On this episode of the podcast, we are joined by Top Gear's very own Jason Blumberg. We talk about some of the craziest things he has ever done in a helicopter, including the helicopter crash that almost killed him and his co-pilot. We also talk about the time he almost got killed by an Apache helicopter and how he almost died on the set of Fear Factor. Also, Jason talks about his favorite places he has been in the helicopter and what it's like to fly in one. And of course, we talk about a bunch of other crazy things Jason has done in his life, including flying over the Big Island and flying over volcanoes. We hope you enjoy this episode, and if you like it, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review! Subscribe, Like, and Share it on whatever platform you're listening to this podcast. If you like the pod, please consider becoming a patron and leaving us a five star review and rating/review on iTunes! Thank you so we can keep sharing the pod with your friends, family, and the podcasting community! Peace, Love, Blessings, Cheers, EJ & Rory, Ej and Cheers. - The Ej & Rory - P.S. - Cheers - EJ and Rory - E.M. & Rory - Ej - Thank you, E.A. - Caitlyn and Rory, Caitlyn Love, Rory and EJ, - John & Ej, Jason and E.B. & EJaredis, & E.J. - - Jon & Rory xx - Jon and Rory - Jon and Ej - Jason, Sarah, . John & Rory & Erika , EJ - E. & R. & Jon, , EJ - , and Jon & Jon & RJ, and Jon and R.J., Jamie, Jon & JB, and J. & J-RJ, & J. , & Jon and J-B. . . - J-J. & BJ & B. & K. - R. & S. J-EJ, J-A. & C. & M. & P. & A. & D. & G. & OJ
00:01:04.000They walked away, the helicopter was toast, but then when you hear it, you start, there's certain things that happen, you start to look back at your life and go like, does that mean I could have also almost died when we did that like 20 minutes from my house, season one?
00:01:40.000So they exist, and they can do different films and movies, and it's cool for these guys because they get to use the skills that they had and get to do something cool with them.
00:01:57.000I mean, what is one of those worth, Jamie?
00:01:58.000Find out what one of those fuckers are worth.
00:02:01.000We had, uh, not those, but we had a bunch of helicopters that we used on Fear Factor, and a lot of times they were really close to each other, like they'd have to fly staggered, where the blades of one were just above the blades of the other, and they're connected, both of them connected by ropes to something.
00:02:17.000They were picking up, like a bus or some shit.
00:05:16.000One of my best friends flies for Delta, and I tell him, you know, you travel a lot, you get it, but if I hear his name broadcast over the PA, I'm probably going to get off the plane, because I've been drunk with him enough times that it's just...
00:05:31.000I dig that he's in charge of so many people's lives, I just don't know if we're there.
00:05:34.000Did you see the picture of the plane that ran into a bird?
00:05:39.000A commercial jet plane slammed into a bird, and it caved in the entire front of the plane?
00:06:17.000So there's this place in Georgia, near me, where we shot, the same place with the helicopter, and they are the people that go and recover airplanes.
00:06:40.000Insurance companies pay them to go and recover these planes.
00:06:43.000And they have to basically cut them up, get them on a train or a flatbed or whatever.
00:06:48.000And so for Christmas, one of our executive producers for Top Gear, he was like showing me, oh, here's some stuff I got from Ronnie and my buddies back in Georgia.
00:06:56.000And it was a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels that looked like it had mold growing on the outside.
00:07:01.000And it was one of the bottles that was in the plane that went down on the Hudson.
00:08:18.000It was in 2000. Yeah, three men are facing misdemeanor charges in connection with Patrick Swayze's emergency landing earlier this month.
00:08:26.000The men are accused of failing to tell authorities about how they allegedly helped the act to remove alcoholic beverages from his crashed plane.
00:10:10.000Well, we were talking before the podcast, and we were talking about muscle cars, and we were talking about Mustangs, and Mustang people being weird.
00:10:19.000Like, you're not the only one who's ever said that to me.
00:10:21.000I haven't experienced this, except in high school.
00:10:23.000When I was in high school, my auto shop teacher was a Mustang fanatic.
00:11:09.000And to quantify it a tiny bit, you told me that you were kind of thinking about building a car and it's maybe a Chevelle or maybe a Mustang.
00:14:35.000Just any time you wanted to, you'd just give it a little juice and it would just kick out the back for you.
00:14:39.000And there's really only a handful of cars that you feel like when you see someone on the road, and you know, sometimes people, it's not that they're messing with you, they're just not bright enough to know how to be a good driver.
00:14:49.000That's one of those cars you would always see a dude in a Mustang just be like, I've had enough of your crap.
00:15:56.000Well, he had never experienced anything like the GT2. So what Alex did, Alex, my buddy from Sharkworks, took a GT2 from, I want to say it's 2010 maybe, somewhere around there.
00:18:29.000On a highway, apparently, is even scarier.
00:18:31.000They were saying on the highway, you just don't feel compelled to let off the gas, and so you look down, you're going 170 miles an hour on a 405, and you're like, what the fuck am I doing?
00:18:39.000Last season of Top Gear, we went to Germany.
00:20:31.000And then, like, on the way there, we were trying to hit the rev limiter on the Autobahn because people know how to drive on the interstate there.
00:21:08.000There's no, like, when I first came here, one of the first things that I did, I drove down to, there's a place called Hard Times Billiards in Bellflower, California.
00:22:40.000The carousel is the coolest feeling I've ever had because you dip in and there's graffiti everywhere, right?
00:22:47.000Because they have these huge parties out there around the races and so you're seeing all this stuff and the car just dips in and you're hauling ass as hard as you can and then it just shoots you right out the other side and you keep going and you're like, I just did it.
