Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 185: The 1919 Motor Transport Corps Convoy

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

we got a great big convoy, ain't she a tragic sight follow victoria on bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/victoriascott.bsky.social buy victoria's book: https://www.carrarabooks.com/store/we-deserve-this Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

I've got my local going. I got the video going. I got the ZenCaster is going. Failed to start recording. Oh, fuck. Don't. No, give it a second. Give it a second. There it is. Okay. It does this on 10,000 losses. And my local is going without a second to spare. My local is live too. Yeah. So, oh, fuck the chair. Hang on. That's my audio. Sorry, Deb. Yeah, you sound fine. Sorry, Devin. Sorry, Devon. We're going to do. Sorry, Devon. Three, three, two, one, Mark.

I missed you guys. I missed you too, yeah. Fucking stupid, dude. Yeah, I find my wife made me take a week off and I took a, took like six days in London. I went into a spiral maybe based on your Twitter presence. Yeah, well, no, like a, like a good spark. I mean, I fell in love, so that was cool. Oh, there you go.

You know, that was, that was pretty neat. That was pretty sick, I guess. That's right. I like that. Go to the European fall in love. that like, that's crazy. Yeah, right? I don't know.

There's just some of this going around. But yeah, I've been all over and now I'm back and I'm like, you ever have that thing where you like take your first like vacation where you don't have to work in like several years and then you come back and you do have to work. But it's the same day that you've been traveling for five hours and also you're insane. Yes. Welcome back.

Thank you. Thank you. Rod's good to be here. I went over the weekend. I was conscripted into miles in transit. its new great race to undisclosed location video. I bought that e-bail chain. Well, I'm not on an email chain.

I visited with several of the contestants. I, that, that was, that was a slog. That was almost as grueling as this. That was like, that was like the Paris to DACA rally, but with coach buses. But yeah, I expect that video in, well, based on the timing of the last one, several months. So, yeah, I don't know, I'm still sore. How are you sore from a, okay. Yeah, the chafing from the walking.

I mean, frankly, like, the, sort of the podcasters lament, right? I found in the course of doing this job for a few years that the kind of soft, flabby body that this job gives you means that, like, you can become sore from almost anything, you know? Well, you know, you know what the worst part was, is that we tried to get, get into see the peacock room to see if it would drive us mad and it was closed oh goddammit they were protecting you no no no you know what it was you know what i think they do is they said it was for humidity conservation right which i think just means they shut the peacock room whenever the tourists get

too sweaty please stop touching this i mean speaking of sweaty tourists i was i was like just walking around in central london and like you know it's 25 26 degrees Celsius, I don't know what that is and freedom eagles. And I'm just like, it's, it's autumn. It shouldn't, it shouldn't be like this and it's gonna be, it's the hottest summer ever and you know, the next one's gonna be worse and I'm just like, we gotta we gotta fix the climate because I'm not a heat-adapted organism, you know? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, uh, Roz and I are cold climate creatures. Oh yeah, me too. Hey, today's the first time I haven't been running the

air conditioner in a while. Atta boy. Yeah, but My windows are all up, but it's nice out. I mean, I'm in a hot, sweaty basement. I'm deep in the podcast mind. This is the thing. This is why we've got to have a release schedule is because if we don't podcast long enough, we forget that we're recording and we are just authentically like friends talking about our air conditioners. Yeah, we just talk about the weather.

Which, I don't know. Maybe that's part of the appeal. Maybe it dissuades people. I'm not a business woman, right? Clearly. I have no sense. Not a scorcher. To what extent that it's like wins people over.

or to what extent this alienates people. I just, I just hang out with my friends in proximity to a microphone and somehow it turns out for people like it. So thank you very much. You'll make the call. I'll call later. You'll call now. God, that was a, that was a weird, that's a subtextual ad.

That's like that and the like, Folger's incest ad for the American, like, kind of latent sexuality, you know? What the fuck? You know what? I'm happy you're not knowing. Yeah. Okay, yeah, show. Don't worry about it.

Are you Googling Fulges Incess Act right now? That's my advertisement for Sears Roebuck and company. Go buy an air conditioner from that. Yes, yes, yes. You forced me to watch this ad before. Yes. I understand there's only like two physical Sears locations left on the East Coast. Anyway, hello and welcome to, well, there's your problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosniag. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I'm November Kelly. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam. Okay, well, my name is Liam McAllenis and my pronouns are he, him. And we have a guest. Hello, my name is Victoria Scott. My pronouns are she and her. Thank you for having me. Of course. As may be clear from the number of times you've been on.

Yeah. Yeah, we love having you on anytime. At this point, I, the number of times you've had me on is beginning to like, conflict with just my deep-seated belief that everybody hates me, and I am questioning my priors and thinking, maybe they kind of like me. Because the thing is, right? You're gonna have to cave in to your paranoia. Everyone hates you constantly.

So, no, this podcast is like, it's a single issue thing. The fact that it makes money is by the by, the point is solely to improve one woman's self-esteem. There you go, yeah. It's working. Hell yeah. That's okay. So, what you see on the screen in front of you is a United States military standard B truck.

Can't park that, mate. I think it's three and a half, two and a half guns. Just say B off the road? B off the road. Yeah, they call it a standard B because it'd be off the road. It'd be off the road, yeah. That's Dwight Eisenhower's own handwriting. Now is that supposed to look like that?

I see this rear wheel is having some trouble. Dwight Eisenhower, girly-ass handwriting. Look at that, look at me. Incredible. I'm sitting there. Yeah, yeah. Not America's first gay president, but perhaps America's second or third. As the resident automotive expert, it should not be doing that.

Should not be doing that. Not be doing that. Okay. Okay. All right. Yeah, I'm learning. I'm listening. I'm learning.

I'm here to diagnose your problem, and that right there is it. Yeah. It should be on the road. Is there someone in my house? I mean... Yes, you are. Do you understand Castle Doctrine? God, the first podcaster involved shooting is gonna be a fucking nightmare.

You have to put you on administrative leave. Today, we're going to talk about the 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy. But before we do that, we have to talk about the goddamn news. So here, here, here in Philadelphia, there was a big crisis about how they were going to fund SEPTA, and the Pennsylvania Republicans found a solution, which is to not fund SEPTA. It's been a ball. The cliff has been gone over. Yeah, it's wonderful.

Okay. So what you're saying to me is that, like Philadelphia and sort of like greater Philadelphia, I guess, just doesn't, isn't going to have public transit. So we are in the first stage of cuts. The second stage of cuts happens next week, maybe the week afterwards. Risk. Um, that's, it's before the next, uh, before the next meeting of the legislature. I know that much. Um, so there's been a across the board 20% service cut. Um, there is a fair increase going on. That's the next round.

And then in January is when the really nasty stuff happens. But anyway, SEPTA has been Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. They have been sort of, you know, in a bind since COVID because, you know, all the costs went up, but the ridership went down. And they were asking for enough money to maintain current levels of service across the city and the region. And, you know, the pencil, there were several ways proposed to get that money, one of which was by taxing something called skill games, right, which are a new thing we have in Pennsylvania, and I think a lot of other places where it's a slot machine, but there's also after you play the slots, some kind of like word search or something that if you complete it, it gives you your money back. So it's not gambling, right? Oh, okay, sure.

yeah so oh yeah it's it's it's bad it's real that's bleak yeah so uh they didn't want to tax those the glp um they rejected a lot of other funding solutions they did come up with their own solution at like the the 11th hour which was to raid the public transportation trust fund for immediate operating expenses and also a bunch of roads and bridges at like one of their towns out in Bumfuck County that has like eight houses and an abandoned dollar store. This is, so this is the kind of equivalent

of like when you're throwing like deck chairs into the ship's boilers, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. I mean, it was essentially like, we're going to redirect a bunch of this funding that was already earmax. earmarked capital improvements to operations and also for, again, I don't know,

widening a country road that gets three cars a day to six lanes. SEPTA is going to be the first rail system to actually do the grommet wrong trousers thing of building the track in front of you as you go. Pretty much, yeah. Well, that applies to be building track, but yes. Yeah. I actually have a guy on the back of the train ripping it up. Yes.

Like that seems like in reverse. Yes. But yeah, so we already went over the cliff. Usually these service cuts, they're pretty hard to reverse once they've been done. Like they're gonna need even more money now than what they were projected. Yeah, I've heard that about austerity that weirdly it like, you don't, you can't just turn the money back on afterwards. Yeah, yeah. There's an ongoing lawsuit right now to restore service because, you know, these are apparently sort of these, these cuts are supposedly targeted.

against African Americans. I don't think that's real. But the idea there would be to start, you know, dipping into the service stabilization fund, which is also another thing where I don't know, that just means when you hit the brick wall, you hit it a lot harder. I mean, I don't know. It sounds pretty racist to me. Like, yeah, well, it is and it is, I mean, everyone got the cuts is the thing, you know? Yeah. But I mean, January, when the big cuts happen, that's going to actually affect the suburbs more because they are just straight up cutting a huge amount of regional rail lines because those are the ones that M-Track owns so they're paying $60 million a year to M-Track and rent, which apparently is what's funding the long-distance

trains in Pennsylvania or the inner-city trains like the Keystone and the Pennsylvanian. So those also go away now apparently. I'm increasingly suspecting that American rail transit is kept. of like American trans women in which we have five dollars we keep passing around between all of us and it's substantially increasing GDP. Yeah. So is there then one railroad that has like a computer science job that's like, it turns out all the money's coming from her?

Yeah, unfortunately it's Brightline and she's an abusive relationship with pedestrians. Cancelling Brightline. This has been like particularly appalling because objectively speaking, like, SEPTA operates with like an order of magnitude less money than any other comparable transit authority, right? They are incredibly cost efficient. They have done every single thing to scrimp and save. And what happens when you do that?

You get curb stop. Yeah, this is like the MTA shouldn't be paying its debts down. Yeah, exactly. There's a lesson here. Never removed the bloat ever. No, you have to have the bloat. You need to be like, you know, VTA and San Jose are just like, Yeah, we're going to build a $14 billion tunnel to nowhere.

Well, not to nowhere. It goes to downtown San Jose. And we don't give a shit. And it's going to, you know, move like five people a day. Who cares? Maybe we'd be in a better position if we took that attitude rather than, I don't know, we're going to do four service expansions in the 30 years I've been alive, which are two new regional rail stations and two kind of crappy bus routes.

Yeah. What you gotta do is you gotta do it the way Glasgow does things, which is build in something so old and so obsolete that it becomes completely impractical to either cut or expand. And it's just locked, it's just like frozen in amber forever. You consider doing that. That's how the L works, yeah. I consider this a cautionary tale against the concept of fiscal conservatism. It's gonna fuck you in the end.

gonna get fucked. You're gonna get... You're screwed. Conservatism only works until you run out of other people's money, right? Exactly. It's impressive that Pennsylvania's managed to take the American kind of arc of the 2020s, which is the rural states declaring war on urban centers that make money, and just localize it down to a single state.

Yes. Well, I mean, this is always the thing, right? It's always been like, you know, against the cities where most Americans live, because, you know, you have pronouns or whatever. Yeah, that's exactly what they're mad at. It's the cultural war bullshit rubbing up, robbing us of septa is a new one for me. To be fair, you do have a hell of a lot of pronouns, you know, they've got you there. They do.

Yeah. I'll use two though. Well, this is the thing. That's why you need the bloat is you need a bunch of pronouns that you don't use that you just have in storage, you know? Like, you've got to get like, you don't even use his because it, because it adds white. Yeah.

Strategic ambiguity, right? You got to have the capacity, the breakout capacity to get a little non-binary. with it at any time. I don't know. I live in West Philly as the pronoun capital of the world. And even then, it hasn't really moved the needle. Before we start recording this episode, I had to choose between coffee and gin, and I think I made the wrong decision by going with coffee.

