Do Go On - 330 - Fordlandia: Henry Ford's Failed Utopia (with Cass Paige)

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

In the 1920s Henry Ford was one of the richest and most famous people in the world when he decided to set up the "perfect" city in the middle of the Amazon in Brazil. What could go wrong? Everything....Support the show and get rewards like bonus episodes: dogoonpod.com or patreon.com/DoGoOnPodSubmit a topic idea directly to the hat: dogoonpod.com/Submit-a-TopicSee us live: https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2022/shows/the-quiz-showSee Matt live: https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2022/shows/honk-honk-hubba-hubba-ring-a-ding-dingTwitter: @DoGoOnPodInstagram: @DoGoOnPodFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/DoGoOnPod/Email us: [e-mail] out our other podcasts:Book Cheat: https://play.acast.com/s/book-cheatPrime Mates: https://play.acast.com/s/prime-mates/Listen Now: https://play.acast.com/s/listen-now/Our awesome theme song by Evan Munro-Smith and logo by Peader ThomasREFERENCES AND FURTHER READING:https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/19/lost-cities-10-fordlandia-failure-henry-ford-amazonhttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/world/americas/deep-in-brazils-amazon-exploring-the-ruins-of-fords-fantasyland.html?auth=login-email&login=emailhttps://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/books/review/Macintyre-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0https://www.damninteresting.com/the-ruins-of-fordlandia/https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105068620https://www.amazon.com/Fordlandia-Henry-Fords-Forgotten-Jungle/dp/0312429622https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Motor_Companyhttps://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryford-antisemitism/https://www.britannica.com/science/rubber-chemical-compoundhttps://www.al.com/living/2013/01/post_89.htmlhttps://connecticuthistory.org/charles-goodyear-and-the-vulcanization-of-rubber/#:~:text=Even%20Goodyear's%20success%20was%20short,in%201860%2C%20%24200%2C000%20in%20debt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melbourne and Canada, we got exciting news for you. And we should also say this is 2026. Jess, what year is it? 2026. Thank God you're here. Right now, I'm in Melbourne doing my show with Serenji Amarna, 630 each night at the Cooper's Inn Hotel, having so much fun. We'd love to see you there.

Canada, we are visiting you in September this year. If you've somehow missed the news, we are heading up Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto for shows. That's going to be so much fun. Tickets for all this stuff, I believe, are online. And I'm here too. To another episode of Do Go On. My name is Dave Warnikey and as always I'm here with Matt Stewart.

Hey Dave, sorry. I forgot where we were for a second there. I forgot that I wasn't just sitting and watching and enjoying. Joining us this week is our friend Cass Page. Woo! Cass, how are you? I'm good. I'm ready to double my joy. That's right. I mean, we had you on the show last week. We spoke about a horrific car accident.

can we bring the joy again this week? Yeah, well, Cass, welcome back on the show. You are playing for the jackpottered prize, which is double knowledge. And yeah, well... I'm feeling pretty confident, I've got to say it. Looking forward to seeing how you go. Before we get on to the game show,

okay, my report this week, Dave, you were going to tell our dear listeners about... About like an actual game show? Yeah, or quiz show that we are doing at the Melbourne Comedy Festival coming up in April, April 2nd, 9 and 16. and that's three Monday nights if you look them up. And you look at your calendar thinking,

what can I do on those nights? At 9 o'clock, I'm in Melbourne. Maybe I'll go to the town hall, you're thinking. I'll see Do Go On. But not the live podcast. You'll see Do Go On the Quiz Show. Very much like the podcast where we take a topic from history, but I, the host, will quiz Matt and Jess

and two guests each week on a topic from history. And by the end of it, we'll have learned the same amount. We'll have laughed the same amount, but there's also points aside for some reason. Yes. I think it's good. I'm like, I enjoy being on the Do-Goan podcast, but I'm a bit annoyed that I can't win it.

That's right. You want to win Dugan? Now you can. It's good for those times you're sitting with your friends. You're like, I'm having a good time, but I need someone to lose. Yes. Yep. Yeah.

Greg, he's been great company, but I want to beat him. I want to be better company. I need a scoring system here. And if you are looking for shows to go to at the Comedy Festival, why not come to see me and Alastair Tronbei Burtchel, you might know him from previous episodes where he told us all about the history of the clip and the pain.

Has he done any other episodes? I think they're the two. They're the two. But we're doing a stand-up show together and it's going to be a lot of fun. It's called Hong Kongk, Hubber, ringer ding ding ding. And it's on, I can't remember where,

but all the details are via the link. And it's on Nightly for the... the second half of the festival. Monday nights, I obviously can't be in the show because I'm going to be in the do-go-on-one one. So you want to win? Yeah, I want to win. Angus Gordon's taking my place those nights. But yeah, come see both those shows. That'd be so cool. I think that would make you really cool, actually. I think it would. If you're listening to this and you've got some nights spare, or if you don't cancel, make them spare. Yeah. And they're not spare anymore. You've got plans.

That's right. And then all of a sudden, you're winning the game I like to call life. For new listeners, how would you explain this show? This podcast show we call Do Go On. What we do here, Matt, is we're taking in terms to report on a topic, often suggested to us by one of the listeners, go away, do a bit of research, write down some facts, bring it back to the other people in the form of a report. It is your turn, Matt, to report on a topic. And because Cass and I have no idea what you're going to talk about,

we always start with a question. That's right. This question is slightly tangential. Oh, no, it's not, you know, it's directly related to the topic. The question is, I couldn't believe it last week when your topic was about car racing. Because my question is, which make of car did Dick Johnson drive in his three Bathurst wins? Oh. Ford.

Correct. Well done, Dave. Wait, Cass, did you have a guess? I was going to guess a four-wheel drive instead of a two-wheel. Look, I think it was a two-wheel drive, but I like, I like, I'd have to go, because I think they were. they might have even been three different kinds of Ford. One of them was, I think, maybe an EL Falcon, but one of the earlier, anyway, it doesn't matter.

This really... Is your report on Dick Johnson? No, it's not. Is it on Bathurst? I just love squeezing Dick Johnson in wherever I can. It's just one of the great names. No, this week's topic is... It's about Ford,

but more specifically, the attempt in a utopian city, Ford founder, Henry Ford set up. What? Bordlandia. Oh, it's not called Bathurst, all right. Bordlandia. Bordlandia. Gasoline flows free.

And the wheel rotations are complementary. That's the chocolate factory. Only, yeah, just with, there's rooms where you can eat, you know, oil. There's a petrol, a petrol fountain. A buffing room. Yeah. You go through a little human kind of. car wash to get a shower.

There's no covers, there's boots. It's honestly, what a wonderland. This topic was suggested by Teigen Longman from the Gold Coast, Ben Monsma from Seattle and Alex Buxel from St. Charles, Missouri.

Okay, let us begin. Henry Ford is best known for being the founding father of the Ford Motor Company. The Ford Model T. revolutionized both transportation and the manufacturing industry by the 1920s, Ford was one of the richest

and best-known people in the world. For The Guardian, Drew Reed writes, it is difficult to overstate the reputation Henry Ford had built for himself by that time, whether in Brazil, America, or anywhere else on the planet. Let's just name a couple of countries. I mean, Brazil is relevant to the topic. It seems like he's just pulled that out of his ass, but that does make sense later. In his day, Ford's name was every bit as evocative of the glimmering promise of technological revolution as Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps even more so. Two of the most respected people. The Zook. Jobsian, the Zook.

Within a decade of its founding in Dearborn, Michigan in 1903, the Ford Motor Company had revolutionized car production by introducing the assembly line. isolating tasks within the complex process of car assembly, allowing new models of his flagship vehicle, the Model T, to be cranked out faster than ever before, making the company a global success. Yet Ford's greatest innovation was arguably not mechanical but social. He took pride in the fair treatment of his staff, and in 1914 to great fanfare,

he proclaimed that all Ford workers would receive a daily salary of $5, which is the equivalent of $120. American dollars today or 90 pounds. Is that like as a minimum or if you're like an upper management and you're getting paid $10 a day? Actually, you're all getting five. The poorer workers are like, yay. And other people are like, I've just lost half my way.

Oh, I think, oh yeah, I think it was, I wasn't screwing anyone. You're all getting $5 a day. What about the assistant CEO? No. How much is that an hour? Because I assume this is after the Industrial Revolution. Yes, it's the eight hour work day. So, yeah, it's less than a dollar an hour.

What about equivalent? So, like... Oh, so what's Dave's the math guy on the show? 120 by 8? Ah, 7 and a half. Yeah. Because, you know, no one pays for lunch breaks. What's minimum wage in American hour?

I'm not sure. I know it's not. I know it's not $15. I think Joe Biden made this just recently. Is it government workers the minimum is now 15? Yeah, right. There you go. Well, so it's him very well, doesn't it?

Whatever the, at the time this was seen as being like quite generous. It is. I've just checked. It's 16 U.S.D. An hour equivalent. Right. So, I mean, and at the time it was like quite generous. So that's one interesting thing about Ford I didn't realize.

Something that I was reading about him, there's a lot of, he had sort of a lot of weird inconsistencies. I'll talk a little bit about some of his real downsides. briefly, but he had this thing where he thought, you know, he wanted everyone to live better lives, supposedly, and he thought he could do so, do that with business. But he accidentally, while he was thinking he was giving everyone the chance to make a bit more money and live better lives, he was creating this system that made human sort of cogs in a machine.

And in the end, it sort of did a lot of the opposite of what he was trying to do, supposedly. Anyway, that's not really what we're talking about necessarily here. You there, cog, back in the machine. Yeah, we're not talking about the Hellscape who created. We're talking about the utopia he didn't create. Yes, that's true. In both forms.

Still with Reid here, he says Ford believed that fair treatment would make his work as more responsible citizens and in the process, solidify a client base for manufacturers. The Reverend Samuel Marcus, one of the heads of Ford's Employee Relations Office, once proclaimed that Ford's cars were the byproducts of his real business, which is the making of men. Oh, that's foreboding, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. This man's representing the workers.

To this point, Reid has painted a pretty rosy picture of old Henry, you could say, but he continues. But some of Ford's social ideas were highly sinister, most notoriously his anti-Semitism, which featured prominently in a newspaper he himself printed, the Dearborn Independent. I heard vaguely about this. I thought it might have been like a thing where people who knew him privately later said that he was a bit anti-Semitic.

He was very public about it. Anyway, this is from a PBS article about it, says, in 1918, Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. A year and a half later, he began publishing a series of articles that claimed a vast Jewish conspiracy was infecting America. The series ran in the following 91 issues. Ford bound the articles in a four volumes titled The International Jew, and distributed half a million copies to his vast network of dealerships and subscribers.

One of the most famous men in America, Henry Ford legitimized ideas that otherwise may have been given little authority. Oh my gosh. Yeah, isn't that? Hectic, isn't it? That's atrocious. Yeah. I did not know that about that.

