The James Donald Forbes McCann Catamaran Plan - Episode 10: An enormous failure

Episode Date: February 27, 2022

The cash giveaway has been cancelled. Details in the podcast. Thanks to everybody who got their dollar.The wheels are falling off, but that's ok, because boats don't need wheels.(Do boats need wheels? They need steering wheels, I suppose. Maybe there are also other boat wheels. I look forward to finding this and many other boat questions out in the future).Join the patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jdfmccannAlso, you can come and see me at the Adelaide fringe if you like:https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/james-donald-forbes-mccann-aesthetic-af2022 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the James Donald Forbes McCann Catamaran Plan. If you'd like to listen to bonus episodes, go sign up to the Patreon. That's patreon.clom. Clom? Ah, we f***ed it. Anyway, look, you'll find a way. Catamaran Home! If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered.

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Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Well, I want to begin by saying thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to everybody who participated in the huge cash giveaway that we launched last week. As explained on last week's podcast, I vowed to give a dollar to everybody who shared the James Donald Forbes Mechanic Had a Rand Plan podcast on their Instagram stories. And to get more people to do it, I later opened that up to Twitter as well. look i won't beat around the bush it was a huge failure it was an enormous failure and i seriously misjudged what the right thing to do was i see that now i take responsibility i hope we can move forwards together to the 13 people who took the dollar, thank you.

I appreciate it. I enjoyed paying you your dollar. The hope was to give out $100. We gave out about $11 on the first day. Got rid of the next $2 on the second day. In the last five days, I've not had occasion to give out a single dollar. And the reason is clear. People who are fans of the podcast don't want to take money away from the podcast. You've told me this.

You, the listener, have sent me message after message saying, James, listen, I'll share the podcast. I'm sharing it anyway. I love the podcast. Please don't give me a dollar. And almost all of the time I've said to those people, you better let me give you that dollar. I want to get rid of the dollar. And sometimes people have acquiesced and said, all right, here's my BSP, here's my account number. But a lot of the time people said, no, you're not getting me that dollar. And so what i had thought of was a savvy and affordable way to advertise the podcast to get

out to more listeners to sell more ads to those listeners and to make more money has backfired into a strange thing where fans don't want to be the vehicle of me moving away from owning a boat. So I thank you for your kindness. I thank you for your attention. I thank you for your complicity to 13 of you. But we have no choice but to cancel the huge cash giveaway. We have to find some other way to grow the podcast. That wasn't it.

I thought I'd be getting rid of the dollars. Lickety split. Dollar, dollar, dollar, dollar, dollar in there. Not so. I had to tell some people I was in a car with, listen, can I give you a dollar, please, for a share? It didn't work. It isn't a good system.

Also, a dollar might not be enough money. Some people love the podcast, but going through the steps necessary to share it, to look up the bank details, to copy that and to send it to me, why one person said $25 was the amount of admin that required and i suppose that's true as well i just thought you know a dollar is a good amount of money to have i'm not going to take the 13 out of the podcast kitty i'm going to while canceling this while cancelling this project, retrospectively pay for it myself out of a $13 charitable donation to my own plan to boat ownership. It's the very least I can do.

I apologise. Well, I don't apologise. I'm sad. Sometimes people confuse those two things. Oh, boy. You know, as we begin this general meeting, using a Gatorade is a bell today. I'll use my keys. This episode is brought to you by Google Pixel.

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As we begin this general meeting, I think now's the time for a State of Union. Where are we at? Where's the life? Where's the boat? Lifeboat. This podcast is perhaps not going to be up to the standard of some of the previous episodes because my laptop is disintegrating in front of me and it's very hard to edit it takes

half an hour to import an audio file at the moment so there won't be as much editing but there will be passion and intensity as we embark on a State of the Union. Let's weigh up some of the pros and some of the cons. Pro, I have quit my job. Last week was my first job-free week, and may I just say it was glorious. I was doing the fringe every night, working, gigging. I was getting up a bit late. I'm still on my work email, so I'm still getting messages from work

that my team, you know, hey, everybody, we're having a meeting. And I think to myself, not me. I'm not having that meeting. And that's a real pro. Con, we are poor. New sources of income are yet to fully commence. And I'm living invoice to invoice. There's no security.

When you're a freelancer, can't have a sick day. I work all hours of the night sometimes. If work comes in and there's a deadline, I will just hunker down, get it done, pump out the work. But then sometimes there's days on end. I mean, I know this is only a week that I'm talking about, but sometimes there are days on end where you go, is no work, don't it come in? I am screwed, baby. I may have to go back on the dole. We don't have savings. I'm not saving any money for superannuation. I don't have enough money for this week, let alone superannuation.

There's no James Donald Forbes McCann retirement plan other than hope that one of my children becomes mega rich. I got holes in my socks. I got holes in my shoes. i'd say they were all cons here's a pro though adelaide fringe always going really well i get out there i do the show every night stunning fabulous love doing it love the audiences coming. Con. I don't see that money for ages. And here's another con. Oh, oh, it's a much bleaker show than I anticipated.

