January 13, 2017 • 53 mins
Make no mistake: the United States is a car culture, and the extreme sprawl of the country means the vast majority of citizens can’t realistically live without their cars. This has inevitably led to enormous amounts of pollution and (some would argue) wars over the resources needed to keep the car culture going. So what if there was an alternative? Why would someone cover it up?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
(00:22):
welcome back to the show. My name is not My
name is Nol. They called me Ben. You are you
that makes this stuff they don't want you to know?
Today we're talking about something that that might seem odd
for listeners of our show because we don't typically talk
about automobiles. Well, you do in another life, in another incarnation.
(00:45):
We know that conspiracies can occur in any realm or discipline,
and cars are really no different. So whether you out there,
whether you were in Briton, Nebraska, Argentina or paul or
Nepal or New Schwabia, you know, wherever you find yourself,
whether you consider yourself a gear head or not. Odds
are that you've heard about all this kind of skullduggery
(01:06):
alleged on the part of auto manufacturers, oil companies and
insidious governments. And you know, we we all know stories
like that, right like who killed the electric car? Perfect example?
And what's what's that? What's a documentary just about how
oil companies and um, you know special interests ultimately are
responsible for bringing down what should have been a viable
(01:28):
technology and a you know, clean solution to driving that
would have, you know, displaced some of the pollution caused
by fossil fuels. That was the e V one, I
believe yea saturn right, yes, the car and uh, full disclosure,
one of our old bosses, Marshall Brain, who founded how
Stuff Works, was pretty nuts about the e V one
(01:49):
And then also that ties into the idea of car
companies repressing the trolley car system. Right, So this is
you don't have to be a car person per se
to to notice this. And the history of the evolutionary
cars is pretty crazy too, That's part of what we
get into. So there there are many, many stories like this,
(02:10):
and so many of the stories, here's the strange thing,
have commonalities. Right. Sure, many times it's one intrepid inventor
alone in his garage or her garage that comes up
with some mind blowing technology that will completely revolutionize the
auto industry, the entire system, and yet they're on the
(02:31):
outside of it, and uh inevitably you hear that they
get shut down somehow. But like, what's a more specific
example of this we could look to Stanley Meyer, who
was famous for creating a water car at least allegedly
creating a water car. Um that it was a water
fuel cell that could run the entire thing on H two,
(02:55):
but it was shut down allegedly by let's say, the
powers that be. And that's not the only example of
a water powered vehicle or alleged water powering technology. Uh.
Their former NASA scientists like a guy named Herman Anderson
and Tennessee, there's a Japanese company that I believe may
still be active called Jenna Packs, and they're just scraping
(03:20):
the surface. Just wait, so it's scraping the bottom. It's
scratching the surface. I would think you could scratch the
bottom or the surface, or you could scrape the bottom.
It just seems like an arbitrary association, their arbitrary verbs.
It's it's groping, groping the tip. That sounds weird, hey,
(03:40):
but it says we're getting weird. For a second, Can
I just say it's nice to be with all three
of us in a room together for the first time
in a minute. Um, I feel like, you know, the
way I saw the band the Smashing Pumpkins, I was
a huge fan of I never saw all the original
members at the same time. I saw like two original
members and then a pinch hitter, and then like three
different times. So I kind of feel like that's what
the listeners have been experiencing on the show lately. It
(04:01):
was like just you guys, and then just me and
Matt and now I'm glad to be back. We're glad. Yeah,
we're glad. That's well said. No, we're glad to join
the most important part of the show, which is you
folks listening out there. We also, if the Smashing Pumpkins
are listening, you know Billy Corrigan, Uh, he's a bit
(04:22):
of a conspiracy nut nut. You know. I don't know
if he's not a nut, but he looks like a nut.
It's definitely, uh listen, he's definitely into the nut some
fringe theories. So if you're listening, let us know if
the Smashing Pumpkins are ever going to get back together,
not after Oal just insulted him. We can take all
this out, Billy Corgan, he used to be my hero.
(04:45):
Keep it all in, keep it all in. Let's tell
the truth. Also, I really like the name of I
never actually listened to the album, but the guitarist James
Eah had an album called let It Come Down or something.
It sounds like James Taylor. Yeah, it's that kind of
like am pop, kind of like crossover country gold. We
are way off the track now, Oh well yeah, okay,
(05:07):
so back back on the track. Speaking of radios, those
are in cars. Speaking of cars, here's our show. We
got there. So there are multiple automotive conspiracies of varying credibility,
some of which would be a little out there, maybe
a little self serving for the people who try to
convince you about them, but many of which disturbing, number
(05:28):
of which are not only plausible but probably happened. You
can hear more about these allegations, especially technological suppression, in
earlier episodes of Stuff they Don't Want You to Know,
which features our guest host uh or a guest Scott
Gearbox Benjamin who host Car Stuff. And from there you
(05:50):
can just go to Car Stuff and find all kinds
of fascinating episodes. Yeah, other run man Preston Tucker also
shut down by the man spoiler. Out of all this,
there's one conspiracy theory that we have not yet brought up,
and that is the story that while World War Two
(06:11):
was looming on the horizon, the legendary automotive tycoon Henry
Ford proposed and actually built a completely for the time
radical new vehicle, one that seemed to completely change the
world of manufacturing, not just for cars, but just in
general forever. And that was the topic of today's episode,
(06:32):
The Hemp Car. The what yeah, you heard me, buddy,
the Hemp car. So he is was Henry Ford? Like
you know a little bit is that we're talking about,
like like cheach and song. We are not here to
make that judgment on Mr Ford. He was a very
stressed out man. I'm sure that's a lot of a
(06:54):
lot of pressure to have on you, um, to be
the head of a company like that. So you know,
then a spare time, who knows what he got up too.
But as it turns out, no, Lakar was not made
of weed. Um if you that's what you're thinking. Uh,
But Hemp throughout history, it's been a pretty incredible resource
that has been largely overlooked due to having a bit
of a bad rap because it is the same thing
(07:16):
as a drug. Right, Yeah, did this actually happen? Was
this car actually constructed is a bunch of malarkey. And
if it did happen, perhaps more importantly, why aren't we
driving himp cars now? If you're listening to this in
your vehicle, now, why isn't it built of hemp? Why
isn't it running on hemp? What happened to the original design?
(07:37):
We can answer that question, as well as several more,
some of which may have to do with the smashing pumpkins.
After a word from our sponsor, and we're back here
the facts. First things first, Yes, as nol, as you
(07:59):
alluded to earlier before the break, hemp gets a bad
name in a lot of circles. Not all marijuana is
created equal, as I'm sure you're local weed man will
tell you right they there's a thing that Look, I'll
be square about it, and I'll be honest. I've always
been confused. I'm a big fan of hip hop, but
(08:19):
have always been kind of confused by the different names
that people have for different strains of marijuana. You know,
it took me a long time to figure an embarrassing
long time to figure out that sour diesel was not
just some catchphrase, that it was an actual thing. It
doesn't sound very appealing. It doesn't sound very appealing, especially
if you're paying money for something. What would you want
(08:40):
sour diesel? But the point is that when we say
not all marijuana's created equal, not just talking about you know,
pot jokes about some kind of indica or cush difference. Uh,
we're also talking about the difference between what people call
hemp and what people call weed. And we're looking at
two kinds of classifications. There's a lead goal difference, which
(09:02):
is very very important if you're ever you know, pulled
over or you're in court for some reason. And there's
a scientific difference, which is important if you want to
be right. So here we go. Usually when people say hemp, uh,
they're talking about strains of cannabis sativa that have been
bred specifically for fiber like or used for clothing or
(09:22):
construction oils or other substances. The main thing is that
this is an umbrella term for this stuff that doesn't
have a larger amount of th HC, so it doesn't
create the feeling of being high. You can't wear a
hemp necklace and all of a sudden, you know, I
used to work in an old theater um and they
actually refer to the ropes in the rigging as the
(09:44):
hemp lines. Um whether it's just an old term that's
stuck around, or whether this theater actually still has the
same stuff that was in there when that term came
into youth, I cannot say for sure. There there's a
lot of updated need updating needed there, but yeah, it's
it was a really prevalent resource and was used very
very strong, has a lot of tensile strength or whatever
(10:06):
for you know, using for rope and like we're seeing
like it's again, it's not something where you would experience
some kind of inebriation touching it. You can't wear a
himp necklace and all of a sudden see musical notes
on Bob Marley's Greatest Hits. You can't pull the hemp
line at a play and all of a sudden find yourself,
you know, experiencing a hallucinatory moment over pizza, as cool
(10:28):
as that would be. But marijuana is different. Marijuana is
a slang term, right, yeah, marijuana like pot weed, t
sticky Goobal's uncle Milroy's elbow medicine. That's a good one.
Hotchi Machi, I don't know. You can just utter any
(10:51):
sour diesel y know, I got that scadoocheh. Yeah, whatever
you want to call it. That's a that's a slang term, right,
And it's this grabbing strains of Cannabis citiva that are
specifically bred to create um putentus resinous glands or trichromes
that grow on flowers and on leaves or buds. So
(11:14):
the difference here, for everybody notices this, The difference here
is is somewhat semantic because not only do hemp and
what we call weed or pot or chock. Uh they
are we starting this now? Are we gonna I'm gonna
feel so weird if if yours from now people start
referring to stuff as cha, surely not. There's gotta be
be their name. Send us right to us and let
(11:36):
us know your favorite nicknames for drugs. We are Jonathan
dot strict wind, how stuff works, dot com Uh. Well. Well,
the difference though, really is because it really is semantic
because not only do do they come from the same genus,
they come from the same species, they're just bred for
different purposes. And we have some experts to weigh on
(11:59):
in on this too, right. According to Ed Rosenthal, author
of the Marijuana Growers Handbook, Um, the quote legal definition
of hemp is a plant that has low th HC
and perhaps a higher level of CBD, which is the
what is that the cannabinoid, Yeah, cannabinoid cannaba Doyle. That's
a Tomue twister right there. I'm mispronounced it for fun. Ok. Yeah,
(12:24):
it's the non psychotropic uh part. It's the non psychotropic substances,
and I believe in the state of Georgia that is
what is legal. You can get a pill form of
that particular part too, if if you have, um, some
sort of you know, if you fall in line with
the with a certain certain set of conditions exactly. But
(12:46):
it is not the same as quote unquote getting high.