No, neither did I. Super grim. Super grim. And it was the kind of thing that I read and I'm like, it's not directly involved in this utopia. He's trying to set up, but I felt like it's kind of thinking, once you're ready, you probably got to, at least, People are listening going, is he going to mention that whole anti-Semitism thing?

Yeah, well, now we have an idea of what he would consider a utopia. Yeah. Sounding worse and worse by the moment. Yeah, anyway, we're not here to talk about that necessarily. We're here to talk about one of his other failings. Fordlandia. According to read, Ford became increasingly convinced that his role in advancing society. Yeah, it doesn't seem like the way people write about him isn't like,

let's make a society without Jewish people. It's more like, let's empower workers and stuff, which is like, it's so weird that you're like going, I'm a real egalitarian or whatever. Yeah. But not this group of people. I'm going to pull all of us, not you, all of us up. Yeah.

Billionaire types, I was like, I need to do this. I need to change the world. It's my job. It's my job. It did seem like that people do, when they get a lot of wealth, they feel like they need to do that. Yeah, that's right.

I need a rocket swel. need rockets. I'll fix it. I'll fix it. And it's just, yeah, I guess when you're really rich, do you fall into a smaller bubble and echo chambers and you can believe these weird conspiracy theories? If you are that successful, so many different doors need to open

up for you and you need to be so lucky, you have to have so much privilege that I don't know how you wouldn't, in some part of your mind, be like, well, the rules don't apply to me. Because you hear about all these things that happen to everyday people and all the setbacks that they face and you face none and every single opportunity you've had has been good,

even if you do have what look to be setbacks. They're not the same setbacks as a normal person would have. So even your mind, you're like, oh, I have the same setbacks as anyone else and it's easy and you manage to bounce back. So you are like, I am therefore more powerful and more resilient than other people because all these setbacks that they have really did set them back for me, different. You would not perceive the world as treating you the same for other people because you would either believe like, I'm the chosen one because how would you not?

or you're like, well, I'm built different. I've earned everything I did. And the other thing you might start to believe is everything I do is right. I've got this figured out. Every little thing I do is right. And I want to share this with a group of people and make a utopia. Yeah. And if you start seeing things like you're making cars that start changing the world

and you are giving people living wages that are changing the world, you're like, hey, everything I do has an effect, which means, I got to keep doing stuff. But I don't know where the anti-Semitism fits in all that. No one does. It never fits in anywhere well, doesn't. No, it's just like, oh, yeah. Always a blight on any history.

Did you ever see that interview with Jeff Bezos, where they were like, he was talking about why he got into space travel? And it was pretty much, no, someone asked him what he does with all of his money. And he's like, well, the only thing I can do, really at this point, the other thing I can invest in, space. It was like in his mind, money is this thing that you, it's an investment and you keep building and building and building. And he's gotten to the top where he, he can't do all of the normal investment things anymore. So it's like, well, I did the only thing I could do it.

Everyone's like, that is not the only thing you could do with money. Like, why you're only seeing it is a way to make more money. So he's like, well, I'll invest in space. That's all I've got left. Yeah, that's, that's an insight. I throw it into this big money pit. I set fire to it. There's nothing else I can do with it. It was the only thing I could do. I've got too much. It wouldn't fit anymore. There's nothing else to invest in, so what else am I able to do with it?

Well, at least that wasn't an anti-Semitic interview, which is what I thought you were going on. Oh, no. Back to Ford. He says, Ford became increasingly convinced that his role in advancing society had to go beyond the factory floor and encompass entire cities.

While he succeeded in bringing some of his smaller urban planning concepts to life, his much larger project, a massive manufacturing city to be built in northern Alabama. 75 miles long was power supplied by damning the Tennessee River, and it never even got off the ground. He had these huge plans. There were investors in the town. They were already setting up little villages out around the town

because Henry Ford was about to come to town and make this a big boom city, but it just never even started. That's kind of like the Mars colony? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, Ford's like, well, what else could I invest in? Alabama. The final frontier. So there was a lot of excitement from locals there,

but the project at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, never got off the ground. Soon after, he moved his attention to Brazil, of course, which is a place where he wanted to start sourcing rubber. During the 1920s, sourcing rubber was becoming increasingly expensive for Ford, which in turn was driving up the costs of producing his model A cars, as rubber was needed for tires, valves, hose, and gaskets, etc. A bunch of different things in a car needed rubber. He was up to the Model A, which I think was the one

that maybe took over from the Model T. It makes no sense. Yeah, surely. Give the man an alphabet. That's really funny. Give the man an alphabet. That's all what I thought too. He's got so many yes friends that he's like,

what comes up to T, A? Yes, Mr. Ford. To combat this, Ford wanted to create and control his own source of rubber. Where does natural rubber come from, you ask? I mean, I didn't know. either of you. Rubber tree.

Brazil. Yes, okay, you both knew. I'll read this for listeners who didn't know. I knew the trees. Didn't know Brazil. You did mention Brazil at the start of the episode and say, hey, this will be important later. Well, let me read a little from Britannica.

Encyclopedia? No it. Whoa! Formed in a living organism, natural rubber consists of solid suspended in a milky fluid called latex that circulates in the inner portions of the bark of many tropical and subtropical trees and shrubs. shrubs, but predominantly

heavier brazilis, a tall softwood tree originating in Brazil. Natural rubber was first scientifically described by Charles Marie de la Condamine and Francois Fresnau of France following an expedition to South America in 1735.

The English chemist Joseph Priestley gave it the name rubber in 1770 when he found it could be used to rub out pencil marks. That's where rubber gets its name. No way. That is so good. Yeah, I think that's just fantastic. Yeah, it seems sort of obvious, I guess, now, but it was

the end of the pencil, the end of the pencil wasn't what gave it its name, but that's so funny that it is. Yeah, I would have thought that it's a rubber because it's made of rubber, not it's called rubber because it rubs. Also, I didn't know rubber and latex are from the same thing. Yeah, that's interesting. That's blown my tiny mind. I didn't know they were from the same plant. And I didn't know rubber

is suspended in latex. Yeah. Look. Their siblings. They didn't know. I mean, I'm taking Britannica's word for this. Oh, okay. Famously. Don't make me doubt.

So, yeah, so that's how I got its name. It was a major, its major commercial success came only after the vulcanization process was invented by Charles Goodyear in 1839. Goodier never really made any money out of his discovery, though. It's quite sad. Bad year for him. I think Bill Bryson goes through this in his history of, short history of nearly everything, or whatever that book's called.

And he talks about how. He put all his money into trying to figure out how to make rubber work. And he ended up sort of stumbling upon it slightly accidentally. So he started making money out of his discovery. He patented it. And he earned money from that. But he spent most of that money in courts fighting companies who were infringing on his patent.

He died at the age of 59 in 1860, $200,000 in debt. The Goodyear Ty and Rubber company from Akron, Ohio was named after him in 1898, but it has no connection to him or his family. So it's a pretty sad story that one, I think. That's a little bit of a sidetrack. Let's get back to Ford Topia. According to Reid, Ford wasn't looking to Brazil simply for the rubber. His goal was to build his vision of the ideal city,

a city that would fuse the same concepts that Ford championed throughout his career and bring a better future to a forgotten part of the planet, and that city would bear his name, Woodlandia. Like he thinks of Brazil, forgotten part of the planet. I mean, maybe you're not thinking about it, but I think Brazilians are still getting about their daily lives. Remembering. It's so weird.

He's looking at a globe, just spins it and goes, how about Brazil? Never heard of it. Yeah. Pretty big. Yeah, it looks like a big chunk of land there. That's weird. There's probably stuff in there.

Yeah, go help people remember Brazil. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And rubber trees are from there. That's Andy. Just the audacity to be like, people don't even think of this country. Yeah, it's just a funny mindset. He has some funny mindstets, doesn't he? It's got a couple. According to Simon Romero writing for the New York Times,

Brazil was home to this plant, the rubber tree, the Hevia Brasilianzus. And the Amazon basin had boomed from 1879 to 1912 as industries in North America and Europe fed the demand for rubber. There was a problem, though. Mass cultivation of rubber trees proved difficult. While the trees grew natively in Brazil, so did parasites and blight that would attack the trees. So when rubber trees were grown too close together, which is what people did to try to, you know, industrialize it or whatever, it made for a perfect breeding ground for these pests.

And so it was very hard to do. They grew naturally, sort of pretty separate. But yeah. On top of that, a British botanist and explorer, smuggled thousands of rubber tree seeds out of Brazil. Brazilian people were making money out of that would really hoping that would not happen. Yeah.

He basically stole their industry from them. Yep. Which led to rubber plantations being set up in British, Dutch and French colonies in Asia. These plantations had similar tropical climates, but no native rubber tree parasites or blight. And as a result, we're able to produce rubber trees more efficiently and on a bigger scale. So all of a sudden, yeah, the,

Brazilian rubber industry was battling. According to Romero, these endeavours on the other side of the world devastated Brazil's rubber economy. But Ford despised relying on the Europeans, fearing a proposal by Winston Churchill to create a rubber cartel. As Reid continues, fresh off the failure of his Alabama development, Ford grew fascinated with the economically ravaged Amazon as a potential site for a reboot of his utopian aspirations. He had reportedly first become interested in the idea after hearing ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, personal friend, tell of his journey down the river. Increasing rubber prices gave him a practical aspect to his dream. In his utopian mine, Ford's plan for growing rubber in the Amazon was a work of civilization.

He believes the values that had made his company a success would build character anywhere else on the planet. In 1928, he went as far to announce, We are not going to South America to make money, but to help develop that wonderful and fertile land. sort of colonial mindset. Oh, yeah. We're going to take what's good here. We're figuring it out here. We're going to spread the love around the world.

A little bit of, oh, I'll fix that. Haven't been there. But have a funny feeling they're not doing it as good as I am. No, I don't think they are. I forget about Brazil all the time. Therefore, they're forward. Yeah, I think I'm going to go fix them. Yeah.

But the move also represented a certain disenchantment with his home country and a desire to start from scratch in the blank slate of the Amazon jungle. About as blank as it gets that land. Yeah. Nothing there. That jungle. Yeah.

So, but isn't that, this is what Greg Grandin wrote in his definitive history of Fulandia, which is kind of like, it's the book that everyone, all these articles, they've all read this book. It all sort of goes back to Greg's work,

which I think was even, what's the big American book prize? I think it was, this book was nominated. Pulitzer. I think it was nominated for the Pulitzer history, maybe. Wow. And this is what a line from Grandin's book said. The force of industrial capitalism Ford helped to unleash

was undermining the world he hoped to restore. This is a weird contradiction to me in Ford's thinking. He's like American ideals, I want to spread that around. But I also don't like where America's heading. So I want to do it somewhere else. And he's also not realizing that, a lot of his work has pushed, you know, the advancement of industrialisation and capitalism and work as its cogs in a machine. He helped create all of that. So it's just, yeah,

it's just interesting that he's got so many blind spots. Anyway, by 1927, Britain's dominance on the global rubber market was starting to wane, which meant Ford had less reason to set up his own rubber plantation. Due to this, his advisor suggested he instead save himself to trouble and start buying from Brazilian supplies, basically cutting in the middleman. But it seems his mind was made up. He wanted to get something happening in the Amazon. And by this stage, in his mind, it wasn't just rubber.

