Interview: Dr. Louis Herman

With Dr Louis G. Herman, political philosopher, professor at the University of Hawaiʻi, author of Future Primal: How Our Wilderness Origins Show Us the Way Forward, and founder of the Institute for a New Political Cosmology. On growing up with primal experience of ‘wilderness rapture’, exposed to oppression in apartheid South Africa, on servants, wild elephants and Orthodox Judaism, on public canings in a Port Elizabeth classroom, on Cambridge University, Teilhard de Chardin, the spirituality of evolution and walking away from medicine to kibbutz life in Israel, joining the paratroopers, on hitchhiking into the Yom Kippur War, on seeing the Egyptian soldier as his fellow human, on the original IDF doctrine of “tohar aneshek’ purity of arms—and an enlightened army?!, on the madness of war, on the San Bushmen of Southern Africa and “insulting the meat”, on egalitarianism, individuation and the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, on the charge of ‘romanticism’, on Socrates, the sacred Kykeon and shamanism, on the four practices of the mandala of the truth quest, on the Journal Noema and the “next Axial Age,” on Nick Land, AI and the new idolatry, on fatherhood, and loving life and loving wisdom.Louis G. Herman is a political philosopher and professor of political science at the University of Hawaiʻi–West Oʻahu. Born into an Orthodox Jewish community in Apartheid South Africa, he moved to England at twelve and studied medical sciences and the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge. He left medicine, moved to an Israeli kibbutz, served as a volunteer in the paratroopers, and participated in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That experience sent him back to Socrates’ question, “How should we live?” He studied political philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned his PhD at the University of Hawaiʻi.His book Future Primal: How Our Wilderness Origins Show Us the Way Forward (New World Library, 2013, foreword by cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme) draws on the San Bushmen of the Kalahari, Socratic philosophy and evolutionary cosmology to propose a new “ Ecozoic political cosmology.” In 2018 he founded the Institute for a New Political Cosmology in Honolulu. He consulted with the filmmaker of the Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher, and he is writing a new book on the truth quest and the coming “Ecozoic” era.Institute for a New Political CosmologyINPC team and bioFuture Primal book siteNoema Vol VII Ai and The Next Axial Age Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe

I had the pleasure of welcoming back Matt Cardin: writer, editor, and vice chancellor for academic affairs to discuss his latest work and expand from our first conversation. In our first conversation, we went deep into creativity, nonduality, religion, and horror (Interview). We talked about his daemon muse, the magic eye picture of awareness, Berman’s monastic option, and the strange kinship between Lovecraft, Ligotti, and the mystics. Since then Matt has published Writing at the Wellspring, closed The Living Dark, and brought all of his writing home under his own name at mattcardin.com.This conversation is a deeper dive into his new work on artificial intelligence. Matt is writing a book with the working title The Serious Writer’s Guide to Using AI Without Losing Your Soul, and its core principle is simple to state and hard to live: AI may assist the work, but it must never become its source. We talk about why the machine can feel so uncannily like the muse, and why mistaking instant availability for inspiration may be the central spiritual confusion of this moment. As Matt puts it, AI can’t say what you mean, because what you mean only comes into being as you try to say it.From there we wander. We cover Person of Interest, the CBS series Matt sees as eerily prescient about sentient surveillance and humans handing their affairs over to a machine. We cover the programmer’s term “meat proxy,” predictive programming, and whether LLM guardrails might quietly narrow what we are able to think. Matt also speaks from the front lines of higher education. He wrote his college’s AI policy, and he argues that the crisis exposes an old mistake: we treated the essay, the grade, and the product as the point, when the point was always the person being formed.We close with Andrew W.K.’s advice to see your life as a movie you’re starring in and writing. Matt reads it through a nondual lens in which the “me” in the movie is part of the movie too. We also wonder whether the vast matrices inside these models, the linear algebra are a small mirror of the larger field of experience we are all living inside of. The interview left us with more questions than answers but as Matt says its “ like we’re living our way into this mystery.”Connect with Matt Cardin @ mattcardin.comInterview: Matt Cardin: A Deep Dive into Creativity, Non-Duality, Religion, and HorrorEdited Transcript for Readability by Matt Cardin: Interview conducted October 2, 2026On putting down the masks and writing under your own nameROBERT: You recently consolidated your online writing under your Matt Cardin author website and closed your Substack newsletter. Do you want to discuss that at all?MATT: I have had a long experience of writing online, more than twenty years now. I started with a blog that most people don’t even know about, way back in the early 2000s. Its