Joe Rogan Experience #2230 - Evan Hafer

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drum roll) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   1. NANarrator0:00

      (drum roll) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

   2. The Joe Rogan Experience. (drums)

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      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.

   4. EHEvan Hafer0:14

      (laughs) Good to see you.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:15

      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.

   6. EHEvan Hafer0:25

      (laughs)

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:25

      We get-

   8. EHEvan Hafer0:25

      Which one?

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:26

      You- Well, yeah, we had a, we had quite a few of them-

   10. EHEvan Hafer0:29

       (laughs)

   11. JRJoe Rogan0:29

       ... 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.

   12. EHEvan Hafer0:40

       Oh.

   13. JRJoe Rogan0:41

       When we were talking, remember we were hanging out in front of the trucks-

   14. EHEvan Hafer0:43

       Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

   15. JRJoe Rogan0:43

       ... and you were telling me about Mumbles?

   16. EHEvan Hafer0:45

       Yeah. (laughs)

   17. JRJoe Rogan0:47

       There's a few conversations I've had-

   18. EHEvan Hafer0:49

       (laughs)

   19. JRJoe Rogan0:49

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

   20. EHEvan Hafer0:55

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan0:55

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

   22. EHEvan Hafer1:01

       I, you know, I always assume people have heard these stories from Afghanistan.

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:06

       Oh, cheers. Cheers, cheers, bro.

   24. EHEvan Hafer1:07

       Yeah.

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:07

       Cheers. (glasses clink) You gotta drink that. You can't cheers with-

   26. EHEvan Hafer1:08

       Oh, yeah. Sorry. You can't cheers with that?

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:09

       You can't cheers with alcohol. Yeah. Buffalo Trace.

   28. EHEvan Hafer1:13

       Mm.

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:13

       Mm.

   30. EHEvan Hafer1:15

       So yeah, it ... The amount of man on man buggery in Afghanistan is significant, and-
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Jesus Christ. …

   1. EHEvan Hafer15:00

      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.

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:22

      Jesus Christ.

   3. EHEvan Hafer15:23

      And-

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:23

      Did you see these parades?

   5. EHEvan Hafer15:25

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

   6. JRJoe Rogan15:31

      Speaking of National Geographic-

   7. EHEvan Hafer15:32

      Yeah. Bacha Bazi.

   8. JRJoe Rogan15:34

      Ugh.

   9. EHEvan Hafer15:34

      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."

   10. JRJoe Rogan15:50

       Right.

   11. EHEvan Hafer15:50

       Right?

   12. JRJoe Rogan15:51

       Yeah.

   13. EHEvan Hafer15:51

       You know? Made my, made me ... it makes your job a little bit easier.

   14. JRJoe Rogan15:54

       Right.

   15. EHEvan Hafer15:54

       Yeah.

   16. JRJoe Rogan15:55

       Yeah.

   17. EHEvan Hafer15:55

       It makes your job a little bit easier.

   18. JRJoe Rogan15:57

       Yeah.

   19. EHEvan Hafer15:57

       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.

   20. JRJoe Rogan16:14

       Right.

   21. EHEvan Hafer16:15

       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-

   22. NANarrator16:29

       Can I say one thing?

   23. EHEvan Hafer16:30

       Yeah, there you go.

   24. JRJoe Rogan16:31

       Inside the lives of girls dressed as boys in Afghanistan, the cultural practice of ba- bacha posh? Po-

   25. EHEvan Hafer16:38

       Bacha posh, that's a, I think that's the flip that's the reverse.

   26. JRJoe Rogan16:41

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

   27. EHEvan Hafer16:47

       That's a different ... so it's boys is dressed as girls.

   28. JRJoe Rogan16:49

       Oh, so that's the opposite?

   29. EHEvan Hafer16:50

       That's the opposite, yeah.

   30. JRJoe Rogan16:51

       Girls dress as boys.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Better than anything? …

   1. EHEvan Hafer30:00

      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-

   2. JRJoe Rogan30:10

      Better than anything?

   3. EHEvan Hafer30:11

      Yes. This is part of the issue-

   4. JRJoe Rogan30:13

      Yeah.

   5. EHEvan Hafer30:13

      ... 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?

   6. JRJoe Rogan30:45

      (scoffs)

   7. EHEvan Hafer30:46

      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.

   8. JRJoe Rogan31:50

      True.

   9. EHEvan Hafer31:51

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

   10. JRJoe Rogan31:56

       And that one doesn't make any sense.

   11. EHEvan Hafer31:58

       No.

   12. JRJoe Rogan31:58

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

   13. EHEvan Hafer32:04

       No. (laughs)

   14. JRJoe Rogan32:04

       I've never done it before. Have you done it?

   15. EHEvan Hafer32:06

       No. Huh-uh.

   16. JRJoe Rogan32:07

       I've never done it-

   17. EHEvan Hafer32:07

       Huh-uh.

   18. JRJoe Rogan32:07

       ... 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.

   19. EHEvan Hafer32:16

       Mm-mm.

   20. JRJoe Rogan32:16

       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-

   21. EHEvan Hafer32:37

       Dude-

   22. JRJoe Rogan32:37

       ... just like psilocybin, probably can't really overdose on it.

   23. EHEvan Hafer32:40

       No, I-

   24. JRJoe Rogan32:40

       I don't know, though.

   25. EHEvan Hafer32:41

       I don't know.

   26. JRJoe Rogan32:42

       Ibogaine might kill you. It sounds really crazy potent.

   27. EHEvan Hafer32:44

       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.

   28. JRJoe Rogan33:24

       Crazy.

   29. EHEvan Hafer33:24

       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?

