their mouth that takes them forever and to actually be full is just impossible. So my point is is that these are ideas and then again, the ultimate idea is to transcend these realms of inherent suffering and karma is something that perpetuates this and to be aware of the root causes of what's creating, you know, suffering and then potentially to either get out of these realms and there's pure lands, these Buddha realms, there's merging with, you know, the essence of everything. And there's also the idea that you know that there's something else, you know, there's a way off the wheel, you know, there's a way out of cyclic existence that is perpetuated by ignorance.

But yet you make the idea or the vow to keep returning to this world or any cyclical world to bring basically fairy people across the Siddhartha thing from this world to a world of not suffering and until that's done, you vow to stay there. So the reason I asked this and bring this up is such a beautiful idea. It is a beautiful idea, right? And it's one I think that resonates with quite a few people. So the other thing is why I bring this up is, you know, if we're looking at DNA or physical structures, I wonder how to fit that into the cosmology is I do tend to believe and I don't mean in the sense that I don't operate like this world isn't real and I don't have responsibilities and obligations, but I do tend to operate that this world is far more like a dream, not that we shouldn't take it seriously, but not as substantial as we like to think.

And I think there's mounting evidence whether people want to say we're living in a simulation or a computer or whatever it is, that things don't really work exactly like how we thought they worked. Even when we're looking at the strict sciences, you know, when you start moving into physics and quantum physics, that shit is just tripping everyone up, like people are getting the smartest people in the world. They're getting freaked out because things make less and less sense as you drill down to smaller and smaller sizes, they just do not act out. They work on a Newtonian level and that tends to play tricks and this is something that we can't really consciously think about every single day.

You know what I mean? Glory that, you know, things in quantum reality don't work the way we think. So things can be at two places at once and things on, you know, thousands of, you know, very far distances awake and have an influence. You know, we don't, we can't hold that in our mind and drive to work. Hello, listener of Synchronicity. You may have heard me mention it in the beginning of this episode, but I am now on Patreon. Become a patron of this show and get a knowing satisfaction that you are helping. Get a free show out every single week and more now. You can also get access to all the music in this song with, in this song.

That makes no sense. You can get all the access to the music that you hear in this podcast because it is all mine. There's some other cool things like getting your name mentioned in the credits. You can even become a guest. I'm horror in the show. If you want to throw serious D Narrow, you can become a guest on the show. Just make sure you got something interesting to talk about. Check it out at patreon.com/synchronicity. What is it back to the episode? I think that like the distance between those thoughts are even closer though. Because we can, not even though, but because we can even conceptualize the possibility of those realms, tells us that there is a, that's undiscovered country for something.

But at the same time, you're also correct because the both are actually correct. Because all I see in the human experience is that we are crafted, maybe not even crafted, but we've grown or we've evolved or this is the point is that we can experience the unknown and the known. We do the both and we don't merge them. So materialist science completely goes the wrong way and they found a really good tool that works really well and it does in this dimension yield results. However, there's whole other dimensions that does not apply to, it's just not applicable to morality. It does not give you any information to make an informed idea of how things ought to be versus how things are.

And then we know that that dimension exists because we all have family, we all know what love feels like, we all know what fear feels like, we all know what emotions feel like. But someone argue that's just a physiological thing happening, that's certain chemicals combining with your nervous system, giving you the feeling of happy. I mean, that is just to be clear as much as I agree with you and think that those things transcend just purely the physical dimensions, you know, there are many scientists whose careers and institutions are built on the premise that no, that is not correct. That's you're just think you're experiencing that because you've got the right trigger of dopamine and serotonin.

And the problem is, for me, that that is a whole, that guy is trying to prove a point. He's not trying to discuss. So right off the bat, I would have to question his intention on why to slam another idea. I feel as a scientist and as a man of truth, I have no problem juggling multiple ideas at the same time. It doesn't hurt me to do that. And I can still have a baseline of where I choose to, where I choose my axioms to be from where I'm going to make decisions from. Sure. That can stay intact. And I can still question everything along the periphery of that. And it's not going to hurt me. Those people have an actual financial and status to protect.

Right. And so I question the merit of how dedicated they are to truth. For my own personal experience, I've sacrificed quite a lot to know what I know and know what I don't know, and most of that has been to take on society and challenge its predetermined notions of capitalism and things like that and live a very modest life to buy myself time to read and to learn and teach myself. And in doing so, I've had people love me and people completely disgusted with me. I can't control that. And the one thing that I see amongst the people that are disgusted is they have a vested interest in the worldview that they have and they will defend it to the death or their very degrees of that.

