Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Route 66: Roadtrips Beyond the Third Wall

Transcript

Route 66: Roadtrips Beyond the Third Wall · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  John Summers is the motoring historian.
• 0:02
  He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into
• 0:06
  a fairly inept sports bike rider.
• 0:08
  Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of
• 0:12
  cheap and fast, and not much reliable.
• 0:15
  On his show, he gets together with various co hosts to talk about new
• 0:18
  and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.
• 0:32
  Good day, good morning, good afternoon.
• 0:35
  It's John Summers, the motoring historian, here again with School Friend.
• 0:39
  Mark Gammy, how are you Mark?
• 0:41
  I'm living the dream, baby.
• 0:43
  Ah, I'm pleased to hear it.
• 0:45
  Um, yeah, so, um, just thought we would talk about US road trips today, thought
• 0:53
  we would talk about the conference that I did at, uh, um, Midway 2 last
• 0:58
  week, and, uh, and anything else that took our fancy for the next sort
• 1:01
  of 40 minutes or so, 45 or an hour.
• 1:05
  It's been an hour.
• 1:06
  Actually, they've all been different lengths because, of course, I can't
• 1:08
  edit for, um, for anything worth a damn.
• 1:12
  We do talk a lot of shit.
• 1:14
  We do talk a lot of shit.
• 1:15
  And, in fact, the last one, I, I, I edited episode three just, just yesterday
• 1:20
  because I'm going to break down.
• 1:21
  The third wall, this is one of the things about the real housewives, right?
• 1:24
  If you're on the real housewives and you're splitting up with your husband,
• 1:28
  you can't be like, we're splitting up because he's butthurt because I'm more
• 1:32
  famous and make more money than him because you're like referring to the show.
• 1:36
  You can't like refer to the show.
• 1:38
  Do you see what I mean?
• 1:39
  You can't break the third wall.
• 1:41
  And what they've done in some reality TV shows is is you'll hear the
• 1:45
  producer talking as a way to make it.
• 1:48
  seem more real.
• 1:50
  You'll hear the producer like asking questions because we all know that
• 1:53
  the third wall's there, so why not?
• 1:55
  Well, I'm not going to pretend like, you know, it's just us chickens talking.
• 2:00
  This is not just us chickens talking.
• 2:02
  The fact that it's being recorded changes what we're Right.
• 2:07
  No, I'm totally natural.
• 2:09
  Well, well, okay.
• 2:10
  Right.
• 2:11
  Okay.
• 2:11
  But that is in fact, whilst that as we're, let's break down the third war completely.
• 2:17
  That is what I'm trying to achieve.
• 2:18
  It's, it's the Mike Brewer Aand Catnet.
• 2:22
  When you meet the real person, they are similar to the persona that they.
• 2:28
  portray on the tv because it's really hard to do that if you've that's just why
• 2:32
  i'm doing the voice because i can be the real me in conversation with you over on
• 2:37
  with voice but i can't be the real with me if i'm i'm sitting here looking at
• 2:42
  myself talking to you here i couldn't be as scruffy as i am or Well, maybe I could.
• 2:47
  I don't know.
• 2:48
  I mean, this is the, the YouTube way.
• 2:50
  I mean, in YouTube nowadays, we got all these shots up people's noses and
• 2:54
  all of shaky camera and all of this kind of Blair witch bollocks, isn't it?
• 2:58
  So I don't know, maybe I could do that, but I don't, I don't feel comfortable
• 3:01
  with that because when you make it a visual medium, you make it mostly about
• 3:05
  the visual and I don't want it to be mostly about the visual, I don't know.
• 3:09
  I mean, I was watching that Aidan Millwood.
• 3:11
  Formula one site before we, uh, we came online here and, and, uh, he's
• 3:17
  interesting because he sets out to tell a great story that he researches really
• 3:22
  well, but the photographs are shitty and he himself is, is not the most visually
• 3:30
  appealing bloke and yet he's happy to put, you know, he himself said, I
• 3:34
  always think he's in office environment, but it's a bit like yours, Gary.
• 3:37
  Um, you know, he's happy to have that kind of.
• 3:41
  of playing, you know, I'm just at my house.
• 3:45
  And I've done all this research about Formula One because I'm interested in
• 3:48
  it and I'm sharing it with you and I'm using Wikipedia images to, you know,
• 3:53
  break up the monotony a little bit.
• 3:54
  But the main thing is what I'm saying rather than the visual image.
• 3:59
  Which takes us back to Just Go Drive, doesn't it?
• 4:02
  Which I'm going to plug a little bit because I actually watched those videos
• 4:05
  that we did a couple of years ago.
• 4:07
  And I think they're interesting because Um, I actually
• 4:10
  don't think they're too bad.
• 4:11
  I just think when you watch a YouTube video, you're expecting like
• 4:17
  a Top Gear style review of a car.
• 4:20
  You're not expecting b roll with insightful commentary.
• 4:24
  If there's b roll, you're expecting the commentary to be anodyne.
• 4:27
  And if there's exciting film, the commentary still may be
• 4:32
  worthwhile or may not be.
• 4:34
  You can still be hit and miss with with.
• 4:36
  Anyway, so I, I, but I watch that stuff again and I'm
• 4:39
  actually quite happy with it.
• 4:40
  I don't, I don't really mind it.
• 4:40
  We still need to, like, launch the, um, the 45 minute NASCAR, um, early history
• 4:46
  of NASCAR video that we did as well.
• 4:48
  Because we put quite a lot of effort into that.
• 4:49
  I'm just still kicking around on my hard drive.
• 4:50
  We need to get that up.
• 4:52
  Yeah, yeah.
• 4:54
  Yeah.
• 4:54
  Well, I, I had considered, of course, I was thinking this is a misnomer.
• 4:57
  Is somebody listening to this thinking I was expecting motion history?
• 5:01
  Where is the history of the Suzuki GSXR?
• 5:05
  I want to know what happened in the 1969 Spanish Grand Prix
• 5:09
  from Barcelona in gory detail.
• 5:11
  I don't know anything that maybe there isn't a, there is an audience
• 5:14
  for that out there, isn't it?
• 5:15
  But I didn't want to do, I feel like that's better done in the written form.
• 5:19
  That's what John Summers.
• 5:20
  net's for.
• 5:21
  Whereas.
• 5:23
  This form is for, you know, us chickens.
• 5:26
  Just, uh, well, if they look it up, I think we get to that in episode 263.
• 5:30
  So they just need to hang out a little bit.
• 5:32
  Well, or go to order to go to john summers.
• 5:35
  net and ancient, ancient video.
• 5:37
  But you see that whole video, the reason that took you ages to do was because you
• 5:41
  were trying to layer in the right image.
• 5:43
  And when I was saying junior Johnson, you needed to be shown
• 5:46
  junior Johnson, not David Pearson.
• 5:48
  And, and getting all that stuff right, and it's a total pain in
• 5:52
  the arse, 99 percent done now, so we should definitely get it out.
• 5:56
  But you know what, it's a lot less of arse than those monks in the medieval period
• 6:01
  writing Latin with quills and ink, and, or, and do it in their eyes, because they
• 6:07
  were trying to work with candles late at night, so if you're gonna, at least it's,
• 6:11
  at least we can preserve what we have in a, in a sensible kind of Uh, of a way.
• 6:17
  Yeah.
• 6:18
  So, let me begin, um, this, um, this conference by, um, having you Google
• 6:25
  up Watkins Glen original track, right?
• 6:29
  If you Google up an original track map of Watkins Glen, um, and if you're
• 6:34
  listening in the car or something, you know, I know you can't Google it up and
• 6:37
  we always talk about these visual images.
• 6:39
  The point is that Watkins Glen was set up to feel like a European circuit.
• 6:46
  So the main start finish is the main high street through the town, and then you
• 6:50
  turn off the high street and rather like the Targa Florio, you climb up this crazy
• 6:55
  hill, a long straight, loads of sweeping around, far more like the Nürburgring.
• 7:02
  Or spa than like the Tar Florio.
• 7:06
  Um, you can drive the roads now.
• 7:10
  Um, and that final corner, big Bend, which is this long downhill
• 7:15
  right-hander, my word, if that's not one of the best corners in Motorsport,
• 7:20
  and I include, you know, I include corners at Spa in, in that, that
• 7:26
  Big Bend, crappy name, great corner.
• 7:30
  Um, yeah, it's a very American name to be fair.
• 7:34
  Well, it is.
• 7:36
  Accurate, too.
• 7:37
  So, the other thing is, is if you look, if you look at the start finish
• 7:42
  and they turn right and they go up the hill, that long right hander there,
• 7:47
  the motel that I stay in is there.
• 7:50
  And it's one of these motels where they don't take, you have to like call
• 7:54
  up by phone, they're not on hotels.
• 7:56
  com or anything like that, you know, and they, they have like one
• 7:59
  of those old credit card machines that, you know, you put it down
• 8:03
  and you run the thing backwards and forth, but the driver stayed there.
• 8:07
  That's why I stay in that, um, in that motel because that's where, where the
• 8:12
  driver stayed and there's loads of driver.
• 8:14
  memorabilia in in the bar and the bar is quite an impressive bar and
• 8:18
  if I tell you that when I Rocked up to to check in on this last visit.
• 8:22
  There was a gun auction Going on, going like more pickup trucks than you could
• 8:28
  shake a stick out parked up outside.
• 8:30
  And as I came in, as I came in, they were hammering a Remington for 550 bucks.
• 8:35
  You know, that was the, the, uh, uh, yeah, the, the auctioneer was a girl
• 8:40
  in her mid twenties and she wasn't.
• 8:42
  absolute rock star, right?
• 8:44
  It was worth, it was worth watching.
• 8:46
  It was worth watching the gun auction because this girl was,
• 8:50
  was, uh, was an absolute Belcher.
• 8:51
  And of course I didn't get a name and can't remember the auction
• 8:54
  company, but that was a pretty cool upstate New York travel experience.
• 8:58
  But yeah, if you look further around the course, as the course crosses the
• 9:01
  railway line, Which in period was like, you know, a total like, and this is
• 9:06
  they, they use it in the early fifties.
• 9:08
  So the cars are like Al Arnson, very early Ferraris.
• 9:11
  So old, uh, Miles Collier's father was killed on that fast.
• 9:17
  Um, I, I think it's a right hander.
• 9:20
  Maybe it's a, yeah, maybe it's a left.
• 9:22
  Maybe it's a right hander, but there's a fast sweeper up at
• 9:25
  the top of the course there.
• 9:26
  But, um, it basically.
• 9:28
  Part of it's A roads.
• 9:30
  A lot of it is B roads.
• 9:31
  A lot of that top part of the course feels like a like an English B road.
• 9:37
  So like a British sports car would be really good, really good along it.
• 9:40
  But yeah, as I say, that big bend is a long sweeping downhill.
• 9:45
  Um, yeah, so it's the kind of course that you can see a Nuvolari
• 9:49
  doing well where you were, uh, you know, so if you had big balls.
• 9:53
  It's a good course.
• 9:54
  Um, so they built, of course, the road course, which the NASCAR guys and
• 9:58
  IndyCar in Formula One used for a bit.
• 10:00
  They built that to try and replicate it, but that's about 10 miles out of town.
• 10:04
  Um, and in the town, there's affiliated to the library.
• 10:10
  There's an organization called the International Motor Racing Research
• 10:16
  Center, and it's an archive.
• 10:18
  Of car stuff.
• 10:20
  So every car book that I've got on my shelf, they have as well.
• 10:25
  It's like, and plus like a ton more, you know, when the, their version, the
• 10:32
  American version of Murray Walker, Chris Okonomaki, um, when, when he popped
• 10:37
  on to where pastors knew a few years ago, his wife donated his archive.
• 10:43
  To the IMRRC.
• 10:46
  Um, yeah.
• 10:48
  So a library where if you call them, they'll do work in a bit
• 10:53
  like the national motor museum that do work and research for you.
• 10:56
  Um, cool.
• 10:57
  But yeah, yeah.
• 11:00
  I, unfortunately a little bit of a backwater and because
• 11:04
  they're not commercially viable.
• 11:06
  You know they rely on donations That makes me always feel awkward about what
• 11:12
  a potential future might might look like.
• 11:15
  I mean i'm I've I'm not a businessman and I didn't enjoy the world of business,
• 11:20
  but I just I'm just uncomfortable with anything that doesn't have a sort of
• 11:24
  sustaining income that's relying on a on a sort of handout and doesn't um,
• 11:30
  you know, yeah, so I, I, I, I felt Also, I guess I feel also that there
• 11:37
  are a few centers like this that have a lot of knowledge and they should
• 11:40
  be like nodes on a greater network.
• 11:42
  So when you are researching information about Indianapolis, it
• 11:47
  should dig into the Rev's archive.
• 11:50
  It should dig into, you know, George Simeone's archive in Philadelphia.
• 11:54
  It should dig into, um, the National Motor Museum.
• 11:57
  It should be in all these places at once, rather than these information
• 12:02
  being sort of siloed away.
• 12:04
  So.
• 12:05
  You know, you need to like, it's like old fashioned history.
• 12:08
  You need to go to these places and like, look through the books and talk to the
• 12:12
  historians to, which is fun for like a beardy old historian like me, but I
• 12:17
  just, I just don't feel it's like the future of, of, If, you know, if we're to
• 12:24
  preserve motorsport, if, you know, people in 120 years time are to understand what
• 12:30
  was so cool about the Porsche 956, then we need to do better than grey haired
• 12:37
  blokes and books on shelves is, is my, uh, Um, this is you said I was, I was,
• 12:43
  I told you I was edited in number three.