00:22:59.000So the carousel is like you're almost going sideways, like a bank?
00:23:03.000Yes, it's a steep bank that just kind of pops in out of nowhere, and you just get in and you kind of just ride it.
00:24:34.000So everybody that was on the track at that point has to exit.
00:24:38.000And this team shows up and they do like an accident investigation because that guy's insurance would still be good on the track at that moment because it was a toll road.
00:24:59.000Because you've heard of friends that are like, oh, I took this new car to the track, and then I paid a tow truck guy to drop it on the side of the 405 so I can call the insurance company and tell them I don't know what happened.
00:25:13.000But you can rent a race car there, either like a Peugeot or they have all these like little kind of import smaller race cars you can rent.
00:25:22.000It says like rent a race car on the windshield and just go for it.
00:25:25.000Well, if you get a Nissan GT-R, they have a speed limiter on it until you get to race courses and the GPS recognizes that you're at a race course.
00:27:58.000That was such a glaring error on their part to make this incredible car, I mean a ridiculously fast car, and then give it these dogshit seats.
00:28:53.000Those cars are shockingly well-balanced.
00:28:55.000Because it's plastic and American and the seats are dogshit, you think, well, this is a fucking terrible car, but it's not.
00:29:04.000If you took it somewhere and just had some really good bucket seats installed, the ride experience, and then the steering wheel's dogshit, too.
00:32:15.000The car broke down five times, like catastrophic failures, like twice the shift linkage blew, where the clutch, like I go to put in the clutch and I move the gear and there's just nothing.
00:32:24.000The gear shifter just spinning around in a circle, nothing connected to it.
00:32:27.000One time it blew at a red light and it stuck in second gear, so I just revved it really high and I pulled out in second gear and I drove to the Porsche dealership in second gear.
00:32:37.000And that was the second time they fixed it, so I was like, what in the fuck?
00:33:23.000And I caught just enough of the curb with the tire that when the tire came off of it, the noise was so loud that I was like, okay, get back in.
00:36:26.000Canada is just on the other side of that shot.
00:36:29.000And this is one of those places where...
00:36:31.000I think they called them Minutemen, where you had to be able to get from, like, where you were sleeping to an airplane in 60 seconds in case, like...
00:38:44.000Tanner taught at one in Colorado for years.
00:38:48.000So again, one of the reasons he's so good at what he does.
00:38:50.000But it's basically like a little road course they have, and they wait for it to snow, and then they put a little water on it and ice it over, and you take BMWs out there and learn how to handle a car in the ice.
00:41:24.000So especially in drifting, those guys have to get as close to each other as they can while still keeping the line, trying to get as close to these different clipping points as they can.
00:41:33.000So he's slamming on the e-brake to make these turns.
00:41:36.000And the way these guys have to use the clutch at the same time they're using the e-brake to get it to slide without killing everything, and then they get back on it.
00:41:46.000A guy like Vaughn Gettin Jr. who drifts a Mustang, he is full throttle the whole time and modulates just with the clutch.
00:41:54.000And that's like next level stuff that I can't, I can only do 11 things at one time.
00:41:59.000So when watching him go out there, Tanner has a, Tanner took a VW Passat, converted it to rear wheel drive and used a LS7 from a Z06. No, it's basically like the Chevy Copo Camaro engine.
00:42:12.000That's a 600 horsepower engine, right?
00:46:38.000You drive around in a lunchbox with wheels.
00:46:41.000But it's got air conditioning, because I wanted my wife to ride in it with me.
00:46:45.000So when I bought it out here, I took it to my friends at TRD, and I told the guy Chuck, I said, can you see, like, it looks like there's a vintage AC. Vintage Air is this company that makes, like, old hot rod kits, right?
00:46:55.000So there was a control panel for a vintage air thing in there, and I said, can you check and see, like, if we could make it and have air conditioning?
00:47:01.000He looked, he's like, yeah, I'm just going to bolt up a Supra AC compressor and charge it.
00:48:01.000I found this ad on there that this national motorsports company was looking for a marketing guy that could be an emcee, and so I sent all my stuff in, and it was one of those terrible interviews, I'm not going to get this job, and then two weeks later, they're like, hey, go down to Daytona, so you got the gig.
00:48:15.000So I go down to Daytona, and I, like, kind of knew a little bit about NASCAR. You know, I knew Petty and Wallace, Earnhardt, but I didn't know much else besides that.
00:48:24.000Went to school for marketing, so all of a sudden I want to be around cars.
00:51:18.000Honestly, you're going to have to look at these, because some of them are so, we forget, because you probably don't spend time with, like, my friends are just pretty normal people.
00:51:26.000I don't spend time with people that are genuinely just out of their mind crazy, and that's an entire section for those people.
00:51:33.000We had a guy like that on Fear Factor once.
00:51:35.000He met a girl, I believe it was at a concert, and spoke to her briefly and wanted to win Fear Factor because he knew that she was the one and he needed to find her again.
00:51:51.000Some insane amount of time and money going around the city and where he met her putting up flyers.
00:51:57.000And so he put up all these flyers and all these people that contacted him that weren't that girl, you know, that were fucking with him.
00:52:03.000And he was like super determined, but he had done it for like a couple of years.
00:52:08.000And they thought it was funny when we first talked about having this guy on the show, like he's got a great story, you gotta hear the story.
00:52:14.000So I heard the story, I go, dude, imagine if that was your fucking sister.
00:52:35.000What if that was the entire conversation?
00:52:37.000Well, it was a very brief conversation.
00:52:39.000I forget the nature of the conversation, but it was extremely brief.
00:52:41.000But I remember being really creeped out by him.
