Joe Rogan Experience #2230 - Evan Hafer

Narrator 0:00 (drum roll) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience. (drums)

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays) What's up? What's going on, brother? Good to see you again.

Evan Hafer 0:14 (laughs) Good to see you.

Joe Rogan 0:15 So this conversation was ... Well, anytime you wanna come on, I'm always happy to talk to you, but this conversation was birthed out of that crazy conversation we had at elk hunting camp.

Evan Hafer 0:25 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:25 We get-

Evan Hafer 0:25 Which one?

Joe Rogan 0:26 You- Well, yeah, we had a, we had quite a few of them-

Evan Hafer 0:29 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:29 ... where you just ... Y- you opened up my eyes to some of these. First of all, I never understood the extent of the man fuckery in Afghanistan.

Evan Hafer 0:40 Oh.

Joe Rogan 0:41 When we were talking, remember we were hanging out in front of the trucks-

Evan Hafer 0:43 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:43 ... and you were telling me about Mumbles?

Evan Hafer 0:45 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:47 There's a few conversations I've had-

Evan Hafer 0:49 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:49 ... with friends that for the rest of my life, now things are different. Like now I look at-

Evan Hafer 0:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:55 ... and I'm like, that one conversation, that one hour conversation we had, like, "Okay, the world's different now."

Evan Hafer 1:01 I, you know, I always assume people have heard these stories from Afghanistan.

Joe Rogan 1:06 Oh, cheers. Cheers, cheers, bro.

Evan Hafer 1:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07 Cheers. (glasses clink) You gotta drink that. You can't cheers with-

Evan Hafer 1:08 Oh, yeah. Sorry. You can't cheers with that?

Joe Rogan 1:09 You can't cheers with alcohol. Yeah. Buffalo Trace.

Evan Hafer 1:13 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:13 Mm.

Evan Hafer 1:15 So yeah, it ... The amount of man on man buggery in Afghanistan is significant, and-

Joe Rogan 1:22 Did they warn you about it before you went over there?

Evan Hafer 1:24 No. No, I think there were so many different things about both Iraq and Afghanistan that the learning curve for all of us-

Joe Rogan 1:31 (coughs)

Evan Hafer 1:31 ... was so high. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:33 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 1:33 Culturally, you don't think about a lot of those things. You just don't. You just d- You know, you grow up in America.

Joe Rogan 1:41 Right.

Evan Hafer 1:42 You assume everybody, every man is basically like an American male because that's at 26 or, you know, 27 years old. You know that there are cultural differences, for sure, but I'm telling you, (laughs) I was in Kuwait for like the first time early on, and, uh, the Kuwaitis like to hold hands. Like the, the dudes like to hold hands, and that's not comfortable, like for, for guys.

Joe Rogan 2:09 Isn't that weird? Isn't that weird though because we do shake hands?

Evan Hafer 2:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:12 You know what I mean?

Evan Hafer 2:12 But you don't walk around-

Joe Rogan 2:14 I know.

Evan Hafer 2:14 ... holding another man's hand. It's just not comfortable in any scenario.

Joe Rogan 2:18 But imagine trying to explain that to someone who didn't understand like what makes it gay.

Evan Hafer 2:23 Dude.

Joe Rogan 2:23 Like at what point in time does like holding onto a hand, does it get-

Evan Hafer 2:26 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 2:27 You know, like there's like a meter, like you can kind of hold onto a hot potato for a couple seconds. (laughs)

Evan Hafer 2:31 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 2:31 And then, then it'll burn your hand.

Evan Hafer 2:33 After a certain point, you're walking around holding another man's hand and you've never really done it probably since you were a kid, maybe holding your dad's hand when you were like-

Joe Rogan 2:42 Right.

Evan Hafer 2:42 ... three or four years old. And in Special Forces they tell you, you know, "You have to work with the cultural differences." And they're just talking in general.

Joe Rogan 2:53 Right. Right.

Evan Hafer 2:53 Like these are ... They're not specific because they don't know where you're going, and you're gonna have to work by, with, and through the host indigenous force, so you have to accept some of the things that, the cultural differences, and just go with the flow.

Joe Rogan 3:07 Right.

Evan Hafer 3:07 So as a new Green Beret, uh, you know, as, you know, SF guys, you're just walking around holding another man's hand and you're so freaked out about it.

Joe Rogan 3:16 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 3:16 You're like, "Oh, man. Oh, man." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 3:20 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 3:20 You're like, "What the ... What the fuck does this mean?"

Joe Rogan 3:23 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 3:23 Like, you know, you're questioning your, all your reality, like, "Oh my God," you know, like, and, and then after a few years, um, you know, time and repetition and war, whatever, somebody goes to hold your hand and you're like, "Get the fuck away from me."

Joe Rogan 3:37 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 3:37 Like, "I'm not, I'm not doing that, bro. Come on. No. No, I'm not doing that." Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:40 So you gave up after a while?

Evan Hafer 3:41 Oh yeah, there's a lot of things you give up, right? You're ... Y- you're taught in SF, drink the tea, eat the food, you know-

Joe Rogan 3:49 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 3:50 ... do everything that they do.

Joe Rogan 3:51 Assimilate.

Evan Hafer 3:51 Yeah, just completely assimilate. And honestly like a lot of that is really good because it does teach you to be a lot more open as far as listening to what they're going through from their tribal plights, like what are they going through from a combat experience? What do they need? And you want, and you want to build rapport. That's what you want to do. And, but rep after rep in a war zone, you kind of get fatigued with that, and then you're like, "Yeah, let's just get to the dirt here, man, man.

Joe Rogan 4:20 Right.

Evan Hafer 4:20 Like who do we want to kill? Like let's, let's get to that."

Joe Rogan 4:23 Right.

Evan Hafer 4:23 And got it, you don't like that tribe, we don't like that tribe. We don't like this, you don't like that. Cool. Okay, so I'm not gonna eat with you because every time I eat with you I can't shit for like-

Joe Rogan 4:34 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 4:35 ... a normal shit for like a year. So we're just gonna not do any of that. And-

Joe Rogan 4:40 You're telling me you literally didn't shit-

Evan Hafer 4:42 ... bypass it.

Joe Rogan 4:42 ... anything but diarrhea for, you said more than a year?

Evan Hafer 4:45 Dude, yeah, it was years, man. I was-

Joe Rogan 4:47 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 4:47 Because I was living and working with the Afghans and, and I, I went from Iraq and I did the invasion with Special Forces from the South, and I did multiple rotations in Iraq both with SF and then with the, the agency when I went over there. And then when we did the ... When we shut down Iraq in 2009, I turned around and basically went to Afghanistan in 2009. So I went from Iraq to Afghanistan and I went from Afghanistan, kind of finished up my, my CIA, uh, combat, I guess, experience, and then went back to the States to do a training thing. But by the time I got to Afghanistan, I had lots of time in Iraq. I had like four years on the ground. And Afghanistan was way different, but I was living and, and working with the Afghanis. I was eating with them. And your job is to not only train, assist, and advise, build rapport, but you're trying to figure it out, so you need to be on the ground with them living, eating, breathing, sleeping, like the whole thing. And they're-... what we call the chow hall facilities aren't the cleanliest. You're trying. Like, you're working with them, you know, you institute different things, like soap and water is, like, a good thing. Um, and it doesn't really matter. You're still gonna get sick based on, you know, the water, where is it coming from, where, what type of well source.

Narrator 6:20 Right.

Evan Hafer 6:21 Like, there's, there's lots of different variables, obviously. But, dude, I, I didn't have a solid shit for two years.

Narrator 6:29 Whoa.

Evan Hafer 6:29 And I was just kinda got normalized to the point where, you know, you're, uh, it's (laughs) it's such a gross thing to think about, man. You could not trust a fart, ever.

Narrator 6:39 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 6:40 And (laughs) I got this great, I got this great story. So I came in off the gun trucks.

Narrator 6:44 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 6:44 And, uh, and I'm tired. I'm, I'm, like went into the embassy and I had a meeting with somebody in Kabul, and, uh, I had this, like, titanium mug that was like the size of a toilet bowl. And I'm filling it up with coffee, and I haven't slept for, I don't know, let's say 20 hours at the time, I'm, I'm fucking dirty. And I'm filling up this, this, uh, this coffee toilet bowl basically, 'cause I'm getting ready to go into a briefing. And I let out a fart, and it wasn't a fart.

Narrator 7:13 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 7:14 (laughs) And, and the dude behind me was like-

Narrator 7:18 Oh.

Evan Hafer 7:18 Yeah. I didn't even turn around, dude.

Narrator 7:20 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 7:21 I, I knew there was somebody waiting for me.

Narrator 7:22 Ugh. Ugh.

Evan Hafer 7:23 And I shit my pants.

Narrator 7:26 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 7:26 And I didn't even turn around. Didn't even blink an eye. Didn't even, like, lift up the handle, 'cause it was just normalized.

Narrator 7:32 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 7:32 And he goes, "Did you shit your pants?" And I was like, "Yeah."

Narrator 7:35 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 7:35 And I just turned around and walked off. It was like-

Narrator 7:37 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 7:37 It was the deputy ambassador or somebody. It was like the, it was like the ambassador, right? And I was just like, "Whatever, dude. I got, I got shit to do. I'm outta here."

Narrator 7:44 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 7:45 Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's to the point of which I had a permanent stain in, like, my combat f- my, my fatigues, right? It was just so bad.

Narrator 7:53 Ugh.

Evan Hafer 7:53 But I was like, "You know what, man? You got shit to do." Like ...

Narrator 7:57 Yeah. People adapt.

Evan Hafer 7:58 You n- You don't, you don't sweat little things like that. And honestly, you're just trying to, like, get through your ... You're trying to get through any and all things, and it's not like we were in trench warfare or anything like that. It's just like, "Dude, I had shit to do. I had people to train. We were going out." And I couldn't let that ... Like, you can't pull over if you're-

Narrator 8:18 Right.

Evan Hafer 8:19 You can at times, but there are just times where you just, you just can't. So you just gotta keep moving.

Narrator 8:23 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 8:23 And it sucks. It's like the less glamorous side. I don't know if you've like (laughs) -

Narrator 8:27 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 8:28 There's a lot of, a lot of books out there telling all the cool stories about that, if you know what I mean.

Narrator 8:32 So when did you find out about the buggery?

Evan Hafer 8:35 Um-

Narrator 8:36 Was it something that you need a lighter?"

Evan Hafer 8:37 Yeah. It was ... So it started in Kuwait. And I had a, I had a, a Arabic linguist, and he was a younger kid. Um, you know, he was blonde hair, blue eyes, he's a Mormon kid. And he literally joined the army at 18, you know? Two years later, after going to the Defensive Language Institute in Monterey, California, you come out and you're speaking Arabic, basically. And young kid, blonde hair, blue eyes, good Mormon kid comes out, and he's with us. And the Kuwaitis r- kept talking about how they wanted to take him camping. And we're like, "Why do you wanna take that dude camping?"