• 12:45
  You said in number three, um, you know, like I, I don't want to walk
• 12:50
  around a museum where the cars are sitting there and they haven't
• 12:53
  even bothered to put up a TV screen where you can see the car driving.
• 12:58
  The one year, every millennium, they fire it up and you're
• 13:01
  going to hear and hear it.
• 13:03
  That was the main point you were making the sound.
• 13:05
  Yeah.
• 13:05
  Yeah.
• 13:06
  So, uh, and, and this is not dissimilar from, um, old Michael shanks.
• 13:12
  Uh, uh, Sanford there in this, this notion that, that he had after going around this
• 13:16
  art gallery in the Hague, where, um, they had these still lives, I've probably told
• 13:20
  you this before, they had these still lives, so the still life would be like
• 13:24
  a bottle of wine and a brass bowl with some fruit in it, and then they would
• 13:29
  have the brass bowl on a plinth at the side, so you've sort of got the art, and
• 13:34
  then you've got like a 3D Representation of it, which is it, which is saying,
• 13:41
  which suddenly, right, the both things are more, there's a symbiosis there.
• 13:46
  The art is, you know, so yeah, so you can, if you've got film of the car
• 13:53
  running in theory, you can preserve the car in perpetuity and not wear out by
• 13:58
  running it, driving it all the time.
• 14:01
  But you can still have the pleasure of making it come alive.
• 14:04
  And as virtual reality gets better and better, I feel
• 14:08
  we're duty bound to do that.
• 14:09
  I mean, already a driving game of racing a blower Bentley at Lamont is more realistic
• 14:16
  than you and me buying a Bentley.
• 14:18
  Go in there and driving down the Mozart driving down the road from
• 14:23
  Paris to tour 130 miles an hour.
• 14:26
  I mean, it's it's so there's there's room for both, right?
• 14:29
  But is having the real Bentley and being able to drive it around and
• 14:33
  then having like a VR representation.
• 14:37
  Of it, which is grounded in, it's not Mario car.
• 14:40
  It's grounded in the reality that Benji field gave us when he wrote
• 14:46
  his impressions of what it was like to race down the Mozart straight.
• 14:49
  You know, we can, the computer can make the road narrow again.
• 14:52
  The computer can make the road rough again.
• 14:55
  Can't it, you know, which
• 14:57
  Oh dude.
• 14:57
  Like, I mean, you know that, that somewhat exists if you, like, if you set up a VR
• 15:01
  connection to something like GP Legends or something, you, you know, you can do
• 15:05
  pretty good sim racing stuff based on, you know, the 1957, you know, GP seasons.
• 15:11
  So you do all the old tr So there's a lot of stuff coming along and with the,
• 15:14
  um, you know, my boss, I was just at a conference the last couple of days.
• 15:18
  My boss's lad, um, I say lad, I think he's like 23 or something, but you
• 15:22
  know, he races sim racing, he plays iRacing, and he, and uh, My boss had
• 15:27
  endless issues with a three letter acronym company, um, delivery firm
• 15:33
  with a brown shield, um, Having issues delivering, finding the hotel in central
• 15:39
  London that's very near to Heathrow.
• 15:41
  Um, but anyway, we got this, we got the box delivered and it was some
• 15:44
  350 or 400 bucks set of pedals by Fanatec, um, that are the pedals.
• 15:50
  And there's full sort of varying resistance in the pedals and you can get
• 15:54
  full geared ratio sort of resistance stuff on the steering wheels now that actually
• 15:58
  feels like you can sell, you can have a really sexy setup at home that used to be.
• 16:04
  So the preserve of the McLaren center, you know, when they started doing VR,
• 16:08
  you can very much get more advanced probably than they had, maybe not in
• 16:12
  terms of full access and the G on the, on the chairs and so forth, but you know,
• 16:16
  you can approach that in a way that you never used to be able to these days.
• 16:19
  But the secondary point I'll make is.
• 16:21
  Back to your point about the museums.
• 16:23
  It's so myopic.
• 16:23
  These places are often short of cash.
• 16:26
  They're often having trouble making ends meet and sustaining what should be, as
• 16:31
  you say, an archive in the physical.
• 16:33
  Um, but look at how successful Goodwood is.
• 16:35
  Look at how successful a lot of these retro classics are.
• 16:38
  Why don't these places rent out a track for a day?
• 16:40
  Tracks need, like, often, especially in the winter, need
• 16:43
  Money as well because they're not being utilized in the same way.
• 16:47
  Why don't these people race rent these places out take the cars there and
• 16:50
  once and sell tickets people would come yeah you're gonna sell a shitload of
• 16:54
  tickets over a long weekend make a load of money it's probably gonna see the
• 16:57
  museum through for the rest of the year and they get turned over once a year
• 17:00
  it's only a few other you know they're probably gonna do 30 or 50 miles, but
• 17:04
  the more you do, the more you put into it, the more they actually give it a
• 17:07
  few beans and like, you know, get the back end out, the more people will come.
• 17:10
  So it's, I think there's, there's more that can be done in that area as well.
• 17:15
  This is exactly what my presentation at the conference was about.
• 17:18
  It was about how the.
• 17:20
  The hobby is, is changing, right?
• 17:22
  It was, it was kind of about YouTube, but I touched on the fact that there
• 17:25
  is this contradiction between museums closing and contradict and collections
• 17:30
  being liquidized and pebble being bigger than ever, um, you know, car show cars
• 17:38
  and coffee events being out of control.
• 17:41
  The value of collectible cars of all a, you know, of all shapes and sizes, but
• 17:47
  particularly, you know, nineties stuff.
• 17:49
  There is, you know, they, yeah, so, um, yeah, but what, what my,
• 17:57
  um, you know, so with, there is definitely scope to have people, um,
• 18:08
  you know, I don't know, I don't know, nobody ever goes to the museum
• 18:11
  in your hometown, you never visit the museums and you know, when did
• 18:14
  you last go to the British Museum?
• 18:16
  When did you last go to the Natural History Museum?
• 18:18
  Like decades and decades ago, you don't go to the things that are
• 18:22
  close to you and, and, um, Yeah.
• 18:25
  So maybe the notion that Goodwood is this like one off thing that you have to
• 18:30
  go to where you have to buy the tickets and all of that, you know, it becomes
• 18:33
  like a Prada handbag, that the fact that it's 30, 000, not 3, 000 or 300, that
• 18:40
  alone makes it You know, covetably it's rareness makes it, you know, the, the,
• 18:46
  and there is a, isn't there an economic phenomenon where as the price goes up,
• 18:50
  it becomes more desirable, not less desirable because it has this, because
• 18:56
  that confers exclusivity or it conveys the greatest status for the owner, right?
• 19:03
  Cause you know, everyone knows how much money you spend on it kind of thing.
• 19:07
  Um, you know, yeah.
• 19:08
  So what we say, there's definitely room for a shake up in the way that we
• 19:13
  think about marketing classic cars, um, or marketing automobility altogether.
• 19:20
  Um, the conference, one of the things that came up repeatedly was this notion that,
• 19:26
  um, we, we need to take a model from the horsey people and, and that once upon
• 19:32
  a time horses were, you know, 100 years ago, horses were, you know, being used.
• 19:37
  as trucks, um, you know, basically, and now they're exclusively as sports
• 19:43
  cars, you know, it's dressage, it's, it's, and what's a dressage, if not a
• 19:47
  demonstration of an everyday skill, if you had to ride a horse every day, you
• 19:52
  basically, if you were going to ride the horse properly and not have the horse,
• 19:56
  Be a paid in the house and you need it to be about as good, not as good as like
• 20:00
  top dressage now, you know what I mean?
• 20:03
  Just as driving on a track, driving a Morris minor round a track in a hundred
• 20:09
  years time is going to be similar to, you know, racing, you see what I mean?
• 20:16
  There's, there's this notion of pulling together the skills.
• 20:20
  I'm not really, you know.
• 20:21
  Um, where exactly where I'm, I'm going with that, but, but yeah.
• 20:25
  I hear what you're saying.
• 20:25
  Yeah.
• 20:25
  Yeah.
• 20:26
  Um, especially as it becomes rarer.
• 20:28
  Um, yeah.
• 20:30
  Again, I was chatting to a chap at the conference and he said that, uh,
• 20:34
  he's, he lives in the States and his neighbor's car had been broken into
• 20:38
  and they'd broken into it, got in and sat in and then just got out and walked
• 20:41
  off because it was a stick shift.
• 20:43
  Yeah.
• 20:44
  Yeah.
• 20:45
  It is a fairly, uh, uh, well known thing that the best way to stop your car
• 20:49
  getting stolen in California is drive something with manual transmission.
• 20:53
  Um, Yeah, and of course, this is why so many hypercars went to
• 20:59
  automatics, because, you know, the reality is managing a V12 stick shift
• 21:08
  in everyday traffic is, you know.
• 21:12
  It's a thing.
• 21:12
  You need to be good.
• 21:14
  You need to be committed and there is always that chance
• 21:17
  that, you know, I, I don't know.
• 21:19
  I mean, there are hills.
• 21:21
  Um, I remember I, you know, if I use the Mustang for the school run,
• 21:25
  I will drive a particular route to avoid having to do a stoppy starty
• 21:31
  through a four way intersection uphill where there's a hundred yards of cars
• 21:36
  because the, the, the clutch pedal needs to be on the floor all the time.
• 21:40
  And, and, you know, I don't know if there's something wrong with the clutch
• 21:43
  or the clutch is just heavy on that, on that Mustang, but you know, my, my
• 21:47
  leg for one hour, I'm like an old man.
• 21:49
  I'll get back pain if I do, you know, so yeah.
• 21:52
  Yeah.
• 21:53
  Okay.
• 21:53
  So what it's, so I presented a lot on YouTube, right?
• 21:56
  It was about what I talked about was how it was most racing.
• 22:00
  This is which, which conference.
• 22:01
  So this is the conference at the places in what I think of
• 22:03
  as Glen and who else is there?
• 22:05
  It's, uh, so it's at this IMRRC, like international
• 22:10
  motor racing research center.
• 22:12
  And the small conference, you know, there's maybe 50
• 22:17
  people in attendance, if that.
• 22:20
  Um, but this bridge that I've always tried to stand on between the
• 22:26
  academics and the car racing people, because remember the car racing
• 22:31
  people often have a lot of money.
• 22:33
  They're often really enthusiastic about cars, but they're, they're what
• 22:37
  the academics call folk historians.
• 22:40
  The, they, they're not trained historians.
• 22:43
  They, they like telling anecdotes, um, you know, bench racing in, in, in our
• 22:50
  parlance, but they're not historians in, in the sense of, you know, when you
• 22:57
  talk to academic historians about cars, what they say is that cars don't have.
• 23:03
  Any agency.
• 23:05
  In other words, we can talk about Henry Ford.
• 23:07
  We can talk about Alfred Sloane and talk about Ferruccio Lamborghini,
• 23:11
  but we can't talk about Lamborghini as as a like a Lamborghini car.
• 23:16
  This is just not in the same realm as and and a lot of this right is the composition
• 23:24
  of people who are historians, which is, you know, it's it's a liberal leaning.
• 23:30
  Female leaning profession.
• 23:32
  And that's very obvious when you go to the, to, to the conferences.
• 23:35
  So, um, you know, I, this event's different from that, right?
• 23:41
  The academics who come are car enthusiasts and the non academics
• 23:47
  who come are folk historians.
• 23:51
  Who are really clever people who work like historians.
• 23:57
  So, for example, Don Kapp, who you will see, you know, knocking around, who's
• 24:03
  a leading light at the conference, um, former Army Ranger, um, multiple, you
• 24:11
  know, helicopter shot out of the sky in Nam, numerous times, um, has focused his
• 24:18
  energies in more recent years on being not just a historian, but on encouraging
• 24:24
  people like me to write and talk about motor racing history, did a big thing
• 24:29
  about the origin of the Silver Arrows.
• 24:32
  Um, He sponsored a paper this time from this guy in New Zealand who thinks he
• 24:40
  can unpick a number of very mysterious histories of Italian 50s racing cars.
• 24:52
  And this, this is a rat hole that's, that's worth disappearing down, right?
• 24:55
  Because this is what the, the, the conference is, is, is really about.
• 25:00
  Um, uh, it seems the Italians registered all of their cars and identified their
• 25:14
  cars, like motorcycles, by the engine.
• 25:19
  Whereas in Europe, we always did it by the body.
• 25:23
  This would seem to be a trivial detail, wouldn't it?
• 25:25
  Right?
• 25:26
  So, in other words, when Luigi and Mario were building the car, they
• 25:30
  put engine one in chassis one.
• 25:33
  Now, somebody then goes out and bends up chassis one,
• 25:37
  which never happened, would it?
• 25:38
  No.
• 25:39
  You take engine one out and you put it in chassis two, and that car becomes Car
• 25:46
  number one, that's now chassis, that's now car one VIN number one, when that
• 25:53
  car gets shipped abroad, when it gets put into racing manifests, it's car number
• 25:58
  one in like, yeah, in actuality, right?
• 26:06
  It's car number two, according to how we Europeans feel about it.
• 26:12
  So fast forward 50 years when Maserati 250Fs are collectible.
