We rescued a van that should've stayed retired, dodged cops and fuel leaks, and learned why outsourcing navigation to ChatGPT was a terrible idea. Plus, Angela's double-ply crisis.
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This is the launch, episode 21, for May 13th, 2025. Streaming from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast, we greet you all a good morning, a good evening, or whenever your timeline may fall, time appropriate greetings indeed to one and all this is the launch my name is chris and i'm angela and that's brent hello hello nice to see both of you we have a lot of show today so before we get into all of that i have a couple of details i want to cover we'd love it if you called us the show is live right now we'll be taking calls after our song of the week the phone number is 774-462-5667 That is 774-462-5667.
Put that in your phone book and then you got it. We're live on Tuesdays, start around 1130 in Pacific, 230 p.m. Eastern, or we release on Wednesday mornings. And we invite you to join us in our chat room, Launch HQ, and in our mumble room, we have details and links at weeklylaunch.rocks. Go over there, get previous episodes, dive in. There's probably something you've missed. I could listen to the old back catalog, and there's things I missed, and I did the shows. You know what I'm saying? Find out. Well, Andrews, I know there's something very important on your mind this week. Yeah, I'm almost wondering if you should share the link and stuff first, because it's not—no.
Okay, well, this is funny, and it is a real problem, people, and I want to know what the heck is going on out there. Now, Keene County, where a woman says she was targeted for her toilet paper, and she has the video, this video, to back it up. A business owner in Lockford catching a man smashing her car window, taking off with a precious cargo. New tonight, CBS 13's Anna Giles with the toilet paper caper. You know, they're loving it, but it's not the only place. There was also another toilet paper caper that happened recently. Well, not too recently. There's a unique case out of Utah County we've got video on.
So look at the surveillance camera. This is an elk ridge. You caught a person stealing a package off their front steps. See that? We're getting just like creeping behind that bush. Get in there, you watch them run off of this little package right there and then run away. See that? Uh-huh. Okay. Seems like pretty normal. Well, it turns out what they stole right there was just a box of toilet paper. And the best part is the thief later came back and returned it. Wait a minute, in the box, not like returning it by throwing it on the trees. Yeah, that would be one way to do it, right?
So, toilet paper thievery is a real problem, Andrews, so I'm glad you're bringing it up. Yeah, so Chris asked me, what can we do in the catching up with Ange section? And so I just gave him a couple words without any context, and it was toilet paper thieves. Yeah, the bastards. So I'm going to start by saying, I know we've all experienced this. You're somewhere, probably at a restaurant, and you've ordered a delicious carbonated beverage. Yeah. And it's so good. But you also have a water. And maybe you don't like ice, right? Because your teeth are sensitive. So it's room temperature water.
These are a lot of specifics. I know. I relate to the tepid water. Okay, but it's very specific. Okay, so you're eating pizza, right? Carbonated beverage is best with pizza. So you go to wash it down, but you mixed up your water and your carbonated beverage. and so you get water, room temperature, water instead of that cold. Carbonated, deliciousness. Yeah. And you're like offended, right? Okay. So this morning I went to go to the bathroom and I normally set my phone on the packs of toilet paper, right? That are wrapped. And I noticed that several rolls of toilet paper were missing.
So hold on. Hold on. So you have a persistent stack? Yes. I do have a persistent stack. You have like a buffer stack? Yeah. All right. Yeah. It is my side table. A fly phone shelf. Right. Exactly. Yes. I know. I should probably put a shelf in there. Okay. So last night, there were four rolls. This morning, there's two. And I know that. Yeah. So these kids normally steal from my bathroom, you know, but I was right by my office, so I'm using the downstairs bathroom. And so I'm like, can we just normalize restocking toilet paper so that I have somewhere to put my phone?
So I go out to the garage and I grab two packs, stack them, and then put them in the these two extra rolls that are still in the bag on top of that set my phone down tell. Me you shop at Costco without telling me you shop. At Costco yes right okay undo my pants sit down and, On the carpeted or carpet rug cover. Seat cover. Yeah, yeah. Because it was down. It was closed for business. I didn't open it because I didn't even, and I was so thrown off by restocking the toilet paper. And to tell you how violated I felt, I still feel violated. What an uncomfortable thing. I sat down on this fuzzy butt.
Yeah. Oh, it was so gross. Like, what do you even do in that situation to recover? I think I could co-sign it should be a family tradition that you keep the toilet paper stocked you know if they who dealt it should restock it and the also thing along with that I feel like it should be a family rule that you properly orient the toilet paper so that it is new tear forward down right. I feel strongly about this. I know and I know there's a couple people I'm not going to name them but there's one in particular maybe two that often stock it the reverse way why. Would you do that.
So the first thing i gotta do before i can even lift the lid for biz is i gotta like flip the toilet paper you know what i'm saying i do the same thing yeah you gotta you gotta get the place right i. Even go to like friends homes and i'm like they're doing it this wrong i gotta flip that. Yeah so. Here's the thing i keep the lid down. Yeah you should right. I keep the lid down for several reasons right uh because uh oh what's the word. Well it's a toilet hygienically When you flush. It's putting all those particles in the air. It's gross.
But also, my cats don't know what a toilet is. They have fallen in. Because they don't know. They expect it to be a solid lid surface. What is that situation like? Is it just total chaos? Were you there for it? It was, yes. Because it was in the toilet closet in my bathroom. They were on the windowsill. And they jumped down and just right in. Whoa. I have a suggestion for you. Your cats are still kind of young, right? Um, what is... Are you going to say train them to use the toilet? You're ruining my whole thing. Okay, you tell it. Okay, you tell it.
No, go ahead. It's your idea. Do it. No, it's your idea. Go for it. I've met a couple cats who were trained to use the toilet, not to hit the flusher, although that would be brilliant. Yeah. Or maybe not. But maybe you go that direction, just like... I mean, that would be great. Yeah. No more litter. Because one of them doesn't even like using the litter box. Well, there you go. And I hate litter boxes. And the other one, yeah, this summer, they're going to be outside all the time. I'm not going to have to... That's a different way to do it. Yeah.
Let them poop on other people's properties. Yeah, I don't know about leaving the lid up all the time, though. No, I know people do it for convenience, but for hygiene reasons, for flushing reasons. Plus, it just solves if you do have a significant other who has a strong stance about not leaving the lid up, it solves that problem because the standard is you close the whole thing every time. And so these are the three things that every family should normalize is restock the toilet paper, make sure it's pointing the right direction with the tear coming down forward, and close the dang lid. it's a toilet after all and.
Keep the keep the paper shelf you know phone shelf stocked. I wonder if other people have bathroom must have or must do's you know i i i'm a little particular about my showers i won't get into it right now but i wonder if others have particulars about their bathroom and bathroom rituals boost in and let us know i'd be curious i i also what other things are people stealing that's just absolutely bonkers because toilet paper i just i would never thought of it but then you know i guess after the pandemic it's not too surprising yeah. I think i have a scar from something someone stole from me that.
Seemed ridiculous oh i definitely do yeah tell me yours tell me yours i'm listening like. A traumatic scar or a physical scar no no. Trauma it's got trauma on there uh when we were kids. You know being canadian and such uh we did a lot of hockey road trips so we had a ton of tapes that we would play because this was in like an old. Dodge. Caravan You needed a caravan Because three kids Plus hockey bags Right. And what have you got a van. Ah, it's a juicy van. So we had a collection of tapes. And I guess one night we left our doors unlocked, because it's what you do in small town Canada. And someone broke into this van and stole our Ren and Stimpy tape.
Ah. Yeah, it even had songs such as, like, you know, I Love Log. That just, I never recovered from that one. That's rough. And I've, like, not trusted society since then. Two stealing traumas for me from a kid, as a kid. I had a massive haul for Halloween one year. And I think I set my bag down somewhere outside and one of the big kids came along and stole my whole bag of candy. And then another time, it was also a Halloween theft, theftery, thievery. We were carving pumpkins and doing the whatnots at a campground with the kiddos. And Hadiyah's dad was there. And we decided to go for a little walk.
And after we were done, we were going to pack up and leave. So we had the jacks up, and we had the jackpads all stacked nicely in our campground so that way we could load them up and go. And we went for our little walk, which we could have only been 20 minutes. And when we got back, somebody had thieved on all of our jackpads, which are not cheap. $700. Yeah. Thieved on our jackpads. You like to think at least they put them to good use. Hopefully. Hopefully they're using them as jackpads. But, yeah, so boost in and tell us what's been thieved on for you or any of your crazy bathroom rules. Ooh.
This should be followed. I was thinking I didn't have a thievery thing. Definitely not from my childhood like you guys. But I did come home when I was living with my grandma to go to college. I got home and every drawer and door and cupboard in the house was open. Creepy. Every single one. And I went to my room and same thing. And so we were. Robbed. Yeah, I remember. Robbed. Yeah. The only thing they took was... dvds that's it my entire collection of dvds i had like 20 dvds uh they didn't take change they didn't take jewelry it was just a stupid hooligan kids taking dvds yeah. I had my house broken into once as a kid they didn't take my sega genesis for some reason.
Oh you had the your cougar got broken into and they took the the radar detector but not the cable for it yeah that was That's so stupid. And they took my music, some of my music CDs. Big Daddy Thump Thump. I don't think they took any of your own mixes. No, I don't think so. So boost in, share. We want to hear your pain, just like Brent. So we are back, and it was a hell of a ride. So just a quick recap, since we have told the story in bits, Brent picked up a abandoned van from Jeff's folks, from Jeff's family, and it hadn't been on the road since at least 2019.
And it was in pretty rough shape, some leaks, tires are completely rotted out because it sat in the hot Los Angeles sun nonstop. And so many parts hadn't moved in many years, but they were ready to make a good deal because of the state of things. And so we went down there during scale, we looked it over, we decided, hey, this is actually in pretty good shape if you excuse the tires, the leaks, and some of these things. And Brent made an offer, and they accepted. And so we went down there just a couple of weeks ago or a week ago and did a rescue plan where we got new tires on her and fixed up a few small essentials, which we'll get into, and drove her to producer Jeff's house.
Where we discovered along the way that it had a massive fuel leak that was going to be... So, so bad that if we continue driving, we were probably taking a pretty big risk and we needed to get all the way back up to northern Washington from Sacramento. So we had to drop the fuel tank in Jeff's backyard. We didn't have any of the tools to do this. So we essentially created tools along the way out of logs and lumber and carjacks. And that's how we dropped a, you know, 200 pound fuel tank. It was half, more than half full with fuel. Had you ever dropped a fuel tank before?
Never have. Never had. And at first, you know, we just dropped just the minimal amount we needed so Brent could stick his body in there and try to do some diagnosing, but we couldn't really hook our peepers on it. And so we kind of thought, okay, it must be this quick connect. We can see the fuel's gushing out of there. It would make sense this part would degrade over time. And guess what? We can manage to get our hands on some. So we had to source it from multiple places, but we got the parts we needed, replaced the quick connect, patted ourselves on the back and said, should we test it?
no let's slap it up there and then we stopped for a second and went no we'll test it we'll see if it's working and we cranked the engine and sure enough the fuel leak was just as bad as if we hadn't fixed it and we were like well now what do we do because that was our best idea and so what we had to do was drop the tank further so we could really get it in the daylight and actually look at the thing and see the top of the fuel pump which is built into the fuel tank so you imagine a huge tank, the top of the tank, it has like this octopus with all these lines coming out of it and this little, you know, plastic ring with all these lines coming out of it. And that's the fuel pump integrated into the fuel tank.
So if you want to replace the fuel pump, you're opening up the fuel tank. It's a big job. And we started looking at this pump and the top of it and Brent started discovering there were cracks all over the top of the fuel pump, all over like the stems and just all kinds of components that were just in really rough shape after 30 years. So Brent did the right thing and refurbed on the whole pump. Yeah, I used this, let's say, secret weapon that I like to keep around. And thankfully, Chris, you had the brilliant idea. The morning of.
For unknown reasons. Randomly when we were out part shopping. Because, you know, we were trying to plan ahead, but you never know what you run into. And you picked up, I think based on my lessons from years past, some epoxy. Yeah, but extra strong metal reinforced epoxy. Not just any. Not your regular epoxy, but your industrial strength epoxy. And it's been kind of a joke that I think that you could fix almost anything with epoxy. And we have actually on Joops. But it turned out this probably was a pretty desperate move. You epoxied all the cracks?
Yeah. Yeah, we did. Okay, you said Brent did the right thing. Don't use that face. So when you said Brent did the right thing, I thought Brent bought a new fuel pump. Well, you see, the thing is, it's a very special fuel pump because it's for a camper van. Sure. And it has an additional outlet for a generator. So you can't just go get a Dodge van fuel pump. It has to be a Dodge camper van fuel pump, which we weren't going to be able to source. Definitely not within 24 or 48 hours. What's the curing time of this epoxy? Oh, well, there are different types. I would most recommend not getting the one minute epoxy setting because it gets so hot that it sometimes melts plastic.
And it's too hot to work with because it's an exothermic reaction that happens between these two products. Did we find this out on the fuel pump? Or is this the previous? No, past mistakes. Okay. They call it plastic welding for a reason. Yeah. So generally the stuff that cures slowest will be the strongest in the end. Sure. But we didn't have time for almost anything. So you did a mid? We got the five-minute stuff, which is my recommendation for the keep around just in case. And it turned out we used a ton of it. Jeff even had some on hand that we also used. So we had clear epoxy. One-fifth of heat. We had other epoxy, yeah, we had all sorts of epoxy, but it was the case where, This major leak that was happening was in the plastic that this new connector we put on passed over.
Sat on top of, yeah, connected over. And we talked for quite a while about how to fix this because it was a little risky to epoxy it because once it's epoxied, there's nothing you can do. There's no going back. You're never getting it off again. Yeah, I think Jeff was trying to encourage strongly that we don't do that because then it's like there's no turning back. But we thought about it and this thing was so cracked. It was in such rough shape that the next step is to replace the fuel pump. Right. Just with more time to do research, get the components, all that stuff. Oh, my God. I can't believe you guys made it all the way up here.
We're just getting into it. At that point, we were only a third way into our trip. And luckily, we, thankfully, we planned it this way. And Jeff, thank you for following us and, like, offering your home for us to stop. Because we knew we would find out a ton of stuff in that first day. Yeah. Because I think it sat at least for six years. and then, you know, we're changing out the tires and wheels and we're, you know, doing a little bit of maintenance. Brent made sure that the, you know, the front wheels were repacked and greased and good to go. And the brakes, you know, we tested a bit. So we knew the brakes worked-ish.
