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Hey, everybody. We are coming to a town ostensibly near you, so punitively see us.

That's right. May 29th, we'll be in Boston, really Medford, Massachusetts. The next night, we're going to go down to Washington, DC, and then scooch back up to New York City at town hall on May 31st.

Yeah. If you're one of those people who likes to plan way far in advance, then you can go ahead and get tickets for our shows in August. We're going to start out where, Chuck?

We're going to be in Chicago, August seventh, Minneapolis, august eighth, then Indiana, Annapolis for the very first time on August ninth, and then we're going to wrap it up in Durham, North Carolina, and right here in Atlanta on September fifth and September seventh.

Yeah. You can get all the info you need and all the ticket links you need by going to stuffyoushouldknow. Com and hitting that tour button, or you can also go to linktree/sysklive. We'll see you guys this year.

Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too. We're just making it our own way, grooving on down the road, easing on down, easing on down the Our Ode. Thumbs out? Yeah, with our thumbs out and our chest puffed and our, I don't know, standing on our titty toes. That all makes this stuff you should know, by the way.

Yeah, can we shout What about that great book that a lot of this is called from?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? No. What great book then?

Jack Reid wrote a book called Roadside Americans, colon The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation. I bought an e-book. I actually read a lot of that thing.

Yeah. How is it?

It's really good. I mean, it seems like the book on hitchhiking in the United States.

That's really great because I ran across a lot of other stuff, not books, but articles that have been written over the decades. There are some really interesting, helpful, authoritative writings on hitchhiking out there. So I'm sure if that guy had the nerve to write an entire book about it, it was probably pretty good.

Yeah, it was good. And I guess we should say that hitchhiking is... This feels like one of those where we would just breeze right into it.

Yeah.

But we should say The way that hitchhiking is when you stand on the side of a road, you may hold a sign that says Akron or Bust, but the traditional, and we'll talk about the thumb in a minute, but the traditional way is to hold the old thumb out. Then someone eases off and says, Where are you heading, buddy? You say, I'm heading to Akron. You going that way? And he says, No, but hop in. And then you get killed.

It's pretty much a part for the course, yeah.

Yeah, it's hitching a ride. It's grabbing a ride. I figured everyone knew that, but you never know.

Yeah. There was one flaw in your story, Chuck. No one's headed to Akron. Everybody's leaving Akron. If you wanted a ride out of Akron, I'm sure it'd be very easy to catch one.

So then your sign would just say, Anywhere.

Anywhere but here.

Oh, man, poor Akron.

We should talk about the origin of the term hitchhiking, too, because there's a lot of competing stories for where the term hitchhiking came from, and I think I found the real one.

Yeah, I'm not so sure about that, but go ahead.

Well, let's start with the first one. There was a 1978 American Motorist magazine article that said, Everybody shut up. It all dates back to the Old West, and hitchhiking was a technique, a method for two people to share one horse, and it went like such.

Yeah.

I haven't explained it yet. I just set you up to explain it.

I'm happy for you to explain this part.

Well, I was going to make- Because I don't buy this one either. I don't buy this one either. I was going to make a horse walking sound while you explain it, but okay. So basically, you have two people with one horse. One person rides the horse, they take it to a predetermined spot and tie it up, and they start walking. And eventually, the other person who started walking from the same spot that the other person started riding from comes upon the horse that's tied up. They get on the horse and they start riding to the next predetermined spot, probably passing the person walking on the way. And then the person walking, catches up to the horse and so on and so forth. And the beauty of it, too, is the horse gets to rest in between rides as well. It sounds like a great idea. And I guess hitching the horse to a tree or something, that's where the term hitchhike came from. Not convinced by this one, but I think it's a great story.

Yeah, I'm not either. That sounds like some demented relay race.

It is. All right, you want to move on to the one I think it is?

Go ahead, because I'm not so sure about this either.

Okay, I think it was a 1966 Sports Illustrated long form article on hitchhiking that was written by Janet Graham, a veteran seasoned hitchhiker. And she made an off-handed reference, jokingly, about how people look down on hitchhikers, so much so that the definition of hitching is to move with jerks, making it sound like you're traveling along with jerks, other hitchhikers. But there's a kernel of truth in there. The word hitch to hitch means to move along in short, sudden movements, like how you scoot a chair up to a table, right? So you're moving by jerks, and jerks are short, sudden movements. So that's hitching. And it makes sense if you look at the entire ride, you're hiking. That's the whole walk. But in between, it's punctuated by short periods in a car that gets you further along, the hitch part. So you're hitch, hiking.

Another great story.

Well, okay, Mr. Smarty Pants, what's the word hitchhiking from?

I'm not really sure. I just know that I go with the Oxford English Dictionary because I think they are superior researchers, and they have it dated back to the term, at least in 1923, even though obviously people were hitchhiking before 1923. But the whole thumb thing, in 1927, at least, or at least that far back, they called hitchhikers thumb pointers, which I think is pretty fun.