Right. You know, maybe not so intense. Well, no, maybe until the ego death. You know what I mean? Until the point where that kind of structure is no longer on the defensive and trying to prove something. And I mean, I think what happens is because there are people who have vested interest in a particular perspective or viewpoint and especially when financial security gets weaved in there that then can trickle down to the culture at large where you have whether it's something as ridiculous as dinosaurs didn't exist and we have fossils and shit, you know what I mean? Like to, you know, not believing that, you know, something like psychic phenomena are actually happening because we can't replicate the test or the results sufficiently automatically it's out, you know, even though it's a phenomenal people experience and just throw it out.

It's devalued. Yeah. At best, it's devalued. At best, it's like, oh, well, what's put that somewhere where it's a thing and it's probably just a statistical chance and you don't have to worry about it. But I mean, yeah, that's a huge part of what's going on. And I like what you're saying about kind of playing within the confines of the system to buy your time to observe, to learn, to discover what truth is for you, because that's something. When I was in Catholic school and the seventh and eighth grade, kids are already talking about their careers. Right. No, of course. And I'm like, I don't know what I want to do.

How do you guys, I'm like, first of all, I'm still rectifying that this entire institution is not supporting, is a complete, like, predicated on a lie that's supporting a myth of a man who is of high moral and telling everyone to act this way, but then doing the opposite. Right. And you guys are, you know, discussing about your careers and your parents are drilling into you. Their parents are very intense and which Catholic high school they were going to go to. So that which college they were going to go to. Right. The whole thing out. And me personally, I'm glad that my family got a divorce. Like, it was, it was troublesome, but, but by going down to those depths, I learned more about life than I could have ever asked for or learned any other way, especially about picking yourself up and, and responsibility and accepting burdens.

I learned that the most through that, through that course, and I appreciate it tremendously. So, yeah, I've studied like Eastern philosophy, not, not too much when you were telling me all that about the, the Helen, I remember hearing about that in a through an Alan Watts lecture. Right. And I remember, and I'll tell you what I remembered when from then when you said it now. The way that what I feel is going on is that there is two languages that are happening. The language of what is seen and the language of what is on the scene and that these two very broad languages or how we, or I say language because of how we interpret these two things.

Right. Because it can change, you know, we didn't always have the scientific method. We didn't always have English, you know, it was different languages were obviously confined by that. But how we interpret what is seen versus what is unseen, that our brains are, are made that way to the two hemispheres are designed that way. So automatically, first of all, I don't think that anything is separate in the universe. I think it's a natural nature scientifically and spiritually. I just think they haven't converged to the point that we fully grasp it. Or I wouldn't say that they haven't converged. I would say that we haven't sufficiently developed our awareness to realize that they were never separated, you know, that's probably a better way of going about it.

I guess I was more or less talking about as a culture. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, and what do you have a huge divide and atheism and religion. And you know, they all leave out that there's people with nefarious and tense outside of ideologies like that, that that vie for power, vie for influence and that those actions can reverberate through the lenses of those others, where it seems like it's, it's a religious issue. It seems like it's a scientific issue. I was just talking about this. I did. It's like a lot. Yeah. I did something. I did a podcast this morning with a guy who came to the mind wave event out in LA and his podcast is called Choose Your Religion.

And we were talking specifically, I was making sure to say that I don't think religion is a bad thing. I think the institutions that have surrounded religion and the people and individuals and collectives that have tried to co-op them and use them as they realize they're a potential source of gaining power are certainly to blame. Especially when we're talking about the Abrahamic religions, you know, if you're not paying attention to the mystical side of those, which even though they've been suppressed through all of them, you know, Sufism, you know, Christian mysticism, Kabbalah, you know, they don't get the same place.

The major traditional parts of the religion, but yeah, man, there's, they're, they're absolutely are beneficial aspects to everything in your life. And this is another thing you were talking about, you know, about the divorce, you know, relationships ending, careers ending, transitions, you know, sicknesses, health issues, all our opportunities, if we allow them to be to learn more about ourselves and by proxy the world at large. The problem is, is when we rail against it or blame someone else or blame external circumstances, we miss that opportunity, oftentimes that's still our natural habit, like no one likes going through a shitty experience and like is like, this is great, I'm going to learn so much.

