The James Donald Forbes McCann Catamaran Plan - Two Thresholds

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

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I'm Jessie Cruikshank, and on my podcast, Phone a Friend, I break down the biggest stories in pop culture. But when I have questions, I get to phone a friend. I phone my old friend, Dan Levy. You will not die hosting the Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle. I didn't even know what thirsty meant until there was all these headlines and i get schooled by a tween facebook is like a no that's what my grandma's on thank god phone a friend with jesse crookshank is not available on facebook it's out

now wherever you get your podcasts a cast helps creators launch grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere a cast.com Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com In the fall of 1988, Ivan Illich stood before a convocation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and pronounced a solemn curse on life. In many contemporary discourses, he said, life has taken on a shadowy substance

and become in effect the ultimate economic resource. A life, he went on, is amenable to management, to improvement, and to evaluation in terms of available resources in a way which is unthinkable when we speak of a person. Life, in this substantive sense, he told the Lutherans, is the most powerful idol that the church has had to face in the course of its history. I've been reading Ivan Ilyich.

Ivan Ilyich. Ivan Ilyich. Not the guy who dies in the Tolstoy novella. Short story? Novella. But the priest, non-practicing by the end of his life, but the priest

philosopher, I've been reading Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich, because I'm a sophisticated man, as well as recording this podcast in a car, this time a big, beautiful Ford motor car. Listen to this. Doesn't that sound strong and meaty?

The Volvo was somehow restrained. You could hear the Scandinavianity in the way that it opened and closed, but the Ford. Click, click. Pow! I love it. The light. I mean, the light won't turn off, and that's not good.

Hold on. One, two, three. Turn off. Ah, come on! Here's the thing. I mean, it's... Driving the Ford, which is my mother-in-law's car, it's been really nice in many ways because it's big and it's strong and it has a turning circle that makes you feel like you have real freedom,

even though when you fully engage that turning circle, it's such a big car it does actually feel a little bit dangerous. But then so much like America, it actually doesn't work very well. There we... Excuse me, I've had a couple of red wines. The lights come off. I'll continue talking about philosophy for just a moment. What I actually want to talk about

is one of my favourite YouTubers who's lost the plot. But I'm seeing everything through this... this prism. This focal point that Ivan Illich describes in Tools for Conviviality. He talks about the two thresholds of any tool. And by tool, he means almost anything. Schools are tools for this man. Roads are tools.

Hats are tools. Tools are tools. Ways of talking to one another are tools. Everything's a tool. But he talks about the two thresholds. There's a good threshold and a bad threshold. Threshold number one is when something is used, like invented, and it betters the world.

So like the automobile. When there were no automobiles on the road, of course the car was better. It was a better thing to have. The man with the car became a god. He could travel at outstanding speeds. He didn't need to feed his horse or worry about his car kicking someone in the back of the head. You know, the car, that's the first threshold.

When you have the thing and it's great. And then there's the second threshold where it becomes warped. Sort of the end becomes the means or the means becomes the end. I don't really know how to, I've had a couple of red wines, not quite sure how to describe it. But it's in the instance of the car to describe it, it would be, well, we have to build cities to suit the car, right? And it just, it goes from the car is a good thing to be able to use to,

well, we need the car. Let's allow it to ruin the rest of our society. And also, as we pass through that second threshold, the first thing we had, that cars were great and were easy to get around, it no longer holds true because everyone's slower now that we have cars. This is the thinking. I'm sure this is only true in some places. It's true in most places, by my experience. You actually, you build a society that takes longer to get around in for the virtue of having the car in it. You have the car,

so you can live further away from other people. So you do live further away from other people. And then there's also traffic and all of them trying to get around to their jobs from the long distances they have to travel. Suddenly you've passed through the second threshold. And not only have you destroyed your cities with roads, but also you're actually not saving any time doing the things you wanted to do on your legs. The shops, you have to drive to the shops, get in the car, put the kids in the car, drive 5, 10, 15 minutes and maybe the shop is further away, but your actual travel time,

you've saved no time. The only point of the damn thing was to save time. The point of it wasn't, oh, look at me, how fabulous it is to have a shop 5 kilometres away instead of 500 metres away. So that would be cars. the schools would be another one how good to have schools that teach people things you know and all these people know how to read now because we've got schools and that's great being able to read is probably a net positive huzzah for the school but then you pass through the second threshold of the school and and it's not about teaching people. It's about separating out the elites.

