Well hi, morphin’ Gordons. You’re quick, you. Can’t catch you.
I’m not trying to hook you in, or at least by no means in a sneaky way. I just want to say that my chat with David Hawkins has sat with me and percolated and excited me over and over again in the week or two since I had it.
There’s lots to it, and I don’t want to overexplain it in advance, or indeed at all. Because I don’t want to deaden the impact it has on you. I want you to take it full in the face, across the brain, down through your heart and all the way to your soul, which I assume is around the spleen. I don’t know what a spleen is. Maybe it’s where your soul lives.
Instead of overexplaining, since we’re on a dozen episodes, I thought I’d have a little check in with you (and myself) on how this whole thing is going.
I still find it quite hard to explain to people what I’m doing. I mean, explaining this podcast to people who don’t listen to podcasts, or indeed to people who do, is a bit of a task. If I try to explain any further than just saying ‘it’s about simple joy’ I tend to tie myself up in knots and say things like, ‘Oh, I’m talking to interesting people about interesting things.’ And I can see their minds going. “this man has no ideas at all”.
When people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a writer. Which is still what I feel like I am, and I suppose in the absence of a boss or a job title, I can choose my own. Writer sounds better than podcaster, and podcast producer sounds a bit better but I don’t think that really fits. ‘Producer’ is quite a vague term, and intentionally so. A producer, in film, TV, theatre or radio, tends to be someone who is across every aspect of the project, from the creative side to the practical bits and the financial stuff too. The ‘executive producer’ is generally in charge. And it certainly has a nice ring to it. But I think a title like that implies that the Simple Joys operation is a big huge operation with lots of big huge things going on, which sounds a bit weird when I’m sitting in my childhood bedroom swearing at Adobe Audition.
So I tell people I’m a writer. It’s a title I can feel like I’ve earned, because while it is a suitable ‘career title’, it is also just a word, like cyclist or… umbrella. A five-year-old child can be a writer, a CEO of a multinational corporation can be a writer. It’s a bit like what Nina said a couple of weeks ago – when someone asked her what she does, she told them she plays football. ‘What do you do?’ is quite a generous question, and it is up to you to see it that way. To those of you with ‘proper jobs’, I challenge you – this week, if someone asks you what you do, tell them you’re a colour-coordinator of shelves, or an enjoyer of the music of Ocean Colour Scene, tell them you experiment with miso. I’m wondering if I should get some business cards made. what I should get printed on them – ‘Joe Wald, Enthusiast’, or ‘Joe Wald, Former Child’. What do we think? I might actually do it.
In a slightly more corny cringe way, calling myself a writer also constitutes a bit of a manifestatory thing that I can turn a joy into a job. I mean, for… jolly nob’s sake, they’re only a letter apart! They’re a typo apart, admittedly if you have hooves rather than hands. To be fair, if you have hooves, you’ve done pretty well to get the ‘j-o’ in place. But anyway, if I keep saying I’m a writer, I might start thinking I’m a writer, and then I’ll start saying it to people with enough confidence that they might pay me money to do it, for whatever reason they might want that.
Have you seen that man on Instagram who hires impersonators to come to his house and just hang out with him? It’s pretty spectacular. There’s something a tiny bit toe-curling about it, but I suppose these are performers who perform for a living and I suppose they’ve consented to be on this man’s TikTok. It’s probably great for their careers, who knows. The Tom Cruise one gives it absolutely everything in a special way that was somehow at once inspiring and degrading. Loved it.
I’d like to think that impersonators are people who are turning a joy into a job. I wonder what led this man to become a Tom Cruise impersonator, whether he just absolutely adores Tom Cruise and wanted to turn that passion into a job, whether he was entirely indifferent to Tom Cruise but people kept saying he looked like Tom Cruise and he hated his day job so just packed up and went all in on the Tom Cruise thing. Big respect for both of those, I’d say. Or… maybe he looked loads like Tom Cruise and as a result developed a fixation and believed that he actually was Tom Cruise. Slightly more concerning. Or maybe he adored Tom Cruise with such a vehemence that his bodily features began to morph into the shape of Tom Cruise’s. Maybe. Perhaps that’s what’s happened to me, but I’m not THAT obsessed with Borat, or the 118 118 guys.
Mm, that one might work better on a stage, because you can’t see me and we’re on a podcast. I often wonder whether these intros slightly stray into half-baked poorly written stand-up routines that I’ll probably never perform. I look quite a lot like Borat / 118 118 at the moment. There we go. Now you’re there. We’ve landed the plane. More like 118 118 before a shower, Borat after.