But, you know, as linear time moves on and we get a little more distance on that regard, typically it's, it's relatively easy to find the transformational aspects and the importance of what was going on. You know, I'm specifically trying to learn how to remember that when shitty things are going on because shitty things going on won't stop, that was essentially one of the noble troops, right? I mean, it's like, there, people are going to get old, people are going to get sick, people are going to die. That shit is going to happen no matter what, like there's no, no escaping that in cyclical existence.

So, railing against it is not the right approach, trying to figure out a way to be with it and understand what's being communicated by those things, I think ultimately is what we're trying to do here. So, I want to shift gears just a little bit and connect to two realms that I think are connected, but how you were a professional gamer, right? And we were playing board games and you're talking about soccer. I think there is, well, a lot of people shit on video games and I grew up playing them. I've been a huge video game player my entire life, I've thoroughly enjoyed, you know, board games like RISC and some of the longer ones when you were kids, what do you view their function as?

Because just from talking to you briefly and getting to know, you're one of the smarter people I've ever met just in terms of being able to convey your viewpoint and some of your thought processes and then your opinions on the world, you're a game player. So like, what do you think the value, if there is a value to playing games is and, you know, yeah, that's a question, I don't have any thought of that. I've thought about that a lot. It always, I always like to start from an emotional standpoint for every person when talking about generalities because it's whatever, what are you there for? Somebody can be playing World of Warcraft and be there to escape their life, right?

And they do not want to be anywhere near anybody. The game does have elements of it that are mechanically pleasing. So there's these two things, right? You have, well, not two things, but you have mechanically pleasing and that's all right, there's a lot of guys who play video games because it's a world that makes sense as opposed to the regular world that doesn't necessarily always make sense. You know that if you do X, Y, Z, that B will be the result of this and we like that. It's reliable and you can keep doing that and then you have the social aspect and it become, become this thing that's, we do together and we also hang out together.

It very much becomes communal. Right. And, and for me, video games started with just the internet and getting an ICQ for the first time. I remember having a pen pal when I was 11 and talking to this girl who was 13 from Canada and we would go back and forth and I would like learn that there was a place called Canada and that's really far and that this girl is from there and she's cool and she's smart about as a trampoline that she told me about and that the world was so much bigger than this. And then you throw the video game element into it becomes like that. But to get away from that, like I don't, I don't gain to get away from life.

I love life. Right. I really like it. So when I play games, I only play for the mechanical aspect as well as the camaraderie aspect. I'm very much of the, of the idea of competition, meaning to run together. And that, and that there's a, there's a certain thing, especially amongst males, obviously, of running through it with a herd with, with each other, hunting together, doing physical things and very things that like require precision that if white make one mistake, you could be fatal. Right. You're not doing just, just imagine running through a forest, that full kilt. Just doing that is a dangerous endeavor.

Right. You run into a tree or something. Yeah. Break your ankle. I mean, if you're by yourself, like, you, you know, you got to get back to civilization. And so precision and accuracy are very hardwired in, in us. And by doing those things, there's, I think there's a place in Nirvana that could be reached where, where me and I've had this experience, I'll tell you one story specifically that could capture this. I was, I was very, very high, I was doing dabs and, and I had woken up, I did some dabs and I was playing this game called Heroes of the Storm. My buddy was on there and he was visiting up north and he was just down the street at somebody else's house.

So we were fairly like, get a couple blocks away. And we both woke up and everyone was still asleep and we're going to go, go float down the river that day. And he's a really good hots player, never played professionally though. And he's a nurse actually, extremely precision. He's a good, he's anything he does. He's good at. And so we're playing hots and we had this thing called Mumble where we could talk like voice over. And I'm seeing there talking to him the whole time and calling out commands. I'm healing. He's the, he's the assassin. We went four versus two and we killed them all. The whole game talking to him, giving him communication and he's not talking to me at all.

Right. And he's perfectly in sync with me. And I just thought, oh, he's in the zone. He's not talking. Sometimes that happens. Destroy the guys we win in like under 10 minutes and, um, and then he, I've seen that going, man, that was so awesome. Jeff. Oh, so awesome. Jeff. Jeff. Does it say anything? Finally he goes, can you hear me now? And I go, yeah, he's like, oh my God, my whole thing was muted the whole time. I didn't hear one word you said. And I was like, dude, you were 100% on every single call I was making as if you could hear me. He's like, he's like, yeah, I was just in the zone and I just, I felt everything.