We all know this. We all know that a school, after a certain point, is not really about teaching important things. That's why they have ridiculous subjects like geography. We've got all the maps. We know how to use the maps. How do you justify being a geography teacher anyway? That is the first and second threshold.

That's what I wanted to... That's been on my mind. I've been thinking of a lot of things in terms of threshold number one and threshold number two. Threshold number one, have a beer. It's quite nice to have a beer. Help you relax after a long day. Threshold number two, have a beer. It's quite nice to have a beer, help you relax after a long day. Threshold number two, you've become an alcoholic. You can't wind down without

the beer. Your life's a mess and she's left you. I guess you could say it about something as simple as shoes. We invent the shoe so that we're able to travel longer distances and walk over rough course things. And then we all have the shoe and we pass through the second threshold. The foot becomes weak. The foot becomes soft and suddenly you can't go no place without the shoe. By the way, I'm just using that as an example. I am not a shoe truther.

I think more people should wear shoes. Whenever I see someone out and about without a shoe, I am very... Maybe I'm thinking about the shoe because on my way out to the Ford to record, I stepped on something very sharp in the driveway, and I had to very slowly step back to the house to get the Birkenstocks on the feet, and I thought, we've crossed another threshold, the pain threshold. Anyway, these are the... And I was talking before with loved ones inside,

before coming out to record this, and we were talking about Instagram and reels and how... You know, it's quite nice when the algorithm starts showing you great stuff. There's stuff that you really want to see, and the algorithm figures that out and it shows you. You know, like I'm staying here and we're watching... I'm staying with my mother-in-law at this beautiful house and my mother-in-law's husband, Andrew. And we were watching some train documentaries and some airport documentaries.

And the algorithm is just given back to back to back to back. Excellent train and airport YouTube videos for us to enjoy. And then we forget to click on the next one. What's that? The Third Reich in Colour? Oh, don't mind if we do watch that together, having a couple of brewskis. Drinking Spates, the pride of the South,

an excellent beer. But I'll tell you this, when the people then are making the content for the algorithm. Second-rate comedians doing third-rate crowd work. Little TikTok dances. Putting your kids front and centre as bait for degenerates in your travel vlog,

interviewing enormously beast-clonged men who compete for the chance to defile your marriage, a woman in a low-cut top telling the worst jokes you've ever seen, sitting around a table with four prostitutes and a right-winger. It's dreadful. Those are dreadful. When someone is making something that they love, first threshold, and then that's distributed by the algorithm for us all to see, not a problem. But when people start making shit stuff to try and crack the algorithm, well, that's a bad threshold to have gone through.

And this has been on my mind very much of late because one of my favorite YouTubers, and I won't name any names because you can't. YouTubers, and I won't name any names because you can't, you know, this is a real person, not hugely wealthy, doing pretty well off of the YouTube, but this is a real person who's brought me a lot of pleasure, and there's no way to publicly talk about this and say their name and not have it be some big stoush, which I don't want. It's made me think of this problem, so I won't give any details. It's a woman. It's an American woman who started out making videos. She was poor.

I've got to say that it's a woman. I didn't have to say it was American. I don't know how much to... This was a poor person who started making YouTube videos. And they were really great. And we enjoyed them a lot. And then it's become successful. And it's gone from, Oh, this is a person who's doing something that they find fun.

First threshold. Ah, wonderful. There's a place for them to put those videos. Two, this is a person who has to work as a YouTuber to afford an increasingly luxurious lifestyle. And the work's gotten worse. And the person appears to be losing the plot and going insane. That's your second threshold. Now, I am trying to buy a boat.

