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Episode: #2199 - Chris Harris

Author: Joe Rogan
Duration: 03:05:25

Episode Shownotes

Chris Harris is an automotive journalist, racing driver, and television presenter. He's also the author of "Variable Valve Timings: Memoirs of a Car Tragic.

"  www.youtube.com/c/chrisharrisoncars Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_04
The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:12 Speaker_00
Before you press record, I have. I'll go most places. And I'm here because I want to tell people the truth about the last eight... I've had a pretty shit two years.

00:00:22 Speaker_00
Because Top Gear ended in a way that most Americans won't know, but my colleague nearly died in a crash. And then they left us in limbo a bit. I've never told anyone anything about it.

00:00:34 Speaker_00
Largely because my friend and colleague who was nearly killed in the accident, called Andrew Flintoff, who was a presenter on the show, Again, no Americans will know who he is, but he's a massive sports hero in the UK.

00:00:44 Speaker_00
He plays that weird game called cricket. He was like our best cricket player.

00:00:48 Speaker_02
Can we use this?

00:00:50 Speaker_00
Yeah, no, we can. I just want to give you a quick foretaste of it. I'll say some things that people won't have heard before, and they'll make them gasp a bit.

00:00:58 Speaker_02
Because we're recording now.

00:00:59 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's fine. What's that?

00:01:04 Speaker_02
Okay, that's fine. We on me?

00:01:07 Speaker_00
I'm gonna go into it all.

00:01:09 Speaker_02
Okay.

00:01:09 Speaker_00
But it might be that what seems quite revelatory to me. Anyway, good to see you since we're rolling. Cheers. Ten years.

00:01:14 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's been a while.

00:01:15 Speaker_00
And you know what? I don't ever listen to what I say or watch what I record. I don't watch my own shows. Good for you. You probably don't either, do you? I don't, no. It's good for the soul. Once it's done, it's buried. Exactly. But I think I came to see you

00:01:30 Speaker_00
about a month before I received a phone call saying, do you want to do this television show called Top Gear?

00:01:36 Speaker_02
Yeah, it was before Top Gear, for sure.

00:01:38 Speaker_00
And I think it was then. And I think at that point, I'd been fielding a lot of questions about, well, why would you follow Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear? And I'd gone, no one would do that. They'd be an idiot to do that.

00:01:49 Speaker_00
And then I looked at the sort of monthly payments I needed to live my life, and I got offered a bit of not much money, but some money. I thought, I'll give it a go. But most importantly, I thought, the 17-year-old me

00:02:00 Speaker_00
if he saw me say no to this job would punch me in the face, because it's my dream job.

00:02:04 Speaker_00
And I know that Top Gear is a weird thing in the US, because I think many US people are aware of it, that it exists, but they've never really seen it, because it never was put on a big network here.

00:02:14 Speaker_02
Yeah, but it became very popular on YouTube. It did. Yeah. I mean, it's a great show. It was a great show.

00:02:20 Speaker_00
Yeah. I mean, whether my era of Top Gear will be considered great, I don't know. I had lots of fun making it. But following in Jeremy's footsteps was, on reflection, a decision I made the wrong call. I shouldn't have done it. Really? Yeah.

00:02:32 Speaker_00
I had a great time. But you try following him in the UK just because of how much he's loved and yeah, yeah Yeah, I just I didn't realize how deep-rooted it was. I still get hate mail now.

00:02:43 Speaker_02
I still get hate mail Yeah, you could have had the exact same show under a different name and people would have loved it.

00:02:49 Speaker_00
Yeah Yeah, I think we made some good films and I love what I did But even if we made a good film, it was always shit because it wasn't Jeremy.

00:02:56 Speaker_02
I really enjoyed it though I enjoyed you being on it, you know, you're great.

00:03:00 Speaker_00
You're my favorite automotive journalist Well, that's very kind of you and I've just I've just seen what you've arrived in as well and I thoroughly approve of your taste Am I allowed to say what it is or not?

00:03:10 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah. It's a Raptor R that John Hennessey jumps up to 1,000 horsepower. It's fucking ridiculous.

00:03:17 Speaker_00
I'm often asked, if you lived in America, what car would you drive? And it would always be a Raptor. Comes under the heading of, always drink the local beer. When you go to a city, don't order a Heineken or a Bud. Drink the local beer.

00:03:30 Speaker_00
And the F-150 Raptor is your local beer.

00:03:34 Speaker_02
Yep, that's about as American as it gets. Dodge Rams and Ford F-150s. Yeah, those are the most American vehicles. A thousand horsepower in a truck. It's ridiculous. We never thought it would be possible, did we? No.

00:03:46 Speaker_02
Zero to 60 in three seconds for a giant pickup truck. It's awesome. And it sounds great, too. It just has this beautiful rumble. Do you think you'll be allowed to drive that in 10 years' time in this state? No. Maybe in this state.

00:03:59 Speaker_02
Yeah, 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. And in California, they have a mandate in 2035.

00:04:13 Speaker_02
After 2035, no internal combustion engine vehicles are allowed to be sold in the state.

00:04:17 Speaker_00
Same in the UK, although they, no, it was 2035, then the last administration moved it back to 2030. Good luck. They're not even ready. They're not ready. The grid's not ready.

00:04:31 Speaker_00
I'm so torn on this because everyone looks to me as the ultimate petrolhead and I'll sit there and go, they're all shit. They're not all shit. They have a place.

00:04:39 Speaker_00
And 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. He said, sure, the solution is that you just use what's pertinent to the energy that's easiest where you live.

00:04:52 Speaker_00
And I think it's the best way of explaining it. If you live here, you drill a hole in the ground. There's oil around here. If you live in Iceland, you drill a hole in the ground. There's loads of geothermal. So why wouldn't you have an EV there?

00:05:04 Speaker_00
It's brilliant. It's everywhere. It's quite a small country. You don't need to travel large distances.

00:05:08 Speaker_02
But Iceland's cold, and the battery capacity, when it gets really cold, diminishes pretty rapidly.

00:05:13 Speaker_00
Yeah, but also, if you live there and you've got loads of batteries and you have a cartridge system where you can slot them in and out, it's doable, isn't it? I just think we need to be a bit cleverer about it.

00:05:22 Speaker_00
But at the moment, the subject's approached with, This is good, this is evil. At the moment, we live in a Star Wars reality. So effectively, you're either the rebellion or you're Darth Vader and his crew. And you will as well.

00:05:35 Speaker_00
I've been pushed into the corner of being Darth Vader. I just don't think I am. When I can, I use the train. If I'm in a city, I quite like riding a bicycle because it suits me. I like it. It works.

00:05:47 Speaker_00
But when I want to go out on an open road and enjoy a 9-11, I want to enjoy 9-11. Why can't I? I find it very difficult when I'm told to do things I don't think are rational or reasonable.

00:05:59 Speaker_02
No. And there's this religious ideology that's attached to climate change. It has that sort of fever-pitched religious aspect to it. And most people, when you corner them, even the real zealots, most people really don't understand

00:06:17 Speaker_02
how much data there is on the impact that human beings have on climate change, how much is being done in China and India that will not change at all and is only going to get more extreme, and what little impact you have.

00:06:31 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's a really interesting point, because it's like being a parent. On the one hand, you can respond to that by saying, well, if I'm going to make no difference, I'll just carry on driving around in my Raptor.

00:06:41 Speaker_00
But then it could be suggested that that means that you should make a difference. But I find it really difficult that we can't understand

00:06:51 Speaker_00
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. We need to prepare ourselves to make logical and progressive changes.

00:07:04 Speaker_02
I don't think you can mandate those changes. First of all, we have a long history of internal combustion engines as recreation vehicles and we love them. I think it's completely unfair.

00:07:17 Speaker_02
if you're still running coal plants that power electric vehicles, which is a fact in America. They have coal plants that power electric vehicles. They do far more damage to the environment.

00:07:27 Speaker_02
And if you tell me I can't have an internal combusted engine while you're doing that to power electric vehicles, I'm going to say, fuck you, because fuck you is the right thing to say, because that doesn't make any sense.

00:07:37 Speaker_02
And there's also this weird thing that is attached to this. This is a business, the green energy business.

00:07:44 Speaker_02
And these people that are involved in the green energy business have done a tremendous job in pushing these politicians to promote this very specific propaganda about what you can and what you can't do and what we need to do and where we need to get to and what bills we need to pass in order to get to this position.

00:08:01 Speaker_02
And they're all profitable. And that's the problem that nobody wants to talk about. This is all business. And like most businesses, like the business of vaccines, or the businesses of infrastructure, or military, there's a lot of money being exchanged.

00:08:18 Speaker_02
And that's why it's being promoted. This isn't some completely altruistic, we need to save the world, and this is what's wrong. That's not true. It's not true.

00:08:29 Speaker_00
I think I agree. And there are some basic tests you can apply to it. If 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. But they can't.

00:08:45 Speaker_00
We cannot. The technology doesn't work at the moment.

00:08:48 Speaker_02
It just doesn't sound the same. It doesn't feel the same.

00:08:51 Speaker_00
But they are. I'm talking about the non-enthusiast. The non-enthusiast, people like you and I that don't care about that.

00:08:56 Speaker_00
If you gave them an electric vehicle that did exactly the same job, that could do it as well, and could be as flexible to their needs, They take it, because it's as good. But no one can do that at the moment. They don't exist.

00:09:07 Speaker_02
They don't exist. It takes too long to charge. You can't just pull over and charge. It takes hours.

00:09:11 Speaker_00
And also, there are so many other industries that pollute so heavily. Why aren't they the subject of so much pernicious legislation? I mean, we talk about shipping. If you start to look into cargo ships, what they emit is extraordinary. Extraordinary.

00:09:25 Speaker_00
Absolutely extraordinary.

00:09:27 Speaker_02
Well, 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 Speaker_02
The 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. Which is so crazy. So, I know.

00:09:58 Speaker_02
Do you know that there's more green on Earth today than there was in the last 100 years?

00:10:06 Speaker_00
No, I didn't know that.

00:10:07 Speaker_02
It's because of the carbon dioxide, because trees eat carbon dioxide.

00:10:12 Speaker_00
I have to say, I'm completely torn on it all. Some days, but 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. And I'm like, that's not good.

00:10:27 Speaker_00
If I can see it, I don't like it.

00:10:29 Speaker_02
We have a lot of diesel trucks here.

00:10:30 Speaker_00
Yeah. And I don't like it.

00:10:31 Speaker_02
You hit the gas on the highway and you see black smoke.

00:10:33 Speaker_00
And I do want, I want things to be different. over time. And I can see that that's the way that we might be heading. But I hate the fact that the timeline is determined by politicians rather than scientists.

00:10:46 Speaker_02
Exactly. And even the scientists are all bought and paid for. That's part of the problem, too. Scientists aren't just scientists. They're scientists that are influenced by the university. They're influenced by whatever research group they're a part of.

00:10:58 Speaker_02
There's a lot of shenanigans going on.

00:11:01 Speaker_00
And the internal combustion engine has ironically reached a point where it's really quite efficient. It's quite a clever thing.

00:11:08 Speaker_00
If 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. We're quite clever.

00:11:17 Speaker_02
But I think they'd be like, you're not using gravity? Why don't you guys just go use gravity? Manipulate gravity. This is so stupid. I have a Tesla. I have a Model S Plaid, and it's fantastic. It is so fast. It's like a time machine.

00:11:31 Speaker_00
Has it got the not real steering wheel?

00:11:33 Speaker_02
Yes. I don't like that. I don't like the yoke. I ordered a new one. I get it in October. No yoke. Regular wheel. Wheel's better. I like a wheel better. But I get it. There's some benefits to the yoke. It's like you get a clearer view of the dash.

00:11:45 Speaker_02
You basically put your hands on there. And he's moving towards like completely automated. You know, you can press doot-doot. You press a button, it'll drive you just based on the navigation.

00:11:54 Speaker_00
Where do you stand on that?

00:11:56 Speaker_02
I don't trust it. No, nor do I. I mean, it just doesn't feel right.

00:11:59 Speaker_00
There's a few times I've been in one of those things with the most advanced. They've all got levels now, haven't they? And I've let it drive me. I'm there thinking, I'm hovering. I don't like it.

00:12:09 Speaker_02
It's the exact same feeling that I got when Joe Biden was the president. Like, is this OK? Are we?

00:12:17 Speaker_00
I just, I have to say, I don't. And in this city, there are a lot of Jaguars with sort of radar-y things on them. Yes, yes, yes. And I presume they're driverless, are they?

00:12:29 Speaker_02
Yes, they're driverless. I don't know what they're called. Wayvo?

00:12:34 Speaker_00
Waymo? Waymo? So I view those like I do that sort of bloke in the corner of the bar that's just a bit shuffly, gets up, does the one-legged walk, comes back from the urinal with a bit of piss down his leg. I'm like, I'm giving you a wide berth, mate.

00:12:47 Speaker_02
Well, there was a bunch of them. They 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.

00:12:59 Speaker_02
And there was a bunch of them because there's quite a few of them in the city. You'll see. I've seen several today. Yes. They caused a traffic jam.

00:13:07 Speaker_02
Yeah, I don't I'm not I mean probably one day it's gonna be the way to do it the way to get around but I Think you can't deny people the joy of driving Just like you can't deny people their ability to ride horses if someone wants to ride a horse They should be able to ride a horse people have a long history of enjoying horse riding.

00:13:27 Speaker_02
Okay, let him ride horses and I have a nine Nineteen ninety I guess it's a 93 RS America And it... That's a rare car. Oh, I love it. It's so beautiful.

00:13:43 Speaker_00
It has no power steering. Because that was the car they made because you weren't allowed the real 94 RS, were you? They did a special one.

00:13:47 Speaker_02
Yes. So this one, I sent it to Shark Works, and they juiced it up to somewhere around 300 horsepower. Nothing crazy. But oh my god, it's so tactile, and it's alive. When I drive it, I'm smiling.

00:14:03 Speaker_02
I have this big smile on my face, like I'm on a fucking ride. I was going to bring my Gunther Works here today, but it's raining.

00:14:11 Speaker_00
Have you got one of those? Yeah. Has it got a roof or not? Yeah, it's got a roof. I mean, so where do we stand on the resto mod scene? Do we think it's gone too far, or do we believe it's the way forward?

00:14:22 Speaker_02
Well, I like the ones that look old but drive new.

00:14:26 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:14:26 Speaker_02
Because they're less dangerous. That's the whole idea, isn't it, really? But I don't think there's anything dangerous in that 964. That's mine.

00:14:36 Speaker_00
That's beautiful. Oh, it's so good.

00:14:38 Speaker_02
How much power has that got?

00:14:40 Speaker_00
460 and it's you know 2,000 but I've also got to raise my hand here and say that I work for singer So I love those too. Well, I actually have a little contract with them So I've got I've actually professionally got to say I ignore that vehicle

00:14:54 Speaker_00
But actually, I love the Resto Mod thing. I think we might be at peak Resto Mod, because there's so much of it going on. But it segues into a point I wanted to make about the way we're traveling.

00:15:08 Speaker_00
One 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. Just buy a used car.

00:15:19 Speaker_00
Then you're not having another one built. There are so many great old cars out there. I just go out and buy something that's 10 years old. Go and look at a 10-year-old AMG. What a machine. And that's a vehicle that's already been built.

00:15:31 Speaker_00
Its wastefulness has already been absorbed into this weird world we live in. Go and buy it. It's there for you with its 500 horsepower. It's ready to go. The greenest thing you can do is to go and buy an old Ferrari.

00:15:44 Speaker_00
right you'll do no miles in it because you'll never use it because it might work now and again it's the greenest thing you can do in your life is buy a used ferrari or lamborghini right it's just best thing so but no one seems to express it this way and the other way is to resto mod is to you know buy something and make it

00:16:03 Speaker_00
Make the car that you wish new car makers built now, but they can't, because they've all been drawn into this need to spend billions on these electric SUVs. There's the other thing that's ironic. They're all SUVs.

00:16:16 Speaker_00
So you're telling me we've got to have these efficient new EVs, but you're going to make them three tons? Shouldn't they be that big?

00:16:22 Speaker_02
Not only that, there's a problem with guardrails. They're too heavy. They go right through the guardrails like butter.

00:16:28 Speaker_00
I saw that. I saw that on Instagram, too. It just goes straight through it.

00:16:33 Speaker_02
They're twice the weight.

00:16:34 Speaker_00
I do think that people love cars. Just look to old stuff. There's so much of it out there.

00:16:40 Speaker_02
Yeah, and they're so good. I have a 2005 M3. It's an E46. Peak car. Peak car. It's such a great car. I know. It's not too powerful, but it's so delightful. It doesn't have a radio. It's got cloth seats. I've cloth seats, that is rare. Yeah, cloth seats.

00:17:01 Speaker_00
I just bought the V10. So you had the E60 V10 M5 over here, crazy machine. Yes. We had the Touring in the UK. They built a Touring, which is a state car, or sorry, a station wagon. And I've got one of those that I bought earlier in the year.

00:17:15 Speaker_00
And I'm just, do you know what? I paid 27,000 pounds for it. I probably spent more than that on it already doing, just making it right. But actually the journey of,

00:17:25 Speaker_00
of just reconditioning and renewing something like that to use for the next five years, I find more interesting than most new performance cars now. Is that a sad statement or not?

00:17:34 Speaker_02
No, no, because there's something about seeing the improvement on a vehicle, like getting a vehicle and going, yeah, you know, the suspension is OK, but these shocks are like, I could adjust this and maybe this, and maybe I can get a little wider wheel in this.

00:17:50 Speaker_00
You remind me so much of one of my favorite colleagues, Mr. LeBlanc, because Matt is a much bigger car guy than anyone realizes.

00:17:57 Speaker_02
We actually grew up in the same town.

00:17:59 Speaker_00
Did you?

00:18:00 Speaker_02
Yeah. I had friends that knew him, but I never met him. I've still never met him.

00:18:04 Speaker_00
He's a wonderful man, and he's a brilliant car guy. He would agree with you. He's like that. He can never quite leave something alone.

00:18:12 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:18:13 Speaker_00
And with motorcycles as well. Motorcycles. I had a bizarre, working with him was wonderful, by the way. I loved him to bits. I'd like to make another TV show with him. I got, one of these gangs that steals motorcycles in the UK got me.

00:18:29 Speaker_00
So I was doing a voiceover in the center of London. I probably told, I might have written this story. I don't know if I told it or not. And I had a new Ducati I'd bought. I like bikes. I'm not very good on them, but I like bikes.

00:18:40 Speaker_00
And I was trying to get better. And Matt's a very good rider. And I had this Ducati Panigale, anniversary with all the, it's the kind of shit you buy when you've just got a TV job, you know, and you think you're the dog's bollocks.

00:18:51 Speaker_00
Looking back, it's fucking embarrassing.

00:18:54 Speaker_00
So I've parked it up in Soho, right in the center of London, where the voiceover studio was, and I was a bit early, so I was milling about, wearing my leathers still, and I saw this bike moving past me, and I thought, that's a nice bike.

00:19:07 Speaker_00
Oh shit, that's my bike. And I saw these guys all in black with stuff, sort of tinted visors black everything what they do is they they basically angle grind off the

00:19:21 Speaker_00
the steering lock, the male part that goes into the headstock, the angle grinder 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 Speaker_00
And they get it around the corner into a van and away it goes. And they did it right in front of me. So I walked up and I was like, this is my bike. I'm small, not a very big guy. I don't present any kind of a threat. And there was three of them.

00:19:46 Speaker_00
And I challenged them, and I said, this is not on. And I started swearing, and one of them had a hammer, claw hammer. And we had a tussle, and the bike fell over. And as the bike fell over, I'm like, well, that's wrecked that then, hasn't it?

00:19:58 Speaker_00
Because I could just see the fairing squashed. And then the guy tried to hit me with the hammer. And I was like, I remember screaming. You're trying to steal my bike, and now you're trying to hit me with the hammer. And then they left.

00:20:10 Speaker_00
And I was really shocked. I'd never had anything like that happen to me. So I picked the bike up, and I walked it down to the voiceover studio. And I rolled it up, and I walked in, and Matt was there. It's a long story.

00:20:22 Speaker_00
And I said, well, he went, how are you? I said, well, someone's just tried to steal my bike, and they tried to hit me with a hammer. And he came outside, and he looked at the bike. He's got the most lovely deadpan voice. And he goes,

00:20:34 Speaker_00
You wanna get those Ducati performance levers, those are too long. Look at him.

00:20:43 Speaker_02
He was trying to mod it, he didn't even care. He almost got killed by a hammer.

00:20:46 Speaker_00
Cause he's like you, he's like obviously, you know, tough, he's a big boy. And he's like, he's fine. But those levers are too long, they don't suit that bike. He's like, those levers are too long. Yeah, the mod thing is really important to me. I love it.

00:21:01 Speaker_00
I cannot leave stuff alone.

