In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the former Top Gear presenter joins the pod to talk about his time on the show, and what it was like being on it. He also talks about why he left the show and why he thinks it was a mistake. Also, he talks about his new car, the Ford Raptor, and his love of the local beer, Heineken and Budweiser. Joe also discusses why he decided to leave Top Gear after 8 years and what he's been up to since then, and why it was probably not a good idea to leave the show at the end of it all. And he explains why he thought it would be a great idea to make a movie about Top Gear, and how he thinks Jeremy Clarkson should have won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. If you haven't done so already, you're missing out on a special bonus episode of the podcast hosted by the late, great comedian and podcaster, J.R. Rogan himself. Check it out! It's a must-listen, and you won't want to miss this one. Enjoy! -Joe Rogan (featuring the excellent automotive journalist John Rocha ( ) and the amazing automotive journalist ( ) (John is a regular contributor to the New York Times, and is one of the most influential automotive journalists in the world, and one of my closest friends in the automotive journalism. ) Joe talks about cars, cars, trucks, and everything in between. He's a bitches, including his love life, and he's also has a good sense of humor, so you should listen to the wholeheartedly. I hope you enjoy it. -J.R.'s podcast is a good one, because it's a lot of fun, and it's good, and that you'll enjoy it, because he's funny and it'll make you feel like you're in a good place. Thank you, Joe's good at it, too. Thanks for listening, Joe, I really appreciate it. -Jon -Jon's new book is out now, Jon's book "The Local Beer Project" is out in paperback, The Local Beer Podcast, which is out on Amazon Prime Video, and I'm looking forward to seeing it soon, too, so don't forget to check it out. Jon's new podcast is out soon, and we'll be shipping it out soon.
00:02:04.000And I know that Top Gear is a weird thing in the U.S. because I think many U.S. people are aware that it exists, but they've never really seen it because it never was put on a big network here.
00:02:14.000Yeah, but it became very popular on YouTube.
00:03:59.000Yeah, but if you leave, they'll have people at the border waiting in the bushes to arrest you the moment you cross over if you don't have an EV. In California, they have a mandate.
00:04:09.000In 2035, after 2035, no internal combustion engine vehicles are allowed to be sold in this state.
00:04:17.000Same in the UK. No, it was 2035. Then the last administration moved it back to 2030. Good luck.
00:04:38.000And the most sophisticated assessment of this that I've come across was just a very normal person I was talking to one day in an airport who said, surely the solution is that you just use...
00:04:49.000What's pertinent to the energy that's easiest where you live?
00:04:52.000And I think it's the best way of explaining it.
00:04:54.000If you live here, you drill a hole in the ground.
00:05:52.000Why can't I? I find it very difficult when I'm told to do things that I don't think are rational or reasonable.
00:05:58.000No, and there's this religious ideology that's attached to climate change.
00:06:04.000It has that sort of fever-pitched religious aspect to it.
00:06:10.000And most people, when you corner them, even the real zealots, most people really don't understand How much data there is on the impact that human beings have on climate change?
00:06:21.000How much is being done in China and India that will not change at all and is only going to get more extreme?
00:06:27.000And like what little impact you have comparatively.
00:06:32.000That's a really interesting point because it's like being a parent.
00:06:36.000On the one hand, you can respond to that by saying, well, yeah, I'm going to make no difference.
00:06:39.000I'll just carry on driving around in my Raptor.
00:06:41.000But then it could be suggested that That means that you should make a difference.
00:06:46.000But I find it really difficult that we can't understand that if there has to ultimately be a change at some point, if it's rational, I don't know if it's now or it's certainly not 2035, that's not reasonable.
00:07:00.000We need to prepare ourselves to make logical and progressive changes.
00:07:04.000I don't think you can mandate those changes.
00:07:06.000First of all, we have a long history of internal combustion engines as recreation vehicles, and we love them.
00:07:14.000I think it's completely unfair if you're still running coal plants that power electric vehicles, which is a fact in America.
00:07:22.000They have coal plants that power electric vehicles.
00:07:25.000They do far more damage to the environment.
00:07:27.000And if you tell me I can't have an internal combustion engine while you're doing that to power electric vehicles, I'm going to say fuck you.
00:07:33.000Because fuck you is the right thing to say, because that doesn't make any sense.
00:07:37.000And there's also this weird thing that is attached to this.
00:07:41.000This is a business, the green energy business.
00:07:44.000And these people that are involved in the green energy business have done a tremendous job We're good to go.
00:08:14.000Infrastructure or military, there's a lot of money being exchanged, and that's why it's being promoted.
00:08:20.000This isn't some completely altruistic, we need to save the world, and this is what's wrong.
00:08:29.000I think I agree, and there are some basic tests you can apply to it.
00:08:34.000If you gave most people that love the internal combustion engine an electric vehicle that could do exactly the same thing as well but be electric, they'd take it.
00:09:27.000Well, do you know that they, I believe it was the UN, passed some sort of regulations on cargo ships, and because of these regulations to make them more, pollute less, the side effect, the unintended consequences were the ocean got warmer.