But note that it's in parentheses, or not parentheses, quotes, which indicates that the writer did not believe that the reader would know what they were talking about.

Yeah, probably. I think so. But it's interesting, the history of hitchhiking, because the people that hitchhiked and why they did it and how it was viewed has really morphed a lot over the decades in the United States. And in the 1920s, When it first got going, it was not like hitchhiking today. It was a lot of sometimes affluent young people, like college students who would be like, I want to go down to Palm Beach, and I go to school in Syracuse, use. And so I can just put my thumb out and get a ride. And it was a pretty safe thing to do for a long time, even though it was safe, though. There were people from the very beginning that were like, Maybe you shouldn't do this. And early reasons were less like, It's dangerous for you and more like, Hey, if you pick someone up, you might get sued or something, or at least be responsible if you get in a wreck with someone in your car that you don't know.

Yeah, and apparently, trucking companies eventually, by mid-century, had banned their drivers from picking up hitchhikers for that very reason because they were on the hook in a lot of states. Totally. But it makes sense that hitchhiking really started around the '20s because that's the very beginning of the time when people started to have cars. So the whole idea behind it was like, Hey, I'm being adventurous and young. You have a car? Give me a ride for a little bit. And there was just the novelty of the whole thing, of having a car and then also picking up just some random person. It went well together because the whole thing was fairly new.

Yeah, for sure. The idea of the original warnings being more about the legalities of being the driver, there was also talk of like, Hey, if you start doing this, next thing you know, it's that slippery slope thing. It will lead to a life of crime or something. You'll see that this is a big argument from certain people in this country ever since hitchhiking started was like, this is just one step away from begging you for money and living on the street.

Yeah, and smoking marijuana cigarettes and becoming a pot fiend.

Yeah, jazz cigarettes.

Right. So that was, like you said, the original version was just adventurous and novel and usually young, white, middle class, typically in the '20s. In the '30s, hitchhiking, which had already been established as a thing, became a viable method of transportation for people who were down on their luck. And because so many people were down on their luck, hitchhiking actually gained a measure of respectability during that period because there was this the whole idea of people who are fortunate enough to own a car helping out the less fortunate because we're all going through this together, right? The thing is, there were also plenty of people that were considered hobos and tramps who were viewed by the public at large as not really wanting to work. So if you were a hitchhiker and you were trying to move to the next town to look for work, you were generally considered like an outstanding person trying to do whatever they could to make an honest living, but you had to differentiate yourself. And oftentimes, you would dress as clean-cut, maybe wearing a suit and a hat, anything you could to basically stand out and say, I'm not like these scumbags.

I actually want a job.

You know that expression, dress for the job you want, not for the Job You Have? Yes. I think that was like dress for the Ride You Want and not for the Ride You Have, which is zero rides.

Exactly. I think you're 100% right with that.

Yeah. So that era, the 1930s, like you said, society didn't look down upon it so much. There was even a poll in 1938 by the Institute of Public Opinion that said 43% of Americans viewed hitchhiking favorably. If you were to take that poll today, I can't imagine how low that number would be.

The latest I saw was a UK number, and it was in the 2010s, and it was down to 9%.

No, they never liked it over there, though.

No, but it It was still fairly popular, even though publicly people claimed it to dislike it as a whole.

Like, bollocks to that.

Right. That's what they said.

Once you got to World War II, another thing happened, which was American servicemen that would go on leave, and people in the army or whatever would sometimes hitchhike to where they wanted to go. If you stopped and picked up a service person who was hitchhiking, then that means that you were doing your patriotic duty by giving a fine young citizen a ride somewhere. Yeah.

So in like 20 years, hitchhiking went from a fun, thrilling, relatively safe thing for college kids to do, to a necessity for people who were moving from town to town looking for work, to a patriotic duty to stop and pick up a serviceman hitchhiking on their way, maybe back to base or out on leave away from base.

Away from Akron.

If you were a factory worker and a woman, people were expected to pick you up as well to give you a lift to the factory. You were just supposed to hold out your credentials for whatever defense factory or whatever you worked in just to make sure no one got the wrong idea.

Yeah, and you had to have on that Rosie the Riveter bandana tied in the front. That was your credential right there.

That definitely gave it away for sure. And then there's something else to mention about hitchhikers during this time, and it actually is It's true throughout the entire time of people picking up hitchhikers. But it started at this time, which was it wasn't that the hitchhikers were just mooching. They actually provide and provided back then a service as well. Well, a lot of times people would pick up a hitchhiker at night because they were getting sleepy and they needed somebody awake and alert to be like, Hey, hey, wake up. Don't fall asleep at the wheel. Other people just were looking for interesting conversation to distract them from a boring road trip. And then I saw a poem from the very early days of hitchhiking where the guy references that he's essentially a counterweight to the driver in the car so that the car doesn't tip over because that's how flimsy the original cars were. I thought so, too. So it's not like anyone was viewing these people as just completely mooching. That came later on.

