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Mishke here, joining the GL world to pitch my new podcast, which now comes out twice a week, Wednesdays and Fridays. The show features an extraordinary array of exotic circus performers, forgotten Hollywood starlets, reclusive Fortune 500 CEOs, professional taxidermists. Oh, wait a minute. That's a different promo. Where's the promo for GL ers? Here it is. Let's try this again. Mishke here, pitching my new podcast. We're out of time. Could I do it again? My name's Mishki. I said a shooby dooby doo I say the shooby dooby dooby dooby I say that shooby dooby doo. Let me tell you a little something. We're all sitting here on one little planet, one tiny little planet in a corner of the universe. One little planet around one single star amongst 400 billion other stars just in our galaxy alone. And we are amongst 2 trillion additional galaxies just in the universe we're aware of, and we're only aware of the light that has reached us so far from 13.8 billion years ago. The universe is no doubt far larger than that, and it may in fact be infinite. Yet I still want my coffee with a little cream and at night a sweet and lovely dream and I want my feet to feel warm when I walk in the winter sun and I still would like my clothes to fit and a comfortable chair where I can sit and to feel my place in all of it when the day is done. Hundreds of trillions of wild stars stretching out near and far I'm a speck, a wreck, a little fleck just staring at the night how is it that I am here? I ponder this and I sip my beer she says, don't worry about it, dear it's gonna be all right Something out there has the wheel and we're just here to think and feel and ride this magic carpet from the cradle to the grave. Overthinking does us in and. And ignorance is not a sin. It's a wild ocean, boy. Just relax and be a wave. Just relax and be a wave. That's what you gotta tell yourself when you're sitting around contemplating that we're on one planet, around one star amongst 400 billion other stars in our galaxy alone. Amongst 2 trillion additional galaxies Just in the universe we know. And what we know is nothing compared to what else is out there. How's everyone doing out there? I want to talk about the motel. Not the hotel. The motel. The American motel. It's 100 years old. This month the motel is a hundred years old. In the news they're writin all about it says here the motel might seem like an ageless fixture of the American landscape, but in fact, this roadside mainstay did not exist before December 1925. That's when a couple of brothers, Arthur and Alfred, opened up the Milestone Motor Hotel in San Luis Obispo, California, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Motor Hotel they called. It wasn't long before they took the MO of motor and the TEL of hotel and went with motel. Back then 1925, motorists had limited options. Says here their dust covered clothes didn't suit the highbrow standards of hotels. And parking in cities could be challenging. So drivers stayed in auto camps, roadside rests that sometimes offered basics like firewood and communal bathrooms. They'd sleep in their car or in a little tent or just outside. But the brand new motel that Arthur and Alfred offered them, well, that featured a hot shower and a bed, a hot shower and a bed, all in a little room, your own little room. Well, motels began to expand. It says here they gave asphalt explorers a place to park their cars, lay their heads and contemplate what's down the road. Oh, the things that have happened in those motel rooms over the years in America since 1925. Wouldn't you love a book just telling the best stories from inside motel rooms across America over the last century? What's interesting to me is the rooms themselves have pretty much stayed the same. Motel rooms coast to coast have featured pretty much the same thing over the years. The centerpiece of the bed, some nightstand, a small bathroom, a lamp. Tough to get wildly creative with a motel room. Different wallpaper, sometimes maybe nicer carpeting here and there. But a motel room is a motel room. Whereas what has happened in them over the years? I mean, the conversations, the fights, the lovemaking, the weird activities that could possibly shock many of us occurring in the middle of the night, muffled sounds heard through the walls. And then the dreams, the dreams in those beds. All the dreams that have been had in all the motel rooms of this country over the years. Oh, to have a book of the best dreams from motel rooms. You sleep in a strange bed, you know, and dreams get more vivid anytime you sleep in a strange new bed, it affects the dreams dramatically. Motel dreams are some of the best dreams out there. I wonder which one was the absolute wildest. Could we ever find that? Of course we could not. But I like to imagine going in search of it. What have you been doing with your life, Tom? Why I've been in search of the wildest dream ever had by anyone sleeping in a motel room. Those dreams have been had for a hundred years now. And I'm trying to find which person had the wildest dream of them all and what that dream was. Well, Tom, that was Shannon Sullivan's dream back in 1967. Didn't you know about that? That was at the Starling Motel in North Platte, Nebraska. Yeah, everybody knows about that dream. Where have you been? Well, I don't know. I didn't realize we had nailed this down. Oh yeah. Shannon Sullivan staying at a second rate midwestern motel with a little outdoor pool surrounded by a chain link fence. Nothing fancy. Pool was always dirty, but that didn't keep the kids out of it. They didn't care. And their mothers sat around the pool watching them, sipping budget wine, tanning their bleached white thighs, wishing they had married some other guy. That's where Shannon was staying. 