Click and Clack, Again
I listen to a lot of podcasts.
Probably too many, if mypodcast archive is any indication. At various points I’ve listened to shows about politics, history, philosophy,
literature, science, technology, AI, war, economics, religion, strange internet subcultures, and whatever else happened to catch my attention.
And, then there is The Best of Car Talk.
I keep coming back to it.
There is, admittedly, an elephant in the room here: why the hell, on God’s green earth, is Kevin writing yet another essay just to talk about a podcast made from some ancient radio show about cars?
Two answers.
First, it’s my freaking website.
Second, I am probably going to write some dark piece about disability or mortality or consciousness or whatever else soon enough. So, just let me have this one, okay?
Besides, I think the fact that I keep returning to Car Talk actually says something about what I want from all this listening.
The original show started on WBUR in Boston in the late seventies and went national through NPR about a decade later. Tom and Ray Magliozzi, better known as Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, took calls from people with broken cars and tried, with wildly varying levels of seriousness, to figure out what was wrong with them. The live show finally ended in 2012, and Tom died a couple of years later. The Best of Car Talk is now assembled from that enormous archive.
Which means I can be sitting here in 2026 listening to a conversation recorded decades ago about why someone's 1988 Honda makes a horrible noise when turning left.
I love that.
It is especially funny given how much of my attention goes toward technology that barely existed a few years ago. I write about AI fairly often. I follow new models, research, products, and the larger question of what all of this is doing to us. So much of what I read and listen to is concerned with what just happened, what happens next, and whether something released six months ago is already obsolete.
Then Tom starts laughing so hard at a caller that Ray can barely get the diagnosis out.
It feels refreshing.
And, the funny thing is that these aren't two guys who stumbled into radio because all they knew how to do was turn a wrench. Both went to MIT. Tom eventually earned a PhD from Boston University and spent time teaching at the university level. Ray really did run a garage. There is genuine expertise underneath the whole ridiculous operation.
They just refuse to behave as though expertise requires solemnity.
That is probably part of what makes the show work so well. Car Talk is ostensibly about cars, but the cars are almost incidental. A caller describes some mechanical catastrophe, Tom starts laughing before the story is even finished, Ray attempts an actual diagnosis, Tom interrupts with something ridiculous, and somehow they eventually arrive at useful advice.
Or don't.
Then there is the Puzzler, a recurring riddle that might involve cars, math, logic, or basically anything else they felt like throwing at people. Answers could be mailed to the wonderfully fictional Puzzler Tower at Car Talk Plaza in Harvard Square, Cambridge, "our fair city." Listening now, I love hearing them tell people to write things down, put a stamp on them, and send them through the actual mail, even as email gradually begins creeping into the instructions too.
The whole show is full of stupid little traditions like that.
There is the "third half" of an hour-long program. There is Cambridge being called "our fair city" with absurd civic reverence. There is their fictional law firm, Dewey, Cheetham & Howe. There are the elaborate fake names and job titles buried in the closing credits. There is Ray saying, "Don't drive like my brother," followed inevitably by Tom saying the same thing about Ray.
And, of course, there is the show's near-constant insistence that listening to it was itself a terrible decision.
That may be my favorite part of the whole sensibility. They make fun of their own advice. They make fun of the show. They make fun of each other. They make fun of NPR while broadcasting on NPR. Even the network identification could become another setup for a joke.
There is remarkably little reverence for anything, including themselves.
And, there is something increasingly pleasant to me about the age of it all. These are old conversations about old machines. Carburetors. Distributors. Rusted-out exhaust systems. Cars from the eighties and nineties that were already falling apart when the calls were recorded and have probably long since been crushed into cubes.
Nothing needs an update. Nobody is predicting what happens next. There is no breaking news. The answer isn't going to change because somebody released a new model on Tuesday.
There are just two extremely smart brothers laughing at each other while somebody somewhere desperately tries to keep a terrible car running for another year.
I have listened to an enormous number of podcasts.
Some taught me things. Some mattered to me for a while and then didn't. Some I once listened to religiously and eventually stopped opening at all.
But, somehow, I keep coming back to Tom and Ray.
Maybe that's enough reason to write about them.
Refreshing
A break from the noise
Small fun thing
