Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1982 - John Hennessey
Uploaded: 2023-05-05T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1982 - John Hennessey' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-05-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1982 - John Hennessey' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-05-05. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1982 - John Hennessey

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day!
We're up, Mr. Hennessey.
Mr. Rogan.
Fun hanging with you today.
It's been a blast.
That fucking vehicle that you have built is the most ridiculous thing I've ever
been inside
in my life.
I can't believe how fast it is.
We only did the speed limit today, right?
Yes, but we got there very quickly.
We got there very quickly, yes.
1,817 horsepower and 3,000 pounds, so you got some power-to-weight ratio to
work with there.
That's like 700 more horsepower than a Tesla Plaid.
Yeah, it's like taking a McLaren 765LT and adding 1,000 horsepower to it.
Something nobody needs, but we've sold 36 of those, the Venom F5.
What happened to you in your life that you needed to make these preposterous
cars?
Well, you know.
Like, what is going on?
Yeah, there it is.
That's the Venom F5.
How did you get to be this guy?
Like, how did this start out where you're making these 1,800 horsepower cars?
It's probably kind of like, you know, the pool hall deal when we were younger.
Like, I didn't have a good relationship with my old man.
He was a car guy, but we didn't get along.
And I don't know, maybe 60 years later, you know, I'm 60 now.
I've got, you know, I still feel like I got a little chip on my shoulder or
something to prove.
Maybe a little bit less now, but for sure.
Isn't it interesting that you would never want that for your son?
No.
But boy, is that a great motivating factor for success.
For sure.
Yeah.
I grew up in kind of an abusive situation and neglect.
And, you know, now all of a sudden I've got all this motivation or I've had all
this motivation for the last, you know, 40 years of my business career.
So it's been good.
It's funny because you would never want that for your children.
No, I mean.
It's amazing how well it's worked out for people like you or for me.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, I don't think everybody out there that has some level of
success has not necessarily been abused and motivated by negativity.
But I can definitely see with our five kids with the nurture mainly from my
wife, Hope, they're going to turn out just fine and there'll be plenty
successful.
But, you know, that's just, I don't know your story, but that's my road, how I
got here.
It can lead you to be very ambitious and very successful, but it can also just
fuck your life up.
Oh, sure.
And you can be very ambitious and very successful and also be, like, happy.
Like, that's possible, too.
That's possible, too.
Yeah.
You don't have to have a tortured childhood.
For sure.
No, I'm very, very blessed.
I mean, you know, to have an opportunity to build toys for people, you know,
whether it's a, you know, a 700,000, 800,000 horsepower pickup truck or a Venom
F5.
You know, we were talking earlier about first world problems, right?
Yeah.
Something nobody really needs.
Nobody needs to go to comedy show or MMA, but they do it for entertainment.
I tell people all the time we're more, are there stars up there?
Yeah.
They fly.
Oh, wow.
Am I in a Rolls Royce?
There's a shooting star.
After the Ric Flair gummy bear, they're going to really start flying.
Yeah.
Yeah, so, no, I feel very blessed, and we're definitely, you know, people come
to us because they want to entertain themselves with their vehicles.
That's a great way of looking at it, too, because that's really what those kind
of cars are.
Like, when I try to describe my love of old muscle cars for people, because,
you know, they kind of are not super reliable.
Yeah.
They're not so great at handling.
Sure.
And, you know, so I turn them, I get them done into resto mods.
Yeah.
But still, but when I drive them, the experience is entertaining.
It's like a ride.
Like, I'm not just in a Corolla.
I'm not just in some quiet Subaru.
I'm in a ride.
But does it take, like, when you drive your Land Cruiser, you drive, you know,
one of your older cars, does it take you back to that time either when you had
that car, you aspired to have that car, you knew the guy or the girl that had
that car kind of growing up, and you wanted it back then, but you didn't know
how you were going to get it?
Oh, yeah, for sure.
With my Chevelle, definitely.
Because my Chevelle, I have a 1970s black with the white stripes, the tuxedo
Chevelle.
Sure.
And when I was a kid.
What's that?
You got the cowl induction in the hood?
Yeah.
Yeah, LL6.
Well, it actually is a 454 under the hood, and Colvin, Casey Colvin's Colvin.
Yeah, yeah, I know Casey, sure.
He's the man.
Big Viper guy, yeah.
Fucking love that dude.
Yeah, yeah.
He hooked up the cowl so that it, when the ignition goes just like that.
Yeah, those vacuum hoses get old and crack, and, yeah.
It's, when I was a kid, when I was about 16 years old, one of my
friends picked me up.
His friend had a 1970 Chevelle, and we were going somewhere.
And I just remember getting in the backseat of the car going, how is it
possible that this
kid owns this car?
Yeah.
This is crazy.
Yeah.
It was the best looking car I'd ever seen in my life.
On those 70 series tires, and guys used to back in the day, when I had a 69 old
442 convertible,
and if you didn't have the Posi rear end, you'd have the one tire fryer.
You know, she'd do the burnout, and you got like one stripe going about 400
feet down the
road.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Those old cars suck to drive, though.
Oh, my God.
If you drive the old ones that don't have resto mod components, like Roadster
Shop components,
they're just terrible.
Yeah.
They're so bad.
Yeah.
So, my wife, for my 60th last year, my 60th birthday, she and the kids bought
me a nice
69 old 442.
So, it's nice enough to where I'll drive it, but not so nice that I don't want
to drive
it.
Right.
And I just, man, when I drive that thing, it's the slowest, least powerful
thing in
the fleet, but it just kind of brings me back.