It was about saving mankind. He can save everyone in Brazil. Yeah. This guy's about three weeks away from putting a music concert in the middle of the Amazon. Yeah. Amazon aid. He sent one of his trusted associates to Brazil

and a deal was made. According to read, he received rights to commercially operate a 5,625 square mile tract of land on the Tapazos River, a tributary of the Amazon for a total of $125,000. It seems like great value, but apparently it wasn't, but it's like a big chunk of land. Ford now had all he needed to bring his ideals to life in the middle of the jungle. As granted notes, Ford had the right to run Fordlandia as a separate state. So it wasn't just the land. He basically was making its own separate country inside. Oh my God.

It was later revealed that Ford's men had given him something of a raw deal. Apparently by law, he could have attained the land for next to nothing. I'll talk a bit about it later, but yeah, his trusted man probably shouldn't have been that trusted. So Ford's Utopian Vision now had a home and the problems began instantly. Oh, that's weird. Weird, because he feels like he gets it. I don't think he gets it. I don't think he's been there. No one gets it like Ford.

But he'd be like, you know, Brazil, forgotten place. I'll send people in. We'll just turn this jungle into an American Midwest city. Yeah. Easy. Like from when I was a boy, you know, when things were right in this world. Before that Ford guy came off. To protect themselves from flooding,

they chose a location on top of a rise for the side of Fordlandia. But this meant that it was in a position that the country, that the cargo vessel hauling their construction supplies was not going to be able to make it down the tapasos until the wet season. In the meantime, a crew was assembled and waiting at the site. The crew made up of local Brazilians. They waited there from the second half of 1928. Time wore on, though.

They became angered by the delay, as well as the fact their food supplies were rotting, and this led to a revolt against the American leadership at the site. so they had a mini revolt and pissed off. Good. Yeah, that happens a few more times. Once the construction supplies finally arrived on site in 1929, work setting up the city was underway.

According to read, construction finally began under the command of Norwegian-born Ina Oxholm, who oversaw the laying out of Fordlandia's basic street grid. This guy, apparently, it turns out, didn't mind a bit of rum. he also had no real skills leading men on land. I think he was a like... Space cowboy?

More of a shipman. Oh, yeah. He also had no knowledge of rubber trees. Well, you don't need him. He knows what a tree is. Yeah. Next question. It's the thing you use to make boats.

What's next question? Yeah. No, that's a good point, Cass. I didn't consider that. I think you're starting to get to Henry Fultz-ed. Well, because he's been in the ship. He's been in a tree. Yes, that's true.

The city was built with a separate neighbourhood, the Villa Americana for the American staff who work there. Brandon points out that this development was separated from the areas intended for Brazilian workers, writing, it was offset a bit, similar to the relationship of suburbia to a city, he says. The Villa Americana had the best view of the city and was the only section with running water, while the Brazilian workers made do with water supplied by wells.

which I think is fair enough. I think utopias normally have sort of inequality built into them, don't I? Yeah. Sorry, you've come to Utopia, but you've only got a silver class ticket. Sorry, we've got a platinum over here, gold here, silver only, sorry. But silver utopia is still pretty good. Yeah, I mean, come on, Utopia. It's better than bronze utopia.

Look at this piece of shit over here. Clearing the jungle was excruciating work, and despite Ford's famously high wages, so these workers were also getting paid about double what that work in Brazil would normally be getting paid. Labor of the car needed for the project was in short supply. Amazon wood, which Ford had initially hoped to sell at a profit until rubber could be produced in the territory, proved useless. I'll probably just be able to sell that wood.

Won't look into it any more than that. I don't know. It's wood. It's useless wood, apparently. I should have got some of that useful wood. Full of holes. All he knows is metal, right? There's no wood in a car.

That's true. Unless, you know, those 80s station wagons from comedy films. The sort of set wagons. Other panelling, yeah. Like Chevy Chase might have driven in one of his vacation films. While there were many issues, construction on the town continued. Portlandia was constructed as an American-style town, kind of like you wanted to, you know, like the Midwest.

American-style town makes me think of, like, when people make an American-style diner. Yeah. And you're like, you could have just made a diner, but what you've done is you've given me some sort of uncanny valley version of what a diner would be by calling it an American-style. diner and now I feel very uncomfortable. And the American style, like the Australian American diners, they're always

from the 50s, right? Yeah. They're always like Happy Day style. With an Elvis pinball machine. I have a funny feeling that it might be similar to Australian style grills in America. They've got a big chain over there. Outback Steghouse? Outback to Stakehouse. And I haven't been to one, but I've heard that they're pretty funny.

You know, like kangaroos on the wall and stuff. You know, like in Australia. Yeah. I'm looking at one right now. I have definitely been to the British chain of Australian pubs called Walkabout, which is pretty form. And yeah, very, very similar sort of strange vibe over there. So it's an American style town they're going for. And Ford wanted to be populated by American Ford employees who would relocate as well as Brazilian workers would all live by what he considered American values.

Obviously, with, you know, built-in class divide. That's American values. Yeah, this sort of confusing me a bit. He didn't like what America was becoming, so he constructed a town in the middle of the jungle where he hoped Brazilians would live by American values. Like, it's very confusing. I miss old America.

I'm going to make new Americans. Yeah, in Brazil. Maybe he was hoping that in his mind, all these people would be like, wow, this is the correct way to live. How good. So he was, maybe he wanted the thrill of a new convert. Like, you know, when you show your friend of YouTube video and they actually laugh and you're like, oh, I'm God.

Like, I know humor. Like, if you show a bunch of new people that's completely new way to live, like, imagine the joy that would give you if they were like, hey, wow. Oh, my God, I understand church. You just talked your way into religion. No, I talked my way into becoming a preach.

Yeah. What are they called? Priests? Yeah, one of the gods of church that isn't God. Reverend? Yeah, you get to tell everyone what to do and they're like, wow. Thank you.

And you're like, oh my God, it wasn't even me, it was God. Cass, I think you're selling yourself short. Let's go for Pope. Yeah. I found that all a bit confusing. But as Grandin wrote, with a surety of purpose

and in curiosity about the world that seems all too familiar, or deliberately rejected expert advice and set out to turn the Amazon into the Midwest of his imagination. Yes, yes. I think my favorite part of any story along these lines

where someone is falling from a height they don't even recognize is when they start rejecting expert advice. That's always like it's a little delicious treat to hear. You're like, oh, yum. It's like when you're watching a rom-com and like they give each other a look and you're like, yeah, I know how this is ending. Nice.

Oh, okay. But wait, is this after or before that bit, two thirds of the way through the movie, when a brief conversation would have fixed everything? But instead, they hate each other and they're sad in a montage separately. This is like the first third of the film. Yeah. We haven't had the brief conversation that would fix everything. Although, again, this expert could have been a brief conversation to fix everything,

but he wasn't going to do it, was he? Well, I'm excited for the brief conversation that'll fix everything moment. Yeah, this one isn't a rom-com, I'm afraid. There's not going to be someone who says, hey, why don't we do this? And it's some sort of, let's undo some of the bad you've done. And he says, no. No, there's a, yeah, I mean. there's a lot of those moments.

There's a lot of those moments. Okay, good. I don't know. I don't even know how many of them are a reference in here. They're all sort of... Too many. They don't need to be said a lot of it, but I think a lot of it's in the, you know,

reading between the lines. He was doing that every day. He still hasn't been there, by the way. He's doing all this from afar. He's not been. No. He's just throwing money at it. Yeah.

So how does he know what's happening then? Well, he's got American managers from his company there. And he... And then a bunch of employees about to head over. Or, you know. I just got trusted people that, like, ripped him off in a deal to buy the place. So, hang on.

So he's, he is making paradise and he's like, no, I don't want to go yet. Is it ready? Yeah. Why keep himself from his dream? That's so weird. God, weird guy. I'm calling it. Weird guy.

Yeah, I think he's a little bit of an oddball. Hmm. Well, rich people aren't weird. They're eccentric. Accentric. you. According to Alan Bellows writing for Damn Interesting.com, scores of Ford employees were relocated to the site.

And over the first few months, an American as Apple Pie community sprung up from what was once a jungle wilderness. It's wild as either photos. You're like, it's amazing. Like, if you throw a lot of money at something, I guess most things are possible. Yeah.

But if you see photos, you would not assume this was in the jungle parts of it when it, you know, it almost seemed like it was working. It included a power plant, a modern hospital, a library, a golf course, a hotel, and rows of white clapboard houses with wicker patio furniture. As the town's population grew, all manners of businesses followed, including tailors, shops, bakeries, butcher shops, restaurants and shoemakers. It grew in a thriving community with Model T Ford's frequenting the neatly paved streets.

Outside of the residential area, long rows of freshly planted saplings soon dotted the landscape. Ford chose not to employ any botanists in the development of Fordlandia's rubber tree fields, instead relying on the cleverness of company engineers, you know, car engineers. Yeah. They know trees. Natural come from ground, so does plant. Next question. Having no prior knowledge of rubber raising, the engineers made their best guess

and planted about 200 trees per acre, despite the fact that there were only about seven wild rubber trees per acre in the Amazon jungles. But naturally they grow seven per acre. They've gone, let's go for 200. I prefer a round number. Yeah, it's just nicer. And then that way you won't be able to walk between them. They'll be packed in.

I think it's better. The plantations of East Asia were packed with flourishing trees. So like in British Ceylon, there was a bit of a thriving, you know, they'd taken the seeds and they were setting up in tropical areas like Sri Lanka was work. so it seemed reasonable to assume that the tree's native land would be just as accommodating. That makes sense. Honestly, be even more accommodating, you think. Yeah.

Let's squeeze in a few more. Unfortunately, Bellows continues, the tiny saplings weren't growing at all. The hilly terrain hemorrhaged all of its topsoil, leaving infertile rocky soil behind. Those trees, which were able to survive in an arbor adolescence, were soon stricken with leaf blight that ate away the leaves and left the tree stunted a new soil. Hord's managers battled the fungus heroically, but they were not armed with the necessary knowledge of horticulture, and their efforts proved futile. Fertile would have been better.

Yeah, that would be great. So, yeah, the town, some of the things, they're making it, looks like an American town, but the real reason they're there is a disaster at this point. And I say it looked like the town was going well. Under the surface, things, you know, it looked in a photo like a Midwestern town, but they were in a tropical climate. Right. Is everyone going around wearing their winter clothes as well?

Yeah, they got their Sunday best on. It's very strict on that. From afar. It's winter here, so it's winter there. That's right. Today I'm wearing long pants, so you will as well. Ford did have strict views, and they included what a working day should be,

and that was 9 to 5, Dolly Parton style. This was despite Brazilian workers being accustomed to working before sunrise and after sunset to avoid the brutal heat of the day. But he's like, no, that's not how we work. We work 9 to 5. Oh, my God. He also had strict views on what food should be eaten.

