Episode 185: The 1919 Motor Transport Corps Convoy

we got a great big convoy, ain't she a tragic sight follow victoria on bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/victoriascott.bsky.socialbuy 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 CompanyPO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134DO 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/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Justin Roczniak?

  I've got my local going. I got the video going. I got, um, the Zen caster is going. Failed to start recording.

• 0:08Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, fuck. No, no. Give it a second. Give it a second. There it is.

• 0:11Justin Roczniak?

  Okay.

• 0:11Liam McAnderson?

  It does this on 10,000 losses and my local is going without a second to spare.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  My local is live too.

• 0:17Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. So, oh, fuck the chair. Hang on.

• 0:20Speaker 02

  Is my audio, is it okay?

• 0:21November Kelly?

  Yeah, you sound fine.

• 0:22Liam McAnderson?

  Sorry, Devon. Sorry, Devon. Sorry, Devon. Sorry, Devon.

• 0:25Justin Roczniak?

  Three, three, two, one, mark.

• 0:31November Kelly?

  I missed you guys.

• 0:32Liam McAnderson?

  I sound so fucking stupid, dude.

• 0:36November Kelly?

  I, I, yeah, I, I find my wife made me take a week off and I took a, took like sick days in London.

• 0:43Liam McAnderson?

  Went into a spiral, maybe based on your Twitter presence?

• 0:46November Kelly?

  Yeah, well, no, like, like, like a good spark. I mean, I fell in love, so that was cool.

• 0:51Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, there you go.

• 0:52November Kelly?

  You know, that was, that was, that was pretty neat. That was pretty sick, I guess.

• 0:56Liam McAnderson?

  That's, I like that.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Go to the Japan Fall in Love. What is that like? That's crazy.

• 1:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, right. I don't know. There's just some of this going around. But yeah, I've, I've, 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.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:20Liam McAnderson?

  Welcome back.

• 1:21November Kelly?

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:22Liam McAnderson?

  Ross is a loved ones.

• 1:24Justin Roczniak?

  I, I went in, uh, over the weekend. I was, uh, conscripted into, um, Miles in Transit's new great race to undisclosed location video.

• 1:34Liam McAnderson?

  I, I, I bought that email check. Well, not on the email check. I just, I, I visited with several of the contestants.

• 1:40Justin Roczniak?

  I, that, that was, that was a slog. That was almost as grueling as this. That was like, that was like the Paris to Dakar rally, but with coach buses.

• 1:53Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, I expect that video in, well, based on the timing of the last one, several months.

• 2:01Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah, um, I don't know. I'm still sore.

• 2:05Liam McAnderson?

  How are you sore from, okay.

• 2:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, uh, the chafing from the walking.

• 2:10November Kelly?

  I mean, frankly, like the, the, 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, like.

• 2:25Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you know, you know what the, the worst part was?

• 2:27November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 2:28Justin Roczniak?

  Is that we tried to get, get in to see the peacock room to see if it would drive us mad and it was closed.

• 2:34November Kelly?

  Oh, god damn it. They were protecting you.

• 2:36Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, no. You know what it was? You know what I think they do is they said it was for humidity conver- uh, conservation, right? Which I think just means they shut the peacock room whenever the tourists get too sweaty.

• 2:50Liam McAnderson?

  Please stop touching this.

• 2:51November Kelly?

  I mean, speaking of sweaty tourists, I was, I was like, uh, just walking around in central London and like, you know, it's 25, 26 degrees Celsius. I don't know what that is in Freedom Eagles and I'm just like.

• 3:03Liam McAnderson?

  Eighty till.

• 3:04November Kelly?

  It's, 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 am not a heat adapted organism, you know?

• 3:18Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely.

• 3:21Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, uh, Roz and I are cold climate creatures.

• 3:24November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, me too.

• 3:25Justin Roczniak?

  Hey, today's the first time I haven't been running the air conditioner in a while.

• 3:28Liam McAnderson?

  Attaboy. Yeah, my windows are all open. It's nice out. I mean, I'm in a hot sweaty basement. I'm deep in the podcast mind, but.

• 3:35November Kelly?

  This is, this is the thing. This is why we gotta 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.

• 3:46Justin Roczniak?

  We just talk about the weather.

• 3:48November Kelly?

  Which, I don't know, maybe that's part of the appeal. Maybe it dissuades people. I'm not a businesswoman, right? Clearly. I have no sense of.

• 3:57November Kelly?

  To what extent this like wins people over or to what extent this alienates people? I just, I just, I just hang out with my friends in proximity to a microphone and somehow it turns out that people like it. So thank you very much.

• 4:09Justin Roczniak?

  You'll make the call. I'll call later. You'll call now.

• 4:14November Kelly?

  God, that was a, that was a weird, that's a, that's a subtext you add. That's like that and the like Folgers incest ad for the American like kind of latent sexuality, you know?

• 4:26Liam McAnderson?

  What the fuck? You know, you know what? I'm happy you're not knowing.

• 4:28November Kelly?

  Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sure. Don't worry about it. Are you Googling Folgers incest ad right now?

• 4:34Justin Roczniak?

  That's my advertisement for Sears Roebuck and company. Go buy an air conditioner.

• 4:39Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, yes, yes. You forced me to watch this ad before. Yes.

• 4:41Justin Roczniak?

  I understand. There's only like two physical Sears locations left on the east coast. Um, anyway. Uh, hello and welcome to, well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Roczniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

• 5:01November Kelly?

  I am November Kelly. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam.

• 5:06Liam McAnderson?

  Okay. Well, my, my name is Liam McAdams and my pronouns are he, him.

• 5:09November Kelly?

  And we have a guest.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Hello, my name is Victoria Scott. My pronouns are she and her. Thank you for having me.

• 5:16November Kelly?

  Of course, as, as maybe clear from the number of times you've been on.

• 5:20Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 5:21November Kelly?

  Yeah, we love having you on anytime.

• 5:23Justin Roczniak?

  Here, here to avenge.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  The, 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.

• 5:36November Kelly?

  Cause the thing is, right?

• 5:37Justin Roczniak?

  You're gonna have to cave into your paranoia. Everyone hates you constantly.

• 5:43November Kelly?

  No, this podcast is, 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.

• 5:52Justin Roczniak?

  There you go. Yeah.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  It's working. Keep trying.

• 5:56November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 5:57Justin Roczniak?

  So what you see on the screen in front of you is a United States military standard B truck.

• 6:06November Kelly?

  Can't park that, mate.

• 6:07Justin Roczniak?

  I think it's three and a half, two and a half tons.

• 6:08Liam McAnderson?

  Just say, be off the road.

• 6:10Justin Roczniak?

  Be off the road, yeah.

• 6:11November Kelly?

  Yeah, they call it a standard B because it be off the road.

• 6:13Justin Roczniak?

  It be off the road, yeah. That's Dwight Eisenhower's own handwriting.

• 6:18Liam McAnderson?

  Now, is that supposed to look like that? Well, I see this rear wheel is having some trouble.

• 6:22November Kelly?

  Dwight Eisenhower, girly ass handwriting. Look at that, look at that B. Incredible.

• 6:26Liam McAnderson?

  You ever see that picture of him sitting there?

• 6:27November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:30November Kelly?

  Not America's first gay president, but perhaps America's second or third.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  As the automotive, resident automotive expert, it should not be doing that.

• 6:38Justin Roczniak?

  Should not be doing that.

• 6:39Liam McAnderson?

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

• 6:44Speaker 02

  I'm here to diagnose your problem, and that right there is it.

• 6:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 6:49Liam McAnderson?

  It might be.

• 6:50Justin Roczniak?

  Should be on the road.

• 6:51Liam McAnderson?

  Is there someone in my house?

• 6:52Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I mean, yes, you are.

• 6:54Liam McAnderson?

  Do you understand castle doctrine?

• 7:01November Kelly?

  God, the first podcaster involved shooting is gonna be a fucking nightmare. I'm gonna put you on administrative leave.

• 7:08Justin Roczniak?

  Today, we're going to talk about the 1919 transcontinental motor convoy.

• 7:14November Kelly?

  Huh.

• 7:14Justin Roczniak?

  But before we do that, we have to talk about the goddamn news.

• 7:28Justin Roczniak?

  So here in Philadelphia, there was a big crisis about how they were gonna fund SEPTA, and the Pennsylvania Republicans found a solution, which is to not fund SEPTA.

• 7:40Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's been, it's been a ball.

• 7:42Justin Roczniak?

  The cliff has been gone over.

• 7:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's wonderful.

• 7:44November Kelly?

  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 gonna have public transit.

• 7:54Justin Roczniak?

  So we are in the first stage of cuts. The second stage of cuts happens next week, maybe the week afterwards?

• 8:03November Kelly?

  Risk.

• 8:03Justin Roczniak?

  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. Um, and then in January is when the really nasty stuff happens. But anyway, um, SEPTA has been Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. Um, they have been sort of, uh, you know, in a bind since COVID because, you know, all the costs went up, but the ridership went down. Um, and they were asking for enough money to maintain current levels of service

• 8:43Justin Roczniak?

  across the city and the region. And, um, you know, the pencil, there, 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 completed, it gives you your money back. So it's not gambling, right?

• 9:13November Kelly?

  Okay, sure.

• 9:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So.

• 9:16November Kelly?

  Oh.

• 9:17Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's bad. It's real.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  That's bleak.

• 9:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, uh, they didn't want to tax those, uh, 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, you know, at like one of their, you know, towns out in bumfuck county that has like eight houses and a abandoned dollar store.

• 9:54November Kelly?

  This is, so this is the kind of equivalent of like when you're throwing like, uh, deck chairs into the ship's boilers, right?

• 10:03Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 10:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, pretty much. I mean, it was it was essentially like, we're gonna redirect a bunch of this funding that was already earmac 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.

• 10:22November Kelly?

  Sept are gonna be the first rail system to actually do the grommet wrong trousers thing of building the track in front of you as you go.

• 10:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.

• 10:33November Kelly?

  Well, that implies it'd be building track, but yes.

• 10:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  They actually have a guy on the back of the train ripping it up.

• 10:39November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 10:41November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 10:43Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 10:52November Kelly?

  Heard that about austerity that weirdly it like you don't you can't just turn the money back on afterwards.

• 10:57Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 11:23November Kelly?

  I mean, I don't know. It sounds it sounds pretty racist to me like.

• 11:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well, it is. And it is. I mean, everyone got the cuts is the thing, you know?

• 11:33November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Justin Roczniak?

  But I mean. January, when the big cuts happen, that's gonna actually affect the suburbs more because they are just straight up cutting a huge amount of regional rail lines.

• 11:45Justin Roczniak?

  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 Easton and the Pennsylvanian. So those also go away now, apparently.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  I'm increasingly suspecting that American rail transit is kind of like American trans women in which we have $5 we keep passing around between all of us and it's substantially increasing GDP.

• 12:13November Kelly?

  Yeah. Is there then one railroad that has like a computer science job that's like, it turns out all the money is coming from her?

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, unfortunately, it's a bright line and she's in a abusive relationship with pedestrians.

• 12:28November Kelly?

  Canceling Brightline.

• 12:30Justin Roczniak?

  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 script and save. And what happens when you do that? You get curb stop.

• 12:51Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, this is like the MTA shouldn't be paying its debts down.

• 12:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 12:54November Kelly?

  There's a lesson here. Never remove the bloat ever.

• 12:58Justin Roczniak?

  You have to have the bloat. You need to be like, you know, VTA in 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. Um, and it's gonna, you know, move like five people a day. Who cares? Um, 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.

• 13:33November Kelly?

  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?

• 13:50Justin Roczniak?

  That's how the L works. Yeah.

• 13:54Justin Roczniak?

  I, I, I, I consider this a cautionary tale against the concept of fiscal conservatism. It, it's gonna fuck you in the end. You're gonna get fucked. You're gonna get, you're, you, you, you're screwed.

• 14:06November Kelly?

  Conservatism only works until you run out of other people's money, right?

• 14:10Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  It's, it's impressive that Pennsylvania has 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.

• 14:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 14:25November Kelly?

  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.

• 14:33Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, that's exactly what they're mad at. It's, it's the culture war bullshit rubbing up, robbing us of SEPTA is, is a new one for me.

• 14:41November Kelly?

  But to be fair, you do have a hell of a lot of pronouns, you know? They've got you there.

• 14:45Liam McAnderson?

  They do.

