September 8, 2023 • 43 mins
While Ralph Nader may not be everyone's favorite politician, he's responsible for some of the biggest life-saving changes in American government. In today's episode, Ben, Max and Noel explore how young Ralph transformed from an eccentric, hitchhiking student to a national champion of consumer rights. This is the story of the man who took on General Motors... and won.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for tuning in. Let's hear it for the Man, the
Myth Legend super producer, mister Max Williams. We are live
in the studio. We've been recording more in person. I'm
Ben your Nola, and I think we did the vibe.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
It's a good vibe.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Yeah, We've got some nag Champa burning, some fresh roasted
coffee beans, some Artistanal espresso that we're sipping. I do
want to say that we're actually in a different studio
today than we have the last couple of times.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
We are in the corner office here at the iHeart,
at the iHeart Compound. All our studios have pretty cool names.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
This one is Prince.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
And what I love about recording in this studio is
we will have people walking by this bank of four
big windows and every so often they stop. And you know,
I know some folks might not enjoy that, but I
love it. I love feeling like I'm in exhibit or
I'm in a zoo. Every time I'm in the zoo,
I see the animals, I'm like, why do you get
(01:30):
all the attention.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
The voyeer and me is pleased and I will never
not pronounce it voy air, which, by the way, I
also decided that you know the band Pearl Jam. You know,
people often put the emphasis on the pearl pearl Jam.
I like to call them pearl Jam.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm with you.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
I got your back.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
The thing about this studio is that it makes us
somewhat public figures when we're recording, and it's apropos for today,
I see, because we are going to talk about.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Walk that one a long ways than I really, We're.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Gonna talk about a public figure who is perhaps a
bit more.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Well known than us. Yeah, Ralph Nadir.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Yes, which is funny because Nader, when spelled differently in
a D I R is a very low points the
lowest point, and it makes you think about nominative determinism.
But despite the name our pale, Ralph has been a
instrumental figure in the life of America.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Yeah, he's the Green Party guy, right, m hm.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
He's always been a real booster for clean energy and
you know, just a general do gooder. You know, he's
the kind of cat you see pop into like democracy
now just to talk about the state of the world.
And I think his perspective is valid now more than ever.
He's not really playing the political game anymore. I think
he's a bit more of a consultant, you know, public figure,
(02:58):
kind of speaker.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
That's right. But there was a time where he.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Was really playing with the big dogs in terms of,
you know, putting himself in to the political process. Ran
for president a couple of times, arguably to some through
a bit of a wrench into the works in terms of,
you know, the balance of votes, and maybe considered to
have done more harm than good by some just in
terms of like splitting the ticket and all of that
(03:24):
kind of stuff. I don't really have a perspective on
that one way or the other, but it certainly is
part of the conversation.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah, Especially back in two thousand, al Gore was running
for president and members of the Democratic Party were pretty
open in their belief that Ralph Nader cost Democrats the election.
That's not us saying that. That's people like current President
Joe Biden, who said literally to the New York Times,
(03:51):
Nader cost us the election.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Right.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Nader is not going to be welcome anywhere near the corridors.
Which corridors is he talking about the.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Corridors of power the halls of Congress. But he had
a well established reputation and track record going into those elections.
Back in the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies, he
waged a war of conscience on one of the biggest
pieces of the automotive industry. In nineteen sixty six, he
(04:24):
was the protagonist witness, I would call it, at these
hearings about automobile safety.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
They were conducted by Senator Abraham Ribikoff of Connecticut, of course,
which is a fabulous name for a politician. And at
the time Nader was kind of an upstart young lawyer
and you know, political activists. He had just published a
book with the very not salacious but you kind of
(04:51):
get it what it's about, title Unsafe at Any Speed,
The Designed in Dangers of the American Automobile. And we've
talked a lot about the history of the American automobile,
you much longer than I on your show car stuff,
but also just the idea of like seat belts, like
when they were implemented and how originally it was sort
(05:11):
of like, yeah, we'll throw those in and there is
a long period of the history of this, you know,
obviously incredibly important invention where safety just was not a
concern and that took a lot of political activism to
put into place.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
One of my favorite weird rabbit holes to go down
in YouTube land is these compilations of people who were
angry about seat belt laws. You will hear the catchphrase
communist in all these interviews, and it's someone saying, well,
you know, making us do this. It's one more step
to communism, but it's also a huge leap forward in safety,
(05:51):
and it doesn't really depend on your political ideology. Why
did this guy, this young lawyer get elevated from being
witness to kind of a celebrity public figure. It's the
fact that he was targeted for retaliation by General Motors.
General Motors, as we'll find, hired pis to try to
(06:13):
dig up dirt on a squeaky clean dude.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Yeah, And you know, back in nineteen thirty eight, Nator's mother, Rose,
actually took her four kids for a visit back to Lebanon,
where their heritage originates, and they actually waited in line
to meet the archbishop of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and
(06:39):
I believe it's pronounced zalais. But this really it's sort
of like one of these apocryphal type stories, like you.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Know, Abraham Lincoln cutting down the cherry tree or.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Whatever when watch whatever the apocryphal because I can't even
keep him straight, irrelevant because it probably didn't happen.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
This may or may not have happened.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
But the story goes that young Ralph, four year old
Ralph sprightly, young lad, refused to kiss the ring, which
is the thing you do you're supposed to do when
you meet a bishop, an archbishop at the very least,
and he said, no, I shall not kiss the ring.
And that is a philosophy that he carried through to
(07:17):
throughout his career.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yeah, And the end of that story is apparently the
archbishop liked his vibe and so he padded Ralph on
the head and he said a lot of ideas going
to come from this boy's head. And that's a cool
way to handle it.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Is it is so him killed?
Speaker 1 (07:35):
I hope not. But Ralph grew up in Connecticut, right,
and he has a very American origin story. It's kind
of like an American dream story. His father, nad Or
the Elder, arrived in the US at the tender age
of nineteen. He only had twenty bucks in his pocket,
and he was able to from that admittedly small starting capital,
(07:59):
he was able to a two story, ten room house
and then a building in the nearby town that became
the Highland Arms, which would be the family's restaurant, and
all the kids work at the restaurant. This this feels
already like American myth making. You know, this one's not apocryphal.
(08:19):
This really did happen, But it's an inspiring story.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Oh yes, especially the whole arrived on these shores with
twenty dollars in his pocket and a spring in his
step and a dream in his heart. You know, you'd
love to see it.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
And he says later, looking back in life, he says,
our restaurant, the Highland Arms, was kind of a It
was almost like a salon, you know, a town meeting place,
a salon, uh huh, yeah, a pearl jam And so
Ralph would hang out and listen to these people talk
their arguments, their views, their ideologies. And when he was
(08:56):
fourteen years old, he was carrying home printed cop of
the Congressional record, which he would read from start to finish.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
I love to read.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
And let me tell you, the Congressional record, for the
most part, is a bit of.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
A snooze, a bit of a slog.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Indeed, gosh, all this stuff sounds made up, but it's not. Yeah,
fourteen years old reading these transcripts absolutely incredible.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
And you know, you hear about places like this restaurant.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
You know here in Atlanta we have Manuel's or manuals
whennounce it, which is for a long time been a
longstanding kind of democratic sort of like place to hold court,
Jimmy Carter's favorite mark exactly. And you hear about that
in lots of different places in Connecticut with its proximity
to the seats of power, you know, New York and DC.
(09:41):
A lot of very politically active folks in this community.
So really cool and makes a lot of sense that
he was surrounded and kind of steeped in this world
and that he was able to at an early age
kind of formulate his own perspective as opposed to kind
of like maybe following others.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, and let's not get twisted. He was an exceptional kid,
but he was still doing normal kid stuff. He had
a job as a newspaper boy. He would play baseball
for hours during the weekend. It's just that in addition
to that, Ralph was already reading biographies about the real muckrakers,
(10:18):
the journalists who went hard on the paint back in
the turn of the century.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, speaking truth to power, right.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
And he interviewed customers they pay for something at the restaurant,
at the cash register, and he would probably he would
hit him with stuff like what do you think about
the gold standard?
Speaker 2 (10:32):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
At one point he actually had a pretty and depth
conversation with Norman Thomas, who had just done a lecture.
And this guy was a very famous socialist and presidential candidate,
also somewhat of a fringe presidential candidate. You know, I
don't know that I would think of the name Norman
Thomas and associated with someone who's run for presidents six times.
