Let’s take a stroll through the mind of John Tory, shall we?

No interview, no texts, no emails.

Just a listen to 20 or so podcasts from Live Drive with John Tory, his three-hour show for CFRB. Beginning in 2009, it ran weekdays until he gave it up to run for mayor in the upcoming Oct. 27 election.

Now Tory is the first to say (as he has) that you can’t be the judge of anything “after a three-minute talk on the radio.” If that holds true, can one make assumptions about anybody’s mind from their words over the same airways?

Let’s say we can. Especially when we’re talking about thousands of words over hours of free-wheeling conversation recorded in podcasts over the summer of 2013.

Here are the top 10 things we learned about Tory from rush-hour radio:

1. He’s not into cars. Not really.

After last summer’s flash flood in Toronto, he interviewed Howard Levitt, the lawyer who left his $200,000 Ferrari in sewage-filled water at the Lower Simcoe St. underpass. Rising water was dangerous and he had to get to the airport for a hearing in Ottawa.

“Get out! Are you serious?” exclaimed Tory when he learned Levitt wore the same suit on the plane and in court the next morning. The lesson, he said, was that anyone who would wade through sludge to go to court in a stinky suit was “the guy I’d want on our side.”

As for the Ferrari? Maybe he’d take it for a spin, but that’s all. “I would never spend $200,000 for a car because I don’t care about cars that much . . . it’s more revealing about (Levitt).”

2. Nobody should call him a blowhard.

“I was self-aware enough to know that a 99.7 percent average wasn’t in the cards for me,” he said, in an interview with Grade 12 graduates Geoffrey Yu and Ryan Gotesman, who scored exactly that last year.

“Math alone would prevent that . . . I still wonder why 2(x-y)2 matters to anybody . . . but anyway.”

Marks weren’t his strong suit.

“I never had a report card like that, so I wouldn’t know what it feels like,” Tory told the teens. While he turned into a “pretty good student,” he sometimes brought home high school report cards “with a number of Cs, and one time worse than that.”

“Is that the best you can do?” his father would ask. Nope. (Or more likely, to the late John Tory Sr.: “No, sir.”)

Tory graduated from Trinity College at U of T and Osgoode Hall Law School at York University. At law school, he needed to work with the TV on “just so I didn’t go completely nuts.”

3. He often seems to think out loud. That July 19 interview with Yu and Gotesman is a good example. To dispel the notion they might be “browners” (a word from his generation), he talked to them about their broad interests in life.

“I’m not the judge anyway, but you both seem perfectly normal to me . . . If you can be normal and get 99.7, then good for you.”

Not everyone is so well-rounded, he said, adding that success at school doesn’t necessarily mean success in life.

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“Who gets to define success anyway? You can be the judge. You can’t after a three-minute talk on the radio.”

His favorite word last summer was “blowback.” As in reaction to a comment or action.

4. He’s either blasé about his age or mentions it a lot because he’s not. After admitting he calculates temperature first in Fahrenheit rather than Celsius, he said: “I’m 59 years old . . . I can’t help myself . . . I’m pushing my pants up under my armpits and complaining about government.”

5. He knows that 25 degrees C is about 77 degrees F. That was on a show with guest chef Lynn Crawford before the “Thrill of the Grill on the Danforth.” (Yes, folks, there was summer in Toronto. Once.)

6. His cellphone once went off a funeral. He thought, “Oh God, that’s embarrassing for someone.” Then he realized it was his phone in his pocket. He says he managed to get it after “only one ring” without taking it out of his pocket.

7. His “beloved wife” and kids will sit beside a landline and take out their cellphones. The implication was that he doesn’t. He doesn’t wear a watch and uses his cell to check the time. On this show, on cellphone costs and etiquette, he carefully repeated that he was a director of Rogers. (He’s also been president and CEO of Rogers Media Inc. and of Rogers Cable Inc.)

8. He appeared to accept the findings of a CRTC report that mobile costs in Canada are roughly in the middle of global costs. But he asked listeners to call in with their experiences. He urged those dissatisfied with their plans to push for better deals and then push a second or third time. “They’re anxious to keep you . . . There’s always competition in the marketplace,” he said, referring to all companies. Not everybody agreed.

9) He’s smoked marijuana. He says he knows it doesn’t make you crazy. But he’d still say to Justin Trudeau’s stand to legalize it, “Not so fast. I’m still not sure about the science.” He says he’s seen long-term continuous use have an effect on people, even draining motivation to the point they don’t want to get up in the morning. There was a “huge response” to the show’s topic, he said, with 90 percent in favour of legalization.

10. We also learned what he learned, or appears to have learned, from hosting the show for so long. Listening to a constant diet of Tory on the radio suggests he’s changed from the politician who lost the Ontario election as Conservative leader in 2007 and the by-election that prompted his resignation in 2009. Doesn’t seem like the old Mr. Dithers.

Consider how he announced he would run, late on Sunday, Feb. 23. He filed his candidacy papers the next morning, stealing thunder from the long-awaited entry by Karen Stintz. Maybe it was on the advice of Nick Kouvalis, former Rob Ford campaign manager, who took credit for Tory’s decision not to run in 2010 by scaring him off with attacks on his integrity. (Tory denies this.) The same guy is now on Tory’s campaign team.

It’s hard to imagine a candidate without all the stick-handling and glitches of live radio making that kind of move.

What we haven’t learned is whether he would make the best mayor.

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