Podcasts about vw beetle

The BOB & TOM Show – June 18, 2026 6:00 AM Hour6:00 – Turtles and Floyd6:05 – Kristi ran over a turtle6:06 – Tom picked up a turtle and moved it to the side of the road6:07 – Chick does not trust raccoons6:08 – National Go Fishing Day6:09 – Discussion about the movie Storks6:21 – Letter about a 1956 Studebaker for sale in Grand Rapids6:23 – Letter about watching the World Cup and coach Dick Advocaat6:25 – Discussion about Barney Frank6:26 – Letter about the VW Beetle being good for doing donuts6:29 – Letter about cheering for the Congo team6:30 – Letter about using a bug assault gun6:31 – Letter about a homemade garage urinal6:34 – Discussion about garage plumbing6:36 – Music reference6:48 – Chick tells Tom he sounds like an idiot6:49 – Music reference6:53 – Letter about deep-fried apple pie6:54 – Letter requesting Kristi's hard-boiled egg air-cooker recipe 7:00 AM Hour7:04 – Jeff in studio7:05 – National Go Fishing Day7:09 – Jeff discusses getting caught without a fishing license7:09 – Sports7:24 – Tom cleans his wallet and credit cards7:25 – Oldest turtle reported at 194 years old7:30 – Discussion about turtle mating7:31 – Pat update on "Good Beaver Gone Bad" and Gen Z trends7:34 – Pat prefers the word "fonky" instead of "wonky"7:48 – Tom explains wiper blade pauses7:50 – Anniversary of Chick's meltdown discussion7:53 – Chick's meltdown 8:00 AM Hour8:05 – Toxic dating service and kitten fishing8:06 – Jeff discusses gobbleintamency8:15 – Tom discusses THC-infused dog treats8:17 – Larry Storch discussion8:26 – Theme song reference8:29 – Discussion about Little Feat appearing on F-Troop8:32 – Today in History8:38 – Josh questions Pat about missing something in Tom's head8:49 – Kristi discusses pan-frying glazed donuts8:51 – Discussion about content creators 9:00 AM Hour9:03 – Al Jackson joins via Zoom from Bloomington, Illinois9:06 – Listener text discussion9:09 – Buns discussion9:11 – Spiral posting discussion9:27 – Tom writes to his daughters at camp9:32 – Robot toilets9:45 – Discussion about Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Sphere9:50 – Giraffe names Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The investigation into Ted Bundy's second year of killing began with a traffic stop nobody planned. Sergeant Bob Hayward, a twenty-two-year veteran of the Utah Highway Patrol, was sitting in his cruiser outside his own home in Granger, Utah, at 2:30 in the morning when a tan VW Beetle passed with its headlights off. He chased it. He searched it. What he found inside — a ski mask, a pantyhose mask with eyeholes cut by hand, a crowbar, an ice pick, rope, and handcuffs — was a kit assembled by someone who had thought about what he was going to use it for.The driver was Ted Bundy. He had no record. He was released on his own recognizance.Two days later, Salt Lake County Detective Jerry Thompson read the arrest report and connected the name to Carol DaRonch — the eighteen-year-old who had fought her way out of a Volkswagen nine months earlier after a man posing as Officer Roseland tried to handcuff her at a mall. Thompson called Mike Fisher in Colorado, who had the Caryn Campbell case. He called Bob Keppel in King County, who had eight names and a stack of tip cards.For the first time, three states realized they had been working the same case for nineteen months without knowing it.The women between those states — Nancy Wilcox, Melissa Smith, Laura Aime, Debby Kent, Caryn Campbell, Julie Cunningham, Denise Oliverson, Lynette Culver, Susan Curtis — crossed jurisdictions nobody had connected. Five states. Five agencies. No shared file.This is the second of five conversations in Ted Bundy: History's Hidden Killers. The investigative thread that finally tied the cases together — and the survivor and the accident that made it possible.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#TedBundy #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #Utah #Colorado #CarolDaRonch #Survivor #SerialKiller #TrueCrimePodcast #ColdCase

