Pod Insights Endless Thread Toyota Hilux trucks - why are they popular online and in war zones? About this episode In April of 2024, a group of aid workers were killed by Israeli Defense Forces https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68714128 while bringing food to Central Gaza. The IDF had alleged that its military analysts had identified a gunman on top of one of the trucks carrying supplies, suggesting it was a military vehicle, not an aid vehicle.
In the online debate following the event, a familiar trope popped up: arguing over whether one of the aid trucks a Toyota Hilux. The reason? In military conflict around the globe, the Hilux is a familiar character. Whether you're a U. S. designated terrorist group, a "freedom fighter," or someone else involved in direct armed conflict, you probably know about the Hilux.
Endless Thread wanted to know why, and how, this happened. So we took a journey beyond America's commercial pickup truck identity to understand why beyond our borders, the Hilux is the truck of choice.
Credits: This episode was produced by Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. It was co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast. When Joe Missoula got the Celtics job, Steve Paliuka sat up until 1:00 in the morning, typing him 25 things about leadership. Dr. Sharon Turbin asks what came first on the list. Listen closely wherever you get your podcasts.
0:19 Amory Sivertson? Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.
0:34 Speaker 02 Observe: The North American Dad. 50s. Great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, "Dang, that's a good offer." The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle. No one called him "boss." He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.
1:05 Speaker 00 WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
1:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, I'm Warren Stoddard. I'm in a MFA program for creative writing and do some teaching and some working on motorcycles. I guess what you would call for a living.
1:25 Ben Brock Johnson? All right. Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance. I like it.
1:29 Speaker 03 Something like that.
1:33 Amory Sivertson? Warren Stoddard is a man who some might describe as having an old soul. When he speaks, he speaks slowly, thoughtfully. He sounds like he's working stuff out.
1:44 Speaker 03 Faced by my mom, my dad, I was killed when I was younger.
1:48 Ben Brock Johnson? Warren's from a little town in Texas, the big state with big hats, big trucks. And for Warren, big memories.
1:58 Speaker 03 I was about three years old, three and a half, and can remember that vividly and like remember the feeling of that loss. And I always was like sort of obsessed with this idea of what you leave behind whenever you're gone.
2:16 Amory Sivertson? After his father was killed in an altercation with a neighbor, Warren's own history took a somewhat expected route. Texas State, football, knee injuries from football, an inability to enlist in the military because knee injuries from football. But then things got unexpected again.
2:36 Speaker 03 It's always been pretty hard for me to ignore things that are happening on the world stage just because I'm, I guess, interested in history and interested in how my life might intersect with history.
2:52 Amory Sivertson? Warren's life first intersected with history when, after viewing the Turkish invasion of what he describes as a peaceful Kurdish enclave in Syria, he says he found amongst the dregs of a Google search, an email address for joining a Kurdish fighting force.
3:09 Speaker 03 They sent me a questionnaire. I answered the questions. They sent me a bunch of books that I needed to read. Read all the books and did a little book report. And they liked my answers enough and they told me to buy a one-way ticket to Sulaymanya in Iraq.
3:29 Ben Brock Johnson? It was in Iraq where Warren would enter the fray of the war against ISIS. And where, a long way from Texas, he noticed the local truck trend.
3:41 Speaker 03 First time I ever saw a Tordah Hilux was in Sulaymanya.
3:45 Amory Sivertson? You couldn't just fly into Syria. So Warren got smuggled over the Iraq border in a pickup truck.
3:52 Speaker 03 We were all piled up in the back of one of those. I think it was 12 of us in the bed. And the bed was covered so that from the outside, it looked like somebody might be transporting chickens. It was just incredibly rough terrain. It was the kind of road that seemed like a mule or a horse or a person on foot might be able to traverse. It felt very old. But doing it in that truck was just this loching, bouncing, bumpy ride in the middle of the night. And the truck never missed a beat.
4:29 Amory Sivertson? Warren and other fighters eventually headed to the front line of combat, landing in a city in southern Syria, on the banks of the Euphrates. His group of fighters was trying to push into a suburb.