Narrator 9:19 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 9:19 Like what's so special about that guy, you know? And you're like, after a while, you realize like that's not what they wanted to do, right? They were like talking about it-

Narrator 9:28 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 9:28 ... in like either a joking way or a serious way. But that's the first exposure.

Narrator 9:34 They wanted to fuck him.

Evan Hafer 9:34 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then-

Narrator 9:36 Did it take you a while to figure that out?

Evan Hafer 9:37 Yeah. Yeah, because you're so naive.

Narrator 9:39 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 9:39 Like, dude, I'm like (laughs) I'm 26 years old. Like I don't fucking know. I don't, I don't think this is a thing. I, I-

Narrator 9:45 Right.

Evan Hafer 9:45 I grew up in Idaho. Like I know, yeah, it exists, but I'm so, you know, blithefully like moving through the world, like thinking everybody's a, an, an American male, right?

Narrator 9:57 Right.

Evan Hafer 9:57 Like, "Yeah, this is weird." And then, you know, you go to Iraq, and where I went, you know, I went to Iraq and multiple, multiple rotations over there. And you start to assimilate with y- the Iraqis you're either working with or you're training with. And then it kinda starts to, to, to fall apart, where it's like, "Oh, this is somewhat normal, uh, for them." Now, they don't talk about it, and I'm not saying it's like everyone, by the way. I'm saying like it's, it's at least relevant enough culturally where it's somewhat normalized and not talked about. It's very strange.

Narrator 10:36 Is, is the, is it similar in Kuwait-

Evan Hafer 10:38 Mm-hmm.

Narrator 10:38 ... as Afghanistan or-

Evan Hafer 10:40 Mm-hmm.

Narrator 10:41 ... do they vary? Iraq is different?

Evan Hafer 10:43 Yeah, they're all a little bit different. Um, and the Afghanis we had to have, um, depending on where we were in their barracks, living situation, like you had to put really hard restrictions, like, you know, no butt-fucking, guys, for the majority of this. Because this is a health issue. We weren't like ... (laughs) It's not like we were, we were putting Bibles on their beds or something.

Narrator 11:08 Right.

Evan Hafer 11:08 We're just saying, "Hey, this is really unhealthy. You guys are gonna spread a bunch of different diseases to one another. And like we've got a mission to, to accomplish here."

Narrator 11:17 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 11:17 And every SF guy, every guy that's like been in Afghanistan knows what man love Thursday is, and it's kind of a, it's kind of a thing that they do.

Narrator 11:24 Is it just Thursday, or is it ... It's, that's just a thing to say.

Evan Hafer 11:29 It's by, it's just a thing. Yeah, yeah.

Narrator 11:29 But it's just they fuck each other.

Evan Hafer 11:30 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They like it.

Narrator 11:32 And so there's the kid with the blue eyes.

Evan Hafer 11:34 Mm-hmm.

Narrator 11:35 And after a while, you're like, "Hey, they don't really wanna camp with him. They're trying to fuck this guy."

Evan Hafer 11:39 (laughs) Yeah. Exactly.

Narrator 11:40 And then you start thinking like, "Hey, how much of this is going on?"

Evan Hafer 11:42 Yeah, yeah. That's, it's, it's exactly right. Yeah. And ...

Narrator 11:46 Wow.

Evan Hafer 11:46 And then you're, as you're exposed to, not more of it, because you don't really see it, you hear about it.

Narrator 11:53 Mm-hmm.

Evan Hafer 11:54 So as you build rapport, build confidence in your friendships, and people start to talk about, but, um-... it, it is fairly pervasive. And I, it's, it's one of those things that you just kind of accept that that's happening from a good port- a good portion of the guys. And-

Joe Rogan 12:15 50%? 60%?

Evan Hafer 12:18 Well, what, what we talked about, like, kind of rewinding, it's, it's, the, the more disturbing factor is, is it's, it's socially indoctrinated in the children, like the sexual exploitation of children. So, it starts early and then it moves into the adulthood. Bacha Bazi is a, a real thing and, you know, it's dressing, uh, boys to look like girls and they have, uh, some Afghanis ... when I say some, I don't know how pervasive it is, but it's very ... it's, it's a big percentage. And the a- adult male stuff, that's like one sub-segment of their culture, but it's the, uh, sexual exp- exploitation of children that when you find that out, that's when things really turn for you psychologically. You're like, "This, this place is really fucked."

Joe Rogan 13:15 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 13:15 And it's, and it's very pervasive. It's, it's very ... it's, it's a, it's ... it, you know, if you go back and you read The Kite Runner, uh ... when I read The Kite Runner when I was in Afghanistan, I realized that it, you know, it's not only the story about this kid, but it's also the story of Afghanistan. It's very, very ... those stories run parallel because children are sexually exploited regularly and it's mainly the boys, from what I understand, to the point of which I was driving out, out on this op, I guess, uh, from Kabul to Jalalabad. And when I first got to Afghanistan, I used to see these truck drivers and I thought, you know, my dad was a truck driver, it's really cool these truck drivers take their sons out with, um, on the road. That's such a really cool cultural thing. And my interpreter turned to me, he's like, "Those aren't their kids, dude." That's how fucking horrible it is.

Joe Rogan 14:15 It's so horrible that they're on display.

Evan Hafer 14:18 Yes.

Joe Rogan 14:18 They're on parade even.

Evan Hafer 14:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 14:19 You were saying. The guys would parade around their harem.

Evan Hafer 14:22 Kandahar and different areas. They'll, they'll have parades and they're on display as to this is my harem and they're proud of it. And that was one of the most disturbing things that we would talk about specifically between like the departments, between Department of State, CIA, and the militaries. Like, when you're out with the guys from a, a tactical and combat role, you see them and you interact with the way they are from a tactical level every day. And you'd bring this up to management and they would say, "Ah, that doesn't ... what do you mean? That doesn't happen. That doesn't happen." Or they pretend it doesn't happen. But if you were on the ground in Afghanistan during the times I was there, honestly, from, you know, 2001 we'll say to the time that we pulled out, everybody uniformly would agree with what I'm saying. I, I, I, if you, if you spent some time in Afghanistan, you knew it was happening.

Joe Rogan 15:22 Jesus Christ.

Evan Hafer 15:23 And-

Joe Rogan 15:23 Did you see these parades?

Evan Hafer 15:25 No, no. We ... but National Geographic, I believe, did an article on it several years ago. So you-

Joe Rogan 15:31 Speaking of National Geographic-

Evan Hafer 15:32 Yeah. Bacha Bazi.

Joe Rogan 15:34 Ugh.

Evan Hafer 15:34 Uh, I, I could be getting the pronunciation a little bit off. But it turns for you emotionally and psychologically 'cause you're like, "Okay, now, now I've got some hate."

Joe Rogan 15:50 Right.

Evan Hafer 15:50 Right?

Joe Rogan 15:51 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 15:51 You know? Made my, made me ... it makes your job a little bit easier.

Joe Rogan 15:54 Right.

Evan Hafer 15:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:55 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 15:55 It makes your job a little bit easier.

Joe Rogan 15:57 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 15:57 It also makes it harder for you not to want to change the entire government system where you, you want to completely, you know, rewrite the entire DNA of the cultural infrastructure.

Joe Rogan 16:14 Right.

Evan Hafer 16:15 Uh, because it's sad and it's, it, it's evil and it's all of these like really horrible things. So, as much as you want to help the Afghans and their plight-

Narrator 16:29 Can I say one thing?

Evan Hafer 16:30 Yeah, there you go.

Joe Rogan 16:31 Inside the lives of girls dressed as boys in Afghanistan, the cultural practice of ba- bacha posh? Po-

Evan Hafer 16:38 Bacha posh, that's a, I think that's the flip that's the reverse.

Joe Rogan 16:41 ... encourages parents to dress their daughters as sons for a better future, but often it only makes life harder.

Evan Hafer 16:47 That's a different ... so it's boys is dressed as girls.

Joe Rogan 16:49 Oh, so that's the opposite?

Evan Hafer 16:50 That's the opposite, yeah.

Joe Rogan 16:51 Girls dress as boys.

Evan Hafer 16:52 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 16:53 So this is a different thing.

Evan Hafer 16:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 16:55 Why do they do that? What's that about, girls dressing as boys?

Evan Hafer 16:59 Well, I think because, well, one, there's, there's a very low education rate, and when I come back to, uh, Afghanistan-

Joe Rogan 17:05 Oh, so they can get the kids educated if they pretend they're boys?

Evan Hafer 17:08 Yeah. And women are, are really seen as ... in Afghanistan who I'm, I'm generalizing, right? I'm, I'm, I'm taking really big-

Joe Rogan 17:15 Right.

Evan Hafer 17:15 ... swaths of the Afghan culture.

Joe Rogan 17:17 Mm-hmm.

Evan Hafer 17:17 So, I know this isn't every Afghan, I've got lots of different Afghan friends and I've hired a lot of Afghans. This isn't everybody.

Joe Rogan 17:25 Look. What the heck is this?

Evan Hafer 17:25 Um, yes.

Joe Rogan 17:26 This is the dancing boys-

Evan Hafer 17:27 This is in their-

Joe Rogan 17:27 ... they're in Afghanistan. Go back up again, show what's going on. These guys are throwing money-

Evan Hafer 17:31 Yes.

Joe Rogan 17:31 ... at this dancing boy. Back that up, Jamie.

Narrator 17:34 I don't ... yeah, it was, I just clicked somewhere random kind of, trying to go back towards you guys.

Joe Rogan 17:38 Oh. What the fuck, man.

Evan Hafer 17:41 Yes. So, those-

Joe Rogan 17:43 But those are like little boys and they were dancing like strippers and these guys are throwing dollars at them.

Evan Hafer 17:48 Yes. Yep.

Joe Rogan 17:51 Oh my god, this is so crazy.

Evan Hafer 17:53 And they're younger, so they go much younger. This is the ... like, this is the thing that people, they don't wanna talk about in Afghanistan that we talked about regularly, which was these are very, what we feel are distinctly-... um, wrong. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 18:14 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 18:14 These are very wrong things from a, a, a American support tactical and strategic intervention. Like, we should not encourage this whatsoever, and it made it very difficult at times for us to, uh, trust with the State Department or somebody else was saying. But I mean, this, this goes back to, you know, Iraq and honestly trust in policymakers in the State Department and their, their entire, you know, position either politically, philosophically. It's, it's just fundamentally flawed. Um-

Joe Rogan 18:44 It's a... So when you're hearing about this, and, uh, the, the, one of the things about, um, child molesting is that if these kids are growing up in this culture where they're going to be an adult and they're gonna do that to kids as well, which has probably happened to all these guys, right?

