S2. Chapter 16: About My Road Rage

What happens when road rage turns into a near-death experience?

In Chapter 16 of The Tao of Lloyd, Lloyd Dobler sets out to explore stillness, emptiness, and non-reactivity, and then promptly fails in spectacular fashion at a red light. A reckless moment of political rage escalates into a real-world confrontation that nearly ends very badly, forcing Lloyd to reckon with the gap between spiritual ideals and how the nervous system actually behaves under threat.

Grounded in Chapter 16 of the Tao Te Ching, this episode becomes a darkly funny, uncomfortably honest meditation on anger, ego, and the illusion of moral superiority. Lloyd reflects on what “emptying the mind” looks like when fear takes the wheel, how rage disguises itself as righteousness, and why enlightenment often arrives not as wisdom—but as survival.

Part confession, part political satire, part sorta-guided meditation, this chapter asks a harder question than how to stay calm: what do you do when you realize you’re the one escalating?

A meditation on stillness, humility, and choosing—just once—not to obey the worst impulse in the room.

From the edge of empire and the center of self—this is The Tao of Lloyd.

Transcript

Welcome back for chapter sixteen.
I’m Lloyd Dobler, yeah that Lloyd Dobler: the teenager in the trench coat and the boombox held to the heavens, serenading Diane Court like a lovesick Jedi dropout.

But that version of me is a prequel: a VHS-era ghost frozen between a Peter Gabriel song and a unrealized future in kick boxing. 

…But! …
If you came for teen angst and the grand gestures of Rom-Coms, I should let you know now that I’ve only got a bum knee, and meditation cushion that once smelled like teen spirit but now smells like mid-life mischief.

So yeah, I’m Lloyd Dobler,
and welcome to The Tao of Lloyd, a podcast where I take one chapter of the Tao Te Ching at a time and shine it on American politics like a blacklight shining on the sheets of a heart shaped bed in a motel that rents by the hour. Cuz that is a podcast niche you did not know you needed until, well, until, well, welcome to America 2025.

Today I want to share with you a near death experience I had recently involving one of America’s pastimes: road rage.

So, I was driving. Stuck in traffic, at a red light. And because, like you, my dopamine addiction to that cell phone device resting in the passenger seat sometimes wins out over my still fledgling spiritual practice I opened up Twitter and saw Pete Hegseth, who had tweeted a picture of himself as a soldier in Iraq twenty years ago, with the caption “Our platoon. 20 years ago, today. Baghdad, Iraq. Pre-air assault raid.”

And I thought, look at this bag a douche Pete Hegseth: the man who rebranded the Department of Defense as the Department of War and treats geopolitics like a bar fight he’s been waiting his whole life to start.

He is the weaponization of ignorance, the glamorization of militarism, with the swaggering confidence of a man who boldly shows off his white nationalist tattoos like he’s auditioning to be the cover model for Crusader Cosplay Quarterly. 

This is the man deciding whose country gets turned into the backdrop of the next Fox News chyron selling us another war and pimping for the military industrial complex.

And so, I’m sitting there, at the red light, and I re-tweet the Hegseth tweet with my own tweet, writing. The Iraq “war” was an illegal, immoral invasion that broke a nation, birthed ISIS, and left the U.S. wondering why karma keeps sending invoices.

Cuz, you know, a sharply worded tweet is exactly how a man who hosts a podcast about non-reactivity should definitely engage with the guy who commands a military budget larger than the next 12 countries combined. In addition to its being the equivalent of picking a fight with a tank using a kazoo, it is the “spiritually evolved” equivalent of teaching a grizzly bear about non-attachment while taping salmon to your torso.

So yeah, I’ve got some work to do on myself. So do you.

And then, just then, a pickup truck the size of a Tank, with one of those gigantic Make 
America Great Again Flags flying out the back rolled up beside me at the light and I did something I’m not proud to admit. I rolled down my window, held my left hand up as high as I could, flipped him the bird and shouted, “DONALD TRUMP WOULD TRADE YOUR FUTURE FOR A DIET COKE AND A SOGGY-ASS BIG MAC! QUIT THE CULT!”

And then I sped in font of him in merging traffic, as he stepped on the gas and cranked Kid Rock anthem up to eleven. 

I’ll tell you the rest of the harrowing near death experience of a story, which again, I’m not bragging and I’m not proud of, but in which there may be some kind of lesson, after this much need stillness for the meditation and the reading.

(Bell chime.)

If you’re somewhere you can safely do it,
I invite you to close your eyes.
Or don’t.
I mean. Whatever. 
But really now, why not just close your eyes to start the journey within?
I mean what have you got to lose?
Unless you're zigzagging through armored vehicles, 
dodging pepper spray while shutting down an ICE RAID,
or navigating a Trader Joe’s parking lot at 5 p.m. on a Sunday
..all activities for which you should keep your eyes open…

But if not, 
Just go ahead and close your eyes
and Start the journey within.

Good.
Get comfortable.

Breathe in through your nose.
Breathe out through your nose like you’re blowing into a Nintendo cartridge because that always, somehow, still works
Breathe in
and out….

