Interview: Tao Lin
The Times of the UK called Tao Lin “a daring, urgent voice for a malfunctioning age,"
I agree. Tao Lin is an exciting original acclaimed voice trying who is trying to make make sense of the personal and external confusion.
He’s an American novelist, poet, essayist, short-story writer and artist. He’s published several novels, and works of non fiction. He has published several books, including the acclaimed novels 'Taipei,' 'Shoplifting from American Apparel,' and 'Leave Society.' Tao is also the editor of MuuMuu House, which he founded in 2008. Currently living on the Big Island in Hawaii, Tao continues to push the boundaries of contemporary literature with his thought-provoking and innovative work.
We connect today to explore his current work on his body mind, his current writing, his views on spirituality, daily routines, the rural vs urban, how he navigates the tension between mainstream and alternative narratives, gate keeping, poisoning the well, on relationships, and how Tao continues to push the boundaries of contemporary thought with original innovative work.
I’ve been following Tao’s work for over a decade so this was a treat to connect.
Connect with Tao Lin @ http://www.taolin.us
AI Transcription
Leafbox:
Hey, Tao. Good morning. Good afternoon.
Tao Lin
Robert. How are you? Thanks for wanting to talk to me. You've had some interesting guests.
Leafbox:
Oh, thank you, Tao. Did you listen to any of them or read some of my interviews?
Tao Lin
Some parts of them, yeah.
Leafbox:
Great. Well, Tao, I really appreciate your time and I think you have another, I'm going to call it symposium or author talk this weekend, so I don't want to take too much of your time.
Tao Lin
Oh no, it's good practice for me talking. I don't get much social interaction these days.
Leafbox:
I was saying one of the articles you wrote recently was about curing your autism. I first learned about your work from mom. He's another author, songwriter, musician, writer, and he on you maybe 10, 12, I don't even know how many years ago, and I interviewed him and I had been following your work for that many years and I, I've seen you speak in San Francisco in person, and I honestly think your speech patterns have become more fluid and more dynamic and more responsive. Maybe it's just evolution of your confidence, but I don't know if that's anything you've noticed or anything. Just your oral skills seem different than they were 10 years ago at least.
Tao Lin
Yeah, I've definitely noticed that. And 10 years ago it was already much better than I was as a teenager when I could barely talk at all. And I've just gotten better at it through practice and through improving my health in various ways. But a lot of it has been from practice because with my writing career, I've done probably hundreds of interviews and readings and I've just gotten better at talking over time.
Leafbox:
Well, I think it's very noticeable, so keep it up and I mean, I'm always trying to work on my voice and I think a lot of it has to do with just breath management and just I'm really understanding the importance of breath and trying to control and respect breath. So I think one of the first questions I want to ask you, Tao, you've been in Hawaii for about four years, I think now you're on the big island and I've been in Hawaii since maybe four or five years with my partner's Polynesian. I'm curious what you've taken from Hawaii. I mean, sometimes your answers seem, is there anything from Hawaii or Polynesian culture that's kind of affecting you?
Tao Lin
Not really. I don't think so. I think the main thing I've gotten from Hawaii is just being in a more rural, healthier environment with less air pollution and less electromagnetic radiation. Because I lived in New York City from 2001 to 2018, and then I moved to upstate New York to more rural areas, but it still seemed pretty polluted compared to Hawaii. For example, I lived in New Jersey, rural New Jersey for a while and there were no birds around at all. But here there's a ton of birds, but besides that, I don't think it has affected me much.
Leafbox:
Have you tried Kava or 'Ava or any other, I mean have any of their local foods or, I know you're kind of on a carnivore diet, but hokey or hunting culture or music or the different racial composition of Hawaii? Any thoughts on those issues or just really focusing on the land and how that's just cleaner?
Tao Lin
Pretty much just on the land and it could be anywhere that I could get this benefit of being in a cleaner area. I haven't been affected by the culture much. I don't see people that much and the culture I interact with, it seems pretty just American rather than Hawaiian, I would say.
Leafbox:
Great. Well, here in, I guess Oahu is more, I don't know, where are you exactly living on the big island
Tao Lin
On the east side?
Leafbox:
Are you near Pahoa or
Tao Lin
Yeah, I am. I'm near. Yeah.