   30. JRJoe Rogan33:59

       Right.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Wow. …

   1. EHEvan Hafer45:00

      on the front of the car and panned around like, "We're gonna kill all you fuckers."

   2. JRJoe Rogan45:05

      Wow.

   3. EHEvan Hafer45:06

      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.

   4. JRJoe Rogan45:22

      Wow.

   5. EHEvan Hafer45:23

      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)

   6. JRJoe Rogan45:41

      (laughs)

   7. EHEvan Hafer45:41

      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."

   8. JRJoe Rogan46:10

      Ooh.

   9. EHEvan Hafer46:10

      "So, when you start losing your shit-"

   10. JRJoe Rogan46:13

       Ooh, that's so true.

   11. EHEvan Hafer46:14

       "... it infects everybody else around you."

   12. JRJoe Rogan46:16

       What a great quote.

   13. EHEvan Hafer46:18

       Yeah.

   14. JRJoe Rogan46:18

       "Psychology is more infectious than the flu." That is a great quote.

   15. EHEvan Hafer46:24

       Yeah, man. It-

   16. JRJoe Rogan46:25

       That's so real.

   17. EHEvan Hafer46:26

       So real.

   18. JRJoe Rogan46:27

       That's so real. That's so real. It was everything.

   19. EHEvan Hafer46:33

       Everything.

   20. JRJoe Rogan46:34

       Everything.

   21. EHEvan Hafer46:35

       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.

   22. JRJoe Rogan46:47

       Yes.

   23. EHEvan Hafer46:48

       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)

   24. JRJoe Rogan46:57

       Of course.

   25. EHEvan Hafer46:58

       ... 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."

   26. JRJoe Rogan47:10

       Mm.

   27. EHEvan Hafer47:10

       "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."

   28. JRJoe Rogan47:22

       That... I think that's why people gravitate towards inspirational figures.

   29. EHEvan Hafer47:26

       Right.

   30. JRJoe Rogan47:26

       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.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Because of Desert Storm,…

   1. EHEvan Hafer1:00:00

      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.

   2. NANarrator1:01:43

      Because of Desert Storm, you think?

   3. EHEvan Hafer1:01:44

      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?

   4. NANarrator1:03:42

      (laughs)

   5. EHEvan Hafer1:03:42

      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.

   6. NANarrator1:04:40

      Nothing.

   7. EHEvan Hafer1:04:41

      Zero consequences.

   8. NANarrator1:04:43

      They put Martha Stewart in jail.

   9. EHEvan Hafer1:04:44

      Yeah. Yeah, they go after Trump for fucking two years-

   10. NANarrator1:04:47

       Yeah.

   11. EHEvan Hafer1:04:47

       ... 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-

   12. NANarrator1:05:11

       Yeah.

   13. EHEvan Hafer1:05:11

       ... 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.

   14. NANarrator1:06:44

       Mm-hmm.

   15. EHEvan Hafer1:06:45

       Uh, JD?

   16. NANarrator1:06:46

       Mm-hmm.

   17. EHEvan Hafer1:06:47

       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.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:07:00

       Right.

   19. EHEvan Hafer1:07:00

       W's kids never went to war.

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:07:02

       Right.

   21. EHEvan Hafer1:07:02

       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-

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:07:08

       But nor did Trump. Trump didn't either, right? He got-

   23. EHEvan Hafer1:07:10

       Yeah.

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:07:10

       ... a bunch of deferments.

   25. EHEvan Hafer1:07:12

       But I think the difference is, is that when somebody is saying, "Stop the endless wars"-

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:07:18

       Right.

   27. EHEvan Hafer1:07:20

       ... I, I am more than happy to go chips in on that narrative-

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:07:23

       Yes.

   29. EHEvan Hafer1:07:24

       ... 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."

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:07:37

       Did you ever see that, um, speech with, uh, Mike Pence and Tucker Carlson?
6. 1:15:00 – 1:24:25

   Well, it's the sky…

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:15:00

      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.

   2. EHEvan Hafer1:15:06

      Well, it's the sky is falling thing, right?

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:15:08

      Yeah.

   4. EHEvan Hafer1:15:08

      It's like-

   5. JRJoe Rogan1:15:09

      Yeah. Yeah.

   6. EHEvan Hafer1:15:09

      ... 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."

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:15:26

      Yeah.

   8. EHEvan Hafer1:15:26

      And, uh, like you can only call me a fascist-

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:15:30

      Yeah.

   10. EHEvan Hafer1:15:30

       ... 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.

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:15:37

       Only when prompted.

   12. EHEvan Hafer1:15:38

       Yeah.

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:15:39

       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.

   14. EHEvan Hafer1:15:48

       What happened yesterday?

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:15:49

       When Biden, Biden and Trump sat down in the White House.

   16. EHEvan Hafer1:15:51

       Yeah, yeah.

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:15:52

       Biden voted for Trump. I guarantee it.

   18. EHEvan Hafer1:15:55

       (laughs)

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:15:55

       I fucking guarantee it.

   20. EHEvan Hafer1:15:58

       (laughs)

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:15:58

       I never saw that dude so happy in his fucking life. He lost, his party lost.

   22. EHEvan Hafer1:16:05

       (laughs) He's like, "Yeah."

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:16:05

       He was happy.

   24. EHEvan Hafer1:16:07

       So happy.

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:16:07

       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)

   26. EHEvan Hafer1:16:16

       (laughs) Look at his fucking smile, dude.

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:16:19

       Trump's like, "Ah, whatever, dude."

   28. EHEvan Hafer1:16:21

       Look at him.

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:16:21

       Look at his fucking smile, man. That's like when your kid-

   30. EHEvan Hafer1:16:25

       He looks-

Episode duration: 4:31:27