Everything comes back to the boat in the end. I'm trying to buy a boat. I'm trying to use a podcast to buy a boat. That is the threshold we're trying to move through. But I'm conscious that I don't want to second threshold it. You know, I don't want to lose the plot. Sell out is another way maybe of saying it. I don't want to jump the shark. And I honestly, I think about this all the time. I think about this all the time with the podcast and YouTube and stand-up comedy. People just lose the plot.

They become grotesque. And I'd like to bring in a second philosophical. This one's not quite appropriate because it's about nihilism and the individual having meaning. But I'm going to reappropriate it. It's Nietzsche. I'm going to reappropriate it for YouTubers making content or just content creators on the internet in general. But it's about nihilism and when you're unhappy. And Nietzsche says there are two things you can do when you've become a nihilist,

because obviously it's bad to be a nihilist. You can either change yourself or you can change the world. One of those two things has to change. So what are you able to change? And frankly, I don't actually know if that's in Nietzsche. That's what I vaguely remember my Nietzsche lecturer at university describing to me as Nietzsche's response to that. It might have been Schopenhauer, might have been Jean-Paul Sartre. I didn't do a lot of the readings, but I do remember that lecture. So, so too with making stuff on the internet or any creative endeavor only it's backwards i'm going to reverse the formulation so it nietzsche says if you're in a really bad place either you

change or the world has to change one of those two things right for you to get back to a place of happiness but what i'm saying is when someone's making good content on the internet they have to stay the same and the world has to stay the same. Does that make sense? So if you're making... I'm going to pull something out of the ether. This is not referring to anybody. And if this is you or someone you know, I'm not trying to start any trouble. Let's say you're someone who makes hand puppets out of garbage. Let's say you're a homeless person and you take garbage and you're making YouTube videos about turning that garbage as a homeless person into hand puppets. Right, you can keep making

videos of that quality, content of that quality, for as long as you remain a homeless person making garbage puppets for YouTube unsuccessfully. But if you become successful doing that and suddenly you're a multi-millionaire who makes garbage out of puppets, if you're making the same show that you were when you were... This is not a strong analogy. You've got all this money now and you're still doing a lo-fi garbage puppet making thing? That's no good. You've lost the equilibrium.

I mean, it's more obvious the other side of the equation, which is if the person is changing the world, then the thing that's being done is different. Like if the homeless man who had been making, if he starts teaching people Latin, Stronger analogies must exist. Or maybe he doesn't know Latin and that would also be bad. This is not a good example.

This is a very bad example. I can think of a better... Punk rock is a better one. Punk rock is a... Hot diggity dog punk rock. That's the one. So punk rock, you have your first punk rock album come out. You're a punk rock band and you play your music very loudly and you go na na na na na na

life is appalling everybody hates me I am very sad. And that's great, you know. People love that. It's authentic. It's real. Congratulations. Your punk rock album is now a multi-million dollar bestseller.

You've got a limousine. You've got a mink coat. You've got a lion on a chain in the front yard. Then you come out with a second album. You try and do the same thing. No, no, no, no, no, no. Life is hard. Well, no one wants to hear that from you anymore

because your life is not hard. You've made good. You can't make the punk record anymore. It's not an authentic expression. To go back to the... Even Illich, you've gone through the second threshold. And to go back to the inverted Nietzsche, you've fallen out of the state of equilibrium

because you are a different person now. The world is the same. You're trying to do the same thing, but you are no longer the same. So I'll just close the door again because it's now getting a bit cold. It's either cold or hot, no matter what we do. See, if I was recording this in my car

for a stylistic reason, I think that would be a big problem. I think we'd really lose something in the podcast. Thankfully, my life remains a chaotic mess, and I really have no choice but to be sitting outside in this big Ford, sweating it up and freezing it up and hoping my kids don't... Anyway, do you see? Do you see the threshold? The Nietzsche? The YouTube?

