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The GM Streetcar Conspiracy · Conspiracy! The Show

0:10
Speaker 1: Welcome to Conspiracy The Show, the world's most trusted conspiracy
0:16
Speaker 1: dary podcast, with your hosts Adam Todd Brown and Olivia Hidar.
0:33
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, welcome to Conspiracy the Show. I'm Adam Todd Brown.
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Speaker 3: Oh, and I'm Olivia Hidar.
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Speaker 2: I saw that Olivia was coughing in that moment, so
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Speaker 2: I decided to make it worse and wait for a response. Olivia,
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Speaker 2: how's it going, Oh.
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Speaker 3: It's going great. I was just coughing. But I've got
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Speaker 3: a mic with a mute button on it now, so
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Speaker 3: the listeners don't have to hear that. Now.
1:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have a mute button, but I'd have to
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Speaker 2: reach for it, and I'm not gonna do that. I'll
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Speaker 2: just make whoever edits this edit out my coughs.
1:09
Speaker 4: Hey.
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Speaker 2: Very very rare guest on Conspiracy the Show. Well rare
1:14
Speaker 2: in that we don't often have guests on this podcast
1:17
Speaker 2: because me and Olivia don't need no fucking help, you
1:20
Speaker 2: know what I'm saying. We can carry this shit. But
1:23
Speaker 2: sometimes we have a topic that seems like it might
1:26
Speaker 2: strike a chord with someone I know. Ah, that's like
1:30
Speaker 2: a music reference, which is appropriate because Danger Van Gordon
1:34
Speaker 2: is here and he's in a band.
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Speaker 4: Hi, everybody, Yeah, we like my band, don't we.
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Speaker 2: We love your band, but we're not here to talk
1:41
Speaker 2: about your music.
1:42
Speaker 4: Maybe at one point for a little while.
1:44
Speaker 2: Yes, don't get me wrong, there will be an extended
1:47
Speaker 2: period where Danger talks about his music. But Danger also
1:51
Speaker 2: went to school to be an urban planner yep, which
1:54
Speaker 2: he's mentioned a time or two on various on Pop's
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Speaker 2: Network podcasts.
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Speaker 4: It's true, and I think our.
2:00
Speaker 2: Topic today lends itself to that expertise.
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Speaker 3: Absolutely.
2:06
Speaker 5: I mean, and are called it expertise, but you know
2:09
Speaker 5: you're not an urban planner. It's fine, it's fine.
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Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'll call it whatever I want. I call
2:14
Speaker 2: it sabotage. Thank you. Deep Internet reference there. So, yeah,
2:20
Speaker 2: we're talking about I mean, we're kind of talking about
2:23
Speaker 2: who framed Roger Rabbit in that That's.
2:26
Speaker 3: Why I watched that movie and nothing else.
2:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's actually Yeah, all we're talking about is who
2:31
Speaker 2: framed Roger Rabbit? How crazy would that be?
2:34
Speaker 4: About? The seamless blend between animation and live action.
2:37
Speaker 3: It's a fantasticas is a pioneer.
2:40
Speaker 5: The dude playing Roger Rabbit showed up in costume every
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Speaker 5: day to perform lines off camera.
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Speaker 4: That's wonderful, it is.
2:46
Speaker 2: What's that costume look like? Though?
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Speaker 5: I bet there's Rabbit ears a large bow tie overalls.
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Speaker 4: I was thinking, yeah, there was makeup involved.
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Speaker 2: I guarantee it was nightmare fuel.
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Speaker 3: But there's no way, there's no way there was makeup
3:02
Speaker 3: in fault.
3:03
Speaker 2: We're talking about what is essentially the real life story
3:07
Speaker 2: behind the events depicted in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. More
3:12
Speaker 2: commonly called the GM Streetcar Conspiracy, this is how General Motors,
3:19
Speaker 2: in concert with a few other corporations, effectively dismantled what
3:25
Speaker 2: was a very robust public transportation system in this nation.
3:30
Speaker 2: A lot of this is based on a nineteen ninety
3:33
Speaker 2: six PBS documentary called Taken for a Ride. At least
3:37
Speaker 2: a lot of what there was that documentary nineteen ninety six,
3:40
Speaker 2: but it seems much much it does.
3:42
Speaker 4: Production values have gone up a lot since then.
3:44
Speaker 3: Man, Look it was public television. It's gonna be a
3:47
Speaker 3: few years behind the curve, but it was definitely it
3:50
Speaker 3: was a very vapor wave. But it's a transportation documentary.
3:54
Speaker 2: It's also and we'll link to it. You can watch
3:57
Speaker 2: it for free on YouTube, and it's very interesting.
3:59
Speaker 5: In.
3:59
Speaker 2: What I like about it is it's from those days
4:02
Speaker 2: gone by of documentaries, when a documentary would be exactly
4:07
Speaker 2: as long as it needed.
4:08
Speaker 3: To be sure.
4:10
Speaker 2: If this came out today, it would be eight episodes
4:14
Speaker 2: on Netflix and it would be excruciating to get through
4:18
Speaker 2: all of it. But this, Yeah, fifty five Tiger King
4:22
Speaker 2: is trash and I hate it so much, and it
4:26
Speaker 2: is in part what I'm talking about when I say that.
4:28
Speaker 3: But yeah, it has never seen it.
4:30
Speaker 2: It's a trash documentary about garbage people who all deserve
4:33
Speaker 2: to be eaten by tigers, but the only one who
4:35
Speaker 2: gets eaten by a tiger is like some poor fucking
4:37
Speaker 2: worker there.
4:38
Speaker 3: Anyway, is how it always goes.
4:41
Speaker 2: Yes, we're talking about this documentary Taken for a Ride.
4:45
Speaker 2: It's fifty five minutes long. It's what I was getting
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Speaker 2: at with all on YouTube yep, free on YouTube.
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Speaker 3: It's very depressing to watch because it was made in
4:55
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety six and nothing with regards to this topic
4:59
Speaker 3: has chased in the intervening twenty four years, twenty five
5:03
Speaker 3: years or whatever long or if it has.
5:05
Speaker 2: It's gotten worse.
5:06
Speaker 5: Everything they complain about is something that still sucks and
5:09
Speaker 5: is indeed worse now, and everybody's like, I remember when
5:12
Speaker 5: we used to ride the electric motor cars up and
5:15
Speaker 5: down Broadway and we'd get there fast, and you'd talk
5:18
Speaker 5: to your neighbors and nothing smelled. Then you'd trust people
5:21
Speaker 5: on those electric conveyance isn't it. Everything was fine, smooth
5:24
Speaker 5: and reliable service. And then they're like, and over the
5:27
Speaker 5: course of six months, they became these noxious, stinky, fart
5:31
Speaker 5: factory buses that were just privately owned and that was
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Speaker 5: the difference.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, it's especially depressing watching this while living in La. Yeah,
5:42
Speaker 2: because they talk about how La used to have this
5:45
Speaker 2: very robust public transportation system and that is definitely not
5:51
Speaker 2: the case now. If you live in LA and you
5:54
Speaker 2: have to get anywhere of any significant distance and use
5:58
Speaker 2: public transportation, you got a long day ahead of it,
6:02
Speaker 2: like two hours.
6:02
Speaker 4: Yeah.
6:02
Speaker 2: Yeah.
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Speaker 5: Basically, yeah, this documentary is like, hey, do you hate traffic?
6:07
Speaker 5: This is the reason why traffic even exists is GM
6:10
Speaker 5: wanted to sell a few more cars, So in order
6:13
Speaker 5: to do that, they had to get rid of systems
6:15
Speaker 5: that worked for the public and that were low cost
6:19
Speaker 5: and helpful and reliable and clean.
6:21
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And so it all starts, I mean The
6:25
Speaker 2: documentary itself starts with this cartoon that GM put out
6:30
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifty seven that envisioned the world in the
6:34
Speaker 2: year two thousand and we all got cars, The kids
6:37
Speaker 2: got cars, the dogs got a car.
6:39
Speaker 4: Children have cars.
6:41
Speaker 2: It's a four four car garage. Like, what happens if
6:44
Speaker 2: they have another kid? You have to add on to
6:47
Speaker 2: the garage.
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Speaker 3: Yes, I think that's the idea.
6:50
Speaker 2: Insane.
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Speaker 4: Family planning was robustly encouraged in the year two thousand.
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Speaker 2: Absolutely insane.
6:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's wild. There's so many things like that throughout
6:58
Speaker 3: this documentary.
6:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of propaganda. There's a lot of
7:02
Speaker 2: General Motors produced propaganda about how buses are the best
7:07
Speaker 2: thing and how everyone hates riding rails. It's fascinating. They
7:11
Speaker 2: did such a good pr job when it came to buses,
7:15
Speaker 2: But I feel like now we're right back to where
7:17
Speaker 2: everyone's like, man, fuck a bus. I don't want to
7:19
Speaker 2: ride a bus. Well, what depends depends on where you are.
7:23
Speaker 3: It's better than not having any public transportation, oh for sure.
7:28
Speaker 3: That's the whole problem is then you get caught into
7:31
Speaker 3: that trap of thinking where it's like, well, look, we've
7:34
Speaker 3: got buses you know, why don't we just do stuff
7:38
Speaker 3: with the buses, when in fact, buses are like the
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Speaker 3: worst kind of public transportation.