And the workers of the town were treated to a diet of oatmeal, canned peaches, and brown rice. This is what we're talking about before. He's like, this is what works for me. This is what'll work for everyone. If you just eat canned peaches, you too will become a multimillionaire. Yeah, that's what you've got to do. They'd be so sick. Like, they'd have sick brains from working at wrong times.

they'd have sick bodies from being in the heat that they'd just have heat stroke all the time. Ford was a teetotler and he wanted the residents of Ford Langdia of course to abstain as well. Yeah. Was he a model tea toddler? Thank you.

Thanks so much. I'd like the car. Yeah. So on his command, the American managers of the town prohibited the consumption of alcohol, which I guess was pretty American because back home in the States,

they were in the middle of their prohibition period. and much like the American Prohibition, the Fordlandia workers drank anyway. Other things Ford encouraged the locals of his utopia to partake in included gardening, square dancing, and the readings of poetry of Emerson and Longfellow. I think they were like on the weekends the workers had to go to these square dancing things

and these poetry reading and stuff. It was all, it all sounds like he's trying to create a cult, only he hasn't done the charismatic thing that cult leaders normally do it? Yeah, he's not there. He's not there, and everyone there's like, I don't want to do this. It seems like in his attempts to create a utopia, unknowingly just like jamming his foot on the accelerator of capitalism, he's created team bonding sessions.

Yeah. He's created an awful work environment. We're going to do an icebreaker now. Now, you guys all live and work in this town. Now, I think it would be a bit fun and snazzy. If we all met out for a little dance, you know, let our hair down. No drinking. It will be a dry event.

But if we could just have a bit of fun, get to know each other. We'll get along better and it'll be easy to work if we all feel like friends. And if we all feel like family, we'll feel obliged to come. And then we're all going to get married to each other. And your wife is now my wife. So, you know, square dancing, that sounds pretty harmless, right? Bit of a squantz. Yeah, but imagine if you're told you had to go square dancing, I'd be like, oh no.

Yeah. Well, apparently there's a bit of a sinister underlying vibe of the square dancing even. I found this great website called, I don't have you heard this one, Wikipedia.org. Oh, is that Brazilian? I think it, yeah, it seems to be, it seems to be kind of based around

Fordlandia based facts and sort of Ford being anti-Semitic. Right. A lot of facts around that sort of area. Wikimedia. Wikipedia. Wikipedia.org. Where the look.

Okay. I mean, it's pretty, pretty narrow. It's like a knockoff. It's like not as, not a good encyclopedia. No, yeah, it's right. I don't even spell encyclopedia right. Can we trust it? Well, I don't know.

Well, anyway, I'm not sure. But anyway, this is what it said of square dancing and Ford. Art of Ford's racist and anti-Semitic legacy includes the funding of square dancing in American schools because he hated jazz and associated its creation with Jewish people. Okay. I personally have never heard that. And square dancing is the answer.

Yeah. Okay. guy has too much money. I'm standing at the storage unit. The doors have opened and that's, I can't unpack all that. It's too much. I'm shutting the door. Is it like, oh yeah, you came for us to do some square dancing? Why is that? Henry, are you okay, man? Well, I mean, clearly you're not, but yeah, he hated jazz. Yeah, wild. And apparently there's a big history of square dancing. There was a few articles about it. Square

dancing is like a white supremacy thing, which blew my fucking mind. Look, when you were saying square dancing, I was assuming it was one of those, you know, like, Kellogg's, how they invented cornflakes to stop people masturbating. Yes. I thought it was like one of those weird, like, purity things. But, yeah, I think it seems like it's kind of, I don't know, I'm confused by it, and maybe there's more to this story. I didn't read too deeply into it, but.

Like, if your end goal is white supremacy, what do you think is happening there? Yeah, very, very strange stuff. Anyway, I don't think the Brazilian workers were particularly keen on Ford's utopian vision, as according to Ben McIntyre writing for The New York Times, the American overseers found it hard to retain employees. Those who stayed died in large numbers from viper bites, malaria, yellow fever, and numerous other tropical afflictions. You know, great Midwestern town.

There's a bakery there, and everyone's, there's a golf course. And yellow fever. Prohibition was supposed to be rigorously upheld, but after a day spent hacking at the encircling jungle, the workers headed to the bars and bordellos that sprang up around the site. Knife fights erupted. Vanieral disease was rife. Along with Prohibition, Ford's other rules were also resented, particularly the rice and peach diet. When a new cafeteria was introduced in place of waiter service, the men rioted, destroying the mess hall and wrecking every vehicle on the property. Apparently in Brazil at that time, they were used to wait at service, so they were like, what the fuck is this? That led to the riot. That led to one of the riots. Oh, okay, not all the other

conditions, but. I think I have a funny feeling there was a build-up of all that. Bit of the straw. But that was, yeah, that was maybe the straw that broke the camel's back. It often is something small that breaks you at the end to be like, oh my goodness, okay, all these really small, awful, insidious things that you can't even give us the common decency of service at a restaurant. Yeah. Like, not only do you think we need to be controlled, but you don't even give us, I'd riot it. Yeah.

I like to think I would have rioted earlier. That's it. Also in Ford's Quest for Utopia, according to Romero, so-called sanitation squads operated across the outpost. Oh, God, this sounds awful already. Killing stray dogs, draining puddles of waterware malaria,

transmitting mosquitoes cumultaire. That one feels fair enough. That one's okay. And checking employees for venereal diseases. Oh, gosh. Gosh. Checking employees for vene. Checking.

Yeah, doesn't that sound a bit weird? But also it sort of sounds a bit like a utopia for me. Dead dogs. Dead dogs near the empty holes where the deadly mosquitoes were. Yeah. Drop them, spread them. Knife fights. Yeah, the knife fights are really selling it for me.

No waiters. Yeah. Cut out that middleman. Despite Ford's narrow and sometimes strange vision of what a utopian. look like, things somehow started to come together for the city. According to Reid, the city would come to feature modern hospitals, schools, generators and a sawmill. By the end of 1930, its landmark structure was complete, a water tower,

utilitarian beacon of modernity for Ford's civilising project. I think Reid definitely, Reid's article definitely adds a slightly more positive, even though it's overall negative. He finds more positives in the story, I think. He's like, oh, he tried. Yeah. They had a water tower. Yeah, come on.

Yeah. It's a big thing. Imagine looking up at that water tower. Sober as a brick. Wishing you could dance to some jazz and being like, we did it. I'd come into this with a pretty negative vibe over the whole project, but you've just turned me around of it. Yeah. Your neighbors died of malaria.

You've got a viper bite and you're not sure what's happening, but hey, we're dancing in a bit. You can go to hospital for that viper bite when you're ready. Yeah. And there's a tower full of malaria. water. Beautiful. Up in the sky where the water comes from. Yeah.

The hospital is quite nice as well. It's a nice hospital. Fantastic. Could I just order a lasagna or someone on my way there? Oh my God. What? Riot. But just as things seemed to be settling down, there was another workers' revolt.

Like there were many of these, but this seems like one of the more famous ones. In December, this is according to Bellows, in December of 1930, after about a year of working in a harsh environment with a strict and disagreeable healthy lifestyle in inverted commas, the labourer's agitation reached critical mass in the workers' cafeteria. Having suffered one too many episodes of indigestion and degradation, a Brazilian man stood and shouted that he would no longer tolerate the conditions. A chorus of voices joined his, and the cacophony was soon joined by an orchestra of banging cups and shattering dishes.

Members of Fordlandia's American management played swiftly. to their homes or into the woods, some of them chased by machete-wielding workers. A group of managers scrambled to the docks and bordered the boats there, which they moved to the center of the river and out of reach of the escalating riots. According to Romero, they smashed time clocks,

cut electricity to the plantation enchanted. Brazil for Brazilians, kill all the Americans, forcing some of the managers to flee into the jungle. Back to bellows. By the time the Brazilian military arrived, three days later, the riders had spent most of their anger. Windows were broken and trucks were overturned, but Fordlandia survived. Work resumed shortly, though the rubber situation had not improved.

A British journalist writing for the Indian Rubber Journal, which I love that that existed, visited in 1931 and wrote, In a long history of tropical agriculture, never has such a vast scheme been entered in such a lavish manner, and with so little to show for the money, Mr Ford's scheme is doomed to failure And this is over a year in at this point, isn't it? Yeah. So it's a year in there like, it's probably not going to go well

after it's already tanking. That's 1930, they're saying that. They forged on though. By the time, you know, obviously the workers are coming in and out. They're not holding on to that many. So I guess that's why there's a few revolts because new people are here and we're going to wait, what? The new people are like, oh, I've never revolted,

before. Yeah, I can do a revolt. By the time of the December 1930 riot, the city had already seen multiple managers come and go from America, and again, a new manager was needed. According to read, Ford finally found a successful manager in Archibald Johnson, who turned the city around after the right, paving the roads, finishing much of the city's housing and beginning work on access roads to connect Fordlandia with a massive territory forded acquired in land from the River. Apparently they built a lot of roads because they're like, you know what another fun thing people do in my utopia? They drive for fun. Cars. Just get out and have a drive. And this is literally a road to nowhere. Yeah, it's just like miles of sort of winding roads around the place.

They still were? They were paved. Some of it? Yeah. I'll talk about that later. Goer a ride? Jora, Jorra. Oh yeah. Day trip? Oh yeah. Dunk down to the Amazon. I think it takes about 18 hours by river from the nearest sort of place you can fly into to get. It's like really remote. But how long by car? Like water car? No, I'm thinking of Model T way.

A model T. The best car there is. Yeah. Well, it'll take as long as the guy in front of you who's chopping down the jungle to make a path for you. Okay. A while. It'll be worth it for getting on that little stretch of road.

It was perhaps under Johnson that Fordlandia came closest to Ford's original idea. He succeeded in bringing many of the amenities typical of American towns into the heart of of the Amazon Basin. This is from Reed. The centerpiece was an entertainment facility that screened Hollywood films and also held dancers.

Square dances? Sinistic square dances. Health and education facilities were also improved. Johnson saw to it that many of Ford's behavioral edicts were put into place, including the strict diet, though the alcohol provision still remained hard to enforce. But one problem remained. Fordlandia was not producing any rubber. Jungle foliage continued to be.

cleared, but efforts to plant rubber trees yielded discouraging results. Few trees that took root were quickly beset by blight. They're like, ah, it's just impossible. That's so weird. This is where rubber trees come from. Why can't we grow rubber trees here? We haven't thought to ask anyone who knows about trees, but still... But there's nothing to know about trees.

They wouldn't tell you anything new. Yeah, your plan. They're grown. They're not working. That's weird. Yeah. Next hole. But it wasn't only the rubber tree.

and Brazilian workers who had an awful time. According to Romero, the Amazon offered its own challenges to the Americans, would you believe? Some couldn't adapt to the conditions, suffering nervous breakdowns. One drowned when a storm on the Tapasos River toppled his boat.

