Heeeere’s Johnny!
Hello everyone. It’s Jack Nicholson’s birthday today! 22nd April 2026, Jack Nicholson turns 89. Not a bad innings, for a serial killer.
Jack Nicholson is not a serial killer, but he is 89. He’s an actor, which means he doesn’t kill people but sometimes pretends to. That’s pretty much the opposite of a serial killer. Serial killers kill people but (always) pretend not to.
Could an actor also be a serial killer? In principle, yes. But if Jack Nicholson was a serial killer, he’d be a person who pretends to be a serial killer professionally, who in his private life pretends not to be a serial killer, and then in his private private life is in fact a serial killer. There would be some mental gymnastics required I think. I’d say pack it in Jack, you’re almost there.
Today is Jack Nicholson’s birthday. I didn’t just know that, I Googled it. I have no strong feelings about Jack Nicholson one way or the other, so it’d be weird if I knew his birthday. But now I do know his birthday. And I’ll probably remember it now, too. Which is weird.
There’s a website called onthisday.com which has huge historical records organised by date. For every day of the year, it tells you all the people who have a birthday on that day. Do you want to know some of the other people who have a birthday on 22nd April?
It’s so important when you make a podcast that you make it enduringly relevant, because not everyone listens on the day of release, or even on the week of release. You need to say things that are interesting and relevant whenever the listener is listening, otherwise you massively limit your potential listenership and render your back catalogue useless.
Anyway, a very happy birthday to long-time listener to the pod, Machine Gun Kelly. Love your work. Some other listeners have birthdays today who I wouldn’t want to feel left out – happy birthday to Amber Heard, Immanuel Kant, Robert Oppenheimer, Lenin, Kaká (that Brazil team hasn’t been the same since you been gone), David Luiz (that’s exactly what I mean, sorry David).
And just in a moment of sincerity amidst the bullshit (I know it can be hard to tell the difference), a little wee tribute to one of the finest British comedians of our time, Mr Sean Locke, who would have been 63 today. Here’s a video that I watch roughly once a month and which makes me happy every single time. Give it a watch if you know him, and especially give it a watch if you don’t – he was a really very funny man.
It’s so many people’s birthday today. I looked at the list and there’s like hundreds more, people who mostly I don’t know but who presumably lots of people do know. There’s a Dutch footballer from the 60s called Henk Groot. Sick. There must be some vague thing that makes you similar to people with whom you share a birthday. There must be something similar in your parents that led them to conceive you at that time. Like, you might pop out more argumentative because your parents got it on on the Ides of March, or more religious because they went to town on Christmas day. But if there’s some sort of vibe in the air around us that impacts us all without our knowing, whether it’s to do with our communal human consciousness or to do with the many similarities in our DNA or to do with the bloody phases of the moon (astrology queens feel free to pipe up now), I’m sure sex has something to do with it, and two people, both of whose parents decided to do the deed on a given day, probably have quite some sort of similarity in their genes. I’ve often thought I could quite accurately guess someone’s month of birth. I do think I’m quite often right. More often than I should be statistically. Maybe in one episode I’ll run through all the months. April babies, chilled out, fun and a bit childish.
The fact that I know of like 20 of the people on the birthday list just for today blows my mind a bit. We know so many people’s names. We have a little profile of them in our minds, in varying degrees of detail. But how many profiles consisting of at least a name and a face do you think you have in your mind? Before I saw that list I would’ve said like 500. And even that seems a bit mad. But now I know that I have a name-and-face profile of at least 15 people who were born on 22nd April. That’s so many. If that’s standard, then that’s 5 and a half thousand. And that’s just celebrities who I’ve never met.
Our brains are absolutely mad. I’ve been slagging off babies for ages, saying that human babies are the silliest most ridiculous and most helpless things in the whole world. It’s not a great take and it doesn’t generally make me that popular. But I pedal it anyway, and it is kind of true. I can’t think of a single juvenile mammal that a newborn would beat in a fight. Rabbits are pretty helpless on the Scale of Mammal Newborn Helplessness, and they’re walking, or hopping, within two weeks. Babies take a year at best. Babies are nightmarish pets and they only get worse. They eventually stop pissing themselves and start talking, and then you wish they’d go back to not talking and you’re furious that there was never a period when they were neither talking nor pissing themselves. Then they start actually doing stuff, but they’re entirely incapable of doing anything independently so it basically means you have to broadly stop living your own life and start living the life of a 7-year-old – you’re up for school every morning, dinner at 5pm, you watch kids’ TV, read kids’ books, every Sunday you have to go and stand on the side of a football pitch in the rain and watch the most mind-numbingly appalling standard of football and act like you loved it. You take them everywhere, do everything for them, help them with their homework and be patient with them when they become tremendously unreasonable around the age of 14, and then they start drinking and smoking and resenting you despite the fact that you were the one that prevented them from being killed by a juvenile rabbit when they were a baby and refrained from leaving them on a hillside when they first called you a nobhead. And then, after all of that, they leave. They go off to uni, and for a bit, almost, just really very almost, you miss them. Annoyance plus time equals fondness and all that. And then, just as you begin to miss them, they come back, move back into your house, eat your food and start a podcast.