Leafbox:
Great. Well, that area of Hawaii has a, I guess I'm going to stereotype it and have kind of a hippie kind of culture, so it's very definitely positive. I guess in line with some of what you're searching for in health and food and I guess at least it supplements that, I mean Tao maybe since we're close to Asia here in Hawaii, what's your current relationship with Taiwan with the language and anything?
Tao Lin
It's the same pretty much because growing up I visited Taiwan around once a year for two to three months a time, and all my relatives lived there, but I didn't speak the language fluently, so I still interacted mostly with just my parents and I've never been influenced much by the local culture of wherever I'm at because I spend so much time online and because I've always been focused more on existential issues that underlie all cultures, and in the past 10 years or so, I've kind of expanded that viewpoint, but I still focus on an underlying thing. For example, I've gotten really into our aboriginal ancestors and how they lived in eight and there really aren't any Aboriginal cultures anymore, or at least that I've lived among. I've always just felt that I lived in an American culture that is pretty much global to if I go to Taiwan, I still feel like I'm in a similar culture to a large degree.
Leafbox:
How good is your Mandarin?
Tao Lin
It's pretty good. I don't know how good it is. When I talk to my parents, I feel pretty limited. I have to use a lot of English words and I think I have a net American accent. Sometimes in Taiwan, people can't understand me because I don't use the tones as much.
Leafbox:
Do you think any aspect of being an outsider, even in Taiwan or in the US there's kind of a linguistic gap in both, at least in Taiwan. Do you think that helped you maintain kind of an outsider perspective?
Tao Lin
Yeah, yeah. I think the outsider perspective started when I was a teenager, when my autism symptoms were at the worst and I just felt like an alt outsider to everyone. This is why I've never connected with people who say they feel confused about their identity. Like children of immigrants who say they don't if they're American or their parents' racial identity, I've never connected with that because I've felt alienated from all cultures, all identities, and I've always just wanted to reconnect with humankind in general rather than one culture. And I think this has helped me in my writing, in my research to focus on underlying issues rather than more surface things like connecting with Taiwanese culture or whatever other culture.
Leafbox:
Well, the only reason I bring it up is because it seems like you're more connected to Hawaii or maybe the land, but maybe it's my misreading, but I wonder if you know any about epigenetic memory. There's theories that the Polynesian people came from Formosa, from Taiwan, so I wonder if there's some aspect of maybe your epigenetic roots feel more comfortable in this type of environment or climate, if there's any thoughts to that.
Tao Lin
No, I don't think I have that. I think I'm trying to feel more connected with our everyone's ancestors because before 12,000 years ago, we were all part of one culture. I could start thinking like that. I want to connect more with my civilized ancestors like Taiwan and China, but to me that's relatively recent compared to the time periods that I'm thinking about now.
Leafbox:
Does that make sense? Most of that reconnection with nature, with our ancestral selves, you're doing through the body and exploration of diet and I guess how you live and what you li eat, right? Is that mainly how you're doing it?
Tao Lin
Yeah, all those things. And also I would say worldview and even religion because I found that our Paleolithic ancestors worshiped nature as a female deity and being in the literary world while I lived in New York, most people I knew were atheist. So I'm trying to reconnect with our ancestors, religious views in addition to their diets and lifestyles, just overall how they viewed the world because they also seemed to be what Rianne Eisler called partnership societies, whereas the global culture right now is what she calls the dominator society. So I would say I'm trying to reconnect with basically everything that our ancestors stood for
Leafbox:
That was explored in your essay. I think it's called Partnership before Sexism and War. Do you think as a counter to that, do you think that the male, I guess non equitable, what's his name? Dr. Joe Rogan's friend in Canada. Do you know who I'm talking about? What is his name? The philosopher psychologist. Anyway, he would argue that the success of current society comes from that dominate male culture. Do you, what are your takeaways from that? What do you want readers to take away from your essay on sexism and war? I guess I'm asking,
Tao Lin
I disagree with that. Is that guy Stephen Pinker?
Leafbox:
Steven Pinker? No, the that he, he's at Harvard. He's the one who thinks it always gets better and better civilization and history. He's the one who wears those wild suits and I guess he gets, he's the Canadian psychologist. He had a addiction to benzos for a while. He's on a carnivore diet as well.
Tao Lin
Oh, okay. It's Jordan Peterson.