So this YouTuber started off making, it was not a garbage making YouTuber. I don't know why I chose that. I'm not really happy with that as the example. I want to talk about it being done right as well though. And how it's done right is rap music and Emma Chamberlain. These are slightly different ways of doing it, but the Emma Chamberlain way of getting through that second threshold without a problem and holding on to the equilibrium and the rap music way of doing it. I'll start with Emma Chamberlain. Emma Chamberlain was making YouTube videos. She was just talking into her camera.

She was a folksy girl next door until she wasn't. She was too damn successful. No one bought her as a folksy girl next door anymore. She disappears. She goes away. She has big reset. She comes back out. She's doing Vogue. And she's the reset. She comes back out. She's doing

Vogue. And she's the Emma Chamberlain of today. Do you understand? She changed. She changed. She had changed. She couldn't help but have changed. She wasn't making millions of dollars before. Now she was. And you can't be the folksy, lovely girl next door if you're making millions of dollars on YouTube content because a folksy girl next door is not making millions of dollars on her YouTube content. She's working at a service station or something. So having changed herself, she changed the world. She started doing a different thing that matched the person she had become. It didn't go crazy. It was still sort of in line with the things she was doing before. But if you change, the thing that you do has to change. That's one way of retaining

the equilibrium and not selling out. And Emma Chamberlain deserves every bit of success she's ever had. She's a true existential thinker. I applaud Emma Chamberlain. The other way is rap music. Rap music starts up at a similar time to punk music. It's on a similar, you know, vibe of we're poor, we're upset, we don't have things, but it survives. Why? And many people have written about this, and I'm going to do an unsophisticated version now, because punk music sets itself up as there's no room within the genre of punk music to have success. You have to be unsuccessful or it's over. But in rap music, you have your first album.

I want to make it. I want a big gold chain. I want lots of money and hoes and a big gun. And then you have all those things and you come back with the next time you go, hey, everybody, I got money and hoes and a big gold chain and a gun and people you can just keep making that album for a long time you can have a career as a rapper virtue not entirely indefinitely but you can have a long long career talking about how good you've got it there's room within that it's a it's a wider threshold to have to go through. The second threshold is not as close, so the arc. I mean, still at some point, at some point you run out of steam. Because youth is more important, I think, than wealth and success in terms of destroying you.

Like if you're no longer young, you have a hard time being a rapper. That's the thing that gets you in the end. It's not money. It's not, oh, he made too much money, he can't be a rapper anymore. It's that you're too old. Andre 3000 knows this. One of the greatest rappers of all time. He comes out and he says, I'm too old.

I'm not hip to the streets. I'm not part of that anymore. I can't contribute with the hippity hop rap music. Here's my flute album. Maybe you like it, maybe you won't. That's what I'm feeling at the moment is my new flute album. But if we may look inward for a moment, if I might turn my withering critical gaze upon myself. I make a podcast, the James Donald Forbes McCann Catamaran Plan, about trying to buy a boat.

And I've got to earn about 500,000 Australian dollars. I guess that's about 350,000 US dollars to get that boat the podcast that I've been making over the last couple of years has been me in Adelaide Australia in my then Volvo now mother-in-law's this is the only episode I think that's going to be in this car my life is changing more people listen to this podcast now than used to and we're moving to America I mean the podcast out, here's a man with nothing going for him, at least in terms of geography and finances for the career. In terms of love, I have so much love. Well, I mean, less immediate love in my life now that we've had to move to the United States. I miss my home. Excuse me. But here I am, sitting out in a car. This is what I

want to say. I'm sitting in a car, recording a podcast, which is what I used to do before, but I'm conscious that I have changed. I have changed. I started out this podcast as a humble suburban husband and father in Adelaide, Australia, doing a ridiculous boat podcast in his spare time. And now I have become a deranged husband and father, dragging his family to the other side of the world in service of a boat podcast that is increasingly doing quite well. And maybe that will be a positive transition, you know? But also, maybe in doing that, the thing that's special and good about it falls apart. Now, thankfully, I don't think of myself as a content creator. I'm not someone who's out here trying to create content for people to satisfy my soul or to

make, you know, an indescribable sum of money. I'm trying to make enough money with a podcast to buy a boat. That's it. That's the end goal. All the podcast has to do is hold together long enough. The interior consistency of the podcast just has to hold together long enough to make it to the other side. And as the podcast gets bigger and more successful, it becomes increasingly ridiculous for me to pose as a man for whom everything is falling apart. Now, thankfully, I actually am a man for whom it is all falling apart at the moment.