I got this jam box I put in the backseat of the turtle box, and I just turn on
my ACDC
and go out cruising around.
You don't even bother just on a stereo.
You know, if it dies at the stop sign, or if it, you know, we'll probably put
an LT4,
an LSA in it, and we'll LS swap it at some point.
Yeah.
Do you think you'll do something to the chassis?
It would probably need that, but, you know, I like a scary ride.
That kind of entertains me, you know?
So, maybe to some degree.
I mean, we do want to have a balanced, safe car, but, you know, the old saying,
Bob Lutz,
who used to be the president of Chrysler back in the day when I first met him,
he was
working for BMW in Germany.
He had a pretty fast motorcycle, and he's out tooling around Germany, and some
dude just
rips past him on the Autobahn, and he pulls into the gas station.
It's this old guy, and Bob goes up looking at his bike, and he's like, is that
a turbocharger
on your bike?
This dude, this is like the early 70s.
And the German guy says, yeah, yes, young man, it has a turbocharger.
And Bob says, well, how much horsepower does that bike have?
He says, well, probably 200 of the tire.
And Bob's like, what?
200 of the tire?
He's like, isn't that too much horsepower?
Bob is saying to this old German guy, isn't that too much horsepower?
And the old guy looks at him and says, young man, there's no such thing as too
much horsepower.
Bob told me that story like 30 years ago.
I was visiting him up in Detroit.
And I think to some degree that's true.
But you want to have it balanced, you want to have it safe, you know?
As long as you're not there for the end.
As long as you're not in the ditch.
As long as you're not there for the accident.
Right.
The thing about motorcycles is the consequences are so grave.
Well, sure, yeah.
I've had a few.
I busted up my knee and spent a week in the hospital when I was in high school.
And I guess now the term they use, and it's to some degree, true donor cycle.
Yeah.
My boys all like to ride.
We ride KTM.
We ride dirt bikes up in Colorado in the summertime.
But I'm like, on the road, you got to be careful.
Because even back in the day, if you're riding, you know, they're distracted
drivers.
Now everybody's on their fucking phone.
Nobody's paying attention to shit.
So bad.
You know, so.
There's so many people that are just addicted to their phones.
And they can't put them down while they're driving.
It's so wild to see.
Yeah.
I mean, every now and then I take a car service to the airport or something.
And if you're not driving, you can just like look out the window.
Just the next time you do that, just look out the window.
More than half the people are fucking not even looking at the road.
They're on their phone.
Yeah.
They're supposed to be driving.
Or they're putting on their makeup.
One of the things I love about Apple CarPlay is you don't have to take your
hands off of anything.
Absolutely.
You can just say, hey Siri, play.
Yeah.
It'll play a song for you.
Yep.
That is the wild.
Like, I do that shit with my daughter because my daughter's into like Taylor
Swift.
And I don't have any Taylor Swift on my phone.
Yeah.
But I could just, while we're in the car, you want to listen to something?
And she brings up a song.
So I just say, hey Siri, play.
And then, bam.
Like that, it's playing it.
I mean.
CarPlay works really well.
It's incredible.
The text, it reads your texts.
Yeah.
It sends texts for you.
It's fucking amazing.
Do you ever put CarPlay in any of your old cars?
They have like retrofit kits now for that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I have.
But honestly, when I'm driving those old cars, I don't like to, sometimes I don't
even like
to listen to music.
Yeah, I'm the same way.
I really just want to hear that engine.
Sure, sure.
You know?
I listen to music sometimes, but it always gets annoying.
I want to hear that engine.
I want to hear that.
Yeah.
You want to fucking feel that V8.
Spin the tires a little bit.
Not too much.
Yeah.
I just, there's something about cars that I guess it was because when I was a
kid, it represented
freedom.
Right?
Because if you were in high school, if you didn't have a car, you had to ride
the bus.
Status.
Yeah.
Status for sure.
Chicks for sure.
Friends maybe, you know?
It was really more impressive for guys than it was for girls.
Sure.
The kinds of cars I like, girls are like, this fucking thing stinks.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Smells like gas.
I went to this, I went to this Jesuit high school up in Kansas City called Rockhurst.
And I was a total, I was a little guy and total nobody.
I was on the wrestling team and I think it was in the 98 pound weight class
when I was
a freshman.
Anyway, I was a total nobody.
And then I bought a motorcycle from my dad when I was like a sophomore.
And I remember the first time I rolled into school, I was late.
And there's like this quadrangle where I could like pull right up to the door.
And there's all these windows that are open.
And all these guys like rush to the window to hear what this loud motorcycle
was.
And all of a sudden I had status.
All of a sudden I was not a nobody.
I was like, who's the wild man in the little kid in the motorcycle?
That is the thing, right?
If you're a kid showing up at school in a motorcycle, you're a wild man.
Sure, yeah.
Yeah.
So I had my car crash and the guy that lived across the street from me had this
Olds 442
convertible.
It's kind of a crazy story.
Like my old man was an insurance adjuster and he was going to buy this car from
this
body shop for like a couple hundred bucks.
And he told me it was going to be my first car, blah, blah, blah.
And like a month goes by, I'm like, hey dad, when are we getting that
car?
And he just kind of ignored me and just kind of blew me off.
And the next thing I knew, the neighbor across the street had that car.
Wow.
So the tour trip, I didn't get the car and now I got to go home every day on my
motorcycle
and look at the neighbor across the street who had the car.
So when I had my motorcycle wreck, I had two bikes, so 16 and I'm trying to fix
my bike and
the guy across the street worked at this Ford factory up in Kansas City and he
offered