00:21:03 Speaker_02
Yeah, I enjoy messing around with stuff too. It's part of the fun of the older cars. Particularly, I have a Nissan GT-R. Yeah, that is the ultimate mod car.

00:21:22 Speaker_02
Because they've been around for so long in exactly the same form, and there's such an aftermarket, and everybody just goes crazy. Find me a standard one that don't exist.

00:21:30 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's very hard to find.

00:21:31 Speaker_02
A stock R35, the unicorn. Yeah, very hard to find.

00:21:35 Speaker_00
How much power does yours have?

00:21:36 Speaker_02
Well, I got a Nismo. I got last year's model, the Nismo. So I got it new. It was still laying around. But I got it because I know you can fuck around with them. So I'm never going to get rid of it. I'm going to keep it forever.

00:21:47 Speaker_02
And I'm going to juice it up to probably 1,000 horsepower or something stupid.

00:21:50 Speaker_00
And if they make another one, it'll have to be a hybrid. It'll have to be.

00:21:53 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah, it'll never be the same. I mean, they're about to do that to Porsches probably. They're about to do that. They're already doing that with the M5, right? The new M5 is a hybrid.

00:22:03 Speaker_00
I've driven that. The new one? Yeah. I'm not sure whether I can say I've driven it or not. Say it. I think I signed a piece of paper saying I'd get sued for 60,000 euros if I said nothing.

00:22:17 Speaker_00
There's a point in this process where you have to acknowledge that the main criticism of hybridity in cars is mass, is weight. So everyone says it's too heavy. But for me, mass is just a number unless you can feel it. It's really important.

00:22:34 Speaker_00
You can't just criticize something because it's heavy. You can't. Because actually, it might affect the way the car drives. But you have to drive it to tell that first. That's where I have a job.

00:22:45 Speaker_00
I won't talk about the M5, because I think I might get sued. But I can tell you now, the BMW M2 is a small performance car that came out, 1750 kilograms.

00:22:56 Speaker_02
My friend Tom Segura had one of those that he sent off to get juiced up. I forget, Dinan did it? I forget who did it.

00:23:03 Speaker_00
Well, the new one came out, and it was 300 kilograms heavier than the last one. And the whole internet had a massive collective baby and went, oh, it's fucking ruined. I ran one for six months. It was better than the last M2. Of course it was.

00:23:14 Speaker_03
Really?

00:23:15 Speaker_00
Yes, because someone German with a massive forehead and a white coat made it that way. Because these are really clever people. And actually, mass only matters if you can feel it. So if you drive a car and you can feel it's too heavy, fine. I'm with you.

00:23:30 Speaker_00
And that's a clue as to what I think about the new M5. Judge it, get in it and judge it before you actually, or drive it before you judge it.

00:23:38 Speaker_02
And that's what it looks like. God, it looks good.

00:23:41 Speaker_00
It's a 700 and something horsepower sedan with a BMW badge. Look, 727.

00:23:47 Speaker_02
When is that coming out?

00:23:49 Speaker_00
The launch is at the end of this year. It is, it's a beast.

00:23:55 Speaker_02
I could only imagine, I had an M5, I miss it. Was it the V10 or the V8 one? It was V8. The E39. Yeah, I had it in, what year was it? 2015 or something? What was that? Which one would that be? That would have been the V10. It wasn't a V10.

00:24:11 Speaker_00
Was it not?

00:24:11 Speaker_02
It was the one after the V8.

00:24:12 Speaker_00
Oh, that would be the F10. Yeah. The F10M.

00:24:16 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:24:17 Speaker_00
I'm a real nerd.

00:24:18 Speaker_02
I loved it. It's a good car. I loved it, it was great.

00:24:20 Speaker_00
And actually, an M car,

00:24:22 Speaker_00
should be, and your E46 is the definition of this, an M car should be a car that the non-car nerd can't spot it from the normal one, but the car nerd can spot it just for the camber, little bit of ride height, little bit of shoulder.

00:24:35 Speaker_00
You can see an M car, you and I can see an M car from a mile. Little hips. But a civilian cannot see an M car from a mile away.

00:24:42 Speaker_02
Especially an E46, because it's such a plain looking car. That's a gorgeous car. We actually had someone reach out to Jamie, that's how I bought it, because we were talking about how great they are, I was like, I'd love to find a low mile one.

00:24:52 Speaker_02
And this one has super low miles. I forget what it is, but it's really low miles.

00:24:56 Speaker_00
M-TEC cloth is rare. Yeah. I look at the cars I missed out on. There was a white manual M-TEC on 18-inch wheels, E46 M3. And why I didn't buy it, I don't know. But then, I suppose I could say that about 1,000 cars that I wish I'd bought or I hadn't sold.

00:25:12 Speaker_00
I wish you never sold that green Porsche. Do you know what? I know who owns it. It appears in the UK now and again, and I see it. It was a cool thing. But I had to realize early on that I couldn't afford to keep all these things.

00:25:26 Speaker_00
But that thing was a masterpiece. It was lovely. But look where that was done by Tuttle, right? And look where they are now. They've just come back from Pebble Beach with this GT1 amazing looking thing, which you might have seen. If you Google GT1 Tuttle.

00:25:38 Speaker_02
Doesn't he have a car that goes to 10,000, 11,000 RPMs?

00:25:40 Speaker_00
That's so nuts. Yeah, it's a it's a lovely thing that he developed with a friend of ours called Philip Kodori who Obviously runs the quail and it's okay. It's okay has it's a very good name, isn't it?

00:25:54 Speaker_00
It's a 911 K Developed by a guy called Kodori K for Kodori and it revs for 11,000 11,000 rpm 911 K. It's my favorite car name ever. I've driven it There's a video on online of that in this gold thing. How is it?

00:26:07 Speaker_00
You need to sit down after driving it because it's just it's just so Visceral. It'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.

00:26:20 Speaker_00
And your eye says it's gone to eight, you've got to stop now. I'm going to have bits of metal coming out the side of the engine, but it never does. And it's so light, everything's carbon. So it's about 900 kilograms. Wow. Yeah, you'd love that.

00:26:31 Speaker_00
That's really, that's very basic. intravenous performance that is. How light did you get your green card down to? Is that it? No, that's what they've just done. So Tuttle did the GT1. He's just launched that at Pebble Beach. Wow. Look at that.

00:26:45 Speaker_00
That looks... I hate the wheels. But again, I've got to be careful. I work for Singer. I love Singer. I love Singer too. Singer amazing, but that's my friend Richard's just done that. Can you get me a picture of a Singer? Why are the wheels so gross?

00:26:57 Speaker_00
Because they're supposed to look like 80s wheels from Le Mans.

00:27:01 Speaker_02
Yeah, let that go.

00:27:02 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think you might be right. I'm 100% right. Those wheels are disgusting. The 911K is an amazing thing. And maybe if I was Porsche or another car maker, I'd be starting to cry foul.

00:27:16 Speaker_00
Because 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.

00:27:28 Speaker_00
Because you can come along, you and I could establish the Monkey and Joe Car Company tomorrow. And we could find a car, we could say, right, we're gonna make an E46 M3.

00:27:36 Speaker_00
We're gonna buy 100 good E46 M3s and we're gonna turn them into the Joe and Monkey M3. And we're going to sell them for $300,000. They're going to have a nice new interior. They're not going to stray too far from the original philosophy of the car.

00:27:51 Speaker_00
Everyone's going to love them. And we wouldn't have to meet any kind of crash legislation. Smog would be according to the vehicle age. In Europe, there's even less to do. It comes under very low volume approval. You don't have to do anything.

00:28:04 Speaker_00
We don't have to meet any emissions regs, really, in Europe. You can do what you want. But if you're a car, if you're called BMW, you cannot make that car. And I'm not sure that's fair.

00:28:15 Speaker_02
Right, like what Ruff does?

00:28:16 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:28:17 Speaker_02
That's not even really a Porsche. Well, it has its own chassis plate.

00:28:21 Speaker_00
It's a really gray area. But I think it's unfair on the car companies in many ways, because they can't go out and do that.

00:28:27 Speaker_02
Right. They can't make a restomod. Porsche could not make a Singer. They could, but they'd have to establish a new co.

00:28:37 Speaker_00
or they'd have to buy a company. But could Porsche make resto mods of their vehicles? I think they potentially could, but they'd be terrified, I suspect, of the potential litigation. Right.

00:28:52 Speaker_00
You know, because if one of them went into a wall, right, you know, you'll suddenly you get to sue Porsche.

00:28:57 Speaker_02
Right. Also, especially if you're selling something like one of those old Widowmakers where and people don't understand that. I mean, I have a 2007 GT3 RS and it's still like around corners. You let off off the gas. It'll whip around on you. Yeah.

00:29:16 Speaker_02
The new ones don't really do that that much. The new ones are much better.

00:29:19 Speaker_00
They've got this rear steer on them, which definitely helps. But they'll still rotate.

00:29:24 Speaker_02
Yeah, just the engine out the back.

00:29:27 Speaker_00
You add that to an old design. It's less prominent now, because tire technology has moved on so much. I remember the first time I got to drive a lot of these things. I didn't quite understand the Widowmaker tag. because they had new tires.

00:29:45 Speaker_00
They had these new tires. Tires are everything. I'll tell you a Top Gear story, it's fairly interesting. My colleague who, called Paddy McGinnis, who's one of the co-hosts, who's claim to fame for me in America is,

00:30:00 Speaker_00
He had to be subtitled in America for Top Gear because his accent is so broad from the North of England, he had subtitles. It's like watching Peaky Blinders. Yeah, no, it's worse than that.

00:30:10 Speaker_00
Anyhow, 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.

00:30:20 Speaker_00
Anyhow, at the end of it all, the car's on a low loader and I look at the tires. They're 20 years old.

00:30:27 Speaker_03
Oh god.

00:30:27 Speaker_00
Yeah. Well, that's it had been borrowed for the job, you know Old tire technology matched with age as well. It's terrible.

00:30:35 Speaker_02
That's the story with the guy from Fast and the Furious What's his name?

00:30:40 Speaker_00
Paul Walker Walker Paul Walker.

00:30:41 Speaker_02
That's the story with him. They had old tires on that car.

00:30:44 Speaker_00
Well Paddy get so Paddy gets Eviscerated in the press because you can't drive and everything else I could have been in that car. I'd have crashed it. I can drive a bit. Anyone. You cannot.

00:30:53 Speaker_00
And if you get in these old cars with old tires on them, they have nothing. Absolutely nothing.

00:30:59 Speaker_02
It's incredible how much the technology has come along in that regard.

00:31:03 Speaker_00
I'd say Michelin, at its best, some of it's like witchcraft. If you get in a new Porsche GT3 RS now, the tire they've developed for that probably has four compounds across it. You know, so the high wear stuff, where it needs the grip.

00:31:23 Speaker_00
They're so clever. They really are. The performance they add to the vehicle, no one knows.

00:31:28 Speaker_02
How come no one can figure out how to make a tire without air?

00:31:34 Speaker_00
It's a really, really interesting point. They must have done. For me, it comes under the same heading as someone must have made a light bulb that you never need to replace. But why would they make it?

00:31:44 Speaker_02
Well, the tire without air thing, for safety purposes. There's a lot of reasons why you would want a tire that, I mean, I know they did make them. They do have them.

00:31:52 Speaker_00
There's this tire that looks like a sort of spring. You know that Adidas shoe that has the sort of lattice? Yeah, you can see through it. It looks a bit like that. Yeah, I have seen those.

00:32:01 Speaker_00
But I suppose you're still dealing with, at that point, it's a sprung mass, which would interfere with suspension. I don't have an answer for you.

00:32:08 Speaker_02
You think that's what it is? It's like it's heavier? I don't know. Because there's no air in it, that makes sense. Because you'd have so much more rubber. But I think they tried to mitigate that by having it clear, so you see through it.

00:32:19 Speaker_00
There were some shots of one recently. I have to assume there's only two reasons you wouldn't make it. One, it doesn't work. Two, it gets in the way of your ability to make money. Normally the latter.

00:32:34 Speaker_02
Yeah, I don't know. It'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... Exactly. Yeah.

00:32:47 Speaker_00
Tires are... the more you get into cars, tires are a fascinating subject. That's, that's a good opener when you meet somebody opposite sex. But I has never worked for me.

00:32:59 Speaker_00
But actually, they are because they're the only contact you have with with with the ground. So it stands to reason that the most important part of the performance package.

00:33:06 Speaker_00
Yeah, f1 commentators, and I'm actually probably slightly less so in the US, but in Formula One, the commentators spend most of the time talking about tires, because it's what is the main factor. But they're not sexy. Tires are not sexy by definition.

00:33:19 Speaker_00
So, you know, car makers will tell you, we've got a new damper system that's got eight settings, and we've got this and this and this. They can't tell you that they've spent five years developing a tire that's revolutionary.

00:33:30 Speaker_00
Nobody cares, because it just looks like a tire. Yeah, it just looks terrible. What are you showing me? And when they come to replace that tire, they'll just give me the cheap one. I don't want to spend that money on that one.

00:33:40 Speaker_02
Right, right, right. So you're experiencing Top Gear.

00:33:47 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's interesting. So I've never really spoken about it because I keep my mouth shut. I like to remain dignified. It's been quite a journey. It's come to an end now. I really feel it's a full stop.

00:34:02 Speaker_00
The show has been put on hold in the UK indefinitely is the terminology from the BBC. That means it's an end. But strangely, it exists in other formats around the world. So there's been an American one. There's one in Finland. There's one in Australia.

00:34:17 Speaker_00
There's one in France. So 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 I'd like to say I hadn't expected, but I had.

00:34:35 Speaker_00
And I think that's the bit that I've found very difficult to deal with over the last couple of years. Fundamentally, I'm quite happy-go-lucky person. I'm very privileged with the life I've had.

00:34:47 Speaker_00
And I love the fact that I earn a living doing what I love. You must have the same thing. To wake up, what a joy. I don't push a desk. I get to wreck other people's tires. And also, my subject is one that is surrounded by joy.

00:34:58 Speaker_00
No one wants to hear, the last person you want to hear from is the miserable car road tester. He can fuck off. And I don't wanna be that guy. I hate those guys. Yeah, but actually, I'll be lying if I said I feel good today.

00:35:13 Speaker_00
I've had a good few months, but the last 18 months have been bad because I just didn't know what to do. Because I'd like to sit here and say I never saw it coming, but I did. So what happened? The accident that my friend Andrew had, known as Fred,

00:35:33 Speaker_00
I won't go into too much, because it's sort of out there what happened. He rolled a Morgan three-wheeler. He wasn't wearing a crash helmet. And if you do that, even at 25, 30 miles an hour, the injuries that you sustain are profound.

00:35:49 Speaker_00
I was there on the day, I was the only presenter with Fred that day. I wasn't actually right by him, but I was close by. I remember the radio message that I heard.

00:36:00 Speaker_00
I always used to have a radio in my little room at the test track where I was sitting inside, so I could hear what was going on. And I heard someone say, there's been a real accident here, the car's upside down.

00:36:12 Speaker_00
So I ran to the window, looked out, and he wasn't moving, so I thought he was dead. I assumed he was, then he moved. I can tell you now that he, unless he's a physical specimen, Fred, he's a big guy. Six foot five, six foot six, strong.

00:36:28 Speaker_00
And if he wasn't so strong, he wouldn't have survived. He'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. So I couldn't believe he survived.

00:36:42 Speaker_00
And that moment of realization that he'd survived has kind of defined my thoughts on the subject since. Because I believe that anything after that is a bit of a bonus. He should be dead, really.

00:36:57 Speaker_00
And the fact that he survived it is remarkable and it's given him and his family a chance to move on under very difficult circumstances. So that day was very difficult, made even more difficult by the fact that the build-up to that particular shoot

00:37:14 Speaker_00
I knew that we were, at the last minute, I knew we were using a Morgan three-wheeler. It's a very, it's a difficult car. You know, it's by just, the name tells you its physics is complicated. It doesn't mean it's inherently dangerous.

00:37:24 Speaker_00
You just drive it according to what it is. You have to be aware of its limitations. And I think that really was difficult. And you need experience.

00:37:34 Speaker_00
There were two people that had driven a Morkan three-wheeler before, present that day, me and someone else, a pro driver. And we were sitting inside at that time. No one had asked us anything about the car. They'd just gone on and shot it without us.

00:37:47 Speaker_00
And I think, if I'm looking in the mirror, I find it very difficult, even now, that Andrew, who I loved a bit, he's a lovely man, he was a pro cricket player. He wasn't an automotive guy. And he but he was a real enthusiast.

00:38:04 Speaker_00
He was great much like you he'd love cars and he he would always come up to me before a shoot and say Tell me how it is.

00:38:13 Speaker_00
You know, I've got all the advice give me the last bit of advice and what I should do what I should expect and 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 that

00:38:26 Speaker_00
How he might approach a difficult vehicle and that was the one day that it went wrong I find that very difficult to live with and I feel partly responsible because I didn't get the chance to talk to him But but my situation nothing compared to his anyhow The bit that I find really difficult is that

00:38:44 Speaker_00
In the aftermath of that accident, the show was put on hold. Andrew had to recover from frankly awful injuries and has done so, but profound injuries. We all kept quiet. We said nothing. And I said nothing because I wanted to look after him.

00:39:00 Speaker_00
It wasn't my story, was it? I was caught up in the collateral damage. I lost my job immediately because they cancelled the show and my contract was up. So suddenly I haven't got a job. But again, you look in the mirror and think I'm alive.

00:39:13 Speaker_00
I've got three beautiful children. I'm not in Fred's position. Andrew and Fred are the same person. Sorry, that's his nickname. And I just sort of got my head down. But I had seen this coming. There was a big inquiry, a lot of soul searching.

00:39:31 Speaker_00
The BBC's good at that. But 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 gonna die on this show.

00:39:47 Speaker_00
So I went to them, I went to the BBC, and I told them of my concerns from what I'd seen.

00:39:52 Speaker_00
As the most experienced driver on the show by a mile, I said, if we carry on, at the very least we're gonna have a serious injury, at the very worst we're gonna have a fatality.

00:40:01 Speaker_02
Let'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 Speaker_02
You 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 Speaker_00
Yeah, there was a bit of an arms race.

00:40:25 Speaker_00
But between us and maybe the other big car show the grand tour at the time to go ever more stupid And we did some we did do some big stunts and a lot of the time and the grand tour is the original cast Top Gear Jeremy Closs and Richard May in their Amazon show.

00:40:38 Speaker_00
Yeah, I'm just happy they just ended his great show So, and also, I'm- James Maron, sorry. Yeah, yeah. I'm not of the health and safety world. I'm not risk-averse. I love a bit of risk.

00:40:51 Speaker_00
And I also absolutely believe that if you enter into a show like Top Gear, you know what you're taking on, you know? I believe that there is no such thing as great risk-free television like that.

00:41:04 Speaker_00
I just turn up and I assess what I see, and I do what I'm comfortable with, And I want to make great television, that's it. And if sometimes it got a bit sketchy, so be it. We've all done that. That's the way the world lives.

00:41:16 Speaker_00
And I think what happened with Top Gear was, I saw repeatedly, too many times, my two co-hosts who didn't have the experience I had in cars. This is the critical thing. I'm qualified to make those decisions, because I've done it a long time.

00:41:32 Speaker_00
They weren't. One of them is an active comedian. The other guy is a pro cricket player. Brilliant entertainers. They were great hosts. But their roles were to make people laugh. And my role was to tell people what cars were like.

00:41:43 Speaker_00
And all too often, in the last year, I saw situations where it got too dangerous. And it culminated actually in us being in Thailand.

00:41:52 Speaker_00
Myself and Paddy were in Thailand and we went, we did a go-kart race down a hill in just compacted mud on wooden go-karts with no engines.

00:42:00 Speaker_00
And I just looked at him and I said, this is just, this, so it's not a question of whether we get injured, it's how injured we get. So just have an ambulance at the bottom because something's going to go wrong.

00:42:08 Speaker_00
Sure enough, I broke something in my hand, broke a finger or what have you. And I just thought which sounds ridiculous from your background because you you know, you're super tough guys, but yeah I don't want to break my fingers.

00:42:19 Speaker_00
I didn't also he was a shit piece of television So I always said I don't mind breaking my hand if we get a BAFTA for it But or an award, but this was just the shit skit, right?

00:42:30 Speaker_00
I ended up damaged and it went on too much so anyhow I went to the BBC and I said I want to have a meeting with the head of health and safety because this is not good and

00:42:39 Speaker_00
And what's really killed me is that no one's ever really acknowledged the fact that I called it beforehand. And it's very difficult to live with that initially for me. When I knew, I thought I'd done the right thing. I'm not very good at that.

00:42:53 Speaker_00
I normally just go with the flow. But I saw this coming. I thought I did the right thing. I went to the BBC. And I found out really that no one had taken me very seriously. I did a bit of digging afterwards.