Leafbox:
Correct. He's very into the spiritual and Christian, Judeo Christian model, but he's always kind of arguing that the non equitable male-driven kind of historical arc is responsible for our success and flourishing, whereas I think in your essay you're arguing that in the past we were more peaceful and equitable and that anthropologist, what do you want readers to take away from that essay or what's your argument there?
Tao Lin
I disagree. That dominated culture is what has led to development or it has led to development, but it's developed more and more, I find just totally wrong theories about nearly everything from biology to physics. So I disagree with that. And in my essay I point out that most of the technologies of civilization developed under the partnership civilization model, like writing megalithic architecture, agriculture, textiles, metallurgy and other things. And it's true that after dominator culture took hold around 6,500 years ago, that technology has advanced a lot, but it's mainly been advanced in service of war. For example, we're still using fossil fuels after using them for like 300 years, but according to my research, we could now be using forms of energy that produce no pollution in our inexhaustible if instead of weaponizing technologies developed over the last century, we had used these technologies to create clean sources of energy. But the reason that we can't do that is because due to the dominator model, military is prioritized in any technology with any relation to the military is immediately classified and used for military purposes. So it can't be used for what is called free energy.
Leafbox:
I think you had a tweet that your next book or one of the three year writing is called, I think Self-Help or Self-Heal, and you listed all the ailments that you've been working on, and one of the last one was civilizational disorder. I'm curious how you define civilizational disorder and how you think your book or work is aiming to heal it.
Tao Lin
I define civilization disorder as just the effects of civilization because a lot of people have researched aborigines and found that they have near perfect health. They don't have cancer, diabetes, art, disease, tooth decay and a bunch of other problems. But western medicine takes all the symptoms of civilization which are caused by new environmental toxins and other ways that were evolutionary mismatched like lack of sunlight and sedentism. Western medicine takes all the symptoms and then groups some of the symptoms together and then gives it a name like eczema or some autoimmune disorder. And then usually says that this disorder is genetic in incurable. So civilization disorder does away with all these diagnoses and just cause all of it, civilization disorder and civilization disorder is curable and to find out how to cure it, we just need to look at our ancestors and see how they lived.
And most of the diagnoses that Western medicine gives are in themselves damaging. Like if a doctor tells you you have incurable cancer, that decreases your lifespan a lot. And the same with all these other disorders like autism or clinical depression. But under the civilization disorder model, if you tell someone they have civilization disorder, I don't think it's going to decrease their lifespan or instill fear in them, but rather it'll give them hope because this model says that you can reduce all these symptoms and that it's not genetic and that everyone suffers from this disorder and you can improve it gradually throughout your life.
Leafbox:
Are you familiar with Brian Johnson and the Blueprint Diet?
Tao Lin
No. What's that?
Leafbox:
He's the former, he's a tech, I don't know, billionaire and he's spending a hundred million dollars on longevity research and he has this blueprint, which is like a specific diet, but the interesting thing about him is that he's trying to reverse aging and extend aging. I'm just curious, your diet is totally different than his, I'm just curious, are you using any modern medicine metrics to track your progress or to see how you're comparing or experiments or self experiments, I don't know, cholesterol levels or whatever it is, any trips to the Western doctor to see how you're actually improving or not improving? Or is are you just doing it mainly by feel?
Tao Lin
I'm just going by how I feel and the symptoms that I'm getting rid of and then through all research I can trust that I'm doing the right thing. I feel like, for example, cholesterol, getting your cholesterol tested, cholesterol varies day by day in the mainstream view of cholesterol is wrong, I think, and many people think studies have found that the higher your total cholesterol, the lower your risk of all cause mortality and cholesterol has been inaccurately maligned. I think
Leafbox:
It, it's an interesting project. I mean I'm personally, my doctor's trying to get me to lower my cholesterol, so I agree with you. It's a very complicated relationship. I'm curious on the health front, what's the biggest kind of original thoughts that you had that have been reversed I guess recently? I mean you've been on the carnivore kind of fruitarian diet for how long fruit and meat and organ meats
Tao Lin
I started, I've been on something like a paleo diet since 2014, and then last year I stopped eating vegetables and I was the only eating meat and fruit and gradually I started eating more and more raw meat and it was when I eliminated vegetables that I finally cured my eczema. I used to have a itchy crotch all the time and it also relieved my headaches and nausea and I feel much more clearheaded. And I've also resolved my autoimmune disorder, which is called onie losing spondylitis, and it gave me back and hip and leg pain and I started eating more raw meat because I noticed that when I ate too much cooked meat, especially if it was cooked at a high temperature like fried, it would worsen my eczema and my digestion. I've also cured my digestion. I used to get loose stools all the time, but now my poop is regularly solid and raw meat.