4:42 Ben Brock Johnson? Several guys, including Warren, ended up in an abandoned house. He says that first night, it was the coldest he'd ever been in his life.
4:58 Amory Sivertson? The next day, they burned the furniture they could find in the house. The other side was lighting fires, too.
5:04 Speaker 03 ISIS lit a bunch of tires on fire. It kind of created this huge black cloud that drifted over the top and toward us so that they could get cover from any airstrikes. To kind of add to their fortune, a dust storm then rolled in. Then maybe at 2 o'clock that afternoon, we started taking small arms fire.
5:28 Ben Brock Johnson? Warren and his fellow fighters set out to engage with ISIS. To do that, they had to get to the rooftop of the house they were in and return fire.
5:36 Speaker 03 And then the three of us ran up onto the roof and then got into a little bit of a firefight.
5:42 Amory Sivertson? Warren isn't sure, but he thinks the US military was supporting the Kurds by shooting mortars towards the ISIS positions. But it was windy, and the mortars were landing close by the Kurds. All of a sudden, a big explosion erupted in the wall on the rooftop next to Warren's face.
6:02 Speaker 03 I got shot by a dushka.
6:05 Ben Brock Johnson? What's that?
6:06 Speaker 03 It's kind of like an anti-aircraft gun, 50-cal hybrid. They're real big.
6:12 Amory Sivertson? Warren thinks the gun that hit him was positioned in a water tower. But he wasn't even sure what hit him at first.
6:19 Speaker 03 I kept patting myself because I felt numb in these spots, and I thought that was weird. And then grabbed the back of my leg and pulled my hand away, and it was covered in blood. And then I looked down, and my boot had a little hole in it. And then there was blood starting to pool inside the boot. So then I was like, well, it looks like I'm injured.
6:45 Ben Brock Johnson? One of the other Arab fighters who had been with him on the rooftop was standing with Warren.
6:49 Speaker 03 He was like, "I think we ought to get you out of here." And I was like, "That sounds like a great idea." So he...
6:56 Ben Brock Johnson? I wouldn't mind that at all.
6:57 Speaker 03 Yeah. That sounds wonderful. Thank you.
7:01 Ben Brock Johnson? He says that the 50 caliber bullet that exploded in the wall next to him sent two pieces of shrapnel into his face. Another piece had lodged in Warren's armpit. Another piece took out a chunk of his leg.
7:13 Amory Sivertson? Warren says another fighter pulled up from behind the combat line in a pickup truck modified with armor. He was hoisted into the vehicle and sped out of there. Warren remembers that drive well.
7:27 Ben Brock Johnson? Especially the sound of the shelling from the other side. He says the shells exploding around the truck were singing.
7:35 Speaker 03 Just the noise of the metal coming off of the mortar bursts.
7:41 Speaker 03 It has a certain whistle hiss that goes through the air.
7:47 Ben Brock Johnson? But the one detail that Warren seems to keep coming back to in his story is a detail you might not notice if Warren didn't sound almost wistful about it. The one thing that got him into Syria and the one thing that got him out.
8:04 Amory Sivertson? A pickup truck called the Toyota Hilux.
8:09 Speaker 03 The truck that we that I got slung into was a Hilux. It had seen some stuff. There was a bullet hole in the windshield, but it was a pickup truck and then they just sped me out of there.
8:27 Amory Sivertson? We think of the pickup truck as the American car. We know what it represents, according to the advertisements we're fed all the time in America. Masculinity, durability, dependability, toughness.
8:42 Ben Brock Johnson? Let's see that again. Some terrific pumping, huh? Like a rockness.
8:52 Amory Sivertson? The most country guitar pluckin', heavyweight haulin', hard hat wearin', mud sprayin', America identity makin' commercials you will ever see on television are for every form of the American-made truck. There are a lot of four-by-fours out there, but there's only one Jeep.
9:09 Ben Brock Johnson? In America, you have a certain set of American truck options. But if you go anywhere outside of America, if you look beyond the towering, ever-rising front grille of the American truck industry, and get under the hood of the internet, photos and videos from all over the world will tell you there is one vehicle that seems to leave the others eaten dust.