(10:53):
But that's usually the way history treats people that don't,
you know, win. But he he says to him, or
asks of him, what is your greatest achievement? A little
bit of a softball question, I suppose, are a little
bit of like the thing a kid would ask for
a book report. But all depends on the person, doesn't it,
you know? And he got an answer that maybe he
wasn't expecting.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Yeah, this guy.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Norman says his greatest achievement is quote having the Democrats
steal my agenda.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
WHOA.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
What he means by that is yet he may not
have become president, but his views empowered and inspired people
in the Democratic Party, and they later enacted many of
the changes that he was hoping for. So he's saying,
the game is bigger than me, and that's something Ralph
Nader took to heart. So he goes to Harvard Law
(11:41):
School and he says he's pretty funny. He's a good
public speaker. He later says, from day one, I laughed
at the game to prepare corporate lawyers. If anyone fell
off the bandwagon and became a lawyer for the poor,
it was viewed as a random event. I love this part.
They made mine sharp by making them narrow.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Well, that is kind of how you make things sharp
in a knife.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Sharpening of context. But I love that that is so
visual and really really a smart way of looking at it.
It's true because these types of programs at these Ivy
League schools are designed to churn out a very specific
type of individual. The caters to a very specific demographic,
aka the super wealthy, and anyone that maybe chooses to
(12:26):
go into more of a social justice field or maybe
to defend the poor or people that are downtrodden are
being taken advantage of. That's seen as a failure and
they're probably not asked to speak at alumni events or
you know, graduation ceremonies.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
So not unless they become a huge public figure. Ye, wells,
we'll see. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
And there's another thing I love about Ralph Nader in
this point in time. So he's going to one of
the most prestigious schools on the planet, and he's also
regularly disappearing. He becomes a drifter. He hitchhikes around the country.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
He's like this beat poet, kind of like young political
activist ideologue.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
It's just a really Johnny Appleseed type vish no, pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Yeah, he's researching the rights of Indigenous Americans, looking into
immigration and my workers. He's asking himself the big questions
about Puerto Rico. And then he starts reading about automobile
safety because he sees so many car crashes during his
time hitchhiking.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Huge shout out to to Mark Green, who wrote the
piece Nator then and now for the Nation back in
twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
You can find that online. I believe we may have
gotten this from.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
EPSCO, so it might not be readily available. If you
can get your hands on it worth a full read.
So remarkably, I imagine, despite all of his absences, it's like
a school marm. You know, you got too many absences.
He did graduate, correct, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
And he went to the YMCA. He was twenty nine
years old. He goes to the YMCA because he wants
to work on what he and Mark Green describe as
body rights. But again, you know, when you graduate from
an institution like this, people take you seriously. Doors open.
He becomes pretty quickly a consultant in the halls of power.
(14:27):
He is working with the Assistant Secretary of Labor for
the Kennedy administration. And the entire time he's doing this,
he's always bringing up highway safety.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
It's like his hobby horse. And he later writes a
groundbreaking article also in the Nation called the safe Car
You can't buy That's.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Right, And you know he builds on what he learned
on his terms by the way, which I love. You know,
his education is Harvard education. He is using it, he's
weaponizing it and using in a way that perhaps the
administrators of such a university would not have intended, which
I love that he's almost like using their power, which
(15:08):
you know, knowledge obviously is power, and this type of
deep knowledge of the law incredibly powerful because it's something
that just so many people don't possess, and he's building
on it in a way that is helping consumers.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Yeah, that's that's the idea, right.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
He's not in this for a plum corporate gig that
turns him into a millionaire necessarily. In fact, he builds
off his research from his time as a student and
a drifter, and he eventually gets a deal to write
a book called Unsafe at Any Speed that designed in
Dangers of the American Automobile. He actually writes this book
(15:47):
twice because when he got the publishing deal, he left
the only copy of the book in a cab. And
you know how it is now, folks, if you ever
use Lyft or uber and you leave something in there,
it's still difficult to find it.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
A cab A cab in the nineteen sixties, you know
what I mean, that's not so funny.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
It reminds me of the kind of weirdo fringe artist
Daniel Johnston, who he didn't know about like tape duplication,
so he would actually record his album every time he
put it he gave it to somebody, he'd record it
and then draw the cover every single time. That's obviously
a little different, but I just think that level of
scrappiness is super cool.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
And he in this book, which publishes in nineteen sixty
five in November, he says, Look, the reason for most
car crashes basically is not the driver. It's not human error.
He says, the reason for most car crashes it's not
the quote nut behind the wheel, but the nut in
the wheel. Because he's talking about the way the cars
(16:47):
are built and that they're being designed, in his opinion,
for style rather than for safety.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Yeah, and this is in the sixties, right, Yeah. Yeah, So,
I mean, like again, we talked about the history of
the automobile and the Model T and originally I think
a lot of it was just about logistics, about creating
something as cheaply and scalable as possible, but just safety
wasn't as much of an issue at the beginning, there
just weren't that many of these things and infrastructure, you know,
would take time to follow. But as we all know,
(17:16):
the law lags way behind, egregiously behind what is actually
needed to keep people safe, whether it is in road
laws or manufacturing sects.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Technology will always outpace legislation for good or for ill,
and in this book he brings out which is worth
a read. And again he's a very talented author. And
there are a lot of examples of automobile safety or
lack thereof in this book. One example he really focuses
on is the Chevy Corvare, especially the nineteen sixty to
(17:52):
sixty three models. He calls this thing in the very
beginning of the book, he calls this thing the one
car accident.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Usually it takes two to tango right. But I think
he's referring to some issues with the handling. I guess
the drive train.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
I'm not a car expert of this vehicle. That was
it was just real squirrely right. It could like easily
spin out.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
So if you've ever worked in any kind of group project,
we all know that the idea you have at the
beginning is not going to be the end result. Right
when you're finally done, when you actually make the thing,
you're gonna have modifications. And the guy who designed the
Corvet ed Cole. He knew what he was doing. He
(18:36):
was smart. He wanted the engine to be all aluminum.
That's a lighter motor, and it's a little more expensive
at the time. So the motor they actually do design
is made of iron instead of aluminum, and that makes
it a lot heavier.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Yeah, and shout out to Matt Chrissara from Popular Mechanics.
Now think about that publication, but there's some really really
great writing and Popular Mechanics from his article. Remember when
Ralph Nader's expose of Chevrolet Corvet paved the way for
better road safety. So, yeah, there was this kind of disconnect.
That extra weight caused some issues with it being kind
(19:13):
of front heavy, like you said, I mean heavy in general,
but also just front heavy. So therefore there was sort
of like a discrepancy in weight between the front and
the back axles.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
And there were other problems with the vehicle related to
the axles, the suspension, things that would cause it to
suddenly lose traction. You know how this may happen if
you were ever at a red light on a rainy
day or rainy evening, and then you push the gas
and the tires sort of real quick. That's trying to
(19:45):
get traction. And the corvet, because of various design flaws,
was just not good at it. It was fun to drive,
but it could have a lot of very dangerous problems.
General Motors this is where we get to the iculous part.
General Motors a very powerful company then and now they
(20:05):
heard about Nader through the Grapevine Wall. So we contacted
them directly multiple times, and they took it personally because
at the time Nader wrote this book, he was it
was a culmination point because there had already been more
than one hundred lawsuits against Chevrolet for the corvat specifically, Yeah,
(20:28):
not all from Nator.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
No, no, no. This was like a known problem.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
This is a source of litigation, and Nator was just
kind of connecting the dots here.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Right, And you can read more about this in a
Great Time article from nineteen sixty six called Investigations Slight
Spoiler in the title the Spies who were caught Cold.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Snap also shout out you mentioned we mentioned car stuff earlier.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
I believe.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
I'm certain because I think I was the producer at
the time. Y'all did a multi part series on the Corvet.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Yes, multipart series on Corvet. Also a series about automotive recalls,
which is a huge thing and car stuff. You know
what I always liked about it is we dive into
the history of some of some of this stuff totally.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
This is gonna be a little bit looser because GM
behaves in a villainous way here and it's fun to talk.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
About He he is thirty two at this time, he's
only thirty two years old, and General Motors decides he
is not quite an existential threat, but someone who needs
to be taken care of, So they hire a law
firm out of Washington to handle things. Find us something
(21:39):
on Ralph and he The law firm pays a guy
named Vincent Gillen, not Vince Gilligan, different dude named Vincent Gillen.