One of our seatbelts disintegrated when we first went for a ride. So we did add an extra seatbelt, which I thought was pretty important. Yeah. But so the epoxy did in fact work. Brent is an epoxy artiste. You would look at this thing and think it was almost factory. It looks so good. Some of it, which I had never done before, so I've gained new skills in this particular epoxy situation, was I had to epoxy paint using a mirror. So doing it backwards because we didn't actually take the fuel tank completely out from under the van because it's A, it had fuel in it, so it was really heavy, and B, whatever we did, we would have to undo.
So it was like half... exposed half under and the only way to like see some components was to use this brilliant mirror that you picked up as well yeah. We always like we might need to be able to see up in there so we'll grab the epoxy we'll grab this mirror wow used them both. Yeah we used way more epoxy than i thought we were going to need thankfully we had it on hand but now the uh well we solved the problem it's. I mean it held you know after after i don't know something like six minutes ten minutes It has a, it can withstand a pressure of 3,200 PSI. So this is some serious stuff. But we were really excited because it just felt like there's no way this is going to work. So we did it all.
But then we left the tank down so we could start it and verify it wasn't leaking. But what do you do? Because this is like the Hail Mary attempt. If this fails, we're basically done. Yeah, we're abandoning ship. And you have to let it, you don't want to like do it too soon because you want to let it harden. even though it says it's ready in like five six minutes like you want to give it like a good hour so we went out and got frozen yogurt and then after we were done with our frozen yogurt we came back to see if it was working it's. Real it's happening it's running i can hear the fuel pump going do we have any leaks i don't see any yes you did it you fixed it it took two days but we did, You want me to turn it off, it's kind of stinky.
It's kind of stinky, Brett. Yeah, okay. Okay. Yeah, okay. We were so excited. He's like, but I want to see if it's leaking. Yeah, we revved it a bit, looked at it for a while, and then man, was it a job putting that thing back in there. I mean, we started working on that rig that day, 7 a.m., 6 a.m., and we were working until midnight in the dark. It was just a marathon day. I'm glad we did that. I know it took us a long time, and it cut into our trip a little bit. Like, we got here a little later than the best case scenario. It was a must fix.
Though. Oh, the amount of fuel that was pouring out of that thing at the time. I realize that's why our fuel consumption was so bad. It must have been almost half. It must have been almost. Yeah. Yeah, it was bad. So, I'm glad we did it. We also replaced a bunch of the fuel lines that were coming out of the octopus, like you said. Better lines and the fuel filter replaced on the fuel filter as well. Those things I spotted on day one because I did a, you know, shove a Brent under your van and see everything that might go wrong. That was on my list of things that I knew were potential issues and I would just ignore. So I'm actually glad we got to replace those.
And the entire time we're like, well, how long do you think this is going to take? Before we started, you know, I think Jeff says four hours. Brent's like, ah, four to six. No, no, no, no, no, no. I was super. I knew exactly how long it would take. And you guys were rarely the optimistic ones. And I was like. Guys. But then as it's working, it's like, OK, well, if this fix works, then we could be on the road tonight by 4 p.m. And then that fix doesn't work. Well, if this fix works, we could be on the road by 7 p.m. And then by 7 p.m. we're still working on a fix.
And then it's like, well, this was an honest. We honestly had this conversation. It's like, should I go take a nap? You and Jeff keep working. and then if you get done around 10, 11 o'clock, I'll jump in the captain's chair and we'll just take off and go down the road and you sleep. And Brent's like, maybe we should do that. I don't know, that could happen. But then, of course, there were so many other little things to do that I just kept puttering away while we got everything ready. And then, you know, about midnight, we realized, okay, we're not leaving tonight. All right, well, we're going to leave first thing in the morning.
We're going to leave at 5 a.m. And to Brent's credit... Thank you. He was up. He was ready to go. It was almost a flawless victory. We're on the road. It's a little after 5.30 a.m. The rent is in the captain's, awake and driving you can believe it and uh she's under her own power after a minor incident we had to resolve before takeoff which we resolved quickly and we don't need to mention that brent killed the battery and so we couldn't leave super early we're not even going to bring it up because we're on the road we're happy right brent. Yeah yeah and this was us uh slowly discovering that we may have a bit of a bigger problem the battery died overnight we thought we knew why but we were focused on other things we had almost 1500 miles to put down at that point and we were headed towards the california coast so we needed some sweet tunes and that's why we were glad we had some tapes that we could pop in and get some sweet retro tape deck action uh at least for a little while maybe like half the day you.
Know i was kind of down with the tape deck technology but this has been a real thing here. Look at this. What is that? Okay. But forward motion? Yeah, I fixed on it. Well done. Thanks. Solved it. Yeah, I fixed on it. It's that new jazz people are talking about. And then it immediately broke. It immediately broke the second after that. Oh, my gosh. So, yeah. That was one problem. I think we were a little distracted by a few things. We almost burned out the transmission. You know i think you and i after doing the fuel tank thing and we fixed on a bunch of stuff yeah even before leaving where the rig had been parked for six years i thought at that point we're like yeah we've kind of checked off all the things that could potentially go wrong on this thing and let's just hit the road and like take in the wind we.
Checked on the transmission fluid but it was unlevel when we checked it and we didn't check it again once it had been driven and was level Because in our minds, we'd check the fluid, I think. It was mildly irresponsible of us. So here we are climbing up a pass. Brent's asleep in the copo seat. And I'm in the captain's chair. And I've been grooving along now for about an hour. And we're climbing. And this thing's pretty good. And as we go up, I'm like, okay, we're going to need a little more power. And it shifts down one gear. And it starts smelling really hot. and then it shifts again and then it shifts again and we realize oh it's slipping gear and brent wakes up what's that smell it's it's slipping pull over pull over i'm like i am pulling over so i pull over in this spot that because i was eyeballing this pull over this big big gravel gravel driveway and i thought oh this will be great we can pull out here and we can do some work so i pull off into this gravel spot and brent jumps out and you know we we pop the hood, And next thing I start hearing is this.
Yeah. Oh, no. And it's a big diesel truck coming down this super sharp hill. And I'm right in his way. A logging truck. No, no. The first one was just a worker truck. Were you on the path like when their brakes were going out? No, no. But he was coming down this sharp hill. So I'm right where he's got to like try to use all his braking to come to a stop before he pulls onto the highway. So I was right in his way when he's trying to come to a stop. So I'm like, break it out of the way. and I start up the van back up and I put it in drive. With the hood open and everything. Yeah, with the hood open.
I can't see that. But I'm moving the van out of the way. I say to Brent, I'm right, okay. So I pop her back into neutral because again, we don't have transmission fluid at this point. So I'm trying not to use the gears, right? So I pop her back into nooch and I roll back into the same spot because again, we got to be level. As soon as I get level, I hear... And this one was the logging truck coming down the hill. yeah final destination style there was another truck and it's the same exact situation prank get out of the way and i gotta put her fire it back up put it in the drive with the hood open yes so we that after that we just like okay there's another spot we can pull so i pop it back in neutral and i roll down the hill to another spot that's a little more level and it was totally fine after that but we were stuck with this big problem there's almost no transmission fluid in this thing.
Wasn't even registering on the stick. And the next auto parts store is 38 miles and you got to go over the pass. And this thing's having a hard time making it up. Right. And there's nothing behind us because 101 in California is basically desolate in parts. And so we also have like one bar. So it's tedious even getting answers to this stuff, right? And of course, you're in a rush. So you can't Uber? Well, there was nothing. You looked. I looked. One was like $200 or something like that. Oh, geez. Yeah. 37 minutes later. Yeah, 37 minute wait and $200 and something. I'm like, we're not doing that.
Oh, okay. Brent's like, well, what about a gas station? I'm like, oh, yeah, they might have fluid, right? Oh, my God. Did you hitchhike? Oh, we should have. That would have been a good story. That would have been kinder to the van. We did the right thing and just popped it in neutral and just rode her down the hill, back down the pass. Oh, my gosh. 37 miles. No, you just went to a gas station. Yeah, which is only 10 miles away. Okay, okay. And basically nearly coasted her back into town and then just had to drive on it a little bit and pulled into a gas station that had the gas prices, had an area for gas pumps, but had no gasoline. We also needed gas at this point.
It had no gasoline at all. still calls itself a gas station. First, Google Maps took us to the wrong spot, but that's an aside, which was tense because we're driving on this transmission with no fluid, and Google Maps is taking us on a random... I have never seen it that bad. It was bad. It was all backwards. But we pull into this old rickety gas station that's no longer a gas station but still has California gas prices, and sure enough, they have a small but useful auto section, and one of the things they had is like this generic automatic transmission fluid that is compatible with the van. Because basically they haven't gotten new supplies since the 90s.
Did you pick up a couple cassette tapes too? Oh, we should have looked. But the lady behind the counter was very surprised to see someone come in through the door. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So right there in the parking lot, we're like going through, because the van has a process you have to go through to like check the transmission fluid properly. So we're going through those processes and adding more fluid and adding more fluid. so we almost blew out the van there was that problem and then there was the problem that really didn't come up much in la or california at all but kind of came up the moment we were in the pacific northwest we're.
Officially driving in the rain for the first time and it's very drippy i don't know if you can see the drips right now but it's it's a lot it's down my neck It's in my mouth. Oh, my gosh. While you're driving? It's been on my face. Oh, you got it. Yeah, it's a little dirty. It's a little dirty. And the best part is, we checked thrice, and the weather app says it's not raining, and there's absolutely no water in the sky at all. And we got at least another two hours on the coast where it's definitely not raining at all. So that's the thing about taking the coast, is there's a lot of moisture out there, and sometimes the weather apps don't show any rain. It was definitely raining.
Yeah, dripping on us while we're driving, in the passenger seat, on the floor, Oh. My gosh. This was one of those things we identified, let's say, as a potential issue. Because the windows, well, the entire van had sat in the California sun, I think, most of its life. But those last six years just cooked all of the seals. And there are these beautiful, three beautiful skylights in the ceiling of this van. But the seals have shrunk so much that there's like a two-inch gap in these seals. So not only are we getting like wind noise through these. Oh, man.
Lots of wind noise. That's tough. But also it turns out water can get through there. We've patched them. The wind noise is better. With epoxy? No, with like some patch tape. But it still leaks. Still the frames themselves are kind of rough. So Highway 101 is a special treat. It really is very nice. But we are in a van that was just rescued. It's in kind of rough looking shape. It's got California plates from 2019. And one thing that people don't know about the RV industry is a lot of campgrounds these days have a 10-year rule. So your rig needs to be 10 years or younger. Oh, wow. They want the park to look nice.
Oh. Brent's rig is 30 years old. Right. Still looks nice, right? It looks. How would you describe it? It looks like it needs a good wash and maybe a new paint or a cover or a gloss. you know it when we were parked in Oregon we had somebody who works at like a halfway house kind of come up to us and think that we were homeless people in the van that needed help and he came up to see if we need assistance that's the vibe the van gives off. But you just got a haircut. I know right well once he saw us he knew immediately like as soon as we opened the door, but it's it's also sketched because the window on the driver's side doesn't go down so we have to open the whole door when somebody approaches yeah so you know some campgrounds aren't going to let us in. It looks a bit sketch.
And we didn't want to park anywhere like a Walmart or a Home Depot or somewhere that might draw attention because the registration and licensing is currently registered to Jeff's deceased grandpa. And so that wasn't. So in California, I don't know about Oregon, but in California, we learned that that means they would impound it if a cop came across it. And so we didn't want to get the van impounded. That would be really inconvenient. So putting everything together we knew we had a lot of tricky things to solve in order to stop for the night and then additionally because of our power problems.
We probably needed to stop somewhere where we could be plugged in because we weren't sure what was going on with the power system. So we needed power hookups. And that's when I realized, you know, pulling on years of boondocking and camping is like a state campground is perfect. If you come in after hours, the ranger is already gone for the night. So it's a self check in process. Nobody's vetting the van. They have hookups and a van can fit anywhere in a state camp. No problem. Like my RV, you got to like book it out three months in advance. But a van, you can just pull in any old spot.
And it worked out, I think, really well. We got a very nice spot near the ocean, near a lighthouse. It was a very nice park. But we were so wiped out that night just from a day. We got up at 4.30, and it was midnight-ish when we were pulling into the campground. I accidentally drank a 165, I think it was, milligram caffeinated propel. I didn't know propel made caffeinated. I just thought it was- Energy drink water? Yeah, I thought I was just getting some water with electrolytes because I was a little dehydrated. turned out I was chugging caffeinated propel didn't know that out like a light I just was so exhausted I was just out but so we were just so tired that our brains weren't working I'm like okay Brian what time do we want to get up because now that we're in we're like in the midway of Oregon we don't want to hit traffic in Tacoma and Seattle and Everett and Marysville so we should time it so we leave in the morning so we're either just missing or getting there just before the traffic gets bad.
And Brent's like, oh, that's a great idea. Okay, so what time do we need to leave then if we want to be at Seattle? And we're like, oh, we are too tired to figure this out. Brent suggested, why don't we ask ChatGPT? So I described the entire problem to ChatGPT. And it gives us a really good answer. I mean, very clearly understood what we were trying to accomplish, gave us a clear, concise time. It said, you need to be leaving by 6 a.m. And, well, we did just that. Unfortunately... Sometimes, ChatGPT tells you what you want to hear, not what you need to hear. So by the time we got into the campground last night, we were exhausted, and Brent had the brilliant idea.
Instead of us trying to do the travel math, let's ask ChatGP to do the travel math. It was really impressive. Yeah, it did a great job, except I realized once we got on the road that it assumed we would be taking I-5 and not Highway 101. So instead of just avoiding traffic, we are going daily traffic, afternoon traffic, all the way from Tacoma, Seattle. Seattle, Everett, and the fish tunnel. We're going to hit it all. Good plan. And it rained. Technology failed this place. Yeah, the weather app said it wouldn't rain. And ChatGPT assumed we'd be taking I-5 when we were taking Highway 101.
And so the math worked out so that we nailed Seattle traffic. All of it. Yeah. I think we learned some things about AI on this trip. Yeah. It was like right 70% of the time. And sometimes it was incredible because I was taking pictures of components that we didn't know. what it did in the van and 70% of the time it was identifying it correctly and telling me what they did. But then sometimes it would tell you something that's completely wrong. I found that fascinating because a lot of these components, we would have had a hard time figuring out what they were unless we had some of this help.
And it was like that first, that first 70% was actually amazingly helpful. And we solved a lot of things based on that. But for instance, We bought a new component recently that we'll talk about in a bit and tried to get some help with how to install it. And the instructions were actually quite correct, except it was an electronic component and it got all of the pinouts that you should plug things into perfectly wrong. Like they were the right names for all the pinouts, but the wrong locations. Luckily, I knew a little bit better. So it's like you get that 70 percent, but actually the rest is what really matters.