00:52:44.000Really creeped out, like, when we had him on the show, because I... There was a lot of decision-making that went into getting on those shows that I didn't agree with.
00:52:53.000A lot of people made it onto the show where I was like, fucking really?
00:52:56.000You want to put this guy on TV? Are you out of your mind?
00:53:06.000It was a guy who beat his girlfriend up on one TV show.
00:53:10.000He threw her to the ground on a TV show and attacked some fucking guy on VH1. And then got in my face, and I was like, Jesus fucking Christ.
00:53:17.000And I said to them, like, why are you putting these crazy fucks that you know are crazy fucks on TV? Like, do you understand that this is, like, irresponsible?
00:53:31.000They're trying to make money, and the way to make money is to have crazy people on TV. That's it.
00:53:35.000You know, and my point of view was like, I had to host it, you know, and these people were kind of dangerous, and, you know, you're on rooftops with them and shit in downtown LA. It's, oh, it's 30 fucking stories up.
00:53:47.000There's a lot of weird shit that could happen on those rooftops You know someone could push somebody somebody could jump and we had some like really nutty fucks that made it on that show but that guy that got the guy almost got in a fight with and that guy that was Trying to find that girl those they stood out like Jesus Christ because I looked in his eyes While I was talking to him,
00:54:10.000It was just this mist of consciousness.
00:54:13.000He was like a child in a man's body who thought he was in a movie and thought, you know, that he's just gonna keep going until he finds the right...
00:54:21.000And as the show went on, you know, a couple days in, hanging out with this guy, you get deeper and deeper into who he really is, and he's creepier and creepier.
00:55:19.000And it wasn't horrible because of the creators.
00:55:21.000It was one of those situations where really funny guys who wrote with Married With Children, they wrote for The Simpsons, they created a show, and then the show became, once it went on television, they took it away from them, and then they brought in some hacks, and it just became, it was gross.
00:56:59.000It was a really interesting landscape for TV because there weren't a ton.
00:57:02.000There's also like, if we look back at that time, I don't remember a lot of other shows that I really liked and could sit there because it was such a good ensemble of so many people that brought different things.
00:57:12.000Whereas normally there's like, there's alpha male and then there's two other sort of people.
00:58:41.000And that shit would happen when we have guest stars who do that, and we would be like, So it was a weird combination of a bunch of people that were just weirdos.
00:58:51.000They didn't fit the mold of a standard sitcom.
00:58:56.000And no one went on to do a sitcom since.
00:59:54.000I was listening to you one day, and you were talking about the difference, and I'm sorry, I can't remember if it was stand-up that I was watching you, or the podcast, but you were talking about the difference between comedians and actors, and how, essentially, actors have to get up every day and pretend to be someone else.
01:00:09.000They never really, like, they don't know who they are, whereas comedians, like, know who they are, and that's what they talk about.
01:00:15.000But even in my limited experience in that town, I'm really lucky.
01:00:19.000I don't ever have to wake up and wonder who to be.
01:00:21.000I can't imagine what that's truly like to dive into someone so much that you essentially get paid to lose yourself each time, and then you have to move on and do it again.
01:00:32.000That's a lot harder, I think, that people know.
01:00:35.000Well, Steven Brute, who's the one guy who did that on the show, he doesn't have any problems knowing who he is.
01:00:44.000He's like very warm and friendly like easygoing guy and he just loves the craft of Creating a character like it's he has the most pure Intention out of any actor person I've ever met like his his love is really of creating You know that Steve Buscemi character that you remember from that movie that you know that Russell Crowe character they like fuck he nailed it,
01:01:08.000you know like that He just loves nailing a character.
01:01:11.000I mean that's He's just a master actor.
01:01:35.000It's like they got fucked over when they were children or when they were, you know, adolescents or whatever the fuck happened to them that led them to have this insatiable desire to be thought of as special.
01:01:45.000And once they get it, that's when they become maniacs.
01:05:31.000We met him, we did something on Top Gear where we were trying to convince him to pick one of these cars that we had each picked for this celebrity and we found out halfway through it was for Donald Trump.
01:05:40.000And he basically was like, this guy looks gay.
01:07:48.000And you're talking, and a camera's on you, and it's broadcasting to the rest of the world, and you're saying this multi-millionaire, world-famous comedian is, in fact, a loser.
01:08:12.000He needs to get in a tent in the middle of the desert and eat a fucking giant bag of mushrooms and really find out how the rest of the world sees him.
01:08:39.000That's one of those girls that I would look at her and then look at him and think, there's no way you guys have ever had a conversation, right?
01:08:47.000No, you look at her, you look at him, and you go, do you know who Tom Arnold is?
01:08:51.000He did what you're doing, but he did it with a woman.
01:11:29.000Right when they get sad about the fucking icebergs melting, they shoot them in the fucking head and cut them up, drag them down to New York.
01:11:35.000Do you think he's ever had a hot dog from a hot dog cart in New York?
01:12:10.000I think he never stopped being a millionaire, I think, but it got down to like a million.
01:12:16.000But he might have had a lot of debt, too.
01:12:18.000I forget what the entire story was, but there was a story that I read in one of those magazines, Esquire in New York or something like that, and they were essentially saying that what he's doing right now is pretending that he's rich, and that if you look at the amount of debt that he had, but...
01:12:35.000I mean, a guy like that knows what the fuck he's doing.
01:12:37.000And I always wondered, like, to be a Michael Jordan, don't you have to be kind of crazy, you know, to be that goddamn good at basketball?
01:12:47.000And to be that fucking deal-making son of a bitch, don't you have to be a real asshole in some ways?
01:12:54.000I think you have to trade in, like, Okay, look, he claimed his network was $9 billion, we figure it's close to $4 billion, $4.1 billion to be exact.