Yeah, I think you did. Yeah, this is going to have to be, I think, a standalone episode, because there's a lot, I have many opinions here. I do think there's, there is some blame. to be put on like the past 30 years of septa management for this happening but also a lot more blame on you know the pennsylvania gop senators um you know why do we even have a senate in a state i don't know the only people doing this right are nebraska unicameralism yeah i thought these are supposed to be laboratories of democracy why are they all bicameral presidential republics

Let's get a parliament or something, come on. It's nothing in the Constitution that says that a state can't be an absolute monarchy. Exactly. So, yeah, that's that. In other news. Do not fact check me about the Constitution thing. I don't know or care. It's a dead lesser anyway.

Nobody's paying attention to it. So Uncle Pete is going to marry a horse. I beg your pardon? Yeah, right. Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern are trying to merge. This is our belated... Alessie or something. Whatever you wanted to be, Dover.

Yeah, it's less, less Uncle Pete, more Mr. Hans, surely. Yeah. Don't Google that. Seattle mentioned. Yeah, Pacific Northwest excellence. So, you know, we have our four class one railroads in the United States, or wait, five. The four trans women with tech jobs, sure. Yeah, exactly.

Uh, Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern are trying to do a merger right now to create the first transcontinental railroad in the United States, like, fully like it's one railroad from one coast to the other. Wait, the first one ever? Yeah. Ever. Okay. It's never been done.

God, you guys needed a Stalin for like 300 years. It would have helped, it would have made some shit worse, but at least the trades would a bit better and good. So now, I think we've long said on this podcast, okay, that the railroad gets better as better and more efficient as it gets bigger, right? This is sort of a question of like theoretical benefits versus practical realities, right? So if you merge these two companies together, you know, you have like lots of new freight routes opening up, you have lots of new, you know, economies of scale and so on and so forth.

It would theoretically be a very, very good thing for a lot of people. How do all these efficiencies get distributed, though, is the question. Oh, into Devidance, you know? Yeah, exactly. And they're going to name it something horrible. Either they just jam it together. No, they're naming it Union Pacific. Oh, okay.

Well, I mean, total California victory, at least. Do you have to give them that much? Total Omaha victory. Yeah. Well, they keep Rule G open, it's my question. It's a refugee from the non-Omaha American century of humiliation. Word Buffet, you son of a whore. Here I was thinking they were just going to call it Union Pacific, North, Norfolk Southern,

and we stuck with U-P-Nus. You-P. We're fans of school ground games, such as I-H-O-P-Nus, I-H-H-P. Imagine if the Illinois Central had merged with Union Pacific. I-C-U-P? Yes. Got your ass. Yeah, he did.

He did get my ass. It's a shame, but I admit what I've invested. So, yeah, you know, there's a lot of advantages that could potentially exist for, like, you know, the railroad itself for shippers, for workers, you know, you could, you could take these efficiencies and invest them into better infrastructure. higher pay for workers, better and more competitive railroad service. Nah, fuck you. More routes, better safety, better working conditions, faster trains, more advanced trains, like, I don't know, finally do some fucking electrification. I'm sorry, did I, did I hear executive compensation and like share by-bikes?

Yeah, that's what we're going for here. That's always the sign of a functioning economy, mostly personally, I'm just sad to see like a goth horse girl, like, turn normie, you know? Like, this is, this is my kind of gala, like, sort of theory. Don't talk to me about gala. Don't talk to me about gala. I was so sure. Speaking of things that it was basically bestiality, like that man has the brain of a dog. She can't. You had a dating show. Did you ever watch it? I, Jesus, no. What do you take me for? No, all I did is when I saw the announcement, I searched for Travis Kelsey, misspelled tweets, and then I found the one where he's going like, ooh, girl shocked me

like electric eel, and he's misspelled eel, and then I retweeted that, so I, I'm a simple one. I take my pleasure's where I find them. It is, it's been not a great day. E-A-L, by the way. Just crazy. That's like, Earl, but it's an eel. Earl.

He found Earl on his head. There's also a woman who spells Squirrel, S-Q-U-I-R-L-E. Who amongst us? Yeah. We congratulate Super Bowl loser, Travis Kelsey. Yeah, I mean, when the Super Bowl happened, I stand by my tweet there, which we were perilously close, and in fact then achieved Donald Trump, Travis Kelsey, Taylor Swift, and Drake all being mad at the same time.

And I think that was the last time humanity was on kind of like an upswing. So. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is going to probably just be, you know, stock buybacks, price gouging customers because they have a near-monopoly power now, trying to drive the operating ratio as close to zero as possible. Tiring off the calendar to be like 1883. You know, this is going to trigger.

This is going to be like the second to last round of mega mergers because the next round of mega mergers after this is going to be one big railroad. it's just run by an unaccountable, you know, dictator. Well, hey, I mean, look at it this way. If we can convince Trump to buy 10% of their stock, then we sort of can get close to having a state-owned railway. Yeah. Like a developed nation.

10% of state-owned railway. I mean, that's putting Britain in the shade there, though. Something break into your house as well? I don't think so. There's just a weird, weird noise from somewhere out near the kitchen. Probably. Getting inducted by aliens and shit. Yeah, it happens to the best ones.

The one thing is this still needs to be approved by the Surface Transportation Board, which is sort of the tattered remnants of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Trump hasn't appointed anyone to that. Like there's still a vacant seat? Surface Transportation Board, call that a snowboard? Or a skateboard, or a surfboard, really, like all of those? No, it is sometimes referred to as the Surfboard. referred to as the surfboard, yeah.

Okay, well, now I know that people in a position to make jokes like that professionally have made that joke, I will be retiring and ending my own life. Yeah. Jay called me and Ross e-clowns to our faces. I mean, that's true, but I prefer to articulate us within a kind of like Comedia del Arte tradition, right, in which each of us embodies a number of kind of like comic roles that, you know, let's not worry about that. Figure that one out in the comments.

Comedy is good, but clown is more difficult. Yeah. What are you going to do, you know? Yeah. So I think there's still, like, a chance. The Surface Transportation Board shuts this down. But I think Trump's secretary of commerce has said this is probably a good idea, which is a strong, strong indicator that it's probably a pretty bad idea.

It's like an opposite. It's like an opposite of what the opposite. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's usually a pretty good, pretty good rule of thumb. So this might get shut, this might not happen, it probably will at this point. There's a lot of ways it could be good in theory, and those aren't things that are going to happen.

So well then, Norfolk Southern, going to the glue factory at long last. Yeah, I was about to say, they're putting the haunts in the glue factory. On the bright side, because every single American class one is allergic to repainting any of their locomotives now, because that also costs money. They'll never actually, we'll keep running them until, like, everything in America has collapsed. Oh, nice. So, like, you'll be able to train spot them for a long time. They'll just, like, paint a patch over the cab numbers with, like, the new UP number.

That'll be it. That's cool. That's the real former bullshit is what happens to 6-11. Does it get absorbed into the Union Pacific? You don't know how they fucking scrap it. Do they send it? No, they scrap it. They actually scrap it and then shoot you.

I didn't shoot me with a gun. That's what happens. Oh, they paint it yellow. Oh, my God. In the middle of the night, you just go one morning and it's just like it is yellow. It's got a big American flag down the side. Yeah. It's got a gray stripe.

Do what the New York Central did to their locomotives. We will preserve nothing and you will like it. It's been renamed from Spirit of Rone Oak to Spirit of North Platte. Spirit of Warren Buffett. Yeah. Or, no, Warren Buffett is BNSF. I forgot that too. Yeah, well, what are you going to do?

So, anyway, that was the goddamn news. Wow, it's under half an hour. Our belated railroad news. Yeah, it's probably some other stuff happened, but I don't remember it. And you already downloaded the slides. I don't know, yeah, exactly. So I think a good place to start here is, what is road? Oh, train good, car, bad episode over.

Scars a Patreon, see you, nerds. Don't worry. Don't worry, cars stay bad for this whole episode. You don't bring me on to say car good. I have a much more nuanced view of car. Not bad, but I like it. Dodge Viper, please? Jet 1 Viper, please?

I'm bringing this back since the Victoria's here again. It's just like if the podcast becomes like 10 times a successful, we wouldn't necessarily announce it, but there would be signs, such as the Viper Engine Note in the back of all of your recording. Speaking of, check the sound. Ah. You got a Corvette engine.

Liam. Liam is constantly screaming over the sound of like a shrink-wrapped canvas roof flapping it in the way of the space as he does. 90 miles an hour. Don't know what the big deal is. If you made me podcast from a car, I think it would be come to like be driven and record at the same time, like a kind of Thunderbird's vibes, actually. I, I always wanted us to do it.

If we make it to Britain, this will be a lot easier. But I think it would be funny for the three of us to be in some sort of vehicle together and have to podcast from the road. Just podcast is on cars getting coffee. Yeah. Yeah. Here's the thing about coming to Britain. You barely even need a visa.

Like, it is remarkably easy. Oh, okay, because I'm an American Express. You know what's already equipped for that is the conference room in the Freckia Rasa. Okay. I don't, I don't, I, okay, we can do that. We can podcast from a train. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you win, and I am not unhappy with your victory.

It's surprisingly affordable. Anyway. Also, just for the record, real quick, Liam has sent me a very nice Dodge Viper, and I will say that as a great spec, Jesus Christ, sorry, I'm done now, that's it, just, yeah, wow. So, so roads, roads are a moral arc of history that bends towards being able to drive the Dodge Viper down it, and you could, you would struggle. 14 GTS, there's 8,800 miles on it. Let's fucking buy this thing.

Oh, the high bids, 143 grand. You subscribe to the patron. You would struggle to drive a Dodge Viper down, I think, any of these roads. Yes. So what we're looking at here is an early trail up here. This is a trail, not so much a road, but that's what we had before roads, right? Sometimes, you know, these trails were like actually made by just wild animals, right? And then people started using them themselves.

You know, this is the Natchez Trace, which is a Native American trail that went from the current location of Nashville to Natchez. That's about 440 miles. And this was maintained by Native Americans for several thousand years. I want to say started by some of the descendants of the same tribe that built Cahogia, the big mound. structure outside St. Louis. Oh, cool. It's like they built St. Louis. They built interstates like it's, uh, like Americans have always been up to this shit. Yeah, exactly.

That was something this is the comment that my, my dad left on one of our episodes when he got the pinned comment was he was mad at us for not mentioning native indigenous trails. And we took it to, uh, thoroughly Eurocentric view of indigenous history. Remember my dad. Yeah, that's why I tried to correct for it this time. Oh, my dad. How's the knee feeling, old man? So this is sort of, this is one version, another version I don't really have a picture of here

as something called a Ridgeway, right? That's an early European thing, the idea being, okay, where did we put the road? We put it at the top of the ridge, right? What does that mean? That means it trains really well because it's a downward slope on both sides, basically zero maintenance, right? A lot harder to get home drunk. on though, because you will fall off and die.

Ah, that's what you have a horse for. It's the shit that happened to Erzzi, the Ice Man, you know, probably. What if the horse gets drunk and dies? Why are you giving your horse liquor? Have you never heard of time? Keith Banger, beer from my horses. So, Ridgeways were pretty good. They were usually kind of an indirect route, though.

They had a lot of steep grades, so on and so forth. At some point, we get this idea, let's pave the road, right? with stone stone paved roads start fairly early like 3,000 BC that's around when the wheel was invented right and this is like difficult it's time consuming and it remains the state of the art in road construction for thousands of years sure I learned about 15 seconds ago that I am not being robbed my father-in-laws at the house which is kind of disappointing I was hoping to castle duck so So, thousands of years pass, and we finally make some advances in road construction, right? This is a man named John Blind Jack Metcalf. How can he see the road? He can't. He's blind.