• 26:18
  Well, it really matters whether this was the car that Sterling
• 26:23
  Moss raced and won, that Fangio was photographed in in that famous picture
• 26:30
  with the damaged nose and the car in a full blooded four wheel drift.
• 26:35
  Right.
• 26:35
  If you can identify that car or even just that engine, that engine and gearbox,
• 26:40
  you know, the identifying that specific car is a much more important thing.
• 26:47
  Well, and the trail is completely, completely blurred.
• 26:52
  Well, um, I saw the paper presented before a couple of years ago before
• 26:57
  the pandemic, and there was a car broker, classic car broker, racing
• 27:01
  car broker, well known guy in the audience and I happened to be stood.
• 27:05
  By him, um, sort of with him for lunch, you know, in line for lunch
• 27:10
  immediately after the presentation.
• 27:12
  So I said to him, what did you make of that Maserati thing?
• 27:15
  And he said he thought it was a load of old bollocks.
• 27:18
  And of course, because He has sold many of those cars and he sold the car saying
• 27:27
  this chassis was the chassis that Sterling Moss used to win in Monaco in 1954.
• 27:35
  You know what I mean?
• 27:36
  I, you know, this was the car that did the deed.
• 27:39
  Yet.
• 27:41
  Now, the paperwork seems completely blurred and crossed out, right?
• 27:46
  Because the way that it was annotated from the factory and the way that it was
• 27:53
  So, so if you think of it, so car number two leaves the factory as car number two.
• 27:58
  But when it comes back to the factory and gets engine number five It becomes
• 28:04
  car number five, but according to our reckoning, it's not car number five.
• 28:08
  It's actually still car number two, right?
• 28:10
  It's got the dinks and the louvers and the brakes and everything of car.
• 28:15
  So you see how it should be a fairly simple thing, but actually.
• 28:19
  It becomes hideously complicated.
• 28:21
  So that's the stuff that Don Capps is, is ready to, to do is pick at those wounds.
• 28:27
  And he'll say, you know, I can't get Doug Nye.
• 28:30
  I can't get my friend Doug Nye to say this.
• 28:32
  And I'm like, I said to him in the conference, Don, like, that's because Doug
• 28:38
  is retained by the auction companies and the auction companies have a business,
• 28:46
  which is predicated on the widget.
• 28:49
  being a widget, not a widget that had a wadget changed into it.
• 28:54
  And, and so this, so this bloke that you've wheeled in this Trevor Lister
• 28:59
  guy from New Zealand who looks like he played far too much rugby and has put
• 29:05
  together these crazy spreadsheets where he thinks it's not just Maserati 250Fs.
• 29:10
  He thinks it's Seatas, it's Oscars.
• 29:12
  Of course, it's Ferraris.
• 29:14
  But there's an additional like level of double layer of complexity with Ferrari.
• 29:19
  One being that they cheated with the numbers.
• 29:23
  Basically, it looks like they deliberately bend the rules.
• 29:25
  Who would imagine for deliberately bend the rules?
• 29:28
  Plus, you've got the obfuscation of the fact that the cars have
• 29:31
  been worth a lot of money for ages.
• 29:33
  So you add the whole like Lord Brocket thing.
• 29:35
  Do you remember Lord Brocket?
• 29:37
  This is in the 80s, English Lord, um, when Ferrari prices went up, he started
• 29:43
  doing things like cutting up some cars to make better ones and faking
• 29:48
  up the identity of the better one.
• 29:50
  And that was cool.
• 29:51
  But by that time, like half a dozen cars, like nice ish cars, cars
• 29:55
  that would be worth millions now, had been cut up to make fakey do.
• 30:00
  GTOs basically that was that was it was it was oh, it's absolutely fingernails
• 30:05
  down the down the blackboard when you think about it But so when you look
• 30:09
  back at that, right, that's how the cars were treated in period So the ferraris
• 30:13
  particularly, uh, and they're of course worth telephone dial amounts money now.
• 30:17
  So so So for somebody like the car broker who I won't name, um, but really well
• 30:24
  known, you've seen him advertised, handles the very, very best cars, one of the top
• 30:29
  two or three car brokers, um, you know, if we were to go back with a voice naming
• 30:33
  car brokers, he would be one of the first three or four names that we would, uh,
• 30:37
  we will come up with, um, yeah, he's to, to dig into that would just be destroyed.
• 30:48
  Um, You know, any sense of value or provenance and, and
• 30:52
  it's a bit like digging into allegations of cheating in NASCAR.
• 30:55
  It's like who gains from it?
• 30:57
  So when Smokey Unix said that Fireball Roberts won the 1962, you know,
• 31:03
  Daytona 500 with a supercharger.
• 31:06
  He wrote that.
• 31:08
  Yet, you know, nobody found any evidence of it.
• 31:09
  The car's long since destroyed.
• 31:11
  All he did was kind of pee on Fireball's achievement somewhat, didn't he?
• 31:17
  He didn't really like we can't prove it and I'm not saying you shouldn't have
• 31:20
  written it if he thought it was true.
• 31:22
  I'm just saying in terms of, of the clarity of history.
• 31:24
  It never leaves them.
• 31:26
  It never leaves them.
• 31:26
  Nigel was the same at Goodwood in his little speech.
• 31:29
  They're still snarky and annoyed and grudge holding.
• 31:34
  I think a lot.
• 31:35
  Yeah, yeah, I just wonder.
• 31:37
  What gives them the vim and vigour, you know?
• 31:39
  Yeah, yeah, well, well, Smokey Eunuch was certainly a vim and vigour kind of person.
• 31:43
  And of course there's, if you've looked online, I've dug into it.
• 31:47
  There's stories about, well, where could the Supercharger have been?
• 31:50
  How could NASCAR have missed it?
• 31:52
  And could Smokey have had it on there and removed it?
• 31:54
  And I, I just think it was an old man.
• 31:57
  You know, talking some shit at the end of his life, Smokey was like that,
• 32:02
  and I don't think there was ever a Supercharger on the car, and I feel
• 32:05
  like there's like an asterisk next to Fireball's achievement, where he was
• 32:09
  super dominant, like dominant in a way that you never see in NASCAR now, and
• 32:14
  I feel it was partly Smokey's car, and I feel that Smokey's car probably was a
• 32:17
  bit cheaty, but I feel like Fireball was really fucking amazing, That weekend,
• 32:23
  it was his day of days, if you like.
• 32:25
  And Smokey, you know, denigrated that for, for, you know, just, but that, but
• 32:32
  you know, that's just, cause I can't imagine how a supercharger would fit.
• 32:34
  But the point is digging into allegations of NASCAR cheating
• 32:39
  just makes everybody look bad.
• 32:40
  You know, when David Pearson won all those super speedway victories with the Wood
• 32:43
  brothers, you know, was that cheating?
• 32:46
  You know, if you, I listened to a Pearson interview recently, um, where
• 32:50
  he was saying, oh, you know, cause oh, petty, he'd often have the big motor.
• 32:54
  And I'm thinking, yeah, but what did the Wood Brothers do to your car?
• 32:58
  You know, no, I, you know, nobody was within the rules.
• 33:02
  So, you know, but, but to dig into that takes away from the,
• 33:06
  the greatness of, uh, of the individual, of the individual driver.
• 33:10
  The point I was making in my presentation was looking at YouTube
• 33:15
  and saying, YouTube has changed the way that we talk about cars.
• 33:18
  Um, if you want to see, if you want to know who, how good Fangio was, You have
• 33:25
  to read, you know, you have to like read history and do standard history.
• 33:30
  You have to like read books and compare and contrast and secondary
• 33:34
  sources and what did contemporaries think and, you know, yeah, it's,
• 33:38
  it's this pure hardcore history.
• 33:40
  Whereas if you want to know how good Senna was, you just watch the races.
• 33:43
  They're all on YouTube.
• 33:44
  You can see.
• 33:45
  You can see for yourself whether or not he's better.
• 33:48
  Well, that's awesome as a, as a history thing.
• 33:51
  And now you've got people on YouTube doing that.
• 33:54
  That Aiden Millwood guy I was talking about earlier.
• 33:56
  You've got NASCAR guys doing that.
• 33:59
  You, you've got people taking things like, um, Alan Grice, I'm
• 34:05
  not sure if you've heard of him.
• 34:06
  He was a total maverick racing in South Africa, racing in Australia.
• 34:12
  He was like a Bathurst guy.
• 34:14
  Well, in the mid eighties, Holden, the Holden factory team were like,
• 34:19
  we're going to race in Europe.
• 34:21
  Gricey, the privateer, he was like, I'm coming too.
• 34:25
  I'm gonna take my Holden as well.
• 34:28
  So you've got Peter Brock with the deal with the Holden dealer team,
• 34:32
  like racing against six through fives and capris and things like that.
• 34:36
  And then you've got this white Holden, Grey's, Holden, not sponsored by anybody.
• 34:44
  Chick D was the name, that's some haulage company from the town that he was on.
• 34:48
  Chick E was, was was the sponsor.
• 34:50
  Grey was faster.
• 34:52
  than the DTV, the dealer team, and even won some races in the
• 34:58
  course of the season, right?
• 34:59
  Amazing story.
• 35:00
  This super 100 mile an hour guy tells that story, right?
• 35:05
  Which I never would have got.
• 35:06
  I'm not going to sit there and watch every You know, every round of the European
• 35:10
  touring car championship from 1986.
• 35:13
  But when supermoto 100 miles an hour packages up for me,
• 35:16
  there's a new narrative and a new way of telling the story.
• 35:19
  So I talked about that.
• 35:20
  I talked about old Hoovey and the supercar guys and how, remember
• 35:24
  I told that story about the.
• 35:26
  You know, three dozen McLarens that nearly ran me over when,
• 35:30
  uh, when I was at Pebble.
• 35:31
  And I couldn't believe how many Lamborghinis and McLarens and new
• 35:36
  supercars that there were at Pebble.
• 35:38
  Yeah, I, I, that's, Hoovy is part of this and these other
• 35:43
  YouTube guys who, Hoovy has three Lamborghinis paid for by the channel.
• 35:49
  Paid for by this stupid persona that he's got where he talks about cars and
• 35:54
  doesn't really do anything with them.
• 35:55
  He just fixes them.
• 35:57
  And then sells them.
• 35:58
  He doesn't really like, he doesn't, it's not like he goes to the track.
• 36:01
  It's not like he's like setting quarter mile times.
• 36:04
  It's not like he's, you know what I mean?
• 36:06
  He doesn't, um, yeah.
• 36:09
  So, uh, yet what he, yet the literally does is enough for him
• 36:13
  to generate an income from that.
• 36:14
  So I thought that was worth, that was worth talking about, but to be honest,
• 36:18
  I've had enough of the whole, like motor racing as a mediated experience.
• 36:22
  I want to go back and do proper, like.
• 36:26
  Hardcore history.
• 36:28
  So I think what I'm going to do next.
• 36:30
  Um, there was, uh, I'm a member of the society of automotive historians and,
• 36:35
  uh, a woman locally contacted the society saying like my dad was into motor racing.
• 36:43
  He's got all these magazines from the 1950s.
• 36:45
  Would you be interested in them?
• 36:47
  So the society contacted me as the local member.
• 36:51
  I met her and there were all these oval track racing stuff
• 36:55
  from the 40s and the 50s.
• 36:57
  It seems that within my, within like 10 miles of my home, there
• 37:01
  were half a dozen racetracks.
• 37:03
  And in that brief window after the war, but before everyone had
• 37:07
  a TV, watching overracing was an enormous thing in, in the US.
• 37:13
  So I'm going to do a bit of research into that.
• 37:15
  I'm going to try and do it on.
• 37:16
  This is, I'm.
• 37:17
  Making this up as I go on.
• 37:19
  I've never said this out loud before.
• 37:20
  I just was going around inside my head.
• 37:23
  When I was a tour guide in Rome, I used to be able to stand in the
• 37:26
  forum and tell the whole story of Rome from one spot in the forum.
• 37:32
  Literally from, you know, over there in 750 BC, right the way
• 37:36
  round to, and there in 430 AD.
• 37:40
  You know, you could just turn around and, and, and it was, it wasn't a, it was
• 37:44
  a great device as a tour guide because it was so clever fundamentally as I'll
• 37:50
  blow my toot my own horn with that.
• 37:52
  But it was actually a shitty tool because the people have to stand still and then
• 37:56
  your feet hurt and you get bored and you get fidgety and you stop listening.
• 37:59
  You need to walk and talk.
• 38:01
  You need to talk for like two minutes and then walk.
• 38:03
  It doesn't matter how significant what you're looking at is you have to walk
• 38:07
  and talk, walk and talk to keep the, uh, the, the, the punters, uh, the punters
• 38:11
  happy, but I wanted to do the same thing with, um, I feel like I could do.
• 38:15
  I want, um, what was I talking about?
• 38:18
  I was talking about the same as.
• 38:21
  You know, standing in the middle of Rome.
• 38:23
  What was I going to do that with?
• 38:24
  I was going to do that with what was I talking about the circuit
• 38:27
  racing stuff that you were going to do the research into.
• 38:29
  Yeah, I could do the same thing standing in, so you could, so you
• 38:33
  could say it from my home in 1930.
• 38:38
  From my home, from where I'm sitting at the moment in 1900,
• 38:42
  what could I go and see in 1910?
• 38:45
  What could I go and see in 1920, in 1930?