The guys forge ahead with their ‘Peak' car series, and discuss the best eras of brands Maserati through Polestar. They debate cars that are reliable and easy to live with for Steven in New England, who is a VW Beetle enthusiast. Then, Joseph is trying to convince his wife that cars have soul, and don't just have to be a “crossover safety pod.” Audio-only MP3 is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and 10 other platforms. Look for us on Tuesdays if you'd like to watch us debate, disagree and then go drive again! 00:00 - Intro 01:34 - BMW Officially Announces The New i3 07:22 - BMW M3 Touring 24h - No Longer A Joke 10:01 - Nissan Confirms New Z Styling + NISMO Z Details 14:22 - Topic Tuesday: Peak Maserati - Polestar 1:08:41 - EDD & HOD Events March 2026; COTA And Pilgrimage 2026 1:10:40 - Car Debate #1: The Beetle Family 1:20:53 - Car Debate #2: Convincing Your Wife That Cars Have Soul Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and subscribe to our two YouTube channels. Write to us your Topic Tuesdays, Car Conclusions and those great Car Debates at everydaydrivertv@gmail.com or everydaydriver.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we say 'the cloud' what we mean is 'the data centre'. Globally, data centres are projected to consume over 1000 terawatt hours in 2026. What does that mean for energy production, distribution, and consumption? Guest Phil Harris, Cerio President and CEO, joins thinkenergy to shed light on something we all rely on but may not fully understand. From efficiency to sustainability, environmental concerns to Cerio's role improving how data centres manage energy. Listen in for the future of cloud computing.  - Related links  ●       Cerio: https://www.cerio.ai/ ●       Phil Harris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paharris/  ●       Trevor Freeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-freeman-p-eng-8b612114  ●       Hydro Ottawa: https://hydroottawa.com/en     To subscribe using Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thinkenergy/id1465129405 To subscribe using Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7wFz7rdR8Gq3f2WOafjxpl To subscribe on Libsyn: http://thinkenergy.libsyn.com/ --- Subscribe so you don't miss a video: https://www.youtube.com/user/hydroottawalimited Follow along on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hydroottawa Stay in the know on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HydroOttawa Keep up with the posts on X: https://twitter.com/thinkenergypod --- Transcript: Trevor Freeman  00:07 Welcome to think energy, a podcast that dives into the fast, changing world of energy through conversations with industry leaders, innovators and people on the front lines of the energy transition. Join me, Trevor Freeman, as I explore the traditional, unconventional and up and coming facets of the energy industry. If you have any thoughts, feedback or ideas for topics we should cover, please reach out to us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com. Hi everyone, and welcome back. Data centres have come up a number of times on this show, and for very good reason, they have become a key underpinning technology for so much of our lives, every time we pull out that phone from our pockets to pull up directions or buy something online or doom, scroll on your social media or new site of choice, every time you use your phone stream a movie, leverage an AI model, whatever you end up using it for, it's funny as I read this list, I'm sure there's like some university student out there who's thinking, man, what is this old man talking about? We don't use our phones for that, whatever the kids are doing these days, whatever we're doing these days with our phones, with our computers, our tablets, et cetera. All of that leverages infrastructure that most of us have never seen and, quite frankly, probably don't really understand we talk about the cloud like it's this amorphous, nebulous thing, but in reality, we're talking about real hardware in a real building that uses real energy, mainly electricity, a lot of water. And this isn't really new, like we've been leveraging centralized data centres for many years now, but what is changing is the scale of the data centres that we're seeing now, and the pace of growth in computing power that we need to do, the things that we want to do, and that our data centres are able to deliver. So just to throw a few numbers at it, the traditional data centre servers that maybe power the early days of on demand online streaming services, for example, they used anywhere from five to 15 kilowatts per rack. But modern server racks that are used to power AI searches, for example, can hit anywhere from 60 to 100 kilowatts per rack. This is great from a power output per rack perspective, but it means massive energy needs, and that is showing up in the size of load requests that we're seeing from new data centres. New data centres today are asking for service connections that are orders of magnitude higher than those built even just five years ago, globally, data centres are projected to consume over 1000 terawatts in 2026 or terawatt hours, sorry, in 2026 and just a quick kind of refresher from high school or wherever you would have learned this, a terawatt is 1000 gigawatts, which is 1000 megawatts. So 1000 terawatt hours, which is roughly equivalent to the annual electricity demand from the country of Japan, an entire country. So given all of this, there are a lot of incentives to find ways to maximize efficiency and reduce some of that energy demand, and that's where my next guest, Phil Harris and his company Cerio come into play. I'll let Phil get into the details of exactly what Cerio does, but essentially, their goal is to reimagine the data centre to maximize sustainability and reduce energy needs. Phil is Cerio's President and CEO, and has been in the networking and data centre industry for over 35 years, including at well known companies like Intel and Cisco. And I'm really excited about this conversation. One to understand, how do we make data centres a little bit more efficient, or maybe a lot more efficient, but also just to really understand, like, what are we talking about when we talk about a data centre? What is actually happening, what is physically inside these buildings, and we'll get into a little bit of that in our conversation. So Phil, welcome to the show.   Phil Harris  04:13 Well, thanks, Trevor. I appreciate it.   Trevor Freeman  04:13 So Phil, obviously we're here today to talk about your work building sustainable data centres, or trying to make data centres a little bit more sustainable. But before we get into that. You know, you've spent your career, you know, decades of your career at different tech giants. Let's call them in telecisco to to mention, you've seen quite a bit of change. No doubt, over your time, has that changed, like, does this industry change linearly? Does it grow fairly steady, or is it kind of big jumps? And are we on the cusp of any major shifts? What can you kind of tell us about the future of this, this sector, data, tech, etc?   Phil Harris  04:48 It's interesting, I think, as companies start, and I was at companies like Cisco, for example, when it was a very small company to when it was very large company. And this should be no surprise for anybody, the bigger the company gets, the harder. It is to change, and they really find that the only way they change is when they absolutely have to, not because they want to, and that's a combination of just inertia and shareholders expectations and a whole bunch of things. So I would say that the bigger the company is, the harder is them, for them to react. And so I think small, nimble companies tend to do much better when there's a lot of transformational technology and development and changes in the overall ecosystem we live in. I think just the second part of your question, you know, I look at the current situation as a point in time where a lot of companies will have to make some significant changes, simply because we're hitting too many walls, technological walls, commercial walls, geopolitical walls, that are really sort of confining what people can do. So I think what's going to about to happen is we're about to see a significant change, and this is not atypical in the industry. If we think about back into the into the start of what we would think of today as computer science around mainframes that were happening in the 60s. You know, for about a decade and a half, two decades, there was a lot of dominance around a particular way of doing things. And then some new innovational technology came along that rapidly changed, that scaled out, and it went from a very dominant set of players to a much larger number of smaller players who could then provide more innovation and more scale and more choice. And I think we're about to see that transition occurring as well.   Trevor Freeman  06:25 So is this, is there sort of like an analogous time, 10 years ago, 20 years ago? Are we on the cusp of, like, the big, the big change that we've seen before? Like, what would you compare this to? You know, in the last 2030, years?   Phil Harris  06:40 Yeah. I mean, I think there's been eras of compute. And if we say, I mean, we can find analogies outside of the compute world, but let's just stay in the compute, computing science world. I gave the mainframe example as one, and then we went to what we call client server, which scaled out rapidly. Telephony. We went from large, big telephone exchanges that started in in the government space, went to very large organizations. Now, basically we've completely scaled out how we make phone calls to use that now 20th century as a terminology. Nobody really makes telephone calls anymore. And we went through this with cloud computing and the Internet, where there was a change in the approach to the way we did things that suddenly gave us a scale out mentality, rather than a scale up mentality. And I think that's what we have to key in on here. Is it that we can take some of you? I was on a panel yesterday where we were talking about scale, and I say, well, to scale or not to scale? That is not the question. It's how do we scale? Do we continue to scale up, which is the current model, or do we start to think about scaling out, which is a more distributed model? So we go from a small number of big things to a large number of smaller things. And typically in computer science, whatever you want to start, storage, compute, memory, telephony, everything we've ever done goes through this arc.   Trevor Freeman  07:59 Yeah, it's it's interesting, and it's, there's obviously my brain's gonna immediately try and find those, those similarities between my world that I live in on the energy side of things. And it's the same question, like, there, there's, there is no path where we're not expanding the amount of energy we need. We're not going to be using more energy. But there are different ways to do that, and there are different paths we can take the business as usual that just grow, grow, grow, decentralized energy production and large scale transmission. Or there's a combination of like, grow those things, but also find alternative methods. More ders more sort of like close to consumer energy sources and storage, et cetera, et cetera. And people that listen to this podcast know I kind of go on ad nauseam about this. So lots of similarities. There another kind of framing or foundational thing that I want to talk through before we really get into the meat of our conversation is helping ground both myself and our listeners, and what exactly we're talking about here. So we, we all use, whether we know it or not, we use, you know, like cloud computing constantly, whether it's in our calls, how we're using the internet, using AI, more, more frequently. Now, what is the physical reality behind that? What's actually happening? What is the term data centre? What is a data centre for our listeners here? What does that look like?   Phil Harris  09:26 Yeah, let's start there. That's a great question. We started recognizing that the amount of power and space required for computers in companies and government in all sorts of different applications was getting larger than we could put in a room, in a closet near maybe where people were using it. We had to sort of create dedicated space, because the power requirements, the cooling requirements, just the noise. You can't hear this, but just in my basement, I have a few different compute systems that my wife continues to tell me is keeping my neighborhood awake. The reality is the environmentals of these things became very difficult. So we created these purpose built locations that had then different requirements in terms of access and facilities and power and cooling and staffing. And so they became a new way of thinking about building compute infrastructure at a building level, not just at the individual computers themselves. So a data is usually a very large room or building, I should say that houses large amounts of compute and storage and other networking equipment. There's a whole range of different technologies that go into a data centre that allows us to process information. That's what a data centre is. To give you some analogies in the US, there's about nearly 6000 data centres, depending on how you measure a data centre. In Canada, we have about 400 in Europe, there's about 750 that we can identify as standalone data centres. You can probably find more places where computers are outside of people's homes, but that's about the ratio we're looking at.   Trevor Freeman  10:59 And we're seeing, I think, and tell me if I'm wrong here, like, all this talk about the AI proliferation, data centre proliferation, we're seeing an expansion of these. Is that we're seeing the size of these data centres expand, or we're seeing just more of them popping up. Like, what does it mean when we say we're seeing, like, data centre growth because of AI, what does that mean?   Phil Harris  11:24 Well, it's fascinating, because now our worlds collide, because the way we now think about how to describe a data centre isn't in the square footage or the number of computers, it's in how much power it consumes, and we now measure it in megawatts, and it starts in 10 megawatts, or single digit megawatts, very small data centres, into average size data centres in the 10s of megawatts, up to now the hundreds and the gigawatts of consumption that you look at these hyperscalers. But I think we have to put this into a sort of a human scale. It helps us to put this in human scale. If I were to go back to ChatGPT actually about now, 15 months ago. ChatGPT-4. If you were to put that data centre footprint into the province of Ontario, for example, where you and I both are right now, it would be the equivalent of a million internal combustion engine cars driving 30 kilometers a day, if you ever drive up the 401 you probably don't want to see another million cars on the 401 Yeah, but that's the amount of energy that we can think of in terms of a data centre of that scale.   Trevor Freeman  12:33 Yeah, and again, kind of putting it in the electrical industry's terms, what we consider as a large load so we have a specific designation of a large load request that is anything five megawatts and higher. And like, up until recently, we would get one or two of those every once in a while, like, it's pretty rare to get a large load request. We are seeing large load requests coming in at a near constant pace now, like the number of large load requests we're getting, and a lot of it is because of this, not all because of data centres or anything like that, but a lot of them are certainly driven by that need for more more computing power, more facilities that support that.   Phil Harris  13:18 That's right. And at the same time, we're seeing a demand on on energy around now home, EV charging, and other aspects of the general distribution of the power, everything's taking a step function. But if I could just say one thing to your point about before I was seven megawatts, was a high load, then we may need to change that scale. It's almost inefficient to build a data centre unless you're somewhere above the 10 megawatt range, because at that point, get somebody else to do it for you.   Trevor Freeman  13:42 Interesting, yeah, and that's where it's sort of like, almost like, renting space in a data centre for a request of that size. Interesting, something that you know, I've seen kind of in your in your writing, on your on your blogs, is the idea that traditional data centres are really built for peak capacity, which absolutely mirrors the power industry. We build our electrical grids for peak capacity, and obviously that leads to a fair amount of inefficiencies. So if you're building just a peak capacity, if you're not at peak capacity, there is an inefficiency happening. There something that you identified. It's a stat from your research talks about graphics processing unit usage rates as low as 20 or 25% so I'm assuming that means kind of like three quarters of that hardware is sitting idle or not being used valuably. Tell us a little bit about what, what Cerio what you're doing, what your composable architecture specifically is doing to reclaim that wasted power and cooling capacity,   Phil Harris  14:44 Yeah, and so it starts off with your the premise you correctly raised is that, if we think about the the equipment, the physical equipment, and how we put these devices and these components together in a data centre, the same model we've been using today is, is about 3035, Years old in terms of individual compute systems, where we run applications, software that has memory and central processing units, those typical things you have in a laptop, or you have every computer. But then we put these accelerators, these GPUs, companies like Nvidia now are the one most valuable companies on the planet, if not the most valuable planet company on the planet, because that's the technology they develop. But we're trying to put these new class of accelerators into an existing compute model which wasn't designed for this. So then itself now starts to fragment the ability to leverage those resources in a data centre. And as you accurately said, it's interesting. If I could geek out on this a little bit for the energy consumer in the room, please. Do we think? We think about the notion not only the megawatts of power going into the data but we we think about what we call power usage efficiency. And that basically says, whatever the power delivered to a data centre, how much of that is applicable to the IT systems in that data centre, a good, well run, efficient data centre is about 1.2 that means about 1.2 times the amount of power that's used is delivered. Your home, for example, is about 30 times the amount of power we use is what's delivered. We are very inefficient from our home use, by the way. But that's another problem to solve in another podcast, but in this case, that's all true until we then ask the question, but what's actually being used at that equipment? And that's now in that 25 to 30% range at any point in time, and we refer to that as stranded and idle assets that, for whatever reason, aren't where the application is or aren't applicable to be used for the application that moment because they're in some other box, or it's a time of day when people use equipment. And by the way, equipment like that isn't being used 24 by seven, but it's drawing power 24 by seven, right? So there's lots of inherent inefficiencies in that model. So what we do is we provide the ability to dynamically have pools of resources where we can dynamically attach resources to a compute system as required, at the scale you're required, and allowing you to be much more efficient in the timing of that and the amount of equipment required to meet your end solution. And by doing that, we can increase the number of accelerators that you apply to a compute system, which inherently means you are much more efficient in those compute systems, because it's not just the computers. As I said before, there's storage, there's firewalls, there's load balances, there's networking equipment, all of that can now be much more efficiently used. All of that is drawing power.   Trevor Freeman  17:35 So is the idea, then, that the equipment not being used, or when you're at a lower demand time in terms of computing power, you've got physical equipment idling, sort of in more idle mode, drawing less resources that you can then ramp up so the peak amount of equipment still there. You're just being more efficient with it when it's not being used. And you've developed a way to sort of dynamically pull that in. Is that what I'm hearing.   Phil Harris  18:00 Exactly, I'll give you an example. A data centre here in Toronto wanted to have a block of 128 GPUs. They could have, they could they could service their customers with, with the current systems they were using previously to deploying our infrastructure, they had to require deploy, actually, 200 GPUs and a very large number of servers in the to house those GPUs. By deploying this area technology, they brought that down to 136 actual GPUs, and they reduced the number of compute platforms by a factor of four. So they reduced it by 75%.   Trevor Freeman  18:35 Yeah, that's fantastic,   Phil Harris  18:36 With exactly the same outcomes to their customers. With no no contention for resources, no oversubscription of resources, just more efficient use of those resources.   Trevor Freeman  18:46 Gotcha. So still able to meet that peak demand, but not sort of firing up that equipment when it's not needed.   Phil Harris  18:53 Well, not just not firing it, not having to have as much stranded equipment, because we can use all the equipment all the time.   Trevor Freeman  19:01 Gotcha. Okay, so in when I was kind of setting up that last question, I used the term composable architecture, and I'll admit that I pulled that from your material. Help me understand what that means. So you know that I've also seen you use composable infrastructure sounds a bit abstract, like, what? What are we talking about here? What does that actually look like?   Phil Harris  19:20 When a consumer, or someone who's building a data centre buys their computer equipment, they usually will actually buy the computers, the GPUs, the storage and other things at the same time, and they will get delivered together, and that box now becomes a unit of compute capacity. But the thing about that is whether you're able to use that entire capacity, the length in which that's a useful there's a lot of innovation churn right now as new things are coming through very quickly. But that box is now solid. You know, it's statically built for the rest of its life. Pretty much, it's very expensive. IBM did a study to take a server out of a rack, these big, six foot racks or bigger, where. These servers are housed with lots of wires going into them, power and data and all sorts of things. It's about $1,000 a minute to take one of those servers out of the rack and either change something that's broken, update something so they just don't get taken out of the rack. Because the average time to take a server out of the rack is about an hour. The math on that's pretty simple. So if I'm spending $60,000 to upgrade a 20,030 $1,000 server, I'm just gonna leave it there and buy another one. So that creates more of these stranded assets. So composability says, Let's separate these things into, as I said, pools of resources, compute accelerators and other devices, and have a fabric between them that allows us to, in real time, assemble a compute system that I need. That's the composing part as I need it, because I can now take the resources anywhere in my data centre, if you've got the right fabric, which we've built that allows you then to real time build that compute system with exactly the same capabilities, exactly the same performance, and without having to change any of your software or the way the service work. Everything has to be off the shelf to make this work, and that's what we've built.   Trevor Freeman  21:05 Got you. So, two of the terms, and you'll forgive me, this is sort of a new sector for me. Two of the terms that are used as metrics to determine performance are power usage, effectiveness, and you've kind of talked about, you know, GPU usage. Is the industry moving more towards that GPU usage metric? Is that just something that you guys are kind of leading the curve on? Or where are we at on that?   Phil Harris  21:34 Oh no, this is very much the industry way of describing not just efficiency, but requirements. And we use very weird terms for this. Every industry has their weird term. Weird terminology, and we're now moving to the for example, in AI, the number of tokens per second when you and I put a request or a question into ChatGPT or CoPilot or chord, whatever we use, those words get translated into tokens, actually numbers. Every compute system is just a big calculator. At the end of the day, we do, we do massive processing on numbers. How many of those tokens can I put into the system? How long does it take to process those tokens and give me a response? And the tokens per second, per watt is now what we're asking. So how many tokens a second, and what power per token is it costing me to process information? And that's the interesting way of thinking about how AI, for example, and that's value started this conversation will be measured is the most amount of tokens per second, per watt. Now, right now, we're focusing on tokens per second. We're not looking at the last denominator, which is watts. So that's why these data centres are getting so ridiculous. Ridiculously large. And you know, we even heard it in the in the State of the Union address in the United States earlier in the week, where, you know, there's now the administration pushing cloud vendors and AI vendors to say, Hey, pretty soon you're gonna be on your own about delivering power. Because, quite frankly, the way you're going. It's going to become untenable to think about that from a national grid perspective. Now, I think that may be a little bit into the future, but I don't think it's a completely unreasonable sentiment at this point.   Trevor Freeman  23:12 Yeah, and I mean, you're talking about, and we talked earlier about the just the scale of energy usage here is reaching a new height, a new level. And if we break it down to the individual racks, you know, these racks of servers or processors that you've got in your data centre, we're now talking about anywhere from 50 kilowatts to 100 kilowatts of cooling need. And that's the big driver of energy usage, I think, is correct here is the cooling need per rack multiplied by, of course, big numbers to get those, you know, 5-10-20-30, megawatt data cetnre we're talking about when we talk about cooling and we talk about, you know, hot spots within a data centre, how does your approach differ from kind of the standard way of doing it.   Phil Harris  24:02 So that's a great question, and I think we should explain why the cooling part, it's a bit like buying really good, expensive wagyu steak every day and then having to spend a lot of money on a gym membership to then go and burn off those calories. So we put all this power into power these compute systems, but then we have to keep them cool, and the harder they that, the faster they run, the more powerful they run, the hotter they get. But we need to cool them. So there's this relationship between the more power we draw, the more cooling we need, and cooling is becoming, as I said, that sort of trade off for performance. Now there's lots of exotic ways of cooling computer systems. We can just blow air across them. We can have a liquid like the radiator in your car, or we can literally drop these compute systems into bars of solvents. Ferdinand Porsche, I like to use of other industry analogies. Ferdinand Porsche, the guy who obviously designed the first Porsches and the VW Beetle, realized if I could distribute the heat of the engine block with a horizontal block, I could blow air across it. It was much more efficient than trying to put a radiator to actually cool down the engine block the way that other cars who have the engine in the front, and it's because of surface area. Now, if I've got to put all my GPUs and CPUs and memory close together, either in the same box or the same rack, that concentration of heat needs to be addressed with cooling. One of the ways we can address this is not only to be very selected when I compose the GPU, it's the only time it's drawing power, but also I can spread them out through my data centre by having a fabric that allows me to connect them to the compute systems with the same performance, but now I can distribute my heat generation. That means I can cool more efficiently, just like that Fernand Porsche analogy of the of the Porsche 911 because now heat over over, spread of distance and surface area is a more efficient way, which means it won't mean that we won't ever get to liquid cooling. I don't think immersion cooling is a good idea for lots of other reasons. It's a necessity, more than an optimization, but we can defer the complexity, the cost of those exotic cooling systems if we're more efficient in a way we use and design our data centres.   Trevor Freeman  26:18 And I guess there's a similar description there of, if you're concentrating all that heat in a specific, you know, physical area within a bigger building room, whatever you want to call it, that that cooling system is having to work to that peak cooling need, so to that hot spot effectively. But it's not working just on that spot. It's working across the whole physical area. If you're spreading that cooling need out across the whole room, one the peak is a little bit lower, and you're just more effectively using your whole cooling system. Is that fair to say?   Phil Harris  26:52 And that's exactly the right way of looking at this. And think about it from this perspective as well. The reason we have to cool is because if we don't call sufficiently, those devices become very unreliable and reduce a useful lifespan without going into who, because they keep this information confidential. But one large cloud provider in the US, for example, a GPU that normally has a lifespan of at least three years, is going down to about nine months right now. And the reason for that reduction the lifespan of the use of that GPU, is because of the heating characteristics within these boxes that are getting even with all these cooling mechanisms are becoming now a reduction in the lifespan. So that means we have to create even, remember, I said what it costs to take a system out of a rack. That means we don't have to apply an efficient and effective cooling strategy, our power strategy and cooling trategy, then we start hitting problems very quickly.   Trevor Freeman  27:50 Got you okay. Okay, so there's a mantra that I admit I hadn't seen before until kind of reading some of your material. It's, it's friends. Don't let friends build data centres. And I think it's referring to, you know, this, this move. And there's so many industries that kind of do this cycle of centralization to decentralization, and the sort of data movement went towards that centralization, and you saw these big, massive data centres. But there's, there's kind of a move now back to, let's call it decentralization or repatriation of data. And so for various geopolitical reasons, organizations, companies, governments, are wanting to pull their data back home and have it kind of be more in their control, living in their own servers. So how are you or how is Cerio helping companies kind of get back into the data centre business or repatriate their data without, kind of, you know, getting into the troubles that led for to that centralization in the first place?   Phil Harris  28:55 Yeah, and by the way, I can't take real credit for that quote. Cole Crawford, who was one of the early guys at Facebook before it became META, and was one of the leading voices in the Open Compute platform movement, which is try and standardize how we do these things. Cole is now the CEO of a company called Vapor IO, and what he was really saying is, it's so complicated and difficult to run data centres, let alone building the capital expense. AI isn't just one thing. There's lots of stages in the workflow of AI. We train these big models. You have heard of large language models like ChatGPT or copilot, but what we use them for the results of those trained models is what we call inference. Now you'll now hear about agentic AI, where we turn those results into actions. Okay, that's the agency part of agentic. Well, the use of AI in the corporate world is now becoming, as you said, both regulated, but from an intellectual property perspective, it's about how I control my data and my information. Because if I put that all into somebody else's large language model, I basically put. Populated somebody else's large language model with what might be my proprietary information or information that's very sensitive, and it's one of the reasons why you'll hear in the press about anthropic for example, trying to put guardrails around the use of their AI, because they're very sensitive to this. Most enterprises, governments of all sorts, have realized, though, they need to have run this in their own data centres, because they need to have control over this in control over this information and the use of this information, that's the repatriation you're talking about, moving these workloads now into the organization that previously said, Hey, cloud computing can take this problem. We're going to now figure out how enterprises, which are far many more of them in far more diverse locations, can now build their own data centres and get the right power, the right efficiency, the right capabilities at the right cost.   Trevor Freeman  30:47 Does that open the door? I mean, earlier, you talked about, you know, if we're talking about a five megawatt data centre, it's almost not worth it. You know, that's just sort of renting space in someone else's. How does that track with an organization that won't have enough data or enough computing power, whatever the metric is to warrant a 30 megawatt data centre for their own data, but wants to get that that control, wants to bring it more in house, is our is your technology helping those smaller data centres exist? Is that the correlation there?   Phil Harris  31:18 We can now move it into one of the things that we another couple of terms that may be an maybe not your your listeners may not be familiar with in the compute world or the data centre world, we talk of brownfield and Greenfield. Brownfield is that which is already there. Greenfield is something I have to build new. A lot of the Brownfield world is what is the predominant sort of quantity of compute power on the planet is primarily brownfield The question is, can I take that existing infrastructure and put the capabilities we've been describing in this discussion into those brownfields? So I can reduce the cost of the expansion of that because I can reuse the compute equipments there, I can now add just the discrete GPU technology, for example, into an existing data centre that doesn't therefore blow the power budget or the cooling envelope within that environment, but I can still now start taking advantage as I figure out what my larger plans are, and at the same time, how do we have a tier of providers? I'll give you an example. There's a company in, again, in Canada, think on who are building a data centre in in Ottawa, it's going to have its own liquid natural LNG as its source of power for its own power requirements. Why? Because they can have the power they need as they need it in that location, and they can provide that secure infrastructure for both government and private enterprises, and think on is certainly in Canada, one of those companies that's really seen to be a trusted partner in this. So it will be a bit of what can I do myself? How do I have a trusted partner? We think of sovereign AI a lot. That means trust more than anything, and that's becoming the new mechanism of thinking about this.   Trevor Freeman  33:04 Thinking about the environmental impact of tech and of data. We've talked about the energy usage here, but there's also the physical aspect to it. Of the pace of improvement in technology means we see obsolescence, or we see kind of technology being outdated fairly quickly. We all, like on the personal level. We all see this with our cell phones, our smartphones, our whatever tech we have at home that seems to be out of date fairly soon. I think that the stat, or that the saying that's out there is, you know, tech is kind of obsolete or becomes trash within three years. Obviously, this is not sustainable. Is this part of the drive of what you're doing? Is it? Are you looking to sort of extend the life of the physical equipment you've touched on this a little bit, but maybe expand a little bit on that?   Phil Harris  33:52 Yeah, this goes a little bit back to that Brownfield-Greenfield discussion. But one way of looking at I guess, is when I put all of these components into what the classic model, the current model, I put my central processing unit, my memory, my storage, my GPUs, all in the same box. What is the thing in that box that I want to take advantage of as new innovation happens, versus that which is happening over a slower evolutionary cycle? Well, right now, if I put everything in the same compute unit. Go back to my cost of taking that box out of the rack. I'm pretty much limited by the slowest innovation curve within that platform. Now as what I can take advantage over time. Interestingly, GPUs are innovating currently at a clip of about once a year. Nvidia comes out the new generation of GPUs once a year, but now we're getting more GPUs into the market. We're getting much more diversity, and that diversity means I'll have more options more often. But if my compute system itself is only innovating once every three years to your point, then if I don't decouple these things, if I don't have the ability to separate these innovations. Curves. I'm always stuck with the slowest innovation curve. One of the things we've done at serial with the fabric we've built and the platform we've built is to allow you now to, if you like, dislocate those innovation curves and those options, so as new technology comes along, I can apply it to the things that are innovating slower and still get the outcomes I'm looking for. And that will significantly increase the existing lifespan of equipment that's in people's data centre.   Trevor Freeman  35:26 So, looking at a data centre of the future, and not, you know, not far into the future, let's say 5-10, years from now, are we seeing some of the same technology still exist within that data centre, or is it, you know, everything gets cycled out within like, what's the generation of a data centre, for example? Like, how often, or how soon will we see it all cycle out?   Phil Harris  35:48 I think you there's a there's a technical answer to that, and the financial answer to that. The depreciation model, so that the capital infrastructure can be written off people's books over a three or five year window is very typical. So we see that there's just a financial inhibition to changing more or faster than that three to five year window. The technical churn, as I said, is happening much more rapidly in the technologies that are drawing most power but providing most capability. So one of the things that we're looking at is how companies now start leasing infrastructure, because if they lease the infrastructure, they can now recycle that and bring new technology in faster into their organizations. But to do that, you've got to have the ability to bring new technology in and not be stuck with these static systems that we have today. So there's a set of financial instruments, and now with work that Cerio is doing, technical capabilities that allow customers to really continue to innovate. So there's no real, hey, it's going to be all churned out in three years. I'll continue to innovate over those three years, reciting the technology that can stay where it is and bringing new technologies as it becomes available at the right financial model.   Trevor Freeman  36:56 I'm curious about what that innovation is. So you talked about Nvidia, kind of essentially a new GPU every year. There's a new version every year. What is the innovation? Are they just is it getting faster and more compute power, and therefore it's pulling more energy? And is that just like a perpetual increase, or is it kind of same compute power, less energy, like, do we ever see, I guess what I'm what I'm getting at with this little bit of a ramble here is, do we ever see that that rate of change in energy usage start to flatten out and come down while we still can grow our computing power? Or does energy usage just continue to grow? Like, are we on a bit of a path with no end right now,   Phil Harris  37:44 History taught us a little bit about this. Gordon Moore, who was one of the founders of Intel actually, we had this term called Moore's Law, and Moore's Law was basically this idea that every 18 months we'll double the number of transistors on a piece of silicon. Now, for those in the computer science world, we understand what that means. For the rest of the world, the Trans World. The transistor is the smallest unit of technology within the computer. It's the basic building block of how we build computers. The central processing is all the GPUs. They all come down to taking literally silicon and in a foundry, we call them, figuring out how to make as many transistors interconnect with each other in a in a smaller area as possible, or the most amount of transistors we can. So a bit of a geeky answer to your question. But the way that we look at how each innovation improves is, are we increasing the number of transistors, which means we can do more math? Remember, all we're doing is processing numbers.   Trevor Freeman  38:41 Per unit, per physical unit, right?   Phil Harris  38:43 Per physical unit.   Trevor Freeman  38:44 Okay.   Phil Harris  38:45 And the way we do that is in these big foundries that process all this silicon into these components. They have, what are called process nodes and the and literally how we etch a transistor, it's called lithography onto a piece of silicon. Tells us the power of that piece of silicon and the more I can etch. So we get into what we call the nanometer scale, or what we call a process node. So every time, if you really look into the spec sheets of Nvidia, every generation, they'll talk about how many nanometers their silicon process is based on. Because the smaller I can get that number, the more transistors I can have on the same amount of silicon, the more processing I have, but every transistor takes power. So with more transistors, I require more power, even though in the same physical space, it looks like the same amount of silicon. Therefore, your question was a great one. Do we ever get to zero nanometers? Well, no, we're going to hit a wall here eventually. So then the question is, that's the scale up model. Try and make one thing as big as possible. How about if we make lots of things powerful, but we have more of them in China, the last year, we heard of deep seek. Deep seek was a Chinese government sponsored effort to try and come up with a. Much more cost effective way of doing the equivalent to ChatGPT. They didn't do that with bigger GPUs. They did it with much smaller GPUs, but many more of them. And that comes back to how efficient I am in deploying lots of things together. And that goes back to my earlier point about we start with scale up. Inevitably, in the industry, we go to scale out.   Trevor Freeman  40:22 And is it fair to say that the power usage per transistor, is that fairly static? Like, is there efficiencies to gain there? Or your GPU is going to use more power because you're packing more transistors into it, and once you hit that wall, that's going to be the power consumption level, is that, right?   Phil Harris  40:43 Well, this is the games that these silicon manufacturers, like Intel, AMD, Nvidia, they're all trying to figure out how to sort of figure out new and interesting ways of packaging all of the silicon in these processing units. And we've got a whole industry and science around the packaging mechanism to make those tiles, and that we now think of them as little tiles of processing power, and some that will be doing very specific jobs. Some will be doing very general jobs. It's now getting to the point where the science around the packaging of these dyes or these tiles is as much as the of the of the innovation, as the actual tiles and the processing on them. So it's an extremely complex technical problem, and we are hitting some walls here, which is why I go back to my earlier point. We're now reaching a point where is it just a technical problem we're solving, or a technical, operational and commercial problem we have to think about? And this is that wall that wall that you asked me about right at the beginning of this conversation. Are we about to hit a wall? And the answer is, yes.   Trevor Freeman  41:46 Interesting. I mean, I'm always fascinated by like, what are the what are the really smart people in the industry focusing their time on? And it's so that's why we're talking to you. Of you know, you're looking at, how do we operationalize this. How do we get the most efficient combination and structure of what we're doing here? There's folks that are looking at, how do we pack the most computing power efficiency into these specific units? I guess there's an aspect of, how do we cool this in the in the most effective way, like, what's, how do we, you know, drive down the cooling power needed? What else is out there, in terms of, like, we have smart people focused on this efficiency. What's the thing that's missing from that, that sort of list?   Phil Harris  42:36 Well, I think maybe what's going on right now. And if I could just add a, unfortunately, just one more layer of complexity.  Remember said we were processing silicon? Well, the Earth's got lots of silicon, but we don't have lots of places to process that silicon. The companies that are formed to process silicon into these processing units, we call them foundries. The world's largest is TSMC, based in Taiwan. And then we have Intel, we have Samsung, we have a few others around the world. Global Foundry is another one. There is a limit, physical limit, because these foundries are huge and they take decades of development and optimization. So if we start breaking ground on a new foundry tomorrow, we'll see output in about five years. So we have a constrained supply. So if I'm if I'm Jensen at Nvidia or any of the big silicon manufacturers, I'm going to optimize that relatively constrained supply to where I'm going to get the best return on my investment. And that's why this scale up model is happening. So given that we know that we won't have any more foundry capacity of scale for another couple of years, at least, then the reality is we've got to think differently about how we're thinking about the processing of that silicon. Do I want just ever bigger processes that become more expensive, more limited in where I can deploy them. And quite frankly, the top 15 consumers in the world of silicon consume about 80% of that silicon, if not more. How do I democratize that? Again, it goes from scale up to a scale out model, where I can use that same processing capacity to produce more silicon.   Trevor Freeman  44:20 Fascinating. Yeah, I just, I took us down a little bit of a nerd out path. You had me really interested in that. Okay, so last question here, we hear this term for a bunch of different reasons. Around the world right now we're hearing this term democratizing, happening a lot, and I know you've talked about democratizing, AI, what does that mean? What does that mean to you, or describe that for us?   Phil Harris  44:48 Yeah, I think it really means. Going back to my last point about if 15 big consumers of silicon are going to consume the vast majority of verbal supply chain, that makes the. At a losing proposition for the rest of the organizations and the rest of the governments and the rest of the individuals on the planet. So how do we make sure that AI can be built both responsibly from a sustainability perspective, right? And I don't mean just the ecological side, but that's important here too, but also from the ability to I was on a panel yesterday between the UK Government and the Canadian government, where we're looking at how do countries around the world have the ability to control their own destiny? And there's this whole notion of sovereignty and AI sovereignty right now that isn't because people want to have closed walls around them, that you want to have choice. They don't want to be dictated to by very dominant players where they, quite frankly, don't have the buying power to compete. You know that the amount of capital going into some of the AI companies, we saw $30 billion going into anthropic last week. That's actually a small increase in their capitalization relative to the other big AI players on the planet. That's $30 billion so we've got to think to ourselves, is that a sustainable model commercially? And the answer is no. So we've got to have technology. We've got to have the right ability to deliver power. We've got to have the right designs of data centres that can keep them cooled in an effective and efficient and responsible way. And we've got to be able to give them enough power to make them viable, to make them useful. That's the democratization we all have to be focused on.   Trevor Freeman  46:25 And we need every, I guess, to sort of round of the point is we need everybody to be able, everybody being, you know, whatever, major industry, countries, whoever, to be able to access that equally, so that we don't have to rely on the major players out there in order to do those things you just said, gotcha.   Phil Harris  46:41 That's exactly right. And look, there'll always be a pyramid here. There always has been a technology. There's always still the big players, right? But the question is, have the big players the stifled out the ability for smaller players to come up, innovate, provide choice, provide alternative ways of looking at things, and that's what got to make sure that we keep the and this always relies on some new technology coming along that enables that. Sarah believes that we've created that next layer in the stack, if you like, of technologies that gives us that opportunity to rethink the innovation curve going forward.   Trevor Freeman  47:14 Very fascinating. Phil, thanks for your time. I really appreciate it. This has been super interesting. It's not an area that I often get to spend my time thinking about so is great to chat today. As as you know, we always kind of round out our interviews with the same series of questions to our guests. So what's a book that you've read that you think everybody should read?   Phil Harris  47:34 Well, I'm not sure I can recommend this for everybody. One of the people who basically, along the lines of some of the things I've been talking about today, who revolutionized the computer world was a gentleman by the name of Linus Torvald in Helsinki in Finland. At the time, he's now based in the States, he realized that there was a dominance around how the operating systems on computers, the things that run the software, was limiting, basically, innovation choice and forcing us down a very closed path. So he wrote something called Linux, which was a new operating system. So be on your phone, your TV, your microwave that's running Linux today. Interesting because there wasn't an operating system that we could then generally deploy. That meant there was more developers had the ability to write applications, more hardware vendors could now have software they could run on their on their platforms. He gave the world a new innovation curve. And every time this happens to my last point, good things happen. Very good things happen for the world, for every individual on the planet. And Linus was one of those individuals who saw that need. And so his book, just for fun, and he's a very quirky guy, as you can probably imagine, is a great book about his philosophical approach to what it takes to change really big problems. And I would encourage all of you just to even just read the first few chapters. It's a fascinating view of how an incredibly smart man, smart individual took on probably one of the biggest problems we had in the 20th and 21st Century of computing, and solved it by recognizing you take a different path.   Trevor Freeman  49:11 Yeah, very cool.   Phil Harris  49:12 As far as shows, um, I don't know. I'm one of these guys. I've got two 13 year old daughters. So my wife and I get to watch TV for a very limited amount of time where we can watch it, about the things we want to watch, so we tend to sort of cram things in. But I'm a huge Aaron Sorkin fan, so if I ever need something on a rainy day to go back just to think about how the world could be, I watch the West Wing. It's a show that's imaginary. It's got incredible script writing, it's got incredible character development, but it really talks about how to think about doing the right thing as well. Now, whether you agree with the politics or not, that's a different question, but just the thought that smart thinking solves big problems, again, sort of It's a bit like the Linus Torvald book. It just speaks to me about sometimes we can solve big problems. With individuals or people who just had the right way of thinking about things.   Trevor Freeman  50:00 Yeah, I think that's the kind of, you know, call it entertainment, because it is entertainment, but it's the entertainment that sticks with you, and that we go back to time and again, is the ones that we can also, like, see the the underlying philosophy, or, you know, theory of change that goes into that entertainment. And it's, it's fun to watch. It's, you know, either humorous or dramatic or whatever, but there's still that underlying message. And I think, yeah, West Wing is a great example of of that. There's a handful of those other sort of classic shows that are in that line too. A free round trip flight anywhere in the world. Where would you go?   Phil Harris  50:40 This is hard. My wife and I were talking about this the other day, and I've had the luxury of traveling just about everywhere. I think there's 15 countries on the planet I haven't been to, but if I ever want to go to one place is Bali. And there's two reasons. One, my wife and I went there for a honeymoon, and it was the beginning of the most important chapter of my life by far. And secondly, it's because it has that balance of everything. It's I love to scuba dive. I love the rainforests, the jungle, the architecture, the people, the food. It just brings everything into one package for me. And so it just again. It's those things that sort of speak to you emotionally and also intellectually. It's one of those things that I could always go back too.   Trevor Freeman  51:26 Fantastic. Who is someone that you admire?   Phil Harris  51:29 In history or today?   Trevor Freeman  51:32 You pick, anything.   Phil Harris  51:33 that's fascinating. I think historically it's under Brit it's hard not to go back to some of my forebears, or my country's forebears, Alan Turing, who, against all adversity, social, political, technical, came up with an inspirational way of thinking about solving what are deemed to be unsolvable. And again, it's a tragic story. I think we've all, if you see the movie that was made about his life, it's a very tragic story, but it's an inspirational story about how, again, if you just take a different approach to solving what seems to be an unsolvable problem, you can you get smart people together. Doesn't have to be a big army of people. I think so. Turing is one of those people that always comes back for me t think, wow, if I could have just some of his courage and some of his imagination and some of his intellect, I'd be a very happy person.   Trevor Freeman  52:29 Yeah, and it's almost, I mean, obviously, a brilliant man, but it's the willing to think in a different way, or willing to approach a problem in a different way that I mean, there's a long list in history of major turning points that are as a result of someone thinking in a different way or doing something in a different way. And I think that's a great example of it.   Phil Harris  52:49 Just about the entire course of human life are in the midpoint of the 20th century, change on that, that man's inspiration, that man's imagination.   Trevor Freeman  52:57 Yeah, and that's, that's not an understatement. That's fantastic. Okay, last question, what's something about, kind of the energy sector, or, you know, your sector that that you're really excited about, or something that you see in the future that you're really excited about?   Phil Harris  53:09 Actually, I see it now, to be honest, there are things in the future. Hey, I have two 13 year old kids. I want to have a sustainable ecology and world environment for them to live in and bring their own families up in. And I think about how we can use power more efficiently, but how we can make it look sustainability is important. I want to see renewable, sustainable energy for the general world as a thesis right now. It's how we can be much more efficient in the use of power and the right power delivery. And I think, as I said, I gave the think on example, that's incredibly exciting, because now, if we can do that at scale, that's an opportunity to do that democratization that I spoke about. So when I think about the things that really excited me about the data centre world, the world I live in, actually that power generation and power availability in a clean, effective, well managed fashion is exactly what we need right now, while the rest of us are solving these transistor problems.   Trevor Freeman  54:04 Yeah, it's, I mean, our listeners are probably going to roll their eyes, because I say this all the time, but one of the things that excites me the most is seeing like we're in a period of change, and that's a really exciting time to be working in this and I kind of hear that from you in your sector as well, and I see it in mine, in the energy sector of we're actually getting to see some of this innovation, some of these like leaps and bounds forward. That's not to say there aren't still problems. It's not to say there aren't steps backwards as well. But it's very cool to be working on this in a time when we're seeing that change, and that's kind of what I'm hearing from you as well. Indeed. Awesome. Phil, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. This has been great. Chatting with you.   Phil Harris  54:42 Trevor, the pleasure is all mine. Thank you.   Trevor Freeman  54:44 Fantastic. Take care.   Phil Harris  54:46 Take care.   Trevor Freeman  54:47 Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the thinkenergy podcast. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and it would be great if you could leave us a review. It really helps to spread the word. As always, we would love to hear from you whether. Feedback, comments or an idea for a show or a guest, you can always reach us at thinkenerg@hydroottawa.com.