He's just feeling it out, you know? Just on his hands and knees, like, oh, yeah, this is a good one. He's one of the first people to really start advancing the science of road building after gaining a lot of direct experience with roads from his own stage. coach line and also a tremendous amount of travel. Oh, so this is like the late 1700s, I want to say. Like I'm sensing a great deal of discomfort personally, being a real driver of progress here of like being on a kind of like metaled road in the sort of like late 18th century being like, oh, there's fucking sucks.

It's fucking terrible. I mean, he had his own stagecoach line and he drove the stagecoaches despite being blind. I mean, not to detract from the guy, but I feel like at that point, you really... It's more the horse driving the stagecoach than... Well, you know, I mean, that, that tracks, yeah. So Metcalf manages to work out, like, a lot of the problems with, like, roads, subgrades with, like, that's the stuff underneath the road.

He was able to build foundations over bogs, which no one could have figured out before. He was really good at, like, figuring out, draining. and grading, right? And he surveyed and built 180 miles of turnpike in the north of England, despite again, being blind. There's an unkind joke here about it being easier to work in the north of England when you don't have to look at it. It's like, well, I assume it's lovely around here, so my morale's, you know, sky high.

He's doing great, yeah. It's like, meanwhile, the guy who can see is, like, busy trying to find something to hang himself from, because he's, like, in search of, like, some, like, visual information that contains color. It's all gray, it's just gray. That's not a black and white photograph. That's just what it looks like. Another guy in this era, Thomas Telford, known as the Colossus of Roads.

How many times do you think he heard that one before he got sick of it? Probably only, you know, he got sick of it instantly. He was one of the first guys to really successfully drive roads through difficult terrain, with the use of really, really big engineering. Like, for instance, you know, here's the Meni's suspension bridge. That was his. I mean, 1820s, like, early 19th century, you're into like steam donkeys and shit, right? Or am I completely off the mark with the time?

Oh, no, you'll have steam donkeys by then, yeah. Yeah, so steam donkeys cheap migrant labor, like, yeah, more plausible than like one blind guy and his horses. This is true, this is true. But it's John Loudon McCatom, who's name. is still familiar, right? He invented a very exacting specification for crushed gravel road surfaces, which we now call McAdam. No, you call Macadam. I call Tarmac, because I'm Oh, we're gonna get there. We're getting there. Fuck, okay, well I guess I'll

get myself. Yeah. That seems a bit extreme. I haven't, but the thing is, because the thing are you trying, are you trying to get every episode I'm on flagged by YouTube for their death threats? No, I just, I just like to keep either, you know, you Justin or Devon, whoever's editing this one, like on their toes. Yeah, exactly. We gotta be, we gotta have the bleep button on standby constantly. It's compulsive at this point. But yeah, no, what it is, is I am freshly back off of Avanti West Coasts, and I have not

had time to read the notes ahead, unusually for me. So I did not know, I did not connect to the two. So I tried to be too clever for my own good. Not for the first time, nor the last. So Macadam pavement is very durable. drains well, it has this very smooth surface. Unlike previous methods of road building, it does not require the sort of firm foundation of stone blocks that everyone's been using so far. It's very, very good until cars were invented, which we'll get to at some point.

And then they became very dusty. So it's future proof against Kant's. Yes. So this is where we get to the next stage in development. Tarmac Adam. oh yeah just shoving together that's fine exactly discovered by accident when a barrel of tar fell off a wagon near demby derbyshire derbyshire derbyshire derbyshire right in 1901 and a man edgar pernell hooley noticed that where the tar barrel had burst the road did not give up dust right nor did it seem to be affected by rutting or other damage to the same extent that the rest of the road was. So he formed a company, the Tar Macadam Syndicate Limited, to start applying

this treatment to roads across England the following year, from whence we get the term tarmac. Yeah, and now that very weird combination of materials are just completely normalized to all of us. Yes. Well, modern asphalt, or if you're a pedant, asphaltic concrete, it's not exactly the same process, but it's a similar idea. Right, now we just apply it all in one go, as opposed to putting the gravel down and then putting

the tar on top. But the idea is it's still like an aggregate with a bunch of sticky stuff holding it together. Exactly. Gotcha. So this is how we get roads, as we know them today. Boo! Left to their own devices, traffic engineers, laws, and independently invent New Jersey, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah. Yes, exactly. In America, of course, we had, you know, Native Americans had systems of trails for millennia, we discussed this. I don't think there was ever really anything that was like paved. I don't think they ever got that far because they never really figured out the wheel. They had like a weird sort of aft sled system that, you know, they attached to dogs. That was like their pack animal. Yeah. It's like, until the Europeans came. It's one of those things. You don't necessarily need to invent it. So you just don't or like

you're aware of the technology, but the applications of it are kind of remote enough that it. It's just like, this is not useful, you know? Yeah. Even by like the post-bellum period that's, you know, after the Civil War, these sorts of long-distance paved and maintained roads, they're few and far between. There's a few that show up early, like Boston Post Road, which my traffic engineering professor said, Ben Franklin invented it so he could pay alimony easier. And that's not entirely true.

entirely true. Yes, it is. We are spreading falsehoods on the internet. Yeah, yeah, well, you know. And invented by Ben Franklin to make posting easier. I can't believe Dr. Martin of Drexley University told a tall tale. So, you know, it predated Ben Franklin somewhat. You know, but this is one of the first, like, you know, big, fast, well-maintained roads through North America. There was also the National Road that went from Cumberland, Maryland, where the C&O Canal stopped, to Van Dahlia, Illinois, right? The center of all, the capital of Illinois. The windy city. Yeah. The home of the Bean. Yes. This was completed in 1835-ish. It had several impressive structures, like here's the Castleman Archbridge, very big stone

arch bridge. Yeah. You have the wheeling suspension bridge. You drive, you know, all the way and up to Vandalia, you get your Vandalia-style pizza, you know. It's just sounding pretty good, you know? I didn't think they had pizza then. I think Italians were still weird.

Italians were still, I don't know, whatever, whatever racist shit, Sacco and Vanzetti must die is what I'm saying. What did they think of Italians in 1835? Nothing fucking good, dude. Yeah, no, nah. I'm gonna count them calipers, buddy, we're going to town. I could buy it as a kind of like, you know, what's the word for Oriolent, orientalizing Italians?

Yeah, we're like having a lot of, a lot of 1830s Americans have what I call a noble savage view of Italians, because like you could get into some like Garibaldism shit, I guess, right? Like, you could be like, I don't know, national liberation struggles kind of thing. The real problem is you wouldn't have had any, I don't know what you would say about them because, you know, all traditional Italian cuisine wasn't invented until like 195 to 1980 in a hotel in Rome. It's also true.

You're like, I can't wait for these guys to invent tiramisu and then I'll start caring about them. Yeah, exactly. How, when are we scheduled to get vodka sauce? Come on. So, you know, you have like a bunch of towns along the roots spring up. You've got taverns and ends every few miles. It's good enough for stage coaches.

it's still kind of, you know, a shitty experience, all things considered. It's not, it's obviously not paved. They don't have like paving at the time, but it's maintained-ish. The federal government builds it and they try to offload it to the states pretty early on because they're like, oh shit, this thing's expensive. But yeah, this is sort of the extent of it. There's a few like maintained long roads, but outside of major urban areas, the roads are just bad to non-existent.

There was no real reason to improve these for a long time, because at the same time, we were, of course, developing the railroads, right? Right. It's like you could experience the, like, highway robbery scene from Barry London, or you could get a steam train. Yeah. You can have a train robbery. That's more fun.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, essentially, like, roads exist for the purpose of, like, getting to the train station. This is correct. This is the correct way to organize the society, yes. You know, railroads have at this point an effective monopoly on interstate and interstate commerce until roads were improved. And, you know, the government had to improve the roads and the railroads effectively controlled the government. That's not how to organize a society, but, you know, primitive accumulation in it. The other thing is, of course, if you had good roads, and it was like 1875 or something, right?

you didn't. Yeah, but if you had them. Sure. What do you do with them? Uh, I charge people tolls for coming down my road. Okay, well, yeah, obviously, you know, a lot of these roads were turnpikes, yes. But I, uh, I ride my horse real fast, something which I assume a horse is going to find easier on like a hard surface than on dirt and grass, which horse has evolved around on. Exactly. It's like, you can have a really long, really good road, uh, but you can't get your horse and cart to go 50 miles an hour, which is something a locomotive could do pretty easily with a lot more stuff, right? Yeah. I mean, I guess you could run like a kind of like a sort of like a like a tram thing, but then you're just back to a railroad, you know? Yeah, I mean,

that was the inner urbans, yeah. And those were pretty successful until the 20s, when everything starts going downhill. So there's not like a lot of point in having good roads at this point, because there's no good road transportation. Everyone's going at the speed of horse. America as yet uncooked by the automobile. Yeah. What a world to dream of. Henry Ford and his nutsifying machine.

Yeah. What's that joke? God made men. Henry Ford made them all. No, Henry. No, it's God made men. Samuel Colt made them equal, and Henry Ford made them assholes. Yeah.

Yes. There we go. Thank you. And I don't know if that's a thing. I just came up with that off the dome. something, because if it doesn't, I'm a genius. I heard it as bastards and not assholes, but yeah, well, points are, points for credit. Like, honestly, we'll give you a, we'll give you a hundred out of a hundred between this

and the surfboard thing, I'm great at like reconstructing other people's jokes. It's been like, you have me a pile of loose joke parts, so I'm like, yeah, I can make something out of this, I guess. This is my generic joke machine. You can reassemble a joke blindfolded in under a minute. This is my joke shed. Making a joke that could kill Shinzo Abe. I just have a scrap box of joke parts I keep in my shed that sometimes I put different

jokes together from, I'm kit bashing a joke. Kit bashing a joke is a real specific, yeah, the ACF only wants you to keep a zero number on the punchline, because that's considered to be the like operative part of the I'm building ghost jokes where I like, sort of like, mill everything out separately. I feel like it would be like, I don't know, a different part of the joke, like the serial number is on like the subject or the packet or something, you know? Yeah, yeah, maybe. You just have like a loose punchline that doesn't go to anything, you know?

When you look into joke regulation, I mean, the problem is it is really difficult to define what a joke is, right? Yeah, but you know it when you see it, right? Well, no, that's why I have a lot of problem with joke control in America. Joke control. Jesus, fuck you. I just don't think that it, it, I don't think the legal regime reflects the reality. Listen, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a joke is a good go with a joke.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That did kind of happen to Bill Cosby, so. Yeah. We all got to go after Dane Cook. Anyway, moving, moving on, before we threatened to do jokes to Dane Cook. Be the first time in his life.

What do I, what the fuck is this? What do I, what do I do I do with this? Do I put it on my head? Do I eat it? All this changes due to the invention of, first, the safety bicycle. Mm-hmm, which is feminism, because it gave women the ability to, as I once saw an in-cell put it, like, cycle around and fuck strange chads. Yeah.

Wow, that is a depressing way to look at that. Mm-hmm. And then later, the automobile, right? So suddenly these, this idea of smooth roads were beneficial to a lot of people, especially cyclists. Now you've got to swim. Mountain bike, you know.

Yeah. But these smooth roads didn't really exist which led to a popular movement for good roads, which was called the good roads movement. We'll get into that

more later. They were the past for, they were literal-minded people. Yeah. Also at this time, farmers have been complaining about

having better roads for a long time, but because they're farmers, you know, they didn't want to pay for them, right? you know, that is a normal sort of farmer-type complaint. I want everything in one bag.