One of the previous managers left after three of his children died from tropical fevers. According to McIntyre, many of the American managers really struggled with the conditions. This story comes from back towards the start in 1929. when two Ford employees, Johansen, a Scot, and Tolkstorfer, a German, headed up river with orders to collect rubber seeds.

Instead, they went on an alcoholic bender. Party boat! On the journey, they also marooned their cook on a desert island, a deserted island. This is like the original hangover movie. And they ended up in the tiny town of Barra. There, Johansson, who was the self-proclaimed rubber seed king of the upper rivers. No one is challenging that title. It's so funny on, you know, how this whole plantation ended up.

You're the seed king, not the tree king, I'm you? Mate, I've sold seeds everywhere. So the seed king bought some perfume in this little town of Barra from a trading post and was seen chasing goats, cows and chickens, attempting to anoint the animals with perfume and shouting, Mr Ford has lots of money You might as well smell good too They were just losing their minds

Another man Sounds like he lost his mind Purposely hurled himself from a boat Into a nest of crocodiles Okay And Had to go I don't think it went well for him

You might as well smell nice as well Crocodiles He fed an entire family Yeah that's true which is, it's producing more than the whole of their Ford Topia. That's very true. The circle of life. The great carmaker himself witnessed none of this.

He never set foot in the town that bore his name. Yet his powerful, contradictory personality influenced every aspect of the project. As Ford fatally despised experts. He just hated experts. Such a funny character trait. I hate experts. Oh, you know a lot about this thing? Get out of my side.

Get out. Get out. If you're having a stab at it, yeah, I'll listen. Hands up, who knows the answer to this question? All right, everyone with their hand up, get out. You're fired. Okay, who knows the answer to this question? 50 people will have their hand up.

How many of you have studied this? 40 people keep their hand up? You're fired. Immediately leave. So did he consider, so he must not have considered himself an expert on anything? I consider myself very lucky. And I'm also surround myself with other very lucky people. So it's not just to this point that he doesn't get there.

He never gets there. In the decades of Fordlandia, and it lasted for decades somehow. And he's never, he never goes there ever. Not decades, but like more than a decade, though. And he never sets foot there. Is he just too busy? Yeah, I guess so. Did he go there initially to scope it out?

He sent some trusted men. Yeah, and then he got a shit deal. Oh, yeah, trusted men. Basically, he just circled an area on a map and said, do you go there and sort it out? He doesn't like experts, and this is McIntice still writing here. Ford's Amazon team had plenty of able men, but as Grandin observes, what it didn't have was a horticulturalist, agromanist, which is a, I have to look up what that meant. I don't know how you pronounce it, but it's an expert, the science of soil management

and crop production, which would have been handy. Didn't have a botanist, didn't have a microbiologist, an entomologist, or any other person who might know something about jungle rubber and its enemies, which included lace bugs, leaf blight, and also there were swarms of caterpillars that apparently left areas of the plantation as bare as bean poles. And he's like, oh, that's a shame.

Weird, fix it. I mean, he's not even saying, I wonder what his picture of it is from back at home as well. He's just going, huh, apparently I've got another letter, though, still not have any luck with this. It's just not real to him. I don't think he experiences empathy in the same way that the people experience empathy. He just, or he just has no concept of any, or he truly is an expert of none.

He's not even an expert on how to breathe, you know, like. Yeah, you're assuming that he's getting these body counts as well, because people are dying on the regular there. You're like, how they got taken out via viper. Unless you just sitting there, be like, oh, weird. Yellow fever, one guy threw himself into crocodiles. And how'd that turn out for him? This sounds like hell.

Goodness gracious. He would be like, that guy was being paid $16 an hour whilst he was jumping into crocodiles. That's pretty good. And in the end, we're also producing rubber. So, you know, we are producing rubber? I haven't checked that in a while. Oh, still not.

Square downs are going well? That's weird. Get the Seed King on. No, do you reckon when he proclaimed himself the Seab King, he was like, oh, not too experty, let you get off. Very lucky. said King. Not only did Ford seem to hate experts, according to Romero,

Ford also seemed to abhor learning from the past. History is bunk, Ford told the New York Times back in 1921. What difference does it make how many times the ancient Greeks flew their kites? He just didn't want to learn from the past. He said that the only history that matters is the history we make today. So it seems Henry Ford truly was a bit of a fuckhead. He seemed to finally make a good decision, though, when he hired expert botanist James R. Weir.

Finally hired a botanist. What was that meaning like? But what did he ask him to do? Yeah. He asked him to teach square dancing. Weir tried to get some trees to finally grow, but concluded that the damp and hilly terrain was not up to the task. As it turned out, the previous owner of the land

was related to that trusted man Ford sent down to organise the purchase of the land. He was sold a pup. It was a dud. So they, like, he paid too much for the land and it was basically not built for purpose. The land couldn't grow the trees. They were doing it wrong anyway. Even if they were doing it right,

they would have battled to grow rubber trees there. That's good. I'm glad that the good land went to not him. You know, I'm glad he didn't... What would have been a worse? I'm glad he didn't desecrate. I mean, he desecrated some land, but, you know, he didn't ruin soil.

the soil wasn't good enough to begin with. He didn't... I couldn't imagine this story being like, cool, nothing ever grew from there again. But if it never grew in the first place, that's not so bad. Yes, that's what it sounds like. It just wasn't particularly good for what he wanted to be anyway.

But yeah, it feels like it would have been a waste for it to have been perfect rubber tree growing land. That would have hurt. We recommended a new plantation site be found, and according to Bellows, Ford purchased a new tract of land 50 miles downstream. stream, establishing the town of Belterra. It was more flat and less damp, making it much more suitable for the finicky rubber trees.

He also imported some grafts from the East Asian plantations, where the trees had been bred for resistance to the leaf blight. Starting from scratch, the new enterprise showed more promise than its predecessor, but progress was slow. For 10 years, Ford's work has laboured to transform soil into rubber, yielding a peak output of 750 tons of latex in 1942, far short of that year's goal of 38,000 tons. Oh, that is so far off. Yeah.

So do you note the year there? 1942. So this started 1929. Jesus. 13 years later, they're still just getting a little bit of rubber going. Was he just rich enough to keep funding this? Yeah, basically. And he just, it didn't even occur to him to.

to think. I tell you, I don't wonder if it was born out of stubbornness or what, but Bellows continues, be that as it may, Ford's perseverance might have eventually paid off if it were not for the fact that scientists developed economical synthetic rubber just as Belterra was establishing itself. So as he finally started making little Ford momentum, synthetic rubber became a thing. Having really been a disaster on all levels, you'd probably expect that Ford would pull the pin on the project, but it rolled on.

According to read, despite having outlived their economic rationale, Fordlandia and Belterra nonetheless persisted for a little longer, but as Ford's car manufacturing operation became increasingly involved in the Second World War effort, his holding in Brazil filled with American military personnel. While the time the war ended, Henry Ford was in poor health. Management of the company fell to his grandson, Henry Ford II, who promptly cut into the company's ballooning costs by selling underperforming assets. Fordlandia was first on the chopping block. Ford the second sold it back to Brazil for

a fraction of what his grandfather had originally paid. Apparently Ford had pumped about $20 million into Fordlandia in the time there and ended selling it back to the Brazilian government for around $250,000. Oh, that's a big loss. It made a huge loss. The moment news of the sale reached Fordlandia, its American residents headed home, leaving its Brazilian residents wondering what had hit them. They're just like all of a sudden their jobs are gone. The town has just basically been left to be a ghost town

all of a sudden and they're like, well, I thought we were starting to get some rubber happening here. I mean, it's a really long time, but you'd have that within living memory for everyone who was an adult moving in there, you know? You'd be like, oh, cool, we're working, this guy's paying us a heap of money. Life's so weird now.

Yeah. Why am they making us do all this? I can go home? Yeah. I don't have to square dance. But kids were born there, like families, generations were there. They were, you know, families were living there. And all of a sudden it's like, oh, yeah, this town, it's sort of, that's it.

It doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. The city's population once in the thousands dropped to less than 100 over the ensuing decades. Some lived in the old workers' bungalows as squatters as the city fell into ruin around them. Reed writes that Fordlandia's death was a quiet one. Equipment from the sawmill and generator was left to the elements and vandals over the years, rusting in the thick Amazon air. The iconic water tower, which we all remember, we all know and love.

Beacon, yeah. Reed loves this water tower. The iconic water tower still stands to this day, though it no longer holds any water, and the Ford logo proudly painted on it has long since faded. In the past decade... So it's just rubbish now. Yeah. Okay.

Rubbish in the sky. Cool beacon. In the past decade, however, Fordlandia has enjoyed something of a renaissance. Part of that is cultural. History has been revisited in news articles, documentaries, and even in music. Icelandic minimalist composer Johann Johansson released an album in 2008 inspired by the city. After the population languished to under 100 for several decades, it has now rebounded to about 3,000 people in recent years.

Wow. So the population is starting to grow. It's just... They've moved in? Yeah. Yeah, people just sort of moved in. I've read stories of like a squatter came in and did up one of the old homes and then sold it at a profit.

It's just really interesting because it was just sort of this little city that's sitting in the middle of nowhere. But some people never left. A lot of the workers did, but some stayed. How big did the population get it as max? It was into the thousands. And now it's, you know, it's back into the thousands. It's really interesting.

One of the current locals, a retired milkman named Expedito Duarte de Brito, lives in one of the homes built for Ford managers back in the day. And the street he lives on Palm Avenue, which is, we're making an American town. Palm Avenue sounds perfect. It maintains multiple stately, largely well-preserved homes, even, you know, 100 years later. De Brito says after the Americans left,

it was a quote, Lutus Paradise, with thieves taking furniture, door knobs, anything the Americans left behind. Hey, they left this now. The treasure trove of nabs here. Come on, everybody. This is a knob looters paradise. So Debrito said when he goes,

I thought, either I occupy this piece of history or it joins the other ruins of Flandia. I may as well take this nice home. That's a great way to justify it, isn't it? He was speaking to Simon Romero, who I've quoted, who wrote the article for the New York Times. He wrote about the city after Visitor. visiting in 2017.

By the time he arrived, the jungle had already swallowed the winding brook golf course and floods and erosion had ravaged the cemetery, leaving concrete crosses strewn across the ground. There's a really interesting photo where the concrete crosses and also the base that would normally sit under the ground. They're all just sitting flat because erosion, floods and erosion have meant that over time they just all came out of the soil and the lying flat on the ground.

I'm guessing above, you know, all of the people who passed away. That is just, so the soil rejected everything. Yeah, yeah, that's right. As Romero put it, the ruins of Fordlandia stand as a testament to the folly of trying to bend the jungle to the will of man.

I'm going to conclude with this paragraph by Bellows, which I thought was a pretty apt way to finish. It was how he finished his article about it. He wrote, Henry Ford's losses in Fordlandia and Belterra are equivalent to 200 million in modern dollars. I think it's even more than that. But anyway, certainly he was unable to buy his way into rubber royalty, and his efforts to spread his American, or healthy lifestyle were met with resentment and hostility.