They pay him a little less than seven thousand dollars. Well,
i'm our FBI guy, now a PI and they say,
find whatever you can on this guy. Get us some
like reputation brow material.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Yeah, And he wrote a letter to I guess some
of his contacts. I'm I'm not clear if they were
connected to the FBI at any point in time, but
he essentially had like subcontractors that he would use to
like do some of his dirty work for him. And
in the letter he said the following. Our job is
to check Nator's life and current activities to determine what
(22:21):
makes him tick, such as his real interest in safety,
his supporters, if any of his politics, his marital status,
his friends.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
His women, boys, etc.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Drinking, dope jobs, in fact, all facets of his life.
You could have just said that, buddy, Yeah, he's making
it clear that they're after dirt. You know, this is
not a learn more about thing or boys, you know,
like drinking and dope. His marital status, right, does he
having affairs? And so this group, Gillan and co. They
(22:54):
do some really clever social engineering. They call sixty upwards
of sixty and relatives of Ralph Nader and they spin
a yarn. They say, we're doing a pre employment investigation.
We're doing a background check. So his parents are Lebanese immigrants.
They do stuff like trying to figure out if there's
(23:14):
any anti Semitism in his family or in his personal beliefs.
And then they said, he's thirty two years old, he's
got a decent job. Why isn't he married? And this
one's a little not apocryphal, but people don't agree on
how this all went down. In at least two instances,
Nater charges that Gillan tries to put him in compromising
(23:39):
positions with women. He says, one girl, he basically says,
they're trying to do honeypot traps on him. One girl
comes to him at a drug store and for absolutely
no apparent reason, out of the blue, she says, hey,
come to my apartment, let's talk about foreign relations.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah, that's pretty gross. And it goes even further.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
There's a second example of this type of tactic where
a second girl is employed and asked him to help
her move some furniture. Oh could you please help me
with that? You a big strong man, And he didn't
even bite like a little. I mean, frankly, it sounds
kind of rude. You know, he should help help the
(24:18):
young lady move the furniture if she needs help.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
But you know, yeah, he also knew he had a target.
Now he's a wilely guy. It's sure he knows what's up.
He's very shrewd.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
And he totally understands, probably largely from remember the game
that he was laughing at back in Harvard. He knows
the lengths that these types will go to. You know,
he probably learned them from the best himself.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
And this all leads to him testifying at this hearing
where a Senate subcommittee headed by a Connecticut Democrat named
Abraham Ribikoff, which mentioned earlier, and this was investigating traffic safety.
For the entire week leading up to these hearings, the
private investigators followed him all around DC. They were literally
(25:03):
doing the Cold War spy stuff, you know, some picturesome
guy and a fedora and a trench coat peeking around
the corner.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Where's he going? And they got caught.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
They got kicked out by guards at the Senate Office
building who said, hey, you guys are walking around like spies.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, knock it off, get right out of town. What
get a different hat? At least you're wearing a spy hat.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
Yeah, And you're clearly wearing those like mirrored spy gear shades,
the ones where you can see around knas.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
And they even reference this in the hearing. Ribikoff says,
there's too much snooping going on, and he says, you know, Natter,
you can feel pretty proud. They put you through the
mill and they haven't found a damn thing wrong with you.
They're saying that this guy actually doesn't have dirt. He
just means what he says.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
I love referring to like private investigators and detectives as
gum shoes. I always think of wearing the world this.
Carmen san Diego, you know where the chief She's like, okay,
gum shoes.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
That's yeh, yeah, yeah, that's great. Also, Dix was fun.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
I watched seven the other night with my girlfriend and
there's a scene where the swat team kicks in the
door of this, you know, one of the victim's houses,
and they're.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Like, Dix, Dix, you gotta come in and see this.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Yeah, No one says that anymore they should.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
So Nader finally gets to testify despite all this, all
these attempts to destroy his character, and he's really good
as a public speaker. He's calm, he is sometimes a
little funny, which goes a long way. One journalist called
(26:42):
him a quote machine gun with facts.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Jesus rat a tat tat.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
He says I'm responsible for my actions, but who's responsible
for those of general motors?
Speaker 2 (26:53):
And he says, you know who.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
We'll paraphrase here, but he says, Look, if you're an individual,
you lose your integrity once. If you're a corporation, you
lose your integrity all the time, and you never encounter
consequences for it. I'm paraphrasing there, but that's what he's
pointing out. And some folks from mainly from the right
side of politics, they try to say, this guy's just
(27:19):
out flogging his book. He just wants to make money
selling his book Unsafe at any Speed.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah, the honorable Carl Curtis of Nebraska.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
I don't think they talk like that in Nebraska, he implies,
just as much, to which Robert Kennedy gives Nator the
chance to say what his real motivations are, to which
Nator responds, very cromulently.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Is that okay?
Speaker 3 (27:46):
Yeah, okay, great, he says, because I happen to have
a scale of priorities that leads me to engage in
the prevention of cruelty to humans.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
My motives are.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
Constantly inquired into. Is it wrong to talk about defect
of cars diseased meats. That's a that's a mouthful corporate cheating.
Is it really distasteful that a person cares enough about
issues like these to dedicate his life to changing them?
That's a real what's the word when it's the question
that really doesn't have an answer? Or yeah, yeah, so historical,
(28:19):
that's the rhetorical. Obviously those things are great. That seems
like a really good thing to dedicate your life.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
To, and that should be something with which all members
of the Senate agree because that's why you're supposed to
go into public office, right to fight for greater good.
So this gets a lot of coverage, The story, as
we would say these days, goes viral, and ultimately Nader
sues GM. They settle out of court for four hundred
(28:46):
and twenty five thousand dollars in twenty twenty three money
that's around that's a little less than four million, So
it's a big, big win, and Nader's attorney says this
is the biggest amount ever paid as damages for invasion
of privacy because they were able to prove that chain
a coman and trace trace back those gum shoes and
(29:08):
those Fedora rock and spies all the way back to
General Motors, and essentially he made the Corvet incredibly unpopular.
And there's a great Politico article about this from a
few years back by Andrew Glass says about this moment
in history. He sank the Corvet by nineteen sixty nine.
(29:29):
Just a few years later, GM stops production entirely.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
I mean, essentially, they were trying to put out a
small car, you know, that would be affordable to consumers
and obviously sell a gazillion of them. But they cut
a lot of corners to make that happen, and Nader
pointed that out, and so they had to basically go
back to the drawing board.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
How dare he right?
Speaker 1 (29:50):
I mean that expense alone is far more than in
that settlement.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Yeah, way more.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
The US public is incensed about this, and they are
increasingly on Major's side. His actions directly lead to the
creation of what we call the National Highway Traffic Safety
Association the NHTSA, and over the next half a century,
this organization has been in charge of auto safety. They're
(30:27):
the ones who decide when a recall is going to occur.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Yeah, that's again, this is like, what are we talking here?
This is late sixties now almost in the seventies. Yeah,
nineteen sixty nine when they stop production. It wasn't until
this point in history that we have an organization, a
government you know, sanctioned organization that is looking out for
the safety of consumers, which.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Is crazy because people have been driving for a while. Yeah,
how long?
Speaker 3 (30:52):
What are we talking here? Sorry, I'm totally brain farting on.
Like when the first car came.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Out, Well, we're thinking you could think of stuff like
the late eighteen ninety Yeah, that's when Henry Ford builds
his first car. But then you know, it mainstreams after
that into the early nineteen hundreds, and the problem is
these cars are getting faster and faster.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
That's right, and there and and no one is there
to get people to literally pump the brakes.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Would you say, no one's at the wheel? I would
say so, I would say both of those tests.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
So this this is a good thing. This is inarguably
a good thing. Over time, this one organization reduces the
rate of deaths per mile driven by eighty percent.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
That's insane. I mean, that's that's incredible.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
And there's an analysis from the Center for Auto Safety
that determined that this saved more than three point five
million lives. I mean, we know how even today we
you know, living here in Atlanta, we know how many
people die in traffic accidents. It's still an incredibly dangerous proposition,
(31:59):
even with all of these oversights.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Yeah, he is up there in the story of good
guys in the world of cars. In my opinion, he's
up there with Neil's Bolin, no relation. He's the dude
who invented the three point seat belt. So that guy
alone has saved a well over a billion lives by now,
and Nader at this point, Nader could probably rest on
(32:23):
his laurels. He went against the goliath and he won.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
But he doesn't.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Instead of instead of, you know, retiring from public life
and just hanging out at the family restaurant in Connecticut.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
This is step one, right, you know, in a storied career.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
You know, this is the perfect example of a guy
who puts his money where his mouth is, you know,
and he literally takes the money that he made during
this legal victory and started an activist agency called the
Center for Study of Responsive Law. Once again, very pithy
right there in the title. We need law that responds
to the needs of people.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
And so he is the progenitor of what we call
the consumer movement or consumer advocacy movement. He says, let's
talk about nuclear power, let's talk about the safety of
oil pipelines. Let's get back to food and drug safety,
because I think The Jungle was a good book, you know.