• 38:47
  Because it would change because something else I was gonna talk about.
• 38:51
  And one of my favorite presenter, um, is, is this guy Joe.
• 38:56
  Um, at the conference is this guy Joe Leonard.
• 38:59
  Who again has a really interesting background, successful businessman,
• 39:03
  um, obsessive car guy throughout his life, classicist, and then, um, I had
• 39:11
  a long conversation with him about Thucydides on a bus ride one time, um.
• 39:16
  He studied.
• 39:18
  So, um, Duesenberg, class judge at Pebble Beach for Duesenberg, um,
• 39:24
  did a really interesting piece about Duesenberg racing cars a few years
• 39:27
  ago, did a really interesting piece this time about people who'd finished
• 39:31
  second at Indianapolis a lot of times.
• 39:34
  So kind of like Lloyd Ruby, but even the kind of beardy historians
• 39:39
  who, uh, represented at the IMRRC.
• 39:43
  They weren't, you know, these are drivers who we've not heard of.
• 39:47
  And a lot of these guys raced on board tracks, which is with all the
• 39:51
  splinters, sprint cars on board tracks.
• 39:54
  Yeah, yes, your face says it all.
• 39:57
  It was Yeah, man, Jesus.
• 39:59
  It was dangerous as a motherfucker.
• 40:00
  Imagine when the track starts to break up, and then you fall out of your car and
• 40:04
  accidentally impale yourself on a piece of 2x4 that's come up off the track.
• 40:09
  I mean, it just, it is eye It's not entirely Eye popping,
• 40:13
  dangerous, and there's no fucking history of it whatsoever.
• 40:16
  And there are books and I need to dig into like, 'cause the books
• 40:19
  are expensive 'cause they're rare.
• 40:21
  So I, I need to dig into that.
• 40:22
  So I think I might go back and do that kind of hardcore history rather than
• 40:26
  doing this kind of, let's talk about how the story got told kind of thing.
• 40:30
  So, um, other people, so, so there's a, there's, so there's the older guys,
• 40:34
  like, like Don and, and, and Joe.
• 40:36
  And then there's.
• 40:38
  younger guys who, um, are racing enthusiasts, but who are academics.
• 40:43
  So there's one girl, Kate Sullivan, who's at the University of Edinburgh,
• 40:47
  who does lots of land racing stuff.
• 40:50
  Like she's the fastest woman in the world in a pickup truck or something
• 40:54
  like that, because she's been out to Bonneville numerous times.
• 40:58
  Um.
• 40:59
  Uh, there's a, this Belgian guy, Tim Robeers, who did a really interesting
• 41:05
  project a few years ago about Formula E and made a lot of us old car guys.
• 41:12
  Sitting in the room, really look at Formula E in a different way.
• 41:16
  And, and you know why it was, it, I realized that Formula E is on its way
• 41:22
  to being when you be me, you, and Dan's used to sit around in, in wilds lane.
• 41:28
  And I used to watch you.
• 41:29
  Be all comers on on wipe out on the PlayStation, and we used to
• 41:33
  say Formula one needs to be this.
• 41:35
  It needs to be this floating needs to be really fast.
• 41:38
  It needs to be neon lights.
• 41:39
  It needs to be upside down.
• 41:40
  It needs to be.
• 41:41
  You could shoot the other guy.
• 41:42
  It needs to be.
• 41:43
  You can drive over power ups.
• 41:45
  Why isn't it that, um, the managing ethos around Formula E at the time
• 41:51
  that Tim did this presentation, um, seemed to be like that.
• 41:55
  And, and that was, was interesting and cool to me.
• 41:59
  It's pretty exciting.
• 42:01
  Yeah.
• 42:01
  So, so the conference brings together, you know, one guy,
• 42:05
  Francis Clacks, African American dude who used to race motorcycles.
• 42:10
  Um, really interesting guy.
• 42:13
  He was, didn't make it this time.
• 42:14
  I'm not even fingers crossed.
• 42:15
  He's still, he's still with us.
• 42:17
  Cause he was a bit frail the last time I, I spoke to him, but, um, Yeah, um, one
• 42:24
  guy, um, an academic at the University of Michigan, Mark Howell, um, who
• 42:29
  worked for Todd Bedean's NASCAR team.
• 42:33
  So, you know, he did a piece about, his presentation was about rock stars and,
• 42:41
  uh, was was about music and racing cars and how there's a lot of crossover to it.
• 42:47
  And he talked about Vince Neal racing in the Indie Lights series and how, how
• 42:52
  about, apparently he was quite good.
• 42:54
  I mean, who knew, right?
• 42:56
  So, uh, yeah, so it's like, and I'd see fabulous pictures of like
• 43:00
  Vince with the Indy cars, but with the long hair and the pout still.
• 43:06
  It was truly where heavy metal meets, uh, yeah, yeah.
• 43:11
  But, but of course he was a bit light on, he was like, you know, I'm trying
• 43:16
  to make a list of all the references between racing and Car between
• 43:23
  racing and you know, every song has a reference to racing or cars in it.
• 43:28
  And I'm like, and, and, uh, I sat there thinking I was able to make a list of half
• 43:34
  a dozen heavy metal songs straight away.
• 43:38
  You know, if, especially if you expand it to, cause to me, right, I think
• 43:42
  the main similarity between racing and rock and roll is that most of the time
• 43:48
  everyone thinks being a rock star is about being on stage like good evening Long
• 43:53
  Beach, you know, and everything's motor racing is about being at the track, you
• 44:00
  know, gentlemen, start your engines and you're racing and no, it's not mostly
• 44:04
  it's about in the truck on the road.
• 44:08
  Both things are mostly about in the truck on the road.
• 44:11
  It's mostly, you know, we are the road crew.
• 44:15
  It's hotel rooms and motorways, you know, that's, that's really,
• 44:21
  um, that's really what it is.
• 44:23
  I, I think so.
• 44:24
  Uh, so I think that a lot of that has in common, they have a lot of that in common.
• 44:30
  Yeah, yeah.
• 44:32
  So, um, so let me, uh, uh, there is a talk track.
• 44:35
  There's not an agenda today, but there is a little talk track that I, uh, yeah,
• 44:40
  so, uh, so there is this sense, right?
• 44:42
  That there's two camps at the IMRRC.
• 44:44
  We try and bridge that camp a little bit.
• 44:47
  And, and there's, uh, Um, but, but I guess the main thing this
• 44:51
  time was that they streamed it.
• 44:52
  So if you go to the IMRRC website, um, there should be a recording of it.
• 44:57
  Uh, the conference was free.
• 44:59
  Um, they'll keep the recording up, you know, this is all
• 45:01
  about publicizing motorsport.
• 45:03
  And, and, you know, as Don's been very ill this, this, this last year, um.
• 45:09
  You know, there is a sense amongst, um, us, us younger guys that, um, this is the
• 45:18
  only event where you can talk about, um, this is the only event where an analysis
• 45:30
  of why Jackie Stewart won the 1968 German Grand Prix and just how effective
• 45:35
  is, so it's a well known story that he cut his own tire chunks out, right?
• 45:42
  What this conference is all about is digging into that.
• 45:44
  Well, what shapes did he cut?
• 45:45
  What did it make that big a difference?
• 45:47
  Well, he got this legendary victory.
• 45:49
  Well.
• 45:50
  Let's read the motorsport review.
• 45:51
  Let's look at the lap charts.
• 45:53
  Let's find as much contemporary film as we can to see how, you know,
• 45:57
  let's see if we can talk to him about what he remembers about it.
• 46:01
  It's it's taking the surface story, which is enough for the folk historians, and
• 46:07
  it's digging into that in a way which is like a Actual hardcore historian, but
• 46:14
  where the actual hardcore historians in academics In academic institutions are
• 46:20
  mostly just eye rolling because they don't give a shit about car racing.
• 46:24
  Um, so yeah, so so that's what uh So, uh, public does though,
• 46:30
  or at least a large chunk of it.
• 46:33
  Well, exactly, right?
• 46:35
  So, that's why publicizing this and trying to bring some of the sheen and
• 46:41
  support of Goodwood to this environment.
• 46:44
  And, you know, you've got a bit, guys like Joe Leonard, they see that.
• 46:48
  He goes to Pebble Beach every year, he shows cars across the East Coast.
• 46:53
  You know, this is something, you know, it's not like he doesn't see.
• 46:58
  the juxtaposition between, um, yeah, between the, the, between the two events,
• 47:03
  between the kinds of, of, of events.
• 47:05
  It's just, uh, um, yeah, I, I, uh, um, yeah.
• 47:11
  So it's, that's what the event's all about.
• 47:13
  So it's in the New York, uh, Watkins Glen's in the Finger Lakes
• 47:17
  region of New York, which candidly is a total asshole to get to.
• 47:22
  Because if you fly there, you have to do a puddle jumper afterwards, and then to
• 47:25
  get out, you have to do the puddle jumper, usually at an inconvenient time of day.
• 47:32
  So you're always worried you're going to miss the connecting
• 47:34
  flight back to California.
• 47:36
  Um, so the other option is, is, you know, you, you, maybe you just do one flight
• 47:40
  and you drive from there, but you, then you're talking like a six hour drive.
• 47:45
  For six hour drive from like JFK or Philadelphia or somewhere like that.
• 47:49
  You still got a pretty long drive to, to get there.
• 47:53
  Um, and then you have to have the car throughout the conference.
• 47:55
  When the time you're at the conference, you don't really need a car.
• 47:59
  So, um.
• 48:01
  That and similar, you know, so anyway, so I did the only sensible thing you
• 48:06
  could possibly do plus I hate fucking flying Let's be candid about it.
• 48:10
  I hate airports hate security I'm fine when I'm on the plane but all of that
• 48:17
  bullshit Between the time that you walk away from the rental car and I sat down
• 48:22
  on the plane and the planes actually taking off all of that can just Go
• 48:27
  straight to hell and never come back to such an extent the plus turbulence
• 48:31
  plus throw in the fact that I fucking hate turbulence as well scares the You
• 48:37
  know every time you come over the Sierra Nevadas it would seem And and I had bad
• 48:43
  weather into Philadelphia, which is why I was like, you know Anyway, um, I drove
• 48:48
  back 3, 000 miles across the country.
• 48:53
  Um, I approve Yeah, so you have done a bunch of driving holidays here and as I
• 49:01
  was driving I was thinking like You've done way more dry and we should preface
• 49:07
  this shouldn't we and this is I've even got this year we should preface this by
• 49:10
  saying that the young impressionable age you and I drove a Lincoln Town car 79
• 49:18
  Lincoln Town car which American car guys will tell you is the last last year of the
• 49:22
  really big cars 400 cubic inch Windsor V8.
• 49:27
  No horsepower, plenty of torque.
• 49:29
  The seafoam, half length velour roof that looked like it had been
• 49:34
  attached by wild animals with all the foam coming out of it.
• 49:38
  Big eagles or something, yeah.
• 49:39
  Seafoam velour interior.
• 49:42
  Do you remember that?
• 49:43
  Eight way directional seat control, baby.
• 49:45
  That fucking worked.
• 49:47
  And it worked, didn't it?
• 49:48
  So, you know, what?
• 49:50
  You could sleep.
• 49:51
  In on the bench seat front and back with your neither your
• 49:54
  head or feet touching the doors.
• 49:56
  Yeah.
• 49:57
  Yeah.
• 49:57
  It was legit.
• 49:58
  So we would just drive and then pull off the highway, park up somewhere.
• 50:02
  And you know, wake up in the morning and sometimes it'd be an office car
• 50:05
  park, sometimes it'd be a hotel.
• 50:07
  Yeah.
• 50:08
  Sometimes it'd be the famous guitar shaped pool of Nashville hotels.
• 50:12
  Yeah.
• 50:12
  And we'd just have a little swim in.
• 50:13
  Yeah.
• 50:14
  Yeah.
• 50:15
  Me and my boxers, because I couldn't find any boxers, any shorts.
• 50:17
  Oh my God, can I?
• 50:19
  Yeah, only realizing as I came out that that was going to delineate
• 50:22
  my scrotal area quite anyway.
• 50:25
  Yeah.
• 50:26
  Yeah.
• 50:27
  Did we go, we never went to Grand Ole Opry, did we?
• 50:30
  We went to Nashville.
• 50:31
  No, but we didn't go to Grand Ole Opry.
• 50:32
  We went to a bar in Nashville where they were playing in the
• 50:34
  evening, and it was pretty cool.
• 50:36
  We had a few beers and like tipped the Giza that was playing, sitting
• 50:39
  on a stool inside the door with the, with the, uh, the cowboy
• 50:41
  hat and the, uh, and the guitar.
• 50:43
  The guitar, sorry.
• 50:44
  Yeah.
• 50:45
  Um.
• 50:45
  And, uh, yeah, that was a, that was a good evening.
• 50:47
  Do you remember that one of the bars we were in, there were loads of
• 50:50
  photographs of country singers and you were like, I see it's important to be
• 50:54
  hot if you're a female country singer.
• 50:57
  And I was like, yeah, that had never occurred to me before.
• 51:00
  In my naivety, I thought it was all about the quality of the singing voice.
• 51:05
  It is that as well.
• 51:07
  It's just that there's a large enough pool of people that want to be country stars.
• 51:11
  And as you are absolutely exceptional, I'm going to pick the hot one.
• 51:16
  Yeah, yeah, well I didn't drive through Nashville this time.