Yeah, getting the pinouts wrong is a bad one. Yeah, that would have fried some things, but otherwise really helpful. Yeah, so it was hit and miss at times. Just a warning, I think, from us. We did okay, though. It wasn't the worst. It was a pretty smooth drive. We did get more rain. In fact, more rain was expected, so the goal really was let's get her parked and then work things out. We're not actually convinced that the isolator is bad. Brent thinks it might have been wired up wrong. And so we're going to do a manual, quick wiring up from the alternator to the old isolator. Is it a good idea? No.
And, you know, hook up the system to that, wire up the batteries to the truck, wire up the battery to the house, see what we can see. This old ancient isolator may be fine if it actually was just wired up wrong. And we do have reason to believe that might be the case. There's several things that indicate that. Right? Save me. So, jumper cable to the alternator, you know, it could go wrong. It's totally fine. Could just replace it, but, you know, that'd be $75, so it's going to test it. And like this, you know. Your hunch was right. It turns out, we don't know who, but at some point, a former owner, maybe the van conversion company, unlikely, but maybe they wired up some of the electrical system wrong, which is why we inevitably ended up having problems.
Well, part of probably why we ended up having problems. And what we assumed was a failed piece of equipment from 30 years ago was actually just wired up wrong and still works. After all these years of being treated poorly, you know, it still works. It's incredible. Yeah, you discovered this issue because we were trying to isolate why our starter battery kept dying. And it turns out it was just trying to charge the house system constantly. Yeah. And also there was some kind of draw from the house system, even if we turned everything off, that would just kill the starter battery.
And that is a problem. Yeah. So we traced wires. We did diagnoses. We used a really bad multimeter to try to figure things out. And it turned out to be this device was wired wrong. Crazy. In that clip, though, Chris, you seem a little hesitant about my testing setup. Brent literally took jumper cables you'd use to start a car, clamped it onto the alternator of the engine and then clamped it onto this device to get power to it. Well, and they didn't quite fit on the alternator because it protects the pin. So I had to use like a pair of needle nose pliers.
And then the first time we started the engine, the shaking of the engine starting just popped the clamp right off. So then while the engine's running and the alternator's hot, Brent's got to clamp it on there while it's vibrating. I did ask you to count my fingers before I got in there. So, you know, it was nice to get that figured out. So at least we're not killing batteries anymore. And on our way home, our first stop before we got her parked was Angela's house. So what was your first impressions? Be honest. Yeah. Okay. So I'm sitting on the couch with my boyfriend and I get a ring notification that there's somebody down the driveway.
Some sketchy vans pulling in the driveway. Right. It previews a sketchy van down the driveway. And I'm like, what the fuck is this? So I go to live view and it's gone. Like, it's just not like there's nothing there. I'm like, oh, maybe they just, you know, whatever. And then I get a second notification and the van's there again. Like, I don't know if you guys pulled forward or like if it's just ring glitching. And so then we're both looking at it. And then we see Brent get out of the side door and we both look at each other and say, it's a bang bus. Oh, my goodness.
And we get up and we run outside and, yeah, we got a tour. Yeah, you got the first tour. Yeah. And it was really cool. It definitely looked a lot more worse for the wear than some of the pictures that you had shared previously. Sure, yeah. I think my favorite thing is I took a picture of you guys. I was in towards the front of the bus and you guys were at the back of the bus. With the door open? With the door open. Yep. And you're standing on the ground looking in and Brent has this road banana. Of course he's eating a road banana. It's funny you say that because many of our photos from this trip have included a banana for unknown reasons. And so I didn't even realize that happened. That's really funny.
But it is pretty cool I love the skylights Yeah. It's going to be nice to fix on Would you paint it? Would you clean it up, shine it up and seal it? That would be really cool It sounds expensive I don't know how much it costs to paint vehicles But it would be cool I'm considering just preserving what's there Oh I see she doesn't like that idea No. I don't Sorry If I had to describe the condition of the paint Chris, help me out here but I think I would describe it as like... Sun tortured? Yeah, California roasted, maybe. Yes.
To the point where it's gone through multiple layers of paint because... The sun has burned through the paint. Yeah, to the point where it got down to the steel and there's rust in those places trying to save on it. Yeah. But also a Picasso? Yeah, I mean, it's nature's art. So I was thinking just clear coat it. Yeah, well, wash on it first. Oh. Get some of that peel and paint off there. All right. Yeah. That would be, maybe the thing would be to get the dying paint off. Maybe that's the thing. I don't know. Isn't all of the paint dying? Yes. But, you know, assuming the interior was fixed up, would you road trip in that thing? No.
I don't know. I mean, it's better. You know what? It is a step up from a tent. Yeah, that's for sure. I can attest to that. I don't know if I'd call it glamping, though. A tent doesn't have that many electrical issues, so. Yes, that's true. You are signing up for something. Okay, in your opinion, since you got the tour, what would you fix first? I would be pulling out any fabric and carpet. Okay. Yeah. With that water leak and I'm allergic to mold. Yeah, fair enough. We should stick her in there and find out if there's any mold. Oh, yeah.
We can't smell any. Overnight? Yeah. But maybe you could be our detector. Yeah, Chris, remember you pulled out the cushions and started banging on them with something? Oh, God. Not inside. No, no, no. Okay, good. We cleaned on it like six times, but every time you got to do a pass. and vacuumed and I got some fabrics, foam cleaner stuff and I brushed that in. I want to see the shower work. Have you pulled the tank to see? Pull the tank like we just drop all the tanks. Drop them all. There's a slight water leak behind the toilet. Small detail. Yeah, we got to fix on that. But otherwise the water seems to work.
The stove's never been used. Oh wait, so did you use the toilet? No. See, here's the thing and I'm really pissed off, Ange, because you know, Some people shouldn't have it this easy And it's really frustrating It's supposed to be harder than this. You think Brent has it easy? Oh, let me tell you So, first of all The microwave, never even been used once Stovetops, never been used once Generator only has 60 hours on it It probably came with $600 worth of tools in there It probably came with another couple hundred dollars worth of accessories And then it's got all the original manuals The engine is basically pristine mint The engines and transmission are in great shape, despite what we've done to them.
The fridge works, and it's a rare model that works on propane. It works on shore electricity, or it works on DC power. And then it's got the simplicity to it, because the whole engine and truck aspect to it is totally analog. It's just one of those things where you just kind of have to look at it for a while. And once you hook your peepers on it, you can actually just understand how it works, and you can just fix on it. So, like, we could do stuff to it that, like, we couldn't do with modern cars. I don't even think we could have rescued a modern car like this after sitting with six-year-old fuel in it and going on the road.
And so when you try to look for a vehicle where the frame and the engine are in great shape but the house just needs a little bit of work. You know, you're looking at like $10,000 for a vehicle like that. Or, you know, if you get one where everything's in decent shape, $15,000 up for vans that are even older than the one Brent got because his is a 91 and these are like 87s and 88s and 85s I was looking at. So it's a hell of a deal. It's just not supposed to work that way. You're supposed to get royally screwed on your first rig, have lots of regrets, get way in debt and make all these poor decisions and then slowly dig your way out and be a man about it.
But instead, you had to go and get a great rig, which you can build on, and basically anything you do to it's a net positive value-wise. It's so frustrating. You know what I mean? Yeah. I feel like you're both frustrated and also have fallen in love with this thing. Yeah, we need sad harmonica. Yeah. Because, like, three times. I love another man's van. This is my sad harmonica. Do you like it? You've done way better. I'll fire. I don't know what's going on. Yeah. No, it's sad, dude. It's sad. You make a beat sad. But it was at least like three times a day on the trip while we were driving down the road.
And you were like, you know, these old rigs, these old engines. They're way better. It's just a different era. Build them like they used to, Brent. And yeah, you started. I could see like your philosophies about engines. Well, it's way simpler. It really is. mechanical. Empathy just like changing as we sort of spent more time in this thing. Also much easier to drive so there's that there's that but we really you know there's um we we had a lot of like expectations we had sort of these ideas of what we would accomplish and all the things we would do on the drive back how do you think we did how do you think it stacks up from the vision to what we actually accomplished.
That is a really good question. I mean, last episode, we kind of asked some big questions about whether this was crazy or not. But going into it, I think, at least for myself, I left a lot of room for unknowns. I knew it was a good idea to stop at Jeff's on day one because we would discover something. Yeah. I know we had a list of all the things we wanted to do to the van before we even started getting on the road. But looking back, it was a bit basic, like making sure all the fluids are good, changing the tires. cleaning it up a little bit and we could not have predicted the entire windshield wiper system being in pieces or forgetting to tighten the lug nuts on the wheels or having to you know add extra grease and the bearings because we discovered a strange issue or you know so many things that we ran into so i think luckily i left room in my expectations for having to spend time on that yeah and we left flexibility in our trip to be able to take a day or two somewhere thankfully was.
Able to let us crash for a day or two. Well could you imagine no if. We probably would have died. Yeah most likely either. From the exhaust leak or from the gas leak either one we would have died if we hadn't fixed. Yeah i think we did well in fixing problems before they became critical, uh the transmission was a bit hairy that. Was a miss. Uh we fixed it we did and it says something about transmissions of that age but i think i think we did all right. Yep i mean there's still outstanding work to be done no doubt about it from leaks to electrical and oil changes and maintenance in between but and paperwork is still an area.
Oh yeah we really right we. Don't really know that process. Last episode we had a couple categories right the uh the travel was one of them number one was travel and i think i wasn't sure if we made the right plans but now looking back i think it was perfect uh we hit about the mark of when we wanted to come back maybe a day later of ideal but i'm actually pretty good uh another category was all the mechanical stuff and we kind of went over that already but that third category of the paperwork remember i was saying how important that was especially for importing slash exporting to canada which is my end goal, and how did we do on the paperwork, Chris?
Well, we got signed paperwork from the people that were taking care of it in California but they're not technically the legal owners because the legal owner is deceased but they were the people that were next of kin, so we got paperwork from them but otherwise that's all we have done because it's like how do you transfer something that's registered to somebody who's not alive in California that hasn't been is probably considered abandoned by the state at this point, and then move it to Canada, you know, and then get it registered in Canada. It's like, that's quite the process. So that's still figuring it out.
Yeah, when we first started this trip, I was like, oh, people have done this before. But when you start looking at all the details, I actually think we're quite a unique case in trying to, like, get this thing registered in a different country. There's some edge case here. It needs work. Let's say this category needs work. But there is a third category or a fourth category. You should ask Ang this Yeah. Okay. Do you remember the fourth category was the viability of all of this? So what do you think? Is this, so our question last time was, is this ridiculous? Yes or no? Or both?
No, I think it was viable. Oh. Yeah, no, I totally, you guys did it within a logical timeframe and you troubleshot a lot of things. A lot more could have gone worse or gone back, right? Like it sounds, I don't know. It sounds good. It's got a lot of potential. It needs work, but it's got a lot of potential. The paperwork is probably the hardest thing at this point. It's hard to spend like a lot of money on it until the paperwork's all done because it's like you don't really know what the end result of that is. I'm also proud of us for not doing anything that wasn't safe. What?
What van were you riding in? Well, okay. Maybe my definition is a little different. Yeah. No, we didn't go too crazy. Right? We had some soft limits, let's say. Yeah. And I thought that was good. I have a question for you, Chris. At what point am I considered like a certified van lifer? Like when do I hit the point where you think I have enough experience and like hard knocks? You got to go live in it for a bit. Well, I'm on day. Nomad. I spent four nights in it so far. You're getting, I don't know. I don't know what that threshold is because it's like road trip combo, but you did a road trip. You might be there.
Probably depends. It depends on how long you lapse now, I suppose, right? That'll be the defining line. There's a lot in there. If you have any questions or you have any feedback on the old bus trip, boost in. Let us know. All right. Coming up on the show, we have a value for value track where if you boost 95% of the sats, go to the artist, makes their day. And then after the music, we'll be taking your calls. so while the music's playing why not call in you can listen to the show and then chime in we'll pull you in get ready here comes the phone number it is 774-462-5667 that is 774-462-5667, boost on in while the music's playing and we'll stack your calls and you will rack your calls, yeah as if and then we'll get to the voicemails as well all right you ready for our track, So this is from Caroline Hale.
I featured it once on This Week in Bitcoin. It's just a great song, and it's called Kick It. Oh, we do have some boosts to get into. And Brentley, I think you should read our first boost. It's a baller boost this week. This is a baller of baller boosts from Daja. 10, oh wait, no. No, no. 100,000 Satoshi. That's right. Well, you know, previously on the Jupiter Network, we had brunch with Brent. I think it's high time for lunch with Brent as a worthy successor. Would it be like a little edgier? Not like super edgy, but just like a little more edgy? Like with mojitos, you mean?
Yeah, maybe. I'm into it. I'd love it. Lunch with Brent doesn't quite have the same ring. Lunch with Brent? Brunch is tough to beat. Open to suggestions. What about Lent with Brent? Just every season we celebrate a holiday with Brent. Once a year. Thank you, Dasha. Appreciate that. Awesome baller boost. Turd Ferguson's here with 30,444 sats. Says, thanks for getting me into Bitcoin. I just hit 100,000 for once. My wife thinks I'm actually smart. Appreciate you guys. Heck yeah. Also, happy Mother's Day to Angela and all the moms in the audience. Yeah. Plus one to that. Thank you, Turd.
I did it three times. That's right. Odyssey West is here with a row of McDucks. He says, I just got to tune into the tail end of the show, and I love the Bang Bus song. Sending you some sats because my fountain wall was locked up on me, so I couldn't boost on my drive home from LinuxFest Northwest. So catching up now, I love seeing you guys at LinuxFest Northwest. No, we didn't get to interact much. I had somebody with me this year. He brought people. That's good. You know, bringing outsiders to the Linux world is a good thing. He says, that person also really loves the launch. Hey, shout out to them.
I think I convinced her to download Fountain and add it as her first podcast. Wow. Awesome. First podcast. Honestly, out there doing the work. Thank you. Appreciate that. You know, that's word of mouth. That's how it works, buddy. You know that. He's been a long timer. He knows that. He's in live chat today, too. And Podbun rounds us out with a row of ducks. 2,222 cents. I use Brave right now. I don't usually have a pin tab, but the first site I open is usually YouTube. Okay. I do. So my dirty browser behavior is that I have multiple browser applications. I've got Firefox on my main screen and usually Firefox or another browser on a second vertical screen.
And then another horizontal screen above my main horizontal screen, I have one Chrome browser, which is what I use for YouTube and YouTube Live TV. Just because it's Chrome and I just dedicate it to that. You're looking at me like you're disgusted. It's just like the Google theme on that one. Yeah, I know. It's a lot. And you listen to music and podcasts. At the same time. At the same time. And videos. Yeah, I know. It's crazy when I used to do that. But now the kids do it. I know. All the Gen Elfers. Yep. They're out there doing that. Thank you, everybody, who boosted in. We did get a few boosts under the 2,000-set cutoff, and we appreciate everybody.