• 14:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Liam McAnderson?

  I'll use two though.

• 14:49November Kelly?

  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

• 14:55Liam McAnderson?

  I don't even use his because it because it adds weight.

• 14:58November Kelly?

  Yeah. Strategic ambiguity, right? You got to have the capacity, the breakout capacity to get a little non-binary with it at any time.

• 15:05Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know. I live in West Philly. It's the pronoun capital of the world. And, you know, even then it hasn't really moved the needle.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:23Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I think you did.

• 15:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is gonna 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.

• 15:50Liam McAnderson?

  Unicameralism, baby.

• 15:52Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 16:04November Kelly?

  There's nothing in the constitution that says that a state can't be an absolute monarchy.

• 16:09Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. So, uh, yeah, that's that. Um, in other news.

• 16:15November Kelly?

  Do not fact check me about the constitution thing. I don't know or care.

• 16:20Liam McAnderson?

  No.

• 16:21November Kelly?

  It's a dead letter anyway. Nobody's paying attention to it anymore.

• 16:25Justin Roczniak?

  So Uncle Pete is gonna marry a horse.

• 16:27November Kelly?

  I beg your pardon?

• 16:29Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, right.

• 16:29Justin Roczniak?

  Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern are trying to merge. This is our belated rail.

• 16:34November Kelly?

  Or something?

• 16:36Liam McAnderson?

  Whatever you want it to be, Nova.

• 16:38November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's like, it's less, less Uncle Pete, more Mr. Hands, surely?

• 16:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 16:43November Kelly?

  Don't Google that.

• 16:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Seattle mentioned.

• 16:48November Kelly?

  Yeah, Pacific Northwest excellence.

• 16:50Justin Roczniak?

  So, uh, you know, we have our, our, our four class one railroads in the United States or wait five.

• 16:56November Kelly?

  The four, the four trans women with tech jobs. Sure.

• 16:58Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 17:13November Kelly?

  Wait, the first one ever?

• 17:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 17:15November Kelly?

  Ever. Okay.

• 17:16Justin Roczniak?

  It's never been done.

• 17:19November Kelly?

  God, you guys needed a Stalin for like 300 years.

• 17:24Liam McAnderson?

  It, it would have helped. It would have made some shit worse, but at least the trades would have been better and good.

• 17:31Justin Roczniak?

  So now I, I think we've long said on this podcast, um, okay, that, that the railroad gets better as it better and more efficient as it gets bigger, right? This is sort of a, uh, a question of like theoretical benefit, benefits versus practical realities, right? Um, so if you merge these two companies together, you know, you, you, 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, it, it would theoretically be a very, very good thing. Um, for a lot of people, how, how do all these efficiencies get distributed though is the question.

• 18:11November Kelly?

  Oh, into dividends, you know?

• 18:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:16November Kelly?

  And they're gonna, they're gonna name it something horrible. Either they just jam it together. So it's.

• 18:19Justin Roczniak?

  No, they're naming it Union Pacific.

• 18:21November Kelly?

  Oh, okay. Well, I mean, total California victory at least. You have to give them that much.

• 18:27Justin Roczniak?

  Total Omaha victory.

• 18:30Liam McAnderson?

  Will they keep rule G open is my question.

• 18:32November Kelly?

  So refugee from the non Omaha, American century of humiliation.

• 18:38Liam McAnderson?

  Son of a whore.

• 18:40November Kelly?

  Here I was thinking they were just gonna call it Union Pacific North Norfolk Southern and we, we stuck with U penis.

• 18:48Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, I, for fans of, of, uh, school ground games such as I H O penis, I H O P.

• 18:55Justin Roczniak?

  Imagine if the Illinois Central had merged with Union Pacific.

• 19:00Liam McAnderson?

  I C U P?

• 19:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 19:03November Kelly?

  Got your ass.

• 19:04Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, he did. He did get my ass. It's a shame, but I, I admit what I've been, what I've invested.

• 19:10Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah, you know, there's a lot of, lot of advantages that could potentially exist for like, you know, the railroad itself, itself for shippers, for workers, you know, you could, you, you, you could, you could take these efficiencies and invest them into better infrastructure, higher pay for workers, better and more competitive railroad service.

• 19:28Liam McAnderson?

  Nah, fuck you.

• 19:29Justin Roczniak?

  More routes, better safety, better working conditions, faster trains, more advanced trains, like, I don't know, finally do some fucking electrification.

• 19:39November Kelly?

  I'm, I'm, I'm sorry. Did, did I, did I hear, um, executive compensation and, uh, like share buybacks?

• 19:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Liam McAnderson?

  That's what we're going for here.

• 19:49November Kelly?

  That's, that's always the sign of a, 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 gayler, like, uh, sort of theory.

• 20:02Liam McAnderson?

  Don't talk to me about gayler. Don't talk to me about gayler. I was so sure.

• 20:08November Kelly?

  Speaking of things that it was. Basically bestiality, like that man has the brain of a dog. She can't.

• 20:13Liam McAnderson?

  He had a dating show. Did you ever watch it?

• 20:16November Kelly?

  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 go, 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, I'm a simple one. I take my pleasures where I find them.

• 20:36Liam McAnderson?

  It is, it has been not a great day.

• 20:38November Kelly?

  E A L, by the way, just crazy.

• 20:41Justin Roczniak?

  That's like Earl, but it's an eel.

• 20:45Liam McAnderson?

  Earl on his head.

• 20:46November Kelly?

  There's also one when he spells squirrel, S Q U I R L E.

• 20:51Liam McAnderson?

  Who amongst us? Uh, yeah. We, we, we congratulate Super Bowl loser Travis Kelsey.

• 21:00November Kelly?

  Yeah. I, I mean, when, when the Super Bowl happened, I, I stand by my tweet there, which was 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.

• 21:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So yeah, I mean, this is gonna probably just be, you know, um, stock buybacks, price gouging customers because they have a near monopoly power now, uh, trying to drive the operating ratio as close to zero as possible.

• 21:35November Kelly?

  Tearing off the calendar to be like, um, 1883.

• 21:38Justin Roczniak?

  You know, this, this is gonna trigger, this is, this is gonna be like the second to last round of mega mergers because the next round of mega mergers after this is gonna be one big railroad. It's just run by an unaccountable, you know, dictator.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Well, hey, I mean, look at it this way. If, if we can convince Trump to buy 10% of their stock, then we sort of can get close to having a state-owned railway.

• 22:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Like a, like a developed nation.

• 22:06Justin Roczniak?

  10% state-owned railway.

• 22:10November Kelly?

  I mean, that's, that's putting Britain in the shade there. So someone break into your house as well.

• 22:15Justin Roczniak?

  I don't think so. There's just a weird, weird noise from somewhere out near the kitchen, probably.

• 22:21November Kelly?

  Getting, getting abducted by aliens and shit.

• 22:23Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's, it happens to the best of us.

• 22:25Justin Roczniak?

  Again. Um, 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 Comm- Commission. Um, Trump hasn't appointed anyone to that. Like there's still a vacant seat.

• 22:40November Kelly?

  Surface Transportation Board, call that a snowboard? I guess a skateboard or a surfboard, really? Like all of those.

• 22:47Justin Roczniak?

  Surfboard. No, it is sometimes referred to as surfboard. Yeah.

• 22:51November Kelly?

  Okay. Well, now I know that people, people in a position to make jokes like that professionally have made that joke. I, I will be retiring and ending my own life.

• 23:02Liam McAnderson?

  Jay called me and Ross E. clowns to our faces.

• 23:06November Kelly?

  I mean, that's true, but I, I prefer to articulate this within a kind of like Commedia dell'arte tradition, right? And 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.

• 23:20Justin Roczniak?

  Comedy is good, but clown is more difficult.

• 23:23Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. You know?

• 23:26Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 23:41Liam McAnderson?

  It's like an FOP endorsement, just do the opposite.

• 23:44Justin Roczniak?

  Says, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's usually a pretty good, pretty good rule of thumb. Uh, so this might get shut. This might not happen. It probably will at this point. Um, there's a lot of ways it could be good in theory, and those aren't things that are going to happen.

• 24:00November Kelly?

  So well, then Norfolk Southern, uh, going to the glue factory at long last.

• 24:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I was about to say they're putting, they're putting the hots in the glue factory.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  On the bright side, because every single, uh, American class one is allergic to repainting any of their locomotives now, because that also costs money. You'll never actually, it will never, they'll, they'll keep running them until like, everything in America has collapsed.

• 24:24November Kelly?

  Oh, nice.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  So like, you'll be able to train spot them for a long time. They'll just like paint a patch over the cap numbers with like the new U P number. That'll be it.

• 24:31Justin Roczniak?

  That's the real fomer bullshit is what happens to six 11. Does it get absorbed into the Union Pacific?

• 24:36Liam McAnderson?

  You know what? I hope they fucking scrap it.

• 24:37Justin Roczniak?

  Do they, do they send it? Do they send it?

• 24:39Liam McAnderson?

  They scrap it. They actually scrap it and then shoot you. And then shoot me with a gun. It's what happens.

• 24:44Justin Roczniak?

  They painted yellow.

• 24:50November Kelly?

  In the middle of the night, you just, you just go one morning and it's just like it's, it is yellow. It's got a big American flag down the side. Yeah.

• 24:58Liam McAnderson?

  Do, do what, do what the New York Central did to their locomotives. We will preserve nothing and you will like it.

• 25:04Justin Roczniak?

  It's been renamed from, uh, Spirit of Roanoke to, uh, Spirit of North Platte.

• 25:12November Kelly?

  Spirit of Warren Buffett.

• 25:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Warren Buffett is, uh, B N S F.

• 25:18Liam McAnderson?

  I forgot that too. Yeah.

• 25:21Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, that was the goddamn news.

• 25:25Liam McAnderson?

  Wow, it is our half an hour.

• 25:27Justin Roczniak?

  Our belated railroad news.

• 25:30November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's probably some other stuff happened, but I don't remember it and you'd already downloaded the slides.

• 25:34Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know. Yeah, exactly. So I think a good place to start here is, what is road?

• 25:41November Kelly?

  Oh.

• 25:43Liam McAnderson?

  Train good, car bad, episode over. Subscribe to Patreon. See you nerds.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Don't worry. Don't worry. Cars stay bad for this whole episode.

• 25:52Liam McAnderson?

  Hey.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  You don't bring me on to say car good. I have a much more nuanced view of car.

• 25:58Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Car bad, but I like it.

• 26:00Liam McAnderson?

  Dodge Viper, please. Jet one Viper, please. I'm bringing this back. It's victorious here again.

• 26:07November Kelly?

  It's just like if the podcast becomes like 10 times as 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 recordings.

• 26:17Liam McAnderson?

  Speaking of which, check this out.

• 26:20Justin Roczniak?

  You got a Corvette engine.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Liam is constantly screaming over the, the sound of like a shrink wrapped canvas roof flapping.

• 26:30Liam McAnderson?

  Nothing's changed. Nothing's changed. I don't know what the big deal is.

• 26:33November Kelly?

  If you, if you, if you made me podcast from a car, I think it would become to like be driven and record at the same time, like a kind of Thunderbirds vibes, actually.

• 26:42Liam McAnderson?

  I, I, I always wanted us to do, if you ever, 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.

• 26:52November Kelly?

  Podcasters and cars getting coffee. Yeah.

• 26:54Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 26:56November Kelly?

  Here's the thing about coming to Britain. You barely even need a visa. Like it is remarkably easy.

• 27:01Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, good. Cause I'm in American Express.

• 27:03Justin Roczniak?

  You know what's already equipped for that is the, uh, the conference room in the Frekia Rasa.

• 27:09Liam McAnderson?

  Okay. I don't, I don't, I, okay. We can do that. We can podcast from a train.

• 27:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 27:15Liam McAnderson?

  That's fine. Yeah.

• 27:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 27:16Liam McAnderson?

  I, you win and I am not unhappy with your victory.

• 27:19Justin Roczniak?

  It's, it's surprisingly affordable. Um, anyway. So.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Also, just, just for the record, real quickly, Liam has sent me a, a very nice Dodge Viper, and I will say that was a great spec. Jesus Christ. Sorry. I'm done now. That's it. Just, wow.

• 27:33November Kelly?

  So, so, so roads, roads are a moral arc of history that bends towards being able to drive the Dodge Viper down it.