Am frühen Morgen des 16. Januar 2004 wird die 34-jährige Speditionskauffrau Doreen S. im thüringischen Schöten bei Apolda auf dem Weg zur Arbeit in ihrem Auto erschossen. Mehrere Schüsse treffen sie, ihr VW Beetle kommt schwer beschädigt an einer Mauer zum Stehen. Die Tat wirkt wie eine gezielte Hinrichtung. Trotz intensiver Ermittlungen, hunderter Befragungen und der Arbeit einer eigenen Sonderkommission bleibt der Mord jahrelang ungeklärt. Erst fast zwei Jahrzehnte später bringt der Hinweis eines Gefängnisinsassen neue Bewegung in den Cold Case. Die Ermittlungen werden wieder aufgenommen, verdeckte Ermittler und eine Vertrauensperson werden eingesetzt. Die Methoden sind nicht unumstritten, führen aber zu einem Erfolg…

Brett and Mark welcome Tim McCarthy, owner and founder of HushMat and ZyCoat to discuss the benefits of adding HushMat to your car's interior, the family of ZyCoat products, and trying to use a VW Beetle as a boat. All this and much more on Driven Radio Show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

S3 MAG recently featured Jzilla's new team cars - a MK7 GTI and a VW Beetle. So James Marcellana & I got no to discuss that, and ended up getting into 'the emotion' behind cars/driving, and how that's a driving force (no pun intended) in what draws us to certain cars. Connection > perfection.

How do you turn a teenage passion for VWs into a global automotive empire?In this episode of 9WERKS Radio, Lee and Andy are joined by Barney Dines, the CEO of Heritage Parts Centre, as the company celebrates a monumental 40th anniversary. Barney shares the "Driven Not Hidden" origins of his career—from restoring his first VW Beetle at just 15 years old to leading one of the world's most respected Porsche and VW parts suppliers.We dive deep into Barney's personal garage, including why he considers his Porsche 997 to be the finest car he's ever owned and his ambitious future plans to resurrect a 550 Spyder and get it back on the road where it belongs.But it's not just about the stories; we get into the "nitty-gritty" of Porsche maintenance and modification. Barney settles the debate on OEM vs. Genuine vs. Patent (Aftermarket) parts, explaining when to save and when to spend to ensure your Porsche stays in peak condition.In this episode:The Heritage Story: How a passion project became a 40-year business success.The 15-Year-Old's Restoration: Barney's first Beetle and the lessons it taught him.The 997 Verdict: Why the 997 is the "Goldilocks" 911 for the CEO of a parts giant.The 550 Spyder Project: Bringing a legend back to the road.The Parts Masterclass: Understanding the difference between Genuine, OEM, and Patent parts.Building a Brand: How Heritage Parts Centre has evolved since 1986.Find your dream Porsche on the 9WERKS Marketplace: 9werks.co.uk/marketplace Thanks to our friends heritagepartscentre.com for sponsoring this podcast, get up to 10% off your basket by entering the code ‘9WERKS10' at the checkout on heritagepartscentre.com‘9WERKS Radio' @9werks.radio is your dedicated Porsche and car podcast, taking you closer than ever to the world's finest sports cars and the culture and history behind them.The show is brought to you by 9werks.co.uk, the innovative online platform for Porsche enthusiasts. Hosted by Porsche Journalist Lee Sibley @9werks_lee, and 911 owner and engineer Andy Brookes @993andy, with special input from friends and experts around the industry, including you, our valued listeners.If you enjoy the podcast and would like to support us by joining the 9WERKS Driven Not Hidden Collective you can do so by hitting the link below, your support would be greatly appreciated.Support the show

Between 1908 and 1927, the Ford Motor Company sold 15,007,033 Model Ts, making the car the best-selling automobile the world had ever seen. That record came to an end on the 17th February, 1972 when the 15,007,034th Volkswagen Beetle rolled off the production line. The car was the brainchild of Adolf Hitler who commissioned it almost immediately after her became chancellor of Germany in 1933. His plan was that the German public, irrespective of whether they were a doctor or a factory worker could buy a car for just 1,000 Reichsmarks which would have been around 31 weeks' pay for the average worker. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly consider whether the Beetle is more a triumph of engineering or advertising; discuss why Ford turned down the Volkswagen factory at Wolfsburg, which they could have had for free; and look at how the Führer's car came to be loved by 1960s American hippies and flower children…   Further Reading: • ‘The VW Beetle: How Hitler's idea became a design icon' (BBC, 2014): https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20130830-the-nazi-car-we-came-to-love  • ‘The world's best-selling cars' (Auto Express, 2022):  https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/best-cars-vans/33872/worlds-best-selling-cars  • ‘The History of Volkswagen, 'The People's Car' (Wall Street Journal, 2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhH-oWHzzvQ  Love the show? Support us!  Join 

How did the VW Beetle go from Hitler's dream car to beloved hippie icon? Today, we're sharing an episode from a new podcast, Business History. Hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith bring to life the greatest innovations, the boldest entrepreneurs and the craziest mavericks in the annals of business—and share the lessons we can learn from their successes and failures. In today's episode: How Hitler launched the Volkswagen Beetle and its journey from Nazi vehicle to bohemian Love Bug. This is part 1 of the Business History series on the Beetle—be sure to head to Business History for part 2. Find Business History wherever you get podcasts. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Think you can read the market better than the bidders? We put that to the test with a live Hemmings sold-car roundup—calling final prices and then revealing the hammer on a lineup that spans a 1966 Dodge W100, a first-year 1970 Monte Carlo, a polarizing 1993 Cadillac Allanté, a white-on-white 1973 Pontiac Firebird, a slick 1959 VW Beetle resto-mod, and a modern-legend 2014 Toyota FJ Cruiser. The fun isn't just in the guesses; it's in what each sale says about how collectors value originality, documentation, drivability, and cultural cool right now.We share why workhorse trucks with clean bones still sell strong, how period-correct Mopars earn a premium, and where personal-luxury Chevys are heading as younger buyers join the hunt. The Allanté's Italian styling meets American expectations in a cautionary tale of hype vs. ownership reality. Meanwhile, the FJ Cruiser shocks with a number that reflects overlanding culture, Toyota's reliability halo, and the power of discontinued icons. If you track classic car values, you'll get practical signals you can use before your next bid or garage purchase.Then we pivot to quick-hit news and context. Racing calendars are thinning as the season winds down. On the industry side, we break down EV retrenchment, hybrid resurgence, and why buyers still prefer paper documents at the dealership despite the digitization push. Add a fast walk through auto history—from interchangeable parts to drive-by-wire—and the trendlines snap into focus: practicality and trust win, while timeless design keeps pulling hearts (and wallets) back to analog charm.Join us live on Saturdays to play along, drop your guesses in the chat, and put your market instincts to the test. If you enjoy the show, follow, subscribe, and share it with a friend who can't resist calling the next hammer price. Your take: which car was the best buy?Be sure to subscribe for more In Wheel Time Car Talk!The Lupe' Tortilla RestaurantsLupe Tortilla in Katy, Texas Gulf Coast Auto ShieldPaint protection, tint, and more!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.---- ----- Want more In Wheel Time car talk any time? In Wheel Time is now available on Audacy! Just go to Audacy.com/InWheelTime where ever you are.----- -----Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast provider for the next episode of In Wheel Time Podcast and check out our live multiplatform broadcast every Saturday, 10a - 12nCT simulcasting on Audacy, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch and InWheelTime.com.In Wheel Time Podcast can be heard on you mobile device from providers such as:Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music Podcast, Spotify, SiriusXM Podcast, iHeartRadio podcast, TuneIn + Alexa, Podcast Addict, Castro, Castbox, YouTube Podcast and more on your mobile device.Follow InWheelTime.com for the latest updates!Twitter: https://twitter.com/InWheelTimeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/inwheeltime/https://www.youtube.com/inwheeltimehttps://www.Facebook.com/InWheelTimeFor more information about In Wheel Time Podcast, email us at info@inwheeltime.com