And you sat streamers out there, 11 of you, streamed us 6,615 sets. I'd love to see that just tick up a little bit. When you combine it with our boosters, we stacked a very handsome 144,825 satoshis. It's getting easier than ever. Fountain has a lot of new updates coming into their client and their web interface, making it easier to boost, and they host the entire infrastructure. If you're ready to take the challenge and host it yourself, there's a lot of great paths. You can get started at podcastapps.com. You just need sats and a podcasting 2.0 app, which also gets you chapters, the live notifications for when the stream is live and instant releases podcastapps.com and thank you everybody who supports us with a boost or a membership don't forget if you're a Jupiter party member you get the extended bootleg version of the show which I gotta say the traders they love it, yeah they love the vol of the bootleg so go get the bootleg version if you're a Jupiter party member because you're missing out otherwise there's a lot more show.
All right, we've got a few voicemails this week. I thought we'd get to. And then we have some wild stories to wrap it up. And then we're all done. We're getting everybody out of here. It's a little bit longer for you because we do not have an episode again next week. We're going to Baston to attend Red Hat Summit, so there will not be a launch. So we're giving you a little extra loaded version. Brent, he brought his birds. So we have the birds in the studio for you because we care about you. And Graphene Man kicks us off with the first voicemail. Hey, launch crew. This is Graphene Man again. A while back, I remember Chris talking about getting his gaming handheld in and that it just had, you know, a metric ton of games and he was enjoying it.
Well, I found one. It's an R36S clone. It was like $20 on AliExpress and I got it right before the tariff hit. I can confidently say that as an adult with very limited free time now, it's helped me fall in love with gaming again. Even now, you can get them for under $50. Preloaded with 9,000 games, it's been an absolute blast. I'm playing through Pokemon Red, which alone is $60 if you get the original. And yeah, I could not suggest it highly enough for the price. Anyway, that's all. Thanks for the great shows. Oh, but it wasn't all. In fact, he called in again, I believe.
You know what? I lied. I did have something else to yap about. Andrews was talking about her car troubles, and it kind of reminded me of when I first got my car. I have a Nissan Leaf, and unfortunately the newer models are kind of known for having battery issues. And so you'll be driving along the road, and a gust of wind will hit you, and the battery will drop like 20%. And any time I took it to the dealership, they basically told me, I don't know, man, that's expected behavior. Even though it qualified under the battery warranty for replacement, it turns out it was a bad sell, as I had suspected.
But it took probably two months of trying to convince them on the phone, talking to Nissan Corporate, for them to actually do anything about it. So I'm just convinced that dealerships are not interested in doing anything for you unless they're going to make a ton of money. And, yeah, that was my bad experience with getting a new car. Hopefully, I'll upgrade to a big boy EV at some point in the future. But for now, you know, this works. And on that note, as you guys have been talking about the Bang Bus, it's inspired me to remove my back seats and do some car camping of my own.
So I'm going to try that this summer and report back to see how it goes. That's awesome. Nice. You know, what's interesting is over the last couple of weeks, my car shutter or the engine shutter has returned. Oh. It happened on the way here. for an extended amount of time. Now I'm wondering, is this temperature related? Is it because they just did an oil change and they put a crappy oil in it, you know, compared to the previous oil change? Because basically, which was not done at the dealership. I don't know. Something's off. But yeah, it'll be three years this July.
You know, you got two guys in studio. I have a lot of mechanical experience in the last two weeks. We could have a look. But we did get a suggestion after last week's episode. That was two weeks ago. I've been here a long time. And the suggestion was maybe to get an ODB2 port recorder that could see some of the history of what's going on. I would imagine like some misfiring going on. Yeah. I can go through the list of things that they did. There were pistons misfiring or whatever. Oh, really? Yeah. They did do some replacement stuff. Still happening. And they did do the diagonal. Yeah. Yeah. They basically said I needed a brake in the engine.
What? That's ridiculous. Like something, a cleaner in the gas tank. Oh, we got snake oil we could recommend. Oh, my God. It's basically a brand new car. And they're like, you need to run the snake oil through the gas. It literally did it driving off the lot. Oh, my God. That's so ridiculous. Yeah, it is ridiculous. Okay. Okay. Well, you'll get there. All right. Just a couple more voicemails. This one is a first-time caller. Now, remember, callers, we want to hear your name in town. Name in town, if you wish to opine. Hi, Chris and Angela. Love the shows. Thank you for doing them.
Wish I'd have found out about you a lot sooner. Anyway, I'm calling because I used to play Shadow of the Beast on my Amiga 1000. I spent the last time on that until I finally finished it. And then in college, we used to play Warcraft and Marathon, which was on the Mac. We used to go around shooting each other. It was a lot of fun. And also on my Amiga, I used to play a racing game where it was a, I don't remember the name of it. It was an elevated track, and you had to try to stay on the track. That's the low road. This is Tux Gear Jammer. We'll catch you later. Bye.
Thanks, Tux Gear Jammer. And so many hours spent playing Marathon. One of the first original, really good first-person shooters. They got bought out and went on to create Halo. So, there you go. A little history for you. Okay, last couple. This is from a guy named Ryan. Hello, JB Launch Crew. This is a guy named Ryan. Long time. I think seventh time. Chris put out a call for names for Brent's new van. Here we go. So I took the opportunity to come up with a couple. First, we're going to go Canada style. We've got the Canuck wagon. That's not bad.
The poutine wagon. And the Maple Meanderer. Maple Meanderer. Oh. And then Linux-wise, I was thinking maybe slash home slash Brent. Or Tux Wagon. Oh, Tux Wagon. Or the Indopenguin. Oh. I like that one. That is cute. And then maybe we go a little Star Trek-y. I was thinking USS Brenter Prize. Oh, my gosh. Or the USS Soyager. Anyway, those are my pitches. Always love the shows Keep up the great work And congratulations Brent on your Your new van life man Excited to hear about all the adventures Thanks everyone, Soyager as in like soy alternative Oh my.
Gosh Alright and our Last one comes from Sidney Penguin. Talking a lot kind of weird to actually like Have a message that's potentially going to be played on the show Anyway I'm like Really behind oh I should probably say Hi I'm Sidney Penguin and I don't think I've been in too much of this stuff. You can call me like the lurcher, I guess, in the JV community. But, where was I gonna go with this? Oh, yes, ADHD, but it's not kicked in, can you tell? Anyway, so, I'm listening to the show from after Linux Fest Northwest then. And Angie said something, maybe kind of concerned me. It was based from like a safety perspective.
You said you weren't counting people when you were at the fest. And I'm thinking, is that a fire hazard in some way to not know how many people are allowed in particular rooms or buildings? Maybe that's not a concern because it's not like, you know, it's like a 3,000 people limit and, you know, you're only getting like 1,000 people. But, yeah, either way, safety conscious, I guess. I work in a manufacturing facility and IT, so it's kind of like being into us. But yeah, anyway, I say all that, and I also heard the question of what is my primary browser and primary tab.
Primary browser is Firefox, because thanks to this show, we'll really do better broadcasting. I've ran Nix OS on my main machine for the last six months or so. It's been great, fantastic. I simultaneously love and hate you all for it, so thank you. And my primary tab is complexity. But I think I'm about to switch to Abacus.ai. If you've not heard of it, look it up. I've only got like five seconds. It's really great. You should try it. It has like everything. Abacus.ai. Huh. Well, thank you for the call. All right.
Are we concerned about fire capacity? So we were all about capacity. We were closing doors to talk. So we even had two situations, one of which I had to diffuse myself. myself a drunk uh really a a community member that had been drinking one of our listeners okay all right yeah of course not yeah and anyway so no we were we we have probably. That brett johnson guy. We did everything above board as far as everything goes uh capacity wise and uh the comment was specifically about we didn't know how many people ran through the fest but there it's among three different buildings and a bunch of outside areas and yes attendance was a fraction of what it was back in 2019 when when it was the last like major i'll.
Tell you where we went over capacity freaking lady jupes man we had a few tours coming through lady jupes for the uh home assistant setup and whatnot that's where we went over capacity don't report us and thank you everybody who calls in please do leave us a voicemail we love them and we want more, All right, so I've got a couple of stories to wrap us up. First is a story of a 55-year-old woman who might have gotten away with it if it wasn't for her darn pet raccoon. A pet raccoon of hers was discovered in the vehicle. I'll play a little bit of the police body cam footage because he kind of captures the moment, and I don't want to spoil it for you.
She would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for this raccoon. Oh, there's no one. He's trying to smoke it. All right. that's what oh my god her meth pipe he's playing with the meth pipe right now, no don't reach for it that's evidence now i don't want him to have well that's why i'm gonna do it, so he. Walks up to the lady. All right well your your raccoon gave you away Okay. No. Oh, yeah. So this gal, she had hidden the meth pipe in her car, but then after the cops arrested her, the raccoon came out, digged the meth pipe out, and I'm not kidding, literally puts it up to its mouth and holds it like a human, like it's smoking.
They got a still from the police body cam. Oh, my goodness. I saw this, hit the social medias, but what I saw was the follow-up that the raccoon is okay. Yeah, the raccoon is okay. The raccoon is okay. So there's a trend happening that I find, I think I'm here for it. At first I was like, no, this is dumb. But now I think I'm here for it. And it is Bigfoot is becoming a social influencer. And it's mostly happening here in our neck of the woods in the Pacific Northwest. And it all started a couple of years ago with a high school student capturing what seemed to be Sasquatch on camera.
Sighting by some high school students near Pocatello has Sasquatch hunters coming to Southeast Idaho. Eyewitness News reporter Jake Taylor shows us what those students saw. The students were on a school project in these woods when they say they saw a dark figure watching them on a ridge. Well, one student pulled his camera out in time to capture this footage. A few fleeting seconds of a dark something disappearing into the tree line. It just didn't really look human-like, so I don't really know what that is. is. It's not a bear, it's not a moose or anything.
It's big and bulky and black. The students then climbed that ridge and took photographs of some Bigfoot prints they found. Idaho State University professor Jeff Meldrum is a Bigfoot expert. His office filled with suspected photos and plaster casts of prints. He examined the photo and the short video of the distant figure. But it nevertheless is a large, dark figure that bears a striking resemblance to descriptions of Sasquatch. So they found footprints. They had grainy footage. A few other things happened. It was a group of high school students.
It was multiple high school students that tested to this. They climbed where they saw the potential Sasquatch, and they photographed what the area looked like. They're not sure what they found. But that was back in 2012. And since then, this idea has continued to percolate in this region. And about 872 miles from the studio, the Idaho town of I think it's Pocatello has decided to make Bigfoot its official social media influencer. I've wandered for thousands of years. I have a nightmare! Kill him! I had not yet this one! I always had to run and hide. Would I ever enjoy the outdoors?
Hey, how's it going? But I think I've found a place I can live and explore the rest of my day. I'll take care of you along the way. My love, one day the time will be free. Whoa, nice catch. So we see San Squanch hanging out with people, hiking, climbing, taking selfies. Having roasted marshmallows. On the left. Nope, your left. He's just having a great old time. He's posting to Insta. Your footprint is welcome. So this town has embraced Satsquatch as its official influencer, and they've released drone footage of him walking around. Of course, the local news is leaning into it and having a lot of fun with it.
But I started doing a little digging around, and it turns out that this isn't the only town that Idaho has been made. This Idaho town isn't the only place where, I guess, Satsquatch is well known and becomes a celebrity. There's also a Milwaukee town that has embraced Sasquatch as its official influencer for social media. And his name is Sam. He's Sasquatch Milwaukee Sam. They all have these weird videos. Good morning. This is South Milwaukee Sam. We'll be right back. Funny how it's almost the same script, isn't it? Isn't that funny? Yep.
I like to think there's a business going out there, like, pitching this idea to various small towns around the U.S. There actually is. You got it. That's where I was going. No way. They figured out a business, and they go around, and this is what they do, is they help them make this brand up. But you see, in Herman, Utah, or I'm not exactly sure how to say it. Herman, Utah, they wanted something a little different, so the company there worked out a Yeti mascot. It's a Yeti. Can you believe this? So get in on the fun. I say we should have thought of this. Maybe we could get it.
What about Bigfoot podcasts? Jupiter Bigfoot. Yeah. We could squanch from time to time. We could get on. We could squanch. And we could all pretend like we're Sasquanches. And a little AI generation. Some music. We're good to go. So maybe that'll be our exit plan when the launch is no longer viable. You know? We'll pivot. Anyways, there's more in the show notes if you're curious. You can go watch South Milwaukee Sam on Insta. Or you can watch the Bigfoot in Pocatello from Idaho. At Bigfoot Pokey. P-O-K-Y. You know, it kind of works because kids love this stuff. So if you're like on a family trip, it works.
I noticed on our trip up the coast from California all the way to Washington, there were several little stops that had Squanch-themed paraphernalia. I'll tell you the truth, and I wasn't going to bring this up in the show because I'm above all this, but since you clearly just brought it up. You're welcome. See, that squanch is a Washington, maybe Oregon phenomenon. It is not an Idaho phenomenon and not a Utah phenomenon, and they are aping on our cool. Aping. They're aping on our cool. They're squanching. They're squanching. They're seriously squanching.
Every traveling fair has tons of Bigfoot stuff. I mean so it's really our thing And that's why on you know Oregon and Washington Coast you see it because that's actually Where Bigfoot lives. Bigfoot as a service. Bigfoot is the service. Bass. Why didn't we think of that? It's so obvious. It is. It's one of those business ideas you think of and you go, oh, man. Oh, man. All right. Well, we're going to wrap it up there. It's a long episode, but we will not be here next week. So we wanted to leave you with a little something and maybe a business idea or two. You know, we're all about the big investments here.
I looked at a property this week for you, Angie. You wouldn't believe it. It had cement corridors underneath it, like from X-Men. It was crazy. Yeah. I think I have a final reflection for this episode. Oh, yeah. What is it? What's about the trip that we did and the crazy mechanical adventure we've been on and the vehicle that we resurrected? Sure. And my question for you, Chris, is would you do it again? Yeah, I'd do it every quarter. Whoa. I would. I would. Or I'd do it at least twice a year or something. It's a better vacation than a vacation.
Wow. Yeah, I could see that. Okay, well, listeners, if you have a Daryl-Elect vehicle in the back end. You probably will be better than Boston. If you've got an old van, you want Brett and I to come rescue. Send us a boost. I'm in. I'm in. All right. So no episode, but you can catch the back catalog at weeklylaunch.rocks. And then after the Red Hat Summit trip, we'll be back to our regular schedule, which will be live on Tuesdays. We'll try to update jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar so you know what's up. or if you get a podcasting 2.0 app, then you'll just know in your app when we're live and when a new episode's come out. You don't have to worry about it.
We will release on Wednesday mornings as always. Thank you very much for listening and thank you for sharing the show from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time.