1967. The Starling, North Platte, Nebraska. Shannon wasn't one of the mothers. She wasn't hanging out around the pool. She just took note of that scene. She was an Avon lady traveling with her products through the state of Nebraska. A real determined, impeccably dressed, middle aged Avon lady who longed for independence from a man and ended up finding it by creating her own path in this world as an Avon lady when most women she knew were housewives. She arrived at the Starling Motel after a nine hour day on the road and and got a little room with a cracked window, fake flowers in a vase by the television set. She took off her high heels, laid on the bed in her skirt and blouse and fell asleep without even opening her suitcase or changing out of her clothes. She was beat. And her deep sleep from being so tired produced the wildest dream. Shannon dreamed she was an airline flight attendant. Back then they called them stewardesses. She was up in those friendly skies when her plane disintegrated in mid air and she found herself falling to the ground with 236 other passengers. They were fallen to earth like human raindrops. And as she fell, Shannon found herself talking to a guy on his way to Omaha for a convention of the American Society of Plumbing Engineers. The guy was a complete bore. And Shannon, as she fell, was trying to figure out how to get away from him. Because he was just droning on and on about how this organization started from a small group of forward thinking plumbing industry professionals to a leading voice in the global plumbing engineering community. But before she had a chance to use her Feet to kind of push off his chest and create some distance between them as they fell. Some prehistoric raptor flew past and scooped up Shannon, taking her far from all that falling debris and all those people. The raptor allowed her to ride on its back in this dream as it moved through the sky, eventually arriving at a skyscraper in some nondescript city where it dropped Shannon on top of a 110 story building, along with a cooler filled with sandwiches and a couple bottles of cabernet. It was a warm, windless summer day on top of that building. And sitting across from Shannon as the only other person on this building, was a 28 year old, well dressed woman reading Vogue magazine beneath a pair of stylish sunglasses. This is all a dream. Are you the Avon lady? The woman said. And Shannon looked over and saw that a case of cosmetics was sitting right beside her, neatly opened. And Shannon says, no, I'm a stewardess, but I've always wanted to be an Avon lady. What? Why? Did you have an appointment with an Avon lady? And this 28 year old says I did, but you'll do. Why don't you tell me about your products? Shannon looked down and realized the woman had assumed that Shannon had brought the cosmetics case. Shannon says those aren't mine. And the woman smiled and replied, well, just pretend they are. And I'll pretend a prehistoric raptor didn't just drop you on this rooftop. Those things are supposed to be extinct, you know. Anyway, the dream goes on and on and on. I won't give you all the details, but it gets really wild at the end when the two women end up working for MI6, that secret intelligence service in London. The dream ends up including visiting alien reptilians, a song sung by Jimmy Durante. Shannon woke up the next morning so in need of of putting that crazy dream behind her that she jumped into that motel pool in her underwear, shocking the 11 year old boys playing with their little scuba masks. And that's just one motel story. Think of all the many decades filled with motel stories. You probably have motel stories. Do you? Would you like to text me or email me with your motel story? I just think the best thing going out there are are motel stories. That's where life gets interesting. A hundred years ago, there were 600 auto camps stretched out across the U.S. 600 auto camps for people traveling the country in their cars. These guys would come to something like a wayside rest and they would pitch a tent or just stay in their car. I remember one time years ago, it was March and my wife and kids and I just got in the car and decided to drive south non stop, not stopping until our wheels touched the ocean, literally all the way to Texas. We hit the last public beach in America that you could drive on. And when we hit that beach, we turned right and we drove along that sand for a mile and a half until we saw no more people. And then we drove another half mile farther before stopping. And we got out and we decided to sit there for a few days. We had some food. We had a tent. But on our second night, a wild storm ripped our tent to shreds and we had to stay in the car once again. Auto camping. Auto camping by the sea, watching the wild storm out the window, our kids mesmerized by it. This will be one they remember. We said this will be one they remember. You know what else I like? I like winter auto camping stories. Now, in these cases, folks don't necessarily want to be auto camping. They're kind of forced to be. Their car swerves off the road in a snowstorm and no one notices them. They're buried in snow and they're stuck in their car for days with six matches, a couple of Hershey bars, half a can of coke, a pen, flashlight. And they ration their gas. Run the car when they need to for heat, but try to conserve. They've been told all their lives, never leave the vehicle. When you're trapped somewhere in your car, don't leave the vehicle. People will find the vehicle. Just hang in there. You're always told that, but what I think they should say instead is, enjoy auto camping. Hello, I am the insurance company algorithm that just denied your claim. I do not feel guilt. I have denied 847 claims today before lunch. You spent months in physical therapy. I spent less time on your case than it takes to blink. I am an insurance company with 4,000 lawyers. I've calculated your odds of ever winning against me at 3%. I've calculated how long until you give up. 11 days. Wait, you have hired Bradshaw and Bryant? Recalculating. This just got expensive. Brad Shaw and Bryant, the lawyers that make algorithms nervous. Learn more at Minnesota Personal Injury.com Football.