Evan Hafer 19:03 Right.

Joe Rogan 19:04 Like, this is... You c- you're not gonna fix that with all these people alive. Like, the culture gets to a point where it's so fucked that it's like, how do you... How can you ever fix that? How many generations would it take before the scars of all those people being abused wears off and normalizes and people can be normal again? People can be like a, what we would consider a Western civiliza- ci- civilization, like London or-

Evan Hafer 19:33 Right.

Joe Rogan 19:33 ... or New York. Like, how?

Evan Hafer 19:35 Just the, the, what we feel is the morally appropriate cultural boundaries.

Joe Rogan 19:43 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 19:43 That's, that's like how many generations would it take? And there's lots of different things that you can talk about, because y- y- the history of Afghanistan is, we'll say post '80s and Soviet, uh, intervention, and then, you know, with the Taliban pushback, the Mujahideen, and like, they completely destroyed the education, the progress and evolution of Afghanistan. I mean, they, they had decades of war. Then you had basically a, um, a failed state with Taliban in extremist control. I mean, as the Taliban moved in, fundamentally, it, it's an evil organization. Uh, I went... There's a soccer field in, in Kabul where the Taliban used to stone women to death because they weren't wearing their hijab. Or the, the rule of a woman would be raped, and she would be accused of infidelity on her husband, and they would stone her, or they would beat her with a stick. And I- they turned the soccer field into a place where they could have public displays for execution. It, it was completely insane. When you, when you think about it from where we're coming from and then where we're going and we're-

Joe Rogan 21:05 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 21:05 ... we're trying to, uh, uh, nation build, which I've, like, fundamental disagreement with that as well. But you, you eliminated the educated portion of your population. You swung to a very extremist fear-based religion, and then there was all, uh, based on the Quran as far as their education system. So they completely separated the women away from being able to evolve. They treated them as beasts of burden. You had to be Islamic extremist to be acceptable. There was a completely, uh, uh, hegemonic, the radical state, or, um, it, it had hegemony as far as, like, it's the theocracy ran everything and it was a very extremist version of Islam. And as we came in, and I wasn't there in 2001. Uh, I came there much later. I came there in 2009, was my first real rotation there. It, it had been seven years, but really it, it was almost like going back in time almost a thou- It felt like you were going back in time like a thousand years.

Joe Rogan 22:22 That's one of the things we were talking about in camp, that when you hear about Socrates and all these ancient cultures, the Spartans, all these people that, like, had boys.

Evan Hafer 22:34 Yes.

Joe Rogan 22:34 And you, you, you see what's going on in Afghanistan and you realize, like, how old a culture Afghanistan is. It's like one of the oldest civilizations in terms of like the way they behave. It's almost like they never caught up with the Western world. I think it was, um... Michael Shermer might have wrote a book, uh, uh, paper about this. He wrote an article about how, um, Islam's the only religion that didn't go through the Enlightenment-

Evan Hafer 23:00 Mm.

Joe Rogan 23:01 ... and that it's, essentially maintains the same values and, you know, the same cultural values as when it was created. So, you know, what, how old is Islam?

Evan Hafer 23:12 Uh, 1600. I think it's, I think it's like, uh, 500 years past Christianity, so let's call it 1,500 years.

Joe Rogan 23:22 1,500 years old.

Evan Hafer 23:23 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:23 Whatever it is. Th- that, that's how people behaved back then. That's what it is. And when you think about, like, Alexander the Great, Alexander the Great who was gay-

Evan Hafer 23:31 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 23:32 ... right, who conquered much of Afghanistan and-

Evan Hafer 23:34 Right.

Joe Rogan 23:34 ... giant swaths of the world. Um, he probably, like, his army and his behavior, and what he probably stained that area with like a type of behavior.

Evan Hafer 23:48 I, I, I think you're 100% right. I think that you had, um, portions of the world were culturally cut off from being able to evolve at the same rate as some of the other places within the Middle East. And those tribes essentially haven't had the opportunity to evolve because they've been very isolated. I mean, look at Afghanistan. It's an extremely isolated area of the world. And, uh, e- e- if you go back to the '70s, it was relatively progressive, somewhat secular, and then...... the Soviet intervention, the collapse, and the failed state led to the rise of the Taliban because they had eviscerated-

Joe Rogan 24:28 Mm-hmm.

Evan Hafer 24:28 ... uh, all of the, the intellectual and the economic class. And in order to succeed or live there, you had to completely capitulate to the theocracy and the fascist state. So, you had to go back in time to live.

Joe Rogan 24:43 (exhales)

Evan Hafer 24:44 You had to grow a beard. I, and when I say this, isn't everybody is 100% no. I'm saying like, this is the way people lived. They lived under tyrannical rules that provided zero opportunity for ... You know, if you had girls, sorry-

Joe Rogan 25:03 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 25:03 ... they're a beast of burden. They treat goats and donkeys better than their girls, their children. The homelessness of children in a war zone is so heartbreaking. Like, it is, it, it strips away at the goodness in your soul watching desperation and, uh, when you see homeless children every day in these cities that are dirty, starving, uh, and there's really not a lot you can do because, you know, you have a war to ... you have a war to fight. And you not only think about it from the homelessness position, you think about the exploitation position. Like, these kids are so fucked. They're homeless. They don't have parents because maybe their fathers were either, you know, killed in the war. Their mothers can't ... they, they can't afford to keep them, and they continue to have more kids. And especially if they've been raped, then there's a cycle of not only exploitation and violence, but then it's also, uh, it- it- it keeps them down economically. So, you have, uh, massive amounts of children that were homeless and exploited, and they're starving. And it's-

Joe Rogan 26:26 (exhales)

Evan Hafer 26:27 ... y- y- you know, you ... From my perspective, when you live in that environment and ... you can't think about it. Like, you have to shut that stuff out.

Joe Rogan 26:41 (exhales)

Evan Hafer 26:41 'Cause if you think about it, it's like opening the door of the submarine, it-

Joe Rogan 26:47 All the water's coming in.

Evan Hafer 26:48 All the water's coming in, and it's gonna fucking sink ya. So, you have to, you have to build a (laughs) , for a lack of a better term, man, you have to build a callous on your soul.

Joe Rogan 26:59 Oof.

Evan Hafer 27:00 'Cause you can't function and, uh, meet and exceed your mission success criteria if you're gonna ... if, if, if you get steamrolled by depression on what you're seeing every day.

Joe Rogan 27:15 Oh, my god.

Evan Hafer 27:16 I- time and repetition, which is one of the big problems, I think, with the GWOT community, or at least what we've had in the last 20 years. I mean, there's lots of different compounding factors that, I think, contribute to the acceleration of veteran suicide, which I, I, I don't wanna, like, launch into some, like, rant about the issues that we're, I think we're, we're all faced, but it's, it's definitely something that I'm extremely passionate about.

Joe Rogan 27:42 Yeah, I'm really hoping, um, and we've talked about this a bunch of times on this podcast, but I'm really hoping that something's gonna change with RFK and about, uh, psychedelics and veterans. I really, really am hoping that they open their eyes to this stuff.

Evan Hafer 27:56 Well, (exhales) like, I was talking to Marcus Capone, and he runs VETS, which he's the guy ... His organization is the organization that takes the guys to Mexico to do ibogaine. And Marcus is a retired SEAL. I was talking to him yesterday, actually. And we (exhales) , I- I- I'll go off on this, which is, you know, we as a subculture from the, the global war on terror community, the veterans, we're under an epidemic of suicide and depression. And the VA has not been a help to us, like, especially the war fighters, like the guys that are ... We have rogered up time and time and time again. They've gone overseas. We've done the bidding for the country. We've watched our friends get killed and fucking torn in half in, like, very ultra-violent ways. You know, we've been exposed to overpressure, and chemicals, and all these other things. And then we come back, and within the VA system, their answer is, "Here's your pills. Here's your retirement. Shut the fuck up." And it's not working. You know, Marcus and I were talking about this yesterday. He was on antidepressants for seven years, seven years, like, antidepressants, and they weren't working. And he, just by chance, his wife, I believe, um, said, "This might work. We need to go to, we need to go to Mexico and do ibogaine. This might work." So, here's a guy that went, did it one time, has never been on an antidepressant since.

Joe Rogan 29:33 Did he have to get off them before he went there-

Evan Hafer 29:35 No.

Joe Rogan 29:35 ... and did it?

Evan Hafer 29:36 I, I, I, I don't know exactly what the protocol is as far as, like, you have to get off, and then you have to get back down there. I know that most of my friend group now, they've- they've done it, and they have an extremely high success rate. Uh, you know, VETS has done a thousand, uh, former war fighters, and they have an extremely high success rate, where they're eliminating pharmaceuticals. So, they'll go down, they'll do it one time. Maybe they've done, you know, subsequent sessions, and they have this really high success rate. And this is part of the-

Joe Rogan 30:10 Better than anything?

Evan Hafer 30:11 Yes. This is part of the issue-

Joe Rogan 30:13 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 30:13 ... is we're under an epidemic of veteran suicide, like, uh, more so than we ever have. And the worst thing about this, too, is it's also affecting our family and our kids.... like our kids are four times higher to commit suicide than our peer set. So it's not just, it's not just the GWOT veteran community, now it's our families and, and our, and our children. You have something that has such a proven track record to help heal vets, and we can't do it without breaking the law. We have to leave the country?

Joe Rogan 30:45 (scoffs)

Evan Hafer 30:46 It's insane. So, you can send me to Iraq under false pretenses and, you know, you can have Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld and all these, this, like, orchestra of fucking idiots can send us all to Iraq, but with, for weapons of mass destruction. We can go fight in the wars, come back, and now we have to break the law to go fix what's wrong with our, our heads or our, you know, our emotions, our, our, our, not only our psychology, but... Dude, we're broken. Like, we've been beat up and kind of shoved in a closet, and then we're sedated and told to shut, shut the fuck up. And meanwhile, you know, Wolfowitz and Bremer and all these other guys, they get to walk around and provide, you know, public speeches about how fucking great they are because they're, you know, strategically important, whereas my peer set were under an epidemic of suicide, our kids are committing suicide, the, the VA's no help to us, and we have to go break the law.

Joe Rogan 31:50 True.

Evan Hafer 31:51 It's like, you get to go flip a fucking coin and paint some paintings, and you think that everything's okay?

Joe Rogan 31:56 And that one doesn't make any sense.

Evan Hafer 31:58 No.

Joe Rogan 31:58 Out of all the ones, that's one that... Mushrooms, you can do recreationally. No one's doing recreational ibogaine.

Evan Hafer 32:04 No. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 32:04 I've never done it before. Have you done it?

Evan Hafer 32:06 No. Huh-uh.