9:38 Amory Sivertson? The Toyota Hilux, a small, unassuming, boxy pickup that started production in the 1960s and has become the subject of entire YouTube channels, Instagram accounts, websites, and endless comment thread discussions. United States-designated terrorist groups use it. Freedom fighters like Warren use it. Military contractors use it. The Hilux seems to have become the vehicle used everywhere across the world where heavy-duty stuff is happening.
10:08 Ben Brock Johnson? And the thing we wanted to understand is how and why.
10:16 Amory Sivertson? I'm Amory Sivertson.
10:18 Ben Brock Johnson? I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread.
10:21 Amory Sivertson? We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR. Today's episode, Toyotas of War.
10:39 Amory Sivertson? Let's start with the name, which is not a real word. It's two. Hilux, as in high luxury. It's a portmanteau. And true to car manufacturer form, the Hilux doesn't exactly hold up to the suggestion of its name.
10:54 Ben Brock Johnson? What it does do is hold up. This is the famous automotive show from the UK, Top Gear.
11:05 Amory Sivertson? First, they take a Hilux and submerge it in the ocean, let the tide go in and out, and then drive it out of the ocean.
11:14 Ben Brock Johnson? And that's just the beginning.
11:16 Speaker 05 Now, earlier on, I left our Toyota pickup on top of a tower block that was about to be demolished with explosives. Who would like to see what happens next?
11:24 Ben Brock Johnson? Yeah! What happens next is the Top Gear hosts show this Hilux at the top of a high-rise building, then they demolish the building and drive the truck out of the rubble.
11:39 Amory Sivertson? The message is, this truck, it's indestructible.
11:43 Ben Brock Johnson? Which has also made it the stuff of internet legend. Here's a YouTuber calling himself Whistlin Diesel, doing a kind of southern boy response to the Top Gear episode, years later.
11:54 Speaker 06 Today, we find out, will it really hold up?
11:57 Speaker 05 I'll back over the skid loader. There you go.
12:16 Amory Sivertson? He's driving one full-tilt through a field, with the back holding a massive pile of cinder blocks. Whistlin Diesel's got 10 million subscribers, and there's loads more Hilux content where this came from. Google it, H-I-L-U-X, and you'll see endless pictures of these boxy trucks, usually the 80s and 90s sort of vintagey-looking ones, all over the internet.
12:43 Ben Brock Johnson? I got interested in the history of this vehicle because of a story from last April, when a group of aid workers were killed by Israeli Defense Forces while bringing food to central Gaza.
12:55 Speaker 00 An Israeli airstrike on Monday killed seven people working with Jose Andres's international food charity, The World Central Kitchen, the three-vehicle convoy which was marched with the World Central Kitchen.
13:06 Ben Brock Johnson? The IDF alleged that its military analysts had identified a gunman on top of one of the trucks carrying supplies, suggesting it was a military vehicle, not an aid vehicle. In the online chatter around this incident, I saw a lot of people talking about the fact that one of the aid vehicles hit by the IDF's drone-fired missiles was a Toyota Hilux, which kicked off this very of-the-now discussion online: accusations of misinformation, subterfuge, and random pickup truck facts.
13:41 Amory Sivertson? And that's how we started to realize how ubiquitous this truck was, how rabid its fanbase was, all over the world, and how it's been that way for a long time.
13:52 Speaker 06 So I'll do like 50 years of history and hopefully five minutes or less.
13:57 Ben Brock Johnson? This is Chris. Chris has run a website and a very popular Instagram account called Toyotas of War, which is as advertised: photos, videos, articles, information, even gear you can buy related to Toyota trucks involved in military conflict. Meta deleted the Instagram account Toyotas of War last year for not following community guidelines. The company was not specific about that, although the account had been temporarily banned before for promoting violence. Chris says Toyotas of War and its new iteration, Cruisers of War, never promoted violence, but like Warren, Chris is obviously also enamored.