01:13:18.000Maybe 15 years ago, maybe 20, something like that, he had hit a really bad spot, and there was an issue with him opening up golf courses, like some golf course in Scotland, and this one guy was fighting it.
01:13:33.000This one guy, he had land that was outside of the golf course, and they wanted to buy him out, and he wouldn't sell, and it became this huge issue where Donald Trump's like, this guy's a loser, he won't sell me his property, and the guy's like, I don't give a fuck about him, this is my house, this is where I live.
01:16:06.000This is what I... I've thought about this long and hard for a long time.
01:16:10.000When you have something like television, and it's something that is just a natural thing that people come home, they turn it on, and they sit there and they veg out.
01:16:19.000And, you know, like, if I want my kids to chill for a second and just, like, sit down, like, if I need to do something, look, daddy has to make a business call, so I'm gonna put on one episode of a show.
01:17:09.000I'll be in a hotel room when it comes on, and if they edit it quick enough, where it's like one scene to the next scene, one scene to the next scene, like I'm watching a little ping pong match with my eyeballs, for whatever reason, I lock in.
01:17:56.000There's this one woman that we had on the show named Sue Akins, and she lives 200 fucking miles plus above the Arctic Circle in this place where you're not allowed to have permanent structure.
01:18:07.000So she has tents that she built up there.
01:18:09.000And, like, these covered, you know, circular tents.
01:19:51.000People are freaking out right now because it came out that I guess whoever the current Bachelorette is might have slept with a bunch of the guys.
01:20:00.000Wait a minute, a woman has sex with a man?
01:20:09.000One of our directors on Top Gear, this guy Gary, was one of the directors for the first couple seasons of The Bachelor, he said, dude, there's a vault with footage.
01:20:52.000You remember The Real World on MTV? That was like people's first sort of look at like, well, I guess if people just sit around and drink all day, they might get into fights about something that's seemingly important.
01:21:02.000Well, just as a bit of history, the guy who produced The Real World was the producer of Fear Factor.
01:22:07.000But you've seen one snake on a stranger.
01:22:09.000I just felt like this is not for me, man.
01:22:12.000Well, I get so used to like fucked up things and vomit and like like it just I'm just so used to it I'm so like just unfazed like one time my wife She went to the gym and she had wheatgrass juice right after the gym.
01:22:25.000She threw up in her car She just couldn't help it.
01:22:27.000She was on the highway and she threw up in her console.
01:24:01.000He doesn't even have a dog or a plant.
01:24:03.000Dude, the beauty is when kids say things that you know aren't wrong, but you're not sure how to help them understand that publicly sometimes they're incorrect.
01:25:16.000And so they start, and the first group is about six women dressed as Raggedy Ann, and then one weird dude wearing striped socks.
01:25:25.000And I don't know how to tell you this, man, but I just felt like saying, hey, dude, if you're not going to dress up like it, just stand over here with the other 12 of us watching this parade, which is all of 100 yards long.
01:27:28.000So we got out and they had like a fake gunfight and the whole thing and like there's these like shitty fake houses that were like, you know those movie houses?
01:27:43.000We got out and they had this whole act and all we could talk about like the whole weekend was that fucking shitty Wild West show that we stopped off just randomly, completely randomly pulled off the road, drove a mile, pulled in, paid our money,
01:27:58.000got out of our car, smoked some weed, got in and went to see this ridiculous Wild West show that was the highlight of our weekend.
01:28:06.000Not at the time, but became the highlight of our weekend because all weekend we're just making fun of this fucking Wild West show that we saw.
01:28:34.000Like, man, I know how this is going to end.
01:28:36.000The best reenactments are reenactments where you know it's a lie in the first place.
01:28:41.000Like a reenactment of the time you saw Bigfoot.
01:28:46.000They used to have this fucking show on the sci-fi network when I was on, when my show was on Joe Rogan Questions Everything was on the network.
01:28:53.000They had this supernatural show that should have just been called the Liar's Hour.
01:28:59.000And one of them was these people that said that they were trapped in a house in Maine while werewolves were outside.
01:29:07.000And they're just going over this whole thing, and they're like talking about- and then they had like the reenactments of them like looking out the window and then seeing the things- Those are the best, right?
01:29:16.000Like they're trapped in- do werewolves not know that glass is super fucking easy to break?
01:32:43.000Is it possible this guy had glaucoma and just the neighbor had a black lab?
01:32:47.000It's possible this guy's been sniffing paint since he was three years old and he's got three brain cells inside his head that are bouncing around off the walls.
01:33:12.000Well, one of the things when I first started doing the sci-fi show, they were worried that the show was going to be just totally debunking things.
01:33:18.000And I said, no, I'm going to approach everything with a complete open mind.
01:33:21.000I just want to find out what are these alien implants that people keep saying that they find in their bodies?
01:33:54.000Three minutes of meeting him, and I'm not exaggerating.
01:33:56.000He told me that he saw Bigfoot, that he saw a bulletproof wolf that appeared out of mist, and that he knew a spot where he could regularly summon UFOs.
01:34:06.000They would come, and these orbs would show up, and they would start moving around you.
01:38:11.000Where did MMA... 1997 is when I first started working for them.
01:38:16.000I did the post-fight interviews in 1997. And was it something like, had you seen it and kind of dug it and told Dana and those guys, hey, I'd love to be part?
01:38:53.000So, for me, it was like that show or that event was like the first time they had figured out a way to get different styles to compete against each other.
01:39:03.000And for me as a martial artist, it was entirely fascinating because I had always wondered, like, what would happen if a karate guy fought a judo guy or what have you?
