Stuff You Should Know - How Monster Trucks Work

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

If you’ve never seen a huge truck with gigantic tires do backflips or roll backward perched only on its two front tires, you haven’t lived yet. Chuck and Josh are here to ignite your interest. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there. Jerry's hanging out in the ether again and this is Stuff You Should Know on a Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.

But it's not. This will be out on a Thursday. That's true. True, true. Who's that guy? I don't know, but he is an American icon. For those of you who live outside of the United States and use the metric system, there is an announcer that is, no one knows his name. He may be living or dead, I'm not sure. I bet a lot of people know his name, but we don't know his name. Well, yeah, I'm just generalizing from my own experience. Got you. But he's like a monster truck ad announcer guy who is always getting you hyped up to want to go to the monster truck rally. Yeah, I think he is second. I mean, there have been some great announcers in the history of this country. I would put him up there with Michael Buffer.

So let's get ready to rumble guy. Yeah. I put triple Sunday man way ahead of him. And Don Pardo to me is my all-time favorite. Yeah, the serent live announcer. Yeah. Featuring Josh Clark. Oh, I've been waiting so long. And musical guests. Bill Cheepo. Oh boy, that'd be a double bill. Who would be your favorite musical guest if you were the host? Oh boy. Dolly Parton. That's a good one, sure. I was going to say Gandhi or Jesus Christ or something like that, but I got my fantasies confused. You know, our buddy Scott Ackerman does a great Don Pardo. No, I didn't know that. Yeah. He's, he's good at that stuff. He is a brilliant comedian. He is. It's great. I've been listening to his new,

new-ish show with Lauren Lapkus and Paula Tompkins, our other friend, called Threatom, and it's hysterical and great. Yeah. Good, nice plug, Chuck. Yeah. Everything Ackerman does turns to gold. Can I give you my brief rundown with off-roading as we get into the Monster Truck episode? Yeah, I predict a dad story coming. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. When I was, and I think we talked about this a little bit when we talked at some point about CB radios, but when we were kids, you and I in the 70s and 80s, CBs were a big deal. The whole culture around it, and it's hard to explain, but it's interesting. And my dad got a CB and he and one of his better friends, Charlie had a, they both had Jeeps. My dad had a brown, brown Jeep, Renegade, and Charlie had a

green one. And we would go off-roading when I was a kid. So we would go up into the mountains and literally cut roads where there were no roads. And my dad was the mud slinger. Oh, really? That was a CB handle. Yeah. Nice. I don't remember what Charlie's was, but we did quite a bit of it, including a fully four wheels off the ground jump at one point on this dirt road where they had been, I think they were going to pave the road. So they had bulldozed, basically a ramp out of dirt and rocks and left it there to come back the next day to probably remove it. And my dad and Charlie heard about it and they were like, let's go jump the Jeeps. And my dad jumped a Jeep with my brother and I in it. No seat belts, of course. Oh my God. Of course not. I don't think Jeeps had back seat

belts back then. Oh my God. And I remember hitting the ground and then bumping up and smashing my head on the roll bar. I do. I can imagine you still have that divot. Yeah. But it was a 70. So I don't even think he said, is everyone okay? I think we just kept on trucking. He's like, take a salt tablet. Yeah, exactly. That's a great story, man. I had no idea that you'd done any off-roading. I've done exactly zero off-roading in my life, but I do have a deeper appreciation for it after researching all this stuff. But I have never been into monster trucks and never gone to one of those, although I will say the thought of you and Emily and me and Yumi going to one of these had a lot of appeal for some reason. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what,

out of the four people you just listed, as far as I know, Yumi's the only one who's been to a monster truck rally. I totally believe it. Yeah. She was into power motor sports for a little while there. That's great. She said it really loud and it's pretty great, except she said breathing all of the gas fumes, exhaust fumes was not super fun. You need to get one of those stadium ones outdoors. Yeah. I saw a footage of one in Anaheim where the angels play. I'm like, oh yeah, it's an outdoor baseball stadium. That's the place to go see a monster truck rally for sure, not like an enclosed sports arena hockey rink. No, and I've heard the noise is really, I've been to one drag race and the noise was really bad there, so I can't imagine what it's