00:09:44.000The surface of the ocean where it was measured got warmer because there's no longer a pollution layer over the ocean where these things are traveling.
00:10:12.000I have to say, I'm completely torn on it all.
00:10:15.000Because I... Some days, you don't have so many diesel vehicles here, but some days I drive around in the UK and I see a diesel throwing some shit out the back of it.
00:11:07.000If you were to invite an alien down in that vehicle there and try and show off what we're capable of, you might show them a Raptor R and go, we did that.
00:12:48.000They got into a sort of a situation where they created a traffic jam because they all came into an intersection together and no one wanted to move.
00:15:03.000It segues into a point I wanted to make about the way we're travelling.
00:15:07.000One of the ways I find to appease myself, if I do wake up some days and think I'm a pretty wasteful individual or whatever it is, even I have moments where I think Just have a look at yourself in the mirror.
00:17:25.000Of just reconditioning and renewing something like that to use for the next five years, I find more interesting than most new performance cars now.
00:17:34.000No, no, because there's something about, like, seeing the improvement on a vehicle.
00:17:39.000Like, getting a vehicle and going, yeah, you know, this suspension is okay, but these shocks are like, I could adjust this, and maybe this, and maybe I can get a little wider wheel in this, and...
00:19:09.000And I saw these guys, all in black, with stuff.
00:19:13.000Sort of tinted visors, black everything.
00:19:17.000What they do is they basically angle grind off the...
00:19:21.000The steering lock, the male part that goes into the headstock, the angle ground that off, break the steering, and then they have a moped behind or something quite powerful with a leg out and another guy and push your bike away in neutral.
00:19:31.000And they get it around the corner into a van and away it goes.
00:26:13.000It's one of the few cars that you're aware of just how fast that crank is spinning, and you have to keep it revving, and it just keeps going.
00:27:10.000And maybe if I was Porsche or another car maker, I'd be starting to cry foul.
00:27:16.000Because what's happened is the Restomod thing is actually a movement that reminds car makers that they're not being given or being offered a fair crack at the whip now.
00:27:34.000We could say, right, we're going to make an E46 M3. We're going to buy 100 good E46 M3s and we're going to turn them into the Joe and Monkey M3. And we're going to sell them for $300,000.
00:27:47.000They're going to have a nice new interior.
00:27:49.000They're not going to stray too far from the original philosophy of the car.
00:30:10.000Anyhow, he crashed a Lamborghini when we were filming and it was all over the press in the UK. It helped it was red, like proper dog-knob red Lamborghini goes off the road.
00:30:19.000Anyhow, at the end of it all, the car's on a low loader and I look at the tyres.
00:32:35.000It's probably a performance issue, too, because by manipulating the tire pressure, you can get it just right, whereas you're not going to be able to manipulate anything once the compound is...
00:33:00.000Because they're the only contact you have with the ground.
00:33:03.000So it stands to reason they're the most important part of the performance package.
00:33:06.000F1 commentators, and I'm actually slightly less so in the US, but in Formula 1, the commentators spend most of the time talking about tyres.
00:34:18.000So the license and the brand exists elsewhere, but not at its home in the UK. And it came to an end for me one day in December 2022 in a way that...
00:34:32.000I'd like to say I hadn't expected, but I had.
00:34:35.000And I think that's the bit that I've found very difficult to deal with over the last couple of years.
00:34:41.000Fundamentally, I'm quite a happy-go-lucky person.
00:34:44.000I'm very privileged with the life I've had.
00:34:46.000And I love the fact that I earn a living doing what I love.
00:36:28.000And if he wasn't so strong, he wouldn't have survived.
00:36:31.000He's a great advert for physical strength and conditioning, because if he hadn't been that strong, he'd have just snapped his neck, he'd be dead.
00:38:14.000Give me the last bit of advice on what I should do, what I should expect.
00:38:18.000And that was the first, because of the call times that day, that was the first time we'd never had the chance to talk about How he might approach a difficult vehicle.
00:38:27.000And that was the one day that it went wrong.
00:38:29.000I find that very difficult to live with.
00:38:31.000And I feel partly responsible because I didn't get the chance to talk to him.
00:38:35.000But my situation is nothing compared to his.
00:38:39.000Anyhow, the bit that I find really difficult is that In the aftermath of that accident, the show was put on hold.
00:38:48.000Andrew had to recover from, frankly, awful injuries, and has done so, but profound injuries.
00:39:34.000But what was never spoken about was that three months before the accident, I'd gone to the BBC and said, unless you change something, someone's going to die on this show.
00:39:48.000I went to the BBC and I told them of my concerns from what I'd seen.
00:39:52.000As the most experienced driver on the show by a mile, I said, if we carry on, at the very least we're going to have a serious injury.
00:39:59.000At the very worst, we're going to have a fatality.
00:40:01.000Let's explain to people that aren't aware of what Top Gear is and how Top Gear works, because I know there's a lot of Americans that never watch the show.
00:40:09.000You guys do a lot of really crazy stunts with automobiles, not necessarily just cars, but big trucks and all kinds of crazy things, and some of them are quite ridiculous.
