Most of what I’ve been watching on YouTube lately has been about cars.

Jenna and I recently bought a 1999 Honda Acty and this Japanese kei truck is right hand drive and standard. I haven’t driven stick since I got my license in high school, so I watched a video on how a manual transmission works to jog my memory.

It didn’t take too long for it to come back to me, and after a few minutes of stalling out in the driveway, I was ready and off to drive an hour to Tony and Jian’s house so we can start building it at their garage over the winter.

We just had it repainted, and we’re planning to make it the Wababaland truck for the Norwich Farmers’ Markets and special events starting in the spring.

YouTube is an amazing resource for learning about cars, how they work, and how to take care of them. It’s pretty similar to when my home page was all about cycling, but I’d die on the hill that car culture is less suffering serious and more pain fun.

Old Top Gear clips. Clarkson’s Farm. Adrien Brody working as an intern at the Porsche factory. Guenther Steiner ranking the 2025 F1 drivers.

All of it deeply enjoyable, even when it has nothing to do with performance.

It’s especially magical whenever you find people that you can relate to, like Jeffrey Pang in Toronto and his videos. This specific one is about why he doesn’t drive his dream car, an air-cooled Porsche 911 that he leaves parked in the garage, because of his fear of how valuable it has become.

He shares stories about drifting cars in Japan, and most recently learning about his dad’s past as an F1 photographer — and the process of printing his never before seen film that have been stored in boxes.

On the surface, these channels are about cars. But underneath, they’re about leading with curiosity instead of authority. It’s not about doing it right, but making mistakes to be less wrong. And it’s less about the cars as objects, and more about the meaning we project onto them.

It’s one of the reasons why I started following James Pumphrey’s channel, speeed.

He’s made videos about the best girl cars, how camping gear has changed over 100 years, upgrading a Walmart bike with $1000 parts, and tastefully modifying a Porsche Cayenne for off-road…which has me inspired to level up from my last project of retrofitting CarPlay in mine.

James and Zach did a 30-day health challenge that brushed up against something heavier: our collective fear of death, whether we’re willing to admit it or not.

Watching it made me think about how much of what we call sustainability is wrapped in good intentions and moral certainty — and how often that hides a quiet discomfort with things ending.

I stumbled upon a video where a team of people decided to map the entire history of the universe into a single line in the desert. 40 million years stretching roughly 4.3 miles.

On that same line, the first recording of human art and music — about 33,000 years ago — measures less than an inch at 0.62 inches. The beginning of modern science, about 400 years ago, is a fraction of that at 0.008 inches. And the length of my life at 34 years, is basically nothing at 0.0007 inches.

It’s humbling to sit with how small our microscopic speck of life really is. And how confident, loud, and smart we can sound about how others should live theirs.

Then there’s Max Schneider. Maybe you’ve seen him on TikTok as Max4Cracks playing his LA dirtbag persona — sporting Carhartt and driving a Land Rover Discovery II — a loose satire of a certain kind of guy you’ve definitely stood in line with at Pine and Crane in Silver Lake.

He recently started creating longer form videos that are surprisingly insightful. His story about spending time with his grandparents in Playa del Sol, Florida to learn the truth about life made me tear up.

Watching it reminded me that presence doesn’t arrive as a revelation, but shows up when you stop looking for one.

100% agree! If I were to do an episode on SubwayTakes, mine would be that nonfiction is a sub-genre of fiction. I’d say something like:

Nonfiction — documentaries, biographies, guides, essays, news, social media — tells us what to believe based on facts. But who is the lawful judge that decides reality? Is the creator capable of being fair? Is god the only one who knows the truth? Or is it the large language model, artificial intelligence, the chaotic judge that exposes the stories we are telling ourselves?

Fiction trades stories of certainty for ones of possibility. Plur1bus, Sinners, Cyberpunk 2077, science fiction allows us to imagine an alternative universe. Like theoretical physics, fiction distills what we know into a story that is willing to be wrong. Not a permanent fixture of thought, but a temporary scaffolding to experience reality.

Fiction asks us to believe that any life is worth living, while nonfiction demands that we record it — the right version of it.

Believing that everyone is a good person is the fiction I choose to subscribe to — this belief makes it possible for people to accept, to forgive, and to change.

Jenna and I went out to dinner the other night, and I could feel the same love that our waitress shared with us. To pass along her energy and words to you:

“Thank you for being here, and I hope you go forth and manifest greatness.”

-Pips