This is the FCB Podcast Network, a brand Mansoda day that we won't saying and we won't say all we got it? Does no one get take that away? It's gonna be okay day that we won't saying and we won't say all we got it? Does no one get tata don't don't say it's don'ta be okay? Well, Hello, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Just Listen to Yourself Plus. And today we have with us a good friend of mine and somebody who I find to be truly one of the most interesting people I've got. Andrew Malcolm. Andrew is a veteran national and foreign correspondent. He's for the News and Politics since nineteen sixty eight. He's been almost a decade. I have to say it like that because it's so long ago. Andrew. Yeah. He spent almost a decade as a communications director for the Government of Montana, then a deputy communications manager for the first G. W. Bush campaign and Laura Bush's press secretary. He's the father of three boys and the author ten non fiction books, two of which became movies. Among other posts at Red State, he writes too Malcolm on the Right weekly features national politics, columns and audio commentaries on Whatever California Scape. Malcolm is a long time Tuesday co host of The Ed Morrissey Show at HOTA dot com, and now he resides in the mountains of Tennessee with his editor wife and their stubborn border collie. Andrew, Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks, I finally made the big time, did I. Well, people who may not have heard of you after reading that resume are going to go wow, that is that is And I mean that's not even everything that Andrew Malcolm that I met years ago. That iteration of Andrew Malcolm was in La Times, writer and editor and yeah, yeah, and I started the top of the ticket conservative log there not two thousand and seven. And I, you know, I had been in newspapers for so long. I was twenty six years on the New York Times and ten on the LA Times. And I realized that I had three boys who were all born, doctor fed, raised, educated, traveled, entertained, clothed by earnings from a newspaper, and not one of them read a newspaper. So I thought, Gee, there's something else going on here. So I got involved in the early days of blogging, and I just love it and I haven't looked back. And that's how we met in the early days of blogging, and I think we really we really hit it off. So it's been a long road, but an interesting one. That's one thing I like about journalism was learning something new every day. So well, that's here I am with you. Well that's what we're going to talk about today, the road and what we learned in the road. But for those wondering what is this guy doing on my podcast? Andrew's one of my favorite people to talk to. I recorded. I helped him record his podcast over at Red State, Malcolm at the Right, which you can enjoy if you're a VIP member over at Red State, and we would the podcast only takes five minutes to record as a short, little bite size podcast, but we would have these really great conversations. You'd always you tell me stories and you just sort of tell them so casually. I was like, he's got a story for everything. Now. I guess that's what happens when you make it to your age, because you're celebrating a milestone birthday in a few days. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Big eight. Oh, I hope I can make it your last interview my voice. Have planned a big family reunion and looking forward to that so that that should be fun. Well, that it's going to be there in Tennessee. Yeah, yep, in the mountains, and we moved and we're I mean, it's just amazing. I love Tennessee. I always say I have Eastern Tennis, which is the pretty part. Mississippi is pretty on the west, but the east it mountains and all the greenery and the fall very colorful. And uh so we build a house on a cliff. So I'm sitting here right now looking out the window. Two thousand feet down is the farmland of this valley. And uh, I mean, I just I'm living the good life after a lot of travels airplanes and boats and what we're talking about road trips today. Yeah, and that's what we're talking about today, road trips because uh, Andrew is, I guess this is why you're a writer. But you you're you have a traveler's heart. You you have a story about how you've been everywhere. And I remember there were a few times when you told me some fun stories about getting on the road with your kids, and you know that road trips are something I like to do with my daughter. That's right, you took one to Denver. I think we did last year. We started the trend by going to Texas during the pandemic. I pulled her out of school and we did. I was just so I didn't know what to do, you know. I was sort of beside myself watching her languish, and so I thought, I know a lot of people in Texas. How about we just go on a road trip and see who will let us sleep on their couch. We did two week We just aimlessly randomly, and it was it was it was so much fun. And this is why I want to talk to you, Andrew, because you have so much experience, so many experiences period. But one of the things that was amazing about it is that at the time, she was thirteen, and she didn't she didn't want to go, you know, she was like, what are we what are we doing? We're not we have no purpose, We're not really going anywhere, and and and she was selling a lot of the ride. She didn't talk a lot, and I think she was like annoyed with me, and I was like, what am I doing? This is this is so dumb, Like she's gonna hate me, and she's not having fun at all. And and when we got back, I mean we were home