But it does apparently relieve um, you know, some chronic
some chronic pain exactly. But the interesting point because the
governor of Georgia at the time who supported that passage
of a very very strange, very very conservative law and said, okay,
(13:07):
just this one oil by like a certain manufacturer for
a certain amount of conditions. That guy's name was Governor
Nathan Deal uh and is his name at the time
of this recording. What's the deal with that? I know? Right?
Nominative determinism right, and he he took such pains to
always say this is not for marijuana, this is not
(13:31):
this is not that t not that that doll, which
is uh, you know, which is strange to go to
such pains when we're really at a what could be
a turning point in history. More and more states are
decriminalizing or even outright legalizing this kind of stuff because
they're seeing a lot of the a lot of the
(13:55):
problems related to drug abuse in America are are more
closely related to hard drugs or alcohol. I mean, how
crazy is it that it is recreationally legal in the
district of Columbia, but yet federally still totally gray area? Youah, yeah, yeah,
it's not really federally, But I I consider that to
(14:18):
be gray because of like the fact that it's just
completely disagrees with all of these different state laws and
it's just like, where is the disconnect there? I just
find it interesting. You're right, it's not gray, but like
the relationship between the two to me is very very
strange and tenuous and contradictory. Right, So, sadly and predictably,
just as just as we're talking about the legal stuff,
(14:39):
as you know, it gets murky real quick, because here
in the United States, the state level definitions don't always
agree with one another of what you know, what is
him versus marijuana, what is legal, what is not? And
then if you even go drill down even further into
the local laws in jurisdictions for zoning. If you look
(14:59):
at California right now, even if on a statewide basis
it's legal, it may be illegal from the locality the
county to have like a growing I don't know of,
to have a farm or yeah, or you know it
right right personal use kind of things, or places like
(15:22):
Ohio which have a famously corrupt approach to the legislation.
As the US moves away from marijuana prohibition at what
appears to be an increasing pace, states are scrambling to
nail down definitions of what would be you know, we
the drug, uh that sweet kitten whisper, I don't know,
(15:43):
I'm just making stuff up. It's my favorite so far.
And what would be hemp as an agricultural product make
you know, rope, fiber, et cetera. So the result now
is a confusing, contradictory state by state legal redefinition based
on what are considered higher levels of cp D or
th HC. It's no secret that for a long long time,
(16:04):
the federal government opposed products that had HIMP components in
any degree as a because of their association with with marijuana.
And you know, that's also the reason why a lot
of middle school and high school kids thought himp necklaces
were cool, because they were like guys like get me,
I get stuff. You know how I feel about Please
(16:29):
don't get us started. And we can find so many
websites of varying authenticity insisting that himp is a miracle
crop by God, by golly, by gum Joseph. I mean,
those sites are all run by dirty hippies, though obviously
with a million uses. George Washington farmed himp. Matt, No,
(16:50):
we wouldn't have good music without pot, et cetera. George
Washington was a dirty hippie. Come on, man, what about
stand up comedy and and stoner food and uh, the
movie Half Baked? You know it's it's true. I wouldn't
know who duncan trust it was if it wasn't for
this substance. But you know, for that matter, what about cars?
(17:15):
Oh yeah, cars? Hoping he would get back around to cars,
the totally forgot what we were talking about. Bro. Yeah,
I'm sorry. We'll get to that right after a word
from ours sponsor. Here's crazy. Let's talk about a man
(17:45):
you probably learned about him in class, A man of
his time, Mr Henry Ford. There's a wealth of well
intentioned misinformation out there on the internet about this fellow.
He did have a brilliant mind. I think that we
can agree up on that. He was an acolyte of
Thomas Edison. You guys remember that person as well. He's
a bit of a stone cold bastard. But that's just
(18:08):
history for you. Okay, Yeah, you're kind of right if
you look to tales of him, him and Tesla that
we have discussed before, and among other people that he
interacted with in his life. Sure, but this, this gentleman
Henry Ford, even played a small part in the creation
of what we refer to as the Weekend. Hey, everybody
likes the Weekend? I know I do. Well, you know
(18:31):
their new albums? Okay, yeah, the calendar weekend? Oh yes, yes,
not the musician so far as we know. There's a
really interesting story about that, which maybe is a story
for another day. You can learn about in a brain
stuff video that will be coming out soon. But it's
strange that people make up this misinformation about Henry Ford,
no matter how well intentioned, is because he did enough
(18:52):
real crazy stuff on his own, raging anti semi I
have heard tell of that raging uh, a little bit
of a loon with his ideas, very strict, uncompromising boss.
But we see that a lot in these Titans of industry,
you know, like Steve Jobs between genius and madness, Like
where he put the iPhone prototype in the fish tank?
(19:16):
What I heard that story? What happened? I mean, I
think I think he wanted it to be thinner or
something like that, and he just like in front of
all the designers who had been slaving away at this prototype,
he just threw it in a fish tank. Him to
start over two fats man. That's something. Consider it. Well, okay,
so run of Henry Ford's story is real quick, just
to show that what are some wacky ones. So one
(19:37):
wacky one is there was a slight redesign on I
believe it was a Model A, was either Model Air,
Model T and it was very very minor. So they
showed it to Henry Ford like, oh, here's the new line.
It was supposed to be everything, he said. And again
I can't stress how how minor this was. And they
didn't tell him about it, but he noticed it and
(19:59):
he tore it apart with his bare hands. He tore
the car apart with his bare hands. It's way easier
to tear one of those cars apart than you know,
like a modern car. Still, yeah, he lost his he
lost his mind. He also built because of the price
of rubber that would be used in tires, and how
he was having difficult time getting that. He said, you know,
(20:20):
I should go to the Amazon, where I know there
could be cheaper rubber and build my own city and
have the people who live in that city just work
for me. Yeah, and we'll call it no lie Fordlandia.
Are you serious? Yeah? I just pulled that out of
my my brain, I did. Are you serious? Well, you
(20:42):
nailed it. Yeah, it's really named it Fordlandia, and that
is amazing. And their native you know, their native people
have been living there in their own culture for an
untold number of years, you know, thousands of thousands of years.
And so he takes this weird, very very strange like
idealized step forward esque approach to what he thinks the
(21:05):
ideal American Western life is. So he makes all the
guys play baseball. No one can drink anymore, they have
to wear certain type of clothes, they all have to
go to church. Eventually it changes completely, the diet changes
completely eventually. So he's trying to assimilate natives basically. Yeah, he's, yeah,
trying to turn them into more American than Americans. And
(21:26):
it doesn't work. But there until fairly recently there were
people who were still living in the ruins of ford
Landia in case Ford Motors decides to come back and started.
The crazy thing about this. The biggest problem that that
Ford didn't even notice because he didn't consult any rubber
experts or anybody that would tell him this before he
(21:49):
even got the idea, is that you cannot cultivate plantation
style rubber in the Amazon rainforest. Yeah, because of all
the different pests and they called blite that affects them.
When you grow the trees so close together, it just
kills everything. And it's such a diverse ecosystem that you
can't really have. It's it's very difficult to have mono
(22:11):
cultural stuff, you know. That's why we lost the good
tasting bananas, the ones that taste like the banana candy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh,
it's either gross Smite Michael, gross Michael, or cavendish. My
girlfriend told me that, like we're talking about banana candy
at a Thanksgiving She said, you know that the original
bananas tasted like banana candy. And I was like, there's
(22:34):
no way that's true. I don't know if true it's true,
and she was mad at me because I do that
sometimes where I'm just like, no way chance, But right, Yeah,
that's Moto agriculture is another great idea for an episode.
So so okay, this guy built his first Off, he's
convinced that there are shadowy caballs that are taking over
the world, and his solution is to make as many
(22:55):
cars as possible. Secondly, uh, he has a huge temper
tears things apart with his bare hands, so he gets
these uh Mr Hyde level fits of rage. And third
he built his own essentially intentional community or commune for
(23:16):
a deal on rubber that didn't work out because he
never thought to ask the smart questions and everyone was
too scared of the guy who say no. So, of course,
when we when we hear somebody tell this forward himp
car story, of course we think, oh that makes sense.
This guy's uber bonkers. He would try it. It's like
we're lucky. He didn't say, let's make a car out
(23:38):
of dirt or people or people the model p or
soiling green or soiling green. Well, here's the answer. Unfortunately, No,
he did not make a car entirely out of himp.
And yeah, I know it's a bummer, right because it's
such a cool story. But he did, to Noel Brown's point,
(23:59):
he did make what they called a soybean car. How
abu what? And it may have contained himp. This is
not just the story made out of thin air. Uh,
here's here's how it went down, right. So Henry Ford
had literally zero problem dismissing the status quo. He was
a rabble rouser. He liked to shake things up, do
things his own way, like Frank Sinatra would say, especially
(24:23):
when he felt that people were limiting progress with their
close minded ways of looking at problems, is how we
do things right. By the late nineteen thirties, he was
intensely aware of a lot of looming potential problems on
the horizon of the automotive industry. Um, and we can
(24:44):
go through a few of those here Steal number one.
Steele had at the time a lot of issues and
limitations as a building material for automobiles. What were some
of those, Well, all right, first, it's going to it's
going to require multiple industries working together. Right. There are
steel manufacturers, so you have to work with them. You
(25:05):
don't own you you buy as supplies steel from them,
you don't own the means of production. That's tough. Also,
when it comes to material science at the time, molding
steel into shapes can be imperfect and a laborious process.
(25:25):
But that wasn't the only problem. Converting or into steel
also a complex operation. So again, you know, titans of
industry at this time are all about owning the entire thing.
