Note to listeners: if you haven’t already, you may want to watch “Hands on a Hardbody: The Documentary” (link to complete film on YouTube here) before listening!

“Hands on a Hardbody: The Documentary” tells the story of an annual competition held from 1992 to 2005 in Longview, Texas, in which a local Nissan dealership selected 24 contestants by lottery for a chance to win a tantalizing symbol of freedom and mobility in many rural areas: a brand-new hardbody truck. All the contestants had to do to win it was to show up at 5am in the sweltering Texas summer heat, place a hand on the truck, and wait until theirs was the last hand left. They got a 5-minute break every hour and a 15-minute break every six hours, but the rest of the time they couldn’t lean, they couldn’t sleep, they couldn’t use the bathroom, and most importantly they couldn’t take their hand off the hardbody.

They could only wrestle with the relentless passage of time… and all of the boredom, exhaustion, physical pain, and quite often delirium it brought with it. 

So they waited. And waited. And waited…sometimes more than 80 straight hours before there was only one hand left. That’s more three entire days and nights. 

As the clock ticks relentlessly on and we learn more about each contestant’s hunger for a chance at prosperity, what seemed like an absurd spectacle of willpower and perseverance becomes a deeper exploration of the human condition—the limits of mind and body, amity and enmity, suffering and compassion, ambition and ability— all as these 24 contestants confront the bittersweet realities of the American dream in the hopes of escaping the suffocating shackles of their circumstances. 

In the words of Benny Perkins, former winner of a hardbody, return contestant in the documentary “Hands on a Hardbody,” and arguably one of the most underrated philosophers of the 20th Century: “It’s a real human drama.”

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

• July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded
• Norman Lear
• American Political Science Association (APSA) crossing the picket line
• “Hands on a Hardbody: The Documentary” (1997)
• Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
• what a 1997 Nissan hardbody truck looks like
• “poverty porn”
• “Hands on a Hardbody: The Documentary” director, S.R. Bindler
• How long can humans stay awake?
• How lotteries tax the poor
• The tragic ending of the Hands on a hardbody contest
• The so-called Haymarket “riot”