John Hennessey, founder of Hennessy Motorsports, built a 1,817-horsepower Venom F5—0-200 mph in under 10 seconds—selling just 36 units despite its impracticality, after racing JDM cars like the Mitsubishi VR4 (164 mph at Silver State Classic) and tuning 15,000 vehicles globally. His 1993 Dodge Viper modification (500+ hp) launched his reputation, while Steven Tyler and Jay Leno became notable clients. Rogan contrasts Hennessey’s long-form, uncensored insights with late-night TV’s manufactured drama, like Top Gear’s staged stunts. Both discuss ADHD meds—Hennessey quit Ritalin after 25 years, noting a 20% drop in aggression—and cold plunges as natural focus boosters, with Rogan’s daily 34°F routine enhancing mental clarity and resilience. Hennessey’s extreme cars reflect his relentless drive, but their real value lies in pushing boundaries, not just brute power. [Automatically generated summary]
I grew up in kind of an abusive situation and neglect, and now all of a sudden I've got all this motivation or I've had all this motivation for the last 40 years of my business career, so it's been good.
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.
I mean, you know, to have an opportunity to build toys for people, you know, whether it's, you know, a 700,000 to 800,000 horsepower pickup truck or a Venom F5. You know, we were talking earlier about first-world problems, right?
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?
Yeah, you know, I saw my wife for my 60th last year, my 60th birthday, she and the kids bought me a nice 69 Olds 442. So it's nice enough to where I'll drive it, but not so nice that I don't want to drive it.
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, a turtle box.
I just turn on my AC-DC and go out cruising around without a care in the world.
If it dies at the stop sign, we'll probably put an LT4 or an LSA in it.
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 of 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.
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.
That's a good story.
You want to have it balanced, you want to have it safe, you know?
I went to this Jesuit high school up in Kansas City called Rockhurst.
I was a little guy and a total nobody.
I was on the wrestling team, and I think I 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 a sophomore.
I remember the first time I rolled into school, I was late, and there was this quadrangle where I could pull right up to the door, and there's all these windows that are open.
All these guys rushed 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 and the little kid and the motorcycle?
So I had my car crash, and the guy that lived across the street from me had this old 442 convertible.
It's kind of a crazy story.
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 did we get in 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.
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 to help me with the bikes, and I ended up making a deal with him, and I sold him.
I traded him the two bikes, and I paid him like 50 bucks a month for a year or something like that, and I bought the car back with my own money.
You know, I mean, back in the back when, you know, mostly back in the growing up in the 70s and 80s, I mean, it was all muscle cars.
So, you know, you see the guy with the Cheval or the Camaro, the 70 and a half, Z28. How old were you?
I'm 60. Okay, so you're a little bit younger.
I'm 65. Yeah, so I just grew up around muscle cars, and then fast forward, you know, went to college for a few years, dropped out, moved from Kansas City to Texas, and back then, like in the 80s, the German cars, or they had these rally cars over in Europe.
And there was the Group B rally cars.
And they call them the Killer Bs because they got so fast back in the mid to late 80s that the crowds would bunch up in the road waiting for these rally cars blasting by at 120 or whatever.
And they knew where the rally cars were because the helicopters were chasing them, kind of spotting for them or the TV camera.
And then one time the cars got so fast that they got ahead of the helicopters and these Group B rally cars landed on people and killed a bunch of people.
So they call them the Killer Bs.
So I was really kind of enamored with the Audi Quattro.
They went to Pikes Peak and they raced at Pikes Peak.
And that's really kind of what got me.
So I kind of, you know, shifted gears from American Muscle to now kind of this higher-tech German all-wheel-drive turbocharged stuff.
And then kind of I started a small environmental cleanup like an asbestos abatement business back in the late 80s and made a little bit of money.
I wasn't dating my wife.
I wasn't married yet.
And so I read in Motor Trend magazine about this guy named C. Van Toon.
He was actually the editor at Motor Trend.
Back in the mid to late 90s.
And he had bought an Eagle Talon.
This is like 1990. Put a roll cage in it.
And he goes and enters the Pikes Peak Hill Climb in Colorado Springs.
And I read that and I'm like, oh man, my name's not Andretti or Unthra.
I can't just show up to Indy, but maybe I could do that.
And so, made a little bit of money on my asbestos business.
I was reading the car magazines.