14:42 Speaker 06 My specific favorite car would be the 79 series Land Cruiser, single cab with the truck bed.
14:55 Amory Sivertson? But the history of Toyota trucks going global goes back much further than 1979. It starts with World War II, when America had a lot of success with a particular ground vehicle.
15:07 Speaker 06 The Willys Jeep is how most Americans refer to it. It's Willys or Willis, however you want to say it.
15:12 Ben Brock Johnson? However you want to say it, that vehicle was great. But it was made in the States. And when the Korean War started, just a few years after World War II ended, and America got involved.
15:23 Amory Sivertson? America do be getting involved in war.
15:26 Ben Brock Johnson? It do. And American forces wanted vehicles like the Willis easily available wherever it wanted to get involved around the world. So it turned to Japan, a country that had recently surrendered to the US and said,
15:42 Speaker 06 Hey, we need to create vehicles that are close to Korea. You're very close to there. Here's the schematics. Produce this and we'll see what we can do with it.
15:52 Amory Sivertson? This, Chris says, led to what was called the Toyota Jeep BJ, which became the 40 series Land Cruiser. And that truck worked really well.
16:02 Speaker 06 And so when you look back, the vehicle was founded on a military design, very simplistic, reliability was a premium, and also keeping costs low.
16:15 Ben Brock Johnson? The United States military budget, the biggest in the world, and bigger than the next seven biggest military budgets combined. But keep those costs low on the trucks.
16:25 Amory Sivertson? We kid. But Toyota's ability to keep costs low has had an impact around the world. Another thing, Chris says, that Toyota has become known for? Logistics.
16:35 Speaker 06 Parts are just everywhere. You know, it's, I'm not joking when I say this. You can just go to a, let's say if you have an issue overseas, you can go to any Toyota dealership and they can get parts to you typically in three to four days. So that's a huge appeal.
16:49 Ben Brock Johnson? And this is all part of why.
16:51 Speaker 06 After the Korean War, Toyotas have been involved in almost every conflict in some role or some fashion.
17:00 Amory Sivertson? But one conflict stands out.
17:02 Speaker 06 So that was the Chad-Libya War.
17:05 Ben Brock Johnson? In French, the Guerre de Toyota, or Great Toyota War, took place on the border between northern Chad and Libya. In the scorching deserts of northern Africa, Surprising and unconventional war unfolded. A battle. It started with a Libyan occupation of northern Chad by Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi had a goal of gaining more territory for Libya by helping to overthrow the Chadian president Yessen Habre.
17:34 Amory Sivertson? The ensuing war saw the more heavily armed military of Gaddafi lining up to face Chadian fighters with fewer resources. Then France entered the fray, giving air support to Chadian troops.
17:47 Ben Brock Johnson? France's help from the sky was a big deal, but so was France's help in providing 400 Toyota pickups. In comparison to Gaddafi's tanks, the trucks were faster, easier to repair, could go farther on less fuel, and they carried more fighters on them. Oh, and these trucks were equipped with guided missile launchers. Here's Chris again.
18:12 Speaker 06 You know, these guys are in, using today's dollars, probably five to $10,000 trucks. And they're just destroying half a million dollar tanks. Everyone in the tanks just got smoked.
18:26 Amory Sivertson? The Great Toyota War officially ended on September 11th, 1987. But it was the beginning of what has, in some ways, been the identity of the Hilux ever since. It's the reason you can find posts asking about the Toyota Hilux all over Reddit. Why you hear about Toyota trucks being associated with terrorists.
18:47 Ben Brock Johnson? Or freedom fighters, depending on who you're talking to. While its history is connected to national military forces, the Hilux has moved into this extra military present where the lines get very blurry. The Hilux has become a very popular vehicle for what has come to be known as the Technical. A Technical is generally a civilian vehicle that is being converted to military usage.
19:14 Speaker 05 Normally buy the means of mounting a heavy weapon on it.
19:21 Amory Sivertson? More from that guy in a minute.
