Conspirituality - Bonus Sample: Losing My Charisma Aired: 2023-03-27 Duration: 06:38 === Commuting Into Charisma (06:35) === [00:00:03] Hello Conspirituality Podcast listeners. [00:00:05] Welcome to a sample of our weekly bonus episode. [00:00:09] If you'd like to support our research, recording, and production time, you can support us for $5 a month on Patreon, or choose a higher tier to access our live streams and bonus videos. [00:00:20] All of this is available at patreon.com slash conspirituality. [00:00:24] You can also access our Monday bonus episodes on Apple Podcasts for $5 a month as well. [00:00:30] Thank you for your support. [00:00:33] I'm recording this early Sunday morning after spending the week recording the audiobook version of our book. [00:00:41] The super professional audio division at Hachette uses Noble Street Studios in Toronto. [00:00:49] And to get there, I drove our family mess-filled Honda Odyssey into town from where we live in the Upper Beaches. [00:00:57] 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. [00:01:07] A lot of that Queen Street West stretch of Parkdale has been hit hard by gentrification over the past decades. [00:01:14] The mental hospital closed down. [00:01:16] Old warehouses have become tony condo complexes. [00:01:21] There are indie fashion and fashionable foodie joints sprinkled everywhere. [00:01:26] But Noble Street is on the western edge of all that hipness, in a patch of blocks that are still transitional. [00:01:35] So lots of empty storefronts with signs from earlier times, appliance sales, hardware, shoe repair. [00:01:43] It's a little bit emptied out in that way that makes me suspicious that the development vultures are circling. [00:01:50] 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. [00:02:00] 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. [00:02:12] So with an opening like this you'll probably guess that I'm going to get into my memories here. [00:02:17] I haven't worked downtown in many years and I've hardly been out of my neighborhood since the pandemic began. [00:02:23] 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. [00:02:37] 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. [00:02:53] 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. [00:03:06] 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. [00:03:13] I don't change my clothes. [00:03:16] Usually I forget to shave. [00:03:18] 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. [00:03:39] 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. [00:03:49] 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. [00:04:05] So I can't get away with anything, but most of all, I can't get away from myself. [00:04:10] 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. [00:04:25] 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. [00:04:49] In the past and now. [00:04:52] To be seen or surveilled. [00:04:54] To be heard or overheard. [00:04:56] 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. [00:05:07] 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. [00:05:29] 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. [00:05:51] That if I could be seen, I would be loved, and if loved, I would be real. [00:05:58] I'm speculating that if there is an anxiety at the core of the influencers we study, it might be related to this. [00:06:07] 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. [00:06:21] And it's made me wonder whether and how I've been that much different from Zach Bush or Mickey Willis or Katie Griggs. [00:06:32] I know how to project that voice. [00:06:35] I know how to put on my resting guru face.