I Was the Three Minute Philosophy Guy

On fumbling internet fame, and an opportunity to rise from the ashes. Will you join me?

So that I don’t bury the lede here—I’m launching a new Substack newsletter.

This one isn’t going away and I will still publish on schedule. But I’m launching a new, additional newsletter that you can also subscribe to if you want. It’s quite a bit different to this one and you can check it out here and take a look around:

http://threeminutephilosophy.substack.com

Now here’s what it’s all about:

Being a creator from the mid-to-early days of the “young internet,” when not everybody was even online and the tools for reaching people creatively were quite good and were momentarily about to get much better before becoming spectacularly worse, I actually had a few opportunities to become internet famous. I fucked them all up, which is why I’m still working a day job, but let’s see if I can’t wind up cracking the formula before I’m the Ben Shapiro approved retirement age of 115.

While my most financially rewarding career was being a type of ghostwriter for Cracked (professional advice—be wary of taking a writing job where your name doesn’t show up on the articles, just saying) my most visible work for a time was a series of educational videos I did on YouTube called Three Minute Philosophy.

This actually started off as a Cracked project. When I came on board way back in the mid-2000s, the site’s video guy, Daniel O’Brien, was looking for pitches. Because Cracked did comedy education, I had the idea of doing a series of short animations about famous philosophers. I was just beginning a philosophy degree at the time.

Before I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a cartoonist, and the only things really holding me back were that I couldn’t draw and I didn’t have the patience to learn animation software. Also I didn’t have animation software. So that’s three key things. I still really dug this idea though, and I was strongly inspired by two artists who were actually doing pretty well with these exact limitations. They were Brad Neely:

And Lev Yilmaz:

These guys were doing a type of thing I’d never seen before—not something you could easily call animation, but it still used static images to tell the story. That was something I could do with MS Paint and the free video editor that came with Windows.

So I cobbled together Three Minute Philosophy: Aristotle and pitched it to Daniel. It was pretty bad. I couldn’t afford sound equipment so I used the microphone built into a cheap webcam. It was much more derisive of Aristotle than anything else, I put comedy way above accuracy, and as I said, I couldn’t draw.

Daniel didn’t go for it, but not because he hated it. It just wasn’t a good fit for the site, it was the wrong kind of nerdy. He asked me if I could do a three minute summary of something more pop-culturish. My second pitch was a history of sitcoms video that they did pick up.

Daniel knew what he was talking about. He’s won five Emmys since then.

But what about the Aristotle video I made? I put it on YouTube, which was still a pretty small website in 2007. And damn, that video was a huge hit.

I guess there weren’t really many people doing that kind of Neely style cheap looking static image “animation,” and certainly nobody else was doing what I was doing with it. So I made a few more episodes about a few more philosophers and tried to make it legitimately educational. I started being compared favourably to Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, who did very fast talking voiceover video game reviews, so I tried to play that up.

My subscriptions went through the ceiling. I only made a few episodes, but within a couple of years my subscriber count was six digits. There were people—and I cannot tell you how bizarre this was—in my philosophy classes at university who recognised my voice from the internet. They had never met me before. They were just, presumably, Googling the names of the philosophers they knew they were going to be studying that week.

The size and scale of my fuckup with Three Minute Philosophy would not become clear to me until the searing acid burn of retrospect some years down the line. Here’s that retrospect in its horrible glory:

This was Early Internet. One Point O. The web was enjoying a period of creative fertility the likes of which it had never seen before and will never see again. Speaking of YouTube in particular, there was no such thing yet as a big name influencer. People like James Rolfe (Angry Video Game Nerd) were literally just starting out. PewDiePie and MrBeast didn’t even have accounts yet. People who would in the coming years quit their jobs to do YouTube full time were still messing around with the platform and uploading videos of their pets. You could get a good number of subscribers doing anything that was even just a little interesting.

Here I was in that environment doing something literally nobody else on the internet was doing, and there was a market for it. A good market.

Try to imagine that these days.

There was no such thing as popular, lay level, philosophy education content. There was no “I Fucking Love Philosophy.” There was no Brian Cox or Neil DeGrasse Tyson of philosophy. And there was certainly nobody doing it on YouTube.

I wasn’t thinking about money. I was getting attention. Doing something creative and feeling like part of a creative community, entertaining people, even being looked up to somewhat, it was a good time for me, a wind-down from work. I could not have known that that kind of reach would just become impossible within five years.