And then of course airlines, pollution, you name it. He
(33:24):
is fighting what he sees as the good fight. And
the list is incredibly long. You can actually name almost
any modern consumer safety thing, and he went to bat
for it.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
The Markereen piece in the Nation lists them, in no
particular order, vastly things like healthcare, smoking, freedom of information laws,
laws regarding multinationals, educational testing services, occupational hazards and the like.
You know, rights of workers, things like that, specs surrounding
(34:03):
the construction of homes.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah yeah, And he says, I want to own the
means of production, at least in the legal sense. So
I'm going to run for president. And this led to
him being somewhat of a divisive figure in the American left.
In two thousand, as we mentioned at the top of
this show, as a candidate for the Green Party, he
got about one hundred thousand votes in Florida. The Democratic
(34:27):
candidate Al Gore lost, according to the Supreme Court, by
five hundred and thirty seven votes, and the Democratic Party
got really really mad about this. They had fought to
keep him off the ballot. And I remember when this
occurs same you would hear people say, you know, a
vote for the Green Party is a vote for the GOP.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Well, and you could argue that there's some truth to that,
you know, just in terms of you know, if we're
talking about what's right, you know, one thing, but we
live within a system that isn't always about what's right,
and you kind of have.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
To choose between.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
You know, it's a two party system basically, so when
you have this third party thrown in there, it just
can kind of throw things out of whack and it
can take votes away from the actual real candidate.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Let's be honest. You know, Nator was never going to win.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
He was running almost more as like a symbol, you know,
almost as more of like taking a stance.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
It's similar to that conversation you had with the sociologist
back at the family restaurant. He was hoping that his
agenda could catch fire, you know what I mean. It's
like if you are playing a team sport. If you're
playing football, a goal doesn't mean that the entire team
hits the finish line, right, And he's saying, if I
can just pass this ball of policy on, then my
(35:51):
team will win. And there's a great two thousand and
four Guardian profile of Nator by Julian Border that gets
into this controversy because people were accusing him of falling
in love with his own magic, of being like Merlin
in a Connecticut Yankee goes to King Arthur's court, which,
now that I think about it, is even more appropriate.
They said, Look, this guy is just super into himself.
(36:13):
He doesn't understand how the real world works, and he
is maybe becoming a bit of a zealot, a bit
of a demagogue, you could say.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
The same people have said the same things about like
Bernie Sanders, you know, sure, yeah, and then he's a
similar social justice kind of figure. You know, throughout his
career he's done very similar things.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
And Nader is aware of this. He told The New
York Times, we lose to win eventually. That is the
story of social justice. You have to be willing to
lose and fight and lose, and fight and lose. And
fight until the agenda is one. But a lot of
people are saying, hey, man, stop making us lose.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Though.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Yeah, I mean again, to your point, Ben, it's less
about winning than it is about just gradually infiltrating the
consciousness and the rhetoric of the actual party in power.
So but you know, you could argue that there are
ways to go about that without kind of stacking the
(37:15):
deck against them. So again, maybe I sound like I'm
saying that Nator shouldn't have run. I really don't have
a dog in that fight. I just am trying to
look at both sides and see maybe there are other
ways of going about this that wouldn't have been quite
as divisive. But you know, extreme times call for extreme measures.
So I mean, maybe that's how he was looking out.
The only way to truly get the other side to
pay attention is to show him that there show them
(37:36):
that there are people that are thinking like him, and
that he can get enough votes to make them realize
maybe we should pivot a little because.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Isn't Gore kind of an environmentalist as well?
Speaker 3 (37:46):
Sure? I mean, he obviously made those unpop what it
was it called an inconvenient truth films? You know, and
not to mention inventing the Internet.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yeah, thanks.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Al Nator is also kind of moving the over window
what is acceptable to be discussed in the public sphere
and what is prioritized in those discussions. So while he
may be a divisive figure, actually he definitely is a
divisive figure.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Right.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
People have different opinions about him and about his actions
when running for president. All that aside, there is no
way around it. Without Ralph Nader, there would not have
been the consumer rights movement that exists in the United
States today.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
Yeah, And speaking of putting his money where his mouth is,
I mean, he still stands by all of these things
that he has put forth in his policies, in his politics,
and his rhetoric, and in his activism for all these years.
He was asked in an interview a handful of years
ago if he had ever owned a car, and he says,
(38:49):
a forty nine student Baker was the last car I owned.
That was the car that if you looked at it,
you couldn't tell the front from the rear. I don't
have a car. You have to take care of them,
figure out where to park castle with the insurance gouging,
look out for recalls, I use public transportation or walk
when I can. Cars are a nuisance.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
I mean, I get it.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
They're also cool and go room room right, right, there's
also that, And you know, the US, there's no secret
is a car culture the vast majority of the country.
You know, you kind of need a car to get
reliable transit. That does not always have to be the case.
That may change in the future. But with all this
we can say Ralph Nader took on GM anyone.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
It's right.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
There's one amazing final quote from another interview where he
was asked about any of his guilty pleasures that he
might have. The interviewer said, do you secretly love Fast
and Furious movies? And I'm sure Ralph dinner is like
what's that? He responded, I do like organic ice cream.
But no, I don't watch many movies because there's so
(39:56):
much to do that occupies almost all my waking time.
In fact, I don't I don't even look at TV anymore.
I listened to NPR and read the newspapers, the Post
and the Times. I'm completely a print person. I don't
have a computer. I use an underwood typewriter. I don't
have email or the Internet because I want to get
work done and not deal with all the crap.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
It's kind of like asking Gnoam Chomsky or Howard Zen
to name their favorite reality TV program. They're gonna say,
what is I do?
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Regular reality?
Speaker 3 (40:29):
Weirdly, though, you know what I saw the other day,
Noam Chomsky has one of those masterclass things. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
and he looks he looks like a deer in headlights
where he's clearly doing the part that's just designed for
the promo, where he's really I will talk about the
most pressing issues facing America today and then the other
parts he's clearly just riffing like he does and it
looks very natural. But yeah, I was still a little
(40:50):
taken aback by it. I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Yeah, it's trying to get the message out there, you
know what I'm saying, and that's what he's advocating for.
Plus he is ninety four years old, Chomsky. He is
eighty nine years old. Ok, so spry as ever imperially slim.
Thanks for helping fewer people die in car accidents, and
(41:13):
thanks for making the consumer movement. You may not agree
with the guy's politics necessarily, but I think we can
all agree that saving lives is a good thing to do.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
I bet it doesn't even have a smartphone. No, why
would he have a smartphone? That guy's landline all. I
bet he has like rotary doll.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Oh, he might have like a Nokia the indestructible flip phone. Sure,
he's got like three numbers brick.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
I think he listens to podcasts now does doesn't have
time too much to occupying all.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Of his waking hours.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
If we print out a transcript and mail it to him, yeah,
it'd be interesting to see what he says.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
That would be cool. I think you consumer fans of We.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
Are fans of Ralph Nader for saving lives, and we
are also fans of ridiculous historical stories. I gotta say too,
I've driven Chevrolet's I love Monte Carlos. They were just
in the wrong on this one.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
And with this, we're going to hit the road with
our safety belts on. Thanks Ralph and all three points,
all three points shout out Nills Bulin, and we can't
wait for a very special episode we have coming out later.
We have a lot of tangents in trivia and things
that don't quite make it into episodes when we're recording.
(42:27):
So we are going to do our first ever clip show.
I think we can called it clip Yeah, it's yeah, it's.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
It'll be a clip show of a type.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Yeah. I think the way I've described it off aras
it'll be a Matroshka doll of segues. So do tune
in for that. Thanks as always to our super producer
mister Max Williams, Thanks to our research associate doctor z.
Thanks to our special off air guest Alex Alex are
you over there?
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Hey? All right?
Speaker 1 (42:58):
Hello tech doing a live show, And of course thanks
to our own pal Jonathan Strickland aka the Quist who else?
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Oh man?
Speaker 3 (43:06):
Alex Williams whose are you very much a Ralph Nader
esque type figure, at least in his nomadic existence. He
loves organic he does love organic ice cream and hitching
hitching a ride here good thanks.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
To Chris frosciotis here in spirit.