I want everything in one bag, but I don't want the bag to be heavy. Oh, they've been like this. How did you get this picture of me? Yeah. So, you know, this movement gains a lot more traction over in Europe, first and foremost, especially in France, right? Where they upgrade roads to very modern standards very quickly, even before like 1900

and that made cycling and motoring much more popular, much more practical you know, hey, that's why the tour to France is there. I was about to say it's like we need a broad flat road so that we can do 19th century cycling shenanigans on it? Yeah, I am going so fast by laying down on Zisset.

So yeah, France is definitely where like this gets the most momentum. But now we have to talk about a guy. So I'm handing this over to Victoria. Oh, have I got a guy for you? This is. It looks like a twat. Whoa, cunty little glasses.

You would be correct. I kind of like that, yeah. Yeah, I mean, they're cool, but like, no. We can't. There is no level of critical support we can give this man. They don't let you get down with the, like, Pansney anymore, you know? It's fucked up. They don't do that.

So this is Carl G. Fisher. He was traditional turn of the century American rags to Rich's story. A anecdote from his childhood was that he was a poor student because he was astigmatic and that's why he's got the glasses and he dropped out of school at age 12 because of it. And according to the Automotive Hall of Fame, he was like kind of ashamed of this fact. So, he taught himself how to run full speeds, full speed backwards. Hell yeah. To like, garner praise from fellow students.

I'll be honest, if I saw a guy like full force sprinting backwards, I would not notice his gay little glasses, I agree. Oh, that would be very... Now, of all the techniques to come up with, to avoid being bullied, it's not the best I've heard, but, you know. Well, you can look at the bully while you're running away from it. It's like a lizard would evolve, you know? Like, you want to try and, like, do fisticuffs to me?

What if I, like, sprint backwards and unveil my, like, threatening, like, neck feathers or whatever? Yeah, so already at the age of 12, a type of guy, in 1891, he started up a bicycle shop, and he became, like, a hardcore cyclist and started racing as a means of, like, attracting attention to his business. Okay, but backwards or forwards? Forwards as far as I know. Although that would be fun if they did like the reverse bicycle racing that they have in, I forget, I think it was, there's some Eastern European country where they built a car that

had a CVT that could go as fast and reverse as it went forwards. So they did backwards car racing. I can't remember the exact car, but that was always fun. But yeah, so he raced bicycles and then in 1900, you know, the bicycle era began to give way to the automobile era. And so he converted his shop into a, what is basically America's first car dealership called the Fisher Automobile Company.

America's first car dealer sprinting backwards onto the lot to offer you finance on the Dionne Houton. My deals are so crazy, they're backwards. What can I do to put you in a new car today? You want to see me run backwards real fucking fast? It's like fucking anything. thing, stop doing that, I guess, please.

Yeah, so with this with this kind of like showmanship in mind, he, his co-owner was Barney Oldfield, who was like one of the most famous names in like pre-World War II American auto racing. Like he, Oldfield was like crucial in like inventing the roll cage after he watched like what he's getting with the car crash. But like, you know, very instrumental like early phases of auto racing. So they both, you know, Oldfield and Carl start racing together, and they're doing the same thing they were with cycling where they're like trying to hype up the dealership. And he sells basically every car in the market. We haven't progressed to, you know, the kind of cartel model of car dealership yet.

So he's just trying to sell whatever he can get his hands on. Notably, there is no report that he ran backwards into people's living rooms to advertise, you know, buying a new REO speed wagon. but he did organize a publicity stunt where he removed the engine from a car and attached it to a hot air balloon and then flew it over the city of Indianapolis and then pretend he flew it out to like where I guess the suburbs would be now had a pre-arranged complete car with an engine that was identical parked there and then drove it back into the city and he was like yeah this car flew over Indianapolis you should go buy one okay that's pretty that's That's your car, early. Early marketing. Just fly your car over the city of Indianapolis. People love the stunt. They love stunts.

Crash or crush. Yeah, people love a stunt, man. Yeah, so this was working. Like, he was actually really well off. And next slide, please. So he was doing fairly well. He was in 1904. He and his buddy James Allison,

who, if you've ever owned a General Motors vehicle, or really any vehicle with a transatl. You've probably heard of Allison transmissions. These two were approached by the guy who invented acetylene. Acetylene. Settling. Settling. Thank you.

I knew I was messing that one up. Acetylene headlights. What? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. A torch, you could hold your car. Yeah. I was about to say you don't have like an alternator on there yet.

You need some kind of horrible gas. The seduline will do the job. Yeah. My, my, my, acetylene headlight. And then that also leads me to the realization. I don't even think that's the scariest gas they used for headlights. It's like, then leads me to the realization that there was a long period where you had like a practical car, but not a practical headlights.

And then I'm thinking about driving a completely unlit, but also very fragile car down an unpaved road at night. Yeah. Jesus. Okay. Yeah, everybody who was really into cars early on is absolutely fucking insane. Yeah, I want to do like a milamilia episode with you or something at some point. Yeah, that's mostly just how Mussolini used auto racing to do fascism.

It's funny, I think locomotives have actually alternators by this point. Again, the train, by right, the better mode of transport, by far, more advanced. Yeah, so he and Allison served this company called Presto liked. This is one of their advertisements where they're like, yeah, cool. We make exploding headlights. It's in something called The Outing Magazine Advertiser, and I knew the Times were homophobic, but I didn't know they were that homophobic. Oh, Jeanette, Pennsylvania. Okay. Oh, boy. Okay. Yeah. So, of course, like, they own the patent. They wrap it. This company basically gets a monopoly on automobile headlights very quickly, because they're much better than driving

without headlights. And they're much more, they're much more effective at actually lighting the road than like anything else that's currently on the market. And they're, you know,

they're better with oil lamps and all that kind of stuff. So, in 1913, he sells Presto Light to the Union Carbide company for $9 million. Oh, those fuckers.

Which is like 280 million today or something ridiculous. So, you know, massive sales. So, you know, and also just as a side note, yes, as you correctly pointed out earlier, There were, as I was researching this, I found like, I think at least two separate instances where his factories explode.

You do. You do kind of get a sense of why people kind of, of the time drew early cars as these like hideous demonic monsters, given the fact that they had like, you know, burning headlights. Yeah. From the depths of hell with it. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

I remember the first time I used an oxytorch and yeah, I've been. The guy who was teaching me was like, yeah, if you see the gauge, do this with the acetylene, you're already dead. So don't worry, man. Yeah, so, you know, but this is like early automobiling. So this guy, so next slide, please. Carl is a big car guy throughout this whole period. Like he loved bikes.

Now he's super into cars and he really enjoys racing them. He goes to, you know, as his car dealership becomes more successful, he takes a trip to France in 1905 and as Ross pointed out earlier they got in on the good roads earlier and you know girls like carl's like their cars are so much better than ours um they're cooking us also like american automotive journalist visits china now yes yes exactly um he's like the french cars are way better and the reason he's reasoning uh is that their their cars can go faster and so they can test them better because their roads are better um In an article in Motor Age magazine in 1905, you know, he was talking about the American

tendency where the only test tracks we had were basically just like horse racing ovals. It's like the Kentucky Derby track or whatever it is on what it's called. Well, I'm glad you guys got rid of that tendency in your most sport, right? Yeah. He said the average horse track is narrow, has fences that are dangerous, and is always dusty or muddy. With high speed cars where wide skids are necessary, the fastest car from a slow start or other temporary delay gets stuck in the rear without chances of ever getting the front on account of continuous seas of dust and skidding cars. He's like, he's like, we don't have good enough racetracks. We got to do better racetracks. I guess I see that if you're like sort of like at the back of like this kind of slough of like mud being thrown up by all of these cars, it's like, I'd say it's like the song, but that hasn't happened yet.

So it's like saying, you know, it's a guy in like 1990, yeah, it's like 9-11 out there. Yeah, they haven't invented like, fucking, uh, figure eight demolition derby races yet. Oh, man. This would be cool. Yeah, this guy would have loved that shit. The problem is that, that, that car doesn't even have like a windshield. So you try and drive that through like, you know, three circular tables or whatever. Yeah.

You die instantly. It's more of a blood sport back then. Yep. Doing more of a kind of like a, like an Aztec, you know, like, ballgame kind of human sacrifice vibe there. Yeah. Well, so this is, you're, we're getting close. You're actually independently reinventing the beginning of American motorsport.

Just like predicting that lots of people die. So Carl takes a trip to the UK in 1907 and he visits the Brooklyn circuit, which is a combination like it was like one of the first aerodromes. It was also a 2.75 mile like steeply banked test track where you could basically just like, it was so steep that there was a center line on it. If you crossed over it, you'd go through the turns without having to touch the wheel. Because gravity would just pull the car back down. So like it's a combination.

It's like, uh, it's a racetrack and in her a drum. It's like throw a couple more things in there. Yeah. Here, come, come here and see the vehicles. Yeah. If you wanna do some dumb shit attached to an engine, this is your place. It's the turn of the century and that's just like one of your types of guys you can class into, right?

It's like, I love dangerous wheeled contraptions that are like vaguely demonic. I wish to die in ways previously. unimaginable. Yeah, I'm gonna die faster than any of my previous ancestors. Yes. Still trying to beat that Irishman who hit 100 miles an hour. Yeah, it's like him, guy who got hit with a ballista in Roman times. Yeah, so Carl comes back to the US and he's like, okay, this is, we gotta build this.

This is what America needs. We have to close the gap between American cars and French cars, which I would argue they never successfully did, but I digress. He buys 328 acres of farmland near Indianapolis. And you may know of this little, this little venue there called the Indianapolis Super Speedway. Yeah, named with characteristic American humility. Yeah. Well, to be fair, it is the largest sports venue on Earth today.

It has a quarter million seats in it. And I will say, it's like the idea, you know, he really wanted it to be an oval instead of like, you know, the road courses that were kind of typical, um, in like both like rural American racing and in some European circuits because he was like, it, it's better for the spectators if they can see the cars the whole time, they should get more excitement. And I will say, put a bunch of like sponsor logos on them, you know, yeah, and I will say haven't gone to the ND 500, uh, it's transcendent. Like he was, I don't want to give him credit because he's not.

not like a great dude but also wow it's a cool track um you kind of see why people have like a quasi religious reference for it when you go there watching like what is it 32 i'm only until nascar pill uh i can't remember how many indie cars are i think it's i think a full grid is like 32 or 34 watching 34 cars do like 240 miles an hour at the same time is pretty great actually um but in any case i digress um here's where you're and there's like a whole like mud pit where people are all just getting like blackout drunk like the whole three-day weekend.

It's awesome. And you feel that super speedway sounds like a great time, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's it's awesome. But any case, they build the track and they first do it with crushed stone. So I guess it'd be the Mac Adam. And it unfortunately sucks.

Four drivers and two spectators die in the first race in 1909. And they cut the race, the actual main event short because people are like crashing and dying like all over the field. AAA, which is like not like the people who come and get you at the tow truck at the time, but they're like the main sanctioning body for all motorsports. They boycott the venue and they're like, you have to make this better because you're killing way too many people. I feel like that's a little unfair, given that in 1909, you couldn't, like, make a coffee without killing for spectators. No. This is, you know, this is early progressivism.

This is woke, to be honest, you know, I, I don't know. I think this is, uh, I, I suppose, you know, social progress is good, but also like. But also, well, this is, it's 1909, come on. Yeah, this, this guy. People die all the time. We're about to have World War I. Yeah, he's not great, but he's like, you know, Napoleon. He's historically progressively bad, and put it this way, spared those guys from dying in World

War I. Yeah. Exactly. It's mercy kill. Not only is it kind of like, you know, bitch made to be complaining about like four people dying when you're gonna get like, you know, the salmon like, you know, a couple of years, yeah. But like, also could have been some of the same guys.