00:40:21.000Yeah, there was a bit of an arms race.
00:40:25.000Between us and maybe the other big car show, the Grand Tour at the time, to go ever more stupid.
00:43:54.000They had two inquiries into the accident commissioned, neither of which I had access to.
00:44:00.000I pushed very hard to have access to the second one and saw some of it.
00:44:06.000This is one of the most bizarre interactions I've had.
00:44:08.000I sat down with someone from the BBC who was going to talk me through bits of the second inquiry into the accident.
00:44:15.000And I'd already been told that I no longer had a job.
00:44:17.000So I'd been told that Top Gear was done.
00:44:21.000And at the beginning of it, he said to me, I won't name him, he said, I want to thank you so much for taking part in this, because it's really going to help us as an organisation going forwards.
00:44:30.000I said, well, it doesn't really help me, I've lost my job.
00:44:35.000And I'm always reminded of that old adage from a very brilliant BBC comedy show, which was, never commit an inquiry that you don't know the outcome of in the first place.
00:46:53.000My experience of that now is that if you establish really big stunts that have big vision and are ambitious, they tend to come with them a level of rigor that means they are executed well.
00:47:08.000The difficult area is the kind of just being at a test track with a smaller crew and someone says, give that a go.
00:47:57.000But at the end of the day, when you start rushing, And I think there was an element of that day at Dunsfold, that was a shoot that was rushed for me.
00:48:08.000I know that that was a, we need to use this day shoot.
00:48:12.000That's another one that's another red flag for me.
00:48:14.000We've got a day at a track, we need to fill it.
00:48:17.000Well, you've reverse engineered that, you know?
00:48:21.000Your priorities are already to fill something up.
00:48:23.000And I look back, some of the stuff that we did on Top Gear, I look back, that was dangerous, visually dangerous, and definitely was in practical terms, I'm very proud of because we executed it well.
00:48:35.000Like, Andrew, Fred Flintoff went off a dam in a metro and did a car bungee.
00:48:40.000It was an extraordinary piece of footage.
00:49:46.000But that, you know, when I said to you earlier a bit of me regrets doing it, I look at that and I think, what a thing to have been part of.
00:50:00.000One thing we did do, which, again, on reflection, was just madness.
00:50:06.000There are these guys that go to motorcycle meets and shows in the UK that have these titanium skid plates on their boots, and they hold onto the back of the bike.
00:50:37.000And I had to hang off the back of it wearing these shoes.
00:50:41.000The big problem with some of these ones is that Andrew was so brave, he would go first, and set such a high benchmark, you'd have to go, shit, I need to really go here.
00:50:49.000So he went out and did like, I thought he'd do 40 miles an hour, I think he did 75 miles an hour, hanging on the back, wearing these titanium shoes.
00:50:56.000Anyhow, Paddy gets in and tries to go really fast, and he falls off.
00:51:01.000And he's okay, but someone goes, Paddy's over.
00:51:04.000I look left, the ambulance driver was having a cigarette.
00:51:08.000At our end of the runway, and he was two miles down there.
00:51:11.000And that was one of those moments where I thought, this has got a bit loose.
00:51:15.000If you're going to do these things, that guy should have been running parallel.
00:54:29.000If you've just received a check from a network for six years of your life, suddenly going, oh, I'll go in with the algorithm, that's quite scary.
00:54:37.000It is, but all you need is one thing to take off, and then all of a sudden you're being suggested to millions and millions of people, which is interesting about the algorithm.
00:54:47.000And if you just look at one type of vehicle, then you're...
00:54:52.000I really just got interested recently in the Ineos Grenadier.
01:05:41.000Maybe the point I didn't make earlier, I have to excuse myself for a bit of jet lag for my confused thoughts sometimes, is that the electric car has one unspoken fact about it.
01:05:57.000There's a meritocracy about the motor car that I find appealing.
01:06:02.000You can have a Bugatti Veyron or Chiron, or you could be some guy that lives in India that's got a little thing that costs 100 quid or $100.
01:06:11.000You're ultimately getting the same thing.
01:06:13.000You have the freedom to travel, to choose where you're going.
01:06:16.000And I think, like you, I don't want to be told what to do.
01:06:21.000And I think it's really important that that vehicle can take you where you want to go.
01:06:25.000But the electric vehicle is for rich people, isn't it?
01:07:34.000I think the main thing it needs is some sort of jet-washable, pressure-washable floor, because I think passengers will eventually shit kidneys out.
01:10:15.000People that work in an organization, they want to expose corruption, they want to expose something, they want to expose some illegal thing they're doing in regards to the environment.
01:10:29.000It's very important to allow people to be anonymous.
01:10:32.000When you're in a dark place, as I was 18 months ago, you can feel that very pertinently.
01:10:37.000There was a lot of very unkind things said about Andrew's accident and Top Gear afterwards.
01:10:43.000I thought to myself, all those anonymous keyboard warriors, fuck you.