I, ah, ah, ah, ah, we've got no money. My landlord was meant to pay me my bond some time ago That hasn't happened yet I was really depending on the bond I haven't sold the old Volvo We had to move away I had to have this visa appointment So there was no time to sell the Volvo

So now I've just got this car sitting And I'm still paying the bloody rego on the Volvo Which is just sucking money out of me. And because we had to move away sooner than I thought that we would have to move away, I didn't get to get rid of as many things as I wanted to. So we had to get this great big storage container. And now I'm paying all this money for that. And I had to quit my job because I found that I can't do my job in America.

And the job that I was going to do in America, I'm not going to be doing anymore. So it's a couple, you know, it's not really really i don't think it's posing as a man for whom things aren't going well at the moment i think it's a man for whom things i i just feel i'm coming apart at the seams a little bit but the podcast is going very well people are enjoying the podcast downloads going up that's good and presumably there will be a point in the future where i have my life together. This is what I'm worried about now. It's like, hey, I can still make the podcast now.

I can still go and have a spaz in someone's family SUV. I can do that. I've done that before. I'm doing that now. This is a point of stability. I know it might seem like I'm a little ratcheted up. This is the calmest I've been all day. This being able to go crazy with things not going well, sitting in a car, that's something I've been doing for a couple of years now and I'm pretty good at it. Indeed, I've gotten so good at

it that it's become sufficiently successful that I can foresee a future in which it's something that I cannot do anymore. And that's scary because I don't know what, when we're in America and the home is sorted. Excuse me, I'm getting a text. Ooh, my South African friend in Perth has played a move in chess. And he shouldn't beat me, but he's doing it. Look, I'll get back to that in a moment. Anyway, my point is, thanks for listening. I think the point is thanks for listening. Is the point thanks for listening?

And by listening and supporting this podcast and helping me get closer to boat ownership, you are compromising the integrity of me being able to do it. And I'm so very proud and grateful that you would do that to me. I mean, wouldn't it be wonderful? I mean, maybe I'm just giving myself airs and I'll never be successful enough to sell out. I mean, what a wonderful thing it would be to have lost the plot because that meant one had had the plot and things had been going well. Things, frankly, are not going well enough for me at the moment

that I could look back and say, ah, the big mistake that I made where I lost all the good. I mean, a lot of things are not successful enough to make it to that second threshold, you know, like the blimp. The blimp was never a big enough hit that it to that second threshold, you know, like the blimp. The blimp was never a big enough hit that it destroyed urban architecture for the sake of servicing blimps. And there's a lot of great punk rock bands that just keep churning out excellent punk music because it's never commercially successful. And so it's always being churned out. But if it's not commercially

successful, how great could it be? That's the question. Better to burn out than to fade away is what I say, especially if we're talking about blimps. Blimps, blimps, blimps, blimps, blimps, blimps, blimps, blimps, blimps, blimps, blimps, blimps, blimps, blimps, blimps, especially if we're talking about... Especially if we're talking about... Once there was a way

to get back homeward. Once there was a way to get back home. Solid Curse on Life. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.

I'm Jessie Kirkshank, and on my podcast, Phone a Friend, I break down the biggest stories in pop culture. But when I have questions, I get to phone a friend. I phone my old friend, Dan Levy. You will not die hosting The Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle. I didn't even know a thirsty man until there was all these headlines. And I get schooled by a tween. Facebook is like

a no. That's what my grandma's on. Thank God Phone a Friend with Jesse Crookshank is not available on Facebook. It's out now wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize

their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.