19:35 Speaker 00 Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast. There's a part of high performance that drives you, shapes you, and pulls at you too. Rarely spoken, almost never examined. That's the quiet tension. Coming up, psychologist and executive coach Dr. Sharon Turbin with Steve Paliuka on what separates the leaders people follow from the ones they don't. Stay with us for a preview. Listen closely wherever you get your podcasts.
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20:32 Ben Brock Johnson? We found Ed Nash in Thailand.
20:34 Speaker 05 It is nine, well, five past nine in the evening, so I'm 12 hours in front of you. So not too bad.
20:41 Amory Sivertson? All right. How's the future?
20:44 Ben Brock Johnson? Ed is another enthusiast who's turned his enthusiasm into a career of informing on the internet. He's written a book about improvised armored vehicles used by Syrian democratic forces in their war against ISIS. And he has a YouTube channel called Military Matters.
21:01 Speaker 05 Where I look at military history and current military affairs.
21:06 Amory Sivertson? A lot of his YouTube videos are about aircraft.
21:09 Speaker 05 It's got some people to accuse me of being an aviation historian. I can't pretend to be that.
21:14 Ben Brock Johnson? But Ed also does a lot on trucks.
21:17 Speaker 05 Hiluxes, they've sold something like more than 17 million since they started making them. And Land Cruises, like more than 10 million globally.
21:28 Amory Sivertson? Yes, Ed is also a big Toyota guy with lots of Toyota facts. It's also fair to say that Ed is very into technicals, a civilian vehicle with a heavy weapon on it.
21:40 Speaker 05 And it could be as simple as mounting a heavy machine gun on it, all the way up to some of the real oddities we've seen around the world, such as rocket pods from helicopter gunships being mounted on the back of them and them being used as artillery. And it's basically a way to turn a heavy weapon into something more flexible tactically to give it more mobility.
22:05 Amory Sivertson? Technicals, like Hiluxes, have a long history intertwined with armed conflict.
22:10 Speaker 05 In some ways, they've replaced what would in classical times suppose to be cavalry. You have a highly mobile force that can charge around attacking the enemy behind the lines, also using them as rapid deployment for troops.
22:26 Ben Brock Johnson? Remember Warren from the beginning? He also said a Hilux can carry a lot of fighters with ease.
22:32 Speaker 03 So you can fit 12 dudes in the back with all of their AKs and then if you really want to, you can fit eight in the cab. So that's 20 guys riding in a Hilux, not terribly unlike a clown car.
22:47 Amory Sivertson? Warren actually associates this clown car with the gun those clowns might be carrying, another pure representation of something that won't let you down when it counts.
22:58 Speaker 03 I think of the Hilux as the AK-47 of pickup trucks, right? It's the cheapest, most efficient, most durable vehicle.
23:14 Ben Brock Johnson? Ed Nash and Warren Stoddard have something in common beyond an apparent enthusiasm for Hiluxes. They've both fought ISIS in Syria. They seem to have had similar reasons, too.
23:27 Speaker 05 ISIS were on the rise. They were all over the news. Obviously, they've risen, I think, in 2014. All the stories were coming about the atrocities they were committing. So I wondered if I could go and help there.
23:40 Ben Brock Johnson? In another example of the current complexity of how we conduct war around the world, Ed and Warren didn't fight on behalf of a national military force.
23:49 Amory Sivertson? They both fought in the YPG, also called the People's Defense Units or People's Protection Units, which is described as a libertarian socialist US-backed Kurdish militant group in Syria. When he joined up about 10 years ago, Ed saw a lot of Hilux technicals.
24:08 Speaker 05 In Syria, technicals were used more as like direct support artillery. They weren't used for charging up on an enemy. They'd stand off, normally have a fairly heavy weapon, a heavy machine gun, and they'd fire kilometers to two kilometers, sometimes three kilometers away to provide suppressive fire.
24:34 Ben Brock Johnson? When I first learned of the Hilux, I wanted to know why, according to the internet, this particular pickup was the only pickup for terrorists. But the more we talked to guys who had experience in war zones, the more it became obvious. The Hilux is the only pickup for anyone who needs a non-official military vehicle.