7:43
Speaker 5: Except any bus in any European capital city. Those buses
7:47
Speaker 5: are rad.
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Speaker 3: They're good, but they're supported by a complex system of
7:51
Speaker 3: public transportation that allows them to flourish. That's the whole problem.
7:56
Speaker 4: Imagine that.
7:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, they do at one point talk about how these
8:00
Speaker 2: railway systems they weren't just prevalent all around the United States,
8:04
Speaker 2: but they were very common in Japan and in Western Europe. Yeah,
8:09
Speaker 2: and at one point after World War Two, all three
8:12
Speaker 2: of those regions had some decisions to make about their
8:15
Speaker 2: public transportation because people were all fuck happy in buying
8:19
Speaker 2: cars because the war was over. And in Western Europe
8:24
Speaker 2: and Japan they decided to reinvest in those public railway systems.
8:29
Speaker 2: And in the United States, we voted for cars.
8:32
Speaker 4: Because we didn't vote for shit.
8:34
Speaker 2: Well, here's the thing you're just gonna have to deal
8:36
Speaker 2: with me saying we when I talk about the government,
8:38
Speaker 2: because whether you like it or not, it's our fucking government.
8:41
Speaker 3: Yeah. And like, part of how the GM and just
8:44
Speaker 3: general auto manufacture propaganda worked was that it convinced people
8:49
Speaker 3: to vote for these things. If we were alive during
8:53
Speaker 3: the day, there's a good chance that we might have
8:54
Speaker 3: voted for this stuff because we wouldn't have known any better.
8:59
Speaker 3: And when this whole like suburban experiment and the modern
9:04
Speaker 3: form of urban planning was conceived, no one quite thought
9:10
Speaker 3: out the disastrous impact that it would end up having.
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Speaker 5: I mean, my biggest takeaway from that documentary was exactly
9:17
Speaker 5: the opposite. That there was huge amounts of people poll
9:21
Speaker 5: after poll, like eighty eight percent. I think was one
9:23
Speaker 5: of the pole results that they were like, we don't
9:26
Speaker 5: want to get rid of our electric rail systems, We
9:29
Speaker 5: don't want this freeway to be cut through these neighborhoods
9:32
Speaker 5: or that neighborhood or whatever. Seeing rooms full of people
9:35
Speaker 5: in like the mid fifties saying I don't want these
9:39
Speaker 5: stinky old buses in place of a system that already
9:43
Speaker 5: is working.
9:43
Speaker 4: Fine.
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Speaker 5: That was the hardest thing for me, because, yeah, like
9:46
Speaker 5: there is that conventional thinking of like, well, you know,
9:49
Speaker 5: people were tricked and they ended up voting against their
9:51
Speaker 5: own interest, because we see that all the time in
9:54
Speaker 5: our lives. But I didn't happened to an extent, sure,
9:57
Speaker 5: But like seeing so many people actually actively pushing back
10:01
Speaker 5: and saying no me and all of these neighborhoods, just
10:05
Speaker 5: whole neighborhoods of people were going to Washington, d C.
10:08
Speaker 5: And they bulldoze your home while you were in Washington
10:10
Speaker 5: actively lobbying against this thing.
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Speaker 4: Yeah. Sorry, it's like, okay, so what.
10:14
Speaker 2: That actually happens? By the way, in this documentary, someone
10:18
Speaker 2: goes to Washington, d C. To lobby against a highway
10:20
Speaker 2: and their home gets bulldozed while they're there. It's brutal.
10:23
Speaker 2: It's brutal. Yeah, So this all starts in the early
10:27
Speaker 2: nineteen twenties. At that point in history, the primary means
10:31
Speaker 2: of public transportation in the United States was railways, be
10:35
Speaker 2: they electric or pulled by fucking horses.
10:39
Speaker 5: At one point, yeah, because you had an inner city
10:41
Speaker 5: area where all the jobs were. There wasn't that big
10:44
Speaker 5: suburban sprawl thing happening. So if you lived in Cleveland
10:48
Speaker 5: or Los Angeles or whatever it was, then you lived
10:50
Speaker 5: in the city and you lived close enough to be
10:52
Speaker 5: able to get that rapid light rail to get to
10:56
Speaker 5: your job on the other side of town. Back when
10:58
Speaker 5: it was you know, it gets to call it town
11:00
Speaker 5: was one centralized place where all the jobs were, and
11:02
Speaker 5: it worked as well as it could because the housing
11:06
Speaker 5: was close enough and all the transportation linked it and
11:09
Speaker 5: was reliable.
11:09
Speaker 4: Right and monocentric urban planning.
11:13
Speaker 2: And at this point only one in ten Americans owned
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Speaker 2: a car. Everyone else was mostly using electric rail trains
11:20
Speaker 2: for public transportation, at least around the city. And Alfred P. Sloane,
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Speaker 2: Junior GM chairman from nineteen twenty three to nineteen fifty six,
11:29
Speaker 2: he recognizes this disparity as an opportunity because in his mind,
11:35
Speaker 2: that means that's ninety percent of an audience that we
11:39
Speaker 2: can convert to car drivers.
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Speaker 5: I'm realizing, and I don't want to get too off
11:45
Speaker 5: track here, but a lot of the podcasts and public
11:49
Speaker 5: radio and all that shit that I remember listening to
11:52
Speaker 5: is supported by grants from the Alford P.
11:54
Speaker 4: Sloan Foundation.
11:55
Speaker 5: Like I can hear Robert siegelsing Alfred P. Sloan, which
11:59
Speaker 5: did not occur to me until you just said his name. Yeah,
12:01
Speaker 5: because you get to whitewash your reputation with whatever you
12:04
Speaker 5: want after you've made your billions from corrupting the urban
12:07
Speaker 5: experience of an entire country.
12:09
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I think that's a common thing. Yeah, like
12:12
Speaker 2: Rockefeller's Carnegie. Sure, all those people wreck the world.
12:16
Speaker 5: Yeah, Jay Griffith tried to kill his wife because she
12:20
Speaker 5: was convinced that she was poisoning him, and she jumped
12:24
Speaker 5: out a window and survived.
12:25
Speaker 4: Then they named Griffith Park after him.
12:27
Speaker 3: Yet they built the observatory on that spot.
12:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, I want that to be true so much.
12:33
Speaker 2: If you look through the right you look through the
12:34
Speaker 2: right telescope, you can still see it happening because it's
12:37
Speaker 2: also haunted. It's La. Everything in LA's hanted.
12:39
Speaker 3: Course, of course, it's everything in LA's fucking haunted. Are
12:42
Speaker 3: you kidding me? Yeah.
12:43
Speaker 2: So to make this conversion of ninety percent of the
12:47
Speaker 2: public into car users, the first thing they have to
12:51
Speaker 2: do is figure out a way to get rid of
12:53
Speaker 2: all these street cars, because street cars take up street
12:57
Speaker 2: and we need street to put cars on, real cars,
13:01
Speaker 2: not these candy ass electric cars that aren't putting out
13:05
Speaker 2: any pollution. They're not killing people.
13:10
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and that's a real deal breaker. In the fifties,
13:12
Speaker 3: if it's not polluting, we can't have that.
13:16
Speaker 5: Before seat belts were invented, or crosswalks or playgrounds, when
13:21
Speaker 5: children just played in the street because it was fine,
13:23
Speaker 5: I'll come later.
13:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, you knew when the caves were coming you could
13:28
Speaker 2: play in the street. They ran on a schedule.
13:30
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, the ripping up of the street cars.
13:32
Speaker 3: It's the entire problem in a nutshell. I mean, it's
13:35
Speaker 3: what we're going to be talking about for this whole episode.
13:37
Speaker 3: But like, that does nothing to make it easier to
13:42
Speaker 3: drive a car in a city. It just makes it
13:46
Speaker 3: so that there are more people in fucking cars on
13:49
Speaker 3: that street instead of people who are in a street
13:52
Speaker 3: car and people who are driving and all that.
13:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty much every change mentioned in this documentary that
13:58
Speaker 2: is supposed to lessen trap, that can make commutes easier
14:01
Speaker 2: for people, just makes everything so much worse, just infinitely worse.
14:06
Speaker 3: It's called aduced demand. It's a big property that no
14:09
Speaker 3: one in American urban planning, you know, at least in
14:12
Speaker 3: the no one knows or cares.
14:14
Speaker 4: Dude. We learned a lot about induced demands in my
14:17
Speaker 4: master's pressure.
14:18
Speaker 5: So I mean you basically already have your degree, Olivia.
14:21
Speaker 3: Thank you? Yeah that's all I needed. Well, good, I
14:23
Speaker 3: don't even need to go to community college. Then I
14:25
Speaker 3: could just say I have a degreetor planning.
14:27
Speaker 4: So it was ordered to me on a podcast.
14:30
Speaker 2: Exactly honorary conspiracy show. Degree. Get yours in the on
14:36
Speaker 2: pop store. Now use code degree you should.
14:40
Speaker 3: Get into next for profit college.
14:43
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, for profit podcast college. We've argued about that
14:47
Speaker 2: on another podcast before.
14:49
Speaker 4: I think I was on that episode.