But history has repeatedly shown that obscene wealth gives one the privilege, perhaps even the obligation, to make bizarre and astonishing mistakes on a grand scale. From that perspective, Fordlandia could, not have been more successful. That's been my report on Fordland. All those articles I quoted will be listed in the show notes, of course. And yeah, I'll be posting a bunch of photos on social media this week if you want to check them out.

Very excited to see those. How cool I'd never heard of it. No, I'd never heard of it either. So thank you so much to Tegan, Ben and Alex for suggesting it. Yeah, really interesting. I've heard bits of stuff about Henry Ford, and it's always been people talking about whatever. an enterprising young guy he was.

It sounds like he sucks. It sounds like he sucks. Yeah, like he definitely had some things that he was very good at. But he had some things he was awful at and, yeah, some... He's just that whole birth of, like, it seems like he was middle stage and he was ramping it into late stage capitalism. Just being like, hey, you know, if we make enough money, we can all be rich. And everyone's like, oh, sounds cool.

And also, yeah, but just like being so blinded to the fact that what he thought was going wrong with America was something he was strongly contributing to. Oh, absolutely a part of. That is just horrendous. And it's like the whole like anti-Semitism and then, you know, second world war is happening, which. But he refuses to learn from the past. Oh, man, it's just, yeah, he just sounded like, ugh. His whole attitude of refusing to learn from the past and then being so terrified of the future, he needed help.

Like, to be so trapped in what you consider to be the present, then hating change, hating the future and deciding you're still not going to learn from the past, but you're going to try and live in it? Yeah. He had some whack things in time. Yeah, so many messy thoughts that, yeah, not a lot of logic going on. An engineer, he knew how to. make things on a, you know, he could do a factory floor, but the rest he seemed like he wasn't

too good at. Oh. I think I read that in the end he was, the company control was taken away from him. Basically, he was pressured into passing on to his grandson. I think his son died relatively young, like in his 40s, maybe. And his wife and maybe his daughter-in-law or something like that, that if you don't pass over control of the company to your grandson,

we're selling our shares, and their shares were worth the majority of the company. So he was like, his wife and his, yeah, I think there's daughter-in-law or something. Someone close to him, they're basically like,

you're not in control anymore. Yeah, you've got to get out. Got to get out. Well, if you're going to tank the company, we're going to do it faster. Yeah, and that's what, once he ceded control, that's when Fordlandi was offload.

Hearing that and the fact that they didn't do that for the 13 years of Fordlandia, you think how bad were its decisions at the end that they went, oh, that's it. All right, we've got to do something. Well, yeah, there was genuine concerns about the company going under and stuff. And this is in a time when cars are just massive, you know, like... People were driving for fun. Yeah, yeah.

I hate learning of it because I like, I've always barriced for Ford at Bathurst, and it's just like, ah, it really sucks that it's named after. Yeah. Can you separate the art from the artist? I think if we've learned anything, it's don't look at the past, right? Yeah, I think he was right. Well, anyway, that was the story of Fordlandia. I think there's a lot of lessons in there for people who want to learn from history. Obviously, that would be silly to do.

Yeah, it's bunk. History's bunk. It almost feels like a lot of those lessons are just pure common sense. Oh, having a think would have benefited this man and all of the people who he had financial responsibility for greatly. Yes. Anyway, that brings us to everyone's favorite section of the show. That's where we like to thank a few of our great supporters. These are the people who keep this show on the road.

They keep the lights on. They keep us going or whatever. They keep the seed king in seeds. Yes. They keep a seedy. And if you want to get involved and support the show, you can go to Patreon.com. slash dig on pod or dugongod.com. and there's a bunch of...

Dave, what are some of the things that our supporters get? Well, we put out three bonus episodes every single month and if you sign up, you also get access to the previous month's bonus episodes. And, I mean, all the months, there's 135 or something of them that you can catch up with. And it's on the adding more and more each month. You can join our Facebook group just for our Patreon supporters. It's a lovely place on the internet.

You get pre-sales on tickets. We give you shout-dasses we're about to do. And, yeah, you just... You become part of a community, which we love. The first thing we like to do is the fact quote or question section, which has a little jingle. Cass, I think you go somewhere like this. Fat good or question.

Ding. You always remember the ding. And to get involved in this, you go to, you sign up and you sign up on the Sydney Schenberg level. And yeah, for this one, you get to give us a fact, a quote, or a question. You also get to give yourself a title. And I'll read four of them out each week. I read them out on the show live.

I haven't read them out before. So, like I say, there's no rehearsal here. No rehearsal, okay? So if I stumble on something, okay, give us a freaking break. Yeah, he'll do it on the night. So the first one comes from Paul Mello. What a guy, this guy is.

I follow him on Twitter. He posts these nice photos walking in a forest every day, and they always make me feel nice. Nice. I'm like, you know, a little peaceful corner of Twitter is Paul Mellor's morning walk photos. Anyway. More like Paul Mello.

Am I right? Because I'm calm. Yeah, big time. So Paul's given himself the title of Shareholder of Fun. Something you should say, Cass, even though the segment's called Fat Quotal Question, the full title is Fat Quota Question, Brag or Suggestion. And I think there's a few others that have slowly filtered in as well. And Paul has given us, this is one of the rare ones we get.

He's given us a brag. Oh, yes, I love a brag. I love a brag. And we give you full permission to brag. Yes, that's right. This is a safe space to brag away. It's a braggadocious place. For sure. I love it.

I know a lot of our listeners are pretty triggered by words like safe space, but, you know, that's on you, man. Anyway. This is a safe space to be triggered. Don't worry. I know you're all beautiful cucks out there. And all right, so this is Paul Brick. I have a brag for you all about, I have a brag for you all this time.

And the brag is that I own shares in a professional football club. Whoa, Paul Meller. Holy shit. The club in question is Real Oviedo. Possibly, or real Oviedo. Sorry, Paul. They are based in the city of Oviedo. Cass, just to back me up here, is that, what would you say that?

Yeah, Oviedo? Oviado. I don't know. I don't know where it is. It's in Asturias, which is a name. northern Spain. They've been around since 1926, but in 2012 they hit upon really hard times financially and through an internet share campaign, they were helped by investment of football fans from over 80 countries raising more than 2 million euros. They then got investment from one of

the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim. And this really steadied the club. Maybe Carlos Slim's like a modern day Henry Ford. Carlos Slim, he's slim, but his pockets are fat. You're in, you're in jingling mode now. You'll jingle anything. Paul goes on. I bought shares for my daughter and I in 2015, as I like the idea of supporting a Spanish football team and use some other shareholders.

They are also an underdog and plain blue. Via Twitter, I made friends with several supporters. In 2018, we finally made the trip to the club. Unfortunately, they lost on that visit, but we did get to go to the game, meet our friends and also meet the team after the game. Oh, awesome. That seems nice.

They welcomed us with open arms, and Oviedo is a beautiful city. He's listed a link there throwing with a thread showing the trip. If I remember, I'll retweet, listeners, remind me if I forget. They currently play in the second tier of Spanish football, La Liga, La Liga smart bank,

and dream of the days they will get back to the top tier. We even have a local English supporters group called Oviadista, Northwest, and have met up in Manchester for drinks and tapas. We watch the games online, but we hope to get back there someday to go see them win. Vamos, Oviedo. That's great.

That's lovely. That's so cool. What a great brag. Doesn't that show the power of the internet? I'm becoming like a big internet's for you guys. I know you're all pretty rough on the internet, but tell me that like 40 years ago, could you have somehow become an investor of a Spanish team from England? You know what I mean?

Think about it. Thank you, Paul. The next one comes from David Loring, aka the Master of Ceremonies. And David offers us a fact, which is, I'm a wedding celebrant as a side hustle, and one of the things I love educating my couples on

is that when you're getting married in a civil ceremony, you have an enormous amount of freedom and flexibility to what you include. Aside from the minimum legal requirements to make your ceremony compliant with the Marriage Act, there are also, I don't know what, he said, where he's from. I'm not sure where he's from, so depending on where this marriage act is.

But anyway, there are almost no limitations on how you choose to celebrate that within the ceremony you create for your special day. So for instance, if you were one third of a podcasting triumvirate who recently got engaged, there would be nothing to stop you doing a live episode during which you got married. Perhaps while some twins of SAS provided running commentary throughout, while they could even evolve into SAS witnesses when it comes to signing certificates. This, of course, assumes that not only would you be willing to dedicate a major life milestone

an emotional highlight of your life to your fact-based comedy podcast, but that your fiancé would as well. Lastly, a big congratulations to Dave on the engagement. I should have led with that at the start, but didn't want this to sound like a sales pitch. I'm sure I speak for the rest of the patrons when I say it was legitimately heartwarming news to read. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And Noah will not be doing a live podcast from my wedding. But I appreciate the thought. It's cool to know that it's possible for anyone who would want to do that. Yeah, that's right. Live podcast at the wedding. I think I know a few people who would borderline do something like that for the podcast, but I think Dave probably wouldn't mind having a day away from it.

So imagine the guests, like at the wedding, you know, friends and family that are like, oh my God, they're doing a live podcast. You know, ceremonies drag on long enough as it is. And I'm like, we're going to do an hour, podcast now. Some of them would also be like, what does that mean? It would be so confusing. Great Uncle Jim's like, what the fuck?

What's happening? Thank you very much, David. Yeah, and that's my engagement via a pie photo late 2021. It was a beautiful moment. Thank you very much. And something that I don't think was included in that post was your partner suggested that. That I did the pie photo, yeah.

And that you were like, are you sure? Yes. But that would have sounded very defensive if you wrote that in the... In the description. By the way, so you know. I also don't think this was the appropriate way to announce it, but I thought it would be very funny,

so, okay, look, let's leave it to that. The next one comes from Drew Forsberg, aka Lieutenant Junior Vice President of Maple Syrup Storage, Emeritus. Amaritus? Emeritus. Emeritus, thank you. Drew has asked a question,

which is, what is best in life? Okay, I think he's going to offer some options here. This is actually not a reference to Conan the Barbarian. It's a genuine question to which activity derives the most satisfaction for you. I normally ask people who ask a question to answer their question. And Drew writes, mine is sitting around a fire at night with familiar friends, preferably sand's light pollution.

Love that. Just the fire and the stars. Familiar friends. Not these unfamiliar friends. Yeah, yeah. Love that, Drew. That does sound great. Sitting around a fire at night without light pollution.

Love it. What is best in life? Fuck, that's a broad question. Cass, you got an answer that comes to mind? I think the things that make me go, oh, like if the moon's real big or if the sky is very good, I will audibly go, whoa. Oh, I love a good sky. I love pointing out.

I love just saying, check out the moon. It's huge. Being just like, oh, that's nice. every now and then I'll look at the, because I swear, I think the sunset gets more vibrant if there's been a fire, and I think there's definitely the scene in Bruce Almighty where he pulls the moon a bit closer to the moon looks extra beautiful, and then it causes like global havoc on the tidal system.