01:10:47.000And you know this, I was almost at that state, which is the ultimate low, the Kelvin of human behaviour, which is, I'll meet you in that car park so we can have a fight.
01:11:29.000Post things and I go away and I don't care what happens in the comments and and also I'm very aware of bots I'm very aware because we've done a lot of research and research We've done a lot of com we'd have a lot of conversations and done a lot of reading about the amount of content that's on especially Twitter and That's not organic.
01:11:50.000There's an FBI analyst that estimated it to be in the range of 80%.
01:11:54.000Eighty percent of all the accounts he thinks are bullshit.
01:11:57.000And they're used to promote specific narratives.
01:12:01.000They're used to argue and shame people.
01:12:03.000They're used to attack certain political figures and public figures.
01:12:08.000And then that conversation becomes completely changed because there's a swarm of people that have a very specific narrative and then the casual person really, well, maybe they're right.
01:12:27.000I'm interested in reading people and their toxic opinions sometimes, but oftentimes I'll go, that doesn't seem real.
01:12:34.000And then I'll go to their account and sure enough, they have 39 followers and it looks like they're probably in, you know, fucking Russia somewhere in a troll farm.
01:12:45.000The pernicious side to it is like all the aspects of life that we know are bad and we shouldn't go there.
01:12:52.000Be they alcohol or, you know, relationships, whatever it is.
01:12:56.000If you're in a bad place, you're susceptible.
01:12:58.000And that's what I find very difficult about that side of the internet.
01:13:04.000Sure, if you're in a bad place, especially you after that accident.
01:13:26.000It's a very inhuman way to communicate.
01:13:30.000We're communicating in text to a person that you don't see their face, you don't look in their eyes, you don't feel the pain of what you're saying to them.
01:13:37.000It's not the way human beings are meant to communicate with each other.
01:13:41.000We're meant to communicate with each other like this.
01:13:43.000That's one of the reasons why podcasts are so successful, and one of the reasons why I only do them with people in the room also, because the only person I've done without that in recent times is Edward Snowden, for obvious reasons.
01:15:11.000So you have to be a person who's objective and introspective, and you have to be able to honestly assess whether or not what you've done is good or bad.
01:15:20.000And we've all done good things, and we've all had bad work.
01:15:24.000And when you put out bad work, and you know it's bad...
01:15:27.000Just accept the fact that it's bad, feel that pain, grow because of it, use it as fuel to be better in the next thing that you do, and that's it.
01:15:36.000But don't wallow in other people telling you you suck or other people attacking you.
01:16:30.000One of the things that happens, particularly with comedians, you see, especially if they start getting involved in political commentary, they start getting audience capture.
01:16:42.000You see it a lot with people who lean right.
01:16:45.000Because there's not as many right-wing voices on the internet.
01:16:47.000You get a tremendous amount of support.
01:16:49.000All these people say, you're the only one out there speaking the truth.
01:16:53.000And they're like, you're out there speaking the truth.
01:16:55.000And you start believing that bullshit and then you change your perspective.
01:17:03.000Yeah, when you're becoming conditioned by the environment you're in without realising it.
01:17:08.000I think, actually, without a segue back to the BBC, I've seen that with that network I work with.
01:17:14.000I think there's a lot of high-quality people that work at the BBC. And at the moment, they're under a lot of pressure, and everyone's judging them as individuals within the organisation.
01:17:22.000I think the organisation, that environment, is almost impossible to work in now.
01:17:31.000Well, they're also – it's like it's an unhealthy relationship in the first place because you have executives and producers who want to make a thing, but they're not the talent.
01:26:26.000I've come here briefly for two reasons.
01:26:29.000One, because I want to be on this podcast, see you.
01:26:31.000The other thing I've come to do in this state, and I'm going to need some help with this, and I'm not here for much longer, is I saw a bumper sticker advertised on That I think is the greatest bumper sticker ever created.
01:26:43.000And it simply says, Texas is bigger than France.
01:27:30.000And one of the reasons is the history of this place.
01:27:32.000Like, for the longest time, the Comanche dominated this territory, and you couldn't get across the land.
01:27:38.000And so the people that eventually figured out how to fight off the Comanche and settle down, they're the craziest, most rugged individuals ever.
01:27:48.000They figured out how to cold camp, and there's a photograph of Jack Hayes, who's the original Texas Ranger, out in the lobby, and that's why he's there.
01:27:57.000Like, without those psychopaths that figured out a way to fight off the most ferocious band of Indians that ever existed in the Plains.
01:28:53.000Because you've got a lot of universities here, you have some really intelligent, interesting people here, great restaurants, great nightlife.
01:29:01.000But also you're surrounded by Texas, Texas.
01:30:23.000What's transpired for me, having travelled here so many times and worked here so often in the last 25 years, is that because we speak the same language and we all look quite similar, we assume our countries are really, really similar, but they're not.
01:31:17.000And I'd have to be here a long time to fully understand the layers of it, the nuances of it.
01:31:23.000And if you came to North Somerset, where I live, there's aspects of it that look, because we speak the same language, that look like they're straightforward, but they're not.
01:31:32.000Everything has subtleties, doesn't it?