00:43:06 Speaker_00
The conversation I had with those people was sort of acknowledged. Then they tried to sort of shut me down a bit. And then they didn't look after me at all. They just sort of left me to rot. And I, even now, I'm totally perplexed by the whole thing.

00:43:21 Speaker_00
To actually say to an organization, This is going to go wrong. And then be there the day that it goes wrong is a position I never expected to be in. And I never want to be in again. It's strange and pretty heartbreaking in many ways. I love that show.

00:43:37 Speaker_02
So did the conversation between you and the network completely stop after the accident?

00:43:44 Speaker_00
They just sort of left me to sweat really. I just didn't really, I just sat in my, where I live and drank whiskey. I didn't have much contact with them at all. Everything went quiet.

00:43:54 Speaker_00
They had two inquiries into the accident commissioned, neither of which I had access to. I pushed very hard to have access to the second one and saw some of it. And I had this, this is one of the most bizarre interactions I've had.

00:44:08 Speaker_00
I sat down with someone from the BBC who was going to talk me through bits of the second inquiry into the accident. And I'd already been told that I no longer had a job. So I'd been told that Top Gear was done.

00:44:21 Speaker_00
And 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 organization going forwards. I said, well, it doesn't really help me. I've lost my job.

00:44:34 Speaker_00
And I'm always reminded of that old adage from a very brilliant BBC comedy show, which was never commission an inquiry that you don't know the outcome of in the first place. So I don't, the whole thing, the whole situation was ridiculous.

00:44:52 Speaker_00
And I've never told anyone that. And I think, and I want to tell people that I did, because a bit of me thought, as the experienced driver, do members of the public think that I didn't do enough to protect Andrew?

00:45:07 Speaker_00
And Paddy as well, they both experienced other incidents on that show that I think were unacceptable. And that's coming as someone who loves a bit of risk.

00:45:15 Speaker_00
If you and I went outside now and there were two quad bikes, I'd happily roll it for a laugh with you, I'm that guy. And even me as that guy thought it had gone too far. Which I think is important to say.

00:45:28 Speaker_02
Well, there's the problem with those shows is they always want to keep pushing the limit and it's generally the producers who don't quite Understand the limitations of the vehicles and not yes They don't have the experience of of what it's like to actually be in control of that vehicle or what is possible, right?

00:45:44 Speaker_00
So what's also often it's can you just do that? Right and then you want to be a crowd pleaser, you know, you you want to be the guy that can do it We had that on fear factor. Yeah

00:45:52 Speaker_02
When I was hosting Fear Factor, there was a couple of times where I was like, what the fuck are we doing? Especially the second season.

00:45:59 Speaker_02
Like, Fear Factor started in 2001 and went to 2007, and then we came back again in 2011, and we only did six episodes. And they tried to make it just really ramped up.

00:46:11 Speaker_02
And when it was canceled, it was actually canceled because people had to drink donkey sperm. Yeah, which was pretty minor. I mean, it's disgusting, but it wasn't anything that was gonna risk anyone's lives.

00:46:25 Speaker_02
But I was really feeling like if this keeps going, the stunts are so spectacular and so big. We're launching cars through moving trains. There was a moving train, and then the train had all these cardboard boxes in it.

00:46:37 Speaker_02
We launch a car off a ramp sideways, and it goes through the train. You have to time it just right so you don't hit the car into one of the big metal... And someone in the car? Yeah, driving it, yeah.

00:46:52 Speaker_00
Oh yeah. My 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 Speaker_00
The difficult area is the kind of just being at a test track with a smaller crew, and someone says, give that a go. That's when it goes wrong. Because no one's really thought about it.

00:47:18 Speaker_00
They're saying, well, we've done the risk assessment, but just give that a go while you're here. I think that goes wrong. And also, my experience, and this is where everyone that's shot with me will be reminded of this now and again.

00:47:32 Speaker_00
close a play, end of the day, that's when it goes wrong. If you're at a test track, the light's coming down, there's 10 minutes to go, and the director says, just do that, I go, no, because everyone's tired.

00:47:43 Speaker_00
Someone's gonna have ignored the lockdown on the circuit. There'll be someone coming driving the other way with the coffee cups over them. It's all, it's the end of the day. If it's six o'clock, 5.30, I'm gone, I'm out.

00:47:54 Speaker_00
And not because I'm workshopped, I'll stay around and pick stuff up. But don't, 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 Speaker_00
And I know that that was a, we need to use this day shoot. That's another one that's another red flag for me. We've got a day at a track, we need to fill it. Well, you've reverse engineered that. Your priorities are already to fill something up.

00:48:24 Speaker_00
And 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 Speaker_00
Like Andrew, Fred Flintoff went off a dam in a metro and did a car bungee. Extraordinary piece of footage you can see it's just amazing film, but it was rigorous It was done properly that has amazing stunt crew that did it.

00:48:49 Speaker_00
I'm not I couldn't have done it It was it was brave and it was a really memorable piece of television that What a legend oh, and he's got me in his ear. He sat like that for 45 minutes look how far down Oh

00:49:04 Speaker_00
And I think I'm very proud of what the team did there. And Andrew was magnificent. Dude, fuck that. Can you imagine? Fuck that.

00:49:15 Speaker_02
Because if it goes wrong, you're dead.

00:49:17 Speaker_00
Yeah. And he's got that chirpy little shit in his ear as well. And there's other stuff that we did that I can't understand what we were doing. So we also did, and you won't find this, I think they've removed it from YouTube.

00:49:30 Speaker_02
Oh my god. How about that? That's so insane. How about that? Look at when it goes over itself like that. Oh my god. That is so ridiculous. And then the yank.

00:49:45 Speaker_00
Oh. But that, you know, when I said to you earlier, I have a bit of me regrets doing it, I look at that and I think, what a thing to have been part of. It's ridiculous.

00:49:57 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:49:58 Speaker_00
And I'm proud of that stuff. One thing we did do, which, again, on reflection, was just madness.

00:50:06 Speaker_00
There 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. You might have seen them. And they go really fast, and sparks go out of the back.

00:50:23 Speaker_00
We decided we'd be good if we did this. So each of us had a vehicle we were using, or you were the person that was pushing that vehicle. You're an advocate for that car in the film. And I think I had the new Land Rover Defender. You've seen those.

00:50:36 Speaker_00
I had a short wheelbase Defender. And I had to hang off the back of it wearing these. We had to wear these shoes.

00:50:41 Speaker_00
The 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.

00:50:50 Speaker_00
So 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. Anyhow, Paddy gets in and tries to go really fast, and he falls off.

00:51:01 Speaker_00
And he's okay, but someone goes, Paddy's over. I look left, the ambulance driver was having a cigarette.

00:51:08 Speaker_00
Our end of the runway and he was two miles down there and I that was the one of those moments where I thought This has got a bit loose, you know If you're gonna do these things that guy should have been running parallel because those and I didn't like that Although two minutes of two miles.

00:51:24 Speaker_00
It's a long time I know although the end of that was quite I can give you some levity there. I've did my run I got I didn't get quite as close as I think I did nearly 80 miles now or something And I fell off at the end and it hurt a bit.

00:51:35 Speaker_00
And I got in the back of the crew car, which I think was another Land Rover. And I was sitting there thinking, this smells terrible. Have I done something wrong here? A really acrid smell.

00:51:44 Speaker_00
Not from the colon, but definitely I thought this is not a good smell. Like a chemical smell? Yeah. And then I was told to get out. What happened was the shoes were red hot. And I'd got in the car and they just melted straight through the carpet.

00:51:57 Speaker_00
And it was just smoldering on fire. I looked like a shit Marvel superhero. Yeah, I think I'm very happy and proud to have done Top Gear. But I'm so sad at the way it ended. That's the ultimate. No one had control of that that day.

00:52:18 Speaker_00
That's what the insurance industry calls an act of God, whether you believe in him or not. But what happened afterwards was really sad, because I've arrived here, you've got your crew, you've got your people.

00:52:30 Speaker_00
They were my people, and from that day, I've never really spoken to them. The producers, everyone else, no one really. It just went like that, bang, done. And that was very hard, because I just couldn't believe it had happened. They're just gone.

00:52:48 Speaker_00
And you spend five, six years of your life, more, In daily contact with people and it just stops.

00:52:53 Speaker_02
I was always torn on those type of moments on Top Gear Because I just wanted to watch car reviews.

00:53:00 Speaker_02
I wanted to watch people have fun with cars But then for the casual people you have to do something stupid like bungee jump off with a car off the side of a dam and it's like I'm not interested. Maybe it's because I hosted Fear Factor for so long.

00:53:14 Speaker_02
I've seen so many things like that. They're not interesting to me. I want to hear a car enthusiast rave about the fun they're having while they're driving an automobile. Maybe you should produce a car show.

00:53:26 Speaker_00
I've got an idea. I'll pitch it to you afterwards. But you're quite right.

00:53:30 Speaker_02
There's plenty of market for that.

00:53:32 Speaker_00
There is. And actually, this is the country for it. Maybe in Europe, it's less. But I know that when we did geeky car stuff that was very, you know, for you and I, the numbers did that. And the moment you did something hyperbolic and ridiculous,

00:53:47 Speaker_00
The numbers did that but what about online online is totally different.

00:53:51 Speaker_02
Yes, right. So that's where it belongs Like what where I found about you was online Yeah, you know and I I don't remember what was the first video that I watched of you, but I do remember that green Porsche Yeah, I remember that's a long time ago.

00:54:03 Speaker_00
I think I met me and that's where I started out and I suspect I'll return there, you know, I've got plans to to relaunch the YouTube channel in the next month or two, and there's content coming.

00:54:13 Speaker_00
YouTube's a very different place to when I left it, and it's pretty surprising. There's so much motoring content out there. It's almost saturated.

00:54:20 Speaker_02
It's very, very saturated. And there's so many different types of markets now, too.

00:54:24 Speaker_00
Yeah. And the algorithm, the idea of being at the behest of an algorithm. It's terrifying. If 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 Speaker_02
It 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 Speaker_02
And if you just look at one type of vehicle, then you're going to like, I really just got interested really recently in the Ineos Grenadier. I was like, what a fascinating idea. What a limited market, by the way, too.

00:55:02 Speaker_00
Well, that actually, ironically, is the only example of a brand new resto mod, isn't it, really?

00:55:07 Speaker_02
Yes. Yes. Similar. I mean, it's essentially a new vehicle. But for the casual, it looks like a Defender. Yeah. It really does. But it's kind of better, kind of quite a bit better.

00:55:18 Speaker_05
Yeah.

00:55:18 Speaker_02
And really interesting. BMW six-cylinder supercharged engine. And so now, when I open up YouTube, it's like, oh, Grenadiers.

00:55:27 Speaker_02
Ineos constantly all these off-roading Australia dudes and all these different people like sending me these things I I Think you're right.

00:55:37 Speaker_00
It does belong on YouTube. I mean linear teller I joined a TV show when I Linear television still survived. Well, you know, you know, I understand destination television. Sure. It's gone now. It's gone. It's it's the world's changed completely.

00:55:49 Speaker_00
Top Gear still has a place in it. You know, many of my previous colleagues make a lot of online content for Top Gear. They do a great job. There's some really good films.

00:55:57 Speaker_00
But there's something quite romantic for me about the sit down, squidge onto the sofa as a family and watch 8 o'clock Sunday night. It was a quasi-religious experience, really.

00:56:09 Speaker_02
But it was in a time where people didn't have smartphones. You're quite right. That's gone. That waiting for a very specific time to watch a program, no one is interested in that anymore.

00:56:20 Speaker_00
I know. It's strange, isn't it? Because it's logical that they wouldn't because no one has any patience because of the immediacy of these things.

00:56:26 Speaker_03
Yes.

00:56:27 Speaker_00
But there's equally something quite lovely about what we used to do.

00:56:31 Speaker_03
Right.

00:56:32 Speaker_00
I can't really reconcile it. I totally acknowledge the excitement of the new, but I'm slightly wistful for the past. Is that fair?

00:56:40 Speaker_02
I see what you're saying. The only thing that still exists that you have to wait for is live sports. So live sports when you're watching a game the game starts at 8 p.m. You have to be there at 8 p.m It's not gonna wait for you. There it is.

00:56:52 Speaker_00
The podcast is a as a concept is amazing as well I've got to be a bit cheesy. I have got a podcast which which I didn't when is this gonna go out? Is this going out a day after we record this? Yeah, pretty soon.

00:57:01 Speaker_00
Well the day after that my new podcast launches. I didn't realize that so It's a really really interesting name Chris Harris on cars. Chris Harris and friends car podcast is what it's called. Because I just thought, well, he's perfect.

00:57:13 Speaker_00
Heinz tomato ketchup. Yeah. So that and that really is a nerd product. So one of the things I did, as by way of therapy was I did a car podcast in the immediate aftermath of this accident. Because I realized I wanted to have contact with this world.

00:57:26 Speaker_00
I think that the moment your life gets difficult, you regress to what is your comfort food. My comfort food is cars. And I love cars. They make me happy.

00:57:36 Speaker_02
Well, I would much prefer you without producers and network executives and all these different people telling you what to do. What I like about podcasts, what I like about YouTube content from people like Matt Farah, is I know it's one human being.

00:57:52 Speaker_02
This is their perspective. This is what they enjoy. They really do love these vehicles. And they talk about it without any influence of other human beings. So you're getting this singular viewpoint. which I think is the most attractive thing about it.

00:58:05 Speaker_00
And the thing you pointed out there, this idea of having to alter things or add sort of ancillary comedy to them to make them appeal to the masses, is what I found very difficult on Top Gear. Because I came there, I arrived as the rigorous car tester.

00:58:23 Speaker_00
You put me with some comedians, put me with whoever, I don't need to do that. They'll do the heavy lifting, they'll make people laugh. But if you want to know whether the new M2 is any good or not, please give it to me and I'll tell you.

00:58:32 Speaker_00
And the M2 is a good example. When the first M2 came out, I was given it to review for Top Gear. And I just said, well, I'd like to just do a review of the car. We've got a test track. I'll slide it around and tell you what it's like. Then move on.

00:58:42 Speaker_00
Someone else can make them laugh. But that wasn't enough. They had a section of this where I was given this sort of piece of testing equipment called the Pantometer 3000 or something just made up. I had to put on these underpants.

00:58:57 Speaker_00
which were going to tell people whether my sphincter was moving faster in this vehicle. I don't know what it was. But I look back, and I should have just said, fuck off. I don't do that. It's just an embarrassing moment in my life.

00:59:12 Speaker_00
But that was exactly it. They felt the need to augment the test. with something stupid to draw in the casual viewer. And that's where YouTube is brilliant. Because YouTube doesn't feel the need to do that. It can just cater for us nerds.

00:59:28 Speaker_00
Whatever you're into, YouTube can deliver it without someone from a network messing with it.

00:59:34 Speaker_02
What's really spectacular about YouTube is there's only one YouTube. You think about how big the internet is.

00:59:39 Speaker_00
There is in China, though.

00:59:41 Speaker_02
Well, that's different.

00:59:42 Speaker_00
I'll tell you a good story about that. About, I don't know, eight years ago or so, I was at the Geneva Motor Show, the biggest car event in my world. And this Chinese guy comes up to me and he's like, really, really grateful.

00:59:55 Speaker_00
He's like, I'm so glad to meet you, I want to say thank you. I went, why do I say thank you? He said, because you've made such a difference to my life. I'm like, I'm not the second coming, I don't know what I've done to you.

01:00:04 Speaker_00
He goes, because, you know, I host all of your videos on a channel in China and they've made me, like, loads of money.

01:00:15 Speaker_00
Sorry, yeah, so I did a bit of research he has he's made lots He just he just took you just ripped them all off YouTube and host Wow, but there's no regulation Wow So he's just telling you he ripped you off But but he had but he thought he had no it wasn't like he had no shame He couldn't even see what he'd done wrong, right?

01:00:33 Speaker_00
Thanks

01:00:34 Speaker_02
Well, China has Apple stores that aren't even Apple. Does it? Yes. China has full Apple stores where they're selling counterfeit laptops, phones, everything. None of it is really Apple. I don't even know that they do phones anymore.

01:00:50 Speaker_02
But they had Apple stores that Apple found out about that weren't even, nothing was Apple.

01:00:57 Speaker_00
Creating content in the last 10 years has become a really fascinating situation because I'm sure you felt the same when you started out. If you produce something, you own it by definition. It doesn't matter whether you're within a network or have you.

01:01:12 Speaker_00
The international property in your head is that's mine. And content producers over the last five years have had to accept the fact that that is no longer the proposition. People can do what they want. You can't hunt them down. And it's shameless.

01:01:26 Speaker_00
And I still occasionally get engaged. I don't look at the Instagram message thing very often, but sometimes I'll just see someone saying, I'm just going to post this. Do you mind? And sometimes I'll go, well, yes, I do.

01:01:37 Speaker_00
I went out there at 3 in the morning. Right. I nearly crashed that car. I paid for those rear tires. Right. Why should you get the chance to monetize that for your channel?

01:01:45 Speaker_02
Exactly.

01:01:46 Speaker_00
What are you offering me?

01:01:47 Speaker_02
Right. Nothing. I just find it really odd. It's very odd. Yeah. And it's also, they feel like they could just say a few things. You know, like, hey, look at Chris Harris doing this. And that's enough. And also, that's enough of an alteration.

01:02:00 Speaker_00
In their professional world, could you imagine if one of them was an accountant and I walked in and said, Right, I've got my books. I can't add up. I'm really disnumerate and I'm an idiot. Just do those for free, will you? Just do them. Yeah.

01:02:12 Speaker_00
No, he'll say, I want some money for that. No, no, no, just do them. And also, shut the fuck up and do them. No other world works like that.

01:02:21 Speaker_02
No, the content world is very strange. It's very strange where people can use your stuff and do entire shows based entirely on your stuff. Oh, it's just extraordinary.

01:02:33 Speaker_00
But the Chinese example was the best for me, though. I love that.

01:02:35 Speaker_02
Well, the best is that he had no shame about it.

01:02:38 Speaker_00
Thought he was doing nothing wrong. They don't think there's anything wrong with that at all. I mean, do you remember, I mean, you have to take the Chinese car industry seriously now.

01:02:47 Speaker_00
But 15 years ago, there used to be a sort of underground recess of Detroit Motor Show where the Chinese car companies would be. And it was a it was a sort of, it was a grim catacomb of of imitation.

01:02:59 Speaker_00
So you'd go underneath and there'd be like their version of a BMW X5, which was literally like someone had gone with a BMW X5 to draw one and done their own version of it.

01:03:08 Speaker_00
They would just shamelessly copy stuff because there was no, there were no IP laws over there. Culturally, they didn't acknowledge imitation. You just do what you want. I reacted terribly at the time.

01:03:18 Speaker_00
I sort of understand now that if you don't get that from the age of one, you can't learn it afterwards. But they were shameless. And I can remember being, again, at the Geneva Motor Show.

01:03:29 Speaker_00
You'd go to the, particularly the Japanese cars, and you'd want to sit in the back of a new one. You couldn't, because there'd be Chinese engineers from car companies measuring them there. It'd be like 20 minutes.

01:03:41 Speaker_00
They'd have these laser rules out, just getting all the measurements of the interiors and of the engines and stuff. You go, can I look at that? No. They'd be there for 20 minutes, shamelessly, just copying, scanning the car in broad daylight.

01:03:54 Speaker_00
It's amazing.

01:03:56 Speaker_02
They make incredible electric cars now, though.

01:03:59 Speaker_00
Oh, they've stolen a march on everyone. They really have.

01:04:02 Speaker_02
China has made, they make some unbelievable cars. I've watched some of them reviewed online. You can't even get them in America. But I watched some of them reviewed online, and they're just fucking fantastic.

01:04:14 Speaker_00
They've definitely had an advantage over Europe. I can't say for America, because you have Tesla, which is the only other global leader in that area, but the European car industry has been caught napping.

01:04:27 Speaker_00
And it's a bit of a worry for someone like me that, you know, I'm very fond of a lot of the European brands, but they're struggling. They're struggling to respond to this.

01:04:35 Speaker_00
There are boats full of very impressive, very good value electric cars that have landed in Europe in the last six months.

01:04:41 Speaker_02
There's also a problem with European cars in that European cars are always known for having a great resale value. Particularly like Lamborghini and Porsche and Ferrari. You could actually make more money off of them in a few years.

01:04:58 Speaker_02
But not electric ones. Nope. That's the problem. Like electric tie cans, you know, those things are gorgeous. That's an incredible vehicle. Good luck trying to sell that thing. I saw Lucid Airs, which is a fantastic car. Have you been in one of those?

01:05:12 Speaker_02
No, I haven't. Wow. I've heard the Sapphire is magnificent. It's extraordinary. You can't, you're going to get like half the price of that thing in a year. It's fucking nuts.

01:05:25 Speaker_00
I know. The Tican in the UK, early one, £30,000.