And I'm like, I'm the kind of guy, whether it's then or now, I don't really want to do what everybody else has done.
I'm a contrarian by nature and You know, if everybody else is racing Porsches or whatever.
So I'm trying to find something that I can afford, but it's high-tech that I can modify to race at Pikes Peak.
And I read about a car that came out that year.
It was the Mitsubishi 3000 GT VR4. So it was all-wheel drive, twin-turbo V6. Let me see what that looks like.
And, you know, the first time I did it, I didn't even have a roll cage, which is pretty stupid.
But...
After I did all this stuff, so I'm engaged, planning a honeymoon.
We bought a house.
I like to say we bought furniture, but my wife corrects me on that.
We inherited furniture from her family.
I think all I brought to the marriage was a mattress and a box spring and a desk, maybe, and a Mac.
Anyway, so I did all that.
I'm doing all these races.
Come home from the honeymoon, and I look at the bank balance, and I'm like, man, I used to have some money in the bank before I got engaged and bought a race car and raced all over the place, and I thought, you know, I really like doing this car thing.
Maybe other people would pay me to modify their cars, like Carroll Shelby, like Alois Roof with Porsches, Reeves Callaway.
And so October of 1991, we opened up Hennessy Motorsports, and I hired a mechanic and got a toolbox, and And off we went.
Yeah, that had a little 3.8 liter single turbo V6. And so then a guy calls me up in early 93, and he said, hey, I've got one of the first Dodge Vipers coming.
It was actually a model year 92, but they had some production delays, so the car didn't come out to the spring of...
I bought a Viper and I want to take it to the Silver State race.
Can you help me put the safety equipment and help it pass tech?
And I said, sure.
I said, but I'll make you a deal.
If you let me modify it, I think I can get another 100 horsepower on that Viper.
And I'll do it for free.
I said, I won't even charge you to do it.
I said, the only thing I'll ask in return, I'll take you out to the race, I'll support you, I'll bring my mechanic, we'll look after your car.
After the race, if you'll, again, my buddy Joe Jacuzzi was with Mitsubishi at the time, said, hey, I'll take you around LA and I'll introduce you to the editor at Motor Trend and Hot Rod and Car Craft.
And road and track.
And sure enough, we did all that.
And I initially did it with my 3000GT, got some articles off of it.
And I'm like, when I was doing that back in the early 90s, this is before social media, this is before YouTube, no internet.
And so the only way we knew about car stuff is we did car magazines, right?
And so I'm doing all this for a couple weeks with Joe and going around.
I'm thinking, man, I've been gone a long time.
I did this race.
I go to talk to all these media guys.
And Joe's like, just be patient.
When the magazine comes out, If they like you and they like your car and they write something nice about it, your phone will ring.
Sure enough, the phone started ringing, so I did all that with the Viper.
You know, the Viper is a big, you know, 8-liter V10. And so back in those days, the exhaust systems sound like a UPS truck.
They still kind of sound weird.
It's two five-cylinders, basically, is what it sounds like.
So we freed up the exhaust.
We did a cold air intake.
We poured it and polished the head.
So we bumped it to at least 500 horsepower.
Then we started doing cams and stroker motors and eventually turbos.
And basically from 93 through for the next 10 years into the early 2000s, I would say we were on the covers of 30, 40 magazines, including all the major buff books.
And the other thing is, when I'm driving my older cars, I've got a Cadillac CTS-V wagon manual, and I'm pulling out of a store, and some lady at Christmas a couple years ago runs into me because she didn't see me.
So I do like driving something bigger like that because if they run into you, it's not going to do that much, and they generally see you and want to not run into you.
Well, yeah, we could talk at length about that, but I think a lot of that boils down to, like, if you look at Europe, you look at Germany, getting a driver's license in Germany is a serious deal.
It takes two years.
It costs about $2,500.
Getting your driver's license in Germany, Germans are so serious, and they're serious about their cars and about their driving and about the Autobahn, but getting the driver's license in Germany is similar to, like, getting a private pilot's license over here.
I mean, I don't know if it's speed, but it's just paying attention.
You know, I mean, our kids all just, you know, in the last 10 years all went through driver's ed, and I think they got, you know, some decent training.
But, you know, to your point, like lane discipline, like, you know, if you're the slowest guy out there, get in the right lane.
You know, if you're going a little bit faster, you go in the inside lane.