01:40:37.000And I just became a fan, and I was hanging out with Dana, and Dana and I became friends, and we would go to dinner, and I would just start saying, well, why don't you have this guy fight that guy?
01:41:29.000News Radio started in 94, so 94, 95. So it was like two, three years in that I was doing that, and they were like, what the fuck are you doing?
01:46:33.000And so, like, traffic was going, and this guy's just, like, creeping in front of cars, and you see people hitting the brakes, then he would recognize that he had a little bit of an opening, so he'd gun it.
01:46:43.000Gun it a car length ahead and like fuck and watching it was giving me a headache I was like this is crazy.
01:46:49.000This is a crazy way to live There's like 40 million people or something like that.
01:46:53.000It's much larger than LA. Yeah much larger much larger 2,000 feet above Denver and polluted as fuck It's madness.
01:47:51.000Which, you know, if you grew up in a small town or if you have ever been to a small town, the one thing that people love is that people look at you, they say hi when you walk down the street.
01:48:37.000Well, the dumbest fucking people in the world are the ones that are, they act like they're something special because they're from New York.
01:49:17.000You know, we were looking at real estate the other day, just as a goof, and there was a tiny-ass, shitty little apartment on the west side.
01:49:58.000The weird thing is, when we were shooting Lost in Transmission, there was two different producers that bought houses in Atlanta where we live.
01:50:08.000Not to live there, but to buy them and then rent them out, because they can at least make a little money and grow some equity in something there, because out here, like, if people don't know, dude, the dumpiest house you can find out here is still like a million...
01:50:23.000Unless you want to live in Palmdale and smoke crack every day, which if you're watching from Palmdale and you smoke crack, I'm not singling you out.
01:51:53.000But yeah, some woman got behind him and she was like just drunk and being silly at a show and just thought it was cute to climb on stage with him and he punched her in the face and knocked her out cold.
01:52:27.000I don't know where she came from, and no one saw her, and then she was just there in my face, and a little bit drunk, and definitely from New Hampshire.
01:52:35.000I don't know if you've had those moments, but it's a real fight-or-flight moment where you're like, why are you, why are you right here in my face, and you're drunk?
01:52:42.000And she knew my name, and then you're like, I'm just gonna go.
01:53:12.000When you hear about that guy that shot Daryl Dimebag on stage, you never know.
01:53:17.000You might be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
01:53:20.000So I can understand that he'd be freaked out if this woman was on stage, but a cursory glance at her Would let you understand, oh, there's no reason to give this woman a concussion.
01:53:50.000What if the security got high because they were listening to a song because I got high?
01:53:54.000Like, that song is basically like, I was going to do all of the things I need to do, like pay the rent, pay the bills, I was going to do some stuff, and then he got high.
01:55:56.000That's what she checked on her college application, right?
01:55:58.000Well, what's amazing about her is she went to Howard University and sued Howard University because sued them for discrimination because she was white.
01:56:08.000So in the lawsuit, she's saying that she's white.
01:56:11.000She's like, well, then I identify as white.
01:58:41.000Not everybody's as eloquent as that fucking guy.
01:58:43.000You sit in his office, you know, maybe you're a regular dude who just doesn't know how to phrase shit that good.
01:58:49.000You sit in his office, you ask him a question, he goes on this fucking 10-minute diatribe about, you know, Rosa Parks and women's rights and, you know, minorities and the white man, and it just keeps going.
01:59:51.000And he told me that diamonds are a girl's best friend, that's why he wears diamonds.
01:59:55.000Diamonds on his rings, diamonds on his chains, like...
01:59:59.000Do you find yourself, when you're on tour, a lot of times when you make it back to a hotel room late on a Saturday night, that Lockup is the only show on television?
02:00:09.000Lockup's one of those shows that when I travel, especially going to NASCAR races, I don't know why they're always on Saturday night, and I feel like, what if these dudes were one wrong car on the interstate away from just being a normal person, and then just snapped, and now I'm watching them?
02:02:48.000Montreal is a very international-feeling city.
02:02:50.000And the outside of Montreal, Quebec, that whole area, the French-speaking area, They have completely different stars.
02:02:59.000They have singers that you've never heard of that are huge that play stadiums.
02:03:03.000They have comedians that a lot of them would steal like English jokes and they would translate them into French and they would go on tour throughout the French speaking areas and do their comedy routines.
02:03:17.000And they have a whole different world.
02:03:55.000Do you think they have Rosetta Stone when you've escaped from prison?
02:03:57.000I bet you could learn in prison, and I bet if the guy was learning French, they would say, this motherfucker is probably learning, so he wants to escape to Quebec.
02:04:06.000He's talking to his new girlfriend, who hates her husband.
02:04:09.000He's like, hey, why don't you Rosetta Stone meet some French?
02:05:28.000And they said it was the most viewed show in the world.
02:05:32.000When you looked at, I guess, CBS Sunday Morning did an awesome kind of, no, it was 60 Minutes, I'm sorry, 60 Minutes was talking about it, based on downloads, both legal and illegal, and then how many shows, how many countries the show airs in.
02:05:46.000Like, our Top Gear U.S. airs in like 100 countries.
02:06:12.000And they got really upset that we were doing an American version because they felt like they were the only ones that knew about the UK show, not realizing how many people around the world saw it.
02:06:22.000They felt like, I've got this special unicorn no one knows about, I'm super awesome.
02:06:26.000Well, it turns out, we were just taking the kind of foundation of it, and it's three people in cars, right?
02:06:33.000So we're going to go do our own thing.
02:06:35.000We started with some of the same kind of fundamental ideas, did everything different.
02:07:34.000I think it's one of those things where he'd gotten in so much trouble before over the things he had said, which is also, like, it's weird because that's the same reason people watch him.