• 27:41Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, look at this, seventeen GTS, there's eighty-eight hundred miles on it, let's fucking buy this thing. Oh, the high bits a hundred and forty-three grand.

• 27:48November Kelly?

  You subscribe to the Patreon. You would struggle to drive a Dodge Viper down, I think, any of these roads?

• 27:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. So, what we're looking at here

• 27:57Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, no.

• 27:58Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, is an early trail up here. This is a trail, not so much a road. 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. Um, you know, this is the Natchez Trace, um, which is a, uh, Native American trail that went from the current location of Nashville to, uh, Natchez. It's about four hundred and forty miles. Um, and this was maintained, uh, by Native Americans for several thousand years. Um, I want to say started by some of the descendants of the same, uh, tribe that built Cahokia, the big mound structure outside St. Louis.

• 28:42November Kelly?

  Oh, cool. It's like they built St. Louis, they built interstates, like it's, uh,

• 28:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, Americans have always been up to this shit, yeah.

• 28:51November Kelly?

  Exactly. There was something in the soil.

• 28:53Liam McAnderson?

  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 thoroughly Euro, Eurocentric view of indigenous history. Remember my dad yelled at us about that?

• 29:08Justin Roczniak?

  That's why I tried to correct for it this time.

• 29:11Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, my dad, how's the knee feeling, old man?

• 29:14Justin Roczniak?

  Um, so, so this is sort of, uh, this is one version. Another version I don't really have a picture of here is something called a Ridgeway, right? Um, that's, uh, uh, uh, early European thing. The idea being, okay, where do we put the road? We put it at the top of the ridge, right? What does that mean? That means it drains really well because it's a downward slope on both sides. Basically zero maintenance, right?

• 29:39November Kelly?

  Lot harder to get home drunk on though, because you will fall off and die.

• 29:43Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, that's what you have a horse for.

• 29:45November Kelly?

  It's the shit that happened to Earthseed the Iceman, you know, probably.

• 29:48Liam McAnderson?

  What if the horse gets drunk and dies?

• 29:50Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, why are you giving your horse liquor?

• 29:53Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, have you never heard of Toby Keith?

• 29:54Justin Roczniak?

  I love him.

• 29:55Liam McAnderson?

  Banger, fear for my horses.

• 29:57Justin Roczniak?

  Um, 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. Um, at some point we get this idea, uh, let's pave the road, right? With stone. Um, stone paved roads start fairly early, like 3,000 B.C. 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.

• 30:27Liam McAnderson?

  Sure. I learned about 15 seconds ago that I am not being robbed. Uh, my father-in-law's at the house, which is kind of disappointing. I was hoping to castle doctor.

• 30:40Justin Roczniak?

  So thousands of years pass and we finally make some advances in road construction, right? There's a man named John Blind Jack Metcalf.

• 30:50Liam McAnderson?

  How can he see the road?

• 30:52Justin Roczniak?

  He can't. Ah, he's blind. He's just feeling it out, you know?

• 30:57Liam McAnderson?

  Just on his hands and knees, like, oh yeah, this is a good one.

• 31:01Justin Roczniak?

  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 stagecoach line and also a tremendous amount of travel. Oh, so this is like the late 1700s, I want to say.

• 31:16November Kelly?

  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 metallized road in the sort of like late 18th century, being like, oh, this fucking sucks.

• 31:30Justin Roczniak?

  God, it's, it's fucking terrible. I mean, he had his own stagecoach line and he drove the stagecoaches despite being blind.

• 31:38November Kelly?

  I mean, not to detract from the guy, but I feel like at that point you really are, it's more of the horse driving the stagecoach than.

• 31:45Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you know, I mean, that, that, that, uh, that tracks. Yeah. Um, so Metcalf, uh, 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 drainage and grading, right? And he surveyed and built 180 miles of turnpike in the north of England, despite, again, being blind.

• 32:17November Kelly?

  Um, 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.

• 32:28Justin Roczniak?

  He's doing great. Yeah.

• 32:30November Kelly?

  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.

• 32:40Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 32:54November Kelly?

  How many times do you think he heard that one before he got sick of it?

• 32:58Justin Roczniak?

  Probably only, you know, I 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 Menai Suspension Bridge. That was his.

• 33:15November Kelly?

  I mean, eighteen twenties, eighteen like twenties, like early nineteenth century, you're into like steam donkeys and shit, right? Or am I completely off the mark with the time?

• 33:23Justin Roczniak?

  No, he'll have steam donkeys by then. Yeah.

• 33:25November Kelly?

  Yeah, so steam donkeys, cheap migrant labor, like, yeah, more plausible than like one blind guy and his horses.

• 33:32Justin Roczniak?

  This is true. This is true. But it's John Loudon McAdam, whose name is still familiar, right? He invented a very exacting specification for crushed gravel road surfaces, which we now call McAdam.

• 33:46November Kelly?

  No, you call McAdam. I call tarmac because I'm.

• 33:50Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, we're gonna get there.

• 33:51Justin Roczniak?

  We're getting there.

• 33:52November Kelly?

  Fuck. Okay. Well, I guess I'll myself.

• 33:54Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. That seems a bit extreme, although.

• 33:57November Kelly?

  The thing is, because the thing is.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Are you trying to get every episode I'm on flagged by YouTube?

• 34:03November Kelly?

  No, I just, I just, I just like to keep either, you know, you, Justin, or Devon, whoever's editing this one, like on their toes.

• 34:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. We gotta be, we gotta have the bleep button on standby.

• 34:13November Kelly?

  It's compulsive at this point. But yeah, no, what it is, is I am freshly back off of Avanti West Coast. And I have not had time to read the notes ahead, unusually for me. So I did not know. I did not connect the two. So I tried to be too clever for my own good, not for the first time.

• 34:34Justin Roczniak?

  So McAdam pavement is very durable. It 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. Um, it's very, very good until cars were invented, which we'll get to at some point. And then they became very dusty.

• 34:57November Kelly?

  So it's future proof against carts.

• 35:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. So this is where we get to the next stage in development. Tarmac Adam.

• 35:06Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah, just shove them together. That's fine.

• 35:09Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. Discovered by accident when a barrel of tar fell off a wagon near Demby Derbyshire Derbyshire.

• 35:17November Kelly?

  Derbyshire.

• 35:18Justin Roczniak?

  Derbyshire, right? In 1901 and a man Edgar Purnell Hooly 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 McAdam or McAdam Syndicate Limited, to start applying this treatment to roads across England the following year, from whence we get the term tarmac.

• 35:50November Kelly?

  Yeah. And now that very weird combination of materials are just completely normalized to all of us.

• 35:55Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 36:11November Kelly?

  But the idea is it's still like an aggregate with a bunch of sticky stuff holding it together.

• 36:16Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 36:17November Kelly?

  Gotcha.

• 36:18Justin Roczniak?

  So this is how we get roads as we know them today.

• 36:23November Kelly?

  Left their own devices, traffic engineers, laws and independently invent New Jersey, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.

• 36:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, exactly. Uh, in America, in America, of course, we had a, you know, Native Americans had systems of trails for millennia. We, we, we, we discussed this. I, 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 half sled system that, um, you know, uh, they attached to dogs. That was like their pack animal.

• 36:52November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's like.

• 36:53Justin Roczniak?

  Until the Europeans came.

• 36:54November Kelly?

  It's one of those things where you, you, you don't necessarily need to invent it. So you just don't, or like you, you're aware of the technology, but the applications of it are kind of remote enough that it's just like, this is not useful, you know?

• 37:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Um, even by like the post Bellum period that's, you know, after the civil war, these sorts of, uh, long distance paved and maintained roads. They're few and far between. There's a few that show up early. Like, uh, Boston Post Road, um, which my traffic engineering professor said Ben Franklin invented it so he could pay alimony easier.

• 37:32Justin Roczniak?

  And.

• 37:33Liam McAnderson?

  Gotta do what you gotta do, man.

• 37:34Justin Roczniak?

  Not entirely true. That it existed well before Ben Franklin.

• 37:37Liam McAnderson?

  We are spreading falsehoods on the internet.

• 37:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Uh, well, you know.

• 37:41November Kelly?

  And invented by Ben Franklin to make posting easier.

• 37:44Justin Roczniak?

  I can't believe Dr. Martin of Drexel University told a tall tale. Um, so, um, you know, it, it predated Ben Franklin somewhat. Um, you know, but this is one of the first, like, you know, big, fast, well-maintained roads through, uh, North America. There was also the National Road that went from Cumberland, Maryland, where the CNO canal stopped to Vandalia, Illinois, right? The center of it all, the capital of Illinois.

• 38:14November Kelly?

  Hmm. The windy city.

• 38:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 38:17November Kelly?

  The, the home of the bean.

• 38:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. This was completed in 1835 ish. It had several impressive structures like, uh, here's the Castleman Arch Bridge. It's a very big stone arch bridge.

• 38:30November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 38:30Justin Roczniak?

  You have the Wheeling Suspension Bridge.

• 38:33November Kelly?

  You, you, you drive, you know, all the way on up to Vandalia. You get your Vandalia style pizza, you know? It's, uh, sounding pretty good, you know?

• 38:42Justin Roczniak?

  I didn't think they had pizza then. I think, uh, Italians were still weird.

• 38:46Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, Italians were still, I don't know, whatever, whatever racist shit. Uh, Sacco invented that it must die is what I'm saying.

• 38:53Justin Roczniak?

  What did they think of Italians in 1835?

• 38:55Liam McAnderson?

  Nothing fucking good, dude. Break out them calipers, buddy. We're going to town.

• 39:01November Kelly?

  I could, I could buy it as a kind of like, you know.

• 39:06Liam McAnderson?

  What's, what's the word for orientalizing Italians?

• 39:09November Kelly?

  Having a lot of, a lot of 1830s Americans have what I call a noble savage view of Italians. Because like you could, 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.

• 39:24Justin Roczniak?

  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 1955 to 1980 in a hotel in Rome.

• 39:35November Kelly?

  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.

• 39:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. How, when are we scheduled to get vodka sauce? Come on.

• 39:47Justin Roczniak?

  So, you know, you have like a bunch of towns along the route spring up. You had got taverns and inns every few miles. It's good enough for stagecoaches. It's still kind of, you know, a shitty experience, all things considered. It's, it's not, it's obviously not paved. They don't have like paving at the time, but it's, 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, ah 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 nonexistent. There was no real reason to improve these for a long time because at the same time, we were of course,

• 40:32Justin Roczniak?

  developing the railroads, right?

• 40:36November Kelly?

  It's like you, you could experience the like highway robbery scene from Barry Lyndon. Or you could get a steam train.

• 40:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. You can have a train robbery. That's more fun.

• 40:46November Kelly?

  Oh yeah, absolutely.

• 40:48Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah, essentially like roads exist for the purpose of like getting to the train station.

• 40:54November Kelly?

  This is correct. This is the correct way to organize the society. Yes.

• 40:57Justin Roczniak?

  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 rail, the roads. And the railroads effectively controlled the government.

• 41:12November Kelly?

  It's not how to organize a society, but you know.

• 41:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 41:15November Kelly?

  Primitive accumulation in it.

• 41:17Justin Roczniak?

  The other thing is, of course, if you had good roads and it was like eighteen seventy five or something, right?

• 41:23Liam McAnderson?

  So you didn't.

• 41:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but if you had them.

• 41:26Liam McAnderson?

  Sure.

• 41:26Justin Roczniak?

  What do you do with?

• 41:28Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, I charge people tolls for coming down my road and if they don't pay.

• 41:32Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, well, yeah, obviously, you know, a lot of these roads were turnpikes, yes, but.

• 41:37November Kelly?

  I, I, 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 horses evolved around on.

• 41:47Justin Roczniak?

  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 fifty miles an hour. Which is something a locomotive could do pretty easily. With a lot more stuff, right?

• 42:00November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess you could run like a kind of like a sort of like, like a, like a tram thing, but then you're just back to a railroad, you know?

• 42:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, that was the interurbans, yeah. And those were pretty successful until the twenties, 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.

• 42:26November Kelly?

  Hmm, America as yet uncocked by the automobile.

• 42:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 42:30Liam McAnderson?

  What a, well, what a, what a, what a world to dream of.

• 42:33November Kelly?

  Henry Ford and his Nazi-fying machine.

• 42:35Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, what's that joke? Uh, God made men, Henry Ford made them all, uh, no, Henry.

• 42:41November Kelly?