Give me the choice between getting machine gunned and getting my head taken smooth off by like a wheel that's like, you know, separated from a car that's going the unheard of speed of 60 miles an hour. It's like a Chris Tucker meme, like this is World War I history, take your, take your sensitive ass back to like early in. That's right, yeah. Um, yeah, so, uh, but anyway, Carl is like, all right, we're gonna fix the track. So he decides that he's going to get 3.2 million 10 pound bricks.

And let people enjoy things. And he's going to pave the track. And it, he paves the entire two and a half mile long circuit. And it is, you know, that's basically the first incarnation in the Indianapolis Super Speedway. It's still called the brickyard to this day. And they run the first 500 mile like endurance race in 1911. And that's the beginning of the Indy 500. At that race, Fisher advocated for the rolling start and the pace car.

and that's, auto racing has begun. Like, he is, this one man is basically kicked off sort of like the modern age of auto racing. So next slide, please. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month.

and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but, you know, it's two bucks you get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes, so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have three. two bucks to spare each month, uh, join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod.

Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. You would think, you know, I, I love auto racing, but the more I read about the early history of it, the more I realize it's kind of like inextricably linked with, uh, especially like Mussolini's fascism. And so it's kind of like, well, that's, I don't know if I would say that this is like a

great success. But he's decided that he's going to actually taking a step further. And he's going to call for every American to own a car and drive it around all the time. And to that end, you know, we don't have any good roads here. So he decides that he writes to a friend in 1912 that the automobile won't get anywhere until it has good roads to run on. And his his issue is, quote, the highways of America are built chiefly of politics, whereas the proper material is crushed rock or concrete. That's his clever bit is that, you know, if these red tape politicians would simply get out of the way we could have, we can have good roads. So to this end, he proposes what becomes the Lincoln Highway, which is a New York to San Francisco road.

That goes through York. It covers Mentioned Sorry It covers 3,400 miles of the US And the idea is that he's going to get a bunch of like Captains of Industry and car companies to all chip in To like build this massive like you know paved improved road

From coast to coast As a means of like encouraging personal automobile use And you know He still I think has an interest in the headlight company at this point. So like he's kind of got a vested interest in being like, yeah, you should definitely buy a car with headlights. You can drive at night in the middle of Nebraska as you venture from New York to San Francisco. It's terrifying. Yeah. Yeah. So like, and he gets major buy-in. Woodrow Wilson, who is, you know, the president of the time, Thomas

Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, are all chipped into fund it. The president of the Lincoln Highway Association was also the president of Packard, which is, you know, major automaker. Yeah. Yeah. The goal of the highway, according to Fisher and the Lincoln Highway Association, was to, quote, stimulate as nothing else could the building of enduring highways everywhere. End quote. So, you know, again, this man is, he's kind of like the guy who invented like CFCs and leaded gasoline, but for American infrastructure. He just can't stop ruin and shit. So he goes to Henry Ford who is like the only guy who's got enough money to actually like build this fucking thing and he's like, hey, can I have some of your money because we'll sell more cars. And Henry Ford was like, no, the government should build the roads or otherwise the public will rely too much on the corporate teat and we need to like tell people that they have to put their own money into the public works of their country, which I don't even know where that falls ideologically. Yeah, I'm a little bit confused here. That I'm kind of like, okay, I agree, but also there's a, there's currently a Z-axis being added to the normal political alignment chart.

Yeah, Henry Ford is somewhere in like the new dimension we're charting. Yeah, might be a few more. We're playing four or five-dimensional chess here. Yeah, so, so this kind of like, this kind of torpedoes the project of like building a bunch of roads because now they've got like they've got like half the money and you know the biggest automaker in the u.s is kind of like no i don't want to be involved with this at all this is woke somehow um and so this is the route that gets planned which uses primarily existing roads um so this is this is from the lincoln highway association which is a modern day group that's

sort of dedicated to like preserving the memory of this because it's obviously very foundational and like how Americans shaped how they travel. But you know, you can see that it's kind of like got a bazillion different colors in it. And that's because the root changed like 50 million times. Because again, it's just using roads that are there. Yes.

They, when they, when it was, when it, they basically, you know, Fisher and a bunch of other guys got together and ran it in 1913 to like inaugurate it as this mass project. It's like, oh, look, you can cross the country with this great new road system that we're going to like put signs up for. You know, You can read those signs in the lights of your oxyacetulin headlights.

Yeah. Notably, you know, it's 3,400 miles, and only 15, like, only about 1,600 miles of it were improved, which is to say, like, graded or, like, had drainage or any, like, the rest of it is just like- Any amount of work put into it at all. The rest of it is like wagon ruts, basically. Yeah. And, you know, the West is basically not a place that people, you know, like, it is not a

place that like the the modern-day American political project had worked on reshaping to its whims yet so like it is still for the intensive like New Yorkers driving their cars a intraversible desolate wilderness and prior to the invention of the crossover yeah and I just want to get this in here next slide please this isn't related to the episode at all but I need you to know how bad this guy is so Carl Fisher after he was done doing all of this, decided he would turn his attention to building Miami Beach. Yeah.

He's the guy. He is like the CFC's guy. He's had a huge negative impact on his environment. Out there like Henry Flagler, yeah. Hates the Jews. Well, you dead bitch. Yeah, no, he developed it. This is a picture of his house.

Because like in the mid-20s, this guy had like more money than God. And he was, like, putting up ads in time, the square, like, moved to the new Miami Beach as, like, the, you know, vacation, premier vacation destination. He was also a rabid anti-Semite, which is, as you pointed out, why there were, like, property restrictions. Suck that shit, you dead, bitch. This guy's, like, having one of the best times you can possibly have as a racist, because he's, like, all in on cars, which are all made by another rabid anti-Semite. Yeah. Notably, they hated each other, like, as the case of all these guys. Yeah. Just handed, like, evil happiness and he's the bad kind. He's the bad kind of anti-Semite. I'm sorry. Ross.

Yeah, no. I mean, like, I don't need to defend your honor when you get accused of being anti-Semitic because you made a joke about R.5 Bush's money again. Oh, that was a long time ago. Dare I ask. Ross did nothing wrong in that scenario. Someone just decided that Ross was anti-Semitism. Semitic. I had to back him up. Anyway, this guy was, like, insanely anti-Semitic. And I had, in a small amount of solace for the entire world, he died penniless because the great Miami Hurricane of 26 wiped out Miami Beach.

And then the Great Depression wiped out all of his money because he was way over leveraged trying to fix Miami Beach and also building like a resort community in Montau or in New York. So, Montock was also like being theorized. as America's great port at this point in time. Okay, fascinating. Yeah, I don't know that. Typical, like, American tycoon story

of, like, rags to riches to rags, but he sucked the whole time. Don't forget the dead part. Yeah, yeah. But he sucked the whole time, so, like, you know, what is the moral of the story? Who knows?

Life is bad. Anyway, next slide, please. Life is bad, but sometimes it happens to bad people. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, back to the actual highway. In 1915, they film a like movie and then drive across the country on the Lincoln Highway to promote it. It was like dubbed the like three mile film because of how much length there was in the real. It is entirely lost media. It was too flammable and Disney decided it wasn't worth preserving. So they destroyed it.

God damn mouse swamp dwelling pieces of shit. Yeah. The Disney episode is coming. God damn it. Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. Ward Kimball destroyed it because of promoted cars instead of trains. Yeah. Okay, well. But, you know, then the Great War happens,

and they don't really work on this at all because it's not really a priority. We have, like, perfectly good railroads, as this has been pointed out. You know, a 1916 road guide to the Lincoln Highway, if you'd like an idea of how rough this is, includes such advice as if you find yourself stranded near fishing, Springs, Utah, quote, build a sagebrush fire, Mr. Thomas will come with a team. He can see you 20 miles off. Honestly, this is a long-suffering man.

Oh, the longest suffering, but also this, this sounds pretty cool in a way that you have to go to some pretty far-flung locations to experience this kind of like travel difficulty now. They were a handful of- Mr. Thomas is probably on his porch. He'll see you. Don't worry. He'll come there with six horses and pull you out. You're welcome for it, douchebag. There were a handful of women that took this trip, either solo or like with family or whatever.

And like I absolutely, if like the world were completely different in, you know, in every single way, I would have so been down shit. Just like I, this is, this is like I recognize that spark of like, what if I put a van and just drove into the west in like every single person. in this way. Cannot judge. But it did suck. America is suffering from trail madness. Yeah. Like, Americans have two thoughts, right?

And it's like, okay, what if I had a hamburger? What if I had a hamburger and what if I took a road trip? What if I could do both? And then I go to in and out. Are they still print the Bible verses on cups and shit? Probably. And I don't think so. Look, you can't ruin it in and out for me.

I have nothing left. I have racking up a world historical number of L's recently. You can't take it out. I'm sorry. I need those hambrews. My Los Angeles routine is land. Get out of the airport. And for some reason,

the garage where they give all the press cars out is directly next door to the LAX in and out. So I go pick up the keys to whatever fancy car they've given me and then get a hamburger and watch. Do you have a like a badge of some kind? You could fax me a copy of just real quick. And you got to lay on the hood and watch the planes go over like Wayne's World. Yeah. So Lincoln Highway sucks. It's, you know, during the course of the Great War, the American military starts this new division called the Motor Transport Corps, which is, you know, basically we're all, they put all of the catch-all just like, hey, trucks are new.

We probably could use those for war. Let's make these guys handle that. Um, so after the war ends, they're planning to do like a convoy across America to celebrate the end of the war, the end of the flu pandemic, um, show off all this new technology. America's looking up. I mean, comprised entirely of the kind of freaks who like survive World War I in the army and go, I know a good thing when I see it. I want to stay in this fucking army. Yeah, yeah. Well, and they want to recruit new soldiers. Also, and this is a direct quote from the like planning document

that I found for this convoy it was to determine by actual experience the possibility and the problems involved in moving an army across the continent assuming that railroad facilities bridges tunnels etc. had been damaged or destroyed by

agents of an asiatic enemy so that was we were really like just frothing to do internment camps I guess even like 20 years before they happened so that's What are they thinking in Indonesia right now? Yeah, yeah. So that was, this kind of hit me like, you know, getting struck by a car as I was reading

through this, is like, ooh, that's, that doesn't look good with later context. Just being like, I'm not gonna, I'm not being racist, because I'm not gonna name the Asiatic power. Could be any of them, you know, could be Guam, you know, we don't know. What are they doing there with the tuna cannery? Um, but that's American Samoa, excuse me. Um, unfortunately. Next slide, I think is you actually, right?

Yeah, I know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I don't really know anything about the Great War. As they said that, as they said in 1066 and all that, the great war was a war between America and Germany and was thus fought in Belgium. Um, yeah, but the large, the long and short of it is a, a guy shot another guy in Serbia and then the second international shot the bed all of Europe. goes to war over essentially nothing in America gets dragged in. The GIs who go out to fight on the front line came back,

having seen two things, which are number one, the horrors, right? Number two, France has pretty good roads, huh? Yeah,

we have those. Weird, weird thing about bringing, um, uh, like French stuff back from the Great War. It's why, um,

uh, Burnley and Lancashire has a weird attachment to like one particular the French liqueur is because the, like, local regiment just brought it back with them. Meanwhile, the Americans are like, I could invent becoming a car psycho. Yes. Yes. Oh, yeah. Maybe cars are, like, cars are fundamentally French, I guess. You know, this is something that we had no idea about.

I did. The French, like, the thing is, like, the average American does not appreciate this because the last French car sold in America was the Pugéau 405. in 1991, but like every single French car from like basically the end of World War II until, I don't know. I've only driven them up until 1991, but all of them were perfect. Like literally all of them are the platonic ideal of like weird car person, like they are built by people who want to fuck the car and that's how you know they're good. I cannot afford a mistress, so I have a car. The one of them is named the SM for God's sake. Like what more do you want?

But yeah, in addition to the horrors, World War I is sort of the first major conflict where, like, motorized transport other than railways was a real going concern, at least where the United States was involved. So, you know, you have cars and trucks instead of horses and wagons, right? The war ends with the United States in a position where I think 90,000 trucks had been built for the military. Suddenly they have this pretty big motor transport corps, and they don't know. to do with it now that it's beast time, clearly it's time for a stunt.

It's like the Great White Fleet, which I'll also talk about at some point, you know. I'm just, I'm just thinking about that, unrelated, but I'm just thinking about that guy who was like, I wish I had been born in like the late 1890s, so I could have lived through World War I and World War II, and then retired during the Cold War, that was like the peak human experience, and just rotating that concept in my mind right now. It's like, yeah, I wish my life was a million times worse. I mean, to be fair. I'd see a lot of cool trains, though. That is true.

Doing like, you know, 1920s, I've seen footage. I've seen newsreels. I will also say that, like, idea of going to Europe and coming back and be like, damn, they got, like, infrastructure here is kind of funny. I took my first international trip recently to visit this lady I know who lives in Glasgow. And I came back and I was like, I was like, whoa, Scottrail is like really a usable, like service. Imagine that.

We had to go to like, we had to go to like Edinburgh. thorough at one day, and I was like, oh my God, we're gonna miss the train. When's the next one? I'm assuming she, you know, that this woman is gonna tell me like, oh, it's like four hours from now, we're completely fucked. And she's like, that's like 20 minutes. I'm like, what the fuck you talking about? Yeah, gesturing to the dedicated like next express train to Edinburgh board in the station

and being like, I don't know, fucking. Yeah, anyway. We have to speak about something similar sometime soon. Anyway, so what about if we did a big road trip? All right. I'm down. It's the American answered everything. Yeah.

I love this shit. Just transition. Don't know what to do with your life? Buy an old van driving to the desert. That's basically what the US Army's doing. My God, is the US Army going to transition? What kind of hormones are need for that? So I put these two guys here.

These are these, this is a manifest of the various vehicles on this road trip. What if you went on a road trip with 300 of you? your best friends. This is the 1919 motor transport motor transport core convoy, right? We got two Cadillacs. We got several dodges. We got a couple whites. There's observation and reconnaissance here.

We got the standard Bs. We'll talk about those. A bunch of motorcycles. Yeah. Yeah, the five Holley's, like, sick. A couple of Packards, too. We got some Dodges. We got some FWDs.

That's four-wheel drives. That was a company. The Garfords, I don't know what they are. You got the GMC ambulances and various other things. I was thinking a military ambulance is such a good fucking aesthetic. Give me the Kentucky Route Zero Humvee ambulance, you know. Some of the multiple of the motorcycles have sidecars, which is cool.

Oh, that fucks. Yeah. You got your Liberty Kitchen trailer. You got your maxwell. Do they charge $20 for a fucking hotel? Retractor. Right? You've got the Militor.

We'll talk about that later. Loader pontoon trailer turned out not to be necessary. The blacksmith truck? The blacksmith and machine shop trucks are max. You've got some Packards. You've got some Rikers, which I don't know what those are. I couldn't find pictures. You got another pair of kitchen trailers.

kitchen trailers, and you got the whites. Really clean drop of that, just in case anybody needed it. There's a lot of vehicles. Yeah, and the goal is like, you know, honestly, the number seems to vary depending on the source, but it was, I think, 50 days, right? Something like that, yeah. Yeah. And now at the time, you know, it was like, you could do this in like a minimum of 20 to 30 days,

but that assumes you're averaging 18 miles an hour and you're not 79 trucks you're just like one person taking a pleasure cruise military military convoys go pretty slow as a general role even today yeah and you know they're doing this in the middle of summer just for the record

so it's like July when they set off there's no air conditioning yeah well the thing is like the roads in Iowa and Nebraska like everything basically like in the great planes they they call them gumbo because of the consistency of the surface. I can always say one sentence of that accent.

Are you going to make so good you're going to slap your mom? Yeah, oh yeah. The trucks will sink in. They're basically hoping they're firm enough that they can drive through them without like the trucks being consumed by the earth. And it's not actually like out

to a good start. On July 12th, five days into the drive, quote from the, from the like overall trip summary report is, all tools furnished with trucks are of inferior quality and construction. Cool and cloudy, roads chucky, I'm not sure, made 35 miles in seven and a half hours. This is the good part of the trip. Yes. Just like, I've had three hammer handles break off in my hand, day two. Yeah, I mean, and they're doing, they're doing a schedule of six days driving.

On Sunday they rest, right? So one fun one is, of course, on the fourth day out, there's a terrific mountain thunderstorm. One GMC cargo truck skidded over the road on the Laurel Hill descent near Ligonier, Pennsylvania, and was lost down the mountainside beyond hope of recovery. Oh, it's bad. fully Italian jobs. Yeah. By the first week, they reach

East Palestine, Ohio. I've heard of that. By the second week, they reach Chicago Heights. Why is it called Chicago Heights? 50 feet above Chicago. That is Heights. And several miles away. Does this say on the slides,

then it got bad? Oh, no. Yeah, no. Then it got bad. Yeah. Next slide, please. Here's one of my favorite images. As somebody who has had the succumbed to the American Madness to Road Trip and sunk her van in the banks of the Colorado River somewhere in like rural Arizona, that shit sucks. That is my expert opinion. That's baked in there.

That's a tandoor at that point. You're just cooking a wheel. Yeah. So remember what I mentioned about the gumbo roads? Yeah. Yeah, they were still gumbo than they hit them even in the middle of July. So basically they get out of Illinois

and it's just like, okay, this is a serious problem. We're getting stuck everywhere. They also noticed that none of their drivers know how to drive yet because they're all like 19 year old army recruits who are desperately excited to go fight in like the trenches in France. What do you mean

it's not a horse? They can't get me home drunk. Yeah. Getting getting your like, I missed deployment thing for well. World War One is, oh, just like this completely like fresh-eyed idealist being like, tell me what it was like to a guy with like half an arm left, whose like lungs are like mostly vesiccant sort of like globules. I got the feeling from reading about this that this seemed like it was kind of fun.

I don't know. It's, okay, my chief impression was that it was the most type two fun of all time. Just kind of like a history of this period of the U.S. Army where it's like genocide, genocide, fuck around, fuck around, fuck around, fuck around, fuck around, like put down strikes, put down strikes, put down strikes, fuck around. Like horror the likes of which no one has ever seen. Road trip. Yeah.

So yeah. And I will say like, you know, they're spending like 15 hours a day in some of these sections to just prep the surface of the road to get the trucks to not sick. into it. That fucking sounds horrible. By Nebraska, they've encountered quicksand and sank into it. QuickSat was one of the things I thought was going to be really big in my adult life and then I never got quicksanded.

You know, by the time that they hit Utah, it's 110 degrees in the shade and 130 in the sun. Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, they, you know, they hit the Sierra Nevada and that's like, it's 30 degrees outside. And this is, of course, again, mostly guys who are. were bummed they missed out and going to Europe by the Great War. And when they started getting mountain passes, like, out in, like, you know, the actual Rockies in Wyoming or whatever, they're, they don't know how to drive. And so they keep blowing up trucks by downshifting wrong because you can't rely on your

brakes at this time, right? Like, they're, like, leather pads strapped to, like, an open, you know, drum brake assembly. And so the way you slow trucks down, down a big grade is, like, you use engine braking. And the thing is, is like, if you don't really know how to do this, you'll just over-rev the engine and blow up whatever the weakest link in your drive train is. So they're like going through transmissions and drive shafts and everything like water. There's actually, this reminds me, my grandfather, may he rest in peace, was like a recruited, was like a draft into Korean War, right? And he went to Germany to like one of the new bases that we had put in over there.

It was like part of the Marshall Project. And he, I remember him telling me about a time that he had to drive his like commanding officer down a convoy on like the Autobahn, right? And, you know, the trucks are actually making some pretty decent speed here. And he's of course like 19 and doesn't know how to drive stick. So he's he's describing basically he puts the Jeep in first gear and is redlining the piss out of it for like seven miles at 30 miles an hour because he doesn't know that he can shift and go to further gears. and imagine this guy is the whole military everybody driving a truck

is basically that guy for this road trip and that's where we're at we also like the the antics of this which I guess I'm giving away a fun little surprise later but Dwight Eisenhower is here

as one of the guys who's bummed he didn't get to go die in the trenches I believe his official title here is Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower is in the observer. Yeah, from the war department, which we're getting back now. Just like, stand there with your hands on your hips and go, damn, that's crazy.

Oh, that's gone poorly, huh? Yeah. He, and this is apocryphal, so I'm not 100% certain it was actually him, but like, he played a prank on the camp somewhere in Royal Wyoming by like mimicking war calls of Native what they thought Native American people would sound like, and almost like restarted the Indian Wars. Yeah, there was apparently some kind of urgent conversation that says, no, don't call Washington, that was fake.

Yeah. Don't have to put down the Lakota again. Yeah, it turns out that the answer to the question, y'all mind if a white boy speaks a little Lakota this evening is yes, very much. Please don't. Yeah, so there's kind of your intersection of like, playful, like American, you know, let's fuck around and also let's do horrible war crimes so woohoo we did it we synthesized it it's two things notably not communism however anyway they they end up abandoning nine vehicles along the course of

this trip and 21 men who all get sick because they they're they're trying to be self-sufficient right like this is war conditions they're bringing their own water and they're running out of water sometimes they bring you like water sources they find and you know they're they're having dodgy food and so 21 guys get left behind his casualties basically um official number of breakdowns according to like the post trip report was 230 and this includes like doing this which is like burying your truck up to its engine block and sand um but like that's just basically every time that happens somebody's got to dig it out or fix a truck or you know and the whole convoy has to stop um they destroyed 88 bridges because they kept driving over them and they would just

break underneath the weight of the truck. So, yeah. And they did this while averaging five and a half hours of sleep at night. Incredible. I mean, that may have something to do with it as well. Well, in fairness, they did put the heaviest truck first, which is with the engineering team. And that had an artillery tractor on the flatbed.

You know, so ideally, like, and that was with the engineering team was there. So they would try and shore up the bridge if it looked like it was going to fall down. And then they would run the truck over it. And if it didn't fall down, that was good. And if it did fall down, well, none of them fell down bad enough to put that truck out of commission. So, you know, it worked. Yeah. You know, the only aspect of this, it was like a just huge runaway success was that 3.25 million people came out to see them.

Basically, every town they drove into, they had a huge welcoming party with like a big, you know, banquet. And the mayor would come out and be like, here's the key to the city. you. You know, so like that was, from a PR perspective, that was great. They didn't actually recruit that many people, though. Yeah. On the way out, you destroy the only bridge out of town, because the weight of the keys of the city, like, is just slightly too much for it.

They did actually have some cars that were, like, purely devoted to public relations. They would go out, you know, 20 miles ahead and say, hey, we're making camp tonight in your town. Yeah. Could you get the mare out? Could we, like, I don't know, go to the saloon. Yeah. Just being like, can we stash the, like, 20 guys with dysentery in the back so that they're, you know. Yeah, can we violate the Third Amendment, bro?

Yeah, exactly. And then it's like, you know, they were like, yeah, we don't have television. Let's have a party. We don't even have a radio yet. That's still for like, I don't know, not rescuing the Titanic. So, yeah, Big Bank wants the whole way. I think these guys, I, again, I think these guys actually had a pretty, good time overall.

Yeah, I mean, compared to like being in the military, like day to day in 1919, you have to figure. Like, to that old, like, George Patton is screaming at you and he's still in like, kind of like twinked out and he's going and, you know, it's not handling as well. I'm mad that the germers are the ones running the concentration camps. Yeah. Yeah. And like, as somebody who's had to do dodgy roadside repairs when I got vehicles out where

they shouldn't be, it's kind of fun. Because then if you live and everybody here did, then you're like, I. did this really cool thing. It was like, oh, that's crazy. You fixed a Toyota high-ice with handcuffs. And you'd be like, yeah. That's me, actually. I am that woman.

