Matan L Samin is an Israeli actor, writer, poet and advocate who has amassed an enviable following on social media.
Known for his unfiltered, and often very funny, posts Matan is refreshingly unapologetic as he gives his followers a glimpse into the reality of being Israeli. Recently Matan published his first book, ‘What If?', a thought-provoking collection of poems that put a different perspective on life situations that affect us all.
I spoke with Matan recently to discuss the writing of ‘What If?', find out about the inspiration behind the collection, and to talk about his work as an advocate for Israel…
Your book ‘What If?' has just come out. How did the idea for the book come about?
Exactly a year ago, I wrote the first ‘ What If?'. Me and my ex said goodbye. Last time we saw each other was on September 10th and we were at this event together. We spoke on September 11th in the morning and we said goodbye. That was the day that I wrote the first ‘What If?' – ‘What if it turned out better than you can ever imagine?'.
I have my copy of the book here (holds the book up to the camera)…
I'm so glad you got it. Can you show it to me? It's the first time I've seen it live (laughs). Seriously. Here's the thing, once they approved it, I rushed to publish it. I was so excited and then I got locked out of my own account so I couldn't order it. I had to order it through Amazon, not with the fast delivery, and ordering to Israel takes a lot of time.
I got my copy a few days ago. I sat and read it from cover to cover. You can tell these poems came from pain and change in your life, but also from self-reflection and self-realisation. There's a sense of you coming to terms with a lot of things. How did you put this book together?
The first chapter of the book is about love, the pull… the heart. The story that opens it literally happened on August 1st. Writing this was a way for me of coping, be cause you get caught up in reality and you get caught up sometimes in pain, in bad feelings or even in good feelings; it works both ways. That was supposed to give another perspective of ‘ okay, I just suffered a breakup'. We all have that ‘ what if I hadn't said that?' It can drive a man insane and I'm an over-thinker and this kind of thing always drive me insane. My way of coping was always by writing. I started writing it and first I wanted to visualise a better world. What if it would turn out better than you can ever imagine? A lot of times it was just to change my perspective.
The past two months was probably on the top three of the worst months of my life. It's been super hard from every angle and every time I thought that I'm going up, I got another blow that has nothing to do with me. It's not things I can control, but it's just pain and I'm walking around with this feeling like you're on the edge of having a mental breakdown or a panic attack. Then the other day, someone posted on their (Instagram) Story one of the poems – ‘what if pain had a purpose?' I read it and I was like, ‘damn, I should really have my book right now. I'm going through this tough time and it's things that I've been through'… everything in there. It wasn't supposed to be a book. It wasn't supposed to become anything until one day on 25th of July, I had an event here I spoke at and I spoke with the woman (running) the event and said, ‘I have this one thing that I'm writing.' I came home and I was about to write one more thing and I (realised) I had a lot. I had a significant amount of what ifs. I started to organise it, I download Grammarly to see if the English works and I used ChatGPT because my (English) vocabulary is not that big. I realised that wasn't enough so I got an editor, a woman who (helped me) back and forth for three or four weeks.
It's an easy read. If I'm not mistaken, it's about 7,000 words so it's really easy to read… really short poems. (As I went through that process) all of a sudden I noticed that I had a book. While I was editing it, I read it and realised that some of it has actually come true.
The things that made me write this are now in the past and you can look at them from the from a different perspective. The same perspective, I was trying to look at in that specific poem. It was the editor, while she was editing it, who told me, ‘it's a self help book'. She was like, ‘yeah, it really helps me. It makes me think'. I realised that these are the things that helped me go through tough times. They allowed me to have a different perspective about life situations, and a lot of them are just horrible. It's hard going through pain. It's hard going through breakup. It's hard going through loss. It's hard looking in the mirror sometimes. But what if you having the balls and the courage to look in the mirror and say the actual truth about yourself and stand there and let it be… what if that's the wake up call that we all need as individuals?
In our mind we have this narrative that we keep telling ourself and we just go in a straight line; we're like the horses in the racetrack. We just go because that's we what we know. (The book) is supposed to open up the point of view a bit. Okay, you're in pain but what if this pain is actually the best thing that ever happened to you? You never know. It's supposed to give you all the what ifs. I know from personal experience that I had with my dad, and previous relationships, that there's nothing that stings more than the what if. Nothing's more painful than the regret of doing and not doing. I usually don't regret any of the things that I did, I can live with them just fine. It's just the things that I didn't do.
Like you, I've had a pretty crappy year so I was drawn to your poems in this book because they offer a positive way to look at the things life throws at you. They have made me question some of the things that have happened to me, and wonder if I have become stronger as a result. I think that's really smart…
That's the way we operate in real life. We have these same steps that we take and we just don't notice anymore all the options that we have. Some of them I wrote after experiences, some of them I wrote inside experiences. There's this one message in my phone that I sent to my ex when we first started dating three years ago. We had this breakup and I wrote to her something about perspective and how I thanked her. I was hurt and it saddened me, but thank you for the time. She texted me right back, like, ‘how the fuck can you do that?' I was training myself to want see different perspectives and we ended up talking and got back together because of that message.