  No, it's God, God made men, Samuel Colt made them equal, and Henry Ford made them assholes.

• 42:46Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 42:47Liam McAnderson?

  There we go. Thank you.

• 42:48November Kelly?

  And I don't know if that's a thing. I just came up with that off the dome. I'm hoping it replicates something, because if it doesn't, I'm a genius.

• 42:53Justin Roczniak?

  Heard it as bastards and not assholes, but yeah.

• 42:56Liam McAnderson?

  Well, points are, points are crap. Like, honestly, we'll, we'll give you, we'll give you a hundred out of a hundred.

• 43:03November Kelly?

  Between, yeah, between this, between this and the surfboard thing, I'm, I'm great at like reconstructing other people's jokes.

• 43:11November Kelly?

  You have me a pile of loose joke parts. I'm like, yeah, I can make something out of this, I guess.

• 43:17Liam McAnderson?

  This is my generic joke machine.

• 43:20November Kelly?

  Can reassemble a joke blindfolded.

• 43:23Justin Roczniak?

  This is my joke shed.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Making a joke that could kill Shinzo Abe.

• 43:30Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 43:40November Kelly?

  Kit bashing a joke is a real specific. Yeah, the ACF only wants you to keep a serial number on the punchline because that's considered to be the like operative part of the joke.

• 43:51November Kelly?

  I'm building ghost jokes where I like sort of like mill everything out separately.

• 43:55Justin Roczniak?

  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 product or something, you know?

• 44:02November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe. You just have like a loose punchline that doesn't go to anything, you know?

• 44:09Justin Roczniak?

  When you look into joke regulation, I mean, the problem is it is really difficult to define what a joke is, right?

• 44:16November Kelly?

  Yeah, you know it when you see it, right?

• 44:17Justin Roczniak?

  Well, no, that's, that's why I have a lot of problem with joke control in America.

• 44:22Liam McAnderson?

  Show control, Jesus, fuck you.

• 44:29Justin Roczniak?

  I just don't think that it, I don't think the legal regime reflects the reality. Anyway.

• 44:35November Kelly?

  I mean, listen, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a joke is a good guy with a joke.

• 44:39Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

• 44:43November Kelly?

  That did kind of happen to Bill Cosby, so.

• 44:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you know.

• 44:52Justin Roczniak?

  We all gotta go after Dane Cook.

• 44:59Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway.

• 45:00Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, moving, moving on swiftly.

• 45:02Justin Roczniak?

  Moving on. Before we threaten to do jokes to Dane Cook.

• 45:06November Kelly?

  Be the first time in his life to feel like, what the fuck is this?

• 45:10Liam McAnderson?

  What, how do I, what do I, what do I, I do with this? Do I put it on my head? Do I eat it?

• 45:15Justin Roczniak?

  All this changes due to the invention of first, the safety bicycle.

• 45:21November Kelly?

  Hmm, which is feminism, because it gave women the ability to, as I once saw an incel put it, uh, like, cycle around and fuck strange chads.

• 45:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 45:31Liam McAnderson?

  Wow, that is a depressing way to look at that.

• 45:34November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 45:34Justin Roczniak?

  And then later, the automobile, right? So suddenly, these, these, this idea of smooth roads, uh, were beneficial to a lot of people, especially cyclists.

• 45:45November Kelly?

  Now you gotta invent a mountain bike, you know?

• 45:47Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 45:58November Kelly?

  They were, the, the, the past, they were literal minded people.

• 46:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Um, also at this time, uh, farmers have been complaining about, uh, having better roads for a long time. But because they're farmers, you know, they didn't want to pay for them, right? Um, you know, that, that is a normal sort of farmer type complaint. I, I want everything in one bag. I want everything in one bag, but I don't want the bag to be heavy. Um.

• 46:22November Kelly?

  Oh, that's, they've been like this for hundreds of years.

• 46:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, you know, this, 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 de France is there.

• 46:50November Kelly?

  I was about to say, it's like, we, we need, we need a broad, flat road so that we can do 19th century cycling shenanigans on her.

• 46:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Why I'm going so fast by laying down on the seat.

• 47:01November Kelly?

  Um.

• 47:04Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Oh, have I got a guy for you? This is.

• 47:19Liam McAnderson?

  Twat.

• 47:20November Kelly?

  Whoa, country little glasses.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Hello. You would be correct.

• 47:24Justin Roczniak?

  I kind of like that, yeah.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they're they're cool, but like, no, we can't. Very, there is no level of critical support we can give this man.

• 47:32November Kelly?

  They don't let you get down with a like pince nez anymore, you know, and it's fucked up.

• 47:36Liam McAnderson?

  They don't, they'll do that.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  So this is Carl G. Fisher. He was traditional, like 18 turn of the century, American rags to riches story. A like anecdote from his childhood was that he was a poor student because he was a stigmatic. 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.

• 48:10November Kelly?

  Hell, yeah.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  To like garner praise from fellow students.

• 48:16November Kelly?

  I'll be, I'll be honest, if I saw a guy like full force sprinting backwards, I would not notice his gay little glasses. I agree.

• 48:23Liam McAnderson?

  I would be very.

• 48:25November Kelly?

  Now of all the techniques to come up with to avoid being bullied, it's not the best I've heard, but you know.

• 48:31Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you can look at the bully while you're running away from it.

• 48:34November Kelly?

  It's like, it's like something like a lizard would evolve, you know, like. You want to try and like, you know, do fisticuffs to me? What if I like sprint backwards and unveil my like threatening like neck feathers or whatever?

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so already at the age of 12, a type of guy.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  In 1891, he started up a bicycle shop and he became like a hardcore cyclist. Started racing as a means of like attracting attention to his business.

• 49:04November Kelly?

  Okay, but backwards or forwards?

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Forwards, as far as I know, although that would be, that'd be fun if they did like the the reverse bicycle racing that they have in, I forget, I think it was some Eastern European country where they built a car that had a CVT that could go as fast in reverse as it went forwards. So they did backwards car racing. I can't remember the exact car, but it 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.

• 49:41November Kelly?

  America's first car dealer sprinting backwards onto the lot to offer you finance on a Deon Booton.

• 49:50Liam McAnderson?

  My deals are so crazy, they're backwards.

• 49:53Justin Roczniak?

  What can I do to put you in a new car today?

• 49:57Liam McAnderson?

  You want to see me run backwards real fucking?

• 50:00November Kelly?

  Fucking, fucking anything. Stop doing that, I guess. Please.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  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, critical, crucial in like, inventing the roll cage, after he watched like, buddies get hit by a 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

• 50:46Speaker 02

  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 Speedwagon. 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.

• 51:26Justin Roczniak?

  Okay.

• 51:28Justin Roczniak?

  Air balloon.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  Early marketing, uh, just, just fly your car over the city of Indianapolis.

• 51:36Justin Roczniak?

  People love the stunt. They love stunts.

• 51:38Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, Crash a Crush. Yeah, people love a stunt, man.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, um, this was working. Like, he was, he was actually really well off. And, uh, next slide, please. So he was, 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 transmission, you've probably heard of Allison transmissions. Um, uh, was they were, these two were approached by the guy who invented, uh, acetylene?

• 52:09Justin Roczniak?

  A settling.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Settling. Thank you. I knew I was messing that one up. Um, acetylene headlights.

• 52:16Justin Roczniak?

  And, uh,

• 52:16November Kelly?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on.

• 52:18Liam McAnderson?

  A torch you can hold your car. Yeah.

• 52:20Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, you don't, you don't have like an alternator on there yet. You need some kind of horrible gas. The settling will do the job.

• 52:27November Kelly?

  My, my, my acetylene headlight. And then that also leads me to the realization.

• 52:31Justin Roczniak?

  Scariest gas they use for headlights.

• 52:35November Kelly?

  It's like, then leads me to the realization that there was a long period where you had like a, a practical car, but not a practical headlights. And then I'm thinking about driving a completely

• 52:45Liam McAnderson?

  Very combustible.

• 52:46November Kelly?

  Lit, uh, but also very fragile car down an unpaved road at night. And

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:53November Kelly?

  Jesus. Okay.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, everybody who was really into cars early on is absolutely fucking insane.

• 53:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, I want to do like a melee media episode with you or something at some point.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's mostly just how Mussolini, uh, used auto racing to do fascism. Um,

• 53:10Justin Roczniak?

  Funny, I think, uh, I think locomotives have, uh, actually alternators by this point.

• 53:16November Kelly?

  Again, the train, by rights, the better mode of transport, by far, more advanced.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so he and Allison started this company called Presto Light. This is one of their advertisements where they're like, yeah, cool. We make, we make exploding headlights.

• 53:33November Kelly?

  It's in, 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.

• 53:40Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, Jeanette, Pennsylvania. Okay. Oh, boy. Okay.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. So of course, like they own the patent, they rapid, they have 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, 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.

• 54:12Liam McAnderson?

  Those fuckers.

• 54:13Speaker 02

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

• 54:30November Kelly?

  Because 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.

• 54:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, from the, from the depths of hell with it. Yeah, exactly.

• 54:47Justin Roczniak?

  I, I remember the first time I used an oxy torch and yeah, I, the guy who was teaching me was like, yeah, if you see the gauge, do this with the acetylene, you're already dead.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, but this is like early automobiling. So this guy, so next slide, please. Carl, 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, 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, Carl's like, Carl's like, their cars are so much better than ours. They're cooking us.

• 55:36November Kelly?

  Like, American automotive journalist visits China now.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, exactly. He's like, the French cars are way better. And the reason he's reasoning is that their, their cars can go faster and so they can test them better because their roads are better. In, in an article in Motor Age magazine in 1905, you know, he was talking about the, 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, I don't know what it's called.

• 56:07November Kelly?

  Well, I'm glad you guys got rid of that sort of tendency in your motorsport, right?

• 56:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. He said, "The, 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."

• 56:31November Kelly?

  Yeah, no kidding.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  He's like, "We don't have good enough racetracks. We gotta do better racetracks."

• 56:36November Kelly?

  I, I guess I see that if you're like, sort of like at the back of like this kind of sloth of like mud being thrown up by all of these cars. It's like, it says like the sun, but that hasn't happened yet. So it's like saying, you know, it's a guy in like 1990. Yeah. It's like nine 11 out there.

• 56:50Justin Roczniak?

  They haven't, they haven't invented like fucking figure eight demolition derby races yet. Oh, man, this would be cool.

• 56:57November Kelly?

  Yeah, this guy would have loved that shit.

• 57:01November Kelly?

  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.

• 57:08Justin Roczniak?

  You die instantly. It's more of a bloodsport back then.

• 57:13November Kelly?

  Doing more of a kind of like a, like an Aztec, you know, like ball game kind of human sacrifice vibe there.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, so this is, you're, you're, we're getting close. You're actually independently reinventing the beginning of American motorsport. 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.

• 57:53Justin Roczniak?

  So like it's a combination. It's like, ah, it's a racetrack and an aerodrome. It's like throw a couple more things in there. Yeah. Here, come, come here and see the vehicles.

• 58:02November Kelly?

  Yeah. If you want to do some dumb shit attached to an engine, this is your place.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 58:14Liam McAnderson?

  I wish to die in ways previously unimaginable.

• 58:17November Kelly?

  Yeah, I'm gonna die faster than any of my previous ancestors.

• 58:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Still trying to beat that Irishman who hit 100 miles an hour.

• 58:28November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's like him, guy who got hit with a ballista in Roman times.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so Carol 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 track, this little like venue there called the Indianapolis Super Speedway.

• 58:59November Kelly?

  Yeah, named with characteristic American humility.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, to be fair, it is the largest sports and sports venue on earth today. It has, it has a quarter million seats in it.

• 59:13Justin Roczniak?

  It's also very fast.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  It's, it's like the idea, the, you know, he really wanted it to be an oval instead of like, you know, the road courses that were kind of typical in like both like rural American racing and in some European circuits. Cause 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.

• 59:31November Kelly?

  Put a bunch of like sponsor logos on them, you know?

• 59:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I will say, having gone to the Indy 500, uh, it's transcendent. Like he was, I don't want to give him credit because he's not like a great dude, but also wow, it's a cool track. 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 like, so NASCAR pill. Uh, I can't remember how many Indy 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. But in any case, I digress. Um, here's where you're.

• 1:00:08Justin Roczniak?

  Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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.

• 1:00:21Justin Roczniak?

