Episode 185: The 1919 Motor Transport Corps Convoy

I've got my local going.

I got the video going.

I got

the Zencaster is going.

Failed to start recording.

Oh, son of God.

No, no.

Give it a second.

Give it a second.

There it is.

Okay.

It does this on 10,000 losses.

And my local is going with not a second to spare.

My local's live, too.

Yeah.

So, oh, fuck the chair.

Hang on.

I'm going to do it.

Sorry, Deb.

Yeah, you sound fine.

Sorry, Devin.

Sorry, Devin.

We're going to do it.

Sorry, Devin.

Three, Devin.

Three, two,

one.

Mark.

I've missed you guys.

I've missed you too.

So fucking stupid, dude.

Yeah,

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

And went into a spiral, maybe, based on your Twitter presence?

Yeah,

like a good spiral.

I mean, I fell in love, so that was cool.

Oh, there you go.

You know, that was, that was...

That was pretty neat.

That was pretty sick, I guess.

That's right.

I like that.

Go to the UK and fall in love.

What is that like?

That's crazy.

Yeah, right.

I don't know.

There's just some of this going around.

But yeah, I've been all over and now I'm back.

And I'm like,

you ever have that thing where you like take your first like vacation where you don't have to work in like several years and then you come back and you do have to work, but it's the same day that you've been traveling for five hours and all, so you're insane.

Oh, yes.

Welcome back.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Ross gets involved once.

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

I bought that eBay channel.

Well, not on that email channel.

I visited with several of the contestants.

That was a slog.

That was almost as grueling as this.

That was like the Paris to Daker rally, but with coach buses.

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

so yeah um i don't know i'm still sore um how are you sore from a okay

yeah uh the chafing from the walking i mean frankly like the 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 well you know you know what the the worst part was 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 oh god damn it they were protecting you no no no you know what it was you know what i think they do is they said it was for humidity convert uh conservation right

which i think just means they shut the peacock room whenever the tourists get too sweaty

please stop touching this i mean speaking of sweaty tourists i was i was like 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 82 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 yeah yeah yeah definitely yeah uh roz and i are cold climate creatures Oh yeah, me too.

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

Atta boy.

Yeah, my windows are all open.

It's nice out.

I mean, I'm in a hot, sweaty basement.

I'm deep in the podcast minds.

But this is the thing.

This is why we got to have a release schedule: 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.

We just talk about the weather.

Which, I don't know, maybe that's part of the appeal.

Maybe it dissuades people.

I'm not a businesswoman, right?

Clearly.

I have no sexual torture.

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.

You'll make the call.

I'll call later.

You'll call now.

God, that was a that was a weird, that's a that's a subtextual ad.

That's like that in the like Folger's incest ad for the American like kind of latent sexuality, you know?

What the fuck?

No, you know what?

I'm happy you're not knowing.

Yeah.

Okay, yeah, sure.

Don't worry about it.

Are you Googling folders that exist at right now?

That's my advertisement for Sears Roebuck and Company.

Go buy an advertisement.

Yes, yes, yes.

You forced me to watch this ad before, yes.

I understand there's only like two physical Sears locations left on the East Coast.

Anyway,

hello.

And welcome to, well, there's your problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I am November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Okay, well, my name is Liam McCadiffs and my pronouns are he, him.

And we have a guest.

Hello, my name is Victoria Scott.

My pronouns are she and her.

Thank you for

that.

Of course.

As may be clear from the number of times you've been.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We love having you on anytime.

Here too.

The number of times you've had me on is beginning to like conflict with just my deep-seated belief that everybody hates me.

And I am questioning my priors and thinking maybe they kind of like me.

Because the thing is, right, that's going to have to cave into your paranoia.

Everyone hates you constantly.

So

no, this podcast is like it's a single-issue thing.

The fact that it makes money is by the by.

The point is solely to improve one woman's self-esteem.

It's working.

Keep trying.

That's okay.

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

Three and a half, two and a half tons.

Did it just say B off the road?

Be off the road.

Yeah.

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

It'd be off the road.

Yeah,

that's Dwight Eisenhower's own handwriting.

Now, is that supposed to look like that?

Well, I see this rear wheel is having some trouble.

Dwight Eisenhower, girly-ass handwriting.

Look at that.

Look at that B.

Incredible.

You ever see that picture of him sitting?

Yeah, yeah.

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

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

Should not be doing that.

Should not be doing that.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

Yeah.

I'm learning.

I'm listening.

I'm learning.

I'm here to diagnose your problem.

And that right there is it.

Yeah.

There might be.

You should be out on the road.

Is there someone in my house?

Yes, you are.

Do you understand castle doctrine?

God

podcaster-involved shooting is going to be a fucking nightmare.

I'm going to put you on administrative leave.

Today, we're going to talk about the 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy.

Huh.

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

So, here in Philadelphia,

there was a big crisis about how they were going to fund SEPTA, and the Pennsylvania Republicans found a solution, which is to not fund SEPTA.

We went over the cliff.

It's been a ball.

The cliff has been gone over.

Yeah, it's wonderful.

Okay.

So what you're saying to me is that like Philadelphia and sort of like greater Philadelphia, I guess, just doesn't, isn't going to have public transit.

So we are in the first stage of cuts.

The second stage of cuts happens next week, maybe the week afterwards.

Brisk.

It's fast.

It's

before the next meeting of the legislature.

I know that much.

So there's been a across the board 20% service cut.

There is a fair increase going on.

That's the next round.

And then in January is when the really nasty stuff happens.

But anyway, SEPTA has been Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority.

They have been sort of, you know, in a bind since COVID because, you know, all the costs went up, but the ridership went down.

And they were asking for enough money to maintain current levels of service across the city and the region.

And, you know, the Pennsylvania, there were several ways proposed to get that money.

One of which is by taxing something called skill games, right?

Which are a new thing we have in Pennsylvania and I think a lot of other places where it's a slot machine, but there's also after you play the slots, some kind of like word search or something that if you complete it, it gives you your money back.

So it's not gambling, right?

Oh, okay, sure.

Yeah.

So, oh,

yeah, it's, it's, it's bad.

It's real.

That's bleak.

Yeah.

So they didn't want to tax those, the GLP.

They rejected a lot of other funding solutions.

They did come up with their own solution at like 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 an abandoned dollar store.

So this is the kind of equivalent of like when you're throwing like

deck chairs into the ship's boilers, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

I mean, it was, it was essentially like we're going to redirect a bunch of this funding that was already earmacked, earmarked capital improvements to operations and also for, again, I don't know, widening a country road that gets three cars a day to six lanes.

SEPTA is going to be the first rail system to actually do the grommet wrong trousers thing of building the track in front of you as you go.

Yep.

Pretty much, yeah.

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

Yeah.

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

Yes.

Like a seamless lady.

Yes.

But yeah.

So we already went over the cliff.

Usually these service cuts, they're pretty hard to reverse once they've been done.

Like they're going to need even more money now than they heard that about Austerisy, that weirdly it like you don't, you can't just turn the money back on afterwards.

Yeah, yeah.

There's an ongoing lawsuit right now to restore service because, you know, these are apparently sort of these, these cuts are supposedly targeted against African Americans.

I don't think that's real, but the idea there would be to start, you know, dipping into the service stabilization fund, which is also another thing where, I don't know, that just means when you hit the brick wall, you hit it a lot harder.

I mean, I don't know.

It sounds pretty racist to me.

Like, yeah, well,

it is.

And it is.

I mean, everyone got the cuts is the thing, you know?

Yeah.

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

Die, die.

Because those are the ones that Mtrak owns.

So they're paying $60 million a year to Mtrack in rent, which apparently is what's funding the long-distance trains in Pennsylvania or the inner city trains like the Keystone and the Pennsylvanian.

So those also go away now, apparently.

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

Yeah, so is there then one railroad that has like a computer science job?

That's like, it turns out all the money's coming from her.

Yeah, unfortunately, it's Bright Line, and she's in an abusive relationship with pedestrians.

Canceling Bright line this has been like particularly appalling because objectively speaking like septa operates with like an order of magnitude less money while the other

comparable transit authority right they are incredibly cost-efficient they have done every single thing to scrimp and save and what happens when you do that you get curb stopped yeah this is like the mta shouldn't be paying its debts down yeah it's like this is a lesson here never remove the bloat ever no you have to have the bloat.

You need to be like, you know, VTA and San Jose are just like, yeah, we're going to build a $14 billion tunnel to nowhere.

Well, not to nowhere.

It goes to downtown San Jose.

And we don't give a shit.

And it's going to, you know, move like five people a day.

Who cares?

Maybe we'd be in a better position if we took that attitude rather than, I don't know, we're going to do four service expansions in the 30 years I've been alive, which are two new regional rail stations and two kind of crappy bus routes.

Yeah.

What you got to do is you got to do it the way Glasgow does things, which is build in something so old and so obsolete that it becomes completely impractical to either cut or expand.

And it's just locked.

It's just like frozen in amber forever.

You consider doing that.

That's how the L works.

Yeah.

I consider this a cautionary tale against the concept of fiscal conservatism.

It's going to fuck you in the end.

You're going to get fucked.

You're going to get

you're screwed.

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

Exactly.

It's impressive that Pennsylvania's managed to take the American kind of arc of the 2020s, which is the rural states declaring war on urban centers that make money and just localize it down to a single state.

Yes.

Well, I mean, this is always the thing, right?

It's always been like, you know, against the cities where most Americans live because, you know, you have pronouns or whatever.

Yeah, that's exactly what they're mad at.

It's, it's the culture war bullshit rubbing up, robbing us of septa is is a new one for me.

To be fair, you do have a hell of a lot of pronouns.