• 51:19
  Although I did drive through Indianapolis, which we drove
• 51:22
  through before, but I didn't stop.
• 51:24
  So I did, um, from Watkins Glen in upstate New York to beyond St.
• 51:32
  Louis, St.
• 51:33
  Louis, Missouri.
• 51:35
  In, on day one, then I did basically, well, from like from nearly near,
• 51:43
  you know, a hundred miles west of St.
• 51:44
  Louis on Route 66, like the route of Route 66 then, because Route 66
• 51:51
  comes from Chicago to Indianapolis.
• 51:55
  There's really interesting things about Route 66, right?
• 51:57
  It's, it's called the main street of America because it connected
• 52:01
  the towns together like an old fashioned English A road.
• 52:04
  And just like now, if you drive the A roads, when there's a motorway
• 52:09
  parallel, like you drive the A4 when the motorway, you know, Marlborough.
• 52:14
  Is still much as it was a hundred or two hundred years ago.
• 52:19
  Um, so when you drive through these communities, well,
• 52:22
  so Route 66 is that too.
• 52:25
  And if you were thinking you might find some decay, like it's there straight away.
• 52:34
  It's there all like along the side of the old road.
• 52:40
  There is a scene of where once there was.
• 52:43
  You know, roadside businesses and take the trade away.
• 52:46
  It does.
• 52:48
  I picked up a can of Coke.
• 52:51
  I stopped in this town, San John, New Mexico, because John obviously.
• 52:56
  Right.
• 52:57
  And, uh, it's one of these where you remember that scene in the big
• 53:00
  Lebowski where, um, Uh, that the PIs after Loki's crashed the car.
• 53:07
  And, uh, the, the, the pi, um, the, that the pi is follow is, uh, is, is, I'll
• 53:15
  get the words outta my mouth in a minute.
• 53:17
  The PI's following him in the blue Volkswagen and says to him,
• 53:20
  you know, yeah, fella Seamus, you know, looking for Bunny.
• 53:24
  Um, you know, the family have sent this picture of her farm in Kansas.
• 53:29
  They think they, if they think it might make her homesick, and it's a picture
• 53:33
  of this fucking barren fucking dust bowl with this shitty little shack on
• 53:39
  it, and you're thinking like, yeah, there is no way in hell she is ever,
• 53:44
  ever going back to, to, to that.
• 53:46
  Um.
• 53:47
  It's that kind of, it was that kind of, so there's no way for me to take
• 53:50
  a piss, but there's this building, I'm like, whatever, in California, there'd
• 53:54
  be like homeless squatters living in the building, but so you wouldn't want to
• 53:57
  like go in there for fear you were like peeing in their bed, but like, I was
• 54:00
  like, there's probably nobody, so anyway, I went in there, took a pee, and next
• 54:03
  to where I'm taking a pee, there's like a stove, and I'm like, oh wow, there's
• 54:07
  still like the stove that was in here when somebody lived in this place, and then
• 54:12
  I noticed next to it, Two old coke cans.
• 54:16
  And when I say old coke cans, I mean that they are from the era where
• 54:22
  when you were, when you did the ring pull, you removed the ring pull.
• 54:27
  Now, correct me if I'm wrong, they changed those when we were
• 54:32
  at Davenport High School for Boys.
• 54:34
  In the late 1980s because I remember David Bickle being upset that you couldn't
• 54:40
  separate the things and you remember he would always Bickle ever afterwards
• 54:44
  would always fiddle with the lid until it broke off out of petulance that they
• 54:50
  weren't going to leave the lid attached that he wanted a separate ring pull.
• 54:54
  You remember that?
• 54:54
  So that must have been what?
• 54:55
  Remember he used to put the ring pull bit.
• 54:58
  Into the, so the, you put the, uh, the, the sort of, uh, tab that came out.
• 55:03
  If you had the, the ring pull with the two little slits in it, you
• 55:06
  could stick it in and then bend it back and use it as a spring and fire
• 55:09
  the ring pull across the classroom.
• 55:11
  Yeah.
• 55:12
  Yeah, I do remember Bickle doing that.
• 55:14
  You know, they're destroying a hobby.
• 55:16
  Yeah.
• 55:16
  They're destroying a way of life.
• 55:17
  Well, so that was, a way of life has been destroyed.
• 55:20
  Well, fucking, this is what I saw on Route 66, right?
• 55:23
  A way of life destroyed.
• 55:25
  A can of soda, a Coke can, that had been drunk, discarded, had left
• 55:30
  there for, what, 30 years, 35 years?
• 55:34
  You know, like, so that was, was interesting.
• 55:37
  So a lot of, you know, so finding the cool abandoned garages with cars.
• 55:43
  Cool cars.
• 55:44
  That was not to the extent that I conditioned myself to, I was like, I'm
• 55:47
  not going to stop if I stop at any of these, I'm just not going to, because
• 55:50
  I set myself to do it in four days.
• 55:53
  So it meant that I had to do at least 750.
• 55:56
  miles a day.
• 55:57
  And then when I started out, I was like, I didn't want to get caught speeding.
• 56:03
  Um, so I just set the speed up.
• 56:05
  Well, well, then I realized I could drive further without getting tired,
• 56:10
  you know, like a lot further because the speeds were lower because
• 56:14
  everything was just moving more slowly.
• 56:17
  Um, so yeah, so yeah, so St.
• 56:20
  Louis the first day, the second day, um, Amarillo, Texas.
• 56:27
  Just by Cadillac Ranch, you know where the so I stopped basically because I was
• 56:33
  good because this is the thing, right?
• 56:35
  You're my guy is that when the sun goes down, you're like, right back in
• 56:41
  cannonball now, because whereas, and you know, in the old days, when I used to
• 56:47
  go up and down to LA a lot, that'd be the time to get the radar detector on.
• 56:50
  And that was the time where you could really make some speed because the
• 56:53
  radar detector would, would work, you know, fast up the hill and then
• 56:56
  roll off over the top of the hill.
• 56:58
  And then on the way.
• 56:59
  If the radar doesn't detect right over the top of the hill, you can just come back
• 57:03
  into throttle and be doing whatever speed you, you, you want to be, you know, you
• 57:07
  want to be, you want to be doing that.
• 57:10
  But, uh, um, I didn't bring a radar detector.
• 57:16
  I didn't want to drive like that this time.
• 57:18
  And I realized on the first day when I've done the whole of the Midwest,
• 57:23
  like all the way across like New York, Philadelphia, Ohio, you know, and then
• 57:28
  right away into Missouri, which is right away across the Midwest, right?
• 57:31
  Missouri was the Western bit of America, you know, the edge
• 57:35
  of the wild West, wasn't it?
• 57:36
  And I did that in a single.
• 57:38
  In a single day.
• 57:40
  So with that thought, I was like, I want to see how the country, how the
• 57:43
  country evolves in terms of landscapes.
• 57:46
  I don't want to plus when you've been driving since eight o'clock,
• 57:49
  since seven, eight o'clock in the morning, by the time it gets dark,
• 57:52
  you're fucking knackered anyway.
• 57:54
  Yeah, so Amarillo, so I did Cadillac Ranch and the weather was like we
• 58:00
  grew up in Plymouth and Plymouth has a special brand of rain, doesn't it?
• 58:04
  Where it's not quite raining.
• 58:06
  It's just damp.
• 58:07
  So you can put an umbrella and it's not going to help you at all.
• 58:10
  You're still going to be wet.
• 58:11
  And the cold gets into your bones far more than the temperature would suggest.
• 58:16
  Like you Americans would say, what, what's the temperature?
• 58:18
  And you would say, Oh, mid fifties.
• 58:20
  And they'd say, well, it's fine.
• 58:21
  And then you leave them out in it for a little bit.
• 58:23
  Like we had, we get a bit of this wet weather like that here.
• 58:25
  Dana watched a soccer match of Ollies.
• 58:28
  Cold got into our bones so uncomfortable and miserable.
• 58:31
  Like with, it was like that when I was at Cadillac Ranch, it was
• 58:33
  like that kind of cotton wool.
• 58:35
  Fog and just a word on Cadillac Ranch as you're driving west.
• 58:39
  It's south of the highway.
• 58:41
  It's actually quite a long way away It's not like Stonehenge Stonehenge
• 58:44
  is way closer way closer to the road then or actually that roads
• 58:49
  closed Did you know that have you been past Stonehenge recently?
• 58:52
  They've closed that closed.
• 58:53
  They've moved the road.
• 58:55
  It's moved Yeah, excellent about time yeah, um, well they moved
• 59:02
  the road they moved is the one that goes right past it Right.
• 59:05
  The one that, that, that road.
• 59:07
  So not the 303.
• 59:08
  The little one is the one that they've closed and they've
• 59:11
  made the whole thing part.
• 59:13
  So down at the, if you go past it, you remember you used to be driving.
• 59:17
  If you were driving West, you used to come off the 303 and on that
• 59:21
  little road, on that little road.
• 59:22
  And then the car park would just be up on the right.
• 59:24
  They've now moved all of that stuff further away and you go to a visitor
• 59:27
  center and then you ride a bus down.
• 59:29
  Um, actually I think it's a better experience.
• 59:32
  But I wasn't, well, you know, a major, yeah, but they're going to move that.
• 59:38
  That's, that's the, the, they're going to, that's, that's going to be moved.
• 59:41
  I think so.
• 59:42
  Yeah.
• 59:43
  Yeah.
• 59:44
  So, um, so Amarillo, Texas to, um, uh, was it Seligman?
• 59:51
  Yeah, it was Seligman, Arizona, which is the town, which is closest to
• 59:57
  radiator Springs in the cars movie.
• 1:00:01
  Um, and it is, I mean, it is, and by that time, right, at almost every intersection,
• 1:00:09
  there's historic Route 66, and if you get off, you can actually drive on what
• 1:00:14
  was Route 66, and it'll run parallel to the main freeway, and sometimes the
• 1:00:20
  surface won't be quite good, and the speed limit will be 55 miles an hour,
• 1:00:24
  but you really get a sense of what it was really what it was really like.
• 1:00:28
  So, um, I actually felt like the best bits of Route 66 were, were out west.
• 1:00:35
  I actually felt like the best vistas, like New Mexico, the high desert, awesome.
• 1:00:42
  But I actually felt like the best vistas were, um, old, uh, California
• 1:00:48
  there coming into Southern California.
• 1:00:51
  Then I came off at 58, um, and came past Bakersfield and then up I 5 and
• 1:00:57
  home to, uh, Home here to, to the, uh, to the San Francisco, to the Bay area.
• 1:01:03
  Um, I kind of want an 18 wheeler again, you know, kind of, um,
• 1:01:10
  they are really, really cool.
• 1:01:15
  Cause I didn't really talk to anybody and I didn't listen to
• 1:01:17
  the radio or anything like that.
• 1:01:18
  I just had my YouTube playlist on mix.
• 1:01:22
  So a lot of like EDM and a lot of heavy metal and absolutely nothing else.
• 1:01:26
  I was just totally like checked out from there and driving slower.
• 1:01:30
  You run at the same speed as, as the trucks a lot of the time.
• 1:01:34
  Although what you'll remember from, um, you know, years ago of, uh.
• 1:01:40
  Of what driving in the Lincoln was on the downhills, then it mess around.
• 1:01:45
  They'll do whatever the speed the truck will run up to.
• 1:01:49
  They won't fight the break, fight it on the brakes.
• 1:01:51
  If it wants to run down that hill at 80 or 85, they will, will let it do that.
• 1:01:56
  Um, and that's, uh, yeah, I'm not, I've been passed by an 18 wheeler like that
• 1:02:02
  for, uh, for some considerable time.
• 1:02:05
  Um, you did a couple of vacations here.
• 1:02:07
  Um, didn't you?
• 1:02:08
  Where did you, where did you drive five years?
• 1:02:11
  Yeah.
• 1:02:12
  Um, yeah.
• 1:02:13
  So just picked up rental Mustangs from various places.
• 1:02:17
  Um, so the V8s obviously, at least sometimes do the straight away if it was
• 1:02:22
  an option or just upgraded the airport.
• 1:02:24
  Um, but yeah, now we flew into, uh, Seattle or a couple of times
• 1:02:29
  into once into Vegas, couple of times into San Francisco.
• 1:02:32
  And then picked up, um, the cars and then did various rou routes or routes
• 1:02:38
  if we're It feels right to say that again, we're talking about America.
• 1:02:41
  Um, and then yeah, I mean, we drove from San Francisco
• 1:02:44
  to Las Vegas to Death Valley.
• 1:02:46
  Uh, I've been through, um, Yosemite, I've been through, um, Yellowstone.
• 1:02:51
  Um, we did Craters of the Moon National Park.
• 1:02:56
  Northern Idaho up to and through Montana up to the, up to the, uh, the border,
• 1:03:01
  um, but going to the sun road and so forth up in that national park up there.
• 1:03:07
  I mean, it's an absolutely fabulous places up there.
• 1:03:09
  Um, regularly get the side eye from the, uh, gentlemen, as I dropped
• 1:03:13
  the, uh, the rental car back.
• 1:03:14
  And he goes, you've had this for three weeks and you've done
• 1:03:16
  five and a half thousand miles.
• 1:03:17
  I don't know.
