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0:45

Thank you so much for joining us for

0:48

this week's session of the iHeart

0:50

Podcast Speaker series.

0:53

This is officially my favorite part of

0:55

the week. I get to take a break and for about

0:57

a half an hour talk to a creator that we're

0:59

in partner with at iHeartMedia. Our excuse,

1:01

so to speak, or being in partnership with that creator

1:04

is podcasting, one of our favorite

1:06

and the newest mass reach medium in the

1:08

United States. But these conversations usually

1:11

sort of meander into places well beyond podcasting

1:13

too, about what drives these creators, what's their

1:15

origin stories, what gets them up in the morning,

1:17

what keeps them going, why they've chosen a

1:20

career of creativity and content

1:22

and in this case podcasting. My guest

1:25

this week is an incredible

1:27

story. Daniel Morton is

1:29

an investigative journalist. She's

1:31

a best selling co author of twenty books.

1:34

She's worked at The New York Times, the San Jose

1:36

Mercury News People, ghost written

1:38

a lot of books for very well known people. She

1:40

has partnered with iHeart to create

1:42

a show called City of the Rails. The

1:45

City of the Rails has been out a few weeks. It's

1:47

one of the biggest one hundred podcasts

1:50

in the world right now, across pretty much

1:52

any platform where you might go and find

1:54

podcasts. I'll set it up this way, Dan

1:56

Ellen. Then I'll sort of throw to you your daughter

1:59

left town to hop trains, and

2:02

this prompted in you this sort of instinctive

2:04

response. I think, not just as an investigative

2:07

journalist, but as a human, as a mother, to find

2:09

out what she was doing, where she had gone,

2:11

what this world is that she had entered

2:13

into, and this sort of secret shadow

2:15

underbelly world of the trains in the United

2:17

States. We were just talking before we went live

2:20

on this conversation about where that instinct

2:22

came from, what drove you to do that? Maybe just

2:24

talk us through the origin of this phenomenal,

2:26

incredible, shocking, all of the above story.

2:29

How did it start? Well, it started at my daughter's

2:31

high school graduation. It was a very small

2:33

high school where everyone was allowed to

2:35

speak directly to the audience, and most people

2:38

came with students came. They were like twelve

2:40

of them. I think to say thank you to the parents

2:42

and thank you to the school. But my daughter, who

2:44

is a very talented musician, walked

2:47

up to this podium and sang a song,

2:49

the refrain of which is, Oh, look

2:51

what I've done. I've gone and made a fool

2:53

of everyone. So I'm sitting in the audience,

2:56

I'm thinking, who's she making a fool

2:58

of? We go off to the reception and she

3:00

splits. She didn't even go to the reception,

3:03

she didn't say goodbye. Some of her train

3:05

hopping friends were in the back of the graduation

3:08

and she left. And it took me a couple

3:10

of days to figure out that it wasn't like she went

3:12

off with a bunch of her friends and like I don't know,

3:14

went to a party and forgot to come home. But then

3:17

she was actually gone. So

3:19

my suspicion was the trains. Because I had

3:21

an open door policy at my house. Anybody

3:23

could show up for dinner. And as she got further

3:25

into her senior year, the guests were older.

3:27

They weren't some of these musicians, and some

3:30

of them hoped trains, and every time they

3:32

would describe this world of the train hopping.

3:34

You know, your heart goes with them, because you all, I

3:36

think a lot of Americans have this one number

3:38

one, Let me get me out of here. I am

3:41

done with this. I just want to go. And

3:43

the image that you think of is I could just cop

3:45

a train. Nobody would know where I am.

3:48

These people live that life. So why

3:50

did she do this? And bigger than that, who

3:52

was she? You know? I mean you had this child.

3:55

I think a lot of parents know this. You have a

3:57

child who lives with you for eighteen years. You think

3:59

you know them, But how did this happen?