01:32:11.000I think the idea that we've created a system where you get promoted because you're inexpert is ridiculous.
01:32:18.000And in my world, that manifests itself in transport.
01:32:21.000I've never come across a transport minister in the UK that really has any idea what's going on or any interest or even uses fucking transport other than being driven around.
01:33:05.000Because of that, because there's these shitty opinions and nasty people and all this information flowing around and bots and all this other stuff, it makes you consider the nature of speech.
01:33:17.000And it makes you consider, like, what...
01:35:22.000And I agree with you that I want to have a sensible view of this world we live in.
01:35:28.000But when you've experienced those things, or when you've had to sit down and speak to your kids' teachers about the awful things that are being said to them, just because their dad happens to present a TV show, it does change you a bit.
01:35:42.000You don't come back from it completely.
01:35:43.000Well, you recognize the real shit nature of some human beings.
01:37:54.000You're watching the most popular automobile show in the world, and they say your car sucked so bad that it died when they were testing it, when it didn't die.
01:38:03.000You've got to be careful what I say here, but without wanting to shatter anyone's illusions, that's the way those car shows are made.
01:38:09.000That's the way a lot of reality shows are made, unfortunately.
01:38:12.000So ultimately, you reverse engineer an outcome.
01:38:15.000So you're being told, this is what you're going to find.
01:39:25.000And actually, I lobbed a bomb on Instagram the other day by saying, I drive around in my Land Cruiser feeling sorry for Range Rover drivers.
01:39:37.000I have some sympathy for people that make television because, you know, they say they don't work with children and animals, but working with cars can be difficult.
01:39:46.000And one side of Top Gear that I found unpalatable, not just the sort of silly comedy bit, which I didn't like, was quite often you'd be given a script.
01:39:55.000I'd be given a script and my review was in it.
01:39:57.000And I'd be like, well, I haven't driven it yet.
01:40:00.000So this is the part where you say it's great.
01:46:17.000But if, let's just say, at certain times in the month, if my girlfriend is feeling down, my dog will go and cuddle her and sit with her all night and provide heat to the part of her body that's in pain.
01:48:19.000These really large bears, big Grizzlies.
01:48:22.000And I do find myself sometimes at four in the morning when I can't sleep, Googling just the size of them, their potential power, the potential statistics of what they can and can't do.
01:48:33.000Are they as awe-inspiring as I should think they are?
01:48:38.000There's a great story that you can find that's on YouTube.
01:48:42.000There's a clip of my friend Steve Rinella and he was on a Fognac Island and they were elk hunting and they had shot an elk and And a Fognac Island is an incredibly difficult place to traverse.
01:48:57.000The bush is dense and thick and the bears are enormous.
01:49:42.000He was with a group of friends, they had shot this elk, and he was filming it for a television show called Meat Eater.
01:49:47.000They shot this elk, and they put most of it up in the tree, and they carry some of it back to camp, and camp is six hours of trekking through the train.
01:49:58.000So then they come back the next day, they trek six hours, they find the spot, they sit down, and they start eating lunch.
01:50:07.000They don't realize that a bear has claimed that meat.
01:50:11.000And so the bear charged through the camp and one of the guys winds up on top of the bear.
01:50:21.000The bear barrels through the people and this guy is literally riding the back of the bear for about 30 yards before he falls off of it.
01:50:31.000One of my friends, my friend Giannis, it is gnashing its teeth about 18 inches from his face as it runs by.
01:53:55.000And there's an actual animal called Gigantopithecus that existed alongside human beings that was an 8 to 10 foot tall bipedal ape that lived in Asia and could have come across the Bering Land Bridge.
01:55:28.000And their bears were similar, I believe, in size to coastal brown bears, the grizzlies, the brown bears that used to live there.
01:55:37.000And there's a place in California called Levesque, there's a town called Levesque that was named after, I believe his name was Stephen Levesque.
01:55:44.000He was the last man to get killed by a brown bear in California before they eradicated them.
01:59:05.000You've seen them go to war with each other when they bite each other.
01:59:08.000They have insane amounts of power and bite force and they're just clamping down on each other's face and they'll do it for half an hour and walk away like it was nothing.
01:59:29.000So the gorilla just gnashes its teeth at other gorillas and makes like he's a badass and they have incredible power, but they don't even eat meat.
01:59:36.000Whereas the bear, all it does is run around killing things.
02:00:24.000And they're wonderful, and they're beautiful, and we should definitely keep a healthy population of them.
02:00:28.000I'm not saying we should eradicate them, but know what they are, and don't be influenced by these goddamn cartoons, cartoons and movies, which have fucked people's heads up.
02:01:06.000And it worked out that it was much easier to come into town and raid bins than it was to stay out there trying to find rabbits in the countryside.
02:01:12.000And these nighttime foxes, they were very clever.
02:01:59.000You've got to decide one or the other.
02:02:02.000Also, if you feed them, then they become accustomed to getting food from that particular area and then you kind of fuck them up because then they lose their ability to hunt.
02:02:11.000If you do it too often, if you provide them with food every day, you're going to fuck them up.