Yeah. And back to World War II, if you were a hitchhiking army person.

That's what they call him, sure.

A A shelter, it depends on where you are, but you could reasonably wait in a shelter. There were certain towns who would say, Hitchhiking is such a thing that we're going to build shelters. This was in the early 1940s, and a couple of examples in California where they would build, and I get the feeling it's like a bus stop thing where you could just get out of the rain or wind while you thumbed a ride, which is pretty cool.

Yes. And hitchhiking, I guess it spread overseas to Europe in particular, I guess by the 1930s, but it definitely wasn't widespread. It became widespread through American servicemen who did the same thing over in Europe that they did in America. And the practice started to catch on after World War II, where it was introduced widely during World War II.

You think that's a good place for a break?

Sure. I wouldn't call it a cliffhanger, but do they all have to be?

I mean, we said the war was over.

Right, exactly.

I think everyone knows what happened next. No cliffhanger.

Right. Okay, so we'll take a break then starting now.

I'm Elia Connie, and this is Family Therapy.

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Tongue Unbroken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for Two Season 2. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. All right, now we're in the 1950s, and this was the first real push. Well, that's not true, actually, because I read in the book there were anti-hitchhiking pushes from the very beginning, but it was here and there, depending on what town you were in or what state you were in. But the first national push came thanks to J. Edgar Hoover, of course, who basically was one of the first guys to put out the idea that this could be really dangerous for you. The next murderer that you hear about on the news could be the person that's getting in your car right now. And of course, there were government, I guess, propaganda or at least warning posters that indicated that. One of them said, Death in disguise, and it had an all-American family basically stopping to pick up what looks like a clean-cut hitchhiker.

Death in disguise, is he a happy vacationer or an escaping criminal?

Yeah, a pleasant companion or a sex maniac. That's what else it said.

Thank you, J. Edgar Hoover.

Yeah, J. Edgar Hoover considered hitchhiking a menace. I think that guy considered everything he didn't like a menace to America, right? But it's really revealing what the social attitudes were toward hitchhiking in this 1957 FBI bulletin that included a letter that he personally wrote about how terrible hitchhiking was, and we needed to stamp it out. He pointed out that what law enforcement was up against was changing the minds of the public against the idea that the courtesy of the road demands that a driver give a hitchhike or a lift if they're able to. So at that time, by the mid '50s, that's what people thought. If you saw some guy walking down the road or a gal, and they had their thumb out, you were basically obligated to stop.

Yeah. There were a couple of high-profile murders in the 1950s dealing dealing with hitchhikers, though, and that, of course, is going to help sway the public opinion. Yes. And, of course, is something that Hoover is going to jump on and highlight as one of the big dangers. The crime rate in the United States was at one of the all-time lows in American history. Hitchhiking certainly didn't ramp it up or anything, but it's not like it was a big statistical analysis that was presented. It was just like, Hey, this big murder happened. It's one of those alarmous things where if it can happen one time, then is it really worth the risk for you to pick up that hitchhiker?

Yeah, that became the premise in non-hitchhiking America. It was just the same thing as stranger danger. It was a more viral panic, right? Yeah, for sure. Something so vile happened a handful of times. It's a statistical anomaly, essentially, but was well-publicized and so horrific, like murders of entire families. There was a guy named Billy Cockkide Cook who killed a family of five, including the three kids ages seven, five, and three, and the family dog, because they just made the mistake of kindly picking him up while he was hitchhiking. News like that spread. Rutger Howard. Yes. I watched that for research last night.

Did you really? Yeah. I actually saw it a couple of years ago, and I think it holds up pretty good.

Yeah, it definitely had a modern-ish feel to it. It didn't feel like stuck in the mid '80s. I feel like it really captured the spirit of the average hitchhiking interaction. Yeah.

Where you eat Fingers as French fries?

Yeah, it was nuts. But yeah, I liked it. I thought it was very long, overly long, but I still liked it. It was a good movie.

It was so funny. I don't remember why I watched it other than... I doubt if it was on a plane. That feels like something I would do on a plane.

Yeah, I don't know. It's enough of a classic that I could see it being on a hip airline. Was it Virgin? Were you flying Virgin that you saw it?

No, I only fly one airline.

So there were like those... I think that Billy Cockkeye Cook killing spree came in 1951, just in time for people to start freaking out. As we'll see, movies are made about these things. The FBI is beating the drum against this stuff. And so it gets a bad rap. And that's a trajectory that it's followed over the decades. Every decade or so, there'll be a handful of highly publicized, really horrific murders that took place because somebody hitchhiked. But if you look at it statistically, it's like a blip on the radar. Yeah, sure. But it scared everybody enough that parents were like, You do not hitchhike. I would never, ever hitchhike because my mom scared me so thoroughly as a kid that I'm just not going to do it. Sorry.