two hours. She was like, I can't wait to go in the next trip. Yeah. Yeah, Well that happens with teenagers. Yeah. Well yeah. And I guess a lot of looking back on it now that you bring it up, I guess a lot of them were when the boys were younger. But uh, and we took some with my parents, but usually, like you your daughter with my parents. When I was little, it was going somewhere, and uh, it was. It was this is a long long time ago, is it, like in the first ten years or so after World War Two? And in those days, of course, there was there was no interstate until the Interstates started in nineteen fifty three. And I have a fun story about how they came about, if you want. But we would take back roads, that's all there were were back roads US highways and the even ones, even numbered ones go east and west and the odd ones go north and south. And but that was the same with the old highways. Highway six would go across the US and Highway two. And so I enjoyed it. I was the only child of two only children, so we didn't have a lot of family to visit or schmooze with, and I would sit in the backseat of the car and my dad. My mother would always have a couple of rolls of life savers, you know, all the multi flavored ones, and she would offer them and we would take. My Dad and I would take turns being first, and somehow every time he picked first, he got the cherry one, which was my favorite at the at the at the cherry end of the life they were rule. And whenever I picked, I got the green one, which was my least favorite. Yeah yeah, And I never could understand it. My dad would just laugh and laugh and he actually often chewed his Life Savers and I said, well, that's not fair, because then you'll get more of them, and he said, right, yeah exactly. So he chew it and he'd get another one, and I'm sucking it and I took me a longer time. So um, the road trips were fun time times. And the the thing I looking back on it, that I liked the most was I had my parents' total attention, especially my dad. You know, he was wearing in those days that was short sleeves shirts. Oh my gosh, my dad in a short sleeved shirt, no tie, no jacket, no fedora. I mean it was. He was strange looking and he always drove. And in those days there were no except for Howard Johnson's there were no chains. Those came with the Interstates, makes sense, And so every region had a guide and it was a Duncan Hines guide. Did you ever hear Duncan Hines? Oh yeah, yeah, Okay, Well Duncan Hines now Procter and Gamble pretends like he makes cake makes Yeah, yeah, Duncan Hines. Back in I guess it was the twenties and thirties, he was a traveling salesman for American greeting cards. So he would drive all around I guess the Midwest mainly, and stay overnight like traveling salesman, and in hotels, and he would take notes on where he would eat and where he would stay, and then at Christmas he would send out a long newsletter to family and friends recommending Maud's cookery in Shelton, Indiana, or wherever he had been selling American greeting cards. Well, friends said, well, why don't you should make a book out of it? So he did, and they became very popular because there were no guides, you know. I mean, you know, you drive on these local highways, you're always going through towns. There's no place. There's no Howard Johnson's, but there was no place that you could trust to eat or that you knew about. So he would have this guy that they were, you know, they had the really good meat loaf, and the prices were reasonable at this level. And my dad had ruled that we would eat we would only eat at places where the food sign lighted part was bigger than the liquor sign. And so my mother, you know, in the mid afternoon, my mother would pull out and my dad would say, well, I think we're going to be near Dunkirk. So she would pull out the guide and look up Dunkirk and we would sort of aim for that restaurant. Well, So Duncan Hines was an integral part of our life, and we had a whole bunch of excuse me, we had a whole bunch of Duncan Hines guides in the glove compartment, which were called the glove compartments, by the way, excuse me, which were called glove compartments because that's where in the old days of open cars you put the gloves when you stop somewhere. I had an uncle, uncle Jim, who was He had a packard from the nineteen thirties and he kept it in meticulous shape. He would come out when I would be at my grandparents and this is in Canada, in the country, rural Ontario. He would come out to visit his brother he lived in the city. And he would get out of the car. Now this is a packer that you know, not a modern car, but closed. They had windows that you could put up and all that. And he would get out of his car. He had a driving coat on, just like the old day, and he would take off his soft gray leather gloves and put them nicely together and put them on the seat and put his on the seat. And he would be Sunday, so he'd be dressed up in a tie, in a suit and and we'd have a hug and um I, I just loved the idea of that car. He would go and let me sit in it and I and I pretend drove all over the place, um and uh. And I never once bumped into anything. Um uh. So we would go on these road trips and as I said, we would usually be going somewhere. But later in my life, UM, I got the idea with when my kids were young and school wasn't involved, where we would go somewhere, you know. I mean we would have a general idea that we're going out, We're going out to Wyoming, uh, and so we would wander along the way and see things. Um and there was a joy to me anyway, I'm