You know, they've got you there.

They do.

Yeah.

I'll use two, though.

Well, this is the thing.

That's why you need the bloat is you need a bunch of pronouns that you don't use, that you just have in storage, you know, like you've got to get like you.

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

Yeah.

Strategic ambiguity, right?

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

I don't know.

I live in West Philly.

It's the pronoun capital of the world.

And, you know, even then, it hasn't really moved the needle.

Before we start recording this episode, I had to choose between coffee and gin.

And I think I made the wrong decision by going with coffee.

Yeah, I think you did.

Yeah, this is going to have to be, I think, a standalone episode because there's a lot.

I have many opinions here.

I do think there's

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.

You know, why do we even have a Senate in a state?

I don't know.

The only people doing this right are Nebraska.

Unicameralism is a lot of people.

This is 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.

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

Exactly.

So yeah, that's that.

In other news.

Do not fact check me about the Constitution thing.

I don't know or care.

No.

It's a dead letter anyway.

Nobody's paying attention to that.

So Uncle Pete is going to marry a horse.

I beg your pardon.

Yeah, right.

Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern are trying to merge.

This is our belated galaxy or something.

Whatever you want it to be, Nova.

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

Hand, surely.

Don't Google that.

Yeah.

Seattle mentioned.

Yeah, Pacific Northwest, excellent.

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

The four trans women with tech jobs, sure.

Yeah, exactly.

Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern are trying to do a merger right now to create the first transcontinental railroad in the United States.

Like fully, like it's one railroad from one coast to the other.

Wait, the first one ever?

Yeah.

Ever.

Okay.

It's never been done.

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

It would have helped.

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

So now I think we've long said on this podcast, okay, the railroad gets

better and more efficient as it gets bigger, right?

This is sort of a

question of like theoretical

benefits versus practical realities, right?

So if you merge these two companies together, you know,

you have like lots of new freight routes opening up.

You have lots of new, you know, economies of scale and so on and so forth.

It would theoretically be a very, very good thing for a lot of people.

How do all these efficiencies get distributed, though, is the question.

Oh, into dividends, you know?

Yeah,

exactly.

And they're going to name it something horrible.

Either they just jam it together.

No, they're naming it Union Pacific.

Oh, okay.

Well, I mean, total California victory, at least.

You have to give them that much.

Total Omaha victory.

Will they keep Rule G open?

That's my question.

It's a refugee from the non-Omaha American century of the world.

You son of a whore.

Here, I was thinking they were just going to call it Union Pacific Norfolk Southern, and we stuck with U-Penis.

For fans of

school ground games such as I-H-O-Penis.

I-H-O-P.

Imagine if the Illinois Central had merged with Union Pacific.

ICUP?

Yes.

Got your ass.

Yeah, he did.

He did get my ass.

It's a shame, but I admit

what I've invested.

So, yeah, you know, there's a lot of advantages that could potentially exist for like, you know, the railroad itself, for shippers, for workers.

You know,

you could take these efficiencies and invest them into better infrastructure.

higher pay for workers, better and more competitive railroad service.

Nah, fuck you.

More routes, routes, better safety, better working conditions, faster trains, more advanced trains.

Like, I don't know, finally do some fucking electrification.

I'm sorry.

Did I hear

executive compensation and like sharp buybacks?

Buybacks.

Yeah.

That's what we're going for here.

That's that's always the sign of a functioning economy.

Mostly personally, I'm just sad to see like a goth horse girl like turn normie.

You know, like this is this is my kind of gala gala, like,

sort of theory.

Don't talk to me about gala.

Don't talk to me about gala.

I was

so sure.

Speaking of things that it was basically bestiality, like that man has the brain of a dog.

She can't.

He had a panic show.

Did you ever watch it?

I, Jesus, no.

What do you take me for?

No, all I did is when I saw the announcement, I searched for Travis Kelsey misspelled tweets.

And then I found the one where he's going like, ooh, girl, shocked me like electric eel, and he's misspelled eel.

And then I retweeted that.

So

I'm a simple one.

I take my pleasures where I find them.

It is.

It has been not a great,

by the way.

It's like Earl.

But it's Eel.

Earl.

I found Earl on his head.

There's also one with Dominic's squirrel, S-Q-U-I-R-L-E.

Who amongst us?

Yeah.

We congratulate Super Bowl loser Travis Kelsey.

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

yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, this is going to probably just be, you know,

stock buybacks, price gouging customers because they have a near monopoly power now, trying to drive the operating ratio as close to zero as possible.

You don't have to cowardly

merge.

This is going to trigger, this is going to be like the second to last round of mega mergers because the next round of mega mergers after this is going to be one big railroad.

It's just run by an unaccountable

dictator.

Well, hey, I mean, look at it this way.

If we can convince Trump to buy 10% of their stock, then we sort of can get close to having a state-owned railway.

Yeah.

Like a developed nation.

10% of a state-owned railway.

I mean, that's putting Britain in the shade there.

Did someone break into your house as well?

I don't think so.

There's just a weird, weird noise from somewhere out near the kitchen, probably.

Getting abducted by aliens and shit.

Yeah, it happens to me.

See if it happens again.

The one thing is this still needs to be approved by the Surface Transportation Board, which is sort of the tattered remnants of the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Trump hasn't appointed anyone to that.

Like, there's still a vacant seat.

Surface Transportation Board, call that a snowboard?

I guess a skateboard or a surfboard, really.

Like all of those.

No, it is sometimes referred to as the surfboard.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, now I know that people in a position to make jokes like that professionally have made that joke.

I will be retiring and ending my own life

uh jay called me and ros e-clowns to our faces i mean that's true but i i prefer to articulate this within a kind of like comedia dell'arte tradition right in which each of us embodies a number of kind of like comic roles that

you know let's not worry about that figure that one out in the comments comedy is good but clown is more difficult yeah yeah what are you gonna do you know yeah so i think there's still like a chance the surface transportation board shuts this down.

But I think Trump's Secretary of Commerce has said this is probably a good idea, which is a strong, strong indicator that it's probably a pretty bad idea.

It's like a loyalty endorses, just what the army from Queens says.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that's usually a pretty good, pretty good rule of thumb.

So this might get shut.

This might not happen.

It probably will at this point.

There's a lot of ways it could be good in theory, and those aren't things that are going to happen.

so well then norfolk southern uh

going to the glue factory at long last yeah i was about to say they're putting they're putting the hots in the glue factory 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 it'll they'll keep running them until like everything in america has collapsed Oh, nice.

So like you'll be able to train spot them for a long time.

They'll just like paint a patch over the cab numbers with like the new up number that'll be it

that's the real farmer bullshit is what happens to 611 does it get absorbed into the union pacific you know what i hope they scrap it do they do they send it do they send it they scrap it they actually scrap it and then shoot you and then shoot me with a gun is what happens oh they paint it yellow oh my god

In the middle of the night, you just go one morning and it's just like it is yellow.

It's got a big

yellow down the side.

It's got a gray stripe.

Do what the New York Central did to their locomotives.

We will preserve nothing and you will like it.

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

Spirit of Warren Buffett.

Yeah.

Warren Buffett is BNSF.

God damn.

I forgot that too.

Yeah.

Well, what do you gotta do?

So, anyway.

That was the goddamn news.

In under half an hour.

Our belated railroad news.

Yeah, it's probably some other stuff happened, but I don't remember it.

And you'd already downloaded the slide.

Yeah, exactly.

So,

I think a good place to start here is what is road?

Oh,

train good, car bad episode over.

Well, subscribe to Patreon.

See you, nerd.

Don't worry.

Don't worry.

Cars stay bad for this whole episode.

You don't bring me on to say car good.

I have a much more nuanced view of car.

Yeah.

Car bad, but I like it.

Dodge Viper, please.

Gen 1 Viper, please.

I'm bringing this back since Victoria's here again.

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.

Speaking of which, check this out.

Gotta corvette it.

Liam is constantly screaming over the sound of like a shrink-wrapped canvas roof flapping in the way of a swing.

He does Nothing exchanges.

Nothing exchanged.

I don't know what the big deal is.

If you made me podcast from a car, I think it would be cunt to be driven and record at the same time.

Like kind of Thunderbirds vibes, actually.

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.

Just want us to drive cars getting coffee.

Yeah.

I mean,

here's the thing about coming to Britain.

You barely even need a visa.

Like, it is remarkably easy.

Okay, because I'm an American Express.

You know what's already equipped for that?

Is the

conference room in the Freckier Rasa?

Okay.

I don't, I don't.

Okay, we can do that.

We can podcast from a train.

Yeah.

I mean,

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

It's surprisingly affordable.

Anyway.

Also, just for the record, real quick, Liam has sent me a very nice Dodge Viper, and I will say that is a great spec.

Jesus Christ.

Sorry, I'm done now.

That's it.

Just

wow.

So, so,

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

And you can see it.

There's a 17 GTS.

There's 8,800 miles on it.

Let's buy this thing.

Oh, the high bid's 143 grand.

You subscribe to the Patreon.

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

Yes.

So, what we're looking at here

is an early trail up here.

This is a trail, not so much a road, but that's what we had before roads, right?

Sometimes, you know, these trails were like actually made by just wild animals, right?

And then people started using them themselves.

You know, this is the Natchez Trace,

which is a Native American trail that went from the current location of Nashville to Natchez.

That's about 440 miles.

And this was maintained by Native Americans for several thousand years.

I want to say started by some of the descendants of the same tribe that built Cahokia, the big mound structure outside St.

Louis.

Oh, cool.

It's like they built St.

Louis.

They built interstates.

Like,

it's

like Americans have always been up to this shit.

Yeah.

Exactly.

There was something.