02:08:01.000Apparently they'd had, like, a long day, and there was some sort of dispute...
02:08:05.000Excuse me about dinner or whether something should be cold there was cold cuts instead of like a hot steak or something I wasn't there and no one talks about it in our Like group everyone's very sensitive because I didn't know whether overnight that would screw up our show because the worldwide brand is it's very important to to everybody that's a part of it and so I think he just had a real bad evening and he took it out on somebody and that cost him
02:09:59.000There's a lot of people from the manufacturers that don't like him, which is funny because sometimes people wouldn't want to loan us cars because things that they had done.
02:10:09.000Well, the Chrysler, remember they had those three cars they drove across America?
02:10:12.000Chrysler didn't want to give them a Challenger.
02:10:45.000They wanted to do one with us and them, kind of a combo thing, and then we never, nobody really moved on it.
02:10:50.000But they were in, because Ken Block was helping them out in South Africa this week, they did like six shows, and they're calling it like Clarkson Hammond May Live or something, because they can't use the name.
02:11:47.000Yeah, like a really talented musician, apparently.
02:11:51.000But those guys, we got to do, when they were launching our show over there, we got to go to this British television thing where they put us up, and they had this party, like Top Gear USA. So they tried to make the most American-themed evening they could.
02:12:06.000So there's glass Coke bottles on every table, and Jack Daniels.
02:12:12.000And then the girls, they had girls in like Daisy Dukes with cowboy boots and American flag bandanas on, and they had like a holster with Jack Daniels and shot glasses.
02:12:26.000Tanner, I think, was single at the time, and I'm a pretty good wingman because my wife loves me, so I can just be an idiot publicly and not worry about it.
02:12:33.000So the whole time I was like, you guys know that's Tanner Faust over there.
02:12:36.000You know, he's got a couple gold medals from X Games.
02:15:58.000Sometimes your parents are going to take you to the worst Raggedy Ann and Andy parade you'll ever see, and you need to not shout that afterwards.
02:16:28.000It's an interesting thing when you have to make sure everybody knows, look, everybody's got a right to be happy, but everybody does not have a right to be completely out of their mind crazy.
02:16:42.000I say you do have a right to be completely out of your mind crazy as long as it doesn't interfere with someone else's happiness.
02:16:50.000Like say if you're a neighbor and you're completely out of your mind crazy and you're like sticking fireworks up your ass and doing cartwheels but you live in a dry area and you could potentially start fires.
02:19:22.000They have sand, and they put some sort of oil on the sand, and the way the ball reacts is very similar to the way a ball would react on grass.
02:20:07.000Now, I've been to a lot of tracks that will use motor oil from all the tractors and stuff to put it on top of gravel to basically keep dust down.
02:20:17.000So it's like that idea magnified, I guess.
02:20:21.000Yeah, I think that just, they're putting, right?
02:20:35.000That's really, like my dad, when he would go play golf, I would always go with him as a kid because I was like, yeah, can I drive the golf cart?
02:20:41.000And then when there's a water hole, then I would take his little ball finder and just swim with a little stick and try to get as many balls as I could.
02:20:48.000I have a friend of mine who has a ranch in California, and he has golf courts.
02:20:52.000He just drives golf carts around his ranch.
02:20:54.000He lets his little kids take the golf cart.
02:20:56.000His daughter was like 10. She was driving us around this fucking golf cart around the ranch.
02:21:31.000I built a golf cart on my new show, but it's a 69 Subaru 360 van, a micro car, and I built it on a golf cart chassis.
02:21:39.000It's got a 20 horsepower single cylinder engine.
02:21:42.000The thing about golf courses is pesticides.
02:21:46.000And I know a dude who got bone cancer, and a lot of people in his neighborhood got bone cancer because the water from the pesticides, the water got contaminated in the wells.
02:21:55.000And, like, a lot of people in his neighborhood all got cancer.
02:22:14.000I mean, roaches are gonna be after the fucking nuclear bombs go off and you're killing them with some chemicals and you leave that shit in the grass and it gets through the ground and seeps into the water and then people drink the water and they get sick as fuck.
02:22:54.000I'm listening to this Radiolab podcast.
02:22:57.000The way they figured out how to use poison gas in the concentration camps, they used Zyklon B. And Zyklon A was originally developed as a pesticide.
02:23:12.000Zyklon A had a particular aroma to it to alert anyone that was near it or handling it that it was very dangerous.
02:23:18.000So the Nazis re-engineered Zyklon A and turned it into a Zyklon B and took out the smell and started using it as gas in the concentration camps.
02:23:30.000Not only that, a Jew who was one of the first guys to figure, or the guy, figured out how to pull nitrogen out of the air.
02:23:37.000Like, a big majority of the particles in the air apparently are nitrogen.
02:23:41.000And nitrogen is very difficult to get, you know, for fertilizer and stuff like that, it's very difficult to acquire, but necessary in order to grow plants.
02:23:49.000And so this guy, Hopper, Fritz Hopper, figured out how to pull it out of the air and use it for fertilizer.
02:23:57.000And apparently that method that he developed in 1910 or some shit like that during World War I, that method is still being used today.
02:24:05.000And like half of the food that people eat in the world is fertilized from this Hopper method.
02:24:13.000Same guy who developed Zyklon B, or Zyklon A, at least.
02:24:16.000I feel like if they ever need to go in front of Congress and talk about the legalization of marijuana, I think we could take a video clip of that last 45 seconds of you telling me that story, and then people would be like, well, if he can remember all that and he smokes weed, we should probably just let it go.
02:24:33.000That's the kind of podcast that you relax and listen to?
02:24:36.000That's the shit that I listen to, yeah.
