Recording the audiobook at a swanky Toronto studio sends Matthew down a memory hole to wonder about performance, self-awareness, and anxiety, and their relation to charisma.
“Whatever charisma I have or project into the world has always been both prompted and tempered by the belief that becoming larger, that reaching out and creating an impression would soothe a confused or immature sense of self. That if I could be seen, I would be loved, and if loved, I would be real.
“If there is an anxiety at the core of the influencers we study, it might be related to this. This week I had the opportunity to meditate on it, to remember how charisma formed around and within me, first through an arts education, and then as a yoga and wellness entrepreneur. It’s made me wonder whether and how I’ve been that much different than Zach Bush, or Mikki Willis, or Katie Griggs. I know how to project that voice, I know how to put on my resting guru face.”
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I'm recording this early Sunday morning after spending the week recording the audiobook version of our book.
The super professional audio division at Hachette uses Noble Street Studios in Toronto.
And to get there, I drove our family mess-filled Honda Odyssey into town from where we live in the Upper Beaches.
It's about a 40-minute drive into a neighbourhood I used to spend a lot of time in when I was young, when I was a novelist and singer.
A lot of that Queen Street West stretch of Parkdale has been hit hard by gentrification over the past decades.
The mental hospital closed down.
Old warehouses have become tony condo complexes.
There are indie fashion and fashionable foodie joints sprinkled everywhere.
But Noble Street is on the western edge of all that hipness, in a patch of blocks that are still transitional.
So lots of empty storefronts with signs from earlier times, appliance sales, hardware, shoe repair.
It's a little bit emptied out in that way that makes me suspicious that the development vultures are circling.
There are unhoused guys hanging around outside the little Parkdale library, and I have a big surge of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God feeling.
A little further west is Little Tibet, where immigrants have nurtured a bustling block of momo counters and chai shops, and everyone looks at home in the cold March sun.
So with an opening like this you'll probably guess that I'm going to get into my memories here.
I haven't worked downtown in many years and I've hardly been out of my neighborhood since the pandemic began.
So there's something about commuting into the past, into an old part of the city, and at a seasonal hinge point because everything is melting, that gets a person out of the typical timeline.
I also was commuting out of the daily grind of researching and writing and into something I haven't done in a really long time, which is thinking and orienting my whole self towards performing and being under a microscope.
On the podcast, and like even now in a recording like this, and on the live streams we do, I am performing in a way, but it's only part of the way to that polished concert hall feeling.
Usually I just finish the script, close the research tabs, plug in the preamp and the mic, and I wait for Derek to let me into the studio and away we go.
I don't change my clothes.
Usually I forget to shave.
But all last week I walked into Noble Street and saw the framed platinum records flash in the sun and I heard my footsteps vanish into the sound insulation and I felt my ears pop a little as I slid the booth door shut and I was under the spotlight.
The gleaming mic is so sensitive that if I brush my finger against my shirt, it like tears through the headphones like a burst of wind through a cornfield.
And there's two really friendly and meticulous sound techs and an audio director listening in on every syllable, catching when I transpose words or I say towards when it's really toward on the page.
So I can't get away with anything, but most of all, I can't get away from myself.
When I inhale to start a new sentence, I pause for a moment, and that pause brings a silence that's so deafening, it sounds like what it might sound like when all sound stops forever.
Now, this all might sound a little tangential to the beat of our show, but this trip back in time and into the city to work in real life among other living and working adults after a long pandemic time of working alone into a space of acute self-consciousness has brought up some stuff about what it means for me to be on stage.
In the past and now.
To be seen or surveilled.
To be heard or overheard.
And this has made me think a lot about charisma, which is a core topic on our podcast, given its centrality to the economy of influence and cults.
So, today I'm going to take a chance on talking about my own charisma, or at least what I understand of it, and how I felt it in my body, how cults pushed it in what could have been a very dumb direction, and how it's also changed over time and dwindled.
As a general note, to the extent that I can see it, whatever charisma I have or project into the world has always been both prompted and tempered by the belief that becoming larger, that reaching out and creating an impression, would soothe a confused or immature sense of self.
That if I could be seen, I would be loved, and if loved, I would be real.
I'm speculating that if there is an anxiety at the core of the influencers we study, it might be related to this.
So this week I had the opportunity to meditate on it and to remember how charisma formed around and within me, first through an arts education and then as a yoga and wellness entrepreneur.
And it's made me wonder whether and how I've been that much different from Zach Bush or Mickey Willis or Katie Griggs.