like for a monster truck gym. Yes, but there's something about it. Even just watching clips on YouTube like I've done the last few days. Me too. I saw a couple of things that I'm going to admit gave me goosebumps a little bit. I was that impressed with it, but part of it was the noise from the engine, but also the noise of like 25 year old guys screaming like little boys because somebody like did a wheelie in like a giant monster truck. Yeah. That definitely adds to the sound as well. And little boys and girls screaming like grown men. Right, exactly. It's a weird scene. It's a big crisscross. So yes, I think it's good that we fessed up out of the gate that we have not been to a monster truck rally. And we're not huge

as far as our understanding of say like motorized engines go, that kind of thing. I feel like we could still do one on this like pretty well because there's just so much to it. There's a lot of really interesting stuff to it. You don't actually have to have gone to see a monster truck rally to appreciate it, especially if you watch some clips on YouTube. Yeah. And you know, the reason I mentioned the off-roading is because that is where monster truck rallies, is that what they're still called? Monster truck jams? They're called monster jam, but that's like a specific brand of show that you go to. Well, the monster jam, correct. Right. I'm calling them rallies.

I'm going to call them monster truck promenades. Okay. So the prom. Cotillion, the monster truck cotillion. I love it. The cotillion started with off-roading and with people like my dad in the 70s and 80s getting off-road, and you know, before that even, off-roading in these pickup trucks that eventually were like, Hey, let's get some bigger tires. Let's lift it up a little bit. Let's get some more ground clearance. And before you know it, trucks are just a little bit bigger and taller than they were before. And a man named Bob Chandler said from St. Louis said, I've got a great idea.

Too bad he didn't like have some sort of IP around this, but he did come up with a great idea, which was the very first big foot. Yeah. Yeah. He's very widely credited as basically the inventor of monster trucks. Yeah. Just from, it was basically born out of necessity. Like he drove his car really hard. The reason his first, the first monster truck was named bigfoot was because that was his nickname. He was well known as a very aggressive off-roading driver. But because of that, he would break axles. He would get stuck in the mud. He would find himself in his truck more importantly in places that your average truck driver would not find themselves. So to kind of get out of those sticky situations or

never get into them in the first place, he started to try to upgrade his truck well beyond anything you would buy from like a dealership. And he was a tinkerer so much so. And he got like so into it, he actually opened his own four by four parts store. In part, I get the very strong impression to probably get a discount on the parts that he was needing to use on his own truck. That he was breaking with regularity. Yeah. Yeah. It was called the Midwest four-wheel drive center. And the initial truck was a 250, a Ford F-250. And he dressed it all up and he got those bigger axles and bigger tires and he actually did invent a technology which was, I'm not sure if he completely invented this, but he at least installed four-wheel steering on his truck, which is

when the back wheels turn and the front wheels turn so you can turn tighter. This was, I don't know about a rage, but this was a thing for a while because my good buddy, your pal, John Pendell from New Jersey, he had one of those four-wheel steering Honda Preludes that he just, it was like his baby, he loved this car more than anything. I remember that they were always like, he can get in and out of the parking spot at the grocery store like you would not believe. Yeah. You should have seen him park at the grocery store. I forgot about that. Effortless. But yeah. So that makes, you know, and especially in a big monster truck, when you're going to need that turning radius and the tires got bigger and bigger, I think he

landed at 44 inches, which was like a tractor tire initially. And that was in 1979. And that was sort of the very first monster truck. Yeah. And nowadays, if you were riding around on 44-inch tires, other monster truck enthusiasts would be like, what's wrong with your tires? But at the time, you could, you could like, people would ask you to pull over so they could talk to you about your car when you were driving down the road with tires like that. Sure. And he actually used it to great effect. He advertised his business as parts, four by four parts business on the car when he was driving around town. And he ended up adding the word Bigfoot, the name Bigfoot onto it. And again, at first, I believe he was basically

saying, you know, like a long haul trucker will put their name or nickname or CB handle on their, on their rig. The rubber duck. That's what he was doing. But in very short order, that became the name of the car or the truck. And then in the successive trucks that came after that, there's I think 25 iterations of Bigfoot or some offshoot of Bigfoot now. Yeah. He, you know, he made one very famous initial video, sort of as a promotion, like a local TV commercial basically for his business of Bigfoot riding over some other cars. And that was it, man. After that, people went berserk. There is one sort of, I don't know if it's apocryphal, but at least we can't find the