24:56 Amory Sivertson? Chris, the guy who started the Toyotas of War website and Instagram page, is a good example. He didn't fall into this stuff because he got curious about it online. It was part of his job in the US.
25:08 Speaker 06 How I became obsessed with them is I used to work for a defense contractor, and we built land cruisers for guys overseas.
25:16 Ben Brock Johnson? Yep. Chris, who didn't want to share his last name because of his work, started an internship for a defense contractor in Kentucky that was souping up Toyota trucks and sending them across the world. Chris says he can't say much specifically about the souping up part.
25:34 Speaker 06 I'll have to be obscure, very limited on that. But yeah, it's typically just armoring packages, typically around like B7. Cooling modifications. And then after that, it's just the, your imagination is the limiting factor of what they're doing with these vehicles.
25:56 Amory Sivertson? The point is, the Hilux pops up on all sides of conflict, which had us wondering, how does Toyota think about and talk about the popularity of this little unassuming truck? Ed Nash has had some of the same questions. He says, back in 2015.
26:13 Speaker 05 The US authorities actually questioned Toyota about this because ISIS used so many Toyota vehicles. And honestly, I think the answer to that is super simple. Toyotas make really, really good vehicles.
26:33 Ben Brock Johnson? The answer from the car company at the time was, we don't sell to people who are going to use them for military purposes. But how do you enforce that as an automaker with the kind of logistics that has your cars and your car parts available all over the globe?
26:47 Amory Sivertson? Someone can walk into a dealership in Turkey, say, and drive into Syria with it, or buy one in Kentucky, soup it up, and send it overseas for a private US military contractor. We reached out to the company repeatedly, but we never got someone to talk to us about why Toyota Hiluxes of a certain vintage are the vehicle of choice for military actors around the world. And Chris, by the way, says that Toyota's never officially acknowledged his social media presence, but he does say that when he comes across the company's marketing team at conferences or expos, they give him friendly, knowing hellos. So the Toyotas of war aren't going anywhere.
27:32 Ben Brock Johnson? Unless they just go out of style. Toyota technicals have been at the tip of the spear in our complex warfare ecosystem for decades now. So we asked Ed Nash what the future of this stuff might look like.
27:48 Speaker 05 Funny enough, you're probably going to see the technical become less relevant now because, as I say, it is generally favored, yeah, you're right, favored by. Low technology, uh, non-state actors.
28:02 Ben Brock Johnson? Uh huh.
28:03 Speaker 05 Or low-grade militaries. But the counter to a technical, in a lot of ways, is something with greater mobility. And what we're seeing now is drones. Civilian drones, which are armed or either with the explosive warhead or dropping explosive warheads. That's a great counter to a technical. It's super cheap, super simple to get, uh, super simple to operate.
28:28 Amory Sivertson? So maybe the 1980s and 90s Toyota Hilux trucks, which have lasted long past their assumed expiration date, will finally stop running.
28:42 Ben Brock Johnson? Maybe. Long after our reporting on this story was mostly done, I was telling a friend about it, far from any kind of battle lines, here in Massachusetts. I figured he was a truck lover, so I thought he might know something about the Hilux. He did. A lot of one-ton trucks still have leaf springs in the back, but coils in the front. In fact, he was just as obsessed as the other guys we talked to. So I met him in his workshop, where on the metal lockers used to store his tools for working on the nearly 20 vehicles parked around his property, Benjamin Freed of Barry, Massachusetts, had pinned up an old wedding announcement. That's. And you and Becker are sitting on the back of a truck. A 1982 Toyota Hilux.
29:27 Ben Brock Johnson? No way. Yeah. For real? Yeah.
29:29 Amory Sivertson? Benjamin told us he has 4.5 Hiluxes in various states, sitting around his property. One died while he was testing it back in the woods behind his house last summer, so he's waiting for the snow to melt to get it out. Benjamin loves Toyotas. His day job is as a mechanical engineer, but he's been building and rebuilding Toyota trucks since he was in high school.