That drives any serious driver crazy is when somebody's in the left lane going 49. That doesn't bother me.
I think the OEMs, to some degree, try to make the cars nannies, whether it's autopilot or adaptive steering.
I think, I had a friend of mine's dad when I was in high school, I'll never forget, he said, hey kid, you know, if you want to stay alive, don't use, if you're driving at night, don't use your cruise control.
I'm like, well, why not?
Well, you set your cruise control, you got your tunes going, you're a little tired, you fall asleep, you end up in the ditch, right?
So I think that, you know, I would almost say that to some degree that the nannies to try to protect drivers all of a sudden become, well, maybe I can crawl in the backseat and take a nap, you know?
3.45, 4 a.m., delivering papers for two, two and a half hours.
And dude, like on a Sunday, which is- You on your bike?
No, I'm in the back of this paper truck.
And this guy had the route.
And then, you know, we would have to like roll the paper and put it in this machine and crank this thing.
It would tie a little knot with some string around it and fucking toss it out the window.
We're going by, you know, like dogs are barking at you and it's snowing and it's cold.
And then I'd be the, you know, I would do some of that.
But all of a sudden there'd be like an apartment complex.
Well, here's your stack of papers.
And I'm out.
Toss on the people's doorsteps and like on like a juicy day we might make like three dollars and twenty-five cents and so what we do we go we go to 7-eleven and we blow half the cash on frickin you know nasty burritos and big gulps and crap like that you know but that was just kind of what we did but that's I mean that's what we had to do to make you do your you're doing papers while you're doing stand-up yeah I was doing newspapers from the time I guess I was Probably like 17 or 18 when I first started it.
It was actually a pass-fail A, so it counted towards your GPA. So I would tell everybody, if you just try, you'll get an A. And it's a real A. So just try.
It was a good way, once I got out of high school, it was a good way to generate some money while I was doing this crazy thing where I was trying to make the Olympic team for Taekwondo.
I could get attention from like making everybody laugh.
Right.
I would do impressions of guys we knew having sex and just stupid shit.
And it was so dumb.
But Steve is the one who told me.
Steve and this other guy, Ed Shorter, was a friend of mine too.
He just said, you really should be Should do stand-up like you could do it.
I'm like dude you think I'm funny because you know me I'm like other people gonna think I'm an asshole like my sense of humor is so fucked up But so then I went to an open mic night and when you go to open mic night one of the things that's good about open mic nights is like if you compare yourself to like a Bill Burr or Dave Chappelle.
It'll blow your mind.
You can't imagine ever reaching that level.
But if you go to an open mic night, you realize, oh, these people are terrible.
And so when you're around these terrible comedians, you realize, oh, okay.
This is how it works.
And then when I was at an open mic night the first time, a couple of real top-level pros stopped by and did sets, like this guy Teddy Bergeron, who did The Tonight Show back in the day, and he had some substance abuse problems, but I'm telling you, in 1988, no one was better.
There was people that are at that level, but no one was.
He was So smooth, so polished, and his material was so interesting and funny.
I did it for about a year and a half, maybe two years.
I did backstage interviews.
There was an event in Japan.
I'm like, I'm not going to Japan.
I don't have any time.
It literally was costing me money.
I loved doing it, but I could make more money doing a comedy club on the weekend than I could going- They weren't making any money, so how are they going to pay you any money, right?
My first event was supposed to be in New York, but they banned it in New York right before they did the event, and they moved the event very quickly, like overnight, to Dothan, Alabama.
There's a fight with Keith Hackney and Joe Saan, and Keith Hackney is on top of Joe Saan, and Joe Saan's like cranking on his neck, and Keith Hackney's just punched him in the nuts.
He was the real reason why the UFC became uber popular, because you would watch The Ultimate Fighter, it was a wild fight, a great fight, but then you need a destroyer.
Bro, I'm telling you, when Chuck Liddell was in his prime, he was one of the most terrifying fucking human beings that's ever walked the face of the earth.
The guy just came after people, and he was so mean.
But that also made the UFC because that guy being at, that was the figurehead.
That was the big guy.
He was the face of the company because he was the guy that like, if you, the casual fan, when you talk to him, like, have you seen the Chuck Liddell fight?
I mean, the depth of what—like, you could have, like, your own Rogan encyclopedia books, but all these people that come on that a lot of people never heard of and have all these interesting facts and opinions, and I find it fascinating.
