Plinko
There is a man named Plinko who used to work as a clown on kids' night at a Ground Round restaurant in Jackson, Michigan. He was in his late forties or early fifties. His mother died of cancer, and somewhere in his grief he'd taken his name from a game on The Price Is Right. The math is there if you want to do it. I'll wait.
Plinko didn't have a driver's license. The restaurant didn't exactly pay him. What they did instead, apparently, was keep him supplied with alcohol, and in exchange he would show up, put his makeup on in the passenger seat of whoever was driving him to work, go inside, get drunk, and make balloon animals for children, except the balloons weren't animals, they were weapons, hatchets and machine guns, and between creations he would sit in the back and drink and mutter, to nobody in particular, "I hate kids."
I know about Plinko because a man named Jason V. called into a recent episode of the Theo Von podcast and left a voicemail responding to Von's request for stories about the busboy experience. Instead, Jason V. talked about Plinko. About his uncle Danny, a Vietnam vet who owned a place called the Burger Bar in Stockbridge, Michigan and counseled his nephew to find himself an Asian woman because they cook and clean and don't talk back. About his mom, who managed the Burger Bar and was in a relationship with her first cousin Steve, who rode with the Outlaws motorcycle club under the road name Push Rod. About how after he stopped working at the Ground Round, Plinko connected him with a man named Detroit Rick, and they sold cable scramblers out of the back of a van, cash only, made good money. And then he joined the Army National Guard and became a recruiter. "I hope this information helps," Jason V. said, and hung up.
The whole thing runs maybe ninety seconds. Jason V. delivers it in one unbroken, affectless stream, the way you'd read a shopping list. Uncle Danny. His mom and her first cousin. Push Rod. Plinko. Detroit Rick. The Army. Bang, bang, bang. "Hope this helps." Click.
I’ve listened to this voicemail over and over. It’s funny, and it’s sad, and it’s kind of absurd—Plinko sitting in a stranger’s passenger seat, putting on clown makeup just to get paid in booze for a job he clearly hates. But that’s not really it. What keeps pulling me back is the way Jason V. tells it, like this whole wild slice of American life is completely normal.
His mom's relationship with her first cousin doesn't get a pause. The illegal cable hustle doesn't get a wink. His proximity to the Outlaws, a man who rides under the name Push Rod, gets the same tonal treatment as everything else, which is none. He just empties it all out in sequence because that's the sequence, and then he hangs up.
Hope this helps. Click.
You know immediately that you are listening to someone who has never once considered whether his life needs to be justified, or explained, or held up against somebody else's and defended. His life is his life. He lives inside it the way most people live inside gravity, without any awareness that it could be otherwise.
I am, though, fantastically aware that it could be otherwise because I do that all the time. I justify and explain. I protect and position and hold my life up against other people's lives, and against some impossible version of my own that has been accumulating since childhood, a version that nobody actually lives but that feels more real than it should, and I defend my choices and my coordinates against all of it, sometimes out loud but mostly in my head, in an endless internal conversation that nobody asked for and nobody is listening to. And I suspect, if you're reading this, so do you.
I don't mean people in general. I mean specifically the kind of person who reads essays on the internet, who maintains a mental list of restaurants they'd like to try, books they'd like to read, travel destinations they'd like to visit, those who've downloaded a meditation app at least twice, who has strong opinions about how other people raise their children but knows better than to say so, who has at some point in the last year described themselves as "trying to be more intentional." People who spend real money on self-improvement and real time on self-examination and have built an entire inner life around the project of figuring out whether their outer life is going the way it's supposed to. We live inside a particular cultural frequency where self-awareness is the baseline expectation, and we've been swimming in it so long we've forgotten it's water.
Or maybe it's just me. Maybe you listen to a ninety-second voicemail about a drunk clown in Michigan and you think huh, that's wild and then you go about your day. In which case I envy you, and you can probably stop reading here. But if any of what I just described sounds even a little familiar, stay with me, because I think there's something in Jason V's voicemail that might rearrange something in you that you didn't know was loose.