We're sharing an episode from another Pushkin podcast, Business History. Hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith examine the surprising stories of businesses big and small, bringing to life the greatest innovations, the boldest entrepreneurs and the craziest mavericks in the archives of commerce and finance.The VW Beetle was the biggest selling car of all time, and it found particular favor with people like hippies and surfers. But this icon of the 60s counterculture had its roots in Nazism. The Volkswagen—the People's Car—was an obsession of Adolf Hitler. He wanted to transform Germany into a land of drivers—and needed an affordable, but reliable automobile. Germany's private auto manufacturers knew the project was doomed to failure. So Hitler assembled a team of designers and factory managers to enact his vision - even if that meant enslaving workers and committing murder. This is part 1 of a two-part series on the VW Beetle. Find part 2 here next Wednesday. Find more episodes of Business History on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ferdinand wanted to make cars for the people, but the Porsche brand we know is an empire of performance. Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients, so here’s one of those. [ASAP Commercial Doors Ad] Dave Young: Welcome to The Empire Builders Podcast. It’s the podcast where we talk about empires that were built, businesses, business empires. You know what we… If you’ve listened before, you know… Stephen Semple: Something like that. I get it. Businesses that have done pretty well over the years. Dave Young: They started small. Stephen Semple: They started small. Dave Young: They started small and then they got big. They got so big to the point that you could call them an empire. Stephen Semple: That’s it. That’s the idea. Dave Young: It’s a pretty simple premise. Stephen Semple: That’s it. Dave Young: So as we counted down, Steve told me the topic today and it’s Porsche. Stephen Semple: Yes, sir. Dave Young: Porsche. I’m assuming this is the car. Stephen Semple: The car, yes, the car. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: The car. Dave Young: And I’m trying to… I know some Porsche jokes, but I probably shouldn’t tell those on this show. I’m trying to think if I’ve ever actually been in a Porsche. Stephen Semple: Oh, well then you’ve got to come up and see me, Dave. Dave Young: You own one. I know you own one. Stephen Semple: Well, I have one. Bernier’s got two. I don’t know how many Steve has. Dave Young: I see how it is. I see how it is. Maybe I will tell my Porsche joke. So you guys that own them, do you call it Porscha? Because some of us just say Porsche. Stephen Semple: Well, if you actually take a look back, that’s the proper German pronunciation as Porsche. Dave Young: Porsche, okay. Stephen Semple: And it’s supposed to not be… It’s not Italian Porsche, right? So it’s Porsche. Dave Young: Porsche, Porsche. Okay, I’ll accept that. I’ll accept that. I’m guessing we’re- Stephen Semple: Well, look, you got to always call a dealership to double check. They’ll tell you. Dave Young: Now, if I had to guess where we’re headed to start this off sometime around the 40s, maybe earlier. Stephen Semple: A little earlier than that, actually. It was founded by Ferdinand Porsche in 1931 in Stuttgart, Germany. You’re not far off. But the interesting thing is where the growth really happened, even though that’s when it was founded, when things really started to happen, was actually post-World War II. Dave Young: That makes sense. Stephen Semple: You’re correct on that. Dave Young: So, it started in 31 and by the time you hit the late 30s and 40s, you’re part of the war machine. Stephen Semple: Yes. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: So it was founded in 1931, Stuttgart, Germany by Ferdinand. And when we take a look at the history of the business for a very long time, they were a part of the VW group, although they were recently spun off into their own separate business. And there’s a lot of shared history between VW and Porsche. A lot of people make fun of the fact that it’s basically a VW. There’s so much connection. Now here’s the other thing is, there’s a lot of connection in Nazi Germany here as well. And I mean- Dave Young: That’s what I was intimating but trying not to say, but yes, there was definitely. Stephen Semple: And not one of these ones of, “Oh, I’m a business and I got sucked up into the machine.” I mean, very early on. Very early on. Ferdinand was a member of the SS following the war, both he and his son were charged. Dave Young: No kidding. Stephen Semple: He served two years in jail. His son six months. So we’re not talking loose connections here. He was a buddy of Adolf. Let’s just put it out there. And if you remember, going back to episode 21, VW was founded by Nazi Germany. So episode 21 about The Beetle, and Ferdinand was the guy who designed the Beetle. Dave Young: Right, right. I remember you saying that, Ferdinand Porsche. Stephen Semple: And look, Porsche has not always had the success it has today. It’s become pretty big. They do 40 billion EU in sales. They have 40,000 employees. They make 300,000 cars. There was a time that they’re making cars in the hundreds and thousands. It wasn’t that long ago. But let’s go back to Germany to the early 1900s. And if we think about Germany at that time, pre-World War II, pre-World War I, there was lots of history of engineering and science in Germany. More Nobel Prizes in Science was awarded to Germany than anywhere else in the world at that time. Dave Young: Right. Stephen Semple: Germany was a real leader in science and engineering. And the first commercial automobile was made in Germany by Mercedes-Benz. So it’s 1906 and Daimler recruits Ferdinand because Ferdinand had been the winner of the Pottingham [inaudible 00:06:05] Prize, which is the automotive engineer of the year, which is given to new chief engineers and basically allows the person to have this designated doctor engineer honoris causa, Ferdinand Porsche. And he would go around calling himself all of that. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: And this is an honorary doctorate because he never actually finished college, but he had real engineering chops, Ferdinand. So he moves to Stuttgart, which at the time is a center of car making in Germany, including all the suppliers. And he works for Benz for 20 years. Okay. Now, it’s Germany in the 1930s and 2% of the population own a car in Germany as compared to the United States, which is 30%. Dave Young: In that time? Stephen Semple: In that time. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: Ferdinand comes up with this idea of we should make an inexpensive car. We shouldn’t be making car for the wealthy. We should make an inexpensive car. The board rejects the idea. Ferdinand leaves in 1929. And in 1931… Kicks around for a few years, and then 1931 starts a consulting firm. Now, this dude knew how to name things. You’re ready for the name of the company? Dave Young: Of the consulting firm? Stephen Semple: Of the consulting firm. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: I have to read this to get it right. The Doctor Engineer Honoris Causa Ferdinand Porsche Construction and Consulting and Design Services for Motor Vehicles. Dave Young: Now, if I know anything about German, that was all one word that you just said, right? Stephen Semple: Well- Dave Young: No spaces in between any of those words. Stephen Semple: Translated, you’ll see it as Dr. in H period, C period, F period, Porsche, capital G, small M, small B, capital H. Dave Young: It just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Stephen Semple: Now, here’s the crazy thing. Up until 2009, that remained the official name of the company. You actually can find, if you see Porsche’s older than that, that if you look for that, it’ll be stamped somewhere in the car that that’s the manufacturer. Dave Young: They changed it finally because it was just too expensive to- Stephen Semple: It cost too much- Dave Young: Put that many letters in a dye cast. Stephen Semple: Exactly, exactly. Dave Young: Holy cow. Stephen Semple: So it’s 1934 and they land a contract with Germany to design a small affordable car for the people called the Volkswagen. Dave Young: Volkswagen. Stephen Semple: Beetle. Right, there you go. Now, here’s the thing that’s weird. Post World War II, the allies are in trying to rebuild Germany and no one owns VW. VW was owned by the state. So now it’s in the hands of the British and the British and the allies want to create a strong economy in West Germany because it’s now the Cold War. So the big defense to defending against East Germany and the expansion of communism is to really get the economy going in Germany. And so the British government, as we know from episode 21 about the Beetle, approached Porsche who designed it and said, “Help us get this car built.” And this is where it gets just a little bit weird because the son goes in one direction. Ferdinand’s doing his own thing. They both got arrested for war crimes. Son gets out first because he did six months. And his son’s name’s Ferry and his dad is in jail for two years. So between this time where dad’s still in jail and son’s out, here’s one of the things they did towards the end of the war. We don’t know exactly how many, but it was probably about 20 of their best engineers and they moved them out into the farmland of Austria and basically had them working in a barn because they didn’t want to get them arrested or killed, quite frankly. So Ferry gets out and he goes to this barn in Austria and he’s looking around and he goes, “What the heck are we going to do to make some money? Let’s start fixing up cars.” Now, not a huge business fixing up cars. It’s post-war and there weren’t a lot of cars in Germany anyway, but they had to do something. Then the dad gets out of jail and he ends up doing this work with Volkswagen. Now, here’s what’s interesting. And this is where the really tight ties between Porsche and Volkswagen start. The deal that the German government gives Ferdinand, the deal that the allies give Ferdinand is this. Dave Young: Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this. [Using Stories to Sell Ad] Dave Young: Let’s pick up our story where we left off and trust me you haven’t missed a thing. Stephen Semple: The deal that the allies give Ferdinand is this. We want your help designing and distributing this car. We will give you a royalty for every VW Beetle sold worldwide. Dave Young: Wow, that’s pretty generous. Stephen Semple: Well, no one knew it was going to be such a huge success and basically go for 50 years that car was being built. Dave Young: Right, right. Stephen Semple: So for a long time, the biggest source of revenue for Porsche was royalties on VW Beetle sales. Dave Young: Wow, okay. So it really- Stephen Semple: Isn’t that crazy? Dave Young: It really wouldn’t exist if that deal hadn’t been made. Stephen Semple: May not have, may not have. Now, meanwhile, Ferry, who has design chops of his own and loves cars, started tinkering around with vehicles. And what he started to do was put big engines in small cars. There was all these Beetle parts lying around. He would build a car, this little car, and he’d put a big engine in it. And if you go back in the time, if you go back and take a look in the late 30s, early 40s, and you take a look at Ferraris and things like that, you take a look at the race cars at the time, they were two-thirds engines. They’re these massive engines. So he went the opposite direction. He said, “Well, let’s take a little car and put a big engine in it.” And he’s driving around and he goes, “This is fun.” Because he’s basing it on parts lying around, which is the VW stuff. It’s an engine in the back. This becomes the Porsche 356, which is basically Porsche’s first car. So they start making this car and they wanted to make it somewhat affordable. So the price was $3,750, which would be $42,000 today. And they also wanted to have it as being a daily driver because again, everybody else making performance cars were not daily drivers, had a trunk, bunch of things, daily driver. And this is an important part of Porsche’s DNA. We’re going to come back to this a little bit later, this idea of it being a daily driver. So coming out of World War II, sports cars, industry’s happening and everybody’s got one. MG and Jag in the UK, there’s Ferrari in Italy, you get the idea. Now, one thing I forgot to mention that’s interesting and still today, the government state of Lower Saxony, which is basically would be the state, they still own 20% of Volkswagen. Dave Young: Really? Okay. Stephen Semple: I forgot to mention that. Dave Young: Who are they now? Stephen Semple: Well, Volkswagen’s still around. Volkswagen’s still- Dave Young: No, who is the Saxony? Stephen Semple: Well, it’d be like saying the state of Texas. It’s a state. Dave Young: Okay, it’s just a part of Germany. Stephen Semple: Part of Germany and that government still owns 20% of the company. Dave Young: What a world. Stephen Semple: Now there’s all this stimulus going on in Germany to try to get the economy going. One of the things that they did, there was a really interesting tax rate. There was an interesting tax structure. There was a very high marginal tax rate. Now, ordinary people were taxed at 15%, but the marginal tax rate could go as high as 95%. And the reason why they wanted to do this was create this incentive for reinvestment. So there’s all this… As they’re making money, there’s this heavy reinvestment. And in the early 50s, racing is really exploding. Automobile racing is really exploding, but the lines between professional and amateur is blurry. If you remember, James Dean and Steve McQueen and other actors, Paul Newman, were all racing. Dave Young: Right. Stephen Semple: They’re all racing vehicles. And Jaguar and Porsche were trying to do the same thing in terms of creating this daily driver that you could race. Now in the end, Porsche won, and I think part of it is because quite frankly, they just built a better vehicle. There was a time where the joke with Jaguars was you had to own two because one would always be in the shop and one… And going back to the early DNA, Ferry Porsche was quoted as saying, “We have the only car that can go from an East African safari to race in the Le Mans to take out to theater and then drive on the streets in New York.” Dave Young: Wow, okay. Stephen Semple: And look, today, Porsche still heavily advertises that. They will advertise a Porsche driving through the snow with ski racks on it. And not their SUVs, the 911. This is very much part of it. And if you think about it, this parallels what Rolex did in the early days. You remember from episode 184 with Rolex. Rolex, the Submariner, the Explorer. Dave Young: Target by niche. Stephen Semple: Target by niche and make it tough and something that you could use and wear day to day. So it’s 1954 and Porsche’s selling 588 cars and about 40% of them is in the US. So really what’s making things hum with them is all those Beetle sales. And it’s the ’60s, the Ford Mustang comes out, the Jag E type comes out, the Austin-Healey comes out, and Porsche decides they need a new vehicle. And they were going to do a sedan, a four door sedan. But what they realized was they didn’t really want to compete with Mercedes and BMW. So they looked around at the other German car manufacturers and they said, “You know what? That’s probably not the place to go.” They had designed it up and that project failed. They had also been working on a six cylinder Boxter engine. So Boxter engine, the cylinders are opposed, so they’re like boxing. And the whole idea is that lowers the center of gravity of the weight of the engine. And they had a project that they were working on that that didn’t go ahead. So they stepped back and they went, “Maybe what we should do is just reduce the size of the sedan and put that engine in it.” That’s what they did. And that became the Porsche 901. Except there’s a problem. Peugeot had the copyright for zero in the middle of a bunch of numbers in France. They couldn’t call it the 901 because of that copyright. Dave Young: So they called it- Stephen Semple: So they called it the 911. And that’s now the iconic Porsche car. 1966, they sell 13,000 of these cars. Now, here’s the thing that I think is very interesting. And Porsche, as far as I could figure out, is the only car manufacturer that does this. First of all, they’ve maintained the 911 forever, but even on top of that, Porsche really understands design language. We can all recognize a Porsche. Dave Young: Right. Stephen Semple: We can recognize one from 2020. We can recognize one from 1999. We can recognize one from 1970. Even though they’ve upgraded the technology, they’ve changed the design of the car. They’ve now come out with the Cayman and the Macan and the Cayenne. They’re all recognizable as that vehicle. They’ve done a great job of doing that. I think that was a lost opportunity, frankly, when Tesla came out because they had a clean design slate. Tesla could have done that. But I think that’s really interesting how they’ve managed to maintain, even though they’ll modernize it. In our minds, we still will see one and go, “That’s a Porsche.” Dave Young: Sure. And the great car brands are able to do that. Stephen Semple: Yes. Dave Young: Audi is always going to be an Audi. Volvo is always going to look like a Volvo. And in the Portals class at Wizard Academy, one of the videos that I use to demonstrate that, there’s a language. If you combine specific shapes and specific lines, that all adds up to that brand of car. And so I’ve got an old video that I got when I was in the Motor Press Guild from Audi. It was just a video that was made for journalists with an Audi designer explaining all the lines on the car when they came out with the Q7 and how it still maintained the Audi design language. It was fascinating. Stephen Semple: It is. Dave Young: So Porsche could tell you that and the cool thing is those designers can tell you that. It’s hard for you and I to go, “Well, I can look at it and say, “That’s a Porsche.” But to be able to put it into words that describe it to someone else, is a gift. Stephen Semple: What’s really interesting, my nephew, Jeffrey, he loves Audi’s. That’s what he has. And he’ll even make the comment, he doesn’t like the Porsche’s because you feel like you’re in a bubble. Audis are very square. If you look at the back of an Audi and you look at the rear end of a Porsche, it has hips. But again, he’s even, “They’re great cars, but I like the squareness of the Audi.” So that’s interesting. Dave Young: Audi Audi has a fairly, not perpendicular, but an upright grill more so than a … And that’s part of their design language. Stephen Semple: So the whole DNA of Porsche came from this whole idea of a small car. Dave Young: Big engine. Stephen Semple: Big engine, daily driver, that was the whole idea is, it’s supposed to be a car that you can drive every day. That’s the core, core, core, core principle. That’s why they always have decent sized trunks. I remember when Gary bought his Boxter, one of the things he loved about it is you can actually put two sets of golf clubs in that car. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: Right? Now, here’s what’s fun. There was a time where when they were really wanting to get things going, they did some great print advertisements. So they had ads like bug killer. Another one was calling it transportation is like calling sex reproduction. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: Now, two of my favorites, one was not perfect. It would list 20 or 30 races that Porsche won. And if you actually read it, there was two that it didn’t. Dave Young: That they didn’t, “We didn’t win all the races.” Stephen Semple: So not perfect. Dave Young: That could have been driver error. Stephen Semple: That could have been. But Dave, you were going to make some jokes. Porsche’s able to laugh at itself. It actually had an ad that said, “Small penis? Have I got a car for you? If you’re going to overcompensate, then by all means, overcompensate.” Dave Young: I love it, I love it. Well, and that’s always the thing, the jokes are not about the car. Stephen Semple: But they actually ran that ad and I believe it ran in Car and Driver Magazine. I cannot imagine getting that ad approved. Dave Young: That’s amazing. Stephen Semple: And look, their own drivers are like, “Yeah, whatever.” Dave Young: Sure, compensating all I want. Absolutely. I love that story. Well, thank you, Stephen. I love the story of Porsche. Stephen Semple: There you go. Dave Young: And get out there and enjoy it or just buy me one and send it here. Thank you. Stephen Semple: All right, thanks, David. Dave Young: Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat, juicy five-star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute Empire Building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.

What if the Volkswagen you built as a teenager never really left you? In this episode, we get into the incredible full-circle story of David Lawler and his 1971 Volkswagen Beetle from Southeast England. David bought his very first VW at just 14 years old, poured years into building it, and saw that dream rewarded when the car landed in a Volkswagen magazine in 1995. But life changes. Priorities shift. The unthinkable happens—and the car is sold. Watching your first show-winning Volkswagen drive away is a regret that never fully fades. For decades, the Beetle would resurface in David's life, always just out of reach. Nearly 30 years later, he finally gets the chance to buy it back—only to discover it's far worse than he imagined. Rather than restore what was lost, David makes a bold decision: start over and build something entirely new. The result is a radically re-imagined 1971 VW Beetle—a modern, hot-rod-inspired machine that stands completely apart from anything else in the Volkswagen world. From extensive paint and bodywork, to chop-top modifications, a full roof conversion, and a cartoon-style window treatment, this build rewrites the rulebook. The hot-rod-meets-custom interior seals the deal as a true one-off. That risk paid off in a big way. The car was selected Top Five at the VolksWorld Show and went on to land the cover of the November 2025 Volkswagen magazine. This episode covers the emotional journey, the design decisions, the fabrication challenges, and what it means to let go of the past—only to build something even better. If you love custom Volkswagen Beetles, VW show cars, chop-top VWs, and real stories from the global air-cooled scene, this one is a must-listen.   www.letstalkdubs.com www.vwtrendsmagazine.com www.rosswulf.com use code LTD10 for 10% off of your order www.ssaircooled.com ICON pistons here

Am 3. September 2023 steht in einer Kleingartenanlage in Gosen am Rand von Berlin ein VW Beetle in Flammen. Bei der kriminaltechnischen Untersuchung wird im Wrack eine Leiche entdeckt. Der Tote ist ein 21-jähriger Mann, der erstochen wurde. Was wollte er hier am Rande der Gartenanlage?   Autor: Jörg Simon   Unsere Podcast-Empfehlung: "Kim & Klaus" - in der ARD Audiothek: https://1.ard.de/kimklaus

Dan Prosser and Andrew Frankel discuss cars of the people. From the Mini and Fiat 500 to the VW Beetle and Citroën 2CV, great peoples' cars have the power to changes the lives of millions, and even entire societies, in ways no other kinds of car ever could. But what are the comment traits of peoples' cars, why do they so often become cultural icons, and what is the future of the peoples' car?Use coupon code pod20 at checkout to get 20% off an annual subscription to The Intercooler's online car magazine for the first year! Listen to this podcast ad-free, and enjoy a subscriber-only midweek podcast too. With a 30-day free trial, you can try it risk-free – https://www.the-intercooler.com/subscribe/Find out more about JBR Capital here – https://www.jbrcapital.comUse coupon code Ti10 to get 10% off your Supernatural Car Care order – https://supernaturalcarcare.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this week's episode, we dissect Herbie: Fully Loaded, a film released on June 24, 2005, starring Lindsay Lohan, Michael Keaton, Matt Dillon, Justin Long, and a '63 VW Beetle named Herbie . Join us as we discuss spiritual connections, sentient cars, 50 year-old brothers, NASCAR, pinks, and more!Notable Mentions + References in This Episode:How sentient is NASCAR Herbie? (Roger Ebert Review)The Love Bug (1968)Rumors - Lindsay LohanFirst - Lindsay LohanHello - Lionel Richie (Herbie Falls in Love)My Shiny Teeth and Me - Chip SkylarkScary Movie 2Michael Keaton's Work on Mister Roger's NeighborhoodDouble Teamed (Episode 045)Right on Track (Episode 053)Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board (Episode 078)Connect with us:Instagram: @in_hindsight_podTwitter: @in_hindsightpod Want us to dissect one of your favorite childhood movies? Send us a DM or email us at inhindsightpod@gmail.com.Thanks for listening!

Click here to share your favorite car, car story or any automotive trivia!Dave Abelow's love affair with Volkswagen Beetles began in middle school when a friend's family rolled into Connecticut from California in a stunning black oval-window Bug with red interior. What started as teenage infatuation evolved into a seven-Beetle odyssey spanning five decades, including the remarkable transformation of his WWII veteran father from VW skeptic to devoted owner during the 1973 oil embargo.As co-founder of Connecticut's Small Car Company club (named after the legendary VW dealership), Dave has spent 11 years building a community that's "more about friendship and camaraderie" than Robert's Rules of Order. His current ride? A fire-breathing 1972 Super Beetle pushing 200 horsepower – proof that these humble cars can pack serious surprises.Listen to Dave's favorite episode with fellow Connecticut air-cooled car enthusiast and past guest, Guinevere Freccia - https://buzzsprout.com/admin/2316026/episodes/16886205-air-cooled-and-carefree-guinevere-s-vw-beetle-tales-and-family-restoration-traditionsBeyond the garage, Dave's "Mentors and Motors" program bridges the gap between talented technical students and restoration shops desperate for skilled workers. He shares the story of spotting raw talent in a young tech student who could both wrench and sketch an Audi TT from memory – now working at a premier restoration shop.From driving his father's '73 Beetle as their wedding getaway car to displaying a vintage Small Car Company deck lid as wall art in his office, Dave demonstrates how air-cooled Volkswagens aren't just transportation – they're threads that weave families, friendships, and futures together. His philosophy? It's about "people as much as it is about the cars." *** Your Favorite Automotive Podcast - Now Arriving Weekly!!! *** Listen on your favorite platform and visit https://carsloved.com for full episodes, our automotive blog, Guest Road Trip Playlist and our new CAR-ousel of Memories photo archive. Don't Forget to Rate & Review to keep the engines of automotive storytelling—and personal restoration—running strong.

Click here to share your favorite car, car story or any automotive trivia!Dive into car culture and automotive nostalgia with Christian & Doug as Deputy Dave (paramedic-turned-sheriff, actor, and VW superfan) shares unforgettable car stories. We hit everything from his laundau-top 1986 Oldsmobile Cutlass, 1967 Volkswagen Beetle nicknamed “Alice,” hand-me-down Crown Victoria, to a gas-guzzling '75 Ford F-100, right up to importing a right-hand-drive 1996 JDM Honda Acty 4x4 kei van on a budget. Dave walks through the import process, dailying a kei van, naming cars, and building a full-on VW shrine (yes, still-sealed collectibles). We also detour into film sets (Apple TV+ Lady in the Lake, Lifetime's Meet, Marry, Murder), CPR class road trips, holiday parades, and why his dream is a VW T2 Transporter double-cab.Dave's favorite episode with Mohammad and his experience as a JDM importer -  https://buzzsprout.com/2316026/episodes/17376238-how-to-import-supra-skyline-integra-jdm-business-secrets-with-mohammad-azeemIf you love classic cars, JDM, collector cars, cars & coffee, and real-world car community vibes—this is your episode! Want to learn more about the JDM world, check out Dave's YouTube video review - https://youtu.be/WEhR-6ml2F4Learn more about Dave CPR Training here - Facebook (CPR page): https://www.facebook.com/share/1G12outS6C/?mibextid=wwXIfrInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/d.hall_paramedic?igsh=MTFzd2I1czFzY21sYw%3D%3D&utm_source=qrTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@paramedicdave87?_t=ZT-8ylqVTIIAwg&_r=1 *** Your Favorite Automotive Podcast - Now Arriving Weekly!!! *** Listen on your favorite platform and visit https://carsloved.com for full episodes, our automotive blog, Guest Road Trip Playlist and our new CAR-ousel of Memories photo archive. Don't Forget to Rate & Review to keep the engines of automotive storytelling—and personal restoration—running strong.

The VW Beetle is the best selling car of all time. The story behind its creation is a bit complicated though. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode we talk with Mark Smith president of Smyth Kit Cars, where you can build your own UTE from a VW Beetle, Dodge Charger and Golf. Plus check out their new teardrop trailer kit. The trailer looks perfect for "drag and drive" events.  We also review the Ford Bronco Sport and discuss oil consumption with Captain Keith on his Denali with the 5.3 engine.  

In this episode we talk with Mark Smith president of Smyth Kit Cars, where you can build your own UTE from a VW Beetle, Dodge Charger and Golf. Plus check out their new teardrop trailer kit. The trailer looks perfect for "drag and drive" events.  We also review the Ford Bronco Sport and discuss oil consumption with Captain Keith on his Denali with the 5.3 engine.  