There's a diet called the Primal Diet that invented and I've been reading his work and it's really compelling. I feel like my diet journey has basically resonated with larger and larger amounts of time. At first I was, when I first started becoming more conscious of my diet, I became a vegetarian. And then later on I was a vegan and veganism is like a few centuries old and vegetarianism is a few millennia old. And then I used the paleo diet, which is tens of thousands of years old. And then an animal-based diet, which is comprised mostly of meat seems to be millions of years old. And then the primal diet, which incorporates more raw meat is also millions of years old because apparently our ancestors ate most of their meat raw or lightly cooked. And I've been led to these more and more unconventional diets through my health problems because I think some people over the past 12,000 years have become more adapted to the modern diet while other people have diet off or who or haven't adapted yet, and these people who are still adapted to the diet that humans ate for millions of years need to go back to that diet in order to function well.
But some people do well on even a standard American diet. They do well for a while at least, and they've just had whatever mutations that allow them to deal with this new diet better. I think
Leafbox:
The funny thing is yesterday I interviewed a toxicologist and food researcher and it's just everything you're saying is just resonating, very disturbing. He's an expert on glyph and other, his advice would just get the best meat you can. So I hope you're getting very local beef and if you can local wild caught access deer or I'm curious, are you eating fish or what's your relationship with the ocean in terms of food?
Tao Lin
I'm not eating fish right now, but I really like sashimi and I'll eat more of it if I had access to it. And I do focus on high quality meat, grass fed meat, and I get my eggs from this local farm that also started selling raw milk, and I think that's very important to get good meat meet factory farmed meat is so bad, they feed the cows and the pigs garbage basically sometimes like candy with the wrappers on and then they get so many hormones and the way that they're raised not in sunlight, just degrades the quality of the meat so much. And I've heard that they're going to start giving animals mRNA vaccines. That's another reason to avoid factory farms meat.
Leafbox:
Well, since you bring up mRNA vaccines, I'm curious, I think I know where you stand on Covid and maybe the vaccines. I'm curious, what has your relationship been with your publishers and your old, I guess contacts and friends? Did you lose a lot of friends over the pandemic or did you meet new friends? I mean the politics of Covid are just so complicated that I'm just curious what your personal relationship was during the pandemic, I guess with outside world or to yourself and frustrations or comments.
Tao Lin
I didn't think I lost any friends, but I already don't talk to that many people. Maybe if I talked to more people, I would've lost some friends, but maybe not because as early as 2017, I had tweeted an email that I sent to my brother recommending him to give his kids less vaccines and that got a major backlash, but still, I didn't lose that many friends. I didn't lose friends actually, I think I don't lose friends because I don't directly try to argue with them about issues like this. I usually try to find common ground with them and talk to them about stuff that I agree with them about. And even though in Leave Society I published published a lot of non-mainstream views on health and diet, I still focused on a lot of things that everyone can agree on because I'm not trying to alienate people. I don't want to do that. I want to give people enough stuff that they can agree with me on to the point that they start trusting some of the more controversial stuff I'm saying.
Leafbox:
What are some of the more controversial things you're saying? I mean maybe I'm just so out there now that, is it the carnivore diet? Is it your Big bang kind of debate? I'm just curious questioning some of the scientific reasoning behind the pandemic or covid. Just curious what you're concerned about or as Asperger's.
Tao Lin
What about Asperger's?
Leafbox:
No, I was like, I think that last essay had some polarization, right? Maybe that's where you're going.
Tao Lin
Yeah. I would say the carnivore diet in my writings about the Big Bang being wrong, they're controversial, but they're not so controversial that I would get labeled like a nutcase or something. But other things that are more controversial, one of 'em is my thoughts about autism. For example, in my recent autism essay, I linked autism strongly to glyphosate and aluminum, and I also wrote about how glyphosate had been found in vaccines. And the aluminum implicated in autism is largely found in vaccines. And this is something that you can't talk about in a lot of cultures. You can't talk about it in the literary world and then in mainstream media. And then going deeper than that, I've started researching germ theory and it seems like germ theory is totally misguided. Bacteria and viruses don't seem to cause disease, but they arrive into disease bodies to help the body clean itself.