This is the comment that 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 a too uh thoroughly euro eurocentric view of indigenous history remember if my dad yelled yeah that's why i tried to correct for it this time oh my dad how's the knee feeling old man 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'd we put the road we put it at the top of the ridge 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?

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

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

It's the shit that happened to Ertzy, the ice man, you know, probably.

What if the horse gets drunk and dies?

Uh, why are you giving your horse liquor?

Uh, have you ever heard of Toby Keeping?

So, ridgeways were pretty good.

They were usually kind of an indirect route, though.

They had a lot of steep grades, so on and so forth.

At some point, we get this idea:

let's pave the road, right, with stone.

Stone-paved roads start fairly early, like 3000 BC.

That's around when the wheel was invented, right?

And this is like difficult.

It's time-consuming, and it remains the state-of-the-art in road construction for thousands of years.

Sure.

I learned about 15 seconds ago that I am not being robbed.

My father-in-law is at the house.

Oh, good.

There he goes.

Which is kind of disappointing.

I was hoping to castle Dr.

Tilman.

So thousands of years pass, and we finally make some advances in road construction, right?

There's a man named John Blindjack Metcalfe.

How can he see the road?

He can't.

Ah.

He's blind.

He's just feeling it out, you know?

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

He's one of the first people to really start advancing the science of road building after gaining a lot of direct experience with roads from his own stagecoach line and also a tremendous amount of travel.

Oh, so this is like the late 1700s, I want to say.

Like, I'm sensing a great deal of discomfort personally being a real driver of progress here of like being on a kind of like metaled road in the sort of like late 18th century being like, oh, there's fucking sucks.

God, it's fucking terrible.

I mean, he had his own stagecoach line, and he drove the stagecoaches despite being blind.

I mean, not to detract from the guy, but I feel like at that point, you really are.

It's more the horse driving the stagecoach.

Well, you know, I mean,

that tracks, yeah.

So Metcalf

manages to work out like a lot of the problems with like road subgrades with like that's the stuff underneath the road.

He was able to build foundations over bogs, which no one had 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.

There's an unkind joke here about it being easier to work in the north of England when you don't have to look at it.

It's like, well, I assume it's lovely around here.

So my morale's, you know, sky high.

He's doing great.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, the guy who can see is like busy trying to find something to hang himself from because he's like in search of like some like visual information that contains color.

It's all gray.

It's just gray.

That's not a black and white photograph.

That's just what it looks like.

Another guy in this era, Thomas Telford, known as the Colossus of Rhodes.

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

Probably only, you know,

he got sick of it instantly.

He was one of the first guys to really successfully drive roads through difficult terrain with the use of really, really big engineering.

Like, for instance, you know, here's the Menai suspension bridge.

That was his.

I mean,

1820s, like early 19th century, you're into like steam donkeys and shit, right?

Or am I completely off the mark with the top?

Oh, no, you'll have steam donkeys by then, yeah.

Yeah, steam donkeys, cheaper migrant labor.

Like, yeah, it's more plausible than like one blind guy and his horses.

This is true.

This is true.

But it's John Louden MacAdam, whose name is still familiar, right?

He invented a very exacting specification for crushed gravel road surfaces, which we now call MacAdam.

No,

you call MacAdam, I call tarmac, because I'm

getting there.

Fuck.

Okay, well, I guess I'll myself.

Yeah.

That seems a bit extreme.

The thing is, because the thing is.

Are you trying to get every every episode I'm on flagged by YouTube for 10 years?

No,

I just like to keep either you, Justin, or Devin, whoever's editing this one, like on their toes.

Yeah, exactly.

We gotta have the blue button on standby, Carl.

It's compulsive at this point.

But yeah, no, what it is, is I am freshly back off of Avanti West Coasts, and I have not had time to read the notes ahead, unusually for me.

So

I did not know.

I did not connect the two.

So I tried to be too clever for my own good.

Not for the first time, nor the last.

So MacAdam pavement is very durable.

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.

It's very, very good until cars were invented, which we'll get to at some point.

And then they became very dusty.

So it's future-proof against carts.

Yes.

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

Tar McAdam.

Oh, yeah, just shove them together.

That's fine.

Exactly.

Discovered by accident when a barrel of tar fell off a wagon near Denby, Derbyshire, Derbyshire.

Derbyshire.

Derbyshire, right?

In 1901.

And a man, Edgar Purnell Hooley, noticed that where the tar barrel had burst, the road did not give up dust, right?

Nor did it seem to be affected by rutting or other damage to the same extent that the rest of the road was.

So he formed a company, the tar Macadam or MacAdam Syndicate Limited, to start applying this treatment to roads across England the following year, from whence we get the term tarmac.

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

Yes.

Well, modern asphalt, or if you're a pedant, asphaltic concrete, it's not exactly the same process, but it's a similar idea, right?

Now we just apply it all in one go as opposed to putting the gravel down and then putting the tar on top.

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

Exactly.

Gotcha.

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

Boom!

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

Yeah.

Yes, exactly.

In America, in America, of course, we had, you know, Native Americans had systems of trails for millennia.

We, 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.

Yeah, until the Europeans came.

It's one of those things

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

Yeah.

Even by like the post-bellum period, that's, you know, after the Civil War, these sorts of long-distance paved and maintained roads, they're few and far between.

There's a few that show up early, like

Boston Post Road,

which my traffic engineering professor said Ben Franklin invented it so he could pay alimony

and gotta do what you gotta do man not entirely true that it exists

we are spreading falsehoods on the internet yeah yeah well you know and invented by Ben Franklin to make posting easier I can't believe dr.

Martin of Drexel University told a tall tale

so

You know, it predated Ben Franklin somewhat.

You know, but this is one of the first like, you know, big, fast, well-maintained roads through North America.

There was also the National Road that went from Cumberland, Maryland, where the CNO Canal stopped, to Vandalia, Illinois, right?

The center of it all, the capital of Illinois.

The windy city.

Yeah.

The home of the bean.

Yes.

This was completed in 1835-ish.

It had several impressive structures.

Like here's the Castleman Arch Bridge.

Very big stone archbridge.

You have the wheeling suspension bridge.

You drive all the way on up to Vandalia.

You get your Vandalia-style pizza.

It's sounding pretty good.

I didn't think they had pizza then.

I think Italians were still weird.

Italians were still, I don't know, whatever racist shit.

Sacco and Vanzetti must die is what I'm saying.

What do they think of Italians in 1835?

Nothing fucking good, dude.

Break out them calipers, buddy.

We're going to town.

I could buy it as a kind of like,

you know.

What's the word for

orientalizing?

A lot of 1830s Americans have what I call a noble savage view of Italians.

Because you could get into some like Garibaldism shit, I guess, right?

Like you could be like, I don't know.

national liberation struggles kind of thing.

The real problem is you wouldn't have had any, I don't know what you would say about them because, you know, all traditional Italian cuisine wasn't invented until like 1955 to 1980 in a hotel in Rome.

It's also true.

You're like, I can't wait for these guys to invent tiramisu and then I'll start caring about them.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

When are we scheduled to get vodka sauce?

Come on.

So, you know, you have like a bunch of towns along the route spring up.

You 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 not, it's obviously not paved.

They don't have like paving at the time, but it's

maintained-ish.

The federal government builds it and they try to offload it to the states pretty early on because they're like, 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 non-existent.

There was no real reason to improve these for a long time because at the same time, we were, of course, developing the railroads, right?

It's like you could experience the like highway robbery scene from Barry Linden or you could get a steam train.

Yeah.

Yes.

You can have a train robbery.

That's more fun.

Oh, yeah.

Absolutely.

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

This is correct.

This is the correct way to organize the society.

Yes.

You know, railroads have at this point an effective monopoly on interstate and intrastate commerce until roads were improved.

And, you know, the government had to improve the rail, the roads, and the railroads effectively controlled the government.

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

primitive accumulation in it.

The other thing is, of course, if you had good roads.

And it was like 1875 or something, right?

So you didn't.

Yeah.

But if you had them,

what do you do with them?

I charge people people tolls for coming down my road.

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

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.

Exactly.

It's like you can have a really long, really good road, but you can't get your horse and cart to go 50 miles an hour.

which is something a locomotive could do pretty easily

with a lot more stuff, right

yeah i mean i guess you could run like a kind of like a sort of like like a like a tram thing but then you're just back to a railroad you know yeah i mean that was the interurbans yeah um and those were pretty successful until the 20s when everything starts going downhill

so

there's not like a lot of point in having good roads at this point because there's no good road transportation everyone's going at the speed of horse.

America as yet uncocked by the automobile.

Yeah.

What a well.

What a world to dream of.

Henry Ford and his Nazifying machine.

Yeah.

What's that joke?

God made men.

Henry Ford made them all.

No, Henry.

No, it's God.

God made men.

Samuel Colt made them equal, and Henry Ford made them assholes.

Yeah.

Yes.

There we go.

Thank you.

And I don't know if that's a thing.

I just came up with that off the dome.

I'm hoping it replicates something because if it doesn't, I'm a genius.

I heard it as bastards and not assholes.

Yeah, but

points are credit.

Like, honestly,

we'll give you 100 out of 100.

Between

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

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

This is my generic joke machine.

You can reassemble a joke blindfolded in under a minute.

This is my job.

Making a joke that could kill Shinzo Abe.

I just have a scrapbox of joke parts I keep in my shed that sometimes I put different jokes together from.

I'm kit bashing a joke.

Yeah, the ACF 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.

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

I feel like it would be like, I don't know, a different part of the joke.

Like the serial number is on like the subject or the predicate or something, you know?

Yeah, yeah, maybe.

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

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

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

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

Jesus, fuck you.

I just don't think that it I don't think the legal regime reflects the reality anyway and listen the only thing that stops a bad guy with a joke is a good guy with a joke exactly

exactly yeah

that did kind of happen to bill cosby so yeah yeah you know

we all gotta go after dane cook

anyway Yeah, moving, moving on swiftly.

Moving on.

Before we threatened to do jokes to Dane Cook,

be the first time in his life.

What the fuck is this?

What do I do with this?

Do I put it on my head?

Do I eat it?

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

which is feminism.

Because it gave women the ability to, as I once saw an incel put it, like cycle around and fuck strange chads.

Yeah.

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

And then later, the automobile, right?

So suddenly these, these, this idea of smooth roads were beneficial to a lot of people, especially cyclists.

Where you gotta win the mountain bike, you know?

Yeah.

But these smooth roads didn't really exist, which led to a popular movement for good roads, which was called the good roads movement.

We'll get into that more later.

The past, they were literal-minded people.

Yeah.

Also, at this time, farmers have been complaining about having better roads for a long time, but because they're farmers, you know, they didn't want to pay for them, right?

You know, that is a normal sort of farmer-type complaint.

I want everything in one bag.

I want everything in one bag, but I don't want the bag to be heavy.

Oh, they've been like this.

How did you get the reduction?

Yeah.

So, you know,

this movement gains a lot more traction over in Europe, first and foremost, especially in France, right?

Where they upgrade roads to very modern standards very quickly, even before like 1900.

And that made cycling and motoring much more popular, much more practical.

You know, that's why the tour de France is

about to say it's like

we need a broad flat road so that we can do 19th century cycling shenanigans on it.

Yeah.

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

so yeah

france is uh definitely where like this gets the most momentum but now we have to talk about a guy so i'm handing this over to victoria oh have i got a guy for you this is

county low glasses

you would be correct i kind of like that yeah 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.

Yeah, they don't let you get down with the like pince nemore, you know, and it's fucked up.

They don't, they'll do that.

Um, so this is Carl G.

Fisher.

Um, he was

traditional, like, 18 turn-of-the-century American rags to riches story.

Um,

a

like anecdote from his childhood was that he was a poor student because he was astigmatic, and that's why he's got the glasses, and he dropped out of school at age 12 because of it.

And according to the Automotive Hall of Fame, he was like kind of ashamed of this fact.

So he taught himself how to run

full speed backwards.

Oh, sure.

To like garner praise from fellow students.

I'll be honest.

If I saw a guy like full force sprinting backwards, I would not notice his gay little glasses.

I agree.

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

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

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?

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

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

Okay, but backwards or forwards?

Forwards, as far as I know.

Although that would be that would be fun if they did like 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 C V T that could go as fast and reverse as it went forwards.

So they did backwards car racing.

I can't remember the exact car, but that was always fun.

But yeah, so he raced bicycles and then in 1900, you know, the bicycle era began to give way to the automobile era.

And so he converted his shop into what is basically America's first car dealership called the Fisher Automobile Company.

America's first car dealer sprinting backwards onto the lot to offer you finance on the Dion boots on.

My deals are so crazy they're backwards.

What do you want a new car today?

Do you want to see me run backwards real fucking?

fucking anything stop doing that i guess please like

um yeah so with this with this kind of like showmanship in mind he his co-owner was uh barney oldfield who was like one of the most famous names in like pre-world war ii american auto racing like he oh oldfield was like critical crucial in like inventing the roll cage uh after he watched like one of his buddies get the

car crash um but like you know very instrumental like early phases of auto racing So they both, you know, Oldfield and Carl start racing together and they're doing the same thing they were with cycling where they're like trying to hype up the dealership.

And he sells basically every car in the market.

We haven't progressed to,

you know, the kind of cartel model of car dealership yet.

So he's just trying to sell whatever he can get his hands on.

Notably,

There is no report that he ran backwards into people's living rooms to advertise, you know, buying a new REO speed wagon.

But he did

organize a publicity stunt where he removed the engine from a car and attached it to a hot air balloon and then flew it over the city of Indianapolis and then pretend he flew it out to like where I guess the suburbs would be now, had a pre-arranged complete car with an engine that was identical parked there and then drove it back into the city.

And he was like, yeah, this car flew over Indianapolis.

You should go buy one.

Okay, that's

attached to

a hot air balloon.

Early marketing.

Just

fly your car over the city of Indianapolis.

People love to stunt.

They love stunts.

Crash a crush.

Yeah, people love a stunt, man.

Yeah.

So this was working.

Like, he was actually really well off.

And next slide, please.

So he was doing fairly well.

He was in 1904.

He and his buddy James Allison, who if you've ever owned a General Motors vehicle or really any vehicle with a transmission, you've probably heard of Allison transmissions.

These two were approached by the guy who invented

acetylene.

Acetylene?

Acetylene.

Acetylene.

Acetylene.

Thank you.

I knew I was messing that one up.

Acetylene headlights.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Hold on.

A torch.

You can hold your car.

Yeah.

But say, you don't have like an alternator on there yet.

You need some kind of horrible gas.

Acetylene will do the job.

My acetylene headlights.

and then that also leads me to the realization curious gas they used for headlights

it's like then leads me to the realization that there was a long period where you had like a practical car but not a practical headlight and then i'm thinking about driving a completely very constant

lit

uh but also very fragile car down an unpaved road at night and yeah Jesus.

Okay.

Yeah.

Everybody who was really into cars early on is absolutely fucking insane.

Yeah, I want to do like a Mele Melia episode with you or something.

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

It's funny.

I think locomotives have actually alternators by this point.

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

Yeah, so

he and Allison start this company called Presto-liked.

This is one of their advertisements where they're like, Yeah, cool.

We make exploding headlights.

It's in something called the Outing Magazine advertiser.

And I knew the Times were homophobic, but I didn't know that.

Oh, Jeanette, Pennsylvania.

Okay.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

Yeah.

So,

of course, like...

They own the patent.

They rapidly, 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 effective at actually lighting the road than anything else that's currently on the market.

And they're better than oil lamps and all that kind of stuff.

So

in 1913, he sells Presto Light to the Union Carbide Company for $9 million.

Those fuckers.

Which is like $280 million today or something ridiculous.

So, yeah, massive sale.

So, you know, and also just as a side note, yes, as you correctly pointed out earlier,

as I was researching this, I found like, I think at least two separate instances where his factories explode.

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

Yeah.

For the depths of hell with it.

Yeah, exactly.

I, I remember the first time I used an oxytorch.

And yeah, I, I, uh, the guy who was teaching me was like, yeah, if you see the gauge do this with the acetylene, you're already dead.

Don't worry, man.

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, you know, as his car dealership becomes more successful, he takes a trip to France in 1905.

And as Ross pointed out earlier, they got in on the good roads earlier.

And, you know,

Carol's like, their cars are so much better than ours.

They're cooking us.

Also, like, American automotive journalist visits China now.

Yes, yes, exactly.

He's like, the French cars are way better.

And the reason he's reasoning is that their cars can go faster.

And so they can test them better because their roads are better.

In an article in Motor Age magazine in 1905, you know, he was talking about the American tendency where the only test tracks we had were basically just like horse racing ovals, like the Kentucky Derby track or whatever it is, I don't know what it's called.

Well, I'm glad you guys got rid of the dragon.

Yeah.

He said, The average horse track is narrow, has fences that are dangerous, and is always dusty or muddy.

With high-speed cars where wide skids are necessary, the fastest car from a slow start or other temporary delay gets stuck in the rear without chances of ever getting the front on account of continuous seas of dust and skidding cars.

And so he's like, he's like, we don't have good enough racetracks.

We got to do better racetracks.

I guess I see that if you're like, sort of like at the back of like this kind of sloth of like mud being thrown up by all of these cars, it's like, it says like the Somme, but that hasn't happened yet.

So it's like saying, you know, it's a guy in like 1990.

Yeah, it's like 9-11 out there.

Yeah, they haven't invented like fucking Figure A demolition derby races yet.

Oh,

this would be cool.

Yeah, this guy would have loved that shit.

The problem is that that car doesn't even have like a windshield.

So you try and drive that through like, you know, three circular tables.

You die instantly.

It's more along in a million directions.

Yep.

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

Yeah.

Well, so this is, 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.

And if you crossed over it, you'd go through the turns without having to touch the wheel because gravity would just pull the car back down.

So I guess...

It's like, it's a racetrack and an aerodrome.

It's like throw a couple more things in there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Here, come, come here and see the vehicles.

Yeah.

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

It's the turn of the century, and that's just like one of your types of guys you can class into, right?

It's like, I love dangerous wheeled contraptions that are like basically.

I wish to die in ways previously unimaginable.

I'm going to die faster than any of my previous ancestors.

Yes.

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

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

Yeah, so Carl comes back to the U.S.

and he's like, okay, this is, we got to 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.

Yeah, named with characteristic American humility.

Yeah.

Well, to be fair, it is the largest sports and you, sports venue on earth today.

It has, it has a quarter million seats in it.

It's also very fast.

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 because he was like, it's better for the spectators if they can see the cars the whole time.

They should get more excitement.

And I will say that.

We can put a bunch of like sponsor logos on them, you know.

Yeah, and I will say, having gone to the Indy 500,

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 reverence for it when you go there.

Watching like, what is it, 32?

I'm only so NASCAR pilled.

I can't remember how many indie cars are.

I think it's, I think, a full grid is like 32 or 34.

Watching 34 cars do like 240 miles an hour at the same time is pretty great, actually.

But in any case, I digress.

Here's where you're.

Near, near, near, near, near, near, near, near, near, near.

Yeah, and there's like a whole like mud pit where people are all just getting like blackout drunk like the whole three-day weekend.

It's awesome.

And you feel that Super Speedway sounds like a great time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, it's, it's, it's awesome.

Um, but in any case, they built the track and they first do it with Crushed Stone.

So I guess that'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 all over the field.

AAA, which is like...

not like the people who come and get you at the tow truck at the time, but they're like the main sanctioning body for all motorsports.

They boycott the venue and they're like, you have to make this better because you're killing way too many people.

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

No.

This is early progressivism.

This is woke, to be honest.

I don't know.

I think this is.

I suppose, you know, social progress is good, but also like, but also, it's

1909.

Come on.

Yeah, this, this, this guy exactly.

He's bad all the time.

We're about to have World War I.

Yeah, he's not great, but he's like, you know, Napoleon.

He's historically progressively bad.

And put it this way, spared those guys from dying in World War I.

Yeah.

Exactly.

It was a mercy kill.

Not only is it kind of like, you know, bitch made to be complaining about like four people dying.

when you're going to get like, you know, the psalm 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.

Like, Chris Tucker means

this is World War One history.

Take your take your sensitive ass back to like early

car.

That's right, yeah.

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 um and let people enjoy things

and he's going to 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 that'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 indie 500.

um at that race they Fisher advocated for the rolling start and the pace car and that's auto racing has begun.

Like he is this this one man has basically kicked off sort of like the modern age of auto racing.

So next slide please.

Hi it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these.

So let me get to the point.

We have this thing called Patreon, right?

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You would think, you know, I love autoracing, 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, it'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

And his issue is: quote: The highways of America are built chiefly of politics, whereas the proper material is crushed rock or concrete.

That's his clever bit: is that if these red tape politicians would simply get out of the way, we could have good roads.

So, to this end,

he proposes what becomes the Lincoln Highway, which is a New York to San Francisco road.

It goes through York.

Sorry.

It covers 3,400 miles of the U.S.

And the idea is that he's going to get a bunch of captains of industry and car companies to all chip in to build this massive,

paved, improved road from coast to coast as a means of encouraging personal automobile use.

And,

you know, he still, I think, has an interest in the headlight company at this point.

So he's kind of got a vested interest in being like, yeah, you should definitely buy a car with headlights.

You can drive at night in the middle of Nebraska as you venture from New York to San Francisco.

It's terrifying.

Yeah, yeah.

So, like, and he gets major buy-in.

Woodrow Wilson, who is, you know, the president 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, major audience.

Yeah, yeah.

The goal of the highway, according to Fisher and the Lincoln Highway Association, was to, quote, stimulate as nothing else could the building of enduring highways everywhere.

End quote.

So, you know, again, this man is, he's kind of like the guy who invented like CFCs and leaded gasoline, but for American infrastructure.

He just can't stop ruining shit.

So he goes to Henry Ford, who is like the only guy who's got enough money to actually 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 for the power of the world.

Fucking bastard.

On the corporate teat.

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

Yeah, I'm just a little bit confused here.

I'm kind of like, okay,

I agree, but also.

There's currently a Z-axis being added to the normal political alignment chart.

Henry Ford is somewhere in like the new dimension we're charting.

Yeah, might be a few more.

We're playing four or five-dimensional chess here.

Yeah, so

this kind of like...

This kind of torpedoes the project of like building a bunch of roads because now they've got like they've got like half the money and you know the biggest automaker in the US is kind of like, no, I don't want to be involved with this at all.

This is woke somehow.

Um, and so this is the route that gets planned, which uses primarily existing roads.

Um, so this is this is from the Lincoln Highway Association, which is a modern-day group that's sort of dedicated to like preserving the memory of this because it's obviously very foundational in like how Americans shaped how they travel.

Um, 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.

Yes.

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 going to like put signs up for.

Notably, those signs in the lights of your Oxia Settlement headlights.

Yeah.

Notably, you know, it's 3,400 miles

and and only 15, like only about 1,600 miles of it were improved, which is to say like graded or like had drainage or anything.

The rest of it is just like...

Any amount of work put into it at all.

The rest of it is like wagon ruts, basically.

And, you know, the West is basically not a place that people, you know, like it is not a place that like the modern-day American political project had worked on reshaping to its whims yet.

So like it is still for the intensive like New Yorkers driving their cars, a

intraversible, desolate wilderness.

Um,

and prior to the invention of the crossover, yeah.

And I just wanted 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.

Yes, he's the guy, he is like the CFC's guy.

Negative impact on his environment.

Cuban douchebags Henry Flagler.

Yeah.

Hates the Jews.

Well, you dead bitch.

Yeah.

No, he developed it.

This is a picture of his house.

Because like in the mid-20s, this guy had like more money than God.

And he...

He was like putting up ads in Times Square, like moved to the new Miami Beach as like the

premier vacation destination.

He was also a rabid anti-Semite, which is, as you've pointed out, why there were like property restrictions.

Suck that shit, you dead bitch.

This guy's like having one of the best times you can possibly have as a racist because he's like all in on cars, which are all made by another rabid anti-Semitic.

Notably, they hated each other, like, as kids.

Yeah.

Just handed, like,

he's the

bad kind.

He's, he's the bad kind of anti-Semite.

I'm sorry.

Roz.

Yeah, no.

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

That was a long time ago.

Dare I ask?

Roz did nothing wrong in that scenario.

Someone just decided that Roz is anti-Semitic and I

had to back him up.

Anyway, this guy was insanely anti-Semitic.

And

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 overleveraged trying to fix Miami Beach and also building like a resort community in Montauk, right in New York.

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

That's okay.

Fascinating.

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

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

Don't forget the dead part.

Yeah, yeah.

But he sucked the whole time.

So, like, you know, what is the moral of the story?

Who knows?

Life is bad.

Anyway, next slide, please.

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hooray.

So,

you know, back to the actual highway.

In 1915, they film a like movie.

and then drive across the country on the Lincoln Highway to promote it.

It was like dubbed the like three-mile film because of how much length there was in the reel.

It has entirely lost media.

It was too flammable.

And Disney decided it wasn't worth preserving, so they destroyed it.

Goddamn mouse swamp-dwelling pieces of shit.

Yeah.

Well, the Disney episode is coming, goddammit.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Lord Kimball destroyed it because it promoted cars instead of trains.

But, you know,

then the Great War happens, and they don't really work on this at all because it's not really a priority.

We have like perfectly good railroads, as has been pointed out.

You know, a 1916 road guide to the Lincoln Highway, if you'd like an idea of how rough this is, includes such advice as: if you find yourself stranded near Fish Springs, Utah, quote, build a sagebrush fire.

Mr.

Thomas will come with a team.

He can see you 20 miles off.

Oh, honestly,

this is a long

suffering man.

Yeah.

Oh, the longest suffering.

But also,

this sounds pretty cool in a way that you have to go to some pretty far-flung locations to experience this kind of like travel difficulty.

There were a handful of women.

Mr.

Thomas is probably on his porch.

He'll see you.

Don't worry.

He'll come there with six horses and pull you out.

And you're welcome for it, douchebag.

There were a handful of women that like took this trip, 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 so been down

just like i this is this is like i recognize that spark of like what if i bought a van and just drove into the west in like every single person

cannot judge um but it did

suffering from from from trail madness yeah like Americans have two thoughts, right?

And it's like, okay, what if I had a trip?

I had a ham dog swiper, right?

What if I had a hamburger?

And what if I took a road trip?

What if I could do both?

And then I go to In-N-Out.

Do they still print the Bible verses on cups and shit?

Probably.

I don't think so.

Do they?

No.

Look, you can't ruin it and out for me.

I have nothing left.

I'm racking up a world historical number of L's recently.

You can't take it and out for any of those hampers.

Sorry.

My Los Angeles routine is land, get out of the airport.

And for some reason, the garage where they give all the press cars out is directly next door to the lax in n-out so i go pick up the keys to whatever fancy car they've given me and then get a hamburger and watch planes do you have a like a like a like a badge of some kind you could fax me a copy of just real quick

you gotta lay on the hood and watch planes go over like wayne's world you know yeah

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 they put all of the catch-all, just like, hey, trucks are new.

We probably could use those for war.

Let's make these guys handle that.

So after the war ends, they're planning to do like a convoy across America to celebrate the end of the war, the end of the flu pandemic.

um kind of show off all this new technology

america's looking up i mean comprised entirely of the kind of freaks who like survive world war one in the army and go, I know a good thing when I see it.

I want to stay in this fucking army.

Yeah, yeah, well, and they want to recruit new soldiers.

Also, and this is a direct quote from the like planning document that I found for this convoy.

It was to determine by actual experience the possibility and the problems involved in moving an army across the continent, assuming that railroad facilities, bridges, tunnels, etc., had been damaged or destroyed by agents of an Asiatic enemy.

Okay.

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 what are they thinking in?

What are they thinking in Indonesia right now?

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.

I was like, ooh, that's uh, that doesn't look good with later context.

Just being like, I'm not gonna, I'm not being racist because I'm not gonna name the Asiatic power.

Could be any of them.

Uh, it 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.

Next slide, I think, is you actually, Robin.

Yeah, no, I duplicated some of that information, unfortunately.

But it's okay.

I don't really know anything about the Great War.

As they said, as they said in 1066 and all that.

The Great War was a war between America and Germany and was thus fought in Belgium.

Yeah, but the long and short of it is a guy shot another guy in Serbia, and then the second international shattered bed.

All of Europe goes to war over essentially nothing, and America gets dragged in.

The GIs who go out to fight on the front line came back having seen two things, which are: number one, the horrors, right?

Number two, France has pretty good roads, huh?

Yeah.

Why don't we have those?

Weird, weird thing about bringing

French stuff back from the Great War.

It's why

Burnley in Lancashire has a weird attachment to one particular French liqueur is because the local regiment just brought it back with them.

Meanwhile, the Americans are like, I could invent becoming a car psycho.

Yes.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

Maybe cars are like, cars are fundamentally French, I guess.

You know, this is something that we had no idea about.

I did.

The french at like the thing is like the average american does not appreciate this because the last french car sold in america was the uh pugeot 405 in 1991 but like every single french car from like basically the end of world war ii until i don't know i've only driven them up until 1991 but all of them were perfect like literally every all of them are the platonic ideal of like weird car person like they are built by people who want to the car and that's how you know they're good

i cannot afford to to have Mr.

S, so I have sick.

One of them is named the SM for God's sake.

Like, what more do you want?

But, yeah, in addition to the horrors, World War 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?

The war ends with the United States in a position where I think 90,000 trucks have 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 peacetime.

Clearly it's time for a stunt.

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

I'm just thinking about that, unrelated, but I'm just thinking about that guy who was like, I wish I had been born in like the late 1890s so I could have...

lived through World War I and World War II and then retired during the Cold War.

That was like the peak human experience.

And just rotating that concept in my mind right now.

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

I mean, to be fair, I've seen a lot of cool trains, though.

That is true.

That is true.

That's true.

During like, you know, 1920s, I've seen footage.

I've seen newsreels.

I will also say that, like, the idea of going to Europe and coming back and being 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.

This is amazing.

We had to go to like Edinburgh at one day.

And I was like, oh my God, we're going to miss the train.

When's the next one?

I'm assuming

that this woman is going to tell me, oh, it's like four hours from now.

We're completely fucked.

And she's like, that's like 20 minutes.

I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about?

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

Fucking.

Yeah, anyway.

We have to speak about something similar sometime soon.

Anyway, so what about if we did a big road trip?

All right.

I'm down.

It's the American answer to everything.

Yeah.

I'd 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 U.S.

Army's doing.

Oh, my God.

Is the U.S.

Army going to transition?

What kind of hormones do you need for that?

So I put these two guys here.

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?

Um, this is the 1919 Motor Transport, Motor Transport Corps Convoy, right?

Um, we got uh two Cadillacs, we got several Dodges, um, we got a couple whites.

There's observation and reconnaissance here.

We got the standard B's.

We'll talk about those.

Um, I don't know, and a bunch of motorcycles, yeah, yeah.

The the five Harleys, like sick, a couple of Packards, too.

We got

some Dodges, we got some FWDs.

That's four-wheel drives.

That was a company.

Uh, the Garfords, I don't know what they are.

You got the GMC ambulances and various other things.

I always think of military ambulance is such a good fucking aesthetic.

Give me the Kentucky Route Zero Humvee ambulance.

You know, I'm like, some of the multiple of the motorcycles have sidecars, which is cool.

God, fucks.

Yeah.

You got your Liberty Kitchen trailer.

You got your Maxwell.

Do they charge $20 for a fucking

motorcycle tractor?

Right.

You've got the Militor.

We'll talk about that later.

Loader pontoon trailer turned out not to be necessary.

The Blacksmith truck?

The blacksmith and machine shop trucks are max.

You've got some Packards.

You've got some Rikers, which I don't know what those are.

I couldn't find pictures you got another pair of kitchen trailers um and you got the whites

really clean drop of that just in case anybody needed it

there's a lot of vehicles yeah and the goal is like uh i i you know honestly the number seemed to vary depending on the source but it was i think 50 days right something like that yeah yeah um and now at the time you know it was like you could do this in like a minimum of 20 to 30 days, but that assumes you're averaging 18 miles an hour and you're not 79 trucks.

You're just like one person taking

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

Yeah.

And they're doing this in the middle of summer, just for the record.

So it's like July when they set up.

There's no air conditioning.

Yeah.

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

of the surface.

I can only say one sentence of that accent.

Or you're going to make sorry, you're going to be so good you're going to slap your mama.

Oh, yeah.

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.

And

it's not actually like out to a good start.

On July 12th, five days into the drive, quote from the from the like overall trip summary report is, all tools furnished with trucks are of inferior quality and construction.

Cool and cloudy.

Roads chucky, chunky.

I'm not sure.

Made 35 miles in seven and a half hours.

This is the good part of the trip.

Yes.

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

Yeah, I mean, and they're doing, they're doing a schedule of six days driving.

Uh, on Sunday, they rest, right?

So, uh, 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.

Just getting fully Italian jobbed.

Yeah.

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

I've heard of that.

By the second week, they reach Chicago Heights.

Why is it called Chicago Heights?

It's 50 feet above Chicago.

That is Heights.

And several miles away.

Does this say on the side that it got bad?

Oh, no.

Yeah, no, then it got bad.

Yeah.

Next slide, please.

Here's one of my favorite images.

As somebody who has had the succumbed to the American madness to road trip and sunk her van in the banks of the Colorado River somewhere in like rural Arizona, that shit sucks.

That is my expert opinion.

That's baked in the...

That's a tandoor at that point.

You're just cooking a wheel.

Yeah, so remember what I mentioned about the gumbo roads?

Yeah.

Yeah, they were still gumbo by the time 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 notice that none of their drivers know how to drive yet because, like, they're all like 19-year-old army recruits who were desperately excited to go fight in like the trenches in France.

Um, what do you mean a sent a horse?

It can't get me home drunk, yeah.

Getting your like, I missed deployment thing for World War I

is,

oh, just like this completely like fresh-eyed idealist being like tell me what it was like to a guy with like half an arm left whose like lungs are like mostly vesicant sort of like globules

I I I got the feeling from reading about this that this seemed like it was kind of fun.

I don't know.

It's okay.

My chief impression was that it was the most type two fun of all time.

Which is just kind of like a history of this period of the U.S.

Army where it's like genocide, genocide, fuck around, fuck around, fuck around, fuck around, fuck around.

Like, put down strikes, put down strikes, put down strikes, fuck around.

Like

horror the likes of which no one has ever seen.

Road trip.

So, yeah.

Road trip, yeah.

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.

Fucking sounds horrible.

By Nebraska, they've encountered quicksand and sank into it.

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

You know, quicksand.

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

Jesus Christ.

Meanwhile,

they hit the Sierra Nevada, and that's like, it's 30 degrees outside.

And this is, of course, again, mostly guys who were bummed they missed out on going to Europe by the Great War.

And when they start hitting mountain passes, like out in

the actual Rockies in Wyoming or whatever,

they don't know how to drive.

And so they keep blowing up trucks by downshifting wrong because you can't rely on your brakes at this time, right?

Like they're like leather pads strapped to like an open 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 link in your drivetrain is.

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 it's like a draft into the Korean War, right?

And he went to Germany to like one of the new bases that we had put in over there as like part of the Marshall Project.

And he, I remember him telling me about a time that he had to drive his like commanding officer down a convoy on like the Autobahn, right?

And you know, the trucks are actually making some pretty decent speed here.

And he's, of course, like 19 and doesn't know how to drive stick.

So he's, he's describing basically he puts the Jeep in first gear and is redlining the piss out of it for like seven miles at 30 miles an hour because he doesn't know that he can shift and go to further gears.

And

imagine this guy is the whole military.

Everybody driving a truck is basically that guy for this road trip.

And that's, that's where we're at.

Um, uh, we also like the 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.

Um,

I believe his official title here is uh Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower is an observer, yeah, from the War Department, which we're getting back now.

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

Oh, that's gone poorly, huh?

huh

yeah um he uh and this is apocryphal so i'm not 100 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 yeah yeah in 1919.

Some kind of urgent conversation that says, no, don't call Washington.

That was fake.

Yeah.

Don't have to put down the Lakota again.

Yeah, it turns out,

yeah, it turns out that the answer to the question, you don't mind if a white boy speaks a little Lakota this evening, is yes, very much.

Please don't.

Yeah, so there's there's kind of your intersection of like uh playful,

like American, you know, let's around and also let's do horrible war crimes.

So, woo-woo-hoo, we did it, we synthesized it.

It's two things.

Uh, notably, not communism, however.

Anyway, they they end up abandoning nine vehicles along the course of this trip and 21 men who all get sick because they they're they they're trying to be self-sufficient right like this is war conditions they're bringing their own water and they're running out of water sometimes they're bringing some like

water sources they find and you know they're they're having dodgy food and so 21 guys get left behind as casualties basically um Official number of breakdowns, according to like the post-trip report, was 230.

And this includes like doing this which is like burying your truck up to its engine block and sand 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

so yeah And they did this while averaging five and a half hours of sleep a night.

Incredible.

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

Well, in fairness, they did put the heaviest truck first, which is with the engineering team.

And that had an artillery tractor on the flatbed.

You know, so ideally, like, and that was with the engineering team was there.

So they would try and shore up the bridge if it looked like it was going to fall down.

And then they would run the truck over it.

And if it didn't fall down, that was good.

And if it did fall down, well, none of them fell down bad enough to put that truck out of commission.

So, you know,

it worked.

Yeah.

You you know, the only aspect of this that was like a just a 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 report that many people, though.

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

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

Yeah.

Could you get the mare out?

Could we like, I don't know, go to a saloon?

You know, just being like,

can we stash the like 20 guys with dysentery in the back so that they're, you know.

Yeah, can we violate the third amendment, bro?

Yeah, exactly.

And then it's like, you know, they were like, yeah, we don't have television.

Let's have a party.

we don't even have a radio yet

that's still for like i don't know not rescuing the titanic

so yeah big banquets the whole way i think these guys i i again i think these guys actually had a pretty good time overall

yeah i mean i mean compared to like being in the military like day to day in 1919 you have to think like it's that or like george patton is screaming at you and he's still in like kind of like slapping around and he's going, and he's not handling it well.

Mad that the Germans are the ones running the concentration camps, yeah,

yeah, yeah.

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 because then if you live and everybody here did, then you're like, I did this really cool thing, and it's like, oh, that's crazy.

You fixed a Toyota Hiat with handcuffs, and you had to be like, Yeah, that's me, actually.

I am that woman.

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

I have a breakdown of select vehicles and their problems.

Well, there's a problem.

Oh, dear.

So these are the FWD Model Bs, right?

FWD stands for four-wheel drive.

They have solid rubber tires.

Beautiful.

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

Solid rubber tires is just like shooting for a high score on the NVH rating.

Autojournalist gets in and gets their feelings shaken out.

Like, oh, yeah.

It's really visceral, guys.

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.

The Audi Quartra of their day.

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

Sick.

Yeah.

Some real, like, you know, you as a kid think this is the coolest vehicle in existence.

And you're right.

Yes.

These were these were three-ton trucks.

Now, on the other hand, there's a different Model B, which is the Class B standardized military truck.

These were produced in enormous quantities in World War I.

You know, there's, I think about 14,000 of these were made by like 20 or 30 different manufacturers, right?

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

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Three-ton capacity.

It had a four-speed transmission to get you up to a blistering 15 miles an hour.

Wow.

Imagining the actual like fast and furious shifting scenes.

It must be pan out.

He's like barely keeping up with a horse.

They had quite a few of these in the convoy.

I forget how many offhand.

And one of them broke down and had to be towed every single goddamn day.

Can you imagine a different form of shit?

Oh,

okay.

I'm going to kill

the eyes that are the bar heads at this point.

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

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

It was healed by Stockton, which is the only time that's ever happened to anything.

The big issue with these because, you know, they were all made by different manufacturers and the standardized B

was not very standardized.

There was no consistent source of breakdowns.

Every single truck broke down in a different way.

Yep, USS we built this yesterday.

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

So they had leaky radiators, excessive fan beltware, hood fastener failures, head gasket failures, broken valve lifters.

That was a big one.

It happened in 50 different ways.

I've been showing the hood fastener one as well.

All of this other shit happens.

Like the engine seizes in a way that's completely unfixable and then the hood falls off as well.

Just out of spite, just to be like, fuck you.

Thrown rods.

Broken carburetors, also in 50 different ways.

Short circuits in the magneto, which I believe is an old-fashioned term for alternator or an old-fashioned type of alternatives does the same thing.

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

Like loose steering wheels.

Sure.

Bent axles and many others.

They never had the same problem twice.

They loved their mistakes.

Yeah.

The only thing that consistently worked on them was the transmission.

The transmission was rock solid on these guys.

Thank you, Mr.

Allison.

You know?

Yeah.

Another model of truck.

This is the Mac five and a half ton truck.

I think I sort of, I'm pretty sure it's got a Mac logo on the front.

And I don't know of any other Macs they put on this.

Giving them

red, yeah, you know.

Yeah.

Great game.

I don't know very much about these.

Two of the five were set up as the mobile machine shop and the mobile blacksmith shop, right?

They overheated a lot.

They drank 50 gallons of water a day per truck.

Jesus.

That's okay.

They had a chain drive instead of a drive shaft.

Drive shafts were pretty common at this point, right?

So the chain drive is like, okay, the rear axle is powered with the chain like a fucking bicycle.

Those immediately clogged with sand and mud.

once they crossed the Mississippi and that locked the rear wheels solid, right?

So once they they became disabled, they could only be towed backwards.

Time is a flat circle,

but they could go backwards at full speed, right?

I will get to that.

This is the Packard one and a half ton truck, they were pretty good.

Just this one works.

I love, I love how hoarse 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?

Oh, yeah.

This is the militor.

Hell yes.

All right.

I love this thing.

It reminds me of a pin scour if you kind of like, you know, retrofuturismed it.

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?

It had this big power winch on it.

This is not the specific Militaur.

This is a different one.

This thing was heavy as fuck.

It had chains on the tires.

it was like it was like this is like the 1919 doof wagon um what's what's that one game is it scythe maybe the like twisted metal no no no it's it's like the board game that's like kind of like 1910s 1920s like um

fucking

hold on i think you mean twisted metal nova no i don't i mean i mean the board game scythe is what i mean so like

you put like a creepy looking clown driving that thing and I would be like, yeah, that's my main.

I mean,

what I've done is I've said, hey, this thing set in an alternate history 1920s reminds me of the 1920s.

So I'm really contributing here.

Yeah.

So this guy was assigned as, you know, the main support vehicle, the main tow truck.

It eventually ended up towing nine trucks at once.

Oh,

yeah, I snowballed games like that too.

Like, send in more trucks.

Yeah.

I paid for this DLC piece of shit.

I'm going to drive it out of the thing if it kills me.

It was always stationed at the rear of the convoy to pick up anyone who broke their truck.

It was completely indispensable, right?

In Salt Lake City, it went out like the bluesmobile.

But there was a valiant effort by the mechanics on the convoy, who, by the way, had a full machine shop and full blacksmith shop.

They were like, okay, we're going to put Humpty Dumpty back together.

We're going to forge a new one out of the ashes of the old.

We can rebuild him.

We have the technology.

And they did it, right?

They did it.

Oh, my God.

With like one bearing still needing replacement.

The expeditionary commander said, nah, just send it by rail to San Francisco.

And it went away.

Incredible.

This was a bad decision.

Yeah.

Oh, boy.

I'll say.

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

It left only a single five-ton treaded artillery tractor with the Engineering Corps as, you know, the tow vehicle, which unlike the Militor, could not keep up with the Convoy because it was an actual tractor tractor, right?

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

Yeah, sure.

When we needed it most, he disappeared.

So, yeah, and miscellaneous equipment.

There were

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.

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.

Those were abandoned.

Both had a big issue where they needed major parts.

Both had an issue where major parts of their suspension had to be replaced 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 yeah that guy on the top right looks like he's not happy in his work i'll say that yeah um

realizing his like left leg is off the bike and is sinking

yeah um the pontoon trailer they brought turned out not to be necessary um there were a lot of cars with the convoy which generally did pretty well um 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 8 and the Leslie Special did not compete.

Yeah, and then there's some images here.

Here's like a typical bridge that they were collapsing.

It's just like two beams of wood with like a deck over it.

Okay, yeah, I'm not mad at them for collapsing this when they get the keys to the city anymore.

This is made of matchsticks.

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.

Yeah.

This looks type two fun.

I would do it.

I would, well, I can't do it anymore because they won't let trans women go do drop shit in the military now.

But, you know, we need to bring back woke so I can take a road.

Bring back woke so Victoria can do this.

Yes, absolutely.

Victoria Scott, famed as supporter of American imperialism.

Well, if the military only did this shit, then would have been like who cares.

If we weren't doing interventions in Latin America, right, of course.

Come join the Road Trip Corps.

So, yeah, this was

pretty goofy.

Yeah.

So it ended up being 56 days traveling

with an average of 10 and a quarter hours on the road working to keep these things running

With six total rest days for a total of 62 days to get from New York to San Francisco.

Average moving speed on travel days, 6.07 miles per hour.

They were a week late.

And they just, yeah.

And like, here's another bridge that broke.

You can see, like, this whole thing was just kind of like, well, I wonder if we could do this.

And the answer was kind of no, you can't.

At this point, if you would like to get large 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.

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.

Backwards, in fact.

Yeah.

And the main lesson, what did we learn?

What did we learn from this?

You should have one kind of truck made by one manufacturer instead of like two dozen different companies all building the same, all building like some variation of the same truck.

You could have one kind of problem.

You should invest in tools.

So you're not breaking three hammers on day one.

And also

what you have the blacksmith truck for instead of make more hammers, you know?

And also the military should know how to drive.

They're going to drive trucks, which based on my grandfather's anecdote from the Korean War era, I don't think that they ever learned that.

My understanding is that along the way, most people did figure out how to drive the truck by the time they were in like Nevada.

Yeah, but like that's the part where

you need to learn how to downshift really well.

And

that's where you're going to blow up your engine because, you know, throwing rods and stuff because 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.

Yeah, just drops out.

Yeah.

They also added a mess officer in Nebraska and they found out that this helped morale shockingly.

And I think that this really says.

I'm tired of robbing farms.

My question is: what did they do?

Because they had dropped both kids, all four kitchen trailers at that point.

They just on the 1920s MRA, it's all lead-soldered cans, you know.

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

Of course.

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

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

It's the thing we're good at.

And the American military, it's logistics.

See how long that holds.

Very good.

said, lethality, lethality, lethality.

That's how I know we're at the true death of neoliberalism: is that we will not be able to put the Burger King truck in Kandahar anymore.

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 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.

Um, And now we can't do that.

And the military's not woke.

So

we're in a new exciting era.

Yeah.

Now you're going to have the steak and shake trailer.

Yeah.

Or the tallow guy in his restaurant in Southwest Lorentz.

I'm going to have a big tanker full of vegetable oil right there, but we can't use it.

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.

And they're like, yeah, you know, our predecessors really loved to joke about

the ability of the American military to put hamburgers in war-torn places.

This got dark.

Never mind.

I'm abandoning this joke midstream.

Next slide, please.

I hinted at it earlier.

But guess who's back?

It's fucking Eisenhower.

White Eisenhower, yeah.

White Eisenhower.

Yeah, he's here as an observer.

So gay.

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

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

I've seen straighter-looking photos of Truman Caposi.

Yes, he joined the trip because he was bummed out he didn't get to fight in the Great War.

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,

end quote.