It's like in those motivational videos that say ‘what if your greatest adversity is actually the biggest opportunity that you have?' We don't think about it because we're cowards with all of our personal shit that just blinds us. We just cannot see. You've probably been on social media in the past 24 hours and saw the assassination of Charlie Kirk. As Jewish people, we love him and he was all for Israel but I'm talking about the people who hated him. They're laughing and dancing. Hate covers their entire world so they cannot even see the empathy. People are so in their own world, they don't even have this feeling.
I hope the book will make you look. If you're trying to have a political debate or anything, if you just tell someone how much you hate them, they're just gonna do the same on their side. The only way to change people's mind is by making them ask questions. They might not agree with you in the moment, but later on at night when they put their heads on the pillow, they'll start asking questions and they're putting a seed in the ground and letting it grow. That's what I hope this book will do. You don't have to like everything, you don't have even to agree with everything. For me, if it's just one poem that touched that nerve then I did my thing, I'm happy and I don't care if I sell a million copies or 20 copies. It was never about that. I'm not expecting to make money out of poetry, but I do wish that it will help and that every person who will buy it finds that one thing that they can relate to. I'm not looking to save anyone's life, I'm looking to save someone's moment. A moment where you're just down or when you're having a panic attack, when you're having this ache that you cannot explain.
I think a lot of people could benefit from reading your book. We see every day that people have lost the ability to empathise with one another and they can't see anything from anyone else's perspective. I'm not Jewish but through this platform I want to put a spotlight on Israeli artists and the great talent that exists in Israel, because that is getting lost in the conversation, which is dominated by the war. We're in a world where Hollywood stars are boycotting the Israeli film industry, thinking they are taking some sort of significant stance when the majority of these people have never been to Israel and don't know what it's like. I have been, it's one of my favourite places and it's why I'm talking to you today, to support the art you're creating…
Once you come here, you see how wonderful this country is. One of my employees, she's from Argentina, South America. We spoke yesterday and I told her I was supposed to post a video that I made yesterday, a reaction video, of IDF soldiers saving sheep from the rebels in Gaza. That's why I love this country and I take pride in this country. We have, I believe, something that because of our Jewishness and we all identify as Jewish, even the radical left – they're still in their blood Jewish, they still celebrate the holidays – which is something that religion has lost from the world.
(Going back to) Charlie Kirk. Charlie was on the his path to bring Christianity back into America, and I hope that his assassination will actually speed this up because we need the Judeo-Christian values in our life. With the war in Iran, there was literally an operation to bring back people from other states into Israel. This is what makes (Israel) so unique. Once you come here and you feel it, you're gonna fall in love with this country because the people here are nice. Of course, if you stay long enough, you'll meet enough assholes trust me, like in every other country. The propaganda of Hamas really works. The propaganda of anyone who ever hated us really works, but we don't have the luxury to care about that. We just keep going. We're just doing what we're doing. At the end of the day, I'm just a normal person, just like you. I want to find love, I want to have a family. I want to have enough money to travel and to raise my future kids just the same as you. I'm not looking to change anyone, I'm not looking to transform anyone. Like me or don't like me.
(With my book) I do want to reach out to you and give you a hand in the moment of need, whatever it may be because that's the ultimate human experience in my opinion. That's the ultimate to give to other people. When we have kids, we give to our kids. We take it for granted, because they're our kids, but no, that's the ultimate human experience. I think a lot of people (in Israel) are like that and once you come here, you actually feel it for yourself. It's really hard to hate us once you see it for yourself. We… I… don't really have the luxury to care if someone likes me or not. I just tell them to fuck off and do whatever they want. Their opinion means nothing to me. At the end of the day, I'd rather be hated and safe than loved and dying.
I understand that and it's a good way to live. I've been to Israel twice, I've studied the culture and I'm learning the language. It really is nothing like people think it is and honestly, I feel safer walking around Israel than I do here in London.
In the past week, one of my videos got really exposed – Sharia Colonized – I don't know why. It went up from 50,000 views to over 130,000 views and I posted it three weeks ago. I got into all the stuff that happened in the UK and started talking to more people. I have a great friend there, Reverend Hayley Ace. She's also a great supporter of Israel, she's a Christian and she's a pastor. You can see how slowly the UK is losing its identity. I saw today that Keir Starmer is thinking about banning the England flag from being put up. I thought that's got to be a joke. Every nation has its problems, but I think in terms of patriotism, we all have the obligation. It's not a right to be a patriot, it's an obligation to be a patriot for your country and for your flag. That's what we are trying to do here.