And I, and I've had that happen several times, me and one of my other pro friends that used to be a pro gamer with a team called EG. And we play a lot and him and Jeff are the only people I've ever had that with where, where we have a psychic connection and we are moving. It's like, it's like Ironman war machine. Just like, boom, boom. Like I shoot over his head. He knows to duck. I don't have to say one word and we're just covering each other on each other's block. And that's what I live for when I play. I found that out through soccer and these things that if you reach this point where you're, it's just reflex.

It's just in the moment, you're so fucking present. Right. And, and at the same time you're harnessing both your, both your entire brain is full killed. I'm learning things from the past. I'm watching how that guy moved where he's slow, how he's, he's moving in the future. I'm already plotting out a strategy to take advantage of the thing that I learned in the past while doing this presently and having this problem in the present that I have to handle, having all those things on and going on makes me reach a level that transcends my physical body. Right. I know exactly what you're talking about completely.

And it's awesome. Yeah. Well, I mean, and this is so good and like it's not winning. It's syncing up with somebody. Right. It has nothing to do. I could care less about winning, but, but by syncing up with people, what ends up happening is a result of that is you tend to win. Right. And some of my favorite moments of my life is when I'm seeped up with my team and I'm facing five other dudes that are all completely synced. Winter lose. That was the best fucking game. And I love every person on that other team because I got to see them at their best and they saw me at our best. And it was like, you know, matrix battling against these dudes and they're super smart and they're super good.

And that's what I live for is that challenge. And it feels so good to clash with a mind like that because I think it makes you stronger. Well, I mean, I think that is a wonderful metaphor for life and probably your approach to everything and because that's, that's what it's about. I mean, that's why I say when I, when I ask people to think about, you know, the happiest moments of their lives, it's typically being with a group of friends being in sync, whether it's laughing, playing a game or it's, you know, when they were helping someone when they were being generous, just completely selfless. Those are the two kind of situations that really seem to trigger this transcendent sense of happiness.

Sacrifice. Yeah. Sacrifice is a, is a noble, noble thing that people don't understand that that can be applied on many multiple dimensions, even something like, I'm not going to eat this thing now to yield benefits for this later. That's a sacrifice. And that's, to me, like sacrifice and love go hand in hand. Right. And you can't have, I don't think that somebody in a relationship that does not know how to sacrifice can properly love because they can't even tell themselves, no, exactly. No, I mean, that's how they know that they love somebody if they can't even love themselves and accept that burden.

That's a tough one though, right? Because a lot of people get into relationships, not necessarily because they are confident in their ability to love or be loved, but because it's filling some void or hurt or something else. And what's interesting when I was in LA, I ended up getting into, you know, conversations with lift drivers, like nonstop. And a lot of them had to do with the topics of relationships and love. One guy had just gotten married and he was talking about how he was always helping his wife and she was on a custom to someone being so nice and it was so great. And then another lift driver was talking about, he had been married for 25 years and he just found out his wife has been cheating on him pretty much the entire time.

And he wants the leave, like, and it was just interesting to see, you know, I love those moments when you're getting like inundated with the same type of conversation randomly that you're not, I was not like I was talking about relationships. You weren't bringing that up to sitting in the car. Yeah. The universe going, hey, go pay attention to this theme. And what was clear is exactly what you're saying, that if you're not able to be on the right page with yourself and at least be able to analyze what's going on and at least be able to sacrifice some aspect of yourself for someone else, I mean, children put this really into perspective pretty easily because if you're not willing to sacrifice for your children, then you have problems.

But no, I mean, everybody, they're going to die off if you're not willing to sacrifice exactly and it's something that is going to be nobody there. Well, and that's the thing. It's an instinctual thing. It's a biological function, right? I mean, it's something that even I'm sure the people who intend to be shitty parents or, you know, have no intention of being good ones still end up sacrificing because it's just this biological instinctual impulse. Yeah. But yeah, man, let me ask you this because I'm going to get to the questions in like five, ten minutes. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about on this before we get towards the end of it?

No, I mean, just having a conversation I find is the most valuable. The only thing I'll share is to really give a little light into my psychology of how I at least I managed to have coped with some of reality because being pretty aware as a kid comes with its consequences and one of them is I started playing Nintendo. You know, I think I shared this with you about my my attempted eight year old suicide. No, you didn't. You did not tell me this. Maybe I didn't. So I think it's I think it's a good story to tell because it's it highlights a little bit of what's possible in kids' heads, but I like Nintendo.