original source, but that he did get pulled over once in Bigfoot and because he would drive this thing on the road. It was just crazy. Yeah. And he was ticketed because the only violation that they found was the headlights were too high off the ground. Yeah. Which I mean, like I was looking at what makes monster trucks not street legal. And that's definitely one of them. But some other ones are like, you know, usually they don't have windshield wipers or horns or things like that. It's not stuff you would think of. Another one though is like the tires can't be like too wide beyond the body. And if they do, you have to have mud flaps to cover it up. There's a lot of different like laws state by state. But for the most part, yeah, you're not allowed to drive those

things on the road for a number of reasons. But yes, the height of the headlights is definitely one of them. So he takes off around the country and starts doing some promotional events. He would go to exhibitions. He would drive over a car or pull a weighted sled that looks like a giant six pack of Budweiser. Did you see some of the early Bigfoot videos? I watched that very first one and a lot of them after that. Yeah. Yeah, they were like slow motion. Yeah. They weren't like hyped up. It was just basically like, okay, for my next trick, I'm going to start in about 90 or 120 seconds. I'm going to roll over this one car very slowly. That's what it was like. Yeah. It wasn't like the extreme sport that it was now. But no one had seen anything like it

though, you know what I mean? So at the time, what seemed boring to us now was like just mind blowing to the people of 1981. Oh yeah. So he was doing pretty well, especially as far as business promotion goes, and realized that he needed a second Bigfoot because people wanted him in movies and they wanted to admit their county fair. And so in 82, Bigfoot two debuted at the Pontiac Silver Dome, this time with 66 inch tires, which kind of ended up being the industry norm. Yes. Apparently they get, or they started out with agricultural tires, the kind of tires that you put on tractors or huge combines like just giant tires. And then to save some of the weight, because these tires can be 800 plus pounds each fully inflated, like mounted to wheels. They'll actually shave off a

lot of the tread, the real deep tread, the lugs I think they're called. They'll shave off a substantial portion. So they still have lots of traction because at these monster truck cattillions, they're driving over like mud and dirt and everything. I don't think those are lugs, are they? I saw somewhere, somebody refer to them as lugs, the huge treads. I thought the lug was the thing that came out that you put the lug nut on when you change a tire. They may have, I mean, this is a very confusing world we live in. It's like possible that they're both called lugs. There's a lot of people laughing at us right now, which is fine. I know, they're gonna pat us on our heads when they see us. They'll probably be nicer than soccer and chess enthusiasts. I certainly hope so,

because I've seen these people get up and yell and I don't want to be yelled at by a monster truck enthusiast. Should we take a break? Sure. And look up what a lug is and come back? Sure. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so,

my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikala, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand

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So Chuck, where we left off, Bigfoot had really kind of established this whole thing in the very early 80s. It appeared in Take This Job and Shove It in 1981. Yeah, Johnny Page. Did you ever see that movie? I'm sure you did. Your dad probably made you watch it like all the time. That was an HBO special for sure. Okay. I never saw it. And I was very surprised to learn that Robert Hayes, the guy from airplane, was in it. Like the main guy, I would not have cast him. I'm surprised no one has reinvigorated his career like Tarantino style.

Sure. Sure. He seems ripe for a comeback. He really does. So it was in that, it was in Pleas Academy 2 and 6. It was part of the pop culture zeitgeist for sure. But at the same time, its success and its popularity spawned, imitators is not the right word. Catillion mates? Yeah, fellow catillion go or something like that. Like other people were like, yes, this is what we should be doing with our lives.

And they actually were able to make a livelihood by appearing at some of those early like hot rod shows or like car exhibitions or, you know, like a drag races, things like that. They would just be there to entertain the crowds. And then all of a sudden they're like, well, maybe we should, you know, match these things against one another. And so from that monster truck rally started to grow on their own. Yeah. I get the feeling it was kind of like the rodeo clown for a little while. Like you said, there would be drag races and they said, and now, you know,

Bigfoot will make it a special appearance. And it's interesting in that it sort of started, it kind of followed NASCAR's footprint a little bit or stock car racing in general, because the name is right there, stock cars. Like initially those cars were just juiced up cars that they would race. And initially these trucks were Ford F-250s and Chevrolets. And they were just trucks that people built bigger and heavier and more rugged and just made them huge. They got to a point though, where they were like, you know, they were using military axles and stuff like that on their big equipment, because everything was breaking, but they found

that those were even breaking. And as they got bigger and bigger, they said, you know what, we need to start over everybody. This is a real thing and we can't just modify these pickup trucks. We got to build these things from the ground up, like NASCAR eventually ended up doing. Yeah. And that's exactly what they did. And apparently Bob Chandler led the way on that as well and really tinkered around with CAD designs, computer-assisted designs. And one of the things he came up with, and it wasn't him specific or it wasn't just him. There were a group of people working on this by this time. This is the, I believe the late 80s. Yeah. So like monster trucks were a thing by now. But they revolutionized it by basically saying, how about instead of

these like super heavy brittle things where the truck itself weighs a total of like 15,000 pounds. Yeah. That's ridiculous. And we break axles because, you know, they're really strong, but they're really brittle too. Let's start using tubes instead. And they created a revolution by creating and welding these cages, these frames, out of very strong but very lightweight tubes. And you're never going to guess one of the components that they use, that they make these tubes out of. Aluminum? Molybdenum.

No way. Way. It's funny. We heard from people about it for an outset and someone said every, I don't know if you saw this and they said in the industry, we just call it molly. Yes, I saw that too. Yeah. Yeah. There's a, they use a chromium molybdenum alloy and they call it chromoly. Wow. Yeah. So that's, that's what your average monster truck is made out of. And you don't need like a, like a, the same amount of stuff that like a passenger vehicle needs. You need just the bare minimum amount of stuff that's going to make this thing run, keep it together, and then

most importantly, protect the driver inside. Because when you strip everything away from the monster truck of today that Bob Chandler and his friends revolutionized in the late 80s, you basically have a, a roll cage is what you're, what you're dealing with. A giant tubular roll cage. That's what a monster truck is at its core. Yeah. And one of the other big improvements and advancements they made was moving the engine behind the driver. So it's a mid-engine layout. No more, you know, what's in front of you under the hood. The bodies of these things now, and since the, you know, late 80s, early 90s are fiberglass and they're just, I mean, if you watch any

videos of this stuff online of like current monster truck rally or Catillians, excuse me, these fiberglass bodies are just, they're just showpieces. They're made to just tear apart and break away. Like very few of them end up in one piece at the end of these. Yes. But they still cost like 10, $15,000 a piece, but they're super modular, super interchangeable so that you might see the same truck a couple of times during a rally, but what you don't realize is they just, oh, sorry, forget what I just said for another 20 minutes. No, I mean, spoil it for the people that think they're watching different trucks. Gotcha. So I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there are more bodies than there are

actual trucks at any given monster truck Catillian. They're just swapping out the actual shells, the fiberglass body. There's a crew there. I was reading about them. They're the unsung heroes of any Catillian where in between, you know, appearances and between shows, like a lot of times those monster truck jams will be, you know, a couple of shows a day on a Sunday in a certain city. They're working feverishly to fix everything that's gone wrong from the abuse that that poor truck took, you know, for the last couple of hours and during the show. But one of the things they do is switch out the bodies real quick so that you have to transport far fewer trucks. It's a lot easier to transport a lighter fiberglass body than a big heavy truck. Yeah, I thought it was

funny. Ed, the Grabster, helped us put this together. And at one point when he was talking about switching out the shells, he said, you know, this kind of started because multiple big foots would show up at an event and you can't have a big foot racing a big foot. And I was like, I bet you no one would care. They probably just think it was cool. Some 12 year old boy would be like, that ain't right. I can't put my finger on it. That ain't right, Paul. Something's been violated here. I don't know who knows. But they did start switching them out with regularity. And like I said, they just tear apart if you watch any video. These drums are pretty insane. I mean,

they're doing like double back flips now. I know it's crazy. So you have to make a distinction whether you're talking about the double back flip where the truck just follows everybody, a giant monster truck hits a ramp and does a back flip. And then before it touches the ground, it does another back flip in midair. It looks hard to do. I didn't see a lot of successful ones. You could also be talking about a consecutive back flip where the truck does a back flip, lands and does another, immediately goes into another back flip. Both are equally impressive. But the single double back flip is the harder of the two to do. And it's fun to watch people try and fail at, but it's also pretty great to see somebody land.