14:50
Speaker 2: You sure were. So the next thing Sloan does to
14:55
Speaker 2: start this process rolling is he starts buying up companies
15:00
Speaker 2: two specifically, at first Omnibus, which was the largest bus
15:04
Speaker 2: operating company in the country, and Yellow Coach, the largest
15:08
Speaker 2: bus production company. And after that, GM moves into Manhattan
15:12
Speaker 2: and buys up a bunch of steak in the New
15:17
Speaker 2: York railway system and.
15:19
Speaker 5: Between because you could do that, which was very smart, right, Yeah.
15:22
Speaker 2: And between nineteen twenty six and nineteen thirty six they
15:26
Speaker 2: just kind of methodically destroy that system and replace it
15:32
Speaker 2: with buses. But they also launched this massive advertising campaign
15:37
Speaker 2: about how moving away from railway cars and into buses
15:41
Speaker 2: is like the ethical thing, and how it's what everyone
15:45
Speaker 2: wants and it's for the best, and it was just
15:48
Speaker 2: all propaganda. People fucking hated buses. They were smelly, they
15:53
Speaker 2: were loud, they polluted, unreliable, unreliable, unlike street cars, which
16:00
Speaker 2: had been operating for a long time perfectly fine by
16:03
Speaker 2: this point. So then National City Lines opens for business
16:07
Speaker 2: in nineteen thirty six, and this is where the conspiracy
16:11
Speaker 2: angle comes into play when it comes to GM and
16:15
Speaker 2: what they did to the public transit system, because they
16:18
Speaker 2: were all of the money behind National City Lines. But
16:23
Speaker 2: publicly you couldn't tell GM was involved in this company
16:28
Speaker 2: at all, right, but not good, very bad. The director
16:33
Speaker 2: of operations came from the Yellow Coach, which we just
16:37
Speaker 2: mentioned was a GM subsidiary, and board members came from Greyhound,
16:41
Speaker 2: which was owned by GM. And also all of the
16:43
Speaker 2: money came from Greyhound, which was owned by GM, so
16:49
Speaker 2: this was a GM company. But just they hired this
16:53
Speaker 2: former bus operator from Minnesota named Roy Fitzgerald and they
16:58
Speaker 2: groom him to be the face of National city Lines. So,
17:01
Speaker 2: by all public appearances, National City Lines is just this young,
17:05
Speaker 2: upstart bus company that started with two buses and just
17:09
Speaker 2: slowly takes over the world field American story.
17:12
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, and it's the nineteen thirties, so no one
17:16
Speaker 3: can like look up and be like, wait, if he's
17:18
Speaker 3: just a farmer, then how did he get the money
17:20
Speaker 3: to start up.
17:22
Speaker 4: On a national scale.
17:23
Speaker 5: Dude, we've barely figured out how to deal with this now, Like,
17:27
Speaker 5: only now are our political advertisement saying at the bottom,
17:30
Speaker 5: who's actually supplying the major funding. Yeah, there's some gambling
17:34
Speaker 5: thing right now where there's like, Hi, my name is
17:36
Speaker 5: this person. I'm a Native American and my tribe was
17:39
Speaker 5: denied our dignity for many, many years, and that's why
17:41
Speaker 5: you vote yes on this thing major funding by draft kings.
17:45
Speaker 5: It's like, yeah, I don't know about that, guys. There's
17:48
Speaker 5: such a disconnect when you can have all that money
17:50
Speaker 5: to just move it around. We're barely catching up to it.
17:53
Speaker 5: One hundred years later, like just the tiniest shreds of culpability, responsibility,
17:59
Speaker 5: transparent is we've just started doing tiny bits of that.
18:03
Speaker 5: So hooray, maybe one hundred years we'll we'll finally have
18:06
Speaker 5: it figured out.
18:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, probably not definitely die, Are you kidding me?
18:10
Speaker 5: Yeah, if we're a coming, I'm going Kurtzwild Baby, I'm
18:14
Speaker 5: moving forever.
18:16
Speaker 2: No thanks, Yeah, hard pass on that. I'm gonna live
18:19
Speaker 2: into my hundreds at best and then out of here.
18:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like, thirty years have not been great for me.
18:27
Speaker 3: I can't even imagine in the hundreds.
18:30
Speaker 2: So eventually four other companies join in with GM in
18:33
Speaker 2: this enterprise, Standard Oil, Mac Trucks, Phillips Petroleum, and Firestone Tire.
18:40
Speaker 2: Which obviously, the thing all of those companies have in
18:44
Speaker 2: common is that it's going to be in their best
18:46
Speaker 2: interest to get as many cars and buses on the
18:49
Speaker 2: road over the next however many years, as compared to
18:53
Speaker 2: electric street cars, which are going to do these companies
18:56
Speaker 2: almost no good. Maybe Standard Oil is gonna need like
18:59
Speaker 2: for lou purposes.
19:01
Speaker 3: But yeah, the thing is and this is part of
19:04
Speaker 3: the problem with free market capitalism in general. I mean,
19:07
Speaker 3: that's a whole separate podcast. But like, it's not like
19:10
Speaker 3: any of these companies wouldn't necessarily go out of business
19:14
Speaker 3: or stop being useful or stop being profitable even if
19:20
Speaker 3: they did not destroy the country through increase motorization. It's
19:24
Speaker 3: just that they wouldn't have made quite as much money
19:29
Speaker 3: if they hadn't, And so they did, and that's why
19:32
Speaker 3: we are now where we h huh.
19:34
Speaker 5: They had an obligation to their shareholders to maximize their
19:37
Speaker 5: profit returns, and therefore, you know, the urban makeup of
19:42
Speaker 5: everywhere we know has to be fundamentally overhauled. And like,
19:45
Speaker 5: people will be annoyed for the rest of their lives,
19:48
Speaker 5: even the people who like benefited from this. Personal helicopters
19:51
Speaker 5: were not a thing at this point, but I bet
19:53
Speaker 5: you anything that there's some guls like the Aultfred Price
19:56
Speaker 5: loans or whatever, still got stuck in traffic occasionally were like.
19:59
Speaker 4: What the hell, Well, I wish we didn't do this. Wait,
20:01
Speaker 4: what am I talking about?
20:02
Speaker 2: Yeah? So, eventually National City Lines comes to kind of
20:08
Speaker 2: dominate the American public transit landscape, and in almost every case,
20:17
Speaker 2: their mo o is to go into a new market,
20:20
Speaker 2: dismantle the rail systems and replace them with buses. But
20:23
Speaker 2: they don't just go in and day one immediately destroy
20:27
Speaker 2: the rail lines. They do it kind of behind the
20:31
Speaker 2: scenes and.
20:32
Speaker 4: Slow to make it suck.
20:33
Speaker 5: First, people have to stop wanting to use it before
20:37
Speaker 5: they'll use your alternative.
20:39
Speaker 2: And they interview an absolutely evil old man who is
20:41
Speaker 2: problem was a.
20:43
Speaker 5: Ghool only shit, we are not under selling this, listeners,
20:47
Speaker 5: the guys saying that lean back into his easy liner,
20:51
Speaker 5: just sharp hay wrinkles and cruelty all over his face.
20:54
Speaker 4: And just like, yeah, we fired him. Yeah, well we
20:57
Speaker 4: told all the people to fire them, and then we
20:59
Speaker 4: fired them.
21:00
Speaker 5: He is of course the worst hitler was alive in
21:03
Speaker 5: this guy's lifetime, and there have to have been some like, oh,
21:06
Speaker 5: maybe I should be that kind of shitty.
21:07
Speaker 4: Well, I could never be that kind of shitty. I'll
21:09
Speaker 4: just be a business shitty.
21:11
Speaker 3: I mean, the thing that's the most gollic that he
21:14
Speaker 3: says is he's ancient. He's like a thousand years old, right,
21:18
Speaker 3: and he's like, of course anybody who is real close
21:20
Speaker 3: to retirement, we fired them first, because of course to
21:23
Speaker 3: get really the old people who are about to quit. Anyway,
21:26
Speaker 3: It's like Jesus.
21:27
Speaker 2: Man, I feel after he says that, for a second,
21:31
Speaker 2: I feel like there is a look on his face
21:33
Speaker 2: where he's like, oh shit, I just said that.
21:35
Speaker 3: Huh yeah, this I think that might just be the
21:38
Speaker 3: coolest of effect. You're just like reading into his blank face.
21:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, he probably had a stroke, but something.
21:45
Speaker 4: He probably has a stroke every day.
21:47
Speaker 2: This guy's name is Barney Larry.
21:49
Speaker 3: I mean he's dead now, definitely.
21:50
Speaker 2: No, he's not. He's one hundred and thirty four years old,
21:54
Speaker 2: still being kept alive at public funds or something.
21:59
Speaker 3: And it's like, look, they have a few promotorism people
22:02
Speaker 3: on this documentary, and they all look the exact state.
22:07
Speaker 3: They all look like these decrepitle ghules.
22:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this guy, the interviewer asks him about how
22:17
Speaker 2: these LA street cars that he oversaw dismantling. She says, well,
22:21
Speaker 2: weren't they profitable when you took them over? And he goes,
22:24
Speaker 2: We're I got done chopping their heads off. They made money.
22:28
Speaker 2: It's like Jesus man. And that's when he talks about
22:33
Speaker 2: firing people, and he's like, yeah, you fire him. We
22:36
Speaker 2: didn't need them. What are we going to do just
22:38
Speaker 2: keep them around? They talk about what they would do
22:42
Speaker 2: to shut these systems down, and they would basically just
22:46
Speaker 2: cut back the frequency of how often the trains ran.
