165 - A Philosophical Map Of Showmanship - A live talk about my upcoming book

What if showmanship isn’t just flair, but a way of seeing the world? I open up the first public talk about my forthcoming book, born from years of touring, early mornings, and 160+ podcast episodes, and share how a single poem became the spine for a philosophy of performance. As the lines were learned by heart, their meanings deepened, revealing a core image: the showman is the one who faces the other way, gathers a field of shared attention, and returns borrowed time as something refined.

From that image, we chart four working maps. First, the live situation itself: performer, audience, and the emergent dimension we call the show. Second, the human being at the center—thinking, feeling, and willing—as both subject and material. Third, the anatomy of an act, where choices in rhythm, structure, tone, and risk make ideas visible. Fourth, the values under intent, the quiet logic behind why we elevate a volunteer or make a joke at their expense. Along the way, we read from a chapter that unpacks the true, the good, and the beautiful, reframing them as guiding stars for craft: truth as resonant inquiry, goodness as lived action that helps others flourish, and beauty as attention’s welcome, from Baroque fugues to black metal’s frost.

To make it concrete, we imagine a three-ring circus under colored lights—blue for truth, red for beauty, green for goodness—where performers fail and try again, and sincerity becomes the real feat. We share practices you can use tomorrow: capture moments that resonate, look beyond your field for patterns, follow fear to find what you value, and translate insights into movement, text, and timing until they live in your hands. If you care about performance, creativity, circus, magic, or the craft of making meaning in front of people, this conversation offers language, tools, and a compass.

If this resonated, subscribe, leave a five-star review, and share it with a friend who faces the other way. For updates on the book, follow The Way of the Showman on Instagram and stay tuned for what comes next.

Transcript

From Podcast To Book Project

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Greetings, fellow travelers, and welcome to The Way of the Showman, where we view the world through the lens of showmanship. I am Captain Frodo, and I will be your host and your guide along the way. And today I bring a special episode. It's an episode that is about my book. As the faithful listener, such as yourself perhaps, will know, I have been working on a book for many years now. And those people who were following along already in season two, the episodes from twenty-two onwards, will know that I spent a considerable amount of time going through trying to write out what the way of the showman, if if the way of the showman is to be a way of life, a way to understand the world through the lens of showmanship, what is this lens and what is the knowledge that we actually uh can um gain from it? So that's what the book has been, and that was what those episodes, 30 episodes or more, back then, a few years ago, and that material has lived in me. I spent a considerable amount of time making a book out of that, a book-length manuscript, rewriting it all, making sure I don't double up too much, and that each of the things that comes in the book has got all the information ahead of it, so that it reads as one long good introduction to all of this. And I am now well, I finished that book a while ago, as I mentioned here, and then Jay Gilligan, who you will know from the podcast here, if you've listened to any episodes, then he's my most the guy that's been here on the podcast the most, except for myself. And uh he uh spent hours and over a few days just read through it in a way that only Jay can do. Pay attention, like no other person. Dug into it and found some um flaws and shortcomings. I have done another rewrite, and that has taken me another six or seven months, and I just finished that, as I mentioned in this upcoming uh talk, because that's what this is. It's a 25-minute or so uh uh talk uh that I did about the book. Um I was invited by Ben Dick Negro that from oh at uh Circusoley, an excellent uh fellow that I have uh gotten to know, that I've met both here in Las Vegas and um in um in Edinburgh as well. We got to have some great times together there. And um then I have been doing some uh mime. He is an excellent teacher and runs a group uh together with a bunch of other people uh called the 1230 clowns, and they are doing a lot of practice and a lot of work here, and I've been so um excited to join them and go back and school myself a little bit over on some days. And one of the things that they do is that they gather in a little theater to practice and they put on shows and they also do well, he invited me anyway. I don't know if they actually do other talks, if that's what they do, but he invited me to come and uh read from my book and uh talk about it. So that's what this uh thing is. At the end of the talk, I realized that I should probably spend now that I'm finished doing my daily writing sessions uh of uh working on the book for a bit until I get feedback on it from my next beta readers, um then I should spend some time working on making a a a synopsis or a short talk. I had it in very simple note form, but because everything in the book is so unbelievably interconnected, like strange loops biting itself in the own in their tails, like the horrorboros uh uh snake. Um I find it hard in this uh talk to be able to compress everything and not always say, Oh, and this is connected to this and this is connected to that. So not try to give too much information in too short time. So um I hope that this uh makes sense to you, but it is also just to celebrate for myself what feels like a big achievement that I've gotten to a point where I can read from it and it makes sense. The topic that I choose to write about is um basically the thing that I've merk worked most on after Jay was finished, and it is um uh yeah, it's about uh true and the good and a beautiful, so quite uh epic stuff there. I um hope you like that. I hope you uh like this. The sound is not uh 100%, it's just recorded on an iPhone lying on a table to the side of the of the place where we were talking. But um I thought it might be interesting for you to to hear. It's the first kind of public uh presentation that I have done of the book, and you guys will all get to hear all the more about it, and uh hope that this next bit of the process is gonna be a lot uh quicker. So, without further ado, here is uh the book talk.