  And you feel that the super speedway sounds like a great time. Yeah.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's awesome. But anyway, so 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. 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 with 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.

• 1:01:05November Kelly?

  I feel like that's a little unfair, given that in 1909, you couldn't like make a coffee without killing four spectators.

• 1:01:11Justin Roczniak?

  No. This, this, this is, you know, this is early progressivism. This is woke, to be honest, you know, I, I, I don't know. I, I think this is, uh, I, I suppose, you know, I, social progress is good, but also like.

• 1:01:25Liam McAnderson?

  But also.

• 1:01:27November Kelly?

  Well, this is.

• 1:01:28Justin Roczniak?

  It's 1909. Come on.

• 1:01:31November Kelly?

  Yeah, this, this, this guy.

• 1:01:32Justin Roczniak?

  People die all the time. We're about to have World War One.

• 1:01:35November Kelly?

  Yeah, he's, 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 One.

• 1:01:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:46Liam McAnderson?

  It's mercy kill.

• 1:01:47November Kelly?

  Not, 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 some in like, you know, a couple of years' time, 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.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  Like Chris Tucker, man, like.

• 1:02:13Justin Roczniak?

  Like Stu Baker.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  This is World War One history. Take your, take your sensitive ass back to like early.

• 1:02:20November Kelly?

  That's right, yeah.

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  Um, yeah. So, uh, but anyway, Carl is like, all right, we're gonna fix the track. So he, he decides that he's going to get 3.2 million 10 pound bricks.

• 1:02:35Justin Roczniak?

  Let people enjoy things.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  And he's gonna pave the track and it, it, he paves the entire two and a half mile long circuit and it is, you know, that's, that's basically the first incarnation of the Indianapolis Super Speedway. It's, it's still called the Brickyard to this day. Um, and they run the first, uh, 500 mile like endurance race in 1911. And that's the beginning of the Indy 500. Um, at that race, they, Fisher advocated for the rolling start and the pace car. And that's, my auto racing has begun. Like he is, he, this, this one man has basically kicked off sort of like the modern age of auto racing. Um, so next slide, please.

• 1:03:19Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, it's Justin. Uh, so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. Uh, 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. Uh, sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. Um, 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

• 1:04:03Justin Roczniak?

  have two bucks to spare each month. Uh, join at patreon.com/ W T Y P pod. Do it if you want, or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  You would think, you know, 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, 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 take it 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

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  of America are built chiefly of politics, whereas the proper material is crushed rock or concrete." That's his, his clever bit is that, you know, if they, these red tape politicians would simply get out of the way, we could have, we'd have good roads. So to this end, he, he proposes what becomes the Lincoln Highway, which is a New York to San Francisco road.

• 1:05:25Liam McAnderson?

  That goes through York.

• 1:05:30November Kelly?

  York mentioned. Sorry.

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  It covers 3,400 miles of the US. And, you know, 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's 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 could drive at night in the middle of Nebraska as you venture from New York to San Francisco.

• 1:06:08November Kelly?

  That's terrifying.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So like, and he gets major buy-in. Woodrow Wilson, who is, you know, the president at the time, Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt are all chipped in to fund it. The president of the Lincoln Highway Association was also the president of Packard, which is, you know, a major automaker.

• 1:06:28Liam McAnderson?

  That convenient.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  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, 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 ruining shit.

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  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-

• 1:07:12Liam McAnderson?

  Fucking bastard.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  On the corporate teat. And we need to, like, tell people that they have to put their own money into the, the public works of their country, which I, I don't even know where that falls ideologically.

• 1:07:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I'm a little bit confused here. That, that, I'm, I'm kind of like, okay, I, I, I agree, but also-

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  There's a, there's currently a Z-axis being added to the normal political alignment chart. And Henry Ford is somewhere in, like, the new dimension we're charting.

• 1:07:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, might be a few more. We're playing four, five dimensional chess here.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, um, so this kind of like, this kind of torpedo is 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 US is kind of like, no, I don't want to be involved with this at all. This is woke somehow. And so this is the route that gets planned, which uses primarily existing roads. 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 bajillion different colors in it, and that's because the route changed, like, 50 million times. Because again, it's just using roads that are there.

• 1:08:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  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 of like, oh, look, you can cross the country with this great new road system that we're gonna, like, put signs up for. Um, notably-

• 1:08:50November Kelly?

  You can read those signs in the lights of your Oxyacetylene headlights.

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  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 bad drainage or any, the rest of it is just like.

• 1:09:10Justin Roczniak?

  Any amount of work put into it at all.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  The rest of it is like wagon ruts, basically. 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, a intraversible, desolate wilderness. And.

• 1:09:38November Kelly?

  Pride to the invention of the crossover.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  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. Uh, so Carl Fisher, after he was done doing all of this, decided he would turn his attention to building Miami Beach.

• 1:09:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  He's the guy.

• 1:09:58November Kelly?

  He is like the CFC's guy. He has a huge negative impact on his environment.

• 1:10:04Justin Roczniak?

  Cuban douchebags. Henry Flagler, yeah.

• 1:10:06Liam McAnderson?

  Hates the Jews. Uh, well, you dead bitch.

• 1:10:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, he, he developed it. This is a picture of his house. Um, cause like in the mid twenties, this guy had like more money than God. Uh, and, uh, he, he was like putting up ads in Times Square, like move 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.

• 1:10:33Liam McAnderson?

  Suck that shit, you dead bitch.

• 1:10:34November Kelly?

  This guy's, 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.

• 1:10:47Speaker 02

  Notably, they hated each other, like as.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:53November Kelly?

  Just handed like evil happiness and he throws it away.

• 1:10:56Justin Roczniak?

  He's, he's the bad kind of anti Semite. I'm sorry.

• 1:11:00Liam McAnderson?

  Roz.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean like.

• 1:11:04Liam McAnderson?

  I don't need to defend your honor when you get accused of being anti Semitic because you made a joke about already five Bush's money again.

• 1:11:10Justin Roczniak?

  That was a long time ago.

• 1:11:12November Kelly?

  Dare I ask?

• 1:11:13Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, Roz did nothing wrong in that scenario. Someone just decided that Roz is anti-Semitic and I had to back him up.

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  Uh, anyway, this guy was like insanely anti-Semitic. Um, and I had in a, 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 Montauk. In New York. Uh, so.

• 1:11:44Justin Roczniak?

  Montauk was also like, uh, being theorized as America's great port at this point in time.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  Was it? Okay. Fascinating. Yeah.

• 1:11:52Liam McAnderson?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  Typical like American tycoon story of like rags to riches to rags, but he sucked the whole time.

• 1:11:59Liam McAnderson?

  Don't forget the dead part.

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Um, but he sucked the whole time. So like, you know, what is the moral of the story? Uh, who knows? Uh, life is bad. Anyway, next slide, please.

• 1:12:11Justin Roczniak?

  Life is bad, but sometimes it happens to bad people.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  So, you know, back to the, the actual highway in, in 1915, they film a like movie. And then drive across the country on the Lincoln Highway to promote it. Uh, it was like dubbed like three mile film because of how much length there was in the reel. Uh, it is entirely lost media. It was too flammable and Disney decided it wasn't worth preserving. So they destroyed it.

• 1:12:38November Kelly?

  Though goddamn mouse swamp dwelling pieces of shit.

• 1:12:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Uh, the Disney episode is coming, goddammit.

• 1:12:46November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Um, yeah.

• 1:12:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, Roy Kimball destroyed it because it promoted cars instead of trains.

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  But you know, they, they, then, 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 has been pointed out. Um, you know, in 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 Fish Springs, Utah, quote, build a sagebrush fire. Mr. Thomas will come with a team. He can see you 20 miles off.

• 1:13:26November Kelly?

  Honestly, this is a long suffering man. The longest suffering, but also this, this, this sounds pretty cool.

• 1:13:37November Kelly?

  In a way that you have to go to some pretty far flung locations to experience this kind of like travel difficulty now.

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  There were, there were a handful of-

• 1:13:44Justin Roczniak?

  Mr. Thomas is probably on his porch. He'll see you, don't worry, he'll come, he'll come there with six horses and pull you out.

• 1:13:52Liam McAnderson?

  And you're welcome for it, douchebag.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  There were a handful of, of women that like took this trip, um, either solo or like with family or whatever. Um, and like, I absolutely, if, if like the world were completely different and, you know, in every single way, I would have sobered 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 world? Cannot judge. Um, but it did suck.

• 1:14:19November Kelly?

  America's suffering from, from, from trail madness.

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, like Americans have two thoughts, right? And it's like, okay, what if I had a hamburger?

• 1:14:28Liam McAnderson?

  One Dodge Viper, right?

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  What if I had a hamburger and what if I took a road trip?

• 1:14:32Liam McAnderson?

  What if I could do both? And then I go to In-N-Out? Are they, do they still print the Bible verses on cups and shit? Probably.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  I don't think so. Do they? Look, you can't ruin In-N-Out for me. I have nothing left. We, I, I have racking up a world historical number of L's recently. You can't take it in out.

• 1:14:48Liam McAnderson?

  I'm sorry.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  I need those hamburgers.

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  My Los Angeles routine is land, get out of the airport. And for some reason, the, the garage where they give all the press cars out is directly next door to the LAX In-N-Out. So I go pick up the keys to whatever fancy car they've given me and then get a hamburger and watch.

• 1:15:06Liam McAnderson?

  Do you have a, like a, like a, like a badge of some kind? You could fax me a copy of just real quick?

• 1:15:13Justin Roczniak?

  You gotta lay on the hood and watch planes go over like Wayne's World, you know?

• 1:15:18Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:20Speaker 02

  So, so Lincoln Highway sucks. Uh, it's, you know, uh, during, during the course of the great war, the American military starts this new division called the Motor Transport Corps, which is, you know, basically where all, they put all of the catchall, 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, uh, flu pandemic. Um, show, kind of show off all this new technology.

• 1:15:53November Kelly?

  Yeah, America's looking up. I mean, comprised entirely of the kind of freaks who like survive World War One in, in the army and go, I know a good thing when I see it. I want to stay in this fucking army.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. 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."

• 1:16:29Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  So, that was, uh, we were really like, just frothing to do internment camps, I guess, even like 20 years before they happened. So that's-

• 1:16:39Justin Roczniak?

  What are they thinking in, what are they thinking in Indonesia right now?

• 1:16:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So that was, that, this kind of hit me like, you know, getting struck by a car as I was reading through this. It's like, woo, that's, uh, that doesn't look good with later context.

• 1:16:51November Kelly?

  Just, 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?"

• 1:16:58Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, could be Guam. You know? We don't know. What are they doing there with the tuna cannery? But that's American Samoa, excuse me. Unfortunately-

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  Uh, next slide, I think, is you, actually, Ross.

• 1:17:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I duplicated some of that information, unfortunately, but-

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  But it's okay. I don't really know anything about the Great War.

• 1:17:17Justin Roczniak?

  As they said, uh, as they said in 1066 and all that, "The Great War was a war between America and Germany and was thus fought in Belgium."

• 1:17:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but the large, the long and short of it is, uh, a guy shot another guy in Serbia, and then the Second International shat the bed. All of Europe goes to war over essentially nothing, and America gets dragged in. Um, 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?

• 1:17:53November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:54Justin Roczniak?

  Why don't we have those?

• 1:17:55November Kelly?

  Weird, weird thing about bringing, um, uh, like, French stuff back from the Great War. It's why, um, uh, Burnley in Lancashire has a weird attachment to like, one particular French liqueur, is because the like, local regiment just brought it back with them. Meanwhile, the Americans are- Like I could invent uh becoming a car psycho.

• 1:18:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:20Justin Roczniak?

  May- maybe cars are like cars are fundamentally French, I guess. You know, this is something that we had no idea about.

• 1:18:27Speaker 02

  I did. Every the the French at like the thing is like the average American does not appreciate this because the last French car sold in America was the Peugeot four oh five in nineteen ninety one. But like every single French car from like basically the end of World War Two until I don't know. I've only driven them up until nineteen ninety one, 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.

• 1:18:59Justin Roczniak?

  I cannot afford it, Mr. S, so I have.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  The one of them is named the SM for God's sake. Like what more do you want?

• 1:19:10Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, in addition to the horrors, World War One 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? Uh, the war ends with the United States in a position where I think ninety thousand trucks had been built for the military. Suddenly they have this pretty big motor transport corps and they don't know what to do with it now that it's beast time. Clearly it's time for a stunt.