In this episode, we dive into the story behind Discipline Child — a wildly custom 1955 Volkswagen Beetle owned by Cali Springer, originally from the Virgin Islands. What began as a simple inquiry about fuel injection turned into a one-of-a-kind build by Alvin Lawrence of Auto Fanatic, also hailing from the islands. This isn't your typical classic VW Beetle. Discipline Child features a Subaru engine swap, full air suspension, electric air conditioning sourced from a Tesla, and a top-tier custom sound system. The level of craftsmanship and attention to detail reflects the dedication and discipline it took to see this project through to the end. From the island roots to the custom Budnik wheels, this car blends old-school air-cooled Volkswagen soul with cutting-edge modern tech — and it's all done in true island style. If you're passionate about vintage VWs, air-cooled culture, and radical custom builds, this is an episode you don't want to miss. Cali Springer is also the promoter for the VI bug out. We also take some time to discuss the VI bug out! An insane Vw show that takes place in St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. Happening this year 2025 December 28 through January 1. We'll bring you more information soon.    https://www.instagram.com/autofanatik/ www.letstalkdubs.com www.vwtrendsmagazine.com.   www.rosswulf.com use code LTD10 to get 10% off your puchase

Send us a textWe're joined this week by Paul Medhurst, the man behind VW workshop, classic car showroom and now destination coffee shop Type 2 Detectives. Paul recalls telling people his Grandad used to drive an Aston Martin - however, his Mum corrected him one day when she overheard him telling some friends... It was actually an Austin Maxi!His Dad had an Austin Princess, then a Ford Cortina which they drove to the South of France. His Mum had a VW Beetle, and later a Mini Cooper, which his Dad scored from the neighbour, after a domestic argument over a brand new VW Campervan meant it had to go! Paul also records a speedy trip around the block in a Porsche 964 with a mate from school... a car which later inspired him to buy his own 964. We hope you enjoy this episode. Please check out Type 2 Detectives here: Type 2 DetectivesWatch their You Tube here: https://youtu.be/fJS-HlnKFa8Support the showWe'd love you to hear and share your stories, please tag and follow us on social media. www.instagram.com/mydadscar_podcastwww.Facebook.com/mydadscar podcastwww.buymeacoffee.com/mydadscarIf you'd like to support the podcast and are able to, you can ‘buy us a coffee' which will help towards costs of hosting and purchasing equipment to allow us to record guests in person, rather than just on zoom. Get in touch with us direct - MyDadsCarPodcast@gmail.com

Should Porsche put a 911 Turbo S engine in a Cayman? We've all said as much for a long time and someone finally did it: BGB Motorsports. We describe what the drive was like.Plus, Zack Klapman's VW Beetle story; PCH has reoponed to the public; and we answer Patreon questions including:How cheap will a BMW M4 GTS get?Commuter/canyon: IS500 vs Alfa Giulia QuadDeman vs BGBHow would you build a C5 today?BMW 850i or LC500?A McLaren Speedtails meant for turns?Matt's amazing brussels sprouts recipeDid they fix the BMW M2?And more!Recorded May 26, 2025TruewerkGet 15 percent off your first order at TRUEWERK.com/tire. SmallsGet 35% off Smalls plus an additional 50% off your first order by using my code TIRE at smalls.com New merch! Grab a shirt or hoodie and support us! https://thesmokingtireshop.com/ Use Off The Record! and ALWAYS fight your tickets! For a 10% discount on your first case go to https://www.offtherecord.com/TST Want your question answered? Want to watch the live stream, get ad-free podcasts, or exclusive podcasts? Join our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thesmokingtirepodcast Tweet at us!https://www.Twitter.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Twitter.com/zackklapman Instagram:https://www.Instagram.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Instagram.com/therealzackklapman Want your question answered? Want to watch the live stream, get ad-free podcasts, or exclusive podcasts? Join our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thesmokingtirepodcast Use Off The Record! and ALWAYS fight your tickets! Enter code TST10 for a 10% discount on your first case on the Off The Record app, or go to http://www.offtherecord.com/TST. Watch our car reviews: https://www.youtube.com/thesmokingtire Tweet at us!https://www.Twitter.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Twitter.com/zackklapman Instagram:https://www.Instagram.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Instagram.com/therealzackklapman

IMPORTANT update on the ID.Buzz. A thing we hated we may not hate anymore. Plus, why did Matt's 6'5" dad and his equally large brothers own a VW Beetle? The EV mandate is over, plus we answer Patreon questions including:Used Audi R8 or AMG-Mercedes GTImperfect cars that are perfect for ONE thing?Which cars have we changed our mind on?Favorite camera gear right nowIs there a V8 Lotus could put in the Emira?Should I PPF my mountain car?Is it true that Porsche 911 owners don't like the Carrera GT?Which special edition car would we want (if any)?Are air-cooled Porsches even worth the money? Recorded May 22, 2025  Hello FreshGo to HelloFresh.com/smokingtire10fm now to get 10 Free Meals with a Free Item For Life. CremoHead to Target or Target.com to find Cremo's new line of antiperspirants and deodorants in the Italian Bergamont and Palo Santo scents New merch! Grab a shirt or hoodie and support us! https://thesmokingtireshop.com/ Use Off The Record! and ALWAYS fight your tickets! For a 10% discount on your first case go to https://www.offtherecord.com/TST Want your question answered? Want to watch the live stream, get ad-free podcasts, or exclusive podcasts? Join our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thesmokingtirepodcast Tweet at us!https://www.Twitter.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Twitter.com/zackklapman Instagram:https://www.Instagram.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Instagram.com/therealzackklapman Want your question answered? Want to watch the live stream, get ad-free podcasts, or exclusive podcasts? Join our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thesmokingtirepodcast Use Off The Record! and ALWAYS fight your tickets! Enter code TST10 for a 10% discount on your first case on the Off The Record app, or go to http://www.offtherecord.com/TST. Watch our car reviews: https://www.youtube.com/thesmokingtire Tweet at us!https://www.Twitter.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Twitter.com/zackklapman Instagram:https://www.Instagram.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Instagram.com/therealzackklapman

Remembering the former president of Uruguay: José 'Pepe' Mujica. He started life as a flower farmer on the outskirts of Montevideo. As a young man he became politically active, part of the left-wing guerilla group the Tupamaros, who were bent on revolution through armed struggle that involved bank heists and kidnappings. With the authorities on his tail Pepe was eventually captured, he was shot six times and later staged what became a record-breaking prison escape. When he was captured and imprisoned again, he was held for 13 years in horrendous conditions but he says the pain and loneliness of that time was when he learned the most about life. A year after the military regime stepped down, Pepe was released and joined formal politics and in 2010 he was voted in as president of Uruguay. He shunned the presidential palace and car for his crumbling farmhouse and old VW Beetle and brought in laws legalising gay marriage and abortion. He had his critics but when he died earlier this month, thousands of people lined the streets to pay their respects. We spoke to Pepe alongside his wife Lucia Topolansky in 2023 and they talked about how their love had changed over their decades together. Presenter: Andrea Kennedy Producer: Louise MorrisGet in touch: liveslessordinary@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

On this episode I am under the weather but I break down for you the big window Beatles from 1958 to 1967. The main differences we start by breaking them down in the three categories 58 to 1961 1962 to 1964 and the third category 1965 to 1967. We discussed the details and differences between these. It's a short one this week but a lot of information. I hope you enjoy it. 

Send us a text**This is the Audio from the Video on YouTube**With swap meet season starting soon, we walk you through the process of checking that old VW case you might find to make sure it is good to use in a future build. Link to YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@BrewCityBugTalkLink to Prescott's Book:https://www.cartechbooks.com/products/how-to-rebuild-vw-air-cooled-engines-1961-2003?fbclid=IwY2xjawJjSrhleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHjqe0UaUOxYEm1tQ_YicW8BJQ3jKo5l4lrG15RvniHlJkylYtM-LMKeUqhzs_aem_c2TPdhkebXrJa2EcpwDKogSupport the showFollow us on Facebook for some exclusive content: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61554312976645 Link to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BrewCityBugTalk Feel free email us with all your questions or comments: BCBugTalk@gmail.com Link to Instagram: www.instagram.com/bcbugtalk If you would like to support the show: https:/www.buzzsprout.com/2290266/support Or support us here: buymeacoffee.com/BCBugTalk Intro Music: Stomping Rock (Four Shots) AlexGrohl

The VW Bus, in its many forms, has become one of the most recognizable vehicles in the company's history. Sure, it might be second to the VW Beetle, but even that might be a close race. While the bus has been out of production for decades for use in the U.S. market, the folks at VW showed off a battery-electric concept in 2016 dubbed BUDD-e. Of course, wiser heads prevailed, and the concept van was updated and given a new name in 2017: ID. Buzz. Of course, it would be a while before the ID. Buzz hit U.S. shores, but a successor to the VW Bus is finally showing up on U.S. streets. The '25 VW ID. Buzz rides on the brand's MEB platform and packs a 91-kWh battery pack under its floor. That battery feeds a 282 hp rear motor or a 335 hp dual-motor powertrain.On this episode of Quick Spin, Autoweek's Mark Vaughn hops behind the wheel of the 2025 VW ID Buzz and puts it through its paces. Vaughn takes you on a guided tour of the ID. Buzz to highlight some of his favorite features. Later, Vaughn takes you along for a live drive review. Adding to these segments, Vaughn chats with host Wesley Wren about the '25 ID. Buzz, minivans as a whole, and more. Closing the show, the pair breaks down what makes the 2025 VW ID. Buzz special.

Send us a textThis week on Shock Talk, Junior and Steve are joined by Class 11 desert racer Cameron Brantz to explore the world of vintage VW Beetle racing. They break down the history of Class 11 in off-road racing, the unique challenges of competing in nearly stock Bugs, and Cameron's journey as a racer. From brutal desert terrain to the camaraderie of the Class 11 community, this episode is packed with insight and passion for one of the most iconic racing classes in off-road.

Podcast Show Notes for Episode 246 of The Clean Energy Show In this week's episode of The Clean Energy Show, we explore the intersection of climate, technology, and resilience in the face of a changing world. Highlights include: Trump's Second Term and Climate Policy: The U.S. pulls out of the Paris Agreement again. What does this mean for global climate efforts? Electric Construction Tools in Oslo: Discover how Norway is leading the charge in cleaner, quieter construction sites, where even the loudest sounds come from an art museum. Understanding Wildfires: Why are trees often left standing after wildfires devastate neighborhoods? We discuss the science of fire behavior and building resilience. Sweden's Underground Heat Battery: Learn about a city storing summer heat for winter use, a fascinating innovation in sustainable energy. Plus, we share listener letters from around the world, including advice for EV road trips in winter, insights on wildfire mitigation, and reactions to the latest energy news. Don't miss our deep dive into the challenges and triumphs of rebuilding after wildfires in California, as well as the science behind humidity and fire risk. Join The Clean Energy Show's CLEAN CLUB on Patreon for exciting perks! Get a monthly bonus podcast, early access to our content, behind the scenes content, access to our members-only Discord community and thank-yous in the credits of videos and shoutouts on our podcast! Starting at just a couple dollars per month! Listener Mail Highlights: EV travel tips and challenges from Vancouver Island to Regina. Reflections on climate action and accountability from Ireland and Germany. A story of nostalgia for winter driving in a 1969 VW Beetle, contrasted with modern EV struggles. The Lightning Round: Quick takes on the biggest clean energy stories, including: Oregon's massive 1.2 GW solar farm. China's rise as a nuclear powerhouse. Europe's potential to meet 25% of EV battery metal demand through recycling by 2030. Contact Us: We'd love to hear from you! Email us at CleanEnergyShow@gmail.com or leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow. Support the show and access exclusive content on our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/c/cleanenergypod. Follow us on social media:

Send us a textThis is the audio from our video we made for our Youtube channel, in this episode we go over the VW Beetle manual transmissions throughout the years. How to identify what version of transmission you have, Swing Axle or IRS, what is the best way to identify what gears you may have in your transmission and we touch a little bit on what to steps to take when making a performance transmission.  Feel free email us with all your questions or comments:BCBugTalk@gmail.comCheck out the Video for this show on YouTube: www.youtube.com/@BrewCityBugTalkFollow us at Brew City Bug Talk on Facebook for some exclusive content.https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61554312976645 Follow us on Instagram:www.instagram.com/bcbugtalkIf you would like to support the show: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2290266/support Or support us here:buymeacoffee.com/BCBugTalkIntro Music: Stomping Rock (Four Shots) AlexGrohl  Support the showFollow us at Brew City Bug Talk on Facebook for some exclusive content. Feel free email us with all your questions or comments:BCBugTalk@gmail.comwww.instagram.com/bcbugtalkwww.youtube.com/@BrewCityBugTalkIf you would like to support the show,https://www.buzzsprout.com/2290266/supporthttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/bcbugtalkIntro Music: Stomping Rock (Four Shots) AlexGrohl

Even though he's been gone for four years, the legend that is Moe Viletto and his brand Tailored For Survival is just as strong as ever. With epic stories for days, if you weren't lucky enough to have known or met Moe, you can still share in a small taste of what an incredible guy he was. Please enjoy one of the most amazing chats we've ever had on The Lunatic Fringe. With one of the most unique stories of how skydiving entered his life, Moe Viletto had just survived an impromptu zero gravity aerobatic flight by the skin of his teeth when he and his pilot buddy spotted canopies off in the distance. Knowing the instant he landed from his first jump that this was what life had been aiming him toward, he embarked on what this year would have been five decades of skydiving, rigging and BASE jumping. Living life on his terms as a rigging gypsy king, scoring a bit of luck here and there and having an incredible time, he did it all without any real plan. From drougeless tandems and AFF before it was a thing, to living in a VW Beetle while trying to find a home for his sewing machines, to BASE jumping with a tent and then on to Hollywood, Moe Viletto and I only scratch the surface of his fifty years of Lunatic Fringe adventures. From his antics to his rigging, Moe Viletto was a trailblazer in every sense of the word and we aren't likely to ever find another quite like him. On what was suppose to be the first of many installments of "Story Time With Moe", he shared with us just a little of what made him such an incredibly loved icon in our sport.  Recorded not much before his passing, I feel nothing but lucky I had the chance to meet the man behind the Lunatic Fringe legend.

#506 Quiz Special. In this bonus episode Gareth Alex and Zog invite you to join in our holiday season quiz “Fact Or Fake?”. Astounding car facts, or are they lies, can you tell the difference?

Click here to send a text to Christian and DougJoe from Season 3 tells us about his first car, an unregistered 1972 VW Beetle, which he proceeded to drift in his parents driveway. A 1971 VW Westfalia followed in a few years but this one came with tags.#everycartellsastory #everycarhasaculture #teenshenanigans #pocast #vwbeetle #carslovedVisit https://linktr.ee/carsloved to find all of our episodes and latest content.

Click here to send a text to Christian and DougHave you ever felt the thrill of learning to drive a stick shift in a maroon Chevy Citation or the excitement of finally getting to sit in the passenger seat of your father's car? Doug and I kick off the first episode of Season 3 with special episode of "All the Cars I've Loved Before" with heartfelt stories from our own journeys into the world of cars, setting the stage for a heartwarming conversation. We shift gears to welcome our guests, the dynamic father-son duo of Tom and Aiden, who share their own automotive adventures and family memories. Tom reminisces about his father's impressive car collection, punctuated with tales of a red 1966 convertible and his father's split-window Corvette.Tom's stories, filled with laughter and illuminate the patience and understanding of his mother amidst his father's passion. Transitioning into Aiden's generation, we explore his fascination with a classic '94 Ranger and the influence of his grandfather's notable collection, featuring gems like a Porsche 911 and a '57 T-Bird. Aiden shares his journey of acquiring and restoring his first car, capturing the essence of excitement, challenge, and the timeless appeal of vintage cars, along with recognition of the growing restomod trend.Finally, we revel in the cultural significance of classic models, such as the 1972 Volkswagen Bug, highlighting its role in bridging generations. Our conversation touches on the camaraderie found at car shows and events, underscoring how these gatherings foster connections that transcend age. Through this episode, we celebrate the profound ties between family and cars, illustrating how these mechanical marvels serve as a unique thread weaving through the tapestry of our lives. Join us for a heartfelt exploration of the stories that bind us, from one generation to the next.

Freeman Thomas is an American automobile and industrial designer who has worked for Porsche, Volkswagen Group, DaimlerChrysler and Ford. He had his hand in some pivotal cars of our time, including: the VW Concept 1 (it became the new Beetle); the Audi TT, A4, and A6; Dodge Tomahawk motorcycle; and he oversaw the design of numerous vehicles at Ford and Jeep. Now he's the CEO of Meyers Manx, the original dune buggy company that has been brought back to life. https://meyersmanx.com/ Recorded September 20, 2024 Get Maine LobsterHead over to GetMaineLobster.com – Promo Code TIRE – 15% off all orders store-wide  MyBookieDouble your first deposit up to $2,000 (100% deposit bonus) at https://bit.ly/joinwithTIRE Delete MeTake control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for DeleteMe. Now at a special discount for our listeners. Today get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to joindeleteme.com/tire and use promo code "TIRE" at checkout New merch! Grab a shirt or hoodie and support us! https://thesmokingtireshop.com/ https://www.noduswatches.com/design-lab-shop/p/canyon-by-matt-farah-night-sky Use Off The Record! and ALWAYS fight your tickets! Enter code TSTPOD for a 10% discount on your first case on the Off The Record app, or go to https://www.offtherecord.com/TST Want your question answered? Want to watch the live stream, get ad-free podcasts, or exclusive podcasts? Join our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thesmokingtirepodcast Tweet at us!https://www.Twitter.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Twitter.com/zackklapman Instagram:https://www.Instagram.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Instagram.com/therealzackklapman Want your question answered? Want to watch the live stream, get ad-free podcasts, or exclusive podcasts? Join our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thesmokingtirepodcast Use Off The Record! and ALWAYS fight your tickets! Enter code TST10 for a 10% discount on your first case on the Off The Record app, or go to http://www.offtherecord.com/TST. Watch our car reviews: https://www.youtube.com/thesmokingtire Tweet at us!https://www.Twitter.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Twitter.com/zackklapman Instagram:https://www.Instagram.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Instagram.com/therealzackklapman

Spooky season continues on The Weirdest Thing. This week Scotty delivers four tales of uncanny automotive accursedness from around the world--from ghostly headlights signalling the presence of an undiscovered roadside fatality in the UK, to a malevolent VW Beetle haunting a famously deadly Malaysian highway. But the primary focus is the Black Volga, a (possibly?) demonic luxury car stalking various nations of the former Soviet Union and stealing away their children for unknowable and diabolic purposes. CONTENT WARNING: This episode talks about various road disasters, and touches briefly upon sexual assault.

OUR NEW WEBSITE IS WORSE THAN YOU HOPED: ⁠⁠⁠www.itsnotthecar.com/⁠⁠⁠ Once, long ago, a German engineer looked at a VW Beetle and thought, “Ahh, my little streitzel, we should tango with the hot-rod physics of love!” The Porsche 911 is divisive. People love 'em. People hate 'em. People fire 'em backward into ditches and Armco and spit excuses for how it wasn't their fault—widowmaker car, Wreck-cellence Was Expected, blah blah blah. (“Too much understeer! Too much oversteer! Chappell Roan! ANYTHING BUT ME!”) Is it the [fault of the] car? It is not!  This show's format rotates weekly, because squirrel. This ep's format is called “How to Drive It.” Please do not hit play while you are in the middle of crashing a Porsche and expect it to help. Related Trivia: Ross and Jeff have raced 911s professionally. Sam has tested countless 911 variants for places like Road & Track and 000—from 2.0-liter Daytona winners to a 934, a 935, and most of the road models since 1964. Also, “streitzel” is both a Hans Stuck nickname and a kind of German pastry, and if those facts bring you joy, you are indeed nerdy enough for this show. This episode was produced by Mike Perlman. ** Support It's Not the Car: Contribute on Patreon ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.patreon.com/notthecar⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ** Topic suggestions, feedback, questions? Let us know what you think: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠INTCPod@gmail.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ** Check out Sam's book: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Smithology: Thoughts, Travels, and Semi-Plausible Car Writing, 2003–2023⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ** Where to find us: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/intcpod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/j.v.braun/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/rossbentley/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/thatsamsmith/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/INTCpod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://rossbentley.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://speedsecrets.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/Drivercoach⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ** ABOUT THE SHOW: It's Not the Car is a podcast about people and speed. We tell racing stories and leave out the boring parts. Ross Bentley is a former IndyCar driver and a world-renowned performance coach and author. Jeff Braun is a champion race engineer. Sam Smith is an award-winning journalist and a former executive editor of Road & Track magazine. Together, we explore the emotion at the heart of the machine. We don't love racing for the nuts and bolts—we love it for what it asks of the bag of meat at the wheel. New episodes every Tuesday.

Today was a parade Isabelle wanted to see, so, she saw it.I shopped. When I was done she FaceTimed with me (as you can see here).I've pretty much figured out how to keep the. grocery bill pretty steady, but it involves knowing how to cook.Isabelle's birthday was yesterday.She did some pretty cool stuff for her birthday.I remember the Shriner's parades as a kid with the guys on the little motorcycles and 15 guys in a VW Beetle and all of that.

Today was a parade Isabelle wanted to see, so, she saw it. I shopped. When I was done she FaceTimed with me (as you can see here). I've pretty much figured out how to keep the. grocery bill pretty steady, but it involves knowing how to cook. Isabelle's birthday was yesterday. She did some pretty cool stuff for her birthday. I remember the Shriner's parades as a kid with the guys on the little motorcycles and 15 guys in a VW Beetle and all of that.