not sure about my wife, but there would be a joy where you wake up in the morning and you didn't know where you were going to be that night. And I just found that to be so exciting. And if you saw a place like driving across Texas one time, I saw one of those big like oil tanks, I mean really big building size oil tanks, but it had a door. So I stopped and went in and it was this huge oil tank full of old antiques and rural memorabilia and yeah, so I spent the entire afternoon there with with my family. May have gotten bored at one point, but I just going around look at it all these old signs from the twenties and thirties. And the big drink at the time was whizz and the soft drink, and so I didn't know, Wow, I didn't know where we were going to be at night, but I didn't know where where we were going to be during the day, and what we would be doing, what we would see. And you'd see some you know, I guess in Kansas. I never got to it, but there's a giant ball of strings. Yeah, I've seen it. Yeah. Yeah. And then there'd be places where you could go and see um fossils in the cliffs. And there's a place and I recommend this to people. It's it's amazing. Of course, I was a history major, so I'm fascinated by this stuff. But the Western, the American Frontier, and you remember the Oregon Trail. Well, there is a place called Guernsey, Wyoming. It's in the southeastern corner of Wyoming, and you can go there and take a walk up a small hill and there are seriously are the ruts in the sandstone from the wagon wheels of the covered wagons. Wow, there were so many of thousands of them going across the country, sort of tending to the northwest. Guernsey was fifteen miles out from Fort Sheridan, which in those days there was trouble with Indians, and so they would stay at the fort and then fifteen miles would be one day they get to Guernsey, which I don't know that it was a town at the time. I don't think it was. But there was a big cliff on the I think it's the Platte River, and there's a cave as too many bats in it for me, but there's there's where they would they'd have fresh water park the wagons, let the horses graze, and they have their backs up against a big cliff and they drew or scratched graffiti into the cliff and you can still see it hera graffiti from the eighteen fifties and eighteen sixties, and there'd be a scratch like all very crude, but a scratch like Mackenzie Brothers eighteen fifty nine, just before the Civil War. These people were making their way across the country and about a mile on the next day, the mile out from Guernsey, as I said, it wasn't a town. Then they'd go through a narrow place where all the wagons had to go through this narrow thing between rocks, and they wore ruts in the rock about this deep and you can go stand in them, and you know, imagine what was, what happened, what their dreams were, where they were going, how their lives turned out. And this is when you know the front as I said, that was wild, and yeah it is. And I always recommend Guernsey to people. You go and you get a sense, it's not hard to get to. You get a sense of wow, what this country is and where we've been. So I don't think I'm afraid that a lot they don't teach history, and I guess they don't even teach cursive writing anymore, but they don't teach history, and so Americans think, well, here we are and life started with the Reagan administration. Well you know, no it didn't. There were two hundred years before that, and it's full of fascinating stories and things that you can come to understand. I recommend this is not a road trip, but I recommend a trilogy of books by Daniel Burstein B O O R ST I am. And he wrote trilogy UH called the Americans the Colonial Experience, the Americans the Democratic Experience, that the Americans the National Experience. And he's a social historian, so he hardly talked about politics or presidents or anything like that. He talks about how institutions got started. Where did Mother's Day come from? Where did it was? Originally was called Decoration Day, but now it's Memorial Day because the Confederate mothers just started um decorating graves at the end of spring, the graves of any soldier from the Civil War, and President Lincoln liked the idea and so he made it a formal holiday. Um and Boston for instance. I'll tell you that this is fascinating to me. Now now everyone's understanding why I had Andrew on this podcast because the wealth I haven't. I haven't said a word. He's just information, writing down everything you said. Hey, y'all, this is Alie Michelle. I'm a conservative social media influencer that has been censored by big tech. So I broke away from the restrictions and started a podcast called pillow Talk with Alie Michelle. My show is a space to have real conversations about the issues that impact our everyday lives without the fear of being canceled by the big tech tyrants. Subscribe to pillow Talk with Alie Michelle and FCB podcast on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you getch podcasts. That's Ali a l I I come check on my show, I'll see you there. Well, you're the you're you're the host, so you tell me to show up. No, I've been writing I'm going to gern I'm definitely going to Guernsey. I've got Duncan Hinds written down, and I've written down Daniel Boorstein books. Yeah. Oh absolutely. And by the way, if people want these books, there's a wonderful website called ABE Books Abe like Abraham Lincoln AbeBooks dot com and they have all there. It's the main website for independent bookstores, so it's not like a chain, and they have all these