22:50
Speaker 2: At first it was every ten minutes, then eventually it
22:52
Speaker 2: would be twelve minutes, fifteen minutes, eighteen minutes, thirty minutes.
22:57
Speaker 2: And the more you do that, the fewer people use
23:00
Speaker 2: and eventually you can just go, well, look, no one's
23:02
Speaker 2: using them anymore. I guess we might as well get
23:05
Speaker 2: rid of them.
23:06
Speaker 3: Yeah. When I lived in LA and I was heavily
23:08
Speaker 3: using and we miss transportation, Thank you, thank you so much.
23:11
Speaker 3: Everybody in the city. There's a daily vigil health absence
23:15
Speaker 3: but the first year especially, I mostly used public transportation
23:19
Speaker 3: to get around. And you can get on the subway,
23:23
Speaker 3: but it doesn't go very many places. And the buses
23:26
Speaker 3: they come like every thirty to forty minutes about sometimes
23:31
Speaker 3: a little more, a lot of times a little less,
23:33
Speaker 3: and like that's great for an American public transportation system.
23:38
Speaker 3: Like I live in Indiana now there's like a bus
23:41
Speaker 3: every fourth street if that, and it comes like on
23:44
Speaker 3: the hour or something. It's awful. And anybody living in
23:48
Speaker 3: Europe would listen to me describe the La transit system
23:52
Speaker 3: and be like that's good, and it is because I
23:57
Speaker 3: get to somewhere within a couple hours, whereas here I
24:01
Speaker 3: need a car. I can't not have a car, or
24:03
Speaker 3: I just can't even go like a few blocks away
24:06
Speaker 3: because it's too far, and like you're next to these
24:08
Speaker 3: horrific strodes and like awful, just polluting air. It's terrible.
24:14
Speaker 5: My favorite is there's a bus stop on the one
24:18
Speaker 5: ten freeway in the middle of the freeway, yes, and
24:22
Speaker 5: you're just expected to go there and wait for a
24:24
Speaker 5: bus as the loudest thing you can experience, sort of
24:28
Speaker 5: like a jet airliner just sort of whooshes around.
24:32
Speaker 3: You, it's terrified.
24:33
Speaker 5: Eighty miles an hour and you just got to sit
24:36
Speaker 5: there wait for the bus because that was the best
24:37
Speaker 5: place they could have put it given the resources that
24:40
Speaker 5: they had.
24:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've almost never had to take a bus in LA,
24:44
Speaker 2: except when I lived in Santa Monica. I would take
24:47
Speaker 2: it a little bit, but that was different. That doesn't count.
24:49
Speaker 2: That's like really just going around town, but just watching
24:54
Speaker 2: the people they interview in this talk about what getting
24:57
Speaker 2: around LA used to be. Like it's like, oh man,
25:00
Speaker 2: that sounds so nice. They interview a former railway worker
25:05
Speaker 2: in this, a guy named Jim Holzer, and he's very
25:07
Speaker 2: salty about what happened to the LA railway system, and
25:12
Speaker 2: at one point he explains it like, imagine you had
25:15
Speaker 2: a Rolls Royce and one day someone took it to
25:18
Speaker 2: an unqualified mechanic and that mechanic destroys your Rolls Royce.
25:21
Speaker 2: You'd be very upset about what happened to your fucking
25:24
Speaker 2: Illuminati car. And he says, well, we had the Rolls
25:27
Speaker 2: Royce of public transportation systems in LA and an unqualified
25:32
Speaker 2: mechanic destroyed it. And of course he's bitter about it,
25:36
Speaker 2: and it does suck because LA is so spread out,
25:40
Speaker 2: it really limits where you can work if you don't
25:44
Speaker 2: have a car. Like I haven't had a car most
25:47
Speaker 2: of the time I've been in LA, but it's because
25:49
Speaker 2: I've lived and worked in the same general area, or
25:52
Speaker 2: now I just work from home, so I don't have
25:55
Speaker 2: a car at all. But like, I don't know what
25:56
Speaker 2: I would do if I was having to get around
25:58
Speaker 2: and didn't also minds.
26:00
Speaker 5: At that point that he's talking about in the early
26:03
Speaker 5: mid forties, Los Angeles wasn't what Los Angeles is, which
26:07
Speaker 5: is two urban cores, two three urban cores, and job
26:11
Speaker 5: centers and then just single family homes for miles and
26:15
Speaker 5: miles and miles in every single direction. Like at that point,
26:18
Speaker 5: it was just the city of Los Angeles, a narrow
26:21
Speaker 5: corridor down to Long Beach. There was some homes up
26:24
Speaker 5: in Pasadena, some homes in the burbank Glendale kind of area,
26:27
Speaker 5: and that was pretty much everything. It was not as
26:30
Speaker 5: developed as it was, so you could get anywhere you
26:33
Speaker 5: needed to go, anywhere worth going on this particular system
26:38
Speaker 5: like LA was big at that point, but it wasn't
26:40
Speaker 5: what it is. So the system totally worked at that point.
26:43
Speaker 2: And they could have expanded the system to go along
26:47
Speaker 2: that expanded growth very easily.
26:49
Speaker 3: It would have been so much cheaper for the city
26:52
Speaker 3: to do also, rather than totally rip it up and
26:56
Speaker 3: invest in a completely new form of infrastructure.
26:59
Speaker 2: And that's one of the really frustrating things you see
27:02
Speaker 2: later in this documentary when there's a clip of the
27:05
Speaker 2: mayor of San Francisco in front of like Congress or someone,
27:09
Speaker 2: and he's advocating for these railway systems, and this old
27:15
Speaker 2: fuck is like, so you're gonna tell me there was
27:17
Speaker 2: any single railway system that would be able to accommodate
27:21
Speaker 2: San Francisco now, And it's like you're comparing apples to oranges, man, Like,
27:25
Speaker 2: if it could accommodate it, then you could just expand
27:28
Speaker 2: it to accommodate that growth. That's not an act comparison,
27:32
Speaker 2: but that's the kind of arguments people leaned on to
27:35
Speaker 2: make sure everyone drove cars forever. And now we're all
27:39
Speaker 2: gonna die.
27:40
Speaker 3: In a car, probably in.
27:41
Speaker 2: A car, and it's not fire because of global warming.
27:46
Speaker 2: So after NCL goes in and destroys Manhattan in LA,
27:51
Speaker 2: then they start just kind of setting about doing it
27:54
Speaker 2: all across the country and by nineteen forty six. They
27:58
Speaker 2: dominate the transit system in more than eighty cities in
28:02
Speaker 2: the United States. They do a thing in this documentary
28:05
Speaker 2: I really hate. They said. Instead of more than eighty
28:08
Speaker 2: which is what I said, they said, it happened in
28:11
Speaker 2: more than eighty three cities in the United States. Well,
28:14
Speaker 2: what does that mean eighty four? Why not just say
28:16
Speaker 2: eighty four? Then what does more than eighty three mean?
28:19
Speaker 2: That makes no sense. So I said more than a
28:21
Speaker 2: half cities? Yeah, here and there, balance restored than in.
28:25
Speaker 2: All the while, the public thinks this company is just
28:28
Speaker 2: owned by these two farmer fucks from Minnesota, the FitzGeralds,
28:32
Speaker 2: and that they're doing it with no corporate help at all.
28:36
Speaker 2: And then that all comes to an end when a
28:38
Speaker 2: guy named Edwin Quimby mails a warning to influential people
28:43
Speaker 2: in cities all around the country. This is how you
28:46
Speaker 2: used to have to do it before the Internet. We
28:50
Speaker 2: covered Behold a Pale Horse, which is a very famous
28:53
Speaker 2: conspiracy theory book that is total bullshit, and the guy
28:57
Speaker 2: who wrote that, at one point, like one of his
29:00
Speaker 2: first acts on the conspiracy theory scene was to just
29:04
Speaker 2: send this letter with all this UFO information to like
29:08
Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty different people. It cost him like
29:11
Speaker 2: one thousand dollars or something. And that's what Edwin Quimby does.
29:15
Speaker 2: He sends out this letter thirty three pages long.
29:20
Speaker 3: And really a letter at that point.
29:22
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a that's a manifesto.
29:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a pamphlet.
29:25
Speaker 2: He sent them a novella. And it's all about how
29:29
Speaker 2: GM is actually the money and driving force behind NCL,
29:35
Speaker 2: and that they're doing it because they want to take
29:38
Speaker 2: your electric railway systems from you and replace them with buses. Yeah,
29:44
Speaker 2: And almost immediately the press swings into action and starts
29:48
Speaker 2: calling him a conspiracy theorist and questions if he's being
29:52
Speaker 2: paid by some foreign influence And I'm sure that wouldn't
29:55
Speaker 2: happen now.
29:57
Speaker 3: No, absolutely, are you kidding? We're so much more evolved now.
30:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm glad we finally got corporate influence out of
30:04
Speaker 2: our media in the United States. But nevertheless, DLJ looks
30:08
Speaker 2: into it, and as a result of this Quimby letter,
30:12
Speaker 2: they launched this investigation and NCL and GM are eventually
30:17
Speaker 2: indicted by a federal grand jury in charge with conspiracy
30:21
Speaker 2: to violate antitrust law.
30:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, yay, good there's never been an anti trust problem
30:29
Speaker 3: in America since.
30:30
Speaker 2: And GM ceased to exist at that point in history.
30:34
Speaker 2: Just joking. The documentary points out, for one, I think
30:38
Speaker 2: GM was fined five thousand dollars.
30:41
Speaker 3: It was something like five thousand per each company or something.
30:45
Speaker 3: It was insanely tiny.
30:46
Speaker 2: Amount, and then one of the key figures in it
30:50
Speaker 2: was fined a dollar. Yeah.
30:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's sucked ass to hear. That was so awful.
30:57
Speaker 2: So it didn't do anything to stop the progress of
31:02
Speaker 2: NCL or GM. GM just kind of had to sell
31:06
Speaker 2: their stake in NCL, but they kept supplying them with
31:11
Speaker 2: the buses, so they were still making money on this.
31:14
Speaker 5: I mean, the conspiratorial thinking question line is why did
31:19
Speaker 5: the DOJ saw that all these fines. They could have said, okay,
31:23
Speaker 5: well you guys made millions of dollars at a point
31:26
Speaker 5: in time in wish millions was how we measured these things,
31:28
Speaker 5: So maybe we should have fine you guys millions of
31:31
Speaker 5: dollars to I don't know, put some of it back.
31:34
Speaker 5: And instead it's like her, what do you have on
31:36
Speaker 5: you give me that?
31:37
Speaker 4: Thanks? Right fuck out of my courtroom.
31:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, look, it's still capitalism, like it's not
31:42
Speaker 3: going to really do much to upset the apple cart.
31:45
Speaker 3: It's very frustrating, and like, by the point that even
31:48
Speaker 3: any of this punishment happened, most of the damage had
31:52
Speaker 3: already been done. Yeah, these systems had already been ripped up,
31:55
Speaker 3: and it was going to take billions of dollars to replace.
31:58
Speaker 3: And at that point, it's not worth it financially, you know,
32:02
Speaker 3: or at least it seemingly is not worth it. Yeah.
32:05
Speaker 2: The documentary says that the Justice Department spent like the
32:08
Speaker 2: next twenty five years trying to find ways to kind
32:13
Speaker 2: of halt GM's growth, and just they failed at every turn,
32:17
Speaker 2: failed darn And so then World War two happens. We
32:21
Speaker 2: already talked about this a little bit. But when was
32:23
Speaker 2: this World War Two? I think was in the late seventies.
32:27
Speaker 2: It was between US and Honduras.
32:30
Speaker 4: Okay, oh, that's right.
32:31
Speaker 5: In fourteen ninety two, the old Gay Sale, the Ocean
32:35
Speaker 5: Blue okay, right, right, right.
32:36
Speaker 2: Right right, And people start really just having kids and
32:40
Speaker 2: buying cars and moving to the suburbs after World War Two.
32:44
Speaker 2: It's the baby boom. It's when the suburbs become a thing.
32:46
Speaker 2: So people start needing cars. But also, we have these
32:49
Speaker 2: railway systems still in a lot of the United States
32:53
Speaker 2: and in again Japan, Western Europe, in those three areas
32:57
Speaker 2: all at the same time have to decide between the
33:00
Speaker 2: two and Western Europe and Japan vote in favor of railways,
33:04
Speaker 2: and they still have those in abundance in those countries now,
33:08
Speaker 2: and they're really great. They're really great. Japan's look like
33:12
Speaker 2: a little bit of chaos, but a lot of things
33:13
Speaker 2: in Japan look like chaos, but it seems like a yeah,
33:18
Speaker 2: the system works. It's just there's a lot of people
33:20
Speaker 2: on those fucking railway cars when you get on.
33:22
Speaker 3: It and look, and the systems work. But like that
33:25
Speaker 3: doesn't mean that there's not room for improvement. I think
33:27
Speaker 3: most people in Japan would agree with that.
33:30
Speaker 2: But in the United States we mostly opted for cars
33:34
Speaker 2: at this point and I'm.
33:35
Speaker 3: I'm happy with it, thank god.
33:39
Speaker 2: This is where they bring up the Pacific electric red cars,
33:42
Speaker 2: which used to be a very prominent thing in LA
33:45
Speaker 2: and it seems like those were great and they have
33:48
Speaker 2: all awesome. Yeah, there's all these meetings where the public
33:52
Speaker 2: is showing up in large numbers and arguing to keep
33:56
Speaker 2: these things in place. And since when does that listen
34:00
Speaker 2: to its people. They certainly didn't in this case, and
34:05
Speaker 2: those systems all went away. And one of the concerns
34:09
Speaker 2: at the time, if you can believe it, seemed to
34:12
Speaker 2: be pollution. A lot of people were concerned that buses
34:15
Speaker 2: and adding more cars might add to a growing pollution
34:19
Speaker 2: problem in LA. Good thing they were wrong about that.
34:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was gonna say that hasn't ever really been
34:25
Speaker 3: a concern in LA, has it?
34:27
Speaker 2: Like, well, no, they have that city engineer who gets
34:29
Speaker 2: up in front of the public and says, there were
34:31
Speaker 2: studies that showed buses don't cause pollution.
34:33
Speaker 3: So right, of course, should be fine, should be fine.
34:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was all very frustrating to watch. Yeah, Like
34:40
Speaker 2: that was just a lot of citizens of LA being
34:43
Speaker 2: exactly right about this problem and being vehemently ignored.
34:48
Speaker 5: Right at that point, a business could just find the
34:51
Speaker 5: one technocrat, the one expert who could be bought off.
34:54
Speaker 4: Like, yeah, I got a couple of weddings.
34:56
Speaker 5: I need to pay for these fucking daughters I have,
34:58
Speaker 5: so yeah, throw me fifteen K and I'll say whatever
35:01
Speaker 5: the fuck you want.
35:02
Speaker 4: Like, buses are ethical, what's sure, I'll say it. Who
35:05
Speaker 4: gives a shit? Yeah, yeah.
35:06
Speaker 5: So they had one guy who used to be on
35:08
Speaker 5: the transportation board who they met his price and then
35:12
Speaker 5: he said whatever the Standard Oil wanted him to say,
35:15
Speaker 5: and the city council or whatever was like, all right, cool.
35:18
Speaker 4: Uh, we didn't need to listen to all these rabble
35:20
Speaker 4: who live here.
35:21
Speaker 3: Just five million dollars. If anybody listening needs to bribe somebody,
35:25
Speaker 3: that's my price.
35:26
Speaker 4: Oh oh, that's really good to know. Thank you.
35:28
Speaker 3: Pretty cheap, I would say, overall, considering the quality that
35:32
Speaker 3: you're getting of the product.
35:34
Speaker 4: Right, what is the cost of the soul?
35:36
Speaker 3: Exactly?
35:37
Speaker 2: Exactly, it's five mil so, yeah.
35:39
Speaker 3: Five million, five million dollars macaroons.
35:43
Speaker 2: So they talk a little bit about how Philadelphia was
35:47
Speaker 2: the last city to kind of put up a fight
35:49
Speaker 2: against NCL and GM, but they eventually lost to And
35:53
Speaker 2: then they move into the second half of this documentary,
35:58
Speaker 2: which is about a different but also related thing, especially
36:03
Speaker 2: in that it still involves that evil Sloane guy from GM,
36:08
Speaker 2: and I immediately thought a danger when they show this
36:11
Speaker 2: PSA about traffic congestion.
36:14
Speaker 4: That is, you know, how upset I got.
36:16
Speaker 2: I believe this was put out by GM. It's from
36:19
Speaker 2: the late sixties, early seventies, and it's showing all these
36:23
Speaker 2: people stuck in traffic, and people are getting angry, and
36:26
Speaker 2: it says, don't.
36:27
Speaker 5: Honk your horn, raise your voice, tell your leaders that
36:31
Speaker 5: you want more roads and more parking.
36:35
Speaker 2: More parking. How'd you feel about that more parking line?
36:39
Speaker 2: Things bad?
36:40
Speaker 5: Because look at that point, maybe it could have been
36:43
Speaker 5: helpful at that point in the urban developments, all right,
36:46
Speaker 5: for those first couple of years, I guess, yeah, we
36:48
Speaker 5: have cars everywhere. Now we could use a few more
36:51
Speaker 5: roads in a little bit more parking. But then those
36:53
Speaker 5: rules that got set into place were.
36:56
Speaker 4: Never changed for seventy years, and just like that, into
37:00
Speaker 4: the system that's totally eaten up all of our land.
37:04
Speaker 5: Parking lots are bad, but also all of these suburban
37:07
Speaker 5: sprawled housing. Like transportation and housing are two sides of
37:11
Speaker 5: the same coin, which is that sort of efficient urban
37:15
Speaker 5: experience or suburban experience, ex urban experience, whatever you want, Like,
37:18
Speaker 5: you need to have the housing near where the jobs are.
37:20
Speaker 5: You need to get people from where the housing is
37:23
Speaker 5: to where the jobs are. And at this point they're
37:25
Speaker 5: starting to say, okay, well everybody's gonna get a car,
37:27
Speaker 5: so let's make sure that every sorry that all white
37:30
Speaker 5: Americans get their own house far from the urban cores possible,
37:36
Speaker 5: because we are pulling money out of these urban cores.