Oh, interesting. So the danger that was drilled into you was more hitchhiking hiking than picking up a hitchhiker?

Either one. No, either one, for sure. Okay. For sure. Yes, I was in grave danger, almost 100% guaranteed to be murdered horribly if I did either one. That's basically what got drummed into my head.

I guess technically, I did hitchhike one time. Now that I think about it, I got lost one time camping with some friends. I went off to hike on my own. We had set up camp, and we were fishing or something, and I went off to hike on my own, and I got lost and ended up miles and miles down the road and found a road, thankfully. And I got a ride. I remember now, I don't know if I put my thumb out or if I just looked like... Maybe I had a fishing pole or something, and they were like, This guy needs a hand, clearly. But I definitely remember, I got a ride from a stranger, and they took me back to the area where I could hike back to the camp.

Wow, and you weren't murdered?

No. I would hitch. I mean, I would now just because I don't need to, and I'm older, and I have a family. But in the not too distant past, I would have considered hitching a ride way more than picking up somebody.

Really?

Yeah, Because what are the chances that someone that pulls over to give you a ride is a serial killer or something? True.

Okay, that's really smart.

But picking someone up? I don't know about that.

Okay, that is really smart for sure. That's a great point. But some of those really high-profile, publicized horrible murders, serial killings, typically, did involve people being... They were hitchhikers, and they were picked up by serial killers who were out looking for hitchhikers.

Well, I think What's his name? Picked Up Hitchhikers, right? Bundy, if I'm not mistaken?

Probably. That would have been during a time where hitchhiking was a thing still.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was something that happened, and I think he might have killed some of them.

Yeah, there were... I mean, overseas, it happened, too. There were some famous murders in Australia, the Australian backpacker murders from, I think, the late '80s, even. It just happens from time to time, and it's so scary. You feel so badly for those people. Your mind just goes to how horrible a way that would be to die that you're like, I'm not going to hitchhike.

Yeah, totally. See, Thomas Howell, he put the fear of God in me.

He did a good job.

No, he was pretty good. Moving forward to the '60s, This is when it got really popular again, of course, because of the hippie movement. It became a big thing for hippies to do because not only could they get around and travel the world doing so, it was really like it just fit the hippie ethos of trusting one another, and it's counterculture, it's owning a car and anti-consumerism, and it's a little bit rebellious. It really just jibed with the whole hippie thing. So there was a lot of hitchhiking in the '60s.

Yeah, it harkened back to that original ethos of hitchhiking, which was people just helping other people out and being rewarded with some great conversation and maybe even making a friend and just see what happened. Sure. Yeah, totally worked with that. But it also provided very practically a way for people who were living the hippie life and didn't have money to go see the world. If you could make it to Europe, you could I literally see Europe and Eurasia and Africa, if you could make it down there, just by hitchhiking on a couple of dollars a day, because this is also a time when youth hostels had really taken hold and spread. So if you could make it over to Europe, you were set for a vacation of a lifetime. Yeah.

Into the 1970s, it remained pretty popular, at least early on. There was a poll in 1973, and this is just a little rinky-dink poll from a high school, but it 272 junior high and high school students said that more than 25 % of them hitchhiked either regularly or occasionally. So it was still going strong among the Utes of America. In that same poll, I said they were... I don't think they were too worried about dangers. One kid even said, I think there are more nuts walking around than in cars.

Pretty smart.

I guess. He's probably right.

Probably. I mean, that's your take on it, right? That's why you wouldn't pick up a hitchhiker, but you would hitchhike because there's more nuts walking than in cars?

Yeah, I think that jibes.

So another teenager in one of those polls was asked, Why do you hitchhike? And they're like, To get to where you're going, of course. And in the '60s and '70s, in particular, hitchhiking among kids who weren't of driving age yet or couldn't afford a car, That was a thing. You would hitchhike home from school rather than take the bus to ride your bike. You would hitchhike across town to go buy something from Eddie's Trick Shop, a new magic illusion, trick.

Yeah. Did you go there?

No, I guess I know that name from you telling me. I don't remember the name of the one in Toledo, the magic shop that I used to go to, but it never even dawned on me like, I want to go buy some mad magazines. I'll just hitchhike over there.

No, of course not.

Our generation, our age group was one of the last ones to be able to just run around the neighborhood like wild animals and then come home in time for dinner. This was like that plus. You would just get in a car with the stranger to go buy a comic book because it was too far to walk or you didn't feel like riding your bike. For us, or for me, at least, it was like, if your parents wouldn't take you, you just didn't get to do it.

Yeah, same here.

Yeah. So that's what kids were doing, though, in the '60s and '70s. They were just hitchhiking. It was just a thing that they did, and they weren't necessarily doing it to be rebellious or to be part of the counterculture. They were doing it because they didn't have a way to drive themselves.