eclectic books that are out of print, including mine. People wanted to go there at search Andrew h welcome, they would find mine. They're all like two three four dollars a piece. And but you're you're helping little bookstores, you know, in um not Guernsey, but in little small towns books guys having bookstores, and they could put their their inventory online and you can get these Daniel Bursten books. I went and I got three sets of the three books, and I gave a set to each of my sons because I wanted them to read about about their country on One of the stories that Boston tells was about a railroad station agent in Wisconsin, or maybe it was Minnesota, but anyway, it was Midwestern railroad station agent. And in those days no FedEx, of course, and there was no rural delivery, so packages went on the railroad. While packages would arrive, people would come and get them. And there was one package that nobody ever came for. So six months went by and this guy agent took the box and opened it up and it was full of watches. Now why would you want watches? Well, here we go. Nobody cared what time it was in the frontier days, because you know, you could have a clock in the saloon and it could say twelve in your town, and the next town at the same clock at the same time would say twelve fifty. It didn't matter. It didn't matter. It was by the sun when it got dark it was kind undown. Yeah, yeah, you didn't know. You didn't have to know what time it was. But then the trains came, and trains need schedules, and if you're going to and if you're going to catch a train it comes at twelve, you're going to need to know what time it is. And so he got the idea of working for the railroad. Well, so he put them on he started selling them. They sold, all of them sold just like that. So he said, well, he ordered some more watches and they sold. So then he started. He quit his job. He started riding trains and selling watches to people that everybody needed to watch. They didn't have it in those day, pocket watches and mainly I guess, and the women had lockets for watches. Well, um, this was so successful that he he quit doing that traveling and he started a little business. And the little business became a big business. And the railroad station agent's name was Alva Sears, Sears Roebuck Sears, and he took up. He took a partner, which or Sears Roebuck was the original Amazon, and he took a partner Roebuck, and they started a mail order business. And then long came rural free delivery. I think it was nineteen ten, so people in the country could get mail and they could You could even order a house. You ordered the parts for the house from Sears Roebuck, the entire house a craft it Sears craft House I think it was called, and it would come come to your place and you could put the house together, but you could order everything. And when the catalog got out of Day eight, it became the toilet paper in the outhouse. You just rip off a page and use it for what you had to use it for. So, so there's a lot of Sears catalogs buried underground and across the country. Well, anyway, those are the kind of stories that Daniel Boorston tells about how America. Yeah, that how America became America. I mean you where did chain restaurants? Well, if you couldn't travel across the country, you didn't need chain restaurants, right, So now we're back up a little bit. I'll tell you the interstate story. Yeah, in World War One, logistics and transportation was a terrible problem. You may remember during the war, the French head army had no transportation, so they had the commandeer the taxis from the streets of Paris to take troops to the front. It was, I don't you know, fifty sixty miles outside Paris. Well, the Americans got into the war late, but the army said, we need to work on this, and they were thinking about domestic defense, and so they got an army colonel and they sent him on a little mini convoy across the country and nineteen nineteen the year after the war ended, and he was taking notes. And in those days the roads were largely dirt, you know, so if it rained somewhere, it was all mud and you get stuck. But the directions you get would be while you go maybe two hours and there's a big oak tree, and you take that road to the left. That those were how you got across the country if you wanted to go across the country and not take the railroad. So he went all the way across the country, and then he wrote a big report and he suggested that there'd be national highways that for defense purposes, because you need to get troops if a country a country was invaded. And the Army looked at it and said all that that would be too expensive, and they put it on the shelf. Nineteen twenty, nineteen fifty three, Dwight Eisenhower became president. He was that army colonel from World War One, and he remembered his report, and he of course it was outdated by then, but he got the idea for national system of US highways that could be used for defense and you'll notice that long stretches of the interstate began in nineteen fifty three changed the economy, enabled growth in places that never could have growth before because they could get parts and ship out their products and farm products. He parts of the interstate are straight, very straight. For runways. They built them up for a highway. It's what it is to be for defense purposes, for the runways. So every movie, every action movie, that lands an airplane on an interstate in an emergency is actually, historically they're being accurate. That is a lot of what the interstate is built for. That's right, that's