Speaker 3 (43:19):
He's Jeff Coates doing all kinds of crazy yoga poses
out in the world.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Just how her new book come out.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
That's incredible.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Yeah, congrats and thanks to you, Ben, Thanks to you
a little bit of a Ralph Nader ask figure yourself.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Zoom zoom zoom. We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 3 (43:40):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for tuning in. Let's hear it for the Man, the
Myth Legend super producer, mister Max Williams. We are live
in the studio. We've been recording more in person. I'm
Ben your Nola, and I think we did the vibe.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
It's a good vibe.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Yeah, We've got some nag Champa burning, some fresh roasted
coffee beans, some Artistanal espresso that we're sipping. I do
want to say that we're actually in a different studio
today than we have the last couple of times.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
We are in the corner office here at the iHeart,
at the iHeart Compound. All our studios have pretty cool names.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
This one is Prince.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
And what I love about recording in this studio is
we will have people walking by this bank of four
big windows and every so often they stop. And you know,
I know some folks might not enjoy that, but I
love it. I love feeling like I'm in exhibit or
I'm in a zoo. Every time I'm in the zoo,
I see the animals, I'm like, why do you get
(01:30):
all the attention.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
The voyeer and me is pleased and I will never
not pronounce it voy air, which, by the way, I
also decided that you know the band Pearl Jam. You know,
people often put the emphasis on the pearl pearl Jam.
I like to call them pearl Jam.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm with you.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
I got your back.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
The thing about this studio is that it makes us
somewhat public figures when we're recording, and it's apropos for today,
I see, because we are going to talk about.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Walk that one a long ways than I really, We're.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Gonna talk about a public figure who is perhaps a
bit more.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Well known than us. Yeah, Ralph Nadir.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Yes, which is funny because Nader, when spelled differently in
a D I R is a very low points the
lowest point, and it makes you think about nominative determinism.
But despite the name our pale, Ralph has been a
instrumental figure in the life of America.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Yeah, he's the Green Party guy, right, m hm.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
He's always been a real booster for clean energy and
you know, just a general do gooder. You know, he's
the kind of cat you see pop into like democracy
now just to talk about the state of the world.
And I think his perspective is valid now more than ever.
He's not really playing the political game anymore. I think
he's a bit more of a consultant, you know, public figure,
(02:58):
kind of speaker.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
That's right. But there was a time where he.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Was really playing with the big dogs in terms of,
you know, putting himself in to the political process. Ran
for president a couple of times, arguably to some through
a bit of a wrench into the works in terms of,
you know, the balance of votes, and maybe considered to
have done more harm than good by some just in
terms of like splitting the ticket and all of that
(03:24):
kind of stuff. I don't really have a perspective on
that one way or the other, but it certainly is
part of the conversation.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah, Especially back in two thousand, al Gore was running
for president and members of the Democratic Party were pretty
open in their belief that Ralph Nader cost Democrats the election.
That's not us saying that. That's people like current President
Joe Biden, who said literally to the New York Times,
(03:51):
Nader cost us the election.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Right.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Nader is not going to be welcome anywhere near the corridors.
Which corridors is he talking about the.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Corridors of power the halls of Congress. But he had
a well established reputation and track record going into those elections.
Back in the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies, he
waged a war of conscience on one of the biggest
pieces of the automotive industry. In nineteen sixty six, he
(04:24):
was the protagonist witness, I would call it, at these
hearings about automobile safety.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
They were conducted by Senator Abraham Ribikoff of Connecticut, of course,
which is a fabulous name for a politician. And at
the time Nader was kind of an upstart young lawyer
and you know, political activists. He had just published a
book with the very not salacious but you kind of
(04:51):
get it what it's about, title Unsafe at Any Speed,
The Designed in Dangers of the American Automobile. And we've
talked a lot about the history of the American automobile,
you much longer than I on your show car stuff,
but also just the idea of like seat belts, like
when they were implemented and how originally it was sort
(05:11):
of like, yeah, we'll throw those in and there is
a long period of the history of this, you know,
obviously incredibly important invention where safety just was not a
concern and that took a lot of political activism to
put into place.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
One of my favorite weird rabbit holes to go down
in YouTube land is these compilations of people who were
angry about seat belt laws. You will hear the catchphrase
communist in all these interviews, and it's someone saying, well,
you know, making us do this. It's one more step
to communism, but it's also a huge leap forward in safety,
(05:51):
and it doesn't really depend on your political ideology. Why
did this guy, this young lawyer get elevated from being
witness to kind of a celebrity public figure. It's the
fact that he was targeted for retaliation by General Motors.
General Motors, as we'll find, hired pis to try to
(06:13):
dig up dirt on a squeaky clean dude.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Yeah, And you know, back in nineteen thirty eight, Nator's mother, Rose,
actually took her four kids for a visit back to Lebanon,
where their heritage originates, and they actually waited in line
to meet the archbishop of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and
(06:39):
I believe it's pronounced zalais. But this really it's sort
of like one of these apocryphal type stories, like you.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Know, Abraham Lincoln cutting down the cherry tree or.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Whatever when watch whatever the apocryphal because I can't even
keep him straight, irrelevant because it probably didn't happen.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
This may or may not have happened.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
But the story goes that young Ralph, four year old
Ralph sprightly, young lad, refused to kiss the ring, which
is the thing you do you're supposed to do when
you meet a bishop, an archbishop at the very least,
and he said, no, I shall not kiss the ring.
And that is a philosophy that he carried through to
(07:17):
throughout his career.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yeah, And the end of that story is apparently the
archbishop liked his vibe and so he padded Ralph on
the head and he said a lot of ideas going
to come from this boy's head. And that's a cool
way to handle it.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Is it is so him killed?
Speaker 1 (07:35):
I hope not. But Ralph grew up in Connecticut, right,
and he has a very American origin story. It's kind
of like an American dream story. His father, nad Or
the Elder, arrived in the US at the tender age
of nineteen. He only had twenty bucks in his pocket,
and he was able to from that admittedly small starting capital,
(07:59):
he was able to a two story, ten room house
and then a building in the nearby town that became
the Highland Arms, which would be the family's restaurant, and
all the kids work at the restaurant. This this feels
already like American myth making. You know, this one's not apocryphal.
(08:19):
This really did happen, But it's an inspiring story.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Oh yes, especially the whole arrived on these shores with
twenty dollars in his pocket and a spring in his
step and a dream in his heart. You know, you'd
love to see it.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
And he says later, looking back in life, he says,
our restaurant, the Highland Arms, was kind of a It
was almost like a salon, you know, a town meeting place,
a salon, uh huh, yeah, a pearl jam And so
Ralph would hang out and listen to these people talk
their arguments, their views, their ideologies. And when he was
(08:56):
fourteen years old, he was carrying home printed cop of
the Congressional record, which he would read from start to finish.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
I love to read.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
And let me tell you, the Congressional record, for the
most part, is a bit of.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
A snooze, a bit of a slog.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Indeed, gosh, all this stuff sounds made up, but it's not. Yeah,
fourteen years old reading these transcripts absolutely incredible.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
And you know, you hear about places like this restaurant.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
You know here in Atlanta we have Manuel's or manuals
whennounce it, which is for a long time been a
longstanding kind of democratic sort of like place to hold court,
Jimmy Carter's favorite mark exactly. And you hear about that
in lots of different places in Connecticut with its proximity
to the seats of power, you know, New York and DC.
(09:41):
A lot of very politically active folks in this community.
So really cool and makes a lot of sense that
he was surrounded and kind of steeped in this world
and that he was able to at an early age
kind of formulate his own perspective as opposed to kind
of like maybe following others.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, and let's not get twisted. He was an exceptional kid,
but he was still doing normal kid stuff. He had
a job as a newspaper boy. He would play baseball
for hours during the weekend. It's just that in addition
to that, Ralph was already reading biographies about the real muckrakers,
(10:18):
the journalists who went hard on the paint back in
the turn of the century.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, speaking truth to power, right.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
And he interviewed customers they pay for something at the restaurant,
at the cash register, and he would probably he would
hit him with stuff like what do you think about
the gold standard?
Speaker 2 (10:32):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
At one point he actually had a pretty and depth
conversation with Norman Thomas, who had just done a lecture.
And this guy was a very famous socialist and presidential candidate,
also somewhat of a fringe presidential candidate. You know, I
don't know that I would think of the name Norman
Thomas and associated with someone who's run for presidents six times.