It’s true a bit with tribute acts, too. You have to be an excellent musician to be in a successful tribute act, but you still have to pretend to be someone else the whole time. What does that do to your self-esteem? Maybe nothing. Maybe you don’t write your own songs and are just really grateful to be able to be paid to play the music you love. Maybe you grew up listening to The Rolling Stones and never had a guitar lesson so it was basically Keith Richards who taught you the guitar and because of that you can play exactly like him, and only like him. But you’ll probably become a great musician in your own right, and after a decade it might start to rankle that you have to dress up as this other guitarist, a man who is alive, living somewhere, who you’ve probably never met and who probably doesn’t know who you are, you have to strap on a headband, go out on stage and contribute to his glorification and yourself remain anonymous and unglorified. Maybe that’d start to wind you up. Or maybe it wouldn’t. And if it didn’t, you’d be happier twofold, because you’d get to go on happily doing this fun thing that you get paid for, and you’d divorce yourself from the ultimately shallow and unrewarding pursuit of glory. Research suggests that fame doesn’t make you happy in your own lifetime, and you won’t be around to see what it does for you after that. But the pursuit of glory will inevitably involve placing yourself above others, so you lose out big style on the great joy of being kind, receiving kindness and creating bonds of trust with other people.
But the pursuit of glory is something that people have done for as long as we’ve heard from people. It’s a massive feature of Ancient Greek literature (yes, my Classics degree cost 9 grand a year, I’m going to try and get my money’s worth). Achilles, who’s the hero of the Iliad, which is an epic poem by Homer about the Trojan War, is a big huge brave strong warrior man. He’s big and huge, and he’s really great at fighting. In fact, basically every time his name is mentioned, it will be preceded by some sort of adjective saying how great he is. ‘Godlike’ is a common one, . He is universally considered the best soldier in Greece. And soldiering was pretty important, so he was pretty important, and he knew it. He behaved like it. He became addicted to this reputation he had, to the reverence that everyone around him had of him, such that his primary, nay, sole goal in life became his own glorification. And this is made pretty explicit in the story. Before he sets off for Troy, a goddess tells him, If you go to Troy, you’ll die young but you’ll win everlasting glory. if you don’t go, you’ll live a nice long life but you won’t be remembered at all in a few generations time. He chose to go, and the rest is history.
Now, you might think he made the right decision and you might be right. It’s impossible to dispute that he’s achieved the fame that he hoped he would – I’m talking about him on a podcast in 2026. The Trojan War is supposed to have happened around 1200 BC. People were still doing human sacrifice and accidentally killing each other in the Olympics at that point – you can imagine podcasting was quite a long way down the priority list. But Achilles has survived into the podcasting age, and hell, he’ll probably outlast it too. I can totally understand why, if you’re an exceptional runner and you’re told that your one chance at Olympic glory and sporting immortality will involve you dying in the process, you might do it anyway. I do see that. It’s quite extreme, but I can understand it.
Which means the pursuit of glory is by no means unnatural thing. I don’t mean to say it’s innate – I don’t think that any evolutionary theory would support the fact that a human’s innate hardwiring would advise them to go and run around a track in the hope of winning a piece of metal before immediately dying – I can’t imagine that’s part of our DNA, but we’ve clearly been predisposed to do that sort of thing for quite a long time and it’s definitely a part of our communal human consciousness, if nothing else. Plugging the theory.
But even the Iliad, an epic about war written in a time when war was the main activity for men, and dying in battle was the greatest honour there was, even the Iliad implies that maybe Achilles wasn’t right to be so bullish in his pursuit of glory. The story is basically how his massively inflated self-image and sense of pride leads to thousands of deaths. So the poem clearly doesn’t consider it to be an overwhelmingly good thing. There’s also characters who behave very differently to Achilles, who don’t furiously pursue glory and immortal renown, and who have achieved it all the same. Like Nestor. Have you heard of Nestor. Mmm, maybe just being a generally really good bloke isn’t quite as memorable as being a violent diva. Point taken. But still.
The fact is this – Achilles persistently ignores good advice to stop being such a diva, and eventually his best friend-cum-lover is killed because of his belligerence. Achilles and Nestor and Agammemnon and Odysseus probably never existed, but this doesn’t matter – we can learn from their behaviour and their advice, as Achilles himself failed to do. The Iliad, like all good stories, raises more questions than it answers, and it’s clear that the question of glory vs long life was on the mind at the time. And it’s surely still on the mind now, in a slightly different way.
And the fact that it’s survived this long must mean that there’s something valuable about it to all humans. The world is pretty different now to how it was then, but our brains are pretty much the same, and it makes it all a bit more fun if we can put ourselves in their shoes for a bit.
So yeah, the podcast is going great, thanks.
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