• 1:19:41November Kelly?

  It's like the Great White Fleet, which I'll also talk about at some point, you know?

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  I'm just, I'm just thinking about that. I unrelated, but I'm just thinking about that guy who was like, I wish I had been born in like the late eighteen nineties. So I could have lived through World War One and World War Two and then retired during the Cold War. That was like the peak human experience. And just rotating that concept in my mind right now.

• 1:20:03November Kelly?

  It's like, yeah, I wish my life was a million times worse. I mean, to be fair.

• 1:20:07Justin Roczniak?

  I'd see a lot of cool trains, though.

• 1:20:09November Kelly?

  That is true. That is true. Doing, doing like, you know, nineteen twenties, I've seen footage. I've seen newsreels.

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  I will also say that like, the 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, Scotrail is like really a usable like service. Imagine that. We had to go to like, we had to go to like Edinburgh 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, it's like 20 minutes. Like, what the fuck are you talking about?

• 1:20:51November Kelly?

  Yeah, gesturing to the dedicated like next express train to Edinburgh board in the station and being like, I don't know, fuckin'.

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, anyway, it's just so funny.

• 1:21:02Justin Roczniak?

  We have to speak about something similar sometime soon. Anyway, so what about if we did a big road trip?

• 1:21:10Liam McAnderson?

  All right, I'm, I'm down.

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  It's the American answer to everything.

• 1:21:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  I love this shit. Just transition, don't know what to do with your life, buy an old van, drive into the desert. That's basically what the US Army's doing.

• 1:21:22November Kelly?

  My God, is the US Army gonna transition?

• 1:21:24Liam McAnderson?

  What kind of hormones need for that?

• 1:21:25Justin Roczniak?

  So I put these two, 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 your best friends?

• 1:21:38Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  Got a bunch of motorcycles.

• 1:21:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59November Kelly?

  Yeah, the, the five Harleys, like, sick.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  Couple of Packards too.

• 1:22:05Justin Roczniak?

  We got, 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.

• 1:22:16November Kelly?

  I always think of military ambulance is such a good fucking aesthetic. Give me the Kentucky Route Zero Humvee ambulance, you know, like.

• 1:22:24Justin Roczniak?

  Some of the, uh, multiple of the motorcycles have sidecars, which is cool.

• 1:22:28Liam McAnderson?

  Odd fucks.

• 1:22:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you got your Liberty Kitchen trailer. You got your Maxwell.

• 1:22:34Liam McAnderson?

  Do they charge $20 for a fucking?

• 1:22:36Justin Roczniak?

  Tractor, right? You've got the Militor. We'll talk about that later.

• 1:22:44Justin Roczniak?

  Loader pontoon trailer turned out not to be necessary.

• 1:22:48November Kelly?

  The blacksmith truck?

• 1:22:50Justin Roczniak?

  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 and you got the Whites.

• 1:23:07November Kelly?

  Really clean drop of that, just in case anybody needed it.

• 1:23:16Justin Roczniak?

  There's a lot of vehicles.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the goal is like, I, you know, honestly, the number seems to vary depending on the source, but it was, I think 50 days, right?

• 1:23:25Justin Roczniak?

  Something like that. Yeah.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And now at the time, you know, it was like, you could do this in like a minimum of 20 to 30 days. Uh, but that assumes you're averaging 18 miles an hour and you're not 79 trucks.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  You're just like one person taking a pleasure cruise.

• 1:23:41Justin Roczniak?

  Military convoys go pretty slow as a general rule, even today.

• 1:23:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. And yeah, they're doing this in the middle of summer, just for the record. So it's like July when they set off.

• 1:23:52Liam McAnderson?

  No air conditioning. Yeah.

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  Well, and the thing is like the roads in Iowa and Nebraska, like everything basically like in the Great Plains. They, they call them gumbo because of the consistency.

• 1:24:10Liam McAnderson?

  I can only say one sentence of that accent.

• 1:24:13Justin Roczniak?

  Are you gonna make sorry? You're gonna be so good, you're gonna slap your mama.

• 1:24:16Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 1:24:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, the trucks will sink in. So they're basically hoping they're firm enough that they can drive through them without like the trucks being consumed by the earth. Uh, and, uh, there, it's not actually like out to a good start. Uh, on July 12th, five days into the drive, uh, 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, chunky? I'm not sure. Made 35 miles in seven and a half hours. This is the good part of the trip.

• 1:24:54November Kelly?

  Yes. Just like I've had three hammer handles break off in my hand. Day two.

• 1:25:01Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 1:25:27November Kelly?

  Oh, just getting fully Italian jobs.

• 1:25:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:32Justin Roczniak?

  By the first week, they reach East Palestine, Ohio.

• 1:25:37November Kelly?

  I've heard of that.

• 1:25:37Justin Roczniak?

  By the second week, they reach Chicago Heights. Why is it called Chicago Heights? It's 50 feet above Chicago.

• 1:25:45Liam McAnderson?

  That is heights.

• 1:25:46Justin Roczniak?

  And several miles away.

• 1:25:49Liam McAnderson?

  Does this say on the side that it got bad? Oh, no.

• 1:25:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, then it got bad.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, next slide, please. Here's, here's one of my favorite images. Uh, 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.

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  That is my expert opinion.

• 1:26:14November Kelly?

  That's baked in there. That's a tandoor at that point. You're just cooking a wheel. Like I.

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so remember when I mentioned about the gumbo roads?

• 1:26:25Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were still gumbo. And then they hit them even in the middle of July. Um, so basically they get out of Illinois and it's just like, okay, this is, this is a serious problem. We're getting stuck everywhere. They also noticed that none of their drivers know how to drive yet. Because like they're all like 19 year old army recruits who are desperately excited to go fight in like the trenches in France. Um.

• 1:26:47Justin Roczniak?

  What do you mean it's not a horse that can't get me home drunk?

• 1:26:50November Kelly?

  Yeah. Getting, getting, getting your like, I missed deployment thing for 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. He's like lungs are like mostly vesicent sort of like globules.

• 1:27:13Justin Roczniak?

  I, I, I got the feeling from reading about this that this seemed like it was kind of fun. I don't know.

• 1:27:19Speaker 02

  It's, okay, my, my chief impression was that it was the most type two fun of all time.

• 1:27:24November Kelly?

  Yeah, just kind of like a history of this period of the US Army where it's like genocide, genocide, fuck around, fuck around, fuck around, fuck around. Uh, like, uh, put down strikes, put down strikes, put down strikes, fuck around. Didn't like horror the likes of which no one has ever seen.

• 1:27:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:41November Kelly?

  Road trip.

• 1:27:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

• 1:27:44Justin Roczniak?

  The road trip, yeah.

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

  And I will say like, you know, they're, 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 sink into it.

• 1:27:55Liam McAnderson?

  Fucking sounds horrible.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  Uh, by Nebraska, they've encountered quicksand and sank into it. Um.

• 1:28:01Liam McAnderson?

  Quicksand was one of those things I thought was gonna be really big in my adult life and then I never got quicksanded.

• 1:28:06Speaker 02

  You know, by the time that they hit Utah, it's 110 degrees in the shade and 130 in the sun.

• 1:28:15Justin Roczniak?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:28:17Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, they, they, you know, they hit the Sierra Nevada and that's like, it's 30 degrees outside. Um, and this is of course, again, mostly guys who were bummed they missed out on going to, you know, Europe, like the great war. Um, and when they started doing mountain passes like out in like, you know, the, the actual Rockies in Wyoming or whatever, uh, 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, they're like leather pads strapped to like an, 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 drivetrain is.

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  So they're like going through transmissions and drive shafts and everything like water. Um, there's actually, this reminds me, my grandfather, uh, may he rest in peace, was, uh, like a recruited, was like a draft in the Korean War, right? And he went to Germany to like one of the, 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 nineteen 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 thirty miles an hour.

• 1:29:47Speaker 02

  Because he doesn't know that he can shift and go to further gears. And imagine, imagine this guy is the whole military. Everybody driving a truck is basically that guy for this road trip and that's, that's where we're at. We also like the, the antics of this, um, 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.

• 1:30:15Justin Roczniak?

  I believe his official title here is Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower is an observer.

• 1:30:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, from the War Department, which we're getting back now.

• 1:30:23November Kelly?

  Just like stand there with your, your like hands on your hips and go, damn, that's crazy.

• 1:30:28Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that's gone poorly, huh?

• 1:30:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, he, uh, and this is apocryphal, so I'm not a hundred percent certain it was actually him, but like, uh, he played a prank on the camp somewhere in rural Wyoming by like mimicking war calls of native, what they thought Native American people would sound like and almost like restarted the Indian wars.

• 1:30:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, there was apparently some kind of urgent conversation that says, no, don't call Washington. That was fake.

• 1:30:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:57Justin Roczniak?

  Don't have to put down the Lakota again.

• 1:31:00November Kelly?

  Yeah, it turns out. Yeah, it turns out that the answer to the question, you all mind if a white boy speaks a little Lakota this evening is yes, very much.

• 1:31:09Liam McAnderson?

  Please don't.

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's, there's kind of your intersection of like, uh, playful, like, American, you know, let's fuck around and also let's do horrible war crimes. So woo hoo, 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 twenty one 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.

• 1:31:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:31:45Speaker 02

  Water sources they find and you know they're they're having dodgy food and so 21 guys get left behind as casualties basically. 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 in sand. 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. They destroyed 88 bridges because they kept driving over them and they would just break underneath the weight of the truck. Uh, so yeah. And they did this while averaging five and a half hours of sleep at night.

• 1:32:24November Kelly?

  Incredible. I mean, that may have something to do with it as well.

• 1:32:27Justin Roczniak?

  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. Um, you know, so ideally like, and that was with the, uh, the engineering team was there. So they would try and shore up the bridge if it looked like it was going to fall down. Um, 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.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:58Justin Roczniak?

  It worked.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, you know, the only aspect of this that 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. We love you. Uh, you know, so like that was from a PR perspective, that was great. They didn't actually recruit many people though.

• 1:33:21November Kelly?

  Yeah. On the way out, you destroy the only bridge out of town because the weight of the key to the city like is just slightly too much for it.

• 1:33:29Justin Roczniak?

  They did actually have some cars that were like purely devoted to public rail relations. They would go out, you know, 20 miles ahead and say, hey, we're, we're making camp tonight in your town.

• 1:33:40November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:41Justin Roczniak?

  Could you get the mayor out? Could we, uh, could we like, uh, I don't know, go to the saloon?

• 1:33:45November Kelly?

  You know, just being like, can we, can we stash the like 20 guys with dysentery in the back so that the, you know?

• 1:33:51Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, can we violate the third amendment, bro?

• 1:33:53Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 1:34:10Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah, big bank wins the whole way. I think these guys, I, I again, I think these guys actually had a pretty good time overall.

• 1:34:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:34:19November Kelly?

  Compared to like being in the military like day to day in 1919, you have to figure like to that or like George Patton is screaming at you and he's still in like, kind of like.

• 1:34:29Liam McAnderson?

  Slapping around.

• 1:34:29November Kelly?

  And he's going, you know, it's not handling it well.

• 1:34:32Liam McAnderson?

  Mad that the germers are the ones running the concentration camps. Yeah.

• 1:34:36November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Speaker 02

  And it, 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. Cause 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 Hiace with handcuffs and you'd be like, yeah, that's me actually. I am that woman.

• 1:34:56Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, but then I believe Roz has a breakdown of all.

• 1:34:59Justin Roczniak?

  I have, I have, uh, I have a breakdown of select vehicles and their problems.

• 1:35:05Liam McAnderson?

  Well, there's your pro- oh dear.

• 1:35:09Justin Roczniak?

  So these are the FWD model Bs, right? FWD stands for four wheel drive. They have solid rubber tires. Beautiful.

• 1:35:21November Kelly?

  I, I'm, I'm, I'm realizing at this point how much I need the fucking snow runner 1919 reboot, you know?

• 1:35:30Speaker 02

  Solid rubber tires is just like shooting for a high score on the, uh, NVH rating. Autojournalist gets in, is like, gets a feeling is shaken out like, oh yeah, it's really visceral, guys.

• 1:35:43Justin Roczniak?

  These ones, these ones, I think they had three of them. They were apparently pretty good. They had some fan belt issues. The fan belts are 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.

• 1:36:06November Kelly?