Leafbox:
Yeah, I've heard of the theory of viruses being part of the viral and co-developing with us. Will you be writing about these topics in your new books or will they be just morally focused on essays and things like that?
Tao Lin
I'm not sure yet. Don't. Well, with the autism stuff, it will be in my new book just because it's so relevant to my own self-healing journey. But the stuff about germ theory, I'm not sure if it'll be in this next book, the one book or one book I've read attacking germ theory called The Truth About Contagion. It was banned on Amazon. It's like one of the only books to ever been banned on Amazon. If I publish something like that, I would just alienate everyone because it goes deeper than just that bacteria and viruses don't cause disease. It's that viruses aren't contagious. These people viruses are actually what are called exosomes. And these exosomes are the body's ways to defend against environmental toxins ranging from everything from pesticides to electromagnetic radiation. And this book, the Truth About Contagion argues that Covid was largely the symptoms of 5g. 5G was first installed in Wuhan. They had something like 10,000 bases there installed, and then all the countries with 5G installed have had Covid outbreaks, whereas places like Africa haven't.
And they get into the details of why 5G would cause these symptoms. One of 'em is because a lot of 5G operates at 60 gigahertz and oxygen absorbs this frequency. It breaks oxygen molecules into individual atoms, which a body can't use. And this possibly explains why people with covid feel like they're suffocating. And then some people might ask, well, what about all the epidemics of the past, like the Spanish flu? But apparently the Spanish flu occurred after the worldwide installation of antennas sending out strong radio signals. And then there have been similar outbreaks for every new electrical technology. So I don't think I'll be writing about any of that in my next book because it'll just get me totally alienated. I want to just focus more on my own self-healing journey, and that's going to include the stuff about autism, which the literary world isn't going to like. So I'm thinking I might want to publish this next book with the natural health publisher like Chelsea Green, which published Stephanie Seneff, who writes about similar stuff as me, and then I'll save my less controversial books for my normal publishers.
Leafbox:
In your research, some of the theories you've been discussing are fringe and controversial. How do you maintain or try to maintain a non-biased perspective? Do you then read the counter perspective or do you talk to virologists, or how do you try to keep in your search for the truth
Tao Lin
At this point? I'm definitely biased against everything. I think I know everything I've been taught, and I think that's the correct way to approach these things rather than being skeptical against the so-called fringe perspectives, because these independent researchers, they have everything to lose by talking about these things. There's no incentive to say that viruses don't cause disease and lose your medical license as people have and get your book banned everywhere and get put on the top 12 disinformation people list people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Have. And then
Leafbox:
How do you ever think some of these theories might be introduced by counter narrative agendas? It's almost like for people who question some of the truth in the nine 11, and when you have extremists who start saying that there was no airplane at all, it's like a kookification of the theories. I'm not quoting about the virologists or I'm just, sometimes agendas are introduced by, you know, spoil the whole pot. People are starting to question something and then you make it even more outlandish to kind of spoil the whole thing.
Tao Lin
Yeah, yeah. I feel like the flat earth theory does that, but I haven't encountered other things like that. I feel like I could talk about nine 11 with nine 11.
I started thinking in 2011 that the mainstream narrative on it was wrong just from watching videos of Tower seven collapsing. So then for a long time I thought bombs had been placed in the buildings. But then in 2017 I watched a presentation by Judy Wood and I read her book and she argues compellingly that the towers were destroyed by directed energy weapons, which turned the towers to dust. And this is why there was no massive pile of rubble. There was just a small pile. And in her view, the false counter narrative to nine 11 is that the towers were destroyed by bombs. And the people who believe that are called truthers, and Judy Wood thinks that that was a counter narrative introduced by the people who perpetrated the crime in order to distract people from the directed energy weapon narrative. Because the directed energy weapon narrative leads to the realization that secret groups out there have technologies that go beyond the mainstream understanding of physics.
And it's these technologies that could be used to provide free energy to everyone. So I think these counter narratives exist, but that the situation is much worse than anyone thinks, to the point that the counter narratives themselves are there to distract from something that seems even more outlandish, if that makes sense. For example, with Covid, it seems like the counter narrative is that it was a lab leak that or that the virus was manmade. But based on my research, it seems that viruses don't even exist in the way that the mainstream defines them. So this counter narrative itself distracts from the reality of the situation, which seems much worse. And I see this across different fields.