You know, you definitely—I mean, you could talk to some— I've had this, like, unexpected education where I get to talk to all these fascinating people and pick their brain.
And, you know, it's like you don't really get a chance to talk to people just like this.
Like, just you and me looking at each other eye to eye, no phones, no people around, just for a conversation.
That's it.
That's all I'm trying to do.
And to be able to do this, like, all the time, it just...
It just seems like it's your own personal curiosity on different things that you like or that you're interested in, whereas it seems like you flip on TV, the people that get interviewed, it's all by design to some degree.
You've got the right PR firm, the right publicist.
And sometimes those people are annoying, you know, and sometimes they're not annoying when you hire them and then become annoying as they get more popular and famous.
So like when you do this, you have to prep much, you get on the internet, you guys do a little bit of research for you, or you just fucking roll in and just start thinking and talking?
Yeah, we actually just came out with a 700 horsepower supercharge package for the C8. We've only been working on it for almost three years, but just finished it up a few months ago.
Look, American OEMs can do whatever they want to do.
I think what Chevrolet's magic has been with the Corvette is to deliver that much value and that nice of a car in the volumes that they do and at the price point that they do.
But look, the Venom F5, what's cool about that is I'm 60. Maybe I'm around another 25 years.
Maybe I'm not.
I don't know.
But I think I would like to see, you know, I'd like to have ultimately when we're all done with production, I'd love for each one of my five kids to have one if I'm able to do that.
Anyway, I'd love to see our grandkids sell it at Barrett-Jack's or RM Auctions at some point down the road for 4 or 5X. Like a McLaren F1, it'd be $20 million someday.
Yeah, well, even like when we're driving, if you still have your Tessa Platt, I drove mine up here, you know, the performance that other thing's capable of, you should not use on the street.
You know, sometimes there might be a place where, you know, you could go out and just have fun with yourself or your buddy, but yeah, same thing.
I mean, the F5, you know, go...
Forget about 0-60.
0-60 is a metric from 60 years ago.
Let's talk about 0-200.
It'll go 0-200 miles an hour in 10 seconds.
A hair under 10 seconds.
It's as fast as or maybe a tiny bit faster from 0-200 miles an hour as compared to a modern Formula 1 car.
Jesus Christ.
Power to weight ratio wise.
But it's built in America.
Our guys just 100 miles down the road build them from here and I think they'll be very collectible someday.
You ever see the gifts where the guys have the telephone pole and they're busting somebody in the balls with it?
I didn't know what I was biting off when I went down this road, but when I started in 2013, it was just kind of an idea and a sketch, and then I got interested in it, and then we built the design model.
Shell helped us build a design model.
We unveiled it at Seaman Vegas in 2017, and then I had orders, and I'm like, now I've got orders.
I've got a design, but I've got to engineer this thing.
So we've had customers ask us, would we be interested in building a dedicated race car?
And it's something we haven't made a decision on, but the answer I lean towards, you know, generally, you want to build a faster car?
Well, hell yeah.
If somebody wants to buy it, I'll build it.
But then the question becomes, we have to kind of go two directions.
Do we want to just build a fun, like something, take it to the Cirque of the Americas that our customer can go out and have fun with?
Or do you want to conform to race series?
All of a sudden, if you're in race series, if you're in Le Mans, you know, something like a World Endurance Championship, you have to conform to all kinds of rules.
I'm not a big rule guy.
I'd rather just kind of build my car, do I kick ass.
But I think there is probably some demand to have a dedicated track car where you've got a full road cage, All the safety equipment, the Halon fire extinguishing system, and everything else that you would expect.
But right now, like I said, we're building.
The coups are sold out.
We're completing the remaining run of those.
Yeah, there's a revolution right there.
Jesus Christ, look at that.
Yeah, that belongs to a guy.
We actually went to the same Jesuit high school back in the late 70s.
He was a senior, and I was a freshman.
And we never knew each other, but when he ordered the car, I found out he was from Kansas City and went to Rockhurst.
And he has his own private test track.
Just up outside of Kansas City.
That's hilarious.
Yeah, you're just driving through the country and you see this fence with like, you know, privacy.
And on the other side of it, it's this gentleman's 3.4 mile private racetrack that we get to test at.
So we had a Velociraptor truck that we were up in Canada with these guys.