  The Audi Quattro of their day.

• 1:36:08Justin Roczniak?

  I think the four wheel drive, uh, corporation eventually went on to make fire trucks and then airport crash tenders. Yeah.

• 1:36:17November Kelly?

  Some real like, you know, you as a kid think this is the coolest vehicle in existence and you're right, vehicles.

• 1:36:23Justin Roczniak?

  These were, these were three ton trucks. Um, 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?

• 1:36:46November Kelly?

  When America was first on it, the USS, we built this yesterday shit.

• 1:36:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Three ton capacity. It had a four speed transmission to get you up to a blistering 15 miles an hour.

• 1:36:57Liam McAnderson?

  Wow.

• 1:37:00Speaker 02

  Imagining the actual like Fast and Furious shifting scenes.

• 1:37:05Speaker 02

  He's like barely keeping up with a horse.

• 1:37:09Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 1:37:19November Kelly?

  Do you imagine like a different, a different shit?

• 1:37:22Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:37:24Liam McAnderson?

  I'm gonna kill Dwight D I's hour the bare hands at this point.

• 1:37:29Justin Roczniak?

  Except for two days when they were near Stockton, California.

• 1:37:32Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, but you're Stockton, so you might as well be broken down.

• 1:37:35November Kelly?

  Healed by Stockton, uh, which is the only time it's ever happened to anything.

• 1:37:40Justin Roczniak?

  The big issue with these because you know, they were all made by different manufacturers and that the standardized B was not very standardized. There was no consistent source of breakdowns. Every single truck broke down in a different way.

• 1:37:54Liam McAnderson?

  Yep. USS we built this yesterday. Yep.

• 1:37:57Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 1:38:09November Kelly?

  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.

• 1:38:22Justin Roczniak?

  Thrown rods, broken carburetors, also in 50 different ways. Short circuits in the Magneto, which I believe is an old fashioned term for a alternator or an old fashioned type of alternator. It does the same thing.

• 1:38:36November Kelly?

  Yeah. It's, it's like, what if an alternator could like, you know, give you an electric shock more readily, right? Like.

• 1:38:41Justin Roczniak?

  Loose steering wheels.

• 1:38:45November Kelly?

  Sure.

• 1:38:46Justin Roczniak?

  Bent, bent axles and many others. They never had the same problem twice.

• 1:38:52November Kelly?

  Well, I mean, that's positive, I guess.

• 1:38:54Liam McAnderson?

  They learn from their mistakes.

• 1:38:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. The only thing that consistently worked on them was the transmission. The transmission was rock solid on these guys.

• 1:39:04November Kelly?

  Thank you, Mr. Allison, you know?

• 1:39:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Another model of truck. This is the Mack five and a half ton truck. I think I sort of, I, I, I'm pretty sure it's got a Mack logo on the front. And I don't know of any other Macs they put on this convoy, right?

• 1:39:20November Kelly?

  Yeah, you know?

• 1:39:21Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Great game.

• 1:39:22Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 1:39:34November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 1:39:36Justin Roczniak?

  They had a chain 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. Um, those immediately clogged with sand and mud. Once they crossed the Mississippi and that locked the rear wheels solid, right? Um, so once they became disabled, they could only be towed backwards.

• 1:40:04November Kelly?

  Time is a flat circle.

• 1:40:09Liam McAnderson?

  But they could go backwards at full speed, right?

• 1:40:13Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, we'll get to that. This is the Packard one and a half ton truck. They were pretty good.

• 1:40:18November Kelly?

  Uh, just, it just, this one works. I, I love, I love how horse all of these look in themselves. Like they really had like a, like engine front in a way that gives it a kind of like a face, you know?

• 1:40:30Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. This is the Militor.

• 1:40:34November Kelly?

  Hell, yes. All right. I love this thing. Reminds me of a pin scout or if you kind of like, you know, retrofuturism that.

• 1:40:41Justin Roczniak?

  This, 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? Uh, it had this big power winch on it. This is not the specific Militor. This is a different one. Um, this thing was heavy as fuck. It had chains on the tires. It was like, it was like, this is like the 1919 goof wagon.

• 1:41:04November Kelly?

  Ah, what's that one fucking game? Is it Scythe, maybe? The like-

• 1:41:10Speaker 02

  Twisted Metal?

• 1:41:11November Kelly?

  No, no, no. It's like the board game that's like, kind of like 1910s, 1920s, like, um, fucking, hold on.

• 1:41:22Liam McAnderson?

  I think you mean Twisted Metal, Nova.

• 1:41:23November Kelly?

  No, I don't. I mean, I mean, the board game Scythe is what I mean. So I was right the first time.

• 1:41:29Speaker 02

  She means twisted. You put like a creepy looking clown driving that thing and I would be like, yeah, that's my main in that.

• 1:41:33November Kelly?

  I mean, what I've, what I've done is I've said, hey, this thing's set in an alternate history 1920s reminds me of the 1920s. So I'm really contributing here.

• 1:41:44Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 1:41:53November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, I've had snow run a game like that too. Like, send in more trucks.

• 1:41:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:59November Kelly?

  I paid for this DLC piece of shit. I'm gonna drive it out of the thing if it kills me.

• 1:42:05Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 1:42:21Justin Roczniak?

  But there was a valiant effort by the mechanics on the convoy, who by the way, had a full machine shop and full blacksmith shop. They were like, okay, we're gonna put Humpty Dumpty back together.

• 1:42:32November Kelly?

  We're gonna, we're gonna forge a new one out of the ashes of the old.

• 1:42:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.

• 1:42:44Justin Roczniak?

  And they did it, right? They did it.

• 1:42:45November Kelly?

  Oh my god.

• 1:42:46Justin Roczniak?

  With like one bearing still needing replacement. The expeditionary commander said, nah, just send it by rail to San Francisco and it went away.

• 1:42:56November Kelly?

  Incredible.

• 1:42:57Justin Roczniak?

  This was a bad decision.

• 1:42:59November Kelly?

  Yeah, I'll say.

• 1:43:01Justin Roczniak?

  Which apparently is in a supplementary document that I could not find. Um, 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?

• 1:43:24November Kelly?

  The, the sort of Northern Lion sells the item that's been carrying the whole run moment. Yeah, sure.

• 1:43:31Justin Roczniak?

  When we needed it most.

• 1:43:37Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah, and miscellaneous equipment. There were two kit, two types of kitchen trailers, two of each. They had very rough rides. Pots and pans and cans just fell on the floor and then rolled out of the vehicle.

• 1:43:52Justin Roczniak?

  There were two four wheeled kitchen trailers, right? 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.

• 1:44:09Justin Roczniak?

  Those were abandoned. Both had a big issue where they needed like major parts. Both had an issue where like major parts of their suspension had to be replaced. Like several times a week. They had a bunch of motorcycles, again with sidecars, you know? They did very poorly on the bad roads. The tires weren't wide enough.

• 1:44:31November Kelly?

  Yeah, that guy on the top right looks like he's not happy in his work. I'll say that.

• 1:44:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:37November Kelly?

  Realizing his like left leg is off the bike and is sinking.

• 1:44:42Justin Roczniak?

  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, uh, lost one of its treads when it was pulling a truck out of quicksand. The most suitable vehicles, of course, the Hannibal twin eight and the Leslie special did not compete.

• 1:45:08Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 1:45:18November Kelly?

  Okay, I'm not mad at them for collapsing this when they get the keys to the city anymore. This is made of matchsticks.

• 1:45:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Like even the big infrastructure, like the bridge over the Mississippi. Like that's spindly as all hell. Like my God. And then like some of the roads here, you can see here's a typical road with a, you know, the mountain road with the mountain on one side and the cliff on the other. Incredible.

• 1:45:41Speaker 02

  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 rock shit in the military now. But, you know, we need to bring back woke so I can take a road.

• 1:45:53Liam McAnderson?

  Bring back woke so Victoria can do this. Yes.

• 1:45:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:45:56Speaker 02

  Victoria Scott famed supporter of the American imperialism.

• 1:46:00Justin Roczniak?

  Well, if the military only did this shit, then like.

• 1:46:04Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, if we weren't doing interventions in in Latin America, right? Of course.

• 1:46:09Justin Roczniak?

  Come, come join the road trip corps.

• 1:46:14Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, so yeah, this was, uh, pretty goofy.

• 1:46:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it it ended up being fifty six days traveling, um, with an average of ten and a quarter hours on the road.

• 1:46:27Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck that.

• 1:46:27Speaker 02

  To keep these things running. Um, with six total rest days for a total of sixty two days to get from New York to San Francisco. Average moving speed on travel days, six point oh seven miles per hour. Uh, they were a week late. Um.

• 1:46:47Speaker 02

  And it just, yeah, and like, here's another bridge that broke. You can see, like, this whole thing was just kind of like, well, what if we could do this? And the answer was kind of no. You can't. Uh, at this point, if you would like to get large equipments 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. I.

• 1:47:18November Kelly?

  Or conversely, you could take a take a leaf out of one Indianapolis used car dealer's book and just hook them all to a balloon.

• 1:47:26Liam McAnderson?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:29Liam McAnderson?

  Backwards in fact.

• 1:47:31Speaker 02

  Hmm. Yeah. Um, and, uh, the the main lesson, what did we learn? What did we learn from this? Uh, 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.

• 1:47:47November Kelly?

  So much for military Keynesianism.

• 1:47:50Speaker 02

  You should invest in tools. So you're not breaking three hammers on day one. And also

• 1:47:56Justin Roczniak?

  That's what you have the blacksmith truck for is to make more hammers, you know?

• 1:48:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:48:09Justin Roczniak?

  My, 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.

• 1:48:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, but like, that's, that's the part where you have to do like, you need to learn how to downshift really well. And

• 1:48:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:23Speaker 02

  That, that's where you're going to blow up your engine because, you know, throwing rods and stuff because you, you're over revving it and the motor's failure mode is not like, oh, you know, it stops, it overheats or whatever. It's like, it explodes.

• 1:48:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, just drops out.

• 1:48:36Speaker 02

  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 sets us up.

• 1:48:45Liam McAnderson?

  Please speed us. I'm tired of robbing farms.

• 1:48:48Speaker 02

  I think that this really

• 1:48:49Justin Roczniak?

  My, my question is, what did they do? Cause they had dropped both kid, all four kitchen trailers at that point.

• 1:48:57November Kelly?

  On the 1920s M R A, it's all lead soldered cans, you know?

• 1:49:03Speaker 02

  And this did lead us to the, the final incarnation of American foreign policy, which is next slide, please. The tactical Burger King.

• 1:49:11November Kelly?

  Of course.

• 1:49:12Speaker 02

  This is my favorite image out of the global war on terrorists.

• 1:49:15November Kelly?

  I want to see one of these negotiating a really narrow twisty roads is the thing.

• 1:49:22Justin Roczniak?

  It's, it's the thing we're good at and the American military, it's logistics.

• 1:49:27November Kelly?

  See how long that holds.

• 1:49:29Justin Roczniak?

  Very good.

• 1:49:30November Kelly?

  As Hackseth said, lethality, lethality, lethality.

• 1:49:34Speaker 02

  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 a hand in 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 is not woke. So. We're in a new exciting era.

• 1:50:05Justin Roczniak?

  Lethality.

• 1:50:07Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:07Justin Roczniak?

  Now you're gonna have the Steak and Shake, uh, trailer. Yeah, with the Tal- or the Tallo guy in his restaurant in southwest Philly. We ran out of Tallo, we can't do anything. I know there's a giant tanker full of vegetable oil right there, but we can't use it.

• 1:50:22Speaker 02

  Just imagining the future episode in 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. Uh, and they're like, yeah, you know, our predecessors really loved to joke about, uh, 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 mid-stream.

• 1:50:51Speaker 02

  Uh, next slide, please. I hinted at it earlier, but guess who's back? It's fucking Eisenhower.

• 1:50:58Justin Roczniak?

  White Eisenhower, yeah.

• 1:50:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's, he's here as an observer and, um,

• 1:51:02November Kelly?

  So gay.

• 1:51:03Speaker 02

  He, I picked this image specifically for you, Nova, because he looked insanely gay in it.

• 1:51:11Speaker 02

  It just like, he just looks like he just stole an apple pie off the windowsill in this image.

• 1:51:16November Kelly?

  I've seen, I've seen, I've seen straighter looking photos of Truman Capote.