Yeah. And speaking of trying and failing, we should talk a little bit about the Anderson family, another first family of monster trucks. So the father, the elder statesman of the Anderson family was in it way early alongside Chandler. And they, his family truck was the grave digger. Eventually he passed it down to his son and then another son. And then eventually his daughter, Kristen is now the driver of the grave digger. And she set the Guinness record for altitude for the highest jump, I think just last year, right? Yeah. In June, 2020, in beautiful Bradenton, Florida, she landed a 33 foot nine inch jump off of a truck ramp. And, you know, it's pretty impressive. And she, I think it was her dad.

The reason I mentioned the, the trying and failing thing was her dad was the first person who said, you know what, these races are fine. Racing, these things are good. But what people, he was the one that said, Hey, after the race, why don't the drivers just come out and do some tricks and stuff? And he realized like people like that more than the races. And although they still do race, now a freestyle competition was born out of that notion. And that's sort of where the crowd pleasing entertainment comes from are the drivers that are doing these jumps and these driving on two wheels and jumping over things and through things. And, you know, it's, it's all right there on that big dirt bit. Yeah. And you can, I mean, Dennis Anderson definitely was the one to be

credited with creating that. And it went from, you know, just the existence of a, of monster trucks to monster trucks do, you know, slowly driving over a couple of cars to them racing. Apparently in the nineties, they raced them. They got them as light as like 9,000 pounds, which is about twice as heavy as say like a normal mid-sized truck today. They, which is really light for a monster truck, considering that, you know, all four tires and wheels combined, maybe make up 2,000, 2,500 of those pounds. So that's really light. And they wanted them light so they could race them and get them really fast. And then they said, you know what, people want to see what Dennis Anderson was saying is all those tricks, but you still need to be able to go

fast. So another about 12,000 pounds is what they clock in at. They're durable, but they're also light enough to be fast and to hit 33 foot high jumps when they hit a ramp. Yeah. And they can do this thanks to a massive supercharged methanol powered engine, 540 cubic inch motors. And you've only got two speeds though. It's got a very low gear transmission system. And I think first gear is sort of like on a 18 wheeler. Like that just sort of gets your wheels rolling. And then you immediately pop into that second gear. And that's all there is because all you need is torque and acceleration. So you can go super fast in a very short span. So you can hit those ramps and do whatever trick that you have up your sleeve. Yeah. And I was like, what's the,

what's the point of using methanol? These engines are called blown alcohol engines are in the industry. They call them Alkes, Alky. And it turns out that methanol actually is less energy dense than gasoline, but you can cram more of it into a gaseous state than you can gas. So if you have a supercharger and air compressor that's compressing a whole bunch of blown alcohol vapors into your engine, you can actually get more power, more energy out of it. So that's the reason that they all run on like pure methanol, no gasoline, not a drop of gasoline goes anywhere near these things. And the engines are extremely big and they're also extraordinarily inefficient fuel wise. There's one very famous monster truck called the raminator. And it clocked in as the fastest,

it was the fastest monster truck on the planet. It did zero to 60 in three seconds, which is faster than a Ferrari Enzo at the time or at least back in 2014. No kidding. But it got 264 feet to the gallon. Isn't that awesome? That's right. I was trying to figure out before you said to the gallon, I was like, where's this going? Right. Wow. That's really funny. Yeah. They're not worried about fuel consumption. They're worried about making that big engine go boom because people love that sound. It's hysterical. Ed put in here that they have attempted electric powered monster trucks, but they were not popular with the fans. They want to hear that engine going. It's part

of the allure, I think. I think more than anything, they don't want to hear themselves. Oh, I doubt that. They also have, you know, if you talk about shocks when you see these things today, it's crazy how they will do something where, and I encourage you to go check out videos if you've never seen this stuff. And these photos, but yeah, definitely video. No, watch a video because they can contort themselves and go back upright way more often than you would think. Like about 80% of the time, I'm like, well, that thing is on its back or it's done for the day. And it manages to just flop back over. And those wheels look like they're all independent of one another. They have four nitrogen charged shocks on every single wheel on all four wheels. Yep. And

it's pretty cool looking. And those shocks are not like normal shocks either. Your average shock has what's called a range of travel, which is the amount of basically give that it has of about four to six inches. These usually have about 24 inch range of travel. And like you said, there's four on each wheel. So on the one hand that keeps the driver's spine from compressing every time they land after a huge jump. And on the other hand, it also pushes the truck off of objects and obstacles. Yeah. And I don't know if we said those huge giant tires, you know, in a normal car, you've probably got about 33 pounds per square inch inflation in them. These have maybe eight to 10. Yeah. So there's a lot of bounce in the tire. There's a huge amount