4:01

So I am, as you said, trained as a journalist,

4:04

and I thought, I'm going to find out about this

4:06

world. I'm going to find out about the world that my

4:08

daughter chose. At first, I thought she was running

4:10

away from me and the world that I held out

4:12

to her, and I think that was part of it. But she was running

4:15

towards something, and what were the values

4:17

of this world? Who were the people in it? Was something

4:19

I was determined to find out. And that's kind of like

4:21

the basis of the podcast is what I found

4:24

when I followed my daughter into the City of the Rails.

4:26

Did you see this coming when she sort

4:29

of escaped your world and into this other

4:31

world? Was it a total shock? Yes?

4:33

I mean, you know, we'd had a little bit of a conflict

4:36

about graduation, but she graduated,

4:39

and she had applied to a very

4:41

prestigious school and she had gotten a

4:43

scholarship and everything, So I thought that

4:45

was what was happening. And I think when you talk

4:47

about this train hopping world, I'll

4:49

speak for myself, maybe everybody listening and watching

4:52

this, it feels like the stuff

4:54

of lore or books or a bygone

4:56

era. At least, it doesn't feel like the United

4:59

States, the America we're in today. But

5:01

you're saying, no, this is a absolutely

5:03

vibrant, active, secret underworld

5:05

or whatever you might call it. Just describe it to us

5:07

a little bit. What in fact are we talking about, Well,

5:10

you're talking about people who reject the

5:12

world that we have created. You

5:14

know, one of the people who I talk to in the first

5:17

episode, I say, you know, why

5:19

do you do this thing, like why do you choose to get

5:21

your food out of a dumpster? Why do you choose to live

5:23

in an illegal squat where you get arrested

5:26

at any moment? She said, because I want

5:28

to, and because I can. There's

5:30

so much waste in the world. I don't want

5:32

to participate in that. I can live

5:34

for free, and I'm not responsible to anyone.

5:37

I can go where I want, when I please. And

5:39

just the feeling of that is something that's

5:41

so alien to the way we are

5:43

bound up. You know, not only we bound up in our own

5:46

economic responsibilities or familial responsibilities,

5:49

we're also attached to technology and to

5:51

all these other things that are like monitoring us. And

5:53

they have taken a step away from that,

5:55

they are rejecting that. So I found

5:57

that part of it fascinating. I

6:16

guess there is this notion that's familiar,

6:18

this notion of wanting to retreat, wanting

6:20

to escape, wanting to maybe simplify,

6:23

back down our lives that even

6:25

as you describe it there, it's it resonates

6:28

it just as a human being. It resonates

6:30

this wanting to go back

6:32

to the land, go back to a simpler version

6:34

of life. But it also feels incredibly

6:37

dangerous. It's this

6:39

underworld that you're talking about. It this subculture.

6:41

I'm not quite sure the name to put it. Incredibly

6:44

dangerous, and in a

6:46

sense, my heart goes out to you. Insofar

6:48

as I have two daughters, I cannot

6:50

imagine watching them disappear

6:52

into this kind of a world. But just talk to us about

6:54

the dangers of it a little bit, I imagine that's very

6:57

real. Yes, well, you can imagine. The railroads

6:59

are not in the safest parts of American

7:01

cities. They're in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods

7:04

in the world. And the trains themselves

7:06

are enormous beasts that weigh

7:09

hundreds of thousands of pounds, and if you get

7:11

entangled with them, you're going to at the minimum

7:13

lose a limb. Even the act of running

7:15

to catch a train. So this guy describes

7:18

it an episode four, where you run alongside

7:20

the train, you throw your pack up

7:22

onto the box car, then you have to

7:24

use your upper body strength to hoist yourself

7:27

up into the box car. This is the crucial

7:29

moment because if you don't do that

7:31

act with a lot of force and confidence,

7:34

you slip back under the train. And there's

7:36

lots of people who lose their limbs that way.