Joe Rogan 32:07 I've never done it-

Evan Hafer 32:07 Huh-uh.

Joe Rogan 32:07 ... but everybody that I've talked to, th- that they said it is one of the most, like, ruthlessly introspective journeys in your life. You don't... It's not fun at all.

Evan Hafer 32:16 Mm-mm.

Joe Rogan 32:16 Dakota Meyer told me, he's like, "I fucking hated it. I couldn't believe someone made me do it. After it was over, I was like, 'What the fuck am I doing?'" It's not a fun time. It's not a recreational drug. It's not a drug of addiction, and it's not a drug of dying. It'd be... It's not... What's the El- Let's find out what the LD50 rate is for ibogaine. It's probably bananas. It's probably-

Evan Hafer 32:37 Dude-

Joe Rogan 32:37 ... just like psilocybin, probably can't really overdose on it.

Evan Hafer 32:40 No, I-

Joe Rogan 32:40 I don't know, though.

Evan Hafer 32:41 I don't know.

Joe Rogan 32:42 Ibogaine might kill you. It sounds really crazy potent.

Evan Hafer 32:44 Most of my, my close friends have done either ayahuasca or ibogaine, neither of which they would say is a good time, all of which have said, all of which, 100%, and, uh, they've come back and been not only fundamentally changed but better. And these are, you know, my business partner, Jared Taylor, he's gone and done ibogaine, and, uh, and then multiple other people that probably don't want me to talk about them on the podcast, guys that have been on 15, 20 different pharmaceuticals, can literally scrape them off their dresser into a garbage can the day they get back.

Joe Rogan 33:24 Crazy.

Evan Hafer 33:24 And the fact that we aren't trying to evolve this section of the medicine, I know that Stanford did a study, I'm not exactly familiar with all the data associated with it, but the, the fact that we aren't leading the charge as a country to come up with dynamic, out of the box solutions for the guys that have gone overseas and, you know, done the, the hard and courageous task for this country, and then they come back and they can't get help, and we're not pushing the envelope?

Joe Rogan 33:59 Right.

Evan Hafer 33:59 That's a crime.

Joe Rogan 34:00 It's a crime.

Evan Hafer 34:00 I mean, I've got lots, I got lots of issues with, you know, Iraq (laughs) at this point, right? I mean, it's fundamentally, uh... And I've told this to people. Like, Iraq is with me every day, right? Afghanistan was, was a part of my life, but Iraq fundamentally changed me for the rest of my life, and I think about it every day. It's not going away. It'll never go away. And-

Joe Rogan 34:23 What about Iraq that was much different than Afghanistan that changed you?

Evan Hafer 34:27 Um... Well, it's the first war experience I had, and, you know, for me, I was like hook, line, and sinker, regime change, you know, move, w- we've, we've gotta find weapons of mass destruction, we've gotta eliminate the threat, we gotta fight them there so we don't have to fight them here.

Joe Rogan 34:48 Everybody thought it was real.

Evan Hafer 34:48 Hell yeah. Yeah, I mean, there was nobody more motivated to go to war than, than me. You know? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there was, but you know what I'm saying, right?

Joe Rogan 34:58 So you were in that group.

Evan Hafer 34:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:59 You were gung-ho.

Evan Hafer 34:59 Oh, 100%. It's not only, "Hey, we're gonna go to war, we're gonna do something good for America." These guys attacked the United States. "We're, we're going to eliminate the terrorist threat." Uh, and (laughs) , you know, war is a, is a, such a strange and surreal circumstance because it changes you for good, it changes you for the bad, and I've looked at this a lot, and I looked at, like, life experience like a, a radio wave almost, like a band where you have highs, you have lows, and most people, we'll, we'll call it 90-plus percent of the United States, their, their frequency only gets so high and only gets so low, and it li- basically stays within, we'll say, a, a fairly small band within the center. Combat, what happens is you go really high and you go really low and it forces you outside of social norms on a second to second basis, and then you do that over and over and over again. And so one person might get in a car wreck in their life and that goes really low, so it's a really high adrenaline dump, and it goes really low because they have an injury. That's like one thing. Well, going out in a combat zone multiple night, like, not only multiple nights a week. Sometimes you're doing multiple targets a night. You might go on, you might be getting in a, what, what the rough equivalent of an adrenaline car wreck-... what, the rough equivalent of a car wreck from an adrenaline dump and a high and a low. You weren't doing that three or four times a night. (exhales) And then, you're doing that night after night, week after week, and it fundamentally changes you because you have to chop all of this down. Because if you get too ramped up and too chaotic, you're gonna lose control and you won't be able to complete your mission criteria. If you get too low, you also won't be able to achieve your mission criteria. Your survival instincts kick down, so it chops your ability to feel all the way down to a normal person's bandwidth because it's a survival mechanism. And this is just my own-

Narrator 37:08 Mm-hmm.

Evan Hafer 37:08 ... assessment. So, from a combat-experience perspective, the first time you feel it, and I'll tell you, I mean, the first time I was, uh, in an ambush, I was losing my shit (laughs) . I mean, anybody who tells you they're not fucking scared, well, they're either, like, fundamentally flawed. They're like Travis Pastrana. He doesn't have, like, a fear portion of his brain, or they're just lying. Like, you're scared out of your fucking mind. Like, going north, like, driving north into Iraq, you're s- you're looking into the deep, dark abyss of the unknown, and you're like, "What the fuck? Am I gonna be a coward?" You know, "Am I gonna live? Am I gonna die?" I mean, our casualty, projected casualty rates was that we were gonna lose most of our ODA.

Narrator 37:59 Jesus Christ.

Evan Hafer 37:59 So, you're, you're stepping into a situation where you're going, "Okay. Well, I know out of this six-shooter that I'm gonna play Russian roulette with, there are four bullets in this."

Narrator 38:09 Oh, my god.

Evan Hafer 38:10 And you're driving north going, "Okay. Let's fucking do it." So, you've already capitulated and given yourself up to die, which is, it's actually a, a very cathartic and I think personally an experience that you can evolve from. Because at that point, if you're dead, you can live uninhibited. Like, everything I do from this point forward is just gravy on (laughs) on, on the steak, man. I'm already dead.

Narrator 38:41 Right.

Evan Hafer 38:41 I was driving north in, in Iraq, and I, like, through, like, the desert, and, uh, my best friend and I are, are, like, driving north. And, and you have, like, hours to stare off into the fucking sand. You know, your, your, you've got night vision goggles or whatever. I had a whole fictionalized funeral for myself.

Narrator 39:03 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 39:04 (laughs) I just fucking... What else am I gonna do, right?

Narrator 39:07 Right.

Evan Hafer 39:07 You're just, like, driving north, you know, and there's nothing going on. So, I had a whole fictionalized funeral. I buried myself, and so I was already dead, or at least I felt like that. And then, we get in our first engagement, and the world starts cracking apart, and your mind can't keep up to what, what's actually happening. You, you'll hear the gunfire, and, you know, I felt, I felt the explosion. I looked in the rearview mirror of the Humvee, which is, sounds crazy. I looked in the rearview mirror, and, um, I saw this, like, car-sized chunk of fire flying behind the vehicle. Like, so distinctly remember this. And I'm turning to my, my, my team leader and I'm like, "We gotta get the fuck outta here." You know, I'm like, losing it, right? (laughs) So stupid. It was so stupid. "We gotta get the fuck outta here."

Narrator 40:01 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 40:01 You know, I'm like, losing it, dude. I'm just fucking losing it. And he's like-

Narrator 40:04 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 40:04 And he's cool, man. He's, like, calm, cool. He's on the radio. You know, he's like, "You know, vehicle one, you know, or vehicle three, this is vehicle one. Vehicle three, this is vehicle one." And we're checking to see if we have comms between us and the other vehicles. And I'm fucking losing it. I'm like, "We gotta get the fuck outta here!" You know? And it was like, "Okay." 'Cause I mean, you know, you're used to, like, watching movies or whatever, and it's the first time anything like this has ever happened.

Narrator 40:30 Right.

Evan Hafer 40:32 And, and at this point, you know, the full insurgency hasn't kicked off that we're hunting .......................... These, these guys weren't the most sophisticated cats on the planet. They, they weren't that good. So- but we end up pushing through and then consolidating at the end of this. And fundamentally, this, this, like, changed my tactical experience in combat forever because my team leader, who I respect and loved, he was killed two years later. He's one of my best friends, was my best friend. Um, he turns to me and he goes, "Hey, man. If you don't have a solution to the problem, just shut the fuck up." (laughs)

Narrator 41:17 (laughs) That's great advice.

Evan Hafer 41:18 I know! And it was-

Narrator 41:19 That's great advice across the board.

Evan Hafer 41:21 Yeah. And, uh, I was like, "Okay. Roger that." You know? I was like, "Okay. Fucking roger that, man." And then, it became a practice discipline when shit's going super sideways and, you know, bullets ... Well, "When bullets are flying." I, I, I hate sounding like that. I, I don't wanna say it. I don't wanna sound like that at all. Um-

Narrator 41:47 But that's what it is.

Evan Hafer 41:48 Dude, you, you keep your shit together. And then I became, by the time I, my, my last ambush in Iraq I was in was w- my l- I. So, I'll b- I'll bookend this experience with, um, ambushes. Uh, I was in Mosul, and I was in a, a little BMW trying to work my way, and I was, I was working a, it was, it was bas- basically a low, like, you're, you're trying to fly under the radar, you're low-viz CIA at this point. So, we're trying to blend in. We got hit at a checkpoint, and they light us up. And so now, I'm alone in a car with another guy and the, the CIA chief.... and the entire Iraqi army in Mosul, Iraq is essentially pursuing us through the, from... I mean, Mosul is the size of Los Angeles, and I started at the north end of Los Angeles, basically, and had to work my way to the southern end of Los Angeles being shot at. (exhales) And, um, and I'm trying to sort through the problem, man. Like, I got a fucking map sheet, and you don't know. I mean, this is, this is Mad Max in the fucking Thunderdome, and Mosul was one of the most fucked up cities in Iraq. Like, it was... It looked like going back to Stalingrad in different sections of this place. It was a complete shit show, and I'm alone with my dr- you know, the guys with, and, and I'm trying to navigate through the city and help the driver. We, we're being pursued from, from literally north to south, uh, being shot at, and we're going, "Okay, right turn, right turn, right turn." And I mean, I have the f- I have like... The dragons are at the bumper. (exhales) They're gonna fucking... They're gonna pull me out of this car and chop my fucking head off. Like, they're gonna turn my car into Swiss cheese. They're gonna fucking chop my head off. I'm dead. We're dead. And, uh, I have like... I brought up, um, Kiowas. They were on station. We had a really good, really good relationship with these, with these guys. And I was like, "Hey, you know, you, this is me. I'm in a, you know, black BMW, like... (laughs) And, uh, you know, I'm moving, you know, I was, uh, uh, from north to south." And, uh, and helicopter came back, said, "Oh, I know who you are." (laughs) "You fucking... You got the everybody following you." 'Cause we... A- And not all the checkpoints are created equal, and for whatever reason, they decided they were gonna kill us that day. And I mean, you don't have time. You're not gonna sit around and be like, "Why do you guys wanna kill us? Well, we're just good guys, you know?" Uh, you're just gonna f- keep moving, and I had to work my way all the way south, um, (sniffs) to a bridge, and I had like one last, one last fucking Hail Mary, man. Like, we had to get across a... We had to get across a bridge into a place called Diamond Back, and I didn't have a QRF because they couldn't pin us down, a, a Quick Reaction Force. And, um, like the Kiowas, like, they, they saved our life 'cause they had, they had the roads blocked off on the bridge, and I was basically smoking at it, like, 100 fucking kilometers an hour, and the Kiowas came down and like literally dropped their fucking skids in the front of the, on the, on the front of the car and panned around like, "We're gonna kill all you fuckers."