On this episode of Quick Charge, we explore the wide range of electric conversions and restomods out there bringing classic style to the ultra modern world of electric vehicles ... even if there aren't that many of them around. Would you rather have a new Taycan, or an all-electric 901? A Demon-powered Hemi Charger, or a Ludicrous Tesla driven '72 Plymouth Satellite? See them all here, then let us know which one you'd like to drive home in the comments! Source Links This is a Tesla Model 3… no really Current classics: MINI Recharged muscles in on the restomod racket Current classics: this 1980 Subaru Brat is your new silent surf buddy Current Classics: electric 911 restomod captures the desired aesthetic Watch Zero Labs convert an old rusty truck into an EV in 24 hours Current Classics: take this drop-top electric Range Rover on a stylish safari Electrogenic brings the DeLorean DMC-12 Back to the Future with a ‘drop-in' EV conversion kit Current Classics: This '72 Plymouth Satellite packs Ludicrous heat This $2,000 kit from China will convert a classic VW Beetle to electric Prefer listening to your podcasts? Audio-only versions of Quick Charge are now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn, and our RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players. New episodes of Quick Charge are recorded Monday through Thursday (that's the plan, anyway). We'll be posting bonus audio content there as well, so be sure to follow and subscribe so you don't miss a minute of Electrek's high-voltage daily news! Got news? Let us know!Drop us a line at tips@electrek.co. You can also rate us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or recommend us in Overcast to help more people discover the show!

How I'm I supposed to live my life with a car that only goes 300 miles per charge when I might need to go to the dry cleaner 4 miles from my house?BONUS EPISODES available on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/deniersplaybook) SOCIALS & MORE (https://linktr.ee/deniersplaybook) CREDITS Created by: Rollie Williams, Nicole Conlan & Ben BoultHosts: Rollie Williams & Nicole ConlanExecutive Producer: Ben Boult Producer: Gregory Haddock Editor: Brittany TerrellResearchers: Carly Rizzuto, Canute Haroldson & James CrugnaleArt: Jordan Doll Music: Tony Domenick Special thanks: The Civil Liberties Defense CenterSOURCESAllen, S. (2016, August 22). The horror of alligator attack on boy at Disney World resort is detailed in new reports. Los Angeles Times.Better Offline. (2024, May 8). Enron Musk ft. Ed Niedermeyer.Contributor, G. (2023, August 13). Are Electric Cars Really Cheaper To Own And Drive Than Gas Cars? CleanTechnica. Coren, M. (2023, August 8). Advice | Is it cheaper to refuel your EV battery or gas tank? We did the math in all 50 states. Washington Post. Electric Classic Cars. (2021, January 4). VW Beetle converted to electric in a day. YouTube. Enel X Way. (2022, November 21). Future of gas stations vs EV chargers | Enel X Way. Www.enelxway.com. Energy.Gov. (n.d.). The Cost to Charge an Electric Vehicle Explained. Energy.gov. Retrieved May 14, 2024, from https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/cost-charge-electric-vehicle-explained#:~:text=Using%20the%20U.S.%20household%20averageFederal Highway Administration. (n.d.). National Household Travel Survey. Nhts.ornl.gov. Retrieved April 24, 2024, from https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-tripsFischer, J. (2022, September 22). The Average Price of an Electric Car Keeps Dropping (2024 Update). CarEdge. Forest Breaking News. (2023, September 20). WATCH: Pete Stauber Tears Into Sec. Pete Buttigieg Over EV Mandates. Www.youtube.com. fueleconomy.gov. (2019). How many gas stations are there in the U.S? Fueleconomy.gov. Hoonigan. (2017, March 28). [HOONIGAN] DT 012: Electric Smart Car Burnouts, Donuts and Other Bad Ideas. YouTube. Jalopnik. (2020, June 2). Unboxing The World's Cheapest New Car Reveals It's So Much Better Than You Think. Www.youtube.com. Jalopnik. (2021, June 29). How The Cheapest Electric Car In The World Held Up After 1 Year. YouTube. Keley Blue Book. (2024, February 13). Kelley Blue Book Reports New-Vehicle Transaction Prices Continue to Tumble, Down 3.5% Year Over Year in January. Kelley Blue Book. Marklines. (2024, January 4). USA - Flash report, Automotive sales volume, 2023 - MarkLines Automotive Industry Portal. Www.marklines.com. Meyer, R., & Jenkins, J. (2024, May 8). ‎Shift Key with Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins: Elon Musk Is Putting the EV Transition in Peril on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts. Nadel, S. (2024, January 10). Charging Ahead: How EVs Could Drive Down Electricity Rates | ACEEE. Www.aceee.org. Not Just Bikes. (2023, March 6). These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us. Www.youtube.com. Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy. (2022, March 21). FOTW #1230, March 21, 2022: More than Half of all Daily Trips Were Less than Three Miles in 2021. Energy.gov. Policy, A. P. (2024, March 7). Comparing the Total Cost of Ownership of the Most Popular Vehicles in the United States. Atlas Public Policy. Randall, T. (2023, March 9). US Electric Cars Set Record With Almost 300-Mile Average Range. Bloomberg.com. Shilling, E. (2022, January 27). Trucks And SUVs Are Now Over 80 Percent Of New Car Sales In The U.S. Jalopnik. Squires, A. (2023, June 27). Building the 2030 National Charging Network. Www.nrel.gov. St. John, J. (2024, May 2). Tesla's Supercharger team layoffs perplex EV charging industry. Canary Media. Sturges, D. (2023). Near to Far: A design for a new equitable and sustainable transportation system. Dan Sturges.The Economic Times. (2023, December 3). Trump on electric vehicles: “They don't go far, they cost a fortune.” Www.youtube.com. The International Council on Clean Transportation. (n.d.). Five things you know about electric vehicles that aren't exactly true. International Council on Clean Transportation. The Simpsons. (n.d.). The Simpsons - Electric car of the future. Www.youtube.com. Retrieved May 14, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wjyaF8ut_E. Season 14, Episode 7.Torchinsky, J. (2023, April 27). This Indian-Market Brochure For The New MG Comet EV Is Concentrated Cringe Injected Right Into Your Brain. The Autopian. Torchinsky, J. (2024a, January 5). You'll Never Guess The Technology That Hospital Beds And Premium Cars Share, And For Very Different Purposes. The Autopian. Torchinsky, J. (2024b, January 8). VW Will Be The First Carmaker To Offer Integrated ChatGPT After All None Of You Demanded It. The Autopian. Torchinsky, J. (2024c, January 24). EV Startup Canoo Announces Deal With Post Office To Provide A Comically Small Number Of Vans. The Autopian. Torchinsky, J. (2024d, January 30). America Is Missing Out on the Best Electric Cars. The Atlantic. Torchinsky, J. (2024e, February 27). Congratulations! You Have Achieved The Same Results As Apple's 10-Year-Long EV Program Which They Just Shut Down. The Autopian. Torchinsky, J. (2024f, March 29). Huge Smartphone Company Xiaomi Just Showed The World Their Under-$30,000 Tesla Model 3 Fighter. The Autopian. Torchinsky, J. (2024g, April 12). “Fully Automated AVs May Never Be Able To Operate Safely” Says One Of The Oldest Professional Computing Technology Organizations. The Autopian. Witt, J. (2022, December 12). Winter & Cold Weather EV Range Loss in 7,000 Cars. Www.recurrentauto.com.Additional Media: The horror of alligator attack on boy at Disney World resort is detailed in new reports - Los Angeles TimesAmerica Is Missing Out on the Best Electric Cars - The AtlanticRobinson Meyer, Elon Musk Is Putting the EV Transition in PerilEd Zitron, Enron Musk Ft. Ed NiedermeyerVW Beetle converted to electric in a dayHow The Cheapest Electric Car In The World Held Up After 1 YearUnboxing The World's Cheapest New Car Reveals It's So Much Better Than You Think[HOONIGAN] DT 012: Electric Smart Car Burnouts, Donuts and Other Bad IdeasI'm an electric car - The SimpsonsWATCH: Pete Stauber Tears Into Sec. Pete Buttigieg Over EV MandatesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Manuel and Maria share their journey around the world from Mexico City to Newfoundland Canada. In a Beetle! They're working on a film with the journey, it will be called Leaving the Frame. Before we get there, Jake and Kris talk about Kris' terrible car habit, and the 944 he almost bought...I hope you guys enjoy this episode as much as we did recording it... Thanks for listening to Overcrest: A Pretty Good Podcast Leaving the frame Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leavingtheframe/?hl=en Maria's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ehrlichmaria/?hl=en Leaving the frame youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa-CHSyUGq04CO-KdeNOwsg --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/overcrest/support

Get subscriber-only episodes instantly, plus email-exclusive insights and guest previews every week - sign up at https://www.realestateteamos.com/subscribeChristy Belt Grossman is the go-to expert for real estate operations. She started in mortgage ops before joining a 2-agent team as an assistant. Together, they grew to the #5 Keller Williams team and one of the first teams to produce $1B in sales.Today, Christy is the Owner of Ops Boss Coaching and shares tips for owners and operators alike on building a business by building a partnership.  You'll also learn when and how to hire or promote an Ops Boss from Assistant to Director of Operations to Chief Operating Officer.Watch or listen to this conversation with Christy to learn:- The definition and value of life-giving leadership- Her growth from assistant to COO in a pioneering real estate team 25+ years ago including a hard lesson along the way- The nuance in operations roles and a team leader's need to match their goals with these roles- Empowering your ops person to be a multiplier rather than just a subtractor- The Assistant as a job (not a career) that's paid based on time spent (not results generated)- The Director of Operations as a goal setter who's paid on results- The Chief Operating Officer as a business leader who's producing results, driving growth, and co-creating and co-casting the vision- The 3x Rule for optimizing your operations- The process to determine proper compensation for operations team members- A general rule of thumb to guide operations hiring- How to identify the Assistant who's prepared to become a Director of Operations- How to set goals and drive progress between team leader and ops leader … together- What solo agents and team leaders get by investing in operationsAt the end, learn about a rock band as a melting pot, a +20-year-old, patriotic VW Beetle, and Picasso's mastermind sessions.Connect with Christy and Ops Boss on Instagram:- https://www.instagram.com/christybeltgrossman/- https://www.instagram.com/opsbosscoaching/Learn more about Ops Boss Coaching:- https://OpsBossCoaching.comLearn more about Real Estate Team OS:- https://www.realestateteamos.com- https://linktr.ee/realestateteamosFollow Real Estate Team OS:- https://www.instagram.com/realestateteamos/- https://www.tiktok.com/@realestateteamos Get subscriber-only episodes instantly, plus email-exclusive insights and guest previews every week - sign up at https://www.realestateteamos.com/subscribe

Transforming the VW Beetle and creating the outdoor racing industry in Southern California.