Leafbox:
How returning to one of your controversial essays where all these counter narratives are at play, you wrote about this Hong Chan jade controversy. Maybe I'm joking about the controversial nature of this, but that essay kind of mirrored your efforts to try to find authenticity to me and meaning and kind of truth in plain sight. I'm curious why you wrote about those, that jade situation on eBay and what attracted you to that?
Tao Lin
The only reason I was interested in that is because of the home sun civilization, because they were a partnership civilization. And I got to that through my research on history and how we fell into dominated culture. The home sun civilization existed from like 6,500 to 5,000 years ago before around 800 years before the first Chinese dynasty and all predominated civilizations. It has been largely ignored by historians, which is why a lot of people can say that we've always been male dominated and more addicted. And then while researching the Hong Sun civilization that came upon this guy, David C. Anderson, who talks about how most of the Hong sun pieces that are viewed as forgeries might actually be real because pieces that aren't found on official archeological digs are viewed as forgeries. And I'm not that interested in this because it doesn't affect my health or the state of the world or the future of humankind that much. But it was a fun article to write. I'd been telling my parents about this and they didn't seem to believe me. So it was nice to write an article just getting all my arguments out for them and other people to read. But I don't view that as controversial compared to these other things I'm writing about.
Leafbox:
No, but I would argue that it's the same process. You're going on trying to find meaning and trying to find authenticity in something that's kind of rewriting a historical norm or something that's not maybe the mainstream.
Tao Lin
Oh yeah, it's definitely in the same thread of truth seeking that I'm on
Leafbox:
Talking about truth seeking. What is your, I think you're meditating now. What is your spiritual practice or I think earlier in the conversation, you said most of your literary friends and world or atheist. What's your current spirituality now?
Tao Lin
I would say that I worship nature. I think most of my friends are spiritual now, but the larger literary world that I'm not friends with seems to be mostly atheist.
Leafbox:
And do you have a meditative practice or are you just kind of
Tao Lin
Yeah, I've been meditating around 40 minutes a day and I've just been trying to focus on nature more into trust nature, which includes trusting my body. All the self-heal stuff I'm writing is spiritual. I think because western medicine antagonizes the body so much by saying that it malfunctions all the time and that it's genetic and I'm trying to unlearn all that and to trust my body. Whenever I get sick, I trust that my body is doing something to help me. And now I think that almost every disease is the body helping, helping me. If I didn't get an autoimmune disorder or didn't have eczema, toxins just keep building up my body and I'll die. And people like Stephanie Seneff have argued that cancer is also a way that the body, or it's a survival mechanism by the body. She talks about how cancer does something, I forget what she said, but other than SP planets, he theorizes that cancer. It takes dead and damaged cells in your body and collects them into tumors for it to gradually dissolve. And so that's another way that a disease is helpful to the body.
Leafbox:
I think in another interview I read that you look at vegetables and plants now more as a medical intervention. What kind of plants are you using now or are you still using psychedelics? Are you still, what's your current relationship to the plant world?
Tao Lin
I've been smoking organic tobacco from a glass pipe, and I drink a little bit of cacao powder each morning. It has some caffeine in it, and I stopped eating vegetables last year, but I've been slowly trying small amounts of different vegetables. I've been eating some raw onion cut up and mixed with raw ground beef. Recently, I think now I do view vegetables as potentially good in a healthy diet, but I think some people's guts are so damaged that they need to have a long period without any vegetables to heal their guts before returning to vegetables because vegetables contain a lot of anti-nutrients like lectins and oxalates that can damage the gut, whereas meat doesn't have those and it helps build up the gut wall.
Leafbox:
Are you still using psychedelics and plant medicines? I mean, your excellent book trip was all about that, but I'm just curious what your relationship is there.
Tao Lin
I haven't used psychedelics in probably a year and a half. Mostly because I'm so focused on my diet and just trying to stay stable and I'm not trying to reach any new insights or change the path of my life. I'm just trying to work on my book right now and gradually heal myself. But I'm still interested in psychedelics and would like to use some more in the future. And I've stopped smoking or eating cannabis too. I stopped around a year ago just to have a more stable mood throughout the day.