Joe Rogan 45:05 Wow.

Evan Hafer 45:06 And I looked over at one of the guys. I looked over and, like, flipped him off (laughs) , and I was like, "You, dead." You know? And then, like, uh, like parting the seas, like Moses or whatever, they moved the fucking cars, and we, we drove back in.

Joe Rogan 45:22 Wow.

Evan Hafer 45:23 And that was, that was it. So bookending... My point of that conversation was... I was losing my shit, the first one, right? And I, I came back and I was talking to the Kiowas, and they're like, "Bro, we didn't know how bad this was because it sounded like you were ordering a pizza." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 45:41 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 45:41 But everything... (laughs) Everything in between was like, like rep, after rep, after rep, after rep, was like, "Sh- like, calm down. Keep your shit together." And one of my really close friends, uh, this guy Jeff Kirkham, uh, my first team sergeant, like awesome fucking guy, like one of the most tactically relevant people in my life, uh, he's like, "Psychology is more contagious than the flu."

Joe Rogan 46:10 Ooh.

Evan Hafer 46:10 "So, when you start losing your shit-"

Joe Rogan 46:13 Ooh, that's so true.

Evan Hafer 46:14 "... it infects everybody else around you."

Joe Rogan 46:16 What a great quote.

Evan Hafer 46:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:18 "Psychology is more infectious than the flu." That is a great quote.

Evan Hafer 46:24 Yeah, man. It-

Joe Rogan 46:25 That's so real.

Evan Hafer 46:26 So real.

Joe Rogan 46:27 That's so real. That's so real. It was everything.

Evan Hafer 46:33 Everything.

Joe Rogan 46:34 Everything.

Evan Hafer 46:35 It controlled every piece of what I would do from that point forward. Like, lose your shit in a, in a gunfight, and then you infect everybody else around you.

Joe Rogan 46:47 Yes.

Evan Hafer 46:48 Rise to the occasion, be the calm in the chaos, become a, you know... Even if you don't feel like it, even if you're... You're wigging out, man. Like- (laughs)

Joe Rogan 46:57 Of course.

Evan Hafer 46:58 ... internally, you can't, you can barely keep your shit together, but what you do is you're like, "Okay, but I gotta, I, I gotta project this."

Joe Rogan 47:10 Mm.

Evan Hafer 47:10 "Because if I infect everybody else with my chaos, I'm injecting more chaos into the equation, and we're all, we’re, we're all gonna run the possibility of dying because of this, because of my actions."

Joe Rogan 47:22 That... I think that's why people gravitate towards inspirational figures.

Evan Hafer 47:26 Right.

Joe Rogan 47:26 It's because they're trying to get some of that psychology. They're trying to get it worn off on them, you know, great quotes and great feats and fascinating people. You wanna absorb some of that psychology. That is such a gre- great quote though, 'cause it's so true. If you're around someone that's freaking out, you're trying to keep your shit together, it's so hard to keep your shit together.

Evan Hafer 47:47 You, you can't.

Joe Rogan 47:48 Right.

Evan Hafer 47:48 But if you're around a bunch of dudes-

Joe Rogan 47:50 They're just stoic.

Evan Hafer 47:51 ... that are surgeons and stoic-

Joe Rogan 47:53 Yeah, yeah.

Evan Hafer 47:53 ... and they... there's no inflection.

Joe Rogan 47:56 Mm-hmm.

Evan Hafer 47:56 What I would say is like, in the time and repetition in the community, I mean, there's a default emotion that is acceptable. It's, you know, anger. Right? So, anger, and when I say joy, it's like joy from callous humor typically, right?

Joe Rogan 48:13 Right.

Evan Hafer 48:13 But it's like you have to... Everybody becomes a Stoic.

Joe Rogan 48:17 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 48:18 Nothing can phase you. And if you are a guy that is phased...

Joe Rogan 48:23 You're a liability.

Evan Hafer 48:24 You're a liability. You're gonna get chopped.

Joe Rogan 48:26 Yeah, yeah. You're, you're infected.

Evan Hafer 48:28 Yeah, exactly. (exhales) Yeah. (sighs) So Iraq, so going back to what, what I, what I was talking about with Iraq, I'm supercharged and, uh, my reality started to kind of crumble as, uh, we met- we went up, we were on the first ODAs when we, we did this joint op with the CIA to go meet this guy, Moqtada al-Sadr. And this is early on, this is like March of the war. And Moqtada al-Sadr became a, uh, prominent figure later on in the, in the war. He was really- relatively a well- like not, not known at all in the beginning of it. (sniffs) And I was working with the, the CIA case officer at that point, not just me, it was like my entire team. And Moqtada's like, he- he's a, he's a bad guy, like he's just a real piece of shit. And at that point in- and Najaf was this town, and, uh, we went out, had a meeting with him, and we came back and all of us on the military, paramilitary side were like, "This guy needs to die." Like, "We need to actually go and ... He has a small armed force. He's basically gonna be a instrument of the Iranians." And we're having this big debate in the team room, and everybody that carried a gun, like we speak (laughs) , we speak animal kingdom.

Narrator 49:52 Uh-huh.

Evan Hafer 49:52 We know when there's a threat.

Narrator 49:54 Right.

Evan Hafer 49:55 And then we have this case officer who's like a, you know, adjunct professor at fucking Georgetown, the guy didn't n- know his ass from a hole in the ground. And we're like, "This guy needs to die. We need to go like get on him now." And, um, case officer was like, "No, he- he's gonna work with us," you know. And we're like-

Narrator 50:13 They wanted him to be an asset.

Evan Hafer 50:14 Yeah. We're like, "This guy is fucking stupid." Like, "This guy's a Sh- he's a Shia, supposedly Shia cleric." You know, if you know Iraq, you got 60% of the country's Shia, it's typically gonna answer to Iran. You've got, uh, 15, 20% is up north, it's the Kurds. And then you've got the rest, is- is Sunni. And we're like, "This guy's not gonna fucking work with us. I mean this guy's a real piece of shit, and he's already spinning up a militia. He's gonna be a problem." "No, no, no, no." And we're like, "Okay." Like, "You're the, you're the big brain on Brad, you know? You're the, you're the PhD, man." Like, "Sure." You know? So, we acquiesce and years later, I don't know how many guys died going into, going back into Najaf, trying to find this fucking guy. I don't know how many. I mean, it was a whole basically surge, push, of probably a division to try to go find this guy. But we had the opportunity to kill him right there, like literally we could've ... Like he had less than 40 guys in the compound and we could've like gone out and got him right, like that night. And, uh, and then he became a problem. And not only did he become a problem, uh, it was like the, the decision-makers were so poor at that point in the ear- early in the war, it started to really affect me in the sense of like I- I was still bought and sold, but it- I started to really think these guys might not know what the fuck they're doing when, um, it was like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and, um, Brennan, um, when they de-Ba'athified Iraq. So after we invaded, they s- they did this thing called de-Ba'athification which was basically, they fired the military and everybody that was involved in the Ba'ath Party. And we're- we're- once again we're in the team room (laughs) and we're watching CNN and it's Rumsfeld talking about, "We're, we're, we're de-Ba'athifying Iraq, we're ta- we're, we're firing everybody." And I'm not exaggerating, everybody in the f- everybody in the team room was like, "What the fuck?"

Narrator 52:30 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 52:30 Like, "You guys, like you guys are, you guys are gonna create the insurgency." Like it was on the ground, that moment, that second, like I wanted to throw, like I- I- I wanted to throw a fucking brick through the TV. Like I- I (laughs) I was like, "These guys are paint by numbers creating an insurgency. They have no fucking clue what they're doing." And that was like that moment, which was fairly early, where I- I lost a lot of confidence in the decision-makers. But okay, you know, then the, the question is well, why'd you keep going back? Well, because you want to try to search for meaning and you're trying to find the, the actual purpose, like what is the purpose? Like are there WMDs here? Like are there, you know, like legit, um, direct traces back to 9/11? Are there things that we're doing that are gonna directly affect and protect America? And you're kinda searching for it. And not kind of, you are. Like that's what you're doing, or at least that's what I was doing. And by the time, by the time I left in 2009, um, uh, I just figured I was gonna die. Like I was like, "Fuck this place." Like, "Fuck," like, like, um, I lived Iraq, right? And then it was like, well, I think time and repetition and thinking that you're dead for that long and then searching for not only some, some what I would say is good in the war itself, because there is good. You have your buddies. You have the comradery, you have the adrenaline-... but you also think you're gonna fucking die every day for years on end, and that's not, uh... Fundamentally, it turns out, it's probably not good for you psychologically, I guess. And so I went to A- Afghanistan thinking, "Well..." And I went to train Afghanis for, um, a force up there. And when I went to train those guys, it was, "Hey, if I can train Afghanis to take on the war, uh, maybe I can protect 18-year-old kids from getting their fucking legs blown off. You know, maybe I can protect the, you know, the 20-year-old kid from Nebraska from getting a, a fucking RPG stuffed through their face." Um, and I was older, and I was also willing to die, so the kids, when I say the kids, you know, 18, 20 years old, like, man, it's not, you know, it's not fun to watch those g- when I say that, that's an understatement. It's so heartbreaking to watch a kid that's never been to fucking combat, like, die. It, it changes everything in your life. And so you go from, you know, Iraq to Afghanistan (laughs) you know, and I'm watching all this stuff unfold, and there's like, there's... And I don't want to say it's all negative because there's, there's, you know, there were things that were very positive. But, uh, I'm so jaded by the time I get there that I'm like, "Well, if I can save some Americans, I'll save some Americans. And, you know, if not, at least this will be an interesting experience." Uh, and then, you know, and, and there's a laundry list of other things (laughs) we, we could talk about. I, I don't wanna get so fucking d- down, I guess.