This is the launch, episode 21, for May 13th, 2025. Streaming from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast, we greet you all a good morning, a good evening, or whenever your timeline may fall, time appropriate greetings indeed to one and all this is the launch my name is chris and i'm angela and that's brent hello hello nice to see both of you we have a lot of show today so before we get into all of that i have a couple of details i want to cover we'd love it if you called us the show is live right now we'll be taking calls after our song of the week the phone number is 774-462-5667 That is 774-462-5667.
Put that in your phone book and then you got it. We're live on Tuesdays, start around 1130 in Pacific, 230 p.m. Eastern, or we release on Wednesday mornings. And we invite you to join us in our chat room, Launch HQ, and in our mumble room, we have details and links at weeklylaunch.rocks. Go over there, get previous episodes, dive in. There's probably something you've missed. I could listen to the old back catalog, and there's things I missed, and I did the shows. You know what I'm saying? Find out. Well, Andrews, I know there's something very important on your mind this week. Yeah, I'm almost wondering if you should share the link and stuff first, because it's not—no.
Okay, well, this is funny, and it is a real problem, people, and I want to know what the heck is going on out there. Now, Keene County, where a woman says she was targeted for her toilet paper, and she has the video, this video, to back it up. A business owner in Lockford catching a man smashing her car window, taking off with a precious cargo. New tonight, CBS 13's Anna Giles with the toilet paper caper. You know, they're loving it, but it's not the only place. There was also another toilet paper caper that happened recently. Well, not too recently. There's a unique case out of Utah County we've got video on.
So look at the surveillance camera. This is an elk ridge. You caught a person stealing a package off their front steps. See that? We're getting just like creeping behind that bush. Get in there, you watch them run off of this little package right there and then run away. See that? Uh-huh. Okay. Seems like pretty normal. Well, it turns out what they stole right there was just a box of toilet paper. And the best part is the thief later came back and returned it. Wait a minute, in the box, not like returning it by throwing it on the trees. Yeah, that would be one way to do it, right?
So, toilet paper thievery is a real problem, Andrews, so I'm glad you're bringing it up. Yeah, so Chris asked me, what can we do in the catching up with Ange section? And so I just gave him a couple words without any context, and it was toilet paper thieves. Yeah, the bastards. So I'm going to start by saying, I know we've all experienced this. You're somewhere, probably at a restaurant, and you've ordered a delicious carbonated beverage. Yeah. And it's so good. But you also have a water. And maybe you don't like ice, right? Because your teeth are sensitive. So it's room temperature water.
These are a lot of specifics. I know. I relate to the tepid water. Okay, but it's very specific. Okay, so you're eating pizza, right? Carbonated beverage is best with pizza. So you go to wash it down, but you mixed up your water and your carbonated beverage. and so you get water, room temperature, water instead of that cold. Carbonated, deliciousness. Yeah. And you're like offended, right? Okay. So this morning I went to go to the bathroom and I normally set my phone on the packs of toilet paper, right? That are wrapped. And I noticed that several rolls of toilet paper were missing.
So hold on. Hold on. So you have a persistent stack? Yes. I do have a persistent stack. You have like a buffer stack? Yeah. All right. Yeah. It is my side table. A fly phone shelf. Right. Exactly. Yes. I know. I should probably put a shelf in there. Okay. So last night, there were four rolls. This morning, there's two. And I know that. Yeah. So these kids normally steal from my bathroom, you know, but I was right by my office, so I'm using the downstairs bathroom. And so I'm like, can we just normalize restocking toilet paper so that I have somewhere to put my phone?
So I go out to the garage and I grab two packs, stack them, and then put them in the these two extra rolls that are still in the bag on top of that set my phone down tell. Me you shop at Costco without telling me you shop. At Costco yes right okay undo my pants sit down and, On the carpeted or carpet rug cover. Seat cover. Yeah, yeah. Because it was down. It was closed for business. I didn't open it because I didn't even, and I was so thrown off by restocking the toilet paper. And to tell you how violated I felt, I still feel violated. What an uncomfortable thing. I sat down on this fuzzy butt.
Yeah. Oh, it was so gross. Like, what do you even do in that situation to recover? I think I could co-sign it should be a family tradition that you keep the toilet paper stocked you know if they who dealt it should restock it and the also thing along with that I feel like it should be a family rule that you properly orient the toilet paper so that it is new tear forward down right. I feel strongly about this. I know and I know there's a couple people I'm not going to name them but there's one in particular maybe two that often stock it the reverse way why. Would you do that.
So the first thing i gotta do before i can even lift the lid for biz is i gotta like flip the toilet paper you know what i'm saying i do the same thing yeah you gotta you gotta get the place right i. Even go to like friends homes and i'm like they're doing it this wrong i gotta flip that. Yeah so. Here's the thing i keep the lid down. Yeah you should right. I keep the lid down for several reasons right uh because uh oh what's the word. Well it's a toilet hygienically When you flush. It's putting all those particles in the air. It's gross.
But also, my cats don't know what a toilet is. They have fallen in. Because they don't know. They expect it to be a solid lid surface. What is that situation like? Is it just total chaos? Were you there for it? It was, yes. Because it was in the toilet closet in my bathroom. They were on the windowsill. And they jumped down and just right in. Whoa. I have a suggestion for you. Your cats are still kind of young, right? Um, what is... Are you going to say train them to use the toilet? You're ruining my whole thing. Okay, you tell it. Okay, you tell it.
No, go ahead. It's your idea. Do it. No, it's your idea. Go for it. I've met a couple cats who were trained to use the toilet, not to hit the flusher, although that would be brilliant. Yeah. Or maybe not. But maybe you go that direction, just like... I mean, that would be great. Yeah. No more litter. Because one of them doesn't even like using the litter box. Well, there you go. And I hate litter boxes. And the other one, yeah, this summer, they're going to be outside all the time. I'm not going to have to... That's a different way to do it. Yeah.
Let them poop on other people's properties. Yeah, I don't know about leaving the lid up all the time, though. No, I know people do it for convenience, but for hygiene reasons, for flushing reasons. Plus, it just solves if you do have a significant other who has a strong stance about not leaving the lid up, it solves that problem because the standard is you close the whole thing every time. And so these are the three things that every family should normalize is restock the toilet paper, make sure it's pointing the right direction with the tear coming down forward, and close the dang lid. it's a toilet after all and.
Keep the keep the paper shelf you know phone shelf stocked. I wonder if other people have bathroom must have or must do's you know i i i'm a little particular about my showers i won't get into it right now but i wonder if others have particulars about their bathroom and bathroom rituals boost in and let us know i'd be curious i i also what other things are people stealing that's just absolutely bonkers because toilet paper i just i would never thought of it but then you know i guess after the pandemic it's not too surprising yeah. I think i have a scar from something someone stole from me that.
Seemed ridiculous oh i definitely do yeah tell me yours tell me yours i'm listening like. A traumatic scar or a physical scar no no. Trauma it's got trauma on there uh when we were kids. You know being canadian and such uh we did a lot of hockey road trips so we had a ton of tapes that we would play because this was in like an old. Dodge. Caravan You needed a caravan Because three kids Plus hockey bags Right. And what have you got a van. Ah, it's a juicy van. So we had a collection of tapes. And I guess one night we left our doors unlocked, because it's what you do in small town Canada. And someone broke into this van and stole our Ren and Stimpy tape.
Ah. Yeah, it even had songs such as, like, you know, I Love Log. That just, I never recovered from that one. That's rough. And I've, like, not trusted society since then. Two stealing traumas for me from a kid, as a kid. I had a massive haul for Halloween one year. And I think I set my bag down somewhere outside and one of the big kids came along and stole my whole bag of candy. And then another time, it was also a Halloween theft, theftery, thievery. We were carving pumpkins and doing the whatnots at a campground with the kiddos. And Hadiyah's dad was there. And we decided to go for a little walk.
And after we were done, we were going to pack up and leave. So we had the jacks up, and we had the jackpads all stacked nicely in our campground so that way we could load them up and go. And we went for our little walk, which we could have only been 20 minutes. And when we got back, somebody had thieved on all of our jackpads, which are not cheap. $700. Yeah. Thieved on our jackpads. You like to think at least they put them to good use. Hopefully. Hopefully they're using them as jackpads. But, yeah, so boost in and tell us what's been thieved on for you or any of your crazy bathroom rules. Ooh.
This should be followed. I was thinking I didn't have a thievery thing. Definitely not from my childhood like you guys. But I did come home when I was living with my grandma to go to college. I got home and every drawer and door and cupboard in the house was open. Creepy. Every single one. And I went to my room and same thing. And so we were. Robbed. Yeah, I remember. Robbed. Yeah. The only thing they took was... dvds that's it my entire collection of dvds i had like 20 dvds uh they didn't take change they didn't take jewelry it was just a stupid hooligan kids taking dvds yeah. I had my house broken into once as a kid they didn't take my sega genesis for some reason.
Oh you had the your cougar got broken into and they took the the radar detector but not the cable for it yeah that was That's so stupid. And they took my music, some of my music CDs. Big Daddy Thump Thump. I don't think they took any of your own mixes. No, I don't think so. So boost in, share. We want to hear your pain, just like Brent. So we are back, and it was a hell of a ride. So just a quick recap, since we have told the story in bits, Brent picked up a abandoned van from Jeff's folks, from Jeff's family, and it hadn't been on the road since at least 2019.
And it was in pretty rough shape, some leaks, tires are completely rotted out because it sat in the hot Los Angeles sun nonstop. And so many parts hadn't moved in many years, but they were ready to make a good deal because of the state of things. And so we went down there during scale, we looked it over, we decided, hey, this is actually in pretty good shape if you excuse the tires, the leaks, and some of these things. And Brent made an offer, and they accepted. And so we went down there just a couple of weeks ago or a week ago and did a rescue plan where we got new tires on her and fixed up a few small essentials, which we'll get into, and drove her to producer Jeff's house.
Where we discovered along the way that it had a massive fuel leak that was going to be... So, so bad that if we continue driving, we were probably taking a pretty big risk and we needed to get all the way back up to northern Washington from Sacramento. So we had to drop the fuel tank in Jeff's backyard. We didn't have any of the tools to do this. So we essentially created tools along the way out of logs and lumber and carjacks. And that's how we dropped a, you know, 200 pound fuel tank. It was half, more than half full with fuel. Had you ever dropped a fuel tank before?
Never have. Never had. And at first, you know, we just dropped just the minimal amount we needed so Brent could stick his body in there and try to do some diagnosing, but we couldn't really hook our peepers on it. And so we kind of thought, okay, it must be this quick connect. We can see the fuel's gushing out of there. It would make sense this part would degrade over time. And guess what? We can manage to get our hands on some. So we had to source it from multiple places, but we got the parts we needed, replaced the quick connect, patted ourselves on the back and said, should we test it?
no let's slap it up there and then we stopped for a second and went no we'll test it we'll see if it's working and we cranked the engine and sure enough the fuel leak was just as bad as if we hadn't fixed it and we were like well now what do we do because that was our best idea and so what we had to do was drop the tank further so we could really get it in the daylight and actually look at the thing and see the top of the fuel pump which is built into the fuel tank so you imagine a huge tank, the top of the tank, it has like this octopus with all these lines coming out of it and this little, you know, plastic ring with all these lines coming out of it. And that's the fuel pump integrated into the fuel tank.
So if you want to replace the fuel pump, you're opening up the fuel tank. It's a big job. And we started looking at this pump and the top of it and Brent started discovering there were cracks all over the top of the fuel pump, all over like the stems and just all kinds of components that were just in really rough shape after 30 years. So Brent did the right thing and refurbed on the whole pump. Yeah, I used this, let's say, secret weapon that I like to keep around. And thankfully, Chris, you had the brilliant idea. The morning of.
For unknown reasons. Randomly when we were out part shopping. Because, you know, we were trying to plan ahead, but you never know what you run into. And you picked up, I think based on my lessons from years past, some epoxy. Yeah, but extra strong metal reinforced epoxy. Not just any. Not your regular epoxy, but your industrial strength epoxy. And it's been kind of a joke that I think that you could fix almost anything with epoxy. And we have actually on Joops. But it turned out this probably was a pretty desperate move. You epoxied all the cracks?
Yeah. Yeah, we did. Okay, you said Brent did the right thing. Don't use that face. So when you said Brent did the right thing, I thought Brent bought a new fuel pump. Well, you see, the thing is, it's a very special fuel pump because it's for a camper van. Sure. And it has an additional outlet for a generator. So you can't just go get a Dodge van fuel pump. It has to be a Dodge camper van fuel pump, which we weren't going to be able to source. Definitely not within 24 or 48 hours. What's the curing time of this epoxy? Oh, well, there are different types. I would most recommend not getting the one minute epoxy setting because it gets so hot that it sometimes melts plastic.
And it's too hot to work with because it's an exothermic reaction that happens between these two products. Did we find this out on the fuel pump? Or is this the previous? No, past mistakes. Okay. They call it plastic welding for a reason. Yeah. So generally the stuff that cures slowest will be the strongest in the end. Sure. But we didn't have time for almost anything. So you did a mid? We got the five-minute stuff, which is my recommendation for the keep around just in case. And it turned out we used a ton of it. Jeff even had some on hand that we also used. So we had clear epoxy. One-fifth of heat. We had other epoxy, yeah, we had all sorts of epoxy, but it was the case where, This major leak that was happening was in the plastic that this new connector we put on passed over.
Sat on top of, yeah, connected over. And we talked for quite a while about how to fix this because it was a little risky to epoxy it because once it's epoxied, there's nothing you can do. There's no going back. You're never getting it off again. Yeah, I think Jeff was trying to encourage strongly that we don't do that because then it's like there's no turning back. But we thought about it and this thing was so cracked. It was in such rough shape that the next step is to replace the fuel pump. Right. Just with more time to do research, get the components, all that stuff. Oh, my God. I can't believe you guys made it all the way up here.
We're just getting into it. At that point, we were only a third way into our trip. And luckily, we, thankfully, we planned it this way. And Jeff, thank you for following us and, like, offering your home for us to stop. Because we knew we would find out a ton of stuff in that first day. Yeah. Because I think it sat at least for six years. and then, you know, we're changing out the tires and wheels and we're, you know, doing a little bit of maintenance. Brent made sure that the, you know, the front wheels were repacked and greased and good to go. And the brakes, you know, we tested a bit. So we knew the brakes worked-ish.
One of our seatbelts disintegrated when we first went for a ride. So we did add an extra seatbelt, which I thought was pretty important. Yeah. But so the epoxy did in fact work. Brent is an epoxy artiste. You would look at this thing and think it was almost factory. It looks so good. Some of it, which I had never done before, so I've gained new skills in this particular epoxy situation, was I had to epoxy paint using a mirror. So doing it backwards because we didn't actually take the fuel tank completely out from under the van because it's A, it had fuel in it, so it was really heavy, and B, whatever we did, we would have to undo.