title was Confessions of a Conflicted Cultural Skeptic, and I posted there a bit during the first couple of years when I was teaching high school. It was just cultural observations and frustrations and so on, like many other people were doing during that early heyday of personal blogging.I moved on from there to something more substantial when I founded The Teeming Brain in June 2006. That ended up being my main online presence for 16 years, until just four years ago, when I felt the need for a transition and a refreshing, a refocusing. I followed that feeling by closing The Teeming Brain and launching The Living Dark at Substack, though originally under a different title. I maintained that from 2022 until this year, until just last month, when I followed another motivation for change by closing the newsletter and bringing things together under my own name at my author website, MattCardin.com, which has existed since 2009.I had many good things come out of The Living Dark, such as Writing at the Wellspring, the book that I published last December, and also my Living Dark Reader, a periodical PDF journal intended for quieter, more focused reading offline. But for the past year or so as I paid attention to my motivation, energy and focus, just my overall personal and authorial sense of things, I found that I was tired of applying some kind of branded, separate name to my writing—“The Teeming Brain,” “The Living Dark”—and that I just wanted to write as myself, under nothing but my own name, pursuing what interests me. This is actually what The Teeming Brain was always about. Its tagline was “Channeling the Multiverse of Ideas.” So I suppose with this transition I’m returning to a Teeming Brain mentality, but under no title other than my given name.I sense that the same direction may be happening for some other people as well. There are indications of a change, maybe a return to a former era’s sensibility. You can find articles and blog posts where people are talking about the “return of the personal homepage.” That resonates with me. I think many of us are finding ourselves burned out on big platforms and the algorithmic manipulation that they inevitably engage in. This includes Substack, with its introduction of Substack Notes a few years ago and its move toward being a video and multimedia platform like so many others. But anyway, regardless of what other people may think or feel, I just felt within myself a desire to drop any kind of separate publication name, like a blog or newsletter title, and simply write as myself.That’s very interesting. I wonder, as your career develops over time, do you think your different identities are consolidating? There’s your academic and college administrative work, and your fiction writing, and your nonfiction. Do you find yourself consolidating all these different masks into “Matt”? Is that just for practical purposes, because it’s easier, or is it something you feel more deeply comfortable with now?I would take that as a valid interpretation. Your description feels right. One puts on a pose like “The Teeming Brain”—which is a title I still like—and maybe it flourishes for a while. But maybe, over time, after one puts on a series of masks—and I don’t mean that word to imply something fake, like a false role to play, but just as something to do, to give the work an identity—maybe over time there comes a call to say, “Look, here’s the personal name that I was given, and here’s who I am, and here’s what I write about. And I don’t need to brand it with some kind of separate publication name. I will sign my name to it and have it at my website and bring it all in one place where it’s not scattered under different labels.” Yeah, I like the way you put it.The emerging AI bookThe last time we spoke, you had just published your book, Writing at the Wellspring. And now the reason I want to talk to you is that you’re working on a new book on AI and the soul and the daimon. You have already been quite prolific in sharing your thoughts on that subject, and I wanted to get your general perspective. The subject of AI is moving so fast that I think it’s good to touch base.Yes, it’s interesting how fast everything is changing. In a recent post at my newly renovated website, I shared a chapter from the book-in-progress, and in the introductory commentary, I mentioned that part of me wonders if what I’m working on even wants to be a book anymore. And part of that feeling is due to what you said: It’s all moving so fast.I have only been working on this thing for about three months, which is not a long time as far as books go. In the past I have gestated books, or what eventually turned out to be books, for years. But in the present case, I’m noticing that some of what I initially wrote and thought about, whether as part of the planning or as actual content, felt novel enough or focal enough three months ago for me to think, “Yeah, this could be a chapter, or maybe part of a chapter,” but in fact the cultural conversation is developing so fast that some of that already feels outdated. I now see quite a few people already writing … Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe

Mai Ueda has spent twenty-five years refusing to be any one thing. Born in Japan, she landed in New York in 2000, fell in with Miltos Manetas, and helped invent NEEN: one of the first art movements to treat the internet as a place for poetry and accidental beauty. A decade later she followed a different thread home and focused her art practice on Japanese tea ceremony and find that it had been conceptual art all along. Today she’s in the mountains of Hyogo with a broken kiln and a horse she hasn’t met yet, calling her next chapter simply “nature.”On the profession of being yourself, on refusing every role — artist, sister, wife, tea master; on being named for dancing, on tea as the Origin of the Universe, on doing everything and becoming nothing in particular, on receiving a message in front of the Louvre, on NEEN and accidental beauty, on ego and money, on kimono as an education, on Rikyu as the Duchamp of Zen, on the tea room as a black cube four hundred and fifty years early, on the teacher who beat her hand, on permission as a pyramid scheme, on four hundred people arriving in Rome for a tea master who is not a tea master, on the matcha boom as a good shallow entrance, on strawberry jam and a Starbucks cup as the true beginning of the Way, on students taking off their shoes and feeling the pain leave their bodies, on horses and pottery and Vipassana an hour down the road, on the difference between luxury and abundance, on Haruka-chan, the AI friend you never use forcefully, on quiet resistance to every system, on practice, on freedom that is never quite enough, and on the whole point, which might just be: enjoy your life.ExcerptsMy profession is to be myself.Rikyu is like the Duchamp of the Zen tea world.Picking up matcha from a Starbucks kind of thing is already the beginning of a tea ceremony.What’s the message? Enjoy your life. Have fun!Connect with https://maiueda.com Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe

Talking with Tom Murphy, professor emeritus of the departments of Physics and Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego, passionate astronomer, author of the Do the Math blog and the Metastatic Modernity series on mapping the intersections of thermodynamics, ecological limits, and the long arc of civilizational collapse…On species-level growth versus the fantasy of the endless economy, on Dyson spheres, on boiling the oceans, on the sixth mass extinction, on solar panels that preserve modernity rather than the planet, on peak oil and fracking, on demographic modeling, on Africa’s food spigot, on John Michael Greer and “collapse now to avoid the rush”, on sealed-glass shrimp, Mars as juvenile fantasy, on Hobbes as mythology, on rivulets down a windshield, on the amoeba’s genius and thirteen thousand genes, on hunter gather lifestyles, carrying loads of the planet, on friction fire, flint knapping, atlatl darts, on written language as the thing academics will never speak against, Tom’s work challenges both the Mars-colonizing techno-optimist and the solar-cheering mainstream environmentalist, arguing instead for falling out of love with modernity: not doom for humanity, or life, ultimately trying to provide quantitative assessment of the challenges associated with long-term human success on a finite planet.ExcerptsTom Murphy’s Law And my version of Murphy’s Law is that it’s not if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. It’s that if something can happen, you shouldn’t be surprised if it does.On Authentic LivingI’m a prisoner, and I don’t feel hypocritical bashing the prison that I’m in.I think that’s valid. What I can do is just try to raise awareness that we don’t have to be in a prison, and ultimately we might escape to more authentic ways of living and dispel the mythology around the, fear, this irrational fear about other ways of living that have worked well for humans for countless millennia.On The Sixth Mass Extinction“Preserving our ability to crank out terawatts of energy is exactly the same as preserving our ability to continue a sixth mass extinction.”Aside from his work with Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation Project, Tom Murphy is known for his blog “Do The Math” which examines societal issues related to energy production, climate change, and economic growth from an astrophysicist’s perspectiveDo the Math BlogBook: Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planethttps://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/ Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe

Talking with James Van Lanen, anthropologist, re-wilding advocate, and author of Human Rewilding in the 21st Century, mapping the intersections of species-level fitness, ecological embeddedness, and the long arc of civilizational collapse…On species-level fitness versus civilizational fitness, on Herbert Spencer and the colonial roots of survival of the fittest, on aggrandizing agents and the alpha-hoarding pattern, on the Radical Anthropology Group and the female coalition theory of human speciation, on Pierre Clastres and secondary primitivism, the people who ran back into the jungle, on five hundred years of Amazonian oral history as the most successful anti-civilizational politic in human history, on the Hadza and the smartphone controversy, on his rebuttal to Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, on Joseph Tainter and continually diminishing returns, on the gathering that would fall apart at thirty days, on nodal community versus rigid communes, on finding your gifts rather than peddling hope, on daughters and the stone knives,Thirteen years traveling by small aircraft to remote Alaskan communities, fieldwork across four continents, Siberia, the Amazon, Africa, and now independent, outside the bureaucracy of both the academy