7:39

So there's that also, you

7:41

know, you have to be able to rely on the

7:43

people that you're with. Many people told me

7:45

you learn more about the people that you're traveling

7:47

with in a few days than you know about some

7:49

members of your family. Because you're

7:51

in these extreme circumstances. You're looking

7:53

for your basics. You're looking for food, water,

7:56

shelter every day. So how

7:58

you arrange that's a matter of trust.

8:01

You to trust one another, there to trust

8:03

one another when things get dire. If you get

8:05

injured in some way, do you have money to go

8:07

to the doctor. Most of them don't even want

8:09

to interact with regular society

8:11

in any way, so there's going to be self

8:13

reliant. So if you can imagine this from a parent's

8:16

perspective, you're thinking, she's cold, she's

8:18

hungry, she maybe wounded in

8:20

some way. How do I know what's going on?

8:22

The only thing I could do because you have to do something. As

8:25

a parent, you feel like you have to do something, and know there's some parents

8:27

would be like, well, she's gone and I'm just going to try

8:29

not to think about it. But I'm not that kind of parent, right,

8:33

Well, I mean you're definitely not. And as an investigative

8:35

journalist, you're probably thinking, I'm pretty good at

8:37

this. I have a crack at trying to find

8:39

her. Was there a moment in the search, in

8:42

the investigation and the research

8:44

you were doing where you're like, Oh, I think i've got

8:46

a lead on another lead on another lead

8:48

maybe and that might lead me to her.

8:50

Was there a pivot point? Well, you know, she

8:53

did occasionally call, and I had

8:55

a little sort of reporting stations set

8:57

up in my house where I had a special notebook

9:00

or whenever she called, and even though

9:02

I was interrogating her, I tried

9:04

to make it sound very casual. I would be

9:06

like, oh, who are you with now? And you used to

9:08

be with so and so and so and so. Who are you

9:10

with now? Write down all their names, right down the

9:12

cell phone number that she was calling me from. In

9:15

case I needed to try to find her, I could

9:17

use that cell phone number. Then if I would say to

9:19

her, like, where are you? Because sometimes when you're on a train,

9:21

you don't know where you are, just say what is the most

9:23

recent landmark that you found? So I

9:25

always had kind of like a basic approximation

9:28

of where she was, and people do come

9:30

in and off the rails. So there were times when

9:32

she was someplace for a while,

9:34

you know, she would call me. She would call me like every

9:37

two three weeks maybe so I could get

9:39

a beat on where she was. So it

9:41

became a puzzle of why do you feel

9:44

like you ever found out why? Or was

9:46

it just this basic escapism

9:49

that all humans have to some extent, or

9:51

was there something specific about your daughter? You

9:53

know, I think the notion of rejecting

9:55

the world on this side of the tracks is

9:57

really a big motivation, and the feeling

10:00

of like I'm not going to answer to

10:02

anyone. I'm just going to be like today,

10:04

I'm going to wake up and decide what I'm going to do,

10:06

and there's nobody who can tell me one way or the other.

10:08

Because I don't have to make any money. Like

10:11

one guy said, as opposed to working

10:13

hard to make money, I worked hard not to

10:15

make money. I wanted to live a life where

10:17

money was not necessary. And when I was in New

10:19

Orleans working on a different part of this story,

10:21

one of the women that I met pointed to

10:24

three dollars that was on a crate in the squad

10:26

that she was living in, and she said, I've had

10:28

those three dollars sitting there for a week.

10:30

I haven't had to spend any money for an

10:32

entire week. So that's

10:35

the motivation, is to not have to be

10:37

pushed around by the urgencies

10:39

that are created from without, have only

10:41

the urgencies that come from within. Did

10:43

that resonate with you? Was there a part of it

10:45

even for you that were like I kind of get that.

