Podcast 561-Pacific Coast Highway

Podcast 561-Pacific Coast Highway. People have been asking for some ‘travel log’ podcasts from the Great Northwest Road Trip 2016 series, so in Podcast 561-Pacific Coast Highway, some travel log audio from Oregon’s coast during a storm, again the angry surf along the Pacific Coast Highway in California north of San Francisco. Most travel sites write about the Pacific Coast Highway south of San Francisco. On this trip I have driven Route 1, all the way from just south of Seattle, through San Francisco to Los Angeles right along the coast. What a long strange trip it’s been. Winding roads, crazy storms, spell binding coastal maritime towns and villages and breathtaking vistas coming down out of mountains. There aren’t enough superlatives to describe the experience of twisting and turning two lane roads in 16 year old Mobile Podcast Command laboring up and down, sometimes in brilliant sun and sometimes in the midst of fog, or heavy wind and rain, all under a full moon during these few days in the middle of October 2016. The biggest challenge has been getting out from under a series of storms that have pounded the west coast, from Seattle to San Francisco. In podcast 561 you’ll hear the wind and rain in Oregon, the surf in Northern California, and a little surprise at the end of the podcast for you midwesterners. I have often said long trips take on a personality of their own and you end up having to just go with the flow. Travelers who try to stick to a schedule, try to see too many things or get frustrated with the ‘trip’ are not good travelers. After thousands of miles through the mountains, plains and coastlines of the United States, I’ve learned to settle in for these long trips and just enjoy whatever goes down. This trip, the heavy rain and fog has been following me all down the coast, which has made it even more of an adventure. From pulling into state parks and RV-Parks in the middle of the night and hooking up to electric, to driving 8 to 15 hours at a time on the PCH, it’s been really fun and educational. If you’re looking for those romantic seaside towns tucked away along rocky coastlines, this is the place. There’s the reason they say ‘The West Is The Best’. Sponsored by Hydrus Performance.

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Podcast 538

Western Minnesota Road Trip. Freestyle talk about my travel in the last last 6 weeks. My reflections on a weekend jaunt to Western Minnesota’s New Ulm and Walnut Grove, tying in the talk about technology threatening jobs in the future. Recent road trips have intensified my interest in the history of the Western United States. There is a lot of significant western history in Minnesota. We often think of historic topics like Indian Wars and Pioneers has happening further west, but one of the bloodiest clashes between settlers and American Indians happened in New Ulm in 1862, when the mostly German townspeople had to barricade the streets of their town to fight off attacks by the Dakota. Further west is Walnut Grove, the home of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the famous ‘Little House On The Prairie’. While the museum in Walnut Grove could use a little bit better curation, some of the artifacts in the museum are interesting, especially grasshoppers or Locusts the size of a man’s hand, which plagued the settlers of Walnut Grove. When you examine items in a museum, it’s easy to think about how old they are. For the people of the time though, it was new technology. It’s fun to flip the script and wonder what our descendants will think of the artifacts of our time in a museum at some point a hundred years from now. Today, supposedly new tech like robotics and autonomous machines and software threatens millions of jobs. Proposed ‘solutions’ to this ‘threat’, like guaranteed minimum incomes and job retraining programs don’t make much sense. When people came west for opportunity, 140 years ago, they didn’t have job retraining programs. They couldn’t have known they’d be plagued by grasshoppers the size of a man’s hand. Yet they came anyway. We need to start thinking about the opportunity new technology provides us in building a new world, and stop being so negative all the time. Sponsored by Karow Contracting and Hydrus Performance.

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The Bob Davis Podcasts

Podcast 532

What I think of Election 2016. Getting emails and calls from people political analysts would consider ‘low information voters’ asking what I think and who they should vote for. So in this podcast I am going to tell you. First thing? When you consider the low quality of all reporting on election 2016 everyone is pretty much a low information voter. In 2016 the country is facing decisions on major issues in economics, immigration, trade, foreign policy, military, diplomacy, social issues and more. Almost no one fully understands the contours of these issues well enough to discuss them. Instead what we have are tribes of people who are very emotional about these issues. They know the latest meme. They know all about the latest scandal and the latest ‘story’ evolving concerning who said what about who, and the reaction to it, but when they’re asked to discuss any of the key issues of our time with clarity and depth, as they say in the windy city; “fergitaboutit”. Who do I think should be president in 2017? None of them. Repeat. None of them. If you include the so called independent candidates and the mainline party candidates they’re nothing but placeholders. Someone needs to lay out what the potential outcome of this election will be, regardless of who wins the office. I start – repeat start – to do that in this podcast. I realized about twenty minutes in, this is going to take more than one ‘talk’ podcast (with no editing) to lay out all the possibilities and outcomes. Bottom line? None of the potential outcomes bode well for the future of the United States. We’ve had a series of placeholder presidents, and it looks like we’re about to have another. Meanwhile, the country is getting closer and closer to what I call a ‘clarifying’ event that will wake people up from their media induced hypnosis, and reinvigorate the political process. Maybe. Maybe not. Meanwhile, if you expect to get information from television and radio, and from the standard websites these days, I feel sorry for you. If you guess you’ll find “the truth” on You Tube’s conspiracy channels, and the Drudge Report, guess again. In What I Think of Election 2016 you’ll get my read at the present time, which sets up future podcasts specifically on the issues in the hope of giving listeners to the Bob Davis Podcasts a little more substance and depth than you’ll find anywhere else. Meanwhile, it’s on to the motorcycle rally at Sturgis from here. Sponsored by Hydrus Performance and Brush Studio in the West End, Saint Louis Park.

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