So it was like half... exposed half under and the only way to like see some components was to use this brilliant mirror that you picked up as well yeah. We always like we might need to be able to see up in there so we'll grab the epoxy we'll grab this mirror wow used them both. Yeah we used way more epoxy than i thought we were going to need thankfully we had it on hand but now the uh well we solved the problem it's. I mean it held you know after after i don't know something like six minutes ten minutes It has a, it can withstand a pressure of 3,200 PSI. So this is some serious stuff. But we were really excited because it just felt like there's no way this is going to work. So we did it all.
But then we left the tank down so we could start it and verify it wasn't leaking. But what do you do? Because this is like the Hail Mary attempt. If this fails, we're basically done. Yeah, we're abandoning ship. And you have to let it, you don't want to like do it too soon because you want to let it harden. even though it says it's ready in like five six minutes like you want to give it like a good hour so we went out and got frozen yogurt and then after we were done with our frozen yogurt we came back to see if it was working it's. Real it's happening it's running i can hear the fuel pump going do we have any leaks i don't see any yes you did it you fixed it it took two days but we did, You want me to turn it off, it's kind of stinky.
It's kind of stinky, Brett. Yeah, okay. Okay. Yeah, okay. We were so excited. He's like, but I want to see if it's leaking. Yeah, we revved it a bit, looked at it for a while, and then man, was it a job putting that thing back in there. I mean, we started working on that rig that day, 7 a.m., 6 a.m., and we were working until midnight in the dark. It was just a marathon day. I'm glad we did that. I know it took us a long time, and it cut into our trip a little bit. Like, we got here a little later than the best case scenario. It was a must fix.
Though. Oh, the amount of fuel that was pouring out of that thing at the time. I realize that's why our fuel consumption was so bad. It must have been almost half. It must have been almost. Yeah. Yeah, it was bad. So, I'm glad we did it. We also replaced a bunch of the fuel lines that were coming out of the octopus, like you said. Better lines and the fuel filter replaced on the fuel filter as well. Those things I spotted on day one because I did a, you know, shove a Brent under your van and see everything that might go wrong. That was on my list of things that I knew were potential issues and I would just ignore. So I'm actually glad we got to replace those.
And the entire time we're like, well, how long do you think this is going to take? Before we started, you know, I think Jeff says four hours. Brent's like, ah, four to six. No, no, no, no, no, no. I was super. I knew exactly how long it would take. And you guys were rarely the optimistic ones. And I was like. Guys. But then as it's working, it's like, OK, well, if this fix works, then we could be on the road tonight by 4 p.m. And then that fix doesn't work. Well, if this fix works, we could be on the road by 7 p.m. And then by 7 p.m. we're still working on a fix.
And then it's like, well, this was an honest. We honestly had this conversation. It's like, should I go take a nap? You and Jeff keep working. and then if you get done around 10, 11 o'clock, I'll jump in the captain's chair and we'll just take off and go down the road and you sleep. And Brent's like, maybe we should do that. I don't know, that could happen. But then, of course, there were so many other little things to do that I just kept puttering away while we got everything ready. And then, you know, about midnight, we realized, okay, we're not leaving tonight. All right, well, we're going to leave first thing in the morning.
We're going to leave at 5 a.m. And to Brent's credit... Thank you. He was up. He was ready to go. It was almost a flawless victory. We're on the road. It's a little after 5.30 a.m. The rent is in the captain's, awake and driving you can believe it and uh she's under her own power after a minor incident we had to resolve before takeoff which we resolved quickly and we don't need to mention that brent killed the battery and so we couldn't leave super early we're not even going to bring it up because we're on the road we're happy right brent. Yeah yeah and this was us uh slowly discovering that we may have a bit of a bigger problem the battery died overnight we thought we knew why but we were focused on other things we had almost 1500 miles to put down at that point and we were headed towards the california coast so we needed some sweet tunes and that's why we were glad we had some tapes that we could pop in and get some sweet retro tape deck action uh at least for a little while maybe like half the day you.
Know i was kind of down with the tape deck technology but this has been a real thing here. Look at this. What is that? Okay. But forward motion? Yeah, I fixed on it. Well done. Thanks. Solved it. Yeah, I fixed on it. It's that new jazz people are talking about. And then it immediately broke. It immediately broke the second after that. Oh, my gosh. So, yeah. That was one problem. I think we were a little distracted by a few things. We almost burned out the transmission. You know i think you and i after doing the fuel tank thing and we fixed on a bunch of stuff yeah even before leaving where the rig had been parked for six years i thought at that point we're like yeah we've kind of checked off all the things that could potentially go wrong on this thing and let's just hit the road and like take in the wind we.
Checked on the transmission fluid but it was unlevel when we checked it and we didn't check it again once it had been driven and was level Because in our minds, we'd check the fluid, I think. It was mildly irresponsible of us. So here we are climbing up a pass. Brent's asleep in the copo seat. And I'm in the captain's chair. And I've been grooving along now for about an hour. And we're climbing. And this thing's pretty good. And as we go up, I'm like, okay, we're going to need a little more power. And it shifts down one gear. And it starts smelling really hot. and then it shifts again and then it shifts again and we realize oh it's slipping gear and brent wakes up what's that smell it's it's slipping pull over pull over i'm like i am pulling over so i pull over in this spot that because i was eyeballing this pull over this big big gravel gravel driveway and i thought oh this will be great we can pull out here and we can do some work so i pull off into this gravel spot and brent jumps out and you know we we pop the hood, And next thing I start hearing is this.
Yeah. Oh, no. And it's a big diesel truck coming down this super sharp hill. And I'm right in his way. A logging truck. No, no. The first one was just a worker truck. Were you on the path like when their brakes were going out? No, no. But he was coming down this sharp hill. So I'm right where he's got to like try to use all his braking to come to a stop before he pulls onto the highway. So I was right in his way when he's trying to come to a stop. So I'm like, break it out of the way. and I start up the van back up and I put it in drive. With the hood open and everything. Yeah, with the hood open.
I can't see that. But I'm moving the van out of the way. I say to Brent, I'm right, okay. So I pop her back into neutral because again, we don't have transmission fluid at this point. So I'm trying not to use the gears, right? So I pop her back into nooch and I roll back into the same spot because again, we got to be level. As soon as I get level, I hear... And this one was the logging truck coming down the hill. yeah final destination style there was another truck and it's the same exact situation prank get out of the way and i gotta put her fire it back up put it in the drive with the hood open yes so we that after that we just like okay there's another spot we can pull so i pop it back in neutral and i roll down the hill to another spot that's a little more level and it was totally fine after that but we were stuck with this big problem there's almost no transmission fluid in this thing.
Wasn't even registering on the stick. And the next auto parts store is 38 miles and you got to go over the pass. And this thing's having a hard time making it up. Right. And there's nothing behind us because 101 in California is basically desolate in parts. And so we also have like one bar. So it's tedious even getting answers to this stuff, right? And of course, you're in a rush. So you can't Uber? Well, there was nothing. You looked. I looked. One was like $200 or something like that. Oh, geez. Yeah. 37 minutes later. Yeah, 37 minute wait and $200 and something. I'm like, we're not doing that.
Oh, okay. Brent's like, well, what about a gas station? I'm like, oh, yeah, they might have fluid, right? Oh, my God. Did you hitchhike? Oh, we should have. That would have been a good story. That would have been kinder to the van. We did the right thing and just popped it in neutral and just rode her down the hill, back down the pass. Oh, my gosh. 37 miles. No, you just went to a gas station. Yeah, which is only 10 miles away. Okay, okay. And basically nearly coasted her back into town and then just had to drive on it a little bit and pulled into a gas station that had the gas prices, had an area for gas pumps, but had no gasoline. We also needed gas at this point.
It had no gasoline at all. still calls itself a gas station. First, Google Maps took us to the wrong spot, but that's an aside, which was tense because we're driving on this transmission with no fluid, and Google Maps is taking us on a random... I have never seen it that bad. It was bad. It was all backwards. But we pull into this old rickety gas station that's no longer a gas station but still has California gas prices, and sure enough, they have a small but useful auto section, and one of the things they had is like this generic automatic transmission fluid that is compatible with the van. Because basically they haven't gotten new supplies since the 90s.
Did you pick up a couple cassette tapes too? Oh, we should have looked. But the lady behind the counter was very surprised to see someone come in through the door. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So right there in the parking lot, we're like going through, because the van has a process you have to go through to like check the transmission fluid properly. So we're going through those processes and adding more fluid and adding more fluid. so we almost blew out the van there was that problem and then there was the problem that really didn't come up much in la or california at all but kind of came up the moment we were in the pacific northwest we're.
Officially driving in the rain for the first time and it's very drippy i don't know if you can see the drips right now but it's it's a lot it's down my neck It's in my mouth. Oh, my gosh. While you're driving? It's been on my face. Oh, you got it. Yeah, it's a little dirty. It's a little dirty. And the best part is, we checked thrice, and the weather app says it's not raining, and there's absolutely no water in the sky at all. And we got at least another two hours on the coast where it's definitely not raining at all. So that's the thing about taking the coast, is there's a lot of moisture out there, and sometimes the weather apps don't show any rain. It was definitely raining.
Yeah, dripping on us while we're driving, in the passenger seat, on the floor, Oh. My gosh. This was one of those things we identified, let's say, as a potential issue. Because the windows, well, the entire van had sat in the California sun, I think, most of its life. But those last six years just cooked all of the seals. And there are these beautiful, three beautiful skylights in the ceiling of this van. But the seals have shrunk so much that there's like a two-inch gap in these seals. So not only are we getting like wind noise through these. Oh, man.
Lots of wind noise. That's tough. But also it turns out water can get through there. We've patched them. The wind noise is better. With epoxy? No, with like some patch tape. But it still leaks. Still the frames themselves are kind of rough. So Highway 101 is a special treat. It really is very nice. But we are in a van that was just rescued. It's in kind of rough looking shape. It's got California plates from 2019. And one thing that people don't know about the RV industry is a lot of campgrounds these days have a 10-year rule. So your rig needs to be 10 years or younger. Oh, wow. They want the park to look nice.
Oh. Brent's rig is 30 years old. Right. Still looks nice, right? It looks. How would you describe it? It looks like it needs a good wash and maybe a new paint or a cover or a gloss. you know it when we were parked in Oregon we had somebody who works at like a halfway house kind of come up to us and think that we were homeless people in the van that needed help and he came up to see if we need assistance that's the vibe the van gives off. But you just got a haircut. I know right well once he saw us he knew immediately like as soon as we opened the door, but it's it's also sketched because the window on the driver's side doesn't go down so we have to open the whole door when somebody approaches yeah so you know some campgrounds aren't going to let us in. It looks a bit sketch.
And we didn't want to park anywhere like a Walmart or a Home Depot or somewhere that might draw attention because the registration and licensing is currently registered to Jeff's deceased grandpa. And so that wasn't. So in California, I don't know about Oregon, but in California, we learned that that means they would impound it if a cop came across it. And so we didn't want to get the van impounded. That would be really inconvenient. So putting everything together we knew we had a lot of tricky things to solve in order to stop for the night and then additionally because of our power problems.
We probably needed to stop somewhere where we could be plugged in because we weren't sure what was going on with the power system. So we needed power hookups. And that's when I realized, you know, pulling on years of boondocking and camping is like a state campground is perfect. If you come in after hours, the ranger is already gone for the night. So it's a self check in process. Nobody's vetting the van. They have hookups and a van can fit anywhere in a state camp. No problem. Like my RV, you got to like book it out three months in advance. But a van, you can just pull in any old spot.
And it worked out, I think, really well. We got a very nice spot near the ocean, near a lighthouse. It was a very nice park. But we were so wiped out that night just from a day. We got up at 4.30, and it was midnight-ish when we were pulling into the campground. I accidentally drank a 165, I think it was, milligram caffeinated propel. I didn't know propel made caffeinated. I just thought it was- Energy drink water? Yeah, I thought I was just getting some water with electrolytes because I was a little dehydrated. turned out I was chugging caffeinated propel didn't know that out like a light I just was so exhausted I was just out but so we were just so tired that our brains weren't working I'm like okay Brian what time do we want to get up because now that we're in we're like in the midway of Oregon we don't want to hit traffic in Tacoma and Seattle and Everett and Marysville so we should time it so we leave in the morning so we're either just missing or getting there just before the traffic gets bad.
And Brent's like, oh, that's a great idea. Okay, so what time do we need to leave then if we want to be at Seattle? And we're like, oh, we are too tired to figure this out. Brent suggested, why don't we ask ChatGPT? So I described the entire problem to ChatGPT. And it gives us a really good answer. I mean, very clearly understood what we were trying to accomplish, gave us a clear, concise time. It said, you need to be leaving by 6 a.m. And, well, we did just that. Unfortunately... Sometimes, ChatGPT tells you what you want to hear, not what you need to hear. So by the time we got into the campground last night, we were exhausted, and Brent had the brilliant idea.
Instead of us trying to do the travel math, let's ask ChatGP to do the travel math. It was really impressive. Yeah, it did a great job, except I realized once we got on the road that it assumed we would be taking I-5 and not Highway 101. So instead of just avoiding traffic, we are going daily traffic, afternoon traffic, all the way from Tacoma, Seattle. Seattle, Everett, and the fish tunnel. We're going to hit it all. Good plan. And it rained. Technology failed this place. Yeah, the weather app said it wouldn't rain. And ChatGPT assumed we'd be taking I-5 when we were taking Highway 101.
And so the math worked out so that we nailed Seattle traffic. All of it. Yeah. I think we learned some things about AI on this trip. Yeah. It was like right 70% of the time. And sometimes it was incredible because I was taking pictures of components that we didn't know. what it did in the van and 70% of the time it was identifying it correctly and telling me what they did. But then sometimes it would tell you something that's completely wrong. I found that fascinating because a lot of these components, we would have had a hard time figuring out what they were unless we had some of this help.
And it was like that first, that first 70% was actually amazingly helpful. And we solved a lot of things based on that. But for instance, We bought a new component recently that we'll talk about in a bit and tried to get some help with how to install it. And the instructions were actually quite correct, except it was an electronic component and it got all of the pinouts that you should plug things into perfectly wrong. Like they were the right names for all the pinouts, but the wrong locations. Luckily, I knew a little bit better. So it's like you get that 70 percent, but actually the rest is what really matters.
Yeah, getting the pinouts wrong is a bad one. Yeah, that would have fried some things, but otherwise really helpful. Yeah, so it was hit and miss at times. Just a warning, I think, from us. We did okay, though. It wasn't the worst. It was a pretty smooth drive. We did get more rain. In fact, more rain was expected, so the goal really was let's get her parked and then work things out. We're not actually convinced that the isolator is bad. Brent thinks it might have been wired up wrong. And so we're going to do a manual, quick wiring up from the alternator to the old isolator. Is it a good idea? No.