They call it vertical integration. Right, so standard oil wants
to own everything from the ground that the oil comes
from to the pump that puts the gas in. Uh
(25:49):
So Ford also started looking into alternate materials tail as
old as time. When it comes to manufacturing, how can
I do it cheaper, better, faster. Yeah, you looked at
plastic and eventually he wanted to find something even better
than that and guess what. He picked that old soybean
as a building block to to build the body of
(26:11):
a car, the panels that you see there. And there's
another factor here that doesn't really rear its ugly head
quite yet, but we're gonna get into that and we'll
we'll see if you can figure out and guess what
it is. So rumor has it that one day, at
some point in the past, Henry Ford visited the Deerfield
Village Trade School and he learned about a crop that
(26:34):
was at this point in time obscure and largely relevant
in the West, and that was the soybean. And this
dude got obsessed with the soybean. He loved him. He
he was probably one of the first Americans to ever
drink this thing called soy milk. M m m m
m m m mmm. And he did it on a
regular basis. Do you guys drink soy milk? No? I do,
(26:56):
like at a mammy them. Yeah, at a mommy is
the business, But soy milk not my jam. He loved it. Though,
I've had some almond milk that I enjoyed. It's not
really milk what it's it's some almond concentrate. In some
other things suspended in a milky liquid. Yeah. Well, he
(27:18):
even held a lunch for journalists at the N four
World's Fair where he served in all soy menu. We're
talking soy crackers, soy bread, soy cheese, straight up soy beans,
probably soyed milk, and so on uh. And he also
believed the versatility of this drop doesn't need to be
limited solely to food stuffs. I felt that soy he
(27:40):
was consuming. I'm really starting to feel like behind the
scenes he might have been doing a little little tokey tokey.
Oh yeah, I thought you meant he was gonna be
having a lot of gas. Well soy beans. That maybe
that too. There were studies that have come out in
the past few years at allege excessive consumption of soy uh,
(28:03):
including you know, products like tofu and stuff can disrupt
termonal levels or raise estrogen levels. And dudes, I don't
know how true that is. I haven't read the studies myself.
So he thought this stuff is so useful. You know,
He's hanging out with his entourage of people that he
hasn't like killed or fired yet, and he's going, man, soybeans,
(28:26):
They're so amazing and I bet we could use them
to build a car instead of just a buffet. And
everyone's like what, And he's like, you're fired, and everybody
else says, oh, great idea. So it hopes of building
a cheaper, more durable, lighter car. He originally enlisted the
help of and this guy is important, a stylist named
et Gregory. However, Henry Ford did not like the work
(28:52):
that this guy and his team were producing, so he
took him off the project and instead he handed it
to a guy named low Overly and Lowell before he
was working at Ford's soybean laboratory, he did have a
dedicated soybean laboratory. Uh Overly was designing tools and die
(29:12):
and Overly, because he wasn't a chemist, found a chemist
named Robert Boyer, and Boyer is the real like hero
of this story or question mark in this story. August,
at a thing called Dearborn Days this community festival and Dearborn, Michigan,
Henry Ford unveils what is called the soybean Car. The
(29:34):
frame was made of tubular steel and had fourteen different
plastic panels connected to it um. This was a two
thousand pound car, which was a good thousand pounds lighter
than a steel car. That's a big deal. Possibly a
little dangerous now maybe right, um, But anyway, lightweight plastic windows,
(29:54):
and it had a one thirty six c I D
flathead Ford V eight sixty horsepower drive train, so not
not bad at all for the time. Here's the thing,
here's why we hear it called a hemp car so often.
Some people might be wondering why we go from hemp
to soybeans. The exact ingredients of these plastic panels made
(30:16):
by the chemist Robert A. Boyer are unknown because no
record of this formula exists. Today, you'll see articles claiming
that the panels were made from a chemical formula that
included many ingredients soybeans, wheat, hemp, flax, and some other stuff. However,
(30:37):
that guy we talked about, who was sort of the
bureaucratic or business head tool designer Lowell overly claims that
it was soybean fiber in a resin with formalde hyde
used to to impregnate the soybean fiber into the resin.
But that's still second hand. We literally don't know what
(30:59):
Robert boy or the chemist designed. We know they experimented
with several stuff. And there's no question that this approach
to design have potential lighter weight, makes it more efficient,
you know, uh, and gave it the ability to pay
on the engine for a high level of performance. Because
right now, so much material science in race cars or
(31:23):
exotic supercars, your neighborhood, Lamborghini and what have you, so
much energy is focused on making engines bigger, but also
making everything else in the car much much lighter, which
is why people are all twitter painted about carbon fiber. Uh. However,
Ford was also convinced that not just would this make
it more efficient, but this would also save lives in
(31:44):
the car, that it would be more durable and safer
and able to roll without crushing. So there are instances
or anecdotes where apparently who walk up and you would
have a steel panel, and then he would have one
of these miracle mystery plastic panels and take a bat
and just knock the living tar out of it, and
then the panel would bounce back and then the steel
would be all dented and stuff. He was always finding
(32:05):
reasons to hit things. But this is one thing we
need to remember. Like you said, Ben, this is essentially
a prototype. It was created so this is a small
batch of whatever material Bowyer created. It doesn't have to
be this giant, industrial size vat thing. That's true. That's
a big that's a great point. And and Ford, like
many industrialists, foresaw a possible and serious shortage of metal
(32:28):
in the future. He wanted to get ahead of the game.
In that summer, in the golden summer of one, the
car made two public appearances, that's it, one in Dearborn
and one to Michigan State Fairgrounds. And after those appearances,
I am sad to say, it got destroyed yep, so
(32:49):
no one could ever use it again and find out
the secrets of the Soybean vehicle. According to overly, the
toolmaker who took over that project, the guy who only
had the job et Gregory, he was the one who
ordered it destroyed, not Henry Ford, really, and we may
never know exactly why. So that other factor that we
mentioned earlier, the the upcoming loss of steel resources, Yeah,
(33:14):
that that did happen, and it was even worse than
forded imagined that. This thing called the attack on Pearl
Harbor occurred in December of the same year and the
US was drawn into World War Two. So guess what
all that steel that would have been used for these vehicles.
It was going into weapon production, creating all kinds of tanks, airplanes,
(33:40):
different kinds of war vehicles, the birth of America as
his superpower. Absolutely, there was a second unit in production,
a second plastic car, swiping car, hemp car, whatever you
wanna call it, in production. This was also halted during
World War Two, and when the dust settled, almost everyone
had forgotten about the curious soybean car. And today there
(34:04):
are questions that remained. First, why don't we know the
composition this miracle plastic? Was it bake light? Was it
maybe like the plastic substance on the trabant? And why
did the guy who originally lost the project become the
one who destroyed it. If there were a conspiracy of
what to suppress this technology, where would originate from steel manufacturers,
agricultural executives. Did they just lose the formula because it
(34:27):
wasn't that good of an idea? Was it actually created
by all of these organic substances they're talking about? Or
was it was it a little wink wink nod nod,
maybe just more plastic? Right? Was it not as special
as they said it was? Yeah, let's not forget Henry
Ford was consistently trying throughout his entire life to marry
(34:47):
and meld agriculture and industries. A lot of people don't
know this, but so the first model Teas come out
in right, the original model Teas could be run off
a hemp based fuel, and it was only due to
economy of scale when gas became cheaper that they said, okay,
we'll just get rid of the himp option. But originally, uh,
(35:10):
he wont implant based fuels. Yeah, he's pushing so hard
for ethanol. He thought that was the way we were
going to move. And the story doesn't end here because
as as we're recording this, multiple people around the globe
are researching the growing potential of HIMP as a fuel source.
Uh and beyondd not necessarily for car construction, although there
(35:30):
is a guy, a former Dell executive that is sort
of taking uh, Henry Ford's idea or his secret formula
and kind of running with it. This is a man
named Bruce Michael Dietson who lives in Florida and has
constructed from a Mazda chassis, a car made entirely from
sort of a woven cannabis hemp material. And as Ben
(35:53):
was talking about comparing the bodies of modern supercars and
things with that carbon fiber, it does have on us
like a woven look to it when you look at
it and you can see the grain of the material,
and it is this is incredibly light and um he
is attempting to kind of like debunk the stigma that
(36:13):
is associated with hemp, which, as it turns out, is
still illegal to grow in Florida. Dietson actually had to
import the woven kind of fabric like material from China
and um, the body is ten times more dent resistant
than steel. Uh, and it wouldn't need nearly as much
(36:33):
body work after an accident. Um. He used a hundred
pounds of woven hemp And if you look at the car,
it's a really cool, sporty, nice looking kind of modern design. UM.
The article here takes great care in using lots of
marijuana puns quote. Building the car was no pipe dream
(36:55):
for Dietson, who found inspiration after hearing about famed industrialists
Henry Ford using the durable material in one to build
the world's first soybean hemp car. Um and it cost
him two grand to make this car. So you know,
he is going out on a limb financially to kind
of bring this back into public consciousness a little bit.
(37:16):
But I think it's interesting experiment for sure. And this
is two thousand and sixteen, and I'm gonna I'm gonna
jump in to defend this guy. Know you you brought
us this story. Uh what I What I have to
say is, whenever somebody does the first iteration of something,
or whenever they do it on their own and it's
their first iteration, even it with someone else's idea, it's
gonna be expensive. So the fact that he could do
(37:37):
it for two d grand and that's it is pretty
low and pretty speaks pretty highly of his approach. So
the thought then would be that if if he manages
to get people to to say, well, maybe we've been
giving this material a bad rap, then the next cars,
you know, like A hundred and ten thousand, and then
(37:58):
on and on and on until ultimately, ideally, if we're
in a perfect world, you know, every everybody gets gets
one for free. WHOA yeah. And this model it does
run on biofuel, which is something I wanted to bring up.
It uses recycled agricultural waste. And I remember, I mean
a decade ago, more than a decade ago. I remember
(38:19):
bands hearing about bands touring and converted like school buses
that could take veggie diesels what they called it, and
you could strain out and process friar used friar grease
to actually fuel your vehicle. And it's like, why don't
we hear more about that? I mean, it's just you know, well,
it's that's the thing. Ford knew. It was possible to
(38:42):
ferment vegetable materials and other plant materials to create fuel,
and you could do it, and it's possible. The problem was,
and it is now the oil industry. I mean, that's
why cars are made out of plastic. That's why they
run on oil. That's that's what we're where it is
(39:02):
because it's cheap enough. There the infrastructures in place to
produce it. Right, there's a there's a thing that happens.