Babies are stupid.
But, in fact, they are not.
I learnt recently that from a physical development perspective human babies are born 18 months too soon. So by about 18 months old, babies are roughly physically capable of what most other mammals are at birth. That’s because, in crude terms, our brains are so unbelievably unbelievable that we have to put a massive amount of work into their development during gestation, infancy and childhood.
Our brains are so sick.
Don’t believe me? Just ask this week’s guest, Dr Lars Hansen.
Full disclosure – Dr Lars possibly knows me better than I know myself. He lives in the New Forest, very near where I was born in Southampton, and he has been a friend of my parents since I was very small. He has memories of me that I do not have of myself, and some very funny ones too. Most of them revolving around him being caught in the middle of furiously violent scraps between me and my brother, usually in the most inopportune places and often, for some reason, naked. Don’t ask me. I don’t remember!
Dr Lars is a psychiatrist. For those that don’t know, as I wasn’t entirely clear on it myself, many psychiatrists do do therapy, and Lars’ main day-to-day is seeing patients in a therapy setting. But he is called a psychiatrist because he has a medicine degree. Psychiatrists are medical doctors and can prescribe medication, whereas therapists/psychologists hold doctoral degrees in psychology and tend to focus on treating mental health conditions without medication. However, there is overlap, and while Lars is a medical doctor, he did his thesis on cognitive behavioural therapy and suicide – cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, is a non-medication-based approach to treatment. And, despite being a psychiatrist, I think Dr Lars would be the first to say that there are lots of naturally occurring things in the world, like exercise and time spent with other people, that can have just as dramatic a therapeutic impact as any medication.
Lars specialises in a variety of areas, including schizophrenia, psychosis, suicidality, anxiety and depression. As well as seeing patients through the NHS and in his private practice, he writes for magazines, appears in TV documentaries on the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, he’s contributed over 70 scientific articles to journals and has written a book, ‘Destination Integration’, about his experience as a Dane in the UK (and the concept of social integration more broadly). A topic as relevant now as it has ever been.
We did this interview in his study where he sees most of his patients. He’s seen a huge number of patients over his career and treated a wide variety of different conditions. Seeing patients as a psychiatrist is vastly different to how you might see a patient in any other area of medicine. Being a medic of any sort requires very strong people skills, but few other specialties demand of the doctor quite the same level of empathy, personal connection, ability to make a person feel entirely at home in your company and ready to let you in on the greatest challenges, darkest sides of and most sensitive truths about their life. Together, he and his patient try to get to understand their mind, a process which requires the patient’s full cooperation. There is no general anaesthetic in psychiatry, and in no other specialty might you have three sessions with a patient before you actually have the chance to examine them. There is just absolutely so much to it, and I’m fascinated and awed by what people like Lars do.
I knew that Lars would be an exceptional guest on this podcast – in fact, I knew that the podcast probably wouldn’t be the same after I’d spoken to him. Because podcast or no podcast, I was really excited to speak to Lars about simple joy. Unsurprisingly, considering his line of work, Lars is a highly sensitive conversationalist. With few people do I feel more comfortable to share things, and it’s because he clearly has such an active fascination in people. When he asks you a question, you can tell that he really genuinely wants to hear what you have to say, because it will help to contribute to his understanding of the rich variety of human existence. It’s such a gift to be able to have conversations like that.
And sure enough, a couple of weekends ago I cycled down to see Lars in the New Forest and we had one of the most enjoyable conversations that I can remember. I’m so pleased that I am able to keep it, and I’m so pleased that I can show it to you. It was so much fun, in fact, that we recorded for two hours until about 11 at night, and it felt criminal to edit such wonderful stuff down to 40 minutes. So I’m very excited that we’re going to have a Dr Lars double header this week and next. So strap on in.
It is my great privilege and even greater joy to introduce Dr Lars Hansen on the Simple Joys Podcast.
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