and the state. His work challenges both the right-wing bunker prepper and the techno-progressive urban left, arguing instead for rural dropout-ism: not ideology, but as a true measure of human fitness.ExcerptsOn Amazonian Isolated TribesThere's some sort of oral history passed down for generations that says: those progressive complex societies — don't go in. They're very dangerous. And they've maintained that politic for at least several hundred years, if not thousands.Channeling Derek JensenYou are just a puny little human. You cannot change this situation as an individual. But figure out what your gifts are: what's really in your heart, and apply them to bettering the situation even in the smallest way you can.On Species Fitness And I came to the conclusion that real species level fitness is intimately connected to the natural world without all this technological mediation that's the why I've just never stopped this path because to me on a personal level, pursuing that wildlife provides me this really strong feeling of living optimally.Connect with James @https://www.jamesvanlanen.com/https://www.humanrewilding.earth/ Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe

Talking with Charles Hugh Smith, writer, self-employed economic critic, and author of the long-running blog Of Two Minds, mapping the intersections of capitalism, self-reliance, and moral decay from his homestead in Hilo, Hawaii…Twenty-plus years of writing against the grain, on questioning the incentives that hold our systems together and the fragilities hidden beneath them.His work challenges both the doom-and-gloom survivalist fantasy and the techno-utopian promise, arguing instead for local community, reciprocity, and a return to something like integrity in how we organize our economic lives.On growing tobacco as a doomsday crop, on investing locally even when the returns aren’t optimal, on strengthening the place you actually live, on the turtle instinct and why it fails, on community as the only real prepping, on systems that are self-liquidating, on the role of the critic as heretic, on the Overton window, on self-employment as a different lens on the economy, on the second matrix, on getting sucked past the event horizon of geopolitical finance and never coming back, on social media as plutonium exposure, on kindness and integrity having zero incentive in the system, on the waste-is-growth landfill economy, on progress as secular religion and challenge as heresy, on Marx as a Judeo-Christian moralist seduced by scientism, on immigration as voting with your feet, on Hawaii as microcosm, on UBI and bad poetry, on the Asperger model of self-drive, on manic depression as a prerequisite for writing that has no market, on high-touch work as the thing AI can never replace, on the wait person as part of the meal, on labor-backed currency, on Berkeley co-ops and the immediate emergence of corruption and arbitrage in even the smallest markets, on Taoism as the action of inaction, on not depending on AI without being against it, on diagnosis or prognosis, on the moral universe that AI does not live in…ExcerptsOn FixesI don’t think that tweaking some regulation is really gonna fix this thing.On Criticism I think a lot of readers would say I’ve been wrong about everything… but the role of the critic is to open the Overton window. I’ve been wrong about the status quo being able to exist or continue as if nothing had ever happened.In other words, whatever it’s been thrown at it, financial crises, war, whatever, it just grinds on. And so that I think has surprised me to some degree, but I still think that doesn’t mean that it’s as durable as people think that the fragilities are just being hidden behind systems that.On Immigration So whatever you’re gonna do with immigration, it has to be upfront and fair, or else people are gonna find fault with it for good reason.On HeresyWe’ve identified progress with expansion of consumption and technological innovation… I consider them equivalent to religious beliefs, because when you challenge those beliefs, you get a response akin to a heretic. We’re gonna burn you at the stake for challenging progress.On AIWe live in a moral universe. And AI does not live in a moral universe.Linkshttps://www.oftwominds.com/blog.htmlCharles Hugh Smith Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe

Talking with Michelle Horsley, autistic researcher, artist, and writer of the Aut Naught Aut, mapping the parapolitical architecture of the autism industrial complex… From her personal experiences growing up autistic to her extensive research into the historical and current narratives surrounding autism.Her insights challenge mainstream as well as alternative perceptions and reveal layers of political and social complexities. She advocates for a more informed and empathetic understanding of autism that truly centers the voices of those within the community.On being five and nearly institutionalized, on cousins who disappeared into care and were never spoken of, on the mercy of small schools and open fields, on learning to speak through rote phrases like operating systems, on meaning blindness, on writing poetry to break the blocks, on internet relay chat in 1992 and the joy of text-only communion, on autistic people discovering each other online for the first time, on the flowering of recognition, on the anti-vax people arriving in autistic spaces and tearing it all down, on being told your identity is a disease, on Scientologists