We talk about this a lot in international affairs or
international economic matters. There's a thing that happens when you
have an economy of scale that has inundated an industry
(39:24):
or region. You know, coal clearly is not the best
answer for a lot of things, right, but if we
have an infrastructure completely designed for coal, then it de
facto becomes the best answer for now. You know, it's
like that that old joke you see people talking about
Mr Wright versus Mr Right Now or whatever. Okay, that's
(39:46):
on some inspirational memes somewhere, I'm sure, but that is
the that's the situation where now. And this is i'm
sure story from history, but it has implications for the
present and for the future. A lot of people forget
just how powerful the manufacturing companies are. And we say manufacturing,
(40:09):
we're not talking about the people manufacture stuff directly for
you to buy. In most cases, we're talking about the
places that sell to those manufacturers. We're talking about the
organizations that own those manufacturers. The most powerful companies on
this planet are the companies that you will rarely ever
hear of. And it would be nice for us to
(40:29):
do a show on that in the future if we
unless they own us too, I don't know. Well, let's
talk to I gu and see what they have to say. Yeah,
we check Corimination Global Unlimited. But in the meantime, while
we're writing a letter to them, that reminds us of
writing letters which means it's time for shut at Conners.
(40:55):
Our first message comes from Ashley. The subject line says,
Putin a spy in the USA? Is that a pun
in the U. S. Army? In the U S. Army?
That's what it says. Uh, let's find out. She says, yes.
I totally intended that title to be a a Putin,
as in Vladimir Putin pun. Wow, that's great. I thought,
(41:18):
all with all the Russia talk, I'd get around to
sharing this story about my grandfather. I've been holding onto
this for you all, hoping that I'd actually get to
sit down and write or record this story. But we
rarely see each other, and he was not at this
year's Christmas function for a family of hermits. Any who,
my grandfather was in the U. S. Marines in the
late nineteen fifties. He served time in the Pacific and
(41:39):
also once bummed a cigarette to Lee Harvey Oswald, then
known as the idiot who shot himself in the foot.
Grandpa says foot, history says elbow. And apparently he caught
a glimpse of an SR seventy one blackbird and a
hangar well before they were public knowledge, and was told
to essentially move along, here's where it gets good, right.
Grandpa also talks about a man named Bobby Robinson. Now,
(42:01):
this gentleman was a quiet man, incredibly bright, but kept
to himself, didn't socialize, and wasn't well liked. He also
didn't go out with others to bars and other off
base excursions, but he tended to vanish for periods of
time by himself. That sounds familiar. Mm hmmm. I don't
remember if Grandpa ever said what role he played. But
(42:22):
after him and his comrades all came home and went
on with their life, they started to get back in
touch with old military buddies. Except no one knew whatever
happened to good old Robbie Robinson. No one knew where
he was, what had become of him, and never made
any contact. He was pretty much forgotten until one day,
many many years ago, Grandpa was watching TV, and what
(42:44):
do you know, there was Robbie Robinson, except this time
he was a Russian politician and he was calling himself
Vladimir Putin. Grandpa claims of this day that the resemblance
is striking, and with all the recent Russian hacker talk
and the history of spies which in our countries. Well,
maybe what say you? Perhaps an episode dealing with the
history of Vladimir Putin? Uh? Is it what the history
(43:07):
books say or is there more? I love your podcast,
your shows one of the first ones I found when
I started listening to them and tech stuff, and I
was so annoyed that you were the only uh, that
you were only doing videos at the time. Much love.
That's very very sweet actually in a cool story about
her grandfather. Both with Lee are Harvey Oswald and this
gentleman that may have been a spy and now runs Russia. Yeah.
(43:31):
I find this fascinating, especially because we don't often talk
about in the mainstream media. We don't often talk about
the deep state, and how former President H. W. Bush
was in charge of the CIA before becoming the president
of the US, and how Vladimir Putin was in charge
(43:54):
of the KGB. There is a famous picture of Vladimir
Putin as a photographer when Ronald Reagan, I believe visits
visits Russia one day, I'm going to maybe post that
in response, will post it somewhere on the internet. But
I really appreciate you writing it, and I'd love to
(44:14):
look into that because honestly, Ashley, the global public doesn't
know very much about Vladimir Putin's personal life. Here, just
for just for giggles between us, I'll show you guys
the picture. See there's President Reagan and they're on the
(44:36):
right in the circle. He has more hair in this picture.
It looks like a like a tourist, like a dad.
You know. He's got like a striped polo shirt on
and has a camera around his neck. It's like he's
a vacationing at Disney World, right, right, Maybe he's posing.
Is that kid's dad? That kid had a weird day.
But it's common knowledge that there have been embedded spy
(44:58):
programs in the US and Russia during the Cold War.
And I'll watch the Show of the Americans, which concerns
itself with some of that. Next shout out comes from
alex um High Conspiracy Guys. First off, I love the show.
Thanks for getting me through the work day. I have
recently been digging into your old podcast and we're listening
(45:19):
to the one about the jfk assassination. You mentioned that
there was a classified file with secrets possibly concerning this
that could be opened by the president in ten with
the inauguration in less than two weeks. I was wondering
if you have heard anything more about this or if
you think that Trump will release any of this information. Well,
if he wants to prove that Ted Cruz's dad had
something to do with it, I sure hope he unseals
(45:41):
that document. That's just my two sents, Um. I also
listened to both of your episodes on whistleblowers, which I
found very interesting. With everything going on with the election
and Russia, it would be great if you could do
another update on this info as well as update us
on the people like Edward Snowden that you had previously
talked about. Again. Love the show, Um, Alex. Great letter
(46:03):
from Alex, Thank you for writing in. We can give
a very small update on this information. So the thing
that we know now is that out of the wealth
of documentation surrounding the JFK assassination, the National Archives released
(46:24):
a list in of three thousand and a hundred, three
thousand and sixty three documents that have been fully withheld.
That's that's the way to say it. This doesn't necessarily
mean that these are all like the first alien contact arrived.
(46:46):
It wasn't a bullet that went through his head it
was a spaceship or anything like that, although that would
be really strangely cool. What this means is that I
just haven't released this stuff. We don't know what it is,
so of course you speculator from runs Rampant. The documents
were listed. They were released in response to a freedom
(47:07):
of information act from the political Outfit and a group
of other researchers and organizations. They were all collected by
the Assassination Records Review Board, and that was something that
was created by a thing called the JFK Records Act.
(47:27):
That same act, that JFK Records Act requires that all
the documents on that list of fully withheld stuff be
released by October. So October of this year is our update, Alex,
unless the next president decides to keep them classified via
executive order or something like that. So at this point
(47:48):
were saw on the wire, were several months out from
seeing what these do contain. And the National Archives when
they released this list of documents, they didn't say you
know what's in them at all. We can't emphasize that enough.
They just said, here are the things that we have
that you don't know about, which is terrible. That's like
when somebody do you ever get a text from one
(48:08):
of your friends, it's just like we need to talk.
I hate that. Just don't just send me the thing.
I will read your long text message. So our final
shout out is from Michelle m and Michelle wrote in
with an interesting question. I want to see what you
guys think of it. I want to see what you
think of it as too as well. Listeners. Michelle says, uh,
(48:33):
great show. Thank you for keeping my mind occupied while
I'm doing the kind of work that only uses the
other half of my brain parentheses. I'm a designer, I've
learned a ton, so she says, straight to it, You
guys should cover weddings. There might not be a huge
conspiracy theory in there, or maybe there is, but the
wedding industry definitely makes huge money by making women and
girls believe from a young age that they need to
(48:53):
have a beautiful event with all sorts of frills and
bells and whistles, and they need to be more beautiful
than humanly possible because it's their special day. And when
you actually look into it, most of the wedding conventions
or patriarchal or just playing archaic and meaningless. Now, for example,
brides originally carried a bouquet to mask the stench of
their poor hygiene back in the day when people stank
(49:14):
all the time, But now bouquets and flowers for for decoration,
and they're seen as a convention that the wedding industry
keeps pushing because they make so much money from people
buying hugely marked up flowers. As you may have guessed,
says Michelle, I'm engaged in planning my wedding. Well, hey,
you know what, congratulations for sure, it's huge. Congratulations Michelle.
And yet even though I know all these traditions are
(49:35):
meaningless and patriarchal and taking my money, I'm still doing them. Uh.
And she talks a little more in detail about this industry,
since she sums it up by saying, so, basically, the
wedding industry is brainwashed almost all women in this country
many others. Please tell me how they did it, because
my emotions have definitely been manipulated for profit. I've been
(49:56):
conditioned to want stupid and expensive things. I was gonna
say this are my as me of the diamonds episode,
and she mentions that right here that we've already covered
diamonds and may have covered weddings, but now I don't
believe we have in this uh, in this amount of debt.
We we have not, and it would it would be
great to get some of our colleagues in on this
to who might have more expertise. I mean, my position
(50:18):
on the whole thing is like, you can make your
wedding whatever you want it to be sure, I mean,
I think you it's easy to feel susceptible to these
pie in the sky big wedding special day scenarios, But
I mean you can have a family affair and invite
your friends and do the directive decoration yourself, or get
some crafty friends to help you and have it be
just wonderful, you know, like that's what my wedding was. Like,
(50:38):
I would say it depends on your family, because in
my experience, weddings are about the family, like appeasing the
family whatever their wishes are, more than the individual uh
couple getting married like that. We can also I just
wanted not to be too luciferian about it, but you
are not beholden to other people except for the one
(51:01):
you're marrying, right ideally, so if you want to just
elope and then take the money, you would have spent
and have an adventure around the world with someone you love.
I don't know. Maybe if I was in someone's family
and they're like, hey, we're not doing a wedding because
we're going to spend the money traveling the world, I'd
be like, that's amazing, that's great. Plus yeah, Plus it
(51:25):
means that I don't have to go somewhere and uh,
interact in a crowd. I'm all about that. I will
kick my feet up, I will write some creepy horror fiction,
and I will think of you guys. Godspeed or matt Speed,
as we often say here, and that ends our gosh,
(51:47):
it also ends our episode, but not our series. Never fear, ladies, gentlemen,
and the others amongst you. We will be returning this week.
We have a big thing in the mix. We want
to hear from you. Find us on Facebook and Twitter,
where we are conspiracy stuff. And while you're on our Facebook,
we just recently posted a question for you, which is
(52:11):
a question for suggestions about what topics we should cover
in twenty seventeen. Our best episode ideas always come from you,
so you can drop by Facebook and let us know
what you think. As we said, before you can catch
all of our car shows. It's weird that we do
have car shows on our website Stuff they don't want
(52:32):
you to know dot Com, along with every other audio
podcast we've ever done. And for those of you who
are saying poppy cock, malarkey, what buffoonery. I would never
use Facebook, don't worry. There are other ways to contact us,
besides chanting alone in a darkened room, which always works.