01:05:30 Speaker_02
Unbelievable.

01:05:32 Speaker_00
Someone paid £120,000 for that three years ago. Crazy. And still really good. It is. It's a very, again, for particular people.

01:05:42 Speaker_00
Maybe 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. It's for rich people. That's what I find quite difficult.

01:05:58 Speaker_00
There's a meritocracy about the motor car that I find appealing, is that you 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 Speaker_00
You're ultimately getting the same thing. You have the freedom to travel, to choose where you're going. And I think, like you, I don't want to be told what to do. And I think it's really important that that vehicle can take you where you want to go.

01:06:25 Speaker_00
But the electric vehicle is for rich people, isn't it? You think about it. You show me the electric vehicle for normal people.

01:06:32 Speaker_02
Well, it's terrible for people that live in apartment complexes. It doesn't exist. Unless you have some sort of a charging station where you park your car and everybody has one so you can leave it charged overnight, it's rough.

01:06:43 Speaker_02
But look at the cost of them. Yeah. Very expensive, terrible resale value.

01:06:47 Speaker_00
Yeah. It's a very flawed concept at the moment. But as you say, the performance of them can be. Your Plaid is a great example.

01:06:57 Speaker_02
It's a time machine.

01:06:58 Speaker_00
Yeah.

01:06:58 Speaker_02
It's a time machine. It really is it merges the traffic silently like It goes faster than anything. It doesn't seem real. It's incredible and I'm sent the new one that I'm getting I'm sending to war It's already sent to unplugged performance.

01:07:14 Speaker_02
Are you aware of those guys?

01:07:15 Speaker_00
So they tune them today? Yes Because it needs to be faster, doesn't it, Joe?

01:07:19 Speaker_02
No, well, they change the suspension. It's not any faster. They use the same powertrain, but they change the suspension, they widen the front and rear, and they upgrade the brakes. They make it much more just agile.

01:07:34 Speaker_00
I think the main thing it needs is some sort of jet washable, pressure washable floor, because I think passengers will eventually shit kidneys out. They're so fast.

01:07:45 Speaker_02
They're shocking. Roadster, which is going to be insane, which is basically vaporware now. Didn't people pay full price for those things five years ago?

01:07:55 Speaker_00
He's fascinating. I know he's been on your show. I don't know what to make of him. I just love the fact that he's He's the ultimate disruptor. He's come along, he's seen an industry, he's gone, that's ready for a shake-up. And he's had a go.

01:08:11 Speaker_00
With multiple industries? Yeah. That's what's crazy. But the one that's pertinent to me, the two questions I'm asked most are, what do you think of the electric car revolution? and its effect on the environment.

01:08:26 Speaker_00
But also, what do you think about Mr. Musk? I almost don't really have an opinion on him. I just let him do what he does. What I do know is I'm always fascinated what he's going to do next. And that's all you need to know.

01:08:37 Speaker_00
And the stuff that he's produced, 10 years ago, there were not many Teslas on the road in the UK. Now they're everywhere. I don't know any other vertical that's witnessed penetration like that.

01:08:49 Speaker_00
If I walk into a white goods store, I'm not seeing fridges made by companies I haven't even heard of 10 years ago.

01:08:55 Speaker_00
But the second most expensive thing you'll ever buy as a civilian, and he's managed to have that level of penetration, that will go down in the history books.

01:09:03 Speaker_02
Yeah.

01:09:04 Speaker_00
It's undeniable.

01:09:05 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's undeniable. And it's also, he's doing that with rockets, and he's also doing that with the internet. So he bought X or Twitter and turned it into X. And that's a massive disruptor, too.

01:09:14 Speaker_00
Do you do Twitter? Whatever it's called now. Yeah. I left it because I got so much abuse initially when I did Top Gear. That's when I got sort of, you know, you get- You can't read comments. No, you can't. But then you'd get drawn into conversations.

01:09:26 Speaker_00
Oh, shit. And actually leaving it was the best thing I ever did at that time. And I haven't gone back. Because I didn't really need it to promote anything. And the toxicity was long before he bought it for me.

01:09:38 Speaker_02
The toxicity is just an inherent quality of people being able to post anonymously. You're never going to get away from that. But you just don't read it. That's the most important thing.

01:09:48 Speaker_02
If you're a public figure, people are always going to have opinions of you. And there's a lot of shitty people out there. And they're the most vocal and they're the most persistent. Let them talk. Do you think in 50 years time,

01:09:59 Speaker_00
You won't be able to post or comment without your identity being revealed.

01:10:05 Speaker_02
I hope that's not the case, but probably. I think they would like to do that in America. But I think it's important for whistleblowers, it's important for

01:10:15 Speaker_02
You know, people that work in an organization and 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. It's very important. You have to have people.

01:10:27 Speaker_02
They want to expose the government. It's very important to allow people to be anonymous.

01:10:32 Speaker_00
When you're in a dark place, as I was 18 months ago, you can feel that very pertinently. There was a lot of very unkind things said about Andrew's accident and Top Gear afterwards.

01:10:43 Speaker_00
And I did want, I thought to myself, all those anonymous keyboard warriors, fuck you.

01:10:47 Speaker_00
And you know this, I was almost at that state, which is the ultimate low, the Kelvin of human behavior, which is, I'll meet you in that car park so we can have a fight.

01:10:57 Speaker_02
You know how bad that is?

01:10:59 Speaker_00
I couldn't do it as well as you. But when you step back from it,

01:11:02 Speaker_02
Yeah, but I don't engage in any of that stuff. I don't read negative things, and I don't engage in it. I'm not afraid of it. I know what it is, and I don't like it. I don't think it's necessary. I don't think it's good for you.

01:11:16 Speaker_02
I don't think anybody gets any benefit out of it. I don't think the person gets benefit out of you calling them a cocksucker. I don't think you get any benefit out of calling them a cocksucker. I don't think it helps. And I just look at it.

01:11:27 Speaker_02
I do what I call post and ghost.

01:11:29 Speaker_02
I post 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 con we'd have a lot of conversations and done a lot of reading about the amount of content that's on especially Twitter

01:11:48 Speaker_02
That's not organic, and it's an extraordinary amount. There's an FBI analyst that estimated it to be in the range of 80%. 80% of all the accounts he thinks are bullshit. And they're used to promote specific narratives.

01:12:01 Speaker_02
They're used to argue and shame people. They're used to attack certain political figures and public figures.

01:12:08 Speaker_02
then that conversation becomes completely changed because there's a Swarm of people that have a very specific narrative and then the casual person Reno. Well, maybe they're right.

01:12:18 Speaker_02
Okay, this guy's a piece of shit I always thought I was a nice guy and then it everything changes and

01:12:24 Speaker_02
Just don't engage don't it's I'm interested in reading people and their toxic opinions sometimes But oftentimes I'll go that doesn't seem real and 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 and in a troll farm and it's not a real the pernicious side to it is like all the aspects of life that we know are bad and we shouldn't go there and

01:12:52 Speaker_00
be they alcohol or, you know, relationships, whatever it is. If you're in a bad place, you're susceptible. And that's what I find very difficult about that side of the internet.

01:13:04 Speaker_02
Sure, if you're in a bad place, especially you after that accident.

01:13:07 Speaker_00
Then it's a magnet. It's like it's just there. It's the crab with its claw open. You're like, everything's saying, don't put your finger there.

01:13:13 Speaker_02
You can't.

01:13:13 Speaker_00
But you do.

01:13:14 Speaker_02
I don't.

01:13:16 Speaker_00
And I did very briefly. And I'm very glad, actually, I'd actually left Twitter before then. But I was very, I couldn't believe some of the heartless comments that were made afterwards.

01:13:25 Speaker_02
It's because they're not there. It's like, it's a very inhuman way to communicate. We're communicating in text to a person that you're not, 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 Speaker_02
It's not the way human beings are meant to communicate with each other.

01:13:41 Speaker_02
We were meant to communicate with each other like this I know this is that'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, it's because the only person I've done without that recent in recent times Edward Snowden for obvious reasons But you don't want to that's that's not a good way to communicate It's not even a good way to communicate with your friends through text message.

01:14:03 Speaker_02
No, you want to be there talking? So the person says something go Oh, okay. I get it. I get it. So why did you think that?

01:14:11 Speaker_00
But it's the cadence of conversation and also the quality of silence and the way that you respond. And actually, I'm now going to say something terrible. My podcast is done over Zoom, but it's the same voices every week.

01:14:22 Speaker_00
So people become used to the cadence of conversation and they can I do believe relate to it. The comments confirm that.

01:14:29 Speaker_02
Well, there's nothing wrong with doing podcasts over zoom. The problem is with guests.

01:14:34 Speaker_00
Exactly. It doesn't work with guests.

01:14:35 Speaker_02
Yeah, it doesn't work with you can do it. But I know people that do it with guests and they're fine. They just they adjust and they're very good podcasts. I listened. My friend Duncan does a lot of people through zoom. And they're great.

01:14:46 Speaker_02
They're great conversations.

01:14:47 Speaker_00
But if you had if you had to sit down and speak to a room full of young people, about how to manage third-party opinions of you on the internet. What would you say to them? Just ignore.

01:14:57 Speaker_02
Yes. Yeah, well, you have to be self-assessing, though. You can't be a person that is clueless about how other people see you. Yes. Because that's not good either.

01:15:12 Speaker_02
So 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. And we've all done good things, and we've all had bad work.

01:15:24 Speaker_02
And when you put out bad work and you know it's bad, Just 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 Speaker_02
But don't wallow in other people telling you you suck or other people attacking you. There's no benefit.

01:15:42 Speaker_00
There's another side to that that I've I had to teach my other co-hosts on this podcast who weren't from a media background at all. I personally believe that to ignore the negativity you can't wallow in the positivity either.

01:15:54 Speaker_00
I just think you don't have the right to just pick and choose what people say about you. You can't just absorb the nice stuff and ignore the bad stuff.

01:16:02 Speaker_02
That's just as bad for you.

01:16:04 Speaker_00
Yeah.

01:16:04 Speaker_02
Because then you're like I'm pretty fucking amazing. You know that's bad for everybody too. That's not good. Nobody benefits from being told they're amazing. You know if you did something that's good.

01:16:15 Speaker_02
So Congratulations, you worked hard you put out something that's good. Leave it alone. Keep moving. Keep moving Yeah, don't don't read all that positive shit and blow your head up and that happens to a lot of people they get like enamored and

01:16:28 Speaker_02
It's called audience capture. And you see it, one 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 Speaker_02
Like, you see it a lot with people who lean right. Because there's not as many right-wing voices on the internet. You get a tremendous amount of support. All these people say, you're the only one out there speaking the truth.

01:16:55 Speaker_02
And you start believing that bullshit and then you change your perspective.

01:16:59 Speaker_00
Yes.

01:17:00 Speaker_02
Audience capture.

01:17:01 Speaker_00
Yes.

01:17:01 Speaker_02
Yeah, that's dangerous too.

01:17:03 Speaker_00
Yeah, when you're becoming conditioned by the environment you're in without realising it. Exactly. I think actually, and rather than just segue back to the BBC, I've seen that with that network I work with.

01:17:14 Speaker_00
I 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.

01:17:23 Speaker_00
I think the organisation is, that environment is almost impossible to work in now. And it's changing them. They almost have nowhere to go.

01:17:31 Speaker_02
Well, 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. And so they're also not the experts.

01:17:42 Speaker_02
So they have their own ideas and they have to have some sort of an impact on it to justify their position. So you see people having ridiculous suggestions that everybody has to entertain because Bob is an executive. OK, Bob is the fucking co-producer.

01:17:57 Speaker_02
We got to listen to Bob. And Bob's got some stupid fucking idea that you have to hear out. And if you say, Bob, it's not going to work because of this. Now you're in an argument with Bob and Bob's mad at you.

01:18:06 Speaker_00
Would you ever make television again like that? No. No.

01:18:09 Speaker_02
Done.

01:18:10 Speaker_00
I've just finished something for the BBC, which this podcast is going to be, he's going to put the catalogue to the vision.

01:18:14 Speaker_00
So I've got one thing I've just done with the BBC, which is not car related, which will be my last thing I've done for the BBC, probably. I did it with Paddy. I loved it.

01:18:22 Speaker_00
It was actually about wellness and trying to, you know, which is a word I fucking hate. It's a captured word. It's not even a word. It's like mindfulness. I can't believe I just said it, so I apologize to you.

01:18:30 Speaker_00
Wellness and mindfulness have both been captured. Spirituality as well. Doesn't mean anything. Captured. Basically, it's about me being, having let myself go. I'm a shit, I let myself go. I'm a bit better now, but you should have seen me a year ago.

01:18:41 Speaker_00
And we've gone off and done three one-hour shows about, you know.

01:18:44 Speaker_02
Was that as a response to the... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:18:49 Speaker_00
I sat and I drank world-class quantities of single malt. I had made, I like a single malt, and I had built up a nice little collection, you know, a really nice little collection. I was quite disciplined.

01:19:03 Speaker_00
I'd pour myself, you know, a beautiful Glenfarclas 25, and I'd enjoy it, and I'd put it away. I did that collection in the first month after the Top Gear incident, the whole lot gone. And then I slipped into the full, you know, it was terrible.

01:19:19 Speaker_00
I don't look back on it as being, I now realize how bad it was, but I'm a bit of a box ticker. You can't talk about it unless you've done it. I've done it. So that was the box you wanted to tick. Let's try being an alcoholic.

01:19:33 Speaker_00
I didn't want to, but now I've done it. I get it. I get it. And also, I was doing a weekly podcast. My sort of decline was quite publicly documented. And some people saw it. Some people didn't. But sometimes I'd see someone say, is he all right?

01:19:49 Speaker_00
And I'm like, no, he really fucking isn't. Where was I with that? But I do think that the... Yeah, if you start going down that route, it's a problem. It really is a problem.

01:20:02 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's a real problem.

01:20:05 Speaker_00
I should say- Mindfulness, wellness, what other words? Wellness is worse than mindfulness. They're both the same to me.

01:20:12 Speaker_00
We went to, so this show we did, all right, and this is, I'm not promoting it, it was interesting, because I like cars, and the BBC had me, all I wanted to do was present stuff about cars. And this organization decided to send me off

01:20:25 Speaker_00
to go to Sweden to see what it's like, why they have a good quality of life. I know they do. I've got a lot of Swedish friends. I've been to Sweden. It's a fucking great place. It was an amazing experience. I loved it. But it didn't involve cars.

01:20:36 Speaker_00
And I want to be making shows about cars. That's what I love doing. I'm no good at anything else.

01:20:40 Speaker_02
That's the difference between being hired and doing your own thing. There you go.

01:20:43 Speaker_00
And I'm grateful for it. And I think there's some really entertaining television. Although we missed out one bit. You talk about having to drink donkey semen.

01:20:51 Speaker_00
yeah there's a there's a clip from this show that's that doesn't make it but i'm given this substance to drink by this guy who's got an impish grin i'm like and i'll do I'm that guy that'll eat most things.

01:21:01 Speaker_00
You know, if you've filmed Top Gear and you've been around the world, you've eaten stuff you shouldn't have eaten. And as long as you've survived, it's another box ticked, you know? I never thought I'd eat a sheep's rectum, but it's fine.

01:21:12 Speaker_00
It's a bit chewy. But I was given this, this vial of liquid, and I drank it, and it tasted a bit like a really peaty single malt. Imagine an Ardbeg that's like really peaty. I was like, coo. And on the label, it said beaver. I was like, OK, what's that?

01:21:32 Speaker_00
And this Swedish guy said, it's the essence of a beaver that we make liquid alcohol with. So you flavor like a shine with beaver because it was strong. And he sort of fudged it and moved on. I was like, phew. And it was strong. The flavor was in my mouth.

01:21:49 Speaker_00
I couldn't get rid of it. Transpires, this is a secretion from the anal gland of the beaver. So I ate beaver arse. I drank it. So someone milked a beaver, and I drank it. Wasn't that bad. What's the benefit of this, supposedly? It has some quality. It does.

01:22:10 Speaker_00
And, you know, if you see the average Swedish guy walking around, you know, I'll have some of that beaver juice if I look like that.

01:22:14 Speaker_02
Are they all drinking it?

01:22:15 Speaker_00
I don't think they're all drinking it.

01:22:17 Speaker_02
Are some of them drinking it?

01:22:18 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think so. Really? It's popular over there? It's for sale.

01:22:23 Speaker_02
What happens if you get a tainted one here it is tails from the fringe beaver gland vodka Wow So that's the beaver's butt right there and it's a gland in the vodka ten days later.

01:22:38 Speaker_00
I was in Japan doing some other work, and I remember my host saying, what do you think to that food? And what I wanted to say to them was, I can just taste beaver arse. 10 days later, my olfactory system, such as it is, was only registering beaver.

01:22:59 Speaker_00
Every food I ate tasted of beaver. Did you try to wash it out with alcohol or anything? I tried everything. Wow. It's incredibly pungent.

01:23:08 Speaker_02
What about fire spitting?

01:23:11 Speaker_00
I didn't do that. I must try that. I was thinking, how did you burn it off? I don't know. You'd have to just get a new head. Wow.

01:23:19 Speaker_02
So it eventually just dissipated in time?

01:23:21 Speaker_00
It did disappear. After 10 days, you still had it? It was still there. You know when it's just there as a sort of residual taste? I would have been so upset. Yeah.

01:23:30 Speaker_02
You motherfucker. You ruined 10 days worth of meals.

01:23:32 Speaker_00
But also, when I found out it hadn't made the cut, I was like, I went through the voiceover and it's not in. That's so crazy. Wellness as a concept is something that I, as a word, I hate.

01:23:50 Speaker_00
And I'm proud of the show that will come out at some point, but I like cars. I want to make shows about cars. And of course I will go back to the internet.

01:24:00 Speaker_02
That's where you belong. You belong doing your own thing. Chris Harris on Cars was awesome.

01:24:05 Speaker_00
We might bring it back. Yeah, do that. We've made some films, and I'm going to give it another month, and then we'll give it another go.

01:24:12 Speaker_02
Well, a bunch of people were trying all these different things. They were trying to monetize it, so you had to subscribe online in order to access the content.

01:24:18 Speaker_00
We did that. It just doesn't work.

01:24:20 Speaker_02
It doesn't work.

01:24:20 Speaker_00
You lose 99.9% of people. There's too much good stuff for free. That's another thing. We come back to that idea of this Chinese guy going, thanks for educating my children or whatever I'd done. There is no monetary value placed on content now.

01:24:37 Speaker_00
There's a few firewall systems that work. I think New York Times and the Times in the London Times works. I pay for that. And I think they make money.

01:24:44 Speaker_02
It works barely.

01:24:45 Speaker_00
But they've had to work so hard.

01:24:47 Speaker_02
They have been diminished greatly by the lack of people wanting to buy paper newspapers.

01:24:53 Speaker_00
Yeah.

01:24:53 Speaker_02
It's been a big impact on them. And it also changes the way they do journalism, because now everything's very clickbaity.

01:24:59 Speaker_00
You know, which is a real problem as well, but the expectation is the content is now free, right? Yeah, you know how many how many listeners would you lose do you think if you put a paywall up for this?

01:25:09 Speaker_02
Well, I lost 50% when I went over to Spotify.

01:25:11 Speaker_00
Did you?

01:25:12 Speaker_02
Yeah, initially. Yeah, we lost like half, but we got it back pretty quickly.

01:25:17 Speaker_00
Yeah.

01:25:17 Speaker_02
Yeah.

01:25:19 Speaker_00
I think the way that we relate and interact with content is fascinating. It is. There's an ever bigger appetite. These devices mean that the immediacy means that there can never be too much content.

01:25:30 Speaker_02
I was pointing that out when I first saw you here, that you have the tiniest little iPhone, the little baby mini. My friend Yoni has one of those too. I admire it. I admire that you don't even have a case on yours, which is even crazier.

01:25:43 Speaker_00
The iPhone's a funny thing because it's a bit like a steering wheel in a car. That's your contact point. It was designed to feel brilliant. And the iPhone, with that metal ridge, is one of the most pleasing objects you'll ever pick up.

01:25:55 Speaker_00
So why put a condom on it? Because you don't want it to break. It's made out of glass. It's still working. And I want an unsheathed phone.

01:26:02 Speaker_02
Also, mine has a nice little kickstand. Look at this.

01:26:06 Speaker_00
Oh, what's that? Yeah, look at that.

01:26:08 Speaker_02
Yeah, when I'm sitting at the kitchen table.

01:26:10 Speaker_00
But when I sit down, when I get in a car, I don't want something. Oh yeah, those are disgusting.

01:26:15 Speaker_02
I judge people so harshly when I get in their car and they have some stupid fucking thing on their steering wheel. I'm like, what is wrong with you? Who are you? Do you wear mittens on top of that, you fucking idiot? What are you doing?

01:26:27 Speaker_00
I've come here briefly for two reasons. One, because I want to be on this podcast, see you. The other thing I've come to do in this state, and I'm going to need some help with this, I'm not here for much longer, is I saw a bumper sticker advertised

01:26:40 Speaker_00
that I think is the greatest bumper sticker ever created. And it simply says, Texas is bigger than France. That's it. It's the statement. And it's for sale online. And I've got eight hours now to go and find it before I fly back.

01:26:55 Speaker_00
But I have to get this bumper sticker. Oh, we'll get you one. It literally just says, it's a statement. It is the greatest statement made by any state or country.

01:27:05 Speaker_02
Well, it's quite a bit bigger than France, isn't it?

01:27:08 Speaker_00
Where is it?

01:27:09 Speaker_02
Yeah.

01:27:13 Speaker_00
Okay. I just love it. Look at that there.

01:27:16 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's kind of funny.

01:27:18 Speaker_00
It's brilliant.

01:27:19 Speaker_02
And I want that I haven't I have a really, we were talking about this at the beginning before we got rolling, but it really is its own country. Yeah, it's very different than the rest of the country. Yeah, it's very independent.

01:27:30 Speaker_02
And one of the reasons is the history of this place, like for the longest time, the Comanche dominated this territory, and you couldn't get across the land.

01:27:39 Speaker_02
And so the people that eventually figured out how to fight off the Comanche and settle down, they're the craziest, most rugged individuals ever. It's the Texas Rangers. They figured out how to cold camp.

01:27:50 Speaker_02
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. Without those psychopaths that figured out a way to fight off the most ferocious band of Indians that ever existed in the plains,

01:28:06 Speaker_02
we would no one would be here so they were very reluctant to join this whole union thing like what the fuck are you talking about also they've they've been conditioned to become

01:28:16 Speaker_00
animals to be extreme fighters. Once their battle's finished, they don't stop being fighters. Right.

01:28:22 Speaker_02
Well, it just flavors the independence of the entire state and the pride of the state. It's very different.

01:28:28 Speaker_00
How does Austin fit into that? Because I think it's viewed as this center of cosmopolitan life within a state that's known to be a bit different. So how does that work? It's good.

01:28:40 Speaker_02
It's a balance. So Austin is this preposterous, progressive blue city that's surrounded by ranchers with guns. So this is saying keep Austin weird and surrounded.

01:28:52 Speaker_02
And I think that's accurate, because you've got a lot of universities here, you have some really intelligent, interesting people here, great restaurants, great nightlife. But also you're surrounded by Texas, Texas, the real Texas.

01:29:06 Speaker_02
The majority of Texas is like ranchers and small town people and they're heavily armed.

01:29:15 Speaker_00
That's the thing about being an English person, sorry, a British person. the gun thing is totally foreign to us. I'm not gonna offer any opinion at all other than say that it's just foreign. It really is.

01:29:27 Speaker_00
And at times, I'm sure people in the UK would quite like to feel the security of having that about them. But it's amazing driving around here as a British person thinking, That person in that car has almost certainly got a gun. Yeah, almost certainly.

01:29:41 Speaker_02
We don't have that. Well, we also have the First Amendment. And you see the consequences of not having the Second Amendment in the UK, because they can tell you, we're going to lock you in jail for a Facebook post. And you can't really do that here.

01:29:56 Speaker_02
You can't just force people to go to jail. That was an issue also in Australia. Australia, they took everyone's guns away after one mass shooting, I think, in the 1990s.

01:30:06 Speaker_02
And they were able to round people up and put them in camps when they found out they had a cold. It was crazy. You can't do that in America. The Second Amendment protects the First Amendment.

01:30:23 Speaker_00
What's transpired for me, having traveled 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.

01:30:36 Speaker_00
But they're not. They're really quite different.

01:30:38 Speaker_02
We have a real caste system over there. You have a class system over there.

01:30:41 Speaker_00
And actually, they're both wonderful places. I love coming here. There's something about all of the states I visited that I love. and I have no strong opinions. Maybe this is the older you get.

01:30:52 Speaker_00
I no longer have strong opinions, really, about the way other people live their lives. So that's what you do. I don't have any opinion about that at all, really. It's what you do. It works for you. And in the UK, we're different as well.

01:31:05 Speaker_00
The older I get, the more emollient I become, I think, about that. When I was younger, I would have had stronger opinions about that. But the way that Texas operates is Texas's stuff. It's the way you do things.

01:31:17 Speaker_00
And I'd have to be here a long time to fully understand the layers of it, the nuances of it.

01:31:23 Speaker_00
And 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. Everything has subtleties, doesn't it? That's the way I see it.

01:31:36 Speaker_00
I think maybe to come back to some of the comments, it's when people become partisan, without any real information that we have problems. People always giving me their fucking opinion about stuff when they haven't stopped to consider it.

01:31:51 Speaker_00
And I'm not trying to dodge issues here. You can probably tell I'm completely apolitical. I just don't like politicians. I don't care what side of the fence they sit on. I'm deeply suspicious of people that go into a career of politics. As you should be.

01:32:05 Speaker_00
As you should be. So I don't profess to be on one side or the other. I just, all of them, tend to be inexpert. I think the idea that we've created a system where you get promoted because you're inexpert is ridiculous.

01:32:18 Speaker_00
And in my world, that manifests itself in transport. I'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. They're just bureaucrats.

01:32:31 Speaker_00
It's ridiculous. So that's my position on it. is I just sit there bewildered by what's going on. And maybe where I am a total soft cock is I don't have the spine to stand up and shout about it.

01:32:44 Speaker_00
But I just, it's bizarre for me that we have inexpert people making decisions for us, hence our discussion about electric cars. But also we have people that have the right to say whatever they want online without having stopped to think of anything.

01:33:00 Speaker_00
that they were talking about, or to research what they're saying. It's remarkable.

01:33:04 Speaker_02
But there's also this, because 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 Speaker_02
And it makes you consider, it gives you a choice. Do I choose to engage in this kind of stuff? Do I choose to read this kind of stuff? Or do I just recognize it for what it is? Like, I don't drink moonshine. I don't go to the,

01:33:29 Speaker_02
If I go to the supermarket and there's a jug of moonshine, I'll go, well, I need to buy that and start drinking it. No, I don't drink. I don't want it. I know it's there. I don't drink it. Right. So you can choose to avoid the things that suck in life.

01:33:41 Speaker_02
You can.

01:33:42 Speaker_00
But through the prism of parenthood, I've got three kids. I do as well. Yeah.

01:33:48 Speaker_02
That's where it gets tricky.

01:33:49 Speaker_00
Yes. And I don't know whether you've probably experienced this as well, but when I was first on Top Gear, there was a lot of hate flying around. And, you know, I was just hated because I wasn't Jeremy, which is odd because Jeremy's one of my heroes.

01:34:02 Speaker_00
I think he's one of the greatest broadcasters out there. I love Top Gear. And to suddenly be the enemy was really weird. I love what he did. I loved his Top Gear. I was just trying to do my own Top Gear. And I just got shat on for it.

01:34:14 Speaker_00
But when my children started taking heat, for what I was doing for a living was very difficult. I found that very difficult.

01:34:21 Speaker_01
It's crazy that people go after someone's kids for a television show about cars. What kind of a piece of shit are you?

01:34:29 Speaker_00
If I was a political broadcaster or someone that was talking about the NRA, I can understand it. I'm talking about the motor car, not the third world debt. It's ridiculous.

01:34:38 Speaker_02
But it doesn't matter. It's just shitty human beings with bad lives.

01:34:42 Speaker_00
When they go for your kids, I'll tell you something. How about this? Never said this publicly. I had a phone call one day from family home saying that my youngest child had been out skateboarding. It's a far past middle now.

01:34:59 Speaker_00
He's been skateboarding on some little lane. When I heard that, I thought, why would he skateboard there? It's really rough. He'd just fall over. But two people in a car had approached him and tried to coax him into the car.

01:35:13 Speaker_00
It turned out it was two tabloid journalists that were trying to get some dirt on me. But they tried to coax my child into the back of the car.

01:35:21 Speaker_01
Oh my god.

01:35:23 Speaker_00
And I agree with you that I want to have a sensible view of this world we live in.

01:35:28 Speaker_00
But 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 Speaker_00
You don't come back from it completely.

01:35:43 Speaker_02
Well, you recognize the real shit nature of some human beings. And when you're confronted with it, we're kind of always aware there's bad people in the world, but when you're confronted with it over such a superficial thing.

01:35:54 Speaker_00
You're so right. So refreshing to hear you say that. It's just a car. Ideal in the least serious subject on the planet. It's a motor car.

01:36:03 Speaker_02
It's just being attached to that iconic name That's all it is and then also the way that show was cancelled because Jeremy punched a producer Did you have to work with the same producer Jeremy punched?

01:36:12 Speaker_00
No, he that guy had left. I Met him once shook his hand. I never didn't know he was I'm on Team Jeremy. Yeah, he's He's brilliant at what he does. If he punched the guy, the guy probably sucks. Jesus, I'm not coming to you on that.

01:36:28 Speaker_00
I'm going to get in trouble. But I do... No one's ever really asked me what I think of Jim. I think he's just the best. He's quite a fucking character. And I shouldn't have... Maybe I shouldn't have tried to follow him, but I wasn't trying to follow him.

01:36:41 Speaker_00
I think what I now realize I was trying to do was I was trying to be part of the solution. I knew I could do the driving bit, but I thought the other people could carry off the Jeremy bit. And I now realize that's very difficult.

01:36:55 Speaker_00
It's a difficult act to follow.

01:36:56 Speaker_02
Yeah, you're not going to follow that. You're just going to be different. He's a completely unique person. I think they did Elon dirtier than anybody ever did. Oh, they were naughty with that. They did a terrible thing. They were naughty with that.

01:37:09 Speaker_02
They did a terrible thing, and I talked to him about it, and he was furious. They pretended that his car died, and they did it for a sketch.

01:37:17 Speaker_02
And this is the early days of Tesla, when Tesla had just that little tiny car that was basically a Lotus with an electric engine.

01:37:25 Speaker_00
That was called the Roadster. That was the original Roadster.

01:37:27 Speaker_02
Yeah, the original one, which is a cool looking little car. And they pretended that it died on them. And they did it for a sketch and they got away with it because it's entertainment. And they were allowed to create a script.

01:37:39 Speaker_02
And apparently someone had got a hold of the script and read in the script before they even filmed it, then the car dies. And then we have to figure out why the car died. So what kind of an impact do you think that had on the sales of his car?

01:37:52 Speaker_02
I mean, it had to be extraordinary. You'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 Speaker_00
I'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. That's the way a lot of reality shows are made, unfortunately. So ultimately, you reverse engineer an outcome.

01:38:15 Speaker_00
So you're being told, this is what you're going to find. This is what's going to happen. All we need to do is, you've got to help us get there. Now, in reality TV, I can understand it.

01:38:25 Speaker_00
But if you're reviewing a product, as you say, that tens of thousands of people make and they rely on, That thing's selling for their livelihood.

01:38:33 Speaker_02
And you're just lying. You're lying.

01:38:36 Speaker_00
You're lying about this car breaking. It did not break. One of the biggest problems on Top Gear for me was when things didn't break. So, you know, often the producers and I understand why they'd want stuff to break.

01:38:47 Speaker_00
That was the joy, particularly with the older cars we'd buy and mess around with. But actually, older cars are quite reliable now. If you buy something and expect the engine to blow up, it won't.

01:38:58 Speaker_02
Well, how many of those 1988 Toyota Land Cruisers are still on the road with hundreds of thousands of miles?

01:39:06 Speaker_00
Well, they did a brilliant film about that, and they're trying to kill a Land Cruiser, and they just couldn't. It ended up dropping off a building, and it drove away. It's the cockroach of the car world. They're incredible.

01:39:16 Speaker_00
I have a 200 series Land Cruiser V8 diesel, 157,000 miles on it.

01:39:21 Speaker_02
I have an 80 series.

01:39:23 Speaker_00
It's just, they are, they're brilliant vehicles. And actually I lobbed a bomb on Instagram the other day by saying, I drive round in my Land Cruiser feeling sorry for Range Rover drivers. And I just got a whole load of... I didn't read it.

01:39:35 Speaker_00
But I do think that I have some sympathy for people that make television because, you know, they say don't work with children and animals, but working with cars can be difficult.

01:39:46 Speaker_00
And one side of Top Gear that I found unpalatable, not just the silly comedy bit, which I didn't like, was quite often you'd be given a script. I'd be given a script, and my review was in it. And I'd be like, well, I haven't driven it yet.

01:40:01 Speaker_00
So this is the part where you say, it's great. But what if I think it's shit? But I can understand why the producer and the director's thinking, well, we've got to get all this packaged together. That's our hour there. That's our hour there.

01:40:11 Speaker_00
But we haven't stopped to actually evaluate this thing we're supposed to be evaluating. And I have some sympathy with people that make television. Because actually, that bit's just, they don't care about that. But for me, that's all that matters.

01:40:24 Speaker_00
I want to give an honest opinion of the car.

01:40:27 Speaker_02
Well, that's where you shine. And that's why you should only be doing things on your own. I think I will after this. Yeah. You know, fuck that wellness show too. Listen, I have to take a leak. Let's come back.

01:40:39 Speaker_00
We'll take a little quick break. Dogs in cars is a good subject.

01:40:43 Speaker_02
Yeah. I love having my dog in the car. My dog loves going in the car. He knows we're going to go do something fun.

01:40:49 Speaker_00
The dog, so is it sensible to suggest that the dog is the ultimate car companion? Sure, because they're never upset. Yeah.

01:40:56 Speaker_02
Yeah. They're like, yay, we're in the car. It must mean we're going somewhere.

01:41:00 Speaker_00
I love, so I've got a GT3 Touring 991. You bring the dog in that? What kind of dog? He's an English Bull Terrier. How big is he?

01:41:09 Speaker_00
quite a size but you know he's with the shark face he just looks like he's gonna kill you but all he'd do is lick you to death he's a gorgeous animal and um from the very from as a pup he all all dogs have access to all cars it's really important for me if you've got a really if you have a car that's a million dollars your dog's going in there really for me it's a it's a it's like a that's the it's closest it gets to religion for me i love it because i it's for me it's a demonstration of

01:41:33 Speaker_00
of who I am. I want my things I love the most to share the things I love the most, right? So the dog goes in it, and I love patination on cars. So my cars are known for being not that clean, let's say. They just live in them.

01:41:46 Speaker_00
And you know the handle on a GT3 under the bucket seat, that lovely handle that you move so it falls backwards? On mine, they're all chewed, where he chewed them as a puppy. And I leave them like that. So when people get in, they go, What was that?

01:41:57 Speaker_00
And I go, I would have talked to you about that. But the only time I've come to grief is that I now am very suspicious of switchgear that's laid on the horizontal. Because I was on a slip road in an M3 of mine. last year. No, sorry, no, it'd be the GT3.

01:42:15 Speaker_00
And I came off a slip road and I accelerated, it was wet. And I thought I'd lean on the systems, you know, when you just get that lean on the traction or the ABS and the car went fully sideways.

01:42:27 Speaker_00
on a slip road in the middle of the day, and it looked outrageous. I mean, that's what I'm quite good at, so I went, well, there you go, that's sideways, wound it off again. The dog had put his paw on the ESP button. Oh, no.

01:42:39 Speaker_00
He had turned all the systems off. Oh, no. Without me knowing. Oh, no. So now I'm aware of that. He's not allowed to do that.

01:42:46 Speaker_02
Yeah, they shouldn't be right there.

01:42:47 Speaker_00
But I suddenly thought, that's, there he is.

01:42:49 Speaker_02
That's a dog, aw, what a cutie.

01:42:51 Speaker_00
That's in the back of the M5, the V10 M5, that's Pipdog.

01:42:54 Speaker_02
Ah, that's nice.

01:42:55 Speaker_00
He's an absolute legend, he is. But he's a great dog companion. No dog sickness. I just love going places with him.

01:43:04 Speaker_02
As long as they're accustomed to it, that's the thing. When I have had dogs in the past that I didn't take in cars often, you take them in the car, they're kind of freaking out. Why are we moving? They start throwing up.

01:43:14 Speaker_00
But it's awful. I don't want to see a dog like that. No one wants to see an animal stressed. And I have rejected cars because my dogs didn't like them. I had a thing called a... I had a thing... I borrowed one and I bought a Golf R Estate.

01:43:29 Speaker_00
I'm not sure you got them over here, but they did a combi sort of station wagon. There's a theme here, I love station wagons.

01:43:35 Speaker_02
Why do you like station wagons?

01:43:37 Speaker_00
I think long roofs and curtailed arses look better. Really? Yeah, the three box thing doesn't do as much for me. I like long down. I don't know why.

01:43:46 Speaker_02
Oh, I think they look gross. Yeah, I love them. I see them, I'm like, what did you do to that fucking thing?

01:43:52 Speaker_00
So I bought, this is the new one. That's actually good looking. I bought the old one, so you type in, click in 2015 Goldfarb Estate there. And I, any one of those, yeah, that'll do. So I went and bought one of these, so that'll be good.

01:44:07 Speaker_00
and that's not it's not too showy and it'll do the job and I at that point I had my old dog boss Vimerana and um and I put him in the back and he just got out again. I was like he hasn't done that before.

01:44:19 Speaker_00
I put him in the back again and it was quite evident he did not like the car. I don't know why.

01:44:24 Speaker_02
So you didn't like the car because he didn't like the car?

01:44:26 Speaker_00
So I took the car back and the guy who sold it said what's the problem? I said dog doesn't like it and he went What? The dog? What do you mean? I said, well, the dog doesn't like it. I can't live with it, because the dog lives with me. So it goes.

01:44:37 Speaker_00
Absolutely. Wow. Yeah, no, the dog's opinion matters. What could it possibly have been? Who knows? Dogs are, as we know, the most incredible things. We don't deserve them. They are wonderful, but they see and they perceive things differently to us. He knew.

01:44:56 Speaker_00
It could be that he didn't like the cologne that the German guy that assembled the boot interior with. Dogs operate on a level of perception we can't even understand. So, yeah, your fascination with bears, could a man

01:45:13 Speaker_00
beaten up by, could a man defeat a bear? I always love that. It's like, well, what are you thinking of? I love, I often like walking around trying to think what my dog's seeing of a situation. What's he smelling?

01:45:24 Speaker_02
Oh, they must be smelling just so many different things.

01:45:26 Speaker_00
I know.

01:45:27 Speaker_02
They apparently can, if you have a hamburger that has like cheese, pickles, onions, ketchup, they can smell all the individual items in the hamburger. They smell everything. They have like a reference of Discern ability.

01:45:42 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's just very different than ours. So do they have like Terminator vision? It's their red code going across and they're like, you know, they have no language too, right?

01:45:51 Speaker_02
So it's all on instincts, which is fascinating because you know Nobody taught my dog to pee on things. He just knows that you step. What's this?

01:46:01 Speaker_02
Pees on it, you know when I like take him on trails and he finds out where all the other dogs have peed like Peter too, but my

01:46:09 Speaker_00
There's an emotional sensitivity to these animals as well. That thing there you've just seen a picture of, I mean, it was bred to fight. bulls and bears, that was what it was bred to do.

01:46:17 Speaker_00
But 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. He will do that consistently. Every single time.

01:46:33 Speaker_00
He knows. He just knows.

01:46:35 Speaker_02
He knows she's uncomfortable. They're empaths. Especially when they really love you, there's something about them. My dog understands language. He doesn't know just like, sit, give me your paw, lie down, stay.

01:46:49 Speaker_00
But tone, I bet you he knows tone.

01:46:50 Speaker_02
Yeah, he knows things. Like we could be going towards the house, I go, nah, let's go around the back. And he's like, okay, we're going around the back. He knows what I'm saying. It's like real subtle, real simple.

01:47:03 Speaker_00
I wonder if we over project on them, because when we were discussing earlier about some of the, this sense of being just so disappointed about, are fellow homo sapiens. I over project onto my dog.

01:47:15 Speaker_00
The more I get disappointed by human beings, the more I revel in dogs.

01:47:18 Speaker_02
Well, they're like human beings, though, in that it depends on the life of the dog. Like people get killed by wild dogs. Yeah. Like in Georgia, some couple recently was attacked and somebody was killed by wild dogs.

01:47:30 Speaker_02
Because the dogs are fending for themselves. They live horrible lives. Now, people that live horrible lives are shit people, right? They're dangerous shit people.

01:47:38 Speaker_02
Whereas a dog like Marshall, that's had nothing but love, and he's a golden retriever, he's bred that way, he's just a genuine joy to everyone he meets. Like, you're my new friend! Everybody he just assumes.

01:47:50 Speaker_02
But you've met dogs that are like, they see people, they're sketchy, they're scared of men, maybe they were beaten. They're a reflection of the environment in which they've been brought up. Exactly. Exactly. Dogs are just like us. They're just like us.

01:48:03 Speaker_02
You get a dog like Carl, Carl thinks everybody loves him and everybody wants to play and that's what he does. He just runs up to you and tries to play because that's his whole life. That's all he's ever experienced is being taken care of.

01:48:14 Speaker_00
I want some bear chat. So I have, I'm slightly fascinated by these really large bears, big grizzlies.

01:48:22 Speaker_00
And 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. Are they as over-inspiring as I should think they are?

01:48:36 Speaker_02
Oh yeah, and beyond. There's a great story that you can find that's on YouTube, there'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.

01:48:51 Speaker_02
A Fognac Island is an incredibly difficult place to traverse. The bush is dense and thick and the bears are enormous. A Fognac is connected to Kodiak. by a small land strip, I believe. It's certainly like right next to Kodiak.

01:49:11 Speaker_02
I might be wrong about that. I think it maybe used to be, I'm not sure. But the point is, they are coastal brown bears. And coastal brown bears are the same thing as a grizzly bear, but their diet is very different.

01:49:22 Speaker_02
So their diet is so rich in protein from salmon. They're enormous. They could be 1,800 pounds, They could be 11 feet tall. They're fucking huge They're preposterously big and you can't imagine how big they are unless you you really encounter them.

01:49:41 Speaker_02
So my friend Steve He was with a group of friends. They had shot this elk and he was filming it for a television show called meat eater and

01:49:48 Speaker_02
They 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 terrain.

01:49:59 Speaker_02
So then they come back the next day, they trek six hours, they find the spot, they sit down and they start eating lunch. they don't realize that a bear has claimed that meat. And so the bear charged through the camp.

01:50:16 Speaker_02
And one of the guys winds up on top of the bear, the bear barrels through the people and this guy's literally riding the back of the bear for about 30 yards before he falls off of it.

01:50:31 Speaker_02
One of my friends, my friend Giannis, it is gnashing its teeth about 18 inches from his face as it runs by. Now imagine a head this big, a foot and a half. I mean, the head is like this, isn't it? Like this, enormous.

01:50:45 Speaker_02
I mean, so big, just impossibly big. And it's gnashing its teeth 18 inches away from his head as it runs by. He hits it with a trekking pole, like whacks it with a trekking pole. The way Steve described it, he said,

01:51:00 Speaker_02
the most reptilian part of your brain is ignited, where you no longer have like, what should I do? There's no, there's no thinking in terms, there's no language. Chaos, full chaos, full chaos, terrifying chaos. No one had their gun in front of them.

01:51:20 Speaker_02
No one, no one knew what to do. They were all, like pistols were in the packs, rifles were sitting down over there. No one was prepared. No one thought the bear was there. They didn't understand that it was there.

01:51:32 Speaker_00
Yeah. I think as a northern European, we're always fascinated by the shit we haven't got. Right. And grizzly bears are up there with Chevy Suburbans, most muscle cars.

01:51:49 Speaker_00
Honestly, the idea of the other, the foreign, is really fascinating for any person that doesn't have that. Sure. Same with Australia. You go to Australia, it's a very different thing. They have little shit that will kill you.

01:52:00 Speaker_00
right spiders you go there and someone will casually go yeah mate that'll that bites you you're fucked You're like, what do you mean? It's a spider. No, mate. Jesus, it's not like a big furry thing. But in South America, it's big and furry.

01:52:15 Speaker_00
It's whole presentation is, I'll kill you. These ones are not quite like that. So I do have this fascination with this stuff. And again, that's why YouTube's great.

01:52:25 Speaker_00
Because as a kid growing up, if you wanted to find out about this stuff, you couldn't really. You had to go and get a book. There was no VHS. If you went to Blockbuster, you couldn't buy Documentary grizzly bears could you right you'd get it right now.

01:52:38 Speaker_02
It's all over there, but even a documentary is not gonna Do it you have to experience them? You have to actually be around one and see it.

01:52:47 Speaker_00
So you have been up close with these things?

01:52:49 Speaker_02
I've only seen one grizzly bear in the wild, and it wasn't big. It was about six feet. But it looked at me so much different than any other animal that I've ever seen. It looks right through you, like, am I going to eat you?

01:53:00 Speaker_00
Yeah, so you were a food source.

01:53:02 Speaker_02
Yeah. Are you a food source? Am I going to eat you? What are you?

01:53:05 Speaker_00
One of the best things I've done with Top Gear was with Matt LeBlanc, who, as you can tell, I'm very fond of. He's just a, he's great fun. But he had this idea around Bigfoot. So he's a believer. In his own way.

01:53:23 Speaker_00
He's not a believer, but he presents a really strong argument. I like people that, as you can tell, I like- I'll shoot that argument full of holes. But I like to apply tests to things. He's not a believer, but he likes to apply tests.

01:53:35 Speaker_00
He said, stand in the Washington State Forest and tell me that we know everything that's in there. And if you come from a little island off Europe, the size of your forests are awe-inspiring.

01:53:46 Speaker_00
And the idea there's so much stuff that we might not know about does interest me.

01:53:50 Speaker_02
There probably at one point in time was something. Yeah, that's what it really is.

01:53:55 Speaker_02
And 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.

01:54:07 Speaker_00
Yeah. It is possible.

01:54:08 Speaker_02
It's possible. And there's also Native Americans have some enormous number of names for these creatures, different tribes. So they don't have fake animals. They don't have a bunch of like dragons and stuff that doesn't exist.

01:54:21 Speaker_00
It's not a mythical creature. Right. So, and I don't want to pitch Matt into something, you know, he's not some crazy believer. And actually the premise of the whole film was fun.

01:54:30 Speaker_00
He was there going, I think there's something here, let's go and have a look for it. And I was just acutely aware as we were in, we shot it in Northern California, so North San Francisco. The forest at night is a sketchy place.

01:54:47 Speaker_00
It really reminds you of just how insignificant we are and how vulnerable we are without our man-made objects to defend ourselves. And in the context of that, a bear for me was terrifying, actually.

01:54:59 Speaker_00
I just thought they were creatures I'd seen on nature programs. The idea that there was something out there that viewed me as food, that if you live in England, we don't have that. We simply don't. We don't have mountain lions.

01:55:10 Speaker_00
I'm not going to get eaten by a badger. I think the largest carnivore in the UK is probably a fox or a badger. We don't have these things that you have. Difficult for you to understand. There's nothing that views me as a food source.

01:55:21 Speaker_02
California killed all the bears, all the grizzlies. They used to have, well the California state flag is a grizzly bear. And 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 Speaker_02
And there's a place in California called Leveque, there's a town called Leveque that was named after, I believe his name was Stephen Leveque. He was the last man to get killed by a brown bear in California before they eradicated them.

01:55:50 Speaker_02
So this is in the 1800s, I guess. So they just started killing them all. They just killed them. Fuck these things. They're killing everybody. Yeah. Let's just kill them. You can sort of see why. Oh, yeah.

01:55:59 Speaker_02
But a polar bear is even more madness again, isn't it? Oh, yeah. Have you ever seen that BBC show where they put the guy in the glass cube? Oh, my God.

01:56:08 Speaker_00
I mean, what was going on there?

01:56:11 Speaker_02
It is so terrifying. The thing is just smelling meat inside that cube and trying to get through it to get to him. It's biting it and you see its massive jaws and they don't eat anything but meat. Yeah. So they're the most dangerous of all polar bears.

01:56:27 Speaker_02
And ironically, they're the ones that we make seem to be the cutest. Fuck that thing. How do you know that's gonna work, by the way? Did you try that out on a bear? It looks like a shit X-Wing fighter, doesn't it, from the inside?

01:56:39 Speaker_02
And this bear just gets to it. It's like, oh, there's meat in there. How do I get to that meat? And we make those things out to be our friends. You know, that's the, you know, what would you do for a Klondike bar?

01:56:52 Speaker_02
You know, they sell Coca-Cola, they sell Klondike bars, and this bear is just a fucking super predator.

01:57:01 Speaker_00
Baloo, Baloo was a bear. What's Baloo? Baloo, Jungle Book. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The friendliest, it's amazing, isn't it, that we anthropomorphize bears. Yeah. More than just about any other creature. Yogi, Yogi. Paddington bear. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:57:16 Speaker_00
Friendly, cuddly. I think because they do look quite appealing. And they are dog-like, aren't they? They're slightly dog-like. Snout. Sure. Shape of head. Well, we put hats on them and shit.

01:57:28 Speaker_02
Only you could prevent forest fires. And they want to eat you. Yeah, they want to eat you. They want to eat anything that's slow. I mean, that's what they're there for. They're nature's cleanup crew.

01:57:38 Speaker_00
A friend of mine walked to the North Pole for some reason. I don't know why. And he had a lot of training before. And this is a long time ago. But the polar bear training that he talked about was quite

01:57:52 Speaker_00
difficult to absorb really effectively it was that there was no there was no gun that you could carry on an expedition like that if you're just on your own or with three other people with sleds right nothing you carry that you could immediately produce that would stop a polar bear an adult polar bear so the best thing they had was a is a short shotgun

01:58:10 Speaker_00
that had a solid bolt, just a solid bolt in it. And if you could get that one thing off, you could stop it. But there's no gauge of shotgun that was gonna stop one of these things, it was coming at you.

01:58:20 Speaker_00
So they carried this thing, they carried this thing that had a solid bolt in it, that's all he had. I don't know much about guns, but that's what they said they were given.

01:58:29 Speaker_02
There's some pistols that you can, effectively unload into a bear and stop them. A .50 cal would stop it, would it? Yeah, well sure, .50 cal. I don't think they have a .50 cal pistol, but they have 40, you know, .40 magnums, .44 magnums.

01:58:42 Speaker_00
Would that stop a bear?

01:58:43 Speaker_02
You'd have to shoot it multiple times. Yeah, not one. And, you know, if you have a .38 or a 9mm, good luck. Good luck. It'll bounce right off its head. Their heads are so thick.

01:58:59 Speaker_02
You could literally shoot it in the forehead and it'd probably bounce off its forehead. I mean, they bite each other. You've seen them go to war with each other when they bite each other.

01:59:08 Speaker_02
They 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. Okay, that versus a big gorilla? That's a good question.

01:59:21 Speaker_02
We've had that question many times. What is it? I think the gorilla is at a severe disadvantage because it doesn't really kill anything. Yeah.

01:59:29 Speaker_02
So 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. Whereas the bear, all it does is run around killing things. That's all it does.

01:59:41 Speaker_02
Kills things and eats dead things. And that's what it wants to do. I got my money on the bear.

01:59:47 Speaker_00
I love it, I love it. What I know about is cars, and I'm here asking questions about bears.

01:59:52 Speaker_02
Well, they're fascinating. They are. It's a fascinating part of our world, and anthropomorphizing is a really fascinating aspect of it. And I think in America it happened with Teddy Roosevelt, with the teddy bear.

02:00:03 Speaker_02
Think that's the beginning of the end and then Disney movies were a huge problem Disney movies are a huge problem because all the bears are your friend They all talk to everybody and hey and say why would you kill the bear like that is a giant forest dog?

02:00:16 Speaker_02
That's an evil animal that it doesn't give a fuck about you or your kids. It'll pull you out of your tent It'll eat you 100% you and they're wonderful and they're beautiful.

02:00:26 Speaker_02
We should definitely keep a healthy population of them I'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.

02:00:38 Speaker_00
Yeah. As a parent, you realize it as well. Particularly in the UK, we don't have dangerous species of animals like that. But we do, through anthropomorphizing them in films and cartoons, we make things cute that might not be cute. Sure.

02:00:57 Speaker_00
We have a real urban fox population in the UK. And they actually started in my hometown of Bristol.

02:01:05 Speaker_00
The fox is a clever creature, and 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. And these nighttime foxes, they were very clever.

02:01:16 Speaker_00
No one really knew they were there. The BBC made a fantastic documentary, I think, again, Attenborough in the early 80s about urban foxes. And they've spread throughout the UK.

02:01:25 Speaker_00
And the fox is this, you know, in most cartoons, it's a lovely, cuddly thing with a bushy tail. It's a beautiful color. But they're predators. They're a real problem for farmers. And they eat a lot of poultry. I'm not even going into fox hunting.

02:01:40 Speaker_00
That's not my world. But there's been a few stories recently of foxes going into people's houses and attacking babies and stuff like that.

02:01:51 Speaker_00
And then you see on Instagram people feeding the foxes in their back gardens, and you think, that's not a domesticated animal. Yeah, you can't do that. You've got to decide one or the other.

02:02:02 Speaker_02
Also, 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 Speaker_02
If you do it too often, if you provide them with food every day, you're gonna fuck them up.

02:02:17 Speaker_00
I'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.

02:02:23 Speaker_00
And 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. Because all the seagulls just dive bomb people. Wow.

02:02:36 Speaker_00
It's like that scene in that Jurassic Park film where the pterodactyls are coming down. Have you ever seen a seagull eat a rat?

02:02:42 Speaker_02
Yeah, whole. Whole. Just throw it down.

02:02:46 Speaker_00
They'll do it to pigeons. They'll do it to everything they can catch. There's a wonderful Instagram clip. I'm admitting too much of my search history here. I think it's a cormorant just being given like a black oily thing, just being given fish.

02:03:00 Speaker_00
And it eats like five. Yeah, I've seen that. You think that the volume of fish you've eaten there is greater than the mass of your body. There's no way that I didn't think you could eat that.

02:03:10 Speaker_02
No, there's so many videos of like different birds throwing down a whole large mouth bass and it's like, how is it even getting in your mouth?

02:03:18 Speaker_02
It doesn't, they have these skinny little necks and they swell up and they have the fins popping out of the tails, popping out of their mouth. Yeah, they're pretty extraordinary creatures, and they're essentially dinosaurs.

02:03:30 Speaker_00
And actually, to come back to the content discussion, YouTube, whatever it is, I do love the fact it's all out there. I love the fact it's being recorded. I had never seen this stuff. I've got a particular phobia, and it is a phobia. I hate crabs.

02:03:45 Speaker_00
And I'm not talking about the STD style. I'm talking about crustacean. Really? Why? I think they're horrid to look at. I won't eat them. I'll eat all other seafood, but I won't eat a crab. You'll eat lobster? Yep. How weird is that?

02:04:03 Speaker_00
Insight into the adult brain. I hate the crab. I also think it's a totally unnecessary looking creature. They're so delicious though. You love them. Everyone I know loves them. My children adore them.

02:04:14 Speaker_00
But if there's a big brown crab on a plate, I can't even sit in a room with it. Also, this is a good example, right in the pantheon in the pantheon of hateful aesthetics, right, right? You have a sketch you have an exoskeleton.

02:04:31 Speaker_00
So you so you're inside out This thing or someone or something has decided that's going to be inside out. So it has a shell to protect its soft, cuddly, and as you described, delicious innards. Why would you make that exoskeleton hairy?

02:04:45 Speaker_00
That's unnecessary. It's also disgusting. This thing has hairs growing out of a shell. What? That's the worst aesthetic of anything.

02:04:52 Speaker_02
Well, very lucky they're small. It'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.

02:05:01 Speaker_00
And they'll grow another claw. That's from a film, that's not real. No, it's real. No, it shouldn't be allowed. In other words, it should be fiction.

02:05:08 Speaker_02
Right. That's from a horror movie.

02:05:10 Speaker_00
Type in coconut crab.

02:05:12 Speaker_02
Oh yeah, those are crazy. They're huge.

02:05:13 Speaker_00
Like anything that you're scared of, you're fascinated by it. Someone did some research into the claw bite force of these things, and they were absolutely shocked at the torque and power they could generate.

02:05:26 Speaker_02
Look at that guy holding one. You get a perspective.

02:05:29 Speaker_00
What is that?

02:05:29 Speaker_02
The size of that thing. What is that?

02:05:32 Speaker_00
Come on, that's unnecessary, isn't it? So type in claw strength of coconut crab and you will be absolutely horrified at what they found. Wow.

02:05:44 Speaker_02
Look at the size of that thing. They are freakish. Where do they live? They live on a couple of islands. 3,300 Newtons. That's so nuts. That could take your hand off. Oh, yeah. Wow.

02:06:06 Speaker_02
The bite of... It's stronger than the bite of most land animals, including leopards, bears, and wild dogs. And it looks like something from a horror movie. Do you know there's some speculation that that's what the fate of Amelia Earhart was? Yes.

02:06:22 Speaker_02
So when I read that, I just... Yeah. That she crashed, got on this island, and the coconut crabs ate her.

02:06:29 Speaker_00
That's insane.

02:06:31 Speaker_02
I mean luckily, I think they clamp slowly. Yeah, but more than a leopard. What the fuck, man? So what is that thing biting through?

02:06:38 Speaker_00
Is that metal? Oh, they're just horrendous. There'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.

02:06:52 Speaker_00
I find that thoroughly addictive. But crustacea like that, that's my ultimate nightmare.

02:06:57 Speaker_02
It's a hard life. It's a hard life for them, you know? Yeah. And you can't make them pets.

02:07:03 Speaker_00
No.

02:07:04 Speaker_02
That's how they're wired.

02:07:06 Speaker_00
But the stats of that, so stronger than a leopard bite.

02:07:09 Speaker_02
That's so bizarre. I would have never imagined that. I would have never guessed.

02:07:13 Speaker_00
No. And I stay up at night worrying about this sometimes. There's something called the Japanese with a giant spider crab. So what I used to go on holiday as a kid was this lovely old sort of Victorian style hotel in Cornwall.

02:07:25 Speaker_00
It was run a bit like Forty Towers. In fact it was like Forty Towers. Had the guy that run it that was the curious guy that made lots of jokes that people found a bit rude. But he was wonderful.

02:07:33 Speaker_00
And they only had about three magazines in their very smelly lounge area where all the old people would sit. And one of them was a National Geographic magazine from about 1975. But I'd always sit and read when my parents were doing other stuff.

02:07:46 Speaker_00
And it had an article about Japanese giants, these giant spider crabs. And there was just one picture of one in a tank with its legs like seven feet apart or something. Well, let me see this thing. And it stayed with me. It stayed with me. For years.

02:08:02 Speaker_00
I was reading about these crabs.

02:08:04 Speaker_04
I got locked into the crabs. Giant spider crab.

02:08:07 Speaker_02
OK, spider crab. Japanese spider crab.

02:08:09 Speaker_00
That's where these are from, too. Giant spider crab.

02:08:11 Speaker_02
Oh, the coconut crabs are from Japan as well?

02:08:13 Speaker_00
Giant spider crab. Can't believe I'm sharing all this. Crabs are a huge problem for me. They really are. My children know. Look at this. What's that? Wow.

02:08:28 Speaker_02
Are those things, do they taste good? Look at that. Are the coconut crabs delicious? I don't think, I've never heard of anyone eating a coconut crab. I wonder why. Jesus Christ, that's insane. That's so big.

02:08:42 Speaker_02
I had no idea that there was a crab that's longer than a human being. Absolutely disgraceful thing. Can you eat a Japanese spider crab? Oh, I think you do. It looks like they got them on ice.

02:08:53 Speaker_02
So it looks like preparing a Japanese spider crab is no easy task. You got to find a big pot. Yeah, right. You got to break it up, I guess. Wow. Dom, what about find out about the coconut crab? Can you eat coconut crabs? I might want to eat one.

02:09:12 Speaker_02
I'm gonna send you a picture if I get one.

02:09:14 Speaker_00
Oh I'll I'll be Glad to see that. It's no longer moving. I just I just cannot get my head. Can you eat them?

02:09:23 Speaker_02
I want yes, it says above that above that an aphrodisiac. Oh, but look it says Yes, coconut crabs are eaten as a delicacy on some islands and are considered an aphrodisiac in other places.

02:09:34 Speaker_02
Some say they're tasty and don't need any extra seasoning or cooking and can be eaten after boiling for about 10 to 15 minutes. However, the species is threatened by intensive hunting. Aw, poor babies. They ate Amelia Earhart.

02:09:47 Speaker_02
Whose fucking side are you on?

02:09:49 Speaker_04
I was reading, they don't have shells. That's why their claws are like their protection. Oh. And they mostly, on one island, only eat other crabs. Oh, wow, they're cannibals? Yeah. Like they eat red crabs, I guess?

02:10:01 Speaker_00
Oh, they eat other crab. Well, we mostly eat other animals, and we're animals. Deary me. Well, I've shared too much there. So that's my ultimate fear. Crabs.

02:10:09 Speaker_00
I can remember several times we'd be asked on Top Gear when we were going away, you know, are you OK with everything? And I'd be thinking, I'll do anything. I'll eat my own feces. But if there's crabs there, I've got problems.

02:10:22 Speaker_00
And only once did we go somewhere where there was, or we had to go there, and we were just in Cuba.

02:10:27 Speaker_00
filming the opening for this film and we were in Bay of Pigs so we're actually there we were right there with a with a Maserati and an old Camaro filming this intro to a film totally random. What is it like being in Cuba?

02:10:42 Speaker_00
I'll give you that in a minute. I was so punch drunk with just travel and filming that I'm working so hard. You'd almost just wake up and go, it's another mad place. We're in Kazakhstan today. I was like, okay, we'll get on with it.

02:10:56 Speaker_00
And looking back, I was in Kazakhstan for 10 days with Matt LeBlanc from Friends. That's a mad thing to do. That's pretty mad. But at the time, it was just like work. Anyhow, so Bay of Pigs, and I looked at my phone, I thought, This is the Bay of Pigs.

02:11:10 Speaker_00
Fucking hell. You know, this is where, you know, this is where it all went a bit wrong for America. This is historically quite a significant place. It could have been a real problem. Yeah. Anyhow. And I look, I'm looking around and there's lots going on.

02:11:22 Speaker_00
And I look left, I'm filming the opening piece to camera, which was typically bad for me. But the reason why it was really bad was I looked left, there was a crab down there shuffling around. And I'm like, I need that, gone.

02:11:33 Speaker_00
But I can't admit to people that that big is worrying me. That's really worrying me. I'm thinking that's going to crawl up my leg. That's something totally irrational.

02:11:42 Speaker_00
I think we all have a creature, maybe, a bogeyman, or a bogeywoman, whatever it is, that maybe we fear. Do you have one at all?

02:11:49 Speaker_02
No, but I think where that comes from, I have a feeling it's genetic memory. I think that's where aphidiophobia comes from, and arachnophobia, fear of snakes and spiders. I think, because some people, we've experienced that on Fear Factor as well.

02:12:02 Speaker_02
Some people have a real, it seems like a genetic, irrational fear of certain things. And I really feel like that is some memory from either an ancestor getting bit or seeing someone get bit and die. I think there's something to that.

02:12:19 Speaker_02
There's a reason why it exists in some people and not in others.

02:12:23 Speaker_00
Because it can't be completely irrational, can it?

02:12:26 Speaker_02
Right. No, I think it's completely a genetic memory. That's my number one guess. Cuba was fascinating because I suppose as an American citizen you can't go there, can you? Can you go there now? I think you used to be able to go there.

02:12:39 Speaker_02
I think during the Obama administration they made it so you can go there. It's an amazing place because it's one of the few Which is kind of crazy, your government can tell you can't go somewhere, like fine.

02:12:50 Speaker_00
Yes, and someone that's so close to you as well. Exactly, you can go there on a rowboat. It's a museum, is what it is. It's a fully functioning museum. For automobiles. For life in many ways.

02:13:03 Speaker_00
It's not something that's been allowed to develop the way that a country should have developed over the last 40, 50 years. So you have a society that has limited technology, and has evolved the way that it does.

02:13:17 Speaker_00
And then you see how resourceful human beings can be. With reference to the automobile, yes, it's fascinating because there's really, it's a strange mashup of weird Soviet intervention and Americana from the 50s and, well, up to 50s.

02:13:33 Speaker_00
So they've kept these American cars going that should have died. They've also got a whole load of Soviet era Ladas that came in when the Russians wanted to help them out. And also, that's where their power stations come from.

02:13:47 Speaker_00
Their 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. I mean, it's an amazing thing. I couldn't believe it.

02:13:59 Speaker_00
It's sort of slightly hidden from all the tourists. It's yes, it's a it's a country that hasn't been allowed to develop at the same speed as the rest of the world and it's 100 miles from the coast of the US or something. I mean, it's 90 is it?

02:14:16 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's amazing It's a it's a well worth visiting if you can go just to see it Just show it just shows you what happens when human beings act absurdly. Did you feel safe over there?

02:14:26 Speaker_02
I

02:14:26 Speaker_00
Totally yeah, totally safe. I had us I had I In many ways I loved it in many ways. I wouldn't want to go again It's one of those curious places where I thought I've seen the right side of it if I scratched too deeply Am I going to see something?

02:14:40 Speaker_00
I don't want to see right. Maybe that was it. I

02:14:43 Speaker_02
Well, you certainly will. I mean, there's a reason why people are escaping there.

02:14:46 Speaker_00
Yeah, of course.

02:14:46 Speaker_02
They're trapped.

02:14:47 Speaker_00
Yeah.

02:14:48 Speaker_02
They're trapped in a communist dictatorship.

02:14:49 Speaker_00
Yeah.

02:14:50 Speaker_02
It's not good.

02:14:51 Speaker_00
Yeah. But as a tourist, you obviously presented something completely contorted, aren't you? That's what happens when you're making a TV show.

02:14:58 Speaker_02
It's also a communist dictatorship that's in a very unusual predicament because they're not allowed to trade, right? So China is a communist dictatorship, but we buy everything from China.

02:15:10 Speaker_02
They're arguably worse than Cuba, but we're not allowed to trade with Cuba because some shit that happened in the 60s.

02:15:15 Speaker_00
But Cuba can sell stuff to other countries other than America. We're full of their cigars and their rum.

02:15:21 Speaker_02
But not America. I 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. I'm going to tell you a thing I did that was illegal. Used to get them from England.

02:15:32 Speaker_02
Yeah, and I used to get Cuban cigars I had a friend who lived in England and he would send me Cuban cigars and then later he would send me the labels So he would he would send me the cigars with no labels Yeah like in a like 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 Speaker_00
The pollution in Havana was the worst I've ever experienced of a city. I think when the wind changed, that power station just bloomed straight over.

02:16:01 Speaker_02
Well, there's a place, was it in Indiana, where there's three coal-fired power plants? And if you go outside, you can run your finger over someone's windshield and you have black coal dust on your finger.

02:16:13 Speaker_02
And 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 Speaker_00
We 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 Speaker_00
So we went there and Rory was there as well and we ended up at Baikonur, which is the Cosmodrome. where the Russian space program is based. And it's an incredible area. I mean, it's just mind-bendingly brilliant.

02:16:45 Speaker_00
The vastness of that part of the world, the Soviet Union, we think the United States of America is big. The Soviet Union was on a scale that you cannot comprehend.

02:16:54 Speaker_00
Kazakhstan was just a small bolt-on to Russia, but in itself has, I think, the fourth longest border of any country with Russia. It's enormous.

02:17:03 Speaker_00
And this area called Baikonur, the way that the Russians worked was once they'd used the launch site, they'd just go somewhere else. Because it was so big, they'd just abandon that one, move on to another one.

02:17:13 Speaker_00
It's a bit like rabbit warrens, you know, just move on. And they plotted all of it in a map. Anyhow, we went there and we watched, well, when we got close, you were aware of the amount of heavy industry.

02:17:23 Speaker_00
It was just, the place was, it was the first place I'd been to where I thought, I'm not sure I should be breathing this. It just felt like you were breathing in stuff that was hurting you.

02:17:31 Speaker_00
I'd never, I've been to, you know, Indian cities where there's heavy pollution, but that's just sort of diesel and petrol fumes. There was something else there, you know, you're like going, what is that?

02:17:42 Speaker_00
But they, it culminated with us watching a Soyuz rocket take off. And they let us get much closer to film it than you would normally be allowed to be. And I've never watched a rocket take off before.

02:17:54 Speaker_00
I haven't been to Cape Canaveral or anywhere in the US. It was one of the most awe-inspiring things I've ever seen. Sounds like such a cliche. But watching a vehicle that has enough power to leave our atmosphere,

02:18:06 Speaker_00
is something I'd advise anyone to do if they have the chance. There's a sort of ripping sound in the air that people who have seen it will understand. It does feel like just the power of this thing is shredding the atmosphere around you.

02:18:22 Speaker_00
And it hits you in the solar plexus. You have no control over this sort of rattling in your chest. And I think we were less than a kilometer away from where it went off. It was absolutely sensational to witness. Wow. Just power. Raw power. Wow.

02:18:38 Speaker_00
And the idea that Mr. Musk has got something that's more powerful than the Saturn V about to take off, that fascinates me. All of that sort of thing. We talk about power and engines. Your Raptor's got a bit of grunt.

02:18:50 Speaker_00
But these things, they just rattle you. But the smell afterwards is interesting.

02:18:57 Speaker_02
Oh, it's gotta be horrible. Yes, like every time they launch I mean how many cars does that account for? You think about like the amount of pollution that's put out amount of carbon that's put out by the burning rockets

02:19:09 Speaker_00
I can't even begin to quantify it. 100,000 cars? What are they burning as well? What's in there? What's in there?

02:19:17 Speaker_00
Talking 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.

02:19:26 Speaker_00
Because there was lots of technology left over from the Second World War that the Germans had for jet engines that they had pioneered.

02:19:35 Speaker_00
that had weird lubricants in them that allowed them to run at very high temperatures or have properties that normal fuel didn't have. And they would use it for qualifying, particularly in Formula One. And the drivers after one lap were gone.

02:19:48 Speaker_00
They were just spent. There was also great stories about the fact that they sometimes have a sort of area outside the Formula One garage. It wasn't as developed as a sport then, but they still had sponsors and guests.

02:19:59 Speaker_00
And one particular team had, you know, all the trees they put outside just died in an afternoon. Because this fuel was so obnoxious.

02:20:07 Speaker_00
And 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.

02:20:23 Speaker_00
But it gave them an extra 100 horsepower for that lap.

02:20:25 Speaker_02
Well, how about leaded gasoline? Leaded 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. And they think that it has dropped people's IQ by a measurable amount.

02:20:41 Speaker_02
People that grew up around leaded gasoline, which is me, during that time, we are dumber because of leaded gasoline. The pipes in our homes 150 years ago were made of lead, lead pipes.

02:20:57 Speaker_02
Well, my friend Shane Gillis is in a hilarious bit about George Washington, and George Washington had lead dentures. So he had this lead thing where these fake teeth were. So he had like a lead in his mouth. So he's getting lead poisoning all day long.

02:21:13 Speaker_00
I have a I have somewhere in my house, something I bought from the internet, which is Boots chemists, so our chemists, your CVS, we have Boots, which is our standard chemist. It's a logo of healthcare, of stuff that's good for you.

02:21:28 Speaker_00
Boots used to sell cigarettes for coughs. Duh! I've got some, I've got a tin somewhere. It's brilliant. And it shows you how you should smoke them to get rid of your cough. Oh boy. So I think- That wasn't that long ago.

02:21:44 Speaker_00
No, that's probably after the Second World- No, before the Second World War. Crazy. I would have thought so.

02:21:50 Speaker_02
A hundred years ago, they thought cigarettes were good for coughs.

02:21:52 Speaker_04
Of course they do.

02:21:54 Speaker_00
But then someone-

02:21:56 Speaker_04
Something like it to see if I'd find the art the the dad and it AI says that menthol cigarettes are flavored which to help with coughs. Oh Come on. This is it can the menthol can decrease the cough reflex which can help with coughs heard of that.

02:22:11 Speaker_02
Oh By reducing airway pain and irritation, menthol can reduce the pain and irritation caused by cigarette smoke. Decreasing the cough reflex, menthol triggers cold, sensitive nerves in the skin, which can decrease the cough reflex.

02:22:23 Speaker_02
Soothing a dry throat, menthol can soothe the dry throat feeling. That's funny that AI is willing to say something that's very un-PC.

02:22:31 Speaker_04
You think the AI fucked up here? Yeah.

02:22:32 Speaker_02
Because I've never heard that. Well, it's probably true. It's terrible for you.

02:22:36 Speaker_04
Yeah, so however smoking can make you cough more. Duh.

02:22:38 Speaker_02
Interesting.

02:22:41 Speaker_00
Yeah. Can't you take menthol without it being in the format of a cigarette?

02:22:44 Speaker_04
I'm sure. Yeah, it's a cough drop, I think.

02:22:47 Speaker_00
Yeah. But what we've learned about metallurgy is fascinating. And it does mean that that's why we have to apply that to what we currently witness in the motor car and the automobile industry.

02:23:02 Speaker_00
There's technology out there that will change something at some point. We just don't know what it is yet. It'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 Speaker_00
And I think maybe that's what I get frustrated by is that you can't wait for that unprecedented change to come.

02:23:19 Speaker_00
necessarily, 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? It's going to happen. Scientists are clever. They have big foreheads for a reason.

02:23:30 Speaker_00
At the moment, the argument is where there's not enough cobalt or where you get the lithium from. That's a slightly speechless argument because I think it won't always be like that.

02:23:38 Speaker_00
Someone will invent something that means that we won't need the cobalt and the lithium.

02:23:42 Speaker_02
Well, some guy invented a water-powered car a long time ago and he was murdered. Do you know that story? It's one of the great conspiracy theories that he yelled, he met with some people, you know, that wanted to talk to him about this design.

02:23:56 Speaker_02
And then he yelled, they poisoned me and he ran outside and died. Yeah. And then nobody ever heard about the water powered car ever again. After that. So what is all that? I don't know. Focus on all that shit.

02:24:10 Speaker_02
So the mysterious death of Stanley Meyer and his water-powered car. It's a wonderful conspiracy theory. I haven't looked into it enough to know how much of it is true. It looks like a Tamiya model underneath. Look at it. It looks like the wild one.

02:24:24 Speaker_02
So this guy developed this water-powered car that had incredible mileage.

02:24:30 Speaker_00
Interesting messaging on the side of the vehicle.

02:24:32 Speaker_02
Yeah. Jesus Christ, a lady? Jesus Christ is Lord. Oh, okay. It's cursive Stanley did Stanley Meyer die because he knew how to turn water into fuel This is a British newspaper.

02:24:50 Speaker_00
Is it? The Express. Hmm. When was this go back?

02:24:54 Speaker_04
I can't remember. This thing is ridiculous.

02:24:57 Speaker_02
What kind of shit website is this?

02:24:59 Speaker_04
It's some really bad one.

02:25:00 Speaker_02
See if there's another article. I'm sure there's other articles about the car that ran on water where it happened happened and outside of in Columbus. Oh, okay. City.

02:25:10 Speaker_02
So his bizarre death at age 57 ended work that, if proved valid, scroll up, could have ended reliance on fossil fuels.

02:25:18 Speaker_02
People who knew him said his work drew worldwide attention, mysterious visitors from overseas, governments buying, and lucrative buyout offers. I know that. He was offered money to sell. I think the Y-Files did an episode on this.

02:25:30 Speaker_02
The Myers death was laced with all sorts of story and conspiracy, cloak and dagger stories, gross city police, Lieutenant Steve Robinette. Lead detective on the case. I told them the stand had died and they never said a word.

02:25:44 Speaker_02
He recalled absolutely nothing No condolences, no questions But how did it run on water? I don't know

02:25:54 Speaker_02
Stephen Myers featured in numerous internet sites 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. It's a fuel cell.

02:26:07 Speaker_02
Okay, hmm He was ignored called a fraud and died without his hometown even remembering him with so much as a plaque hmm, but I have to believe that

02:26:22 Speaker_00
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 Speaker_02
Yeah, right. Especially over exhaust, right? It says, the basis for Myers' research, electrolysis, is taught in middle school science labs. Electricity flows through water, cracking the molecules and filling test tubes with oxygen and hydrogen bubbles.

02:26:44 Speaker_02
A match is lighted, the volatile gases explode and prove that water is separated into its components. Meyer said his invention did so by using much less electricity than physicists say is possible.

02:26:57 Speaker_02
Videos show his contraption turning water into a frothy mix within seconds. It takes so much energy to separate H2 from the O, said Ohio State University professor emeritus Neville Rea.

02:27:10 Speaker_02
Physicist 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 Speaker_02
Basically, 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

02:27:39 Speaker_02
So who knows but when he said the Lord sent me, okay now it gets odd His first few words were the Lord sent me here to this home.

02:27:50 Speaker_02
I'd like to use your home as an experiment Okay, hold on Meyers creativity seemed to peak when he met Charles and Valerie Hughes truck drivers who lived in the Jackson Township Julia Hughes the youngest of the seven children was five years old when Meyer rang the doorbell of her home on Marlane Drive

02:28:09 Speaker_02
His first few words were the Lord sent me here to this home.

02:28:12 Speaker_02
I'd like to use your home as an experiment She said maybe it was just a two-story garage shop or the privacy of towering oak and sycamore trees Julia isn't sure what Meyer saw there, but she knew her parents didn't have room for a struggling inventor Yet after visiting with the family for several hours Meyer stayed the night and then the next few years in the late 1970s in return Meyer built the family a solar silo designed to both heat and cool the home

02:28:38 Speaker_02
The structure required thousands of clear resin light guides, a crude form of fiber optics which Meyer baked and molded in the family kitchen. Jesus. Julia Hughes recalled the chemical stench.

02:28:51 Speaker_02
The system was supposed to channel the sun's rays into the tower base to heat water and generate electricity for an air conditioner. Despite extensive efforts that included re-plumbing the house, the invention never worked.

02:29:02 Speaker_02
Oh, so he might have been a kook.

02:29:04 Speaker_00
Hard to tell. But I'll tell you what, you love a conspiracy theory. Ooh, I love them. I know you do. I'm less, I'm seduced by some.

02:29:13 Speaker_03
Yeah.

02:29:15 Speaker_00
But I'm probably less into them than you are. I will say this, the more you delve into the relationship between business and science and the way that our lives run, it's very difficult not

02:29:31 Speaker_00
to assume that many ideas are quashed because they're not helpful for certain businesses. Unquestionable. And I think the automotive industry is and has been at the forefront of that. Well, the oil business.

02:29:43 Speaker_04
Just the oil business in general. Speaking 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 Speaker_02
Yeah, the Arabs wanted to offer me $250 million to stop today. You and this lovely family can live in peace and prosperity the rest of your days. Meijer told them this.

02:30:05 Speaker_02
The army officials, meanwhile, had questioned Meijer about what foreigners wanted, thinking that a deal might have been struck.

02:30:12 Speaker_02
Charlie recalled Meijer telling the family, Meijer discussed the offer in the Clark documentary, many times over the last decade have been offered enormous amounts of money.

02:30:21 Speaker_02
simply to sell out or to sit on it, the Arabs have offered me a total of a billion dollars total pay simply to sit on it and do nothing with it. Hmm.

02:30:34 Speaker_00
I'll tell you why. Sure. An event that happened here that did shake my... I'm less cynical probably. I'm less likely to be as interested in conspiracy theories, maybe because I lack your imagination.

02:30:51 Speaker_00
I don't know what it is, but maybe I'm terrified of the fact that I'm being taken for a ride in too many areas of my life.

02:30:58 Speaker_00
but dieselgate the volkswagen thing that happened in this country really shook me because i didn't think something could have happened on that scale explain it to people because it's pretty crazy well effectively um volkswagen were

02:31:14 Speaker_00
able to put software into their vehicles that allowed them to cheat in emissions tests. And a load of vehicles that had stated emissions qualities didn't have them when they were not on the test rig.

02:31:30 Speaker_00
And actually, that process had been going on in many different ways for most motor cars forever. But 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 Speaker_00
But if you have an Audi RS4 from 2007 and you start the engine up, it idles in an odd way. The car feels very aggressive for the first 30 seconds that you start it. That's because there's an air pump.

02:31:54 Speaker_00
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 Speaker_00
This had been going on for a long time, but the scale of it was, I suppose, sort of an industrial subterfuge that I didn't think it could happen. Right.

02:32:15 Speaker_02
Especially with a large corporation like Volkswagen.

02:32:17 Speaker_00
I know, that did shake me, because I'm a flag bearer for my industry. I'm proud to be part of the wider car industry. And I didn't think that could happen. And it wasn't just a bit of naughtiness, it was lies. And how many people knew about it?

02:32:38 Speaker_00
One has to assume quite a few.

02:32:40 Speaker_02
Yeah, you'd assume.

02:32:41 Speaker_00
But I think there was a moral complication to it, because they were still making very clever, really quite clean vehicles. They weren't trying to cover up something absolutely hideous. They were in the margins. But it was still wrong.

02:33:01 Speaker_00
It was morally completely wrong. And once they got away with it, they were stuck with it. They couldn't suddenly sort of backtrack on it. And I think it shook my confidence in those large corporations.

02:33:16 Speaker_00
I thought they were being more honest with us and probably made me more likely to believe conspiracy theories afterwards. So I thought, well, if they're capable of that, what else are they doing?

02:33:25 Speaker_02
Conspiracy theories are fascinating because some of them are bullshit and some of them are real and it's hard to figure out What's what yeah, you know, there's some crazy ones like the earth is flat and then there's some ones like the CIA might have killed JFK

02:33:38 Speaker_02
And you're like, ooh, they might have.

02:33:42 Speaker_00
They might have. It makes very good listening. I love listening to you talk about it. Oh, they're fascinating. But I suppose I tend to sit a bit further back. I'd like to hear other people talk about them.

02:33:51 Speaker_00
But 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? And how bad was it?

02:34:01 Speaker_02
And how many of them did they get away with? Yeah. For everyone that gets caught. It's not like they catch every conspiracy.

02:34:08 Speaker_00
Right.

02:34:08 Speaker_02
There's no way.

02:34:09 Speaker_00
No.

02:34:09 Speaker_02
No. Some of them sneak through and manage to be effective. Do 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 Speaker_02
Winning this court battle was something like one half of one percent. This is Mike Lynch is it?

02:34:32 Speaker_02
Yeah the guy who died on the boat and 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 waterspout and sinks his yacht and

02:34:47 Speaker_00
I was discussing this over a few glasses of wine with some friends. It's got Rogan written all over it. It's perfect for you. I'm not going to pass any comment.

02:34:57 Speaker_00
I'm going to be a soft cock again, but I'm going to say that I read it and my eyes, well, my eyebrows raised. I thought, that seems like a coincidence.

02:35:06 Speaker_02
Didn't the lawyer die as well?

02:35:10 Speaker_00
Who else died? The co-defendant was hit by a car. In Cambridge, I think. One incident was a cycling incident in the UK. Was it a hit and run? No, the person that hit the cyclist, I think, they have got. But they were asking for information around it.

02:35:28 Speaker_02
Did the person that hit the cyclist have any connection to anybody?

02:35:33 Speaker_00
I don't know. Was it suspicious? I just read it and just thought, like you, I'm like, oh my God.

02:35:39 Speaker_02
Billionaire autonomy co-founder Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain's careers were intertwined for years in a fraud trial Then they died on the same day miles apart Yeah, I Think I suppose the difficulty I have with that is I

02:35:58 Speaker_00
That's a tragedy.

02:36:00 Speaker_02
They fucked over some billionaires. They fucked over some very, very powerful people.

02:36:05 Speaker_00
It was Hewlett-Packard. They sold autonomy to Hewlett-Packard. He was extradited to the US. I don't know. It's not my world.

02:36:18 Speaker_00
I suppose the conspiracy theory thing is fascinating, but then when it's in the context of people losing their lives like that, I'm like, do I want to comment? Because it's so awful what happened.

02:36:28 Speaker_00
And also, going down in a boat was right up there for me. Jesus Christ. Also a freak water spout? Have you seen the size of this boat? It's extraordinary. It's like 300 feet long.

02:36:40 Speaker_02
Yeah.

02:36:41 Speaker_00
How?

02:36:42 Speaker_02
How did it sink? What happened?

02:36:44 Speaker_00
I know. You love it, don't you? Love it. You absolutely love it, don't you? Love it. Yeah.

02:36:47 Speaker_02
Because I gotta think that there's people in this world that have the ability to do certain things to certain people that fuck them over. I think you're right. Yeah. And that seems like that would qualify.

02:37:01 Speaker_02
We're talking about they got ripped off by billions of dollars and then somehow or another this guy gets off and then dies right away. Yeah. And dies in the weirdest of ways, a freak water spout.

02:37:16 Speaker_02
How many people die every year in freak water spouts on 300 foot yachts?

02:37:22 Speaker_00
I'm doing my uncomfortable face. It's so out there. It's so out there. Yeah. Yeah. It really is. Yeah. And I'll bring it back to something more mundane.

02:37:33 Speaker_00
There were quite a few things that happened in Formula One, sport that I follow the most closely probably. in the 90s and noughties, that looking back, you think there must have been someone at a button that could make things happen.

02:37:46 Speaker_00
Because it was so beyond a coincidence. And I never stopped to think of the implications of that thought. But if someone could do that in a sport, they can do it in the rest of your life.

02:37:56 Speaker_02
And they've always rigged sports. I mean, people have been rigging sports since the beginning of sports betting. But the sport that you're involved with, can you rig that? Oh, yes. People have rigged it. People have gotten in trouble for rigging it. Yeah.

02:38:09 Speaker_02
Certain fighters may have an injury. There's a controversy about a certain trainer that was involved in betting in an online discord

02:38:20 Speaker_02
Server and they would talk about bets and they'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 falls down gets beat up loses by TKO in the first round blows his knee out his knee apparently already been fucked and

02:38:47 Speaker_02
And so this guy, who is the trainer, he's being investigated by the feds. He gets kicked out of the sport. No one from his gym is allowed to compete in the UFC anymore. And he's under investigation.

02:39:00 Speaker_02
And if it turns out that what they're saying about him is true, he's really rightly fucked.

02:39:05 Speaker_00
Yeah. I think, actually, there's a crossover here between conspiracy and cheating. Now, I think the greatest book that's not been written and never will be written is the greatest cheats in motorsport.

02:39:19 Speaker_00
Some of the stories I've heard over the years are so good. Just because what they do is they reveal the competitive nature of human beings, but also ingenuity.

02:39:30 Speaker_00
You will see people that are most ingenious when they're cheating, not when they're abiding by the rules.

02:39:34 Speaker_00
And Formula One is about the 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.

02:39:43 Speaker_00
He coined the phrase the unfair advantage, which is a phrase I love because it just defines so many sports. Whether we like it or not, we're searching for the unfair advantage, aren't we?

02:39:53 Speaker_00
And in motorsport, some of the cheats I've heard about are just brilliant.

02:39:56 Speaker_01
Like what kind of stuff?

02:39:59 Speaker_00
I 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. He was the voice of our motorsport for 40 years.

02:40:14 Speaker_00
He had a very distinctive voice. He's a lovely man, met him a few times. And 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 Speaker_00
But it turned out that it was a V12 and it was very, very thirsty.

02:40:30 Speaker_00
So 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.

02:40:45 Speaker_00
And he told this story about, I don't think I'm misquoting, he said, well, that's why I was knackered. It wasn't because it was a V12. Because on the warm down lap, I knew I had to pump this thing like 40 times to fill up the ladder. Wow.

02:40:55 Speaker_00
And there's amazing stories of just ingenious cheats. I mean, there's so many of them. I mean, Formula One is about. not getting caught. That's really what that's what it's about.

02:41:05 Speaker_00
You know, you what's the line between interpreting rules and not getting caught? And I love all of that. And I have a few times said to people I know in this in those sports. Can I write that book? Will you tell me that?

02:41:18 Speaker_00
No, I won't tell you any of the stories. I'll tell them to you now as a friend. But if they're ever published, I'm a dead man. Right? Because all the money involved, but the ingenious cheating. I mean, in 1995,

02:41:31 Speaker_00
Toyota was excluded from the World Rally Championship because it just had a brilliantly simple piece of cheating. All the world rally cars were turbocharged. And you have what's called a restrictor, an intake restrictor.

02:41:44 Speaker_00
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 Speaker_00
But 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 Speaker_00
What they didn't realise was that the World Rally Championship had a couple of situations where the cars run side by side, it'd be a drag race. And so the Toyota just fucked off into the distance.

02:42:12 Speaker_00
And everyone went, well, they're cheating, aren't they? And then they found it. But this was perpetrated by Toyota, by a car company. And I suppose those things I find fascinating.

02:42:24 Speaker_02
Wouldn't you tell them to don't get ahead in the straightaway? They didn't tell. The driver and co-driver didn't know.

02:42:33 Speaker_00
Dirty. They just knew that sometimes when they got in a car, someone did that with a lever.

02:42:39 Speaker_02
They didn't know. And Formula One is not big in America, which is odd. So how do you feel about it here in Austin? Well, I saw it in Austin. It's amazing. I love it. I went to COTA. We have that up there?

02:42:52 Speaker_00
Yeah.

02:42:53 Speaker_02
That's COTA. My friend Bobby owns the place. So he took me around and showed me. And we went there for the races.

02:43:00 Speaker_00
It's incredible. They put on one of the best races of the season here.

02:43:03 Speaker_02
Awesome, the tracks incredible and it's so fast. They're going so fast. It's so wild to watch Yeah, and I find it amazing how huge NASCAR is here where they're just going around an oval They do have some streets circuits, don't they?

02:43:15 Speaker_00
They do have some short arrivals. But yeah, Formula One is more complex.

02:43:20 Speaker_02
Way more complex. And the vehicles themselves are so incredible. And they're so expensive. It's just unbelievable how much money is involved in Formula One. So it makes sense why people would cheat a little bit.

02:43:34 Speaker_00
I think it's this gray area of interpreting a rule book that's complicated, but also trying not to get caught. And some of the, just the way that they've, through the years, and it creates subterfuge, it creates games.

02:43:50 Speaker_00
Another great story, we covered this on Top Gear, was one of the great interpreters of the rule book was Colin Chapman, who was the man that founded Lotus. And he had found a way in something called the Lotus, I think it was 77.

02:44:04 Speaker_00
It was a car that Andretti won the championship in. They created a ground effect. So it's now a common thing.

02:44:11 Speaker_00
But 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 Speaker_00
So you were generating downforce, not through wings, but through accelerating air under the car. By the way, any engineers listening to this, I'm not an engineer, but I have a basic understanding of it, having driven these things.

02:44:31 Speaker_00
But if my terminology is wrong, I apologize. But effectively, You're generating downforce in a way that you can't see it on the vehicle. It's not got wings. And what they would do is they'd lower these. There was a sort of a handle.

02:44:42 Speaker_00
They'd lower these skirts when they went out onto the track. So when the car went out on track and in the paddock, it looked like a normal car.

02:44:50 Speaker_00
But they were going so much faster than everyone else, he needed to find a way of diverting the attention to the other teams. So what he would do was, at the end of a test session, quite often, he'd have a guy scuttle from the back of the garage.

02:45:04 Speaker_00
with something underneath a piece of cotton or something, or a blanket, and run over towards a service truck. And everyone would see him do it. So all the teams were like, they've got a trick differential, they've got something special. But it wasn't.

02:45:18 Speaker_00
It was a kettle. It was a kettle this guy was running around with underneath the towel, just so everyone thought it was a component. It was a total diversion. And I met the guy that used to just run around with this. It was like a teapot-y kettle thing.

02:45:32 Speaker_00
He was just told at the end of the session, put that under there and run away with it. So everyone thinks it's like a differential or something.

02:45:39 Speaker_00
And I think that's where I love motorsport, because it brings out these bizarre human competitive human behaviors.

02:45:47 Speaker_02
What's also the margins of victory are so slim. If you have the same horsepower, same compound tires, just different engineers putting it all together.

02:45:58 Speaker_00
But they are completely different vehicles. Yes, they may have the same tires. But these are a bunch of people, 400 people in different parts of the world, are told, this is the rule book. Away you go.

02:46:09 Speaker_00
And they are within a tenth of each other on a track. It's amazing. Amazing. It is amazing. But they're all at it. And there's always some conspiracy at the moment. Red Bull,

02:46:21 Speaker_00
Apparently everyone thought they had some special brake system that they've now had to get rid of because the FIA was aware of it. Now Red Bull's complaining that McLaren and Mercedes have got flexible front wings.

02:46:33 Speaker_00
It is the politics of the playground being played out with billions of dollars on a racetrack. And that's why I'm totally addicted to it at the moment.

02:46:42 Speaker_02
And how much of that engineering and technology gets to consumer cars? Good question.

02:46:50 Speaker_00
I think direct crossover, there's some, but not as much as you'd hope.

02:46:55 Speaker_00
But 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 Speaker_00
I believe that. I think if you look for direct crossovers in all of these places, you come away disappointed.

02:47:17 Speaker_00
But 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. He's going to know shit.

02:47:29 Speaker_00
He's going to have a way of looking at that project that's going to make it profoundly better. I believe that. I once wrote a story for

02:47:37 Speaker_00
some in-house magazine I think for BAR Racing when they had a race team about the crossover between aeronautical engineering and Formula One. That's profound. That really is.

02:47:46 Speaker_00
I mean, the way a Formula One car sucks itself to the track is an upside down plane. But there were further things as well. The carbon ceramic brake disc was developed for what? Concorde. Really? They couldn't stop Concorde.

02:48:00 Speaker_00
It was going through brakes, obviously. And someone went, well, why don't we use different material for the rotor? And that's where the carbon ceramic brake came from. So there's this huge crossover in metallurgy.

02:48:12 Speaker_00
And actually, to broaden that, what's the greatest legacy of your frankly amazing, mind-boggling, national space program. You know, it's what we learned about materials, isn't it? NASA served to teach us all about materials. We are benefiting now.

02:48:31 Speaker_00
There's something about the Raptor you'll go home in. that wouldn't be there if NASA hadn't needed to have some weird material with a property that hadn't been required before. I really believe that.

02:48:42 Speaker_00
That's the incredible corollary of projects that are ambitious projects on that scale.

02:48:49 Speaker_02
It has to be with like the Defense Department and the construction of fighter jets.

02:48:54 Speaker_00
Oh, aren't they? I'm just fascinated by them. We did a film with the F-35. I raced an F-35 in a McLaren Speedtail. And the level of classification around the vehicle was so difficult.

02:49:07 Speaker_00
Because I didn't realize that we don't, as a British government, we don't own those planes. We lease them from you. We're not allowed to own them. Really? Yeah. So the IP stays with you guys. And what we do with them is kind of up to you.

02:49:19 Speaker_00
But we weren't allowed any cockpit shots at all. We weren't allowed to sit inside it. I just got a description from the pilot of what the aircraft could do.

02:49:27 Speaker_02
Well you know they're doing those fighter jets now with AI running them and they beat human pilots 100% of the time in dogfights.

02:49:36 Speaker_00
Do they? Yeah. That F-35 was one of the coolest man-made objects I've ever seen. They're incredible. We had to go up there to So actually, it was a bit like that bungee jump thing. This was so serious that we had to be rigorous.

02:49:50 Speaker_00
For 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.

02:49:59 Speaker_00
The runway, you're not allowed to go in there and drop litter because it could get sucked up when it's doing that hovering thing. So you go in there, you're decontaminated. And we spent several days working out how to run this drag race.

02:50:11 Speaker_00
It started out with a genuine drag race between me in a McLaren and this F35. And they had their data on how it accelerated. And we had McLaren there with their data.

02:50:21 Speaker_00
And they worked out that the car would get off the line much quicker than the plane would overtake at a certain point. But I was told very clearly

02:50:29 Speaker_00
that I couldn't get in the wash of the aircraft as it took off because it would just flip the car backwards. And we had to sort of choreograph that bit, not fake it, but choreograph it.

02:50:38 Speaker_00
So anyhow, first run we did, I was told that I'd be absolutely safe. I'd be so far ahead of the plane that the plane would then be in the air by the time it went over me and we'd be away. Anyhow.

02:50:49 Speaker_00
First run we do, I'm like this in this McLaren, it's fucking fast. And it accelerates, and I look left, and I hear a noise, and there's a plane coming past me on the ground. And I thought, I'm in trouble here.

02:51:00 Speaker_00
And the front wheels of the car came off the ground. Whoa! At about 137 miles an hour. It didn't do that. I was fully, any racing driver would tell you, and I'm a pretty poor racing driver, you know when the front wheels aren't on the ground.

02:51:14 Speaker_00
What do you do?

02:51:16 Speaker_00
well you just shit yourself and you're so invested in it you're like well if it's going over if it's going over this is the greatest piece of television ever and i hope it doesn't and the thing just the thing went it just went next to me and again i this is why i you know i want to be someone that expresses joy what a thing to have done

02:51:38 Speaker_00
And when an F-35 comes past you, and it's just got off the ground. Yeah, you were. When this thing comes past you, it just started screaming, fuck!

02:51:48 Speaker_02
Does it show your front wheel?

02:51:49 Speaker_00
Look at that! Look at that thing there!

02:51:51 Speaker_02
That's incredible. It's so nuts that they put you next to that thing, though.

02:51:56 Speaker_00
When it was right by me, it fucking, and we never showed. You're going 218 miles an hour? No, that's kilometers. It comes past me like that. Bang! And I just thought, and as it did it, the front wheels just went. And I thought, wow, I'm in trouble here.

02:52:16 Speaker_00
Wow. But the power and the sound. You know, you talk about the internal combustion engine, why these electric things make no sound. We are amateurs compared to what they get to play with.

02:52:27 Speaker_02
Yeah. And they have like, what, 30 minutes of flight time before they run out of gas?

02:52:32 Speaker_00
I don't think that thing can go very far. But all this vectoring. The way it can just decide to be hanging like a helicopter. Yeah, incredible. It's remarkable. But they don't share the IP at all. We were not allowed to see inside it.

02:52:46 Speaker_02
That is so wild that it can do that. Just hover in the air like that and shoot its draft down. Fucking crazy.

02:52:54 Speaker_00
Maybe that's the TV show. I just think there's a whole, is it boys toys? There's got to be more sophisticated. There's a whole load of stuff that's got moving parts.

02:53:03 Speaker_02
I think you're overthinking it. I just love it. I think you and your passion for automobiles is all you need. Do it on the internet. It'll be huge.

02:53:10 Speaker_00
I hope so.

02:53:11 Speaker_02
I think so. I don't think you need anything else.

02:53:13 Speaker_00
I quite like those things, though.

02:53:15 Speaker_02
They're pretty badass. If you can get a hold of one of those, that's great, too. I'm in an F-22. Have you been to an air show and seen one of those? I flew in an F-A-18. Did you? Yeah, with the Blue Angels. Wow. It was insane. Insane. Yeah, insane.

02:53:27 Speaker_02
Just the G-force, the physical effect on your body is so extraordinary. Yeah. You know, they don't use G-suits, either. They don't use gravity suits. So you have to hook. So you hold on to the... And then you do that breathing thing.

02:53:39 Speaker_02
You're forcing blood and you feel your consciousness closing like an elevator door you see it You see the darkness coming from the left and the right you're fighting it off.

02:53:49 Speaker_00
I wasn't very good at it I thought I'd be I was thought I'd be quite good because people of our height Yeah should be quite good at it But I felt it I got put up in one of those extra 300s the cart the stunt planes.

02:53:58 Speaker_00
Mm-hmm It's a prop thing But you know, they're the ones that they use in the Red Bull air races. Mm-hmm, and I once he got to sort of six seven G's Yeah, I saw I started to see

02:54:08 Speaker_02
Yeah, you have to fight it off. I think I got to seven and a half G's, but those guys can go to like nine, 10 G's like that. It's fucking insane.

02:54:15 Speaker_02
The pressure and the maneuverability of these things, the pilot took me through like this canyon and you're, you know, 100, 200 feet off the ground. Just flying through those cans sideways. It's fucking insane. Insane.

02:54:31 Speaker_00
I did a ridiculous film, looking back, with a guy called Andy Green. Do you know who Andy Green is? No. Fastest man on Earth. He's the one that still holds the world's land speed record. So he drove Thrust SSC.

02:54:43 Speaker_00
He was the first man to go supersonic in a car. And they had this thing called Bloodhound. And this is the last thing I'll bore you with on this podcast. So they had this thing called Bloodhound, which was supposed to go 1,000 miles an hour.

02:54:56 Speaker_00
And they were going to drive it on some salt flats or something it dried out in South Africa, I think. Anyhow, it was supposed to be funded by industry. They lost all their sponsors, and they decided to try and publicly fund it, and they couldn't.

02:55:11 Speaker_00
And Andy, during that phase, said, I've got an extra 300. He's an ex-fighter pilot, because they're the only people that can drive these things. Racing drivers are useless, because the decision-making is so quick and profound.

02:55:22 Speaker_00
They identified early on they need pilots, not racing drivers. He said, I've got an extra 300, and this car has got various stages of propulsion. You start off with a jet, then it goes to a rocket. And he goes, I was like, it's madness.

02:55:37 Speaker_00
He 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. So he's put, just bore yourself with it, he's put, there's a film, if you type in my name.

02:55:51 Speaker_00
Look at that fucking thing. Type in my name and his name, and there's a film on YouTube of him taking me up in this stunt plane to put me through the g's that he'll have in the part, and honestly, by the end of it,

02:56:05 Speaker_02
How fast did he go in this thing? Oh my God, look at that.

02:56:08 Speaker_00
He had oversteer at over 600 miles an hour. That was in the US. Wow. But the way he put me through the G-forces, I would have been a terrible fighter pilot. Couldn't I kept getting great great pumping.

02:56:27 Speaker_02
Yeah. Well, those guys are all jacked.

02:56:29 Speaker_02
That's one thing I found out about the Blue Angels They had like when you go to their training facility, there's weightlifting equipment everywhere You have to have muscle because you have to you're literally It's like brute force.

02:56:41 Speaker_02
You should have been brilliant at it then.

02:56:42 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's not fun. I

02:56:45 Speaker_02
It's a lot of work.

02:56:46 Speaker_00
So when I do some YouTube videos with cars, can I come and drag you into a car? Yes. Let's do it. I'm in. Let's go. I've loved talking to you. Thank you very much.

02:56:55 Speaker_02
I love talking to you, too. Thanks for being here, man. It's great to see you again after all these years. I'll be back in 10 years. No, let's have it quicker. And let's definitely get you on YouTube, on the internet. Do your own thing.

02:57:07 Speaker_00
It'll happen soon enough.

02:57:08 Speaker_02
You don't need other people. Thank you. Fuck those people. Bye, everybody.