And, you know, hook up the system to that, wire up the batteries to the truck, wire up the battery to the house, see what we can see. This old ancient isolator may be fine if it actually was just wired up wrong. And we do have reason to believe that might be the case. There's several things that indicate that. Right? Save me. So, jumper cable to the alternator, you know, it could go wrong. It's totally fine. Could just replace it, but, you know, that'd be $75, so it's going to test it. And like this, you know. Your hunch was right. It turns out, we don't know who, but at some point, a former owner, maybe the van conversion company, unlikely, but maybe they wired up some of the electrical system wrong, which is why we inevitably ended up having problems.
Well, part of probably why we ended up having problems. And what we assumed was a failed piece of equipment from 30 years ago was actually just wired up wrong and still works. After all these years of being treated poorly, you know, it still works. It's incredible. Yeah, you discovered this issue because we were trying to isolate why our starter battery kept dying. And it turns out it was just trying to charge the house system constantly. Yeah. And also there was some kind of draw from the house system, even if we turned everything off, that would just kill the starter battery.
And that is a problem. Yeah. So we traced wires. We did diagnoses. We used a really bad multimeter to try to figure things out. And it turned out to be this device was wired wrong. Crazy. In that clip, though, Chris, you seem a little hesitant about my testing setup. Brent literally took jumper cables you'd use to start a car, clamped it onto the alternator of the engine and then clamped it onto this device to get power to it. Well, and they didn't quite fit on the alternator because it protects the pin. So I had to use like a pair of needle nose pliers.
And then the first time we started the engine, the shaking of the engine starting just popped the clamp right off. So then while the engine's running and the alternator's hot, Brent's got to clamp it on there while it's vibrating. I did ask you to count my fingers before I got in there. So, you know, it was nice to get that figured out. So at least we're not killing batteries anymore. And on our way home, our first stop before we got her parked was Angela's house. So what was your first impressions? Be honest. Yeah. Okay. So I'm sitting on the couch with my boyfriend and I get a ring notification that there's somebody down the driveway.
Some sketchy vans pulling in the driveway. Right. It previews a sketchy van down the driveway. And I'm like, what the fuck is this? So I go to live view and it's gone. Like, it's just not like there's nothing there. I'm like, oh, maybe they just, you know, whatever. And then I get a second notification and the van's there again. Like, I don't know if you guys pulled forward or like if it's just ring glitching. And so then we're both looking at it. And then we see Brent get out of the side door and we both look at each other and say, it's a bang bus. Oh, my goodness.
And we get up and we run outside and, yeah, we got a tour. Yeah, you got the first tour. Yeah. And it was really cool. It definitely looked a lot more worse for the wear than some of the pictures that you had shared previously. Sure, yeah. I think my favorite thing is I took a picture of you guys. I was in towards the front of the bus and you guys were at the back of the bus. With the door open? With the door open. Yep. And you're standing on the ground looking in and Brent has this road banana. Of course he's eating a road banana. It's funny you say that because many of our photos from this trip have included a banana for unknown reasons. And so I didn't even realize that happened. That's really funny.
But it is pretty cool I love the skylights Yeah. It's going to be nice to fix on Would you paint it? Would you clean it up, shine it up and seal it? That would be really cool It sounds expensive I don't know how much it costs to paint vehicles But it would be cool I'm considering just preserving what's there Oh I see she doesn't like that idea No. I don't Sorry If I had to describe the condition of the paint Chris, help me out here but I think I would describe it as like... Sun tortured? Yeah, California roasted, maybe. Yes.
To the point where it's gone through multiple layers of paint because... The sun has burned through the paint. Yeah, to the point where it got down to the steel and there's rust in those places trying to save on it. Yeah. But also a Picasso? Yeah, I mean, it's nature's art. So I was thinking just clear coat it. Yeah, well, wash on it first. Oh. Get some of that peel and paint off there. All right. Yeah. That would be, maybe the thing would be to get the dying paint off. Maybe that's the thing. I don't know. Isn't all of the paint dying? Yes. But, you know, assuming the interior was fixed up, would you road trip in that thing? No.
I don't know. I mean, it's better. You know what? It is a step up from a tent. Yeah, that's for sure. I can attest to that. I don't know if I'd call it glamping, though. A tent doesn't have that many electrical issues, so. Yes, that's true. You are signing up for something. Okay, in your opinion, since you got the tour, what would you fix first? I would be pulling out any fabric and carpet. Okay. Yeah. With that water leak and I'm allergic to mold. Yeah, fair enough. We should stick her in there and find out if there's any mold. Oh, yeah.
We can't smell any. Overnight? Yeah. But maybe you could be our detector. Yeah, Chris, remember you pulled out the cushions and started banging on them with something? Oh, God. Not inside. No, no, no. Okay, good. We cleaned on it like six times, but every time you got to do a pass. and vacuumed and I got some fabrics, foam cleaner stuff and I brushed that in. I want to see the shower work. Have you pulled the tank to see? Pull the tank like we just drop all the tanks. Drop them all. There's a slight water leak behind the toilet. Small detail. Yeah, we got to fix on that. But otherwise the water seems to work.
The stove's never been used. Oh wait, so did you use the toilet? No. See, here's the thing and I'm really pissed off, Ange, because you know, Some people shouldn't have it this easy And it's really frustrating It's supposed to be harder than this. You think Brent has it easy? Oh, let me tell you So, first of all The microwave, never even been used once Stovetops, never been used once Generator only has 60 hours on it It probably came with $600 worth of tools in there It probably came with another couple hundred dollars worth of accessories And then it's got all the original manuals The engine is basically pristine mint The engines and transmission are in great shape, despite what we've done to them.
The fridge works, and it's a rare model that works on propane. It works on shore electricity, or it works on DC power. And then it's got the simplicity to it, because the whole engine and truck aspect to it is totally analog. It's just one of those things where you just kind of have to look at it for a while. And once you hook your peepers on it, you can actually just understand how it works, and you can just fix on it. So, like, we could do stuff to it that, like, we couldn't do with modern cars. I don't even think we could have rescued a modern car like this after sitting with six-year-old fuel in it and going on the road.
And so when you try to look for a vehicle where the frame and the engine are in great shape but the house just needs a little bit of work. You know, you're looking at like $10,000 for a vehicle like that. Or, you know, if you get one where everything's in decent shape, $15,000 up for vans that are even older than the one Brent got because his is a 91 and these are like 87s and 88s and 85s I was looking at. So it's a hell of a deal. It's just not supposed to work that way. You're supposed to get royally screwed on your first rig, have lots of regrets, get way in debt and make all these poor decisions and then slowly dig your way out and be a man about it.
But instead, you had to go and get a great rig, which you can build on, and basically anything you do to it's a net positive value-wise. It's so frustrating. You know what I mean? Yeah. I feel like you're both frustrated and also have fallen in love with this thing. Yeah, we need sad harmonica. Yeah. Because, like, three times. I love another man's van. This is my sad harmonica. Do you like it? You've done way better. I'll fire. I don't know what's going on. Yeah. No, it's sad, dude. It's sad. You make a beat sad. But it was at least like three times a day on the trip while we were driving down the road.
And you were like, you know, these old rigs, these old engines. They're way better. It's just a different era. Build them like they used to, Brent. And yeah, you started. I could see like your philosophies about engines. Well, it's way simpler. It really is. mechanical. Empathy just like changing as we sort of spent more time in this thing. Also much easier to drive so there's that there's that but we really you know there's um we we had a lot of like expectations we had sort of these ideas of what we would accomplish and all the things we would do on the drive back how do you think we did how do you think it stacks up from the vision to what we actually accomplished.
That is a really good question. I mean, last episode, we kind of asked some big questions about whether this was crazy or not. But going into it, I think, at least for myself, I left a lot of room for unknowns. I knew it was a good idea to stop at Jeff's on day one because we would discover something. Yeah. I know we had a list of all the things we wanted to do to the van before we even started getting on the road. But looking back, it was a bit basic, like making sure all the fluids are good, changing the tires. cleaning it up a little bit and we could not have predicted the entire windshield wiper system being in pieces or forgetting to tighten the lug nuts on the wheels or having to you know add extra grease and the bearings because we discovered a strange issue or you know so many things that we ran into so i think luckily i left room in my expectations for having to spend time on that yeah and we left flexibility in our trip to be able to take a day or two somewhere thankfully was.
Able to let us crash for a day or two. Well could you imagine no if. We probably would have died. Yeah most likely either. From the exhaust leak or from the gas leak either one we would have died if we hadn't fixed. Yeah i think we did well in fixing problems before they became critical, uh the transmission was a bit hairy that. Was a miss. Uh we fixed it we did and it says something about transmissions of that age but i think i think we did all right. Yep i mean there's still outstanding work to be done no doubt about it from leaks to electrical and oil changes and maintenance in between but and paperwork is still an area.
Oh yeah we really right we. Don't really know that process. Last episode we had a couple categories right the uh the travel was one of them number one was travel and i think i wasn't sure if we made the right plans but now looking back i think it was perfect uh we hit about the mark of when we wanted to come back maybe a day later of ideal but i'm actually pretty good uh another category was all the mechanical stuff and we kind of went over that already but that third category of the paperwork remember i was saying how important that was especially for importing slash exporting to canada which is my end goal, and how did we do on the paperwork, Chris?
Well, we got signed paperwork from the people that were taking care of it in California but they're not technically the legal owners because the legal owner is deceased but they were the people that were next of kin, so we got paperwork from them but otherwise that's all we have done because it's like how do you transfer something that's registered to somebody who's not alive in California that hasn't been is probably considered abandoned by the state at this point, and then move it to Canada, you know, and then get it registered in Canada. It's like, that's quite the process. So that's still figuring it out.
Yeah, when we first started this trip, I was like, oh, people have done this before. But when you start looking at all the details, I actually think we're quite a unique case in trying to, like, get this thing registered in a different country. There's some edge case here. It needs work. Let's say this category needs work. But there is a third category or a fourth category. You should ask Ang this Yeah. Okay. Do you remember the fourth category was the viability of all of this? So what do you think? Is this, so our question last time was, is this ridiculous? Yes or no? Or both?
No, I think it was viable. Oh. Yeah, no, I totally, you guys did it within a logical timeframe and you troubleshot a lot of things. A lot more could have gone worse or gone back, right? Like it sounds, I don't know. It sounds good. It's got a lot of potential. It needs work, but it's got a lot of potential. The paperwork is probably the hardest thing at this point. It's hard to spend like a lot of money on it until the paperwork's all done because it's like you don't really know what the end result of that is. I'm also proud of us for not doing anything that wasn't safe. What?
What van were you riding in? Well, okay. Maybe my definition is a little different. Yeah. No, we didn't go too crazy. Right? We had some soft limits, let's say. Yeah. And I thought that was good. I have a question for you, Chris. At what point am I considered like a certified van lifer? Like when do I hit the point where you think I have enough experience and like hard knocks? You got to go live in it for a bit. Well, I'm on day. Nomad. I spent four nights in it so far. You're getting, I don't know. I don't know what that threshold is because it's like road trip combo, but you did a road trip. You might be there.
Probably depends. It depends on how long you lapse now, I suppose, right? That'll be the defining line. There's a lot in there. If you have any questions or you have any feedback on the old bus trip, boost in. Let us know. All right. Coming up on the show, we have a value for value track where if you boost 95% of the sats, go to the artist, makes their day. And then after the music, we'll be taking your calls. so while the music's playing why not call in you can listen to the show and then chime in we'll pull you in get ready here comes the phone number it is 774-462-5667 that is 774-462-5667, boost on in while the music's playing and we'll stack your calls and you will rack your calls, yeah as if and then we'll get to the voicemails as well all right you ready for our track, So this is from Caroline Hale.
I featured it once on This Week in Bitcoin. It's just a great song, and it's called Kick It. Oh, we do have some boosts to get into. And Brentley, I think you should read our first boost. It's a baller boost this week. This is a baller of baller boosts from Daja. 10, oh wait, no. No, no. 100,000 Satoshi. That's right. Well, you know, previously on the Jupiter Network, we had brunch with Brent. I think it's high time for lunch with Brent as a worthy successor. Would it be like a little edgier? Not like super edgy, but just like a little more edgy? Like with mojitos, you mean?
Yeah, maybe. I'm into it. I'd love it. Lunch with Brent doesn't quite have the same ring. Lunch with Brent? Brunch is tough to beat. Open to suggestions. What about Lent with Brent? Just every season we celebrate a holiday with Brent. Once a year. Thank you, Dasha. Appreciate that. Awesome baller boost. Turd Ferguson's here with 30,444 sats. Says, thanks for getting me into Bitcoin. I just hit 100,000 for once. My wife thinks I'm actually smart. Appreciate you guys. Heck yeah. Also, happy Mother's Day to Angela and all the moms in the audience. Yeah. Plus one to that. Thank you, Turd.
I did it three times. That's right. Odyssey West is here with a row of McDucks. He says, I just got to tune into the tail end of the show, and I love the Bang Bus song. Sending you some sats because my fountain wall was locked up on me, so I couldn't boost on my drive home from LinuxFest Northwest. So catching up now, I love seeing you guys at LinuxFest Northwest. No, we didn't get to interact much. I had somebody with me this year. He brought people. That's good. You know, bringing outsiders to the Linux world is a good thing. He says, that person also really loves the launch. Hey, shout out to them.
I think I convinced her to download Fountain and add it as her first podcast. Wow. Awesome. First podcast. Honestly, out there doing the work. Thank you. Appreciate that. You know, that's word of mouth. That's how it works, buddy. You know that. He's been a long timer. He knows that. He's in live chat today, too. And Podbun rounds us out with a row of ducks. 2,222 cents. I use Brave right now. I don't usually have a pin tab, but the first site I open is usually YouTube. Okay. I do. So my dirty browser behavior is that I have multiple browser applications. I've got Firefox on my main screen and usually Firefox or another browser on a second vertical screen.
And then another horizontal screen above my main horizontal screen, I have one Chrome browser, which is what I use for YouTube and YouTube Live TV. Just because it's Chrome and I just dedicate it to that. You're looking at me like you're disgusted. It's just like the Google theme on that one. Yeah, I know. It's a lot. And you listen to music and podcasts. At the same time. At the same time. And videos. Yeah, I know. It's crazy when I used to do that. But now the kids do it. I know. All the Gen Elfers. Yep. They're out there doing that. Thank you, everybody, who boosted in. We did get a few boosts under the 2,000-set cutoff, and we appreciate everybody.