My brother saved up. He got it for us and we only had two games, but we played them all the time and they played them to death and I just try to, you know, beat the games at a faster rate. My dad, you know, was was always saving money. You know, this is what we had money and he would see how the video games cost a lot of money. He's like, Oh, this is what robbery. And I'm like, okay. So one day he just showed up from work and he had a lunch bag full of Nintendo cartridges, all used. I don't know where he got them from, but he just gave me a bunch of them and I started playing and I made a little goal for myself as I'm going to play every single game and I'm going to beat every single game.

So I put each game in and I did that and I progressed to and I got to one game that was this weird Greek thing to gain and I'm trying to get to the thing and I couldn't do it. Which game was it? I have no idea what the name of it was. It was some weird copy because he got all these weird games like other languages. Right. Right. And this one, I never found out what the name of the game was, but when I would get into a problem, I'd be like, okay, well, I'm just going to press up at every single section. Move forward, press up. Move forward, press up. Move forward, press up. Okay, that didn't work.

Go to every single location, press AA, AA, AA, and I would just, I would just, you know, troubleshoot the entire thing to try to figure out how to get to the next area and I couldn't. No matter what I did, I couldn't do it. It was racking my brain. It was driving me crazy for a couple of days and I would leave the Nintendo on and mark the thing, my mother would come in and I'd turn it right back on, put the blanket over my head and keep trying to beat this. Around the third night, I had an existential crisis and I realized that the world didn't make sense and that there was no pattern to it, that something must be wrong, either that or I must be broken.

Right. And whatever it was, I felt like I didn't want to be in this world anymore. So I genuinely went to the bathroom and my family doesn't know any of this. I never had the heart to tell them because I felt tremendously guilty and sad and but I went in there and I, and all I knew about the toothpaste was it says, don't eat because it's harmful. So so I just ate the entire tube of toothpaste and I sat on the bathroom floor expecting myself to die. And of course I didn't, my stomach, they turned and I vomited it all up. And after I did that, I felt so ashamed, Catholic shame, and I put the thing away and I see the toothpaste and the trash and I just quietly went to bed and never spoke about it.

But my intention to kill myself was 100% the same thing. I just, well, I found out later when I was in my twenties, I was reading some sort of article online and they were talking about top games that were released, like shitty games that were released and not finished. And I recognized the screenshots from one of those games and it was some game that was released and it wasn't finished. It was like broken. Right. It's like the ET game where it's impossible to beat and is the worst game of all time. And you, I mean, I, I, I hate to laugh at any genuine suicide attempt, but the fact that you thought you could kill yourself by eating a tube of toothpaste is the cutest thing I have ever.

It's the most adorable suicide attempt of all time. Holy shit, man. And for that moment forward, I always thought like I was just last night, I'll have these moments where I think about death and I think about myself being an old man and, and I think that always hurts to be the most was that, of that, that incident was thinking how much I would hurt my family if I had succeeded and like that, that I always carried with me ever since. Well, I mean, I don't think you have to carry it as a burden. I think you could look at it as a pretty lightweight way to find out that you don't want to kill yourself and that also that even if you did, you come up with terribly shitty ideas and ways to do it.

So probably wouldn't be worth your time. Um, dude, that's a really good story to share. And I mean, I think it's important because whether it's a video game causing an existential crisis of not having reality work or it's other some, you know, quote unquote, bigger, shittier experience that leads to that, could be a mundane thing, um, you got, you figured it out, right? I mean, from that point on, you, you kind of put into perspective A, the consequences of doing something like that. And B, right now it seems like you have a pretty good idea of the cosmology of the universe. I mean, you, you're able to talk about things succinctly.

And this isn't to say that you or I or anyone else has this shit figured out, right? What you are talking about is guiding principles and strategies and concepts on how to engage with the world and yourself. And I think as long as those are in the general ballpark of clear seeing, if you want to call it wisdom, compassion, generosity, patience, these types of things, diligence, focus, these are, these are all good things. Nothing bad is going to come from that. You're going to get to the point. Right now, I think we're at a point in where we have like Jordan Peterson and Western culture and he identifies himself as being Christian, um, with like young and Heidegger from Germany during a time of, of great peril and Eastern philosophies have ideas that all merge down to Aboriginal cultures, they all, there's a, there's a truth there that needs to be harnessed.