SPEAKER_00 5:47

Are you okay with that too if they would film you? Yeah, yeah. And then if you for some reason don't want to give your names out, of course, the I'm also here in incognito.

Feedback, Rewrites, And Purpose

The Poem As Structural Spine

Archetypal Showman And Shared Attention

Four Maps Of Showmanship

Reading: True, Good, And Beautiful

The Three-Ring Metaphor Of Values

Practices For Seeking Meaning

SPEAKER_02 5:58

It's a witness protection thing, but it's a funny. I'm live in America, so it's fine. As long as I'm still living up, I'm safe. Greetings, fellow travelers, it is um uh really nice. It's the first time I'm talking about my book in uh live like this. Um so I when the pandemic hit, I was living here, and one of the things I started uh to do to do something creative while I couldn't do shows was that I started a podcast, and the podcast uh was and is still called The Way of the Showman. So I've done 160 plus episodes since then. And when I first started out, it was not the conversation podcast, it was just me talking. So it started out by being these essays that I'd published on a blog, and then it went into that was the first 21 episodes, and then I had for a long time throughout my life been thinking a lot about uh performance uh as you do. And one of the things is by being in, I was in a show for 12 years that toured around, and we did eight shows a week, six days uh a week. Uh but I am a very early riser if I have a sleeping problem. That is that I when I wake up in the morning I can't go back to sleep. So I had lots of hours in the day when I was in hotel rooms or in whatever, and I could spend time reading and developing my ideas. And for a very long time, the ideas was just lots of different ideas scattered about, like islands on an ocean or whatever. But somehow I also knew that somewhere deep below they were all actually connected up by the same bedrock or whatever, but I didn't know quite what that was. So when the pandemic uh came, as I was doing these first essays, I started to try to put it all uh into words. And the first effort of that ended up being sort of 35 episodes or so of me sketching these ideas out. And uh as I was writing it and needing to have the episodes come out and all this, it it um it's not as cohesive as what when you put it into a book where everything needs to not repeat yourself and put it all together. So that was a big effort. I put all of this together, and then six months ago or so, uh guy that's on the podcast a lot, another performer, Jay Gilligan, who's worked a lot in Absinthe. He's the teacher of all of the kids who are in Water on Mars, all the jugglers over there were his students back at the circuit school. He's a teacher at the circuit school in Stockholm. So he read the book, and um he said, uh in the introduction of the book, you lay out the premise for what the book is, and for the first half of the book, you follow the promise that you've made, but the last half you are going off on a tangent. So I've spent the last six months um writing, and I spent 20 hours writing on my two days off, these last 10 hours, and now it's finished again. So thank you. Thank you very much. So that's just a little bit of the um of the um what how it all came to be. And the structure of the book is as idiosyncratic as the material in it. I start by talking about because when you have lots of disparate ideas and you start to connect it together, what will be the tool that you use to connect it so that the one thought after the next gets structured so you read it from the beginning to the end? And this was for me a poem. A poem that I wrote, and the book starts with me talking about how I was had this desire when I made the show when another worldwide, not the pandemic, but the tsunami hit, and uh I had a five-month contract uh that was supposed to be at the Hilton Hotel in Waikiki Beach in Hawaii. And my wife was very excited. Then the this thing came and they the tsunami, and I got a five-month period off. In that period, I made a show, and that show was called The Way of the Showman. And in that show, I wanted to say something, deliver a text or say something that would be kind of grand and have big ideas that would color the stuff that came later in the show. And I was looking for what that could be, and in all of my notes and everything, I found this poem. And I thought, oh well, this is kind of interesting. It just sort of sketches out what like a person does in a show. And I didn't sort of see the depth of it in the beginning, but I it became a placeholder and I put it into the show, and this poem is now what um is the I take each of those verses because as I was working with that poem, and something happens when you're delivering a text, when you're working with material and you learn it by heart, and I really like this thing of learning it, learning something by heart. It becomes a part of you, and as you speak it, uh you learn more and more about what that actually means. My favorite poet, David White, favorite current poet, he uh says that um the act of poetry is to discover things that you didn't know that you already knew. And I was reading this poem and started uh pr presenting it, declaring the poem, and discovering more and more things that I um that what that actually meant. So uh although the poem remained the same from the beginning and until now, my understanding of it has grown along the way. So the poem is the same, but I am now changed, and this book is kind of capturing that. So I thought maybe I'll try to declare the poem first, and then I'll do a little reading. Uh, because a lot of this whole thinking started, and the thing that drew me to this piece of text that I'd written that I can't quite remember having written was this one sentence. So the poem uh starts, um, and I performed it early on in the show, and it goes, I am a showman. First and foremost, it is a showman. I am but what does that mean? It's not something that's easy to grasp onto. So let me try and explain. A showman is someone who faces the other way. This is not a showman. It's a showman, and a showman who calls for attention, but he has something to show when he gets it. Where a showman is someone who has walked with the crowd and then turned around to face the others, and a showman shows man, revealing the pulsing meat of human experience and reminding us of the inherent folly of all human endeavor. For when we're laughing at the clown, we are laughing at ourselves, and a showman. Well, I'll just uh I was I was gonna I'm running out of time, so anyway, a showman when a showman and showman performs on a market square, he creates a universe, and in this universe, the showman is like the sun, and the audience is like planets gathering orderly around him, and the gravity of the showman warps time and it walks space, and in this walked space, the showman steals the crowd's time, but then like an alchemical uh Robin Hood, he returns it refined as showtime. I am a showman, first and foremost, it is a showman. I am. So that's a poem. So the starting point of all of this was this one realization, which is the first bit that I talk about in the book of what it means, that the showman is somebody who faces the other way. Because this structure, I believe, have come to believe, is a fundamental structure of uh human organization. It's a thing that we do as human beings that is not really done in any other species. It's that a group of people if you look at it sort of in the big picture, it can actually be one-on-one, one magician doing magic for one person. But the archetypal image is this of somebody facing the other way. And for you guys to give me attention for a duration of time, I need to have something to show you, and I'm using all the language from the poem that is of value or interest to you, or else you will walk away from this. So from this simple kind of pattern comes the first um map, because this is what I call the book The Way of the Showman, uh, a philosophical map of showmanship. So I deal a lot with this process of map making, because a map is something which is uh always less than the territory. The map of this area just has little squares for houses and everything, and it necessarily has a lot less detail. And all the structures and so that I talk about in the poem, like this thing of one facing the other way, are these kinds of maps. So reality is endlessly complicated, but if I want to say something deep about performance, uh I need to simplify it. So I start with this the one facing the other way, which lumps us clowns and jugglers and acrobats in with a whole bunch of other people who also do this, like a priest also is in this situation. So it takes the spiritual into it. Uh and also teachers and professors are in this situation. And then I can then look at it because the the whole situation is then made up of showman. So the foundation of what showmanship is is a showman and an audience. And when we have an act of reciprocal attention like we have now, then a new dimension that is not really existing anywhere else than in the human um experience comes into being. And I call that level the show. And what we do in this shared experience of show is very different than a teacher does, and it's very different from what a priest does. Yet they are all somewhat related. So um those are the kind of three things that is the starting point of one facing the other way, a group of people, and the shared attention, which means to and then the creation of a show, a new dimension, a new existence. And this means to me then that the showman, which is now an archetypal, because it's not a coincidence that the poem doesn't say, Oh, and then he gets his balls out and juggles, so then he does the handstand. The showman in the poem is the archetypal showman before he actually manifests in doing any one particular skill. So it's the most kind of, it's like what light is before you put it through a prism. It's the white light that breaks into a rainbow of, we call it seven colours, but it's an unlimited amount of colours. We've just delineated those. So this is like what how I see the show, man. And I am also just, I am aware of the archaic um use of man in this. And as I I it irks me that this is the way that it is, but uh when human, which is that it's that, that's how I think of it as in a show human. So I I spend some time playing with those kind of words to place that in. And um, but yeah, so that's the that's the kind of starting point of it, what showmanship is. And then I look at the there's the line in the poem which is in verse five saying, a showman shows man, man, which places the human being at the very center of what a performance is. So then I make a map. What what what can we which features, and I bring it down to four main or three sort of features that I that of a thinking, feeling, and willing or action. And then I look, so that's like one map, and then I make another map of what is actually, how does these things, our thoughts, and how does our feelings and how does our actions manifest on in an act, and I break that down into another into another kind of map. And then finally I look at all the choices that we make in whatever it is that we're going to do, they display some sort of intent. And then I go, what so if I if I'm on stage and I get uh steal somebody's watch and I can and then I make the audience laugh at this person at how inobservant they are or how how how they couldn't didn't catch me steal their watch, then my intent is clear to see. I wanted to make fun of this person, but behind the intent that you display lies the values that made you take those choices. What are the values that I would have taken so that I would want to make somebody laugh at a stranger in front of a group of people? So the final kind of map is then about values. What are the values that you lean towards? Um and all