02:02:16.000I've just had my holiday down in Newquay on the north coast of Cornwall, which is just one of the most beautiful places on the planet.
02:02:22.000And when you buy fish and chips from the fish and chips outlets, they all have a seagull warning now on the shop front saying, when you buy your fish and chips, protect it.
02:02:32.000Because all the seagulls just dive bomb people.
02:03:10.000No, there's so many videos of, like, different birds throwing down a whole largemouth bass, and it's like, how is it even getting in your mouth?
02:03:18.000They have these skinny little necks, and they swell up, and they have the fins popping out, the tails popping out of their mouth.
02:03:27.000Yeah, they're pretty extraordinary creatures, and they're essentially dinosaurs.
02:03:30.000And actually, to come back to the content discussion, YouTube, whatever it is, I do love the fact it's all out there.
02:04:54.000It's also interesting that people, they catch them and snap their claws off and throw them back in the water because their claws will regenerate.
02:06:41.000There's that lovely guy on Instagram who's a fisherman who does the experiments with the lobsters and he gets the lobster crushing claw and he puts stuff in the claw and works out what they can chop in half.
02:13:27.000Weird Soviet intervention and Americana from the 50s and, well, up to 50s.
02:13:33.000So they've kept these American cars going that should have died.
02:13:37.000They've also got a whole load of Soviet-era ladders that came in when the Russians wanted to help them out.
02:13:44.000And also, that's where their power stations come from.
02:13:47.000Their power station, they have a coal-fired power station on the north side of the island that, when it's operating, has a plume of smoke that goes as far as the eye can see.
02:15:22.000I think you can get them now in limited quantities, but it used to be if you got a hold of Cuban cigars, I would get them.
02:15:29.000I'm going to tell you a thing I did that was illegal.
02:15:31.000I used to get them from England, and I used to get Cuban cigars.
02:15:34.000I had a friend who lived in England, and he would send me Cuban cigars, and then later he would send me the labels.
02:15:40.000So he would send me the cigars with no labels, like in a Ziploc bag, send me a few cigars, and then he would send me the labels in an envelope a couple days later.
02:15:52.000The pollution in Havana was the worst I've ever experienced of a city.
02:15:56.000I think when the wind changed, that power station just bloomed straight over.
02:16:00.000Well, there's a place, was it in Indiana, where there's three coal-fired power plants?
02:16:06.000And if you go outside, you can run your finger over someone's windshield and you have black coal dust on your finger.
02:16:12.000And all these people in that area have all sorts of weird fucking diseases because they're just breathing in particulates every day.
02:16:19.000We went to one of the best things I did with Top Gear again, a repeat phrase, maybe only to reconsider my negativity, was the Kazakhstan thing with Matt.
02:16:29.000So we went there, and Rory was there as well, and we ended up at Baikonur, which is the Cosmodrome.
02:16:35.000Where the Russian space program is based.
02:16:41.000I mean, it's just mind-bendingly brilliant.
02:16:44.000The vastness of that part of the world, the Soviet Union, if we think that the United States of America is big, the Soviet Union was on a scale that you cannot comprehend.
02:16:54.000Kazakhstan was just a small bolt-on to Russia, but in itself has, I think, the fourth longest border of any country with Russia.
02:19:16.000Talking about ropey fuels, I was talking to some guys that used to race sports cars and Formula One back in the 80s when they were using some very funky fuels because there was lots of technology left over in the Second World War that the Germans had for jet engines that they had pioneered.
02:19:50.000There was also great stories about the fact that they'd sometimes have a sort of area outside the Formula One garage.
02:19:55.000It wasn't as developed as a sport then, but they still had sponsors and guests.
02:19:59.000And one particular team had, you know, all the trees they put outside just died in an afternoon.
02:20:05.000LAUGHTER Because this fuel was so obnoxious.
02:20:07.000And I think actually a guy called Andy Wallace, who's a fantastic racing driver, who's now the chief test driver for Bugatti, tells some amazing stories about literally being hauled out of Group C race cars after qualifying because the fuel was just impossible, just poisoning them.
02:20:27.000Leaded gasoline, there's been studies that show that in the places with higher amounts of leaded gasoline, you can see the lower IQ in the kids.
02:20:36.000And they think that it has dropped people's IQ by a measurable amount.
02:20:41.000Like, people that grew up around leaded gasoline, which is me, during that time, we are dumber because of leaded gasoline.
02:20:50.000The pipes in our homes 150 years ago were made of Lead.
02:23:07.000It's going to happen because we're having to relearn so much of what we thought was facts in other areas of our lives.
02:23:13.000And I think maybe that's what I get frustrated by.
02:23:15.000You can't wait for that unprecedented change to come.
02:23:19.000Necessarily, but you have to assume at some point, someone's going to make a battery that runs on wasp piss or fucking water or something, aren't they?
02:25:10.000So, his bizarre death at age 57 ended work that, if proved valid, scroll up, could have ended reliance on fossil fuels.