Leafbox:
And has that happened or,
Tao Lin
Yeah, I think so because when I use any drug, I feel like it just takes my energy or my mood or my creativity from the other parts of my day and concentrates it into the one or two hours after I use the drug. So when I stopped smoking cannabis, the creativity and mood enhancement I got from it, I feel like it just spread out into the rest of my life a little bit, which because I've been single for a year and spending most of my time alone, that has felt more satisfying to me to have to be more stable throughout the day. But when I'm more social, I feel like at this point I concentrating some of that energy into my social times because otherwise I can get pretty autistic during those times.
Leafbox:
Are you still making your mandala art pieces?
Tao Lin
Yeah, I've been drawing usually one to two hours a day. Yeah.
Leafbox:
And do you do that for a spiritual or creative outlet? What is the purpose of those?
Tao Lin
Creative and it relaxes me and it's an activity that doesn't demand anything from me. I don't need to be in a certain mood or need to have any energy at all to do it. And usually while drawing, I'm listening to a podcast, so sometimes I draw just to have something to do while listening to some interview with someone. And I also like the end results. I like art. That surprises me.
Leafbox:
Talking about art your other, you're writing a fiction book on a science fiction genre. How is that going?
Tao Lin
It's going pretty good. I go back to work on it once every few months just going through the draft. I have once and I have the whole thing outlined pretty much it's just like 5,000 words now, and it's from the perspective of an alien. And this alien is an editor or this alien is a writer, but his job is to edit a dream. And it's a dream that every human is going to get in 2035 and it's going to be, the dream is going to happen after an alien attack is hoaxed on the global population. And the hoaxing of that is going to trigger, it's going to allow aliens to finally intervene in terrestrial matters and they're going to give everyone a 10 day dream that's going to reveal the true history of humans and convince everyone that aliens are peaceful and that there's a larger galactic community that is peaceful, that humans are going to join after the stream.
Leafbox:
And you think that's going to come out when
Tao Lin
It could come out in like 20, 20 30? No, not 2028 maybe. I don't know. After I finish South Peel book, I'll see about that book.
Leafbox:
Talking about editing, what's your day-to-day on the MuuMuu press? What's your editorial process or the business process or, I'm just curious what part of your creative outlet is dedicated to that?
Tao Lin
I haven't been doing much with it around or a few months ago I had an open submission period for the first time and I got 150 submissions and I printed them all and read at least some of them. And then I published five of them. But other than that, I just solicit work from friends mostly, and it doesn't take that much work and it doesn't make any money either. The last book I published was in 2020 was last year actually. And it was fun to do that. It's mostly just a fun publishing thing that I have. And the online magazine part, I view it just as a personal anthology, a public personal anthology of work that I like
Leafbox:
Returning to the personal how, you said you've been single for a year, but I think you wrote, I dunno if it was on Twitter or somewhere that you're looking to start a family maybe in the future. What are your goals there or what do you imagine or envision?
Tao Lin
I tweeted, I tweeted anyone want to have unvaccinated, homeschooled kids in three to six years.
Leafbox:
I feel in Pahoa you're going to get a lot of interested parties, but maybe that's just me
Tao Lin
Possibly. There seem to be some interest, but I've been pretty set on just being single and just working on myself and my books. But then I was sick for a few days and somehow I just started thinking I wanted to be in a relationship and that led to that tweet. But still that tweet said that anyone want to have it in three to six years. So I don't feel ready at all right now to be in a relationship or to have a kid, but as I've started to finally heal myself of these chronic problems, having kids has seemed more attractive to me and it seems like it'll be a wonderful experience. And I feel like having learned so much about health that I could have raised healthy kids, but I don't want to focus on that anymore. If I could delete that tweet, I might just want to focus on myself and my writing for now for at least another year or two or three in whatever happens with relationships, I'll just let it happen. I don't want to try to pursue anything.
Leafbox:
Well, the reason I commend that tweet is that I'm a father and when you have a child and a family, it really solidifies a lot of your spiritual and life value. So I think you'll find a lot of value in it. I mean, it's really brought me to focus more on health, on my spiritual being. I never drink alcohol anymore. I just want to be healthier and healthier, be a better person, and that family responsibility to really, I think it improves one self.
Tao Lin
Yeah, I can see all that happening. How old is your kid or how many kids do you
Leafbox:
Have? Just one. She's five.
Tao Lin
And how old are you?
Leafbox:
I'm 42.
Tao Lin
Oh, nice. So you had kid, a kid somewhat late. What were you like before having the kid? Were you trying to have a kid or how did that happen?