(10:53):
But that's usually the way history treats people that don't,
you know, win. But he he says to him, or
asks of him, what is your greatest achievement? A little
bit of a softball question, I suppose, are a little
bit of like the thing a kid would ask for
a book report. But all depends on the person, doesn't it,
you know? And he got an answer that maybe he
wasn't expecting.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Yeah, this guy.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Norman says his greatest achievement is quote having the Democrats
steal my agenda.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
WHOA.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
What he means by that is yet he may not
have become president, but his views empowered and inspired people
in the Democratic Party, and they later enacted many of
the changes that he was hoping for. So he's saying,
the game is bigger than me, and that's something Ralph
Nader took to heart. So he goes to Harvard Law
(11:41):
School and he says he's pretty funny. He's a good
public speaker. He later says, from day one, I laughed
at the game to prepare corporate lawyers. If anyone fell
off the bandwagon and became a lawyer for the poor,
it was viewed as a random event. I love this part.
They made mine sharp by making them narrow.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Well, that is kind of how you make things sharp
in a knife.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Sharpening of context. But I love that that is so
visual and really really a smart way of looking at it.
It's true because these types of programs at these Ivy
League schools are designed to churn out a very specific
type of individual. The caters to a very specific demographic,
aka the super wealthy, and anyone that maybe chooses to
(12:26):
go into more of a social justice field or maybe
to defend the poor or people that are downtrodden are
being taken advantage of. That's seen as a failure and
they're probably not asked to speak at alumni events or
you know, graduation ceremonies.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
So not unless they become a huge public figure. Ye, wells,
we'll see. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
And there's another thing I love about Ralph Nader in
this point in time. So he's going to one of
the most prestigious schools on the planet, and he's also
regularly disappearing. He becomes a drifter. He hitchhikes around the country.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
He's like this beat poet, kind of like young political
activist ideologue.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
It's just a really Johnny Appleseed type vish no, pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Yeah, he's researching the rights of Indigenous Americans, looking into
immigration and my workers. He's asking himself the big questions
about Puerto Rico. And then he starts reading about automobile
safety because he sees so many car crashes during his
time hitchhiking.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Huge shout out to to Mark Green, who wrote the
piece Nator then and now for the Nation back in
twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
You can find that online. I believe we may have
gotten this from.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
EPSCO, so it might not be readily available. If you
can get your hands on it worth a full read.
So remarkably, I imagine, despite all of his absences, it's like
a school marm. You know, you got too many absences.
He did graduate, correct, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
And he went to the YMCA. He was twenty nine
years old. He goes to the YMCA because he wants
to work on what he and Mark Green describe as
body rights. But again, you know, when you graduate from
an institution like this, people take you seriously. Doors open.
He becomes pretty quickly a consultant in the halls of power.
(14:27):
He is working with the Assistant Secretary of Labor for
the Kennedy administration. And the entire time he's doing this,
he's always bringing up highway safety.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
It's like his hobby horse. And he later writes a
groundbreaking article also in the Nation called the safe Car
You can't buy That's.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Right, And you know he builds on what he learned
on his terms by the way, which I love. You know,
his education is Harvard education. He is using it, he's
weaponizing it and using in a way that perhaps the
administrators of such a university would not have intended, which
I love that he's almost like using their power, which
(15:08):
you know, knowledge obviously is power, and this type of
deep knowledge of the law incredibly powerful because it's something
that just so many people don't possess, and he's building
on it in a way that is helping consumers.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Yeah, that's that's the idea, right.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
He's not in this for a plum corporate gig that
turns him into a millionaire necessarily. In fact, he builds
off his research from his time as a student and
a drifter, and he eventually gets a deal to write
a book called Unsafe at Any Speed that designed in
Dangers of the American Automobile. He actually writes this book
(15:47):
twice because when he got the publishing deal, he left
the only copy of the book in a cab. And
you know how it is now, folks, if you ever
use Lyft or uber and you leave something in there,
it's still difficult to find it.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
A cab A cab in the nineteen sixties, you know
what I mean, that's not so funny.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
It reminds me of the kind of weirdo fringe artist
Daniel Johnston, who he didn't know about like tape duplication,
so he would actually record his album every time he
put it he gave it to somebody, he'd record it
and then draw the cover every single time. That's obviously
a little different, but I just think that level of
scrappiness is super cool.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
And he in this book, which publishes in nineteen sixty
five in November, he says, Look, the reason for most
car crashes basically is not the driver. It's not human error.
He says, the reason for most car crashes it's not
the quote nut behind the wheel, but the nut in
the wheel. Because he's talking about the way the cars
(16:47):
are built and that they're being designed, in his opinion,
for style rather than for safety.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Yeah, and this is in the sixties, right, Yeah. Yeah, So,
I mean, like again, we talked about the history of
the automobile and the Model T and originally I think
a lot of it was just about logistics, about creating
something as cheaply and scalable as possible, but just safety
wasn't as much of an issue at the beginning, there
just weren't that many of these things and infrastructure, you know,
would take time to follow. But as we all know,
(17:16):
the law lags way behind, egregiously behind what is actually
needed to keep people safe, whether it is in road
laws or manufacturing sects.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Technology will always outpace legislation for good or for ill,
and in this book he brings out which is worth
a read. And again he's a very talented author. And
there are a lot of examples of automobile safety or
lack thereof in this book. One example he really focuses
on is the Chevy Corvare, especially the nineteen sixty to
(17:52):
sixty three models. He calls this thing in the very
beginning of the book, he calls this thing the one
car accident.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Usually it takes two to tango right. But I think
he's referring to some issues with the handling. I guess
the drive train.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
I'm not a car expert of this vehicle. That was
it was just real squirrely right. It could like easily
spin out.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
So if you've ever worked in any kind of group project,
we all know that the idea you have at the
beginning is not going to be the end result. Right
when you're finally done, when you actually make the thing,
you're gonna have modifications. And the guy who designed the
Corvet ed Cole. He knew what he was doing. He
(18:36):
was smart. He wanted the engine to be all aluminum.
That's a lighter motor, and it's a little more expensive
at the time. So the motor they actually do design
is made of iron instead of aluminum, and that makes
it a lot heavier.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Yeah, and shout out to Matt Chrissara from Popular Mechanics.
Now think about that publication, but there's some really really
great writing and Popular Mechanics from his article. Remember when
Ralph Nader's expose of Chevrolet Corvet paved the way for
better road safety. So, yeah, there was this kind of disconnect.
That extra weight caused some issues with it being kind
(19:13):
of front heavy, like you said, I mean heavy in general,
but also just front heavy. So therefore there was sort
of like a discrepancy in weight between the front and
the back axles.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
And there were other problems with the vehicle related to
the axles, the suspension, things that would cause it to
suddenly lose traction. You know how this may happen if
you were ever at a red light on a rainy
day or rainy evening, and then you push the gas
and the tires sort of real quick. That's trying to
(19:45):
get traction. And the corvet, because of various design flaws,
was just not good at it. It was fun to drive,
but it could have a lot of very dangerous problems.
General Motors this is where we get to the iculous part.
General Motors a very powerful company then and now they
(20:05):
heard about Nader through the Grapevine Wall. So we contacted
them directly multiple times, and they took it personally because
at the time Nader wrote this book, he was it
was a culmination point because there had already been more
than one hundred lawsuits against Chevrolet for the corvat specifically, Yeah,
(20:28):
not all from Nator.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
No, no, no. This was like a known problem.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
This is a source of litigation, and Nator was just
kind of connecting the dots here.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Right, And you can read more about this in a
Great Time article from nineteen sixty six called Investigations Slight
Spoiler in the title the Spies who were caught Cold.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Snap also shout out you mentioned we mentioned car stuff earlier.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
I believe.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
I'm certain because I think I was the producer at
the time. Y'all did a multi part series on the Corvet.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Yes, multipart series on Corvet. Also a series about automotive recalls,
which is a huge thing and car stuff. You know
what I always liked about it is we dive into
the history of some of some of this stuff totally.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
This is gonna be a little bit looser because GM
behaves in a villainous way here and it's fun to talk.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
About He he is thirty two at this time, he's
only thirty two years old, and General Motors decides he
is not quite an existential threat, but someone who needs
to be taken care of, So they hire a law
firm out of Washington to handle things. Find us something
(21:39):
on Ralph and he The law firm pays a guy
named Vincent Gillen, not Vince Gilligan, different dude named Vincent Gillen.
They pay him a little less than seven thousand dollars. Well,
i'm our FBI guy, now a PI and they say,
find whatever you can on this guy. Get us some
like reputation brow material.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Yeah, And he wrote a letter to I guess some
of his contacts. I'm I'm not clear if they were
connected to the FBI at any point in time, but
he essentially had like subcontractors that he would use to
like do some of his dirty work for him. And
in the letter he said the following. Our job is
to check Nator's life and current activities to determine what
(22:21):
makes him tick, such as his real interest in safety,
his supporters, if any of his politics, his marital status,
his friends.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
His women, boys, etc.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Drinking, dope jobs, in fact, all facets of his life.