of range of travel in the shocks. And when you put it all together, they can pop up on their back wheels. They can pop up on their front wheels. They can just do tumbles and somersaults and all sorts of crazy stuff because of those shocks and that virtually deflated tires that are basically like giant balloons. Yeah, they bounce. They need more cushion for the pushing. They bounce around quite a bit. I think, you know, safety is an important thing. And like NASCAR, again, they sort of followed that model of in the early days, I would be surprised that Bob Chandler even used a seat belt. He seems kind of like a wildcard to me. But like I said, along with NASCAR, they started improving the safety over the years. There are still things

like back injuries. Fire is another thing that's obviously, because, you know, when you flip these things over and you're bouncing around, those fuel, it's not just like a regular gas tank or oil reservoir. They're like super modified. And there are backup systems and redundancies to make sure they're not throwing flaming gas all over people. They're automatic fire extinguishers like in NASCAR. They're wearing those fire suits and gloves. I think they even, I'm not sure if it's the exact Han's device, but the device that I think after, I might be wrong, I'm just going from memory, but I think after Dale Earnhardt died is when they brought in that device, basically, that straps a NASCAR driver's head completely stationary. Yes, absolutely true. And I think

that's what they're using in monster trucks as well. Yes. So I was reading a guy who went to Monster Truck University in Illinois or Monster Jam University and got to test out driving a monster truck. And he said, your field of vision or your field, yeah, is basically relegated to how much you can move your eyeballs in their sockets. Yeah, exactly. That's it. Your head is not moving at all. And not only is your head immobilized, your body is basically too, except for your arms. And you're strapped in with a five point seatbelt that's actually ratcheted in. It's not some buckle. Like they use ratchets to screw them in. So you are in that thing. And then also, if you're an actual professional monster truck driver, the seat that you're sitting in has actually

been molded to your body. So you probably can't fluctuate and wait too much if you're on the monster truck circuit or else you're not going to fit into your own seat, you know. Yeah, you got to watch your weight, I imagine. And you know, the whole debate about whether they're race car drivers or athletes is, of course, they're athletes. And I would imagine a monster truck driver, it takes a lot of toll on the body and they have to be in pretty decent shape as well. Sure. Also, like whoever you are listening, you couldn't do this. No, totally. It's not something like driving one of these things is not intuitive. It's not like, not only do you have to learn it, I get the impression that you have to be basically naturally talented

to start with to even get good at it at all too. Yeah, I mean, should we talk a little bit about driving? I think one thing we did mention, which is pretty cool, is that the driver sits in the middle. It's not mounted on the left side, like we drive here in the United States. It's in the center because for a very good reason. So your arm doesn't fly out the window and get crunched. That's a big one. And I actually have seen a picture of Bob Chandler driving bigfoot with his arm out the window. Yes, he's leaning out the window looking at the ground, like checking his clearance. But he's like, he might as well be going 10 miles an hour down a country road for the way that he's sitting in this car. I'm like, especially now knowing that they're like

strapped in and in the center of the car. It's just hilarious to see. I can't believe the guy's still alive. Yeah, I mean, is he still alive today? Is he still around? Yes. Like we said, there are only those two gears and there's also still that rear wheel steering that Chandler came up with. And I don't think we mentioned he called it a 4x4x4 because 4x4 obviously for four wheel drive and then that four wheel steering. But you now can turn those on and off the four wheel steering feature with the toggle switch. That's how you drive it. Yeah. So like flipping that switch on and off and steering and hitting the gas where you're, and I don't think we got to that part yet, but it's actually attached via a toe loop to the

accelerator throttle because they would have problems with sticking accelerators and that is not good in a monster truck that can go that fast. So now you can pull back on the accelerator, but all of this stuff takes a lot of practice and that's why you would go to the monster truck university. Yes, and have to be naturally talented too. And then there's also safety issues, Chuck, that they've come up with because there've been a lot of tragedies. Apparently no monster truck drivers ever died driving a monster truck, but plenty of spectators have been killed because of things like when you crush a car, debris can fly everywhere. Sure. Parts of the monster truck itself can come off and they're usually moving pretty fast and are pretty heavy when