• 1:03:19
  I went out, there's a lot to see, you know, but, uh, Yeah, I mean, look, it's,
• 1:03:25
  it's epic, and you know, if you spend a bit of time out there, you can find some
• 1:03:28
  really nice roads, you really can, I mean, you know, I'm just thinking off the top
• 1:03:32
  of my butt, but Boise, Boise, which is a wonderful name, uh, Idaho, if you, if you
• 1:03:37
  head northeast out of there up to Idaho City, once you get past there on the 21,
• 1:03:41
  ah, damn, that is a, a beautiful piece of road, and it's twisty as all hell.
• 1:03:46
  Um, well surfaced goes all the way up into the mountains and, and I
• 1:03:51
  should, I should point out there that you, uh, it wasn't like we prepared
• 1:03:56
  for this call or anything like that.
• 1:03:57
  You just remembered that off the cuff because you enjoy
• 1:03:59
  driving that rope so much.
• 1:04:01
  Oh, I've been out there twice.
• 1:04:02
  Didn't really, cause it was just so great.
• 1:04:04
  We took a little detour on the way back from, um, uh, the
• 1:04:09
  Grand Teton's National Park.
• 1:04:12
  Which I love the fact that it is basically the big Tits National Park
• 1:04:15
  as the name . That's what that means.
• 1:04:17
  Um, because there's two mountains that look like a pair of Bo Zoomas , which
• 1:04:22
  wizzywig what you see is what you get.
• 1:04:25
  It's fair enough, isn't it?
• 1:04:26
  Yeah.
• 1:04:26
  Yeah.
• 1:04:27
  There, there's that, um, joke isn't there that I always, uh, forget how to
• 1:04:31
  tell properly, but the, the punchline is, it's like Native Americans talking
• 1:04:35
  to each other and, uh, the punchline is anyway, why do you ask two dogs fucking.
• 1:04:41
  Okay.
• 1:04:43
  That's an odd name, dad.
• 1:04:44
  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 1:04:45
  Um, but yeah, I mean, there's some, there's some special stuff up there.
• 1:04:49
  Um, and if you get up early or if you're bored of the point with a lot
• 1:04:52
  of those national parks, you know, don't get up early, you know, have
• 1:04:55
  a lie in you on holiday with the missus, you know, Chile and have a big
• 1:04:58
  breakfast, go and do a bit of driving to get you where you get to then have
• 1:05:02
  a nice late lunch and linger over it.
• 1:05:04
  Um, go and chill out somewhere, look at a bit of scenery and then head on
• 1:05:08
  up to say, you know, um, The national park about an hour before sunset.
• 1:05:14
  Perfect.
• 1:05:14
  Everyone's coming the other way.
• 1:05:16
  So a you've got the road up there when everyone's around pretty
• 1:05:19
  much to yourself going one way so you can enjoy the road up there.
• 1:05:22
  Then you get up to the car park is almost empty.
• 1:05:25
  You get lovely sunset light on everything.
• 1:05:27
  So your photos look golden.
• 1:05:29
  And then when you leave, you're leaving sort of.
• 1:05:32
  Just after the sun goes down, time to get back to the hotel and have
• 1:05:35
  a nice bottle of wine and some food with the, uh, with your good lady.
• 1:05:38
  And you can thrash the rental car on the way back down the mountain as well.
• 1:05:42
  So, yeah, lots to be said for that.
• 1:05:48
  And, if there's roadworks, that's the other trick I would advise.
• 1:05:52
  Uh, if there's roadworks, uh, on your chosen route, then, uh, you
• 1:05:57
  know, get through the roadworks.
• 1:05:59
  If you're at the back of the EQ, get through the roadworks on the Contraflow.
• 1:06:02
  Stop, you know, sit down, do, do something constructive.
• 1:06:05
  Uh, 10 15 minutes, and then you know that whole road ahead of you has got no one
• 1:06:10
  on it, so you can have, you know, stretch the vehicle's legs somewhat, um, and if
• 1:06:16
  you're first through on the contraflow, because you probably will be at the
• 1:06:19
  next one, because everyone else would have gone through ahead of you, then you
• 1:06:22
  definitely know you've got the entire time of the contraflow was coming the other
• 1:06:26
  way, and no one in front of you as well.
• 1:06:28
  Yeah, I was And if you have to wait, and if it's long enough, sometimes you'll
• 1:06:32
  catch up, and I'm not saying this has happened to me or anything, but you'll
• 1:06:35
  catch up a Northwind branded caravan at least three or four times, so when
• 1:06:40
  you're editing your own private GoPro footage of it, you you come hooning up
• 1:06:43
  to the back of said caravan on multiple occasions, and then just find a little
• 1:06:48
  lay by somewhere picturesque with a nice view of the river and chill out for a bit.
• 1:06:52
  Have a little, uh, you know, um, relaxed time and then head on
• 1:06:56
  again, cracking entertainment.
• 1:07:00
  Um,
• 1:07:03
  I guess the other thought that I had is about, um, Route 66 is, um, that
• 1:07:13
  what they badge as historic Route 66 is the road as it was in 1926 when
• 1:07:23
  it was like designated as Route 66.
• 1:07:27
  That sort of hides the fact that it was in continual evolution.
• 1:07:33
  So, it wasn't like it suddenly bypassed the towns and, you know,
• 1:07:37
  people were thrown out of work.
• 1:07:39
  It continually evolved and changed and developed, basically as cities grew up.
• 1:07:47
  It then needed to bypass those cities because it was slow driving
• 1:07:51
  through the middle of them.
• 1:07:53
  Um, so it, it, it was a continual shifting, changing, um, kind of a thing.
• 1:07:58
  And I actually, you know, you and I have, have hiked that road, that prehistoric
• 1:08:04
  road, um, west of London, the Ridgeway.
• 1:08:07
  It actually reminded me more of that, that it was this sense of sort
• 1:08:10
  of, of continual, um, evolution.
• 1:08:14
  Rather than being one kind of, um, you know, fixed thing that
• 1:08:18
  this was Route 66 kind of thing.
• 1:08:20
  It wasn't like that.
• 1:08:21
  It was a, it was a continually evolving, uh, evolving thing.
• 1:08:26
  Um, who's your favorite YouTuber at the moment?
• 1:08:29
  I
• 1:08:33
  quite like, uh, well, obviously I like a bit of Todd's, Triple Todd,
• 1:08:38
  um, who was introducing himself as Hi, it's Todd from Todd's Workshop
• 1:08:41
  and Todd Cutlater, as if he didn't get that it was Todd the first time.
• 1:08:44
  Um, I understand why he does it, but it still makes me smile every time.
• 1:08:48
  Doing these.
• 1:08:49
  Roman Catapulta revisited, and he's got himself a ballista that he experiments
• 1:08:56
  with, and he's good buddies with Dr.
• 1:08:58
  Toby Kaplan from the Wallace Collection in London, so he makes replicas of, you
• 1:09:02
  know, uh, daggers and then tests them out against various types of leather
• 1:09:06
  and chain mail to see how brutally dead you would be if someone knifed you with
• 1:09:09
  them, and whether or not it does any damage to the weapons, um, And he usually
• 1:09:14
  gets the gentleman from, uh, Scholar Gladiatoria, which is another quite
• 1:09:17
  good YouTube channel, if you like your arms and armor, to help him demo them.
• 1:09:21
  And he's into that sort of historical reenactment with sort
• 1:09:23
  of, um, foam latex weapons stuff.
• 1:09:26
  Which is pretty brutal, to be honest.
• 1:09:28
  Um, but, uh, where they do a bit of arms and armor reenactment fighting.
• 1:09:32
  So I've got like that.
• 1:09:33
  And then I also like, I was watching a bit of, uh, Dafydd Phillips, who's
• 1:09:37
  a Welsh photographer and videographer.
• 1:09:39
  Who spends a lot of time going to air shows like Axalp in Switzerland, uh,
• 1:09:44
  and hanging around on the Mac Loop in North Wales and Snowdonia, where all
• 1:09:49
  the sort of fighter jets from various allied nations, uh, NATO nations go to
• 1:09:53
  train at flying sort of sub mountain level and sort of 500 feet and so forth.
• 1:09:58
  And he gets, he climbs up the mountain daily, has his little CB radio to
• 1:10:03
  listen in to the, to the pilots.
• 1:10:05
  Uh, chatter.
• 1:10:06
  So, because you don't, they don't announce the flight schedule, obviously,
• 1:10:09
  um, and then, you know, gets amazing, like, 4K footage of F 35s coming past
• 1:10:15
  at just about subsonic speeds below him.
• 1:10:19
  He's standing above them on the mountain looking down, uh, and the bits where,
• 1:10:23
  the bits I love every time is where they start to pull out a vertical turn,
• 1:10:27
  so they'll flip over like they do in Top Gun and, like, pull vertical and
• 1:10:30
  you get that sort of, sort of mist and halo of vapor over the top as it sort
• 1:10:35
  of rips the moisture out of the air as they pull the, uh, pull upwards.
• 1:10:39
  And some of the shots of that with the sunlight on it and
• 1:10:41
  it's all sort of rainbow trails through that is just beautiful.
• 1:10:45
  So that's the, yeah, we're looking at that maybe.
• 1:10:48
  I was aware of that alley in Wales and had seen some of the photos.
• 1:10:51
  So, uh, yeah.
• 1:10:52
  Um, I, I, uh, I've been enjoying, um, Salvage Rebuilds UK.
• 1:10:59
  Which is these, these two guys in Kent who, who rebuilt cars.
• 1:11:04
  Um, and now one of them is kind of shy.
• 1:11:06
  The one that's skillful guy is kind of shy and doesn't like to talk very much.
• 1:11:11
  And, and the guy that talks to the camera all the time, it's like a dose
• 1:11:16
  of England without being in England.
• 1:11:18
  So, so a.
• 1:11:20
  Something that made me fall about laughing the other day was, was, uh,
• 1:11:25
  Rob talks about, he's talking about damage to the part of the car that's
• 1:11:30
  below the door between the wheels, which I don't know how you would
• 1:11:34
  pronounce it, but he pronounces it seal.
• 1:11:37
  The seal, damage to the seal, well, and, and he has these really flat, like
• 1:11:45
  Kent, like, like, so, um, it, it, so the, the accent makes me laugh, the
• 1:11:51
  skill of, of workmanship that they'll take like an Audi A3 the front and
• 1:11:58
  they'll have it rebuilt in a couple of days and you can, and, and it's not just
• 1:12:04
  the sourcing and fitting of the parts, it's not just the repair in the engine,
• 1:12:08
  it's hardcore body Repair as, as well.
• 1:12:12
  So there's the element that I always liked from those, that kind of YouTube,
• 1:12:15
  where you were, where, where you learn it, but now that the seal as, as, uh,
• 1:12:20
  makes me laugh, the accent makes me laugh.
• 1:12:22
  And, and what really made me laugh is this one video where after he
• 1:12:26
  says seal, the other one goes, Oh.
• 1:12:29
  Like, I like, like, like I said, and, and when I pointed that out,
• 1:12:32
  bug is on Pier 39 or whatever.
• 1:12:34
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:12:34
  It's like, like the seals on, on Pier 39 and the our of the, uh, and yeah, so
• 1:12:41
  that made me laugh 'cause of, of our, um, silly joke about, about the seals.
• 1:12:46
  But, but yeah, the, the, so I'm enjoying, I've enjoyed salvage
• 1:12:49
  Rebels uk, um, 'cause of that, uh, favorite car or bike at the moment.
• 1:12:54
  I
• 1:12:58
  dunno.
• 1:12:59
  Um.
• 1:13:00
  What's yours?
• 1:13:01
  Give me another 30 seconds to think about that.
• 1:13:04
  Oh, um, I hadn't, I told you to think about this before you came on the call.
• 1:13:09
  Yeah, I did.
• 1:13:11
  Um, but I, I, of course I told you to do it and then hadn't done it myself,
• 1:13:15
  but that's what this should be, right?
• 1:13:16
  This, this favorite car at the moment should be a totally spontaneous thing.
• 1:13:19
  And I've said car and bike to combine it together.
• 1:13:22
  I've got to be honest with you.
• 1:13:23
  I did this open garage thing.
• 1:13:25
  For some of my neighbors where we, you know, there's a number of us on
• 1:13:28
  the street that are into cars and bikes in different kinds of ways.
• 1:13:32
  So we do a little get together where we just drink beer and talk about cars
• 1:13:37
  or bikes or whatever takes our fancy.
• 1:13:41
  And I hadn't hosted, and I thought, instead of just hosting, I'll get a
• 1:13:46
  couple of cars out of the garage, I'll move the bikes around, I'll make it so
• 1:13:50
  that you can actually see the bikes, and, uh, yeah, and I didn't plan to,
• 1:13:54
  like, call it an open garage, but that's what it sort of turned out to be, and it
• 1:13:58
  felt like an open garage to me, because I was, like, espousing about my, uh,
• 1:14:04
  my, my stuff, um, One of my bikes, uh, the 90 GSS XR 1100, which is black and
• 1:14:13
  gray, and has a bunch of race bits on it.
• 1:14:16
  Four Yoshimura race pipe, four, um, McCoy's.
• 1:14:21
  Um, it really, uh, I, I'd not looked at it.
• 1:14:28
  In, you know, I, I don't know if it'd been in a corner.
• 1:14:31
  Um, I'd not looked at it in comparison to, I have the same bike in the same
• 1:14:35
  colors with a standard exhaust on it.
• 1:14:37
  And it's totally standard setup.
• 1:14:39
  And I guess I hadn't, I, because I've been fiddling around with and trying
• 1:14:42
  to get the standard bike to work.