37:40
Speaker 5: We are putting them into building roads and houses, subsidizing
37:43
Speaker 5: their mortgages, making sure that these people who are white
37:47
Speaker 5: and have blue eyes and that they're gonna be taken
37:49
Speaker 5: care of and it's fine. And they obviously need cars
37:52
Speaker 5: if they're gonna get from a point A to point B,
37:54
Speaker 5: that they have to make sure that there's way too
37:56
Speaker 5: much parking everywhere to.
37:57
Speaker 4: Make that easy. Because the worst thing in the world that.
38:00
Speaker 5: Could happen is that you have to walk a couple
38:02
Speaker 5: of blocks. Who can walk a couple of blocks certainly
38:05
Speaker 5: not me?
38:06
Speaker 1: Not me.
38:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, as a single person living in a single family house,
38:11
Speaker 3: it fucking sucks. I constantly have way too much space
38:15
Speaker 3: to like keep a clean house. It's just constantly filthy
38:20
Speaker 3: because I literally in my daily life can't touch every
38:24
Speaker 3: surface in my house because there's too many. It's the worst. Like,
38:29
Speaker 3: single family neighborhoods are disastrous for anybody's living. Like, look,
38:34
Speaker 3: I get if you want to have a yard and stuff,
38:37
Speaker 3: and you know, if you've got a big family or whatever,
38:39
Speaker 3: that's fine, but it.
38:41
Speaker 5: Shouldn't be the only choice he has.
38:47
Speaker 3: I mean, that's the thing, Like, more even than the
38:50
Speaker 3: fucking cars, is the zoning in our country and no
38:54
Speaker 3: multi use zoning whatsoever in the entire fucking nation kind
38:58
Speaker 3: of makes it difficult to old neighborhoods that are nice
39:02
Speaker 3: to live in because you know, you have to drive
39:04
Speaker 3: fucking everywhere.
39:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, speaking of that, the next thing Alfred Sloan
39:10
Speaker 2: focuses on. After effectively dismantling public transportation in the United States,
39:17
Speaker 2: he starts looking toward the expansion of highways and freeways
39:22
Speaker 2: in the United States. He essentially founds the highway Lobby, which, yeah,
39:27
Speaker 2: I guess I didn't know was a thing, but it
39:29
Speaker 2: makes sense now that it would be, Yeah, a thing.
39:33
Speaker 3: That's the thing. Like, it's not really as big of
39:36
Speaker 3: a deal now because it's all established. Like it was
39:40
Speaker 3: a huge influence back in the forties and fifties and
39:43
Speaker 3: sixties because all the highways and shit were being built,
39:47
Speaker 3: and now they just need to be expanded and it's
39:49
Speaker 3: just a money scene for every fucking state.
39:51
Speaker 2: I didn't realize there was as much controversy as there
39:55
Speaker 2: was around the construction of the highway system. But it
39:58
Speaker 2: absolutely makes sense that there was I think I heard
40:02
Speaker 2: it put the best in this documentary in that someone
40:06
Speaker 2: said they're destroying communities so people who don't live there
40:11
Speaker 2: can drive through.
40:12
Speaker 3: Them quickly, and that it's the whole problem.
40:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is essentially the entire problem with how the
40:18
Speaker 2: highway system came to be, right much, just.
40:21
Speaker 5: The actual freeway system was a good idea, let's make
40:24
Speaker 5: it easy to move goods from coast to coast. It
40:28
Speaker 5: was Eisenhower that put that through. And Eisenhower, like the
40:30
Speaker 5: military general, knew the value of being able to ship
40:34
Speaker 5: military personnel and equipment from one city to another. But
40:38
Speaker 5: the problem was that they were like, Okay, well we're
40:40
Speaker 5: going to take these interested highways and put them through
40:43
Speaker 5: the center of each individual city, whereas there's places like
40:47
Speaker 5: I think DC at the time, if I'm not mistaken,
40:50
Speaker 5: the point of DC was that you couldn't actually take
40:53
Speaker 5: a freeway to the core there's that dumb ring road
40:56
Speaker 5: around it, because that kept that interior core more less intact.
41:01
Speaker 4: But you get stuff like Los Angeles where they.
41:03
Speaker 5: Just cut through, well, what's what's the poorest in parenthesis
41:06
Speaker 5: blackest part of town?
41:08
Speaker 4: Well, let's just put our freeway fucking there. It gives
41:10
Speaker 4: a shit. Yeah, oh those people, and what are we gonna.
41:12
Speaker 3: Do exactly, And it's a huge problem and it does
41:16
Speaker 3: contribute to you know, it's it's this whole thing. Like again,
41:19
Speaker 3: I live in Indianapolis. It's got a giant ring freeway.
41:22
Speaker 3: Then they have two freeways that cut straight through the
41:25
Speaker 3: city center. And those freeways make it even harder to
41:29
Speaker 3: navigate through roads because the interstates are going through one
41:34
Speaker 3: way streets and through places that can only be navigated
41:38
Speaker 3: in a certain way. And like you can cut off
41:40
Speaker 3: neighborhoods that are right next to each other, but they're
41:44
Speaker 3: impossible to get to and from because there's a highway
41:46
Speaker 3: through them at all.
41:47
Speaker 5: You're also describing San Francisco, that place with the highways
41:50
Speaker 5: and just how everything is sealed away and you have
41:54
Speaker 5: to just know where you're going in order to get there,
41:56
Speaker 5: or at least you did when I was trying to
41:58
Speaker 5: navigate it. And law was two thousand and six or so. Yeah,
42:02
Speaker 5: it's confusing. You get in New York City, it's a
42:05
Speaker 5: gread makes sense. Boom, it's a giant urban core that
42:07
Speaker 5: makes sense. But then you get these other places that
42:09
Speaker 5: are just sort of like, well, let's build them around
42:11
Speaker 5: the idea of the car and how far like an
42:14
Speaker 5: hour's worth of a drive might be. And you do that,
42:17
Speaker 5: and you add geography, and you get some really weird, amorphous,
42:21
Speaker 5: meaningless shapes, and it just sort of congeals in these
42:24
Speaker 5: weird directions, dendritic streets that just sort of end.
42:28
Speaker 2: Yeah. I found the propaganda videos around the highway stuff
42:33
Speaker 2: just fascinating eerie. There's one where a woman there's like
42:37
Speaker 2: a public meeting and it seems like everyone doesn't want
42:40
Speaker 2: this highway, and this woman stands up and says one
42:43
Speaker 2: of the most incomprehensible things I've ever heard, which.
42:46
Speaker 3: Is, it's can't it's a parody.
42:49
Speaker 2: Can't you see that this highway means a whole new
42:53
Speaker 2: way of life for these children? And that's it. In
42:56
Speaker 2: the room explodes in applause.
43:00
Speaker 3: All the people who are originally opposing the freeway are
43:02
Speaker 3: like in tears clapping at the end of this nonsense.
43:07
Speaker 2: And so Eisenhower takes office and his cabinet is outfitted
43:12
Speaker 2: with a bunch of GM allies, most importantly Charles Wilson,
43:15
Speaker 2: GM president was also Secretary of Defense, because that makes
43:19
Speaker 2: sense that, of course those two jobs would lend themselves
43:22
Speaker 2: to each other. And he immediately starts pushing highways as
43:26
Speaker 2: necessary for national security.
43:28
Speaker 4: Which, yeah, sure, that was the point I made.
43:30
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's link El Paso to Los Angeles.
43:35
Speaker 4: That makes sense. Yeah yeah.
43:36
Speaker 3: Let's definitely not expand our existing interstate rail system that
43:40
Speaker 3: we spent millions of dollars in the eighteen hundreds to build.
43:43
Speaker 3: Let's just make it highways. And look, highways are good,
43:46
Speaker 3: Like I love driving, I really love driving. I do.
43:49
Speaker 3: It shouldn't be your only option, right exactly. It's a tool,
43:53
Speaker 3: but America, you know, treats it not only like the
43:57
Speaker 3: only tool, but it's part of our identity as a country.
44:02
Speaker 3: It's really weird.
44:03
Speaker 2: So in nineteen fifty six, Congress passes the Interstate Highway
44:07
Speaker 2: System Act. They build highways and freeways all around the
44:10
Speaker 2: country and within cities. This gets red at one point
44:14
Speaker 2: in this documentary, here goes.
44:17
Speaker 3: I had never heard this.
44:18
Speaker 2: This is absurd.
44:19
Speaker 4: Oh be advised.
44:21
Speaker 5: This is right where the baby started getting super fussy
44:23
Speaker 5: for me and I had to I had to focus,
44:24
Speaker 5: switch gears. Wasn't able to finish this particular documentary. But
44:27
Speaker 5: I was like, I know most of this stuff and
44:29
Speaker 5: I'm already mad, So.
44:30
Speaker 3: Well, you're gonna love this cool.
44:32
Speaker 2: Here goes oh Almighty God, who has given us this
44:36
Speaker 2: earth and has appointed men to have domination over it,
44:41
Speaker 2: who has commanded us to make straight the highways, to
44:45
Speaker 2: lift up the valleys, and to make the mountains low.
44:49
Speaker 2: We asked thy blessing, bless these on nations road builders
44:53
Speaker 2: and their friends. That's the road builders Prayer, nineteen forty six,
44:58
Speaker 2: author unknown, so Uoming it was the CIA.
45:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, of course I would love to read the Book
45:04
Speaker 3: of the Bible where the Lord talks about the fucking
45:08
Speaker 3: highways that we need to build. You know, Jesus driving
45:11
Speaker 3: a bitching hot rod.
45:16
Speaker 2: So it happens highways are built, it's chaos. People are
45:20
Speaker 2: displaced from their homes. In a lot of cases, the
45:22
Speaker 2: freeways aren't helping. There's a really notorious example of the
45:26
Speaker 2: one that went up in Boston initially that fed four
45:29
Speaker 2: lanes of traffic into three lanes of highway. Like, that's
45:33
Speaker 2: not helping engineering at all.
45:36
Speaker 4: And in some.
45:37
Speaker 2: Places people protest and just don't drive on them or
45:41
Speaker 2: refuse them all together. Initially, San Francisco's mayor. He seems
45:46
Speaker 2: like one of the more prominent voices speaking out against
45:49
Speaker 2: these highway systems at the time. Joseph Alioto. Granted, I'm
45:53
Speaker 2: sure he oppressed people of color in some way in
45:56
Speaker 2: this capacity, but he seemed but.
46:00
Speaker 3: He's pretty great love.
46:02
Speaker 2: On this particular front. He seems like a decent egg.
46:05
Speaker 2: And he gets a call from the state and they're like,
46:10
Speaker 2: we want to put a highway along the Embarcadero, and
46:12
Speaker 2: he's like, no, you can't. People don't want it. It's
46:15
Speaker 2: gonna be stinky and smelly, and you are not allowed
46:19
Speaker 2: to do that. It's a very pretty area and you're
46:21
Speaker 2: gonna make it ugly and no. And he is featured
46:25
Speaker 2: a lot in this speaking out against the highway lobby.
46:28
Speaker 2: At one point, he says, those freeway people would put
46:31
Speaker 2: a highway right through the Vatican if you let them.
46:34
Speaker 2: And here's the thing I would too, to be honest, like, that's.
46:36
Speaker 3: Not why for a different reason, Yes.
46:40
Speaker 2: Exactly, that's the whole thing. I don't think me and
46:43
Speaker 2: him are on the same page when it comes to
46:45
Speaker 2: that comparison. But and yeah, there's lots of interviews with
46:48
Speaker 2: people who talk about how brutal. This point in history
46:52
Speaker 2: was when we were building these freeways through all these
46:54
Speaker 2: communities and just displacing people left and right. One woman
46:58
Speaker 2: mentions how it was so bad that she assumed it
47:02
Speaker 2: would be no time at all before the government would
47:04
Speaker 2: be like, all right, this has been a disaster, we
47:06
Speaker 2: should probably pull back on this, and whoops, not us.
47:11
Speaker 2: We really really kept at it. And yeah, by the
47:14
Speaker 2: mid sixties, the government had just very clearly sided with cars,
47:19
Speaker 2: and that's kind of where it lies. They talk a
47:22
Speaker 2: little more in the documentary about the mayor of San
47:25
Speaker 2: Francisco kind of lobbying against these highways and how that
47:31
Speaker 2: public attention did cause a little bit of a comeback
47:34
Speaker 2: for public transportation and that's why, like the bart system
47:38
Speaker 2: exists in San Francisco, or why Washington, DC has the
47:44
Speaker 2: subway system that they have. That point in history is
47:48
Speaker 2: when there was this brief resurgence where those kind of
47:53
Speaker 2: systems became a thing. But it's back to the point
47:56
Speaker 2: where we desperately need way more of that. I mean,
48:00
Speaker 2: in bigger cities, I feel like you can get to
48:02
Speaker 2: the airport and a lot of places pretty easy, and
48:06
Speaker 2: that's about it.
48:07
Speaker 3: Facilitating commerce and travel.
48:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, like Chicago, Denver, you can share a shit get
48:12
Speaker 2: from the airport to wherever you want to be. But
48:14
Speaker 2: after that, I mean you can get wherever you want. Chicago,
48:17
Speaker 2: You're gonna get stabbed on a lot of those yeah trains.
48:20
Speaker 3: I mean yeah, And in any of these things like
48:23
Speaker 3: Chicago or anything, these places that have very flawed, subpar
48:28
Speaker 3: transit systems are still among the best in the country
48:31
Speaker 3: because yeah, everywhere else they're non existent. So you know,
48:36
Speaker 3: we'll take what we can get at a certain point.
48:38
Speaker 2: So danger, how do we fix this? I mean, you
48:40
Speaker 2: went to school, yeah for it, So I feel like
48:43
Speaker 2: if you could, in like, yeah, ninety to one hundred
48:46
Speaker 2: and twenty seconds.
48:47
Speaker 3: Just yeah, lay out please.
48:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, lay out our path forward for the future. Please go.
48:53
Speaker 4: Uh yeah. So telecommuting is going to be big and bigger.
48:58
Speaker 3: Uh.
48:58
Speaker 5: We got to make sure that we'reing the portfolios of
49:02
Speaker 5: large land owners appropriately so that we can get the
49:06
Speaker 5: resources that we need to build the kind of infrastructure
49:09
Speaker 5: and housing that we need.
49:11
Speaker 4: Single family zoning is not good.
49:14
Speaker 5: If you ever climb up to the Hollywood Hills or
49:17
Speaker 5: anywhere in southern California that is a mountain, and you
49:19
Speaker 5: look and you will only see I don't know, like
49:22
Speaker 5: three quarters of it at least will be single family housing.
49:25
Speaker 5: All of that is a political decision that got made
49:28
Speaker 5: a long time ago, and it remains so because people
49:31
Speaker 5: still think that their housing valuation is more important than
49:34
Speaker 5: actually building infrastructure and things that need in the areas
49:38
Speaker 5: where the jobs might exist. Spoiler alert, ladies and jele me,
49:42
Speaker 5: your housing values go up regardless of whether or not
49:46
Speaker 5: there is an apartment building on your street corner or something,
49:50
Speaker 5: because more housing means more desired to live somewhere, which
49:53
Speaker 5: means you'll be able to sell out a profit.
49:55
Speaker 4: You know. Congratulations, y'all.
49:58
Speaker 5: Polycentric job centers are what we have now, so we
50:00
Speaker 5: have to figure out how to get the I mean,
50:02
Speaker 5: it's an ugly thing to say, but buses like the
50:04
Speaker 5: buses that exist, more and more buses charging more appropriately.
50:09
Speaker 4: For parking, making it more expensive to use a car.
50:12
Speaker 3: But also you actually had to Yeah, they were way
50:16
Speaker 3: past two minutes.
50:17
Speaker 2: Yeah. I feel like I feel like the lights.
50:22
Speaker 5: Make it easier to take transit and make it harder
50:25
Speaker 5: to use private transportation.
50:27
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, I mean.
50:28
Speaker 5: That's don't don't sleep on the housing part of it.
50:31
Speaker 5: The housing part is huge.
50:32
Speaker 3: It has to be a holistic approach. It has to
50:34
Speaker 3: be housing, it has to be zoning. Hey, people in
50:37
Speaker 3: the middle of the country, don't you want to get
50:39
Speaker 3: in on the bodega debate about you know what it's
50:43
Speaker 3: like to have a bodega on your street corner? Come on,
50:46
Speaker 3: get into multi use zoning. It's great.
50:48
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, So yeah, that's the documentary, that's the debate.
50:53
Speaker 2: I think it is pretty clear that GM there was
50:55
Speaker 2: obviously a conspiracy to destroy street cars. There have been
51:01
Speaker 2: since then. The argument you see the most against this
51:04
Speaker 2: idea is that, well, all of those railway systems were
51:08
Speaker 2: in decline and starting to fail when GM came in
51:12
Speaker 2: and took them over. And I feel like that's a
51:15
Speaker 2: very weak excuse because they could have just reinvested money
51:18
Speaker 2: in those and expanded those.
51:21
Speaker 3: Yeah, would have been cheaper.
51:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, it would have been cheaper, would have been less
51:24
Speaker 2: profit for GM. I'm sure.
51:26
Speaker 5: Hey, in nineteen fifties America, do you have a problem
51:29
Speaker 5: consider setting it on fire?
51:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, yes.
51:33
Speaker 3: Absolutely so.
51:35
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know if I agree with that debunking
51:39
Speaker 2: of this conspiracy. I also saw an article that said
51:43
Speaker 2: GM wasn't convicted of a conspiracy to destroy rail systems.
51:51
Speaker 2: And it's like, well, yeah, because there's no law that
51:53
Speaker 2: says that specific thing, asshole, that's still why it happened.
51:58
Speaker 2: But no, it wasn't that exact wording in the fucking
52:02
Speaker 2: official government document that punished them for it. Fucking a
52:06
Speaker 2: chirk off.
52:07
Speaker 3: America does have a great track record of charging companies
52:11
Speaker 3: with anything, like we kind of just let them do
52:13
Speaker 3: what they want.
52:14
Speaker 4: You did, what will you do it again? Yes, I'll
52:17
Speaker 4: try not to.
52:18
Speaker 3: Well, you're trying to make a little more money next time, Okay.