One hundred years ago, a bright new age for children was dawning in America. Child labor laws were being passed, public education was spreading, and more. But Adam Benforado says America stopped short in its revolution of children's rights. Today, more than eleven million American children live in poverty. We deny young people any political power, while we fail to act on the issues that matter most to them: racism, inequality, and climate change. That's why Adam is calling for a new revolution for kids. He joins us to discuss his book, A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All.   About the Guest Adam Benforado is a professor of law at the Drexel University Kline School of Law and the New York Times best-selling author of A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All and Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice. His research, teaching, and advocacy is focused on children's rights and criminal justice. A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, he served as a clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and an attorney at Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C. He has published numerous scholarly articles. His popular writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Scientific American, Slate, and The Atlantic. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and children.   Transcript ADAM BENFORADO: If you're an architect, if you're a plumber, if you are a judge on an immigration court, I want you to think about what your job would look like if you put children first. The reason to do this is because this is good for all of us. It's not just good for kids. It's good for people who don't even like children at all. This is the best path forward as a society, because we all pay the costs of that inattention and those harms that come to kids. BLAIR HODGES: That's Adam Benforado and he's calling for a revolution in the way we all think about childhood. Which is gonna sound a little weird if you think kids today have it easier than ever. And it's true. I mean, they have some luxuries I couldn't even dream of as a kid—like I had to wait until Saturday morning to watch my favorite cartoons. Even then, I had to make the difficult choice between Muppet Babies or Ninja Turtles because they were on at the same time on a different channel. As a parent, Adam Benforado says he cheers for many improvements, but as a professor of law at Drexel University, he says the way children are treated by the courts in the US, economic limits they face, their lack of voting power, their poor access to health care, things like this make kids as vulnerable in America as they've been in 100 years. He wants that to change, not just because it would be better for kids. He says it would be better for everyone. But could the world's major challenges with health, climate change, and public safety really be easier to address by changing the way we treat kids? Adam Benforado says yes, that's why he wrote the book, A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All, and he's here to talk about it right now. There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.   LIFELONG INTEREST IN CHILDREN'S RIGHTS (2:15)   BLAIR HODGES: Adam Benforado, welcome to Family Proclamations. ADAM BENFORADO: Great to be with you. BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book, A Minor Revolution. And this is about children's rights. I wondered what got you interested in focusing on the legal rights of children. Your background is in law. So talk a little bit about why the rights of children became your focus. ADAM BENFORADO: So I think for me this is really a lifelong project. I think the seeds of this really come from my own childhood. I was really lucky to be born into a family with two really loving, supportive parents who spent a lot of time encouraging me and helping me be independent. But I think all around me, throughout my childhood, I saw a lot of abuse and, honestly, subjugation of children. And it really bothered me, starting when I was in elementary school, seeing the way kids were treated as, you know, not second-class citizens but as just, like, non-entities, I mean, not even like human beings. I think I was also aware of broader forces. I think I was really aware of the impact of wealth. I had a 1,200 square foot house and in my early elementary years I felt like the rich kid. And then I went to a kind of wealthy neighborhood in fourth grade where one of my friend's fathers got a limousine for the fourth-grade birthday party. And suddenly, I was like, “Oh my gosh! Actually my parents have like a beat-up VW Beetle.” And I'm like, “I'm not wealthy, like, I'm actually kind of worried about what my friends might think of my wealth, my family's wealth.” I think I was someone who really thought that I should vote when I was like in sixth grade. I didn't understand, you know, maybe I don't know as much as this other person. But I did know about the world. I have things I care about. Why shouldn't I have a say? I have a say in a whole bunch of other areas of my life. My parents listened when we were discussing things like what we should have for dinner, or whatever. I think it was those interactions and observations which informed my sense of and desire to write about some of the injustices I saw. And I think that carried me to law school, and certainly informed the questions I was interested in looking into, and certainly the way I taught. And in terms of coming to children's rights, the type of legal scholars usually sort of fall into these two camps of either being like general human rights—people who kind of focus over time on children's rights—or they are like practitioners who are working in the child welfare system, and then they come in with this particular angle. And it's funny because honestly, I was writing about all these different topics—like I started out writing about the role of corporations in society, and I teach criminal law. And in each of these subjects I look at things through the lens of children. So I'm very interested in, you know, how corporations manipulate kids to use them as weapons against their parents. I'm very interested in criminal law on juvenile justice issues— BLAIR HODGES: Are you talking about breakfast cereal commercials and toy commercials? [laughter] ADAM BENFORADO: Yes, yes. [laughter] BLAIR HODGES: Like how stores put all the candy and toys right by the checkout so you have to pass through there with your kids. ADAM BENFORADO: Oh, yeah. And that's something now, as a father—I think the cool thing about this project is, the seeds of this project started when I was a kid, but now I'm seeing it from a different perspective. I have two kids and, I tell you, right before I was writing this book, I had this experience with my daughter in Whole Foods. It's one of these times when we've got to go to the grocery store, there's no food, and my daughter looks up in front of the egg aisle, and there's this giant giraffe that costs $100, you know? And my daughter just breaks down, like lying on the ground, sobbing. And I'm like, “What are you doing?” BLAIR HODGES: It's pretty genius really. ADAM BENFORADO: And here's the kicker, one of the Amazon shoppers passing through comes up, looks at me, and goes, “Spoiled.” She shakes her head. And I was like, “Oh my god, this is a set up! This is just like this giant trap.” And what's brilliant about it is that no parents are gonna buy the hundred-dollar giraffe. You're coming in for eggs. But you know, what you might do to stop the embarrassment is buy the ten-dollar little plushie, stuffed animal, just to get out of that awkward social situation. BLAIR HODGES: That's right. I wonder, do you remember an example—you mentioned when you were in elementary school you saw children being treated not even as citizens at all. Do you remember anything in particular that stood out to you? You said you wanted to vote in sixth grade, as an example. Is there anything else like, “Wow, why are we kids being treated like this?” ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, I mean, I thought about it in many circumstances. In elementary school, learning that my good friend's father spanked him and being like, my friend is really, he's a really smart, really nice person. We're no different. And he messes up in little, tiny ways. But everyone messes up. Adults mess up all the time and no one hits them. And then moving on from that to becoming a law professor and being like, wow, not suddenly being like, “Oh, this all makes sense.” But actually, wait a second, it's criminal law that you can't hit a prisoner. Like someone who's a murderer or rapist, it's prohibited under the Constitution from formally beating people as a punishment. And yet the legal minds, the geniuses, who are on our courts have said, “It's actually okay, it's constitutionally permissible. Kids are different.” And I think the answer to that today is because we don't see kids the way we see adults. We don't see them as full citizens. And I think there were a lot of moments like that. I think the bullying that I saw in junior high school, you know, again, that's what kids do. But what was so frustrating to me was the treating of this by adults, you know. The gym teacher, the math teacher, who saw the same terrible abuse. Like the kids who face this must carry those scars to this day. And doing nothing. There were all these instances where kids end up protected from things they don't need protecting from, where they can actually be empowered. And then actually, on the flip side, exposed to real harms that we could do something about, you know? There were adults who could easily have done things and didn't. And I think that all of those little observations, I kind of filed them back in my mind. And moments of censorship. So, you know, I remember a moment from Junior year—I got into this Governor's School down in Virginia, went away for a month, and it was like, the first time in my life that I was feeling like getting treated as an adult. Like it was all independent. They had college professors teaching this stuff. And you know what? I did all the reading, I read all the poetry. I did all the history. I did it all because I was like, “This is interesting, and I want to be engaged in these conversations.” And I felt this whole month, treated as an adult. And then at the final little party thing—and over the course of the term, there were people at Governor's School who were musicians, and I played in rock bands. So I formed this little band called “Beans and Franks” and we wrote some songs. And I'm about to go up to perform. The band gets to perform at the last thing, and the head of Governor's School comes up to me and is like, “Okay, I'm gonna need to review the lyrics.” And I was like, “What?” Like, I'm 17 years old, like, I've been listening to—Everyone here has heard everything already. Like, you've been treating me like an adult for a month. And now you want to review the lyrics? What? And I thought through like, there aren't even any offensive lyrics. But okay, I'll go through this song that I've written. And there was one line, which I think it was something like—again, it's embarrassing to even say, it was just stupid—It was like, “Smooth like a rubber, bounce it back to your mother.” [laughter] And he's like, “No, no. You cannot do that.” And honestly, as a 17-year-old boy I wrote a few songs with more offensive lyrics. [laughter] BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you were like, “We were going easy on y'all here.” ADAM BENFORADO: Yes! I was like, “Hey, I've actually cleaned this up for the Governor's School performance.” And it was like, you can't perform this. I just was like, how do you expect me to be prepared to be a member of society? I'm going off to college in a year, and it soured everything else. It was like all the other stuff. You want to control me. You're happy when I'm getting A's in my classes and doing what you say. But as soon as I show some real independence, that's when you're like, “No, you're nothing. I'm the decider.” And it's interesting, I teach this course called The Rights of Children, and actually have my students think back to moments from their childhood. And what I have observed, which is so interesting, is how fresh these incidents are. Like a student, who was now 27 years old, writing about that moment at the eighth-grade dance, where she was going into a strict Catholic school, and they had always had the same dress code. The girls got to wear off the shoulder dresses and the new principal changed it but she organized a petition and had all the teachers sign it, and the principal wouldn't even meet with them. Wouldn't even meet. And she's carried that to law school. She's writing about it just as if it happened yesterday. And I think it's these things that all of us carry, we sort of often kind of later justify it as a rite of passage that everyone should go through as opposed to, “No, that's wrong. And I'm going to change that for the next generation. I want them to experience something different than what I experienced.” As opposed to, “Yeah, it's just part of the experience. You're brutalized and then you get to brutalize when you're an adult, and so it's fair.”   AMERICA'S CHILD WELFARE MOVEMENT 100 YEARS AGO (12:39)   BLAIR HODGES: To get to this point where dress codes and things are the main concern, you actually take us back in time to talk about some of the reforms that happened a century ago. Your book starts back in 1906. There's this Spokane Press article. Here's a quote from it. It says, “When your children are swinging in the hammock, or playing at the park, stop and give a thought to the pale-faced factory boys and girls of the metropolis.” They're painting this picture of child labor and distinguishing between more privileged kids and kids that are basically laborers at this time. What was happening at the turn of the century, what was the child's rights movement like back then? ADAM BENFORADO: So I wanted to open the book with this broader historical context in part because this was this miraculous moment a little over a hundred years ago where, coming out of the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, Americans—and these are really everyday Americans, across the country—came together and said we need to do something about the plight of children. And we need to do something, not simply because this is unfair to kids, but because we are setting ourselves up for failure as a nation. So when we fail to invest in the education of, you know, five to 15-year-olds, that's setting us up to fail in the decades ahead. So people came together—reformers who were often kind of lumped together as this child saver progressive movement, came together to demand changes: building of better public schools, mandatory public education, pushing for health and even things like drug safety measures, building playgrounds, investing in and creating an entirely new juvenile justice system based on rehabilitation rather than punishment. I chose to go back and just pick up kind of a random paper from 1906 to show just how much this energy was pushing into every area of life. So this is a little four-page paper from Washington State. And literally every page has like three different articles about child-focused reforms. And I think what was miraculous was just how much was done. By 1912 President Taft had created the first federal agency focused on the whole child, this Children's Bureau. And the idea, I think, coming out of this was, certainly in the decades ahead, we are going to see this bright new age for children across the country. And unfortunately, I think what we have seen over the course of the 20th century and then into the last couple of decades, is not simply kind of slowing to a trudge, but in some cases, even backtracking on some things. So you started with this example of child labor, this excerpt from this article. Well, what have we seen over just the last couple of months? Exposés in the New York Times about young people working in terrible labor conditions. Working the overnight shifts, just as those kids were laboring in 1906. And the reasons that are given to justify it are just the same as were given in 1906: “It's an economic necessity, coming out of the pandemic, we've had changes in the job market. We actually need to roll back job protections in our state. Businesses can't compete unless we let 15-year-olds continue to work.” BLAIR HODGES: Or like “families need the money, like this is actually good for families.” Instead of looking at how when people aren't being paid living wages, “Oh, let's make their children work.” ADAM BENFORADO: It's something that I think, you know, we see a little bit in fiction even. I'm halfway through a new book called Demon Copperhead—really great if any listeners are looking for a new summer read—but it traces actually kind of the effects of the child welfare system, but also the fact that kids are picking tobacco in our fields. One of the historical examples that's in this 1906 newspaper is the plight of kids rolling cigarettes in factories in New York City. Okay, well, they may not be doing that in New York City anymore. But down in North Carolina, kids today are picking tobacco in a hundred-degree heat. And they're getting nicotine poisoning, just like kids did a hundred years ago. And often it's the most vulnerable kids. It's migrant kids. It's kids whose parents are desperate for cash. And we're turning our back on them. In a way, unfortunately, I think this is a real indictment of the status quo. I think we're turning our backs more than people did 120 years ago. I think the child labor movement was going in the right direction. There was a lot of work that they ultimately, you know— Some of these child labor laws from a hundred years ago, there were exemptions for farm workers. But they were making a lot of progress. Here? Look at the last couple of months. We're backtracking. In a lot of areas we're repealing labor protections, virtually. BLAIR HODGES: We'll talk about some of the reasons you think that's happening as we go. Just to set the table as we get into some of the rights you're arguing for, I want to point out that your book is not making philosophical arguments, you're arguing about pragmatic benefits. ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, I think that's one of the things that probably sets this book, and I think my approach, apart from some other rights scholars and rights advocates is I'm not simply arguing that this is a good thing to do for kids, right? It's not “natural rights.” I think that's usually where people start is like, even if there were no benefit to the rest of us, this is the good thing to do. That's how we tend to think about rights. And I absolutely believe that is true for children. But I think that's never going to get us where we want to be. I think we need to make the strong case for why actually putting children first benefits all of us. And that's because so many social problems are best addressed if you focus on interventions, rehab, in childhood. Ultimately, as a society, you always have to pay for things like crime, underemployment, poor health. The question is simply: Are you going to pay pennies on those preventative early interventions? Or are you going to pay many dollars on the backend when problems have already metastasized and hardened? It's a choice. Again, do you want to pay for school lunches for all kids? Or do you want to have kids who can't pay attention in school and don't graduate, and then you have a labor force who is underperforming and underemployed? You're gonna have to pay for that triple bypass. There's no free option. And so really, this is also I think, an answer to those critics who are worried that somehow this is a zero-sum game—that if you invest in kids, somehow you harm older Americans. No! When you invest in kids, you have healthier old people, you have old people who actually have more in their retirement account so they can take care of themselves. So what is the best pathway for us as a society? Invest in kids. I think that's the core takeaway for the book.   ISOLATED PARENTING (20:09)   BLAIR HODGES: Right. And I want people to see that, because this isn't a book for parents, per se, this is a book for all people. And the other point is, everyone's been a child, whether you end up having kids later on, we've all been children, we've all experienced that. And the way children are raised in our society affects everybody, not just parents. And so this isn't a book about parenting. ADAM BENFORADO: That's a great point. And I think, unfortunately, kids and kid's issues and children's rights in this country, have been framed only as a parent's issue. And that's part of that story, that historical story of like, what happened to those early child savers, those early progressives? And one of the answers is over the course of the 20th century, we lost this vision of investing in and empowering kids as a societal endeavor and it shifted to this idea that, “No, raising up kids is solely the work of individual parents.” BLAIR HODGES: It's “Don't Tread on Me” parenting. ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah. It's atomized. So what has happened over the course of the 20th century, this was coming from popular culture. But I think it was also coming from our elite institutions. The Supreme Court is coming out with really these groundbreaking opinions, saying parents are ultimately in possession of a fundamental right to decide the destinies of their children in all of the important matters, whether that's religion, whether that's schooling, whether that's medical care. And one of the consequences of that is this incredible weight which is placed on all parents' shoulders. Now, it's entirely up to you whether your kid sinks or swims. You actually have to be the ultimate decider on everything. You're the one who's asked to decide, now, is my kid going to learn about race history? Not the school. The school isn't going to teach them about these defining historical moments, because they're scared, they don't want the protests and the pushback. And the textbooks are being removed, these references of well, “We've got to leave out the Holocaust. Slavery, let's take that out. We'll leave this, take that. We're not taking a position. It's just up to individual parents to make these decisions.” So suddenly, parents, you have to be a historian. Well, suddenly, you actually have to decide on medical care, too. Don't just take the vaccine schedule from the doctor. No, you do your own research. Oh, you want to protect your kid from, you know, lead and asbestos? Well, you do the research. I will tell you as a parent, it is exhausting. It explains one of the reasons why parent burnout and unhappiness is so high in this country, as opposed to some of the studies that have been done comparatively, parents who have nothing, who face incredible odds in Africa, are much, much, much happier as parents. Why? Because it's a collective endeavor. They don't have to do everything. They're not alone in these struggles. And unfortunately, I think that's the rub of the whole parents' rights movement is, okay, you get to decide, but being a parent, raising kids is so hard. You face so much.   THE EARLY YEARS: A RIGHT TO ATTACHMENT (23:34)   BLAIR HODGES: And there's less and less social support. We'll talk about this in a later part of the interview about early childhood and the “Right to Investment.” But let's start with “The Right to Attachment.” So in the book you've laid out these particular rights for kids, and you kind of rolled them out according to developmental stages of where children are at. You're following the best research on childhood development. In the first years, the “right to attachment” is what you highlight in here. And one of the things some of these earlier child advocates had wrong was the idea that parents shouldn't baby their babies, that they shouldn't coddle them, they should maintain a kind of detachment from them. And then there was this fascinating monkey experiment listeners might have heard of, I think I heard about it as an undergraduate, where they had these monkeys and they had a mother that was like, just this wire cage that would give them milk. And then also a monkey that was like covered in fabric and it was comfortable. And then the baby monkeys would go to the milk mom and eat, but then they would always go back to the comfortable mom, and that's who they would bond with. So the argument became secure bonds, warm bonds, loving experiences, more nurturing-type experiences are important. And you had a big scientific shift here away from this detached parenting style to close parenting, and you're arguing for more of that for kids. ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, and I argue, hey, this research has continued and now is incredibly robust on the value of early attachment with a primary caregiver. It's actually been supplemented by work even showing intergenerational effects, in the context of these monkeys. If you engage in that early deprivation, it actually can have intergenerational effects on the future monkey offspring. Now, I think we look at the state of the research and then we look at what society has done in response. Well, what society has done in response is work in incredible ways, severing the bonds and failing to support bonds that I think we could really seriously strengthen. What are some examples of that? Well, we're the only wealthy, advanced nation who does not have paid mandatory supported care leave for the parents and adoptive parents of young kids. And again, as I said, that sets us up for failure as a nation. But so many parents go back to work after just a couple of days at home with their kids. And that doesn't make economic sense. More often the argument is, you know, “Economically we can't have businesses giving people six months off.” And everywhere else in the world, they say, “We can't not do that. It's economically stupid not to do that. We're going to just pay more money on the backend if we do that.” Now, I think we obviously can make a lot of progress by really simple guarantees to new parents in terms of care leave. But I think we also have to think about some of the ways we really sever bonds carelessly. One of the biggest ones, I think, is our criminal justice system. Millions of kids have or have had a parent locked up during their childhoods, and that has horrible repercussions downline. Often it's not locked up in prison, it's actually pretrial in jail. What happens to a mom accused of, you know, some theft or a drug crime, when she's waiting trial? Well, trials in the United States take a long time. Bail might be $1,000 or $2,000. For a poor parent, they may not have that. So what happens as a result of that? A single mom is taken out—those three kids are put into foster care. We all pay for that. We pay for locking up the mom pretrial. We pay for those kids going into the foster system. And we pay the lifelong costs of our non-functional child welfare system as well. So we do it there. We do it at the border. Obviously, there was a lot of controversy over the last few years about child separation policies. But we also do it with our child welfare system when it comes to poverty. So how do we deal with parental poverty? Do we help parents? No, what we do is, we take kids away from their parents. A police officer is called, a child welfare worker is called, goes into a house and finds no food in the refrigerator— BLAIR HODGES: An empty fridge, yeah. ADAM BENFORADO: Finds roaches, finds peeling lead paint. What do we do? Do we get that mother into good, stable housing? Do we give her money for food? Do we feed the kids at school? No, what we do is we say, “You're a bad mom, you failed. You're an abomination.” And we take the kids away and often put them in worse circumstances. And if we were guided by that research, that robust set of research on the value of attachment, we would make very, very different choices. We would say, “You know what? This isn't about the mom, ultimately.” And I say this to audiences when I talk, look, sometimes folks are filled with anger at parents who have, in their view, failed to meet their responsibilities. That's an area where I think I'm going to disagree with all the people in which I see these as situational constraints on parents, but let's actually set that to the side. If you want to hate that mom, and think that she's a bad person, go ahead and do that. Let's focus on the kids though. Because we need to do what's best for those kids. Right? And I will tell you, taking kids away from parents who love them, and are poor, is setting us up for failure as a nation. And I think that if we can get into that mindset whenever there's anger at the parents like, “Why should we pay for public school breakfasts and lunches? It's these parents, these deadbeat parents that we're incentivizing.” It's like, hey, there's a kid who is not eating lunch. Focus on the kid. Leave the parents aside. You want to vilify the parents? Okay. I think that's the wrong approach. But let's at least agree that the kid should eat a healthy meal every day.   EARLY CHILDHOOD: THE RIGHT TO INVESTMENT (29:46)   BLAIR HODGES: This is where it connects to the next chapter on early childhood, “The Right to Investment,” and you're arguing that children deserve a right to investment in good schools, in their quality of health care, in the housing they have available to them, in mentorship. You introduce us in this chapter to Harold, this is a Black man from Philadelphia, and what his story suggests about the right to investment. He's an interesting example because he's someone the system did sort of invest in. But as you know, they would put him in particular programs, help him get schooling and things, but as a Black man, he witnessed this and saw himself sort of, as he kind of won the lottery. ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, he describes himself as a unicorn. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, a ton of other Black kids didn't get these kinds of investments. And so he's like, wait a minute, the system is doing this on an individual level, a kind of band-aid solution, but not changing the overall system. Harold had mixed feelings about how he was invested in. ADAM BENFORADO: I think this was one of the most powerful interviews I did. It was just eye opening, in some ways for both of us in this conversation. But he remarked early on about this defining moment in his childhood where his parents, they'd just gotten kicked out of their house, and they were basically are homeless. And they're in downtown Philadelphia, where I currently live, standing on a street corner. He's six years old. He's just trying to figure out like, what are they going to do? Like, where are they gonna sleep, get food, all this stuff. They're on a street corner. And he said he just saw a white guy with his briefcase and like, everything about it was just so perfect. There's the Rolex and everything, that perfect suit and all this stuff. And he said, this was the first moment when he was like, “How is it that we're in the same city on the same day, and my family has nothing? And this person has everything? How is that?” I think there was this innocence and also profound insight in that moment of like, wait a sec, all of us walk by this all the time. We're the country with the most billionaires in the world. And we also have, like, one in six or seven kids living below the poverty line. Like that's like 11 million kids. We have, like 700 billionaires. And our Fortune 500 Companies made something like $16 trillion in revenue. We have like 11 million kids living in poverty. And again, that's not simply a moral abomination. That's setting us up for economic and social failure in the years ahead. And I think, as you point out, one of the really fascinating things about Harold's account of his life is that he was being held up as he moved through childhood as a success story, right? So the local news wanted to do a profile, and it's like, this is great. The kid from the ghetto has made it out against the odds. And he was like, “You are telling a story about your own failure, because there was me, but then there were all of my classmates, who you neglected.” He struggled with this, honestly. It's like, “Why me?” BLAIR HODGES: It's a survivor's guilt. ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, it was. It was very much a sense of like, “Wait, why me, though?” Like, why is it that we only invest in the diamonds in the rough? And we even see this, I think, in some academic work on inequality, is this idea of like, we need to figure out the diamonds in the rough. And I think my argument, certainly Harold's insight is, no, we need to help all children, not just the ones who end up at Harvard, or Wharton, or who end up being inventors. All of these kids could benefit from our investment. But we see that both in early childhood and we see that at the end, even some of the debates about—you know, we can talk about this later—but student loan forgiveness and all that. We need to invest in kids also who do not go to college. And I think even liberals get really worked up about like, “Hey, we need to pay for college.” Well, some people aren't going to go to college. And we really heavily subsidize, even without any actions by Biden, we really heavily subsidize people going to college. We do virtually nothing for kids who aren't. And that sets us up, again, for failure as a nation.   LATE CHILDHOOD: A RIGHT TO COMMUNITY (34:15)   BLAIR HODGES: It's a rising tide lifts all boats kind of approach, right? So again, in this chapter, “Right to Investment,” you're looking at ways early education can be better invested in, health care opportunities, housing, as I mentioned. So those are just some of the areas you talk about in “Right to Investment.” Let's look at the next chapter on late childhood. And this is where you talk about “A Right to Community.” We've touched on this a little bit already. This is where you really emphasize the parental rights movement and what that's done. You introduce us to an extreme example here of how dedication to parental rights can lead to trauma and abuse. This is an Amish family who basically gifted their children to this predatory abuser. And as parents, they could just make these kinds of decisions that put their children at extreme risk. You talk about how this is similar to, or connected to homeschooling—not that you're condemning homeschooling. But you're connecting it to these other issues where parents have control over their children's relationships, over how their education is, how their healthcare and medical care is. And parents get the final say in a lot of these things. Tell us about how that connects to this “Right to Community.” ADAM BENFORADO: I chose this example, ready to acknowledge it's an extreme example, of literally gifting your daughters to a predator and thinking that was actually a completely legitimate thing to do. And I argue that comes from our culture, which really treats children as property. And in some ways—again I like to trace history here, if you go back to ancient Roman republic, coming across into the early modern period in England, and then being brought over to the colonies, this consistent idea of kids belonging to their parents, and their labor belongs to their parents, and their bodies belong to their parents, and then tracing the effects of that. BLAIR HODGES: I was shocked by the custody thing. You point out that the word “custody” is used for prisoners who are in custody, property as in custody, and custody of children. It's a property thing. ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah. And I think it's something that works out just fine for a lot of kids whose parents make good decisions and you know, it's fine, they often love you very much, they try to make good decisions. The problem is if you don't have those good parents under the law in the United States, you honestly can be completely isolated from all of the advances in medical care, from all of the knowledge we have accrued over thousands of years, from all of the valuable social connections. Your parents really can keep you locked on their compound with no access to education, with no access to medicine, with no access to human contact, legally, in the United States. And so the extreme example is to say, wait a second, those kids don't simply have rights as human beings, but we all will pay the consequences when those kids grow up with those depravations. We will pay the moral consequences; we will pay the economic and social consequences of that. I argue we need to stop thinking about kids as belonging to their parents and more think about ways we can cultivate this sense of belonging. And that's not to say that parents don't have a role as, not gatekeepers, but sort of facilitators of these exchanges. I certainly do that a lot with my kids, talking to them about the information that they're receiving, protecting them from certain things, and certainly facilitating access to relationships and medical care. But I think the idea that this is all on parents' shoulders is really bad for kids who face these depravations. And it's bad for all of us. I think when kids don't learn about the history of this country, I think that's bad for all of us.   PARENTAL RIGHTS AND CHILDREN'S VOICES (38:25)   BLAIR HODGES: You talk about how this cuts across into medical care—when it comes to COVID, for example, vaccines. Some parents want to have the right to refuse vaccines for their children. And how that can be a health risk, or the right to refuse medical care for children is a big issue. ADAM BENFORADO: I mean, I think one of the things that really surprises even some criminal law students is some of the legal regimes which have been instituted across the United States which actually protect parents who choose prayer over adopting the most basic medical care to treat preventable conditions. And the fact that actually, you know, in a number of states—I look at Idaho in particular. I mean, there are kids who are dying of things that we have known how to treat for decades, because their parents don't believe in it. And again, we could have conversations about, you know, what if a 16-year-old kid wants to refuse medical care for a genuinely held religious belief? But that's not really the question. I mean, this is really when a 12-year-old is desperate to go to the doctor because she has a ruptured esophagus and her parents say no. Or a kid who has a broken arm and the bone's poking out and the family doesn't take them to the emergency room to treat these easily addressed medical conditions. And again, I think we have a reason to intervene for those kids, but I think we have a reason to intervene on behalf of all of us. It's not good for any of us when kids are suffering and carry the weight of these treatable childhood conditions later in life. BLAIR HODGES: It's tricky, this chapter, because I think parental rights, as you point out, are sacrosanct across the political spectrum. This is an issue that conservatives and liberals and everybody in between is kind of united on, this idea that parents should make the choice and sort of be in charge of all these things. ADAM BENFORADO: It's really interesting. I think the Republican party has decided that parents' rights may be their pathway back to the White House and capturing State Houses. There was certainly success with both in Virginia and in Florida with politicizing parents' rights, and the response of a number of leading progressives, including political folks has been, “Okay, we need a matching liberal parents' rights movement.” So if Republicans are saying parents have a right to know every single school book and read every sentence of every lesson plan and to protect their kids from learning about gay people or whatever, then liberals step up like, “No, I have a right to allow my kid to read this book. I have a right as a parent to have my kid learn in school that gay people exist or have a bathroom that anyone can use.” And personally, I'm like, wait a second, progressives. As a parent, I share the concern when I learned about censorship in my school library, and I get upset too. But let's talk about kids' rights. Like I want to talk about it and frame it around, hey, high school students, maybe they should have a say about what they're learning about the history of race in the United States. I want to stop using kids as props, like you know when DeSantis comes out and signs a bill. That's the only time we actually see kids. And guess what? I want to hear from them. And I think that's the path forward for liberals is, like, let's actually involve kids in these questions. You brought up one of the examples of the vaccines. And again, I think parents have a lot to weigh in here. What is frustrating though, the story I give is of this teenager who this is in the earlier days of the pandemic, who wants to get vaccinated because she just wants to be with her friends. She wants to be allowed to engage with this public life. And she's like, “Hey Mom, this is what I want.” And her mom's just like, “No.” It's like a 16-year-old kid who wants medical care. That, to me, it's like crazy that the kid has no voice in that situation. And the same thing of like, why is it that a 17-year-old should have no say in the books they're reading in English class? That's not preparing them to be successful citizens. And none of this is to say that parents shouldn't have rights. I think parents absolutely should have rights. It's just the kid should have rights too. And I think the conversation would be a lot more enriched; I think we'd make better decisions on a lot of these things about a lot of these things. It's not to say that there aren't dangerous things or there's not inappropriate material. I think there are inappropriate things. I think there are things that are really harmful to kids, and upsetting. I certainly was upset by some of the books and things that I read. But I think an approach that says the only people who have a valid opinion here are adults, is just the wrong approach.   BLAIR HODGES: So that's what you're trying to get readers to do is like think about how younger folks can be involved in this decision making and their voices can be heard.   ADAM BENFORADO: Right, be part of the community.   EARLY ADOLESCENCE: THE RIGHT TO BE A KID (43:45)   BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about the next chapter: “The Right to Be a Kid.” This is framed around early adolescence. And this really zooms in on the criminal justice system, a passion of yours, and the ways childhood can be erased there. You include the story of a man who was convicted of murder when he was a teenager, and how he was tried as an adult even though he was a teenager, despite what we know about brain development, about the ability of him to make decisions, or what it was like to be an adolescent and make that kind of decision. What did that story do for you in this chapter? ADAM BENFORADO: My last book, Unfair, was about injustice in our criminal justice system and it focused on different biases and things that come into every stage of the normal criminal case. I was very familiar with wrongful convictions and sort of the injustice that can come from that. And this conversation I had with this now middle-aged man, I talked to him when he was in his forties, reflecting back. I think it really reveals a different type of injustice. So this man, Ghani, is very forthright about the fact that he did the crime. He killed another boy when he was an adolescent. And yet I think the justice story doesn't stop there. What was so profoundly unjust about this was failing to understand what brought this young man to commit this atrocious act. And he readily acknowledges the harm that came from that and the failure to understand that people change. That, yeah, the person who is fifteen is not the same person as the person who is 45. And the harshness of giving up on someone and condemning someone for what they do, anything that they do, when they're fifteen. This young man was given, in Pennsylvania, life without the possibility of parole. He was basically condemned—“You are going to live in a box until you die”—at age fifteen or sixteen. We are a country that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. It's right there in the eighth amendment. And yet, we said to this young man—who basically was a prisoner of a drug gang locked in a crack house, dealing crack through the mail slot—“We've given up and we're gonna put you in a box, nine-by-seven box, until you die decades in the future.” And it was only because the Supreme Court changed the legal landscape that he was eventually released, when the Supreme Court said actually someone who commits a crime before age eighteen cannot get a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole. He was released decades later. And what I want us to realize in this chapter is that children have a right to remain a kid, to enjoy that halo of childhood, even when they make terrible mistakes. And that's hard for us. But I think if you look at the data from what comes out of psychology and neuroscience, you start to see what adolescence is. It's a necessary step. But it's a challenging one. It's one where our brains are developed in certain ways, but not in others. And so we can make mistakes. And what we need to do as a society is try to allow for those mistakes, that's part of growing up, in ways that are less devastating, to prevent young men from joining drug gangs and killing people, but also that mitigate the harm of treating one mistake—again, a very bad mistake—as a reason to condemn an individual for the rest of their life. And I go back to some of the mistakes I made, that luckily did not have life or death consequences.   CHILDHOOD AND RACISM (47:44)   BLAIR HODGES: Same. But you and me are both white guys, too. You talk about how that makes a difference—how racist this system often is, people being prosecuted as adults. ADAM BENFORADO: I mean, I think about one of the smartest guys I know, I met him my first day at Harvard Law School, he grew up in Pennsylvania. And we were talking early in the first semester of law school about an experience he had. And, again, he was just the most charming, brilliant guy, went to Harvard undergrad. And he was coming home, I think it was Pottstown, one day from football practice, and he had all his football gear in a bag over his shoulder. And I think he'd already gotten in early at Harvard. He's running home because he's late. And he's the nicest guy. He's probably running home to get home early for, you know, dinner or something. Cops pull up, chase him down, throw him up against the chain link, because there's been a burglary. And in that moment, that could have been it. That could have been it. That experience never, ever happened to me as a kid, and the simple answer is, I have white skin. Did I run with bags? Was I wearing hoodies? Yes, all of those things were true of me. We could go back to my poor fashion choices as a teenager. All those things are true, but that never happened to me. And that aligns with the research that shows how young Black kids do not enjoy that halo of childhood. They are “adultified” very early on, and that has consequences where, you know, misbehaving at school. White kids— BLAIR HODGES: Are more likely to be suspended. More likely to have repercussions. ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, and then if it's a more serious thing, intervention of the police. And once you're into the police system, you get a lot harsher treatment. And this is true of girls too, right? So we see, actually, it can be a real problem with girls who have been sexually trafficked. A white girl is treated as a victim. Black girls? Well, you're a prostitute. And that means how the police treat you, that means how even courts will treat you, and I think we need to really think hard about ways we can ensure all children are treated as kids. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you talk about like these juvenile courts where kids are involved in the process. ADAM BENFORADO: To me, that's one of the ways that we can move forward, is getting back to that early 20th century idea that, hey, kids are different, and we should really focus on rehabilitation and on diverting kids to a different system that's focused on kids are changeable, they make mistakes, they may need to have changes in their lives. And we can do that because kids are really malleable in this period. And I think that's one of the reasons I throw my support behind diversion programs and some of the cool new ideas to try to make interventions on kids whose lives are starting to go down paths that can lead to very serious consequences.   LATE ADOLESCENCE: THE RIGHT TO BE HEARD (50:43)   BLAIR HODGES: In your “Right to Be Heard” chapter you talk about actual court systems where juveniles get to be part of the process, judging their peers. It's a real jury of their peers. ADAM BENFORADO: In this next chapter the focus here—If the previous chapter was on ways that I think we “adultify” kids in circumstances and treat them as adults in circumstances where they're ill-prepared for that and we really need to protect them, this is a chapter about other ways in which we infantilize kids when they actually really have the ability to do a lot more than we give them credit. And again, I am driven by the psychology neuroscience literature here. I think there's this really interesting thing. We tend to think about the brain as this balloon that kind of just gets bigger and bigger and bigger over the course of development. But what we now know is different areas of the brain mature at different rates. And that, actually, areas of the brain that focus more on the  old cognition moments develop much faster than those that are involved in that kind of control of impulses— BLAIR HODGES: Assessing risk— ADAM BENFORADO: Yes, risk, and dealing with peer pressure. Yeah, those are later developing things really into people's 20s. There's a really strong argument that we actually need to figure out ways to empower kids much earlier. So I focus, yes, on the ability of kids to serve as jurors, but I also focus on extending the right to vote to young people and allowing young people to run for office, serve on school boards. And I think this is supported, certainly, by the mind sciences research. But I also think it's likely to lead to much better outcomes for us as a society. Sometimes when I talk to audiences about this, I have someone raise their hand and it's like, “Oh, well, this is going to distort the system, you're taking power away from adults.” And I'm like, the current system is biased. We are making decisions which are too old-focus and too conservative. One of the things we know from the psychology of literature, is that sometimes as people get older, they make much more conservative decisions on things, they're too risk averse. And while risk aversion can be beneficial, under certain circumstances, it actually can be the most dangerous thing you can do, particularly when things are rapidly changing and you have new problems. I often get the pushback when I talk about this, “Well, okay, maybe that's true that kids actually do have the capacity to deal with these things, but they don't have the life experience.” And I'm like, “What do you think are the most pressing issues today?” Okay, well, it's like, you know, how to regulate social media, and trans rights, and racial justice, and climate change. I stop them like, okay, hold that thought. Let's think about the average 15-year-old. Okay, so social media. They are on TikTok. They know so much more than my octogenarian father-in-law. Trans rights: my octogenarian father-in-law, he doesn't have any trans friends or gay friends. Racial justice: the youngest generation is the most diverse multicultural generation America has ever seen. Let's talk about climate change. Well, that 85-year-old is going to be long dead as the worst effects of climate change ravage the United States. That 15-year-old is going to be living through those floods and forest fires, and the civil unrest around the world that is coming down the pipeline and has no ability to choose the leaders who will make decisions today that will affect them for the rest of their life. And I think, again, that's not democracy. Democracy is about people who have a stake in the decisions, political decisions, having a say in those decisions. BLAIR HODGES: Right. And so you talk about extending the franchise to young people, like at least local elections or school boards. And I don't find you to be an absolutist in the sense of saying, like, here's this fundamental right, they need to just have every, you know—You seem to be willing to negotiate and willing to talk about how this unfolds. ADAM BENFORADO: I think there are many different pathways here. One of the things we're seeing around the world is lowering the voting age to sixteen. Over the last several decades we've had more and more countries— BLAIR HODGES: It's been proposed here, hasn't it? Didn't you say someone's proposed it in the US? ADAM BENFORADO: It's been voted on in the House. We are seeing more municipalities, we have a handful now of municipalities where 16-year-olds can vote. But we have a number of countries—and these are like, you know, it's like Austria and Brazil. I mean, these are big countries. BLAIR HODGES: I didn't know any of this until I read your book. I don't understand how I missed it. I listen to NPR. I'm an avid news reader. I don't know how I missed it. ADAM BENFORADO: It's a really interesting phenomenon. And I think what we've seen is all the horrors, the fears of like, this is going to destroy society, don't happen. And I think what we will see, in my opinion, as we extend this right, we're gonna see a lot more engagement. And I think this, in some ways, a solution out of some of the gridlock. I think bringing in new voices and new voters is a great way to actually move forward on some of these intractable problems we have. I think young people can actually help us move away from this period of political polarization, in part because I think young people are more changeable and are less doctrinaire on a lot of these issues. I interviewed this young man who, because of a loophole in the law, ran for governor in Kansas. And what I think was just fascinating about talking to him was, he was running as a Republican. But one of the issues where he was just different was gun control. And that's because he was like, “Hey, I go to a public school. And this is something I'm really worried about, school shootings.” BLAIR HODGES: And he's been through drills. Getting under his desk and stuff. ADAM BENFORADO: He's like, “I'm in favor of sensible gun control.” One of the people who interviewed him on TV was like, well, that doesn't align with the party. And he was like, “Yeah, I'm proud of that.” Old people running for office on the Republican platform would never say that. He would say that because he actually believes it. And I think that's on the liberal side, too. I think there are issues where some young new Democrats may not toe the party line on something. And you know what? I personally am comfortable with that. I think we need to break out. BLAIR HODGES: I think that's why it won't happen, though. [laughs] Because the people that get to make the decision about letting it happen are gonna do the calculus of, will this help me politically, yes or no? And that's the question they'll ask in order to make it legal. ADAM BENFORADO: I think young people have got to stop asking and start demanding. I wrote a piece in Rolling Stone a couple of weeks ago, where I said, it was after the latest gun shooting, and I was like, you know, it's great. The March for Lives folks, and all these folks out being politically active. But my argument is: stop marching to try to get adults to act on gun control or act on climate change and get out there marching for the right to vote. The adults are not going to save you. You need to exercise that protest power to demand power. Because until you have power, those in power are not going to listen to you. And so, again, I think this is something—I'm optimistic. I think this is something where we're going to see a lot of changes in my lifetime. This is one of the areas I'm most excited about is lowering the voting age. BLAIR HODGES: Well, you have my hope. And, you know, I'd love to see it. But time will tell. ADAM BENFORADO: We can talk more on the show in twenty years. [laughter]   ON THE CUSP OF ADULTHOOD: THE RIGHT TO START FRESH (58:36)   BLAIR HODGES:  Wow. Cool. All right. We're talking with Adam Benforado about the book, A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All. And Adam also mentioned the book Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice. That's also a great one. Adam is a professor of law at the Drexel University Klein School of Law. All right, let's talk about on the cusp of adulthood, this is “The Right to Start Fresh.” This chapter has a lot to say about how economic conditions are harder for younger folks today than they were even just a few decades ago. People are economically less well-off right now. The economy is looking harder, wages are stagnating, inflation is happening, college debt is ballooning. But back in the 50s, or 60s, there might be a guy who could marry his partner and be the sole breadwinner and have kids and buy a house really early and do all these things. These opportunities aren't on the table anymore. So this chapter talks about trying to get younger people off on the right foot at this cusp of adulthood when it comes to job choice, when it comes to mobility, when it comes to inheritance. ADAM BENFORADO: I think this really focuses on the popular perception that childhood maybe is tough because you belong to someone else, but once you become an adult suddenly the shackles are off, and you're free. The world is your oyster, and especially in America, you are the freest of the free. BLAIR HODGES: You've got bootstraps, you can pull ‘em. ADAM BENFORADO: Yep. Live where you want, control your destiny, do what you want, marry who you want. And what I look at is all of the ways we actually have locked young people in. We've already determined the trajectory of their life before they even get to that. And so I look at the ways how we capitalize, or fail to capitalize, people's professional development. We could make a decision as a society that, hey, you're a future worker in the United States of America and so we will pay for your training and your education until you are finished and you're ready to work. That's the bargain that we make. But instead, we say, no, no, no, no, you who have no money will self-finance your education, to the tune of $100,000, $150,000 and you will pay that off for the rest of your life. Maybe actually, you'll do it by joining the military and paying it off that way. But somehow, you're gonna start life in the red. And actually, I had this moment, I think I cut it out of the book, but it was actually right before I went to law school. I finished undergrad, I got into law school, and I wasn't quite ready to go and I took a deferment for a year and I went over—my then girlfriend, her parents had bought this 16th century farmhouse outside of London. And I was like, “I'm gonna go and kind of work renovating this house.” And there were some professional builders who were also doing things that year. And I remember being out and I was cleaning off bricks to fix up this like rental with this guy. And we started talking. It's like, hey, so you're going to law school? Oh, you're going to Harvard? And he was like, “So how much is that going to cost?” And I was like, “I don't even really know. I think it's like, you know, $50,000 or $60,000 a year.” And he suddenly was like, “Adam, you cannot do this. Let me tell you, I'm 50 years old. Like, there's so many things that come up in life. People get sick, you know, you get someone pregnant. You can't start life in the red. That's madness.” Honestly, I had gotten into law school. Everyone up to that moment had just been like, “This is the best thing. Everything's great. Of course, everyone goes into debt.” And that was the only person who was like, this is crazy, what a stupid system, because of the things life throws at you. And the truth is, he was speaking the truth. It is mad to put people down, you know, to have the weight of hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to start out life. And it's particularly unfair, as I point out to do this, based on sort of the different economic situations people find themselves in. One of the areas I focus on is not simply how we lock people in with that, but also how we lock them in geographically. Because coming out of college, you cannot take that job in San Francisco unless you already have existing family wealth. Why? Think about how much money you need. You need the money for the first and last month's rent and the security deposit. And that means you need like $8,000 starting out. A lot of young people who are from poor families, they can get the job, they went to the good college and can get the job, but they cannot move there. And that's really different, I think from previous generations. It wasn't just a myth, the idea that you move where the opportunity was, that was a reality in America, right? You move where the jobs are. “Go West, young man.” People really did do that. But they cannot do that now. And again, that's bad for America. We need workers where the jobs are. We don't need workers stagnating in areas of the country where there are no jobs. We need them moving out to the Bay Area where the jobs are, that increases our GDP. But they cannot do that, based on the choices, and a lot of those choices are things that seem to have nothing to do with young people. They seem to be things like zoning laws. Like okay, it makes sense that any new construction in the city needs to have parking. Well, what does that do that limits housing for those young people, and that means that they do not move there? And that keeps those houses for those older people, skyrocketing property values. But you think about, you know, some of the rules about licensing. So many jobs now, you know, it's like, farmer, hairdresser, you have to have special licenses. And again, that also prevents— BLAIR HODGES: Which are state-dependent too, right? ADAM BENFORADO: Yes. And geographic mobility, even things like, traditionally, law licenses. What is the main reason we have these state bars, I am very skeptical that it's to protect the public. I think it's to protect the monopoly lawyers have in each of these states to prevent new entrants into the market. And I think that hurts all of us. And so I want to focus on ways we can make young people freer at the start of life. Let's stop with different legal regimes that lock in things for old people and think more about ways we can free up young people, because that's going to be best for us as a country. BLAIR HODGES: You talked about inheritance and dead hand laws when it comes to that as well, the right of older folks to be able to lock in wealth in particular ways. ADAM BENFORADO: So I give this example—I really love art and I'm lucky enough to live really near one of the most amazing art collections in the world, which is housed at the Barnes Foundation in downtown Philadelphia. It has an amazing post-Impressionist collection. And one of the funniest things is, or the amazing thing is, thousands of people now visit every year, and that might never have come to be had the law originally been followed. So this guy Barnes, who made basically trillions of dollars in gonorrhea treatments around the turn of the century and bought up all this art, he stipulated in his will that this collection of art was going to be housed in his house out in Lower Merion. And that, you know, only a certain number of people could visit every week and all these rules. And that's how it would have been for all eternity if he had left enough money to preserve it in that way. But the fact of the matter is, he didn't. He didn't leave enough money. And so to the court system, this amazing collection was moved to downtown Philadelphia. It was placed in this, in my opinion, much better space. And now thousands and thousands more Americans and people around the world get to see this groundbreaking work. I think this is an area where we need to focus more on the benefits to living than the rights of the dead. And this is actually not a new notion. I have this wonderful quote from Thomas Jefferson in the book in which he said the same thing. And he was fighting down in