Yeah. I wonder if some of that was more prevalent in more trusted small town America. Probably. Than the main streets of Tolito and Stone Mountain where we grew up. What am I talking about? Like I was some urban tough.

Right. Yeah. You used to play Kick the Can with Harvey Keitel.

So Hiking, like I said, was doing pretty well into the '70s, but it started... That's when the decline that we're at today basically started, was in the early to mid '70s. Reputationally, it started to go down. By the end of the '80s, there was one journalist who said, Basically, it's all but dead. And that gybe is just my memory. I said gybe three times a day, four now. That reconciles with my own memories, and I'm sure yours, of growing up, of seeing it be... Because I remember seeing it when I was a kid, but just less and less over the years. And a lot of that had to do with car ownership. In the '40s, about half of Americans owned a car in 1941. Less than 20 years later, that was at 80 %. And then into the '70s and '80s, you saw the deal was in my family and a lot of other even regular middle-class families, where you ended up with an extra car for the 16-year-old to drive because that's the one that mom aged out of or whatever. In our family, it was the VW Beatle that my mom drove from 1968 to, I guess, till my My sister, I'm not sure if my sister drove it or not, but I ended up driving that Beatle because that was the extra car.

There were extra cars in American households for the first time. All of a sudden, teenagers had wheels, usually some old car, like a the 8 Beatle.

Yeah. So I just found that fascinating. It wasn't just that people were scared out of hitchhiking. Even kids in those early '70s polls were aware of the dangers, but they weren't afraid of it enough to not hitchhike. It was, at least in part, that whole group of people who hitchhiked because they were trying to get from point A to point B, didn't have to do that any longer because they had more and more expanded access to cars, right? Because even if your parents didn't have a car, you might have a friend now that had a car and would come pick you up, right?

That's a big one. There's always a friend that had the car.

Another thing that seems to have changed things for hitchhiking is the spread of interstate travel in the US and in Europe. There's plenty of laws these days that basically prevent people from hitchhiking on the highway in particular. But even in places where it's not prohibited, just the practicality of getting somebody going 80 miles an hour to slow down and pull over and it not be a mile and a half ahead, a point that you have to trot to that far to get in the car, it's not conducive to hitchhiking at all. So as interstate travel spread, hitchhiking just became a little bit harder, although people started just standing on entrance ramps or-Right. Apparently on the Autobahn, if you go to Europe, they have those gas stations that you just... It's like an exit, and then the gas station and then the entrance ramp right back onto the highway. You know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, I think so.

So they have those, and people would just go from gas station to gas station. You could get a ride at a gas station and still do interstate travel. So there's ways around it, but it still put a crimp in the whole idea. You could just pull over to the side of the road and pick somebody up pretty easily like you could before the interstates.

Yeah. Depending on where you are in the United States or anti-hitchhiking laws, maybe in some districts or regions or towns that weren't too keen on it. And this goes back to the very beginning, but it wasn't the thing that was super... It may have been on the books, but it wasn't super enforced. Some more conservative towns may have enforced it more. Obviously, the elephant in the room is if you were demographically, like you said, it was a lot of middle class white men earlier on, you had a much harder time getting a ride if you were a person of color. You had a lot of times, you would have an easier time if you were a woman, but they were discouraged from doing it more for, I guess, the dangers that they thought a woman could face versus a man. But it was just Lucy Goosy as far as who a cop decided to hassle.

Interestingly about that sexism thing, I saw it also go in a different direction, too. I think that 1966 Sports Illustrated article by Janet Graham, she basically talks about that, how you want to dress enough to catch people's attention, but you don't want to throw out a sign Hey, come pick me up, because you might attract the wrong guy, or conversely, you might also just get passed by by some guy who doesn't trust you because of how you're dressed.

Yeah, that's interesting. Sports Illustrated used to do lots of weird articles like that.

Yeah, this is a really long article with great illustrations. Sports Illustrated lived up to its name. It had a lot of illustrations in this article, and it's definitely worth looking up. It's a great article. But no sport? Not really. I guess it could be a sport. Well, apparently they did have, I don't know what you call them, but basically speed trials. A bunch of hitchhikers would all get picked up in the same town and try to make it to this pre-arranged destination, see who got there fastest.

All right. That's a sport.

There's another thing that seems to have led to a decline in hitchhiking, too, and that is that as fewer people actually needed to hitchhike, the people who were left over who still needed to hitchhike because they couldn't, say, afford a car or something like that, were viewed less and less favorably or sympathetically.

Yeah, that was the real change, I think, is when it got to the point where they were like, Oh, well, if that person can't even afford a car... And this is when you could buy a used car that ran for a couple of grand or something. So it was like, If they can't afford that, then they're bad news.

Right. So they're downtrodden. So I'm going to look down upon them, and That means that hitchhiking itself, by association, came to get a bad name, which further meant that anybody who hitchhiked had to be bad news. And so this feedback loop started, and it was, I think, still to this day, that hitchhiking has that image because of that change in perception, sadly.