You could have just said that, buddy, Yeah, he's making
it clear that they're after dirt. You know, this is
not a learn more about thing or boys, you know,
like drinking and dope. His marital status, right, does he
having affairs? And so this group, Gillan and co. They
(22:54):
do some really clever social engineering. They call sixty upwards
of sixty and relatives of Ralph Nader and they spin
a yarn. They say, we're doing a pre employment investigation.
We're doing a background check. So his parents are Lebanese immigrants.
They do stuff like trying to figure out if there's
(23:14):
any anti Semitism in his family or in his personal beliefs.
And then they said, he's thirty two years old, he's
got a decent job. Why isn't he married? And this
one's a little not apocryphal, but people don't agree on
how this all went down. In at least two instances,
Nater charges that Gillan tries to put him in compromising
(23:39):
positions with women. He says, one girl, he basically says,
they're trying to do honeypot traps on him. One girl
comes to him at a drug store and for absolutely
no apparent reason, out of the blue, she says, hey,
come to my apartment, let's talk about foreign relations.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah, that's pretty gross. And it goes even further.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
There's a second example of this type of tactic where
a second girl is employed and asked him to help
her move some furniture. Oh could you please help me
with that? You a big strong man, And he didn't
even bite like a little. I mean, frankly, it sounds
kind of rude. You know, he should help help the
(24:18):
young lady move the furniture if she needs help.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
But you know, yeah, he also knew he had a target.
Now he's a wilely guy. It's sure he knows what's up.
He's very shrewd.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
And he totally understands, probably largely from remember the game
that he was laughing at back in Harvard. He knows
the lengths that these types will go to. You know,
he probably learned them from the best himself.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
And this all leads to him testifying at this hearing
where a Senate subcommittee headed by a Connecticut Democrat named
Abraham Ribikoff, which mentioned earlier, and this was investigating traffic safety.
For the entire week leading up to these hearings, the
private investigators followed him all around DC. They were literally
(25:03):
doing the Cold War spy stuff, you know, some picturesome
guy and a fedora and a trench coat peeking around
the corner.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Where's he going? And they got caught.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
They got kicked out by guards at the Senate Office
building who said, hey, you guys are walking around like spies.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, knock it off, get right out of town. What
get a different hat? At least you're wearing a spy hat.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
Yeah, And you're clearly wearing those like mirrored spy gear shades,
the ones where you can see around knas.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
And they even reference this in the hearing. Ribikoff says,
there's too much snooping going on, and he says, you know, Natter,
you can feel pretty proud. They put you through the
mill and they haven't found a damn thing wrong with you.
They're saying that this guy actually doesn't have dirt. He
just means what he says.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
I love referring to like private investigators and detectives as
gum shoes. I always think of wearing the world this.
Carmen san Diego, you know where the chief She's like, okay,
gum shoes.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
That's yeh, yeah, yeah, that's great. Also, Dix was fun.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
I watched seven the other night with my girlfriend and
there's a scene where the swat team kicks in the
door of this, you know, one of the victim's houses,
and they're.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Like, Dix, Dix, you gotta come in and see this.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Yeah, No one says that anymore they should.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
So Nader finally gets to testify despite all this, all
these attempts to destroy his character, and he's really good
as a public speaker. He's calm, he is sometimes a
little funny, which goes a long way. One journalist called
(26:42):
him a quote machine gun with facts.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Jesus rat a tat tat.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
He says I'm responsible for my actions, but who's responsible
for those of general motors?
Speaker 2 (26:53):
And he says, you know who.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
We'll paraphrase here, but he says, Look, if you're an individual,
you lose your integrity once. If you're a corporation, you
lose your integrity all the time, and you never encounter
consequences for it. I'm paraphrasing there, but that's what he's
pointing out. And some folks from mainly from the right
side of politics, they try to say, this guy's just
(27:19):
out flogging his book. He just wants to make money
selling his book Unsafe at any Speed.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah, the honorable Carl Curtis of Nebraska.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
I don't think they talk like that in Nebraska, he implies,
just as much, to which Robert Kennedy gives Nator the
chance to say what his real motivations are, to which
Nator responds, very cromulently.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Is that okay?
Speaker 3 (27:46):
Yeah, okay, great, he says, because I happen to have
a scale of priorities that leads me to engage in
the prevention of cruelty to humans.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
My motives are.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
Constantly inquired into. Is it wrong to talk about defect
of cars diseased meats. That's a that's a mouthful corporate cheating.
Is it really distasteful that a person cares enough about
issues like these to dedicate his life to changing them?
That's a real what's the word when it's the question
that really doesn't have an answer? Or yeah, yeah, so historical,
(28:19):
that's the rhetorical. Obviously those things are great. That seems
like a really good thing to dedicate your life.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
To, and that should be something with which all members
of the Senate agree because that's why you're supposed to
go into public office, right to fight for greater good.
So this gets a lot of coverage, The story, as
we would say these days, goes viral, and ultimately Nader
sues GM. They settle out of court for four hundred
(28:46):
and twenty five thousand dollars in twenty twenty three money
that's around that's a little less than four million, So
it's a big, big win, and Nader's attorney says this
is the biggest amount ever paid as damages for invasion
of privacy because they were able to prove that chain
a coman and trace trace back those gum shoes and
(29:08):
those Fedora rock and spies all the way back to
General Motors, and essentially he made the Corvet incredibly unpopular.
And there's a great Politico article about this from a
few years back by Andrew Glass says about this moment
in history. He sank the Corvet by nineteen sixty nine.
(29:29):
Just a few years later, GM stops production entirely.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
I mean, essentially, they were trying to put out a
small car, you know, that would be affordable to consumers
and obviously sell a gazillion of them. But they cut
a lot of corners to make that happen, and Nader
pointed that out, and so they had to basically go
back to the drawing board.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
How dare he right?
Speaker 1 (29:50):
I mean that expense alone is far more than in
that settlement.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Yeah, way more.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
The US public is incensed about this, and they are
increasingly on Major's side. His actions directly lead to the
creation of what we call the National Highway Traffic Safety
Association the NHTSA, and over the next half a century,
this organization has been in charge of auto safety. They're
(30:27):
the ones who decide when a recall is going to occur.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Yeah, that's again, this is like, what are we talking here?
This is late sixties now almost in the seventies. Yeah,
nineteen sixty nine when they stop production. It wasn't until
this point in history that we have an organization, a
government you know, sanctioned organization that is looking out for
the safety of consumers, which.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Is crazy because people have been driving for a while. Yeah,
how long?
Speaker 3 (30:52):
What are we talking here? Sorry, I'm totally brain farting on.
Like when the first car came.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Out, Well, we're thinking you could think of stuff like
the late eighteen ninety Yeah, that's when Henry Ford builds
his first car. But then you know, it mainstreams after
that into the early nineteen hundreds, and the problem is
these cars are getting faster and faster.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
That's right, and there and and no one is there
to get people to literally pump the brakes.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Would you say, no one's at the wheel? I would
say so, I would say both of those tests.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
So this this is a good thing. This is inarguably
a good thing. Over time, this one organization reduces the
rate of deaths per mile driven by eighty percent.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
That's insane. I mean, that's that's incredible.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
And there's an analysis from the Center for Auto Safety
that determined that this saved more than three point five
million lives. I mean, we know how even today we
you know, living here in Atlanta, we know how many
people die in traffic accidents. It's still an incredibly dangerous proposition,
(31:59):
even with all of these oversights.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Yeah, he is up there in the story of good
guys in the world of cars. In my opinion, he's
up there with Neil's Bolin, no relation. He's the dude
who invented the three point seat belt. So that guy
alone has saved a well over a billion lives by now,
and Nader at this point, Nader could probably rest on
(32:23):
his laurels. He went against the goliath and he won.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
But he doesn't.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Instead of instead of, you know, retiring from public life
and just hanging out at the family restaurant in Connecticut.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
This is step one, right, you know, in a storied career.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
You know, this is the perfect example of a guy
who puts his money where his mouth is, you know,
and he literally takes the money that he made during
this legal victory and started an activist agency called the
Center for Study of Responsive Law. Once again, very pithy
right there in the title. We need law that responds
to the needs of people.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
And so he is the progenitor of what we call
the consumer movement or consumer advocacy movement. He says, let's
talk about nuclear power, let's talk about the safety of
oil pipelines. Let's get back to food and drug safety,
because I think The Jungle was a good book, you know.