• 1:14:44
  I hadn't looked at the racier one for a long time.
• 1:14:47
  And the racier one is sexy as a bag of cats.
• 1:14:52
  And I.
• 1:14:54
  Fucking love sports bikes and I guess I learned just recently that that
• 1:15:00
  bike, um, the values have always hurt them because in the TT in 1989,
• 1:15:07
  two riders were killed riding them.
• 1:15:10
  Steve Henshaw.
• 1:15:12
  And, uh, Phil McCallum, both in one fucking race.
• 1:15:16
  So no wonder they're, they're not that, uh, they're not that loved.
• 1:15:20
  And there's this feeling of more engine than there is chassis
• 1:15:24
  or, or, or, uh, or brake.
• 1:15:26
  But you know, I quite like the MV Brutale.
• 1:15:31
  Oh, you do?
• 1:15:32
  A new one.
• 1:15:33
  That's new, is it?
• 1:15:34
  Yeah, well, I don't know whether it's new or not, but like the
• 1:15:37
  new sexy exhaust system on it.
• 1:15:38
  I mean, Oh, it's always like that.
• 1:15:41
  It's always like, um, yeah, yeah, it's just, yeah, yeah, it's very nice.
• 1:15:45
  Um, although from an event point of view, I was watching an episode of Harry's
• 1:15:49
  Garage the other day, uh, bless him.
• 1:15:51
  And, uh, he was talking about having some custom bike build for this Sand
• 1:15:55
  Raiders thing, which I'd never heard of, which I think I sent you the link to.
• 1:15:59
  a chance to have a look at it, but it's essentially gentlemen's Dakar lights.
• 1:16:04
  So you go to Mexico and they ship you, you need to provide a bike or you can rent
• 1:16:09
  a bike off them and it's a week's worth of, I think you do about like two and
• 1:16:14
  a half thousand kilometers or something in a week or something like that.
• 1:16:17
  So it's not a, you know, you do the miles through Morocco and they've set
• 1:16:22
  it up to do all these different stages.
• 1:16:24
  You say every night in nice hotels.
• 1:16:25
  Come on, we're not savages.
• 1:16:27
  Um, They'll ship the bike down for you to, from wherever it's coming from.
• 1:16:31
  And you have to have the right insurance and so forth, but you can
• 1:16:34
  live your Dakar fantasy and it's like two and a half thousand euros.
• 1:16:39
  Yeah.
• 1:16:40
  I've got a new model.
• 1:16:42
  I'm not sure how much of a Dakar fantasy I, I have, um, I also ride you around
• 1:16:48
  in the desert, that sort of thing.
• 1:16:49
  I also feel like.
• 1:16:51
  Uh, yeah, I mean, but, but, oh, but it's like, they've chosen picturesque routes
• 1:16:55
  because it's not the Dakar, you know, so they, it's like through the mountains
• 1:16:59
  and through all this sort of stuff.
• 1:17:00
  So they've chosen what looks to be a really gorgeous route,
• 1:17:03
  at least from looking at the, from the, from the information.
• 1:17:05
  Harry did it last year and said he really, he thought it was awesome.
• 1:17:08
  I didn't see any videos about it.
• 1:17:09
  Maybe I just missed them.
• 1:17:10
  Um, but yeah, Mark, if you ever want to have, uh, uh, Uh, desert riding fantasy,
• 1:17:16
  like we should, you should fly here and we should go down and see Mark Newton
• 1:17:20
  in Todos Santos and take his Yeah, but I don't want to get shot, I want to go
• 1:17:24
  and have the, uh, the instagram Todos Santos is, is not, that's not, that's,
• 1:17:28
  well, I mean, that's, that, it's a touristy place, look it up, look it
• 1:17:34
  up, it's touristy spot, Todos Santos.
• 1:17:36
  It'd be, the, the shooty bit is up by the border.
• 1:17:42
  Well, either way, I quite like the idea of it.
• 1:17:44
  But look, I mean, reality is, I'm gonna have to, I'm, I've been eyeing up Honda,
• 1:17:49
  um, CRX250 rallies, um, things like that.
• 1:17:56
  I'm thinking that'll do me.
• 1:17:57
  Well, the other thing, the other thing you, you should do is, um,
• 1:18:01
  since, um, certainly since I, when I picked up riding again, um, I was
• 1:18:09
  amazed at how the kit has changed.
• 1:18:12
  So basically now you can get like Kevlar jeans and a Kevlar check
• 1:18:17
  shirt that does better protection.
• 1:18:21
  Then, um, the, your leathers.
• 1:18:24
  So the whole business of, Oh, I'm too fat to fit into my leathers.
• 1:18:27
  Now I need to slim down.
• 1:18:28
  Yeah.
• 1:18:29
  I'm going to need to buy in stuff anyway.
• 1:18:30
  Yeah.
• 1:18:31
  But, um, especially if I'm going off road, it's also, it's also
• 1:18:35
  like a whole adventure finding the equipment because it's actually
• 1:18:39
  quite hard to step away from.
• 1:18:42
  So what I bought, I bought this, um.
• 1:18:45
  Armored vest thing, and it's got foam in the elbow.
• 1:18:48
  And it's quite hard to step away from what I used to have with that Elpa and Stiles
• 1:18:51
  thing, like on a hard armored elbow.
• 1:18:54
  It's hard to, it's weird to step away from hard plastic and know that this soft
• 1:18:58
  foam is going to provide more protection because this soft foam is this like clever
• 1:19:03
  fucking material that goes ultra hard.
• 1:19:06
  when you hit it.
• 1:19:07
  So it's like soft and flexible until it's hit and then when it's hit
• 1:19:11
  it's super it's it's super hard.
• 1:19:13
  Like those non newtonian fluids and so forth.
• 1:19:15
  Yeah yeah so so it's so between that and so if you wear that armor and then you
• 1:19:21
  wear like a Kevlar shirt like a Czech Kevlar shirt that like could pass as
• 1:19:27
  a normal Like not set, not classy, but you know, we're like a, a, you know, you
• 1:19:33
  could wear it in the pub and not look like you were in a motorcycle kind of thing.
• 1:19:36
  Those things have more slide than leather.
• 1:19:40
  It's, it's absolutely brain out.
• 1:19:43
  It's you, you need to adjust your light.
• 1:19:47
  Perception of, of what's possible with it.
• 1:19:49
  Um, cause I was thinking about it cause I kind of rushed the learning and what
• 1:19:54
  were you, the important thing for me was, was getting jeans that were, see,
• 1:19:59
  if I sit on a sport, if I sit on a jigsaw in the trousers that I'm wearing
• 1:20:03
  at the moment, wearing the tennis shoes I'm wearing at the moment, I fit fine.
• 1:20:07
  If I do the same thing wearing boots and my leathers, I can't
• 1:20:11
  get my foot onto the peg easily.
• 1:20:13
  Well, that's bloody dangerous.
• 1:20:15
  So one of my main goal was to get.
• 1:20:17
  Things that were proper get proper armor, but where I could actually get my leg up.
• 1:20:22
  So I ended up getting a size of climb.
• 1:20:26
  K.
• 1:20:26
  L.
• 1:20:26
  I.
• 1:20:27
  M.
• 1:20:27
  It's the best gene maker based upon the research that I did 18 months ago.
• 1:20:33
  I, I've got a pair of them, but if I don't put the belt on, they fall down.
• 1:20:37
  They're like that, that, I mean, they, they, they look, they look like they're
• 1:20:40
  for a bloke, you know, three inch, they are for a bloke, three inches
• 1:20:44
  taller than me and, you know, and a lot fatter, but this way, this way
• 1:20:49
  I get enough play in the knee that I can, you know, and they're wide enough,
• 1:20:53
  so they go over the top of my boot.
• 1:20:55
  So where my old boot and the jean goes over there anyway, it's the
• 1:21:00
  whole, like getting the right kit.
• 1:21:02
  He's uh, is, is a total, uh, is a total fucking sport.
• 1:21:06
  Um, what's the most scared?
• 1:21:08
  I thought of this the other day, what's the most scared you've
• 1:21:10
  ever been in a car or on a bike?
• 1:21:13
  I'll go first if you're thinking.
• 1:21:16
  Okay.
• 1:21:17
  Um, I thought of this question and then I didn't have an answer and I was thinking,
• 1:21:25
  well, you've got to have an answer.
• 1:21:26
  It's such a good question.
• 1:21:27
  You've got to have an answer about it.
• 1:21:28
  I was thinking, well, what is the most frightening times?
• 1:21:31
  And the most frightening times is the moment where, you
• 1:21:34
  know, you're going to crash.
• 1:21:35
  Where you're out of control and you know you're going to crash.
• 1:21:38
  So if I think about the time that took that, that moment lasted the
• 1:21:44
  longest, um, the occasion, because on a sports bike, the window, but usually
• 1:21:50
  don't have time to be scared, right?
• 1:21:51
  Usually just you're on it and then you're hurt, right?
• 1:21:55
  There's not the, there's not the, so I was pretty scared.
• 1:22:00
  Um, when I rode that Aprilia around Italy and I was on a bridge or I was riding
• 1:22:05
  on a freeway and it was a downhill and we were going on to a bridge and the
• 1:22:09
  joint of the bridge had like this metal section about a foot wide and it was
• 1:22:14
  slipped with water and I just knew the front wheel was going to slide and there's
• 1:22:19
  nothing to do but watch the front wheel slide and hope that I didn't fall off
• 1:22:23
  and eat the Pavement at highway speeds and I just was over it and that was it.
• 1:22:28
  So that was scary, but you know, but I actually think the most scared was
• 1:22:33
  probably in that white Ford Sierra two liter gear that you and I own jointly.
• 1:22:41
  Um, on the way home from the office or the gym one day where the back
• 1:22:45
  snapped on me and I caught it.
• 1:22:47
  But didn't correct fast enough, and the act of catching it meant that I
• 1:22:52
  just speared off the road and into a ditch at about 80 or 85 miles an hour.
• 1:22:57
  And I remember it going, and me catching it, and feeling like a hero
• 1:23:03
  for catching it, and then immediately it wanting to spear off the road,
• 1:23:08
  and me seeing the tree in the ditch coming and just thinking, fucking hell.
• 1:23:12
  Like, this could be the very end.
• 1:23:16
  And you lost your nice green Jaguar bag out of the back because some
• 1:23:18
  little bastard came along and pilfered it overnight before we could go back
• 1:23:22
  and empty out the car in the morning.
• 1:23:23
  Yeah, yeah, well you were a trooper that day.
• 1:23:25
  Thank you, uh, again for that.
• 1:23:27
  Because, uh, when the car stopped moving, I was like, oh,
• 1:23:32
  let's fucking get out of here.
• 1:23:34
  And the right hand side of it was against the ditch.
• 1:23:37
  And, because it went in, it went across the ditch, Fucking tree bounced
• 1:23:41
  back, went along the ditch backwards.
• 1:23:44
  Um, so the driver, so I tried to get out of the driver door and it wouldn't open.
• 1:23:48
  And the passenger doors were against the ditch.
• 1:23:49
  So I opened the sunroof to get out and walk to a pub to call you.
• 1:23:53
  And I remember in the pub, they looked at me as if I was like,
• 1:23:58
  you know, if, if I was fucking ET, they looked at me the same way.
• 1:24:01
  It's like the pool ball stopped moving when I, when I walked in the pub.
• 1:24:07
  Yeah.
• 1:24:07
  But I covered, yeah, the loss of the nice green.
• 1:24:12
  Jaguar bag still more to this, uh, to respond, I guess, I don't know.
• 1:24:19
  I mean, obviously I've had a few accidents.
• 1:24:20
  Everyone does.
• 1:24:21
  If you've been done as many hundreds of thousands of miles as we have.
• 1:24:24
  Um, I guess, I was thinking about it earlier on, when you mentioned this,
• 1:24:28
  but um, the um, Uh, I came, when I used to, I used to drive to and from my work,
• 1:24:33
  Redstone, in Bramley, the village near, I was living in Risley, near Reading.
• 1:24:38
  And there was a back roads route, that you could, no,
• 1:24:41
  route, we're back in England now.
• 1:24:42
  There was a back roads route, um, that you could go from my house to the
• 1:24:46
  office, and you got an hour for lunch.
• 1:24:49
  But, it was about a 15 minute drive.
• 1:24:51
  But I would still go home for lunch because I knew that road really well,
• 1:24:55
  and you could get, I could do that route in about seven or eight minutes,
• 1:24:59
  so therefore you could have about 45 minutes at home, having a nice bit of
• 1:25:04
  lunch, watch a bit of telly or whatever, and then blast back to the office.
• 1:25:08
  And I was doing my, I think it was in, in various cars, but I think at the
• 1:25:12
  time I was in that, um, angular shape sort of, uh, focus two liter gear.
• 1:25:18
  Um.
• 1:25:19
  And I came smoothly carving my nice apex lines around the corner and there was
• 1:25:25
  a guy in a box van reversing round the corner line corner Reversing round the
• 1:25:34
  corner towards me and I was like, uh oh And it was one of those runs where I okay
• 1:25:39
  either I'm just gonna have a nap and the mother and father of all rear ending into
• 1:25:43
  this van and I'm gonna lose that So I just overtook him It's like, well, you
• 1:25:46
  know, and I, you know, it's like, roll the dice here, buddy, make a saving throw.