• 1:51:23Speaker 02

  Um, yes, he joined the trip because he was, he was bummed out. He didn't get to fight in the Great War. Um, he saw himself, according to his memoirs, quote, "In the years ahead, putting on weight in a meaningless chair-bound assignment, shuffling papers and filling out forms." So he joined partly on a lark, uh, end quote. And, uh, yeah, then he, he decided that he, he ended up devoting an entire chapter of his memoirs to like this trip and it made a huge impact on him and like, uh, about like the general state of American infrastructure and kind of like how logistics could be done. And, uh, next slide, please.

• 1:51:59November Kelly?

  The, the, 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.

• 1:52:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:09Speaker 02

  Um, this center image, which I found incredibly comedic, comes directly from the United States Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration.

• 1:52:18Justin Roczniak?

  I'm thinking about those roads.

• 1:52:23November Kelly?

  What's the legality of putting that in a T-shirt ourselves?

• 1:52:27Speaker 02

  I mean, I think they're gonna defund it.

• 1:52:29Justin Roczniak?

  It's government, it's public domain.

• 1:52:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And also, like, what are they gonna sue you? They don't have any lawyers left. They can't, they literally We got my dad, let's do this. Missed from 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 DC, they literally cannot indict a hand sandwich. Government over. Um, anyway, yeah, so Uh, in his, in his words in his memoir, um, 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, uh, you, you might say to me at this point, but Victoria,

• 1:53:10Speaker 02

  the Reichs Autobahn, which is what Hitler insisted you call the Autobahn, uh, was basically unused by the Wehrmacht for any defense purpose purposes at all. Like, it was completely useless. It was a huge boondoggle they spent a ton of fucking money on. Uh, and the, the whole, like, light-colored highways that they, 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. Um, 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. Um, and that meant that no trucks could drive, like, up any of the grades.

• 1:53:50Speaker 02

  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. Um, and really, the only actual use that the Autobahn had at any point during World War II was for the Allies to invade with, um, because it was just like this nice straight shot directly into all their major city centers. And notably, the Allies also destroyed all of the roads by driving on them with tanks. Um, so you would think that, like, Victoria, surely, you know, that, that defeats the whole purpose of the interstate highway system for, like, a military use. Um, and yeah, you'd be right. He just, he just thought it was cool. You 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.

• 1:54:35Speaker 02

  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, uh, so you can get to work. So, thank you, President Dwight Eisenhower.

• 1:54:47Justin Roczniak?

  It is kind of funny that, you know, we, we, 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, uh, within the United States. Just go through a field, man. It's all rail.

• 1:55:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:55:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's literally like, uh, we're putting 500 tanks on 200 flag cars.

• 1:55:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:10Justin Roczniak?

  You know, it's, uh,

• 1:55:11Speaker 02

  I mean, they did that for the stupid parade even.

• 1:55:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, they had the,

• 1:55:15Speaker 02

  50 military bases within driving distance. And the thing is, you can't drive a fucking tank on a road. It destroys the road.

• 1:55:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:23Speaker 02

  It would have been better. It would have been better to leave them all fucking unpaved.

• 1:55:28Justin Roczniak?

  We have to bring, uh, we have to bring, you know, 200 tanks up there and also like 200 low boy trailer tractor trailers.

• 1:55:35Speaker 02

  And also it's like, it's, it's not like roads are not like susceptible to bombing. I don't understand the logic here where it's like, well, rail isn't 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, the thought process here.

• 1:55:51Justin Roczniak?

  You can also, as, uh, demonstrated by the, uh, Russia, Ukraine, or Ukraine conflict, uh, you had to do modern warfare entirely with trains.

• 1:56:04Justin Roczniak?

  Ukrainian railroad, railroad guys are really good at fixing stuff real fast.

• 1:56:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, so you might, you know, like, uh, 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? Um, and yeah, now we have like the United States Autobahn system, which notably is significantly worse than like the German Autobahn, because you can't drive fast on it.

• 1:56:32Justin Roczniak?

  I, I, I would also say in sort of defense of Eisenhower, that a lot of the stuff that the internet, uh, the interstate highway, System became was not something that was sort of intentional.

• 1:56:44November Kelly?

  In vision.

• 1:56:45Justin Roczniak?

  The uh he envisioned it um like the idea of you know, we're gonna drive the interstate directly into cities. It was supposed to more mirror the idea of like the first superhighway, 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 we got all this this huge pot of money from, you know, the Defense Aid Highway Act, um which people used to do racism and blow up every black neighborhood in America.

• 1:57:18Speaker 02

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

• 1:57:40Justin Roczniak?

  Dwight Eisenhower took a road trip with his buddies. And now I don't have a trolley to Center City. Well, as frequently.

• 1:57:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, average, average car actually, uh, average cost of car ownership in the US is around $12,000 a year. Right now, new car prices, I think 48 grand.

• 1:57:59Justin Roczniak?

  They're expensive now.

• 1:58:01Speaker 02

  That's proven real sustainable.

• 1:58:02Justin Roczniak?

  I don't even like used car prices are really expensive right now.

• 1:58:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, average used cars, I think I want to say 29 as of the last time I checked.

• 1:58:10Justin Roczniak?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:58:12Speaker 02

  So, you know, that's a, yeah, I don't know. I what I learned is that cars are bad.

• 1:58:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, what did we learn?

• 1:58:18November Kelly?

  Car bad. Car bad, truck kind of funny.

• 1:58:21Justin Roczniak?

  Truck is pretty funny. Motorcycle with sidecar?

• 1:58:24November Kelly?

  Cool. Cool.

• 1:58:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:58:36Justin Roczniak?

  Motorcycle with sidecar, like you need like you need like your little friend to go in there. Then you have like a sidekick though.

• 1:58:43November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:43Justin Roczniak?

  That sounds fun.

• 1:58:44November Kelly?

  Intimate, you know?

• 1:58:45Speaker 02

  I have thought how cool it'd be if like I I'd learned how to ride a motorcycle with a sidecar and like my wife and I, cross country road trip like a Ural or something.

• 1:58:54Justin Roczniak?

  That's gonna be easier than like a regular motorcycle, right?

• 1:58:57Speaker 02

  I do need a different license for it in like most.

• 1:59:00November Kelly?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:59:01Speaker 02

  Pretty sure, yeah.

• 1:59:02Justin Roczniak?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:59:03Speaker 02

  It's got a different, well, because it's not a two, it's not like a single wheel propulsion, like a Ural's got a rear axle. It's it's two wheel drive.

• 1:59:11Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I didn't know. I thought it was just something you attach to it. I didn't.

• 1:59:14Speaker 02

  Depends on the bike.

• 1:59:15November Kelly?

  I thought it was attached to it.

• 1:59:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it depends on the bike, but Urals, which are kind of like the ones that you like, there's somebody like nearby me who has a Urall. And like, those are two rear driven wheels, just part of what makes them cool, because they're way better at like doing off roading. They're they're very like quintessentially adventure bikes and you can, you know, it's you 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. It could be fun.

• 1:59:44Justin Roczniak?

  What if you had two sidecars and no extra wheels?

• 1:59:48Speaker 02

  I think you've invented a a high capacity tricycle.

• 1:59:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, no, you you still have only the one wheel. Sidecars just have to balance like if your friends weigh different amounts, you have to give one of them a sandbag or something.

• 2:00:02Speaker 02

  Carrying my buddies in my Honda Goldwing's hard bags.

• 2:00:08Justin Roczniak?

  All right, well, um, you know, I I 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.

• 2:00:24November Kelly?

  Never let it be said that like individual action can't change the world for the worse.

• 2:00:33Justin Roczniak?

  Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

• 2:00:38Justin Roczniak?

  Shake hands with danger. G'day, cunts. I wonder what country this is from.

• 2:00:44November Kelly?

  G'day.

• 2:00:46Justin Roczniak?

  This is a story of why the pictured flag post has protective fencing. It takes place shortly before the fencing was put up.

• 2:00:54November Kelly?

  See, because of me, they have a fence.

• 2:00:58Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 2:01:09November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know, like different colors, handkerchiefs, the one side means top, one side means bottom, like.

• 2:01:18Justin Roczniak?

  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, uh, 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.

• 2:01:58Justin Roczniak?

  On the day of the incident, the DT marshal was an experienced marshal, teaching a trainee with only a handful of days trackside at most. Things started to go wrong when a blue MG 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.

• 2:02:25November Kelly?

  I love motorsport.

• 2:02:26Justin Roczniak?

  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 Armco fence.

• 2:02:47November Kelly?

  Oh, no. Oh, dude. Yeah.

• 2:02:50Justin Roczniak?

  I believe he would have been fully focused on the blue car, his other hand on the top button of his headset, ready to give race control required information. The next car, which was a red MG, came along. Perhaps lost in the haze, it hit the oil trail and lost control, veering hard directly into the flagpost and hitting it at speed. An upright end plate on the 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.

• 2:03:34November Kelly?

  Wave flag with remaining arm.

• 2:03:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:39Justin Roczniak?

  The event was quickly red flagged and the injured marshal was seen seen to by on track medical staff before being transferred to a public ambulance and taken for emergency surgery. The poor trainee meanwhile was physically unhurt but in shock and was sent home for the day.

• 2:03:55November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, you've just seen a fucking Samurai movie special effect pop off like I I would take the day as well. Yeah.

• 2:04:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I'd probably take that day off. Yeah, you just saw the the wrist get cut off and slide slowly, you know.

• 2:04:12Liam McAnderson?

  Thanks, Rods.

• 2:04:13Justin Roczniak?

  From an MG.

• 2:04:15Speaker 02

  This is basically just all of early motorsport.

• 2:04:18Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:19Speaker 02

  Still a decent amount of 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 tied in well enough. Yeah, go out.

• 2:04:32Justin Roczniak?

  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, happy to be track side and willing to wave flags with either hand or both when we were busy.

• 2:04:47November Kelly?

  Nice bus.

• 2:04:48Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 2:05:03November Kelly?

  Can't keep a good marshal down.

• 2:05:05Speaker 02

  Whenever I read stories like this, I'm just like, I even had PTSD that you've just got to be like volumetrically compressing into the base of your spine to just be like, yeah, I'm gonna go out and wave flags again.

• 2:05:16November Kelly?

  What if, what if, what if you're not? What if you're just fine? What if it's like, yeah, I took my hand, but like, I don't, I got it back. No harm, no foul.

• 2:05:23Speaker 02

  It 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.

• 2:05:37Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:05:37Speaker 02

  Hours.

• 2:05:39Liam McAnderson?

  Right?

• 2:05:39Speaker 02

  I just, huh?

• 2:05:41Liam McAnderson?

  I said, right, no, I was completely agreeing with you.

• 2:05:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, like I just, I, these people are built different. Good, good, good for them. I don't know. Just fascinating to me. That would, that would probably fuck me up a little bit.

• 2:05:52Justin Roczniak?

  It's love of the game.

• 2:05:53Speaker 02

  Genuinely.

• 2:05:54Liam McAnderson?

  Love of the game.

• 2:05:55Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that was safety third.

• 2:05:59Justin Roczniak?

  Shake hands with danger. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

• 2:06:06Speaker 02

  Um, I got one really quick. That's cool.

• 2:06:08November Kelly?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:06:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:06:09Speaker 02

  Um.

• 2:06:10Justin Roczniak?

  No, just because I asked doesn't mean I want you to do it.

• 2:06:16Speaker 02

  I, uh, my book, We Deserve This, which is the trans feminine fashion look book with like the car theme, um, is actually going to, I'm going to be speaking about it at Elliott 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 being like the local news about it, which is kind of cool.

• 2:06:38Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:06:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that'll be, that'll be fun. Um, you can buy that at Rar Books and put links in the description. 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.

• 2:06:50November Kelly?

  Absolutely.

• 2:06:51Liam McAnderson?

  Or we'll kill you.

• 2:06:51November Kelly?

  Right. Yes.

• 2:06:52Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 2:06:58Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 2:06:59November Kelly?

  Yep.

• 2:06:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. All right.

• 2:07:00Liam McAnderson?

  Bye, buddy.

• 2:07:01Justin Roczniak?

  Podcast.

• 2:07:01November Kelly?

  Bye.

• 2:07:02Justin Roczniak?

  All right.

• 2:07:02Speaker 02

  Thank you again for having me.

• 2:07:04November Kelly?

  Anytime. Literally anytime.

• 2:07:06Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, this is fun.