Max Pam is an Australian photographer born in 1949 in suburban Melbourne, which as a teenager he found to be grim, oppressive and culturally isolated. He found refuge in the counter-culture of surfing and the imagery of National Geographic and Surfer Magazine and became determined to travel overseas.Max left Australia at 20, after accepting a job as a photographer assisting an astrophysicist. Together, the pair drove a VW Beetle from Calcutta to London. This adventure proved inspirational, and travel has remained a crucial and continuous link to his creative and personal development. As Gary Dufour noted in his essay in Indian Ocean Journals (Steidl, 2000): “Each photograph is shaped by incidents experienced as a traveller. His photographs extend upon the tradition of the gazetteer; each photograph a record of an experience, a personal account of an encounter somewhere in the world. Each glimpse is part of an unfolding story rather than simply a record of a place observed. While travel underscores his production Pam's photographs are not the accidental evidence of a tourist.”Max's work takes the viewer on compelling journeys around the globe, recording observations with an often surrealist intensity, matching the heightened sensory awareness of foreign travel. The work frequently implies an interior, psychic journey, corresponding with the physical journey of travel. His work in Asian counties is well represented in publications as are his travels in Europe, Australia, and the Indian Ocean Rim cultures including India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Yemen, The Republic of Tanzania, Mauritius, Madagascar, the Cocos and Christmas Islands. The images leave the viewer, as Tim Winton said in Going East (Marval 1992), “grateful for having been taken so mysteriously by surprise and so far and sweetly abroad.”Max's first survey show was held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1986, and was followed by a mid-career retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1991. He was also the subject of a major exhibition at the Comptoir de la Photographie, Paris in 1990, which covered the work of three decades. He has published several highly acclaimed photographic monographs and 'carnets de voyage', including Going East: Twenty Years of Asian Photography (1992), Max Pam (1999), Ethiopia (1999) and Indian Ocean Journals (2000). Going East won Europe's major photo book award the Grand Prix du Livre Photographique in 1992. In the same year Max held his largest solo show to date at the Sogo Nara Museum of Art, Nara. He has published work in the leading international journals and is represented in major public and private collections in Australia, Great Britain, France and Japan.In episode 217 Max discusses, among other things:How he adopted the visual diary as his photographic approach.The influence of Diane Arbus.Why he chose such a specific period of his life to explore in his new memoir.How Arbus inspired him to shoot 6x6.How surfing in Australia introduced him travelling.How he ended up in India and why it fascinates him.The magic of film vs. digital.Working with book designers… or not.The time he failed to get into Magnum Photos.Surviving financially, teaching, and the importance of ‘marrying up'.Travel and family.Returning to Australia in a poor mental state, post typhoid.His wife's Alzheimer's and eventual death.Referenced:Philip Jones-GriffithDon McCullenLarry BurrowsDavid BaileyDiane ArbusEdward WestonTina ModottiRoger BallenGeorge OrwellBernard PlossuRamon PezSarah MoonOne Flew Over The Cuckoos NestPeter Beard Website | Instagram“I'm a very curious person and ultimately having the camera amplifies that curiosity in a really profound way. And it also gives you carte blanche to stick your head into areas where normally you'd think ‘ah, it's a bit dodgy, maybe not, I could get my head cut off it I stuck it in the hole…' But often then you think, ‘well come on man, you've got a camera there, isn't this part of your self image?' And so it's like this ticket to ride on something that is actually quite dangerous.”

Lots to chat about this week. Radimak the Tesla road rage guy gets 5 years in jail but which gang will he join? Both Spike and Jonny crash on their electric motorcycles. The new Aston DBX 707, Lotus Emira and Aprilia Tuono V4 Factory are discussed. Zuckerman buys a VW Beetle and many, many listener questions answered.