Interstate 93

What was your defining or aha moment? What happened?

My aha moment was after 40 plus years of methamphetamine addiction, I got an aggravated DUI driving the wrong way on the freeway on Interstate 93 in Arizona trying to kill myself.

And I went 14 miles the wrong way on the freeway, ended up going to jail for this.

After two car accidents and stealing of a boat, I was looking at 57 years in prison when I hit county jail.

It's a heavy, moss-draped silence, broken only by the snap of a dead branch of the distant, lonely call of a crow.

If you were to hop in your car right now and take a short drive north of here, up past the old mill towns and the winding blacktop of Interstate 93, you'd find yourself in a patch of forest in Salem, New Hampshire, where that silence feels less like peace and more like a held breath.

Now, they called the spot America's Stonehenge, but for a long time, the locals just called it Mr. Hill.

And when you step off the pavement and into the deep forest green shadows of the pines, you'll start to understand why.

Town meeting, as it is known, is distinctly libertarian in that it is both directly democratic and also rewards those with the time, money, and ability to influence their neighbors and show up to the meetings when all other people have to work overtime.

While the Puritan flintiness and stinginess contributed to a conservative fiscal culture, the settlements of Scots-Irish borderers in the region, there is both a dairy and a London dairy in the state, separated by I-93, contributed to a culture that valued natural freedom, the freedom of free men in the wilderness to provide for themselves.

Beyond its founding peoples, New Hampshire also was notably a New England stronghold for Jacksonianism and antebellum Democratic Party politics.

This Jeffersonian, Jacksonian vision of free men living off the land as yeoman farmers, staunchly Republican and unkind towards do-gooders and regulators, influenced the libertarian movement and deeply affected the character of New Hampshire society.

And it was a complete and utter bomb.

And they shut down the Southeast Expressway for four hours to film him going wherever they got the cut in half car, film him going back and forth over the Zaken Bridge.

Okay.

Now,

And it was a complete and utter bomb.

And they shut down the Southeast Expressway for four hours to film him wherever they got the cut in half.

Film him going back and forth over the Zaken Bridge.

Now, who the...

The CFO doesn't have any money.

If I convince the CFO to give me money, I make the CFO be the bad guy and go take money away from other people.

So the CFO resents me and then all my peers hate me because they know exactly where the money was taken away from them.

Is this thing on?

Yesterday's price is not today's price.

I know we're all afraid of commitment, but if you can do me a solid and follow the show on Apple or Spotify, just send us a screenshot that you followed us.

Send it to Ben at mostlymetrics.com. And he's going to swipe my Brex card and he's going to send you something.

I really hope it doesn't go over budget, but he's going to send you a hat, maybe a dog bowl, maybe a sticker, maybe a hat.

We live in such a young country, and New England is one of the places where you can get the strongest sense of seeing history and touching it.

If you were coming up to camp in this forest from, say, Boston, you'd probably take Interstate 93, which allows you to swiftly travel between some of the major towns in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire.

But if you wanted to make the trip a little more adventurous, you might take the older path that snakes back and forth across the route of I-93.

This older route, really a connection of multiple roads, has the formal name of US Route 3, but parts of it near White Mountain National Forest are also known as the Daniel Webster Highway, named for the legendary attorney, statesman, and member of Congress from New Hampshire.