they're flying through the air. And then sometimes monster trucks can just like drive into crowds. So if you go to a monster truck rally or Catillion, whatever your preference is, you will see that the lower seats are just totally, you can't go down there because these things are so unpredictable and can so easily spin out of control that it's just not safe to be anywhere near ground level when one of them is driving around. Yeah. And I think after they implemented that, there were incidences where the trucks did go up into those empty seats where and everyone involved looked around and just sort of nodded like, yeah, we did it. Yeah, just saved some lives. And then also there's another thing too where if you go to one of these

shows, you'll find that there's four people standing around at each corner of the hockey rink or the baseball diamond or whatever that have little remote controls that in each one of them is capable of completely shutting off the engine and the fuel immediately with the press of a button. And they do that in case the driver is knocked unconscious, but the throttle is still down in the cars or the truck's still running around. Yes, you don't want a ghost driven monster truck inside of a stadium full of people. I mean, do you know, doesn't that just shout how dangerous this is that there's people standing by with remote controls to turn the thing off if you're knocked unconscious while you're doing your job? Yeah. And maybe we won't

go over all these, but there have been fatalities multiple times through the years at monster truck rallies, including small children getting killed in the audience. And this was mainly in the 90s, but there was one in Mexico in 2013, there was something else in 2014. In the Netherlands? Yeah, which is, I don't know. Why is that surprising to me that the Netherlands has monster truck rallies? But I mean, these people, they were just standing around like they were watching, I don't know, a couple of dogs do it or something like that just in a circle. And then all of a sudden the monster truck loses control and just plows into the crowd. I think it killed like three or four people. Yeah. Like they're watching Disney on ice? Basically. Nice tease.

Yeah, with that one for sure. All right, we'll take a break and we'll come back and reveal why I mentioned Disney on ice right after this. me in this situation. If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new

podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikler. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop?

But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So you mentioned there were at least 25 different big-foot over the years. Bigfoot is, you know, it's part of popular culture now in the nomenclature. Like, Emily will, if she sees a big truck in our neighborhood, will be like, you know,

look at that big foot, get out of the way or some big foot. I mean, let me just rephrase or restate what I said. It was in police academy two and six. You had two different times. I'm sure when they got the six, they're like, who should we bring back? They're like, definitely the guy that makes the noises. Robert Hayes? No, no, no. No, not Robert Hayes. Yeah, let's get Bigfoot back in here. They were gonna, he came that close to having his career revised by police academy six, but they skipped them over for Bigfoot. So Bigfoot 14 jumped to 727 and 99.

And then Bigfoot five, if you look this thing up, it's pretty ridiculous. It's the biggest one of all. They built Bigfoot five with tires that are 10 feet tall that were used on the VC 22 snow freighter land train, which was this, I mean, it's a train. It's really a vehicle connected to other vehicles. It's more like a big shipping bus, but it's a trackless freight train basically that they shuttled supplies between Cold War early warning outposts between Alaska and Canada in the 50s. And if you look up Bigfoot, which one was it 14? Just, just take a look at those ridiculous tires. It doesn't look as fun or as nimble because they're just super tall and not as wide. But yeah, it was, it was, it was a stunt.

It's ostentatious even for a monster truck. I think so. And it just doesn't look as nimble and as fun. For those of you who were raised in the 90s rather than the 80s, these grave diggers probably even more familiar than Bigfoot. And like we said, Dennis Anderson, the original creator of Gravedigger and whose family keeps driving for him was the guy who basically came up with freestyle monster truck. And yeah, that's off to him. I think his, his daughter Kristen is the, the only first and only full time monster truck driver who's a woman. Oh yeah. Well, that's off to her as well.

And also the Guinness world record holder too, which is nothing to sneeze at. That's right. There's also, you know, since we were talking about fiberglass bodies that are super removable, since you're no longer having to kind of work with anything that was originally a car or a truck, you can kind of do whatever you want. And some people model like the Gravedigger is modeled after a fifties Chevy panel van. There's one that's called the big kahuna that looks like a woody from the sixties that you'd, you know, go surfing in. Sure. And then there's some that don't look like cars at all, or they look like cars that are hybridized with like animals, like El Toro loco is a bull with

horns. My personal favorite is Megalodon. That's your shark. It's a giant shark. There's higher ed is a yellow school bus. There's one called the zombie Chuck that has arms sticking out and tattered rags coming off of it, like a zombie. And then one of the best ever, the Mohawk Warrior with a giant Mohawk sponsored by great clips. Is it really? Yes. Which really kind of reveals like the state of monster truck Cattilians today. It is super commercialized. And the main reason why it's super commercialized is because Monster Jam, which started out from, you know, the hot rod racing community was bought by Feld Entertainment, which has a lot of different live touring acts. And one of them is Monster Jam.