Yeah, but then I believe Roz is a breakdown of all of the vehicles. I have a breakdown of select vehicles and their problems. Oh, well, there's your, oh, dear. So these are the FWD Model Bs, right? like, FWD stands for four-wheel drive. They have solid rubber tires. Beautiful. I'm realizing at this point how much I need the fucking Snow Runner 1919 reboot, you know?

Solid rubber tires is just like shooting for a high score on the NVH rating. Autojournalist gets in just like, gets their filling is shaken out. Like, oh yeah. It's really visceral guys. These ones, I think they had three of them. They were apparently pretty good. They had some fan belt issues. The fan belts were made of leather, by the way.

They were difficult to steer. Otherwise, they ran pretty well on bad terrain. They pulled through all the muddy roads unaided. All of them made the full trip. Turns out four-wheel drive works pretty good. The Audi quarter of that day. I think the four-wheel drive corporation eventually went on to make fire trucks and then airport crash tenders.

Oh, sick. Yeah. Some real, like, you know, you as a kid think this is the coolest vehicle in existence and your right vehicles. Yeah. These were three-ton trucks. Now, on the other hand, there's a different Model B, which is the Class B standardized military truck.

These were produced in enormous quantities in World War I. You know, there's, I think about 14,000 of these were made by, like, 20 or 30 different manufacturers, right? When America was first on it, to USS, we built this yesterday's shit. Yeah, exactly. Three-ton capacity. It had a four-speed transmission to get you up to a blistering 15 miles an hour. Wow.

Imagining the actual, like, Fast and Furious shifting scenes. It was, like, barely keeping up with a horse. They had quite a few of these in the convoy. I forget how many offhand and one of them broke down and had to be towed every single goddamn day. Do you mean a different, a different one? Oh, do you mean, okay. I'm gonna kill Dwight D.I's down with the bare heads at this point.

Except for two days when they were near Stockton, California. Yeah, but they were stopped, so you might as well be broken down. It was healed by Stockton, uh, which is the only time that's ever happened to anything. big issue with these because, you know, they were all made by different manufacturers and the standardized B was not very standardized. There was no consistent source of breakdowns. Every single truck broke down in a different way. Yep, USS we built this yesterday. Yep. Yep. Yep. So they had leaky radiators, excessive fan belt wear, hood fastener failures, head gasket failures, broken valve lifters. That was a big one. It happened at 50 different ways.

I'm trying the hood fastener one as well as the, all of this other shit happens, like the engine seizes in a way that's completely unfixable, and then the hood falls off as well. Just out of spite, just to be like, fuck you. Thrown rods, broken carburetors, also in 50 different ways. Short circuits in the magneto, which I believe is an old-fashioned term for an alternator, or an old-fashioned type of alternate. He does the same thing. Yeah, it's like, what if an alternator could like, you know,

give you an electric shock more readily, right? Loose steering wheels. Sure. Bent, bent axles, and many others. They never had the same problem twice. The only thing, I guess, they left from their mistakes. Yeah. The only thing that consistently worked on them was the transmission.

The transmission was rock solid on these guys. Thank you, Mr. Allison, you know. Yeah. Another model of truck. This is the Mac five and a half ton truck. I think I sort of, I'm pretty sure it's got a Mac logo on the front. And I don't know of any other Macs they put on this. Giving, giving disowned here, you know.

Great game. I don't know very much about these. Two of the five were set up as the mobile machine shop and the mobile blacksmith shop, right? They overheated a lot. They drank 50 gallons of water a day per truck. Jesus. That's what that's okay. They had a change.

drive instead of a drive shaft. Drive shafts were pretty common at this point, right? So chain drive is like, okay, the rear axle is powered with the chain like a fucking bicycle. Those immediately clogged with sand and mud once they crossed the Mississippi, and that locked the rear wheels solid, right? So once they became disabled, they could only be towed backwards. is a flat circle. But they could go backwards at full speed, right?

I will get to that. This is the Packard one and a half ton truck. They were pretty good. Just this one works. I love how horse all of these look in themselves. Like they really had like an engine front in a way that gives it a kind of like a face, you know? Oh yeah. This is the Militor.

Hell, yes. All right, I love this thing. Reminds me a Pint Scout or if you kind of like, you know, retro-futurism did. This guy could go a whopping 15 miles an hour, and this was designed not to be a truck, but to be an artillery tractor, right? It had this big power winch on it. This is not the specific Militour. This is a different one.

This thing was heavy as fuck. It had chains on the tires. It was like, it was like, this is like the 1919 duff-wag. What's that one fucking game? Is it Sithe, maybe? The like... Twisted metal? No, no, no.

It's like the board game that's like kind of like 1910s, 1920s, like, fucking... Hold on. I think you mean twisted metal, no. No, I don't. I mean the board game, Sithe is what I mean. So I was right the first time. You put like a creepy-looking clown driving that thing, and I would be like, yeah, that's my main. I mean, what I've done is I've said, hey, this thing set in an alternate history in 1920s

reminds me of the 1920s. So I'm really contributing here. So this guy was assigned as, you know, the main support vehicle, the main tow truck, it eventually ended up towing nine trucks at once. Oh, geez. That's no one of games like that too. Like, send in more trucks. Yeah.

I paid for this DLC piece of shit, I'm gonna drive it out of the thing. if it kills me. It was always stationed at the rear of the convoy to pick up anyone who broke their truck. It was completely indispensable, right? In Salt Lake City, it went out like the Bluesmobile. But there was a valiant effort by the mechanics on the convoy,

who by the way, had a full machine shop and full blacksmith's job. They were like, okay, we're going to put Humpty Dumpty back together. We're gonna forge a new one out of the asses of the old. We can rebuild him, we have the technology. And they did it, right? They did it.

Oh my God. With like one bearing still needing replacement, the expeditionary commander said, nah, just sent it by rail to San Francisco, and it went away. Incredible. This was a bad decision. Yeah, I'll say. which apparently is in a supplementary document that I could not find. It left only a single five-ton, treaded artillery tractor with the engineering corps as, you

know, the tow vehicle, which unlike the Militor, could not keep up with the convoy, because it was an actual tractor tractor, right? The sort of Northern Lions sells the item that's been carrying the whole run moment, yeah, sure. when we needed it most he disappeared so yeah and miscellaneous equipment um there were two two types of kitchen trailers two of each um they had very rough rides pots and pans and cans just fell on the floor and then rolled out of the vehicle um there were two four-wheeled kitchen trailers right um those went to pieces in nevada and california and then there were two two wheeled kitchen trailers

which blew up very early on when the ranges fell out of them those were abandoned both had a big issue where they needed like major parts both had an issue were like major parts of their suspension had to be replaced

like several times a week they had a bunch of motorcycles again with side cars you know they did very poorly on the bad roads the tires weren't wide enough. Yeah, that guy on the top right looks like he's not happy in his work, I'll say that. Yeah.

Realizing his left leg is off the bike and is sinking. Yeah. The pontoon trailer they brought turned out not to be necessary. There were a lot of cars with the convoy, which generally did pretty well. The artillery tractor, the treaded one, lost one of its treads when it was pulling a truck out of quicksand. Um, the most suitable vehicles, of course, the Hannibal Twin 8 and the Leslie Special did not compete. Um, yeah, and then there's some images here.

Here's like a typical bridge that they were collapsing. It's just like two beams of wood with like a deck over it. Okay, yeah, I'm not mad at them for collapsing this when they get the piece of the city anymore. This is made of match sticks. Yeah, exactly. Like even the big infrastructure, like the bridge over the Mississippi, like that's spindle is all hell. Like my God. And then like some of the roads here, you can see here's the typical

road with a, you know, the mountain road with the mountain on one side and the cliff on the other. Incredible. Yeah. This looks type two fun. I would do it. I would, well, I can't do it anymore because they won't let, they won't let trans women go do drock shit in the military now. But, you know, we need to bring back woke so I can take a road. Bring back woke so Victoria can do this. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. Victoria Scott famed his supporter of the American imperialism. Well, if the military only did this shit, then would have been like, who cares?

We were doing interventions in Latin America, right, of course. Come join the road trip core. So yeah, this was pretty goofy. Yeah, so it ended up being 56 days traveling with an average of 10 and a quarter hours on the road working to keep these things running with six total rest days for a total of 62 days

to get from New York to San Francisco average moving speed on travel days 6.07 miles per hour they were a week late and it's just yeah and like here's another bridge that broke you can see like this whole thing was just kind of like well I wonder if we could do this

and the answer was kind of no you can't At this point, if you would like to get large equipment of, large amounts of, like, military personnel and equipment across the country, you should use the incredibly well-developed railroad we have built, which at this point in time, again, the Milwaukee Road has already got the Pacific Extension. You can take an electric train from Montana to Tacoma, Washington, without any problem whatsoever. Or, conversely, you could take a leaf out of one Indianapolis used car dealer's book and just hook them all to a balloon. backwards in fact yeah and the main lesson what do we learn what do we learn from this

you should have one kind of truck made by one manufacturer instead of like two dozen different companies all building the same all building like some variation of the same truck like you can have one problem you should invest in tools so you're not breaking three hammers on day one

And also, that's what you have the blacksmith truck for us to make more hammers, you know. And also the military should know how to drive. They're going to drive trucks, which, based on my grandfather's anecdote from the Korean War era, I don't think that they ever learned that. My understanding is that along the way, most people did figure out how to drive the truck by the time they were in, like, Nevada. Yeah, but like, that's the part where you have, like, you need to learn how to downshift really well. And that's where you're going to blow up your engine because. because, you know, thrown rods and stuff because you're overreving it and the motor's failure mode is not like, oh, you know, it stops, it overheats or whatever. It's like it explodes.

Yeah, just drops out. Yeah. They also added a mess officer in Nebraska and they found out that this helps morale, shockingly. And it, I think that this really- Please speed us. I'm tired of robbing farms. I don't know. My question is, what did they do? Because they had dropped both all four kitchen trailers at that point. On the 1920s MRI, it's all lead soldered cans, you know. And this did lead us to the final incarnation of American foreign policy, which is, next slide please, the Tactical Burger King. Of course.

This is my favorite image out of the global war on terror. I want to see one of these negotiating a really narrow, twisty roads is the thing. It's the thing we're good at. and the American military, it's logistics. See how long that holds. As Hegis said, lethality, lethality. That's how I know we're at the true death of neoliberalism, is that we will not be able to put the Burger King truck in Kandahar anymore.

And that was like, neoliberalism was like, we're going to do something incredibly evil in like a way where we cloak it in decent language, and we're going to like expand the project so everybody can have an hand to the evil, and also we're going to be really good at getting Burger Kings into, like, very remote places. You will be floored at where we can get a Burger King. And now we can't do that. And the military's not woke. So we're in a new exciting era.

Lethality. Yeah. Now you're going to have the steak and shake trailer. Yeah, with the towel or the tallow guy in his restaurant in Southwest Hill. We ran out of a towel. Yeah. I know there's a giant tanker full of vegetable oil right there, but we can't use it. I mean, just imagining the future episode and, like,

the 2070s when like people have rediscovered the old recordings of this show and they're like they're doing like an homage to it and there's an episode about like the great the great steak and shake incident of the civil war of 35 and they're like yeah you know our predecessors really loves to joke about you know the ability of the American military to put hamburgers in war torn places this got dark never mind I'm abandoning this joke midstream next slide please I hinted at it earlier But guess who's back? It's fucking Eisenhower. White Eisenhower, yeah. Yeah, he's here as an observer. He's so gay. I picked this image specifically for you, Nova, because he looked insanely gay. He looks so happy to see me. It's just like, he just looks like he just stole an apple pie off the window sill in this image.