right. Well, and of course that's that's what they used to sell Congress on was it. Well, it's for national defense. And then of course it just grew and grew and grew and still just like the original US highways, odd numbers north and south generally, even numbers east and west generally. And so if you take Interstate eighty, it's the gold or not the Golden Gate, it's the Oakland Bay Bridge, and it's the George Washington Bridge, and you can go on a super highway the entire distance. Well, if you can travel that far, you don't need duncan Hines because the that and this is what Worston points out. The ability to travel created the need for restaurants that were familiar McDonald's, Burger, King and all these, and so they enabled them that you wouldn't have to look them up. You knew what a McDonald's burger was. And McDonald's was actually a real restaurant. In Riverside, just outside Los Angeles, was two brothers. They had a restaurant, and Ray Crock who founded McDonald's the chain. He sold milkshake machines and he would go to McDonald's and the business was booming and he liked their hamburgers, and so he bought the name and made this international franchise. Um, well that's the sort. This is where yeah, go ahead, no you uh no, this is where I This is what I love about the idea of a road trip is stop and you see little pieces of America. And when I'm with my daughter, although she does find this annoying, but if there are markers like historical markers, or if I see a sign for you know, this historical house or the I'll be like, oh, let's let's go, let's pull over, let's let's see here's here's a ridiculous story about our road trip through Texas. Um. We we were driving, um, I can't even remember where we were driving now and through the oil fields and um. But there was a sign for um like a crater, a meteor crater and think, no, this was in Texas. Is some craters. We were driving there was a sign for it. Go see the X y Z crater. It's created by meteorites. And however, many million years ago, I was like, great, let's pull over, because remember this is the pandemic. A lot of stuff is closed. We're not like orring, you know, I think, um the I think NASA Museum or whatever in Euston was open. But it was a crazy experience. So anywhere that seemed outside that was like outside, I would be like, great, let's go that we can look at a crater. Well, so we pull off and we pull onto this dirt road and we're we're driving down this dirt road, driving forever in the middle of nowhere. But the signs are pointing us crater, this crater, crater this way, and you're not gonna believe this. The crater was closed. They closed, they closed the crater for the pandemic. So we got to. Once we got a little down the road, we can see an information center, a small center, and then a fenced off area and everything was closed. And the center was closed and you couldn't get I suppose if I took a detour long enough, if we just got out on foot and walked long enough, we could have found the lace. But they had blocked other like this closed for the pandemic. I'm like, what, how do you close a crater for coronavirus? Yeah, you got to wear a mask in the crater. Well, you know, you know the big crater which is in forget the name of it, but it's in Arizona and you can visit there, and it was online. Just broke me up. I saw earlier this year an aerial picture of the crater and the visitor center next to it, and the caption of they're clever. There's some funny people on Twitter and said, look how close the meteor came to the visitors center. So those those are the kinds of of well, it's serendipity, and you know, we don't have a lot of serendipity in our lives. And I think modern people I like it, and of course I came from another era where you don't know exactly what you're fine. I mean, if you if you're searching online, you need some fairly specific search terms. Um. If you're in life and you're enjoying yourself, part of the joy is not knowing, you know, and you can go on these roads now you want to. I would recommend you have a destination in mind or a place where you're going to go and turn around. But that doesn't that doesn't mean you have to get there. And I recommend you know most of us, including me, have satellite radio in their car. But if you turn off the satellite radio and you use the search function, you get and you have to change every thirty or forty miles. Would you get the local radio stations and you hear what the local news is? You know who passed away? Yesterday? I went and I did a story for The New York Times once on the radio station in Charles City, Iowa. And it had it had a tornado a few years before, and it was in the studio was in an old hardware store, and the disc jockey or the news guy, they had a desk in the front window. So you could walk along main street and you look in and here they are. And I forgot what was the case. It was Charles at KCCHA. I think it was UM and they'd be given the weather, and I loved that. I sat with them and I wrote about it for a day. The guy would say, it's twelve o'clock in downtown Charles City and cloudy. Looking out the window, that's the weather. Will look out the window, Yeah, look out the window to see what the weather was and what they would be announcing. They would have corndy tassling. Uh, not parties, but work works sessions on the weekends during the late corn in season. UM and the storm. The course, weather is a big deal there because it controls their whole economy. So I would final thing. I spent a day with UM on one of my road trips, a day with at a holiday