29:52 Ben Brock Johnson? But always dreamed of having a Hilux. Now that he's got 4.5 Hiluxes, he spends his free time working on them. He actually invented his own perfected version. It doesn't have body armor or bullet holes in it. He calls it the Hi-Runner. It's a Hilux fused with a 4Runner.
30:11 Amory Sivertson? I know my cars, but Benjamin really knows his trucks.
30:15 Ben Brock Johnson? They have, uh, pretty strong, fully boxed frame construction, so. This is a, this one is a 22R, which means it's car. They yeah, they seem a little overbuilt in some. The Hilux also had leaf strings.
30:36 Amory Sivertson? Standing out in the frozen, crusted Massachusetts snow, next to a Hilux with a battered paint job and no seat in the cab, far from direct military conflict, Benjamin's Hilux life is pretty peaceful. And yet, he says the same thing everyone says.
30:54 Ben Brock Johnson? Everybody tends to like Toyotas for the same reason. Aside from aesthetics, they're probably not doing it for aesthetics in the same way I am to some degree, but they're easy to work on, they're reliable, they can take a lot of abuse without breaking. This is not a car commercial or a Hilux-themed YouTube channel. It is a reminder that there's a huge difference between what we're told, bigger is better, tough is powerful, the higher the grill, the bigger the thrill, and what, at the end of the day, is what we want. Maybe the little boxy 40-year-old pickup is actually what we're looking for.
31:38 Amory Sivertson? But considering the Toyota Hilux mythology online, we still needed proof up close. And finally, with Benjamin's help, we got it.
31:50 Ben Brock Johnson? What are you doing? Putting a little bit of gas in the carburetor.
31:58 Ben Brock Johnson? I've never seen somebody put gas in a carburetor, but I don't really know anything about anything, so. There we go, round two. Okay.
32:07 Ben Brock Johnson? Come on, big money, no whammies.
32:27 Amory Sivertson? Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written by Ben Brock Johnson. It was produced by Dean Russell, and it was co-hosted by me, Amory Sivertson, and...
32:38 Ben Brock Johnson? Me, Ben Brock Johnson. Our episode was edited by Meg Kramer. Sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikes. The rest of our team is Franny Monahan, Grace Tatter, Caitlin Harrop, and Emily Jankowski. Our managing producer is Suma Tajoshi.
32:54 Amory Sivertson? Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and a building that was demolished for a TV show.
33:04 Amory Sivertson? And just a reminder, we are still working on an upcoming episode about how people are using AI in their relationships. So, not just like, "I made myself an AI girlfriend," because we made that episode already. We're talking, you know, how AI is playing into your work relationships, your friend relationships, relationships with your family, your parents, those kinds of things. So, send us a voice memo, or you can send a written message to [email protected] .
33:31 Ben Brock Johnson? If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless Thread, again, at WBUR.org.
34:01 Speaker 00 Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast with Dr. Sharon Cherben, psychologist, executive coach, and a close listener to what lives beneath high performance. Here she is with Steve Paliuka, who built Bain Capital and helped bring a championship back to Boston on the thing the best leaders do that most don't. The best leaders kind of give credit and take blame.
34:25 Speaker 05 Something goes wrong, they're the first ones to take responsibility for it. And they see the good in the other people on the team. They don't immediately try to deflect whatever problem there was, what went wrong. You miss the sales target on the salesperson, they reflect on themselves and what they could do better. Same thing, you know, what Joe Mazzulla does in basketball. If you see his press conferences and the Celtics don't play well, the first thing he says is, you know, I need to coach better. I made a mistake here. I made a mistake there. Not many coaches do that. But that's why the players, you know, love Joe, and that's why, another reason he's a great coach. So there are things like that that you learn. There are many, many more things like that I learned from people like Red Auerbach and my classmates from business school and sports and all the rest.
35:10 Speaker 05 And really, what an array of leaders, because leadership is both the same and
35:17 Speaker 00 different depending on the environment that you're in. Listen for more of the Quiet Tension wherever you get your podcasts.
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