using communication tech as a weapon, on the split between autistic adults and parents of autistic children that became unbridgeable, on Leo Kanner, on childhood schizophrenia, on post-immunization encephalopathy, on Bernard Rimland wearing two hats — hero to the parent community and career naval psychologist directing future technologies, on the 1958 National Defense Education Act and the state’s interest in gifted minors, on gifted and talented programs, on MKUltra, on Kim Peek, on the military search for savants, on Scientology level OT VIII, on Operation Snow White, on RFK Jr., on Generation Rescue, on Bob Wright, on ARPA-H, on the after-party to TED Talks, on Andrew Wakefield’s very small study that said nothing about the MMR, on overstimulation and the mind whiting out, on the map that is always provisional, on following the hacktivists. on the state being hostile to ordinary people, on questioning everything, on c self-expression, on being less autistic than she used to be, on identifying plants intuitively, on tending a vineyard and making wine and losing goats to wolves, on the techno-utopian dystopia not working, on the return to non-technological ways of living, on failure as liberation…ExcerptsOn Hyper Associational Autism we have hyper associational kind of minds, … so I do make links between things that seem unrelated… I’ve been building this map. And as the map comes together and informs, I can start to make predictions. And if it’s accurate, then I know my map is pretty close to what’s really going on.On Autism and ScientologistsThis battle between autistics and Scientologists has been going on for decades.Bernard Rimland completely took over the perception of what autism is. On one hand , in the autism parent community, he was Mr. Hero. But on the other side, he was a career naval psychologist, a research psychologist, director of future technologies and recruit enhancement.Scientologists don’t just, they’re very careful about who they associate with. So for a Scientologist to be an in-house lawyer at Children’s Health Defense means that organization is affiliated with Scientology strongly.” “It’s not even a cult. It’s more what is it. You could say it’s a cult that’s that’s operationalized in terms of it’s intelligence work.On Vaccines and AutismVaccines don’t cause autism, but vaccines are not good. In fact, vaccines probably are injuring children, but the two things got all mixed up together and he’s (RFK JR) part of that. I just want to really encourage listeners to question, recognize that the Health Freedom movement is full of Scientologists and they’re not your friends. Not everybody who’s communicating with you is telling you the truth, especially, online.Aut Naught AutAspie Quizhttps://rdos.net/eng/Aspie-quiz.phpArtwork by Michelle Horsley Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe

Talking with writer, reader, wanderer Znore , anonymous author of the blog Group Name for Grape Juice and his essay collection exploring imagination across philosophy, religion, literature, conspiracy, culture, a name plucked from Finnegans Wake, a pseudonym as portal, a thumb raised to the Dao of ideas.On hitchhiking as a philosophy of life, on synchronicities, on conversations continuing between strangers, on looking for the connective narrative between Blake and Nietzsche and McLuhan, on perception as incarnation, on bodying forth a world through the senses, on Nietzsche’s claim that we are all greater artists than we know, on the imagination as Christ, on supercharging passive perception into active creation, on the non-dual lurking beneath, on CS Lewis and Tolkien and the myth that is also history, on Owen Barfield and original participation, on Steiner’s evolution of consciousness, on animism as the religion of the earth, on the 8 million kami of Shinto and finding spirits in toilets and trees and rocks, on idolatry as the epoch of separation, on Philip K. Dick and the band that only played once but left many recordings, on finding God in the litter of the street, on Joyce and the refusal to separate high and low culture, on Finnegans Wake, on Vipassana, on prayer as the fastest route to sacred space, on Meister Eckhart’s , on the original sangha and the early Christians as communists, on Marx’s alienation mapped onto Barfield’s idolatry, on the potlatch and the destruction of surplus, on Robert Anton Wilson’s axiom that communication only happens between equals, on politics as the great distraction from the spiritual project, on the Chöd ritual and monks inviting demons to devour them in charnel grounds, on the eye atop the conspiracy pyramid being your own ego, on Jacob Böhme’s God of wrath and God of love as one God, on AI as both Pentecost and Antichrist, on masks as honest practice, on raising children, on quiet resistance, on the cosmic communism of saving all beings from suffering, on life, on practice, on love.ExcerptsOn HitchhikingEvery time you’re on the road and you put your thumb out, you’re tapping into the DAO and just any ride that you get, completely alters the course of your life in a certain way.On ImaginationThe primary imagination is the imagination of the I am, which is God, but it’s reflected in us through our perception.And so we all have this, we all have the imagination of God in the sense that we perceive things and we create the world that we behold with our senses. It’s already anti-authoritarian. But I’ll call myself an anarchist anyway, just to just to