That's why I've had my diligent looking through the past to try to figure that out with, you know, with encompassing the values of science, because I think truth is truth, anything that help to figure out truth, um, is, is a tool worth using, whether it's, you know, that's why I always felt it crazy to consider myself an atheist, an anti-theist, like my, if someone said, Hey, Michael, what are you all about? I'm like, well, I don't believe that God was a deity. Right. And I'm like, that's the first, I mean, that's the first thing you want to label yourself. Well, I, you and I know in a lot of people, it's a strange thing.

I mean, people like Bill Maher and other people who have attached themselves to the atheist label. I mean, to me, it's just the ultimate hubris to be like, yeah, I know for sure there ain't no God. It's like, damn, you're a motherfucking genius who understands the keys to everything. Like, I, I'm not saying I know for a fact that there is some energy or God that permeates everything, but I've experienced things that lead me to that conclusion. But if someone, well, it's got a built in audience, though, there's lots of bugo dollars to be made out of that kind of respect. And I mean, the whole thing is, it's just like there's, you can slice and dice everything, which is why I always kind of subscribed.

And the reason I use Buddhism as a template so much is anyone who says, listen, don't take my word for it, go see if what I'm saying is true. That is something I tend to put a little more credence in. As soon as you're being asked to hook wind and sink or swallow something without challenging it or asking a question like you did when you were a kid at Catholic school, I find that to be fraught with a tremendous amount of peril. And then the other part of this is it's like also being humble enough to know that we don't individually have it all figured out, nor by asking questions, are we going to get to the bottom of everything and being willing to accept that there are external or other things we can learn from and holding those two ideas hand in hand, I think is really where the power comes in for a lot of this stuff.

Okay, but I'm going to go to the full to be the magician. Yeah, I mean, and that's, these are all, you know, these are cards and tarot, you know, there's a whole lot, there's a lot of angles on this, dude, we're going to do this again. But let me get to the last few questions and then, yeah, all right, so what is your favorite color? I don't have one. I like all colors. That's fine. That's a favorite colors. That's okay. What's your favorite? They all have a time and place. I totally understand that. What's your favorite number? Oh, I kind of like all numbers, but I'm a bit partial to three. There you go.

I had a feeling you were going to say three. I don't know why. What's your favorite animal? Oh, man, I'm obviously biased towards mammals, but I like all I like all animals. I could find a spider cute spider. You're going to see the first person I like all animals, but I like insect like I like all life because once we're going with spider, your favorite animal spider, that's a really awesome, really, really awesome animal, by the way. Okay. And last last question, what's a practical tip that has helped you in your life that you could share with people listening that could potentially help them?

Don't lie to yourself. It's pretty fun. Whatever you do, do not lie to yourself and when you know that you're lying to yourself, you need to stop. This is a dark fucking path. Don't lie to yourself. It's so true. And I mean, if you do catch yourself lying to yourself, which I think everyone does at some point, be honest and then, you know, admit it and accept it. Except that if I know when I'm fucking up and I tell myself I'm fucking up, but then don't make that good enough. Well, yeah, that's, yeah, and don't, you know, be aware that we all have shadow sides and things that are not perfect. No one is insinuating that anyone has this all figured out and is a perfectly 100% moral and ethical person, but just be truthful about when that's not happening is a big point.

Yeah. I think I think that shadow self gets neglected. It's a big time, a big child and when you lie to yourself, you're lying to the, to your shadow self. You're lying to the child like self, the, the incorporation of your entire sum of experiences. And by, by doing that, you're cheating yourself out of what life is. And it's going to reflect that and you're going to be walking around in your own hell. Yeah. And if you lie to your little child shadow self and they find out they're not going to be happy and then they're going to come out of no other ways, this year, a line of coke or something.

It's coming out and it's going to, it's going to, it's going to want retribution here to hate yourself. That's, that's why you don't lie to yourself because you're going to hate yourself. Dude. This has been awesome. I'm really glad we did this. Let's do it again in the not too distant future. Um, dude, really, really. Thank you. Thank you for coming on. Awesome. Thank you, dah. All right. Peace, man. See ya. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Take a body down town, take a body down town, take a body down town, take a body down town, take a body down town, take a body down town. Take a body down town, take a body down town.

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