52:22
Speaker 2: You're gonna have to pay us, Okay. Yeah. It really
52:26
Speaker 2: is like sometimes corporations just sort of get shaken down
52:31
Speaker 2: by the government as opposed to ever facing any punishment,
52:35
Speaker 2: like banks or like car companies, where like they'll make
52:39
Speaker 2: all of this money cutting corners on environmental shit, and
52:43
Speaker 2: then they'll get like a two million dollar fine and
52:46
Speaker 2: it's like they made so much money cutting those corners,
52:49
Speaker 2: Like that's not punishing, that's just asking for your share
52:52
Speaker 2: of the profits. That doesn't need nothing.
52:55
Speaker 3: You're describing a fundamental problem of free market capitalism. I
52:58
Speaker 3: mean this is the whole.
53:00
Speaker 2: Oh no, capitalism, great, I won't hear capitalism be slandered
53:03
Speaker 2: on this American podcast.
53:05
Speaker 3: Of course, of course, of course I love green dollar
53:07
Speaker 3: dollar bills all that. It's awesome.
53:10
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, this podcast is brought to you by cash Cash.
53:13
Speaker 3: You need to buy cash.
53:15
Speaker 2: Cash, Yeah yeah, send me in Olivia cash if like,
53:19
Speaker 2: especially if you're like getting off into gold because you're
53:22
Speaker 2: a survivalist or something, Just send that. Will you send
53:26
Speaker 2: that worthless ass cash to me and Olivia and danger kids?
53:32
Speaker 2: So do we have any final thoughts on this si?
53:35
Speaker 3: It's very depressing. Like I said, this is made in
53:38
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety six, and it could be made exactly the
53:42
Speaker 3: same today, except a lot of the people who remember
53:45
Speaker 3: how good public transportation used to be are now dead
53:48
Speaker 3: and so can't advocate for it, so it would actually
53:52
Speaker 3: be even more depressing.
53:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, you'd have to build your eight part Netflix documentary
53:57
Speaker 2: series around the footage from this documentary because most of
54:01
Speaker 2: these people are dead now, hopefully including that fuck face
54:05
Speaker 2: that fired all the LA railway.
54:06
Speaker 3: Oh the word hotly that vampire must be dead.
54:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, I hope he died sad and penniless. Man.
54:13
Speaker 5: What bothers me the most is that there's that old
54:15
Speaker 5: timey recording was like, Wow, I don't think of sounds
54:17
Speaker 5: like this, and it's a godly speaking like this, and
54:20
Speaker 5: he's saying things that I've thought but never heard spoken
54:23
Speaker 5: out loud, Like why is it in every car commercial
54:26
Speaker 5: you never see any other cars on the road.
54:29
Speaker 4: There's never any other people. It's only just a beauty
54:31
Speaker 4: and the speed. And that's just not how things go.
54:34
Speaker 5: It's like, yeah, wait, this guy said that seventy years
54:37
Speaker 5: ago and nobody noticed.
54:39
Speaker 4: What the hell?
54:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, because he.
54:41
Speaker 3: Was talking like this, You're saying everything like this and
54:44
Speaker 3: no one could pay attention to any of his.
54:46
Speaker 2: Words exactly makes it very distracting.
54:49
Speaker 3: It's sad I have to make very stupid jokes because
54:52
Speaker 3: this is a very depressing subject that currently affects everybody listening. Yeah,
54:58
Speaker 3: if they're in America. If you're not in America, you.
55:00
Speaker 5: Yeah, Hey, you America, enjoy your hopefully much better transit
55:05
Speaker 5: and housing.
55:06
Speaker 3: Yeah that's guys, you're right.
55:10
Speaker 4: I hope at least you have some air conditioning.
55:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, they don't walkable cities.
55:15
Speaker 2: We also sided with air conditioning over being uncomfortable in
55:19
Speaker 2: this country.
55:20
Speaker 3: So look, I gotta have the air condition Yeah.
55:22
Speaker 2: I'd be that if this documentary was about air conditioning,
55:26
Speaker 2: I'd be that person on the LA Freeway who was like,
55:29
Speaker 2: I've never done life without it? What do you mean
55:31
Speaker 2: I can't be though, I'm not gonna get Yeah, I
55:35
Speaker 2: have too. I grew up very poor and hot. So
55:39
Speaker 2: not hot in the cool way, hot in the it's
55:42
Speaker 2: sweltering in my home way.
55:43
Speaker 3: Okay, we don't know one says hot.
55:45
Speaker 2: Anymore, so I do.
55:46
Speaker 3: I still say hot, good, I'm glad.
55:48
Speaker 4: I also say I'm glad.
55:51
Speaker 3: Guys a couple of old guys.
55:55
Speaker 2: So I think that's our episode. Thank you both for
55:58
Speaker 2: doing it. Do we have anything to plug before we
56:02
Speaker 2: get out of here? Olivia? How about you going back?
56:05
Speaker 3: And you guys lost rewatch podcast? You can listen to that.
56:09
Speaker 3: It's on the on Pop's Patreon in the conspiracy tier.
56:12
Speaker 3: Other than that, no, no plugs, nothing.
56:16
Speaker 2: I will quickly mention that I am doing a live
56:19
Speaker 2: podcast in New York City August twenty eighth at four
56:23
Speaker 2: pm at caveat NYC with Alex Schmidt, Chalice Fauwkins in
56:27
Speaker 2: Sliceberg's slim almost said Slice Berg Smith, who the fuck
56:31
Speaker 2: is that? You can get tickets at on pops dot
56:33
Speaker 2: Coe slash NYC, come out and meet me, especially if
56:36
Speaker 2: you liis. I feel like I have not met most
56:38
Speaker 2: of the people who listen to this podcast. I don't
56:41
Speaker 2: know how much crossover there is, but come out. Just
56:44
Speaker 2: pretend it's a conspiracy pod and come out and meet
56:47
Speaker 2: me anyway, and tell me. I don't know why fucking
56:50
Speaker 2: pizzagate is real or whatever you want to talk about.
56:53
Speaker 3: But do you want to encourage that?
56:55
Speaker 2: No, I actually don't. Yeah, yeah, don't do that. Yeah,
56:59
Speaker 2: if you're one of the people who canceled because I
57:01
Speaker 2: put out a Trump episode this week and you said
57:04
Speaker 2: I was too woke, don't come. Don't. I don't need
57:08
Speaker 2: that energy there.
57:09
Speaker 3: But otherwise it never ceases to amaze me when you
57:12
Speaker 3: mentioned that that happens, that there are still people who
57:15
Speaker 3: support Trump who listen.
57:17
Speaker 2: Oh, well, it's just because I'm very good at podcasts.
57:20
Speaker 2: No better than Trump isn't being president.
57:24
Speaker 5: So I mean, absolutely is always getting elected president.
57:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, well exactly so unpops Dot CEO slash NYC come
57:33
Speaker 2: to that, all right, danger, let's hear those plugs.
57:36
Speaker 4: Sure. I mean, I'm on paternity leave, I'm tired all
57:39
Speaker 4: the time. I got a baby.
57:42
Speaker 5: Please listen to countless thousands Patreon dot com slash countless thousands.
57:47
Speaker 5: We are going to be putting out a new album
57:50
Speaker 5: called Tremble very soon. I believe We've got a new
57:52
Speaker 5: collaboration coming out really soon that I'm very excited for.
57:56
Speaker 4: I can't wait. We're whatever it's We're.
57:59
Speaker 5: Doing our own version the Monster Mash, and it's gonna
58:01
Speaker 5: be dope, and it's gonna be out by Halloween. And
58:02
Speaker 5: we have a very special guests who will be working
58:05
Speaker 5: in the lab late one night. Yeah, it's gonna be
58:06
Speaker 5: dope of shit. So Pageantic kamsas counting thousands. I barely
58:09
Speaker 5: tweet anymore, but countless ones yours, there's a yours. Just
58:12
Speaker 5: just email us countless thousands of Gmail. Just just let
58:15
Speaker 5: me know I exist, because I forget that the world's
58:18
Speaker 5: out there because I'm up at I'm up at four
58:20
Speaker 5: every day putting formula into a tiny baby that refuses
58:25
Speaker 5: to sleep.
58:26
Speaker 4: M Yeah, so.
58:27
Speaker 3: Sounds fun, it's not.
58:29
Speaker 4: But we go out.
58:30
Speaker 5: I put her in the little babysiting, we go out
58:32
Speaker 5: walking shout to count the skunks.
58:34
Speaker 4: There's a lot of skunks in the neighborhood. They're really cute.
58:37
Speaker 5: One day my dog's going to charge at them and
58:39
Speaker 5: it's all gonna be over. That's the day the.
58:42
Speaker 4: Dog's getting kicked. It's the day that my dog's getting
58:44
Speaker 4: kicked into the moon.
58:46
Speaker 2: Oh what, Okay, don't kick your.
58:49
Speaker 4: Dog into the moon.
58:51
Speaker 5: I'll only ever kick him if I kick him into
58:53
Speaker 5: the moon because he chased a skink and the skink
58:55
Speaker 5: spray us.
58:56
Speaker 3: Okay, what is happening?
58:58
Speaker 2: Okay, I think that that's it. Let's get out of
59:01
Speaker 2: here danger. Say goodbye, and don't kick your dog. Bye. Everybody, Olivia,
59:06
Speaker 2: say goodbye, bye, goodbye, everybody.
59:09
Speaker 3: We love you.
59:14
Speaker 4: Peaklver planet has to be destroying