Joe Rogan 56:28 It seems like it's impossible not to once you're going back on it. I mean, how, there's... How could you not? A- and the, the overwhelming negative experiences, the over- overwhelming horrific experiences.

Evan Hafer 56:41 Well, I think that's where I have this massive distrust in politicians. Like, they... And I think that's part of the reason. They, they have, they have squandered the courage of the American servicemen in these, these forever wars that we've entered in under lies. So like, you know, Wolfowitz and W and Rumsfeld and, and-

Joe Rogan 57:13 Colin Powell.

Evan Hafer 57:14 Yeah. And... Sorry, man, I don't, I don't have any respect for those guys. Like, I don't... Not only do I not have any respect for those guys, I have a, I have a profound amount of hatred for their arrogance. 'Cause I'm in my 20s. I'm, I'm, uh, I'm not making excuses, but, you know, there's plenty of guys like me that were not only hooked, line, and sinker, and I still would. I'd still sign up for this country. I think service is a remarkable, uh, courage... And, and it's courage and service back to our community is something we have to cherish. Like, we do. But when you have an orchestra of idiots that are manipulating the courageous men and women of our country to go into these wars based on a Neocon pipe dream and there's no consequences. You know, you can pull out of Afghanistan and leave billions of dollars of, of equipment. Who the fuck got fired? But if I made a mistake, if me and my buddies made a mistake, we, we fucking... We lost our lives. We go to jail. Like, we lost our clearances. And I'm not trying to sound like a whiny bitch. I'm just saying, like, no consequences for these guys.

Joe Rogan 58:25 Nothing.

Evan Hafer 58:26 Nothing.

Joe Rogan 58:27 Nothing.

Evan Hafer 58:27 You know, they get to go paint paintings, and they think it's okay.

Joe Rogan 58:30 Imagine no consequences for lying about weapons of mass destruction. And has there ever been a large scale investigation as to what led them to either believe or to push the narrative that there was weapons of mass destruction?

Evan Hafer 58:45 Well, I think if you r- you read... I mean, I, uh, I mean, there's, there's a lot... There... I think there's a lot of, like, um... There's a lot of books out there, obviously, and, and whether or not you have to kind of sort through the actual documents and figure out, like, where these guys were at. And I've, I've spent a little bit of my life trying to understand from their perspective. And I honestly think big part of it is the guys who were making the decisions, um, their hubris, their utopian belief that they were going to be able to rebuild Iraq like Houston.

Joe Rogan 59:16 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 59:16 You know? Like, "Oh, it's an oil country," you know? And, you know, they really believed that if they didn't rein in this rogue nation of Iraq, that Iraq was going to eventually contribute to terrorism. And you had guys that were so consumed with their intelligence when it flipped to not only hubris, but they didn't have wisdom. They had intelligence. The... Wolfowitz is a smart guy. He's, he's not an idiot. The problem is he's not wise. These guys weren't wise men.

Joe Rogan 59:56 Mm.

Evan Hafer 59:56 There's a difference between having a high IQ and having the experience and repetition, seeing death and destruction, seeing people's lives fucking torn apart, and then understanding something from reading a book or thinking about it from an economics perspective. And, you know, I think Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, they had this belief that they could do anything they wanted to validate this. And they did. They had to data mine information and pull and pluck from different analysts that agreed with them. But most of the intel community didn't agree with them. They're like, "We had defeated the Iraqi Army to the point..." When I say defeated it...... like, if we go back to the '90s, we say Desert Storm was '91. And then from that point forward, you can basically say, you know, H.W. to Clinton administration, Clinton administration with the economic sanctions, and with the integrated bombing campaigns that they had led throughout the '90s, we had essentially stuffed that guy back into a hole where the only thing he could do is sell oil on the black market. And he had to really, he had to, he had a fascist state where he, he, he and his family had, you know, complete control out of the country, but he wasn't going to be a threat from an international terrorism perspective. That's just false. It's not only false, but it is patently false. And they had to mine the data to validate it. They had to lie. They had to, uh, sift through and find and pick and pull the pieces of information, and they really thought this was gonna be a fucking cakewalk. They did.

Narrator 1:01:43 Because of Desert Storm, you think?

Evan Hafer 1:01:44 They thought because of Desert Storm and what they ... And they were listening to these assets, like, um, uh, Chalabi and some of these Iraq, uh, former Iraqi exiles and they were listening to these guys who, by the way, were also manipulated by the Iranians and paid for by Iranian intel guys, uh, uh, uh, their Iranian assets. They're listening to these people and they were living in their own echo chambers, validating this, this idea that it was better for regime change, for the international, not only the international economy, but it was gonna be, uh, uh, uh, a stable, uh, petroleum-based country where we could integrate democracy. And none of these guys were Arabists. None of these guys actually understood the Middle East, not one. They didn't have any combat experience. They didn't really have any combat experience from the long-term, low-intensity conflict, uh, guerrilla warfare perspective. They were given not only the information, but they were given, uh, uh, most of the information they were given was, was saying, "This is going to be much more complex than you think it's going to be." And they denied not only the opinions, but the information, and they went ahead with their fucking plans anyway. Rumsfeld chopped- single-handedly dictated how many people were gonna participate in the war. Like, he was dictating how many divisions it was gonna take. And he's like, "Actually, I think you could do it for half that." Like, he was, like, trying to negotiate how many guys that Tommy Franks was gonna use to invade Iraq. And Tommy Franks didn't have the balls to say, "Actually, I need two more divisions." So a lot of this is just, like, fundamentally these are professional politicians and bureaucrats drinking their own piss. Like I was saying earlier, you know, like, you can drink your own piss once or twice before your kidneys start to shut down and it'll fucking kill you, right?

Narrator 1:03:42 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 1:03:42 These guys are all sitting around in their echo chambers, talking to the same types of people, defining how they were going to send servicemen and women to Iraq, and they were wrong. Not only were they wrong, but they were told otherwise by lots of different people to include, I mean, uh, Tony Blair had a lot of different issues with this. Colin Powell essentially sold this and got the dominoes to fall on the entire thing, because he, they knew that Colin Powell was so respected that if he sat in front of the UN with Tenet, who was the director of the CIA, right behind him and held up this little thing of, of, you know, VX or whatever it was, that they could push it across the line from the international community. I mean, these guys were crooked, man. And, uh, not only were they crooked, they were so fundamentally wrong. And there's no consequences.

Narrator 1:04:40 Nothing.

Evan Hafer 1:04:41 Zero consequences.

Narrator 1:04:43 They put Martha Stewart in jail.

Evan Hafer 1:04:44 Yeah. Yeah, they go after Trump for fucking two years-

Narrator 1:04:47 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:04:47 ... on, you know, Russia collusion. It's like you spent $7 trillion and thousands of American lives, uh, hundreds of thousands of lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, and you're saying you're gonna put this guy through the wringer for two years because there might be some dossier that was paid for by the Clintons? Like, who's the criminal? I, and, and so for me, I, I get all wound up when it-

Narrator 1:05:11 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:05:11 ... when it comes to this, because rep after rep, year after year, my, my two closest friends in the world were, were literally, uh, one torn in half by a, a EFP, which was a direct, a, a Iranian manufactured shaped charge. You know, my other friend was turned into fucking moon dust, and I mean, these are my two closest friends in the world. Guys I grew up with, uh, in, in, in the army that I spent every fucking day with. And, uh, I- I- I've, since then, I've had obviously more friends, but I mean, those are the two, uh, closest friends in the earliest part of the war. So I'm so directly affected by this because it fundamentally changed who I was forever. Uh, it, it gave me a profound amount of mistrust in, in my government, you know, in the decision makers. I don't believe, I actually don't believe what they're telling me anymore. I have a, I have a, a lot of skepticism when it comes to the people that are pulling the, the, the handles in government. And I have to go to my peer set, and what I tell people is, "Man, my, my, my, my currency is courage," right? It's like, that's what I broker in. So my friends that have gone through the GWOT, which I'm extremely happy for all these GWOT guys that are in, like, getting appointed to these positions. You know, you've got Pete, you've got Tulsi.

Narrator 1:06:44 Mm-hmm.

Evan Hafer 1:06:45 Uh, JD?

Narrator 1:06:46 Mm-hmm.

Evan Hafer 1:06:47 Like, they fundamentally know the-... what war is. And when you have decision-makers that have never been to war and their kids will never go to war... Cheney's kids never went to war.

Joe Rogan 1:07:00 Right.

Evan Hafer 1:07:00 W's kids never went to war.

Joe Rogan 1:07:02 Right.

Evan Hafer 1:07:02 Rum's, like... A-and none of these guys, by the way, they're all Vietnam-era guys. None of them went to fucking Vietnam. So it's really easy-

Joe Rogan 1:07:08 But nor did Trump. Trump didn't either, right? He got-

Evan Hafer 1:07:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:10 ... a bunch of deferments.

Evan Hafer 1:07:12 But I think the difference is, is that when somebody is saying, "Stop the endless wars"-

Joe Rogan 1:07:18 Right.

Evan Hafer 1:07:20 ... I, I am more than happy to go chips in on that narrative-

Joe Rogan 1:07:23 Yes.

Evan Hafer 1:07:24 ... than I am to go, "Oh, we need to invest and, and put more time, money, energy into creating more chaos and destruction in the American service members' lives, or the lives of other people."

Joe Rogan 1:07:37 Did you ever see that, um, speech with, uh, Mike Pence and Tucker Carlson?

Evan Hafer 1:07:42 No. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:07:42 Tucker Carlson essentially ended Mike Pence's political career.

Evan Hafer 1:07:46 Really?

Joe Rogan 1:07:47 In one speech, yeah. Because, uh, this was when Pence was running for president. And Tucker was sitting there with him, and Pence was talking about getting helicopters and tanks and weapons to, to Ukraine, and he was explaining how, uh, they were being incompetent because they weren't providing them with what they needed, and Tucker went on this rant. See if you can find it. It- it's pro-... I bet you could find it under that... Here it is. Listen to this.

Narrator 1:08:18 Well, this is the whole thing. You just want me to show the Tucker part? 'Cause it's, uh, four, it's four minutes long.

Joe Rogan 1:08:23 Let me hear what he says. L- just start right where your cursor is. Click where your cursor is.

Narrator 1:08:29 January, we'll let somebody transfer some jets.

1:08:32 I'm sorry, Mr. Vice President, have you-

Joe Rogan 1:08:34 Yes. (clears throat)

Narrator 1:08:34 ... uh, I know you're running for president. Uh, you are dist-

Joe Rogan 1:08:37 Thank you. Thanks for noticing.

Narrator 1:08:37 ... you are distressed that the Ukrainians don't have enough American tanks. Every city in the United States has become much worse over the past three years.

1:08:47 Yeah.

1:08:47 Drive around. There's not one city that's gotten better in the United States.