And you sat streamers out there, 11 of you, streamed us 6,615 sets. I'd love to see that just tick up a little bit. When you combine it with our boosters, we stacked a very handsome 144,825 satoshis. It's getting easier than ever. Fountain has a lot of new updates coming into their client and their web interface, making it easier to boost, and they host the entire infrastructure. If you're ready to take the challenge and host it yourself, there's a lot of great paths. You can get started at podcastapps.com. You just need sats and a podcasting 2.0 app, which also gets you chapters, the live notifications for when the stream is live and instant releases podcastapps.com and thank you everybody who supports us with a boost or a membership don't forget if you're a Jupiter party member you get the extended bootleg version of the show which I gotta say the traders they love it, yeah they love the vol of the bootleg so go get the bootleg version if you're a Jupiter party member because you're missing out otherwise there's a lot more show.
All right, we've got a few voicemails this week. I thought we'd get to. And then we have some wild stories to wrap it up. And then we're all done. We're getting everybody out of here. It's a little bit longer for you because we do not have an episode again next week. We're going to Baston to attend Red Hat Summit, so there will not be a launch. So we're giving you a little extra loaded version. Brent, he brought his birds. So we have the birds in the studio for you because we care about you. And Graphene Man kicks us off with the first voicemail. Hey, launch crew. This is Graphene Man again. A while back, I remember Chris talking about getting his gaming handheld in and that it just had, you know, a metric ton of games and he was enjoying it.
Well, I found one. It's an R36S clone. It was like $20 on AliExpress and I got it right before the tariff hit. I can confidently say that as an adult with very limited free time now, it's helped me fall in love with gaming again. Even now, you can get them for under $50. Preloaded with 9,000 games, it's been an absolute blast. I'm playing through Pokemon Red, which alone is $60 if you get the original. And yeah, I could not suggest it highly enough for the price. Anyway, that's all. Thanks for the great shows. Oh, but it wasn't all. In fact, he called in again, I believe.
You know what? I lied. I did have something else to yap about. Andrews was talking about her car troubles, and it kind of reminded me of when I first got my car. I have a Nissan Leaf, and unfortunately the newer models are kind of known for having battery issues. And so you'll be driving along the road, and a gust of wind will hit you, and the battery will drop like 20%. And any time I took it to the dealership, they basically told me, I don't know, man, that's expected behavior. Even though it qualified under the battery warranty for replacement, it turns out it was a bad sell, as I had suspected.
But it took probably two months of trying to convince them on the phone, talking to Nissan Corporate, for them to actually do anything about it. So I'm just convinced that dealerships are not interested in doing anything for you unless they're going to make a ton of money. And, yeah, that was my bad experience with getting a new car. Hopefully, I'll upgrade to a big boy EV at some point in the future. But for now, you know, this works. And on that note, as you guys have been talking about the Bang Bus, it's inspired me to remove my back seats and do some car camping of my own.
So I'm going to try that this summer and report back to see how it goes. That's awesome. Nice. You know, what's interesting is over the last couple of weeks, my car shutter or the engine shutter has returned. Oh. It happened on the way here. for an extended amount of time. Now I'm wondering, is this temperature related? Is it because they just did an oil change and they put a crappy oil in it, you know, compared to the previous oil change? Because basically, which was not done at the dealership. I don't know. Something's off. But yeah, it'll be three years this July.
You know, you got two guys in studio. I have a lot of mechanical experience in the last two weeks. We could have a look. But we did get a suggestion after last week's episode. That was two weeks ago. I've been here a long time. And the suggestion was maybe to get an ODB2 port recorder that could see some of the history of what's going on. I would imagine like some misfiring going on. Yeah. I can go through the list of things that they did. There were pistons misfiring or whatever. Oh, really? Yeah. They did do some replacement stuff. Still happening. And they did do the diagonal. Yeah. Yeah. They basically said I needed a brake in the engine.
What? That's ridiculous. Like something, a cleaner in the gas tank. Oh, we got snake oil we could recommend. Oh, my God. It's basically a brand new car. And they're like, you need to run the snake oil through the gas. It literally did it driving off the lot. Oh, my God. That's so ridiculous. Yeah, it is ridiculous. Okay. Okay. Well, you'll get there. All right. Just a couple more voicemails. This one is a first-time caller. Now, remember, callers, we want to hear your name in town. Name in town, if you wish to opine. Hi, Chris and Angela. Love the shows. Thank you for doing them.
Wish I'd have found out about you a lot sooner. Anyway, I'm calling because I used to play Shadow of the Beast on my Amiga 1000. I spent the last time on that until I finally finished it. And then in college, we used to play Warcraft and Marathon, which was on the Mac. We used to go around shooting each other. It was a lot of fun. And also on my Amiga, I used to play a racing game where it was a, I don't remember the name of it. It was an elevated track, and you had to try to stay on the track. That's the low road. This is Tux Gear Jammer. We'll catch you later. Bye.
Thanks, Tux Gear Jammer. And so many hours spent playing Marathon. One of the first original, really good first-person shooters. They got bought out and went on to create Halo. So, there you go. A little history for you. Okay, last couple. This is from a guy named Ryan. Hello, JB Launch Crew. This is a guy named Ryan. Long time. I think seventh time. Chris put out a call for names for Brent's new van. Here we go. So I took the opportunity to come up with a couple. First, we're going to go Canada style. We've got the Canuck wagon. That's not bad.
The poutine wagon. And the Maple Meanderer. Maple Meanderer. Oh. And then Linux-wise, I was thinking maybe slash home slash Brent. Or Tux Wagon. Oh, Tux Wagon. Or the Indopenguin. Oh. I like that one. That is cute. And then maybe we go a little Star Trek-y. I was thinking USS Brenter Prize. Oh, my gosh. Or the USS Soyager. Anyway, those are my pitches. Always love the shows Keep up the great work And congratulations Brent on your Your new van life man Excited to hear about all the adventures Thanks everyone, Soyager as in like soy alternative Oh my.
Gosh Alright and our Last one comes from Sidney Penguin. Talking a lot kind of weird to actually like Have a message that's potentially going to be played on the show Anyway I'm like Really behind oh I should probably say Hi I'm Sidney Penguin and I don't think I've been in too much of this stuff. You can call me like the lurcher, I guess, in the JV community. But, where was I gonna go with this? Oh, yes, ADHD, but it's not kicked in, can you tell? Anyway, so, I'm listening to the show from after Linux Fest Northwest then. And Angie said something, maybe kind of concerned me. It was based from like a safety perspective.
You said you weren't counting people when you were at the fest. And I'm thinking, is that a fire hazard in some way to not know how many people are allowed in particular rooms or buildings? Maybe that's not a concern because it's not like, you know, it's like a 3,000 people limit and, you know, you're only getting like 1,000 people. But, yeah, either way, safety conscious, I guess. I work in a manufacturing facility and IT, so it's kind of like being into us. But yeah, anyway, I say all that, and I also heard the question of what is my primary browser and primary tab.
Primary browser is Firefox, because thanks to this show, we'll really do better broadcasting. I've ran Nix OS on my main machine for the last six months or so. It's been great, fantastic. I simultaneously love and hate you all for it, so thank you. And my primary tab is complexity. But I think I'm about to switch to Abacus.ai. If you've not heard of it, look it up. I've only got like five seconds. It's really great. You should try it. It has like everything. Abacus.ai. Huh. Well, thank you for the call. All right.
Are we concerned about fire capacity? So we were all about capacity. We were closing doors to talk. So we even had two situations, one of which I had to diffuse myself. myself a drunk uh really a a community member that had been drinking one of our listeners okay all right yeah of course not yeah and anyway so no we were we we have probably. That brett johnson guy. We did everything above board as far as everything goes uh capacity wise and uh the comment was specifically about we didn't know how many people ran through the fest but there it's among three different buildings and a bunch of outside areas and yes attendance was a fraction of what it was back in 2019 when when it was the last like major i'll.
Tell you where we went over capacity freaking lady jupes man we had a few tours coming through lady jupes for the uh home assistant setup and whatnot that's where we went over capacity don't report us and thank you everybody who calls in please do leave us a voicemail we love them and we want more, All right, so I've got a couple of stories to wrap us up. First is a story of a 55-year-old woman who might have gotten away with it if it wasn't for her darn pet raccoon. A pet raccoon of hers was discovered in the vehicle. I'll play a little bit of the police body cam footage because he kind of captures the moment, and I don't want to spoil it for you.
She would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for this raccoon. Oh, there's no one. He's trying to smoke it. All right. that's what oh my god her meth pipe he's playing with the meth pipe right now, no don't reach for it that's evidence now i don't want him to have well that's why i'm gonna do it, so he. Walks up to the lady. All right well your your raccoon gave you away Okay. No. Oh, yeah. So this gal, she had hidden the meth pipe in her car, but then after the cops arrested her, the raccoon came out, digged the meth pipe out, and I'm not kidding, literally puts it up to its mouth and holds it like a human, like it's smoking.
They got a still from the police body cam. Oh, my goodness. I saw this, hit the social medias, but what I saw was the follow-up that the raccoon is okay. Yeah, the raccoon is okay. The raccoon is okay. So there's a trend happening that I find, I think I'm here for it. At first I was like, no, this is dumb. But now I think I'm here for it. And it is Bigfoot is becoming a social influencer. And it's mostly happening here in our neck of the woods in the Pacific Northwest. And it all started a couple of years ago with a high school student capturing what seemed to be Sasquatch on camera.
Sighting by some high school students near Pocatello has Sasquatch hunters coming to Southeast Idaho. Eyewitness News reporter Jake Taylor shows us what those students saw. The students were on a school project in these woods when they say they saw a dark figure watching them on a ridge. Well, one student pulled his camera out in time to capture this footage. A few fleeting seconds of a dark something disappearing into the tree line. It just didn't really look human-like, so I don't really know what that is. is. It's not a bear, it's not a moose or anything.
It's big and bulky and black. The students then climbed that ridge and took photographs of some Bigfoot prints they found. Idaho State University professor Jeff Meldrum is a Bigfoot expert. His office filled with suspected photos and plaster casts of prints. He examined the photo and the short video of the distant figure. But it nevertheless is a large, dark figure that bears a striking resemblance to descriptions of Sasquatch. So they found footprints. They had grainy footage. A few other things happened. It was a group of high school students.
It was multiple high school students that tested to this. They climbed where they saw the potential Sasquatch, and they photographed what the area looked like. They're not sure what they found. But that was back in 2012. And since then, this idea has continued to percolate in this region. And about 872 miles from the studio, the Idaho town of I think it's Pocatello has decided to make Bigfoot its official social media influencer. I've wandered for thousands of years. I have a nightmare! Kill him! I had not yet this one! I always had to run and hide. Would I ever enjoy the outdoors?
Hey, how's it going? But I think I've found a place I can live and explore the rest of my day. I'll take care of you along the way. My love, one day the time will be free. Whoa, nice catch. So we see San Squanch hanging out with people, hiking, climbing, taking selfies. Having roasted marshmallows. On the left. Nope, your left. He's just having a great old time. He's posting to Insta. Your footprint is welcome. So this town has embraced Satsquatch as its official influencer, and they've released drone footage of him walking around. Of course, the local news is leaning into it and having a lot of fun with it.
But I started doing a little digging around, and it turns out that this isn't the only town that Idaho has been made. This Idaho town isn't the only place where, I guess, Satsquatch is well known and becomes a celebrity. There's also a Milwaukee town that has embraced Sasquatch as its official influencer for social media. And his name is Sam. He's Sasquatch Milwaukee Sam. They all have these weird videos. Good morning. This is South Milwaukee Sam. We'll be right back. Funny how it's almost the same script, isn't it? Isn't that funny? Yep.
I like to think there's a business going out there, like, pitching this idea to various small towns around the U.S. There actually is. You got it. That's where I was going. No way. They figured out a business, and they go around, and this is what they do, is they help them make this brand up. But you see, in Herman, Utah, or I'm not exactly sure how to say it. Herman, Utah, they wanted something a little different, so the company there worked out a Yeti mascot. It's a Yeti. Can you believe this? So get in on the fun. I say we should have thought of this. Maybe we could get it.
What about Bigfoot podcasts? Jupiter Bigfoot. Yeah. We could squanch from time to time. We could get on. We could squanch. And we could all pretend like we're Sasquanches. And a little AI generation. Some music. We're good to go. So maybe that'll be our exit plan when the launch is no longer viable. You know? We'll pivot. Anyways, there's more in the show notes if you're curious. You can go watch South Milwaukee Sam on Insta. Or you can watch the Bigfoot in Pocatello from Idaho. At Bigfoot Pokey. P-O-K-Y. You know, it kind of works because kids love this stuff. So if you're like on a family trip, it works.
I noticed on our trip up the coast from California all the way to Washington, there were several little stops that had Squanch-themed paraphernalia. I'll tell you the truth, and I wasn't going to bring this up in the show because I'm above all this, but since you clearly just brought it up. You're welcome. See, that squanch is a Washington, maybe Oregon phenomenon. It is not an Idaho phenomenon and not a Utah phenomenon, and they are aping on our cool. Aping. They're aping on our cool. They're squanching. They're squanching. They're seriously squanching.
Every traveling fair has tons of Bigfoot stuff. I mean so it's really our thing And that's why on you know Oregon and Washington Coast you see it because that's actually Where Bigfoot lives. Bigfoot as a service. Bigfoot is the service. Bass. Why didn't we think of that? It's so obvious. It is. It's one of those business ideas you think of and you go, oh, man. Oh, man. All right. Well, we're going to wrap it up there. It's a long episode, but we will not be here next week. So we wanted to leave you with a little something and maybe a business idea or two. You know, we're all about the big investments here.
I looked at a property this week for you, Angie. You wouldn't believe it. It had cement corridors underneath it, like from X-Men. It was crazy. Yeah. I think I have a final reflection for this episode. Oh, yeah. What is it? What's about the trip that we did and the crazy mechanical adventure we've been on and the vehicle that we resurrected? Sure. And my question for you, Chris, is would you do it again? Yeah, I'd do it every quarter. Whoa. I would. I would. Or I'd do it at least twice a year or something. It's a better vacation than a vacation.
Wow. Yeah, I could see that. Okay, well, listeners, if you have a Daryl-Elect vehicle in the back end. You probably will be better than Boston. If you've got an old van, you want Brett and I to come rescue. Send us a boost. I'm in. I'm in. All right. So no episode, but you can catch the back catalog at weeklylaunch.rocks. And then after the Red Hat Summit trip, we'll be back to our regular schedule, which will be live on Tuesdays. We'll try to update jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar so you know what's up. or if you get a podcasting 2.0 app, then you'll just know in your app when we're live and when a new episode's come out. You don't have to worry about it.
We will release on Wednesday mornings as always. Thank you very much for listening and thank you for sharing the show from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time.
Intro
I Need TP for my Bunghole
Man in the Mirror
Park It Like You Stole It
Mechanical Empathy
Call a Ghost Attorney
Caroline Hale - Kick It
Boosts
Voicemails
Just a Little Meth Curious
Totally NOT Just a Foot Fetish Community
Outro