inn. I forgot where it was. It was New Mexico or Arizona, twenty four hours in the life of a holiday and in the summertime. And you know, in those days it were still smoking, So how many ashtrays got stolen that day? I stood at the front desk and people would have reservations, but of course reservations unless you guarantee them they end at six. So some people would come in at five fifty five and they say, no, I'm so we're full. But at six o two they come in and the same people could get a room because they're guarantee. So there's a little trick when you're traveling. I learned that one I spent twenty four hours in a gas I did this. This was a gimmick I used in Lander, Wyoming in a Conico gas station and the people coming through from Yellowstone or going to Yellowstone and the little stories or big stories and went and I spend a day at Mount Rushmore and I was kind of not kind of it was very moving. First of all, I don't know if everybody, well everybody should go. At some point, you get out of the car in the parking lot, you walk up this little hill and you come out in their trees, and there it is. I mean, it's it's stunning. The scale of it is just stunning. And I would kind of turn my back to it and watch people as they saw it for the first time and then talk with them, and you know, it's a simple thing, but appreciating what we have. There's an awful lot of time. We think we spend these days on what we don't have. You know, I want this, I want that. You need to do this, you need to do that. But I think it's important to realize and remember and treasure what we already have and what those who came before us. Oh, hey, the Oregon trail people. But yeah, I can't wait to go see that. I'm going to go Google. You can google Oregon Trail ruts and you can see what she was. I mean, it's not exciting unless you know a little bit of history and you go wow. I'm like you, I do find it exciting. Hey, y'all, this is Ali Michelle. I'm a conservative social media influencer that has been censored by big tech. So I broke away from the restrictions and started a podcast called pillow Talk with Ali Michelle. My show is a space to have real conversations about the issues that impact our everyday lives without the fear of being canceled by the big tech tyrants. Subscribe to pillow Talk with Alie Michelle and FCB pod cast on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you getch podcasts. That's Ali a l I I come check on my show I'll see you there. Hey, y'all, this is Ali Michelle. I'm a conservative social media influencer that has been censored by big tech. So I broke away from the restrictions and started a podcast called pillow Talk with Alie Michelle. My show is a space to have real conversations about the issues that impact our everyday lives without the fear of being canceled by the big tech tyrants. Subscribe to pillow Talk with Alie Michelle and FCB podcast on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you getch podcasts. That's Ali a l II. Come check on my show. I'll see you there. You said something earlier, you said you when you travel, you find these little stories. Basically, you find these little tidbits. It's America, and and you love the idea of waking up and not knowing what's what's ahead of you in a good way because sometimes that's a story feeling that purpose. But one of the one of the things that I that I love about traveling is that you find, especially traveling in the US, you these are your people. These are our people, right, these are our ancestors, or these are our neighbors, or these are our fellow citizens, and yet they live or have lived such different lights, and you get to have a tiny peek into it, a little tiny peek into the window. I mean when I was when I was younger. I still do this. Actually I'm sure you do too. But be driving through an unfamiliar area and I'll look at the houses and I'll think, well, I wonder what their life is like. I wonder what kind of life they're living. Is there a dad, does he come home? Is there someone making dinner? Are they stressed? Or what's life like in this tiny spot? And you, like my daughter and I, we on our last road trip we did Denver and back to California, drove through Utah in the middle of the night. I had to. I had planned on driving through, but I had to stop. I was tired, and so stopped in this little town in Utah. I saw it coming up on my GPS and coming into this town, there are signs, just billboard sign after billboard sign advertising um multifamily single building, multifamily homes, or a doctor for your all of your families, or a lawyer that will help you plan estates for all of your families. And it was like, oh, we're in polygamy territory. And it's comment that the signs were everywhere, and it was night, and I was like, I don't know what I have. This makes me feel weird. I told my daughter, I, let's get out of here in the morning as soon as we can. But when we woke up, suddenly the sun came up and the whole town looked different, and it was paint and and you could see you could see the groups of apartment buildings that were clearly from multiple families. And then we went to the Starbucks and we interacted with some of the people there, and and then we drove away. You know, we left the polygamy on behind. But I know, but it's left the little piece of piece of it with you. Yeah, a memory that you now you're sharing with. Yeah, this is not a different country. It's not your something something I think people will find. It's certainly here in Tennessee. Is it once you get away from the big metropolitan areas. I