10:48

Well. You know, I'm a big anti authoritarian

10:51

and it hasn't actually served me well in

10:53

my career. I know how to tell somebody

10:55

off and say I'm out of here, but I'm not brave

10:57

enough to betray you

11:00

know, I mean to say to the whole

11:02

world I'm gone, and you couldn't

11:05

figure out why. I laughed, Yeah, and

11:07

now sorry, I don't have a cell phone anymore. I'm

11:09

not that much of an outsider. I'm

11:12

just not Is it safe to word to use the

11:14

word hobo? That's an interesting question

11:16

because I know a lot of people have heard

11:18

that hobo is like a slur. You know that

11:20

it's sort of akin to calling somebody a bum,

11:23

you know what I mean, or like get a slur for

11:25

homeless people. But inside the world

11:27

of the hobo class, it's

11:30

not. In fact, in the first episode, one

11:32

of the hoboes that I'm hanging out with him when he's about

11:34

to hop a train, describes how

11:36

you have to earn it that he considered himself

11:39

a hobo able to use that honor

11:41

only after he'd been train hopping for more

11:43

than five or six years. I think

11:45

he said ten years. He said, like a journeyman

11:47

plumber. I mean, to know this world because

11:49

everyone thinks when they think of train hopping, they

11:51

think of, oh, you're on this box car and

11:54

you're free. But you don't really think about,

11:56

Okay, how do you choose the train

11:58

that's going where you want to go? You know, and

12:00

that there's a whole science to that, in

12:02

a way to analyze the content

12:05

the cargo that the train is carrying

12:07

and go Okay, well that's got lumber on it

12:09

and it's probably heading to San Francisco,

12:12

where it's going to be transported to China.

12:14

We export a lot of lumber to China. So

12:16

that's my train because I'm going to Oakland. And there's

12:18

a secret guide book which actually got

12:20

a copy of, called the Crew Change that

12:23

is created by Hobos. They all

12:25

file information to this list

12:27

serve where they say, oh, this yard has changed,

12:29

you know the place that we used to get on. You can't

12:31

get through at that point anymore. You have to go in another

12:33

way. And here's where you get eastbound

12:35

trains going to this this this place.

12:38

So it's passed around from

12:40

hobo to hobo as like a secret

12:43

guide to the underworld. It's incredible.

13:03

How prevalent is this Like, should we assume

13:05

that every one out of three trains

13:07

we see probably has hobos tucked away

13:09

in some car? Or is it like na, not quite

13:11

that much, but it is a lot. I can't

13:13

get a sense of this. But there's only a few cars

13:15

that hbos can actually ride in. And

13:17

if you look at a double stacked train, you know, when there are

13:19

two cars stacked on top of one another, those

13:21

are least likely to have hobos in them. There

13:24

are fewer box cars than they've ever been. There's all

13:26

sorts of other specialized cars. There's

13:28

a car called a grainer they put grain in.

13:30

There's also a little there's a little cover on the side

13:32

within a hole in it, and you can slip into that

13:34

hole and be undetected. So when an

13:36

experienced rider stands at the side of

13:38

the yard, they assess the available

13:41

rides, and sometimes they're looking for a very specific

13:43

car. The first episode, the hobo that

13:45

I'm with says, I'm looking for a very specific

13:48

car, you know, and it's called a pig with wings.

13:51

Pig with wings, hut. Never heard that before?

13:53

Really think called box cars, right, And there's

13:55

also all of this technique. Right if you

13:57

get into a box car, you can't do it

14:00

as you've got a railroad spike in your hand. Why

14:02

because if the box car door slam shut,

14:04

you're trapped inside the box car. Oh wow,

14:07

So you've got to spike the door so

14:09

that if it's slam shut because of the motion,

14:11

you still have a way to get out, because you could die inside

14:13

a box car. Did you feel and danger

14:15

yourself a lot? Or were you always sort of an outsider

14:18

And I'm an outsider. I'm definitely an

14:20

outsider, and a lot of the Hobos of you

14:22

near an outsider. On the other hand,

14:25

I have a journalist curiosity and

14:27

lack of judgment. I mean, I'm driven

14:29

by a certain amount of urgency, but I'm also

14:31

more curious than i am judgmental, and

14:33

I think that that always comes across in

14:36

speaking with the people that are

14:38

from the outside. There's sort of a backdrop to the

14:40

whole story that I think is your personal story.