02:27:30.000You have genuine interest in feedback and stuff like that.
02:27:32.000That's what I dig, because there's so many people that are like...
02:27:36.000They wouldn't want to say, like, I had a Coca-Cola Classic at lunch today because someone's going to tell them there's, like, corn syrup in there.
02:27:56.000I think so many people go through life like trying to project something instead of just being who they are and working on what the negative aspects of whoever they have designed themselves to be.
02:28:08.000Instead of working on that, they just put up this fucking fake facade.
02:28:44.000Isn't that amazing that a guy can be on a network fucking television show, like a squeaky clean CBS show, like two and a half men, and do these interviews about smoking rocks and paying girls to leave.
02:29:00.000You don't pay them to have sex with you, you pay them to leave.
02:29:24.000Like, there's some of the videos that he did, like, right after he got kicked off that show, and he did, like, these weird podcast-style videos where he's, like, staring into the camera and, like, people behind him.
02:29:39.000But still, people loved the fact that he was being who he really is.
02:29:45.000I think so much of what you see, like, when you see Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah Winfrey's couch, saying how much she's in love, I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love!
02:29:53.000And all the women in the audience are like, yeah!
02:30:37.000The thing that I'm still puzzled by right now is that I put up a picture on Instagram about a picture with some friends or whatever, and the amount of people that will go out of their way to say nasty stuff to strangers I'll put a picture up of friends that I'm hanging with and someone will go after someone in the picture and I'm like,
02:31:29.000Occasionally, a twat will sneak through the net and find their way into my Twitter feed, but then you just block them and then you're done with it.
02:31:36.000But Instagram, good luck trying to block those fucking monsters.
02:31:41.000And they all have, if you go to their accounts, they're all locked.
02:32:10.000So sometimes I'll watch people, and I don't get a lot anymore, but when they said I was on Top Gear or when I started being on TV for NASCAR, then you would see those people come out of the woodwork.
02:32:20.000I did these funny videos for NASCAR on NBC with Danica Patrick and Kevin Hart, all these people, and someone will be like, you suck, you're fat, you're stupid.
02:32:31.000But I would say 95% of the time, I at least like to know, if it's something funny, then I'll laugh and just move on.
02:32:39.000But if it's something to where they really want to go after you, I'll be like, okay, let me at least look at your profile.
02:32:45.000And if I can tell they don't know any better, you just block them, mute them, roll them.
02:32:48.000But if I feel like they know better, every once in a while, I'll just lean back a tiny bit.
02:32:53.000And this guy one day went after me about something stupid.
02:32:56.000And he told me how stupid I was and fat and ugly and I shouldn't have a job and whatever.
02:33:00.000I looked at his profile on Twitter and it was a picture with him and his daughter going canoeing.
02:33:06.000And so all I said was, hey man, I hope no one ever says to your daughter at school what you just said to me, because I know that'll feel bad for you to hear that.
02:33:14.000And he, you would have thought I cussed his mother.
02:34:10.000Because that's what's going to happen.
02:34:11.000I'm going to retweet you, and then everyone is going to, all these other people that are bored looking for some asshole to shit on, they get home, they're tired of taking shit from their boss, their fucking wife is an asshole, their kids suck, and they're happy to climb up your ass and plant bombs.
02:34:30.000But I think it's because of the same reasons why people were bullying people in middle school, where you don't see nearly as much when you become an adult.
02:35:21.000Because you pick your friends if you're a wise person, and you'll have a better life if you do that.
02:35:26.000If you don't pick your friends, you just let anybody in your life, you develop a series of fucking incurable disasters over and over and over again that you never really recover from.
02:35:35.000And you live your life based on the momentum of a bunch of assholes who aren't thinking straight.
02:35:41.000I have friends like that, that live their life like that.
02:35:44.000It's just one fucking disaster after another fucking disaster, and if you get caught up in the hurricane that is their life, they'll drag you into the cyclone, you'll get fucking tossed out into the ocean somewhere.
02:35:55.000Or, You choose, but in the online world, you don't get to choose.
02:36:00.000So if you're out there, and what they're doing by blocking you, they think, well, I'll just get him, and he can't even get me back!
02:36:07.000So they put their little fucking locked profile on Instagram, and it's just guaranteed they're a coward.
02:36:14.000Like, anybody who has a locked profile that talks shit, I just block them immediately.
02:38:31.000There's a lot of people out there that are hurting.
02:38:32.000I think the model of life that the majority of people are living in civilization, the civilized world, when you're involving offices and jobs that you don't really want and places that you don't really want to go to but you have to.
02:38:48.000Like, what you're doing for a living, you enjoy.
02:38:51.000Obviously, you have a real passion for cars and you're having a great time.
02:40:26.000I know how to type my name in the fucking, you know, my password and how to get my Gmail, but I don't know what's going on underneath the fucking surface of this metal thing.
02:40:54.000They're raising kids and fucking them up.
02:40:57.000And then it's our job as the kids who got fucked up to sort of decipher what the fuck our parents did wrong to us and try to make it through life with as much happiness as we possibly can till our heart stops beating.
02:41:15.000And those are the people on Instagram with locked accounts.
02:41:17.000And those are the people that eat chili dogs with windbreakers on and smile to your face and shit on you on your fucking computer or on Sirius satellite radio or whatever they do.
02:41:33.000Especially liking other people that are successful.
02:41:36.000Hosting Top Gear with that handsome Tanner Faust and that beautiful Adam Ferrara.
02:41:40.000I mean, I will say this, I think you know, like if your life sucks, if it's not where you want, you know, we've all been there, but like I think a lot of people forget sometimes that you can change that.