02:25:18.000People who knew him said his work drew worldwide attention, mysterious visitors from overseas, government spying, and lucrative buyout offers.
02:25:53.000Stephen Meyers featured in numerous internet sites, a significant portion of the 1995 documentary, It Runs on Water, narrated by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, aired on BBC, focused on his water fuel cell invention.
02:26:18.000But I have to believe that A piece of technology will emerge in the next 50 years that will make us all wonder why we all got so freaked out, you know?
02:26:31.000Yeah, right, especially over exhaust, right?
02:26:46.000The volatile gases explode and prove that water is separated into its components.
02:26:51.000Meyer said his invention did so by using much less electricity than physicists say is possible.
02:26:57.000Videos show his contraption turning water into a frothy mix within seconds.
02:27:02.000Takes so much energy to separate H2 from the O, said Ohio State University professor emeritus Neville Rieh.
02:27:10.000Physicists for more than 41 years that energy is pretty much not changed with time It's a fixed amount and nothing changes that Myers work defies the laws of conservation of energy Which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed?
02:27:23.000Basically, it says you cannot get something for nothing He may have had a nice way to store hydrogen and use it to make a very effective motor But there is no way to do something fancy and separate hydrogen with less energy hmm So who knows?
02:27:41.000But when he said, the Lord sent me, okay, now it gets odd.
02:27:45.000His first few words were, the Lord sent me here to this home.
02:27:49.000I'd like to use your home as an experiment.
02:27:53.000Meyer's creativity seemed to peak when he met Charles and Valerie Hughes, truck drivers who lived in the Jackson Township.
02:28:00.000Julia Hughes, the youngest of the seven children, was five years old when Meyer rang the doorbell of her home on Mar Lane Drive.
02:28:09.000His first few words were, the Lord sent me here to this home.
02:28:12.000I'd like to use your home as an experiment, she said.
02:28:14.000Maybe it was just a two-story garage shop or the privacy of towering oak and sycamore trees.
02:28:19.000Julia isn't sure what Meyer saw there, but she knew her parents didn't have room for a struggling inventor.
02:28:25.000Yet after visiting with the family for several hours, Meyer stayed the night and then the next few years in the late 1970s.
02:28:32.000In return, Meyer built the family a solar silo designed to both heat and cool the home.
02:28:38.000The structure required thousands of clear resin light guides, a crude form of fiber optics which Meyer baked and molded in the family kitchen.
02:28:48.000Julia Hughes recalled the chemical stench the system was supposed to channel the sun's rays into the tower base to heat water and generate electricity for an air conditioner.
02:28:58.000Despite extensive efforts that included re-plumbing the house, the invention never worked.
02:29:44.000Speaking of, before we go too far, one of the kids remembered some people showed up at the house and offered him, quote, $250 million to stop.
02:29:55.000Yeah, the Arabs wanted to offer me 250 million dollars to stop today.
02:29:59.000You and this lovely family can live in peace and prosperity the rest of your days.
02:30:05.000The army officials meanwhile had questioned Meyer about what foreigners wanted, thinking that the deal might have been struck.
02:30:12.000Charlie recalled Meyer telling the family, Meyer discussed the offer in the Clark documentary many times over the last decade have been offered enormous amounts of money.
02:31:14.000Able to put software into their vehicles that allowed them to cheat in emissions tests.
02:31:20.000And a load of vehicles that had stated emissions qualities didn't have them when they were not on the test rig.
02:31:29.000And actually that process had been going on in many different ways for most motorcars forever.
02:31:36.000But the scale on which they offended and the fact they did it in the US meant they got absolutely hammered for it.
02:31:41.000But if you have an Audi RS4 from 2007 and you start the engine up, it idles in an odd way.
02:31:49.000The car feels very aggressive for the first 30 seconds that you start it.
02:31:52.000That's because there's an air pump inside the car that is basically forcing air through the exhaust faster than it needs to, so that when you put it on a test rig, it has lower emissions than it should do.
02:32:03.000This has been going on for a long time.
02:32:05.000But the scale of it was, I suppose, an industrial subterfuge that I didn't think could happen.
02:33:46.000But I suppose I tend to sit a bit further back and just, I'd like to hear other people talk about them.
02:33:51.000But when it enters your world, when something becomes pertinent to you, you suddenly go, hang on a minute, what else have they been doing here?
02:34:09.000No, some of them sneak through and manage to be effective.
02:34:13.000Do you know the latest one about this gentleman who was a billionaire who had apparently overvalued his company and went to court for it and the possibility of him...
02:34:27.000Winning this court battle was something like one half of one percent.
02:34:32.000Yeah, the guy who just died on the boat.
02:34:35.000And then right after he gets out, the guy who he's with, the co-defendant, gets hit by a car, and then he gets hit by a freak water spout and sinks his yacht.
02:34:47.000I was discussing this over a few glasses of wine with some friends.
02:37:29.000And I'll bring it back to something more mundane.
02:37:32.000There were quite a lot of things that happened in Formula One, a sport that I follow the most closely probably, in the 90s and noughties, that looking back...
02:37:42.000You think there must have been, someone had a button that could make things happen.