You can try that first. You can send us an email.
(52:53):
We are conspiracy at how stuff Works dot com
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
(00:22):
welcome back to the show. My name is not My
name is Nol. They called me Ben. You are you
that makes this stuff they don't want you to know?
Today we're talking about something that that might seem odd
for listeners of our show because we don't typically talk
about automobiles. Well, you do in another life, in another incarnation.
(00:45):
We know that conspiracies can occur in any realm or discipline,
and cars are really no different. So whether you out there,
whether you were in Briton, Nebraska, Argentina or paul or
Nepal or New Schwabia, you know, wherever you find yourself,
whether you consider yourself a gear head or not. Odds
are that you've heard about all this kind of skullduggery
(01:06):
alleged on the part of auto manufacturers, oil companies and
insidious governments. And you know, we we all know stories
like that, right like who killed the electric car? Perfect example?
And what's what's that? What's a documentary just about how
oil companies and um, you know special interests ultimately are
responsible for bringing down what should have been a viable
(01:28):
technology and a you know, clean solution to driving that
would have, you know, displaced some of the pollution caused
by fossil fuels. That was the e V one, I
believe yea saturn right, yes, the car and uh, full disclosure,
one of our old bosses, Marshall Brain, who founded how
Stuff Works, was pretty nuts about the e V one
(01:49):
And then also that ties into the idea of car
companies repressing the trolley car system. Right, So this is
you don't have to be a car person per se
to to notice this. And the history of the evolutionary
cars is pretty crazy too, That's part of what we
get into. So there there are many, many stories like this,
(02:10):
and so many of the stories, here's the strange thing,
have commonalities. Right. Sure, many times it's one intrepid inventor
alone in his garage or her garage that comes up
with some mind blowing technology that will completely revolutionize the
auto industry, the entire system, and yet they're on the
(02:31):
outside of it, and uh inevitably you hear that they
get shut down somehow. But like, what's a more specific
example of this we could look to Stanley Meyer, who
was famous for creating a water car at least allegedly
creating a water car. Um that it was a water
fuel cell that could run the entire thing on H two,
(02:55):
but it was shut down allegedly by let's say, the
powers that be. And that's not the only example of
a water powered vehicle or alleged water powering technology. Uh.
Their former NASA scientists like a guy named Herman Anderson
and Tennessee, there's a Japanese company that I believe may
still be active called Jenna Packs, and they're just scraping
(03:20):
the surface. Just wait, so it's scraping the bottom. It's
scratching the surface. I would think you could scratch the
bottom or the surface, or you could scrape the bottom.
It just seems like an arbitrary association, their arbitrary verbs.
It's it's groping, groping the tip. That sounds weird, hey,
(03:40):
but it says we're getting weird. For a second, Can
I just say it's nice to be with all three
of us in a room together for the first time
in a minute. Um, I feel like, you know, the
way I saw the band the Smashing Pumpkins, I was
a huge fan of I never saw all the original
members at the same time. I saw like two original
members and then a pinch hitter, and then like three
different times. So I kind of feel like that's what
the listeners have been experiencing on the show lately. It
(04:01):
was like just you guys, and then just me and
Matt and now I'm glad to be back. We're glad. Yeah,
we're glad. That's well said. No, we're glad to join
the most important part of the show, which is you
folks listening out there. We also, if the Smashing Pumpkins
are listening, you know Billy Corrigan, Uh, he's a bit
(04:22):
of a conspiracy nut nut. You know. I don't know
if he's not a nut, but he looks like a nut.
It's definitely, uh listen, he's definitely into the nut some
fringe theories. So if you're listening, let us know if
the Smashing Pumpkins are ever going to get back together,
not after Oal just insulted him. We can take all
this out, Billy Corgan, he used to be my hero.
(04:45):
Keep it all in, keep it all in. Let's tell
the truth. Also, I really like the name of I
never actually listened to the album, but the guitarist James
Eah had an album called let It Come Down or something.
It sounds like James Taylor. Yeah, it's that kind of
like am pop, kind of like crossover country gold. We
are way off the track now, Oh well yeah, okay,
(05:07):
so back back on the track. Speaking of radios, those
are in cars. Speaking of cars, here's our show. We
got there. So there are multiple automotive conspiracies of varying credibility,
some of which would be a little out there, maybe
a little self serving for the people who try to
convince you about them, but many of which disturbing, number
(05:28):
of which are not only plausible but probably happened. You
can hear more about these allegations, especially technological suppression, in
earlier episodes of Stuff they Don't Want You to Know,
which features our guest host uh or a guest Scott
Gearbox Benjamin who host Car Stuff. And from there you
(05:50):
can just go to Car Stuff and find all kinds
of fascinating episodes. Yeah, other run man Preston Tucker also
shut down by the man spoiler. Out of all this,
there's one conspiracy theory that we have not yet brought up,
and that is the story that while World War Two
(06:11):
was looming on the horizon, the legendary automotive tycoon Henry
Ford proposed and actually built a completely for the time
radical new vehicle, one that seemed to completely change the
world of manufacturing, not just for cars, but just in
general forever. And that was the topic of today's episode,
(06:32):
The Hemp Car. The what yeah, you heard me, buddy,
the Hemp car. So he is was Henry Ford? Like
you know a little bit is that we're talking about,
like like cheach and song. We are not here to
make that judgment on Mr Ford. He was a very
stressed out man. I'm sure that's a lot of a
(06:54):
lot of pressure to have on you, um, to be
the head of a company like that. So you know,
then a spare time, who knows what he got up too.
But as it turns out, no, Lakar was not made
of weed. Um if you that's what you're thinking. Uh,
But Hemp throughout history, it's been a pretty incredible resource
that has been largely overlooked due to having a bit
of a bad rap because it is the same thing
(07:16):
as a drug. Right, Yeah, did this actually happen? Was
this car actually constructed is a bunch of malarkey. And
if it did happen, perhaps more importantly, why aren't we
driving himp cars now? If you're listening to this in
your vehicle, now, why isn't it built of hemp? Why
isn't it running on hemp? What happened to the original design?
(07:37):
We can answer that question, as well as several more,
some of which may have to do with the smashing pumpkins.
After a word from our sponsor, and we're back here
the facts. First things first, Yes, as nol, as you
(07:59):
alluded to earlier before the break, hemp gets a bad
name in a lot of circles. Not all marijuana is
created equal, as I'm sure you're local weed man will
tell you right they there's a thing that Look, I'll
be square about it, and I'll be honest. I've always
been confused. I'm a big fan of hip hop, but
(08:19):
have always been kind of confused by the different names
that people have for different strains of marijuana. You know,
it took me a long time to figure an embarrassing
long time to figure out that sour diesel was not
just some catchphrase, that it was an actual thing. It
doesn't sound very appealing. It doesn't sound very appealing, especially
if you're paying money for something. What would you want
(08:40):
sour diesel? But the point is that when we say
not all marijuana's created equal, not just talking about you know,
pot jokes about some kind of indica or cush difference. Uh,
we're also talking about the difference between what people call
hemp and what people call weed. And we're looking at
two kinds of classifications. There's a lead goal difference, which
(09:02):
is very very important if you're ever you know, pulled
over or you're in court for some reason. And there's
a scientific difference, which is important if you want to
be right. So here we go. Usually when people say hemp, uh,
they're talking about strains of cannabis sativa that have been
bred specifically for fiber like or used for clothing or
(09:22):
construction oils or other substances. The main thing is that
this is an umbrella term for this stuff that doesn't
have a larger amount of th HC, so it doesn't
create the feeling of being high. You can't wear a
hemp necklace and all of a sudden, you know, I
used to work in an old theater um and they
actually refer to the ropes in the rigging as the
(09:44):
hemp lines. Um whether it's just an old term that's
stuck around, or whether this theater actually still has the
same stuff that was in there when that term came
into youth, I cannot say for sure. There there's a
lot of updated need updating needed there, but yeah, it's
it was a really prevalent resource and was used very
very strong, has a lot of tensile strength or whatever
(10:06):
for you know, using for rope and like we're seeing
like it's again, it's not something where you would experience
some kind of inebriation touching it. You can't wear a
himp necklace and all of a sudden see musical notes
on Bob Marley's Greatest Hits. You can't pull the hemp
line at a play and all of a sudden find yourself,
you know, experiencing a hallucinatory moment over pizza, as cool
(10:28):
as that would be. But marijuana is different. Marijuana is
a slang term, right, yeah, marijuana like pot weed, t
sticky Goobal's uncle Milroy's elbow medicine. That's a good one.
Hotchi Machi, I don't know. You can just utter any
(10:51):
sour diesel y know, I got that scadoocheh. Yeah, whatever
you want to call it. That's a that's a slang term, right,
And it's this grabbing strains of Cannabis citiva that are
specifically bred to create um putentus resinous glands or trichromes
that grow on flowers and on leaves or buds. So
(11:14):
the difference here, for everybody notices this, The difference here
is is somewhat semantic because not only do hemp and
what we call weed or pot or chock. Uh they
are we starting this now? Are we gonna I'm gonna
feel so weird if if yours from now people start
referring to stuff as cha, surely not. There's gotta be
be their name. Send us right to us and let
(11:36):
us know your favorite nicknames for drugs. We are Jonathan
dot strict wind, how stuff works, dot com Uh. Well. Well,
the difference though, really is because it really is semantic
because not only do do they come from the same genus,
they come from the same species, they're just bred for
different purposes. And we have some experts to weigh on
(11:59):
in on this too, right. According to Ed Rosenthal, author
of the Marijuana Growers Handbook, Um, the quote legal definition
of hemp is a plant that has low th HC
and perhaps a higher level of CBD, which is the
what is that the cannabinoid, Yeah, cannabinoid cannaba Doyle. That's
a Tomue twister right there. I'm mispronounced it for fun. Ok. Yeah,
(12:24):
it's the non psychotropic uh part. It's the non psychotropic substances,
and I believe in the state of Georgia that is
what is legal. You can get a pill form of
that particular part too, if if you have, um, some
sort of you know, if you fall in line with
the with a certain certain set of conditions exactly. But
(12:46):
it is not the same as quote unquote getting high.
But it does apparently relieve um, you know, some chronic
some chronic pain exactly. But the interesting point because the
governor of Georgia at the time who supported that passage
of a very very strange, very very conservative law and said, okay,
(13:07):
just this one oil by like a certain manufacturer for
a certain amount of conditions. That guy's name was Governor
Nathan Deal uh and is his name at the time
of this recording. What's the deal with that? I know? Right?
Nominative determinism right, and he he took such pains to
always say this is not for marijuana, this is not
(13:31):
this is not that t not that that doll, which
is uh, you know, which is strange to go to
such pains when we're really at a what could be
a turning point in history. More and more states are
decriminalizing or even outright legalizing this kind of stuff because
they're seeing a lot of the a lot of the
(13:55):
problems related to drug abuse in America are are more
closely related to hard drugs or alcohol. I mean, how
crazy is it that it is recreationally legal in the
district of Columbia, but yet federally still totally gray area? Youah, yeah, yeah,
it's not really federally, But I I consider that to
(14:18):
be gray because of like the fact that it's just
completely disagrees with all of these different state laws and
it's just like, where is the disconnect there? I just
find it interesting. You're right, it's not gray, but like
the relationship between the two to me is very very
strange and tenuous and contradictory. Right, So, sadly and predictably,
just as just as we're talking about the legal stuff,
(14:39):
as you know, it gets murky real quick, because here
in the United States, the state level definitions don't always
agree with one another of what you know, what is
him versus marijuana, what is legal, what is not? And
then if you even go drill down even further into
the local laws in jurisdictions for zoning. If you look
(14:59):
at California right now, even if on a statewide basis
it's legal, it may be illegal from the locality the
county to have like a growing I don't know of,
to have a farm or yeah, or you know it
right right personal use kind of things, or places like
(15:22):
Ohio which have a famously corrupt approach to the legislation.
As the US moves away from marijuana prohibition at what
appears to be an increasing pace, states are scrambling to
nail down definitions of what would be you know, we
the drug, uh that sweet kitten whisper, I don't know,
(15:43):
I'm just making stuff up. It's my favorite so far.
And what would be hemp as an agricultural product make
you know, rope, fiber, et cetera. So the result now
is a confusing, contradictory state by state legal redefinition based
on what are considered higher levels of cp D or
th HC. It's no secret that for a long long time,
(16:04):
the federal government opposed products that had HIMP components in
any degree as a because of their association with with marijuana.
And you know, that's also the reason why a lot
of middle school and high school kids thought himp necklaces
were cool, because they were like guys like get me,
I get stuff. You know how I feel about Please
(16:29):
don't get us started. And we can find so many
websites of varying authenticity insisting that himp is a miracle
crop by God, by golly, by gum Joseph. I mean,
those sites are all run by dirty hippies, though obviously
with a million uses. George Washington farmed himp. Matt, No,
(16:50):
we wouldn't have good music without pot, et cetera. George
Washington was a dirty hippie. Come on, man, what about
stand up comedy and and stoner food and uh, the
movie Half Baked? You know it's it's true. I wouldn't
know who duncan trust it was if it wasn't for
this substance. But you know, for that matter, what about cars?
(17:15):
Oh yeah, cars? Hoping he would get back around to cars,
the totally forgot what we were talking about. Bro. Yeah,
I'm sorry. We'll get to that right after a word
from ours sponsor. Here's crazy. Let's talk about a man
(17:45):
you probably learned about him in class, A man of
his time, Mr Henry Ford. There's a wealth of well
intentioned misinformation out there on the internet about this fellow.
He did have a brilliant mind. I think that we
can agree up on that. He was an acolyte of
Thomas Edison. You guys remember that person as well. He's
a bit of a stone cold bastard. But that's just
(18:08):
history for you. Okay, Yeah, you're kind of right if
you look to tales of him, him and Tesla that
we have discussed before, and among other people that he
interacted with in his life. Sure, but this, this gentleman
Henry Ford, even played a small part in the creation
of what we refer to as the Weekend. Hey, everybody
likes the Weekend? I know I do. Well, you know
(18:31):
their new albums? Okay, yeah, the calendar weekend? Oh yes, yes,
not the musician so far as we know. There's a
really interesting story about that, which maybe is a story
for another day. You can learn about in a brain
stuff video that will be coming out soon. But it's
strange that people make up this misinformation about Henry Ford,
no matter how well intentioned, is because he did enough
(18:52):
real crazy stuff on his own, raging anti semi I
have heard tell of that raging uh, a little bit
of a loon with his ideas, very strict, uncompromising boss.
But we see that a lot in these Titans of industry,
you know, like Steve Jobs between genius and madness, Like
where he put the iPhone prototype in the fish tank?
(19:16):
What I heard that story? What happened? I mean, I
think I think he wanted it to be thinner or
something like that, and he just like in front of
all the designers who had been slaving away at this prototype,
he just threw it in a fish tank. Him to
start over two fats man. That's something. Consider it. Well, okay,
so run of Henry Ford's story is real quick, just
to show that what are some wacky ones. So one
(19:37):
wacky one is there was a slight redesign on I
believe it was a Model A, was either Model Air,
Model T and it was very very minor. So they
showed it to Henry Ford like, oh, here's the new line.
It was supposed to be everything, he said. And again
I can't stress how how minor this was. And they
didn't tell him about it, but he noticed it and
(19:59):
he tore it apart with his bare hands. He tore
the car apart with his bare hands. It's way easier
to tear one of those cars apart than you know,
like a modern car. Still, yeah, he lost his he
lost his mind. He also built because of the price
of rubber that would be used in tires, and how
he was having difficult time getting that. He said, you know,
(20:20):
I should go to the Amazon, where I know there
could be cheaper rubber and build my own city and
have the people who live in that city just work
for me. Yeah, and we'll call it no lie Fordlandia.
Are you serious? Yeah? I just pulled that out of
my my brain, I did. Are you serious? Well, you
(20:42):
nailed it. Yeah, it's really named it Fordlandia, and that
is amazing. And their native you know, their native people
have been living there in their own culture for an
untold number of years, you know, thousands of thousands of years.
And so he takes this weird, very very strange like
idealized step forward esque approach to what he thinks the
(21:05):
ideal American Western life is. So he makes all the
guys play baseball. No one can drink anymore, they have
to wear certain type of clothes, they all have to
go to church. Eventually it changes completely, the diet changes
completely eventually. So he's trying to assimilate natives basically. Yeah, he's, yeah,
trying to turn them into more American than Americans. And
(21:26):
it doesn't work. But there until fairly recently there were
people who were still living in the ruins of ford
Landia in case Ford Motors decides to come back and started.
The crazy thing about this. The biggest problem that that
Ford didn't even notice because he didn't consult any rubber
experts or anybody that would tell him this before he
(21:49):
even got the idea, is that you cannot cultivate plantation
style rubber in the Amazon rainforest. Yeah, because of all
the different pests and they called blite that affects them.
When you grow the trees so close together, it just
kills everything. And it's such a diverse ecosystem that you
can't really have. It's it's very difficult to have mono
(22:11):
cultural stuff, you know. That's why we lost the good
tasting bananas, the ones that taste like the banana candy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh,
it's either gross Smite Michael, gross Michael, or cavendish. My
girlfriend told me that, like we're talking about banana candy
at a Thanksgiving She said, you know that the original
bananas tasted like banana candy. And I was like, there's
(22:34):
no way that's true. I don't know if true it's true,
and she was mad at me because I do that
sometimes where I'm just like, no way chance, But right, Yeah,
that's Moto agriculture is another great idea for an episode.
So so okay, this guy built his first Off, he's
convinced that there are shadowy caballs that are taking over
the world, and his solution is to make as many
(22:55):
cars as possible. Secondly, uh, he has a huge temper
tears things apart with his bare hands, so he gets
these uh Mr Hyde level fits of rage. And third
he built his own essentially intentional community or commune for
(23:16):
a deal on rubber that didn't work out because he
never thought to ask the smart questions and everyone was
too scared of the guy who say no. So, of course,
when we when we hear somebody tell this forward himp
car story, of course we think, oh that makes sense.
This guy's uber bonkers. He would try it. It's like
we're lucky. He didn't say, let's make a car out
(23:38):
of dirt or people or people the model p or
soiling green or soiling green. Well, here's the answer. Unfortunately, No,
he did not make a car entirely out of himp.
And yeah, I know it's a bummer, right because it's
such a cool story. But he did, to Noel Brown's point,
(23:59):
he did make what they called a soybean car. How
abu what? And it may have contained himp. This is
not just the story made out of thin air. Uh,
here's here's how it went down, right. So Henry Ford
had literally zero problem dismissing the status quo. He was
a rabble rouser. He liked to shake things up, do
things his own way, like Frank Sinatra would say, especially
(24:23):
when he felt that people were limiting progress with their
close minded ways of looking at problems, is how we
do things right. By the late nineteen thirties, he was
intensely aware of a lot of looming potential problems on
the horizon of the automotive industry. Um, and we can
(24:44):
go through a few of those here Steal number one.
Steele had at the time a lot of issues and
limitations as a building material for automobiles. What were some
of those, Well, all right, first, it's going to it's
going to require multiple industries working together. Right. There are
steel manufacturers, so you have to work with them. You
(25:05):
don't own you you buy as supplies steel from them,
you don't own the means of production. That's tough. Also,
when it comes to material science at the time, molding
steel into shapes can be imperfect and a laborious process.
(25:25):
But that wasn't the only problem. Converting or into steel
also a complex operation. So again, you know, titans of
industry at this time are all about owning the entire thing.
They call it vertical integration. Right, so standard oil wants
to own everything from the ground that the oil comes
from to the pump that puts the gas in. Uh
(25:49):
So Ford also started looking into alternate materials tail as
old as time. When it comes to manufacturing, how can
I do it cheaper, better, faster. Yeah, you looked at
plastic and eventually he wanted to find something even better
than that and guess what. He picked that old soybean
as a building block to to build the body of
(26:11):
a car, the panels that you see there. And there's
another factor here that doesn't really rear its ugly head
quite yet, but we're gonna get into that and we'll
we'll see if you can figure out and guess what
it is. So rumor has it that one day, at
some point in the past, Henry Ford visited the Deerfield
Village Trade School and he learned about a crop that
(26:34):
was at this point in time obscure and largely relevant
in the West, and that was the soybean. And this
dude got obsessed with the soybean. He loved him. He
he was probably one of the first Americans to ever
drink this thing called soy milk. M m m m
m m m mmm. And he did it on a
regular basis. Do you guys drink soy milk? No? I do,
(26:56):
like at a mammy them. Yeah, at a mommy is
the business, But soy milk not my jam. He loved it. Though,
I've had some almond milk that I enjoyed. It's not
really milk what it's it's some almond concentrate. In some
other things suspended in a milky liquid. Yeah. Well, he
(27:18):
even held a lunch for journalists at the N four
World's Fair where he served in all soy menu. We're
talking soy crackers, soy bread, soy cheese, straight up soy beans,
probably soyed milk, and so on uh. And he also
believed the versatility of this drop doesn't need to be
limited solely to food stuffs. I felt that soy he
(27:40):
was consuming. I'm really starting to feel like behind the
scenes he might have been doing a little little tokey tokey.