Yeah. And of course, because of the Reagan years and the Thatcher years, there was a big, I don't know about a sea change, but at least a very public view that you're lazy if you're hitchhiking, just like you're lazy if you're on food stamps. And if you're out of work and you can't afford a car, then that means you're derelict. It was a conservative movement in two ways, politically conservative. It was looked down upon by them. But also just the word conservative in its true definition, just like risk averse, people became a little more conservative as far as what risk they were willing to undertake by picking up a hitchhiker, or I guess, hitchhiking. Yeah.

And then also during that time, a transactional society developed where everything had a price. Nothing was free, and anything that was free is Communists, right? That's what communists are into. There's this guy named Joe Moran, who's a historian who wrote in The Guardian. He wrote about the gift relationship, the kinds of exchanges based on trust and goodwill that bring tangible benefits to everyone, but are the hardest to retrieve when they're gone. Those got stamped out in that transactional economy that Thatcher and Reagan brought. And I think it's just fascinating. You can blame basically everything on Thatcher and Reagan, and probably be right the vast majority of the time. So I think the upshot of the whole thing, Chuck, is that the ethos of, I have a car, you don't, I'm going to help you out, converted into, My car is mine, so TS for you, loser. Is what that changeover happened.

All right, that's a good place for a break, so angry people can compose emails. And we'll be right back, and we'll talk about some notable famous hitchhikers over the years. I'm Elia Connie, and this is Family Therapy.

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Okay, Chuck, so we're back. We have gotten a lot of angry emails in the interim, but that's okay.

They're flowing in.

Let's talk a little bit about demographics because you hit on how it's easier in some cases for some people to catch a ride than it is for others. But the main demographic I could see when you look at just the differences in hitchhiking experiences seem to be pretty much just divided between men and women. And I think one of the things that you see is this whole sexist idea that if a woman hitchhikes and something happens to her, she was just basically asking for it. She put herself in unnecessary danger, which is a terrible way to look at a crime against an innocent person under any circumstances. But there's a Reader's Digest. That was just a whole thread of thinking. There was a Reader's Digest article from 1973 that said that in the case of a girl who hitchhikes, the odds against her reaching her destination unmolested are today literally no better than if she played Russian roulette, which from what I've read is totally made up. And there was also two girls that conducted a science experiment in San Diego in 1977, and they solicited 356 rides, and they were either wearing a control costume of pretty conservative clothing or a revealing costume.

And they found that the revealing costume far and away attracted more rides, mostly from men.

All right, we promised talk of notable hitchhikers, and we could go on all day listing famous people who at one point or another hitchhike Hitchhiked. For me, John Waters is a pretty fun one because he hitchhiked and enjoyed it as a kid, and then eventually wrote a book. He hitchhiked as a 68-year-old grown man in the 2013 from his home in Baltimore to his other home in San Francisco, and wrote a book about it called Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America. This one is fun because the whole first half of the book is just fiction. It's like fun stories he wrote about who could pick him up and what that could lead to, whether it was a serial killer or something a little more fun. But the second half of the book, I think, is about his real journey, hitchhiking. He made it all the way.

That's great. I mean, I'm glad John Water survived because he's a national treasure.

Who else?

Hitchbot is the other one I want to cover.

I'd never heard of Hitchbot. Is that a famous person?

You have. We talked about Hitchbot, and I think Internet Roundup or something like that. Oh, really? Back in 2015, there was a robot. It was very basic in design. It was a social experiment more than anything. They wanted to see how people responded to a robot. And they sent this Klugey, junky, cartoonish-looking robot all the way across Germany, all the way across the Netherlands, all the way across Canada. And they finally said, Okay, it's time for America. We're going to set this guy out on the road in Salem, Massachusetts, and see if he can make it to San Francisco's destination. He made it to Boston. He made it to New York. He made it to Philadelphia. And he didn't get out of Philadelphia alive. He was dismembered and completely taken apart by some jerk, Vandal somewhere, who was caught on video wearing a football shirt, like a football jersey. I can only imagine it was an Eagles's jersey. And so this robot made it through three countries and didn't even get past Philadelphia. In the United States, which is sad. I remember being sad about it at the time, but we definitely talked about Hitchbot, but he's a very famous hitchhiker as well.

He had a real positive spirit. He like, tweeted the whole time about how good everything was. Oh, really? Yeah.

Let me see. What do we got here? I don't want to talk about Dave Matthews, do we? No. He hitchhiked on time to a concert. I guess we can say that at least. You know what we should cover on a short stuff is the Dave Matthews poop Bridge incident. I don't know about that one. Do you ever hear about that?

No.

Well, we'll talk about it on a Short Stuff. It's when his tour bus dumped the contents of their-Oh, I did hear that.thing off a Bridge onto people, or it was on a boat or something that was below the Bridge.

My God.

They got in trouble for it.

Let's talk about movies instead. What about that?