Leafbox:
No, I was with my partner for a long time. I think we would've wished to had kids earlier. Just sometimes it doesn't happen. So I think I would like to have more kids, but sometimes nature doesn't provide or it's always, you're very blessed to have one beautiful daughter. So I think my change has really been trying to be a better person and be calmer. And I think it brings a lot of attention to, you get to relive life almost as when you have a child and everything superficial becomes less important. I'm really not concerned about material items or anything like that. It's just time is the most valuable thing.
Tao Lin
Yeah, yeah, it sounds great. I can see myself getting all those benefits from it, the motivation, because just being by myself, the motivation to be healthy and everything, it doesn't extend that bar, but I can see with a kid there's so much more motivation to be a better person.
Leafbox:
Maybe on my last question or one of my last questions, how is on the other end, do you have any thoughts about the current obsession with AI and transhumanism and the anti-human? I guess that's a biased way of asking, but I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on that or where the technology's going.
Tao Lin
I'm not sure I've noticed that chat G P T is pretty biased just because it gets all of its source material from, or a lot of it from mainstream media, so it just promulgates therapies in terms of the transhumanism stuff. Could you talk about that a little bit? I'm not sure I have a good grasp of what people were talking about in terms of that.
Leafbox:
I mean, that's a whole world of just, you know, could go in the most extreme Neurolink or trying to the singularity where we become one with computers. There's positive aspects, obviously if you're blind and you get to see again to maybe more dystopic of transhumanism where we lose our human element to kind of a super organism,
Tao Lin
I think it's the wrong direction. I feel like it's just a symptom of dominator culture, wanting to progress in a way that it thinks it's good. But in terms of all the ways that this could help people, like with blindness, I feel like that's also misguided because there's so many ways that we could roll back our technological advances in order to heal people by just encouraging people to grow their own food and do community stuff instead of installing antennas and satellites that increase radiation. And just, I think scaling back to an earlier time would be a wiser move than just going blindly forward into stuff that is probably going to damage everyone even worse than people already have been damaged. If there wasn't a health crisis right now with the highest rates of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, depression, and all these things, then maybe we could start working on technological advances. But I feel like dealing with all the other problems first would be wiser. What do you think?
Leafbox:
It's a very complicated world I'm concerned about. Yeah, just so many aspects. I think simplifying and there's enough aspects that we don't have to, I'm not an anti technologist, but the more I read someone like Ted Kazinski, you start wondering, obviously I'm against violence, but the technosphere has an ability to self ate and just keep rolling like an avalanche sometimes in ways we never can imagine, and that's what I'm worried about, that it's just an avalanche of un. But at the same time, if you at or there's less poverty in the whole world, and I dunno if that's because of modern science, and so it's a very complicated discussion. I think we have to balance those sides. Do you have any final advice for aspiring writers or artists?
Tao Lin
Let me think. I don't think so. Maybe think for yourself, form your own opinions and stay skeptical, but be skeptical against a mainstream viva, not lesser known perspectives.
Leafbox:
Do you think people are becoming, I mean, one of the good things about the Covid pandemic to me seems like people are more willing to question things now. Maybe a year and a half ago when people were fully into it, it was impossible. But now I feel like, I don't know, it just seems like people are, I'm not going to say being red pilled, but they're just kind of, and there seems to be a lot of skepticism, a lot of things, so I don't know if that's positive or negative or destabilizing, but I feel optimistic in some ways. I don't know. What do you think?
Tao Lin
Yeah, I think, yeah, I feel optimistic in terms of that. I'm not sure if as a whole society has gotten more skeptical or not. It's hard to tell because people who supported the mainstream narrative on Covid, they still seem to do that. I'm not sure though, because I've been reading so much, so many people that opposed the mainstream narrative. It's just hard to tell.
Leafbox:
Anyway. Tao, any other, what's on the agenda for today? What's your last question? I have your daily schedule. What's left for the rest of the day? Writing, drawing, what's happening?
Tao Lin
I'm going to do some writing. I'm going to feed the cats. I might go into town to buy some mangoes. There's some mangoes I really like at this one store, and I'm going to do some reading and I'm going to eat some raw ground beef and comb my cats and go to sleep.
Leafbox:
Great. Well, Tao, I really appreciate your time. I love your writing. I love your books. Thank you for being open-minded and encouraging others to be the same.
Tao Lin
Thank you. And thank you for talking to me and asking me interesting questions.