guess that's redundant metropolitan area is big, but it's such a yeah. Uh. The people in small town America, they suspect the best until proven wrong, whereas in the big cities people expect the worst. So there's no eye contact, you're doing your phone, you're crossing the street, and in a small town, you don't do that. I just posted on Twitter a few days ago my little town as the town square has put up pictures of all the high school seniors graduating. The senior picture of every senior on different light poles all around the square with their first name Ashland, class of nineteen twenty or twenty twenty three. And you know the idea that that's important, that maybe as far as they go and education, which is great, but it's a marking positive achievement, and lots of times in America we only hear about the crimes, the bad things that go on. And if you stop for a minute and you're looking to think, these kids, presumably about eighteen or seventeen, they're graduating, They've they've met all the requirements for the community to graduate from high school, and now they go on to who knows lives. And I've stayed in touch with some of the people I wrote about. I wrote about one time in the seventies the healthiest American and turned out I had a big report from the American Medical Association, and I extrapolated what all the health qualities were. And it came down to a teenage boy in the Upper Midwest, and so I went and I found a family and Uh it was the Fitzsimmons family in good Thunder, Minnesota, and I spent a couple of days with them, went to football practice with Dick in high school and they had five sons who all made linebacker. So they the team gave the mother a plaque celebrating that she produced so many linebackers for the high school team. UM. So we were we were picking up bales of hay and I worked with them out there and they had a hog farm, and I've sort of kept in touch with him and UH and the Alder brothers and they became this huge, very successful um pork producers with many farms. UM and UH sadly now the boy UH that I wrote about, he's older and he's got a form of cancer that UH that he's fighting. So UH is sort of like tracking history, but in a minute in a minute form, and you feel better. I think you feel wholer about the country and about our lives here. Sometimes these days I did one of my you mentioned the Malcolm on the right audio posts, I did one just the other day about why do we all feel so upset and disoriented? And they kind of trying to trace everybody with their own reasons, but trying to trace the reasons for that internal turmoil that so many of us feel. But there are ways to counter that, and one of them is to celebrate what a great place we have by actually visiting it. You know, you don't have to go far. You just you know, one hundred miles, two hundred miles even on like Chicar will go that far and yeah, and uh you stop. You know, I would eat in the diners, not the burger kings. Uh and uh, I listened. I used the search function on my radio, and it would find a new station every I said, every thirty or forty miles, and they'd be talking about their their daily lives and who passed and uh, when the service would be where, and when the visiting would be uh and it I don't know, it just it helps me feel grounded. Um. Of course, my kids grow up and once they get into their teens, they've got um camps and sports camps and teams and and and all that, and it kind of makes it more difficult. So but I'm glad I did it when they were little, and tell you the truth, I still did it. This is, to my mind, the ideal job. I had a boss who would on the New York Times and we would say, Okay, I want you to do do a road trip this summer. So I would rent a station wagon to be just like everybody else. I'd be an suv if it was today, but rent a station wagon and just set out. And I had some general ideas that I was going to go to Mount Rushmore and I would probably go to a gas station and hang out and so on, but um, just to cruise. And I even made a series of story, or not a series of a story about a series of visits I was. My wife said it was a phoniest excuse to gorge myself. I would. I was in search of the perfect cheeseburger and so that that enabled me to eat cheeseburgers all across the Upper Midwest. And and then I wrote a story and Uh, one of them was in UM. I was in the South Dakota. I forget where it was. Uh, And I went back there a couple of years later, and they had a big blow up of the story, recommending that I had recommended in New York, Andrew H. Malcolm had recommended our cheeseburger and our butter scotch pie. I never had butter scotch pie. And I said, whatever you eat, you need to wash it down with a big piece of butter scotch pie. Oh wow, Andrew, I'm gonna I'm gonna have to stop you here. Yeah, that's okay. One more story, Oh yes, please, great, Okay, one more little story. Okay. I was in I was in month going. We lived in Montana for a while, but before we lived there, I was there on another one of these road trips and uh. We were driving down on a back road and along the side of the road was a guy looked like a cowboy riding a horse and leading a pack horse. And oh, isn't that nice. He's on his own little road trip. And go lead a minute, and I pulled over. I couldn't believe I didn't think of it as soon as I saw him. I pulled over and it was a guy. He didn't get off his horse, but he talked with me for a while. And it was this guy actually from Montana, I think, or Wyoming, who had always wanted to not go across America, but to go from the bottom to the top of the