Yeah. And that was not without some controversy. You know, prior to the big corporate takeover, there was it was people like Bob Chandler. It was it was these people that would get together, maybe get a sponsorship and raise some money because they're very expensive to build. Obviously, it's not like they were all just like rich guys doing this stuff. So you get a sponsor. You'd build out a monster truck team and your truck. You'd be paid money to show up at an event. And if your truck gets a notoriety, you get more money. And I think in 85 is when the United States Hot Rod Association started having these races, where there were actually rules and a point system. And then these other point series started up. And eventually that culminated

in 88 when a bunch of the drivers got together and formed the MTR a the monster truck racing association, right, where you finally had some like real safety rules. And everything was just sort of codified. But then, you know, that's when the sort of corporate takeover thing started coming in. And there was a lot of controversy with Feld Entertainment coming in there. And they're like, it's sort of lost a bit of its soul in the monster truck world. And half the trucks that you see at any given rally will be Feld trucks and and they're rigging it. So the Feld trucks are winning, which is, you know, some people say some people might get worked up about that and others might say it's just about the entertainment who really cares about the competition.

Right. And it's very much the same as like getting worked up about, you know, pro wrestling being rigged, where it's like, yes, it is. It's for entertainment purposes. This isn't a sport, but it's still very athletic. What you're seeing is really hard to do. It's really impressive. It takes a lot of work to make that happen. So yeah, it's for entertainment, but it's still legitimate in all these other ways and just stop being upset and kick back and enjoy it. Yeah, or don't and don't go and just shut up about it. Well, that's what Bob Chandler did with Bigfoot. Bigfoot is conspicuously absent from all of the Monster Jam series because he didn't like Feld Entertainment. And apparently he's since said,

you know, I would have liked to have maybe not done that because I think my life would be a lot easier. I'd probably be 50 times richer, but, you know, it is what it is. And so Bigfoot is still its own thing on its own, just being Bigfoot. Bigfoot's gonna Bigfoot. You got anything else? I got nothing else. This is interesting. I gotta say, I enjoyed watching those YouTube vids. Same here. I'm still not interested in going to one unless the four of us go together. All right. Well, we'll make it happen. Once this pandemic passes, we're going. But it can't be the first live event I go to that could. Okay. Fair enough. But we will go. We will go. We'll go to the KFC Yum Center in Lexington, Kentucky to

see it. Ooh, that sounds like fun. And in the meantime, everybody, if you or at all entertained by this episode, go check out some monster truck clips and specifically look up moonwalking. It's one of the most amazing things you will ever see in your life. Since I said it's one of the most amazing things you'll ever see in your life, obviously, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this a correction email. We like to read corrections when we get stuff wrong. Sure. It's been a hallmark of the show. And I'm going to read one right now from Mike. Hey, guys, I was listening to the Uranium Mining podcast today, which was great and super interesting. However, I just want to let you know, and I expect I'm not the only person who emailed,

but you are, Mike, that Uranium is categorically not from the Big Bang. During Big Bang, nucleosynthesis, hydrogen, helium, lithium, and beryllium were produced, including various isotopes and basically nothing else. Uranium is produced from supernovae exploding stars. During the final seconds of a life star, something called the R process occurs where dozens of neutrons can rapidly be added to the existing atomic nuclei. Some of these neutrons will subsequently decay into protons and electrons until a stable, or at least quasi-stable, isotope is reached such as Uranium. Cheers. Thanks for all the great podcasts. That's from Mike. Cheers. It ended kind of abruptly there, but man, thanks for the schooling, Mike.

Who knew? Mike did. I definitely did not know, and I like to think that I know basically everything there is to know about the Big Bang. There you have it. No Uranium. Thanks, Mike. If you want to school us like Mike did, we are always willing to sit in awe of someone else's giant brain, so you can email us. That's the best way to get in touch these days. Wrap it up and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.