Yeah. I mean, in media in general, there are some very famous, famous books and movies that were centered around hitchhiking, whether it's, obviously, Jack Kerouac's On the Road is a big one, or Tom Robbins, even Cal Girls Get the Blues, the Gus Van Zant movie, Sissy, the main character, was born with an abnormally large thumb. She obviously had a talent as a hitchhiker, and that's one of the subplots of the book and film.

Hitchhiking, it depends on the film, but it can be depicted as a cautionary tale where it just goes so off the rails bad that no one should ever hitchhike ever, like in Hitcher, like we were talking about with C. Thomas Hall and Rooker Hauer. That Billy Cockkeye Cook murder spree got turned into a movie two years after called The Hitchhiker. It was supposedly pretty good. So throughout from the '50s onward, hitchhikers could be depicted as murderous people or people picking up hitchhikers could be depicted as murderous. But there was also... Hitchhiking made appearance as MacGuffins in a lot of films, as just a funny little side thing, like Peewee Herman getting picked up by Large Marge in Peewee's Big Adventure.

What a scene.

Big Bird and Follow That Bird did a lot of hitchhiking in that movie.

Yeah.

Have you ever seen I saw the Devil?

I don't think so. That's Rob zombie, right?

No, it's a Korean film, a Korean serial killer film. I can't remember the guy's name who directed it, but it's really good. But there's this one scene in there where the main character, the antagonist, I guess, is a serial serial killer, but they follow him so much. He's basically the main character. He hitchhikes, gets picked up by a car that's being driven by a guy who had already picked up another hitchhiker. So now there's two guys, including him in the car, being driven by a third guy, and they all turn out to be serial killers, and they get in this fight driving down the road, a fight to the death. It's a really interesting, just a side scene that they could have easily edited out, but it's so good. It's nuts.

That sounds really familiar. I might have seen that, actually.

It came out in 2010, I think.

Yeah, the McGuffin thing is big, though. I feel like most times, if hitchhiking isn't a plot that turns out to be really bad or something that you're supposed to think it is, at least, very few times, I feel like it's just a scene where someone hitchhikes, and it's no big deal, unless it's a period thing from the '60s or whatever.

Yes. A good example of that is Dumb & Dumber, where Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels pick up the guy who's trying to assassinate them, and he ends up dying because of the Hot Sauce Burger. They trick him into eating. Yeah. That's a good one.

That's a good movie.

And then, apparently, I've never seen it, but the definitive earliest hitchhiking scene is from It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. It's a very cute scene.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah, he's basically being a man, teaching her how it's all It's all in the thumb. It's all in the thumb. That's how you hitchhike, and he's getting nowhere with it. And she leans down and sticks her leg out and adjusts her stocking, and a car just comes to a screeching halt to pick them both up.

Yeah, and she's like, stick that thumb where the sun don't shine. Exactly. If you are in Europe, we mentioned how it was going post-World War II, but throughout the years, it's ebbed and flowed in Europe. But it seems to be more popular and doable, depending on what country you're in in Europe today. I think the Netherlands is still very well known as a country where you can pretty safely hitchhike. I think Germany, at least for a while, it was pretty popular, always generally frowned upon in the UK.

But people still did. Apparently, still today, if you're around Glastonbury, you're probably going to get hit up for a ride at festival time.

Yeah, that thing, of course. There's always somebody on the side of the road trying to go see some big music festival.

Probably Dave Matthews.

Or I'm sure what's a burning man? I bet that's half hitchhiking.

Yeah, for sure. I'm sure any of the big festivals, there's probably a lot of people hitching there.

We have to mention Cuba because it is a pretty single a regularly unique country in terms of hitchhiking, in that after the Berlin Wall fell, the oil from the Soviets really dried up. I can't remember what the period was called, the special period or something like that, where basically the national bus system and transportation, public transport system, stopped. It slowed down, then eventually just went away. And then they nationalized it in that if you are a government I think it was only until 2014, you had to have a special government license to even have a private car. But if you are a government car, you are required, supposedly, to pick up hitchhikers. And for From what I read, I read a few articles about it, hitchhiking is public transportation in Cuba now. Wow. It's set up. They're called yellow points where you stop at a certain place. If you're a government car, if you're an agricultural truck or whatever carrying something from province to province, you're required to stop, pick people up. They pay you if it's within province, a penny an American dollars or I think 11 cents if it's trans provincial. But really interesting.

I saw on the Hitch Wicked website. Of course, there's all kinds of great websites now where you can really find out where it's good and not. Because it's still a thing, like a culture that a lot of people embrace. But Hitch Wicked said that everybody hitchhikes in Cuba.

Yeah.

It's just a way of life.