And yeah, then he decided that he ended up devoting an entire chapter of his memoirs to this trip, and it made a huge impact on him and about the general state of American infrastructure and kind of like how logistics could be done.

And next slide, please.

The fifth time the like hood falls off the truck that is already buried in quicksand, you're like, fuck this, I'm going to invent the interstate highway system.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

I'm thinking about those roads.

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

I mean, I think they're going to define it.

It's public domain.

Yeah.

And also, like, what are they going to do?

Sue you?

They don't have any lawyers left.

They can't.

They literally

got 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.

At the ice agents in D.C.

They literally cannot indict a hand sandwich.

Government over.

Anyway, yeah.

So in his words and his memoir,

the old convoy had started me thinking about good two-lane highways, but Germany in World War II had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land.

So

you might say to me at this point, but Victoria,

the Reichs Autobahn, which is what Hitler insisted you call the Autobahn, was basically unused by the Wehrmacht for any defense

purposes at all.

Like, it was completely useless.

It was a huge boondoggle they spent a ton of fucking money on.

And the whole like light-colored highways that 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.

And also they were all like graded and designed really stupidly because they were just trying to like, you know, sell this like scenic enjoyment.

And that meant that no trucks could drive like up any of the grades.

So they were totally unused.

by like the Germans for the entire length of World War II.

And also like Germany didn't have any personal cars.

And so like nobody really drove on them.

They're totally useless.

And really the only actual use that the Autobahn had at any point during World War II was for the Allies to invade with

because it was just like this nice straight shot directly into all their major city centers.

And notably the Allies also destroyed all of the roads by driving on them with tanks.

So you would think that like Victoria surely, you know, that defeats the whole purpose of the interstate highway system for like a military use.

And yeah, you'd be right.

He just, he just thought it was cool.

He just thought this was a great idea to like build a bunch of highways.

And then we ended up with the image on the right.

And now you have to spend $12,000 a year on a device that has, by the time you're done with it, no resale value so you can get to work.

So thank you, President Dwight Eisenhower.

It is kind of funny that, you know, we built the highway, the interstate highway system on the grounds of defense.

Right.

And then practically speaking, practically speaking, when you move military equipment around within the United States, just going through a field, man.

It's all rail.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's literally like

we're putting 500 tanks on 200 flag cars.

Yeah.

You know, it's.

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

They had the 50 military bases within driving distance.

And the thing is, you can't drive a fucking tank on a road.

It destroys the road.

Yeah, it would have been better.

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

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

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, rails, rail infrastructure is so uniquely susceptible to like sabotage.

It's like you can blow up a road.

You can block a road.

Like, I don't understand the thought process here.

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

Ukrainian railway guys are really good at fixing stuff real fast.

Yeah, no, so you might, you know, like, it once again, the United States wins World War II.

And then it's like, what if we just import all the stupidest shit that the Nazis did to the United States?

And yeah, now we have like the United States Autobahn system, which notably is significantly worse than like the German Autobahn because you can't drive fast on it.

I would also say in sort of defense of Eisenhower that a lot of the stuff that the internet, the interstate highway system became was not something that was sort of intentional from the way

he envisioned it.

Like the idea of, you know, we're going to drive the interstate directly into cities.

It was supposed to.

more mirror the idea of like the first super highway, the Pennsylvania turnpike, where you sort of skirt the edges of the city as opposed to, you know, blasting directly through it.

But yeah, we, we got all this, this huge pot of money from, you know, the Defense Aid Highway Act, which people used to do racism and blow up every black neighborhood in America.

Yeah, it's

certainly great.

And this is, we are still,

Dwight Eisenhower took a dumb road trip with his buddies 105 years ago, and I I am still dealing with the consequences of it is kind of like my whole argument

for researching this episode.

It was kind of like, damn, it really is this guy's fault.

Dwight Eisenhower took a road trip with his buddies, and now I don't have a trolley to center city

as frequently.

Yeah, no,

average car actually, average cost of car ownership in the U.S.

is around $12,000 a year, according to AAA right now.

New car price is, I think, 48 grand.

So that's expensive now.

That's proven real sustainable.

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

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

Jesus Christ.

Uh, so you know, that's uh, yeah, I don't know.

I what I learned is that cars are bad.

Yeah, what do we learn?

Carbades are bad.

Carbad, truck, kind of funny.

Truck is pretty funny.

Motorcycle with sidecar, cool, cool.

Every American experiences the death drive to get in the stupidest contraption available to you and just head straight for the horizon through the worst roads possible.

Motorcycle with sidecar, like you need like, you need like your little friend to go in there.

Then you have like a sidekick, though.

Yeah.

That sounds fun.

It's intimate, you know?

I have thought how cool it would be if like I learned how to ride a motorcycle with a sidecar and like my wife and I took a cross-country road trip like a year old or something.

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

Do you need a different license for it in like most

pretty sure.

Yeah, I didn't know that.

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 two-wheel drive.

Oh, I didn't know.

I thought it was just something you attached to it.

I didn't depends on the bike.

I thought it was something you just attached to it.

Yeah, it depends on the bike.

But Urals, which are kind of like the ones that you see, like there's somebody at like nearby me who has a Ural.

And like, those are two rear-driven wheels, which is part of what makes them cool because they're way better at like doing off-roading.

They're very like quintessentially adventure bikes.

And you can, you know, it's you can take somebody with you and it is cool.

Like wear the little like Audrey Hepburn style, like, you know, scarf covering your hair, put on a big pair of shades, you know, go off-roading.

I think it'd be fun.

What if you had two sidecars and no extra wheels?

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

Well, no, no, you still have only the one-wheel in fact.

Sidecars just have to balance.

Like if your friends weigh different amounts, you have to give one of them a sandbag or something.

Carrying my buddies in my Honda Goldwings hard bags.

All right.

Well,

you know,

I do believe what we've learned today is that you two could go on a road trip with 300 of your best friends and fundamentally change the course of history and cause climate change.

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

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

Shake hands with danger.

G'day, cunts.

I wonder what country this is from.

Good day.

This is a story of why the pictured flag post has protective fencing.

It takes place shortly before the fencing was put up.

See, because of me, they have a fence.

Like my last safety third story, this one occurred during a historic motorsport event.

But before getting to the incident, I'll give some context on standard flagging practice.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We all know, like, different colors, handkerchiefs.

One side means top, one side means bottom.

Like.

This image looks uptrack, the approaching angle for cars, before they leave to the right of the picture, heading down track, or DT.

Flag marshals typically stand face to face and a few feet apart, with the DT marshal stood further away from the track.

One reason for this,

one reason for this arrangement, is in case a car hits the post.

The official who can't see the approaching car has some warning, usually in the form of the other marshal panicking and fleeing.

The non-official advice in such a scenario is to follow suit.

On the day of the incident, the DT Marshal was an experienced marshal teaching a trainee with only a handful of days track side at most.

Things started to go wrong when a blue MG blew its decades-old oil hoses off the engine while accelerating down the strait, approaching the post.

Some of the spilled oil was transformed into a thick cloud obscuring the track.

I love motorsports.

The rest of it was dumped onto the track on the racing line, automatically used by the race cars, including the one seconds behind the blue MG.

The senior marshal began waving a flag to warn drivers of what was going on.

His arm going past the Arm Cove fence.

I believe he would have to.

Oh, no.

Okay.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

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 flag post and hitting it at speed.

An upright end plate on a car's wing sliced through the marshal's wrist, including the bone, as I've been told

by him,

leaving it barely attached to the rest of him.

This event was quickly red-flagged, and the injured marshal was seen to by on-track medical staff.

Wave flag with remaining arm.

Yeah.

The event was quickly red-flagged, and the injured marshal was 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.

Yeah, I mean, you've just seen a fucking samurai movie special effect pop off.

Like, I

would take the day as well.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'd probably take that day off.

Yeah, you just saw the wrist get cut off and slide slowly.

You know,

thanks, Ron.

From an animal.

This is basically just all of early motorsport.

Yeah.

Still a decent amount of present motorsport, I guess.

I've seen some pretty sketchy shit go into like little small town tracks.

People will just, tech inspection is like, yeah, battery is probably zip-tied in well enough.

Yeah, go on.

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.

I believe the trainee from that day is also still flagging.

While I was at this flag post, myself and the other marshal made sure to stand well back during race starts and whenever we didn't need to wave flags.

And it was a good day.

Can't keep a good marshal down.

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

It's not like that.

What if you're just fine?

What if it's like, yeah, it took my hand, but like, I don't know, I got it back.

No harm, no foul.

Like, I was involved in like a relatively minor car accident with no injuries and no other cars involved.

And it took me like months before I could drive a car without having vivid flashbacks.

Hours.

Right.

I just, huh?

I said, right.

No, I was completely agreeing with you.

Yeah.

Like, I just,

these people are built different.

Good, good, good for them.

I don't know.

Just fascinating to me.

That would probably fuck me up a little bit.

Love of the game.

Genuinely.

Love the game.

Wow.

That was safety third.

Shakes hands with with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

I got one really quick.

That's cool.

Yeah, of course.

Yes.

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

Be decent.

My book, We Deserve This, which is the trans feminine fashion lookbook with like the car theme, is actually going to, I'm going to be speaking about it at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle 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

um yeah so that'll be that'll be fun um you can buy that at career books and you can put links in the description i presume uh but yeah that's it i just i was excited about this event and i'd love if people came out and you know said hi absolutely or we'll kill you right yes yeah better you better go to that you're gonna have to go to that yeah i don't know what else listen to all the podcasts we're on yes yep Yes.

All right.

Bye, bro.

Podcast.

Bye.

All right.

Thank you again for having me.

Anytime.

Literally, anytime.

Oh, this is fun.