Oh yeah, I thought you meant he was gonna be
having a lot of gas. Well soy beans. That maybe
that too. There were studies that have come out in
the past few years at allege excessive consumption of soy uh,
(28:03):
including you know, products like tofu and stuff can disrupt
termonal levels or raise estrogen levels. And dudes, I don't
know how true that is. I haven't read the studies myself.
So he thought this stuff is so useful. You know,
He's hanging out with his entourage of people that he
hasn't like killed or fired yet, and he's going, man, soybeans,
(28:26):
They're so amazing and I bet we could use them
to build a car instead of just a buffet. And
everyone's like what, And he's like, you're fired, and everybody
else says, oh, great idea. So it hopes of building
a cheaper, more durable, lighter car. He originally enlisted the
help of and this guy is important, a stylist named
et Gregory. However, Henry Ford did not like the work
(28:52):
that this guy and his team were producing, so he
took him off the project and instead he handed it
to a guy named low Overly and Lowell before he
was working at Ford's soybean laboratory, he did have a
dedicated soybean laboratory. Uh Overly was designing tools and die
(29:12):
and Overly, because he wasn't a chemist, found a chemist
named Robert Boyer, and Boyer is the real like hero
of this story or question mark in this story. August,
at a thing called Dearborn Days this community festival and Dearborn, Michigan,
Henry Ford unveils what is called the soybean Car. The
(29:34):
frame was made of tubular steel and had fourteen different
plastic panels connected to it um. This was a two
thousand pound car, which was a good thousand pounds lighter
than a steel car. That's a big deal. Possibly a
little dangerous now maybe right, um, But anyway, lightweight plastic windows,
(29:54):
and it had a one thirty six c I D
flathead Ford V eight sixty horsepower drive train, so not
not bad at all for the time. Here's the thing,
here's why we hear it called a hemp car so often.
Some people might be wondering why we go from hemp
to soybeans. The exact ingredients of these plastic panels made
(30:16):
by the chemist Robert A. Boyer are unknown because no
record of this formula exists. Today, you'll see articles claiming
that the panels were made from a chemical formula that
included many ingredients soybeans, wheat, hemp, flax, and some other stuff. However,
(30:37):
that guy we talked about, who was sort of the
bureaucratic or business head tool designer Lowell overly claims that
it was soybean fiber in a resin with formalde hyde
used to to impregnate the soybean fiber into the resin.
But that's still second hand. We literally don't know what
(30:59):
Robert boy or the chemist designed. We know they experimented
with several stuff. And there's no question that this approach
to design have potential lighter weight, makes it more efficient,
you know, uh, and gave it the ability to pay
on the engine for a high level of performance. Because
right now, so much material science in race cars or
(31:23):
exotic supercars, your neighborhood, Lamborghini and what have you, so
much energy is focused on making engines bigger, but also
making everything else in the car much much lighter, which
is why people are all twitter painted about carbon fiber. Uh. However,
Ford was also convinced that not just would this make
it more efficient, but this would also save lives in
(31:44):
the car, that it would be more durable and safer
and able to roll without crushing. So there are instances
or anecdotes where apparently who walk up and you would
have a steel panel, and then he would have one
of these miracle mystery plastic panels and take a bat
and just knock the living tar out of it, and
then the panel would bounce back and then the steel
would be all dented and stuff. He was always finding
(32:05):
reasons to hit things. But this is one thing we
need to remember. Like you said, Ben, this is essentially
a prototype. It was created so this is a small
batch of whatever material Bowyer created. It doesn't have to
be this giant, industrial size vat thing. That's true. That's
a big that's a great point. And and Ford, like
many industrialists, foresaw a possible and serious shortage of metal
(32:28):
in the future. He wanted to get ahead of the game.
In that summer, in the golden summer of one, the
car made two public appearances, that's it, one in Dearborn
and one to Michigan State Fairgrounds. And after those appearances,
I am sad to say, it got destroyed yep, so
(32:49):
no one could ever use it again and find out
the secrets of the Soybean vehicle. According to overly, the
toolmaker who took over that project, the guy who only
had the job et Gregory, he was the one who
ordered it destroyed, not Henry Ford, really, and we may
never know exactly why. So that other factor that we
mentioned earlier, the the upcoming loss of steel resources, Yeah,
(33:14):
that that did happen, and it was even worse than
forded imagined that. This thing called the attack on Pearl
Harbor occurred in December of the same year and the
US was drawn into World War Two. So guess what
all that steel that would have been used for these vehicles.
It was going into weapon production, creating all kinds of tanks, airplanes,
(33:40):
different kinds of war vehicles, the birth of America as
his superpower. Absolutely, there was a second unit in production,
a second plastic car, swiping car, hemp car, whatever you
wanna call it, in production. This was also halted during
World War Two, and when the dust settled, almost everyone
had forgotten about the curious soybean car. And today there
(34:04):
are questions that remained. First, why don't we know the
composition this miracle plastic? Was it bake light? Was it
maybe like the plastic substance on the trabant? And why
did the guy who originally lost the project become the
one who destroyed it. If there were a conspiracy of
what to suppress this technology, where would originate from steel manufacturers,
agricultural executives. Did they just lose the formula because it
(34:27):
wasn't that good of an idea? Was it actually created
by all of these organic substances they're talking about? Or
was it was it a little wink wink nod nod,
maybe just more plastic? Right? Was it not as special
as they said it was? Yeah, let's not forget Henry
Ford was consistently trying throughout his entire life to marry
(34:47):
and meld agriculture and industries. A lot of people don't
know this, but so the first model Teas come out
in right, the original model Teas could be run off
a hemp based fuel, and it was only due to
economy of scale when gas became cheaper that they said, okay,
we'll just get rid of the himp option. But originally, uh,
(35:10):
he wont implant based fuels. Yeah, he's pushing so hard
for ethanol. He thought that was the way we were
going to move. And the story doesn't end here because
as as we're recording this, multiple people around the globe
are researching the growing potential of HIMP as a fuel source.
Uh and beyondd not necessarily for car construction, although there
(35:30):
is a guy, a former Dell executive that is sort
of taking uh, Henry Ford's idea or his secret formula
and kind of running with it. This is a man
named Bruce Michael Dietson who lives in Florida and has
constructed from a Mazda chassis, a car made entirely from
sort of a woven cannabis hemp material. And as Ben
(35:53):
was talking about comparing the bodies of modern supercars and
things with that carbon fiber, it does have on us
like a woven look to it when you look at
it and you can see the grain of the material,
and it is this is incredibly light and um he
is attempting to kind of like debunk the stigma that
(36:13):
is associated with hemp, which, as it turns out, is
still illegal to grow in Florida. Dietson actually had to
import the woven kind of fabric like material from China
and um, the body is ten times more dent resistant
than steel. Uh, and it wouldn't need nearly as much
(36:33):
body work after an accident. Um. He used a hundred
pounds of woven hemp And if you look at the car,
it's a really cool, sporty, nice looking kind of modern design. UM.
The article here takes great care in using lots of
marijuana puns quote. Building the car was no pipe dream
(36:55):
for Dietson, who found inspiration after hearing about famed industrialists
Henry Ford using the durable material in one to build
the world's first soybean hemp car. Um and it cost
him two grand to make this car. So you know,
he is going out on a limb financially to kind
of bring this back into public consciousness a little bit.
(37:16):
But I think it's interesting experiment for sure. And this
is two thousand and sixteen, and I'm gonna I'm gonna
jump in to defend this guy. Know you you brought
us this story. Uh what I What I have to
say is, whenever somebody does the first iteration of something,
or whenever they do it on their own and it's
their first iteration, even it with someone else's idea, it's
gonna be expensive. So the fact that he could do
(37:37):
it for two d grand and that's it is pretty
low and pretty speaks pretty highly of his approach. So
the thought then would be that if if he manages
to get people to to say, well, maybe we've been
giving this material a bad rap, then the next cars,
you know, like A hundred and ten thousand, and then
(37:58):
on and on and on until ultimately, ideally, if we're
in a perfect world, you know, every everybody gets gets
one for free. WHOA yeah. And this model it does
run on biofuel, which is something I wanted to bring up.
It uses recycled agricultural waste. And I remember, I mean
a decade ago, more than a decade ago. I remember
(38:19):
bands hearing about bands touring and converted like school buses
that could take veggie diesels what they called it, and
you could strain out and process friar used friar grease
to actually fuel your vehicle. And it's like, why don't
we hear more about that? I mean, it's just you know, well,
it's that's the thing. Ford knew. It was possible to
(38:42):
ferment vegetable materials and other plant materials to create fuel,
and you could do it, and it's possible. The problem was,
and it is now the oil industry. I mean, that's
why cars are made out of plastic. That's why they
run on oil. That's that's what we're where it is
(39:02):
because it's cheap enough. There the infrastructures in place to
produce it. Right, there's a there's a thing that happens.
We talk about this a lot in international affairs or
international economic matters. There's a thing that happens when you
have an economy of scale that has inundated an industry
(39:24):
or region. You know, coal clearly is not the best
answer for a lot of things, right, but if we
have an infrastructure completely designed for coal, then it de
facto becomes the best answer for now. You know, it's
like that that old joke you see people talking about
Mr Wright versus Mr Right Now or whatever. Okay, that's
(39:46):
on some inspirational memes somewhere, I'm sure, but that is
the that's the situation where now. And this is i'm
sure story from history, but it has implications for the
present and for the future. A lot of people forget
just how powerful the manufacturing companies are. And we say manufacturing,
(40:09):
we're not talking about the people manufacture stuff directly for
you to buy. In most cases, we're talking about the
places that sell to those manufacturers. We're talking about the
organizations that own those manufacturers. The most powerful companies on
this planet are the companies that you will rarely ever
hear of. And it would be nice for us to
(40:29):
do a show on that in the future if we
unless they own us too, I don't know. Well, let's
talk to I gu and see what they have to say. Yeah,
we check Corimination Global Unlimited. But in the meantime, while
we're writing a letter to them, that reminds us of
writing letters which means it's time for shut at Conners.