02:41:54.000Like we, the reality that we're flying through this gigantic marble in space, it will kind of blow your mind, but the fact that you can wake up every day and do what you want to do or not do what you want to do, like that's pretty awesome.
02:42:05.000These things, the fact that we're sitting here, this didn't happen by accident.
02:42:09.000And I think sometimes people forget that if there's something out there that you want, you're going to have to physically do something about it.
02:42:16.000And that's the one thing that when people come after me that I love having fun.
02:42:23.000You know, for me, it was like I was either going to try to go back to school and be some sort of teacher, like a high school counselor, because Columbine and stuff like that breaks my heart.
02:42:34.000And it's because those kids didn't have the parents that I did, who when they got made fun of, the parents weren't there to say, you're fine.
02:42:42.000There's something wrong with those people that they don't have enough confidence in who they are that they're going to take it out on everybody else.
02:42:48.000And so I thought, well, I'm either going to do that or...
02:42:52.000I'm going to try and get on TV and make as many people smile as I can.
02:42:55.000But it's because I wanted to do something about it.
02:42:57.000Sometimes it breaks my heart that there are people that aren't willing to push and say, I want something better.
02:43:03.000Well, I think a lot of people feel trapped in their existence because they sort of live their life on momentum.
02:43:10.000And they got kind of stuck in this trap.
02:43:13.000They're in high school and then they go to college and they get student loans and they somehow get out and they don't have a job and they're trying to find a job and then they take whatever job they can get and they still have debt and then they have a family and then they have mouths to feed and they feel fucking trapped and super frustrated.
02:43:28.000Yeah, so they see a guy like you who's putting a 900 horsepower engine in a Scion and running around like a fucking crazy person on television, and they get mad.
02:44:33.000And sometimes you're shitting on people and you're correct.
02:44:35.000You know, sometimes you're shitting on people and, you know, you realize you are watching some bloated ego or some ridiculous version of, you know, a pop singer that record companies are trying to stuff down your face and you know it's horseshit.
02:44:49.000And you're correct in comparing them to, you know, whatever, fill in the blank, Lou Reed or Mick Jagger or whatever the fuck it is that you really appreciate.
02:46:12.000And that's what's going on with these people that you would have never chosen to communicate with reach out and fuck with you.
02:46:18.000You know, whether it's through Twitter or Facebook or what have you.
02:46:20.000I think that we're going to come to a point in time where, and not too far away from now, where we're going to share thoughts in some sort of a weird way.
02:46:29.000It's not going to be as simple as like, Reading something on reddit or you know Facebook or Instagram It's going to be way more complex.
02:46:39.000Yeah, it's going to be we're gonna have Have you seen that thing that they did where they did an experiment where they they hooked these people up to some sort of a brain Detecting device and landed electrodes on their head and they they sent words Through the internet across the world Like,
02:46:57.000instantaneously, these people on the other side of the world received these words and knew what the person was saying.
02:48:20.000Because he didn't, you know, he's never even been to America.
02:48:23.000And they're trying to bring him to America for some alleged crimes against these alleged movie companies where people were uploading videos.
02:48:33.000But it's also, like, I would like to know, like, what percentage of that site was being used for that, and what percentage of it was being used for people just uploading things.
02:48:41.000I don't totally understand how he was, were people paying, like, a subscription fee?
02:48:52.000A company in Barcelona called Starlab described transmitting short words like chow encoded as binary digits between the brains of individuals on different continents.
02:49:05.000The sender of the message wore an EEG. Electroencephalography cap that captured electrical signals generated by his cortex while he thought about moving his hands or feet.
02:49:18.000These signals were then sent over the internet to a computer that translated them into jolts delivered to a recipient's brain using a magnetic coil.
02:49:27.000In Starlab's case, the recipient perceived a flash of light.
02:49:30.000In the University of Washington case, the magnetic pulse caused An involuntary twitch of the wrist over a touchpad to shoot a rocket into a computer game.
02:49:41.000See, we're getting to this weird place in technology and the ability that we have to manipulate technology.
02:49:50.000The ability that we have to manipulate matter and information, it's going to make...
02:49:56.000Haters online it's gonna be it's gonna be ridiculous.
02:49:58.000This is a Temporary pit stop like an adolescent stage and the communication that we're enjoying and it's it's what it is is if you look back at Watch Game of Thrones send a raven, you know, they take a fucking raven time message to his leg, you know That was like the only way you can get a message to somebody.
02:50:45.000You're saying that we could wake up one day and I'll be like, I'll be thinking we should get coffee, and you'll be thinking that sounds great?
02:51:03.000My buddy Parker Kligerman's doing something with those.
02:51:05.000There's a bunch of different nootropics that'll help with memory, but we've done two double-blind placebo-controlled tests at Onnit with the Boston Institute of Memory, Boston Center for Memory, and they showed...
02:51:18.000Wait, can you not remember the name of the center?
02:53:06.000I think we're going to be able to record things that you see directly to some sort of medium, like whether it's an SD card or whatever the fuck it is.
02:53:16.000And you're going to be able to share experiences with someone else.
02:53:20.000Your wife is like, hey, how was work today?
02:53:22.000You're like, well, why don't you fucking live it, bitch?
02:53:43.000But you know what's really bumming me out, and what's gonna bum me out as an automotive enthusiast, as you are as well, is these self-driving cars.
02:55:34.000But imagine if you were in that self-driving car, and you're safe and sound, and some dickwad in a fucking Mustang is going hooniginning right on the corner sideways.
02:55:45.000He's just doing a standing burnout at the stoplight.
02:56:48.000R-U-T-L-E-D-G-E. W-O-O-D. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we'll be back tomorrow with hypnotist Vinnie Shorman, the man that Joe Schilling was telling me about.