1:08:51 Right.

1:08:51 And it's visible. Our economy has degraded. The suicide rate has jumped. Public filth and disorder and crime have exponentially increased. And yet, your concern is that the Ukrainians, a country most people can't find on a map-

Joe Rogan 1:09:07 (laughs)

Narrator 1:09:07 ... who've received tens of billions of US tax dollars, don't have enough tanks.

1:09:11 Right.

1:09:11 I think it's a fair question to ask, like, where's the concern for the United States in that?

1:09:15 Well, it's not my concern.

Evan Hafer 1:09:18 (laughs)

Narrator 1:09:19 Tucker, I've heard-

Joe Rogan 1:09:19 What?

Narrator 1:09:19 ... that routine from you before, but that's not my concern. I'm running for president of the United States 'cause I think this country is in a lot of trouble. I think Joe Biden has weakened America at home and abroad. And as president of the United States, we're gonna restore law and order in our cities. We're gonna secure our border. We're gonna get this economy moving again. And we're gonna make sure that we have men and women on our courts at every level that will stand for the right to life and defend all the God-given liberties enshrined in our Constitution. Anybody that says that we can't be the leader of the free world and solve our problems at home has a pretty small view of the greatest nation on Earth. We can do both. And as president of the United States, we will secure our border. We will support our military. We will revive our economy and stand by our values, and we will also lead the world for freedom under my administration. I promise you. (applause)

1:10:15 Amen. Vice President Mike Pence, thank you very much.

Joe Rogan 1:10:18 Just that, "That's not my concern. That's not my concern." What the fuck are you talking about? Why- (laughs) How would you ever answer anything that way? "That is not my concern." That's not your concern?

Evan Hafer 1:10:29 No.

Joe Rogan 1:10:29 You don't, you don't think he just made a really good point? That we're, we're really confused as to, first of all, aren't we, like, a trillion dollars in debt? How do we have-

Evan Hafer 1:10:37 No, we're 35 and a half trillion-

Joe Rogan 1:10:39 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:10:39 ... dollars in debt.

Joe Rogan 1:10:40 Y- yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:10:40 Like, it's crazy.

Joe Rogan 1:10:41 It's crazy. How do we have the money? How do we have-

Evan Hafer 1:10:44 We don't.

Joe Rogan 1:10:44 ... the money to send to Iraq, and we don't have the money to fix our cities? How do, how... And how can you say, "That's not my concern"? That, what that is, is the opposite of what Trump is.

Narrator 1:10:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:56 That is nonsense talk. I, uh, not that he doesn't have nonsense talk, but that is not a, a re- a person's real feelings.

Narrator 1:11:03 No.

Joe Rogan 1:11:03 That is just political speech. That's just, "We're gonna clean up our country. We're gonna preserve the right to life."

Evan Hafer 1:11:09 It's memorizing sound bites-

Joe Rogan 1:11:11 Exactly, exactly.

Evan Hafer 1:11:12 ... and, and that's the entire problem with Washington right there.

Joe Rogan 1:11:15 Yeah, exactly.

Evan Hafer 1:11:16 They, they memorize sound bites. They say one thing, they do the other thing.

Joe Rogan 1:11:19 Exactly, exactly.

Evan Hafer 1:11:20 They completely... They've lost the trust of their constituents. They've lost the trust of the American public.

Joe Rogan 1:11:28 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:11:28 And by the way, it's administration after administration. It's politician after politician.

Joe Rogan 1:11:33 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:11:34 There's... There... It's not... It shouldn't be a surprise that people don't like politicians. I mean, look at that guy.

Joe Rogan 1:11:38 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:11:38 He's a fucking robot.

Joe Rogan 1:11:40 He's weird.

Evan Hafer 1:11:40 He's a weird dude.

Joe Rogan 1:11:41 He's weird.

Evan Hafer 1:11:42 You know-

Joe Rogan 1:11:42 And they, they kept trying to say JD's weird. JD's not weird at all. I met that guy. He's fucking cool. He's normal. Smart as shit. I could, I could hang with that guy. He could be my friend.

Evan Hafer 1:11:51 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:52 Like, he's not even a little weird.

Evan Hafer 1:11:53 No, that guy's-

Joe Rogan 1:11:54 You know?

Evan Hafer 1:11:54 ... weird.

Joe Rogan 1:11:54 I-

Evan Hafer 1:11:55 Like-

Joe Rogan 1:11:55 I mean, I guess anybody who's that smart is weird. You know?

Evan Hafer 1:11:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:58 People who go to Yale, people that... Like, he's weird in that way. Like, that's an odd dude. You don't see a lot of those. But normal. That guy's bizarre. Like, his face doesn't move. Did you get Botox at 80?

Evan Hafer 1:12:10 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:12:10 Like, what the fuck is going on? Like, y- you're weird.

Evan Hafer 1:12:12 I think they have low IQs and they're pushing that thing to the red. That's why they're actually so afraid to do anything.

Joe Rogan 1:12:18 Mm-hmm.

Evan Hafer 1:12:18 'Cause they're like, "I have..." They're like, "I'm really pushing this thing. I've got like a hundy, like a 105, but my parents were rich."

Joe Rogan 1:12:25 Mm-hmm.

Evan Hafer 1:12:25 "So, I went to Yale."

Joe Rogan 1:12:26 Right.

Evan Hafer 1:12:27 "And if I break outside of my box, actually people are gonna know that I'm a fucking retard, so..."

Joe Rogan 1:12:31 Right. Well, I'd l- also think that, if you're that ambition, uh, y- y- you have an ambition at that level, uh, and you're...... so driven to become the alpha that you wanna be the president, the amount of work that's involved in that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for reading.

Evan Hafer 1:12:48 Uh-uh.

Joe Rogan 1:12:49 It doesn't leave a whole lot of room for watching documentaries and having important in-depth conversations with people and expanding your understanding of the world. It's very narrow. They're basically actors. A lot... Most of these people exhibit a lot of the traits that I see in actors. This, uh, desire to m- morph oneself to please the people around you, the saying the things that you think people want to hear because you want to get ahead. It's- it's all, like, very similar. They're actors. And th- the fact that these actors can rise to a position where they can actually dictate what these military veterans do and don't do when they have no knowledge or experience in this-

Evan Hafer 1:13:31 No.

Joe Rogan 1:13:32 ... that's... The fact that that's a real thing is fucking crazy.

Evan Hafer 1:13:35 No.

Joe Rogan 1:13:35 It's really crazy.

Evan Hafer 1:13:38 I, I, I mean, I think that's... By, by the time I left, I was so jaded and the motivating factor was- Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Joe Rogan 1:13:45 Of course.

Evan Hafer 1:13:47 I, I, I was like, "No man will ever have control over my destiny again."

Joe Rogan 1:13:51 Hmm.

Evan Hafer 1:13:52 Like I won't, I will not... I w- there's... I will not put a bit in my mouth-

Joe Rogan 1:13:59 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:13:59 ... for another man in the government that will not be making decisions for me.

Joe Rogan 1:14:05 Yeah. I don't, I don't think we can recall a time in our history where we did trust the government. But there's this... Which is such a weird thing to say. You know, I used to think it was the Obama administration. But boy, Obama during this Kamala Harris admin- she, he-

Evan Hafer 1:14:21 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:14:21 It changed my opinion of that guy.

Evan Hafer 1:14:24 (laughs) Y- really? Did you have a high opinion of him before?

Joe Rogan 1:14:26 Yeah, I did. Yeah, I did just as an intelligent person-

Evan Hafer 1:14:30 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:14:30 ... and a statesman. I felt, I felt like he's probably, like, caught up in the system. It's very difficult to make real meaningful change. You know, you think you're gonna do something and then you get into office and you're like, "Oh God, what a fucking quagmire this place is." But watching him just straight up lie about Trump, the, the thing that got me was that very fine people thing, the white supremacist thing. They just kept trying to say that he was a racist, which is this thing that I think worked in like 2017.

Evan Hafer 1:14:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:58 You know, I think it worked back then. I don't think it works anymore. I don't think people believe it anymore. I think that we've gotten numb to all this stuff.

Evan Hafer 1:15:06 Well, it's the sky is falling thing, right?

Joe Rogan 1:15:08 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:15:08 It's like-

Joe Rogan 1:15:09 Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:15:09 ... cry wolf or whatever. It's like you guys can only call, you can only call me a fascist so many times. I mean, like, The New York Times wrote that article a couple years ago, right, where I'm like... It was the front of the coffee cup where it was like, "Do you want Trump 2024? Do you want low taxes? Do you want this to happen?" And I'm like, "I want all that. Sounds good."

Joe Rogan 1:15:26 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:15:26 And, uh, like you can only call me a fascist-

Joe Rogan 1:15:30 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:15:30 ... racist asshole... I mean, to be fair, like, I, I, I can float into the asshole category relatively easy, but you can only call all this stuff.

Joe Rogan 1:15:37 Only when prompted.

Evan Hafer 1:15:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:15:39 Only when prompted. Yeah, it's, uh... Do you know what one of my fucking favorite things of this whole election cycle has been? Yesterday.

Evan Hafer 1:15:48 What happened yesterday?

Joe Rogan 1:15:49 When Biden, Biden and Trump sat down in the White House.

Evan Hafer 1:15:51 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:15:52 Biden voted for Trump. I guarantee it.

Evan Hafer 1:15:55 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:15:55 I fucking guarantee it.

Evan Hafer 1:15:58 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:15:58 I never saw that dude so happy in his fucking life. He lost, his party lost.

Evan Hafer 1:16:05 (laughs) He's like, "Yeah."

Joe Rogan 1:16:05 He was happy.

Evan Hafer 1:16:07 So happy.

Joe Rogan 1:16:07 When, when Obama had to shake hands with Trump and do the whole transition thing, Obama looked like, "Jesus Christ." Look at, look at Biden. (laughs)

Evan Hafer 1:16:16 (laughs) Look at his fucking smile, dude.

Joe Rogan 1:16:19 Trump's like, "Ah, whatever, dude."

Evan Hafer 1:16:21 Look at him.

Joe Rogan 1:16:21 Look at his fucking smile, man. That's like when your kid-

Evan Hafer 1:16:25 He looks-

Joe Rogan 1:16:25 ... gets married. You know-

Evan Hafer 1:16:27 That, that dude looks like a hairless cat. Look at him.

Joe Rogan 1:16:29 It's crazy. First of all, what have they done to him? What have they done to his face?

Evan Hafer 1:16:33 They, they've done it all. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:16:33 Go back to the other picture because it was more high res. Wo- look at his mug, man. First of all-

Evan Hafer 1:16:40 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:16:40 ... for sure he's got-

Evan Hafer 1:16:41 Looking good.