So every time I notice those things, I'm aware that, you know, at least if the world is ending, it's going to be so beautiful the whole time it happens. That's a silver lining. I'm like, wow, if this is it, What an it. That's great. Yeah, that sounds like, I think any of that sort of beautiful naturey stuff,

that's something I... Beautiful naturey stuff. Started getting into that with, uh, over the last few years on Facebook, I just started liking any beautiful nature photos. And now the algorithm just floods my feed with beautiful naturey stuff. Yeah. And I love all that sort of stuff, I think. Being thick and the source of nature is good.

Swam in a gorge recently. Oh, man. Never done that before. Wow. Stunning. Oh, my God. sort of stuff up in the Alpine regions of Victorians are all very, very pretty. If you're up in the ocean and the tight, like the waves are a bit going.

And so you just get bobbed around and you're like, oh, I'm a little grape in a cup of water or something. I love getting bobbed. Yeah. I think the other one I would say is like just a nice beer garden with some mates on a nice day. No plans. Just. Just vibes. Yeah.

Not thinking about work in the morning or something. Just, you know, just feeling like those times, and often they're out in nature or wherever, where it just feels like you're not thinking about tomorrow, just really present in the moment. Love those times. I love walking along the ocean when the breeze is blowing in and just sucking in the air through my nose. Oh, yeah. It feels like I'm cleaning out my lungs, even though I know I'm definitely not doing that. Just going, oh, love that.

Yeah, that sounds nice. Yeah, that sounds nice. Oh, these are all great things. Thank you very much for that question, Drew. And finally, from Nathan Swap, aka SkyCaptain of the Time Zeppelin. Sometimes I don't understand what it means and then in the comment and question

or whatever it explains. Sometimes it doesn't. Does that make sense with you? Yeah. You know what Sky Captain of the Time Zeppelin means? No, I mean, aside from literally. What does it literally mean? I mean, Zeppelin goes in the sky.

Yes. Time Zeppelin, I'm imagining it travels through time. Okay. Captain as you would captain a ship. Sky, I don't think, is really needed. I know where I was like that one goes. Yeah, okay, that makes sense to me. All right, you've helped me out there, guess.

The film called Sky Captain in the world of tomorrow? If there's more to get, I didn't get it. No, I just sort of might have been a reference to the thing. That's what I meant. I didn't mean you did help me out there. I think I was probably on a similar page. Pass page. Anyway, Nathan asked a question this week, writing,

if you guys could travel to any place and time to spend a holiday, maximum a month, where would you want to go? And is there a time and place in history that you would be happy to move to permanently? Bonus question, what would be your time machine vehicle? Do you want to hear Nathan's answers before you give us? Absolutely. You're right. My answers.

I would love to spend a month in medieval Europe and hang out with kings and emperors. Feast, party, watch a battle or two. It's like the ultimate glamping. Brushing over how horrific medieval battles were. I would love to move to 1880 to 1914, America slash Europe. It has electricity and plumbing and to me the peak time for art and architecture. My time travel vehicle would be a...

Zeppelin, I want to put the fear of God in the peasants and awe in emperors. Well, I think he sort of explained his title there. That does explain the title. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm happy enough living now, I think. Yeah, I don't think I'd move anywhere permanently. And I feel like we have enough, because if we're talking about traveling back in time, we have enough now that we could create any kind of life for ourselves that we wanted,

in a way or to some extent. Like if you travel back to medieval times and you were like, this rules, you'd be able to recreate some sort of living there without having to give up your wonderful do-go on podcasts, for example, which I know you would be very sad to lose. Yeah, I would never travel back as far in time as podcast. It didn't exist.

Yeah, I mean, geez, that's a hard question. I often think, like, if I could, it'd be great to see, you know, some big event a band that no longer exists, you know, seeing the Beatles live or seeing Elvis or seeing Chuck Berry or, you know, whatever. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like I should have an answer to this already.

But, yeah, for a month. And I always, like, maybe it's my brain being negative, but I'm always like, depending on you go back, like, medicine also goes backwards and, you know, all these other things do as well. Yeah. I think, I think it would be, it's interesting because, like, you know, it's interesting because, when you talk about like seeing old bands and stuff, it's like, oh, it would be cool to witness a historical event that people spoke about really, really fondly.

But when people talk about events really, really fondly, they're either talking about the run-on effects from historical context that came later. So they're like, oh, all these people knew they were a part of something, but they didn't know what it was until later. So going back to those events, really, really cool. But if you're going back to an event that people are talking about fondly just because they're nostalgic, it would be really interesting to see what sucked. Yeah.

You know, like, what if it sucked? And how much, how a lot of the people there might have been. been not actually having a good time. Like Woodstock or something. Yeah, like Woodstock. I think it would be really interesting to travel back to either, I think it's around the 40s in Hollywood where stars were really manufactured, like a couple of them.

Like I've, I think, was it, I've forgotten their name. There was one Hollywood starlet who, they had like a Hollywood name, but it wasn't their original name. And I think they pretty much had their ethnicity whitewashed out so they could be famous. Like they had like really big, beautiful eyebrows. It got completely like plurril. so they looked whiter, like all these different things done to their features, their hair got bleached. And seeing the machine of how someone gets like manufactured would be very interesting.

And I'm guessing because we're traveling back in time, in my mind, I'm like, oh, I'm observing, I'm not stopping anything. But it'll be really interesting to see how old Hollywood machines and fame worked when that decided to become relevant. Like when fame was properly invented for film. Right. Alternatively, I'd love to go to Studio 54 because it sounds like maybe. it sucked. Really? Yeah, like all those crazy parties, like, wow, it was so... But I think people say it's crazy because it was exclusive

and the people who were there now have historical context for it. And, you know, you look back and you're like, yeah, there were 10 people in the same room who were influential. But like, someone wrote a horse into a party. Like, is that good party? Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah. I'm picking there.

I'm going to the studio 54 parties and I'm saying if they sucked. Love it. Well, I look forward to you reporting back. Uh, what? And I'll, my vehicle's the horse. Yeah, great. You're on the horse, that's great. I'm competing horse.

That's what it turns out. Yeah. That person was a time traveler. I come back, I'm like, this party sucks. And I walk my horse straight back out. Oh my God, on the horse I ridden on. Uh, uh, yeah, I don't know if my, uh, after reading a bit more about Ford, it's kind of ruined my, uh, my dream car for me a little bit.

Which was? Which was a Ford. My, uh, family car. when I was a kid was an old, already an old Ford Falcon. I think I think I was still, I think I can still

more out with getting one. I mean, he's long dead. Fuck him. He can't ruin that car. He was already dead when I was made. It's a 1978 Falcon. So if I can turn that in a time machine, that'd be pretty cool.

What about you, Dave? Also, I'm sort of apt for this episode. Where are you going? Well, do I have to pick a, I think maybe the 60s. I'd just love to see, you know, the kinks. and the Beatles and Chuck Barry still, you know, had a few hits in the 60s.

It would be cool to see some of those bands, I think. Yeah. See if they sucked. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, the Beatles concerts seem like they'd be nightmares. Oh, they really sound bad. Shut up. I can't hear Paul.

It sounds like they played well, but they could hardly hear each other and the crowd couldn't hear the music and it wasn't. Maybe it would be better to go one of their later ones when they did just a few those pop-up things. Yeah. But, yeah, I don't know. I don't think John Lennon was a particularly good guy either. Oh, what if you just went, solved a historical mystery?

Oh, that'd be fun. Because no one in the future would believe you, because you don't, you couldn't, there's no way you could bring proof back and not ruin the world. Yeah. You know, you just have to witness it and bear that knowledge. Like, oh, that'd be cool. I'd get on the flight and book a ticket next to D.B. Cooper. You still wouldn't know if you survived, though.

Wouldn't know if he survived, but I'd know who he was for sure. I know they think they've figured it out, but you could prove it definitively by. You come forward and then look at the photographs of the people that are queues. That's a good one. Yeah, something like that, that would be really interesting. I think that I would go back to ancient Rome and ride around on a hot red Vespa. Voo! Ancient Rome.

Go on, hey, this is your future. You're going to be famous for these. Just throwing out slices of pizza to people. Yeah. I just think... Who is this Vespa writing god? And it turns out that it's like a back-to-the-future moment where Marvin Barry sort of, sort of where we shoot it and all on it and a guy picks up the pizza and goes interesting

mama me that's fun yeah that's great so your time travel vehicle's the Vespa yeah man I'd love to I'd just love to go everywhere I'd just be curious to see all the you know I'd be Bill and Tedding it where they just go to all these classic moments through history I'd be sick time travel it just feels like a real fun thing I'm into it but yeah I'm sure we're not being able to affect anything. Otherwise, I'd feel a real duty to be going back and fixing all these fuck things that happened. Yeah, I'm imagining we're observing only.

Yeah. We're there. People sort of forget we're there. Otherwise, I'm becoming Henry Ford. I'm going, I'm going to go fix. Oh, this forgotten time in history. I'm going to go there and make it better. Thank you, Nathan, Drew, David and Paul.

If you want to get involved in the fact, a quote of question section, like I say, sign up to the Sydney-Shymberg level. A couple of other things we like to do. One of them is thank a bunch of our supporters. And Jess normally comes up with a game cast. Last week you came up with a bit of a game, which was what mode of transport that people would take around Le Mans.

What are you going to do this week? What rule are you enforcing for your utopia? Yeah. What you to... Does it have to be a bonkers rule? Oh, are you saying any of Henry Ford's were not bonkers rules? Yes, it has to be a bonkers rule. Good point.

All right. Well, if I may kick us off, love to thank from Dublin in Ireland. Aidan Coglin from Dublin, who of course famously enforces the rule that you've got to use every cup of coffee has to have two sugars. Don't care if you like it sweet or not.

We like to put a little... I like that a little sweetness at the start of my day. Oh, you don't like caffeine? Well, bad luck because you're starting your day with a coffee and two sugars. That's what I do. And that's how I made my fortune, I assume. Really, it's that little kick of not only caffeine to get your brain and your metabolism going,

it's the sugar to give you a little burst of energy at the same time. Two different energy streams. That's what you need. Yeah, and I know people say both of those will crash your energy later, but... Those people aren't running this company. They don't have their own utopia. They sound a little bit like experts to me. Oh, don't like them.

Stinky. Thank you very much, Aidan Coglin. And I'd also love to thank from Magimba from Queensland, Australia, Luke Stanley. Oh, caps backwards only. Yeah. But it's sunny and the brim. It keeps the sun in my eyes. Yeah, well, people from our town are cool, okay?

You've got to protect your neck from the sun. That's right. That sounds like a leader who got a skin cancer on their neck. I went, no, no, no, that never happened again. And finally from me, another supporter from Dublin Island, it's Ian McGuire. Cass you got, you haven't done one, yeah? What do you got? Only sporks.

Only sporks. Let's make it efficient. Yeah, they have one edge that is bladed. That is the only utility. Everyone gets one spork. Yep. It's better for the environment that way. You only ever have to wash one thing.

That does make some sense. I don't know how bonkers that is. Hey, I'd join this cult. Yes. Dave, would you like to thank a few? Yes, I just want to say that that might have been Owen McGuire. Owen. Just in case you wondering if that was you, you think.