So this has been back into 2014. And so I'm working with the producers and they're like, you know, when you're around the talent, don't talk to them.
Don't spend time around them.
I'm like, I'm around famous people more than these guys.
a lot more famous.
I mean, I don't care that they're a big deal.
So anyway, so the producer's kind of being a dick.
And so we show up with these guys, and then we're like, provide the vehicle, and they're going to go cross country through Canada and through the mountains and do all this crazy shit.
And then they're going to go up on the mountain, they're going to rescue Richard Hammond, who's at the top of the mountain, and he's got one of these Breitling watches where you pull out the little cord, and it tells the satellite that you're stranded, so it gives your coordinates to get rescued.
Anyway, so now the producers are saying, well, you know, you can't go up on the mountain while they're filming.
I'm like, okay, but listen to this.
I'm going to go watch football.
It's the playoffs.
I'm going to go watch football.
And if something breaks and you need us to help you, we're not coming.
They're like, oh, then they change their tune.
Like, okay, we'll come with us.
And finally, it all turns out fine.
Well, that producer, I won't say his name, but that producer that was being a massive dick, and maybe he was just doing his job, like two weeks later, they're somewhere else in there in England, and Jeremy gets a little bit of a temper, and these guys work long hours, and maybe they hadn't eaten, and the producer guy was fucking with him, and Jeremy fucking whacked the guy, and I'm like, I wanted to fucking punch that guy a couple times too.
But I can't do that, and I don't want to get arrested in Canada.
But they're still like- You know, I'm sure that's all water under the bridge.
But Jeremy- So Jeremy, Richard Hammond, and James May were all very tied.
I've spent time around them.
And then the other guy that's behind the scenes but just so talented, his name is Andy Willman.
He was the producer when they were on BBC. Now he's the producer.
But when Steven Tyler was being interviewed, you like this from your comedy part of your brain, when Steven was being interviewed by Jeremy, I noticed that the interview went on for like twice as long as it probably should have.
I get claustrophobic, so I don't like being in tight crowds, so I'm kind of hanging towards the back of the crowd that they're filming all this live, and then they aired it later, but they're filming in front of a live audience, and here this guy that looks like he's a homeless dude, wearing a t-shirt, looks like he hadn't showered in about a week, he's standing there making notes.
And I realized I was Andy Willman, the producer of the show.
And so what Jeremy's doing, he's telling all these jokes and asking these questions.
And Andy is using the live audience as his focus group.
Oh, they laughed at this.
Oh, I don't think this is as funny.
And that's how they edit it before it gets transmitted to the rest of the UK and the world.
And I don't know if that, you know, comedians or entertainers kind of, but, you know, you would think to some degree you want to improve your craft, but he's got a quick turnaround time, so, like, he's got another show he's got to do the following week, so he's just like, Jeremy's doing all this stuff, and sometimes they laugh and sometimes they wouldn't, but this guy was definitely paying attention.
Tesla attempted to sue the BBC for libel in March of 2011. The courts ruled in favor of the BBC, saying that no viewer of the show would be likely to reasonably compare the Roadster's performance on the show with its performance in the real world.
Yeah, I don't know how it doesn't break your neck.
Stuff like that.
When we were in Canada with the crew, we were hanging out with the crew.
So they went down to Canada.
They went to Argentina, excuse me.
The gummy bears kicking in, I suppose.
They're in Argentina, and so one of the cars, they rode on the car.
They're doing this cross-country thing.
They're kind of poking fun at the Argentinians when they lost the Falcon War back in the 80s to the Brits.
And the story was that these guys were getting chased out of the country like people were looking for them.
If they found them, they were going to freaking beat their ass pretty hard or worse.
And so I'm talking to the crew and, you know, the presenters were able to get to Buenos Aires and were able to get out of the country.
But the crew was still there.
And people are like, they're calling the embassy.
They're like, hey, you know, what can we do?
The fucking locals are trying to get us.
And so I guess the presenters, again, this is what I'm hearing from the crew when we were in Canada with our Velociraptor, is that, you know, the presenters got out.
The crew were stuck fearing for their lives, like hiding out in places, trying to make it to the airport to get home.
And then so when the whole shit hit the fan, the presenters in England felt bad for him.
So they bought them all first class tickets or business class for him from Argentina back to the UK.