I've seen, I've seen, I've seen straight-looking photos of Truman Caposi. Yes, he joined the trip because he was bummed out. He didn't go to a fight in the Great War. He saw himself, according to his memoirs, quote, in the years ahead, putting on weight in a meaningless chairbound assignment, shuffling papers and filling out forms. So he joined partly on a lark, end quote. And, yeah, then he decided that he ended up devoting an entire chapter of his memoirs

to like this trip, and it made a huge impact on him. and about like the general state of American infrastructure and kind of like how logistics could be done. And next slide, please. The fifth time the like hood falls off the truck that is already buried in quicksand, you're like, fuck this, I'm going to invent the interstate highway system. Yeah. Yeah.

This center image, which I found incredibly comedic, comes directly from the United States Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration. I'm thinking about those roads. What's the legality of putting that in a t-shirt ourselves? I mean, I think they're going to defun it. It's public domain. Yeah. And also, like, what are they going to sue you?

They don't have any lawyers left. They literally, we got missing the goddamn news, but like, they literally, I found out today that they couldn't find a grand jury to indict the guy that threw the sandwich. Sandwich guy, yeah. Yeah, and the ice agents in D.C., they literally cannot indict a hand sandwich. government over. Anyway, yeah. So in his words and his memoir,

the old convoy had started me thinking about good two-lane highways, but Germany in World War II had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land. So you might say to me at this point, but Victoria, the Reichs-autobahn, which is what Hitler insisted you call the Autobahn, It was basically unused by the Wehrmacht for any defense purposes at all. Like, it was completely useless. It was a huge boondoggle. They spent a ton of fucking money on.

And the whole, like, light-colored highways that Hitler insisted upon because they looked pretty on like the pastoral landscape were like a tactical problem. They had to paint them all black during World War II. And also they were all like graded and designed really stupidly because they were just trying to like, you know, sell this like scenic enjoyment. And that meant that no trucks could drive, like, up any of the grades. So they were totally unused by, like, the Germans for the entire length of World War II. And also, like, Germany didn't have any personal cars.

And so, like, nobody really drove on them. They're totally useless. And really, the only actual use that the Autobahn had at any point during World War II was for the Allies to invade with because it was just, like, this nice straight shot directly into all their major city centers. And notably, the Allies also destroyed. destroyed all of the roads by driving on them with tanks. So you would think that like Victoria, surely, you know, that defeats the whole purpose of the interstate highway system

for like a military use. And yeah, you'd be right. He just thought it was cool. He just thought this was a great idea to like build a bunch of highways. And then we ended up with the image on the right. And now you have to spend $12,000 a year on a device that has, by the time you're done with it, no resale value, so you can get to work.

So thank you. President Dwight Eisenhower. It is kind of funny that, you know, we built the highway, the interstate highway system on the grounds of defense, right? And then practically speaking, practically speaking, when you move military equipment around within the United States. Just going through a field, man. It's all rail.

Yes. Yeah, it's literally like, we're putting 500 tanks on 200 flat cars. Yeah. You know, it's... I mean, they did that for the stupid parade even. Yeah, yeah, they had the... 50 military bases within driving distance. And the thing is you can't drive a fucking tank on a road.

It destroys the road. Yeah, we have to bring it. It would have been better. It would have better to leave them all fucking unpaved. We have to bring, uh, we have to bring, you know, 200 tanks up there and also like 200 low boy trailer, tractor trailers. And also it's like, it's not like, roads are not like susceptible to bombing. I don't understand the logic here. It's like, well, rails, rail infrastructure is so, you know, uniquely susceptible to, like,

sabotage. It's like, you can blow up a road. You can block a road. Like, I don't understand the thought process here. You can also, as demonstrated by the Russia, Ukraine conflict, you know, do modern warfare entirely with trains. Yeah. Ukrainian railroad, railway guys are really good at fixing stuff real fast. Yeah. No, so you might, you know, like it once again, the United States wins World War II and then it's like what if we just import all the stupidest shit that the Nazis did to the United States and yeah

now we have like the United States Audubon system which notably is significantly worse than like the German Autobahn because you can't drive fast on it I would also say in sort of defense of Eisenhower that a lot of the stuff that the internet at the interstate highway

system became was not something that was sort of intentional from the way he envisioned it like the idea of you know we're going to drive the interstate directly into cities it was supposed to more mirror the idea of like the first super highway the Pennsylvania Turnpike where you sort of skirt the edges of the city as opposed to you know blasting directly through it but yeah we got all this this huge pot of money from you know the defense aid highway act which people used to do racism and blow up every black neighborhood in America.

Yeah, it's certainly great. And this is, we are still, Dwight Eisenhower took a dumb road trip with his buddies 105 years ago, and I am still dealing with the consequences of it is kind of like my whole argument for researching this episode. It was kind of like, damn, it really is this guy's fault. Dwight Eisenhower took a road trip with his buddies

and now I don't have a trolley to center city. Right. Well, as frequently. Yeah, no, average car, actually, average cost of car ownership in the U.S. is around $12,000 a year according to AAA right now. New car price is, I think, $48,000. They're expensive now.

That's proven real sustainable. I don't, even like used car prices are really expensive right now. Yeah, average used cars, I think I want to say, 29 as of the last time I checked. Jesus, right. So, you know. That's, yeah, I don't know. What I learned is that cars are bad.

Yeah, what do we learn? Car bad. Car bad. Truck kind of funny. Truck is pretty funny. Motorcycle with sidecar? Cool. Cool.

Every American experiences the death drive to get in the stupidest contraption available to you and just head straight for the horizon through the worst roads possible. Motorcycle with sidecar, like you need like your little friend to go in there. Then you have like a sidekick, though. Yeah, that sounds fun. It's intimate, you know?

I have thought how cool it would be if, like, I learned how to ride a motorcycle with a sidecar and, like, my wife and I think they were a cross-country road trip, like, a year old or something. That's going to be easier than, like, a regular motorcycle, right? Do you need a different license for it in, like, most? Oh, interesting. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. I didn't know that.

It's got a difference. Well, because it's not a two, it's not like a single wheel propulsion. Like a year old's got a rear axle. It's two-wheel drive. Oh, I didn't know. I thought it was just something you attached to it. Depends on the bike. I thought of something you just attached to it.

Yeah, it depends on the bike. But year olds, which are kind of like the ones that you see. Like there's somebody like nearby me who has a year old. And like those are two rear driven wheels, which is part of what makes them cool is because they're way better at like doing off-roading. They're very like quintessentially adventure bikes. And you can, you know, it's can take somebody with you and it's cool. Like wear the little like Audrey Hepburn style like, you know, scarf covering your hair,

put on a big pair of shades, you know. Go off-roading, I think it'd be fun. What if you had two sidecars and no extra wheels? I think you've invented a high-capacity tricycle. No, no, you still have only the one-wheel in fact. Sidecars just have to balance. Like, if your friends weigh different amounts, you have to give one of them a sandbag or something.

Carrying my buddies in my Honda Goldwing's hard bags. All right, well, you know, I do believe what we've learned today is that you two could go on a road trip with 300 of your best friends and fundamentally change the course of history and cause climate change. Never let it be said that, like, individual action can't change the world for the worse. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands for danger. Giday, cunts. I wonder what country this is from. Good day. This is a story of why the pictured flag post has protective fencing. It takes place shortly before the fencing was put up. See, because of me, they have a fence. Like my last safety third story, this one occurred during a historic motorsport event.

But before getting to the incident, I'll give some context on standard flagging practice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know. like different colors, handkerchiefs, one side means top, one side means bottom, like... This image looks up track, the approaching angle for cars, before they

leave to the right of the picture heading down track, or DT. Flag marshals typically stand face to face and a few feet apart, with the DT marshal stood further away from the track. One reason for this, one reason

for this arrangement, is in case a car hits the post. The official who can't see the approaching car has some warning, usually in the form of the other marshal panicking and fleeing. The non-official advice in such a scenario is to follow suit. On the day of the instant,

the D.T. Marshall was an experienced marshal teaching a trainee with only a handful of days' trackside at most. Things started to go wrong when a blue M.G. blew its decades-old oil hoses off the engine while accelerating down the straight, approaching the post. Some of the spilled oil was transformed

into a thick cloud obscuring the track. I love motorsports. The rest of it was dumped onto the track on the racing line, automatically used by the race cars, including the one seconds behind the blue MG. The senior marshal began waving a flag, to warn drivers of what was going on.

His arm going past the arm co-fence. I believe... Oh, no. Oh, oh, okay. Yeah, uh-huh. I believe he would have been fully focused on the blue car, his other hand on the talk button of his headset, ready to give race control required information. The next car, which was a red M.G, came along.

Perhaps lost in the haze, it hit the oil trail and lost control, veering hard. directly into the flag post and hitting it at speed. An upright end plate on a car's wing sliced through the marshal's wrist, including the bone, as I've been told, by him, leaving it barely attached to the rest of him.

This event was quickly red flagged and the injured marshal was seen to by on-track medical staff. Wave flag with remaining arm. Yeah. The event was quickly red-fledged, flagged and the injured marshal was seen to by on-track medical staff before being transferred to a public ambulance had taken for emergency surgery. The poor trainee, meanwhile, was physically unhurt, but in shock, and was sent home for the

day. Yeah, I mean, you've just seen a fucking samurai movie special effect pop off. Like, I would take the day as well, yeah. Yeah, I'd probably take that day off, yeah. You just saw the, the wrist get cut off and slide slowly, you know. Oh. Thanks, Ross. From an M.G.

This is basically just all of early motorsport. Yeah. Still at least about a present motorsport, I guess. I've seen some pretty sketchy shit going to like little small town tracks. People will just, tech inspection is like, yeah, batteries probably zip tight in well enough. Yeah, go out. It looks good to me. Fast forward to the day before I took this picture, and I had that same senior marshal on my post.

post, happy to be trackside and willing to wave flags with either hand or both when we were busy. I believe the trainee from that day is also still flagging. While I was at this flag post, myself and the other marshal made sure to stand well back during race starts and whenever we didn't need to wave flags. And it was a good day. Can't keep a good marshal down. Whenever I read stories like this, I'm just like, I, the amount of PTSD that you've just going to be like volumetrically compressing into the base of your spine to just be like,

yeah, I'm going to go out and wave flags again. What if what if you're just fine? What if it's like, yeah, it took my hand, but like, I don't know. I got it back. No harm, no foul. Like, I was involved in like a relatively minor car accident with no injuries and no other cars involved. And it took me like months before I could like drive a car without having vivid flashbacks.

Yeah, right. right I just I said right no I was completely agreeing with you yeah like I just these people are built different good good for them

I don't know just fascinating to me because that would that would probably fuck me up a little bit it's love of the game genuinely love of the game wow that was

safety third our next episode will be on Chernobyl does anyone have any commercials before we go I got one really quick that's cool yeah of course yes um no just because i ask doesn't mean i want you to do it

i'd be decent i uh my book we deserve this which is the trans feminine fashion lookbook with like the car theme um is actually going to i'm going to be speaking about it at elliot bay books in seattle um on september 8th so if anybody wants to hear like come ask me questions about it or like you know hear more of the process of creating it i'll be talking about it there i'm also me on like the local news about it which is kind of cool um yeah so that'll be that'll be fun um you can buy that for our books and you can put links in the script i presume uh but yeah that's it i just i was excited about this event and i'd love it people came out and you know said hi absolutely we'll kill you right yes yeah you better go to that you're gonna have to go to that yeah i don't know what else listen to all

the podcasts we're on yes yeah yes all right bye everybody podcast bye all right thank you again for having me anytime literally anytime oh this is fun Thank you.