United States. So he had rented a trailer and he took his two horses and he went down to the Mexican border, and then he was spending the entire summer riding along the roadside back roadsides to Canada. And he wasn't that far away when I found him. And he's there, and he was, you know, he was. Sometimes he would sleep in the fields it was summer, and sometimes people would see him and they'd start up a conversation. Then they'd invite him to dinner. But he could cook his own a little camp stove, and he and he was loving it. And he was loving it because guess what, he didn't know where he was going to be that night. He was taking them. He was looking at things. For instance, he'd look and he'd see that all the old houses had front porches, but no one was on them. Guess why. Air conditioning. Air Conditioning sent everybody inside so they didn't sit out in the front porch and talk to people walking by anymore. So at the end of our conversation, and this is a good ending for our conversation, At the end of our conversation. I said, you know, it's just wonderful what you're doing. I admire you so much, and so many people I think would would envy you and would like to travel like you do. And he looked at me and he looked down at me. Was on the horse. He looked down at me and he said, mound up the Trail is why. And to me that encapsulates why I like road trips and why I was so excited to come on your show and talk a little bit about it. Mound Up the Trail is why. I couldn't think of a better note to end on. I mean, I feel like we could have done it. We could do a whole other hour on this top. Well I'm still here, no, I mean for another time. Hopefully I'll make eighty one here. Let's just focus on eighty right now. And I feel like you're in a good position to get there, so yeah, yeah, man, this is a nice way to cap You made me think of a lot of memories I hadn't thought of for a long time, and it's it's great fun to savor them back. You know, In the end, the Kira all riches, houses, travel, whatever, In the end, all any of us have our memories. And I think even though your daughter was grumpy, she's going to remember that road trip with you and savor and savor that memory. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. You're so right, Andrew. Thank you so much. And I think dealing with the passing of my father and my aunt this month, I've came home to California thinking the same thing. You know what all you know looking at all the stuff in my dad's house. But it didn't matter, It didn't make a difference. I've got lots of stuff to stress over, but there's so much beauty around me, and I can't take any of it with me, Like you say, only the memories. I want to encourage everybody to get out there this summer, have an adventure. You might think that you aren't worthy of an adventure, Andrew. I think a lot of people these days feel fear or the fear of the unknown, and they don't want to experience something that could lead to an awkward or uncomfortable situation. But road trips are where you get to know America. And this is a great country with amazing people and stories in it, and you can't see it if you don't get out so I want to I want to encourage you to take andrew suggestion, even if it's fifty miles one hundred miles. You don't have to go across the country. Pick a place you've never a town you'd never been. I live in California. There's plenty of towns I've never been through in the state, and go explore Andrew before let you go. You know, I think I think people will find might be surprising to them that people are in those places that they might visit are very open and friendly. Right, yeah, you don't. You you might carry an urban suspicion or concern about the unknown, but they don't, you know. I mean, they're living a very nice, peaceful, innocent life and you're passing through it, and they're interested in you. So I agree with Kire. I recommend give it, give it a shot, and I think you'll I think you'll go away thinking, you know, I'm going to do this again. I hope so well, everybody. If you have a story of a road trip experience that you had that sort of changed you, go ahead and feel free to write to me Jailed t Y at ProtonMail dot com, or if you want to respond to something that Andrew said if he if he triggered a memory, or you have a question for him that I can pass on jail Ty at ProtonMail dot com. Of course you can find me on Twitter at real Cura Davis. Don't forget to like and subscribe to this podcast. Andrew. Tell everybody how they can find out more about you. Well, I'm I'm on Twitter and I have pretty often have pretty good conversations with followers there. We can think there's some one hundred and thirty odds something a thousand of us at AH Malcolm A h M A L C O l M. I'm also on Facebook A Malcolm um and uh, I'm on Instagram with I think Andrew H Malcolm tot something like that. I don't look myself up that much, but I'd love to hear from people, and I'm and I'm hoping that Kiro will pass along the comments that folks send in Thank you. I will, of course, all right, thank you everybody, until we talk again, don't forget. Every once in a while, just stop and listen to yourself. A braid of Lord my soda day that we won't said, and we won't say all we gotta does no one get take tatto and dude bathe, it's gonna be okay. A braid of Lord my soda day that we won't say, and we won't say all we gotta does no one get take tatto and you don't say it's gonna be okay. This has been a presentation of the FCBT podcast network, where real talk lifts. Visit us online at FCBT podcasts dot com.