14:42

But the backdrop that that is, and I don't want to

14:44

put words in your mouth, but it feels like the

14:47

story of America. Railroads are so

14:49

intertwined with the story of the history of

14:51

our country in obvious ways and less obvious

14:53

ways. But as you dug into this in

14:55

this search and investigation around your

14:57

daughter, talk about that a little bit. What came

15:00

white for you around how this is really a

15:02

story about the country to some extent. Well,

15:04

the railroads are the beginning of corporate America.

15:07

They are the first business that was operated

15:09

on a national scale, So they created

15:11

a lot of the corporate dodges and things

15:14

that protect the modern corporation.

15:16

For instance, the corporate personhood

15:18

that we have today started in

15:20

the eighteen sixties with the railroads trying

15:23

to use the fourteenth Amendment that breed the slaves

15:25

to make themselves into people, to give rights

15:27

to them as corporations that were the kind of

15:29

rights that you get as a person. Lobbyists

15:31

were created by the railroads. Why because

15:34

after the Civil War there was a lot of

15:36

expansion of the rails and huge

15:38

government subsidies. I mean a lot of people know about

15:40

the fact that all this land was given to the railroads

15:42

for free so they could lay their trap. A historian,

15:45

Richard White estimates that if you put

15:47

together all of the land that was given to the railroads

15:49

for free, would be the size of the state of

15:51

Alaska. But there was more than that. There

15:54

were federal subsidies for railroad

15:56

construction. They were federally guaranteed

15:58

bonds, So anybody who wanted a railroad

16:00

was trying to get this from the government. So

16:02

where did they hang out In the lobby of the Willard

16:05

Hotel where all of the congress people

16:07

came, and in the lobby of Congress, hence

16:09

the name lobbyists. Railroads invented

16:11

time zones, so before the Transcontinental

16:14

Railroad was made, the power access in the United

16:16

States was north south, but when it became

16:19

east to west noon in Chicago

16:22

is not the same time as noon in New

16:24

York, So how are you going to calibrate the

16:26

timing of the trains. Well, railroad

16:28

engineers divided the country into time

16:31

zones so that they could calibrate the arrival

16:33

of the trains, which led to Einstein's

16:36

theory of relativity. Because Einstein

16:38

was in the patent office in Burne, Switzerland,

16:41

getting all of these patents about how to calibrate

16:43

time, which made him understand things are

16:46

relative from one place to another became

16:48

the basis of the theory of relativity. And I

16:50

could go on, but I'll stop. I

16:55

think, honestly like to pull this back down

16:57

into podcasting a little bit. I

17:00

don't want to do it. I want you to go on and on. I think

17:02

what you're talking about, though, is but podcasting does really,

17:04

really well. We have a medium here and podcasts

17:06

and that we at iHeartMedia, fell in love with

17:08

a few years ago and it's been some of

17:10

the most exciting and I think honestly innovative

17:13

content happening in the world today. But the

17:15

way you describe the effects, the ripple

17:17

effects of the railroad industry from

17:19

you personally all the way through to a

17:22

physics defying theory of relativity and

17:24

everything in between. Is what podcasts are

17:26

really good at. This medium lets

17:28

you follow a story into the nooks and crannies

17:31

and the meandering past that it's supposed to

17:33

take, as opposed to formatting it

17:35

into a stricter structure or anything

17:37

like that. What has surprised you about

17:39

the podcast medium? What do you like about it

17:41

that you didn't really realize it was that good

17:43

at or anything like that. Well, one

17:45

of the things that I really was excited about

17:48

was the ability to use sound to tell

17:50

this story, because everyone has an emotional

17:52

connection to the sounds of the trains, and