Sorry. Sorry, Owen. You're Owen an apology indeed. See, that was worth it for that. Worthy for that, Owen. Worth it for that, Owen. Orien, just in case. Is that I tell you?

Irish spellings fuck me up. Shavorn. I can say it because I'm not looking at it. But if I'm looking at it, I'm struggling to say it. We certainly use letters differently. It is different languages. Beautiful. Beautiful language. I would like to thank from Munda in Victoria, Julian Barnes.

What about food comes from vending machines only. Okay. Yep. If you can't get it from a machine, you can't get it at all. You cannot have it. Spaghetti? Yes, as long as it's from a machine. From a machine, that's right.

It comes out strand by strand. You get your tokens. Yes. And you get to spend them. Whatever you, you can have whatever you want. One piece of spaghetti. That's the same as, you know, like a sausage roll. I don't make the rules.

Well, I mean, yeah, I do make the rules. But that's the rule. And Julian Barnes says, Bon Appetit. And now from someone who comes from an unknown location can only imagine deep within the fortress of the moles, big shout out to Benji Pierce. Benji Pierce.

Wow, all the beds have to be made of straw. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. It's straw with a woolen overlay. I grew up. Congratulations. In a barn.

and I turned out great. So everyone else now sleeps on straw. And that was the defining feature of my life. I assumed that was the thing. Everything else I did was the same as my brother, and he turned out shit. So I assume it was the hay that made me what I am. Yeah, you've got to look at back support.

It's firm, but it's still soft. You know, it's softer than sleeping on the ground, which I did have to do sometimes. So I'm actually giving you a life a luxury. I also know that Farlap, the thoroughbred horse, used to sleep in and on hay. And look how well he did. That was the greatest horse ever.

So, you know, say no more. So Benji Pierce, thank you for a horrible night's sleep. And I would like to thank from Fern Tree Gully in Victoria, Kerry Toomey. Perry Toomey. What was Carrie's thing again, Cass? You know Kerry's work, I think. Every fruit has to be peeled. Everything that comes out of the ground or on a tree,

you have to peel it because the outside's dirty. So I'm talking grapes. I'm talking apples. I am talking potatoes. Strawberries? Yes. Every single thing. I thought skin often held a lot of the nutrients.

That's why you would be wrong. We do take all of the skin off because it's if it's like you're not even listening. Have you ever peeled a bit of potato skin and then just eaten the skin? Yeah. That tastes bad. No good. That's so good. Have you ever peeled the carrot just eating the carrot skin?

Yes. Not as great as the rest of the carrot. Well, I kind of like it, but... I think we're going to have to execute this, man. I've never seen cats look at anyone with those eyes. Destain. Fair enough, you've sold me. Let's get rid of the carrot.

And I think Carrie's right. And I, for one, welcome our new skinless overlord. Cass, would you like to thank a few... of our great supporters. Okay, I'll have a go. From Beverly Park, New South Wales, it's Don's Ronald Varugis. Varuguese?

That is a great name. Oh, Varugasei. Love that. What about Don's rule is? The colour pink is called yellow and the colour yellow is called pink. Yeah. He just thinks that pink looks yellow and yellow looks pink.

It just pink doesn't have a pink vibe. It's got a yellow vibe. It looks yellow. Yeah. If you think of the feelings you get when you see pink, it is yellow. Yeah. So you've got to name appropriately.

I'm so sorry, Don's. I think that's a good rule. Barugis? Yeah, that's just fantastic. So sorry. Okay, next up from Westlake, South Australia, it's Sean. Oh, Sean. A bit like Prince or Adele.

No one knows their surname. Yeah, I think when your name's as unique and beautiful as Sean, why bother with a surname? Yeah, no one gets one actually. And that's what Sean says, yeah. No one gets a surname anymore. Everyone's called Sean. We're all Sean.

And finally, all the way from Sydney, New South Wales, it's Nicola. Ah, Nicola, another Uno Namo. Uniclo. Nicola and Sean live in a similar town. Yes. But what's Nicola's rule? Nicola's rule is we no longer walk. It slides everywhere.

If you want to get around town, you've got to take a slide. So, yes, we are building a lot of slides. Absolutely. It is not good for you. to become unconnected to the ground for that longer period as to when you are walking or running. And that is the reason, you know, the slides we are connected to the ground by more of a surface area.

And if you do need to get from A to B and it is more of a horizontal plane rather than a vertical, it's walking Olympics rules. One, you have to have contact with the ground at all times. And if you're not sure about it, crawl. Yeah. Even do crawl. Yeah, because we will have those people out there

who are ready to show you a yellow or red. card, which I think is how they do it, famously to an Australian walker in one of the Olympics. Oh, yeah. It was so close to the end. You mean a pink or a red card? Sorry. Yes.

Come on, Sean. Sorry. Sean. No, Sean's work was the mono name. Mono name. Oh, sorry, I'm Sean. You are Sean now. Sorry, I'm Sean now.

Look how embarrassed. You're turning yellow. And it was all yellow. And Sean, so he, I don't know if Sean's thought it. through because wouldn't they get confusing if you're like hey Sean and everyone's like yeah I think so instead I think he's going to have to number everyone Sean one Sean two Sean three sure four maybe it'll become tonal so they'll be Sean Sean Sean Sean yeah

Sean Sean yeah yeah oh that's great that's everyone on planet earth so well that's everyone in our utopia at least anyway thank you which is now our planet earth thank you so much Nicola Sean Don's Kerry Benjy in Owen, Luke and Aiden. The last thing we need to do is thank a few of our triptitch club members. These are new inductees into our triptage club, which you get exclusive access. It's a one-way ticket.

You can't leave, but you can certainly enter when you are supporting us on the shout-out level or above for three straight years. This week, Dave, there's five inductees. I'm standing on the door. I've got the velvet rope. I'm going to lift it up. I've got the guest lists. I'll read out the names.

Dave will then hype you up. He's standing in there with all the other. people have been welcomed into the Triptitch Club. They're all going to welcome you with open arms and a really great vibe. Cass is behind the bar. Cass, you've come up, what's your Fordlandia cocktail? Okay. So it is served in a rubber cup.

Yeah. Number one. It is... Which had to be sourced from Southeast Asia, unfortunately, because... Yeah, it's a synthetic rubber cup. Yeah, that's right. So you get the nice hand feel and mouthful. when you put it to your lips.

It is river washed to whiskey. So it's mixed in. The barrels are washed with river, but also a bit of puddle. So you get malaria puddles in there. Okay. You get a cacophony of waters. If you're a water simile,

you're going to be able to pick out a lot of notes in here. It is made daffery style. We blend up ice. Love a dacary. River water whiskey. The seeds. Yes. Oh, the Seat King.

The Seat King Seeds. And, oh, what else are we putting in there? I'm so sorry, canned beaches. Oh, of course. There we go. Are they opened or is it just the can? We'll open them. We'll open and pee all the beaches.

Yes, of course, thank you. Give them a big blend and that is... Do we name the cocktails? Well, I think we just call it the Fordlandia. Oh, the Fordlandia. That's beautiful. Two Fordlandia's thanks. And Dave, you've normally booked a band?

Yes, but there was a bit of... an era with the booking. I thought I was booking Henry Ford, but I've accidentally booked the singer Clinton Ford. Oh, okay. English popular singer of the 1950s and 60s who sang

Skiffel music. Oh, Skiffle. Early, yeah, Skiffle bands. I think that was English trying to do blues, maybe. Or their take on it, maybe. Yes, I think that developed into the quarryman, Beatles style.

But Clinton Ford, guys. Turn forward. Clinton Ford. Clinton Ford. Clinton Ford. All right, Dave, you ready to hype up these new inductees? L, yeah. All right.

Cass, I'm going to need you to hype me up, though. Yeah. I am vulnerable. So we got five. And first up from Sheffield in England, it's Chris Gray. Ooh, Chris Gray is Riskay. Oh, saved it. There was a wobble, but you saved it.

And I think coming back from your challenges is something that Henry Ford could never do. You're better than the leader of a utopia. And from York in England. And it's Peter Atkin. Oh, Peter, great to meet you. Oh, that's nice. I like that one. That was really good.

You did really well on that one. From Raby in New South Wales, Australia. Zach Zillinsky. Raby more like baby. Zach Linsky, come on down. Baby. All right. Yeah, okay.

All right. Okay, in this instance, I'm looking to Zach. Is he, is he okay with being called baby? Zach attack is the op. Oh, there we go. I love the honesty of the feedback. I'll glance to Zach and if he's chill, I'm going to be like, yeah, you read the room probably. Come on, I'm getting good smiles.

Good smiles. From Stockport in Great Britain, it's Ellie Durkan. More like, hell yeah, Durkan. Oh, yeah, that's fun. That's fun. She looks happy. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. I need that.

And finally, from Como in Western Australia. Jamie Griffiths. Oh, Kokomo! Jamie Griffiths, come on down. And then the Beach Boys, uh, Kokomo starts playing. Oh, all right. No, I get it now. I get it now.

It is so, like, Jess blindly praises everything you do. It's so good to have Cass here, who is also baffled by most of the things you say. I mean, Jamie Griffiths, what are you doing with that? I don't know. Jamie Griffiths. See? I've got a ball. Perhaps you like to bounce it.

Great. Jimmy Griffiths, hey Giffiths, your love, because I'm giving it back to you. All right, no, you're right, it is hard. Thank you so much to Jamie Ellie, Zach, Peter and Chris. Welcome in, make yourselves at home. Grab yourself a booth.

Grab yourself fordlandia. Enjoy. And enjoy the music of Mr. Ford. Mr. Ford. Not the Mr. Ford, sadly. But on the posters, it does say Mr. Ford. Well, that brings the end of episode. Another fine time.

Cass, you did it. You have taken home. the jackpot, you've won it. Well done. Yes, double my joy, double the learning. Congratulations, and I believe we can read out. Next week's Challenger is a young whippersnapper by the name of Jess Perkins. Yes. We'll be back.

I've heard good things. I've heard good things. Excited to see if she can get anywhere near your success on this very difficult show. Cass where can people find you? Online. If you go to sandspanceradia.com, all of the wonderful podcast on the Sand's Pants Networker on there. I'm on Why Am I Sad? D&D is for nerds and shut up a second. If you like laughing, have a go at those.

People don't listen to the show for that. So you might not find your audience here. A lot of people who just come here to learn. I promise you will learn nothing from anything I do. You can find us online at Digon Pod on, on, you know, as a Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. email address is do go on pod at gmail.com. Our website is do go on pod.com.

And yeah, find us in those places. I think all those links are in the show notes. Yeah, check them out. Click away. Go click mad in there. Click wild. Click. Hey, we'll be back next week with another episode.

Thanks again, Cass, for joining us last couple of weeks. We really appreciate you. You are an absolute legend. Thank you so much. Until next week, I'll say thank you and goodbye. Bye. Don't forget to sign up to our tour mailing list so we know where in the world you are and we can come and tell you when

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