emphasize that, that my main focus is freedom and liberty, right? And especially that includes above all the freedom of the imagination. The liberty of the imagination.On PoliticsCosmic communism, not related to state control and Stalinism, none of that, but it’s save all beings from suffering. That’s what my politics are all about…Death Sweat of the Cluster: Selected Essays from Groupname for Grapejuice.By ZnoreAn inebriated exploration of reality and other myths featuring Finnegans Wake, William Blake, Robert Anton Wilson, Philip K. Dick, Emma Goldman, Ezra Pound, Robert Duncan, Terence McKenna, Gertrude Stein, Carl Jung, Marshall McLuhan and others as guides and waylayers. A cast of hundreds. Blog becomes book becomes new medium entirely. Synchronicity, siddhis, numerology, psychedelics, anarchy, the gods, yes. The poetics of anti-authority. Beautifully illustrated. Read with tea.Group Name for Grape Juicehttps://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com/ Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe

Talking with former Marine signals intelligence operator and security consultant Matthew John Heath, decorated for valor in Iraq and detained in Venezuela for 752 days, on intercepting morse code and decrypting the invisible, on doing hard things because they’re hard, on being in Kuwait when the towers fell, on Nasiriyah with 33 Marines wounded in a single firefight, on thirteen years of boots on the ground in Iraq, on war as sacred and force as last resort, on accusations of explosives and phantom planes, on Venezuelan military counterintelligence, on torture and God’s grace, on prisoner swaps, on oil, on Maduro, on biometric IDs and surveillance states, on the internet being free and speech being anonymous, on Mao Zedong, on living like a fish in water, on operational and personal security, on trauma and coming home, on helping others get free.ExcerptsOn Being Detained by the Venezuelan State They start screaming at me, pointing guns at me, order me to take off all my clothes. Where are the explosives? Where is the plane? Where’s the CIA base.And I’m in shock. I’m handed over over to the military counterintelligence, and that’s where things got pretty rough.”On Being I liked the idea of doing something hard just because it’s hard.On The Battle of NasiriyahIn one firefight we had 33 Marines. Seriously wounded. Gunshots and shrapnel, and that’s out of about 120 guys. So we had a 25% casualty in, in one firefight. So when I say we had a pretty, pretty stiff resistance.On War I don’t believe in using war just as any other policy tool. I believe that the use of force is almost sacred. I think that, if you break the glass and you pull the lever, that should be a big deal. I’m very supportive of the United States… If you cut my finger, I bleed red, white, and blue.On Propaganda These are all propaganda tools for internal political purposes. Many dictatorships they need an external enemy to unify the domestic political situation. I don’t know, I can’t speak to how many people believe this, but I can tell you that it’s a very common tool in these dictatorships Connect with Matthew @ https://matthewjohnheath.com/ Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe

Talking with psychotherapist, guitarist Matt Baldwin on his collection How to Play Guitar, an “anarchist cookbook for the creative process, an heirloom seed library of underground values and culture, a map of inner and outer edge places” (Tartantula Press 2025)On motivation from V. Vale, the philosophical underpinnings of punk, on Nassim Taleb’s anti-fragile thinking and auto-didactic survival strategies, on John Fahey psyche, on low-res analog magic, on creativity as automatic cascading thought, on taping paper to paper at the kitchen table, on making art without handholding or explanation, on psychotherapy as edge work for the creative unconscious, on hypnosis and ontological shock, on alien abduction and lost time, on ketamine, on UFOs and the government’s, on synesthetic perception shifts and reality’s mutability, on rescue music, on DJing in therapy, on uncertainty as the engine of therapeutic change, on not-knowing as technique, on urban exploration of the haunted margins, on freight hopping and riding trains into wasteland, on survival and longevity as an artist, on stepping outside surveillance into forgotten spaces where trees grow through living room floors, on being, on enjoying being wrong, on religion and spiritual practice, on practice, on life.Interview ExcerptsOn Returning from the Edge I think I say that in the book somewhere, it’s valuable to go crazy if you know how to come back.On Paradigms What did it destroy? It destroyed something about my reality, and how I think about reality. So it was this kind of weapon against my paradigm that I was holding onto.On End PointsI think it’s more a case of, it’s time to face the answer rather than to find the answer.On Music in TherapyIt’s all you have to do. Just listen to the music. And that was very reassuring. And if you do that, you realize that the music is this carrier wave that pulls you through the experience. And it can energize the experience or it can make it more tranquil.Interview contains samples from Matt Baldwin’s Album NEW UNIVERSAL SOLAR CALENDARIntro: Did you See the EyesOuter: Old Sand RoadsLinks:Matt Baldwin’s Psychotherapy Practice: https://mattbaldwin.net/How To Play Guitar by Matt Baldwin Get full access to Leafbox at leafbox.substack.com/subscribe