(40:55):
Our first message comes from Ashley. The subject line says,
Putin a spy in the USA? Is that a pun
in the U. S. Army? In the U S. Army?
That's what it says. Uh, let's find out. She says, yes.
I totally intended that title to be a a Putin,
as in Vladimir Putin pun. Wow, that's great. I thought,
(41:18):
all with all the Russia talk, I'd get around to
sharing this story about my grandfather. I've been holding onto
this for you all, hoping that I'd actually get to
sit down and write or record this story. But we
rarely see each other, and he was not at this
year's Christmas function for a family of hermits. Any who,
my grandfather was in the U. S. Marines in the
late nineteen fifties. He served time in the Pacific and
(41:39):
also once bummed a cigarette to Lee Harvey Oswald, then
known as the idiot who shot himself in the foot.
Grandpa says foot, history says elbow. And apparently he caught
a glimpse of an SR seventy one blackbird and a
hangar well before they were public knowledge, and was told
to essentially move along, here's where it gets good, right.
Grandpa also talks about a man named Bobby Robinson. Now,
(42:01):
this gentleman was a quiet man, incredibly bright, but kept
to himself, didn't socialize, and wasn't well liked. He also
didn't go out with others to bars and other off
base excursions, but he tended to vanish for periods of
time by himself. That sounds familiar. Mm hmmm. I don't
remember if Grandpa ever said what role he played. But
(42:22):
after him and his comrades all came home and went
on with their life, they started to get back in
touch with old military buddies. Except no one knew whatever
happened to good old Robbie Robinson. No one knew where
he was, what had become of him, and never made
any contact. He was pretty much forgotten until one day,
many many years ago, Grandpa was watching TV, and what
(42:44):
do you know, there was Robbie Robinson, except this time
he was a Russian politician and he was calling himself
Vladimir Putin. Grandpa claims of this day that the resemblance
is striking, and with all the recent Russian hacker talk
and the history of spies which in our countries. Well,
maybe what say you? Perhaps an episode dealing with the
history of Vladimir Putin? Uh? Is it what the history
(43:07):
books say or is there more? I love your podcast,
your shows one of the first ones I found when
I started listening to them and tech stuff, and I
was so annoyed that you were the only uh, that
you were only doing videos at the time. Much love.
That's very very sweet actually in a cool story about
her grandfather. Both with Lee are Harvey Oswald and this
gentleman that may have been a spy and now runs Russia. Yeah.
(43:31):
I find this fascinating, especially because we don't often talk
about in the mainstream media. We don't often talk about
the deep state, and how former President H. W. Bush
was in charge of the CIA before becoming the president
of the US, and how Vladimir Putin was in charge
(43:54):
of the KGB. There is a famous picture of Vladimir
Putin as a photographer when Ronald Reagan, I believe visits
visits Russia one day, I'm going to maybe post that
in response, will post it somewhere on the internet. But
I really appreciate you writing it, and I'd love to
(44:14):
look into that because honestly, Ashley, the global public doesn't
know very much about Vladimir Putin's personal life. Here, just
for just for giggles between us, I'll show you guys
the picture. See there's President Reagan and they're on the
(44:36):
right in the circle. He has more hair in this picture.
It looks like a like a tourist, like a dad.
You know. He's got like a striped polo shirt on
and has a camera around his neck. It's like he's
a vacationing at Disney World, right, right, Maybe he's posing.
Is that kid's dad? That kid had a weird day.
But it's common knowledge that there have been embedded spy
(44:58):
programs in the US and Russia during the Cold War.
And I'll watch the Show of the Americans, which concerns
itself with some of that. Next shout out comes from
alex um High Conspiracy Guys. First off, I love the show.
Thanks for getting me through the work day. I have
recently been digging into your old podcast and we're listening
(45:19):
to the one about the jfk assassination. You mentioned that
there was a classified file with secrets possibly concerning this
that could be opened by the president in ten with
the inauguration in less than two weeks. I was wondering
if you have heard anything more about this or if
you think that Trump will release any of this information. Well,
if he wants to prove that Ted Cruz's dad had
something to do with it, I sure hope he unseals
(45:41):
that document. That's just my two sents, Um. I also
listened to both of your episodes on whistleblowers, which I
found very interesting. With everything going on with the election
and Russia, it would be great if you could do
another update on this info as well as update us
on the people like Edward Snowden that you had previously
talked about. Again. Love the show, Um, Alex. Great letter
(46:03):
from Alex, Thank you for writing in. We can give
a very small update on this information. So the thing
that we know now is that out of the wealth
of documentation surrounding the JFK assassination, the National Archives released
(46:24):
a list in of three thousand and a hundred, three
thousand and sixty three documents that have been fully withheld.
That's that's the way to say it. This doesn't necessarily
mean that these are all like the first alien contact arrived.
(46:46):
It wasn't a bullet that went through his head it
was a spaceship or anything like that, although that would
be really strangely cool. What this means is that I
just haven't released this stuff. We don't know what it is,
so of course you speculator from runs Rampant. The documents
were listed. They were released in response to a freedom
(47:07):
of information act from the political Outfit and a group
of other researchers and organizations. They were all collected by
the Assassination Records Review Board, and that was something that
was created by a thing called the JFK Records Act.
(47:27):
That same act, that JFK Records Act requires that all
the documents on that list of fully withheld stuff be
released by October. So October of this year is our update, Alex,
unless the next president decides to keep them classified via
executive order or something like that. So at this point
(47:48):
were saw on the wire, were several months out from
seeing what these do contain. And the National Archives when
they released this list of documents, they didn't say you
know what's in them at all. We can't emphasize that enough.
They just said, here are the things that we have
that you don't know about, which is terrible. That's like
when somebody do you ever get a text from one
(48:08):
of your friends, it's just like we need to talk.
I hate that. Just don't just send me the thing.
I will read your long text message. So our final
shout out is from Michelle m and Michelle wrote in
with an interesting question. I want to see what you
guys think of it. I want to see what you
think of it as too as well. Listeners. Michelle says, uh,
(48:33):
great show. Thank you for keeping my mind occupied while
I'm doing the kind of work that only uses the
other half of my brain parentheses. I'm a designer, I've
learned a ton, so she says, straight to it, You
guys should cover weddings. There might not be a huge
conspiracy theory in there, or maybe there is, but the
wedding industry definitely makes huge money by making women and
girls believe from a young age that they need to
(48:53):
have a beautiful event with all sorts of frills and
bells and whistles, and they need to be more beautiful
than humanly possible because it's their special day. And when
you actually look into it, most of the wedding conventions
or patriarchal or just playing archaic and meaningless. Now, for example,
brides originally carried a bouquet to mask the stench of
their poor hygiene back in the day when people stank
(49:14):
all the time, But now bouquets and flowers for for decoration,
and they're seen as a convention that the wedding industry
keeps pushing because they make so much money from people
buying hugely marked up flowers. As you may have guessed,
says Michelle, I'm engaged in planning my wedding. Well, hey,
you know what, congratulations for sure, it's huge. Congratulations Michelle.
And yet even though I know all these traditions are
(49:35):
meaningless and patriarchal and taking my money, I'm still doing them. Uh.
And she talks a little more in detail about this industry,
since she sums it up by saying, so, basically, the
wedding industry is brainwashed almost all women in this country
many others. Please tell me how they did it, because
my emotions have definitely been manipulated for profit. I've been
(49:56):
conditioned to want stupid and expensive things. I was gonna
say this are my as me of the diamonds episode,
and she mentions that right here that we've already covered
diamonds and may have covered weddings, but now I don't
believe we have in this uh, in this amount of debt.
We we have not, and it would it would be
great to get some of our colleagues in on this
to who might have more expertise. I mean, my position
(50:18):
on the whole thing is like, you can make your
wedding whatever you want it to be sure, I mean,
I think you it's easy to feel susceptible to these
pie in the sky big wedding special day scenarios, But
I mean you can have a family affair and invite
your friends and do the directive decoration yourself, or get
some crafty friends to help you and have it be
just wonderful, you know, like that's what my wedding was. Like,
(50:38):
I would say it depends on your family, because in
my experience, weddings are about the family, like appeasing the
family whatever their wishes are, more than the individual uh
couple getting married like that. We can also I just
wanted not to be too luciferian about it, but you
are not beholden to other people except for the one
(51:01):
you're marrying, right ideally, so if you want to just
elope and then take the money, you would have spent
and have an adventure around the world with someone you love.
I don't know. Maybe if I was in someone's family
and they're like, hey, we're not doing a wedding because
we're going to spend the money traveling the world, I'd
be like, that's amazing, that's great. Plus yeah, Plus it
(51:25):
means that I don't have to go somewhere and uh,
interact in a crowd. I'm all about that. I will
kick my feet up, I will write some creepy horror fiction,
and I will think of you guys. Godspeed or matt Speed,
as we often say here, and that ends our gosh,
(51:47):
it also ends our episode, but not our series. Never fear, ladies, gentlemen,
and the others amongst you. We will be returning this week.
We have a big thing in the mix. We want
to hear from you. Find us on Facebook and Twitter,
where we are conspiracy stuff. And while you're on our Facebook,
we just recently posted a question for you, which is
(52:11):
a question for suggestions about what topics we should cover
in twenty seventeen. Our best episode ideas always come from you,
so you can drop by Facebook and let us know
what you think. As we said, before you can catch
all of our car shows. It's weird that we do
have car shows on our website Stuff they don't want
(52:32):
you to know dot Com, along with every other audio
podcast we've ever done. And for those of you who
are saying poppy cock, malarkey, what buffoonery. I would never
use Facebook, don't worry. There are other ways to contact us,
besides chanting alone in a darkened room, which always works.
You can try that first. You can send us an email.
(52:53):
We are conspiracy at how stuff Works dot com
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