• 1:25:51
  Cause if there's something coming the other way, it's going to
• 1:25:52
  be worse than hitting the van.
• 1:25:54
  If it isn't.
• 1:25:55
  Yeah.
• 1:25:56
  And there wasn't.
• 1:25:57
  Um, I just overtook him at like galactic speed, off down the other end of the
• 1:26:04
  road and around the next bend before I could even react to put the horn on.
• 1:26:08
  Yeah.
• 1:26:08
  I mean, yeah.
• 1:26:10
  That's a pretty good one.
• 1:26:12
  And I'd never heard that one before.
• 1:26:13
  It was kind of intimidating.
• 1:26:14
  Yeah.
• 1:26:14
  Yeah.
• 1:26:14
  Yeah.
• 1:26:16
  Yeah.
• 1:26:17
  Um, and my other question is gonna be about books and, and of course you are not
• 1:26:21
  reading at the moment, so I'll talk about my books and, and, and then, uh, I've
• 1:26:24
  done all your books at a moment, but Yeah.
• 1:26:26
  Yeah.
• 1:26:27
  Um, I, so I, I, uh, the book I was gonna talk about was Old Miles Collier's,
• 1:26:33
  um, the archeological automobile and, and how this is really just.
• 1:26:39
  It's a handbook for looking after, um, collector cars and how to think about
• 1:26:44
  collector cars, how to think about, um, the automobile as a historical thing.
• 1:26:50
  If you care about cars, if you have any interesting cars,
• 1:26:53
  the book is worth picking up.
• 1:26:55
  Um, it's 150.
• 1:26:58
  I mean, It's one review the Society of Automotive Historians Review,
• 1:27:03
  Reuben Verde's Skilled Reviewer.
• 1:27:07
  Um, his comment was that really this, it would be great if
• 1:27:10
  this was in paperback form.
• 1:27:12
  And I think this is interesting because this book was something
• 1:27:15
  that I was originally gonna write with Michael Shanks.
• 1:27:19
  And then because Michael was busy, um, and it wasn't going to be the 15, $20.
• 1:27:30
  In the high street bookshop kind of publication, Michael, it wasn't the
• 1:27:36
  right thing for him to be involved in doing with his time and energy.
• 1:27:39
  It didn't suit his what he needed to do it at the time.
• 1:27:42
  So one way or another, it never got written.
• 1:27:44
  Miles wrote it himself.
• 1:27:48
  But of course, what comes out is very different from what would have
• 1:27:52
  been, you know, um, you know, what it would have been like if he and I had
• 1:27:58
  written, if two Englishmen, uh, you know, if two, uh, lower middle class
• 1:28:03
  Englishmen had written it, it would be very different from if, you know,
• 1:28:06
  one of the wealthiest and leading car collectors in the world has written it.
• 1:28:10
  Now for all that, the The book has Miles's just incredibly dexterous feel for, for
• 1:28:23
  storytelling and, and for cars in, in general, it's really exquisite and, and
• 1:28:29
  to reduce it to paperback at 15 bucks in the airport almost doesn't do it justice
• 1:28:34
  because he approaches the cars like high art and, and his book looks like high art.
• 1:28:40
  And the stuff that he's written, um, comes across as the, the musings of,
• 1:28:49
  of somebody who, who regards the stuff as high art rather than as, you know,
• 1:28:54
  paperback and, and, and disposable.
• 1:28:57
  That's not to say, so there's a long and short is there's still room.
• 1:29:00
  for somebody like myself to take those ideas and that aesthetic and discuss
• 1:29:06
  it in a way which is accessible for people who have XR3s and Camaros.
• 1:29:11
  Um, so that's my, yeah.
• 1:29:13
  So the, so the, the recent audio book I'm listening to, um, uh, is,
• 1:29:19
  I'm on book two of Sherlock Holmes, uh, and the Cthulhu Casebooks.
• 1:29:24
  So this is an, this is a book, books, series of books
• 1:29:27
  written by James Lovegrove.
• 1:29:29
  Because, of course, Holmes is old enough now that it's public property,
• 1:29:33
  um, that, so you can write with those characters because, you know, Mr.
• 1:29:37
  Conan Doyle, uh, Sir, Sir A himself is long dead and it's passed into
• 1:29:42
  public domain, copyright has expired.
• 1:29:44
  Um, so he's written Cthulhu ized versions of the books where, yes, Holmes
• 1:29:50
  is still the same sort of deductive genius, but actually he was waging a
• 1:29:54
  long campaign against the Elder Gods, who were, Behind a lot of the evil
• 1:29:59
  that was going on and there's like Cthulhu style monsters and summonings
• 1:30:04
  and evil stuff going on in the deeps beneath London, and it's pretty good.
• 1:30:08
  Yeah, well, and actually, Mark, that's given us a really nice segue for me
• 1:30:14
  to talk about what I was going to say is that, you know, in I asked you
• 1:30:19
  for favorite books, um, one of these.
• 1:30:21
  episodes a while ago, and you were like, well, I've been writing and
• 1:30:24
  I was going to say, we should say, you know, you, you're, you've been
• 1:30:27
  writing these satirical Dungeons and Dragons novels that sort of bring our
• 1:30:33
  Dungeons and Dragons campaign alive.
• 1:30:36
  Um, Halvar and Clarence, Chronicles of Halvar and Clarence,
• 1:30:40
  there's a website, um Well, the website's not quite up again yet.
• 1:30:45
  Well, of course not, but, you know, who's listening to this?
• 1:30:48
  And, you know, by the time you build it, it's probably going to be up.
• 1:30:52
  How many people who are listening to it are actually going to
• 1:30:54
  go to the website anyway?
• 1:30:55
  But of course, all of this also, all, every one of them.
• 1:30:58
  Uh, no, the other, but this also ties to, to the, the YouTube channel that we
• 1:31:04
  talk about all the time in 44 teeth, the motorcycling YouTube channel and Mike
• 1:31:09
  booth, because however, I'm Clarence.
• 1:31:12
  com sponsored Mike booth, um, on his fateful.
• 1:31:18
  Visit to, to the TT recently.
• 1:31:20
  So this is why we've been invested in, uh, in Mike Booth.
• 1:31:24
  And, and Mark, you've been invested in, uh, in, in writing
• 1:31:28
  these, uh, these, these novels.
• 1:31:31
  So I'm gonna Yeah.
• 1:31:32
  Best wishes.
• 1:31:32
  So I'm gonna, of course, I'm sorry.
• 1:31:35
  I said of course, best wishes to boo these still.
• 1:31:37
  He, I saw a video of his update from any other way.
• 1:31:39
  The guys approaching it in exactly the way you would hope.
• 1:31:42
  He would like an absolute hero, and I'm sure he'll show us that all up as to.
• 1:31:46
  What can be done?
• 1:31:47
  Yeah, I watched the beginning of one video and he was looking very pale and he was
• 1:31:51
  saying, you know, some days are just shit.
• 1:31:54
  And I think he, I think that's inevitable cheese dude, you know,
• 1:31:58
  and there was, there was one where he described the wound.
• 1:32:01
  Did you see that one?
• 1:32:03
  And the description that he'd used to do, I'm not going to spoil
• 1:32:07
  44 teeth storytelling because it is, um, my word is compelling.
• 1:32:12
  Yeah.
• 1:32:12
  So look on the theme of, of motorcycle, um, I and this is where I'm going to wrap.
• 1:32:18
  I'm going to wrap up with a little bit of trumpet blowing and a good
• 1:32:21
  news story, which is that through some politicking, the motorcycle
• 1:32:28
  course at San Francisco City College was due to be taken off the roster.
• 1:32:34
  So at the moment there's no You know, if you wanted to study motorcycles
• 1:32:39
  at San Francisco City College for the first time in 20 years,
• 1:32:43
  you couldn't do it this semester.
• 1:32:45
  But next semester, it has been reinstated, um, in small
• 1:32:50
  part due to the flamey letter.
• 1:32:54
  That I wrote to the trustees of the college, which then got forwarded
• 1:32:58
  to the chancellor and it seemed that what happened was the course
• 1:33:03
  appears in the books and as far as the chancellor and the trustees were
• 1:33:08
  concerned, the course was going ahead, but where the rubber met the road.
• 1:33:13
  For a couple of sort of political reasons that are too complicated to
• 1:33:17
  drill into here, it wasn't going ahead.
• 1:33:20
  And by stirring up the hornet's nest and being like, you know, what the fuck?
• 1:33:24
  The motorcycle course is really good.
• 1:33:25
  Like, where is it?
• 1:33:26
  The students want it.
• 1:33:27
  There's faculty to teach it.
• 1:33:29
  What the fuck?
• 1:33:30
  Just by being that, it's meant that the course is now being reinstated in a
• 1:33:35
  meaningful way, um, in the, in the spring.
• 1:33:39
  So, uh, go me.
• 1:33:41
  And, uh, as I said to Dana, it seems that maybe that time I spent at City
• 1:33:47
  College wasn't, um, you know, doing the admin stuff and the meetings at City
• 1:33:52
  College wasn't actually wasted time.
• 1:33:54
  It has tangible benefits and improvements.
• 1:33:59
  Um, yeah, I, I guess that the, you know, there's a bigger story with City College,
• 1:34:03
  which is that, you know, the motorcycle course is small beans in comparison to
• 1:34:08
  teaching English as a second language to Syrian refugees, um, or to, you
• 1:34:13
  know, Yeah, you've got to skill them up.
• 1:34:14
  Yeah, got to skill people up.
• 1:34:16
  There's no having the American dream if you can't get a foothold on it.
• 1:34:21
  Dude, like, how are you going to make America great again?
• 1:34:24
  If you can't even speak the language, come on, get behind it, get a hat, everyone
• 1:34:31
  needs a hat, not that hat, it's too late.
• 1:34:33
  But no, truly, it's carry your own culture with you, but you've got to skill up
• 1:34:38
  and integrate into society, haven't you?
• 1:34:41
  That's alright.
• 1:34:42
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:34:43
  So apparently there are 300 languages spoken in California at
• 1:34:46
  the moment, the same as it was.
• 1:34:48
  In the 1840s, before the gold rush.
• 1:34:52
  Shit bro, I didn't even know there were 300 languages still being spoken.
• 1:34:56
  Yeah, in California, there were 300 languages, but the native Americans
• 1:35:00
  in California had had 300 languages.
• 1:35:03
  Apparently when I did that, when I did that American history course,
• 1:35:06
  that was one of the eye popping things about when you think of the, you, when
• 1:35:10
  you think of native Americans, you need to think of it as a hodgepodge
• 1:35:15
  of all sorts of different cultures.
• 1:35:17
  That's it's a patchwork of cultures because it was small tribes, you know,
• 1:35:24
  each of which had their own cultures and it's absolutely fascinated.
• 1:35:28
  Fascinating history.
• 1:35:30
  I'd like to study the more warlike ones.
• 1:35:33
  There were some warlike ones near here.
• 1:35:34
  I, of course, I'm interested in these.
• 1:35:36
  Ollie's been studying the Ohlone people that were in this part of,
• 1:35:41
  uh, but they seem, you know, they seem to be pretty Ewok y I'm not so
• 1:35:45
  interested in the evil archetypes.
• 1:35:48
  Garlands of flowers and pacifism.
• 1:35:50
  Yeah, yeah, but is that just what we You can bring a few stormtroopers,
• 1:35:53
  like, rather than Ewoks, and they've got a bit of fire going.
• 1:35:56
  But is that just what we take from them, right?
• 1:35:59
  That when we look back on How their lives were, you know, we
• 1:36:03
  like the idea of it being, you know, a simple pastoral paradise.
• 1:36:08
  It probably wasn't like that, was it?
• 1:36:09
  It's probably more like, more, it's probably more like
• 1:36:12
  the homeless people are now.
• 1:36:15
  More like Ewok on Ewok knife action.
• 1:36:18
  Yeah.
• 1:36:19
  Yeah.
• 1:36:19
  Could be.
• 1:36:20
  Every Ewok for themselves.
• 1:36:22
  Yeah.
• 1:36:24
  Yeah.
• 1:36:24
  Well look on that super incongruous note.
• 1:36:28
  Let me bring this be beach.
• 1:36:30
  Wow.
• 1:36:31
  On that rambling.
• 1:36:33
  And is that copyright?
• 1:36:34
  Are we gonna be done for copyright now on that?
• 1:36:36
  It was on the Ewok cartoon.
• 1:36:38
  As I recall from when we were kids, and I used to be like, be chihuahua when
• 1:36:42
  anything unusual or extreme happened.
• 1:36:46
  Yeah.
• 1:36:46
  Like, you know, an AT ST kicks through the back of that little mud hut.
• 1:36:50
  Yeah.
• 1:36:50
  They'd be like, ah, run away, be chihuahua.
• 1:36:53
  Yeah.
• 1:36:53
  But then get them back with big, like, logs on swings and stuff later on.
• 1:36:57
  Because, you know, much like Avatar, the locals have got to win.
• 1:37:00
  Yeah.
• 1:37:01
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:37:04
  Yeah, well, look, on that, um, incongruous and unusual note,
• 1:37:09
  let me thank you for your time.
• 1:37:12
  It's all good.
• 1:37:13
  And, uh, bid, uh, our listeners adieu.
• 1:37:18
  Our listener.
• 1:37:20
  Yeah, me whilst I'm editing it.
• 1:37:22
  Adieu.
• 1:37:25
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• 1:37:39
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