We have developed, over time, two systems that run in parallel and never shut off. The first one, the inward facing system, watches you watch yourself, the part of your brain that is forever running an audit of your own inner state. Am I okay? Does this add up? Am I the person I think I am, or am I performing a version of that person so convincingly that I can no longer tell the difference? It's the part that sits in a room full of friends having a genuinely good time and somewhere beneath the good time is taking its own temperature. Checking and calibrating, not because anything is wrong, but because checking and calibrating is what it does. It doesn't need a reason. It just runs. And runs. And runs.
The second one faces out. And this one is meaner. More relentless. It compares and judges, and the judging is the meanest part of all, though not for the reason you'd think, because every judgment you make about somebody else's life is always, whether you realize it or not, a judgment about your own. The eyes looking out but only ever seeing what's inside. It measures where you live against where your college roommate lives, your career against the career of the person you were sure you'd be outpacing by now, your life against the curated evidence of everyone else's life that arrives on your phone all day long. This is the system that ambitious people carry around like a second skeleton, one that vibrates with a low-grade awareness of all the places you haven't gotten to yet and all the people who seem to have gotten there without trying as hard as you have. It's exhausting. It's also so normal that pointing it out feels almost embarrassing, the way it would be embarrassing to point out that you breathe.
Both systems run all day. They overlap. They feed each other. And they produce, in combination, a kind of continuous life-management that goes well beyond evaluation. It's evaluation plus comparison plus projection plus a persistent, ambient anxiety about whether you're falling behind, and all of it is happening while you're trying to live the actual life that the systems are busy measuring.
Jason V., to his credit, doesn't appear to have this software installed. His life may sound strange or chaotic or even dangerous to you, but before you file it away under some convenient category, ask yourself honestly whether you are as free in your own life as Jason V. sounds in his. I'm not. Not even close.
If I were leaving a voicemail describing my own biography, the version you'd hear would have already been through seventeen rounds of internal editing before I opened my mouth. And when I finally did, I’d probably delete it. Every detail would arrive pre-managed, tagged, contextualized. Filed and sorted by the internal committee that convened sometime in adolescence and never adjourned.
Uncle Danny's dating advice, for example, would get logged as deeply problematic, handle with a combination of humor and visible discomfort, make sure the listener knows you know this is bad. The motorcycle club uncle would become actually kind of a great story for dinner parties, as long as you establish enough distance between you and the Outlaws to signal that you are not, yourself, an Outlaw. An unlicensed middle-aged alcoholic clown making balloon weapons for children would become okay that one's actually kind of incredible, but deliver it like you're telling a story about somebody you heard about, not somebody you know well and worked alongside. Every item on the list getting its own little branding exercise before being allowed out the door.
Jason V. needed none of that. He lived them and he listed them and he left. Uncle Danny was Uncle Danny. Push Rod was Push Rod. Plinko was Plinko. And Jason V. is Jason V. Period.
Something about this voicemail is disarming, and I think it's worth paying attention to.
Part of it is just the voicemail itself, which is a small, accidental masterpiece of American biography. But I don't think that's the whole thing. I think the reason I keep replaying it is more personal, and I'm still figuring out how to say it without making it sound like I'm turning someone else's life into a lesson about my own, which, honestly, maybe I am, but then again maybe that's just what people do. We build our lives, whether we admit it or not, out of other lives we encounter. Out of the houses we grew up in and the people we met on the way to wherever we ended up and the stories we heard at the end of long podcasts from strangers who called in to talk about bussing tables. Every life you're exposed to gets absorbed somewhere, becomes part of the architecture of how you understand what a life can be, what a life can look like, what a life can hold. Most of the time this happens quietly, invisibly, like sediment accumulating at the bottom of a river. You don't notice it. But sometimes someone calls in and describes a world so completely outside your own that the sediment shifts, and you feel it, and you can't quite settle back into the arrangement you had before.
