Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2199 - Chris Harris
Uploaded: 2024-09-05T17:00:03.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2199 - Chris Harris' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-09-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2199 - Chris Harris' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-09-05. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2199 - Chris Harris

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
So 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
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.
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.
He plays that weird game called cricket.
He was like our best cricket player.
Can we use this?
Yeah, no, we can.
I just want to give you a quick foretaste of it.
I'm not, I'm here to, I'll say some things that people won't have heard before
and they'll
make them gasp a bit.
Because we're recording now.
Yeah, that's fine.
Yeah, that's fine.
What's that?
Okay.
That's fine.
Were you on me?
I'm going to go into it all.
Okay.
But it might be that what seems quite revelatory to me.
Anyway, good to see you since we're rolling.
Cheers.
Ten years.
Yeah.
It's been a while.
And do you know what?
I don't, 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 about a month before I received a phone call
saying, do you want
to do this television show called Top Gear?
Yeah, it was before Top Gear for sure.
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.
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, if he saw me say no to this
job, would punch
me in the face.
Right.
Because it's my dream job.
Right.
And I know that Top Gear is a weird thing in the U.S. because I think many U.S.
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.
Yeah, but it became very popular on YouTube.
It did.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a great show.
It was a great show.
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 of
a decision.
I made the wrong call.
I shouldn't have done it.
Really?
Yeah.
I had a great time, but you try following him in the U.K.
Just because of how much he's loved.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just, I didn't realize how deep-rooted it was.
I still get hate mail now.
I still get hate mail now.
Yeah.
You could have had the exact same show under a different name and people would
have loved
it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And 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.
I really enjoyed it, though.
I enjoyed you being on it.
I was very kind.
You're great.
You're my favorite automotive journalist.
Well, that's very kind of you.
And I've just seen what you've arrived in as well, and I thoroughly approve of
your taste
in motor vehicles.
Am I allowed to say what it is or not?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a Raptor R that John Hennessey jumps up to 1,000 horsepower.
It's fucking ridiculous.
I think, I'm often asked, if you lived in America, what car would you drive?
And it would always be a Raptor.
It comes under the heading of, always drink the local beer.
You know, we go to a city, don't order a Heineken or a Bud, drink the local
beer.
Yeah.
And the F-150 Raptor is your local beer.
Yep.
That's about as American as it gets.
Dodge Rams and Ford F-150s.
Yeah.
Those are the most American vehicles.
1,000 horsepower in a truck.
It's ridiculous.
We never thought it would be possible, did we?
No.
No.
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?
Maybe in this state, 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, you know, in California, they have a mandate in 2035.
You know, after 2035, no internal combustion engine vehicles are allowed to be
sold in the
state.
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.
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.
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 who said, surely the solution is
that you just
use what's pertinent to the energy that's easiest where you live.
And I think it's the best way of explaining it.
You know, if you live here, you drill a hole in the ground.
There's oil around here.
Yeah.
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?
It's brilliant.
It's everywhere.
It's quite a small country.
I don't need to travel large distances.
But Iceland's cold.
And the battery capacity, when it gets really cold, diminishes pretty rapidly.
Yeah, but also, if you live there and you've got loads of batteries and you
have a cartridge
system, we can slot them in and out.
It's doable, isn't it?
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
I just think we need to be a bit clever about it.
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.
Yeah.
And you will have as well.
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.
But when I want to go out on an open road and enjoy a 9-11, I want to enjoy a 9-11.
Why can't I?
I find it very difficult when I'm told to do things that I don't think are
rational or reasonable.
No.
And there's this religious ideology that's attached to climate change that's,
it has that
sort of fever-pitched religious aspect to it.
And most people, when you corner them, if they're even the real zealots, most
people really don't
understand how much data there is on the impact that human beings have on
climate change, how
much is being done in China and India that will not change at all and is only
going to get
more extreme.
And like what little impact you have comparatively.
That's a really interesting point because on the one, when you, it's like being
a parent.
On the one hand, you can respond to that by saying, well, yeah, if I'm going to
make no
difference, I'll just carry on driving around in my Raptor.
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 that if 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.
No.
We need to prepare ourselves to make logical and progressive changes.
Yeah.
I don't think you can mandate those changes.
No.
First of all, we have a long history of internal combustion engines as
recreation vehicles and
we love them.
And we're not, I don't, I think it's completely unfair 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.
And if you tell me I can't have an internal combustion engine while you're
doing that to
power electric vehicles, I'm going to say fuck you because fuck you is the
right thing to
say because that doesn't make any sense.
Yeah.
And there's also this weird thing that is attached to this.
This is a business, the green energy business.
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.
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 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.
It's not true.
It's not true.
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.
We cannot.
The technology doesn't work at the moment.
It just doesn't sound the same, it doesn't feel the same.
But that's the non-enthusiast, the non-enthusiast, people like you and I that
don't care about
that.
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'd take it because it's as
good.
But no one can do that at the moment.
They don't exist.
They don't exist.
It takes too long to charge.
You can't just pull over and charge.
It takes hours.
And also, there are so many other industries that pollute so heavily.
Why aren't they the subject of so much sort of pernicious legislation?
I mean, we talk about shipping.
If you start to look into cargo ships, what they emit is extraordinary.
Extraordinary.
Absolutely extraordinary.
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.
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.
Do you know that there's more green on Earth today than there was in the last
100 years?
No, I didn't know that.
It's because of the carbon dioxide because trees eat carbon dioxide.
I have to say, I'm completely torn on it all because I, some days, you don't
have so many diesel
vehicles here, but some days I drive around in the UK and I see a diesel
throwing some shit
out the back of it.
I'm like, that's not good.
If I can see it, I don't like it.
We have a lot of diesel trucks here.
Yeah, and I don't like it.
You hit the gas on the highway and you see black smoke.
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, I hate the fact that the timeline is determined by politicians
rather than scientists.
Exactly.
And even the scientists are all bought and paid for.
That's part of the problem too.
Yeah.
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.
There's a lot of shenanigans going on.
And the internal combustion engine has ironically reached a point where it's
really quite efficient.
You know, it's quite a clever thing.
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