#2107 - Billy Walters

Joe Rogan (0:04)

Joe Rogan Experience Good to see you.

Billy Walters (0:14)

It's good seeing you, Joe. It's good being here, thank you.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

So you know George Knapp, that's crazy.

Billy Walters (0:18)

I do know George.

Joe Rogan (0:19)

Did you get involved in the whole UFO thing with him?

Billy Walters (0:22)

Not really. I knew George, got introduced to him, the way he pays the bills.

He covers the news in Las Vegas and does a lot of feature stories. And that's how I met George and we've become good friends over the years. I have a tremendous amount of respect for George and the work he does.

Joe Rogan (0:40)

He's a great man, a really good guy too. Did he cover your story?

Billy Walters (0:45)

George has covered a lot of stories involving me over the years. I've been in Las Vegas. I moved there permanently in 1982 And since I've been there, I've been involved in a lot of different things, indictments.

I did quite a bit of business there.

The biggest business mistakes I probably made, I did some business there with, I did some public-private partnerships with local government and didn't make any money. Matter of fact, lost quite a bit of money, but I got quite a bit of notoriety that I wasn't looking for. I got involved in a world that I didn't totally understand until I got into it. I got into it for business and found myself wrapped up in a political world and that wasn't good.

Joe Rogan (1:30)

They think gambling is a dirty business. The political world, that's the real dirty business, right?

Billy Walters (1:35)

Yeah, I would agree with that. I've met a lot of people over the years in that world and have a lot of respect for some and of course, I withhold my thoughts and comments about others.

Joe Rogan (1:48)

That's a game that you don't want to bet on, right? That is a rigged game.

Billy Walters (1:53)

Yeah, that's a pretty tough game. That one there is, that one is pretty much over before you get involved, I think, most of the time.

Joe Rogan (2:00)

So, I've been paying attention to your story and it's pretty wild, man. You essentially started gambling in a pool hall when you were about six years old.

Billy Walters (2:08)

That's right, yeah.

Joe Rogan (2:09)

That's a very young age to get the bug.

Billy Walters (2:12)

Yeah, well, it's kind of interesting how I got there.

You know, my father passed away when I was a year and a half old and my mother left to find work. I was born and raised in a small rural town in central Kentucky, a little town called Muffordville. And I was lucky. I had two sisters who were older than me. And my grandmother on my father's side took my oldest sister, my aunt on my father's side took my other sister and my mother, my grandmother on my mother's side took me to raise me. And luckily for me, I could have had four parents, I could have had a better role model than her. She worked two jobs.

She was an extremely proud lady. She wouldn't have taken any assistance from anyone if her life depended on it.

And so I learned a lot of things from her early on in life that have been extremely important to me and have kind of carried me through to where I'm at today. And she worked these two jobs. I mean, the first places, Joe, I ever went when I left my home were a Baptist church, you know, Sunday school on Sunday morning, you know, church afterwards, training union on Sunday night, prayer meeting on Wednesday night. And I went to a Christian youth organization on Sunday night called The Royal Ambassadors. But when I was around four, my grandmother, she had these two jobs and she had to have someone to keep an eye on me while my uncle Harry had a pool room. So she started dropping me off at the pool room when I was four years old and uncle Harry, he went to the back pool table, he put up a couple old wooden Coca-Cola cases, handed me a pool stick and he went back to work and I actually started banging pool balls when I was four.

And by the time I'm six, I'm racking balls in uncle Harry's pool room and playing penny nine ball. So my life when I was six, I'm in church five times a week and I'm in my uncle Harry's pool room and I just began the first grade. So that was my life.