And then of course airlines, pollution, you name it. He
(33:24):
is fighting what he sees as the good fight. And
the list is incredibly long. You can actually name almost
any modern consumer safety thing, and he went to bat
for it.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
The Markereen piece in the Nation lists them, in no
particular order, vastly things like healthcare, smoking, freedom of information laws,
laws regarding multinationals, educational testing services, occupational hazards and the like.
You know, rights of workers, things like that, specs surrounding
(34:03):
the construction of homes.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah yeah, And he says, I want to own the
means of production, at least in the legal sense. So
I'm going to run for president. And this led to
him being somewhat of a divisive figure in the American left.
In two thousand, as we mentioned at the top of
this show, as a candidate for the Green Party, he
got about one hundred thousand votes in Florida. The Democratic
(34:27):
candidate Al Gore lost, according to the Supreme Court, by
five hundred and thirty seven votes, and the Democratic Party
got really really mad about this. They had fought to
keep him off the ballot. And I remember when this
occurs same you would hear people say, you know, a
vote for the Green Party is a vote for the GOP.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Well, and you could argue that there's some truth to that,
you know, just in terms of you know, if we're
talking about what's right, you know, one thing, but we
live within a system that isn't always about what's right,
and you kind of have.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
To choose between.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
You know, it's a two party system basically, so when
you have this third party thrown in there, it just
can kind of throw things out of whack and it
can take votes away from the actual real candidate.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Let's be honest. You know, Nator was never going to win.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
He was running almost more as like a symbol, you know,
almost as more of like taking a stance.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
It's similar to that conversation you had with the sociologist
back at the family restaurant. He was hoping that his
agenda could catch fire, you know what I mean. It's
like if you are playing a team sport. If you're
playing football, a goal doesn't mean that the entire team
hits the finish line, right, And he's saying, if I
can just pass this ball of policy on, then my
(35:51):
team will win. And there's a great two thousand and
four Guardian profile of Nator by Julian Border that gets
into this controversy because people were accusing him of falling
in love with his own magic, of being like Merlin
in a Connecticut Yankee goes to King Arthur's court, which,
now that I think about it, is even more appropriate.
They said, Look, this guy is just super into himself.
(36:13):
He doesn't understand how the real world works, and he
is maybe becoming a bit of a zealot, a bit
of a demagogue, you could say.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
The same people have said the same things about like
Bernie Sanders, you know, sure, yeah, and then he's a
similar social justice kind of figure. You know, throughout his
career he's done very similar things.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
And Nader is aware of this. He told The New
York Times, we lose to win eventually. That is the
story of social justice. You have to be willing to
lose and fight and lose, and fight and lose. And
fight until the agenda is one. But a lot of
people are saying, hey, man, stop making us lose.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Though.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Yeah, I mean again, to your point, Ben, it's less
about winning than it is about just gradually infiltrating the
consciousness and the rhetoric of the actual party in power.
So but you know, you could argue that there are
ways to go about that without kind of stacking the
(37:15):
deck against them. So again, maybe I sound like I'm
saying that Nator shouldn't have run. I really don't have
a dog in that fight. I just am trying to
look at both sides and see maybe there are other
ways of going about this that wouldn't have been quite
as divisive. But you know, extreme times call for extreme measures.
So I mean, maybe that's how he was looking out.
The only way to truly get the other side to
pay attention is to show him that there show them
(37:36):
that there are people that are thinking like him, and
that he can get enough votes to make them realize
maybe we should pivot a little because.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Isn't Gore kind of an environmentalist as well?
Speaker 3 (37:46):
Sure? I mean, he obviously made those unpop what it
was it called an inconvenient truth films? You know, and
not to mention inventing the Internet.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yeah, thanks.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Al Nator is also kind of moving the over window
what is acceptable to be discussed in the public sphere
and what is prioritized in those discussions. So while he
may be a divisive figure, actually he definitely is a
divisive figure.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Right.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
People have different opinions about him and about his actions
when running for president. All that aside, there is no
way around it. Without Ralph Nader, there would not have
been the consumer rights movement that exists in the United
States today.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
Yeah, And speaking of putting his money where his mouth is,
I mean, he still stands by all of these things
that he has put forth in his policies, in his politics,
and his rhetoric, and in his activism for all these years.
He was asked in an interview a handful of years
ago if he had ever owned a car, and he says,
(38:49):
a forty nine student Baker was the last car I owned.
That was the car that if you looked at it,
you couldn't tell the front from the rear. I don't
have a car. You have to take care of them,
figure out where to park castle with the insurance gouging,
look out for recalls, I use public transportation or walk
when I can. Cars are a nuisance.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
I mean, I get it.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
They're also cool and go room room right, right, there's
also that, And you know, the US, there's no secret
is a car culture the vast majority of the country.
You know, you kind of need a car to get
reliable transit. That does not always have to be the case.
That may change in the future. But with all this
we can say Ralph Nader took on GM anyone.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
It's right.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
There's one amazing final quote from another interview where he
was asked about any of his guilty pleasures that he
might have. The interviewer said, do you secretly love Fast
and Furious movies? And I'm sure Ralph dinner is like
what's that? He responded, I do like organic ice cream.
But no, I don't watch many movies because there's so
(39:56):
much to do that occupies almost all my waking time.
In fact, I don't I don't even look at TV anymore.
I listened to NPR and read the newspapers, the Post
and the Times. I'm completely a print person. I don't
have a computer. I use an underwood typewriter. I don't
have email or the Internet because I want to get
work done and not deal with all the crap.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
It's kind of like asking Gnoam Chomsky or Howard Zen
to name their favorite reality TV program. They're gonna say,
what is I do?
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Regular reality?
Speaker 3 (40:29):
Weirdly, though, you know what I saw the other day,
Noam Chomsky has one of those masterclass things. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
and he looks he looks like a deer in headlights
where he's clearly doing the part that's just designed for
the promo, where he's really I will talk about the
most pressing issues facing America today and then the other
parts he's clearly just riffing like he does and it
looks very natural. But yeah, I was still a little
(40:50):
taken aback by it. I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Yeah, it's trying to get the message out there, you
know what I'm saying, and that's what he's advocating for.
Plus he is ninety four years old, Chomsky. He is
eighty nine years old. Ok, so spry as ever imperially slim.
Thanks for helping fewer people die in car accidents, and
(41:13):
thanks for making the consumer movement. You may not agree
with the guy's politics necessarily, but I think we can
all agree that saving lives is a good thing to do.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
I bet it doesn't even have a smartphone. No, why
would he have a smartphone? That guy's landline all. I
bet he has like rotary doll.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Oh, he might have like a Nokia the indestructible flip phone. Sure,
he's got like three numbers brick.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
I think he listens to podcasts now does doesn't have
time too much to occupying all.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Of his waking hours.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
If we print out a transcript and mail it to him, yeah,
it'd be interesting to see what he says.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
That would be cool. I think you consumer fans of We.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
Are fans of Ralph Nader for saving lives, and we
are also fans of ridiculous historical stories. I gotta say too,
I've driven Chevrolet's I love Monte Carlos. They were just
in the wrong on this one.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
And with this, we're going to hit the road with
our safety belts on. Thanks Ralph and all three points,
all three points shout out Nills Bulin, and we can't
wait for a very special episode we have coming out later.
We have a lot of tangents in trivia and things
that don't quite make it into episodes when we're recording.
(42:27):
So we are going to do our first ever clip show.
I think we can called it clip Yeah, it's yeah, it's.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
It'll be a clip show of a type.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Yeah. I think the way I've described it off aras
it'll be a Matroshka doll of segues. So do tune
in for that. Thanks as always to our super producer
mister Max Williams, Thanks to our research associate doctor z.
Thanks to our special off air guest Alex Alex are
you over there?
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Hey? All right?
Speaker 1 (42:58):
Hello tech doing a live show, And of course thanks
to our own pal Jonathan Strickland aka the Quist who else?
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Oh man?
Speaker 3 (43:06):
Alex Williams whose are you very much a Ralph Nader
esque type figure, at least in his nomadic existence. He
loves organic he does love organic ice cream and hitching
hitching a ride here good thanks.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
To Chris frosciotis here in spirit.
Speaker 3 (43:19):
He's Jeff Coates doing all kinds of crazy yoga poses
out in the world.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Just how her new book come out.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
That's incredible.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Yeah, congrats and thanks to you, Ben, Thanks to you
a little bit of a Ralph Nader ask figure yourself.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Zoom zoom zoom. We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 3 (43:40):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Ridiculous History News
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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