You don't really know necessarily what a show is going to be until you start doing it. I thought there'd be a lot of jokes, a lot of uplifting, do some riffing with the crowd. Instead, it's a very, very, very focused on death. And that's rough. And it's more emotionally draining than I had anticipated at the outset. Here's a pro, though. My son's walking. My little boy, he's walking around.

Here's a con. He's walking into things. He's screaming all the time. Holy dooly. Here's a pro. The podcast is going great guns. We're getting more listeners all the time. You know, only 13 people wanted to share the podcast and get paid a dollar for it.

But a lot of people were listening. We're getting so many listeners february it's on track to be our greatest ever month of the three months we've done and that's very impressive because february i don't know how familiar you are with months february is shorter than january and already we have beaten the january. Yes, the wind is at our back. Con, I don't know how I'm going to keep making the podcast with this laptop. It is very bad. If the power cable gets nudged out, it just dies.

Oh! It's going real slow. It's not loading well. I don't know how i'm going to make you do the freelance work now i do have money from the podcast that i can take out and buy a laptop with i could do that i'm not going to do that we're going to fight on i want that boat money to be for boat related projects primarily and while i would use a laptop for the boat podcast, I'd be using it for the other stuff as well. Work.

Facebook. See how the war in the Ukraine is going on. Excuse me, war in Ukraine. Can't stop saying the Ukraine. Here's a con. I haven't been to confession in a long time. But here's a pro. I want to. I confession in a long time. But here's a pro. I want to.

I want to. And over Easter, I will. Here's a con. My wife is very tired. I go out every night to this festival, performing. I can't help like I want to help. And it pains me to see her suffer with the children. Here's another con.

We may have to move out of our rental. Because the owners want to do renovations. Con! We can't afford to buy a house when that happens. Con! With inflation and increasingly competitive market and low vacancy, you know, it's all f***ed up. The housing market's all f***ed up right now.

So we can't afford to move into a house that's as good as this house. I'm falling over my words. I'm so upset about it. We're going to have to move to, we're in like a cool inner city suburb with meth people on the street. Beautiful. It's a really beautiful home that we got to move into. And we got to move into it when the COVID thing was just kicking off. And no one knew what was happening.

They were divesting themselves and rentals came right down. We got a beautiful home and a lovely meth-addled, close to town neighborhood. We're not going to be able to live like that. We're going to have to go and rent in. Oh, you know, we're going to have to rent in. We're going to have to, you know, those ugly first homeowner homes, those ugly $300,000 homes in ridiculous new suburbs where it's all copy paste and they all they all look the same and most of the frontage is just a car park. We're going to have to live there and it won't even be our home. It'll be someone else's first home. Then they've moved out and we're just paying off their mortgage while they live in their forever home, baby.

Oh, that is going to be so grim. Here's another con. I am fat. I am a big fat person. Con. Never has buying a boat seemed so remote and so trivial. I mean, there's real stuff going on in our lives. People have health issues.

People are tired. People are sad. Children have high needs, if not special needs. Man, sometimes I wonder how involved does caring for a child have to be before you just get to have some extra money from the government and they have a doctor use a name to describe what's going on. I don't think my car has insurance at the moment. I gotta take it to get serviced. Haven't done that in a while. Oh, there's just f***ing yoghurt.

Yoghurt caked onto bits of the car that I didn't know yoghurt had been caked onto and I took the child seats out to give some people a lift the other day. It's like, ah, sh** it, I'm so sorry. My car is like a f***ing compost heap at the moment. I mean, how am I meant to think about a boat

when this is going on? I didn't even, we didn't even make it to the boat museum. Every day I wake up and I say, I literally say that letter to my wife, I say to my children, can we go to the boat museum today? Can we make this happen? There's never a good time. One must make time for the boat museum. Con, even though the fringe is on and many great

comedians are in town, I have not yet managed to conduct a single interview. There will be no interview in this podcast. Pro, there is one bit of my show that I especially love doing where I wave a silk scarf around. Con, I have injured my shoulder waving the silk scarf. And that is the dumbest injury and most embarrassing way of having a sore shoulder that I have even heard of anyone having a silk scarf-related shoulder injury. So, on balance, I think we'd have to say things are actually going pretty well.

You know, not well in the abstract, but well for me. I mean, man, if you were to ask how I was doing last year, or the year before, or the year before, at this exact time of year, it's never been going this well before sorry if i made that seem down this is the best my life has ever been affirmation affirmation let's keep moving on up hey i just want to let everybody know that as well as all that other stuff i've also recorded some of the best beats of my life if you love rapping hey here's a beat for you a one-time j Donald Forbes McCann exclusive

that you can use however you like. Keep it real, everybody. Catamaran Ho! Once, once, once. Chance Donald Forbes McCann exclusive. Chance Donald Forbes McCann exclusive. Chance Donald Forbes McCann Ho! Let's go! Thank you. We'll be life goes. New father, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest.

And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.