of it is quite lofty and they're big kind of images. So it's for a long time I wanted to include the word poetic as well, because it has the poem and all that. So they're kind of images that I create to um to hopefully not prescribe things, so though I uh make these little maps, there's kind of four maps of what showmanship is and what an act, what the anatomy of an act is, and what map can we make of the human being, and finally what are the values that guides it. So it's these kind of four maps that I that I spend the whole book um bringing out. So to draw this to a little close, I thought I could read a little uh a little bit. It'll take about uh ten minutes to read, a little bit less, hopefully. And this is towards the end of the book, it's chapter eight. Um which is where I talk a little bit about this alchemical stuff. I bring in that word alchemical in it. And the interesting thing here is also that I'm writing about this poem, trying to understand what it is. Uh so it's not so that I wrote everything and put it in, and uh when I go back through my notes and stuff, I find that some of these things have been with me. Since the middle of the 90s, and somehow all of those thoughts have sort of found their way into this poem. So yeah. This is towards the end. And I am now this little subchapter thing is called Unpacking the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Which is those are the three kinds of uh I mean the true, the good, and the beautiful is a pillar of Western thinking from Plato uh and uh onwards up and um so so I use those really big lofty kind of um lofty things to to guide uh to guide us as values. All right, so I'll I'll just read here for for for a little bit so you get the flavor of um because I'm asking as I said the human being has these different faculties that we deal with. It's like we approach the world by thinking, that's one of the elements of how we take the world in through our head, and then we also feel strong emotions, that's what makes us feel strong things about our ideas or whatever, and then we have our actions, which you can see as a picture of like our head and our heart and our hands, as those three different dimensions of in through which we act and undergrasp the world. And this um uh chapter that I'm gonna read talks about how um how these three values connect up to uh these three faculties. So let me just read without any more um it's always weird when you're reading something from in the middle of the thing. Unpacking the true, the good, and the beautiful. Our thinking knows truth as its paragon. Thinking desires truth, not opinion, not convenience, but what is. Yet it doesn't know the finality of truth ahead of time in any given instance. Because the value of truth isn't finished and final as an artifact. It's a start to set the course by that will never be reached. Truth in any given situation is something that we have to work out for ourselves. Each moment has its own truths, and as the moments flow through their duration, the nature of truth flows with it. The heart of the matter is the recognition of truth by resonance in ourselves. We know something about the world because it resonates within us. I think I like to think that uh true isn't so much any definitive answer, but rather our persistent and heartfelt inquiry after it. We know the good and can choose to act accordingly. The good is perhaps the clearest case of objective worth, which is something I talk about. How how do we connect with other people? We can't just if if my biggest passion is to count cars that drive past my window, that's maybe not the meaning that becomes meaningful to other people. So I'm looking for these. What are the things that could be perceived as objective meaning? And I make the argument here that the true, the good, and the beautiful are such things. Think only of things like alleviating suffering, helping others flourish, and promoting justice. If seen at a slant, our performances could be said to potentially further those causes. As promote justice, making other flourish. The nature of the good and the moral action flowing from it is also an organic and evolving value. The right action in a situation in the Middle Ages versus now are in some ways different, yet at their heart it is the same. We have the ability to know and want to take good action, not by following a final and prescribed dogma, but to have the ideal in us as a compass needle guiding our way to the right actions for any given situation. The good connects our lives to something larger than ourselves without the need of invoking the supernatural. The beautiful is not just the models on the magazine covers or the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. We can find beauty in a fugue by Bach, but we can also find it in the frosty landscapes conjured by Norwegian black metal music. The connoisseurs of each music style might be reluctant to admit the beauty in the other, yet I am in the camp that experiences beauty in both metal and the Baroque. Profound beauty can also be found in tragedies like Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights, and Eminem's song Stan. An everyday tragedy like a car crash is not beautiful in and of itself, but a storyteller like Emily Bronte or Eminem can shape and structure the telling of such an event so that we see beauty in the tragic. Our actual inner experience of beauty takes many forms, from the comforting to the disturbing, from the sacred to the profane. The scope of affection we find in beauty is too vast to detail, but to me, a common denominator is that it has a positive influence on us. We like looking and we like listening to what's beautiful. It's easy and pleasurable to pay attention to, which you probably remember is a feature that it shares with entertainment. So here I'm sort of bringing it right back to. So that that was just a little bit to give a flavor of how I argue it. We are um how we argue that