Joe Rogan 1:16:41 ... something going on with his forehead. They Botoxed-

Evan Hafer 1:16:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:16:43 ... the shit out of his forehead. They gave him a facelift for sure. It was a bunch of different things they did, which very ill-advised, by the way, folks.

Evan Hafer 1:16:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:16:49 Look at Trump, he looks like shit. No one cares. Everyone loves him. And you don't, you don't look better if you get your face pulled back like a lizard.

Evan Hafer 1:16:57 No.

Joe Rogan 1:16:57 You just more look, more like a lizard. Everybody thinks you're a lizard already. But look at that smile.

Evan Hafer 1:17:03 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:17:03 That motherfucker's never been happier in his life. In his life.

Evan Hafer 1:17:07 So cute.

Joe Rogan 1:17:07 He's like, "That bitch."

Evan Hafer 1:17:09 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:17:09 "She went down." You can't tell me he wasn't happy. Like when he put that MAGA hat on. You ever see that's... The-

Evan Hafer 1:17:15 Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, he was like, "Yeah."

Joe Rogan 1:17:16 He put the MAGA hat on and he took it with him on the plane.

Evan Hafer 1:17:21 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:17:21 I'm guarantee you, I guarantee you that motherfucker was happy. He had a giant smile on his face. He said welcome back to him. I thought it was Hitler.

Evan Hafer 1:17:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:30 I thought he was dangerous.

Evan Hafer 1:17:31 Yeah. I mean, that, that's what they all said, right? It's like, "Hey this is the, the... He's a threat to democracy. This."

Joe Rogan 1:17:36 I thought he was a Nazi.

Evan Hafer 1:17:36 And then all of a sudden it's like, "Oh, hey, we're gonna have a smooth transition here."

Joe Rogan 1:17:41 This was the guy that you said was sharp as a tack.

Evan Hafer 1:17:44 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:17:44 He was gonna be... Up until four months ago.

Evan Hafer 1:17:46 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:46 Four months ago-

Evan Hafer 1:17:47 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:47 ... that guy was gonna be running again.

Evan Hafer 1:17:49 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:17:50 And now here he is smiling like a Cheshire cat.

Evan Hafer 1:17:54 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:17:55 How big was his smi- That's a crazy smile.

Evan Hafer 1:17:57 Oh, yeah. Oh, man. He looks, loo- he looks like he's wearing a mask.

Joe Rogan 1:18:01 Uh, he might be.

Evan Hafer 1:18:02 Yeah. Maybe he is wearing a mask.

Joe Rogan 1:18:02 There was that one fake Biden. Did you ever see the fake Biden?

Evan Hafer 1:18:05 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:18:05 The tall guy?

Evan Hafer 1:18:06 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:18:06 That guy was so much taller. The guy was like 6'4". (laughs) He was a giant Biden.

Evan Hafer 1:18:12 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:18:12 It made no sense.

Evan Hafer 1:18:13 They, they're, they're gonna smoke that one by us. Like, it's like, "Dude, this guy is like, you know, 6'7" could be playing in the NBA." They're like, "That's Biden."

Joe Rogan 1:18:19 He was so much taller.

Evan Hafer 1:18:21 It's Biden. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:18:21 They showed Jill and him together.

Evan Hafer 1:18:23 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:18:23 And Jill's like, like, "What happened? That's a different human being."

Evan Hafer 1:18:27 Totally.

Joe Rogan 1:18:28 It's so nuts, man. It's so nuts. All the different things that happened during this election are wilder than anything you've ever seen in a fucking movie.

Evan Hafer 1:18:35 It, it brought... I think it, it brought so many more people into politics too. And people-

Joe Rogan 1:18:39 Oh, yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:18:39 Like, the more people pay attention to what's going on with politicians, with the country, I don't think that's a bad thing because-

Joe Rogan 1:18:47 Right.

Evan Hafer 1:18:47 ... I think...... bureaucrats and politicians alike, they directly benefit from people not paying attention.

Joe Rogan 1:18:54 Yes.

Evan Hafer 1:18:55 And so, they only want you to pay attention once a year, when they're gonna try to get everybody galvanized around a couple little stupid things, and then get them out to the voting booth. But not too many. Like, we don't want a lot of complex thought out of the voters. We don't really want them to think about too much-

Joe Rogan 1:19:09 Right.

Evan Hafer 1:19:09 ... because, you know, we still got, uh, we still got a national deficit that we gotta increase. And I gotta line the, line the pockets of all my buddies-

Joe Rogan 1:19:17 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:19:17 ... you know, at Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, and, and Lockheed Martin. Like, we don't want them to get in too far.

Joe Rogan 1:19:23 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:19:23 Like, don't, don't start talking about the reserve, or don't start (laughs) talking about any of that-

Joe Rogan 1:19:27 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:19:27 ... other stuff.

Joe Rogan 1:19:27 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:19:28 Like, I think that's what it is.

Joe Rogan 1:19:29 Well, I think that's also why politicians are, some of them at least, are terrified of podcasts.

Evan Hafer 1:19:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:19:36 Because you do have to talk about that. But that's what makes guys like JD and guys like Trump unique, in that they will just sit and talk with anybody. I mean, he sat with Theo Von. Theo talked to him about doing coke. (laughs)

Evan Hafer 1:19:48 That's awesome. That is so funny.

Joe Rogan 1:19:50 Theo's amazing.

Evan Hafer 1:19:52 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:19:52 It was amaze... Theo has that ability to be himself no matter who he's talking to. And him talking to Trump about how he used to love to do coke. (laughs)

Evan Hafer 1:20:00 It's like... And Trump's just sitting there, which was super funny, by the way.

Joe Rogan 1:20:04 Yeah, he's sitting there like, "This poor guy."

Evan Hafer 1:20:06 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:20:06 Like, you see Theo falling apart in front of you. Like, "Jesus Christ, I thought I was running for president here."

Evan Hafer 1:20:10 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:20:10 "I think I might have to help this young fella."

Evan Hafer 1:20:12 (laughs) Who do I, who do I-

Joe Rogan 1:20:14 Uh.

Evan Hafer 1:20:14 ... need to talk to about this?

Joe Rogan 1:20:15 But like, you know, Kamala didn't have the ability to do that. Or if she did, nobody brought it out of her.

Evan Hafer 1:20:20 No.

Joe Rogan 1:20:20 I was hoping I could. I really was. I was hoping I could have a conversation with her. There's all this talk now that the reason why she didn't do it is because of, um, progressive people in her party, the pushback.

Evan Hafer 1:20:30 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:20:31 Which might b- have some f- truth to it. But for the record, they offered me two very specific days, and, um, in different places in the country, to travel, and then go do it, and do it for an hour. I said, "I didn't want to do that." And especially after Trump had done it here in three hours, I'm like, "This is the only way to do it." And Elon said it best, he said, he goes, "You can kind of bullshit someone for an hour, but it goes hour two and hour three, like that's, that's when the real you comes out."

Evan Hafer 1:20:58 Yeah, you're, you're gonna get-

Joe Rogan 1:21:00 It's the real you.

Evan Hafer 1:21:01 You're gonna, you're gonna tear the layers off the onion, right? So it's like-

Joe Rogan 1:21:04 100%. 100%.

Evan Hafer 1:21:05 (laughs) It might make you cry.

Joe Rogan 1:21:07 Yeah.

Evan Hafer 1:21:07 And it- (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:21:08 (laughs)

Evan Hafer 1:21:09 The more you peel it, the more you're gonna be like, "Oh, this person's fucking stupid as shit."

Joe Rogan 1:21:13 Well, how much are you bullshitting the world, right?

Evan Hafer 1:21:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:21:14 And the, the, the quote about Trump, or the narrative about Trump has always been that he's bullshitting everybody, that he's a con man.

Evan Hafer 1:21:21 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:21:21 He's definitely very persuasive. You know, Scott Adams has wrote about this pretty much in depth, about how, how well, uh, Trump practices the art of persuasion.

Evan Hafer 1:21:29 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:21:29 You know, The Art of the Deal. He's w- great at making people his friend and m- making relationships. And if you're his enemy, "Fuck you," scorched earth. You know, it's like this, and there's fear of that. You don't wanna get on his bad side. There's all this like, there's this, um, art of like how he negotiates and he's gone-

Evan Hafer 1:21:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:21:45 ... through these years and years and years of business.

Evan Hafer 1:21:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:21:48 But, but that's him. That's, the, the guy's right there. You could talk to him about everything and anything, he's right there. He's not protecting any of his ideas.

Evan Hafer 1:21:57 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:21:58 He called a girl he's allegedly slept with horse face when he was the president on Twitter.

Evan Hafer 1:22:02 (laughs) That's so funny.

Joe Rogan 1:22:03 It's the wildest shit. So you're getting what you get. That's who the guy is. And you love... I like him.

Evan Hafer 1:22:09 I, I-

Joe Rogan 1:22:09 I, I've g- I've grown to like him. I, I had a much more negative opinion of him back in the day because it was... (sighs) There's only so much you can pay attention to and do deep dives on-

Evan Hafer 1:22:20 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:22:20 ... before you lose your fucking mind. And with him, I was always like, "Oh, that guy, the grab 'em by the pussy guy, like, is probably not good for the country. That seems crazy." But as time went on, I was like, "Oh, you need a guy that is completely crazy to expose how corrupt the whole system is."

Evan Hafer 1:22:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:22:36 And how they all collude together, and how they all, they all say the s- There's all these montages of clips of news organizations saying the same narrative outright, over and over, verbatim, word by word. They're getting fed this by someone, some entity, some- They're, somehow or another they're collaborating. And they're all choosing this very specific narrative, and they're running with it and they're trying to destroy people with it. And I saw them do it with me.

Evan Hafer 1:23:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:23:04 I saw them do it with me during the COVID thing, and it was all motivated by the pharmaceutical drug companies and the profits. And they were terrified that someone's gonna come along and somehow or another put a, a notch in this little thing that they've created, which is a, a devious little thing that they've done, where they, uh, eliminated all sorts of other m- remedies. They, they cut out all these generic drugs that possibly could have been used to help people. They denied people the use of monoclonal antibodies. They pushed the fucking shit out of this one thing so they could make money off of it, and they did it in collusion with the media. No one acted like a journalist. No one looked at the excess deaths. No one looked at the instances of myocarditis in young people. No one looked at any of that. There was no journalism. It just showed everyone that the whole system is bought and paid for. It's all corrupt. And the only way you could find out who a person really is, is to listen to them talk for long periods of time. It's the only thing, it's the only truth serum we have left.

Evan Hafer 1:24:02 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:24:02 And even that's not 100% effective.

Evan Hafer 1:24:04 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:24:04 But it's pretty good. It's pretty f- Your brain knows bullshit. You know? You ever, like, met some guy, and like he's dating this girl that you know, and there's just something about the g- It's like, what? He's shaking my hand,