17:54

to be able to communicate that this

17:57

means something to you, that very emotional

17:59

connection without having to put a big read

18:01

knee on arrow at it and go you care. But

18:03

when you hear that train, when you hear that whistle,

18:06

it arouses the heart of you that

18:08

says, is this it? Can

18:10

I get out of here? Is there some other place I

18:12

could go? Could I just like get on the train,

18:14

you know, without having to say that stuff. I

18:16

think that is an enormous gift

18:18

to storytelling. The other thing is the very

18:21

talented people from my heart that I've been working

18:23

with not saying too much,

18:25

you know, like trying to just say

18:28

enough so that people get the point. Because people are

18:30

very smart. I've come from the print world,

18:32

where you you know, like Okay, here we're going to have three paragraphs

18:35

about lobbying. They want to tell

18:37

it in four sentences, and I

18:39

think that gets it across just as effectively

18:42

with the other tools that are available to

18:44

you through sound and other things with podcasting.

18:46

Then the other thing is who's going to read a book these

18:48

days? I mean, I've written a lot of books, but you

18:50

know, this is such an incredible opportunity

18:53

to reach a big audience who may

18:55

not have thought of these things before. And

18:57

the fact that all of these different people from

18:59

all of the different walks of life are coming

19:01

to this podcast and sorry to rethink their

19:03

own lives. We had a mommy blogger who said, you

19:05

know, this is making me think I show up

19:07

to work every day, I do the things I'm supposed

19:10

to do, and at the end of the day, what does

19:12

it amount to? And I'm like, Wow, if we could

19:14

reach a suburban mom with this podcast,

19:16

I mean, which you wouldn't read a book about the

19:18

rails same thing. Other side of this

19:20

audience, A hobo left me a

19:22

voicemail Masters but there's a number on the end

19:24

of the podcast, and he said, I've been

19:27

on the rails for thirty years. I'm fifty

19:29

two years old, and I thought, you know, I'm too old

19:31

to get off the rails. But then I listened to your

19:33

episode about moving into the barn,

19:35

and I thought I could do that. I could get

19:37

off the rails. So just think about that

19:39

ability of the podcast to

19:42

touch a suburban mom and a hobo

19:44

in the same episode. That's amazing.

19:47

It is a strangely, deeply,

19:49

deeply moving medium. It really

19:52

does have a way of taking a story and literally

19:54

and then figuratively getting in your head. I

19:56

just want to thank you so much for hanging out with us the

19:59

show that you've made City of the Rails in

20:01

partnership with the iHeart podcast Network. For

20:03

everybody listening or watching this show

20:05

hits you hard. It is extremely

20:08

moving, extremely smart.

20:10

When we talk about podcasting creating

20:13

some of the highest quality content

20:16

in the world period, in

20:18

any medium, this Danelle is exactly

20:20

the kind of show we're talking about. It really is

20:22

a pretty phenomenal work of art. I think that you've

20:24

put out there, and it's all the things we just talked

20:27

about. It's a mother you coming to terms

20:29

with what is moving and motivating

20:31

her daughter. It's the story of America. It's

20:34

deeply powerful. So I really appreciate

20:36

you hanging out with us today, Danelle, and I

20:38

really do encourage everyone. Just take

20:40

a second, subscribe to the feed, listen to the

20:42

first couple episodes. You won't stop. But

20:44

Danelle, thank you so much. Thank you, thank

20:47

you for helping to get people to come

20:49

listen to this show, and thanks to you all for hanging

20:51

out with us today. We will see you next time on the iHeart

20:53

podcast speaker series, Take Care, Be

20:55

Well, Talk Soon Podversations

21:07

as a production of iHeartRadio. You can

21:09

find more from the biggest names in podcasting

21:11

on iHeartRadio app or wherever you get

21:13

your podcasts.