Jason V's voicemail did that to me. And I think what makes it unusual, what separates it from all the other stories about unusual lives that I've heard and filed and moved on from, is that Jason V. doesn't know he's doing it. Every documentary I've ever watched about people living on the margins, every This American Life segment about some eccentric corner of the country, comes to me pre-packaged. Narrated, scored, structured in a way that helps me absorb it from a safe, comfortable distance. Jason V. doesn't do packaging. He just calls in and lays it down.
We talk endlessly about authenticity now. The word itself deserves an autopsy, because I think we've basically destroyed it. Somewhere along the way, authenticity stopped being a quality and became an industry. You can spot the wreckage everywhere. Brands hire authenticity consultants. Athletes give post-game interviews media-trained into a kind of warm mush that sounds personal but says absolutely nothing. Pop stars release documentaries about their "real selves" that were produced by the same teams who built the glossy, unreal version in the first place. CEOs are on authenticity journeys, which, if you sit with it for even a few seconds, is a phrase that could only mean the opposite of what it says. YouTubers perform vulnerability for subscribers. Instagram accounts perform messiness for engagement. Politicians perform outrage for donations. There are entire podcasts built around being real, the format where people stage-manage their own candor in exchange for likes and follows and downloads and whatever other metrics the dashboards are tracking this week, and nobody involved appears to find any of this even slightly strange.
The word used to mean this thing is what it claims to be. Now it means something closer to this thing has been carefully constructed to seem unconstructed, and the construction took considerably more effort than just being a thing would have.
Jason V. doesn't answer to clean definitions of fancy words like authenticity. He's doing authenticity his own way, and the key to his version of it, the thing that makes it so disorienting to encounter, is that it's completely and totally unaware of itself. He's just a man who called in and reported. He answered the question, described his own life as if reading from a clipboard, and hung up, apparently without any interest in how it came across or what it might say about him or whether it would play well with the audience.
And the reason I've listened fifteen times and am now writing about it at length, at the risk of repeating myself, is that it reminded me that this used to be an option. Just saying what happened. Warmly or not, who cares, and without apology, and letting it be what it is. Just being the person to whom it happened and trusting that the happening is enough. That you can just open your mouth and let your life walk out of it without a chaperone.
I'm not sure when that stopped being available to people like me. I don't remember signing up for any of this surveillance, if surveillance is even the right word for it, this constant half-conscious monitoring of your own life from somewhere slightly outside it. Nobody sat me down and said, okay, from now on you're going to run a background check on your own life every forty-five minutes. It just showed up one day, probably somewhere around adolescence, like most of the worst habits. Probably it got worse with the internet and the phones and the arrival of all those other people's curated lives on your screen every morning, and by that point the whole operation was so thoroughly embedded that removing it would be like removing your accent. You wouldn't even know where to start.
But I suspect this runs much deeper than phones and algorithms. I keep saying "people like me" because I'd not want to presume things about you, though I'd bet real money you recognize more of this than you're comfortable with. People like me have been running some version of this software for as long as there's been a self-conscious class of people whose primary concern is managing and presenting their own experience, who spend at least as much time curating the story of their life as actually living the thing. We're very good at it. Frighteningly good. We've been refining it for generations. Entire civilizations built on the art of looking like you know what you're doing while privately wondering whether anybody actually does.
I want to be careful here, because I don't think the answer is to be Jason V. I couldn't be Jason V. if I tried, and I'm not sure I'd want to be. The self-awareness, the planning, the monitoring, all of it has served me well in a hundred ways I don't have space to list. It helped me build businesses and raise kids and get sober and stay sober and handle a world that does, in fact, require you to manage how you show up in it. The software isn't the problem. The problem is the moment it stops working for you and starts working on you. The moment the curating becomes the living, and you can't remember which one you sat down to do.