But then the question becomes kind of given the pattern of wanting to further jump the shark.
And look, if I climb a mountain, I want to climb the next mountain.
So I get that to some degree.
But did these guys actually like try to stir up the locals by putting shit on their car to fuck with them?
I don't know if they knew it was going to go as far, but it's kind of a shitty deal where they skated out of there, and their crew was literally afraid they were going to get fucking beat to death.
He's got ones that he drives around that aren't even supposed to have rubber tires, so he had to put rubber on these steel wheels so that it's legal to drive around.
Well, did they ever tell you, so on a steam car, you're heating up this boiler, and the boiler's got water in it, and that turns into steam, and that's what makes it go.
But when you run low on water, if you're not careful, it'll explode.
So you have to turn off the heat.
So this came up because I was in Jay's one time and I saw one of his steam cars.
I'm like, what's the garden hose in the backseat for?
He's like, well...
You know, I'm over at, driving through Burbank and, you know, his start running out of water.
So he's able to shut it down so the engine doesn't explode.
And he goes up and knocks on some little old lady's front door and says, you know, ma'am, can I hook my spigot up to your, you know, my hose up to your spigot?
You know, another thing I learned from Jay that's cool, so whether it's a $2.7 million Venomified Revolution or one of our Velociraptor Mammoth trucks, whenever I'm out in public with one of our vehicles or if I'm at like a Cars and Coffee car show, Jay taught me that.
I said, what got you into cars, Jay?
He says, well, when he was 12 years old, there was like maybe a 55 Jag parked out in front of a store and he was admiring it and the guy came up to the car and says, hey kid, you like the car?
He says, yeah.
And the owner said, would you like to sit in it?
And so I've seen Jay at a bunch of car shows.
So if you're somewhere south of 12 years old and you ask him nicely, You know, he'll let you sit in his car.
So we do the same thing.
And so when they kind of start queuing up and I get the 14-year-old, I'm like, no, no, no.
Because if you're just talking to someone and you're talking to them for five minutes and then you're going to commercial, it's like you can only get so into the subject.
And some subjects deserve more attention.
They deserve time.
And you really can't do it on those shows.
And then also you're censored, right?
So you can't say certain words.
You can't speak your mind.
You'll have a producer in your ear telling you what to do.
And then on top of that, you have these commercials.
You have to wait for the commercial.
Then you've got to build momentum back up.
And you're back.
All right, we're back.
You know, like, why are we back?
Like, what is this?
It's the worst way to have conversations is...
And that's essentially what those things are.
What those things are is just, it's like short attention span, quick soundbite conversations that are not satisfying.
That's the problem.
To get a satisfying conversation, you need to talk to someone for a long time.
We worked with him on a project a couple years ago.
We're just sitting in a truck bullshitting.
And, you know, I kind of asked him, I said, so, since you don't do the Tonight Show, do you miss any of that at all?
He's like, no, not really.
He's like, I... He's like, I wasn't really big on going to movies, so if somebody's coming on the show, I'd go watch the movie just so I knew what to talk about.
He's like, I'm really not into celebrities, and I don't go to the movies that much.
And when you're on a television show, you're kind of depending upon people flipping through the channels or people that are accustomed to watching it at 11 p.m.
Someone could be funny and have one clip about one subject that resonates with people, and they throw it up on their Instagram, and then it gets reposted and shared.
They put it up on Twitter, it's on YouTube, and then bam, all of a sudden they're famous.
It happens all the time now.
This is a great time for people to get their stuff out there.
I'd been married for a while and we're having trouble.
My counselor gives me this book and says, answer these 100 questions and if you're more than 80 of them, then you're ADHD. I was 98 out of 100. So I started taking Ritalin.
And I've been taking Ritalin for...
Almost 25 years.
So fast forward to a couple months ago, I go to my doctor, to the clinic, to go get my prescription refill because it's a controlled substance, like Adderall or opioids or whatever else.
And look, for me, it just wakes me up in the morning.
I don't drink coffee.
And it kind of helps me stay focused on the stuff I've got to do and better follow through and focus.
And so I go in and the nurse says, well, we have a new policy at the clinic.
In order to get a refill for Ritalin or any other controlled substance, we have to drug test you.
And I said, okay, alright, whatever.
Once a year.
And so I started filling out some paperwork.
I'm like, she's like, okay, well tell me now when you want to go pee in the cup.