we can sort of what why am I talking about the true, the good, and the beautiful? So I'm just talking a little bit about there was more to that chapter, but um this chapter then comes after this is about realizing the true, the good, and the beautiful. Imagine the circus not as a spectacle, but as a manifestation of it, the human being. A round big top with three rings where thinking, feeling, and willing are shown and developed in public view. Each ring has its guiding star, a colored light up in the circus dome shining down, blue for the thinking and the true. A reddish ray shines onto the feeling of the beautiful, and finally a greenish tint that shades the willing of the good. This is not a place of mere entertainment. It's a picture of how the human being meets reality. A wonderful thing about it is that the three rings are not rivals, they're all part of the same great show. Each of the three rings reflect different ways reality speaks to us. Three faculties of our inner geography that strives towards three values up in the circus dome. And the performers in the ring in the rings continually fail and fall short, but their earnest desire to find their way is more valuable and marvelous than any final destination. In their hearts, the audience knows this and sees through the shortcomings to the sincerity of their strivings. How much time do we have? Okay. So how do we realize it? Study. Notice what you think and feel as you go through your day, mindful of what resonates in you as good, true, and beautiful. Seek it in what you see, read, hear, and encounter in the world. In these thoughts and feelings, you'll find a foundation, the ground beneath your feet, from which you can take the first steps towards sharing these insights with others. We must actively seek these things out. Take notes, make voice memos, steer conversations towards it, ask the brave and beautiful questions. Write down what moves you or what you discovered in any given conversation. Find what you're most afraid of, for in that you will find what you care about. Find what you're most afraid of, for in that you will find what you care about. Find what holds you back in your striving to be a better you. Write it down, write a poem about it, juggle it, make magic of it, meditate, read more, watch great cinema, look outside your own field. If you're a magician, don't just pay attention to magic and other magicians. Grapple with the big questions. Find whomever around you that you know who have expressed themselves about whatever obstacles face you. Find them and learn from them and find out what the smarter giants before you have said about these things in history. Wisdom can be found in all masters of their craft. You can find it in a master sushi maker, in scientists, in philosophers, gurus, painters, poets, and musicians, and you can find it everywhere as long as you're actively looking for it. Don't ever assume that any one person will have the whole truth, certainly not yourself. The true, good, and beautiful is always manifold. The transcendental values are like brilliant, cut, endlessly multifaceted diamonds, where anyone is only ever to see one facet or a few facets at a time. Each of the greats who have gained their knowledge of values like the sushi maker, the philosopher, an artist and scientist has each grasped their own aspects of these truths. Seek all this out and take notes, real, on paper, in well-chosen, good-looking notebooks or on your phone. Write it in longhand, rework it into poems, retell the insights to yourself in voice memos, or write it in a blog, tell a friend. Work actively on your insights. They will have a greater inner importance and value for yourself. Once these insights have been made and assimilated into your heart and mind, you will find ways. You will find ways to let them collar and come alive in your actions and acts. Thus, our stage, no, thus our acts on stage and in the world can do their share of tipping the world balance towards the true, the good, and the beautiful. So yeah. So I'm aware of this. It's funny because I'm always kind of expressing myself through spoken word, and you have to speak a little bit differently. So when I'm reading these manuscripts on my podcast, I was doing in the beginning, uh, exploring different topics. I read, but I'm doing what I started to do here in the beginning, where I'm reading and then I stop and I comment and then I go back, but then I decided I should probably just read the whole flow because the language is quite different when you are just reading stuff aloud, and it's it's kind of dense, and it keeps this is also late in the book. It's in the penultimate chapter, the second to last chapter. So it assumes you've got a whole bunch of stuff connected to the other verses. So uh yeah, that's that's where it's at. Thanks for your time and attention.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

So that was the first time when I spoke publicly about my uh upcoming book. Still in uh the final stages of the writing process, and I will um still have questions as to what exactly to do what to do with the with the publication and everything. But uh whatever might happen, you will find out about it here on the way of the showman, and you will be able to get it from uh uh links via the show notes, etc., and all of that. So um yeah. Until then, uh I will publish it also on uh on my on uh the way of the showman on the Instagram account. You'll find out about it there. And um, yeah. So maybe sign up to that. Write us a review. And when I say us, it's me. I do, or uh it's just me. So uh write me a review. Say uh tell the world that this is a five-star podcast, and uh it would really mean a whole lot to me. And sign up if you haven't done that so the episodes come down, it really, really helps me. Thank you so much for checking all this out, and until next time, take care of yourself and those you love, and I hope to see you along the way.