The most fascinating thing is that I was getting emails from actual educators who wanted to use my videos in classrooms. This was exciting for me because one of my biggest ignition points is I am passionate about education. I think it is the most important thing in all of human civilization. If someone with my level of anxiety was capable of handling the remarkably immense stress of being a teacher that’s where I’d be right now. I’d be Mr Holland’s Opusing that shit.

The teachers just needed me to tone down the comedy and get rid of the swearing. They also wanted me to talk more slowly so they could actually follow along. That’s kind of where this started to fall apart.

I did eventually come to the realisation that I could monetize this. It was late but still possible. I had grand plans. First, I started remaking the initial series of videos. They would be better quality. They would be more accurate. There would be less swearing. I would talk more slowly. The illustrations would be better. There would be an accompanying website, with articles and additional material. I had seasons laid out.

Three Minute Philosophy: The Reboot was launched. It went badly.

“Bring back the swearing” was the most common complaint. It turns out that a large amount of my audience wasn’t really in it for learning, not really—the juxtaposition between such a self-serious topic as philosophy and me yelling “bag of piss fucker” into a microphone with an Australian accent was where the entertainment was really coming from. People also didn’t like that I was slowing down my funny talking. There was also this really weird thing where I had always intended “Three Minute Philosophy” as a really catchy title that wasn’t literal, but every time a video went one second over the three minute mark a bunch of people screamed at me like Trump voters spotting a Latino casting a ballot. The comment section jeered and spat at me like I’d ruined their afternoon.

There’s something incredibly demoralising in the moment that a clown discovers that he is a clown.

I was still entertaining people, but I wasn’t entertaining them in quite the way that I thought I was, and that just sort of took the energy right out of the whole thing. I was busy with Cracked, I was trying to write a book, I also had work and study, so I stopped doing the thing. A few years went by and my YouTube became one of those Dead Channels that people will occasionally half-remember they were subscribed to and maybe still are.

I started teaching myself animation as a hobby in 2016 and suddenly all those cogs started spinning again. The X Files had just dropped another season after over a decade’s hiatus. Star Wars was back. Ancient nostalgia was starting to bubble to the surface. People were hungry for cultural resurgence. Shit, maybe it wasn’t too late after all. Was there room in the world for Three Minute Philosophy: The Event Series?

I still had the threeminutephilosophy.com domain registered to me. This was on, baby, this was happening. I would correct past mistakes. I would publish on a schedule. One new video a week. Animated. With actual images, no more MS Paint. Actual sound equipment. I cobbled together an episode and that shit looked good.

I blasted full steam ahead and lasted three weeks and three episodes. Bizarrely, like the sad forgetful clown, I’d forgotten that all the things that thwarted me the first time still applied. Like, obviously they still applied. People didn’t like the animation gimmick. These weren’t funny enough. One of them was almost four fucking minutes long what the fuck? I was still busy with paid work and one week per video was ludicrously unachievable.

On top of everything else I have a speech impediment that many people incorrectly call a lisp but is actually a rhotacism or as you might prefer, an Elmer Fudd, so speaking quickly is very difficult for me and no, I have no idea what I was goddamn thinking, thank you.

Rather than stress over it, I walked away. Bingo bongo. And that’s the story of Three Minute Philosophy, the most promising creative project I’ve ever fumbled.

SO ANYWAY, I’m here to launch it again.

“But clown,” I hear you say, “You’ve tried this three times already and just laid out in exhausting detail how you failed every single time, and now you are hear to tell us that you are willingly and even gleefully walking back into the same trap again, changing nothing, like a small and particularly idiotic mammal. Are you very crazy?”

Yes, absolutely. But I see an opportunity here and the differences are platform, audience, and delivery. In short, I’m finished with YouTube. It is cancer. It is so far down the enshittification pipe right now that it has reached levels of worthless heretofore unexplored. Google was patient zero of the disease killing the internet and Substack feels comfortable to me right now in a way I haven’t felt since way back in 2007 when I dropped that first video.

So I’m going to use this energy. Here’s how it will work: The Three Minute Philosophy Substack will have paid subscription, but every newsletter will contain an entire transcript that’s free for everybody. So free subscribers still get some entertaining free to read educational pop philosophy direct to your inbox. The paywall will be on the video, and I will also be adding additional content such as printable transcript PDFs and maybe some other stuff as I think of it.

It won’t be weekly. That is insane. I’m going to try for at least once a month. (This newsletter that you’re reading right now will still be weekly, and free. I love you.)

So if you wanna dive in, here’s the first one. And just so you know what you’re getting if you choose a paid subscription, here’s the first video, free for you Plato Was a Dick readers, in its entirety. Peace!

Xenophanes