And I said, you got a drug passing me now?
I said, I'm 60 years old.
I've never been drug tested in my life.
And it just pissed me off.
I'm like, I'm paying money to be here.
I just want my Ritalin.
So I stopped taking it.
And so like for 30 days, I'm kind of like, oh man, I got a little less energy, a little less focus.
Well then I've been watching you and other friends cold plunging.
I would want to get into tussles on just stupid shit.
And so this recent revelation is the clinic wanting to drug test me so I could get my Ritalin refill.
Me not taking the Ritalin, I believe, my wife and kids at least tell me this, a few employees, that I'm just, you know, I don't have to take gummy bears to calm down at times, right?
I'll take a gummy bear sometimes to go to sleep.
But then I thought, okay, well, what can help kind of replace, kind of give me that kick in the ass in the morning, so kind of wake me up and get me going, and I'll go do an early workout, a boxing workout a couple times a week, but I'm like, I need something else.
I've been seeing you and other people doing the cold plunge program.
And that's like, and I had done it a few times before I got off the Ritalin, but I thought like, okay, the last time I did that, that like gave me like this boost of focus, like this mental focus and more calm through the day.
So I bought a cold plunge tank and I got it about three weeks ago and cold plunge maybe five days a week in the morning.
And I don't know, maybe it's just because it's a combination of, it's something that I really don't want to do and it's really hard to do.
And when I say that to myself, I'm like, that's the very reason I need to go do it.
And then secondarily, just like it shocks my system and all of a sudden it just wakes me up.
So I'm like, you know, so if you're listening out there and you're on Ritalin, your kid's on Ritalin, you know, I'm not a doctor, I'm not telling you what to do, but I am saying that I got off of Ritalin and now I can kind of backfill that boost energy in the morning by doing a cold plunge.
The thing about that kind of stuff to me is if you can function as good as you're functioning without it, I wonder, because we think of medications as being necessary.
We think of things like that as being necessary, like this is what you need, it'll straighten you out.
Is it?
You know, I mean, is what we're missing, like at least with some people, is what they're missing physical activity and stressors, things like cold and heat, and things like a morning workout, like how many people are just going to a pill And not doing those other things to see if like maybe there's a more healthy way to approach this.
He's got two scoped knees, and so he thought he tweaked his knee playing pickleball the other day, and he did it and said no more pain.
So, I mean, you as an athlete, I mean, and still probably training pretty hard, do you find like when your body's getting a little worn or your joints are a little sore, does the cold plunge help you too?
And they wanted to put him on certain medications, and he said, I want to try Doing a ketogenic diet and doing the cold plunge every day.
And so this guy shifted his diet and went to doing a cold plunge every day before his workouts.
And his testosterone rocketed.
All of his problems went away.
He started feeling way healthier.
But I think sometimes people need like a little bit of a wake-up call just to kind of straighten up your diet.
And maybe it doesn't need to be keto, but maybe Maybe the benefit wasn't really from him doing keto, which may have been a benefit, but it also might have been when you're doing keto, you're not eating any bullshit.
You can't eat potato chips.
You can't drink soda.
You only get a certain amount of carbs per day.
So you're trying to get your body into this state where it's just burning fat, and just by doing that, you're eliminating bullshit.
And that's probably what's fucking with people more than anything.
So when my heart rate, like when, you know, my resting, my heart rate after rounds, like I'll do like 10 rounds on the bag, and it's still beating fast when I go in.
So, and then because of the heat, like it's a static form of cardio.
Yeah, but like a really fast, like a track-focused go-kart, like for me, like that's something that will take my mind off of everything because maybe a little bit like boxing or something in that if I'm not focused on what I'm doing, I'm either going to fucking lose or get fucking hurt or both.
And so anyway, skiing fast and go-karts are what take my mind off of everything.
Fred Bear was like one of the original pioneers of bow hunting in this country.
But pool, to me, is like one of the ultimate ones, because you could do it at any time you want.
Anytime you have time, I can just go out there and set some drills up, or just run some balls, and it just frees my mind.
Because you know, you're a good pool player.
When you're making a long shot, especially a shot on that table, and you know you have to get pinpoint position on the next ball, there's like so much going on.
We built 1,000 horsepower GT500 for Jim Farley, the CEO, and his son went out and drove around Monterey, California last August and had a blast with it.