I was reading about Poland in the Cold War, I think the '50s or '60s, where they essentially nationalized it by, I think they passed some regulations saying, you basically have to stop if you see a hitchhiker. You, private citizens, and have to pick up hitchhikers. But we're going to sweeten the pot. We're going to sell these books of vouchers that hitchhikers buy for very cheap, and then they give you a voucher for picking them up, and then you, the driver, hand it in and get a lottery ticket in exchange. You could win big bucks. But apparently, even still, the Polish people were like, We don't like being told that we have to pick up strangers if we don't want to. It was never popular, and it went away, but it sounded like an interesting experiment.

There's two lotteries in. There's the lottery of if you have a serial killer that you've picked up, and then there's the second lottery. I did forget one thing about Cuba that I thought was interesting. They call it Irkon Labotella, which means going with a bottle. That's what they call it there, because apparently, they think When you stick your thumb up like that, it's resembling you holding something and taking a drink.

Awesome.

Yeah.

And then speaking of today, also, like you said, there's a lot of sites that trade info and best places to get picked up and where to avoid and all that stuff. That's a huge deal that people, even out on the road, are connected. And I saw that actually you can make a really good case that that's morphed into a combination between that whole free spirit, freedom of the road, environmental thing. It's less environmentally impactful to not drive yourself, but to hitch instead, combined with that transactional nature of our society. And now we have ride share apps. It's essentially the same thing, except you're paying somebody to come get you rather than standing out there relying on someone else's goodwill.

Well, there are also hitchhiking apps that are essentially ride share apps that you don't pay for. And I think it's just a way of connecting the hitchhiker culture to potentially a ride.

Supposedly also, one more thing, in DC, still to this day, from what I read, there's something called slugging. And every morning, people who want to ride in the carpool but are driving to work by themselves, there's these predetermined spots where people just line up and you just stop and somebody gets in your car and you take them into DC with you on your commute so you can ride in the carpool lane.

That's like when Larry David picked up a sex worker So he could get to the Dodger game quicker. And he ended up having to take her to the game and all. That's great. It was a classic her.

So I would strongly recommend people read that 1966 Sports Illustrated article by Janet Graham. It's called Rule of Thumb for the Open Road. And there's another one from the London Review of Books by Mike Jay called That Old Thumb. Both of them are just excellent, I guess, chronicles on hitchhiking over the decades.

Yeah, and that book's great.

Okay, well, Chuck said that book's great, and we don't have anything else to say about hitchhiking, so I think that means everybody, it's time for a listener mail.

I'm going to call this That But then, brook is Great because this is from Brook. Okay. You like how it did that? Hey, guys, my name is Brook. I love listening to your show. Now, in the latest episode, peanuts part 2, you stated that the comic strip setting is unknown. We were wrong, my friend. On behalf of Minnesota, I had to mention that Hennepin County, Minnesota, was actually stated to be the setting in a 1957 strip of peanuts.

Brook, I don't like this email. I don't want to know this.

Minnesotans are especially obsessed with peanuts and Snoopy. Minnesota has over 500 five-foot peanuts statues scattered across the state, with more than 100 of them being in Saint Paul. They also used to be a peanuts theme park in the Mall of America called Camp Snoopy. Sadly, Camp Snoopy would later become Nickelodeon Park in 2008. Even still, statues of the peanuts gang are scattered far and wide, including a Linus statue at the Minnesota State Fair. Even my uncle had a Linus statue in his yard. Cute. Had no idea. Thanks so much for the show. I listen while I am trail-skating 30 plus miles for marathon skate training. Wow. Do you know that was a thing?

No, I'm taking that to mean rollerblading?

I guess or roller skates for whatever, 30 something miles.

I'll betbrook has extraordinarily strong thighs at this point. I can't imagine, dude.

Cabs and feet and big toes and little toes. I bet it's all very strong. You guys definitely help me get through it. I love all the little jokes and side comments. I hope you have a great day.

Thanks a lot, brook. That was a quintessential Minnesota nice sign off, too, by the way. Thank you for that. Totally. Great email. Even though it contained information I didn't really want to hear, I still must doff my hat to you for that one. Doffed. If you want to be like Brook and get in touch with us with some information we don't necessarily want to hear, we'd prefer you didn't do that. Otherwise, you can email us at stuffpodcast@iheartradio. Com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, it's me, Blippy, and this is my best friend, Mika. Hi, I'm Mika, and this is our brand new podcast, Blippy and Mika's Road Trip. The Blippy Mobile will take us to amazing places. And we'll meet new friends along the way. Listen to Blippy and Mika's Road Trip podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Black Effect presents Family Therapy, and I'm your host, Elia Connie. Jay is the woman in this dynamic who is currently co-parenting two young boys with her former partner, David. David, he He is a leader.

He just don't want to leave me.

But how do you lead a woman? How do you lead in a relationship? What's the blue part? David, you just asked the most important question. Listen to Family Therapy on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Ihard podcast update this week on your free IHard radio app. Fodor's Guide to Espionage, a '60s-era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jet-sets around the globe. Tongue Unbroken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for Two Season 2. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free IHart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast.