Best of the Week - August 25, 2019 - Joe Rogan Experience

You know, I think to really be a good game warden, you gotta cut your teeth on all the traditional stuff that's critical of just having to check guys with guns all the time. You know, most cops look at that and go, that's crazy. I mean, everybody you check has a knife or a firearm. Well, fortunately, 99% of them are guys like you and me that want to see a game warden and the game warden wants to see us. But for that one felon that's on parole and he's in the woods hiding out, and we run across that a lot, and I run across a ton of that down here in SoCal at the start of my career and I've got some interesting stories about that. So guys who are like, they skip bail and then they go and hide? Yep, and they've got like a no bail warrant. They're wanted on some warrant somewhere. And so they're off fishing, they have an illegal firearm. Maybe they're a felon in possession of a firearm they can't even have. And now they're out in a remote area where no cop's gonna find me here. And then I'm the new game warden in Riverside County, you know, all fricking motivated, really green. I don't know totally what I'm doing yet. And I'm in that truck cruising and something I got into down here that was just crazy. But I will say this, it was a heck of a learning curve and I'm really blessed it went out the way it did and I was safe in it. But we would get gang bangers from LA here and they would go over into Riverside County and get into my kind of rural foothills and on the edge of the national forest and they'd have AK-47s and they'd have, you know, automatic pistols and they would spotlight through these canyons, gunning for everything. They'd kill rabbits, they'd kill coyotes, they'd kill deer. They'd get to the end of like a canyon that has like an outlet of a dam, throw a gill net out and spend all night, they're just gill netting fish and hunting freely and shooting and killing everything with their spotlights. Grab their gill net, grab hundreds of fish, pack up and then head back, you know, back to the LA basin. Gang bangers? I'm not kidding. And the craziest part- Fishing gang bangers? Yeah. Commercial, almost commercial fishing? Does it? So strange. And what would they do with the fish? Oh, they'd eat them, maybe they'd sell them, you know, who knows? Usually with quantities that big, they were getting sold. But the thing that was crazy is I would be, you know, alone, I'd be in my truck. I didn't have a canine yet, you know, and now I just retired with, well, like you're a marshal, I have Apollo, yellow lab, English lab, she's amazing. Never gonna bite a bad guy, but she's gonna lick him to death and try to, you know, turn him our way. But I didn't even have a companion dog at the time. And I would go and run into these guys and go, okay, this is what I learned in the academy, that, you know, that head-on spotlighting stop that you never wanna have, or getting behind him, blacked out and tracking him down. And next thing I know, I got AKs, and I got all these frickin' prohibited exotic weapons, and I'm going, this is crazy, I'm pulling these guys out alone. I don't have a lot of backup. So it was just you? It was just me. How many guys did you run into? Sometimes it'd be two. One night I pulled like eight people out of a van. Oh, shit. And I was alone. Oh, shit. And they were all armed, and it was one of my heaviest, most intense cases, and I had been on one year. Like say, if you're preparing for a fight, how many days a week do you do strength and conditioning? When I'm preparing for a fight, every day. Every day. Every day. It's not, of course, it's not the same training, but every day I see a Valentino, and we train together, yeah, every day. I train more conditioning and strength, more than kickboxing. Really? Yeah, I don't have a trainer in kickboxing. What? Yeah, that's right. What? Yeah. Really? People don't believe in when I say that, but I don't know. You train yourself. I train myself. That's insane. I have, of course, my friend in France, who holds meat for me. I can't hold meat for myself. He holds meat for me, and we just talk together. We just plan a game plan together for a fight. We just talk. I'm my own coach, you know? That is crazy. I never had a coach. At your level? Yeah. To be your own coach. You've never had a coach? No, of course I had a first. Guys who teach you. Yeah, he teach me. After that, he couldn't teach me anymore because of his job, you know, when I was young. And then I just moved from two countries, and countries, and countries to learn, to learn, to learn, and then came back in France, Paris, and I just trained myself. That is insane. How many world champions just train themselves? I think nobody. How do you do that? That sounds crazy. But why didn't you get another coach? I don't know, because I didn't find a coach who can, I don't know, can just teach me. I really don't know. That's a good question. I don't know why I didn't, why I didn't found a new coach. I don't know. Have you thought about making any trips to Holland, or to Thailand, or? You know, Bordeaux in France? Sure. Yeah, so I was raised there. That's where I started kickboxing. I started with full contact, you know full contact. Rick Rufus was my first island. Really? Yeah, I was watching Rick Rufus every day. His brother Duke is one of the big coaches in MMA today. His name is his brother. Duke. Duke Rufus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a friend of mine, he's great. Oh, nice. Yeah, he's Adam Milwaukee. He has Rufus sport. Buddy Man, who's a biologist with the Forest Service, a guy named Carl Malcolm, you might have heard on our show. He just sent me a paper that was about kids' attitudes to wildlife, and it was comparing rural people's attitude and knowledge of wildlife for kids with urban and suburban attitudes about wildlife. And you can see the input of media when you look at this thing, because people who live in an urban or suburban environment when they tell you the top of mind wildlife that they know about, it's non-native stuff. Like lions? Yeah, they're likely to know what's an animal, right? And an animal will be like, oh, it'd be like a giraffe. Right? And people who have a more rural or remote viewpoint are much more likely when they think of wildlife to think of things that they interact with, and not like the things that are on your mobile above your crib when you're a little baby. And it sort of points, and also, there's a slight tendency, I gotta look at this more carefully, but there's a slight tendency to have negative feelings, or think things are dangerous or bad, the more urban you are in terms of native wildlife, to more recognize it as like a negative or bad thing. And what they're pointing to is, again, I wanna look at this much more carefully, pardon me to the authors, authors if I'm messing this up, I was just looking at it this morning. What they're pointing to is the stirrings of there being a greater acceptance of decreased biodiversity, meaning that you're kinda like okay with the bad things having gone, and we're focused on like, what are animals? Well, animals would be like a giraffe and hippopotamus, and the things that Disney tells me about, and not like possums and raccoons, which are kinda gross. And I was like, you know, I don't like that. And so I wound up kind of calling around to all the different shops in Dallas, where it's like, okay, I've got a Ferrari 328, I wanna make it a little faster. And I had done all this stuff on my MGB back in the day, so I know the things that you wind up doing with intake and exhaust and cam timings, and the options there, but they were all basically horrified, like you just don't do this to a Ferrari. And like the only suggestion that came out was, we can put an Italian to be exhaust on it, and that'll make it sound better, and maybe it's good for a couple horsepower or something. Those are things that people largely do for the aesthetics, whether it's aural or visual with it, and that's not a big move. And right about that time, John Romero at the office had picked up, there was a copy of Turbo Magazine back in the day, and there was an article about an old replica, kind of race car, done by a local company in Dallas called Norwood Autosport, or Norwood Autocraft. And I thought, well, he's right here, I'll call him up. And so I call him up, I get Bob Norwood on the phone, and I start going through my pitch, I've got a 328, I'd like it to be a little faster, what do you think we can, and before I could even finish, he said, we'll put a turbo on it. Like, yeah, now we're talking. And that was the beginning of kind of all the science project experiments. What does a 328 have standard horsepower? I think in the best, probably the European trim, it was probably around 300 horsepower. And what'd you get it up to with a turbocharger? So we went through a number of steps of this, and this is all swapping out all the computer electronics, different turbos, and eventually I melted the engine in it when it was at like 500 or so, and I went through a long history of melting many pistons in the different cars. But that wound up being this decade-long set of interesting experiments there, that was my gateway drug into working on this. And we're like, okay, we've made all this power in this system, we know it's kind of at the limits of a lot of things in the chassis, after we melted the engine there, we tuned it back down a little bit. That's the way so many engineering things wind up going. You go it until it breaks, then you dial it back a little bit, and you stay there. It must have been radically fast for a 328, it's very light, right? Yes. What is the curb weight? Well, it's not super light, I think it was like 3,200 pounds. But yeah, you could really feel it rear back when you went into it, and at high speed, it's a little bit dirty if you start getting up in 150 plus miles an hour for that. So we thought, well, what's the next level? Where do we go from here? So he had done a twin turbo job on a Testarossa before, which is a much wider car. Stock, they would go 180, 190 miles an hour with a normal Ferrari trim. And it was a bigger five liter flat 12, so there's a lot more possibility for doing things there. So I got a Testarossa, and we said, all right, we're going to do the twin turbo job with intercoolers, with the new engine management systems. And we went through this long string of upgrades through this, which generally was like, OK, we melted the pistons, we broke the input shaft all these times. But at its top form in peak, I still have the dyno sheet for, it was like 1,009 horsepower at the rear wheels. None of this crank horsepower talk, this was over 1,000 horsepower at the rear wheels, and it was amazing. I thought, and I want to say this very clearly, I thought he was wonderful at his job. If you had someone who was actually a business person on that show, it would be the worst show in the world, because Bill Gates would make proper decisions. And there'd be no surprises. You want someone capricious and crazy with no filter. That's what you want. And that's what we got. So he makes arbitrary decisions that you try, the human brain tries desperately to make those make sense, and that ends up being some kind of entertainment. And so I actually, Donald Trump Jr. said to me, of all the people we've had on the show, you seem like the only person who's ever liked my father. He said, you actually seem to like them. And I said, you know, I have a fascination and a respect and a affection for people who are able to get out of their filters. And I said, some people do that with pure genius, like Bob Dylan. Some people do it with bravery, like Lenny Bruce. Some people do it with drugs, you know, Neil Young perhaps, Jimi Hendrix perhaps. And most people do it with a mixture of stuff. But I said, Thelonious Monk said, the genius is the one who is most like himself. And I said, with some sort of mental problems coupled with greed and a lack of compassion, your father has somehow found a way to throw off the filters. And I will listen to Tiny Tim talk on tape for hours, because I like that little bit of Asperger's and all that other stuff. I'm not qualified to do it, but I'm saying this is possible. He's auditing. I can hear him talk forever. I can listen to Lenny Bruce. You know, Hal Willner has those hundreds of hours of him just ranting under his tape. I think I don't like people on drugs that much, but boy, I do. And I listen to Lenny Bruce talk forever. And Donald Trump had the dark side of that. You know, it's almost like when I was hitchhiking around the country and, you know, homeless and shit, and you'd end up at a biker place and, you know, some clubhouse and some guy's just holding court and ranting. I've always been interested in the people who are out on the margins, you know? And what Donald Jr. took as affection, I guess, was a bit of affection, but it's also that if you have thrown off some filters, I'll listen to you talk. And so that was that. It was very, very strange. And then I really did spend a lot of time kind of sticking up for Donald Trump, saying, yeah, there's interesting stuff there. And yeah, he's crazy and he's venal and he's empty. You know, really weird stuff that you've never seen before. You have never seen someone who has never laughed sincerely and never made a joke. Never laughed sincerely. No, he will laugh in a bully way. You look kind of fat, Joe. Really? Yeah, he'll do that. But he won't laugh at himself. Oh, no. And also, but never even a joke. Even a turn of fresh. But he says funny things on Twitter. Did you see the thing he did on Twitter the other day where he put a picture of Trump Tower in Greenland and he said, I promise not to do this? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I laughed. That was funny. Just a giant Trump Tower in the middle of Greenland. I never saw it. I mean, I saw that, too. But you never saw him in person. I never saw him in person. I also never saw him showing the enjoyment or understanding of music.