Good.

This is Chapter 16 of the Tao Te Ching:

Empty your mind of all thoughts. 
Let your heart be at peace. 
Watch the turmoil of beings, 
but contemplate their return. 
Each separate being in the universe returns to the common source. 
Returning to the source is serenity.

If you don't realize the source, 
you stumble in confusion and sorrow. 
When you realize where you come from, 
you naturally become tolerant, 
disinterested, amused, 
kind hearted as a grandmother, 
dignified as a king. 
Immersed in the wonder of the Tao,
you can deal with whatever life brings you, 
and when death comes, you are ready.

(Bell chime.)

And that’s Chapter 16.

Now, back to the story. 
I held my left hand up as high as I could, flipped him the bird and shouted, “DONALD TRUMP WOULD TRADE YOUR FUTURE FOR A DIET COKE AND A SOGGY-ASS BIG MAC! QUIT THE CULT!”

And then I sped in front of him in merging traffic, as he stepped on the gas and cranked his Kid Rock anthem up to eleven.

And suddenly we were reenacting a Fast & Furious chase scene, if Fast & Furious were directed by Wes Anderson and everyone drove badly. I cut across two lanes; he followed. I hit 64 in my shitty old Prius; he hit 104 in a truck compensating for three different childhood wounds. I finally swerved into the strip mall with a Whole Foods, and an abandoned multiplex where raccoons now do community theater. He followed. We exited our cars like absolute idiots preparing for a duel to the death.

I mean cue the western duel music.

He marched towards me with the kind of vengeance usually reserved for Greek tragedies. He looked like Guy Fieri, but lumpier and much angrier.
Like he just finished shooting 3 seasons of diners, drive ins and dives and someone swapped his Pepto-Bismol with cheap whisky. And there we were: two dudes in America in 2025, filled with a rage whose exact source we probably could not identify. Both of us navigating some crisis without a safe word.

He checked me out, and I don’t look all that threatening. In truth, aside from my kickboxing career, which ended with a 6 win, 17 loss record as an amateur, I had not really been in a fight with anyone since that time in the 8th grade at the roller rink when Billy Genovese beat me into submission in front of a girl I was asking out during the snowball. And even though I had skates on and he was in adidas shell tops and thus had an unfair advantage, it still left me with no real life experience that would give me any confidence that I could win this fight with angry Guy Fieri.

And I thought of Chapter 16. This chapter you are listening to now. And the writers block I was having about it. And I thought: Empty your mind Lloyd: don’t suppress your thoughts but rather step back from them. See, there is a concept in Zen called the mirror mind, as I understand it goes something like this: the mirror never refuses to show anything, it also doesn't retain anything after it is gone. The mind should be like a mirror in that way.

And thinking this made me see this other guy. Guy Fieri, as me. Cosmically speaking, that is.

Enlightenment really picks its moments, huh?

But I don’t think I had the words that he would hear to express the ancient beauty or mysticism or whatever that suddenly came over me as I stared down the man, moving towards me with a truly impressive spew of curse words and venom and creative phrases that all ended with promises that he would ‘kill me, you radical left commie fuckface’— the kind of threats that seemed empty in the high school hallway, but in this sparsely populated parking lot, brought with them a percentage of probability somewhere safely above zero.

And without thinking too much I raised my hand, not to hit him, but in the universally understood gesture for “Stop”- which, miraculously he did. Perhaps he stopped out of curiosity to how I would respond to his verbal dexterity, to see if my chest pumping verbal game was on his level.  Or perhaps, it occurs to me now, he stopped out of the same fear I was feeling about serious injury of even my life ending. And how sad that final chapter would be if it began with some tweet from Pete Hegseth.

And I heard the following words come out of my mouth:

If you take one more step towards me, I promise you that you will define your life from here on out as before and after this moment. And the after this moment part of your life will be filled with pain, regret, a catheter, and a multitude of other unpleasantries.

Unpleasantries. What did I say?

The words came out of my face calmy, and then I squatted into a crouch, something like I had seen Bruce Lee do before he fought Kareem Abdul Jabar in the film Game of Death.

But I am not Bruce Lee. And this was all a bluff.

He repeated a few of his string of spaghetti curses and threats. But I said nothing. Just channeled Bruce Lee and looked into his eyes.

He was me, if I had grown up with different circumstances. But if he decided to call my bluff, and engage in a fight, I don’t think I’d be speaking into this mic now.

Eventually he left.

I remained crouched like Bruce Lee long after he was out of eyesight, MAGA flag waving in the wake of his gas guzzling truck. Kid Rock blasting. Middle fingers waving.

I brought this on myself.  I’ve got to be better than this, I thought, and then I left my Bruce Lee stance, and purchased not 1 but three slices stale pizza from the Whole Foods prepared food section and ate them all in my creaky old Prius, in that sad parking lot, knowing this much gluten was going to wreak havoc on my insides and promising to be better tomorrow.

Tomorrow.
Tomorrow I’ll be better.
Tomorrow I’ll begin.

Join me?

From the edge of empire
and the center of the self—
this is The Tao of Lloyd.