People call me misogynist, they call me racist, they call me Islamaphobe… they call me so many names, but at the end of the day, I honestly don't give a fuck. I honestly don't give a fuck what you are. I don't give a fuck how you identify. I don't give a fuck what your religion is. I don't care if you're Jewish, Christian, Muslim… you identify as they/ them. I don't care. Do whatever you want. It's your life. But if you're trying to take over reality and changing people's words, that's where I draw the line. If you have a good heart, do whatever you want. I don't care. I'm doing the same. I think I have a good heart and I'm just speaking my truth. I'm just saying what I actually believe, and I think if someone gets offended, fine. Get offended. I have nothing to do with that. It's tough and it's hard but sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes a book comes out of it.
You're one of my favourite people to follow on Instagram because your content is so unfiltered and real. Like you mentioned before, Israelis come together and they continue their lives regardless of the outside noise. You wouldn't get that from someone in the UK because they're too afraid. Does that enable you to be bolder without the fear of backlash or ‘getting cancelled'?
Give it long enough. I know a lot of people (in the UK) who are doing that – Reverend Hayley Ace she is amazing. Tommy Robinson, they've been chasing him for the past 10 years and he's been saying it all along. There's a lot of influencers from the UK who are not willing to lose their country. The more people will start feeling that they're losing the grip on their country, the more they will wake up. It has to go this way in order to find its balance. It's just a sad truth. It happened to us on October 7th. We knew Hamas was there. We knew they were planning. It wasn't a secret. It's not like Hamas just woke up one day and was like, ‘you know what? We love the Jews, but today we hate them'. They always hated us. We ignored the facts, we ignored the truth, and that's what happens. That's the consequences of putting things under the rug. Every society and every country that does that will suffer the same consequences. It's just truth. How many people are you going to lose? We lost 1,300. How many people is the UK gonna lose? I don't know. Maybe one, maybe zero, maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand. It's sad, but it's just society laws; it always happens like that with a group of people.
I got so many messages yesterday on Instagram (after Charlie Kirk's assassination). (I heard from) Americans (who) felt that (they) we just wanted to find a church. People who haven't been to church for 10 years because they feel the pain, they feel the loss, and something was taken away from them. The same thing happens when we lose someone as will happen when you lose the sense of freedom or the sense of patriotism. What will happen if that happens? I don't know. That's another what if. Maybe I'll do a what if about politics?
Maybe this is the beginning of ‘What If? Part Two'?
I've been thinking about it actually but I think first let's start with this one. I still haven't started promoting it on my Instagram so let's see how it goes. I got few offers from people who wanted to make it into a blog. They offered because of the work I'm doing on Instagram. They are Israelis and they wanted to partner and build the website pro bono. I'm fucking broke. I can't afford that shit. We were supposed to meet but they got drafted to the Army for two weeks, so I'm waiting for them to come back.
I have a rule of thumb in my life. It's called the one person rule. If there is just one person that was touched by (the book), or liked it or it made them smile, then that's good enough for me. Takes all the pressure off. If I'm posting something and there's one person who likes it, it doesn't matter if 10,000 or 1000 like it, as long as I influence one person and change their day for the better. That's the thing about being an artist, you're trying in your own way. You're trying to speak for the voiceless. You are the voice of the voiceless and that's what you're trying to do. That's what I'm trying to do with my advocacy and that's what I'm trying to do with the book.
It's all thoughts. Literally all thoughts that were in my head for years that I haven't told anyone. What if you're worst nightmare comes to life and you won't know what to do when everything inside of you wants to scream, but you can't because you're at work. Or you're surrounded by people so you're forced to sit in it. You're forced to feel it, the full pain of it so to write it down and to put it out there, that's every artist's dream. If one person reads it and (identifies with it) that's more than enough for me.
The book resonated strongly with me and I've been bookmarking parts to go back to…
Amazing. Here's the thing, if you read it again in a month or in a week, or maybe even tonight, you might even think something different. I have this project called ‘Go Deep' that was supposed to come out. I finished it a long time ago but I haven't done anything with it. It's 60 really hard questions that every person should ask themselves, in my opinion. I wrote the questions, I answered each and every one. I tested it on my friends and the answers I got were sometimes really, truly unbelievable. Every question there resonates different, and there is no right or wrong. Every time I ask them to someone, they can answer something different.
That's the thing about poetry as well, because your mind right now is in a certain place. When you are reading a certain poem, you focus either on the beginning or on the middle, or one word that just catches you. I have a lot of poetry books home (and when I read them again I see) a different thing now and it touches different because I've evolved. Sometimes it's because I feel even worse than when I first read it (laughs) so it hits a different spot. It's like cracking a shell – first it hits there and then it hits there until the entire shell opens and you can emerge a new person. That's how we work with our feelings. I really hope that the book will do that to people. That will be the greatest gift ever.
Matan L. Samin's book ‘What If?' is available to buy now. Follow Matan on Instagram at @matanelsamin.
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