02:37:46.000Because it was so beyond a coincidence.
02:37:49.000And I never stopped to think of the implications of that thought.
02:37:52.000But if someone could do that in a sport, they can do it in the rest of your lives, aren't they?
02:38:12.000There's a controversy about a certain trainer that was involved in betting and an online discord.
02:38:20.000Server and they would talk about bets and he'd make a lot of bets and he was making more money betting than other things and there was a fighter that he was taking care of and that fighter apparently had a knee injury and went into the fight and then all this money got bet on this guy losing in the first round and so he throws a kick in the first round,
02:38:41.000falls down, gets beat up, loses by TKO in the first round, blows his knee out.
02:38:45.000His knee had apparently already been fucked.
02:38:47.000And so this guy, who is the trainer, he's being investigated by the feds.
02:39:36.000The phrase that the great Mark Donoghue, one of your great drivers, Mark Donoghue was a Can-Am driver who did a bit of Formula One as well.
02:39:42.000He coined the phrase the unfair advantage, which is a phrase I love because it just defines so many sports.
02:39:49.000Whether we like it or not, we're searching for the unfair advantage, aren't we?
02:39:53.000And in motorsports, some of the cheats I've heard about are just brilliant.
02:39:59.000I can remember hearing a guy called Wynne Percy, who was a touring car driver from the UK in the 60s and 70s, describing how there was a famous commentator we had called Murray Walker.
02:40:11.000He was the voice of our motorsport for 40 years.
02:40:18.000And he'd often describe Wynne Percy getting out of this particular car he'd been racing covered in sweat because it was such a monster to drive.
02:40:27.000But it turned out that it was a V12 and it was very, very thirsty.
02:40:30.000So to make sure that when they did a fuel check at the end of the race, to make sure they were abiding by the rules, he would be furiously pumping a hand pump underneath the seat to inflate a bladder in the fuel tank to cut off a load of the volume.
02:41:31.000Toyota was excluded from the World Running Championship because it just had a brilliantly simple piece of cheating.
02:41:38.000All the world running cars were turbocharged, and you have what's called a restrictor, an intake restrictor, so you actually make sure that you can't take more than a certain amount of air into the turbocharger, which should limit the power and make it a level playing field.
02:41:51.000But they created this brilliantly simple bypass valve that meant that when the car was running, the air would just go round, and the intake restrictor was completely redundant.
02:42:00.000What they didn't realise was that the World Rally Championship had a couple of situations where the cars would run side by side.
02:43:50.000Another great story, we covered this on Top Gear, was one of the great interpreters of the rulebook was Colin Chapman, who was the man that founded Lotus.
02:43:58.000And he had found a way in something called the Lotus.
02:44:02.000I think it was 77. It was a car that Andretti won the championship in.
02:44:07.000They created something called ground effect.
02:44:11.000But he worked out that if you sealed the sides of a car on the road, you could effectively accelerate air underneath the car and create a low-pressure area which basically sucked the car to the ground.
02:44:21.000So you were generating downforce, not through wings, but through accelerating air under the car.
02:44:26.000By the way, any engineers listen to this, I'm not an engineer, but I'm basically understanding of it, having driven these things.
02:44:30.000But if my terminology is wrong, I apologise.
02:44:33.000But effectively, you're generating downforce in a way that you can't see it on the vehicle.
02:46:01.000But these are a bunch of people, 400 people in different parts of the world are told, this is the rule book, away you go and they are within a tenth of each other on a track.
02:46:50.000I think direct crossover, there's some, but not as much as you'd hope.
02:46:55.000But it's undeniable that the brains that are involved in that sport, when they go over to the road car side, carry with them a curiosity and a skill set that's been so enhanced by what they learned on the racetrack that we all benefit.
02:47:11.000I think if you look for direct crossovers in all of these places, you come away disappointed.
02:47:17.000But if you tell me that the person that has run Max Verstappen's car for the last three years If he went to be involved in the next Tesla Model 3, he's going to have a profound effect on it.
02:47:35.000I once wrote a story for some in-house magazine, I think for BAR Racing, when they had a race team, about the crossover between aeronautical engineering and Formula One.
02:49:44.000So actually, it was a bit like that bungee jump thing.
02:49:47.000This was so serious that we had to be rigorous.
02:49:50.000For example, in the theatre of war, I'm not sure you can decide whether the ground is full of chips of stones or not, but they have a decontaminated area.
02:50:00.000You're not allowed to go in there and drop litter because it can get sucked up when it's doing that hovering thing.
02:50:05.000So you go in there, you're decontaminated.
02:50:07.000And we spent several days working out how to run this drag race.
02:50:11.000It started out with a genuine drag race between me in a McLaren and this F-35.
02:50:16.000And they had their data on how it accelerated.
02:50:19.000And we had McLaren there with their data.
02:50:21.000And they worked out that the car would get off the line much quicker than the plane would overtake at a certain point.
02:55:37.000He goes, I've got an extra 300 and I've developed a way of doing aerobatic moves that will demonstrate the change in G-force during the run.