And Jason V.'s voicemail is ninety seconds of evidence that it's possible to live without any of it. That there are people out there right now, in Michigan and Louisiana and a hundred other places, who are simply living their lives without the overlay or the committee, and that those lives are as coherent and as real and as full as anything we've ever managed to produce with all our planning and monitoring. Which, when considered at scale, is either the most liberating or the most destabilizing thing I've come across in a long time, and I cannot for the life of me decide which.
Von typically plays listener voicemails at the end of his solo episodes. But before he got to them here, he spent the first forty-five minutes being vintage Theo. He sat there, alone on the mic, working through his own mess in real time. This is what Theo does. This is what his audience loves about him. He lays it all out there with an earnestness and lack of pretense I’ve rarely encountered from other public figures working today, a cultural bellwether who most of the mainstream still hasn't figured out how to file.
In this episode, he talked about his relationship with God, about the fact that he'd stopped praying and couldn't figure out why, and then, mid-thought, arrived at the possibility that he was scared to pray because if he actually did the things he was supposed to do for himself, he might have to change, and he wasn't sure he wanted that. He talked about slipping up the day before on pornography and masturbation, casually, without drama, as if reporting a weather event. He talked about being tired of always having to come to his own rescue. I know that feeling. I think a lot of us do.
Then he got into the state of the world, and you could feel the register shift. He talked about the war, about the food supply slowly poisoning people and the healthcare system waiting on the other end to profit from the damage, about algorithms that seem purpose-built to keep us numb and scrolling while the whole thing grinds forward without our consent. You could hear him trying to say something he wasn't sure he was allowed to say, and saying it anyway, because staying quiet felt worse than being wrong. And he said all of this on mic, to millions of people, with the kind of unguarded honesty that makes you want to look away and lean in at the same time, because that is what Theo Von does. "They want us to be alive," he said, "but they don't want us to live." And then he pivoted to green chilies in Albuquerque, because that is also what Theo Von does.
What I want to say about all of this is something I'm still working out, and I think the honest thing to do is say it imperfectly rather than wait until it's clean. Theo is running the same software I'm running. The same internal monitoring, the same sorting, the same searching for whether the life makes sense, whether the pieces add up, whether he's doing it right. He is not Jason V. He is not unmonitored. But he does something with the monitoring that I don't do and that almost nobody with his audience does. He turns the screen around. He lets you watch the sorting happen. He sits there on mic and works through his spiritual exhaustion and his political confusion and his bodily shame in real time, and he doesn't clean any of it up before you hear it. The committee is in session, but the door is wide open, and you're invited to sit there and watch it work. That's its own kind of freedom, maybe the only kind available to those of us who already have the software installed and can't figure out how to uninstall it.
And then Jason V. called in. Plinko. Push Rod. Detroit Rick. The Army. Theo looked relieved. He smiled, laughed as he listened, clearly delighted, and then said only, “You just restored my hope. Thank you for your service, Jason V.”
I've been sitting with that line for a while now, "you just restored my hope," and I think I finally understand what got restored, or at least I have a version of it that feels close to right.
For ninety seconds, the monitoring stopped. Not because Jason V. said anything wise or hopeful or redemptive, or because his voicemail contained some hidden lesson about how to live. It stopped because Jason V. said something unmonitored. He opened his mouth and what came out was a life, unprocessed, presented without any apparent interest in what it meant or how it looked or where it ranked on anyone's scale of anything. And for Theo Von, a man who had just spent close to an hour publicly sorting through his own spiritual inventory, ninety seconds of someone who obviously hadn't submitted his own biography to an internal committee for review, was the most restoring thing he could have heard. It was a vacation from the software, a reminder that it's optional, or at least that it used to be, and that somewhere out there, in Jackson, Michigan, in the back of a Ground Round restaurant, in the passenger seat of somebody's car, a man named Plinko is putting on his makeup and heading to work, and he does not care what any of us think about it.
I listened the same voicemail, and my first instinct was to write an essay about it.
I'll let you sit with that.